Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, Volume One 9781942401209

Citation preview

CLASSIC READINGS ON MONSTER THEORY

ARC REFERENCE

CLASSIC READINGS ON MONSTER THEORY DEMONSTRARE Volume 1

Edited by

ASA SIMON MITTMAN and MARCUS HENSEL

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2018, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The authors assert their moral right to be identified as the authors of their part of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page 2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copy­ right Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Publisher’s permission.

ISBN 9781942401193 e-ISBN 9781942401209 https://arc-humanities.org Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction: “A Marvel of Monsters” ASA SIMON MITTMAN and MARCUS HENSEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

PART I. MONSTER THEORY

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” J.R.R. TOLKIEN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

“A Measure of Man,” excerpted from The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought JOHN BLOCK FRIEDMAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 “The Nature of Horror,” from The Philosophy of Horror NOËL CARROLL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 “Rethinking the Canon: Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters” MICHAEL CAMILLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” JEFFREY JEROME COHEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

PART II. ALLIED THEORIES

“Introduction,” from Orientalism EDWARD SAID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

“Approaching Abjection,” from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection JULIA KRISTEVA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity,” from Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters J. HALBERSTAM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 “From Wonder to Error: A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” from Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body ROSEMARIE GARLAND THOMSON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 3.1. Riverine Apple-Smellers. Mandeville’s Travels, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fr. 2810, fol. 219v, fifteenth century.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Figure 3.2. Blemmyae. Mande­ville’s Travels, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fr. 2810, fol. 219v, fifteenth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Figure 6.1. Casts of the Prophet Isaiah from Souillac and part of the South Porch of Chartres Cathedral. Paris, Musée des Monuments français, before 1937. Photo: Archives Photographiques d’Art et d’Histoire.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Figure 6.2. Monster at the edge of the inner face of the left socle of the West Portal of Senlis Cathedral, ca. 1170.. . . . . . . . . . . 40 Figure 11.1. Charles Tripp, the “Armless Wonder,” demonstrates his ability to eat with his feet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Figure 11.2. Lipstretching, often exoticized in circuses and freak shows, in an African tribe.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Figure 11.3. A common practice at freak shows was to juxtapose stark physical differences.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

To Grendel’s Mother—may she someday have a name

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Our thanks to Dymphna Evans, who first published The

Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous and

then solicited this two-volume source reader. That’s a lot of monsters, but we hope she’ll continue to look for more lovely monsters to bring into print. Thanks also to Ilse Schweitzer VanDonkelaar and Ruth Kennedy at Arc Humanities Press for their care in seeing this two-volume set into print. Our thanks to Rick Godden and Joy Ambler for their insightful suggestions for the volume introduction, and for excellent conversations about monsters old and new, near and far. Thanks to Stevi Mittman for producing the excellent index, and for doing so with lightning speed. In these times of skyrocketing permissions costs, we are appreciative of those generous rights holders who granted us permission to reproduce their texts and images for free. The free flow of information is the most basic and fundamental principle of the academic enterprise. Thanks to Paige Stewart, who aided with a number of entries. And deep and abiding thanks to our families, who have to live with us, and all the monsters who come with us.

Copyright Statements Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © The Tolkien Estate Limited 1983. Friedman, “A Measure of Man,” from The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, © John Block Friedman. Apple Smellers and Blemmyes, BNF MS Fr. 2810, f. 219v and 194v, © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Noël Carroll, “The Nature of Horror,” from The Philosophy of Horror, copyright 1990 From The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart by Noel Carroll. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.

Michael Camille, “Rethinking the Canon: Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters,” first published by the College Art Association in the June 1996 issue of The Art Bulletin.

Monster from Senlis Cathedral, Photo © James Austin.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” from Monster Theory: Reading Culture, © Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press.

Edward Said, “Introduction,” from Orientalism, Edward W. Said, copyright © 1978 by Edward W. Said. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, by Julia Kristeva. Copyright © 1982 Julia Kristeva. Reprinted with permission of Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press and Editions du Seuil. J. Halberstam, “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity,” in Skin Shows, Judith (Jack) Halberstam, pp. 1–27. Copyright, 1995, Duke Uni­ver­sity Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “From Wonder to Error: A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” from Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body © Rosemary Garland Thomson and New York Uni­ver­sity Press. Photograph of Charles Tripp, The “Armless Wonder,” © Ronald G. Becker Collection of Charles Eisenmann Photographs, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse Uni­ver­sity Libraries. Photographs of Howie And Morre, and Anna Swan © Harvard Uni­ver­sity Library.

INTRODUCTION: “A MARVEL OF MONSTERS” ASA SIMON MITTMAN and MARCUS HENSEL

Under the Werewolf ’s Skin Gerald of Wales, a priest and writer active in Britain around 1200 CE, tells a curious tale of “some astonishing things that happened in our times.”1 He has heard the story of another priest travelling through Ireland with only a boy as his companion. They are sitting around a campfire, beneath a tree, when a wolf approaches them. Naturally, they are afraid, but the wolf then speaks to them with a human voice, telling them to have no fear. The wolf even “added sensible words about God” to further reassure him.2 The priest is, nonetheless, astonished and afraid: he and his young assistant are alone in the woods with a supernatural creature, a wolf that speaks like a man. The wolf then tells the priest his story: We are of the kin of the people of Ossory. Thus, every seven years, by the curse of a certain saint, Abbot Natalis, two people, male and female, both in this form, are exiled from the boundaries of other people. Stripping off the form of the human completely, they put on a wolfish form. At the end of the space of seven years, if they survive, they return to their former country and nature, and two others are chosen in their place, in the same condition.3

1  Geraldi Cambrensis, Opera, vol. 5, Topographia Hibernica, et Expug­ natio Hibernica, ed. James F. Dimock (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867), 101: “Nunc ea, quae nostris hic temporibus digna stupore contigerunt, explicemus.” Translations from Gerald are ours. 2  Geraldi Cambrensis, Opera, 101: “verba de Deo sana subjunxit.”

3  Geraldi Cambrensis, Opera, 102: “De quodam hominum genere sumus Ossiriensium. Unde, quolibet septennio, per imprecationem sancti cujusdam, Natalis scilicet abbatis, duo, videlicet mas et femina, tam a formis quam finibus exulare coguntur. Formam enim humanam prorsus exuentes, induunt lupinam. Completo vero septennii spatio, si forte superstites fuerint, aliis duobus ipsorum loco simili conditione subrogatis, ad pristinam redeunt tam patriam quam naturam.”

Many werewolf narratives imply that the monstrosity is a curse, but the source of this curse is rarely spelled out in such detail. This cursed werewolf then explains that he and his wife are this cursed pair, and that she, trapped in the shape of a wolf, is dying and needs a priest to attend to her last rites. “The priest follows trembling,” but is hesitant to provide a mass and absolution for a talking wolf.4 Then, as Gerald tells us, “to cleanse any doubt, his foot performing as a hand, [the male wolf] pulled back the entire skin of the [female] wolf from the head to the navel and folded it back; and the clear form of an old woman appeared […] He immediately rolled the skin of the wolf back on, and joined it together in its prior form.”5 The priest then agrees—“compelled more by terror than reason,”6 though Gerald does not specify the pre­ cise cause of this fear—to perform the last rites for her. As Caroline Walker Bynum asks in her book on Gerald and medi­ eval ideas about transformation, “did the priest improperly give the Eucharist,” that is, in Catholicism, the miraculously transformed body and blood of Jesus, “to a wolf or properly comfort a dying if deformed ‘human’?”7 What do we take from this? There are many lessons embedded in this strange tale, but for our purposes here, the 4  Geraldi Cambrensis, Opera, 102: “presbyter sequitur treme­ bundus.” 5  Geraldi Cambrensis, Opera, 102–3: “Et ut omnem abstergeret dubietatem, pede quasi pro manu fungens, pellem totam a capite lupae retrahens, usque ad umbilicum replicavit: et statim expressa forma vetulae cujusdam apparuit […] Et statim pellis, a lupo retracta, priori se formpe coaptavit.”

6  Geraldi Cambrensis, Opera, 103: “terrore tamen magis quam ratione compulsus.”

7  Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 27.

x

Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel

key one is this: inside every monster lurks a human being. Hence, werewolves “retain in (or under) wolfishness the rapaciousness or courtesy of human selves.”8 Peel back the fur, the scales, the spikes, the slime, and beneath the monstrous hide, there we are, always and inevitably. This is because all monsters are human creations. They exist because we create or define them as such.9 We therefore owe them our care and attention. We must not follow the model of Doctor Frankenstein, who gives life to a creature he then rejects with disgust. The Monster implores the doctor—and we would be wise to heed this admonition: All men hate the wretched; how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind.10

Monsters do perform important work for us as individuals and communities, policing our boundaries, defining our norms and mores through their inversions and transgressions. Through their bodies, words, and deeds, monsters show us ourselves. This is not a new insight. In the early fifth century, Saint Augustine, an early Christian bishop of the North African city of Hippo, uses a series of Latin puns to characterize the nature of monsters. He says they take their name, monstra, from monstrare (to show) in order demonstrare (to demonstrate) something that we can learn from.11 While we might draw different conclusions about what lessons they teach, we agree with Augustine that we have much to learn from monsters. They are, as Julia Kristeva says in a related context, “the primers of my culture.”12 By gathering a great 8  Bynum, 32.

9  Asa Simon Mittman, “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman with Peter Dendle (London: Ashgate, 2012), 1–14; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3–25, and volume 1 of this collection. 10  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prome­ theus, in volume 2 of this collection, 179. 11  Augustine, City of God, in volume 2 of this collection.

12  Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection,” in volume 1 of this collection.

variety and range of sources in this volume, we hope to give the monsters their due, to do our duty towards them, to look carefully and thoughtfully at them, and, ultimately, to see them and understand what they strive to demonstrate for us.

On the Shoulders of Giants

When Isaac Newton famously noted that he stood “on the shoulders of giants,” what he meant was that he did not have to invent all of his ideas out of nothing. Indeed, Newton bor­ rowed this clever line used to describe how he relied on the work of others from an earlier author, perhaps the twelfthcentury bishop of Chartres, France, John of Salisbury, who cites Bernard of Chartres as his source; this is how scholar­ ship works, with long chains of authors building on—and hopefully crediting!—one another’s work. In John’s (or Bernard’s) version, there are two monstrous figures, with he and his contemporaries as “dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants.”13 In this short phrase, these various authors both humble themselves and denigrate “dwarfs,” also elevating those they respect by comparing them to “giants.” In assembling this collection, we are working to celebrate monster theorists and the monsters they unleash or attempt to contain—each of which perches atop the previous creation, building the canon. We have organized the larger work into two volumes: Classic Readings on Monster Theory and Primary Sources on Monsters. The first volume is a contribution to the field of “monster theory” and the second to “monster studies.” These terms have each been in use for about twenty years, but it is really only in the last five or so that they have gained much traction. “Monster theory” is a term that was coined by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen for his 1996 collection of essays, Mon­ ster Theory: Reading Culture, and we use it here to refer to academic sources that provide methods for considering mon­ sters, approaches to them, ways of seeing how monsters and the monstrous function in various contexts. Conceiving of our work as “monster theory” or “monster studies” involves adopting a fairly recent critical lens, and most of the material specifically and sustainedly dealing with monsters has been written after 1980. Indeed, one might argue that monster theory in its present form would not be possible without the advent of postmodern theory: the roots of monster theory, like the closely allied fields of postcolonial 13  Daniel D. McGarry, trans., The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967), 167.

and queer theory, lie in the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. A full explanation of post-structuralism lies far beyond the scope of this chapter, but suffice it to say that this new way of thinking questioned the universality of Enlightenment ideals—the notion that the world can be understood through careful, scientific examination and rational thought, and that doing so would lead to the betterment of society—and rejected traditional centres of cultures and philosophies. The upshot of this decentring was significant: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)—a urinal placed on a pedestal—now had just as much claim to “art” as did Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco, The Last Supper (1495–1498), and marginal groups from colonized subjects to queer cultures to monsters became valid foci for study. Because the marginal was just that until the mid-1960s, texts that deal specifically with monsters are sparse prior. J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1936 essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is really the opening salvo in monster theory, with the eminent medievalist and author arguing that monsters were not something to be embarrassed about. Rudolf Wittkower followed in 1942 with his “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” examining a number of monsters and covering a massive historical scope—from Classical Greece to seventeenth-century Germany and England. He ends with a note that becomes a refrain in monster theory: monsters “shaped not only the day-dreams of beauty and harmony of western man but created at the same time symbols which expressed the horrors of his real dreams.”14 Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1947/1965) departs from its precur­ sors by consistently interpreting monsters in a positive way.15 By placing them in the “carnivalesque” setting in which the official culture is rejected and parodied, he reads monsters as comic, gay figures—objects of laughter, which defeats fear. In a short essay published in 1962, Georges Canguilhem returns to the traditional negative reading of the monster, concluding that monsters are a disruptive entity in the natural order of things. As disruptions, however, he argues that they are also formative: they remind us of the fragility and impermanence of the “natural” world.16 14  Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the Historicism of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 5 (1942): 159–97 at 197.

15  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984). 16  Georges Canguilhem, “Monstrosity and the Monstrous,” Diogenes 40 (1962): 27–42.

Introduction: “A Marvel of Monsters”

1968 brought a sea change in Western thought. After the student protests in Poland and France, and the growth of Civil Rights and antiwar movements in the United States, scholars began to look at literature (and therefore monsters) differently. In 1975 Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at the Collège de France on the concept of “abnormal.”17 Arguing for the importance of the body, and for notions of power as a strategy rather than a fixed fact, he traces the absorption of the monster into the judicial and medical systems of Europe, where it eventually becomes what Foucault calls a “pale monster” that can be either punished (assimilated into the legal and cultural complex) or treated (assimilated into the medical complex). Six years after Foucault’s lecture, John Block Friedman published The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, which traces the depiction of monstrous peoples from ancient Greece and into the early modern period.18 Friedman undertakes a sustained cultural examination of monsters, identifying key markers of identity used to other monsters.19 Over the course of the following decade, this approach, in which scholars analyze how monsters are constructed as inferior beings due to differences in these markers, became the dominant approach in monster theory. In his 1990 Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carroll shifts the focus from the markers on the bodies and in the actions of monsters to the interactions of normative humans with them. Rejecting any definition of a monster based on its quiddity (what it is), he instead adopts affective criteria based on the emotional responses to it by characters in narratives and audiences reading them (how it is perceived).20 It is not the inherent qualities of the being that make it monstrous but the response “we”—characters within a narrative and readers/viewers of these narratives—have to it that renders the creature a monster. Carroll is particularly interested in disgust, based in the monster’s categorical impurity, and fear, brought about by danger to the individual or community. In 1996, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture provided a list of seven theses on 17  Michel Foucault, Abnormal, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Verso, 2004).

18  John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ver­s ity Press, 1981), and see selection in volume 1 of this collection. 19  Ibid, 26.

20  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990), and see selection in volume 1 of this collection.

xi

xii

Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel

monsters, the purpose of which was to create a basis for using monsters to interpret and understand the cultures that produced them.21 Though there are only seven, they cover an astonishing range: some explore the monster’s body and its shattering of classification systems, and some speak to the cultural impact of a monster’s very existence, but all shape the monster theory that comes after. Cohen’s essay is something of a manifesto and marks a break in the narrative arc of monster theory, because he neither seeks the meaning of a specific monster, nor uses monsters as a cog in a larger theory: bending Augustine’s claim that monsters exist to teach, Cohen argues only that monsters mean. The essay, however, still relies on the work of earlier scholars. Most of his theses rely on previous thinkers: for example, the ideas in Thesis III are discussed by Foucault, Friedman, and Carroll. In that sense, Cohen stands, like Newton, on the shoulders of giants. However, he uses these earlier ideas to discover and communicate something completely new in monster theory—an articulation of heretofore unspoken, disparate ideas into a cohesive theory. It is at this point that one loses the thread, so to speak. Either because the works are so recent that we cannot fully judge their impact on monster theory or because there are too many of them to maintain a coherent history, like the monster itself, the shape and direction of the field fragments, blurs, and is difficult to define. Unlike “monster theory,” “monster studies” is a more recent term, and, like all fields characterized as “studies,” it is used to describe content rather than approaches to that content. We have attempted to assemble here a collection of monsters. There is no widely recognized collective noun to describe a group of monsters, but we have borrowed for the title to this introduction Siobhan Carroll’s suggestion: a marvel of monsters. This term captures the potentially positive role of monsters that—evil or sublime—captivate us.

or embarrassment when they appear in “serious” works of literature. The succeeding entries, covering approaches to monstrous images, monstrous texts, horror, abjection, or fear, build on the foundation laid in Tolkien’s essay. Some important texts, however, do not focus on monsters at all: for instance, Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, the seminal text of postcolonialism, argues that the West identifies itself through a (false) vision of the East created by the West. For a number of reasons, Said’s ideas overlap with and influence monster theory, and it is our hope that this selection of read­ ings will provide a range of interpretive tools and strategies for students to use to grapple with the primary sources in the second volume—and everywhere else. All of the selections collected here are presented as they originally appeared, unless specified by an editorial note in the selection’s critical introduction. We have not regular­ ized, expanded, or altered spellings or citation styles except in cases of clear errors. Any insertions or notes by volume editors are enclosed in brackets and attributed to “Eds.” We provide a brief introduction to each reading, setting the theorist and theory in context, and providing background and guiding questions. Cross-references to other works in this col­ lection are noted with underlined, bold text. There are many other readings that we might have included (with unlimited resources, this volume would look very different), yet the set of readings here collected are among the most essential for any student entering the vibrant field of monster theory. It is worth noting that some of these readings are very chal­ lenging. Some have rich and, at times, specialized vocabulary, bristly writing styles, and, most importantly, difficult concepts that ask the reader to reconsider how they have understood not only the monstrous, but also the norm defined through its difference with the monstrous. In every case, though, these readings will reward your efforts. Give them the time they need, and you will acquire a richer understanding of the vital nature of monsters—and of the humans who encounter them.

Our first volume is intended to introduce students to the most important and influential modern theorists of the mon­ strous. We start with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” first published in The Proceedings of the British Academy in 1936, which says monsters merit seri­ ous scholarly consideration and are not an error or accident

Primary Sources on Monsters

Classic Readings on Monster Theory

21  Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” and see selection in volume 1 of this collection.

Our second volume is intended to introduce students to some of the most influential and indicative monster nar­ ratives from the West. These texts contain numerous intersections, with many deliberately building upon the foundations laid by others. Together, they form a reasonably coherent set of materials, thereby allowing us to witness the consistent, multi-millennial strategies the West has articu­ lated, weaponized, and deployed to exclude, disempower, and

dehumanize a range of groups and individuals within and without its porous boundaries. The readings in volume two are all primary sources, which means that they are all either original, creative works or accounts written at or near the time of the events they narrate.

Destroy All Monsters: An Urgency

Deep within a large crowd, a young white man in a plain white t-shirt, with a blue bandana around his neck and a white par­ ticle mask askew on top of his head, holds a homemade sign on a pole.22 It reads in red ink, darkened here and there with black, “DESTROY ALL MONSTERS.” Above this slogan is the raised fist of Black Lives Matter, drawn in a range of colors and radiating bright orange lines. This photograph was taken on August 12, 2017 (the day before we drafted this essay) at the Unite the Right rally, which brought together neo-Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, and other hate groups in Charlottesville, Virginia. This was purportedly the largest white supremacist rally in the United States in decades, though firm figures on attendance are dif­ ficult to obtain. Monsters have been around as long as humans, since they define us by stalking our borders and mirroring our traits. Indeed, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has argued, in a sense humans cannot have existed prior to the monsters that define us: Perhaps it is time to ask the question that always arises when the monster is discussed seriously … Do monsters really exist? Surely they must, for if they do not, how could we?23

There are moments, though, when monsters seem partic­ ularly potent, prevalent, even necessary. By some measures, the world has never been more peaceful, and human life never more safe and secure.24 And yet, this is not the experi­ ence most of us have. The news each day makes it seem that the world is on fire, that we are living in the most dangerous 22  The image, by Reuters photographer Joshua Roberts, is captioned “A group of counter-protesters march against members of white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.” It is available in Priscilla Alvarez, “A State of Emergency in Charlottesville,” The Atlantic (August 12, 2017) . 23  Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” 20.

24  Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin, 2012).

Introduction: “A Marvel of Monsters”

of times. This is statistically untrue, vastly so; various prehis­ toric burial sites indicate that 20%, 30%, even 60% of deaths were due to interpersonal violence.25 But since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which killed perhaps 200,000 people in a matter of moments and gave birth to Godzilla and the rest of the kaijū26), we have lived with a different level of existential threat. And now, as we write this introduction, the United States is in a state of tumult, a convulsion, a paroxism, as white supremacist groups march through our streets bearing torches and shouting Nazi-era slogans of hate (“Blood and soil!” “Jews will not replace us!”27). The young man with the “DESTROY ALL MONSTERS” sign was one of the counterprotesters, one of the marchers who came to challenge and defy the torch-bearing mob. In hipster fashion, he seems to have taken his slogan from Ishirō Honda’s somewhat obscure eighth sequel to Godzilla, released in 1968, in which the mon­ sters from previous kaijū films (Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and others) attack cities through the world under the command of scientists who are, in turn, under mind control by hostile aliens.28 This slogan, then, is a fitting response to the sense that American cities are being attacked as if by an outside force, yet this is not an alien invasion. These marchers are American citizens, and, despite the foreign origins of many of the symbols they carry, they are part of a long-standing American history of hate groups, and—whether individuals wish it or not—are a part of the identities of and systems that benefit all white Americans.29 25  Max Roser, “Ethnographic and Archaeological Evidence on Violent Deaths,” Our World in Data (2016) .

26  William Tsutsui, “Chapter 1: The Birth of Gojira,” in Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004), 13–42.

27  Yair Rosenberg, “‘Jews will not replace us’: Why white supremacists go after Jews,” The Washington Post (August 14, 2017) . 28  He might, though, have based it on the 1970s–1980s proto-punk band from Detroit of the same name.

29  See, for example, “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Con­ federacy” Southern Poverty Law Center (April 21, 2016) . See also Karl Steel, “Bad Heritage: The American Viking Fantasy, from the Nineteenth Century to Now,” in Nature, Culture, Ecologies: Nature in Transcultural Contexts, ed. Gesa Mackenthun and Stephanie Wodianka (Münster: Waxmann, 2017).

xiii

xiv

Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel

The trouble with the counter-protester’s slogan is that, of course, we can never destroy all monsters. Anyone familiar with monster narratives, from Gilgamesh to Godzilla, knows that there is always a sequel, always a Return Of, a Bride Of, a Son Of …. Always a Godzilla Raids Again (directed by Motoyoshi Oda, 1955). Surely, it has generally seemed that the Nazis were thoroughly and absolutely defeated, yet the Unite the Right marchers wore and waved swastikas, gave the Nazi salute, shouted “heil” this and “heil” that. A poisonous ideology that seemed long dead shambled back to life. Of course, monster movies have long literalized this fear in a seemingly endless series of Nazi zombie movies including, among many others, Shock Waves (1977), Zombie Lake (1981), Oasis of the Zombies (1982), Dead Snow (2009), Angry Nazi Zombies (2012), Outpost: Black Sun (2012), Nazis at the Center of the Earth (2012), Frankenstein’s Army (2013), and Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014). The fascist marchers in Charlottesville and those who sympathize with them are participating in one of the oldest of human impulses, to define themselves through the exclusion of others, to puff themselves up by attempting to stomp others down, to raise their sense of self-worth through the insult of, denunciation of, and outright assault on and murder of other individuals and groups. This pernicious role is one of the central functions that monsters serve across time. Monsters are fun—tremendous, city-smashing, fire-breathing, shapeshifting, boundary-pushing, messy, sexy, crazy fun. But if, in these narratives and images, you only see the fun, you are missing a great deal of the importance of monsters and the power we grant them to shape our societies. As Augustine tells us, these monsters demonstrate so much we can learn from; as Cohen argues, they bear substantial meaning. We cannot destroy all monsters, much as we might sometimes wish to. We are all one another’s monsters. This is because monsters are relative to the culture that produces them. In medieval Christian art and literature, demons are often dark-skinned; in medieval Islamic art and literature, demons are often white-skinned.30 Nazis, as we have just seen, have become revenants (sometimes literally, at least 30  See, for example, Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” and “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race,” Literature Compass 8/5 (2011): 258– 74; 275–93; and Francesca Leoni, “On the Monstrous in the Islamic Visual Tradition,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Mittman with Peter Dendle (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 151–72.

on film) and crept back out of the darkness. But seventyodd years ago, the German Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer published grotesquely caricatured images of Jews literally consuming “good” Germans. This noxious imagery is still alive and kicking, and was on display in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally. Your monster may be our friend; our friend may be your monster. This does not mean that all such moves are morally, ethically, practically, or rhetorically interchangeable, however. Reading the texts in this collection carefully should reveal problematic processes you see all around you. These pro­ cesses may cause you harm, or you may be unin­tentionally perpetuating them and the harms they cause others. The ideology of the hate groups that the sign-holding counter-pro­ tester came out to defy might be summed up by the very same slogan he brandished, though they would consider others to be the “monsters”: Jewish, Black, Hispanic, LGBTQIA, and differently abled people—and any others who do not fit their violently restrictive notions of human “purity.” Assertions of monstrosity are not merely insults, but are fundamental denials of the humanity of human beings. Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, sparking the massive protests in Ferguson, Missouri, dehumanized his victim, saying during grand jury proceedings, “it looks like a demon.”31 Of course, we have no doubt that we are on the right side of history. This is immaterial. If we give in to the impulse to destroy one another, we fall into the divisive trap that hate groups lay. To be clear, there is no equivalency whatsoever between those who declare that certain people have no right to live freely and peacefully—or to live at all—because of their race or religion or nationality or sexuality or gender identity, or any other basic element of their human identity, and those who declare that they, that we, that all people do have these fundamental and inalienable rights. Nevertheless, hate groups tap into something (monstrously) human: all the bombs and blood of the Allied Nations could never have destroyed the Nazis because their strategy of power through demonization was already a revenant, shambling through Columbus’s governorship of Hispaniola, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, and the Kiev Pogrom of 1905. Nazism was certain to outlive Nazis as a fetid, festering, rotting corpse of an ideology. But as with Gerald’s sympathetic werewolves, 31  State of Missouri vs. Darren Wilson. Grand Jury Testimony, vol. 5 (16 September, 2014): 224–25. Also note that Wilson uses the pronoun “it” instead of “he,” serving to further dehumanize Brown.

beneath the skin of the entirely unsympathetic Nazi zombies are yet more humans. Whatever we think about the ethics of people on opposing sides of conflicts, whether some might claim that there were “fine people” on both sides, the point is that there are people on both sides, and we are always and inevitably the real monsters of history. In James Cameron’s 1986 science-fiction/horror film Aliens, a group of marines, a corporate agent, and their guide Ripley—Sigourney Weaver in her most iconic role—find a young girl nicknamed Newt living in the ruins of a planetary terraforming colony decimated by the film franchise’s eponymous monsters. Newt is understandably traumatized and catatonic, but eventually speaks. In a darkly parodic scene, Ripley tucks Newt in to bed, and the young child says “My mommy always said there were no monsters—no real ones, but there are.” Ripley, serving in the place of her mother, responds as no parents ever do: “Yes, there are, aren’t there?” The next scene, though, shows us who those real monsters are, when the corporate agent attempts to impregnate Newt with the alien’s offspring so as to smuggle it back to earth as a superweapon. As Jeffrey Weinstock argues, “the ostensible monster in Alien and its various sequels is obviously the nightmarish double-mouthed extraterrestrial designed by H. R. Giger. Just as monstrous and more insidious, however, is the corporation,” embodied in its agent, “Carter Burke (Paul Reiser at his most smarmy), a human .… The Alien films thus essentially have two monsters—the alien itself and the bigger monster, the monstrous corporation, that just as clearly feeds on the lives of the human characters.”32 Even in a film with a monster as unrelentingly terrifying as the Xenomorph— with its razor-sharp fangs, claws, eyeless “face,” seemingly exposed vertebrae, acid for blood, and use of humans as living incubators for its deadly offspring—it is the humans who are the worst monsters. One of the few consensus views throughout the texts collected in this volume is that it is not, in the end, horns or fangs or claws that make a being monstrous, but the purpose to which a being puts whatever tools and weapons it has. Ishirō Honda’s Destroy All Monsters—spoiler alert!—has an ironic twist: it is the good old monsters, led by Godzilla, who in the end save humanity. They are scorned, feared, and attacked by the world’s powers, but want only to return to 32  Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman with Peter Dendle (London: Ashgate, 2012): 275–89 at 283.

Introduction: “A Marvel of Monsters”

their peaceful island of Monsterland. The world needs its monsters, and its monster stories. This is the impetus for our collection. Whether the monsters are deadly enemies or unlikely saviours, their stories are essential to our understanding of the world, and our place within it.

xv

Part I MONSTER THEORY

J.R.R. TOLKIEN, “BEOWULF: THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS”

Critical Introduction

Reading Questions

John Ronald Reuel

How does Tolkien build his argument that the monsters of Beo­wulf deserve to be taken seriously? What is the tone of this essay? Is it what you would expect of a scholar taking on this subject?

(J.R.R.) Tolkien (1892–1973) is the only author to appear in both volumes of this collection, as he was a prominent writer of both monster-filled novels and academic work on the history of the representation of the monstrous. He was more prolific as a writer of fiction than as an academic, but some of his essays have proven to have a lasting impact. Here, we feature his influential published lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” written while he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford. In this piece, Tolkien challenged the contemporary consensus about Beowulf, which was then largely mined for linguistic material rather than appreciated as a work of lit­ erature. His position, now universally accepted in scholarly writing, is that the poem is of great literary merit and that its monsters—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon— are at its intellectual and emotional core. He argues that it is “improbable” a thoughtful poet would expend such energy on a trite subject and therefore turns his erudite attention to these monsters. This is a radical departure for scholarship of the early twentieth century and an important early step toward the development of the field of monster studies. It is also worth noting that Beowulf—and medieval poetry, more broadly—served as source material and inspiration for his novels set in Middle Earth, which takes its name from the Anglo-Saxon “middangeard.”

Further Reading

Drout, Michael D. C. “Beowulf: Tolkien’s Scholarship.” In J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, 59–60. Edited by Michael D.C. Drout, Douglas Anderson, Marjorie Burns, Verlyn Flieger, and T.A. Shippey. London: Routledge, 2007. Fulk, Robert Dennis, ed. Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Antho­logy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1991. Orchard, Andy. Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995. ASM

“BEOWULF: THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS” J.R.R. TOLKIEN

In 1864 the

Reverend Oswald Cockayne wrote of the Reverend Doctor Joseph Bosworth, Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon: “I have tried to lend to others the conviction I have long entertained that Dr. Bosworth is not a man so dili­ gent in his special walk as duly to read the books … which have been printed in our old English, or so-called Anglosaxon [sic] tongue. He may do very well for a professor.”1 These words were inspired by dissatisfaction with Bosworth’s dictionary, and were doubtless unfair. If Bosworth were still alive, a mod­ ern Cockayne would probably accuse him of not reading the “literature” of his subject, the books written about the books in the so-called Anglo-Saxon tongue. The original books are nearly buried. Of none is this so true as of The Beowulf, as it used to be called. I have, of course, read The Beowulf, as have most (but not all) of those who have criticized it. But I fear that, unwor­ thy successor and beneficiary of Joseph Bosworth, I have not been a man so diligent in my special walk as duly to read all that has been printed on, or touching on, this poem. But I have read enough, I think, to venture the opinion that Beowulfiana is, while rich in many departments, specially poor in one. It is poor in criticism, criticism that is directed to the understand­ ing of a poem as a poem. It has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness lies in placing the unimportant things at the cen­ tre and the important on the outer edges. This is one of the opinions that I wish specially to consider. I think it profoundly untrue of the poem, but strikingly true of the literature about it. Beowulf has been used as a quarry of fancy far more assidu­ ously than it has been studied as a work of art. It is of Beowulf, then, as a poem that I wish to speak; and though it may seem presumption that I should try with swich a lewed mannes wit to pace the wisdom of an heep of lerned men, in this department there is at least more chance for lewed man. But there is so much that might still be said even under these limitations that I shall confine myself mainly to the monsters—Grendel and the Dragon, as they appear in what seems to me the best and most authoritative general criticism in English—and to certain considerations the structure and conduct of the poem that arise from this theme. 1  The Shrine, p. 4.

There is an historical explanation of the state of Beowulfi­ ana that I have referred to. And that explanation is important, if one would venture to criticize the critics. A sketch of the history of the subject is required. But I will here only attempt, for brevity’s sake, to present my view of it allegorically. As it set out upon its adventures among modern scholars, Beowulf was christened by Wanley Poesis—Poeseos Anglo-Saxonicæ egregium exemplum. But the fairy godmother later invited to superintend its fortunes was Historia. And she brought with her Philologia, Mythologia, Archaeologia, and Laographia.2 Excellent ladies. But where was the child’s name-sake? Poesis was usually forgotten; occasionally admitted by a side-door; sometimes dismissed upon the door-step. “The Beowulf,” they said, “is hardly an affair of yours, and not in any case a protégé that you could be proud of. It is an historical document. Only as such does it interest the superior culture of to-day.” And it is as an historical document that it has mainly been examined and dissected. Though ideas as to the nature and quality of the history and information embedded in it have changed much since Thorkelin called it De Danorum Rebus Gestis, this has remained steadily true. In still recent pronouncements this view is explicit. In 1925 Professor Archibald Strong translated Beowulf into verse;3 but in 1921 he had declared: “Beowulf is the picture of a whole civilization, of the Germania which Tacitus describes. The main interest which the poem has for us is thus not a purely literary interest. Beowulf is an important historical document.”4 2  Thus in Professor Chambers’s great bibliography (in his Beowulf: An Introduction) we find a section, § 8. Questions of Literary History, Date, and Authorship; Beowulf in the Light of History, Archaeology, Heroic Legend, Mythology, and Folklore. It is impressive, but there is no section that names Poetry. As certain of the items included show, such consideration as Poetry is accorded at all is buried unnamed in § 8. 3  Beowulf translated into modern English rhyming verse, Constable, 1925.

4  A Short History of English Literature, Oxford Univ. Press, 1921, pp. 2–3. I choose this example, because it is precisely to general literary histories that we must usually turn for literary judgements on Beowulf. The experts in Beowulfiana are seldom concerned with such judgements. And it is in the highly compressed histories, such as this, that we discover what the process of digestion makes of the special “literature” of the experts. Here is the distilled product of Research.

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”

I make this preliminary point, because it seems to me that the air has been clouded not only for Strong, but for other more authoritative critics, by the dust of the quarrying researchers. It may well be asked: why should we approach this, or indeed any other poem, mainly as an historical document? Such an attitude is defensible: firstly, if one is not concerned with poetry at all, but seeking information wherever it may be found; secondly, if the so-called poem contains in fact no poetry. I am not concerned with the first case. The historian’s search is, of course, perfectly legitimate, even if it does not assist criticism in general at all (for that is not its object), so long as it is not mistaken for criticism. To Professor Birger Nerman as an historian of Swedish origins Beowulf is doubtless an important document, but he is not writing a history of English poetry. Of the second case it may be said that to rate a poem, a thing at the least in metrical form, as mainly of historical interest should in a literary survey be equivalent to saying that it has no literary merits, and little more need in such a survey then be said about it. But such a judgement on Beowulf is false. So far from being a poem so poor that only its accidental historical interest can still recommend it, Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content, and is largely independent even of the most important facts (such as the date and identity of Hygelac) that research has discovered. It is indeed a curious fact that it is one of the peculiar poetic virtues of Beowulf that has contributed to its own critical misfortunes. The illusion of historical truth and perspective, that has made Beowulf seem such an attractive quarry, is largely a product of art. The author has used an instinctive historical sense—a part indeed of the ancient English temper (and not unconnected with its reputed melancholy), of which Beowulf is a supreme expression; but he has used it with a poetical and not an historical object. The lovers of poetry can safely study the art, but the seekers after history must beware lest the glamour of Poesis overcome them. Nearly all the censure, and most of the praise, that has been bestowed on The Beowulf has been due either to the belief that it was something that it was not—for example, primitive, pagan, Teutonic, an allegory (political or mythical), or most often, an epic; or to disappointment at the discovery that it was itself and not something that the scholar would

have liked better—for example, a heathen heroic lay, a history of Sweden, a manual of Germanic antiquities, or a Nordic Summa Theologica. I would express the whole industry in yet another alle­ gory. A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: “This tower is most interesting.” But they also said (after pushing it over): “What a muddle it is in!” And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: “He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.” But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea. I hope I shall show that that allegory is just—even when we consider the more recent and more perceptive critics (whose concern is in intention with literature). To reach these we must pass in rapid flight over the heads of many decades of critics. As we do so a conflicting babel mounts up to us, which I can report as something after this fashion.5 “Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative; the rules of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; it is the confused product of a committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons (this is a Gallic voice); it is a string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, though the genius seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone (this is a very recent voice); it is a

This compendium, moreover, is competent, and written by a man who had (unlike some other authors of similar things) read the poem itself with attention.

5  I include nothing that has not somewhere been said by some one, if not in my exact words; but I do not, of course, attempt to represent all the dicta, wise or otherwise, that have been uttered.

5

6

J.R.R. Tolkien

wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); it is a hotch-potch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document; it is a mythical allegory (very old voices these and generally shouted down, but not so far out as some of the newer cries); it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no shape at all; it is singularly weak in construction; it is a clever allegory of contemporary politics (old John Earle with some slight support from Mr. Girvan, only they look to differ­ ent periods); its architecture is solid; it is thin and cheap (a solemn voice); it is undeniably weighty (the same voice); it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a burden to English sylla­ buses; and (final universal chorus of all voices) it is worth studying. It is not surprising that it should now be felt that a view, a decision, a conviction are imperatively needed. But it is plainly only in the consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view or conviction can be reached or steadily held. For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another. Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to hear; but though their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short. None the less, paths of a sort have been opened in the wood. Slowly with the rolling years the obvious (so often the last revelation of analytic study) has been discovered: that we have to deal with a poem by an Englishman using afresh ancient and largely traditional material. At last then, after inquiring so long whence this material came, and what its original or aboriginal nature was (questions that cannot ever be decisively answered), we might also now again inquire what the poet did with it. If we ask that question, then there is still, perhaps, something lacking even in the major critics, the learned and revered masters from whom we humbly derive. The chief points with which I feel dissatisfied I will now approach by way of W. P. Ker, whose name and memory I honour. He would deserve reverence, of course, even if he still lived and had not ellor gehworfen on Frean wære upon a high mountain in the heart of that Europe which he loved: a great scholar, as illuminating himself as a critic, as he was often biting as a critic of the critics. None the less I cannot help feeling that in approaching Beowulf he was hampered by the almost inevitable weakness of his greatness: stories and plots must sometimes have seemed triter to him, the muchread, than they did to the old poets and their audiences. The

dwarf on the spot sometimes sees things missed by the trav­ elling giant ranging many countries. In considering a period when literature was narrower in range and men possessed a less diversified stock of ideas and themes, one must seek to recapture and esteem the deep pondering and profound feel­ ing that they gave to such as they possessed. In any case Ker has been potent. For his criticism is masterly, expressed always in words both pungent and weighty, and not least so when it is (as I occasionally venture to think) itself open to criticism. His words and judgements are often quoted, or reappear in various modifications, digested, their source probably sometimes forgotten. It is impossible to avoid quotation of the well-known passage in his Dark Ages: A reasonable view of the merit of Beowulf is not impossible, though rash enthusiasm may have made too much of it, while a correct and sober taste may have too contemptuously refused to attend to Grendel or the Fire-drake. The fault of Beowulf is that there is nothing much in the story. The hero is occupied in killing monsters, like Hercules or Theseus. But there are other things in the lives of Hercules and Theseus besides the killing the Hydra or of Procrustes, Beowulf has nothing else to do, when he has killed Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Denmark: he goes home to his own Gautland, until at last the rolling years bring the Fire-drake and his last adventure. It is too simple. Yet the three chief episodes are well wrought and well diversified; are not repetitions, exactly; there is a change of temper between the wrestling with Grendel in the night at Heorot and the descent under water to encounter Grendel’s mother; while the sentiment of the Dragon is different again. But the great beauty, the real value, of Beowulf is in its dignity of style. In construction it is curiously weak, in a sense preposterous, for while the main story is simplicity itself, the merest commonplace of heroic legend, all about it, in the historic allusions, there are revelations of a whole world of tragedy, plots different in import from that of Beowulf, more like the tragic themes of Iceland. Yet with this radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges, the poem of Beowulf is undeniably weighty. The thing itself is cheap; the moral and the spirit of it can only be matched among the noblest authors.6

6  The Dark Ages, pp. 252–3.

This passage was written more than thirty years ago, but has hardly been surpassed. It remains, in this country at any rate, a potent influence. Yet its primary effect is to state a paradox which one feels has always strained the belief, even of those who accepted it, and has given to Beowulf the character of an “enigmatic poem.” The chief virtue of the passage (not the one for which it is usually esteemed) is that it does accord some attention to the monsters, despite correct and sober taste. But the contrast made between the radical defect of theme and structure, and at the same time the dignity, loftiness in converse, and well-wrought finish has become a commonplace even of the best criticism, a paradox the strangeness of which has almost been forgotten in the process of swallowing it upon authority.7 We may compare Professor Chambers in his Widsith, p. 79, where he is studying the story of Ingeld, son of Froda, and his feud with the great Scylding house of Denmark, a story introduced in Beowulf merely as an allusion. Nothing [Chambers says] could better show the disproportion of Beowulf which “puts the ir­rele­ vances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges,” than this passing allusion to the story of Ingeld. For in this conflict between plighted troth and the duty of revenge we have a situation which the old heroic poets loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons.

I pass over the fact that the allusion has a dramatic purpose in Beowulf that is a sufficient defence both of its presence and of its manner. The author of Beowulf cannot be held responsible for the fact that we now have only his poem and not others dealing primarily with Ingeld. He was not selling one thing for another, but giving something new. But let us return to the dragon. “A wilderness of dragons.” There is a sting in this Shylockian plural, the sharper for coming 7  None the less Ker modified it in an important particular in English Literature, Mediæval, pp. 29–94. In general, though in different words, vaguer and less incisive, he repeats himself. We are still told that “the story is commonplace and the plan is feeble,” or that “the story is thin and poor.” But we learn also at the end of his notice that: “Those distracting allusions to things apart from the chief story make up for their want of proportion. They give the impression of reality and weight; the story is not in the air … it is part of the solid world.” By the admission of so grave an artistic reason for the procedure of the poem Ker himself began the undermining of his own criticism of its structure. But this line of thought does not seem to have been further pursued. Possibly it was this very thought, working in his mind, that made Ker’s notice of Beowulf in the small later book, his “shilling shocker,” more vague and hesitant in tone, and so of less influence.

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”

from a critic, who deserves the title of the poet’s best friend. It is in the tradition of the Book of St. Albans, from which the poet might retort upon his critics: “Yea, a desserte of lapwyngs, a shrewednes of apes, a raffull of knaues, and a gagle of gees.” As for the poem, one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer, or a host; and a man might well exchange for one good dragon what he would not sell for a wilderness. And dragons, real dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale, are actually rare. In northern literature there are only two that are significant. If we omit from consideration the vast and vague Encircler of the World, Miðgarðsormr, the doom of the great gods and no matter for heroes, we have but the dragon of the Volsungs, Fáfnir, and Beowulf’s bane. It is true that both of these are in Beowulf, one in the main story, and the other spoken of by a minstrel praising Beowulf himself. But this is not a wilderness of dragons. Indeed the allusion to the more renowned worm killed by the Wælsing is sufficient indication that the poet selected a dragon of well-founded purpose (or saw its significance in the plot as it had reached him), even as he was careful to compare his hero, Beowulf son of Ecgtheow, to the prince of the heroes of the North, the dragon-slaying Wælsing. He esteemed dragons, as rare as they are dire, as some do still. He liked them—as a poet, not as a sober zoologist; and he had good reason. But we meet this kind of criticism again. In Chambers’s Beowulf and the Heroic Age—the most significant single essay on the poem that I know—it is still present. The riddle is still unsolved. The folk-tale motive stands still like the spectre of old research, dead but unquiet in its grave. We are told again that the main story of Beowulf is a wild folk­ tale. Quite true, of course. It is true of the main story of King Lear, unless in that case you would prefer to substitute silly for wild. But more: we are told that the same sort of stuff is found in Homer, yet there it is kept in its proper place. “The folk-tale is a good servant,” Chambers says, and does not per­ haps realize the importance of the admission, made to save the face of Homer and Virgil; for he continues: “but a bad master: it has been allowed in Beowulf to usurp the place of honour, and to drive into episodes and digressions the things which should be the main stuff of a well-conducted epic.”8 It is not clear to me why good conduct must depend on the main stuff. But I will for the moment remark only that, if it is so, Beowulf is evidently not a well-conducted epic. It may turn out to be no epic at all. But the puzzle still continues. 8  Foreword to Strong’s translation, p. xxvi: see note 3.

7

8

J.R.R. Tolkien

In the most recent discourse upon this theme it still appears, toned down almost to a melancholy question-mark, as if this paradox had at last begun to afflict with weariness the thought that endeavours to support it. In the final perora­ tion of his notable lecture on Folk-tale and History in Beowulf given last year, Mr. Girvan said: Confessedly there is matter for wonder and scope for doubt, but we might be able to answer with complete satisfaction some of the questionings which rise in men’s minds over the poet’s presentment of his hero, if we could also answer with certainty the question why he chose just this subject, when to our modern judgment there were at hand so many greater, charged with the splendour and tragedy of humanity, and in all respects worthier of a genius as astonishing as it was rare in Anglo-Saxon England.

