Monster

Monster

The monster's face.

Right off, right up front. A close-up of a monstrous face, filling the frame. The first thing we see is the monster, the face of the monster, looking back at us.

Then the camera pulls back, and while the monster remains in place, as if its gaze frozen on us, we see behind it a schoolbus. The bus stops along the curb. The door opens. Some children scatter out, then take to the sidewalk, approaching. We hear the sounds of their chatter, laughs, squeals. They don't seem to notice the hideous beast still staring at us as we see them. Then they look in this direction, almost in unison their eyes falling on it. But their manner scarcely changes. The camera pulls back more as the children move towards it. We now see the full hideous form of the beast, how it towers over the children. It wheels around. The sounds of the children increase again, and they spread out and surround the monster. They fall into a mess of action, darting at, jabbing, punching, kicking. One of them throws his books at the creature. Another picks up a stick and starts swinging at it. From their noise can be heard "ugly," "freak," "assy," etc. The bus pulls away in the background.

This story is reported to have been told as an anecdote by the author of the subject work to one of its many archivist/followers - or maybe just some friend. There's at least one version of the account that says it was an idea for a film and it's described in those terms. Whether this was supposed to be somehow part of the book or not is as apocryphal as everything else about this work. Including the author.

The work itself is called "Monster." Do we rush ahead and talk about the significance of that for the literary work, or can we even get past the

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significance of it for the very existence of the work itself? The title was meant to have been as brazen a flouting of literary behemoths as a reference to its contents. Like the monster's face right up front, a spoiler, but also a humorously redundant description of the object it labeled: a brick, a fat-ass tome, a defiance of any reader intimidation or boredom or withering for any reason, a work of epic sweep and pretension, of ambition ad absurdum; of sprawling, vast conception but also for the most narrow and squalid purposes, at once the sophomoric dropout insult to James Joyce or Marcel Proust and the literal jerking off that gave us Our Lady of the Flowers or 120 Days of Sodom.

But like so many "real" monsters - the Loch Ness, Bigfoot, the Yeti - this monster is nothing but it's legend. Nothing but that perpetual tease of the allusion. It wants to be one of the great lost works, like Dream of the Red Chamber or Pierre Menard's Don Quixote. Even that status is dubious.

There are so many layers of rumor to the backstory of the work - itself a megalopolis of forking paths, a Brobdingnagian onion - it could fill volumes alone. None of it has ever brought us to even the first person to have encountered the work or its author. Rather than plunge into that continent of anecdotes, go off again on that Arne Saknussemm chase, I prefer to use the time and space instead for what has heretofore had little coverage: the work itself - inasmuch as a literary work can exist as a constellation of ideas and associations without pages.

The discussions and debates and epistolary brawls about the origin of the fragments, where they come from, who might've added to them, what is genuine or true to form and what is incongruous or counterfeit, can go on of themselves, and will probably include this essay even though it will not address them directly. I will give some account of the result, this reconstructed or hypothetical author. But that is also towards the tack of my argument that the "work" itself - the material that in this case is of questionable material status, the array or jumble, the stuff floating around, this atomic particle pinball of puns and tracks and swipes, these wisps of things to which all solidity must fall as its precarious witness - is the construction of the author; not just what the author is creating as a product or separate from himself (or herself, as we'll see in more ways than one). The work is creating the person of the author. The project is also the projection. As Friedrich Nietzsche said somewhere, trying to explain the

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writing by what an author does in life can reach the absurdity that what the author does in life is write. Some have conjectured that the author of this work is Eddie Fish, having to do with the previous quixotic literary work I presented under the title Wishing Madness. Evidence is purportedly to be found in the last words of that work (minus closing epigraphs), which can be construed to refer to the creation of this work, with the very last word even by name1 [see "How I Wrote Certain of My Books," note 1, herein]. Assuming that is a meaning of those words, Eddie Fish nevertheless was the name presented within the material by that mysterious source and cannot be trusted as anything other than pseudonymous.

Other names that have turned up as candidates for the "Monster" author may certainly match the silly pun of that one, and perhaps suggest a connection to a common source, if not other sources who are only adding mischief. For example: Avery Cunningham. That's even less of a stretch than Eddie Fish, especially as a couplet with Ora.

The name which has gained the most currency is Emmet Hong. It has at least the air of something more incidentally, or casually, or maybe historically constructed. But, this name too can be dissected to show the contrivance, and in fact the greater degree of it - it's not just a silly pun - is making the same case, or at least argument, that the persona of the author here is very much part of the fabric of the "work" itself. The simpler wordplay is that "Emmet" is an old English word for "ant" and "hong" can be a Chinese word for "red." The significance of "red ant" will become apparent when we get into the material of the work.

But why Chinese? We've already mentioned Dream of the Red Chamber, also published in English under the title The Story of the Stone. In Chinese, it's "Hong lou meng." Not only is the story of this work, considered one of China's four great classical novels, a model for the work of Monster, as we'll show, but so is the backstory involving the author Cao Xuequin. Red Chamber has its own field of study covering the history of the author, which is itself murky; manuscripts and editions, a subject of contention like the books of the bible or the versions of One Thousand and One Nights; and the story itself and its exegsis, including sets of notes in red on early circulated manuscripts by a person or persons known as Red Inkstone. All this is known as "redology."

There is a good line - and by good we mean with a significant following, not necessarily any more credible - of conjecture around

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information that this author, or at least name, is connected to Emma Hong: that one is a version of the other, was mistaken for the other, or one was used for the other, either by a woman who used a male pseudonym to get around sexism, or a man who used a female pseudonym to, well, do something of the same, or simply to be in drag or throw off the trail. Or perhaps either name was gender neutral, like "Evelyn," or given regardless of gender, or just confused. The gender relay we will see in the "story" itself would do as much to explain any of this. There is a reference made to a note about the etymology of "orient," "occident" and the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root "ER-" that somehow refers to "EMMA," but it's not certain how this is meant - as a name, etymological particle, abbreviation or acronym. At least one account says this note is in the red Paris notebook, widely regarded as a kind of ur-source of Monster. We'll come back to that, too.

In either case, there is still the Hong part, at least one meaning of which is "red." In at least one account there is a full Chinese name version for the author, Hong Jizhi, given in native form with the family name first. As clever as this may be as further construction to make the name look plausible, it's still more of a cross-lingual code, and in more than one way. "Ji zhi" can mean machine or quick-witted, resourceful. So we have "red machine," for example, and even the sense that the story works like a machine of wit. But then there is also the expression, "hóng yán zhī jĭ," which is a close female friend or confidante. This would be the the tightest or perhaps most elegant tie to Dream of the Red Chamber, as we'll see when we unfold the similarities and particularly Monster's structure of the city of women.

