The original article was written in French for Recherches Germaniques https://journals.openedition.org/rg/ Theiller, Martin. “From monster to animal: a critique of the Kraken’s natural history.” In Recherches Germaniques, (2025). Translated by the author.
From monster to animal: a critique of the Kraken’s natural history
by Martin Theiller
‘For centuries the myth of the kraken, whose tentacular arms have haunted marine imaginings, was built on a persistent confusion between the octopus (which has eight arms and lives at the bottom of the sea) and the squid (which is pelagic and has two tentacles).’[1]
Retrieved from an article published in La Recherche (July 2020), this assertion regarding the fundamentally animal nature of the Scandinavian monster reflects a now well-established conception of the kraken in science history. While the author does acknowledge the many controversies running through centuries of natural history, his conclusion is absolute: the kraken has become an animal “in the name of science”—a giant squid to be more specific.[2] Its “modern scientific name,” Architeuthis dux, authoritatively carries through with the transformation and gives it a proper scientific form.[3] A similar article from National Geographic (July 6, 2021), titled “Kraken: the giant squid which made the seas tremble,” draws the same conclusion: we now know “for a fact that this animal exists,” although it is not “as savage as the creature retrieved from northern imaginings and Renaissance bestiaries.”[4] As the scholars quoted here explain, this certitude regarding the true nature of the kraken came from the late Classical age, that is to say from the second half of the 18th century, when a number of naturalists driven by the ideas of the Enlightenment compared real descriptions of sea animals with the tales of the legendary monster. The question of the kraken afterwards remained important in the 19th century—during which the monster was for the first time associated with a giant squid—up to the beginning of the 21st century when a living specimen of this species was seen for the first time.[5]
In the following argument, I would like to question this transformation from monster to animal set in motion more than 200 years ago. My intention however is not to discuss the actual existence of the creature or the species to which it could belong, but rather to bring meaning to this shift, as a way to shed light on the relationship of modern societies with the living, non-human world. Indeed, it is not so much the fact that the kraken could be a squid or an octopus that is worth investigating to improve our understanding of the animal world, but instead the mere idea that animality could be forced upon a legendary monster in the name of reason and knowledge. My point is therefore to understand the motives behind the transformation, as well as its ethical and social consequences, more than criticize the scientific reasoning around which it is structured. It seems to me that the erasure of the monster in favour of the animal does not signify a positive and improved understanding of the non-human world, but is on the contrary the unfortunate mark of an ever-increasing power struggle between human societies and other environments.
Sea Monsters during the Renaissance
The Renaissance was an important period for marine imaginings: not only was it the time when representations of sea monsters on nautical charts were the most abundant, but it also preceded the Classical age during which the same creatures started losing their monstrosity. It is therefore necessary to first describe the converging conceptions of alterity and knowledge in the 16th century to understand the foundations onto which the transformation effected by the Scandinavian naturalists of the Enlightenment was set in motion. A compelling example to start the analysis is the well-known Carta Marina by the bishop of Uppsala Olaus Magnus (1490-1557), which was influential in Scandinavia and Europe throughout the Renaissance. Within the chaotic yet colourful profusion of monsters painted on the map, it is possible to identify the infamous sea serpent (here devouring sailors) which Olaus Magnus further describes in his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (A Description of the Northern Peoples, 1555). More interesting however are the many other creatures which seem to be monstrous but are at the same time designated with names of animal species. A ziphius, a walrus and a whale thus share the northern seas with the sea serpent, as if they were unproblematically comparable.
