On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Monsters return in this new investigation because, as always, their various abnormalities help biologists detect the relevant expression mechanisms, both abnormal and normal. The biologist Scott Holley, for example, is currently studying zebra fish monsters in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University.31 He and his colleagues are exploring the ways that early genetic events can transform limb and body morphologies across vertebrate species. Zebra fish, especially teratological versions, are a relatively new model for studying the formation of the spinal column; humans and fish, for example, have the same genetic process for segmenting vertebrae,32 and certain spinal teratologies of the zebra fish appear to unfold similarly in certain cases of human spinal birth defects. So progress in our understanding of the fish may help us prevent or ameliorate spinal deformities in humans.

  The focus of Holley’s research is to understand how the genes express in the segmentation process (somitogenesis) of the vertebral column. The anterior and posterior axis of the forming fish begins to divide into repeated elements, called somites, which will eventually become vertebrae. Cells transcribe the gene and build the spine downward from top to bottom. The cells build the spine by dividing through mitosis and also by migrating in a distinct downward, then outward pattern. But this building process is regulated further by a “segmentation clock,” a universal biological timing system that can now be observed across vertebrate species. The growth is pushing downward, but regular oscillations are traveling upward toward the anterior of the developing fish, creating repeated wave-fronts. The waves constitute ebbs and flows of transcription activity. The wave-front, which travels one cell diameter every five minutes, tries to make somites (prevertebrae) everywhere, but the regulating clock gates the activity and thereby creates the necessary gaps between vertebrae. All of this is a complex feedback system of signals which ensures that enough, but not too much, material is growing, but also being channeled correctly. Embryo-genesis is a remarkable dance of dynamic cell division, migration, and tissue complexification, but still a relatively stable process if you back up to observe the level of body plan morphogenesis.

  Professor Holley’s group has isolated some specific zebra fish mutations in which the on/off switches are not working; the gates are not regulating properly. Malfunctions in the segmentation clock can produce too many or too few vertebrae, or lead the organism to build a spine with too much cell migration and not enough mitosis. The same mutation causes abnormal formation of the vertebral column in fish, mice, and humans.

  Professor Holley himself is not particularly concerned with the evolutionary implications of his research, but one can see how the proponents of macromutation could get very excited about it. Small adjustments in the segmentation clock could result in significant changes to the overall length of the body. And these switching systems are not just concerned with anatomical construction; they also regulate the postpartum or post-ovum growth and aging mechanisms of organisms. Neoteny, for example, is the retention of otherwise juvenile traits well into the adult phase of an animal’s life span.33 Evo-devo biologists suggest that such adjustments to maturation rates (inter- and intraspecies) could be the result of mutations in the regulating homeotic genes. These timing mutations would be selected for or against, just like smaller variations, depending on whether they conferred advantage to the organism.

  In 2006 the Swiss ichthyologist Maurice Kottelat discovered the tiniest fish in the world, the size of a fingernail clipping, living in the acidic peat swamps of Sumatra. This monstrous fish is a mosaic of mature and immature phenotypes: it has a juvenile larval body with mature gonads and pelvic fins. It is as if the sexual equipment of an adult was found on a newborn. It is unclear why such a mosaic would be selected for and preserved, but the mechanics of how mutations of aging occur are slowly becoming clearer.

  Evo-devo biologists love these weird and murky interfaces between homeotic genes, embryogenesis, and species transformations. Theirs is still very much an emerging field of study, but we have some impressive data so far. Homeotic genes regulate the development of an embryo by regulating smaller scale gene sequences, often acting like repressor molecules that bind onto specific DNA sites and block RNA transcription and subsequent protein production. Some regulating genes, such as Pax genes, are conserved over many species and orders, acting like little tool kits capable of building their same products in whatever context they appear. When the Pax genes that help build eyes are transplanted from an insect to a mouse, or vice versa, they start to build eyes in these radically new environments.

