Wednesday, October 29, 2014
trans of machen's Latin
"The universe is silent throughout the day, and not without dread has it been sundered; it shines with nightly fires, and resounds on all sides from the choruses of the Aegripans [mythical goats with fish-tails]: both the playing of reed-pipes and the ringing of cymbals are heard throughout the ocean shore."
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Deep Horror, Archaic Horror
Deep Horror, Archaic Horror
Category disturbance and breakdown occur in terms of subjectivity, the thoughts and feelings of a character in various ways coming undone, the structures of the self breaking down. These also appear in terms of the body which in different ways loses boundaries, becomes porous and permeable, and by turns doubles, fragments, and goes abject.
(Abjection: the condition of the dependent and still-undefined body of the infant; the body as a sack of blood and excrement and primary need; abjection: the body as raw matter. Chapter one of Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror is the standard reference for this term. )
Deep horror may be defined as a site where certain modern forms of subjectivity are constructed.
Drawing on Foucault and others, the argument here is that a range of discourses and practices, including literature, articulate problematizations that open up an imagined "deep space" and "deep time" inside the human.
(I use the term "deep"in a Darwinian/evolutionist sense. In late-Victorian scientific discourses, "life" and "man" are projected on very long historical lines. Evolutionist gradualism and uniformitarianism require such long stretches of time to make sense, of course. Gillain Beer among others discusses this concept; Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrow is the classic popular exposition of the modern concept of deep time.)
Like the morphology of plants and animals, or like the strata of different ages exposed in contiguous layers by a geological cut, the human mind is also said to be layered with histories. In the human mind, there are "vestiges" of a long evolutionary history all the way back to the prehuman and even the pre-vertebrate. (Amoebas are us.) This idea finds broad application in early cultural anthropology with the notion of "survivals." These are superstitions, customs, folklore beliefs. The May-Day dance is a survival of ancient pagan rituals. The belief in the evil eye is a survival of ancient magical systems. Christianity itself is a survival of archaic blood-sacrifice rituals.
"Survivals" also are vestiges of older ways of feeling and thinking that still exist in the modern mind. The human mind retains an archaic psychic layer, thousands of years old, still wired with the instinctual sex and aggression circuits of the early hominids, the proto-religious emotionalism of "primitive" humankind ("animism"), and a fundamental propensity to "savage" thought-process characterized by the irrational.
In some respects, the image is one of an infantile, childish entity continuing to exist at some level within the minds of modern, more enlightened humanity.
Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a well known late-Victorian version of this construction.
Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau presents a different sort of case, where the survivals motif is given literal expression in the present world by means of the new science of biology.
Such constructions open up new territory for description, analysis, and classification. The mind of modern man is said to be inhabited still by archaic drives, feelings, thoughts, and images. "Alienists" and then Freud and psychoanalysis take off from this point. It's a hugely productive fiction, we might say.
If biopower in one respect is about getting more control over individual bodies and minds for the benefit of the nation-state and modern capitalism, this deep-time, psychologizing "analytic of finitude," as Foucault named it, is one means of achieving it.
Problematize the body and mind of the individual in new ways, thus justifying multiple techniques of interpellating (calling to order, defining individual identities in particular ways); taking confessions (the individual becomes a case study, a case, a file or portfolio tracking the course of an ailment and a cure); and promoting internalized control (all of the discourse and practice here promotes a social norm that the individual is "programmed" to embrace and to internalize as a means of meeting a definition of "the normal" or the properly functional).
Another side, however, and arguably an important aspect of Late-Victorian Decadence, is this "deep" construction of modern subjectivity opening to different lines that resist or elude the normativizing and social-control trend of biopower. Writers like Vernon Lee claim such power for different visions, often subversive of mainstream Victorian values.
So this inward turn to deep horror can be read in light of Victorian problematizations of life, body, and mind that in some respects foster what Foucault calls biopower or more broadly we can call a dominant biopolitics of the late-Victorian period that is focused on social control of various kinds, maximizing productivity and maintaining political and social stability by attempting to model docile, self-normativizing subjects.
Returning to Carroll, we can track horror effects as they take an inward turn in deep horror and what I call "archaic horror." The two are often mixed. Sometimes, as with Verne's giant squid or Well's Island of beast-men, the deep/archaic is externalized. In others, outward and inward are mixed, as in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Category disturbance and breakdown occur in terms of subjectivity, the thoughts and feelings of a character in various ways coming undone, the structures of the self breaking down. These also appear in terms of the body which in different ways loses boundaries, becomes porous and permeable, and by turns doubles, fragments, and goes abject.
(Abjection: the condition of the dependent and still-undefined body of the infant; the body as a sack of blood and excrement and primary need; abjection: the body as raw matter. Chapter one of Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror is the standard reference for this term. )
Deep horror may be defined as a site where certain modern forms of subjectivity are constructed.
Drawing on Foucault and others, the argument here is that a range of discourses and practices, including literature, articulate problematizations that open up an imagined "deep space" and "deep time" inside the human.
(I use the term "deep"in a Darwinian/evolutionist sense. In late-Victorian scientific discourses, "life" and "man" are projected on very long historical lines. Evolutionist gradualism and uniformitarianism require such long stretches of time to make sense, of course. Gillain Beer among others discusses this concept; Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrow is the classic popular exposition of the modern concept of deep time.)
Like the morphology of plants and animals, or like the strata of different ages exposed in contiguous layers by a geological cut, the human mind is also said to be layered with histories. In the human mind, there are "vestiges" of a long evolutionary history all the way back to the prehuman and even the pre-vertebrate. (Amoebas are us.) This idea finds broad application in early cultural anthropology with the notion of "survivals." These are superstitions, customs, folklore beliefs. The May-Day dance is a survival of ancient pagan rituals. The belief in the evil eye is a survival of ancient magical systems. Christianity itself is a survival of archaic blood-sacrifice rituals.
"Survivals" also are vestiges of older ways of feeling and thinking that still exist in the modern mind. The human mind retains an archaic psychic layer, thousands of years old, still wired with the instinctual sex and aggression circuits of the early hominids, the proto-religious emotionalism of "primitive" humankind ("animism"), and a fundamental propensity to "savage" thought-process characterized by the irrational.
In some respects, the image is one of an infantile, childish entity continuing to exist at some level within the minds of modern, more enlightened humanity.
Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a well known late-Victorian version of this construction.
Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau presents a different sort of case, where the survivals motif is given literal expression in the present world by means of the new science of biology.
Such constructions open up new territory for description, analysis, and classification. The mind of modern man is said to be inhabited still by archaic drives, feelings, thoughts, and images. "Alienists" and then Freud and psychoanalysis take off from this point. It's a hugely productive fiction, we might say.
If biopower in one respect is about getting more control over individual bodies and minds for the benefit of the nation-state and modern capitalism, this deep-time, psychologizing "analytic of finitude," as Foucault named it, is one means of achieving it.
Problematize the body and mind of the individual in new ways, thus justifying multiple techniques of interpellating (calling to order, defining individual identities in particular ways); taking confessions (the individual becomes a case study, a case, a file or portfolio tracking the course of an ailment and a cure); and promoting internalized control (all of the discourse and practice here promotes a social norm that the individual is "programmed" to embrace and to internalize as a means of meeting a definition of "the normal" or the properly functional).
Another side, however, and arguably an important aspect of Late-Victorian Decadence, is this "deep" construction of modern subjectivity opening to different lines that resist or elude the normativizing and social-control trend of biopower. Writers like Vernon Lee claim such power for different visions, often subversive of mainstream Victorian values.
So this inward turn to deep horror can be read in light of Victorian problematizations of life, body, and mind that in some respects foster what Foucault calls biopower or more broadly we can call a dominant biopolitics of the late-Victorian period that is focused on social control of various kinds, maximizing productivity and maintaining political and social stability by attempting to model docile, self-normativizing subjects.
Returning to Carroll, we can track horror effects as they take an inward turn in deep horror and what I call "archaic horror." The two are often mixed. Sometimes, as with Verne's giant squid or Well's Island of beast-men, the deep/archaic is externalized. In others, outward and inward are mixed, as in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Ernst Haeckel, Bathybius, Moneres, Amoeba, Evolution
Ernst Haeckel on Bathybius and Moneres, 1869.
Whether Bathybius is or is not a true Moneres, at all events we already know with certitude a number of true Moneres whose fundamental importance is quite independent of Bathybius. We know that even now there exist in the waters of our planet a number of very low forms of life, which are not only the simplest of all actually observed organisms, but even the simplest imaginable of living things. Their whole body, in the fully-developed and reproductive condition, consists of nothing but a little mass of structureless protoplasm, whose changing, variable processes all at once discharge the various life functions—movement, sensation, transmutation of matter, nutrition, growth, and reproduction. Morphologically considered, the body of a Moneres is as simple as an inorganic crystal. We cannot distinguish in it separate parts; or, rather, each part is equivalent to each other. These facts and their far-reaching consequences apply to all Moneres without exception—with or without Bathybius!—and hence it does not affect the theory at all whether Bathybius exists or not.
When we describe these Moneres as "absolutely simple organisms," we of course only express their morphological simplicity, the absence of distinct organs. Chemico-physically, they may be highly composite; indeed, we must in any case ascribe to them, as to all albuminous bodies, a highly-complex molecular structure. Many regard the slime-like albuminous body of Moneres as a single chemical albumen combination, while others see in it a multitude of such combinations; others, again, regard it as an emulsion or intimate blending of albuminous and fatty particles. For a general biological view of the Moneres this is of subordinate interest; for, however the case may be, the creature is at all events, from the anatomical point of view, perfectly simple—an organism without organs. It proves incontrovertibly that life does not depend on the coöperation of different organs, but on a certain chemico-physical constitution of amorphous matter—on that albuminous substance which we call sarcode or protoplasm—a nitro-carbon compound in the semi-fluid state.
Hence, life is not a result of organization, but vice versa. Amorphous protoplasm gives rise to organized forms. Having already, in previous writings, called attention to the high importance of the Moneres from this and other points of view, I can here only refer to those papers. At present I must content myself with pointing out the importance of the Moneres in connection with the great question of the origin of life. The oldest organisms, sprung by spontaneous generation (Urzengung) from inorganic matter, must have been Moneres.
It is precisely the general importance of the Moneres for the solution of the greatest of biological problems that makes them a stumbling-block and a scandal to the opponents of the doctrine of evolution. These men, of course, take every opportunity to dispute the existence of Moneres, exactly as was done in the case of Eozoön Canadense, the much-disputed oldest fossil of the Laurentian formation. The most experienced and competent students of the class Rhizopoda—at their head Prof. Carpenter, of London, and the distinguished anatomist Max Schultze, of Bonn, deceased—are firmly convinced that the American Eozoön is a genuine Rhizopod—a Polythalamium, near akin to Polytrema. I have myself for several years made a special study of Rhizopods. I have minutely examined several fine preparations of Eozoön made by Carpenter and Schultze, and I have not the slightest doubt that it is a genuine Polythalamium, and not a mineral.
But, just because of the extraordinary fundamental importance of Eozoön, and because the discovery of that fossil adds several millions of years to the earth's organic history, making the primitive Silurian formations to appear recent by comparison, and rendering a great service to the doctrine of evolution, therefore it is that the opponents of that doctrine so stoutly affirm that it is not of organic origin at all, but purely mineral. But as the high importance of Eozoön was placed in its proper light by these unavailing attacks of ill-informed opponents, so is it, too, with the Moneres—with or without Bathybius. The true Moneres remain, forming an immovable foundation-stone of the doctrine of evolution.—Kosmos.
Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Squid
1869
18 Squid
For several days the Nautilus kept well away from the American coast. It clearly did not want to hang about the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean. Nevertheless, its keel would not have lacked water, for the average depth of these seas is 1,800 metres; but probably the wa- ters dotted with islands and crisscrossed by steamers did not suit Captain Nemo.
On 16 April we sighted Martinique and Guadeloupe at a distance of about 30 miles. I caught a brief glimpse of their high peaks.
The Canadian was counting on implementing his plans in the Gulf, either by reaching a piece of land or by accosting one of the numerous boats which worked their way along the
267
shores of the islands, and so he was very disappointed. Escape would have been practicable if
Ned had managed to get hold of the boat without the captain knowing. But we could not even
dream of doing this in mid-ocean.
Ned, Conseil, and I had quite a long conversation on the subject. We had been prison- ers on board the Nautilus for six months. We had travelled 17,000 leagues and, as Ned pointed out, there was no reason to expect any change. He therefore made a suggestion which I was not expecting. This was that I categorically ask Captain Nemo: did he plan to keep us on board his vessel indefinitely?
Such a course of action did not appeal to me. In my view, it couldn’t possibly suc- ceed. We couldn’t count on the captain of the Nautilus, only on ourselves alone and com- pletely. Also, for some time the captain had become more sombre, withdrawn, and anti- social. He seemed to be avoiding me, as I only met him at rare intervals. Formerly, he had enjoyed explaining the underwater marvels to me; but now he left me to my studies and no longer came into the salon.
What change had come over him? What was he reacting to? I had done nothing to re- proach myself with. Perhaps our very presence on board weighed on him? But in any case, he was certainly not the sort of man to give us back our freedom.
