Monstrous Reflection 9781848884076, 1848884079

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction • Elsa Bouet and Petra Rehling
Part I: Political Monstrosity
Monstrosity in Italian Politics • Paola Attolino
Fanatics and Absolutists: Communist Monsters in John le Carre’s Cold War Fiction • Toby Manning
Removing the Blindfold: Power, Truth and Testimony • Adriana Spahr
Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism and Corporatism in the Cinema of the ‘New French Extremity’ • Sophie Walon
Part II: Creating the Monster
Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans: The Impossibility of Utopia in the Strugatskys’ The Ugly Swans • Elsa Bouet
The Name of the Beast: Monstrosity and the Subhuman in Michael Gira and Nietzsche • Michael T. Miller
‘I Can’t even Hate Bates’: Sufferance, Guilt and Strategies of Victimization in Psycho • Marcia Heloisa
Language and Monstrosity in the Works of Tommaso Landolfi • Irene Bulla
Part III: Locating the Monster
The Evil City: Geographical Space in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World • Niculae Gheran
The Human and the Inhuman in Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama • Carlo Comanducci
Beyond the Crisis: Turn of the Tide for the Monstrous Duality of Hong Kong Cinema • Petra Rehling
Monster as a Figure of Memory • Mateusz Chaberski
Part IV: Bodily Monstrosity
Jeepers Creepers: Queer Bogeyman • Sergio Fernando Juárez
Caliban and Aaron: Monstrous Bodies and Monstrous Language • Kristen Wright
Making Yellow Monstrous: Frankenstein to Fu Manchu • Viv Chadder
Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative: The Witchy Writer and Liquid Identity • Brooke Maggs
Part V: Gender Monstrosities
Revenge as a Means to Preserve Individual Sovereignty: Monstrous Women in French Literature • Mateusz Orszulak
‘Ugly as a Foetus’: Female Bodies and Abject Sacredness in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot • Madeleine Bendixen
Racial and Sexual Fantasies in the Allegoric Orgies of Venus Noir and Black Swan • Fjoralba Miraka
‘She’s No Hag’: New Visions and Narratives of Grendel’s Mother in Zemeckis’ Beowulf • Almudena Nido
Cyclopes, Hundred-Handers, Typhon and the Mechanisms of Monstrosity in Hesiod’s Theogony • Camila Aline Zanon

Citation preview

Monstrous Reflections

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board Simon Bacon Katarzyna Bronk John L. Hochheimer Stephen Morris Peter Twohig

Ana Borlescu Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter John Parry Karl Spracklen S Ram Vemuri

An At the Interface research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/ The Evil Hub ‘Monsters and the Monstrous’

2014

Monstrous Reflections

Edited by

Petra Rehling and Elsa Bouet

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-407-6 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2014. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Elsa Bouet and Petra Rehling Part I

Political Monstrosity Monstrosity in Italian Politics Paola Attolino

Part II

vii

3

Fanatics and Absolutists: Communist Monsters in John le Carre’s Cold War Fiction Toby Manning

17

Removing the Blindfold: Power, Truth and Testimony Adriana Spahr

29

Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism and Corporatism in the Cinema of the ‘New French Extremity’ Sophie Walon

39

Creating the Monster Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans: The Impossibility of Utopia in the Strugatskys’ The Ugly Swans Elsa Bouet

53

The Name of the Beast: Monstrosity and the Subhuman in Michael Gira and Nietzsche Michael T. Miller

63

‘I Can’t even Hate Bates’: Sufferance, Guilt and Strategies of Victimization in Psycho Marcia Heloisa

71

Language and Monstrosity in the Works of Tommaso Landolfi Irene Bulla

79

Part III Locating the Monster The Evil City: Geographical Space in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Niculae Gheran

Part IV

Part V

91

The Human and the Inhuman in Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama Carlo Comanducci

101

Beyond the Crisis: Turn of the Tide for the Monstrous Duality of Hong Kong Cinema Petra Rehling

109

Monster as a Figure of Memory Mateusz Chaberski

119

Bodily Monstrosity Jeepers Creepers: Queer Bogeyman Sergio Fernando Juárez

131

Caliban and Aaron: Monstrous Bodies and Monstrous Language Kristen Wright

143

Making Yellow Monstrous: Frankenstein to Fu Manchu Viv Chadder

153

Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative: The Witchy Writer and Liquid Identity Brooke Maggs

161

Gender Monstrosities Revenge as a Means to Preserve Individual Sovereignty: Monstrous Women in French Literature Mateusz Orszulak

173

‘Ugly as a Foetus’: Female Bodies and Abject Sacredness in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot Madeleine Bendixen

183

Racial and Sexual Fantasies in the Allegoric Orgies of Venus Noir and Black Swan Fjoralba Miraka

193

‘She’s No Hag’: New Visions and Narratives of Grendel’s Mother in Zemeckis’ Beowulf Almudena Nido

201

Cyclopes, Hundred-Handers, Typhon and the Mechanisms of Monstrosity in Hesiod’s Theogony Camila Aline Zanon

215

Introduction Elsa Bouet and Petra Rehling The conference on Monsters, where this collection originated, attracted academics from a wide range of fields, including Film studies, Literature, Classics, Sociology, Linguistics and Politics. The debates at the event engaged and questioned existing definitions but also served to reflect on traditional ideas of monstrosity. Ultimately the title of this volume was chosen because all the chapters represent the idea of a ‘monstrous reflection’ in one way or another. Clearly, the multiplicitous meanings of the title are meant to echo the manifold cultural impacts of the monstrous. A reflection signifies the images that are projected or captured, just as a monster is a projection of cultural fears and anxieties. A reflection can also mean the process of contemplating and considering concepts, ideas and facts. So monsters can serve as a means to explore the cultural anxieties they embody and the reasons for these anxieties. Thus the monster acts as a mirror highlighting the reasons underlying the creation of categories. 1 A reflection is also a negative remark, a comment, a statement applicable in that the monstrous or the word ‘monster’ becomes a label of otherness and exclusion. However, this label is sometimes a construction, a discursive and rhetorical trope, which only serves to other those deemed undesirable, as they do not fit in the prescribed or official boundaries of normality. This suggests that the monster might not always be monstrous, but is only believed to be so because of the need for dominant ideologies to other. The monster is an integral part of society, a necessity or an appendix, often dismissed, but just as often welcomed or embraced. Nietzsche knew that ‘when you gaze long enough into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you’.2 We can understanding the monster as both the reflection and the reflected. This volume is about either side: the ones gazing into the mirror and the ‘things’ staring back at humanity along with the uncomfortable truths that are revealed in the process. Some monsters follow their instincts and desires, often to extreme levels. By discarding inhibitions and limits they move into society’s taboos; they become taboos themselves. Monsters live through contrast and they are not always the ones hiding in the shadows, on the contrary, where monsters rule, they make outlaws of the ‘normal’, the normative, the harmless, the human, or rather the humane. As it stands out among the adapted and the normative, the monstrous does indeed fulfil some requirements of the artistic, as it is somehow ‘created’ and artificial and may in fact invite our commentary by default. Often the monster ‘wants’ to be found, as revealing its monstrosity will also consolidate its uniqueness. Maybe it is this mirroring, or ‘revealing’, that is needed to draw back mankind from the abyss, to avoid infinite defeatism from overtaking hope for change or integration. Monsters can be imagined marvellous and fantastic beasts. These can be physically repulsive as they are depicted as deformed, abject or powerful entities

x

Introduction

__________________________________________________________________ which threaten to bring destruction and chaos to the order. Such creatures emanate from alternate realms, be they magical, divine or hellish. Beasts such as Titans and Cyclopes and other fantastic creatures are deemed monstrous because they threaten the real, the laws of nature as we know them, but also the prescribed categories of normalities. Although fantastic, these beasts encapsulate moral codes of behaviour and cultural dictates which proscribe transgression. However, most of the monsters who populate these chapters are not fantastic: some of them are simply human beings outcast for being different. Women, people of a different sexual orientation or race are depicted as monstrous by the dominant forces as they do not fit in with the patriarchal order, the heteronormative structures or the discourses on racial purity. All the chapters point to the process of mirroring which make these dominant discourses monstrous. The chapters indicate that depicting difference and otherness as monstrous reflects back on the persons, governments and ideologists making such statements, and that therefore they are truly the monstrous ones. When we expel the monstrous, categorize or stigmatize it, this can happen without noticing that the act of separation, the ‘othering’, can become monstrous in itself. The moment we define something as monstrous we also begin to understand ourselves as different. The very definition of ‘monster’ seems to forbid affiliation, but monsters often reflect on the ones in their presence or under their thrall. As much as the good in people is mirrored in some monsters, it is just as easy to give in to their charismatic, alien power. Thus a fascination with monsters carries a warning as they sometimes do more than exclude those they deem different and inferior. As predators they live other lives than as victims; monsters have the power to rule and instil fear. Time and again monsters have become leaders and managed to turn inhumane agendas into gruesome reality. The chapters here present people and governments who simply lack any human empathy. These types of monsters silence dissidence and decimate people who refuse to comply with their dictatorial rules. They wreak havoc, torture and kill and taint history with their evil deeds, traumatising social consciousness and individuals. History can therefore become a haunting and monstrous presence threatening the very stability of the present in which national and individual memories or traumas turn into monsters resurfacing from the past. Ending such monstrosity may prove to be impossible when it continuously infects the present and subsequent generations, finds new forms of empowerment and perpetrates new atrocities. Even giving a voice to the oppressed and attempting to uncover hidden truths, revealing the extent of historical barbarity, is not always enough to destroy such resistant types of monstrosity. While some monsters can seemingly be defeated – or so some narratives indicate – others appear to come back to life again and again, demonstrating the resilience of othering procedures throughout history. Monsters are cultural capital in mirroring and reminding us of our wrongs and hence implicitly utopian by

Elsa Bouet and Petra Rehling

xi

__________________________________________________________________ showing us our flaws and evilness. We can read into them means to improve our interactions with individuals and societies. As long as humanity is not united, we will require monsters to remind us of the underlying reasons of our division. Can we ignore the monstrous? Of course we can; but then we also have to live with the consequences. Instead we could learn or decide to live with the monster, tame or reform it, abandon or fight it – if it needs fighting – or hope it will fade into nothingness before we turn into monsters ourselves from staring into the abyss for too long. The chapters here question common tropes of monstrosity. From ugly beasts, such as diseased or deformed characters, to powerful beauties, from destructive mythological fiends to evil, supernatural creatures, from the utterly other to the less than human, from the feminine to the sexual deviant, from memories and feelings that destroy oneself of social relations and cultures, to a political past that haunts the political, racial other, from non-normative behaviour to the need to create an enemy for political ends, from the sick and rebellious to animalising those who are deemed inferior; monsters are classifiable because of their abnormal, nonnormative behaviour in that they do not fit in the categories of the acceptable. The first section opens by looking at politics. Politics are full of monstrous figures, such as leaders, opponents, enemies, insurgents and political misfits. This section shows how political discourses are created to expose the monstrousness of their opponents. In the first chapter, Paola Attolino looks at how language is used by international journalists to depict Silvio Berlusconi as a controversial, monstrous figure. Attolino’s study reveals how language is manipulated to create value judgements on politicians and how the monster becomes a discursive construction. Adriana Spahr’s analysis focuses on a similar issue: the creation of monsters during the military regime from 1976 to 1984, when the government justified its use of violence on some citizens by describing them as monstrous for protesting against the regime. Spahr exposes the limits of this official discourse by revealing the monstrous actions of a government, who tortured its citizens and made them disappear, never to be seen again, their names erased from official records. Spahr reveals the monstrosity of official history, which tries to hide its own monstrosity underneath the creation of monsters. Next, Toby Manning depicts how monsters are created in the fiction of spy novelist John Le Carré. He shows how the author constructs a Manichean dichotomy of good and evil by means of a monstrous enemy, the communist spy, thereby revealing not only British cultural anxieties of the Cold War years but also the monstrosity of British politics. Sophie Walon investigates the extent to which characters in the New Extremity French cinema can be perceived as monstrous: they present protagonists disconnected from reality, apathetic and resorting to self-harm to reconnect with their bodies, or ultra aggressive desensitised characters competing in a corporate environment. The struggles and lack of humanity of the characters mirror the monstrousness of the

xii

Introduction

__________________________________________________________________ capitalist system which engenders disconnections as it pits individuals against one another. The second section focuses on ways in which monsters are created in literary works and the Classics. Here, again, the chapters connect in that they highlight the mechanisms by which monstrosity is fallaciously determined and often the result of the continuation of practises of categorisation and ostracising. The section starts with Elsa Bouet’s chapter where she explores how in the Strugatsky brothers’ The Ugly Swans lepers are deemed monstrous, whilst they offer the potential for utopia. This label is the result of the long lasting practise of excluding otherness on grounds of its difference. Michael Miller also reflects on the creation of categories in Michael Gira’s short story collection The Consumer. Using Nietzsche’s concept of the superhuman, Miller explores how the categories of human and subhuman are created in the stories and reveal the reasons for which some groups of people are perceived as monstrous and thus excluded from society. The categories of the monstrous are also assessed by Marcia Heloisa in her chapter on Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho and the TV series Bates Motel. Heloisa discusses how film and series challenge the monstrosity of the main character, Norman Bates. The film explores the psychological reasons that force the character to commit murder and also his normality, indicating that the monster could very well lurk within all of us, thus challenging the category of the monstrous itself. Finally, Irene Bulla investigates the work of Tommaso Landolfi. Investigating the author’s fantastic, monstrous language which brings about a crisis of categories in that the relation between signifier and signified is broken down, Bulla depicts the self-reflective nature of Landolfi’s work, which presents the constrictive nature of language both as a monstrous restrictive aspect of literary creation and of meaning creation. The subsequent section focuses on locating the monster in history, tradition, memory and specific geographical landscapes. Spaces thus become monstrous, hosting the ideological other and the grievances of the past that it sometimes capitalises on. Niculae Gheran posits dystopian narrative as depicting monstrous cities, confluences of modernity, disenchantment, ideology and control. Gheran argues that these fictitious cities are purposely constructed as monstrous to decry the monstrosity of modern cities, which implicitly serve to purport the ideals of Romantic spatiality. Carlo Commanducci explores how in Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama a Japanese isolated, rural environment becomes a space where differences between the human and inhuman – even the animal – are blurred. Set against the backdrop of deeply ingrained traditions and punitive codes, the film exposes how the humans threaten to tear their own community apart; indicative of humanity’s own monstrosity and inhumanity. In yet another space-time continuum, Petra Rehling explains how Hong Kong cinema was built on geographical boundaries and the need to demonise China during the pre-handover turmoil, a conflict which cinema recreated inside a gothic Hong Kong populated by monstrous and criminal entities that had to be defeated by any violent means

Elsa Bouet and Petra Rehling

xiii

__________________________________________________________________ possible. Rehling understands the 1997 handover to China as a now lost antagonism that a modern, post-unification Hong Kong can no longer capitalise on. Mateusz Chaberski’s chapter analyses the contemporary play A Piece on the Mother and the Fatherland by Bożena Umińska-Keff, in which a mother and daughter relationship breaks down because of the mother’s suffering during the Second World War. In this play, memories themselves are presented as monstrous. In this respect, the chapter suggests the monstrosity of history but also of the linguistic and cultural images that pervade the play. Bodily identities which differ from the prescribed norm can also be considered as monstrous by dominant ideological discourses. For example, racial differences, sexual practises, prominent bodily parts, deformity or bodily labels can all serve to visually and physically mark otherness and thus monstrosity. Sergio Fernando Juárez investigates the queer elements of Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers. In the film, the monstrous Creeper only feasts on the bodies of his male victims while discarding the flesh of his female ones. Juárez argues that this association of the male bodies with the monstrous Creeper is heavily sexualised and therefore construes gay male sexuality as monstrous. Kristen Wright’s chapter exposes how in two of Shakespeare’s plays the characters’ monstrosity is defined by their black skin, which in Renaissance culture marked them as physically threatening. However, in the plays these features are not their only monstrous aspects. Emphasis is also placed on their mouths, which become the loci of their monstrous sexuality, threatening to eradicate racial purity and their linguistic ability, allowing them to upset the power balance. Similarly, Viv Chadder’s chapter focuses on how films and fiction demonise race. Looking at the representation of ‘yellowness’ in cultural representations spanning from Frankenstein to the 1960s character Fu Manchu, Chadder argues that yellow skin embodied a threat to British cultural identity, and as a monstrosity served to preserve the stability of identity and therefore difference. Brooke Maggs’s chapter equally reflects on bodily labels, such as that of the witch, and how they impact on social identity and her own writing practice. Identifying with the monstrous figure of the witch, Maggs explores her own ability to explore radical otherness through the creation of various characters. Sliding between different labels, this liquid identity reveals that monstrosity is less a binary and much more than a categorisation, it is an embracing of difference. The final section centres on femininity and masculinity as monstrous. The chapters all explore how gender binaries create division in which gender difference appears monstrous. Most notably, the chapters expose the traditional representation of the female as monstrous, which in turn serves to mirror the monstrosity of the masculine who objectifies and oppresses women. The section opens with Mateusz Orszulak who looks at the representations of women in French works written during the Ancien Régime. Women are seen as monstrous as they question and rebel against the patriarchal social order of their times. However, this also serves to

xiv

Introduction

__________________________________________________________________ criticise and demonstrate that the social categories and hierarchies of the times were a monstrous construction. Madeleine Bendixen analyses the depictions of abject femininity in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariots. She explores the ways in which the feminine is associated with the Kristevan abject and questioned through its association with liminality, the socialised and the sacred. Fjoralba Miaraka’s chapter discusses how films depict and portray the male gaze as objectifying women. Some films focus so intensively on how the men frame, objectify and commodify the female body that the viewer can become complicit in this process. This allows the viewer to become aware and therefore to reflect on the monstrosity of the masculine gaze. Almudena Nido looks at how feminine beauty can be construed as monstrous. Analysing Zemeckis’ film remake of Beowulf, Nido presents how Grendel’s mother is monstrous in a different way compared to the original poem: she is no longer monstrous because she has given birth to a monster but because her beauty threatens to disarm the warrior society of the film, showing that ultimately monstrosity needs to be updated to different cultural contexts. Finally, Camila Zanon’s analysis of the ways in which some creatures are deemed monstrous in Hesiod’s Theogony. While they all share the same monstrous features, divine strength, deformity and liminality, Zanon investigates why some of these creatures are deemed monstrous while others are not.

Notes 1

See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-25. In this essay, Cohen argues that the monster ‘incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy’ and that it ‘refuses categorization’ as it does not participate in the ‘classificatory “order of things”’. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Aphorism 146 (1886).

Bibliography Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’. Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3-25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘Beyond Good and Evil’. Aphorism 146. 1886.

Part I Political Monstrosity

Monstrosity in Italian Politics Paola Attolino Abstract In the aftermath of the last political election in Italy, the independent journalist Gwynne Dyer wrote about the victory of ‘a mythical beast called “Grillosconi”’, a blend term formed by the surname of the leader of the newborn Five Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, and the most controversial figure of Italian politics in the last twenty years, Silvio Berlusconi. What Dyer names ‘the Grillosconi monster’ is emblematic of the social, political and democratic crisis that Italy has been experiencing over the last few years. By applying the Appraisal framework – an approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances and to manage interpersonal relationships – to a corpus of journalistic articles, the present chapter aims at investigating to what extent lexical choices, linguistic uses and the employment of pragmatic strategies may reveal an idea of monstrosity regarding Italian politics. Key Words: Italian politics, monstrosity, Appraisal Framework. ***** ‘I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed’.1 The very first lines from Eminem’s current hit single seem to remind us that we live in a time of monsters. We live with our monsters. ‘The monster is that uncertain cultural body in which is condensed an intriguing simultaneity or doubleness’. 2 Indeed, monstrosity customarily represents the epitome of difference, of otherness, thus calling into question both individual and collective identity, be it ethnic, national or political. ‘I’m Italian and Mr Berlusconi doesn’t represent me’. This sentence has turned out to be a sort of mantra for many Italian people, who want to distance themselves from the awkward (monstrous?) behaviour of Italy’s former Prime Minister. In the last twenty years, in fact, the image of Italy in the world has been nearly exclusively associated with Berlusconi’s inappropriate witticisms (his description of the newly elected president of the United States, Barack Obama, as ‘young, handsome and even suntanned’3 is but one), his huge conflict-of-interest problem, and his notorious ‘bunga bunga’ parties. However, the idea for this chapter started from the intriguing definition given by the independent journalist, Gwynne Dyer, of the result of the 2013 political elections in Italy: The winner of last week’s election in Italy was a mythical beast called “Grillosconi”. That is bad news for Italy, for the single European currency, the euro, and even for the future of the

4

Monstrosity in Italian Politics

__________________________________________________________________ European Union. Not that “Grillosconi” will ever form a coherent government in Italy.4 Blending the names of two frontrunners in the Italian elections is a wordformation strategy not new to media coverages of Italian politics. The international edition of Newsweek magazine dedicated the cover of its April 7, 2008 issue to ‘Veltrusconi’, Italy’s hybrid candidate embodying ‘a grand coalition to save Italy’ and visually represented by a disconcerting photomontage where the faces of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Walter Veltroni, his left-centre rival, are merged into one.5 However, what Dyer names as ‘the Grillosconi monster’ is emblematic of the social, political and democratic crisis that Italy has been experiencing in recent years, a crisis that will ‘continue indefinitely’. A thorough reading of the article makes it clear that in fact the real monster is the Italian electorate, which is partly still loyal to Silvio Berlusconi, ‘the older part of the beast’, but has partly shifted to the newer one, ‘a clown like Grillo’.6 Dyer’s article fits the category of Commentary, a kind of journalism that presents arguments and offers opinions. Indeed, journalistic discourse in general is far from being objective. The way people and events are observed, interpreted and reported in news stories reflects ideologies and points of view, resulting in acts of evaluation. In order to explore, describe and explain the way language is used to evaluate, hence to adopt stances and manage interpersonal relationships, researchers James Martin and Peter White have developed the Appraisal framework, an extension of the Systemic Functional Linguistics theories introduced by Michael Halliday. Appraisal is concerned with interpersonal meaning in texts, in other words with the negotiation of social relationships by communicating emotion, judgement and engagement. Thus, such an approach is particularly valuable in media discourse analysis, as it enables us to explore the notion of journalistic voice. The Appraisal framework comprises three main sub-systems: Attitude, Dialogue (or Engagement) and Intertextuality. Attitude concerns ‘the semantic resources used to negotiate emotions, judgments and valuations’.7 Dialogue resources ‘are used by speakers to negotiate a space for particular attitudes and points of view within the diversity of value positions operative in any speech community’.8 Under Intertextuality, speakers adopt value positions towards what they represent as the views and statements of other speakers.9 Applying the Appraisal framework to a small corpus of journalistic articles, this chapter aims at investigating to what extent lexical choices, linguistic uses and the employment of pragmatic strategies may reveal an idea of monstrosity regarding Italian politics. As the analysis intends to be qualitative rather than quantitative, it has been carried out on a small collection of English journalistic texts about Italian politics,

Paola Attolino

5

__________________________________________________________________ Google searched and assembled according to a specific and empirical criterion: the occurrence of the term monster and/or its derivatives. It is worthy of note that the above-mentioned article by Gwynne Dyer is not the only one referring to Italian politics in these terms. Up to sixteen articles are available. The mere fact that the data analysed include terms like monster, monstrous and monstrosity suggests the idea of a negative Attitude of the journalists. Among the three terms, the adjective monstrous is more frequently used, and it is often associated with abstract concepts: (1)

Monstrous bureaucracy, expired politicians and corruption are some of [Italy’s] drawbacks.10

(2)

European Journalists Condemn “Monstrous” Media Law As Italy Supports Concentration.11

(3)

Italy has been taken on a ride that was both monstrous and farcical.12

(4)

Once stripped of his office, sentenced to community service, the leader of Forza Italia will still have two formidable weapons: an intact media apparatus and “monstruous” financial resources – even more monstrous in lean times.13

(5)

But the media mogul didn’t hide his bitterness at his conviction, branding it “monstrous”.14

(6)

Monti did nothing to hack back the monstrous debt (it rose from 120 per cent to 129 per cent).15

(7)

Still, it is difficult to see how a low private debt can counterbalance Italy’s monstrous public debt of €1800 bn: the fourth highest public debt in the world after USA, Japan and Germany.16

(8)

The complexity of the [Tangentopoli] investigation developed into something so monstrous that it was too difficult for the average citizen to keep up with the facts.17

Significantly, only three out of nine occurrences of the adjective monstrous are given in quotation marks, which means that only those elements are externally sourced judgments, hence they do not contribute to the reader’s sense of the journalist’s own position or voice. In (5) the use of the term monstrous is

Monstrosity in Italian Politics

6

__________________________________________________________________ attributable to Silvio Berlusconi, who is labelled as ‘the media mogul’ and refers to a judicial decision regarding him, whereas in (2) it conveys the opinion of the European Federation of Journalists. Extract (4) offers an example of scare quotes, as quotation marks are used for purposes other than to identify a direct quotation, suggesting the journalist’s wish to emphasize or to distance themselves from the term in quotes.18 In the other cases, we are concerned with explicit negative judgements, for which the author takes direct responsibility. The modifier monstrous falls into a category of judgement that Martin and White have termed ‘Social Sanction’.19 Indeed, any system of judgement is socio-culturally specific, as we generally interpret ‘someone’s behaviour in positive or negative terms within a framework of social and ethical values’.20 Within Social Sanction, the domains of Propriety (right vs. wrong behaviour) and Veracity (honesty vs. dishonesty) emerge. Thus, Social Sanction is the dimension that is complementary to Social Esteem, which is made up of assessment meanings included under the headings of Normality (usual vs. unusual), Capacity (capable vs. incapable) and Tenacity (resolute vs. irresolute).21 In the extracts reported above, in fact, we could easily replace the adjective monstrous with abnormal. The sense of the sentences would be the same, but with a different connotation, as monstrosity may serve to signal social distress. It is worth noting that in extracts (4), (6) and (7) the adjective monstrous refers to a concept related with money (financial resources, debt, public debt). Interestingly, the complex etymology of monster traces back to the Latin monstrum, which is derived from monere (‘to warn’ or ‘to advise’), sharing the same root with money.22 As to the occurrences of the nouns monster and monstrosity, in addition to the already mentioned ‘Grillosconi monster’ by Gwynne Dyer, further examples were found in a thought-provoking text: (9)

[…] the advent and popularity of the Movimento Cinque Stelle and their unwillingness to set aside its scruples and “fare l’inciucio” (underhand schemes), has brought Left and Right together to create a new type of government in Italy. They have created a monster.23

(10)

The bestial union of two opposites into a new monstrosity recalls most vividly Dante’s description of the transformations of the thieves in Inf. XXIV and Inf. XXV. Dante describes three different types of transformations, but the one that fits these the best describes the sin of Peculato, or theft of a public good. 24

(11)

Why is [the PD-PDL government] a monstrosity and not a positive moment of bi-partisanship? The motive for this unnatural union is

Paola Attolino

7

__________________________________________________________________ the preservation of the two-party system, the caste system, that benefits both parties while not serving Italy’s interests or respecting the clear call of the vox populi. 25 Here, the monstrosity of Italian politics is applied not to the 2013 electoral result (as in Dyer’s article), but to the new government born from such an impasse: a ‘bestial’, ‘unnatural union’ between Bersani’s centre-left PD (Partito Democratico) and Berlusconi’s centre-right PDL (Popolo della Libertà). Interestingly, the expression ‘fare l’inciucio’ in (9) is difficult if not impossible to translate into English, as if it were an idiosyncrasy of Italian politics, a peculiarity leading to the sin of ‘Peculato’ mentioned in (10). These sinners, in fact, as described by Dante, are attacked by a reptile and then merge with it to form a new monstrous serpentine beast, the ‘unnatural union’ stated in (11). It is worth noting that Dante is also singled out in Girlfriend in a Coma, a thought-provoking 2013 film directed by Italian journalist Annalisa Piras, and co-written by Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist. The film identifies ‘ignavia’, the sin describing the lack of moral courage condemned by the Poet in the Divine Comedy, as a crucial issue behind Italians’ failure to act when confronted with their country’s relentless decline over the last twenty years. Significantly, Giovanna Melandri, the president of the foundation running the MAXII National Museum of the 21st Century Arts of Rome, where the film was originally scheduled for February 13, 2013, banned the Italian premiere from being held there because of the imminent ‘delicate’ political elections in Italy. In an interview with The Guardian, Bill Emmott accused the Italian government of censorship.26 As they are journalistic commentaries and editorials, most of the articles investigated present a higher frequency of monogloss, namely utterances that intentionally and openly convey the individual, subjective opinions and arguments of the author. However, along with Attitude, the data analysed display Dialogic resources, as extract (11) illustrates. The use of the interrogative form, in fact, suggests the author’s intention of engaging in a dialogue with the reader. The Engagement system developed in the Appraisal framework follows Bakthin’s dialogic perspective of language and his notion of heteroglossia, namely the diversity of voices, style of discourse or points of view occurring in any form of verbal communication.27 The following extracts offer further examples of dialogic positioning, as the journalists engage with other voices and alternative viewpoints at play in the current communicative context: (12)

So why would anyone look to [Beppe Grillo] for a solution to today’s pressing problems? Good question.28

(13)

“What is it with you Italians?” I keep asking them. I get no plausible answer.29

Monstrosity in Italian Politics

8

__________________________________________________________________ (14)

The two decades of Berlusconi should finally be assessed: how was Berlusconism born? How could it have taken root? 30

(15)

Tic toc…will Italy hit the ‘Stop’ button in time? 31

(16)

Will America learn the lessons Italians missed? 32

(17)

Oh, and one last thing: Berlusconi’s mild tea-making punishment is highly unlikely to dissuade others from committing similar crimes, now is it? Such is Italy. Well, what does one expect from a bunch of coffee drinkers?!33

Noticeably, the author is aligned vis-à-vis the putative addressee, the potential reader, though in (13) the direct quotation performs a sort of double engagement (with Italians and with readers). Extract (17) offers a clear example of irony, a figure of speech broadly spotted in the data analysed. The article, in fact, is about another Italian monstrosity: the soft punishment (a one-year community service with Alzheimer’s patients) assigned to Silvio Berlusconi after his conviction for tax fraud, and the author refers ironically to such a verdict as ‘tea making duties’.34 Indeed, the often cutting edge of irony is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens. And it happens in what could be called ‘discursive communities’. Definitely, such a community enables irony to occur.35 Moreover, labelling Italians as ‘a bunch of coffee drinkers’36 suggests the idea of a stereotyped imagined community.37 Through their mass audience targeting procedure, the media are in fact extremely influential in the construction of a sense of national coherence, and often make generalisations to the public. The notion of heteroglossia pertains also to the Intertextuality system developed in the Appraisal framework, which comes to the foreground when the author of a text chooses to quote the words of another, either endorsing or disendorsing them. In the articles analysed, the protagonists of the Italian political scenario are often quoted, as in the following examples: (18)

Beppe Grillo – a comedian turned politician who inspired the Five Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle) that shook the foundations of Italian politics – said, “We have to bring politics back to the citizens. We must do politics ourselves. A little more everyday!”38

(19)

“We want to destroy everything,” Grillo said in a recent interview with the BBC. “But not rebuild with the same old rubble. We have new ideas.”39

Paola Attolino

9

__________________________________________________________________ (20)

“Surrender! You’re surrounded!” [Grillo] bellowed over and over again at his rallies. The phrase was traditionally very popular with Italian fascists. 40

(21)

“If you want to count in politics, you have to bring money to your party,” wrote Socialist parliament member Andrea Moroni, defending his public role in a 1992 farewell letter before committing suicide.41

(22)

“Everybody knew, everybody was silent. Who will cast the first stone?” asked Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Italian Socialist Party in July 1992. The symbol of Italian corruption, Mr. Craxi had a simple message: In blaming the entire system no one should feel guilty.42

It has to be said that the data also contain examples of indirect quotation, where there may be considerable paraphrasing, as the words attributed are not so plainly demarcated. The extracts above present neutral or non-endorsing quoting verbs (‘say’, ‘write’, ‘ask’), with the exception of (20), where the verb ‘bellow’ conveys the author’s dis-endorsement,43 as confirmed by the explicit comparison between Beppe Grillo’s boldness and Fascism, which the author considers as the new and the old monstrosity in Italian politics. Indeed, the idea of Fascism as an Italian monstrosity recurs in many of the articles analysed, but it is more frequently associated with Berlusconism rather than Grillism. It is not a matter of neoauthoritarian political methods, but of a corrupted and long lasting political system, which is hard to get rid of: The infection, our “disease of the century”, has lasted a long time. This also applies to the alleged fall of Berlusconi. It is a relief to know that he will no longer be a critical factor for the parliament and the government. But Berlusconism is still here. And it will be not easy to wean ourselves off this drug that has fascinated not only politicians and parties, but the entire society.44 In fact, the infection the author refers to is Fascism, ‘our’ (the journalist is Italian) enduring contamination, which Berlusconism is compared to in terms of its resilience, as the expression ‘alleged fall’ suggests. The author’s definition of Berlusconism as a ‘drug’ that has fascinated the whole society conveys another common feature found in most of the articles analysed. This feature is a token of judgement, an implicit evaluation under which ‘values are triggered by what can be viewed as simply “acts”, apparently unevaluated descriptions of some event or

10

Monstrosity in Italian Politics

__________________________________________________________________ state of affairs’.45 The same expression, ‘Grillosconi’ by Gwynne Dyer, may be considered a token of invoked judgement. The same may be said of ‘Renzusconi’, the newest blend (and the newest monster!) describing the present Italian political situation and, in particular, the secret pact between Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Silvio Berlusconi aimed at introducing ‘the new electoral system, [which] is a monstrum’.46 Though focusing on the how, rather than the why, the short analysis carried out here shows that journalistic lexical choices not only reflect, but also contribute to creating value judgements. The term monster and its derivatives aptly fulfill a socio-political contract in which the language used is in some ways fitting and well established. On the other hand, the lexical choices have a denotative and connotative variability that is often linked to the phenomenon described as going beyond journalistic language and pointing to the conclusion that what is supposedly assessed as the actual monstrosity of the Bel Paese is the realization that in a democracy you get the politicians you deserve.

Notes 1

Eminem, ‘The Monster’, The Marshall Mathers LP2, Aftermath Entertainment, Interscope Records, 2013. CD. 2 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Monster Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), ix. 3 Nick Squires, ‘Silvio Berlusconi Hails “Handsome and Suntanned” Barack Obama’, The Telegraph, 6 November 2008, viewed on 07 May 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/3392769/SilvioBerlusconi-hails-handsome-and-suntanned-Barack-Obama.html. 4 Gwynne Dyer, ‘Italy: Grillosconi Wins’, Gwynne Dyer, 28 February 2013, viewed 05 May 2014. http://gwynnedyer.com/2013/italy-grillosconi-wins/. Italics mine. 5 Marco Castelnuovo, ‘Il Veltrusconi di Newsweek’, La Stampa, Diario Politico, 31 March 2008, viewed on 21 October 2014. http://www.lastampa.it/2008/03/31/blogs/diario-politico/il-veltrusconi-dinewsweek-BBmcn1Ja9MAD1G9zSZAcfK/pagina.html. Blog. 6 Dyer, ‘Italy: Grillosconi Wins’. 7 James R. Martin, ‘Beyond Exchange: Appraisal Systems in English’, Evaluation in Text, eds. Susan Hunston and Geoffrey Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145. 8 Peter R. R. White, ‘Dialogue and Inter-Subjectivity: Reinterpreting the Semantics of Modality and Hedging’, Working with Dialogue, eds. Malcolm Coulthard, Janet Cotterill and Frances Rock (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), 71.

Paola Attolino

11

__________________________________________________________________ 9

James R. Martin and Peter R. R. White, The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 10 Gaurav Daga, ‘Arvind Kejriwal Is India’s Beppe Grillo’, MalayMailOnline, 13 February 2014. Italics mine. 11 Anon., ‘European Journalists Condemn “Monstrous” Media Law As Italy Supports Concentration’, Fédération Européenne des Journalistes, 9 April 2011, viewed on 30 April 2014. http://www.ifj.org/nc/en/news-single-view/browse/22/backpid/59/category/africa2/article/european-journalists-condemn-monstrous-media-law-as-italy-supportsconcentration/. Italics mine. 12 Peter Popham, ‘Italy Has Been Taken on a Ride that Was Both Monstrous and Farcical’, The Independent, 9 November 2011. Italics mine. 13 Barbara Spinelli, ‘The Burdensome Legacy of Il Cavaliere’, VoxEurop, 28 November 2013, viewed on 21 February 2015. http://www.voxeurop.eu/en/content/article/4361041-burdensome-legacy-ilcavaliere?xtor=RSS-18. Italics mine. 14 Eric Sylvers, ‘Berlusconi to Work with Alzheimer’s Patients for Community Service’, The Wall Street Journal, 30 April 2014. Italics mine. 15 Nicholas Farrell, ‘Beppe Grillo: Italy’s New Mussolini’, The Spectator, 2 March 2013. Italics mine. 16 Ernest Levy, ‘Italy’s Countdown to Default has Begun’, The DaftBlogger eJournal, 1 June 2011. Italics mine. 17 Juraj Kittler, ‘Money and Politics, Italian Style’, The Christian Science Monitor, 28 February 2002. Italics mine. 18 Andrew Calcutt and Philip Hammond, Journalism Studies: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 98 19 Martin and White, The Language of Evaluation, 52. 20 Clare Painter, ‘Development Attitude: An Ontogenetic Perspective on Appraisal’, Text, Vol. 23/2, 189. 21 Martin and White, The Language of Evaluation, 52. 22 Anon., ‘Etymology of Monster’, Etymology Now, viewed on May 15, 2014. http://etymologynow.blogspot.it/2010/08/etymology-of-monster.html. 23 Jason Houston, ‘Bersani the Snake: Peculato’, Italy Today With Dante, 23 April 2013. Italics mine. 24 Ibid. Italics mine. 25 Ibid. Italics mine. 26 Lizzie Davies, ‘Film-Maker Accuses Italian Government of Censorship After Premiere is Called Off’, The Guardian, 01 February 2013. 27 Michail M. Bakthin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981 [1930s].

12

Monstrosity in Italian Politics

__________________________________________________________________ 28

Dyer, ‘Italy: Grillosconi Wins’. Nicholas Farrell, ‘What Is With You Italians?’, Taki’s Magazine, 16 April 2012. 30 Spinelli, Barbara, ‘The Burdensome Legacy of Il Cavaliere’. 31 Levy, ‘Italy’s Countdown’. 32 Kittler, ‘Money and Politics’. 33 Alex Roe, ‘Old Human Rights Champion Silvio Berlusconi to Serve Tea’, Italy Chronicles, 21 April 2014. 34 Ibid. 35 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London/ New York: Routledge, 1994), 85. 36 Roe, ‘Silvio Berlusconi to Serve Tea’. 37 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 38 Daga, ‘India’s Beppe Grillo’. 39 Dyer, ‘Italy: Grillosconi Wins’. 40 Farrell, ‘What Is With You Italians?’. 41 Levy, ‘Italy’s Countdown’. 42 Ibid. 43 White, ‘Dialogue and Inter-Subjectivity’, 71. 44 Spinelli, ‘The Burdensome Legacy’. 45 Martin and White, The Language of Evaluation, 64. 46 Perry Anderson, ‘The Italian Disaster’, London Review of Books, Vol. 36, No.10, 22 May 2014. 3-16, viewed on 26 August 2014. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/perry-anderson/the-italian-disaster. 29

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Anderson, Perry. ‘The Italian Disaster’. London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No.10, 22 May 2014. 3-16. Viewed on 26 August 2014. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/perry-anderson/the-italian-disaster. Anonymous, ‘Etymology of Monster’, Etymology Now. Viewed on May 15, 2014. http://etymologynow.blogspot.it/2010/08/etymology-of-monster.html.

Paola Attolino

13

__________________________________________________________________ Anonymous, ‘European Journalists Condemn “Monstrous” Media Law As Italy Supports Concentration’, Fédération Européenne des Journalistes, 9 April 2011. Viewed on 30 April 2014. http://www.ifj.org/nc/en/news-single-view/browse/22/backpid/59/category/africa2/article/european-journalists-condemn-monstrous-media-law-as-italy-supportsconcentration/. Bakthin, Michail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981 [1930s]. Calcutt, Andrew and Philip Hammond. Journalism Studies: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Castelnuovo, Marco. ‘Il Veltrusconi di Newsweek’, La Stampa, Diario Politico. 31 March 2008. Viewed on 21 October 2014. http://www.lastampa.it/2008/03/31/blogs/diario-politico/il-veltrusconi-dinewsweek-BBmcn1Ja9MAD1G9zSZAcfK/pagina.html. Blog. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Daga, Gaurav. ‘Arvind Kejriwal Is India’s Beppe Grillo’, MalayMailOnline, 13 February 2014. Viewed on 13 May 2014. http://www.themalaymailonline.com/opinion/gaurav-daga/article/arvind-kejriwalis-indias-beppe-grillo. Davies, Lizzie. ‘Film-Maker Accuses Italian Government of Censorship After Premiere is Called Off’, The Guardian, 01 February 2013. Viewed on 26 August 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/01/filmmaker-accuses-italiangovernment-censorship?INTCMP=SRCH. Dyer, Gwynne. ‘Italy: Grillosconi Wins’. Gwynne Dyer, 28 February 2013. Viewed on 05 May 2014. http://gwynnedyer.com/2013/italy-grillosconi-wins/. Eminem, ‘The Monster’, The Marshall Mathers LP2, Aftermath Entertainment, Interscope Records, 2013. CD.

14

Monstrosity in Italian Politics

__________________________________________________________________ Farrell, Nicholas. ‘Beppe Grillo: Italy’s New Mussolini’, The Spectator, 02 March 2013. Viewed on 12 May 2014. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8854261/italys-new-duce.

———. ‘What Is with You Italians?’. Taki’s Magazine, 16 April 2012. Viewed on 29 April 2014. http://takimag.com/article/what_is_it_with_you_italians_nicholas_farrell/print#axz z31QnCpBM1. Halliday, M.A.K. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Baltimore: University Park Press, 1978. Houston, Jason. ‘Bersani the Snake: Peculato’. Italy Today With Dante, 23 April 2013. Viewed on 14 May 2014. http://italytodaywithdante.blogspot.it/2013/04/bersani-snake-peculato-25.html. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London/ New York: Routledge, 1994. Kittler, Juraj. ‘Money and Politics, Italian Style’. The Christian Science Monitor, 28 February 2002. Viewed on 13 May 2014. http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0228/p08s04-coop.html. Levy, Ernest. ‘Italy’s Countdown to Default Has Begun’. The DaftBlogger eJournal, 01 June 2011. Viewed on 24 April 2014. http://www.daftblogger.com/eurobonds-for-eurozones-crevices/. Martin, James R. ‘Beyond Exchange: Appraisal Systems in English’. Evaluation in Text, edited by Susan Hunston and Geoffrey Thompson, 142-175. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Martin, James R. and Peter R.R. White. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Painter, Clare. ‘Development Attitude: An Ontogenetic Perspective on Appraisal. Text, Vol. 23/2, 183-210.

Paola Attolino

15

__________________________________________________________________ Popham, Peter. ‘Italy Has Been Taken on a Ride that Was Both Monstrous and Farcical’. The Independent, 09 November 2011. Viewed on 01 May 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/italy-has-been-taken-on-a-ridethat-was-both-monstrous-and-farcical-6259215.html. Roe, Alex. ‘Old Human Rights Champion Silvio Berlusconi to Serve Tea’. Italy Chronicles, 21 April 2014. Viewed on 15 May 2014. http://italychronicles.com/berlusconi-human-rights-tea-making-champion/. Spinelli, Barbara. ‘The Burdensome Legacy of Il Cavaliere’, VoxEurop, 28 November 2013. Viewed on 21 February 2015. http://www.voxeurop.eu/en/content/article/4361041-burdensome-legacy-ilcavaliere?xtor=RSS-18. Squires, Nick. ‘Silvio Berlusconi Hails ‘Handsome and Suntanned’ Barack Obama’. The Telegraph, 06 November 2008. Viewed on 07 May 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/3392769/SilvioBerlusconi-hails-handsome-and-suntanned-Barack-Obama.html. Sylvers, Eric. ‘Berlusconi to Work with Alzheimer’s Patients for Community Service’. The Wall Street Journal, 30 April 2014. Viewed on 13 May 2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303948104579533442685 342338. White, Peter R.R. ‘Dialogue and Inter-Subjectivity: Reinterpreting the Semantics of Modality and Hedging’. Working with Dialogue, edited by Malcolm Coulthard, Janet Cotterill and Frances Rock, 67-80. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. Paola Attolino teaches English Language and Linguistics at the University of Salerno (Italy), Department of Political, Social and Communication Science. Her main research interests focus on evaluation in language, sociolinguistics, argumentative discourse (especially media and political language) and nonstandard English. She has variously published on these topics.

Fanatics and Absolutists: Communist Monsters in John le Carré’s Cold War Fiction Toby Manning Abstract John le Carré’s Cold War espionage novels were heralded as a realist antidote to the Manichean, good vs. evil simplicities of James Bond and John Buchan. Rather than creating upright British gentlemen unmasking foreign grotesques, le Carré is held to demonstrate a moral equivalence between the Cold Warring sides. To the contrary, le Carré retains a subtle Manicheanism, and creates British saints just as gentlemanly as Buchan heroes, who do battle with Eastern devils, dehumanised by ‘ideology’. This reflects contemporary anxieties about the continuance of a British ‘way of life’, felt to be under threat from expansionist Soviet communism from without and post-war social reorganisation from within. In Call for the Dead (1961) East German villain, Dieter Frey, is a ‘Satanic’ multiple-murderer who is cathartically eliminated by George Smiley. In Russian master spy Karla, le Carré created an enemy of mythic proportions for Smiley to battle in a 1970s trilogy. Implacable and brutal, Karla is an inhuman ‘fanatic’, a lethal merger of ideology and ‘evil’. That Karla never speaks a word throughout the trilogy means his monstrosity is enhanced, whilst his political ideology is silenced. Modern twists on this Manichean monstrosity occur in the way multiple-murderer, Nazi spymaster Mundt in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Nazi war criminal Karfeld in A Small Town in Germany (1968) both transpire to be on the British side. We see this twist also in the mirror-imaging of Smiley and Karla in Smiley’s People (1979). But in all cases, British monstrosity is a copy of – and defence against – a communist original. With ‘ideology’ presented as a central facet of enemy monstrousness, Western ideology is denied. However, perhaps the unambiguous defeat of these communist monsters is, conversely, an indicator of political insecurity in le Carré. Key Words: Monster, le Carré, Manichean, spy, villain, Cold-War, Soviet, Communism, ideology, socialism, evil. ***** Arriving at the chilly peak of the Cold War, John le Carré’s Cold War espionage novels were heralded as a realist antidote to the Manichean simplicities of John Buchan and Ian Fleming’s James Bond. With his breakthrough novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), le Carré was claimed by critics to reveal a moral equivalence between the Cold Warring sides, ushering in a new realism in spy fiction. In a typical review, The Scotsman declared of The Spy:

18

Fanatics and Absolutists

__________________________________________________________________ There is a chilling authenticity about it: one feels that here truly are the monstrous realities behind the news paragraphs which record the shifts and tensions of the Cold War.1 There is a tension in the language here, between adventure story dramatics and journalistic sobriety, that offers a salient reminder that the ‘realities’ of Cold War ‘tensions’ – hot war; nuclear Armageddon – were both nightmarishly monstrous and banally everyday. That tension also suggests that this new ‘realism’ was not quite the departure it was declared. Le Carré’s most famous spy, George Smiley, may be dowdier of dress and less gifted with girls than James Bond, but he is just as much England’s heroic champion – Saint George slaying the communist dragon. While Smiley’s enemies may be physically less grotesque than Bond’s, they are nonetheless deformed by ‘ideology’. Jerry Palmer claims that thrillers are always concerned with a ‘conspiracy’ that ‘must be a transgression not just of civil law but of natural law … against an immanent order of the world … a malum in se’ (evil in itself).2 Michael Denning adds that in espionage fiction: The thriller is based on paranoia and conspiracy – all of these events fit a pattern which can be traced back to an evil source … which must not only be revealed but also defeated.3 In this respect le Carré is not a departure but is entirely sui generis. Such is the influence of Northrop Frye and his structuralist inheritors that generic conventions tend to be regarded as timeless.4 But in the 1960s and 70s the Soviet conspiracy of communist expansionism was certainly perceived to be real in the West, while the Berlin Checkpoint Charlie standoff (October 1961) and Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) emphasised the real possibility of superpower conflict escalating into nuclear conflagration. Thus, in le Carré’s Cold War novels the archetype of the monstrous villain is deployed to fit the historical moment – to demonise communism – not just to obey the imperatives of genre. Le Carré’s books channel contemporary anxieties about a British ‘way of life’ felt to be under threat not just from without (Soviet communism) but from within. While post-war reform redrew the domestic social map and old distinctions and deferences diminished, post-war political decline redrew the geopolitical map and Britain’s international power diminished. Clearly there is a connection between the threat without and the threat within here for a particular social grouping that was just becoming known as the Establishment. It was a Socialist post-war government that had overseen both social democratisation and imperial decolonisation, with Harold Wilson’s 60s and 70s governments promising more of the same. As the Long Boom began to recede and empire became a financial millstone, working class militancy posed a threat that was inevitably associated in Establishment

Toby Manning

19

__________________________________________________________________ minds with the threat of the Soviet worker state. Trades unions were ‘the peril in our midst’, as a 1956 book by Woodrow Wyatt had it, a volume sponsored by the British government’s secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department, dedicated to demonising Communism. 5 It can be no coincidence that the sole working class character in le Carré’s debut novel, Call for the Dead (1961), Adam Scarr, is a criminal rogue who, for material gain, assists Britain’s communist enemies. But Scarr is by no means the most monstrous character in le Carré’s debut; that honour goes to Dieter Frey. 1. Dieter Frey Dieter Frey in Call for the Dead is the first of an identity parade of communist monsters throughout le Carré’s Cold War novels. The novel’s sympathy for Frey, and his accomplice Elsa Fennan’s persecution by the Nazis as German Jews is quickly overwhelmed by their post-war conversion to communism. In this we see a link to real-life nuclear spy Klaus Fuchs, exposed in 1947 by MI5. We never actually hear what either Dieter or Elsa’s beliefs are, however: Elsa denies all, while Dieter only directly utters two words throughout the novel. Their communism is thus defined as means rather than end: a series of murders as they plot against their former ally, Britain. As guide and focaliser, we have to take Dieter at Smiley’s word – and Smiley’s word is consistently overwrought regarding Dieter: [Dieter] was the same improbable romantic with the magic of a charlatan: the same unforgettable figure which had struggled over the ruins of Germany, implacable of purpose, satanic in fulfilment, dark and swift like the Gods of the North. 6 Dieter’s limp, once a focus of sympathy, now becomes monstrous. On cue, Dieter will shortly callously murder his accomplice Elsa at a theatre performance. The point is that, as a representative of communism, Dieter has to be a threat to British verities: Everything [Smiley] admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for … the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom? 7 That tell-tale ‘mass’ suggests that communism is a cipher for the working class – the enemy within. Raymond Williams once wrote, ‘There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses’.8 Similarly we are only given, in Call, ways of seeing communism as monstrous:

20

Fanatics and Absolutists

__________________________________________________________________ Larger than life, undiminished by the moderating influence of experience [Dieter] was a man who thought and acted in absolute terms, without patience or compromise.9 Dieter cared nothing for human life: dreamed only of armies of faceless men bound by their lowest common denominators; he wanted to shape the world as if it were a tree, cutting off what did not fit the regular image.10 Such formulations rest on Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous evocations of ‘totalitarianism’, linking Soviet communism with German fascism.11 Le Carré’s synonym for totalitarianism, ‘absolutism’, probably derives from Clement Attlee’s 1948 national address, suggesting a Russian continuity with oppressive Tsarist absolutism: ‘the absolutists who suppress opposition masquerade under the name of upholders of liberty’. 12 Communism here is authoritarian, hypocritical, while the West is an implicit bastion of ‘liberty’. 2. Jens Fiedler The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) begins and ends at the Berlin Wall. Le Carré’s declaration that the Wall was ‘the perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad’ reflected a common Western stance.13 Here, ‘ideology’ is something possessed only by the communist East. When hard-bitten Western agent Alec Leamas is asked what his philosophy is by communist GDR interrogator, Jens Fiedler, Leamas responds impatiently: ‘What do you mean, a philosophy? … we’re not Marxists, we’re nothing. Just people.’14 Leamas makes it very clear here: communists have ideology; Westerners are neutral, above dogma. Which, of course, usefully avoids having to defend capitalism. Communists, in Leamas’s implication, are not people but ideological automatons. ‘Ideology’ is thus a defining facet of enemy monstrousness. Nevertheless, the deepest articulation of the communist other in le Carré’s work is found in The Spy. Fiedler, deputy chief of the GDR Abteilung, is carefully depicted as personable and principled, and is thus a key exhibit in critics’ ‘moral equivalence’ arguments. Yet Fiedler is made to articulate a hard-line Stalinist philosophy that le Carré clearly regards as monstrous. A movement which protects itself against counter-revolution can hardly stop at the exploitation – or the elimination, Leamas – of a few individuals. … I myself would have put a bomb in a restaurant if it brought us further along the road. Afterwards I would draw the balance – so many women, so many children; and so far along the road.15

Toby Manning

21

__________________________________________________________________ This speech of Fiedler’s illustrates what Patrick Dobel correctly notes as a ‘tension between a monstrous utilitarianism that dismisses all human costs as means to a greater good and western respect for individual worth [which] undergirds all the books’. 16 However, the ‘greater good’ of communism is never properly defined. Communism as utopianism is invisible; unheard. Instead Soviet bloc communism appears much as Party ideologue O’Brien declares in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power’.17 3. Karla In Soviet master-spy ‘Karla’, le Carré created a modern Moriarty, a monstrous enemy of mythic proportions for Smiley to battle in his 1970s Karla Trilogy. Karla is the mastermind behind the ‘mole’, Bill Haydon (based on Cambridge spy, Kim Philby) in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). Karla’s key characteristic is a brutal disregard for human life: as he eliminates Western espionage networks in Tinker, tries to protect his Chinese mole in Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and covers his own misuse of Party resources in Smiley’s People (1979), the body count stacks ever higher. Amidst this his female cover name is a grotesque joke. Smiley’s Sovietologist colleague, Connie Sachs, reveals of Karla’s lover: One day she ups and gets ideas above her station … soft on revolution. Mixing with bloody intellectuals. Wanting the State to wither away … He had her shoved in the slammer. … In the end the old despot’s love turned to hatred and he had his ideal carted off and spavined: end of story … He destroyed all records of her, killed whoever might have heard, which is Karla’s way, bless him, isn’t it, darling, always was? 18 As Michael Wood’s review of Smiley’s People suggested, Karla’s characterisation is somewhat simplistic: ‘The Russians are monsters … because they don’t care about killing and we do’. 19 To be more precise, the Russians are monsters because they do not care about killing in the name of ideology. Witness: [Smiley] thought of Karla again, and of his absolutism, which at least gave point to the perpetual chaos that was life’s condition; point to violence, and to death; of Karla for whom killing had never been more than the necessary adjunct of a grand design. 20 You get the impression that a crime passionel would be more acceptable. Murder as planning is a nightmare vision of bureaucratic monstrousness. As it is, we meet Karla only twice throughout the trilogy. When Smiley interviews Karla in a prison in Delhi, Karla sits in implacable silence while Smiley

22

Fanatics and Absolutists

__________________________________________________________________ tries to persuade him to defect to the West. Karla’s inhumanity is here consolidated by his immunity to the bounty of the capitalist West. Here is Smiley on Karla: 21 I believed, you see, that I had seen something in his face that was superior to mere dogma, not realising that it was my own reflection. I had convinced myself that [Karla] ultimately was accessible to ordinary human arguments. 22 Karla opting to return to the East – where he is likely to be imprisoned or shot – is seen as the ultimate monstrousness. ‘[Karla] would rather die than disown the political system to which he was committed … Karla is a fanatic’ declares Smiley.23 ‘Evil’ and ‘ideology’ make a lethal merger in this idea of ‘fanaticism’. However, by remaining silent – not just in this Delhi scene, but throughout the entire trilogy that bears his name – Karla never actually articulates any ideology behind his monstrous actions. Despite Smiley flagging up Karla’s ‘fanaticism’, Karla’s communism is what Pierre Macherey would call the ‘not said’ of the trilogy.24 Thus the text conflates communist means as communist ends, ideology blurs with power, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This was the climate of the times: in his exposé of the Cambridge spy ring, Andrew Boyle called communism an ‘inhuman philosophy’,25 while Ronald Reagan would routinely reference the Soviet Union in mythic – and Star Wars (1977) – terms as the ‘evil empire’. 26 Communism is monstrous. 4. Mirrors of Monstrousness Modern twists on this Manichean monstrosity occur in the idea that the monster might be in the mirror, that in le Carré, the West is depicted quite as negatively as the East – the moral equivalence argument referenced earlier. In two 1960s novels le Carré uses archetypally monstrous villains to explore this mirroring. In The Spy, Hans Mundt is the brutal head of the East German Abteilung and an overt antiSemite. Leamas and his boss Control hatch a complex scheme to bring Mundt down. But the twist is Leamas’s discovery that the monstrous Mundt is in fact ‘our’ man, Britain’s own ‘mole’ inside the communist fabric. Similarly, Klaus Karfeld is built up as the villain in A Small Town in Germany (1968), a politician whose rowdy rallies are tearing up West Germany. A minor Jewish official in the Bonn British Embassy discovers Karfeld is a Nazi war criminal. The stinger is that the British already know, and have covered it up to secure Karfeld’s backing for British entry into the Common Market. What are the implications when the monsters turn out to be on ‘our’ side? Now le Carré’s famed ethical greyness starts to look more like uncertainty, a moral ‘yes, but…’. Because, for all le Carré’s unease about unsavoury political alliances, the points made to Leamas by his boss, Control, early in The Spy, are never fundamentally overturned either in The Spy or in le Carré’s fiction in general.