  Eight of these homeotic controlling genes are called Hox genes; they can be found in most animals as the controlling system of body morphology. These eight Hox genes are so embedded in the deep grammar of life that biologists believe they’ve been at work in our collective gene pool for over half a billion years. It is possible that these Hox gene systems cause many of the homologous body plans that Richard Owen previously obfuscated by evoking transcendentalism. If these Hox genes turn out to be the real archetypes, then Geoffroy, with his “generative laws,” may have been more correct even than Darwin, with his thesis of contingent shared ancestry.

  IN LIGHT OF EVO-DEVO, what more can we conclude about the nagging question of hopeful monsters? The scientist Sean B. Carrol seems confident that the “specter of a ‘hopeful monster’” has finally been banished by evo-devo.34 In support of the neo-Darwinian modern synthesis, Carrol claims that the gradual (nonsaltational) micromutations, together with the sifting effect of natural selection, are all that is needed to explain evolution—no appeals to jumps, leaps, sports, monsters, or macromutations are necessary. “Evolution of homeotic genes and the traits they control has been very important,” Carrol explains, “but has not occurred by different means than the sorts of mutations and variations that typically arise in populations. The preservation of Hox genes and other tool kit genes for more than five hundred million years illustrates that the pressure to maintain these proteins has generally been as great as that upon any class of molecules. Instead, the evolutionary tinkering of switches, from those of master Hox genes to those of humbler pigmentation enzymes, typically underlies the evolution of form.” In short, Carrol claims that macroevolution is entirely explained by microevolution.

  In the United States, where all evolutionary issues are still battling with ridiculous creationist claims, it is easy to understand why biologists want to present a unified Darwinian front against the looming threats of irrationality. My suspicion is that some of the current reemphasis on gradualism is due to this perceived need to cut off pathways to special creation or various miraculous evolution theories. But the idea, loathed by Darwinians, of nature jumping is not inherently incoherent. The objection that Darwin originally had, and that all biologists still rightly have, is to the idea that a jump could somehow foretell the best adaptive direction (the potentially helpful trait) and then modify accordingly to meet the niche demands. Nature cannot see that wings or extra vertebrae would be really helpful to a specific rodent and thereby accelerate an anatomical jump to wings or extra vertebrae. The reason Darwinians are so riled up by the mention of saltation is that it has historically been connected to the idea of a purposeful Nature (e.g., by Owen, Asa Gray, de Vries, neo-Lamarckians). If we strip saltation from this unfortunate teleologi-cal association we find nothing prohibitive about the idea that macromutations can strike out and take their chances, just as micromutations do, in the domain of natural selection. The vast majority of mutations, micro and macro, would be deleterious (or neutral) in the face of environmental pressure, but occasionally they might offer a slight advantage to their possessor. In any case, in a historical science such as evolution theory, which must rationally reconstruct events from deep time, the idea of successful nonteleological macromutations is at least as coherent as gradualism in the reconstruction of phylogeny.

  In the end, some of the recent debates about monsters in biology are more semantic than
substantive. If you decide to define monsters or teratologies as variations too extreme to reproduce viable offspring, then of course you’re not going to find any monsters acting as launching pads for evolutionary pathways; you’ve begged the question in your definition. But if you define monsters as extreme morphological deviations and leave it at that, the issue of whether or not there are “hopeful monsters” becomes a more empirical point.

  PART

  4

  Inner Monsters

  The Psychological Aspects

  12

  The Art of Human Vulnerability

  Angst and Horror

  Presently, I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief—oh, no! It was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE, THE TELL-TALE HEART

  THE WORD HORROR COMES FROM the Latin verb horrere, to “stand on end” or bristle. The term is often used today to designate an artistic genre that began with the gothic literature of Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818), Polidori (The Vampyre, 1819), and Irving (Sleepy Hollow, 1820) and continues to the present with such authors as Stephen King and filmmakers George Romero, Sam Raimi, and Wes Craven. But horror has also found its way into ordinary language as the name of the ineffable emotion that one experiences when one is afraid of something unfamiliar; for example, a monster, or perceived monster, induces an experience that’s somewhat different from the fear provoked by a snarling dog. Horror is both the human emotion and the artistic genre designed to produce that emotion. It is the subjective arena in which we usually encounter monsters.

