Menace

Chapter 4 continues the probe of monstrosity by querying our species’ own self-aggrandizement into an unsustainable planetary presence alongside the kindred counter-response we are provoking from the biosphere, loosely figured as “climate-crisis.” But here the crisis is perhaps better composed in language as “comeuppance”—at once a re-action and rebalancing. The trek begins with a summary invocation of monster theory—especially in the work of Steven Engler, arguing for an interpretive rather than representational approach to the study of monsters that does not so much cast the monster figures found in older cultures around the globe as “figurations” for something else (race, sex, excess, transgression) but rather takes those emblems seriously in context and focuses on delineating the way the figures “signify” in that context. But in this exploration the approach will invert the scholarly gaze to ask questions about what is lost when monsters are reduced merely to objects of study (much less cinematic entertainment) and the actual capacity for “feeling” monstrosity, so carefully kept alive in more indigenous cultures, is shriveled in modern arrogance into mere fascination with “the other.” Again, the supposition here is that human monstrosity on the planet in terms of our numbers and environmental impact is today quite real and indeed outsized—as is the blowback occasioned in response. But what is missing is the communally mediated emotionality necessary to perceive such. The chapter works with a triad of theorists running from African American scholar Charles Long’s mobilization of Rudolf Otto’s Mysterium Tremendum et fascinans, through Potawatomi biologist Robin Kimmerer’s characterization of the cannibalistic Anishinaabe Windigo apparition, to Lakota lawyer-theologian Vine Deloria’s invocation of a dread Land Presence—each of the three differentially marking out experiences of monstrous “hauntings” engendering trepidation and demanding respect. Together the three diagnose what could prove to be a fatal incapacity in modern global culture to wrestle with monstrosity as a real spiritual/material eventuality and with the ecoreciprocity and sense of limitation it more readily inculcates in cultures that still narrate the danger of excess as a central trope in their collective sensibility.