Monstrous Others

The inaugural issue of Equinoxes, a graduate journal of French and Francophone studies published by Brown University, is devoted entirely to theme of monstrosity:

Les vrais monstres - les plus affreuses aberrations que la nature ait produites - ne sont ni vrais, ni naturels, mais sont plutôt de pure facture humaine. Ils doivent ainsi leur belle pérennité dans l'imaginaire collectif à une seule caractéristique essentielle : l'absence.

In effect, in classic academic parlance, the conjuring up of Frankensteins, Nessies, Big Foots, and Bartmanns, the projection of the monstrous onto others represents a purging. The monster is a shadowy repository for the unspoken, unspeakable, unthinkable, undoable-our desires, fears, demons. Like the proverbial cat, the monster is out of the bag. Our monsters and we are in fact one.

If you have time to read only one article, Alexa Wright's visual study of the "monstrous" body is a stunning work. Wright's interest in monsters began when she chanced upon an image of the mythic Monstrous Races in a library book. Sightings of these monstrous beings, who were believed to live "beyond the edge of the world," date as far back as the 4th century BCE. Alexander the Great even claimed to have seen them.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, monsters and monstrosities found strange lodgings in the European Wunderkammern, precursors of the modern museum. Tsar Peter I (the Great) of Russia encountered these "cabinets of curiosities" in his first trip through Western Europe and determined to have his own. Inspired by Dutch surgeon and anatomist Fredrick Ruysch, who had one of Western Europe's most impressive collections of anatomical specimens, he returned to Russian and set out in search of monsters. In 1718, he issued a special decree calling for "monstrosities" (e.g., siamese goat feti, etc.) and paid handsomely for these specimens. The remains of his vast collection (which included Ruysch's specimens) can be found today in a special wing of St. Petersburg's Kunstkamera.

With the exception of V, Friday the 13th-The Series was the best show on televsion. The premise was simple but terrifying: an antiques collector strikes a pact with the devil, unwittingly cursing every object in his shop. After his "death," his heirs sell off the items, only to discover that they have unleashed EVIL into the world. Each episode featured a particular object they sought to recover (usually, with great success). This show foreshadowed (and probably inspired) my interest in curious things, or vice-versa. A (desiccated) chicken and an egg would be among the first objects in my "cabinet de curiosités."

Links:
*The New York Academy of Medicine
*Pliny's Historia Naturalis
*NYC's Cabinet of Curiosities (press release for last year's exhibit)
*More!

Comments

[Lorraine]

How have I never heard about Friday the 13th- The Series? That is just the kind of show I would have totally been into back then. Probably now, too.