A brief word about the person of this author - all that is needed to make the same point. The accounts about the author's life make him out to be anything from a failed member of a well-connected family, like Cao Xuequin, to a clerk working away his life in large firms, like Franz Kafka, or even nothing more than a shut-in with equally unknown or missing relatives, whiling away his days on an elaborate fantasy that served him more as a game or hobby than an artistic work, something like Henry Darger. One legendary anecdote has it that he (I'm going with the consensus for gender here) was once asked what he was going to do with all this writing, and replied: "Put it in a box under my bed." The work itself is meant to be a maze or tissue or web weaving together all sorts of significations, indeed like the streets of a great city, like the map of

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Chicago which in turn looks like a spider web. This is the material, the fabric, the character of the writer.

I am not a writer. I am writing.

Main thought! The individual himself is a fallacy. Everything which happens in us is in itself something else which we do not know. "The individual" is merely a sum of conscious feelings and judgments and misconceptions, a belief, a piece of the true life system or many pieces thought together and spun together, a "unity," that doesn't hold together. We are buds on a single tree - what do we know about what can become of us from the interests of the tree! But we have a consciousness as though we would and should be everything, a phantasy of "I" and all "not I." Stop feeling oneself as this phantastic ego! Learn gradually to discard the supposed individual! Discover the fallacies of the ego! Recognize egoism as fallacy! The opposite is not to be understood as altruism! This would be love of other supposed individuals!

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe

The other work serving as, indeed, a plan for "Monster," is that of Rabelais. La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, most famously translated into English by Thomas Urquhart as Gargantua and Pantagruel or The Works of Rabelais. This doesn't surface in the name of the author, but in the name of the city that is the locus of the story, Gargantron. The fact that, at least by some accounts, Gargantron is located in France is supposed to be further indication that it's more specifically referring to the work of Rabelais and not just the word derived from his giant's name. On the other hand, Gargantua is one among other sources for the central figure of "Monster," something else the title also refers to: the giant holding cities in his mouth or standing for the city or nation, or the scale of individual made up of organisms or making up larger organisms - the metaphorical, metonymical play of the organism. This would go through Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan among others.

In many respects, "Monster" would be more a plan than a story. The play of figure and scale and, as I'll show later, another key to the

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conception, the question of the individual character in art, what could be referred to as the question or matter of the protagonist, mean that if there is a main character here, it is the city. What's more, even all this - all this figuration, whether inside or outside, indeed whether there would be an inside or outside to this story or diegesis or material - would be referred to or mapped or figured by this city. In this city. It is the city, then, literally and figuratively, since the city is this figure.

According to at least one source, there was an etymological street plan: the streets having the names of linguistic parts that would then make combinations as the streets crossed, or following certain philological progressions from one to the next in the various directions. Other notes or accounts referred to the streets of the city having the names of all the literary references and influences, such as those already mentioned: so, for example, a Boulevard de Rabelais, a Swift Street, an Avenida Borges, but also Beckett Road, Nabokov Prospect, Wittgenstein Way, Place de Paré, Grimm Strasse, Via Dante, ulice Kafka, Hurston Ave., etc.

Most of the material attributed to "Monster" as the formative work, the Grundriss, such as the aforementioned red Paris notebook, but also the elusive black "accuracy" notebook, the átírótömb, and the blue and brown books, etc., suggests, if it doesn't say outright, that the maps were mostly cut-ups of other cities, bearing street names from real cities but mashed together or remixed. According to one theory, this charted a history of the author's own interactions, but across a psychological time, or even paradoxical paths representing the peculiarities of memories, such as jumps, changes, strange turns or loops. There is also ample evidence to suggest that all of these were to be used and then some, and that this plan for a city works like a palimpsest, though in that, not unlike a real city. Street names change and with enough time even geological sedimentation occurs, such as with the Louvre Castle beneath the Louvre, ruined and preserved as exhibit by the museum. The streets could thus also allow traveling in time, "returning" to events as if to places, or the locations themselves representing the iterations of visits there.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. As you can see, it's hard not to go rushing headlong at any turn, hard to stop the flow of these formations. Back a moment to the etymological plan. Another idea of the plan was that at least the major arteries of the city would be named for the taxonomic orders of insects. This falls into dispute about the chapter names, because at least one account has it the book was to be divided into chapters for the

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orders of insecta, but that further broke down into whether the chapters would actually bear those names: Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidotera, etc. There might, for example, be the same number of chapters, but the names would be for the streets in the city, however referred to, and not set down as actual headings for the chapters. But then there is the dispute over the number of insect orders, both the actual dispute over the orders themselves, in the scientific field, and then over the number of the women who collectively make up the closest thing to a central character, and the correspondence between the two. As we shall see, even the number of these characters, the size of this group or class, is disputed: which characters referred to belong to a central group, if there is one, or are incidental, and what is the criteria for that, what makes that set.

Again, we slide off into all that. But how to decide which way to go? This is also what is taken up, the order and disorder, the unraveling of the story, progression and digression, drift, and radiating or circling and doubling back, like ant scouts, whether and how representation can be the experience of the flaneur, the drifter, or how even decision or reflex works when there is no fixed or absolute order or orientation, and how all this even undermines and understands - stands under, underwrites - any progression, line, narrative.

Back again to etymology. Why insects? Isn't that "entomology"? Among the many figures in this mad rotating index, this relay of different things or orders expressing each other, is a simple malapropism of etymology/entomology. But whether that is the path that leads us to others, or is simply a result of what else comes together - well, that's impossible to say and doesn't really matter. The best way to set out the explanation of this is to simply present these two quotations, themselves part of the pavement or mosaic of the work:

Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to these limits is at once feared as a threat of death, and desired as access to a life without différance. The history of man calling himself man is the articulation of all these limits among themselves. All concepts determining a non-supplementarity (nature, animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity, etc.) have evidently no truth-value. They

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belong - moreover, with the idea of truth itself - to an epoch of supplementarity. They have meaning only within a closure of the game.

- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatry Spivak)

(The list of other(s) would also include: machine, woman, monster. As we'll show with other documents.)

For the only way we can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way we can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure, he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropolgists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

- Samuel Beckett

Now to set it out as explicitly as possible: the essential thrust, the question, that is posed by this work - even by the very idea or proposal of the work itself:

If man has always made himself the protagonist of his own drama, at least in the Western tradition, is it possible for there to be a "work" - narrative, dramatic, literary, perhaps even artistic - that does not have this protagonist, that is not this self-depiction, self-actualization of one man?

