Creature, Stranger, Monster, Other panel discussion with Dame Marina Warner
Duration: 01:27:04
Join acclaimed novelist, historian and mythographer, Dame Marina Warner, for a monstrous discussion about feminism, animism, horror and folklore – with MA Writing students Fiona Glen, Hattie Gibson, Laura Robertson and Yin Ying Kong.
Originally broadcast on Twitch, Thursday 30 July 2020, 6pm BST. As part of the MA Writing Royal College of Art degree show programme #RCA2020.
︎ FULL VIDEO HERE
︎ FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE
First 7 minutes of transcript:
00:12
Marina Warner: Well I'm very pleased to be asked to read your work and to take part in this conversation about creature, stranger, monster, other – or is it creature, monster, stranger, other?
00:23
Marina Warner: The interesting thing is that in this sequence, the hidden term, I think, is self. Because we are all creatures, monsters, strangers, and to some extent others too.
00:38
Marina Warner: And the words come loaded with a history of both dread and repulsion and fascination and attraction. The creaturely, which can be perceived as monstrous, is always ambiguous and is that chain of words a progression or a prophecy laden with fear?
00:58
Marina Warner: I think I sense in it a strong current of curiosity filled with desire which leads the mind of someone reading the title.
01:09
Marina Warner: To want to know what the states are rather than feel that they're repulsive. And the stranger is a category.
Marina Warner: With which artists are especially now identified. And by artist I mean anyone trying to express themselves in a medium to represent or evoke or symbolise the world. And I think that people attempting to do this
Marina Warner:– generally artists, are identified with a stranger because ever since Rimbauld said 'I am another' – I is another – j'est un autre
Marina Warner: We have been trying to think of art as a way of projecting into other states of escaping the limits of the
Marina Warner: Of the solipsistic self. Of course, solipsism will exert its heaviness and its pressure, but in a sense that imaginative leap that we all try to make when writing
Marina Warner: Or making art is one of actually trying to see what it feels like to be someone else, to be outside. And that someone else need not be a person, it can be a stone or a river.
Marina Warner: And there's of course now also a very important aspect of the stranger, which is the ecological and geopolitical effects of
Marina Warner: Transmigrations and transcultural activities and I was reminded of a beautiful poem that actually Adrienne Rich wrote, a long time ago. She wrote in the 80s in her prophetically named collection of poems called An Atlas of The Difficult World.
Marina Warner: She begins – ‘memory says: want to do right? Don't count on me’. And then she lists various atrocities.
Marina Warner: And various acts that are actually good. One of the acts that are good memory remembers is 'I'm a table set with room for the stranger'. So hospitality to the stranger was one of the contemporary demands that we feel rightly
Marina Warner:The demand and the pressure that demand on us.
Marina Warner: We also wish we wish to embrace the possible exclusion that terms like monstrous or stranger imply, we wish to enter that space of exclusion or at least share in it with the
Marina Warner: Added difficulty these days that we mustn't feel that we are laying a claim to it or owning it in authentically, we need to empathize with that position of strangeness without pretending or making a false claim to know it.
4:00
Marina Warner: Now in the works that I read of yours two strands caught my attention most strongly and they're both associated with monstrosity and alienation from the altogether human, from the human as normative
4:05
Marina Warner: And the first is that many of you explore forms of metamorphosis, of leaving the familiar body and traveling inward or outward. Not being bordered and contoured by your familiar shapes
4:15
Marina Warner: And in myths and in religions, in many myths and religions, the interesting thing is that shape shifting is not simply a loss of self
4:33
Marina Warner: Nor is it disfigurement or degradation. It can be a resource or a potential reality. So the Jinn in the Nights, for example, who can be both good and bad. I mean, they can
Marina Warner: Bring you blessings, or they can bring you dreadful curses and they are highly metamorphic. They change their appearances their size, their identity, their voices, everything
Marina Warner: And totem animals in Native American beliefs, like the crow and the jackal and the eagle are also positive resources and the shamanistic practices also practice that
Marina Warner: And heraldic beasts, interestingly enough, in the Western tradition are also avatars in medieval chivalry, you know you wear a great bear on your head
Marina Warner: Or a great eagle on your shield to pretend that when you're in a battle that you have the power of these animals and that connects actually to YY's work
5:30
Marina Warner: And then these. Secondly, and this is a point about writing as a way of making forms of generating new forms. I felt that the importance in all, I felt the importance in all your work of a capacity for mimicry
Marina Warner: The language in which you express your different narratives and thoughts and visions as you explore your topics.
Marina Warner: Sets out consciously to imitate the shape and motion of the subjects, the syntax and grammar vocabulary, taking on the rhythms of an octopus's tentacular motion
6:00
Marina Warner: And protective camouflage. Or the fragmented and drifting that happens over a night of sleepless fears. So that the octopus is Fiona's work and the insomnia is
Marina Warner: Is yours Laura's, and more of this when we hear from each of you. And in the case of Hattie’s work there is again a mimicry of the processes of surgery of the metastases of disease in her in the actual language that she's using. So just but just finally
6:40
Marina Warner: On the general topic, metamorphosis and mimicry our capacity as sentient beings but they involve mutations in and out of non sentient states. A woman turns into a tree to escape rape in the case of Daphne
6:55
Marina Warner: And human beings appear after the flood from rocks thrown over their shoulders by Deucalian and Pyrrha
7:00
Marina Warner: When drawing on metamorphosis and mimicry language reaches towards animating matter at all levels of creation
7:10
Marina Warner: And the ecological dangers of the Anthropocene have intensified this growing sensitivity that creatures like us are feeling about matter, however, apparently inert – about wounding the body of the world.
7:30
Marina Warner: And finally, because we're now going to hear your voices. What do we hear when the stranger or the monster speaks? How do we listen to that strangeness of speech? So now I hope I'm going to hear from you exactly that.
#RCA2020
︎ FULL VIDEO HERE
︎ FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE