The full title of Mary Shelley’s famous novel is Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. What follows is a close reading showing that not only is the title character a modern equivalent of the ancient Greek god, but the novel as a whole is a modern equivalent to the ancient Greek myth. As far as I know, this is an original argument. It's also a demonstration of how "subtexts" work.
A subtext is another text “through” which a primary text is meant to be read, and with reference to which it draws its significance. It provides a kind of harmony, consonant or dissonant, to the melody of the text. Thus the way the text departs from the subtext can be as significant as the way it follows it. For example, another subtext for Frankenstein is Milton’s Paradise Lost. When the Monster says to Dr. Frankenstein, “Evil be thou my good,” the reader is meant to recognize the words as Satan’s, and think of the Monster as a great but fallen being in everlasting and self-destructive rebellion against his creator. On the other hand, when he tells Frankenstein about the first time he looked at his reflection in the pond, saying, “I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster I am,” the reader is meant to recognize the contrast to the scene in Milton’s epic in which Eve first sees her own reflection and marvels at how beautiful she is.
Shelley uses the Prometheus myth as a subtext for her retelling of it, both in obvious and subtle ways: in language, in imagery, in symbolism, in plot, in characterization, and in meaning. Here is the relevant section of the Prometheus myth—which is actually part of a much longer myth cycle—from Robert Graves’ book The Greek Myths:
"[Prometheus, who had formed mankind out of clay, was the wisest of the Titans,] and Athene, at whose birth from Zeus’s head he had assisted, taught him architecture, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, medicine, metallurgy, and other useful arts, which he passed on to mankind. But Zeus, who had decided to extirpate the whole race of man, and spared them only at Prometheus’s urgent plea, grew angry at their increasing powers and talents . . . [and withheld] fire from mankind. Prometheus at once went to Athene, with a plea for a backstairs admittance to Olympus, and this she granted. On his arrival, he lighted a torch at the fiery chariot of the Sun and presently broke from it a fragment of glowing charcoal, which he thrust into the pithy hollow of a giant fennel-stalk. Then, extinguishing his torch, he stole away undiscovered, and give fire to mankind. Zeus swore revenge. He ordered Hephaestus to make a clay woman, and the four Winds to breathe life into her, and all the goddesses of Olympus to adorn her. This woman, Pandora, the most beautiful ever created . . . opened a box, which Prometheus had warned Epimetheus to keep closed, and in which he had been at pains to imprison all the Spites that might plague mankind: such as Old Age, Labor, Sickness, Insanity, Vice, and Passion. Out these flew in a cloud . . . [and] attacked the race of mortals. Delusive Hope, however, whom Prometheus had also shut in the box, discouraged them by her lies from a general suicide. . . . Zeus had Prometheus chained naked to a pillar [in most versions, a cliff] in the Caucasian mountains, where a greedy vulture [in some versions, an eagle] tore at his liver all day, year in, year out; and there was no end to the pain, because every night (during which Prometheus was exposed to cruel frost and cold) his liver grew whole again" (Graves 144-145).
Shelley’s novel uses what is called interpolated narration—it nests narrative within narrative like a Russian doll. Moving from the outside inward, we have Shelley herself, the novelist, giving voice to Robert Walton, who is writing to his sister; Walton quotes Frankenstein; Frankenstein in turn reproduces the speech of the Monster; and the Monster at one point tells us the story of the De Lacey family. Debora and I thought it made sense to try to follow the same pattern in our presentation, and since she’s covered Shelley, I’ll start with Walton.
Shamelessly borrowing from the title of an animated television series, I would characterize Walton as a “Young Frankenstein,” a man similar in mold to the protagonist, but smaller in stature. He has two main functions. The first is to give us a third-person take on Frankenstein, to tell us things about him that Frankenstein wouldn’t tell us about himself, such as his appearance and the manner of his death. His second, more important function, is to give Frankenstein—and probably Shelley—someone to whom to moralize.
Like Frankenstein, Walton aspires to greatness, glory, even immortality. He wants, somehow, to boldly go where no man has gone before. Realizing, however, that he lacks the power of artistic creation, he turns to discovery. “I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death.” He is goal-driven, single-minded, even obsessive. He seeks knowledge at any cost, and is willing to sacrifice his own life—and more disturbingly, the lives of others, in this case his crew—to achieve his aim. Using metaphors similar to Frankenstein’s, he describes that aim as “the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race.” For these reasons, we should suspect that he may be deceiving himself about his true motives when he writes to Margaret that “you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation.”
Walton and Frankenstein are thus kindred Promethean spirits, and Frankenstein of course recognizes this. “When I reflect,” Frankenstein warns, “that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale. . . . Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” Despite the hermeneutical problem that Frankenstein is not a moral exemplar and therefore may be an unreliable moralizer, I’m going to venture that this is the message Shelley wants to communicate to us as readers. Subtlety does not appear to be her primary aim in this novel. Notice, though, that the acquirement of knowledge is dangerous but not necessarily wicked or forbidden, and that the man without it may be happier—ignorance is bliss—but not necessarily better off. Shelley is not against knowledge, science, or technology per se, but against a certain kind of attitude.
Walton is only a minor character. Most of the novel, by far, is in the voice of Frankenstein himself, and it is this level of narrative that the Prometheus myth is most present. First of all, however, if Frankenstein is the modern “Prometheus,” how is it modern? The critic George Levine explains:
"[Frankenstein is a] secular myth, with no metaphysical machinery, no gods: the creation is from mortal bodies with the assistance of electricity, not spirit; and the deaths are not pursued beyond the grave. . . . Its modernity lies the transformation of fantasy and traditional Christian and pagan myths into unremitting secularity, into the myth of mankind as it must work within the limits of the visible, physical world" (Levine 6-7).
Many scholars believe that mythology is the precursor to science, as it plays the same function in society: explaining why things are the way they are. In the shift from the ancient to the modern era, the gods have been replaced by “natural forces”—cereal, for example, now grows by photosynthesis rather than by the touch of Ceres—and personalistic explanations have been replaced by impersonal deterministic ones. So Shelley ingeniously transposes the myth into a modern key by having physics and psychology do the work that Zeus and Athena did in the original.
Now, how is Frankenstein like Prometheus? First of all, he’s an extraordinary human being. Even his first name, Victor, means “conqueror” or “champion”—and this is only half ironic. Walton marvels at his intelligence and remarks, “What a glorious creature must he have been in the days of his prosperity when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin! He seems to feel his own worth and the greatness of his fall.” One thing that the critics, at least the ones I’ve read, neglect to point out is that the novel has nearly all the conventions of a Greek tragedy, with Frankenstein cast as the tragic hero. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the protagonist, chained to a rock in the wilderness, recounts to the chorus and the audience the story of how he got there. In Frankenstein, the protagonist, confined to a bed on a ship in the Arctic, recounts to Walton the story of how he got there. Both start in medias res, and in both, considering that the past is told in flashback, the actual time elapsed is rather short. Traditionally, the tragic hero is a great being whose hubris and moral blindness are fated to lead him to overreach himself and ultimately come crashing down, providing everyone else with a sobering lesson. As I will argue, both Prometheus and Frankenstein fit this role. It is also interesting that even though Frankenstein is thoroughly secular in mindset, he uses the pagan rhetoric of fate to tell his story. His first disillusionment with science, he says, “was a strong effort of the spirit of good; but it was ineffectual. Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.”
Second, Frankenstein is like Prometheus in his passion for and possession of knowledge. The latter learns a range of “useful arts” from Athena, the goddess of wisdom. The former studies “every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics,” under Professor Waldman. Yet he is no connoisseur who delights in learning for its own sake. He realizes that knowledge is power. So it is only after Waldman promises that the modern scientist has “new and almost unlimited powers” and can “perform miracles” that Frankenstein becomes interested. Whereas his sister Elizabeth, who represents the feminine approach, “contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearance of things,” he says, “I delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine.” His metaphors of discovery involve violence, domination, and control. Consider: “I pursued nature to her hiding places.” And later, “The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him, and was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery. . . . But here were books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more.” Pursuing, unveiling, and penetrating a feminine object—intentionally or not, his language even suggests rape! One could say that he wants carnal knowledge of Nature.
