Monstrosity: A Final Note

What is the aura of a monster? I’m not sure I know. Different monsters probably have different ones. I will take forest monsters since forests are something I know. Forests are chock full of noises most of which a child cannot readily identify. They are full of movement and rustling and even flashes of brown furry somethings that disappear behind trees almost the instant they are seen. A forest is phenomenally rich. We might take the view that as we grow up more and more of these ‘sightings’ or ‘hearings’ will be reduced to previously known entities, to ‘noumena’ as we have been calling them. We might also take a trip to a university to study flora and fauna and other boreal matters. This study will, we are confident, reduce pretty much all forest phenomena to forest noumena.

Unfortunately we do not really know this. Some things we hear and see might well retain the flickering, uncertain status of phenomenal objects. These objects might in fact be noumena for other classification schemes though not for ours. I’ve heard chilling sounds in the forest that I could not classify and didn’t want to stick around to classify. These might be phenomena for me but noumena to someone else. That’s a wendigo an Ojibway person might say. He might then tell me all about wendigoag; how to recognize them and how to avoid them or appease them if they are angry. For him this may well be ordinary talk comparable to how I might speak of a badger (also an animal to appease or avoid!). I suspect that wendigoag would have a somewhat different aura for me precisely because I do not know if they are actually there. Phenomena that remain phenomena have a teasing uncertainty about them. Of course to an Ojibway person a powerful spirit like a wendigo may also have an aura of sublimity or awe about it. I might sense this too and that is why frightened as I am I might almost want them to exist (though farther away).

Early theorists of the gothic aesthetic attributed sublimity to ghosts and monsters and used this to explain their continuing appeal. Sublimity is the feeling that we are dwarfed or overcome, radically decentered by something not to ordinary scale.  Quantity, whether of size or power or reality, has a quality of its own.  Of course the reader of gothic fiction does not, like a Welsh farmer say, live in actual fear of fairies or monsters. She cultivates the thrill of the sublime as a special mood in a world that is all too ordinary and all too cultivated. She can close the book if her senses are overloaded. Like Gilgamesh in the ancient epic she can even kill (symbolically or literally) the forest monster and chop down and cart off all the wood. Gilgamesh, alas, does this to the detriment of his own humanity and it is the act of hubris that precipitates his fall. He has reduced the forest to an itemized list of objects and killed its spirit. This spirit is that which withdraws from us into itself and holds itself in mystery. Perhaps a forest without monsters, a forest composed only of noumena is just this: a forest without potential to shock or surprise or reveal further depths and heights of being. This would be a forest without the possibility of the sublime. Perhaps we seek for forests that are not itemized parts but wholes that have depths like an unexplored pool. Forests that are real forests, not just piles of wood, may well need to have Bigfoot or Bigfoot style entities in them. This raises the question of whether blurry images of the brown furry kind are something on which we impose our psychological, aesthetic or spiritual needs and whether by doing so we distort reality (as a Carl Sagan would think) or enhance and elevate it (as Blake might depending on which needs we were talking about). Perhaps it scarcely matters as art and science both are modes in which we edit being with a keen eye.