with Ryan Denson
Today’s guest is Ryan Denson, currently Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He has previously written in depth on Charybdis’ eerie nature in a 2023 article for the interdisciplinary journal Preternature entitled “Monstrous Disembodiment and Ontological Uncertainty in Charybdis.” He has also written a chapter on “Sirens and Harpies: The Enchanting and Repulsive Avian Monsters of Classical Antiquity” for The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth.
Ary Renan, Charybde et Scylla, 1894. Scylla is at right, with an amorphous Charybdis at left. Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.5.
Professor Denson, how did you first get interested in monsters, especially those from antiquity?
My interest in ancient monsters stems from my interest in science fiction. One particularly prominent influence has been the television series The X-Files (1993–2002), reruns of which I watched frequently in my childhood. It was the series’ blend of infusing the weird and the eerie with a realistic modern-day setting that helped shape my research interests towards exploring similar depictions of the strange and supernatural, albeit in the very different worlds of ancient and medieval literature. In addition to being entertaining, science fiction forces us to confront alternate possibilities of reality, and their philosophical implications. Are silicon-based life forms possible? Can hybrid forms of humanity actually exist? Is it possible to create sentient life through artificial intelligence? Science fiction may be the genre that is most readily primed for this sort of philosophical pondering, but there is little preventing from using all forms of fiction to probe such deep questions about reality.
You’ve got a wonderfully philosophical approach to monsters. Tell us more about it.
One of my favorite monsters for exploring underlying philosophical issues is Charybdis, the whirlpool monster situated opposite Scylla in a narrow sea channel in Homer’s Odyssey. Other monsters of that epic poem possess clear signs of having a certain level of consciousness. They may react to the environment around them, as Scylla does when snatching up prey in her strait; they may have the capacity for speech, as with the Cyclopes. Charybdis is unique for the fact that the Odyssey never gives her any signs of consciousness that we would expect of an ordinary living creature. According to Circe’s description of her, Charybdis sucks down and disgorges water three times a day, seemingly every day. In contrast to Scylla’s tendency to react to her environment, Charybdis presumably does this action regardless of whether or not anything enters the strait. Though apparently intended to be a living entity like her counterpart Scylla, Charybdis seems to be effectively an automated creature that carries out the same actions according to a fixed routine.
Another especially unsettling portion of the Odyssey provides the detail that after Charybdis sucks down water, the sea floor below the whirlpool is revealed. Here, we see that there is apparently no monster at the bottom of the water causing the whirlpool, as is sometimes popularly assumed, but rather that Charybdis is the whirlpool itself. Charybdis is, thus, seemingly something of an automaton that possesses no body whatsoever. The audience is implicitly led to believe that Charybdis is a monster in some sense, but we are left with virtually no details to support this. Charybdis’ peculiar nature forces us to wonder: to what degree is this monstrous patch of water actually conscious or even alive?
Fittingly, this oddity is found at sea, an environment often conceptualized as an ‘other’ space. The unfathomable depths of the sea are, in many ways, like the vast reaches of outer space in that both are often blank canvases onto which the human imagination projects such monstrosities. This general similarity with outer space, a realm that dominates not just science fiction but modern science itself, further illustrates the capacity for both environments to flourish with monstrosities. A suitable comparison to Homer’s Charybdis appears in the modern science fiction world of Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006). In that ‘first contact’ novel, we see a creative imagining of alien beings much more highly advanced than humans. Yet, just as Charybdis seems to be the whirlpool itself, so too do Watts’ aliens appear to be part of the organic spacecraft in which they travel. Even more unnerving is the fact that such organic and intelligent creatures are found to possess no consciousness at all. Intelligence without consciousness seems almost incomprehensible to humans, and many would, accordingly, regard such beings as monstrosities. These monstrous aliens, like Charybdis, serve to elucidate philosophical issues about the nature of life. Both monstrous figures evoke a profound question: is our highly anthropocentric definition of life and consciousness the only viable one?
Your take on Charybdis says a lot about why and how ancient monsters continue to be relevant and useful in modern thought.
Monsters appeal because of their ability to evoke the strange and the mysterious. I think the human mind inherently gravitates towards the fantastical, and in a world sometimes dominated by a secular, overly rationalist outlook, exploring monsters takes on an even greater role as it sheds light on what The X-Files’ Agent Mulder would say are ‘extreme possibilities.’ Charybdis, in sum, is a prime example of a monster that unsettles us, but it is through forcing ourselves to look deeper at that unsettling nature that we can speculate on larger issues. The Odyssey poet may not have intended us to use Charybdis for such pondering on the nature of consciousness, but there is nothing preventing us from using it for such a purpose. As the well-worn saying goes, monsters are “good to think with.”*
* The phrase ‘good to think with’, now often applied to monsters, originates with Claude Lévi- Strauss’ 1962 Totemism (in a completely different context).
Dr. Ryan Denson earned his PhD from the University of Exeter, UK in 2022. Prior to his position at the University of Silesia, he held a teaching position at Trent University in Canada. His research interests concern ancient folklore, the supernatural, and the ancient imagination. His current project focuses on the neglected genre of Byzantine hexaemera (homilies on the Genesis creation narrative) as part of the project “Beyond the Sacred: Conceptions of Nature in Byzantium (4th–15th Centuries)” funded by NCN OPUS (a grant from Poland’s National Science Center).