The captivating horror of category violation

October 26, 2017 5:30 PM

Philosopher Stephen Asma asks, "Why are so many monsters hybrids?"
posted by Rumple (28 comments total)

Don't forget that horrible bird-human hybrid, the angel. Or the terrifying flightless angels of New Zealand, the Kiwis.
posted by XMLicious at 6:31 PM on October 26, 2017 [11 favorites]

I mean, if you're having to describe something unknown to the listener/reader, It's (part) of (animal) and (different part) of (different animal) is the most efficient way to go. Like, who knows what a leopard is? But a cross between a lion and a pard? Everyone can understand that.

OK maybe a bad example
posted by ckape at 6:41 PM on October 26, 2017 [14 favorites]

Spiderbaby
posted by Artw at 6:41 PM on October 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is why we are terrified by the platypus
posted by thelonius at 6:55 PM on October 26, 2017 [11 favorites]

I feel like the simpler explanation is that people aren't really very creative. I'm sort of imagining something like this scene from Good Omens:

"Do you know," he said, "my cousin said that in America there's shops that sell thirty-nine different flavors of ice cream?"

This even silenced Adam, briefly.

"There aren't thirty-nine flavors of ice cream," said Pepper. "There aren't thirty-nine flavors in the whole world."

"There could be, if you mixed them up," said Wensleydale, blinking owlishly. "You know. Strawberry and chocolate. Chocolate and vanilla." He sought for more English flavors. "Strawberry and vanilla and chocolate," he added, lamely.

You know, but with monster bits and ancient Greeks instead of ice cream and urchins.
posted by darksasami at 6:58 PM on October 26, 2017 [23 favorites]

Because it is amazing piece of writing relevant to this, a couple of excerpts from China Miéville’s Theses on Monsters that apply:

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 unknowable, the bad numinous. A monster is somaticized sublime, delegate from a baleful pleroma. The telos of monstrous quiddity is godhead.

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 variably 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.
posted by blahblahblah at 7:03 PM on October 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

Cthulhu is a good one.

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

I mean, they've made him plush now, but that used to be the shit.
posted by Artw at 7:15 PM on October 26, 2017 [9 favorites]

Old Howie P was quite good with the opposite trick as well, of describing things by what they are NOT like "They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall. "
posted by Artw at 7:44 PM on October 26, 2017 [12 favorites]

A nice opportunity to quote one of favorite jokes, from Woody Allen's list of mythical creatures: "The Great Roe. A mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion".
posted by TheShadowKnows at 8:02 PM on October 26, 2017 [14 favorites]

they've made him plush now

Makes me wonder... I've seen adorable plushies of Cthulu and cholera. Is there a monster whose horror would transcend plushification?
posted by MengerSponge at 8:51 PM on October 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Ravenous killer Care Bear?
posted by idiopath at 9:34 PM on October 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

No, plushification is part of the process by which we assimilate all horrors (see also: Hugh the friendly borg, Asylum of the Daleks). It is the fate of all monsters to gradually be reconciled into the sphere of human cognition, regardless of initial alien-ness or malignity.

This article makes me think of one of my earliest reviews, where I explored the film Deep Six in terms of a theory of coherency of monstrosity- that is, the plausibility and therefore terror of the monster relates to the degree that it adheres to some internal logic of operations.

I can't find a link to that essay anymore. Perhaps I should revisit and republish.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 10:43 PM on October 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

Is there a monster whose horror would transcend plushification?

Donald John Trump. OBVI.
posted by adamgreenfield at 12:36 AM on October 27, 2017 [7 favorites]

Metafilter: delegate from a baleful pleroma (although I was tempted by "not mere nerd hankering")
posted by crocomancer at 4:09 AM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Tangentially related: villains often being portrayed as queer and androgynous (particularly as men with flamboyant flair) as a way of stepping over boundaries and seeming “different.”
posted by picklenickle at 4:53 AM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Deep Six is the one where the monster is an eel-crab, right?
posted by Artw at 6:32 AM on October 27, 2017

Any discussion of the dangers and terrors of liminality and hybridity always makes me think of Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas:

"[S]ociety does not exist in a neutral, uncharged vacuum. It is subject to external pressures; that which is not with it, part of it and subject to its laws, is potentially against it. In describing these pressures on boundaries and margins I admit to having made society sound more systematic than it really is. But just such an expressive over-systematising is necessary for interpreting the beliefs in question. For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, about and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created."

Stability, and wholeness, and being self-contained and easily defined are all illusions-- but many people cling to those illusions as the only possible defense against the uncanny and inherent horror of existence. Anything (or anyone) that violates the boundaries of those illusions-- and survives, or thrives-- is treated as a threat, because they have exposed the illusory nature of defenses that are built on sand.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 6:43 AM on October 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

Asma is building upon Mary Douglas's book Purity and Danger, in which she argues that objects that fall on the boundaries between folk categories are treated either as unclean or as sacred. Dirt is matter out of place. Pigs are not kosher, she argues, not because Jews were incapable of figuring out how to cook pork safely, but for the reason given in Torah: they cleave the hoof but do not chew the cud. They fall directly on the line between animals you herd and animals you hunt. Shellfish are not kosher, not because Jews couldn't figure out when they are safe to eat, but because they fall on the intersection of plants, animals, and stones.

Douglas was an anthropologist, and so does not talk about universal, biologically hardwired folk taxonomies. What interests her, and interested her more as she wrote more, is how society hands one a set of categories within which one then thinks.

Douglas argues that not everything without a place is dirt. Some things that fall on category lines are filthy, some holy. She points out that people falling on the line between man and woman are sometimes despised, but that eunuchs are sometimes priests, and that priests are sometimes celibate and wear dresses. It is surprising that Asma did not mention that some hybrids are monsters, but that Egyptian and Hindu gods are hybrids and sacred. No offense intended to Christians, but it is interesting to note that Christ is a live man with mortal wounds, and that the Trinity is a peculiar amalgam of philosophical principle and human flesh. Someone upthread points out that angels are hybrid also.

Where Amsa goes wrong, I think, is in conflating fear of new, unknown things with whatever it is one feels when seeing something like a face-hugger, which does not seem to be classifiable at all. Snakes and spiders, it seems to me, don't sit on category lines. They just don't move quite like anything else. That is different. I would argue that octopuses do sit on a category line, being many snakes with a single, large, boneless, vaguely humanoid head. It is a hard distinction to make rigorously, and that is the chief problem with this kind of theory.
posted by ckridge at 6:46 AM on October 27, 2017 [7 favorites]

Heh. A Fiendish Thingy beat me to the punch.
posted by ckridge at 6:46 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

ckridge, his failure to cite Douglas was bizarre to me.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:13 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

As a trans woman, I immediately thought of cis folks disgust or confusion at us that can't just be explained by misapplied homophobia or religious mandate. While to me, I'm fully a woman, I understand that a passerby might recognize male and female qualities in my body, and see me as a violation of what they learned is a core pair of categories from a young age.

I think the Purity and Danger theory is more refined (and I see it does deal with how gender non-conforming people can be seen either way in different contexts). I wonder if part of the difference is that the sacred seems unattainable without divine or enlightened interference, while dirt could be seen as a mistake of crossbreeding or corruption. I'll have to read it.
posted by ikea_femme at 7:16 AM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

"Monsters are sticky memes that draw groups together into moral communities" - reminds me of Rene Girard.
posted by doctornemo at 7:21 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

ikea_femme, if it interests you, Douglas specifically talks about the hazards of transition as a concept in and of itself, regardless of context--

"First, consider beliefs about persons in a marginal state. These are people who are somehow left out in the patterning of society, who are placeless. They may be doing nothing morally wrong, but their status is indefinable. . . . Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others."

She is writing about pregnancy, menstruation, and tribal rituals of endurance for boys who must "prove" themselves to become men in this section, but I think her focus on fear of the one who is in transition (or has transitioned) is interesting precisely because it echoes so much of the incoherent yet strident transphobia we see today.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:40 AM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

It is interesting that gender liminal people are treated as monsters if they try to do ordinary things like use a restroom or get married, but as celebrities if they can somehow get into a band or show. Celebrities are close enough to sacred idols that in India they are sometimes worshiped as gods. Patton Oswalt has a routine containing this exchange between a gay man and an elderly person from a red state:

"Can I marry my boyfriend?"

"No! That's disgusting!"

"OK. Can I blow him on a trapeze under a spotlight in front of several thousand people?"

"That would be great! Can we bring the kids?"
posted by ckridge at 7:54 AM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Pure is poor - VURT, Jeff Noon.
posted by Artw at 7:55 AM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

His failure to cite Douglas is bizarre, his failure to cite Noel Carroll is downright inconceivable. The lack of both is irresponsible.
posted by meese at 8:03 AM on October 27, 2017

So why all the taxonomic mashing and mixing?

I always thought it was wizards; cf. owlbears. Which always makes me wonder what wizard did the work to get a dragon and a fly together.
posted by nubs at 8:18 AM on October 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

It is interesting that gender liminal people are treated as monsters if they try to do ordinary things like use a restroom or get married, but as celebrities if they can somehow get into a band or show. Celebrities are close enough to sacred idols that in India they are sometimes worshiped as gods.

See also the example of Korla Pandit and other black Americans who managed to step outside their socially defined place in the Jim Crow south by basically putting on turbans and becoming exotic and fascinating foreigners to whom southern racial rules did not apply.
posted by Naberius at 10:19 AM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]