Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster StoryAuthor(s): Daniel PundaySource: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. 803-820Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3738613Accessed: 15/09/2010 17:06

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NARRATIVE PERFORMANCE IN THE

CONTEMPORARY MONSTER STORY

Recently literary and cultural criticism has come to recognize the signal im- portance of the body in constructing culture, and we have seen a flourishing of articles and books on representations of the body. One of the most traditional ways that a writer can explore society through the body is by telling a monster story. Critics have long recognized that literary monsters serve to challenge the homogeneity of society by revealing its tensions, inconsistencies, and gaps. Contemporary theory, as well as popular culture, is clearly in sympathy with the monster story's goal of revealing social disunity through bodily multiplicity. More than ever we are aware of our bodies as constructions dependent upon technology and social expectation. The popularity within literary criticism of Donna Haraway's claim that we are all today 'cyborgs' existing within and con- structed by many different information circuits is only a reflection of the larger social interest in images of the synthetic, heterogeneous body. One witty state- ment of our thinking about the body is Max Apple's short story 'Free Agents' (1983), in which the author's internal organs decide to leave him, suing for their right to sell themselves to the highest bidder. They issue a press release: 'The so-called one-life one-body ruling [. . .] has for an entire decade been based upon false medical, legal, and moral evidence. The star surgeons traipse through the land making big reputations by moving organs from one body to another. An average John Doe might have a new heart, a fresh kidney, pints of alien blood, even an engrafted tooth if the dentists have their way, and you know they will. Meanwhile, the organs are treated as so much meat.'1 Apple's story of the court case that will decide this issue (with the pituitary gland as the judge, and the organs of famous people as the jury) humorously shows just how widely recognized is the disunity of the body.

That contemporary culture has accepted the disunity of the body in a way makes the monster story curiously irrelevant. For if we recognize that we are all, like Apple's narrator, 'monsters' comprised of independent elements, what need have we for stories that foreground this disunity? And yet, monsters continue to inspire writers and to attract readers. Even leaving aside the monsters of popular horror fllm and fiction, characters with monstrous bodies have consistently appeared in 'serious' contemporary fiction. We think, for example, of Italo Calvino's 77 visconte dimezzato (1951), William Burroughs's The Ticket that Exploded (1967), John Gardner's Grendel (1971), Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983), and Alasdair Gray's Poor Things (1992). What cultural 'work', we might ask, do monster novels do at the end of the twentieth century? In this article I will argue that monster novels provide contemporary writers with the chance to examine the process of story telling itself.2 I would like to discuss a number

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the International Narrative Conference (North- western University) in April 1998 under the title, 'Monster Stories after the "Body Politic"'.

1 'Free Agents', in Free Agents (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 102-14 (p. 103). 2 This is not, of course, to suggest that some contemporary novels do not use monstrous bodies

simply as a fact 'given' within the cultures to which they are appealing. We might think, for

804 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

of contemporary monster stories, but will primarily focus on three particularly significant texts: Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984), Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1989), and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1990). What we find, ultimately, is that monster stories raise important questions about the agency of literary symbolism?who makes the body 'mean' and how that act supports or undercuts larger socio-political messages within the novel.

The Symbolic Body

As a number of recent critics have noted, before the eighteenth century the monster was most often seen as a divine sign intended to convey some message; these critics frequently link monster to the French term montrery to demonstrate. In this sense, monstrosity is a fact that must be interpreted by considering what message it sends. Chris Baldick summarizes Michel Foucault's work on insanity by noting: 'In a world created by a reasonable God, the freak or lunatic must have a purpose: to reveal the results of vice, folly, and unreason, as a warning [. . .] to erring humanity.'3 The monstrous body is assured of meaning because of its participation within a nexus of traditional assumptions about nature and humanity. This is the kind of monstrous sign that Mikhail Bakhtin has explored in his book on Rabelais, where the grotesque body becomes a symbolic representative of life in general: 'the grotesque body is cosmic and universal. It stresses elements common to the entire cosmos: earth, water, fire, air; it is directly related to the sun, to the stars. It contains the signs of the zodiac. It reflects the cosmic hierarchy. This body can merge with various natural phenomena, with mountains, rivers, seas, islands, and continents. It can fill the entire universe.'4 The grotesque or monstrous body here is made meaningful by a whole set of philosophical and mythic resonances. Barbara Maria Stafford has recently noted that monstrosity was handled in early modern science, likewise, as a sign that promised to reveal the hidden truth about human development: 'The paradox of eighteenth-century genetic research was that it studied irregular occurrences in order to discover something about how regular organisms conceived.'5 Despite this scientific interest, the monstrous body remains a simple sign that points back to some deeper error or message.

This monstrous sign becomes complicated, however, when the body is treated as comprised of independent elements and subsystems. Stafford notes that 'By the late eighteenth century the model of the body as an integral whole finally fell apart' (p. 340), in large part because of a fundamental shift to seeing bodily example, of Ben Okri's The Famished Road (New York: Anchor, 1993), which uses a number of monstrous ghostly bodies simply as part of the mythology that provides the background for the story. We should not dismiss the possibility that even works like this pick up on the current trend to use literary monsters to reflect on the nature of storytelling. Okri, for example, associates the monstrous ghosts, who have entered the world to experience human reality (p. 136), with storytelling about 'the myths of beginnings' (p. 6). 3 In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity andNineteenth-Century Writing(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 10. 4 Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), P- 318. 5 Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 256.

DANIEL PUNDAY 805

components as independent. For Stafford, recognizing that the body is made up of independent elements raises fundamental interpretational problems for those who study it: 'One might never arrive at the cumulative scene, but only drown in the unamalgamated details. The abstract invisible laws for achieving a superior coalescence were easily submerged beneath disconnected empirica' (p. 332). In other words, once scientists recognize that the monstrous body is not a simple sign, they need to justify the means by which they explain and link the various elements of the body.6 Bakhtin likewise notes that the modern body is treated as an individual object, and thus loses most of its links to the broad cultural mythologies that ensure its effortless interpretation.7 This trans- formation is quite clear in how bodily space is made to serve political rhetoric. Baldick observes that one traditional way that the disharmony of monstrous body elements is made meaningful is by treating that body as a political sign emphasizing the necessity of a unifying political authority (a king) that gives or- ganic wholeness to the 'body politic'. As Baldick writes, 'When political discord and rebellion appear, this "body" is said to be not just diseased, but misshapen, abortive, monstrous' (p. 14). Yet, even in the doctrine of the body politic we begin to see a complication of the moral point being made by the body. In Leviathan (1651) Thomas Hobbes gives us his famous definition of the state as 'an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates, and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punish- menty by which fastened to the seat ofthe sovereignty every joint and member is moved to perform his duty, are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural'.8 Hobbes implies that a disproportionate body will signify the political disunity of a commonwealth, and thus will function as a monstrous 'sign' that reveals the political problems to be remedied. Hobbes's analysis ofthe body into parts and functions also departs, however, from the simple sign Baldick describes and instead treats the body as an inherently 'corporate' entity made up of distinct elements whose relations are very much subject to debate.9 More generally we can say that as science begins to treat the body as a composite entity, monstrosity forces its interpreters to explain their methods and assumptions.IO

6 Other critics have suggested that the monstrous body has always embodied the problems of representation. In particular see Marie-Helene Huet's influential discussion of the monster in the context of Platonic theories of imitation in Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 24-27.

