Leaving the Human Circus: Why Joseph Merrick Should Have Become-Elephant

Poster for The Elephant Man 

(dir. David Lynch, 1980)

 

 

I. 

 

Not everybody who saw David Lynch's mawkish and moralising movie The Elephant Man (1980) will remember that the suggestion is given that Joseph Merrick's severe physical deformities may have been caused by his mother having been frightened by a rampaging elephant during her pregnancy [1].  

 

But most people seem to recall Merrick making the anguished cry when surrounded by a hostile crowd at a train station: I am not an animal! I am a human being! [2]

 

And it's this line - one which causes my compassion for his suffering to curdle into irritation at his philosophical capitulation - that I wish to critically examine here. But readers might care to note in advance that this is not merely a defence of animality; it is an intervention in the politics of human disability also. 

 

II.

 

The phrase I am not an animal is resonant, say the psychologists, because it speaks to our deep fear of losing basic human dignity and being treated like a helpless, unthinking beast. 

 

It's not only an instinctive appeal for compassion, but a demand that we recognise the right of all men to be accorded an exceptional degree of respect and not subject to cruelty, neglect, or marginalisation.  

 

Merrick wants acknowledgement of the fact that he thinks and feels just like other men - including, somewhat ironically, those who mock and torment him - and that he is neither monstrous nor lacking a rational soul and therefore doesn't deserve to be taunted, victimised, or kept in a cage.  

 

 

III. 

 

So, what's wrong with that, you might ask. 

 

Well, for one thing, it's a negative proposition; one that wholly relies on denigrating animality in order to assert human worth - and I don't like that. 

 

By defining human being strictly by what it is not, the phrase reinforces an artificial boundary between humans and the rest of the living world and for it to be meaningful the concept of the animal must be understood not only as something other, but something vastly inferior; something that can be hunted, farmed, exterminated, eaten and experimented on. 

 

In other words, the phrase posits animality as a baseline of low value against which to measure human exceptionalism [3]. 

 

Now, of course, defenders of Merrick will say that when he uses this phrase he is not consciously making a philosophical statement - just asking to be treated with kindness or left alone. However, by making his defensive appeal in this manner he is reinforcing a way of thinking that devalues animals and accords him protected status purely on the grounds that he shares humanity with his tormentors.   

 

There is, I suppose, a kind of irony in this - the Elephant Man is a speciesist [4] ...  

 

 

IV.

 

For me, it would have been a far more radical film if Lynch's Merrick had embraced his animality and affirmed his otherness, rather than pleading for acceptance and the right to assimilate into human society. 

 

Instead of desperately begging to be admitted to humanity, Merrick should have put down his Bible, picked up a sticky bun and said: I am not a man! I am an elephant! And you still have no right to abuse me! 

 

That would have been fantastic: Merrick could have subverted the entire logic of oppression by declaring that all life has inherent value, regardless of whether it matches human standards of beauty, speech, or reason.

 

But, alas, 'twas not to be.

 

For whatever reason, The Elephant Man is a morally conventional (and boring) movie that reinforces a traditional Hollywood-humanist structure largely based on true events rather than the director's surreal imagination [5]. 

 

Thus, the cinematic version of Merrick is all-too-close to the real-life Merrick and we are denied the pleasure of witnessing his becoming-elephant and thereby locating a unique, untamed power in his own body [6].    

 

 

V.   

 

Some readers will, I know, be asking what becoming-elephant means exactly. 

 

Well, it does not involve Merrick charging round on all fours or constantly foraging for food; it involves, rather, creating a zone of intensity that disrupts the binary of man and beast. To become-elephant is to refuse to play the game of a system built on division and exclusion.

 

By forgetting about human rights and operating instead on the plane of the animal, Merrick would escape the trap of assimilation. He would no longer be a deformed and disabled human begging for entry into the world of his more shapely, able-bodied oppressors; he would become a radical, untameable force that exposes Man as a constructed, tyrannical fiction. 

 

 

VI.  

 

In sum: as long as human beings think animals inferior, then human societies will always find a way to label certain marginalised humans as animals in order to justify treating them as inferiors too.

