 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
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 9: Monsters Undead and Giant
Chair: Lois Drawmer
Vamp-irony: The Bestiality of the Socratic Irony
Eva Antal
Eszterházy
College, Eger, Hungary
In my doctoral thesis titled On the Concept of Irony — With
(Continual) Reference to Kierkegaard, I study
several 'ironological' (irony-theoretical) texts of primary importance.
As the title itself (ironically) indicates, the longest chapter of
my thesis is concerned with Kierkegaard's doctoral treatise, The
Concept of Irony,
With Continual Reference to Socrates, which is the most thorough
theoretical work ever written on the concept. In Kierkegaard's reading,
Socrates is the first real individual owing to his irony as its ”infinite,
absolute negativity” made his negative freedom impossible.
While analysing
the Kierkegaardian criticism of the Socratic ironical method, I found its
rhetoric 'monstrous': pictures of suffocating seduction, torture-chambers,
crypts and bestial creatures (eg. gadfly, snake, sting ray) are embedded
in the philosophical discussion. All of these rhetorical tropes are associated
with the 'demoniac' figure of Socrates, and it is not by chance that he
appears in a 'bestiary' – as Derrida says in Plato's
Pharmacy (In Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago
UP, 1981. 119).
This remark gave me the idea of collecting and interpreting
these metaphors, and – to my great (ironic) pleasure - I found the most
elaborate parts related to the vampire. Socrates, the ironist, is said
to behave and act like an intellectual vampire, ”who has sucked the blood
of the lover [cf. the student] and while doing so … lulled him to sleep,
and tormented him with troubled dreams” (Kierkegaard Works, XIII
144. Trans. Hong and Hong. Princeton UP). That is, in the course of the
master's philosophical (ironic) inquiry the listener was bereft of his
everyday beliefs, but not given clear answers and finally left 'hollow'
in aporetic despair. The working of irony is compared to the vampire's
blood-sucking, while its philosophical implications - similarly to Nosferatu
- have been eternally haunting in the living-dead Socratic irony ever
since.
Tracking the Zombie Diaspora: From Subhuman Haiti to Posthuman
Tuscon
John Cussans
Chelsea College of Art
and Design, London, United Kingdom
The Zombie is a particularly resilient and chimerical
figure in the history of popular monsters.
Originating in the folklore
of Colonial Haitian culture, the legendary Zombie is believed to be an
individual whose soul has been stolen - after death - by a sorcerer.
From the early Hollywood representations of Zombies as soul-less somnambulists
governed by the will of a charismatic magician, through the plagues of
insatiable, cinematic, cannibal Zombies of the 1970's, to the contemporary
Zombies that populate the debates of cognitive science, the mythic Zombie
has exercised a peculiar hold of the Western popular and scientific imagination
for two hundred years.
Following themes developed in an earlier presentation
- Voodoo Terror: (mis)representations of Voodoo and Western Cultural
Anxieties ( http://haitisupport.gn.apc.org/res_culture_index.htm )
- this paper will explore the peculiar resilience of the Zombie figure
in both popular culture and modern - and postmodern - scientific discourse.
I will draw parallels between the figures of the zombie, the somnambulist
and the automaton in 19th century European popular culture and science.
At stake in each figure is a complex of issues involving the nature of
consciousness, the existence of the soul, the exercise of freewill and
fears about the exercise of influence at a distance. These considerations
will be extended to explore the emergence of the Zombie in contemporary
cognitive science and consciousness studies where the Zombie is used
to represent a hypothetically perfect simulacrum of a human being but
lacking the essential quality of consciousness.
The Ethical Ambiguity of the Monster: Good and Evil as
Human Possibilities in Michel Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes
Hanna Meretoja
University of Turku, Finland
As Mikhail Bakhtin states in his famous
Rabelais-study, giants are typically ambivalent figures in folk legends
and literature: they are not clear-cut good or evil, and their grotesque
corporality manifests metamorphosis, an ambiguous state of becoming.
Michel Tournier, one of the most prominent contemporary French novelists,
has built his novel Le
Roi des Aulnes (The Erl-King, 1970) intertextually on the
basis of age-old giant and monster imagery, thereby
opening up a new, interesting perspective into the ambiguity of monstrosity.
Through its monster imagery the novel demonstrates that evil is not an
essential property of some men, those designated as “monsters”,
but rather a possibility that resides in every human being.
The protagonist
of Le Roi des Aulnes, Abel Tiffauges, is a
car mechanic living in pre-World War II Paris, who endeavours to construct
his identity on the basis of various monster and giant myths. He believes
that he is “an ogre”, “a fabulous monster emerging
from the mists of time”, and more specifically, a “child-bearer”,
that is, a giant whose vocation is to carry children, like Saint Christopher
carried the Christ Child across the river. The mythical figure of the
Erl-King, best know from Goethe’s ballad Der Erlkönig,
functions in the novel as a kind of “negative inversion” of
Saint Christopher. Tiffauges wavers between being a Saint Christopher
and an Erl-King figure, a gentle giant carrying children safe and a monster
wrenching children from their parents’ arms. I would like to suggest
that it is of utmost importance that Tiffauges is an ambiguous figure
whose identity is not determined by a pre-given essence but is, on the
contrary, constituted in the hermeneutic process in which he applies
various mythical models into the concrete, singular situations that he
encounters. The reader has to participate in this interpretative process
by constantly re-evaluating whether Tiffauges is a “good” or
a “bad” child-bearer. Gradually it becomes evident that he
is an ethically ambiguous figure who has the potential for both good
and evil, like all of us. This ambiguity calls attention to the ethical
responsibility that accompanies the interpretation and application of
culturally transmitted mythical models. In the novel this central theme
gains its urgency in relation to the historical context of Nazi Germany.
Download Style Sheet 1
(pdf)
Download Style Sheet 2
(pdf)
Download Specimen Chapter
(Word)
© Wickedness.Net 2004