Surplus, absence and hybridity:

medieval monsters (and contemporary visual arts).

Monstrosity (and enigmaticity) - paradoxically natural in its unnaturalness (also natural, yet paradoxical):

As much as there is no human community without language, there is no human community without its sense of monstrosity.

There is no human community without a fascination with secrets and enigmas either.

Teratology and cultural teratology - (in biology) the science or study of monstrosities or abnormal formations in organisms.

Show me your monsters and I will tell you who you are?

The monstrous and psychology; the monstrous and cultural theory:

1. monstrosity - liminality - magic - playfulness (homo ludens vs. homo faber) - carnivalesque (reversal of hierarchies and the bodily element) - the enigma.

2. C. G. Jung's idea of “collective unconscious,” i.e. “a reservoir of the experiences of our species.” Also like the Jungian “shadow aspect”: that part of consciousness consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings or instincts.

3. the fantastic races as comparable to Edward Saïd's orientalism - imagined constructs of otherness, as the means of labelling and distancing disparate social groups and non-Christian religious groups.
   If “all discourse is ideological,” then all monsters are ideological too.

4. Rene Girard's idea of the scapegoat in culture: the monster as a scapegoat.

5. A gendered perspective: medieval femininity as quintessentially grotesque, resulting from the role of women in the Fall (suggested by Margaret Miles). Cf. Grendel's mother - the most fearsome of the Beowulf monsters; also the sheela-na-gig carvings (left).

What was monstrous to medieval Christian writers like St. Augustine or Isidore of Seville?

1. deformation; hybridity; absence/superfluity

• animals made monstrous by the superfluity or absence of parts (like double bodied lions, headless blemmyae)

• hybridity: animals combining different species

• human hybrids (cynocephalii “dogheads” etc.)

2. Anglo-Saxon visual arts as particularly reminiscent of hybridity and superfluity

3. Isidore of Seville claims in Etymologiae that miracles occur non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura “not against nature but against what is known of nature.”

4. In Liber monstorum three kinds of monstrosities: monstrous births of men, horrible wild beasts, and dire kinds of dragons, serpents and vipers.

St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD):

Quid dicam de Cynocephalis, quorum canina capita atque ipse latratus magis bestias quam homines confitetur? Sed omnia genera hominum, quae dicuntur esse, credere non est necesse. Verum quisquis uspiam nascitur homo, id est animal rationale mortale, quamlibet nostris inusitatam sensibus gerat corporis formam seu colorem siue motum siue sonum siue qualibet ui, qualibet parte, qualibet qualitate naturam: ex illo uno protoplasto originem ducere nullus fidelium dubitauerit. St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XVI. 8., 5th c.

[What am I to say of the Cynocephali, whose dog's head and actual barking prove them to be animals rather than men? Now we are not bound to believe in the existence of all the types of men which are described. But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man - that is, a rational and mortal being - derives from that one first created human being. And this is true, however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodily shape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part or quality.]

Henry Bettenson trans., 1984

Sed si homines sunt, de quibus illa mira conscripta sunt: quid, si propterea Deus uoluit etiam nonnullas gentes ita creare, ne in his monstris, quae apud nos oportet ex hominibus nasci, eius sapientiam, qua naturam fingit humanam, uelut artem cuiuspiam minus perfecti opificis, putaremus errasse? St. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XVI. 8., 5th c.

[But if we assume that the subjects of those remarkable accounts are in fact men, it may be suggested that God decided to create some races in this way, so that we should not suppose that the wisdom with which he fashions the physical being of men has gone astray in the case of the monsters which are bound to be born among us of physical parents; for that would be to regard the works of God's wisdom as the products of an imperfectly skilled craftsman.]

Henry Bettenson trans., 1984

The monster as an effective sign: the term monstrum “omen,” from monere, “to warn,” related also to demonstrare - the implications are didactic.

Cf. the words of Hugh of St. Victor about the mnemonic purpose of the marginalia.

1. The monster in its apotropaic function (preventing or defending from evil, cf. the Coppergate helmet) - medieval visual arts relegate them to margins (of manuscripts or of buildings).

2. Hence a connection between medieval monstrosity and liminality - Grendel as an example of a liminal being (existing across various borders).

3. Grotesques and drolleries - effectively serving as talismans: “evoking laughter or fear, confusion or distraction, monsters both represent demons and avert their attacks.”

4. The meaning of the monstrous: Bernard of Clarivaux (1090-1153) spoke of “the beautiful deformity” - the meaningfulness of the monsters as particularly effective signs. He himself described himself as a hybrid - a “chimera” between a monk and a diplomat.

5. In the light of the apophatic (negative) theology of the mystics like Pseudo-Dionysius monsters show God through their limits, through the limits of what people can imagine them to be, and by stating what God is not.

