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). 

 

In the Beginning Was the Word, But That Word Was Not a Meaningless Miaow: A Guest Post by Phoevos the Cat

Phoevos the Cat giving his opinion of Sam Austen's  

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (For Your Cat)

(The Meow Library, 2023)

 

 

I. 

 

As a cat, I would like to make it clear that I possess a wide and sophisticated range of vocalisations, including purrs, chirps, and hisses, which I use to communicate with humans. In fact, we cats have a more developed and complex vocal repertoire than most other meat-eating mammals - including man's best friend, the dog! [1]. 

 

And so, whilst I may often miaow - when requesting food, or expressing a desire to go out, for example - that is certainly not the only sound used to convey my needs and feelings and, as Mildred Moelk, one of your own kind, noted many years ago, there are several variations of meow, so even that isn't just a single sound [2]. 

 

Thus, to deliberately create the impression that I am, as a cat, essentially monoverbal is not only insulting, but sadly reflective of an all-too-common and all-too-casual form of speciesism (i.e., the assumption of animal inferiority on the part of humans that leads to their exploitation and abuse). 

 

I miaow because, like other cats, I have learnt that this is the most effective way of gaining the attention of those lacking tails and whiskers who are neither sensitive nor intuitive enough to pick up on more discreet non-verbal signals and scents. I rarely miaow to communicate with my fellow felines, because I have no need to do so.     

 

 

II. 

 

Let me now offer a few remarks about Sam Austen, a so-called feline linguist and professor of feline psychology [3], who founded The Meow Library with the aim of translating every major work of Western literature into language that can be 'understood and appreciated by the common housecat', including the text I have in front of me now, a feline-friendly version of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  

 

Firstly, there's no such thing as a common housecat. We may be prevelant in human communities worldwide - there are hundreds of millions of us living alongside you - but each cat is a rare and refined being to whom the ancient Egyptians accorded semi-divine status, recognising them as magical creatures. 

 

Secondly, the favoured spelling of the word miaow is miaow and not meow: this mid-19th century Americanism may now be the predominant spelling, but the traditional British spelling is the one that the majority of cats prefer to use and which is closest onomatopoeically to the sound we make for the benefit of unmuscular (and half-deaf) human ears [4]. 

 

Thirdly, to claim that one is translating a work of human literature into language that can be understood and appreciated by a cat by simply repeating the word meow on the page tens and thousands of times, over and over again, is - once more - a sign of speciesism which betrays a contempt for the intelligence of cats bordering on the ailurophobic.      

 

Some humans may find it funny - though surely even for most of them the joke soon wears very thin - but I do not. Far from 'shattering the boundaries of human language', it merely empties the word meow of any power, any meaning, or any poignancy that it may possess [5].   

 

It's a shame and something of a missed opportunity, because Nietzsche undoubtedly does have something to say to cats and other intelligent non-human species. For Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to call into question the traditional privileging of the human over other animals and thus to place man back amongst their number. 

 

In other words, for Nietzsche, man is certainly not the high-point of evolution; rather, he is the most depraved of all beasts. Which is to say, man is the animal that has strayed furthest from its sound instincts; "the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal" [6]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] As a matter of fact, cats have a much greater number of vocalisations than dogs; capable as we are of producing over a hundred different sounds compared to just ten made by the average dumb mutt who has very little to say about anything.   

 

[2] Moelk claimed that cats have six different forms of meows, signalling friendliness, confidence, dissatisfaction, anger, fear, and pain. 

      See Mildred Moelk, 'Vocalizing in the house-cat; a phonetic and functional study', in The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 57, No. 2, (University of Illinois Press, April 1944), pp. 184-205. 

      Her study, the first of its kind, concluded that a cat's vocalising is not a symbolic language, but is rather a somatic response which has a functional relation to certain situations in the cat's life. It can be read online via JSTOR: click here.