7 Bakhtin writes, 'In the modern image of the individual body, sexual life, eating, drinking, and defecation have radically changed their meaning: they have been transferred to the private and psychological level where their connotation becomes narrow and specific, torn away from the direct relation to the life of society and to the cosmic whole. In this new connotation they can no longer carry on their former philosophicalfunctions' (p. 321). 8 Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 5. 9 For an analysis of this shift in political philosophy see Ernst H. Kantorowicz's discussion of the creation of a 'polity-centered' social state in The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 193-272. 10 Our best-known examples of literary monstrosity reflect exactly this synthetic body. Norma Rowen has recently argued that exactly this 'synthetic' quality of the Frankenstein monster sep- arates it from past traditions of artificial life. Comparing the monster to earlier models like the

806 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

Despite this historical shift in the way the monstrous body is made meaning- ful, when critics offer interpretations of literary monsters, they often treat the monster as a timeless literary trope. Critics frequently flnd in novels like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the stuff of very effective cultural critique, bringing to- gether many different elements ofthe culture in the monster's body for the sake of revealing problems within the society itself.11 Stephen Bann speaks for many of these critics when he defines monsters as objects that exist outside the fixed episteme of a culture, suggesting that interest in such 'curiosities' reflects an attempt to come to terms with epistemological questions: 'It could be argued that evidence of this kind [i.e. using monsters in artworks to explore biological form] simply points to a transitional, or unresolved, quality in seventeenth- century speculations about the natural world. Krzysztof Pomian has defined "curiosity" as an "interim rule" between religion and science. Phenomena of the type described might appear to be symptomatic of this state of being nei- ther one thing not the other.'12 Critics thus treat the monster as an embodiment of postmodern attitudes towards difference and cultural heterogeneity, often celebrating the monster as that which challenges our everyday models of the world. In his introduction to the collection Monster Theory Jeffrey Jerome Co- hen argues that 'Because of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at times of crisis as the kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes.'13 The monster here becomes a symbol of difference, of what is repressed by the dominant culture. As a result, all cultural bodies come to seem monstrous in Cohen's analysis: 'History itself becomes a monster: defeatur- ing, self-deconstructive, always in danger of exposing the sutures that bind its disparate elements into a single, unnatural body' (p. 9). Cohen in many ways seems to return to an older model of the meaning of monstrosity by suggesting that the monster is a simple sign?in this case, a sign about the limitations of our ways of ordering the world. Despite a great deal of very sophisticated recent historical work on the monstrous body in science and culture, then, lit? erary critics seem to struggle to address the place of these bodies within literary works. If the hermeneutics of the monster has been shown to be in question since the seventeenth century, its place within a narrative must likewise be rad- ically at issue. The idea of rethinking narrative through the monstrous body

golem and the automaton, Rowan writes, 'the automaton is made of artificial substances and raises no expectations that he is human. Frankenstein's monster, assembled out of bits of flesh, becomes not a machine but something human that has been horribly distorted?an image out of nightmare': 'The Making of Frankenstein's Monster: Post-Golem, Pre-Robot', in The State of the Fantas- tic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, ed. by Nicholas Ruddick (Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 1992), pp. 169-77 (P- I7?)- 11 See e.g. David A. Hedrich Hirsch's essay 'Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutioning the Family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein', which sees Shelley's Frankenstein as a novel about the attempt to create a single general man out of culturally diverse materials: 'by scavenging from dissecting rooms and mortuaries the body parts of myriad individuals, and then confederating these individual parts into a new, conglomerate mass, Frankenstein [. . .] seeks to bring to life, in spectacular form, an ideal of le genre humain that transcends the bounds of the individual': Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. by JefTrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 115-40 (p. 116). 12 Stephen Bann, 'Introduetion', in Frankenstein, Creation, and Monstrosity, ed. by Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion, 1994), pp. 1-15 (p. 4). 13

'Monster Culture (Seven Theses)', in Monster Theory, pp. 3-25 (p. 6).

DANIEL PUNDAY 807

is precisely what Donna Haraway suggests in her well-known remark that 'the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narra- tives with a different logic of repression'.14 Although literary critics frequently appeal to Haraway to define the monster as a trope for disruption, few have seriously considered Haraway's claim that monsters send us back to rethink the basic mechanisms and 'logics' of narrative.

Contemporary novelists have particularly been interested in problems that monstrous bodies create for the construction of literary narrative. We can see

contemporary writers working through the difhculty of giving the monster a clear significance by turning to Angela Carter's novel Nights at the Circus. Carter's novel tells the story of Sophie Fevvers, a circus acrobat born with a full set of wings. Carter wants to use her winged woman both to make a comment about the freedoms accorded to women, and also to think through the problems of creating a woman who symbolizes such freedoms. Carter is quite explicit later in the novel in drawing our attention to Fevvers's symbolic qualities. Remarking about a woman in Siberia who is isolated by her community during childbirth, Fevvers says 'And once the old world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the same as I. This young woman in my arms, whom we found tied hand and foot with the grisly bonds of ritual, will suffer no more of it; she will tear off her mind

forg'd manacles, will rise up and fly away.'15 Carter clearly sees her heroine as an image of the future of women, an image that should allow women to think about their own freedom. Throughout the novel Carter uses images of stopped time to suggest that Fevvers represents a new beginning for women. During her initial interview with Jack Walser, an American journalist who is investigating Fevvers's physical endowment and who later falls in love with her, time seems not to pass (pp. 42-43), and at several moments Fevvers is associated with such stopped time. During her first attempt at flight in the brothel in which she is raised, she moves a stopped clock in order to climb up onto the mantle of the

living-room fireplace, taking the place of this symbol of suspended time (p. 29). The novel itself ends on New Year's Eve 1899, a fact which is used to suggest Fevvers's role as marking the threshold of a new age: 'We're on the cusp, my dear, tomorrow is another time-scheme' (p. 284).

While Carter obviously intends us to take her heroine seriously as a symbol of female freedom, she is very conscious about the problems that such symbol- ism brings with it. Early in the novel she realizes that learning to fly creates a 'wound'?an 'irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of human? ity' (P- 34)- Later, however, Walser suggests that giving up her symbolic role brings with it certain dangers: 'As a symbolic woman, she has a meaning, as an anomaly, none' (p. 161). In this passage Walser is trying to suggest that remaining a symbol keeps her human, but Fevvers seems to realize that these two are necessarily separate. The real problem of Fevvers's symbolism is clear when she describes her goals: 'On that bright day, when I am no more a singular being but, warts and all the female paradigm, no longer an imagined fiction but

14 'The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminismin the Late Twentieth

Century', in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-81 (p. 150). 15 Nights at the Circus (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 285.

