Posthumanism in Towards Another Summer

72

human beings and animals.²⁸ To put it more explicitly then, one can become a posthuman when the human genes are intermingled with animal genes, which is not preferred nowadays because of the ethical side of issue. Yet, there is another way to make human beings posthuman, and that is through metaphorization, as Braidotti claims. If, for instance, a person has a very brave nature, he/she is resembled to a lion²⁹, or if he/she is very tall, he/she is resembled to a giraffe³⁰. If he/she immigrates from a place to another, the migratory nature of a bird is attributed to him/her. That is also the way how human-animal relation is founded, and how human beings become posthuman in the sense that either they change form, their physical appearance, or their mind changes and they feel like an animal, as in Grace Cleave in Towards Another Summer, by Janet Frame.

73

that is, her consciousness is affected not only from her desires to turn back to the sense of unity lost with colonialism, to change places, and to move from one place to another to free herself from her already shattered or fragmented mind, but also from the external determiners like her moving from one place to another due to her father’s occupation and the British and the New Zealander who she alienates herself from. These examples prove Pepperell as Grace’s consciousness is the product of the intermingled and interacting internal and external forces around her.

There are various reasons why Grace transforms herself into a bird, and these are related to her alienation from the external world that otherizes her. The first reason is to cover the feeling of the lack of holistic identity and to be alive or not to be dead and unrecognised among the people in the world outside; so as to achieve these goals, she becomes a posthuman when she willingly leaves her human identity and adopts a bird one:

Birds too, Grace thought, remembering that she had been changed; Philomela;

Procne; it was an old tradition; we must tend the myths, she thought; only in that way shall we survive. Survive, survive; the word wearied her; here, in the northern hemisphere, survival was as much a part of consciousness as food and sex and shelter, and yet it was no longer the prerogative of the north; even in the warm south it occupied their minds; would the seasons change, then; would people change – to beasts, or to birds, as she had done? (Frame, 2009: 97)

Pointing out the difficulties of surviving in the North, in Britain, Grace draws an analogy between herself and Philomela and Procne, the sisters turning into birds so as to escape from the exasperation of their foe, Tereus, a representative of the male sex using a symbol of patriarchy and potency, his male organ, phallus, to sexually satisfy himself.

Tereus, the representative of the external world who is influential in Philomel and

74

Procne in their search for a way to escape from their human identity, is the symbol and representation of the Other. Braidotti claims in The Posthuman (2013) that the other is

“the notion of ‘difference’ as pejoration” (2013: 15):

In so far as difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as ‘others’. These are the sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies. We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others. Because their history in Europe and elsewhere has been one of lethal exclusions and fatal disqualifications, these ‘others’ raise issues of power and exclusion. (15)

Philomel and Procne’s transformations into a different species and their leaving their human forms reveal not only their inferior nature in the face of a superior patriarchal male figure, but also their superior nature that rejects the same patriarchy by deciding to transform themselves into another species.³¹ Therefore, it can be clearly said that

31 Just like Philomel and Procne, the other female character that challenges the patriarchy and the might of patriarchy is exemplified as Daphne, who prays her father, the river-god Peneus, to transform her into a laurel tree to escape from Apollo, as stated in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses (1958); the scene is depicted as follows:

And as they ran young Phoebus saved his breath For greater speed to close the race, to circle The spent girl in an open field, to harry The chase as greyhound races hare,

His teeth, his black jaws glancing at her heels.

The god by grace of hope, the girl, despair, Still kept their increasing pace until his lips

75

Philomel and Procne are the earlier examples of posthuman characters who leave the human form and adopt an animal one. Their transformation is given in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses as follows:

Then with a naked steel he paced the floor

To trap, to strike down both of Pandion’s daughters –

Who flew, as if on wings, ahead of him.

In truth, they were on wings: one took to forest,

The other fluttered to the roof. (1958: 169)

Just like Philomel and Procne, Grace Cleave decides her transformation herself.

However, it should not be forgotten that the common point in all is that their decisions are the outcomes of the external forces as Pepperell argues. The emigration to another

Breathed at her shoulder; and almost spent, The girl saw waves of a familiar river, Her father’s home, and in a trembling voice Called, “Father, if your waters still hold charms To save your daughter, cover with green earth This body I wear too well,” and as she spoke A soaring drowsiness possessed her; growing

In earth she stood, white thighs embraced by climbing Bark, her white arms branches, her fair head swaying In a cloud of leaves; all that was Daphne bowed In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green

Leaf twined within her hair and she was laurel. (1958: 19-20)

76

country, as an external factor that causes the transformation of Grace, is the other reason for the same transformation that makes Grace a posthuman character:

How had she ever become used to living in Great Britain, she wondered. [...] It was a dismal grey wintry land with too many people; it was people who made the squalor; if you must have snow let it be out of sight of the human race; no; for every contamination there is a poem. (Frame, 2009: 103)

