5 And then came … monsters

ANYA LEONARD

In chapter one of your book, you ask, what makes a monster? So I think this is an excellent starting point and perhaps we should begin there. What makes a monster?

LIZ GLOYN

Loads of different things make a monster. It really depends on what you’re thinking about in terms of what the work a monster does culturally. So are we thinking about monsters as things that help-- things that we’re afraid of, obviously. But where does that fear come from?

There’s been some really important work done in the field of monster studies about what precisely the key characteristics of a monster are. So some of those possibilities include being policing factors. So you don’t do something because otherwise the monster will get to you, very familiar one.

Categorisation things. Monsters exist because they break categories. So the Centaur in classical myth is a really good example of this. You have humans. You have animals. And then the monster is the thing that combines the two of them and breaks down the category. So they’re there to help humans articulate what category boundaries are in some interesting ways about the world.

They can be there to reinforce social norms. They can be there to help us articulate fears of the other, whoever the other might be. And what a surprise the other tends to be women, people of colour, people who aren’t like us in terms of religious background, whatever that might be. And that then becomes in its turn because the other has become monsterised-- monsterises the other, and then that sort of legitimates all sorts of unpleasant treatment on the basis of monstering. And sexual orientation, obviously, is sort of a very popular one. But I mean, it’s the social factors that come together to create monsters in some really interesting ways and monsters that are very specific to their cultures. That’s why in the modern era, we find so many types of monster that are really about a fear of not being able to spot the monster in time and a way in which we can’t see the monster at all.

So you have the serial killer. You don’t know the serial killer. It’s a serial killer until it’s too late, and the camera pans into the basement and you get the moment of revelation. You have the very closely related cousin to the serial killer, the terrorist, who is kind of weird because you kind of can spot a terrorist because often they have a different colour skin than everyone else, which obviously is a huge problem with racialising the monster.

But then, again, of course, the terrorist, you also can’t see the terrorist and they slip away. And yeah, so that pattern of racialising is sort of quite interesting because obviously people try and spot terrorists, but you can’t. You misidentify people. So again, the monster always escapes in that sense.

You have people who are-- you have films and horrors where the monster is the big faceless government agency, who looks like all the other government agencies. But when you go into the building, they are in fact engaged in some sort of horrible, I don’t know, organ harvesting or whatever it might be. Those kinds of films very much always in the Bourne conspiracy kind of stuff, that sort of end of things.

You have the virus, which of course, I say that now in the current circumstance. But so many films--

ANYA LEONARD

I know that one very much.

LIZ GLOYN

Yeah, exactly. But so many films in which the virus is the monster, the unseeable, the unprotectable. Of course, what the coronavirus does not do is turn people into zombies, which, of course, is what it does in most of the horror movies. But it’s still that same fear of the invisible.

And then the fourth kind of trope, which we’re seeing more monsters of in the contemporary world is monstrous nature. So everything that’s lovely and beautiful and wonderful. And then Mother Earth bites back and there’s a tsunami, there’s a sword, there’s a giant shark, whatever it might be.

Nature getting its own back on humans who have ignored or overseen or somehow violated the pact with nature, very much kind of the unseen monster in the idle, perhaps might be one way of thinking about it. Those are all very modern fears, and they are very much focused on not being able to spot a monster in time to respond to it, which is a very modern paranoia. Very sort of twentieth and twenty-first century fear of not being able to control stuff in a highly controlled and structured society.

Whereas if you look at classical monsters, how do you spot a classical monster? It’s got three heads. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Tails. Exactly. They’re very obvious and clear and straightforward. And so when you see classical monsters used in popular culture, they’re kind of really reassuringly retro.

ANYA LEONARD

When we think about Greek mythology and you’re saying about these differences how we're re-examining that and those deviations are showing us something about our society. But as a general question, how does studying ancient monsters and mythology help us today? Like, what can we learn about ancient monsters that will make a difference in our lives now?

LIZ GLOYN

I think the fact that people keep on going back to classical reception and keep on wanting to learn more about these stories and tell them again and what we want to-- where we want to go with these issues. And I think it tells us, I mean, this is a very hackneyed phrase, but I’ll use it anyway. That myth is good to think with.

Myth is a good way of exploring those issues and playing out those tensions and taking those rough bits in our own society and not quite thought experimenting because that isn’t quite what I’m after. But using it as a vehicle through which we express and expand our own understanding of what it means to be human.

Now, obviously, the ancient world is hugely different to ours. It’s a different country. It’s a different time. They are very different. They have different value systems. I don’t want to nod towards a world in which it’s like, well, the Greeks were just like us and therefore because they weren’t. They were not at all like us.

But through looking at the way that they construct and they understand and they think about the world, we then can use that same kind of reflectiveness to look at our own constructions, our own beliefs, our own positions and say, well, does it have to be like this really, or is there something here that we might want to unpick a bit? Does the ancient world help us unpick it? Where can we go with this?

So it’s both about mythology, of course, but also just about antiquity in general. It’s a way of helping us to critically engage with the modern world around us, and start to think through some of those issues about constructions of power, constructions of gender, constructions of race, all that kind of stuff, which, if you are unreflectively living in the moment, TM, look like they’re immutable and they should never change.

And actually, there are a lot of questions about whether the systems that we have are actually the systems that we should have. And classics and the ancient world is one way of starting to unknot some of that thread.