On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (59 page)

26
. Moreover, when animal populations have lost digits, like the horse, they seem to have lost them (morphologically speaking) in the same reverse sequence.

27
. Notice that Alberch’s logic of development does not give us some absolutely necessary sequence of inevitable body plans; after all, we know that fossil tetrapods can have five, six, seven, or even eight digits. But it does give us a fundamental internal constraint system that can be turned on for longer or shorter periods and thereby provide predictable morphological consequences.

28
. A close reading of Gould suggests, however, that this “vindication” is more of a rhetorical device, helping raise awareness for a historically ignored area of study (development). Gould redefines “hopeful monster” in a way that keeps it under the umbrella of Darwinism, and therefore confusingly uses the term differently than Goldschmidt. In his article “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,”
Natural History
86 (June/July 1977), Gould argues that small changes in the embryological “constraint systems” (such as the timing mutation to stop or continue digit building) can produce large morphological transformations in the adult, and possibly macro-evolutionary pathways.

29
. See Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff, “Evolving Evolution,”
New York Review of Books
53, no. 8 (2006).

30
. The same question regarding discrete form and matter was raised at the organismal level of biology. Technically, every cell
can
make the whole organism, in the sense that it contains all the information code. But although each cell has the entire recipe, its job is to specialize and build and maintain something quite particular (muscle, bone, blood, etc.). We might have expected that cells would have only information on a need-to-know basis, like a foot soldier who gets only a part of the overall tactical plan. In fact, they have the entire plan inside them, but chemical gatekeepers are rationing out very limited parts of the total information.

31
. My description of Scott Holley’s work is drawn from his public lecture “Fish ‘n Clocks: How the Vertebral Column Is Segmented in Zebrafish Embryogenesis,” delivered on December 6, 2007, as part of the Science and Mathematics Colloquium Series, Columbia College, Chicago. For a more technical articulation of his recent work, see his essay “The Genetics and Embryology of Zebrafish Metamerism,”
Developmental Dynamics
236 (2007).

32
. Zebra fish make great models because their process of vertebral construction takes only about twenty-five hours to complete, whereas the same development in humans
takes six weeks. Add to this the fact that zebra fish are transparent and therefore easy to observe in terms of internal development.

33
. A simple illustration can be seen in the extremely protracted juvenile traits of humans when compared with other primates, such as chimps. Maximum brain growth for chimps is concluded around one year of age, whereas humans continue until their late teens. The bodily or somatic maturing of an animal can be quite delayed or reduced, especially when compared with phylogenetic relatives, but the sexual maturation of the same animal can seem accelerated by comparison.

34
. See Sean B. Carrol,
Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo
(Norton, 2005). My quotations are taken from
chapter 11
.

1
. In 1962 S. Shachter and J. Singer demonstrated in their paper “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State” (
Psychological Review
69) that an emotion requires both a physiological arousal and a correlate cognition. For example, subjects injected with adrenalin do not automatically have an emotional response to the chemical. However, when the subject is first questioned about a painful event, then the injection will trigger an upsetting emotional response. The cognitive interpretation of, or even just correlation with, physiological arousal is crucial to defining the subsequent felt emotion; the cognitive aspect is not just an epiphenomenon of the chemical. This question of the relationship between cognitive and affective states has an earlier incarnation in the disagreement between William James and Walter Cannon. As Rami Gabriel points out in
Affective Reactions in a Prosopagnosic Patient
(PhD dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2007), “William James (1890) argued that the internal changes occur because of an arousing event, and we subsequently interpret these internal feelings as an emotion. Cannon (1929) disagreed claiming that the same changes occur in the internal organs in a range of emotional responses, so it is implausible that one emotion is attached to one particular feeling, furthermore artificial changes brought about by for example, adrenalin do not necessarily produce an emotional feeling.” I am indebted to Dr. Gabriel for steering me to this important debate.

2
. In the 1940s a psychologist named Donald Hebb continued Darwin’s experiments on chimp fear of snakes and showed that infant chimpanzees who had no earlier exposure to snakes were nonetheless terrified of them when first presented. Hebb continued to introduce novel objects and animals to the chimps and discovered something more subtle than just snake phobia. He concluded that chimps had alarmed and frightful responses to any extremely varied morphologies they encountered. When something in their perceptual field jumped out as radically different, it could not be processed by the cognitive categories already in place. As Melvin Konner describes it, “Against the background of knowledge already accumulated by the infant chimps, the new objects were different; they aroused many perceptual schemas or patterns stored in the brain but fitted into none, causing arousal and then fear. The brain was somehow designed to generate fear as the result of such a cognitive mismatch.” See Melvin Konner’s description of Donald Hebb’s, Wolfgang Schleidt’s, and Mary Ainsworth’s experiments in
The Tangled Wing
(Times Books, 2002),
chapter 10
.

3
. Noel Carroll’s theorizing about horror can be found in
The Philosophy of Horror
(Routledge, 1990).

4
. H. P. Lovecraft,
Supernatural Horror in Literature
(Dover Publications, 1973).