6. But monstrosity was considered also as issuing from the profane and unreligious imagination.

7. Also the comical effect of the monstrous.

Isidore of Seville (560-636 AD):

Portenta esse Varro ait quae contra naturam nata videntur: sed non sunt contra naturam, quia divina voluntate fiunt, cum voluntas Creatoris cuiusque conditae rei natura sit. ... Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura. Portenta autem et ostenta, monstra atque prodigia ideo nuncupantur, quod portendere atque ostendere, monstrare ac praedicare aliqua futura videntur. Nam portenta dicta perhibent a portendendo, id est praeostendendo. Ostenta autem, quod ostendere quidquam futurum videantur. Prodigia, quod porro dicant, id est futura praedicant.

Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XI. 3. 1-3, 7th c.

[Varro says that portents are things which seem to be born contrary to nature. But they are not contrary to nature, since they happen by divine will, when it is the will of the Creator and the nature of the created thing. … Therefore a portent is not what is contrary to nature, but contrary to what is known in nature. Portents are called ostenta [signs], monstra [monstrosities] and prodigia [prodigies] because they seem to denote (portendere), display (ostendere), show (monstrare), and predict (praedicare) some future events.]

Priscilla Throop trans., 2005

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (a Neo-Platonic Christian mystic, 5^th/6^th c. AD)

… et erit malum in universitatis plenitudinem comperfectum, et universo numquid imperfectum esse quod propter seipsum praestitum. Dicit autem ad haec vera ratio, quia malum, si malum, nullam essentiam aut generationem facit, solum vero vitiat et corrumpit, quantum in se, et existentium substantiam. Si autem genificum quis ei esse dicat, et hujus corruptione alteri dare generationem, respondendum vere, numquid corrumpunt, quae dant generationem … Et erit malum corruptio quidem per seipsum, genificum vero per bonum. ... Omnia existentia, quantum sunt, et bona sunt, et ex bono; quantum autem privantur bono, neque existentia sunt, neque bona.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names,

(Ioannes Scotus Eriugena trans., 862 A.D.), IV.19

[Evil contributes to the fulfilment of the world and by its very existence it saves it from imperfection. The true answer to this will be that evil, as evil, never produces being or birth. All it can do by itself is in a limited fashion to debase or destroy the substance of things. And if anyone should say that it is a begetter of things and that by the destruction of one thing it gives birth to something else, the correct reply is that it is not qua destructiveness that it brings this about. … That is to say, evil in itself is a destructive force but is a productive force through the activity of the Good. … All beings, to the extent that they exist, are good and come from the Good and they fall short of goodness and being in proportion to their remoteness from the Good.]

Colm Luibhead trans., 1987

Several sources presenting monstrous beings and races known to the Anglo-Saxons:

1. Texts known as mirabilia “marvels,” fantastic descriptions of, usually, Eastern lands. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts: Wonders of the East (ca. 1000), Liber monstrorum, Letter of Alexander to Aristotle.

2. Liber monstrorum an Anglo-Latin catalogue of marvellous creatures. Composed in late 7th/early 8th c., it appears in five manuscripts from late 9th/early 10th c.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen on contemporary fascination with monsters:

[It is] a society that has created and commodified `ambient fear'— a kind of total fear that saturates day-to-day living, prodding and silently antagonizing but never speaking its own name. This anxiety manifests itself symptomatically as a cul-tural fascination with monsters—a fixation that is born of the twin desire to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore dis-empower) that which threatens. And so the monster appears simultaneously as the demonic disemboweler of slasher films and as a wide-eyed, sickeningly cute plush toy for children: velociraptor and Barney.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory, 1996

Monstrosity and contemporary visual arts?

Norman Rosenthal (and others) on yBA (young British Artists) and their 1997 exhibition:

The strange, the mysterious, the freakish, the fantasy of science, the abnormality of the normal and the normality of the abnormal…

Norman Rosenthal, introduction to Sensation, exhibition of British artists from the Saatchi Collection, 1997

The greatest images are those that invoke both reality and sensation…

Norman Rosenthal, an introduction to the Sensation exhibition, 1997

A kind of punk art that spits in your face, punches you in the stomach, and nicks your wallet while you are puking on the floor.

Jonathan Hari, The Independent

We take the `monstrous' to describe a numenal [incapable of being known] or vampirical sublime which preys upon corporeality in moments of aesthetic bliss. … One thing for sure is that `humanity' and `monstrosity' are not dislocated as a duality, are not even related equivalents but the same. Human monstrosity describes the superconductive ability to expend energy which occurs perfectly well in psychosis. Humane monstrosity merely describes activities sublimated along `meta-scatological' levels.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, an interview with Maia Damianovic, 2000.

See, for instance:

Marcus Hindley, Myra

Jake and Dinos Chapman (various works)

Marc Quinn, Self

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