Toby Manning

23

__________________________________________________________________ Control says, firstly: ‘We are never going to be aggressors … We do disagreeable things but we are defensive’:27 i.e. the Russians started and perpetuate the Cold War. This reflects standard Western propaganda: ‘Communism, personified by the Soviet Union, was consistently presented as expansionary and offensive in contrast with the West, which was presented as essentially defensive.’ 28 Such propaganda nonetheless elides Western provocations like missiles in Turkey, the US nurturing European capitalism via the Marshall Plan, West German rearmament, or in this fictional case, placing spies inside the GDR. Secondly, Control declares, ‘we do disagreeable things so that ordinary people … can sleep safely in their beds at night’.29 This is a justification of almost any action (Control’s ‘methods’), towards a vague but potent ‘greater good’ (Control’s ‘ideals’); actions like sacrificing Leamas’s lover, Liz, to safeguard Nazi Mundt’s position as a GDR British spy. Indeed, thirdly, Control declares, ‘You can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?’30 This suggests both that Soviet policy has no ‘greater good’ and that Britain, in doing ‘wicked things’ is simply keeping up with the Joneskis, the Soviets, authors of this ‘monstrous utilitarianism’. This thinking is often reproduced, unquestioned, by le Carré critics, e.g. ‘le Carré’s novels indict an absolute loyalty to a cause as the most dangerous of all characteristics to the values of the West’. 31 Dobel is here making a distinction between ‘values’ (aka ‘ideals’, Western, benign) and ‘cause’ (aka ‘ideology’, Eastern, malign) that is identical to that of Control. The West has no ideology. Something similar occurs in the mirroring of Smiley and Karla in Smiley’s People (1979). Reviewer Christopher Booker, saw the novel dramatising a psychic ‘battle with the inner monster which lies in each of us.’32 For Al Alvarez, Smiley himself had become ‘a bit of a monster’.33 Parallels are built up between the two spies – as Karla becomes humanised via love of his errant daughter, so Smiley is dehumanised by entrapping Karla via the very love of that daughter. But for all this mirroring, Karla remains the more monstrous of the pair. At another Berlin Wall finale, as Smiley waits for Karla to defect, Smiley agonises about his ‘methods’: An unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. 34 Note the language here: ‘evil’, ‘fanaticism’, and most notably the clear statement that the ruthless ‘weapons’ ‘are his’, Karla’s – they originate from the Soviet system. So when Connie Sachs says, in an oft-quoted speech, ‘It’s grey.

24

Fanatics and Absolutists

__________________________________________________________________ Half-angels fighting half-devils. No one knows where the lines are’ 35 what initially appears as an assertion of moral equivalence is, on closer inspection, nothing of the sort. If there is a neutral moral line, then half-angel is half way to beatitude, halfdevil is half way to damnation: there is a vast gulf between them. If there were any doubt about which side is which, Smiley has, one scene previously, dubbed himself ‘Mr Angel’, while ‘devil’ is used of a servant of the Soviet system.36 The grand designs here belong only to communism. George Orwell once accused Dickens of not being able to see capitalism as just such a grand design: It was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils cannot be remedied … in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system.37 The same is true of le Carré: communism is just bad human nature – men behaving monstrously. Possessing no ideology, no system, the West possesses no home-grown evil, only imitative monstrosity. But perhaps there is a hint of political uncertainty inside the very certainty with which these ‘monsters’ are always defeated in le Carré. Such victories as Smiley’s cathartic elimination of Dieter Frey, were by no means guaranteed in real life. Kim Philby, unlike le Carré’s fictional counterpart, Bill Haydon, was never caught, never interrogated, never killed. Philby was exonerated in the House of Commons, kept on the British payroll, and allowed to escape and to defect to the Soviet Union to gloat. No wonder we need Saint George Smiley to slay the communist monster, to resolve and put to rest this cultural and political anxiety: not just to spare British blushes, but to quell doubts about the British system.

Notes 1

Patrick Gaffney, ‘Crime Calendar’, Review of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré, The Scotsman, 21 September 1963, 6. 2 Jerry Palmer, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 185. 3 Michael Denning, Cover Stories (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 46. 4 See: Bruce Merry, Anatomy of the Spy Thriller (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1977), 132; Lars Ole Sauerberg, Secret Agents in Fiction: Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Len Deighton (New York: St Martin’s, 1984), 22, 59. 5 John Jenks, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 106. 6 John le Carré, Call for the Dead, (Harmondsworth: Penguin [1961] 1985), 131. 7 Ibid., 138.

Toby Manning

25

__________________________________________________________________ 8

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Hogarth, [1958] 1993), 300. Le Carré, Call, 131. 10 Ibid., 138. 11 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, [1950] 1994); 1961 New Yorker columns. 12 Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-53: The Information Research Department (London: Routledge, 2003), 42. 13 Le Carré, Afterword to Lamplighter edition of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1989), 208. 14 Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (London: Pan, [1963] 1964), 133. 15 Ibid., 133-34. 16 J. Patrick Dobel, ‘The Honourable Spymaster; John le Carré and the Character of Espionage’, Administration & Society 20 (1998), 194. 17 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, [1949] 2013), 301-302. 18 Le Carré, Smiley’s People (London: Pan, [1979] 1980), 184. 19 Michael Wood, ‘Spy Fiction, Spy Fact’, Review of Smiley’s People by John le Carré, New York Times, 6 Jan 1980, 16. 20 Ibid., 220. 21 Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (London: Sceptre, [1974] 1999), 215. 22 Ibid., 221. 23 Ibid., 222. 24 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1966] 1978), 84. 25 Andrew Boyle, Climate of Treason (London: Coronet, [1979] 1980), 28. 26 Ronald Reagan, Address to the National Association of Evangelicals, 8 March 1983, viewed 15 May 2014, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/reagan-evil-empire-speech-text/. 27 Le Carré, The Spy, 20. 28 Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 128. 29 Le Carré, The Spy, 20. 30 Ibid., 20. 31 Dobel, ‘The Honourable Spymaster’, 198. 32 Christopher Booker, ‘Spymasters and Spy-Monsters’, Review of Smiley’s People by John le Carré, The Spectator, 9 Feb 1980, 16. 33 A. Alvarez, ‘Half Angels versus Half Devils’, Review of Smiley’s People by John le Carré, The Observer, 3 Feb 1980, 39. 34 Le Carré, Smiley’s, 332. 35 Ibid., 182. 36 Ibid., 8. 9

26

Fanatics and Absolutists

__________________________________________________________________ 37

George Orwell, ‘Dickens’, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1: An Age Like This (London: Penguin, 1976), 457.

Bibliography Alvarez, A. ‘Half Angels versus Half Devils’. Review of Smiley’s People by John le Carré. The Observer, 3 Feb., 1980. Andrew, Christopher. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, [1950] 1994. Bloom, Clive, ed. Spy Thrillers: From Buchan to le Carré. Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1990. Booker, Christopher. ‘Spymasters and Spy-Monsters’. Review of Smiley’s People by John le Carré. The Spectator, 9 Feb. 1980. Boyle, Andrew. Climate of Treason. London: Coronet, [1979]1980. Defty, Andrew. Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-53: The Information Research Department. London: Routledge, 2003. Denning, Michael. Cover Stories. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Dobel, J. Patrick. ‘The Honourable Spymaster; John le Carré and the Character of Espionage’. Administration & Society 20 (1998), 191-215. Gaffney, Patrick. ‘Crime Calendar’. Review of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré. The Scotsman, 21 Sept 1963. Gross, Miriam. ‘The Secret World of John le Carré’. The Observer, 3 February 1980. Jenks John. British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Knightley, Philip. The Master Spy. New York: Knopf, 1989.

Toby Manning

27

__________________________________________________________________ Lashmar, Paul and James Oliver. Britain’s Secret Propaganda War. Stroud: Sutton, 1998. Le Carré, John. Call for the Dead. Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1961]1964. ———. A Murder of Quality. London; Sceptre, [1962], 2006. ———. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. London: Pan, [1963] 1964. ———. The Looking Glass War. London: Penguin Classics, [1965] 2011. ———. A Small Town in Germany. London: Pan, [1968] 1969. ———. Introduction to Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, by Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley. London: Deutsch, 1968. ———. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. London: Sceptre, [1974] 1999. ———. The Honourable Schoolboy. London: Sceptre, [1977] 1999. ———. Smiley’s People. London: Pan, [1979] 1980. ———. A Perfect Spy. London: Coronet, [1986] 1987. Pierre Macherey. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, [1966] 1978 Merry, Bruce. Anatomy of the Spy Thriller. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1977. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 1: An Age Like This. London: Penguin, 1976. Palmer, Jerry. Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Secret Agents in Fiction: Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Len Deighton. New York: St Martin’s, 1984. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. London: Hogarth, 1993.

28

Fanatics and Absolutists

__________________________________________________________________ Wood, Michael. ‘Spy Fiction, Spy Fact’. Review of Smiley’s People by John le Carré, New York Times. 6 Jan. 1980. Toby Manning has just completed a PhD at the English School of the Open University, is a teacher at City Lit College, London and a freelance journalist.

Removing the Blindfold: Power, Truth and Testimony Adriana Spahr Abstract From 1975 to 1983 Argentina was marked by internal conflicts which surpassed those lived through in its entire history. The rise of the military power started during the last period of Isabel Peron’s government and continued through the military takeover from 1976 to 1984. The excuse to overthrow the weak Argentine democracy was to end the ‘monstrous’ guerrilla fighters who wanted to destroy the foundations of Western and Christian society in Argentina. It did not take long for the media and society in general to support the military’s point of view that these ‘revolutionaries’ had to be destroyed (annihilated) so that it wouldn't contaminate the rest of the country. As a result, they were persecuted and exterminated in inhuman and ‘monstrous’ ways by the military and other members of the Argentine security forces. The extermination of thousands of Argentineans was possible by the implementation of the figure of the ‘desaparecido’ [the disappeared]. These measures allowed the military government to keep detainees in secret locations in terrible living conditions until they decided to kill them. Fortunately, some of these detainees survived and began to share their traumatic experience with the country since the return of democracy in 1984. Testimonies such as the CONADEP (1983) [National Commission for the Disappearance of People], compiled as ‘Nunca más’ [Never Again] (1984), removed the blindfold that had fallen on Argentinean society during the time of the dictatorship. It is the aim of my paper to analyse the way in which testimonies (written and oral) have contributed not only to unveil the truth but also, to give a voice to those silenced – that is revealing the monstrosity of official history and replacing it with a (re)writing that better reflects the atrocities of one of the darkest periods in Argentine history. Key Words: Argentina, dirty war, dictatorship, testimony, monstrous guerilla, power, disaparecido, truth. ***** K.K. Seet argues that the monster emerges as the transfigured notion of the doppelgänger or double of the self.1 We are fascinated by it and so find ourselves huddled in its enclosure, because it ultimately symbolizes our vulnerability as human beings. The doppelgänger constantly challenges our perception that, as human beings, we are incapable of causing harm because our very humanity is that fragile line that separates the ‘us’ from ‘them’. Therefore, human nature would have it that we are hard wired to try to discover and investigate how, when and where the monster appears from within us or when the monster swallows the human being or the human being swallows the monster. The focus of this chapter

30

Removing the Blindfold

__________________________________________________________________ is to work through this transformation process by discussing the case of Argentina during its last military dictatorship (1976-1983). In the middle of the last century in Latin America there arose guerrilla movements of a nationalistic and/or Marxist/Leninist nature which were influenced by independence freedom processes in the world (Angola [1975], Algeria [1962], Vietnam [1975] and Cuba [1959]). These movements attempted, ideally, to replace, either totally or partially, the capitalist system and to completely break the connections with hegemonic economic powers on an international level, which caused, the movements believed, the social differences and the hardships of the majority of the population in their respective countries. As a result, at the beginning of the seventies, Argentina was marked by internal conflicts which exceeded those of its entire political history. On one hand were those idealistic political groups, consisting mainly of young people – generally from the middle class – and on the other hand were the social, political and security institutions which viewed these minority groups as the ‘other’, those ‘monsters’ who wanted to destroy the harmony and social peace of Argentina. Assisted by the political springtime which began with the establishment of the Peronist government in 1973, thousands of these ‘monsters’ invaded the city streets, bringing with them grassroots, student, union, and professional organizations. These ‘monstrous’ invasions took to the street of cities in the country to celebrate social victories on one day, and ask for social improvement in the various sectors of the Argentine population on another. The monsters also kidnapped businessmen in order to finance their operations and to provide economic aid and organizational and educational advice, mainly to poor neighbourhoods. These monsters also executed members of the armed forces and politicians whom they accused of torturing and killing popular militants and members of civic and religious organizations. 2 They executed trade unionists whom they accused of betraying their union members. 3 Soon, the bodies of these monsters began to appear in different parts of the country riddled with bullets or destroyed by bombs.4 Supported by the media coverage of the events, the country was perceived to be on the verge of complete chaos – and the military intervened directly in Argentina. Let us recall that the rise of the military power had begun during the last period of Isabel Peron’s government and continued through its takeover of the country from 1976 to 1984. The excuse for overthrowing the weak Argentine democracy was to end the ‘monstrous’ guerrilla fighters who wanted to destroy the foundations of Western and Christian society in Argentina. 5 These ‘monsters’ were generally young students and professionals of different political, religious and social orientations who dedicated themselves to the idea that social changes based on the vindication of the dispossessed were possible. It did not take long for the media and society in general to support the military’s point of view – that these

Adriana Spahr

31

__________________________________________________________________ ‘revolutionaries’ had to be destroyed so that they would not contaminate the rest of the country. Despite the fact that the armed forces maintained that there was a war in the country, a war which they called a dirty war, never did such a confrontation between the military – who called themselves ‘the defenders of the Fatherland’ – and the revolutionary ‘monsters’ exist, since the latter lacked the resources, the tactics and the strategies to confront the larger machine of the Argentine army. 6 And so, in a short time, the defiant political monsters were captured by military groups, under camouflage or hidden by darkness, typically by entering the houses of these subversive monsters or catching them in any public or private place. These ‘gentlemen of the night’ had not only extraordinary powers given to them by the coup d'état but also magical powers drawn from stories rooted nowadays in the cultural imaginary. These magical powers were similar to those of Regina, the stepmother in Once Upon a Time who could erase people’s memories; and to the powers of the unique ring of Lord of the Rings, which made the user invisible to others. But, as the followers of the TV series Once Upon a Time know, ‘all magic comes with a price’.7 So, just as Sauron, Tolkien’s character who loves order and loathes confusion, the Argentinian persecutors, ‘the defenders of the Fatherland’, were devoured by the monster which they had been trying to eradicate; one could say that they had been seduced by the Dark Side. 8 The military, holding all the authority of the institutional power which would have allowed them to judge, condemn and execute those whom they accused of distorting the order, still opted for illegality in their actions. 9 In order to create terror, through their plan of extermination, they instituted the evil plan of having people ‘disappear’.10 The disappearance began with the very act of detaining the person during which his or her head was covered by a hood or his or her eyes were blindfolded. Blindfolding the detainee was to prevent him or her from seeing those who had detained him or her and, as it would be discovered later, also preventing the detainees from seeing other detainees who accompanied them in their misfortune in one of the 610 secret detention centres spread out throughout the country.11 However, as an act of magic, as previously stated, the civilians who witnessed the arrests didn’t see or hear anything. As a matter of fact, nobody appeared to have seen or heard anything. The forever critical and opinionated Argentinean society had become blind, deaf and dumb. There were only murmurings, murmurings that the desperate relatives of those who had been arrested tried to follow in order to find information to help locate their missing loved one. 12 These relatives unceasingly went in search of their loved ones to government, military and religious departmental offices but without any success.

32

Removing the Blindfold

__________________________________________________________________ First, the dictatorship made people disappear. After, it denied that they had disappeared and, in this way the dictatorship made the disappeared disappear. Like a brutal magic trick. 13 The murmurings became louder rumours when those few fortunate people who had been freed from the detention camps came to speak in front of Human Rights Organizations and other international organizations when they left the country. Thanks to the endeavours of these individuals, it was learned that the detainees lived (this is a euphemism) not only blindfolded but shackled as well,14 until they were executed (burned, thrown while still alive from planes into rivers and the ocean, etc.) after suffering horrendous torture. 15 The monster that had eaten the subversive monster was not satiated and its aberrations increased: it killed its political adversaries, whether local or foreign, it seized and or sold new-born children whose mothers it had killed, 16 it took over the farms/ranches of rich people and the houses and belongings of those it had arrested.17 Nothing was beyond its power; it was the power. In 1983, owing to the flood of denunciations at an international level and the production of the first testimonies written by survivors, the first democratic government after the Argentine coup d’etat was forced to form a commission to evaluate the denunciations of the long list of violations of human rights. 18 Those whom they had tried to dehumanize (by means of torture) and whose memories they had tried to suppress, 19 those blindfolded people, tried, in every one of their declarations, to break the spell that had enveloped the society. Each declaration was intended to remove the blindfold from the eyes of, not only the individual, but of the country, and ultimately restore the country’s lost and subverted memory. In 1985, the head of the ‘new monster’, the highest ranking member of the Armed Forces, was judged and imprisoned for his atrocities. 20 The tenacity of the members of human rights organizations, the production of texts about the period and the oral and written testimonies of the surviving victims and their relatives made it possible for Argentinean society to begin to accept and talk about what they had kept to themselves. Present day judgments are not only directed at the members of all the security forces but also at civilians implicated in the violation of human rights during the military dictatorship. 21 Despite these achievements which place Argentina as a pioneer in the defence of human rights and the work carried out to prevent a culture of forgetting, can we say that this monster is really dead? Or simply that it is crouched down waiting for another opportune moment to attack? Can we say that Argentinean society has assumed responsibility for what happened in the country and has understood that the monster does not live outside of oneself but is an integral part of our essence? Further research has to be undertaken to determine the overall complicity of Argentinean society and the political and social organization of the time. The Nuremberg trials (1945-46), the shattered bodies of women in the city of Juarez-

Adriana Spahr

33

__________________________________________________________________ Mexico, the systematic human rights violations in different parts of the world today, all owing to egotism and thirst for power, prove otherwise. It is true that the monster acts as a mirror of ourselves and it is because of this that we are attracted by it. However, nothing will change if, in the image reflected in the mirror, we do not recognize ourselves and continue looking for the monster outside of ourselves. If this is the case, as Jean Franco says, the historical conditions that transform us into monsters or accomplices of monsters lie in wait for us all. 22

Notes 1

K. K. Seet, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine in Japan’s “Dark Water” and South Korea’s “A Tale of Two Sisters,”’ Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24:2 71 (2009): 142. 2 The most notorious event was on September 19, 1974, when the leftist organization Montoneros kidnapped the siblings, Jorge and Juan Born, head of the multinational corporation Bunge and Born, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The siblings were freed for US$ 60 million ransom. The Marxist-Leninist group, PRT, kidnapped John Thompson, a US citizen, on June 1973, and the entrepreneur Ordan Sallustro, who was killed by his kidnappers when Police Forces arrived at the place where Sallustro was detained. Alejandro Garcia, La crisis Argentina, 1966-1972: Notas y documentos sobre una época de violencia política (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, Secretariado de Publicaciones, 1994), 39-40. 3 The following unionists were killed: General Secretary of the Steel Workers Agusto Timoteo Vandor (1923-1969), General Secretary of the Worker General Confederation (CGT) Jose Ignacio Rucci (1924-1973) and the labour trade unionist leader José Alonso (1917-1970). Ibid., Garcia, La crisis Argentina, 61-63. 4 From 1974 paramilitary groups, such as Triple A (Argentina Anti-Communist Alliance) and the American Liberators Command, linked to state officers, were accused of 900 murders between 1973-1975. Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La dictadura militar 1976/1983. Del golpe de estado a la restauración democrática (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2003), 73. 5 The two more important guerrilla organizations were: ERP-PRT (People’s Revolutionary Army- Revolutionary Worker’s Party) and Montoneros. 6 Because of that, the period is also known as ‘State Terrorism’ (even though the dictatorship called it the ‘National Reorganization Process’). During this time they implemented illegal practices: used indiscriminate violence, persecution, systematic torture, forced disappearance of people, and manipulation of information. It is estimated that during this period the repressive forces got rid of 30,000 people. This number is given by the Human Rights Organizations, although the official list has 10,017 registered missing people. Ramón Torres Molina, cited by Horacio Vezzetti, ‘Verdad jurídica y verdad histórica. Condiciones, usos y

34

Removing the Blindfold

__________________________________________________________________ límites de la figure del ‘genocidio,’ ed. Claudia. Hild, Philippe-Joseph Salazar and Lucas G. Martin, Lesa humanidad: Argentina y Sudáfrica: reflexiones después del mal (Buenos Aires, Katz, 2014), 27. There is an enormous amount of information about this period, written in Argentina and abroad. Some examples are (Nunca más, Poder y desaparición, los campos de concentración en Argentina, Ese infierno, Putas y guerrilleras, Madre de Mendoza, La voluntad, poder militar y sociedad política en la Argentina 1943-1973; also, created by the Human Rights Organization such as Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Madres de Plaza de Mayo, last modified February 2015, Viewed February, 21 2015 http://www.madres.org/navegar/nav.php; Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, last modified February 2015, Viewed 21 2015 http://www.abuelas.org.ar ; H.I.J.O.S (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio/Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence). H.I.J.O.S., last modified February 23 2015, Viewed 23 February 2015, http://www.hijos-capital.org.ar. 7 This is the iconic phrase of Rumplestiltskin also known as the ‘Dark One’ on ABC’s Once Upon a Time series. As an example, see the episode, ‘The Price of Gold,’ Once Upon a Time, Season 1, episode 4, dir. David Barrett, original air date November 13, 2011. 8 ‘He [Sauron] still had the relics of positive purposes that descended from the good of the nature in which he began: it had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall, and of his relapse) that he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction’. J. R. R. Tolkien, Morgoth’s Ring, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton, 1993), 396. 9 General Acdel Edgardo Vilas says: ‘I decided to dispense with justice, not without declaring a fight to the death with the judges and lawyers complicit with subversion … It was necessary to forget the teachings of the military college and the rules of conventional warfare where the formalisms (honour and ethics) are an essential part of military life. I decided to quarantine … the guerrillas so that the most dangerous and most important would never make it to court’. Alippo Paoletti, Como los nazis, como Vietnam los campos de concentración en Argentina, (Buenos Aires: Contrapunto, 1987), 28-29. (The translation from Spanish to English has been done by the author unless otherwise noted). 10 Vezzetti, ‘Verdad jurídica y verdad histórica’. 26-28. 11 Juan Gasparini, Montoneros: Final de cuentas (Buenos Aires, Puntosur Editores, 1988), 102. 12 Hugo De Marinis, and Adriana Spahr, Madre de Mendoza (Buenos Aires, Corregidor 2013) 98-111. 13 Laura Restrepo, Demasiados héroes (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2009), 128. 14 María C. Castaño Blanco, Más que humanos (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1988), 32-35.

Adriana Spahr

35

__________________________________________________________________ 15

The tortures were unimaginable: electric prods, mutilation, waterboarding, impaling, hitting, attacks with dogs, and principally for women, rape, and torture of children (Alippo Paoletti, Como los nazis, como Vietnam, 25; Miguel Bonasso, Recuerdo de la muerte (Buenos Aires: Bruguera, 1984), 40-41, 121; Nunca Mas (Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional sobre Desaparición de Personas [CONADEP],1984), 223-231; Horacio Verbisky, El vuelo, (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995),16, 29-32; and Miriam Lewin, and Olga Wormat, Putas y guerrilleras (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2014). 16 Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo is the human rights organization that searches for the children of those mothers who were pregnant when they were detained and disappeared during the dictatorship. The organization believes that 500 children were appropriated by the military forces. Up to Aug. 22, 2014, the organization found 115 children. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. ‘Convocamos a una conferencia para anunciar el encuentro de una nueva nieta,’ Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, August 22 August 2014, Viewed 23 August, 2014, http://www.abuelas.org.ar/comunicados.php?comunicados=restituciones.php&der1 =der1_varios.php&der2=der2_dif.php. 17 Vezzetti, ‘Verdad jurídica y verdad histórica’. 26. 18 The reports of this commission (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) was published in Nunca más. 19 Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity (Durham: University Press, 2013), 9. 20 In 1989 President Menem decreed the first amnesty to free military officers accused and convicted of violation of human rights. It included also Mario Firmenich, top leader of the Montoneros organization. The purpose of the president was to calm down military forces calling for reconciliation. A year later, the president signed another amnesty for the purpose of freeing other military forces accused of charges unrelated to human rights violations (uprising, Falklands War) and members of the leftist organization MTP (All for the Fatherland) in 1989, who had tried to take a barracks at La Tablada / Buenos Aires. These amnesties were declared illegal in 2003. Hernán Fair, ‘Las relaciones políticas entre el Menemismo y las Fuerzas Armadas. Un análisis histórico-político del período 1989-1995,’ Kairo. Revista de temas sociales [San Luis, Argentina, Universidad Nacional de San Luis] 15, no 27 (May 2011): 2-4. 21 The judges prosecuted persons accused of the disappearance of persons without hard evidence, only through the accusation of people. The hard evidence, the body of the disappeared, was never recuperated; moreover, the military forces have never admitted that they had kidnapped people. It is important to notice that the governments of the Kirchners (Nestor [2003-2007] and Cristina [2007- present day]), democratic presidents of Argentina, fully supported the struggles of the Human Rights Organization in Argentina.

36

Removing the Blindfold

__________________________________________________________________ 22

Franco, Cruel Modernity, 7.

Bibliography Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. ‘Convocamos a una conferencia para anunciar el encuentro de una nueva nieta.’ Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, 22 August 2014, Viewed 23 August 2014. http://www.abuelas.org.ar/comunicados.php?comunicados=restituciones.php&der1 =der1_varios.php&der2=der2_dif.php. Actis, Munú, Cristina Aldini, Liliana Gardella, Miriam Lewin and Elisa Tokar. Ese infierno. Conversaciones con cinco mujeres sobrevivientes de la ESMA. Buenos Aires: Altamira, 2006. Bonasso, Miguel. Recuerdo de la muerte. Buenos Aires: Bruguera, 1984. Calveiro, Pilar. Poder y desaparición. Los campos de concentración en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1998. Castaño Blanco, María C. Más que humanos. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1988. De Marinis Hugo and Adriana Spahr. Madre de Mendoza. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2013. Fair, Hernán. ‘Las relaciones políticas entre el Menemismo y las Fuerzas Armadas. Un análisis histórico-político del período 1989-1995.’ Kairo. Revista de temas sociales [San Luis, Argentina, Universidad Nacional de San Luis] 15, no. 27 (May 2011): 1-16. Franco, Jean. Cruel Modernity. United States: Duke University Press, 2013. Garcia, Alejandro. La crisis Argentina, 1966-1972: Notas y documentos sobre una época de violencia política. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, Secretariado de Publicaciones, 1994. Gasparini, Juan. Montoneros: Final de cuentas. Buenos Aires: Puntosur Editores, 1988.

Adriana Spahr

37

__________________________________________________________________ H.I.J.O.S (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio/Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence). Last modified 23 February 2015, Viewed 23 February 2015, http://www.hijos-capital.org.ar. La causa peronista. ‘Mario Firmenich y Norma Arrostito cuentan cómo murió Aramburu.’ 1, no. 9 (Sept 3, 1974). Lewin, Miriam, and Wormat Olga. Putas y guerrilleras. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2014. Novaro, Marcos, and Vicente Palermo. La dictadura militar 1976/1983. Del golpe de estado a la restauración democrática. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2003. Nunca más. Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional sobre Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP), 1984. Once Upon a Time. ‘The Price of Gold’ television series 1.4 (2011). Directed by David Barrett. American Broadcasting Company. First broadcast November 13, 2011. Paoletti, Alippo. Como los nazis, como Vietnam los campos de concentración en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Contrapunto, 1987. Restrepo, Laura. Demasiados héroes. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2009. Seet, K. K. ‘Mothers and Daughters: Abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine in Japan’s “Dark Water” and South Korea’s “A Tale of Two Sisters.”’ Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24.2 (2009): 139159. Tolkien, J. R. R. Morgoth’s Ring. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton, 1993. Verbisky, Horacio. El vuelo. Planeta: Buenos Aires, 1995. Adriana Spahr, Ph.D. She is an Associate Professor at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. Her area of research focuses on political and social issues as reflected in works of literature.

Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism and Corporatism in the Cinema of the ‘New French Extremity’ Sophie Walon Abstract This chapter examines New French Extremity films, which link their monstrous characters to late capitalism and its corporate environments. I will specifically focus on two films which, on the one hand, address the destructive power of capitalism over the individual (development of stress-induced pathologies, disintegration of relationships) and, on the other hand, its transformative action on human nature (dehumanisation, virtualisation of human beings and relationships, post-humanism). Marina De Van’s Dans ma peau plunges its audience almost literally in the skin of Esther, who begins to practice self-mutilation and selfcannibalism. Although the reasons of her monstrous pathology remain obscure throughout the film, her everyday (working) life, the dialogue, and the mise-enscene offer clues that connect her psychosomatic troubles to the capitalist context in which she is immersed. Far from being endogenous, Esther’s behaviour seems to be fuelled by her corporate milieu, which exerts vampiric effects on her by using her body as a mere productive tool to generate profits. Therefore, her monstrous disorder functions both as a symptom and as an allegory of a socio-economic system that badly affects individuals. Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover also takes place in a corporate context as the film focuses on financial conflicts between international firms specialising in mass media. There are no monstrous characters proper in Demonlover, but there is something monstrous about the way they are dehumanised by their aggressively capitalist environment and its fierce competition, and by the omnipresence of media and communication technologies, which disembodies and virtualises human beings and relationships. Moreover, as these mediatised images are often extremely violent, they induce an emotional desensitisation, which heightens the impression that the characters are caught in a monstrous process of ‘becoming-machine’. This hyper-capitalist, hyper-globalised, and hyper-mediatised context shapes a heavily virtualised world, in which human beings evolve towards a new, alarming (post)human condition. Key Words: New French extremity, capitalism, corporatism, vampiric socioeconomic system, (self-)mutilation, (self-)cannibalism, ‘Becoming-Machine’, dehumanisation, disembodiment and virtualisation, posthumanism. ***** 1. New French Extremity and Its Monstrous Embodiments of SocioEconomic Dysfunctions In the 2000s, critics and academics noticed the emergence of a new tendency in

40

Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism

__________________________________________________________________ French cinema, which prominently features severe psychosomatic pathologies, extreme violence, or graphic sex that are often morbid and sometimes monstrous. This tendency of French cinema appeared in the 1990s, at the instigation of directors such as Catherine Breillat, François Ozon, Olivier Assayas, and Claire Denis, and radicalised in the 2000s with provocative films from Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, Bertrand Bonello, Marina De Van, and Philippe Grandrieux. In an article significantly titled ‘Flesh and Bone: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’,1 James Quant first noticed this new, ‘monstrous’ orientation of French cinema. In this chapter, the critic vehemently denounces the emergence of a cinema obsessed with the most abject violence and the most morbid sexuality, and he coins the pejoratively intended expression ‘New French Extremity’ to describe this trend. Quandt criticises this type of cinema for its gruesome excess of bodily dysfunctions as well as for its gloomy focus on psychological and social trouble: he accuses New French Extremity directors of yielding to sensationalist strategies through which the spirit of transgression that once animated French cinema gave way to shock tactics and facile, gratuitous provocation.2 However, certain scholars, such as Martine Beugnet, Linda Williams and Tim Palmer, underscored the social, political, and philosophical dimensions of these films, as well as their innovative aesthetics. For example, Beugnet has substantiated how much these directors have invented a new path in cinema – that avoids both the pitfalls of pure abstraction and those of commercial productions – and revived the sensorial impact as well as the transgressive nature of the cinematic medium.3 According to Beugnet, their films offer original, highly hybrid, and often unsettling cinematic experiences, which demonstrate ‘cinema’s unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually’.4 In the manner of the body horror genre,5 the forms of monstrosity that these films feature mostly stem from the representation of psychosomatic pathologies, morbid sexual deviances, or physical metamorphoses, which distort the traits of the human figure to the point that it becomes unrecognisable, monstrous, and that it challenges the very definition of the human. Indeed, these films offer original variations on disturbed representations of humans by shaping a wide range of abnormal, sick, wounded, mutilated, disfigured, disembodied, in short monstrous figures. Contrasting sharply with the smooth and normalised images of human beings featured in the majority of films and media (the internet, TV, advertising), the bizarre characters which populate films of the New French Extremity raise questions on the issues of marginality, hybridity, transgression, deviance, pathologies, the unhuman, and hence, on the concept of monstrosity. This chapter will focus specifically on two films of the New French Extremity – Marina De Van’s Dans ma peau and Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (both released in 2002) – which link their monstrous characters to late capitalism and its corporate environment, characterised by exacerbated greed, individualism, and competition, by heightened globalisation, increased dematerialisation of human relationships,

Sophie Walon

41

__________________________________________________________________ etc. While Dans ma peau addresses the destructive power of corporatism over the individual by underscoring the development of stress-induced pathologies and the disintegration of relationships it triggers, Demonlover tackles the transformative action of capitalism on human nature as it unveils processes of dehumanisation, underlines the growing virtualisation of human beings and relationships, and suggests a post-humanist condition. Several questions will underpin my analysis of the two films: what sort of monsters do they feature and why? What aesthetic techniques do they use to shape monstrous figures on screen? What social, cultural, political, or economic implications do these disturbed representations of humans encapsulate or crystallise? Which theoretical and philosophical conceptions of human beings do they conjure? This chapter will thus endeavour to elucidate which types of critical discourse – aesthetic, moral, philosophical, social, political – these monstrous figures embody. 2. Marina De Van’s Dans ma peau Dans ma peau (literally ‘in my skin’) tells the story of Esther, a cheerful, ambitious thirty-year old woman upon whom life seems to smile. She is in a stable relationship with Vincent and is soon promoted director of studies at the research institute she works for. However, one day, during a party with some colleagues, she goes out to take a look at her host’s garden, which is under construction, and she inadvertently falls in a hole. It does not seem to be a serious accident so she just goes back to the house to join her colleagues as if nothing happened: she drinks, chats, dances, etc. When she is about to leave, she goes to the toilets where she notices big, fresh stains of blood on the floor, only to realise that she is the one who is losing so much blood. It finally dawns on her that although her fall had seemed benign, it severely wounded her leg. Nonetheless, even after this worrying discovery, Esther ‘do[es] not feel tired’6 and decides to prolong the evening with her friends. This insensitivity to physical pain reveals to Esther a form of disconnection between her body and her consciousness, i.e. a certain foreignness of her body, a feeling of non-belonging to it.7 Esther thus becomes increasingly and morbidly fascinated by her body: she begins to study it as though it were a foreign body, detached from her. One day, while she is at work, she hastily leaves her office to retreat to a storeroom. There, she examines and fiddles with her open, still oozing wounds and starts cutting the skin of her thighs with a piece of metal. This experience of self-mutilation seems to appear to Esther as a means – admittedly extreme – of reconnecting with her own sensations, of feeling her body again and re-appropriating it. As the film progresses, Esther’s trouble worsens and takes on a monstrous dimension. For instance, during a professional dinner with her company’s new clients, her left hand becomes autonomous and uncontrollable: Esther cannot even

42

Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism

__________________________________________________________________ prevent it from playing with the food on her plate despite the awkwardness of the situation. The sequence becomes increasingly surrealistic as her hand literally detaches itself from her arm and lies, inert, on the table. Esther finally succeeds to knit it back to her arm and then cuts her arm under the table as though to check the sensitivity of her body, which decidedly seems to slip from her.8 Of course, this experience shuts her out from the conversation: acting extremely strangely and transgressing all good manners, Esther’s pathology now compromises her professional life. After the dinner, she rents a hotel room to quench her drive to cut herself.9 Lying down on the floor, she cuts pieces of her skin, kisses, licks, bites, and even tastes her wounds.10 Left mutilated, she does not dare to admit this recurrence to her partner so, in order to justify her new wounds, she stages a car accident.11 At this stage, her self-mutilation and even self-cannibalistic urges become properly self-destructive: they do not only affect her flesh but also her work (the catastrophic professional dinner) and her romantic relationship (her partner worries about her, does not understand her anymore, she lies to him). Confronted with a professional surrounding and a partner who do not understand her erratic behaviour and from whom she feels increasingly separated, she sinks more deeply into her addiction. One morning, instead of going to work, she rents a room again: this time, she mutilates her face which will exclude her more definitively from all professional and sentimental relationships as she cannot explain or conceal these all too exposed wounds. This time, she also cuts a wide piece of her skin, which might be fatal to her, as the last shot of the film shows her inert, perhaps dead, on the hotel bed. Although the causes of Esther’s monstrous pathology remain obscure throughout the film, her everyday (working) life, the dialogue, and the mise-enscene offer clues that connect her psychosomatic troubles with the corporate context in which she is immersed. Indeed, Esther works in the oppressing world of Paris’ La défense, where the climate is that of intensified capitalism, which prizes individual success and breeds remorseless competition, and, hence, individualism and social disintegration. The film’s establishing shots foreshadow this underlying critical discourse, showing greyish, all-glass and metal skyscrapers, keyboards and computer screens, bulky bunches of paperwork, and bland, anonymous offices. They introduce the world of post-modern, capitalist firms as de-humanised, cold, and impersonal.12 Moreover, when she later cuts herself in a closet of her work place, it is after having spent all morning in her office, typing on her keyboard and staring at her computer screen without having taken any break.13 Tellingly, just after this selfmutilation scene, the film unfolds images of menacing-looking skyscrapers as though to suggest that this alienating urban and corporate environment could well be the cause of Esther’s deviant practices. Not only does Esther’s anxiety-inducing job, with its ‘short deadlines’, put

Sophie Walon

43

__________________________________________________________________ excessive pressure on her, but it also affects her relationships, which are limited or even shattered by it.14 For instance, after a long morning of work, Esther asks Sandrine, a colleague and long-time friend of hers, to take a much-needed break with her, but Sandrine significantly replies: ‘no, I have a monstrous load of work now. If I stop, I am done for’.15 Despite Esther’s insistence, Sandrine does not want to waste time on a coffee break; she even starts to become irritated by Esther’s presence in her office as it is slowing down her work rate. Esther then admits that she has just voluntarily cut herself. Worried, Sandrine finally pays attention to her and seems available to discuss what happened. However, it is then Esther who does not have time anymore as she suddenly realises that she might have misinterpreted a point in the report she wrote and this seems much more urgent than the fact that she just mutilated herself. And when Sandrine invites her at her place that night, she barely accepts on account of having too much work. Work pressure thus seems to shatter priorities and to be a stumbling block to close human relationships.16 Indeed, this exacerbated capitalist and corporate environment will pit the two longtime friends against each other when Esther is promoted director of studies, the position Sandrine coveted. The competitive corporate world thus proves to be a hostile milieu for human relationships. Esther loses one of the few people to whom she could have confided her pathological urges, which would have been the first step to any potential recovery. Moreover, Dans ma peau features a world in which family is absent (Esther’s family is never mentioned), probably dissolved by hectic rhythms of work. Also, Esther and her partner do not even see each other every day, as they often work very late at night. Therefore, Dans ma peau’s characters are relatively isolated beings: this turning on oneself and social disintegration appears mostly to be caused by their work and a system based on individual success and hence competition. This all suggests that Esther’s monstrosity does not appear by incomprehensible accident: far from being endogenous, Esther’s monstrous behaviour seems to be fuelled by this stressful and competitive corporate environment. She seems to have been ‘contaminated’ by this late-capitalist climate in which if one stops for a moment, even just to take a coffee, one is ‘done for’. Therefore, when she cuts herself in a closet at her workplace, it is as though it were the only way to cut herself off from her work. Hurting and crippling her body, thus making it unfit for work, can therefore be read as a means, admittedly extreme, of escaping the claws or rather the teeth of this vampiric corporate world, this invisible but genuine monster, which insidiously eats her and sucks her life away.17 Esther’s horrifying trouble is thus both destructive and salutary: it seems to be a desperate response to and an escape from a hostile world that has dispossessed her of her own body. Indeed, this self-mutilation can be seen as a strategy to reappropriate her body, to escape its economical exploitation, to avoid the bodily norms imposed by a depersonalising production system and to assert a personal,

44

Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism

__________________________________________________________________ self-chosen use of her body. Ultimately, Dans ma peau can be read as an original reinterpretation of the figures of the vampire and the cannibal in a post-modern context: not only does Esther exert her vampiric and cannibal urges on herself instead of on others but, above all, it seems that Esther has been contaminated by the real, although invisible, ‘vampire’ of corporatism in hyper-capitalist times. Therefore, her monstrous pathology functions both as a symptom and as an allegory of a socioeconomic milieu that badly affects individuals, working conditions and human relationships; it can thus be seen as the embodiment of the invisible (for they are faceless), evasive, and yet omnipotent ‘monsters’ of contemporary society (competition, individualism, venality, etc.). 3. Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover Olivier Assayas’ cyber-thriller Demonlover (2002) also takes place in a corporate environment. The film focuses on financial conflicts between international firms specialising in mass media and which are competing to obtain the financial control of a Japanese group, TokyoAnime, that specialises in the making of animated porn films. Diane officially works for Volf Corporation, a French firm that wants to buy TokyoAnime. As, in fact, she works on behalf of Mangatronics – a rival firm to TokyoAnime – she poisons her manager in order to derail the finalisation of the contract between Volf Corporation and TokyoAnime, which, if successful, would be disastrous for Mangatronics. However, Diane’s conspiracy is rendered more difficult to carry out as Volf associates with the American firm Demonlover to buy TokyoAnime. Diane thus has to confront the director of Demonlover: this leads to a cycle of violence which aggravates when she discovers that Demonlover is related to the Hellfireclub, a torture porn website that fulfils on demand the most extreme fantasies of its users. There are no literal monstrous characters in Demonlover, but there is something monstrous in the way they are desensitised and dehumanised by their aggressively competitive capitalist environment and by the omnipresence of media and communication technologies that virtualises and disembodies human beings and relationships. Indeed, Demonlover’s world is one of mediatised images and relations: this induces a form of virtualisation of the real and of humans, who seem caught in a monstrous process of ‘becoming-machine’.18 For instance, Diane’s cold beauty, her mechanical, almost robot-like elocution, her emotional insensitivity make her an almost unreal character, who seems modelled on this world that is invaded by computers, phones, and all sorts of screens. Similarly, Elaine’s stiff (botoxed) face evokes the plastic, unreal aspect of the animated actresses of the TokyoAnime films. The virtualisation of people by machines and technologies is also eloquently suggested in the sequence in which Diane goes to a nightclub in Tokyo. There, gogo dancers are ‘derealised’, i.e. made to appear unreal by the multicolour and

Sophie Walon

45

__________________________________________________________________ stroboscopic lights that screen their human traits as they project on their bodies a series of chromatic variations and diverse motifs that make them look like giant kaleidoscopes. The dancers thus become sorts of screens that are embedded, almost dissolved, in the designer and multimedia decor of the nightclub. Absorbed by this all-pervasive screen-like environment, their bodies no longer express their interiority: they are only reflecting surfaces, emptied of their internal substance, as though they were vampirised by our society’s creeping technologization and mediatisation.19 Also, by transforming reality into its own mediatised representations and human relationships into disembodied, virtual interactions, this world of media seems to engender insensitive people, whose sensations and feelings have been anesthetised.20 Indeed, Demonlover’s characters do not appear to have emotions: for instance, in the opening scene, which takes place on a plane, the passengers are not in the least disturbed by the violent images of explosion from the film shown on their screens. Later, when Diane visits TokyoAnime’s workshops, she does not raise an eyebrow while she watches an animated porn film in which young girls are violently raped by giant tentacles and other phallic monsters. Later, she does not seem excited by the erotic film she watches in a hotel room and she is not horrified by the shocking images she later discovers when she consults the Hellfireclub website.21 This monstrous desensitisation to violence, which seems to be induced by its virtual representations in all sorts of media, creates the condition for the creation of websites such as the Hellfireclub, since its desensitised users seem to need to exert extreme, sadistic violence to experience certain sensations and jolts. This process of dehumanisation can also be read in the impersonal lives of the characters. Most of them are single and friendless, because of the stress of their busy schedules and the pressure of competition, which pits them against one another. Moreover, their jobs set them in anonymous, transitory spaces (hotels, airports, planes, cars, offices, glass and metal buildings, etc.), those of the capitalist, globalised landscape. As a result, they seem uprooted from any natural or personal environments, which increases the impression that they are all interchangeable pawns in an abstract and cynical post-modern, capitalist game. This culture of screen, media, new technologies, and the possibilities these open up for the characters to create avatars of themselves, seem to trigger the emergence of people who are so adept at concealing and reinventing their identity that their personality, as though it were overly diffracted, becomes unidentifiable and somewhat dissolved by the overwhelming multitude of roles they play. The almost schizophrenic duplicity of most Demonlover’s characters makes them hybrid or protean figures whose cynicism verges on psychological and moral monstrosity. For example, Diane officially works for Volf but secretly works for Mangatronics, Elaine is supposed to be the director of Demonlover but also seems to be behind the Hellfireclub; Elise works for Volf but is also an agent of the Hellfireclub, etc. The craftiness of these double agents seems to be the result of a

46

Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism

__________________________________________________________________ deceitful business culture, which hides primal aggressiveness behind polished and sophisticated appearance, and a non-transparent world behind its bright, all-glass skyscrapers. This hyper-globalised, hyper-capitalist and hyper-mediatised context shapes a dehumanised world, in which humans give way to money, computers and to a virtual reality. The characters seem to be denaturalised by the pressure of competition and consequent disintegration of human relationships as well as by the increasingly pervasive technologisation of contemporary societies, which disembodies human relationships, virtualises reality, and, hence, slowly dehumanises human beings, who appear to evolve towards a dystopic post-human condition. 4. Conclusion The forms of monstrosity shown in these films emerge on small scales (those of the body, of individuals) but they crystallise contemporary issues of much larger scale: late-capitalism’s cynicism and inhumanity, exacerbated individualism, distressing working conditions, all-pervasive technologisation, etc. New French Extremity’s monstrous characters are shown as symptoms or allegories of the crisis of social and economic systems in a time of intensified globalisation and capitalism, as well as the crisis of the concept of human that results from it. Therefore, New French Extremity gives tangible, monstrous forms to faceless, evasive, and yet ubiquitous socio-economic dysfunctions, which threaten human relationships and even the very concept of the human, at least in its traditional humanist meaning. The fact that these global, socio-economic issues manifest themselves on the level of the individual and the intimate (the self, the body) underscores how they contaminate human beings who literally in-corporate their violence and monstrosity. In these films, ‘monstrous’ capitalist and corporate environments thus trigger ‘monstrous’ responses from the characters; they induce both destructive and transformative effects by fuelling monstrous pathologies and behaviours, as well as a new, disturbing (post)human nature.

Notes 1

James Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,’ Artforum (February 2004): 126-132. 2 According to Quandt, films of the New French Extremity only wallow in monstrous images of gang rapes, incest, sadomasochism, and other perverse, violent, or sexual practices: it is a cinema that is determined to ‘wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement’. See Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 126.