I therefore asked Ned to give me more time to think about the question. If his sugges- tion failed, it could wreck his plans by reviving the captain’s suspicions, and make our situa- tion very difficult. In addition, I had no arguments to offer concerning the state of our health. With the exception of the difficulties under the ice of the South Pole, we had never been in better health, Ned, Conseil, nor myself. The nourishing food, healthy atmosphere, regularity in our lives, and uniformity of temperature simply didn’t allow illness to take hold. I could understand how a life like this would suit a man who had no regrets about leaving life on shore, a Captain Nemo who was at home here, who went where he wished, and who pursued goals that were mysterious to others and known only to himself; but as for the three of us, we had been made to break with humanity. For my part, I did not wish my intriguing and original studies to be buried with me. I was now in a position to write the real book of the sea, and I wanted this book to appear sooner rather than later.
Through the open panel, ten metres below the surface of the West Indian waters, how many interesting specimens I could see for recording in my daily notes! Amongst other zoo- phytes, there were the Portuguese men-of-war known as pelagic men-of-war, which are thick oblong bladders with a pearly sheen, spreading their membranes out to be blown in the cur- rent and letting their blue tentacles float like threads of silk, charming jellyfish to look at but authentic nettles to the touch for they secrete a corrosive liquid. Amongst the articulates there were one-and-half-metre long annelids, with pink trunks and 1,700 locomotive organs, which snaked through the water, going through all the colours of the rainbow as they passed by. In the branch of the fishes there were enormous cartilaginous Mobula mantas, ten feet long and 600 pounds in weight, with triangular pectoral fins, a slight swelling in the middle of the back, and fixed eyes on the edge of the front part of the head; floating like wrecked ships, they sometimes adhered to our window like dark shutters. There were American triggerfish for which Nature had mixed only white and black paint, long, fleshy, feathered gobies with yellow fins and prominent jaws, and 1.6-metre scombroids of the species of albacores with short sharp teeth and a fine covering of scales. Then red mullets appeared in clouds, enclosed from head to tail in golden stripes and waving their glorious fins; they are true masterpieces of jewellery that were formerly offered to Diana,331 particularly sought out by rich Romans
331. Diana: the virgin goddess of hunting and of childbirth, associated with the moon. 268
Ned, Conseil, and I had quite a long conversation on the subject. We had been prison- ers on board the Nautilus for six months. We had travelled 17,000 leagues and, as Ned pointed out, there was no reason to expect any change. He therefore made a suggestion which I was not expecting. This was that I categorically ask Captain Nemo: did he plan to keep us on board his vessel indefinitely?
Such a course of action did not appeal to me. In my view, it couldn’t possibly suc- ceed. We couldn’t count on the captain of the Nautilus, only on ourselves alone and com- pletely. Also, for some time the captain had become more sombre, withdrawn, and anti- social. He seemed to be avoiding me, as I only met him at rare intervals. Formerly, he had enjoyed explaining the underwater marvels to me; but now he left me to my studies and no longer came into the salon.
What change had come over him? What was he reacting to? I had done nothing to re- proach myself with. Perhaps our very presence on board weighed on him? But in any case, he was certainly not the sort of man to give us back our freedom.
I therefore asked Ned to give me more time to think about the question. If his sugges- tion failed, it could wreck his plans by reviving the captain’s suspicions, and make our situa- tion very difficult. In addition, I had no arguments to offer concerning the state of our health. With the exception of the difficulties under the ice of the South Pole, we had never been in better health, Ned, Conseil, nor myself. The nourishing food, healthy atmosphere, regularity in our lives, and uniformity of temperature simply didn’t allow illness to take hold. I could understand how a life like this would suit a man who had no regrets about leaving life on shore, a Captain Nemo who was at home here, who went where he wished, and who pursued goals that were mysterious to others and known only to himself; but as for the three of us, we had been made to break with humanity. For my part, I did not wish my intriguing and original studies to be buried with me. I was now in a position to write the real book of the sea, and I wanted this book to appear sooner rather than later.
Through the open panel, ten metres below the surface of the West Indian waters, how many interesting specimens I could see for recording in my daily notes! Amongst other zoo- phytes, there were the Portuguese men-of-war known as pelagic men-of-war, which are thick oblong bladders with a pearly sheen, spreading their membranes out to be blown in the cur- rent and letting their blue tentacles float like threads of silk, charming jellyfish to look at but authentic nettles to the touch for they secrete a corrosive liquid. Amongst the articulates there were one-and-half-metre long annelids, with pink trunks and 1,700 locomotive organs, which snaked through the water, going through all the colours of the rainbow as they passed by. In the branch of the fishes there were enormous cartilaginous Mobula mantas, ten feet long and 600 pounds in weight, with triangular pectoral fins, a slight swelling in the middle of the back, and fixed eyes on the edge of the front part of the head; floating like wrecked ships, they sometimes adhered to our window like dark shutters. There were American triggerfish for which Nature had mixed only white and black paint, long, fleshy, feathered gobies with yellow fins and prominent jaws, and 1.6-metre scombroids of the species of albacores with short sharp teeth and a fine covering of scales. Then red mullets appeared in clouds, enclosed from head to tail in golden stripes and waving their glorious fins; they are true masterpieces of jewellery that were formerly offered to Diana,331 particularly sought out by rich Romans
331. Diana: the virgin goddess of hunting and of childbirth, associated with the moon. 268
and the subject of the proverb: ‘Those that catch them don’t eat them!’ Finally golden Po-
macentri passed before our eyes, decked out in emerald strips and clothed in velvet and silk,
like lords out of Veronese; sparina sparids fled using their swift thoracic fins; fifteen-inch
clupeids produced an aura of phosphorescent gleams; grey mullets threshed the water with
their large fleshy tails; red Coregonids seemed to scythe the sea with their sharp pectoral fins;
and silvery Selenes justified their name by rising on the horizon of the waters with milky
gleams like so many moons.
How many other marvellous specimens I would have observed, if the Nautilus hadn’t gradually dropped down towards the lower strata! Its inclined planes carried it down to depths of 2,000 then 3,500 metres. The animal life now consisted only of crinoids, starfish, charming medusa-head pentacrinites whose straight stems supported small calyxes, top- shells, bloody dentalia, and fissurella, coastal molluscs of great size.
On 20 April we had come back up to an average depth of 1,500 metres. The closest land was the Bahamas, spread like cobblestones over the surface of the waters. High subma- rine cliffs rose, vertical walls of roughly hewn blocks resting on wide bases, with black holes opening up between them whose ends our electric rays could not penetrate.
The rocks were carpeted with huge grasses, giant laminarias, and enormous wracks: a true espalier of hydrophytes worthy of a world of Titans.
From these colossal plants, Conseil, Ned, and I naturally turned to listing the gigantic animals of the sea. Some of them were evidently destined to be the food of others. However, through the windows of the Nautilus, almost motionless, I could not yet see anything clinging to the long filaments except the principal articulates of the division of brachyurans: decapods with long limbs, purple crabs, and clios peculiar to the seas of the West Indies.
It was about eleven o’clock when Ned Land drew my attention to a formidable swarming moving through the large expanses of seaweed.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘these are real squids’ caves, and I would not be surprised to see a few monsters here!’
‘What?’ said Conseil. ‘Calamar, mere calamar of the class of cephalopods?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘giant squid. But friend Land is undoubtedly mistaken, for I can’t see anything.’
‘What a shame,’ replied Conseil. ‘I long to come face to face with one of those squid I have heard about so often, which can drag ships down to the bottom of the seas. Those beasts are called Krak .... ‘
‘Crackpots .... ‘ the Canadian interjected.
‘Krakens,’ continued Conseil, without paying attention to his companion’s joke.
‘I will never be able to believe’, said Land, ‘in the existence of such animals.’
‘Why ever not? We ended up believing in monsieur’s narwhal.’
‘We were wrong, Conseil.’
‘Undoubtedly, but others still believe in it.’
‘Probably, Conseil, but for my part I have resolved to admit the existence of such
monsters only after I have dissected them with my own hand.’
‘So’, Conseil asked, ‘monsieur does not believe in giant squid?’
‘Hey, who the hell has ever believed in them?’ exclaimed the Canadian.
‘Many people, friend Ned.’
‘Not fishermen. Scientists perhaps!’
‘With respect, Ned: fishermen and scientists.’
‘But as I stand here,’ said Conseil in the most serious tone, ‘I can perfectly remember
seeing a large ship being dragged under the waves by the arms of a cephalopod.’ 269
How many other marvellous specimens I would have observed, if the Nautilus hadn’t gradually dropped down towards the lower strata! Its inclined planes carried it down to depths of 2,000 then 3,500 metres. The animal life now consisted only of crinoids, starfish, charming medusa-head pentacrinites whose straight stems supported small calyxes, top- shells, bloody dentalia, and fissurella, coastal molluscs of great size.
On 20 April we had come back up to an average depth of 1,500 metres. The closest land was the Bahamas, spread like cobblestones over the surface of the waters. High subma- rine cliffs rose, vertical walls of roughly hewn blocks resting on wide bases, with black holes opening up between them whose ends our electric rays could not penetrate.
The rocks were carpeted with huge grasses, giant laminarias, and enormous wracks: a true espalier of hydrophytes worthy of a world of Titans.
From these colossal plants, Conseil, Ned, and I naturally turned to listing the gigantic animals of the sea. Some of them were evidently destined to be the food of others. However, through the windows of the Nautilus, almost motionless, I could not yet see anything clinging to the long filaments except the principal articulates of the division of brachyurans: decapods with long limbs, purple crabs, and clios peculiar to the seas of the West Indies.
It was about eleven o’clock when Ned Land drew my attention to a formidable swarming moving through the large expanses of seaweed.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘these are real squids’ caves, and I would not be surprised to see a few monsters here!’
‘What?’ said Conseil. ‘Calamar, mere calamar of the class of cephalopods?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘giant squid. But friend Land is undoubtedly mistaken, for I can’t see anything.’
‘What a shame,’ replied Conseil. ‘I long to come face to face with one of those squid I have heard about so often, which can drag ships down to the bottom of the seas. Those beasts are called Krak .... ‘
‘Crackpots .... ‘ the Canadian interjected.
‘Krakens,’ continued Conseil, without paying attention to his companion’s joke.
‘I will never be able to believe’, said Land, ‘in the existence of such animals.’
‘Why ever not? We ended up believing in monsieur’s narwhal.’
‘We were wrong, Conseil.’
‘Undoubtedly, but others still believe in it.’
‘Probably, Conseil, but for my part I have resolved to admit the existence of such
monsters only after I have dissected them with my own hand.’
‘So’, Conseil asked, ‘monsieur does not believe in giant squid?’
‘Hey, who the hell has ever believed in them?’ exclaimed the Canadian.
‘Many people, friend Ned.’
‘Not fishermen. Scientists perhaps!’
‘With respect, Ned: fishermen and scientists.’
‘But as I stand here,’ said Conseil in the most serious tone, ‘I can perfectly remember
seeing a large ship being dragged under the waves by the arms of a cephalopod.’ 269
‘You have seen that?’ asked the Canadian.
‘Yes Ned.’
‘With your own eyes?’
‘With my own eyes.’
‘Where, please?’
‘At Saint-Malo,’ Conseil replied imperturbably.
‘In the port?’ Ned asked sarcastically.
‘No, in a church.’
‘In a church!’
‘Yes friend Ned. It was a painting of the said squid!’332
‘So!’ said Ned Land, bursting out laughing. ‘Mr Conseil has been leading me on!’ ‘Actually, he is right,’ I said. ‘I have heard of the painting, but the subject of the pic-
ture is taken from legend, and you know what should be thought of legends in natural his- tory!333 When people start talking about monsters, their imaginations easily go off at a tan- gent. Not only has it been claimed that these squid can drag down ships, but a certain Olaus Magnus speaks of a mile-long cephalopod,334 which seemed more like an island than an ani- mal. It is also said that one day the Bishop of Nidaros erected an altar on an immense rock. Once his mass was over, the rock started moving and returned to the sea.335 The rock was a squid.’
‘And that’s all?’ asked the Canadian.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Another bishop, Pontoppidan of Bergen, also speaks of a squid on which a whole regiment of cavalry could manœuvre!’
‘They didn’t mess around, those bishops of olden days!’ Ned remarked.
‘Finally, the naturalists of antiquity cite monsters whose jaws resembled bays, and which were too big to get through the Strait of Gibraltar!’
‘You don’t say!’
‘But what truth is there in all those tales?’ asked Conseil.
‘None, my friends, at least none amongst the parts which go beyond the limits of
plausibility and become fable or legend. However, if no cause is needed for the imagination of storytellers, some sort of pretext is. It cannot be denied that there are very big squid and
332. a painting of the said squid: Ellis says that the church referred to is St Thomas’s Chapel; and that the painting is an ex-voto from sailors grateful for surviving the incident described in Mont- fort’s book (see note to p. 347 below).
333. and you know what should be thought of legends in natural history!: MS2 has ‘ex-votos’ in- stead of ‘legends’: not only anti-clerical but showing the connection with St Thomas’s Chapel and Montfort.
