The Monster in the Machine

Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart

Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). $59.95 (cloth); $20.95 (paper).

Zakiya Hanafi’s The Monster in the Machine is carefully rhetorically constructed to appeal to both general audiences and more scholarly communities. For the general audience, the book is written in lucid, highly engaging prose to narrate the story of how the "monster" (which we demarcate ourselves against) in effect becomes the machine (which we construct). For specialists in late sixteenth to early eighteenth century Italian history, philosophy of technology, or contemporary theory, the book also harnesses an immense variety of historical sources and theoretical frameworks. Hanafi’s own introductory remarks anticipate the tensions of using such an approach:

This is not a definitive or authoritative history of monstrosity in early modern Italy. It is a guided tour designed to stimulate and entertain readers who are interested in a variety of topics and issues: historians of early modern science, of monstrosity, of Baroque aesthetics, of art; literary critics of the seicento; scholars of Vico; philosophers of technology, and so on. It is a point of conjuncture for all readers who would meditate on the advent of the postmodern condition, and who enjoy doing so by looking to the pre-modern and early modern periods for the challenging metaphors that cultures provide (x).

For the most part, Hanafi succeeds at this high wire rhetorical act, which sometimes seems to resemble the movement of narrative epicycles; stories within stories intersect with other stories in a weblike fashion. Chapter 1 begins in Paris, 1826, with the startling story of how Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire removes the wrappings of a diminutive mummy, and finds neither what is recognizably an animal nor a human. As an unclassifiable hybrid—a human baby displaying "simianlike deformations"—this monster was obviously honored as a sacred animal, yet excluded from human tombs. The aim of this narrative is to show us the sacred origins of monsters as associated with the purely metaphysical world, and thus, divine will. "Monstrum and teratos, the Latin and Greek roots of monster did not signify a deformed being, but a sign in the same category as portentum, prodigium, and ostentum, terms belonging to the divinatory sciences, only migrating later through association to the natural sciences" (3).

Chapter 2 begins with Benedetto Varchi’s attempts to describe a double-bodied monster: a young woman simultaneously beautiful and ugly. With a postmodern twist, Hanafi argues that the tensions of Varchi’s descriptive attempts to demarcate the desirable from the undesirable in fact underlines their kinship. "It [becomes] a matter of indifference which one is which: we are more entertained by the fascinating conceit (or witty figure of speech) that the monster offers our imagination than we are in forming an accurate picture of it in our minds" (20). Yet the more important rhetorical point is to show how this act of description transplants monstrosity from the realm of "naturalia" to the realm of "artificilia." Most of this chapter ranges across the views of Liceti, Ficino, and Porta, in their engagement with the philosophical questions of whether monsters are nature’s "errors" or testaments to nature’s experimental profligacy. Even more strikingly, Hanafi shows that scientists and magicians occupy intersecting roles as "manipulators" of/alongside nature, breeding scientific practices and rhetorical justifications that are hybrids of Lamarck-esque pseudo-science (as in Porta’s "natural magick" recipe of breeding a race of two-legged dogs by cutting off two legs of a pair of dogs, breeding them, and if their offspring still have four legs, repeating the procedure ad infinitum) and of science and demonology (as in Liceti’s appropriation of the Aristotelian schema of generative causes to form a comprehensive taxonomy of how demons can create monsters without generating their own sperm).

In chapter 3, arguably the most compelling of the chapters, Hanafi’s central thesis is that "the sacred monster did not die out; it transmuted and migrated into mechanical contrivances" (54). What made the automaton monstrous was that it was inanimate and yet appeared to be self-moving—a potentially blasphemous phenomenon. In addition, Hanafi excavates the increasingly misogynistic characterization of the pregnant woman, displacing her from the status of the experimenter and "inverse Pygmalion" (as when a woman, by staring at a marble statue during her pregnancy, formed her son in the image of the statue) in Porta’s "natural magick" to the sphere of the experimental object whose flesh is manipulated by the wise magus (scientist as Great Manipulator) in Campanella (61-62). Yet Hanafi also shows the increasing internalization of the concept of the monstrous. Through Kircher’s dioptric or catoptric machines, the spectator "assumes the place of the monster" by watching his/her face metamorphose into an ass’s head, or a lion, among others (83). Monsters are no longer rare exceptions "out there" but reside in the most mundane, familiar, and intimate places, "in drops of water, in human blood, in fleas and spiders, on the moon, in our companions’ faces as they peer at us from the other side of the glass sphere, in our own faces as we gaze into a polished surface" (83).

