Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

  He had made us, but he didn’t know what was going on in our minds … That was what frightened him. Not Miranda’s talons or Arnie’s massive strength. He’d created us, but he didn’t understand us, and for him that was unbearable.

  This is the hope that resonates through Halam’s otherwise distressing tale. At the end of the novel, Semi, Miranda, and Arnie manage to kill Dr. Franklin, escape from his island, obtain their antidotes, return to human form, and be reunited with their parents. But at the end of the novel, and of their story, they know that they have not really come “back to normal,” even if they “look almost normal on the outside.” For

  Whatever we look like on the outside, there’s something we all three know. We are not back to the way we were before. Once you’ve been made transgenic, you stay transgenic. The different DNA is lurking in our cells.

  Semi, Miranda, and Arnie still retain the potential for metamorphosis, a power lurking deep within their cells. And given their experiences, perhaps they feel that being “normal” isn’t much more attractive than being the prisoner of a mad scientist was. Semi recalls feeling, when she first became a fish,

  as if being normal had been a straitjacket, and this was how it felt when all the horrible restraints, that you’d been suffering all your life without realizing it, were magically taken away.

  Such a feeling could never be that of an actual manta ray, whose fishiness is the only condition it knows. It could also never be that of a human being who lives an entirely commodified existence, never venturing beyond the limits of normalcy. Rather, Dr. Franklin’s Island is the dream of a transgenic being, a human-become-fish-become-human hybrid entity. The novel expresses this dream and this beauty, at the same time that it recounts the terror of a technoscience that seeks absolute domination, and that instrumentally treats human and animal beings only as “experimental subjects.”

  That is why Dr. Franklin’s Island ends with a coda, in which Semi continues to think about her transgenic potential:

  I know that we can transform again. I believe it will happen, some way, somehow. I think about breathing water and swimming through the music of the ocean. I think about having a skeleton of supple cartilage instead of brittle bone. I think about feeling my whole body as one soaring, gliding, sweeping wing. I know that Miranda will never forget being able to fly. I dream of another planet, with an ocean of heavy air, where I can swim and she can fly, where we can be the marvelous creatures that we became; and be free, together, with no bars between us. I wonder if it exists, somewhere, out there …

  Chapter 5

  Message in a Bottle

  Nalo Hopkinson’s 2005 short story “Message in a Bottle” is a fable about art, communication, and futurity. It was originally written for Futureways, a multi-authored volume described by its editors as

  a faux science fiction novel … Futureways is the story of an art exhibition in the distant future, the biennale of a future civilization … each chapter deals with the transport of art objects to the venue of the biennale, a task difficult enough in the modern era but even more tenuous in the imagined futures of the writers.

  (McBride and Rubsamen 2005)

  Hopkinson later republished the story in two of her own collections: first in the chapbook Report from Planet Midnight (Hopkinson 2012), and then in her short story compendium Falling in Love With Hominids (Hopkinson 2015). As these republications suggest, “Message in a Bottle” is legible outside of the occasion for which it was initially written. Indeed, although the story ultimately concerns “the transport of art objects” into the distant future for an exhibition, it tells us very little about this presumptive future. Instead, it is recognizably set in something like the present moment. The prompt for the story suggests a movement through space (“transport … to the venue”) unfolding in an “imagined future” time. Most of the stories in the Futureways anthology follow this conceit (though little attempt is made to place all the stories in a common future world, or to have the same future art exhibition as the destination for all of them). But Hopkinson inverts the entire premise. She imagines the difficulties of transport through time instead of through space, and she evokes a strange, distant future only in terms of the ways that, via time travel, it reveals itself in advance to us in the present.

  Indeed, the notion of a future art exhibition is only mentioned explicitly at the very end of “Message in a Bottle” – though it then becomes apparent that this prospect has structured everything in the story from the beginning. The retrospective narrative structure gives the story an odd, shifting emotional tone. For most of my first reading, “Message in a Bottle” seemed light and humorous. Then, when I got to the end, I was thrown for a loop – because things had suddenly turned weird and outrageous. It was only on rereading the story that I grasped how twisted and distressing the situation it describes really is. “Message in a Bottle” sneaks up on you, and leaves a disturbing aftertaste.

  If the story at first seems cute and funny, this is largely due to the charm of its protagonist-narrator Greg. He is an installation artist, living in present-day St. John’s, Newfoundland. He identifies himself as a heterosexual man of Indigenous origins. His friends and lovers tend also to be nonwhite people, like his “lush and brown” girlfriend Cecilia. Greg is insightful and conscious about racial and post-colonial issues, and the politics of art and culture; though perhaps less so about gender and sexuality.

  Greg explains his cultural politics by telling us about

  this bunch of Sioux activists, how they’d been protesting against a university whose archaeology department had dug up one of their ancestral burial sites … When the director of the department refused to reconsider, these guys had gone one night to the graveyard where his great-grandmother was buried. They’d dug up her remains, laid out all the bones, labelled them with little tags. They did jail time, but the university returned their ancestors’ remains to the band council.

