Life is the chemical matter — the organic formed out of the non-organic
By Pramod K Nayar
While philosophers, theologians, scripture-specialists have always debated the meaning of life, biologists speak of chemicals that are animated under certain conditions to produce what we have come to define as life. But in the wake of evolutionary biologists, we have begun to see life as not autonomous, bounded and self-contained, but made of multiple forms of life, including bacteria.
Influenced by these theories, and anticipating some of them — because Literature is not just about what is but also about what could be — literary texts have been interested in the nature of life where lifeforms transmute, merge, erode and become some-thing else.
Humanimalia
The horror of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s iconic text, The Metamorphosis, is not that he has become an insect, but that the transformation is never completed: he retains his human consciousness within the insect’s body even if some of his perceptual frames have become insect-like. For those humans around him, they see only a bug. His family members are ambivalent towards him because they understand, in some vague fashion, that Gregor is still in there somewhere.
The human-plant creature that is ‘The Swamp Thing’ in Alan Moore’s eponymous classic, retains the consciousness of the human. In David Garnett’s 1922 novella Lady into Fox, Mrs Tebrick turns into a fox. Immediately after this transformation, Tebrick ‘saw at once that his wife was looking at him from the animal’s eyes’. He discovers that inside the fox, it is still his wife, and she retains, in Tebrick’s perspective, her human cognitive abilities and consciousness: “What helped most to make living with her bearable for him was that she understood him perfectly — yes, every word he said, and though she was dumb she expressed herself very fluently by looks and signs though never by the voice.”
In Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales, a woman, over time, is transformed into a pig.
In both Kafka and Darrieussecq, the transformation into an animal has been conventionally seen by critics as signalling the dehumanisation of the human in contemporary society. As the critic Anat Pick notes about Darrieussecq’s story:
“the protagonist’s metamorphosis seems like mere accompaniment to her everyday experiences in which she is subjected to physical violations by the male management and clientele, violations that specifically “animalize” her.”
Variations of the transmuted human, however, do not only take on the human-machine or human-animal form.
The Mineral-human
Spider-man has to come to grips — sadly, this is impossible — with the Sandman (Marko) who literally flows like sand because his molecular structure has taken on the characteristics of sand. In Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries, Daisy Stone Flett, the protagonist, imagines her body transforming: the ‘living cells’ will become encrusted with ‘mineral deposition’, ‘the folds of her dress, so primitive and stiff, are softened by a decorative edge, a calcium border of seashells’.
In AS Byatt’s lesser-known story, ‘The Stone Woman’, a woman, Ines, slowly turns to stone. In the opening lines, we are told that Ines is grieving: ‘grief made her insubstantial’. As the story progresses, the old metaphor of grief making a stone of the heart becomes literal. She ‘became mineral’. Byatt charts the woman’s slow evolution, if that is what it is, to a stone-human:
“Hot liquid rose to the sills of her eyes and clattered in pearly drops on her ruddy hematite cheeks … Her cheeks were beginning to sprout silica flakes and dendrite fibres … There were droplets of alabaster and peridot clustering in her gray hair like the eggs of some mythic stony louse.”
Ines becomes a stone garden herself: “She had planted small gardens in the crevices of her body, trailing grasses, liverworts. Creatures ran over her — insects first, a stone-colored butterfly, indistinguishable from her speckled breast, foraging ants, a millipede. There were even fine red worms, the color of raw meat, which burrowed unhindered. She began to walk more, taking these things with her.”
She begins to sense an affinity with stone statues. Eventually, Ines goes to the stone trolls up in the mountains.
Such stories point to another aspect of life. Fossils and bone make up lifeforms, and when lifeforms end, they go back into the earth, feeding the soil and its other lifeforms so that the minerals circulate. Bones and fossils represent a different temporal dimension — of life passed — that intersects with our own. What constitutes the form of life is, then, the chemical matter from previously extant lifeforms. In other words, the organic is formed out of and within the non-organic.
More-than-Human Future
In Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Children, the progeny appearing after the SHEVA virus has devastated the world, are hybrids endowed with special abilities although their outward appearance is human. In Jeff Lemire’s sprawling graphic novel, Sweet Tooth, likewise, the humanimals born after the plague are hunted by human survivors for biomedical experimentation. Much of Octavia Butler’s work has been geared towards suggesting that humanity can only survive if we get past the species boundary.
In Butler and Lemire, the hybrids (human-alien in Butler, human-animal in Lemire) start all over again. Butler and Lemire suggest that the hybrids have a better chance of continuing humanity, albeit in new forms. Lemire’s Gus — the ‘deer boy’, now a man — puts it thus towards the end of Sweet Tooth:
“Man’s time was done. They had their chance to live in harmony with the land and they failed.
Then we were born. The hybrid. We are one with the land. One with the animals that walk it. But we also carry mankind’s legacy in our blood and bones so that we are no better than they. We too can fall. We too can fail. We must never forget the face of the gods as man did…for their faces are our faces. And for that we leave this hide to feed the wolves. An offering back to the land that sustains us.”
In her stunning novel, Dark Constellations, Pola Oloixarac speaks of the ‘strange rapport between plants and insects’, of the ‘secret pacts between species’. Most of the metaphors are of species-fluidity: women are like spiders, palms are like octopuses, lakes are like sluggish blue animals, greenhouses are like insects, spoons are like butterflies, branches are like coral reefs, clouds are like swans, voices are like crocodile’s eyes, and rivers like serpents.
Contemporary literature suggests that the future is irrevocably multispecies.