2nd Global Conference

Monsters and the Monstrous:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Monday 10th May - Wednesday 12th May 2004
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 2: Monsters Down South & in the Big City
Chair: Peter Remington

From Aliens to African-American Creatures: Two Examples of Monsters in Ecuadorian Short Stories
Wladimir Chávez
University of Bergen, Norway

When the literary critics talk about Latin America , usually they focus the attention on a limited group of books. This group is usually included in an ambiguous category called Magical Realism . Therefore, writers like García Márquez on the one hand, and Isabel Allende or Laura Esquivel on the other, have obtained much popularity in Europe and the United States.
This has produced horrible generalizations. In fact, many literature theoreticians suppose that any supernatural event in a plot written by a Latin American author is Magical Realism without doubt. They forget that there already exist better ways to approach a novel or a story.
There are many monsters in the Literature of Latin America. It is possible to find some of them in the pre-Columbian oral traditions or in the legends during the Spanish domination or even in the Literature for children and teenagers. And monsters also exist in the plots of the Contemporary Literature for adults. In Ecuador there is a pioneering book that appeared in the 90's: Profundo en la Galaxia, by Santiago Páez. In spite of the fact that it got excellent critics, the book is almost unknown abroad. Monsters of different types appear in Páez´s stories, which are a strange mix between the science of the West and the Andean tradition.
Another text than deserves special attention is La Tunda, a story by the Ecuadorian Adalberto Ortiz. For the first time in Ecuadorian Contemporary Literature it is possible to find a monster from the afro-Ecuadorian oral tradition. It is a unique creature: it seems to generate a bizarre psychological fear. At the same time, it seems to incarnate prejudices and ignorance.
I am going to evaluate the monsters in Ecuadorian Literature, with special attention to the stories of Santiago Páez and Adalberto Ortiz. I would like to prove with my dissertation that in the Andean countries it is possible to write Fantastic Literature of a high level that it is not necessarily Magical Realism.

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The Magic Mazes of Edward James: Mexico or the Monstrous Anamorphosis
Jean-Philippe Imbert
Dublin City University, S.A.L.I.S., French Section, Dublin, Ireland

The intentions of this paper are to present, analyze and place into perspective within his overall artistic production the monsters Edward Frank Willis James (1907- 1984) encountered all his life long.
First, we are going to look at the frightful factors which forced James to flee from England: the loneliness of a life of desire and despair spent in the Gothic castle of West Dean in the heart of fox-hunting Sussex; his ostracization from the post-Victorian gotha in spite of his position as heir to an immense fortune, allied to a failure to fulfil his hybrid pulsions lurking behind his lavish yet horrific marriage to Tilly Losh, all prevented him from being recognized as a creator in his own right, in the artistic nomenclatura of Surrealism.
In the second part, we are going to see how choosing vegetal architecture as an art form was the only logical means James found to represent anamorphosis and generate monsters, thanks to the all-encompassing nature of Mexican Surrealism, which triggered his creative process. The mountain lanes of Xilitla, vegetal recreations of Piranesi's Geols as an answer to Breton's mazes mentioned in his Manifeste Surréaliste, allow the chimeric griffons of Remedios Varo to dance with the half-veiled ghouls of Leonora Carrington, in a pre-hispanic land where the monstrous and the mythical meet with nature.
Finally, we will analyze how James transformed his exile into a quest, by adapting the influences of alchemical texts, the Cabala, Jewish esoteric theosophy and hermeticism to the Mayan and Aztec cultures of his adopted homeland. This being the only way to represent the unrepresentable, to achieve the unachievable and make peace with the inner monsters of his life, so as to be finally acknowledged as a Surrealist aesthete.

Monstrous Metropolis
Inga Bryden
School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred's College, Winchester, UK

This paper will discuss the cultural types and meanings of `monsters' in the western city, as represented in contemporary literature and the cultural phenomenon of the urban legend. It will also consider the senses in which writers construct the city and urban experience as `monstrous'.
The archetypal construction of the labyrinth (a term interchangeable with maze) has come to denote disorientation and fear: at the heart of the Cretan labyrinth was the hybrid, monstrous Minotaur which fed on human flesh. Nineteenth-century writers adapted this image to describe the industrial city – labyrinthine, as in layered, alienating and `unreadable'. London 's East End is depicted as a network of `hells' (opium dens) or `webs' (gambling dens), at the centre of which lay the monstrous Other (an amalgam of urban, middle-class anxieties). Or London itself is a `strangely mingled monster…devouring human flesh' in order to function.
The paper develops this notion to consider how mythical monsters (for example, the hydra, the sphinx) are used by contemporary writers of the urban (such as Sinclair), or, drawing on cultural geography, how they might be interpreted as metaphors for the city itself.
The narratives discussed articulate a desire to impose order on a perceived urban chaos; how to tame the `monster' of psychological anxiety, which cannot be mapped? The `paranoid structures of modernity' might attempt to `control' by eradicating dust/decay or through systems of surveillance (the cyclops as disembodied eye). Literary narratives also teach us to follow the red thread and `read the clues' of subterranean networks (the Underground) and hidden social connections.
The paper moves from Classical myth to urban legends – how do writers rework these, themselves recycled tales `full of warnings against the imaginary hazards of everyday life'? Central to urban legends are transgressive animals (feral cats, malformed pigeons, gigantic alligators) and ordinary household objects which become `instruments of domination'. If the boundaries between urban/wild, domestic/feral, human/animal are blurred, is it ultimately the city dweller who is made monstrous?

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