PREMISE
To the extent that the exercise of ethics is a practical matter based on counterfactual scenarios there is room for considering particular scenarios that eliminate as many extrinsic elements as possible in order to highlight structures of responsibility. Even if the scenarios in question exceed likelihood they can presumably be used as one step in isolating general problems: a step that is of practical import precisely because it seeks to avoid the Scylla of everyday life with its attendant myopia as well as the Charybdis of complete abstraction. This providence does not belong to the dubitable genre of space operetta in particular and neither is what follows intended to be coextensive with the entirety of any ethical edifice.
Dramatis persona:
Jacques Lantier
Instructions:
Jacques’ part (i.e. the text in its entirety) is to be read by a choir of seventeen on a stage without embellishments, five of whom are women and twelve of whom are men. The italicized passages will be read in a flat intonation and without affect. The members of the choir decide for themselves how the other parts will be read, but each will try to make him or herself heard above their peers without screaming. It is suggested that they borrow the voice of a tin can to do so. The reading can be introduced by Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Mvt III.
I
For what purpose he had been fated to dwell on the beast Jacques would likely never know. There, somewhere in the outer reaches of the Kuiper belt, he cut and cooked the flesh that nourished him, slept on the half-corpse that supported him and recycled his excrements with its.
Jacques’ modest life would have been the wet dream of Terry Pratchett and to the great chagrin of John Locke. The craft that had always carried him was of chelonid descent. The turtle’s body formed a precarious bulwark against the surrounding void. Its hide was frostbitten and formed a necrotic spacesuit which was all that protected Jacques from the surrounding vacuum. There they floated, man and turtle beset at once from two sides.
Every cycle Jacques woke to see to his home. The routine was rigid not because Jacques was naturally diligent, but because the circumstances of his life required it. These, in turn, had engendered in Jacques a genuine love for his host.
The cabin in which Jacques spent his nights (and most of his days) was modestly furnished: A threadbare berth, a small desk and a chair; all made from unadorned steel. In other words, the apotheosis of interstellar practicality.
On top of the desk lay the only piece of paper on the beast. It had been salvaged from an old book, one of the last artefacts from Earth.
The text read:
9 Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning;
10 Because it shut not up the doors of my tomb, nor hid trouble from mine eyes.
The first letter of the word “tomb” was written in blue ink on a dark spot where another letter had been crossed out. The fragment was otherwise intact.
No other humans are shown. Perhaps they exist or perhaps Jacques is alone. There is no affair, no murder, no new demons for Jacques to give himself over to. There is only the pacifying rhythm of everycyclical life and its necessary perversions.
Jacques cabin was embedded beneath the shell in a cavity that had once been occupied by lungs. These had been replaced by more sophisticated means for keeping the reptilian’s blood oxygenated. The extracorporeal membrane that was housed on the turtle’s back was fed a steady supply of oxygen freed by electrolytic means from a small asteroid that had been abducted from its previous residence in the vicinity of Saturn. It was up to Jacques to maintain the apparatus and grow what little nutrition was still required to keep his host alive.
Jacques himself had acquired a rather different taste. A taste for turtle soup.
What are the consequences of having been born within the confines of turtle flesh and to live by a projected will as the organ of another’s desire? Jacques, as the subject of such a will, will not injected by blood or abuse, but is subject to the imposition of projected constraints in the hoped-for accomplishment of an unaccomplished task. Something was once important enough for a now-dead somebody to grow an intergenerational spaceship and to transmit their will to one who must fulfil this something in their stead. The question does not at all concern whether the inherited constraints are of predominantly social or natural origin (even the latter can be described as a blind will in analogical terms). Rather, how can Jacques respond to the rigour of this will – whatever its origin – that he does not know and does not have the means to exercise, but whose constraints he is nevertheless subjected to?
In the abstract: The concrete possibility of unmooring oneself from an inherited ill will by means of forgetfulness. Its effects on subsequent generations. The prospect of a return to a base will.
Jacques only knew that there had been a mission and that its conditions for success had been forgotten.
