Margrit Shildrick - Embodyng the Monster - Encounters With the Vulnerable Self

Embodying the Monster

Theory, Culture & Society

Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture withincontemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the heritage of clas-sical social theory, the book series examines ways in which this tradition has beenreshaped by a new generation of theorists. It also publishes theoretically informedanalyses of everyday life, popular culture, and new intellectual movements.

EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University

SERIES EDITORIAL BOARDRoy Boyne, University of DurhamMike Hepworth, University of AberdeenScott Lash, Goldsmiths College, University of AberdeenRoland Robertson, University of PittsburghBryan S. Turner, University of Cambridge

THE TCS CENTREThe Theory, Culture & Society book series, the journals Theory, Culture &Society and Body & Society, and related conference, seminar and postgraduateprogrammes operate from the TCS Centre at Nottingham Trent University. Forfurther details of the TCS Centres activities please contact:

Centre AdministratorThe TCS Centre, Room 175Faculty of HumanitiesNottingham Trent UniversityClifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UKe-mail: [email protected]: http://tcs.ntu.ac.uk

Recent volumes include:

Society and CulturePrinciples of Scarcity and SolidityBryan S. Turner and Chris Rojek

Modernity and ExclusionJoel S. Kah

Virilio LiveJohn Armitage

The Experience of CultureMichael Richardson

The Sociological Condition Chris Shilling and Philip A. Mellor

Embodying the Monster

Encounters with theVulnerable Self

MARGRIT SHILDRICK

SAGE PublicationsLondon Thousand Oaks New Delhi

2002 Margrit Shildrick

First published 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form orby any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording orotherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd6 Bonhill StreetLondon EC2A 4PU

SAGE Publications Inc2455 Teller RoadThousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd32, M-Block MarketGreater Kailash - INew Delhi 110 048

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available fromthe British Library

ISBN 0 7619 7013 4ISBN 0 7619 6549 1 (pbk)

Library of Congress control number available

Typeset by SIVA Math Setters, Chennai, IndiaPrinted in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford, Surrey

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1. Monsters, Marvels and Meanings 9

2. Monstering the (M)Other 28

3. The Selfs Clean and Proper Body 48

4. Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk 68

5. Levinas and Vulnerable Becoming 87

6. The Relational Economy of Touch 103

7. Welcoming the Monstrous Arrivant 120

Notes 134

Bibliography 142

Index 149

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Human twins conjoined at the head, born at Worms in 1495(Sbastien Brandt) from Aesculape, 1993, Vol. 1 14

1.2 Some members of the Monstrous Races in Cosmographiaeuniversalis, lib. VI (Munster 1554) 15

1.3 The Monster of Ravenna in De monstrorum caussis, natura,et differentis (Licetus 1634) 18

3.1 The Monster of Cracow in De monstrorum caussis, natura,et differentis (Licetus 1634) 52

3.2 Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins, photographed in 1860(Source unknown) 57

3.3 Lazarus and John Baptista Coloredo fromThe Gentlemens Magazine (1777) 64

3.4 The Bengali Boy (Basire) from The Philosophical Transactionsof the Royal Society 80 (1790) 65

4.1 Conjoined twins from Still Life (Karl Grimes 1997) 70

Figure 1.1, copyright ISHM, is reproduced courtesy of the International Society forthe History of Medicine (ISHM) and supplied by the Wellcome Library, London;Figures 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 are reproduced courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London;Figure 1.2 with the permission of the governors and guardians of Marshs Library,Dublin; Figures 1.3 and 3.1 courtesy of Liverpool Medical Institution; Figure 4.1courtesy of the artist and the Gallery of Photography, Dublin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The genesis and successful completion of Embodying the Monster relies, as doesevery publication, on a wide number of colleagues and friends though somemay remain unaware of its existence as well as on various forms of institutionalsupport. On the formal level, I am very grateful to Staffordshire University forgiving me a three-year research fellowship that has allowed me to concentratefull-time on this and related projects, and for providing sufficient funding for meto attend several important conferences where initial papers were tested out. Ishould also like to thank the organisers of a number of seminar series and con-ferences held under the auspices of the Institute of Womens Studies at LancasterUniversity where I have had the opportunity of many stimulating discussionsabout both my own work and that of others. Thanks too to the feminist academicsin Australia who welcomed my participation at their own conferences and seminarsand provided some invaluable responses to my ideas. It would be too restrictive toname any individuals here, but I hope that all those involved feel acknowledged.On a more practical level, Id like to register my gratitude for continuing supportfrom the Department of Primary Care at University of Liverpool where I havecome and gone over many years, initially as a student of bioethics, then as a part-time lecturer, and finally as an honorary research fellow.

Turning to more personal matters, it is perhaps even harder to supply any listthat does full justice to the many people who provided critical and supportiveinput. Some have been directly involved with aspects of the text, while othershave given equally valuable emotional backup. I particularly want to thank JanetPrice, who has been heroic both in her willingness to read a complete draft on topof previous exposure to several of the discrete papers that became chapters, andin her unwavering friendship. Lis Davidson too has probably heard almost everyword, though in a less organised way, and my thanks to her extend far beyond theacademic. Im not sure its possible to make a firm distinction between intel-lectual and personal engagement, so Ill mention indiscriminately several otherswhove given their backing one way or another. Thanks variously to MaggieONeill and Ruth Holliday, and other current colleagues, who eased my way in anew job; to Joanna Hodge, who unknowingly set the whole project in motion, toenduring friends Liz MacGarvey and Grindl Dockery who always bring freshperspectives; to Ailbhe Smyth for those all-important invitations; to Sara Ahmedfor several years of difficult but productive questions; and to Mike Featherstonewho published some early papers and asked for the book.

As Ive indicated, some of the text has already appeared as discrete papers orchapters in books edited by others. Most, however, have been heavily reworkedand often split between two or more chapters in the present book, making itdifficult to give exact acknowledgments. Incorporated work has previouslyappeared in the journals Body & Society, Journal of Medical Humanities,

Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and Rethinking History; and in the editedcollections Transformations (Routledge 2000), Body Modification (Sage 2000),Thinking Through the Skin (Routledge 2001), Beliefs, Bodies and Being(Rowman Littlefield 2001), and Contagion: Cultural and Historical Studies(Routledge 2001).

viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

What are the figures of difference that haunt the western imaginary, and whatwould it mean to reflect on, rework and valorise them? My project here is thelimited one of reconfiguring two such devalued domains that are interwoven onewith the other in both predictable and surprising ways. On the one hand, I turnto the monster in order to uncover and rethink a relation with the standards ofnormality that proves to be uncontainable and ultimately unknowable. Althoughthe image of the monster is long familiar in popular culture, from the earliestrecorded narrative and plastic representations through to the cyborg figures ofthe present day and future anticipation, it is in its operation as a concept themonstrous that it shows itself to be a deeply disruptive force. My second con-cept, by contrast, is that of vulnerability, an existential state that may belong toany one of us, but which is characterised nonetheless as a negative attribute, afailure of self-protection, that opens the self to the potential of harm. As such itis, like the notion of the monstrous, largely projected on to the other and held atbay lest it undermine the security of closure and self-sufficiency. The link that Iwant to make is that we are always and everywhere vulnerable precisely becausethe monstrous is not only an exteriority. In both cases what is at issue is thepermeability of the boundaries that guarantee the normatively embodied self. As Ishall argue, neither vulnerability nor the monstrous is fully containable within thebinary structure of the western logos, but signal a transformation of the relationbetween self and other such that the encounter with the strange is not a discreteevent but the constant condition of becoming. Both are in play, then, on a planewhere conceptual logics cannot be distinguished from the corporeality of becom-ing in the world. Moreover, in contradistinction to the dominant convention, thebody expressly the differential body is not incidental to the ontological andethical processes of the self, but intrinsic to their operation.

Within the context of a more general elevation of the body as a focus for con-temporary scholarship, many theorists, and particularly those who are feminists,have identified the erasure of the corporeal from the founding moment of westernmodernity I refer to the take-up of the Cartesian split between mind and body as a paradigmatic element in the oppression not only of women, but of a range ofother others. Moreover, as the sustained deconstruction of the seminal texts ofphilosophy has shown, from the classical era to the present century, the mascu-linist retreat from the body and from embodiment has denied to those othersaccess to subjectivity itself. It is somewhat paradoxical, then, that deconstructionand its companion discourse, postmodernism on which my project reliesextensively reputedly have no place for the corporeal. The confusion arises, Ibelieve, from the mistake of thinking that postmodernism must take only oneform. From the common ground of problematising the modernist project, the

trajectory of postmodernisms is multiple, and for feminism in particular, the bodyremains a politically necessary site of contestation. Given that masculinist domi-nance has characteristically entailed the disembodiment of the exclusionary mascu-line subject, and a corresponding corporeal inscription of femininity/otherness,the task is to reject biologism with its appeal to prediscursive natural givens at the same time as recuperating the possibility of embodiment.