808 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

a plain fact?then he [Walser] will slap down his notebooks, bear witness to me and my prophetic role' (p. 286). Fevvers suggests that her ultimate goal is simply to become ordinary, yet doing so would clearly violate the symbolism which has made her stand out and which has ultimately attracted Walser. As this passage suggests, Fevvers is very much aware that she depends on Walser as the audience to her symbolism. Fevver describes her early childhood in the brothel as 'my apprenticeship in being looked aty (p. 23), and suggests that her whole identity depends on having a spectator that gives her meaning beyond 'plain fact'. Indeed, it is precisely her symbolic role that makes Fevvers feel whole:

And surely he was here; one of the wooden houses must shelter the young American. And she would see, once again, the wonder in the eyes of the beloved and become whole. . . .

'Think of him, not as a lover, but as a scribe, as an amanuensis,' she said to Lizzie. And not of my trajectory alone, but of yours, too, Lizzie; of your long history of exile and cunning which you've scarcely hinted to him, which will fill up ten times more of his notebooks than my story ever did.' (p. 285) Carter suggests that Fevvers depends on Walser to make her 'whole' and to give her meaning. The significance of Fevvers's claim about being whole is particularly easy to see if we note her criticism earlier in the novel about bur- lesque clowning. As another type of exaggerated body, the clown shares many qualities with the symbolism of Fevvers's bird-body. Fevvers, however, hates clowns: 'Don't you know how I hate clowns, young man? I truly think they are a crime against humanity' (p. 143). Part ofthe reason that Fevvers dislikes clowns so intensely seems to be that they represent quite the opposite of the unifying symbol that Fevvers sees herself to be. Clowning is described earlier in the novel as representing the 'freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with the language which is vital to our being' (p. 103). This attitude towards identity clearly contrasts to Fevvers's desire for wholeness and the defined meaning that she achieves in Walser's notebooks. This contrast is especially clear when the clowns are described as 'deconstructing themselves': 'At the climax of his turn, everything having collapsed about him as if a grenade exploded it, he starts to deconstruct himself. His face becomes contorted by the most hideous grimaces, as if he were trying to shake off the very white with which it is coated: shake! shake! shake out his teeth, shake off his nose, shake away his eyeballs, let all go flying off in a convulsive self-dismemberment' (p. 117). The clown's will- ingness to fracture himself into parts is precisely the opposite of what Fevvers strives for in her relationship with Walser.

Let us note how the contrast between Fevvers and the clowns repeats the problems with the meaning of monstrous bodies in general. Above I suggested an inherent split between older forms of body symbolism based on the represen- tational qualities of the whole and new, scientific methods that sought to account for the basic elements of monstrous bodies. It is not difhcult to see precisely the same opposition in this novel.16 Fevvers clearly represents the older expectation of a unified meaning for the monstrous body; the clowns exemplify the will-

It is because it fails to note the counter-example of the clowns and Fevvers's feeling about them that Magali Cornier Michael's discussion of representation in Carter's novel, Angela Carter's

DANIEL PUNDAY 809

ingness to analyse the body into component elements and to question how they relate to each other. More importantly, Carter helps to suggest why this rep- resentational problem fascinates contemporary writers. What Carter discovers when she considers the meaning of monstrous bodies are specific problems in how narrative represents agency. In particular, Nights at the Circus suggests that there is an inherent conflict between symbolism and the representation of possible character actions. Although Fevvers is meaningful in a conventional novelistic way, she is also very much the product of an author's creative act. She is, in other words, strangely passive in the meaning that she brings to the novel. Fevvers's unifying symbolism certainly seems more capable of making a politically significant 'statement' than the clowns' self-deconstruction. Indeed, there is little reason to think that the clowns could accomplish anything like the political lesson that Carter associates with Fevvers, since Carter's purpose is to provide an image of a likely future. None the less, their anti-symbolic monstros? ity points to problems of really taking to heart and implementing the image that Carter is providing of female freedom. With the clowns Carter hopes, I think, to make readers aware of the gap between symbolic representation and 'plain fact'. In drawing our attention to the limitations in Fevver's own symbolism, Carter is suggesting that our own goal as readers?in hoping to create a neat, symbolic meaning for the novel's key elements?can work against her hope of representing the 'plain fact' of an alternative future. In other words, Carter struggles to create symbolism while granting her characters a genuine agency.

We should notice the difference between what Carter is accomplishing by emphasizing this conflict and the types of representational indeterminacies usually attributed to the monster novel. In using a monstrous body to criticize her own methods of symbolism, Carter seems to follow many contemporary critics' characterization of the traditional monster story. One of the earliest and best-known examples of this way of reading literary monsters is Barbara Johnson's Diacritics essay on Frankenstein. There Johnson declares the novel to be, in good deconstructive style, one of a number of texts that are 'tex- tual dramatizations of the very problems with which they deal'.17 When she turns to Shelley's novel, she offers the following overall evaluation of its con- cerns: 'Frankenstein [. . .] can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein. What is at stake in Mary's introduction as well as in the novel is the description of a primal scene of creation. Frankenstein combines a mon? strous answer to two of the most fundamental questions one can ask: where do babies come from? and where do stories come from? In both cases, the scene of creation is described, but the answer to these questions is still withheld' (p. 7). Building on earlier feminist work, Johnson describes Frankenstein as a novel concerned with creation in general,18 which she extends to the issue of novelistic creation as well. This characterization has become the most com- mon current way of viewing monster novels of all types. What Carter is doing

Nights at the Circus: An Engaged Feminism via Subversive Postmodern Strategies' (Contemporary Literature, 35 (1994), 492-521) does not see the limitations of symbolism in the novel.

17 Barbara Johnson, 'My Monster/My Self, Diacritics, 12.2 (1982), 2-10 (p. 3). 18 See e.g. Ellen Moers's influential discussion of Frankenstein as a 'birth myth' in Literary Women (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976).

810 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

in Nights at the Circus is subtly but significantly different. Rather than being interested in issues of creation in the abstract, Carter is concerned with how narrative shapes and limits the meaning that she can give to an entity?in this case, to a monstrous body. As a result, Carter places much more emphasis on the effect of her story and on the political problems that this type of symbolism encounters.