  The action was effective, in other words, even though the activists paid a price for it. The white archaeologists were forced to acknowledge the gross asymmetry between how they treat the cultural values and material traces of other (supposedly “ancient”) peoples, and how they treat their own. What deserves reverence, and what can be taken as mere data for analysis? Why do archaeologists and anthropologists consider some groups of people to be “primitive,” even though we are all living in the same highly technologized present moment? Greg’s anecdote recalls the actual case of Kenniwick Man, a 9,000-year-old skeleton dug up by archaeologists in 1996, subjected to multiple tests, and only returned to the Umatilla people for proper burial in 2017 (Thomas 2000).

  Greg’s own gallery installation, “The Excavations,” which he describes in the course of the story, is about the social roles played by physical stuff. It takes the form of a mock archaeological site. Greg packs the art gallery with “half a ton of dirt,” in which he buries such objects as “a rubber boot” that has been cast aside by the person who wore it, “a large plastic jug that used to hold bleach, and that had been refitted as a bucket for a small child to tote water in,” and “a scrap of hand-woven blanket with brown stains on it.” When visitors enter the gallery, they “get basic excavation tools. When they pull something free of the soil, it triggers a story about the artifact on the monitors above.” The exhibition thus calls our attention to “the kinds of present-day historical artifacts” that actual archaeologists “[toss] aside in their zeal to get at the iconic past of the native peoples” they are studying.

  In this way, Greg’s installation undermines notions of the ahistorical authenticity of Indigenous peoples, such as well-meaning white Westerners are all too likely to project upon them. It points out – just as the Sioux activists’ action did – how Indigenous peoples, no less than white Westerners, inhabit the same present moment; and that this present itself is deeply historical, inflected by the intertwined histories of all the peoples involved in it. That is to say, the lived and experienced present, no less th
an the reconstructed past, is deeply contingent, embedded in stories and processes, and open to contestation and change.

  In “The Excavations,” Greg acquaints his viewers with the actual, present-day material culture of the Indigenous people of (in this case) Chiapas, Mexico. The exhibition shows how this culture is multiple and heterogeneous, and how it is rich in meanings despite economic poverty. This living culture bears the traces both of colonialist oppression and of the native people’s resistance to this oppression. Indigenous peoples, with their histories, their political struggles, and their values, must be seen as actors in the present. We cannot relegate them (as anthropologists all too often have done) to the status of human relics, stuck in ways of living that belong to the past.

  The installation itself is self-consciously shaped by the historical contingencies of its own creation. Greg notes that the soil he uses for the exhibition is

  left over from a local archaeological dig. I wish I could have gotten it directly from Mexico, but I couldn’t afford the permit for doing that.

  This reminds us that art-making is not just pure and unfettered expression. For it is never free from economic, legal, and bureaucratic constraints. But even the artifacts in the installation that actually do come from Chiapas do not simply “speak for themselves.” Objects are shaped and given meaning by the ways that they have been used, and by the narratives that take them up. We can only really understand an artifact when we grasp its history and its context. We need to know who wore that particular boot, and what was carried in that particular plastic jug. Now, any use to which an object is put leaves traces behind on the object itself. But these traces are generally incomplete and fragmentary. The challenge of archaeology is to reconstruct a fuller history from the insufficient traces that it leaves behind. This is always a difficult, perilous act of interpretation. It’s an uncertain and unfinishable task in both directions. On the one hand, an object, in its palpable physical presence (this plastic boot, this stained fragment of blanket), is always more that the stories that can be told about it. But on the other hand, and at the same time, these stories extend beyond what any particular artifact can ever contain; they encompass more of the world than what is immediately present.

  This doubleness is expressed in the very shape of Greg’s installation, which pairs material artifacts with video clips that tell their stories. Neither half of the exhibition would work without the other. It is equally important that we actually find these physical objects by digging them out of the soil, and that we learn the stories of their provenance and their many transformations. “The Excavations” is a complex assemblage, networking cheap technologies (boots, buckets, and blankets) with expensive ones (computers, video monitors, and digital recordings), physical objects with streams of images and sounds, Mexican artifacts with Canadian replicas, and objects that work to tell stories with objects about which the stories are told. The installation also points up its own inevitable incompleteness; however much we get from it, we must also realize that there is always more. For this reason, not everything in the exhibition is given an explanatory narrative. Greg has carefully “videotaped every artifact with which I’d seeded the soil that went onto the gallery floor,” but “some of the artifacts are ‘blanks’ that trigger no stories” on the video monitors.

  Greg’s personal life, like his art, is inflected by his experiences as a nonwhite man in a racist society. He is proud of his Indigenous heritage, but he rejects the clichés that white people all too frequently believe about what the life of a person with that heritage is supposed to be like. For instance, even though Greg covers his installation in half a ton of soil, he is far from being a traditionalist whose primary tie is to the land. Rather, Greg is a techie, an urbanite, and sex-positive. He and Cecilia “geekspeak at each other all the time. When we’re out in public, people fall silent in linguistic bafflement around us.” He gleefully tells us how he and Cecelia will go “shopping for a new motherboard” in the morning, then “hump like bunnies till we both come screaming” in the afternoon.