 

When Merrick cries: I am not an animal! I am a human being! he isn't just capitulating to speciesism; he is validating the neurotypical, able-bodied framework of what constitutes an all-too-human human being.

 

Liberation for the disabled doesn't come from desperately trying to fit into an oppressive, idealised human standard. Instead, it comes from shattering the standard itself - embracing the radical alterity of the non-conforming body as a site of resistance.

 

Merrick should not have apologised for his elephantism: he should have packed his trunk and said goodbye to the human circus with a trump, trump, trump!

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I discuss this cinematic fantasy and the myth of maternal impression upon which it rests in a post dated 25 January 2018 - click here - and again in a later post (4 March 2021) with reference to D. H. Lawrence and his Leda poems: click here. 

 

[2] This scene can be watched on YouTube - click here. 

 

[3] There are several posts on Torpedo the Ark in which I oppose the idea of human exceptionalism, i.e., the vile, stupid, and conceited belief that human beings are fundamentally superior to other living creatures and possess a unique moral status or set of capacities (that we are made in God's image). 

 

[4] Speciesism was a term coined in 1970 by psychologist Richard D. Ryder and later popularised by philosopher Peter Singer. As a concept, it describes a human bias or prejudice in favour of their own species against the interests of other species. 

 

[5] Because the tale of Joseph Merrick (played by John Hurt) and his relationship with Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) relies on documented history, Lynch stays closer to a factual narrative than he usually does in his films. This will have pleased the studio bosses who made clear to him that they expected a Victorian melodrama that was accessible to mainstream audiences and made clear the moral divide between compassionate medical professionals and cruel, exploitative sideshow owners. 

      To be fair to Lynch, he was still regarded as a relatively young and inexperienced filmmaker in 1980, having directed his first feature-length movie only three years before - and Eraserhead was a low-budget, independently financed project produced entirely outside the traditional Hollywood studio system. Thus, he needed to prove (perhaps to himself as much as anyone else) that he could handle a large crew, a traditional script, and a commercial (multi-million dollar) budget. 

      Afterwards, with nothing to prove - Lynch was Oscar-nominated for his directorial work on The Elephant Man - he felt free to make movies like Blue Velvet (1986), which were perhaps a little more avant-garde shall we say (although it should be noted that Lynch refused to rank his films and was always immensely proud of The Elephant Man).  

 

[6] In Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy, becoming-animal is not about a human literally (or even metaphorically) turning into a beast, nor mimicking an animal. It is, rather, a process of deterritorialisation - i.e., escaping the rigid, violent categories of majoritarian human identity imposed by society and discovering new intensities, etc. 

      See their jointly written text Mille Plateau (1980), trans. into English by Brian Massumi as A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Myth of Maternal Impression

Der det er kvinne er det svane

 

 

I. 

 

Perhaps my favourite sequence of poems by D. H. Lawrence is inspired by the Leda myth and playfully imagines the queer idea of a modern woman giving birth to a baby that is part-human, part-bird:

Won't it be strange, when the nurse brings the new-born infant 

to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed greenish feet

made to smite the waters behind it? [1]

 

That certainly would be strange: one might even think it ludicrous and quite impossible. 

 

The poet insists, however, that, far-off, at the core of space and the quick of time, swims a wild swan upon the waters of chaos. A great white bird who will one day return amongst men with a hiss of wings and a sea-touch tip of a beak in order to frighten featherless women and stamp his black marsh-feet on their white and marshy flesh [2]:

 

And in the dark unscientific I feel the drum-winds of his wings

and the drip of his cold, webbed-feet, mud-black

brush over my face as he goes

to seek the women in the dark, our women, our weird women whom he treads

with dreams and thrusts that make them cry in their sleep. [3]  

 

 

II.

 

Normally one would regard this purely as poetic fantasy. But I strongly suspect that Lawrence intends us to take his vision seriously and that he passionately believes in an occult theory of maternal impression - i.e., the belief that a powerful psycho-physiological force exerted on a pregnant woman may influence the development of the unborn baby.  

 

As a medical theory of inheritance seeking to explain the existence of birth defects and congenital disorders, maternal impression has long been discredited and should not be confused with the empirically validated genetic phenomenon of maternal effect. 