Sophie Walon

47

__________________________________________________________________ 3

Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: University Press of Edinburgh, 2007). 4 Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation, back cover. 5 The body horror genre is illustrated by the works of directors such as David Cronenberg, Brian Yuzna, and Clive Barker. 6 Dans ma peau. DVD. Directed by Marina De Van. Paris: Rézo Films, 2002. 7 Marina De Van has actually experienced this feeling as a child. See Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy. Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown: Wesleyan University, 2011), 81. 8 In this scene, Esther’s increasing feeling of disconnection particularly manifests itself in an aural mode, as sounds stop being objective and realistic to espouse her viewpoint. At the beginning of the scene, there is little noise in this quiet and elegant restaurant but, progressively, the hubbub of the conversations and the jingling of the crockery become deafening, expressing Esther’s increasing malaise. Here, the film really puts the spectators in the skin of Esther as it conveys her idiosyncratic, anxious sensations. 9 To quench her morbid urges, she rents a hotel room like adulterous lovers do: this denotes the romantic and sexual narcissism of the character as well as the autoeroticic dimension of her pathology. 10 The second time she goes to a hotel to mutilate herself, the scene is partly shown in split-screen: the ‘skin of the film’ is thus cut, torn just like Esther’s skin. This aesthetic strategy also insists on the motif of division, which evokes Esther’s schizophrenic tendencies on a filmic level. Therefore, although I focus on the monstrosity of the characters in this chapter, it is also the films of the New French Extremity themselves, their materiality (their visual and aural fluxes) and their excessive visceral impact that can be experienced as ‘monstrous’. Similarly, the black screens that the editing prolongs in this sequence create a gap in the materiality and the continuity of the film. These filmic ‘wounds’ re-enact the ones Esther inflicts on her body. 11 This scene is reminiscent of Crash from David Cronenberg (1996); the influence of his works is to be found in the aesthetic and themes of Dans ma peau. 12 In this opening sequence, the split-screens, as they visually split up the screen, and hence insist on the motif of division, perhaps already suggest that this corporate environment alienates and divides people, pits people against one another, or induces schizophrenic tendencies in its employees by rendering socioprofessional requirements and people’s personal lives and desires incompatible. 13 This stressful and trying corporate environment is also presented as oppressing and alienating. The offices even take on a prison-like dimension when Esther says to Sandrine that she feels ‘imprisoned in her office’, that she ‘just wants to get some fresh air’ because ‘with their air-conditioning system, one can’t open a

48

Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism

__________________________________________________________________ window’, which makes her ‘suffocate’. Dans ma peau. DVD. Directed by Marina De Van. Paris: Rézo Films, 2002. 14 In a corporate culture in which one cannot complain too much as one runs the risk of sounding whiny and weak, Esther nonetheless admits, during an informal conversation with a colleague, that her job is ‘tiring’ and stressful because the ‘deadlines are short’. Dans ma peau. DVD. Directed by Marina De Van. Paris: Rézo Films, 2002. 15 Dans ma peau. DVD. Directed by Marina De Van. Paris: Rézo Films, 2002. 16 That night, when Esther arrives at Sandrine’s, she warns her friend that she ‘will still need to work tonight’. As for Sandrine, she admits to Esther that she is ‘so fed up’ with her job and that she feels like a ‘dogsbody’. Work thus insidiously interferes with Esther’s personal life (she can’t even spend a night at her friend without working) and fails to give Sandrine any feeling of satisfaction, stimulation, or recognition. Dans ma peau. DVD. Directed by Marina De Van. Paris: Rézo Films, 2002. 17 Indeed, the company Esther works for exerts vampiric effects on her: it leaves her worn-out and heartless by using up all her time, energy, and enthusiasm, and by destroying her relationships (which are shattered, damaged, or corrupted under the constraints of working times, competition, and stress). 18 For the notion of ‘becoming’, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004). 19 In Demonlover, there is something monstrous about the imagery itself: its pale, ashen hues, which are due to slight but consistent overexposure, make the characters look pallid, as though their blood had been sucked out and their flesh hollowed out. With its lighting effects that dematerialise the bodies and make them appear like smooth, reflecting surfaces that bear a certain similarity to computer screens, Demonlover is a vampiric film that disembodies its characters and makes them look almost unreal. The film thus conveys in the very materiality of its images one of its key themes: the omnipresence of multimedia images in our postmodern societies, i.e. the increased mediatisation or the ‘spectacularisation’ of the real into media representations, which tends to ‘de-actualise’ reality. 20 These mediatised images (from films, TV, video-games, the internet) are often extremely violent, which induces a ‘de-actualisation’ of and a desensitisation to violence. 21 Other characters prove to be insensitive too. For instance, Diane’s assistant, Elise, seems completely undisturbed by the violence staged in the video games she plays impassively.

Sophie Walon

49

__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography Beugnet, Martine. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinbourgh: University Press of Edinburgh, 2007. Dans ma peau. DVD. Directed by Marina De Van. Paris: Rézo Films, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. Demonlover. DVD. Directed by Olivier Assayas. Paris: M6 Vidéo, 2002. Palmer, Tim. Brutal Intimacy. Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema. Middletown: Wesleyan University, 2011. Quandt, James. ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema.’ Artforum (February 2004): 126-132. Sophie Walon received a four-year scholarship from ENS Lyon after graduating with a multidisciplinary BA from Lycée Henry IV (Paris). She holds master degree in philosophy (from ENS Lyon) and in film studies (from the University of Oxford). She is currently undertaking her doctoral research on representations of the body in dance films at ENS Paris, where she also teaches film theory and history.

Part II Creating the Monster

Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans: The Impossibility of Utopia in the Strugatskys’ The Ugly Swans Elsa Bouet Abstract: Jerome Cohen argues that the creature or the monster provides a space of interaction: ‘The space of transformation, becoming, passion, alterity, the uncanny, the utopian, is in fact an interspace.’ The relationship and conflict between the monster and its other open an ‘unstable exchange’, in which each side serves as a mirror to the other, questioning their actions, their motives and their epistemological categories. This interaction offers the possibility of change, turning the monster into a harbinger of utopia. This image of the monster as the herald of positive change is subverted in Arkady and Boris’ Strugatsky The Ugly Swans, in which the reconsideration of ideological categories becomes impossible. In this novel, an unnamed town is plagued by lepers who are said to be the cause of the never-ending rain which constantly batters the town. The adults fear the lepers and their strange influence over the children. The lepers live in a camp known as the leprosarium, which adults are not allowed to enter. Here, a reversed dichotomy of imprisonment is created: it is not the lepers who are imprisoned in the camp, but rather the adults who are caged in their world. As the lepers usher in a new world, they exclude the adults, the ugly swans, who are unable to reconsider their superficial, materialistic and war mongering habits. This chapter will investigate how The Ugly Swans breaks away from the paradigm of the monster as opening up possibilities. The lepers serve to criticise the superficiality of humanity, as they disengage and withdraw from any interactions with it: they thus foreclose any possibility for humans to achieve utopian aims, suggesting their inability to evolve and to reconsider their categories, therefore turning them into abject creatures. Key Words: Strugatsky, The Ugly Swans, Jeffrey Cohen, utopia, ideology, prisons, monsters. ***** 1. Introduction Jeffrey Cohen argues that The monster and its dreamer are not two entities inhabiting a divided world, but two participants in an open process, two components of a circuit that intermixes and disperses both within an open, vibrant, unstable expanse.1

54

Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans

__________________________________________________________________ The relation between the monster and its creator is not characterised by closure. Instead, they resist and engage with each other by creating a mirror for the other; identities continually change in this process of differentiation and reciprocation, although the creator or the human might want to emphasise their difference to the monster. Cohen continues: ‘The space of transformation, becoming, passion, alterity, the uncanny, the utopian is in fact an interspace’.2 The distance created by the exchange between the monster and the human is a space for reading positive emotional and social changes and for exploring utopian possibilities. To exemplify this, Cohen quotes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). For Victor, the creature’s monstrosity is reflective of his hubris, that is, his transgression of natural and divine laws as he creates a living being without interaction with a woman, also placing himself as God. Victor thus rejects the creature that was his progeny, his Adam.3 On the other hand, the creature desires acceptance from his maker and from the wider community: this longing to be part of humanity and the subsequent rejection from the community reflects humanity’s shallowness and contemptible nature. Hurt by this rejection, the creature turns into a vengeful beast and hunts Victor. In Frankenstein, the interaction between the monster and the maker shows that both parties act as a mirror: Victor sees his sin in the monster, the monster sees the possibility of community and realises the cruelty of society in Victor. Briefly, this interaction between Victor and his creature expresses the ideal of a cohesive community, of altruism and openness to difference. Frankenstein also suggests the need to deconstruct ideological paradigms of exclusion in view of becoming more accepting of the other – a feature of utopia – as the creature is excluded from society on grounds of his appearance and origin, suggesting humanity’s monstrosity. The Strugatsky’s Ugly Swans (1967) seems to lack this interaction between the monster, that is, the lepers, and humanity. The lepers do not want anything from humans, unlike Victor’s creature who wants to belong. The lepers still serve as a mirror, revealing humanity’s own monstrosity, but their unwillingness to interact with humanity shuts off the interspace which normally allows for the creation of utopian discourse and possibilities. 2. Perceptions of the Lepers as Monsters Victor Banev, the main protagonist and a writer, returns to his hometown, which remains unnamed. He wants to take a break away from his problems in the city and takes this opportunity to visit his estranged wife and his teenage daughter, whom he has never met. He discovers that it is always raining on the town, formerly a sunny and popular resort, now overrun by lepers. The narrative follows Victor’s discovery of the lepers’ activities and their being perceived as monsters by the inhabitants. The lepers’ disease is known to be a genetic disease. Despite this, Victor, just like the other citizens, feels disgusted by the lepers and dreads being contaminated by them. Their illness makes them repulsive and physically monstrous: they have

Elsa Bouet

55

__________________________________________________________________ ‘blisters and eruptions […]. Sometimes festering ulcers’.4 Popular belief holds that they give ‘warts, like toads’.5 People are anxious to approach a leper or ‘above all touch him’.6 This repulsion prompts the humans to seclude the lepers outside the town in a leprosarium, although the lepers are able to leave their camp and go about the town. This practice is reminiscent of the ancient and medieval rejection of the lepers, who were considered ‘unclean’7 and thought to spread their foulness through touch.8 For Michel Foucault, this ancient practise of exclusion of the leper is at the origin of ‘the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning’, which is supported by a binary discourse of division between ‘mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal’,9 repudiating the ideologically undesirable. The Ugly Swans revives this ancient and Medieval practise: it associates leprosy with foulness: the disease is known as ‘ocularis ringus’, which stands for the yellow circles around the lepers’ eyes, reminiscent of jaundice, caused by a liver disorder or occasionally hepatitis.10 This disease, caused by poor sanitation, transmitted sexually or by blood, further suggests contamination and depravity. Moreover, the lepers stay out in the rain; constantly wet, they are said to be ‘mouldy from all the rain’ and to smell of slime, giving them the nickname ‘slimies’.11 The Ugly Swans suggests a continuity of disciplinary partitioning, based on classifying, categorising and excluding otherness. It demonstrates humanity’s inability to transcend his ideological and dictatorial classifications through the symbolic exclusion of the lepers. The children of the town spend a lot of time with the lepers, more than they do with their parents, which causes the adults to further fear and reject the lepers. The adults are fully unaware of the children and the lepers’ reasons for spending so much time together, and the adults fear that the lepers will ultimately lead the children away, referring to the ‘Pied Piper’ who takes children to a new, alternate world. The safety of the children is questioned, even exploited, to further alienate the lepers. An agent in charge of writing an exposé against the leprosarium, Pavor, is threatening to falsely report that the leprosarium physician uses ‘the blood of Christian infants’ for treating leprosy12 and to unravel how the lepers lure the children to ‘suck their blood [and] defile them’,13 a fallacy since the lepers care for the children’s welfare. The belief that the lepers will harm the children and use their blood for curative purposes echoes the Medieval Romance Amys and Amiloun, in which Amys is asked to slay his children on Christmas day and use their blood to anoint his friend Amiloun to cure his leprosy. 14 Pavor uses defunct myths to incite further fear and hatred of the lepers, further illustrating humanity’s lasting cycle of inability to accept difference. 3. Lepers as ‘Supermen’ The lepers rarely concern themselves with the adults of the town. Victor, in one of the few interactions with the lepers, witnesses the extent of their discontent and contempt for the world of the adults. One of the lepers gets caught in a bear trap

56

Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans

__________________________________________________________________ that has been laid to prevent them from approaching a property, although this is an illegal practice. Victor helps the leper to get out of the trap and to get some care from the physician of the leprosarium. Victor then meets another leper and enquires about the health of the one he rescued and suggests to him that they file a complaint with the police. The leper replies that ‘This does not make any sense’.15 Victor is puzzled by this seemingly nonsensical answer and wants clarification from the leper who states that they ‘don’t need that’ and that ‘it doesn’t interest [them]’.16 The lepers are not interested in the man-made legal and ideological stratification, rules and order. This scorn for the ideological world of the adults contrasts to the lepers’ interest in the children. It is only through the explanations that the children give to Victor that he and the reader are able to understand the lepers’ motivations. He learns that the lepers want to educate the children, who hope to be ‘leaning towards a future of deideologisation’.17 The lepers do not need food to sustain themselves, but die if they are not given anything to read. They are thus educators: they take the children to the leprosarium to let them read and learn away from the adults’ indoctrination, enabling them to reach their potential. The lepers being contained in the leprosarium is a reference to dissidents and intellectuals being sent to the Gulags in the Soviet Union. In that respect, the lepers serve as a symbol of political dissidence: their knowledge makes them undesirable as they have the potential to transform the ideological order: they see the children as able to create a new world free from the adults’ nefarious ideology. Unlike the adults, the lepers do not strive to condition the children, but foster their own abilities. Victor reflects on the adults’ indoctrination of the children: ‘if a man teaches children “Think the way I do,” it’s criminal’.18 Adults condition their children, ‘deforming them in [their] own image’,19 a mark of the continuation and transfer – not transformation – of past categories. In contrast, the lepers enable the children to learn free from indoctrination and free to make their own deductions. Victor, amazed at their teaching methods, ponders ‘how do they go about it those slimies, those bastards, […] only not men but supermen’.20 The lepers’ heuristic teaching methods become a superpower, enabling them to become more than human: as Nietzsche’s ‘superman’, man that has to be surpassed because of his pettiness, his ignorance and ideological presumptions, a fact that the lepers are attempting to implement.21 The lepers have other superpowers. They seem responsible for the rain that constantly batters the town, which appears to come from the leprosarium as ‘Around [it] there was no rain’.22 This constant rain is also an important symbol: the fields are rotting, the cats have fled and the mice have taken over 23 – another reference to the Pied Piper – and is believed by adults to be a sign of the ‘apocalypse’: ‘the earth will be sown anew and as never before, and there shall be no weeds among the grain’.24 This prophecy of a new world adheres to the etymological meaning of the word ‘monster’ signifying ‘omen’ or ‘divine

Elsa Bouet

57

__________________________________________________________________ messenger’25: the lepers are divine agents foreshadowing the ushering of a new world in which ideology does not exist nor spread. The emergence of this new world is revealed to Victor by the children. For Victor, it means that his is to be destroyed, and therefore he finds the children cruel. The children clarify their aims: you’ve misunderstood us […] We’re not cruel at all […] After all, we’re not intending to destroy your old world. It’s you that’s cruel: you can’t imagine building the new without destroying the old. We can imagine this very well. […] We’re not destroying anything, only building.26 However, Victor does not accept the children’s view and reminds them that history has demonstrated that, when new worlds are built, old worlds are destroyed in the process. The children explain that they, just like the lepers, do not want anything to do with adults, that they are building another future for themselves, not for the adults, breaking free from their dystopian historical cycle. They view the realistic characters Victor depicts in his novels, representing the adults of the narrative, as not wanting to be changed, as ‘so unpleasant, so neglected, so hopeless, that one does not even want to change them. [T]hey’re not worth it’.27 For the children, remaining with the adults or destroying their world would not signify change, but the continuity of ideology and barbarity. The only option left to them is not to engage with the adults, emotionally, socially or politically. The children, disgruntled with the adults, eventually decide to seek permanent refuge in the leprosarium. This causes the parents to panic and to go towards the leprosarium en masse. The adults hear a ‘Voice’ ringing out, which was ‘like thunder’, coming from ‘all sides at once’ exuding ‘boundless tolerance’, presumably, in this apocalyptic context, the voice of God, reinforcing the idea that the lepers are divine envoys. 28 This voice assures that the children are safe and act of their own free will: they do not want to turn into drunkards and debauchers, into petty slaves and conformists. They do not want you to turn them into criminals; they do not want your families and they don’t want your government.29 This offers a stark change of perspective and makes the reader reflect on the adult humans depicted in the novel. Eventually, Victor understands what the lepers and the children want: They have no plan to reeducate us and they don’t even want to blow up the old world, they don’t want to have anything to do

58

Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans

__________________________________________________________________ with it. […A]ll they want from the old world is for it to leave them in peace.30 Humanity cannot live in accord with others, which emphasises its inhumanity and the utopian, unreachable nature of peace. 4. Humans as Monsters In contrast to the lepers, humanity is physically beautiful, but full of vices and disdain for otherness. As the Voice indicated, humans are revealed as the real monsters. The behaviour of adults is deplorable, as exemplified by Victor, who gets drunk every day and gets into brawls with anyone who contradicts him. He constantly causes damage to the hotel in which he stays. Pavor tells him his view of human behaviour: We’ve bankrupted ourselves ideologically. We’ve gone through all philosophical systems and discredited every one, we’ve tried all possible ethical systems and we’ve stayed the same amoral louts we always were, no better than troglodytes. 31 The double meaning of the word ‘troglodyte’ is relevant: it serves to qualify someone ‘who lives in a cave’ or ‘regarded as being deliberately ignorant or oldfashioned’.32 It expresses humanity’s inability to change its long history of fear and hatred of the other, referred to in the novel: people ‘have to hate somebody. In some places they hate the Jews, in other places they hate blacks, and we hate the slimies’.33 Being written in the late 1960s, this refers to the Holocaust of the Second World War and to the history of slavery, of decolonisation and of the Civil Rights Movement, but also to the longer history of Western and human hatred of otherness. Just like Victor, humanity cannot ‘get along without fights’.34 The Ugly Swans revives the old age outcast monster of the leper to show how humanity has been and is unable to shake its exclusion and fear of otherness, as opposed to fostering and embracing it. The adults viewing the lepers as monsters, whilst the children accept them and view them for who they really are – benevolent agents of change – is precisely what excludes them from the new world that the lepers will usher. Victor understands the self-destructive nature of humanity: ‘Is it true that all the animal in man is bad?’35 The answer to this question was provided to him right from the beginning of the novel by one of the children: ‘It is precisely that which is most natural that is least fitting for man’.36 Victor repeats this at the very end of the novel, having understood that man will be forever unable to shake off his animalistic nature. This idea is possibly indebted to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in which Zarathustra questions whether or not people are ready to surpass man: ‘would you rather go back to the beast than surpass man?’37 Man is an animal unable to transcend his selfish, destructive, primitive nature and to

Elsa Bouet

59

__________________________________________________________________ accept otherness. Victor eventually understands why the lepers do not want to or do not need to have interaction with man: ‘Why should the slimies crush us? We’ll do it all by ourselves’.38 Interestingly, whilst the lepers’ utter discontent for man offers the possibility of a utopian reading, in that, by decrying humanity’s propensity for violence and hatred, the novel suggests the need for acceptance and openness. Simultaneously, it also immediately shuts off this utopian potential through the lepers’ lack of interaction with humans, a constant reminder of their baseness, degeneracy and bestiality. This idea of enclosure is symbolised by the use of barbed wire in the novel. Whilst the lepers are able to walk around town, humans are not allowed in the leprosarium, which is under heavy, armed surveillance, to protect the lepers from being assaulted. The leprosarium is enclosed by barbed wire, not to anyone’s surprise as the ‘world is full of barbed wire’.39 Whilst the adults view the lepers as needing confinement, the physician suggests that ‘Maybe they are not the ones behind the barbed wire’, that maybe the adults are,40 indicating that they are caged in their own, ideologically fixed, old and unchanging categories. Victor, towards the end of the novel, understands this. As he ponders over the question whether he is for or against the lepers, he realises that he cannot shake off the paradigms of enmity and differentiation of otherness common to humanity and that he cannot view them independently from the binary categorisation of good and evil, normal and abnormal and healthy and sick. Instead, he understands human nature: ‘A new species arising out of an old one, and we call it a genetic illness’,41 thus recognising that man can only degrade what he does not understand to an illness, an anomaly or a monster, while man does not recognise that he is ‘degenerating’,42 that is devolving into a lesser species. At the end of the novel, the children have ushered their new world and have transformed into young adults. Not much is said about them. Victor’s daughter walks towards him ‘barefoot, in a simple summer dress’ in the fresh green grass, an Edenic, peaceful Eve.43 The lack of details and the simplicity of her garments reflect the unsulliedness of her world, rid from its complex suits and clothing, its statuses and titles, its categories and classification, its fear of otherness, all counterintuitive to openness and utopia. Victor has to go back to his world, having witnessed what he could never have dreamed of: earlier, he imagined writing about such a world in which people accept difference, but he realises his inability to do so. He thinks: ‘To write something like that you’d have to stuff yourself with LSD’,44 ‘it’s impossible’.45 Humanity’s ability to conceive of utopia is so impeded by its creating monsters that it can only conceive of utopia in a drug induced haze.

60

Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans

__________________________________________________________________

Notes 1

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Postscript: The Promise of Monsters’, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 463. 2 Ibid. 3 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2008), 100. 4 Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, The Ugly Swans, trans. Alice Nakhimovsky and Alex Nakhimovsky (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 191. 5 Ibid., 17. 6 Ibid. 7 ‘Leviticus, 13:45’ (New International Version), Bible Gateway, viewed 26th May 2015, https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIV-Bible/. 8 Ibid., ‘Leviticus, 22’. 9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 199. 10 National Health Service UK, ‘Hepatitis,’ NHS Choices, Sept 2012, viewed 26 May 2015, http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Hepatitis/Pages/Introduction.aspx. 11 Strugatsky, Swans 21. 12 Ibid., 134. 13 Ibid. 14 ‘Amys and Amiloun’, Richard Coer de Lion; The Lyfe of Impomydon; Amys and Amiloun, ed. Henry Weber (Edinburgh: George Ramsay and Co., 1810), ll.21852328. For more information, see Corinne Saunders, ‘Bodily Narratives: Illness, Medicine and Healing in Middle English Narratives’, Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 183; and Ivana Djordjević, ‘Rewriting Divine Favour’, same volume, 161-3. See also Brian Murdoch, Adam's Grace: Fall and Redemption in Medieval Literature (Cambridge Boydell and Brewer, 2000), 105-6, in which he argues that the romance of Jaufré also makes use of the images of children’s blood as curative of leprosy. 15 Strugatsky, Swans, 56. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 96. 18 Ibid., 165. 19 Ibid., 162. 20 Ibid. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London, Penguin: 1971), 41. 22 Strugatsky, Swans, 157. 23 Ibid., 26.

Elsa Bouet

61

__________________________________________________________________ 24

Ibid., 20. Andrew Hock-Soon Ng, Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism (Bakingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 4-5. 26 Ibid., 75-6. 27 Ibid., 70. 28 Ibid., 160. 29 Ibid., 161. 30 Ibid., 165. 31 Ibid., 129-30. 32 The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), s.v. ‘troglodyte’. 33 Strugatsky, Swans, 46. 34 Ibid., 6. 35 Ibid., 164. 36 Ibid., 10. 37 Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 41. 38 Strugatsky, Swans, 189. 39 Ibid., 87. 40 Ibid., 138. 41 Ibid., 192. 42 Ibid., 129. 43 Ibid., 234. 44 Ibid., 197-8. 45 Ibid., 197. 25

Bibliography ‘Amys and Amiloun.’ Richard Coer de Lion; The Lyfe of Impomydon; Amys and Amiloun. Edited by Henry Weber, 366-473. Edinburgh: George Ramsay and Co., 1810. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘Postscript: The Promise of Monsters.’ The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Edited by Asa S. Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, 449-64. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. Djordjević, Ivana. ‘Rewriting Divine Favour.’ Boundaries in Medieval Romance. Edited by Neil Cartlidge, 149-60. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008.

62

Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans

__________________________________________________________________ Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. ‘Leviticus (Bible New International Version)’. Bible Gateway, viewed 26 May 2015, https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIVBible/ Murdoch, Brian. Adam's Grace: Fall and Redemption in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000 National Health Service UK, ‘Hepatitis,’ NHS Choices, Sept 2012, viewed 26 May 2015, http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Hepatitis/Pages/Introduction.aspx. Ng, Andrew Hock-Soon. Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism. Bakingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1971 Saunders, Corinne. ‘Bodily Narratives: Illness, Medicine and Healing in Middle English Narratives.’ Boundaries in Medieval Romance. Edited by Neil Cartlidge, 175-90. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2008. Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The Ugly Swans. Translated by Alice Nakhimovsky and Alex Nakhimovsky. New York: Macmillan, 1980. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Edited by J.A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Elsa Bouet has recently completed her PhD on utopian and dystopian literature. She is currently broadening her research interest to monsters and the monstrous in relation to ideology and utopia.

The Name of the Beast: Monstrosity and the Subhuman in Michael Gira and Nietzsche Michael T. Miller Abstract Throughout human history, many societies and groups have sought to eject certain groups from the politically human; this dehumanising of certain others serves to create a sphere of biological humans which are outside of society; one which can be either exterminated or utilised for the greater good. This is particularly evident in the work of Nietzsche, who argued that the common humanity is fit only for slavery; they are fodder for the Übermensch who constitute the truly human. Utilising in this context the work of musician and writer Michael Gira, this chapter will examine the idea of the monstrous subhuman as a mechanism of both exclusion from society, and the tighter integration of that society as a whole. Gira presents a degraded and uncanny form of humanity which exists outside of the usual social conventions; one brutalised, ill-defined and lacking in personal boundaries. I will argue that there is a nominal element to the subhuman; the subhuman in Gira’s work is never bestowed with a personal name, that element which assures individuality and autonomy; it is via the removal of concrete personhood, embodied in the name, that the subhuman is excluded from the social sphere of morality, and established as an object to be abused, without the will or strength to protect itself; it then exists within a mechanised cosmos, one in which it has no power of assertion or autonomy, and is always subject to the will of another. With the removal of the name, the subject disintegrates to the extent that it is no longer subject to morality, either in its own actions, or in those imposed on it. Key Words: Subhuman, Michael Gira, Nietzsche, names, naming, power, subjectivity. ***** 1. The Subhuman in Michael Gira’s The Consumer This chapter will look at a special form of monster – the subhuman. The subhuman is that group outside or beneath society; cast out from the in-group, denied human or citizen status, denied the basic rights of existence, freedom, and self-determination. I will look at how artist Michael Gira expresses this idea, along with how Nietzsche conceives the difference between the authentically human and the subhuman; then I will tie this up with an examination of the role of the personal name. Michael Gira is a musician and writer who has been pursuing his art for some thirty years. He was a founding member of the band Swans, whose music was a molten, lava-like mixture of punk, no wave and hard rock so brutal as to make

64

The Name of the Beast

__________________________________________________________________ audiences physically sick. Gira’s lyrics expressed a dark and nihilistic outlook and his single published monograph, The Consumer, displays a similar fascination. 1 Laconic and surreal in style, the pages are filled with violence, disgust and abuse. Individuals are tortured, raped, castrated, defeated and destroyed. The Consumer is an account of the victim, both from within and without: it carries none of the bold claims of the victor, whose confident assertions paint reality in monochrome; unlike Nietzsche who describes the Superman with a characteristic lack of concern for those beneath them, Gira describes the world of those overpowered by the strong in society, awash with uncertainty. Confusion reigns, and the victim struggles to find some kind of solid identity within the melee. One imprisoned, manipulated narrator muses: I’m in a situation where I can’t resist. I’m not sure if I want to fight back. The only reason to defend myself would be if I were told to defend myself, in order to amuse or edify one of them. I have an instinct - a vague desire - to retain a sense of myself. I don’t know if I’ve been manipulated into thinking in this way. 2 Several reviewers described the text as dealing with self-hatred, but they miss the mark; it is not simply hatred of oneself, but hatred of a self; there is a deep ambivalence toward the possibility of identity. The absence of any coherent self is reiterated throughout the book. Self-hood is always porous, and susceptible to external influence. For the reader, there is a constantly repeated refrain of ‘What am I’? The narrator – switching easily between male and female, victim and aggressor – keeps pressing, pushing and flailing, while those forms which we had assume dictate the cleavage of self and other dissolve around them. This absence of boundaries hovers like a vulture over every piece. The victim is often complicit in their own abuse, the distinction between abuser and abused, perpetrator of violence and victim of it, are constantly questioned: the victim appears even to seek suffering, because if they are pummelled enough eventually something solid might be found. But in Gira’s words, he is ‘malleable, shaped, soft’.3 The narrator is always pushing to find a point of resistance that never comes, a concrete wall, anything real and not fluid; to find where one person begins and another ends. But this certainty is never given, and boundaries are never found. Several stories take this to the logical extreme, where physical boundaries between the body and the environment begin to disappear, and one seduced yet distressed character seeks identification with another, an autistic, mechanical communion which might ‘ruin my awareness of myself’.4 Prior to this, his body is an alien presence, something uncontrollable, but whose very theoretical controllability reinforces its alien nature. When literally consumed by the woman’s body, he can no longer tell who contains who or whether he or she ever existed, and concludes

Michael T. Miller

65

__________________________________________________________________ with the hope that he can manipulate her body into destroying his own. 5 This fluidity returns as the Boss mocks his worker, claiming: ‘He’s not himself, he doesn’t belong to himself. He’s watching his boundaries dissolve as I control him’.6 Often the victim is eaten by another. A protagonist crawls toward a furnace while being kicked and beaten by a cop. Eventually he collapses, unable even to explain his failure to move. He wakes, castrated and branded, suspended in front of a mirror and unable to look away from his disintegrating corpse. As the cops slice meat from his thigh and eat it, he muses, ‘I’m happy to have them eating me. Eventually I’ll disappear. As I dissipate, they’ll grow stronger. I’ll feel myself pouring into them’.7 Another narrator’s leg is hacked off and consumed before she is violated. As her assaulters bark like dogs, she is consumed – erased – by a redness, a heat into which she disappears.8 Several narrators are obliterated by another’s odour, or their own smell reaches out to infect the environment, as a virtual extension of their body: a selfless, paranoid carer writes of his grandmother, ‘I want my world, my body, to consist of her smell. After it has become me, I’ll be held enclosed, like an insect in a huge fist, and crushed’.9 Another narrator acts like a fungus, corrupting and consuming the space they inhabit until it is impossible to tell where they end and the bed or walls begin.10 For one lust-crazed character, ‘The world’s an immediate extension of my thoughts, my self hatred’.11 In lack of the simple solidity that we are used to, it is impossible to grasp self- and other-hood. Without boundaries, all becomes one single, skinless entity. The subject appears hollowed out and vacuous as he waits for instruction: ‘My only ambition is to become more pliable, more inert’.12 The superior dominates the worker and ultimately will ‘wipe my mind clean’. 13 2. Nietzsche’s Subhuman For Nietzsche the bulk of humanity is not of value; the useless majority are nothing but slaves and chattel to the true heirs of the race, the Übermensch or Supermen. The Superman represents the pinnacle of humanity, stripped of all the weakness and doubt that plagues the species and finally is able to live with dignity, with absolute self-control expressed via their Will; following their drives and instincts without the trappings of moral concern for those who cannot equal them. For Nietzsche the merely human is subhuman. The subhuman must ‘take as little space, strength, and sunshine as possible from the well-constituted’.14 Not just this, they must actively support and promote – which is to say feed and empower with their very substance – the Superman. Like the bird of prey who consumes the lamb, the superman ascribes no interiority or subjective experience to the subhuman. They are irrelevant, negligible. The subhuman does not think or feel, their value is not internal to them. They are defined from without and do not even possess individual unity. They are a mass, a

66

The Name of the Beast

__________________________________________________________________ group indistinguishable and inseparable; that ‘mass of subordinate, powerless men who have no common feeling’.15 The subhuman, then, is inferior because it is a sick being; unwell, of a poor constitution which makes it unable to live up to the value of humanity. Conversely, it is the sick who are the greatest danger; the mentally sick, those who forego their own will, and bow down, becoming subhuman; subhumanity is always something of a choice for Nietzsche: a human being makes the choice to follow their will or to efface it, choosing whether to become the hunter or the prey. This sickness of the will, this disease of bad faith, is transmissible: the Superman can become infected if they fall into the trap of pitying the weak. The weak are to be used and discarded, not respected in any fashion. Pity is the reserve of the strong who are not strong enough to abuse. And thus, ‘Those who are from the outset victims, oppressed, broken – those are they, the weakest are they, who most undermine life’.16 3. The Role of the Personal Name Almost no character in The Consumer is named, other than occasional titles: ‘the cop’, ‘the worker’, ‘my grandmother’. The reader finds oneself entrapped in the book’s world where identity is so difficult to establish, a claustrophobic space where there is nothing but the extended plane of heaving flesh. The absence of names indicates the absence of sufficient identity which characterises the subhuman and one feels the narrator is in search of the containment that names provide. If only they could find some title other than you, me, he and she, some way of identifying specific individuals, the need for boundaries would be satisfied. On the few occasions we do encounter a named character the experience is jarring and conspicuous, the effect immediately obvious: ‘Jennifer’ is a person, she is someone, not just a body, not just meat. We assume that ‘Jennifer’ has a life, friends and family, goes on holidays abroad. The recognition of Jennifer is shocking too for the reason that she is distant: all the other characters have appeared in claustrophobic proximity, slippery and in constant flux as they violate and compromise each other – but Jennifer is contained and withdrawn. She is impenetrable, the name seems to form a wall between her essence and the narrator. She does not extend beyond it yet exists in projection behind it. Because she retains this integrity, actual interaction is possible, even if unwanted: she repeatedly asks, ‘are you alright?’ to the annihilation-seeking narrator who returned to the reality of his office job, to find himself standing cruciform on his desk, staring into a fluorescent bulb centimetres from his face. 17 The absence of names on the other hand reduces characters to the behavioural moment. They have no history because they have no identity, and they have no internality because there are no criteria of differentiation between them and other bodies. The fluidity which is often expressed physically is also mental, as when locked in a room with only the occasional presence of a genderless creature who he

Michael T. Miller

67

__________________________________________________________________ is compelled to alternately fuck or brutalise, our subject finds it impossible even to tell whether his emotions are his own or are manipulations, whether his desires are natural or implanted and whether his memories are accurate: When a thought comes into my mind, it warps and stretches out of its initial shape, changes into something else before I have a chance to recognize it as something I’ve made. I presume that I remember things but I’m not certain. I don’t know if what I’m thinking is random (mine) or what I’m supposed to be thinking in order to satisfy their desires, to fulfil the prescribed influence of the environment they’ve put me in.18 Thus while the other is often experienced as self, self is also experienced as other. Not only have boundaries disintegrated but internal consistency and integrity has broken down, because there is no external pressure to keep it together as a unity: ‘I have to second guess myself as well as them’, 19 the invisible them who never appear but must be presumed to be in control of the environment and actions of the creature with whom he is locked in this destructive and sadistic performance. So while the self is always compromised and disempowered, it yet extends beyond its own confines. The flawed individuality of the subhuman, that ‘mass of subordinate, powerless men who have no common feeling’ finds that correlative with their lack of personal will or self-control is an inability to distinguish themselves from others, and while they are consumed by the wilful ‘I’ of the Superman, a posited personal self is alien even to the one who should claim it. The relation between action and intention are endlessly questioned and reiterated, as the narrator questions whether they instigated their own, or asserts that another’s are under their control. The desire for separation is made explicit when the narrator claims ‘I want you to hold me down, keep me back, keep me away from the part of yourself where you exist’,20 and yet ‘I want you to annihilate my perception of myself when you fuck me, treating me like flesh between your fingers’.21 This is the logical end of the desire to find boundaries: membranes are damaged in the search for some solid, impenetrable thing, abuse is sought as a method of locating that which suffers it and ultimately the minimal selfhood of subjective awareness must be annihilated if that is the only way to prove that it ever existed. 4. The Subhuman as Monster The subhuman is disgusting, like many monsters; and uncanny like many. It is human but is not a human. It is biologically identical with human beings, but not politically or metaphysically so. It exists in this strata beneath society, even supporting and nourishing it; the human world could not survive without it; our own shadow in the netherworld, the ground beneath our feet. Any conception of equality, Nietzsche argues, depends on inequality: for there to be an inside where

68

The Name of the Beast

__________________________________________________________________ human rights is a meaningful concept there must be an outside where human beings are deprived of everything, even of their own selves. 22 It is non-value, the zero-point or nadir, which founds and guarantees the existence of the valuable. The black in apartheid-era South Africa, the American slave. When society becomes total, all-consuming, it dissolves; in the absence of boundary delimiting the outside, there is also no inside. But whereas the monster is huge, so colossal as to refuse definition or understanding, the subhuman is tiny; irrelevant. Divided and without personal integrity; an unconstituted mass without individuality. The subhuman is not feared as such. It is not a monster in this way, not a Lovecraftian ineffable. It is horrific, but at the same time all too understandable; the completely known, the forgotten, the ignored. The Asian sweat-shop labourer, the Eastern European immigrant in London. Though in a way it is feared, because all humans know that could be our fate; the boundary between human and subhuman is worryingly thin. We could pass through it without knowing. We must hate and reject the subhuman in order to create distance, to prevent ourselves from sliding into it...to shore up our own position within the hierarchy.23 It is for this reason that being or becoming subhuman is perceived almost as a choice. Because the boundary is so thin, and the human is perceived as so essentially self-determining, that the subhuman lacks this can be perceived only as a deliberate abnegation. They have entered this pitiable/detestable/disgusting state themselves, of their own volition. And so voluntarily gave up their right to be respected as human. The homeless in New York, the homosexual in Uganda. The subhuman seems to reject morality – they live outside our sphere of what is humane, and so are rejected from the humane; those to whom no duties are applicable. Even to suggest that the subhuman has consciousness may risk ascribing to them a valid point-of-view and thereby degrading the perception of humanity proper, confusing the pure power of the Superman’s will with this crippled concupiscence which is the mentality of the subhuman. To say that they have something approaching a valid subjectivity and rational world-view would challenge the self-evident perfection of our own social paradigms. The Jew in Nazi Germany; “Zionists” in the contemporary Arab world and Palestinians in the Israeli. Something like a mass noun, there are no individual subhumans, just a mass of bodies, pouring over themselves without differentiation. Never personal, never individuated, the subhuman is a category without articulation. Ultimately there may be no characters in The Consumer at all – only situations, playing themselves out. The absence of internality, of the criteria necessary for selfhood, makes the subhuman translucent, diaphanous; their workings are open to view like a simple machine. Similarly though, the subhuman is blind to the motivations of their attackers; as the Übermensch who follow primitive instinctual drives to take what they want, their psychology is opaque to the victim. While the Übermensch display a

Michael T. Miller

69

__________________________________________________________________ transcendent interiority, one which is unimaginably different to the subhuman, the subhuman is perfectly transparent to the Übermensch. Their thoughts and feelings are not only observable but malleable. They lack integrity, like a clockwork mechanism opened up for view; nature, or Descartes’ dog who was dissected alive so he could see how it worked.24

Notes 1

Michael Gira, The Consumer (Los Angeles: 2.13.61 Publications, 1994). Gira, ‘A Contract,’ The Consumer, 138. 3 Gira, ‘Defeated,’ The Consumer, 159-160. 4 Gira, ‘A Man,’ The Consumer, 162. 5 ‘I’m using her body to kill my body.’ Ibid., 163. 6 Gira, ‘The Boss,’ The Consumer, 170. 7 Gira, ‘Initiate,’ The Consumer, 155. 8 Gira, ‘Blind,’ The Consumer, 167-8. 9 Gira, ‘The Caregiver,’ The Consumer, 207. 10 Gira, ‘A Grave,’ The Consumer, 173. 11 Gira, ‘Defeated,’ The Consumer, 159. 12 Gira, ‘The Ideal Worker,’ The Consumer, 156. 13 Ibid. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values vol.1, ed. Dr. Oscar levy, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (London/Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1914), 295 (#373). 15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1, ed. Dr. Oscar levy, trans. Helen Zimmerman (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1909), 65 (#45). 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, ed. Dr. Oscar Levy, trans. Horace B. Samuel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910), 157. Likewise Gira writes of a ‘compressed sphere of concentrated pain in my skull’ which is ‘what they’d like me to believe is “compassion,” but is really a symptom of my mind decomposing.’ Gira, ‘A Contract,’ The Consumer, 139-40. 17 Gira, ‘Daydreams,’ The Consumer, 210-212. 18 Gira, ‘A Contract,’ The Consumer, 138. 19 Ibid., 142. 20 Gira, ‘Money’s Flesh,’ The Consumer 181. 21 Ibid., 180. 22 See the discussion of this in James Wilson, ‘Nietzsche and Equality,’ Nietzsche and Ethics, ed. G.V. Tevenar (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 221 – 240. 23 Gira’s narrator often perceives themselves as tiny and pathetic; the damage they seek is itself a validation: ‘When I feel them looking in at me, I’m alive. I want them to kill me. I want to feel my guts spread out like jelly across one of their 2

70

The Name of the Beast

__________________________________________________________________ palms. I want them to hear the tiny sound I make when I die.’ Gira, ‘The Caregiver,’ The Consumer, 205. 24 See e.g., Richard Watson, Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes (Boston: David R Godine, 2007), 167.

Bibliography Gira, Michael. The Consumer. Los Angeles: 2.13.61 Publications, 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1. Edited by Dr. Oscar levy, translated by Helen Zimmerman. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1909. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Edited by Dr. Oscar Levy, translated by Horace B. Samuel. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values vol.1. Edited by Dr. Oscar Levy, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. London/Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1914. Watson, Richard. Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes. Boston: David R Godine, 2007. Wilson, James. ‘Nietzsche and Equality.’ Nietzsche and Ethics, edited by G.V. Tevenar. 221 – 240. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Michael T. Miller is an interdisciplinary researcher, working mostly in Jewish Studies and Philosophy. He completed his PhD at the University of Nottingham in 2014 and is currently working on his first monograph, The Metaphysical Meaning of the Name of God in Jewish Thought.

‘I Can’t even Hate Bates’: Sufferance, Guilt and Strategies of Victimization in Psycho Marcia Heloisa Abstract This chapter proposes a discussion on monstrosity and the economy of guilt in the 1960 movie Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s chef d'oeuvre, based on the homonymous novel by Robert Bloch. The film stands as a seminal work whose cultural and artistic relevance not only stood the test of time, but also seems to be constantly inviting revisions and re-imaginings. Among these, the 2013 television series Bates Motel stands out as a prequel that intends to offer the viewer an in-depth look into the original characters’ lives years before the events of Bloch's novel and its subsequent cinematic rendering. Psycho´s simple yet powerful plot introduces the reader/viewer to Norman Bates, a man who sees himself entrapped in a claustrophobic existence, haunted by the looming presence of his dominating mother, whose constant abuse deprived Norman, since his childhood, of any sense of self-confidence, social aptitude and filial autonomy. Often read as a work drenched in Jungian archetypes, Psycho can alternatively be seen as an archetype itself. Its subversive narrative, challenging our linear and nonsynchronous understanding of the mystery/horror genre plot evolution, lead to a paradigm shift that forever changed our perception of monstrosity. By presenting Norman as a regular all-American guy, Psycho redefined the monster as seemingly harmless and entirely human. The monster was no longer the Other, but ourselves – just as the fear of death became the fear of the mind. Psycho made us realize that worse than dying was living in a world where one could no longer discern the blurred lines that separate sanity from madness. Using Sigmund Freud's analysis of consciousness of guilt, social anxiety and the relocation of the parental authoritative voice to the super-ego, this chapter examines how the perpetrator can become the victim and investigates recent reappraisals of Norman as a tragic figure searching for individuation. Key Words: Psycho, guilt, archetype, horror, monstrosity. ***** 1. Introduction The chapter proposes a discussion on monstrosity and the economy of guilt in the 1960 movie Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's chef d'oeuvre, based on the homonymous novel by Robert Bloch (1959). The film stands as a seminal work whose cultural and artistic relevance not only stood the test of time, but also seems to be constantly inviting revisions and re-imaginings.

72

‘I Can’t even Hate Bates’

__________________________________________________________________ Psycho´s simple yet powerful plot introduces the reader/viewer to Norman Bates, a man who sees himself entrapped in a claustrophobic existence, haunted by the looming presence of his dominating mother. Her constant abuse deprived Norman, since his childhood, of any sense of self-confidence, social aptitude and filial autonomy. This pathological bonding empowers the mother and emasculates the son; nonetheless, when an outsider threatens to unbalance the mother and son dynamics, Norman kills his mother and her partner. Unable to negotiate the psychological consequences of his crime, Norman develops a dissociative identity disorder that leads him to commit a series of murders impersonating his mother. All the while, he also keeps hidden in his house the embalmed corpse of his Mrs Bates, thus preserved thanks to his skills as an amateur taxidermist. Norman Bates offers Psycho’s most recognisable example of interstitiality. However, the narrative’s ambiguous nature is not limited to its characters and their motivations. Its subversive quality leads to a paradigm shift that forever changed our perception of monstrosity. By presenting Norman as a regular all-American guy, Psycho redefined the monster as seemingly harmless and entirely human. The monster was no longer the Other, but ourselves – just as the fear of death becames a fear of the mind. To author Charles Derry, ‘the fear in Psycho is not particularly of death or symbolic evil; the fear is instead of living in a crazy world’. 1 Psycho made us realize that worse than dying was living in a world where one could no longer discern the blurred lines that separate sanity from madness. 2. Psycho as an Archetype Often read as a work drenched in archetypes, Psycho can be seen as an archetype itself. In Man and his Symbols, Carl Jung defines archetype as ‘a tendency to form representations as a motif – representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern’. 2 Jung notices that one of the characteristics of the archetype is the fascination they tend to inspire, creating ‘myths, religions and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of history’. 3 A brief survey in the Film Studies literature supplies the basis for my claim that Psycho constitutes a cinematic archetype in its capacity to function as the manifestation of a human drive through its symbolic representations. As such, Psycho establishes simultaneously a paradigm shift, a model for narratological renovation and the apex of the artistic expression representative of the American zeitgeist of the 1960s, as several authors emphasize in their analysis. In his A History of Horror, Wheeler Winston Dixon claims that Psycho is ‘the film that truly put an end to the 1950s and opened up a new era for the horror film’. 4 For W. Scott Poole, Psycho changed the American movies forever, offering ‘a shocking, blood-drenched welcome to the 1960s’. 5 David A. Cook, in his thorough exam of the history of American cinema, goes even further in enhancing the movie’s relevance to its genre, stating that Psycho was ‘the film that lent most legitimacy to horror in the 1960s’, and is considered by many critics

Marcia Heloisa

73

__________________________________________________________________ as ‘the first modernist American film in its calculation, detachment, and reflexivity’. 6 In his study of psychoanalysis in modern horror film, author Charles Derry states that it is almost unbelievable to imagine that ‘there was ever a time when Psycho was considered neither a horror film, nor a universally-acclaimed work of art’ and thus sums up the influence of Hitchcock’s masterpiece: the most amazing thing about Psycho is that from the beginning to the end it very consciously goes against all the established conventions, and in doing so manages to redefine exactly what horror is by relating it to the modern sixties sensibilities. 7 This quote encompasses what I consider the key elements to understand why Psycho became a work that never ceases to impress, amaze and maintain its literary/cinematic relevance. First, it contradicted the established conventions of its genre. Second, it altered the very definition of horror. Third, it enabled a powerful intertextuality with the spirit of the times, becoming a cultural product that gathered a collection of symptomatic changes crucial to the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s in the United States. Charles Derry sums up the contribution of Psycho to a new conception for the horror genre: ‘Hitchcock broke away from the two standard realms of horror – the pseudoscientific and the supernatural – and substituted instead the psychological’. 8 Since horror is born out of cultural anxieties, the end of the 1950s and its plastic prosperity was a fertile ground for a fresh kind of fear. Thus, the classic horror with its folkloric monsters, hideous hybrids and invaders from outer space gave way to a new old menace: man. When detailing a subgenre he calls ‘Horror of Personality’, Derry underlines its difference from the classic horror by stressing that the traditional monsters were abstracted from man. In his words, classic horror was a genre ‘that keeps its distance from man both aesthetically and metaphysically’. 9 In the sixties, violence, crime and the angst-ridden post-sexual revolution youth forced horror to reappraise its concerns. Where science and religion have failed, psychology managed to supply – at least tentatively – the safest harbour one could wish for in times of social and moral catastrophe: a logical, rational explanation for evil. Psycho is perhaps the most influential work of this horror subgenre, being paradoxically a brand new product made from an amalgam of older elements. As man became the monster du jour, horror reinvented itself as the ultimate realm of psychological nightmares, an uncanny place that resembled hell and home at the same time. From its intricate Freudian plot to the film set 10 (that cleverly combined the Victorian allure of the ancestral haunted mansion with the sleek and impersonal verticality of the modern motel), Psycho contributed to the deconstruction of the tropes that preserved the Gothic legacy of the pair science/religion in American horror stories. Norman Bates as the psycho-next-door was suddenly scarier and

74

‘I Can’t even Hate Bates’

__________________________________________________________________ more believable than any haunted castle in Transylvania. As one of the characters in the novel concludes, ‘horror wasn’t in the house. It was in his head’. 11 Psycho showed its audience that no one was safe. The genre would never be the same. 12 Horror narratives were forced to adjust its pace, altering not only the face of monsters, but society’s notion of security as well. As the evil menace moved from foreign/supernatural/outdoor to domestic/psychological/indoor, the illusion of safety was shattered and replaced by a contagious paranoia. Once monstrosity lost its conspicuous nature, there was no telling what apparent normalcy could hide underneath its mask. As Poole concludes, the monster ‘might live next door, might live in your house, or might even live inside you’. 13 3. Norman Bates: From Monster Next-Door to Primetime Hero As a part of its ‘100 Years series’, the American Film Institute presented in 2003 a list of the top fifty villains of film history so far. The number one villain was Hannibal Lecter, but Norman Bates followed close to the infamous doctor with peculiar eating habits, nailing the second spot on the list. 14 Ten years after the AFI list, Norman Bates seemed to retain his position as top villain – until Bates Motel subtly changed the audience perception. While both novel and film offer a psychological explanation for Bates’s crimes – including matricide – as the unfortunate result of a lifetime of abuse, repression and rejection, Bates remained nonetheless a villain. In killing his own mother, Bates became not only a criminal, but also the violator of a taboo. As such, he is contagious; he represents, at the same time, the disease and the afflicted. W. Scott Poole sees Bates as ‘the new American monster’, a creature ‘not born from the supernatural shadows or cobbled together in a lab, but coming to deadly life in the midst of American family structures’. 15 Bates Motel, being a prequel that introduces Norman Bates as an inexperienced teenager, speaks directly to the viewer’s tendency to become more lenient toward youngsters. This is not the middle-aged, big, fat, overgrown Mamma’s Boy depicted by Robert Bloch in his novel nor the stammering, slightly creepy motel owner of the film. This is an amiable boy with Bambi-esque pleading eyes who, despite a quaint wardrobe, reeks of youth. Freddie Highmore’s Norman Bates is more evocative of a poor Dickensian orphan than a future psychopathic killer. 16 Another element that contributes to the character’s victimization is the portrayal of his dominant mother, Norma Bates, played by Vera Farmiga. Possessive, manipulative, unbalanced, highly neurotic and prone to hysterics, Norma distracts the viewer from Norman’s monstrosity by becoming the monster herself. 4. Horror of Personality Revisited: Innocent as Charged Guilt plays an essential role in Psycho, being a major theme interwoven in the narrative in an almost inextricable way. All the main characters experience what we call ‘a sense of guilt’, for crimes intended or committed, and are haunted by the

Marcia Heloisa

75

__________________________________________________________________ consequences of their actions. What I would like to argue is that guilt in Psycho is not exclusively circumscribed to the aftermath of the crime, being sometimes the emotion that leads the criminal to act in the first place. Whether moved by impulse, despair or the need for punishment, both Marion Crane and Norman Bates experience guilt before and/or during their criminal intents. 17 In ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, Sigmund Freud discusses the psychological strategies of guilt. To Freud, guilt represents ‘a fear of loss of love’ in its initial stages. 18 He defines ‘sense of guilt’ as the tension between the superego and the ego, made manifest by a need for punishment. The sense of guilty arises from the renunciation of the drives, a task accomplished by the pressure of the super-ego, which takes ‘the place once occupied by the father, or by both parents’, later ‘taken over by the wider human community’. 19 As Freud further explains, ‘the super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same anxieties and is on the look-out for opportunities to expose it to punishment by the external world’. 20 Norman’s oppressive upbringing made him prone to self-loathing and he moved from the suspicion that everything was sinful to the conviction that only sin could establish his connection to the world. Marion’s death, for instance, may be explained as the conclusion of Norman’s search for what Freud called ‘opportunities to expose’ the sinful ego to punishment. The desire to fit in, the need to establish a social/personal relationship with another human being and the guilt for having killed his mother were all mingled in the fractured identity of Norman Bates. 21 As a result, he experiences guilt before and after his crimes, but also a kind of temporary release from anxiety. In his analysis of criminals from a sense of guilt, Freud concludes, ‘the crimes committed in order to fix the sense of guilt to something came as a relief to the sufferers’. 22 There is also a distorted notion of ‘correction’ in Norman’s crimes impersonating his mother. By becoming his deceased mother, he not only undoes his matricide, but acts in a way that would make his mother proud. In the end, Norman Bates is caught and sent to a mental institution. He is, after all, a sick man who needs treatment. The audience cannot help pitying Norman, a feeling best conveyed in the novel by the words of Marion Crane’s sister, Lila: Funny, how differently things work out in real life. None of us really suspected the truth, we just blundered along until we did the right things for the wrong reasons. And right now, I can’t even hate Bates for what he did. He must have suffered more than any of us. In a way I can almost understand. We’re all not quite as sane as we pretend to be. 23 Acknowledging that we are all prone to insanity definitely makes Norman Bates less guilty in our eyes. The question that remains to be answered is whether empathizing with a criminal decreases his monstrosity or enhances our own. As

76

‘I Can’t even Hate Bates’

__________________________________________________________________ Joseph Maddrey observes, ‘By constantly giving the camera a voyeur’s gaze and by making us empathize first with a thief and later with a murderer, he ascribes guilt to the viewer’. 24 Maybe we came to see Norman Bates more as victim than perpetrator because the closer we look, the more familiar he seems. Psycho remains a meaningful experience to the public, because it somehow forces its audience to a joint venture of guilt, insanity and forgiveness. The feeling that we all go a little Norman sometimes is hard to shake. Maybe that is why we ‘can’t even hate Bates’. The minute we find ourselves capable of relating to his suffering, hate becomes pity. Horror comes full circle and the monster, once more, fulfils its function: it restores our humanity.