In chapter 4, Hanafi continues her genealogy of the increasing medicalization, materialization, and misogyny of the social construction of the monstrous. There is a fascinating interplay binding anatomy, ethics, and myth, in the visual juxtaposition of the Lustful man and the satyr fondling Venus, revealing their physical attributes (and therefore souls) to be similar (112). Woman is now a "monster of nature," and what constitutes her monstrosity is the lack of correspondence/proportion/balance between her outer beauty and inner drive to emotional excesses (113). This is stark contrast to the male, where outer deformity is reputedly an accurate symptom of spiritual sickness, such as the "collapsing legs" of an "effeminate" man resembling bovine legs and therefore spiritual atavism (106). Yet Hanafi is careful to point out that even Descartes’ materialist thought experiment of conceiving human beings as machines is far from contemporary interpretations of what "materialism" entails. "[Descartes] simply demonstrated that [the human body] could be imagined as a machine. . . . The machine conceit thus serves as both a heuristic and an apologetic device" (128).

The detour into "Vico’s Monstrous Body" in chapter 5 occurs when Hanafi decides to examine how metaphors of monstrosity contour the rhetorical constructions of "health" and "sickness" in the body politic in Vico’s medico-political philosophy. She writes: "My line of thinking . . . goes something like this: If machines are monstrous, and the human body is a machine, then human bodies must be monstrous, too; and so, by extension, is the body politic" (135). Vico saw that the increasing popularity of the mechanistic paradigm could lead to a denial of human imagination and free will, and proposed a solution to this conundrum by transvaluing the term "conatus," a word used in the physical sciences to describe the principle of motion, into a metaphysical concept that serves as the intermediary between matter and spirit, and between human will and Divine Will. Vico stated that when the metaphysical nature of conatus is negated (as in the materialist hypothesis of the human body), the process of humanization is thwarted and monstrosity is spawned, both in the individual and in the state (137-138). Hanafi also reads Vico’s elevation of Hercules to the status of hero within his philosophy biographically: as a man persecuted by ailing health throughout his life, Vico naturally turns to Hercules as the icon of the hero who conquers, not only the monsters whose features resemble his own, but also the savage beasts that lurk within himself (185).

Chapter 6, the least coherently linked with the evolving rhetoric of monstrosity and mechanics, argues that "stupor and marvel—the same emotions that emerge when monsters are put on display and when automatons execute their mechanical performances—were in themselves monstrous affects" (186). Thus, emblems, as a hybridized genre combining a motto, a picture, and an epigram, functioned as monstrous pedagogical tools. Similarly, Peregrini warns that the beauty and power of tropes, like sirens, could lead the courtier away from the highly regulated path of "la civil conversatione" (199). Hanafi provocatively returns to the point at which she began: the image of woman as monstrous siren. "Yet the siren is at the same time a figure, a metaphor—for metaphor itself. The siren provides the form with which to represent metaphor, but the content of that form is metaphor itself" (215).

Chapter 6 perhaps best represents the simultaneous strengths and weaknesses of Hanafi’s approach. Imaginative, rich with anecdotes, and lively in its fluctuations across various stories, it illustrates the "methodological principle that [she] adopt[s] . . . of ‘seeing the connections’ (to use Ludwig Wittgenstein’s term) rather than ‘making explanations’" (x). It is certainly entertaining and engaging, but fails to make a solid justification for how this body of literature intersects with the central narrative of how the "monster" became the "machine."

Finally, much as I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, there is a major equivocation that sits right at the heart of Hanafi’s characterization of what constitutes the "monstrous." She repeatedly characterizes the monster by negation from the very beginning—"A monster is whatever we are not" (viii); "what is monstrous is simply radically other, nothing more than ‘nonhuman’" (2)—to her afterword: " . . . the monster is a concept that we need in order to tell ourselves what we are not" (218). Such a negation would explain the fear and suspicion with which monsters have been increasingly treated as their sacred origins have been sundered, but it does not adequately explain why there is a continuing fascination with and ambivalent admiration of monsters. Hanafi herself observes in her afterword: "Our favorite contemporary monster of all—the extraterrestrial—always arrives in a spaceship born from a superior technology. More often than not, we envy their superior advancement. Perhaps the truth is that we all secretly yearn to be aliens" (218). If this is so, then monsters are the liminal point of not only what we are not, but also what we are; they reveal and conceal not only what we fear but also what we hope for; and allow us imaginatively to excavate the depths of not only who we could be in relation to nature and divinity, but also who we are in relation to the daemons that lurk within.