The Idea of Lost Identity in Fantasy Fiction: Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft

Text by professor Timo Airaksinen part no: 2.
In fantasy literature, monsters are so terrifying that to meet one leads to insanity and suicide. However, "I am becoming a monster" must feel worse. Thomas Nagel asks, "What is it like to be a bat?"; I ask what it is like to become and be a monster – is it possible to know? To answer, we need semiotic tools. I design a Nagel Test to determine one's ability to formulate de se thoughts and beliefs during and after the monstrous transmogrification. To do this, I will discuss what I call a Perry Case and Perry Tale. Most emphatically, my goal is not to offer new interpretations of the masterpieces of Stevenson, Stoker, and Lovecraft. I use their stories as sources of examples. I sketch a theory of monsters in the fantasy world. My modest main aim is to understand the logic and semiotics of losing one's personal identity and its psychological consequences. I imagine the semantics of a possible world maximally similar to the readers' actual world, except it allows monsters and, because of them, monstrous threats to one's identity. This is the language game played by the classical horror writers I will introduce.
Keywords: Thomas Nagel, de se beliefs, possible worlds, monsters; personal identity; physical identity; horror; suicide, madness, literary strategies, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." (H.P. Lovecraft)
2. Methodology: The Nagel Test and Perry Tales
The basic idea of a monster embodies our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities beyond linguistic comprehensibility (Asma, 2009; Wolfe, 2005). We are now interested in cases where transformation into a monster, instead of an encounter with a monster, is central. Hence, the primary source of horror is the loss of identity. The secondary source of panic is the nasty form and type of the target creature.
We need methodological tools. Thomas Nagel famously queries whether I can know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel, 1979). Can I know what it is like to be a Zombie? (Marcus, 2004). Can I know what it is like to be the creature that I, after my transformation, will be, for instance, a werewolf or a vampire? If I cannot, I have become an alien Other (see Ch. 7 below). Call this the Nagel Test of Being a Human or a human-like person. The crucial test question is: Can I know what it is like to be that creature? If the answer is positive, I will remain human regardless of my new bodily appearance – however monstrous and grotesque (Edwards and Graulund, 2013, pp. 34f., 46f.). A negative answer means I will be an Other, an alien being, a stranger, and an outsider; hence I will lose my identity and myself. I have become something I now fail to understand. I will not understand myself as myself, which means "I myself" vanished. In Kafka's story, Gregor Samsa turns into an insect, and in the movie The Fly, the unlucky scientist sports a common housefly's head, but both retain their human personality. They are still human beings in an impossible body. Can we know what it is like to have that kind of body. The answer seems positive because people have a wide variety of different-looking bodies.
Next, we can use the idea of de se (of oneself) thoughts and beliefs to complement the Nagel Test. The following example I call the Perry Case and its applications Perry Tales.
[A]mong singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself "as oneself" (de se thoughts […]) raise special issues, [. . .] [John] Perry [. . .] introduces his case with a famous example: "I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally, it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch." Before his epiphany, Perry had a belief [de re] about [someone, actually] himself, that he was making a mess. This, however, is insufficient for him to have the reflexive, self-conscious belief [de se] that he would express in accepting "I am making a mess," the one that leads him to rearrange the torn sack in the cart. (García-Carpintero, 2015; also, García-Carpintero, and Torre, 2016)[1]
Let us create a novel Perry Tale: I am pushing my shopping cart in the supermarket when I observe the horrified faces around me becoming increasingly panicky. I say to myself, "They see something monstrous," and I infer that something weird is occurring here while, at the same time, I sneakily try to locate it. Finally, I succeed: I see my reflection on a glassy surface and realize what they see, a monster in the shop, and I am what they dread, the monster. The spectators watch something alien – but who am I now?
What is happening? What am I becoming? I understand my human identity may disappear; can I still use (the singular personal pronoun in the subjective case) "I" and (the reflexive case) "myself" as I used to? I have not yet lost them completely because, at this point, I can still wonder about myself. This may change later; therefore, the situation must be understood de dicto, not de re: the referent of "I" may still exist, but it is no longer the familiar "myself." Therefore, I will fail to formulate de se thoughts: the referent of the indexical "I" has vanished along with my conscious identity. An alien Other no longer uses "I" the way I do – if they use "I" at all. If they do not, I fail to know what it is like to be this thing; thus, my Nagel Test fails. This is to say, only if both I and the monster can use "I" in the same way, do we both pass the Nagel Test (see Ch. 7). The monster may pass the Nagel Test, but then we are dealing with a person-like being, for instance, Gregor Samsa in his cockroach body. A real monster also has a monstrous mind.
In this way, we combine the Nagel Test and Perry Tales. Think of a Perry Tale, which focuses on the transmuting person's ability to manage de se thoughts. As long as the newly transmogrified creature can formulate de se thoughts and figure in a Perry Tale as "I" and "myself," it also passes the Nagel Test; thus, this is a person and not (yet) a full-fledged monster. The main point is that one's continuous ability to formulate and use de se propositions in their right contexts entails passing the Nagel Test. In this case, we know what it is like to be that creature, which is to say that one is a person – we only know persons.
Monstrosity is an essential characterization of a life form whose body and mind are equally bizarre. A bizarre body has its bizarre brain, or no brain as we know it. Nevertheless, the ontology of the monster category is fluid. Many different kinds of monsters exist; as we will see, some monstrous appearances pass the Nagel Test, just like Gregor Samsa does. But how could a giant cockroach or a fly acquire a retain the human brain? A normal brain in the wrong type of body sounds paradoxical. Such monsters can be even more fully alien Others than most, yet they may use "I" in a way true monsters cannot.
Next, I will show how these considerations affect our reading of the narratives about losing one's identity to an alien Other. The cases I introduce below are in ascending order of the comprehensiveness of the transformation. In other words, we move from partial to complete transformations. We are now mainly interested in the horror of lost identity and, hence, true monsters. But let us now discuss the slippery slope to the otherness of true monstrosity.
[1] We need three concepts to disambiguate propositional content: de re (about the thing), de dicto (about what is said), and de se (of oneself). My wife told me, holding an egg: "I am sorry, dear, but this is the last egg." What does she mean? Was she saying I will never again see an egg? Or the egg I see will be my last at this meal? The first sentence is de dicto, and the second de re. A simple example of a de se thought is a person who, after viewing a blurred image in the police blotter, ponders who that might be. The face looks familiar, and finally, she says, "Oh, I am in that picture." Here "I" is an indexical term that designates the speaker.