Graphic image from the London News, 1875. A Rhinoceros Fight at Baroda. Public Domain, USA
[This is part 3 of 4. To read the other parts of the interview, click the links at the bottom of this page.]
TS: There’s a section of your recent book, The Monster in Theater History, where you’re discussing the problem of horrifying transformations, and you talk about St. Augustine’s theological account of the difference between human and animal, such that human beings—able to choose between good and evil–are suspended between heaven and hell, whereas animals are incapable of sin, but also denied the possibility of salvation.
MC: Yes, per Augustine, animals are doli incapax (incapable of sin). So, if a man were to transform into an animal, he’d be absolved of sin, but he’d also be incapable of salvation. The impossibility of this state of affairs in Augustine becomes part of the authoritative basis for the church position that such transformations are strictly impossible.
TS: This reminds me of something from my time in Silicon Valley—the idea of a forbidden state in the logic of a semiconductor circuit design. You have a circuit design that relies on a finite state machine model, implemented by way of deterministic properties of the underlying device physics. But sometimes, it is possible for the circuit to allow for indeterminacy under certain conditions, and the logic fails and the chip will latch up. So, a man turning into an animal, from a theological point of view, could be regarded as a metaphysical forbidden state case.
MC: Interesting! In this particular passage in the book, I was looking into werewolves—in the book I consider popular types of monsters from the point of view of their literary and theatrical precedents. The werewolf goes back very, very far, and is found in many places in the world. In every case, this is a type of witchcraft or shamanism that allows people to do this.
But for Christians in the Christian era, Augustine says that God created everything in its proper form, and that’s it. This was canon law up through to the 14th century, when it became politically expedient for a variety of reasons to start burning people as witches. I got really interested in the subtle logic necessary for Christian authorities to be able to do this, in these witch trials. To read a line from the book, “It is as if the nonexistence of the werewolf as a physical being constitutes just as grave a violation of the inviolable right order as an actual contravention of that order.”
TS: I think the spectacle of witch trials is a good segue back to why we are discussing this. Watching the play Rhinoceros, we the audience are watching characters in the play who are spectating these horrifying transformations. So thus far in this conversation, admittedly in a highly non-systematic way, we’ve been talking about horror. I’d like to back up, and discuss the topic of horror in your book, The Monster in Theater History.
In the phenomenology of fear that you offer up, you start by saying that fear is usually in the jurisdiction of the behavioral psychologists, but you go on to say that both psychology and theater observe and analyze human behavior—the difference is that in the theater, you have a kind of a laboratory, because you have direct representation of action which allows you to look at the representation of fear or being afraid as a subject matter.
MC: Well, I was really intrigued by a book by Joanna Bourke, called “Fear: A Cultural History.” She says that historians are actually rather hesitant to speak about fear, because they recognize it more as a psychological condition and not a historical one. But she nonetheless begins with the assertion that “fear acquires meaning through cultural language and rites.” So while we can describe fear in terms of a set of neuro-biological impulses, you know, chemicals flooding our brains that make us experience emotions, the way that we experience these emotions is very historically determined.
One of the things that I looked at was the fact that there are seven different experiences we call fear. One of them is fright. Feeling fright in response to an oncoming bus is a very healthy thing to feel. But then there are all these other types. There is anxiety, where we worry about things, and we don’t even know what we’re worrying about; we are worrying about things in the future which may not ever happen. Of course, this is not all bad either—there is often a survival advantage associated with it.
But then we have the other ones—for instance, dread. Dread is fear about something this going to happen that you can’t do anything about. That’s not very useful. Then there is terror, which stops us in our tracks and paralyzes us. There is also panic, which is just the opposite—we’re so afraid, we can’t stop moving.
TS: And these are all grouped under fear.
MC: Yes. Horror though, is something very different from all of these things. Horror is an aesthetic response.
TS: Which brings us back to the representation of emotions in the theater, the aspect of a kind of group response—spectatorship. In speaking about horror, you have some recourse to Aristotle’s account of mimesis, and presumably tragic catharsis. Are modern horror genres a successor to Greek tragedy?
MC: For Aristotle, the components of tragic experience are simultaneous feelings of intense pity and intense fear.
TS: Right. There’s usually some sort of terrible affront to the gods at the root, some hubris that fuels it—
MC: Exactly. The drama is fueled by the need for expiation of psycho-spiritual effluvia—miasma, as they would say.
TS: Oh my God, I love when you talk miasma!
