On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  The monster concept also continues to do significant work in our contemporary political sphere. In 2008 Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisor, Samantha Power, referred to Hillary Clinton as “a monster” and promptly lost her job. Any word that causes you to get fired is still carrying some heavy connotative baggage. George W. Bush regularly referred to the bills proposed by Congress that he intended to veto as “monstrous pieces of legislation.” And 2007 saw the beleaguered Karl Rove casting himself to various media outlets as a character in the monster epic Beowulf. While Capitol Hill was pressing for Rove’s resignation, he told Chris Wallace on Fox News, “Let’s face it, I mean, I’m a myth. You know, I’m Beowulf, you know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am, but they’re after me.”

  I INCLUDE ALL THESE DIVERSE ANECDOTES to illustrate that both the literal and the symbolic uses of monster are alive and well in our contemporary world. One will search in vain through this book to find a single compelling definition of monster. That’s not because I forgot to include one, but because I don’t think there is one. I am a proponent of a cognitive science position called prototype theory, a theory that began with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that conceptual and linguistic meaning is more like “family resemblance” than we previously thought. In earlier theories, from Aristotle to logical positivism, we assumed that every instance of bird or dog or bed or monster must satisfy an abstract essential definition. For example, if I want to know whether this thing before me is a circle, I see whether it fulfills the essential definition of a plane-sided figure with all points equidistant from the center. Wittgenstein, however, noticed that most things were not connected by a common definition, but instead shared overlapping similarities. His classic example of the game demonstrated that although some games share properties (e.g., baseball and football both use a ball, chess and tennis employ two competing sides, golf and poker and charades have certain overlaps), no one defining criterion can be said to capture all games. Instead, we link all these activities together through overlapping similarities, in the same way we recognize that Carol, Edward, Daniel, and David are all members of the same family, some sharing a similar nose, others sharing similar hair, others similar eyes, but none of them with all the same features or properties.7

  In more recent cognitive science circles this way of thinking about categorization has come to be called prototype theory.8 When I say or think bird, some more or less determinate bird comes into my mind’s eye; it looks more like a robin than an albatross or a penguin. For many people, a robinlike bird is the conceptual prototype of bird, and other birds are closer or further away from that prototype. The duck, falcon, and ostrich can be conceptually mapped in varying distances from my prototype image of a bird. Each bird fulfills some of the criteria of bird (e.g., has feathers, flies, is oviparous and beaked), but none of them fulfills all the criteria. There is no definition of bird that wouldn’t eventually leave some bird out.

  The term and the concept of monster is a prototype category. Like bird, there may be environmentally specific archetypes for a clan’s central threat, and we might even draw up a general taxonomy of types: “crawlers” (spider-type monsters), “slitherers” (snake-like monsters), “collosals” (giant creatures), “hybrids” (mixed-species creatures), “possessors” (spirits, specters, etc.), and “parasites” (infectious blood-suckers, etc.). But functionally speaking they probably appear and reappear in our stories and in our artwork because they help us (and helped our ancestors) navigate the dangers of our environment. The monster archetype seems to appear in every culture’s artwork. This suggests that stories about monster threats and heroic conquests provide us with a ritualized, rehearsable simulation of reality, a virtual way to represent the forces of nature, the threats from other animals, and the dangers of human social interaction.

  In this book I have been touring the map of related properties or qualities that we call monstrous. Each era expresses different fascinations with monsters—medieval Christians focused on demons, the Gilded Age had a penchant for freaks—but some prototypical qualities unite the family of monsters, albeit loosely. We have seen throughout this book, for example, that most monsters cannot be reasoned with. Monsters are generally ugly and inspire horror. Monsters are unnatural. Monsters are overwhelmingly powerful. Monsters are evil. Monsters are misunderstood. Monsters cannot be understood. These recognizable monster qualities coalesce into cultural prototypes, such as Frankenstein’s creature and St. Anthony’s demons, and they reflect the fears of specific eras. But they also reflect more universal human anxieties and cognitive tendencies, the stuff that gives us human solidarity with the ancient Greeks, the medievals, and, as would be seen in more comparative histories, Asians, Middle Easterners, Native Americans, and others.

  By now the reader has surely noticed some continuities over historical epochs. Yes, certain aspects of monsters are historically provincial and relative, irrevocably situated in context, but some show perennial persistence. One notices, for example, the recurrent way that inner monstrosity is supposed to manifest itself on the physical body of the creature; evil and ugly are enduring correlations. Pliny the Elder argued that physiognomy reflected one’s moral character, and monsters looked ugly for that reason. The Victorian criminologist Cesare Lombroso continued the long-standing connection by arguing that malformed faces betray atavistic, savage characters. Even the recent Hollywood film 300 has been criticized for portraying enemy Persians as repulsively ugly. The correlation of moral character and physical morphology is an enduring aspect of monsterology.