There is something irritatingly odd about all this. One even dares to wonder if something has not gone wrong with “our modern judgement,” supposing that it is justly represented. Higher praise than is found in the learned critics, whose schol­ arship enables them to appreciate these things, could hardly be given to the detail, the tone, the style, and indeed to the total effect of Beowulf. Yet this poetic talent, we are to under­ stand, has all been squandered on an unprofitable theme: as if Milton had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse. Even if Milton had done this (and he might have done worse), we should perhaps pause to consider whether his poetic handling had not had some effect upon the trivial theme; what alchemy had been performed upon the base metal; whether indeed it remained base or trivial when he had finished with it. The high tone, the sense of dignity, alone is evidence in Beowulf of the presence of a mind lofty and thoughtful. It is, one would have said, improbable that such a man would write more than three thousand lines (wrought to a high finish) on matter that is really not worth serious atten­ tion that remains thin and cheap when he has finished with it. Or that he should in the selection of his material, in the choice of what to put forward, what to keep subordinate “upon the outer edges,” have shown a puerile simplicity much below the level of the characters he himself draws in his own poem. Any theory that will at least allow us to believe that what he did was of design, and that for that design there is a defence that may still have force, would seem more probable. It has been too little observed that all the machinery of “dignity” is to be found elsewhere. Cynewulf, or the author of Andreas, or of Guthlac (most notably), have a command of dignified verse. In them there is well-wrought language,

weighty words, lofty sentiment, precisely that which we are told is the real beauty of Beowulf. Yet it cannot, I think, be disputed, that Beowulf is more beautiful, that each line there is more significant (even when, as sometimes happens, it is the same line) than in the other long Old English poems. Where then resides the special virtue of Beowulf if the common element (which belongs largely to the language itself, and to a literary tradition) is deducted? It resides, one might guess, in the theme, and the spirit this has infused into the whole. For, in fact, if there were a real discrepancy between theme and style, that style would not be felt as beautiful but as incongruous or false. And that incongruity is present in some measure in all the long Old English poems, save one—Beowulf. The paradoxical contrast that has been drawn between matter and manner in Beowulf has thus an inherent literary improbability. Why then have the great critics thought otherwise? I must pass rather hastily over the answers to this question. The reasons are various, I think, and would take long to examine. I believe that one reason is that the shadow of research has lain upon criticism. The habit, for instance, of pondering a summarized plot of Beowulf, denuded of all that gives it particular force or individual life, has encouraged the notion that its main story is wild, or trivial, or typical, even after treatment. Yet all stories, great and small are one or more of these three things in such nakedness. The comparison of skeleton “plots” is simply not a critical literary process at all. It has been favoured by research in comparative folk-lore, the objects of which are primarily historical or scientific.9 Another reason is, I think, that the allusions have attracted curiosity (antiquarian rather than critical) to their elucidation; and this 9  It has also been favoured by the rise of “English schools,” in whose syllabuses Beowulf has inevitably some place, and the consequent production of compendious literary histories. For these cater (in fact, if not in intention) for those seeking knowledge about, and ready-made judgements upon, works which they have not the time, or (often enough) the desire, to know at first hand. The small literary value of such summaries is sometimes recognized in the act of giving them. Thus Strong (op. cit.) gives a fairly complete one, but remarks that “the short summary does scant justice to the poem.” Ker in E. Lit. (Med.) says: “So told, in abstract, it is not a particularly interesting story.” He evidently perceived what might be the retort, for he attempts to justify the procedure in this case, adding: “Told in this way the story of Theseus or Hercules would still have much more in it.” I dissent. But it does not matter, for the comparison of two plots “told in this way” is no guide whatever to the merits of literary versions told in quite different ways. It is not necessarily the best poem that loses least in précis.

needs so much study and research that attention has been diverted from the poem as a whole, and from the function of the allusions, as shaped and placed, in the poetic economy of Beowulf as it is. Yet actually the appreciation of this function is largely independent of such investigations. But there is also, I suppose, a real question of taste involved: a judgement that the heroic or tragic story on a strictly human plane is by nature superior. Doom is held less literary than ἁ� μαρτί� α. The proposition seems to have been passed as self-evident. I dissent, even at the risk of being held incorrect or not sober. But I will not here enter into debate, nor attempt at length a defence of the mythical mode of imag­ ination and the disentanglement of the confusion between myth and folk-tale into which these judgements appear to have fallen. The myth has other forms than the (now dis­ credited) mythical allegory of nature: the sun, the seasons, the sea, and such things. The term “folk-tale” is misleading; its very tone of depreciation begs the question. Folk-tales in being, as told—for the “typical folk-tale,” of course, is merely an abstract conception of research nowhere existing—do often contain elements that are thin and cheap, with little even potential virtue; but they also contain much that is far more powerful, and that cannot be sharply separated from myth, being derived from it, or capable in poetic hands of turning into it: that is of becoming largely significant—as a whole, accepted unanalysed. The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory, and, what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected. It is possible, I think, to be moved by the power of myth and yet to misunderstand the sensation, to ascribe it wholly to something else that is also present: to metrical art, style, or verbal skill. Correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us—the proud we that includes all intelligent living people—in ogres and dragons; we then perceive its puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures. Even though it attributes “genius,” as does Mr. Girvan, to the author, it cannot admit that the monsters are anything but a sad mistake.

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”

It does not seem plain that ancient taste supports the modern as much as it has been represented to do. I have the author of Beowulf, at any rate, on my side: a greater man than most of us. And I cannot myself perceive a period in the North when one kind alone was esteemed: there was room for myth and heroic legend, and for blends of these. As for the dragon: as far as we know anything about these old poets, we know this: the prince of the heroes of the North, supremely memorable—hans nafn mun uppi meðan veröldin stendr—was a dragon-slayer. And his most renowned deed, from which in Norse he derived his title Fáfnisbani, was the slaying of the prince of legendary worms. Although there is plainly considerable difference between the later Norse and the ancient English form of the story alluded to in Beowulf, already there it had these two primary features: the dragon, and the slaying of him as the chief deed of the greatest of heroes—he wæs wreccena wide mærost. A dragon is no idle fancy. Whatever may be his origins, in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men’s imagina­ tion, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold. Even to-day (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who yet have been caught by the fascina­ tion of the worm. More than one poem in recent years (since Beowulf escaped somewhat from the dominion of the stu­ dents of origins to the students of poetry) has been inspired by the dragon of Beowulf, but none that I know of by Ingeld son of Froda. Indeed, I do not think Chambers very happy in his particular choice. He gives battle on dubious ground. In so far as we can now grasp its detail and atmosphere the story of Ingeld the thrice faithless and easily persuaded is chiefly interesting as an episode in a larger theme, as part of a tradition that had acquired legendary, and so dramatically personalized, form concerning moving events in history: the arising of Denmark, and wars in the islands of the North. In itself it is not a supremely potent story. But, of course, as with all tales of any sort, its literary power must have depended mainly upon how it was handled. A poet may have made a great thing of it. Upon this chance must be founded the pop­ ularity of Ingeld’s legend in England, for which there is some evidence.10 There is no inherent magical virtue about heroic10  Namely the use of it in Beowulf, both dramatically in depicting the sagacity of Beowulf the hero, and as an essential part of the traditions concerning the Scylding court, which is the legendary background against which the rise of the hero is set—as a later age would have chosen the court of Arthur. Also the probable allusion in Alcuin’s letter to Speratus: see Chambers’s Widsith, p. 78.

9

10

J.R.R. Tolkien

tragic stories as such, and apart from the merits of individual treatments. The same heroic plot can yield good and bad poems, and good and bad sagas. The recipe for the central situations of such stories, studied in the abstract, is after all as “simple” and as “typical” as that of folk-tales. There are in any case many heroes but very few good dragons. Beowulf ’s dragon, if one wishes really to criticize, is not to be blamed for being a dragon, but rather for not being dragon enough, plain pure fairy-story dragon. There are in the poem some vivid touches of the right kind—as þa se wyrm onwoc, wroht wæs geniwad; stonc æfter stane, 2285—in which this dragon is real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own, but the conception, none the less, approaches draconitas rather than draco: a personification of malice, greed, destruction (the evil side of heroic life), and of the undiscriminating cruelty of fortune that distinguishes not good or bad (the evil aspect of all life). But for Beowulf, the poem, that is as it should be. In this poem the balance is nice, but it is preserved. The large symbolism is near the surface, but it does not break through, nor become allegory. Something more significant than a standard hero, a man faced with a foe more evil than any human enemy of house or realm, is before us, and yet incarnate in time, walking in heroic history, and treading the named lands of the North. And this, we are told, is the radical defect of Beowulf that its author, coming in a time rich in the legends of heroic men, has used them afresh in an original fashion, giving us not just one more, but something akin yet different: a measure and interpretation of them all. We do not deny the worth of the hero by accepting Grendel and the dragon. Let us by all means esteem the old heroes: men caught in the chains of circumstance or of their own character, torn between duties equally sacred, dying with their backs to the wall. But Beowulf, I fancy, plays a larger part than is recognized in helping us to esteem them. Heroic lays may have dealt in their own way—we have little enough to judge by—a way more brief and vigorous, perhaps, though perhaps also more harsh and noisy (and less thoughtful), with the actions of heroes caught in circumstances that conformed more or less to the varied but fundamentally simple recipe for an heroic situation. In these (if we had them) we could see the exaltation of undefeated will, which receives doctrinal expression in the words of Byrhtwold at the battle of Maldon.11 11  This expression may well have been actually used by the eald geneat, but none the less (or perhaps rather precisely on that account) is probably to be regarded not as new-minted, but as an

But though with sympathy and patience we might gather, from a line here or a tone there, the background of imagina­ tion which gives to this indomitability, this paradox of defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged, its full significance, it is in Beowulf that a poet has devoted a whole poem to the theme, and has drawn the struggle in different proportions, so that we may see man at war with the hostile world, and his inevi­ table overthrow in Time.12 The particular is on the outer edge, the essential in the centre. Of course, I do not assert that the poet, if questioned, would have replied in the Anglo-Saxon equivalents of these terms. Had the matter been so explicit to him, his poem would certainly have been the worse. None the less we may still, against his great scene, hung with tapestries woven of ancient tales of ruin, see the hæleð walk. When we have read his poem, as a poem, rather than as a collection of episodes, we perceive that he who wrote hæleð under heofenum may have meant in dictionary terms “heroes under heaven,” or “mighty men upon earth,” but he and his hearers were thinking of the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsecg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof; whereon, as in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat. That even this “geography,” once held as a material fact, could now be classed as a mere folk-tale affects its value very little. It transcends astronomy. Not that astronomy has done anything to make the island seem more secure or the outer seas less formidable. Beowulf is not, then, the hero of an heroic lay, precisely. He has no enmeshed loyalties, nor hapless love. He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy. It is not an irritating accident that the tone of the poem is so high and its theme so low. It is the theme in its deadly seriousness that begets the dignity of tone: lif is læne: eal scæceð leoht and lif somod. So deadly and ineluctable is the underlying thought, that those who in the circle of light, within the besieged hall, are absorbed in work or talk and do not look to the ancient and honoured gnome of long descent.

12  For the words hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað are not, of course, an exhortation to simple courage. They are not reminders that fortune favours the brave, or that victory may be snatched from defeat by the stubborn. (Such thoughts were familiar, but otherwise expressed: wyrd oft nereð unfægne eorl, ponne his ellen deah.) The words of Byrhtwold were made for a man’s last and hopeless day.

battlements, either do not regard it or recoil. Death comes to the feast, and they say He gibbers: He has no sense of proportion. I would suggest, then, that the monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness. The key to the fusion-point of imagination that produced this poem lies, therefore, in those very references to Cain which have often been used as a stick to beat an ass—taken as an evident sign (were any needed) of the muddled heads of early Anglo-Saxons. They could not, it was said, keep Scandinavian bogies and the Scriptures separate in their puzzled brains. The New Testament was beyond their comprehension. I am not, as I have confessed, a man so diligent as duly to read all the books about Beowulf, but as far as I am aware the most suggestive approach to this point appears in the essay Beowulf and the Heroic Age to which I have already referred.13 I will quote a small part of it. In the epoch of Beowulf a Heroic Age more wild and primitive than that of Greece is brought into touch with Christendom, with the Sermon on the Mount, with Catholic theology and ideas of Heaven and Hell. We see the difference, if we compare the wilder things—the folk-tale element—in Beowulf with the wilder things of Homer. Take for example the tale of Odysseus and the Cyclops—the No-man trick. Odys­ seus is struggling with a monstrous and wicked foe, but he is not exactly thought of as struggling with the powers of darkness. Polyphemus, by devouring his guests, acts in a way which is hateful to Zeus and the other gods: yet the Cyclops is himself god—begotten and under divine protection, and the fact that Odys­ seus has maimed him is a wrong which Poseidon is slow to forgive. But the gigantic foes whom Beowulf has to meet are identified with the foes of God. Grendel and the dragon are constantly referred to in language which is meant to recall the powers of darkness with which Christian men felt themselves to be encompassed. They14 are the “inmates of Hell,” “adversaries of God,” “offspring of Cain,” “enemies of mankind.” Consequently, the matter of the main story of Beowulf, monstrous as it is, is not so far removed from common mediaeval experience as it seems to us

13  Foreword to Strong’s translation, p. xxviii. See note 3.

14  This is not strictly true. The dragon is not referred to in such terms, which are applied to Grendel and to the primeval giants.

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”

to be from our own.… Grendel hardly differs15 from the fiends of the pit who were always in ambush to waylay a righteous man. And so Beowulf, for all that he moves in the world of the primitive Heroic Age of the Germans, nevertheless is almost a Christian knight.16

There are some hints here which are, I think, worth pursuing further. Most important is it to consider how and why the monsters become “adversaries of God,” and so begin to symbolize (and ultimately to become identified with) the powers of evil, even while they remain, as they do still remain in Beowulf, mortal denizens of the material world, in it and of it. I accept without argument throughout the attribution of Beowulf to the “age of Bede”—one of the firmer conclusions of a department of research most clearly serviceable to criticism: inquiry into the probable date of the effective composition of the poem as we have it. So regarded Beowulf is, of course, an historical document of the first order for the study of the mood and thought of the period and one perhaps too little used for the purpose by professed historians.17 But it is the mood of the author, the essential cast of his imaginative apprehension of the world, that is my concern, not history for its own sake; I am interested in that time of fusion only as it may help us to understand the poem. And in the poem I think we may observe not confusion, a half-hearted or a muddled business but a fusion that has occurred at a given point of contact between old and new, a product of thought and deep emotion. One of the most potent elements in that fusion is the Northern courage: the theory of courage, which is the great contribution of early Northern literature. This is not a military judgement. I am not asserting that, if the Trojans could have employed a Northern king and his companions, they would have driven Agamemnon and Achilles into the sea, more decisively than the Greek hexameter routs the alliterative line—though it is not improbable. I refer rather to the central position the creed of unyielding will holds in the North. With due reserve we may turn to the tradition of pagan imagination as it survived in Icelandic. Of English 15  He differs in important points, referred to later.

16  I should prefer to say that he moves in a northern heroic age imagined by a Christian, and therefore has a noble and gentle quality, though conceived to be a pagan.

17  It is, for instance, dismissed cursorily, and somewhat contemp­ tuously in the recent (somewhat contemptuous) essay of Dr. Watson, The Age of Bede in Bede, His Life, Times, and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson, 1935.

11

12

J.R.R. Tolkien

pre-Christian mythology we know practically nothing. But the fundamentally similar heroic temper of ancient England and Scandinavia cannot have been founded on (or perhaps rather, cannot have generated) mythologies divergent on this essential point. “The Northern Gods,” Ker said, “have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason”—mythologically, the monsters—“but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.”18 And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this “absolute resistance, perfect because without hope.” At least in this vision of the final defeat of the humane (and of the divine made in its image), and in the essential hostility of the gods and heroes on the one hand and the monsters on the other, we may suppose that pagan English and Norse imagination agreed. But in England this imagination was brought into touch with Christendom, and with the Scriptures. The process of “conversion” was a long one, but some of its effects were doubtless immediate: an alchemy of change (producing ultimately the mediaeval) was at once at work. One does not have to wait until all the native traditions of the older world have been replaced or forgotten; for the minds which still retain them are changed, and the memories viewed in a different perspective: at once they become more ancient and remote, and in a sense darker. It is through such a blending that there was available to a poet who set out to write a poem—and in the case of Beowulf we may probably use this very word—on a scale and plan unlike a minstrel’s lay, both new faith and new learning (or education); and also a body of native tradition (itself requiring to be learned) for the changed mind to contemplate together.19 The native “learning” cannot be denied in the case of Beowulf. Its display has grievously perturbed the critics, for the author draws upon tradition at will for his own purposes, as a poet of later times might draw upon history or the classics and expect his allusions to be understood (within a certain class of hearers). He was in fact, like Virgil, learned enough in the vernacular department to have an historical perspective, even an antiquarian curiosity. He cast his time into the long-ago, because already the long18  The Dark Ages, p. 57.

19  If we consider the period as a whole. It is not, of course, neces­ sarily true of individuals. These doubtless from the beginning showed many degrees from deep instruction and understanding to disjointed superstition, or blank ignorance.

ago had a special poetical attraction. He knew much about old days, and though his knowledge—of such things as sea-burial and the funeral pyre, for instance—was rich and poetical rather than accurate with the accuracy of modern archaeol­ ogy (such as that is), one thing he knew clearly: those days were heathen—heathen, noble, and hopeless. But if the specifically Christian was suppressed,20 so also were the old gods. Partly because they had not really existed, and had been always, in the Christian view, only delusions or lies fabricated by the evil one, the gastbona, to whom the hopeless turned especially in times of need. Partly because their old names (certainly not forgotten) had been potent, and were connected in memory still, not only with mythology or such fairy-tale matter as we find, say, in Gylfaginning, but with active heathendom, religion and wigweorþung. Most of all because they were not actually essential to the theme. The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figures, the men of old, hæleð under heofenum, remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God, ece Dryhten, the eternal Captain of the new. Even so the vision of the war changes. For it begins to dissolve, even as the contest on the fields of Time thus takes on its largest aspect. The tragedy of the great temporal defeat remains for a while poignant, but ceases to 20  Avoidance of obvious anachronisms (such as are found in Judith, for instance, where the heroine refers in her own speeches to Christ and the Trinity), and the absence of all definitely Christian names and terms, is natural and plainly intentional. It must be observed that there is a difference between the comments of the author and the things said in reported speech by his characters. The two chief of these, Hrothgar and Beowulf, are again differentiated. Thus the only definitely Scriptural references, to Abel (108) and to Cain (108, 1261), occur where the poet is speaking as commentator. The theory of Grendel’s origin is not known to the actors: Hrothgar denies all knowledge of the ancestry of Grendel (1355). The giants (1688 ff.) are, it is true, represented pictorially, and in Scriptural terms. But this suggests rather that the author identified native and Scriptural accounts, and gave his picture Scriptural colour, since of the two accounts Scripture was the truer. And if so it would be closer to that told in remote antiquity when the sword was made, more especially since the wundorsmiþas who wrought it were actually giants (1558, 1562, 1679): they would know the true tale. See note 25.

be finally important. It is no defeat, for the end of the world is part of the design of Metod, the Arbiter who is above the mortal world. Beyond there appears a possibility of eternal victory (or eternal defeat), and the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries. So the old monsters became images of the evil spirit or spirits, or rather the evil spirits entered into the monsters and took visible shape in the hideous bodies of the þyrsas and sigelhearwan of heathen imagination. But that shift is not complete in Beowulf—whatever may have been true of its period in general. Its author is still con­ cerned primarily with man on earth, rehandling in a new perspective an ancient theme: that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die. A theme no Christian need despise. Yet this theme plainly would not be so treated, but for the nearness of a pagan time. The shadow of its despair, if only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret, is still there. The worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt. As the poet looks back into the past, surveying the history of kings and warriors in the old traditions, he sees that all glory (or as we might say “culture” or “civilization”) ends in night. The solution of that tragedy is not treated—it does not arise out of the material. We get in fact a poem from a pregnant moment of poise, looking back into the pit, by a man learned in old tales who was struggling, as it were, to get a general view of them all, perceiving their common tragedy of inevi­ table ruin, and yet feeling this more poetically because he was himself removed from the direct pressure of its despair. He could view from without, but still feel immediately and from within, the old dogma: despair of the event, combined with faith in the value of doomed resistance. He was still dealing with the great temporal tragedy, and not yet writing an alle­ gorical homily in verse. Grendel inhabits the visible world and eats the flesh and blood of men; he enters their houses by the doors. The dragon wields a physical fire, and covets gold not souls; he is slain with iron in his belly. Beowulf’s byrne was made by Weland, and the iron shield he bore against the serpent by his own smiths: it was not yet the breastplate of righteousness, nor the shield of faith for the quenching of all the fiery darts of the wicked. Almost we might say that this poem was (in one direction) inspired by the debate that had long been held and continued after, and that it was one of the chief contributions to the controversy: shall we or shall we not consign the heathen ancestors to perdition? What good will it do posterity to read the battles of Hector? Quid Hinieldus cum Christo? The author of Beowulf showed forth the permanent value of that pietas which treasures the memory of man’s struggles in the

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”

dark past, man fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned. It would seem to have been part of the English temper in its strong sense of tradition, dependent doubtless on dynasties, noble houses, and their code of honour, and strengthened, it may be, by the more inquisitive and less severe Celtic learning, that it should, at least in some quarters and despite grave and Gallic voices, preserve much from the northern past to blend with southern learning, and new faith. It has been thought that the influence of Latin epic, especially of the Aeneid, is perceptible in Beowulf, and a necessary explanation, if only in the exciting of emulation, of the development of the long and studied poem in early England. There is, of course, a likeness in places between these greater and lesser things, the Aeneid and Beowulf, if they are read in conjunction. But the smaller points in which imitation or reminiscence might be perceived are inconclusive, while the real likeness is deeper and due to certain qualities in the authors independent of the question whether the Anglo-Saxon had read Virgil or not. It is this deeper likeness which makes things, that are either the inevitabilities of human poetry or the accidental congruences of all tales, ring alike. We have the great pagan on the threshold of the change of the world; and the great (if lesser) Christian just over the threshold of the great change in his time and place: the backward view: multa putans sortemque animo miseratus iniquam.21 But we will now return once more to the monsters, and consider especially the difference of their status in the north­ ern and southern mythologies. Of Grendel it is said: Godes yrre bær. But the Cyclops is god-begotten and his maiming is an offence against his begetter, the god Poseidon. This radi­ cal difference in mythological status is only brought out more sharply by the very closeness of the similarity in conception (in all save mere size) that is seen, if we compare Beowulf, 740 ff., with the description of the Cyclops devouring men in Odys­ sey, ix—or still more in Aeneid, iii. 622 ff. In Virgil, whatever may be true of the fairy-tale world of the Odyssey, the Cyclops walks veritably in the historic world. He is seen by Aeneas in Sicily, monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, as much a peril­ ous fact as Grendel was in Denmark, earmsceapen on weres

21  In fact the real resemblance of the Aeneid and Beowulf lies in the constant presence of a sense of many-storied antiquity, together with its natural accompaniment, stern and noble melancholy. In this they are really akin and together differ from Homer’s flatter, if more glittering, surface.

13

14

J.R.R. Tolkien

wæstmum … næfne he wæs mara þonne ænig man oðer; as real as Acestes or Hrothgar.22 At this point in particular we may regret that we do not know more about pre-Christian English mythology. Yet it is, as I have said, legitimate to suppose that in the matter of the position of the monsters in regard to men and gods the view was fundamentally the same as in later Icelandic. Thus, though all such generalizations are naturally imperfect in detail (since they deal with matter of various origins, constantly reworked, and never even at most more than partially systematized), we may with some truth contrast the “inhumanness” of the Greek gods, however anthropomorphic, with the “humanness” of the Northern, however titanic. In the southern myths there is also rumour of wars with giants and great powers not Olympian, the Titania pubes fulmine deiecti, rolling like Satan and his satellites in the nethermost Abyss. But this war is differently conceived. It lies in a chaotic past. The ruling gods are not besieged, not in ever-present peril or under future doom.23 Their offspring on earth may be heroes or fair women; it may also be the other creatures hostile to men. The gods are not the allies of men in their war against these or other monsters. The interest of the gods is in this or that man as part of their individual schemes, not 22  I use this illustration following Chambers, because of the close resemblance between Grendel and the Cyclops in kind. But other examples could be adduced: Cacus, for instance, the offspring of Vulcan. One might ponder the contrast between the legends of the torture of Prometheus and of Loki: the one for assisting men, the other for assisting the powers of darkness.

23  There is actually no final principle in the legendary hostilities contained in classical mythology. For the present purpose that is all that matters: we are not here concerned with remoter mythological origins, in the North or South. The gods, Cronian or Olympian, the Titans, and other great natural powers, and various monsters, even minor local horrors, are not clearly distinguished in origin or ancestry. There could be no permanent policy of war, led by Olympus, to which human courage might be dedicated, among mythological races so promiscuous. Of course, nowhere can absolute rigidity of distinction be expected, because in a sense the foe is always both within and without; the fortress must fall through treachery as well as by assault. Thus Grendel has a perverted human shape, and the giants or jötnar, even when (like the Titans) they are of super-divine stature, are parodies of the human-divine form. Even in Norse, where the distinction is most rigid, Loki dwells in Asgarðr, though he is an evil and lying spirit, and fatal monsters come of him. For it is true of man, maker of myths, that Grendel and the Dragon, in their lust, greed, and malice, have a part in him. But mythically conceived the gods do not recognize any bond with Fenris úlfr, any more than men with Grendel or the serpent.

as part of a great strategy that includes all good men, as the infantry of battle. In Norse, at any rate, the gods are within Time, doomed with their allies to death. Their battle is with the monsters and the outer darkness. They gather heroes for the last defence. Already before euhemerism saved them by embalming them, and they dwindled in antiquarian fancy to the mighty ancestors of northern kings (English and Scan­ dinavian), they had become in their very being the enlarged shadows of great men and warriors upon the walls of the world. When Baldr is slain and goes to Hel he cannot escape thence any more than mortal man. This may make the southern gods more godlike—more lofty, dread, and inscrutable. They are timeless and do not fear death. Such a mythology may hold the promise of a pro­ founder thought. In any case it was a virtue of the southern mythology that it could not stop where it was. It must go for­ ward to philosophy or relapse into anarchy. For in a sense it had shirked the problem precisely by not having the monsters in the centre—as they are in Beowulf to the astonishment of the critics. But such horrors cannot be left permanently unexplained, lurking on the outer edges and under suspicion of being connected with the Government. It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this prob­ lem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage. “As a working theory absolutely impregnable.” So potent is it, that while the older southern imagination has faded for ever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times. It can work, even as it did work with the goðlauss Viking, remember that the poet of Beowulf saw clearly: the wages of heroism is death. For these reasons I think that the passages in Beowulf concerning the giants and their war with God, together with the two mentions of Cain (as the ancestor of the giants in general and Grendel in particular) are specially important. They are directly connected with Scripture, yet they can­ not be dissociated from the creatures of northern myth, the ever-watchful foes of the gods (and men). The undoubtedly scriptural Cain is connected with eotenas and ylfe, which are the jötnar and ālfar of Norse. But this is not due to mere confu­ sion—it is rather an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old and new, was kindled. At this point new Scripture and old tradition touched and ignited. It is for this reason that these elements of Scripture alone appear in a poem dealing of design with the noble pagan of old days. For they are precisely the elements which bear upon this theme.

Man alien in a hostile world, engaged in a struggle which he cannot win while the world lasts, is assured that his foes are the foes also of Dryhten, that his courage noble in itself is also the highest loyalty: so said thyle and clerk. In Beowulf we have, then, an historical poem about the pagan past, or an attempt at one—literal historical fidelity founded on modern research was, of course, not attempted. It is a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical. So far from being a confused semi-pagan—historically unlikely for a man of this sort in the period—he brought probably first to his task a knowledge of Christian poetry, especially that of the Cædmon school, and especially Genesis.24 He makes his minstrel sing in Heorot of the Creation of the earth and the lights of Heaven. So excellent is this choice as the theme of the harp that maddened Grendel lurking joyless in the dark without that it matters little whether this is anachronistic or not.25 Secondly, to his task the poet brought a considerable learning in native lays and traditions: only by learning and training could such things be acquired, they were no more born naturally into an Englishman of the seventh or eighth centuries, by simple virtue of being an “Anglo-Saxon,” than ready-made knowledge of poetry and history is inherited by birth in modern children. It would seem that, in his attempt to depict ancient preChristian days, intending to emphasize their nobility, and the desire of the good for truth, he turned naturally when delineating the great King of Heorot to the Old Testament. In the folces hyrde of the Danes we have much of the shepherd patriarchs and kings of Israel, servants of the one God, who attribute to His mercy all the good things that come to them in 24  The Genesis which is preserved for us is a late copy of a damaged original, but is still certainly in its older parts a poem whose com­ position must be referred to the early period. That Genesis A is actually older than Beowulf is generally recognized as the most probable reading of such evidence as there is.

25  Actually the poet may have known, what we can guess, that such creation-themes were also ancient in the North. Völuspá describes Chaos and the making of the sun and moon, and very similar language occurs in the Old High German fragment known as the Wessobrunner Gebet. The song of the minstrel Iopas, who had his knowledge from Atlas, at the end of the first book of the Aeneid is also in part a song of origins: hic canit errantem lunam solisque labores, unde hominum genus et pecudes, unde imber et ignes. In any case the Anglo-Saxon poet’s view throughout was plainly that true, or truer, knowledge was possessed in ancient days (when men were not deceived by the Devil); at least they knew of the one God and Creator, though not of heaven, for that was lost. See note 20.

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”

this life. We have in fact a Christian English conception of the noble chief before Christianity, who could lapse (as could Israel) in times of temptation into idolatry.26 On the other hand, the traditional matter in English, not to mention the living survival of the heroic code and temper among the noble households of ancient England, enabled him to draw differently, and in some respects much closer to the actual heathen hæleð, the character of Beowulf, especially as a young knight, who used his great gift of mægen to earn dom and lof among men and posterity. Beowulf is not an actual picture of historic Denmark or Geatland or Sweden about A.D. 500. But it is (if with certain minor defects) on a general view a self-consistent picture, a construction bearing clearly the marks of design and thought. The whole must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds of the poet’s contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with a deep significance—a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow. This impression of depth is an effect and a justification of the use of episodes and allusions to old tales, mostly darker, more pagan, and desperate than the foreground. To a similar antiquarian temper, and a similar use of vernacular learning, is probably due the similar effect of antiquity (and melancholy) in the Aeneid—especially felt as soon as Aeneas reaches Italy and the Saturni gentem...sponte sua veterisque dei se more tenentem. Ic þa leode wat ge wið feond ge wið freond fæste worhte, æghwæs untæle ealde wisan. Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets that Virgil knew, and only used in the making of a new thing! The criticism that the important matters are put on the outer edges misses this point of artistry, and indeed fails to see why the old things have in Beowulf such an appeal: it is the poet himself who made antiquity so appealing. His poem has more value in consequence, and is a greater contribution to early mediaeval thought than the harsh and intolerant view that consigned all the heroes to the devil. We may be thankful that the product of so noble a temper has been preserved by chance (if such it be) from the dragon of destruction. The general structure of the poem, so viewed, is not really difficult to perceive, if we look to the main points, the 26  It is of Old Testament lapses rather than of any events in England (of which he is not speaking) that the poet is thinking in lines 175 ff., and this colours his manner of allusion to knowledge which he may have derived from native traditions concerning the Danes and the special heathen religious significance of the site of Heorot (Hleiðrar, æt hærgtrafum, the tabernacles)—it was possibly a matter that embittered the feud of Danes and Heathobeards. If so, this is another point where old and new have blended [...].

15

16

J.R.R. Tolkien

strategy, and neglect the many points of minor tactics. We must dismiss, of course, from mind the notion that Beowulf is a “narrative poem,” that it tells a tale or intends to tell a tale sequentially. The poem “lacks steady advance”: so Klaeber heads a critical section in his edition.27 But the poem was not meant to advance, steadily or unsteadily. It is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death. It is divided in consequence into two opposed portions, different in matter, manner, and length: A from 1 to 2199 (including an exordium of 52 lines); B from 2200 to 3182 (the end). There is no reason to cavil at this proportion; in any case, for the purpose and the production of the required effect, it proves in practice to be right. This simple and static structure, solid and strong, is in each part much diversified, and capable of enduring this treatment. In the conduct of the presentation of Beowulf’s rise to fame on the one hand, and of his kingship and death on the other, criticism can find things to question, especially if it is captious, but also much to praise, if it is attentive. But the only serious weakness, or apparent weakness, is the long recapitulation: the report of Beowulf to Hygelac. This recapit­ ulation is well done. Without serious discrepancy28 it retells rapidly the events in Heorot, and retouches the account; and it serves to illustrate, since he himself describes his own deeds, yet more vividly the character of a young man, singled out by destiny, as he steps suddenly forth in his full powers. Yet this is perhaps not quite sufficient to justify the repetition. The explanation, if not complete justification, is probably to be sought in different directions. 27  Though only explicitly referred to here and in disagreement, this edition is, of course, of great authority, and all who have used it have learned much from it.

28  I am not concerned with minor discrepancies at any point in the poem. They are no proof of composite authorship, nor even of incompetent authorship. It is very difficult, even in a newly invented tale of any length, to avoid such defects; more so still in rehandling old and oft-told tales. The points that are seized in the study, with a copy that can be indexed and turned to and fro (even if never read straight through as it was meant to be), are usually such as may easily escape an author and still more easily his natural audience. Virgil certainly does not escape such faults, even within the limits of a single book. Modern printed tales, that have presumably had the advantage of proof-correction, can even be observed to hesitate in the heroine’s Christian name.

For one thing, the old tale was not first told or invented by this poet. So much is clear from investigation of the folktale analogues. Even the legendary association of the Scylding court with a marauding monster, and with the arrival from abroad of a champion and deliverer was probably already old. The plot was not the poet’s; and though he has infused feeling and significance into its crude material, that plot was not a perfect vehicle of the theme or themes that came to hidden life in the poet’s mind as he worked upon it. Not an unusual event in literature. For the contrast—youth and death—it would probably have been better, if we had no journeying. If the single nation of the Geatas had been the scene, we should have felt the stage not narrower, but symbolically wider. More plainly should we have perceived in one people and their hero all mankind and its heroes. This at any rate I have always myself felt in reading Beowulf; but I have also felt that this defect is rectified by the bringing of the tale of Grendel to Geatland. As Beowulf stands in Hygelac’s hall and tells his story, he sets his feet firm again in the land of his own people, and is no longer in danger of appearing a mere wrecca, an errant adventurer and slayer of bogies that do not concern him. There is in fact a double division in the poem: the funda­ mental one already referred to, and a secondary but important division at line 1887. After that the essentials of the previous part are taken up and compacted, so that all the tragedy of Beowulf is contained between 1888 and the end.29 But, of course, without the first half we should miss much incidental illustration; we should miss also the dark background of the court of Heorot that loomed as large in glory and doom in ancient northern imagination as the court of Arthur: no vision of the past was complete without it. And (most important) we should lose the direct contrast of youth and age in the persons of Beowulf and Hrothgar which is one of the chief purposes of this section: it ends with the pregnant words oþ þæt hine yldo benam mægenes wyrnum, se þe oft manegum scod. In any case we must not view this poem as in intention an exciting narrative or a romantic tale. The very nature of Old English metre is often misjudged. In it there is no single rhythmic pattern progressing from the beginning of a line to the end, and repeated with variation in other lines. The lines do not go according to a tune. They are founded on a balance; 29  The least satisfactory arrangement possible is thus to read only lines 1–1887 and not the remainder. This procedure has none the less been, from time to time, directed or encouraged by more than one “English syllabus.”

an opposition between two halves of roughly equivalent30 phonetic weight, and significant content, which are more often rhythmically contrasted than similar. They are more like masonry than music. In this fundamental fact of poetic expression I think there is a parallel to the total structure of Beowulf. Beowulf is indeed the most successful Old English poem because in it the elements, language, metre, theme, structure, are all most nearly in harmony. Judgement of the verse has often gone astray through listening for an accentual rhythm and pattern: and it seems to halt and stumble. Judge­ ment of the theme goes astray through considering it as the narrative handling of a plot: and it seems to halt and stumble. Language and verse, of course, differ from stone or wood or paint, and can be only heard or read in a time-sequence; so that in any poem that deals at all with characters and events some narrative element must be present. We have none the less in Beowulf a method and structure that within the limits of the verse-kind approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune. This is clear in the second half. In the struggle with Grendel one can as a reader dismiss the certainty of literary experience that the hero will not in fact perish, and allow oneself to share the hopes and fears of the Geats upon the shore. In the second part the author has no desire whatever that the issue should remain open, even according to literary convention. There is no need to hasten like the messenger, who rode to bear the lamentable news to the waiting people (2892 ff.). They may have hoped, but we are not supposed to. By now we are supposed to have grasped the plan. Disaster is foreboded. Defeat is the theme. Triumph over the foes of man’s precarious fortress is over, and we approach slowly and reluctantly the inevitable victory of death.31 “In structure,” it was said of Beowulf, “it is curiously weak, in a sense preposterous,” though great merits of detail were allowed. In structure actually it is curiously strong, in a sense inevitable, though there are defects of detail. The general design of the poet is not only defensible, it is, 30  Equivalent, but not necessarily equal, certainly not as such things may be measured by machines.

31  That the particular bearer of enmity, the Dragon, also dies is important chiefly to Beowulf himself. He was a great man. Not many even in dying can achieve the death of a single worm, or the temporary salvation of their kindred. Within the limits of human life Beowulf neither lived nor died in vain—brave men might say. But there is no hint, indeed there are many to the contrary, that it was a war to end war, or a dragon-fight to end dragons. It is the end of Beowulf, and of the hope of his people.

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”

I think, admirable. There may have previously existed in stirring verse dealing in straightforward manner and even in natural sequence with the Beowulf’s deeds, or with the fall of Hygelac; or again with the fluctuations of the feud between the houses of Hrethel the Geat and Ongentheow the Swede; or with the tragedy of the Heathobards, and the treason that destroyed the Scylding dynasty. Indeed this must be admitted to be practically certain: it was the existence of such connected legends—connected in the mind, not necessarily dealt with in chronicle fashion or in long semihistorical poems—that permitted the peculiar use of them in Beowulf. This poem cannot be criticized or comprehended, if its original audience is imagined in like case to ourselves, possessing only Beowulf in splendid isolation. For Beowulf was not designed to tell the tale of Hygelac’s fall, or for that matter to give the whole biography of Beowulf, still less to write the history of the Geatish kingdom and its downfall. But it used knowledge of these things for its own purpose—to give that sense of perspective, of antiquity with a greater and yet darker antiquity behind. These things are mainly on the outer edges or in the background because they belong there, if they are to function in this way. But in the centre we have an heroic figure of enlarged proportions. Beowulf is not an “epic,” not even a magnified “lay.” No terms borrowed from Greek or other literatures exactly fit: there is no reason why they should. Though if we must have a term, we should choose rather “elegy.” It is an heroicelegiac poem; and in a sense all its first 3,136 lines are the prelude to a dirge: him pa gegiredan Geata leode ad ofer eorðan unwaclicne: one of the most moving ever written. But for the universal significance which is given to the fortunes of its hero it is an enhancement and not a detraction, in fact it is necessary, that his final foe should be not some Swedish prince, or treacherous friend, but a dragon: a thing made by imagination for just such a purpose. Nowhere does a dragon come in so precisely where he should. But if the hero falls before a dragon, then certainly he should achieve his early glory by vanquishing a foe of similar order. There is, I think, no criticism more beside the mark than that which some have made, complaining that it is monsters in both halves that is so disgusting; one they could have stomached more easily. That is nonsense. I can see the point of asking for no monsters. I can also see the point of the situation in Beowulf. But no point at all in mere reduction of numbers. It would really have been preposterous, if the poet had recounted Beowulf’s rise to fame in a “typical” or “commonplace” war in Frisia, and then ended him with a

17

18

J.R.R. Tolkien

dragon. Or if he had told of his cleansing of Heorot, and then brought him to defeat and death in a “wild” or “trivial” Swedish invasion! If the dragon is the right end for Beowulf, and I agree with the author that it is, then Grendel is an eminently suitable beginning. They are creatures, feond mancynnes, of a similar order and kindred significance. Triumph over the lesser and more nearly human is cancelled by defeat before the older and more elemental. And the conquest of the ogres comes at the right moment: not in earliest youth, though the nicors are referred to in Beowulf’s geogoðfeore as a presage of the kind of hero we have to deal with; and not during the later period of recognized ability and prowess;32 but in that first moment, which often comes in great lives, when men look up in surprise and see that a hero has unawares leaped forth. The placing of the dragon is inevitable: a man can but die upon his death-day. I will conclude by drawing an imaginary contrast. Let us suppose that our poet had chosen a theme more conso­ nant with “our modern judgement”; the life and death of St. Oswald. He might then have made a poem, and told first of Heavenfield, when Oswald as a young prince against all hope won a great victory with a remnant of brave men; and then have passed at once to the lamentable defeat of Oswestry, which seemed to destroy the hope of Christian Northumbria; while all the rest of Oswald’s life, and the traditions of the royal house and its feud with that of Deira might be intro­ duced allusively or omitted. To any one but an historian in search of facts and chronology this would have been a fine thing, an heroic-elegiac poem greater than history. It would be much better than a plain narrative, in verse or prose, however steadily advancing. This mere arrangement would at once give it more significance than a straightforward account of one king’s life: the contrast of rising and setting, achievement and death. But even so it would fall far short of Beowulf. Poetically it would be greatly enhanced if the poet had taken violent liberties with history and much enlarged the reign of Oswald, making him old and full of years of care and glory when he went forth heavy with foreboding to face the heathen Penda: the contrast of youth and age would add

32  We do, however, learn incidentally much of this period: it is not strictly true, even of our poem as it is, to say that after the deeds in Heorot Beowulf “has nothing else to do.” Great heroes, like great saints, should show themselves capable of dealing also with the ordinary things of life, even though they may do so with a strength more than ordinary. We may wish to be assured of this (and the poet has assured us), without demanding that he should put such things in the centre, when they are not the centre of his thought.

enormously to the original theme, and give it a more univer­ sal meaning. But even so it would still fall short of Beowulf. To match his theme with the rise and fall of poor “folk-tale” Beowulf the poet would have been obliged to turn Cadwal­ lon and Penda into giants and demons. It is just because the main foes in Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant than this imaginary poem of a great king’s fall. It glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods, however important. At the beginning, and during its process, and most of all at the end, we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world. A light starts—lixte se leoma ofer landa fela—and there is a sound of music; but the outer darkness and its hostile offspring lie ever in wait for the torches to fail and the voices to cease. Grendel is maddened by the sound of harps. And one last point, which those will feel who to-day preserve the ancient pietas towards the past: Beowulf is not a “primitive” poem; it is a late one, using the materials (then still plentiful) preserved from a day already changing and passing, a time that has now for ever vanished, swallowed in oblivion; using them for a new purpose, with a wider sweep of imagination, if with a less bitter and concentrated force. When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo. There is not much poetry in the world like this; and though Beowulf may not be among the very greatest poems of our western world and its tradition, it has its own individual character, and peculiar solemnity; it would still have power had it been written in some time or place unknown and without posterity, if it contained no name that could now be recognized or identified by research. Yet it is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal—until the dragon comes.

JOHN BLOCK FRIEDMAN, “A MEASURE OF MAN,” excerpted from THE MONSTROUS RACES IN MEDIEVAL ART AND THOUGHT

Critical Introduction

Reading Questions

John Block Friedman (1934– ) wrote The Monstrous

Friedman makes the case that traits such as diet and clothing still function as cultural markers even today. As you read about the marvelous races from almost two millennia ago, try to generate a list of contemporary monsters that seem monstrous because of their behaviour in each of these categories. The five categories covered in this excerpt were likely chosen because they spoke most directly to Friedman’s subject of Plinian races, but Friedman makes no claims to be comprehensive. What has he left out of his list? What cul­ tural markers might be important for the study of medieval, Romantic, or contemporary monsters, for instance?

Races in Medieval Art and Thought with, as the title suggests, a focus on the Plinian peoples in the medieval West. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History is an encyclopedic work written in the late 70s CE; in it, he describes odd groups or tribes of people (the mouthless Astomi and the one-footed Sciapod, for instance) who generally live far away from Rome. By the Middle Ages, Pliny’s “races” had become an important part of the Western worldview—showing up in everything from theological treatises to maps. Friedman takes as his task the study of how Greek and Roman sources othered these crea­ tures and how that project continued and developed in the medieval West. In the excerpt reproduced here, Friedman focuses nar­ rowly on five “measures of man” as they existed in the Greek and Roman worldview. All five (diet, language, city-dwelling, clothing, and weapons) are cultural attributes. The careful reader will notice that he only lightly touches on physical characteristics that might set these creatures apart from “nor­ mal” human beings. This is an interesting and useful approach that is not limited to the Plinian peoples or medieval texts: it highlights the cultural and relativistic attitudes that are so important in monster creation, whether that creation takes place in ancient Greece, medieval England, or in the United States of the 1950s. Note that Friedman uses the term “monstrous races” to describe these groups. This usage is common in scholarship, but we prefer to speak about monstrous peoples to avoid projecting modern ideas about race back in history to periods that had very different ideas about how to divide people into groups and categories.