Equipped with elephant-like paws and tusks, Magnus’s whale looks more like a monstrous hybrid than the cetacean to which we associate this name today. In the middle of several heterogeneous paragraphs covering a wide range of topics, including how their fat can be used or the affection the mothers give to their calves, Magnus explains in his Description of the Northern Peoples that some whales reach monstrous proportions and can even be mistaken for islands.[6] The whale thus appears as a strange beast, through which legend, knowledge and tradition freely converge, as if the bishop had uncritically collected and arranged what he could learn about this animal. This is at least what the Danish naturalist Erik Pontoppidan (1698-1764) reproached Magnus for more than two centuries later, calling him a “credulous” man and his description of the whale a “fabulous and ridiculous romance.”[7] In The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault similarly points out that the 18th-century naturalist Buffon (1707-1788) expresses “astonishment at finding in the work” of a learned Renaissance savant like Ulisse Aldrovandi (1T22-1605) “such an inextricable mixture of exact descriptions” and “fables without commentary, remarks dealing indifferently with an animal’s anatomy, […] its mythological values, or the uses to which it could be put in medicine or magic.”[8] In the two cases presented here, the unproblematic proximity between the monstrous and the animal and by extension between myths and natural history in Renaissance writings is harshly condemned by Enlightenment thinkers. The latter thoroughly exclude these works from the realm of knowledge: Pontoppidan calls Magnus’s description of the whale a “fable,” and Buffon the “hotch-potch of writing” of Aldrovandi pure “legend.”[9]
This declared rupture with Renaissance writings expressed by Classical naturalists is signified by the refusal to incorporate any mythological dimension in their rational investigations. It is in that sense comparable with the process of Aufklärung described by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944), as a program “to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.”[10] Understood here as the global and historical movement driving the advance of thought, this process “has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.”[11] The distinction between myths and science around which it came to be structured from the 18th century onward is however more fallacious than it seems according to Horkheimer and Adorno, who explain that such a rupture is in fact rather superficial, a “trick” put forward by a new configuration of knowledge so as to assert its authority. In truth, “the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products”: they already participated in the advance of thought, and sought to free human beings from their fear of the unknown.[12] In other words, they already played an important role in the process of Aufklärung. The narration of origins which mythologies offer reflects a desire to represent, confirm and explain these origins, and as a result to enlighten and reassure human societies. A sea monster for instance already reduces the ocean to a representation that the myth in which it is inscribed puts forward: it reveals the dangers of the abyss and gives in turn power to men over the seas.[13]
By extension, the knowledge gathered by Renaissance savants like Olaus Magnus is not irrational or against the advance of thought on the pretext that it addresses such myths. According to Foucault, Aldrovandi “was neither a better nor a worse observer than Buffon; he was neither more credulous than he, nor less attached to the faithfulness of the observing eye or to the rationality of things.”[14] Rather, his observation was “not linked to things in accordance with the same system or by the same arrangement of the episteme.”[15] The works of Magnus and Aldrovandi already constitute a form of thought which enlightens the world, which helps explain and master it, only “to write the history of a plant or an animal” during the Renaissance “was as much a matter of describing its elements or organs as of describing […] the legends and stories with which it had been involved.”[16] The apparently fabulous representation of the whale by Olaus Magnus results from a complex convergence of motifs that could be found in a wide variety of sources attached to these marine animals, be they observations or legends. For instance, the two men making a fire which are painted on the back of the whale directly evoke an older legend described in ancient bestiaries such as the Physiologus (3rd-4th century), according to which sailors would mistake whales with islands and start camping on their back.[17] During the Renaissance, such a scene was not a mere fable to be set against knowledge, but could on the contrary become an element of knowledge on marine animals in virtue of its connection with the whale.
