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Nessie is much more than a monster to us
We cling to the myth because it goes right to the heart of our culture and who we think we are
Brian Morton guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 16
The tourism people want us to stop thinking about Loch Ness solely in terms of the monster, and instead as part of one of the world's great geological formations, one link in the chain of the Great Glen. More Grand Canyon and less Jurassic Pond, you might say.
It's a persuasive idea, but the truth is that Nessie is a vital and complex icon. We need her, or him, or them, as a guarantor of national identity and distinctiveness.
It's 75 years since the first 'photograph' of the Loch Ness Monster appeared in the public prints. They came thick and fast after that, though for some reason they thinned out rather suddenly when colour photography came along. Loch Ness became a place of pilgrimage for a broad spectrum of researchers and obsessives, naturalists, New Agers, palaeontologists, cryptozoologists, hoaxers and film-makers; for Britons it's cheaper to get to than Dallas and there's a grassy knoll for everyone.
The place has a strange effect on people. It turned poor Tim Dinsdale, the best known Nessie researcher, into a brooding obsessive. It tempted the saintly Peter Scott into a gross manipulation of scientific evidence: turn a blurry photograph upside down, highlight and touch up a vague rhombus in the middle and, presto, you have a fin! It's a plesiosaur! And does anyone rib BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell - 'Still watching dinosaurs, Nick?' - about his youthful obsession with the monster.
The 'Surgeon's Photograph' - and what a clever designation that was for what turned out to be an April Fool joke; who'd suspect a medical man? - has survived its own debunking and is still considered, even by disbelievers, to be an image 'of' the monster. In reality, it is the monster, an ambiguous surfacing of something many of us guiltily want to believe in.
The curious thing about Loch Ness studies is that all the debunking in the world doesn't seem to make a dent on the phenomenon. One by one, the classic photographs and iconic sightings are ticked off as natural phenomena or pranks: swimming deer, mergansers, a family of otters, fertiliser bags filled with straw, fishing-boat fenders and a broken hatstand (that was us; we were young and needed the money, though nobody wanted the snaps), 'vegetable mats' bubbling up from the goo, boat wakes and standing waves, logs and even dogs - one famous picture is alleged to be a double-exposed Labrador with a stick in its mouth, which seems to me an even greater jump of imagination than thinking it represents a living fossil alive and breeding in a Scottish loch.
We need Nessie because she tells us so much about ourselves. If she exists at all, she must be impossibly ancient which reminds us of our own long past.
She's not altogether comely by all accounts, which is our way of telling the world that even if we lack superficial glamour, there's something impressive underneath.
Her very elusiveness is useful in a country which doesn't boast elephants or vast herds of grazing wildebeest. A Loch Ness safari is a triumph of hope over probability.
Deeper than all this, though, is that almost metaphysical question about whether the Loch Ness Monster actually exists and what she represents.
There's a touch of spuriously elegant coincidence in the recognition that Nessie was first photographed in the year King Kong was released and Hitler assumed power in Germany, forming the Gestapo shortly thereafter.
I once spent a very uncomfortable hour in an Inverness pub with an American woman who was trying to convince me that Nessie was the actualisation of evil. Perhaps more interesting is its closeness to the modern take-off of Scottish nationalism.
Though Sir Alexander McEwan was roundly trounced in the 1933 Kilmarnock byelection, beaten into fourth by three rival Labour candidates, he stood as the candidate for both the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish party, who managed to overcome their Lilliputian differences the very next year to become the SNP.
You're not going to tell me there's no connection between its rise and the sudden appearance of 'the creature'. After a slumber of centuries, Nessie suddenly started making more winning appearances than Michael Phelps, just as the Nats started to come on the scene. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I used 'actually' in its proper sense because even more deeply buried in the Loch Ness phenomenon is an anxiety that goes to the heart of Scottish culture.
Perhaps the creature was there once - during our human history, that is - but no more.
One school of Nessie watchers believes that our presence pushed her to extinction. Others will tell you that you won't see her if you're actively looking for her. Others still insist that you can only see her if you already believe.
Here's the rub: which specialism is more appropriate to Scottish identity, palaeontology or cryptozoology? Did it exist in the past, but is now little more than a fossil record? Or is it a hippogriff, put together out of elements lifted straight from the unconscious, but with no real-world existence?