Notes 1

Charles Derry, Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21th Century (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009), 31. 2 Carl Gustav Jung, A Man and his Symbols (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 67. 3 Ibid., 79. 4 Wheeler Winston Dixon, A History of Horror (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 75. 5 W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (Texas: Baylor University Press, 2011), 141-2. 6 David A. Cook, History of the American Cinema: Lost Illusions (1970 to 1979) (California: University of California Press, 2000), 222. 7 Derry, Dark dreams, 29. 8 Ibid., 31. 9 Ibid., 22. 10 ‘Hitchcock uses the very generic house in his film to foil the audience’s expectations of having the most horrific act happen there … Whereas many of the haunted-house films are really mystery films masquerading as horror, Psycho, with its inquiring detective, is really a horror film masquerading as a mystery. (After all, director Hitchcock even murdered the detective)’: Derry, Dark Dreams, 30. 11 Robert Bloch, Psycho (New York: The Overlook Press, 2010), 171. 12 ‘The influence of Psycho is also obviously apparent in many of the titles released in the sixties – titles that include Mania, Trauma, Maniac, The Sadist, Anatomy of a Psycho, Dementia 13, Strait-Jacket, Pyro, Shock Treatment, The Psychopath, Psycho-Circus, Berserk, Twisted Nerve, The Mad Room, Fanatic and even Paranoia’. Derry, Dark Dreams, 32. 13 ‘By the 1960s postwar social needs had created discourses about mental illness, fears of violence, and the impersonal nature of modern life. You did not have to go messing about in crypts and dungeons to find something lurking. The monster might live next door, might live in your house, or might even live inside you.

Marcia Heloisa

77

__________________________________________________________________ Monsters stalked Americans in an age of growing dread’. Poole, Monsters in America, 139. 14 It is interesting to notice that Norman Bates was deemed more villainous than the following characters: Darth Vader (Star Wars), Amon Goeth (Schindler’s List), the shark (Jaws), Jack Torrence (The Shining), Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver) and Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare in Elm’s Street). 15 Poole, Monsters in America, 142. 16 A ‘New York Times’ television review of Bates Motel conceded that the series has more elements of a coming-of-age tale than the iconic Psycho movie stating that ‘it’s less a horror story than it is a bildungsroman of the budding psychopath’. Alessandra Stanley, ‘Mother, as she Lives and Breathes’, The New York Times, March 17, 2013. 17 ‘Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that the sense of guilt was present before the misdeed, that it did not arise from it, but conversely—the misdeed arose from the sense of guilt. These people might justly be described as criminals from a sense of guilt’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Character-Types Met with in PsychoAnalytic Work’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, Vintage Classics, 309333. 18 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Digital Edition 2013; position 868-870. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 It is also interesting to consider Norman Bates development as a character in the sequels released after Hitchcock’s film and before Bates Motel: Psycho II (1983), Psycho III (1986) and Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990). The sequels, especially Psycho II, are crucial to Bates Motel’s portrait of Norman Bates as a tragic figure, doomed to fail in his attempts to lead a crime-free life and unable to escape its fate of a serial murderer. 22 Freud, ‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work’, 309-333. 23 Bloch, Psycho, 172. 24 Joseph Maddrey, Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2004), 44.

Bibliography Bloch, Robert. Psycho. New York: The Overlook Press, 2010. Cook, David A. History of the American Cinema: Lost Illusions (1970 to 1979). California: University of California Press, 2000.

78

‘I Can’t even Hate Bates’

__________________________________________________________________ Derry, Charles. Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21th Century. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. A History of Horror. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Durgnat, Raymond. A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Digital Edition, 2013. ———. ‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. London: Vintage Classics, 2001. Jung, Carl Gustav. Four Archetypes. London: Routledge Classics, 2001. ———. A Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday, 1964. Maddrey, Joseph. Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2004. Poole, W. Scott. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Texas: Baylor University Press, 2011. Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Faber & Faber,1993. Marcia Heloisa is a PhD student at Universidade Federal. After concluding her MA in Literature with a dissertation on animality in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, she is currently examining the role of the monster as a psychopomp in modern horror narratives.

Language and Monstrosity in the Works of Tommaso Landolfi Irene Bulla Abstract My chapter looks at the intersection between monstrosity and language in the works of Italian writer Tommaso Landolfi (1908 – 1979). After situating Landolfi in the context of twentieth-century Italian fantastico, I emphasise the importance of the monstrous figure in the articulation of the writer’s concern with the aesthetic and existential opacity of language. By focusing on the notion of ‘tendril-words’ and tendril-monsters, I examine how Landolfi’s monstrous word is both the harbinger of crisis (crisis of narrative, i.e. silence; crisis of reason, i.e. madness) and a promise of alternative revelations (however terrifying), potentially signalling a way out of the ‘trite, tentative’ language upon which we base our delusion of control over the world and ourselves. Key Words: Italian literature, fantastic literature, language, monstrosity, Tommaso Landolfi. ***** My chapter investigates the intersection of monstrosity and language by looking at the works of Italian writer Tommaso Landolfi (1908-1979) in the context of twentieth-century Italian fantastic literature. By establishing an unsettling proximity between monstrosity and language, Landolfi suggests that ‘the stuff monsters are made on’ is not necessarily scales, slime or rotten flesh: the scariest monster of all is a monster made of words, an unruly piece of languagematter that eats away at the textual fabric, thus exposing the uncertain ground upon which narratives are constructed. The monstrous word is indeed the core of Landolfi’s poetics, as it helps him frame the question he is most concerned about – the aesthetic and existential (im)possibilities of language. The dialectics of inclusion and exclusion between monstrosity and language – the way these categories trouble and complicate one another – has been articulated in countless ways over the centuries. For instance, in Dante’s Inferno, the giant Nimrod’s damnation is connoted in terms of a loss of intelligible speech.1 His immense, inert body is the emblem and consequence of post-Babelic confusion, so much so that he can only express himself through inarticulate babble (which Dante renders with invented, slightly ‘oriental’ words).2 The descent into the bottom of Hell is parallel to a gradual degradation of language, culminating in the appearance of Lucifer, a three-faced, bat-winged beast whose mouths have the sole purpose of chewing the souls of the damned. But the monster can stake its claim on language and even make it new, as is the case with Frankenstein’s ‘fiend’; or reveal its monstrosity precisely through its speech, as does Caliban in The Tempest.3

80

Language and Monstrosity

__________________________________________________________________ But what if the nearness of monstrosity and language were to collapse into sameness? How would the notion of words as monsters challenge our association of language with humanity? Tommaso Landolfi entrusts the monster with the potential to answer these questions: a borderline figure, known trespasser of the boundaries between real and imaginary, human and inhuman, the monstrous creature reveals the shaky foundations upon which those categories and distinctions are based. At the same time, it exposes the inadequacy of classical, coherent narratives associated with the kind of rational scientific empiricism to which fantastic literature is a reaction (and upon which the fantastic imagination is necessarily based, as argued, among others, by Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal study of the genre).4 Born in 1908 to a noble family in Pico, a small town in central Italy, Tommaso Landolfi pursued his studies in Prato and Firenze, where he graduated in Russian Language and Literature in 1932. A deeply erudite man with a solitary and aristocratic temperament, he spent long periods seeking isolation in his mansion in Pico or feeding his gambling addiction in the main casino cities (Sanremo, Venice). Owing to a systematic distance from the current literary landscape (as well as to an almost complete political disengagement during the Fascist regime and after), Landolfi came to be regarded as the most European of Italian writers, his sources being mainly the great masters of international fantastic literature such as Poe, Hoffmann, Mérimée and Gogol. Both the bleakness of provincial life and the tragic figure of the gambler were to become thematic staples of his work, as well as the tragic disconnection of language from the world and the self, what Simone Castaldi refers to as the ‘process of insulation of the narrative-linguistic act from its referent’.5 One might argue that this insulation of language (literature curling up over itself to become its own object of inquiry) is in fact the main characteristic of Italian fantastic literature as it developed after the turn of the twentieth century. Admittedly, fantastic literature in general is one of the most self-reflexive genres of all. It is a widespread feature of fantastic texts to indulge in theoretical reflections on diegesis and matters of genre-definition (for example, cf. the famous terminological discussion on wunderlich and wunderbar in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Deserted House).6 Yet, this feature is absolutely crucial in the Italian fantastico, so much so that critics such as Gianfranco Contini, Italo Calvino and Lucio Lugnani have remarked on its ironic, intellectual and ‘jaded’ nature. 7 The ghosts, vampires, werewolves, animated statues and automata haunting the moonless nights of French and German canonical texts simply do not graft well onto Italian soil. Here, if anything, the hour of madness is midday, when ghosts appear under the scorching sun; and city monsters are forced to relocate mostly to the dismal provincial towns of Sicily or Ciociaria. The paraphernalia of nineteenth-century fantastic are surely present, but used mainly as stage props for a different kind of play, making for what we might call a post-Fantastic (to paraphrase Stefano

Irene Bulla

81

__________________________________________________________________ Lazzarin’s definition, Italian fantastic is not about rough materials, but about the functions assigned to those materials).8 In Landolfi’s work, this peculiarly ‘jaded’ handling of fantastic material finds its extreme expression in the notion of the ‘impossibility’ of literature. In his view, not only is the fantastic genre all too naïve, but the entire concept of narrative, understood as a classical, coherent model, is absurd. To him, the literature of modernity is itself a ghost, born of the ashes of traditional narratives; and the only possible object of inquiry of this evanescent literature is its own impotence. 9 The failure of mimetic narrative, which pretends to adhere to reality (or to partake in the referential discourses about the real) becomes apparent in the extreme cases in which language shows its cracks, where signifiers and signified lose their reassuring correspondence. At the centre of this epistemological vertigo is a literally impossible creature: the monster. Although countless non-human entities of various kinds and sizes (insects, reptiles, arachnoids, half-human-half-beasts) populate the dreamscape of Landolfi’s tales, I will be focusing on a particular variety of monsters, the one the author seems to feel more strongly about. In a short passage from his 1967 pseudodiary Des Mois, he dwells on what he calls ‘parole-viticcio’, tendril-words, and the effect they have on the mind: We all have, either voluntarily or by accident, done the experiment of tossing and turning a word in our heads until all meaning leaks out, leaving the word empty. At this point the word seems to detach itself, not only from the object to which it is normally tied, but from every possible object or foothold or support. The word starts to curl up, and twine around itself within the mind. At first it resembles the tips of a branch, which the fire in the fireplace twists and shrivels before burning them, and then the emptied word resembles only itself. We could call these words that have no conceivable relationship with the world of phenomena “tendril-words.” Now, what are they? Are they unrecognizable objects or actual standalone words? And, in the latter case, where are they and what do they symbolize? And we ourselves — what are we supposed to do with them, in which space, in which abyss of the soul should we let them swarm? Once again we cannot but feel overcome by them; nor, dismayed, do we find anything better than to retreat hastily from that world of [...] [threatening shadows] and return the words to their trite, tentative meaning.10 Tendril-words are therefore the paradoxical bits of language-matter originated by a disturbance in the relationship of signifier to signified. They do not mean

82

Language and Monstrosity

__________________________________________________________________ anything, and yet they exist and impose upon the mind with an obsessive, haunting quality, bringing about ‘terrifying experiences’. 11 What this passage clearly shows is that the encounter with the monstrous happens at the edge of language: the threatening shadows are nothing but ‘linguistic vampires’,12 an eloquent example of the aforementioned post-Fantastic. The tendril-word obsessing the mind of the narrator in Landolfi’s bizarre sci-fi novel Cancroregina (lit. Cancerqueen) is ‘porrovio’. A non-existent word with vague suggestions of permeability (poro = pore) and imperfection (porro = a wart on the skin),13 it also designates an elusive, lurking creature. As it is often the case in Landolfi, the tendril-word is also a tendril-monster. As Paul Valéry once wrote, there is only one thing more frightening than a monster: trying to describe one.14 Unsurprisingly, impossible monsters come with impossible names. Landolfi, the Linnaeus of imaginary animals,15 conjures up an impressive number of language-bending archaisms or plain neologisms in an effort to describe the ineffable. The ‘mental bat’ that flaps against the inside of a person’s skull is therefore referred to as a vipistrello, a variation of the standard Italian pipistrello (bat); the were-goat Gurù, a hybrid creature with a woman’s torso and a goat’s legs (from La Pietra lunare), deserves the invention of a new class of beings, the veranie. Let us go back to Cancroregina. The novel is divided into two parts. In the first, a lucid narrator explains, in his diary/logbook, how he found himself in the spaceship Cancerqueen with the body of its dead inventor orbiting around it. The second part is the chronicle of the protagonist’s progressive descent into madness, again recounted by himself. The porrovio appears at the end of the novel. It is an undefinable beast which can be known only by its impact: 16 the consequence of its appearance is the outbreak of madness, manifested in the form of incoherent and rambling speech and in the actual disintegration of discourse. Right before the diary ends (with many dots, the signal fading out into deep space), the narrator muses over the porrovio in a way that exposes the uncertain status of this monstrous entity: For a long time my life has been obsessed by the search for and arranging of words. The porrovio roams around, grey, in the darkness, the porrovio comes and goes, the porrovio is a mass I cannot swallow. The porrovio is not a beast: it is a word.17 As the much-quoted phrase by Hugh of St. Victor goes, monstra vocantur quia monstrant: we call them ‘monsters’ because they show or point to something (or they ‘stand for’ something, much like a word stands for its referent). 18 In being gateways to alternative dimensions, monsters transcend themselves and become

Irene Bulla

83

__________________________________________________________________ signs to be interpreted, questions to be answered, although not always successfully (‘the ghost tells us it looks like something, but it never says what’).19 What to do, then, with a monster that breaks the comfort of binary signification, to the point that it ‘roams freely’ between the realm of mots and that of choses? How could it not lead the rationalising mind to the brink of the ‘abyss of the soul’, the ‘world of threatening shadows’ in which madness lurks? This unhinged fluidity is the mark of tendril-monsters. In order to make sense of a ‘traditional’ monster (think of the vampire and its long pedigree in oral and written culture), the reader needs only activate textual connections to a cultural heritage s/he at least partially shares with the author. This allows for interpretation in the light of what came before – for instance, it allows the reader to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular intertextual reference. As Ferdinando Amigoni puts it, ‘we all have a shelf in our mental library where unicorns can be neatly placed’. 20 On the contrary, the tendril-monster offers an unprecedented instance of monstrosity: no one has ever seen a porrovio (not even the narrator, we suspect, despite what he is telling us), no one knows what it looks like, nor can it be ‘shelved’ or made sense of through taxonomical language since it completely eludes description. Let us keep in mind the main features of tendril-monsters – their unexplainable, unsignifiable being-there, and the way they polarize narrative through their obsessive quality. It might be interesting to recall the notion of ‘narrative prosthesis’ elaborated by disability scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between monstrosity and narrative.21 According to Mitchell and Snyder, literary narrative shows a structural discursive dependency upon the theme of corporeal difference. This ‘narrative prosthesis’ is both identified as a device for characterisation and as a metaphorical embodiment of the original disruption that is the necessary motor of literary narratives. The need for a story arises when a deviation from the norms of the fictional world takes place and has to be made sense of. The deviant body is therefore ‘a potent symbolic site of literary investment’, 22 an overdetermined surface on which narrative has to prove itself. The secular literary fortunes of the disabled body as narrative prosthesis are explained by its being set up as a problem, a riddle in need of interpretation. In Mitchell and Snyder’s words, ‘the body’s weighty materiality functions as a textual and cultural other – an object with its own undisciplined language that exceeds the text’s ability to control it’.23 The deviant body is the hard core of materiality defying any discursive attempt at deconstruction and analysis. Since there are many areas of productive overlap between disability and monster studies, I take the liberty to apply Mitchell and Snyder’s considerations to those elements of disruption and deviance that are Landolfi’s tendril-monsters.24 What I think is to be gained for our purposes is the idea of a challenge and steadfast resistance to interpretation. The hard core of the monstrous cannot be

84

Language and Monstrosity

__________________________________________________________________ signified or interpreted away through a comfortable narrative of order and control. The corporeal quality of Landolfian monster-words is noted by Amigoni when he states that [p]erhaps the miracle occurring in the writing of Landolfi is exactly this: to be able to make a linguistic derangement more immediately physical in its effects ... [than] a monster coming out of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory’. 25 The poignancy of the monster trope in Landolfi is also testified to by those works in which deviant embodiments are invested with an ancestral fascination, such as the aforementioned were-goat in La pietra lunare, who speaks the incomprehensible language of nature and the moon, or the disabled girl of ‘La Muta’ (‘The Mute’), slashed to death by the male protagonist in a desperate, halfdelirious effort to penetrate/possess her silence. In this short story, the unattainable ‘truth’ the protagonist is after is defined as both ‘refulgent’ and ‘monstrous’: perhaps monstrosity may after all be an alternative to the world of ‘trite, tentative meaning’ in which man is confined by language, if only one had the courage to peer into the abyss. (At the end of the story, which is also a confession and a pretrial memoir, the narrator famously comments on the poisonous nature of language: ‘... nothing I said is true; not because it isn’t true, but because I said it’).26 The abyss is a terrifying place, but perhaps there is something even worse: a world which is deaf to the dark promises of monsters, the most inhuman world possible (‘when the world gives up on the marvellous – that’s when it scares me the most’).27 The way Landolfi explores the intersection of monstrosity and language brings to the fore the paradoxical potential of the monster figure. The monster is an enemy of boundaries and the embodiment of their fragility. If language depends on discreteness (between subject and object, between word and its referent), the tendril-monster eats away at the space between signifier and signified and becomes its own sign, opening up a terrifying twilight zone (an all-linguistic version of the grey area where Todorovian hésitation happens)28. Like the porrovio in the belly of the Cancerqueen spaceship, so does the tendril-word consume language from within like a gangrene, monsterising – zombifying – the language or, perhaps, only bringing its inherent monstrosity in full view. At the same time, monsters are also the bodies around which cultural narratives of the most various kinds are constructed; by sanctioning these narratives with their negative presence, they make them possible. Just like the zombie virus, which both kills the host and keeps it – somehow – alive, so is the monster-word both the reason for the collapse of textuality and the hard core around which impossible literature becomes, in fact, possible. Landolfi’s greatest feat is then the stubborn

Irene Bulla

85

__________________________________________________________________ quest for a residual trace of humanity, or for a monstrous glimpse of truth, in the walking corpse of modern literature.

Notes 1

Dante Alighieri, ‘Canto XIII,’ Inferno, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Random House, 2002). 2 In his perceptive study of monstrosity in the Middle Ages, David Williams highlights ‘the simultaneity of the origins of discourse and monstrosity’ in the legend of the tower of Babel: ‘born of the same matrix’, both represent ‘the grotesque union of disparate forms’, both loss of unity and possibility of reconstruction. David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996: 63-64. 3 Cf. Kristen Wright, ‘Caliban and Aaron: Monstrous Mouths and Monstrous Desires,’ in this volume. 4 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Todorov famously discusses the fantastic story of the 19th century as a text establishing a familiar world dominated by the laws of scientific rationalism, which are then put into question by an apparently supernatural occurrence. The hésitation experienced by the character and the reader alike (is the ghost real, is it a dream, a hallucination?) is the hallmark of the fantastic. 5 Simone Castaldi, ‘Il Linguaggio come Funzione del Fantastico nella Narrativa di Tommaso Landolfi’, Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 44.2 (2010): 364. 6 E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Deserted House, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004. 7 This is the adjective used by Lucio Lugnani (‘smaliziato’ in Italian) in his essay ‘Verità e Disordine: Il Dispositivo dell’Oggetto Mediatore,’ in Remo Ceserani et al., La Narrazione Fantastica (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1983), 208. 8 Stefano Lazzarin, ‘“Centuria”: Le Sorti del Fantastico nel Novecento,’ Studi Novecenteschi 53 (1997): 143. 9 Cf. his short story collection Racconti Impossibili, Opere, ed. Idolina Landolfi, vol. 2, 1960-1971 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1992), 589-678. 10 Tommaso Landolfi, Des Mois, Opere, ed. Idolina Landolfi, vol. 2, 1960-1971 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1992), 765. (The translation is found in Gio Clairval, ‘Dino Buzzati: Interpretation of Buzzati and the Colomber’, Weirdfictionreview.com, 12 February, 2012, Blog. All subsequent translations from the Italian are mine), viewed on 4 April 2014, http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/02/weirdfictionreview-coms-101-weirdwriters-4%E2%80%89-%E2%80%89dino-buzzati/. 11 Ibid.

86

Language and Monstrosity

__________________________________________________________________ 12

Ferdinando Amigoni, Fantasmi nel Novecento (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004), 83. 13 Stefano Lazzarin, ‘Parole-viticci: Bestiario e Onomastica di Tommaso Landolfi’, Studi Novecenteschi XXXIV 74 (2007), 317-318. 14 Qtd. in Massimo Riva, ‘Per Speculum Melancholiae: The Awakening of Reason Engenders Monsters’, Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2001), 279. 15 Stefano Lazzarin, ‘Vipistrello, Colombre, Animale Giglio: Vampiri Linguistici del Novecento Italiano’, Italies 10 (2006), viewed 11 May 2014, http://italies.revues.org/634. 16 As argued by Asa Simon Mittman, the monstrous takes so many culturespecific forms that any general definition based on mere observation is impossible: rather, ‘the monster is known through its effect, its impact’. Asa Simon Mittman, ‘Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies’, The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, 6. 17 Note the obsessive repetition of the word; Tommaso Landolfi, Cancroregina, Opere, ed. Idolina Landolfi, vol. 1, 1937-1959 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1992), 564. 18 David Williams, ‘Monsters Then and Now’, Lo Sguardo 9 II (2012), 239. 19 Charles Grivel, qtd. in Ferdinando Amigoni, Fantasmi, 86. 20 Ferdinando Amigoni, Fantasmi, 25. 21 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Narrative Prosthesis’, Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2010), 274-287. 22 Ibid., 276. 23 Ibid., 275. 24 Moreover – but this would deserve far more attention that I can grant it here – Landolfian texts abound with depictions of disability, generally framed as a source of fear and horror and mostly associated with female bodies. 25 Ferdinando Amigoni, ‘Putting Ghosts to Good Use: Savinio, Bontempelli, Landolfi’, Italica 77 (2000): 78. Cf. Landolfi’s gastric image, ‘[t]he porrovio is a mass I cannot swallow’. 26 Tommaso Landolfi, ‘La Muta’, Opere, ed. Idolina Landolfi, vol. 1, 1937-1959 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1992), 449. 27 Tommaso Landolfi, ‘Il Rigatore’, Del Meno (Milano: Rizzoli, 1978), 188. 28 This is Simone Castaldi’s argument in the aforementioned article ‘Il Linguaggio’.

Bibliography Alighieri, Dante. ‘Canto XIII,’ Inferno. Translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Random House, 2002.

Irene Bulla

87

__________________________________________________________________ Amigoni, Ferdinando. ‘Putting Ghosts to Good Use: Savinio, Bontempelli, Landolfi’. Italica LXXVII.1 (2000): 69-80. ———. Fantasmi nel Novecento. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2004. Clairval, Gio. ‘Dino Buzzati: Interpretation of Buzzati and the Colomber’. Weirdfictionreview.com, 12 February, 2012. Blog. Viewed on 4 April 2014. http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/02/weirdfictionreview-coms-101-weirdwriters-4%E2%80%89-%E2%80%89dino-buzzati/. Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Deserted House. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004. Lazzarin, Stefano. ‘“Centuria”. Le Sorti del Fantastico nel Novecento’. Studi Novecenteschi XXIV 53 (1997): 99-145. ———. ‘Parole-viticci: Bestiario e Onomastica di Tommaso Landolfi’. Studi Novecenteschi XXXIV 74 (2007): 307-337. ———. ‘Vipistrello, Colombre, Animale Giglio: Vampiri Linguistici del Novecento Italiano’. Italies 10 (2006). Viewed 11 May 2014. http://italies.revues.org/634. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. ‘Narrative Prosthesis’. Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 274-287. New York: Routledge, 2010. Mittman, Asa Simon. ‘Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies’. The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle, 1-14. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Landolfi, Tommaso. Cancroregina. Opere, edited by Idolina Landolfi, vol. 1, 519565. Milan: Rizzoli, 1992. ———. Del Meno. Milano: Rizzoli, 1978. ———. Des Mois. Opere, edited by Idolina Landolfi, vol. 2, 681-802. Milan: Rizzoli, 1992.

88

Language and Monstrosity

__________________________________________________________________ ———. ‘La Muta.’ Opere, edited by Idolina Landolfi, vol. 2, 431-450. Milan: Rizzoli, 1992. ———. Racconti Impossibili. Opere, edited by Idolina Landolfi, vol. 2, 589-678. Milan: Rizzoli, 1992. Williams, David. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. ———. ‘Monsters Then and Now’. Lo Sguardo 9 II (2012): 239-258. Irene Bulla is a Ph.D. Candidate in Italian and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her doctoral project focuses on the notion of monstrosity in Italian fantastic literature. Her interests include modern Italian literature, fantastic literature, monster studies, biography studies, the theory and practice of translation.

Part III Locating the Monster

The Evil City: Geographical Space in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Niculae Gheran Abstract This chapter focuses on three environments characteristic to negative utopias and the mechanics behind their construction that makes them being perceived as monstrous. Its aim is to show that despite the fact that the works chosen belong to twentieth-century Literature, we can talk about ways in which the nineteenthcentury Romantic ethos and ideology influenced the construction of these environments and are ultimately responsible for their being depicted and perceived as monstrous. Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre show in their book Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity the clear ways in which the Romantic ethos perpetuated itself in different forms during the twentieth and twenty-first century. They show how Romantic antipathy for artificial environments and the construction of the city as a negative topology was perpetuated within the next ages in political and spiritual movements, forms of thinking and writing associated with individuals who would not commonly be associated with the Romantic ethos. This happened, for instance, through the preference of vitalism and energy as opposed to stasis, opposition to the disenchantment of the world, despotism and the mechanistic state, and opposition to bourgeois capitalism as well as the Enlightenment. It is the purpose of the present chapter to show that the chosen authors, by their specific critique against modernity, fall into this category and that the environments rendered in their works are constructed as monstrous precisely because they fail to conform to many of the elements that constitute what can be argued as a Romantic form of spatial practice. Key Words: Orwell, Huxley, dystopia, monsters, monstrous, modernity, geography, spatiality. ***** Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre show in their book Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity the clear ways in which the Romantic ethos perpetuated itself in different forms during the 20th and twenty-first century. They show how Romantic antipathy for artificial environments and the construction of the city as a negative topology was perpetuated within the next ages in political and spiritual movements, forms of thinking and writing associated with individuals who would not commonly be associated with the Romantic ethos. This happened, for instance, through the preference of vitalism and energy as opposed to stasis, opposition to the disenchantment of the world, despotism and the mechanistic state, and opposition to bourgeois capitalism as well as the Enlightenment. It is the purpose

92

The Evil City

__________________________________________________________________ of the present chapter to show how important dystopian authors, by means of their specific critique against modernity fall into this category and that the environments rendered in their works are perceived by the reader as being monstrous precisely because they fail to conform to many of the elements that constitute what can be argued as a Romantic form of spatial practice. 1. The Evil City and the Beautiful Countryside We need to remember the fact that the English Romantic poets lived at the dawn of the industrial era. For them, natural environments were in sharp contrast to the smoke, crowded streets and noisy machinery of cities like London. However, while Romanticism subsided as a literary movement, the industrial era did not stop its onslaught and carried forth into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Future authors used this symbolic dichotomy between city and country, so dear to the Romantics, in their own works. Of course, one cannot call these novels Romantic in the traditional sense but certain tenets of their writing, particularly with regards to their peculiar binary construction of symbolic space, their stance of opposition and anxiety towards modernity in many of its manifestation can be taken as being inherited from the Romantic ethos. First of all, the word ‘modernity’ is not to be taken in a literary sense within this context; it is not to be taken as a synonym for literary ‘modernism’, the literary and artistic movement that began towards the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, many of the authors of negative utopias were called modernists by literary standards despite the fact that many, similarly to the Romantics as we shall see, did not endorse many of the values of what we can generically call ‘modern industrial civilization’. Indeed we can call many of them anti-modern literary modernists. This is because, despite the fact that they belong to literary modernism, the impulse that led to the construction of their works, specifically their symbolic geography, can be linked to the remnants of a Romantic ethos and to the critique of modernity that these authors made. Max Weber observed that the principal features of modernity were the calculating spirit, the disenchantment of the world, instrumental rationality and bureaucratic domination. 1 Charles Cooley also mentions as effects of modernity the urbanization, secularization and reification of the social landscape.2 Reification is defined as, ‘the dehumanization of human life, the transforming of human relations into relations among things, inert objects’.3 To these we can add the decline of all qualitative, social, and religious values; the death of the imagination and the novelistic spirit; the tedious uniformization of life and the purely utilitarian relations of human beings among themselves and with nature.4

Niculae Gheran

93

_______________________________________________________ Interestingly enough, if we take a look at many twentieth-century negative utopias we can observe the critique of modernity as taking shape along the same lines. The topography of the modern negative utopian city is presented as a dehumanized space where we can observe the phenomenon of social reification, and in the case of politically charged negative utopias we can see the same horror in the face of uniformization and detachment from nature. The fictional worlds presented by authors such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Horace Newte and many others lack qualitative, social and religious values and are presented to us as completely disenchanted universes. In many cases there is a complete overlap between the nightmare of the Romantics and that of the authors of dystopias, because the main parallel between these two groups of authors is not necessarily aesthetic but ideological. Both in their own way oppose the same structure, the onslaught of modernity and the modern ethos. Lowy and Sayre note in Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity that we can find important parallels between the thinking of the nineteenth and the following centuries.5 I believe that negative utopias are a particularly good example of this if we have in mind the themes of the disenchantment of the world, the critique of quantification, mechanization, rationalist abstraction, the modern state, modern politics and the dissolution of social bonds. In some, the authors place emphasis on the importance of the past, history and memory (precisely because the works portray dark futures in which memory itself seems to be erased). Interestingly enough, despite such erasure of historical continuity attributed to the dominating political system within the negative utopia, many authors construct marginal locations, natural or artificial, or make use of objects in their novels that are associated with an idealized pre-dystopian past and memory. These locations are small in number and usually accessible only by the main characters in the novels. These allusions to a lost pre-dystopian, sometimes idealized past, whether usually containing traditional values, in my opinion is a sign of the presence of residues of the Romantic ethos. It is important to note that progress, modernity and enlightenment values are directly attacked in many dystopias. There are a great number of authors of negative utopias whose critique falls precisely on the values of modernity, the same that were attacked by the Romantics in the previous century. Progressive systems of social organization are attacked by authors such as George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. One of his central characters in Brave New World, John, nicknamed ‘the savage’ is a good example. He is nicknamed ‘the savage’ because he has lived the greater part of his life on the reservation beyond the border of the dystopian state. Huxley obviously alludes to Rousseau’s noble savage and thus the values of Romanticism itself. The author’s geographical polarization is between a natural order belonging to the past incorporating values absent from the second one, a modern dystopian present. The values of the past are valued as good and positive by Huxley and many others like him, while on the other hand the

94

The Evil City

__________________________________________________________________ reification, quantification, the loss of qualitative human and cultural values, the solitude of individuals, uprootedness, alienation, the uncontrollable dynamic of machines and technology, temporality reduced to the instantaneous, the degradation of nature6 are all features of modernity. Not only are they features of modernity, they are the exact same issues the Romantics criticised one hundred years earlier. Disturbed by the progression of the malady we call modernity; the nineteenth and twentieth-century Romantics were often melancholic and pessimistic in their outlook: moved by a tragic sentiment of the world and by terrible premonitions, they presented the future under the darkest possible colors. 7 George Orwell, an author very sensitive to issues of temporality, observed that modern individuals find themselves trapped ‘in an everlasting present without past (which worried him the most) and without future’.8 And indeed, in 1984 this is precisely the way in which the great majority of the inhabitants of his fictional world live. Only the main character struggles to gather the broken pieces of the past and re-create a mental image of it. Orwell’s Romanticism and idealization of the past, particularly British past before WW1 is more than obvious upon a close inspection of the text, an analysis of certain environments presented in his work as well as of the objects that serve as memory triggers. It is precisely the darkness of his present and the hopelessness of his world’s future that emphasizes the immense importance of even the smallest fragments of the now forbidden past, for after all, ‘he who controls the past, controls the future’9. One of the central features of modernity that the Romantics rebelled against was the idea of a mechanized and rationalized environment. They preferred the dynamic, the natural and the organic to the mechanical. They reacted against the mechanizing tendencies of the age as famously described by authors such as Thomas Carlyle in works like The Signs of the Times. Carlyle notes that: Were we required to characterize this age epithet, we should be tempted to call Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of outward and inward sense of that word.10

of ours by any single it, not an Heroical, but, above all others, Machinery, in every

In politics as well, the Romantics saw the modern state as being a mechanical system that was artificial, inorganic, geometrical, lifeless and soulless. Schelling for example complained in Das älteste Sustem des deutschen Idealismus (The

Niculae Gheran

95

_______________________________________________________ oldest system of German idealism) arguing that ‘We must go beyond the State! For every State necessarily treats free human beings like a mechanical system of gears’.11 I believe that this particular aspect of the Romantic ethos has influenced negative utopias to greater or lesser extent. The writers of negative utopias offered a critique of twentieth-century Europe with the advance of totalitarian regimes, ecological and social catastrophes just as much as the Romantics critiqued their age similarly. Robert Sayre notes on the Romantic worldview that: … one may also choose to flee society, leaving cities behind for the country, trading modern countries for exotic ones, abandoning the centres of development for some “elsewhere” that keeps a more primitive past alive in the present. The approach of exoticism is a search for a past in the present by a mere displacement in space. A rejection of contemporary society, an experience of loss, a melancholic nostalgia, and a quest for the lost object: such are the chief components of the Romantic vision.12 In the case of many notable characters of dystopian literature the same thing happens. We should think of the forest outside London where Julia secretly meets Winston in Orwell’s 1984, the reservation from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World visited by Bernard Marx, the forest to which Guy Montag escapes to in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 459 or, in Russian literature, the land beyond the Green Wall in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. These are very similar attempts to escape the modern city and move towards a natural topography of the past. Often these natural surroundings are idealized just as much as the Romantics idealized the lost natural order and its connection with the past as opposed to the artificiality of the industrial city. We deal with the exact same type of nostalgia for a lost Eden, a Golden Age or a lost Atlantis. James McKusick notes in Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology that there is a prevailing tendency to conceive the West as a place of freedom, wildness and nature, while the east is negatively associated with urbanization and the decadence of the Old World.13 Among other polarities between east and west/city and country we could not forget: tame and wild, free and servile, spontaneous nature and mechanized culture, wilderness and civilization. Having in mind especially the political aspect of this type of polarization between how the east and west have been constructed in the imaginary of western nineteenth-century Anglophone literature (free – servile, country – city, wild – tame), it is not very hard to realize how easy and useful the exploitation of this imaginary dialectic inherited from the nineteenth century was by authors of negative utopias, especially those that criticized the advance of totalitarian regimes

96

The Evil City

__________________________________________________________________ like communism, a regime that has always been associated with the east and therefore fitting in perfectly into the imaginary dialectic presented above. It is a very important thing to note that twentieth century dystopian authors share the exact same contempt for the mechanical model of the world as well as for the rationalized environments that they perceived as dominating their epoch. The dystopian city has often been compared to the Panopticon prison model imagined by the British utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, a figure much despised by many of the Romantics as well. The Romantics used images of nature to shift the attention and underline the importance of nature in the face of modernization. Authors of negative utopias on the other hand centred on the city and left only spots of nature on the margin. However, their view of the modernized industrial city coincides perfectly with that of the Romantics. 2. Anxiety about the Death of Individualism Daniel Shanahan notes in ‘Towards a Genealogy of Individualism’ the immense importance of individualism for western culture. Shanahan notes that when we make statements such as ‘we are all individuals’ we make more than a remark about the particularity of human existence; such a statement implies that our individuality, which we take to be a kind of uniqueness, provides the very fibre of our moral character. Indeed, when diversity among individuals begins to disappear, we become alarmed, for we fear that the very core of our moral being may be threatened by excessive uniformity. 14 However Lillian Furst argues in her book Romanticism in Perspective that it was the real innovation of the Romantics to turn individualism into a whole ethos. It can be fairly argued that Romanticism represents the first convergence of individualistic attitudes into a social, literary and philosophical movement that places an emphasis on the solitary individual as nothing less than the centre of the universe, or at least the universe as seen from the human perspective. 15 Central to this is the image of the character resisting the levelling mechanism of the eighteenth century, the resistance against enlightenment ideology and the rationalizing of the environment. The Romantics saw the industrial revolution as a quintessential enemy of individualism, forcing individuals to conform more and more to standardized patterns of existence symbolized, for example, by people working in factory assembly lines. Their works are first of all reactions against the trend of atomization and automatization of the individual as we have seen in the previous section of this chapter. Regarding the influence passed on by Romantic individualism to modern twentieth-century individualism, M.H. Abrams shows how this type of individualism has evolved into the reigning diagnosis of our own age: the claim that man, who was once well, is now ill, and that at the core of the modern

Niculae Gheran

97

_______________________________________________________ malaise lies his fragmentation, dissociation, estrangement, or (in the most highly charged of these parallel terms) ‘alienation’.16 The Romantics showed signs and symptoms of alienation that are similar to, if not the same as, the alienation we associate with the modern experience. 17 Wylie Sypher suggests that the liberal tradition has acted as a transmission device whereby the attitudes of Romanticism were carried along into the modern world. 18 Needless to say, the issue of individualism was also a great concern for twentieth-century writers of negative utopias. Mechanization and atomization were perceived as real dangers more than ever before because in the twentieth century the individual was threatened by collective totalitarianism that sought to reconstruct society on the hive model with a total disregard for the autonomy of the individual. Communism, Fascism and Nazism posed an even greater threat to individual autonomy than the industrial revolution and the factory model did back in the nineteenth century for the Romantics. For this reason, the reaction of many authors of negative utopias is extremely similar in scope to that of the Romantics, to create a counterbalance and warning signs against the modern new evils society was facing. Within novels or poetry, the Romantic character is always different in many ways from the ordinary around him, it is precisely this difference, his individual autonomy, his lack of ability or desire to integrate that sets him apart from the masses living around him. One cannot be blind to the fact that this trait of the Romantic character, his uncommonness, is also a trait of main characters from dystopian literature. Main characters inhabiting dystopian literature are always, as a rule of thumb, different from those around them, they are individuals and therefore they are left alienated. These differences can be geo-temporal (the character is associated to another time frame and/or location, usually the past, genetic, physical, intellectual, psychological, political or, in many occasions the characters are associated with a form of art that underlines their separateness). To give only a few examples, Bernard Marx in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is genetically, physically and psychologically different from other individuals in the strict caste system of the world around him. Along with his poet friend Helmholz he simply does not fit in like ‘normal’ people do in Huxley’s universe. John the Savage, another very important character in Huxley’s dystopian novel, of whom I spoke before, belongs, technically speaking, to two worlds simultaneously: on the one hand he belongs to the savage reservation, because his mother was a native of the reservation and this was the environment that shaped him emotionally and culturally throughout his life, but, on the other hand, genetically he belongs to the world state, his father being a member of the Alpha ruling caste of Huxley’s universe. He reads old literature, being fond particularly of William Shakespeare, an author banned by the world state. He is another example of a character that does not seem to fit in anywhere. And we can give countless other examples: Guy Montag from Ray

98

The Evil City

__________________________________________________________________ Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Chip from Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, Offred from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Winston Smith and Julia from George Orwell’s 1984, the Chinese traveller from Owen Gregory’s Meccania, Juno from E.M Forster’s The Machine Stops, and the list can go on and on. These characters are different from each other yet they have one common trait, their obvious difference from other people inhabiting their fictional space, their individuality. It is this difference as well as their tendency to rebel in different forms against the status quo of the dystopian world that marks their identity as one linked with the Romantic ethos and, more specifically linked, with making a stand in favour of individual autonomy as opposed to assuming the collectivized identity forced upon other people by the dystopian status quo. 3. Conclusion So if we are to answer the question of why do we perceive dystopian geography as monstrous geography we should understand that when the Romantics tapped into human emotions and natural responses as a source for creativity, they tapped into some of the deepest fears and desires of western culture. These fears did not change much in the twentieth and not even in the twenty-first century when new challenges appeared. Just because we now own iPads does not mean that many do not fear alienation, the dreariness of urban environments, the transforming of human relations into relations among things, uniformization, social reification, the dissolution of social bonds, the prospect of losing our individuality, living in a totally uniform world or that the world may still fall into despotism and be ruled by a mechanistic state. If the Romantics feared the spoiling of the environment by industrial civilization, we should be attentive to the great importance that ecology plays in our culture, how European policies are influenced by environmental concerns and fears of a further destruction of nature.

Notes 1

Max Weber quoted in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills eds., Essays in Sociology, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 347. 2 Charles Cooley quoted in Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (London & Durham, Duke University Press: 2001), 19. 3 Ibid., 20. 4 Ibid., 25. 5 Ibid., 1-43. 6 Ibid., 251. 7 Ibid., 251. 8 George, Orwell quoted in Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, 19. 9 George Orwell, 1984, (London: Signet Classic, 1950), 17

Niculae Gheran

99

_______________________________________________________ 10

Thomas Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), 235. 11 Wilhelm Friedrich Schelling, quoted in Lowy and Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, 39. 12 Ibid., 23. 13 James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2. 14 Daniel Shanahan, Towards a Genealogy of Individualism (Massachusetts University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 21. 15 Lillian Furst, Romanticism in Perspective (London, Macmillan, 1969), 58. 16 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York, Norton, 1971), 145. 17 Shanahan, Towards a Genealogy, 96. 18 Wylie Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, Vintage, 1962), 26.

Bibliography Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York, Norton, 1971. Carlyle, Thomas. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. London: Chapman and Hall, 1888. Furst, Lillian. Romanticism in Perspective. London:Macmillan, 1969. Gerth, Hans and Mills. C. Wright eds. Essays in Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Lowy, Michael and Sayre Robert. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, London & Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. McKusick, James. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: Macmillan, 2010. Shanahan, Daniel. Towards a Genealogy of Individualism. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Sypher, Wylie. Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art. New York: Vintage, 1962.

100

The Evil City

__________________________________________________________________ Niculae Liviu Gheran is currently a third year PhD Student in Comparative Literature at Babeş-Boylai University in Romania with a thesis on the influence of nineteenth-century thinking on twentieth-century Anglophone Dystopian Literature. He has taught university level seminars on Romanticism at the aforementioned university, is part of a national research grant on dystopias, took part in the coordination of a volume on science fiction and fantasy and also published several articles on the present topic in various European academic journals. The research that lead to the publication of this article was sponsored by the POSDRU European Scholarship program POSDRU/159/1.5/S/140863‚ Cercetători competitivi pe plan european în domeniul științelor umaniste și socioeconomice. Rețea de cercetare multiregională (CCPE).’

The Human and the Inhuman in Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama Carlo Comanducci Abstract The monstrous is individuated by the same normative discourses that regulate the definition and the performative constitution of the corps propre, the human and the social. The mechanism of monstrosity and that of humanity are, thus, one and the same. The function of this mechanism is precisely to affirm the existence of a clear split between the human and the inhuman, and to objectivate this split by performing their separation in discursive and social practices. Referring to the different views on the abject in the works of Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, this paper argues that the human and the inhuman are not just inseparable, in that they are two products of the same dynamics, but also radically indistinguishable. The split which is assumed and created by normative discourses, as much as it is deemed necessary for the formation of human subjects and communities, is in fact impossible to realise completely, and always uncertain. Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama provides an example of this fundamental and irresoluble ambiguity of humanity and inhumanity, as it presents a prototypical rural community in nineteenth century Japan in which the boundaries between the human and the animal, social aggregation and isolation, compassion and cruelty, death and plenty, are hard to draw. By refusing to take an essential and idealised notion of humanity as the universal ground of equality and social institutions, Imamura compels us to acknowledge the contingency and indeterminacy of the human and the inhuman, and the hegemonic struggles that characterize their very distinction. Key Words: Abjection, The Ballad of Narayama, Judith Butler, contingency, humanity, Shohei Imamura, inhumanity, Julia Kristeva, performativity, Slavoj Žižek. ***** I will move from the premise that the monstrous – the inhuman – is individuated by the same normative discourses that regulate the definition, and the performative constitution, of the human, the social, and the corps propre (one’s own clean and proper body).1 The mechanisms of monstrosity and those of humanity, I believe, are one and the same. What from a certain perspective can be taken to be the moment of the monster’s repression – the moment of its exclusion from the scope of normalcy and from the spaces that social norms define – is actually the moment of the monster’s binding construction, and of the constitution of the human subject as well.

102

The Human and the Inhuman

__________________________________________________________________ We could say that humanity and inhumanity, then, are both dependent on each other, and inseparable. So, on one side, normal (or rather normative) subjectivity is informed by the rejection of one’s own inhumanity; this rejection can then be seen to induce a projection of inhumanity onto social others which eventually grounds, and reinforces, the realities of their discrimination. And, on the other side, inhumanity may appear as a more or less wilful subversion of a certain image of humanity. What is central to both dynamics is a definite split between the human and the inhuman, the other and the self, which at the same time is predicated by normative discourses and grounds their very power. In this paper, I want to point out that this split is never entirely realisable and never entirely clear, that humanity and inhumanity are not just inseparable and dialectically constructed, but also radically contingent and, thus, largely indistinguishable. The measure of normativity of discourses on humanity and inhumanity, I think, lays first of all in the apparent neatness of the split that they assume and perform, and only after in their content, so to speak, or their contingent criteria. In other words, the power of normative discourses does not only lie in ruling who or what is to be considered human or inhuman, but, more fundamentally, in establishing and validating the very possibility of their unambiguous separation. This split is imposed in the first place not between but actually within the subjects social discourses attempt (and can only attempt) to define. Addressing the mechanism of monstrosity, then, is not just a matter of stating its relativity (one’s humanity can be another’s inhumanity), but rather its radical indeterminacy: exactly what is human and inhuman within any given discourse, and about any possible subject or situation, can never be entirely clear. 1. Contingency and Abjection Much like, as Judith Butler argued in Gender Trouble, no one becomes a woman, since the idea of becoming a woman implies that women realise and abide by a transcendental and naturalised idea of womanhood, which is in fact already a consequence and a contingent product of sexist discourses, no one essentially is a monster, and no one becomes a monster by actualising some kind of monstrous nature which would exist before and beyond its discursive definition. 2 If we accept this, at the same time, we also have to accept that no human being is essentially human, and that no one becomes human, in the sense that it comes to incarnate a fixed set of transcendental qualities that define its humanity, however universal and inclusive those might be. In other words, the human and the inhuman should never be taken as a datum, but only as they are objectivated and brought into existence by their performance in discursive social practices. As a consequence, any definition of humanity is already, to a certain extent, normative – it constitutes a project of mastery over human beings. Once we recognise its contingency, instead, any such a definite distinction between the human and the inhuman appears in all its hegemonic, cultural and political, significance.

Carlo Comanducci

103

__________________________________________________________________ The mutual implication and indistinctness of bodies and discourse that ground Judith Butler’s gender performativity; the mutual implication of political power and pre-political violence that Slavoj Žižek envisages; and, finally, the mutual implication of the abject and the propre which can be drawn from the work of Julia Kristeva, can all be taken as ways of re-politicizing reified conceptions of humanity and to make their contingency more visible. At the same time, all these authors suggest to keep universality as an impossible, but still desirable, ideal. One could say that, from a normative authoritarian perspective, humanity and inhumanity are seemingly produced, much like female and male identities, under the implicit dominance of one of the two terms. So that what a woman is would be defined as that which lies before and beyond the discursive scope defined by man; and what is inhuman would be defined as that which lies before and beyond the discursive scope defined by the human. To refuse the dominance of one term (and thus to address its own contingent status and its existing lines of fracture), implies the need to constantly question the possibility of the distinction between the human and the inhuman – or, at the very least, of the actuality of their naturalised distinction. In turn, this implies the ability to bear the ambivalence and undecidability of both humanity and inhumanity. This is, I believe, the most radical sense in which we can take Julia Kristeva’s idea of abjection. The abject can never be identified, really, but must rather be taken as that aspect of psychic processes and discourse that prevents a firm existence and a clear identity of objects, and subjects, themselves.3 In this sense, inhumanity implies something more than the trespassing of a boundary set by social norms; it implies a constant uncertainty as to where the boundary actually is and on what side one happens to be.4 Butler would have us ask ourselves if the very idea of the abject as an irrepresentable realm entirely beyond discourse is not in fact a further reification of some more fundamental normative discourse. 5 For this reason, too, it is probably safer to address abjection exclusively as a limit of discursive power itself. If the abject is not an object, indeed, it is not even a safe criterion for separating the human from the inhuman, but rather the result of the impossibility of doing so. Therefore, the mechanism of monstrosity, rather than resting on an actual and successful repression of the inhuman, should be addressed from the perspective of the failure of the logic of humanity and inhumanity itself. The human subject, according to Slavoj Žižek, would be nothing but the failure of this logic – in his words, a failure of symbolization.6 One could say that every individual, confronted with normative discourses on humanity and subjectivity, is fundamentally inhuman, for it will never be able to embody those norms entirely. From this perspective, inhumanity and the contingency of existence would go hand in hand, as they are both opposed to transcendental discourses on humanity and to the projects of mastery that they

104

The Human and the Inhuman

__________________________________________________________________ serve and inform. This can be taken, perhaps, as the ground of non-authoritarian political practice. As a matter of fact, all political acts, and especially those made in the name of human nature, are already involved in a struggle for hegemony concerning the definition of humanity. But, at the same time, radical contingency also makes all these discourses necessarily ambivalent and ambiguous. So, in The Obscenity of Human Rights, Žižek warns us against the instrumental use of a discourse on human rights, which not only covered, but informed, the violence during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian war.7 Beyond this instrumental use, however, as Žižek continues, ‘the problem with human rights humanism is that it covers up this monstrosity of the “human as such”, presenting it as a sublime human essence’.8 A transcendental and idealised vision of humanity covers up the violence which is inherent to political power, and thus to the definition and formation of human subjects as well. If the essence of humanity is paradoxically inhuman, then, and if human institutions are responsible at the same time, and by the same token, for the discursive construction of subjects as human beings and for their dehumanisation, every political act becomes fundamentally ambivalent. In fact, the space which is opened up by this unclearness, by this undecidability, by this impurity even and abjection, is none other than the space of politics itself. 2. The Ballad of Narayama Shohei Imamura's Narayama Bushiko – The Ballad of Narayama – can be taken as an example of the fundamental and irresoluble ambiguity of humanity and inhumanity, as it presents a prototypical rural community in nineteenth century Japan in which clear-cut boundaries between the human and the animal, social aggregation and isolation, compassion and cruelty, death and plenty, are hard to draw. 9 The Ballad of Narayama was directed by Imamura in 1983. The film is set, and was shot on location, in a rural village in a mountainous region in Northern Japan.10 The main storyline of the film was taken from the homonymous novel by Shichiro Fukasawa, which had enjoyed a certain success after its publication in 1956 and was adapted several times for the Kabuki theatre. In 1958, the novel was also adapted for the silver screen by director Keinosuke Kinoshita – a version which is perhaps mostly notable for the way it translated some aspects of the theatre set to the film’s transitions. 11 The story of Narayama is centred on the sacrifice of Orin, an elderly but still healthy woman of the village, who willingly accepts to be brought to the summit of mount Narayama where, following an ancient tradition, she will be left to die of exposure and starvation. Her act will allow the marriage between her eldest son Tatsuhei and Tamayan, a recent widow from another village, and, in due time, the birth of their baby. Orin’s sacrifice is necessary since food resources are so scarce

Carlo Comanducci

105

__________________________________________________________________ that the families of the village cannot sustain new members until older, or unproductive ones, are dead. To the villagers, Orin’s healthy teeth seem improper, then, immoral, and even inhuman. A mocking song, which acts as a counterpoint for a great part of the film to the more dramatic final ballad, refers to her as a demon with thirty – three teeth. She becomes more human, at least to some, when, after seeing and approving of Tamayan, she opts to break them on a millstone. Imamura maintained the main elements of the narrative, and even followed Kinoshita’s scenario quite closely, but he introduced a new character, Risuke (which he took from another of Fukasawa’s novels, The Miserables in NorthEastern Japan); he also added a sub-plot involving the execution of a family of thieves, and a series of shots of animals – all elements which make a clear definition of humanity impossible. 3. Human, not too Human In one interview, Imamura declared that he considered human beings and animals identical.12 Indeed, we can trace a consistent inclination to draw parallels between animals and humans throughout his filmography, which always implies more than a visual metaphor and a moral analogy. In Narayama, more specifically, we find several cuts that place animal predation and social violence, human and animal sexuality, on the same plane. Himself unclearly on the border between animal and human (animal in human form or monstrous ‘human as such’) is Risuke, the character which Imamura introduced as the youngest brother of the Nekkonoie family of which Tatsuhei is the head. Despite the respectable status of his family, Risuke works as a mere farmhand, he has right to neither marriage nor property, he cannot have a sexual life – he is at the same time free from the demands of the village institutions, and excluded from all forms of communal life. Even his relatives barely tolerate him. And why is that? Because he stinks. His foul smell sticks to him like a nature, and it defines him entirely below the human. We, as spectators, might tend to perceive him, precisely because of his discrimination, as more essentially human than the other villagers. But his misfortune does not make him any nobler than the others: angered by sexual frustration, Risuke regularly ‘befriends’ the neighbours’ dog, he masturbates spying on the sexual life of the other members of the village, and finally, threatening to become completely intractable, takes advantage of an elderly woman that Orin manages to procure him as part of Tatsuhei’s marriage arrangements. The scene, which does not reduce the woman to a mere victim, while still maintaining the character of a rape, is cut together with the solemn ceremony in preparation of Orin’s final voyage. Tatsuhei, the other side of Risuke’s abjection, is a no less ambivalent figure. He killed his father when he was fifteen, over his father’s reticence to carry his own mother to the mountain. In a way, then, Tatsuhei’s obedience to the law is in some respects not only tainted, but motivated, by its previous infraction. Even more from

106

The Human and the Inhuman

__________________________________________________________________ without the diegesis, Tatsuhei appears at the same time humane and obscene, and even more obscene as his humanity is somewhat earnest: his obscenity is that of the laws of the village by which his life, like that of his mother Orin, abides; his inhumanity is the humanity that his society defines. Tatsuhei’s marriage with Tamayan corresponds in fact to the reproduction not only of the village population but of the order of its institutions. 4. Death and Plenty: Orin’s Sacrifices Kesakichi is the second brother of the Nekkonoie family. He is having an affair with Matsuyan of the Amaya family, who lives in the same village. Instead of attending to their duties, the couple prefers to get lost in the forest and have sex. And isn’t that human? And yet, in this, they are not seen by the other as proper citizens. Consequently, their fate is aimed to a tragic ending, originating from the theft of a sack of potatoes: Matsuyan, indeed, is taking advantage of her presence in the Nekkonoian household to steal some food. Note that her very involvement with Kesakichi is equated with theft, and, therefore, with murder: Orin’s death can grant only one wedding, and it is either Tatsuhei’s child or his brother’s that could be sustained. The rest of the Amaya family was busy stealing from other villagers too, and, when they are discovered, their food stores are confiscated, which, considering the approaching winter, already amounts to a death sentence. But just to be sure, the village council deliberates that the Amayas should be executed. Tatsuhei, in a surge of humanity and in consideration to his brother, would like to spare at least the girl, who is pregnant, from being killed. On the night of the execution, before dinner, Matsuyan is safe in Tatsuhei’s house. But Orin manages to have her killed by offering her some potatoes, which the unsuspecting girl happily brings back home, just in time for the execution. The house of the Amayas is attacked and burned to the ground, and every member of the family is cast down in a pit and buried alive by the congregated community. Orin’s act, carried out without any visible sign of complacency or remorse, constructs her as a much more contrasted and ambivalent character than in the original narrative. Her murderous kindness and her selfless sacrifice are both immoral – or, rather, in their mutual implication, both utterly beyond the scope of morality and immorality, and rather within a complex and floating equilibrium of interpersonal conflicts and discursive hegemony. From being the unselfish heroine in a dramatic displacement of post-war Japan, Orin becomes in Imamura’s film an incarnation of the political power that attends to the enforcement and the reproduction of the village institutions, and the active and passive bearer of the prepolitical violence which informs it. In the case of the Amaya execution, the laws that regulate the human community appear laden with their own inhumanity: the law that punishes theft also effectively rules out sharing as a way to prevent both famine and crime, and as

Carlo Comanducci

107

__________________________________________________________________ a different way of organising human relations. More than that, the act of sharing itself (Orin’s offering of food to Matsuyan) is made into the signifier and the agent of the community’s own repression of communality. The village of Narayama can be seen then as a community which is structured precisely by those forces that threaten to tear it apart, in a brilliant figuration of the paradoxical dialectics which traverse capitalism in a prominent way, but, more generally, political subjects and spaces as such.