Further Reading

Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1981. Mittman, Asa Simon. “Are the Monstrous ‘Races’ Races?” post­ medieval 6 (2015): 36–51. Wittkower, Rudolf. “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti­ tutes 5 (1942): 159–97. MH

“A MEASURE OF MAN,” EXCERPTED FROM THE MONSTROUS RACES IN MEDIEVAL ART AND THOUGHT JOHN BLOCK FRIEDMAN

Greco-Roman accounts of the monstrous races exhibit a marked ethnocentrism which made the observer’s culture, language, and physical appearance the norm by which to evaluate all other peoples. The Hellenes, like many other tightly knit cultures, tended to view outsiders as likely to be inferior and untrustworthy.1 From them we have inherited words like “barbarian” and “xenophobia,” which reflect their attitudes toward the world beyond Greek-speaking lands, attitudes that were often justified by experience. Yet at the same time the Greeks were an intensely curious, seafaring people whose great interest in the variety of human life often led them to venture into unknown territory. The works of Ctesias, Megasthenes, and other Hellenic travelers reveal both a fascination with the strangeness of other peoples and places and an implicit revulsion from the “other.” Although an alien was usually defined in antiquity with respect to his legal status as a non-national who did not have the protection of the law or the freedom of the city, his legal status was only one of the ways in which he was perceived to be different.2 Other more intuitive indicators of foreignness were highly charged with emotional significance. Everyday cultural differences in such things as diet, speech, clothes, weapons, customs, and social organization were what truly set alien peoples apart from their observers in the classical world, and the power of these cultural traits to mark a race as monstrous persisted into the Middle Ages and beyond. Even today these traits continue to signal whether a person is “one of us” or not. Most readers of fiction will have noticed that an instinctual indicator of social class or national difference is the food that a person eats. A character in a postwar British novel of social class is defined partly by the fact that she uses “sauce” on her food. A writer evokes the cultural milieu of his boyhood by describing a typical family dinner. The epithets “frog” for a Frenchman or “kraut” for a 1  On this point see Annie Dorsinfang-Smets, “Les É� trangers dans la sociétié primitive,” L’Étranger (Recueils de la Sociétié Jean Bodin) 9 (1958): 60. 2  See John Gilissen, “Le Satut de étrangers,” L’Étranger 9 (1958): 10.

German identify whole nations with a food known to be eaten there. Ants, sheep’s eyes, wild game, wheat germ, pork—all place a distance between the people who eat them and the people who do not. This was even truer in antiquity. As early as Homer’s treatment of the Lotus-Eaters and Polyphemus (Odyssey 9) we see that for the Greeks a race’s dietary practices were an important sign of its humanity or inhumanity.3 It was common in the Greek periegesis or description of coastal voyages to name coastal or island peoples after their eating habits. Rather than trying to elicit the name that the people might use of themselves, the traveler characterized them by the dominant food in their diet.4 Thus we find Agatharcides of Cnidos describing the peoples of Ethiopia as Fish-Eaters, Root-Eaters, Elephant-Eaters, and Dog-Milkers.5 And Homer (Iliad 13) has Zeus surveying the distant Hippomolgi, or Horse-Milkers, with wonder. As late as the tenth century we see much the same habit of mind in the geography of Pseudo-Moses of Chorene.6 In discussing Libya, the author simply lists the peoples there by diet, giving them long and 3  See on this subject, H. C. Baldry, The Unity of Mankind in Greek Though (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 4, 10.

4  The periegesis or periplus in antiquity followed the order of cities, peoples, and the like as a sailor would encounter them in traveling the coasts. See F. Gisinger, “Periplus,” P-W 19.1 (1937): 839–850. The earliest example is the lost treatise of Hecataeus of Miletus, c. 500 B.C., on which see Lionel Pearson, Early Ionian Historians (Oxford, 1939), pp. 30, 34ff. Scylax of Caranda, an explorer for Darius, has a periplus in the fourth century associated with his name. The author described gigantic Ethiopians, and bearded, hairy, and extremely attractive men; see C. Müller, ed., Geographi Graeci Minores (rpt. Hildesheim, 1965), 1.54, p. 54.

5  See Agatharcides of Cnidos, De Mari Erythraeo, in Müller, Geographici Graeci 1.40, pp. 134f; 51, p. 142; 55, pp. 146f; 60, pp. 152f. Even Saint Jerome, in the Adversus Jovinianum 2.7, discusses at length the unusual things distant races eat, mentioning Troglodytes, Scythians, and Icthiophagi, [Patrologia Latina] 23, 294–297.

6  Arséne Soukry, ed. and tr., Géographie de Moïse de Coréne (Venice, 1881), 4.7–8, pp. 28–29. On the whole subject see Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 21.

“A Measure of Man,” excerpted from The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought

The unusual diets of these races no doubt accounted for much of their immense popularity in medieval encyclopedias and Eastern travel narratives. In medieval representations of the Plinian peoples the artists take obvious pleasure in presenting unusual foods or eating habits, often going far beyond the verbal instructions in the texts. An example is the illustration cycle featuring the Cynomolgus from the bestiary formerly in Sion College […]. One of Pliny’s races in Ethiopia, the Cynomolgi, or Dog-Milkers, is plainly a variant form of the Cynocephali of Ctesias and other Greek writers. In Pliny’s catalog of the races, the Dog-Milkers appear right after the Anthropophagi (6.35.195, p. 482). The Sion College illustrator gives us an Anthropophagus in the upper right register, chew­ ing on various human parts; to his left is the Cynomolgus, whose rubric now contains the new information that he too eats human flesh. Apparently his dog-milking has been for­ gotten or the meaning of his name was no longer understood when people ceased to read Greek. The illustrator has handed him a limb similar to the one eaten by the Anthropophagus and a new race of dog-headed cannibals develops from the harmless Cynomolgus. Another picture cycle, this time from Mandeville’s Travels, shows how diet contributed strongly to the races’ capacity to evoke wonder in a medieval audience (Figure 3.1).7 The Middle English metrical Mandeville presents some­ what more succinctly than the prose version information about the people in the miniature.

Figure 3.1. Riverine Apple-Smellers. Mandeville’s Travels, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fr. 2810, fol. 219v, fifteenth century.

resonant names: Rhizophagi, Struthophagi, Icthiophagi, Anthropophagi, and, in Scythia, Galactophagi. The point of view implicit in such labels is ethnocentric, for character­ ization by diet suggests the difference or remoteness of the other from the observer rather than the common bond of humanity. Although the Romans were considerably more cos­ mopolitan in these matters, it is suggestive that Pliny in his Natural History characterized many races according to their alien diets. Among them were the Astomi or Apple-Smellers, Straw-Drinkers, Raw-Meat-Eaters, snake-eating Troglodytes, dog-milking Cynomolgi, parent-eating Anthropophagi, and Panphagi, who devour anything.

There is another island That men call Piktain And the people of that region

7  These miniatures, from Paris BN Fr. 2810, a fifteenth-century manuscript made for John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, have been published by H. Omon, Livre de Merveilles: Reproduction des 265 miniatures du manuscrit français 2810 de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1907). The manuscript, dating from 1403, contains a variety of Eastern travel texts: Marco Polo, Oderic of Pordenone, Letters of the Khan to Pope Benedict XII, John of Cor, Archbishop of Sultanieh’s “Book of the State of the Great Khan,” Mandeville, Haytoun of Armenia’s “Flowers of History,” and an itinerary by Ricoldo de Monte Croce. The makeup of the manuscript has been discussed and portions published by Louis de Backer, L’Extrême Orient au Moyen Age (Paris, 1877). Mandeville occupies folios 141r–225v. On Mandeville see J.W. Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (New York, 1954), and, more recently, Donald Howard, “The World of Mandeville’s Travels,” Yearbook of English Studies 1 (1971): 1–17; C.W.R.D. Moseley, “The Metamorphoses of Sir John Mandeville,” Yearbook of English Studies 4 (1974): 5–25; and Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 130–157.

21

22

John Block Friedman

... Never eat or drink But everyone in that land Holds an apple in his hand ... By whose smell he lives ... And on the island of Dendros, I gather, That is next to it, Men live on flesh and fish.8

In the prose version we learn that the men of Dendros— whom we have met before in the Alexander literature—“have skins as coarsely haired as beasts, except for the face. These people go as well under water as they do on dry land.”9 The illustrator has seen fit, perhaps in the interests of economy, to conflate the people of Piktain with those of Dendros and make a single race of hairy, riverine Apple-Smellers. Perhaps, as well, he realized that people who could live on the smell of apples would seem more remarkable and alien to his audience than those who ate flesh and fish, even raw. Nearly equal in importance to diet as a measure of man was the possession of speech. Homer had referred to a certain race as “barbarians,” literally barbaraphonoi (Iliad 2.867) or those whose language sounds like “bar bar” to a Greek, and the term was not uncommon among later writers.10 This 8  M. C. Seymour, ed., The Metrical Version of Mandeville’s Travels, [Early English Text Society: Original Series] 269 (London, 1973), ll. 2506–2509; 2511–2513; 2517; 2529–2531.

9  P. Hamelius, ed., Mandeville’s Travels, EETS: OS 153 (rpt. London 1960, 1961), ch. 33, p. 198.

10  See on the Greek sense of this word J. Jüthner, Hellenen und Bar­ baren aus der Geschichte des Nationalbewusstseins (Leipzig, 1923), and H. H. Bacon, Barbarians in Greek Tragedy (New Haven, 1961). For its changing sense among Latin-speaking peoples, see W. R. Jones, “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 376–407. Saint Augustine observed that “the diversity of languages separates one man from another. For if two men, each ignorant of the other’s language, meet and are compelled by some necessity not to pass on but to remain together, then it is easier for dumb animals, even of different kinds, to associate together than for them, though both are human beings. For where they cannot communicate their views to one another, merely because they speak different languages, so little good does it do them to be alike by endowment of nature, so far as social unity is concerned, that a man would rather have his dog for company than a foreigner.” William Chase Greene, ed. and tr., Saint Augustine: The City of God, vol. 6, [Loeb Classical Library] (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1959), 19.7, p. 149.

suggests that to the Greek mind the concept of audekseis, the use of articulate speech distinguishing men from animals and non-men, was not enough to confer full humanity. The speech had to be Greek, for the sounds of the non-Greek-speaking “other” were not the true communications of rational men.11 Again, the Roman world was more cosmopolitan than the Greek in this regard, but characterization of the alien by language was shared to a lesser degree by Pliny. Interestingly, five of his races are monstrous wholly or partly because they lack human speech. In addition to their surprising counte­ nances, the Cynocephali bark like dogs. Both the Astomi and the Straw-Drinkers by implication lack speech altogether, as do more explicitly the snake-eating Troglodytes and the speechless gesturing people. Even the names foreign peoples used among themselves were held in low esteem by the ancients. Pliny observed that “the Greeks give to Africa the name of Libya … the names of its people and towns are absolutely unpronounceable except by the natives” (5.1, p. 219). And when Pseudo-Moses of Chorene names a few of the forty-three races in Scythia, he says of the rest, “The other people bear some barbarous names; it is superfluous to repeat them here.”12 As late as the fourteenth century we find the author of Mandeville’s Travels including a variety of alphabets in his work to show that the alien had not only a different speech but even a different form of writing. One manuscript of the Travels adds to the six alphabets found in most versions two others, the alphabets of Cathay and of Pentexoire, the land of Prester John.13 It should be noticed that such curiosity about the speech of other races, while showing Western fascination with their strangeness, is often smug or moralizing and rarely depicts these peoples to advantage. Mandeville is one notable exception to this statement. Another mark of the alien was his existence outside the cultural setting of a city. Preeminently social and civil, the Hellenes had trouble viewing the members of primitive societies as men because they did not make use of the polis. For the Greeks, it was difficult to imagine a man independent 11  Rendel Harris, The Voyage of Hanno (Cambridge, 1928) 11, p. 26: “The coast…was at every point occupied by Ethiops;…their talk was unintelligible even to our Lexite friends.” 12  Soukry, Géographie, 6.34, p. 56.

13  See Guy De Poerck, “Le Corpus Mandevillien du MS Cantilly 699,” in G. De Poerck et al., eds., Fin du Moyen Age et Renaissance: Mélanges de philologie française offerts à Robert Guiette (Anvers, 1961), pp. 31–32.

“A Measure of Man,” excerpted from The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought

of his city; slaves and aliens who had no city had no independent existence. The city conferred humanity, for it gave its citizens a shared setting in which to exercise their human faculties in the practice of law, social intercourse, worship, philosophy, and art. Partly because barbarians did not organize themselves into city-states as did the Greeks, we see Aristotle in Politics 1.218 thinking of barbarians as natural slaves and outcasts, agreeing with Homer that they were rightly ruled over by Greeks. As Aristotle pointed out in the Nichomachean Ethics 10.9.8–9, and Politics 1.1.5, “normality” was only possible to the inhabitant of the city-state on the Greek model. Men who lived outside cities, since their lives were guided by no law, were not really human, as for example Homer’s Cyclopes, who lived apart in caves without themites or precedents to guide them. The Romans, too, considered the ability to form cities as one of the distinguishing characteristics of humanity. Accordingly, the monstrous races who did not meet this criterion seemed to the ancients uncivilized and scarcely human. In a late antique itinerary, for example, we learn of “men large and half wild, Aegypanes, Blemmies, Iampasantes, Satyri, without houses or habitation.”14 Most accounts of the races, whether Greek or Latin, place just this sort of stress on the uncivilized nature of their habitat. Monstrous men ordinarily dwell in mountains, caves, deserts, rivers, or woods, and cannot truly be understood apart from their barren or savage landscapes. When early Christianity inherited the concept of the city from antiquity and used it as a metaphor for a spiritual community of believers, the Plinian peoples, as non-Christians, were again excluded. Or, in one tradition, they were relegated to a metaphoric city of evildoers. Some Christian thinkers associated them with the line of Cain. Saint Ambrose, in his treatise De Cain et Abel, argued that the two brothers signified two inimical forms of human consciousness. One, symbolized by Cain, believed only in the primacy of man and in the creations of human genius, whereas the other, symbolized by Abel, rendered homage to God and to His works.15 In The City of God, Saint Augustine developed this view. He recalled of Cain that after his malediction “he built a city” (Genesis 4:17). Just what sort of city this might have been was implied by the contrast between the two brothers. Develop­ ing his notion of the city, Augustine said: 14  Roccardo Quadri, ed., Anonymi Leidensis de Situ Orbis Libri Duo (Padua, 1974), 2.5.15, p. 49. 15  Saint Ambrose, De Cain et Abel, 1.1, PL 14, 317.

I speak of … two cities, that is, two societies of human beings, of which one is predestined to reign eternally with God and the other to undergo eternal punishment with the devil … Cain … the first-born … belonged to the city of men; Abel was born later and belonged to the City of God … Cain founded a city, but Abel, being a sojourner, founded none. For the city of the saints is above.16

It was very common in early Christian commentaries to connect the monstrous races with Cain as their first parent, and to assume that the races partook of Cain’s curse and promise of eternal torment in hell. In a number of illustrations for The City of God we see Cain building this “city of men” while the monstrous races are depicted in the background, as in a fifteenth-century example … where mosque-like architectural shapes suggest the artist’s moral attitude toward the nonChristian world.17 There is a certain irony in this attitude, insofar as early Christianity itself was nurtured and throve in urban centers of the ancient world, where specialization or division of labor allowed residents the luxury of a more sophisticated religion. The ills to which the flesh is heir were more common in city environments, as were all the vices, yet the Christian reaction against them was more often to create an ideal city than to retreat into a vision of a pastoral life. The stern Ambrosian association of the races with the city of man was only one of several Christian attitudes toward them, but whether they were relegated to their own sinful cities or to a wild landscape without cities, the monstrous races were early seen as exiled from the society of mankind because of innately evil dispositions. In keeping with their uncivilized surroundings, the monstrous races in medieval art were often shown naked or wearing only animal skins, since they lacked textile arts. The Pygmies in some accounts were said to braid garments of their own hair. Undoubtedly the nakedness of many of these races was a necessary convention in that it enabled the artist to show their anatomical peculiarities. And obviously nakedness was the attribute of the Gymnosophisti or naked wise men— though on occasion they are decorously covered in leaves, as in a miniature from the Middle English Alexander cycle […]. However in almost all other instances nakedness was a sign 16  Philip Levine, ed. and tr., Saint Augustine: The City of God, vol. 4, LCL (London and Cambridge, Mass. 1966), 15.1, pp. 413–415. 17  This miniature was published by A. de Laborde, Les Mansuscrits à peintures de la Cité de Dieu de Saint Augustin, 3 vols. (Paris 1909), vol. 2, pl. 94. See vol. 1, pp. 423–448, for discussion.

23

24

John Block Friedman

Figure 3.2. Blemmyae. Mande­ ville’s Travels, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fr. 2810, fol. 219v, fifteenth century

“A Measure of Man,” excerpted from The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought

of wildness and hostility of the animal nature thought to char­ acterize those who lived beyond the limits of the Christian world. A hair or animal garment reflected only a slightly more charitable view of the being in question, giving him a status somewhere between animal and human. Huguccio of Pisa, the author of a very popular alphabetical dictionary, the Magnae Derivationes, explains the word monstrum by reference to mastruca, hairy garments of skins: “Who ever dresses himself in such garments is transformed into a monstrous being.”18 Even Heracles, who came by his lion skin honestly enough, was always shown wearing it and carrying a club, becoming a stock figure for the boor or bully in Satyr plays. The ubiquitous club, a weapon made from a branch wrenched from a tree and so made without forethought or art, reveal yet another prejudice of the medieval world concerning alien peoples. Men who carry clubs are ignorant of chivalric weapons and the military customs of civilized Westerners. Indeed, only the Amazons, who have a special status among the races, are regularly depicted with the armor and weapons of medieval men. More typical is a scene of the Blemmyae from an illustrated text of Mandeville (Figure 3.2) Here the Blemmyae carries a shield, but his offensive weapon is the long club or stave. Alice Colby-Hall has pointed out that “in twelfth-century literature, peasants, giants, and non-Christian warriors often defend themselves with large sticks of some sort.”19 Undoubtedly one is meant to see a resemblance between the representative of a monstrous race and the rustic or churl whose uncivil nature is commonly shown by the club he wields. In portraits of the figure of Dangier in Le Roman de la Rose, the club is an emblem of his social and moral status. Sometimes the club is held by a churl or herdsman who is himself monstrous in physical appearance. The most familiar example of this is the set piece of description in Chretien de Troyes’s Yavain of the giant herdsman near the magic spring, dressed in untanned beef hides and holding a great club (ll. 269f ).20 The club seems to symbolize this giant’s monstrousness in a group of Arthurian murals from Schmalkalden, Thuringia, painted about 1250, where it is his 18  Huguccio of Pisa, Magnae Derivationes, Vat. Reg. Lat. 1627, fol. 144: “et dicitur sic quasi monstruosa quia qui eam movit et inditur in ferarum habitum transformatur. Unde mastrucatas … mastruca indutus.” 19  Alice M. Colby-Hall, The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Liter­ ature (Geneva, 1965), p. 171. 20  See Paul Salmon, “The Wild Man in ‘Iwein’ and Medieval Descrip­ tive Technique,” [Modern Language Review] 56 (1961): 520–528.

distinguishing attribute.21 Likewise, the giant in Aimon de Varennes’s Florimont is described as so strong and savage that he uses only club and shield.22 Saracens and devils in a great variety of Middle English romances wield clubs,23 as does a monstrous figure labeled Violanltia in a manuscript in the state library of Munich.24 Finally we might note that although the weapon with which the first murderer, Cain, slew his brother was usually the jawbone of an ass,25 in the Genesis scenes from the Paris Psalter he holds a club.26 In summary, the peoples introduced to the West by Ctesias, Megasthenes, and Pliny were perceived as monstrous because they did not look like western Europeans or share their cultural norms. Some of these-races, like the Blemmyae and Astomi, were physically anomalous; others differed in speech, diet, social customs, or modes of defense. Whatever the nature of the differences, however, the Plinian races diverged sufficiently from Western men to evoke very little feeling of brotherhood or empathy. The sense of the alien or “other” in the marvelous races of the East was so great as to disqualify them, in the Greco-Roman view, from the epithet “men.” Both in themselves and in their geographic location, they were creatures of the extreme. 21  See Roger Sherman Loomis, Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (New York, 1938), fig. 161.

22  Aimon de Varennes, Florimont, ed. Alfons Hilka (Göttingen, 1932), l. 3197, p. 124.

23  See for examples J. Campion et al., eds., Sir Perceval of Gales (Heidelburg, 1913), l. 2018; A. S. Cook, ed., Sir Eglamour (New York, 1911), l. 308; S. J. Herrtage, ed., Sir Ferumbras, EETS: [Extra Series] 34 (rpt. London, 1966) l. 4653; Emil Hausknecht, ed., The Sowdone of Babylone, EETS: ES 38 (London, 1881), l. 2919; and W. W. Skeat, ed., The Romans of Partenay, EETS: OS 22 (London, 1899), l. 4177.

24  Munich Staatsbibiothek CLM 18158 (Tergernsee) fol. 63, eleventh century. See also a Benedictine antiphoner from Suabia, Karlsruhe Bad. Landesbibliothek Aug. Perg. 60, fol. 2r. These miniatures are discussed by Gérard Cames, Allégories et symboles dans l’Hortus Delicarium (Leiden, 1971), pp. 117–120; the second example appears as pl. 63, fig. 117. A miniature depicting the choleric temperament in BL Add. 17987, fol. 88r, shows a man beating a woman with a club. It has been published by Fritz Saxl and Hans Meier, Catalogue of Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages (London, 1953), vol. 3.2, pl. 88, Fig. 228.

25  See on this subject A. A. Barb, “Cain’s Murder-Weapon and Samson’s Jawbone of an Ass,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 386–389, which gives a comprehensive biblio­ graphy. 26  This is BN Paris Lat. 8846, fol. 1v, end of the twelfth century.

25

26

John Block Friedman

Greek attitudes toward the extreme in all things are too well known known to need extensive discussion here, and we may take Aristotle’s remarks on this subject in the Nicomachean Ethics as representative, though in this work he is speaking about a virtuous mean. Defining the mean as “a point equally distant from either extreme,” he argues that “excess and deficiency are a mark of vice, and observance of the mean a mark of virtue.”27 Extremes of all sorts could be imagined as “marks of vice,” and geographic extremes could be “marks of vice” as well. The Greeks and Romans imagined themselves to be at the center of the civilized world and believed that their way of life constituted a standard by which all things far from that center were judged. The farther from the center, the more extreme a thing was, and therefore the more a “vice” it was. For the Greeks, the East or things Asian were extreme with respect to the mean, and we often find an aesthetic polarity between things Attic and Asian. Asia represented emotion, redundance, and formal disorder, whereas Athens and the Attic represented moderation, control, and formal balance. Edgar de Bruyne, in his pioneering study of medieval aesthetics, has suggested that late antique and early medieval fascination with the monstrous races may be an outgrowth of this opposition between Atticism and Asianism. Presumably, the Attic sensibility, looking from the center out to the edges of the world, found the monstrous—with its corollaries, the enigmatic, the inflated, and the grandiose—attractive because its very Asianism gave a frisson of the beautiful.28 Extremes of form and of place were closely linked in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Being a seafaring people, the Greeks had fairly well-defined edges for the central community of nations that made up the human family, edges that constituted the borders of the known. But even as the known world expanded, the view from within it remained much the same. At the center of such a world was the perceiver. His race, language, and cultural characteristics were the mean, and everything moved toward the extreme as it moved further from him. The very greatest extreme was assumed to exist beyond the borders of the known, and held a great fascination for the observer at the center.

By the late antique period, the surface of the globe began to be distinguished into regions and the concept of environment developed, with the attendant idea that the oikumene could itself be divided into regions according to climate.29 Men who lived in different climates would perforce be different from one another because of unequal climactic influence; indeed, there would be some areas in which conditions would be so extreme that men like those of the center could not exist at all.30 Such places received the label “uninhabitable,” but were not necessarily considered empty of life. They contained no people like those of the center, but were considered to be likely and appropriate habitats for the monstrous races.

27  H. Rackham, ed. and tr., The Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, LCL (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1962), 2.6.5.9–14, pp. 91, 93, 95.

30  For good general discussion of climactic theory, see Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, pp. 80–115; Marian J. Tooley, “Bodin and the Mediaeval Theory of Climate,” Speculum 28 (1953): 64–83, especially 64–70; and Frank. M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 172–176.

28  Edgar de Bruyne, Études d’esthétique médiévale (Bruges, 1946), pp. 135–141. See also Katherine George, “The Civilized West Looks at Primitive Africa: 1400–1800. A Study in Ethnocentrism,” Isis 49 (1958) 62–72.

29  See Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, p. 17, and Baldry, The Unity, pp. 17, 167.

NOËL CARROLL, “THE NATURE OF HORROR,” from THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR

Critical Introduction

Reading Questions

Noël Carroll’s (1947–

Think about your favorite monster. Does it produce fear and disgust in you? Why or why not? Can you think of a cultural context in which it would not produce fear and disgust? (Pennywise the Clown would not seem out of place at a Juggalos’ “Gathering,” for example!) Lastly, think about its narrative context (whether it be literary, film, or internet denizen): does it seem that it is supposed to elicit fear and disgust in its original context? Why or why not?

) book is, surprisingly, not focused on monsters. Instead he is concerned with what he calls “art-horror,” a term he uses to describe the genre com­ monly called horror and the type of emotion its texts attempt to produce. On his way to defining art-horror, however, Carroll necessarily includes a discussion of monsters and the function they have in horror texts. Carroll argues that monsters are terrifying because they evoke a sense of disgust—whether that stems from unnatural morphology or the incorporation of Mary Douglas’s classic elements of filth (feces, dirt, etc.) from her landmark 1966 Purity and Danger. What makes Carroll’s discussion so inter­ esting for monster theory is the way he handles the relativistic nature of what is disgusting (and therefore scary). Many of the thinkers in this volume agree that monsters are scary, but what is included in the term shifts from culture to culture. I, for instance, inwardly cringe at the thought of putting my fin­ gers in the mouth of a gigantic fish, but in Oklahoma, where “noodling” is popular, that is an accepted way of fishing. To deal with this relativism, Carroll suggests that we gauge the unnaturalness of the monster not by our own responses to it, but by the text’s. For him, the monster is disgusting only if the narration or, especially, the characters with whom we are supposed to empathize identify it as such. In analyzing the intratextual response to a monster, Carroll attempts to avoid the pitfall of projecting our individual or cultural biases onto the text. In doing so, he provides some interesting avenues of approach for monster studies—especially those that under­ take cross-cultural analyses.

Editorial Notes

The following is a selected excerpt from a lengthy study. Where a few paragraphs have been omitted, it has been indicated with an ellipsis; where entire pages have been omitted, it has been indicated by a line break and three hyphens.

Further Reading

Carroll, Noël. “Monsters and the Moving Image: Replies to Laetz and Yanal.” Film and Philosophy 13 (2009): 125–36. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror. New York: Routledge, 1990. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge, 1966, reprinted 2003. Feagin, Susan L., “Monsters, Disgust and Fascination.” Philo­ sophical Studies 65 (February 1992): 75–90. MH

“THE NATURE OF HORROR,” FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR NOËL CARROLL

What appears to

demarcate the horror story from mere stories with monsters, such as myths, is the attitude of characters in the story to the monsters they encounter. In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters they meet as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order. In fairy tales, on the other hand, monsters are part of the eve­ ryday furniture of the universe. For example, in “The Three Princesses of Whiteland,” in the Andrew Lang collection, a lad is beset by a three-headed troll; however, the writing does not signal that he finds this particular creature any more unusual than the lions he had passed earlier. A creature like Chewbacca in the space opera Star Wars is just one of the guys, though a creature gotten up in the same wolf outfit, in a film like The Howling, would be regarded with utter revulsion by the human characters in that fiction. Boreads, griffins, chimeras, baselisks [sic], dragons, satyrs, and such are bothersome and fearsome creatures in the world of myths, but they are not unnatural; they can be accommo­ dated by the metaphysics of the cosmology that produced them. The monsters of horror, however, breach the norms of ontological propriety presumed by the positive human charac­ ters in the story. That is, in examples of horror, it would appear that the monster is an extraordinary character in our ordinary world, whereas in fairy tales and the like the monster is an ordinary creature in an extraordinary world. And the extraor­ dinariness of that world—its distance from our own—is often signaled by formulas such as “once upon a time.” […] As I have suggested, one indicator of that which differenti­ ates works of horror proper from monster stories in general is the affective responses of the positive human characters in the stories to the monsters that beleaguer them. Moreover, though we have only spoken about the emotions of charac­ ters in horror stories, nevertheless, the preceding hypothesis is useful for getting at the emotional responses that works of horror are designed to elicit from audiences. For hor­ ror appears to be one of those genres in which the emotive responses of the audience, ideally, run parallel to the emo­ tions of characters. Indeed, in works of horror the responses of characters often seem to cue the emotional responses of the audiences.1 1  This is not to say that the audience response to monsters is the

In “Jonathan Harker’s Journal,” in Dracula, we read:

As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which do what I would, I could not conceal.

This shudder, this recoil at the vampire’s touch, this feeling of nausea all structure our emotional reception of the ensuing descriptions of Dracula; for example, when his protruding teeth are mentioned we regard them as shudder-inducing, nauseating, rank—not something one would want either to touch or be touched by. Similarly, in films we model our emotional response upon ones like that of the young, blonde woman in Night of the Living Dead, who, when surrounded by zombies, screams and clutches herself in such a way as to avoid contact with the contaminated flesh. The characters in works of horror exemplify for us the way in which to react to the monsters in the fiction. In film and onstage, the characters shrink from the monsters, contracting themselves in order to avoid the grip of the creature but also to avert an accidental brush against this unclean being. This does not same as the response of the characters. Audience members do not believe that they are being attacked by monsters or that the monster in the fiction exists, though the fictional characters do. Also, the fictional characters do not take pleasure from the manifestation of the monsters in the story, though the audience does. So the audience’s responses and the characters’ are not strictly equivalent. This is why I have said that the audience’s emotional response runs parallel to the emotions of the fictional characters and not that the audience’s emotions and those of the characters are identical … For the purposes of this book, when it is said that the audience’s emotional responses parallel those of characters, that is a term of art that means that the audience’s evaluative thoughts about the kind of creature the monster represents correspond to the evaluative beliefs that fictional characters have about the monster. Here, the idea of an evaluative thought—both in terms of the way emotions are evaluative, and in terms of the way that audience’s emotions are connected to thoughts—are technical notions to be taken up later in this chapter and the next. That the audience’s evaluative thoughts about the fictional monster correspond to the emotional evaluations and beliefs of fictional characters in no way implies that the audience accepts the existence of the fictional monster, though, of course, the characters do.

mean that we believe in the existence of fictional monsters, as the characters in horror stories do, but that we regard the description or depiction of them as unsettling virtue of the same kind of qualities that revolt someone like Jonathan Harker in the preceding quotation. The emotional reactions of characters, then, provide a set of instructions or, rather, examples about the way in which the audience is to respond to the monsters in the fiction— that is, about the way we are meant to react to its monstrous properties. In the classic film King Kong, for example, there is a scene on the ship during the journey to Skull Island in which the fictional director, Carl Denham, stages a screen test for Ann Darrow, the heroine of the film within the film. The offscreen motivations that Denham supplies his starlet can be taken as a set of instructions for the way both Ann Darrow and the audience are to react to the first apparition of Kong. Denham says to Darrow: Now you look higher. You’re amazed. Your eyes open wider. It’s horrible Ann, but you can’t look away. There’s no chance for you, Ann—no escape. You’re help­less, Ann, helpless. There’s just one chance. If you can scream—but your throat’s paralyzed. Scream, Ann, cry. Perhaps if you didn’t see it you could scream. Throw your arms across your face and scream, scream for your life.

In horror fictions, the emotions of the audience are supposed to mirror those of the positive human characters in certain, but not all, respects. In the preceding examples the characters’ responses counsel us that the appropriate reactions to the monsters in question comprise shuddering, nausea, shrink­ ing, paralysis, screaming, and revulsion. Our responses are meant, ideally, to parallel those of characters.2 Our responses are supposed to converge (but not exactly duplicate) those of the characters; like the characters we assess the monster as a horrifying sort of being (though unlike the characters, we do not believe in its existence). This mirroring-effect, moreover, 2  Though in the vast majority of cases the audience’s emotional response to the monster is cued, in certain pertinent respects, by a character’s response, this is not absolutely necessary. The audience, for example, may be offered a glimpse of the monster before any character is and, if the monster is a sufficiently disgusting aberration of nature and/or the audience knows that the work in question is horror, then they could be horrified without a fictional exemplar. In the standard case, however, there are fictional exemplars, and it is on this general sort of case that I am attempting to build my distinction between horror fictions and mere stories with monsters in them.

“The Nature of Horror,” from The Philosophy of Horror

is a key feature of the horror genre. For it is not the case for every genre that the audience response is supposed to repeat certain of the elements of the emotional state of characters. […] How do characters respond to monsters in horror sto­ ries? Well, of course, they’re frightened. After all, monsters are dangerous. But there is more to it than this. In Mary Shel­ ley’s famous novel, Victor Frankenstein recounts his reaction to the first movements of his creation: “now that I had fin­ ished, the beauty of the dream vanished and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, unable to compose my mind to sleep.” Shortly after this, the monster, with an outstretched hand, wakens Victor, who flees from its touch. […] Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde also evokes a powerful physical response. In the report of his running down the little girl, Hyde is said to induce loathing on sight. This is not simply a moral category, however, for it is connected with his ugli­ ness which is said to cause one to sweat. This bodily sense of revulsion is further amplified when Enfield says of Hyde: He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, some­ thing down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not for want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment. […]

Horrific creatures seem to be regarded not only as incon­ ceivable but also as unclean and disgusting. Frankenstein’s laboratory, for example, is described as “a workshop of filthy creation.” And Clive Barker, the literary equivalent of the splatter film, characterizes his monster, the son of celluloid, in the story of the same name, thusly: [Son of Celluloid]. “This is the body I once occupied, yes. His name was Barberio. A criminal; nothing spec­ tacular. He never aspired to greatness.” [Birdy]. “And you?” “His cancer. I’m the piece of him which did aspire, that did long to be more than a humble cell. I am a dreaming disease. No wonder I love the movies.” The son of celluloid was weeping over the edge of the broken floor, its true body exposed now it had no reason to fabricate a glory.

29

30

Noël Carroll

It was a filthy thing, a tumor grown fat on wasted passion. A parasite with the shape of a slug, and the texture of raw liver. For a moment a toothless mouth, badly molded, formed at its head end and said: “I’m going to have to find a new way to eat your soul.” It flopped into the crawlspace beside Birdy. Without its shimmering coat of many technicolors it was the size of a small child. She backed away as it stretched a sensor to touch her, but avoidance was a limited option. The crawlspace was narrow, and further along it was blocked with what looked to be broken chairs and discarded prayer books. There was no way but the way she’d come, and that was fifteen feet above her head. Tentatively, the cancer touched her foot, and she was sick. She couldn’t help it, even though she was ashamed to be giving in to such primitive responses. It revolted her as nothing ever had before; it brought to mind something aborted, a bucket case. “Go to hell,” she said to it, kicking at its head, but it kept coming, its diarrheal mass trapping her legs. She could feel the churning motion of its innards as it rose up to her. …

Since horrific creatures are so physically repulsive, they often provoke nausea in the characters who discover them. In Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” the presence of the Shoggoths, giant, shape-changing, black, excremental worms, is heralded by an odor which is explicitly described as nauseating. In Black Ashes, by Noel Scanlon, touted as “Ireland’s answer to Stephen King,” the investigative reporter Sally Stevens vomits when the nefarious Swami Ramesh changes into the demon Ravana who has been described as hideously and terrifyingly ugly, his face blackened, his fingers talons, his teeth fanged, his tongue scaled and, in all, giving off a smell of putrefaction. Emotionally, these violations of nature are so fulsome and revolting that they frequently produce in characters the conviction that mere physical contact with them can be lethal. Consider the dream portent that Jack Sawyer encounters in The Talisman by King and Straub: some terrible creature had been coming for his mother—a dwarvish monstrosity with misplaced eyes and rotting, cheesy skin. “Your mother’s almost dead, Jack, can you say hallelujah?” this monstrosity had croaked, and Jack knew—the way you knew things in dreams—that it was radioactive, and that if it touched him he would die.

What examples like this (which can be multiplied endlessly) indicate is that the character’s affective reaction to the mon­ strous in horror stories is not merely a matter of fear, i.e., of being frightened by something that threatens danger. Rather threat is compounded with revulsion, nausea, and disgust. And this corresponds as well with the tendency in horror novels and stories to describe monsters in terms of and to associate them with filth, decay, deterioration, slime and so on. The monster in horror fiction, that is, is not only lethal but—and this is of utmost significance—also disgusting. Moreover, this combination of affect can be quite explicit in the very language of horror stories; M. R. James writes in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” that “The feelings which this horror stirred in Dennistoun were the intensest physical fear and the most profound mental loathing.”3

Defining Art-Horror

[…] We are now in a position to organize these observations about the emotion of art-horror. Assuming that “I-as-audiencemember” am in an analogous emotional state to that which fictional characters beset by monsters are described to be in, then: I am occurrently art-horrified by some monster X, say Dracula, if and only if 1) I am in some state of abnormal, physically felt agitation (shuddering, tingling, screaming, etc.) which 2) has been caused by a) the thought: that Dracula is a possible being; and by the evaluative thoughts: that b) said Dracula has the property of being physically (and perhaps morally and socially) threatening in the ways portrayed in the fiction and that c) said Dracula has the property of being impure, where 3) such thoughts are usually accompanied by the desire to avoid the touch of things like Dracula.4 3  In Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, for example, the victim of the vampire says: “I experienced a strange and tumultuous excitement that was pleasureable, even and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust.” (Emphasis added) The degree to which explicit mention is made of feelings like disgust, revulsion, and their cognates in horror literature is statistically overwhelming. And it is on the strength of this empirical finding that the case to be developed above is based. However, it should be noted that one may have a work of art-horror where the revulsive character of the monster is not stated outright in the text. But, in those cases, I conjecture the text will imply, in a pretty straightforward manner, either through language (e.g., reference to odors or bodily deformation and disintegration, or through a description that otherwise disgusts the reader) or through character behavior that the monster is disgusting. 4  In the matter of the horrific touch, H. P. Lovecraft makes an interesting observation in his Supernatural Horror in Literature (New

Of course, “Dracula,” here, is merely a heuristic device. Any old monster X can be plugged into the formula. Moreover, in order to forestall charges of circularity, let me note that, for our purposes, “monster” refers to any being not believed to exist now according to contemporary science. Thus, dinosaurs and nonhuman visitors from another galaxy are monsters under this stipulation though the former once existed and the latter might exist. Whether they are monsters who are also horrifying in the context of a particular fiction depends upon whether they meet the conditions of the analysis above. Some monsters may be only threatening rather than horrifying, while others may be neither threatening nor horrifying.5 Another thing to note about the preceding definition is that it is the evaluative components of the theory that primarily serve to individuate art-horror. And, furthermore, it is crucial that two evaluative components come into play: that the monster is regarded as threatening and impure. If the monster were only evaluated as potentially threatening, the emotion would be fear; if only potentially impure, the emotion would be disgust. Art-horror requires evaluation both in terms of threat and disgust. The threat component of the analysis derives from the fact that the monsters we find in horror stories are uniformly dangerous or at least appear to be so; when they cease to be threatening, they cease to be horrifying. The impurity clause in the definition is postulated as a result of noting the regularity with which literary descriptions of the experiences of horror undergone by fictional characters include reference to disgust, repugnance, nausea, physical loathing, shuddering, revulsion, abhorrence, abomination, and so on. Likewise, the gestures actors on stage and on screen adopt when confronting horrific monsters communicate corresponding mental states. And, of course, these reactions—abomination, nausea, shuddering, revulsion, disgust, etc.—are charac­ teristically the product of perceiving something to be noxious or impure. 6 (With regard to the impurity clause of this York: Dover Publications, 1973), p. 102. Speaking of M. R. James’s ghosts, he writes: “In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy—a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man—usually touched before it is seen.” 5  Since this theory is of art-horror, which is itself connected to an imaginative genre, I have not felt it to be necessary in my definition to underscore that the monsters in question are fictional.

6  In his Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley Books, 1987), Stephen

“The Nature of Horror,” from The Philosophy of Horror

theory, it is persuasive to recall that horrific beings are often associated with contamination—sicknesses, disease, and plague—and often accompanied by infectious vermin—rats, insects and the like.) It should also be mentioned that though the third criterion about the desire to avoid physical contact—which may be rooted in the fear of funestation—seems generally accurate, it might be better to consider it to be an extremely frequent but not necessary ingredient of art-horror.7 This caveat is included in my definition by means of the qualification “usually.”

King isolates three different emotional levels of horror (pp. 22–23): terror, horror, and revulsion. He says “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out.” Terror, for King, is a kind of apprehension of the unknown; no monster is manifested but our imagination of what might be is nerve wrenching. In horror, the monster is shown or described; its physical wrongness causes a physical reaction. With revulsion, the monster is so gross that the physical reaction is one of extreme disgust. So, for King, terror is fear+imagination; horror is fear+graphic portrayal; and revulsion is fear+gross, graphic portrayal. The emotional affects available in the genre, then, are a continuum of levels of response.   Though these distinctions make a certain operational sense, I don’t think that they provide an adequate map of art-horror, for I would want to argue that some element of revulsion must be present in what King calls terror and horror, as well as in “the grossout.” […] King’s category of terror reminds one that there is a certain school of thought with regard to horror that is nicely characterized by Lovecraft’s formula “Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told” (Supernatural Horror in Literature, p. 42). The notion here is that the best horror works by suggestion, by getting the reader to imagine what is the case. The presumption is that the reader can scare himself—can imagine what horrifies herself most—better than any author […].

7  An example of a novella where the issue of the touch of the horrific creature is pervasive is the novella The Black Spider by Jeremias Gotthelf; even when the fearsome Spider is lodged in a containing post, the narrator says: “But I will confess, never in my life have I prayed as I prayed when I held that dreadful post in my hands. My whole body was on fire, and I couldn’t help looking to see if there were any black spots coming out on my hands or anywhere else on me, and a load fell from my heart when at last everything was in its place.” In this tale the Spider is a identified as a contagious scourge, a veritable rampaging plague. This, of course, suggests that there is a certain sense to the correlation between contamination imagery in works of horror and the tendency of characters to shrink from the touch of horrific creatures. That is, insofar as such creatures are identified or associated with contamination, one fears any contact with their vile bodies. Perhaps, as well, the recurring descriptions of such monsters as unclean connects with the notion that they are contaminated and infectious and that even brushing against them is risky.

31

32

Noël Carroll

In my definition of horror, the evaluative criteria—of dan­ gerousness and impurity—constitute what in certain idioms are called the formal object of the emotion.8 The formal object of the emotion is the evaluative category that circumscribes the kind of particular object the emotion can focus upon. To be an object of art-horror, in other words, is limited to particular objects, such as Dracula, that are threatening and impure. The formal object or evaluative category of the emotion constrains the range of particular objects upon which the emotion can be focused. An emotion involves, among other things, an appraisal of particular objects along the dimensions speci­ fied by the emotion’s operative evaluative category. Where a particular object is not assessable in terms of the evaluative category appropriate to a given emotion, the emotion, by definition, cannot be focused on said object. That is, I cannot be art-horrified by an entity that I do not think is threatening and impure. I may be in some emotional state with respect to this entity, but it is not art-horror. Thus, the formal object or evaluative category of the emotion is part of the concept of the emotion. Though the relation of the evaluative category to the accompanying felt physical agitation is causal, the relation of the evaluative category to the emotion is constitutive and, therefore, noncontingent. It is in this sense that one might say that the emotion is individuated by its object, i.e., by its formal object. Art-horror is primarily identified in virtue of danger and impurity. The evaluative category selects or focuses upon particular objects. The emotion is directed toward such objects; art-hor­ ror is directed at particular objects like Dracula, the Wolfman, and Mr. Hyde. The root of the term “emotion,” as we noted above, comes from the Latin for moving out. Perhaps, we can read that playfully and suggest that an emotion is an inner moving (a physical agitation) directed outward (toward) a particular object under the prompting and guidance of an appropriate evaluative category. Much of the next chapter will be concerned with the ontological status of the particular objects of art-horror. However, by way of preview, some comment may be helpful now. The problem with discussing the particular object of the emotion of art-horror is that it is a fictive being. Consequently, we cannot construe “particular object” here to mean something like a material being with specifiable space8  See O. H. Green, “The Expression of Emotion,” Mind, vol. 79 (1970); and Lyons, Emotion, chap. 5. In Action, Emotion and Will (Lon­don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), Anthony Kenny calls this the appropriate object of them emotion (p. 183).

time co-ordinates. The Dracula who art-horrifies us doesn’t have specifiable space-time co-ordinates; he doesn’t exist. So what kind of particular object is he? Though this will be clarified and qualified in the next chapter, for the time being let us say that the particular object of art-horror—Dracula, if you will—is a thought. Saying that we are art-horrified by Dracula means that we are horrified by the thought of Dracula where the thought of such a possible being does not commit us to a belief in his existence. Here, the thought of Dracula, the particular object that art-horrifies me, is not the actual event of my thinking of Dracula but the content of the thought, viz., that Dracula, a threatening and impure being of such and such dimensions, might exist and do these terrible things. Dracula, the thought, is the concept of a certain possible being.9 Of course, I come to think about this concept because a given book, or film, or picture invites me to entertain the thought of Dracula, that is, to consider the concept of a certain possible being, viz., Dracula. From such representations of the concept of Dracula, we recognize Dracula to be a threatening and impure prospect, one which gives rise to the emotion of art-horror. […] The use of the notion of impurity in this theory has caused misgivings in two different directions. Commentators, hearing my lectures on this theory, have worried that it is too subjective…, on the one hand, and too vague on the other. In the remainder of this section, I will take up these objections. The charge of subjectivity involves the fear that the emphasis on disgust in the theory is really a matter of projection. It goes something like this: Carroll is a delicate sort of guy whose toilet training was probably traumatic. He hasn’t actually done any empirical research into the reception of works of horror by audiences. He doesn’t know that they find horrific monsters disgusting and impure. At best, he’s identified his own reaction by introspection and projected it onto everyone else. 9  More needs to be said of the sense of possibility here. For the most part, logical possibility is what we have in mind. But there are complications. For in certain horror stories, especially ones involving time-travel, we may meet up with creatures that are not only physically impossible, but logically impossible as well. In order to handle these, we may have to talk about ostensibly, logically possible beings—beings whose logical impossibility is not foregrounded by the text; beings whose logical impossibility may even be obscured by the text. The prospect that we can mentally entertain impossibilities is explored, though inconclusively, by Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern Uni­ver­sity Press, 1973), pp. 123–24.