 

To be absolutely clear: the mother of Joseph Merrick was not frightened by an elephant during her pregnancy! Or, if she was, this did not leave a monstrous imprint on the gestating foetus. And just because a mother-to-be is feeling blue, this will not result in her child being marked with depressive tendencies.   

 

The fact that Lawrence believed in this sort of thing is made clear in a letter written to Bertrand Russell, in December 1915, whilst engaged in reading Sir James Frazer whom, he reported, confirmed his already established belief in blood-consciousness as something not only independent of mental consciousness, but superior to it. 

 

Via sexual intercourse, says Lawrence, he can establish a blood contact with a woman: "There is a transmission, I don't know of what, between her blood and mine, in the act of connection." And then he adds the following paragraph which is crucial to our discussion here: 

 

"Similarly in the transmission from the blood of the mother to the embryo in the womb, there goes the whole blood consciousness. And when they say a mental image is sometimes transmitted from the mother to the embryo, this is not the mental image, but the blood-image. All living things, even plants, have a blood-being. If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman, and is transferred to the foetus, probably without intervention either of nerve or brain consciousness." 

 

"And this", concludes Lawrence, "is the origin of totem: and for this reason some tribes no doubt really were kangaroos: they contained the blood-knowledge of the kangaroo" [4].

 

As one commentator notes:

 

"It is difficult of course to take such ideas any more seriously than Lawrence’s solemn pronouncements upon the importance of the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion to the health of human blood-knowledge, or his earnest belief that tuberculosis is caused by love. Yet we must at least pay attention when Lawrence himself indicates that an idea or principle is of vital significance to him." [5]

 

That's a true and fair thing to say. It's also important: for by paying attention to what Lawrence says about maternal impression we find a new way of reading numerous scenes in his work; one wonders, for example, if Ursula might have given birth to a centaur if she hadn't miscarried ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Won't it be strange -?', Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 380.  

[2] I'm paraphrasing here from several of the poems in the Leda sequence found in Pansies, including 'Swan', 'Leda', and 'Give us gods'. See Poems, ibid., pp. 378-80. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Give us gods', Poems, ibid., p. 380. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Bertrand Russell (8 December 1915), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 469-71. I wish there was someway of knowing Russell's reaction when he first read this letter, or how he replied to it (if he ever did). 

[5] Chris Baldick, 'D. H. Lawrence as Noah: Redemptions of the Inhuman and «Non-Human»,' essay in L'inhumain, ed. André Topia, Carle Bonafous-Murat, and Marie-Christine Lemardeley (Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), pp. 47-55. Click here to read online.  

 

For a sequel to this post, on swan maidens, click here.

 

 

On the Myth of Maternal Impression (with Reference to the Case of Joseph Merrick)

Joseph Merrick (aka the Elephant Man) 

Photo from c.1889

I remember being amused by the suggestion made in David Lynch's mawkish and moralizing movie The Elephant Man (1980), that Merrick's unfortunate condition may have been caused by his mother having been frightened by a rampaging elephant during her pregnancy. 

At the time, I thought this was just a cinematic fantasy, or a typical piece of Hollywood hokum. But I eventually discovered that the folklorish idea of maternal impression (or what is sometimes referred to with the German term Versehen) is a genuine - though long-discredited - theory of inheritance from a world before genetic science. It was particularly popular in the 18th century.

Basically, this superstitious concept rests on the belief that a powerful mental stimulus experienced by a woman-with-child could produce an impression on the gestating fetus, thus causing the newborn baby to be marked in some manner. Or as my friend Simon Solomon would say, a psychic disturbance or trauma is realised on the physical plane as some kind of birth defect or congenital disorder (thus demonstrating that mind and imagination shape matter). 

Whilst we now know that this is essentially nonsense - that a woman frightened by a cat is extremely unlikely to give birth to a child with whiskers - there is of course evidence to suggest that physical or psychological illness in the mother can affect the fetus in adverse ways, as can the consumption of alcohol or the smoking of cigarettes, for example.

So, ladies, don't over do it on the vino when pregnant and lay off the fags; but, please, don't worry too much about any perverse longings, being attacked by monsters, or coming into direct contact with animal skins ...