Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

  Where Dr. Moreau is tormented by the continuing failures of his experiments, Dr. Franklin is calmly “prepared to sacrifice” his experimental subjects whenever he needs to. “Of course there’s a price to pay” for any research advance; just as in the derivatives market, unpredictability and failure are built in to the project from the very beginning. Indeed, Dr. Franklin, like a derivatives trader, thrives on uncertainty. He regards each research setback as a new opportunity to exercise his mastery. When things go wrong with an experiment, he says that “I don’t look on this as a failure … It has been a very exciting first trial.” He is sarcastically delighted whenever Semi and Miranda try to escape or otherwise resist him: “Many congratulations!” he tells them; “Excellent! Well done!” The girls’ unexpected behavior confirms the animacy and flexibility of biological matter – the very qualities that Dr. Franklin seeks to cultivate. Every act of disobedience is a new source of experimental data for him, or a stress test allowing him to debug and refine his procedures. Dr. Franklin praises Semi and Miranda for being “highly resourceful, psychologically very resilient,” which makes them “excellent candidates for my first human trials.”

  Semi is rightly disturbed when she hears this sort of praise:

  “Resilient?” I repeated. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the word, it was because I couldn’t understand why these compliments sounded so creepy.

  The creepiness has to do, I would suggest, with the way that resilience has become a neoliberal buzzword. Where Dr. Moreau fears the moment when “the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again,” Dr. Franklin considers Semi’s and Miranda’s most valuable trait to be precisely that they are able to “bounce back … You don’t crawl into a corner whimpering when you’re faced with a tremendous challenge. You deal with it.” As John Patrick Leary observes, resilience is a key concept for neoliberalism because, at the same time that it praises “one’s own, private ability to bounce back from hardship,” it also takes such hardship as a given: “one can only be ‘resilient to crisis’ – or, more to the point, expect others to be – if one first accepts crisis as a more or less regular condition of those others’ existence” (Leary 2018). Consequently, as Robin James puts it, resilience discourse means that victimized and oppressed people “are individually responsible for overcoming” the very damage that has been systematically and concertedly inflicted upon them (James 2015). Dr. Franklin praises Semi and Miranda for having what it takes to endure the abuse he subjects them to, and also for providing him with new challenges along the way. This is quite different from the more straightforward sadism of Dr. Moreau’s vivisections – though I hesitate to judge which is worse.

  Along with all of this, Dr. Franklin also offers Semi and Miranda the “choice” as to which one of them will be transformed into a bird, and which into a fish. They are “free to make” the choice, whichever way they prefer. This gives us a gruesomely hilarious illustration of how rational choice works in the neoliberal order. Every individual is “free to choose” (as Milton Friedman liked to say: Friedman and Friedman 1980) among various alternatives. But the alternatives themselves are severely constrained, already given in advance, and never in the individual’s control. Dr. Franklin tells Semi and Miranda that there are “very good technical reasons” as to which animals he proposes to turn them into. Their “free choice” does not include selecting a different species, let alone being able to avoid the transformation altogether.

  It is also worth noting that Dr. Franklin does not transform any of the teenagers into other mammals, but only into less closely related creatures (birds, reptiles, fish – at least they still remain vertebrates). In other words, Dr. Franklin does not just dehumanize Semi, Miranda, and Arnie; he de-mammalizes them as well. Turning them into dogs or tigers, or even into rats or pigs, would presumably not be alien and alienating enough.

  Unlike Dr. Moreau, who works in solitude, Dr. Franklin has a large staff of collaborators and assistants – or better, employees – as befits the cost and complexity of biological research today. The island is not an isolated outpost, so much as it is an “evil paradise” (Davis and Monk 2011): a fully functioning authoritarian mini-state, with its own particular role to play in the neoliberal world order. Dr. Franklin’s staff includes “orderlies and technicians” and armed security guards, not to mention the people who clean and cook and take care of supplies. These workers all live on the island with their families, in what is essentially a company town (a relic of nineteenth-century capitalism that is making a comeback today: cf. Richman 2018, and Straus and Zamfira 2017). Miranda refers sarcastically at one point to what she imagines as “Dr. Franklin’s Island General Stores.”

