BABEL CFP: Monstrous Binaries: Monster Theories in/at Play

Monstrous Binaries: Monster Theories in/at Play

“It is conventional to call ‘monster’ any blending of dissonant elements. I call ‘monster’ every original inexhaustible beauty.”—Alfred Jarry, “Les Monstres”

Whether or not it is beautiful, the monster is certainly inexhaustible. The BABEL Working Group invites submissions that explore the inexhaustibility of literary monsters as they both demand and defy binary characterizations. How might binary models explain, occlude, or displace other monstrous possibilities? The invitation is purposefully open and might include approaches that range from postcolonial theory to Russian Formalism, from queer theory to ecocriticism (and all points in between/beyond).

The panel will be a part of the 2009 SEMA conference, and its goal is to bring together disparate readings of monsters, letting them commingle, coexist, and (perhaps) coalesce for a few minutes. Abstracts should be for papers fifteen minutes in length. They may offer focused examinations of primary texts or more abstract, theoretical discussions, but all submissions should make explicit their theoretical genealogy.

A *partial* list of approaches might include: Kristeva, Foucault, Girard, Plumwood, Derrida, Bakhtin, Lacan, Cohen, Levi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Propp, Zizek, Canguilhem, Butler, and/or Freud.

Deadline for Submission: 11 June 2009

Send Abstracts (150-250 words) to:

Timothy Asay (tasay@uoregon.edu) or

Marcus Hensel (mhensel1@uoregon.edu)

BABEL Working Group: http://www.siue.edu/babel/Babel-Home.htm

SEMA 2009 Conference: http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/site/gShQhq/sema2009

...at least I think so right now.

That is how all studies--medieval or otherwise--should end. I've been reading Allen Frantzen's Desire for Origins, and in advocating an always-tentative, always-becoming notion of the past, he states: "the layers of the past cannot readily be reduced to a single plot without loss" (107). (By "plot" he's referring to the causal, linear view of history that dominates Anglo-Saxon studies in particular and medieval studies in general.)

It seems to me that loss is one thing that seems to be animating a lot of really interesting work on the Middle Ages right now. I can remember Jorie Woods, the person most responsible for me being a medievalist, bringing in lesbian love letters and Hrotsvit of Gandersheim and Poetria Nova--and really blowing my mind by making me realize there was more to medieval literature than Arthuriana and Beowulf. Liz Scala wrote a great book on absent narratives. Carolyn Dinshaw wrote a book that almost compels one to think about aspects of the Middle Ages that we've been ignoring for centuries. Of course, Jeffrey Cohen did more to direct real thinking about medieval monsters than Tolkien could have dreamed of. And he's been joined by Eileen Joy, Karl Steel, and Mary Kate Hurley who are pursuing different margins--until-now-lost themes, characters, motifs, and texts--over at the ITM. But it strikes me that this is all about anxiety of loss: a loss of the past, a lost of MSS, a loss of knowledge, a loss of identity that is based not just on what we've inherited but also the sort of thinking and methodology we've inherited. (EDIT: WSJ just published something about missing texts.)

Sometimes the paths have been blazed so well and made so inviting by people like Tolkien and Benson that we don't even realized there might be another way. Maybe the road home is the most convenient and efficient way to get there, but sometimes you just have to be like Cheever's Neddy and decide to swim home via your neighbors' swimming pools. At first it's ridiculous (aren't firsts almost always ridiculous, though?), and then people will resent it, but that's because it's outside the norm.

If we could get away from a plotted, linear view of medieval studies, we might be able to (re)develop or (re)construct some of those other paths that have been abandoned. We all know from experience that early work we do in a field or on a topic is often embarrassingly wrong. So why do we pretend when we're writing it that it's anything more than a giant, researched, well-thought-out conditional statement? Doesn't refusing to acknowledge the contingency in all of our work really push out other ways of seeing Anglo-Saxon England? It's not necessarily slippery-slope relativism to admit what we say could change tomorrow, next month, next decade (let's take a tip from Barthes or, if you like, Thomas Merton, who said "My ideas are always changing, always moving around one center. And I am always seeing that center from somewhere else. Hence I will always be accused of inconsistency. But I will no longer be there to hear the accusation.") Why shouldn't everyone admit it? Why shouldn't every paper, every thesis, every dissertation end with "...at least I think so right now"?

[NB: The picture at the top of this blog entry is Eva Hesse's "Contingent," a series of hanging panels made of cheesecloth-type fabric and plastic. The piece itself, if it is even possible to see it and has not degraded to a catastrophic extent, is always contingent--on time, on environment, on gravity. All of these things will change it from year to year (the cheesecloth will stretch and change the length of the pieces). Hesse said:

Piece is in many parts.
Each in itself is a complete statement,
together am not certain how it will be....
textures coarse, rough, changing.
see through, non see through, consistent, inconsistent.
enclosed tightly by glass like encasement just hanging there.
then more, others, will they hang there in the same way?
try a continuous flowing one.
try some random closely spaced.
try some distant far spaced.
they are tight and formal but very ethereal, sensitive, fragile.
see through mostly
not painting, not sculpture, it's there though.
I remember I wanted to get to non art, non connotive,
non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing,
everything, but of another kind, vision, sort.
from a total other reference point, is it possible?]

Blindness is a Foucauldian Nightmare

Unfortunately, I heard about this book via the movie. I haven't seen it, but that is how I became aware of its presence. I figured that I liked Borges and Marquez, so why not stereotype and see if I'd like Saramago, too. I know that Borges and Marquez are very different writers--as far as content and style--but there is a strong magic realism element in both. Though Borges' work is more Anglo-Saxon in its prose, the fantastic stories are told with such a matter-of-fact tone and mixed so seamlessly into "reality" that it does remind me of magic realism (I'm thinking specifically of his short stories like "The Gospel According to St. Mark," "The Library of Babel," and "The Circular Ruins").

At any rate, Blindness sort of fits into the preconceived notion I created. It is certainly a good story and an even better idea. The plague that--one would think--would equalize the population actually stratifies it, fragments it, and animalizes it. In fact, the society (predictably) crumbles in fairly predictable ways.

The story seems to overlap with Michel Foucault's ideas of power--those he outlines in Discipline and Punish--especially in "Panopticism." The strength of Saramago's work over Foucault's is that it gives a human dimension to Foucault's ideas; it puts flesh (in both beautiful and disgusting ways) on Foucault's skeleton, so to speak. At the beginning, when the plague first breaks out and those suffering from it are quarrantined in an abandoned asylum (the symbolism there should be noted and could be another sly nod to Foucault's Birth of the Clinic); at first, there is order, announcements, a plan, and regular(ish) deliveries of food. This is like the early versions of power structures that Foucault describes in the Middle Ages and Renaissance when The Plague would break out. The towns would be compartmentalized, policed, and put under the strong, heirarchal control of non-infected outsiders. The infected were forced to stay in their homes on pain of death--which is analagous to the blind being forced to stay in the asylum under pain of death.

But as the plague spreads and the government obviously cannot contain it or control the growing anarchy, the social order breaks down and the idea of Panopticism begins to take hold. The thugs extort all the valuables from the other blind internees, but, of course, they couldn't search thoroughly--so it was really up to all the other fellow internees to make sure everyone gave everything they had (everyone's food depended on it). So, too, with the prostitution; the thugs don't seem to care how many women the different wards send. They say that if there are 7 women and they only send 6, those 6 will just have to work harder, thus putting the pressure on the other woman to go along with the plan.

All in all, it's an interesting meditation on what happens when the idea of "greater good of society" or even the idea of "society" is rendered obsolete.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE SIGNIFIED BEHIND THE CURTAIN

A half-baked musing on that old chestnut, the linguistic sign.

In preparation for my Orals Exam, I'm going back and reading a small portion of de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (for the part about meaning being created by difference/negation). Funnily enough, there are still notes in my theory reader from four years ago when I was reading it on lunch breaks while (not)working at Brown McCarroll (NB: I do not recommend reading Jaobson's "Two Aspects of Language" and then returning to the world of asbestos litigation...talk about aphasia...). Looking back on those notes (and diagrams), I didn't get Saussure's ideas. At all.

Sure, I understood that the signifier and signified have an arbitrary relationship, but I guess I had read too much Lacan by that point to see that the whole play of signifiers idea flows naturally out of Saussure's ideas.

"On the one hand the concept [aka, the signified] seems to be the counterpart of the sound-image [aka, the signifier], and on the other hand the sign itself is in turn the counterpart of the other signs of language."

Saussure here seems to be doing the legwork for what Lacan thinks he discovered--disconnecting the function of the linguistic sign from the ontology of it.* It seems to me that a Saussurian linguistic sign is like the Wizard of Oz. There is the concept/signified (the actual Kansan huckster, Professor Marvel) and then there is the sound-image/signifier (the All-Powerful Oz). One is a disappointment once the curtain has been pulled away; the other is a lot of hype, hot air, and tricks. The one hides and is (mis)represented by the sound-image/signifier, which interacts with others and (re)creates the concept/signified as it does so. Remember, there'd be nothing sad or disappointing about Professor Marvel if it hadn't been for the representation of The Wizard of Oz, but it's also true that The Wizard began to function independently of its concept/signifier the longer it interacted with those in the land of Oz.

