• No se han encontrado resultados

The Island of Doctor Moreau and the End of History

In document On Writing Neo Victorian Fiction (página 62-66)

Jacobo Canady Salgado Universidad de Sevilla

jcanady76@yahoo.es Abstract

In The Island of Doctor Moreau Wells describes how Moreau has carved men out of animals, blurring the boundary between man and animal. This essay uses this blurring to study the role of ethics in the society by the beings created by Moreau and the way their reversion into animality at the end of the story parallels the fate that awaits man after the End of History in Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Keywords: Moreau, Wells, man, animal, Kojève, Hegel, History, ethics

The plot of H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau is well known: Edward Prendick, the only survivor of a shipwreck is rescued by a vessel where he meets Montgomery, the only passenger in the ship, who is in charge of a peculiar cargo: a number of wild animals. When they reach Montgomery's destination, an uncharted island in the Pacific, the captain of the ship threatens Prendick with leaving him on the sea at his own peril. Montgomery and his boss, Doctor Moreau, take pity of him and decide to allow him to stay on their island with them. There, Prendick soon learns that Moreau and Montgomery are involved in some kind of weird experiment. He meets some strange people that lead him to think that Moreau and Montgomery are turning humans into animals, but, then, he is told that, in fact, they are doing just the opposite: they are carving, by means of vivisection, men out of animals. The traditional reading of the novel is also well known: Wells as an advocate of Darwin's theory of Evolution, has written a grisly parody of natural selection where the suffering of the animals in Moreau's table work as a comprised version of the suffering involved in natural selection and evolution (Kemp 20). Moreover, Wells also tries to show in his novel that the line that divides the human from the animal is not so clear. Regarding another of Wells' novels, War of the World, the critic Peter Kemp explains that, at first, Homo Sapiens is placed on one side of a line, and the rest of beings on the other side, but the arrival of the Martians causes that man finds himself dragged to the animals' side (23). Something similar happens in The Island of Doctor Moreau, where Prendick, at first, considers that the differences between man and the rest of animals are clear, but after his stay on the island with Moreau and his creatures, the Beast Folk, this certainty vanishes. Thus, after his return to England, Prendick feels isolated from the rest of his fellow men, since he cannot but notice the animality in them.

This essay will use this blurring of the boundary between man and animal in Wells' novel as a starting point to study the parallelisms between the way the Beast Folk revert into animality at the end of the story with the fate that awaits man after the End of History in Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

One of the aspects of the life of the Beast Folk that strikes Prendick most, in The Island of Doctor Moreau, is that they have a certain ethical system, called the ‘Law’. This ‘Law’

presents Moreau as some sort of almighty god, who can both hurt and heal them, and who is the owner of the “House of Pain”, the “lightning-flash” and the “deep salt sea”, and, besides, from whose punishments nobody can escape (Wells 59-60). Prendick’s immediate reaction is to feel horrified, since he thinks that Moreau “had infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of

Jacobo Canady Salgado - The Island of Doctor Moreau and the End of History

61

deification of himself” (Wells 59). This bewilderment was shared by many contemporary readers of the novel who, as Steven McLean explains on an endnote to the novel, found similarities between the Law of the Beast Folk and human religion (note 1, pag. 136) In any case, independently of whether Wells intended to mock religious beliefs or not, it is clear that the Law shares with human religion a key factor: it regulates the behaviour of its subjects, prohibiting them a series of things such as going on all-fours, sucking up drinks or eating flesh or fish (Wells 59). This set of prohibitions have, then, a double function, since they work as an ethical system for the Beast Folk and also allows them to draw the line that separates them from animals.

In his La Comunidad que Viene the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers that the origin of any ethics is to be found in the fact that there is no ‘human essence:’ “sólo por esto puede existir algo así como una ética: pues está claro que si el hombre fuese o tuviese que ser esta o aquella sustancia, este o aquel destino, no existiría ética posible, y sólo habría tareas que realizar” (41). It is, then, precisely the lack of any human nature, of any essence proper to humans that an ethics is possible and necessary. It is the human animal, recognizing and defining himself as human, who brings ethics into existence. To this, Slavoj Žižek adds a second movement: in return, this ethics distinguishes its subjects as humans. According to Žižek, every ethical system relays on a gesture that he calls “fetishist disavowal”: every ethics draws a line and ignores some sort of suffering, which is why “the Christian motto ‘All men are brothers’ [. . .] also means that those who do not accept brotherhood are not men” (46).

Thus, the Law originates because the Beast Folk have the consciousness of being men, and therefore they need a code of behaviour. But, at the same time, it is their acceptance of the Law what grants them the status of men. That is, when they accept, for instance, “not to eat Flesh or Fish” and add to that interdiction “are we not Men?” (Wells 59), they are defining how they, as men must behave (not eating flesh or fish), but, at the same time, they are stating that it is the following of the Law, the act of not eating flesh or fish that makes them human.

They do not eat flesh or fish because they are human, and they are human because they do not eat flesh or fish. The obvious consequence of this, of great relevance for the Beast Folk, is that those who do not follow the Law are outside the group of men. It is the Law what draws, for them, the line between man and animal.