334. but a certain Olaus Magnus speaks of a mile-long cephalopod: (Verne: ‘Olaüs Magnus’) (1490–1557), Swedish scholar and archbishop of Uppsala, an expert on runes and author of a work translated as Histoire des pays septentrionaux (1560, 1561). In fact, his monsters are only about 200 feet long.
335. one day the Bishop of Nidaros erected an altar on an immense rock. Once his mass was over, the rock started moving and returned to the sea: (Verne: ‘Nidros’) Eric Falkendorff, archbishop of Nidaros (now Trondheim), wrote a letter to Pope Leo X about this mass. Larousse’s Grand dic- tionnaire universel du XIXe siècle reads: ‘Olaüs Magnus recounts the heroic deeds of a colossal cephalopod at least a mile long, which resembled an island in the midst of the waters more than an animal. The bishop of Nidaros discovered one of these gigantic animals peacefully sleeping in the sun and took it for an immense rock. He had an altar erected on its back and duly celebrated mass. The kraken remained motionless while the ceremony was continuing; but scarcely had the bishop regained the shore than it dived back down into the sea.’
270
‘With your own eyes?’
‘With my own eyes.’
‘Where, please?’
‘At Saint-Malo,’ Conseil replied imperturbably.
‘In the port?’ Ned asked sarcastically.
‘No, in a church.’
‘In a church!’
‘Yes friend Ned. It was a painting of the said squid!’332
‘So!’ said Ned Land, bursting out laughing. ‘Mr Conseil has been leading me on!’ ‘Actually, he is right,’ I said. ‘I have heard of the painting, but the subject of the pic-
ture is taken from legend, and you know what should be thought of legends in natural his- tory!333 When people start talking about monsters, their imaginations easily go off at a tan- gent. Not only has it been claimed that these squid can drag down ships, but a certain Olaus Magnus speaks of a mile-long cephalopod,334 which seemed more like an island than an ani- mal. It is also said that one day the Bishop of Nidaros erected an altar on an immense rock. Once his mass was over, the rock started moving and returned to the sea.335 The rock was a squid.’
‘And that’s all?’ asked the Canadian.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Another bishop, Pontoppidan of Bergen, also speaks of a squid on which a whole regiment of cavalry could manœuvre!’
‘They didn’t mess around, those bishops of olden days!’ Ned remarked.
‘Finally, the naturalists of antiquity cite monsters whose jaws resembled bays, and which were too big to get through the Strait of Gibraltar!’
‘You don’t say!’
‘But what truth is there in all those tales?’ asked Conseil.
‘None, my friends, at least none amongst the parts which go beyond the limits of
plausibility and become fable or legend. However, if no cause is needed for the imagination of storytellers, some sort of pretext is. It cannot be denied that there are very big squid and
332. a painting of the said squid: Ellis says that the church referred to is St Thomas’s Chapel; and that the painting is an ex-voto from sailors grateful for surviving the incident described in Mont- fort’s book (see note to p. 347 below).
333. and you know what should be thought of legends in natural history!: MS2 has ‘ex-votos’ in- stead of ‘legends’: not only anti-clerical but showing the connection with St Thomas’s Chapel and Montfort.
334. but a certain Olaus Magnus speaks of a mile-long cephalopod: (Verne: ‘Olaüs Magnus’) (1490–1557), Swedish scholar and archbishop of Uppsala, an expert on runes and author of a work translated as Histoire des pays septentrionaux (1560, 1561). In fact, his monsters are only about 200 feet long.
335. one day the Bishop of Nidaros erected an altar on an immense rock. Once his mass was over, the rock started moving and returned to the sea: (Verne: ‘Nidros’) Eric Falkendorff, archbishop of Nidaros (now Trondheim), wrote a letter to Pope Leo X about this mass. Larousse’s Grand dic- tionnaire universel du XIXe siècle reads: ‘Olaüs Magnus recounts the heroic deeds of a colossal cephalopod at least a mile long, which resembled an island in the midst of the waters more than an animal. The bishop of Nidaros discovered one of these gigantic animals peacefully sleeping in the sun and took it for an immense rock. He had an altar erected on its back and duly celebrated mass. The kraken remained motionless while the ceremony was continuing; but scarcely had the bishop regained the shore than it dived back down into the sea.’
270
calamar, even if they are smaller than whales. Aristotle observed the dimensions of a squid
five cubits long, that is 3.10 metres. Our fishermen frequently see ones longer than 1.8 me-
tres. The museums of Trieste and Montpellier contain skeletons of squid that are two metres
long. What is more, the naturalists have calculated that an animal only six feet in length
would have tentacles of twenty-seven feet, which is more than enough to make a formidable
monster.’
‘And are they still caught nowadays?’ asked the Canadian.
‘If they are not caught, at least sailors still see them. One of my friends, Captain Paul Bos of Le Havre,336 has often told me that he encountered one such colossal monster in the Indian Ocean. And the most astonishing thing happened a few years ago, in 1861, which no longer allows the existence of these gigantic animals to be denied.’
‘Go on,’ said Ned Land.
‘Thank you. In 1861, north-east of Tenerife, at the approximate latitude where we are now, the crew of the sloop Alecton sighted an enormous squid swimming in its wake. Captain Bouyer337 closed on the animal and attacked it with harpoons and guns, but without great suc- cess, for bullets and harpoons passed through the soft flesh like unset jelly. After several un- successful attempts, the crew managed to put a slip knot round the mollusc’s body. The knot slid as far as the tail-fins and stopped there. They then tried to haul the monster on board, but it was so heavy that the rope pulled the tail off, and deprived of this adornment, it disap- peared under the water.’
‘Finally we have a fact.’
‘An indisputable fact, my good Ned. That was why it was proposed to call it “Bouyer’s squid”.’
‘And how long was it?’ he asked.
‘Did it not measure about six metres?’ said Conseil, standing at the window and ex- amining the holes in the cliff.
‘Precisely,’ I replied.
‘Was its head not crowned with eight tentacles, which waved in the water like a nest
336. Captain Paul Bos of Le Havre: no trace has been found.
MD (p. 66) says that a possible influence on 20TL was Gustave Lennier, director of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle of Le Havre, where Verne visited an exhibition in June 1868 that Lennier had or- ganized, including African and American fish; its catalogue was published as Les Merveilles de l’aquarium de l’exposition du Havre (1868).
337. Captain Bouyer: (Verne: ‘Commander Bouguer’) Frédéric (dates unknown), author of L’Amour d’un monstre: Scènes de la vie créole (1866) (the title may be an allusion to the 1861 inci- dent) and La Guyane française; notes et souvenirs d’un voyage exécuté en 1862B1863 (1867), with illustrations by Riou, one of the illustrators of 20TL. Vierne (1986; p. 375) reports that a letter to the Figaro of 21 August 1871 indicated Verne’s misspelling, which was not however corrected in subse- quent reprints. The incident Aronnax relates took place on 30 November 1861: it is certified in a letter written to the French Academy of Sciences by Sabin Berthelot, French consul at Tenerife: ‘the steam despatch-boat Alecton [....] encountered a monstrous polyp [....] 16–18 feet in length without counting the eight formidable arms, covered with air-holes [....] eyes [of] a frightful fixity. Its mouth like a par- rot’s beak [....] about two tons [....] a strong odour of musk.’ The tail apparently weighed 40lb. The story was much criticized, including the impracticability of trying to haul a two-ton mass on to a small ship using a single rope, the strange behaviour of the creature in swimming under the boat and re- maining on the scene for two or three hours, and the lack of information about the tail. However, in the 1870s a whole series of similar creatures were washed up on Newfoundland, with enormous eyes, parrot-like beaks, and tentacles reportedly up to 35 feet long. Modern authorities indicate maximum total lengths of 50 feet and weights of two tonnes.
271
‘And are they still caught nowadays?’ asked the Canadian.
‘If they are not caught, at least sailors still see them. One of my friends, Captain Paul Bos of Le Havre,336 has often told me that he encountered one such colossal monster in the Indian Ocean. And the most astonishing thing happened a few years ago, in 1861, which no longer allows the existence of these gigantic animals to be denied.’
‘Go on,’ said Ned Land.
‘Thank you. In 1861, north-east of Tenerife, at the approximate latitude where we are now, the crew of the sloop Alecton sighted an enormous squid swimming in its wake. Captain Bouyer337 closed on the animal and attacked it with harpoons and guns, but without great suc- cess, for bullets and harpoons passed through the soft flesh like unset jelly. After several un- successful attempts, the crew managed to put a slip knot round the mollusc’s body. The knot slid as far as the tail-fins and stopped there. They then tried to haul the monster on board, but it was so heavy that the rope pulled the tail off, and deprived of this adornment, it disap- peared under the water.’
‘Finally we have a fact.’
‘An indisputable fact, my good Ned. That was why it was proposed to call it “Bouyer’s squid”.’
‘And how long was it?’ he asked.
‘Did it not measure about six metres?’ said Conseil, standing at the window and ex- amining the holes in the cliff.
‘Precisely,’ I replied.
‘Was its head not crowned with eight tentacles, which waved in the water like a nest
336. Captain Paul Bos of Le Havre: no trace has been found.
MD (p. 66) says that a possible influence on 20TL was Gustave Lennier, director of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle of Le Havre, where Verne visited an exhibition in June 1868 that Lennier had or- ganized, including African and American fish; its catalogue was published as Les Merveilles de l’aquarium de l’exposition du Havre (1868).
337. Captain Bouyer: (Verne: ‘Commander Bouguer’) Frédéric (dates unknown), author of L’Amour d’un monstre: Scènes de la vie créole (1866) (the title may be an allusion to the 1861 inci- dent) and La Guyane française; notes et souvenirs d’un voyage exécuté en 1862B1863 (1867), with illustrations by Riou, one of the illustrators of 20TL. Vierne (1986; p. 375) reports that a letter to the Figaro of 21 August 1871 indicated Verne’s misspelling, which was not however corrected in subse- quent reprints. The incident Aronnax relates took place on 30 November 1861: it is certified in a letter written to the French Academy of Sciences by Sabin Berthelot, French consul at Tenerife: ‘the steam despatch-boat Alecton [....] encountered a monstrous polyp [....] 16–18 feet in length without counting the eight formidable arms, covered with air-holes [....] eyes [of] a frightful fixity. Its mouth like a par- rot’s beak [....] about two tons [....] a strong odour of musk.’ The tail apparently weighed 40lb. The story was much criticized, including the impracticability of trying to haul a two-ton mass on to a small ship using a single rope, the strange behaviour of the creature in swimming under the boat and re- maining on the scene for two or three hours, and the lack of information about the tail. However, in the 1870s a whole series of similar creatures were washed up on Newfoundland, with enormous eyes, parrot-like beaks, and tentacles reportedly up to 35 feet long. Modern authorities indicate maximum total lengths of 50 feet and weights of two tonnes.
271
of serpents?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Were its eyes not extremely prominent and large?’
‘Yes Conseil.’
‘And was its mouth not a real parrot’s beak, a formidable one at that?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Well, if monsieur pleases,’ calmly replied Conseil, ‘if that isn’t Bouyer’s squid, then
at least it must be one of its brothers.’
I gaped at him. Ned rushed to the window.
‘What a frightening beast!’ he exclaimed.
I looked in turn, and could not hide a movement of repulsion. In front of my eyes
moved a horrible monster, worthy of appearing in any teratological legend.
It was a squid of colossal dimensions, eight metres in length. It was moving back- wards at extreme velocity as it headed towards the Nautilus. It was staring with its enormous fixed eyes of sea-green hue. Its eight arms, or rather legs, were not only implanted on its head, thus giving these animals the name of cephalopods, but were twice as big as its body and waving around like the Furies’ hair. We could distinctly see the 250 suckers in the form of hemispherical capsules on the inside of the tentacles. Sometimes these suckers were placed on the salon’s windows and stuck there. The monster’s mouth—a horny beak like a par- rot’s—was opening and closing vertically. Its tongue emerged oscillating from this pair of shears, and was made of a horny substance, itself equipped with several rows of sharp teeth. What a freak of nature: a bird’s beak on a mollusc! Its body, cylindrical but swollen in the middle, formed a fleshy mass that had to weigh 20 to 25 tons. Its colour changed in quick succession according to the animal’s irritation, and went progressively from pale grey to red-
dish-brown.338
What was the mollusc irritated at? Undoubtedly at the Nautilus, more formidable than
it, and on which its sucking arms and mandibles could not really take hold. And yet what monsters these squid were, what vitality the Creator had endowed them with, and what vigour their movements had, since they possessed three hearts!
Chance had brought us to this squid, and I did not want to waste the opportunity of closely studying such a specimen of cephalopod. I overcame the horror its appearance caused me, picked up a pencil, and began to draw it.
‘Perhaps it is the same one as the Alecton saw,’ said Conseil.
‘It can’t be,’ replied the Canadian, ‘since the other one lost its tail and this one still has it.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I replied. ‘The arms and tails of these animals form again by redin- tegration, and in seven years the squid’s tail has undoubtedly had the time to grow again.’
‘In any case,’ replied Ned, ‘if it’s not this one, it’s perhaps one of those!’
Other squid were indeed appearing at the starboard window. I counted seven of them. They formed a procession accompanying the Nautilus, and I could hear the grinding of their beaks on the metal hull. We had plenty on our plate.