*Yeah, I know Lacan references Saussure often enough, but I haven't seen anything that gives him the sort of finder's-fee credit he probably deserves. It could be out there, but I just haven't seen it.

It's Always the Last Place you Look, or A Revised Orals Prospectus

[Author's Note: This is the last version of my Orals prospectus. If this one doesn't go through, I think I'm quitting. Really. It is a version of what came before, but if you compare the two, there are very few superficial similarities...which I a good thing, I hope.]

Monsters and the Construction of Community in Medieval Literature

A little more than seventy years ago, the venerable J.R.R. Tolkien urged Anglo-Saxonists to rethink their approach to Beowulf. Up to this point it had often been considered a poor example of Old English poetry, but Tolkien thought in order to understand the poem as a poem one must examine its monsters. They were not, as the prevailing wisdom ran, “an inexplicable blunder of taste”; instead, he argued they were “essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem.”[1] Thus began the genealogy of monster theory in medieval literature.

Over the years the approaches have changed: in 1936 Tolkien thought a study of Beowulf’s monsters would lead to the recognition of its literary merits and its placement within a specific genre. Contemporary medieval monster theorists, however, are more attracted to the analysis of monsters as boundary figures. The general shift in approach may have moved from formalism and structuralism to post-structuralism and cultural criticism, but the focus has never strayed from the monsters themselves.

Whether those monsters are medieval creations like the Grendelkin and Chretien de Troyes’ Harpin or their more contemporary brethren like Dracula and Freddy Kreuger, they may be characterized by a single tenet: monsters are what they are because they are both physically and culturally transgressive.[2] This formulation transcends both cultural and historical contexts, but how monsters break these rules, on the other hand, is wholly dependent on the specifics of culture and history. Beowulf’s Grendel and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are not the same in their goals or methods, but their transgressions still fall into either the physical or cultural category. Grendel has glowing eyes and steel-like claws; Dracula is undead and can turn into a bat. Grendel is inimical to the weapons and armor so important to the humans of the poem and mocks the feast hall by making men into the meal; Dracula drains the Life Force from his victims and unleashes female sexuality in a way that threatens the Victorian sensibilities of the male
characters.

Each transgression (be it Grendel’s cannibalism or Dracula’s shape-shifting) necessarily marks a boundary—for without a line there is no crossing, no transgression. For Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the other medieval monster theorists who largely follow his lead, the boundary is limned by the creator(s) of the monster. It is through their monsters that they tell us what they believe should not be possible, what they believe one should not think, speak, or do.[3] In short, monsters have always done the job from which they got their names: they point out and show the line between “us” and “them,” this side and the Other side.[4] Such a function was as true for the Victorian era as it was for our era of examination, the Middle Ages. It has also led Cohen to describe monsters as “the primary vehicle for the representation of Otherness in the Middle
Ages,” a statement on which there is widespread consensus.[5]

This consensus deals with a functional analysis of monsters. Gone are the days of trying to identify Grendel or Harpin ontologically; the question of what they actually were is of less interest than the question of what they do in texts and the effects of those actions on an extratextual scale. As boundary figures, monsters symbolize the Other as they define knowledge and community values by demarcating their outer limits.[6] Such a reading of monsters is not new and relies heavily on the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage—in which the infant uses her image in the glass to create an imago, or false vision of her Self. Key for monster theorists is the exteriority of the image: the use of a mirror’s image creates the Self, but at the same instant introduces the structural possibility of the Other.[7] Lacan’s ideas have been extended by Hayden White into the realm of cultural criticism; he theorizes that communities must use “ostensive self definition by negation” to think of themselves as communities.[8] For White, examples of medieval wildmen served to define what authors meant by “civilized,” “us,” or even “human.” The distinction is one that easily extends from wildmen to monsters, where they are agents of the Other and the negative by which a definition is created. Such a reading has gained traction with monster theorists. Most have accepted the premise that because communities are unable to craft positivist definitions of themselves, they use monsters as didactic exempla of transgressive behavior to work out what is not a part of their community and, conversely, help outline what is a part of it.

Such is the current state of monster theory as it applies to the Middle Ages: we mostly agree that monsters negatively define the cultures and communities that created them. However, no one has undertaken a serious, sustained interrogation of the specific processes by which monsters help form communities. I am interested in moving past what monsters do (boundary markers) to examine how monsters function and the consequences of those processes; that interest has brought me to the two following questions:

1. What is the process by which communities adopt, adapt, or create monsters?
2. How do monsters work to strengthen the communities’ sense of themselves?
   