In recent years, then, many feminist theorists have looked again at the indif-ference to the corporeal and have developed new insights which mobilise a rein-statement of the feminine. In this work, I shall extend that reassessment to takeaccount of differently excluded others with a focus on those who are categorisedas monstrous, not just as the feminine, or the racial other, but also those who arephysically disabled or whose bodies radically disrupt morphological expecta-tions. Although feminist theory has long since moved on from an exclusive con-centration on gender issues, I sense with relatively few exceptions that for allthe emphasis given in recent and current thought to embodied difference as thegrounds for a specific reappraisal of the conventional paradigms of ontology,epistemology, and ethics, the body that is recovered in its difference, remainshighly normative.1 It is as though in the desire to establish an adequate alterna-tive to masculinist standards of disembodied subjectivity, the body in questionmust be read primarily through its capacity to instantiate new norms of sexuality,production or reproduction. Whether the feminist approach has appealed to amore or less nuanced form of essentialism, to notions of the body as a socialconstruct, or to a phenomenology of the body that emphasises corporeal being-in-the-world, all seem to me to have failed to engage with the issues arisingfrom morphological diversity that are not reducible to questions of samenessand difference.

In contrast, what I want to do in this book is to address the consequences ontological, epistemological and above all ethical of viewing all bodies asunable to comply with the norms through which they enter the space of discourse,and thus of what counts as reality.2 It is not that some bodies are reducible to thesame while others figure as the absolute other, but rather that all resist full or finalexpression. The security of categories whether of self or non-self is undoneby a radical undecidability. The issue is not one of revaluing differently embod-ied others, but of rethinking the nature of embodiment itself. By engaging with acharacteristically, though by no means exclusively, feminist take-up of theinsights of poststructuralism and postmodernism, I shall suggest that the reincor-poration into our terms of reference of what might be called monstrous bodies by which I mean those bodies that in their gross failure to approximate to corporealnorms are radically excluded demands a fundamental re-evaluation of the self-same, and of the relationship between self and other. Where normative embodi-ment has hitherto seemed to guarantee individual autonomous selfhood, what ismonstrous in all its forms hybrid creatures, conjoined twins, human clones,cyborg embodiment and others disrupts the notions of separation and distinc-tion that underlie such claims. So long as the monstrous remains the absoluteother in its corporeal difference it poses few problems; in other words it is sodistanced in its difference that it can clearly be put into an oppositional category

2 EMBODYING THE MONSTER

of not-me. Once, however, it begins to resemble those of us who lay claim to theprimary term of identity, or to reflect back aspects of ourselves that are repressed,then its indeterminate status neither wholly self nor wholly other becomesdeeply disturbing. In short, what is at stake is not simply the status of thosebodies which might be termed monstrous, but the being in the body of us all. Tovalorise the monster, then, is to challenge the parameters of the subject as definedwithin logocentric discourse.

The use of the term monster or monstrous to describe such liminal beingshas extensive historical precedents, but my point in this work, far from being toreiterate the negative charge of that ascription, is to contest the binary thatopposes the monstrous to the normal. There is plentiful archival evidence ofthe destruction or persecution of those considered monstrous, and certainly themonster has often functioned as a scapegoat, carrying the taint of all that must beexcluded in order to secure the ideal of an untroubled social order. Clearly, thecategory has taken on very specific cultural and historical forms with regard notsimply to anomalies of embodiment, but to the operation of racist or sexist para-digms that have deployed the notion of the subhuman for highly politicalpurposes.3 Nonetheless, the pertinence of the monstrous, I would argue, is deter-mined not only by the contested terrain of a particular historical moment, but bythe always already problematic ontology of human being. The hermeneutics of themonstrous focus, then, on quasi-human beings, for they alone can confirm thenormalcy and closure of the centred self, though, as I shall go on to discuss, simul-taneously unsettling it by being all too human. Such monsters are both necessaryand feared, and yet effectively have been denied a place in the domain of ethics,except as the passive object of moral regard. The implicit danger of my trans-historical approach which must be acknowledged lest it play out the very ethi-cal erasure that I am contesting is that the specificity of any singular instanceshould be betrayed by reference to a generalised category of the monstrous. Butinsofar as my task is to deconstruct the strategies of a morphological imaginarythat covers over the differences within and across terms, whilst universalising thedifferences between terms, then it is a risk that can, and must, be negotiated.Moreover, the greater violence would be to assume that the particularity of theother is within our grasp, that the place of the other is fully accountable fromthe outside.

What I propose is a new form of ethics that answers more fully to the multi-plicity of embodied difference, and as such, it is precisely my intention to undothe singular category of the monster. In place of a morality of principles and rulesthat speaks to a clear-cut set of binaries setting out the good and the evil, the selfand the other, normal and abnormal, the permissible and the prohibited, I turnaway from such normative ethics to embrace instead the ambiguity and unpre-dictability of an openness towards the monstrous other. It is a move that acknow-ledges both vulnerability to the other, and the vulnerability of the self. Thequestion of value here is not so much made irrelevant, as disrupted, suspended inthe face of an encounter that cannot be known in advance. Moreover, despite apersistent desire, stretching from the natural science of Aristotle through to presentday medical discourse, which seeks to categorise and explain monstrosity through

INTRODUCTION 3

the pathology of abnormal corporeality, there is another more disruptive intuitionthat the monstrous cannot be confined in the place of the other. It is not simplythat monsters strangers in general disrupt the usual rules of interaction in thattheir cultural distance may be offset by physical proximity, but that they may notbe outside at all. Although they are always there in our conscious appraisal of theexternal world, they are also the other within. In seeking confirmation of our ownsecure subjecthood in what we are not, what we see mirrored in the monster arethe leaks and flows, the vulnerabilities in our own embodied being. Monsters,then, are deeply disturbing; neither good nor evil, inside nor outside, not self orother. On the contrary, they are always liminal, refusing to stay in place, trans-gressive and transformative. They disrupt both internal and external order, andoverturn the distinctions that set out the limits of the human subject.

The question of the reality or otherwise of such monstrous creatures is notone that will concern me as such, and I have no hesitation in bringing together theundoubtedly mythological, the speculative, and those whose differential embodi-ment is lived out in our own experience. What matters is the way in which eachbreaks with any given form, and functions beyond predetermined limits as a fluidsignifier. My approach is unashamedly postmodernist in that I understand allbodies to be discursively constructed rather than given. It is not simply that corpo-reality is a dynamic process that belies the static universalisation of the bodyimage, but that all bodies are in some sense phantasmatic. Nonetheless, my inten-tion to mark my primary concern as being with the meaning of the corporeal, andto concur with Liz Grosz that (bodies) are materialities that are uncontainable inphysicalist terms alone (1994: xi), should not be taken to exclude the substantialand tangible. Indeed, two things are at work in my approach. Although fromone perspective, I take on the often somewhat abstract theorisations of post-modernism to contest the dominant body image of modernity, that does not standalone. At the same time, my focus on certain aspects of materialisation engageswith not only the monstrous bodies of the past, but the radically new possibilitiesof embodiment that are emerging in the era of postmodernity, through such tech-niques as cloning, transsexual surgery, genetic engineering and xenotransplanta-tion. Combining those points of view strongly suggests that the standard body isnot only being superseded in practice, but has been unstable all along.

When I first started thinking about the notion of the monstrous body, initiallythrough archival texts, it was to ask just what it is that the monster signifies monstrare itself means to show forth that gives rise to a transhistorical andubiquitous intermingling of fascination and fear. In other words, why is it thatlike the feminine or racial others for example, monsters are both the unspoken ofwestern discourse, and at the same time always haunting its margins, simultane-ously seductive and threatening? What is clear is that the strength of the westernlogos as a symbolic system depends in large part on defining those who are other,those who escape normative identity, if they successfully resist total exclusion, asmarginal and dangerous. That same process is at work with regard to the bodyitself. In those discourses where corporeality is scarcely considered a proper com-ponent of identity, then the potential of corporeal irruption into consciousness anirruption that is a feature of all bodies constitutes an understandable threat to


self-containment. Moreover, when in addition that threat is associated withwomen, or other others, who are already embodied differently to existing norms,then it is considerably heightened. And yet, as my analysis will uncover, the mon-strous is never simply negative because it is never fully outside, but always afigure of ambiguous identity. Although the very word monster is a commonterm of abuse, implying a denial of any likeness between self and other such thata barrier is put in place between the two, the very force of rejection of suchotherness cannot but suggest a level of disturbing familiarity, even similarity. Themonster is not just abhorrent, it is also enticing, a figure that calls to us, thatinvites recognition. Simultaneously threat and promise, the monster, as with thefeminine, comes to embody those things which an ordered and limited life musttry, and finally fail, to abject.