  Dr. Franklin’s research facility is nothing like Dr. Moreau’s “House of Pain” – or for that matter, Victor Frankenstein’s “workshop of filthy creation.” Rather, Dr. Franklin’s compound is large, self-contained, sanitized, and sterile. In contemporary biotechnology, as Donna Haraway puts it, “the new machines are so clean and light” (Haraway 1991). Dr. Franklin’s laboratory consists of “empty, bright, clinical rooms,” all of which are fully climate controlled. Some of these rooms are reminiscent of hotel suites, while others are more like prison cells. In every room, supplies are neatly stockpiled in “walk-in cold cupboard[s]‌ with stacked shelves.” Desks are piled with computer keyboards and monitors – rather than with anything like Dr. Moreau’s gruesome surgical tools. Video spy cameras are everywhere. Doors are always locked, and operated by codes tapped out on keypads. Here, as more generally in what Deleuze calls “control societies” (Deleuze 1995), crude force is replaced by discreet but uninterrupted surveillance, and a continual modulation of effects.

  Dr. Franklin begins his experiments, just as Dr. Moreau does, by endowing other animals with human traits. His odd menagerie includes such specimens as bats with human legs, pigs who have human hands and who “squealed and chattered at each other, in high-pitched almost childish voices,” a capybara with “puffy and red” human lips, and “something that looked like a monkey head with octopus tentacles.” But producing such disturbing and incongruous hybrids is not a goal in itself. Such experiments are only “steps on the way to a much greater goal … we’ve gone beyond them now.” Where Dr. Moreau seeks to humanize beasts, Dr. Franklin and Dr. Skinner don’t see this as a sufficiently ambitious goal. They proclaim that “we’ve gone as far as we can, infusing human genetic material into dumb animals.” Evidently their transgenic technology does not lead them to reject human species chauvinism. Rather, they seem to hyperbolize it. Dr. Franklin and Dr. Skinner are desperate to go further, to take the “next step”: to remake people so that they become “more than human” or “superhumans.”

  Dr. Franklin therefore pontificates about growth, discovery, and entrepreneurial initiative – in striking contrast to Dr. Moreau’s language of rationality and moral regeneration. As experimental subjects, Semi and Miranda will “serve the cause of human progress … Look on it as a great adventure.” Indeed, Dr. Franklin sounds at times like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, drunk on his own vision:

  See if you can picture some of the possibilities. Imagine being as strong as an elephant. Imagine being able to use sunshine to make food, like a plant. Imagine being able to fly like a bird. Imagine being able to breathe underwater, and swim with the fishes. Imagine … though this is farther off, I admit … being able to breathe different gases, or live comfortably in the hard vacuum of space.

  (ellipses in original)

  All of these are familiar staples of transhumanist speculation, not to mention science fiction. Nonetheless, Dr. Franklin’s exalted language cannot be taken at face value. Like so much entrepreneurial discourse, it is largely hype. Though Dr. Franklin does endow Semi with the ability to breathe underwater, and Miranda with the ability to fly, these changes do not really enhance the girls’ abilities; they just replace one set of capacities with another. Semi-the-fish is able to breathe underwater, but at the price of no lo
nger being able to breathe air. Miranda-the-bird has wings, but they have replaced those crucial human organs, the arms and hands. Dr. Franklin, it turns out, is less interested in the “science fiction” of superhuman abilities and “interplanetary travel” than he is in coming up with a solid “commercial proposition.” His real aim is to improve his transgenic formula to the point where he can sell it

  to an exotic holiday company … Imagine it. You take a pill, or a couple of injections. Like being vaccinated. They put you in a flotation tank overnight, while the ugly stuff is going on. You wake up in a five-star underwater hotel, on your ocean safari. Or in some kind of luxury cliffside flying lodge, on the wall of the Grand Canyon. Spend two weeks exploring the deep ocean, or flying like a bird, then go through the same thing in reverse.