My plan for this project is to examine how two very different medieval texts—Beowulf and Chretien’s Yvain—answer these questions. Written by an unknown Anglo-Saxon poet, Beowulf is the product of a society that retained significant Germanic cultural mores like tribalism and adherence to the warrior code. In contrast, Yvain was written in the so-called High Middle Ages within a French courtly milieu that valued the stylized virtues of chivalry and courtly love. Geographically and chronologically separated, each text deals with its monsters and their social threat in a distinctive way. Each does, however, deal with monsters and their social threats, so it will be instructive to compare how Anglo-Saxon and later medieval French communities incorporated and responded to their own monsters.

The examination will begin by exploring the process by which the monsters of these two texts were (re)created. In Beowulf, I will look at how the Grendelkin threaten the community through their relationship to weapons. Certainly this culturally transgressive behavior is one among many they exhibit (cannibalism, silence, dress, etc.). But in a world where weapons have names and even lineages, it is significant that both Grendel and his mother do not use weapons favored by the human warriors of the poem and that Grendel himself seems to be enchanted against harm from Geatish and Danish swords. Likewise, a close study of Yvain shows the giant, Harpin, to be a threat to chivalric sexual mores because he is attempting to extort a lord’s beautiful, virginal daughter. Since he is usually shorthand for libidinal excess, a giant carrying off of a virgin is an obvious threat to female purity, but Harpin’s actions are much more subtle and significant: he does not desire her but instead plans on prostituting the courtly maiden to his knaves and dishwashers—the lowest members of his household. In Harpin, Chretien was able to present a threat not only to the idealized female purity upon which courtly love was built but also to the heteronormative vision of masculinity upon which chivalry was built.[9]

Through the above examination, I hope to establish that communities (re)create monsters based on their own highly-prized cultural practices—in this case weapon use and sexual customs. The monster is created from foundational cultural beliefs and so can be thought of as a constellation of transgressions. These transgressions cut to the quick, threatening or questioning cultural practices that are, arguably, the defining characteristics of any community. To help explain how monsters define and strengthen a community’s sense of itself, I will turn to Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities.[10] In both texts the monster is defeated, a sort of tableau vivant that plays out again and again—whether it be in classical, medieval, Victorian, or contemporary horror fiction. Grendel’s defeat by Beowulf and Harpin’s by Yvain signify not only the triumph of the individual heroes, but also the triumph of the cultural mores they defend. These mores, according to Anderson, are the very things that bind individuals together, making—and remaking—socially-constructed communities that are based on specific shared traits. It is in a community’s identity-formation that the function of the monster is most important; as a constellation of transgressive qualities, the monster is defeated, reaffirming a particular value set and in turn (re)defining or (re)constructing the community. If we can understand the construction of medieval communities, we can better comprehend how they envisioned themselves and their place in the world. Such an understanding has consequences far beyond the monsters in Beowulf or Yvain, for through their nightmares these communities tell us who they were.

Notes:
1 “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245-95. 261.

2 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3-25. 6.

3 For limits on thought, see Cohen’s “The Limits of Knowing: Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Poplar Culture.” Medieval Folklore 3 (1994): 1-37. For limits on speech, see David Williams’ Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996. For limits on action, see John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000.

4 The Latin monstro means to “show” or “point out” and is the root of the Modern English “demonstrate.”

5 “The Use of Monsters and the Middle Ages.” SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2 (1992): 47-69. 49 (Emphasis mine).

On this consensus, see also: Noël Carroll. The Philosophy of Horror. New York: Routledge, 1990; Albrecht Classen. “Medieval Answers to the Strange World Outside: Foreigners and the Foreign as Cultural Challenges and Catalysts.” Demons: Mediators Between This World and the Other. Eds. Ruth Petzoldt and Paul Neubauer. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. 133-51; Edward J. Ingebretsen. “Monster-Making: A Politics of Persuasion.” Journal of American Culture 21.2 (1998): 25-34; and Franco Moretti. “Dialectic of Fear.” Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller. London:
Verso, 1988. 83-108.

6 About a monster’s physical (taxonomic) transgressions there is much to say. However, it is here that I must focus on the cultural side of the ledger. For more on physical transgressions and boundaries of knowledge, see Cohen’s “The Limits of Knowing: Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Poplar Culture.”

7 Lacan associates this self/Other split that occurs during the mirror stage with Freud’s Innenwelt and Umwelt. See Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” in Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977. 1-10.