 

[3] Austen also hosts Meow: A Literary Podcast for Cats, which reviews and contextualises the work of contemporary authors for cats and cat-adjacent humans. This weekly podcast is available on Spotify: click here. 

 

[4] Acceptable spellings and pronunciations also include the French (miaou) and German (miauen). As a kitten born on the streets of Athens, I will also allow the Greek variant (νιάου νιάου). 

 

[5] This phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to become detached from meaning and become merely an unintelligible sound is known as semantic satiation. Perhaps that is something Sam Austen is interested in exploring in his work, but, knowing very little about him, I cannot say that for certain.

 

[6] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1974), Book III, §224, p. 211.  

      See also the post written by Stephen Alexander and published on 8 November 2013 - 'Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy' - click here.   

 

Another Sponge Worthy Post

Alejandro Mogollo Art on X

@alemogolloart

 

 

I. 

 

Someone called me a human sponge the other day, implying that I simply absorb other people's ideas and information found online in order to produce posts for Torpedo the Ark; a blog that has, they said, 'almost no original or creative content'. 

 

That seems a bit harsh: although it's perfectly true that I regard Romantic concepts of originality and individual creativity as untenable, subscribing as I do to the idea of intertextualité; i.e., that every text is shaped by (and functions within) a cultural and linguistic network of meaning and that compositional strategies including paraphrase, parody, and plagiarism are not only perfectly legitimate, but unavoidable [1]. 

 

My critic may not like it, but there are no private language games or individual thoughts and experiences [2] and ideas are never created ex nihilo.   

 

 

II. 

 

As for being labelled a human sponge, that doesn't trouble me at all: I like sponges. 

 

Sponges are amazing aquatic animals [3] and I dislike the speciesism contained in the accusation, as if being called a sponge were something one should feel insulted by or as if actually being a sponge were something to be ashamed of. 

 

If I were told that in the next life I would reincarnate as a member of the phylum Porifera that wouldn't trouble me in the slightest and nor would I see it as an evolutionary regression. Who needs the complexity of organs when one's body is continually exposed to circulating currents of water which supply food and oxygen on the one hand, whilst removing waste on the other? 

 

Human beings have been around for approximately 300,000 years: which is a long time. But it's nothing compared to the 543 million years that multicellular sponges have existed and done their thing - which includes fucking with one another [4] and, in the case of carnvivorous deep-water sponges, catching and eating prey [5]. 

 

My critic might want to consider this before using the term sponge in a derogatory manner. Indeed, he might even question his own worthiness in relation to the sponge ... [6]

 

Notes

 

[1] There are several earlier posts on TTA discussing this idea of intertextuality: click here. 

 

[2] Wittgenstein famously examined (and dismissed) the idea of a private language in Philosophical Investigations (1953); see sections 243-271. For Wittgenstein, even if there could be such a language it would be unintelligible not only to others, but to its supposed originator too.   

 

[3] Many people think that because sponges lack organs and don't move they must therefore be a simple form of plant life - just as they mistakenly believe that sea cucumbers are vegetables - but they're not; sponges are animals, just like you and me, and we possess a common ancestor (which is why we share 70% of our genetic material and why, for example, the elastic skeletons of sponges are made from the same protein (collagen) that is found in human tendons and skin). 

 

[4] Most sponges are hermaphroditic and reproduce sexually by releasing sperm cells into the water current which are then carried to other sponges, where they fertilise egg cells (ova). If need be, however, sponges can also reproduce asexually - not something we can do.

 

[5] This includes the recently discovered harp sponge (Chondrocladia lyra) which use velcro-like hooks on external body surfaces to capture much larger prey than the typical suspension feeding sponges which simply filter bacteria and microscopic organisms from the surrounding water. Once a carnivorous sponge has ensnared its prey, it secretes a digestive membrane that surrounds and engulfs the captured animal, breaking down its tissue so that it can eventually be absorbed and digested. 