  Consider some other repetitions in monster history. The hugely popular tradition of a monster zone, articulated in the legend of Alexander’s gates, is alive and well today. Recall that Alexander’s gates were supposed to contain the worst monsters that Christianity and Islam could imagine. The monster zone was a real feature of medieval and Renaissance geography. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional Mordor continued the tradition of an enclosed land of monsters always threatening to overcome their containment. And though the literal gates have fallen away, our contemporary news media report daily on the mysterious and impenetrable “tribal zone” in northern Pakistan. Military and news media cannot penetrate the difficult region where Osama bin Laden and his “evil horde” reside. The tribal zone has a rich connotative life, one that draws on centuries of mythmaking, xenophobia, and a genuine human need to map the headquarters of evil.9

  Another recurring leitmotif of monsterology has been the question of how we meet the threat. Usually monsters are for fighting. We examined the way that heroes, from Alexander to Beowulf, define themselves by how they meet the monsters in the field. Thomas R. Pynchon gives us a heroic picture of modern technophobia, a picture that underscores the idea that monsters may come and go, but what they represent persists. Luddites, Pynchon suggests, should be respected because they’re fighting the machines on our behalf: “When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don’t we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass—the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero—who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?”10 The Badass does not negotiate or try to reason with monsters because monsters cannot be reasoned with. The Badass is an imagined force with the power to meet the overwhelming monster force. Whether the monsters are the giant serpents of Alexander’s letter to Aristotle or the robot assassins of sci-fi, they similarly threaten annihilation and need aggressive combat in response.

  Yet another recurring theme in our natural history of monsters has been the prototype of demonic possession. From Medea’s murderous loss of control to the demon possessions of the Malleus Malificarum and the monsters of the Id, we have yearned to express one of the greatest human fears: the loss of freewill agency. The phenomenological experience of losing one’s self is familiar enough to anyone who’s had too much to drink, who’s played the fool in love, who’s felt humiliated and then rageful, or who’s lived in a metaphorical or a lite
ral state of slavery. The “empirical data of freedom” (a truant experience for some philosophical systems) might be best described negatively as how one feels when not compelled by this list of coercions— or positively described, the feeling of being somewhat in control. Monsters of demonic possession are imaginative expressions of this loss of control. The specific face of the monster will vary from culture to culture, but the universal dimension seems undeniable.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. The coelacanths are closely related to lungfishes. They were believed to be extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period, but a live specimen was found off the east coast of South Africa in 1938. Since then they have also been captured in the Comoros, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar. Giant squids were thought to be mythical, but we now understand them to be real members of the Architeuthidae family. They can grow to be as large as forty-four feet long, although some reports go as large as sixty feet. In 2004 a group of Japanese researchers from the National Science Museum of Japan documented the behemoth in its natural deep-ocean habitat, and in December 2006 the same team caught a small specimen (twenty-four feet) off the Ogasawara Islands. The team leader, Tsunemi Kubodera, conjectures that there are many giant squid living very deep and providing a large part of the sperm whale’s substantial diet. In “Where Wonders Await Us,” Tim Flannery writes, “Studies of squid beaks taken from the bellies of such whales reveal that for the great majority of squid families, the very smallest squid eaten by the whales exceeds in size the largest example ever caught by a scientist” (New York Review of Books, December 20, 2007). Also consult the writings of Richard Ellis, a giant squid expert, including Monsters of the Sea (Lyon’s Press, 2006) and The Search for the Giant Squid (Penguin, 1999).

  2. Quoted in Flannery, “Where Wonders Await Us.”

  3. The Bible refers to sea monsters regularly. See Psalms 74:13, Genesis 1:21, Isaiah 51:9, Job 41, and the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Thomas Hobbes famously uses the giant sea monster as a metaphor for his discussion of the social commonwealth in Leviathan (1651). Remember also Proteus from Homer’s Odyssey, and of course Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851).

  4. More detailed comparisons can be found in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Murray, 1872).

  5. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, in Darwin, edited by Philip Appleman, 2nd ed. (Norton, 1979).

  6. Tim Flannery, “Queens of the Web,” New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008.

  7. For a similar evolutionary approach, see David Jones, Instinct for Dragons (Routledge, 2002), in which he traces our dragon mythophobias to prehistoric fears of raptors, large cats, and snakes.

  8. In their book The Evolution of Ethics (1985), Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson argue, “Our minds are not tabulae rasae, but moulded according to certain dispositions. These dispositions…incline us to particular courses of action, such as learning rapidly to fear heights and snakes, although they certainly do not lock us, ant like, into undeviating behaviour.” In The Modularity of Mind (MIT Press, 1983) and elsewhere, the philosopher Jerry Fodor surveys the thesis that the mind may be more “modular” than we previously thought, and strong phobias may be evidence of one of these modules, each module being like a hard-wired, preset computer that evolved for guiding human thinking and behaving. Fodor maintains the primacy of a general adaptive intelligence (an open information system) and does not want to reduce the mind to these modules, but theoretical room has been made to include these modules in the wider frame of our cognition model.

  9. When Darwin read Plato’s theory of innate ideas, as articulated in the Phaedo, he scandalously updated the ancient doctrine by suggesting (in his notebooks) that we think of these deep concepts, such as Justice and Beauty, as successful descendants of our ancestral “monkey” minds. See Notebook M, 1838.