Notes 1

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 65. 2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 152. 3 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1. 4 ‘In the final analysis the pure / impure opposition would not be a datum in itself but would stem from the necessity for the speaking being to be confronted with sexual difference and the symbolic’. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 82. 5 Butler, Gender Trouble, 123. 6 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Class Struggle or Post-modernism? Yes, Please!, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000, pp. 90-135), 120. 7 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Obscenity of Human Rights: Violence as Symptom’, Lacan.com (2005): np., viewed 6 August 2014, http://www.lacan.com/zizviol.html. 8 Ibid. 9 The Ballad of Narayama, dir. Shohei Imamura, Toei, 1983, 35mm. 10 Bastian Meiresonne, Shohei Imamura: Évaporation d’une Réalité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 89. 11 Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson, ‘Traditional Theatre and Film in Japan’, Film Quarterly 12.1 (1958): 2-9, 6. 12 Hubert Niogret, ed., Shohei Imamura: Entretiens et Témoignages (Paris: Dreamland, 2002), 65.

Bibliography The Ballad of Narayama. Directed by Shohei Imamura. Toei, 1983. 35mm. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.

108

The Human and the Inhuman

__________________________________________________________________ Butler, Judith, Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Polylogue. Paris: Seuil, 1977. ———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Meiresonne, Bastian. Shohei Imamura: Évaporation d’une Réalité. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010. Niogret, Hubert, ed. Shohei Imamura: Entretiens et Témoignages. Paris: Dreamland, 2002. Quandt, James, ed. Shohei Imamura. Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival Group, 1997. Richie, Donald and Joseph L. Anderson. ‘Traditional Theatre and Film in Japan.’ Film Quarterly 12.1 (1958): 2-9. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘The Obscenity of Human Rights: Violence as Symptom’, Lacan.com (2005): np. Viewed 6 August 2014, http://www.lacan.com/zizviol.html. Carlo Comanducci is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham (U.K.). He is currently working on a dissertation on psychoanalysis and cinema spectatorship, focused on the contingency of experience, emancipated spectatorship and free associations.

Beyond the Crisis: Turn of the Tide for the Monstrous Duality of Hong Kong Cinema Petra Rehling Abstract Following the Golden Age of the 1980s to mid-1990s, Hong Kong’s film industry, a cinema of intense and graphic violence and action, has been in steady decline. Before the climax, innovation and experimentation had bonded with customs and consumerism to form a unique and ecstatic entertainment culture and the most vibrant film landscape on the planet. However, with the big local crisis, the 1997 handover to China, replaced by a number of global ones, Hong Kong’s film industry is left without an antagonism that used to fuel the entertainment machinery for decades. While before the cityscape was celebrated as a place of constant battle, following the handover, Hongkongers seem to have made peace with their monstrous, fatalistic visions of the future and have retired a demonized China. Instead, ‘New Hong Kong cinema’ is swallowed by visions of a Greater China, which are channelled through celebratory historicism, cultural allegiance, and distractive spectacle. It is unique for a major film industry to solely revolve around one catastrophic epicentre. Hong Kong used to be a ‘crisis cinema’ that thrived on milking the fears of the ‘1997 syndrome’ along with its complicated socio-economic and cultural heritages for show. Although other industries have pointed out their own disaster centres to define national identities – New York or Tokyo come to mind – film in Hong Kong has always survived on the power of its historic juncture, utilised as a metaphoric realm for gothic fights of monstrous doppelgangers in an uncanny metropolis. By revealing the chaotic formula and monstrous duality of the past, this article is evaluating the potential of the current trajectory in Hong Kong cinema. Key Words: Hong Kong, film, 1997 syndrome, China, city, duality, crisis. ***** 1. Introduction Before the handover, Hong Kong was a place where filmic texts were dominant media to vocalise societal fears. They identified the city as the centre for violent negotiations over an intimidating duality, based on the anticipation of the postcolonial condition. While it took residents many years to understand themselves as citizens, the new administration promptly redefined the people living in Hong Kong today as ‘inhabitants’. 1 Meanwhile, Hong Kong cinema ‘has been pulling a “disappearing act”’ 2, moved out into Hollywood, global cinema, the PRC, and panAsian film. A ‘monstrous duality’, fuelling the 1980s to 1990s crisis cinema, at first existed

110

Beyond the Crisis

__________________________________________________________________ outside colonial reality. Subsequently, an alliance with either Britain or China, a turn to the West or return to the Motherland, was never a dilemma. Instead, city dwellers began to distance themselves from their Chinese neighbours, Taiwan, and China, who had been locked in an ugly political battle since the 1940s. After all, these two were presented either as opportunistic capitalists in a post-Confucian society, or as unpleasant ‘communist Others’, something between country bumpkins and scary invaders. 3 For Stephen Teo the identity crisis manifested precisely in these two choices. 4 The Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 triggered Hong Kong cinema’s most frantic phase. Hong Kong took this ‘monstrous event’ to trigger its crisis cinema. Common responses to ‘Chinese takeover’ fears were immigration, panic, and frenetic postulations of cultural, political, and economic positions, especially in film. Unlike the pre-handover crisis, there was somewhat a kaleidoscope of catastrophes and emergencies that fed the post-colonial depression; economic breakdown, political unrest and demonstrations, SARS, and the loss of legendary actors like Anita Mui and Lesley Cheung to cancer and suicide. In the 2000s, Hong Kong has turned from a society in crisis to a troubled society and, according to Chu, is losing its hybrid cultures and spaces which were ‘key factors of its success back in the 1980s’. 5 Hong Kong’s ‘in-between-ness’ could end very soon. New global crises, technological, geopolitical, and individual, have taken root alongside nationalistic debates about belonging. For Hongkongers this means that they are confronted with a mixture of globalizing, trans-cultural, and pan-Asian attributes, in which power is increasingly invested outside the national and into corporate and media identities. 2. The Chaotic Formula In Hong Kong cinema, the threatening surrounding forces translated into the nostalgic, the supernatural, and the violent. Until the handover, practically all genres in the territory were in one way or another utilising the ‘1997-syndrome’. In this time, all of Hong Kong’s heroes, no matter the genre, found themselves fighting in a shadowland, or ‘third space’, a realm or an atmosphere of suspicion, viciousness, and insurrection. It was not physical harm that Hongkongers feared, but replacement and – most importantly – loss of personal freedom and property. China, the ‘evil Other,’ colonized cinema with aggressive demons of the ghostly or criminal kind and raised questions of how to exorcise or accommodate these intrusions. There was a ‘beastliness’ to China that would manifest as a life-sucking tree monster or an army of Qing dynasty ‘hop-zombies’. In fantasy films the demonization of China was fun and mostly relocated into an imperial ‘wuxia’ universe. The story was different in the world of ‘heroic bloodshed’, or the hero film genre, a contemporary version of the wuxia universe, where martial arts are replaced with guns and the society is dominated by the code of the brotherhood. Here, struggles with monstrous duality became internalized in ultraviolent epic battles over per-

Petra Rehling

111

__________________________________________________________________ sonal identity. Hero films, created by John Woo and Ringo Lam, characterized the city as an uninviting maze of corruption, pain, aggression, and endless loss; hence the pile-up of climactic fatal scenes towards many film endings. In these films, wrestling with personal choices translated for the most part into doppelganger allegories about broken cops and crooks and often boiled down to simplistic but emotionally amplified struggles over self-control. The city itself became a grotesque protagonist in these fights, providing the conditions to turn its heroes into perpetual victims, doomed to repeat their violent and fatalistic struggles over and over again – essentially in a place of limbo. Woo’s hero films established a ‘divided city’, which is governed by both the police and triad societies. The system is morally obscure and often shows how ‘official’ law enforcement is overcome by ‘sanctioned’ self-justice. Crime is only marginally questioned; instead it is accepted as part of a society that, in effect, has sidestepped negotiations of humanitarian or administrative guidelines and jumped right to straightforward defeatist conclusions. These attitudes are cushioned by widespread knowledge of the public about the ethics of ‘jianghu’, a fictive underworld order based on conservative ideas about loyalty, etiquette, and brotherhood alliances from wuxia literature, in which, for instance, the assassin is a staple hero. By turning Hong Kong into an embattled space in which intruders or code breakers have to be fought and punished, it did not matter that these heroes were ‘trapped animals’ 6 and usually failed devastatingly in the eye of overwhelming forces. Gangster films of this time portray the city as a cardboard arena for showcasing the ‘end of times’ cynicism. Their anticipatory pessimism created a self-destructive rationale that sounded like ‘anything heroic goes’, a kind of ‘apocalyptic decadence’ that ignores any remotely positive link to the future as superfluous or expendable, family, lovers, and children included. When talking about the ‘chaotic formula’ of Hong Kong cinema, one inescapably has to turn to turn to these violent essences and modes. As popular as these sentiments were, in the first half of the 1990s people started to show signs of exhaustion from this constant violent negativism and began to accept the impending transformation with greater self-irony, even melancholia. This reflected, on the one hand, in the countless ‘little heroes’ of comedian Stephen Chow’s nonsense cinema (moleitau), and on the other hand in the softer defeatist tones of nostalgic movies. 3. Double Madness In effect, the departure from previous hysterics meant a turn of the tide for heroism in Hong Kong film and an utter disenchantment in hero movies. One of the main changes in hero films can be seen in the general ‘turn of the double’, for instance in Ringo Lam’s Full Alert (1997). In the film, the classic doppelgangers, killer and cop, find themselves helplessly sliding down a maddening spiral of regret and rage towards the final suicide of the ‘dark double’. Stories of blood broth-

112

Beyond the Crisis

__________________________________________________________________ erhood used to thematise the making and unmaking of heroes and criminals, and when a cop turned rogue, he often had to go down with his dark double. In Full Alert, both men are alone in their anxiety and have nobody to confide in about their nightmares than each other. There is no satisfaction in murder and death and fulfilling one’s duty, the only thing that remains is exhaustion. By the turn of the century, the general pace and action choreography of films had changed. In Johnnie To’s The Mission (1999), the frantic action of the past comes to a complete standstill; the film contains static snapshot of iconic poses of Hong Kong cinema, underlined by occasional gunshot sounds and elevator music. While John Woo’s heroes came to ‘freeze’ usually at each other’s gunpoint after an action blizzard, To’s postmodern heroes often find themselves in a rut. By turning political debate into a farce in his triad movies, To ridicules pre-handover promises and the concessions made to Hong Kong, which, the moment other – commercial – interests overpower the desire for ‘peace’ quickly become obsolete. With the revised doppelganger motive on overdrive, playing ‘mind games’ in the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-2003) became an enormous international success. The film has two undercover moles, a triad hiding among the police, and an undercover policeman among criminals. The shady individuals face destruction through expulsion from the system. In fact, the mad individual is ejected as a faulty subject from the community of sane liars in the end; to continue playing the schizophrenic identity game, one has to be able to juggle multiple identities at once. Stephen Teo writes, ‘By probing new forms of cinematic violence in the gangster movies, To exposes the hypocrisy, the cynicism, the absurdity and the implacability of violence’, 7 and defines violence as a ‘postmodern accommodation’ to contemporary urban life. 8 As their former semi-religious and symbolic rituality has eroded into the mechanical, the triads have no means to save themselves from the ‘vicious cycle of revenge’ anymore. 9 Like greater society, their problem lies with the loss of personal values and the deferral of the mythical brotherly code. In Election 2 (2006), the triad leaders’ dialogues and arguments in the election debates solely revolve around a simple singular objective, money, and with it the power to control the deployment of finances in the system. Beautified violence of John Woo, though dispensed senselessly through hatred, revenge, even hot-headedness, could sow imminent justice, create martyrs, and let people die in sacrifice for a greater good. The shocking final piece of violence in Election (2005) occurs not out of the system’s fatalistic streak, but its pragmatism which inspires violence that Stephen Teo has characterized as more female in form and signifying the crisis of masculinity in recent hero films. 10 Johnnie To also recaptures this kind of violence in the final moments of Exiled (2006), the moment his group of heroes willingly walks into a trap. They die smiling, besmirching the good violence of the ‘Wooniverse’ with their deaths, which, as it turns out, are quite in vain. The heroes spend ridiculous but heart-warming moments fantasizing about their escape from the muddy system; a system in which brothers are not brothers anymore and despite their guns

Petra Rehling

113

__________________________________________________________________ do not possess the slightest power to leave a statement with their own deaths. They die smiling, knowing that they have accomplished nothing but their own extraction from the system. The Hong Kong triads in Election work like a primitive society inside a complex governmental system. They do have their own judicial arrangements, but they frequently undermine it to facilitate personal vengeance, which in consequence upsets all the involved parties and social structures. 11 And this is where the hero stories of the past turn sour in the present. The judicial system of the triads, when it is in balance, even though it has mostly lost its religious or humanistic character, is still ‘transcendental’ enough to uphold the sacrificial system of the past in which ‘there is no real difference between … justice and the concept of revenge’. 12 ‘The irony of the film is’, so Teo, ‘that it shows that peace embedded in the structure of symbolic and lawmaking violence can never bring real peace of mind to its perpetrators’. 13 The moment the system breaks, it enters the ‘sacrificial crisis’. 14 According to René Girard, reciprocal violence can be as contagious as a disease. 15 Violence can appear both as evil or as good and helpful, but ‘[t]he secret of the dual nature of violence still eludes men’. 16 With violence the triad leaders mean to bring back stability to their community. In the old hero movies, they did succeed, as with the death of all or most of the contestants a crisis was completely removed. In most of the new gangster movies, crisis is not solved; it continues to fester like a disease. The new heroism in Hong Kong cinema is pathological, a disease, that defines the situation of Hong Kong nowadays as a ‘condition’. Cops and robbers used to represent the ambivalent struggles with complete disappearance in the past. This has now been reformulated into the irrational chaos of a post-colonial Hong Kong in which the identity crisis is still unresolved. The traditional urban hero is now deprived of the miraculous powers of the gun and its control to choose and invoke fatalistic endings as meaningful and karmic; it is a ‘schizophrenic universe in which the hero acts out his accursed destiny’. 17 By digressing into the subconscious, anti-heroes cannot exist as sane and moral instances of identification anymore. There is nothing hiding within in these figures but madness. The idea of ‘gamic deception’ as some kind of ‘violation of the mind’ so far has found its climax in the Mad Detective (2007). In the film, the literally crazy investigator, Bun, envisions the multiple hidden personalities and alliances of his opponents as ghosts. Bun sees them whisper into the ears of their humans, and reveal their true selves to him; some of which turn out to be killers. In the end, Bun discovers his own inner demon-killer and has a schizophrenic dialogue with him before he shoots a powerless criminal in cold blood. The ‘injured hero,’ also a classic trope of Hong Kong heroic and wuxia cinema, has moved on from the physical to the psychological and beyond the established ‘wounded souls’ of heroic criminals of the past. The modern protagonists are tragic figures beyond redemption. Their monstrosity is their total irrelevance of who they are actually supposed to represent. Their titles and occupations are interchangeable

114

Beyond the Crisis

__________________________________________________________________ empty signifiers in a mad world of chaos and power struggles, distrust, and identity theft. What is so terrifying about these people is that they effectively bridge the gap between representations of the monster in fiction and the ‘mundane monsters’ we encounter in everyday life. They live out inner debates, ideological challenges and justifications ‘normal’ people accept daily in their own defence. There are, so the conclusion, no upright citizens left in this world; they are, in fact, impossible to conceive. Even the psych doctor, while treating the schizophrenic doubles in Infernal Affairs 3, confesses to the crime of lying and wrongfully accusing an innocent man in the past. After twenty years of anxious defining, there is now a new pragmatism to violence that is entrenched in an atmosphere of insanity and schizophrenia in city movies, which makes for higher production value, but also retires the old moral principles of jianghu, around which popular culture has revolved for a long time. Instead of traditional notions of community, rebellion, and defiance, now we see the ‘machinations of the new system at work;’ a kind of resignation into a new world order without a major antagonising crisis, but with a lot of smaller irksome annoyances like in every other major city of the world, drug trafficking or digital surveillance for instance. 4. Conclusion The post-colonial identity crisis differs from the pre-handover 1997-syndrome that has now been renamed into the more general ‘China factor’ of Hong Kong cinema. Perry Lam summarizes the situation like this: ‘Hong Kong movies come loaded these days, with ideas about how to make themselves more mainland-like, or at least more mainland-friendly’. 18 As Desser notices, most of the wuxia epics, for instance, discuss issues of ‘unification’ and Chinese history as a means ‘to work through the new reality of China as an emergent power on the world scene’. 19 In the new martial arts films, the old symbolic antagonisms have been replaced by historical analogies, which are wrapped in the same successful film techniques and bestowed with familiar names of actors and directors that have thrived in Hong Kong cinema all along. Hong Kong has turned into a political landscape that is being pulled apart by an unresolved identity struggle whose entertainment value is increasingly dubious. For the new heroes of the gangster genre, it is not easy to relocate inside a new Hong Kong, after all that has transpired. Their deals with a devil, they have tried to exorcise for so long, propose no painless exit out of personal dilemmas, not even karmic death. When in past Hong Kong cinema China occasionally functioned as a ‘retreat’ or ‘rural escape’, even allegorical ‘home’, it was yet never intended to position Hongkongers in the Chinese context. This could mean that the city will discard domesticity in order to disappear inside the much larger realm/identity/existence as a Chinese citizen and return a sense of belonging to Hongkongers who, as statistics have found out, increasingly begin to describe

Petra Rehling

115

__________________________________________________________________ themselves as ‘Chinese’ again. 20 By turning more intellectual, Hong Kong cinema has become less visceral, but it has not introduced a more logical world of violence. On the contrary, as now in effect with the disappearance of the ‘third space’, the cops, moles or killers, iconic hero figures of Hong Kong film, find themselves involved in the machinations of a shadowy system that does not allow them to pass judgement anymore. It is the careless manner in which the triads discuss their disposal of rivals and their own helplessness in the face of the most vicious among them, that the new world does not seem to consist of antagonisms anymore. There is nobody left to trust at all. This principle, however, is something that Mainland cop movies, for instance, steer away from. But here as well the old third space of the past is efficiently demolished by political doctrine. In the 2013 reboot of Jackie Chan’s most famous Police Story series, the new doctrine is paraded right in the open. Homage sets in, as the code of jianghu Chan tries to evoke, it delivers the criminal right back into the hands of the system the old heroes meant to subvert by means of the third space. While Chan whitewashes ‘legal violence’ in his film, at the end of Drug War (2013), Johnnie To’s camera lingers on his heroic villain begging for mercy during his execution by lethal injection. Disciplining bad guys or offering them redemption through proper legal processing by the state apparatus has become a new trope in these Mainland movies. For cinema in Hong Kong, newfound allegiances and the willingness to co-operate means that old animosities and fears inevitably have to be put to rest. Dissent or criticism will not make it past the censors onto the continent. This has already led to self-censorship and lip services paid to China, something that was even copied by Hollywood, which included extra scenes with Chinese actors and extra dialogue to appease the Chinese audience in Iron Man 3. 21 A move like this from Hollywood does not hold much promise for the joyful anarchy of ‘the old Hong Kong cinema’ itself. What we can take away from ‘New Hong Kong cinema’ for now are the usual aesthetic experimentations with classic stories and characters. This time around, narratives demonstrate high value scripts, bitter ideas of heroism on the edge of madness and absurdist theatre, and new, often gimmicky and less protracted types of violence with greater shock value. But the inability to thematise or even formulate a new crisis in conjunction with the careless dismissal of modern world disorder, which also bothers the territory, puts Hong Kong cinema into crisis itself. Much will rely on the question if the industry can speak in different tongues and if there is room for more than one ‘Chineseness’ in Asian cinema. As soon as all its assets have been annexed by the pan-Asian filmmaking ideology, there will simply not be a Hong Kong cinema anymore.

116

Beyond the Crisis

__________________________________________________________________

Notes 1

Vivian P.Y. Lee, Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997: The Post-Nostalgic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 39. 2 Perry Lam, Once a Hero: The Vanishing Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: East Slope Publishing Limited, 2011), Kindle ebook, loc. 50. 3 Chu Yiu-wai, Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), Kindle ebook, loc. 277. 4 Stephen Teo, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film, (Aberdeen, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), 77. 5 Chu, Lost in Transition, loc. 1952. 6 Lam, Once a Hero, loc. 395. 7 Teo, Director in Action,197. 8 Ibid.,183. 9 René Girard, translated by Patrick Gregory,Violence and the Sacred (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 26, first published as La Violence et la sacre by Editions Bernard Grasset in 1972. 10 Teo, Director in Action,187. 11 Girard, Violence and the Sacred,17. 12 Ibid., 25-26. 13 Teo, Director in Action,196. 14 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 43ff. 15 Ibid., 29-33. 16 Ibid., 40. 17 Lee, Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997, 140. 18 Lam, Once a Hero, loc. 239 19 David Desser, ‘Reclaiming a Legacy: The New-style Martial Arts Saga and Globalized Entertainment,’ in Kinnia Shuk-ting Yau, ed., East Asian Cinema and Cultural Heritage From China, Hong Kong, Taiwan to Japan and South Korea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2. 20 Chu, Lost in Transition, loc. 2771. 21 James Daniel, ‘Iron Man 3 Execs “Changed Film for Chinese Audience” by Adding Four Minutes to the Film with Chinese Actors,’ Daily Mail Online (May 14, 2013) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324077/Iron-Man-3-execs-changedfilm-Chinese-audience-adding-4-minutes-Chinese-actors.html.

Petra Rehling

117

__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography Chu , Yiu-wai. Lost in Transition: Hong Kong Culture in the Age of China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. Kindle ebook. Daniel, James. ‘Iron Man 3 Execs “Changed Film for Chinese Audience” by Adding Four Minutes to the Film with Chinese Actors’, May 14 2013, Daily Mail Online http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324077/Iron-Man-3-execschanged-film-Chinese-audience-adding-4-minutes-Chinese-actors.html. Desser, David. ‘Reclaiming a Legacy: The New-style Martial Arts Saga and Globalized Entertainment’. In Kinnia Shuk-ting Yau, ed., East Asian Cinema and Cultural Heritage From China, Hong Kong, Taiwan to Japan and South Korea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 1-26. Girard, René. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Violence and the Sacred. London: Bloomsbury, 2013 (first published as La Violence et la sacre by Editions Bernard Grasset in 1972). Lam, Perry. Once a Hero: The Vanishing Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: East Slope Publishing Limited, 2011, Kindle ebook. Lee, Vivian P.Y. Hong Kong Cinema Since 1997 – The Post-Nostalgic Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Teo, Stephen. Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film. Aberdeen, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007. Petra Rehling is a German independent scholar, sinologist, freelance journalist, artist, and former Associate Professor of the English Department at Da-yeh University, Taiwan. Her previous publications include a book on Hong Kong cinema, articles on Wong Kar-wai, science fiction, wuxia, cyberculture, and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

Monster as a Figure of Memory Mateusz Chaberski Abstract The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the utility of the monster figure for challenging the binary opposition between cultural and communicative memories as defined by Jan Assmann. The scholar distinguishes between cultural performances aiming at conveying the dominant narrative of the past and individual narratives providing a potentially subversive version of the official history. Thus, the monster as a creature that ‘combines elements of two or more animal forms’ (OED) becomes an apt metaphor for memory as a phenomenon combining both elements of Assmann’s theory. For, communicative memories are to a great extent determined by the cultural frames of memory, to allude to the title of Maurice Halbwachs’ seminal work. Subsequently, the elements of cultural memory are employed by individuals to form their personal histories. In this context, destabilising the distinction between the two modes of memory reveals a mechanism of power relations lying behind the process of creating memories itself. This aspect of the monster figure is exemplified by the Polish contemporary drama A Piece on Mother and the Fatherland (2008) by Bożena Umińska-Keff. The text is a story of a complex relationship between Usia and her Jewish mother who blames the daughter for her own suffering during the Second World War. The monstrous manifests itself in two aspects of the piece. On the one hand, the mother is depicted by Usia, as an oppressive monster incessantly controlling her life. On the other hand, Keff’s work itself may be perceived as a ‘monsterpiece’ due to recycling strategies employed by the author intermingling different genres (e.g. ancient tragedy and oratorio) and cultural images (e.g. Ridley Scott’s Ripley and Nat Turner). Through the monstrous language, Usia attempts to create her own story against both the traumatised past of her mother and the dominant Polish patriarchal narratives about the war. Key Words: Cultural memory, communicative memory, monsterpiece, recycling, contemporary drama. ***** 1. The Monstrous Memory of the Mother A brief overview of memory studies literature would suffice to notice that interrelations between monsters and memory have been somewhat overlooked. For example, talking about the body as a medium of memory in her Erinnerungsräume, Aleida Assmann fails to encompass the monster as one of the potential figures of memory.1 Therefore, the aim of my article is to fulfil this apparent gap in the memory studies research and to discuss possible repercussions of the monster

120

Monster as a Figure of Memory

__________________________________________________________________ entering the realm of memory. I would like to prove that the monster figure is not only an apt one for talking about memory, but also that it may enable us to challenge our hitherto accepted preconceptions about memory. According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, any attempt to form a theoretical approach to monsters must concern itself with strings of cultural moments, connected by a logic that always threatens to shift; invigorated by change and escape. [It is a] work that must content itself with fragments (footprints, bones, talismans, teeth, shadows, obscured glimpses – signifiers of monstrous passing that stand in for the monstrous body itself).2 I would like to investigate how Cohen’s model of monster theory may be applied to question the binary opposition between cultural and communicative memory which, to a great extent, has dominated contemporary memory studies. The basis for my considerations will be the contemporary Polish literary work A Piece on Mother and the Fatherland (2008) by Bożena Umińska-Keff which, in an unexpected way, links memory of the Holocaust with the theme of the monstrous. I will discuss the link in two movements. The first one revolves around the representation of the monster in Keff’s piece and mnemonic processes it depicts. The second one shifts the attention from representation to the mode of representing. I will discuss A Piece on Mother and the Fatherland as a kind of monsterpiece which may become a blueprint for further research on monsters and memory in culture. In its content, Piece is a story about a complicated relationship between a mother and her daughter, Usia, which is characterised by the lack of communication and mutual hostility. The mother, also referred to as ‘The Meter’ as an allusion to the Greek goddess, is depicted as an oppressive monster who controls every aspect of the daughter’s life: from her first adolescent love affairs to her marriage. Through emotional blackmail and incessant complaints, she exerts power over her daughter who is then forced to maintain contacts between the mother and her grandson and tolerate her unexpected visits. Keff’s work stresses especially the daughter’s solitude, as nobody is able to understand her tragic situation. Also, there is the social constraint whereby one should love his or her parents. Consequently, the daughter is torn between the feelings for her mother and the desperate need to end their toxic relation. Yet, Piece’s focus does not lie solely in the characters’ psychological problems, for the roots of the mother-daughter conflict trace back to the Second World War during which the mother, who is a Jew, witnessed the German and Soviet atrocities. She blames her daughter, who was born shortly after the war, for her own suffering of the adulterous life of her husband, the wartime repressions and, finally, the Holocaust. At one point, the daughter is even referred to by the mother

Mateusz Chaberski

121

__________________________________________________________________ as ‘Adolf Hitler’.3 In the event, the characters become figures representing the most controversial issues in Polish contemporary culture. Keff’s drama provides a unique combination of the feminist perspective on the position of the woman in Polish culture with references to the troubled Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War. In order to understand the process, whereby the monster figure is employed to depict the work of memory, it is crucial to scrutinise the depiction of the mother in order to answer the question: How do monsters remember? The character of the mother in Keff’s text is a blend of heterogeneous cultural representations of the monster ranging from animal-like creature resembling Grendel’s mother from Beowulf to Ridley Scott’s Alien trilogy. Each monstrous incarnation of the mother contributes a different aspect to the multifaceted motherdaughter relationship. For example, depiction of the mother as ‘The Meter-Alien’4 introduces an overtly feminist perspective to Usia’s rebellion against her mother. This interpretation becomes evident taking into consideration Patricia Meltzer’s comments on Ripley, ‘hailed as science fiction films’ first female character who is both ‘“hero” and survivor [who] inspires feminists’ interest in the constellation of woman and monster’.5 Taking these remarks into consideration, the daughter becomes a subversive figure aiming at surpassing the influence of her overbearing mother. However, the configuration of woman and monster Meltzer alludes to is used by Keff to depict the complicated process of memory transmission between the mother and the daughter. To scrutinise the process, let us consider the following passage from a section of the piece meaningfully entitled The Visit and Other Memories: In the fenlands of depression she lies half deep in water her yawning jaws, full of regrets, sometimes spewing lava, sometimes spurting cool ashes of the Jewish Historical Institute archives where the other day, storing the shot and the gassed she stumbled upon it. ‘I found’, she announces looking into the void (which is me sitting on a chair) a document. My mother was shot dead in the forest near Lvow. She was shot dead in the forest. For half a century I haven’t known that. * She didn’t know for half a century and now she knows! And tells it to a random witness.6 The passage clearly refers to a process of transferring memories from mother to her daughter. In this case, Usia learns that her grandmother was shot dead during the war. In his work Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, Jan Asmann

122

Monster as a Figure of Memory

__________________________________________________________________ categorises such situations as belonging to communicative memory carried by ‘witnesses within memory community’.7 According to Asmann, this form of transferring knowledge about the past, compared to cultural memory, is ‘informal and arising from interaction’.8 Thus, according to the German historian, communicative memory generates a huge critical potential which may be used for a subversive vision of the past of a given society. However, a closer analysis of the passage reveals that Keff blurs the Asmannian typology of memory by the use of the monster figure. For the depiction of the mother is clearly rooted in the traditional imagery of monstrosity. For an English-speaking audience, the passage may evoke the character of Grendel’s mother which is one of the most prominent monstrous mother figures in the history of literature. This intertextual reference is further reinforced by the form of the poem itself, as the author employs the traditional Anglo Saxon device of alliteration in order to link expressions pertaining to different semantic fields. This enables the author to connect the image of the supernatural monster ‘sometimes spurting ashes’9 with the typical figure of cultural memory which is that of the archive. Consequently, the status of the mother as an innocent witness of the past is undermined. In fact, her memory is a monstrous hybrid of the individual and the cultural (represented here by the Jewish Historical Institute which is an institutional repository of official memory about the Holocaust) which is then passed on to the daughter who becomes a ‘random witness’.10 Thus, using the monster figure, the author reveals that communicative memory is not, as Asmann would argue, a potential field of creating counter narratives about the past. Conversely, Keff’s piece proves that the transfer of memories on the individual level is as oppressive as institutional commemorating practices social groups employ to forge their members’ identities. In this context, in Keff’s monstrous world, there is no possibility of distinguishing between a vision of the past that is imposed on an individual and his or her individual narratives about the past. Now, let us examine how this vision of a hybrid memory influences the very form of the text. 2. A Piece on Mother and the Fatherland as a Monsterpiece Published in 2008, Bożena Keff’s text has prompted considerable criticism contributing to the sudden reappearance of the old debate about literary genres and distinct boundaries between them. In the age of the post-modern hybrid form, literary critics unexpectedly found it important to classify the text according to traditional distinctions between poetry and drama. For instance, the critic Przemysław Czapliński claims that ‘[it] is a mix of opera, tragedy and oratorium’.11 In fact, Piece explores the liminal space between all those types of literary expression which are incorporated into a single piece of writing. However, the remark indicates that Keff’s text has acquired a peculiar position in Polish contemporary literature. Originally published as a poem, A Piece on Mother and the Fatherland was soon adapted for the theatre, which grounded its status as a

Mateusz Chaberski

123

__________________________________________________________________ dramatic text. Moreover, the work is prominent due to its language combining highly intellectual literary allusions with blatantly vulgar language which results in emotionally intense linguistic material for the theatre. The problematic literary status of Bożena Keff’s work is overtly stated in Janion and Filipiak’s afterword as the critics ask: ‘A piece – what kind of a literary genre is it?’.12 Thus, the title itself suggests the resistance of the text to any sort of traditional classification, for Keff’s work exploits two broad classes of artistic phenomena which can be referred to as ‘utwór’. On the one hand, it stresses its textual character, as words are the primary material employed to convey meanings. In this case, the most prototypical referent would be a poem, as the text is organised in verses and stances. On the other hand, the Polish term ‘utwór’ is conventionally used in reference to any form of musical composition be it instrumental or voiced. In this respect, Janion and Filipiak indicate that opera and oratorio as genres most closely relate to A Piece on Mother and the Fatherland.13 The former is reflected in the heightened emotional register of the text which also lies at the heart of the operatic communication. Influences of the latter may be seen in Keff’s raising the ultimate moral and existential questions. However, Piece constantly challenges the constraints of both genres by its frequent shifts of style from highly literary to vulgar. Moreover, in English, the word ‘piece’ does not necessarily refer to musical works but may be used to other artistic realms as plastic arts, dance and theatre. This, opens the interpretation of Keff’s text to a vast field of semiotic systems which potentially converge in a single piece of writing. In the face of these classification problems, it is more useful to search for a generic term that would concentrate on the creative process employed by the author. In an interview with Katarzyna Bielas, Bożena Keff herself has called her text a ‘monsterpiece’.14 Although coined spontaneously, the expression proves accurate especially considering one of the definitions of a monster which ‘combines elements of two or more animal forms’.15 Hence, a monsterpiece becomes a work of art which combines two or more artistic forms and the boundaries between its components are intentionally blurred so that they form a coherent entity. Thus, the term denotes the process – whereby Keff does not only blend various forms and conventions but also intermingles different styles and registers of the language. In this respect, Keff’s monsterpiece may be perceived as an example of recycling cultural material which is an emerging strategy used by contemporary artists. According to a French theatre scholar, Josette Féral, in the process of recycling, a work of art employs various materials, objects, sounds, and forms circulating in culture and, by detaching them from original context, transforms them profoundly and inserts into new discourses changing their meaning.16

124

Monster as a Figure of Memory

__________________________________________________________________ In the face of the new artistic paradigm, an analysis of a monsterpiece cannot rely solely on traditional elements of a literary work but must be ready to interrogate them according to the function they acquire in the whole piece. As far as Piece’s structure is concerned, it is divided into ten parts including a short introductory poem and an epilogue. Although the whole piece is written in free verse, its parts represent different forms of expression pertaining to drama. The overriding convention employed by the author is Greek tragedy which manifests itself in the dialogue between the Narrator and Chorus present throughout the piece. The cultural origins of the dialogical form are signalled from the very beginning, as the Chorus uses the original Greek expressive onomatopoeia ‘Oi moi oi moi’.17 However, the reference is not merely an intertextual allusion. On the contrary, its primary function is to reinforce the gravity of the conflict between Usia and her mother. The figure of the mother therefore acquires a quasi-mythical status of a ruthless goddess who exerts her power, whereas her daughter becomes the one who rebels against the will of the gods. Consequently, between the two emerges a sort of tragic agon – a conflict of ideas whereby one contestant is doomed to failure. The conflict is then realised in poetic forms borrowed from the opera which, in its beginnings, was regarded as the successor of the Classic tragedy. Therefore, Usia and her mother express their emotions in arias, songs and duets as if taken from a libretto. However, blending Greek tragedy with opera tradition is not merely a linguistic effect. The conflict between mother and daughter becomes a conflict of memories between the author and her own mother. In one of the interviews, Keff confesses that her mother referred to the myth of motherhood, she put herself on a pedestal leaving no space for my own voice, any critical remark was forbidden. She has completely overwhelmed me with her biography’.18 Keff’s confession is not merely an excuse to read the text exclusively as an account of her personal experiences. The question of the voice, and especially the female voice, raised by the author, provides a crucial interpretative path for the whole work. Maria Janion and Izabela Filipiak argue that language devices used by Keff serve as emancipatory strategies against the language used by the mother rooted in the dominant narratives about motherhood.19 Thus, the text becomes an attempt at creating the daughter’s own idiolect. The process can be exemplified by referring to the intertextual juxtapositions of the elements of high culture with popcultural images, which permeate all levels of Keff’s work. For example, characters from Greek mythology such as Demeter and Persephone coexist within one fictional world with such popular heroes and heroines as Frodo from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or the video game beauty Lara Croft. Janion and Filipiak claim that the

Mateusz Chaberski

125

__________________________________________________________________ strategy aims at ‘developing private myths’20 of the daughter who struggles for constructing her unique identity independent from the martyrological discourse of the mother. However, the critics bitterly conclude that the endeavour is doomed to failure due to the symbolic power of the figure of mother in Polish society. To conclude, the use of the monster figure in Keff’s A Piece on Mother and the Fatherland may incite us to re-examine the cultural history in order to inspect how monsters and monsterpieces reconfigure the traditional binary between the individual and the collective. However, research on the monster as a figure of memory must take into consideration not only the monster’s mode of remembering and transferring its memories to the other but also broader cultural and sociopolitical contexts in which a particular monsterpiece functions. Only by encompassing the nexus of phenomena into the analysis can we scrutinise various cultural strategies employed by particular social groups to influence individual memories of their members.

Notes 1

Aleida Asmann, Erinerrungsräume (Munich: C.H Beck, 1999), 241-290. Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, Monster Theory, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 3-25. 3 Bożena Umińska-Keff, Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie (Cracow: HaArt!, 2008), 27. My translation. 4 Ibid., 26. 5 Patricia Meltzer, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 115. 6 Umińska-Keff, Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie, 16. 7 Jan Asmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 41. 8 Ibid. 9 Umińska-Keff, Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie, 16. 10 Ibid. 11 Przemysław Czapliński, ‘Mausoleum’, Tygodnik Powszechny 37 (2008). My translation.Viewed 10 May 2014, http://www.tygodnik.onet.pl/kultura/mausoleum/8fsvl. 12 Maria Janion and Izabela Filipiak, ‘Afterword to Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie’, by Bożena Keff (Cracow: HaArt!, 2008), 82. My translation. 13 Ibid. 14 Katarzyna Bielas, ‘Nielegalny plik’, Gazeta Wyborcza (2008). My translation. Viewed 10 May 2014, http://wyborcza.pl/duzyformat/1,127291,5250183,Nielegalny_plik.html. 15 Oxford English Dictionary, Viewed 23 February 2014. 2

126

Monster as a Figure of Memory

__________________________________________________________________ http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/121738. 16 Josette Féral, ‘Odpadki i zagadki: od Mony Lisy do Rambo’, Didaskalia 95 (2010), 38. My translation. 17 Keff, Utwór, 11. 18 Bielas, ‘Nielegalny plik’. 19 Janion and Filipiak, ‘Afterword’, 85. 20 Ibid., 86.

Bibliography Asmann, Aleida. Erinerrungsräume. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1999. Asmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Bielas, Katarzyna. ‘Nielegalny plik’. Gazeta Wyborcza (2008). Viewed 10 May 2014. http://wyborcza.pl/duzyformat/1,127291,5250183,Nielegalny_plik.html. Cohen, Jeffrey J. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’. Monster Theory, edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen, 2-25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Czapliński, Przemysław. ‘Mausoleum’. Tygodnik Powszechny 37 (2008). Viewed 10 May 2014. http://www.tygodnik.onet.pl/kultura/mausoleum/8fsvl. Féral, Josette. ‘Odpadki i zagadki: od Mony Lisy do Rambo’. Didaskalia 95 (2010): 36-41. Janion, Filipiak. ‘Afterword’.Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie. Bożena Keff, 81-98. Cracow: HaArt!, 2008. Meltzer, Patricia. Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Oxford English Dictionary. Viewed 23 February 2014. http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/121738 Umińska-Keff, Bożena. Utwór o Matce i Ojczyźnie. Cracow: HaArt!. 2008.

Mateusz Chaberski

127

__________________________________________________________________ Mateusz Chaberski graduated from Inter-faculty Individual Studies in Humanities at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. He has got an M.A degree in theatre studies and translation studies. He is now beginning his PhD programme in performance studies. His academic interests encompass memory studies, cyberculture, hybrid forms of contemporary art and drama translation.

Part IV Bodily Monstrosity

Jeepers Creepers: Queer Bogeyman Sergio Fernando Juárez Abstract On the surface the 2001 film Jeepers Creepers may be considered a ‘typical slasher’ horror film featuring a supernatural bogeyman the likes of Michael Myers from the 1978 film Halloween. Upon a deeper examination of the text a concealed queer narrative is influential in the linkage between monstrosity and queer sexuality. This essay attempts to unveil the underlying queer narrative emanating from the film’s director Victor Salva, whose perspective and life struggles are immersed within the text. Both director and the culture within which the film originates from effect a construction of gay male sexuality as monstrous and violent. Darry, the young male in the film, is victimized by the Creeper and becomes a part of the monster itself. Vital to the construction of queer sexuality and monstrosity is the link between Darry and the bogeyman, which occurs through marking both as sexually ambiguous. The becoming a young gay male is signified as a violent process which creates monstrous queer bogeymen. Lost within this construction of monstrous and violent sexuality is a conflation of gay male sexuality and paedophilia. Centralizing experience is a manoeuvre toward acknowledging the cultural influences affecting Salva’s construction of a bogeyman. Employing Kent Ono’s discursive auteur in combination with Jeffery Cohen’s seven theses of monster culture offers a contextually rich framework to uncover the concealed queer yet homophobic perspective constructing gay male sexuality as monstrous and violent. Through Cohen’s (1996) seven theses of monster culture it is possible to centre the relationship between a monster and the culture within which it is found. I argue it is not only Salva’s experiences which influence the film, but the views embedded within reflect an internalized social anxiety of queer sexuality. Key Words: Queer, gay, sexuality, monstrosity, paedophilia, religion, bogeymen, internalized homophobia, auteur theory, discursive auteur. ***** 1. Introduction As a child you might have been told not to do something because otherwise ‘the bogeyman will get you’, scaring you into behaving. Bogeymen are creatures which lurk between the boundaries of right and wrong.1 They live on the threshold of cultural boundaries that, when crossed, elicit castigating responses.2 Bogeymen come in many forms, devils, werewolves, or men with supernatural strength a la Michael Myers of the 1978 film Halloween, stalking, tormenting and killing their victims. The bogeyman in the 2001 film Jeepers Creepers is named Creeper and is similar to its predecessors in a variety of interesting ways. Like the clown

132

Jeepers Creepers

__________________________________________________________________ Pennywise from the movie IT, the Creeper is a cyclical terror in that it appears every twenty-three years to feed, terrorizing the residents of a rural Florida community for twenty-three days. The community is mostly unaware they are being stalked by a predator, while the Creeper preys on victims searching for something it likes, needing to taste them and smell their fear before devouring them. It feeds on the bodies of its victims to sustain itself; the victims’ body parts become a part of the Creeper, needing them to make itself look human. But what makes this bogeyman so different from those that have come before it? Why does this Creeper merit analysis? In the Creeper we find a bogeyman who terrorizes young males and is marked as a queer character. Here we have a bogeyman who punishes those who dare cross conservative Catholic values of sexuality. It is a queer bogeyman who kisses the severed head of a male victim. The Creeper pursues its potential victims Darry and Trish, though Trish does not need to fear her assailant because the Creeper, as revealed in the ending of the film, prefers the taste of male flesh. Throughout the film women are victimized by the Creeper, but it is never seen eating from their bodies, yet several times it is seen eating the bodies of men. This analysis attempts to deconstruct the Creeper itself, beginning with an explanation of discursive auteur theory. This is followed by an explanation of the development of religion and sexuality in Victor Salva’s film, producer and writer, in conjunction with a biography of his traumatic experiences. These experiences, I argue, distort Salva’s perspective of sexuality which develop an internalized homophobia and association of paedophilia with gay sexuality. Next follows a deconstruction of queer monstrosity and particularly the purposeful use of sexual ambiguity to mark the leading characters, the Creeper and Darry, as queer while simultaneously linking them to one another. Lastly, in chapter five ‘umm tastes so darn good’ and ‘house of pain’ is an explication of specific scenes which are representative of the association between queer sexuality, monstrosity and violence. 2. Discursive Auteur The manifestation of the Creeper as a queer figure and religious symbol embedded within the film is in part due to Salva being the writer and director of the film. Auteur theory addresses these influences, positing that a director’s influence, which is not readily visible, affects the treatment of the film. 3 Limiting analysis to strictly Salva’s experiences falls short in explaining the construction of the Creeper as a queer bogeyman, because monsters are cultural constructions, reflecting societal anxieties.4 Projansky and Ono propose an interesting development of a discursive auteur by positing a concern for ‘how discourse constructs authors themselves in such a way as to contain certain textual possibilities’.5 The filmmaker/auteur is a particular subject operating within discourse.6 They describe the director as the

Sergio Fernando Juárez

133

__________________________________________________________________ creator of a text who is often seen as the originator of a film yet is a subject themselves who is positioned within a larger culture, a director is the creator of the narratives found in their film and positioned as the source of origin of textual meaning by members of the press, yet they themselves ‘are a subject positioned in particular ways in relation to the larger culture’. 7 By acknowledging the possible cultural forces affecting a directors intention and awareness I can begin to account for context to be able to extract Salva’s influence of the treatment of the visual, behavioural, and narrative content of the film.8 Auteur theory, according to Andrew Sarris, concerns itself with an interior and deeper meaning attempting to extrapolate the tension between a director and his material. 9 Still, Sarris’ attempt of analysing the text falls short by not accounting for larger cultural influences. Discursive auteur theory provides a holistic approach which is in line with the understanding that ‘films are social constructions and as such invite shared experiences’.10 Thus, a directors body of work is treated as a body of persuasive text, designed to invite audiences to a unique experience even if the conception of the auteur holds true.11 A critic rhetorically inquiries into these shared experiences, by interrogating the film itself, regarding the film as a constructed invitation to a complex experience of thoughts and feelings.12 This perspective is a useful way of thinking about the persuasive potential in films.13 Constructions of meaning in a film require a holistic approach which includes, but is not limited to, the director. Theories of monster culture, as an addition, contextually complement auteur theory, by providing a wider perspective that is inclusive of cultural analysis beyond the director of the film.14 Auteur theory is a means of deciphering underlying perspectives that shape the film.15 Specifically, Jeffrey J. Cohen intended the seven theses of monster culture to provide a method to read a culture from the monsters engendered from them. Monsters can be historical reflection of culture and provide a glimpse into societal anxieties relevant to a certain era.16 Inclusion of Cohen’s seven theses of monster culture provides a larger theoretical frame to explore the cultural construction of monstrosity and, in particular, the queer aspects of this bogeyman. Victor Salva himself admits to creating from what he knows. 17 It is no coincidence that the Creeper resembles the creature from the Black Lagoon and is a menacing bogeyman standing tall above most humans and possessing a dark animal-like complexion. The Creeper does not speak and has supernatural strength like a Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees. Salva gave it bat wings like that of a devil or demon often seen in Catholic mythology so that it may fly. Men cannot escape the quick and strong predator; the Creeper can outmanoeuvre gun shots, break through walls, punch through cars, and bend steel bars. 3. Salva, Monstrosity and Religion Victor Salva grew up in Martinez, California, with his brother, mother, and step-father.18 Salva hid his sexuality and his youth was made more difficult having

134

Jeepers Creepers

__________________________________________________________________ to grow up in a strict Catholic family to an abusive step-father who would beat him.19 At age eighteen Salva was thrown out of his home after his parents found gay pornographic magazines under his bed, having been told to ‘stop being gay or get out’.20 Salva is now a registered sex offender who at age thirty in 1988 was sentenced to three years at Soledad correctional facility after pleading guilty to charges of lewd and lascivious conduct for having sex with a person under fourteen and procuring a child for pornography. 21 The victim at the time was only twelve years old and starred in Salva’s first feature film Clownhouse.22 During the premier of the film Powder conservative Christian activists protested Salva’s involvement in Disney and the film.23 Salva’s life experiences of closeted sexuality, child molestation, punishment, and continued ostracizing serve as the motivation behind the consecutive linkage of young gay Darry to the Creeper. Ludgar Viefhues writes of the relationship between sexuality and Catholicism, categorizing it as one of repression. Catholicism asks that members on the one hand to be spiritual yet suppresses their desire and sexuality, asking those within the church to abandon their desires. 24 Acceptance is offered to everyone, unless a member openly identifies as being ‘non-heterosexual’ then they are no longer identified as a person but a monstrous other. Harry M. Benshoff’s essay The Monster and the Homosexual theorizes gay sexuality as monstrous, writing of the perceived threats gay sexuality poses to individuals, others, and the community.25 Salva’s experiences regarding his sexuality and sanctioning from family members and community manifest themselves within the film. Stephen Clark stresses that it is important to note that sexuality and paedophilia are not interrelated nor should be synonymous. 26 This conflation of sexuality and paedophilia is exhibited within the media in United States and erroneously links them one another but also consequentially develops an internalized homophobia within queer people like Victor Salva.27 Bernadette Barton provides an example of this internalized homophobic viewpoint when she describes how gay men living in the Bible belt begin to ascribe these narratives, which construct gay male sexuality as an abomination, unto their own bodies.28 4. Becoming a Queer Bogeyman Throughout the film the Creeper hunts down Darry and eventually captures him. In the final scene of the film the audience is provided a gruesome image of Darry hung like a slaughtered animal from a hook with his eyes and rear portion of his skull removed. The camera pans toward the body hanging from a hook positioning it where the audience can see clearly through the brutal punctures where Darry’s eyes used to be and to the wall behind the body. Suddenly, the Creeper steps in looking through the eyes of Darry. The Creeper’s eyes (which are Darry’s eyes) are positioned in a way that looks as though Darry’s dead body is a mask which hid his true monstrous self. The victim’s eyes have become the monster’s eyes, linking Darry and the Creeper to one another. Darry now

Sergio Fernando Juárez

135

__________________________________________________________________ experiences life through the body of his tormentor, metaphorically linking the life of a young gay male with a predator; they become one and the same. The Creeper and Darry are linked to one another visually in the film and this relationship offers a key space for further investigating the construction of queer sexuality as monstrous and violent. In this case, instead of clearly marking the sexuality of the characters, ambiguity is employed as a rhetorical device to mark both Darry and the Creeper as queer characters. Perhaps it is similar to what Michael DeAngelis dubbed ‘gay style’, which is described as an elaborate strategy that distances association with ‘gay’ culture yet is visible within the content developed at Robert Stigwood Organization Studios (RSO).29 Gay style refers to marketing practices of RSO Studios during the 1970s when there was an increased ‘influence of a more visible gay culture upon the consumer behavioural patterns of the mainstream, straight identified public’.30 Darry and the Creeper are queer characters whose sexuality is not easily discernible but clearly introduce a gay male sexuality in question. In an early scene Darry’s sexuality is revealed in juxtaposition to his sister Trish’s when they are having a conversation while driving home from college during spring break. Darry asks Trish about a young man she had been dating, subtly coding her as heterosexual, meanwhile, Darry’s romantic status is not addressed at all. Later, Darry’s ambiguous sexuality is visually marked by the revelation of a rose tattoo around his bellybutton. A rose tattoo in of itself does not imply a queer sexuality, but in combination with its purposeful placement around an intimate orifice and timing of the revelation, after Darry has fallen into a pipe and into the Creeper’s lair, it begins to imply an association with a queer sexuality. Lastly, Darry is ultimately marked as queer because he is the one chosen by the Creeper as a victim. Throughout the film the Creeper is never seen consuming the flesh from the body of a woman. In four encounters with women the Creeper does not once consume their flesh, not the police woman, not the ‘Cat Lady,’ nor Jezelle or Trish. Near the end, in an encounter with both Darry and Trish, the Creeper tosses aside Trish and holds onto Darry. This is after licking and tasting both their faces and preferring the taste of the flesh of the young male. The Creeper implicitly prefers the taste of men over women. The Creeper is also coded through ambiguity, though it is more explicit in the displays of sexuality. The Creeper itself physically resembles a man, but Jezelle in the film describes it, saying ‘it dresses like a man only to hide that it’s not’ codifying the monster as queer through ambiguity. The Creeper is not a man though it attempts to pass as one. The Creeper’s hyper-masculinity is an attempt to hide its gay sexuality. In order to pass for a man, it wears men’s clothing in the form a long trench coat and a hat. Highlighting a standard in society which dictates gender enactment, sexuality must match gender. Being coded as attempting to ‘pass as a man’ the Creeper’s behaviour creates categorical confusion of gender and sexual standards.31 The Creeper, as Cohen states in the third thesis, monsters

136

Jeepers Creepers

__________________________________________________________________ resist classification within hierarchical or binary systems and instead demand a ‘system’ allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration-allowing w.32 Monsters become readily apparent during clashes of extremes and times of crisis. 33 It is during these times monsters gain the power to problematize binary thinking, creating a crisis. These social fissures break standards of normalcy like daylight breaking through the inner and outer edges of window blinds. Monsters possess an ability to evade and undermine societal structures, breaking through attempts to resist daylight. 5. ‘Umm Tastes So Darn Good!’ and the ‘House of Pain’ In this scene the Creeper has found Darry and Trish, they are being escorted by a male and a female officer. The Creeper lands on the police vehicle’s roof, the female officer looks out from the front passenger window and is surprised by the creeper who grabs her by her hair and casually tosses her aside disinterested. It then punches through the vehicle ceiling grabbing the young attractive male officer from his head and pulling it just above the opening it has made and proceeds to decapitate its victim, bites its tongue and pulls it out, which simultaneously looks like a passionate kiss. This scene exhibits simultaneous fear and desire with the Creeper taking the head of the young male victim and bringing it close to its face in what I would describe as a passionate kiss. It is a kiss but in the same turn, it tears out the tongue with its teeth from the mouth of its victim. It is both disgust and desire, further exemplified by the text visible on a billboard in the background of the scene that reads ‘umm tastes so darn good’ in the background of the same scene. Same sex desire and behaviour is associated with the monstrous. Saunders describes this horror as masking our desire and fascination with gay male sexuality.34 Cohen also describes monstrosity as a kind of desire in the sixth thesis, the scene exemplifies the blurring of fear and desire. A kiss between heterosexual couples is viewed as harmless, yet a kiss between two men still is depicted as horror. Though ambiguity is purposely used as a tool to exhibit gay sexuality is manifested through ambiguity, during this scene there is a pivot. This is a pivot of sexuality being referenced in a subtle fashion, sexuality is explicitly begun to be associated with the monstrous. Within this delimited and liminal space people can engage in ‘escapist delight’ while upholding cultural boundaries,35 becoming horror ‘only when the monster threatens to overstep these boundaries, to destroy or deconstruct the thin wall of category and culture’. 36 Cohen writes monsters are ‘continually linked to forbidden practices in order to normalize and to enforce’, clearly defining the space they can encompass. Yet these same monsters terrifying communities can be an attraction and these same creatures who ‘terrify and interdict’ are a place of escape where fantasies can be explored.37 Monsters are linked to the forbidden, making them ‘all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint’.38 Horror movies are a place where society can explore monstrous

Sergio Fernando Juárez

137

__________________________________________________________________ sexualities yet also live in fear of them. But not all in our society enjoy the freedom to explore these liminal spaces without consequence. The church in the film is displayed as dilapidated, abandoned building. The abandoned church serves as a signifier for the Catholic Church, it is a home to powerful conservative values which no longer fit and are abandoned. The church may be considered a closeted space in the sense that it is a hidden space that is painful to queer inhabitants. It is a place where carnal desires are hidden deep underneath and are the foundation of society and the church. Offenders must bare this mark publicly as Salva is marked for his own sexual ‘deviance’ by having to report himself as a sexual offender.39 By suppressing sexuality, hidden spaces become home for predators. Creepers and predators are monstrous identities encapsulating Salva’s body and preserving it like petrified wood. Salva’s sexuality and transgression have come to define him for life in U.S. society. The ‘house of pain’ also is home to the ‘sick Sistine chapel’ described in the movie, it is a collage of offenders, the bodies of victims of the Creeper sewn together, mummified like petrified wood and hollow on the inside. The transgressions of paedophiles define their existence and they are symbolically no longer whole living people. This social distinction robs Salva and others of a complex identity forever, simplifying their existence as registered sex offenders. The online sex offender registration is open for all to see and is a ‘house of pain’ where they are on display for the wonder and curiosity of onlookers. 6. Conclusion Through discursive auteur theory in combination with theories of monstrosity and culture like Cohen’s seven theses of monster culture, this analysis is able to uncover Salva’s perspective which constructs sexuality as monstrous and violent. These constructions reinforce hegemonic structures of sexuality in the media, though Salva is a queer male. In this film queer sexuality is shaped as monstrous, violent, and leading to death. While the Creeper is a queer figure, it is upholding heteronormative standards. Conservative values are coded through Catholic values which reinforce a heteronormative environment in Salva’s life. These values are affecting his perspectives on sexuality. Discursive auteur theory provides a lens to focus on the relationship between the text, Salva’s experiences, and with Cohen’s Seven Theses of Monster Culture which allow for the inclusion of the larger context. This points to a lived experience of monstrosity and allows for extrapolation of the embedded and engendered perspective of queer sexuality. Salva’s perspectives are imprinted on the characters but also the visual narrative exhibited in Jeepers Creepers. Still, though a queer male himself, Salva depicts queer male sexuality as monstrous and violent while simultaneously conflating the sanctioning of a child molester with the sanctioning suffered by the gay community in society today. The Creeper is a bogeyman spawned from Salva’s skewed perspective of sexuality and nightmares

138

Jeepers Creepers

__________________________________________________________________ of having grown up in the U.S. and punishment for having violated a young boy. The internalized conflation of sexuality and paedophilia which manifests onscreen is a warning of the power messages carry in perpetuating intolerant views but also of the suffering caused to members of our communities.