Again like Prometheus, Frankenstein tells himself that he seeks this knowledge for the good of mankind. But we can see that mankind being benefited is not as important to him as his own status as benefactor. His hubris here is overwhelming:
"So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein [this is the first mention of his name in the novel]—more, more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. . . . What glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!"
And even greater than a discover and preserver is a creator:
"No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs."
Prometheus creates man out of clay; Frankenstein creates a man out of dead body parts. Interestingly, the more human Frankenstein’s creation becomes, the less human, i.e. the less of a natural and social being, he himself becomes. “[M]y eyes were insensible to the charms of nature,” he recalls. “And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. . . . I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health.” As the Monster grows, Frankenstein wastes away, and (jumping ahead a bit) when the creature finally gains consciousness, the creator promptly loses it.
In addition to their wide range of knowledge, the Promethei both possess a powerful secret. The ancient Prometheus hides a spark of Olympian fire inside a fennel-stalk and delivers it to mankind. This part of the myth is highly symbolic, because for some ancient cultures the ability to use fire is the answer to Dr. Bieber’s question, the essence or distinguishing mark of humanity. (And in Disney’s version of The Jungle Book, King Louie of the apes sings to Mowgli, “Give me the power / of man’s red flower / so I can be like you!”) The modern Prometheus has solved the mystery of how to turn a spark of the modern fire, electricity, into the “spark of life,” the “animating principle.”
Though we don’t have time now to explore it in detail, it’s extremely interesting to trace the image of fire throughout the novel. The critic Anne Mellor concisely discusses some of its key occurrences:
"The creature raised from the dead by Victor Frankenstein’s stolen “spark,” after having gradually learned to distinguish between differing sensations and ideas, encounters a fire left by some wandering beggars. His first reaction to Prometheus’ gift is intense delight at its warmth; his second reaction, after having thrust his hand into the live embers, is intense pain. His judgment, “How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!”, focuses the moral dilemma of the novel: was the cause that Frankenstein served, the creation of life from death, good or evil or both? The creature’s use of fire thus becomes emblematic. Initially, the creature tries to achieve a reunion with both the natural and the human order by domesticating fire. He learns to tame his fire to his own purposes, using it to provide warmth, light during the night, and heat for cooking his raw nuts and roots. More important, he attempts to ingratiate himself with the De Lacey family by bringing them love-gifts of firewood. But finally, this “tamed” fire and what it represents—the possibility of including the creature around the family hearth or within the circle of civilization—is refused by the De Laceys. . . . Fire now becomes the agency of destruction. The creature, learning that the De Laceys will never return to their cottage and filled with “feelings of revenge and hatred,” burns down the only home he has ever known. . . . Fire, with its forked tongue, is now the instrument of Satan. As such, it recurs in the last moments of the novel, when the creature promises Walton (perhaps falsely) that he shall “consume to ashes this miserable frame” in his funeral pyre at the North Pole" (Mellor 1988:78-79).
Prometheus oversteps his rightful boundaries by flouting Zeus. Frankenstein doesn’t, because there aren’t any gods in Shelley’s novel, at least not as active characters. But he does describe his actions in religious language, as profanation of the sacred. Before bringing the Monster to life, he expresses a purely irreligious attitude: “Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life.” But afterwards, his “prophetic soul” and despises his “unnatural” activities, his “unhallowed arts,” and his “thrice-accursed hands” and “profane fingers” that “disturbed” what they should have left alone.
In Greek, Prometheus’s name means “forethinker.” Despite his great learning, he lacks wise judgment. In twice deceiving Zeus he shows great strategy and cunning, but he does not think about the consequences. Frankenstein, too, is able to put into action the awesome task of creating a living being. But as soon as it is finished, he does not know what to do with it. He just runs away from it. He remembers, “I traversed the streets, without any clear conception of where I was, or what I was doing.” Furthermore, Mellor points out that “throughout his experiment, Frankenstein never considers the possibility that his creature might not wish the existence he is about to receive. On the contrary, he blithely assumes that the creature will ‘bless’ him and be filled with ‘gratitude.’ . . . He never once considers how such a giant will survive among normal human beings. Nor does he carefully contemplate the features of the creature he is making.” (Mellor 1988:5)
Pandora’s name is synonymous with vicious curiosity. By ignoring the divine warning and opening the box, she inadvertently but irrevocably unleashes a horde of evils upon mankind. Though he doesn’t mention her name, Frankenstein clearly thinks in similar terms of his own decision to create the Monster. “Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery; had he not murdered my brother? . . . I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror . . . the living monument of presumption and rash ignorance which I had let loose upon the world.” There may also be a parallel between Pandora and the Monster’s bride: Frankenstein doesn’t finish creating her, aborts her in fact, because he believes she will be a Pandora: “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. . . . [F]uture ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.” Here he actually does consider the consequences, but it’s arguable that he miscalculates. Had he finished creating her, he might have appeased the monster and averted tragedy.
Clearly not impressed by Prometheus’ audacity, Zeus has the unfortunate Titan chained to a high, cold, and lonely mountainside, where a giant eagle daily pecks out his liver, which grows back every night. The secularity and the realism of Shelley’s novel make such a fate impossible for Frankenstein, yet all the same torments are there for him, translated from external to internal, from visceral to psychological. Frankenstein first encounters the Monster, and with him the consequences of his fatal decision, on top of a very high mountain. Listen to the language here:
"The immense mountains and precipices … spoke of a power mighty as Omnipotence—and I ceased to fear, or to bend before any being less almighty than that which had created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most terrific guise … [T]he mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, [struck me] as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings."
These high, inhospitable, inaccessible mountains, their peaks shrouded in mist, with lightning playing across them, strongly echo Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods. It is on this mountain that judgment first comes to Frankenstein. The parallels to the Caucasus Mountains, where Prometheus is enchained, are the small, lonely, barren rock of an island in the Atlantic where Frankenstein works on the Monster’s bride, the actual prison he finds himself in afterward, and ultimately the frozen wastes of the Arctic where he endlessly pursues the Monster.
It is also during this meeting with the Monster that Frankenstein is put in bondage. This bondage, however, is psychological. He places himself under oath to the Monster and thereafter finds that he feels like a “slave.” He can’t go where he likes or do what he likes because of his onerous obligations. He can’t banish the guilt of his deed, the terror of his creation, or the dread of his duty from his mind. “For an instant,” he says, “I dared to shake off my chains, and look around me with a free and lofty spirit; but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.” Ironically, even the secret which he so jealously guarded before is now a burden he longs to get off his chest but cannot.
For the rest of the novel Frankenstein is isolated, sometimes spatially and always morally, from mankind. While on the island, he says “Company was irksome to me,” because of the foulness of his work. But when he’s in society, he cannot enter into it because of his guilt. “I abhorred the face of man,” he says. “Oh, not abhorred! … But I felt that I had not right to share their intercourse.” In his sufferings, he tells us, “solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, deathlike solitude.” And worst of all, the Monster punishes him by consuming his loved ones. “Know that, one by one, my friends were snatched away; I was left desolate.” In the Arctic his only company is his own desire for revenge.
Since there are no gods in Shelley’s retelling of the myth, the cast is smaller. That’s why the Monster plays several parts: creature, Zeus, and bird. When the Monster has finished his speech, Frankenstein recalls, “I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle.” Like Prometheus’s eagle, Frankenstein’s Monster relentlessly eats away at his soul. And what makes this unending suffering possible for both of them is, ironically, their immortality. Prometheus cannot die because he is a god, and his liver grows back every night. Frankenstein is not literally immortal, but he seems to have a much stronger constitution than the average man. He complains, “Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture? But I was doomed to live.” He now sees immortality not as a blessing but as a curse.
