TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081991/0819640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 66

The Uses of Monsters


By Howard G. Chua-Eoan


    Aghast, we cover our faces, confused and unable to choose
between expressions of disgust and nervous laughter. What a
surprise . . . who could have imagined . . . such horror. There
is a moment of black epiphany at the revelation of a
particularly heinous crime -- a moment that is both oracular and
inexpressible. Statistics and forensic minutiae will eventually
move in to cloud our vision. And the incessant patter of news
updates will inevitably numb us, pushing onward the boundaries
of our tolerance for atrocity. But in the beginning, as we make
out the shape of the crime, as we see it unfolding like some
putrid flower, one word sputters to our lips: "Monster." The
word applies whether the alleged criminal is a killer-cannibal
in Wisconsin who has confessed to murdering and dismembering 17
victims or 39 schoolboys in Kenya arrested for the rape of 71
of their female classmates and the murder of 19 others.

    The choice of word is instructive. Its image is not its
origin. Monster conjures up a three-headed Cerberus at the gates
of Hades. Etymologically, however, the word has few frills. It
is related to demonstrate and to remonstrate, and ultimately
comes from the Latin monstrum, an omen portending the will of
the gods, which is itself linked to the verb monere, to warn. If
a city sinned against heaven, heaven sent it a monster. One can
argue that the Sphinx, who confronted travelers to Thebes with
her famous riddle, was born of some Oedipal crime and performed
an important, if carnivorous, role in the balance of the
ethical ecosystem. Monsters, therefore, were created to teach
lessons. And they can still be pedagogical -- even in an age
that no longer believes in the gods or their messengers. Our
misfortune is that monsters need not look monstrous. Hence,
schoolboys in Africa. Hence, Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee, who,
with his strong cheekbones and broad shoulders, is not some
finny Creature from the Black Lagoon.

    If Dahmer and the schoolboys are monsters, what lessons do
they point to? Kenyan society is searching for reasons for its
nightmare. Was it "abominable male chauvinism," as a local
journalist put it, that brought on the crime? The boys, it
seemed, were taking revenge on the girls for their refusal to
join them in a quarrel with school officials. The logic: it is
all right to rape women -- to kill them even -- if they do not
obey male authority. The ability to inflict violence is the
proof of power. There is a "logic" too to Dahmer's crime. Raised
in a culture that condoned racial prejudice and despised
homosexuals, Dahmer appeared to believe he could preserve a
place in mainstream society -- with all its furtive hopes of
family, friends and future -- by destroying the evidence of his
homosexuality. He killed his "lovers" -- mostly blacks --
dismembered them, and may, in some cases, have devoured their
remains. Crime is a logical, if messy, quick fix to the
shortcomings of society.

    Is that the lesson then? That we get the criminals our
societies deserve? Yes, of course. But the other question to be
asked is, Do we ever remember the lessons? The strong emotions
of pity and sorrow brought on by horror can have a tonic
effect, thus the Aristotelian theory of tragic catharsis. But
very often, we inure ourselves to the terrible. For one, we can
choose to misread the implication. In Milwaukee, for example,
public reaction has included the harassment of local gays, the
very community victimized by Dahmer. A Wisconsin gay activist
reports receiving a phone message saying, "You got what you
deserved. You're going to get more of it."

    Modernity too has provided a handyman's bag of tools to
explain crime. Reasons range from an excess of chemically
imbalanced junk food affecting the brain and judgment, to the
violent climate engendered by certain movies, to governments
failing their impoverished citizens. While some of these provide
illumination, they can distance us from the crime. The initial
moment of revelation, the strange intimation that perhaps "I too
have sinned and somehow share in this carnage," that
responsibility is dissipated. Economics, sociology and
psychology enter. The crime deflates to a manageable size, one
that justice can work on and prisons can hide. The criminal is
buried, the atrocity tucked away.

    Can a rationalizing modernity then be so different from
15th century France? Gilles de Rais, a comrade in arms of St.
Joan of Arc, was one of the most famous soldiers in the Hundred
Years War. But he used his power as a feudal lord to commit
multiple murders with impunity. In satanic rites he sacrificed
innumerable peasant children to the devil, sodomizing their
dying bodies and preserving the heads of the "pretty" ones. In
his book The Trial of Gilles de Rais, French historian Georges
Bataille noted incredulously that the man given to butchering
infants calmly raised a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents
-- the children slaughtered in Bethlehem by Herod. Yet at his
execution Gilles de Rais exhibited so much remorse that the
crowd gathered to witness the death of a monster was completely
confused. How could God not forgive such devout penitence? It
is the Bible, after all, that promises, "Though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be as white as snow."

    That is the final weapon of monsters: they beguile us with
our own frailty. By way of science or theology, arguments
Pavlovian or Paulinian, we diminish their horrors as we seek
guarantees of forgiveness for our own capacity for error. We do
this even though we know that humanity's "errors" -- our bigotry
or anger or lust or selfishness or greed -- will go on churning
out the accursed creatures. Like our forebears, we have got in
the habit of monsters. If we are to escape their terror, we must
not distort their significance. If they frighten us, we must
remember why. Otherwise, monstrum and remonstrance fade from
memory, and we gain not even the awful lesson about the darkness
that we must each live with and subdue.