  10. The Hunterian collection, named after the naturalist John Hunter (1728–1793), is housed in the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.

  11. Though it also needs to be pointed out that many “freaks” marketed themselves and profited nicely from the cultural institutions of curiosity. For example, Charles O’Brien (the “Irish Giant”), General Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton), Chang and Eng Bunker (the Siamese Twins), and many others all capitalized on their unique gifts and benefited financially.

  12. Milgram began the study in 1961, around the time of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, but a full analysis can be found in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (HarperCollins).

  13. See Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapter 13. In a later work, Hiding from Humanity (Princeton, 2006), Nussbaum cautions against the tendency to import moral disgust into the legal domain. Criminalizing those who disgust us is common but unfair and illustrates a neurotic impulse toward purification on the part of society rather than a legal transgression on the part of the accused.

  14. Which is why the Greeks believed that one cannot be considered happy until one’s life is over. For example, see Aristotle’s definition of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics, book I, part IX.

  15. In the indoctrination propaganda of the time, Angkar became a looming abstract Big Brother to the young boys who were essentially abducted into Khmer Rouge service. Khmer people grew to fear Angkar, to love Angkar, to kill for Angkar, or at least to pretend to. See John Marston, “Democratic Kampuchea and the Idea of Modernity,” in Cambodia Emerges from the Past, edited by Judy Ledgerwood (Northern Illinois University Press, 2002).

  16. The damaging agricultural policies of the early Khmer Rouge, inspired by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, were disastrous and left tens of thousands of people starving, ill, and exhausted. People were being forced to perform Herculean manual labor efforts to recreate the countryside with new dams and expansive field plots, but it was too much too soon for a labor force that was already weak and famished. Pol Pot and Angkar interpreted this failure as a corruption and betrayal from within and set about a paranoid witch hunt that resulted partly in the S21 catastrophe.

  17. See Sam Keen’s PBS documentary Faces of the Enemy (originally airing in 1987; re-released on DVD in 2004) for an eerie sequence in which Keen sits down for a meeting with a death row inmate, David Rice. Keen confronts Rice, who violently murdered a family, and struggles to articulate his changing perception of the criminal.

  18. Around the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), the dragon’s appearance consolidated into its familiar form, having a snake body, the scales and tail of a fish, stag-like antlers, the face of a camel, the ears of a bull, eagle-like talons, the feet of a tiger, and the eyes of a demon. Often it is portrayed with a flaming pearl under its chin.

  19. Frankenstein, vol. 3, chapter 3.

  20. Long before Christian and Jewish versions of the animated giant, we had the pagan giant bronze man, Talos. He served King Minos as the guardian of Crete, running around the island three times a day and throwing giant boulders at ships that might be trying to invade. His body was made of bronze and his blood was liquid lead. Jason and Medea, who sought to land at Crete, tricked the giant and caused him to fall off a cliff. The fall caused the nail that closed Talos’s vein to fall out and his lead blood drained away.

  21. For example, many biologically oriented science fiction stories invoke and exploit the host-parasite relation in compelling ways. But such a notion of monster can be found, not just in imagination, but in Nature Herself. Consider the disturbing host-parasite relationships of Ichneumonidae, or the digger wasps, for example, and their various prey (usually caterpillars). These wasps lay their eggs inside the tissues of living caterpillars, and when the larvae hatch out they eat the still living caterpillar from the inside out. What is perhaps even more gruesome is that the wasp paralyzes the caterpillar so that it cannot move, but its continual metabolic process keeps its body fresh for consumption. It’s a shuddering thou
ght to consider that the hapless caterpillar can feel itself being slowly eaten alive and can do nothing about it.

  22. Animism, contrary to most Western portrayals, has its own empirical foundation, one that may be every bit as rational as ours. Animism can be defined as the belief that there are many kinds of persons in this world, only some of whom are human. For an animist it is crucial to placate and honor these other spirit-persons. But it’s important to remember that the daily lives of people in the developing world are not filled with the kinds of independence, predictability, and freedom that we in the developed world enjoy. Frequently you do not choose your spouse, your work, your number of children; in fact, you don’t choose much of anything when you are very poor and tied to the survival of your family. In that world, where life really is capricious and out of your control, animism seems empirically corroborated.

  23. See Teresa A. Goddu, “Vampire Gothic,” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (spring 1999).

  24. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, “Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, edited by M. Johnson (University of Minnesota Press, 1981). Also see Johnson and Lakoff’s important Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Many people read Johnson and Lakoff as social constructionists who see these deep metaphors as malleable cultural products, liberating us from the deterministic tenor of the evolutionary psychologists. But Johnson and Lakoff are clear that our metaphors of thinking emerge out of our bodily existence, and so it seems but a short step to unify the philosophy of metaphor with the biology of evolution. Even if language (and its deep metaphors) should be studied as an irreducible autonomous reality, the reasons for doing so are largely methodological, and there’s no reason to believe that biology and cognitive linguistics cannot be two sides of the same coin. The monster may eventually turn out to be a discursive entity that shapes our thinking and communicating, but also a mental module that has been shaped by our evolutionary history.