What would such a "work" look like? Would it even be a work, if heretofore the work has always been in these terms? Would it be something else, then, something other than the Western drama: a play of machine, animal, woman that is not one? Of a multitude if there is one? Can there be a or the story of such? Would it be something like a clinical documentary of insects?

From this, posed as an initial proposition, we can skip straight ahead to the rejoinder that is nonetheless already there. There is nothing but the play of these terms for anything, for any "thing," and it's in that play of even any unity, of organism or individual, as well as any collective, that we find everything this protagonism pretends to suppress. That's the drama, that's the play-acting. Nonetheless, posing the question has

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implications for any work and any "thing," for state or even existence, for becoming or development - ontology/ontogeny, another of the little word slides in the material.

This is the space where "Monster" plays. The impossible space of its very possibility. Of every possibility.

This relay of terms, roles, positions, is figuration and representation, perhaps thinking itself, but if art is the place of figure par excellence, then it is not subordinate to other discourse - philosophy, for example, or science, logic or even mathematics, something supposedly only truthful, direct, constative, non-figural - since all other discourse must also rely on this figure. The truth cannot subtend fiction because it too always requires a (larger) frame. Is art merely in the frame of a commentary about it, if that too must use a frame? Is there a mastering discourse, any statement that could ever leave the series or play of statements framing each other? Art passive to some husbandry, as if its flower would not overrun it.

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real where the unreal's real.

- Cao Xuequin, The Story of the Stone (trans. David Hawkes)

Neither fact nor fiction. Faction. Fixion. Even the distinction may be irrelevant, when just as much of this can be science as art: scale, for example, and organism. Rate and measure and ratios and powers. An individual is made up of smaller organisms and can make up larger ones. A host of microorganisms act as an individual human. A host of individual ants make a colony act as an organism. Man with a bird's eye view is as a god to look at man as an insect - machine, monster. And perhaps the other par excellence, the other who stands for all others, like the X standing for the other labels that stand for: woman.

Is this a specifically feminist view - however paradoxically that would be both impossible and invalidating by a discourse that passes itself for all others? Again, it's difficult to tell which approach or orientation, here, and perhaps because it's also irrelevant. Do all roads lead to Rome, or does Rome lead to all roads? In Gargantron? If the second sex is always left as the other even among the other others, man always identifying himself as a gender even before the distinction of gender, the fact that she is always spoken for is already saying this for her, too. Not being, she is the spoken

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for, the passing for, the moon that is always light's reflection and not its source, the medium of value never her own she can nonetheless usurp, standing for and feeling for, sympathy and empathy. She is always this matter of becoming. (More on that later.) You don't have to get it from her, or even along this line. Here is how they've said it for her:

I suppose the happiest people, and those who reach the best destination, are the ones who have cultivated the goodness of the ordinary citizen - what is called self-control and integrity - which is acquired by habit and practice, without the help of philosophy and reason.

How are these the happiest?

Because they will probably pass into some other kind of social and disciplined creature like bees, wasps, and ants, or even back into the human race again, becoming decent citizens.

- Plato, Phaedo

Of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation.

- Plato, Timaeus

This bizarre hierarchy, itself a kind of deformity, and not unlike the Chinese taxonomy referred to by Jorge Luis Borges (as cited by Michel Foucault), would have women below social insects on a value or merit scale of reincarnation, but thus somehow equivalent to an entirely separate species or even order of creature, even though supposedly only a gender of one. Why would the sexes of the other species not also be so separated in the hierarchy, and would thus social insect males, as drones, be lower? Etc., etc. - you can create your own concatenations. Gargantron is sparked by this twisted figure from the sacred foundation of Western culture as much as the more vulgar stereotype that girls think bugs are creepy. Such de-formation allows the same mix-up and cross-pollination and miscegenation and refiguration as is also carried in the wordplay whereby

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the girls of Gargantron are "in sects," which works by sound as well as sight.

Can ants, animals, machines, gods, be protagonists? Can women? The first actor, stepping out of the chorus - man standing for anyone - the subject. Can there be a story that does not have a protagonist? That has not one man. That has not one man, but a multitude of women, a swarm of others, in sects, a mass, activity not meted and plotted and protagonized, action not lined out, but the lines perpetually crossed, cut, tangled and related? An overgrown garden.

Every portion of matter can be thought of as a garden full of plants, or as a pond full of fish. But every branch of the plant, every part of the animal, and every drop of its vital fluids, is another such garden, or another such pool . . . Thus there is no uncultivated ground in the universe; nothing barren, nothing dead.

- Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology

Man, one, the protagonist, the subject, only has this part by taking part in this relay of figures, this figuration, this play and scale. Just as man is a god and a termite, astronomical and subatomic, he is also woman, by even the same route of his subsuming generalization, and certainly by communication and the entire empathetic and signifying structuration of understanding or knowing anything, as even his insurmountable, incommensurable individuality leaves him no other way to "be" - but by becoming, inferring, "acting", attempting, pre-tending, groping, surmising.

As even the story of the one. So, for example, the first, as simply the first example, whose number already presupposes another. An other. The story of "an," as indefinite article, derived as also the word "one" from Old English ān for "one," but also as a negating prefix meaning "not," "without," "lacking." Ann, the name of the "first" character in Monster, is thus also the name for one, an other, the first one, which means also simply the first in a series to be one, the person whose fate is meted out in this other direction, told backwards from the view of a place arrived at, plotted, melodrama-ed, tragedied. The at least an other - the n other, second or third or fourth, etc., each one always a first person, a second

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person and a third person - intercepts this path, but then is shown as the one in turn. Then the forking paths, other axes, the city street plan like ant or termite tunnels, the beehive, with more dimensions, a Moebius strip, the city itself capsizing, turning inside out, personae inverting, intussescepting. Gods - wo[men] - ants.

Teeming.

Not only is the city the main character, the multitude acting as the one, Gargantua who can hold cities in his mouth, but the author, too, is the city, in more than one way. As already said, the project is identifying the author as much as anything else in his life. The author is writing himself through this project/projection. But the author is also the one made up of all these others, is also this composite, is the one crawling with others. Teeming is also for being the sense of all the others. Rife, coursed with. The body is the city of the tracks and traces of all the others, the disconnected impressions like fireworks, echoes, quantum events, the image-echoes, the verging of the anguish, a reach for sensation that seems to stand away from the fingers, arms, tongue, breast, genitals, forehead . . . The taunting, haunting of the other(s). The author is the spider in her own web, and the way in which the author is caught up in the implications of the work is part of the figure of this work throughout.