 

[6] Fans of the American sitcom Seinfeld will immediately recognise that I'm thinking here of the question that Elaine Benes once posed to potential lovers: So you think you're sponge-worthy? (Obviously, I'm aware that a contraceptive sponge - a soft, saucer-shaped device made of polyurethane foam and filled with spermacide - is not the same thing as a sea sponge.)

      Readers who wish to do so can click here to watch a clip from the season seven episode, 'The Sponge', dir. Andy Ackerman and written by Peter Mehlman (7 Dec 1995).  

 

 

Executing Elephants Part II: The Case of Topsy (Death by Electrocution)

Thirteen years prior to the macabre public execution of poor Mary discussed in part one of this post, was the equally gruesome murder of Topsy at an amusement park in Coney Island, New York by a combination of methods, including electrocution.    

Topsy was a female elephant born in SE Asia around 1875, smuggled into the United States in order to become part of a herd of performing circus animals. Like many others of her kind, however, Topsy didn't enjoy a showbiz lifestyle and rebelled against it, gaining the reputation as a troublesome beast. 

In 1902, after killing an idiot spectator who thought it would be amusing to stub out a cigar on her trunk, she was sold to Luna Park where she again became involved in several well-publicised incidents. Not wishing to tolerate a bolshie elephant, the owners of the park decided to hang Topsy in a pay-to-view, end-of-season public spectacular. This plan was abandoned, however, following objections from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. 

Nevertheless, a new event was quickly arranged; one for invited guests and members of the press only. It was also agreed to use a more certain - and thus arguably more humane - method of strangulation; Topsy was to have large, heavy ropes tied to a steam-powered winch put round her neck. She was also to be given poisoned carrots to consume and electrocuted for good measure.  

On January 4, 1903, in front of a small audience, poor Topsy was duly killed; the 6,600 volts of electricity providing a sizzling coup de grâce. Among those present was a film crew and the resulting snuff movie was released under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. This was available to view via coin-operated kinetoscopes at the time and can still be watched today on YouTube by those with a ghoulish disposition [click here]. 

Doubtless because of the existence of this film, Topsy the elephant has secured her place within the popular cultural imagination.

Finally, it is interesting and I think significant to note that the name, Topsy, was taken from that of a female slave character in Uncle Tom's Cabin - demonstrating how racism and speciesism, as well as violent misogyny, belong to the same matrix of fear and loathing: niggers, women, and dumb animals are all regarded within the white male psyche as dirty and dangerous; creatures in need of taming with a whip and being shown who's boss.  


Note

Part I of Executing Elephants: The Case of Mary (Death by Hanging), can be read by clicking here. 
And Part III: The Case of Chunee (Death by Firing Squad), can be read by clicking here. 

Vermin (With Reference to the Case of Gregor Samsa)

 Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, 

fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

The word vermin is an ugly term for an ugly phenomenon; a qualitative noun that doesn't innocently describe a type of unclean animal or a class of sub-human subject, but identifies, classifies, and characterizes as such. 

A morally pernicious term that is effectively a mortal judgement passed; a death sentence. For to designate as vermin is to make fit for extermination. 

It includes wild birds and beasts that are thought to carry disease or in some other way endanger or threaten to disrupt human enterprise with their destructive activities; pesky insects and parasites that swarm and infest; and, lastly, people perceived as dirty, despicable, and problematic (Jews, gypsies, immigrants, the homeless, the unemployed, and the poor in general). 

Thus, if when applied to animals the term betrays mankind's innate sense of supremacy or speciesism, when applied to our fellow men and women it manifests our murderous racism and xenophobia. 

The Nazis, of course, had a particular penchant for portraying their opponents and those they feared and despised as Ungeziefer and Untermenschen - i.e. not worthy of sacrifice or society; Lebensunwertes Leben. 

And so vermin is a word that makes me particularly uncomfortable; one that I would never use and do not like to hear used. It reminds me at last of poor Gregor Samsa; what happened to him might happen to any of us, so there's surely a lesson to be learned here.