Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

  In the course of her “argument” with Wells, Halam looks at many of the ways that biological theory and practice have changed in the more-than-century between his time and hers. Dr. Franklin’s Island unfolds on the far side of the paradigm shift that Clifford Simak foresaw half a century earlier in “Shadow Show.” This is most evident in the strategic inversion at the center of Halam’s novel. Where Dr. Moreau struggles to mold animals into quasi-human beings, Dr. Franklin easily accomplishes the opposite. He subjects three British teenagers to transgenic experiments, transforming them against their will into human-animal hybrids. Semirah Garson, nicknamed Semi, the narrator, is made into a fish, something like a manta ray. Her friend Miranda Fallow is turned into “a big dark bird, big as an eagle, black as a raven.” The third teenager, Arnie Pullman, becomes a long, thick snake.

  The science depicted in Dr. Franklin’s Island goes beyond anything we are actually able to do today. But Halam closely extrapolates from current trends. Twenty-first-century biotechnology is focused upon the programming and manufacture of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), transgenic hybrids, and even entirely artificial microbes. At the same time, scientists have increasingly become aware of the importance of horizontal (cross-species) gene transfer in the biological world. Bacteria share resistance to antibiotics in this way. Multicellular organisms use gene transfer as well. Recent studies have shown that both the mammalian placenta (Chuong 2013) and the mammalian long-term memory storage system (Pastuzyn 2018) have retroviral, extra-mammalian origins. For Wells, the modification and hybridization of distinct organisms was an extravagant fantasy; but Halam writes at a time when transgenesis is recognized as a scientific fact, and has almost become a technological commonplace.

  Dr. Franklin’s Island is also firmly anchored in the globalized neoliberal world that we inhabit today. No precise date is given, but nothing in the book – aside from Dr. Franklin’s own procedures – goes beyond actually existing technologies and social structures. Media saturation is especially taken for granted. The novel begins, ironically enough, by recounting a stunt for reality television that goes wrong. Semi, Miranda, and Arnie are part of a group of “British Young Conservationists … prizewinners in a competition run by the Planet Savers TV program.” The teenagers are headed for “a wildlife conservation station deep in the Ecuador rain forest,” where they will ostensibly help the scientists with “biodiversity experiment[s]‌,” under the watchful eyes of the TV presenters and their cameras.

  But the Young Conservationists never reach their destination. Their plane crashes over the ocean, and Semi, Miranda, and Arnie are the only survivors. They find themselves marooned on a distant island, which at first they think is unpopulated. They survive by gathering coconuts and spearing fish; they construct a shelter from palm fronds. It is important that, throughout their ordeal, the teens do not ever become feral and savage. This is not a Lord of the Flies scenario. It is true that Arnie is a bit obnoxious in a stereotypical nerdy teen boy way; he is a “big pale chunky boy” who has no friends and likes to pass the time by playing computer games. Alone on the island with two girls and no gaming consoles, he tends to be mean and sarcastic, and to do selfish things behind the others’ backs. Nonetheless, underneath his “nasty and cynical” front, Arnie is really just another “lonely, misfit person.” Most of the time, he works together with Semi and Miranda. The three teenagers do their best, not just to survive, but to recreate as much as possible of what they have lost. They do not have to start entirely from scratch, because they are able to make use of flotsam salvaged from the plane wreck. In this, they resemble the protagonists of such classic novels as Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson (the latter of which is explicitly mentioned in the text).

  But it turns out that the island is far from being isolated and uninhabited. Like just about every other place in the world, it is in fact tightly connected to the global network and the global economy. The teenagers are watched from a distance all along, although they are unaware of this. Their Robinsonade comes to an end when first Arnie, and then Semi and Miranda, are captured and imprisoned by Dr. Franklin’s paramilitary force. Arnie disappears from the narrative when he is separated from the others; it is only toward the end of the novel that the girls reestablish contact with him. For the most part, Dr. Franklin’s Island recounts the growing friendship between Semi and Miranda, as they struggle to survive and escape from Dr. Franklin’s cruelties.

  Legally speaking, the island is Dr. Franklin’s “private property,” and the site of his research facility. Dr. Franklin regularly gets supplies, as well as workers, from the mainland, where he is “a big man … the local jefe,” with considerable financial and political influence. He is respected and deferred to, even though the details of his research are kept secret. Dr. Franklin thus remains connected to the world at large, in a way that Dr. Moreau does not.

  Dr. Franklin also knows who the teens are, having been “in contact with the Search and Rescue operation” ever since the flight went down. Indeed, this is why he can get away with kidnapping them. He is sufficiently powerful and well-known that nobody will ever question his claim that he did not find the teenagers. “You are missing, believed dead,” he and his flunky Dr. Skinner tell them; “you don’t exist” as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Semi and her friends have no recourse; instead of becoming junior experimenters, they are made into experiments themselves.