In the face of the potential vulnerabilities exposed by the embodied other, theideal of the humanist subject of modernity, supposedly fully present to himself,self-sufficient and rational, can be maintained only on the basis of a series ofputative exclusions. That which is different must be located outside the bound-aries of the proper, in black people, in foreigners, in animals, in the congenitallydisabled, and in women; in short in all those who might be seen as monstrous. Atthe least contentious level, monsters whether those already cited, or those ofdisordered maternal impressions, of science-fiction literature, or of the becoming-cyborg evoke opposition to the paradigms of a humanity that is marked by self-possession. Moreover, what is at stake in a politics of identity and difference isthe security of borders that mark out the places which are safe and which areunsafe, and who is due moral consideration and who is not. But despite the foun-dational claims, those boundaries are never finally secured, not because theclaims of the excluded may become too insistent to resist, but because exclusionitself is incomplete. As Derrida has shown, the uncontested belief in full self-presence at the heart of the logos cannot be maintained even by the violent hier-archy of the binary. At the very moment of definition, the subject is marked byits excluded other, the absent presence which primary identification must deny,and on which it relies. The monster is irreducible to the selfsame but it is alsowithin. And it is that trace, the supplement, the undecidable signifier at the heartof diffrance, the spectre of the other who haunts the selfsame, which ensures thatchange is not only possible but perhaps inevitable. If identity is founded on whatButler calls a radical concealment (1991: 15), then the encounter with themonstrous other opens up both the putative risk of indifferentiation, and the hopethat oppressive identities might be interrupted.

My concern, then, is to uncover the extent to which the western notion of thesovereign self, and of the bounded body, is, in general, both guaranteed and con-tested by those who do not, indeed cannot, unproblematically occupy the embod-ied subject position. As such, any being who traverses the liminal spaces that evadeclassification takes on the potential to confound normative identity, and monstersparadigmatically fulfil that role. For all their conceptual fluidity, however, the forceof normalisation that is directed towards them should never be underestimated, andI am far from suggesting that successful resistance to the standards of sameness anddifference is assured. On the contrary, the persecution of those who are classed as

INTRODUCTION 5

monstrous may operate within historically changing parameters, but it is aspersistent as it is intolerable, at least to the ethics that I propose. Nonetheless, it isin the very negativity that the monstrous provokes that we may begin to discern dif-ferent ways forward. It is not that the fears are offset by fascination for that toomay be intercut with a certain shame but rather that we cannot finally locate themonster as wholly other. Though it remains excessive of any category, it alwaysclaims us, always touches us and implicates us in its own becoming. And it is herethat the theme of vulnerability begins to take shape as the somewhat unanticipatedyet irreducible companion of the monstrous. Alongside the capacity to evoke anxi-ety and loathing, the vulnerability that may seem to belong to it is also our own.And, moreover, as we reflect on the meaning of the monstrous, and on its confu-sion of boundaries, the notion of vulnerability emerges precisely as the problem-atic. The responses of disavowal of and identification with the monstrous ariseequally because we are already without boundaries, already vulnerable. It is not myclaim that every form of the monstrous effects the same counter-logic, but that indemanding a deconstruction of the strategies by which the self is secured, all maybe effective in mobilising new ways of thinking not simply the binary encounterbetween self and other, but the very impossibility of such a determined location.

In turning, as I do in the chapters that follow, variously to historical archivesand to contemporary cultural and biomedical sources, and to the discourses ofphilosophy, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, I want to wrench those textsaway from their conventional readings. Rather than accepting any at face value,I intend to go beyond the specific disciplinary receptions as history, as anthro-pology, and so on that are taken to mark the limits of their intelligibility. Byasking what metaphors and rhetorical devices such texts carry, and what forms ofimaginary are put into play, my aim is to effect a double reading that opens upthe problematic to unanticipated insights. The outcome that I hope for in inter-weaving such differential source material, and in exploiting multiple layers andregisters is, as Derrida puts it, that the articulation of the heterogeneous voicesamong themselves both causes one to think and causes the language to think(1995b: 375). In particular, I want to be quite clear from the start that in bringingtogether empirical material of various sorts with what is at times a highly theo-retical discourse about the nature of embodied subjectivity, my intention is to dis-rupt the binary between practice and theory. At the same time, the juxtapositionof models of thought that are more usually kept apart can serve to throw new lighton each in what is, I hope, a mutually productive manner. It is often the case thatthe insights that I draw on are scattered throughout poststructuralist and post-modernist works, and that the most provocative and ultimately most illuminatinginspirations are commonly denied currency outside their own disciplinary bound-aries. Yet, in researching this project, what has struck me time and again is therichness and relevance of various postulates drawn from theorists who have noth-ing to say directly with regard to the monstrous, disability or vulnerability, orindeed to each other. In many instances I have unashamedly forced the issue, notso much in refashioning ideas to fit my own ends, but in opening up new chan-nels of exploration, where ideas flow and overflow into unexpected configura-tions, and circulate between hitherto disconnected sites of enquiry.


The book begins, then, with a critical historical survey of monsters and themonstrous taken always to include the modern category of disabled bodies and introduces the always ambivalent nature of our response to the problematic.I go on to raise the question of what is at stake in our reading of texts as history,and to question our investments in textual truths. Chapter 2 continues with thoseissues firmly in mind as it focuses on the close connections between the mon-strous and the female body, both in the past and in contemporary popular culture.By tracing out the trajectory of maternal imagination, I introduce the notion of acultural imaginary that differentially constructs monsters in response to bothsocio-political and psychic anxieties. The following chapter brings together thephenomenological stress on corporeality with modernist conceptions of the self,and mounts a challenge to the separation of mind and body through a reflectionon the conjoined and concorporate body. With specific reference to some recentcases of conjoined twinning, I demonstrate the fragility of the clean and properbody. The boundaries of the modernist subject are further contested in Chapter 4where the notion of vulnerability is firmly linked to the encounter with the mon-strous other whose very presence signals the threat of contamination. By reflect-ing on both a recent photographic exhibition of radically deformed foetal andinfant bodies, and on responses to other forms of disability, I reconsider the psy-chic dimensions of corporeal rejection. The theme of vulnerability as a quality ofthe self in the encounter with the other is extended in the next chapter, whichgives an account of the partial satisfaction of Levinasian ethics. In response tothose limits, Chapter 6 goes on to reincorporate the lived body in its considera-tion of the tangible relation with the monstrous. In focusing on the phenomeno-logy of touch with particular reference to the work of Luce Irigaray and MauriceMerleau-Ponty I reintroduce the question of conjoined twinning and suggest itfigures a relational economy that is better able to accommodate embodied differ-ence than conventional models that privilege specular detachment. The finalchapter both encompasses the materiality of Donna Haraways promisingmonsters, whether they be the cyborgs of the future or the tricks of an alwaysunpredictable nature, and the more abstract insights of Derrida, who haunts thewhole book like the spectres he evokes. For Derrida, undecidability and hencevulnerability are the irreducible components of any ethical becoming, and hishope for the future is precisely that it should be monstrous. I conclude with areminder that ethics is not about finding solutions, but about creating openings inand through the uncertainty of strange encounters.

If my project is successful, then the final issue that I want to mention here is lesscontentious than it might otherwise be. I am acutely aware that in choosing toinclude a limited number of illustrations throughout my text, I run the risk ofencouraging a kind of voyeurism with respect to monstrous bodies. Just as the useof certain terms, such as monster itself, is freighted with sexist, racist and ableistconnotations which must be constantly challenged and undone, the deploymentof visual imagery also requires delicate negotiation. By explicating the discursivecontext of the illustrations I hope, at the very least, to counter the negativity asso-ciated with those who are differently embodied, but that is too modest an aim. Overthe period of research for this book, I have perused countless images both historical

INTRODUCTION 7

and current, overtly fantastic and ostensibly accurate representations of reality.Inevitably the repulsion and fascination that I analyse is as much my own as that ofeither the abstract modernist subject, or the projected reader, and I want to be clearthat none of us is innocent. Nonetheless, while we may all teeter on the brink of avoyeurism that in its lack of (self-)recognition would reduce the object of our gazeto merely one of excitement for the forbidden, a more reflexive engagement willprovoke just those questions that I want to ask of the ambivalent nature of theencounter with the monstrous. What exactly is it that we are looking for? And evenas I question my own motives in looking, as I explore the theorisations that willmove my thinking out of the boundaries that seem to structure what is possible,I am struck especially in the face of video and photographic material not by anyacademic insight into vulnerability but by the overspilling of my own slow tears.For an academic this is a scandalous admission, and one, I hope, that will be shared.