[Laughter]
TS: It sort of seems like horror is an element within tragedy, something that fuels the emotions toward the cathartic response; for example, the wheeling out of dead bodies at the end of tragedies. So, it can’t be really equivalent, right? I mean, tragedy is about the collision of two equally ultimate moral demands, two calls of duty which can neither be evaded nor reconciled—how the polytheistic religious universe turns us into the gods’ playthings—
MC: Yes, in this sense tragedy is functioning overall at the level of judgment. But I would say that the idea of a spiritual miasma as something that spreads—
TS: Like wildfire…
MC: Yes—it becomes a kind of collective guilt, and I would argue that this belongs to the older cultic strata of Greek theater, from Dionysian cult worship. So the concept then becomes that we transfer all our guilt to one person, who can then be sacrificed.
TS: The jumping off point for your book in relation to this is looking at the special case of what’s going on with monsters per se, the collective experience of horror and a kind of intentional forgetting or erasure that occurs in relation to witnessing or spectating something monstrous.
MC: Yes. Absolutely. For my purposes, I want to define horror as the experience of suddenly confronting something that alters your understanding of the universe, and your role within it. I mean this in something approaching the Freudian sense of the uncanny—seeing things that ought to be dead that move around, etc. Of course, it all depends on the aesthetic context. In some cases, a doll coming to life could be regarded as gorgeous and amazing, like in E.T.A Hoffman’s The Nutcracker.
TS: Dolls coming to life always scare me anyway. Not a fan of Snuggles the stuffed bear crawling out of the laundry basket in the fabric softener commercial. You just gotta go at that thing with a poker from the fireplace until it stops moving.
MC: Well ok. But this stuff is culturally specific. The Japanese have a very different sense of what the uncanny valley is than Americans do because of a different history of understanding the relationship between the artificial and the natural.
TS: Yes, and by the same token, I think we tend to find things that the Japanese find charming to be just creepy sometimes. Uncanny valley. Is that anywhere near Simi Valley?
MC: Um, yeah…
TS: I was reading up about horror—it has a Latin root that means bristling or shuddering or something like that; one of the first questions that comes up when you think about this is whether horror is something that refers to the object of horror that horrifies, or whether it is a really something more about the subject.
It seems like this is a sort of branching moment for thinking about horror. The philosopher of art Noel Carroll writes specifically about what he calls “art horror.” This has to do with the aesthesis, or the artistic perception, of the horrifying object – so it makes sense that in the study of aesthetic experience for the most part, one would tend toward a focus on the object. And there seems to be two kinds of literature on aesthetic horror. There’s the study of horror genres in literature and film. So you have your body snatchers allegory, and other things that have to do with the aesthesis of the horrifying object—representations of defilement, abomination, violation of naturalness, cannibalism, etc.
But there is also a parallel literature that has to do with thinking about the image, criticism about images of actual horrifying events in the world. This includes work on the image by Susan Sontag, and other people like Adriana Cavarero, that concerns images of lynchings, the holocaust, and what is going on when we are spectators to these kinds of things. Among other things, this debate appears to be about the significance of the non-catharsis of these images—what does it mean that we respond to these images aesthetically, but not morally or politically?
MC: The issues around “art in the service of forgetting” versus “art as having a potential to create a kind of political praxis in the modern, capitalist technological age” are extremely complex…
TS: I do realize that. I guess I’m trying to get at the question of different types of horror by circling around this issue of forgetting and erasure in aesthetic horror, in monster horror, because I think it points beyond itself in some sense. I guess I’m trying to get us to expand on the significance of your claim that horror has to do with challenging our view of how the universe works.
There’s this line from Stanley Cavell in The Claim of Reason where he gives the name horror to the perception of the “precariousness of human identity,” to the perception that “it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become something other than who we are and who we take ourselves to be.” Would it be correct to say that this falls within your description, then?
MC: Absolutely. Some psychologists say that we basically fear three things—the unknown, loss, and death. Phenomenologically, the universe is happening around us in ways we can’t possibly comprehend. We are ordering our perceptions in ways that we hope we can control so that we can get on with our lives.
TS: Got it. So we can see how the displacement that occurs with monsters is related to the whole question of the precariousness of human identity, fear of loss, and death.
MC: Yes. In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach talks about this, and I discuss it a lot in my book as well. He calls it surrogation. This concept is very important in the theater because it has to do with substitution along with an erasure of the fact that the substituted thing is not the thing that is missing. Roach says that this kind of thing directs our attention of the thing that’s causing the fear.
In The Monster in Theater History, I make the claim that with monsters, we see a kind of surrogation that is trying to cope with social anxiety, with the idea that we are lacking a perfect, harmonious, and unified community. The surrogation of the monster alleviates anxiety by directing attention away from the imaginary center of society and toward the imaginary margins where it can examine these various sorts of collisions through what turn out to be essentially public acts of forgetting. This, in my view, is what monsters in the theater are “up to” as we watch them unfold their horrific plots.
[To read the final part of this interview, click on the link below for part 4: “Interview part 4, Rhinoceros, Moral Horror & the Sublime.”]
Complete Series