8 Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 151-52.

9 See: Lee Ramsey. Chivalric Romances: Popular Literature in Medieval England. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1983, and Cohen. “Decapitation and Coming of Age: Constructing Masculinity and the Monstrous.” Arthurian Yearbook III. Ed. Keith Busby. New York: Garland, 1993. 171-90.

10 Anderson discusses imagined communities in the context of modern nationalism and its rise, but mutatis mutandis, his theory will be applicable to community formation, whether or not nationalism is involved.

Reaching up to Touch the Floor

The title of this post is a reference to Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers. In it, he tells an allegorical story about a land in which the people could not touch the floor without great difficulty. It was difficult because the accepted approach to touching the floor was to reach upwards as high as you might; so pervasive was the reach-up ideology, that the only time people could be taught to touch the floor was indirectly--by tying their shoes "without sitting down and shaking [their] hands around at the same time" (13).

So, yeah. That's sort of how I feel at this point, like I've been going about this thing the wrong way. I've tightened up to the point that it's difficult for me to think creatively about my proposal. I've no trouble thinking critically; thanks to a lot of great support from my friends, I think I have a good idea of the areas that were problematic (and on some of these, there was new and different widespread concensus!). What I'm having trouble with is remedying the problem areas. I know what's wrong, but I'm so overwhelmed by the project and its argument that I can't hold any 2 portions of it in my head for more than a few seconds...and forget trying to re-examine the relationship between 2 or more portions of the proposal. That is far beyond the scope of someone who just today forgot one of the key primary sources for this research project (remembered Harpin but forgot Chretien when talking to Eric Lutrell today). So I'm going to work only on this paragraph tonight--and probably for just a few minutes. I imagine a lot of it is about to go by the wayside...

Original:

This widespread consensus, however, has made for an awkward moment in monster theory. Such agreement has left many unsure as to how we should proceed, and some have focused their attentions on other projects. Indeed, conversations with fellow members of the BABEL Working Group such as Cohen, Eileen Joy, and Karl Steel have shown that while monsters are still a source of discussion, scholarly interest in them is beginning to wane in favor of attendant issues (hybridity, sexuality, medieval concepts of the human, etc.). As many who were once heavily involved in monster theory have foreseen, academic agreement quickly becomes academic stagnation. Thus, what was once the study of characters who could petrify with fear is itself in danger of sinking into the swamp and becoming petrified by consensus.

Well, even I have to admit that this paragraph is pretty bad. Let's see what I can do here.

Revised:

Academic consensus is a rare bird, and one of the reasons for this is the stagnation that often follows in its wake. Broad-scale agreement kills discussion and ceases movement: we relinquish our places at the vanguard where we advanced new and risky ideas to bivouac in familiar territory where we produce prescriptive statements. Our sense of inquiry leaves us.

One might argue that the momentum of monster theory has begun to wain, our forward progress has slowed. Perhaps each scholar associated with monster theory has begun to keep one eye open for more attractive, vibrant areas of inquiry. Perhaps when there is nothing left to argue, there is nothing left to say. Perhaps--though we be blind men touching different parts of the proverbial elephant--we have decided that is it, indeed, an elephant. We are far from done, for we have not even begun to understand how the elephant works. We may agree on the definition and even function of monsters in medieval texts, but that is just the "what"; we have only begun to ask the "how" and the "why" of that function.

I started fading there at the end. But it provokes lots of questions in my head: How do monsters function as boundary figures? Is it by dint of their physical description/appearance? Their actions? Their rupture of "normal" narrative events? Their troubling and overshadowing of other, more formal aspects of the works that contain them? Their peculiar cultural markers (such as cannibalism, silence/gibberish, clothing)?

Do these aspects themselves reinforce the boundary via fear? If so, how is fear employed? Is it fear of the monster and of the Other (psychoanalytic) or fear of ending up like the monster who always suffers the same fate in what amounts to a morality tale (structuralist)? Is it fear of what is necessarily on the other side of that boundary? Is what is on the other side of the monster what is actually deeply-seated in all of us (Lacanian extimacy)?

I think the waters are sufficiently muddied...but I'm no closer to a cogent prospectus. Great.

Monsters are the Washington Generals of Literature

I guess my committee chair was right: there are some ginormous structuralist underpinnings in this project. I was re-reading Cohen's introduction to Monster Theory (for the eleventy billionth time), and I realized that I am assuming a general plot for monsters within texts. It may not be the main plot: it could be an incidental story or the overarching theme of the work, but it almost always turns out the same. The general story arc for monsters is that they threaten and then lose. It's so simple that many people have relied on it without stating it explicity or, having stated it explicitly, did not place it within its proper theoretical context.