This configuration of knowledge was strongly condemned in the 18th century precisely because of its unstable, shifting and plural nature. The shape and description of the whale could freely be altered from one Renaissance bestiary to the other as new motifs could increasingly be attached to the animal depending on the readings, discoveries and ideas of the naturalists of the time, thus making the knowledge attached to the whale potentially infinite. Hence the impossibility from the perspective of Enlightenment thinkers to achieve a complete and definitive knowledge with this method of inquiry. Foucault explains that the system of the 16th century, “never complete and always open to fresh possibilities,” could become increasingly probable, but it could never become absolute.[18] It is exactly because knowledge was configured around this open structure during the Renaissance that monstrosity and animality could freely converge: this unstable nature did not exclude the unprecedented out of reason, and monsters are precisely unpredictable figures. According to Jacques Derrida, the monstrous can only manifest as such if it is not familiar to us, and this absence of preparation is precisely what makes it terrifying: “a monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name,” as if “no anticipation had prepared one to identify this figure.”[19] While monsters are often given names, it is important to keep in mind here that this is necessarily an a posteriori and plural process: each tale, legend or myth does not reproduce the monstrous as if it were the mere specimen of its species (otherwise it would not be monstrous at all). Each occurrence on the contrary demands to be acknowledged and integrated to the notion of the monstrous, which is itself to be altered as a result.
The representation of sea monsters and animals on the nautical charts of the Renaissance resulted from a specific configuration of knowledge, through which multiple relationships to the other could be inscribed in the realm of rational thought. Although this approach which I have described here with Magnus or Aldrovandi already drives the movement of Aufklärung as understood by Horkheimer and Adorno forward, it does not fully achieve the process from the point of view of 18th-century naturalists. The instability of the monster, itself anchored in a form of knowledge which by default is not exhaustive allows one to approach and know the world without making it absolutely knowable, that is to say predictable. In other words, while the knowledge of the 16th century could very well participate in liberating human beings from their fear of the unknown, it was bound to never put an end to the feeling of fear itself. This limit arguably constitutes one of the most important foundations onto which knowledge was reconfigured in the 18th century.
The Natural History of the Kraken
To understand the new approach to knowledge and the living, non-human world developed by Enlightenment naturalists from their critique of Renaissance savants, it is necessary to explore their own accounts of marine life. The Kraken is in that sense a particularly interesting case, as it is a figure that is profoundly anchored in the scientific literature of the 18th century. As the Enlightenment was thriving in Europe, the word “kraken” started to appear in publications on the natural history of marine wildlife, among which Det første Forsøg paa Norges Naturlige Historie (The Natural History of Norway, 1752) would become particularly influential.[20] Its previously mentioned author, Erik Pontoppidan, set up to put in writing what used to be an oral tradition among Norwegian fisherman in a chapter entirely dedicated to sea monsters. From the tales thus transcribed, the reader can learn that the kraken is the most gigantic creature of God’s entire creation, with a body that can potentially cover the whole surface of the sea and to which a multitude of members are attached—sometimes described as arms, horns or branches.[21] The beast has in fact never been directly seen in its entirety, which overall makes the kraken appear as a sort of monster: the ambiguities of these conflicting accounts implies that it is hardly possible to anticipate its appearance.
What thoroughly illustrates the new approach of the 18th century toward the monstrous and the animal are the many commentaries which follow these accounts. Pontoppidan wanted to apply the methodology of scientific investigation of his own time to this legend, which implies removing from the fishermen’s tale the unpredictability of the monster so as to make the possibility of its existence more credible. Pontoppidan is to my knowledge the first naturalist who willingly admits the reality behind the kraken on condition that he can prove its rationality. In order to do so, Pontoppidan compares the observations of Norwegian fishermen on the kraken with those of renowned naturalists on mundane animals. Exploring on which points these different outlooks overlap, he hopes to recognize in the kraken structures already identified in other marine animals which have been “rationally” categorized. In the course of this demonstration,[22] he associates for instance the multitude of “arms” attached to the kraken’s body described by the fishermen with the tentacles or “feeling instruments” of the “polyp” (which probably refers here to all cephalopods).[23] Among the sources and authorities invoked to defend his theory that the kraken could belong to this branch of the animal kingdom, Pontoppidan mentions the publications of various naturalists such as Conrad Gesner as well as even more ancient works, for instance The Natural History by Pliny the Elder.[24] The different animals cited throughout the chapter as elements of comparison generally share a round body to which are attached several arms, and this in spite of their noticeable difference in size. While the question of the disproportionate size of the kraken is problematic, Pontoppidan conjectures that smaller polyps which have been observed could be akin to a larger animal, considering that the size of specific individuals does not alter the nature of the species as a whole.[25] Following that line of thought, Pontoppidan reaches the conclusion that the kraken is literally possible, insofar as it can be put in a global system that was rationally constituted, in virtue of the characters it shares with other animals already categorized within the same system.