Despite her becoming used to living in Britain, she wants to escape from the social external world there as she is not able to express what she thinks and how she feels in this country. Therefore, she prefers isolating and alienating herself from the people causing squalor. That is, moving to other places even from her childhood years is not the only apparent reason she alienates herself from the people around her; instead, she also wants to escape from the people bothering her. While comparing Hegel to Sartre, Gavin Rae argues that Hegel’s alienation has a positive meaning besides the negative one because an alienated person deliberately chooses alienation to have a consciousness about herself (Rae, 2011: 149):

while consciousness may not wish to be estranged from itself, it is only by being estranged from what it truly is that consciousness can come to fully understand itself. (149)

Therefore, the quotation above unravels that the sense of postcolonial alienation is closely related to posthumanism in the sense that the alienated character tries to have a consciousness about herself and to express herself either in Britain in the north or in New Zealand in the south; however, when she recognises that she cannot express herself, she alienates herself from the people of either of these nations, and the way to escape from this alienation or the way for recognition lies in changing a form in which she feels she can express herself.

77

Still another reason why she needs to transform herself into a bird is given as follows:

Why not tell them, why not explain? she said to herself. I don’t wish to inhabit the human world under false pretences. I’m relieved to have discovered my identity after being so confused about it for so many years. Why should people be afraid if I confide in them? Yet people will always be afraid and jealous of those who finally establish their identity; it leads them to consider their own, to seclude it, cosset it, for fear it may be borrowed or interfered with, and when they are in the act of protecting it they suffer the shock of realising that their identity is nothing, it is something they dreamed and never knew; and then begins the painstaking search – what shall they choose – beast? another human being? insect³²? bird?

(Frame, 2009: 105)

The quotation unravelling Grace’s posthuman nature also delineates her isolation from the people around her. She isolates herself as she is not contented with living under false pretences. She does not identify herself as a human being, so acting as if she were a human being would be a false pretence for her. Therefore, she accepts her new identity although it may be undesirable and fearful for some because living with a new identity means losing the certainty about the current one and being in the process of searching for a new one, whether it be a beast, another human being, an insect, or a bird.

About the uncertainty of human identity, Robert Pepperell argues that posthumanism is

32 The transformation of a human being into an insect is also depicted in Frantz Kafka’s

“The Metamorphosis” (1971) as follows: “AS GREGOR SAMSA awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

(Kafka, 1971: 89) In the story, the protagonist’s, Gregor Samsa’s, uselessness in a utilitarian society is depicted by means of the metaphor of an insect.

78

different from humanism in the sense that certainty about what a “human being” is is lost in posthumanism (2003: 184). Instead, for Pepperell, “[q]uestions arise in the posthuman era that would have not troubled us in the humanist era — What is a human?

Is there such a thing?” (184). What is certain and answer to these questions in posthumanism is that people will go on searching for an identity for themselves: “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.”

(Fanon, 1986: 110-111) Grace, as the other of the British people, is aware of the fact that identity is not achieved by the “I” as the subject; instead, identity is given and defined by the other. When people understand that their identities, the form of which is the body they have, are also defined by the Other, they recognise the lack in themselves, which is the potential to know who they are, and the ceaseless search for identity, in the form of a bird, a beast, an insect, or even another human being, commences. This is the reason why leaving an identity behind is the prerequisite for finding another. The narrator depicts Grace’s thoughts on the same issue as follows:

In my country, Grace thought – yes, I’m saying it, in my country – the sky and cloud used to be above, the grass and the dead below, and through this wall and that wall sheep and cattle and the wind from the Southern Alps. But I’m in a different world now, I’m completing the act of finding by losing [...]. (Frame, 2009: 156-157)

Here, the idea of finding a new identity by leaving behind the current one is repeated.

The place where Grace belongs to is no longer New Zealand or Britain or any place in the world. It turns into sky where birds fly, so Grace is alienated from the human world.

What she desires in her alienation is to be heard and recognised:

79

– It rains, a gale rises, the big top collapses, fire breaks out, panic, people trample their neighbours to death as faced with the prospect of dying they make the decision, now, swiftly, who matters most. I matter. I. I. I matter. Philip, Anne, Noel, Sarah, listen to me. I matter. I fly alone, apart from the flock, on long journeys through storm and clear skies to another summer. Hear me! (167)

As shown, before leaving the Thirkettle family in Relham, Grace repeats the same entreaty of being heard and recognised with her new identity, as a migratory bird flying alone, apart from the human world:

I’m nowhere. She felt the world go dark with sudden exclusion and she was beating her wings against the door of the dark but no one opened the door; indeed, no one heard. (179)

Her willing isolation from the human world does not satisfy Grace as she is still in need of being heard and recognised. That is, her alienation does not provide the sense of unification and wholeness within the self³³ because she still cannot disclose her identity as a bird. Kalekin-Fishman defines self-isolation as a type of alienation as follows:

Found among people suffering from depression, such alienation is perceived when a person construes herself as objectively unlike others, and increasingly unlike the self she would like to be. Such a state is mental illness, where a person invalidates and devalues him- or her-self. (2006: 524)

33 Some features of alienation are given as “a lack of unity, a feeling of separateness, distortion, or a discord of some kind” in Pamela Jones’ doctoral dissertation entitled

“Inside the outside: A study of alienation” (Jones, 2005: 6).