But it is a structuralist precept in the classic sense. Grimm, Propp, et al. often got bogged down in detailing minute variations of story types--trying to create some sort of Linnean taxonomy of every single type and variant of that type. It not only was so ambitious as to be impossible, but it seemed to be of limited use even in its ideal form. On the other side of the register, Jung, Campbell, et al. often generalized similarities to the point that they were so vague and all-encompassing that one saw them in everything. How does one make a story without a protagonist and antagonist? How does the protagonist then not become a variant of (or response to) The Hero?

But as Edward Ingebretsen once wrote (I paraphrase): the monster exists to be killed, we must be the one who kills it, and it can never be our fault. Whether that monster is a personification of a cultural anxiety (Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, Freddy, witches) or a partial reification of an actual personage (the Japanese in WWII propaganda posters, OJ Simpson, Native Americans), the story plays out the same way. The monster threatens. We, the people, resist and fight (sometimes via proxy in the hero, sometimes not). The monster dies by our hand. Our anxieties are termporarily assuaged.

It's not a very interesting plot line, but it's just a terrifically general skeleton plot--a thing that Tolkien once complained was, no matter the text, either "wild, or trivial, or typical." The thing about it is its ability to provide comfort. I think it functions in the same way our favorite movies do. There's no doubt that Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby are going to save the General's lodge in White Christmas, and there's no doubt that Marvin's going to be shot in the head in Pulp Fiction. But I keep watching these movies even though I know what will happen. We keep re-reading books even though we know what's there. It's not because we want to see if Bing convinces Rosemary Clooney he's not a bad guy or if Beowulf can pull out one more battle with Grendel. No, we return for the show, not the score. In this sense, I think monsters really are like the Washington Generals. You go to watch the Harlem Globetrotters beat the snot out of them, and you want to see how it will be done, but God help the Generals if they actually win one because they'll make the kids in the stands cry. Same with monsters. They exist to lose to the hero or to us. They help us exorcise or excise our anxieties in a safe way.

Every Time I Think I'm Out...They PULL me Back in

My Orals proposal was rejected!





Soooooo, since it bounced like a Bernie Madoff check, I guess I have my work cut out for me. I need to figure out what the hell's confusing about this thing; the trouble is, like my students, I'm so close to it that I can't see the confusing parts, the logically flawed parts. It seems to make total sense to me, but not to a group of non-medievalists who don't know what the hell monster theory is.

I was already pretty concerned about oversimplifying monster theory as a movement, so it's ironic that it was decided I didn't explain it clearly/simply enough. Maybe I should contextualize monster theory within the post-structuralist and cultural criticism movement, but I footnoted the proposal pretty heavily. I didn't think I had to explain much in the way of who two of the biggest names in medieval monster theory are; I mean, I think I introduced my sources pretty well (not the USSC Justice, but that was an parenthetical, explanatory note, not a supporting/resource note).

I also heard that they were confused a bit by the primary texts--that because they weren't medievalists, they didn't quite follow what I planned to do with/to Harpin and Grendel. I'm not at all sure what to do about this problem; I was unaware that I was writing to a general academic audience. I thought I was writing to my chair since he and other medieval-types will be on the Orals Committee, but now I have to do the most difficult thing a writer can attempt (besides adapting Ulysses to the screen). I have to think like a non-medievalist, and I honestly don't know if I can do that. I've put a call out to medievalists and non-medievalists for some help in identifying the problems, but I can't wait. I have to start out now, so I'm going to take it bird by bird, as Anne Lamott would say.

First off, the initial paragraph.


Original:

For years—at least since John Block Friedman’s 1981 book The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought and Jeffrey J. Cohen’s debut on the scene in the early 1990s—monster theory has been overwhelmingly concerned with reading monsters as marginal figures that demarcate the cultures that create them. Freddy Krueger, Frankenstein’s monster, the Giant of Mount St Michel, the Grendelkin, or Polyphemus mark the boundaries of what is and is not possible. Perhaps more importantly, they serve as outer boundaries of what an individual can or cannot think, speak, or do. In short, they have usually been read as “the primary vehicle for the representation of Otherness in the Middle Ages”; in fact, on this there is a rare and surprisingly widespread consensus.

Redux:

Back in 1936, the venerable J.R.R. Tolkien urged Anglo-Saxonists to rethink their approach to Beowulf. Up to this point, the poem had largely been used as a historical document rather than a poetic work, but Tolkien thought we should not ignore the monsters of the poem. They were not, as so many had previously thought, "an inexplicable blunder of taste"; instead, he argued they were "essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem" (261). And so began the genealogy of monster theory in medieval literature.