However, the method that I have adopted to isolate the ingredients of art-horror is designed to blunt charges of projection. I am interested in the emotional response that horror is supposed to elicit. I have approached this issue by assuming that the audience’s responses to the monsters in works of horror are ideally intended to run parallel to and often to be cued by the emotional responses of the relevant fictional characters to monsters. This presupposition, in turn, enables us to look to works of horror themselves for evidence of the emotional response they want to engender. I have not depended on introspection in fastening on disgust and impurity as part of the emotion of art-horror. Rather, I found expressions and gestures of disgust as a regularly recurring feature of characters’s reactions in horror fictions. It is true that I have not done any audience research. Nevertheless, that does not entail that the theory has no empirical base. Rather, the empirical base is comprised of the many stories, dramas, films, etc., that I reviewed in order to track how fictional characters react to the monsters they encounter. I believe that my hypotheses about art-horror can be confirmed by, for example, turning to the descriptions of character reactions to the monsters in horror novels and checking them for the recurring reference to fear and disgust (or the strong implication of fear and disgust). Whether art-horror is supposed to involve impurity, then, can be corroborated by scanning works of horror in order to see whether or not disgust and suggestions of impurity are regularly recurring features. Moreover, there may be another way to bolster the claims of my theory. For the theory, as stated above and in terms of some of the structures to be discussed below, can be used to create horrific effects. That is, one can use this theory as a recipe for making horrific creatures. The theory, of course, is not an algorithm that guarantees success by the blind application of rules. But it can be used to guide the construction of fictive beings of the sort that most of us would agree are horrific. The capacity of the theory to facilitate simulations of horror, then, may argue for the sufficiency of the theory. Again, the object of my study concerns the emotional response that works of art-horror are supposed to elicit. This is neither to claim that all works of horror succeed in this matter—Robot Monster, for example, borders on the ridiculous—nor that every audience member will report that they are horrified—one can imagine macho teenagers deny­ ing that monsters disgust them, claiming instead that they are amused. I am not preoccupied with the actual relations of works of art-horror to audiences, but with a normative

“The Nature of Horror,” from The Philosophy of Horror

relation, the response the audience is supposed to have to the work of art-horror. I believe that we are able to get at this by presuming that the work of art-horror has built into it, so to speak, a set of instructions about the appropriate way the audience is to respond to it. These instructions are mani­ fested, by example, in the responses of the positive, human characters to the monsters in horror fiction. We learn what is to be art-horrified in large measure from the fiction itself; indeed, the very criteria for what it is to be art-horrified can be found in the fiction in the description or enactment of the human character’s responses. Works of horror, that is, teach us, in large measure, the appropriate way to respond to them.10 Unearthing those cues or instructions is an empirical matter, not an exercise in subjective projection. Even if I can avoid the charge of projection, it might still be argued that the notion of impurity employed in my defini­ tion of art-horror is too vague. If a work of horror does not 10  The notion that literature clarifies and teaches us the criteria of emotions has been argued by Alex Neil in his “Emotion, Learning and Literature,” a paper delivered at the meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics in Kansas City, Missouri on Oct. 30, 1987. Neil’s argument figures in his claim that literature can give us knowledge about the world, specifically knowledge about how to apply the language of everyday emotions. Literature does this by exemplifying the criteria of application of emotive terms in descriptions of characters. Likewise, I want to claim that the criteria for art-horror is to be found in character reactions in the works in the genre. Audiences ideally model their responses on them. But, I do not wish to argue that art-horror teaches us about the world; for I doubt that art-horror as described is an everyday emotion. Perhaps it is an emotion that we only encounter when attending to examples of the horror genre. This is not to say that Neil’s general theory is wrong; but only that art-horror is not a robust example of it.   (One place where something like art-horror can be found in everyday life, it should be noted, is in the language of racism. Racist rhetoric often portrays its victims as interstitial and impure. Black people have been treated as though fusions of ape and human as have the Irish—see Apes and Angels by L. Perry Curtis (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1971).)   From another direction, my notion that works in the horror genre instruct the audience about how they are to respond might correlate with recent research in literary studies—sometimes slotted under the rubric of reception studies—to the effect that there is some sort of contract between the reader and the work. Part of the substance of that contract, in my account, is that the audience model its response to monsters in terms of the evaluative categories exemplified by characters. Of course, the audience may refuse the contract. A particularly inept monster may raise laughter rather than horror. The character’s response is not the whole story. The monster must be appropriately fearsome and disgusting. If it is not, the audience may just reject the contract.

33

34

Noël Carroll

explicitly attribute “impurity” to a monster, how can we be satisfied that the monster is regarded to be impure in the text? The concept of impurity is just too fuzzy to be of use. But perhaps I can relieve some of these anxieties concerning vagueness by saying something about the kinds of objects that standardly give rise to or cause reactions of impurity. This, moreover, will enable me to expand my theory of art-horror from the realm of definition to that of explanation, from an analysis of the application of the concept of art-horror to an analysis of its causation. In her classic study Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas correlates reactions of impurity with the transgression or violation of schemes of cultural categorization.11 In her interpretation of the abominations of Leviticus, for example, she hypothesizes that the reason crawling things from the sea, like lobsters, are regarded as impure is that crawling was a defining feature of earthbound creatures, not of creatures of the sea. A lobster, in other words, is a kind of category mistake and, hence, impure. Similarly, all winged insects with four legs are abominated because though four legs is a feature of land animals, these things fly, i.e., they inhabit the air. Things that are interstitial, that cross the boundaries of the deep categories of a culture’s conceptual scheme, are impure, according to Douglas. Feces, insofar as they figure ambiguously in terms of categorical oppositions such as me/not me, inside/outside, and living/dead, serve as ready candidates for abhorrence as impure, as do spittle, blood, tears, sweat, hair clippings, vomit, nail clippings, pieces of flesh, and so on. Douglas notes that among the people called the Lele, flying squirrels are avoided since they cannot be categorized unambiguously as either birds or animals. Also, objects can raise categorical misgivings by virtue of being incomplete representatives of their class, such as rotting and disintegrating things, as well as by virtue of being form­ less, for example, dirt.12 Following Douglas, then, I initially speculate that an object or being is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or form­ less.13 These features appear to form a suitable grouping as 11  Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

12  Here one recalls the particular disgust that Roquentin feels toward viscosity in Sartre’s novel Nausea.

13  “Object” and “entity” are stressed here in order to block certain counterexamples. Category errors and logical paradoxes, though they may horrify philosophers, are not normally regarded as impure. But neither do they belong to the domain of “objects and entities.” For the

prominent ways in which categorizing can be problematized. This list may not be exhaustive, nor is it clear that its terms are mutually exclusive. But it is certainly useful for analyzing the monsters of the horror genre. For they are beings or creatures that specialize in formlessness, incompleteness, categorical interstitiality, and categorical contradictoriness. Let a brief inventory carry this point for the time being. Many monsters of the horror genre are interstitial and/or contradictory in terms of being both living and dead: ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, the Frankenstein monster, Melmoth the Wanderer, and so on. Near relatives to these are monstrous entities that conflate the animate and the inani­ mate: haunted houses, with malevolent wills of their own, robots, and the car in King’s Christine. Also many monsters confound different species: werewolves, humanoid insects, humanoid reptiles, and the inhabitants of Dr. Moreau’s island.14 […] Horrific monsters often involve the mixture of what is normally distinct. Demonically possessed characters typically involve the superimposition of two categorically distinct indi­ viduals, the possessee and the possessor, the latter usually a demon, who, in turn, is often a categorically transgressive figure (e.g., a goat-god). Stevenson’s most famous monster is two men, Jekyll and Hyde, where Hyde is described as having a simian aspect which makes him appear not quite human.15 Werewolves mix man and wolf, while shape changers of other sorts compound humans with other species. The monster in King’s It is a kind of categorically contradictory creature raised to a higher power. For It is a monster that can change into any other monster, those other monsters already being categorically transgressive. And, of course, some monsters, like the scorpion big enough to eat Mexico City, are magni­ fications of creatures and crawling things already ajudged impure and interstitial in the culture. purpose of analyzing art-horror, the domain of objects that are to be assessed in terms of impurity are beings. Indeed, they are a special sort of beings, viz., monsters.

14  In terms of fine art, Sibylle Ruppert mixes different species in her horrific charcoal drawing, such as The Third Sex. Also see Lucas Samaras’s Photo-transformation in this respect. H. R. Giger’s work not only compounds the categorical opposites of the organic and the mechanical but also those of inside and outside.

15  In John Barrymore’s 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde’s make-up is designed to suggest that he is a cross between a man and a spider. See James B. Twitchell’s analysis in his Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1985), pp. 245–246.

Categorical incompleteness is also a standard feature of the monsters of horror; ghosts and zombies frequently come without eyes, arms, legs, or skin, or they are in some advanced state of disintegration. And, in a related vein, detached body parts are serviceable monsters, severed heads and especially hands, e.g., de Maupassant’s “The Hand” and “The Withered Hand,” Le Fanu’s “The Narrative of a Ghost of a Hand,” Golding’s “The Call of the Hand,” Conan Doyle’s “The Brown Hand,” Nerval’s “The Enchanted Hand,” Dreiser’s “The Hand,” William Harvey’s “The Beast With Five Fingers” and so on. A brain in a vat is the monster in the novel Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak, which has been adapted for the screen more than once, while in the film Fiend Without a Face the monsters are brains that use their spinal cords as tails. The rate of recurrence with which the biologies of monsters are vaporous or gelatinous attests to the applicability of the notion of formlessness to horrific impurity while the writing style of certain horror authors, such as Lovecraft, at times, and Straub, through their vague, suggestive, and often inchoate descriptions of the monsters, leaves an impression of formlessness. Indeed, many monsters are literally formless: the man-eating oil slick in King’s short story “The Raft,” the malevolent entity in James Herbert’s The Fog and The Dark, in Matthew Phipps Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, in Joseph Payne Brennan’s novella “Slime,” in Kate Wilhelm’s and Ted Thomas’s The Clone, and the monsters in movies like The Blob (both versions) and The Stuff.16 Douglas’s observations, then, may help dispel some of the fuzziness of the impurity clause of my definition of arthorror. They can be used to supply paradigmatic examples for the application of the impurity clause as well as rough guiding principles for isolating impurity—such as that of categorical transgression. Furthermore, Douglas’s theory of impurity can be used by scholars of horror to identify some of the pertinent features of the monsters in the stories they study. That is, given a monster in a horror story, the scholar can ask in what ways it is categorically interstitial, contradictory (in Douglas’s sense), incomplete, and/or formless. These features, moreover, provide a crucial part of the causal structure of the reaction of impurity that operates in the raising of the emotion of art-horror. They are part of what triggers it. This is not to say that we realize that Dracula 16  Though not strictly horror images in the terms of my theory, Francis Bacon’s paintings often evoke descriptions as horrifying because they suggest virtually formless mounds of human flesh. See his Lying Figure With A Hypodermic Syringe.

“The Nature of Horror,” from The Philosophy of Horror

is, among other things, categorically interstitial and that we then react, accordingly, with art horror. Rather that monster X is categorically interstitial causes a sense of impurity in us without our necessarily being aware of precisely what causes that sense.17 In addition, the emphasis Douglas places on categorical schemes in the analysis of impurity indicates a way for us to account for the recurrent description of our impure monsters as “un-natural.” They are un-natural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge.18 Undoubtedly, it is in virtue of this cognitive threat that not only are horrific monsters referred to as impossible, but also that they tend to render those who encounter them insane, mad, deranged, and so on.19 For such monsters are in a certain sense challenges to the foundations of a culture’s way of thinking. Douglas’s theory of impurity might also help us to answer a frequent puzzle about horror. It is a remarkable fact about the creatures of horror that very often they do not seem to be of sufficient strength to make a grown man cower. A tettering zombie or a severed hand would appear incapable of muster­ 17  In her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Colum­ bia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982), Julia Kristeva also uses Douglas’s work to discuss horror. However, the topic of her book does not quite coincide with the topic of this book. This book is narrowly concerned with the genre of art-horror; Kristeva’s theorizing is probably meant to encompass this as well as much else. For her, it seems that horror and abomination are metaphysical elements which she connects with an abstract conception of the female (specifically the mother’s body), and which she believes we would be advised to acknowledge […].

18  Considering the opening distinctions in this section, a question may arise at this point concerning the reason why the monsters of fairy tales do not raise horror responses from either the human characters they meet or in their readers. But aren’t these creatures categorical violations? It seems to me that there are at least three possible answers to this puzzle, though as yet I am uncertain which I prefer. First, we might argue that these creatures are not categorical violations in fairy tales and myths. Second we might take note of the way in which fairy tales characteristically begin with formulas like “Once upon a time.” Perhaps this functions to remove them from the rules of prevailing categorical schemes. Lastly, it may [be] the case that categorical transgression is only one of several necessary conditions for impurity. If this is so, the discovery of further conditions might reveal why horrific monsters are impure whereas fairy-tale monsters are not.

19  Indeed the very sight of a horrific creature may kill. See Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan.”

35

36

Noël Carroll

ing enough force to overpower a co-ordinated six-year-old. Nevertheless, they are presented as unstoppable, and this seems psychologically acceptable to audiences. This might be explained by noting Douglas’s claim that culturally impure objects are generally taken to be invested with magical pow­ ers, and, as a result, are often employed in rituals. Monsters in works of horror, by extension, then, may be similarly imbued with awesome powers in virtue of their impurity. It is also the case that the geography of horror stories generally situates the origin of monsters in such places as lost continents and outer space. Or the creature comes from under the sea or under the earth. That is, monsters are native to places outside of and/or unknown to the human world. Or, the creatures come from marginal, hidden, or abandoned sites: graveyards, abandoned towers and castles, sewers, or old houses—that is, they belong to environs outside of and unknown to ordinary social intercourse. Given the theory of horror expounded above, it is tempting to interpret the geog­ raphy of horror as a figurative spatialization or literalization of the notion that what horrifies is that which lies outside cultural categories and is, perforce, unknown.20

20  In Sigmund Freud’s celebrated essay “The ‘Uncanny’,” he notes that the relevant German concept attached to this term signals a disclosure, revelation, or exposure of what is ordinarily alien, hidden, repressed, concealed, or secreted by our familiar ways of seeing. This view, at least in a minimal way, corresponds to our notion of the importance of categorical transgression in the production of arthorror. The horrific creature is one that is ill-adjusted to our cultural schemata, and those categories, in a sense, might be thought to exclude and to perhaps obscure the recognition of the kinds of possibilities such creatures represent. However, I must also admit that I’m a bit uncomfortable with putting the matter this way. For it seems to me more apt to say that in general our cultural categories ignore—rather than repress, hide, or suppress—the kinds of conceptual possibilities represented by horrific creatures. Undoubtedly, the notion of the return of the repressed has some applicability to horror; the question is whether it applies comprehensively to every manifestation of art-horror. My sense is that it does not. But more on the issue of repression and the relation of the theory propounded here and rival psychoanalytic theories appears in later sections of this book. Freud’s essay is anthologized in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 19–62.

MICHAEL CAMILLE, “RETHINKING THE CANON: PROPHETS, CANONS, AND PROMISING MONSTERS”

Critical Introduction

Reading Questions

Michael Camille (1958–2002),

How does the monstrous challenge the idea of the canon? Camille begins and ends with personal anecdotes. Are they effective? Why or why not?

Mary L. Block Professor in Art History at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, took a decidedly iconoclastic approach to his work, focusing on sub­ versive topics generally ignored in art history to this point, including queer subjects, scatological imagery, and, of course monstrosity. In addition to his then-risqué subject matter, Camille also wrote in a far more lively and rich tone than was—and is—common in scholarly publications, pepper­ ing his texts with expletives, sexual puns, and personal nar­ ratives. Camille’s most significant work is his Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992), a book exploring the wonderful riot of imagery in the margins of medieval manuscripts, architecture, and culture, which of course included many monsters. Here, we present “Prophets, Canons, and Promising Mon­ sters,” published as part of a special feature on “Rethinking the Canon” in the flagship art history journal, Art Bulletin, in June, 1996. In this short essay, Camille uses the monster as a way to dismantle the concept of “the canon”—the com­ monly accepted set of supposedly “timeless masterpieces” found in major survey textbooks for introductory courses and in major art museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The British Museum (London), and the Musée du Louvre (Paris). The monstrous, Camille argues, can never be canonical because “whereas the canon is constructed out of the always already known, prejudged and expected, the monster, being unstable, crosses boundaries between human and nonhuman, mingling the appropriate and the inappropri­ ate, showing itself in constantly novel and unexpected ways.” Since the monster cannot be pinned down, cannot be known fully or understood, it cannot become a stable part of the canon, but also highlights the very nature of the canon and canonicity.

Editorial Notes

No changes have been made to the text presented here. How­ ever, one of the photographs from the original publication is no longer available for reproduction, so we have substituted a very similar image.

Further Reading

Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992. Camille, Michael. “Rethinking the Canon: Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters.” Art Bulletin 78.2 (1996): 198–201. Salomon, Nanette. “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omis­ sion.” In (En)Gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe, edited by Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow, 222–36. Knoxville: Uni­ver­sity of Tennessee Press, 1991. ASM

“RETHINKING THE CANON: PROPHETS, CANONS, AND PROMISING MONSTERS” MICHAEL CAMILLE

I used to be almost embarrassed to admit to friends and colleagues the place where I spent so many hours with things medieval. It was constructed to be, and can still be construed as, celebrating those aspects of art history that I had despised—triumphant nationalism, a purely stylistic tax­ onomy of objects, and a rigidly chronological system of their classification. The place was not even medieval, but a modern museum, and to make matters worse, none of the canonical works exhibited there was real. The pantheon of simulacra I am talking about is the collection of plaster casts at the Musée des Monuments français. More recently I came across some old photographs showing how the moulages there were arranged before 1937, when the collection, opened by Viollet le Duc in 1883, filled a wing of the old Trocadéro Palace. It was then called the Musée de Sculpture Comparée. These photographs show how the canon of French medieval sculpture was then displayed, not along stylistic and chronological lines as it is today. As its title suggests, the museum’s purpose was to allow the visitor to compare, as in a museum of natural history, one species of carving to another—the Romanesque to the Gothic leaf, for example. One photograph shows the juxtaposition of the statue of Isaiah from Souillac, which would today be con­ sidered key in any canon of medieval sculpture, hanging next to a work which would not have so central a place today—part of the damaged, late thirteenth-century sculpture added to the south porch of Chartres cathedral and representing four of the mechanical arts (Figure 6.1). On my last visit these two casts were still on show, one in the Romanesque Room and the other farther along, in the Early Gothic Room. Now I am less inclined to downplay my desire to behold plaster of Paris in Paris than I used to be. This is partly because the history of how objects were collected and repro­ duced—how canons were created—has become a major focus for art-historical research. This museum is now itself a monument (along with another favorite, the two vast Cast Courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) to the nineteenth-century interest in mechanical copies made for pedagogical purposes.1 But on another level these ghosts 1  This aspect of the history of taste as it has affected notions of canonicity is discussed by Ivan Gaskell, “History of Images,” in New

Figure 6.1. Casts of the Prophet Isaiah from Souillac and part of the South Porch of Chartres Cathedral. Paris, Musée des Monuments français, before 1937. Photo: Archives Photographiques d’Art et d’Histoire.

of stones have surely gained from the current fashion for phantasmatic simulation and our culture’s preference for the ironic copy over the dead original. As a medievalist, however, I tend to view these plaster casts more like contact relics, made from molds taken, like Veronica’s veil, from the surface of the divine prototype, thus giving them their own peculiar kind of authenticity. Floating free of their architectural anchors, Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, London, 1991, 178–82.

“Rethinking the Canon: Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters”

they are often more visible and certainly better lit by natural light than the fragments of real Romanesque and Gothic stone sculpture that also drift unmoored, marginalized and spotlit, in the recently renovated sculpture galleries of the Louvre. Nor have the sites and statues from which molds were made and then these replicas cast fared much better. The casts remain important records, especially where pollution and destruction have, in the intervening years, obliterated details on the originals that can still be discerned in their delicately crafted imprints. In fact, when you travel all the way to Souil­ lac you will find the actual Isaiah relief, of exactly the same dimensions as its twin—6 feet 6¾ inches high—isolated, already moved from its original twelfth-century locus. It is a fragment stuck on the right side of the door on the dim inte­ rior west wall of the abbey church, impossible to see properly without a flashlight, which anyway flattens the stone surface, making the actual object far more distorted and theatrical than the version in the museum. The images in the Musée des Monuments français have been arranged to tell a story. For those of us trying to teach or learn about medieval art, even though we might see a totally different story than the one narrated by their official order and placement, these casts are powerful tools, precisely because they are not “fixed in stone.” Their plaster permeability presents a canon but also a means for disrupting canonicity, adding to it and filling it with unnatural others. In this respect I would argue that a canon is not made up of the actual objects but only of representations of those objects. As Frank Kermode has suggested in his discussion of the origins of the term, the canon originally referred to the sacred authority of eternally reinterpretable scripture.2 Arthistorical canons, as constituted by a set of predetermined, isolated images of “great works” reproduced in books or in a series of more complex institutional replicas such as the plaster casts at the Musée des Monuments français, are thus, like writing, supplemental and secondary. Whether their bias be nationalist, formalist, or iconographic, canons are created not so much out of a series of worthy objects as out of the possibilities of their reproduction. For example, the paint­ ings that were most enjoyed in the eighteenth century were those that could be most easily engraved and made available to a new collecting audience, just as, in the nineteenth cen­ tury, the taste for Gothic ornament was directly stimulated by plaster reproductions. The advent of photography meant 2  Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention, Chicago, 1985, 76–79.

that the ideal Museum Without Walls could expand even further. In terms of the history of medieval sculpture, it was exactly those fragmentary Brancusi-like bits of stone, devoid of their original polychromy, which looked so good when dramatically lit in black-and-white photographs, that were “canonized.” Henri Focillon helped place the Souillac Isaiah in the canon through analyzing its drapery, just as Meyer Scha­ piro aided its ascent in his famous study of its social context. Contemporary students might focus on the figure’s textuality (the scroll) or his sexuality (the way his thighs are scooped out of the stone), seeing sculpture not as sign but as body. The plaster Isaiah in Paris is, in this sense, part of the history of the reception of a sculptural fragment that remains in the abbey church at Souillac and constitutes part of the process of its canonization. Very consciously I have been discussing the canon not only at one remove (in the plaster cast at the Musée des Monuments français) but also at two removes (as this copy appears in an old photograph). This is because, like so many art historians of my generation, I am anxious about my relationship with the object. I have to admit that, during the three or four times I have seen it, the stone prophet at Souillac held me enthralled, even in the half-dark. He seems to be struggling to read and show something to his audience, to communicate about his vision to me, as he lunges forward, pointing insistently to the unfurling scroll that is his speech, gesticulating just as animatedly as I sometimes do in front of the slides that I project of him. There exist many medieval things, not only sculptures, but also all kinds of objects that can, like this prophet, with­ stand the repeated peeling-off of their surfaces, the milking of their visibility by an almost parasitic technology of repro­ duction in two- and three-dimensional copies. Rather than draining them, this constant replication serves only to make them even more dynamically communicative and capable of taking on new meaning and significance. Even though being a medievalist puts me in a different relation to notions of canonicity than, say, being a modernist, I agree with T. J. Clark’s observation in a recent discussion of Cezanne that certain works of art show us what it is to “represent at a certain historical moment—they show us the powers and limits of a practice of knowledge.”3 I suppose that one day the Isaiah might be removed from the canon as displayed in the Paris cast museum. A new director might want to high­ 3  T. J. Clark, “Freud’s Cezannne,” Representations, no. 52, Fall 1995, 115–16.

39

40

Michael Camille

light a different fragment of twelfth-century sculpture from this region of the Dordogne, which produced many hundreds of other examples. But this is unlikely, because the piece has a place in the history, not just of sculpture, but of the body and prophecy, despite, or perhaps because of, its having lost its original place in the abbey church. Canonical works are usually described as those that have been stripped of their contingency, their particular place in space and time, and that now stand alone as “works of art.” It seems to me that pre­ cisely the opposite is the case: the truly exceptional work is one which registers, reacts to, and even redefines its particu­ lar historical circumstances, as I think the Souillac sculpture does and as Schapiro described it in his still resonant essay of 1939. 4 The prophet continues to communicate across the centuries in different ways to different generations of beholders because of his presence in that particular place. A medieval art historian is far more likely to want to construct a canon, not of objects, but of places, sites of pilgrimage, and performance to which one returns again and again. Liminal works, that is, works which are both spatially marginal and which cross or come between two distinct peri­ ods, often fail to achieve canonical status. A piece of medieval sculpture, which is molded in my own mental museum of monuments but which is not cast at the Musée des Monu­ ments français, appears as part of the west portal of Senlis Cathedral. It is a superbly ambiguous thing, less than a foot long, part reptile, part bird, and all stone, that crouches along­ side its twin on the inner edge of the left socle, alongside the Labors of the Months (Figure 6.2). The reasons why this thing at Senlis is not part of the canon of medieval sculpture are not hard to fathom. Not only is its snout weathered, but also, and more important, it is temporally as well as spatially marginal, out of place, so to speak, in its place. It is a vestige of the haunted tanglewood of “Romanesque” bestiality perching on one of the key examples of an “Early Gothic” portal. The sculpture from Senlis that is part of the canon, and that gets reproduced in most studies of medieval sculpture, is the Death and Assumption of the Virgin in the tympanum above, perhaps carved by the same individual who made the monster. Rather than the latter’s canonical status, more pressing issues would be who controls access to it and its rapid physical deterioration, its eventual disappearance. 4  Meyer Schapiro, “The Sculptures of Souillac” (1939), in Roma­ nesque Art, Selected Papers, I, New York, 1977, 102–30.

Figure 6.2. Monster at the edge of the inner face of the left socle of the West Portal of Senlis Cathedral, ca. 1170.

In planning a graduate course, “Monstrosity in Medieval Art,” I have begun to create a canon of monsters in which the Senlis beast has assumed an important place. Making lists of the slimy, feathery, and scaly, and comparing this example with many others, I find that it turns out to be more a dragon than a basilisk, as I first thought; its complex ancestry goes back hundreds of years and crosses three continents. Jacques Derrida has recently described how “as soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it,” which is exactly what I am doing in my search for its sources and meaning.5 Nineteenth-century canons of medieval sculpture were constructed according to a Linnean taxonomy of nature. Modernist canons, though focused more on the figurative, tended ironically toward disembodiment. Our own age, I

5  “Faced with a monster, one may become aware of what the norm is and when this norm has a history—any appearance of monstrosity in this domain allows an analysis of the history of the norms…. The monster is also that which appears for the first time and, consequently, is not yet recognized. A monster is a species for which we do not have a name, which does not mean that the species is abnormal, namely the composition or hybridization of already known species. Simply, it shows itself [elle se montre]—that is what the word monster means—it shows itself in something that is not yet shown and that therefore looks like a hallucination, it strikes the eye, it frightens precisely because no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure”; Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews, 1974– 1994, Stanford, 1995, 386.

“Rethinking the Canon: Prophets, Canons, and Promising Monsters”

would suggest, looks more to monsters and hybrids as para­ digms, precisely because recent technological displacements and prosthetic possibilities have called into question the very notion of what bodies are. In her essay “The Promises of Monsters,” historian of science Donna Haraway examines how technological transformations created “out of what is not quite a plethora of human and inhuman actors” have radically altered our categories and canons.6 Her concept of the monster would actually seem to me to be a far more promising way of thinking about classifying medieval art than the traditional notion of the canon. The advantages are obvious. Whereas the canon is a transcendent, uncreated text, like the Bible or the Torah, the monster is a material creature, a creation. Whereas the canon is constructed out of the always already known, prejudged and expected, the monster, being unstable, crosses boundaries between human and nonhuman, mingling the appropriate and the inappropri­ ate, showing itself in constantly novel and unexpected ways. Stripped of contingency, the canonical object is supposed to transcend space and time and stand autonomous. By contrast the monster is always lurking somewhere, guard­ ing the threshold as at Senlis, or warning off the evil eye. The canonical object is usually reduced to the purely visual level and, in its superficial visibility, has none of the somatic richness that C. Nadia Seremetakis argues has been lost in modernity—what she calls the “the inundating experience of sensory flooding, shock and multiplicity.”7 The monstrous, on the other hand, is all sensation, at one point soft and slimy, at another sharp and spiky. It now seems imperative to analyze the relations between the monstrous parts of a thing rather than analyze them as discrete and separate entities. In this sense, the stone prophet at Souillac too becomes a magnifi­ cent chimera, a hybrid combination of different traditions of corporeality, Ottonian, Byzantine, even classical, crisscrossed and constantly transforming into shocking visibility. The prophet shows us his scroll, teaching, as the art histo­ rian does, by pointing things out. But we now live in a visual culture in which people behold the future through clicking on icons rather than through pointing at actual things. One of the major myths of the computer revolution is that it will collapse 6  Donna Haraway, “The Promise of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. A. Treichler, New York/London, 1992, 295–337.

7  C. Nadia Seremetakis, “Implications,” in The Senses Still: Per­ ception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Serematakis, Boulder, Colo./San Francisco/Oxford, 1994, 123.

the canon by democratizing images, making everything that can be reduced to a screen available to everyone. There is much talk about including a wider range of “others” in muse­ ums and providing new visual venues of display to minorities and previously marginalized artistic producers. The new technology, however, seems to be more Berenson than Bau­ drillard. Will it really liberate us from the tyranny of the canon by providing multiple images of hundreds of thousands of other objects worldwide, things which we can combine and redeploy ourselves in order to teach and explore, play and perform with the past? Or will it endlessly publicize only those canonical things owned by powerful institutions? Copy­ right laws will insure that these images will be sacrosanct anyway, even more inviolable to analysis and redeployment than their originals. Once facsimiles are available, of course, the things themselves disappear into the vaults.8 I suppose it is better that students see a screen version of a painting, a manuscript page, or the Souillac Isaiah than the murky xeroxes that now seem ubiquitous in undergraduate teach­ ing. Yet I would disagree with researchers in medieval art who have embraced the new computer technology as an empowering means of historical vision, allowing them to take their classes on virtual reality trips inside and around Chartres Cathedral, for example. In this they are not only fol­ lowing Viollet le Duc’s misplaced positivist logic, which saw the cathedrals as wonderful machines, but are also further reducing their experience of the past to a single, simulated register. At the very moment when body and performance have become fundamental to art-historical concerns, our visual technology is fixing our focus firmly within the screen/ picture frame. The canon and the idea of a canonical object then will not be eroded, but actually reinforced by marketdriven technologies of mass communication. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings have recently suggested that “the art object no longer appears as object but rather as a constellation of processes, offering and offered to a series of reading heads.”9 While this might be true of contemporary visual products, it seems to me that we cannot treat works from the past in this 8  For the problem of access to rare materials, increasingly denied to students of medieval manuscripts for example, see G. Thomas Tanselle, “Books, Canons and the Nature of Dispute,” Common Knowledge, VI, 1992, 87–188; and Michael Camille, “The Très Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry, XVII, 1991, 72–108.

9  Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, eds., Vision and Textuality, Durham, N.C. 1995, 16.

41

42

Michael Camille

way, as things only to be read in our heads. Our images are not just about networks but about textures. They are not read on screen but felt on flesh, and pushed out of matter even to the level of pain. In recent years the linguistic model, which for at least two decades has been so influential in our field, has gradually been replaced by one rooted less in language and more in corporeality. Emphasis upon the body will surely have an effect upon how canons are shaped in the future, and I welcome the work of those art historians who are returning to the relationship between bodies and objects both canoni­ cal and noncanonical. I did not say “return to the object”—a strange Proustian phrase one hears a lot nowadays in our field, as if anyone could return, or was ever really there (at the object, or in the object) in the first place. But the danger we face as art historians is distance, losing the sensations that tie us to the material world of objects, constructing canons that would deny not only the nervous system, but also the decay of all things. I am afraid I have ended up sounding very medieval. Ultimately medieval paintings and sculptures, like all objects from the past, have to be understood as encrypted, as inti­ mately linked with death. I have just finished a monstrous but I hope not morbid book about a single Parisian illuminator, in an effort to remember an ordinary life and death in images. I was very conscious of not wanting to place this man called Pierre Remiet within a canon of great medieval French illu­ minators.10 I came to know him too well simply to put him on that distant pedestal. It was because Remiet’s repetitive and sometimes rushed illuminations have not become part of the “canon” of great works that I decided to write a whole book about his extraordinary struggle to make rather ordinary images. Although his art brilliantly evokes the late fourteenthcentury fascination with rotting corpses, it exemplifies and embodies rather than breaking out of the mold to become truly monstrous. Nonetheless, I think it is important to study and value this less-exalted kind of image making, to examine the whole range of more mundane visual performances that the dead have depicted for us. In Paris, when I revisit the cast museum or open one of Remiet’s manuscripts at the Biblio­ thèque Nationale, it is not in order to worship at the shrine of actual art or to read in the inscribed traces of the historical past. It is to feel my flesh crawl and to be haunted.

10  Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator, London/New Haven, 1996.

JEFFREY JEROME COHEN, “MONSTER CULTURE (SEVEN THESES)”

Critical Introduction

Reading Questions

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

How is the essay structured? Is this a useful approach? Which of the theses seems the most vital to your understanding of the culture role of monsters and the monstrous?

(1964– ), Professor of English, founding Director of the GW Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington Uni­ver­sity, and current Dean of the Humanities at Arizona State Uni­ver­ sity is the seminal figure in the formation of contemporary monster theory, a methodology that takes its name from one of his many publications. As the table of contents of these two volumes indicate, there were many earlier texts in the field, but Cohen’s 1996 edited collection, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press), and, in particular, his introductory essay, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” were profoundly generative. Cohen states early on that he seeks to understand “cultures from the monsters they engender,” and his seven theses build a framework for thinking about how monsters mean. “Monster Culture” is a staple of course syllabi and likely the most widely cited text in subsequent scholar­ ship on monstrosity. Indeed, it is at times treated by scholars as a sort of gospel text of the field, quoted as if it were a series of uncontestable pronouncements. It is worth noting, though, that Cohen himself refers to his seven theses as “breakable postulates” and has since worked to explore, expand, and refine his own thinking on the subject though numerous publications including Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 1999). In this reading, Cohen argues for the cultural origin and importance of the monstrous, a principle that guides much work in the field.

Editorial Note

Cohen uses the term “hermaphrodites” because he is refer­ ring to ancient and medieval texts that use this term. It is no longer the preferred term for actual human beings whose bodies or gender identities lie between traditional notions of male and female. Intersex or trans* are now common terms.

Further Reading

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 1999. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 1996. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “The Order of Monsters: Monster Lore and Medieval Narrative Traditions.” In Telling Tales: Medi­ eval Narratives and the Folk Tradition, edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman, Diana Conchado, and Giuseppe Carlo Di Scipio, 37–58. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: The Bodies of Gerald of Wales.” In The Postcolonial Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 85–104. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. ASM

“MONSTER CULTURE (SEVEN THESES)” JEFFREY JEROME COHEN

What I will

propose here by way of a first foray, as entrance into this book of monstrous content, is a sketch of a new modus legendi: a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender. In doing so, I will partially violate two of the sacred dicta of recent cultural studies: the compul­ sion to historical specificity and the insistence that all knowl­ edge (and hence all cartographies of that knowledge) is local. Of the first I will say only that in cultural studies today history (disguised perhaps as “culture”) tends to be fetishized as a telos,1 as a final determinant of meaning; post de Man, post Foucault, post Hayden White,2 one must bear in mind that history is just another text in a procession of texts, and not a guarantor of any singular signification. A movement away from the longue durée and toward microeconomics (of capi­ tal or of gender) is associated most often with Foucauldian criticism; yet recent critics have found that where Foucault went wrong was mainly in his details, in his minute specifics. Nonetheless, his methodology—his archaeology of ideas, his histories of unthought—remains with good reason the cho­ sen route of inquiry for most cultural critics today, whether they work in postmodern cyberculture or in the Middle Ages. And so I would like to make some grand gestures. We live in an age that has rightly given up on Unified Theory, an age when we realize that history (like “individuality,” “subjectiv­ ity,” “gender,” and “culture”) is composed of a multitude of fragments, rather than of smooth epistemological wholes. Some fragments will be collected here and bound temporar­ ily together to form a loosely integrated net—or, better, an unassimilated hybrid, a monstrous body. Rather than argue a “theory of teratology,” I offer by way of introduction to the essays that follow a set of breakable postulates in search of specific cultural moments. I offer seven theses toward under­ standing cultures through the monsters they bear.

Thesis I: The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body

Vampires, burial, death: inter the corpse where the road forks, so that when it springs from the grave, it will not know 1  [Greek for “end-goal” or “aim.” Eds.]

2  [Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, and Hayden White. See de Man’s Allegories of Reading; Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. 1; and White’s Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Eds.]

which path to follow. Drive a stake through its heart: it will be stuck to the ground at the fork, it will haunt that place that leads to many other places, that point of indecision. Behead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as subject, only as pure body. The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.3 The monster’s body quite literally incorpo­ rates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the mon­ ster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically “that which reveals,” “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signi­ fies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that cre­ ated it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again. These epistemological spaces between the monster’s bones are Derrida’s familiar chasm of différance: a genetic uncertainty principle, the essence of the monster’s vitality, the reason it always rises from the dissection table as its secrets are about to be revealed and vanishes into the night.

Thesis II: The Monster Always Escapes

We see the damage that the monster wreaks, the material remains (the footprints of the yeti across Tibetan snow, the bones of the giant stranded on a rocky cliff), but the monster itself turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear someplace else (for who is the yeti if not the medieval wild man? Who is the wild man if not the biblical and classical giant?). No matter how many times King Arthur killed the ogre of Mount Saint Michael, the monster reappeared in another heroic chronicle, bequeathing the Middle Ages an abundance of morte d’Arthurs. Regardless of how many times Sigourney Weaver’s beleaguered Ripley utterly destroys the ambiguous 3  Literally, here, Zeitgeist: Time Ghost, the bodiless spirit that uncannily incorporates a “place” that is a series of places, the cross­ roads that is a point in a movement toward an uncertain elsewhere. Bury the Zeitgeist by the crossroads: it is confused as it awakens, it is not going anywhere, it intersects everyplace; all roads lead back to the monster.

Alien that stalks her, its monstrous progeny return, ready to stalk again in another bigger-than-ever sequel. No monster tastes of death but once. The anxiety that condenses like green vapor into the form of the vampire can be dispersed temporarily, but the revenant by definition returns. And so the monster’s body is both corporeal and incorporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift. Each time the grave opens and the unquiet slumberer strides forth (“come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all”),4 the message proclaimed is transformed by the air that gives its speaker new life. Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literaryhistorical) that generate them. In speaking of the new kind of vampire invented by Bram Stoker, we might explore the foreign count’s transgressive but compelling sexuality, as subtly alluring to Jonathan Harker as Henry Irving, Stoker’s mentor, was to Stoker.5 Or we might analyze Murnau’s selfloathing appropriation of the same demon in Nosferatu, where in the face of nascent fascism the undercurrent of desire surfaces in plague and bodily corruption. Anne Rice has given the myth a modern rewriting in which homosexuality and vampirism have been conjoined, apotheosized; that she has created a pop culture phenomenon in the process is not insignificant, especially at a time when gender as a construct has been scrutinized at almost every social register. In Fran­ cis Coppola’s recent blockbuster, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the homosexual subtext present at least since the appearance of Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian lamia (Carmilla, 1872) has, like the red corpuscles that serve as the film’s leitmotif, risen to the surface, primarily as an AIDS awareness that transforms the disease of vampirism into a sadistic (and very medieval) form of redemption through the torments of the body in pain. No coincidence, then, that Coppola was putting together a docu­ mentary on AIDS at the same time he was working on Dracula. In each of these vampire stories, the undead returns in slightly different clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social movements or a specific, determining event: la décadence and its new possibilities, homophobia and its hateful imperatives, the acceptance of new subjec­ tivities unfixed by binary gender, a fin de siècle social activism paternalistic in its embrace. Discourse extracting a transcul­ tural, transtemporal phenomenon labeled “the vampire” is of rather limited utility; even if vampiric figures are found 4  [A reference to the biblical Lazarus by way of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” ll. 94–95. Eds.]

5  I realize that this is an interpretive biographical maneuver Barthes would surely have called “the living death of the author.”

“Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

almost worldwide, from ancient Egypt to modern Holly­ wood, each reappearance and its analysis is still bound in a double act of construction and reconstitution.6 “Monster theory” must therefore concern itself with strings of cultural moments, connected by a logic that always threatens to shift; invigorated by change and escape, by the impossibility of achieving what Susan Stewart calls the desired “fall or death, the stopping” of its gigantic subject,7 monstrous interpreta­ tion is as much process as epiphany, a work that must content itself with fragments (footprints, bones, talismans, teeth, shadows, obscured glimpses—signifiers of monstrous pass­ ing that stand in for the monstrous body itself).

Thesis III: The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis

The monster always escapes because it refuses easy categori­ zation. Of the nightmarish creature that Ridley Scott brought to life in Alien, Harvey Greenberg writes: It is a Linnean nightmare, defying every natural law of evolution; by turns bivalve, crustacean, reptilian, and humanoid. It seems capable of lying dormant within its egg indefinitely. It sheds its skin like a snake, its carapace like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp …. It responds according to Lamarckian and Darwinian principles.8

This refusal to participate in the classificatory “order of things” is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.

6  Thus the superiority of Joan Copjec’s “Vampires, Breast-feeding, and Anxiety,” October 58 (Fall 1991): 25–43, to Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988).

7  “The giant is represented through movement, through being in time. Even in the ascription of the still landscape to the giant, it is the activities of the giant, his or her legendary actions, that have resulted in the observable trace. In contrast to the still and perfect universe of the miniature, the gigantic represents the order and disorder of historical forces.” Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984). 86. 8  Harvey R. Greenberg, “Reimaging the Gargoyle: Psychoanalytic Notes on Alien,” in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fic­ tion, ed. Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Berg­ strom (Minneapolis: Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 1991), 90–91.

45

46

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Because of its ontological liminality, the monster notori­ ously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes—as “that which ques­ tions binary thinking and introduces a crisis.”9 This power to evade and to undermine has coursed through the monster’s blood from classical times, when despite all the attempts of Aristotle (and later Pliny, Augustine, and Isidore) to incorporate the monstrous races10 into a coherent epistemo­ logical system, the monster always escaped to return to its habitations at the margins of the world (a purely conceptual locus rather than a geographic one). 11 Classical “wonder books” radically undermine the Aristotelian taxonomic sys­ tem, for by refusing an easy compartmentalization of their monstrous contents, they demand a radical rethinking of boundary and normality. The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freak­ ish compilation of the monster’s body. A mixed category, 9  Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11. Garber writes at some length about “category crisis,” which she defines as “a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another: black/white, Jew/Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave …. [That which crosses the border, like the transvestite] will always function as a mechanism of overdetermination—a mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another. An analogy here might be the so-called ‘tagged’ gene that shows up in a genetic chain, indicating the presence of some otherwise hidden condition. It is not the gene itself, but its presence, that marks the trouble spot, indicating the likelihood of a crisis somewhere, elsewhere” (pp. 16–17). Note, however, that whereas Garber insists that the transvestite must be read with rather than through, the monster can be read only through—for the monster, pure culture, is nothing of itself.

10  These are the ancient monsters recorded first by the Greek writers Ktesias and Megasthenes, and include such wild imaginings as the Pygmies, the Sciapods (men with one large foot with which they can hop about at tremendous speed or that they can lift over their reclining bodies as a sort of beach umbrella), Blemmyae (“men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders,” in Othello’s words), and Cynocephali, ferocious dog-headed men who are anthropophagous to boot. John Block Friedman has called these creatures the Plinian races, after the classical encyclopedist who bestowed them to the Middle Ages and early modern period. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1981).