  Greg also describes himself as something of a bricoleur (though he doesn’t actually use this word). He gathers all sorts of miscellaneous stuff, and ends up using it for his art. Indeed, he is really a hoarder; he accumulates and keeps whatever odds and ends and pieces of junk he happens to find:

  My home is also my studio, and it’s a warren of tangled cables, jury-rigged networked computers, and piles of books about as stable as playing-card houses. Plus bins full of old newspaper clippings, bones of dead animals, rusted metal I picked up on the street, whatever. I don’t throw anything away if it looks the least bit interesting. You never know when it might come in handy as part of an installation piece. The chaos has a certain nestlike comfort to it.

  I think that Greg’s sense of “nestlike comfort” is the key here. His accumulations, with their mild but not unmanageable disorder, make for a relaxing sense of repletion. This offers a sharp contrast to the uptight, obsessive neatness of normative white bourgeois suburban life. No matter what physical object Greg needs, he is likely to be able to find it somewhere or other, in one of his piles of stuff. The “chaos” that always surrounds him marks his home as being really his. He finds it familiar and relaxing, all the more so in that outsiders cannot make heads or tails of it.

  There is one vitally important thing I haven’t mentioned yet. This is that Greg’s description of his homely mess, and his anecdote about the Sioux activists, both come up in the course of his riffing on what seems to be his favorite subject, which is how he doesn’t particularly like children. This complaint runs through the entire story, as a sort of obsessive refrain. Indeed, Greg gives us a whole comedy routine – although he is largely serious – about how children make him feel uncomfortable; or to put it more bluntly, how “children creep me out.” At one point, he tries to explain himself, defensively:

  I truly don’t hate children. I just don’t understand them. They seem like another species. I’ll help a lost child find a parent, or give a boost to a little body struggling to get a drink from a water fountain – same as I’d do for a puppy or a kitten; but I’ve never had the urge to be a father.

  The comparison of kids to puppies and kittens is indicative; Greg is not a mean person, but I take it that he is not particularly fond of dogs or cats either. Greg is perturbed by the sheer alien difference of children; it seems to him that their values and desires bear no relation to his own. He doesn’t “really know how to talk to kids” — or how to approach them in any other way, for that matter. With their magical beliefs – such as the fact that they “don’t yet grok that delicate, all-important boundary between the animate and inanimate” – children strike him as dangerous and untrustworthy. And with their intense “single-mindedness” and their sense of “enfranchised hauteur,” they make far too many absolute demands. Once they “latch on to an idea,” they never let go. “Before you know it, you’re arranging your whole life around their likes and dislikes.”

  Greg is especially upset at the way that children seem to suck up all of their parents’ focus and energy. His art-school pal Babette and her husband Sunil “have looked tired, desperate and drawn for a while now,” ever since they adopted their daughter Kamla. Even when Babette is cuddling Kamla, Greg says, her “eyes look sad,” and her “expression … blends frustration with concern.” For her part, Babette often complains to Greg that the little girl is “making our lives hell” with her incessant clamoring and complaining. Greg laments that Babette “used to talk about gigabytes, Cronenberg and post-humanism”; but now that she is a mother, she finds it “perfectly normal to discuss [her] child’s excreta with anyone who’ll sit still for five minutes.”

  Greg’s tirades about children are funny, if one-sided. He is not wrong to object to those people he calls “the righteous breeders of the flock”: the ones who “spawn like frogs in springtime – or whenever the hell frogs spawn,” and insist that everyone else ought to do the same. He is exasperat
ed when friends and prospective lovers pepper him with stock questions like, “Don’t you care about passing on your legacy?”, and, if you don’t have kids, “what are you going to do with your life, then?” Sometimes, he responds to these questions with irritated humor: “I guess I’m going to go home and put a gun to my head, since I’m clearly no use to myself or anyone else.” At other times, he is breezily sarcastic about the idea that children are “supposed to be your insurance for the future; you know, to carry your name on, and shit.” At still other times he says, reasonably enough, that

  my life has tons of value. I just happen to think it consists of more than my genetic material … I’m making my own legacy, thank you very much. A body of art I can point to and document.

  None of this changes when Greg and Cecilia themselves become parents. It happens “by accident”: when Cecilia gets pregnant despite their precautions, “we sort of dared each other to go through with it.” Greg and Cecelia find themselves “curious” about “how our small brown child might change a world that desperately needs some change.” For the time being, however, “baby’s not about changing anyone’s world but ours.” In the present moment of the story, Greg and Cecilia have a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, named Russ; Greg refers to him, only half humorously, as “our creepy little alien child.” Greg mentions how he and Cecilia “learned the real meaning of sleep deprivation” when the child was born; and he is now forced to acknowledge that “poo and pee are really damned important, especially when you’re responsible for the life of a small, helpless being that can barely do anything else.” Greg is already “freaked that” Russ has “begun making poo-poo jokes”; he absolutely doesn’t want to consider that, “in a blink of an eye, barely a decade from now, [Russ’] body will be entering puberty. He’ll start getting erections, having sexual thoughts.” For the time being, Greg is just relieved whenever his mother is able to keep an eye on Russ, so that he can return attention to his art.