On the Intelligence of Reptiles

If men were as much men as lizards are lizards 

they'd be worth looking at. - D. H. Lawrence

I.

I suppose the cognitive ability of mammals and birds is now pretty much an established fact; that is to say, human beings have finally conceded that they are not the only creatures that possess minds and know how to think and use language, etc.

Unfortunately, however, there's still lingering prejudice when it comes to other classes of animal - reptiles, for example, are still not accorded the respect they deserve and are generally considered less intelligent even than certain species of fish ...!

I'm sure it's not only the scalies and herpetophiles out there who are offended by the injustice of this ...


II.

It's true, of course, that reptile brains are (relative to their body mass) significantly smaller than our own. But, be that as it may, reptiles are far from mindless - and certainly not as stupid as some people like to believe. It's worth recalling that dinosaurs roamed the earth for around 175 million years - which is a lot longer than the 100,000 years modern humans have clocked up (or are ever likely to clock up).

Larger lizards and crocodiles regularly exhibit complex behaviour, including cooperation; Komodo dragons are known to engage in play; turtles are also fun and sociable and some species are better even than white rats in learning to navigate their way round mazes. D. H. Lawrence, who famously immortalised a number of tortoises in his poetry, would be delighted to know that they are capable of learning via operant conditioning and that they are able to retain learned behaviours thanks to excellent long-term memories.   

We know these things because after spending years putting mammals, birds, and fish through their paces, researchers are finally giving reptiles the opportunity to show us what they can do via tests specifically designed for them.

Now that scientists have got better at designing reptile-friendly experiments, they've been pretty astonished by the results: reptiles, it seems, are not just good-looking, they're pretty savvy after all - and certainly more than living machines driven by instinct alone; they possess what is known as behavioral flexibility (i.e., the ability to alter behaviour as external circumstances change).

Although the field of reptile cognition is still in its infancy, it's already clear that intelligence is more widely distributed across the animal kingdom than previously realised - and so human exceptionalism takes another poke in the eye!

Notes 

The lines from D. H. Lawrence are from the short verse 'Lizard', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 455. Click here to read online. 

For a related post to this one on the intelligence of fish, click here.

On the Intelligence of Fish

I'm not as dumb as you look ...

I.

I suppose the cognitive ability of mammals and birds is now pretty much an established fact; that is to say, human beings have finally conceded that they are not the only creatures that possess minds and know how to think and use language, etc.

Unfortunately, however, there's still lingering prejudice when it comes to other classes of animal - fish, for example, are still not accorded the respect they deserve and many people continue to subscribe to the belief that they and other acquatic lifeforms are intellectually inferior to terrestrial organisms.

One doesn't have to be an ichthyophile - or even particularly fond of our underwater friends - to be irritated by the injustice of this and the anthropocentric conceit it displays ... 

II.

To say it loud and clear right from the start: fish are not stupid!

In fact, in many areas, such as memory, their cognitive abilities match or exceed those of animals usually ranked above them in the hierarchy of intelligence constructed by man; numerous studies have shown that they can retain information for months or even years - and this includes goldfish!

And whilst they typically have quite small brains (relative to body size), some species have extremely large brains (again, relative to body size) and are capable of learning complex tasks and forming cognitive maps. (There are some people who can barely manage to do this.) 

Of course, having only mouths in which to hold and manipulate objects (no fingers, no hands or feet), severely restricts their use of tools. But some species of fish use shells and rocks in ways that might surprise many and in one recent laboratory study, Atlantic cod were trained to pull a string in order to release food from a feeding machine. Also, let's not ignore the fact that fish can construct sophisticated shelters and nesting places ...

Such behaviour may be innate, rather than learned, but it's still impressive: for we're not just talking holes in the sand here, but deep and extensive excavations reinforced with coral fragments; beautiful-looking pebble mounds and sand towers; nests made from vegetation, glued together with bodily fluids specially secreted for the job and decorated with coloured algae and/or bits of artificial material that now litter their world just like ours. The fact that fish will often make repairs and build extensions (quicker than my next-door-neighbour) further suggests considerable DIY know-how.

