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Today we move on from the divine to monsters a little closer to home.
Monsters Fabled and Literary
Today, the familial thread linking monsters with the divine is tenuous at best. Now our monsters are children of the imagination and of the street, and though these new chimeras no longer sport the luster of dying gods, still we follow the ancient formula in their making.
As a writer, I find myself particularly drawn to the macabre and lonely conjurings of the creative mind, from fable to genre tome. An outgrowth of our mythic past, faërie-tales and fables boast two basic monster types: natural creatures out to pounce on the errant, foolish, and unsuspecting, and errant, foolish, unsuspecting humans who have been enchanted.
Natural monsters are a wonderfully diverse lot: dragons, trolls, kelpies, bunyips, and big, bad wolves. They populate woods and ponds and closet shadows, the threat of their lethal clutches keeping unruly children on the beaten path.[1] With the exception of the Bears Goldilocks encountered, we imagine these beings living off on their own—in small bands at most—hostile misanthropes with voracious appetites, just waiting for us to put a step wrong. When we do, these creatures demand feats of reckless—if well-rewarded—bravado, as knights and woodsmen flock to rescue their hapless victims.
The truth of these creatures is more complex, of course. Many are devoted to family and clan, and are simply doing their best to live in a dangerous world. Who the real victims are under such circumstances is open to debate—after all, why should humans be the only species allowed to be fruitful and multiply or stand their ground? Sure, Jack was poor, but that doesn’t justify stealing from the Giant and his wife, and, amongst humans, home invasion is frowned upon even if you are a golden-tressed ingénue.
But these monsters aren’t human; most don’t even have names—all the better to despise and slay them, my dear.
Enchanted people/monsters are cautionary characters of a different stripe, symbolic of a litany of failings, willful and otherwise, that come with being human. Especially a royal human. This is where faërie tales veer into the world of political commentary, shining light on what it takes to be a good prince in a best of all possible worlds. Greed, sloth, and disrespect, arrogance, and ignorance, common weaknesses in ordinary folk become fatal flaws for those to the purple born. Of all people, they should know better and deserve harsh remedial lessons when they forget. In the past, such erudition fell to the gods—the legends of Medusa and Arachne spring to mind. Now it is the province of the faërie. Lord or lady, cross the wrong sprite and you wind up on a whole new learning curve, cursed, beset, besieged, and potentially dead.
So it was with the Beast, the Green Serpent, the Frog Prince, the Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh—changlings all, mastering lessons in scale and fur they failed to learn in skin. Hoping, in the end, to be redeemed. Lucky for them, in the tidy fashion of once-upon-a-time, redemption is possible.
No matter how fierce or hideous, these ensorcelled creatures can always be uncursed by love. By someone who steps outside of their own comfort zone—often for the sake of family honor—and gets past their fears and kneejerk prejudices. Beauty liberates her Beast. The Princess (reluctantly) keeps her word and de-amphibifies her saucy Frog. Snow White and Rose Red help the enchanted bear return to his regal form.
All is well until the next time, when another faërie feels slighted and a monster grows in a princeling’s stead, his grisly aspect, like Dorian Gray’s portrait, a constant reminder of his transgressions. He’s driven off and those left behind breathe a collective sigh of relief. They are safe from the ‘other’ in their midst. They can forget. And they do, until through stupidity or greed, someone else stumbles upon the beast, and the whole chain of events—initially dangerous, ultimately miraculous—begins again.
In faërie tales, the cycle continues until we learn; until we see with clear eyes, that monsters are not ‘other,’ they are us. Until we acknowledge that, more than faëries—even more than gods—we are their makers, responsible for all their wonder and terror.
Sympathy for the Monster—Old Forms and Modern Madness
As the Age of Enlightenment folded into an Age of Industry and Angst, we began to do just that, and creatures of anonymous myth and faërie tale started competing with monsters boasting distinctively authored pedigrees. From the Phantom of the Opera to Man-Thing, Moby-Dick to Godzilla, this new breed are amalgams of horror and fantasy, natural and divine, forged in the ancient furnace of persecution and aloneness, yet endowed by their creators with the self-awareness, dread, and dreams of the age. They are stentorian instruments of the author’s voice, mirrors of a maturing knowledge of psychology and growing dis-ease within society and ourselves.
In our progressively alienating environment, we humans recognize the monster—the potential for the monster—within. Alienated souls lost in a modern world speak to us. They inspire our sympathy, empathy, even respect, eliciting by turns admiration and terror.[2] Changelings, demi-gods, massive beasts born of nature and human folly, they still get our adrenaline pumping, even give us the occasional nightmare. Yet, in this strange new literary—and cinematic—world, they also make us think, even re-examine our traditional notions of good and evil. If we give them a chance, we discover, for better and worse, they are more like us than different. Of course, giving them that chance is the hard part.
