Sleeping Bacchant By Károly Lotz (19th Century)

"'Will Not Let Die': Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine" in The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar

“Shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and has for years— / Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.”

— Walt Whitman, from “L. of. G’s Purport”, Leaves of Grass

In other words, Cassandra is not just a translator, she is also an embodiment of the very function of translation: her prophetic speech often appears to be suspended between languages, like Benjamin's translator who operates in the realm of 'pure language' that is beyond any single linguistic code. Cassandra takes and reformulates and incomprehensible message from the future and becomes incomprehensible in the process, (re)producing a message in such a way that it demands a second, or third or fourth translation. Sometimes she descends from a trance-like state of prophecy to initiate the next link in the chain of interpretations herself, reframing her own message in more prosaic language, only to find that this speech too is received with confusion. Her utterance is always both a target and source text at the same time. The proliferation of translation acts within her single body evokes a kind of never-ending self-translation; like the self-translator, Cassandra suffers a splitting of the self, one part of which is committed to the spirit of the original composition, while the other struggles to reframe it for a new audience that can never grasp the meaning of the original.

Emily Pillinger, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature

monster theory 101

So anyone who has even glanced at my blog knows that a lot of my work is built around an area of literary theory called ‘monster theory’, which is far from a major theoretical discipline. As such I thought I’d give a little run down on what it is and resources that are good in terms of getting started.

Monster Theory is loosely described as the study of monsters, fictional characters that we (humans) deem monstrous. This is usually rooted in the concept of norm/other, which becomes human/monster. The basis of modern monster theory is built on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who published a paper in 1996 titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses) which included seven different and overlapping views on what monsters are, why we create them, what they mean and how they fit into both literary canon and our society. These seven theses are (very quickly and loosely);

The Monster’s Body Is A Cultural Body: a monstrous being “is born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” Meaning a monster created for a work of fiction is generally an embodiment of a certain cultural anxiety or fear occurring in a specific socio-cultural moment. For instance, during the 70s and 80s, during the AIDS crisis in the US, you’ll notice a sharp rise in the number of vampire films (creatures who transmit a kind of ‘death’ through bodily fluids, through a highly sexualised penetrative contact).

The Monster Always Escapes: a monstrous being is, in part, so threatening because it is pervasive. The monster might appear dead, only for the corpse to be missing in the final shots of the film. This builds upon the previous point; a cultural anxiety does not immediately vanish simply because the personified monster of it is slain, issues like disease, poverty, homophobia, racism, ableism will ultimately again rear their ugly heads.

The Monster Is The Harbinger of Category Crisis: monstrous beings refuse “to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’,” and resist any kind of systematic structure. In a culture so obsessed with binary oppositions and classifications, things that refuse classification are often a threat to that very system of classification. If the system is not all-encompassing, it fails altogether. This can cause monsters to shake established systems of understanding culture, identity and knowledge. 

The Monster Dwells At The Gates of Difference: “…the monster is difference made flesh […] monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.” Monstrous beings are, as previously mentioned, a cultural body, which also means generally they take on traits of ostracised members of a culture, and act as stand in’s for fears, phobias and ostracisation of these social groups. For example, in a later work by Cohen, Undead: A Zombie Oriented Ontology, he states of zombies; “…we feel no shame in declaring their bodies repulsive. They eat disgusting food. They possess no coherent language; it all sounds like grunts and moans. They desire everything we possess.” And further notes that the generally accepted method of dispatching them is a gunshot to the head–a violent crime against another human being. This same rhetoric could easily be applied to conservative white opinions of immigrants–and in fact, the origin of the word zombie can be traced back to the Haitian slave trade route.