So far I’ve focused exclusively on the Greek subtext of the novel. But one of the things that makes it brilliant is the way that Shelley weaves together several different subtexts. Together with the language of Promethean punishment are the biblical metaphors of hell. When he sees the Monster for the first time, Frankenstein says, “I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed.” At another point he says, “I … felt the never-dying worm alive in my bosom.” And one especially remarkable use of this language takes place when Frankenstein is returning home and approaches the Alps. “I saw the lightnings playing on the summit of Mont Blanc. . . . [V]ivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant everything seemed of pitchy darkness, until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash.” Shelley manages to combine two contradictory biblical images, the darkness and the lake of fire! But on the biblical sources of the novel, others have written.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
The Social Lives of Elephants (Long Essay)
If there’s any common thread that ties together all the different disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, it’s that all of them try, in different ways, to answer the question, “What does it mean to be a person?” Since human beings have nearly always thought of themselves as the only persons living on this planet, closely bound up with that question is another: “What is unique about human beings?” These questions are much too broad and much too philosophical for definitive answers, but many people have suggested that the answer to both has something to do with having intelligence, or moral consciousness, or emotions, or the ability to communicate and form relationships with others. Though I couldn’t begin to prove it in five minutes, I suggest that studying elephants—of all things—might make us want to rethink the way we frame these problems. In her book The Astonishing Elephant, Shana Alexander writes, “Physiologically, elephants are unique—entirely different from all other mammals. Yet, since antiquity, observers have agreed that the elephant is the animal most akin to man.” That is, elephants show, in at least a primitive form, many of the features of personhood. Perhaps the things that make us humans beings unique are not entirely the same as the things that make us persons.
Although there are a few solitary elephants, “loners” or “hermits,” most elephants live in one of two kinds of groups, cow herds and bull herds. Here is a photograph of a cow herd. Cow herds are tightly-knit and permanent groups of related females and their calves, led by the oldest and most dominant female, the matriarch. According to Dan Freeman, in Elephants: The Vanishing Giants, these are usually between 10 and 50 animals, but they can be as large as 500. Now and then, such as when the matriarch dies, they split into smaller groups. When a male calf reaches maturity, the cows drive him away, violently if necessary. For a while he tries to return, but they won’t let him. Eventually, he joins up with a bull herd. Bull herds are much looser, temporary groups of mature males. Their association seems to be based not on blood but on friendship, enjoying each other’s company, and on self-interest, as being part of a group provides mutual advantages. The more stable bull herds sort themselves into a hierarchy based on dominance, which is usually based on size, which—since male elephants never stop growing—is in turn based on age. Cow herds and bull herds are aware of each other, but they usually only come together to mate. These herds are not self-contained; they are part of a larger network of kinship groups in the wider geographical area. The distinguished zoologist Joyce Poole writes in Growing Up with Elephants, “Elephant society is complex and multi-tiered, involving other families, clans, and subpopulations. Eventually, an adult elephant will know every elephant in its population and will know its relationship and position with regard to each.”
Essential to being part of society is being able to communicate with each other. Elephants communicate intensely through a complex “language” that involves all of their senses. Visual communication, to begin with, mostly involves the positioning of the head and the trunk. Although the significance of each is not understood, scientists have recognized at least twenty different postures on the scale of aggression to submission. The most aggressive is the intimidation posture, which looks like this: the elephant faces its opponent directly, raises its head, and spreads its ears at right angles to its head, making it look much bigger. Sometimes it will shake its head back and forth, causing its ears to snap sharply against its head, trumpet loudly, toss up dust and bushes, and even bluff a charge.
The second kind of communication is oral. Elephants can make at least thirty different vocal sounds, including trumpets, squeals, growls, rumbles, and sounds too low-pitched for humans to hear. Poole classifies these sounds into several types: dominance, sexual excitement, social excitement, group dynamics and coordination, social fear, surprise, and distress. Other experts think there is a sound for reassurance. One sound, the “let’s go” rumble, could be considered symbolic and therefore an instance of language. As in our own species, female elephants are much more chatty than males. They vocalize much more, and nineteen of the sounds are used exclusively by females.
Not all communication is “verbal”—much of it is tactile. Elephants touch either frequently, and for many reasons. Sometimes it’s aggressive. Bulls competing for mating privileges, like these ones, will engage in shoving matches, which are forceful but rarely harmful. Sometimes it’s playful. Young elephants bounce off each other, climb on each other, and even “trunk wrestle." Most often, however, it’s affectionate. When two of them meet after having been separated, they extend touch the tips of their trunks together in something like a handshake. When they are together, they stroke and caress each other with their trunks and forefeet. They find it reassuring.
Finally, elephants communicate by smell and even taste. They emit bodily chemicals to mark territory, for example, or to indicate when they are in heat. This may be another reason they put their trunks in each other’s mouths.
We’ve seen some elephant affection already; but by far the most affectionate elephant relationship is between a mother and her calf. Since the bull wanders off soon after mating, the cow gives birth surrounded by her female relatives. This is a cause of great excitement for them: they crowd around the calf, making affectionate noises and trying to touch it and pick it up. Clearly, they find it adorable. If this little guy didn’t weigh 250 pounds, I’d try to pick him up too. Elephant mothers are exceptionally doting, nearly always cuddling with their children and indulging their every need. There are many stories of mother elephants going to heroic and sacrificial lengths to protect their babies.
Yet parenting can be an exhausting job. It takes a village to raise a child—or in this case, it takes a herd. When the mother needs a rest, the juvenile cows in the herd, called “allomothers” or “aunties” take over. According to Jeheskel Shoshani, in Elephants: Majestic Creatures of the Wild, their job is “following [the calves], standing over them while they are sleeping, getting them up when the family moves on, helping them if they get stuck in the mud or caught up in a bush, running to their aid if they make a distress call, and chasing after them and bringing them back if they wander.” Eltringham writes that Many of the skills an elephant needs to survive are not innate but have to be learned from others. So the older elephants are educators. They are also disciplinarians: they will spank young elephants with their trunks if they get out of line. When these young elephants reach maturity at about fourteen years old, the females are taught child care and the males are expelled from the herd.
If birth is an emotional time for elephants, so is death. Unlike any other animals except humans, elephants seem to have an awareness of their mortality. Sadly, sometimes birth and death occur together, if a calf is stillborn. When this happens, the herd will wait as the bereaved mother stands off by herself for a day or two, holding her dead child on her tusks. When an adult elephant is dying, either of age or of something else, the others may stand next to him, propping him up. When he finally dies, they stand over his body for a long time, caressing it with their feet or their trunks, sometimes even weeping elephant tears. According to Alexander, they often return the next day to pay their respects, and sometimes they bury the body by covering it with dirt or branches. And this may be the most uncanny thing of all: when elephants come across skeletons of other animals, they ignore them, but when they come across elephant bones, they react differently. Poole writes, “They approach slowly and silently, and then the touching begins, slowly, as they deliberately, carefully turn a skull over and over with their trunks, touching, hovering over the long bones with their hind feet.”
This is a sobering observation—and, I think, an appropriate place to conclude. I’ve shown that elephants have a complex social organization, a sophisticated system of communication, what appear to be deep bonds between them (especially between mothers and children), and a way of responding to death that is strangely similar to that of our own species. Whether these things make them persons or not, I’ll let you decide.
The Ganges: Public Health Nightmare (Short Essay)
The Ganges River of northern India may be the most polluted body of water in the world. It may also have the greatest variety of pollutants. Some of them are toxic byproducts of industry: “pharmaceutical companies, electronics plants, textile and paper industries, tanneries, fertilizer manufacturers and oil refineries discharge effluent into the river. This hazardous waste includes hydrochloric acid, mercury and other heavy metals, bleaches and dyes, pesticides, and polychlorinated biphenyls … Runoff from farms in the Ganges basin adds chemical fertilizers and pesticides such as DDT.” Most of them, however, are organic. In Varanasi alone, the river swallows the remains of 40,000 human corpses a year—some cremated, some partially cremated, and some whole—not to mention the dead cattle. Worst yet is the daily dump of hundreds of million gallons of raw sewage. Fecal coliform counts are dangerously high, 100 times the government’s acceptable standard for bathing according to one source and 67000 times according to another. People who use this water risk hepatitis, typhoid, cholera, amoebic dysentery, other waterborne diseases, and a variety of skin afflictions.