The Evolutionary Body

Contemporary novels use monsters, then, to investigate the paradoxes and li- mitations of narrative. When Carter balances the symbolic Fevvers against the deconstructive clowns, she suggests the direction of contemporary monster novels?towards an interest in the way that a symbol enters the world of the reader to provide an image of a real alternative future. In this contemporary interest in the 'worldliness' of novelistic symbolism19 we glimpse the potential for a radical reworking of our assumptions about narrative itself. Normally we assume that narrative offers us a 'message' by subordinating characters' actions and even their futures to some overall thematic structure. Carter's novel hints at something quite different?a way in which characters' futures might be more important than and even somewhat independent of the message that the author offers her readers. To explore this radical narrative possibility, let us consider another historical influence on the modern concept of the body, evolutionary theory, which likewise radicalizes the representational problem that we have al- ready noted. When Darwin argues that all species are transformations of earlier creatures, he suggests that every living creature is in some sense a monster. Jasia Reichardt notes that our idea of the monster likewise suggests a small but recognizable departure from past forms: 'The essential condition for a mon? ster is that the human characteristics it possesses must not be changed too far. When departure from the norm is complete, as in a caricature that has forfeited recognizability, the result will evoke fear and disgust. Transforming a person into a monster is achieved by the exaggeration of one or two features.'20 If this definition of monstrosity is correct, evolutionary mutation of particular char? acteristics is an inherently monstrous process. Recent critics have recognized how the concept of evolution radically challenges our traditional definitions of the monster. Eric White argues, for example, that 'evolutionist' cinema sees all human forms as monstrous by virtue of their hybrid nature: 'Such monstrous becomings can be understood to figure an evolutionist perspective on the hu? man body as an assemblage of non-human parts. That is, evolutionist cinema renders the body monstrous by, so to speak, re-animating hitherto latent as- pects of human nature, the genealogically prior forms of non-human life that

19 In using the term 'worldliness' I have in mind Edward Said's suggestion in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) that literary and cultural critics need to pay more attention to the fact that 'a text in its actually being a text is a being in the world' (p. 33). In other words, critics need to think about the work not as a passive object of interpretation, but as a historical part of the world upon which critics act. 20 Jasia Reichardt, Artificial Life and the Myth of Frankenstein', in Frankenstein: Creation and Monstrosity, ed. by Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion, 1994), pp. 136-57 (p. 139).

DANIEL PUNDAY 8l I

constitute what I'd like to call the menagerie within.'21 As White makes clear, evolution implies that the human body is inherently monstrous.

How does evolution affect the interpretational problems ofthe monster? Evo? lution forces readers to place the monster within a narrative context. Gillian Beer makes this connection between narrative and evolution in her influential study Darwin's Plots: 'Because of its preoccupation with time and with change evolutionary theory has inherent affinities with the problems and processes of narrative.'22 The Darwinian monster is only monstrous because of the evolu? tionary moment at which it appears. While we are supposed to see traditional literary monsters as monstrous by their very nature, evolutionary thought en- courages us to think about how such creatures point to new possible forms of body organization. Nicholas Mosley has just this Darwinian understanding of monstrosity in mind in his novel Hopeful Monsters (1990). Characters discuss the idea of hopeful monsters: 'They are things born perhaps slightly before their time; when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them!'23 Mosley makes particularly clear that we have to place the monster into context to decide if it is merely a sign of abnormality or a harbinger of new human forms. The need to contextualize the monster obviously complicates the way that such a creature can carry meaning and encourages us to read its significance in fundamentally different ways. Such evolutionary novels of monstrosity are an important subgenre of contemporary monster fiction. We might think, for example, of Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), which uses a 'monstrous' female warrior from the future, Jael, to point towards possibilities in human relations.24 Jael clearly represents one extreme version of female potential; she explicitly addresses women drawn from several earlier periods:25

It took me years to throw off the last of my Pussy-fetters, to stop being (however brutalized) vestigially Puss-cat-ified, but at last I did and now I am the rosy, wholesome, single-minded assassin you see before you today.

I come and go as I please. I do what I want. I have wrestled myself through to an independence of mind that has ended by bringing all of you here today. I short, I am a grown woman. (p. 187)

Russ suggests that 'hopeful monsters' can play many roles in fiction?not merely as a way to suggest desirable alternatives to the present (it is not at all clear that Russ means Jael to represent an ideal), but also to analyse the present by comparison with the futures that it seems to suggest.

21 Eric White, '"Once They Were Men, Now They're Landcrabs": Monstrous Becomings in Evolutionist Cinema', in Posthuman Bodies, ed. by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 244-66 (p. 244). 22 Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth- Century Fiction, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 5.

23 Hopeful Monsters (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 71. 24 Jael is described as a monster both because she fails to fit traditional definitions of femininity

('You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and antimatter': Joanna Russ, The Female Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p. 151) and because her body departs from current bodily forms?she has, for example, hidden claws and metal teeth (p. 181).

25 The women themselves are explicitly offered as variations on the same character whose dif- ferences are determined by historical circumstances. Jael remarks, 'Look in each other's faces. What you see is essentially the same genotype, modified by age, by circumstances, by education, by diet, by learning, by God knows what' (p. 161).

812 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

When evolutionary ideas about the body are brought to bear on narrative, they challenge basic assumptions about how monster novels are constructed and read. In Galdpagos (1985) Kurt Vonnegut likewise writes about 'hopeful monsters',26 but does so in a way that more clearly reveals the narrative prob- lems that come with such an evolutionary understanding of literary monsters. Vonnegut insists on approaching his characters less in terms of personal psy- chology or moral choices, and more in terms of the biology that, he claims, causes their actions. Thus it is late in the novel that he says he will 'trot onstage the only real villain in my story: the oversize human brain' (p. 167). While this passage may seem merely a poetic departure from our normal ways of speaking about moral responsibility, Vonnegut clearly intends it to be taken seriously. Many times during the novel he describes human morality as a re? sult of our biological form. Speaking from the novel's far-future perspective, where humans have evolved into fish, Vonnegut writes, 'There are still plenty of hallucinators today, people who respond passionately to all sorts of things which aren't really going on. [. . .] But people like that can't get hold of weapons now, and they're easy to swim away from. Even if they found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?' (p. 91). Vonnegut makes it clear here that the real agents of his story are biological forms, which are ultimately responsible for the actions of his human characters. Vonnegut's rather unusual storytelling method forces us to read a second narrative above the level of the usual characters and events, a narrative which provides the real motivation and causality for the story. In the process, we are forced to consider that the monster might be viewed not as a self-contained entity but as a product of our reading context. Donna Haraway suggests something of this approach to the monster when she remarks that cyborgs, often seen as another type of contemporary monster, 'have mutated, in fact and fiction, into second-order entities like genomic and electronic databases and the other denizens of the zone called cyberspace'.27 Haraway suggests?although, admittedly, she does not elaborate?that we might observe not merely concrete humanoid monsters in the mould of Victor Frankenstein's creation, but also abstract, microscopic, or electronic 'monsters'. Monsters at their most extreme, then, are the product ofthe narrative context that readers adopt.28

Although many contemporary narratives are interested in evolution, most revealing is when evolution's demand that we contextualize the body in order to make it meaningful is integrated into stories whose main purpose is not

26 Galdpagos (New York: Delacorte Press, 1985), p. 51. 27 'Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order', in The Cyborg Hand-

book, ed. by Chris Habbles Gray (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. xi-xx (p. xix). 28 The fact that the monster may in many ways reflect larger narrative forces helps to account for the occasional use of what we might call abstract monsters in contemporary fiction. Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) is typical of this subgenre. The monster of Brautigan's title haunts the house of a scientist in the American West at the turn of the century, and is described very abstractly as a by-product of an experiment known only as 'The Chemicals'. The monster is treated merely as a disembodied malicious force, destroyed only when the jar containing 'The Chemicals' itself is contaminated. Brautigan's story uses a monster in an extremely abstract way, in large part treating it as a precondition of the Gothic story formula that he mocks.