11  The discussion of the implication of the monstrous in the manufacture of heuristics is partially based upon my essay “The Limits of Knowing: Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Popular Culture,” Medieval Folklore 3 (Fall 1994): 1–37.

the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a “sys­ tem” allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integra­ tion—allowing what Hogle has called with a wonderful pun “a deeper play of differences, a nonbinary polymorphism at the ‘base’ of human nature.”12 The horizon where the monsters dwell might well be imag­ ined as the visible edge of the hermeneutic circle itself: the monstrous offers an escape from its hermetic path, an invita­ tion to explore new spirals, new and interconnected methods of perceiving the world.13 In the face of the monster, scientific inquiry and its ordered rationality crumble. The monstrous is a genus too large to be encapsulated in any conceptual sys­ tem; the monster’s very existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure; like the giants of Mandeville’s Travels, it threatens to devour “all raw & quyk” any thinker who insists otherwise. The monster is in this way the living embodiment of the phe­ nomenon Derrida has famously labeled the “supplement” (ce dangereux supplément):14 it breaks apart bifurcating, “either/ or” syllogistic logic with a kind of reasoning closer to “and/or,” introducing what Barbara Johnson has called “a revolution in the very logic of meaning.”15 Full of rebuke to traditional methods of organizing knowl­ edge and human experience, the geography of the monster is an imperiling expanse, and therefore always a contested cultural space.

Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference

The monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us. In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supple­ ment, the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the 12  Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and His Interpreters,” in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: Uni­ ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1988), 161.

13  “The hermeneutic circle does not permit access or escape to an uninterrupted reality; but we do not [have to] keep going around in the same path.” Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 137–38. 14  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1974).

15  Barbara Johnson, “Introduction,” in Jacques Derrida, Dissemi­ nation, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1981), xiii.

Beyond—of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as dis­ tant and distinct but originate Within. Any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual. The exaggeration of cultural difference into monstrous aberration is familiar enough. The most famous distor­ tion occurs in the Bible, where the aboriginal inhabitants of Canaan are envisioned as menacing giants to justify the Hebrew colonization of the Promised Land (Numbers 13). Representing an anterior culture as monstrous justifies its displacement or extermination by rendering the act heroic. In medieval France the chansons de geste celebrated the crusades by transforming Muslims into demonic carica­ tures whose menacing lack of humanity was readable from their bestial attributes; by culturally glossing “Saracens” as “monstra,” propagandists rendered rhetorically admissible the annexation of the East by the West. This representational project was part of a whole dictionary of strategic glosses in which “monstra” slipped into significations of the feminine and the hypermasculine. A recent newspaper article on Yugoslavia reminds us how persistent these divisive mythologies can be, and how they can endure divorced from any grounding in historical reality: A Bosnian Serb militiaman, hitchhiking to Sarajevo, tells a reporter in all earnestness that the Muslims are feeding Serbian children to the animals in the zoo. The story is nonsense. There aren’t any animals left alive in the Sarajevo zoo. But the militiaman is convinced and can recall all the wrongs that Muslims may or may not have perpetrated during their 500 years of rule.16

In the United States, Native Americans were presented as unredeemable savages so that the powerful political machine of Manifest Destiny could push westward with disregard. Scattered throughout Europe by the Diaspora and steadfastly refusing assimilation into Christian society, Jews have been perennial favorites for xenophobic misrepresentation, for here was an alien culture living, working, and even at times prospering within vast communities dedicated to becoming homogeneous and monolithic. The Middle Ages accused the Jews of crimes ranging from the bringing of the plague to bleeding Christian children to make their Passover meal. Nazi 16  H. D. S. Greenway, “Adversaries Create Devils of Each Other,” Boston Globe, December 15, 1992, i.

“Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

Germany simply brought these ancient traditions of hate to their conclusion, inventing a Final Solution that differed from earlier persecutions only in its technological efficiency. Political or ideological difference is as much a catalyst to monstrous representation on a micro level as cultural alterity in the macrocosm. A political figure suddenly out of favor is transformed like an unwilling participant in a science experi­ ment by the appointed historians of the replacement regime: “monstrous history” is rife with sudden, Ovidian meta­ morphoses, from Vlad Tepes to Ronald Reagan. The most illustrious of these propaganda-bred demons is the English king Richard III, whom Thomas More famously described as “little of stature, ill fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard fauoured of vis­ age …. hee came into the worlde with feete forward, … also not vntothed.”17 From birth, More declares, Richard was a monster, “his deformed body a readable text”18 on which was inscribed his deviant morality (indistinguishable from an incorrect political orientation). The almost obsessive descanting on Richard from Poly­ dor Vergil in the Renaissance to the Friends of Richard III Incorporated in our own era demonstrates the process of “monster theory” at its most active: culture gives birth to a monster before our eyes, painting over the normally propor­ tioned Richard who once lived, raising his shoulder to deform simultaneously person, cultural response, and the possibility of objectivity.19 History itself becomes a monster: defeaturing, self-deconstructive, always in danger of exposing the sutures that bind its disparate elements into a single, unnatural body. At the same time Richard moves between Monster and Man, the disturbing suggestion arises that this incoherent body, denaturalized and always in peril of disaggregation, may well be our own. 17  Thomas More, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More, vol. 2, The History of King Richard III, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1963), 7.

18  Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1988), 30. My discussion of Richard is indebted to Marjorie Garber’s provocative work.

19  “A portrait now in the Society of Antiquaries of London, painted about 1505, shows a Richard with straight shoulders. But a second portrait, possibly of earlier date, in the Royal Collection, seems to emblematize the whole controversy [over Richard’s supposed monstrosity], for in it, X-ray examination reveals an original straight shoulder line, which was subsequently painted over to present the raised right shoulder silhouette so often copied by later portraitists.” Ibid., 35.

47

48

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

The difficult project of constructing and maintain­ ing gender identities elicits an array of anxious responses throughout culture, producing another impetus to terato­ genesis. The woman who oversteps the boundaries of her gender role risks becoming a Scylla, Weird Sister, Lilith (“die erste Eva,” “la mère obscuré”),20 Bertha Mason, or Gorgon.21 “Deviant” sexual identity is similarly susceptible to monster­ ization. The great medieval encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais describes the visit of a hermaphroditic cynocephalus to the French court in his Speculum naturale (31.126).22 Its male reproductive organ is said to be disproportionately large, but the monster could use either sex at its own discretion. Bruno Roy writes of this fantastic hybrid: “What warning did he come to deliver to the king? He came to bear witness to sexual norms …. He embodied the punishment earned by those who violate sexual taboos.”23 This strange creature, a composite of the supposedly discrete categories “male” and “female,” arrives before King Louis to validate heterosexuality over homosexuality, with its supposed inversions and transforma­ tions (“Equa fit equus,” one Latin writer declared; “The horse becomes a mare”).24 The strange dog-headed monster is a liv­ 20  I am hinting here at the possibility of a feminist recuperation of the gendered monster by citing the titles of two famous books about Lilith (a favorite figure in feminist writing): Jacques Bril’s Lilith, ou, La Mere obscure (Paris: Payot, 1981), and Siegmund Hurwitz’s Lilith, die erste Eva: Eine Studie uber dunkle Aspekte des Weiblichen (Zurich: Daimon Verlag, 1980).

21  “The monster-woman, threatening to replace her angelic sister, embodies intransigent female autonomy and thus represents both the author’s power to allay ‘his’ anxieties by calling their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and simultaneously, the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained ‘place’ and thus generates a story that ‘gets away’ from its author.” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984), 28. The “dangerous” role of feminine will in the engendering of monsters is also explored by Marie-Hélène Huet in Monstrous Imagination (Cam­ bridge: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993). 22  A cynocephalus is a dog-headed man, like the recently decan­ onized Saint Christopher. Bad enough to be a cynocephalus without being hermaphroditic to boot: the monster accrues one kind of difference on top of another, like a magnet that draws differences into an aggregate, multivalent identity around an unstable core.

23  Bruno Roy, “En marge du monde connu: Les races de monstres,” in Aspects de la marginalité au Moyen Age, ed. Guy-H Allard (Quebec: Les É� ditions de l’Aurore, 1975), 77. This translation is mine.

24  See, for example, Monica E. McAlpine, “The Pardoner’s Homo­ sexuality and How It Matters,” PMLA 95 (1980): 8–22.

ing excoriation of gender ambiguity and sexual abnormality, as Vincent’s cultural moment defines them: heteronormaliza­ tion incarnate. From the classical period into the twentieth century, race has been almost as powerful a catalyst to the creation of mon­ sters as culture, gender, and sexuality. Africa early became the West’s significant other, the sign of its ontological difference simply being skin color. According to the Greek myth of Phaë­ ton, the denizens of mysterious and uncertain Ethiopia were black because they had been scorched by the too-close pass­ ing of the sun. The Roman naturalist Pliny assumed nonwhite skin to be symptomatic of a complete difference in tempera­ ment and attributed Africa’s darkness to climate; the intense heat, he said, had burned the Africans’ skin and malformed their bodies (Natural History, 2.80). These differences were quickly moralized through a pervasive rhetoric of deviance. Paulinus of Nola, a wealthy landowner turned early church homilist, explained that the Ethiopians had been scorched by sin and vice rather than by the sun, and the anonymous commentator to Theodulus’s influential Ecloga (tenth cen­ tury) succinctly glossed the meaning of the word Ethyopium: “Ethiopians, that is, sinners. Indeed, sinners can rightly be compared to Ethiopians, who are black men presenting a ter­ rifying appearance to those beholding them.”25 Dark skin was associated with the fires of hell, and so signified in Christian mythology demonic provenance. The perverse and exag­ gerated sexual appetite of monsters generally was quickly affixed to the Ethiopian; this linking was only strengthened by a xenophobic backlash as dark-skinned people were forcibly imported into Europe early in the Renaissance. Nar­ ratives of miscegenation arose and circulated to sanction official policies of exclusion; Queen Elizabeth is famous for her anxiety over “blackamoores” and their supposed threat to the “increase of people of our own nation.”26 Through all of these monsters the boundaries between personal and national bodies blur. To complicate this cat­ egory confusion further, one kind of alterity is often written as another, so that national difference (for example) is transformed into sexual difference. Giraldus Cambrensis demonstrates just this slippage of the foreign in his Topogra­ 25  Cited by Friedman, The Monstrous Races, 64.

26  Elizabeth deported “blackamoores” in 1596 and again in 1601. See Karen Newman, “‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 148.

phy of Ireland; when he writes of the Irish (ostensibly simply to provide information about them to a curious English court, but actually as a first step toward invading and colonizing the island), he observes: It is indeed a most filthy race, a race sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than all other nations of the first principles of faith …. These people who have customs so different from others, and so opposite to them, on making signs either with the hands or the head, beckon when they mean that you should go away, and nod backwards as often as they wish to be rid of you. Likewise, in this nation, the men pass their water sitting, the women standing …. The women, also, as well as the men, ride astride, with their legs stuck out on each side of the horse.27

One kind of inversion becomes another as Giraldus deciphers the alphabet of Irish culture—and reads it backwards, against the norm of English masculinity. Giraldus creates a vision of monstrous gender (aberrant, demonstrative): the violation of the cultural codes that valence gendered behaviors creates a rupture that must be cemented with (in this case) the bind­ ing, corrective mortar of English normalcy. A bloody war of subjugation followed immediately after the promulgation of this text, remained potent throughout the High Middle Ages, and in a way continues to this day. Through a similar discursive process the East becomes feminized (Said) and the soul of Africa grows dark (Gates).28 One kind of difference becomes another as the normative categories of gender, sexuality, national identity, and eth­ nicity slide together like the imbricated circles of a Venn diagram, abjecting from the center that which becomes the monster. This violent foreclosure erects a self-validating, Hegelian master/slave dialectic that naturalizes the subju­ gation of one cultural body by another by writing the body excluded from personhood and agency as in every way dif­ ferent, monstrous. A polysemy is granted so that a greater threat can be encoded; multiplicity of meanings, paradoxi­ cally, iterates the same restricting, agitprop representations that narrowed signification performs. Yet a danger resides in this multiplication: as difference, like a Hydra, sprouts 27  See Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernae (The History and Topography of Ireland), trans. John J. O’Meara (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), 24. 28  See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfroAmerican Literature (New York: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988).

“Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

two heads where one has been lopped away, the possibili­ ties of escape, resistance, disruption arise with more force. René Girard has written at great length about the real violence these debasing representations enact, connecting monsterizing depiction with the phenomenon of the scape­ goat. Monsters are never created ex nihilo, but through a process of fragmentation and recombination in which ele­ ments are extracted “from various forms” (including—indeed, especially—marginalized social groups) and then assembled as the monster, “which can then claim an independent identity.”29 The political-cultural monster, the embodiment of radical difference, paradoxically threatens to erase difference in the world of its creators, to demonstrate the potential for the system to differ from its own difference, in other words not to be different at all, to cease to exist as a system …. Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality …. Despite what is said around us persecu­ tors are never obsessed with difference but rather by its unutterable contrary, the lack of difference.30

By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially freefloating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed. Because it is a body across which difference has been repeatedly written, the monster (like Frankenstein’s creature, that combination of odd somatic pieces stitched together from a community of cadavers) seeks out its author to demand its raison d’être—and to bear witness to the fact that it could have been constructed Otherwise. Godzilla trampled Tokyo; Girard frees him here to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private body to the public world.

Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible

The monster resists capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite, but it is something more than a Bakhtinian ally of the popular. From its position at the limits of knowing, the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncer­ tain demesnes. The giants of Patagonia, the dragons of the

29  René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1986), 33. 30  Ibid., 21–22.

49

50

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Orient, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park together declare that curiosity is more often punished than rewarded, that one is better off safely contained within one’s own domestic sphere than abroad, away from the watchful eyes of the state. The monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual), delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself. Lycaon, the first werewolf in Western literature, under­ goes his lupine metamorphosis as the culmination of a fable of hospitality.31 Ovid relates how the primeval giants attempted to plunge the world into anarchy by wrenching Olympus from the gods, only to be shattered by divine thunderbolts. From their scattered blood arose a race of men who continued their fathers’ malignant ways.32 Among this wicked progeny was Lycaon, king of Arcadia. When Jupiter arrived as a guest at his house, Lycaon tried to kill the ruler of the gods as he slept, and the next day served him pieces of a servant’s body as a meal. The enraged Jupiter punished this violation of the hostguest relationship by transforming Lycaon into a monstrous semblance of that lawless, godless state to which his actions would drag humanity back: The king himself flies in terror and, gaining the fields, howls aloud, attempting in vain to speak. His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter. His garments change to shaggy hair, his arms to legs. He turns into a wolf, and yet retains some traces of his former shape.33

31  Extended travel was dependent in both the ancient and medieval world on the promulgation of an ideal of hospitality that sanctified the responsibility of host to guest. A violation of that code is responsible for the destruction of the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, for the devolution from man to giant in Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, and for the first punitive transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This popular type of narrative may be conveniently labeled the fable of hospitality; such stories envalue the practice whose breach they illustrate through a drama repudiating the dangerous behavior. The valorization is accomplished in one of two ways: the host is a monster already and learns a lesson at the hands of his guest, or the host becomes a monster in the course of the narrative and audience members realize how they should conduct themselves. In either case, the cloak of monstrousness calls attention to those behaviors and attitudes the text is concerned with interdicting. 32  Ovid, Metamorphoses (Loeb Classical Library no. 42), ed. G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1916, rpr. 1984), 1.156–62. 33  Ibid., 1.231–39.

The horribly fascinating loss of Lycaon’s humanity merely rei­ fies his previous moral state; the king’s body is rendered all transparence, instantly and insistently readable. The power of the narrative prohibition peaks in the lingering description of the monstrously composite Lycaon, at that median where he is both man and beast, dual natures in a helpless tumult of assertion. The fable concludes when Lycaon can no longer speak, only signify. Whereas monsters born of political expedience and selfjustifying nationalism function as living invitations to action, usually military (invasions, usurpations, colonizations), the monster of prohibition polices the borders of the possible, interdicting through its grotesque body some behaviors and actions, envaluing others. It is possible, for example, that medieval merchants intentionally disseminated maps depict­ ing sea serpents like Leviathan at the edges of their trade routes in order to discourage further exploration and to establish monopolies.34 Every monster is in this way a double narrative, two living stories: one that describes how the mon­ ster came to be and another, its testimony, detailing what cultural use the monster serves. The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together that system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the bor­ ders that cannot—must not—be crossed. Primarily these borders are in place to control the traffic in women, or more generally to establish strictly homosocial bonds, the ties between men that keep a patriarchal society functional. A kind of herdsman, this monster delimits the social space through which cultural bodies may move, and in classical times (for example) validated a tight, hierarchi­ cal system of naturalized leadership and control where every man had a functional place. 35 The prototype in Western culture for this kind of “geographic” monster is Homer’s Polyphemos. The quintessential xenophobic rendition of 34  I am indebted to Keeryung Hong of Harvard Uni­ver­s ity for sharing her research on medieval map production for this hypothesis.

35  A useful (albeit politically charged) term for such a collective is Männer­bunde, “all-male groups with aggression as one major function.” See Joseph Harris, “Love and Death in the Männerbunde: An Essay with Special Reference to the Bjarkamál and The Battle of Maldon,” in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period, ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), 78. See also the Interscripta discussion of “Medieval Masculinities,” moderated and edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, accessible via www: http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/e-center/interscripta/ mm. html (the piece is also forthcoming in a nonhypertext version in Arthuriana, as “The Armour of an Alienating Identity”).[...] [“The Armour of an Alienating Identity,” Arthuriana 6.4 (1996): 1–24. Eds.]

the foreign (the barbaric—that which is unintelligible within a given cultural-linguistic system),36 the Cyclopes are repre­ sented as savages who have not “a law to bless them” and who lack the techne to produce (Greek-style) civilization. Their archaism is conveyed through their lack of hierarchy and of a politics of precedent. This dissociation from community leads to a rugged individualism that in Homeric terms can only be horrifying. Because they live without a system of tradition and custom, the Cyclopes are a danger to the arriving Greeks, men whose identities are contingent upon a compartmentalized function within a deindividualizing system of subordination and control. Polyphemos’s victims are devoured, engulfed, made to vanish from the public gaze: cannibalism as incorpo­ ration into the wrong cultural body. The monster is a powerful ally of what Foucault calls “the society of the panopticon,” in which “polymorphous conducts [are] actually extracted from people’s bodies and from their pleasures … [to be] drawn out, revealed, isolated, intensi­ fied, incorporated, by multifarious power devices.”37 Susan Stewart has observed that “the monster’s sexuality takes on a separate life”;38 Foucault helps us to see why. The monster embodies those sexual practices that must not be committed, or that may be committed only through the body of the mon­ ster. She and Them!: the monster enforces the cultural codes that regulate sexual desire. Anyone familiar with the low-budget science fiction movie craze of the 1950s will recognize in the preceding sentence two superb films of the genre, one about a radioactive virago from outer space who kills every man she touches, the other a social parable in which giant ants (really, Communists) burrow beneath Los Angeles (that is, Hollywood) and threaten world peace (that is, American conservatism). I connect these two seemingly unrelated titles here to call attention to the anxieties that monsterized their subjects in the first place, and to enact syntactically an even deeper fear: that the two will join in some unholy miscegenation. We have seen that the monster arises at the gap where difference is perceived as dividing a recording voice from its captured subject; the criterion of this division is arbitrary, and can range from anatomy or skin color to religious belief, custom, 36  The Greek word barbaros, from which we derive the modern English word barbaric, means “making the sound bar bar”—that is, not speaking Greek, and therefore speaking nonsense.

37  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 47–48.

38  Stewart, On Longing. See especially “The Imaginary Body,” 104–31.

“Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

and political ideology. The monster’s destructiveness is really a deconstructiveness: it threatens to reveal that difference originates in process, rather than in fact (and that “fact” is subject to constant reconstruction and change). Given that the recorders of the history of the West have been mainly European and male, women (She) and nonwhites (Them!) have found themselves repeatedly transformed into monsters, whether to validate specific alignments of masculinity and whiteness, or simply to be pushed from its realm of thought.39 Feminine and cultural others are monstrous enough by themselves in patriarchal society, but when they threaten to mingle, the entire economy of desire comes under attack. As a vehicle of prohibition, the monster most often arises to enforce the laws of exogamy, both the incest taboo (which establishes a traffic in women by mandating that they marry outside their families) and the decrees against interracial sexual mingling (which limit the parameters of that traffic by policing the boundaries of culture, usually in the service of some notion of group “purity”).40 Incest narratives are common to every tradition and have been extensively docu­ mented, mainly owing to Levi-Strauss’s elevation of the taboo to the founding base of patriarchal society. Miscegenation, that intersection of misogyny (gender anxiety) and racism (no matter how naive), has received considerably less critical attention. I will say a few words about it here. The Bible has long been the primary source for divine decrees against interracial mixing. One of these pro­ nouncements is a straightforward command from God that comes through the mouth of the prophet Joshua (Joshua 23:12 ff.); another is a cryptic episode in Genesis much elab­ orated during the medieval period, alluding to “sons of God”

39  The situation was obviously far more complex than these statements can begin to show; “European,” for example, usually includes only males of the Western Latin tradition. Sexual orientation further complicates the picture, as we shall see. Donna Haraway, following Trinh Minh-ha, calls the humans beneath the monstrous skin “inappropriate/d others”: “To be ‘inappropriate/d’ does not mean ‘not to be in relation with’—i.e., to be in a special reservation, with the status of the authentic, the untouched, in the allochronic and allotropic condition of innocence. Rather to be an ‘inappropriate/d other’ means to be in critical deconstructive relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality—as the means of making potent connection that exceeds domination.” “The Promises of Monsters,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 299. 40  This discussion owes an obvious debt to Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).

51

52

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

who impregnate the “daughters of men” with a race of wicked giants (Genesis 6:4). The monsters are here, as elsewhere, expedient representations of other cultures, generalized and demonized to enforce a strict notion of group sameness. The fears of contamination, impurity, and loss of identity that produce stories like the Genesis episode are strong, and they reappear incessantly. Shakespeare’s Caliban, for example, is the product of such an illicit mingling, the “freckled whelp” of the Algerian witch Sycorax and the devil. Charlotte Brontë reversed the usual paradigm in Jane Eyre (white Rochester and lunatic Jamaican Bertha Mason), but horror movies as seemingly innocent as King Kong demonstrate miscegenation anxiety in its brutal essence. Even a film as recent as 1979’s immensely successful Alien may have a cognizance of the fear in its under-workings: the grotesque creature that stalks the heroine (dressed in the final scene only in her underwear) drips a glistening slime of K-Y Jelly from its teeth; the jaw tendons are constructed of shredded condoms; and the man inside the rubber suit is Bolaji Badejo, a Masai tribesman standing seven feet tall who happened to be studying in Eng­ land at the time the film was cast.41 The narratives of the West perform the strangest dance around that fire in which miscegenation and its practitioners have been condemned to burn. Among the flames we see the old women of Salem hanging, accused of sexual relations with the black devil; we suspect they died because they crossed a different border, one that prohibits women from managing property and living solitary, unmanaged lives. The flames devour the Jews of thirteenth-century England, who stole chil­ dren from proper families and baked seder matzo with their blood; as a menace to the survival of English race and culture, they were expelled from the country and their property con­ fiscated. A competing narrative again implicates monstrous economics—the Jews were the money lenders, the state and its commerce were heavily indebted to them—but this sec­ ond story is submerged in a horrifying fable of cultural purity and threat to Christian continuance. As the American frontier expanded beneath the banner of Manifest Destiny in the nine­ teenth century, tales circulated about how “Indians” routinely kidnapped white women to furnish wives for themselves; the West was a place of danger waiting to be tamed into farms, its menacing native inhabitants fit only to be dispossessed. It matters little that the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son did not rape and butcher his employer’s daughter; that 41  John Eastman, Retakes: Behind the Scenes of 500 Classic Movies, 9–10.

narrative is supplied by the police, by an angry white society, indeed by Western history itself. In the novel, as in life, the threat occurs when a nonwhite leaves the reserve abandoned to him; Wright envisions what happens when the horizon of narrative expectation is firmly set, and his conclusion (born out in seventeenth-century Salem, medieval England, and nineteenth-century America) is that the actual circumstances of history tend to vanish when a narrative of miscegenation can be supplied. The monster is transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker; and so the monster and all that it embod­ ies must be exiled or destroyed. The repressed, however, like Freud himself, always seems to return.

Thesis VI: Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire

The monster is continually linked to forbidden practices, in order to normalize and to enforce. The monster also attracts. The same creatures who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint. This simultaneous repul­ sion and attraction at the core of the monster’s composition accounts greatly for its continued cultural popularity, for the fact that the monster seldom can be contained in a simple, binary dialectic (thesis, antithesis … no synthesis). We dis­ trust and loathe the monster at the same time we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair. Through the body of the monster fantasies of aggression, domination, and inversion are allowed safe expression in a clearly delimited and permanently liminal space. Escapist delight gives way to horror only when the monster threatens to overstep these boundaries, to destroy or deconstruct the thin walls of category and culture. When contained by geo­ graphic, generic, or epistemic marginalization, the monster can function as an alter ego, as an alluring projection of (an Other) self. The monster awakens one to the pleasures of the body, to the simple and fleeting joys of being frightened, or frightening—to the experience of mortality and corporeality. We watch the monstrous spectacle of the horror film because we know that the cinema is a temporary place, that the jolting sensuousness of the celluloid images will be followed by reentry into the world of comfort and light.42 Likewise, the story

42  Paul Coates interestingly observes that “the horror film becomes the essential form of cinema, monstrous content manifesting itself in the monstrous form of the gigantic screen.” The Gorgon’s Gaze

on the page before us may horrify (whether it appears in the New York Times news section or Stephen King’s latest novel matters little), so long as we are safe in the knowledge of its nearing end (the number of pages in our right hand is dwin­ dling) and our liberation from it. Aurally received narratives work no differently; no matter how unsettling the descrip­ tion of the giant, no matter how many unbaptized children and hapless knights he devours, King Arthur will ultimately destroy him. The audience knows how the genre works. Times of carnival temporally marginalize the monstrous, but at the same time allow it a safe realm of expression and play: on Halloween everyone is a demon for a night. The same impulse to ataractic fantasy is behind much lavishly bizarre manuscript marginalia, from abstract scribblings at the edges of an ordered page to preposterous animals and vaguely humanoid creatures of strange anatomy that crowd a biblical text. Gargoyles and ornately sculpted grotesques, lurking at the crossbeams or upon the roof of the cathedral, likewise record the liberating fantasies of a bored or repressed hand suddenly freed to populate the margins. Maps and travel accounts inherited from antiquity invented whole geographies of the mind and peopled them with exotic and fantastic creatures; Ultima Thule, Ethiopia, and the Antipodes were the medieval equivalents of outer space and virtual reality, imaginary (wholly verbal) geographies accessible from anywhere, never meant to be discovered but always waiting to be explored. Jacques Le Goff has written that the Indian Ocean (a “mental horizon” imagined, in the Middle Ages, to be completely enclosed by land) was a cultural space where taboos were eliminated or exchanged for others. The weirdness of this world produced an im­ pression of liberation and freedom. The strict morality imposed by the Church was contrasted with the discomfiting attractiveness of a world of bizarre tastes, which practiced coprophagy and cannibal­ ism; of bodily innocence, where man, freed of the modesty of clothing, rediscovered nudism and sexual freedom; and where, once rid of restrictive mono­ gamy and family barriers, he could give himself over to polygamy, incest, and eroticism.43

(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1991), 77. Carol Clover locates some of the pleasure of the monster film in its cross-gender game of identification; see Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992). Why not go further, and call the pleasure cross-somatic? 43  Jacques Le Goff, “The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean,” in

“Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

The habitations of the monsters (Africa, Scandinavia, America, Venus, the Delta Quadrant—whatever land is sufficiently dis­ tant to be exoticized) are more than dark regions of uncertain danger: they are also realms of happy fantasy, horizons of liberation. Their monsters serve as secondary bodies through which the possibilities of other genders, other sexual practices, and other social customs can be explored. Hermaphrodites, Amazons, and lascivious cannibals beckon from the edges of the world, the most distant planets of the galaxy. The co-optation of the monster into a symbol of the desir­ able is often accomplished through the neutralization of potentially threatening aspects with a liberal dose of comedy: the thundering giant becomes the bumbling giant.44 Monsters may still function, however, as the vehicles of causative fanta­ sies even without their valences reversed. What Bakhtin calls “official culture” can transfer all that is viewed as undesirable in itself into the body of the monster, performing a wish-fulfill­ ment drama of its own; the scapegoated monster is perhaps ritually destroyed in the course of some official narrative, purging the community by eliminating its sins. The monster’s eradication functions as an exorcism and, when retold and promulgated, as a catechism. The monastically manufactured Queste del Saint Graal serves as an ecclesiastically sanctioned antidote to the looser morality of the secular romances; when Sir Bors comes across a castle where “ladies of high descent and rank” tempt him to sexual indulgence, these ladies are, of course, demons in lascivious disguise. When Bors refuses to sleep with one of these transcorporal devils (described as “so lovely and so fair that it seemed all earthly beauty was embodied in her”), his steadfast assertion of control banishes them all shrieking back to hell.45 The episode valorizes the celibacy so central to the authors’ belief system (and so dif­ Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1980), 197. The postmodern equivalent of such spaces is Gibsonian cyberspace, with its MOOs and MUSHes and other arenas of unlimited possibility.

44  For Mikhail Bakhtin, famously, this is the transformative power of laughter: “Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great internal censor; it liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, fear of the prohibitions, of the past, of power.” Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Indianapolis: Indiana Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984), 94. Bakhtin traces the moment of escape to the point at which laughter became a part of the “higher levels of literature,” when Rabelais wrote Gargantua et Pantagruel. 45  The Quest for the Holy Grail, trans. Pauline Matarasso (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 194.

53

54

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

ficult to enforce) while inculcating a lesson in morality for the work’s intended secular audience, the knights and courtly women fond of romances. Seldom, however, are monsters as uncomplicated in their use and manufacture as the demons that haunt Sir Bors. Allegory may flatten a monster rather thin, as when the viva­ cious demon of the Anglo-Saxon hagiographic poem Juliana becomes the one-sided complainer of Cynewulf’s Elene. More often, however, the monster retains a haunting complexity. The dense symbolism that makes a thick description of the monsters in Spenser, Milton, and even Beowulf so challeng­ ing reminds us how permeable the monstrous body can be, how difficult to dissect. This corporal fluidity, this simultaneity of anxiety and desire, ensures that the monster will always dangerously entice. A certain intrigue is allowed even Vincent of Beau­ vais’s well-endowed cynocephalus, for he occupies a textual space of allure before his necessary dismissal, during which he is granted an undeniable charm. The monstrous lurks somewhere in that ambiguous, primal space between fear and attraction, close to the heart of what Kristeva calls “abjection”: There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, fasci­ nates desire, which, nonetheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sick­ ened, it rejects …. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflag­ gingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.46

And the self that one stands so suddenly and so nervously beside is the monster. The monster is the abjected fragment that enables the formation of all kinds of identities—personal, national, cul­ tural, economic, sexual, psychological, universal, particular (even if that “particular” identity is an embrace of the power/ status/knowledge of abjection itself ); as such it reveals their partiality, their contiguity. A product of a multitude of 46  Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982), 1.

morphogeneses (ranging from somatic to ethnic) that align themselves to imbue meaning to the Us and Them behind every cultural mode of seeing, the monster of abjection resides in that marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous: simultaneously “exorbitant” and “quite close.” Judith Butler calls this conceptual locus “a domain of unlivability and unin­ telligibility that bounds the domain of intelligible effects,” but points out that even when discursively closed off, it offers a base for critique, a margin from which to reread dominant paradigms. 47 Like Grendel thundering from the mere or Dracula creeping from the grave, like Kristeva’s “boomerang, a vortex of summons” or the uncanny Freudian-Lacanian return of the repressed, the monster is always coming back, always at the verge of irruption. Perhaps it is time to ask the question that always arises when the monster is discussed seriously (the inevitability of the question a symptom of the deep anxiety about what is and what should be thinkable, an anxiety that the process of mon­ ster theory is destined to raise): Do monsters really exist? Surely they must, for if they did not, how could we?

Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold … of Becoming

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”48

Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge—and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to re-evaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our per­ ception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them. 47  Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 22. Both Butler and I have in mind here Foucault’s notion of an emancipation of thought “from what it silently thinks” that will allow “it to think differently.” Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), 9. 48  [From Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act 5.1. Eds.]

Part II ALLIED THEORIES

EDWARD SAID, “INTRODUCTION,” from ORIENTALISM

Critical Introduction

Reading Questions

Edward Said (1935–2003) was a prolific writer and

How is Orientalism constructed through texts? How does Orientalism relate to “the Orient,” that is, the east? And how does this imagined East relate to the West?

thinker, publishing at least twenty-two books on literary criticism and postcolonial thought. His name, however, will forever be associated with his 1978 book, Orientalism. The study is the cornerstone of current postcolonial literary stud­ ies, and one might argue that without this book, authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ha Jin, or Arundhati Roy would not have garnered the attention they deserve. Said bases his reading of geopolitics in post-structuralism, in which the reader rather than the author’s intention becomes central, and is particu­ larly reliant on the approaches to history practiced by Michel Foucault. Said looks past individual texts to examine the way a group of texts work together to produce the Orient (the East) and, in turn, the Occident (the West). Though Orientalism makes no real mention of monsters, it is an important part of monster studies for two reasons. The first reason aligns with Said’s original intent with the work: so many of the monsters in Western culture from the Clas­ sical through the Early Modern period come from the East. Whether it be Pliny’s marvelous Sciapods, the cynocephalic St. Christopher, or Shakespeare’s Caliban, the East was Europe’s preferred setting for monsters—and Orientalism can help us understand why. The second reason Said’s work is important is that his approach and conclusions are trans­ ferable to monster studies. What his study reveals about the West’s relationship with the East is an analogue to our rela­ tionship with the monster: it is created by “us,” it tells “us” who we are by demonstrating what we are not, it does not speak for itself, it does not know itself like “we” know it or seek to know it, and it reminds the reader to look at the discourses on monsters (the theological, scientific, social, etc.) in the text in which they appear. It is safe to say that Orientalism—and by extension postcolonial studies—have had and continue to have an enormous impact on the study of monsters.

Editorial Note

Since this is a heavily excerpted selection, breaks have been indicated by bracketed ellipses [...].

Further Reading

Mitter, Partha. “Postcolonial Monsters: A Conversation with Partha Mitter.” In The Ashgate Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, 329–42. Surrey: Ashgate, 2012. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 2004. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–315. Urbana: Uni­ ver­sity of Illinois Press, 1988. MH

“INTRODUCTION,” FROM ORIENTALISM EDWARD SAID

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, set­ tling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism, as a discourse, one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism uni­ laterally determines what can be said about the Orient but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question. How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. [...]

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts, it is an elaboration not only a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole

series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discov­ ery, philological reconstructionism, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is manifestly different (or alterna­ tive and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw but rather is produced and exists in an une­ ven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is— and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world. [ ...]

Yet what German Orientalism had in common with AngloFrench and later American Orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western cul­ ture. This authority must in large part be the subject of any description of Orientalism, and it is so in this study. Even the name Orientalism suggests a serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise; when I apply it to modern American social scientists (since they do not call themselves Orientalists, my use of the word is anomalous), it is to draw attention to the way Middle East experts can still draw on the vestiges of Orientalism’s intellectual position in nineteenth-century Europe. There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judg­ ments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. All these attributes of author­ ity apply to Orientalism, and much of what I do in this study is

Orientalism

to describe both the historical authority in and the personal authorities of Orientalism. My principal methodological devices for studying author­ ity here are what can be called strategic location, which is a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic forma­ tion, which is, a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. I use the notion of strategy simply to identify the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions. Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Ori­ ent; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text—all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf. None of this takes place in the abstract, however. Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Addi­ tionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works, audi­ ences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable formation—for example, that of philological studies, of anthologies of extracts from Oriental literature, of travel books, of Oriental fantasies—whose pres­ ence in time, in discourse, in institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives it strength and authority. It is clear, I hope, that my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it described. I do not think that this idea can be overemphasized. Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orien­ talist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course repre­ sentation: as early as Aeschylus’s play The Persians the Orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening Oth­

erness into figures that are relatively familiar (in Aeschylus’s case, grieving Asiatic women). The dramatic immediacy of rep­ resentation in The Persians obscures the fact that the audience is watching a highly artificial enactment of what a non-Oriental has made into a symbol for the whole Orient. My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient. This evidence is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient. “Sie können sich nicht vertreten, sie müssen vertreten werden,”1 as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not “truth” but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a highly organized and encoded system which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written languages there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent verac­ ity of a written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as “the Orient.” Thus all of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Ori­ entalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear “there” in discourse about it. And these repre­ sentations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient. [ ...]

1  [“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” Eds.]

59

60

Edward Said

On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on “the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt.” These, he said, “belong to a wholly different category” than those “affecting the Isle of Wight or the West Riding of Yorkshire.” He spoke with the authority of a long-time member of Parliament […]. During his involvement in impe­ rial affairs Balfour served a monarch who in 1876 had been declared Empress of India; he had been especially well placed in positions of uncommon influence to follow the Afghan and Zulu wars, the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the death of General Gordon in the Sudan, the Fashoda Incident, the battle of Omdurman, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War.2 In addition his remarkable social eminence, the breadth of his learning and wit […] his education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and his apparent command over impe­ rial affairs all gave considerable authority to what he told the Commons in June 1910. But there was still more to Balfour’s speech, or at least to his need for giving it so didactically and moralistically. Some members were questioning the neces­ sity for “England in Egypt,” […] designating a once-profitable occupation that had become a source of trouble now that Egyptian nationalism was on the rise and the continuing British presence in Egypt no longer so easy to defend. Balfour, then, to inform and explain. Recalling the challenge of J. M. Robertson, the member of Tyneside, Balfour himself put Robertson’s question again: “What right have you to take up these airs of superiority with regard to people whom you choose to call Oriental?” The choice of “Oriental” was canonical; it had been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron. It designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, culturally. One could speak in Europe of an Oriental personality, an Oriental atmosphere, an Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be under­ stood. Marx had used the word, and now Balfour was using it; his choice was understandable and called for no comment whatever. I take up no attitude of superiority. But I ask [Rob­ ertson and anyone else] … who has even the most

2  [The Fashoda Incident (1898) was a conflict between England and France over control of the Nile and the Sudan; the Boer War (1899–1902) was fought by England in what is now South Africa against Boer states that resisted British colonial rule; the RussoJapanese War (1904–05) was fought by Russia and Japan over control of the Korean Peninsula, and England was allied with Japan (though it took no part in the actual warfare). Eds.]

superficial knowledge of history, if they will look in the face the facts with which a British statesman has to deal when he is put in a position of supremacy over great races like the inhabitants of Egypt and coun­ tries in the East. We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country. We know it further back; we know it more intimately; we know more about it. It goes far beyond the petty span of the history of our race, which is lost in the prehistoric period at a time when the Egyptian civilisation had already passed its prime. Look at all the Oriental countries. Do not talk about superiority or inferiority.

Two great themes dominate his remarks here and in what will follow: knowledge and power, the Baconian themes. As Balfour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in his mind is associated with “our” knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or economic power. Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilization from its origins to its prime to its decline—and of course, it means being able to do that. Knowledge means rising above imme­ diacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a “fact” which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for “us” to deny autonomy to “it”—the Oriental country—since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it. British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, and the burdens of knowledge make such questions as inferiority and superiority seem petty ones. Balfour nowhere denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for granted as he describes the consequences of knowledge. [ ...]

We would be wrong, I think, to underestimate the reservoir of accredited knowledge, the codes of Orientalist orthodoxy, to which Cromer3 and Balfour refer everywhere in their writ­ ing and in their public policy. To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, 3  [Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer was the British agent and consulgeneral in Egypt from 1883–1907 and, unlike Balfour, was exper­ ienced in the day-to-day management of what he called the “subject races” in Egypt. Eds.]

Orientalism

rather than after the fact. Men have always divided the world up into regions having either real or imagined distinction from each other. The absolute demarcation between East and West, which Balfour and Cromer accept with such compla­ cency, had been years, even centuries, in the making. There were of course innumerable voyages of discovery; there were contacts through trade and war. But more than this, since the middle of the eighteenth century there had been two princi­ pal elements in the relation between East and West. One was a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient, knowledge reinforced by the colonial encounter as well as by the widespread interest in the alien and unusual, exploited by the developing sciences of ethnology, comparative anat­ omy, philology, and history; furthermore, to this systematic knowledge was added a sizable body of literature produced by novelists, poets, translators, and gifted travelers. The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination. There is no way of putting this euphemistically. True, the relation­ ship of strong to weak could be disguised or mitigated, as when Balfour acknowledged the “greatness” of Oriental civi­ lizations. But the essential relationship, on political, cultural, and even religious grounds, was seen—in the West, which is what concerns us here—to be one between a strong and a weak partner. Many terms were used to express the relation: Balfour and Cromer, typically, used several. The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “‘normal.” But the way of enliven­ ing the relationship was everywhere to stress the fact that the Oriental lived in a different but thoroughly organized world of his own, a world with its own national, cultural, and epis­ temological boundaries and principles of internal coherence. Yet what gave the Oriental’s world its intelligibility and iden­ tity was not the result of his own efforts but rather the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was identified by the West. Thus the two features of cultural relationship I have been discussing come together. Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. In Cromer’s and Balfour’s language the Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one dis­ ciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks. Where do these come from?

Cultural strength is not something we can discuss very easily—and one of the purposes of the present work is to illustrate, analyze, and reflect upon Orientalism as an exer­ cise of cultural strength. In other words, it is better not to risk generalizations about so vague and yet so important a notion as cultural strength until a good deal of material has been analyzed first. But at the outset one can say that so far as the West was concerned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West. The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. Orientalism, then, is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing. During the early years of the twentieth century, men like Balfour and Cromer could say what they said, in the way they did, because a still earlier tradition of Orientalism than the nineteenth-century one provided them with a vocabu­ lary, imagery, rhetoric, and figures with which to say it. Yet Orientalism reinforced, and was reinforced by, the certain knowledge that Europe or the West literally commanded the vastly greater part of the earth’s surface. The period of immense advance in the institutions and content of Ori­ entalism coincides exactly with the period of unparalleled European expansion; from 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial dominion expanded from about 35 percent of the earth’s surface to about 85 percent of it.4 Every continent was affected, none more so than Africa and Asia. The two greatest empires were the British and the French; allies and partners in some things, in others they were hostile rivals. In the Orient, from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to Indochina and Malaya, their colonial possessions and imperial spheres of influence were adjacent, frequently over­ lapped, often were fought over. But it was in the Near Orient, the lands of the Arab Near East, where Islam was supposed to define cultural and racial characteristics, that the British and the French encountered each other and “the Orient” with the greatest intensity, familiarity, and complexity. For much of the nineteenth century, as Lord Salisbury put it in 1881, their common view of the Orient was intricately problematic: “When you have got a … faithful ally who is bent on meddling 4  Harry Magdoff, “Colonialism (1713–c. 1970),” Encyclopedia Brit­ annica, 15th ed. (1974), pp. 893–4. See also D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), p. 178.

61

62

Edward Said

in a country in which you are deeply interested—you have three courses open to you. You may renounce—or monopo­ lize—or share. Renouncing would have been to place the French across our road to India. Monopolizing would have been very near the risk of war. So we resolved to share.”5 And share they did, in ways that we shall investigate presently. What they shared, however, was not only land or profit or rule; it was the kind of intellectual power I have been calling Orientalism. In a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of information commonly and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held. What bound the archive together was a family of ideas6 and a unifying set of values proven in vari­ ous ways to be effective. These ideas explained the behavior of Orientals; they supplied Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere; most important, they allowed Europeans to deal with and even to see Orientals as a phe­ nomenon possessing regular characteristics. But like any set of durable ideas, Orientalist notions influenced the people who were called Orientals as well as those called Occidental, European, or Western; in short, Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine. If the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, then we must be prepared to note how in its development and subsequent history Orientalism deepened and even hardened the distinction. When it became common practice during the nineteenth century for Britain to retire its administrators from India and elsewhere once they had reached the age of fifty-five, then a further refine­ ment in Orientalism had been achieved; no Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westerner as he aged and degenerated, just as no Westerner needed ever to see himself, mirrored in the eyes of the subject race, as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever-alert young Raj.7 Orientalist ideas took a number of different forms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First of all, in Europe there was a vast literature about the Orient inherited from 5  Quoted in Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer: A Study in Anglo-Egyptian Relations (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), p. 3.

6  The phrase is to be found in Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of the Early Ideas About Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference (London: Cambridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1975), p. 17.

7  V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Ages of Empire (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), p. 55.

the European past. What is distinctive about the late eigh­ teenth and early nineteenth centuries, which is where this study assumes modern Orientalism to have begun, is that an Oriental renaissance took place, as Edgar Quinet phrased it.8 Suddenly it seemed to a wide variety of thinkers, politi­ cians, and artists that a new awareness of the Orient, which extended from China to the Mediterranean, had arisen. This awareness was partly the result of newly discovered and translated Oriental texts in languages like Sanskrit, Zend, and Arabic; it was also the result of a newly perceived rela­ tionship between the Orient and the West. For my purposes here, the keynote of the relationship was set for the Near East and Europe by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, an invasion which was in many ways the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another apparently stronger one. For with Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt processes were set in motion between East and West that still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives. And the Napoleonic expedition, with its great collective monument of erudition, the Description de l’Égypte, provided, a scene or setting for Orientalism, since Egypt and subsequently the other Islamic lands were viewed as the live province, the laboratory, the theater of effective Western knowledge about the Orient. I shall return to the Napoleonic adventure a little later. With such experiences as Napoleon’s the Orient as a body of knowledge in the West was modernized, and this is a second form in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism existed. From the outset of the period I shall be examining there was everywhere amongst Orientalists the ambition to formulate their discoveries, experiences, and insights suitably in modern terms, to put ideas about the Orient in very close touch with modern realities. Renan’s9 linguistic investigations of Semitic in 1848, for example, were couched in a style that drew heavily for its authority upon contemporary comparative grammar, comparative anatomy, and racial theory; these lent his Orientalism prestige and— the other side of the coin—made Orientalism vulnerable, as it has been ever since, to modish as well as seriously influ­ ential currents of thought in the West. Orientalism has been subjected to imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism, Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Spenglerism. But 8  Edgar Quinet, Le Génie des religions, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Paguerre, 1857), pp. 55–74. 9  [Joseph Ernest Renan, the first to theorize that Ashkenazi Jews were descended from the Turkish Khazars. Eds.]

