I wrote this quite some years ago, for a panel at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
It seems appropriate for today, General Election day, as we prepare yet again to be monstered.
What is a Monster?
In contemporary fiction, a monster will inevitably be:
Post-Marxist
Post-Freudian/post-Jungian
Post-Cinema
Post- or maybe Mid-Genetics
Which, let’s face it, isn’t very scary.
‘Look out, there’s a Monster coming!’
is a lot more scary than
‘Look out, there’s a fictional construct revealing horrific tensions not only within the psyche of its creator but also within the historical dialectic… coming! Oh no, it’s special effects aren’t very convincing – perhaps revealing our own growing fears of inauthenticity!’
Help! It seems to be biting me.
Clearly I’m using the Monster to represent aberrant eruptions of the unreal or supernatural into Realism. (I’d prefer for the moment talk in these terms rather than those of genre and mainstream; I’m also going to ally realism and rationalism, although their relationship isn’t one of straightforward comradeship.)
But there’s a very strong argument to be made that Realism is itself the aberration, the Monstrous distortion of human experience. From Beowulf to Gawain and the Green Knight through Gulliver’s Travels, Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula, there have always been major Monsters.
Where do they come from?
In Goya’s etching it is ‘The Sleep of Reason,’ which is said to ‘Produce Monsters’.
But, post-everything-I-listed-at-the-start, it’s inescapable that we are the Monsters: we are the Wolf Man, we are the Crowd-Beast. Yes, of course, we are the Monsters, and the problem is that we know that we are.
We don’t really scare ourselves any more. We have reached what you could call ‘the Scooby-Doo impasse’: we know the Monster is never the Monster, always the Janitor who wants to take over the Funfair.
“And we’d have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for you meddling Ids!”
To be paradoxical, Goya’s statement can be reversed, and I think is meant to be: it’s the sleep of Monsters which produces Reason. Reason is our Monstrous Dream of how the World should be – it’s only through Reason that we are able to talk about the World at all.
Or perhaps we can read the reversal another way, the Sleep of Monsters is us pretending that the Monsters we see ourselves as being are asleep. In other words, we understand ourselves so well that our Monster-selves are not only unscary they are safely un-conscious.
Yet in this Rational, Reasonable, Realistic world of ours, the Monsters may slumber but they never go completely away. The absence of Monsters would mean the absence of us.
If we want our Monsters to be scary again, we will have to misunderstand them. We will have to misunderestimate them – and to do that, we will have to forget all that we’ve learnt about them. This can’t be achieved by an act of will, but it can become political policy – it can be attempted if not achieved by censorship and propaganda.
Since Godzilla, the God-monster, stomped on Manhattan, the ‘isolated thing in water’, we have been encouraged to believe our Reasonable world is threatened by real Monsters. Our ploughshares have been beaten into swords – and, in the same forge, the Hammer and Sickle has been refashioned into a Crescent. ‘Post-al-Quaeda’ has to be added to my list of what a monster now can’t help but be.
On one side we have the Scary Monsters, on the other it’s the Super Creeps. Not an attractive choice, but fiction of all sorts – genre and mainstream – has to accommodate or ignore both.
What an excellent explanation of human beings. Almost reassuring! (Weirdly)