The new conditions developed by Pontoppidan under which the existence of the kraken becomes acceptable manifest a number of epistemological transformations. First of all, the rationalization which brings the unknown back to the familiar is signified here by the absolute transformation of the monster into an animal, which effectively suppresses the ambivalence of the Renaissance. This shift however suggests that the kraken became known because the animal to which it was associated was considered as already known, in such a way that the movement from the monster to the animal envisioned here came with another transformation: the animal became proof. Yet this “animal proof” raises new difficulties. One cannot prove the existence of a monster without entirely undermining its monstrosity, since the proof is defined and achieved as the complete antithesis of the monstrous: it stabilizes thought into a permanent state whereas the monstrous is elusive. Besides, the proof acts as such only if the conditions of the experiment through which it emerges can be reproduced, while the monster only exists in the unexpected and unprecedented. Altering the monster into an animal which serves as a proof thus amounts to constructing the animal in opposition to the monster, that is to say as a stable and reproducible entity. And this is the other difficulty which comes with the “animal proof,” since no living being is a stable or reproducible entity.
The only way for Pontoppidan’s logic to be received and for living beings to serve as evidence is for them to take on a more generic, even mathematical form. It is then not surprising to note the increasing use of the word “specimen” in the scientific literature of the 18th century to refer to animals and plants.[26] This process illustrates to some extent the development of a new, generic conception of life insofar as the specimen, being defined as an element which serves as a representative reference for a larger group, suppresses the individual animal through an independent representation. The former individual is replaced with a generic representative, which can then be quantitatively compared with other animals within a specific system as an abstraction. It is this capacity to be absolutely categorized which makes the animal “knowable” according to Foucault, who explains that all knowledge of life becomes in the Classical age “the possibility of establishing an ordered succession between things, even non-measurable ones.”[27] The incorporation of the living world within this ordered succession is achieved through universal descriptions which act as stable representations. These descriptions are based on the identification of the visible and immediately distinguishable features of the animals (such as the arms or horns mentioned by Pontoppidan) which are then analysed according to their shape, quantity, as well as “the manner in which they are distributed in space in relation to each other, and the relative magnitude of each element.”[28] Together, these four variables allow the naturalist to articulate a representation that is apparently faithful to the animal in question and that can be received and understood by all: “confronted with the same individual entity, everyone will be able to give the same description; and, inversely, given such a description everyone will be able to recognize the individual entities that correspond to it.”[29] In other words, this process will make it possible to apply the logic of the proof to the living world.
Since the animal becomes predictable, knowledge takes on a finite and absolute form. The motives behind the necessity to transform the kraken into an animal and reject the ambivalent monstrosity of the Renaissance are then perfectly apparent: the unprecedented, unexpected and the plural are fundamentally incompatible with this new configuration of knowledge. All the monstrous features which cannot successfully be incorporated to this logic of generic and stable descriptions no longer belong to the realm of knowledge and are on the contrary pushed back to mythology and fable. It is however important to underline that this disavowal of the monstrous which characterizes the natural history of the 18th century is not limited to obviously fantastical elements: it also implies the disregard of everything that is not immediately visible, universally recognizable or predictable in the living beings thus studied. To obtain a description that is systematically considered valid of an individual animal, it is necessary to limit the observation to the elements which, “in the rather confused wealth of representation, can be analysed, recognized by all, and thus given a name that everyone will be able to understand.”[30] Some aspects of the individual will be systematically excluded from knowledge—such as the qualitative rather than quantitative features, those that are invisible or variable like personality or life experience—in such a way that the “domain of visibility” from which the animal becomes knowledge is nothing but “what is left after these exclusions.”[31] To quote Foucault: “the Classical age used its ingenuity, if not to see as little as possible, at least to restrict deliberately the area of its experience.”[32] This arbitrary and normative gaze around which the natural history of the 18th century is structured significantly converges with the semantic construction of the word “animal” described by Jacques Derrida in The Animal that Therefore I Am, that is to say as “a theorem, something seen and not seeing.”[33] Derrida explains that living animals are gazed upon but do not get the chance to gaze back at the naturalists and philosophers who talk about them, as if these men were deliberately ignoring the possibility that these animals could be defined on their own terms. A symbol of this unfair power struggle, the word “animal” is “an appellation that men have instituted” to refer to living beings while ignoring them.