I continued my work. These monsters stayed in our wake with such precision that
338. reddish-brown: Ellis claims that this description is worse than ‘wrong’, arguing that ‘blue- green eyes’ and a ‘hornlike’ tongue are errors and that an eight-metre squid could not weigh 20,000 kilograms. But ‘blue-green’ is in fact a mistranslation and Verne may possibly be indicating the length of the body without the tentacles.
Ve rne’s mention of the Furies (the terrible winged goddesses with serpentine hair) is surely mo- tivated by the name of the first Fury, Alecto, also the name of Bouyer’s vessel.
272
‘Were its eyes not extremely prominent and large?’
‘Yes Conseil.’
‘And was its mouth not a real parrot’s beak, a formidable one at that?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Well, if monsieur pleases,’ calmly replied Conseil, ‘if that isn’t Bouyer’s squid, then
at least it must be one of its brothers.’
I gaped at him. Ned rushed to the window.
‘What a frightening beast!’ he exclaimed.
I looked in turn, and could not hide a movement of repulsion. In front of my eyes
moved a horrible monster, worthy of appearing in any teratological legend.
It was a squid of colossal dimensions, eight metres in length. It was moving back- wards at extreme velocity as it headed towards the Nautilus. It was staring with its enormous fixed eyes of sea-green hue. Its eight arms, or rather legs, were not only implanted on its head, thus giving these animals the name of cephalopods, but were twice as big as its body and waving around like the Furies’ hair. We could distinctly see the 250 suckers in the form of hemispherical capsules on the inside of the tentacles. Sometimes these suckers were placed on the salon’s windows and stuck there. The monster’s mouth—a horny beak like a par- rot’s—was opening and closing vertically. Its tongue emerged oscillating from this pair of shears, and was made of a horny substance, itself equipped with several rows of sharp teeth. What a freak of nature: a bird’s beak on a mollusc! Its body, cylindrical but swollen in the middle, formed a fleshy mass that had to weigh 20 to 25 tons. Its colour changed in quick succession according to the animal’s irritation, and went progressively from pale grey to red-
dish-brown.338
What was the mollusc irritated at? Undoubtedly at the Nautilus, more formidable than
it, and on which its sucking arms and mandibles could not really take hold. And yet what monsters these squid were, what vitality the Creator had endowed them with, and what vigour their movements had, since they possessed three hearts!
Chance had brought us to this squid, and I did not want to waste the opportunity of closely studying such a specimen of cephalopod. I overcame the horror its appearance caused me, picked up a pencil, and began to draw it.
‘Perhaps it is the same one as the Alecton saw,’ said Conseil.
‘It can’t be,’ replied the Canadian, ‘since the other one lost its tail and this one still has it.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I replied. ‘The arms and tails of these animals form again by redin- tegration, and in seven years the squid’s tail has undoubtedly had the time to grow again.’
‘In any case,’ replied Ned, ‘if it’s not this one, it’s perhaps one of those!’
Other squid were indeed appearing at the starboard window. I counted seven of them. They formed a procession accompanying the Nautilus, and I could hear the grinding of their beaks on the metal hull. We had plenty on our plate.
I continued my work. These monsters stayed in our wake with such precision that
338. reddish-brown: Ellis claims that this description is worse than ‘wrong’, arguing that ‘blue- green eyes’ and a ‘hornlike’ tongue are errors and that an eight-metre squid could not weigh 20,000 kilograms. But ‘blue-green’ is in fact a mistranslation and Verne may possibly be indicating the length of the body without the tentacles.
Ve rne’s mention of the Furies (the terrible winged goddesses with serpentine hair) is surely mo- tivated by the name of the first Fury, Alecto, also the name of Bouyer’s vessel.
272
they seemed motionless, and I could have traced them directly on to the window. We were in
fact moving at moderate speed.
Suddenly the Nautilus stopped. The shock made its whole framework tremble.
‘Have we hit something?’ I asked.
‘If we have,’ replied the Canadian, ‘then we’re free again.’
The Nautilus was undoubtedly disengaged again, but was no longer moving. Its pro-
peller blades were not cutting the waves. A minute passed before Captain Nemo, followed by his first officer, came into the salon.
I had not seen him for some time. He look sombre. Without speaking to us, perhaps without even seeing us, he approached the panel, looked at the squid, and said a few words to his first officer. His deputy went out.
Soon the panels were closed again. The ceiling was lit up. I approached the captain.
‘A curious collection of squid,’ I said, in the detached tone a visitor would use in front of the window of an aquarium.
‘Right,’ he replied, ‘and we are going to fight them hand to hand.’
I looked at the captain. I thought I had misheard.
‘Hand to hand?’ I repeated.
‘Yes, monsieur. The propeller has stopped. I think that the corneous mandibles of one
of the squid have got caught in its blades, preventing us moving.’ ‘And what are you going to do?’
‘Surface, and massacre all the vermin.’
‘A difficult task.’
‘Electric bullets are indeed powerless against this soft flesh, for they do not find enough resistance to explode. But we will attack them with axes.’
‘And with harpoons, monsieur,’ said the Canadian, ‘if you will accept my help.’
‘I accept, Master Land.’
‘We’re right behind you,’ I said as Captain Nemo headed for the central staircase. About ten men armed with grappling axes were standing ready for an attack. Conseil
and I picked up two as well. Land seized a harpoon.
The Nautilus meanwhile had surfaced. One of the sailors, standing on the top steps,
was unscrewing the bolts of the hatch. But the bolts were hardly free when the hatch sud- denly shot open, clearly yanked up by the suckers on the arm of a squid.
Immediately one of those long arms slid like a snake into the opening as twenty others waved above. With a single axe blow, Captain Nemo severed the formidable tentacle, which then slid down the stairs, twisting.
While we were all rushing together towards the platform, two other arms, lashing through the air, landed on the sailor in front of Captain Nemo—and carried him off with irre- sistible force.
Captain Nemo exclaimed and rushed outside. We followed him as quickly as we could.
What a scene! The poor man, seized by the tentacle and glued to its suckers, was be- ing rocked in the air at the whim of its enormous trunk. He was groaning as he suffocated, and he was shouting: ‘Au secours! Au secours!’ These words in French flabbergasted me. So I had a compatriot on board, perhaps several! I will hear his heartbreaking appeal in my ears till the end of my life.
The unfortunate man was lost. Who could possibly have wrested him from that pow- erful embrace? However, Captain Nemo rushed at the squid, and with a single axe blow chopped off another arm. His first officer was angrily fighting other monsters crawling over
273
Suddenly the Nautilus stopped. The shock made its whole framework tremble.
‘Have we hit something?’ I asked.
‘If we have,’ replied the Canadian, ‘then we’re free again.’
The Nautilus was undoubtedly disengaged again, but was no longer moving. Its pro-
peller blades were not cutting the waves. A minute passed before Captain Nemo, followed by his first officer, came into the salon.
I had not seen him for some time. He look sombre. Without speaking to us, perhaps without even seeing us, he approached the panel, looked at the squid, and said a few words to his first officer. His deputy went out.
Soon the panels were closed again. The ceiling was lit up. I approached the captain.
‘A curious collection of squid,’ I said, in the detached tone a visitor would use in front of the window of an aquarium.
‘Right,’ he replied, ‘and we are going to fight them hand to hand.’
I looked at the captain. I thought I had misheard.
‘Hand to hand?’ I repeated.
‘Yes, monsieur. The propeller has stopped. I think that the corneous mandibles of one
of the squid have got caught in its blades, preventing us moving.’ ‘And what are you going to do?’
‘Surface, and massacre all the vermin.’
‘A difficult task.’
‘Electric bullets are indeed powerless against this soft flesh, for they do not find enough resistance to explode. But we will attack them with axes.’
‘And with harpoons, monsieur,’ said the Canadian, ‘if you will accept my help.’
‘I accept, Master Land.’
‘We’re right behind you,’ I said as Captain Nemo headed for the central staircase. About ten men armed with grappling axes were standing ready for an attack. Conseil
and I picked up two as well. Land seized a harpoon.
The Nautilus meanwhile had surfaced. One of the sailors, standing on the top steps,
was unscrewing the bolts of the hatch. But the bolts were hardly free when the hatch sud- denly shot open, clearly yanked up by the suckers on the arm of a squid.
Immediately one of those long arms slid like a snake into the opening as twenty others waved above. With a single axe blow, Captain Nemo severed the formidable tentacle, which then slid down the stairs, twisting.
While we were all rushing together towards the platform, two other arms, lashing through the air, landed on the sailor in front of Captain Nemo—and carried him off with irre- sistible force.
Captain Nemo exclaimed and rushed outside. We followed him as quickly as we could.
What a scene! The poor man, seized by the tentacle and glued to its suckers, was be- ing rocked in the air at the whim of its enormous trunk. He was groaning as he suffocated, and he was shouting: ‘Au secours! Au secours!’ These words in French flabbergasted me. So I had a compatriot on board, perhaps several! I will hear his heartbreaking appeal in my ears till the end of my life.
The unfortunate man was lost. Who could possibly have wrested him from that pow- erful embrace? However, Captain Nemo rushed at the squid, and with a single axe blow chopped off another arm. His first officer was angrily fighting other monsters crawling over
273
the sides of the Nautilus. The crew were attacking them with their axes. The Canadian, Con-
seil, and I were plunging our weapons into the fleshy masses. A strong smell of musk filled
the atmosphere. It was horrible.
For a moment I thought that the poor man enlaced by the squid could be rescued from its powerful suction. Seven arms out of eight had been severed. A single one, brandishing the victim like a quill, remained twisting in the air. But just as Captain Nemo and his deputy were rushing at the animal, it gave out a spurt of blackish liquid, secreted from a bursa in its abdomen.339 We were blinded. By the time the cloud had cleared, the squid had vanished, carrying with it my unfortunate compatriot.340
Then our rage boiled over against the monsters. We were no longer in control of our- selves. Ten or twelve squid had invaded the platform and sides of the Nautilus. We were slid- ing around in the midst of the truncated serpents, tossing about on the platform in waves of blood and black ink. It was as if the viscous tentacles were coming back to life again like Hy- dra’s heads. Ned Land’s harpoons plunged repeatedly into the glaucous eyes of the squid, de- stroying them with each blow. But my brave companion was suddenly knocked down by the tentacles of a monster he could not avoid.
God! My heart leapt with revulsion and horror! The formidable squid’s beak gaped open before Ned. The poor man was about to be cut in two. I rushed to help him. But Captain Nemo had got there before me and his axe disappeared between the two enormous jaws. Mi- raculously saved, the Canadian got up and drove his harpoon right through the triple heart of the squid.
‘For services rendered!’ Captain Nemo said.
Ned bowed without replying.
The battle had lasted for a mere quarter of an hour. The vanquished monsters, muti-
lated and terribly wounded, finally retreated and then disappeared under the waves.
Captain Nemo, red341 with blood, motionless near the searchlight, examined the sea
which had swallowed up one of his companions, as large tears flowed from his eyes.
339. a spurt of blackish liquid, secreted from a bursa in its abdomen: some of the symbolism of this battle scene may derive from the ‘black ink’ and the ‘quill’ mentioned in it, perhaps referring to the struggle of writing and hence to Nemo’s remark to Aronnax that his ‘ink will be the liquid se- creted by a cuttlefish or squid’.
340. with it my unfortunate compatriot: the musk smell and dark liquid are similar to descriptions going back to Pontoppidan and Pliny. But this scene bears a close resemblance to what a Captain Jean Magnus Dens told Pierre Denys (de) Montfort (director of the Natural History Museum, cited by Hugo, but apparently later convicted of forgery). Montfort’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particu- lière des mollusques (1802–5), states that ‘poulpes’ can sink ships, and reports that Dens’s men were scraping their ship between St Helena and Cape Negro, when a huge animal rose from the water and threw a giant tentacle round two of them. Another arm seized a third man, who shouted for help. The crew cut off the monster’s arm with axes and knives, and several harpoons were driven into the mon- ster, but to little effect, and it eventually carried off the two sailors. The third man was delirious and died the following night. The arm cut off was 25 feet long, as thick as a mizzen yard, and had suckers as big as saucepan lids. In reality, although little is known about the giant squid, there are very few authentic accounts of squid attacking ships or people. But Dens’s story (perhaps together with Bouyer’s monster) is surely a source for Verne’s dramatic episode.
341. red: MS2 has ‘red and black’, a clear reference to Stendhal’s novel, but also a striking con- junction of blood and ink.
274
For a moment I thought that the poor man enlaced by the squid could be rescued from its powerful suction. Seven arms out of eight had been severed. A single one, brandishing the victim like a quill, remained twisting in the air. But just as Captain Nemo and his deputy were rushing at the animal, it gave out a spurt of blackish liquid, secreted from a bursa in its abdomen.339 We were blinded. By the time the cloud had cleared, the squid had vanished, carrying with it my unfortunate compatriot.340
Then our rage boiled over against the monsters. We were no longer in control of our- selves. Ten or twelve squid had invaded the platform and sides of the Nautilus. We were slid- ing around in the midst of the truncated serpents, tossing about on the platform in waves of blood and black ink. It was as if the viscous tentacles were coming back to life again like Hy- dra’s heads. Ned Land’s harpoons plunged repeatedly into the glaucous eyes of the squid, de- stroying them with each blow. But my brave companion was suddenly knocked down by the tentacles of a monster he could not avoid.