Despite these dangers, however, the Ganges, or Ganga in the vernacular, is the most desired destination in India. In Varanasi alone, an average of 60,000 people a day immerse themselves in the river. During the Kumbh Mela festival every several years, millions of pilgrims (estimates vary from 20 million to an incredible 70 million) make their way to Allahabad, another riverside city, for a ritual bath. So many unwashed bodies, of course, add even more contaminants to the water. Nevertheless, many even drink it and carry bottles back to their relatives.
Needless to say, this is a public health crisis. One of the unspoken lessons of the course so far is that public health situations, like all social or environmental situations, are part of a complex web of causes and effects, none of which is an independent variable. Some of them are common and predictable, and some of them are strange and surprising. The economic causes of the Ganges pollution are what you might expect. A century of booming population in India has concentrated in cities near the river. Infrastructure is weak, and the government lacks the resources to clean the water: for example, electricity is scarce, and the sewage pumps and water treatment plants suffer frequent power failures. Many citizens have no access to any other water source, either because they can’t afford it or because it simply isn’t available.
There are, however, some interesting religious and cultural causes for this crisis as well. According to Indian mythology, the Mother Ganges is a goddess who long ago descended from the sky to resurrect the ashes of an ancient king’s ancestors. Now, any Hindu who dips in or drinks from her, especially at the holy city of Varanasi, is freed from a great deal of karmic debt. Anyone whose remains are scattered in her escapes immediately from the cycle of reincarnation. And she is the most respectful resting place for the carcasses of holy cows.
These beliefs have a powerful grip on Hindu minds, powerful enough in many cases to neutralize warnings of health risks. Christians aren’t the only ones for whom science and faith are at odds! Some pilgrims are simply unaware of the river’s pollution, or even unaware of the microbial origins of disease. Many refuse to believe that holy water can be dangerous, despite the evidence. “‘Ganga is my mother, it could never harm me,’ says Hanuman Sahani, a lifetime boatman … [who] uses the water—straight from the river—for worship, but also to drink and brush his teeth.” Others are willing to take the physical risks, which they consider insignificant next to the spiritual benefits. Or sometimes even social benefits: a friend of mine, an American Christian, jumped in to show solidarity with his Hindu friends. And for whatever reason, a number of Western tourists, presumably educated ones, enter the water every year. All of this shows that informing and warning people may not be enough to keep them from hazardous behaviors, even those that we think are avoidable. Sometimes dogma yields to pragmatism: this January a group of sadhus (holy men) threatened to boycott the Kumbh Mela unless the government did something about the water conditions. The government settled on a temporary solution, “ordering Uttar Pradesh officials to release 1500 cubic feet per second of water every day from the Arora dam.” Yet even without this measure, most Hindus would have continued doing what they have always done.
If a river this polluted ran through the United States, the government would almost certainly have kept people out of it, by force if necessary. This is not an option for the Indian government. Although it is a secular democracy, most of its officials are Hindus. And even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. The consequences breaking a millennia-old tradition by fencing off the holiest pilgrimage site in the world would be unthinkable. Furthermore, Indians tend to be proud of their culture and have a strong sense of honor, and one of the consequences is that the government tends to conceal or downplay its problems. This is why the only accurate reports of water quality come from private organizations. The Ganga Action Plan, initiated in 1985, tried to set up water treatment systems and to target polluting industries, but its measures all failed for a variety of reasons. Since then the government has made little to no attempt to warn people about the river’s dangers. Furthermore, probably because of Hinduism’s influence, Indian culture has less of a sense of civic action and cooperation, commitment to the public good, and responsibility for shared resources than Western culture. This may be why nobody in particular feels personally responsible to keep the river clean.
Interestingly, some Indian intellectuals have found one at least partially effective strategy to keep people out of the Ganges. It involves sensitivity to people’s religious sensibilities. You could call it an integration of faith and learning. One activist explains that “to tell a Hindu that Ganga, goddess and mother, is “polluted” or “dirty” is an insult; it suggests that she is no longer sacred. Rather, the approach must acknowledge that human action, not the holy river herself, is responsible: ‘We are allowing our mother to be defiled.’” Another activist simply “explains to devout Hindus that Mother Ganges is not feeling well. She can be cured by eradicating pollution.”
Despite these dangers, however, the Ganges, or Ganga in the vernacular, is the most desired destination in India. In Varanasi alone, an average of 60,000 people a day immerse themselves in the river. During the Kumbh Mela festival every several years, millions of pilgrims (estimates vary from 20 million to an incredible 70 million) make their way to Allahabad, another riverside city, for a ritual bath. So many unwashed bodies, of course, add even more contaminants to the water. Nevertheless, many even drink it and carry bottles back to their relatives.
Needless to say, this is a public health crisis. One of the unspoken lessons of the course so far is that public health situations, like all social or environmental situations, are part of a complex web of causes and effects, none of which is an independent variable. Some of them are common and predictable, and some of them are strange and surprising. The economic causes of the Ganges pollution are what you might expect. A century of booming population in India has concentrated in cities near the river. Infrastructure is weak, and the government lacks the resources to clean the water: for example, electricity is scarce, and the sewage pumps and water treatment plants suffer frequent power failures. Many citizens have no access to any other water source, either because they can’t afford it or because it simply isn’t available.
There are, however, some interesting religious and cultural causes for this crisis as well. According to Indian mythology, the Mother Ganges is a goddess who long ago descended from the sky to resurrect the ashes of an ancient king’s ancestors. Now, any Hindu who dips in or drinks from her, especially at the holy city of Varanasi, is freed from a great deal of karmic debt. Anyone whose remains are scattered in her escapes immediately from the cycle of reincarnation. And she is the most respectful resting place for the carcasses of holy cows.
These beliefs have a powerful grip on Hindu minds, powerful enough in many cases to neutralize warnings of health risks. Christians aren’t the only ones for whom science and faith are at odds! Some pilgrims are simply unaware of the river’s pollution, or even unaware of the microbial origins of disease. Many refuse to believe that holy water can be dangerous, despite the evidence. “‘Ganga is my mother, it could never harm me,’ says Hanuman Sahani, a lifetime boatman … [who] uses the water—straight from the river—for worship, but also to drink and brush his teeth.” Others are willing to take the physical risks, which they consider insignificant next to the spiritual benefits. Or sometimes even social benefits: a friend of mine, an American Christian, jumped in to show solidarity with his Hindu friends. And for whatever reason, a number of Western tourists, presumably educated ones, enter the water every year. All of this shows that informing and warning people may not be enough to keep them from hazardous behaviors, even those that we think are avoidable. Sometimes dogma yields to pragmatism: this January a group of sadhus (holy men) threatened to boycott the Kumbh Mela unless the government did something about the water conditions. The government settled on a temporary solution, “ordering Uttar Pradesh officials to release 1500 cubic feet per second of water every day from the Arora dam.” Yet even without this measure, most Hindus would have continued doing what they have always done.
If a river this polluted ran through the United States, the government would almost certainly have kept people out of it, by force if necessary. This is not an option for the Indian government. Although it is a secular democracy, most of its officials are Hindus. And even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. The consequences breaking a millennia-old tradition by fencing off the holiest pilgrimage site in the world would be unthinkable. Furthermore, Indians tend to be proud of their culture and have a strong sense of honor, and one of the consequences is that the government tends to conceal or downplay its problems. This is why the only accurate reports of water quality come from private organizations. The Ganga Action Plan, initiated in 1985, tried to set up water treatment systems and to target polluting industries, but its measures all failed for a variety of reasons. Since then the government has made little to no attempt to warn people about the river’s dangers. Furthermore, probably because of Hinduism’s influence, Indian culture has less of a sense of civic action and cooperation, commitment to the public good, and responsibility for shared resources than Western culture. This may be why nobody in particular feels personally responsible to keep the river clean.
