Theses on Monsters

Author(s): China Miville

Source: Conjunctions, No. 59, Colloquy (2012), pp. 142-144
Published by: Conjunctions
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24517221
Accessed: 31-07-2017 16:26 UTC

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 Theses on Monsters
China Miville

1.

The history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of

monsters. Homo sapiens is a bringer-forth of monsters as reason's
dream. They are not pathologies but symptoms, diagnoses, glories,
games, and terrors.

2.

To insist that an element of the impossible and fantastic is a sine qua

non of monstrousness is not mere nerd hankering (though it is that
too). Monsters must be creature forms and corpuscles of the un
knowable, the bad numinous. A monster is somaticized sublime,
delegate from a baleful pleroma. The telos of monstrous quiddity is
godhead.

3.

There is a countervailing tendency in the monstrous corpus. It is

evident in Pokmon's injunction to "catch 'em all," in the Monster
Manual's exhaustive taxonomies, in Hollywood's fetishized "Mon
ster Shot." A thing so evasive of categories provokesand surrenders
toravenous desire for specificity, for an itemization of its impos
sible body, for a genealogy, for an illustration. The telos of monstrous
quiddity is specimen.

Ghosts are not monsters.

5.

It is pointed out, regularly and endlessly, that the word "monster"

shares roots with "monstrum," "monstrare," "monere""that

142

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 China Miville

which teaches," "to show," "to warn." This is true but no longer of
any help at all, if it ever was.

6.

Epochs throw up the monsters they need. History can be written of

monsters, and in them. We experience the conjunctions of certain
werewolves and crisis-gnawed feudalism, of Cthulhu and rupturing
modernity, of Frankenstein's and Moreau's made things and a vari
ably troubled Enlightenment, of vampires and tediously everything,
of zombies and mummies and aliens and golems/robots/clockwork
constructs and their own anxieties. We pass also through the endless
shifts of such monstrous germs and antigens into new wounds. All
our moments are monstrous moments.

7.

Monsters demand decoding, but to be worthy of their own mon

strosity, they avoid final capitulation to that demand. Monsters mean
something, and/but they mean everything, and/but they are them
selves and irreducible. They are too concretely fanged, toothed, scaled,
fire-breathing, on the one hand, and too doorlike, polysmie, fecund,
rebuking of closure, on the other, merely to signify, let alone to sig
nify one thing.

Any bugbear that can be completely parsed was never a monster, but
some rubber-mask-wearing Scooby-Doo villain, a semiotic banality
in fatuous disguise. It is a solution without a problem.

Our sympathy for the monster is notorious. We weep for King Kong
and the Creatine from the Black Lagoon, no matter what they've done.
We root for Lucifer and ache for Grendel.

It is a trace of skepticism that the given order is a desideratum that

lies behind our tears for its antagonists, our troubled empathy with
the invader of Hrothgar's hall.

143

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China Miville

9.

Such sympathy for the monster is a known factor, a small problem,

a minor complication for those who, in drab reaction, deploy an
accusation of monstrousness against designated social enemies.

10.

When those same powers who enmonster their scapegoats reach a

tipping point, a critical mass, of political ire, they abruptly and with
bullying swagger enmonster themselves. The shock troops of reac
tion embrace their own supposed monstrousness. (From this invest
ment emerged, for example, the Nazi Werwolf program.) Such are by
far more dreadful than any monster because, their own aggrandize
ments notwithstanding, they are not monsters. They are more banal
and more evil.

11.

The saw that We Have Seen the Real Monsters and They Are Us is
neither revelation, nor clever, nor interesting, nor true. It is a betrayal
of the monstrous, and of humanity.

144

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