Here be Monsters.

Monsters are highly polysemic — you can use them to “mean” almost anything. And the same monster can have four or five contradictory meanings in the same film or book.

Should we not include this polysemy in our very definition of Monster? That is, part of what’s monstrous about monsters is somehow this very agglutination of significance, these uncontrolled outgrowths of meaning. There is a passage in Zizek about Spielberg’s Jaws where how remarks on how the notable plurality of the meanings given to the shark is the key to its meaning. The shark’s monstrousness is produced retroactively by the fact that none of the proffered meaning stick to it. The failure of each successive meaning to enclose it seems to delineate, by negation, the magnitude of the monster. (In Othello, Iago’s evasive answers indicate some ‘monster in [his] thoughts’ which are producing the evasions. The evasions are the ripples formed by the hidden monster.)


Monstrousness is the name we give to what both generates yet refuses our interpretations. The very plurality of interpretations appears to have been generated by the monster itself. (And speaking of ‘generation’ isn’t there a persistent link between monstrosity and birth/ procreation? ‘The sleep of reason breeds monsters..’ the suggestion is of blind propagation.)

Caliban as monster. He is ‘servant-monster’ ‘man-monster’ and ‘fish-monster’ all within the space of 50 lines. Polymorphous, then, as well as polysemic. But isn’t what makes Caliban a definitive monster the fact of his botched-humanity? Don’t we typically see the monstrous as a deformation or mutation of humanity rather than a thing in its own right? In MND, what do the mechanicals say on Bottom’s transformation into an ass - “oh monstrous’. An ass itself would not be monstrous, but the warping of humanity, the becoming-other, this animal enhancement…here lies the monstrous. The monstrous is a protrusion of the human beyond the human. An eyeball bulging from the socket like a boiled egg, a tongue growing out of a neck, or men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders – all might meet with the cry ‘oh monstrous’! ‘Nature’ has been perverted, distended, re-arranged. Some fly has entered the Natural ointment. (Indeed, one thinks of ‘The Fly’ movie, where a tiny laboratory complication, a microscopic interference, produces the utterly monstrous.)

There is also a tradition according to which a monster as portent: ie, it’s a sign, an index of a Catastrophe. It points beyond itself, it is a crack or kink in nature through which presses the Horror. The monstrous is a grimace in the surface of reality that discloses some Other Thing - not necessarily ‘under the surface’, but some Thing which at least bends the surface out of true.


R.W. Dent, researching Shakespeare’s use of ‘monstrous ingratitude’ in Lear, cites the following: 'The name of men is too good for them (i.e. those guilty of ingratitude), seeing they are monsters in nature the which hath seeded a certain sense of thankfulnesse in all creatures' (from R.Allen Oderifferous Garden of Charitie). Ingratitude is 'monstrous', because it is unnatural, it seems that nature has omitted something, and this subtraction produces monsters. Some little irregularity in nature, some minor variation in the DNA (Nature’s own Symbolic Order) allows the monstrous to appear. The monstrous, not as a thing in its own right, but a function of some slip up, bodge, omission. ‘The sleep of reason breeds monsters’: the monstrous is something against which we must be constantly vigilant – we take our foot off the peddle, we take our hand of the lid, and the monstrous emerges. The monstrous creeps into reality trough a loophole of inattention.



Why is it that deep sea fish appear monstrous? After all they are only fish. Is it not that these appear as:

1.formless, lumps of proto-matter, blind and undeveloped life.

2. they do not fit into our available grids of classification – they appear as anomalies, inexplicable lapses in nature, often from another time, surviving bizarrely into the present.

3. they appear only as the distended or abnormal form of more familiar creatures, a series of botched experiments.



Satan, who represents Evil, the utterly vicious, is yet not a monster because he also fits absolutely into a certain moral universe, a certain symbolic order. What would be monstrous would be some pathological outgrowth within that moral order.

The monstrous is always something that breaks through, distorts, or simply refuses our Symbolic ways of organising the world, our various symbolic orders – whether these be Nature, Good/ Evil, or whatever. The monstrous is the presence within these of something foreign, but a foreignness which seems to be nothing more than a mutation within the familiar.

In a certain way, the monstrous belongs to the realm of appearance. Zizek:

But Christianity, and in its own way already--maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it--Buddhism, introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion, the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the universality of nirvana, or the Holy Spirit,

From the pre-Xian point of view, xianity can only appear monstrous. The ‘monstrous’ depends on the perceiving gaze, and which symbolic system one occupies. Perhaps the birth of the new is always destined to appear monstrous.

Notes.

Still to be explored: link between creation and the monstrous.

Q: Why mythic beasts creatures like satyrs and unicorns not 'monsters'?

[nb see comments for some v. interesting links and suggestions]