In print, ink, and on celluloid, the list of non-humanoid monsters is as long as a wyvern’s tail, though a couple stand above the rest. On the cinematic front, King Kong and Godzilla, though of varied origins, are both monsters of the old god-beast mold, yet, unlike their mythic predecessors, they upended the old burdens of fear and villainy and, in the prism of modern sensibilities, became wild anti-heroes. Though outside the normal bounds of nature, they are not inherently barbarous or cruel. Rather, wrenched from their habitat, pained and hunted, they are tormented by forces beyond their control. Often by us. It wasn’t “beauty killed the beast,” but the loss of home and exploitation of the showman; and Godzilla is a voice roaring in the wilderness we choose to obliterate rather than heed.[3] When these more traditional creatures exchange their lot with heroes and victims, different, much more human monsters emerged.
These are the new changlings, humans—or near humans—warped not by some spell of a scorned faërie, but by fate or malignant designs. These are monsters broken and reformed on the rack of loss and obsession. Ahab, Frankenstein’s creature, GollumM of Middle Earth, monsters born in the madness of solitude and self-loathing.
“Ahab?!” you say.
Most definitely. Moby-Dick is a masterpiece of monster fiction, and of course, many consider the whale the monster. For all of Melville’s forward transcendentalist thinking, he was still writing of and for his time. It was the mid 19th century, and God smiled down upon the whalers of New Bedford. Theirs was a noble, lucrative, and extremely dangerous profession. Despite the ominous homilies from Father Mapple’s pulpit, reaping the rich spoils of the sea was a divine right of man. Against this backdrop—and by virtue of his cetacean ways—Moby-Dick, à la George’s Dragon or the Tarasque of Provence, is the logical evil antagonist. In such a scenario, Ahab stands tall, the tragic (anti)-hero, Aeschylean in his single-minded quest for revenge. And even by cynical 21st-century standards, Ahab has his sympathetic points. A man of faith and education, for near forty years he was a bold captain, inspiring loyalty from his men, sharing with them the perils of their chosen life. He even married, had a wife and son, and though we learn little of them, it speaks to his having familial ties. Once upon a time.
Then the bite of an alabaster leviathan flensed him clean of his better self, and he took on the changling’s mantle, becoming a man transformed by loss of limb and pain of flesh. Yet Moby-Dick was hardly unscathed by their encounter: for years he’s borne the misery of the whaler’s “fiery darts,” festering beneath his skin. Is Ahab’s torment so much more because he is human? Or is it his monstrous flaw that, as a human, he cannot let it go? As he turtles within himself, his hatred grows. In the end, he hunts Moby-Dick round perdition’s flames not because he is a whale, nor even because he took his leg. He would slay Moby-Dick because he is the symbol of the darkness worming into Ahab’s heart, the loneliness filling Ahab’s head.
To a 21st-century whale-hugging reader, all this seems a bit over the top, and for good reason. Moby-Dick is a marvel of nature, an ancient of his kind as wild and mysterious as the depths he sounds. The singular and majestic best of his species, his alliance is neutral; the only malice in him is that consigned by his would-be executioners. If he had his druthers, he’d no doubt delight in cruising the seven seas, dining on giant squid, perhaps fathering a pod or two of whale-lets and being left alone. Instead, he must run before ships and harpoons, away from waters red with the blood of thousands of his kin. It is a curious universe in which one peg-leg outweighs so much slaughter.
In human terms, Moby-Dick was acting in self-defense. He sought to flee the tenacious Pequod, but when that failed, he stood his ground.[4] Ahab may have seen the creature as “possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven,” showing “retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice…in his whole aspect,” but that was a projection of his own murderous intent and purpose. The White Whale mirrors Ahab’s broken self-loathing, and that is an image he cannot abide.[5] This is the fine madness that turns heroes—and ordinary men—into beasts.
NEXT WEEK: FRANKENSTEIN
[1] Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf” used to give me nightmares!
[2] Remarking on his 1946 film, La Belle et la Bête,Jean Cocteau said his “goal was to make the Beast so human, so likeable, so superior to man, that his transformation into Prince Charming would be for Belle a terrible disappointment.” He succeeded so well that—according to apocrypha—upon seeing the film, Greta Garbo cried out, “Give me back my beast!”
[3] Though somewhat childish in intent and execution, Monster Island was one place where Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, et al. knew the companionship of their kind and were able to live in peace. Of course, that was messed up for them, too.
[4] And 23 of these United States would back him up on this.
[5] One is reminded of Seneca who said that monstrum, like tragedy, is “a visual and horrific revelation of truth.”