The new understanding of the animal in the 18th century suggests that the living world can only be observed, and thus potentially known, to the extent that a form of standardization is achievable. The universal descriptions naturalists come up with and which institute the animal as knowledge thoroughly erase the individuality of living beings to favour a single representation, which is posited as the only possible rational relationship we may have with the non-human world. While the monstrous was always plural during the Renaissance, the “animal” of natural history which prevailed in the 18th century was on the contrary always singular—though not in the sense that each living being is unique, but precisely to deny them these particularities, by selecting what makes them comparable instead. The way in which the kraken was handled in Pontoppidan’s demonstration is therefore not that different from the treatment received by all the “polyps” to which it was associated: to become “animal,” both monsters and living beings are deprived of their particularities.
Sea monsters unmasked
There is a direct correlation between the way in which knowledge is produced and then used in society, that is why it is necessary not only to question the structure of 18th-century natural history, but also to explore the concrete consequences that such a configuration of knowledge may have had over our relationship to the non-human world. The point of this last segment is to trace connections between the systemic domination of animal life that we experience today with the epistemological transformations that I have previously described. When it comes to sea monsters and marine species, several manifestations of this violent connection appeared as soon as the 19th century, especially on the British isles. In the wake of the H.M.S Challenger expedition from 1872 to 1876, a number of British naturalists enthusiastically revived the debates around the nature of the kraken and dived back into the works of Pontoppidan.[34] The case of the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee is particularly interesting here: contrary to some of his contemporaries who already integrated recent Darwinist perspectives to their research—which are worthy of attention but lie beyond the scope of the present article[35]—Lee defends the efforts and perspective of Pontoppidan across his book Sea Monsters Unmasked, which was published in 1883. He nonetheless stresses that Pontoppidan “gave too much credence to contemporary narratives and old traditions of floating islands and sea monsters, and to the superstitious beliefs and exaggerated statements of ignorant fishermen.”[36] Lee thus aims at identifying with greater accuracy the species to which the kraken could belong and eventually reaches the now prevailing conclusion that it must be a kind of squid.
While Lee’s reasoning is indeed inspired by the works of Pontoppidan, the demonstration significantly becomes a narrative of conquest and victory through which connotations of domination constantly underlie the scientific discourse. This dimension is especially apparent in the illustrations which come with the text and through which the domination of the species under study becomes evident:
The first kind of illustrations we find in the chapter on the kraken depict animals which are obviously monstrous, such as the octopus on Figure 2 taken from the Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des mollusques by the French naturalist Pierre Dénys de Montfort. Henry Lee however indicates to the reader how little scientific credit such pictures deserve: they would be “fitter to decorate the outside of a showman’s caravan at a fair than seriously to illustrate a work on natural history.”[37] This disdain for the monstrous strongly resembles the way in which 18th-century naturalists rejected any mythological dimension from their own investigations. Alongside these fabulous illustrations, we find anatomical drawings of different species to which the kraken is compared (Figure 3) while Lee gives textual precisions regarding their respective structure and features, such as the shape and quantity of suckers they possess.[38] This juxtaposition of fabulous and anatomical drawings is reminiscent of the transformation from the monster to the “animal proof” in the 18th century that I have previously described. However, Lee’s demonstration significantly ends on illustrations of the same animals now dismembered, whose inanimate tentacles are exposed as on a fish stall.