  Hallam says in an interview that, when she reread The Island of Dr. Moreau, she especially disliked “H. G. Wells’ ideas about animal nature versus human nature.” Wells’ vision is grounded in a pernicious dualism. Human transcendence remains forever in tension with crass, raging animal drives: what Dr. Moreau calls “cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity.” Wells, like so many other Victorians, gives a Darwinian twist to the old Platonic and Christian vision of human beings split between angel and beast, or rationality and animality. Dr. Moreau’s goal is to liquidate this duality, so that only pure reason remains. His torturous vivisections of various animals are intended to extirpate their bestial nature, and raise them up to fully human status:

  Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, “This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!”

  But of course, Dr. Moreau never succeeds in doing this. He is no better at playing God than Victor Frankenstein was. For all the tortures that Dr. Moreau inflicts, and despite endowing his animals with the power of speech, he is unable to reach “the seat of the emotions,” which is where the real resistance to rationality lies. After completing his surgeries, therefore, Dr. Moreau finds that he still needs to subject his Beast Folk to harsh and continual discipline. He sees this as the only way to keep them more or less human. At any opportunity, Dr. Moreau complains, “they revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again.”

  Wells gives us a gruesome portrait of Dr. Moreau’s excessive rationalism, and of the underlying sadism that drives it. But Dr. Moreau’s governance of his island also works as a hyperbolic example – or a parody – of the nineteenth-century regime of biopower. Michel Foucault describes biopower as a set of “techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault 1976). In the new power arrangements that arise in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century, discipline does not just constrain actual behavior; it gets extended to all “the basic biological features of the human species” (Foucault 2007).

  In other words, biopower is not just about what you do; more crucially, it is focused on policing what you are. Biopower is all about a normative model of what it means to be human. Dr. Moreau tries to keep the Beast Folk human by continually chastising and haranguing them, by forcing them to perform incessant rituals, and by repeatedly threatening them with pain. This is Foucault’s disciplinary society par excellence. We might say that Wells literalizes the presuppositions and mec
hanisms of biopower, by giving us a story in which actual animals are tortured in order to fit them within rigid constraints of what it means to be human.

  Dr. Moreau’s forcible humanization of his animals is continually shadowed by its inverse: his panic about the reversion of his creatures to their original bestial nature. This fear of reversion is a central feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-American racism. Humanity is defined according to a normative model: white, male, heterosexual, and Protestant, and therefore supposedly “rational.” Anyone not conforming to this model is regarded as irrational and less than fully human. So-called “scientific racism” is the underside of the regime of biopower. Later speculative writers in this tradition become even more unhinged than Wells’ Dr. Moreau, in their dread of a supposed animalistic reversion that threatens to undermine the privileges of white humanity. H. P. Lovecraft writes whole stories in this vein, like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “The Call of Cthulhlu,” in the latter of which he channels The Island of Dr. Moreau directly:

  There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.

  Things are altogether different in the world of Dr. Franklin’s Island. Obviously, racism and misogyny have far from disappeared from twenty-first century life; if anything, they are on the rise in today’s political climate. Nonetheless, contemporary biology does not recognize any sharp distinction between different human types, let alone between humanity and animality, or between rationality and emotion. These all come down to matters of degree, rather than differences of kind. Genes work in the same ways across all living species. There is no hierarchical chain of being, but only a mesh (as Timothy Morton calls it: Morton 2010) of interconnected and mutually dependent entities. Where Dr. Moreau wishes to extirpate animal-being, therefore, Dr. Franklin rather desires to capture it, appropriate it, and capitalize upon it. Far from seeking to transcend animality, Dr. Franklin regards animals – or more precisely, their genomes – as valuable resources, available to him for selection, manipulation, and productive use.

  All this is possible because Dr. Franklin directly works on the genotype, whereas Dr. Moreau only works on the level of gross anatomy, or of what we now call the phenotype. (Part of the point here is that the very distinction between genotype and phenotype had not yet been recognized when Wells wrote his novel.) Where Dr. Moreau’s approach is physiological, Dr. Franklin’s is genetic. Dr. Moreau assaults and alters animal bodies on the largest scale; Dr. Franklin rearranges things on the molecular level. Dr. Moreau relies upon “the plasticity of living forms,” and seeks, through vivisection, “to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.” In this way, he is more a precursor of D’Arcy Thompson than a follower of Darwin. In contrast, Dr. Franklin is a true heir of Watson and Crick; he invokes the power of DNA in order to direct and alter biological growth. Semi and Miranda are not subjected to invasive surgery; instead, they are treated with infusions and injections made from their own stem cells, “cut and spliced” with “pieces of original animal genes” as well as with entirely new artificial genes “that had never existed before in the world.”

  Dr. Franklin’s experiments reflect the way that the new biology of the twenty-first century is, above all, pragmatic and operational: concerned with fostering performance, rather than with capturing essence. Sophia Roosth observes in her recent study of synthetic biology that the aim of contemporary research is “not experiment but manufacture, not reduction but construction, not analysis but synthesis.” If a software model does not accurately reflect the activity of a virus, for instance, synthetic biologists respond “not [by] reprogramming the software model but [by] rebuilding the physical virus to conform to the software model” (Roosth 2017). Genomes are tailored to fit whatever purposes we want them to serve. Contemporary biology is constructivist and performative; that is to say, its premises are diametrically opposed to those of nineteenth-century biopower. Identity is irrelevant; actual activity is everything. Today’s biotechnology is not concerned with what life is, or with any supposed essence of humanity, but only with – as Deleuze puts it, paraphrasing Spinoza – what a body can do.