God! My heart leapt with revulsion and horror! The formidable squid’s beak gaped open before Ned. The poor man was about to be cut in two. I rushed to help him. But Captain Nemo had got there before me and his axe disappeared between the two enormous jaws. Mi- raculously saved, the Canadian got up and drove his harpoon right through the triple heart of the squid.
‘For services rendered!’ Captain Nemo said.
Ned bowed without replying.
The battle had lasted for a mere quarter of an hour. The vanquished monsters, muti-
lated and terribly wounded, finally retreated and then disappeared under the waves.
Captain Nemo, red341 with blood, motionless near the searchlight, examined the sea
which had swallowed up one of his companions, as large tears flowed from his eyes.
339. a spurt of blackish liquid, secreted from a bursa in its abdomen: some of the symbolism of this battle scene may derive from the ‘black ink’ and the ‘quill’ mentioned in it, perhaps referring to the struggle of writing and hence to Nemo’s remark to Aronnax that his ‘ink will be the liquid se- creted by a cuttlefish or squid’.
340. with it my unfortunate compatriot: the musk smell and dark liquid are similar to descriptions going back to Pontoppidan and Pliny. But this scene bears a close resemblance to what a Captain Jean Magnus Dens told Pierre Denys (de) Montfort (director of the Natural History Museum, cited by Hugo, but apparently later convicted of forgery). Montfort’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particu- lière des mollusques (1802–5), states that ‘poulpes’ can sink ships, and reports that Dens’s men were scraping their ship between St Helena and Cape Negro, when a huge animal rose from the water and threw a giant tentacle round two of them. Another arm seized a third man, who shouted for help. The crew cut off the monster’s arm with axes and knives, and several harpoons were driven into the mon- ster, but to little effect, and it eventually carried off the two sailors. The third man was delirious and died the following night. The arm cut off was 25 feet long, as thick as a mizzen yard, and had suckers as big as saucepan lids. In reality, although little is known about the giant squid, there are very few authentic accounts of squid attacking ships or people. But Dens’s story (perhaps together with Bouyer’s monster) is surely a source for Verne’s dramatic episode.
341. red: MS2 has ‘red and black’, a clear reference to Stendhal’s novel, but also a striking con- junction of blood and ink.
274
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Noel Carroll excerpt, fantastic biologies: fusion, fission, fusion, magnification, massification, metonymy, incompletion, formlessness
(Summary of Horror Theories)
Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery/42
The objects of art-horror are essentially threatening and impure. The creator of horror presents creatures that are salient in respect to these attributes. In this, certain recurring strategies for designing monsters appear with striking regularity across the arts and media. The purpose of this section is to take note of some of the most characteristic ways in which monsters are produced for the reading and viewing public. This section could be subtitled: “How to make a monster.” Horrific monsters are threatening. This aspect of the design of horrific monsters is, I think, incontestable. They must be dangerous. This can be satisfied simply by making the monster lethal. That it kills and maims is
Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery / 43
enough. The monster may also be threatening psychologically, morally, or socially. It may destroy one’s identity (William Blatty’s The Exorcist or Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”), seek to destroy the moral order (Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby et al.), or advance an alternative society (Richard Matheson’s I am Legend). Monsters may also trigger certain enduring infantile fears, such as those of being eaten or dismembered, or sexual fears, concerning rape and incest. However, in order to be threatening, it is sufficient that the monster be physically dangerous. If it produces further anxieties that is so much icing on the cake. So the creators of art-horror must be sure that the creatures in their fictions are threatening and this can be done by assuring that they are at least physically dangerous. Of course, if a monster is psychologically threatening but not physically threatening—i.e., if it’s after your mind, not your body—it will still count as a horrific creature if it inspires revulsion. Horrific creatures are also impure. Here, the means for presenting this aspect of horrific creatures are less obvious. So I will spend some time looking at the characteristic structures through which horrific impurity is portrayed. As discussed in an earlier section concerning the definition of horror, many cases of impurity are generated by what, adapting Mary Douglas, I called interstitiality and categorical contradictoriness. Impurity involves a conflict between two or more standing cultural categories. Thus, it should come as no surprise that many of the most basic structures for representing horrific creatures are combinatory in nature.
FUSION
One structure for the composition of horrific beings is fusion. On the simplest physical level, this often entails the construction of creatures that transgress categorical distinctions such as inside/outside, living/dead, insect/ human, flesh/machine, and so on. Mummies, vampires, ghosts, zombies, and Freddie, Elm Street’s premier nightmare, are fusion figures in this respect. Each, in different ways, blur the distinction between living and dead. Each, in some sense, is both living and dead. A fusion figure is a composite that unites attributes held to be categorically distinct and/or at odds in the cultural scheme of things in unambiguously one, spatio-temporally discrete entity. The caterpillars in E.F.Benson’s story of the same name are fusion figures insofar as they defy biology not only due to their extraordinary length but also because their legs are outfitted with crab pincers. Similarly, the blighted victim in John Metcalfe’s “Mr. Meldrum’s Mania” falls into this category since he is a combination of a man with the Egyptian god Thoth, already a fusion creature compounding an ibis head with a human body, not to mention his moon-disk and crescent accoutrements. Lovecraft’s amalgams of octopi and crustaceans with humanoid forms are paradigmatic fusion figures, as are the pig-men in William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. Fusion examples from film would include figures such as the
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babies in the It’s Alive series and the grotesqueries in Alligator People and The Reptile. The central mark of a fusion figure is the compounding of ordinarily disjoint or conflicting categories in an integral, spatio-temporally unified individual. On this view, many of the characters in possession stories are fusion figures. They may be inhabited by many demons—“I am legion”—or one. But as long as they are composite beings, locatable in an unbroken spatio-temporal continuum with a single identity, we shall count them as fusion figures. Also, I tend to see the Frankenstein monster, especially as he is represented in the Universal Pictures’ movie cycle, as a fusion figure. For not only is it emphasized that he is made from distinct bodies, along with electrical attachments, but the series presents him as if he had different brains imposed upon him—first a criminal’s and later Igor’s. In this, the films appear to uphold the unlikely hypothesis that somehow the monster has a kind of continuing identity—one that is perhaps innocent and benign—in spite of the brain it has. Obviously, this is, to say the least, paradoxical, but if we allow the fiction of brain transplants, why quibble about whether the monster is in some sense the still the same monster it would have been had it not had a criminal’s or Igor’s.brain foisted upon it? The fusion aspect of the Frankenstein monster becomes quite hysterical in Hammer Films’ And Frankenstein Created Woman. Dr. Frankenstein transfers the soul of his dead assistant Hans into the body of Hans’s dead, beloved Christina, and Hans, in Christina’s body, seduces and dispatches the hooligans who had driven Christina (i.e., Christina unified in mind and body) to her death.
The fusion figure may find its prototype in the sort of symbolic structure that Freud called the collective figure or condensation with respect to dreams. Freud writes that one way …in which a ‘collective figure’ can be produced for the purposes of dreamcondensation [is] by uniting the actual features of two or more people into a single dream-image. It was in this way that Dr. M. of my dream was constructed. He bore the name of Dr. M., he spoke and acted like him; but his physical characteristics and his malady belonged to someone else, namely to my eldest brother. One single feature, his pale appearance, was doubly determined, since it was common to both of them in real life. Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle with the yellow beard was a similar composite figure. But in his case the dream-image was constructued in yet another way. I did not combine the features of one person with those of another and in the process omit from the memory-picture certain features of each of them. What I did was to adopt the procedure by means of which Galton produced family portraits: namely by projecting two images onto a single plate, so that certain features common to both are
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emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture. In my dream about my uncle the fair beard emerged prominently from a face which belonged to two people and which was consequently blurred….”50
For Freud, the condensatory or collective figure superimposes, in the manner of a photograph, two or more entities in one individual. Similarly, the fusion figure of art-horror is a composite figure, conflating distinct types of beings. In his discussion of condensation, Freud stresses that the fused elements have something in common. However, in art- horror what the combined elements have in common need not be salient—in T.E.D.Klein’s “Nadelman’s God,” the horrific entity has literally been constructed from a hodgepodge of garbage. As in the associationist writings of the British Empiricists, the fantastic fusion beings of horror are colligations of ontologically or biologically separate orders.51 They are single figures in whom distinct and often clashing types of elements are superimposed or condensed, resulting in entities that are impure and repulsive. Freud notes that the collective structures we find in the dream-work are not unlike “…the composite animals invented by the folk imagination of the Orient.”52 Presumably, Freud has in mind here figures like the winged lions of ancient Assyria. Other examples of this type of condensation-figure would include the gargoyles on medieval cathedrals, the demon-priest (part rodent, part man) in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony triptych, the chickens with the heads of human babies in Goya’s “Ya van desplumadoes” in Los Caprichos, and characters like The Thing (a.k.a. Ben Grimm)—literally a man of stone—in the Marvel comic book series The Fantastic Four.
Of course, in these examples, the elements that go into the condensation or fusion are visually perceptible. However, this is not necessary. One might condense different ontological orders such as the animate and inanimate— e.g., a haunted house—and here nothing that meets the naked eye signals the fusion. And, furthermore, whether any of the preceding examples shall count as horrific fusion depends upon whether or not, in the representational context in which they appear, the beings so concocted match the criteria of art-horror. As a means of composing horrific beings, fusion hinges upon conflating, combining, or condensing distinct and/or opposed categorical elements in a spatio-temporally continuous monster.
FISSION
In contrast, another popular means for creating interstitial beings is fission. In fusion, categorically contradictory elements are fused or condensed or superimposed in one unified spatiotemporal being whose identity is homogeneous. But with fission, the contradictory elements are, so to speak, distributed over different, though
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metaphysically related, identities. The type of creatures that I have in mind here include doppelgangers, alter-egos, and werewolves. Werewolves, for example, violate the categorical distinction between humans and wolves. In this case, the animal and the human inhabit the same body (understood as spatially locatable protoplasm); however, they do so at different times. The animal and the wolf identities are not temporally continuous, though presumably their protoplasm is numerically the same; at a given point in time (the rise of the full moon), the body, inhabited by the human, is turned over to the wolf. The human identity and the wolf identity are not fused, but, so to speak, they are sequenced. The human and the wolf are spatially continuous, occupying the same body, but the identity changes or alternates over time; the two identities—and the opposed categories they represent—do not overlap temporally in the same body. That protoplasm is heterogeneous in terms of accommodating different, mutually exclusive identities at different times. The werewolf figure embodies a categorical contradiction between man and animal which it distributes over time. Of course, what is being said of werewolves here applies to shape changers of every variety. In Kipling’s “Mark of the Beast,” the victim is on his way to becoming a leopard, while in Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal,” the boy-idiot seems to be transmutating into a sea lion. One form of fission, then, divides the fantastic being into two or more (categorically distinct) identities that alternatively possess the body in question. Call this temporal fission.53
Temporal fission can be distinguished from fusion in that the categories combined in the figure of the fantastic being are not temporally simultaneous; rather, they are split or broken or distributed over time. A second mode of fission distributes the categorical conflict over space through the creation of doubles. Examples here include the portrait in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the dwarf in the cavalier’s body in Mary Shelley’s “Transformation,” and the doppelgangers in movies like The Student of Prague and Warning Shadows. Structurally, what is involved in spatial fission is a process of multiplication, i.e., a character or set of characters is multiplied into one or more new facets, each standing for another aspect of the self, generally one that is either hidden, ignored, repressed, or denied by the character who has been cloned. These new facets generally contradict cultural ideals (usually morally charged ones) of normality. The alter-ego represents a normatively alien aspect of the self. Most of my examples so far employ some mechanism of reflection—a portrait, a mirror, shadows—as the pretext for doubling. But this sort of fission figure can appear without such devices. In the movie I Married A Monster From Outer Space, a young bride begins to suspect that her new husband is not quite himself. Somehow he’s different from the man she used to date. And, she’s quite right. Her boyfriend
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was kidnapped by invaders from another planet on his way back from a bachelor party and he was replaced by an alien. This double, however, initially lacks feelings—the essential characteristic of being human in fifties sci- fi films of this sort—and his bride intuits this. Thus, the categorical distinction between humanity and inhumanity—marked in terms of the possession versus the lack of feelings—is projected symbolically by splitting the boyfriend in two, with each corresponding entity standing for a categorically distinct order of being. The basic story of I Married A Monster From Outer Space—its sci-fi elements aside—resembles a very specific paranoid delusion called the Capgras syndrome. The delusion involves the patient’s belief that his or her parents, lovers, etc. have become minatory doppelgangers. This enables the patient to deny his fear or hatred of a loved one by splitting the loved one in half, creating a bad version (the invader) and a good one (the victim). The new relation of marriage in I Married A Monster From Outer Space appears to engender a conflict, perhaps over sexuality, in the wife that is expressed through the fission figure.55
Just as condensation suggests a model for fusion figuration, splitting as a psychic trope of denial may be the root prototype for spatial fission in art-horror, organzing conflicts, categorical and thematic, through the multiplication of characters. Fission, then, in horror occurs in two major forms—spatial fission and temporal fission. Temporal fission—which the split between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exemplifies—divides characters in time—while spatial fission—for instance, the case of doppelgangers—multiplies characters in space. Here characters become symbols for categorically distinct or opposed elements. In the case of fusion, on the other hand, categorically distinct or opposed elements are conflated or colligated or condensed into a single, spatio- temporally continuous entity whose identity is stable. Both fission and fusion are symbolic structures that facilitate—in different ways—the linkage of distinct and/or opposed categories, thereby providing vehicles for projecting the themes of interstitiality, categorical contradictoriness, and impurity. The fantastic biologies of horrific monsters are, to a surprising extent, reducible to the symbolic structures of fusion and fission.
