Photograph courtesy Mira Mattar
Monster Emporium Press began in 2006 as a working group of the artist’s collective What They Could Do They Did, dedicated to publishing documentation, writing, and images relating to the multi-media events the collective produced. By 2009 the press had a name and its own momentum, and ever since has continued to publish writing and images by a strange array of marginal creatures. Flash fiction, short stories, zines, and the occasional art book are made available as physical copies or PDFs from their website and at many zine and publishing fairs in the UK. In 2013 Monster Emporium Press published their first color-illustrated collection of flash fiction, Just Like A Human!, consisting of eighteen very short stories about animals.
Most of the contemporary publishing I come in contact with is online, immaterial or just old-school, by hook or by crook DIY. The differences between this stuff and that put out by big publishing houses are increasingly not of the obvious kind. Often the small runs of rogue presses have higher aesthetic and material standards than the big players, other times it’s just obvious how much more pleasure went into their making. Though the latter has been most clearly true of the output of Monster Emporium Press, their aesthetic and critical concerns are also extremely ambitious and, in Just Like A Human!, more evident than ever before. How much more idea driven you can be when you have little to lose! The front and back covers of Just Like A Human! are a single field of disembodied and tessellating fly legs and wings, punctuated with a variety of different colored eyes. It calls to mind those children’s books that allow you to mix up different animals to create monstrous chimeras, but also perhaps the dissections by Descartes that spawned mind-body dualism and machinic metaphors that have now haunted humanity for centuries. It is evocative both of natural history and science fiction, and though the texts within refer more explicitly to the former than the latter the cover infects the reader with a sense of Brundlefly and bio-political horror that cannot be easily shaken and which the more realistic yet no less frightening gaping maws of the three full colour drawings inside do little to dispel.
Just Like A Human! is Monster Emporium Press’ first publication created solely as a collaboration between all three founding members of the editorial team. The inclusion, alongside texts by Mira Mattar and Michael Reid, of designer Kathryn Corlett’s illustrations is a crucial development, as is the collaboration itself. Mattar and Reid are both strange, quiet writers. Their work shares a precision and perhaps some tendency toward the claustrophobic, and though it would be a mistake to read them as a unified front, there is certainly a contrast between the tense understatement of the writing in Just Like A Human! and the bold grotesquery of Corlett’s vivid drawings. Through the choice of subject matter — the diversity of the single category of “animal” — in this collaboration by three very different critters, coherence is achieved.
Both Mira Mattar and Michael Reid have been students of philosophy as well as fiction and know well that, to borrow a term from Donna Haraway, the two are old if not easy “messmates.” In 2008’s When Species Meet Haraway laid out a manifesto for understanding relationships between, as she characterizes them, “humans and other critters.” For Haraway these “critters” are our kin, and the implied relatedness and interdependence between kinds forms the basis for her rejection of human exceptionalism in order to allow a total adjustment of our perspective on politics, ecology, and other systems of relations (what Haraway terms “cosmopolitics”) to allow for the possibility of “becoming with” a diversity of “kin and kinds.” This convivial “becoming with” is opposed to the solitary “becoming-animal” previously proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus because Haraway, on feminist grounds, rightly refuses the opposition by Deleuze and Guattari of the wild to the domestic. Why privilege the wolf over the dog, she asks, when we have shared histories with dogs for so long? Why the horror at the domestication of animals unless you seek to reify the wild? An encounter described by Jacques Derrida between himself and his cat and the “regard” between them is also interrogated, in this case for Derrida’s assumptions about what might be perceived by the gaze of his small companion.
Just Like A Human! is a work of fiction, a construct in a different register, or as we might say, a different beast entirely from Haraway’s academic critique of category, but it could well be said to inhabit a similar set of questions. It would be incorrect to say all of these stories are about — or even that they are meant to assert — victories over human exceptionalism. But the boundaries and edge lands delineating kinds here are inhabited and described with great clarity. A narrator watches the “insect drama” of a wasp hiding in the eye of a sardine, a woman is possessed by a mule, a dog narrates a story about Pythagoras. Taxonomies, the naming of others, the possibility of death and dismemberment but also of strange alliances, eating together, eating each other; Just Like A Human! oozes with barely contained guts. The idea of the animal, like all categories, is inadequate and shifting, but more than most it contains within it the possibility of acknowledging diversity. Everything is othered here, which paradoxically makes the familiarity in the mostly mundane relations described both more noticeable and more strange.
Read “three dogs,” from Just Like a Human! at 3AM Magazine.
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