Research Abstract
Monstrous Preservation of Memory and Folklore: How Shape-shifters in The Devourers Forever Carry Their Prey
Throughout Indra Das’ novel The Devourers, the monstrous, shape-shifting characters—called werewolves, rakshasas, djinns, even gods—are shown to hold within them the memories of their human prey, what they call khrissals. The monsters get great use from this power, such as when a shapeshifter 
character is shown to speak a multitude of languages fluently thanks to the experience and the knowledge of the humans he has killed. The creatures preserve not only pure memory and feeling, but experience and skill as well. And these shape-shifters are shown to be expert storytellers in their own right, transcribing the events, beliefs, and desires of their own lives and of the lives of their prey. They do this in the written form but are also shown to plant their consumed memories directly into the minds of others, sharing what they know through spells and glamors. These consumed memories eventually fade over characters’ centuries of existence, like all memories are apt to do, but even then the stories are not truly lost, as we see near the end of the novel when one shape-shifter consumes another and must first know then purge each and every prey of the consumed.
In this paper, I argue that novels such as The Devourers and similar media provides a unique and integral, but perhaps undeserved within the texts, role to their monstrous creatures— carrying the history and memories of humans, the creatures they hunt, across the land and over many generations. In learning of the experiences of their prey and expertly crafting those experiences as narratives to tell others, the shape-shifters of these works act as horrific bards, telling tales of the dead that belong to them only in the most perverse sense. Where real, human bards tell the histories and legends of their people and their communities through song and oral tradition, these monsters mimic that role by telling only the stories of those they’ve killed and consumed, rather than their own. And rather than spreading these stories around the world through repeated retellings, like a normal bard, these shape-shifters take the stories and memories with them to the grave, should they be killed. Even being consumed by another werewolf doesn’t prevent this loss, as the consumer must purge the memories of the prey they haven’t killed themselves. Overall, much of the horror of The Devourers comes from this colonial appropriation, increasing the abject potential of these werewolves by imparting what is typically an important societal function on those that, very simply, cannot do it service. Das, an Indian man well versed in the history of colonization in his country, brings this horror to life through explicitly representation of his shape-shifters as western outsiders in pursuit of new lands to call their own. By acting as if they are the bards of western human history and forming myths around humanity more so than their own tribes, these devourers that are forever in a liminal existence find importance only in a humanity that they look down upon, chase down, and consume.
Capstone Description
How to Love a Creature So Unlike Yourself: Tellings of the Beauty and the Beast in The Bloody Chamber
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a collection of ten short stories that are all retellings of different fairy tales or folklore. Two of these stories, The Courtship of Mr. Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride are retellings of Beauty and the Beast. The first is a somewhat simple, happy love story, where a beastly man helps a father regain his lost fortune and falls in love with his daughter. Eventually, when the girl professes her love, he turns into a human and we are told that they live happily ever after. The second involves a girl being lost by her father in a game of cards to a Beast. Here, there is no love between her and her father, and the story ends with her willingly turning into a beast herself and becoming mates with her kidnapper. In my presentation, I will be looking at two specific moments in the two tellings that are completely opposed. The first is the images of the ending, which are direct reversals of one another in that both subjects end up as human in one and as creature in the other. The next is the presence of the white rose in the two stories: In Courtship, this rose is a beloved gift from a father to his daughter that kickstarts the plot. In The Tiger, the rose is abrupt, inconsequential, and immediately forgotten, given by the beast to the girl as condolences for being lost in a gamble. Between these two sets of images, I will be arguing that both versions of the ‘Beauty’ character are able to find power and independence on their own terms, though in dramatically different ways and with somewhat ambiguous results.