In order to make a horrific monster—in terms of the impurity requirement—it is enough to link distinct and/or opposed categories by fission or fusion. In terms of fusion, one can put claws on Rosemary’s baby, the devil in Regan, or a fly’s head on Vincent Price’s body. By fission, discrete and/or contradictory categories can be connected by having different biological or ontological orders take turns inhabiting one body, or by populating the fiction with numerically different but otherwise identical bodies, each representing one of the opposed categories. In the most fundamental sense of fusion and fission, these structures are meant to apply to the organization of opposed cultural categories, generally of a deep
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biological or ontological sort: human/reptile, living/dead, etc.
FUSION, FISSION, AND CULTURAL THEMES
But it is also true that in much horror, especially that which is considered to be classic, the opposition of such cultural categories in the biology of the horrific creatures portend further oppositions, oppositions that might be thought of in terms of thematic conflicts or antinomies which, in turn, are generally deep-seated in the culture in which the fiction has been produced. For example, the horrific creatures in Blackwood’s celebrated “Ancient Sorceries” are were-cats. An entire French town goes feline, at night indulging all manner of unmentionable (and unmentioned) debaucheries in the presence of Satan. In terms of my model, these creatures are the product of temporal fission. But this division—between cat and human—heralds other oppositions in the context of the story. An Englishman (perhaps the reincarnation of a cat man from bygone days) visits the town and is gradually tempted to join the coven. The opposition of cat versus human plays into further oppositions—sensual versus staid, nondirective activity versus conscientious, female versus male, and maybe even French versus British. That is, the salient opposition of different elements at the categorical level of biology might be thought of as prefiguring a series of further thematic oppositions. Another example along the same lines would be Val Lewton’s film Cat People. Irena is a shape-changer whose divided self is not only categorically fissured but also represents the opposition of chaste love versus violent sexuality. In terms of fusion, the vampire in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla may be a case in point; for the opposition between living and dead in the monster’s make-up portends a further thematic conflict concerning lesbianism.56 The notions of fission and fusion are meant to apply strictly to the biological and ontological categorical ingredients that go into making monsters. So it is sufficient for a being to be part man and part snake for it to qualify as a horrific fusion figure, or for a woman to be a lady by day and a troll or gorgon by night in order for her to qualify as a horrific fission figure. However, it is frequently the case that the oppositional biologies of fantastic beings correlate to an oppositional thematics. This is generally the case with what are thought to be the better specimens of horror. As a result, much of the work of the critic of horror, as opposed to the theoretician of horror, will be to trace the thematic conflicts that appear in her objects of study. That the creatures are fission or fusion figures may be less interesting than what this dimension of categorical interstitiality prefigures at the thematic level.57 However, for purposes of theoretically identifying the symbolic structures through which myriad monsters are made, the notions of fission and fusion are crucial.
MAGNIFICATION
Along with fission and fusion, another recurring symbolic structure for generating horrific monsters is the magnification of entities or beings already
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typically adjudged impure or disgusting within the culture. In the concluding paragraphs of M.R. James’s “The Ash-Tree,” the gardener looks into the hollow of a tree trunk, his face contorts “with an incredulous terror and loathing,” and he cries out with a “dreadful voice” before fainting. What he has seen is a poisonous spider—spawned from a witch’s body for the purposes of revenge—that is as big as a man’s head.58 The spider, already a phobic object in our culture, exceeds in horribleness not only because of its supernatural provenance and unearthly abilities but especially because of its increase in size beyond the normal. Things that creep and crawl—and that tend to make our flesh creep and crawl—are prime candidates for the objects of art-horror; such creatures already disgust, and augmenting their scale increases their physical dangerousness. In Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot,” a hellish creature is summoned by means of an unholy book.
Calvin pushed me and I tottered, the church whirling before me, and fell to the floor. My head crashed against the edge of an upturned pew, and red fire filled my head—yet seemed to clear it. I groped for the sulphur matches I had brought. Subterranean thunder filled the place. Plaster fell. The rusted bell in the steeple pealed a choked devil’s clarion in sympathetic vibration. My match flared. I touched it to the book just as the pulpit exploded upward in a rending explosion of wood. A huge black maw was discovered beneath; Cal tottered on the edge, his hands held out, his face distended in a wordless scream that I shall hear forever. And then there was a huge surge of gray, vibrating flesh. The smell became a nightmare tide. It was a huge outpouring of a viscid, pustulant jelly, a huge and awful form that seemed to skyrocket from the very bowels of the ground. And yet, with a sudden horrible comprehension which no man can have known, I perceived that it was but one ring, one segment, of a monster worm that had existed eyeless for years in the chambered darkness beneath that abominated church! The book flared alight in my hands, and the Thing seemed to scream soundlessly above me. Calvin was struck glancingly and flung the length of the church like a doll with a broken neck.
Monsters of the magnified phobia variety were quite popular in fifties’s movies (undoubtedly, they were suggested by the first radiation experiments on seeds). Some examples include: Them!, Tarantula, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Deadly Mantis, Giant Gila Monster, Monster From Green Hell, Attack of the Giant Leeches, The Spider, Black Scorpion, The Fly, The Monster That Challenged The World, The Giant Spider Invasion, Mothra, The Return of the Fly, the humungus octopus in It Came From Beneath The Sea, the big crawlers in Rodan, the giant grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End, and the proportionately towering black widow in The Incredible Shrinking Man, among others.
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Insofar as detached body parts can elicit revulsion, we encounter the Crawling Eye attempting to conquer the world. More recently, giant ants have eaten Joan Collins in Empire of the Ants and outsized rats have surrounded Marjoe Gortner in Food of the Gods. Of course, one cannot magnify just anything and hope for a horrific creature; few seem to have been convinced by the monster rabbits in Night of the Lepus. What needs to be magnified are things that are already potentially disturbing and disgusting.59
MASSIFICATION
For the purposes of art-horror, one may exploit the repelling aspect of existing creatures not only by magnifying them, but also by massing them. In Richard Lewis’s novel Devil’s Coach Horse armies of bloodthirsty beetles are on the rampage, while the identity of the monstrous masses in Guy Smith’s Killer Crabs and Peter Tremayne’s Ants requires no further comment. These swarms of crawling things, grouped for an ultimate showdown with humanity, are, of course, really fantastical beings, invested with strategic abilities, virtual invulnerability, a hankering for human flesh, and often mutated powers unknown to present-day biological science. Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen versus the Ants”—surely the Moby Dick of the insect genre—is based on the scientifically correct observation that certain types of ants forage in large co-ordinated collectives, but he imbues these ants with qualities and powers that experts of the day would have found unprecedented.60 They are hunting people and horses—rather than other insects like spiders, cockroaches, and grasshoppers—and the story strongly suggests that they knock out Leiningen’s weir in order to cross the channel. Saul Bass’s movie Phase IV presents the army of ants as a superior intelligence while in Kingdom of the Spiders the invading tarantulas enwrap an entire town in their web for purposes of food storage; in Kiss of the Tarantulas, the spiders become hit-men.
As with the case of magnification, with massification it is not the case that any kind of entity can be grouped into horrific hordes. It must be the sort of thing we are already prone to find repellent—a point made comically by The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (and its sequel, The Return of….). Massing mountains of already disgusting creatures, unified and guided by unfriendly purposes, generates art-horror by augmenting the threat posed by these antecedently phobic objects. Fantastic biologies, linking different and opposed cultural categories, can be constructed by means of fission and fusion, while the horrific potential of already disgusting and phobic entities can be accentuated by means of magnification and massification. These are primary structures for the construction of horrific creatures. These structures pertain primarily to what might be thought of as the biologies of horrific monsters.
METONYMY
However, another structure, not essentially connected to the biology of these creatures, warrants discussion in a review of the presentation of horrific beings, for
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though not a matter of biology, it is an important recurring strategy in the staging of monsters. This strategy might be called horrific metonymy. Often the horror of horrific creatures is not something that can be perceived by the naked eye or that comes through a description of the look of the monster. Frequently, in such cases, the horrific being is surrounded by objects that we antecedently take to be objects of disgust and/or phobia. In “The Spectre Bride,” The Wandering Jew, a fusion figure, does not initially appear disgusting; however, the wedding is associated by contiguity with disgust:
[The Wandering Jew] “Poor girl, I am leading thee indeed to our nuptials; but the priest will be death, thy parents the mouldering skeletons that rot in heaps around; and the witnesses [of] our union, the lazy worms that revel on the carious bones of the dead. Come, my young bride, the priest is impatient for his victim.” As they proceeded, a dim blue light moved swiftly before them, and displayed at the extremity of the churchyard the portals of a vault. It was open, and they entered it in silence. The hollow wind came rushing through the gloomy abode of the dead; and on every side were the mouldering remnants of coffins, which dropped piece by piece upon the damp earth. Every step they took was on a dead body; and the bleached bones rattled horribly beneath their feet. In the centre of the vault rose a heap of unburied skeletons, whereon was seated a figure too awful even for the darkest imagination to conceive. As they approached it, the hollow vault rung with a hellish peal of laughter; and every mouldering corpse seemed endued with unearthly life.
Here, though the horrific bridegroom himself doesn’t elicit disgust perceptually, everything that surrounds him and his hellish ministrations is impure by the lights of the culture. In a similar vein, Dracula, both in literature and on stage and screen, is associated with vermin; in the novel, he commands armies of rats. And undoubtedly, the association of horrific beings with disease and contamination is related to the tendency to surround horrific beings with further impurities. In Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game—a sort of update of Melmoth the Wanderer—the Mephistophelian character Mamoulian is ostensibly normallooking but his associated minion, the Razor-Eater is a hulking zombie undergoing graphically described putrefaction throughout the novel, a feature made more unsettling by his always messy indulging of his sweet tooth. Likewise, the child possessed by the spirit of Beth in John Saul’s Suffer the Children, though not outwardly disgusting herself, is surrounded by stomach-turning ceremonies such as a make-believe tea party attended by blood-splattered children, the skeleton of Beth, and a decapitated cat in a doll’s outfit whose head keeps rolling off its shoulders. With Mamoulian and Beth the fantastic being is not perceptually repulsive but is linked by metonymy to perceptually disgusting things.
Of course, even those creatures like Dracula though they may not, in the main, be portrayed as perceptually
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loathsome, are nevertheless still disgusting and impure; one doesn’t require perceptually detectable grotesquerie in order to be reviling. Dracula strikes Harker as sickening though his appearance is not literally monstrous. In such cases, the association of such impure creatures with perceptually pronounced gore or other disgusting trappings is a means of underscoring the repulsive nature of the being. In James Herbert’s novel The Magic Cottage, the villainous magus Mycroft is a stately, altogether human figure who has at his disposal agencies marked by incredible noxiousness. In the final confrontation with the narrator, he summons them: the “carpet was ripping explosively all around me, and sluglike monsters oozed over the edges in shiny slimes. Hands that were scabbed and dripping pus clawed at the frayed carpet in an effort to drag the rest of their life forms out into the open. Those membranes, full of wriggling life, quivered their snouts in the air before curling over the edge. Wispy black smoke tendrils drifted up in lazy spirals, and these were full of diseased microorganisms, the corrupting evil that roamed the depths, subversives that searched for ways to surface, intent on finding exposure, definition—actuality. These were the infiltrating substances of evil.”
Horrific metonymy need not be restricted to cases where the monsters do not look gruesome; an already misshapen creature can be associated with entities already antecedently thought of in terms of impurity and filth. Think of Murnau’s Nosferatu and the remake by Werner Herzog, where the vampire is linked to unclean, crawling things. Similarly, zombies with great gobs of phlegm dangling from their lips exemplify horrific metonymy. Fusion, fission, magnification, massification and horrific metonymy are the major tropes for presenting the monsters of art-horror.61
Fusion and fission are means for constructing horrific biologies; magnification and massification are means for augmenting the powers of already disgusting and phobic creatures. Horrific metonymy is a means of emphasizing the impure and disgusting nature of the creature—from the outside, so to speak—by associating said being with objects and entities that are already reviled: body parts, vermin, skeletons, and all manner of filth. The horrific creature is essentially a compound of danger and disgust and each of these structures provides a means of developing these attributes in tandem.