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explicitly evolutionary. As an example, I would like to turn to Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, a work with no apparent interest in Darwin but with a great deal of insight into the narrative problems that result from the need to contextualize the monstrous body. The Satanic Verses tells the story of Gibreel Farishta, a star of Indian theological epic films, and Saladin Chamcha, an Anglophile emigre to London who makes his living doing voices for television shows and commercials. As the story opens, Gibreel and Chamcha are falling from an aeroplane that has just been destroyed by terrorists. Both survive miraculously, but each undergoes a 'monsterization': Gibreel is turned into the archangel that his name alludes to, and Chamcha rapidly acquires devilish horns, hoofs, and tail. Although Gibreel is clearly transformed in many ways by his experience, this change remains primarily psychological: we are left to wonder until the end of the novel if he may not merely be hallueinating. Chamcha, thus, is the primary 'monster' of the novel, and it is through him that we see what role monstrosity plays in Rushdie's novel. Chamcha's monstrosity itself arises from his problematic relationship to his own ethnic background. He leaves his native Bombay as a teen when he is sent to boarding school in England, and his early adulthood is a story of assimilation and the suppression of his background. Chamcha's way of earning a living suggests the larger point that Rushdie is trying to make with this character. Chamcha is 'the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice': 'If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal voice for your packet of

garlic-flavoured crisps, he was your man. He made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas. On the radio he could convince an audience that he was Russian, Chinese, Sicilian, the President of the United States.'29 Rushdie's emphasis on nationality later in this passage makes it clear that Chamcha's skills are specifically a matter of ethnic impersonation. Moreover, in also using Chamcha's vocal talents to make commercial objects speak, Rushdie suggests that the audience that consumes these imitations of ethnicity is ultimately treating such people as objects sold and traded.

Rushdie uses monstrosity as a way of emphasizing Chamcha's involvement with and connection to his ethnic past, and so gives it a positive connotation. Chamcha is monstrous in two different ways. First, he is a monster from the perspective of his family and friends back in Bombay, to whom he appears to be 'possessed' by Western ideas. Chamcha's father chastises him: 'Will you spend your life jiggling and preening under bright lights, kissing blonde women under the gaze of strangers who have paid to watch your shame? You are no son of mine, but a ghoul, a hoosh, a demon up from hell' (pp. 47-48). In a second sense, the monster itself is a simple image of ethnic otherness, an embodiment of

'foreignness' for the West. Chamcha is placed in a hospital with other monsters shortly after his transformation, where he is told by other inmates that his transformation is the result of the London authorities themselves:

The manticore ground its three rows of teeth in evident frustration. 'There's a woman over that way,' it said, 'who is now mostly water-bufTalo. There are businessmen from

The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, 1989), p. 60.

814 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes where they were turned into slippery snakes. I myself am in the rag trade; for some years now I have been a highly paid male model, based in Bombay, wearing a wide range of suitings and shirtings also. But who will employ me now?' he burst into sudden and unexpected tears. 'There, there,' said Saladin Chamcha, automatically. 'Everything will be all right, I'm sure of it. Have courage.'

The creature composed itself. 'The point is,' it said fiercely, 'some of us aren't going to stand for it. We're going to bust out of here before they turn us into anything worse. Every night I feel a different piece of me beginning to change. . . .'

'But how do they do it?' Chamcha wanted to know. 'They describe us,' the other whispered solemnly. 'That's all. They have the power

of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.' (p. 168)

This long passage makes it clear that monstrosity represents the transforma- tion of ethnic 'others' in the eyes of the native British. When Chamcha is transformed into a devil at the outset of the novel, Rushdie is clearly trying to dramatize his ethnic otherization?even though, in fact, this otherization occurred without his recognition long before. Thus, monstrosity brings to the surface problems that already exist, allowing for Chamcha's reintegration with his ethnic heritage.

Rushdie is able to see monstrosity so positively because he believes that the body and culture are both inherently hybrid. Indeed, one of the principal themes of Satanic Verses is the issue of unity and diversity. Once Gibreel has been transformed into the archangel, he begins to dream (hallucinate?) the story of the birth of Islam. The appearance of a monotheistic religion in a culture that is used to having many different deities provides much of the drama for this subplot of the story. One of the men seeking to suppress the new religion reflects, 'Why do I fear Mahound? For that: one one one, his terrifying singularity. Whereas I am always divided, always two or three or fifteen' (p. 102). A page later, Rushdie makes the 'terror' of such singularity clearer by noting the interest that many groups have in keeping the system of morality and law fiuid: 'Today, female pilgrims are often kidnapped for ransom or sold into concubinage. Gangs of young Sharks patrol the city, keeping their own kind of law. It is said that Abu Simbel meets secretly with the gangleaders and organizes them all. This is the world into which Mahound has brought his message: one one one. Amid such multiplicity, it sounds like a dangerous word' (p. 103). Here unity threatens the operation of the distinct cartels that wield so much power in Jahilia. In this passage unity seems to be a desirable check to lawlessness, yet other sections ofthe book question the desirability of simple unity. The opening image of Gibreel and Chamcha falling from the aeroplane emphasizes hybridity and transformation: 'pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them' (p. 6). Rushdie seems to make a generally applicable comment on the unrecognized importance of such hybridity when a minor character remarks on the 'eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition' (p. 70). Rushdie places his interest in hybridity in the centre of the novel with the relationship between Chamcha and Gibreel, who form some sort of heterogeneous whole. Later in the novel

DANIEL PUNDAY 815

Rushdie entertains the possibility that the two represent 'two fundamentally different types of self (p. 427), Gibreel being the type that seeks to remain continuous despite is reinventions through acting, and Chamcha more willing to create selected discontinuities in his life and personality. Chamcha, at least, discovers a great deal about himself and his past by experiencing a dichotomous relationship with Gibreel. The importance of such binary relations suggests that identity is discovered through one's participation in larger, hybrid wholes. Like Carter, we can say, Rushdie recognizes that monstrosity works against unity within the novel. But unlike Carter, Rushdie embraces hybridity rather than holding up the unified symbol as the centre of the novel.30

Because he treats Chamcha's monstrous body as a hybrid with relations to others, Rushdie is moved to question traditional ideas of narrative order. One ofthe most striking characteristics of Satanic Verses is how aware characters are of the issues of storytelling. The inmates' claims to be 'described' suggest that they are exploiting this symbolism, but Rushdie makes the point even more dramatically later in the novel when Chamcha becomes a hero for immigrant protesters in London. Mishal, a young woman in the house where Chamcha hides out in London, remarks, 'You're a hero. I mean, people can really identify with you. It's an image white society has rejected for so long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own' (pp. 286-87). This passage in many ways simply repeats the kind of analysis of the meaning of Chamcha's body that I conducted above. Mishal is right, I think, to see Chamcha's form as a reflection of white attitudes. At the same time, however, we find a thematic device that we would normally associate with the level of the novel's writer and readers?who are supposed to 'get' the symbolism of Chamcha?now being recognized by the characters within the novel themselves. Rushdie has clearly sought to dramatize the many different meanings of Chamcha's body. This is not to say, as many critics have said about literary monsters before, that Chamcha is an image of simple polysemy.31 Instead Rushdie is investigating the way that a symbol like Chamcha is inserted into narrative contexts by different 'readers'. He draws our attention not to multiplicity, but to the contextualizing function of his characters and narrators. Chamcha's contextualized symbolism here is merely part of the novel's larger interest in how a story is reshaped by its teller. Indeed, Gibreel's controversial