Although my methodological approach may at times seem dis-ordered, andcertainly outside the strict bounds of logical analysis, I can only claim that as avirtue, and remind the reader that our discursive conventions need not determine,or be allowed to limit, the paths that deconstructive thought can travel. For femi-nist thinkers, such an apparent lack of logical rigour has often been the only wayout of the stranglehold of masculinist models of intellectual and academic propri-ety, and although this work is only tangentially a contribution to feminist theoryas such, I am acutely aware that the structures that I contest are those that havebeen authorised by phallologocentric discourse. Indeed it is difficult to imagineany contestation of modernist normativities that did not entail not simply anawareness, but a politics, of sexual difference. The deconstruction of hithertounproblematised conventions does not, however, imply that they can or should berejected in their entirety. Some paradigms remain useful as a basis for criticalthought and others will always reassert themselves. The trick is to let neithersettle. I would concur strongly with John Caputo who comments on his own chal-lenge to mainstream philosophy: To question philosophy and its ethicsis not tojettison them altogether, but to let them be rocked by a shock or trauma of some-thing other, to expose them to a view from somewhere else, where thingsmayeven seem a little mad (1999: 84). The prospect is certainly risky, but alsoprovocative of the positive realignments that my own strategy intends to mobilise.

It is not, of course, only to methodological concerns that Caputos remarkscould be applied, but to the nature of the terrain of the monstrous as a whole.4 Theradical challenge that such an unsettled and unsettling terrain offers to the sceneof the embodied self is indeed traumatic, but out of that rending of the ontologi-cally and ethically known and certain, space is created for movement and trans-formation. Though the very incoherence of the monstrous exposes thevulnerability at the heart of all becoming, the task does not end there, but opensup the question of how to develop provisionally other more adequate struc-tures that can accommodate corporeal undecidability without compromising theconditions for an ethics. I make no promise of answers, but offer the belief that itis only by reconfiguring thought that we can move on to potentially more creativemodes both of becoming in ourselves and of encountering others, whatever formthose others might take.


1MONSTERS, MARVELS ANDMEANINGS

The concept of the monstrous and the figure of the monster have haunted westernhistory from its earliest records. Whether in the popular cultural legacy of ancientGreek myth, in travellers tales of early imperialist and colonialist encounters, inthe so-called freak shows, and the enduring tradition of horror stories and films,or in the more rarefied context of the medical theory of the classical ages, theEuropean Enlightenment, or contemporary high-tech biomedical science, the cate-gory of the monster is of enduring fascination. Although my purpose is not topresent a socio-history of monstrosity as though it were already there waiting tobe catalogued, described and expounded by the supposedly impartial voice of thehistorian, I want to look both at some persistent themes in the western imagina-tion, and at some specific instances of monstrosity, to open up the meaningswhich both order and disorder the historical discourse. In this chapter, what is atissue primarily is the epistemological significance of that discourse, but as willquickly become clear in later chapters, the epistemological is intimately entwinedwith ontological and ultimately ethical dimensions. The status of the subject andof human personhood may often remain unspoken in the projection of themonstrous as a wholly external phenomenon, but even in the most objectified ofaccounts, the discomforting question of boundaries may be discerned. Indeed, thevery insistence on a series of binaries that define the otherness of the monstershould alert us to the instability of the categories that ground the normativehuman subject. The varying and sometimes contradictory explanatory accounts towhich I refer take in both the notion of monstrous races and individual monsters,and serve to justify, among other things, a range of sexist, racist and colonialistattitudes. Nonetheless, in beginning with a relatively unproblematised deline-ation, I want to point the way to the fractures and insecurities which render thediscourse of the monstrous both so engaging and disturbing.

Monsters of course show themselves in many different and culturally specificways, but what is monstrous about them is most often the form of their embodi-ment. They are, in an important sense, what Donna Haraway (1992a) calls inap-propriate/d others in that they challenge and resist normative human being, in thefirst instance by their aberrant corporeality. I want to stress from the outset thatthe reality of the various forms is not at issue, and though a descriptive readingof historical texts may yield successive reformulations of inappropriate/d others,what concerns me is that monsters operate primarily in the imaginary. My explicitintention in using archival and other sources is to challenge the conventionaldisciplinary limits set on their use and meaning in order to discover what underlying

forms of imaginary are mobilised by their expressive strategies. The differentialinterpretations of monstrosity may speak clearly to the mapping of specificsocio-historical anxieties and interests, but what is at stake more importantly arethe contested relations between self and other, the simultaneous rejection andrecognition, horror and fascination, that grounds ontological unease. What linksthe monstrous others, whether those of human birth whose bodies fail to matchthe normative standard encephalitic infants, conjoined twins, even Parsmonster of Ravenna1 or man-made creations like Sil in the film Species (towhich I shall refer later) or the replicants in Blade Runner, is their unnatural andoften hybrid corporeality.

Although that differential and strange embodiment might explain the enduringfascination of the monstrous as an object of knowledge, it does not so easilyaccount for the normative anxiety that they invoke. What disturbs is that for allthat it is extra-ordinary and widely characterised as unnatural, the monster is notoutside nature. It is, rather, an instance of natures startling capacity to producealien forms within, a capacity that equally constitutes identical twins and evenpregnant women, for example, as productive of ontological uncertainty. In otherwords, against an ideal bodyliness that is the being of the self in the body thatrelies on the singular and the unified, where everything is in its expected place,monstrosity in its various forms offers a gross insult. At very least, it destabilisesthe grand narratives of biology and evolutionary science and signifies other waysof being in the world. It is perhaps odd explicable only in terms of the binaryeither/or of constructivist culture versus essentialist nature that the dynamismof the biological, of the natural, should have ever been overlaid with the imageryof the static and determinate. And although I am interested primarily in whollyorganic monsters, the issues raised are often equally relevant to techno-organicmonstrosity such as the cyborg envisioned by Haraway (1990). Moreover, ratherthan reiterate a nature/culture split, as though some monsters are natural whereothers are not, it would be more appropriate perhaps to recognise from the outsetthat techne plays a part in the construction of all monsters, indeed all bodies. AsHaraway reminds us: Biology is discourse, not the living world itself (1992b:298). The biological is no guarantee of a predictable given structure of reality; onthe contrary, the monsters that most effectively complicate our preconceptionsare precisely those that are blatantly organic.

What I am disputing, then, is the givenness of any body, the sense of a founda-tional and certain form which may be compared to an ideal template. Despite theconvention of taking the body for granted, it is clear that embodiment is always adynamic process of development, growth and adaption, but there is more to it thanthat. The point in the sense intended by Judith Butler (1993) is that bodies,rather than being material and graspable from the start, are materialised through aset of discursive practices. It is over a period of time that the process comes toinstantiate the effects of the solidity, surfaces and boundaries that mark out thematerial. And moreover, as Butler claims: there is no reference to a pure bodywhich is not at the same time a further formation of that body (1993: 10). Thebody, then, is not a prediscursive reality, but rather a locus of production, the siteof contested meaning, and as such fluid and unstable, never given and fixed.


Regardless, then, of whether past narratives speak to realisably embodied and grosspeculiarities, to simple category mistakes, or to the effects of a powerful personalor social imaginary, the question of the concrete existence of specific monsters isnot one that need concern us. In any case, although for my own part, I am clearlypersuaded that the materiality of bodies is inaccessible and is known only as medi-ated (t)here are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value cod-ings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, is how Spivak puts it(1989: 149) it makes little difference whether or not we redefine all bodies associal and psychic constructs. What is at issue is the transformatory power of thebody, and whatever credit is given to the pre-existent reality of nature, biologicalprocess itself does as a matter of course continually frustrate the desire for certainty.

Nonetheless, organic bodies are as it were naturalised post hoc, where theepithet unnatural implies a location that is literally out of place, the scene ofcultural degradation or the abnormal, although that might sometimes signify themarvellous. The reverse terminology is even less straightforward, for althoughnature may be accorded positive value as the site of the pure and uncontaminated,it also threatens to overspill the boundaries of the proper. When set against cultureas that which is managed and regulated, nature is at best base and unruly thatwhich must be controlled and at worst that which is deeply disruptive and uncon-trollable. And that negativity is clearest in the conventional association of thefemale with the natural, such that womens bodies are especially untrustworthy. Anappeal to nature is, then, always ambivalent, and the desire for clear distinctionseither between nature and culture, or between the appropriate (where everything isin its place) and chaotic aspects of the natural are constantly disrupted. If then allbodies are capable of frustrating those binaries, it is the very excessiveness ofmonsters that places them at the forefront of what Haraway calls queering whatcounts as nature (1992b: 300). The point is that monsters can signify both the binaryopposition between the natural and the non-natural, where the primary term confersvalue, and also the disruption within that destabilises the standard of the same. Inother words, they speak to both the radical otherness that constitutes an outside andto the difference that inhabits identity itself. The issue is not so much that monstersthreaten to overrun the boundaries of the proper, as that they promise to dissolvethem. Before following through that thought in later chapters, however, I want firstto trace some historical representations and explanations of the monstrous, althoughas will become clear, no account can be disinterested or merely descriptive.