It is sometimes said that geology collapses space and time. But there were few rocks aboard the beast. The closest thing to a science of the Earth might have been a somatology of calcified veins and dead skin; of wires and arcane machines. If such a science had ever existed its finer details had already been lost.
The beast kept drifting as it always had, probably oblivious to all this.
II
Something was approaching in the distance.
Even if the turtle had had windows, Jacques would not have seen the great whale in the dark, nor that the whale was a white whale.
Jacques was preoccupied. He thought about the recipe he had perfected over so many cycles.
Ingredients for turtle soup:
½ pound turtle meat, freshly cut
3 cups water
1 large onion, hydroponically grown
1 tsp salt
¼ cup flour
Jacques stirred his soup. Feeling inclined to experiment, he added another ½ cup water.
The whale approached very slowly (many thousand kilometres still separated it from the turtle). A description may have likened it to leviathan, the beast between this world and that.
Jacques stirs his soup. The desire to kill will never take root in him and his conception of death is at any rate weak. The price he must pay for this blessing is the indefinite perpetuation of the cruelty he is circumstantially compelled to commit against the beast that carries him in the act of ravaging its flesh. In the apparent absence of an object for the forgotten will according to which he was ultimately born, Jacques’ desire is rerouted toward turtle soup. It is a question of continuous deferral of predestined enjoyment and the satiation of the void by an unpredicted tendency that, unless one turns to theology, can only be thought of in relation to bare environmental affordances or as a determinate zombie will sutured to an unborn subject. The latter alternative is more interesting. Jacques knows not what he was meant to seek and is therefore catapulted onto a base below base, not unlike a driver who is ignorant of his own destination. His is meat without murder and pain without death.
When the first spoonful entered Jacques’ mouth the meat dissolved as it would in the wet of a mother’s embrace.
Meanwhile, the whale drew closer at an approximate angle of 80°. Its colossal bulk was not surrounded by a great shroud. There were no struggles to be had and there were no ships to be sunk. No fowls flew screaming above a yawning gulf. This abyss never silenced and it never spoke.
The decision to add water to the recipe turned out to have been disastrous. The flavour was wrong. The texture was worse. It was a waste of delicious meat and Jacques did not have time to begin again. He had other duties to complete.
The whale and the turtle reached their closest point of approach a few kilometres from one another after which the distance between them grew. They would never be so close again.
As he kept eating despite himself, Jacques was dissipating. He felt his body mixing with the turtle’s flesh and may well have described the process in terms of a gradual divestment of himself. The more he ate, the less he became.
The two beasts forever disappeared from their respective horizons, carried as they were by the fading light of a distant sun.
Jacques had finished eating.
POSTSCRIPT
I am quite hesitant about the utility of this exercise. What good can embedding Émile Zola’s monomaniac Jacques Lantier in a giant turtle be for thinking about ethics? In short, what’s the point? To argue that there is indeed a point and to say something about its nature, I will expand on the putatively ethical problem that underlies the text in spite of my hesitancy. I will do so by way saying that setting (oneself) apart from the ground is not a particularly easy thing to do.
What do I mean by this? I mean to say that to set apart, and particularly to set oneself apart, is to exist in an individuated state, that is, in separation from an environment. To set apart is to make be in some sense: psychically, biologically, technically, socially or morally (there is a significant overlap). To be in some sense is to be subject to constraints – constraints that belong to different registers (natural, social, cultural etc). Disentangling these registers in literature is quite difficult since they tend to blend together. In my reappropriation of Jacques Lantier, I tried to say something about a register of natural constraints such that the word ‘ground’ in the expression ‘setting apart from the ground’ should be read in the most literal sense of earth or soil. The problem is such that natural constraints impart themselves on other registers of constraints and vice versa. Hence, to inquire into how one can make be in some sense in relation to and distinction from the constraints that one’s natural environment imposes requires that the constraints in question are analyzable in isolation from other kinds of constraints. The possibility of isolating one kind of constraints from other kinds seems to be dubitable, but what harm can there be in trying to shed the unwanted parts like a certain someone cuts his meat?