Moving on, we come to the question of social intelligence (i.e., the capacity to know themselves and recognise others) ...

It seems that fish can remember things about other individuals; whether they are friend or foe, for example - something that is obviously quite crucial in a world of dog eat dogfish - and this causes them to modify their own behaviour accordingly (including ways that might even be thought of as manipulative and deceptive, though probably it's going a bit far to say they possess a theory of mind).

Although rare, there are instances of fish cooperating with others of their kind; when hunting prey, for example, it often pays to work in groups. And they can communicate amongst themselves using sign language as well as squeaks and other low-frequency sounds, inaudible to the human ear.

Thus, D. H. Lawrence was wrong to describe them as soundless and out of touch. Indeed, they even enjoy gently rubbing their bodies against one another, so are not suspended in watery isolation, forever apart. That said, Lawrence does recognise that fish not only know fear but joie de vivre - and their joy is often expressed in play behaviour; another key indicator of intelligence.

Finally, fish can learn from other fish simply by observing them in action (this is sometimes described as the cultural transmission of knowledge). You might ask what does a fish have to learn? Well, the location of a reliable food source, or a convenient hiding place, would be two examples of things that it might be crucial to have knowledge of. And, if you are a fish who happens to provide a grooming service for another species, it's important to learn how to do a good job.    

So, in sum: fish are intelligent and sensitive animals, with good memories, impressive problem-solving skills, and the ability to learn new things. We should treat them with the same care and respect as we would warm-blooded creatures, even if they are to some extent forever beyond our understanding and even if, as Lawrence says, we will never know their gods.


Notes

Image adapted by Stephen Alexander from a bottle of Albariño by Faustino Rivero Ulecia; a refreshing white wine with a citric finish that makes a perfect accompaniment to, er, fish ... 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Fish', in The Poems, Vol I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 289-94. The poem is very lovely, even if technically incorrect on a number of points; but then, to be fair, Lawrence was a poet and not a marine biologist. It can be read online by clicking here. 

For a sister post to this one on the intelligence of reptiles, click here. 

Watching the Detectives: Notes on Special Branch and The Sweeney

George Sewell and Patrick Mower as Craven and Haggerty in Special Branch

John Thaw and Dennis Waterman as Regan and Carter in The Sweeney

I suppose every generation is convinced that the TV crime dramas of their youth were the best. For me, for example, as a child of the seventies, nothing before or after can touch The Sweeney (1975-78).

However, I do have a growing affection for the show that was in many ways its direct predecessor; Special Branch (1969-74), which was also made by Thames Television and which, like The Sweeney, ran for 53 episodes over four series.

Actually, when I say I have an increasing amount of affection for Special Branch, I'm only referring to series 3 and 4, starring George Sewell (as DCI Alan Craven) and Patrick Mower (as DCI Tom Haggerty). I have little familiarity with the earlier episodes and, despite the presence of Derren Nesbitt as dandyish DCI Jordan - the copper with a kipper tie - no great interest in them.   

For me, the show only really took off in 1973. And the reason for this - apart from the change of cast - was because Euston Films* took charge of the production and pioneered a technique of fast shooting on location using 16mm film for a grittier, more realistic look (a technique and a look they would later perfect on The Sweeney).

Craven and Haggerty were harder, more cynical characters than previously seen and Special Branch storylines became more complex; often dealing with social and political issues, for example, and revealing the sometimes dubious relationship between police and criminals (it's amusing to note that both George Sewell and Patrick Mower would later appear as villians in The Sweeney). 

So, here we are in 2020 ... What's the appeal of Craven and Haggerty, Regan and Carter, today?

Is it just nostalgia for unreconstructed seventies masculinity? Perhaps - though we are of course now invited to view such through an ironic lens whilst passing moral judgement on the racism and sexism and bad fashion choices, etc. 

Or is it, perhaps, that Special Branch and The Sweeney remain massively entertaining and that they still have something important to teach viewers; not about policing or political correctness, but about how to make memorable (well-written, well-acted) television.     