  In this performative, operational way, contemporary biotechnology is still (or again) a sort of vitalistic practice. But this is not the old vitalism. As I already have argued in reference to Simak’s “Shadow Show,” our current sense of vital animacy is radically different from the vitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, we no longer need to posit anything like Victor Frankenstein’s mysterious “spark of life.” For we now understand that vital transformation is a common, everyday process. It is entirely explicable in physicochemical terms, and therefore it is as mundane as it is magical. As Semi says, reflecting on her own transgenic crossings,

  Have you ever seen a seedling, a baby weed, shoving up from under a concrete slab? Or pushing through to the sunlight, through four or five centimeters of tarmac? That’s what changing was like for me … That’s the power that Dr. Franklin had put into his DNA infusions. That’s what the chemistry of life can do.

  The “chemistry of life” is active nearly everywhere on our planet. And it works in the same way in Dr. Franklin’s extreme transgenic experiments as it does in the ordinary growth and reproduction of living things. This is why, as Dr. Franklin puts it at one point, “the idea of growing a new kind of human being from scratch [i]‌s a nonstarter.” Victor Frankenstein was entirely misguided. You can get much better results, Dr. Franklin says, by “putting new genes into a ready-made living human body, and getting it to change.” Rather than worrying about how dead, inert matter can be endowed with life, Dr. Franklin seeks to induce smooth, lateral, and seamlessly reversible metamorphoses among multiple already-living entities. With his transgenic technology, he hopes to achieve, for bioengineering, something like the “universal transmutability of fluctuation” that Melinda Cooper sees at work “in the circulation of capital today” (Cooper 2010).

  Dr. Franklin’s experiments incorporate a high degree of uncertainty into their basic operations, much as actual pharmaceutical research projects do – and as financial derivatives do as well. As Miranda remarks to Semi at one point,

  Transgenic experiments can be random. I don’t think they knew how we would turn out. That’s the whole point of being a scientist, isn’t it? You try things, to see what happens.

  This is why the old biopower, which sought to enforce norms decreed in advance, is obsolete. Today instead, biotechnology and finance alike reject pregiven forms, and seek instead to adaptively manage future uncertainties. As Cooper puts it, power now works through rhizomatic proliferation and variation:

  The power of leverage is one of potentiation through connection, the power to liquefy and freeze relations, to potentialize and depotentialize connections, and thus to shape (and be shaped by) the possibilities of movement of everyday life. This is a power that operates in the future subjunctive, since the promise of leverage is a claim over the future in all its unknowability – a claim over event worlds that have yet to actualize in space and time.

  (Cooper 2010)

  Cooper is writing about “leverage” in financial markets; but her logic applies with equal force to the transformations wrought by postgenomic biotechnology. The “chemistry of life,” as embodied in DNA, is at once manipulable and unpredictable. DNA can be programmed like a computer; nonetheless, the consequences of this programming are nonlinear and not entirely within the programmers’ control. DNA molecules are tightly organized, in chains that can reach great length; and these chains tend to strongly conserve their organization. But at the same time, thanks to its modular structure, DNA is also highly amenable to mutation and rearrangement. These characteristics underlie the animacy of life as we understand it today. Transgenic technology operates in the mode of what Cooper calls the “future subjunctive”: it remains open to, and is able to profit from, a wide range of possi
ble situations. The “chemistry of life” exhibits the “flexibility and adaptability” that are central to what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe as “the new spirit of capitalism” in the twenty-first century (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018). Life today is cheap: plentiful, easily manipulable, and just as easily disposable.

  It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Dr. Franklin is a very different sort of “mad scientist” figure than Dr. Moreau. Wells’ character is megalomaniacal in his ambitions and tormented by his repeated failures; he seems to revel in the infliction of pain. Dr. Franklin is equally megalomaniacal, and is in fact described as a “mad scientist” by Semi at several points in the text. But Dr. Franklin, unlike Dr. Moreau, is always cold and detached, with a “creepy beaming smile.” Semi notes that Dr. Franklin is “never nasty,” and always “polite.” He promises the teenagers that he “will cause as little physical pain as possible. I am never needlessly cruel!” Of course, what he means by this is only that he does not revel in cruelty for its own sake. He wants his research to move forward efficiently, and he is only cruel to the extent that this serves his research goals. Despite the leveling power of his new technologies, he is still committed to the old scientific goal of humanity’s absolute domination of nature. This fits in with his megalomania, since he regards “everyone but himself” as “still an animal, a thing to be used,” and therefore as expendable. Indeed, Semi observes that Dr. Franklin treats her and Miranda in much the same way that “normal people treat normal animals, a lot of the time”: we lock them up and exploit them, compelling them to do precisely what we want, “and yet we somehow expect them to like us.”