Monster Theory: Reading Culture (review)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

130 Reviews models of power and the Early Modern state, emphasising the importance of local readings and detailed research. Ultimately, Clegg concludes, 'a history of press censorship' in the reign of Elizabeth 'is a history of critical moments in the Elizabethan state' (p. 222). Andrew McRae Department of English University of Sydney Cohen, Jeoffrey Jerome, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Minneapoli London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996; paper; pp. xiii, 315; R.R.P. US$21.95, US$54.95 (cloth). This powerful and well integrated collection comprises some fourteen ess by various contributors, together with a framing introduction by Jeffrey Cohen. As w e are told at various points (pp. xiii, 24, etc.) many of the ideas in the main text arise initially from medieval or Renaissance social situations, literatures or topoi. Furthermore, various of the contributors—Ruth Waterhouse, Michael Uebel and William Sayers—have had long and active careers as teachers of the literature of earlier periods of European culture. Several of them, like Kathleen Perry Long in her essay, 'Hermaphrodites Newly Discovered: The Cultural Monsters of Sixteenth-Century France', make the point that the present can explain the past more meaningfully. Indeed, Dr. Ruth Waterhouse goes further, as, in the words of the editor, she proceeds backwards, and so draws out one of the central concerns of the collection, antidiachronicity, . . . following the insights of the deconstructionists . . . she argues that w e can and should read backward from the present . . . A n d so Grendel is filtered through such intervening texts as Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (p. x) In short, the Beowulf essay, like a number of the others, argues powerful for the value of current cultural thought as a means of according insights into a Dark Age text. Waterhouse does, however, argue strongly for the more familiar argument and case that 'studies of Old English texts reveal as much about the period of and cultural influences on the decoder as about the AngloSaxon period itself (p.26). Here she follows Frantzen (1991), Fulm (1991), and K e m p Malone in 1970. Yet she also gives us some of the volume's clearest and most articulate comments on the Self-Other relationship, where that may be seen as the perversion of reason, and so the Other viewed as antisocial, Reviews 131 supernatural, destructive always and yet ever interacting with the society which has spawned or spurned it. In some ways these arguments are complemented by William Sayers in his essay entitled 'The Alien and the Alienated as Unquiet Dead in the Sagas of the Icelanders'. This probing account of the medieval Icelandic culture of the supernatural examines the purposes to which the draugr is put in the immediate context of three principal sagas: the early chapters of Laxdoela saga; the Eurbyggja saga, with its most elaborate intertwining of the draugr and related motifs, such as supernatural animals in the general story line; and the 'person' of Glamr, in Grettis saga Asmundarson, and the consequent descent of a hero, from ascent toward strength, glory, community, and inevitable descent into powerlessness, outlawry, and solitude,... to a private life of personal memory, solitude, and fear of the dark; . . . knowledge . . . from the 'other side', of man's inevitable social, physical and spiritual decline' (p. 253) As Sayers concludes pertinently, the contemporary reader was left with the loss of the simple pagan heroic ethos, but with understanding and acceptance of 'a sadder, wiser, potentially more compassionate world under the new Christian faith' (p. 262). Thus the pagan past has been used to explain or validate the civilised(?) present, and so is an attempt at 'ethnogenesis' and the inoculation of the community—in theory at least— from past virulences by a greater conscience and its entry into a more ordered and functioning world. The above analysis of two papers is indicative of the foregrounded concerns, the detailed study of the monstrous and the Other in such contexts as: Montaigne's 'Des boyteux', III, xi; a satiric account of the court of Henri IH, written across the doubly sexed body of the hermaphrodite; or in the conjoining of giants and dwarves in Renaissance England. Yet Cohen is right to do what...