The relationship between monstrosity and what might be deemed the natural wasone which greatly exercised the classical mind, and later the Church fathers, forwhom the problem was how to account for the unnatural within a God-given uni-verse. Unlike many of his contemporaries who posited wholly supernatural expla-nation, Aristotle used the term monstrosity to describe forms of corporeal excess,deficiency or displacement, not just in those bodies which were malformed by dis-ease, accident, or birth, but more widely to depict all beings that are a deviation fromthe common course of nature. As he put it: Monstrosities belong to the class ofthings contrary to nature, not any and every kind of nature, but Nature in her usualoperations; the crucial marker for him being that such deformities transgressed thelaw of generative resemblance (Generatione Animalium 1953: 767b, 510). And

MONSTERS, MARVELS AND MEANINGS 11

insofar as Aristotle marked excess and deficiency more generally as conditions ofmoral failing, the traditional characterisation of monstrosity in terms of excess,deficiency or displacement suggests not only bodily imperfection, but animproper being. Given, however, that Aristotle regarded any deviation from themorphology of the normal male body as a type of monstrosity he famouslycharacterised the birth of girls as the most common form of deformity (GA, 728a18; 737a 27) then what is at issue is not so much the unexpected disruption ofcorporeal limits, as the putative failure signalled by both monstrous and femalebirth of the male seed to replicate itself, to reproduce paternal likeness. Thesearch for the causes of monstrosity is, for Aristotle, not so much a philosophicalenquiry into significance, as an enquiry into a puzzling aspect of everyday bio-logy. Such natural science aside, however, it appears from the surviving texts thatthe important questions for the classical world, the Middle Ages, and the earlymodern period were often the more abstract ones focused on the meaning of themonstrous. The Aristotelian insistence that such beings are curiosities of nature,rather than opposed to it, was widely reflected in subsequent texts, but it does notpreclude a parallel history in which monstrosities are understood as prodigies, asmarvellous signifiers of Gods will, the ominous markers of good or ill to come.

The Latin roots of the word monster are rich in associations, suggesting bothmonstrare to show, and monere to warn, and for the most part it was these con-notations that were the focus of scholarly interest. Although the commentaryoffered by Aristotle remained influential, it was Ciceros list of synonyms monstra, ostenta, portenta, prodigia (De Divinatione 1920: 1, 42) which anchorsmeaning in later ages, and privileges a teleological rather than aetiologicalapproach. What Cicero firmly marks out is the trajectory of the monstrous as asupranatural signifier of coming social and political calamities, or as a commen-tary on contemporary mores. Such interpretations were seized upon in medievaland Renaissance Christian Europe as a means of offering social, political and reli-gious comment, and both lay and scholarly texts concur in their understanding ofthe meaning of monstrosity. Accordingly, gross deviations from the norm were notsimply horrifying, but also marvellous, signs both of natures fecundity and Godspower. Thus, in the thirteenth and fourteenth century works of the pseudo-Albertus Magnus, monsters are created for the adornment of the universe (1992:113), while Ambroise Par, writing in 1573, begins his list of the causes of mon-strosity: The first whereof is the glory of God, that his immense power may bemanifested to those which are ignorant of it.Another cause is, that God maypunish mens whickednesse, or show signs of punishment at hand (1982: 4).

Somewhat later, but in a similar vein, John Bulwer, whose encyclopaedicAnthropometamorphosis (1653) deals in the main with the monstrous appearanceand contaminatory potential of other races, also acknowledges the traditional expla-nations of Gods influence and mans own sin, albeit with a more naturalistic tone:

these apparitions that be contrarie to Nature, happen not without the providence ofAlmighty God, but for the punishing and admonishing of Men, these things by just judg-ment are often permitted, not but Man hath a great hand in these monstrosities; forinordinate Lust is drawn in as a Cause of these Events, whereby the seed of Man is madeweak and unperfect. (Quoted in Glenister 1964: 17)


What is more interesting, however, is Bulwers further claim that man frequentlyhas a part in deliberately creating such abnormal features as deformed heads,elongated ears, and the marks of scarification, not just for purposes of fraud which many writers allude to but for reasons of differential cultural norms. Inhis view, quasi-mythological races such as the Blemmyae, who reputedly had noheads, but instead faces on their chests, are real people who have fashioned theirown monstrosity over generations. Bulwers detailed explanations, althoughhighly intolerant of what he takes to be insults to the Regular Beauty andHonesty of Nature (1653: title page), may represent an early recognition thatmonstrous difference is a matter of cultural production.

Any supposedly monstrous birth could be called upon to support both politicaland moral exhortations, and for a time after the commercialisation of printing inthe sixteenth century, heavily illustrated popular texts circulated with more orless fantastic versions of monster stories, much as the tabloid newspapers mightpublish such stories today. Even when books appeared initially in Latin a stra-tegy conferring authority and respectability translations into the vernacular com-monly followed, often into several different and usually idiosyncratically updatededitions. Fortunius Licetus original work of 1616, De monstrum, caussis naturaet differentis, which is one of the most comprehensive surveys of that period ofhuman malformations, taking in both classical references and topical accounts, isstill being supplemented almost a century later when Jean Palfryns French trans-lation of 1708 appeals to topical interest by marking on its title page a monstrousbirth that had occurred in Flanders just a few years previously. Despite, however,regular appeals to the authenticity of eyewitness accounts, the testimony ofrespected professionals, and the textual authority of classical authors such asHippocrates, Aristotle or Galen, there is little internal attempt in pre-modernworks to cite singular evidence in ways that would be understood today. StephenBateman, for example, sincerely recommends his own monster book, (t)o whosepainefull studie I have putte nothingsaving that whyche I myselfe have seen inmy own time, or have received of my special friends, men of good credite (1581:Preface), but in fact the subsequent text is almost entirely taken from a work byConrad Lycosthenes (1557). But it mattered little; observation as such was notthe motive force of such texts which sought rather to position monstrosity withina familiar network of epistemic associations mythological, classical, biblical,medical and symbolic. Edward Fentons introduction to his free translation of theFrench author Boaistuau (1560) is similarly typical of the period:

there is nothing to seeme, which more stireth the spirite of man, which raiiseth more hissenses, which doth more amaze him, or ingendereth a greater terror or admiration in allcreatures, than the monsters, wonders and adhominations, wherein we see the workes ofNature, not only turned arsiversie, misseshapen and deformed, but (which is more) theydo for the most part discover unto us the secret judgement and scourge of the ire of God.(Fenton 1569: Preface)

What matters in these highly coincident texts is that they speak both to pedagogicintent and to a human curiosity about what lies outside the bounds of the known.

The various images of monsters human, animal or hybrid are clearlyintended not as exact, but as iconic, representations, for not only do the same


narrative descriptions reappear across a range of works spanning many decades,but the selfsame image may be used within a single book to illustrate accounts ofseveral different creatures. Batemans The Doome Warning all Men to theIudgemente (1581), for example, characteristically reiterates both text and picturesalready popularised in earlier works, as well as showing no regard for congruencebetween the apparent age of the figures in the drawings, and those in the textwhose stories are illustrated. Monstrous births hermaphrodites, hydrocephalicinfants, hairy men, one-eyed giants, dog-headed humans, human-headed pigs andconjoined twins and other freak events such as meteorological peculiarities arerelated with gusto. But where causative explanation is offered, it is invariablyoverlaid with portentous meaning. Bateman was evidently aware of the doctrineof maternal imagination,2 as his account of twins joined at the head makes clear:

The cause of this Monster was this, two Women spake together, one of whiche was withChild, and the thirde coming upon them sodayne knocked both their Heades together asthey were talking, wherewith the Woman with Child being afrayd made a token of theKnock in her Child. (1581: 287)3

But the event flows seamlessly into his reference to a battle between Christiansand Turks in the same year as the birth. The connection is purely emblematic(Figure 1.1).