Incompletion and Formlessness
Freud
1. Repression. What energy, desire, or passion seems repressed, suppressed, maybe oppressed? How is it manifesting?
2. The Uncanny. Do the domestic, the familiar, and the secure turn strange?
3. Repetition. Do things repeat, keep coming back insisting, like a broken record, like a desiring-machine?
4. Animism/animation. Do dead things, inanimate objects, or other nonhuman things come alive?
5. Ambivalence. Does the monster or the horror suggest mixed feelings, attraction as well as repulsion? (and beyond Freud: potentials for deprogramming standard cultural codes on a track of alternatives, freedoms?)
Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek
6. Abjection and the Real. Any heightening, highlighting of raw life, matter formless or sticky or slimy? Links to the mother and the feminine?
7. Lamella. Any special emphasis on the formless, amoeba-like, slimy and slippery and boundary-crossing?
Mary Douglas, Noel Carroll
8. Category disturbance, disordering. Any mixing, crossover, blurring, distortion of social-cultural classifications? (human and nonhuman, living and dead, whole and fragment, masculine and feminine, and so on). Specifically, via Carroll on horror:
9. Categorically ambiguous—the horror/monster, in two classifications at once?
10. Incompletion—the horror/monster is missing something, not fully formed?
11. Formlessness—the horror/monster is fluid, slimy, lamellar, scrambled, dispersed?
12. Fusion—the horror/monster involves two or more entities combined in one?
13. Fission—the horror/monster is one entity splitting into two, doubling, changing back and forth?
14. Magnification—the horror/monster with one feature or the whole expanding, as if to explode identity/category?
15. Massification—the horror/monster involving swarming, crowding, teeming, as it to overrun category boundaries?
16. Metonymy—innocuous things turning to horror objects via association with monster/horror?
The objects of art-horror are essentially threatening and impure. The creator of horror presents creatures that are salient in respect to these attributes. In this, certain recurring strategies for designing monsters appear with striking regularity across the arts and media. The purpose of this section is to take note of some of the most characteristic ways in which monsters are produced for the reading and viewing public. This section could be subtitled: “How to make a monster.” Horrific monsters are threatening. This aspect of the design of horrific monsters is, I think, incontestable. They must be dangerous. This can be satisfied simply by making the monster lethal. That it kills and maims is
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enough. The monster may also be threatening psychologically, morally, or socially. It may destroy one’s identity (William Blatty’s The Exorcist or Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”), seek to destroy the moral order (Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby et al.), or advance an alternative society (Richard Matheson’s I am Legend). Monsters may also trigger certain enduring infantile fears, such as those of being eaten or dismembered, or sexual fears, concerning rape and incest. However, in order to be threatening, it is sufficient that the monster be physically dangerous. If it produces further anxieties that is so much icing on the cake. So the creators of art-horror must be sure that the creatures in their fictions are threatening and this can be done by assuring that they are at least physically dangerous. Of course, if a monster is psychologically threatening but not physically threatening—i.e., if it’s after your mind, not your body—it will still count as a horrific creature if it inspires revulsion. Horrific creatures are also impure. Here, the means for presenting this aspect of horrific creatures are less obvious. So I will spend some time looking at the characteristic structures through which horrific impurity is portrayed. As discussed in an earlier section concerning the definition of horror, many cases of impurity are generated by what, adapting Mary Douglas, I called interstitiality and categorical contradictoriness. Impurity involves a conflict between two or more standing cultural categories. Thus, it should come as no surprise that many of the most basic structures for representing horrific creatures are combinatory in nature.
FUSION
One structure for the composition of horrific beings is fusion. On the simplest physical level, this often entails the construction of creatures that transgress categorical distinctions such as inside/outside, living/dead, insect/ human, flesh/machine, and so on. Mummies, vampires, ghosts, zombies, and Freddie, Elm Street’s premier nightmare, are fusion figures in this respect. Each, in different ways, blur the distinction between living and dead. Each, in some sense, is both living and dead. A fusion figure is a composite that unites attributes held to be categorically distinct and/or at odds in the cultural scheme of things in unambiguously one, spatio-temporally discrete entity. The caterpillars in E.F.Benson’s story of the same name are fusion figures insofar as they defy biology not only due to their extraordinary length but also because their legs are outfitted with crab pincers. Similarly, the blighted victim in John Metcalfe’s “Mr. Meldrum’s Mania” falls into this category since he is a combination of a man with the Egyptian god Thoth, already a fusion creature compounding an ibis head with a human body, not to mention his moon-disk and crescent accoutrements. Lovecraft’s amalgams of octopi and crustaceans with humanoid forms are paradigmatic fusion figures, as are the pig-men in William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. Fusion examples from film would include figures such as the
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babies in the It’s Alive series and the grotesqueries in Alligator People and The Reptile. The central mark of a fusion figure is the compounding of ordinarily disjoint or conflicting categories in an integral, spatio-temporally unified individual. On this view, many of the characters in possession stories are fusion figures. They may be inhabited by many demons—“I am legion”—or one. But as long as they are composite beings, locatable in an unbroken spatio-temporal continuum with a single identity, we shall count them as fusion figures. Also, I tend to see the Frankenstein monster, especially as he is represented in the Universal Pictures’ movie cycle, as a fusion figure. For not only is it emphasized that he is made from distinct bodies, along with electrical attachments, but the series presents him as if he had different brains imposed upon him—first a criminal’s and later Igor’s. In this, the films appear to uphold the unlikely hypothesis that somehow the monster has a kind of continuing identity—one that is perhaps innocent and benign—in spite of the brain it has. Obviously, this is, to say the least, paradoxical, but if we allow the fiction of brain transplants, why quibble about whether the monster is in some sense the still the same monster it would have been had it not had a criminal’s or Igor’s.brain foisted upon it? The fusion aspect of the Frankenstein monster becomes quite hysterical in Hammer Films’ And Frankenstein Created Woman. Dr. Frankenstein transfers the soul of his dead assistant Hans into the body of Hans’s dead, beloved Christina, and Hans, in Christina’s body, seduces and dispatches the hooligans who had driven Christina (i.e., Christina unified in mind and body) to her death.
The fusion figure may find its prototype in the sort of symbolic structure that Freud called the collective figure or condensation with respect to dreams. Freud writes that one way …in which a ‘collective figure’ can be produced for the purposes of dreamcondensation [is] by uniting the actual features of two or more people into a single dream-image. It was in this way that Dr. M. of my dream was constructed. He bore the name of Dr. M., he spoke and acted like him; but his physical characteristics and his malady belonged to someone else, namely to my eldest brother. One single feature, his pale appearance, was doubly determined, since it was common to both of them in real life. Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle with the yellow beard was a similar composite figure. But in his case the dream-image was constructued in yet another way. I did not combine the features of one person with those of another and in the process omit from the memory-picture certain features of each of them. What I did was to adopt the procedure by means of which Galton produced family portraits: namely by projecting two images onto a single plate, so that certain features common to both are
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emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture. In my dream about my uncle the fair beard emerged prominently from a face which belonged to two people and which was consequently blurred….”50
For Freud, the condensatory or collective figure superimposes, in the manner of a photograph, two or more entities in one individual. Similarly, the fusion figure of art-horror is a composite figure, conflating distinct types of beings. In his discussion of condensation, Freud stresses that the fused elements have something in common. However, in art- horror what the combined elements have in common need not be salient—in T.E.D.Klein’s “Nadelman’s God,” the horrific entity has literally been constructed from a hodgepodge of garbage. As in the associationist writings of the British Empiricists, the fantastic fusion beings of horror are colligations of ontologically or biologically separate orders.51 They are single figures in whom distinct and often clashing types of elements are superimposed or condensed, resulting in entities that are impure and repulsive. Freud notes that the collective structures we find in the dream-work are not unlike “…the composite animals invented by the folk imagination of the Orient.”52 Presumably, Freud has in mind here figures like the winged lions of ancient Assyria. Other examples of this type of condensation-figure would include the gargoyles on medieval cathedrals, the demon-priest (part rodent, part man) in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony triptych, the chickens with the heads of human babies in Goya’s “Ya van desplumadoes” in Los Caprichos, and characters like The Thing (a.k.a. Ben Grimm)—literally a man of stone—in the Marvel comic book series The Fantastic Four.
Of course, in these examples, the elements that go into the condensation or fusion are visually perceptible. However, this is not necessary. One might condense different ontological orders such as the animate and inanimate— e.g., a haunted house—and here nothing that meets the naked eye signals the fusion. And, furthermore, whether any of the preceding examples shall count as horrific fusion depends upon whether or not, in the representational context in which they appear, the beings so concocted match the criteria of art-horror. As a means of composing horrific beings, fusion hinges upon conflating, combining, or condensing distinct and/or opposed categorical elements in a spatio-temporally continuous monster.
FISSION
In contrast, another popular means for creating interstitial beings is fission. In fusion, categorically contradictory elements are fused or condensed or superimposed in one unified spatiotemporal being whose identity is homogeneous. But with fission, the contradictory elements are, so to speak, distributed over different, though
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metaphysically related, identities. The type of creatures that I have in mind here include doppelgangers, alter-egos, and werewolves. Werewolves, for example, violate the categorical distinction between humans and wolves. In this case, the animal and the human inhabit the same body (understood as spatially locatable protoplasm); however, they do so at different times. The animal and the wolf identities are not temporally continuous, though presumably their protoplasm is numerically the same; at a given point in time (the rise of the full moon), the body, inhabited by the human, is turned over to the wolf. The human identity and the wolf identity are not fused, but, so to speak, they are sequenced. The human and the wolf are spatially continuous, occupying the same body, but the identity changes or alternates over time; the two identities—and the opposed categories they represent—do not overlap temporally in the same body. That protoplasm is heterogeneous in terms of accommodating different, mutually exclusive identities at different times. The werewolf figure embodies a categorical contradiction between man and animal which it distributes over time. Of course, what is being said of werewolves here applies to shape changers of every variety. In Kipling’s “Mark of the Beast,” the victim is on his way to becoming a leopard, while in Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal,” the boy-idiot seems to be transmutating into a sea lion. One form of fission, then, divides the fantastic being into two or more (categorically distinct) identities that alternatively possess the body in question. Call this temporal fission.53
Temporal fission can be distinguished from fusion in that the categories combined in the figure of the fantastic being are not temporally simultaneous; rather, they are split or broken or distributed over time. A second mode of fission distributes the categorical conflict over space through the creation of doubles. Examples here include the portrait in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the dwarf in the cavalier’s body in Mary Shelley’s “Transformation,” and the doppelgangers in movies like The Student of Prague and Warning Shadows. Structurally, what is involved in spatial fission is a process of multiplication, i.e., a character or set of characters is multiplied into one or more new facets, each standing for another aspect of the self, generally one that is either hidden, ignored, repressed, or denied by the character who has been cloned. These new facets generally contradict cultural ideals (usually morally charged ones) of normality. The alter-ego represents a normatively alien aspect of the self. Most of my examples so far employ some mechanism of reflection—a portrait, a mirror, shadows—as the pretext for doubling. But this sort of fission figure can appear without such devices. In the movie I Married A Monster From Outer Space, a young bride begins to suspect that her new husband is not quite himself. Somehow he’s different from the man she used to date. And, she’s quite right. Her boyfriend
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was kidnapped by invaders from another planet on his way back from a bachelor party and he was replaced by an alien. This double, however, initially lacks feelings—the essential characteristic of being human in fifties sci- fi films of this sort—and his bride intuits this. Thus, the categorical distinction between humanity and inhumanity—marked in terms of the possession versus the lack of feelings—is projected symbolically by splitting the boyfriend in two, with each corresponding entity standing for a categorically distinct order of being. The basic story of I Married A Monster From Outer Space—its sci-fi elements aside—resembles a very specific paranoid delusion called the Capgras syndrome. The delusion involves the patient’s belief that his or her parents, lovers, etc. have become minatory doppelgangers. This enables the patient to deny his fear or hatred of a loved one by splitting the loved one in half, creating a bad version (the invader) and a good one (the victim). The new relation of marriage in I Married A Monster From Outer Space appears to engender a conflict, perhaps over sexuality, in the wife that is expressed through the fission figure.55
Just as condensation suggests a model for fusion figuration, splitting as a psychic trope of denial may be the root prototype for spatial fission in art-horror, organzing conflicts, categorical and thematic, through the multiplication of characters. Fission, then, in horror occurs in two major forms—spatial fission and temporal fission. Temporal fission—which the split between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exemplifies—divides characters in time—while spatial fission—for instance, the case of doppelgangers—multiplies characters in space. Here characters become symbols for categorically distinct or opposed elements. In the case of fusion, on the other hand, categorically distinct or opposed elements are conflated or colligated or condensed into a single, spatio- temporally continuous entity whose identity is stable. Both fission and fusion are symbolic structures that facilitate—in different ways—the linkage of distinct and/or opposed categories, thereby providing vehicles for projecting the themes of interstitiality, categorical contradictoriness, and impurity. The fantastic biologies of horrific monsters are, to a surprising extent, reducible to the symbolic structures of fusion and fission.
In order to make a horrific monster—in terms of the impurity requirement—it is enough to link distinct and/or opposed categories by fission or fusion. In terms of fusion, one can put claws on Rosemary’s baby, the devil in Regan, or a fly’s head on Vincent Price’s body. By fission, discrete and/or contradictory categories can be connected by having different biological or ontological orders take turns inhabiting one body, or by populating the fiction with numerically different but otherwise identical bodies, each representing one of the opposed categories. In the most fundamental sense of fusion and fission, these structures are meant to apply to the organization of opposed cultural categories, generally of a deep
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biological or ontological sort: human/reptile, living/dead, etc.