Notes 1

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3. 2 Ibid. 3 Richard Koszarski, ‘Auteurism Revisted’, Film History, 7 (1995), 355-357. 4 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, 4. 5 Sarah Projansky and Kent A. Ono, ‘Making Films Asian American: Shopping for Fangs and the Discursive Auteur’, Authorship and Film, eds. David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (New York: Routledge, 2003), 267. 6 Ibid, 264. 7 Ibid. 8 Koszarski, ‘Auteurism Revisited’, 356. 9 Andrew Sarris, ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962’, Film Theory and Criticism Introductory Readings, eds, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford, 1999), 561. 10 Kendall Phillips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, and the Modern Horror Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2012), Kindle edition. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Kendall Phillips, Projected Fears Horror Films and American Culture (Westport: Preager, 2005), 133. 15 Andrew Sarris, ‘Notes on The Auteur Theory’, 561. 16 Phillips, Projected Fears, 133. 17 Patrick Goldstein, ‘Victor Salva’s Horror Stories’, Los Angeles Times, 11 June 2006. 18 Goldstein, ‘Victor Salva’s Horror Stories’. 19 Ibid. 20 Glen Lovell, ‘Can Victor Salva Move On’, Cinemadope.com, accessed May, 16 2014, http://cinemadope.com/features-2/victor-salvas-monster-factory/. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid

Sergio Fernando Juárez

139

__________________________________________________________________ 24

Ludger Viefhues, ‘On My Bed at Night I Sought Him Whom My Heart Loves. Reflections on Trust, Horror, G*D, and the Queer Body in Vowed Religious Life’, Modern Theology 17(2001), 415. 25 Harry M. Benshoff, ‘The Monster and the Homosexual’, Horror: The Film Reader, ed, Mark Jancovich (London:Routledge, 2002), 91. 26 Stephen Clark, ‘Gay Priests and Other Bogeymen’, Journal of Homosexuality 51(2006). 4. 27 Richard Gartner., ‘Sexual Victimization of Boys by Men: Meanings and Consequences,’ Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, 3.2 (1999): 4. 28 Bernadette Barton, ‘Abomination-Life as a Bible Belt Gay’, Journal of Homosexuality. 57.4 (2010): 465-484. 29 Michael DeAngelis, ‘Robert Stigwood: Producer, Author, Text,’ Authorship and Film, eds, David A. Gerstner and Janet Steiger (New York: Routledge, 2003), 247261. 30 Ibid. 31 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses),’ 4 32 Ibid., 6. 33 Ibid. 34 Michael William Saunders, Imps of the Perverse: Gay Monsters in Film (Westport: Praeger, 1998). 17. 35 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture,’ 17. 36 Ibid. 37 Saunders, Imps of the Perverse, 17. 38 Ibid. 39 Viefhues, On My Bed at Night, 415.

Bibliography Barton, Bernadette. ‘“Abomination”: Life as a Bible Belt Gay.’ Journal of Homosexuality 57.4 (2010): 465-484. Benshoff, Harry M. ‘The Monster and the Homosexual.’ Horror: The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, 91-102. London: Routledge, 2002. Clark, Stephen J. ‘Gay Priests and Other Bogeymen.’ Journal of Homosexuality (2006): 1-13.

140

Jeepers Creepers

__________________________________________________________________ Cohen, Jefferey Jerome. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses).’ In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jefferey Jerome Cohen, 3-25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. DeAngelis, Michael. ‘Robert Stigwood: Producer, Author, Text.’ In Authorship and Film, edited by David A. Gerstner and Janet Steiger, 247-261. New York: Routledge, 2003. Gartner, Richard B. 2004. ‘Predatory Priests: Sexually Abusing Fathers.’ Studies in Gender and Sexuality 5.1 (2004): 31-56. Goldstein, Patrick. ‘Victor Salva’s Horror Stories.’ Los Angeles Times, June 11, 2006. Koszarski, Richard. ‘Revisiting Auteurism.’ Film History, 7.4 (1995): 355-357. Lovell, Glen. ‘Can Victor Salva Move On.’ Cinemadope.com, March 28, 1999: 12. Phillips, Kendall. Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, and the Modern Horror Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. ———. Projected Fears Horror Films and American Culture. Westport: Preager, 2005). Projansky, Sarah and Kent A. Ono. ‘Making Films Asian American: Shopping for Fangs and the Discursive Auteur.’ Authorship and Film, edited by David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger, 263-296. New York: Routledge, 2003. Sarris, Andrew. ‘Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962.’ Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 561-564. New York: Oxford, 2004. Saunders, Michael William. Imps of the Perverse: Gay Monsters in Film. Westport: Praeger,1998. Viefhues, Ludger. ‘“On My Bed at Night I Sought Him Whome My Heart Loves”: Reflections on Trust, Horror, G*D, and the Queer Body in Vowed Religious Life.’ Modern Theology 17.4 (2001): 414-425.

Sergio Fernando Juárez

141

__________________________________________________________________ Sergio Fernando Juárez is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Denver. Currently my research is focused on issues of migration in the United States with an emphasis on issues affecting undocumented Latina/o residents in the southwest region.

Caliban and Aaron: Monstrous Bodies and Monstrous Language Kristen Wright Abstract Medieval literature is densely populated by a wide variety of monsters that, as noted by Cohen and others, represent the threat of chaos and the barbaric ‘other’ that exists in the liminal spaces just outside of civilization. Although some of the more extreme versions of these monstrous characters (giants, cenocephali, etc…) have largely disappeared by the Renaissance, black skin is still used as a marker of someone who is both spiritually and physically threatening. In the characters of Caliban and Aaron, Shakespeare not only presents foreign men with black skin who exhibit monstrous behaviours, but he also specifies their threat in terms of the men’s mouths and ability to use language. While the mouth is easily recognizable as a potential sexual orifice, Shakespeare goes a step further and ties these men’s ability to speak and to manipulate their words to their sexual and physical threat. Caliban has learned language imperfectly in order to curse his captors, and he is also unable to fulfil his desire to rape Miranda and ‘people the isle with Calibans’; Aaron, on the other hand, speaks masterfully and is able to manipulate those around him resulting in his greater physical threat. In both of these characters their sexual menace is directly tied to how effectively they can use and understand language. What Shakespeare presents is not primarily the threat of monstrous physical body, but the threat of the monstrous mind. Key Words: Monster, race, skin colour, sexuality, early modern, language. ***** Although many scholars have written on physical monstrosity, particularly of the medieval period, they have typically overlooked Renaissance depictions of monstrosity as a primarily psychological and social phenomenon. Medieval literature generally depicts monsters as physically grotesque beings who exist outside of the human community; however, by the Renaissance, many of these physical markers of monstrosity were dropped in favour of mental or behavioural difference. Despite this change in appearance, the literary role of the monster remains much the same: the monster reveals the horrors that exist outside of the boundaries of ‘normal’ society because, as argued by Mark Burnett, ‘a society’s conventions are often as narrowly demarcated as its physical norms, enabling “monstrosity” to signal a range of personality and behavioural traits which fall outside prescribed perimeters’.1 Through their actions, and to a lesser extent their appearance, Renaissance monsters warn of the danger of the ‘other’ and unnatural or anti-social behaviour. In this paper, I argue that Shakespeare’s characters Caliban and Aaron, who both possess some monstrous physical traits, are

144

Caliban and Aaron

__________________________________________________________________ threatening in direct proportion to their respective ability to manipulate language. In The Tempest, Caliban represents the bestial, primitive man who does not fully control language, and he is therefore only a primitive or brutish threat. However, in Titus Andronicus, Aaron commandeers civilized language for his own monstrous means, showing that monsters are most threatening when they can insidiously pervert the tools of civilization itself. Caliban and Aaron are very different types of monsters, but they both emerge from the same tradition of depicting foreigners, specifically dark or black skinned Africans as monstrous. Medieval Romances use black skin to show that characters are spiritually monstrous: Muslims, and other non-Christians, are frequently depicted as black, and often the blacker the skin of the character, the more monstrous the other features and behaviour.2 In Renaissance England, the motivation for negatively classifying foreigners largely shifted from religious to economic/social, but the threat of the foreign other, which had been mitigated by distance in the medieval period, also became a local threat as trade and slavery brought Africans into Europe. So, although many overtly monstrous features were dropped as the increasing presence of Africans in London made such depictions less believable, writers continued to use skin colour to mark foreigners out as ‘other’ or monstrous. Despite being more visually realistic, descriptions by Renaissance writers reveal the same anxiety about racial/colonial dominance as the medieval Romances. According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the monstrous body ‘demarcate[s] the bonds that hold together that system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to borders that cannot – must not – be crossed’.3 Aaron and Caliban are both created out of the tradition of depicting black skin as monstrous, and their physical difference points to the social and sexual boundaries that they will attempt to cross or destroy; however, neither of them is primarily threatening because of their physical attributes. Instead, they are tricksters and plotters who show the monstrous extremes of man’s behaviour; they are the new Renaissance type of monster whose threat is proportional to his intelligence and who works to destroy social boundaries with their minds rather than their bodies. Caliban, whose mother is the Algerian witch Sycorax, does in fact have some of the physical markers of a monster, and these physical differences reveal both his primitive state and his monstrous intentions. His difference can be easily read on his body: he is a ‘freckled whelp’4, ‘a strange fish’5, and a ‘puppy headed monster’6, and Trinculo and Stephano marvel over him and taunt him as a ‘monster’ dozens of times in the play.7 In fact, Miranda points out that Caliban’s monstrous body makes him irredeemably other when she calls him an ‘Abhorred slave / Which any print of goodness will not take’.8 Miranda clearly views the physical body as an embodiment of the possessor’s moral qualities, and Caliban’s monstrous appearance directly contrasts with the handsome Ferdinand’s ‘divine’ appearance.9 Caliban’s monstrous form cannot be stamped with goodness; his ugly appearance reveals that he has instead already been imprinted with wickedness.

Kristen Wright

145

__________________________________________________________________ However, for all of its focus on appearances, the play is equally concerned with language and there is a direct contrast between the well-spoken and handsome Ferdinand and the physically monstrous and ineloquent Caliban. When Miranda and Ferdinand first meet, Ferdinand is thrilled that Miranda speaks his language, exclaiming ‘My language? Heavens! / I am the best of them that speak this speech, / Were I but where ‘tis spoken’.10 More than her appearance, Miranda’s language immediately marks her as both akin to Ferdinand and superior to the other residents of the wild island. Ferdinand recognizes that he is far from home, but their shared language symbolizes their humanity and their cultural ties. In contrast, Caliban does not speak any language at all until Prospero and Miranda teach him, and his rejection of language prevents him from being truly threatening. When Prospero and Miranda arrive at the island, Caliban is a wild creature who cannot speak, yet he has a more practical and primitive survival knowledge that is contrasted with Prospero’s more civilized ‘book’ knowledge. However, while Caliban’s physical form is unchangeable in nature, his rejection of language is a choice. He laments that Prospero and Miranda taught him ‘To name the bigger light, and how the less, / That burn by day and night’.11 He then contrasts this with the practical knowledge that he gave to Miranda and Prospero saying: ‘then I lov’d thee / and show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, / The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile, / Curs’d be I that did so’.12 Caliban feels cheated because he offered Prospero and Miranda practical knowledge of the island, and in exchange he was given common language, which he considers to be of lesser value. However, despite Caliban’s protestations that he gave Prospero and Miranda the more useful knowledge, he does recognize the potential power of language. Caliban first complains to Miranda ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse’.13 However, when he later attempts to enlist Stephano and Trinculo in his overthrow of Prospero, he tells them that they must ‘first possess [Prospero’s] books’14 before they can rule the island. This seems contradictory, but it reveals that Caliban recognizes the difference between his own ineffectual cursing and the magical language contained in Prospero’s books. He knows that the words and spells in Prospero’s books are the key to Prospero’s power, but his own attempts at using language have largely failed. The monstrous looking but inept Caliban remains in his primitive linguistic state, and is therefore never truly threatening to Prospero and Miranda. In contrast, Aaron’s language facilitates and enhances his monstrous behaviour, and despite his lack of overt physical monstrosity, Aaron still represents the threat of deviant behaviour. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that ‘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’.15 So, although only Aaron’s black skin physically marks him as ‘other’, it still visually identifies him as a monstrous threat to both political structure and sexual order.

146

Caliban and Aaron

__________________________________________________________________ Furthermore, just as Aaron appears less monstrous or different, he is much more able to not only use language, but he is even able to turn it into a weapon. Like Caliban, Aaron’s knowledge is his greatest currency, and he teaches those around him; however, unlike Caliban he is not willing to just give his knowledge away, but rather he uses his knowledge and his mastery of language to take advantage of others. Aaron appears well educated and makes numerous references to classical mythology and Roman history, and Aaron uses these references to convince others to carry out his monstrous plans. It is Aaron who first compares Lavinia to Lucrece when he lectures Chiron and Demetrius on how to obtain the object of their lust: Tis policy and stratagem must do That you affect, and so must you resolve, That what you cannot as you would achieve You must perforce accomplish as you may. Take this of me: Lucrece was not more chaste Than this Lavinia, Bassianus’ love.’16 Aaron suggests that rather than trying to win Lavinia, they can simply rape her, just as Tarquin raped Lucrece. Aaron thus becomes the boys’ tutor in evil, and he effectively turns Roman history against its own people. Then Aaron takes this even further and advises Tamora that Bassianus’ ‘Philomel must lose her tongue today’.17 It is thus, through Aaron, that Chiron and Demetrius not only re-enact Tereus’ brutal rape of Philomel, but they even surpass the original in brutality. Aaron’s choice of lessons for Chiron, Demetrius and Tamora may also reveal both the depth of his evil and his intellect. The two stories that he chooses as examples, those of Lucrece and Philomel, both end in the destruction of the men who committed the rapes. The eloquent and monstrous Aaron not only orchestrates the downfall of the Andronicii, but he uses the ignorance of language and stories, to trick others into destroying themselves. Although Aaron does not physically aid in Lavinia’s rape, preferring to rely on his wits and ability to ‘teach’ others to do his wicked deeds, he does more directly challenge the sexual and social order in his relationship with Tamora. Unlike Caliban, who has been taught language but relies on his unimpressive and inadequate strength to rape Miranda, Aaron does not rely on physical strength but rather his language to physically dominate Tamora through verbal ‘amorous chains’.18 His relationship with her is certainly physical, but he woos her rather than ravishes her. Through his ability to talk his way into Tamora’s bed, Aaron also performs another function of the classical monster: in the body of his mixed race child he threatens both racial boundaries and social boundaries, specifically the Roman succession. As Cohen claims, ‘the political-cultural monster, the embodiment of

Kristen Wright

147

__________________________________________________________________ radical difference, paradoxically threatens to erase difference in the world of its creators’.19 By having sex with Tamora, Aaron has already threatened the sexual boundary between races, and if not for the paternity of Tamora and Aaron’s son being revealed by his dark skin, Aaron could have potentially fathered the next emperor of Rome. Unable to place his own son on the throne, Aaron then attempts to place one of his own race on the throne instead. In place of Aaron’s dark skinned child, Aaron convinces Chiron and Demetrius to substitute the fair skinned child of one of Aaron’s countrymen.20 If successful in his scheme, Aaron would have placed a child on the throne who is of entirely foreign parentage, a fact not revealed by any physical difference. Chiron and Demetrius easily acquiesce to this plan, and once again Aaron manages to sow discord and threaten the social order with his ability to manipulate others through language. Of course the plan fails and Aaron is captured by Lucius; however, Aaron does succeed in using language to save his own son. Once captured and with no hope of preserving his own life, Aaron uses language as a purely destructive force. After Aaron negotiates terms of safety for his son by revealing the Goths’ scheme, Aaron, unlike Iago, cannot resist bragging about the evil that he has committed. He promises Lucius that ‘If thou do this, I’ll show thee wondrous things, / Which highly may advantage thee to hear’,21 and in her work, Molly Easo Smith claims that ‘Aaron’s eagerness to talk about his misdeeds reveals his primary goal hereafter in the play, namely, to inflict psychological torment on his hearers by recounting their vulnerability to his villainies’.22 This is true, but in this moment Aaron not only reminds Lucius of his vulnerabilities but also makes Lucius re-experience the horrors that Aaron has wrought on his family. He tells Lucius Even now I curse the day—and yet I think Few come within the compass of my curse Wherein I did not some notorious ill: As kill a man, or else devise his death, Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it, Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself. 23 For Aaron, words not only evoke powerful images, but can also motivate or inspire others to perform monstrous actions. While Caliban thought that his ability to curse was useless, Aaron has fully recognized the power of language, allowing him to both torment men with his words and to encourage them to commit monstrous deeds for him. Yet, as part of recognizing the power of language, Aaron also recognizes that he is not the only one who can manipulate or betray others with words. Unlike Caliban, who denies the power of language but is deceived by everybody, Aaron, whose power comes from the mastery of speech, is the first to distrust the words of

148

Caliban and Aaron

__________________________________________________________________ others. When his son is born, Aaron commits one of his few direct acts of violence when he murders the nurse noting ‘Two may keep counsel when the third’s away’.24 Again, we see Aaron question the words of others when he asks Lucius to swear that his child will be kept safe. Aaron, the consummate liar and manipulator does not even trust oaths sworn to God, believing that the verbalization is worthless and he only decides to trust the oath because Lucius is religious; he trusts Lucius’ piety rather than his words: Yet for I know thou art religious, And hast a thing within thee called conscience, With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies, Which I have seen thee careful to observe, Therefore I urge thy oath.25 This also reveals the potential chaos created by Aaron’s monstrous use of language: if language cannot be trusted, then communication threatens to break down entirely. Like all monsters, Aaron must be either driven from society or killed before he can wreak further havoc. He has already threatened the succession of the empire both through his fathering of a child with the empress, but more directly in that his actions have helped to get both royal sons, Saturninus and Bassianus, killed. The fact that language is Aaron’s weapon of choice makes his death even more appropriate: Aaron is buried up to his neck and left to rave unheeded while he slowly starves to death. In this moment, Aaron most fully demonstrates the Latin root of monster: monstrare, to show. He shows everyone both his most threatening aspect (his mouth), and he shows what happens to those who use language in a monstrous way. However, this method of execution, ironically allows Aaron a victory by letting him demonstrate his verbal threat. In his final words, he does not plead for help as Lucius predicts, but instead he proclaims his fury and he dies still speaking curses. In his Essays, Michel de Montaigne claims ‘I have seen no more evident monstrosity or miracle in the world than myself’26 and this idea, that the potential for both monstrosity and miracle resides in man, can help us to understand both Caliban and Aaron. These characters represent two monstrous extremes of human potential. At the end of The Tempest when Prospero is asked about Caliban, he responds, ‘This thing of darkness I / acknowledge mine’.27 While Caliban is literally his slave, this response also hints at Caliban representing the bestial or monstrous man in each of us. Prospero is the master of high art and magical language while Caliban is the bestial primitive monster/man who can hardly use language at all. Caliban is therefore the bestial ‘thing of darkness’ that threatens to consume us all when we are separated from society. Aaron, however, is also a ‘thing of darkness’ but he represents the opposite extreme. If language is one of the

Kristen Wright

149

__________________________________________________________________ hallmarks of civilized man, then Aaron shows what can happen when that language is abused and used as a weapon. Aaron looks and acts more human, but this coupled with his monstrous behaviour makes Aaron even more frightening. Aaron, rather than being a physical threat that can be fought, threatens to overthrow the reason of those around him, and he gleefully pulls down society by convincing others to commit monstrous deeds for him. Caliban might look more like a traditional monster, but he and Aaron both demonstrate the boundaries of language and what it means to be human.

Notes 1

Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2. 2 For more on the way that black skin is depicted as monstrous and a mark of sinful behaviour see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 114-146; Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Irina Metzler, ‘Perceptions of Hot Climate in Medieval Cosmography and Travel Literature’, in Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond, ed. Joan Pau Rubies (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 379-415. 3 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 13. 4 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Edition. ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 1.2.285. 5 Ibid., 2.2.27. 6 Ibid., 2.2.154. 7 For more examples see Act 2, Scene 2 and Act 3, Scene 2. 8 Ibid., 1.2.352-3. 9 Ibid., 1.2.419. 10 Ibid., 1.2.429-431. 11 Ibid., 1.2.335-6 12 Ibid., 1.2.336-339. 13 Ibid., 1.2.362-363. 14 Ibid., 3.2.92. 15 Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, 7. 16 Ibid., 2.1.104-7. 17 Ibid., 2.3.43.

150

Caliban and Aaron

__________________________________________________________________ 18

Ibid., 2.1.15. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, 11. 20 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Edition. ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 4.2.150-161. 21 Ibid., 5.1.55-56. 22 Molly Easo Smith, ‘Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 36.2 (1996): 323. 23 Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 5.1.125-130. 24 Ibid., 4.2.144. 25 Ibid., 5.1.74-78. 26 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Cripples’, The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2003), 958. 27 Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.275-6. 19

Bibliography Burnett, Mark Thornton. Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’. Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3-25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ———. ‘On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England’. In Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 114-146. de Montaigne, Michel. ‘Of Cripples’. The Complete Works. Translated by Donald M. Frame. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2003. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Metzler, Irina. ‘Perceptions of Hot Climate in Medieval Cosmography and Travel Literature’. Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond, edited by Joan Pau Rubies, 379-415. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2009.

Kristen Wright

151

__________________________________________________________________ Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Edition, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. ———. Titus Andronicus, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Edition, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Smith, Molly Easo. ‘Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus’. In Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36.2 (1996): 315-331. Kristen Wright is a PhD Candidate at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her research interests include Renaissance drama and poetry, monsters, folklore, and travel literature.

Making Yellow Monstrous: Frankenstein to Fu Manchu Viv Chadder Abstract I am primarily interested in the ways in which the Orient and ideas of yellowness become demonized in British cultural history. Sax Rohmer’s fiction has often enough been the subject of criticism for its overt racism. I needed to understand, if there were mitigating circumstances for this much denigrated attitude. Rather than attempting to save Rohmer from this wholly incorrect approach, for which there are very little grounds, I decided to investigate the history of the yellow peril, and the ways in which the idea of yellowness became a signifier of racial difference and of the Orient. Did the Orient always occupy the place of the other in British Culture, or was there a more complex history to be disclosed? What accounts for the evident mismatch between historical evidence and race paranoia? Do Rohmer’s fictions and film texts enable an alternative view of the status and function of the Orient in representation? There will be some textual exploration of the alliance between the monster and the sign of yellowness, from Frankenstein to Fu Manchu. Other issues will include playing yellow face in film and on stage, the yellow cigarette, the fog, and the circuit of desire. Key Words: Difference, becoming yellow, the Orient, racial science, yellow peril. ***** This paper is concerned with the idea of difference, especially with regard to the Orient, and in the context of horror. It is also underwritten by Freud’s paper on The Uncanny, especially the idea that the uncanny concerns a class of the frightening which should have remained hidden, but which has become visible. It is concerned to discover the interdisciplinary processes by which developments in racial science come to coincide with the literary in British cultural history in the early nineteenth century in making a monster, which is conceived in racial terms and by which the racial other is revealed to be deeply embedded within British public and domestic space. Fu Manchu, the creation of Sax Rohmer in the early twentieth century, therefore, has enjoyed a long and varied history, achieving global expansion, in a shape whose difference in the form of yellowness is systematically and almost pathologically emphasized, while retaining its familiarity. Edward Said, in his renowned work on Orientalism, offers some thoughts on the function of the Orient in relation to the West: ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.’ 1

154

Making Yellow Monstrous

__________________________________________________________________ So, here the purpose is to understand the ways in which the difference of the Orient functions to stabilize Western identity and enhance its power. While Alain Grosrichard expands this concept to include the idea that: ‘Very quickly, however, this external threat will appear as if it were also, and even primarily, an internal one’. 2 This external and threatening Orient is then, effectively, one that is already on the inside, in the same way that the ‘Unheimliche’ in Freud’s work is already inherent to the ‘heimlich’. The threat, therefore, that this yellow monster constitutes, is not truly in the category of absolute difference, rather, it is an intrinsic component of the same, while it becomes, at the same time, its monster. A distinct fantasy of the Orient emerges, incorporating the political as despotic, the social as possessive, exclusive and sexual and the cultural as exotic. The latter leaves clear traces in British visual culture in terms of its enthusiasm for Oriental style, both in the public and the domestic sphere. The late medieval travel narrative of Sir John Mandeville was widely translated and read, and although the credibility of the narrator has been challenged, it has been a source of knowledge of the Orient, informing actual expeditions. The description of the ritual surrounding the death of the father is recorded with some degree of wonder and barely concealed horror, particularly the offering of titbits from the head of the father to special guests. However, it is these kinds of details that coloured the view of the Orient for readers. It would appear that it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that Orientals became yellow. The enthusiasm of Enlightenment thinkers such as Linnaeus for ordering and classifying prompted a desire to classify racial difference. Blumenbach in the early nineteenth century developed these classifications according to craniology and skin pigmentation, through which the Mongolian became yellow. Blumenbach also begins to develop a classification of racial characteristics which are mainly in the negative as compared to the Caucasian. By the late nineteenth century, the ‘disease’ of opium addiction is particularly associated with the Orient. However, this passage from Dickens’ unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in 1870, introduces a more enigmatic idea: Lying, also dressed and across the bed not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman … She hands him the nearly emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on her face … He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple, and his colour are repeated in her. Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles with one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly. The Lascar laughs and dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is still. 3

Viv Chadder

155

__________________________________________________________________ Not only has this woman been stained by exposure to opium smoke, but the shape of her cranium, too, has become like that of the Chinaman. So, has she become Chinese? Or is she still Caucasian? This is a radical invasion, which blurs the boundaries between self and other. However, our first yellow monster emerges in the early nineteenth century. In Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein, 1818, Victor Frankenstein describes his creation thus: How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. 4 Shelley, here, makes two kinds of racial connections. Her monster is ‘yellow’ and he is mummy-like. The scholar Anne Mellor has expertly made the connection between the Shelleys and the most recent ideas of racial science. 5 It would appear to be incontrovertible that the Shelleys would have been aware of this work and body of ideas. From the description it would appear that the construction of this creature has exaggerated these racial features and enhanced its monstrous difference. The following monstrous woman appears in Rider Haggard’s novel, King Solomon’s Mines (1885). I observed a wizened monkey-like figure creeping from the shadow of the hut. It crept on all fours, but when it reached the place where the king sat it rose upon its feet, and throwing the furry covering from its face, revealed a most extraordinary and weird countenance. Apparently it was that of a woman of great age, so shrunken that in size it seemed little larger than the face of a year old child, but made up of countless deep and yellow wrinkles. Set among these wrinkles was a sunken slit that represented the mouth, beneath which the chin curved outwards to a point. There was no nose to speak of; indeed, the visage might have been taken for that of a sun-dried corpse, had it not been for a pair of large black eyes, still full of fire and intelligence, which gleamed and played under the snow-white eyebrows, and projecting parchment-coloured skull, like jewels in a charnel house. The head itself was perfectly bare, and yellow

156

Making Yellow Monstrous

__________________________________________________________________ in hue, while the naked wrinkled scalp moved and contracted like the hood of a cobra. 6 Haggard’s protagonists are exploring in Africa, so their journey necessarily involves encounters with the racial Other. This woman, however, not only fulfils a cardinal function in the plot, she is also a lethal condensation of late nineteenth century preoccupations with women. She manifests a devolutionary frame, she is cobra -like and ancient, she is a witch in her social function within the tribe. She is also a trickster and leads the white explorers to almost certain death. At this point in writing, references to the Yellow Peril would have been well known and understood, but this figure is a synthesis of an accumulation of cultural traditions regarding women, as well as an Other of the Other, that is to say of the three races represented in this episode in the novel, where Gagool pitilessly sniffs out witches within the Kukuana tribe and leaves a pile of corpses in her wake. The Modernists who appear at the art exhibition in Rohmer’s novel, The Yellow Claw, 1913, also looked to the East for inspiration. Their Bohemian haunt, the bizarrely decorated Cave of the Golden Calf, equally accommodates the enthusiasm of the poets and the artists for all things Oriental. The enthusiasm for the Oriental within Britain was not the province alone of popular taste, the Modernists looked to the East for modes of expression that would adequately communicate the conditions of modern metropolitan life. British culture since the eighteenth century had accommodated oriental forms and frequently absorbed them into domestic life. So as well as public displays such as the Kew Pagoda, we frequently findChinese rooms in the houses of the great estates, Chinese style gardens, wallpapers, ornaments and clothing, for which there was a fashion in the 1920s. This happy intermingling, however, came not without anxiety. The Chinese room had negative associations with women and promiscuity. Chinese style clothing frequently denoted the flapper and the inexorable advance of the liberated woman. So despite this intermingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the homely with the uncanny, it nevertheless constituted a threat to the British nation, for which Chinese style became increasingly identified with the feminine, the irregular and the irrational. Did Chinese style have rules? In The Grammar of Chinese Ornament from 1856, Owen Jones, the Welsh architect, dared to suggest that it did, but not the classical discipline and restraint of traditional style, but rather an insidious grouping of decorative curves, a distinct breach with tradition. 7 The yellow monster reappears early in the twentieth century, with a media life extending into the twenty first, in the form of Fu Manchu. We should attend to the detail of Rohmer’s initial description: Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long magnetic eyes of the true cat green. Invest him

Viv Chadder

157

__________________________________________________________________ with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, and all the resources if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence, imagine that awful being and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. 8 Fu Manchu is, we learn, by no means a figure of complete alterity. He is a combination of Shakespeare and Satan, he has a supreme intellect, or cunning. He is an isolated being, although we learn in the course of The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, 1913, that he has a pet marmoset, as well as innumerable snakes, cats and microbes at his disposal, as a personal army. So, therefore he is an admixture of the most representative and the most alien aspects of British culture, and a fitting opponent for our white heroes, as he summons the extremes of his scientific knowledge to corrupt and destroy the elite of British society. Similar to the uncanny, according to Freud, which comes from the outside, but is also always, already, on the inside, in this instance, this enigmatic being is a significant seeker of world domination. That this monster directs its operations from Limehouse in darkest London is entirely appropriate, as it is a site of cultural tradition, already associated with the yellow man, and a place of mystery and darkness, where might be found the occasional Aladdin’s cave, as in D W Griffith’s film Broken Blossoms (1919). Said and his successor, Grosrichard, in their work on Orientalism have argued that the Orient becomes a function of Western identity. It had become the guarantor of Western stability and identity, while at the same time threatening its existence. It would seem then that difference must be sustained and any blurring of boundaries constitutes, in itself, a danger to belief in the certainties of Western superiority. Rohmer’s fictions and their contemporary popularity and the ensuing ‘life’ of the figure in British film cycles of the 1920s and the 1960s in this way reevoke, not just the late nineteenth century preoccupation with the Yellow Peril, stimulated by the more recent Boxer rebellion and enhanced by cinema, but also the fear that the certainty of (racial) difference may collapse, with unthinkable consequences for the West. May Fu Manchu therefore become less of a monster and more of a mirror? Or, as a recent book on Fu Manchu suggests, this figure becomes a collection of props, and nothing more, through its dispersal into a variety of media forms in the course of the twentieth century. 9 Clearly he is still a part of Western cultural memory. And, at this point in time, he must be viewed within the context of Globalisation. We may speculate, therefore, if Rohmer’s creation, occurring after the high point of Yellow Peril anxiety, generates another kind of anxiety: of that which may arise if difference fails. So, if the Orient as the ineradicable other is the difference necessary to the preservation and stability of the Occident, perhaps, as a fantasy, lying buried deep in the heart of the subject, like Fu Manchu, it may always return? ‘The world shall hear from me again’. 10 This

158

Making Yellow Monstrous

__________________________________________________________________ line occurs in the 1960s series of films starring Christopher Lee. And, defying the experience of the film spectators, as they witness Fu Manchu being blown to pieces, beheaded, or otherwise destroyed, I question whether this is merely the logic of the series, an ominous threat, or a reassurance of the perpetuity of ‘difference’.

Notes 1

Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 3. Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East (London: Verso, 1998), 22. 3 Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Middlesex: Penguin, [1870] 1974), 38. 4 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, [1818] 1993), 51-52. 5 Anne Mellor, ‘Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril’, Nineteenth Century Contexts 23 (2001): 1-28. 6 Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007), 100-101. 7 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Chinese Ornament (London: Studio Editions, 1987). 8 Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (New York: Dover Publications, 1998), 13. 9 Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu; The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014). 2

Bibliography Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Middlesex: Penguin, [1870] 1974. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Art and Literature. Volume 14. Edited by Albert Dickson. London: Penguin Freud Library, 1990. Grosrichard, Alain. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East. London: Verso, 1998. Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon's Mines. London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1885] 2007. Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Chinese Ornament. London: Studio Editions, 1987.

Viv Chadder

159

__________________________________________________________________ King, Homay. Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema and the Enigmatic Signifier. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Mayer, Ruth. Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Routledge, 1989. Rohmer, Sax. The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu. New York: Dover Publications, 1998. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 2003. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, [1818] 1993. Viv Chadder was Senior Lecturer in Film and Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University, now retired. She is currently a PhD research student at De Montfort University. Her interests include British Cinema, Orientalism, the history of ideas and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative: The Witchy Writer and Liquid Identity Brooke Maggs Abstract As a child, I attended a Wizard of Oz themed party and was delegated green gloves to wear – the role of the Wicked Witch of the West. From that time, I have been intrigued by the weight and form of the ‘witch monster’ label, its effect on my creative writing practice and social identity more broadly. Investigating the ‘witch monster’ label challenges my impulse to impose narrative mechanisms such as genre, stereotypes and plot structures on characters and their stories. I find Jean Baudrillard’s theory of Western consumer society as a social mechanism, where consumer identities are constructed by binary relations, is a valid approach to exploring these narrative labels and mechanisms. Monsters are not binaries, there is monstrosity in all characters and their stories by extension. It is normal to be monstrous. By synthesising my concept of monstrosity with Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange, specifically ‘radical otherness’, I will explore its potential to realise the inherent monstrosity in my writing. This will provide further understanding of symbolic exchange by illustrating the importance of forming relationships with ourselves and others not by constructed communication but unmediated communion. This is where we may be liquid and slide between various labels and their associated expectations. As a witchy writer, I explore the radical other in order to realise this liquid identity for characters and their stories. I seek to redefine monstrosity as an internal duality, not a binary good/wicked label, by creating narratives with extreme environments and intense relationships. A character’s relationship with their inherent monstrosity is a paradox that cannot be mediated by external mechanisms, therefore it subverts their constructed, stereotypical identity. This dual relation, like mine as both child and witch, reveals vulnerabilities and thus celebrates monstrosity as a way of writing and being. Key Words: Liquid identity, radical otherness, creative writing practice, character, redefining monstrosity. ***** As a child, I attended a Wizard of Oz themed party where all children were to assume a role from the story. I was given green gloves to wear and made to play the role of the Wicked Witch of the West. The other children’s lips curled, they laughed. I experienced a small portion of the weight that came with the label ‘Wicked Witch’– despised, evil, ugly. I was subjected to a narrative stereotype that assigned to me the personal qualities and expectations that come

162

Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative

__________________________________________________________________ with being a monster and I was treated as such. Yet I was more than a monster, I was also a mortified child. From that time, I have been intrigued by the weight and form of the ‘witch monster’ label and its effect on my creative writing practice. My experience of this label has brought me to a metaphorical understanding that characters like the Wicked Witch are more than mundane monsters. They have aspects of monstrosity – they are vicious, chaotic and have bodies that are deformed in some way – and these aspects make them outsiders. Just like the witch’s green skin, those green gloves made me an outsider at the party. They also made me vulnerable, open to be ridiculed and labelled. Characters like the witch have little opportunity to shift beyond their stereotypes because their vulnerabilities cannot be realised or explored within an identity constructed from a binary good/wicked label. This understanding of the ‘witch monster’ label challenges my impulse to impose stereotypes such as cyborg, vampire and detective onto characters that carry with them expectations of the character’s behaviour and personality. I then corral these characters through a network of plot points that complicate the story and give little depth to their stock identities. However, when I write I am also wearing the green gloves and I am driven to unpick these stereotypes by uncovering aspects of monstrosity within these characters. I trace how characters, not plots, are made complex by their attempts to find a sense of self when they are simultaneously monstrous and vulnerable. This internal duality provides characters with the distance they need to perceive their labels and associated expectations, play with them, and then cast them off and shape-shift. To investigate the effect of the witch monster label on my creative writing process, I use Jean Baudrillard’s theory of Western consumer society as a social mechanism where, similarly to character stereotypes, consumer identities are constructed from binary relations. By synthesising my concept of monstrosity with Baudrillard’s concept of radical otherness, I explore its potential to realise the inherent monstrosity in my characters. This allows me to theorise and speculate on my witchy writing as a creative practice, one that imposes familiar, constructed identities and realities, play with them and then undermine them. It also provides further understanding of radical otherness as a duality that allows characters the potential to become liquid and shape-shift beyond their stereotypes. To comprehend this shape-shifting, I use cyber theorist Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s concept of liquid identity as explained by Dyson. 1 Stone uses this concept to theorise the subversive potential of cyberspaces, such as the Internet. She argues they may give rise to a liquid identity, as they provide opportunities to ‘break free of location technologies which are intended to create singular identities’. 2 Stone proposes that subversive spaces, which I extend to include the subversive space of my creative work, may allow for one to leave the concept of subjectivity, their constructed identity.

Brooke Maggs

163

__________________________________________________________________ By first imposing stereotypes, my writing process produces a narrative system of identities and environments that parallel Baudrillard’s consumer society. It is a coded system of semiotic communication where all things and relations have a label or a sign value. This sign value is what they signify or communicate within the system. In consumer society, signs have become detached from their signifiers. This means the value of a sign is no longer grounded by a referent or what Baudrillard calls ‘the real’. Instead, they are determined by their relationships with other signs, and all of these sign relationships are mediated by a system of binary regulation called ‘the code’. 3 This code determines that signs are to be defined in opposition to one another. For example, in the narrative system, the value of the ‘witch monster’ sign is understood by other signs, ‘ugly’ and ‘evil’, which are defined by their opposition to ‘beautiful’ and ‘good’. The witch monster label is an image defined by a model, a stereotype, made of binary pairs of difference. Baudrillard believes the consequence of this system is that ‘the real’ is no longer referred to. The real is erased as there is a ‘substituting [of] signs of the real for the real itself’ 4 and in its place is the hyperreal, a constructed reality. Hyperreality is problematic when signs are associated with the personal qualities of both characters and consumers, and therefore their personality may be confused or erased from their perception entirely. Baudrillard explains this is because in the process of being defined via these models of binary differences, ‘everyone finds his or her own personality in living up to these models’. 5 Therefore, what it means to be beautiful in consumer society may create the perception that someone is a better person. An important part of the witch’s monster label is her green skin, but this is her natural appearance which is not beautiful or ugly, it is real. However, the perception of it becomes determined by the coded system of difference, by ‘ugly’ as opposed to ‘beautiful’. Here we see, much like the consumer, her reality is erased on the assumption that what is constructed as ‘ugly’ is also expected to be ‘evil’ as defined by the system. We see that characters are defined by coded differences that are ‘against each other in dialectical terms’ 6 in a way that suggests they must be either one or the other. The result of this is that there is a systematic alternation between two terms...because neither retains a reference, nor therefore an antagonistic reality, and therefore...the system is indifferent to which one it employs. 7 Based on this, Baudrillard argues there is no real distinction between differences such as good and evil, beautiful and ugly, they are equivalent, mere simulations of difference. The totality of this unifying system eliminates the possibility to formulate any defining features or nuances that may occur outside of these constructed identities and realities. He describes this as the ‘abolishing

164

Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative

__________________________________________________________________ [of] the real difference between human beings’ 8 and therefore there is a ‘homogenising [of] persons’ 9 in hyperreality. When I write hyperreal environments, my characters are all similar as they are initially defined by a system of equivalence. This leads to an ‘excessive reality lacking all the defining dangers, personal investment and relationships of actual presence’. 10 Characters do not ‘exist as playwrights or actors but as terminals of multiple networks’ 11 of communication. These intense environments are important because it is when these identities are ‘at the pinnacle of coherence [they] are close to the abyss of corruption’ 12 and distance from them can be achieved. In order to locate relations outside of binary difference, Baudrillard believes we must look to what he calls the symbolic order. Symbolic relations manifest as communions without communication, they are often unspoken and therefore are not governed or defined by signs or labels because they are based on ‘an act of exchange and a social relation’. 13 These exchanges are reversible, not alternating, they are based on duality, not unity and are considered to be ‘core to the enigma of social being’. 14 The existence of the symbolic order and the semiotic coded system are not oppositional, one does not occur entirely without the other. Therefore, when a character’s identity is realised completely on the level of the coded system, it is followed by its symbolic aspect, what Baudrillard calls radical otherness. For him, the radical other acts as a ‘condition for our identity’ as it ‘alienates us from ourselves’. 15 Radical otherness opens a dialog, creates a duality that is reversible, where there ‘is no final reconciliation’ 16 and therefore it can assist in seeing these constructed identities for what they are, and how they may be deepened in order to create real characters. Radical otherness is not the concept of ‘the Other’ such as ‘evil’, ‘ugly’, ‘monster’, which is merely a simulated difference. Rather, it is an otherness that allows characters to become a ‘radical exception that bears no relationship to society and that cannot easily be returned to it’ 17 and therefore, outside of their narrative system. Characters with an internal duality will always be in a dilemma because they are capable of exchanging with their radical other. This exchange is a relation based on reversibility, on real differences that cannot be resolved by equivalence. Reversibility means characters can be simultaneously good and evil, monstrous and vulnerable. When characters exchange with their radical other, they may become liquid. Therefore these characters ‘do not share any commonality [with the system] which would allow them to be initially opposed or subsequently reconciled’. 18 This allows them to slide from a singular identity and become a singularity. Liquid identity is attained when there is no preference for either aspect of the duality, and understanding that the ‘key thing is the antagonism between them’ 19 is crucial for me to write beyond stereotypes. I have sought to test my own interpretation of radical otherness within my writing practice as monstrousness and explored how it might manifest in my characters. However, due to the alternating, totalising nature of Baudrillard’s

Brooke Maggs

165

__________________________________________________________________ ‘code’, his attempts to actualise radical otherness within consumer society have led him to examine hyper-conformity, suicide and terrorism. He believed these to be defiant, symbolic acts that may paralyse the social system. As a result, his critics have labelled him nihilistic 20 and fatalistic. 21 I argue that Baudrillard is not nihilistic, but speculative, as I am in my writing, in his attempts to locate radical otherness. This speculation means that in theorising the intertwined nature of the semiotic and the symbolic, Baudrillard has raised questions regarding the ‘specification of the relationship between the simulacrum [the simulated differences of the semiotic] and the symbolic’. 22 As Mahoney observes, the ‘paradox of Baudrillard’s work, naturally, is that it sought to speak of that which must remain unspoken’ 23 which is the nature of the symbolic order. The notion of radical otherness is left ‘open, perhaps deliberately, as a method’ 24 and I argue, as a way of dissuading any fixation on labels and expectations that follow them. Radical otherness will always be ‘personal, local, and immediate’ and of a ‘raw, unrefined reactive energy’ 25 that may appear in many different forms. On this basis, every constructed identity a character endures or embraces will suggest or provoke different forms of radical otherness; therefore different labels may reveal different monstrous aspects and vulnerabilities. As the symbolic order and the coded system are not oppositional, liquid characters are haunted by labels and their associated expectations. They cannot exist without their stereotype, it is a part of them and it is possible for them to fall prey to it once again. The results of witchy writing, then, are stories about a character’s struggle for a liquid identity that is marked by shifting across many labels or in and out of the same label. The result is multi-faceted characters who ‘exist in a dynamic, antagonistic relation, and take part in a shared destiny’ 26 of constant shape-shifting that is also shaped by the writer and the reader. It can be seen that internal dualities are nuanced and I must strive for absolute clarity as I write a character’s journey toward liquid identity. An example of my attempt to do this is Warbird, a futuristic narrative depicting an air force pilot whose air ship is destroyed in a battle because she refuses orders to engage in friendly fire. Although these orders came from a corrupt commanding officer, Warbird is blamed for this catastrophe. She is rebuilt as 78% machine and, although most soldiers are rebuilt with cybernetic parts, it is uncommon for one to survive such an extreme rebuild: The Senior Airman on my left, Bellucio, says. “So, what are you? Fifty per-cent can-opener? Sixty?” He rests his arm behind me on the ledge of the booth. “We have a bet going.” [...] I show [them] my tags. “I’m a Master Admiral[...] – ”

166

Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative

__________________________________________________________________ “You were Master Admiral.” Portlock points his battering ram at my face. “We saw you down in the lab. You’re that lab experiment R&D is drooling over. The one that killed her crew during [Operation] Veneration Valley.” He looks past me, at Bellucio. “What was her name?” “Zentra.” “Right. Zentra.” 27 Initially, these machine parts make her appear as a stereotypical cyborg, a woman made into the ultimate war machine. ‘Warbird’ in itself is a label, a collective name for women in the air force that is patriotic but also subtly patronising. Warbird begins as a label, a soldier stereotype, who acquires machine parts that make her both monstrous and vulnerable: they mark her with physical pain, trauma from battle, and as the insubordinate Master Admiral that killed her crew. During the course of the narrative, this label is extended to a ‘war/bird’ dilemma as the story traces her attempts to find a sense of self. To fuel this process, I place her in an extreme environment by having Warbird shut down and activate again many years into the future. During this time, the world changes from wartime to peacetime. This peacetime is the ultimate consumer society with no understanding of violence. Here, I shackle her to an enormous constructed identity, General Master Admiral Evangeline Zentra, a celebrity known as the face of a cosmetic corporation. Warbird is encouraged to assume this persona but even though it is her real name it has been made irrelevant to her. At the point when she is close to being realised as ‘Evangeline Zentra’ she is able to distance herself from this label. She does this by exchanging with her radical other, her machine: I turn inward, [...] I strive for that higher place, for that connection, and all the source code comes to me. It’s in languages I can’t read, [...] But the compiler translates it all into object code that my machine understands. And when I stop thinking human, I understand it too. I’m not afraid, angry or trapped [...] this is my system. This is me. 28 The realisation and acceptance of her dual nature allows Warbird to understand that she is a soldier without a war, who will find little contentment in this passive peacetime. We see that duality can be considered a ‘concrete relationship, sometimes happy, sometimes not’ 29 where monstrosity is not an ‘other’ but an invisible part, a partner. As Warbird’s duality cannot be realised in this reality, and it is an important part of her character, she knows she can never be ‘Evangeline Zentra’.

Brooke Maggs

167

__________________________________________________________________ As I have theorised it, my creative writing is an interaction with a radical otherness, a dual relation as both child and witch that allows me to see there is monstrosity in all characters. It is important to be monstrous. Despite this conclusion, I still write stereotypical characters within complex plots. Therefore, I must continue to seek inherent monstrosities in my characters as they reveal vulnerabilities and, consequently, internal dualities. Through my creative process, I see we are all monstrous and we are all human. To be a real character is to be a relatable character. It therefore celebrates monstrosity as a way of writing and being.

