The Wonders

PADDY O’REILLY

THE WONDERS

SOUTH MELBOURNE: AFFIRM PRESS, 2014

Behind our popular stories of transhumanism, there exists a murky shadow of humankind’s elevation above non-human animals. To be human, in this model, is to be rational, self-aware, with a typical and increasingly narrow vision of humanity that excludes our experiences of sensation, instinct, affect and emotion. In narratives of transhuman success, becoming-animal is rarely if ever presented as a positive evolutionary step, and emotion, instinct and even sexuality are stripped from us in the pursuit of a form of ‘awareness’ that equates to rationalist knowledge acquisition. Becoming ‘more human’, defined as more intelligent, rational and self-aware, is a positive step, one that technological enhancement can hypothetically facilitate in a way that transgenics cannot.

We are stubbornly distrustful of the animal instincts that, for better or worse, lurk beneath our rational, careful, controlled human existence, to say nothing of our fear of animalised bodies. We need, in Rilke’s terms, to ‘know our withering’ and rationally comprehend the realities of our existence in order to be fully human, and any retreat into animalism is seen as a step away from this necessary self-awareness. Is it any wonder that Heinrich von Kleist concludes his meditation on marionettes and perfect grace with an anecdote about fencing with a captive bear? Is it any wonder that Rilke places us between the animal and the puppet, that which is governed by internal sensuous instinct and that which is mindlessly controlled by a greater prime mover? Instinct takes a back seat to intellect, and emotional and affective responses such as intimacy, community and empathy are endangered in the pursuit of the transhuman ideal.

On the surface, Paddy O’Reilly’s latest novel, The Wonders, is about neither animals nor marionettes, though the main characters are clear examples of human-plus. Mechanical-hearted Leon, angel-winged Christos and wool-covered Kathryn are only inhuman insofar as they possess highly unusual physical enhancements and, through the course of the novel, are elevated to stratospheric and dehumanising levels of celebrity. Kathryn, a stereotypically feisty Irishwoman, has grown a pelt of dark wool as a side effect of an experimental treatment for Huntington’s disease; Christos, a performance artist, designed a pair of removable wings that are bonded to the muscles and nerves in his shoulders; Leon, after a failed heart transplant, has a mechanical heart implanted in an open cage in his chest. The trio are recruited by aging circus enterpreneur Rhona Burke to form a kind of travelling circus troupe, with their ‘freakish’ bodies as the main drawcard. Rhona is keen to distance herself from the inhumane ‘human zoos’ and freakshows of the early twentieth century, assuring Leon at their first meeting that he and the others would be objects of veneration, not pity:

[Rhona told him] ‘Not a sideshow exhibit. Not a freak the way you’re thinking. … You’re going to be whoever you want. It’s not just people staring at you. You’re going to entrance the people who come to see you. More than a weird body, more than a trick, you’re going to give them a story, a life, a legend.’ (13)

What Leon fails to realise, and what Rhona either overlooks or conveniently leaves out, is that by becoming a legend the three Wonders are stuck as objects for other people’s consumption. This is less ‘whoever you want’ and more ‘whoever we, and they, can make you become’. For the Wonders themselves, life is far from wondrous, and they are objectified and dehumanised both in their public performances and in the hermetic Overington compound in which they live.

Despite the intense public scrutiny that attends their public appearances, the Wonders are kept apart from their families and communities and robbed of any chance to make meaningful connections beyond Overington’s four walls, where they are housed alongside Rhona’s small collection of retired circus animals with only one another and their staff for company. Like the elephants Maisie and Maximus or the old chimpanzee Lola, they are recovering from trauma, but living such a hermetic life that contact with the outside world becomes increasingly traumatic and dangerous. Overington is designed as a sanctuary for humans and animals alike, as Rhona explains when the trio first arrive: her original group of retired animals were subjected to violence until she increased security, realising that ‘the animals would stay in, but I had to keep the humans out’ (27). Keeping the humans out, by way of maintaining distance and secrecy between her wondrous troupe and the rest of the world, is well-intentioned paternalism designed to keep them all safe, but it also serves to prevent them from the kinds of human interactions that would help them stay sane and healthy.