30 Rushdie's willingness to embrace hybridity may partially depend on his non-Europeanback- ground. Indeed, Stafford notes that the distaste for hybrid creatures arose specifically in the atmosphere of eighteenth-century European rationalism (p. 214). Often works that explicitly de- part from European narrative models seem to encounter the narrative dynamics of the monster that I am describing here as less problematic. Consider, for example, Gerald Vizenor's Native- American novel Bearhart: The Heirship Chronicles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Vizenor's novel deploys a number of hybrid and 'monstrous' creatures, but specifically challenges us to avoid assigning them simple meaning. At one point, for example, a character notes that 'We were all part fish and animals in the beginning' (p. 146), and criticizes characters who turn normal bodies into a 'terminal creed' that hides the fact that 'we are all incomplete' (p. 147). Vizenor takes the clown as his hero, and suggests more generally how embracing the hybrid body leads away from simple symbolism.

31 See, for example, Judith Halberstam's discussion of the nineteenth-century grotesque in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985): 'The monster always becomes a primary focus of interpretation and its monstrosity seems available for any number of meanings' (p. 2).

816 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

history of Islam is the most important such narrative contextualization. Feroza Jussawalla has noted that Rushdie's rewriting of the story is part of the Indian Islamic tradition:

This idea of retelling the story of Islam was the project of many Indian Islamic groups? such as the Ismailis, the Aga Khanis, the Khodjas, the Bohra?predominant among the Muslim community in India, particularly in Bombay, where Salman Rushdie, Saleem Sinai, Gibreel Farishta, and Salahuddin Chamcha all originate. Their effect on Islam was a secularizing or broadening one, since many of them as converts to Islam from Hinduism brought their traditions and in a sense 'Hinduized' Indian Islam. Each of these sects chose their favorite martyr and recreated the story of the Prophet to make their martyrs, in Hindu fashion, saints.32

In Chamcha, however, Rushdie seems to push this contextualizing function to an extreme by making him function in many overlapping narratives, producing a novel that violates our assumptions about textual unity.

Rushdie's complication of Chamcha's symbolism, then, is part of an open- ended understanding of narrative. At several points in the story the characters experience themselves and each other as fiction. Indeed, Gibreel's dreams are very much a matter of watching a story unfold: 'Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and at other moments spectator. When he's a camera the pee oh vee is always on the move, he hates static shots, so he's floating up on a high crane looking down at the foreshortened figures ofthe actors, or he's swooping down to stand invisibly between them' (p. 108). Other characters likewise experience the world as a story. Gibreel's girlfriend in the later part of the novel, Alleluia Cone, is described as acting like 'a character in a story of a kind in which she could never have imagined she belonged' (p. 319). Passages of this sort suggest that the novel is a network of many narratives and symbols, each of which functions in somewhat different ways independent of the others because it has a different contextualizing consciousness. A general gloss for such narrative multiplicity comes from Alleluia Cone's father:

'The modern city,' Otto Cone on his hobbyhorse had lectured his bored family at table, 'is the locus classicus of incompatible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the omnibus. One universe, on a zebra crossing, is caught for an instant, blinking like a rabbit, in the headlamps of a motor-vehicle in which an entirely alien and contradictory continuum is to be found. And as long as that's all, they pass in the night, jostling on Tube stations, raising their hats in some hotel corridor, it's not so bad. But if they meet! It's uranium and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom.' (p. 314) The modern city seems similar to the heterogeneous narratives of Satanic Verses. Indeed, the novel climaxes with riots and fire in London, which can be seen as exactly the kind of explosion that Otto Cone describes: it is the moment when the minority unhappiness is given shape temporarily by the monstrosity of Chamcha. If this is the case, then, Rushdie has constructed a novel that circulates symbols?especially the figure of the monster?through many narratives and many levels of functioning. The result is a story that closely mirrors the image of the city described by Otto Cone. The Satanic

32 Feroza Jussawalla, 'Rushdie's Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses as Rushdie's Love Letter to Islam', Diacritics, 26.1 (1996), 50-73 (p. 63).

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Verses is a mixture of 'incompatible realities'?narrative lines created by the interpretations carried out by a variety of characters and 'narrators' within the story.

This particular approach to monster symbolism uses evolution's claim that we must contextualize the monstrous body to reconsider the nature of narra? tive. Evolution demands that monsters be placed within a narrative context that evaluates them in terms of the current norm and future morphology. Rushdie has done something equivalent: he has placed his monster into the context of many competing narratives in a way that keeps its function open-ended and does not allow it to become a simple image of abnormality. As I suggested at the outset, behind this transformation of the role of the literary monster is a larger rethinking of what it means to construct a narrative. The monster has become the occasion upon which a story can be opened up to many narrative levels and trajectories. In Galdpagos we noted that Vonnegut used evolutionary issues to create at least two layers of actors, each with its claim to be the central agents of the story. In Rushdie's novel, likewise, we see Chamcha inserted into many stories that raise fundamental questions about the perspective from which this symbol is made meaningful. Ultimately, Rushdie has created the equiva? lent at the level of his whole narrative of what Carter accomplished when she placed Fevvers's symbolism alongside the self-deconstructing clowning. Both writers are seeking to balance the monster's unifying and 'deconstructive' ten- dencies. Rushdie, however, has found in narrative's own heterogeneous mixture of many levels and many trajectories the perfect vehicle through which these two tendencies can be integrated.

Performing Monsters

Rushdie's narrative clearly encourages us to think about the fundamental models with which we approach narrative, and suggests that how we contextu? alize bodies within a narrative is a point at which a radically new style of novel can be developed. Behind the need to contextualize the body is an issue that we have already noted in Nights at the Circus?agency. Who is contextualizing and thus controlling the symbolism of the monstrous body? Clearly in Rushdie's novel agency is transformed, as responsibility for the symbolic meaning of the monstrous body is diffused throughout the novel. I suggested at the outset that the monstrous body helped contemporary fiction to think through the condi- tions of storytelling. We have seen that these conditions specifically focus on the problem of who is doing what in a story?how an author 'performs' the monstrous body and how monstrous creatures can act in rich ways irreducible to the symbolism granted to them by authors. Contemporary monster stories, then, explore the agency of narrative.