When I borrowed Zola’s Lantier I was interested in a naturalist interpretation of willing and particularly in the possibility of exercising a will in tension with nature so as to set oneself apart. I tried to hone in on this problem, convinced that each and every person must negotiate it according to their own terms but that some invariant difficulties of setting oneself apart can be thematized based on a singular case. My somewhat sardonic short story therefore harbors a somewhat grimmer dimension than what may be obvious at first glance. As such, it is best read as one propaedeutic among others. To the extent that it is meant to do anything, it is meant to articulate the problem of setting apart from natural constraints. I wanted to describe one situation in which this problem is foregrounded by attempting to regress all other constraints. Ideally, my story will aid the reader in developing their own tools for setting themselves apart if only because it has been a reminder that doing so is indeed difficult. Setting oneself apart from the ground is a personal problem, not in the sense that it is uniquely mine or anyone else’s, but in the sense that being someone – anyone – requires that a nascent ‘one’ has successfully set itself apart.
There are of course several ways to thematize the difficulty of setting apart from the ground or, what amounts to the same thing, to inquire into how one can be in some sense in relation to and distinction from natural constraints. Some of these are immanent to the problem in the sense of being attempts to set apart in their own right. In very general terms, many artists have gone far in dramatizing the problem in their respective disciplines. Take for example painting, a tradition that once earned its well-deserved privilege among the visual arts by virtue of configuring itself around exploring the relationship between figure and ground. A painter, by definition, sets figure apart from ground in painting, just like a songbird does by singing. For this reason alone, I cannot paint and I cannot sing. Likewise, some of the best writers have attempted to set something apart in writing and yes, compared to their efforts I write poorly and am only able to say something about the problem without progressing it at all. But then again, why should the knowledge that success is precluded lead to resignation?
Freud speculated that the now infamous death-instinct was the psychosocial prolongation of an essentially biological striving to regress to a prior state. The repetition-compulsion, and mimicry in general, was literally the organism’s way of breaking down the barriers that protected it from external excitations. Roger Caillois made a significant contribution to this idea by positing that mimicry, and perhaps any system of correspondences, was a mere means of responding to a temptation by space. To fail at setting oneself apart is not only to regress, but to do so in response to one’s fascination with externality as such. Conversely, then, to set oneself apart literally means to fight the temptation to merge with one’s surroundings.
As the reader will be aware, I do believe that we can find a similar problem at work in both Melville and Zola (or, rather, it is possible to retroactively ascribe it their work in very different ways). Captain Ahab is certainly dissipating into some strange will that is not wholly his, but which relentlessly calls him toward the sea, and is not Bartleby in his preference to not to caught up in another, if rather less spectacular, dissimulation become desiccation? The question of willing seems to be central, and more so than repetition, the latter being one means to the end of assimilation among others. To say that death is extrinsic in these cases would be tantamount to making a perverse joke: Ahab’s fate is not accidental and is only the inevitable outcome of his fascination with the white whale. By pursuing it he seeks the disappearance of his own will. With this I should add that I am not so sure that a putative death instinct provides a sufficient alternative either. What is at stake is precisely the seemingly inevitably capitulation and eventual assimilation of one will to another, and how to set oneself against it.
The analogical constitution of nature as a subjectless will goes a long way toward explaining the efficacy of natural constraints and makes these somewhat easier to treat in literature (the scientific and philosophical feasibility of this analogy does not concern me here). This is because describing natural constraints as if they were a kind of will transforms them into a character that straddles the exact limit where a figure faces its exterior. The ground from which one sets apart starts moving, so to speak. I concede that my exercise in reconceptualization is indulgent and it definitely risks descending into a farcical vitalism unless one remembers that the ‘zombie will’ is a useful analogy and nothing else, and that nature, in fact, does not possess a will no matter how sluggish it might be thought to be. Since in literature, we can hardly stop being human, it is preferable to pursue a carefully considered anthropomorphising of nature than to naively pretend that we can think about ourselves in ‘non-human’ terms.