80

Namely, her self-isolation from the human form invalidates her human identity, and her alienation in the bird identity also reflects how she is different from the others, the Thirkettle family or the British people. As this difference, or “deviance […] [from]

conformity” to the social Other (524), serves the alienated in that they “do invest effort in realizing the alternative goals that they choose” (525), Grace searches for alternative identities to express herself among the human world. However, this also ends in failure because she cannot make herself heard in her bird form and identity too. Pointing out she does not belong to any places, Grace realizes the darkness as a symbol of absence of belonging from which she is trying to escape but cannot manage. In other words, she is also alienated in her new identity as a bird. Her alienation from the human world, either in her human or bird identity, is a continuous process she cannot free herself from:

the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy – it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image. [...] Identification […] is always the return of an image of identity that bears the mark of splitting in the Other place from which it comes. (Bhabha, 1994: 45)

That is, she will be in perpetual search for an identity that will not be a self-fulfilling process as she rejects the pre-given human identity that does not thoroughly represent her and as she accepts an image of a bird identity and transforms herself into a bird, and also as she may have different identities in the future. Hence, she alienates herself from the cause of the pre-given identity to find her new identity, so she alienates herself from the Other and from the human world, in general. In this sense, her alienation corresponds to the alienation defined by Rahel Jaeggi: alienation, for her, is “a relation of relationlessness,” a condition marked not by the absence of a relation to self and world but by a deficient relation—a lack of proper connection—to the same” (Jaeggi,

81

2014: xii). To be more precise, Grace’s search for a self depicts her relation to self, but this relation is deficient because she is in a constant search for the self. In other words,

alienation is said to consist in a distorted relation to oneself and to one’s world that can be characterized as the failure to adequately appropriate oneself or the world, to make oneself or the world one’s own. Alienation, then, stems from a disruption in one or more of the various processes of appropriation (of oneself or one’s world), the successful carrying out of which is the mark of a healthy, integrated, self-affirming subjectivity. (xii)

In this sense, one can easily recognise the relation between alienation and posthumanism: both focus on the disrupted unity of the body and the mind for Grace.

That is, her consciousness is in a continuing process of her search for what or who she is. To be more precise, alienation Grace experiences is the outcome of her distorted relation to her human identity and body and to the social world in which she lives and leaves. What is meant by the distorted relationship with the human identity and the social world is that she does not have a complete unification with these two concepts.

That is to say that there is disconnection between how she feels herself in her human form or in the social environment she lives in and who/what she is in fact. She is the other of the human form and identity; she is a bird. That is, it is difficult for her to appropriate herself to the human world as she cannot find her true self in this human world to which she feels she does not belong and in which she feels she is not complete-in-herself. For Jaeggi,

[t]he concept of appropriation [...] includes a broadly understood capacity of knowing and dealing with oneself: having access to or command over oneself and the world. This can be explicated as the capacity to make the life one leads, or what one wills and does, one’s own; as the capacity to identify with oneself and

82

with what one does; in other words, as the ability to realize oneself in what one does. (37)

As this is not true for Grace in her human identity, she chooses to transform herself into a bird. Although this transformation does not totally make her contented as she still cannot make herself recognised by the people around her, one cannot totally claim that the transformation is amiss for her. The very ending of the novel underscores her transformation as the appreciation of uncertainty that is related to her posthuman nature as well as her perpetual alienation that also stems from her postcolonial identity: for her, it does not matter whether she sleeps at home with her family in New Zealand, at Thirkettle’s house in Britain, or in the First- or Second-Class carriages of the train that goes to London (Frame, 2009: 212-213):

does it matter, for Distance looks our way; the godwits vanish towards another summer and none knows where he will lie down at night. (213)

As Braidotti claims, her posthumanity is attained through metaphorization. She is just like a godwit that may lie down at any place. The sense of physical transformation into a bird also highlights her (partial and ceaseless)³⁴ psychological transformation, which explains the (partial) change in her consciousness, which makes a human being a posthuman for Pepperell. That is, the change in the body and the mind of the character welcomes a new consciousness for her. It is also through this consciousness she can question the concept of what a human being is through the lens of postcolonialism:

34 The reason why it is partial is that the transformation into a bird is not the end of Grace’s search for an identity for herself. She is in ceaseless search for an identity, and she knows that this is ceaseless because she does not know who/what she will be in the aftermath of her bird identity, as indicated in the last expression of the novel: “none knows where he will lie down at night” (Frame, 2009: 213).