Orientalism

Orientalism, like many of the natural and social sciences, has had “paradigms” of research, its own learned societies, its own Establishment. During the nineteenth century the field increased enormously in prestige, as did also the reputation and influence of such institutions as the Société asiatique, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesell­ schaft, and the American Oriental Society. With the growth of these societies went also an increase, all across Europe, in the number of professorships in Oriental studies; consequently there was an expansion in the available means for dissemi­ nating Orientalism. Orientalist periodicals, beginning with the Fundgraben des Orients (1809), multiplied the quantity of knowledge as well as the number of specialties. Yet little of this activity and very few of these institutions existed and flourished freely, for in a third form in which it existed, Orientalism imposed limits upon thought about the Orient. Even the most imaginative writers of an age, men like Flaubert, Nerval, Scott, were constrained in what they could either experience of or say about the Orient. For Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world, “we” lived in ours. The vision and material reality propped each other up, kept each other going. A certain freedom of intercourse was always the Westerner’s privilege; because his was the stron­ ger culture, he could penetrate, he could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery, as Disraeli once called it. Yet what has, I think, been previously overlooked is the constricted vocabulary of such a privilege, and the comparative limitations of such a vision. My argu­ ment takes it that the Orientalist reality is both antihuman and persistent. Its scope, as much as its institutions and allpervasive influence, lasts up to the present. But how did and does Orientalism work? How can one describe it all together as a historical phenomenon, a way of thought, a contemporary problem, and a material reality? Consider Cromer again, an accomplished technician of empire but also a beneficiary of Orientalism. He can furnish us with a rudimentary answer. In “The Government of Subject Races” he wrestles with the problem of how Britain, a nation of indi­ viduals, is to administer a wide-flung empire according to a number of central principles. He contrasts the “local agent,” who has both a specialist’s knowledge of the native and an Anglo-Saxon individuality, with the central authority at home in London. The former may “treat subjects of local interest in a

manner calculated to damage, or even to jeopardize, Imperial interests. The central authority is in a position to obviate any danger arising from this cause.” Why? Because this authority can “ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine” and “should endeavour, so far as is possible, to realise the circumstances attendant on the government of the dependency.”10 The language is vague and unattractive, but the point is not hard to grasp. Cromer envisions a seat of power in the West, and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine’s branches feed into it in the East—human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you—is processed by the machine, then converted into more power. The specialist does the immediate trans­ lation of mere Oriental matter into useful substance: the Oriental becomes, for example, a subject race, an example of an “Oriental” mentality, all for the enhancement of the “authority”‘ at home. “Local interests” are Orientalist special interests, the “central authority” is the general interest of the imperial society as a whole. What Cromer quite accurately sees is the management of knowledge by society, the fact that knowledge—no matter how special—is regulated first by the local concerns of a specialist, later by the general concerns of a social system of authority. The interplay between local and central interests is intricate, but by no means indiscriminate. In Cromer’s own case as an imperial administrator the “proper study is also man,” he says. When Pope proclaimed the proper study of mankind to be man, he meant all men, including “the poor Indian”; whereas Cromer’s “also” reminds us that certain men, such as Orientals, can be singled out as the subject for proper study. The proper study in this sense— of Orientals—is Orientalism, properly separate from other forms of knowledge, but finally useful (because finite) for the material and social reality enclosing all knowledge at any time, supporting knowledge, providing it with uses. An order of sovereignty is set up from East to West, a mock chain of being whose clearest form was given once by Kipling: Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments,

10  Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Political and Literary Essays, 1908–1913 (1913; reprinted Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), p. 35.

63

64

Edward Said

and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress.11

As deeply forged as is this monstrous chain of command, as strongly managed as is Cromer’s “harmonious working,” Orientalism can also express the strength of the West and the Orient’s weakness—as seen by the West. Such strength and such weakness are as intrinsic to Orientalism as they are to any view that divides the world into large general divisions, entities that coexist in a state of tension produced by what is believed to be radical difference. [...]

It may appear strange to speak about something or some­ one as holding a textual attitude, but a student of literature will understand the phrase more easily if he will recall the kind of view attacked by Voltaire in Candide, or even the attitude to reality satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. What seems unexceptionable good sense to these writers is that it is a fallacy to assume that the swarming, unpredict­ able, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books—texts—say; to apply what one learns out of a book literally to reality is to risk folly or ruin. One would no more think of using Amadis of Gaul to understand sixteenth-century (or present-day) Spain than one would use the Bible to understand, say, the House of Commons. But clearly people have tried and do try to use texts in so simple-minded a way, for otherwise Candide and Don Quixote would not still have the appeal for readers that they do today. It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human. But is this failing constantly pre­ sent, or are there circumstances that, more than others, make the textual attitude likely to prevail? Two situations favor a textual attitude. One is when a human being confronts at close quarters something relatively unknown and threatening and previously distant. In such a case one has recourse not only to what in one’s previous experience the novelty resembles but also to what one has read about it. Travel books or guide book are about as “natu­ ral” a kind of text, as logical in their composition and in their use, as any book one can think of, precisely because of this human tendency to fall back on a text when the uncertainties of travel in strange parts seem to threaten one’s equanimity. Many travelers find themselves saying of an experience in 11  See Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 40.

a new country that it wasn’t what they expected, meaning that it wasn’t what a book said it would be. And of course many writers of travel books or guidebooks compose them in order to say that a country is like this, or better, that it is colorful, expensive, interesting, and so forth. The idea in either case is that people, places, and experiences can always be described by a book, so much so that the book (or text) acquires a greater authority, and use, even than the actuality it describes. The comedy of Fabrice del Dongo’s12 search for the battle of Waterloo is not so much that he fails to find the battle, but that he looks for it as something texts have told him about. A second situation favoring the textual attitude is the appearance of success. If one reads a book claiming that lions are fierce and then encounters a fierce lion (I simplify, of course), the chances are that one will be encouraged to read more books by that same author, and believe them. But if, in addition, the lion book instructs one how to deal with a fierce lion, and the instructions work perfectly, then not only will the author be greatly believed, he will also be impelled to try his hand at other kinds of written performance. There is a rather complex dialectic of reinforcement by which the experiences of readers in reality are determined by what they have read, and this in turn influences writers to take up sub­ jects defined in advance by readers’ experiences. A book on how to handle a fierce lion might then cause a series of books to be produced on such subjects as the fierceness of lions, the origins of fierceness, and so forth. Similarly, as the focus of the text centers more narrowly on the subject—no longer lions but their fierceness—we might expect that the ways by which it is recommended that a lion’s fierceness be handled will actually increase its fierceness, force it to be fierce since that is what it is, and that is what in essence we know or can only know about it. A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the 12  [The main character in Stendhal’s 1893 novel, La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma). Eds.]

Orientalism

originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it. This kind of text is composed out of those preexisting units of information deposited by Flaubert in the catalogue of idées reçues. In the light of all this, consider Napoleon and de Lesseps. Everything they knew, more or less, about the Orient came from books written in the tradition of Orientalism, placed in its library of idées reçues; for them the Orient, like the fierce lion, was something to be encountered and dealt with to a certain extent because the texts made that Orient pos­ sible. Such an Orient was silent, available to Europe for the realization of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images, or mere descriptions devised for it. Earlier in this chapter I called such a relation between Western writ­ ing (and its consequences) and Oriental silence the result of and the sign of the West’s great cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient. But there is another side to the strength, a side whose existence depends on the pressures of the Orientalist tradition and its textual attitude to the Ori­ ent; this side lives its own life, as books about fierce lions will do until lions can talk back. The perspective rarely drawn on Napoleon and de Lesseps—to take two among the many pro­ jectors who hatched plans for the Orient—is the one that sees them carrying on in the dimensionless silence of the Orient mainly because the discourse of Orientalism, over and above the Orient’s powerlessness to do anything about them, suf­ fused their activity with meaning, intelligibility, and reality. The discourse of Orientalism and what made it possible—in Napoleon’s case, a West far more powerful militarily than the Orient—gave them Orientals who could be described in such works as Description de l’Égypte and an Orient that could be cut across as de Lesseps cut across Suez. Moreover, Orien­ talism gave them their success—at least from their point of view, which had nothing to do with the Oriental. Success, in other words, had all the actual human interchange between Oriental and Westerner of the Judge’s “said I to myself, said I” in Trial by Jury. Once we begin to think of Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient, we will encounter few surprises. For if it is true that historians like Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt emplot their narratives “as a story of a particular kind,” the same is also true of Orientalists who plotted Oriental history, character, and destiny for hundreds of years. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Orientalists became a more serious quantity, because by then the reaches of imaginative and

actual geography had shrunk, because the Oriental-European relationship was determined by an unstoppable European expansion in search of markets, resources, and colonies, and finally, because Orientalism had accomplished its selfmetamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution. Evidence of this metamorphosis is already appar­ ent in what I have said of Napoleon, de Lesseps, Balfour, and Cromer. Their projects in the Orient are understandable on only the most rudimentary level as the efforts of men of vision and genius, heroes in Carlyle’s sense. In fact Napoleon, de Les­ seps, Gomer, and Balfour are far more regular, far less unusual, if we recall the schemata of d’Herbelot and Dante and add to them both a modernized, efficient engine (like the nineteenthcentury European empire) and a positive twist: since one cannot ontologically obliterate the Orient (as d’Herbelot and Dante perhaps realized), one does have the means to capture it, treat it, describe it, improve it, radically alter it. The point I am trying to make here is that the transition from a merely textual apprehension, formulation, or defini­ tion of the Orient to the putting of all this into practice in the Orient did take place, and that Orientalism had much to do with that—if I may use the word in a literal sense—pre­ posterous transition. So far as its strictly scholarly work was concerned (and I find the idea of strictly scholarly work as disinterested and abstract hard to understand: still, we can allow it intellectually), Orientalism did a great many things. During its great age in the nineteenth century it produced scholars; it increased the number of languages taught in the West and the quantity of manuscripts edited, translated, and commented on; in many cases, it provided the Orient with sympathetic European students, genuinely interested in such matters as Sanskrit grammar, Phoenician numismatics, and Arabic poetry. Yet—and here we must be very clear—Orien­ talism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenthcentury Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality. Oriental­ ism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. And Orientalism, in its post-eighteenth-century form, could never revise itself. All this makes Cromer and Balfour, as observers and administrators of the Orient, inevitable. The closeness between politics and Orientalism, or to put it more circumspectly, the great likelihood that ideas about

65

66

Edward Said

the Orient drawn from Orientalism can be put to political use, is an important yet extremely sensitive truth. It raises ques­ tions about the predisposition towards innocence or guilt, scholarly disinterest or pressure-group complicity, in such fields as black or women’s studies. It necessarily provokes unrest in one’s conscience about cultural, racial, or historical generalizations, their uses, value, degree of objectivity, and fundamental intent. More than anything else, the political and cultural circumstances in which Western Orientalism has flourished draw attention to the debased position of the Orient or Oriental as an object of study. Can any other than a political master-slave relation produce the Orientalized Ori­ ent perfectly characterized by Anwar Abdel Malek? a) On the level of the position of the problem, and the prob­ lematic … the Orient and Orientals [are considered by Orientalism] as an “object” of study, stamped with an otherness—as all that is different, whether it be “sub­ ject” or “object”—but of a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist character …. This “object” of study will be, as is customary, passive, non-participating, endowed with a “historical” subjectivity, above all, non-active, non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself: the only Orient or Oriental or “subject” which could be admitted, at the extreme limit, is the alienated being, philosophically, that is, other than itself in relationship to itself, posed, understood, defined—and acted—by others.

b) On the level of the thematic, [the Orientalists] adopt an essentialist conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study, a conception which expresses itself through a characterized ethnist typol­ ogy … and will soon proceed with it towards racism. According to the traditional orientalists, an essence should exist—sometimes even clearly described in metaphysical terms—which constitutes the inalien­ able and common basis of all the beings considered; this essence is both “historical,” since it goes back to the dawn of history, and fundamentally a-historical, since it transfixes the being, “the object” of study, within its inalienable and non-evolutive specificity, instead of defining it as all other beings, states, nations, peoples, and cultures—as a product, a resultant of the vection of the forces operating in the field of historical evolution. Thus one ends with a typology—based on a real specificity, but detached from history, and, consequently, conceived as being intangible, essential—which makes of the studied “object” another being with regard to

whom the studying subject is transcendent; we will have a homo Sinicus, a homo Arabicus (and why not a homo Aegypticus, etc.), a homo Africanus, the man—the “normal man,” it is understood being the European man of the historical period, that is, since Greek antiquity. One sees how much, from the eighteenth to the twenti­ eth century, the hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud are accompanied by europocen­ trism in the area of human and social sciences, and more particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples.13

13  Anwar Abdel Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes 44 (Winter 1963), pp. 107–08.

JULIA KRISTEVA, “APPROACHING ABJECTION,” from POWERS OF HORROR: AN ESSAY ON ABJECTION

Critical Introduction

Julia Kristeva (1941–

) is a French feminist theo­ rist and practising psychoanalyst, though not a mainstream member of either of these movements. Rather than seeking to theorize the female as whole and complete—as male sub­ jects are generally assumed to be in Western culture—she instead interprets the human subject as inherently fractured and fragmentary. She takes seriously Sigmund Freud’s theo­ ries of sexuality and human psychological development, writ­ ing about the Oedipus Complex, ego formation, narcissism, and other Freudian mainstays. While her work is influential in monster theory, most contemporary scholars who cite her largely ignore these elements, which, though the underpin­ nings of her arguments, are no longer generally taken as accu­ rate descriptions of a universal human psyche. Where monster theorists take their inspiration, instead, is her work on “abjection,” especially her Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (originally published in French as Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection in 1980). Here, again relying on Freudian constructs, Kristeva explores the complex notion of “the abject,” an element of the human that is neither us nor not us, neither inside nor outside, and therefore destabilizing to the boundaries that define us. The abject, epitomized by bodily fluids, is both repellent and compelling, strange and familiar. In semiotics, the study of how we make meaning and an approach commonly used in monster theory, the abject is therefore both subject (the active, thinking self) and object (the passive being or thing acted upon). It is, in other terms, both self and other. Through the abject, Kristeva demolishes the boundaries between Us and Them and therefore is often used by those studying monsters to characterize the fraught

relationship between heroes and monsters. The abject—and, by analogy, the monstrous—is necessary; normative but not normative, human, but not human, it defines both. As Kristeva writes, “abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.” Here, we include a selection from the introduction to Powers of Horror, “Approaching Abjection.” The text is quite dense and difficult, perhaps the most challenging chapter in this volume. It requires—and rewards—slow, careful reading.

Reading Questions

Why did Kristeva choose to write in such a prickly, difficult style? How does this affect your reading process and ultimate understanding of the text? Can you define the abject in your own terms, and provide new examples of the phenomenon? What monsters are abject, and why?

Editorial Note

The text presented here is a translation from the original French, produced by Leon S. Roudiez.

Further Reading

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans­ lated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982. Oliver, Kelly, ed. Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kriste­ va’s Writings. New York: Routledge, 1993. Smith, Anna. Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrange­ ment. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997. ASM

“APPROACHING ABJECTION,” FROM POWERS OF HORROR: AN ESSAY ON ABJECTION JULIA KRISTEVA

Neither Subject nor Object There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to ema­ nate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repul­ sion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a mat­ ter of fact, makes me, ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A certain “ego” that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bod­ ies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that “I” puts up with, sublime and devastated, for “I” deposits it to the father’s account [verse au père–père-version]: I endure it,

for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowl­ edge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.

The Improper/Unclean

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them. Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gag­ ging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that “I” am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which “I” become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute

“Approaching Abjection,” from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become inte­ grated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects. The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior …. Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in

amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you…. In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children’s shoes, or something like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christ­ mas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.

The Abjection of Self

If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pul­ verizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruit­ less attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible con­ stitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experi­ ence of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the founda­ tions of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded. One always passes too quickly over this word, “want,” and today psychoanalysts are finally taking into account only its more or less fetishized product, the “object of want.” But if one imagines (and imagine one must, for it is the working of imagination whose foundations are being laid here) the experience of want itself as logically preliminary to being and object—to the being of the object—then one understands that abjection, and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none but literature. Mystical Christendom turned this abjection of self into the ultimate proof of humility before God, witness Elizabeth of Hungary who “though a great princess, delighted in nothing so much as in abasing herself.”1 The question remains as to the ordeal, a secular one this time, that abjection can constitute for someone who, in what 1  Francis de Sales, Introduction to a Devout Life, Thomas S. Kepler, tr. (New York: World, 1952), p: 125. [Modified to conform to the French text, which reads, “l’abjection de soy-mesme.”]

69

70

Julia Kristeva

is termed knowledge of castration, turning away from per­ verse dodges, presents himself with his own body and ego as the most precious non-objects; they are no longer seen in their own right but forfeited, abject. The termination of analy­ sis can lead us there, as we shall see. Such are the pangs and delights of masochism. Essentially different from “uncanniness,” more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory. I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on that account, “all by himself,” and, to save himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him—all gifts, all objects. He has, he could have, a sense of the abject. Even before things for him are—hence before they are signifiable—he drives them out, dominated by drive as he is, and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject. A sacred configuration. Fear cements his com­ pound, conjoined to another world, thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father; that is what he tries to cleanse himself of, tirelessly. What solace does he come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father, existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains. Without him the holy brat would probably have no sense of the sacred; a blank subject, he would remain, discomfited, at the dump for non-objects that are always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified by abjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, he through whom the abject exists. Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations, out of such daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up—fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear”—a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it cease­ lessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.

Beyond the Unconscious Put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion. They are clearly distinguishable from those under­ stood as neurotic or psychotic, articulated by negation and its modalities, transgression, denial, and repudiation. Their dynamics challenges the theory of the unconscious, seeing that the latter is dependent upon a dialectic of negativity. The theory of the unconscious, as is well known, presup­ poses a repression of contents (affects and presentations) that, thereby, do not have access to consciousness but effect within the subject modifications, either of speech (parapraxes, etc.), or of the body (symptoms), or both (hallucinations, etc.). As correlative to the notion of repression, Freud put forward that of denial as a means of figuring out neurosis, that of rejection (repudiation) as a means of situating psychosis. The asym­ metry of the two repressions becomes more marked owing to denial’s bearing on the object whereas repudiation affects desire itself (Lacan, in perfect keeping with Freud’s thought, interprets that as “repudiation of the Name of the Father”). Yet, facing the ab-ject and more specifically phobia and the splitting of the ego (a point I shall return to), one might ask if those articulations of negativity germane to the uncon­ scious (inherited by Freud from philosophy and psychology) have not become inoperative. The “unconscious” contents remain here excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established—one that implies a refusal but also a subli­ mating elaboration. As if the fundamental opposition were between I and Other or, in more archaic fashion, between Inside and Outside. As if such an opposition subsumed the one between Conscious and Unconscious, elaborated on the basis of neuroses. Owing to the ambiguous opposition I/Other, Inside/Out­ side—an opposition that is vigorous but pervious, violent but uncertain—there are contents, “normally” unconscious in neurotics, that become explicit if not conscious in “border­ line” patients’ speeches and behavior. Such contents are often openly manifested through symbolic practices, without by the same token being integrated into the judging consciousness of those particular subjects. Since they make the conscious/ unconscious distinction irrelevant, borderline subjects and their speech constitute propitious ground for a sublimating discourse (“aesthetic” or “mystical,” etc.), rather than a scien­ tific or rationalist one.

An Exile who Asks, “Where?”

“Approaching Abjection,” from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and there­ fore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing. Situationist in a sense, and not without laugh­ ter—since laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection. Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichaean, he divides, excludes, and without, properly speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all unaware of them. Often, moreover, he includes himself among them, thus casting within himself the scalpel that carries out his separations. Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning his place: “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?” For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject—constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.

Time: Forgetfulness and Thunder

For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws his jouissance. The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered. Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance. The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the soughtafter turns into the banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightning an operation that, if it were thought out, would involve bringing together the two opposite terms but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder. The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth.

Jouissance and Affect

Jouissance, in short. For the stray considers himself as equivalent to a Third Party. He secures the latter’s judgment,

he acts on the strength of its power in order to condemn, he grounds himself on its law to tear the veil of oblivion but also to set up its object as inoperative. As jettisoned. Parachuted by the Other. A ternary structure, if you wish, held in key­ stone position by the Other, but a “structure” that is skewed, a topology of catastrophe. For, having provided itself with an alter ego, the Other no longer has a grip on the three apices of the triangle where subjective homogeneity resides; and so, it jettisons the object into an abominable real, inaccessible except through jouissance. It follows that jouissance alone causes the abject to exist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion. And, as in jouissance where the object of desire, known as object a [in Lacan’s terminology], bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the Other, there is nothing either objective or objectal to the abject. It is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence. Hence a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant. One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if nor its submissive and willing ones. We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjec­ tion acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But also because abjection itself is a composite of judgment and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives. Abjec­ tion preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be—main­ taining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out. To be sure, if I am affected by what does not yet appear to me as a thing, it is because laws, connections, and even structures of meaning govern and condition me. That order, that glance, that voice, that gesture, which enact the law for my frightened body, constitute and bring about an effect and not yet a sign. I speak to it in vain in order to exclude it from what will no longer be, for myself, a world that can be assimi­ lated. Obviously, I am only like someone else: mimetic logic of the advent of the ego, objects, and signs. But when I seek (myself), lose (myself), or experience jouissance—then “I” is heterogeneous. Discomfort, unease, dizziness stemming from an ambiguity that, through the violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space out of which signs and objects arise. Thus

71

72

Julia Kristeva

braided, woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out to me through loathing. This means once more that the heterogeneous flow, which portions the abject and sends back abjection, already dwells in a human animal that has been highly altered. I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be “me.” Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be. A posses­ sion previous to my advent: a being-there of the symbolic that a father might or might not embody. Significance is indeed inherent in the human body.

At the Limit of Primal Repression

If, on account of that Other, a space becomes demarcated, separating the abject from what will be a subject and its objects, it is because a repression that one might call “pri­ mal” has been effected prior to the springing forth of the ego, of its objects I and representations. The latter, in turn, as they depend on another repression, the “secondary” one, arrive only a posteriori on an enigmatic foundation that has already been marked off; its return, in a phobic, obsessional, psychotic guise, or more generally and in more imaginary fashion in the shape of abjection, notifies us of the limits of the human universe. On such limits and at the limit one could say that there is no unconscious, which is elaborated when representations and affects (whether or not tied to representations) shape a logic. Here, on the contrary, consciousness has not assumed its rights and transformed into signifiers those fluid demar­ cations of yet unstable territories where an “I” that is taking shape is ceaselessly straying. We are no longer within the sphere of the unconscious but at the limit of primal repression that, nevertheless, has discovered an intrinsically corporeal and already signifying brand, symptom, and sign: repug­ nance, disgust, abjection. There is an effervescence of object and sign—not of desire but of intolerable significance; they tumble over into non-sense or the impossible real, but they appear even so in spite of “myself” (which is not) as abjection.

Premises of the Sign, Linings of the Sublime

Let us pause a while at this juncture. If the abject is already a wellspring of sign for a non-object, on the edges of primal repression, one can understand its skirting the somatic

symptom on the one hand and sublimation on the other. The symptom: a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear, for its strayed subject is huddled outside the paths of desire. Sublimation, on the contrary, is nothing else than the possibil­ ity of naming the prenominal, the pre-objectal, which are in fact only a trans-nominal, a trans-objectal. In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublima­ tion, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being. For the sublime has no object either. When the starry sky, a vista of open seas or a stained glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly. I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where “I” am delight and loss. Not at all short of but always with and through per­ ception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination.

Before the Beginning: Separation

The abject might then appear as the most fragile (from a syn­ chronic point of view), the most archaic (from a diachronic one) sublimation of an “object” still inseparable from drives. The abject is that pseudo-object that is made up before but appears only within the gaps of secondary repression. The abject would thus be the “object” of primal repression. But what is primal repression? Let us call it the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject, repeat. Without one division, one separa­ tion, one subject/object having been constituted (not yet, or no longer yet). Why? Perhaps because of maternal anguish, unable to be satiated within the encompassing symbolic.

“Approaching Abjection,” from Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by primal repression, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder. The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before existing out­ side of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling. The difficulty a mother has in acknowledging (or being acknowl­ edged by) the symbolic realm—in other words, the problem she has with the phallus that her father or her husband stands for—is not such as to help the future subject leave the natu­ ral mansion. The child can serve its mother as token of her own authentication; there is, however, hardly any reason for her to serve as go-between for it to become autonomous and authentic in its turn. In such close combat, the symbolic light that a third party, eventually the father, can contribute helps the future subject, the more so if it happens to be endowed with a robust supply of drive energy, in pursuing a reluctant struggle against what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject. Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting. In this struggle, which fashions the human being, the mime­ sis, by means of which he becomes homologous to another in order to become himself, is in short logically and chrono­ logically secondary. Even before being like, “I” am not but do separate, reject, ab-ject. Abjection, with a meaning broadened to take in subjective diachrony, is a precondition of narcissism. It is coexistent with it and causes it to be permanently brittle. The more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recog­ nize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed.

The “Chora,” Receptacle of Narcissism

Let us enter, for a moment, into that Freudian aporia called primal repression. Curious primacy, where what is repressed cannot really be held down, and where what represses always already borrows its strength and authority from what is appar­ ently very secondary: language. Let us therefore not speak of primacy but of the instability of the symbolic function in its most significant aspect—the prohibition placed on the mater­ nal body (as a defense against autoeroticism and incest taboo).

Here, drives hold sway and constitute a strange space that I shall name, after Plato (Timeus, 48–53), a chora, a receptacle. For the benefit of the ego or its detriment, drives, whether life drives or death drives, serve to correlate that “not yet” ego with an “object” in order to establish both of them. Such a process, while dichotomous (inside/outside, ego/not ego) and repetitive, has nevertheless something centripetal about it: it aims to settle the ego as center of a solar system of objects. If, by dint of coming back towards the center, the drive’s motion should eventually become centrifugal, hence fasten on the Other and come into being as sign so as to produce meaning—that is, literally speaking, exorbitant. But from that moment on, while I recognize my image as sign and change in order to signify, another economy is instituted. The sign represses the chora and its eternal return. Desire alone will henceforth be witness to that “primal” pul­ sation. But desire ex-patriates the ego toward an other subject and accepts the exactness of the ego only as narcissistic. Nar­ cissism then appears as a regression to a position set back from the other, a return to a self-contemplative, conservative, self-sufficient haven. Actually, such narcissism never is the wrinkleless image of the Greek youth in a quiet fountain. The conflicts of drives muddle its bed, cloud its water, and bring forth everything that, by not becoming integrated with a given system of signs, is abjection for it. Abjection is therefore a kind of narcissistic crisis: it is wit­ ness to the ephemeral aspect of the state called “narcissism” with reproachful jealousy, heaven knows why; what is more, abjection gives narcissism (the thing and the concept) its classification as “seeming.” Nevertheless, it is enough that a prohibition, which can be a superego, block the desire craving an other—or that this other, as its role demands, not fulfill it—for desire and its signifiers to turn back toward the “same,” thus clouding the waters of Narcissus. It is precisely at the moment of nar­ cissistic perturbation (all things considered, the per­manent state of the speaking being, if he would only hear himself speak) that secondary repression, with its reserve of sym­ bolic means, attempts to transfer to its own account, which has thus been overdrawn, the resources of primal repression. The archaic economy is brought into full light of day, signified, verbalized. Its strategies (rejecting, separating, repeating/ abjecting) hence find a symbolic existence, and the very logic of the symbolic—arguments, demonstrations, proofs, etc.—must conform to it. It is then that the object ceases to be circumscribed, reasoned with, thrust aside: it appears as abject.

73

74

Julia Kristeva

Two seemingly contradictory causes bring about the narcissistic crisis that provides, along with its truth, a view of the abject. Too much strictness on the part of the Other, confused with the One and the Law. The lapse of the Other, which shows through the breakdown of objects of desire. In both instances, the abject appears in order to uphold “I” within the Other. The abject is the violence of mourning for an “object” that has always already been lost. The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away—it assigns it a source in the non-ego, drive, and death. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that trans­ forms death drive into a start of life, of new significance.

Perverse or Artistic

The abject is related to perversion. The sense of abjection that I experience is anchored in the superego. The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibi­ tion, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them. It kills in the name of life—a progressive despot; it lives at the behest of death—an operator in genetic experimentations; it curbs the other’s suffering for its own profit—a cynic (and a psychoanalyst); it establishes narcissistic power while pre­ tending to reveal the abyss—an artist who practices his art as a “business.” Corruption is its most common, most obvious appearance. That is the socialized appearance of the abject. An unshakable adherence to Prohibition and Law is neces­ sary if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in and thrust aside. Religion, Morality, Law. Obviously always arbitrary, more or less; unfailingly oppressive, rather more than less; laboriously prevailing, more and more so. Contemporary literature does not take their place. Rather, it seems to be written out of the untenable aspects of perverse or superego positions. It acknowledges the impossibility of Religion, Morality, and Law—their power play, their neces­ sary and absurd seeming. Like perversion, it takes advantage of them, gets round them, and makes sport of them. Never­ theless, it maintains a distance where the abject is concerned. The writer, fascinated by the abject, imagines its logic, projects himself into it, introjects it, and as a consequence perverts language—style and content. But on the other hand, as the sense of abjection is both the abject’s judge and accom­ plice, this is also true of the literature that confronts it. One might thus say that with such a literature there takes place

a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and Immorality. For the subject firmly settled in its superego, a writing of this sort is necessarily implicated in the interspace that characterizes perversion; and for that reason, it gives rises in turn to abjection. And yet, such texts call for a softening of the superego. Writing them implies an ability to imagine the abject, that is, to see oneself in its place and to thrust it aside only by means of the displacements of verbal play. It is only after his death, eventually, that the writer of abjec­ tion will escape his condition of waste, reject, abject. Then, he will either sink into oblivion or attain the rank of incom­ mensurate ideal. Death would thus be the chief curator of our imaginary museum; it would protect us in the last resort from the abjection that contemporary literature claims to expend while uttering it. Such a protection, which gives its quietus to abjection, but also perhaps to the bothersome, incandescent stake of the literary phenomenon itself, which, raised to the status of the sacred, is severed from its specificity. Death thus keeps house in our contemporary universe. By purifying (us from) literature, it establishes our secular religion.

As Abjection—So the Sacred

Abjection accompanies all religious structurings and reap­ pears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse. Several structurations of abjection should be distin­ guished, each one determining a specific form of the sacred. Abjection appears as a rite of defilement and pollution in the paganism that accompanies societies with a dominant or surviving matrilinear character. It takes on the form of the exclusion of a substance (nutritive or linked to sexuality), the execution of which coincides with the sacred since it sets it up. Abjection persists as exclusion or taboo (dietary or other) in monotheistic religions, Judaism in particular, but drifts over to more “secondary” forms such as transgression (of the Law) within the same monotheistic economy. It finally encounters, with Christian sin, a dialectic elaboration, as it becomes integrated in the Christian Word as a threatening otherness—but always nameable, always totalizeable. The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion. Seen from that standpoint, the artistic experience, which is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies, appears as the essential component of religiosity. That is perhaps why it is destined to survive the collapse of the historical forms of religions.

J. HALBERSTAM, “PARASITES AND PERVERTS: AN INTRODUCTION TO GOTHIC MONSTROSITY,” from SKIN SHOWS: GOTHIC HORROR AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF MONSTERS

Critical Introduction

Reading Questions

J. Halberstam (1961–

What, for Halberstam, is the function of the monster? What sorts of evidence does Halberstam rely on to make her case regarding Gothic horror?

) is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature at the Uni­ver­sity of Southern California. He is a leading queer theorist whose books and articles have focused on destabilizing binary notions about sex, gender, and sexual­ ity, especially non-normative masculinities. She also works with posthuman and transgender theory. Halberstam’s books include Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1998) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). Here, we feature a reading from his first authored book, Skin Shows, which grapples with the notion of the monster. The passage comes from the introduction, “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity,” wherein Halberstam establishes the nineteenth-century Gothic model of mon­ strosity as one rooted in a “balancing act between inside/out­ side, female/male, body/mind, native/foreign, proletarian/ aristocrat,” in contrast to the twentieth-century postmodern monstrosity of the surface—skin-deep visibility driven by “the advent of cinematic body horror.” Halberstam relies on several theorists of sexuality and the body, including Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, and ultimately concludes that, “the monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities, so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities.” This embrace of “our” monstrosity is a crucial development in monster theory.

Editorial Notes

We here present most of the introductory chapter to Halberstam’s book, leaving off the final section containing an outline of the rest of the book’s chapters. Note that some of Halberstam’s publications are published under “Judith,” some under “Jack,” and some under “J.” We have chosen the ungen­ dered initial, J., to honor that freedom and fluidity.

Further Reading

Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Techno­ logy of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995. Halberstam, Judith. “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stok­ er’s Dracula.” In Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, edited by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, 248–66. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Uni­ver­sity Press. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans­ lated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982, and selection in volume 1. ASM

“PARASITES AND PERVERTS: AN INTRODUCTION TO GOTHIC MONSTROSITY,” FROM SKIN SHOWS: GOTHIC HORROR AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF MONSTERS J. HALBERSTAM

Skin Shows In The Silence of the Lambs (1991) by Jonathan Demme, one of many modern adaptations of Frankenstein, a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill collects women in order to flay them and use their skins to construct a “woman suit.” Sitting in his base­ ment sewing hides, Buffalo Bill makes his monster a sutured beast, a patchwork of gender, sex, and sexuality. Skin, in this morbid scene, represents the monstrosity of surfaces and as Buffalo Bill dresses up in his suit and prances in front of the mirror, he becomes a layered body, a body of many surfaces laid one upon the other. Depth and essence dissolve in this mirror dance and identity and humanity become skin deep. My subject is monsters and I begin in Buffalo Bill’s base­ ment, his “filthy workshop of creation,” because it dramatizes precisely the distance traveled between current representa­ tions of monstrosity and their genesis in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Where the monsters of the nineteenth cen­ tury metaphorized modern subjectivity as a balancing act between inside/outside, female/male, body/mind, native/ foreign, proletarian/aristocratic, monstrosity in postmodern horror films finds its place in what Baudrillard has called the obscenity of “immediate visibility”1 and what Linda Williams has dubbed “the frenzy of the visible.”2 The immediate vis­ ibility of a Buffalo Bill, the way in which he makes the surface itself monstrous transforms the cavernous monstrosity of Jekyll/Hyde, Dorian Gray, or Dracula into a beast who is all body and no soul. Victorian monsters produced and were produced by an emergent conception of the self as a body which enveloped 1  Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Towns­ end, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 130. Baudrillard writes: “Obscenity begins precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication.”

2  Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1989).

a soul, as a body, indeed, enthralled to its soul. Michel Fou­ cault writes in Discipline and Punish that “the soul is the prison of the body” and he proposes a genealogy of the soul that will show it to be born out of “methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.”3 Foucault also claims that, as modern forms of discipline shifted their gaze from the body to the soul, crime literature moved from confession or gal­ lows speeches or the cataloguing of famous criminals to the detective fiction obsessed with identifying criminality and investigating crime. The hero of such literature was now the middle- or upper-class schemer whose crime became a vir­ tuoso performance of skill and enterprise. There are many congruities between Gothic fiction and detective fiction but in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form—the monster—that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption. Further­ more, just as the detective character appears across genres in many different kinds of fiction (in the sensation novel, in Dickens), so Gothic infiltrates the Victorian novel as a symptomatic moment in which boundaries between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself. While many literary histories, therefore, have relegated Gothic to a subordinate status in relation to realism, I will be arguing that nineteenth-century literary tradition is a Gothic tradition and that this has every­ thing to do with the changing technologies of subjectivity that Foucault describes. Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the nor­ mal, the healthy, and the pure can be known. Gothic, within my analysis, may be loosely defined as the rhetorical style and narrative structure designed to produce fear and desire within the reader. The production of fear in a literary text (as 3  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage 1979), 30, 29.

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

opposed to a cinematic text) emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning. Gothic, in a way, refers to an ornamental excess (think of Gothic architecture—gargoyles and crazy loops and spirals), a rhetorical extravagance that produces, quite simply, too much. Within Gothic novels, I argue, mul­ tiple interpretations are embedded in the text and part of the experience of horror comes from the realization that mean­ ing itself runs riot. Gothic novels produce a symbol for this interpretive mayhem in the body of the monster. The monster always becomes a primary focus of interpretation and its monstrosity seems available for any number of meanings. While I will examine closely the implications of embodied horror (monstrosity) in nineteenth-century Gothic, I will also be paying careful attention to the rhetorical system which produces it (Gothic). Many histories of the Gothic novel begin with the Gothic Romances of the later eighteenth century by Mrs. Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and Matthew Lewis. 4 While, obviously, there are connections to be made between these stories of mad monks, haunted castles, and wicked foreigners and the nineteenth-century Gothic tales of monsters and vampires, we should not take the connections too far. I will argue in this book that the emergence of the monster within Gothic fiction marks a peculiarly modern emphasis upon the horror of par­ ticular kinds of bodies. Furthermore, the ability of the Gothic story to take the imprint of any number of interpretations makes it a hideous offspring of capitalism itself. The Gothic novel of the nineteenth century and the Gothic horror film of the late twentieth century are both obsessed with multiple modes of consumption and production, with dangerous con­ sumption and excessive productivity, and with economies of meaning. The monster itself is an economic form in that it condenses various racial and sexual threats to nation, capi­ talism, and the bourgeoisie in one body. If the Gothic novel produces an easy answer to the question of what threatens national security and prosperity (the monster), the Gothic monster represents many answers to the question of who must be removed from the community at large. I will be con­ sidering, therefore, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gothic as separate from eighteenth-century Gothic, but I will also be tracing Gothic textuality across many modes of discourse. 4  See, for example, Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963); Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of Gothic (New York: Russell and Russell, 1938); David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980).

Within the nineteenth-century Gothic, authors mixed and matched a wide variety of signifiers of difference to fabricate the deviant body—Dracula, Jekyll/Hyde, and even Franken­ stein’s monster before them are lumpen bodies, bodies pieced together out of the fabric of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In the modern period and with the advent of cinematic body horror, the shift from the literary Gothic to the visual Gothic was accompanied by a narrowing rather than a broadening of the scope of horror. One might expect to find that cinema mul­ tiplies the possibilities for monstrosity but in fact, the visual register quickly reaches a limit of visibility. In Frankenstein the reader can only imagine the dreadful spectacle of the monster and so its monstrosity is limited only by the reader’s imagination; in the horror film, the monster must always fail to be monstrous enough and horror therefore depends upon the explicit violation of female bodies as opposed to simply the sight of the monster. Furthermore, as I noted, while nineteenth-century Gothic monstrosity was a combination of the features of deviant race, class, and gender, within contemporary horror, the mon­ ster, for various reasons, tends to show clearly the markings of deviant sexualities and gendering but less clearly the signs of class or race. Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, for example, leads one to suppose that the monstrous body is a sexed or gendered body only, but this particular body, a bor­ rowed skin, is also clearly inscribed with a narrative of class conflict. To give just one example of deviant class in this film, the heroine, Clarice Starling, is identified by Hannibal Lecter as a woman trying to hide her working-class roots behind “bad perfume” and cheap leather shoes. Given the empha­ ses in this film upon skins and hides, it is all too significant that cheap leather gives Starling away. Poor skin, in this film, literally signifies poverty, or the trace of it. As we will see, however, the narrative of monstrous class identity has been almost completely subsumed within The Silence of the Lambs by monstrous sexuality and gender. The discourse of racialized monstrosity within the mod­ ern horror film proves to be a discursive minefield. Perhaps because race has been so successfully gothicized within our recent history, filmmakers and screenplay writers tend not to want to make a monster who is defined by a deviant racial identity. European anti-Semitism and American rac­ ism towards black Americans are precisely Gothic discourses given over to the making monstrous of particular kinds of bodies. This study will delineate carefully the multiple strands of anti-Semitism within nineteenth-century Gothic and I will attempt to suggest why anti-Semitism in particular

77

78

J. Halberstam

used Gothic methods to make Jews monstrous. But when it comes to tracing the threads of Gothic race into modern hor­ ror, we often draw a blank. The gothicization of certain “races” over the last century, one might say, has been all too successful. This does not mean that Gothic race is not readable in the contemporary horror text but it is clear that, within Gothic, the difference between representing racism and representing race is extremely tricky to negotiate. I will be arguing, in relation to The Silence of the Lambs, that the film clearly represents homophobia and sex­ ism and punishes actions motivated by them; it would be very difficult in a horror film to show and punish racism simulta­ neously. To give an example of what I am arguing here, one can look at a contemporary horror film, Candyman (1990), and the way it merges monstrosity and race. In Candyman two female graduate students in anthropol­ ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Illinois at Chicago are researching urban legends when they run across the story of Candyman, the ghost of a murdered black man who haunts the Cabrini Green projects. Candyman was the son of a former slave who made good by inventing a procedure for the mass production of shoes. Despite his wealth, Candyman still ran into trouble with the white community by falling in love with a white woman. He was chased by white men to Cabrini Green where they caught him, cut his right hand off, and drove a hook into the bloody stump. Next Candyman was covered in honey and taken to an apiary where the bees killed him. Now, the urban myth goes, Candyman responds to all who call him. The two researchers, a white woman and a black woman, go to Cabrini Green to hunt for information on Candyman. Naturally, the black woman, Bernadette, is killed by Candyman, and the white woman, Helen, is seduced by him. While the film on some level attempts to direct all kinds of social criticism at urban planners, historians, and racist white homeowners, ultimately the horror stabilizes in the ghastly body of the black man whose monstrosity turns upon his desire for the white woman and his murderous intentions towards black women. No amount of elaborate framing within this film can pre­ vent it from confirming racist assumptions about black male aggression towards white female bodies. Monstrosity, in this tired narrative, never becomes mobile; rather, it remains anchored by the weight of racist narratives. The film contains some clever visual moves, like a shot of Helen going through the back of a mirror into a derelict apartment. She next passes through a hole in the wall and the camera reverses to show her stepping through a graffiti painting of a black man’s face. She stops for a moment in the mouth of the black man and this

startling image hints at the various forms of oral transmis­ sions that the film circulates. Is Helen contained by the oral history of the Candyman or is she the articulate voice of the academy that disrupts its transmission and brings violence to the surface? Inevitably, Helen’s character stabilizes under the sign of the white woman victim and Candyman’s horror becomes a static signifier of black male violence. If race in nineteenth-century Gothic was one of many clashing surfaces of monstrosity, in the context of twentieth-century Gothic, race becomes a master signifier of monstrosity and when invoked, it blocks out all other possibilities of monstrous identity. Moving from nineteenth-century Gothic monsters to the monsters of contemporary horror films, my study will show that within the history of embodied deviance, monsters always combine the markings of a plurality of differences even if certain forms of difference are eclipsed momentarily by oth­ ers. The fact that monstrosity within contemporary horror seems to have stabilized into an amalgam of sex and gender demonstrates the need to read a history of otherness into and out of the history of Gothic fiction. Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century specifically used the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality within narratives about the relation between subjectivities and certain bodies. Monstrosity (and the fear it gives rise to) is historically conditioned rather than a psychological universal. Tracing the emergence of monstrosity from Frankenstein through to the contemporary horror film (in both its high- and lowbudget forms), I will attempt to show that monsters not only reveal certain material conditions of the production of horror, but they also make strange the categories of beauty, human­ ity, and identity that we still cling to. While the horror within Frankenstein seemed to depend upon the monster’s actual hideous physical aspect, his status as anomaly, and his essen­ tial foreignness, the threat of Buffalo Bill depends upon the violence of his identity crisis, a crisis that will exact a price in female flesh. Buffalo Bill’s identity crisis is precisely that, a crisis of knowledge, a “category crisis”5; but it no longer takes the form of the anomaly—now a category crisis indicates a crisis of sexual identity. 5  This term is coined by Marjorie Garber in Vested Interests: CrossDressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1991), 16. In this study of transvestism, Garber suggests that the cross-dresser and the transsexual provoke category crises that are displaced onto the place of gender ambiguity. This argument is useful to the claim that I make that all difference in modernity has been subsumed under the aegis of sexual difference.