Figure 1.1 Human twins conjoined at the head, born at Worms in 1495(Sbastien Brandt) from Aesculape, 1933, Vol. 1

Like many other writers of the great period of monster texts, or wonder booksas they are often known, Bateman makes little distinction between one categoryof monster and another, so that deformed human beings, newly discovered andstrange animals of land and sea, and fabulous creatures of mythology are alllumped together. In this there is some continuity with the medieval tradition ofbestiaries catalogues of animal lore which occasionally, though not invari-ably, included both individual hybrid human forms and the so-called monstrousraces as part of their treatment of the animal world. A more important link is inthe pedagogic purpose of the bestiary whereby each creature was assigned anallegorical significance in terms of its putative good or evil features. The long-established belief in the existence of monstrous races at the outer margins of theknown and habitable world was itself an important element in the composition ofwonder books. In his hugely influential Natural History (1961), first circulated inAD77, the Roman writer and traveller Pliny the Elder lists over fifty such races,which range from the recognisably human, such as the short-statured Pygmies ofinterior Africa or the one-legged Sciopods of India, to the morphological confu-sion of two other notable Indian races, the Cynocephali, who have dogs headsand communicate by barking, and the Panotii whose enormous ears serve notonly as blankets, but provide the means of flight (Figure 1.2).4 For Pliny himself,the description of such races conveys a sense of wonderment at the diversitycreated by natures power and majesty, and he does not characterise corporealdifference as indicative of moral failings. In contrast, both bestiaries and wonder


Figure 1.2 Some members of the Monstrous Races in Cosmographiaeuniversalis, lib. VI (Munster 1554)

books explicitly use difference to draw out moral lessons, with the latter inparticular loading the non-normative with negativity.

As travel expanded throughout the medieval period for reasons of trade,conquest, crusade and pilgrimage increasing encounters with the racial otherprovided a complex vehicle for the expression of inner desires and anxieties.Narrative accounts such as that given in the fourteenth-century manuscriptscalled Mandevilles Travels (1967)5 indicate that far from actual contact withunfamiliar ethnic groups resulting in a reduction of illusory expectations, percep-tion was framed in highly fanciful terms. Nearly three centuries later, Bulwer isstill writing of the monstrous races as a present reality: For although this Nationof Men hath been accounted by many among the Types and Fabulous Narrations ofthe Ancients, yet in these latter Times we have received credible Intelligence ofsuch kind of Nations newly found (1653: 18). He then goes on to describeseveral instances in which races of Cynocephali have been discovered. AlthoughBulwer himself believes that such monstrosities could be the result of longstandinghuman manipulation of nature, his text nonetheless feeds into a well-establishedpopular tradition of quasi-anthropological writing. Friedmans remarks on theearlier travel narratives are no less apposite: there appears to have been a psycho-logical need for Plinian peoples. Their appeal to medieval men was based on suchfactors as fantasy, escapism, delight in the exercise of the imagination, and veryimportant fear of the unknown (1981: 24). Nor are such responses limited todistant history. The monstrous images alternately terrifying and fascinating ofthe primitives supposedly inhabiting lands unconquered, or at least unaccessed,by the colonialist powers have been a mainstay of the European imaginary.Present day racism thrives on such long-established connotations.

Although the margins of the known world were held to be the pre-eminentlocation of monsters, then, it was, as Cohen reminds us, a purely conceptuallocus rather than a geographical one (1996: 6).6 Above all, the representation ofgeographically and imaginatively distant peoples is beset by questions as to theirhuman or animal status. Despite Aristotles deep scepticism about the probabil-ity of hybridity he argued that differential periods of gestation made inter-species generation impossible monstrosity was frequently manifest in thepopular imagination in just such a guise. Travellers tales provided a rich sourceof images, in which individual as well as racial examples were equally common.The human/animal hybrid signalled not just absolute otherness, but the corruptionof human form and being. Accordingly, other races were situated not simply asmonstrously different, but as ontologically and existentially dependent on theunquestioned humanity of the civilised races. What is less obvious, but nonethe-less crucial, is that the existential status of that humanity does not stand alone, butby corollary is dependent on its monstrous other.

What seems to emerge from the accounts referred to above, is that the cate-gories of natural, supranatural and supernatural are far from distinct.7 Themonster occupies an essentially fluid site where despite its putative otherness, itcannot be separated entirely from the nature of man himself. Even whenexpressed within the prevalent and historically persistent discourse of the super-natural, the monster is taken to reflect back at least some contingent truths of the


human condition. The monstrous is not thereby the absolute other, but rather amirror of humanity: on an individual level, the external manifestation of thesinner within. Given that all human beings were seen as more or less corruptedfrom a state of pre-lapsarian perfection, then the visible disorder of the monstrousbody, and the moral failings that it signalled, were a sign of the vulnerability ofall men and women to a loss of humanity. What was thrown into question was thestability and predictability of human existence. Although, then, at first sight, themonstrous represents an indisputable case of otherness, which might engenderfear and horror of the unknown, it has a far more paradoxical status. Given thatthe western logos is structured according to an infinite series of binaries thatground all knowledge in the play of sameness and difference, it is only by mak-ing such distinctions, by having a clear sense of self and other, that it is possibleto mark out the parameters of self-identity. If we know what we are by what weare not, then the other, in its apparent separation and distinction, serves a positivefunction of securing the boundaries of the self. And yet time and again themonstrous cannot be confined to the place of the other; it is not simply alien, butarouses always the contradictory responses of denial and recognition, disgust andempathy, exclusion and identification.

I want now to look in some detail at one of the most ubiquitous hybridmonsters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which speaks eloquently tothe way in which such figures operated simultaneously on several differentlevels. The point is not whether such figures were taken as really existing, forthough countless medical historians have indulged our own ages disciplinarydesire for categorisation with explanations based on modern knowledge of con-genital deformity, many monsters seem to us, and may have been, wholly fantas-tic. It would be misplaced to see our predecessors as simply credulous, for as theearly seventeenth-century author of the apocryphal Aristotles Works admits,without doubt some of the stories of monsters are fabulous (n.d.: 40), but thatdoes not diminish their pedagogical value. Indeed in many early manuscripts andprinted books, there is a characteristic indifference to the putative modernistboundary between reality and fantasy. What interests me, then, is not the truthvalue, but what significance can be attached to the accounts. Although Aristotlehad defined monstrosity in terms of bodily excess and deficiency, the legacy ofPliny in particular threw up the question of hybridity where the division betweenhuman and animal was indeterminate. But even in those historical momentswhere the issue of monstrous corporeality may seem to be primarily about form,about the difficulty of reconciling in a single body those things which should notgo together, what can be read there too are all sorts of ontological anxieties aboutwhat exactly the human subject consists in. The dislocations of hybridity are,then, the surface manifestations of a much deeper uncertainty and vulnerabilityof the self.

The rather charming Monster of Ravenna is one of the most widely reproducedfigures in monster texts of the early modern period, and multiple illustrations ofits appearance are still in existence (Figure 1.3). The images that we have all showan infant of reputedly human birth, whose body nonetheless displays a variety oftransgressive elements, and whose human status is surely complicated by its


resemblance to both an angel and a devil. The figure is evidently intersexed,having both penis and pudenda as well as breasts, though the convention refers onlyto an it. The head bears a single horn, the arms are replaced by feathered or insome cases reptilian wings, the legs are fused to form a scaled, sometimes feath-ered, mermaid-like tail which terminates in a giant avian or reptilian claw. In addi-tion a third eye peers out at knee level, and in some illustrations, cross-like lettersor marks confusingly symbolising Christian virtue appear on the torso. In short,the monstrous body ostentatiously crosses the boundaries between male andfemale, between human and animal (itself hybridised as simultaneously mammal,reptile, fish and bird), and, on the interpretive level, between virtue and vice.Writing in the mid-sixteenth century, Par (1982) offers a relatively unmediatedaccount of its existence, counting it among the examples of those monsters causedby the wrath of God. In contrast, Bateman more specifically explains each of thecorporeal peculiarities in terms of pride, unsteadfastness, buggery, and other suchvices, but he also makes the link to the political situation of popery at Ravenna, themonsters birthplace. The working out of Gods scourge as signified on the body ofthe child indicates to Bateman the wider lesson, that for these vices Italy shold bebeaten down with the sword (1581: 295). Nonetheless, the corporeally inscribedletters carry their own contrary message of salvation should Italy turn to virtue.