Why are monsters suited to investigating narrative agency? We have already seen a partial answer to this when we noted the author's need to contextualize the evolutionary body, placing emphasis on the author's act of making the monster meaningful. More generally, I would like to suggest that the monster is an entity created precisely by suppressing agency. It is, in other words, an object of pure being that usually embodies whatever meaning we attribute to

818 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

it seamlessly. One novel that explores the passive 'being' of monstrosity is Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, which I would like to discuss briefly by way of conclusion. Dunn's popular and controversial novel tells the story of the Binewski family circus. Al and Lil Binewski decide to breed their own freak show by systematically exposing Lil to chemicals while she is pregnant. In a perverse turn on the idea of parental responsibility, Lil remarks, 'What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?'33 Aside from several unsuccessful 'projects' that are either stillborn or that die very young, the couple manage to produce five children: Arturo, known as Aqua Body, whose hands and feet are in the shape of flippers and who lacks arms and legs; Siamese twins Electra (Ely) and Iphigenia (Iphy); Olympia (Ollie), an albino dwarf; and Fortunato (Chick), who is physically normal but who has the power of telekinesis, the ability to move objects with his mind. The story itself is told by Ollie years later after the circus is destroyed. The story allows Dunn to investigate not only the notion of family?although this is perhaps the novel's most dramatic and controversial material?but also the peculiar public position that such monstrosity creates for the Binewski family. I would specifically like to focus on the novel's comments about public monstrosity and the way that the circus's show is sustained and presented.

The Binewski family is extremely public by virtue of its willingness to display deformity to make a living. Ollie realizes, however, later in her life that there is something inherently 'public' about monstrosity: 'People talk easily to me. They think a bald albino hunchback dwarf can't hide anything. My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves. They begin out of simply courtesy. Just being visible is my biggest confession' (p. 156). In one sense, we might initially feel that such physical deformity is profoundly personal?it renders the individual unique and would seem to sever his or her experience from that of others. Dunn, however, insists that monstrosity places Ollie and her siblings in a permanently public role. And for Dunn, the purely public role that these monstrous individuals necessarily occupy makes them into pure beings. Of all the members of the circus, Arty is the one to realize the power that monstrosity brings: 'We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise. Even a rat's-ass dwarf jester got credit for terrible canniness disguised in his foolery. Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. The norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us as cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanctity' (p. 114). Arty eventually goes on to exploit this objectivity by founding a religion in which 'norms' gradually sacrifice their appendages in order to move closer and closer to the monstrous ideal represented by Arty himself. Most notable in Dunn's reflections on the public power of monstrosity is the way that it is linked to the image of pure being. Above I quoted the passage where Lil remarks that her children 'earn a living just by being themselves'. This theme reappears with surprising importance as the novel goes on: monstrosity appears to be a static object of observation, and

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (New York: Warner Books, 1990), p. 7.

DANIEL PUNDAY 819

never an actor. Arty's religion exploits a number of contemporary insecurities, among which is the fear of being ordinary; as Arty remarks, 'I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique' (p. 223). But the most important fear that he plays upon is the despair that comes with being reduced to a simple economic cog, a worker. Arty makes this point in a discussion with an interviewer when he remarks on the luxury of monstrosity: 'Consider the bound feet of the Mandarin maiden . . . and the Manchu scholar who jams his hands into lacquered boxes so his fingernails will grow like curling death. Even the Mexican welder sports one long polished nail on his smallest finger which declares to the world, "My life allows superfluity. I have this whole finger to spare, unnecessary to my labor and unscathed by it"' (p. 221; Dunn's ellipsis). This passage suggests a fundamental opposition between activity and monstrosity?the monstrous body is an object for viewing and cut off from action, especially routine mass labour.

As Geek Love builds towards its climax, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the image of pure being that Arty offers to his followers cannot be sustained; indeed, it is not even a coherent goal. The most obvious problem with Arty's plans is practical. His religion calls for initiates to move up through the ranks of holiness by gradually sacrificing body parts?usually at the rate of single joints of appendages at a time, with recovery periods between each surgery. Initiates pay an initial 'dowry' to enter the religion, and are thereafter taken care of by members of lower standing as they increasingly lose the ability to take care of themselves. But, of course, a point will eventually arise when the number of those 'completed' will outstrip the number of new members available to take care of them and this elaborate pyramid scheme will collapse. Dunn, however, suggests more philosophical problems with the pure being represented by Arty, especially when she reveals the importance of Chick's telekinesis to the religion. Chick becomes important for Arty when he learns how to use his power to manipulate parts of the brain that control pain. Later, Chick even learns how to do surgery himself, eventually making the circus doctor unnecessary. One might very well argue that Arty's religion depends on Chick's ability to facilitate the surgeries that are the basis of spiritual progression. And yet, Chick's skill in 'moving things' (p. 71) is the very opposite ofthe pure being that Arty promises his followers. Chick is, we can say, the 'doing' that stands behind and supports the pure 'being' that Arty sells to his followers. He is likewise an 'invisible' monster?a person whose monstrosity lacks the visual appeal that makes Arty an embodiment of pure being. In the end it is precisely Chick's 'doing' that destroys Arty and the circus. Arty is indirectly responsible for the twins' child (Mumpo), who is 'eating the twins'?feeding constantly to the point that the twins themselves become 'frail and bony except the four breasts that ballooned every three hours in time for Mumpo to wake' (p. 309). Elly eventually kills the child, and is in turn killed by Iphy. Confronted by this personal loss, the sensitive Chick turns his blame on Arty, who himself has played the twins against each other and had ruthlessly sought to destroy Elly. The ending of the circus and of the family as a whole is a fiery storm:

820 Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story

I [Ollie] heard nothing, but raised my hands against the rushing air, and the fire came, toppling toward us in falling blocks like the wave in a child's dream, huge, though the torches were booths and tents no taller than a man could touch with his hand. It came billowing, scorching toward us, and the Chick, in his pain, could not hold himself but reached. I felt him rush through me like a current of love to my cross points, and then draw back. I, with my arms lifted, felt his eyes open into me, and felt their blue flicker of recognition. Then he drew back. He pulled out of my separate self and was gone. He turned away?and the fire came. The flames spouted from him?pale as light? bursting outward from his belly. He did not scream or move but he spread, and my world exploded with him. (p. 319)

The circus ends in an apotheosis of the very power that sustained it invisibly throughout most of the book. The final image here of flames sprouting out of Chick is in many ways the very opposite of the monstrosity that we have seen?an active agent rather than a passive object?suggesting that ultimately the power of such monstrosity rests on action that supports it behind the scene.

Geek Love frames its reflections on monstrosity in terms of storytelling, sug? gesting that in the end this discussion of monstrous being applies to narrative bodies in general.34 Indeed, Peter Brooks has argued that the modern novel explores the body precisely through the desire for revelation and disclosure?a desire that the monster completely embodies.35 We can say that the monster story suggests that authors and readers necessarily participate in the desire to reveal all bodies as monsters?as meaningful symbols?even though doing so empties them of agency. Dunn claims that behind the monster show is an actor who invisibly sustains the monster's apparently natural and passive symbol? ism. We have seen both Carter and Rushdie reflect upon the problems of the monster's meaning, but Dunn specifically suggests that more often than not the value of monstrosity is to hide that agency, allowing writers or individuals freedom to create a creature that seems to 'speak for itself. The alternative to the ironies of creating and displaying monsters that Dunn reveals in Geek Love is the hybrid, multiple narrative that Rushdie constructs. Satanic Verses offers a way of using the performative energy of monstrous symbolism to drive the narrative itself in many directions and upon many different levels. All of the contemporary writers of monster stories find a way to exploit the problems of 'performing' the monster, however, using the figure of the monstrous body as a point where the narrative reflects on the problems of significance, agency, and narrative order. Against our current critical assumption that literary mon? sters are icons of polysemy and cultural disunity, contemporary fiction uses its monsters to challenge and invigorate the art of storytelling.