Interestingly, some Indian intellectuals have found one at least partially effective strategy to keep people out of the Ganges. It involves sensitivity to people’s religious sensibilities. You could call it an integration of faith and learning. One activist explains that “to tell a Hindu that Ganga, goddess and mother, is “polluted” or “dirty” is an insult; it suggests that she is no longer sacred. Rather, the approach must acknowledge that human action, not the holy river herself, is responsible: ‘We are allowing our mother to be defiled.’” Another activist simply “explains to devout Hindus that Mother Ganges is not feeling well. She can be cured by eradicating pollution.”
Is Philosophy Architecture or Cartography? (Long Essay)
Though their lifetimes were nearly three hundred years apart, Rene Descartes and Edmund Husserl had many things in common. Both were trained as mathematicians and only later turned to philosophy; both brought from mathematics a taste for rigorous analysis and exactitude, a thirst for certainty, and a hatred of skepticism; both were dissatisfied with the philosophical climate of their times, a decadent Scholasticism for Descartes and an exhausted Kantian / post-Kantian idealism for Husserl; both sought firmly to ground the other more specialized sciences in a kind of “first philosophy”; and both had an enormous impact on Western thought. Descartes is in many ways considered the founder of the whole modern tradition in philosophy, and Husserl is without a doubt the primary figure in the most influential movement of twentieth-century continental philosophy, phenomenology. Given their similar aims, however, it is instructive to contrast their methods. (Doing so also dispels the myth that philosophy never advances as a discipline). Husserl admired Descartes and sympathized with his goals—in fact, he even entitled one of his mature works Cartesian Meditations—but he was convinced that his predecessor had taken a wrong turn at the very beginning of his journey.
In spite of his plan to doubt everything, according to Husserl, Descartes had failed to call into question a fundamental assumption: the representative theory of perception. The assumption is that the world and the things that make it up are outside our minds, but what we have access to through our senses are representations, images, copies of those things inside our minds. The obvious question that arises is, How do we know that those representations match the real things? We don’t, and we can’t. This leads either to some sort of idealism (Berkeley, Kant) or to skepticism. Descartes is concerned with the latter. He writes,
Everything which I have thus far accepted as entirely true and assured has been acquired from the senses or by means of the senses. But I have learned by experience that these senses sometimes mislead me, and it is prudent never to trust wholly to those things which have once deceived us.
Convinced that sensation/perception is unreliable (as a pre-Kantian, he doesn’t make the distinction), he decides to doubt all of his perceptual beliefs and all beliefs that are based on them. He calls the existence of the entire external world into question, and in search of a better foundation, retreats inside his own mind. He finds what he is looking for in the cogito, the intuition of his existence as “a thing which thinks,” and then immediately in a deductive demonstration of the existence of a non-deceiving God. This, he believes, is the rock-solid foundation on which we can build an indestructible edifice of certain knowledge.
Unfortunately, Descartes’ successors quickly point out how in each of these two steps he smuggles in unwarranted metaphysical assumptions, and how when he is finished we are still left with an intractable mind-body problem, among other difficulties. They agree that Descartes’ problem is unsolved and that a chasm still yawns between representation and reality, mind and matter, thoughts and things. Here Husserl makes his first bold move: he argues that everyone’s mistake is falsely thinking of thinking in spatial metaphors. One consequence of this is that Husserl flatly denies the representative theory of perception. When we examine consciousness, he points out, we find that it is intentional, that is, directed, consciousness-of. It is irreducibly composed of a subject pole/aspect (the conscious ego and the act by which it is directed), an object pole (what it is directed toward), and a meaning pole (what the object is understood as). Now, if the object were simply an image, it would be entirely contained within consciousness, part of the act. But reflection shows that objects actually transcend consciousness. First, if I look at, say, a particular tree several times on different occasions, or if several different people look at it at once, it is clearly the same tree we are seeing, not different ones. Second, when we look at the tree from different angles or under different conditions, we see different parts of it. It is never fully present at once, the way an act is. Third, our very concept of a representation requires acquaintance with that-which-is-represented. You wouldn’t be able to think of, say, a painting of a landscape as a representation unless you had some sort of acquaintance with landscapes. You wouldn’t be able to recognize dreams or hallucinations for what they are unless you had at some point not been dreaming or hallucinating.
So global skepticism like Descartes’, the idea that we only have access to representations, is incoherent. “Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object itself be constituted through an image.” We have direct, unmediated acquaintance with objects as presentations. “We are always already in contact with being.” To invert Plato’s parable, philosophers have thought they were in a cave, specifically a bony one filled with squishy gray matter. In fact, they have all along been sitting in broad daylight, and what they thought were shadows on the wall were actually the real things. Husserl’s second target, the equivalent of Descartes’ evil demon, is psychologism, the doctrine that the laws of logic are rooted in the nature of the human mind, not in the nature of reality. He argues that psychologism confuses acts of knowing, which are temporal, with the objects of knowledge, in this case the eternal, abstract, ideal, entities and laws of logic. The difference is evident under phenomenological investigation.
With the skeptical problematic out of the way, the primary task is no longer to construct a deductive metaphysical system. Without a doubt that objects are given to us, the fundamental question is how they are given to us. Thus Husserl calls for a return “to the things themselves.” He considers himself an epistemological realist, claiming that we know things as they actually are, but he is neither a metaphysical realist nor a metaphysical idealist. He believes that consciousness is essentially intended toward objects, while objects are essentially possibilities for intending subjects, and therefore it is incoherent to think of one without the other. The world only appears, and only could appear, in consciousness. It follows that that the first-person perspective is prior to the third-person perspective. So the work of phenomenology, as “first philosophy” and the grounding for all other sciences, is to clarify and demarcate the “phenomenological realm,” that is, the essential structures of consciousness. This requires epoche, that is, suspending or bracketing—not Cartesian doubting, which is incoherent—our metaphysical assumptions and judgments, including those of existence. In doing so we pass from the natural attitude to the presuppositionless phenomenological attitude.
The phenomenologist is less of an architect than a surveyor and cartographer (although, unfortunately, this too is a spatial metaphor). Before jumping to hasty metaphysical conclusions, as Descartes does, Husserl wants to linger in the phenomenological realm until it has been fully explored. Like the scholastic realists, he discovers that both acts and objects come to us in distinct, intelligible, essential structures. We can intend the same object through different kinds of acts, such as seeing, remembering, imagining, and signifying. Or we can with the same act intend different kinds of objects, such as physical objects, states of affairs, propositions, and abstract entities (categorial objects). We can intend the same object with different meanings, or the different objects with the same meaning. All of these need to be classified. In practice, our consciousness consists of multilayered intentions and complex objects, which needed to be sorted out. There is also the question of what in experience is constituted by the subject and what is constituted by the object. Fundamental ontology inquires into the general categories of being; regional ontology inquires more specifically into certain portions of the phenomenological realm. As regional ontologies, the special sciences need to be demarcated and situated within it. We can perform the eidetic reduction to determine which elements of a thing are essential and which are accidental. And finally, we can perform the transcendental reduction, which inquires into the conditions of the possibility of experience in general. This is an enormous array of tasks; and unlike Descartes, who sought to complete his project alone in his “stove” in a matter of days, Husserl emphasizes that phenomenology is a communal endeavor that takes lifetimes.
In spite of his plan to doubt everything, according to Husserl, Descartes had failed to call into question a fundamental assumption: the representative theory of perception. The assumption is that the world and the things that make it up are outside our minds, but what we have access to through our senses are representations, images, copies of those things inside our minds. The obvious question that arises is, How do we know that those representations match the real things? We don’t, and we can’t. This leads either to some sort of idealism (Berkeley, Kant) or to skepticism. Descartes is concerned with the latter. He writes,
Everything which I have thus far accepted as entirely true and assured has been acquired from the senses or by means of the senses. But I have learned by experience that these senses sometimes mislead me, and it is prudent never to trust wholly to those things which have once deceived us.