The Wonders are never marketed as freaks, but the best spin in the world can’t change people’s reactions to bodies that challenge our conventional ideas of the human.  Rhona explains to Leon that, for her idea to work, ‘I needed people whose difference or mutation or disability, or whatever it was, made them more than human’  instead of the objects of pity and disgust of an old-fashioned freakshow (49). In fact, the success of Rhona’s show is rooted entirely in this freakishness, in the paradoxical fact that, to the uncritical public eye, becoming more than human also means becoming inhuman. Awe and fear are no better than pity and disgust, since both reactions rely on a denial of the similarity and intimacy between people. The fans reading the celebrity mags, the religious fundamentalists, the disability rights activists, all the fans and detractors alike treat the Wonders as inexplicable and other, and their carefully rehearsed appearances thwart any possible sense of familiarity by emphasising difference:

The wide-angle spotlight snapped on and burned a beam from heaven onto Christos’ body. … [E]ach time he raised his wings to the dramatic notes of O Fortuna, the power of the image and the music combined to arouse extraordinary emotions. They had seen women begin to cry, men half stand before sinking into their seats with their mouths drooping open. (91)

If anything, the Wonders are closer to a menagerie, a kind of status symbol both for Rhona Burke’s Penny Queen circus company and for the audience members who can attend their private shows. These rare specimens are exalted through a spectacular stageshow designed to enhance their superhuman qualities, which they are all required to keep hidden when not onstage or within the compound. Their bodies-as-performance are kept firmly within the realm of the uncanny, the revelation of something that is usually kept hidden or is forbidden to be shown.

As a result of the troubling dehumanisation involved in their stageshow and the emotional detachment of Leon, through whom the narrative is focalised, the reader (like the Wonders’ audiences) is incapable of accessing the Wonders as genuine, complex and empathetic figures.  Leon’s heart failure is not just physical; the novel makes it clear that his emotional health and resilience, his ability to make empathetic connections with others and process his own emotional reactions, is severely limited. The focalisation thus also limits the possibility of deep emotional and empathetic engagement on the reader’s part.

Even Leon’s relationship with Minh, the doctor hired to act as a live-in private doctor at Overington, seems sterile and unaffectionate. His proposal to Minh and their wedding ceremony, conducted of course within the safe confines of the compound, cover only four pages, despite this being a significant emotional and social step for Leon. There is little sense of spectacle, as though the spectacle of the Wonders has robbed all other events of life and colour, and like the rest of their lives the wedding itself is interrupted by the presence of protesters outside the walls:

The latest message, painted in blue on the timber struts of the first gate, said:

You are cannibals, feeding off our disability. Without us, your shadow freaks, you would only be half the humans you are. (184)

But Leon doesn’t dwell on the presence of the protesters—we move immediately past this scene into a new chapter that brushes over Leon and Minh’s honeymoon within a single paragraph. The focalisation pulls back and becomes distant from Leon’s emotional and personal experiences, and strips this event, like most wondrous moments in the novel, of any sense of significance for the reader. This is arguably a valuable anodyne to the cult of celebrity in which we, as much as the characters in the novel, participate. But this sense of desaturation is emphasised by the novel’s pace, which doesn’t allow any opportunity for reflection or introspection and lends all of the events a similar timbre. The turning points in the novel—including running over an explosive device while travelling to a performance in Dubai, the discovery that one of their team is selling information to the media and Kathryn’s subsequent kidnapping—should be emotionally heightened, but Leon is so limited by anxiety and second-guessing that exciting events are relegated to the background.