This definition of man by the recognition of himself as such finds an echo in the work of Alexandre Kojève. When he defines what is man according to Hegel he bases his definition in the distinction between human and animal desire. Kojève explains that man is a self-conscious being, whereas an animal is just merely aware of itself (Dialéctica 10). Man, continues Kojève, becomes self-conscious the moment he says 'I' for the first time, and the origin for this urge to say 'I' is to be found in a special kind of Desire (Dialéctica 10). The existence of this Desire implies that a human existence can only takes place within a biological reality, that is, human existence is supported by an animal life. But this animal life, although a necessary condition, is not enough. The desires of animals, explains Kojève, are directed toward a natural object: food, in the case of a desire for eating; water, in a desire for drinking, and so on. But this animal desire only produces, as was just explained, an awareness of oneself. Then, for a self-consciousness to exist it is necessary a Desire for a non-natural object, something that is not part of the given reality. The only thing that is not part of the given reality is another desire. Thus, self-consciousness can only appear if Desire is directed toward another desire. And it is necessary for man to remain human that this properly human Desire (the one directed toward another Desire) prevails over the rest of animal Desires. This Desire for the Desire of another man is the Desire of being the object of Desire of the other.

That is, human Desire is the desire for being recognized as a man by another man (Dialéctica 10-13). Thus, when the Beast Folk in Wells' novel repeat “are we not men?” when they intone the 'Law' they are expressing their desire to be recognized as men.

Nonetheless, it is important to notice that one of the consequences of this definition of man is that it implies that there is not a stable and fixed human nature, but that man exists as long as there is a tension between human and animal Desire. But, according to Kojève, once History is over, this tension will no longer be necessary, what will mean the end of man as such, who will be replaced by another being, no longer a man, but an animal, so:

If Man becomes animal again, his arts, his loves, and his play must also become purely

“natural” again. Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals, and would indulge in love like adult beasts. But one cannot then say that all this “makes Man happy”. One would have to say that post-historical animals of the species Homo sapiens (which will live amidst abundance and complete security) will be content as a result of their artistic, erotic and playful behaviour, inasmuch as, by definition, they will be contented with it (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel 159).

The process that will signal the End of History and the apparition of the post-historical animal that will replace man is quite similar to the fate that awaits the Beast Folk in Wells' novel. When Moreau describes Prendick the nature of his experiments, he complains that, in spite of his efforts, “somehow the things drift back again, the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again” (Wells 77). Although Moreau provides no more details, Prendick has the chance to check what this process is about: when Moreau dies, a process similar to the End of History takes place. In the same way that the Death of God, announced by Nietzsche, caused a crisis in the system of values, the Death of Moreau will put the 'Law' in a critical situation, accelerating the reversion of the Beast Folk into mere beasts (Wells 123). Thus, Prendick witnesses how they start losing the faculty of language in a progressive way; they begin to find difficulties when trying to walk erected, how they start losing the notions of decorum and decency, how they stop showing respect for monogamy, and so on until the reversion is complete (Wells 122-23). This reversion can be interpreted as the prevailing of animal desires over the human Desire for recognition; they do no longer recognize themselves as humans. As was explained above, Kojève's reading of Hegelian man implies that there is no human nature or substance, man exists as long as there is an inner tension between animality and humanity.

Moreau's creatures can no longer keep that tension after his death.

To sum up, in H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau the boundary between man and animal is shown to be contingent: thanks to vivisection and hypnosis Moreau is able to carve men out of wild animals. These men, the Beast Folk, express during all the novel their desire to be recognized and accepted as humans. They even have a moral code that they call the 'Law' and that defines the way they, as humans, must behave. This desire for recognition has been compared to the definition of man by Hegel, who, accordingly to Alexandre Kojève, is an animal who becomes man when another man recognizes him as such. This is so because for Hegel, explains Kojève, there is not human nature. He distinguishes between two different kind of desires: animal and human. Animal desires are desires that are directed toward natural objects, whereas human Desire is not directed to an object but to another Desire: it is the Desire to be the object of Desire of another man. It is, explains Kojève, the desire to be recognized as human by another human. Just like the Beast Folk in Wells' novel. Moreover, Kojève explains that after the End of History the tension between human and animal in man will disappear, being man, thus, replaced by a post-historical animal. Again, this is similar to the fate of the Beast Folk after Moreau's Death in The Island of Doctor Moreau. There, Prendick explains how animality substitutes, step by step, humanity in them in a process he calls 'reversion'.

Jacobo Canady Salgado - The Island of Doctor Moreau and the End of History

63

References

Agamben, Giorgio 2006: La Comunidad que Viene. Trans. José Luis Villacañas and Claudio La Rocca. Valencia: Pre-Textos.

Kemp, Peter 1996: H.G. Wells and the Culminating Ape. Biological Imperative and Imaginative Obsessions. London: McMillan Press Ltd.

Kojéve, Alexandre 1991: Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Cornell UP.

--- 2006: La Dialéctica del Amo y del Esclavo en Hegel. Trans. Juan José Sebreli. Buenos Aires: Leviatán.

McLean, Steve 2005: 'Notes'. The Island of Doctor Moreau. H.G. Wells. London: Penguin.

Wells, Herbert George 2005: The Island of Doctor Moreau. London: Penguin.

Žižek, Slavoj 2008: Violence. London: Profile.

Manfred Draudt - Shakespeare and the elevation of the Vienna Burgtheater to a German National Theatre

Shakespeare and the elevation of the Vienna Burgtheater to a

In document On Writing Neo Victorian Fiction (página 62-66)