The work itself is built up by this accretion, as if secretion, the teeming of life processed and redeposited, like a termite mound. Rather than represent or convey, grasp or master and use as an implement the teleology of one life, all significance carefully selected and sculpted around the subject - for one as for the other - the "work" performs this teeming, breaks up into the unchoreographed array of activity that would be singular only as a sweep or swath, an aerial shot. The work is not the overarching planned community, designed in one swoop, or a narrative executed like a monolithic philosophical system, but the various passes or runs made, flourishes, moves in a game, ludic flights or the mimicry of play, even as essay aphoristic.

Another junction that includes this teeming is the goof on fornication/formication. The latter term means the sensation of crawling over the skin by small creatures like ants, often associated with various psychological states or disorders, such as a side effect of drugs. The word derives from the Latin for ant. "Formic" acid is also a derivation, as the simplest carboxylic acid naturally occurs in ants who use it as a predatory and defensive spray. The smell of formic acid, especially cumulative at the

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ant mound or colony, is similar to urine, from whence the term "pismire," which simply means "urine ant," and thus "pissant." The latter's extension to refer contemptuously to persons came later, but perhaps not quite as directly from the sense you would think.

He is angry as a pissemyre,
Though ţat he haue al that he kan desire.

- Chaucer

The term "pissanthropist" is found in the "Monster" material. We'll discuss that more in the context of the work's many coinages and tropes, and also in relation to another source and cast of the work having to do with anthropology and warring girls.

The play with "fornication" is a parallel stitch with "in/sects" because of the homophonic play with "sex." It's perhaps more of a stretch to see - or hear - the way this is also referring to gender, but all this is interlaced in other ways. Sex itself is used as a more general figure for the way the characters relay - go in and out of each other, through each other. The physical act doesn't merely pass for the empathetic exchange, since even the sense of the act already has so much to do with that. But in the same way that these characters are rotating perspectives, and even the figure of this as the passages of the city, with Moebius strip and wormhole routes of surreal or paradoxical dimension, a snakes and ladders game operating between the literal and figurative, or perhaps merely between figurative levels or frames, the characters themselves are also passages. Everything is via, and this also through the agency of like, the via of analogy, figure, association, juxtaposition. In many ways then, "intercourse" becomes the broadest figure of all, making its various senses reverberate and even more with the literal and figurative traffic of streets, tunnels, canals and passages, of bodies through each other, different scales, genders, species, all figures figured by figure in this interchange. The puns and pun-like couplings are doing this themselves, performing as well as referring, bringing together, confusing (cōnfundere, to mix together; see confound) things otherwise separated. Of course biological reproduction is this fusion, union, merging of material that is perhaps this mixing and recombining par excellence - certainly organism - but even before consummation, intussusception, penetration, contact, there is the brush,

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the caress, the apprehension and sensation, the foreplay and here the way fornication is mixed with this formication, the sense of teeming and the teeming of sense.

Fourmi, [in French, this word for "ant" is feminine gender, une fourmi] this is not only the figure of the very small, the scale of the miniscule (small as an ant) and the microscopic figure of innumerable multiplicity, of the incalculable of what teems and swarms without counting, without letting itself be counted, without letting itself be taken in . . . The ant, the swarming of the ant is also the thing that is insect. Hymenopteran insect, thus winged insect, hymeneal insect, with veiled wings, with wings in the form of veils. It teems and swarms. The word insect participates in the teeming anthill of the word fourmi. (In parentheses, I note that all words are ants, and in this way insects, we must draw all the conclusions for sexual difference: as soon as words join in, as soon as they are a party to sexual difference or sexual difference has a brush with them, here is my hypothesis, as soon as there is sexual difference, there are words or rather traces to read. It begins in this way. There can be traces without sexual difference, for example with asexual living things, but there cannot be sexual difference without trace, and this holds not only for "us," for the living things we call humans . . .)

- Derrida, "Fourmis," Lectures de la différence sexuelle

Ants motive behavior vectors. The meditation on form action drama becomes one of the behavior of form. Observing the behavior of observing.

The hive or the termites' nest is all of a piece, and we can examine it from any angle. We can speak of a typical hive, a typical bee, a typical termitary, whereas there are as many kinds of ants' nests as there are species of ants, as many different modes of life as there are species. One can get no hold upon one's subject; one does not know at which point it is best attacked. The material available is too rich, too vast: its

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ramifications are endless; we soon lose our way, and our interest is dispersed in all directions. Unity is impossible, for there is no center. We find that we are writing, not the history of a family or a community, but the annals, or rather the ephemeral chronicles, of a hundred different nations . . .

From a certain point of view the meanest ant-hill, a replica in petto of our own destinies, is more interesting than the most formidable congeries of extragalactic nebulae, even though this contain millions of stars thousands of times larger than our own sun. It may perhaps help us to decipher, a little sooner and more effectually, the thoughts and the afterthoughts of nature, and certain of her secrets, which are everywhere identical, whether on the earth or in the heavens.

In order that we should really be interested - as it is just and necessary that we should be - in lives which are not on the scale of our own, let us imagine that we are considering the history of a pre-human race, which lived and died some thousands or millions of years before our own advent . . .

Each of us is merely a collective being, a colony of social cells; but we do not in the least know what commands, directs, regulates and harmonizes the prodigiously complex and disseminated activities of our organic life, the basis of an existence of which our consciousness or intellectual life is only an accessory manifestation, belated, precarious and ephemeral. We do not know, we cannot understand our own secret; which seems to us so obvious; how then can we hope to fathom the great analogous secret which is concealed in the colonies of the social insects?

- Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Ant

From the perspective of watching ants, there is the question of purpose, design, intent, which really all amount to perspective, inasmuch as that is perception. These two are linked, inextricably qualifications of each other. Watching behavior of the whole colony, we can marvel at the contrast to any individual ant, as if we could take the position or view of that individual. But that would immediately revert to an individual perspective ignorant of the whole, analogous to that of one individual attending to her

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own aims and routes without a sense of making up the daily current of the city, something she gets from everyone else besides her, just as to anyone else she is lumped in to that mass behavior. If we could take a place as micronauts in the ant's perspective, a single human would be more on the mass or elemental scale, like a city or weather, even its behavior abstracted by this grandeur or oversight, and if we were smaller still, by the same factor again relative to the ant, we would find the single "human" a vast realm teeming with another population, even on the surface before we entered the routes and highways, the circulatory system, or the level of cells.