5
. The contrast between fear and angst is articulated in Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time
(Blackwell, 1978),
part I
,
chapter 6
, “Care as the Being of Dasein.”

6
. See Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Judgment
(Hackett, 1987),
part I
, section 27.

7
. For Kant, the sublime is an experience of incoherence that results when reason sets a task for the mind for which it does not have enough power to complete. Looking at the night sky, for example, and trying to envision the expanse of space and time stretching before us is a task that cannot be adequately completed. He contrasts this incoherent magnitude with a different kind of incoherent magnitude, which he calls a
monstrous
magnitude. He uses
monstrous
as a technical term to designate an object that contradicts itself, something of a size that renders its own purpose or function impossible. It’s hard to know what he means here, except that he may be thinking of absurd objects, such as staircases that are so monumentally big that no one can climb them. Or perhaps he’s imagining an animal whose head is so large that it cannot move. In this strict definition, Kant’s “sublime” and “monstrous” are both species of incoherence, but with different origins and implications. See
Critique of Judgment
,
part I
, section 26.

8
. Schopenhauer’s most formal presentation of this philosophy can be found in his 1819
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Representation
, in two volumes (Dover, 1966). See Bryan Magee’s interesting discussion of Schopenhauer’s influence on subsequent artists in
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
(Oxford University Press, 1997),
part II
.

9
. The highly emotional and subjective interests of Expressionist art (of which horror might be seen as a subspecies) manifest the philosophical trajectory I’ve been sketching. The art of human vulnerability and the sense of cosmic fear can be seen in the famous shrieking face of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
(1893). In addition to painting works called
Anxiety
and
Despair
, Munch is reported to have said, “Sickness, insanity, and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.” One finds these artistic tendencies toward terror in earlier works as well, in Bosch, El Greco, and Goya.

10
. The famous line about nature “red in tooth and claw” is from Tennyson’s 1850 poem
In Memoriam A. H. H
., but it was often applied to Darwinian natural selection. The quote from Thomas Henry Huxley is taken from his 1893
Romanes Lecture
and can be found in
Darwin: A Norton Critical Reader
, 2nd ed., edited by Philip Appleman (Norton, 1979).

11
. As we’ve already seen in our discussion of Plato, among others, the inner monsters of psychology are not really new at all. But it is fair to make a generalization at the level of paradigms and say that the twentieth century is comparatively subjective in its understanding of monsters.

12
. Freud begins his essay by admitting the unorthodox nature of his crossover into aesthetics:

The subject of the “uncanny” is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening. (“The Uncanny,” in
Studies in Parapsychology
, edited by Philip Rieff [Collier Books, 1963])

13
. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills point out that the German word for monster can be deconstructed in a manner similar to Freud’s
uncanny
: “In the same way that Freud divides the word ‘un-heimlich’ to reveal its literal meaning, ‘un-familiar’ or ‘un-homely,’ so, too, the German word for monster, Ungeheuer, can similarly be split into two semantic units—‘un-geheuer’ likewise means ‘un-familiar’ or ‘un-safe.’
From this it might be argued that monsters are the embodiment of something that is both familiar and foreign, disturbing and reassuring.” “Conceptualizing the Monstrous,” in
The Monstrous Middle Ages
(University of Wales Press, 2003). Also see Julia Kristeva,
The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
(Columbia University Press, 1982), and Judith Butler,
Bodies That Matter
(Routledge, 1993), for discussions of “abjection.” Abjection is a cultural category, with
unheimlich
overlaps, designating a marginal, liminal being (or beings). Kristeva and Butler appear to be combining the categorical mismatch approach and the psychoanalytical approach to discuss horror and ultimately gender prejudice. I have not found Kristeva’s and Butler’s work very helpful in understanding monsters, or anything else really, but the work certainly has its own devoted following.

14
. Beal,
Religion and Its Monsters
, introduction.

15
. One of the first forms of repression that Freud details in the developmental sequence is the now classic case of potty training. “The excreta,” Freud says, “arouse no disgust in children. They seem valuable to them as being a part of their own body which has come away from it. Here upbringing insists with special energy on hastening the course of development which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable.” Repression transforms values, but, provided the repressions don’t become neurotic, those transformations are usually healthy for social life. Freud adds the bold claim, “Anal erotism [infant attachment to excreta] succumbs in the first instance to the ‘organic repression’ which paved the way to civilization.”
Civilization and Its Discontents
(Norton, 1961),
chapter 4
, note 1.

16
. With regard to a theory of “doubles,” Freud sees himself enlarging on the good start made by his colleague Otto Rank in his 1914
Der Doppelganger
.

17
. In early civilizations, Freud points out, kings and people of means often created replicas of themselves; artisans were enlisted to fabricate doubles and triples of the royal personage, often burying the additional selves with the original. One wonders if real identical twins feel anything like a lesser sense of finitude or a stronger sense of existential security. Do they feel as though their sibling is a backup copy of their own self (like a hard-drive backup)? The double was originally a positive demonstration or representation of the universal will-to-live (
conatus
). But our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of maturing experience. Reality reminds us as we are developing that we will not cheat death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic pleasure principle is impossible given the brute facts of our animal nature.