FUSION, FISSION, AND CULTURAL THEMES
But it is also true that in much horror, especially that which is considered to be classic, the opposition of such cultural categories in the biology of the horrific creatures portend further oppositions, oppositions that might be thought of in terms of thematic conflicts or antinomies which, in turn, are generally deep-seated in the culture in which the fiction has been produced. For example, the horrific creatures in Blackwood’s celebrated “Ancient Sorceries” are were-cats. An entire French town goes feline, at night indulging all manner of unmentionable (and unmentioned) debaucheries in the presence of Satan. In terms of my model, these creatures are the product of temporal fission. But this division—between cat and human—heralds other oppositions in the context of the story. An Englishman (perhaps the reincarnation of a cat man from bygone days) visits the town and is gradually tempted to join the coven. The opposition of cat versus human plays into further oppositions—sensual versus staid, nondirective activity versus conscientious, female versus male, and maybe even French versus British. That is, the salient opposition of different elements at the categorical level of biology might be thought of as prefiguring a series of further thematic oppositions. Another example along the same lines would be Val Lewton’s film Cat People. Irena is a shape-changer whose divided self is not only categorically fissured but also represents the opposition of chaste love versus violent sexuality. In terms of fusion, the vampire in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla may be a case in point; for the opposition between living and dead in the monster’s make-up portends a further thematic conflict concerning lesbianism.56 The notions of fission and fusion are meant to apply strictly to the biological and ontological categorical ingredients that go into making monsters. So it is sufficient for a being to be part man and part snake for it to qualify as a horrific fusion figure, or for a woman to be a lady by day and a troll or gorgon by night in order for her to qualify as a horrific fission figure. However, it is frequently the case that the oppositional biologies of fantastic beings correlate to an oppositional thematics. This is generally the case with what are thought to be the better specimens of horror. As a result, much of the work of the critic of horror, as opposed to the theoretician of horror, will be to trace the thematic conflicts that appear in her objects of study. That the creatures are fission or fusion figures may be less interesting than what this dimension of categorical interstitiality prefigures at the thematic level.57 However, for purposes of theoretically identifying the symbolic structures through which myriad monsters are made, the notions of fission and fusion are crucial.
MAGNIFICATION
Along with fission and fusion, another recurring symbolic structure for generating horrific monsters is the magnification of entities or beings already
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typically adjudged impure or disgusting within the culture. In the concluding paragraphs of M.R. James’s “The Ash-Tree,” the gardener looks into the hollow of a tree trunk, his face contorts “with an incredulous terror and loathing,” and he cries out with a “dreadful voice” before fainting. What he has seen is a poisonous spider—spawned from a witch’s body for the purposes of revenge—that is as big as a man’s head.58 The spider, already a phobic object in our culture, exceeds in horribleness not only because of its supernatural provenance and unearthly abilities but especially because of its increase in size beyond the normal. Things that creep and crawl—and that tend to make our flesh creep and crawl—are prime candidates for the objects of art-horror; such creatures already disgust, and augmenting their scale increases their physical dangerousness. In Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot,” a hellish creature is summoned by means of an unholy book.
Calvin pushed me and I tottered, the church whirling before me, and fell to the floor. My head crashed against the edge of an upturned pew, and red fire filled my head—yet seemed to clear it. I groped for the sulphur matches I had brought. Subterranean thunder filled the place. Plaster fell. The rusted bell in the steeple pealed a choked devil’s clarion in sympathetic vibration. My match flared. I touched it to the book just as the pulpit exploded upward in a rending explosion of wood. A huge black maw was discovered beneath; Cal tottered on the edge, his hands held out, his face distended in a wordless scream that I shall hear forever. And then there was a huge surge of gray, vibrating flesh. The smell became a nightmare tide. It was a huge outpouring of a viscid, pustulant jelly, a huge and awful form that seemed to skyrocket from the very bowels of the ground. And yet, with a sudden horrible comprehension which no man can have known, I perceived that it was but one ring, one segment, of a monster worm that had existed eyeless for years in the chambered darkness beneath that abominated church! The book flared alight in my hands, and the Thing seemed to scream soundlessly above me. Calvin was struck glancingly and flung the length of the church like a doll with a broken neck.
Monsters of the magnified phobia variety were quite popular in fifties’s movies (undoubtedly, they were suggested by the first radiation experiments on seeds). Some examples include: Them!, Tarantula, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Deadly Mantis, Giant Gila Monster, Monster From Green Hell, Attack of the Giant Leeches, The Spider, Black Scorpion, The Fly, The Monster That Challenged The World, The Giant Spider Invasion, Mothra, The Return of the Fly, the humungus octopus in It Came From Beneath The Sea, the big crawlers in Rodan, the giant grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End, and the proportionately towering black widow in The Incredible Shrinking Man, among others.
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Insofar as detached body parts can elicit revulsion, we encounter the Crawling Eye attempting to conquer the world. More recently, giant ants have eaten Joan Collins in Empire of the Ants and outsized rats have surrounded Marjoe Gortner in Food of the Gods. Of course, one cannot magnify just anything and hope for a horrific creature; few seem to have been convinced by the monster rabbits in Night of the Lepus. What needs to be magnified are things that are already potentially disturbing and disgusting.59
MASSIFICATION
For the purposes of art-horror, one may exploit the repelling aspect of existing creatures not only by magnifying them, but also by massing them. In Richard Lewis’s novel Devil’s Coach Horse armies of bloodthirsty beetles are on the rampage, while the identity of the monstrous masses in Guy Smith’s Killer Crabs and Peter Tremayne’s Ants requires no further comment. These swarms of crawling things, grouped for an ultimate showdown with humanity, are, of course, really fantastical beings, invested with strategic abilities, virtual invulnerability, a hankering for human flesh, and often mutated powers unknown to present-day biological science. Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen versus the Ants”—surely the Moby Dick of the insect genre—is based on the scientifically correct observation that certain types of ants forage in large co-ordinated collectives, but he imbues these ants with qualities and powers that experts of the day would have found unprecedented.60 They are hunting people and horses—rather than other insects like spiders, cockroaches, and grasshoppers—and the story strongly suggests that they knock out Leiningen’s weir in order to cross the channel. Saul Bass’s movie Phase IV presents the army of ants as a superior intelligence while in Kingdom of the Spiders the invading tarantulas enwrap an entire town in their web for purposes of food storage; in Kiss of the Tarantulas, the spiders become hit-men.
As with the case of magnification, with massification it is not the case that any kind of entity can be grouped into horrific hordes. It must be the sort of thing we are already prone to find repellent—a point made comically by The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (and its sequel, The Return of….). Massing mountains of already disgusting creatures, unified and guided by unfriendly purposes, generates art-horror by augmenting the threat posed by these antecedently phobic objects. Fantastic biologies, linking different and opposed cultural categories, can be constructed by means of fission and fusion, while the horrific potential of already disgusting and phobic entities can be accentuated by means of magnification and massification. These are primary structures for the construction of horrific creatures. These structures pertain primarily to what might be thought of as the biologies of horrific monsters.
METONYMY
However, another structure, not essentially connected to the biology of these creatures, warrants discussion in a review of the presentation of horrific beings, for
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though not a matter of biology, it is an important recurring strategy in the staging of monsters. This strategy might be called horrific metonymy. Often the horror of horrific creatures is not something that can be perceived by the naked eye or that comes through a description of the look of the monster. Frequently, in such cases, the horrific being is surrounded by objects that we antecedently take to be objects of disgust and/or phobia. In “The Spectre Bride,” The Wandering Jew, a fusion figure, does not initially appear disgusting; however, the wedding is associated by contiguity with disgust:
[The Wandering Jew] “Poor girl, I am leading thee indeed to our nuptials; but the priest will be death, thy parents the mouldering skeletons that rot in heaps around; and the witnesses [of] our union, the lazy worms that revel on the carious bones of the dead. Come, my young bride, the priest is impatient for his victim.” As they proceeded, a dim blue light moved swiftly before them, and displayed at the extremity of the churchyard the portals of a vault. It was open, and they entered it in silence. The hollow wind came rushing through the gloomy abode of the dead; and on every side were the mouldering remnants of coffins, which dropped piece by piece upon the damp earth. Every step they took was on a dead body; and the bleached bones rattled horribly beneath their feet. In the centre of the vault rose a heap of unburied skeletons, whereon was seated a figure too awful even for the darkest imagination to conceive. As they approached it, the hollow vault rung with a hellish peal of laughter; and every mouldering corpse seemed endued with unearthly life.
Here, though the horrific bridegroom himself doesn’t elicit disgust perceptually, everything that surrounds him and his hellish ministrations is impure by the lights of the culture. In a similar vein, Dracula, both in literature and on stage and screen, is associated with vermin; in the novel, he commands armies of rats. And undoubtedly, the association of horrific beings with disease and contamination is related to the tendency to surround horrific beings with further impurities. In Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game—a sort of update of Melmoth the Wanderer—the Mephistophelian character Mamoulian is ostensibly normallooking but his associated minion, the Razor-Eater is a hulking zombie undergoing graphically described putrefaction throughout the novel, a feature made more unsettling by his always messy indulging of his sweet tooth. Likewise, the child possessed by the spirit of Beth in John Saul’s Suffer the Children, though not outwardly disgusting herself, is surrounded by stomach-turning ceremonies such as a make-believe tea party attended by blood-splattered children, the skeleton of Beth, and a decapitated cat in a doll’s outfit whose head keeps rolling off its shoulders. With Mamoulian and Beth the fantastic being is not perceptually repulsive but is linked by metonymy to perceptually disgusting things.
Of course, even those creatures like Dracula though they may not, in the main, be portrayed as perceptually
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loathsome, are nevertheless still disgusting and impure; one doesn’t require perceptually detectable grotesquerie in order to be reviling. Dracula strikes Harker as sickening though his appearance is not literally monstrous. In such cases, the association of such impure creatures with perceptually pronounced gore or other disgusting trappings is a means of underscoring the repulsive nature of the being. In James Herbert’s novel The Magic Cottage, the villainous magus Mycroft is a stately, altogether human figure who has at his disposal agencies marked by incredible noxiousness. In the final confrontation with the narrator, he summons them: the “carpet was ripping explosively all around me, and sluglike monsters oozed over the edges in shiny slimes. Hands that were scabbed and dripping pus clawed at the frayed carpet in an effort to drag the rest of their life forms out into the open. Those membranes, full of wriggling life, quivered their snouts in the air before curling over the edge. Wispy black smoke tendrils drifted up in lazy spirals, and these were full of diseased microorganisms, the corrupting evil that roamed the depths, subversives that searched for ways to surface, intent on finding exposure, definition—actuality. These were the infiltrating substances of evil.”
Horrific metonymy need not be restricted to cases where the monsters do not look gruesome; an already misshapen creature can be associated with entities already antecedently thought of in terms of impurity and filth. Think of Murnau’s Nosferatu and the remake by Werner Herzog, where the vampire is linked to unclean, crawling things. Similarly, zombies with great gobs of phlegm dangling from their lips exemplify horrific metonymy. Fusion, fission, magnification, massification and horrific metonymy are the major tropes for presenting the monsters of art-horror.61
Fusion and fission are means for constructing horrific biologies; magnification and massification are means for augmenting the powers of already disgusting and phobic creatures. Horrific metonymy is a means of emphasizing the impure and disgusting nature of the creature—from the outside, so to speak—by associating said being with objects and entities that are already reviled: body parts, vermin, skeletons, and all manner of filth. The horrific creature is essentially a compound of danger and disgust and each of these structures provides a means of developing these attributes in tandem.
Incompletion and Formlessness
Categorical incompleteness is also a standard feature of the monsters of horror; ghosts and zombies frequently come without eyes, arms, legs, or skin, or they are in some advanced state of disintegration. And, in a related vein, detached body parts are serviceable monsters, severed heads and especially hands, e.g., de Maupassant’s “The Hand” and “The Withered Hand,” Le Fanu’s “The Narrative of a Ghost of a Hand,” Golding’s “The Call of the Hand,” Conan Doyle’s “The Brown Hand,” Nerval’s “The Enchanted Hand,” Dreiser’s “The Hand,” William Harvey’s “The Beast With Five Fingers” and so on. A brain in a vat is the monster in the novel Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak, which has been adapted for the screen more than once, while in the film Fiend Without a Face the monsters are brains that use their spinal cords as tails. The rate of recurrence with which the biologies of monsters are vaporous or gelatinous attests to the applicability of the notion of formlessness to horrific impurity while the writing style of certain horror authors, such as Lovecraft, at times, and Straub, through their vague, suggestive, and often inchoate descriptions of the monsters, leaves an impression of formlessness. Indeed, many monsters are literally formless: the man-eating oil slick in King’s short story “The Raft,” the malevolent entity in James Herbert’s The Fog and The Dark, in Matthew Phipps Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, in Joseph Payne Brennan’s novella “Slime,” in Kate Wilhelm’s and Ted Thomas’s The
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Clone, and the monsters in movies like The Blob (both versions) and The Stuff.
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