It is possible that if one were to succeed in protecting the analogy of the zombie will against vitalism – and I am not so sure that I have – literature might liberate its treatment of nature from the political and social shackles which also bind it. Further, if such an uncompromising ‘naturalist’ literature were to come into being it would have to be without any other inflated metaphysical or theological baggage. If these criteria were to be achieved, literature would ascend toward practical applicability even as it remained tethered to a formal account of setting a figure apart from a ground. In other words, literature would itself become a sui generis means of merging with the ground as well as the condition of setting apart or, simply, a curious instance of inverted retrogression.
In order to even begin distilling the relation between a figure and a ground in these terms, it was necessary to liberate the figure (the will) from the social constraints that impinged on it by means of oblivion. Where Ahab gave himself over to his mania willingly, Zola’s Lantier did all in his might to control his urge to kill. In my scenario the willing maniac is long dead and Lantier has forgotten his ordained task. He has managed to depart from another’s mania and while he has given himself over to his own obsession, his defining feature is that he does not know that he has done so. In the far future, Jacques Lantier no longer needs to enter into an intimate relationship with a replacement object (the train or the generic machine) in order to avoid consummating his inherited desire for the simple reason that the object in question has become one with that which it was meant to substitute. Lantier the chelonaut has been ejected from the tension between an imperative of human origin and bare desire that was such an important part of his character in Zola’s novel. However, the very same act of forgetting is also what brings about his capitulation to a synthetic nature where normative constraints cannot be taken into account. His capitulation eventually leads to erasure as his will is dissipated by compulsion and routine.
As I intimated above, it is true that I, too, suffer from a failure to set myself apart. By now the reader will undoubtedly have noticed the weakness of my prose, its peculiar gaps, its lack of tautness or tensile strength and its constitutive propensity to be pulled apart. Someone once said that they write in order to exist, but for one whose existence was always given, but given weakly, writing cannot even be considered a genetic act since any thought such a being can transmit has invariably turned into a turgid husk on its journey from mind to word. For such a being, writing can be palliative at best. I know very well that my words are metallic and maybe the case is such that my mind was wrought from iron. And where there is iron there will be rust. But whatever its nature, my corrosion appears to be unusually rapid and the dilapidation unusually severe and I wish that it were not so. All other writers can make their words dance. Some can even make their bodies move to music. In contrast, I need no interplanetary turtle in order to have ceased being in existence.
That to set oneself apart from the ground constitutes an ethical problem may be a bit clearer now, although I hesitate at this declaration since, with me, everything is necessarily opaque. This opacity is the same opacity that constitutes the problem which I share with the space-faring Jacques Lantier: the active divestment of myself by the surrounding world. The difference is that Lantier knows not that he cannot see, whereas I am doubly cursed for knowing my condition. I see only that my curse is the hook that has kept me from erasure until now.
It is imperative that the cases of Ahab, Lantier and myself are not taken to exhaust the problem of setting apart from the ground too quickly. For instance, one could imagine an experiment during which the unfortunate participant is divested of all sense data. It would be a somewhat fantastical reinterpretation of the old idea of a brain in a vat and, not so coincidentally, the exact inverse of the man in a turtle. The former is posited as a norm-responsive machine unaware of its physical constraints and the latter is immersed in an implacable routine and given over to his base desires on condition that he is unaware of their relative baseness. Whereas the former cannot see because its vision is obscured by an iron veil, the latter unveils himself by decomposing. Perhaps, then, the properly ethical task is to somehow relate the diametrically opposed poles of separation and immersion, holding them however briefly in abeyance. To see whether or not the tension between the height of separation and the depth of immersion can meet in some kind of shared nexus would require that their respective regions of opacity and translucence are explored and thematized in a more exhaustive manner than I will have been able to have done. While the structure of the problem(s) may seem relatively simple, the act of making a complete inventory of the practical attitudes to nature’s zombie beyond the walls of the social, political and theological prison that complicates it will be considerably more difficult.