Over the years, the approaches and theories have changed with the shifting sands of academic trends. Tolkien thought a closer examination of the monsters of Beowulf would lead to a better understanding of its literary merits, its generic placement, and the theme of a hero's courage. Currently, medieval monster theorists are concerned less with these aspects of the poem; at least since John Block Friedman’s 1981 book The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought and Jeffrey J. Cohen’s debut on the scene in the early 1990s, monster theory has been largely concerned with reading monsters as marginal figures that demarcate the cultures that create them.

The general shift in approach may have moved from a formalist bent to post-structuralism and cultural criticism, but the focus of the approach never has. Monsters--be they medieval creations like the Grendelkin or the Giant of Mount St Michel or their contemporary brethren like Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, or Freddy Kreuger--mark boundaries. For Tolkien it was the boundary of what is and is not a poem, a lyric, or a hero. For Cohen and other contemporary monster theorists, it is the boundary of what is and is not possible and of what an individual can or cannot think, speak, or do. In short, contemporary monster theory has usually read monsters as “the primary vehicle for the representation of Otherness in the Middle Ages”; in fact, on this there is a rare and surprisingly widespread consensus.

There, that can't be worse than before...or can it?

Mad Max Beyond the Pillars of Hercules

The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 2) doesn't get old, I've just begun to realize. I find it interesting that it doesn't because the clothes and hair are so painfully dated and not much happens plot-wise: it's just a loner getting a truck for to good guys to get out of their city with.

But that loner is the one who interests me. Mel Gibson does a nice job of playing a guy who's been alone for a long time (he lost his family and partner in the previous film) and doesn't want to be around anyone else. What's painfully obvious for the viewer is that Max's chosen road is a death sentence: sooner or later, the petrol runs out or he gets himself in a tight spot that even Dog can help him get out of. He's obviously on a treadmill, and the best he can do is maintain. But he's got to be alone--even when he finds a decent partner (the Gyro-copter Captain) and a good sidekick (the feral kid).

In the end, the one I feel sorry for is actually Max because he's left behind--even more alone (he's without Dog now) and more broken down than he was before. He bears his hero status with that poker face, but it's the hero status that keeps him from being a part of the community. The Gyro-copter Captain becomes the leader of that band, and later on the feral kid learns how to talk and leads the band. Max can't do that even though he's more inspirational to those people than any of their other leaders.

I sometimes think this is so because he's not of them, but it's kind of a chicken-or-the-egg situation: he's a hero not a leader because he's not of them? or he's not of them because he's a hero not a leader? The second choice has more to recommend it since the Gyro-copter Captain is not of the community, either. That would seem to suggest that in order to be a hero, the character would have to be separated from the community that he or she is working to protect. Hero's never represent communities--not through synecdoche, metonymy, exemplae, or isotyping. It's usually the leader, the king.

In the medieval and Renaissance periods, you get the "king's body" in the Body Politic metaphor; the nation and land is figured/personified into the symbolic body of the king and the king is reified (to use Paxson's apparently unorthodox definition of the word) into the nation and the land (see the Fisher King for an example). Hero's don't get this, and if they do get something, it tends to be outside of the realm (I'm thinking of the Pillars of Hercules, which mark the outer boundaries of the Mediterranean).

So while the community goes on "2000 miles north" to an Edenic land where "all you have to do is breathe," Max stays behind. Is it any wonder that they're in the Outback? He's out there, the only place he can really be a hero (because if he goes with the community and becomes a leader, he ceases to be a hero), the only place to meet the monsters...

which makes you wonder: just how much of a hero and how much of a monster is Max?

Pending Orals Prospectus

[Author's Note: This is the version of my Orals prospectus that has now been submitted to the shadowy organization known as the Graduate Committee. Hopefully, it will be accepted--unless they don't like being called a "shadowy organization."]

For years—at least since John Block Friedman’s 1981 book The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought and Jeffrey J. Cohen’s debut on the scene in the early 1990s—monster theory has been overwhelmingly concerned with reading monsters as marginal figures that demarcate the cultures that create them. Freddy Krueger, Frankenstein’s monster, the Giant of Mount St Michel, the Grendelkin, or Polyphemus mark the boundaries of what is and is not possible. Perhaps more importantly, they serve as outer boundaries of what an individual can or cannot think, speak, or do.[1] In short, they have usually been read as “the primary vehicle for the representation of Otherness in the Middle Ages”;[2] in fact, on this there is a rare and surprisingly widespread consensus.

