The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ed. AsaSimon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. 558 pp. $149.95 cloth / $64.95 paper.
2015; Wiley; Volume: 48; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jpcu.12366
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoWhat is it about monsters and the monstrous? Are monsters a part of the natural order or a deviation from it? Consider some of the usual suspects from ancient Greek mythology and literature like Polyphemus, the Minotaur, and Sophocles’ Ajax, figures who reappear like a bad penny. The Cyclops, for example, resurfaces as the murderous one-eyed Bible salesman in O Bother, Where Art Thou?; the Minotaur pops up again in rural Louisiana as a serial killer in season one of HBO's new crime drama True Detective; and Ajax's fate could be the story of any traumatized combat veteran who ends up on the skids or in the news. Even so, things weren't always so bad in the ancient world. In a nuanced chapter on Greek and Roman mythology and literature, D. Felton shows how the defeat of monsters and the monstrous was a celebratory fable about the emergence of reason and civilization out of darkness and chaos. Goya's reworking of the same material centuries later somewhat blurs this triumphalist allegory. Montaigne's brief essay “Of a Monstrous Child” (c. 1580) argued that phenomena, apparently contrary to custom and experience, actually reveal God's provision for a hidden order in nature, and he was not the first to make such a claim. It would appear that the plasticity of monsters is part of their dark allure wherever or however they materialize: in legend or propaganda, in pseudo-ethnography and cryptozoology, in literature and film (imaginary travelogues, vampires, etc.), or in recent monster/monstrous-themed television shows like Dexter, The Walking Dead, and American Horror Story. Monsters endure because, regardless of cultural specifics, they are at once liminal and familiar, an argument famously made by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In fact, the monster/monstrous nexus might be the all-time pop culture motif after love/romance; like romantic love, the exoticism associated with certain monsters re-enchants and redeems a fallen world. According to one commentator, our enduring preoccupation with Bigfoot testifies to this curious longing for a mythic “Ecomessiah” (445). The book on review here offers a broad synthetic treatment in the relatively new field of monster studies although interest in the topic dates from antiquity to the present. In his introduction, the editor identifies the impetus for the project as an effort “to expand productively the scope of the monstrous, a subject that is, by its nature, heterogeneous or even heterodox” (5). Two sections on history and critical approaches to monsters provide the reader with a balance of contextual and analytical information gleaned from diverse geographical regions and eras. The results of this research are sometimes disturbing, revealing obscure discursive networks that deploy images and narratives of monsters and the monstrous to justify and perpetuate a variety of questionable acts and beliefs. In some instances, a generic monster figure evolves according to cultural milieu. For instance, the chapter on the vagina dentata surveys this projection of male sexual anxiety from Plato through the film Teeth (2007) with women depicted as predators or victims. In chapters on the Caribbean, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and native African religious deities, production of the “monstrous” delegitimizes targeted beliefs and practices while stripping indigenous people of their human identity. It comes as no surprise in this setting that, in addition to flora and fauna, cannibals and monstrous women figure prominently in narratives laced with fear, desire, and revulsion. The transgressive “other” is both a lure and a snare. Instead of symbolizing a rich, complex cultural heritage, an African water deity is demonized by certain observers simply because she emerged from a non-Christian belief system. As Surekha Davies notes, Aristotle, Cicero, and medieval Christian thinkers produced a conceptual framework in which monsters represented a departure from nature or an omen of natural disaster and political upheaval. In contrast, Herodotus and especially Pliny the Elder described entire races of monstrous/marvelous creatures living in remote regions of the world as taxonomic exercises or as entertainment. Writing on the heels of Nero's reign of terror, Pliny's Naturalis Historia might be considered an early instance of literary world-building as a retreat from an intolerable political situation. Across a broad range of opinion in the medieval and renaissance periods malformed children were viewed as cautionary signs of maternal failure and wrong living. Images of monsters were used in religious propaganda to undermine opposition beliefs and to shore up the faithful. Since most people probably couldn't read during this period, enlightenment critiques of monsters and the monstrous likely had little impact on these popular notions. Still, there is a link from Pliny's monsters and the first Bartholomew Fair (1133) to later historical figures like Joseph Merrick (the “Elephant Man”) and P.T. Barnum's “Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy,” except that Fedor Jeftichew—who barked and growled as part of his sideshow act—reportedly spoke Russian, German, and English backstage. The Japanese experience of monsters and the monstrous is of course deeply inflected by their atom bomb experience in WWII. Collective Japanese anxiety over this event as well as Cold War tensions found prominent expression in the Godzilla franchise. More traditional monster lore embraced playful animism and parlor games that feature encyclopedic monster taxonomies. The Japanese “monstrous” also appears in political allegory and benign environmental propaganda; along the way came the global Pokémon craze. The scope and analytic rigor of this volume is evident in those chapters which closely examine monster iconography in political, religious, and aesthetic realms, with source material taken from cultural artifacts like Mayan hieroglyphs (cosmography) and Chinese ceremonial costumes (ritual). Here, the monster figure is often used in narratives which legitimize political violence/order within a social grouping; alternately, the monster functions as the guardian of boundaries, the violation of which could result in an epiphany or a permanent fatal error. Starting in the nineteenth century, the monster is used to critique assumptions about “normalcy” rooted in broadly accepted binary constructs. The chapter by Six and Thompson takes well-known literary figures like Frankenstein, Quasimodo, Dr. Jekyll, and Dorian Gray to suggest that monstrosity is latent in the human order and not exclusive to the Other. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock takes this perspective further by proposing that the monster in contemporary popular culture signifies a crisis in visibility associated with pervasive conspiracy narratives rooted in paranoia and concealed threats. Hence, it isn't Quasimodo or the Elephant Man or even The Blob that should worry us but the mild-mannered sociopathic serial killer next door (Dexter) or convoluted corporate-government intrigues or perhaps the prospect of alien abduction or infiltration by lethal viruses (The X-Files, Millennium, etc.) Other chapters on gender, borderland monsters, colonialism and race, and video gaming point to the richness of this research companion. With its thoughtful editorial curation and extensive bibliography, this collection of essays on monsters and the monstrous provides a valuable introduction to a complex subject.
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