Do we cling to Nessie because we don't really know who we are any more?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/1 ... ss-monster
We cling to the myth because it goes right to the heart of our culture and who we think we are
Brian Morton guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 16
The tourism people want us to stop thinking about Loch Ness solely in terms of the monster, and instead as part of one of the world's great geological formations, one link in the chain of the Great Glen. More Grand Canyon and less Jurassic Pond, you might say.
It's a persuasive idea, but the truth is that Nessie is a vital and complex icon. We need her, or him, or them, as a guarantor of national identity and distinctiveness.
It's 75 years since the first 'photograph' of the Loch Ness Monster appeared in the public prints. They came thick and fast after that, though for some reason they thinned out rather suddenly when colour photography came along. Loch Ness became a place of pilgrimage for a broad spectrum of researchers and obsessives, naturalists, New Agers, palaeontologists, cryptozoologists, hoaxers and film-makers; for Britons it's cheaper to get to than Dallas and there's a grassy knoll for everyone.
The place has a strange effect on people. It turned poor Tim Dinsdale, the best known Nessie researcher, into a brooding obsessive. It tempted the saintly Peter Scott into a gross manipulation of scientific evidence: turn a blurry photograph upside down, highlight and touch up a vague rhombus in the middle and, presto, you have a fin! It's a plesiosaur! And does anyone rib BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell - 'Still watching dinosaurs, Nick?' - about his youthful obsession with the monster.
The 'Surgeon's Photograph' - and what a clever designation that was for what turned out to be an April Fool joke; who'd suspect a medical man? - has survived its own debunking and is still considered, even by disbelievers, to be an image 'of' the monster. In reality, it is the monster, an ambiguous surfacing of something many of us guiltily want to believe in.
The curious thing about Loch Ness studies is that all the debunking in the world doesn't seem to make a dent on the phenomenon. One by one, the classic photographs and iconic sightings are ticked off as natural phenomena or pranks: swimming deer, mergansers, a family of otters, fertiliser bags filled with straw, fishing-boat fenders and a broken hatstand (that was us; we were young and needed the money, though nobody wanted the snaps), 'vegetable mats' bubbling up from the goo, boat wakes and standing waves, logs and even dogs - one famous picture is alleged to be a double-exposed Labrador with a stick in its mouth, which seems to me an even greater jump of imagination than thinking it represents a living fossil alive and breeding in a Scottish loch.
We need Nessie because she tells us so much about ourselves. If she exists at all, she must be impossibly ancient which reminds us of our own long past.
She's not altogether comely by all accounts, which is our way of telling the world that even if we lack superficial glamour, there's something impressive underneath.
Her very elusiveness is useful in a country which doesn't boast elephants or vast herds of grazing wildebeest. A Loch Ness safari is a triumph of hope over probability.
Deeper than all this, though, is that almost metaphysical question about whether the Loch Ness Monster actually exists and what she represents.
There's a touch of spuriously elegant coincidence in the recognition that Nessie was first photographed in the year King Kong was released and Hitler assumed power in Germany, forming the Gestapo shortly thereafter.
I once spent a very uncomfortable hour in an Inverness pub with an American woman who was trying to convince me that Nessie was the actualisation of evil. Perhaps more interesting is its closeness to the modern take-off of Scottish nationalism.
Though Sir Alexander McEwan was roundly trounced in the 1933 Kilmarnock byelection, beaten into fourth by three rival Labour candidates, he stood as the candidate for both the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish party, who managed to overcome their Lilliputian differences the very next year to become the SNP.
You're not going to tell me there's no connection between its rise and the sudden appearance of 'the creature'. After a slumber of centuries, Nessie suddenly started making more winning appearances than Michael Phelps, just as the Nats started to come on the scene. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I used 'actually' in its proper sense because even more deeply buried in the Loch Ness phenomenon is an anxiety that goes to the heart of Scottish culture.
Perhaps the creature was there once - during our human history, that is - but no more.
One school of Nessie watchers believes that our presence pushed her to extinction. Others will tell you that you won't see her if you're actively looking for her. Others still insist that you can only see her if you already believe.
Here's the rub: which specialism is more appropriate to Scottish identity, palaeontology or cryptozoology? Did it exist in the past, but is now little more than a fossil record? Or is it a hippogriff, put together out of elements lifted straight from the unconscious, but with no real-world existence?
Do we cling to Nessie because we don't really know who we are any more?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/nov/1 ... ss-monster
