Véronique Campion-Vincent | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 22, 2000

Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman. Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock, London, Chatto & Windus, 1998; New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999, 435 p.

Marina Warner (novelist and historian, whose previous studies link cultural studies and folklore Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, 1976 From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, 1995) gives here a very rich study on the figures of fear, mostly male, always very present in contemporary culture. This book has received the Katharine Briggs Award, in 1999.

Myths and lullabies, stories and songs, pictures and movies, all the expressions of learned and popular cultures are reviewed during the three parts of this book: Scaring, Lulling, Making Mock. MW takes the reader on a tour to the lands of fear, through cultures, eras and levels.

The chapters of the first part ‘Scaring’ review the themes of terror, emphasizing their extensions on the side of cannibalism: ‘Here comes the bogeyman’ (23-47), ‘My father he ate me’ (53-77), ‘The Polyp and the Cyclops’ (82-93), ‘The devil’s banquet’ (95-115), ‘Hoc est corpus’ [Corpus Christi feast] (126-135) ‘Now… we can begin to feed’ (136-159) ‘Terrors properly applied’ [Fear-based education] (160-183). They are intertwined with three interludes called ‘Reflections’, where MW comments a painting by Goya, ‘Saturn devouring his child’ (48-52), a sculpture representing the antique monster Scylla seizing Odysseus’s men (78-81), the feast ‘Patum’ a carnival filled with monsters, devils and frightening masks, of the small mountain town of Berga, Catalonia, in 1996 (116-125).

A detailed presentation of the first chapter ‘Here comes the bogeyman’ will show the extreme diversity of the themes approached in this book: an evocation of Goethe’s King of the Alders poem (1782), is followed by the presentation of a contemporary folkloric version in Devon (Dartmoor): the demon huntsman Dewer, and an evocation of one of Angela Carter’s tales in The Bloody Chamber (1975). Several tales and figures of “child-stealers, night-raiders, cradle-snatchers” are then reviewed (from the omo nero to the Baba Yaga going through the Pied Piper, the Sandman and, of course, the Bogeyman), MW discussing in parallel Classical myths, characters of folklore, and the multiple literary elaborations built upon them (Hoffmann’s fairy tale The Sandman (1817), Charles Perrault, Lewis Carroll, but also Michel Tournier (1970 Le roi des Aulnes revisiting the King of the Alders legend in a wartime German setting), Doris Lessing (1988, The Fifth Child), David Lynch (Blue Velvet) and Angela Carter). After a linguistic and phonologic detour upon the origin and evolution of ‘Bogy’ and ‘Bogeyman’, MW recalls that several folktales stage heroes that triumph over monsters, from Odysseus to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ through Tom Thumb. The chapter closes upon a picture of the fictional cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter (hero of “Silence of the lambs”). [This description had to leave out several of the references alluded to by MW].

‘Lulling’ opens with ‘Reflections’ commenting Caravaggio’s painting, ‘The rest on the flight into Egypt’ (186-191). This part is fully dedicated to lullabies and their multiple functions, studied in the three chapters ‘Sing now mother… what me shall befall’ (192-207), ‘Herod the king, in his raging’ (208-233), ‘And thou, oh nightengale’ [Myths of the childish or adult female victim’s return as a nightingale] (224-237).

The five chapters of the third part ‘Making Mock’ will bring discoveries to the reader, especially in the cultural history dimension of the book. This part opens upon ‘Reflections’ commenting Desprez’s engraving of ‘The Chimera’ (1777), and another set of ‘Reflections’ on the well-known series of Albert Eckhout’s Brazilian portraits introduces the last chapter. ‘In the genre of the monstrous’ (246-261) reflects upon the promotion of the horrible and the monstrous, which have become entertainment in contemporary mass culture. ‘Circe’s swine: wizard and brute’ (262-283) evokes animal metamorphoses and presents the character of Gryllus, created by Plutarch, victim of Circe become swine who energetically refuses the return to human shape he is offered. Gryllus reappears in ‘All my business is my song’ (284-301), but under the shape of the cricket, perpetually singing animal, minute grotesque carved in antique gems endowed with magical powers, and also present in the edges of ancient manuscripts where it parodies men. The happy little singing animal has been utilized in literature, from La Fontaine’s cicada to il grillo parlante of Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883). These utilizations are detailed in this chapter that enlarges on to the role of monstrous characters in the fantastic genres. ‘Fee, fie, fo, fum’ (302-325) returns to folklore with an evocation of the folktales ogres and of the part they play in Basile (1633-36 Il Pentamerone) and Perrault (1697 Contes du temps passé) where they are frequently outwitted and killed by young heroes, male and female. At the beginning of the 19th century, the adaptations and commentaries of folktales by radical rationalist atheist philosopher William Goodwin (father of Mary Shelley) are, tells MW, an early example of political correctness, a strategy “to use fiction and fantasy to introduce children to ideas and thinking and to rationalize their fears”. ‘Of the paltriness of things’ (326-339) develops the figures of mockery and humour that set the ogre and the bogeyman in a ridiculous posture, reduced to nothing by laughter and ruse. The frequent identification ogre/stranger takes MW to examine racist humour, insults and jokes, and the replicas reversing the situation when the blacks accused of cannibalism “take the insults and turn them into a means of defiance” posing as cannibals in calypso songs for example. ‘Going bananas’ (340-373) follows the meanders of parodic inversion through the theme of the banana in contemporary humour. A multiple symbol: phallic signifier, epitomizing the natural plenitude assigned to the tropics (to their bountiful nature as well as to their oversexed inhabitants), the banana has been utilized since the twenties in music hall (they constituted Joséphine Baker’s costume in the Revue nègre of 1926) and the reader will discover the multiplicity of its contemporary uses: racist insult (some English football fans through bananas onto the pitch in abusive mockery at a rejected black player) but also elective food for athletes, base of an economical activity basic to the Caribbean and Central America, emblem of the tropical and musical movie comedies of the forties illustrated by Busby Berkeley and Carmen Miranda, etc.

The ‘Epilogue: Snip! Snap! Snip!’ (374-387) first discusses the mutilations inflicted to the devils in Uccello’s predella ‘The miracle of the profaned host’ (brought by a poor woman to a Jewish usurer and that miraculously resists the affronts he inflicts on the host, a theme close to that of the ritual murder) and cases of destruction of scaring images. Then childish terrors are evoked, especially those raised by the Struwwelpeter of Heinrich Hoffmann (1845) and its castrating character the scissor-man, who cuts the thumb of the child that persists to suck it. Hoffmann intended to mock the cruel and rigid educators of his time, but his books have terrorised generations of children unaware of his ironic intentions. [MW, who still sucked her thumb at seven, had personally asked her father to destroy the menacing book.]

After the austereness and the refusal of images of protestantism, our era is that of the return of the power of images, of the abandonment of verification for the acceptance of their magic and powers; of the raising to star status of great criminals, which incarnate the fears raised by the ogre or bogeyman in their atrocious actions.