Notes

*Note: Euston Films was originally a subsidary of Thames Television, founded in 1971 by Lloyd Shirley (Controller of Drama), George Taylor (Head of Film Facilities), and Brian Tesler (Director of Programmes). As well as Special Branch and The Sweeney, they also gave us Van der Valk and Minder. 

Bonus: to listen to the Special Branch theme tune (composed by Robert Early): click here. And to watch the original opening and closing credits to The Sweeney (music composed by Harry South): click here.

Like a Face Drawn in Sand: Anti-Humanism in D. H. Lawrence and Michel Foucault

Detail from the front cover of Foucault Now, 

ed. James D. Faubion, (Polity Press, 2014)

I.

According to Andrew Keese, a faculty member of the English Dept. at Texas Tech University: "Lawrence worried about anything which might force humans to be something other than they were actually born to be." [1]

But this is laughably mistaken in its natal essentialism. For Lawrence, the self was a product of external forces: "I am myself, and I remain myself only by the grace of the powers that enter me, from the unseen, and make me forever newly myself." [2]

He vehemently rejected the idea of an individual as a fixed entity with a predetermined fate and, like Foucault, Lawrence was happy to welcome the incoming tide that would mark the death of man. Not because he was anti-human, but because he was anti-humanist and keen to challenge all forms of anthropocentric thinking, including the conceited idea that man is the necessary end or highpoint of evolution.


II.

For readers unfamiliar with Foucault's notorious (but very beautiful) concluding paragraphs from The Order of Things, here they are in full: 

"One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area - European culture since the sixteenth century - one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words - in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same –-only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

      If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility –-without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises - were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." [3]

Foucault's argument is actually very straightforward: he is using the term man to refer to a cultural and historical formation - not a biological organism or zoological species. In other words, man is a specific (but contingent) mode of being that has arisen at a particular time due to circumstances that will sooner or later change.

Understanding man in this way allows us to also think about the play of forces (social, economic, technological, etc.) peculiar to each epoch and how these interact with each other and with the forces within the human animal to produce new forms and ways of being. Unlike Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, Foucault is not fantasising about a world without humans, but thinking rather of a future in which the convenient fiction of humanity as presently conceived is no longer tenable.

Further, Foucault is interested in the extent to which man as a conceptual category can be understood as a bourgeois compromise (or as a bridge between ape and Übermensch, as Nietzsche would say) and to what degree man is merely something that obstructs and inhibits vital forces and flows.       

To be honest, the idea is so simple and - I would have thought - uncontroversial, that I cannot see why some people (including those who should know better) have problems understanding or accepting it ... 

Notes

[1] Andrew Keese, 'Engineering Away Humanity: Lawrence on Technology and Mental Consciousness in Lady Chatterley's Lover and Pansies', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 127-135. The line quoted is on p. 134. 

I'm afraid that Keese misunderstands both Lawrence and Michel Foucault in this essay; particularly on the subject of power, which neither saw as corrupting (that would be Lord Acton), nor as something merely repressive. Nor is it correct to say that, like Lawrence, Foucault regards humans as being "out of balance between their instinctual and mental selves" [129]. That's more a Freudian schema than Foucauldian and, as far as I recall, Foucault doesn't uphold the Cartesian mind-body division in his corporeal ontology.     

[2] D. H. Lawrence, '...... Love Was Once a Little Boy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 344.

[3] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (Routledge, 1989), pp. 421-22.

All Aboard! On D. H. Lawrence and Trains

Ian McKellen as D. H. Lawrence and Janet Suzman 
as Frieda Lawrence aboard a train in Priest of Love 
(dir. Christopher Miles, 1981)

I.

To be honest, I would probably associate trains more with the cinema than with literature; I'm thinking of Hitchcock's films for starters and, of course, the Lumière brothers' L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895).

Having said that, I can recall several novels featuring trains and/or railway stations as a prominent motif: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) would be one example; as would Zola's psychological thriller La Bête humaine (1890). Then there's Graham Greene's Stamboul Train (1932) and, of course, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) ...

But one author whom I wouldn't immediately think of in relation to trains, is D. H. Lawrence. And yet, as two recent essays by Lawrence scholars have shown, trains are actually quite a crucial and recurrent feature of his work ...