And what are these levels? What is the difference, the bridge, the link or jump between these levels? From cell to organism, or even from atom to cell? This question is one that necessarily defies perspective even though that is its matter. It suspends any category by putting them all in play. Is the question biological, empirical, epistemological, phenomenological, psychological, existential, ontological, philosophical? How can we be or not be a part of this? How can we be a/part?

This is physics and fiction. Fixion. Poesis, art. It is the making that is going on.

Nothing to something. Not the arrogance of the central or paramount exemplary, but the infinitesimal, of location in all the relations. Abjection, emptying out, becomes necessary for this, generative, like dead leaves. The what for is an expanding frame that shows the limit of causality, its qualification. Instead of merely showing, it shows up the extension. This larger frame, the space of putting in play, putting things together, is poesis, the figurative or fictive "power" of signification, meaning, relation.

The cosmos is in this perception, an absolute contained and conditioned. The very abstraction of horizon, sky, heaven, limitless, unconditioned, is also a blindness.

Happening, going on, is rotated through each axis of perception. Teeming with each as rebus, intersection, hieroglyphics as animated game counters. Would it be possible to tell a story that does not chart the path in advance, that doesn't tell the past as if it's telling the future? For action to be nothing but the activity of a group that is random relative to each of the individuals, the portent of any drift being only the patterns of refrains made by individual rounds? The project of writing itself - this writing, this project, and all writing in general: cultivating as the ambiguity, ambivalence, decision, tension between forming, cutting, selecting, and

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letting, laisez-aller, laisez-faire. The sculpted garden or lawn versus overrun by flowers, weeds.

The structure of the work:

The chapters start out as if each is about a different character but also each as if independent, a singular work. As each character is described, there are also encounters with others and we see each character's perception of others, which is reversed, mirrored but refracted in other chapters. But the language itself for each builds up a kind of point counterpoint resonance or harmony, so that there is also a repetition of form even with different terms for each one. In this way the work as a whole is like a chain-work, a pattern of refrains, the repetitions making intertwining loops, like gears or lace, or like a flower. But the symmetry is also loose, rough, and suggests the kind of bend by omission, inference and relation, not the repetition of positive force, but the intervals or effects of relations. The patterns of unruliness, of disorder. De-formation. Perhaps like weeds. Again, the termite's mound. The work as a whole has thus the order of a fugue, the rhythm of poetry, with a line through it like narrative that all this grows around, but also the indiscriminate turns, jags, forks, strikes off in curved flourish angles from the main - the dérive, the drift, the distraction that supplements order or progression.

Rose briar.

Poetry - writing, pictures, music, dance - is this machineflower, fireworks (hanabi in Japanese: "fire flower"), of thinking. Associations this atomic clockwork propagation. Gridwork, lacework, web of tissue. Does it follow an order or is order simply what follows? The intricacies of the way the paths interconnect, the threads cross or come together - convenience - which is also their parting. The future extent of this question or thrust from the ant perspective, can there be a story of one's immersion? Of one's insignificance? Of the mortal oblivion - mortal absence - what happens daily "in" life as much as with one's death?

Oh You who know my secret, do not uncover me from your protection / May You protect from the consequences of Sins; with the wages of your grace pay me / Oh You who even know the crawling of the ants in the dark / You who took the misery and suffering of Job.

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- Inscription on the Aleppo room panels, Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin

This "Monster" is a tribute also to so much more doing and undoing, to leisure, lassitude, lying about, idleness, discursiveness, excursion; to play, the (non)work of women, children, indigent, unproductive; and to this principle behind endeavor or production, productivity. This is the "work" that one does as accretion, passivity, the trail one leaves of any activity regardless of intent, design, conscious mastery. This book takes into account and disrupts the process of preparing for and writing the novel. The trick also performs the thematics of the book. It demonstrates the removal. It presents the un-appearance, the conundrum of the monster that involves the etymology of the word for it.

The word "monster" comes from a Latin term for omen, portent or sign, and is related to terms like "demonstrate" and "demonstration" (cf. "monstration") and the French verb for "to show." (Ultimately it comes from a term for "to think," but we'll discuss the term more later.) As we know even from every monster movie, however, the striptease played with the beast even more than the beauty, there is always the tension about the ominous way of showing, which is usually more alluding. The illusion/allusion factor in the work and of the work, of the monster and of this "Monster," involves even that etymological sense of play and joke (Latin ludere as in "ludicrous").

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: "here are our monsters," without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

- Derrida, "Some Statements, etc.," The States of Theory (ed. David Carroll)

To play with monstrosity, to hold up even the grotesque and absurd for laughter, is carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtin expanded the medieval carnival into a literary form largely through his writings on Rabelais, and if Rabelais is material for construction of the "Monster" city, Bakhtin is part of it. Monster's city Gargantron is named after Rabelais's character Gargantua. Not only are the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel able to hold entire cities or nations in their mouth, but they also vary in size according

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to context. Amalgam, multiplicity, motley - component and function. Bakhtin's term разноречие (raznorechie), translated as heteroglossia, which means literally different tongues or languages, expresses the heterogeneity and even conflict involved in language or discourse and particularly as it would occur in the novel. A novel itself is like this agora, the market or public space, an exchange between different speeches, modes of speech, stories, jargon, accents, languages, idioms. The city is the greatest convergence of this type, conglomeration, the tangle of roads and routes and aims and tacks. It is the place of greatest traffic and encounter of cultures whereby there can be any presentation, assertion of culture, the marketplace of ideas, thus the sense of cosmopolitan as expanded society, fellowship beyond the parochial, but also the pejorative sense of sophistication as degradation, of superficial community or worse, purely exploitative relations, the human jungle. Within each language as between them are also differences along a vertical axis, of station, status, some more expressly hierarchical: high and low.

Bakhtin believed he was recovering the meaning or sense of carnival that had been lost or suppressed even by the various movements that had otherwise carried its memory, such as Romanticism. The carnival was not merely a festival, revelry or ribaldry, letting loose or debunking, grotesque bodies and misalliances. All this was part of a larger movement or sense. "Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal," Bakhtin wrote. "It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed." Perhaps one could say fixed or pat. The revaluation of all values. Perhaps the carnival was the collective form of the Nietzschean fire that melts down swords and tools and coin, to remake them.

