Monsterful Mashups: On The Torsional Coruscations of Object-Oriented Ontologies & New Materialisms (part 2 of 2)
Monsters within. Monsters without. No deferral.
‘I am It—or better, I am They’ (Mark Fisher)
‘They are who are’ (Donna Haraway)
PREFACE:
As promised, here is the conclusion to the chapter whose opening was sampled in Part 1. It’s much shorter but its paragraphs are, um, much denser than I remembered. If nothing else, it’s worth scrolling down to the very end and reading the block quote on the ‘monsterful’ from Michael Foster’s reflections on Japanese yokai.
‘Any attempt to finally resolve these figures finds them maddeningly ambiguous, with parts of bodies detaching and re-emerging as some other figure or form’ (Karin Myhre, on taotie masks from China)
Conclusion: The Laffertian Ecomonstrous: Chthulucene & Cthulhucene Amalgamated1
[…] As noted at the opening of this chapter, this category-busting combinatory approach has at least some precedent. Bennett remarks: ‘It makes sense to try to do justice both to systems and things—to acknowledge the stubborn reality of individuation and the essentially distributive quality of their affectivity’ (Bennett 2015: 229). There are energies and there are entities. So we suggest for our ecomonstrous reading of Lafferty, an unholy alliance/bivalence: Chthulucene and ‘Cthulhucene’ amalgamated. We propose that our qualified embrace of OOO will follow Lovecraft not only in the indescribability (due to inexhaustibility) of his monsters, but also in Lovecraft’s realisation of our porosity toward hybridisation with them. As Mark Fisher remarked about Lovecraft’s story ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, when the apparently human protagonist eventually realises he is himself a ‘Deep One’ (an amphibious race of para-humans enthralled to an aquatic monster god), he must acquiesce to more-than-human entanglement: ‘I am It—or better, I am They’ (Fisher 2016: 16). But instead of finding this entangling monstration something to loathe as Lovecraft did, I suggest that Lafferty responds as Klyukanov suggests with all-too-human (and, we might add, all-too-more-than-human) care, faith, hope, and love.2 Again and again his tales willingly surrender to this enmeshment (even if his characters only do so in varying degrees). Equally, we propose that our qualified embrace of NM will grant not only permeable distribution into teeming more-than-human matter-flows, but also the withdrawing dense ontology of things that persists in excess of entanglements. As Haraway forcefully encapsulates this obdurate opacity of entities: ‘They are who are’ (Haraway 2016: 2).
It is a poetics in which monsters illuminate/darken (noctiluminate) the outer limits of connectedness (NM) and separateness (OOO) and the monstrous exceeding of those limits in the liminal and the hybrid, the mixed and betwixt of weird realism and vibrant materiality.
Attempting to fuse NM and OOO in an ecomonstrous poetics admittedly creates a Lovecraftian monster that can barely hold together3 or indeed a Laffertian monstrosity of simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal movements.4 Nevertheless, we will aim to strenuously insist that the ecomonstrous consists of both entanglement and withdrawal, and without secretly collapsing one into the other. On the one hand, this torqued vision of entanglement-withdrawal is like the shifting zoomorphisms of taotie Chinese monster masks: ‘Any attempt to finally resolve these figures finds them maddeningly ambiguous, with parts of bodies detaching and re-emerging as some other figure or form’ (Myhre 2012: 218). On the other hand, this tortuosity is akin to Ian Bogost’s remark when he insists that OOO combines two seemingly competing meanings of ‘wonder’ (dizzying awe vs. puzzling logic): ‘This is not one of those irreconcilable Derridean suspensions, either. It’s a truly simultaneous condition without deferral’ (Bogost 2012: 121; cf. Cohen 1996: 7). In the same way, we posit an ecomonstrous torsion of Chthulucene/Cthulhucene without deferral: ‘Withdrawn and manifest’ (Bennett 2015: 226, emphasis in original). Or as another new materialist remarks: ‘The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa’ (Smith 2011: 71, emphasis in original). Lafferty’s ecomonstrous poetics suggests a Chthulucene/Cthulhucene that perpetually amalgamates just such ‘irreducible alterity and infinite connection’ (ibid.). It is a poetics in which monsters illuminate/darken (noctiluminate) the outer limits of connectedness (NM) and separateness (OOO) and the monstrous exceeding of those limits in the liminal and the hybrid, the mixed and betwixt of weird realism and vibrant materiality.5
‘There are so many good stories yet to tell, so many netbags yet to string, and not just by human beings […] Diverse human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story.’ (Donna Haraway)
Furthermore, and to reiterate, ecomonstrous poetics affirms that the monstrous is out there in the world, before and beyond (human) culture, and that in this material nexus of uncanny entanglement-withdrawal, nonhumans make monsters with us. Nonhumans are right there with us, hand-in-tentacle, when we construct our exorbitant nightmares and fantasias, for ‘matters and discourses are co-constituting’ (Sheldon 2015: 201, emphasis added).6 In this regard, note Haraway’s characterisation of Bruno Latour (whose work is drawn upon extensively in both NM and OOO) as ‘a compositionist intent on understanding how a common world, how collectives, are built-with each other, where all the builders are not human beings’ (Haraway 2016: 41, emphasis added). As noted above, material ecocriticism holds that nonhumans are telling stories (including, let us note, scary stories) with us: ‘There are so many good stories yet to tell, so many netbags yet to string, and not just by human beings’ (Haraway: 49, emphasis added).7 This is the more-than-human monstrous storytelling that Lafferty’s ecomonstrous poetics evinces. ‘Diverse human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story’ (55, emphasis added). Human culture itself is, after all, only another expression of the vibrancy-tenebrity of things. Lafferty’s ecomonstrous poetics, then, expresses or ‘carries’ (is built-with and co-constituted by) the monstrations of nonhumans.
