Where there be monsters

With her fantastic crest of curlers on, and her hair still damp from the shower, my grandmother is known at home as the Sea Monster. She chuckles when she hears this, so plainly she is a kindhearted monster. And a decorative sort of monster, the kind with which the 16th-century Swedish mapmaker Olaus Magnus peppered his famous Carta Marina, a map of Scandinavia and the seas around, "as if laying out a deluxe box of chocolates with glorious flavors and varieties, emerald green and crimson, frilled and bulbous, toothy, barbed, and serpentine". Of course, my grandmother couldn't say boo to a seagull, let alone a sailor.

The quote is from "Here Be Monsters", a very nice review essay by Marina Warner in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books. Professor Warner points out that although rich clients in pre-modern centuries often had talented illustrators add monsters to their maps, and although those monsters were imaginatively concocted from various parts of real creatures and from sailors' and travellers' tales, once those creatures were drawn into the maps they came into being, as it were, and found that they had a job to do.

Not only did the monsters fill terra incognita, the unexplored blank spaces on the maps of land and sea, they also shouldered a load of meaning. Warner explains: "[M]any of these primordial monsters are hybrids defying nature. They belong to dark places, those underworlds under land and sea - volcanoes, ocean abysses - because they embody our lack of understanding, and mirror it in their savagery and disorderly, heterogeneous asymmetries of shape. … [A]rtists conjured extremes of physical monstrosity to convey spellbound states, in which perverse desires are spoken and thrilling moral transgressions follow."

They embodied, but they also demonstrated: "The word 'monster' encloses a memory of [the Latin verb] monstrare, to show, as in 'demonstrate', and monsters were interpreted as revealing in many different ways: … the sea gave evidence of the plenitude and infinite variety of creation and the maps enriched understanding of the Book of Nature and its mirabilia." And the verb monere, to warn: "sea monsters may have embodied physical dangers, they were also frequently taken to be divine portents - Leviathans to punish the wicked or prophesy doom".

And they were large: "hugeness," says Warner, "an attribute of sublimity, is a defining characteristic of monstrosity".

Don't be fooled, these monsters did not retire with the Scientific Revolution. They are still here, even if they no longer wear the fancy dress of scales and spines. Look at any map today - best of all, look at the freely downloadable satellite imagery of the Earth's surface. Are there no terrae incognitae, no unknown, threatening, secret-bearing areas - no zones where great monsters seem to move in the deep?

You see, I'm not speaking just of obviously mysterious sites like military installations, or the eerily empty towns around Chernobyl, or the temple cities appearing out of the forest in Cambodia. Nor even of sites of extreme violence like battlefields, terrorist targets or the locations of caste, tribal or communal massacres.

No, think of other, more familiar places. Think of, for instance, the poor and crowded parts of your own city, or the ill-designed business districts that teem in the daytime and empty at night, the interminable spread of middle-class housing around the city - so much sameness. How much that is unknown and even unimaginable goes on beneath the flat surface of the page or screen? Any one of these territories offers its own dark places, its savagery and asymmetries of shape. They are all also both demonstration and warning, and they are huge and growing.

And yet, to me, one of the most frightening territories, is, on the surface, the most appealing. Central Delhi seen from the sky is almost impenetrable. The leafy green that adorns also covers; you learn little more from the sky than you would walking or driving along its featureless, nearly lifeless avenues. If I were to draw a map of Delhi today, here there would be monsters - not the decorative, allusive kind, but Godzilla and Smaug.

rraote@yahoo.com