Convinced that sensation/perception is unreliable (as a pre-Kantian, he doesn’t make the distinction), he decides to doubt all of his perceptual beliefs and all beliefs that are based on them. He calls the existence of the entire external world into question, and in search of a better foundation, retreats inside his own mind. He finds what he is looking for in the cogito, the intuition of his existence as “a thing which thinks,” and then immediately in a deductive demonstration of the existence of a non-deceiving God. This, he believes, is the rock-solid foundation on which we can build an indestructible edifice of certain knowledge.
Unfortunately, Descartes’ successors quickly point out how in each of these two steps he smuggles in unwarranted metaphysical assumptions, and how when he is finished we are still left with an intractable mind-body problem, among other difficulties. They agree that Descartes’ problem is unsolved and that a chasm still yawns between representation and reality, mind and matter, thoughts and things. Here Husserl makes his first bold move: he argues that everyone’s mistake is falsely thinking of thinking in spatial metaphors. One consequence of this is that Husserl flatly denies the representative theory of perception. When we examine consciousness, he points out, we find that it is intentional, that is, directed, consciousness-of. It is irreducibly composed of a subject pole/aspect (the conscious ego and the act by which it is directed), an object pole (what it is directed toward), and a meaning pole (what the object is understood as). Now, if the object were simply an image, it would be entirely contained within consciousness, part of the act. But reflection shows that objects actually transcend consciousness. First, if I look at, say, a particular tree several times on different occasions, or if several different people look at it at once, it is clearly the same tree we are seeing, not different ones. Second, when we look at the tree from different angles or under different conditions, we see different parts of it. It is never fully present at once, the way an act is. Third, our very concept of a representation requires acquaintance with that-which-is-represented. You wouldn’t be able to think of, say, a painting of a landscape as a representation unless you had some sort of acquaintance with landscapes. You wouldn’t be able to recognize dreams or hallucinations for what they are unless you had at some point not been dreaming or hallucinating.
So global skepticism like Descartes’, the idea that we only have access to representations, is incoherent. “Since the interpretation of anything as an image presupposes an object intentionally given to consciousness, we should plainly have a regressus in infinitum were we again to let this latter object itself be constituted through an image.” We have direct, unmediated acquaintance with objects as presentations. “We are always already in contact with being.” To invert Plato’s parable, philosophers have thought they were in a cave, specifically a bony one filled with squishy gray matter. In fact, they have all along been sitting in broad daylight, and what they thought were shadows on the wall were actually the real things. Husserl’s second target, the equivalent of Descartes’ evil demon, is psychologism, the doctrine that the laws of logic are rooted in the nature of the human mind, not in the nature of reality. He argues that psychologism confuses acts of knowing, which are temporal, with the objects of knowledge, in this case the eternal, abstract, ideal, entities and laws of logic. The difference is evident under phenomenological investigation.
With the skeptical problematic out of the way, the primary task is no longer to construct a deductive metaphysical system. Without a doubt that objects are given to us, the fundamental question is how they are given to us. Thus Husserl calls for a return “to the things themselves.” He considers himself an epistemological realist, claiming that we know things as they actually are, but he is neither a metaphysical realist nor a metaphysical idealist. He believes that consciousness is essentially intended toward objects, while objects are essentially possibilities for intending subjects, and therefore it is incoherent to think of one without the other. The world only appears, and only could appear, in consciousness. It follows that that the first-person perspective is prior to the third-person perspective. So the work of phenomenology, as “first philosophy” and the grounding for all other sciences, is to clarify and demarcate the “phenomenological realm,” that is, the essential structures of consciousness. This requires epoche, that is, suspending or bracketing—not Cartesian doubting, which is incoherent—our metaphysical assumptions and judgments, including those of existence. In doing so we pass from the natural attitude to the presuppositionless phenomenological attitude.
The phenomenologist is less of an architect than a surveyor and cartographer (although, unfortunately, this too is a spatial metaphor). Before jumping to hasty metaphysical conclusions, as Descartes does, Husserl wants to linger in the phenomenological realm until it has been fully explored. Like the scholastic realists, he discovers that both acts and objects come to us in distinct, intelligible, essential structures. We can intend the same object through different kinds of acts, such as seeing, remembering, imagining, and signifying. Or we can with the same act intend different kinds of objects, such as physical objects, states of affairs, propositions, and abstract entities (categorial objects). We can intend the same object with different meanings, or the different objects with the same meaning. All of these need to be classified. In practice, our consciousness consists of multilayered intentions and complex objects, which needed to be sorted out. There is also the question of what in experience is constituted by the subject and what is constituted by the object. Fundamental ontology inquires into the general categories of being; regional ontology inquires more specifically into certain portions of the phenomenological realm. As regional ontologies, the special sciences need to be demarcated and situated within it. We can perform the eidetic reduction to determine which elements of a thing are essential and which are accidental. And finally, we can perform the transcendental reduction, which inquires into the conditions of the possibility of experience in general. This is an enormous array of tasks; and unlike Descartes, who sought to complete his project alone in his “stove” in a matter of days, Husserl emphasizes that phenomenology is a communal endeavor that takes lifetimes.
Speaking in Tongues: Bakhtin vs. Saussure (Long Essay)
Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin writes,
Language—like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives—is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is characteristic of all living language. Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems, within these various systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of language filled with various semantic and axiological content and each with its own different sound."
Given Bakhtin’s stress on the heteroglossia in all language, we might expect him to embody it noticeably in his own writings, like Plato or Kierkegaard or Melville. In fact, the only thing resembling heteroglossia that I noticed in the essay was his tendency to say everything more than once. His prose is plain, sturdy, and reasonably clear—though for this we may have the translators to thank. They write in their introduction that “Bakhtin’s style, while recognizably belonging to a Russian tradition of scholarly prose, is, nevertheless, highly idiosyncratic.”
Saussure’s object of study is langue—the timeless, universal structure of language-as-such—and his method is synchronic and ahistorical, abstract and reductive, systematic and “scientific.” Bakhtin, on the other hand, argues that there is no such thing as language-as-such, only parole, and he takes as his starting point the particular, individual, situationally embedded utterance, which he sometimes misleadingly calls “the word.” His frame of mind is a nominalist one, or to put it another way, he is “hostile to all ‘instantiation’ models… which understand particular acts as mere instantiations of timeless norms.” In taking a diachronic, historical approach, he is returning to the nineteenth-century, pre-Saussurean traditions of philology and etymology; but what makes his theory a novel one (pun intended) is his emphasis on dialogue.
This means several different, but related, things. First, language is dialogue-with-the-world. Words represent concepts, each with an inherent value judgment, and concepts are formed and reformed in interaction with objects. The way we speak doesn’t just mirror or parallel the way we think, it is the way we think. Thought is internal dialogue. Since each person’s experience of the world is different, our language tends to diverge, a process Bakhtin calls “centrifugal force” and which contemporary linguists call “linguistic drift.”
But at the same time, every utterance, thought or spoken, is also a part of what we may call dialogue-with-the-other. In everything we say, we both respond to and anticipate our audience. As we strive to be understood by the other, we try to negotiate our way sympathetically through the complex filter of his language, thought, and perception. Here Bakhtin’s phenomenology is brilliant, and in trying to put this delicate and indescribable process into words he resorts to some of the most picturesque language of the essay. But anyone who has ever thought “I need to watch my words carefully,” or said “No, that’s not what I meant,” or been in an argument that felt like two elephants battling each other through a keyhole, knows what it is like. (Try discussing “free will” with a college student.) Understanding, on this model, can never be complete, but it certainly isn’t impossible, and through dialogue our individual languages come closer together. Groups of people with similar experiences and a high level of interaction—by age, region, ethnicity, class, profession, political party, or whatever—form discourses, jargons, what Bakhtin means by “languages.” This “centripetal force” makes the members of these groups more like each other, but it also results in “stratification,” making the groups more distinct.
(The men of Gilead said unto him, “Art thou an Ephraimite?” If he said, “Nay,” then said they unto him, “Say now ‘Shibboleth.’” And he said “Sibboleth,” for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him at the passages of the Jordan; and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.)