This widespread consensus, however, has made for an awkward moment in monster theory. Such agreement has left many unsure as to how we should proceed, and some have focused their attentions on other projects. Indeed, conversations with fellow members of the BABEL Working Group such as Cohen, Eileen Joy, and Karl Steel have shown that while monsters are still a source of discussion, scholarly interest in them is beginning to wane in favor of attendant issues (hybridity, sexuality, medieval concepts of the human, etc.). As many who were once heavily involved in monster theory have foreseen, academic agreement quickly becomes academic stagnation. Thus, what was once the study of characters who could petrify with fear is itself in danger of sinking into the swamp and becoming petrified by consensus.

What have not been agreed upon—or even hotly debated—are the functions of monsters as boundary figures. We may agree that as symbols of the Other they demarcate, and we may even agree (though to a lesser extent) on how they go about doing so. But to my knowledge no serious, sustained interrogation has been performed on their function as means of community-formation. Boundary figures by their very nature create an inside and outside. As the Lacanian imago immediately introduces the structural possibility of self/not self, so too does the monster introduce the structural possibility of us/them.[3] This interpretation denies any positivist model for definition, and it is the basis on which Hayden White forms his idea of “ostensive self-definition by negation.”[4] He argues that cultures are largely unable to create an overall definition of what they are and so point to a thing that they are not.[5] Following White’s theory of how the concept of “wildness” served to define “human” or “civilized,” we may read monsters as boundary figures that aid in the creation of a culture’s (negative) definition—of defining what it is by demarcating what it is not.

But how do communities define themselves in this way? What is the process by which they adopt, adapt, or create monsters, and exactly how does this work to strengthen their sense of themselves? It will be the goal of this project to suggest an answer to those questions. As I stated before, the purpose of monsters is understood quite well: they reinforce commonly-held cultural practices—foodways, speech, or ethical precepts—by threatening and questioning them in a fictionalized (and thus circumscribed) manner. I plan on quickly sketching how this process plays out in medieval heroic episodes, both early and late: weapon-use in the case of Beowulf’s Grendel, and sexual mores in Chretien de Troyes’ Harpin. Having established the process by which cultural features are reinforced, I will next turn to Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities in which individuals are part of socially-constructed communities based on specific shared traits. Anderson discusses this in the context of nationalism and its rise, but mutatis mutandis, this theory is will be crucial in exploring how the reaffirmation of a particular value works to strengthen or reconstruct the culture as a whole.

Certainly, such a study moves out of the morass that threatens the future of monster theory, but it is a small step. What I seek to do with this project is to take the first step in a large-scale interrogation of monster theory. By investigating one of the foundational—but largely unquestioned—tenets of monster theory I hope to put a finer point on how it is supposed to work and then, in the dissertation, further the study into instances in which it does not work. To my mind, it is usually the exceptions to the rule that are most instructive as to its limits and application. That is, if monsters always threaten the community and are always Other to it, then (via the structural opposition sketched out above) they always have a negative counterpart. The usual reading of epic, heroic, or romance literature places the hero in this position, but such a reading is reductive and ignores contrary evidence such as Marie de France’s werewolf, Bisclavret, or even Beowulf in his earlier exploits. Rather, it is the king who is the obverse of the monster, and the hero exists as a liminal figure—embodying both the civilized and the monstrous in a way that neither the king nor the monster ever can.

NOTES:
[1] For limits on thought, see Jeffrey J. Cohen’s “The Limits of Knowing: Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Poplar Culture.” Medieval Folklore 3 (1994): 1-37. For limits on speech, see David Williams’ Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996. For limits on action, see John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000. [2] “The Use of Monsters and the Middle Ages.” SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2 (1992): 47-69. p. 49 (Emphasis mine). On this consensus, see also: Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990); Albrecht Classen, “Medieval Answers to the Strange World Outside: Foreigners and the Foreign as Cultural Challenges and Catalysts,” in Demons: Mediators Between This World and the Other, eds. Ruth Petzoldt and Paul Neubauer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998); Edward J. Ingebretsen, “Monster-Making: A Politics of Persuasion.” Journal of American Culture 21.2 (1998): 25-34; and Franco Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller. (London: Verso, 1988).
[3] Lacan associates the self/not self split that occurs with Freud’s Innenwelt and Umwelt. See Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” in Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
[4] Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. pp. 151-52.
[5] US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart produced a lasting example of ostensive negative definition in 1964. Admitting that he could not define pornography, he then stated “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that” (Jacobellis v. Ohio. 378 U.S. 184. Supreme Ct. of the US. 22 June 1964).