Narrative performance in the contemporary monster story.(Critical Essay)

Recently literary and cultural criticism has come to recognize the signal importance of the body in constructing culture, and we have seen a flourishing of articles and books on representations of the body. One of the most traditional ways that a writer can explore society through the body is by telling a monster story. Critics have long recognized that literary monsters serve to challenge the homogeneity of society by revealing its tensions, inconsistencies, and gaps. Contemporary theory, as well as popular culture, is clearly in sympathy with the monster story's goal of revealing social disunity through bodily multiplicity. More than ever we are aware of our bodies as constructions dependent upon technology and social expectation. The popularity within literary criticism of Donna Haraway's claim that we are all today 'cyborgs' existing within and constructed by many different information circuits is only a reflection of the larger social interest in images of the synthetic, heterogeneous body. One witty statement of our thinking about the body is Max Apple's short story 'Free Agents' (1983), in which the author's internal organs decide to leave him, suing for their right to sell themselves to the highest bidder. They issue a press release: 'The so-called one-life one-body ruling [...] has for an entire decade been based upon false medical, legal, and moral evidence. The star surgeons traipse through the land making big reputations by moving organs from one body to another. An average John Doe might have a new heart, a fresh kidney, pints of alien blood, even an engrafted tooth if the dentists have their way, and you know they will. Meanwhile, the organs are treated as so much meat.' (1) Apple's story of the court case that will decide this issue (with the pituitary gland as the judge, and the organs of famous people as the jury) humorously shows just how widely recognized is the disunity of the body.

That contemporary culture has accepted the disunity of the body in a way makes the monster story curiously irrelevant. For if we recognize that we are all, like Apple's narrator, 'monsters' comprised of independent elements, what need have we for stories that foreground this disunity? And yet, monsters continue to inspire writers and to attract readers. Even leaving aside the monsters of popular horror film and fiction, characters with monstrous bodies have consistently appeared in 'serious' contemporary fiction. We think, for example, of Italo Calvino's Il visconte dimezzato (1951), William Burroughs's The Ticket that Exploded (1967), John Gardner's Grendel (1971), Sahnan Rushdie's Shame (1983), and Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (1992). What cultural 'work', we might ask, do monster novels do at the end of the twentieth century? In this article I will argue that monster novels provide contemporary writers with the chance to examine the process of storytelling itself. (2) I would like to discuss a number of contemporary monster stories, but will primarily focus on three particularly significant texts: Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984), Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1989), and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1990). What we find, ultimately, is that monster stories raise important questions about the agency of literary symbolism--who makes the body 'mean' and how that act supports or undercuts larger socio-political messages within the novel.

The Symbolic Body

As a number of recent critics have noted, before the eighteenth century the monster was most often seen as a divine sign intended to convey some message; these critics frequently link monster to the French term montrer, to demonstrate. In this sense, monstrosity is a fact that must be interpreted by considering what message it sends. Chris Baldick summarizes Michel Foucault's work on insanity by noting: 'In a world created by a reasonable God, the freak or lunatic must have a purpose: to reveal the results of vice, folly, and unreason, as a warning [...] to erring humanity.' (3) The monstrous body is assured of meaning because of its participation within a nexus of traditional assumptions about nature and humanity. This is the kind of monstrous sign that Mikhail Bakhtin has explored in his book on Rabelais, where the grotesque body becomes a symbolic representative of life in general: 'the grotesque body is cosmic and universal. It stresses elements common to the entire cosmos: earth, water, fire, air; it is directly related to the sun, to the stars. It contains the signs of the zodiac. It reflects the cosmic hierarchy. This body can merge with various natural phenomena, with mountains, rivers, seas, islands, and continents. It can fill the entire universe.' (4) The grotesque or monstrous body here is made meaningful by a whole set of philosophical and mythic resonances. Barbara Maria Stafford has recently noted that monstrosity was handled in early modern science, likewise, as a sign that promised to reveal the hidden truth about human development: 'The paradox of eighteenth-century genetic research was that it studied irregular occurrences in order to discover something about how regular organisms conceived.' (5) Despite this scientific interest, the monstrous body remains a simple sign that points back to some deeper error or message.

This monstrous sign becomes complicated, however, when the body is treated as comprised of independent elements and subsystems. Stafford notes that 'By the late eighteenth century the model of the body as an integral whole finally fell apart' (p. 340), in large part because of a fundamental shift to seeing bodily components as independent. For Stafford, recognizing that the body is made up of independent elements raises fundamental interpretational problems for those who study it: 'One might never arrive at the cumulative scene, but only drown in the unamalgamated details. The abstract invisible laws for achieving a superior coalescence were easily submerged beneath disconnected empirica' (p. 332). In other words, once scientists recognize that the monstrous body is not a simple sign, they need to justify the means by which they explain and link the various elements of the body. (6) Bakhtin likewise notes that the modern body is treated as an individual object, and thus loses most of its links to the broad cultural mythologies that ensure its effortless interpretation. (7) This transformation is quite clear in how bodily space is made to serve political rhetoric. Baldick observes that one traditional way that the disharmony of monstrous body elements is made meaningful is by treating that body as a political sign emphasizing the necessity of a unifying political authority (a king) that gives organic wholeness to the 'body politic'. As Baldick writes, 'When political discord and rebellion appear, this "body" is said to be not just diseased, but misshapen, abortive, monstrous' (p. 14). Yet, even in the doctrine of the body politic we begin to see a complication of the moral point being made by the body. In Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes gives us his famous definition of the state as 'an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates, and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment, by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty every joint and member is moved to perform his duty, are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural'. (8) Hobbes implies that a disproportionate body will signify the political disunity of a commonwealth, and thus will function as a monstrous 'sign' that reveals the political problems to be remedied. Hobbes's analysis of the body into parts and functions also departs, however, from the simple sign Baldick describes and instead treats the body as an inherently 'corporate' entity made up of distinct elements whose relations are very much subject to debate. (9) More generally we can say that as science begins to treat the body as a composite entity, monstrosity forces its interpreters to explain their methods and assumptions. (10)

Despite this historical shift in the way the monstrous body is made meaningful, when critics offer interpretations of literary monsters, they often treat the monster as a timeless literary trope. Critics frequently find in novels like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the stuff of very effective cultural critique, bringing together many different elements of the culture in the monster's body for the sake of revealing problems within the society itself. (11) Stephen Bann speaks for many of these critics when he defines monsters as objects that exist outside the fixed episteme of a culture, suggesting that interest in such 'curiosities' reflects an attempt to come to terms with epistemological questions: 'It could be argued that evidence of this kind [i.e. using monsters in artworks to explore biological form] simply points to a transitional, or unresolved, quality in seventeenth-century speculations about the natural world. Krzysztof Pomian has defined "curiosity" as an "interim rule" between religion and science. Phenomena of the type described might appear to be symptomatic of this state of being neither one thing not the other.' (12) Critics thus treat the monster as an embodiment of postmodern attitudes towards difference and cultural heterogeneity, often celebrating the monster as that which challenges our everyday models of the world. In his introduction to the collection Monster Theory Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that 'Because of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at times of crisis as the kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes.' (13) The monster here becomes a symbol of difference, of what is repressed by the dominant culture. As a result, all cultural bodies come to seem monstrous in Cohen's ...