But does this produce a conundrum? Is it possible then to have a literature of the carnivalesque, of the festival, of the market and street and public space? According to Bakhtin, any novel, any language is already this. But again, what character stands out? Is there a tragedy, a drama with no protagonist; a literature of that which does not stand out, is immersed, is not presented or seen; a recording hostile to the fixing and immortalizing it also brings off? Can anonymity, oblivion, be portrayed? As with the monster question, so for the work: the question of whether it is possible. The question of whether it exists, can exist, can be. Which is the way to express this? That may be the question of the most import. To be or be able, that is the question. (And we won't be far from Hamlet, either.)

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Another major route to the Monster city is Le Livre de Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies), of Christine de Pizan, which preceded Rabelais's work by more than a century. Christine was born in Venice, but her father was appointed astrologer to King Charles V of France, and she grew up and married there. She wrote in French and was the first woman in Middle Ages Europe to earn a living writing. The Book of the City of Ladies is also notable for being one of the first major works in defense of women, at least against works by male writers passing misogyny off as reasoning, if not the broader tradition.

At this point in Christine's dream-vision, three personified Virtues - Reason, Rectitude and Justice - come to correct the negative view of women that she has absorbed from her study of Matheolus. They inform Christine that she has been chosen by God to write a book which will refute, point by point, the misogynists' accusations against womankind. This book will be like a city, one which is designed to house virtuous ladies and to protect them from anti-feminist attack. The Virtues then go on to provide Christine with examples of past and present heroines who will form the foundations, walls and towers of this allegorical City of Ladies.

- Rosalind Brown-Grant, introduction to The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan (trans. Brown-Grant)

The figure of the city is within the book and it is the book. The book is constructing a figure which is thus also of the book itself. Because it's writing about the construction of this figure of the city, it is constructing itself as the figure of this city. The allegorical city is one and the same as its plan, and the figure cuts across the line of diegesis, across the fourth wall, so to speak, or any frame. In fact the more we speak of frame in such a case, the more we fall into this figure of construction. While allegory traditionally meant the personification of abstract concepts - here Reason, Rectitude and Justice appearing as three ladies - Christine's work demonstrates how easily the allegorical operation was expanded.

Lady Reason replied to my words, saying: "Stand up now, daughter, and without further delay let us make our way to

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the Field of Letters. There we will build the City of Ladies on flat, fertile ground, where fruits of all kinds flourish and fresh streams flow, a place where every good thing grows in abundance. Take the spade of intelligence and dig deep to make a great trench all around where you see the line I have traced. I'll help you carry away the hods of earth on my shoulders."

- Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies

Allegory makes even more interesting loops in this case because of its relation to the agora: the Greek root άγορά, the open public space, the assembly area or marketplace. The word "allegory" literally means "speaking about something else," but from the parts allos, "another, different" and agoreuein, "speak openly, speak in the assembly," public speaking, and that derived from agora. Allegory is a way of passing off something as something else, treating a subject under the guise of another in the open. It's a kind of contraband passed in the open market. The city itself negotiates all these lines and borders in exchange: across kin to neighbor often as close (separated by a wall), neighborhoods, regions, states or provinces, countries, nationalities, languages, customs, cultures, idioms. The city is commerce and exchange and communication, which in turn is exchange in all these ways, and while we could say "literally" to refer to the streets and intersections and traffic and public spaces, the squares and plazas, but also the complicated convolutions of topography itself, of inside and outside, public and private space - indoor plazas, private offices, hospitals and hotels also the very terms of which refer to the complex customs in the exchange of guest and host - once again what seems the more figurative is not really so, since the literal communication that goes on, the culture and concepts and figures, are really the activity of the city. The city is a constant relay of the other, as also it's a matter of the roles every individual plays in her interaction. The city is allegory in so many ways, before we even get to the particular allegory of Christine de Pizan's city or the "Monster" city.

Christine was influenced in her turn by St. Augustine's City of God, and likely by Dante's Divine Comedy. Though Augustine's work came a thousand years earlier, it was no more the beginning of the idea of the heavenly or supernatural place, the u-topia, Greek "no place," as Sir

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Thomas More would coin it a century after Christine (Rabelais was the first to use the term in French). Gods and ancestors had lived in these places beyond place even before Olympus. Perhaps the only difference from the express allegories was that the ideas had been handed down from generation to generation, without knowing any specific author. Augustine and Dante set down their own agency of the invention, and the written record is as important in setting their names on these works. They were architects of these ideal places. Augustine held up the city as a model, but it was the structure of the book itself, and the construction of the argument, the defense and assertion of Christianity. It was abstract and symbolic, using allegorical function but beyond being merely allegory or analogy.

In the same way, Christine de Pizan envisioned - or received the vision - of holding up women as exemplary in the form of a city. But if she had to protest being déclassé, she didn't exactly break up the classes.

It's true that there is nothing worse than a woman who is dissolute and depraved: she's like a monster, a creature going against its own nature, which is to be timid, meek and pure. I can assure you that those writers who condemn the entire female sex for being sinful, when in fact there are so many women who are extremely virtuous, are not acting with my [Reason's] approval. They've committed a grave error, as do all those who subscribe to their views. So let us throw out these horrible, ugly, misshapen stones from your work as they have no place in your beautiful city.

- Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies

Holding up, exemplarity, the fissure or tissue (weave) of identity. And for whom? What perspective or perception? Women who are proper women even for a woman, objects any less than for a male gaze, or manipulated any less than, as we'll see, girls at war over secret names - are women less objects for being subject? The subject, subjects? Can they step out of the chorus to be the actor, or to be presented, on the stage? Is there any picture, any drama, any story without doing so, that could be this immersion in "life itself"? Is there any life itself without this representation? Even if for no one but an author, the first audience,

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perhaps even that crowd and chorus and actor unto himself? Or herself? Does it make a difference whether it's Emmet Hong or Emma Hong?

Life / story. The story of life. The story of my life. Is life a story? Can there be a life without this story? Is life agon, event, act - epiphenomenon, antagonism, protagonism, drama, tragedy - or is it the else, the ipseity, pulse, oceanic mass of banal rhythms, the always going on, the passing that even stillness is?

Henry Darger, for example, wrote In the Realms of the Unreal for no audience but himself, de facto if not intentionally, imagined his armies of girls as angels with wings, and wrote himself into the work as their protector. But he also imagined - depicted both with writing and images - the torture and death of these girls. The tension between angels and monsters serves for the portrait and portrayer as well as the thing portrayed. Does it have to be lowering, kenosis, obscuring, to prevent holding or lifting up? While there may be an unavoidable favor, even if only a kind of technical one, to make anyone or anything a subject, in Monster the idea of making heroes - or heroines - or angels of these women is more suitable to the sense of female ants having wings than supernatural or eschatological beings. The biological - perhaps material is a better word - function is far more interesting, at least to the Monster author, than heavenly means of transportation.