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

It is in the realm of sexuality, however, that Buffalo Bill and Frankenstein’s monster seem to share traits and it is here that we may be inclined to read Buffalo Bill as a rein­ carnation of many of the features of nineteenth-century monstrosity. As a sexual being, Frankenstein’s monster is foreign and as an outsider to the community, his foreign sexuality is monstrous and threatens miscegenation. Fran­ kenstein’s lonely monster is driven out of town by the mob when he threatens to reproduce. Similarly, Buffalo Bill threatens the community with his indeterminate gender and sexuality. Indeed, sexuality and its uneasy relation to gender identity creates Buffalo Bill’s monstrosity. But much ground has been traveled between the stitched monstrosity of Fran­ kenstein and the sutured gender horror of Buffalo Bill; while both monsters have been sewn into skin bodysuits and while both want to jump out of their skins, the nineteenth-century monster is marked by racial or species violation while Buf­ falo Bill seems to be all gender. If we measure one skin job against the other, we can read transitions between various signifying systems of identity. Skin, I will argue with reference to certain nineteenthcentury monsters, becomes a kind of metonym for the human; and its color, its pallor, its shape mean every­ thing within a semiotic of monstrosity. Skin might be too tight (Frankenstein’s creature), too dark (Hyde), too pale (Dracula), too superficial (Dorian Gray’s canvas), too loose (Leatherface), or too sexed (Buffalo Bill). Skin houses the body and it is figured in Gothic as the ultimate boundary, the material that divides the inside from the outside. The vam­ pire will puncture and mark the skin with his fangs, Mr. Hyde will covet white skin, Dorian Gray will desire his own canvas, Buffalo Bill will covet female skin, Leatherface will wear his victim’s skin as a trophy and recycle his flesh as food. Slowly but surely the outside becomes the inside and the hide no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster. The Gothic text, whether novel or film, plays out an elaborate skin show. How sexuality became the dominant mark of otherness is a question that we may begin to answer by deconstruct­ ing Victorian Gothic monsters and examining the constitutive features of the horror they represent. If, for example, many nineteenth-century monsters seem to produce fears more clearly related to racial identity than gender identity, how is it that we as modern readers have been unable to discern these more intricate contours of difference? Obviously, the answer to such a question and many others like it lies in a history of sexuality, a history introduced by Michel Foucault and contin­

ued by recent studies which link Foucault’s work to a history of the novel.6 In this study I am not simply attempting to add racial, national, or class difference to the already well-defined otherness of sexual perversion nor am I attempting merely another reading of the Gothic tradition; I am suggesting that, where the foreign and the sexual merge within monstrosity in Gothic, a particular history of sexuality unfolds. It is indeed necessary to map out a relation between the monstrous sexu­ ality of the foreigner and the foreign sexuality of the monster because sexuality, I will argue, is itself a beast created in nineteenth-century literature. Where sexuality becomes an identity, other “others” become invisible and the multiple features of monstrosity seem to degenerate back into a pri­ meval sexual slime. Class, race, and nation are subsumed, in other words, within the monstrous sexual body; accordingly, Dracula’s bite drains pleasure rather than capital, Mr. Hyde symbolizes repression rather than the production of self, and both figure foreign aspect as a threat to domestic secu­ rity. While I will attempt here to delineate the mechanism by which multiple otherness is subsumed by the unitary other­ ness of sexuality, it is actually beyond the scope of this study to account for the very particular and individual histories of race, nation, and class within the nineteenth century. I am concerned specifically with representational strategies and with the particularities of deviant race, class, national and gender markings. Past studies of the Gothic have tended toward the psy­ chological, or more precisely, the psychoanalytic, because the unconscious is assumed to be the proper seat of fear. So, for example, there are studies of the Gothic which associate Gothic with masochism,7 with the abject mater­

6  Most notable, for my purposes, among such studies are Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987) and David A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1988).

7  See Michelle A. Masse, In The Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (Ithaca and London: Cornell Uni­ver­s ity Press, 1992). Masse’s study looks at the intersections of the Gothic novel, masochism, and feminism. Masse writes: “The novels’ central concern with masochism does not mean that characters (or women) are masochistic, although many are. Instead my premise is that what characters in these novels represent, whether through repudiation, doubt, or celebration, is the cultural, psychoanalytic, and fictional expectation that they should be masochistic if they are ‘normal’ women” (2).

79

80

J. Halberstam

nal,8 with women’s “fear of self,”9 with the very construction of female identity.10 And yet, as critics like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have shown, the uncon­ scious itself and all of its mechanisms are precisely the effects of historical and cultural production. Therefore, to historicize monstrosity in literature, and especially in the Gothic novel, reveals a specificity within the way that, since the age of Frankenstein and Dracula, monsters mark difference within and upon bodies. A historical study of Gothic and of Gothic monstrosity must actually avoid psychoanalytic readings just long enough to expose the way that Gothic actually partici­ pates in the production of something like a psychology of self. However, as will be clear, certain psychoanalytic positions on fear and desire are useful ways of negotiating between the psychic and the social and of showing how some social mechanisms are internalized to the point that they are expe­ rienced as internal mechanisms. In order to examine such a process, a detour through Freud’s case histories of paranoia will be necessary. The body that scares and appalls changes over time, as do the individual characteristics that add up to monstrosity, as do the preferred interpretations of that monstrosity. Within the traits that make a body monstrous—that is, frightening or ugly, abnormal or disgusting—we may read the difference between an other and a self, a pervert and a normal person, a foreigner and a native. Furthermore, in order to read monsters as the embodiment of psychic horror, one must first of all sub­ scribe to psychoanalysis’s own tale of human subjectivity—a 8  See Susan Wolstenholme, Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers (Albany, N.Y.: State Uni­ver­sity of New York Press, 1993). Wolstenholme has a chapter entitled “Exorcising the Mother” and another called “Why Would a Textual Mother Haunt a House Like This?” She writes: “As linguistic structures novels are always inscribed in paternal law; in one sense (a strictly psychoanalytic one), no text can really have a ‘mother’ because inscription in language implies differentiation from the maternal. But as I have suggested, Gothic-marked narratives always point to the space where the absent mother might be” (151).   Another study of Gothic similarly invests in exclusively familial metaphors for the relations between authors, Gothic novels, and fear or dread. In Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1980), Judith Wilt writes: “Dread is the father and mother of the Gothic. Dread begets rage and fright and cruel horror, or awe and worship and shining steadfastness—all of these have human features, but Dread has no face” (5). 9  Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1978).

10  Claire Kahane “Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity,” The Cen­ tennial Review 24 (1980): 43–64.

fiction intent upon rewriting the Gothic elements of human subjectivity. As I have said, my study refuses the universality of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “daddy-mommy-me triangle”11 but it cannot always escape the triangle. With characteristic grim humor, Deleuze and Guattari describe the psychoanalytic encounter between analyst and patient: “The psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: ‘Tell me a little bit about your desiring machines, won’t you!’ Instead he screams: ‘Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!’ Even Melanie Klein. So the entire process of desiringproduction is trampled underfoot and reduced to parental images, laid out step by step in accordance with supposed pre-oedipal stages, totalized in Oedipus ….”12 Within modern Western culture, we are disciplined through a variety of social and political mechanisms into psychoanalytic relations and then psychoanalytic explanations are deployed to totalize our submission. Resistance in such a circular system, as many theorists have noted, merely becomes part of the oppressive mechanism. However, as we will see in later chapters of this study, psychoanalysis, with its emphases on and investments in the normal, quickly reveals itself to be inadequate to the task of unraveling the power of horror. In relation to Gothic monstrosity, it is all too easy to understand how the relation between fear and desire may be oedipalized, psychologized, humanized. Psychoanalysis itself has a clinical term for the transformation of desire into fear and of the desired/feared, object into monster: paranoia. Freud believed that his theory of paranoia as a repressed homosexual desire could be applied to any and all cases of paranoia regardless of race or social class. This, of course, is where the psychoanalytic crisis begins and ends—in its attempt to reduce everything to the sexual and then in its equation of sexuality and identity. The process by which political material becomes sexual material is one in which the novel plays a major role. And the Gothic novel, particularly the late-Victorian Gothic novel, provides a metaphor for this process in the form of the monster. The monster is the prod­ uct of and the symbol for the transformation of identity into sexual identity through the mechanism of failed repression. One Lacanian account of monstrosity demonstrates simultaneously the appeal and the danger of psychoanalytic 11  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, preface by Michel Foucault (Minneapolis: Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota Press, 1983), 51.

12  Deleuze and Guattari, “The Whole and Its Parts,” in Anti-Oedipus, 45.

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

explanations. In Slavoj Ž� ižek’s essay “Grimaces of the Real, Or When the Phallus Appears,” he reads the phantom from The Phantom of the Opera alongside such enigmatic images as the vampire, Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), and David Lynch’s Elephant Man (1980).13 Ž� ižek attempts to position images of the living-dead as both mediators between high art and mass culture and as “‘the void of the pure self’” (67). Ž� ižek is at his most persuasive when he discusses the multi­ plicity of meaning generated by the monster. The fecundity of the monster as a symbol leads him to state: “The crucial ques­ tion is not ‘What does the phantom signify?’ but ‘How is the very space constituted where entities like the phantom can emerge?’” (63). The monster/phantom, in other words, never stands for a simple or unitary prejudice, it always acts as a “fantasy screen” upon which viewers and readers inscribe and sexualize meaning. Ž� ižek also seems to be very aware of the dangers of what he calls “the so-called psychoanalytic interpretation of art’” which operates within a kind of spiral of interpretation so that everything means psychoanalysis. Accordingly, rather than explain the mother’s voice in Psycho as the maternal superego, he suggests “turn(ing) it around, to explain the very logic of the maternal superego by means of this vocal stain” (51). But Ž� ižek does not always sustain his challenge to the hegemonic structure of psychoanalysis. Indeed, he often stays firmly within the interpretive confines of the psycho­ analytic model and merely uses cultural texts as examples of psychoanalytic functions (particularly Lacanian functions). Within this model, the phantom of the opera, for example, is a “fetish,” it literally stands in for various kinds of antago­ nisms: class-based, racial, economic, national, etc. But the fetish remains always a sexual mechanism and this is where Ž� ižek’s analysis is doomed to reproduce the process which it attempts to explain; the fetish is a sexualized object that stands in for and indeed covers up other kinds of antagonism. Ž� ižek gives, as an example of the fetishistic role of the phan­ tom, the Jew of anti-Semitic discourse. While this book will also make concrete connections between anti-Semitism and the Gothic production of monsters and indeed, between racial and sexual layers of signification, it is crucial to an interpreta­ tion of Gothic to understand that the Jew/phantom/monster is sexualized within fictional narratives (and this includes pseudo-scientific and social-science narratives that are usu­

ally classified as nonfiction) as a part of the narrative process that transforms class/race/gender threat into sexual threat. Ž� ižek’s claim, then, that “the Jew is the anal object par excellence, that is to say, the partial object stain that disturbs the harmony of the class relationship” (57) precisely leaves intact the sexualization of Jewishness; his assertion that the phantom of the living-dead is the emergence of “the anal father” or “primal father” and the opposite of paternal law reinscribes parental (symbolic or otherwise) relations into a scene that precisely seems to escape the familial; his claim, finally, that vampires do not appear in mirrors because “they have read their Lacan” and know, therefore, that “they mate­ rialize object a which, by definition, cannot be mirrored” (55), begs to be read as a parody of what it invokes but instead actually continues to posit subjects that simply do not exist independent of their production in Lacanian psychoanalysis. The vampire of the nineteenth-century narrative has most certainly not read his/her Lacan (avant la lettre) and does not know that he/she cannot be mirrored. This vampire crawls face down along the wall dividing self from other, class from race from gender and drains metaphoricity from one place only to infuse it in another. While Ž� ižek claims often in his work to be using psychoanalysis and specifically Lacan to explain popular culture paradigms, too often he merely uses popular culture to explain Lacan. And of course, this particu­ lar relationship between host and parasite is the only one that psychoanalytic discourse can endorse. Ž� ižek warns: “The analysis that focuses on the ‘ideological meaning’ of monsters overlooks the fact that, before signifying something, before serving as a vessel of meaning, monsters embody enjoyment qua the limit of interpretation, that is to say, nonmeaning as such” (64). The idea that a realm of “nonmeaning” exists prior to interpretation is only possible in a structural universe in which form and content can easily be separated. Gothic lit­ erature in particular is a rhetorical form which resists the disintegration of form and content.14 Monstrosity always unites monstrous form with monstrous meaning. In Skin Shows I will be situating Gothic as a site or topos in nineteenth-century fiction and contemporary horror film. In its typical form, the Gothic topos is the monstrous body à la Frankenstein, Dracula, Dorian Gray, Jekyll/Hyde; in its generic form, Gothic is the disruption of realism and of all generic purity. It is the hideous eruption of the monstrous in

13  Slavoj Ž� ižek, “Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears,” October 58 (Fall 1991): 44–68.

14  For more on this see George E. Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (Uni­ver­sity Park and London: The Pennsylvania State Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1989).

81

82

J. Halberstam

the heart of domestic England but it is also the narrative that calls genre itself into question. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I think functions as an allegory of Gothic production, contains a domestic tableau of family life (the De Laceys) right in the heart of the narrative. This structure inverts and threatens to maintain a reversal whereby, rather than the Gothic residing in the dark comers of realism, the realistic is buried alive in the gloomy recesses of Gothic. It may well be that the novel is always Gothic. In her 1832 introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley writes, “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”15 Shelley’s “hideous progeny” was not merely her novel but the nine­ teenth-century Gothic novel itself. The Gothic, of course, did indeed prosper and thrive through the century. It grew in popularity until, by the turn of the century, its readership was massive enough that a writer could actually make a liv­ ing from the sale of his Gothic works. In 1891, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson loosed his “shilling shocker,” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, upon the reading public hoping for commercial returns. Stevenson described his novella as a “Gothic gnome” and worried that he had produced a gross distortion of lit­ erature.16 Such an anxiety marked Gothic itself as a monstrous form in relation to its popularity and its improper subject matter. The appellation “Gothic gnome” labeled the genre as a mutation or hybrid form of true art and genteel literature. But monsters do indeed sell books and books sell mon­ sters and the very popularity of the Gothic suggests that readers and writers collaborate in the production of the features of monstrosity. Gothic novels, in fact, thematize the monstrous aspects of both production and consumption— Frankenstein is, after all, an allegory about a production that refuses to submit to its author and Dracula is a novel about an arch-consumer, the vampire, who feeds upon middle-class women and then turns them into vampires by forcing them to feed upon him. The Gothic, in fact, like the vampire itself,

creates a public who consumes monstrosity, who revels in it, and who then surveys its individual members for signs of deviance or monstrosity, excess or violence. Anxiety about the effects of consuming popular literature revealed itself in England in the 1890s in the form of essays and books which denounced certain works as “degener­ ate” (a label defined by Max Nordau’s book Degeneration).17 Although Gothic fiction obviously fell into this category, the censors missed the mark in denouncing such works. Rather than condoning the perversity they recorded, Gothic authors, in fact, seemed quite scrupulous about taking a moral stand against the unnatural acts that produce monstrosity. Long sentimental sermons on truth and purity punctuate many a gruesome tale and leave few doubts as to its morality by the narrative’s end. Bram Stoker, for example, sermonizes both in his novels and in an essay printed in the journal The Nineteenth Century called “The Censorship of Fiction.” In this essay, Stoker calls for stricter surveillance of popular fiction and drama. Stoker thinks censorship would combat human weakness on two levels, namely, “the weakness of the great mass of people who form audiences, and of those who are content to do base things in the way of catering for these base appetites.”18 Obviously, Stoker did not expect his own writ­ ing to be received as a work that “catered to base appetites” because, presumably, it used perverse sexuality to identify what or who threatened the dominant class. Similarly, Oscar Wilde was shocked by the critics who called The Picture of Dorian Gray “poisonous” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” Wil­ de’s novel, after all, tells the story of a young man seduced by a poisonous book and punished soundly for his corruptions. Wilde defends his work by saying, “It was necessary, sir, for the dramatic development of this story to surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption.” He continues, “Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.”19 Producing and consuming monsters and monstrous fictions, we might say, adds up to what Eve Sedgwick has called, in her study of Gothic conventions, “an aesthetic of

15  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1831; reprint, ed. M. K. Joseph, New York and Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1980), 10.

17  Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1895).

Gothic Gnomes

16  See Patrick Bratlinger and Richard Boyle, “The Education of Edward Hyde: Stevenson’s ‘Gothic Gnome’ and the Mass Readership of Late Victorian England,” in 100 Years of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ed. Gordon Hirsch and William Veeder (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1988).

18  Bram Stoker, “The Censorship of Fiction,” The Nineteenth Cen­tury (September 1908): 481.

19  See the introduction to Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; reprint, ed. and with an introduction by Isobel Murray, Oxford and New York: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1981).

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

pleasurable fear.”20 The Gothic, in other words, inspires fear and desire at the same time—fear of and desire for the other, fear of and desire for the possibly latent perversity lurking within the reader herself. But fear and desire within the same body produce a disciplinary effect. In other words, a Victo­ rian public could consume Gothic novels in vast quantities without regarding such a material as debased because Gothic gave readers the thrill of reading about so-called perverse activities while identifying aberrant sexuality as a condition of otherness and as an essential trait of foreign bodies. The monster, of course, marks the distance between the perverse and the supposedly disciplined sexuality of a reader. Also, the signifiers of “normal” sexuality maintain a kind of hegemonic power by remaining invisible. So, the aesthetic of pleasurable fear that Sedgwick refers to makes pleasure possible only by fixing horror elsewhere, in an obviously and literally foreign body, and by then articulat­ ing the need to expel the foreign body. Thus, both Dracula and Hyde are characters with markedly foreign physiognomies; they are dark and venal, foreign in both aspect and behavior. Dracula, for example, is described by Harker as an angular fig­ ure with a strong face notable for “peculiarly arched nostrils … a lofty domed forehead,” bushy hair and eyebrows, “sharp white teeth,” and ears pointed at the tops.21 Hyde is described as small and deformed, “pale and dwarfish … troglodytic.”22 By making monstrosity so obviously a physical condition and by linking it to sexual corruption, such fictions bind foreign aspects to perverse activities. The most telling example I can find of a monstrous foreigner in Gothic is Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula who obvi­ ously comes to England from a distant “elsewhere” in search of English blood. Critics have discussed at length the perverse and dangerous sexuality exhibited by the vampire but, with a few exceptions, criticism has not connected Dracula’s sexual attacks with the threat of the foreign. Dracula, I argue in my fourth chapter, condenses the xenophobia of Gothic fiction into a very specific horror—the vampire embodies and exhib­ its all the stereotyping of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism. The anatomy of the vampire, for example, compares remark­ ably to anti-Semitic studies of Jewish physiognomy—peculiar nose, pointed ears, sharp teeth, claw-like hands and further­ 20  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), vi.

21  Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1981), 18.

22  Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1981), 18.

more, in Stoker’s novel, blood and money (central facets in anti-Semitism) mark the corruption of the vampire. The vampire merges Jewishness and monstrosity and represents this hybrid monster as a threat to Englishness and English womanhood in particular. In the Jew, then, Gothic fiction finds a monster versatile enough to represent fears about race, nation, and sexuality, a monster who combines in one body fears of the foreign and the perverse.

Perversion and Parasitism Within nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, the Jew was marked as a threat to capital, to masculinity, and to nation­ hood. Jews in England at the turn of the century were the object of an internal colonization. While the black African became the threatening other abroad, it was closer to home that people focused their real fears about the collapse of nation through a desire for racial homogeneity.23 Jews were referred to as “degenerate,” the bearers of syphilis, hysteri­ cal, neurotic, as bloodsuckers and, on a more practical level, Jews were viewed as middlemen in business.24 Not all Gothic novels are as explicit as Dracula about their identification of monster and Jew. In some works we can read a more gener­ alized code of fear which links horror to the Oriental25 and 23  In an article on the influence of Spanish models of nationhood upon English debate of “the Jewish question,” Michael Ragussis looks at nineteenth-century novels like Ivanhoe and their positioning of questions of nationhood alongside calls for Jewish assimilation: “By depicting the persecution of the Jews at a critical moment in history— the founding of the English nation-state—Ivanhoe located ‘the Jewish question’ at the heart of English national identity” (478). See “The Birth of a Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and the ‘Secret Race,’” Critical Inquiry 20 (Spring 1994): 477–508.

24  See, for example, Henry Arthur Jones, “Middlemen and Parasites,” in The New Review (June 1893): 645–54; and “The Dread of the Jew,” The Spectator 83 (September 9, 1899): 338–39, where the author discusses references made in popular periodicals of the time to Jews as “a parasitical race with no ideals beyond precious metals.” “Parasite” and “degenerate” became coded synonyms for Jews in such literature. 25  See, for example, Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897), in Victorian Villainies, ed. Graham Greene and Sir Hugh Greene (New York: Penguin, 1984). For an excellent article on this little-known Gothic text, see Kelly Hurley, “‘The Inner Chambers of All Nameless Sin’: The Beetle, Gothic Female Sexuality and Oriental Barbarism,” in Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Lloyd Davis (Albany: State Uni­ver­sity of New York Press, 1993), 193–213.

83

84

J. Halberstam

in others we must interpret a bodily semiotic that marks monsters as symbols of a diseased culture. But to under­ stand better how the history of the Gothic novel charts the entanglement of race, nation, and sexuality in productions of otherness, we might consider the Gothic monster as the antithesis of “Englishness.” Benedict Anderson has written about the cultural roots of the nation in terms of “imagined communities” which are “conceived in language, not in blood.”26 By linking the development of a print industry, particularly the populariza­ tion of novels and newspapers, to the spread of nationalism, Anderson pays dose attention to the ways in which a shared conception of what constitutes “nation-ness” is written and read across certain communities. If the nation, therefore, is a textual production which creates national community in terms of an inside and an outside and then makes those categories indispensable, Gothic becomes one place to look for a fiction of the foreign, a narrative of who and what is notEnglish and not-native. The racism that becomes a mark of nineteenth-century Gothic arises out of the attempt within horror fiction to give form to what terrifies the national com­ munity. Gothic monsters are defined both as other than the imagined community and as the being that cannot be imag­ ined as community. “Racism and anti-Semitism,” Anderson writes, “mani­ fest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic oppression and domination” (136). The rac­ ism and anti-Semitism that I have identified as a hallmark of nineteenth-century Gothic literature certainly direct themselves towards a domestic rather than a foreign scene. Gothic in the 1890s, as represented by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde, takes place in the backstreets of London in laboratories and asylums, in old abandoned houses and decaying city streets, in hospitals and bedrooms, in homes and gardens. The monster, such a narrative suggests, will find you in the intimacy of your own home; indeed, it will make your home its home (or you its home) and alter forever the comfort of domestic privacy. The monster peeps through the window, enters through the back door, and sits beside you in the parlor; the monster is always invited in but never asked to stay. The racism that seems to inhere to the nineteenth-century Gothic monster, then, may 26  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), 133.

be drawn from imperialistic or colonialist fantasies of other lands and peoples, but it concentrates its imaginative force upon the other peoples in “our” lands, the monsters at home. The figure of the parasite becomes paramount within Gothic precisely because it is an internal not an external danger that Gothic identifies and attempts to dispel. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt has argued convincingly that the modern category of anti-Semi­ tism emerges from both nineteenth-century attempts to make race the “key to history” and the particular history of the Jews as “a people without a government, without a country, and without a language.”27 As such, the Jew, with regards to nation and, for our purposes, to English nationality, might be said to represent the not-English, the not-middle-class, the parasiti­ cal tribe that drains but never restores or produces. Arendt shows how the decline of the aristocracy and of nationalism by the mid-nineteenth century made people seek new ground for both commonality and superiority. She writes, “For if race doctrines finally served more sinister and immediately politi­ cal purposes, it is still true that much of their plausibility and persuasiveness lay in the fact that they helped anybody feel himself an aristocrat who had been selected by birth on the strength of ‘racial’ qualification.” Arendt’s point is of central importance to an understanding of the history of Gothic. We might note in passing that, from the late eighteenth century to the nineteenth century, the terrain of Gothic horror shifted from the fear of corrupted aristocracy or clergy, represented by the haunted castle or abbey, to the fear embodied by monstrous bodies. Reading Gothic with nineteenth-century ideologies of race suggests why this shift occurs. If, then, with the rise of bourgeois culture, aristocratic heritage became less and less of an index of essential national identity, the construction of national unity increasingly depended upon the category of race and class. Therefore, the blood of nobility now became the blood of the native and both were identified in contradistinction to so-called “impure” races such as Jews and Gypsies. The nobility, furthermore, gave way to a middle class identified by both their relation to capital as producers and consumers and a normal sexuality that leads to repro­ duction.28 27  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 8.

28  For a fascinating and clever account of the production of heterosexuality within capitalism, see Henry Abelove, “Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England,” Genders 6 (1989): 125–30.

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

The Gothic novel, I have been arguing, establishes the terms of monstrosity that were to be, and indeed were in the process of being, projected onto all who threatened the interests of a dwindling English nationalism. As the English empire stretched over oceans and continents, the need to define an essential English character became more and more pressing. Non-nationals, like Jews, for example, but also like the Irish or Gypsies, came to be increasingly identified by their alien natures and the concept of “foreign” became ever more closely associated with a kind of parasitical mon­ strosity, a non-reproductive sexuality, and an anti-English character. Gothic monsters in the 1880s and 1890s made parasitism—vampirism—the defining characteristic of hor­ ror. The parasitical nature of the beast might be quite literal, as in Stoker’s vampire, or it might be a more indirect trait, as suggested by the creeping and homeless Hyde; it might be defined by a homoerotic influence, as exerted by Dorian Gray. Parasitism, especially with regards to the vampire, represents a bad or pathological sexuality, non-reproductive sexuality, a sexuality that exhausts and wastes and exists prior to and outside of the marriage contract. The ability of race ideology and sexology to create a new elite to replace the aristocracy also allows for the staging of historical battles within the body. This suggests how Gothic monstrosity may intersect with, participate in, and resist the production of a theory of racial superiority. The Gothic monster—Frankenstein’s creature, Hyde, Dorian Gray, and Dracula—represents the dramatization of the race question and of sexology in their many different incarnations. If Fran­ kenstein’s monster articulates the injustice of demonizing one’s own productions, Hyde suggests that the most respect­ able bodies may be contaminated by bad blood, and if Dorian Gray’s portrait makes an essential connection between the homosexual and the uncanny, Dracula embodies once and for all the danger of the hybrid race and the perverse sexuality within the form of the vampire.

The Power of Horror

In Gothic, as in many areas of Victorian culture, sexual mate­ rial was not repressed but produced on a massive scale, as Michel Foucault has argued.29 The narrative, then, that professed outrage at acts of sexual perversion (the nightly wanderings of Hyde, for example, or Dracula’s midnight 29  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980).

feasts) in fact produced a catalogue of perverse sexuality by first showcasing the temptations of the flesh in glorious technicolor and then by depicting so-called normal sex as a sickly enterprise devoid of all passion. One has only to think of the contrast between Mina Harker’s encounter with Count Dracula—she is found lapping at blood from his breast—and her sexually neutral, maternal relations with her husband. The production of sexuality as identity and as the inver­ sion of identity (perversion—a turning away from identity) in Gothic novels consolidates normal sexuality by defining it in contrast to its monstrous manifestations. Horror, I have suggested, exercises power even as it incites pleasure and/ or disgust. Horror, indeed, has a power closely related to its pleasure-producing function and the twin mechanism of pleasure-power perhaps explains how it is that Gothic may empower some readers even as it disables others. An example of how Gothic appeals differently to different readers may be found in contemporary slasher movies like The Texas Chain­ saw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978). Critics generally argue that these films inspire potency in a male viewer and incredible vulnerability in a female viewer. However, as we shall see in the later chapters of this book, the mechanisms of Gothic narrative never turn so neatly around gender identifications. A male viewer of the slasher film, like a male reader of the nineteenth-century Gothic, may find himself on the receiving end of countless acts of degradation in relation to monstrosity and its powers while the female reader and spectator may be able to access a surprising source of power through monstrous forms and monstrous genres. In her psychoanalytic study of fear, Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines horror in terms of “abjection.” The abject, she writes, is “something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.”30 In a chapter on the writings of Celine, Kristeva goes on to identify abjection with the Jew of anti-Semitic discourse. Anti-Semitic fantasy, she suggests, elevates Jewishness to both mastery and weakness, to “sex tinged with femininity and death” (185). The Jew, for Kristeva, anchors abjection within a body, a foreign body that retains a certain familiarity and that therefore confuses the boundary between self and other. The connection that Kristeva makes between psychological categories and socio-political processes leads her to claim 30  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1982), 4.

85

86

J. Halberstam

that anti-Semitism functions as a receptacle for all kinds of fears—sexual, political, national, cultural, economic. This insight is important to the kinds of arguments that I am mak­ ing about the economic function of the Gothic monster. The Jew in general within antisemitism is gothicized or trans­ formed into a figure of almost universal loathing who haunts the community and represents its worst fears. By making the Jew supernatural, Gothic anti-Semitism actually makes Jews into spooks and Jew-hating into a psychological inevitability. The power of literary horror, indeed, lies in its ability to trans­ form political struggles into psychological conditions and then to blur the distinction between the two. Literary horror, or Gothic, I suggest, uses the language of race hatred (most obviously anti-Semitism) to characterize monstrosity as a representation of psychological disorder. To understand the way monster may be equated with Jew or foreigner or nonEnglish national, we need to historicize Gothic metaphors like vampire and parasite. We also have to read the effacement of the connection between monster and foreigner alongside the articulation of monster as a sexual category.

The Return of the Repressed

In an introduction to Studies on Hysteria written in 1893, Freud identifies the repressed itself as a foreign body. Noting that hysterical symptoms replay some original trauma in response to an accident, Freud explains that the memory of trauma “acts like a foreign body which, long after its entry, must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.”31 In other words, until an original site of trauma reveals itself in therapy, it remains foreign to body and mind but active in both. The repressed, then, figures as a sexual secret that the body keeps from itself and it figures as foreign because what disturbs the body goes unrecognized by the mind. The fiction that Freud tells about the foreign body as the repressed connects remarkably with the fiction Gothic tells about monsters as foreigners. Texts, like bodies, store up memories of past fears, of distant traumas. “Hysterics,” writes Freud, “suffer mainly from reminiscences” (7). History, per­ sonal and social, haunts many hysterics and the repressed always takes on an uncanny life of its own. Freud here has described the landscape of his own science—foreignness is repressed into the depths of an unconscious, a kind of cess­ pool of forgotten memories, and it rises to the surface as a 31  Sigmund Freud and Josef Brauer, Studies on Hysteria (1893; reprint, trans. and ed. James Strachey, New York: Basic, 1987), 6.

sexual disturbance. Psychoanalysis gothicizes sexuality; that is to say, it creates a body haunted by a monstrous sexuality and forced into repressing its Gothic secrets. Psychoanalysis, in the Freudian scenario, is a sexual science able to account for and perhaps cure Gothic sexualities. Gothicization in this formula, then, is the identification of bodies in terms of what they are not. A Gothic other stabilizes sameness, a gothicized body is one that disrupts the surface-depth relationship between the body and the mind. It is the body that must be spoken, identified, or eliminated. Eve Sedgwick has advanced a reading of Gothic as the return of the repressed. She reads fear in the Gothic in terms of the trope of “live burial” and finds in Gothic “a carceral sublime of representation, of the body, and potentially of politics and history as well” (Coherence, vi). Live burial as a trope is, of course, standard fare in the Gothic, particularly in eighteenth-century Gothic like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Live burial also works nicely as a metaphor for a repressed thing that threat­ ens to return. Sedgwick’s example of the repressed in Gothic is homosexuality. She characterizes the “paranoid Gothic novel” in terms of its thematization of homophobia and thus, she describes Frankenstein’s plot in terms of “a tableau of two men chasing each other across the landscape” (Coherence, ix). But Sedgwick’s reading tells only half the story. The sex­ ual outsider in Gothic, I am suggesting, is always also a racial pariah, a national outcast, a class outlaw. The “carceral sub­ lime of representation” that, for Sedgwick, marks the role of textuality or language in the production of fear does not only symbolize that Gothic language buries fear alive. Live burial is certainly a major and standard trope of Gothic but I want to read it alongside the trope of parasitism. Parasitism, I think, adds an economic dimension to live burial that reveals the entanglement of capital, nation, and the body in the fictions of otherness sanctified and popularized by any given culture. If live burial, for Sedgwick, reveals a “queerness of meaning,” an essential doubleness within language that plays itself out through homoerotic doubles within the text, the carceral in my reading hinges upon a more clearly metonymic structure. Live burial as parasitism, then, becomes a tooth buried in an exposed neck for the explicit purpose of blood sucking or a monstrous Hyde hidden within the very flesh of a respectable Jekyll. Live burial is the entanglement of self and other within monstrosity and the parasitical relationship between the two. The one is always buried in the other. The form of the Gothic novel, again as Sedgwick remarks, reflects further upon the parasitical monstrosity it creates.

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

The story buried within a story buried within a story that Shelley’s Frankenstein popularizes evolves into the narrative with one story but many different tellers. This form is really established by Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). In this novel, Collins uses a series of narrators so that almost every character in the novel tells his or her side of the story. Such a narrative device gives the effect of completion and operates according to a kind of judicial model of narration where all witnesses step forward to give an account. Within this narrative system, the author professes to be no more than a collector of documents, a compiler of the facts of the case. The reader, of course, is the judge and jury, the courtroom audience, and often, a kind of prosecuting presence expected to know truth, recognize guilt, and penalize monstrosity. In Dracula Bram Stoker directly copies Collins’s style. Stevenson also uses Collins’s narrative technique in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but he frames his story in a more overtly legal setting so that our main narrator is a lawyer, the central docu­ ment is the last will and testament of Dr. Jekyll, and all other accounts contribute to the “strange case.” All Gothic novels employing this narrative device share an almost obsessive concern with documentation and they all exhibit a sinister mistrust of the not-said, the unspoken, the hidden, and the silent. Furthermore, most Gothic novels lack the point of view of the monster. Collins does include in his novel a chapter by the notorious Count Fosco but Fosco’s account is written as a forced confession that confirms his guilt and reveals his machinations. Neither Dracula nor Dorian Gray ever directly give their versions of events and Jekyll stands in at all times for his monstrous double, Hyde. Collins’s novel is extremely important to the Victorian Gothic tradition in that it establishes a layered narrative struc­ ture in which a story must be peeled back to reveal the secret or repressed center. The secret buried in the heart of Gothic, I suggested much earlier, is usually identified as a sexual secret. In an essay on the function of sensationalism in The Woman in White, Ann Cvetkovich argues that the sexual secret in this novel ultimately has little to do with a random sexual desire and everything to do with the class structure that brings Wal­ ter Hartright into contact with his future bride, Laura Fairlie. Cvetkovich suggests that the novel, in fact, sensationalizes class relations by making the relationship between Laura and her lowly art teacher seem fateful—preordained rather than a product of one man’s social ambition.32 32  See Ann Cvetkovitch, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and

Novels in a Gothic mode transform class and race, sexual and national relations into supernatural or monstrous features. The threat posed by the Gothic monster is a com­ bination of money, science, perversion, and imperialism but by reducing it to solely sexual aberrance, we fail to historicize Gothic embodiments.

The Technology of Monsters

This book will argue that Gothic novels are technologies that produce the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body. The monster’s body, indeed, is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative. The monster functions as monster, in other words, when it is able to condense as many fear-producing traits as possible into one body. Hence the sense that Frankenstein’s monster is bursting out of his skin—he is indeed filled to bursting point with flesh and meaning both. Dracula, at the other end of the nineteenth century, is a body that consumes to excess—the vampiric body in its ideal state is a bloated body, sated with the blood of its victims. Monsters are meaning machines. They can represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in one body. And even within these divisions of identity, the monster can still be broken down. Dracula, for example, can be read as aristocrat, a symbol of the masses; he is predator and yet feminine, he is consumer and producer, he is parasite and host, he is homosexual and heterosexual, he is even a les­ bian. Monsters and the Gothic fiction that creates them are therefore technologies, narrative technologies that produce the perfect figure for negative identity. Monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual. But Gothic is also a narrative technique, a generic spin that transforms the lovely and the beautiful into the abhor­ rent and then frames this transformation within a humanist moral fable. A brilliant postmodern example of what happens when a narrative is gothicized is Tim Burton’s surrealistic Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Nightmare is an ani­ mated fantasy about what happens when Halloween takes over Christmas. Halloween and Christmas, in this film, are conceived as places rather than times or occasions and they Vic­tor­ian Sensationalism (New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992).

87

88

J. Halberstam

each are embodied by their festive representatives, Jack Skeleton33 and Santa Claus. Indeed religious or superstitious meanings of these holidays are almost entirely absent from the plot. Jack Skeleton is a kind of melancholic romantic hero who languishes under the strain of representing fear and maintaining the machinery of horror every year. He stumbles upon the place called Christmas one day after a stroll through the woods beyond his graveyard and he decides that he wants to do Christmas this year instead of Halloween. The transformation of Christmas into Halloween is the gothicization of the sentimental; presents and toys, food and decorations are all transformed from cheery icons of good­ will into fanged monsters, death masks, and all manner of skullduggery. Kids are frightened, parents are shocked, Santa Claus is kidnapped, and mayhem ensues. Of course, a pathetic sentimental heroine called Sally uses her rag-doll body to restore law and order and to woo Jack back to his proper place but nonetheless, the damage has been done. Christmas, the myth of a transcendent generosity, goodwill, and commu­ nity love has been unmasked as just another consumer ritual and its icons have been exposed as simply toys without teeth or masks that smile instead of grimace. The naturalness and goodness of Christmas has unraveled and shown itself to be the easy target of any and all attempts to make it Gothic. While Nightmare suggests that, at least in a postmodern setting, gothicization seems to have progressive and even radicalizing effects, it is not always so simple to tell whether the presence of Gothic registers a conservative or a progressive move. Of course, Gothic is, as I have been arguing, mobile and therefore, we should not expect it to succumb so easily to attempts to make a claim for its political investments. But it does seem as if there has been a transformation in the uses of Gothic from the early nineteenth century to the present. The second part of my study attempts to read the contemporary horror film in order to argue that horror now disrupts dominant culture’s representations of family, heterosexuality, ethnicity, and class politics. It disrupts, furthermore, the logic of genre that essentializes generic categories and stabilizes the production of meaning within them. Gothic film horror, I propose, produces models of reading (many in any one location) that allow for multiple interpretations and a plurality of locations of cultural resistance. 33  [Halberstam refers to the protagonist of the film as “Jack Skele­ ton” instead of the correct “Jack Skellington,” thus drawing attention to the efficiency of Burton’s word-play. Eds.]

ROSEMARIE GARLAND THOMSON, “FROM WONDER TO ERROR: A GENEALOGY OF FREAK DISCOURSE IN MODERNITY,” from FREAKERY: CULTURAL SPECTACLES OF THE EXTRAORDINARY BODY

Critical Introduction

Reading Questions

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

What does it mean to argue that nobody is born a “freak,” but made into one through cultural processes? How might we apply this insight to other figures considered “monsters” or “monstrous”?

(1946– ) is Prof­ essor of English and Co-Director of the Emory Disability Studies Initiative at Emory Uni­ver­sity. She specializes in American literature and culture, which she approaches from the perspective of disability studies—a field she helped to found—as well as feminism, and, more recently, bioethics. Among Garland Thomson’s notable contributions to mon­ ster studies is her reframing of “disability”—often seen as a source of sorrow, a failure and lack—to a source of won­ der. Instead of using terms like “deformed” or “disabled,” she writes about “exceptional,” “unexpected,” and, most pointedly, “extraordinary” bodies. In so doing, she creates a positive dis­ course to describe and discuss non-normative bodies. Garland Thomson’s major publications include her authored books—Staring: How We Look (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disabil­ ity in American Culture and Literature (Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1997)—and a series of edited collections. Here, we present “From Wonder to Error: A Genealogy of Freak Dis­ course in Modernity,” which is the introduction to Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1996). In this essay, Garland Thomson argues for her new vocabulary of the extraordinary while exploring the shifts in perceptions of non-normative bodies over time. Through a consideration of the circus and sideshow practices of the Victorian period, she argues that “freaks” are not born. Instead, they are made by culture through a process she refers to as “enfreakment,” a term she borrows from David Hevey, a disability theorist, author, filmmaker, and photogra­ pher. Enfreakment is the series of “cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commercialize.” As she writes, “the monstrous body exists in societies to be exploited for someone else’s purposes.”

Editorial Notes

We here present most of the introductory chapter to Garland Thompson book, leaving off the final section containing an outline of the rest of the book’s chapters. The original images used in her essay were not available, so we have substituted similar images of the same performers. We have also reduced the total number of illustrations.

Further Reading

Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amuse­ment and Profit. Chicago: Uni­ ver­ sity of Chicago Press 1988. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, ed. Freakery: Cultural Specta­ cles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1996. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figur­ ing Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1997. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gig­ antic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984. ASM

“FROM WONDER TO ERROR: A GENEALOGY OF FREAK DISCOURSE IN MODERNITY,” FROM FREAKERY: CULTURAL SPECTACLES OF THE EXTRAORDINARY BODY ROSEMARIE GARLAND THOMSON

People who are visually different have always pro­ voked the imaginations of their fellow human beings. Those of us who have been known since antiquity as “monsters” and more recently as “freaks” defy the ordinary and mock the predictable, exciting both anxiety and speculation among our more banal brethren. History bears ample witness to this profound disquiet stirred in the human soul by bodies that stray from what is typical or predictable. Such troubled fascination with the different body has occasioned endur­ ing cultural icons that range from the cyclopic Polyphemus and the gigantic Goliath to werewolves and the seven ador­ able little dwarfs. Perhaps even the founding Judeo-Christian myth that Adam’s body contained Eve, drenched as it is by millennia of interpretation, derives from reports of the rare condition fetus in fetu, in which tumors encasing fetuses are embedded in the bodies of their living siblings.1 The presence of the anomalous human body, at once familiar and alien, has unfolded as well within the collective cultural consciousness into fanciful hybrids such as centaurs, griffins, satyrs, mino­ taurs, sphinxes, mermaids, and cyclopses—all figures that are perhaps the mythical explanations for the startling bod­ ies whose curious lineaments gesture toward other modes of being and confuse comforting distinctions between what is human and what is not. What seems clearest in all this, how­ ever, is that the extraordinary body is fundamental to the nar­ ratives by which we make sense of ourselves and our world. By its very presence, the exceptional body seems to com­ pel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation. The unexpected body fires rich, if anxious, narratives and practices that probe the contours and boundaries of what we take to be human. Stone Age cave drawings, for example, record monstrous births, while prehistoric gravesites evince elaborate ritual sacrifices of such bodies. Clay tablets at the Assyrian city of Nineveh describe in detail sixty-two of what we would now call congenital abnormalities, along with their prophetic meanings. Aristotle, Cicero, Pliny, Augustine, 1  George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1897), 199–200.

Bacon, and Montaigne account for such disruptions of the seemingly natural order in their interpretative schemata. For these fathers of Western thought, the differently formed body is most often evidence of God’s design, divine wrath, or nature’s abundance, but it is always an interpretive occasion. Perpetually significant, the singular body has been alter­ natingly coveted, revered, and dreaded. Their rarity made exceptional bodies instrumental and lucrative to those who appropriated them, even in precapitalist societies. For example, Egyptian kings, Roman aristocrats, and Euro­pean royalty kept dwarfs and fools as amusing pets. Cheap, popu­ lar “monster ballads” in Renaissance England detailed the corporeal particulars of anomalous bodies and uncovered their hidden lessons: a cleft palate cautioned against lewd talk; missing fingers warned against idleness. An anxious England even made bestiality a capital offense in 1534, lest the occasional, unsettling birth anomalies that suggested hybridity might burgeon uncontrolled as testimonies to some threatening cousinship between man and beast.2 Tributes to Matthew Buchinger—who was virtually armless and legless, but nevertheless powdered and wigged—record that he daz­ zled eighteenth-century Europe with his conjuring, musical performances, calligraphic skills, and marksmanship with the pistol.3 Learned gentlemen of the early Enlightenment col­ lected relics of the increasingly secularized monstrous body in their eclectic cabinets of curiosities, along with an array of oddities such as sharks’ teeth, fossils, and intricately carved cherrystones.4 As scientific inquiry began to eclipse religious justification, the internal anatomy of exceptional bodies was exposed in the dissection theaters and represented in early medical treatises upon which reputations were built. The cabinet of curiosity commercialized into such equally 2  Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 135.

3  Ricky Jay, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (New York: Villard, 1986), 44–57. 4  Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 4.

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

diverse popular museums as P. T. Barnum’s famous American Museum, all replete with their sensationalized, hyperbolic narratives.5 The ancient practice of exhibiting anomalous bodies in taverns and on streetcorners consolidated in the nineteenth century into institutions such as American circus sideshows or London’s Bartholemew Fair, where showmen and monster-mongers proliferated in response to a seemingly insatiable desire to gawk contemplatively at these marvelous phenomena.6 In a definitive bifurcation from the popular, nineteenth-century science officially enunciated teratology as the study, classification, and manipulation of monstrous bodies. As scientific explanation eclipsed religious mystery to become the authoritative cultural narrative of modernity, the exceptional body began increasingly to be represented in clinical terms as pathology, and the monstrous body moved from the freak show stage into the medical theater. Thus, even though the discourses of the anomalous body comprise a series of successive reframings within a variety of registers over time, the uneasy human impulse to textualize, to contain, to explain our most unexpected corporeal manifestations to ourselves has remained constant.7 5  For discussions of Barnum, sec Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); and A. H. Saxon, P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: New York Uni­ver­sity Press, 1989).

6  Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Belknap, 1978).

7  The history of monsters and freaks is found in Gould and Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities; John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1981); Mark V. Barrow, “A Brief History of Teratology,” in Problems of Birth Defects, ed. T. V. N. Persaud (Baltimore: Uni­ver­sity Park Press, 1977), 18–28; Josef Warkany, “Congenital Malformations in the Past,” in Problems of Birth Defects, ed. T. V. N. Persaud (Baltimore: Uni­ver­sity Park Press, 1977), 5–17; Dudley Wilson, Signs and Portents: Monstrous Births from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1993); Charles J. S. Thompson, The Mystery and Lore of Monsters (New Hyde Park: Uni­ver­sity Books, 1968); Kathryn Park and Lorraine Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies 92 (August 1981): 20–54; Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984), chap. 13; Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978); Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities far Amusement and Profit (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1988); Daniel P. Mannix, Freaks: We Who Are Not as Others (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1990); and Frederick Drimmer, Very Special People (New York: Amjon, 1983).

