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The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, eds.)

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.3.2.0401

2161-2196

John Weslee Ellis-Etchison,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle amass a rich cache of scholarship spanning a diverse array of literary, cinematic, and cultural materials and traversing formidable temporal, geographic, and theoretical boundaries in their recent Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Though a cursory inspection might lead one to assume that such a variety of subjects bespeaks a disparate, unfocused critical trajectory or perhaps a frenetic lack of coherence, this is not the case. I dare say further inquiry clarifies how the range of work in this text demonstrates the ubiquitous allure the monstrous holds across time, space, and discipline. Simultaneously, its capacious scope signals the heretofore-unexplored expanse of critical terrain for which this research companion acts as a harbinger.Framing their companion in light of John Block Friedman's 1981 The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's 1996 Monster Theory: Reading Culture among others—including Bettina Bildhauer, Robert Mills, and Andy Orchard, just to name a few—Mittman and Dendle draw heavily on critical paradigms of the monstrous that have developed in the field of medieval studies. Yet they encourage their contributors to fly far afield in terms of the methodologies and subject matters of their respective projects. Less concerned with determining whether people have always believed in monsters, the impetus of this text lies in classifying and understanding what constitutes the monstrous. Moving beyond physical embodiment and the limits imposed by behavioral and cultural boundaries, the editors instead urge their contributors to explore the impact of monsters and the monstrous. They are ultimately concerned with assessing in what ways the idea of the monstrous can decenter, destabilize. In this respect, for the editors, the monstrous calls into question what and how we know, not only our environment but also, ourselves.The Companion disrupts a purely occidental epistemological standpoint through its infusion of global studies of monstrosity with studies of more familiar North American and European examples. Divided into loosely defined historical and theoretical sections, the book refuses to construct any particular chronological or geographic narrative, which Mittman observes to be no more or less arbitrary than any other way they might have chosen to arrange its contents. Understandably, with such a broad subject the text naturally tends to the episodic rather than the exhaustive, yet the authors whose work make up this volume ably maintain an enduring but flexible investigation into the monstrous which serves to illustrate that the more we know about our monsters the more we know about their social contexts.Opening the first section of the book, “History of Monstrosity,” Persephone Braham's “The Monstrous Caribbean” questions how figures of monstrosity—specifically cannibals, amazons, sirens, and zombies—persist as cultural identifiers for Haiti, the Caribbean, and other parts of Latin America, and traces these associations from their imposition by early European explorers to their contemporary uses in works of fiction and cinema that contextualize, undergird, and/or challenge these same connections.In her contribution “The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly,” Surekha Davies focuses on three strands of Renaissance teratology: divine prodigies, maternal impressions, and exotic monstrous races. She explores the foundations of these beliefs in classical works by Aristotle, Cicero, and Pliny the Elder, and then demonstrates how these build on one another through the centuries, reaching their apogee, perhaps, in the works of various eighteenth-century European authors.Henry John Drewel, in “Beauteous Beast,” investigates the protean depiction of this African and African Atlantic water divinity as mother, mistress, and monster. Exploring Mami Wata's visual history from traditional African arts, through her infusion with the European mermaid, then the Eastern snake charmer, Drewel shows how her progressive demonization—continuing even into contemporary representations—reflects the particular cultural needs of observers at specific instances.Debbie Felton's “Rejecting and Embracing the Monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome” scrutinizes the metaphorical transformation of cultural anxieties into monstrously hybridized creatures within classical mythology. Felton argues that the defeat of such monsters by harmonious gods (Zeus and Apollo) and heroic mortals (Perseus, Bellerophon, Heracles, and Odysseus) are examples of the masculine desire to control as well as humanity's perpetual and necessary struggle to bring order and culture to chaos.In “Early Modern Past to Postmodern Future,” Michael Dylan Foster articulates how abundance and variation, encyclopedic discourse, and ludic sensibilities converge in folkloric Japanese monster discourse to construct a plastic, flexible notion of monsters, or yōkai, casting them variously as objects of terror and delight, dread and hope. This, he argues, helps to explain their enduring popularity in domestic and international markets.Francesca Leoni examines two central but under-analyzed figures from Islamic literary tradition in “On the Monstrous in the Islamic Visual Tradition.” Turning a critical eye toward the tenth-century Annals of the Prophets and Kings, to investigate Iblis, the Islamic Satan, and an eleventh-century epic poem, “Book of Kings,” to inspect div-i safid, or white demon, Leoni's critical interest lies in understanding how being or becoming monstrous functions in these Medieval Islamic works.Michelle Osterfield Li's “Human of the Heart: Pitiful Oni in Medieval Japan” considers the relationship between oni, spirit-creatures associated with the human dead, and human behavior and emotions. Based on her reading of Buddhist texts, short stories, and poems, Li observes a progressive narrative over time. Although early tales of the spirits treat them as dispassionate—perhaps even vengeful—arbiters of karma, righting or punishing social and political wrongs, later tales reveal how the oni become compassionate through their interactions with people.In “The Maya ‘Cosmic Monster’ as a Political and Religious Symbol,” Matthew Looper examines the Mayan reverence for this hybridized crocodile, iguana, snake, and deer creature associated with cosmic renewal through its role as sacrificial victim. Once labeled “monstrous,” these creatures, Looper asserts, are better understood as sacred earth–sky manifestations fundamental to unlocking Mayan culture, and shed important light on issues such as its notion of creation and the structure of divine kingship.Karin Myhre, in “Monsters Lift the Veil,” examines the vital transversal of borders among the human and the animal, the living and the dead, and the mundane and the numinous. Through her study of traditional Chinese sources, Myhre recognizes how liminal spaces are fertile for the proliferation of monsters, and argues that while such boundaries are imperative to stable cultural meaning, their permeability is integral to the acquisition of extraordinary wisdom.Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson's “From Hideous to Hedonist” charts the literary treatment of monstrosity from the early nineteenth century to the fin de siècle, exploring texts by Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. They argue that dramatic changes in representation reflect an epistemological crisis for these authors and their social environs, as monstrosity shifts from being an aberration visited on a damnable few to a clandestine darkness that lurks below the consciousness of ordinary people.In his “Centaurs, Satyrs, and Cynocephali,” Karl Steel offers an insightful account of how medieval scholars—especially Jerome and Augustine—grappled with the limits of the human. Steel's patient analysis illuminates how confronting their own uncertain understanding of monstrous hybrids and other figures of exotic otherness forced these early thinkers not only to interrogate but also to rethink their own humanity.Concluding this section of the text, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock's “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture” surveys a series of interdependent movements that exemplify modern Western thought about the monstrous. Using modern popular films, television series, and books, Weinstock guides us through archetypical monsters, psychopaths, sociopolitical collectives, viruses, and natural disasters to illustrate a growing epistemic angst concerning the loss of easily discernable monstrosity.The second major section of the volume, “Critical Approaches to Monstrosity,” opens with Patricia MacCormack's “Posthuman Teratology,” which decenters the human as the litmus test for determining monstrosity. MacCormack, instead, endorses a concept of absolute mutability that radically alienates the human subject not only from the other but also from the self, and utilizes cyborgs, animalized body modification, and the ethical turn of the posthumanities to demonstrate that we are all necessarily monstrous assemblages.Sarah Alison Miller, in “Monstrous Sexuality,” considers the monsterization of female genitalia through a range of depictions—including portrayals of victimization like Scylla from classical mythology or Sin from Milton's Paradise Lost and images of the femme castatrice such as the heroine of the film Teeth, or even real-life examples, including the antirape condom and the female chastity belt—to argue for the female body's simultaneously visceral desirability and irreconcilable otherness.Shedding light on the critical conversation about intercultural engagement and monstrosity, in “Postcolonial Monsters: A Conversation with Partha Mitter,” the editors offer the transcript of a fascinating discussion that traverses the particularities of Indian artwork that appear monstrous to the Western eye, and reciprocally, European art that seems monstrous to non-Western audiences. The discussion also introduces into the debate considerations of nationalism and modernism to qualify aspects of Western, Middle Eastern, and Eastern constructions of monstrosity.Reveling in the uncertain boundary between identity categories, Dana Oswald, in “Monstrous Gender: Geographies of Ambiguity,” adopts a transhistorical approach to analyze monstrous gender in order to elucidate the categorical slippage that monsters represent. Oswald focuses on depictions of hypermasculine voracious appetites, hypersexual seductresses, as well as gender-bending and -blending individuals to highlight the superficial rigidity surrounding the mythic certainty of distinctly gendered bodies.In “Monstrosity and Race in the Late Middle Ages,” Debra Higgs Strickland offers a detailed account of the way theories about the monstrous races in the medieval period, including varieties of one-legged, giant-eared, cannibalistic, gargantuan, and/or dog-headed beings, were appropriated by Christian apologists and broadly employed to disenfranchise and defame figures embodying ethnic otherness including Jews, Muslims, Mongols, and Ethiopians, and which are vestigial in modern racist rhetoric.Closing the theoretical section of the text, Chet Van Duzer's essay, “Hic sunt dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters,” offers a thoughtful analysis of the geographical distribution of monsters on medieval and Renaissance maps, examining why some monsters were located on the periphery of the known world—in Africa, Asia, the Antipodes, the Oceans, and the New World—while others were depicted in close proximity to people. He also offers some thoughts about the mechanisms that brought some exotic monsters closer to home.As a conclusion, the editors offer a sober reminder of the way modern consumer culture has essentialized, bowdlerized, and commoditized the monstrous to an extreme degree. Dendle articulately and succinctly notes that while modern people have simultaneously elevated monsters to the zenith of tabloid infamy, sneering at past cultures as bucolic and superstitious for lacking the wherewithal to discern fact from fiction, we are blind to our own categorical slippages. The monsters with which we are so fascinated are gaining an ever-greater foothold, creeping into the realm of the possible. Touted by cryptozoologists and parapsychologists through popular media outlets, celebrity monstrosities like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and apparitions of the dearly departed challenge what we know, slowly altering our epistemological certitude. For Dendle, the monster, it seems, is ever at the gate, beckoning to be let in.Scholars of all stripes—especially monster aficionados from the humanities and social sciences—and those simply looking for a worthwhile read would do well to pick up this volume. The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous demonstrates critical breadth, while each of the essays shows an equal degree of depth. Moreover, though both its physical and financial heft are formidable, this tome's stylish prose and subject matter that artfully blends the pedantic with the popular lends itself nicely to use at all levels within the academy—as secondary material in the undergraduate classroom, as fodder for debate in a graduate student research project, or as a resource for professors who want to brush up on the ways by which well-defined periods and genres of literature intersect with this ever-growing, some might say monstrously so, field of scholarship.