  We are moving in our story from anxieties about external monsters to anxieties about inner monsters. Obviously, earlier eras felt the drama of inner alienation, but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries dredged the depths of the unconscious more deeply and tried to map their findings. In this chapter I want to analyze some of those psychological mechanisms that respond to monsters. In this way we’ll have better insight when we turn to the unique creatures ahead.

  FEAR AND COGNITIVE MISMATCH

  There seems to be some undeniable cognitive component to monster fear.1 Is a headless horseman particularly scary when compared with a moustache-less man or a hatless man because we’ve never experienced such an anomaly, or because we have some instinctual understanding that heads are essential for human life, so that the headless monster is an instance of multiple “category jamming,” both morphologically incoherent and also transgressing the categories of animate and inanimate?

  The philosopher of horror Noel Carroll invented the term category jamming and makes an argument that fits nicely with findings from developmental psychology. Experiments demonstrate that animals and humans respond to their earliest experiences by internalizing a cognitive classification system based on the creatures they regularly encounter. After a certain time, however, the classification system “solidifies” into a cognitive framework, and any subsequently strange and unclassifiable encounter produces fear in the knower.2 Categorical mismatch makes the knower very uncomfortable. Carroll arrived at his own mismatch theory by noticing that most horror monsters are disgusting as well as threatening.3 He argues that human beings seem especially disgusted by “impurity.” Things that we find impure and consider to be abominations are usually interstitial entities, in between normal categories of being. For example, blood, feces, spit, snot, and vomit all blur the usual categories of me and not me, or human and not human. Pushing this idea of transgressing categories further, Carroll extends the unsettling aspect of interstitial awareness to our experience of monsters in horror genres. The argument is made more compelling by the fact that so many monsters are depicted as truly disgusting. One thinks of the mucus-like slime oozing off most aliens, the gelatinous blob monsters, the undulating goopy transformations of shape-shifters, or the viscous twisting of monster reproduction. Carroll thinks that it is this cognitive slippage invoked by monsters that explains why we are both repelled by and drawn to horror films and novels. The fascination produced by categorical mismatches is the solution to the paradox of why we seek out an experience that is at least partly unpleasant.

  ANGST AND FEAR

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) is a name synonymous with horror, and many connoisseurs of the genre consider him the rightful heir to Poe’s distinguished mantle. His stories, such as the “The Call of Cthulhu,” were sometimes published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales during his lifetime, but his influence has been acknowledged by many, including Jorge Luis Borges, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and even a small army of heavy metal bands.

  In “The Call of the Cthulhu” Lovecraft describes a giant sea monster sleeping at the bottom of the ocean until accidentally awakened by foolish men. Allusions to Leviathan abound, but also the legends of the Kraken, the ship-smashing giant octopus or squid feared by northern sailors since at least the seventeenth century. The monster appears to draw on imagery from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1830 poem “The Kraken” in which Tennyson describes the beast’s “ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep.” Tennyson’s poem, it bears mentioning, also influenced Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Lovecraft’s monster Cthulhu is described as a green, sticky, mountain-size creature, with an “awful squid head,” “writhing feelers,” and “flabby claws.” When the monster’s head is rammed with a ship, it bursts with “a slushy nastiness” like a “cloven sunfish,” but then recomposes and regenerates of its own self-organizing power.