Figure 11.1. Charles Tripp, the “Armless Wonder,” demonstrates his ability to eat with his feet.

As this very brief recapitulation of the exceptional body’s appropriations in Western culture implies, what we might call “freak discourse” can be seen as a single gauge registering a historical shift from the ancient to the modern era. Although extraordinary bodily forms have always been acknowledged as atypical, the cultural resonances accorded them arise from the historical and intellectual moments in which these bodies are embedded. Because such bodies are rare, unique, mate­ rial, and confounding of cultural categories, they function as magnets to which culture secures its anxieties, questions, and needs at any given moment. Like the bodies of females and slaves, the monstrous body exists in societies to be exploited for someone else’s purposes. Thus, singular bodies become

91

92

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

politicized when culture maps its concerns upon them as meditations on individual as well as national values, identity, and direction. Under the extreme pressures of modernity, it would seem, the significances imposed upon such bodies intensified and the modes of representation proliferated in ways from which we can coax fresh cultural understandings. As a way to introduce the chapters that comprise this volume, I want to suggest in rather broad strokes here how freak discourse is both imbricated in and reflective of our collective cultural transformation into modernity. The trajectory of historical change in the ways the anomalous body is framed within the cultural imagination—what I am calling here the freak discourse’s genealogy—can be characterized simply as a movement from a narrative of the marvelous to a narrative of the deviant. As modernity develops in western culture, freak discourse logs the change: the prodigious monster transforms into the pathological terata; what was once sought after as revelation becomes pursued as entertainment; what aroused awe now inspires horror; what was taken as a portent shifts to a site of progress. In brief: wonder becomes error. Consider, for instance, the semantic distinctions applied to anomalous bodies over time. Never simply itself, the excep­ tional body betokens something else, becomes revelatory, sustains narrative, exists socially in a realm of hyper-repre­ sentation. Indeed, the word monster—perhaps the earliest and most enduring name for the singular body—derives from the Latin monstra, meaning to warn, show, or sign, and which has given us the modern verb demonstrate. Monsters were taken as a showing forth of divine will from antiquity until the hand of God seemingly loosed its grip on the world. When the gods lapsed into silence, monsters became an index of Nature’s fancy or—as they now appear in genetics and embryology—the Rosetta Stone that reveals the mechanics of life. As portents, monsters were the premier manifestation of a varied group of astonishing natural phenomena known as prodigies, marvels, or wonders. Under the sign of the miraculous, comets, earthquakes, six-legged calves, cyclopic pigs, and human monsters confirmed, repudiated, or revised what humanity imagined as the order of things. By challeng­ ing the boundaries of the human and the coherence of what seemed to be the natural world, monstrous bodies appeared as sublime, merging the terrible with the wonderful, equal­ izing repulsion with attraction. Whether generating awe, delight, terror, or knowledge, the monstrous emerges from culture-bound expectations even as it violates them. Certainly the cultural relativity of

Figure 11.2. Lipstretching, often exoticized in circuses and freak shows, in an African tribe.

what counts as monstrous is witnessed by the medieval Wonder Books, which imagined as monsters the alien races of distant geographies, particularly those of “The East.”8 In a similar genre, the French surgeon Ambroise Paré in 1573 conflated what we would today see as the normal, the devi­ ant, and the fanciful in an illustrated treatise on monsters that catalogues together marvels such as conjoined twins, giraffes, hermaphrodites, sea devils, elephants, unicorns, comets, incubi, and Egyptian mermaids.9 Paré’s Des Mon­ stres et prodigies straddles the seam between wonder and error, between marvelous and medicalized narratives of the anomalous body. Along with the traditional divinely driven explanations, Paré initiates a secular, clinical approach to monsters that runs parallel to and competes with religious interpretations, finally eclipsing them around the beginning of the twentieth century. This incipient scientific view, which depends upon the fantasy of objectivity and sees regularity rather than exceptionality as founding epistemology, imposes empiricism upon the narrative of wonder that had ranged rel­ atively freely across earlier representations of monsters. By the seventeenth century this alternative humanistic, scientific discourse, which endorses the predictable, entwines itself with the idea of religious prodigies, casting extraordinary bodies as nature’s benevolent whimsies, bestowed upon the world to delight man’s curiosity and inspire his awe. This is not, however, the awe of divine warning, but rather an impli­

8  Friedman, Monstrous Races; and Mary Bane Campbell, The Witness and the Other World Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988). 9  Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1982).

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

cation that the world exists increasingly not to glorify god but to please man, who is destined to be its master. The notion of the monster as prodigy fades at this junc­ ture, transfiguring singular bodies into lusus naturae, nature’s sport or the freak of nature. As divine design disengages from the natural world in the human mind, the word freak emerges to express capricious variegation or sudden, erratic change. Milton’s Lycidas seems to have initiated freak into English in 1637 to mean a fleck of color. By the seventeenth century freak broadens to mean whimsy or fancy. Not until 1847 does the word become synonymous with human corporeal anomaly. Thus, wonder, which enters the language as early as 700, separates from augury to become whimsy as Enlighten­ ment thinking begins to rationalize the world. What was once ominous marvel now becomes gratuitous oddity as monsters shift into the category of curiosities.10 Curiosity fuses inquisi­ tiveness, acquisitiveness, and novelty to the ancient pursuit of the extraordinary body, shifting the ownership of such bodies from God to the scientist, whose Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, antedate modern museums. Simultaneous with the secularism that finds delight in nature’s corporeal jokes arises the contrasting empiricism that creates the knowledge used to drive fancy from the world. Consequently, at just the historical moment when the foreboding monster transforms into the whimsical freak, the Enlightenment logic Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno have termed “the disenchantment of the world” produces teratology, the science of monstrosity that eventually tames and rationalizes the wondrous freak.11 Formally articulated in 1832 by the French zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, teratology recasts the freak from astonishing corporeal extravagance into the pathological specimen of the terata. Mastered and demythologized by modernity, then, is the marvelously singular body whose terrible presence in the world quickened such cultural narratives as Genesis and the ­Odyssey. Domesticated within the laboratory and the textbook, what was once the prodigious monster, the fanciful freak, the strange and subtle curiosity of nature, has become today the abnormal, the intolerable. The exceptional body thus becomes what Arnold Davidson calls an “especially 10  All definitions are from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).

11  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten­ ment, trans. John Cumming (1944; reprint, London: Allen Lane, 1973), 3; see also Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971).

vicious normative violation,” demanding genetic reconstruc­ tion, surgical normalization, therapeutic elimination, or relegation to pathological specimen.12 In response to the tensions of modernity, the ancient practice of interpreting extraordinary bodies not only shifted toward the secular and the rational, but it flourished as never before within the expanding marketplace, institutionalized under the banner of the freak show. Especially in Victorian America, the exhibition of freaks exploded into a public ritual that bonded a sundering polity together in the collec­ tive act of looking. In a turbulent era of social and material change, the spectacle of the extraordinary body stimulated curiosity, ignited speculation, provoked titillation, furnished novelty, filled coffers, confirmed commonality, and certified national identity. From the Jacksonian to the Progressive eras, Americans flocked to freak shows. With the older narrative of wonder still culturally tenable and the newer narrative of error ever more compelling, the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries comprised a heightened, transitional moment for such ceremonial displays. Redolent with the older authority of the prodigious, infused with the fitfulness of the fanciful, and susceptible to the certainties of scientific positivism, the singular body on exhibit was ripe for reading.13 But before we probe further the ways the freak show entwines itself with the social, economic, political, and ideological structures of what was arguably America’s most intense period of modernization, we should first explore the conventions of display that created Victorian America’s celebrated freaks. The early itinerant monster-mongers who exhibited human oddities in taverns and the slightly more respectable performances in rented halls evolved in the mid-nineteenth century into institutionalized, permanent exhibitions of freaks in dime museums and later in circus sideshows, fairs, and amusement park midways. The apotheosis of museums, which both inaugurated and informed the myriad dime museums that followed, was P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, which he purchased and revitalized in 1841. Later, Barnum shaped the circus into the three-ringed extravaganza, infusing it with vigor and freaks 12  Arnold I. Davidson, “The Horror of Monsters,” in The Boundaries of Humanity: Human, Animals, Machines, ed. James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna (Berkeley: Uni­ver­sity of California Press, 1999), 51.

13  For a discussion of prodigies and religion in America, see Michael P. Winship, “Prodigies, Puritanism, and the Perils of Natural Philo­ sophy: The Example of Cotton Mather,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, L1, no. 1 (January 1994): 92–105.

93

94

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

Figure 11.3. A common practice at freak shows was to juxtapose stark physical differences.

well into the twentieth century. Until the turn of the century, dime museums proliferated, offering spectacles of amusement parading as edification to all classes of Americans.14 Human freaks were the central magnets of Barnum’s showplace and all successive dime museums. In the museums’ curio halls and lecture rooms as well as on the sideshows’ stages and platforms gathered an astonishing array of corporeal won­ ders, from wild men of Borneo to fat ladies, living skeletons, Fiji princes, albinos, bearded women, Siamese twins, tattooed Circassians, armless and legless wonders, Chinese giants, cannibals, midget triplets, hermaphrodites, spotted boys, and much more. Augmenting the marvelous bodies were ancillary performers and curiosities such as ventriloquists, perform­ ing geese, mesmerists, beauty contestants, contortionists, sharpshooters, trained goats, frog eaters, sword-swallowers, tumbling monkeys, boa constrictors, canaries whistling “Yankee Doodle,” and a “Nail King” who drove nails through boards with his teeth.15 From the Prince of Wales and Henry

14  The words muse and amusement both descend from the related Old French and Old English words for staring, gaping, or being idle. Museum comes directly into English from the Latin. 15  George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (1927–49;

James to families and the humblest immigrants, Americans gathered at this most democratizing institution to gaze raptly at the ineffable other who was both the focus and the creation of the freak show’s hyperbolic conventions of display.16 The exaggerated, sensationalized discourse that is the freak show’s essence ranged over the seemingly singular bodies that we would now call either “physically disabled” or “exotic ethnics,” framing them and heightening their differ­ ences from viewers, who were rendered comfortably common and safely standard by the exchange. Freak discourse struc­ tured a cultural ritual that seized upon any deviation from the typical, embellishing and intensifying it to produce a human spectacle whose every somatic feature was laden with sig­ reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970), 14:1888–91; and William G. FitzGerald, “Side-Shows,” parts 1–4, Strand Magazine, March–June 1897, 321–28, 405–16, 521–28, 776–80.

16  Brooks McNamara, “‘A Congress of Wonders’: The Rise and Fall of the Dime Museum,” Emerson Society Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1974): 216–32; Marcello Truzzi, “Circus and Side Shows,” in American Popular Entertainment, ed. Myron Matlaw (Westport, Conn.: Green­ wood, 1979) 175–85; and James B. Twitchell, Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (New York: Columbia Uni­ver­sity Press, 1992), 57–65.

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

nificance before the gaping spectator. An animal-skin wrap, a spear, and some grunting noises, for example, made a retarded black man into the Missing Link. Irregular pigmentation enhanced by a loincloth and some palm fronds produced the Leopard Boy. Feathers, blankets, and a seven-pound hammer turned an “ordinary nigger” into the Ironed-Skulled Prince.17 Shaved heads, top-knots, and gaudy tunics render two micro­ cephalics into the Aztec Children. Congenital anomalies and progressive or hereditary conditions yielded imaginative hybrids of the human and animal reminiscent of classical satyrs, centaurs, or minotaurs: the Turtle Boy, the Mule-Faced Woman, Serpentina, the Camel Girl, the Dog-Faced Boy, the Bear Woman, the Lobster Boy, the Lion Woman, the Alligator Man, and Sealo. Bodies whose forms appeared to transgress rigid social categories such as race, gender, and personhood were particularly good grist for the freak mill. Albino Africans with dreadlocks, double-genitaled hermaphrodites, bearded women, fat boys, half-people, the legless and/or armless, and conjoined twins violated the categorical boundaries that seem to order civilization and inform individuality. Such hybridity, along with excess and absence, are the threaten­ ing organizational principles that constituted freakdom. At once dangerous and alluring, this cultural space of seemingly infinite license is what the freak shows both amplified and contained with their conventions of display. An interlocking set of stylized, highly embellished nar­ ratives fashioned unusual bodies into freaks within the formalized spaces of shows, museums, fairs, and circuses. The four entwined narrative forms that produced freaks were, first, the oral spiel—often called the “lecture” that was delivered by the showman or “professor” who usually managed the exhibited person; second, the often fabricated or fantastic textual accounts—both long pamphlets and broadside or newspaper advertisements—of the freak’s always extraordinary life and identity; third, the staging, which included costuming, choreography, performance, and the spatial relation to the audience; and fourth, drawings or photographs that disseminated an iterable, fixed, collectible visual image of staged freakishness that penetrated into the Victorian parlor and family album. For commercial ends, freak exhibits enlisted, then, the oral and visual senses as well as their technological prosthetics, the reproducible printed word and image, to bombard actual and potential audiences with the freaks that their conventions manufactured. 17  FitzGerald, “Side-Shows,” part 2, 409.

Although commercial hyperbole drove all these narrative modes, the linguistic genres themselves varied. The fabulous was shot through with the scientific; truth claims abutted the credulous; the mundane flanked the peculiar. One example is the sensationally embroidered printed biographies of the freak’s life, accomplishments, and corporeal irregularities. According to one pamphlet, the pregnant mother of the hir­ sute Madame Howard, the Lion Woman, was attacked by lions that her brave father then slew. Similarly, the Lobster Boy’s fate was determined when his pregnant mother allegedly fainted at the sight of her husband’s exceptionally large catch of the day.18 Tattooed white men were ostensibly captured and tortured by cannibals. Missing Links were discovered in the jungles of darkest Africa. The armless and legless per­ formed on stage, with their alternative limbs, such ordinary tasks as violin playing, calligraphy, needlework, or taking tea, which were then detailed in inflated language that makes them remarkable even as it invites pity and admiration. Autographed souvenir cabinet photographs or the extremely popular cartes d’visites literally framed freaks by surround­ ing them with enhancing props like jungle backdrops or by juxtaposing giants with midgets, for instance, or fat men with human skeletons to intensify by contrast their bodily differ­ ences.19 Presented along with the printed souvenirs were the oral narratives of the showman’s pitch, the lecturer’s yarn, and the “professor’s” pseudo-authoritative accounts—all ornamented with the lurid and dramatized to the point of caricature. Respected medical doctors authenticated the exhibits by detailing their examinations in language at once clinical and reverent. Costuming enhanced the extraordinary quality of the freak’s body, and staging established distance as well as literal hierarchies between the group of specta­ tors and the lone spectacle on the elevated platform or in the sunken pit. Living skeletons wore leotards; fat or bearded ladies sported frills and jewels; hermaphrodites dressed in half-male and half-female outfits; Zulu warriors became alien by way of animal skins, spears, whoops, and jungle scenes. Conventionalized stage names created parodic juxtapositions as well. Midgets always had inflated titles from “high” soci­ ety, such as Commodore Nutt, General Tom Thumb, Princess Wee-wee; fat ladies’ names, such as Dolly Dimples, Captivatin’ 18  The theory of maternal impression as a source of congenital anomalies is discussed in Marie Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1993). 19  Michael Mitchell, Monsters of the Gilded Age: The Photographs of Charles Eisenmann (Toronto: Gage, 1979).

95

96

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

Liz, and Winsome Winnie, mocked feminine scripts. Taken together, these mediating narratives, as well as the cultural premise of irreducible corporeal difference upon which the freak show was founded, comprise the process David Hevey calls “enfreakment.”20 Enfreakment emerges from cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commercialize. Paradoxically, however, at the same time that enfreakment elaborately foregrounds specific bodily eccentricities, it also collapses all those differences into a “freakery,” a single amorphous category of corporeal otherness. By constituting the freak as an icon of generalized embodied deviance, the exhibitions also simultaneously reinscribed gender, race, sexual aberrance, ethnicity, and disability as inextricable yet particular exclusionary systems legitimated by bodily variation—all represented by the single multivalent figure of the freak. Thus, what we assume to be a freak of nature was instead a freak of culture.21 The freak show made more than freaks: it fashioned as well the self-governed, iterable subject of democracy—the American cultural self. Parading at once as entertainment and education, the institutionalized social process of enfreak­ ment united and validated the disparate throng positioned as viewers. A freak show’s cultural work is to make the physical particularity of the freak into a hypervisible text against which the viewer’s indistinguishable body fades into a seemingly neutral, tractable, and invulnerable instrument of the autonomous will, suitable to the uniform abstract citi­ zenry democracy institutes. Yet the freaks’ popularity—the strange blend of reverence and condescension audiences registered—suggests ambivalence toward such forfeiture of the bodily distinction that marked eminence in traditional societies. Bound together by their purchased assurance that they are not freaks, the fascinated onlookers perhaps longed in some sense to be extraordinary marvels instead of mun­ dane, even banal, democrats in a confusing cultural moment. Nevertheless, the privileged state of disembodiment that the freak show conferred upon its spectators, however fraudu­ lent, must have been seductive. It evidently was well worth the dime or quarter at a time when modernization rendered 20  David Hevey, The Creatures That Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery (New York: Routledge, 1992), 53.

21  Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1984), 109.

the meaning of bodily differences and vulnerabilities increas­ ingly unstable and threatening. The freak show’s golden age occurred specifically within the productive context of nineteenth-century America’s swift and chaotic modernization. That rich cultural matrix provided a conducive environment for the archaic custom of exhibit­ ing and interpreting extraordinary bodies and alien cultures to thrive in the invigorated form of the freak show. But the very cultural and socioeconomic conditions that animated anew this ancient, almost anachronistic, practice composed the very context that at the same time rendered it obsolete, making the freak show today virtually synonymous with bad taste, a practice that has gone the way of public executions. In the escalating upheaval of modernization between about 1840 through 1940, what we now think of as the freak show flared like a comet and then vanished from view, re-emerging in almost unrecognizable forms in the late twentieth century.22 Although it is impossible to disentangle or establish causality among the interlocking and mutually determining cultural phenomena that quickened and then quieted the freak show, let us nevertheless try roughly to uncouple the forces mod­ ernization brought to bear on the exhibition of the anomalous body. Most fundamentally, modernization reconstituted the human body. Freak shows became ritual sites where the uncertain polity could anxiously contemplate the new parameters of embodiment that cultural transformations had wrought. The changes in production, labor, technology, and market relations that we loosely call industrialization redeployed and often literally reconfigured the body, per­ haps turning America’s collective eyes more attentively on the extraordinary body for explanation, validation, or simply comfort. Machine culture created new somatic geographies. For example, the decline of the apprentice system, the rise of the machine and the factory, as well as wage labor, put bodies on arbitrary schedules instead of allowing natural rhythms to govern activity. Rather than machines acting as prosthetics for the human body as they had in traditional cultures, the body under industrialization began to seem more like an extension of the machine, which threatened to replace the working body or at the least restructure its rela­ tion to labor. Efficiency, a concept rooted in the mechanical, ascended to prominence as a measurement of bodily value. 22  Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of Amer­ ican Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); and Bogdan, Freak Show, 2.

“Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity”

Mechanized practices such as standardization, mass produc­ tion, and interchangeable parts promoted sameness of form as a cultural value and made singularity in both products and bodies seem deviant. The professionalization of authority, wage labor, the logic of slavery and abolition, as well as the women’s rights movement challenged the common citizen’s sense of autonomy and mastery over his own body and oth­ ers’ bodies. Moreover, industrial accidents as well as the technologies and scale of the Civil War literally changed the shapes of human bodies on a dramatic new scale. Both senti­ mentalism and realism, the major representational modes of the freak show period, register in differing ways the concern with the place and meaning of the body. If this new body felt alien to the ordinary citizen, the freak’s bizarre embodiment could assuage viewers uneasiness either by functioning as a touchstone of anxious identification or as an assurance of their regularized normalcy.23 Modernization not only reimagined and reshaped the body, it relocated it as well. The new geography of labor changed the physical relationships between bodies, liter­ ally separating workers from owners, the skilled from the unskilled, men from women and children. Mental and manual work migrated apart. Transportation systems and new work patterns moved people from farms and familial contexts into cities as well as into anonymous social and labor hier­ archies. Wage labor and urbanization created unstructured leisure time and forged situational, transient relationships, while change stimulated a taste for the novel. In addition to restless physical migrations, a surging marketplace both promised and threatened social mobility founded upon unstable incomes. All these dislocations created anonymity, forcing people to rely upon bodily appearance rather than kinship or local memberships as indices of identity and social position. 24 In addition, secularization deemphasized the

23  For a discussion of the body’s historicity, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1990); for a history of disability in America, see Deborah A. Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia: Temple Uni­ver­sity Press, 1984). For discussions of the body in modernity, see Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992); David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Belknap, 1983); and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1974). 24  Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­ sity Press, 1982); and Sennett, The Fall of Public Man.

condition of one’s soul, while an intensifying market system spawned the anxious display of status, and technologies such as portraiture photography located identity in one’s exterior image. Social upheavals such as immigration, emancipation, and feminism—along with discriminatory responses such as nativism, segregation, and eugenics—depended upon the logic of visual corporeal differences for their coherence and enactment. Consequently, the way the body looked and functioned became one’s primary social resource as local contexts receded, support networks unraveled, and mobility dominated social life. In this way, modernity effected a standardization of every­ day life that saturated the entire social fabric, producing and reinforcing the concept of an unmarked, normative, leveled body as the dominant subject of democracy. Clocks, depart­ ment stores, ready-made clothing, catalogues, advertising, and factory items sculpted the prosaic toward sameness, while increased literacy and the iterable nature of a burgeon­ ing print culture fortified the impulse toward conformity. With its dependence on predictability, scientific discourse also reimagined the body, depreciating particularity while valorizing uniformity. Statistics quantified the body; evolu­ tion provided a new heritage; eugenics and teratology policed its boundaries; prosthetics normalized it; and asylums cor­ doned off deviance. Additionally, allopathic, professionalized medicine consolidated its dominance, casting as pathological all departures from the standard body. Finally, the notion of progress and the ideology of improvement—always a fraught consolation against the vagaries of contingency—imple­ mented the ascendance of this new image of a malleable, regularized body whose attainment was both an individual and national obligation.25 Thus the iconography of social status transformed as the polity concerned itself with the subtleties of decoding bodies pressed toward the homogenous, even while the ideology of individualism called for distinction. In the midst of this com­ munal quest for identity, the extravagantly marked, pliant figure of the freak quietly commanded the imaginations of practically everyone. During a confusing era, the freak body represented at once boundless liberty and appalling disorder, the former the promise and the latter the threat of democ­ racy. The enterprising entrepreneur capitalized on all of this

25  Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).

97

98

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

amid the prevailing culture of exhibition in which eager and puzzled citizens sought truth, meaning, edification, and dis­ traction within a ceremonial cultural space that ritually fused the visual with the textual. This standardization of life and body under modernity was accompanied by a tendency toward compartmentalization and stratification. As culture became more dynamic, complex, and literate with modernization, broad discourses tended to cleave into multiple, discrete discursive systems inflected by an elaborate system of social markers. Such differentiation created, for example, myriad branches of specialized knowl­ edge and work, each located somewhere on the ladder of social status. In democratized nineteenth-century America, class distinctions solidified, bifurcating cultural discourses as well into high and low.26 Swept along on this wave, freak show discourse, which from premodern times had been primarily iconographic—that is, of the show, whether religious or secu­ lar—began to be intersected by literate, scientific discourse and to fragment into an array of specialized discourses, some popular and some elite. With this dispersion of discourses, Victorian middle-class decorum’s project of self-definition increasingly repudiated the popular freak show, while sen­ timentality recast awe into pity, and other forms of visual entertainment like theater—and, later, movies—prolifer­ ated. Thus the freak show itself—which although perpetually democratic, had always vexed respectability—came to rest irrevocably at the bottom of low culture. Indeed, the word “freak” was stigmatized enough by 1898 that the Barnum and Bailey Circus replaced it with the term “human curiosities” by 1903, supposedly in response to a group protest by the circus freak performers.27 26  Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ver­sity Press, 1988); and Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle-Class: Social Experience in the City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1989).

27  Bruce A. McConachie, “Museum Theater and the Problem of Res­pec­tability for Mid-Century Urban Americans,” in The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present, ed. Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller (New York: Cambridge Uni­ ver­sity Press, 1993), 65–80; “The Uprising of the Freaks,” Barnum and Bailey Route Book, 1897–1901, 21. John Lentz, in “The Revolt of the Freaks,” Bandwagon Sept./Oct. 1977, 26–29, concludes that this revolt was a publicity stunt; nevertheless, its success demonstrates that the term freak was considered generally objectionable by the end of the century.

Yet before the freak show broke off from respectable society around the turn of the century, it was a central ele­ ment in our collective cultural project of representing the body. Although the earlier freak show, with its hybrid of old wonder narratives, commercialized show narratives, and clinical scientific narratives, seems today to have dissipated, it has instead dispersed and transformed. Freak discourse did not vanish with the shows, but proliferated into a variety of contemporary discourses that still allude to its premises. Before this dissemination, however, the exhibition of freaks was inextricably entwined with an array of now-discrete dis­ courses that were then only beginning to differentiate from one another in the nineteenth century. Genetics, embryol­ ogy, anatomy, teratology, and reconstructive surgery—the discrete, high scientific discourses that now pathologize the extraordinary body—were once closely linked with the show­ men’s display of the freak body. The equally elite discourses of anthropology and ethnology, as well as museum culture and taxidermy, were inseparable from the display of freaks in the early nineteenth century. The entertainment discourses of vaudeville, circuses, beauty pageants, zoos, horror films, rock celebrity culture, and Epcot Center have descended from the freak show, to which displays of these kinds were once fused.

INDEX

Abel: 12n20, 23 abjection: xiv, 54, 67, 68–74 defined: 67,68,70 the corpse: 69 abnormality: xiii, 28, 30, 40, 48, 80, 90, 93, 95 acephalic: 44 Adam: 90 Adorno, Theodor: 93 Aeneas: 13, 15 Aeneid: 13, 13n21, 15, 15n25 Aeschylus The Persians: 59 Africa: 22, 48, 53, 61, 95 black African: 83, 92f11.2 African skin: 48 AIDS: 45 Alexander Literature: 22, 23 alien defined: 20 defined by diet: 20 defined by language: 22 defined by geography: 22–23 defined by weapon: 25 prejudice against: 25 Alien (1979 film): xvii, 44–45, 52 Aliens: xv, 20–23, 25, 47, 61, 71, 72, 85, 92, 95–97 Aliens (1986 film): xvii, 45, 52 Alter ego: 52, 71–72 Amazons: 25, 53 Abrose, Saint: 23 America: xv, 51–53, 58, 93, 96–98 American: xv, 91, 93, 94, 96 racism: xv–xvi, 77 Anderson, Benedict: 84 animal nature: 25 anti-semitism: xv–xvi, 77, 81, 83, 84, 86 Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (L. Perry Curtis, 1971 monograh): 33 Arendt, Hannah: 84 Aristotle: 23, 26, 46, 90 Aristotelian taxonomy system: 46

art horror: 27–36 attitude of characters vs attitude of audience: 30 impurity clause: 31, 32 Arthur, King: 9n10, 16, 25, 44, 53, Asia: 26, 60, 61 Asianism: 26 Asiatic: 59, 63 astomi: 19, 21, 25 “At the Mountain of Madness” (H.P. Lovecraft, 1931 story): 30 atticism: 26 augury: 93 Augustine, Saint: xii, xiv, xvi, 22n10, 23, 46, 90

Bacon, Sir Francis: 35n16, 60, 90 Bakhtin, Mikhail: xiii, 49, 53, 53n44 Balfour, Arthur James: 60, 61, 65 barbarians: 20, 22, 23, 51, 51n36 Bartholomew Fair: 91 bearded women: 94, 95 Bede: 11 Beowulf (character): 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12n20, 13, 15, 16, 17n31, 17, 18 Beowulf (poem): 3, 4–18, 54 “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (J.R.R. Tolkien, 1936 essay): xiii, 4–18 Beowulfiania: 4, 4n4 Beowulf’s dragon: 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14n23, 17n31, 18 Bible: 41, 47, 51, 64 Black Lives Matter: xv Black Ashes: 30 blemmyae: 23, 24f3.2, 25, 46n10 Blob, The (1958 film): 35 blood: 69, 78, 83–87 of Jesus: xi and soil: xv Bogdan, Robert: 89 Bosworth, Dr. Joseph: 4 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 film): 45, 83, 87

Buffalo Bill (character): 76–79 Burke, Carter (character): xvii Burton, Tim: 87 Butler, Judith: 54, 54n47 Bynum, Caroline Walker: xi

Cain: 11, 12n20, 14, 23, 25 Camille, Michael: 37–42 Caliban: 52, 57 Candyman (1990 film): 78 Canguilhem, Georges: xiii cannibalism: 21, 51, 53, 94, 95 canon/canonical: xii, 37, 38–42, 58, 60 capitalism: 77, 84n28 Carmilla (Le Fanu, 1872 novella): 30n3, 45 Carroll, Noël: xii, xiii, xiv, 27, 28–36 castration: 70 Catholicism: xi, 11 centaurs: 90, 95 Chaos: 12, 15n25 Chaucer, Geoffrey: 60 chimera: 28, 41 Christine (1983 film): 34 Christopher, Saint: 48n22, 57 Cicero: 90 City of God (Augustine of Hippo, fifth c. theological treatise): 23 cleft palate: 90 climactic theory: 26n30 clubs: 25 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome: xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, 43, 44–55 Colby-Hall, Alice: 25 Collins, Wilkie: 87 congenital abnormalities: 90, 95 conjoined twins: 92, 95 Coppola, Francis Ford: 45 AIDS documentary: 45 corporation: xvii Cromer, Lord: 60, 60n3, 61, 63–65 Ctesias see entry for Ktesias cultural moment: 44, 45, 48, 96

100

index

cultural studies: 44 curiosities: 90, 91n7, 93, 94, 98 cyclopes: 23, 51 Cynewulf: 8, 54 cynocephalus: 21, 22, 46, 48, 48n22, 54, 57

Darwinism: 45, 62 Davidson, Arnold: 93 De Bruyne, Edgar: 26 De Cain et Abel (treatise): 23 Deleuze, Gilles: 80 Demme, Johnathan: 76 demons: xvi, 18, 47, 53, 54 Denmark: 6, 7, 9, 13, 15 Derrida, Jacques: xiii, 40, 40n5, 44, 46 Des monstres et prodigies (Ambroise Paré, 1573 medical treatise): 92 devil, the: 15, 15n25, 23, 25, 52, 53 dinosaurs: 31, 50 disability studies: 89, 97n23 Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault, 1975 monograph): 58, 76 divine warning: 92 Douglas, Mary: 27, 34–36 draconitas: 10 Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897 novel): 28, 80–83 Dracula, Count (character): 28, 30–32, 54, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 85–87 dragons: 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 17, 17n31, 18, 28, 40, 49 dreams: xiii, 29, 30 Drout, Michael D.: 3 dwarfs: xii, 6, 83, 90

Earth: 10, 15, 61 Elene (poem): 54 Egypt: 45, 60, 62, 65, 90, 92 Elephant Man, The: 81 Elephant Man (1980 film): 81 encyclopedias: 19, 21, 46n10, 48 enfreakment: 89, 96 England: xiii, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 19, 52, 60, 60n2, 82, 83, 90 English nationalism: 85 Enlightenment: xiii, 90, 93 Epic of Gilgamesh, The (Sumerian epic poem): xvi Ethiopia: 20, 21, 53 Ethiopians: 20n4, 48 meaning: 48 ethnocentrism: 20, 21 ethnology: 61, 98 eugenics: 97

exorcism: 53

fascism: xv–xvi, 45 fairy tale/story: 10, 12, 13, 28, 35n18 Feagin, Susan L.: 27 fetish: 44, 69, 81 film: xv, xvi horror: xv, xvii, 28, 29, 32, 45, 51, 52–53, 76–79, 81, 85, 88, 98 gothicization: 78, 79, 81, 85, 88 racial monstrosity: 77, 78 Filthy Race: 49 fin de siècle: 45 Fiend without a Face (1958 film): 35 fire: 12, 31n7, 48, 52 Foucault, Michel: xiii, xiv, 44, 47, 51, 54, 57, 58, 64, 76, 79, 80, 85 France: xii, xiii, 47, 60n2 Frankenstein (1931 film): 77, 78 Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818 novel): 76, 77, 80, 82, 86, 87 Frankenstein, Victor: xii, 29 Frankenstein’s monster: 29, 34, 49, 77, 79, 81, 85, 87 freak from corporeal extravagance to pathological specimen: 91, 93 history of term: 93 of culture: 96 of nature: 96 freak discourse: 89–92, 94, 98 freak show: 91–98, 92f11.2, 94f11.5 commercialization of abnormality: 95 demise of: 98 effects of modernization and industrialization: 96 golden age: 96 history: 93, 97 Freud, Sigmund: 36n20, 52, 54, 62, 66, 67, 70, 73, 75, 80, 86 Friedman, John Block: xiii, xiv, 19, 20–26, 46 Fulk, Robert D.: 3 Garber, Marjorie: 46n9, 78n5 gargoyles: 53, 77 Gates, Henry Louis Jr.: 49 gender: xvi, 43, 48, 49, 51, 53, 76–79, 81, 85, 95, 96 as a construct: 45, 48 Genesis (Biblical book): xvi, 15, 15n24, 23, 25, 51, 52, 93 Gerald of Wales: xi, xvi–xvii, 43, 48, 49 Germany: xiii, 47 ghosts: 30, 31n4, 34, 35, 38

giants: xii, xiv, 6, 11n14, 12, 12n20, 14, 14n23, 18, 25, 30, 44, 45n7, 46, 47, 49, 50, 50n31, 52, 53, 94, 95 Giger, H. R.: xvii, 34n14 Gilgamesh: xvi Giraldus Cambrensis see entry for Gerald of Wales Girard, René: 49 Godzilla (character): xv, xvi, xvii, 49 Godzilla (1954 film): xvi Goliath: 90 gothic: 30–31n4, 75, 77–78 masochism: 79 monstrosity: 75, 77, 78–88 race: 78 gothic architecture: 38, 39, 40, 77 gothic (genre): 76 Gray, Dorian (character): 76, 79, 81, 82, 85 Greece: xiii, 11, 19 Greek mythology: 4n2, 12, 14, 14n23 Grendel (character): 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 11n20, 13, 14n23, 14–18, 54 Grendel’s Mother (character): 3, 6 griffins: 28–90 Guattari, Félix: 80 Halberstam, Judith/Jack/J: 75, 76–88 Haraway, Donna: 41, 51n39 Harker, Johnathan’s journal: 28, 29, 45, 83 Harker, Mina (character): 85 hate groups: xv, xvi Hegel, George W. F.: 49 Heorot: 6, 15, 16, 18 Heracles/Hercules: 25 hermaphrodites: 43, 48, 53, 92, 94, 95 Hevey, David: 89, 96 Homer: 7, 11, 20, 22, 23, 50, 51, 59 homophobia: 45, 78, 86 homosexuality: 45, 48, 80, 85, 86, 87 Honda, Ishirô: xv, xvii Horkheimer, Max: 93 horror: xiii, xiv, xvii, 14, 27, 28–36 Howling, The (1981 film): 28 Hrothgar: 12n20, 14, 16 Huet, Marie-Hélène: 48n21 hybridity: 90, 95 Hyde, Mr. (character): 29, 32, 34, 76, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87 hydras: 6, 49 Iceland: 6, 11, 14 India: 60, 62, 63 Indian Ocean: 53

Ingeld: 7, 9 inhuman: 14, 18, 20, 41 insects: 31, 34, 52 intersexuals: 43 invasion: xv, 18, 50, 62 invisibility: 59, 79, 83 Ireland/Irish: xi, 30, 33, 49, 85 Irving, Henry: 45 Isaiah carving, Souillac: 38, 38f6.1, 39, 41 Islam: 61, 80 Islamic art: xvi Island of Dr. Moreau, The (H. G. Wells, 1896 novel): 34 Japan Russo-Japanese War: 60, 60n2 Jekyll, Henry (character): 34, 76, 77, 81, 86, 87 Jews: xv, xvi, 46n9, 47, 52, 78, 81, 83, 83n23, 83n24, 84–86 Johnson, Barbara: 46 Juliana (first c. poem): 54 Jurassic Park (1993 film): 50 Kaijū: xv, 15 Ker, W. P.: 6, 6n7, 8n9, 12 Kermode, Frank: 39 Kilmister, Lemmy: 56 King Kong (1933 film): 29, 52 King, Stephen: 30, 31n6, 53 Koran, The: 65 Kristeva, Julia: 35n17, 54, 67, 68–74, 75, 85 Ktesias: 20, 21, 25, 46n10

Lacan, Jacques: 54, 70, 71, 80, 81 lamia: 45 Lecter, Hannibal (character): 77 Le Duc, Violette: 38, 41 Le Fanu, Sheridan: 30n3, 35, 45 lesbian lamia (Carmilla, 1872): 30n3, 45 Le Goff, Jacques: 53 Leviathan: 50 Leviticus: 34 Lewis, Matthew: 77, 86 Lilith: 48 longue durée: 44 Lovecraft, H. P.: 30, 31–35 lusus naturae: 93 Lycaon: 50 Lycidas (John Milton, 1637 poem): 93 Lynch, David: 81 Lyotard, Jean-Francois: xiii

Mandeville, John: 21, 22, 46, 60 Mandeville’s Travels, see Travels of Sir John Mandeville marginalia: 53 marvellous: 19, 25, 91–94, 96 Marvels of the East: xiii Mason, Bertha: 48, 52 “Measures of Man”: 19, 20–25 Megasthenes: 20, 25, 46n10 Melville, Stephen: 41 mermaids: 90, 92 Metamorphoses: 50, 65 Metod: 13 Middle Ages: 19, 20, 26, 44, 47, 49, 53 Middle Earth: 3 Milton, John: 8, 54, 93 minotaur: 90, 95 miscegenation: 48, 51, 52, 79 misogyny: 51, 53 Mitter, Partha: 57 Monk, The (Matthew Gregory Lewis, eighteenth c. novel): 86 monkeys: 94 monster (defined): xii, 92 monster studies: xii, xiv, 3, 27, 57, 89 monster theory: xii, xiii, xiv, 27, 43, 45, 47, 54, 67, 75 monstrosity: 37 and appearance: 22, 30, 35, 45, 51n39, 77, 79 and behaviour: 48, 53, 83–85 and climate: 26n30, 48 and cosmology: 28 and deformity: xi, 29, 30, 47, 83, 89 as discourse: 45, 54, 58, 59, 64, 65, 70, 77, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98 and disease: 31, 45 and dress: 25, 46n9, 76, 78n5, 95 and excess: 26, 77, 82, 87, 95, and gender: xvi, 43, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53, 53n42, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85, 87, 95, 96 and geography: 51 and governments: 23 and humanity: xvi, 20, 21, 26, 59, 71, 84 and hybridity: 90, 95 and invisibility: 59, 79, 83 and language: 19, 20, 22, 23, 47, 50, 92 and the maternal: 70, 72, 73, 80n8, 81, 85, 95n18 and morality: 22, 47, 48, 53, 54, 68, 74, 82 and nakedness: 23 as omens and portents: 30, 92

index

and other: xi, xiii, xvi, 20, 22, 25, 39, 41, 46, 52, 72, 73, 74, 83, 85, 86, 94 as pathology: 91 and pity: 95, 98 and race: 26, 33 and rationality: 22, 46, 61, 70, 93 and science: 31, 46, 87, 91,93 and sexuality: xvi, 40, 45, 48, 51, 53, 73, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85–87, 90 as scapegoat: 49, 53 contemporary: 6, 19, 31, 45, 62, 76–79, 81, 85, 88, 98 female: 48n21 in medieval art: 40 racialized: 77 monstrous birth: 90 monstrous peoples: 46 Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, The (John Block Friedman, 1981 monograph): xiii, 19, 20–26 More, Thomas: 47 Morte d’Arthur (Thomas Malory, 1485 romance): 44 Mothra (1961 film): xv Murnau, F. W.: 45 Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Ann Radcliffe, 1794 novel): 86 Native Americans: 47, 52 Native Son (Richard Wright, 1940 novel): 52 Nazis, xv, xvi, xvii: 47, 64 Nerman, Birger: 5 New Testament: 11 Newton, Sir Isaac: xii, xiv Nicomachean ethics: 26 Night of the Living Dead (1968 film): 28 Norse: 9, 12, 14n23, 14 Nosferatu (1922 film): 45

ogres: 9, 18 Odysseus: 11 Odyssey (Homer, eighth c. epic poem): 13, 93 Oedipus: 20, 67, 80 Oliver, Kelly: 67 Orchard, Andy: 3 Orient: 50, 57, 58–65 Oriental: 62, 66 description: 61 Orientalism (book): 57, 58–65 Orientalism (concept): 58–65

101

102

index

after the Napoleonic Invasion: 62 American: 58, 63 Anglo-French: 58 German: 58 as political vision: 58, 65 and politics: 58–65 Othello (character): 46 other(s): xi, xiii, xvi, 20, 22, 25, 39, 41, 46, 52, 72, 73, 74, 83, 85, 86, 94; see also alien othered: 19 otherness: 59, 66, 68, 70, 71, 74, 79, 84, 86, 96 Ovid: 47, 50, 50n31

parasite: 76–88 Pare, Ambroise: 92 perverts: 76–88 Philosophy of Horror (Noël E. Carroll, 1990 monograph): xiii, 27, 28–35 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Oscar Wilde, 1890 novel): 82 polymorphism: 46, 51 Polyphemus: 51, 52 polysemy: 49 post-enlightenment: 58 postcolonialism: xiv Psycho (1960 film): 81 Purity and Danger (Mary Douglas, 1966 monograph): 27, 34 Queer theory: xiii Queste del Saint Graal (medieval romance): 53

Rabelais and His World (Mikhail Bakhtin, 1947 monograph): xiii, 53n44 race black skin: xvi, 48 racism: 33, 51, 62, 66, 77, 78, 84 Radcliff, Ann: 86 Readings, Bill: 41 reconstructionism: 58 religion: xvi, 12, 23, 74 Remiet, Pierre: 42 revenant, xvi: 45 Richard III: 47 Roberston, J. M.: 60 Robot Monster (1953 film): 33 Rodan (1956 film): xv Roy, Bruno: 48

Said, Edward: xiv, 49, 57, 58–66 Saint-Hilaire, Isadore Geoffroy: 93

Salisbury, Lord: xii, 61 Salomon, Nanette: 37 Saracens: 25, 47 Satan: 14 Scanlon, Noel: 30 scapegoating: 49, 53 Schapiro, Meyer: 39 sciapod: 19, 46n10, 57 science: 31, 41, 46, 47, 58, 61, 69, 86, 87, 91 Scriptures: 11, 12 Scylding: 7, 9n10, 16, 17 scylla: 48 sea devil: 92 Sedgwick, Eve: 82, 83, 86 sexual identity: 48, 78, 80 sexuality aberrant: 83, 85 abnormality: 48, 84 bestiality: 40, 90 dangerous: 83, 85 disciplined: 83 fears of: 83 Gothicized: 45, 79, 86, homosexuality: xvi, 45, 48, 80, 85–87 incest: 51, 53, 73 monstrous: 77, 79, 86 normal: 83, 84 “Seven Theses” (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen): xiii, 43, 44–54 Shakespeare, William: 52, 57, 60 She! (1965 film): 51 Shelley, Mary: 29, 82, 87 sideshow: see freak show Silence of the Lambs, The (1991 film): 76, 77, 78 homophobia and sexism in: 78 skin: 77, 87 animal: 23, 25, 27, 95 colour: 48, 51 dark: xvi, 48 female: 79 of monsters: 22, 30, 35, 45, 51n39, 77, 79 poverty: 77 white: xvi, 79 Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Tech­ nology of Monsters (Jack Halber­ stam, 1995 monograph): 75, 76 Smith, Anna: 67 speculum historiale: 48 Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty: 57 Starling, Clarice (character): 77 Stewart, Susan: 45, 51, 89 Stevenson, Robert Lewis: 29, 34, 82, 84, 87

Stoker, Bram: 45, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Lewis Stevenson, 1886 novel): 82, 87 Strong, Archibald: 4, 5, 8n9

Talisman, The (Stephen King and Peter Straub, 1984 novel): 30 telos: 44n1 teratology: 44, 91, 93, 97, 98 Them! (1954 film): 51 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland: 89, 90–98 Tolkien, J.R.R.: xiii, xiv, 3, 4–18 transformation beautiful into abhorrent: 87 cultural: 92, 96 desire into fear: 80 identity into sexual identity: 80 punitive: 50n31 technological: 41 transsexual: 43 transvestism: 78n5, 46n9 Travels of Sir John Mandeville, The (fourteenth c. travel narrative): 21, 21f3.1, 22, 24f3.2, 25 Ultima Thule: 53 unified theory: 44

vampires: 28, 34, 44, 45, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86 Vincent of Beauvais: 48, 54 Virgil: 5, 7, 12, 13, 15

Weinstock, Jeffrey: xvii Weird Sister: 48 werewolf: xi, 50 White, Hayden: 44 white supremacists: xv Wilde, Oscar: 82, 84 Wittkower, Rudolf: xiii, 19 wolf: xi, xii, 28, 34, 50 Woman in White, The (Wilkie Collins, 1860 novel): 87 Wonder Books: 46, 92 witches: 48n21, 52 Wright, Richard: 52 Wunderkammer (cabinets of curiosities): 93 yeti: 44

Žižek, Slavoj: 81 Zombies: xvii, 28, 34, 35