Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manners of Imaginary Terrors

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Hantke, Steffen

Gilmore, David. 2002. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manners of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $24.95 hc. 224 pp.

David Gilmore's book Monsters is the most recent contribution to an increasingly popular field of inquiry. Unlike the historical focus in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Monster Theory (1996) and Marie-Hélène Huet's Monstrous Imagination (1993), and the interest in popular culture in Neil Carroll's Philosophy of Horror (1990), Monsters approaches the subject of its subtitle-Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manners of Imaginary Terrors-from an anthropological perspective, concentrating on preindustrial and non-Western cultures. A professor of anthropology at SUNY, Stony Brook, Gilmore's familiarity with folkloric traditions across a vast array of cultures throughout the world comes into play as the book retells their stories about monsters. Gilmore's survey shows a keen eye for recurrent structural and thematic similarities in the narratives themselves, as well as for the shared morphological and behavioral features of their protagonists. The concept of the monstrous, Gilmore argues, is fueled by essential human psychology, as is the need to articulate the conflicts that arise from these universals and to assume psychological mastery over them in the act of narrative externalization. Hence, these universal psychological features express themselves, regardless of cultural and socio-historical idiosyncrasies, in a repertoire of images that is strikingly similar no matter where the anthropological gaze is directed.

Gilmore's list of characteristic tropes is concise and consistent throughout the book. Monsters inhabit marginal or liminal spaces and are associated with water or primordial slime. Monsters are large in size, the product of combinations of naturally occurring features, and largely defined by their mouths, which link them to cultural taboos about cannibalism. They embody parental authority, are associated with the individual's or collective's past, and hence articulate fears of regression. They are doubles of the heroic figures that fight and vanquish them, an inherent ambiguity that accounts for the contrary movements of identification and disavowal, of fear and awe, of repulsion and attraction that they inspire in every culture.

Gilmore's Freudian approach retrieves patterns of Oedipal conflict from the generational trope. In the morphological emphasis on the monster's mouth, he recognizes patterns of oral aggressions theorized in Karl Abraham's and Melanie Klein's work on infantile sadism directed against the mother's body (180-85); in the adult, Gilmore suggests, the traces of repressed, atavistic aggression are sublimated into the contradictory emotions of aggression and guilt, and into a fantasy of the monsters in which "the fantasist is both subject (eater) and object (eaten)" (184).

This reliance on Freudian psychoanalysis might sit a little uncomfortably with Gilmore's claim that he is dealing with universal phenomena. Given the historical and cultural specificity of Freud's work, one cannot help but wonder to what degree non-Western cultures conform to the social patterns that underlie his theorizing. Against these reservations, Gilmore's argument, in turn, is rear-guarded only by a few cautionary asides, and so his extensive list of narratives that "prove" these universals, given their impressive geographical range, can easily backfire. Readers who initially give him the benefit of the doubt about the existence of psychological universals might discover that the differences between all these monsters are far more interesting than their similarities. For these readers, the cultural use of the monster, to which Gilmore devotes so much attention, might quickly present itself as a multiplicity of cultural uses. When these readers start asking about concrete situations in which monsters are, consciously or unconsciously, deployed, Gilmore's psychological universals may have to give way to historical specifics or ideological pragmatics. The curiously dehistoricizing effect of Gilmore's theoretical approach returns with a vengeance as readers move past the book's grand thesis faster than its author.

Despite these theoretical reservations, Gilmore's theoretical speculations on the psychological functions of monster folklore are by far the most intriguing parts of the book. Seeing Gilmore's enthusiasm for the material, readers might feel disappointed that these speculations are not developed further. Outlined in the introduction and then fleshed out in the conclusion, they tend to be buried under extensive amounts of anthropological narrative-story after story about monsters which make up the bulk of the book. The relentless repetition of the list of key features by which we recognize the monster is distracting as well. Not only do the opening and closing chapters contain this list, but summaries of it are scattered, unnecessarily, throughout sections of chapters. The effect of this repetition is to make the author appear condescending or pedantic-charges from which Gilmore is exonerated by his intellectual excitement and pleasure alone. However, an editor with an eye for the use of this book in cultural studies, outside of anthropology, might have asked Gilmore to cut some repetition to make room for the more thought-provoking and original aspects of the book.