Werewolves, Giants, and Gulliver: Marvelous Bodies in the Posthuman Predicament

Abstract

This essay proposes to reappraise the monstrous creatures at the liminality of humanity in Gerald of Wales’s Topography of Ireland and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as marvelous bodies in the posthuman predicament, particularly at the intersection of the posthuman and the colonial. Apart from its latest theoretical sophistication and primary associations with the cyborgic human, posthuman thinking is not confined to the present century but stimulates new readings of older texts, committed to reconsidering the human itself and the human-nonhuman boundaries, challenging the unitary, normative subject of the Enlightenment, and understanding bodies of difference from non-normative perspective. This essay focuses on the different ways Gerald’s and Swift’s monstrous creatures appear to viewers, for the monstrous is associated both etymologically and cognitively with morphological transgression and constructed as such in certain frames of view. Despite the manifestly colonial agenda of the Topography as a whole, the story of the werewolves of Ossory grants them potent subjectivity in both text and illustration, and Gerald’s own intervention in the story suggests ambiguity, thus partially conceding to the ailing she-wolf demanding to die a human. In contrast, Gulliver is the first giant in the Travels whose voracious body and behavior, threatening carnage and cannibalism, embodies the very monstrous, and he further suffers a series of dysmorphic transformation. Oblivious to his own posthuman shapeshifting, Gulliver turns to all other bodies than his own the dehumanizing view of a micrographer like Robert Hook, denying their wholeness in difference. It is this Gulliverian eye that reduces Irish bodies to mere edibles, wearables, and biodegradables in A Modest Proposal. Gulliver is subjected to that very microscopic inspection by Brobdingnaggian philosophers and labelled Lusus Naturæ. It turns out that monstrosity is in the enhanced and Enlightened eye of the beholder, like the deformed eyes of the Laputans.