Such a progression from the epistemological abstraction of life towards the concrete fragmentation of animal bodies can probably be best understood using the cycle of reification described by Carol J.Adams in The Sexual Politics of Meat. The structure of this cycle follows the different steps through which any process of domination is carried out: first, “objectification permits an oppressor to view another being as an object,” which the mechanism of abstraction essential to the knowledge produced through natural history effectively performs.[39] “The oppressor then violates this being by object-like treatment,” which in the case of animals implies converting “living breathing beings into dead objects” and leads to their “fragmentation, or brutal dismemberment” as in Figure 4.[40] The last step of the cycle is consumption, “the fulfillment of oppression” which reiterates the “annihilation” of the animal “as a subject of importance in itself.”[41] This last dimension also manifests in Henry Lee’s demonstration, insofar as Sea Monsters Unmasked is punctuated with episodes and anecdotes describing the killing and consumption of the animals to which the kraken is compared. Lee mentions for instance the “savoury meal” which the crew of the Endeavour cooked in 1769 from the body of a large cuttle, “one of the best soups they ever tasted.”[42] The transition from a terrifying monstrous creature to a cuttle soup is far from insignificant: a narrative of humiliation underlies the scientific demonstration, which signifies the convergence of the process of rationalization with that of domination.
The specific example of the kraken reflects in fact a much larger process described by Derrida, through which our relationship with the non-human world would have undergone “an alteration that is at the same time more serious and less recognizable than a historical turning point” and yet “has been accelerating, intensifying […] for about two centuries, at an incalculable rate and level.”[43] The now extreme reification of life on Earth would be structurally linked with “the joint developments of zoological, ethological, biological, and genetic forms of knowledge, which remain inseparable from techniques of intervention into their object, from the transformation of the actual object […] namely, the living animal.”[44] For example, industrial farming “at a demographic level unknown in the past” and “artificial insemination on a massive scale” of living animals constitute some of the most violent consequences of the epistemological transformation which took place in the 18th century.[45] Indeed, if the standardization of life appears as a necessary condition for the development of natural history, it is also significantly essential to the organization of a type of farming whose industrialization is based on the planned reproducibility of the individuals. While the specific natural history of the kraken is obviously not directly connected with the later development of intensive farming, these two apparently isolated aspects of the “modern” relationship with life nonetheless signify a similar logic of power/knowledge.
What Derrida describes here is not entirely different from the 18th-century radicalization of the process of Aufklärung critiqued by Horkheimer and Adorno, a moment when the concepts of unpredictability and plurality became increasingly erased from thought. The now “known” individuals became universal abstractions, but this “identity of everything with everything is bought at the cost that nothing can at the same time be identical to itself” according to Horkheimer and Adorno, who consider this kind of “negation of each individual” to be the foundation of “the manipulated collective.”[46] Knowledge institutes a “levelling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable” and by extension makes the systemic domination of life on Earth possible. Industry, “for which abstraction prepared the way,” only organized the interchangeability of life which knowledge had conceptualized in the 18th century.[47]
Conclusion
The study of the kraken’s natural history and of the shift from monster to animal makes it possible to better understand the alteration of our relationship to life since the 18th century. The animal-monster of the Renaissance was still a threatening object of knowledge as it embodied a limit in what could be known and thus what could be dominated. By structuring knowledge in opposition with the monstrous, comparing unpredictability with fable and fear with immaturity, 18th-century naturalists made the association of power with knowledge legitimate and turned domination into an enlightened position. What we inherited from this transformation conducted more than two centuries ago is a general idea of the animal whose suffering is by default rational. Of course, the study of life has changed since then and modern biology is no natural history: the concepts of evolution and ecosystems for instance have fundamentally impacted our understanding of life and largely supplanted the importance of immediately visible structures and features in the animals we study. And yet it seems, as Derrida suggests, that this epistemological progress has not successfully untangled the association of animality with domination, insofar as the planetary-scale and systemic execution of non-human animals is still largely considered to be normal, natural and rational.