So every society has a multitude of different languages, “heteroglossia,” from which each individual can choose. Since none of these languages is good for all-purpose use, we are all multilingual. Cessationists to the contrary, we all speak in tongues. And since the groups that these languages represent are themselves constantly in dialogue, realigning, recombining, “making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling-Free,”language itself is in constant motion, full of tension and conflict. Another example: after the Norman Conquest and subjugation of Britain, the Anglo-Saxon servants in the stables called their animals cows, pigs, and sheep, while the French nobles in their palaces called the cuts of meat sizzling on their plates boeuf, porc, and mouton—French for cow, pig, and sheep. Now we English speakers use both sets of words. Ancient class conflict is built into our vocabulary.
But from Saussure’s mountaintop, it all looks peaceful. Or, if you like, it looks the way a Petri dish looks to the naked eye. Since he focuses on the purely formal elements of phonetics, syntax and grammar, which are also those that vary the least, language appears to him as an elegant edifice rather than a raging battleground. For him, languages are large discrete, homogeneous wholes like “English,” “French,” “German,” and “Russian,” rather than points on a continuum. What’s worse, for Bakhtin, is that Saussure’s specimens for dissection are flash-frozen and extracted from their natural habitats. The language that structural linguists call English, or Standard English, is not an organic language at all but an artificial abstraction. So is any attempt to fix a “national language,” or a “literary language.”
Writing from a small Russian village in 1934, Bakhtin strikingly anticipates some the insights of the later French poststructuralists. His concept of heteroglossia resembles Barthes’ concept of intertextuality. Like Derrida, he argues that the author can never be fully “present” even in his own words. Like Foucault, he associates discourse and power. And like all of them, he distrusts systems, abstractions, and universals. At the same time, for reasons we haven’t fully seen yet, he doesn’t push these ideas to radical or skeptical or destructive or antiauthoritarian conclusions. His theory of the novel as an orchestra (not a cacophony) of different voices still allows for “constructive criticism” and for literary appreciation. The author, in Bakhtin’s view, is still alive and well.
No position, of course, is immune to objections. It’s not clear that, on the theory of language he presents here, Bakhtin’s later untangling of voices in Dickens and other novelists is warranted or even possible, even without the temporal and cultural distance. It’s one thing to point out differences in speech styles between characters, another to argue that a conjunction in the narrative discourse is an instance of heteroglossia for the purpose of ironic distancing (305).
Still, I think that stretching Bakhtin’s thought to cover new situations will be more profitable than looking for holes in it. The Bible may contain more heteroglossia than any other book, from the putative four authors of the Pentateuch to the Egyptian influences on the wisdom literature to the Greek Hebraisms of the New Testament. Although heteroglossia has always been part of society, it is increasing all the time. A deeper awareness of the ways in which our thought and language are dialogic “all the way down” may help us better understand our place in the dialogue, and it may improve our ability to engage in dialogue with other faiths and traditions. Babel is a part of the human condition, but Pentecost is a possibility.
The Bad Scientist (Fiction)
The laboratory was dimly lit and reeked of sulfur. The scientist stroked his dark mustache with obvious satisfaction and looked again at his newest prototype, which was beginning to stir on the table. “You know, Humphrey,” he grinned, revealing a row of pointy teeth. “Humphrey I. Vernon—could anyone possibly think of a less dangerous sounding name? It’s perfect. For years, I’ve been going about this in entirely the wrong way. I’ve dedicated my considerable genius to designing longer claws and stronger jaws. I’ve made my creatures fierce and fearsome for the full frontal assault, brawny and brutal for the blinding blitzkrieg. And I’m still proud of some of them, especially the Amazon Anaconda, the Nile Crocodile, and the Great White Shark. They have a kind of grotesque majesty to which you’ll never even come close. But as far as biological weapons go, I have to admit that they are, well, almost complete failures. They manage to pick off a human here and there, but there are several billion of those disgusting vermin crawling the earth now, and their numbers are increasing steadily. When I conceived my beasts, I didn’t realize how their great size would actually be a weakness. Because of their great energy needs and slowness to reproduce themselves, there can’t ever be many of them, and because of their obvious visibility they’re easy to shut out or shoot at. I’ve had to change my tactics completely, Humphrey. Call it a ‘paradigm shift,’ if you like. Your predecessors were massive and massively complex; you’re diminutive and diabolically simple. They used force and violence; you’ll use stealth and patience. Their weapons were teeth and talons; yours are information, imitation, infiltration, replication. You won’t compete with humans, you’ll use their own tools and tendencies against them. You’re a spy, a saboteur, a hacker, a hijacker, a proselytizer and a terrorist all rolled into one neat little package. You’ll be lethal. They’ll never see you coming.”
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, is one of the smallest living things in existence, about one ten thousandth of a millimeter across. Magnified, it looks like an orange stuffed with cloves or a rubber ball covered with suction cups. Its outside, called the viral envelope, is a smooth, fatty protective sheath that resembles a human cell. The protrusions are glycoproteins, which enable the virus to stick to a human cell, merge its viral envelope with the cell membrane, and then unload its cargo into the cell’s interior. The core of the virus is a roughly triangular packet of genetic information: two thousand viral proteins encasing a few different enzymes and two strands of RNA.
“You will, however, have to follow my instructions exactly—which shouldn’t be difficult, because I’ve programmed you to do nothing else.” The scientist stood up and smoothed the wrinkles from the front of his immaculate white lab coat with his delicate hands. His yellow eyes gleamed. “I call it Operation Trojan Horse, although I suppose the allusion is lost upon you. The only entrance to the city is by a waterway on the south side. Tomorrow night you will float in on a small boat with the same identifying markings as the ones all of the citizens have. There’s a sizable squad of guards at the gates and another at the docks to keep out the barbarians, but they shouldn’t stop you—they won’t suspect you and they may not even see you—and just in case they do, you’ll be in disguise. Once inside, look for the soldiers’ barracks. It shouldn’t be hard to find, it’s a huge white dome. Here it’s impossible to get in by the main entrance, so sneak around to the other side under the cover of darkness, throw up your grappling hook, and climb in through the window. Steal a uniform and make your way to the lieutenant’s quarters. Kill him quietly while he’s sleeping, however you have to, and hide the body. You’ll be impersonating him from now on.”
HIV, like a fish, dies if it dries; it only enters a body in the juices of another’s. It targets a particular class of immune cell, dendritic cells. Once its core is inside, the enzyme reverse transcriptase copies the one-stranded RNA into two-stranded DNA that is indistinguishable from the cell’s DNA. The enzyme viral integrase carries the segment of viral DNA to the cell’s nucleus and splices it into the cell’s DNA. A cell is like a factory, and DNA is like its assembly instructions; now the virus uses the cell’s machinery to make viral proteins instead. The viral enzyme protease puts these proteins together into new, complete viruses. And these clones—some of which will be mutants— split off from their host cell to find others, taking over not just dendritic cells but other immune cells called T-helper cells. Dendritic cells travel throughout the body and congregate in the lymph nodes, giving the new viruses a prime opportunity to jump between them and then spread to new areas.
“Needless to say, things will change once you’re in command. This stage of the plan will be a long one, so bide your time. Institute new rules and assign new duties. Confiscate your soldiers’ field manuals and replace them with the ones I’ve given you. Make sure that those who question your authority disappear mysteriously during the night, but reward those who follow orders. You will need their loyalty as well as their obedience. When, finally, you find a subordinate you can trust—he will probably one of your recruits—make him an offer he can’t refuse. Let him in on the plan. Tell him that the city is going to be destroyed but that you’re giving him an opportunity to be on the winning side. He’ll infiltrate and assume command of another barracks, just the way you did with this one. And you’ll tell the general that he never returned from a dangerous mission; you don’t want him to get suspicious just yet.”