The Monster Polices The Borders Of The Possible: to live in the dynamic the monster is predicated upon (norm/other, human/monster), there must, therefore, be a border between the two. The monster can therefore serve as a warning; transgress the boundaries by which you are human, and become monstrous; “…the monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographical, sexual).” The most popular examples of this theory comes in the form of a Disney film: Beauty and the Beast. The Prince does not extend hospitalities to the old woman seeking aid, acting outside an accepted code of conduct for their society, and is therefore rendered monstrous as a result. While this is a more direct example, the trope is pervasive even among works and genres not featuring the supernatural.

The Monster Is Really A Kind Of Desire: the monstrous is often associated with a kind of transgressive or forbidden action, like say…the fact that female villains will often take on intense temptress roles, this is usually in an attempt to enforce and normalise the opposite behaviour. “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can also evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint.”

The Monster Stands At The Threshold…Of Becoming: This thesis is really only a paragraph and is possibly my favourite piece of writing ever so rather than try and explain it I’ll simply let it stand on it’s own: Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge–and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we have created them.

It is important to note that while this essay is considered fundamental in the concept of monster theory and it’s study, Cohen’s work is built upon work like Julia Kristeva’s Power of Horror: Essays on Abjection, and Barbara Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine. Additions to the field have been added since then; collected editions like the Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters, Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters, as well as essays in journals, collected editions on other wider topics (like horror, fantasy, sociology in literature). But the field is still relatively small at this point. I’ll be putting together a sort of reading list at some point in a post about where you can really get a good overview of the area, but the central starting point for monster theory is decidedly Cohen’s essay (which is the introductory chapter to an entire book on the subject). 

“Medea is very much concerned with the problem of woman’s place in human society […] Euripides is concerned in this play not with progress or reform but (as in the Hippolytus and the Bacchae) with the eruption in tragic violence of forces in human nature which have been repressed and scorned, which in their long-delayed breakout exact a monstrous revenge. The Medea is not about woman’s rights; it is about woman’s wrongs, those done to her and by her.”

— Knox, B. (1979). The Medea of Euripides, from Word and action: essays on the ancient theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp.295-322.

TALES: KASHMIRI STORIES AND SONGS collected by Tilawônu Hatim, Sir Aurel Stein, and Sir George Abraham Grierson (London: Murray, 1923)

source

Persephone and the Springtime was written by Margaret Hodges with illustrations by Arvis Stewart.

Part 1

James Baldwin talking about love

AND IF we’re talking about Ovid’s take on the Persephone myth anyway, and the other story Ovid inserted, the comparison between the boy being turned into a lizard for laughing at Demeter and the Demophon myth are so different in every single aspect that I cannot fathom what the use of the second one is to the Persephone myth, only to Ovid’s overall themes. While Demophon is a temporary stand-in for Persephone and perhaps even a tool Demeter uses to one-up her brothers, and is a cultic display of her matronly side as a goddess, the lizard tale just…provides comedy? Characterizes her as petty or fickle? It really is the most derailing story line in this part of the text, as Demeter is searching before it and after it. It only provides the mandatory metamorphosis, but so does Cyane? And the fun part is that the episode reflects the Homeric hymn in that Demeter is received as a guest and receives a specific type of food tied to her role as goddess of the grain, but here it has absolutely no payoff, nor any ambiguity to make us guess at more. It just…is. 

some of the short stories from this eve that im thinking abt still... someone read them and tell me ur thoughts thank u

monsters never leave you - carlie st. george . i thought the fairytale elements were woven together nicely 😌 you get undead siblings, tree mothers, chosen family, forgiveness vs love etc! good stuff

call them children - wenmimareba klobah collins the monster narrative continues. their descriptions are delightful, especially in the crafting of the setting, and the ending... obsessed

my country is a ghost - eugenia triantafyllou the longing after loss that imbues this.. feel like it captures a loss of family connection when you’re not in your homeland very well imo

open house on haunted hill - john wiswell another house that loves you! adore the concept of this one, though it’s not horror vibes, more cozy and amusing! though the last line ‘if anything is as patient as a parent, it’s a haunting’ so much potential Thematically there for something more sinister... please may someone write it!