II.

According to Indrek Männiste, "one of the most idiosyncratic ways in which Lawrence realizes the cantus technicus in counterpoint is his frequent use of the train trope” [183].

He explains:

"While the more sensationalist drama of Victorian times focused mainly on the dangers of rail travel and its shock elements, Lawrence uses trains synecdochally as the ambassadors of modernity, and plays them out, as always, as threatening on a more metaphysical plane. Trains are described habitually as intruders on nature and as estranging to certain characters." [183]

Indeed, trains – along with cars and buses and other motor vehicles – force the countryside itself to retreat into its own isolation, making it evermore mysteriously inaccessible. As Lawrence notes in a late essay: "People have more 'joy-rides and outings [...] but they never seem to touch the reality of the country-side' (LEA, 15-16)." [185]

And yet – to deploy my own adversative conjunction if I may – trains play a positive role in Lawrence’s fiction too ...

Helen Baron demonstrates how they "occur frequently in his novels, stories, and poems" [191], often advancing the plot, heightening the drama, or helping him reveal things about his characters. She also explores "the variety of ways that Lawrence subtly focused on trains […] to coerce – overtly or subliminally – the reader’s feelings and responses” [191].

So, for all his siderodromophobia, it's possible that Lawrence was a secret locomotive lover after all and one thinks of his poem 'Kisses in the Train', in which, as Baron notes, the erotic element is intensified by being set on a speeding train. The opening two stanzas of the poem read:

I saw the Midlands
      Revolve through her hair;
The fields of autumn
      Stretching bare,
And sheep on pasture
      Tossed back in scare.

And still as ever
      The world went round,
My mouth on her pulsing
      Throat was found,
And my breast to her beating
      Breast was bound.  

Notes

Indrek Männiste, 'Poetics of Technology: D. H. Lawrence and the Well-Tempered Counterpoint', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 175-189.

Helen Baron, 'Trains in D. H. Lawrence's Creative Writing', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ibid. pp. 191-202.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Kisses in the Train', Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 83-4. 

For my review of D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, see The Lawrentian, ed. David Brock, (Autumn Edition, 2020). For a revised extract from this review in the form of a post on Torpedo the Ark, click here.   

Taking a Trip Through The Beauty Jungle

Press ad for The Beauty Jungle (1964)

The most colourful and exciting film of the year

The good people at Talking Pictures TV have found another absolute gem of a movie: The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964), starring (60s and 70s stalwart) Ian Hendry as local journalist Don MacKenzie and (lovely Lancashire lass) Janette Scott as the typist-turned-beauty contestant Shirley Freeman.

Also putting in appearances are Tommy Trinder, Sid James, and a 21-year-old Maggie Nolan as just one of the mulitude of leggy-lovelies gracing the screen, so obviously a film with instant appeal for viewers like me (although it's interesting to note that promotion for the film was aimed primarily at a female audience in the belief that it was the sort of film women will want to see; the sort of picture women will want to talk about).   

Essentially a moral tale - or, rather, a sexploitation movie masquerading as a moral tale - it purports to expose the sordid and corrupt world of beauty pageants. MacKenzie, acting as a manager and image consultant to Shirley, is desperate to also become her lover. Unfortunately for him, having left her home, her job, and her boyfriend and transformed from a happy young brunette into a glamorous and ambitious blonde, greedy for ever-greater fame and success, she isn't interested and spurns his advances.         

Of far more interest to Shirley are playboy filmstar Rex Carrick (played by Edmund Purdom) and sauve international beauty pageant promoter Armand (played by the French actor Jean Claudio). She tries to seduce the former, only to discover he's either gay or asexual; and she (mistakenly) agrees to sleep with the latter in the (vain) hope of becoming Miss Globe (a title that goes to Miss Peru, played by a former Miss Israel, Aliza Gur). 