The virus lies dormant and undetected for between two weeks and twenty years. Often the infected person does not know he has it and spreads it to other people. At some point, different in every case, the protein TAT is activated and the virus awakens. Scientists have yet to figure why this happens when it does. Macrophages, the immune system’s heavy infantry, recognize the foreigner and enlist the aid of the T-helper cells, which go into overdrive producing antibodies to fight it. But many of the T-helpers have been subverted by the virus to unwittingly produce more viruses instead of antibodies. The viruses proliferate until the T-helper cells overload, wear out, and die.
The scientist licked his thin lips with a long, narrow tongue. “Drop dark hints in dark taverns. Drive the jeep through the city and slip propaganda pamphlets under doors. Send dissidents to other cities. Do whatever it takes, use any subversive technique you can think of, as long as it’s covert. And finally, when you think that a critical mass of the military is behind you, it’s time to put the final phase of the plan into action. Have one of your henchmen attack one of the guards in broad daylight. He’ll sound the alarm, and the closest barracks will send a patrol of soldiers. It should be a mix of rebels and patriots; those in the patrol who are loyal to you will liquidate those who aren’t. When the city authorities realize what is happening, they will send more patrols to the scene, which will meet a similar fate, until every barracks is empty. Fling open the gates and let the barbarians in, and as the city burns, gather up the spoils and escape with as many of your men as you can.”
A healthy person has about a million T-helper cells per milliliter of blood. When HIV causes this number to drop below 200,000, the person is considered to have AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. HIV by itself doesn’t kill, but it cripples the immune system, allowing other pathogens to wreak havoc. Often the first defenses to weaken are those against mouth fungus and tuberculosis, then skin diseases, viral tumors, and pneumonia. Eventually, even diseases that a healthy person can resist easily, like the common cold, can be fatal. Medication can slow the pace of AIDS, but there is no cure.
“Make me proud, Humphrey. Simeon will take you to the drop-off point.” The scientist gestured at a small and ugly gray monkey hunched by his feet. He unlatched the heavy door, and paused to look at the letters on it. “What does that stand for? Hideous Experimental Laboratories of Lucifer?” As the door opened, he eagerly filled his lungs with acrid smoke and pricked up his misshapen ears to the distant sounds of weeping and gnashing of teeth. He swished his tail. “Why does God get all the credit for intelligent design?” he laughed.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, is one of the smallest living things in existence, about one ten thousandth of a millimeter across. Magnified, it looks like an orange stuffed with cloves or a rubber ball covered with suction cups. Its outside, called the viral envelope, is a smooth, fatty protective sheath that resembles a human cell. The protrusions are glycoproteins, which enable the virus to stick to a human cell, merge its viral envelope with the cell membrane, and then unload its cargo into the cell’s interior. The core of the virus is a roughly triangular packet of genetic information: two thousand viral proteins encasing a few different enzymes and two strands of RNA.
“You will, however, have to follow my instructions exactly—which shouldn’t be difficult, because I’ve programmed you to do nothing else.” The scientist stood up and smoothed the wrinkles from the front of his immaculate white lab coat with his delicate hands. His yellow eyes gleamed. “I call it Operation Trojan Horse, although I suppose the allusion is lost upon you. The only entrance to the city is by a waterway on the south side. Tomorrow night you will float in on a small boat with the same identifying markings as the ones all of the citizens have. There’s a sizable squad of guards at the gates and another at the docks to keep out the barbarians, but they shouldn’t stop you—they won’t suspect you and they may not even see you—and just in case they do, you’ll be in disguise. Once inside, look for the soldiers’ barracks. It shouldn’t be hard to find, it’s a huge white dome. Here it’s impossible to get in by the main entrance, so sneak around to the other side under the cover of darkness, throw up your grappling hook, and climb in through the window. Steal a uniform and make your way to the lieutenant’s quarters. Kill him quietly while he’s sleeping, however you have to, and hide the body. You’ll be impersonating him from now on.”
HIV, like a fish, dies if it dries; it only enters a body in the juices of another’s. It targets a particular class of immune cell, dendritic cells. Once its core is inside, the enzyme reverse transcriptase copies the one-stranded RNA into two-stranded DNA that is indistinguishable from the cell’s DNA. The enzyme viral integrase carries the segment of viral DNA to the cell’s nucleus and splices it into the cell’s DNA. A cell is like a factory, and DNA is like its assembly instructions; now the virus uses the cell’s machinery to make viral proteins instead. The viral enzyme protease puts these proteins together into new, complete viruses. And these clones—some of which will be mutants— split off from their host cell to find others, taking over not just dendritic cells but other immune cells called T-helper cells. Dendritic cells travel throughout the body and congregate in the lymph nodes, giving the new viruses a prime opportunity to jump between them and then spread to new areas.
“Needless to say, things will change once you’re in command. This stage of the plan will be a long one, so bide your time. Institute new rules and assign new duties. Confiscate your soldiers’ field manuals and replace them with the ones I’ve given you. Make sure that those who question your authority disappear mysteriously during the night, but reward those who follow orders. You will need their loyalty as well as their obedience. When, finally, you find a subordinate you can trust—he will probably one of your recruits—make him an offer he can’t refuse. Let him in on the plan. Tell him that the city is going to be destroyed but that you’re giving him an opportunity to be on the winning side. He’ll infiltrate and assume command of another barracks, just the way you did with this one. And you’ll tell the general that he never returned from a dangerous mission; you don’t want him to get suspicious just yet.”
The virus lies dormant and undetected for between two weeks and twenty years. Often the infected person does not know he has it and spreads it to other people. At some point, different in every case, the protein TAT is activated and the virus awakens. Scientists have yet to figure why this happens when it does. Macrophages, the immune system’s heavy infantry, recognize the foreigner and enlist the aid of the T-helper cells, which go into overdrive producing antibodies to fight it. But many of the T-helpers have been subverted by the virus to unwittingly produce more viruses instead of antibodies. The viruses proliferate until the T-helper cells overload, wear out, and die.
The scientist licked his thin lips with a long, narrow tongue. “Drop dark hints in dark taverns. Drive the jeep through the city and slip propaganda pamphlets under doors. Send dissidents to other cities. Do whatever it takes, use any subversive technique you can think of, as long as it’s covert. And finally, when you think that a critical mass of the military is behind you, it’s time to put the final phase of the plan into action. Have one of your henchmen attack one of the guards in broad daylight. He’ll sound the alarm, and the closest barracks will send a patrol of soldiers. It should be a mix of rebels and patriots; those in the patrol who are loyal to you will liquidate those who aren’t. When the city authorities realize what is happening, they will send more patrols to the scene, which will meet a similar fate, until every barracks is empty. Fling open the gates and let the barbarians in, and as the city burns, gather up the spoils and escape with as many of your men as you can.”
A healthy person has about a million T-helper cells per milliliter of blood. When HIV causes this number to drop below 200,000, the person is considered to have AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. HIV by itself doesn’t kill, but it cripples the immune system, allowing other pathogens to wreak havoc. Often the first defenses to weaken are those against mouth fungus and tuberculosis, then skin diseases, viral tumors, and pneumonia. Eventually, even diseases that a healthy person can resist easily, like the common cold, can be fatal. Medication can slow the pace of AIDS, but there is no cure.
“Make me proud, Humphrey. Simeon will take you to the drop-off point.” The scientist gestured at a small and ugly gray monkey hunched by his feet. He unlatched the heavy door, and paused to look at the letters on it. “What does that stand for? Hideous Experimental Laboratories of Lucifer?” As the door opened, he eagerly filled his lungs with acrid smoke and pricked up his misshapen ears to the distant sounds of weeping and gnashing of teeth. He swished his tail. “Why does God get all the credit for intelligent design?” he laughed.
Literature I (Tidbit)
Literature is less of a resting place for thought than a launching pad for it. It doesn’t treat any question or topic with as much depth and rigor as the specialized disciplines, such as the sciences, history, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, or theology. The study of literature creates generalists rather than specialists. The disadvantages are that it is hard to avoid sloppy thinking, and hard to find a niche in a society that operates by the division of labor. The advantages are that it treats all of these issues as interconnected with each other and interwoven with human life, it gives a kind of “what it is like” window or vicarious account of other people’s experiences, and teaches something like wisdom rather than just knowledge.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)