[René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, veritable father of myrmecology] understands the importance and the significance of the nuptial flight, and is the first writer to explain why the females have wings which they suddenly discard after their union is consummated; whereas the older naturalists were convinced that the female ant grew wings only in her old age, as a sort of consolation, so that she might die with greater dignity.

- Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Ant

In the Iliad of Homer there are the Myrmidons, whom Achilles leads in the Trojan war. The name "Myrmidons" is derived from the Greek term for ant, because these people were, according to Greek legend, created by Zeus from a colony of ants. There is an account of this myth in Ovid's Metamorphosis. We'll come back to both of these.

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Character Structure

The lacing in of other for significance: the valence for the color of "life." Story. The city is the figure and it is the place of figures, the relay of figure(s). The story of the city is also the city of stories. The following passage was reputedly found in the source materials. It's not known whether it was intended to be part of the text of Monster or merely about it:

Stories in your head, always telling stories. Everything turns into this and this is what keeps you going all day. There's always a girl involved. Girls and plots. Girls are plots. Girls are the end of plots, the detour of the plot, the detour in the plot and the detour that ends the plot. Plots begin and end with girls. See a girl and it's a plot - right away a plot gets going. But follow this girl and the plot goes astray, the girl is the drift, the pure form of the plot, the aimlessness of seduction, the overcoming of end - overtaking.

The city of ladies, the city of women, or the city of girls? The lines are always crossed. Via a pop vernacular, the obsession with the "girl" or even girls, women, females, reverses the central character or figure even inasmuch as it is objectifying, an obsession that is all the more acute when problematic, shows up the most chauvinistic attitude or discourse. Via Jacques Lacan, the cast of desire as both to have and to be complicates the most reactive or axiomatic distinction as well as the sympathetic, from the misogynistic sources of Christine de Pizan, or Sade on the one hand, to Cao Xuequin on the other. The author as female assumes the same position with respect to her subject, her objects, to portray, represent, pass off, sympathize, desire, detest, objectify. For Monster, the relay doesn't attempt to avoid the problem of these positions or roles or implications, because it's also showing that they belong to the broadest gesture to reduce difference. The escape from these twists and complications and qualifications is the dream of any pure, unconditioned point of perception.

It is impossible to dissociate the questions of art, style and truth from the question of the woman. Nevertheless the

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question "what is woman?" is itself suspended by the simple formulation of their common problematic.

- Derrida, Spurs (translated by Barbara Harlow)

Another source or spark for the work, another via, is Derrida's account of Levi-Strauss's account of his field work with the Nambikwara, in Of Grammatolgy, where the frame of the anthropologist cannot fail to implicate him, even before the theorizing generalizations for all "man" - anthropos, another of the terms Monster plays with a couple of ways, "anthro apologist" and "anthro/arthro" (see below). The scene is so elaborate, contains so much of significance to Monster, that it could've been the seed by itself. Even the relay effect of it, the story, the layers and the strands that are woven, make it a nutshell diorama. For this reason, we'll let these other players tell the story here, so please pardon the longer detours. Just think of them as the roads that go into Gargantron, or as pockets, concentrations, neighborhoods or districts with their routes and ties to other places. Claude Levi-Strauss himself, special guest star of Jacques Derrida, will set the stage.

The Nambikwara make no difficulties and are quite indifferent to the presence of the anthropologist with his notebooks and camera. But certain problems of language complicated matters. They are not allowed, for instance, to use proper names. To tell one from another we had to do as the men of the line do and agree with the Nambikwara on a set of nicknames which would serve for identification. Either Portuguese names, like Julio, Jose-Maria, Luisa; or sobriquets such as Lebre, hare, or Assucar, sugar. I even knew one whom Rondon or one of his companions had nicknamed Cavaignac on account of his little pointed beard - a rarity among Indians, most of whom have no hair on their faces. One day, when I was playing with a group of children, a little girl was struck by one of her comrades. She ran to me for protection and began to whisper something, a "great secret,'' in my ear. As I did not understand I had to ask her to repeat it over and over again. Eventually her adversary found out what was going on, came up to me in a rage, and tried in her

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turn to tell me what seemed to be another secret. After a little while I was able to get to the bottom of the incident. The first little girl was trying to tell me her enemy's name, and when the enemy found out what was going on she decided to tell me the other girl's name, by way of reprisal. Thenceforward it was easy enough, though not very scrupulous, to egg the children on, one against the other, till in time I knew all of their names. When this was completed and we were all, in a sense, one another's accomplices, I soon got them to give me the adults' names too. When this [cabal] was discovered the children were reprimanded and my sources of information dried up.

- Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (quoted by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, translated by Gyatri Spivak)

While Derrida's stage is a larger context about any alleged primacy of the proper name or one of its functions, and of speech over writing, even these involve, and not only by analogy, notions of innocence, pure distinction if not purity, and violence.

The lifting of the interdict, the great game of denunciation and the great exhibition of the "proper" (let us note that we speak here of an act of war and there is much to say about the fact that it is little girls who open themselves to this game and these hostilities) does not consist in revealing proper names, but in tearing the veil hiding a classification and an appurtenance, the inscription within a system of linguistico-social differences . . .

Empirical violence, war in the colloquial sense (ruse and perfidy of little girls, apparent ruse and perfidy of little girls, for the anthropologist will prove them innocent by showing himself as the true and only culprit; ruse and perfidy of the Indian chief playing at the comedy of writing, apparent ruse and perfidy of the Indian chief borrowing all his resources from the Occidental intrusion), which Levi-Strauss always thinks of as an accident. An accident occurring, in his view, upon a terrain of innocence, in a "state of culture" whose natural goodness had not yet been degraded . . .

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The mere presence of a spectator, then, is a violation. First a pure violation: a silent and immobile foreigner attends a game of young girls. That one of them should have "struck" a "comrade" is not yet true violence. No integrity has been breached. Violence appears only at the moment when the intimacy of proper names can be opened to forced entry. And that is possible only at the moment when the space is shaped and reoriented by the glance of the foreigner. The eye of the other calls out the proper names, spells them out, and removes the prohibition that covered them.