Having failed to make it to the top, Shirley is reduced to working as a celebrity judge back on the local beauty contest circuit - until, that is, she sees her younger sister paraded before her (and under the management of MacKenzie). This forces her to walk away from the industry for good and presumably back into a life of obscurity and nine-to-five normality; just another victim of the beauty jungle and its brutal, primitive law (though one who was happy to be complicit so long as she was winning). 

What feminist critics or members of the #MeToo generation would make of such a film heaven only knows; one imagines they'd be triggered (perhaps rightly) by the unabashed sexual objectification and abuse of young women by powerful and unscrupulous older men.

But the film has such quirky British charm - not only, as I said earlier, do Tommy Trinder and Sid James appear, but Lionel (Give Us a Clue) Blair and cheeky chappie Joe Brown also pop up on screen - that such sleazy behaviour is normalised, humanised, and made entertaining. Maybe that's the thing with vice and immorality - we find it so damn seductive (and excusable) if it's carried out by people with a twinkle in their eye!

And, what's more, I fully appreciate why girls like Shirley Freeman set out on the path to fame and riches, prepared to do whatever it takes in order to escape being little Miss No One from nowhere - for who wants to peel potatoes and scrub floors when you can drink champagne and travel the world in style?


Notes

To watch a trailer for The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964): click here.

To see the astonishing press kit released to help promote the film visit the William K. Everson Archive (NYU): click here.

I Am Elektro: My Brain Is Bigger Than Yours

1: Elektro sneaks a fag (and cops a feel) backstage before a show (1954)

 2: Elektro and Sparko go through their repertoire of tricks for a 
female admirer at the New York World's Fair (1939-40).

An American correspondent writes (with reference to a recent post):

"You Brits may have built the first robot, Eric, but in Elektro we had the biggest, the best, and most bad-ass." 

And, whilst my fondness for Eric - the man without a soul - remains undiminished, I have to admit that Elektro was pretty impressive: seven feet tall and weighing in at 265 lbs, his steel frame was covered with an aluminium skin.

He could not only walk, talk, and respond to simple voice commands, but blow up balloons and smoke cigarettes like a trooper. Further, as can be seen from the above photos, Elektro also had an eye for the ladies and owned a robotic dog, Sparko, that was trained to bark at humans.  

Manufactured by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1938, Elektro made his debut appearance the following year at the New York World's Fair. He then made a career in the 1950s working in a promotional capacity for the company, touring all over the US and helping to sell their fridges, washing machines, and other electrical goods.  

Alas, people are fickle and times change; Elektro's popularity eventually waned ...

Finding himself out of work, he accepted the role of Thinko, in the sexploitation comedy Sex Kittens Go to College (dir. Albert Zugsmith, 1960), appearing alongside Mamie Van Doren, Tuesday Weld, and Mijanou Bardot. The version released in adult theatres included an additional nine minute dream sequence featuring Thinko with some erotic dancers.   

Unfortunately, the film was neither a great critical nor a commercial success and, having failed to make a name for himself in Hollywood, Elektro ended his days as a minor attraction at an amusement park in California before slipping into almost complete cultural obscurity. 

However, I'm delighted to inform readers that Elektro managed to avoid the scrapyard and now has pride of place at the Mansfield Memorial Museum, where he is billed as the oldest surviving American robot in the world.

Notes

Photo credits: 1: Bettmann / Getty Images. 2: Westinghouse Electric Corporation

For a wonderful short colour film featuring Elektro in action at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, click here.

Musical bonus: Meat Beat Manifesto, Original Control (Version 2), (1992), ft. Elektro: click here.

This post is for Zena, a long term lover of robots. 

Carbon Footprints and Diamond Geezers: On the Allotropic Love Affair Between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich

Alan Bates as Rupert Birkin and Oliver Reed as Gerald Crich 

getting all allotropic in Ken Russell's Women in Love (1969)

In a famous letter, Lawrence advised that, when it came to understanding the characters in his fiction, readers shouldn't look for the old stable ego or concern themselves with personal traits.

Instead, they should attune themselves to "another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which [...] are states of the same single radically-unchanged element".*

It's a nice - rather Futurist-sounding - notion and one that Lawrence scholars have often referred to over the years. But I don't know if anyone loves the word allotrope and its derivatives more than Thalia Trigoni, who theorises Lawrence's radical dualism on the basis of a concept first conceived by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, in 1841.

