Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Subhuman Circumstances?
The first chapter of Proud Man was heavy for it gave great detail of the troubles conflicting England in the 1930’s. “The Person” is narrated by a hermaphrodite, The Genuine Person, visiting or dreaming of England’s past. There they (I guess that’s a proper pronoun for a hermaphrodite) describes the prevalent classism, racism, and sexism of the time. The critical focus is the inequality of men and women based on chauvinistic practices and the apparent, blind religious devotion of the subhuman characters.
The narrator explains that males invented their dominating power when they became conscious of their lesser part in sexual reproduction, because of “...a deep rooted jealousy of the female’s greater biological importance” (24). If men and women are equals, why does the author attempt to make the reality of women better/dominating to men? Is this her attempt?
Being a religious person, I was struck by the controversial notions raised by Burdekin and found it hard to reconcile her words with my understanding of Christianity and Catholicism. It made this a complicated read for me to say the least. I am not sure if anyone else felt this way, but we are at a Jesuit, Catholic university, after all, so I thought I would ask, how this chapter, based on your religious or non-religious/philosophical outlook, struck you? I’m hoping someone might help me contend with this work in a more agreeable way!
The men and women of England are referred to as subhuman to signal their state of half-consciousness. The Genuine Person also points out the intellectual and rational gap between the subhumans of the past and of the humans who are contemporaries of them (again, the hermaphroditic pronoun).
We discussed the difference and meanings of what it is to act like a human as opposed to an animal concerning the blurred human and inhuman behavior of Yank in the Hairy Ape. We often hear about the great intelligence of animals as equal to that of young children, for example, the chimp’s ability to make tools, a faculty that was thought to be exclusively human. In Proud Man, the Genuine Person considers these subhumans to be worse than animals. They also explain that, “One of the major differences between subhumans and human beings, besides the difference between a half-conscious being with a split mind, and a fully conscious being with a whole mind, and perhaps arising out of that difference, is caused by the subhuman idea of privilege” (17). Clearly, our narrator sees nothing special about human beings and that the subhumans were sorely mistaken to believe in their privilege. This leads me to ask, what do you believe differentiates human beings from animals?
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Diana,
ReplyDeleteI can tell that you put a good deal of thought into this post, as I found it to be very observant and thought-provoking.
As for your religious question, I am getting the impression (from the reading) that Burdekin is taking a philosophical approach; the style of language in this reading is very metaphysical, almost like something you would find in Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. Virtually every root cause and effect of humanity is mapped out in either virtues or vices, peace and war, dominion or oppression.
As I prepare for my post this coming Tuesday, I will certainly keep your insights in mind. Great work!
-Brandon Gerlinger
I wonder if we might not read the text as a curious transcription, into a new mode, of some fundamental tenets of (a brand of) Christianity. Subhumans are "not happy in their bisexuality because they have become conscious of it": that is, they have tasted of the tree and have become ashamed ("the operation of their partially conscious brains upon their animal desires sets up an appalling mental torture called a sense of guilt, a conviction of sin"). The Person implies that a "fully conscious" brain operating on animal desire would not produce guilt. Some of the early Church fathers (for paternal figures they were) locate original sin in the sex act itself; Milton, on the other hand, gives us an Eden in which connubial joys are not absent. Recall, as well, that his angels can "either sex assume, or both": a distinct advantage over The Person, whose experience of wholeness seems to preclude eros entirely. Milton's angels enjoy the delights of desire and of consummation without any attendant "guilt."
ReplyDeleteThe Person's emphasis on "guilt" as lying at the bottom of the "malodorous well" of the subhuman mind has a strangely moralistic quality (despite true humanity's pre (or post-post) lapsarian innocence of moral categories).
Does misery, in the Person's "just so" story about subhuman evolution, play the same role it does in some religious visions of salvation?: "it is, if evolution is a fact, necessary." Necessary just as the Fall was "necessary." Just before this statement, the Person claims that misery is neither good nor bad: by extension, we can surmise the "evolution" isn't good or bad, either. If evolution can produce the human from the subhuman, as it produced the subhuman from the animal, then being human isn't a good: if it were, one would expect the Person so label the instrument that produces is "good," as well. Or perhaps productive of good without being good itself (think of Milton's God enlisting Satan himself into his salvific plan).
This is all rather confusing. In any case, I hope I've suggested that parts of the text can be brought into dialogue with elements of Christian tradition. If art, religion, and war are escapes from sexual misery (a spin on the Freudian concept of sublimation), then so is imagining a fully integrated entity that is free from such pains.