  This is one of the novel’s most brilliant ironies. Dr. Franklin is not really trying to surpass or transcend the human condition – at least not in the short run. Rather, he wants to realize a business plan. It is not surprising, therefore, that Semi and Miranda feel cheated once they have undergone Dr. Franklin’s treatment. The girls find, to their disappointment, that they have been turned into “monsters, not superhumans.” They retain just enough of their humanity to be able to realize that animal traits have overwritten, rather than augmented, their human ones. Now they are less than human, or other than merely human – and this is not the same as being “more than human.”

  In depicting these changes, Halam rejects Wells’ creaky Victorian dualism, and draws instead upon an older tradition: the Romantic celebration of animal unselfconsciousness. This is arguably more in line with our current understanding of our own animality. As Halam puts it in her interview, the novel seeks to express

  the wonder and joy of being reunited with the animal kingdom, rediscovering the delight of being an animal, at home in the living world – but still this special kind of self-aware, conscious animal that is a human being.

  A human being may well be a “special kind” of animal, but we remain animals nonetheless. We may well be distinguished by our strange capacity for self-awareness and self-alienation; but we are not regressing, or losing something essential, when we feel the embodied enjoyment of being, like our fellow creatures, “at home in the living world.” Despite the horrors of their imprisonment, and the pain of the transformation itself, Semi and Miranda are able to positively enjoy their new animal status. This is because, like Shelley’s skylark or Keats’ nightingale, they are able to put aside their human self-consciousness along with their human bodily forms:

  Before the change, we’d have thought that losing our human feelings, becoming mutant-monsters in our minds would have been the worst horror imaginable. In fact it turns out to be the only thing that makes life possible … there’s no disgust and horror at being monsters.

  Now that Semi is a fish, her new bodymind affords her new sorts of perceptions, and new powers to affect and to be affected. Semi feels a true happiness in discovering all the things that her fish-body can do, and in exercising her new powers to the fullest. Being an animal turns out to be easy:

  One very good thing is that we don’t have to make any effort to be our animal selves. Miranda-the-bird and Semi-the-fish know everything they need to know. They eat, sleep, move, react like the animals they are. All we have to do is learn to sort of keep our human thoughts out of the way, and everything just happens.

  The human thoughts never entirely disappear, but it is not hard to push them into the background. In Semi’s fish state, she no longer has to deal with her feelings of awkwardness and anxiety, her perpetual sense of inadequacy, and her shyness: all the trials and tribulations that have afflicted her as a teenager (and that are described in excruciating detail in the opening pages of the novel, before Semi’s life is changed by the plane crash). Instead, Semi feels entirely at home in her animal body, which is also, immediately, her mind:

  My head wasn’t separate from my body anymore. My head and my heart were together, in the center of me, and me was this smooth, flowing delta-plane … my legs weren’t dangling extra things anymore, they were inside me as well … my whole body responded. I went flying forward, backward, up, down, with perfect control, any direction I wanted. I was free, so free.

  This delta body, with its reabsorption of extremities (head and limbs) into one central mass, corresponds to a psychical reabsorption of mind into immediate physical experience. Everything is “inside me,” Semi says, and her ability to flow through the water in three dimensions is unimpeded. Semi describes the sheer rapture of swimming as a manta ray as

  the most magical experience of my life … Everything was alive. The water was full of movement, sound and light. I try to think of how it felt in human terms, and the nearest I can come is … it was like swimming through music. Not loud, wild, music, not that night, but sparkling, dancing music, with a deep steady underbeat, and distant voices weaving in and out; and I was part of this music … Joy, that’s the only word for it.