Despite a startling number of modern attempts to reclaim the creature as thereal outcome of several distinct congenital deformities,8 the Monster of


Figure 1.3 The Monster of Ravenna in De monstrorum natura, caussis etdifferentis (Licetus 1634)

Ravenna is a highly symbolic figure constructed at the confluence of severaldiscourses in this instance political, religious and superstitious. Its monstrousform is marked by the classical attributes of excess, deficiency and displacement,sutured together in a hyperrealisation of ambiguity. Moreover, the very hybridityof the infant speaks to a series of transgressions with regard to sexuality, species,and personhood. If the monster is more than appearance, if it does have an innerlife, is it that of the brute animal or is it that of a sense of self? More pertinent forthe historical context was the question of whether such a creature should be bap-tised. If the soul were an attribute of human beings alone, and baptism the neces-sary gateway to salvation, then the Church faced a very real dilemma about theappropriate response to those monstrous births which confounded the putativeboundaries of the human. In the early Christian period, Augustine laid down aremarkably tolerant formula that remained influential for many centuries:

But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man thatis as a rational and mortal being derives from that one first-created human being. Andthis is true, however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodilyshape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part, orquality. (City of God 16. 8; 1972: 662)9

By the early seventeenth century, however, the canonist, Alphonzo a Carranza,offered a more ambiguous version, that those having human form can and oughtto be washed by holy baptism and those truly monstrous, which lack rationalsouls, not (quoted in Friedman 1981: 1823). Perhaps because the qualifier forbaptism was, strictly speaking, a matter of the rational soul rather than of appear-ance, the subsequent Enlightenment interest in more naturalistic explications ofhuman monstrosity did not settle the issue of what was appropriate. The problemof radical hybridity, and what it signified of inner being, remained. The real orimagined fate of the Monster of Ravenna is not recorded.

When Bateman turns to another multiple hybrid, the equally infamous Monsterof Cracow,10 reputedly born in 1543, the prodigious nature of the event is not onlyapparent in the peculiarity of the birth, but is voiced directly by the monster itself:he is said to have lived foure houres after he was borne, and at length (after hehad uttered these Wordes, Vigilate, dominus deus vester adventat, that is, Watche,youre Lorde is a comming) to have dyed (1581: 337). What is notable again isthat the Latin-spouting infant, a favourite with Renaissance and early modernchroniclers, is as much constructed by the discursive strategies of the political andreligious climate as by any account of an actual birth. As Foucault among othershas shown, the body is the inscribed surface of events, a text to be decipheredand read (1977: 148), an utterance in its own right. It is as though the monstros-ity is materialised precisely in order that it might speak. The monsters that engageus most, then, that command intricate explanation, are those which are closest tous, those which display some aspect of our own form, and speak, both literallyand metaphorically, a human language. And monsters do always signify. In hissermon on the birth of conjoined twins in his parish, for example, the seventeenth-century cleric Thomas Bedford characteristically stresses that all monstrous andmisshapen births, though dead, yet speak for the instruction of the living(Bedford 1635). Although the purely animal monster might also be an object


of curiosity or fear, and has a similar history of heralding events to come, ofproviding a material marker of divine affect, or later of signifying evolutionarydiversity, it does not thereby unsettle the security of human being. The animal isthe other in the comforting guise of absolute difference, but in its lack of human-ity it cannot appeal directly to the heart of our own being. Those monsters thatare at least in an ambivalent relationship to humanity, however, are always tooclose for comfort. They invoke vulnerability.

Although I am wary of a too simplistic periodisation of the past that lines upthe epistemological significance of the monstrous with specific external events,many commentators have claimed that a preoccupation with monstrosity seemsto be a regular feature of periods of social and political uncertainty.11 Whethersuch an externalisation of motivation is justified or not, what is certain is that thegrasping after an order of explanation in the face of extraordinary corporeal dis-ruption is an enduring feature of historical record. We should remember, more-over, that for many centuries, including the early modern period, the human bodyin all its forms represented variously, in the popular and sometimes in thescholastic imagination, an index and analogy of the political state, of cosmology,and of the wider natural world.12 In short, the body was freighted with symbolicmeaning. For those births attributed to divine or supernatural intervention, theirsupposed purpose could cover a number of options: to foretell macro-calamities;to express Gods wrath or vengeance on a morally negligent population; or indeedto punish individual immorality such as sodomy, transspecies coupling, consort-ing with the devil, or intercourse on the Sabbath. Whether narrated in popularmonster books or in the somewhat later proliferation of street ballads and broad-sheets, which operate as much within the realm of entertainment as moral admo-nition, monstrous affronts to nature always demanded interpretation. And evenwhen the longstanding belief in the supposedly portentous nature of monstrositylost favour among the learned in the face of the more biologistic explanations ofEnlightenment science, the requirement of exegesis remained. Each instance isrelated to an external cause, but that does not settle meaning. Moreover, the verytelling seems also to speak to an ontological vulnerability in which the ambigu-ously unnatural otherness of monsters may serve as the focus of abjected fear,anxiety and guilt.

It is with regard to this inherent ambiguity that we should understand attemptsmade to fix the epistemology and ontology of monstrosity, to impose order on thedisordered. To summarise briefly the empirical parameters of the debate, thehistory of monstrosity took, during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,a decidedly normative and positivist turn. In line with Foucaults concept of anemergent norm for the human body itself, monstrous difference became moreregularly defined as deviant abnormal rather than as wholly distinctive. Witha reinvigorated interest in practical science, Enlightenment scholars largely aban-doned abstract speculations on monstrosity in order to impose instead a medicaldiscourse increasingly focused on embryology and comparative anatomy which served to normalise and domesticate the marvellous and prodigious. Thepioneering methods of Francis Bacon were particularly influential, and hisNovum Organum of 1620 explicitly sets out to categorise deviant instances, that


is errors of nature, freaks and monsters, where nature deflects and declines fromits usual course (Bacon 2000: 148, Aphorism 8). The point was to therebybetter understand common forms, and ultimately to control nature. As Baconnotes: we must make a collection or particular natural history of all the monstersand prodigious products of nature, and every novelty, rarity or abnormality innature. But this must be done with the greatest discretion, to maintain credibility(2000: 149, Aphorism 8). The gathering of collections of monstrosities as part ofthe fad for a gentlemans personal cabinet of curiosities was a familiar featurein an age of expanding travel and commerce, but the value of the monstrous asthe other caught in the gaze of the beholder was more than that of entertainmentor moral instruction. For Bacon and his successors, it promised insight into thenature of life itself. As the body in general became an object of intense scrutiny,the monstrous was studied as the prototype for a new kind of scientific fact(Daston 1991: 95), an aberration that would throw light on the normal. By thenineteenth century, the newly coined science of teratology seemed to promise thecertainty of explanation.

It was particularly in the field of reproduction that the scientific approach tomonsters played an influential role in grounding and contesting a range of specu-lative theories. The relative importance of the sperm and egg, the role of the uter-ine environment, and dominance of either preformation or epigenesis13 as modelsof generation were all debated in a context which explicitly sought to account formonstrous births. The question of whether such births were predetermined or theresult of accident was itself relevant both to the possibility of repair of the abnor-mal body, and to the prospect of creating monsters experimentally. In the view ofmany commentators, such as Dudley Wilson in his detailed book, Signs andPortents (1993), there is a clear epistemological break between the pre-Enlightenment focus on the supranatural status and symbolic significance of themonstrous, and the post-Enlightenment will to impose rational meaning anddeterminate form. Wilson takes as paradigmatic the work of nineteenth-centuryscientists such as Etienne and Isidore Geoffroy St-Hilaire who were especiallyconcerned with investigating the monstrous as a stage in the development of thefoetus. Their greater aim was to throw light on the origin and development of dif-ferential species themselves, where the monstrous marked a kind of transitionstage. The sense of mystery and awe that had characterised the response inearlier periods was reduced by the scientific gaze in such work to the desire tounravel a set of natural laws that were as yet imperfectly understood, but essen-tially transparent. Monstrosity was simply the normal which had been hinderedor had deviated into a parallel yet equally explicable course. As Isidore GeoffroySt-Hilaire wrote in 1832:

Monstrousness is no longer random disorder, but another order, equally regular andequally subject to laws: it is the mixture of an old and a new order, the simultaneouspresence of two states that ordinarily succeed one another. (Quoted in Jacob 1989: 124)

The operation of power/knowledge here, and the illusion of potential if not actualmastery, attempts to strip away the disturbing and indeterminate status of themonstrous body. If, as Geoffroy St-Hilaire asserts, there are no exceptions to the


laws of nature, only to the laws of the naturalists, then science has laid claim toits own invulnerability.

