I sold my first paid byline to a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper at the age of ten. That was 1975. In the fifty-one years since, I have continued to be paid to construct figures that audiences will find frightening, or sympathetic, or contemptible, or laughable, on schedule, in plays and musicals and screenplays and novels and podcast scripts and editorial work. My Dramatists Guild membership dates from 1984. My MFA is from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University. A publishing house I founded in the same year I sold the first byline has operated without interruption since. The inventory exists for a single reason: the labor of figure-construction is something I know from inside the work, and the working-dramatist’s perspective on that labor is the perspective from which my new book is written.
The book is Commissioned Monsters: A Labor History of Fear. It is published today, available in paperback, on Kindle, and as a free web PDF download from BolesBooks.com. The book is a four-thousand-year history of monstrous figures read from the working-dramatist’s vantage: every figure was designed, every design had a designer, every designer was paid, and somebody profited from the figure once it was in circulation.
This vantage makes a difference to how the dramatist reads the broader cultural-critical literature about monstrous figures. Cultural studies, since roughly the 1980s, has tended to treat the monster as a symptom or expression of some deeper cultural anxiety. The witch is read as anxiety about female autonomy, the vampire as anxiety about contagion or sexuality, the zombie as anxiety about consumer capitalism, and so on through a long and graceful literature. The readings have produced sophisticated work on specific texts and figures, and they have value within their working register. They have also consistently obscured something every paid figure-constructor knows from inside the work: every figure was designed by somebody specific, with specific intentions, for specific institutions, and the figure entered cultural circulation because the design served those institutional purposes well enough to justify the labor cost.
The book opens with a specific clay mask in the British Museum, made in southern Iraq during the Old Babylonian period approximately three thousand eight hundred years ago. The mask was paid for. Somebody walked silver from a temple administrator’s hand to a workshop, where an artisan converted the silver into clay-and-pigment labor over several days, and the resulting figure left the workshop on a delivery cart for installation in a temple precinct or a private household. The transaction is documented in the surviving cuneiform-tablet record at the level of the rate structures the Old Babylonian labor market produced, even where the specific invoice for this specific mask has not survived. From there, the book traces the same architectural form across approximately twenty additional cases ranging through Salem, the medieval witch manuals, the Penny Press, the Welfare Queen, the McMartin daycare prosecutions, the Central Park case, the Muslim ban, the Yellow Peril novels, and the cable-news segments on Russian sleeper agents, ending with a chapter on whether a society could organize itself without commissioning monstrous figures at all.
The labor-history register I am operating in has working antecedents reaching back several generations, antecedents that the cultural-studies mainstream chose to disregard. E.P. Thompson established, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the methodological move of reading culture through the documentary record of the labor that produced it. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) named the culture industry as a productive apparatus, though they declined to name specific contractors and specific beneficiaries operating within it. Antonio Gramsci, in the Prison Notebooks he composed between 1929 and 1935, identified the same architectural question through the concept of cultural hegemony, without resolving the question case-by-case. My book treats this tradition as its working ancestry.
The collective-unconscious frame, by contrast, is a Jungian inheritance whose practical effect has been to launder the labor question into a metaphysical claim about a culture’s depths. A monster, the frame proposes, wells up from the collective psyche to express what the culture cannot consciously name. The frame is graceful, and it has produced graceful readings. It also has the side effect, which I argue is sometimes the intended effect, of letting the contractors who actually designed and commissioned the figure disappear into a fog of mystical attribution. The frame makes the question of who paid for what fear effectively unaskable. A figure that wells up from the collective psyche has no invoice, no designer, no beneficiary; it is everyone’s and no one’s. The contractor who wrote the actual invoice can collect his fee unmolested.
The dramatist’s craft has its own technical literature on the labor of figure-construction. Stanislavski on character motivation, Brecht on alienation, Peter Brook on the rough theatre, David Mamet on the construction of dramatic tension; every working dramatist who has written about the craft has documented some piece of the labor. None of them named the question quite the way my book names it. The materials for the argument were already present in the practitioner literature, however, and the book is partly an attempt to bring the practitioner perspective into contact with the cultural-historical scholarship that has been operating without it for too long.
What changes when the labor-history register is applied. The figure begins to lose its supernatural quality. Frankenstein becomes a young woman writing on a dare during a rainy summer at Lake Geneva, working through her grief over a lost child, on a manuscript that established her as a working author for the rest of her life. Dracula becomes Bram Stoker’s seven-year freelance project, conducted while he held a day job managing the Lyceum Theatre for Henry Irving, marketed to a specific late-Victorian middle-class readership that wanted exotic-and-erotic novels with deniable supernatural plausibility. The Welfare Queen becomes a Republican campaign-team product whose contractor architecture is documented in surviving campaign records and Federal Election Commission filings. Mary Shelley’s contract, Stoker’s day job, and the Republican campaign team’s documented messaging records are the primary evidence in the labor-history register; the figure’s cultural meaning follows as the secondary effect produced by the labor those documents recorded.
I am a dramatist. My book is the work of a dramatist looking at four thousand years of other dramatists, working in clay or in print or in television or in cable-news graphics, making decisions about what their audiences will find frightening on schedule, for a fee. The book respects the labor. It documents the labor. It names the labor where the documentary record permits naming. The cultural-critical literature on monsters has, with significant exceptions, declined to do any of those three things; my book is one attempt to restore them.
The paperback edition is available through standard distribution. Kindle is available through Amazon. A free web PDF can be downloaded from BolesBooks.com for any reader who prefers to read the book without paying for it. The free option matters to the argument. Because the book is specifically about who pays for what fear and who profits from the fear they paid for, the option to read the book without paying ensures that the argument is accessible to readers regardless of the commercial position they occupy.
When the next play I write reaches rehearsal, I will, in the course of that rehearsal, make decisions about what the audience will find frightening, sympathetic, contemptible, or laughable. My collaborators and I will be paid for those decisions. The labor is the labor. The figures that emerge from the labor will be the figures that emerge from the labor. My book is one dramatist’s attempt to look at four thousand years of the same labor honestly, name the contractors where the documentary record permits naming them, and make the practitioner perspective available to a broader readership for the first time.
I think you will find it worth your time.
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