  Such is the beautiful potential of transgenic transformation. “What do animals do with themselves all day?” Semi asks herself. And she immediately answers: “A lot of nothing, basically.” But this is a joyous and relaxing nothing: positive and restful, without any sense of emptiness or lack. Dr. Franklin has not only undermined Dr. Moreau’s binary opposition between human and animal; he has also dismantled Cartesian skepticism, with its concomitant dualism of mind and body. The wonder of animal-being is that consciousness and body plan run together, in Spinozian parallel. As Semi reflects at one point,

  I think animals without hands have different minds from animals with hands. Animals with hands that they can use to pick things up – like monkeys, humans, birds, mice, rats – tend to like being busy, and tinkering with things. Animals without hands, like snakes, or fish, or cats, are happy doing nothing for long periods. I’d always been a thoughtful person. As a fish, I completely shared the daydreamer-animal attitude to life.

  Semi and Miranda find that it is difficult to think human thoughts, let alone express them, when you have the physiology of a fish or a bird. In her fish form, Semi is no longer physically able to speak, or to make any sort of noise, since her lungs and larynx have been transformed into other organs. However, she still retains the capacity for human language and thought, since she still possesses human DNA, and the specifically human portions of her brain. To accommodate this, Dr. Franklin implants “microchips in [the teenagers’] brains, little tiny radios connected to [their] speech centers,” allowing them to converse via what he calls “radio telepathy.” This is a sort of virtual reality simulation. The girls find themselves in a “white place,” something “like being inside a cloud.” There is no background, no “world,” to anchor this virtual experience: “everywhere you actually looked at the whiteness, it blurred out, and vanished into nothingness.” But in this virtual nonspace, the girls “can see mental images of each other” and hear each other’s speech.

  Semi finds the experience of “radio telepathy” unnerving, not just due to the lack of any background, but also because

  I had the weirdest feeling of being in two places at once. I knew that while I sat with Miranda there, the mutant-fish monster that was also me was still swimming around in that pool.

  The two states of hybrid being – human and animal – both continue to exist, but they do not coincide or fuse together. You can experience things either animalistically or humanly, but you cannot have both sorts of experience at the same time. Instead, you can move from one framework to the other by “flipp[ing] some mental switches.” Miranda suggests to Semi that “it’s like having dual nationality. You’re officially two people, but you don’t feel anything odd.” The girls are unable to reconcile or combine their dual natures; but by moving back and forth between them, they are able to revel in a sort of Nietzschean perspectivism. They contemplate each condition from the point of view of the other one:

  In my dual-nationality mind, it was as if I remembered everything
that a natural-born tropical manta ray would know. Only better than remembering, because this wasn’t like Semi-the-girl remembering facts she’d learned, and sometimes getting them wrong. It was certain knowledge, like knowing the difference between light and dark. These “memories” must have come from the fish DNA that had been grafted into my human DNA. But because I was girl as well as fish, I could think about my inbuilt animal knowledge with a human mind. I really enjoyed that.

  This art of inverting perspectives is the crucial lesson of Dr. Franklin’s Island. Semi and Miranda are able to fully enjoy their animal condition at one moment, and to fight against the coercion that led to it in the next. Swimming in her pool, Semi confesses to having “the strangest feeling that we could live like this, and be fairly content” in animal form, pretty much indefinitely. She finds her animal powers “amazing.” She immediately adds a qualification, however: “if only we weren’t prisoners … But we are prisoners.”

  The novel asks us to entertain both sides of this dilemma. Dr. Franklin performs his transgenic surgery because he wants to capture and commodify animal experience. If he can produce it on demand, in a reliable, objective, easily manageable form, then he can sell it as an exotic holiday package. The privatization and marketing of aspects of life that were previously open and common – and especially of such impalpable qualities as experiences, atmospheres, and moods – is one of the frontiers of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. And the operationalism of mainstream biotechnology is largely oriented toward this goal.

  But at the same time, Dr. Franklin’s ambitions are thwarted, because the teenagers’ animal rapture remains opaque to him. He cannot grasp or measure it, no matter how thoroughly he works to “biopsy the internal organs and the brain, take samples of your spinal fluid,” and so on. “I could see [Dr. Franklin’s] frustration,” Semi says at the moment of their final confrontation: