the struggle inside

We Are All Monsters October 29, 2010

Those of us who have experienced serious mental health problems have an acute understanding of what it is like to feel monstrous. Lurking in the shadows beneath the enormous weight of a cold and fathomless ocean, numb to pain but hissing a warning that tentacles are ready to strangle anyone who might attempt to move us. Tearing at pillows and stifling screams of rage into them, pacing behind locked doors to spare the would-be victims of a red-eyed, howling fury. Sweating, shaking, and paralyzed with shame as the shrieking banshee of panic rises to the drumming heartbeat drowning out the surrounding mundane conversations of people who have begun to stare. We know instinctively that monsters are repulsive, abnormal, dangerous outcasts – and we identify with them. And we’re not the only ones. The enduring, overwhelming popularity of monsters demonstrates that millions of people see something of themselves in the monstrous. We all celebrated when Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth.” We’ve cried in empathy when Frankenstein’s monster declared, “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.” Many of us have secretly rooted for King Kong to destroy his human attackers, and we’ve made mutants from the Incredible Hulk to Spider-Man to the X-Men our heroes. Why is that?

China Miéville, a Marxist science fiction and fantasy writer, offers this explanation in a presentation (well worth listening to in its entirety) on “Marxism and Monsters” that he delivered at the British Socialist Worker’s Party Marxism Festival in 2005:

“Why would we secretly have this kind of simultaneous repulsion but also attraction to these horrendous figures, to these monsters which are the articulations of fears? Well, what I’m going to suggest is that if you think of Grendel as the sort of archetype for the outsider monster that gets back into the inside, think about the way the outsider is so threatening. Who is the outsider the most threatening to? The outsider is most threatening to the people who are telling you that what’s inside is basically alright. It is very, very functional to the status quo that it mustn’t be messed with. Now, those of us who are Marxists, who are socialists, have a whole theory of what’s wrong with the status quo, but what we know full well that for centuries, for millennia, people on the receiving end of the status quo: the oppressed, the marginalized, the alienated, have always known (whether or not they could articulate it) – that something was wrong. That this was not how they deserved to live. And what this means, therefore, is that while King Hrothgar is absolutely horrified that Grendel gets into his hoard and starts smashing shit up – if you weren’t that in love with the status quo anyway, it could be worse. You know, all of a sudden the intrusion of this monstrous thing starts throwing things around, threatening the status quo; well, in some way that you’ve never been able to articulate, you’ve never really been that in love with the status quo anyway. So I think the fact is, the fact that monsters are such sympathetic figures, is in a tremendously inchoate, mediated fashion an expression of the fact that most of us don’t really love the status quo. And this is why, you know, we are products of our society, so we are repelled by monsters, but we are also products of our society that know something’s wrong with our society, so we kind of have a sneaking admiration for them.”

The etymological root of the word “monster” is an interesting one. It comes from the Latin word monstrum, which could mean a monstrosity, but could also mean an omen, portent or sign. It derives from the verb monere, which means to warn or advise. The appearance of monsters and the monstrous is a critical warning that something is wrong; a signal of a threat which should be paid heed to rather than treated as a threat in itself. In his 1974-1975 lectures on “abnormality” at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault describes how people who were physically, mentally and behaviorally aberrant have been criminalized, punished, and disciplined in order to try to make them conform to the status quo, which is defined by its defenders as normal and sane. As Marxists, we would be more inclined to see monstrous expressions of alienation, pain or fury as symptoms of a sick status quo which itself should be changed.  (more…)