That is why it seems to me necessary to challenge the classical foundations of this conception of the animal, however dated they are, since there are still traces of their impact in our relation to life. If we want to think the non-human world without imposing the domination of thought upon it, it is necessary to reconsider the opposition between monster and animal around which this conception was structured in the first place. The dialectical methodology of Horkheimer and Adorno is in this perspective a precious support to carry out this re-examination, since it has effectively undermined the distinction between mythology and Enlightenment which precedes the transformation from monster to animal. The two philosophers have successfully exposed the way in which the levelling abstraction of thought ends up reproducing the arbitrary mechanisms of mythological explanation, which allows us in turn to understand how the classical concept of the animal similarly ends up acting like the monster it was supposed to overcome.
The “animal” conceptualized two centuries ago appears as a complete and solid form of knowledge contrary to mythological monsters only because we cannot consider as unknown something we have a priori defined. If the living, non-human world is necessarily unpredictable, it does not have to be the case of the system we use to describe it, whose changes and mutations we can easily anticipate. It is then not possible to be afraid of non-human living beings as long as our conceptual representation of life dominates them. It was through this mechanism that the apparently rational idea of an animal freed from monstrosity was posited in the 18th century, that is to say by replacing individual lives with organized abstractions. Classical though has in that sense not overcome its fear of the unknown, but on the contrary pushed this anxiety to the extreme by negating the reality of the very object of fear. To quote Horkheimer and Adorno: “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized.”[48] By extension, the fear of the unknown we could sense in monstrous representations of animals from the Renaissance was intensified through the Classical concept of the animal. This abstract animal entirely reproduces the functions of the monster it disavows: not only does it signify our fear of the unknown—albeit in an extreme way by negating its existence—but it also points to the limit of knowledge by embodying our ignorance of all these features it arbitrarily excludes from life.
About the author: I am currently a PhD student in Strasbourg University, France. My research, supervised by Hélène Ibata and Thomas Mohnike, explores the reception of Norse mythology and folklore in 19th-century Britain. More specifically, this project aims at describing the use of Norse-inspired monsters in the British counter-cultures and discourses of the time, whether it be on epistemological or social grounds. This perspective has led me to study the mythologization of the sea in Victorian science and culture, which I hope to further investigate in future projects.
References
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Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2002.
-Armendáriz, Xabier. “Kraken: le calamar géant qui a fait trembler les mers.” In National Geographic Histoire et Civilisations. 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.fr/histoire/2021/07/kraken-le-calamar-geant-qui-a-fait-trembler-les-mers [13/08/2024].
-Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press [2006], 2008.
-Egede, Hans. A Description of Greenland. London: T. and J. Allman, 1818.
-Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London and New York: Taylor and Francis, [1966] 2005.
-Gibson, John. Monsters of the Sea. London: T.Nelson and Sons, 1887.
-Gould, Charles. Mythical Monsters. London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1886.
-Heath. “The Kraken and Other Sea Monster.” In Report of the Proceedings of the Literary & Philosophical Society of Liverpool Being Session XXXIV 1. Liverpool: Thomas Baines, 1845.
-Lee, Henry. Sea Monsters Unmasked. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1883.
-Magnus, Olaus. A compendious history of the Goths, Svvedes, & Vandals, and other northern nations. Translated by: unknown. London: J.Streater, 1658.
-Péton, Loïc. “Le kraken, entre mythe et science.” In La Recherche 561, 2020: 102-105.
-Pontoppidan, Erik. The Natural History of Norway. Translated by: unknown.London: A.Linde, [1752] 1755.
-Van Duzer, Chet. Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps. London: British Library, 2014.