- Derrida, Of Grammatology

Derrida plays Levi-Strauss against himself, prosecutor and defense. He uses Levi-Strauss's own words, if in a different book, to show the sort of discernment about the proper name that raises for Derrida the question of a territory pure of this division, or perhaps any other, merely because it is a culture that does not have writing per se.

"What we have here are thus two extreme types of proper name between which there are a whole series of intermediate cases. At one extreme, the name is an identifying mark which, by the application of a rule, establishes that the individual who is named is a member of a preordained class (a social group in a system of groups, a status by birth in a system of statuses). At the other extreme, the name is a free creation on the part of the individual who gives the name and expresses a transitory and subjective state of his own by means of the person he names. But can one be said to be really naming in either case? The choice seems only to be between identifying someone else by assigning him to a class or, under cover of giving him a name, identifying oneself through him. One therefore never names: one classifies someone else if the name is given to him in virtue of his characteristics and one classifies oneself if, in the belief that one need not follow a rule, one names someone else 'freely,' that is, in virtue of characteristics of one's own. And most commonly one does both at once . . ." Radicalizing this intention, it should perhaps be asked if it is any longer legitimate to refer to the

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pre-nominal "property" of pure "monstration" - pointing at - if pure indication, as the zero degree of language, as "sensible certitude," is not a myth always already effaced by the play of difference.

- Derrida, Of Grammatology (citing Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind)

We will return to this matter of monstration, indication, pointing at, when we look at the Monster language more specifically and via Wittgenstein. Girls, groups of girls, games, wars, perhaps war games, subterfuge and relay, double-crossing and secret identity, nicknames, aliases, alter egos, insiders and outsiders, implication of outsider, including the reader or writer, even as Levi-Strauss puts it, naming to identify the one who gives the name: again the author is creating his own character or persona with the work, and the characters, especially in a work so consciously formal and figural as Monster, are as much made up by their names.

But another point before we move on to that. The generalizable problem of the observer effect, not to mention manipulation, has another expression in the toy paradox. This aligns the anthropologist and his subjects, the author and his subjects, with the subject and object problem. Monster attempts to emphasize this tension that is already there. Little figures, figurines, toys. (Note also game counters, or any marks used as such.) If the toy has too much autonomy, then it is not manipulated at all, acts on its own, and there is no sense of determination in the play. It becomes a pure spectacle and can become tiresome as such. The train that runs by itself in the cycle of its track reduces to circular monotony; the cat loses interest with something whose animation shows no variance, only mechanical repetition. On the other hand, if the toy has no automation at all, then it is utterly dependent and requires constant manipulation. And it can become tiresome as such, the play becomes work. The cat can be subject to the same poles of interest, as the pet. Or the ants in an ant farm. So can any other, as a pet. Or toy. The lover. Or friend, relative. Even an enemy. Anything that is an interest can be the same conundrum which, among other ways, makes even the subject itself pass into this problem of the object. And certainly you can get tired of this very thing, which can amount to, when not in other ways, tired of the self. The ego is bound to

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this condition of the other(s), whether the despotic spasms of narcissism or the desert of separation.

The characters themselves, and organization. Do you talk about organization first? Theme first? But every spot, bit, stroke is an intersection that comes out of the context and makes up the context. The "chapters" then told from as many points of view. Is this simultaneity, succession? The "same" story? Or that many different stories? What is character and what is background, what is individual and what is environment - organ, organism, organization. Sometimes the events appear to be identifiable as in common between some of the different characters. They seem to intersect and there are complementary accounts of the "same" action or of an interaction. For the most part, however, they appear to be that many separate stories among which one might never notice that they have anything in common: a random sample of this many personae apparently unrelated except insomuch as they are in the same city. As stated before, sometimes it's not clear which characters belong to the class as the main ones, and several characters might be mentioned before it is clear which is the main one of the section. This is also because the point of view may belong to her and it's only others that are being identified.

This group or ensemble character is also shifting and relaying through a couple of other interesting agencies. One little expression from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale known as "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" (in German, "Die zertanzten Schuhe," more like "The Danced-in Shoes") serves as a big engine:

einer immer schöner als die andere

Most likely English equivalent: "each one more beautiful than the other." Depending on the version, it's in the first line of the tale, the immediate introduction of the daughters, so something like, "Once upon a time there was a king who had twelve daughters, each one more beautiful than the other." Versions and translations can vary to say "each more beautiful than the next" or "than the last." But the German says it this way, with "other," making it even less clear of any order of the daughters. And no order is stated: from oldest to youngest, youngest to oldest, how they entered the room. Even if an order is implied, or even if the vagueness could be attributed as an error or loose expression or inadvertent, the idea is still

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there, of a comparative that has no set order or hierarchy, and that allows a circularity that is paradoxical only for any strict hierarchy. Such a hierarchy would also produce a superlative, so that, for example, one daughter would have to be the most beautiful of all. The apparently paradoxical comparative subsumes the superlative then, since it works every way, for each compared to any other.

In the notebooks and preparatory material for Monster, there is the term "circular superlative." It's not known whether this term appears anywhere in the Monster text, or would have, since it's not known what is exactly the Monster text. I've followed the author and taken up this term, and further explanation of this is in the essay in the present collection titled after the term. (See "The Circular Superlative.")

The Monster author - sometimes we'll use Hong to refer to this for convenience - had already noted slack or play in comparison, its effects and implications, and particularly in works with ensembles or many characters. This is more pronounced with characters requiring superlatives, such as heroes, for example in the Iliad. Each one of the Greek heroes is described in superlative terms, but each one can't be the greatest of all of them, if there is any strict hierarchy. (Again, I discuss the further implications of this, the differences of and how this works as ideal, perception or measure, and "practical" or actual (empirical), in "The Circular Superlative.") What's more, in comparison of the Iliad and the modern-day superheroes of comic books, Hong saw how this factor more particularly expressed the way types of ability or power created all kinds of conundrums that were not reducible to imaginary distance from reality. The phrase from Grimm crystallized all this.

Monster uses this, then, not merely as incidental, but as a principle of operation. The relay of characters and perceptions follows the way perception, measure, estimation, can overlap or conflict, not just between different individuals, but within one, extending also the fractal behavior of scale, figure, organism. One made of many, or many forming a different kind of one, and each level homologous in this. Each one more beautiful than the other means each is model, and not the model. Beauty and power. Spell. Something other than power - not power and a kind of power - appeal. There is a whole cast of the female characters as fantastic, as well: supernatural, surreal, or impossible in any sort of logical or naturalistic terms. They are also marvels and pariahs (we'll see another route for this).

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