Purdue University Calumet Daniel Punday 34 The novel itself is very much a 'monster story' told to Ollie's daughter. And Ollie starts her

story by mentioning Al's storytelling about the birth of herself and her sisters, often referring to a time 'before I even dreamedyou, my dreamlets' (p. 4). This passage subtly treats the family as a created thing, a dream-like or fictive construct of Al and Lil. 35 Brooks writes, 'An aesthetics of narrative embodiment insists that the body is only apparently lacking in meaning, that it can be semiotically retrieved. Along with the semioticization of the body goes what we might call the somatization of the story: the implicit claim that the body is a key sign in narrative and a central nexus of narrative meanings': Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 25.

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Issue Table of ContentsThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. i-x+793-1064+i-xliiVolume Information [pp. i-xxviii]Front Matter [pp. i-ix]Frustrated Readers and Conventional Decapitation in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" [pp. 793-802]Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story [pp. 803-820]The Autobiographical and the Real in Apollinaire's War Poetry [pp. 821-834]"La Crmonie des adieux" and "Le Livre bris": Situating Sartre in the Text [pp. 835-849]"Il Gran Pan Non morto": The Vitality of D'annunzio's Irrepressible Critics [pp. 850-862]From Linguistic Monument to Social Memory: Translation Strategies in Philip Polack's Version of Espriu's "Primera histria d'Esther" [pp. 863-876]Fontane's "Der Stechlin": A Fragile Utopia [pp. 877-891]"Eine Sprechmaschine bin ich": Johannes R. Becher's Version of Majakovskij's "150 000 000" [pp. 892-908]Sons of the Soviet Apocalypse: Viktor Astaf'ev's "The Damned and the Dead" [pp. 909-923]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 924-925]Review: untitled [pp. 925-926]Review: untitled [pp. 926-927]Review: untitled [pp. 927-928]Review: untitled [pp. 928-929]Review: untitled [pp. 929-930]Review: untitled [pp. 930-932]Review: untitled [pp. 932-933]Review: untitled [pp. 933-934]Review: untitled [pp. 934-936]Review: untitled [pp. 936-937]Review: untitled [pp. 937-938]Review: untitled [pp. 938-939]Review: untitled [pp. 939-941]Review: untitled [pp. 941-942]Review: untitled [pp. 942-943]Review: untitled [pp. 943-944]Review: untitled [pp. 944-945]Review: untitled [pp. 945-946]Review: untitled [pp. 946-947]Review: untitled [pp. 947-949]Review: untitled [pp. 949-950]Review: untitled [pp. 950-951]Review: untitled [pp. 951-952]Review: untitled [pp. 952-954]Review: untitled [pp. 954-955]Review: untitled [pp. 955-956]Review: untitled [pp. 956-957]Review: untitled [p. 957]Review: untitled [p. 958]Review: untitled [p. 959]Review: untitled [pp. 959-960]Review: untitled [pp. 960-961]Review: untitled [pp. 961-962]Review: untitled [pp. 962-963]Review: untitled [p. 963]Review: untitled [p. 964]Review: untitled [pp. 964-965]Review: untitled [pp. 965-967]Review: untitled [pp. 967-968]Review: untitled [pp. 968-969]Review: untitled [pp. 969-970]Review: untitled [pp. 970-971]Review: untitled [pp. 971-972]Review: untitled [p. 972]Review: untitled [p. 973]Review: untitled [pp. 973-974]Review: untitled [pp. 974-978]Review: untitled [pp. 978-979]Review: untitled [p. 979]Review: untitled [pp. 979-980]Review: untitled [pp. 980-981]Review: untitled [pp. 981-982]Review: untitled [pp. 982-983]Review: untitled [pp. 983-984]Review: untitled [pp. 984-985]Review: untitled [pp. 985-986]Review: untitled [pp. 986-987]Review: untitled [pp. 987-988]Review: untitled [pp. 988-989]Review: untitled [p. 989]Review: untitled [pp. 989-990]Review: untitled [pp. 990-991]Review: untitled [pp. 991-992]Review: untitled [p. 992]Review: untitled [pp. 993-994]Review: untitled [pp. 994-995]Review: untitled [pp. 995-997]Review: untitled [pp. 997-998]Review: untitled [pp. 998-1000]Review: untitled [pp. 1000-1001]Review: untitled [pp. 1001-1002]Review: untitled [pp. 1003-1004]Review: untitled [pp. 1004-1005]Review: untitled [pp. 1005-1007]Review: untitled [pp. 1007-1008]Review: untitled [pp. 1008-1010]Review: untitled [pp. 1010-1011]Review: untitled [pp. 1011-1012]Review: untitled [pp. 1012-1013]Review: untitled [pp. 1013-1014]Review: untitled [pp. 1014-1015]Review: untitled [pp. 1015-1017]Review: untitled [pp. 1017-1018]Review: untitled [pp. 1018-1019]Review: untitled [pp. 1019-1020]Review: untitled [p. 1020]Review: untitled [pp. 1020-1021]Review: untitled [pp. 1021-1023]Review: untitled [pp. 1023-1025]Review: untitled [pp. 1025-1026]Review: untitled [p. 1027]Review: untitled [pp. 1028-1029]Review: untitled [pp. 1029-1031]Review: untitled [pp. 1031-1032]Review: untitled [pp. 1032-1033]Review: untitled [pp. 1034-1035]Review: untitled [p. 1035]Review: untitled [pp. 1035-1037]Review: untitled [pp. 1037-1038]Review: untitled [pp. 1038-1039]Review: untitled [pp. 1039-1040]Review: untitled [pp. 1040-1041]Review: untitled [pp. 1041-1042]Review: untitled [pp. 1042-1043]Review: untitled [pp. 1043-1044]Review: untitled [pp. 1044-1045]Review: untitled [pp. 1045-1046]Review: untitled [pp. 1046-1047]Review: untitled [p. 1047]Review: untitled [pp. 1048-1049]Review: untitled [pp. 1049-1050]Review: untitled [pp. 1050-1052]Review: untitled [pp. 1052-1053]Review: untitled [pp. 1053-1054]Review: untitled [pp. 1054-1056]Review: untitled [pp. 1056-1058]Review: untitled [pp. 1058-1059]Review: untitled [pp. 1059-1060]Review: untitled [pp. 1060-1062]Review: untitled [p. 1062]

Abstracts [pp. 1063-1064]The Presidential Address of the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2002The Popular Canon [pp. xxix-xxxix]

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