The only exception to this detachment is the frequent and almost uncomfortable attention to Leon’s sexual responses. We are constantly reminded (or, perhaps, reassured) that Leon is that absurd and improbable creature, the hot-blooded male, despite his mechanical heart, and he frequently retreats into sexual gratification as a means of escaping from emotional turmoil and self-awareness. That he is a sexual being is neither surprising nor unspeakable, and even the escapist nature of his fantasies is no great stretch of the imagination. It is the uncritical way in which he includes the women in his life in these fantasies, and particularly Kathryn, that is so problematic. We are told about his so-called ‘guerrilla erections’ during his first meeting with Kathryn (22), as though it is essential to establish both that he is capable of such reactions and that Kathryn, despite her woolly pelt, is capable of inciting them. He despises his autonomic physical response but never once questions the objectification that underpins his intentional sexual daydreaming, and the narrative, focalised through him, blurs this distinction. He is a martyr to his erections—the long-suffering invalid being ambushed by unwelcome sexual swellings–but doesn’t question the validity of using Kathryn, a colleague and friend, as the object of fantasy. Of course, you can’t think your way out of a hard-on, and even this level of self-reflection wouldn’t necessarily prevent the odd erection. But Leon continues to use his ability to be turned on by Kathryn’s vulnerable and slightly inhuman body as a kind of sexual proof-of-life throughout the first half of the book. He explicitly chooses to fantasise about her and focus on her exclusively as a sexual object, with little consideration of either her complex personality or the levels of sexual and physical trauma that she has experienced.

There can be little doubt that the public reactions to Kathryn are heavily influenced by her gender and by the sexualisation of her bodily spectacle; from being called a ‘slut’ by protesters to being ‘named as the sexiest woman who had ever lived by a salacious men’s magazine’ (108), her success is explicitly linked to sex. Like Leon and Christos, Kathryn cannot escape the scrutiny of those who consider her a freak; unlike the men, this scrutiny carries the weight of sexual objectification and shame, and she, more than either Leon or Christos, is explicitly treated as less-than-human by the general public and tacitly positioned as such by Leon himself. Kathryn’s ongoing dehumanisation is portrayed as inescapable, almost inevitable, as she tries to recover from her brutal exploitation at the hands of her ex-husband and yet finds herself again the object of sexualised attention:

[Kathryn’s husband] posed her naked on the floor to document every new growth of wool with a cheap camera and a blinding flash. … After Kathryn had gone he sold the remaining photos and his story, complete with invented details of her raging sexual appetite and bizarre antics, which he claimed were brought on by the change. (104-5)

Obscenely, it is immediately following his first glimpse of these porn star images that Leon indulges in his second sexual fantasy about Kathryn, using her ‘for a quick uncomplicated release before sleep’ that night:

[he imagined] how it would feel to have wool under his fingers. To sense the swell of a breast under soft curly fleece. To reach between warm woolly thighs to find moisture. (106)

As readers, we are placed in the awkward position of relating to Kathryn through Leon’s gaze, and although he may be capable of treating these fantasies as ‘uncomplicated’, I like to believe that most readers would be uncomfortable with this leap. Leon’s sexual fantasies are focused on uncovering the human woman beneath the animalistic exterior—proof positive that Kathryn is seen as subhuman, rather than superhuman, due to the animalistic nature of her modified body as well as her gender identity.

This dehumanisation of Kathryn as a sexual object, enacted by the novel’s focal character, is arguably a tactic for forcing the reader to challenge Leon’s lack of empathy as a stand-in for their own. However, his lack of self-reflection and ongoing inability to engage with or express emotional connections to the other characters establishes one key barrier to this kind of reflection: he is unsympathetic, certainly, but his persistently interior gaze means that we as readers have our own empathy constrained by Leon’s limited emotional connections.