Although in one sense the domain of science at least appears to treat the anom-alous body with a new degree of moral neutrality, the very fact that anyepistemological category such as that which constitutes the proper form ofhumanity works on the basis of exclusion, should alert us to its questionableethical underpinnings. In discursively constructing the objects of its concern,rather than simply reporting on a pre-existing state of affairs, the operation ofboth historical and contemporary biomedical discourse is never exempt fromdeconstructive scrutiny. In introducing a new system of classification to the naturalsciences, for example, Linnaeus was enabled to demythologise human-bornmonsters and include them in a common genus with other human beings, whilstat the same time emphasising a hierarchical ordering of species that privilegedwhite Europeans over darker skinned peoples, who were in turn superior to themerely monstrous in form (Linnaeus 1759). Almost 250 years later, the resultingformalisation and authorisation of a racial hierarchy based in the apparentneutrality of science has been deeply shaken, but not entirely dislodged. The task,then, is to displace such texts from familiar and preferred readings, decouplingthem, that is, from the predetermined disciplinary frameworks medical, moral,legal, or the like that function to delimit their significance and meaning. It isperhaps in what remains overtly unspoken, though often apparent in the rhetori-cal and metaphorical devices that mark all discourse scientific or otherwise that we may discern the workings of an imaginary that responds with anxiety tothe monstrous. The desire for mastery over the excessive other, so explicit inBaconian taxonomies, for example, illustrates not so much the strength of thescientific endeavour as the need to stabilise the uncertainty that the monstrouscreates at the heart of human being. The same desire is, moreover, no less a moti-vating force in the present day response to corporeal difference, with regard notonly to skin colour, but, as I shall go on to discuss, to congenital disabilities.14

The narrative of a set of explicit cultural transformations that constitute theemergence of western modernity, and which produce a corresponding change inthe response to the monstrous, is taken up in Rosemarie Garland Thomsonsanalysis of the genealogy of what she calls freak discourse. According toThomson, the progressive shift from the mode of the marvellous to the mode ofthe deviant can be discerned in a series of sequential moves: from prodigiousmonsters to the pathological terata of medical discourse; from revelation to enter-tainment; from awe to horror; from portent to site of progress; from wonder toerror (1996: 3). In an epoch of increasing faith in rational and secular explana-tion, the monstrous was incorporated into the quintessentially modernist para-digm of the normal/abnormal, where its threat was and is relational rather thanautonomous. In the face of the valorisation of uniformity and unity, it must beboth compared and contrasted to corporeal norms in a way that reduces differenceto a matter of pathology. Taking up the Foucauldian theme, Thomson asserts thatmodernity affected a standardization of everyday life that saturated the entiresocial fabric, producing and reinforcing the concept of an unmarked, normative,levelled body as the dominant subject of democracy (1996: 12). In consequence,


the monstrous body represented at once boundless liberty and appallingdisorder (ibid.) which must be recontained by strategies of normalisation insti-tutionalisation, reconstructive surgery, prosthetic aids and so on. Thomsonherself is particularly concerned with issues of corporeal disability, which shesees as providing the present day coordinates of monstrosity or freakery, limitednow to the abnormal.

And yet the standardising impulses of modernity and the positivism of science,taken at face value by Wilson, Daston, and to a large extent by Thomson, to sig-nal an epistemological break in the response to the monstrous, tells us little of theenduring and disruptive power of the morphological imaginary. Rather than thesequential model that I have outlined above, I propose instead an interweaving ofelements where the deviant and the marvellous are always imbricated one withthe other. Alongside, and indeed within, the work of the learned societies,15 asense of wonder remained undisturbed, an indication that the monstrous signifiedrather more than simple corporeal difference. A late seventeenth-century report tothe Royal Society, for example, on the strange birth of conjoined twins testifiesto the persistent fascination of the monstrous. The twins, reports Mr A.P., arelikely to Live, if the Multitudes that come to see them (sometimes 500 in a day)do not occasion the shortening of their Lives (A.P. 1705: 303). And yet, despitethe enormous public and scientific interest in monsters in the early modernperiod, it is difficult to find evidence of any self-awareness on the part of theobservers. For bodies like the Royal Society, which very self-consciously pro-moted scholarly impartiality, this is perhaps not surprising, but the emphasis puton measurement, on dissection where possible, and on the importance of corro-borating accounts creates a distance that serves to obscure less acceptable con-cerns. By focusing on the monster as an object of knowledge, observers couldendeavour to ignore the disquieting questions that monsters raised about thehuman condition in general, and individual identity in particular. If the hundreds and they were as likely to be sophisticated and educated urbanites as unschooledpeasants who flocked to each new monster attraction on display in the largecities were made conscious of their own vulnerability, then there is little textualevidence of it (Todd 1995: 154). Certainly the crowds came to gasp with horrorand to admire, to be frightened and amused, but the very extent of the desire towitness monstrosity first hand, to report in detail every instance, and to circulatea prodigious literature indicates, I suggest, an inner anxiety about the relationbetween the creatures on display and normative form and identity. It is an anxi-ety, moreover, that persists in our own time.

Although the last two centuries have seen a massive acceleration in biomedicalknowledge, it has also been a period during which the organised freak show thedisplay of human monstrosities for profit and entertainment has flourished. Theword freak seems to have been used to indicate corporeal anomaly only sincethe mid-eighteenth century, and freak shows as such were a particular feature ofthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but there is a much longer standingtradition of showing monsters for gain. For individual children and adults whosurvived a monstrous birth, there is plentiful evidence from all periods that self-display was a common strategy of subsistence. Paul Semonin (1996) traces the


tradition of such public shows back to Bartholomews Fair which was held annu-ally in London from the early 1100s until it was finally suppressed in 1855,16

although private appearances before the wealthy and titled were also popular aslate as the reign of Queen Victoria, who personally received many well-knownshow figures such as the diminutive General Tom Thumb. As the evidence ofadvertisements, ballads and handbills from an earlier period demonstrates, freakshave traditionally been, and continued to be, shown in such a way as to offsettheir non-normative natures and bodies with an appeal to their recognisableeveryday or cultured attributes that drew in the spectators at the same time asastounding them. Relatively few of those displayed were passive objects; theywere performers engaged not only in showing off their anomalies, but in singing,sewing, dancing, feeding children, conversing in foreign languages, and in everyway bypassing the putative handicaps of their extraordinary bodies. As Todd putsit, a dynamic of attraction and avoidance structures the internal economy ofmonster exhibits (1995: 156) such that sameness and difference are simultane-ously evoked.

Such shows have attracted much scholarly analysis of late both for theirdemonstration of the function of the gaze, and for the ways in which they con-struct and authorise such binary systems as racist discourse. What the spectatorsactually believe of what they see and hear seems scarcely to matter. As the mostsuccessful of the nineteenth-century showmen, P.T. Barnum himself allows inhis autobiography, the spectacle was often based on a fraud in that there might belittle or nothing out of the ordinary with the body, or mental capacities, of theperformer. Although many other shows did of course stage real anomalies, thecrucial factor, as Robert Bogdan makes clear, is that the label of freak relates notto a particular physiology, but to a way of thinking about and presenting people(1988: 3). When, however, he goes on to remark that everyone exhibited was mis-represented, he means merely that showmen and performers exaggerated physi-cal features, mimicked strange behavioural traits and made up suitably exoticbackgrounds. Rather than accepting Bogdans assumption of an underlying truestate of being, I prefer to think in terms of the discursive construction of allbodies and selves in which the gaze, whether of science or entertainment, plays aprominent role. The question of authenticity is redundant, for as Susan Stewartnotes: it is the imaginary relation, not the real one, that we seek in the spectacle(1993: 111). Like the biomedical gaze which manages monstrosity either byexamining the bodies of the dead or by reducing the living to categories ofknowledge, the freak show, for all its play with the flexibility of the boundariesbetween them and us, is finally no more than a safely contained and distanced dis-play that seeks to sanitise the contaminatory potential of the anomalous other.

The point is that freak shows were productions which staged not real life assuch, but more or less meticulously contrived spectacles, which encouragedviewers to think and see in terms of various binary distinctions between themand us. Those divisions, moreover, took on cultural, racial, national or histori-cal significances which emphasised difference as inferiority. In creating such adistance, the display of abnormality served to normalise the viewing public at thesame time as marking the performer as a deviant type. Again like science which,


for example, during the early part of the nineteenth century was displaying andlater dissecting the body of Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, thefreak show made explicit links between cultural otherness and monstrous form.17

Racial stereotyping was extremely common, both in the overdetermined use ofnon-white performers, and in the practice of blacking up to produce a moreexotic image. For Susan Stewart:

(t)he body of the cultural other isboth naturalized and domesticated in a process thatwe might consider to be characteristic of colonization in general.On display, the freakrepresents the naming of the frontier and the assurance that the wilderness, the outside,is now territory. (1993: 10910)

But in that precisely lies the problem; for, contrary to Stewarts view of the freakdisplay as a horrifying closure, the shifting of boundaries, and the ability ofmonstrous difference to enter into the space of identity, gestures towards an open-ing up of signification. The safety of entertainment and putative education aboutthe anomalous or racial other is undermined by the persistence of a troublingfamiliarity. In Barnums highly popular What is It? show, for example, thespectacle of the supposed man-monkey did not just evoke feelings of cu

Documents

Margrit Shildrick - Embodyng the Monster - Encounters With the Vulnerable Self