Notes 1

Frances Dyson, ‘Liquid Identity’, Transit Lounge: An Interface Book from 21.C, eds. Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar (Australia: Craftsman House, 1997), 108110. 2 Ibid., 109. 3 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), 69. 4 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 4. 5 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner (London: Sage, 1998), 96. 6 Jean Baudrillard, Passwords, trans. Chris Turner (London: Sage, 2003), 82. 7 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 33. 8 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 89. 9 Ibid. 10 William Merrin, ‘Speculating to the Death: Machinic Integration and Transformation Within a Virtulized Reality’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 4 (2007), para 13, viewed 23 August 2014, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_2/v4-2-merrin.html. 11 Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, c1987), quoted in William Merrin, ‘Speculating to the Death: Machinic Integration and Transformation within a Virtualized Reality’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 4 (2007), para 19, viewed 23 August 2014, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_2/v4-2-merrin.html. 12 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 4 . 13 Ibid., 133. 14 Jon Baldwin, ‘Potlatch Politics: Baudrillard’s Gift’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 9 (2012), para 1, viewed 23 August 2014, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-baldwinart.html.

168

Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative

__________________________________________________________________ 15

Ashley Woodward, ‘Other + Otherness’ The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed. Richard Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 149, EBL eBook Library edition. 16 Aurel Schmidt, ‘Only Impossible Exchange is Possible’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 6 (2009), para 14, viewed 23 August 2014, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-6_1/v6-1-schmidt.html. 17 Rex Butler, ‘Impossible Exchange’ , The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed. Richard Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 107. EBL eBook Library edition. 18 Ashley Woodward, ‘Duality’ The Baudrillard Dictionary, ed. Richard Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 61. EBL eBook Library edition. 19 Jean Baudrillard, Passwords, 82. 20 See Douglas Kellner, ‘Introduction: Jean Baudrillard in the Fin-De Millennium’, Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, ed. Douglas Kellner (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), 10; Chris Rojek, ‘Baudrillard and Politics’, Forget Baudrillard? eds. Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner (London: Routledge, 1993), 121. 21 Mark Gottdiener, ‘The System of Objects and the Commodification of Everyday Life’, Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, ed. Douglas Kellner (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), 38. I BELIEVE, THIS IS THE CORRECT SPELLING OF GOTTDIENER, RIGHT? 22 Dean MacCannell and Juliet Flower MacCannell, ‘Social Class in Postmodernity: Simulacrum or Return of the Real?’ Forget Baudrillard? eds. Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner (London: Routledge, 1993), 125 23 Paul O. Mahoney, ‘Revisiting Symbolic Exchange: Baudrillard’s Aristocratic Critique’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 6 (2009), viewed 23 August 2014, http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-6_1/v6-1-mahoney.html. 24 Aurel Schmidt, ‘Only Impossible Exchange is Possible’, para 15. 25 Andrew M. Koch and Rick Elmore, ‘Simulation and Symbolic Exchange: Jean Baudrillard’s Augmentation of Marx’s Theory of Value’, Politics & Policy 34 (2006), 573. 26 Ashley Woodward, ‘Duality’, 61. 27 Brooke Maggs, ‘Warbird’, (Honours thesis, Deakin University, 2013), 24. 28 Ibid., 52. 29 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 141.

Bibliography Baldwin, Jon. ‘Potlatch Politics – Baudrillard’s Gift’. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 9 (2012). Viewed 23 August 2014. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-baldwinart.html.

Brooke Maggs

169

__________________________________________________________________ Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. ———. The Evil Demon of Images, Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, c1987, quoted in William Merrin, ‘Speculating to the Death: Machinic Integration and Transformation Within a Virtulized Reality’. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 4, (2007). Viewed 23 August 2014. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_2/v4-2-merrin.html. ———. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage, 1993. ———. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage, 1998. ———. Passwords. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Sage, 2003 Butler, Rex. ‘Impossible Exchange’. In The Baudrillard Dictionary, edited by Richard Smith, 105-108. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, EBL eBook Library edition. Dyson, Frances. ‘Liquid Identity’. Transit Lounge: An Interface Book From 21.C, edited by Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, 108-110. Australia: Craftsman House, 1997. Gottdiener, Mark. ‘The System of Objects and the Commodification of Everyday Life’. Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, edited by Douglas Kellner, 25-40. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1994. Kellner, Douglas. ‘Introduction: Jean Baudrillard in the Fin-De Millennium’. Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, edited by Douglas Kellner, 1-24. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 1994. Koch, Andrew M. and Rick Elmore. ‘Simulation and Symbolic Exchange: Jean Baudrillard’s Augmentation of Marx’s Theory of Value’. Politics & Policy 34 (2006), 556-575.

170

Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative

__________________________________________________________________ MacCannell, Dean and Juliet Flower MacCannell. ‘Social Class in Postmodernity: Simulacrum or Return of the Real?’ Forget Baudrillard?, edited by Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner, 124-146. London: Routledge, 1993. Maggs, Brooke. ‘Warbird’. Honours Dissertation, Deakin University, 2013. Mahoney, Paul O. ‘Revisiting Symbolic Exchange: Baudrillard’s Aristocratic Critique’. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 6 (2009). Viewed 23 August 2014. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-6_1/v6-1-mahoney.html. Merrin, William. ‘Speculating to the Death: Machinic Integration and Transformation within a Virtualized Reality’. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 4, (2007). Viewed 23 August 2014. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol4_2/v4-2-merrin.html. Rojek, Chris. ‘Baudrillard and Politics’. In Forget Baudrillard?, edited by Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner, 107-124. London: Routledge, 1993. Schmidt, Aurel. ‘Only Impossible Exchange is Possible’. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 6, (2009). Viewed 23 August 2014. http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-6_1/v6-1-schmidt.html. Woodward, Ashley. ‘Other + Otherness’. The Baudrillard Dictionary, edited by Richard Smith, 147-150. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. EBL eBook Library edition. ———. ‘Duality’. The Baudrillard Dictionary, edited by Richard Smith, 60-62. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. EBL eBook Library edition. Brooke Maggs is a writer and an independent scholar from Australia. Currently, she is continuing her practice-led research into creative writing practice, liquid identity and character by writing a novel-length artefact based on Warbird.

Part V Gender Monstrosities

Revenge as a Means to Preserve Individual Sovereignty: Monstrous Women in French Literature Mateusz Orszulak Abstract Corrupt female characters cross a multitude of boundaries and reveal cultural anxieties about women. Female guilt is a common motive but real devilish women are a rarity in the history of literature. Their role is ambiguous, on the one hand, transgression of all norms can be seen as a means to preserve individual sovereignty and undermine social hegemony of men; on the other hand their fall seems to underline the inferior social and moral position of women in society. The aim of the article is to concisely analyse the mechanisms of female evil based on literary works that present totally corrupt and audacious female characters who do not hesitate to commit most monstrous crimes to satisfy their thirst of revenge. The protagonists include: Medea from the eponymous play by Corneille, who uses murder as a means of liberation; Marquise de Merteuil from The Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, who succeeds through manipulations in inciting Danceny to commit murder; Milady, from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, whose only motivation is a ferocious desire of vengeance. In this paper I would like to assess the extent to which revenge and crime can be considered as a means of personal liberation. How does female moral transgression undermine social hegemony of men? Is punishment a just compensation or rather a form of restoring patriarchal system of values? Key Words: Monstrous women, revenge, French literature, moral transgression, liberation, crime, guilt, murder. ***** Literature is often a projection of lights and shadows of human existence and reflects the interplay between the conscious and unconscious spheres of human actions and motivations. By analysing literary work, we can not only observe the evolution of mentalities and social norms in historical perspective but also get insight into universal values, which reveal social attitudes and their ideological basis. It is also true for the status of women, reflected in art, literature, and other areas of cultural creation. The question of female guilt and evil seems particularly interesting, due to numerous interpretations that it offers and different realities of life it embraces. Many authors tackled the problem of women’s place in society and their behaviour, yet no other type of female protagonists is more adapted to revealing analyses of the phenomenon of revenge and evil than monstrous women, who do not hesitate to commit even the most atrocious crimes to achieve their aims. Their attitude could be considered as a challenge to social norms and male

174

Mateusz Orszulak

__________________________________________________________________ hierarchy which enslave them. An analysis of corrupt female characters will serve to assert the extent to which vengeance and crime can be considered as a means of personal liberation and how female moral transgression undermines social hegemony of men. 1. The Passion of Revenge In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that ‘men seek to return either evil for evil – and if they cannot do so, think their position mere slavery’.1 For ancient Greeks revenge was a part of their ethical code, and their mythology gives numerous examples of how important the passion was. Christianity introduced the opposing notion of forgiveness, often described in terms of positive expression of love, compassion or mercy.2 Revenge takes different forms of expression depending on the situation. The history of legal system shows that even punishment for crimes could be perceived as a form of vengeance in social conditions. In this case private vengeance would be opposed to official justice, but the question could become more complex if we take into account that social norms are not stable and what is considered just in one society or in one epoch will not necessarily be justifiable in another. Francis Bacon in his ‘Essays Civil and Moral’ argues: ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out’; this quotation suggests that revenge usurps the role of the law. 3 Revenge, seen in a positive light, can also be a powerful tool of liberation. First of all, it is a result of injustice and retaliation for injuries, which cause psychological need for compensation. Secondly, the passion itself is a sort of enslavement, which persists till the moment of taking vengeance. Thirdly, it always involves activity and freedom of decision, as opposed to the previous role of victim, which is generally passive. It is not possible to imagine literature without revenge, which is often associated with other negative emotions like pride, jealousy, rage, hatred, grudge or treason, all of them constitute indispensable traits of evil characters. 2. Female Inferiority St. Augustine asserted that female subordination was part of God’s original creation, for women were physically, intellectually and morally inferior and consequently unable to represent the image of God.4 On the other hand, the Virgin Mary, the counterpart of the fallen Eve, equally marked the spirituality of the Middle Ages. In general, however, the discourse of misogyny dominated, as women were considered to be the privileged instrument of the demon. 5 Aristotelian misogyny was also influential and became canonical; it survived to the detriment of women for the next two thousand years. In his theory about unequal procreative functions Aristotle condemned the female sex to an inferior status and claimed that women were passive in contrast to men, which was partially based on the

Mateusz Orszulak

175

__________________________________________________________________ conviction that action was superior to inaction. According to the philosopher, the physiological sphere determined social and moral hierarchy, and thus all social inequalities could be justified.6 It is no wonder, with such a cultural background, that passivity is considered by scholars as a term that early modern discourse largely used to characterize women. 7 ‘Women’s inferiority’ in law and elsewhere, as Felicity Nussbaum has shown, is justified by invoking ‘her inherently weak nature’.8 3. Female Monstrosity Female monstrosity is not the product of a single historical age nor a particular culture or language community, but owing to enormous corpus of possible sources we will concentrate on the protagonists, which represent different types of guilt and perfidy taken from literary works of the French Ancien Régime or directly related to the period, such as Medea from the eponymous play by Corneille; Marquise de Merteuil from ’The Dangerous Liaisons’ by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and Milady, from the historical novel ’The Three Musketeer’s by Alexandre Dumas. A. Medea Medea evokes the destructive force of revenge from ancient times. The first tragedy by Pierre Corneille was created in 1635 and is marked by the baroque taste for excess seen particularly in the vindictive fury of the protagonist, which constitutes the central axe of the play. Yet, the overall character is not as monotonous as it may seem at first, which is proved by Corneille’s contradictory opinions about Medea. In the ‘Examen de Medée’ from 1660, he considers her crimes as a direct result of the cruelties committed against her by Creon, and her husband, Jason: ‘on excuse sa vengeance après l’indigne traitement qu’elle a reçu de Créon et son mari’. 9 But later, in the dedication to Monsieur P.T.N.G., he emphasizes the sheer monstrosity of the infanticide: ‘le crime en son char de triomphe’.10 This duality can be observed throughout the play, when the perfidious character of Jason is exposed. But even then, Medea – the betrayed spouse – does not seem a passive victim: she invokes infernal deities to help her avenge the injustice. The humiliations she has to suffer and the love for her husband make Medea hesitate between two contradictory passions: love and hate. On the other hand, she is a victim of two men, which does not leave any doubt that she is not only prey to contradictory emotions but also to social hierarchy. When Creon decides to banish her using a political pretext that all criminals should be expelled from Corinth, Medea makes it clear that it is pure hypocrisy because he knew about her crimes. She alludes that her guilt is relative, conscious that she is completely powerless, at mercy of a hideous manipulation, aiming to rid Jason and Creusa of her. This suffocating situation gives the magician an impulse to prepare her revenge:

176

Mateusz Orszulak

__________________________________________________________________ Est-ce user comme il faut d'un pouvoir légitime Que me faire coupable et jouir de mon crime? 11 Murdering her children is an extreme solution, but Medea apparently considers it her maternal right. Even if the internal monologue from the last act shows her last hesitation, Medea’s determination will overcome the feeble maternal love: Cessez dorénavant, pensers irrésolus, D’épargner des enfants que je ne verrai plus. Chers fruits de mon amour, si je vous ai fait naître, Ce n’est pas seulement pour caresser un traître : Il me prive de vous, et je l’en vais priver. Mais ma pitié renaît, et revient me braver ; Je n’exécute rien, et mon âme éperdue Entre deux passions demeure suspendue. N’en délibérons plus, mon bras en résoudra. Je vous perds, mes enfants ; mais Jason vous perdra ; Il ne vous verra plus...12 It is definitely an extreme way of cutting her liaisons with the past, but the demonic self of Medea, her archetypal fury, was released when hatred substituted love in her soul or rather in the battle of the antagonist passions. Corneille’s protagonist seems, moreover, to fight against her destiny and her feminine condition. The vehemence of her actions and combativeness are for Medea a source of emancipation and in more general terms an expression of superhuman authority: C'est demain que mon art fait triompher ma haine ; Demain je suis Médée, et je tire raison De mon bannissement et de votre prison.13 Medea, as the quotation suggests, does not display the behaviour expected of women, she emphasizes constantly her individuality, illustrated also by verse 237: ‘Je ne suis encore moi-même’; her frenetic activity escapes the rules of feminine ethos. The evolution of the protagonist illustrates a close relation between personal subjugation, revenge and liberation, in the physical and metaphysical world. In the first phase of the myth, Medea falls victim to blind love, assisted by Aphrodite, and her uncontrollable passion impedes her from seeing the real face of Jason. In Corinth it is too late, as she becomes victimized on different levels, legally as she needs to conform to Creon’s decisions, personally to a flighty husband, and emotionally enslaved by the passion of revenge, fuelled by treason she has to

Mateusz Orszulak

177

__________________________________________________________________ suffer. Paradoxically, vengeance in Corneille’s plays refers often to justice and Medea deploys her monstrous powers to counteract the legalisation of injustice. 14 B. Marquise de Merteuil Marquise de Merteuil masks her true character using manipulation and profiting from culturally sanctioned ideal of female behaviour, which can be considered as a response to male dominance in the French society under the Ancien Régime. She creates a sort of individualistic ethic by reading and observing the life of aristocratic spheres, functioning as a form of emancipation in a society where women are practically reduced to slavery. One of the purposes of this ‘autoéducation’ is to exalt the self: ‘je puis dire que je suis mon ouvrage’ (’Lettre 81’).15 Although Merteuil presents her ‘self-education’ rather as an exception, her plan to corrupt Cécile de Volange, proves that she is inclined to acquire new adepts of her pernicious morality. In one of her first letters to Valmont she clearly establishes her priorities: ‘Je m’en vengerai. Je le promets’ (‘Lettre 54’). The marquise and the vicomte form an infernal couple on equal terms, but Merteuil’s attitude compared to other female protagonists of the novel seems particularly bold and belligerent, as her unique aim is to make toys out of men ‘faire de ces hommes si redoutables le jouet de mes caprices ou de mes fantaisies ; ôter aux uns la volonté, aux autres la puissance de me nuire’ (‘Lettre 81’). She becomes progressively the master of intrigue, making the Vicomte her cavalier servente. Such emotional monstrosity is a fruit of egocentrism and authoritarian mentality deprived of moral scruples. The term ‘libertine’ is seldom associated with women, due to social constraints that did not always let the women play an equal role in society. Nevertheless, the example of Marquise de Merteuil proves that female libertinism was possible in certain conditions and could be considered as a double transgression, not only moral or religious but also sexual, and, what is more, such behaviour is in a conflictual position to a traditionally ascribed social role of women. It may seem as if the marquise unconsciously wanted to elevate herself above feminine condition and libertinism served as an ideology through which the protagonist gained freedom to tyrannize people. Laclos presents a utopian vision of a woman who breaks norms regarding hierarchy of sexes, alluding indirectly at forthcoming changes of the French Revolution. His portrayal appears, however, to reinforce male fears about female nature and the justification for their exclusion from the public life. Merteuil’s physical disfigurement and exile from Paris seems to be just punishment for the moral monstrosities she committed, but, on the other hand, this ‘edifying’ end might symbolize the fate of all women, who decide to liberate themselves from social constraints. Once defeated, Marquise becomes again a woman at the mercy of social norms and expectations she was able to elude at the times of her triumphs.

178

Mateusz Orszulak

__________________________________________________________________ C. Milady Milady, Lady Clarick, countess de la Fère, or countess de Winter, or Anne de Breuil are multiple identities of the main female protagonist of the Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, who embodies evil and crime in the novel. She seems to represent the ambiguous morality of the turbulent seventeenth century, full of wars, treason and contradictions, suggested from the very beginning of the plot: Il y avait les seigneurs qui guerroyaient entre eux; il y avait le roi qui faisait la guerre au cardinal; il y avait l'Espagnol qui faisait la guerre au roi. Puis, outre ces guerres sourdes ou publiques, secrètes ou patentes, il y avait encore les voleurs, les mendiants, les huguenots, les loups et les laquais, qui faisaient la guerre à tout le monde.16 Such historical background seems favourable to all sorts of excess, and gives the evil the opportunity to flourish. In this world, there are two antagonist parties centred around king Louis XIII: on the one hand Tréville, the captain of the musketeers, on the other the cardinal Richelieu and his guards. Such division emphasizes the opposing categories of good and evil, which are vital for the plot and which determine the behaviour of the protagonists. Yet, the frontier between crime and justice is not always well-defined, and consequently crime can be committed under the colour of justice: ‘“Alors,” continua Milady, “alors je réunis toutes mes forces, je me rappelai que le moment de la vengeance ou plutôt de la justice avait sonné”’.17 Milady seems indefinable and mysterious from her first encounter with d’Artagnan. She appears in different roles, and the plot gives fragmentary information about the protagonist; she is successively Milady, Countess de Winter, and Athos’ wife. It is in chapter 30, when d’Artagnan decides to follow her, that the female character becomes the centre of attention, and her identity is revealed. Thanks to her multiple roles, she lives a double life between her past and current intrigues: first as Anne de Breuil and countess de la Fère, hanged by her husband, second as Lady Clarick, and countess de Winter, the Cardinal's accomplice, who will be punished by the musketeers. She is therefore like an evil force, which appears to be indestructible and eternal in her insatiable will of revenge. Her evil spirit seems to haunt the musketeers even after her death: Milady’s son Mordaunt, equally cunning and dangerous, sets about avenging her death in the in the sequel Twenty Years After. The system of values of the novel has essentially militaristic and masculine traits and Milady does not belong to the world of musketeers not only because of her crimes but also because she is a woman. 18 She dared to transgress moral and social borders, as well as religious norms during her life of crime and deceit, but

Mateusz Orszulak

179

__________________________________________________________________ her biggest sin was not to comply with her socially ascribed role. Another important factor is the physical beauty, which Milady uses to seduce and control men, yet the success of her manipulations puts her once more in opposition to expected female weakness and masculinizes her character. We find in the novel numerous notions that present the protagonist as strong and adamant in her will: ‘volonté de fer’, ‘âme virile’, etc. 19 The supernatural side of her nature is also emphasized by metaphors related to fire: ‘éclairs lancés par ses yeux’, ‘regards brûlants’, ‘rire et joie infernale’.20 The strong character of Milady might be considered as a fruit of social conditions which she had to face and her life of crime as an act of opposition to passivity expected of women. Her death is symbolic on two levels: on the one hand it is a destruction of evil and punishment for crimes, on the other, however, the annihilation of Milady restores not only moral order but also defines the fate of women which dared to leave their socially sanctioned role. 4. Conclusive Remarks Although monstrous women presented in the article were all subjugated to social hierarchy, their active roles seem to suggest that the inferior role in society could sometimes be illusive. They rarely succeed, however, in their attempts to gain emancipation, which reflects the general views on the status of women in society, far from independence and sovereignty. The lack of success does not necessarily mean that the wicked female characters are covered with shame. As Corneille suggested in relation to Cleopatra, protagonist from his tragedy Rodogune, even the most awful crimes could arouse admiration: ‘tous ses crimes sont accompagnés d’une grandeur d’âme qui a quelque chose de si haut qu’en même temps qu’on déteste ses actions, on admire la source dont elles partent’.21 The examples show that revenge is often associated with revolt against social or religious norms, as well as male domination. Acts of female vengeance upset traditionally sanctioned gender norms and represent feminine agency and power, which stands in opposition to typical constructions of femininity. Vindictiveness could be thus understood as a means of compensation for injustice, but in more general terms also as a trait of character, which enables evil women to actively face the stereotype of female passivity and inferiority.

Notes 1

Andrew Bailey, First Philosophy: Values and Society: Fundamental Problems and Readings in Philosophy (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004), 173. 2 Michael E. McCullough, Kenneth I. Pargament, Carl E. Thoresen, ‘The Frontier of Forgiveness: Seven Directions for Psychological Study,’ Forgiveness: Theory,

180

Mateusz Orszulak

__________________________________________________________________ Research, and Practice, ed. Michael E. McCullough, Kenneth I. Pargament, Carl E. Thoresen (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 314. 3 Daniel Kornstein, Kill all the Lawyers? Shakespeare's Legal Appeal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 94. 4 Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17. 5 Joanna Gorecka-Kalita, ‘Ave Eva. Féminité funeste et féminité rédemptrice dans les romans du Graal composés au XIIIe siècle’, in La femme dans la littérature française - symbole et réalité, ed. Krystyna Modrzejewska (Uniwersytet Opolski, 1999), 17. 6 Yvonne Day Merrill, The Social Construction of Western Women's Rhetoric before 1750 (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1996), 51. 7 Scott Paul Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 16401770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8. 8 Ibid., 9. 9 Pierre Corneille, ‘Examen de Medée,’ Oeuvres choisies de P. Corneille, vol. 1 (Paris: Chez Lheureux, 1822), 126-127. I left the French language quotations without translation because they are always paraphrased beforehand. 10 Ibid., 41. 11 Pierre Corneille, Médée, v. 445-446. 12 Ibid., v. 1347-1357. 13 Ibid., v. 1262-64. 14 Helga Zsák, ‘La vengeance comme devoir: Chimène dans Le Cid de Corneille’, Verbum 2 (2001): 413. 15 Morten Nojgaard, ‘L’Éducation de la Marquise: Un Contre-exemple? A propos des Liaisons dangereuses.’, Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 57 (2002): 421. 16 Alexendre Dumas, Les trois mousquetaires, Volume 1 (Paris: Lévy, 1860), 4. 17 Alexendre Dumas, Les trois mousquetaires, Volume 2 (Paris: Lévy, 1866), 240. 18 Claude Benoit and Dolores Jimenez, ‘La femme criminelle chez Dumas. Réflexions à partir des Trois Mousquetaires d’Alexandre Dumas,’ in Crime et châtiment dans le roman populaire de langue française du XIXe siècle, ed. Ellen Constans and Jean-Claude Vareille, (Limoges: PUL, 1994), 249. 19 Ibid., 252. 20 Ibid., 254. 21 Mariette Cuénin-Lieber, Corneille et le monologue: une interrogation sur le héros, (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2002), 288.

Mateusz Orszulak

181

__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography Bailey, Andrew. First Philosophy: Values and Society: Fundamental Problems and Readings in Philosoph. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004. Benoit, Claude, and Dolores Jimenez. ‘La femme criminelle chez Dumas. Réflexions à partir des Trois Mousquetaires d’Alexandre Dumas’. In Crime et châtiment dans le roman populaire de langue française du XIXe siècle, edited by Ellen Constans and Jean-Claude Vareille, 243-257. Limoges: PUL, 1994. Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre. Les liaisons dangereuses: lettres recueillies dans une société, et publiées pour l'instruction de quelques autres, Vol. 1. Bruxelles: J. Rozez, 1869. Corneille. Pierre. ‘Discours de l'utilité et des parties du poëme dramatique’. In Œuvres de P. Corneille, Vol. 1. Paris: L. Hachette et Cie, 1862. Corneille, Pierre. ‘Medée’. In Oeuvres choisies de P.Corneille, Vol. 1. Paris: Chez Lheureux, 1822. Cuénin-Lieber, Mariette. Corneille et le monologue: une interrogation sur le héros. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2002. Day Merrill, Yvonne. The Social Construction of Western Women's Rhetoric before 1750. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1996. Dumas, Alexendre. Les trois mousquetaires, Vol. 1. Paris: Lévy, 1860. Dumas, Alexendre. Les trois mousquetaires, Vol. 2. Paris: Lévy, 1866. Dumas, Alexandre. Vingt ans après. Brussels: Primento Digital, 2012. Gordon, Scott Paul. The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 16401770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

182

Mateusz Orszulak

__________________________________________________________________ Gorecka-Kalita, Joanna. ‘Ave Eva. Féminité funeste et féminité rédemptrice dans les romans du Graal composés au XIIIe siècle’. In La femme dans la littérature française - symbole et réalité, edited by Krystyna Modrzejewska, 17-25. Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 1999. Kornstein, Daniel. Kill all the Lawyers? Shakespeare's Legal Appeal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. McCullough Michael E., Kenneth I. Pargament and Carl E. Thoresen. ‘The Frontier of Forgiveness: Seven Directions for Psychological Study’. In Forgiveness: Theory, Research, and Practice, edited by Michael E. McCullough, Kenneth I. Pargament, and Carl E. Thoresen, 299-320. New York: Guilford Press, 2001. Nojgaard, Morten. ‘L’Éducation de la Marquise: Un Contre-exemple? A propos des Liaisons dangereuses’. Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 57 (2002): 403–431. Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Zsák, Helga. ‘La vengeance comme devoir: Chimène dans Le Cid de Corneille’. Verbum 2 (2001): 411-418. Mateusz Orszulak obtained a master’s degree in Romance studies at Lodz University with specialization in French literature of the seventeenth century. Currently a first year doctoral candidate at Munich University in the DFG Research Training Group ‘Globalization and Literature: Representations, Transformations, Interventions’ with research project concerning cultural identity in travel accounts of the sixteenth century.

‘Ugly as a Foetus’: Female Bodies and Abject Sacredness in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot Madeleine Bendixen Abstract Patrick White’s novels construct an idiosyncratic sacred aesthetic: a corporeal mysticism that privileges the conditions of otherness and abjection. In Riders in the Chariot (1961), White’s most explicitly spiritual work, the grotesque aspects of the physical body are, for many commentators, potent symbols of non-rational experience. Several critics have analysed the novel with reference to Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject; however, none of these readings have given a substantial role to femininity within such a framework. This is despite the fact that Kristeva’s model for psycho-sexual development positions the feminine as abject with respect to the symbolic order of society. This chapter offers a Kristevan psychoanalytic reading of Riders in the Chariot, interpreting the novel’s mystical aesthetic through a symbolic scheme based upon the female body and its abject condition. In this analysis, the link between monstrosity and sacredness in White’s spiritual vision is provided by the problematic psychical existence of the feminine. The four ‘riders’ of the novel are positioned psychically as feminine and abjected from the phallic order of Sarsparilla. The liminal and libidinal significance of these characters is manifested bodily, and their moments of illumination and redemption are, similarly, physical in nature. For White, the porous, the maternal, the unwhole, the unborn and the unutterable are spiritual junctures, binding beauty to revulsion, the sacred to the profane. Key Words: Patrick White, Julia Kristeva, the sacred, the abject, the feminine, the body. ***** 1. Introduction In Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot, the half-caste Aborigine Alf Dubbo recalls painting his ‘daemon’, 1 in his youth, as a vermilion tree of unborn dreams. His mentor and teacher Mrs Pask, for whom ‘art is first and foremost a moral force’, 2 is unimpressed, even disturbed, by the boy’s picture: “Dreams! But there is nothing to indicate that they are any such thing. Just a shape. I would have said mis-shapen kidneys!” So that he was put to worse shame. “That is because they have not been dreamt yet,” he uttered slowly. And all the foetuses were palpitating on the porous paper. 3

184

‘Ugly as a Foetus’

__________________________________________________________________ The erotic/grotesque, procreative/incomplete foetus is one of the two strongest motifs of the novel (along with the eponymous chariot). Most often it arises in connection with the eccentric spinster Mary Hare, whose ugliness and simple intuition is loathed by her father. A bitter Norbert Hare accuses young Mary of being ‘one of the unborn’, 4 a pure soul amongst ‘decadent’ 5 human beings. For Andrew McCann, the recurring foetus, ‘both sign of marginalisation and of redemption’, 6 is representative of the role of the abject in White’s fiction. This essay proposes that, in fact, the foetus of Riders is only one component of an entire symbolic scheme underpinning the novel’s mystical aesthetic – a symbolism based upon the female body and its psychical condition of strangeness, as described by Julia Kristeva in her theory of abjection. 7 The chapter offers a Kristevan psychoanalytic reading of Riders in the Chariot, using abject feminine corporeality as an interpretive key. It argues that the four ‘riders’, positioned psychically as feminine, are abjected from the phallic order of suburban Sarsparilla – violently, though not completely, cast out from social existence. As liminal, borderline creatures, they are able to access the jouissance of sacred/semiotic experience, but unable to integrate this experience into the worldly terms of the symbolic order. 2. Abject Bodies White’s concept of the spiritual transcends material reality, and yet his characters are always (at least, until the moment of death) unmistakably incarnate. Physically defective, awkward and alienated, the visionaries of Riders experience an agonising conflict between their concrete, earthly selves and their purer spiritual selves. Mary Hare is the old, fiery haired, freckled and dappled spinster who lives in the crumbling mansion Xanadu, the relic of her father Norbert’s failure to bring continental grandeur to the antipodes. She has almost blinding glimpses of the infinite – the ‘womb’ from which she is both inside and outside, from which she is ‘unborn’, or rather, ‘half-born’. The Jewish Mordecai Himmelfarb, disgraced intellectual, widower and survivor of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, is a tortured Messiah, struggling with faith, the purpose of suffering, and the means to enlightenment. Ruth Godbold is a poor washerwoman and earthy martyr. Mother to a horde of little girls, she is also a nurturer on a grander and more profound scale. And Alf Dubbo is an artistic prodigy who has, since childhood, apprehended the divine in the form of crude and startling (though unfinished) paintings. Dubbo is wronged, violated, misunderstood, and, ultimately, fails the greatest trial of his faith, though he repents with the offerings of his two frantic and brilliant final works. These four characters navigate a scathing version of suburban Sydney in the 1950s, filled with narcissists, conformists and commodity-fetishists. The residents of the fictional Sarsparilla have constructed an illusion of normality through a process of repression and abjection of those who cannot comply with ‘social

Madeleine Bendixen

185

__________________________________________________________________ hygiene’ 8 – namely, the visionary protagonists. Jettisoned from the social order, these four connect with each other; firstly, in face-to-face moments of wordless understanding; and secondly, in their shared visions of the eponymous chariot. This image appears to them in fragments, always excruciatingly incomplete, illuminating the rift between body and soul that underscores each of their painful spiritual struggles. But although the ‘riders’ desire bodily dissolution, White implies that, conversely, it is total immersion in ambivalent physical existence that will enable enlightenment. The physical body of White’s fiction has a highly spiritual function. Its perviousness and its abjections – blood, spittle, disease, excrement – spoil the illusion of any ‘rigidly conceived self’ 9 and remind one of the true ambivalence of material existence. James Clements writes that for White, ‘skins exist, but they are not impenetrable. It is not belief in the self, but in the impregnable self, that must be overcome.’ 10 3. The Abject and the Feminine The perverse, annihilating power of the abject is a necessarily horrific, but also propitious quality of White’s conception of sacredness. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva claims that sacredness and abjection have always been intertwined. She writes, ‘the various means of purifying the abject – the various catharses – make up the history of religions.’ 11 Religious rituals of defilement and purification have traditionally been derived from a fear of the feminine. Primitive belief systems attributed ‘abject or demoniacal potential’ 12 to women, and ‘particularly the mother’, 13 from whom the subject was violently (but not completely) separated in order to form a distinct identity, still posing a threat to the subject’s autonomy. Thus, ancient religions’ ‘two prototypes of filth (excrement and menses)’ corresponded to ‘a primal cartography of the body.’ 14 Their purification was the attempt to ward off the ‘maternal power’ that performed this mapping of ‘our autoerotic baby bodies.’ 15 In Kristeva’s model of psycho-sexual development, femininity is essentially an abject condition. The Phallus, the detachable signifier, ‘inscribe[s] opposition, the minimal condition for meaning, on the surface of the body itself: yes/no, one/zero, being/nonbeing.’ 16 In the process of becoming a speaking subject in the symbolic order – which is a paternal order – the infant boy and girl encounter the Phallus, which is the cipher for all language (and thus, meaning) and is (incorrectly) conflated with the male organ: …the boy tries out that confrontation with the conviction of “belonging to it”, and the girl with the impression of a strangeness. Because she will acquire and strengthen her capacity to speak, her capacity to assess herself in terms of the law of the other, to enter the order (of thought and of society), the girl will be part of the phallic order. But since she will remain

186

‘Ugly as a Foetus’

__________________________________________________________________ a stranger there, she will preserve a sense of inferiority, of exclusion, or, at best, irony. 17 The division of the sexes is not a purely biological process; rather, gender difference is inscribed on the body according to the subject’s relation to the Phallus. Therefore, one is not ‘other’ because one is a woman; rather, one is woman because one is ‘other’. Like the feminine subject, whose otherness makes it a stranger to the phallic order, the four visionaries of Riders are liminal creatures – belonging, but not belonging, to Sarsparilla. In this way, these characters can be read as psychically feminine with regard to the town’s (phallic) symbolic order. In the Kristevan psychoanalytical context, it is important to consider gender and sexual difference in non-essentialist terms. The phallic body and the castrated body do not inherently correspond to genitalia; rather, they are part of a sexual metaphorical vocabulary that expresses possession and lack, positivity and negativity, existence and non-existence. The body that is codified as in possession (ie., phallic) is masculine, and that codified as lacking or excluded (i.e., castrated) is feminine. One tends to view ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as binary, whereas Kristeva suggests that the terms should not signpost a difference between subjects, but rather, the difference within the subject. According to Elizabeth Grosz, Kristeva conceives of sexual difference as a ‘heterogeneity, not between one (sexually specific) body and another, but between oneself and one’s body or oneself and one’s language.’ 18 If gender division occurs at the site of the body only arbitrarily, then it is reasonable to view other, non-biological processes of difference and differentiation also as metaphorically gendered processes, where the Phallus comes to stand for other examples of possession and lack. In this way, not only can anatomically male characters be read as feminine, experiencing the abject psychical condition of castration, but anatomically male writers such as White can have access to, and express, the symbolism of this condition. 4. The Porousness of the Feminine: Mary Hare and Himmelfarb Kristeva asks: What if the sacred were the unconscious perception the human being has of its untenable eroticism: always on the borderline between nature and culture, the animalistic and the verbal, the sensible and the nameable? 19 It is possible to draw parallels between sacred experience and the unconscious: both are unknowable to the speaking subject, both at times penetrate and inflect material reality, and both are reservoirs of overwhelming, pulverising bliss.

Madeleine Bendixen

187

__________________________________________________________________ Kristeva suggests that if one considers the sacred to resemble the trace of the subject’s pre-symbolic eroticism, which (like the non-rational sacred) cannot be expressed in the symbolic order, then the feminine subject, whose eroticism is unsignifiable, and who exists at the borderline of meaning and non-meaning, is better placed to access it. 20 Having been awkwardly and incompletely coded by the symbolic order of Sarsparilla, the four illuminates straddle the boundary between socialised and unsocialised, the known and the numinous, the symbolic and the semiotic. They exist in a liminal space, buffeted by pressures from both sides of the divide. This results in a condition similar to what Kristeva terms ‘that troubling porousness of women.’ 21 ‘The “glass” of repression does not withstand the pressure of an internal reality: the female ego’, 22 which is shapeless and permeating, like perfume. Mary Hare has the gift of sight, able to look ‘deeper than was commonly considered decent’; 23 it seems she is able to penetrate the soul, or the unconscious, with her eyes, encountering psychic contents of which the owner himself is not aware. Norbert Hare is almost destroyed by his daughter’s ability to stray into his depths. After his ‘failed suicide’, she could not prevent herself from continuing to look, right into him…and although he had forgiven her for the crime of being, it was doubtful whether he would ever forgive her for that of seeing. 24 The eyes, for Norbert, become the site of abjection; they represent the boundary of his body/self and the illusion of its wholeness, which Mary has now disturbed. Himmelfarb represents the feminine because of his physical and ethnic strangeness, which elicits in Sarsparilla’s ‘pythoness’, 25 Mrs Flack, a bodily revulsion response in the form of an attack of ‘phlegm.’ 26 His intellect confounds the phallic order amongst the ‘blokes’ at the factory, whose more violent abjection of him results in his mock-crucifixion. Inscribed as a female subject, Himmelfarb possesses the porousness of the ‘vaginal body’, 27 which absorbs the desire of others, the duties of ‘zaddik’ 28 and ‘Messiah’, 29 and the collective suffering of the entire Jewish race. As a result, he is eternally displaced, even in Jerusalem, a home that ‘would never be his.’ 30 His libidinal, though traumatic, relationship to his primal faith is personified in the abject figure of the naked woman in the entrance to the gas chamber at the Friedensdorf extermination camp: Her scalp was grey stubble where the reddish hair had been. Her one dug hung down beside the ancient scar which represented the second. Her belly sloped away from the hillock of her navel. Her thighs were particularly poor. But it was her voice which

188

‘Ugly as a Foetus’

__________________________________________________________________ lingered. Stripped. Calling to him from out of the dark of history, ageless, ageless, and interminable. 31 5. The Maternal Body and Redemption: Mrs Godbold and Alf Dubbo Mrs Godbold’s porousness is literal as well as psychical, her ‘large pores opened by the steam from her copper.’ 32 However, it is the maternal associations of her body, and her religiosity – which ‘becomes a living thing, like a child fluttering in the womb’ 33 – that are most potent in the novel. Ruth Godbold’s maternal figure – her identification with the archaic Mother – fascinates and overpowers. She is a physical emblem of maternity: ‘strangled by the arms of a weaned child, she was seldom it seemed without a second baby greedy at her breast, and a third impatient in her body.’ 34 Like Himmelfarb, she embodies a sense of timelessness, as though she permeates all of history. Dubbo paints her as the ‘Mother of God’, 35 and indeed, she is reminiscent of the grieving Virgin Mary as, after being abandoned by her unfaithful husband, she cries ‘for the condition of men.’ 36 It is because of her identification with maternity that Mrs Godbold must constantly be abjected by the residents of Sarsparilla, for whom she destabilises the pretence to order. She ruptures identity as a deeply erotic reminder of the violence by which the subject came into being. Her voluptuous female corporeality, ‘desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject’ 37 signals the threat of a return to the semiotic, and the forfeiture of identity. Alf Dubbo’s painting – his ‘regenerating, creative act’ 38 – renders him, too, a maternal figure. Dubbo’s intuitions of the sacred are unutterable in the phallic order, and he has ‘not yet seen Jesus Christ’, 39 though the question of divine love conjures for him something erotic and deeply interior: the memory of his mother and the ‘quarter-caste called Joe Mullens’, 40 and ‘the livid jags of the metho love the two had danced together on the squeaky bed.’ 41 For him, art is a bodily and libidinal act, painted ‘with his trembling fingers.’ 42 His work simulates procreation, in that it takes on that ‘miraculous alchemy’ that Kristeva posits ‘at the dawn of the mother’s connection to the child.’ 43 She writes, ‘love-tenderness takes the place of erotic love: the “object” of satisfaction is transformed into an “other” – to care for, to nourish.’ 44 Though Dubbo only briefly encounters the other three ‘riders’, he ultimately paints them, in ‘The Deposition’ and ‘The Chariot’, and, in a fashion, gives birth to them. His erotic sacred intuitions are transposed, or ‘resorbed’ into those ‘loved, and only loved “other[s]”.’ 45 Dubbo’s maternal act epitomises the act of redemption that could never be performed within the symbolic order. Similarly, Himmelfarb’s and Mrs Godbold’s sacrifices are as sacred as they are corporeal, imbued with the abject nature of White’s Hidden God. Mary Hare, whose father deems ‘ugly as a foetus…ripped out too soon’ 46 is, at the end of the novel, painted by Dubbo as a ‘dreamtime

Madeleine Bendixen

189

__________________________________________________________________ womb’, 47 complete in incompleteness, just as the image of the Chariot is never perfected, but is embodied on earth by its riders, the zaddikim. 6. Conclusion It is important to remember that each of the four protagonists of Riders in the Chariot is a rich and complex character whose significance in the novel goes far beyond the interpretations in this chapter. By regarding them as Kristevan psychosexual subjects, this author’s intention is not to diminish, for example, Dubbo’s representation of Indigeneity, Mary Hare’s potential as an eco-critical figure, or the issues of racial and diasporic identity raised by Himmelfarb’s story. It is possible to see these functions as being complemented, rather than reduced, by viewing the characters as abject and liminal subjects who can, and do, fit into many literary and theoretical categories of otherness and monstrosity. Riders is the most explicitly spiritual of White’s novels, and the work that gives perhaps the most complete illustration of his abject interpretation of sacredness. This chapter has gone some way to give an account of the novel’s sacred aesthetic through a Kristevan psychoanalytic framework. As abject, feminine psychoanalytic subjects, White’s four ‘riders’ occupy external and internal thresholds: socialised/unsocialised, symbolic/semiotic. For White, the attributes of female corporeality – the maternal, the porous, the unutterable erotic – are spiritual junctures where the material meets the immaterial, where the flesh meets the divine.

Notes 1

Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot (London: Vintage, 1996 [1961]), 360. Ibid., 355. 3 Ibid., 357. 4 Ibid., 39. 5 Ibid. 6 Andrew McCann, ‘The Ethics of Abjection: Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot’, Australian Literary Studies 18 (1997): 145-155, Viewed 19 March 2013, http://search.informit.com.au.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/fullText;dn=980404107;res =APAFT, 148. 7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 8 McCann, ‘The Ethics of Abjection,’ 148. 9 James Clements, ‘“Verbal Sludge”: Mud and Malleability in the Novels of Patrick White’, Antipodes 23 (2009): 133-138, Viewed 7 March 2013, 2

190

‘Ugly as a Foetus’

__________________________________________________________________ http://search.proquest.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/docview/211238707/fulltextP DF?accountid=13380, 134. 10 Ibid., 133. 11 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17. 12 Ibid., 65. 13 Ibid., 70. 14 Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 95. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 58. 17 Ibid., 59. 18 Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 66. 19 Clément and Kristeva, Feminine and the Sacred, 27. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 16. 22 Ibid. 23 White, Riders, 28. 24 Ibid., 39. 25 Ibid., 239. 26 Ibid. 27 Clément and Kristeva, Feminine and the Sacred, 16. 28 White, Riders, 108. 29 Ibid., 214. 30 Ibid., 211. 31 Ibid., 204-205. 32 Ibid., 72. 33 Ibid., 259. 34 Ibid., 73. 35 Ibid., 510. 36 Ibid., 323. 37 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 54. 38 White, Riders, 384. 39 Ibid., 361. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 366. 43 Clément and Kristeva, Feminine and the Sacred, 56. 44 Ibid., 57. 45 Ibid., 56.

Madeleine Bendixen

191

__________________________________________________________________ 46 47

White, Riders, 61. Ibid., 511.

Bibliography Clément, Catherine and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Clements, James. ‘“Verbal Sludge”: Mud and Malleability in the Novels of Patrick White.’ Antipodes 23 (2009): 133-138. Viewed 7 March 2013. http://search.proquest.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/docview/211238707/fulltextP DF?accountid=13380. Grogan, Bridget. ‘Abjection and Compassion: Affective Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction’. Journal of Literary Studies 28 (2012): 93-115. Viewed 19 March 2013. http://www.tandfonline.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/doi/pdf/10.1080/02564718.2 012.679509. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. McCann, Andrew. ‘The Ethics of Abjection: Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot.’ Australian Literary Studies 18 (1997): 145-155. Viewed 19 March 2013. http://search.informit.com.au.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/fullText;dn=980404107;res =APAFT. White, Patrick. Patrick White Speaks. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.

———. Riders in the Chariot. London: Vintage, 1996 [1961]. Madeleine Bendixen is a PhD student at Queensland University of Technology. She is also a writer of fiction and poetry.

Performing Otherness for the Monstrous Gaze: Racial and Sexual Fantasies in the Allegoric Orgies of Venus Noir and Black Swan Fjoralba Miraka Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to explore the politics of gender and race as well as the way in which female sexuality is treated in the films Venus Noir (2010) and Black Swan (2011). More specifically, I will examine the way(s) in which the processes of ‘othering’ and ‘monsterizing’ are exposed by these two filmic narratives. In both films, the female body constitutes an ideologically charged site, upon which the western tradition inscribes its sexual and racial beliefs; according to the western classificatory practices the female body is a monstrous other; it deviates from the Eurocentric male standard. On the one hand, Black Swan points to the extreme of the sexual(ised) Other and exposes the perverse nature of the dichotomy virgin/whore in line with which female sexuality can only find one specific expressive form – a monstrous form. I intend to explore whether the film deviates from older discourses to offer instead a radical approach towards the nature of female sexuality. On the other hand, Venus Noir pinpoints the genderand race-oriented categorizations of the western world through a vivid visual representation of a supposedly deviant representative of the African female subject. My inquiry here is whether the filmic reproduction of such representation reinforces older racial and sexual discourses or disrupts and threatens to subvert them, offering a more dynamic perspective of the subject in question. In a final analysis, I want to explore whether these two cultural products can be taken as political weapons that make a statement about the progressive – or regressive – path of western cultural practices regarding the issue of female sexuality and its expression. Key Words: Otherness, female sexuality, male gaze, racial monsters. ***** 1. Venus Noir Venus Noir narrates the story of Sarah Baartman, the Hotenttot Venus who performed savagery in a freak show in nineteenth century London. From the very beginning the film provides a historical context within which the gaze and its object interconnect. In the first six minutes, the nineteenth-century scientific voice overrides Sarah’s silenced black female body and invokes hegemonic ideologies that depend on oppositional categories such as normalcy/abnormalcy, inferiority/ superiority; western science condemns this black female body under investigation as a devious racial and sexual Other. The film makes obvious the racism that

194

Performing Otherness for the Monstrous Gaze

__________________________________________________________________ underlies scientific inquiry. As Patricia Hill Collins points out, referring to the practices of western science, observers from England, France, Germany, Belgium, and other colonial powers perceived African sensuality, eroticism, spirituality, and/or sexuality as deviant, out of control, sinful, and an essential feature of racial difference. 1 Set at the centre of the stage, covered with a white sheet, symbolically resembling a ghost, the black female body corresponds to a sexed phantasm, an absent but visible presence that supposedly offers the link between humans and apes. Circulating images of her genitals around the amphitheatre results in the fetishisation of the female sexual organs; the white male scientist transforms the inert black body into a fetish for the male audience. The film contrasts the male gaze to Sarah’s shut eyes by using facial close-ups. It shows that science reduces the black female body to a case study, and that the male gaze has the power to erase individuality and the human element. The human subject under the scrutiny of the male scientific gaze becomes monstrous because the gaze projects its monstrosity onto it. In the nineteenth century, black female bodies were systematically subjected to scientific voyeurism, and became sites invested with racism and sexism. As Anne Fausto-Sterling informs us, ‘there were at least seven scientific descriptions of the bodies of women of colour done in the tradition of classical comparative anatomy’ during the period 1814-1870.2 The white, male, scientific gaze invests the black female body with connotations that construct a borderline between normal and abnormal, while nature only invests it with denotations. Consequently, male science equates female nature with sexuality and then reduces this sexuality to the genital parts and their physiology. The film exposes and criticizes the white, male misperception of female sexuality by symbolically silencing the female agent, allowing it to be present only physically. Obviously, the sheet that covers Sarah’s body makes it stand out in the frame, only to render it a marked body, ghost-like and silent, invisible in its visible position. It reigns throughout the film but only on physical terms; it is a voiceless, stigmatized, fetishized body, a vessel that receives bias and hosts prejudice. The performance of this physicality itself pays credit to and discloses the monstrous workings of the gaze that constantly scrutinizes her. Through the sequence of the early scenes, the film foregrounds that it is western science that marks an African woman sexually and racially and perceives her as an inherently deviant female subject. The scenes that follow shift the focus to the public gaze, since this very woman is now placed in a freak show, and is treated as a vehicle of entertainment. Patricia Hill Collins has noted that

Fjoralba Miraka

195

__________________________________________________________________ [i]n the nineteenth century, the term freak appeared in descriptions of human oddities … individuals who fell outside the boundaries of normality … all were exhibited as freaks of nature for the fun and amusement of live audiences. 3 Hendric Caesar exhibits Sarah as a human specimen, yet ‘astonishingly different’, ‘a truly remarkable phenomenon’, ‘a female savage from the Dark Continent, Africa’.4 He offers the English public a stereotypical image of the African as savage and primitive and reaffirms their expectations. He conflates the categories of race and sex, abiding by Sigmund Freud’s comparison of female sexuality to a ‘dark continent’. 5 He exposes his ‘monstrous savage’ in a cage and makes her act in a wild manner; she performs monstrosity and wildness as if they were her natural traits. Caesar’s freak show both reproduces and reinforces the scientific theories by having the Black female agent re-enact them for the purpose of public entertainment. Whereas under the scientific gaze, Sarah remains silenced and invisible, during the freak show performance she makes her presence visible only to emulate a predetermined image that validates western assumptions and expectations. In these scenes, the white gaze dominates and the white male voice functions as an authority. Caesar asserts that Sarah is ‘under complete control’ and is used to repeat the western cultural script. 6 In this sense, Sarah’s body becomes a symptom of the white gaze; it comes to represent only what the gaze insists on perceiving: the deviant monstrous other. The film makes clear that this female monster is a fabrication, the construct of a process of over-inscription of existing ideas and hegemonic ideologies that demand re-enactment. Having exposed the process of fetishizing the black female body and of demonizing it as a sexual beast, the cinematic narrative turns to show that this obsession with the black female body and sexuality is actually a pathological symptom of whiteness. It is not enough to exhibit Sarah as an exotic work of nature; she has to be ‘educated’ in order to perform this exoticism in front of white audiences.7 Sarah is forced to act like a beast for the pleasure of the Captain, a white middle-class man, and for the kicks of a white woman; both ride her like one rides a mare. On this occasion, Sarah’s body is exploited in order to satisfy the sexual fantasies of white people. The white mind first animalizes the black woman and then fantasizes her taming; it also endows her with a hypersexual promiscuity as they expect her to be constantly available for sexual intercourse. The film tries to disrupt these fantasies through extreme close-ups of the white audience, enabling the spectators watch the whites while they are watching Sarah. But it is up to the individual spectator whether he or she will identify with the white subjects on the screen and share their sexualized and racialized perspective or whether she or he will realize that by animalizing black sexuality and at the same time being obsessed with it, white people reveal their own psychological sickness and freakiness. The obsession with observing her genitals and the intrusive way this

196

Performing Otherness for the Monstrous Gaze

__________________________________________________________________ observation is carried out constitute sexual harassment and virtual rape. Every time Sarah is exposed before a white audience, she is turned into a sex object and forced to vicariously fulfil white sexual fantasies. The film reminds us that, according to the white perspective, Sarah embodies two prominent and congruent figures of the nineteenth century, namely the female Hottentot and the prostitute. She is forced to prostitute herself during the freak show exhibitions and tolerate the white touch on her buttocks and then to literally become a prostitute later in her life. As Sander Gillman clarifies, [t]he prostitute is the essential sexualized female in the perception of the nineteenth century. She is perceived as the embodiment of sexuality and of all that is associated with sexuality, disease as well as passion … The late nineteenthcentury perception of the prostitute merged with that of the black.8 Thus, if intra-racially the deviant, monstrous, sexual other is the prostitute, then inter-racially this position is reserved for the black female. The film makes it more than obvious that Sarah is a construct that sustains the myth of black female promiscuity; it deciphers for the spectator the cultural process of creating and circulating such a monstrous icon. It shows that the African woman is condemned on three levels, for her sex, for her sexuality and for her skin colour. When the Hottentot and the prostitute combine, the cultural stigmatization of the African female is complete and irreversible and eventually leads to her death. More importantly, the film incriminates the white male and his gaze for assuming the position of an absolute authority and for subjugating both the Hottentot and the prostitute; the Hottentot’s body is penetrated by the scrutinizing gaze and the prostitute’s body by sexual intercourse. Both penetrations are deadly. Visually, the Hotenttot (displayed as a monstrous presence) and the European prostitute (represented as a sex object) become spectacles for consumption as well as concrete fetishized commodities. Their cinematic bodies are marked with connotations, resonances and significations which are all man-derived. 2. Black Swan Looking at the Black Swan, we can perceive several similarities with Venus Noir, regarding the performative function of the heroine and the gender-specific gaze. In this film, the female body is also used to discuss the transmission of ideology within the cinematic narrative. Nina Sayers, the female protagonist, is both a signifier of the category ‘woman’ and the signified, both the sign and the element that the sign points to. Centred in the middle of the stage, light shed on her body, she draws the attention of the viewer, invites her audience and the viewers to engage in voyeuristic delight by watching her, and she becomes the sole object of

Fjoralba Miraka

197

__________________________________________________________________ observation, a fetishized moving sign to be placed under the lens and be deciphered. The director Thomas Leroy, who embodies both the male gaze and the male authority, assumes this authoritative position from the beginning, when he is placed above everybody in the dancing hall, watching them perform for his approval. At this early stage, thus, the object of the gaze and its subject are clearly set in their respective place; similarly to Venus Noir, the gaze is routinely male and its object is, as expected, female. His gaze resembles the authoritative voice of the King in the story of Snow White, in which his voice is the voice of the looking glass, the patriarchal voice of judgment that rules the Queen’s – and every woman’s – selfevaluation … his voice resides now in her own mirror, her own mind.9 Thomas’s gesture/touch on the shoulder is a gesture of approval or disapproval, and this gesture stigmatizes the body that has been touched, renders it a passive disposable object. It problematizes the relation between the external standard of perfection, femininity and sexuality imposed by a male other and the female objectified individuality. Thomas’s intention to attempt a reversal of the original Swan Lake story reads well as a metaphor for a general reversal of an older, overarching tradition that locks female sexuality in chastity and prudence, represented in the film by the figure of the mother. Instead, this reversal aims at liberation and offers space for female sexuality to be fully expressed, however, it is the form of this expression that I am mostly concerned with. The implication that underlies such a plot is that we have moved beyond the limitations set to restrict female sexuality and have entered into a new age of expression, during which the body is used as the main vehicle of transmission. No matter how subversive this plot might seem to be, it only offers one more ‘box’ to confine the feminine within. Whereas in the old tradition women were warned that ‘if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters’,10 in this new tradition, (which wants to break the dichotomy angel/monster by dictating a different, supposedly liberating, possibility) they are told to embody both. Thomas asks, ‘…which of you can embody both swans, the Black and the White?’11 It is positive to hear a man urging a young woman to express her sensuality and sexuality; however, it is disappointing to see this sexuality expressed time and again in the only form it has always assumed, the monstrous. The trap has changed from ‘either black or white’ to ‘both black and white’ retaining, however, the fundamental categories of blackness and whiteness. We witness the replacement of the old rule with a new one, but the authoritative position of the male voice – and gaze – remains intact. The only point I consider as likely to carry some true potential of subversion is the moment when Nina arrests the gaze and returns it back. She gazes back at

198

Performing Otherness for the Monstrous Gaze

__________________________________________________________________ Thomas and Lily during their sexual intercourse, and to her eyes he turns into the monstrous figure of the opening scene; thus she exposes the perverted nature of the gaze that has been observing her. In fact, she imposes the figure of the monstrous lustful twin on the male other; she rejects it as a possible second, hidden nature of her own, suggesting thus that the abnormal nature of her sexuality stands outside herself, only in the others’ perception of herself. Nevertheless, the focal point of this moment is the narrative function of the monstrous figure, which on the one hand stands for the dark side of female sexuality but on the other hand occupies a male body in order to reveal itself. Does this suggest that the aggressive nature of sexuality is indeed a masculine attribute, not a feminine one? Is it inevitable that it resides in the male body? If it does, then once again the theory of sexual difference sustains the already established categories of aggressive masculinity and passive femininity. With this in mind, Nina is rendered a deviant sexual(ised) body that is neither fully feminine nor masculine. She is an other standing between the borderline of femininity/masculinity, normalcy/abnormalcy. It is in her last performance as a transformed angel into a monster that she finally answers back to this new dictate that wants her to possess both sides; what she reveals is that both the role of the angel and the monster are mere constructs that prevent the authentic nature of female sexuality from coming to the surface. She powders herself accordingly so that she alternates between the angel and the monster; she acts out either the virgin angel or the monstrous twin and exposes the pernicious effects such a dictate has on her individuality. At this point, one more devastating effect is highlighted: it is precisely this new ability the woman has been accorded, that is to alternate between selves, that creates anxiety in the male subject, urging him to confine her within certain frames. Male patriarchal order defines the frames within which she is to circulate, embeds her sexuality with categorical specificities that do not allow her to enter the same domain as he does, and then punishes her for what she is or comes to represent. Her otherness is gender-specific, which means it is grounded in monstrosity, which in turn derives from her sex. She is punished with madness and ultimately with death for her sexual awakening which has already been accorded the status of the monstrous and the deviant. Consequently, I am inclined to believe that the attempt to change the story into a new one reveals the potential of this film to offer a new possibility; but insisting on an inglorious and devastating end means that this potential is not meant to be fulfilled. 3. Conclusion As a concluding remark then I would say that both films engage in a similar process of exposing the pernicious way in which the female body and sexuality are rendered as deviant others to the male subject. Both imply that it is the male gaze that prescribes the monster and then becomes obsessed with it. In Venus Noir, the practices of white European culture exploit, dehumanize and finally destroy the

Fjoralba Miraka

199

__________________________________________________________________ African female subject. In Black Swan the alternative perspective is given expression only to be silenced with the death of the heroine. Both deaths disrupt the possibility of reaching a positive concluding remark. Venus Noir, as a tribute to the African woman, I would say shows that her fate was a crime committed by the Europeans, it tries to shame their racist frame of mind, without offering an alternative. Similarly Black Swan fails to move on a step further.