-Weber, Elisabeth, editor. Points… Interviews, 1974-1994 Jacques Derrida. Translated by Peggy Kamuf and others. Stanford University Press, [1992] 1995.
[1]Loïc Péton, “Le kraken, entre mythe et science,” in La Recherche 561 (2020): p. 102.
[2]Ibid, p. 105.
[3]Ibid, p. 104.
[4]Xabier Armendáriz, “Kraken: le calamar géant qui a fait trembler les mers,” in National Geographic Histoire et Civilisations (2021), accessed August 13, 2024. https://www.nationalgeographic.fr/histoire/2021/07/kraken-le-calamar-geant-qui-a-fait-trembler-les-mers
[5]Loïc Péton, “le kraken, entre mythe et science,” p. 102.
[6] Olaus Magnus, A compendious history of the Goths, Svvedes, & Vandals, and other northern nations, trans. unknown (London: J.Streater, 1658), p. 235.
[7] Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway, trans. unknown(London: A.Linde, [1752] 1755), p. 215.
[8]Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. unknown (London and New York: Taylor and Francis [1966] 2005), p. 43.
[9]Ibid, p. 44.
[10]Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 1.
[11]Ibid.
[12]Ibid, p. 5.
[13]Chet Van Duzer, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, (London: British Library, 2014), p. 12.
[14]Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 44.
[15]Ibid.
[16]Ibid, p. 140.
[17]For more information on the Physiologus and the whale-island motif, see Chet Van Duzer, Sea Monsters, p. 48.
[18]Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 61.
[19]Elisabeth Weber ed, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994 Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others, (Stanford University Press, [1992] 1995), p. 386.
[20]The Kraken is also mentioned in another contemporary and widely-read book by Hans Egede, A Description of Greenland, trans. unknown. London: T. and J. Allman, [1741] 1818.
[21]Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway, p. 210-218.
[22]Ibid, p. 212.
[23]Henry Lee, Sea Monsters Unmasked, (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1883), p. 9.
[24]Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway, p. 217.
[25]Ibid.
[26]Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “specimen,” accessed July 4, 2023. https://www-oed-com.scd-rproxy.u strasbg.fr/view/Entry/186018?redirectedFrom=SPECIMEN#eid
[27]Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 63.
[28]Ibid, p. 146.
[29]Ibid.
[30]Ibid.
[31]Ibid, p. 145.
[32]Ibid.
[33]Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills, (New York: Fordham University Press [2006], 2008), p. 14.
[34]See for instance John Gibson, Monsters of the Sea, (London: T.Nelson and Sons, 1887) and Heath, “The Kraken and Other Sea Monster,” in Report of the Proceedings of the Literary & Philosophical Society of Liverpool Being Session XXXIV 1, (Liverpool: Thomas Baines, 1845), p. 68-74.
[35] See for instance Charles Gould, Mythical Monsters, (London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1886).
[36] Henry Lee, Sea Monsters, p. 3.
[37]Henry Lee, Sea Monsters, p. 31.
[38]Ibid, p. 22-23.
[39]Carol J. Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, (London and New York: Continuum, [1990] 2010), p. 73.
[40]Ibid.
[41]Ibid. Of course Adams’s main thesis is that both non-human animals and women are victims of this cycle of objectification in patriarchal societies. She has brilliantly shown how female bodies are subjected to the same process of reification, fragmentation and consumption that the animal carcasses we consume. The fact that Lee repeatedly sexualizes the kraken in his book similarly reflects the masculine domination that is common to both the humiliation of women and non-human animals, which aptly supports Adams’s theory. When announcing his project to the reader in the opening pages of the chapter on the kraken for instance, Lee states: “I venture to hope that I may […] enable the reader to identify the member of the family from which we are to strip the dress and ‘make up’ in which it masqueraded as the Kraken.’’ (p.10)
[42]Henry Lee, Sea Monsters, p. 36.
[43]Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, p. 24-25.
[44]Ibid.
[45]Ibid.
[46]Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 9
[47]Ibid.
[48]Ibid, p. 11.