She also offers an interesting reading of the gladitorial scene in Women in Love fought between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, in which the former is equated with a lump of coal who is proud of his carbon footprint, whilst the latter is characterised as a real diamond geezer - all sparkle and no soot.** 

Whilst the essential point is that both are men of carbon, we all know which of these two characters the miner’s son and former schoolteacher privileges and with whom his sympathies lie - and it isn't the playboy industrialist. By refusing to acknowledge his own carbon nature, Gerald the diamond empties himself of real being. He dazzles, but he's ontologically void; lacking any inner life, any soul.
 

Birkin, on the other hand, is keen to immerse himself in the darkness of his own carbon-self:

"He is the primary representative of the unconscious and the instinctual […] the advocate of ‘the great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head - the dark involuntary being’ (WL, 43)." [143].

But again, it's crucial to remember that Birkin and Gerald "represent two forms of the same mode of being" [143], each seeing himself reflected in the other. The naked wrestling scene is as close as they ever get to merging in a peculiar oneness and establishing an intimate and instinctive form of Blutsbrüderschaft.

It is, therefore, so much more than merely an episode of disguised homoeroticism, as many commentators have suggested: "The 'Gladiatorial' is an externalised psychomachia wherein the constituent elements of human nature merge into oneness at the same time that they are striving to break free." [145]

Of course, as we know, it doesn’t quite work out and things end badly for poor Gerald:

"Gerald experiences a death of the body, he becomes a mental machine-like being driven purely by mental reason. His physical intelligence freezes in a state that triggers a process of disintegration that will finally lead to his death in the Alps. […] A stubborn intellectualist who embodies the spirit of mechanical industrialization and rationalization, Gerald is unable to introduce his experience with Birkin into the symbolic order of understanding." [145]

That might be true. But, arguably, over-heated attempts to become-carbon and seek out dark gods also lead to self-destruction and acts of atrocity. And besides, isn’t it better to be a diamond with a fatal flaw than a lump of coal without?

Notes

* D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 732, to Edward Garnet, 5 June 1914, pp. 182-84. Lines quoted are on p. 183. 

** Thalia Trigoni, 'Lawrence’s Allotropic “Gladiatorial”: Resisting the Mechanization of the Human in Women in Love', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 137-47. See also her essay 'Lawrence's Radical Dualism: The Bodily Unconscious', English Studies, 95: 3 (2014), 302-21.  

This post is a revised extract from a longer review of D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity that will appear in The Lawrentian, ed. David Brock, (Autumn Edition, 2020).  

If He Only Had a Soul: Notes on Eric the Robot

Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

When a man's an empty kettle / He should be on his mettle ...

Probably because my childhood memories and cultural imagination have been very much shaped by American TV and cinema, I always thought that Robby the Robot was the real deal and the first of his metallic kind.

So imagine my surprise when I recently read of Eric; the first functioning electric-powered robot, made in England by former First World War pilot Capt. William Richards, and aircraft engineer Alan Reffell ...

Following his first public appearance - at London's Royal Horticultural Hall in 1928 (opening the Exhibition of the Society of Model Engineers) - Eric and his two operators set off on a US tour, where he cheerfully introduced himself to audiences as the man without a soul.  

I think my favourite description of him comes from an essay by Tina Ferris:   

"Eric was designed to stand, bow […] and to dazzle the audience by answering simple questions. […] Motorized pulleys moved his arms and head while 35,000 volts of electricity generated glowing eyes and sparks that shot from his mouth when [he] spoke. Eric's six-foot-tall aluminium body resembled a knight in shining armour […] A big breastplate was emblazoned with the letters RUR across [his] chest leaving little doubt about [his] inspiration."

Ferris concludes, however, on a somewhat sour note, that Eric's performance ultimately amounted to no more than "exotic theatrical showboating that at once seemed to trivialize robots and also to magnify their threat" [1].