  Lovecraft was a master at giving us these blood-curdling monsters, but it is the emotion of eerie dread he excels in producing that I want to examine here. In his 1927 Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft argues that good horror evokes a unique subjective emotion, which he refers to as “cosmic fear.”4 There is something in the horror experience, he claims, that resonates with a deep, instinctual awe of the unknown. “The one test of the really weird,” he explains, “is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes on the known universe’s utmost rim.” Lovecraft suggests that all human beings have an instinctual awareness (some more refined than others) of the paltry state of human understanding, especially when compared with the almost limitless domain of the strange and unfamiliar. That sense of fragility and vulnerability is a major aspect of this “cosmic fear” that horror triggers in us.

  The same year that Lovecraft published Supernatural Horror in Literature, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger published his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). From quite a different starting place, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other existential writers argued that there is a radical kind of human experience, which is like fear but in a way deeper. Heidegger calls this radical dread angst (anxiety). Fear, he argued, is different from angst, because fear is a response to a definite, identifiable threat. One will have a fearful response to an assailant in a dark alley, an approaching aggressive animal, or a felt earthquake or other natural disaster. But angst is the response to an indefinite threat; the danger is nowhere in particular and yet everywhere. Like Lovecraft’s “cosmic fear,” Heidegger’s angst is an ineffable emotion of metaphysical proportions. Angst doesn’t make me aware of a particular threat, but draws me out of my ordinary utilitarian ways of operating in the day-to-day world and makes me aware of my existential quandary: Who and what am I? “Being-anxious,” Heidegger says, “discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world.”5 It places human beings into a face-to-face crisis with their own authentic potentiality. Angst is that unsettling philosophical sense that you, and every other thing in the world, are just dust in the wind.

  It is remarkable that thinkers as diverse as Lovecraft, Heidegger, and (as we’ll see) Freud were all trying to articulate a similar range of oblique irrational subjec
tive experiences—dark, unsettling experiences that could not be discursively communicated except in the poetic and visual expressions of artists. When the horror genre pushes past the simple fear-based narrative of a monster chasing a victim and instead constructs an eerie world of foreboding, it seems to cross over into this more metaphysical pessimism of cosmic absurdity. Cosmic fear or angst or despair suggests, even if only temporarily, that the world lacks the secure structure and meaning that we ordinarily assume it to have. Every horror film, and there are a lot of them, that gives us a false ending of heroic triumph over the monster, but then shifts the camera to an unstoppable legion of such monsters now on their way to wreak further havoc challenges our deep sense of a just moral fabric to the universe. The same can be said about monsters like Love-craft’s Cthulhu or Hercules’s Hydra, who take a beating, even seem to be obliterated, but then reassemble their odious slime bodies into new and improved tentacles, claws, morphologies, or even clones. Both existentialism and horror, in their emphasis on human vulnerability, are critiques of rationalist Enlightenment-based modernity.

  The description and theory of a cosmic fear, with its threatening “unknown spheres and powers…on the known universe’s utmost rim,” might be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s concept of the sublime. Sometimes we have an aesthetic experience that is both painful and pleasurable, and Kant calls this the sublime. Kant’s favorite examples usually involve huge, unintelligible magnitudes, such as contemplating the infinity of the universe as you peer out at the night sky, or experiencing some overwhelming natural disaster from a safe distance. If I am asked to think of the whole universe, I understand very well the request and I have some sort of idea of the whole universe, but I cannot actually imagine it. I imagine parts of it maybe, or I imagine some giant amorphous blob of matter contained in a larger empty space, but both of these are failures or frustrations of the imagination to follow through on the idea. “Hence the feeling of the sublime,” Kant explains, “is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imagination’s inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but is at the same time also a pleasure” because we experience (in this frustration) that reason itself has interests which are above and beyond our usual modes of experience and understanding. “In presenting the sublime in nature,” Kant states, “the mind feels agitated, while in an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful in nature it is in restful contemplation.”6 All this becomes part of Kant’s larger project, which is to make room for the higher truths of ethics and religion (i.e., the moral law and the big ideas of God, freedom, and soul) that cannot be discovered directly by the common modes of human knowledge, but that can be inferred from these universally unattainable tasks or yearnings of reason.7