Kathryn’s becoming-animal is positioned both as an extension of her volatile feminine nature and as a de-evolution. In contrast to Leon and Christos, whose mechanical becomings serve to address the shortcomings and extend the capabilities of the human body, Lady Lamb’s new body offers few benefits to balance her very visible otherness. As the Wonders’ celebrity status increases and their segregation from the public becomes more pronounced, Kathryn is portrayed as a wild creature, prone to emotional outbursts and ‘irrational’ behaviour. One such episode involves her slipping away from the scrutiny of her security detail in a department store, during which time she purchases an elaborate hat that, in the subsequent argument with Rhona, she claims not to want (103). As a symptom of trauma, these ‘escapes’ are entirely understandable and resolutely human, even if they may exist beyond rational thought. She resists the carceral surveillance of her new life–the constant scrutiny and objectification of which reflect her ex-husband’s abuse–and she frequently grasps for material objects to prove her femininity and humanity. The stolen hat, as well as the designer shoes and couture cloaks and gowns that she wears in her public performances, symbolise Kathryn’s attempts to shift away from the becoming-animal, to reclaim the markers of womanhood as part of the project of re-humanising herself. However, if we take Deleuze and Guattari’s view from A Thousand Plateaus, this kind of imitation does not serve the becoming at all, and so long as Kathryn inhabits the position of the animal, then her desired becoming-human will remain impossible. And through Leon’s eyes, as much as through the eyes of the public, she is a spectacular but mysterious specimen, a dress-up doll and Dolly the sheep rolled into one.

Although the characters’ backgrounds are all touched upon in the novel, the complex ramifications of trauma on the mind and body are rarely directly acknowledged by Leon; as a result, the novel doesn’t offer explicit reflection on these issues and, through the combination of its emotionally stunted focal character and its relentless pace, robs the reader of any opportunity to conduct this reflection for herself. This is particularly obvious in relation to Kathryn, as Leon’s perspective does little to examine the abuse, fear and self-uncertainty that underpins her behaviour.  After the department store incident, the reader is told more about the details of Kathryn’s childhood, her brother the schoolboy drug dealer, and the exploitation she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, but Leon’s dialogue immediately undercuts the seriousness of her situation. His response is typically ingenuous: ‘”But she did recover,” Leon said. “She’s incredible now, so gutsy and beautiful.”‘ (107). Rhona corrects him, lightly, claiming that Kathryn is still ‘dreadfully scarred’ underneath her tough behaviour. But even this is glossed over–rather than having Leon consider this possibility, the next paragraph jumps directly to his ‘uncomplicated release’ that night. What’s more, his understanding that ‘her possibility for pleasure [is] bound tight by the punishing past written into her body’ (107) is framed not as acknowledgement of her trauma but simply a background for why his sexual desire for her is a fantasy and not something that would be tenable in the light of day.

For better or worse, Leon, as a character, reflects our own discomfort with and resistance to relationships that challenge our privilege. While he may sympathise with Kathryn as a fellow ‘freak,’ he remains ignorant to the intersections of her bodily transformation and her gender identity; although he is frequently confronted with differently-abled members of the public, the shelter of his celebrity, as much as his underdeveloped empathy organ, robs him of his capacity to engage with them as anything other than Other. Of course, this is surely the point: that we, despite our best intentions, respond just as inhumanely as Leon when we should be extending our notion of humanity, expanding our idea of what it means to be human and offering compassion rather than building distance. The problem, in this novel as in many others, is that the focal character offers us little in the way of emotional resonance–Leon is so withdrawn from social and emotional engagement that the foundations that might make us empathise with the rest of the supposedly wondrous characters are flimsy. Ultimately, what carries this intriguing and potentially revelatory tale of human augmentation is not Leon at all, but the glimpses of true emotional and psychological depth that we can glean from beyond his myopic worldview. In this regard at least, the machinic shift–the rational, logical, anti-emotional rhetoric that has attended humanist theories of selfhood since the Renaissance and reaches its apotheosis in visions of digital positivism and human-machine symbiosis–is deeply damaging, as the subsumption of the emotions constrains our ability to recognise the complex nature of humanity in ourselves and others.