Mysteriously, however, Eric disappeared soon afterwards: some think he self-destructed; others that he was cannibalised for spare parts. Personally, I like to think that he eloped with Maria the Maschinenmensch and star of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (or at least an identical replica of everybody's favourite fembot).


Afterword

In 2016, the Science Museum raised funds through a Kickstarter campaign to rebuild Eric. Working from archive material including photographs and film clips, the artist-roboticist Giles Walker brought him back to life (so to speak) and Eric was added to the museum's permanent collection, appearing as part of the 2017 Robots exhibition. For more details, click here.

Notes

[1] Tina Ferris, 'D. H. Lawrence and "The Machine Incarnate": Robots Among the "Nettles"', in D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity, ed. Indrek Männiste, (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 51-71. Lines quoted are on p. 55.

[2] Ibid. 

Musical bonus: Jack Haley as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), performing 'If I Only Had a Heart' by Harold Arlen (music) and Yip Harburg (lyrics): Click here. 

For a follow-up post to this one, featuring the bad boy of robots, Elektro, click here.

A Brief Note on The Scapegoat (1957) by Daphne du Maurier

Virago (2004)

I'm sorry to say, but Daphne du Maurier's eleventh novel, The Scapegoat (1957), isn't one I'll be adding to my list of favourite books (not even my list of favourite books by her).

For whilst Lisa Appignanesi writes in her Introduction to the work that it has "terse economy of style [and] great literary sophistication" [v], I'm afraid I found it rather tedious at times and - despite the great promise of its premise to do with the performance of identity and the struggle to consciously maintain a lie - philosophically disappointing.

Just to be clear: I loved the first couple of chapters: I loved the final three chapters. It was the twenty-odd chapters in between that I had problems with ...

And one of the main problems was the feeble and depressing protagonist-narrator; a character in stark contrast to his fascinating French double.* One wishes the novel had been more about the latter and less about the former's attempt to live (and redeem) Jean's de Gué's life.

In addition, the other characters in the book - particularly the family members - are also extremely unsympathetic. The English imposter might learn to love them, but I'm afraid Monsieur le Comte is right:

(i) His mother, an obese morphine addict, is the most egotistical, the most rapacious, and the most monstrous of old women ...

(ii) His younger brother, Paul, is a painfully inferior and provincial oaf with a "thoroughly disagreeable personality" [355]...

(iii) His sister-in-law (and lover), Renée, might have an enchanting body, but possesses "a mind like an empty box" [355] ...

(iv) His sister, Blanche, is "so twisted with repressed sex and frustrated passion" [355] that she has become fanatically pious as well as resentful ...

(v) And, finally, his daughter, Marie-Noel, is an affected and manipulative little brat who puts on an act of sweetness and innocence, whilst really just wanting to be the centre of attention.         

Of course, there's Béla, who seems a good sort (cooks like an angel; fucks like a beast) and she performs an interesting role in the novel. As understanding and compassionate as she is, however, I suspect that even she was glad to see the back of a self-harming substitute with suicidal fantasies, and keenly awaited the return of the man who had been her lover for three years.

He may lack tendresse, but at least Jean de Gué knows who he is, what he wants, and how to whistle for his dog.    

Notes

*I'm assuming that there are two actual characters - English John and Jean de Gué - and not two distinct personalities belonging to the same schizophrenic subject, although, in many ways, this would be more believable and more interesting and I rather wish du Maurier had openly explored what is now referrred to as dissociative identity disorder. She might even have given us a dramatic Fight Club moment when it's revealed that the Narrator is Tyler Durden and that it takes a Marla Singer - or, in this case, a Béla - to enable John to know the true from the false and realise that he's Dr Jekyll and Mr Jackass, i.e., somebody with deep seated problems for which he should seek professional help. See Fight Club (1999), dir. David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter, based on the 1996 novel of the same title by Chuck Palahniuk.   

Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, with an Introduction by Lisa Appignanesi, (Virago Press, 2004). The page numbers given in the post refer to this edition. 

For another post on The Scapegoat, click here. 

Bonus: to watch the trailer for the 1959 film adaptation dir. Robert Hamer, starring Alec Guiness, click here.