Notes 1

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (London: Routledge, 2005), 98. 2 Anne Fausto Sterling, ‘Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815-17’, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), 78. 3 Collins, Black Sexual Politics, 120. 4 Venus Noir. Dir. Abdellatif Kechiche. MK2 2010. 5 For an extended analysis see Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Question of Lay Analysis,’ Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin Freud Library, 1926), 15:313. 6 Venus Noir. Dir. Abdellatif Kechiche. MK2 2010. 7 It becomes evident throughout the film that Sara is trained by Ceasar to perform what the audience expect; she is not really a savage from the dark continent. 8 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 94-99. 9 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2nd ed) (London: Yale University Press, 2000), 38. 10 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 53.

Bibliography Black Swan. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2010. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous – Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. 1993. Print. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. London: Routledge. 2005. Print.

200

Performing Otherness for the Monstrous Gaze

__________________________________________________________________ Fausto-Sterling, Anne. ‘Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815-17’. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture. ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 2002. Print Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Question of Lay Analysis,’ Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis Vol. 15. London: Penguin Freud Library, 1926. Gilman, Sander L. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. London: Cornell University Press. 1985. Print. M. Gilbert, Sandra, Susan Gubar. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. (2nd ed). London: Yale University Press. 2000. Print. Venus Noir. Dir. Abdellatif Kechiche. MK2 2010. Fjoralba Miraka has acquired both her BA and MA degrees from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her academic interests revolve around Feminist Film Theory, Film Theory and Criticism, Gender Studies, and Women’s Studies. Her next endeavor will be a PhD project on Hollywood Renaissance and New Hollywood directors, examining their female characters from a socio-historical, feminist perspective.

‘She’s No Hag’: New Visions and Narratives of Grendel’s Mother in Zemeckis’ Beowulf Almudena Nido Abstract Portrayed by the unmistakeable Angelina Jolie in the latest film version of the epic poem, Grendel’s Mother has been turned into a femme fatale who embodies the most terrible menace for male heroic power and a curse for mighty warriors. As the most fearsome monstrous force in the new version of Beowulf, she is trapped by the ambiguity of the uneasy conjunction of desire and power, and she is turned into a fetish for the audience of the film. Her naked female body constitutes the main anxiety in an otherwise epic male world enslaved by an ongoing fight for power and lust that revolves around this new embodiment of female monstrousness. Anxieties that were not present in the original poem are brought forth, as a probable bid to connect more easily with the postmodern viewer. But it results in an entrapment for female power, as her body is both the site of her power and her submission to male power. Underneath her overt sexuality and beauty her monstrosity lurks, expressed in the creation of new monsters. This new Grendel’s Mother provides a distorted image of motherhood and sexuality that not only works for the male heroic society that Zemeckis’ has imagined Heorot to be, but it is mainly a commodification of the female monster. This paper proposes a feminist reading of this new depiction of Grendel’s Mother in regard to the use of beauty and sexuality as new aspects of the monster and the effects they have on her power to destabilize Heorot’s society. This analysis explores the different expressions of monstrosity that are used in Grendel’s Mother to make her a monstrous embodiment able to terrorise the revisited male society of Beowulf, proving that different incarnations of the monster need updating to be still monsters in different historical contexts. Key Words: Grendel’s Mother, beauty, female monster, film study, feminism, monstrous motherhood. ***** 1. Woman, Mother and Monster The recent interest in heroes and monsters has seen a resurgence in the number of interpretations and rewritings of epic stories, adding different features and characteristics to heroes and monsters to make them more appealing and understandable for modern audiences. The most recent film version of Beowulf portrays the female monster in a seemingly new light, that of beauty, and even though it is arguably one of the most erratic adaptations of the epic so far, it is worth analysing as a re-reading. It constitutes a reinterpretation of and update for

202

‘She’s No Hag’

__________________________________________________________________ modern audiences: as I want to show in this paper, it still communicate some of the anxieties in regards to the female monster present in the original poem. 1 In fact, much has been said and done of a monster which is not described physically in the poem, apart from her straight identification as a female and a mother. These two features have been enough to make of her a monster, though. The interpretations of her forms in the graphic representations in popular culture have ranged from that of a trollwoman, a ghost-like wraith or a primitive matriarch, but her embodiment has certainly played along with the expectation of the female monster as a physical deformed being. Apart from the inherent expectation of a horrifying form fitting both mother and son, critics have found analysing these images of her as both a monster and female very uncomfortable. Female figures in Beowulf have had their importance within the poem and their cultural context either diminished or magnified, proving that it is still a debatable topic in terms of accuracy and relevance for women. The perceptions of the female figures have reflected the visions of normative gender roles inside the community of each historical period that have looked into the poem. Such a consideration is probably behind the obscurity with which Grendel’s Mother has been treated. 2 As a monster, she has been referred to as an uncomfortable transition between two great monsters whose explicit femininity made critics uneasy and caused her to be treated as a lesser monster than her son, less visible than the dragon. 3 In essence she was seen as ‘a blot upon the thematic and structural unit of the poem’. 4 Arguably, she presents characteristics and anxieties that are very different from those of the other monsters in the epic and her femininity and motherhood make her a more ambiguous presence. She seems to have: ‘her own particular brand of otherness; her inhuman affiliation and propensities make it hard to distinguish between what is monstrous and what is female’. 5 Grendel’s Mother is not as monstrous as we may have been led to believe, at least not physically. In fact, her supposed physical deformity and ugliness are never stated in the poem, as she is specifically described as having the form of a woman. 6 At the same time, the poet applies to her expressions that are commonly used for male warriors to denote her uncommon female violence. 7 As a mother and sole survivor of her race, her duty and pain are understandable by the Germanic warrior ethos and gain the sympathy of the poet. And, it is her behaviour – with her excessive female violence and disregard for the legality of Grendel’s punishment – that is considered monstrous. 8 But graphic representations of this monster have recurred as physical monstrosity in subsequent re-interpretations, possibly as a correlation with her monstrous son Grendel and to make them kin not only by blood but also in physical appearance. 9 Zemeckis’s version (2007) proposes a different configuration of Grendel’s Mother’s monstrousness already hinted by other Beowulf film versions where, contrary to expectations within the warrior community (and in the audience already

Almudena Nido

203

__________________________________________________________________ familiar with Grendel and his physical deformity), she is a beautiful woman. 10 This challenges the nature of monstrosity, if it is not shown on the exterior, and questions the relationship between such a female figure and warrior society. Zemeckis’s version of Beowulf takes on beauty as bait that allows the female monster to manipulate warrior society. The focus is on sexuality and desire for power, updating the anxieties present in Beowulf for a post-modern twenty-first century audience. This results also in an exploration of the hero and the community that produces and consumes him. In fact, Zemeckis’s Beowulf presents a world where heroes, although still formidable and bigger than life, are somewhat braggarts and because of their shows of strength and prowess are no longer figures of honour and chastity but fallible men subjected to and directed by their own libido and desires. Post-modern notions of heroicity that erode the image of the epic hero abound in Zemeckis’s. 11 This adds to the fascination already present in the poem for the Other, ever expanding since Gardner’s rewriting and interrogation of the epic from the monster’s point of view. This seems to get out of control and Zemeckis’s Beowulf results, with just a very few exceptions, in nothing that can be easily, fully and willingly identified as Beowulf. 12 But, as I want to show with this article, these changes are still faithful to some of the original anxieties that are poured into Grendel’s Mother’s encounter with the hero and that stay the same in the new embodiment of the female monster. 2. The Hero and the Beautiful Monster One of the few aspects that has been retained in Zemeckis’s otherwise very freely re-interpreted Beowulf is the sudden intrusion in the epic of the possibility of a fallible character in the hero. Zemeckis’s film seems to be based on the possibility, as first hinted in the original poem, that the hero remains, momentarily, at a loss as to how to deal with one monstrous figure and sees how all his heroic paraphernalia is unstable and can be tumbled in a mishap. In the original poem, this is a moment of terror and suspense for both hero and listeners, a potentially disastrous moment where imminent crisis is just averted by divine intervention (in the form of a sword). Every expectation of heroicity is suddenly discarded the moment the hero fails spectacularly and loses his heroic quality, momentarily in the poem, permanently in Zemeckis’s film version. In both, the hero is left in an unheroic position when he first encounters the female monster because he cannot even initiate acts of hostility. Against the female monster, the hero needs something more than his fame and bravery, as the poet points out ‘no matter how brave he was’ 13: he was momentarily at the mercy of Grendel’s Mother when ‘He stumbles, loses his footing, then this is the fall, the failure of the effectiveness of heroic action – even his resolution, his strength are not enough’. 14 Zemeckis’ film version acknowledges this fateful possibility in the uneasy situation of the hero facing for the first time the female monster and portrays the

204

‘She’s No Hag’

__________________________________________________________________ failing hero, who is in direct contact with the monstrous and who has lost his effectiveness against the female monster. But this new fascination with the combination of femininity and monstrosity has been fuelled with an added sexuality foreign to the epic, turning it into ‘a sexually vexed version of the story’ 15 that results into a ‘disquieting fusion of graphic violence and moral conservatism’ 16 where perceptions of the hero mix with monstrousness in the hero’s inclinations and desires that turn him into an anti-hero and a mirror of the monster. This proves to be somehow an essential focus in the anxiety the female monster generates both in the original poem and the twenty-first century audience already versed in spectacular monsters and powerful superheroes. Zemeckis’ film emphasises monstrous sexuality, turning Grendel’s Mother into a femme fatale and a man-eater that lures and traps powerful male figures into unwanted and monstrous fatherhoods that ruin the kingdom. 17 She is presented as a colossal force against the phallic power of swords and heroic ethos, her fecund body is seen as a trap for patriarchal power and a gateway for never-ending monstrous progenies that set up vengeful enterprises against their own fathers. There is a recurrent association between woman, womb – either in the sexual depravity or in her fecundity – and the monstrous that invokes a fear of the natural world. The womb, a difference from that which defines the norm, is seen as part of the monstrous embodiment due to its ability to hide and create new life. Grendel’s Mother’s body in this new version is able to provoke fascination and horror with its fecundity, just like a dangerous vortex due to its reproductive function, and the dangerous and endless possibilities that her body can give birth to. Both possibilities of the feminine as sacred and dangerous in film seem to be represented in Zemeckis’ version of Beowulf in the figures of Grendel’s mother and Wealhtheow, as respectively the corrupt and the innocent woman. 18 As a corrupt woman, Grendel’s Mother is marked by the several key elements by which she is able to make men succumb to her spells: as it was pointed out during the conference by one delegate, Grendel’s mother’s voice is one of them and plays an important part in the perception of the femme fatale. Her sultry voice also suggestively points to the special relationship this monster has with discourse in this revision of the epic. Characterized as a very ambivalent figure, she is made to be in this film version a monster that commands discourse in a more effective way than her son Grendel. She is a monster endowed with a mastery of discourse not seen in the epic poem and that further situates her in an in-between position, astride the semiotic and symbolic orders, since she is able to speak to the hero in the same language (not an archaic version of it like her son does) and communicate fluently with the hero to stir his desires and express her own feelings when she loses her son. But the other attributes she has been endowed with in this new version, so cleverly emphasised in the film, further point to her new role in this new epic as a temptress and femme fatale. The most remarkable ones are her unexpected beauty

Almudena Nido

205

__________________________________________________________________ and sex appeal that at the same time seem to distance her from other versions of this female monster. For the heroic community of Zemeckis' film, her beauty is as monstrous as her violence and desire for vengeance, probably because ‘nothing terrifies a male audience more than a physically and sexually powerful woman’ 19 and mainly because she represents a formulaic image of female beauty that is understandable in that community (and in our post-modern mass media culture, too). This emphasis on beauty seems to point to a monstrosity that is skin deep, inaccessible to the bare eye and capitalized by using Angelina Jolie as a commodity to embody this new female monster. 20 This shape-shifting monster with her high heels, voluptuous body, and sultry voice, ‘looks and sounds more like a Las Vegas showgirl than a terrifying monster’. 21 She is presented as an object to be gazed at, to tempt spectators as well as the hero, letting us see her in her naked glory in a safe way. 22 This new Grendel’s Mother has been characterized with several elements that call into attention male desire and how the female monster achieves a perversion of that desire for her own goals. The first remarkable thing is that she is wearing high heels, stiletto heels in a historical context where they did not exist but that is the classic fetishist image for twenty-first century audience. 23 High heels are both a phallic extension and a means of discomfort that, in the case of Grendel’s Mother, grow from her own body as part of her human embodiment, which is a temporary accessory for her, a means to achieve something, probably even an uncomfortable skin, just as uncomfortable high heels can be for the female body and posture. As one delegate in the conference pointed out, they also resemble talons that would further her animalistic characterization. 24 Her tail-braid that acts like a whip is a phallic substitute that also reminds spectators of her previously hinted reptile form. Her body is a naked surface, barely covered by a golden liquid that seems to be like a slithery skin that makes her appear like a single mass of flesh a column walking erect. She is seen all in all ‘in her full phallic glory’ 25 which is a perversion of male desire that she uses to get what she wants. In Zemeckis’ version, Grendel’s Mother transforms herself into a vision of perfect female beauty, proving that ‘Beauty is the striving male’s supreme temptation’ 26 in a coalescence of female sexuality and malevolence which find a voracious articulation in woman’s monstrous fecundity. Her beauty is the main form of entrapment. Her idealised female beauty is a representation of man’s desire that, not only make her powerful and desirable but also highlight that the hero is a fallible character in a fallible community. She is portrayed as an irresistible force that no hero, in the past or foreseeable future, can resist. Not only Beowulf succumbs to her beauty: Hrothgar is also a victim of her charm as he joins in the acknowledgement of Grendel’s Mother’s true (ironically false) form when he states ‘She is no hag’. 27 In fact, the embodiment of

206

‘She’s No Hag’

__________________________________________________________________ Grendel’s Mother is so effective for the heroic male society that Zemeckis’ has used, that the entrapment will be repeated ad infinitum. Heroes are doomed to fall in Zemeckis’ Beowulf because their drive to heroism is not the same as in the original poem. Sex and desire are the main forces behind this new heroism. Grendel’s mother’s beauty is irresistible because it is a commodity in that society. Women in Zemeckis’ do desire the hero, physically. The emphasis is on lust because it is what society in general is made to be about in this new Beowulf. Women should act as peace-weavers in the heroic society depicted in the Beowulf poem, weaving peace with their own bodies and tying warring male communities, 28 or, in Zemeckis’ film version, as vessels of male desire and one of the rewards of heroism and a source of admiration for the hero’s fearlessness. Nothing in the male warrior society of this new Beowulf has prepared the male hero to withstand such a threat. This new Heorot is, as Hrothgar proclaims halfnaked and drunken, the place to divide the spoils of conquest (gold and treasure), a place of merriment, joy and fornication. Hardly epic poetry material. It is a social place, with all the importance the hall had in Anglo-Saxon society as the centre of the community and representation of the social hierarchy, where revellers (those same that participate in the heroic society) take part, as the script of the film details, in celebrations with belching, public urination, drunkenness, maiden fondling. 29 It is obvious that this cannot be made to be the same Hrothgar that delivers the hero a moving speech about contention and the danger of pride. As a projection of men’s desire, she is a spectacle of lust, but her monstrousness is elsewhere. Everything, every power she has, even her identity, has to do with man, with the desires she stirs in hero and spectator, and the relation she is able to extract from their desire. She just mirrors, mimics, and mocks those desires in her body and acquires the form that is needed to lure the hero. Her embodiment is in itself the expression of a male underworld of fear and desire where the hero falls prey to a desire that mirrors his grandeur, mockingly, because Grendel’s Mother will use it against him in an uncanny exercise of monstrous female shrewdness playing out a never-ending threat of castration, haunting the male consciousness with beauty and phallic substitutes to conceal her lack. 30 Her image is used to lure men as it is used to promote the film, too, proving that the time of the heroes in Zemeckis’ Beowulf will be brief, no matter how many years they are able to reign, as they will be forever threatened by the female monster who has found a crack in this decadent new Heorot. 31 3. Conclusion Notwithstanding the clear differences in context and the liberties taken with the text and characters, this new representation of Grendel’s Mother is not so foreign to the spirit of the poem if it is also taken as a representation of female resistance within the poem, as characterized too by another female figure, that of Modthryth, that is usually erased from all kind of film versions of Beowulf. Female presence in

Almudena Nido

207

__________________________________________________________________ the poem Beowulf is, in fact, so ambivalent, seemingly passive yet empowered with formless strength, so laden with ambiguities, that it has to be contained in the poem by frames, enclosures and structure in the case of Zemeckis’ those of formulaic female beauty. This is so because the traditional social role of peaceweavers that feature in the poem, as mothers who produce peace and life and unite different kingdoms in one blood, is not entirely a secure position from which women can be easily controlled. One of those fateful instances in which warrior society is at stake is central to Zemeckis’ adaptation: when a woman in Beowulf, produces with her body or wishes death (as in the case of Grendel’s Mother in both the poem and Zemeckis’ or Modthryth in the poem), the result can destabilize the warrior society so badly that it can render all its structures and tenets feeble and useless. 32 Like Zemeckis’ Grendel’s Mother, Modthryth provokes a shudder or terror, because she, just like this new Grendel’s Mother achieves a tremor of amazement at the unknown: ‘just enough to make us think, as we watch [other women in Beowulf] obediently performing [their] womanly duties, that one never knows…’ 33 This ambivalent female resistance as expressed in this version of Beowulf, visible not in its ugliness or repulsiveness, shows that no matter how the poem can be retold and reimagined, it is ever present in its very ambiguous form.

Notes 1

As Forni posits in her own analysis of Zemeckis’ Beowulf, it seems most constructive to approach the film as a reinterpretation of the poem instead of analysing the faithfulness (or not) to the original. See Kathleen Forni, ‘Popularizing High Culture: Zemeckis’s Beowulf’, Studies in Popular Culture 31. 2 (2009): 45. 2 The choice of words when translating the part played by the queens in Beowulf reveals the social relevance and agency that are attached to the female figures in Beowulf. The most important view, due to the relevance and the pervasiveness of such interpretation, is that of Frederik Klaeber who managed to transpose in his translation the normative gender roles of his time by favouring several word choices. He marginalised the queens and relegated them to the realm of maternal affection and helpless passive femininity, imposing thus the conventions that pertained to his own cultural context (nineteenth-century German bourgeois culture) in regards to kingship, family and gender roles. See Josephine Bloomfield, ‘Diminished by Kindness: Frederik Klaeber’s Rewriting of Wealhtheow’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1994): 183-203. 3 See Adrien Bonjour, ‘Grendel’s Dam and the Composition of Beowulf’, English Studies 30 1-6 (1949): 117; Jane Chance, ‘The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1980): 153; and Carolyn Anderson, ‘Gæst, Gender, and Kin in Beowulf: Consumption of the Boundaries’, The Heroic Age 5 (2001): np. Paul Taylor, for example, treated

208

‘She’s No Hag’

__________________________________________________________________ Grendel’s mother’s fight against Beowulf as a type of appendage to the Grendel’s episode. Paul Beekman Taylor, ‘Beowulf’s Second Grendel’s Fight’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1985): 62-69. 4 Chance, ‘Structural Unity’, 152. 5 James Hala, ‘The Parturition of Poetry and the Birthing of Culture: the Ides Aglaecwif and Beowulf’, Exemplaria 10 (1998): 29-50. 6 Grendel’s Mother is described in human terms by being referred to as ‘wif’ and ‘ides’, terms which are normally reserved only to human women and to the term ‘modor’ (mother) is exclusively used to describe her, even though other mothers do appear in the poem. 7 As it has been pointed out by several researchers, there is a recurrent link between Grendel’s mother and a perceived masculine characteristic not only in her deeds and violence but also in her own form when undertaking the attack to Heorot. For example, Chance, ‘Structural Unity’, 285, identifies the female monster as one of human nature but male behaviour, as it is shown in the poem when her vengeance is seen as a masculine deed. She is referred with a masculine word for ‘avenger’ and she is referred as Grendel’s ‘kinsman’. See also M. Wendy Hennequin, ‘We’ve Created a Monster: The Strange Case of Grendel’s Mother’, English Studies 89.5 (2008): 512. 8 Curiously enough, Grendel’s mother has been shown to be more human than her son in Beowulf, especially when it comes to her behaviour. She only attacks after the death of her son and with the purpose of vengeance, not as her son did without apparent reason, or the Dragon who is driven out by greed. Her duty and pain are indeed understandable by the warrior community but she contravenes wergild regulations in justice when she undertakes her vengeance of a murderer. 9 The several representations of this female monster in film and art seem to point to how she has been studied by critics, as either a type of Grendel or a different kind of monster that can be ignored or considered as a mere anecdote, just as she was in early Beowulf studies. 10 This new sexy Grendel’s mother with the emphasis on how female sexuality can be monstrously destructive is not entirely an innovative feature of Zemeckis’ film version, Forni, ‘Popularizing High Culture’, 49. Graham Baker’s science fiction rendering of Beowulf (1999) also used it by portraying a predatory shape-shifting Grendel’s mother who acted as a seductress and was also keen to have men father her monstrous sons. This character was played by a former Playboy Playmate, a fact that further points to how important male desire and fetishization are as foundations for the reimagining of female monstrousness. 11 This is coupled with a heavy Oedipazation of the story that erodes the general ethos of the warrior community. This introduces new anxieties that do not spring directly from the epic poem and do not reflect the poet’s concerns but our own cultural obsessions. See Edward L. Risden, ‘The Hero, the Mad Male Id and a

Almudena Nido

209

__________________________________________________________________ Feminist Beowulf: The Sexualizing of an Epic’, Beowulf: on Film: Adaptations and Variations, ed. Nikolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2013), 119-120. 12 Forni points out the several aspects of the epic and its cultural context that Zemeckis’ film version did get right in Forni, ‘Popularizing High Culture’, 48. 13 Beowulf, 1508b. 14 Rosemary Huisman, ‘The Three Tellings of Beowulf’s Fight with Grendel’s Mother’, Leeds Studies in English 20 (1989): 223; Beowulf, 1543. 15 Edward L. Risden, ‘The Cinematic Commodification of Beowulf: The Serial Fetishizing of a Hero’, Beowulf: on Film: Adaptations and Variations, ed. Nikolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2013), 20. Risden is very explicit when he emphasises ‘There is no sex in Beowulf!’ and, if there is any hint of it, he points out that it would not warrant to be the focus of any Beowulf version (Risden, ‘The Hero’, 120); this is not completely accurate. As Acker aptly puts, sexuality in Beowulf is not overtly shown or perceived, but effectively repressed from the poem ‘banished to the bowers outlying Heorot where Grendel exiles the men to their shame’ Paul Acker, ‘Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf’, PMLA 121.3 (May 2006): 708. 16 Forni, ‘Popularizing High Culture’, 46. 17 The innovations in Zemeckis’ revision of the epic in terms of sexuality and paternity of the monsters may derive from an analysis of the fight against female monster and hero, where undertones of a horrific sexuality were found, with an inversion of sexual roles and an overt emphasis on penetration, Chance, ‘Structural Unity’, 102-104. 18 ‘Representations of the sacred feminine polarise to either the powerful, impure and corrupt woman or the sacred asexual nourishing mother’. Jane M. Ussher, Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body (East Sussex: Routledge, 2006), 1. 19 Bill Schipper, ‘All Talk: Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf, Wealtheow, and Grendel’s Mother’, Literature Compass 8.7 (2011): 425. 20 Beauty in Zemeckis’ version is an impenetrable frontier – as can be seen in the fact that Beowulf’s sword melts away under Grendel’s mother’s touch – that hides a monstrous mystery that no hero can get access to. Following from Risden’s argument that Beowulf itself has been commodified both as a piece of art and a hero, becoming, effectively a fetish, the monster has become more than the nameless female monster she originally was by being now associated with Jolie’s name and recognizable form. This new portrayal of the female monster has certainly not only altered how the monster is perceived by making it more recognizable as a monster of our own time, but also her presence and distinguishable embodiment have contributed to the saleability and marketing of the product. Risden, ‘The Cinematic Commodification’, 78.

210

‘She’s No Hag’

__________________________________________________________________ 21

Schipper, ‘All Talk’, 425. It is made safe to see Angelina Jolie is almost naked. As a film critic from Wall Street Journal wrote: ‘[One] of the triumphs of this brave new motion-capture technology is to make Ms. Jolie's long-tailed devil in stiletto heels look buff naked without being undressed’. Joe Morgenstern, ‘Old English Goes New Hollywood in Epic Beowulf’, The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2007, viewed on 25 August 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB119517337319395051. Another from The Philadelphia Inquirer summed up her role as the embodiment of the female monster and her importance within the film: ‘Let's talk about Angelina Jolie, sheathed only in spray-on gold, with a wicked serpent's tail and stiletto heels built into her feet. Yes, she is Grendel's Mother—hot mama!—the malevolent matriarch who dwells in the cave with her oozy, unhappy, monster-boy’. Steven Rea, ‘Beowulf an epic exercise in silliness’, Philly, November 16, 2007, viewed on 25 http://articles.philly.com/2007-11August 2014, 16/entertainment/24996514_1_grendel-s-mother-beowulf-motion-capture. 23 The high heel invention is said to date from the sixteenth century and the stiletto from the 1950s. 24 In Heaney’s translation she is said to be equipped with ‘savage talons’ Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf: A New Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers, 2000), 105; whereas Donaldson’s translation renders it as ‘awful grip’. Talbot E. Donaldson, trans. Beowulf (New York: WWW Norton and Company, 1966). In any case her talons would be expected to be in her hands and not only or exclusively in her feet as they are referred to in the context of the fight against the hero. 25 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Visual and Other Pleasures, ed. Laura Mulvey (London: MacMillan Press, 1989), 10. 26 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 236. 27 Beowulf, dir. Robert Zemeckis. Los Angeles: Shangri-La Entertainment, 2007, DVD. 28 Stacy S. Klein, Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 100. 29 Their king Hrothgar even relieves himself by letting loose, as the script describes, ‘a rip roaring fart’ in the hall. Forni, ‘Popularizing High Culture’, 46. 30 Ibid., 14. 31 By presenting a morally faulted hero, Zemeckis’ version seems to postulate Grendel’s mother as a type of scapegoat, an easy excuse for the hero’s bad choices in the course of action of the film and his fallibility. It is not only authority that is at stake in Zemeckis’, as every male hero seems to have their responsibility over their duties and desires overtaken from them. It is made dangerously explicit that female beauty and sex appeal are then linked to male irresponsibility and 22

Almudena Nido

211

__________________________________________________________________ unaccountability. The female monster in her aspect of a beautiful sexually overactive female specimen, then, is presented, as a matter of fact, as the source and reason for the irresponsible behaviour and choices of the hero and at the same time a way to expunge all responsibility from the hero’s demeanour and choices. This points to how articulated this vision of female beauty is with male power. See Forni, ‘Popularizing High Culture’ for an analysis of the implications of this perception of the hero when fighting the female monster in Zemeckis. 32 A mother, given her social role in Germanic society, was expected to be empowered through her son and could incite vengeance of her kin but she was never expected to execute it herself. In the case of Grendel’s mother it is not only horrible for the Anglo-Saxon audience of the poem that she is an avenging female, but that she is an avenging mother. Acker, ‘Horror and the Maternal’, 707; Shari Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature (New York: SUNY Press, 2001), 90. 33 Gillian R. Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in ‘Beowulf’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 107.

Bibliography Acker, Paul. ‘Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf’. PMLA 121.3 (May 2006): 702716. Anderson, Carolyn. ‘Gæst, Gender, and Kin in Beowulf: Consumption of the Boundaries’. The Heroic Age 5 (2001), np. Viewed on 29 August 2014. http://www.heroicage.org/issues/5/Anderson1.html. Beowulf. Directed by Graham Baker. Los Angeles: Capitol Films, 1999, DVD. Beowulf. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Los Angeles: Shangri-La Entertainment, ImageMovers, 2007, DVD. Beville, Maria. The Unnamealable Monster in Literature and Film. New York: Routledge, 2014. Bloomfield, Josephine. ‘Diminished by Kindness: Frederik Klaeber’s Rewriting of Wealhtheow’. Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1994): 183-203. Bonjour, Adrien. ‘Grendel’s Dam and the Composition of Beowulf’. English Studies 30 1-6 (1949): 113-124.

212

‘She’s No Hag’

__________________________________________________________________ Chance, Jane. ‘Grendel’s Mother as Epic Anti-Type of the Virgin and Queen’. Interpretations of ‘Beowulf’, edited by R. D. Fulk, 251-263. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. ———. ‘The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1980): 287-303. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Doane, Mary Ann. ‘The Economy of Desire: the Commodity Form in/of the Cinema’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11 (1989): 23-33. Donaldson, E. Talbot. trans. Beowulf. New York: WWW Norton and Company, 1966. Forni, Kathleen. ‘Popularizing High Culture: Zemeckis’s Beowulf’. Studies in Popular Culture 31. 2 (2009): 45-59. Hala, James. ‘The Parturition of Poetry and the Birthing of Culture: the Ides Aglaecwif and Beowulf’. Exemplaria 10 (1998): 29-50. Heaney, Seamus, trans. Beowulf: A New Translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers, 2000. Hennequin M. Wendy. ‘We’ve Created a Monster: The Strange Case of Grendel’s Mother’. English Studies 89.5 (2008): 503-523. Horner, Shari. The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature. New York: SUNY Press, 2001. Huisman, Rosemary. ‘The Three Tellings of Beowulf’s Fight with Grendel’s Mother’. Leeds Studies in English 20 (1989): 217-248. Klein, Stacy S. Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

Almudena Nido

213

__________________________________________________________________ Livingston, Michael and John William Sutton. ‘Reinventing the Hero: Gardner’s Grendel and the Shifting Face of Beowulf in Popular Culture’. Studies in Popular Culture 29. 1 (October 2006): 1-16. Morgenstern, Joe. ‘Old English Goes New Hollywood In Epic Beowulf’. The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2007. Viewed on 25 August 2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB119517337319395051. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Visual and Other Pleasures, edited by Laura Mulvey, 14-26. London: MacMillan Press, 1989. Olsen, Hennessey A. ‘Women in Beowulf’. Approaches to Teaching Beowulf, edited by Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. And Robert F. Yeager, 150-156. New York: Modern language Association, 1984. Overing, Gillian R. Language, Sign, and Gender in ‘Beowulf’. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Rea, Steven. ‘Beowulf an Epic Exercise in Silliness’. Philly, November 16, 2007. http://articles.philly.com/2007-11Viewed on 25 August 2014. 16/entertainment/24996514_1_grendel-s-mother-beowulf-motion-capture. Risden, Edward L. ‘The Cinematic Commodification of Beowulf: The Serial Fetishizing of a Hero’. Beowulf: on Film: Adaptations and Variations, edited by Nikolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden, 66-80. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co Publishers, 2013. ———. ‘The Hero, the Mad Male Id and a Feminist Beowulf: The Sexualizing of an Epic’. Beowulf: on Film: Adaptations and Variations, edited by Nikolas Haydock and Edward L. Risden, 119-131. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co Publishers, 2013. Schipper, Bill. ‘All Talk: Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf, Wealtheow, and Grendel’s Mother’. Literature Compass 8. 7 (2011): 423-426. Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. Abingdon: Routledge, 1994. Taylor, Paul Beekman. ‘Beowulf’s Second Grendel’s Fight’. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86 (1985): 62-69.

214

‘She’s No Hag’

__________________________________________________________________ Ussher, Jane M. Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body. East Sussex: Routledge, 2006. Wrenn, Charles Leslie, ed. Beowulf: with the Finnesburg Fragment. Boston: Harrap, 1953. Almudena Nido is an independent researcher at the University of Oviedo (Spain) whose research focuses on Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf and the interactions of power and resistance in the poem. Currently her research and writing are devoted to analysing the monsters in Beowulf as figures of resistance in space and discourse.

Cyclopes, Hundred-Handers, Typhon and the Mechanisms of Monstrosity in Hesiod’s Theogony Camila Aline Zanon Abstract Hesiod’s Theogony is one of the main written sources for archaic Greek cosmogony. Broadly speaking, the poem tells about how the cosmos came to be, its organization and how Zeus came to rule over it. In order to become its ruler, Zeus had to face some of the fiercest enemies such as the Titans, Prometheus and Typhon; this last one considered a monstrous being, with a hundred serpent heads and fire breathing eyes. On the other hand, to win over such creatures he needed the most powerful weapons, one of them being the thunderbolt, his main source of power. But this very fundamental weapon was given to him by a set of considered monstrous figures: the Cyclopes, one-eyed children of the Earth and Sky and brothers to the Titans themselves. Another element of Zeus’ victory over the Titans is the rescue operated by him of the other set of monstrous brothers, and also sons of Earth and Sky, the Hundred-handers, who work as Zeus’ heavy artillery against the Titans, their own brothers. Cyclopes and Hundred-handers are Zeus’ allies while Typhon is his enemy, a difference that leads us to question if they must be considered under the same category of ‘monster’ in the poem. If so, what mechanisms of monstrosity operated that kind of distinction on their role on the order of the cosmos? If not, do theories of monstrosity, such as taxonomy, liminality or otherness, explain that difference? Is the monster category valid to think Cyclopes and Hundred-handers in the poem? Those are the main questions the paper intends to address in order to understand what lies behind the incorporation of figures considered monstrous under the rule of Zeus and, consequently, into the organized cosmos presented in the poem. Key Words: Hesiod, ancient Greek mythology, monsters, Cyclopes, Hundredhanders, Typhon. ***** 1. The Theogony and Its Monsters Hesiod’s Theogony is an ancient Greek poem that belongs to an archaic and oral tradition of poetry composed in hexameter verse. It narrates the beginning of the cosmos, from the primordial divinities to the reign of Zeus over all that exists. 1 Not exactly an epic poem such as the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, although they all use the same verse and belong to a tradition of poetry transmitted orally, Hesiod’s Theogony intertwines genealogies and narrative episodes to present the cosmos itself, its organization and how it came to be under the rule of Zeus. Among the

216 Cyclopes, Hundred-Handers, Typhon and the Mechanisms of Monstrosity __________________________________________________________________ immortals, and some heroes mentioned here and there, what we call ‘monsters’ also have roles to play in the cosmos presented in the poem. The so-called ‘catalogue of monsters’ (v. 270-335), for example, presents a variety of beings, all off-springs of Forkis and Keto, these two being children to Sea and Earth. The couple of siblings Forkis and Keto give birth to creatures such as the Gorgons, Ekhidna, Chimaera, Sphinx, and some of those children also begot their own set of off-springs, like Ekhidna, who gave birth to Cerberus and the Hydra. But the catalogue of monsters is not my main focus in this paper. For now, I will leave those creatures be, all of them very well accommodated and encapsulated in the catalogue, and I will turn myself to the creatures outside the catalogue, the ones that are not necessarily enclosed, but appear in some key episodes of the poem and of the configuration of the cosmos, which are the Cyclopes, their brothers Hundred-handers, and Typhon, half-brother to both of them. 2. Children of Earth and Sky: Titans, Cyclopes and Hundred-Handers Immediately after giving birth to twelve children, who will later be named Titans in the poem (v. 207-210), Earth (or Gaia), having mated with her own son Sky (or Uranus), also gives birth to two set of children, the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers. The Titans, having Kronos among them, do not receive any physical description and they are only listed in the poem. The Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers, on the other hand, will receive descriptions of eight and seven verses each, contrasting with their siblings being only named.2 The verses 139-153, dedicated to the description of the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers, have already been considered as a later interpolation of the text because they seem to break or interrupt the narrative flow, standing between the birth of Kronos and the episode of the castration of Sky, operated by Kronos himself, an episode in which the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers will not play any role. However, many reasons have been given against this interpolation idea, one of them considers the crucial role these creatures play in the poem and argues that the poet uses the concept of ring-composition technique, which is very common to oral poetry in general.3 Roughly speaking, a ring starts and finishes with the same or very similar information, enclosing what is important at the centre of it. In the case of the description of the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers, it is framed by the information that Kronos hated his father (v. 138) and that his father, Sky, hated all his children (v. 154-156). Besides putting the description of the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers at the centre of the ring, this enclosure emphasizes their importance not to the following episode, but to the poem as a whole, given the crucial role they will play for the establishment of Zeus’ rule over the cosmos. The Cyclopes are described as having violent hearts and are named individually. Each name relates to an aspect of the thunderbolt: Brontes is the

Camila Aline Zanon

217

__________________________________________________________________ equivalent of thunder, the sound; Steropes is the visual aspect; and Arges is what strikes people. They gave Zeus the thunderbolt and are said to be ‘like the gods in other regards, but only one eye was set in the middle of their foreheads’ (v. 142143). To their work, which means the thunderbolt they gave to Zeus, they apply a kind of raw physical strength and also a kind of physical force that is intentional and focused. They also apply contrivances to their work (v. 146), a kind of intelligence related to ingenuity and resourcefulness. The Hundred-handers also have individual names: Kottos, Gyges and Briareos. The meaning of their names, however, is more obscure than the Cyclopes’. We can only suggest that the set of consonants ‘br’ in Briareos can refer to the ‘br’ present in the word ‘obrimos’, used to qualify the Hundred-handers themselves, which means ‘strong’ or ‘mighty’. It could not be otherwise, since those creatures have one hundred arms/hands each, not to mention also fifty heads each. They are huge, strong, presumptuous, and also have the same kind of raw physical strength as their brothers, the Cyclopes, but unlike them, the Hundred-handers do not produce a weapon, instead they are themselves a powerful one. Right after the description of both groups and the information that Sky hates all his children, the poem tells us about Earth and her plan to set her children free from her own womb and to relieve her grievous pain: she creates an adamant sickle and Kronos uses it to castrate Sky, releasing Kronos’ brothers and sisters from Earth’s womb. At this moment, Sky names them ‘Titans’, a denomination that bears a double wordplay: on the one hand, the Greek verb ‘titainô’ (‘to stretch’) suggests that they ‘stretched’ or ‘strained’ themselves in order to castrate their father; on the other hand, the word ‘tisin’ (‘punishment’) means that they would be ‘punished’ for that action against their father (v. 207-210).4 So far in the poem we do not have reasons to think that the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers are not Titans themselves or were not released altogether with their brothers and sisters. It is only almost three hundred verses later (v. 501-506) that the poem tells us about the release of the Cyclopes, and some four hundred verses later (v. 624-626) that we are told about the release of the Hundred-handers. Both groups will be released by Zeus himself, not by Kronos and Earth’s sickle. Right after being born, Zeus releases the Cyclopes, his uncles, ‘whom their father had bound in his folly’ (v. 502). In return, as an act of gratitude, the Cyclopes give Zeus the thunderbolt, the most powerful weapon that helps Zeus to reign over mortals and immortals (v. 503-506). In turn, the Hundred-handers are released by Zeus in another context, which is the fight against the Titans, siblings to the Hundred-handers and uncles and aunts to Zeus, an episode known as Titanomachy (v. 617-721). The battles against them are enduring and neither the Titans nor the Olympians come out as winners. The Hundred-handers are still imprisoned by their father because of his hate of their appearance and size. The poem is very clear about their feelings: the Hundredhanders suffered with pain and much grief in their hearts (v. 621-624). Then, by

218 Cyclopes, Hundred-Handers, Typhon and the Mechanisms of Monstrosity __________________________________________________________________ Earth’s advice, Zeus releases them and they help Zeus fight the Titans throwing huge rocks over their brothers and sisters, each using their one hundred hands. Although they did not make a weapon to Zeus, like the Cyclopes did, they worked as heavy artillery against the Titans. While the poem does not inform us about the Cyclopes’ destiny after they give Zeus the thunderbolt, it does tell us what happens to the Hundred-handers after the victory over the Titans: they live by the bronze gates of Tartarus as Zeus’ faithful guards against the Titans, who are enclosed by those powerful gates made by Poseidon (v. 729-734). 3. Child of Earth and Tartarus: Typhon and the Threat to Zeus’ Rule I will now briefly turn my attention to Typhon. He is the only creature considered monstrous outside the catalogue of monsters that does not end up as Zeus’ ally; instead he is the ultimate enemy of Zeus in the poem (v. 820-880). After the Titans are expelled to Tartarus, Earth gives birth to Typhon, who has Tartarus himself as his father. Typhon has in his arms the same kind of raw physical strength as his half-brothers Cyclopes and Hundred-handers. He has tireless feet like the ones of a powerful god (v. 824). He has a hundred serpentheads, with dark tongues. Fire sparkles from his eyes ‘in his divine heads’ (v. 827). All of them are ‘talking-heads’, which speak in many different ways: sometimes to be understood by the gods, sometimes sounding like a bull mooing, sometimes like a lion, or like little dog puppies, or hissing (v. 829-835). The poem makes very clear that, if Zeus were not to see him right away and thundered strongly and harsh, Typhon would have ruled over mortals and immortals (v. 836-839). But Zeus manages to attack him with his thunderbolt and strikes all of Typhon’s ‘divine heads’. When Zeus strikes him, Typhon starts melting with Earth, but Zeus manages to throw him into Tartarus. Despite being imprisoned, Typhon still produces all the humid winds that destroy ships over the sea, leaving men defenceless, and also causing disarray over the fields and spoiling them with dust (v. 869-881). 4. Monsters or Deities? The Cyclopes, the Hundred-handers and Typhon are generally considered monsters of Greek mythology, as indicated by many books on the subject that put those creatures under the ‘monster’ category, not under ‘gods’ or ‘deities’. That labelling is mainly due to their appearance, I believe. But we all know that the concept of ‘monster’ is not bounded by that. We can call a murderer a ‘monster’ or simply a cruel person, or we can use ‘monster’ to refer to something huge or even someone that is highly successful in his/her field of expertise. 5 Although, when we call the Cyclopes, the Hundred-handers and Typhon monsters, we mainly refer to their appearance and do not think much about their roles, which, in the poem, set the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers apart from Typhon. But what does make

Camila Aline Zanon

219

__________________________________________________________________ Typhon Zeus’ enemy and the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers his allies? What mechanisms of monstrosity can possibly lie behind the different roles they play in the poem? If we assume they all fall into the category of ‘monsters’, mainly because of their appearance, why does Zeus release the Cyclopes and the Hundredhanders, but fight and imprison Typhon? Why is Typhon considered a threat and the others are not? Concerning the monster ‘category’ in Hesiod’s Theogony, and maybe in all Greek poetry in hexameter as well, the Greek word generally translated as ‘monster’ – pelôr in ancient Greek – has a similar meaning to monstrum in Latin, which is ‘portent’, ‘prodigy’, referring to something shown by the gods, but it also can mean ‘huge’ in its adjective form. The translation choice varies according to what is being called ‘pelôr’ and most of the times it is somewhat arbitrary. For example, in Hesiod’s Theogony, ‘pêlor’ and its correlated forms are most often used to refer to Earth (8 times out of 13), twice to refer to Ekhidna (daughter of Forkis and Keto), twice to Typhon and once to the sickle produced by Earth which will be used to castrate Sky. Scholars usually translate it as ‘huge’ when it comes to Earth and the sickle, but as ‘monster’ when it comes to Ekhidna and Typhon. Why is that? Why can Ekhidna and Typhon not be simply ‘huge’, like Earth and the sickle? Another word often translated as ‘monster’ is teras, which is used only once in the poem to refer to Tartarus, a personified place under Earth, like the Sky above it. Therefore, it is possible that the monster category in the poem does not correspond to our category and there is also a possibility that the category as we know it is simply non-existent in that poem, being a projection of a later category onto the poem. Maybe the Cyclopes, the Hundred-handers and Typhon are not considered monsters by the culture that produced those poems and are viewed rather as deities, like their siblings Titans.6 5. Theoretical and Cautious Approach In order to understand the mechanisms of monstrosity in Hesiod’s Theogony, I first tried the liminality approach. However, it seemed that all that liminality allowed me to say is that Cyclopes, Hundred-handers and Typhon are liminal creatures in the way that the first two groups remain almost away from the cosmos until they are released and so reinstated into the cosmos by Zeus, and that Typhon is prevented from participating in the cosmos under Zeus’ rule by being imprisoned in Tartarus. Or, more interestingly, that they are liminal because they stand in between the categories of deity and some other category that I honestly could not find in the poem. The classicist Jenny Clay, one of the few classicists to deal with monsters in Hesiod’s poem, puts this category as hybrids: the monstrous creatures are hybrids of the human and the bestial and they diverge from an anthropomorphic canonical form implied in the poem. Although the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers are not hybrids, she points out that the monsters outside the catalogue have a ‘multiplication of human or animal features or, conversely, a

220 Cyclopes, Hundred-Handers, Typhon and the Mechanisms of Monstrosity __________________________________________________________________ subtraction and isolation of features that usually occur in pairs’, which accounts for the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers.7 Although the Cyclopes have only one eye, let us not forget that the poem says they are ‘like the gods in other regards’ (v. 142) and that Typhon has god’s feet and he can speak in a way the gods understand. So, the question remained: if they are all liminal, what does set Typhon apart from the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers? Dan Sperber’s notion of monsters as ‘taxonomic aberration’ seemed to be more fruitful in this case, meaning that they do not fit a given taxonomic system or the mental frame responsible for ordering and explaining the world. Consequently, monsters are not only a physical threat but also a cognitive one, transgressing the limits imposed by that system, exposing how artificial the limits of the classification system are, and revealing the arbitrariness and fragility of culture itself.8 But it still does not answer the question of the different role the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers have as Zeus’ allies on the one hand, and Typhon as his enemy on the other, assuming they are all ‘taxonomic aberrations’. Finally, I tried to approach this matter with one of the most common theories of monstrosity: the otherness approach, although the Cyclopes, the Hundred-handers and Typhon are all other to Zeus. The Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers are born very early in the history of the cosmos; they belong to the generation of Kronos, Zeus’ father. To rule over the entire cosmos, Zeus incorporates in his new order very strong and powerful elements from the previous generation, and he is smartly selective about those elements. He frees the Cyclopes, the aspects of thunderbolt themselves, a very strong weapon, suitable to the most powerful of all beings. He frees the Hundred-handers, upon Earth’s cunning advice, in order to win the battle against the Titans. When his order is almost well-established, Earth mates with Tartarus and gives birth to Typhon, who endangers Zeus’ new order. Typhon breaks through this new order being a late child, a child that represents the old order of children of Earth, an intruder, a transgressor of the new established order threatening to bring the past right into the present. Despite the Cyclopes, the Hundred-handers and Typhon are all ‘other’ to Zeus, only Typhon poses a threat because he is the uninvited other from the distant past, the aberration of another time and order trying to rule over Zeus’ time and order. 5. Conclusion Regarding the mechanism of monstrosity that seems to be operating in Hesiod’s Theogony, it seems that it concerns rather a challenge to Zeus’ order than any sign of physical aberration the creatures might have. Another clue to this is the episode of Prometheus (v. 507-616), son of the Titan Iapetus. Prometheus is not usually considered a monster, but like Typhon he also defies Zeus’ order, and is punished for that. Prometheus and Typhon are punished by Zeus regardless their appearance because Zeus is merciless to anyone who poses any kind of threat to his order or simply challenges his decisions. It does not matter if we mortals consider them as

Camila Aline Zanon

221

__________________________________________________________________ having a monstrous appearance. What matters is Zeus’ own judgement of the menace they can represent against his rule and he does not seem to judge by appearance.

Notes 1

The edition of the Theogony used for this paper is Martin L. West, Hesiod, Theogony: Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1988 [1966]. The translation to English is the one by Glenn Most, Hesiod. Vol 1: Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia (Cambridge, Mass.; London, England: Harvard University Press), 2006. 2 Compare the short listing of names for the Titans and the more detailed description of the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handers in Most, Hesiod. Vol. 1, 1415, verses 129-153. 3 The point against the interpolation and in favour of ring-composition technique was convincingly defended by William G. Thalmann, Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1984, 13-14. 4 West, Hesiod, Theogony, 210. 5 For an attempt to broadly define monsters, see the seven theses proposed by Jeffrey J. Cohen ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-25. 6 Even if the creatures considered monstrous in ancient Greek hexametric poetry possibly have their origins in the Near East, it is important to understand how the culture that produced hexametric poetry perceived those creatures and how it renegotiated their value. 7 Jenny Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 151. 8 Dan Sperber, ‘Pourquoi les animaux parfaits, les hybrides et les monstres sont-ils bons à penser symboliquement’, L’Homme 15.2 (1975): 5-34.

Bibliography Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Clay, Jenny. Hesiod’s Cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cohen, Jeffrey J., ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

222 Cyclopes, Hundred-Handers, Typhon and the Mechanisms of Monstrosity __________________________________________________________________ Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2002 (1966). Sperber, Dan. ‘Pourquoi les animaux parfaits, les hybrides et les monstres sont-ils bons à penser symboliquement.’ L’Homme 15.2 (1975): 5-34. Thalmann, William G. Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. West, Martin L. Hesiod, Theogony: Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 (1966). Camila Aline Zanon has a scholarship from FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) in Brazil to study creatures considered monstrous in ancient Greek hexametric poetry, as a Ph.D. student at the University of São Paulo.