Finally, the NM-OOO torsion also helps develop our understanding of the Weird Bioregionalism exemplified in Lafferty’s fiction. The entanglements Lafferty’s fiction continuously stages are indicative of the potentials of more-than-human collaboration and coexistence and the dangers of ignoring our em-placement in a biome. The frequent inhuman withdrawals his fiction depicts, on the other hand, keep the possibility of ‘harmony’ with one’s region somewhat unstable and uncanny, a constant reminder that we dwell with strange strangers whose weird plenitude we cannot exhaust, no matter how intimate and hospitable we mutually become. For even bioregionalism can become anthropocentric if it is not grounded in a sense of genuine mystery and wonder. To that end, let us hear Michael Foster on Japanese yokai and the ‘monsterful’ (monstrous + wonderful) as an envoi that encapsulates the themes of this chapter:
If the monsterful is about wonder and the possibility of the inconceivable, it reminds us that there are otherworlds out there—sounds we have never heard, wavelengths of light human eyes cannot see, entire structures of thought yet to be imagined. As the human world contends with seemingly unsurmountable twenty-first-century challenges, the otherworld of yōkai may provide an escapist dream of fantasy and lighthearted play. But more significantly, with its variety and abundance and endless change, it can also offer a metaphor for imagining the unknown, and for the possibility of transforming amorphous hopes into solid futures. (Foster 2015: 244)
WORKS CITED:
Adamson, Joni. 2014. ‘Source of Life: Avatar, Amazonia, and an Ecology of Selves’, in Iovino, Serenella and Oppermann, Serpil, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 253-268.
Bennett, Jane. 2015. ‘Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy’, in Grusin, Richard, ed. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 223-239.
Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. ‘Monster Culture: Seven Theses’, in Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 3-25.
Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.
Foster, Michael Dylan. 2015. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. Oakland: University of California Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lafferty, R. A. 1976. ‘Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs’, in Elwood, Roger, ed. Odyssey 1(2), 33-38, 58-61.
Myhre, Karin. 2012. ‘Monsters Lift the Veil: Chinese Animal Hybrids and Processes of Transformation’, in Mittman, Asa Simon and Dendle, Peter J., eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 217236.
Sheldon, Rebekah. 2015. ‘Form/Matter/Chora: Object-Oriented Ontology and Feminist New Materialism’, in Grusin, Richard, ed. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 193-222.
Smith, Rachel Greenwald. 2011. ‘Materialism, Ecology, Aesthetics’. Mediations 25(2), 6178.
Wheeler, Wendy. 2014. ‘Natural Play, Natural Metaphor, and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic Realism’, in Iovino, Serenella and Oppermann, Serpil, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 67-79.
From Petersen 2020: 118-121.
See Igor Klyukanov’s essay ‘The Monstrosity of Adduction’ (2018: 140).
Thesis footnote: E.g. the vast monster at the end of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1929) comprised entirely and indiscriminately of tentacles, eyes, and mouths; or the shifting, bubbling shoggoths in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1936).
Thesis footnote: The bird-and-bug giants that fly apart and reassemble [‘Bird-Master’ (1983)], the half-animated churning clay multitudes [‘Smoe and the Implicit Clay’ (1976)], the river shore cut up and stitched back together [‘All Pieces of a River Shore’ (1970)], the competing stories of cabrito consumption [‘Cabrito’ (1976)], Pickens picked down to his bones and less than bones, ‘until the next story’ [Okla Hannali (1972)].
Thesis footnote: As Joni Adamson reports, article 2 of the 2010 Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth and Climate Change—a South American document rooted in ‘indigenous cosmovisions based on ancient and ancestral indigenous knowledge’—declares ‘that each “sentient being” (read: ecosystem, forest, river, and so on) is a cosmos in itself’ which exists nevertheless in a ‘pluriform and multi-vocal world’ of ‘indivisible and interdependent relationship’ (Adamson 2014: 254, 264, emphases added). Withdrawal and entanglement.
Thesis footnote: Cf. Iovino: ‘the horizon of material ecocriticism is that of […] an ecology of mind and of imagination as embodied processes that are created and re-created in the essential co-implication with nonhuman subjects and forms’ (cited in Wheeler 2014: 78, emphases added).
Thesis footnote: Haraway’s ‘netbags’ references Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’.
Excited to see you engaging with Alien Phenomenology.