Abstract
In this article I investigate the representation of insects in Willem Anker’s recently published award-winning play Samsa-masjien (2015) (“Samsa machine”) within the framework of human-animal studies (HAS). Scholars in the field consider the focus of HAS to be “the intertwining” (Woodward and Lemmer 2014:2) or “linking, ‘together in one’” (Marvin and McHugh 2014:2) of human and non-human animals. Samsa-masjien is loosely based on Franz Kafka’s Themetamorphosis and tells the story of Gregor Samsa, a retired school principal in his seventies who, along with his wife Josefine, lives with their daughter Grete and son-in-law Tjaart. Gregor suffers from dementia and part of his condition is that he sees and feels insects crawling on his skin – no one else can see these insects, though. He then starts to believe that he is turning into an insect himself. Josefine starts to share Gregor’s beliefs and also starts to act more and more like an insect. Gregor dies and the play ends with Josefine collapsing on the stage.
In an interview (Anker, Bouwer and Wicomb 2015) Anker describes the play as an investigation of the boundaries of being human. I identify the following boundaries explored in the play: the boundaries between clean and dirty; language, sound and noise; and childhood, adulthood, old age and death. I find that all these boundaries can be linked to the boundary between human and animal.
The set of the play consists of two levels: the basement of the house and a living space at the top. The damp, dark, dirty space of the basement is in contrast with the sterile, hypermodern space of the living area above. Grete and Tjaart do not really go into the basement. Grete, a copywriter, has an obsession with keeping filth and vermin out of her house: as part of her copywriting contract with Pestkill she gets a lifetime supply of insecticides, and she is also currently busy with a pitch for a “No Touch Handwash System” (Anker 2015:22, 65). According to Grete “people do not want to touch anything anymore” (Anker 2015:66–7, my translation). During a conversation between her and prospective clients the following phrase can be heard: “I can’t wait until they sort out that cybersex thing. Bodies are so ... icky” (Anker 2015:74). The disembodiment of the modern human is further portrayed by Grete and Tjaart’s unsuccessfully trying to have sex.
Wolfe (2010:xiv–xv) shows that the “fundamental anthropological dogma associated with humanism [is tied to] the humanity/animality dichotomy: namely, that ‘the human’ is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether”. According to Diamond (2008:74), in order to bridge the divide between human and animal, humans need to become aware of their own embodiment and vulnerability: “The awareness we each have of being a living body, being ‘alive to the world’, carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them.”
As Gregor’s condition worsens, he and Josefine spend more time in the basement. Here they build what Gregor calls his noise machine. It consists of, among other things, an old out-of-tune piano, sound equipment playing voice recordings, and Josefine’s attempts at playing the violin (Anker 2015:22, 45). The machine is the Samsa machine that the title refers to. The title recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s (2005:4) concepts of the abstract machine and machinic assemblages. Gregor’s and Josefine’s metamorphosis into insects can also not be discussed without referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s (2005:232–309) concept of “becoming-animal”. Returning to the premise that embodiment and vulnerability bring the human and non-human animal closer together, Deleuze (2004:23) states the following regarding the process of becoming:
[E]very man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility […] This is not an arrangement of man and beast, nor a resemblance; it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimental identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man. This is the reality of becoming.
It is in the basement, the space associated with dirt and animality, that Gregor and Josefine go through their metamorphosis. Earlier in the play they already return to the body by having passionate sex in the basement, which is described as simultaneously animal-like and vulnerable (Anker 2015:64). This is in contrast to the young people’s frustrating sexual encounter. InSamsa-masjien passion can be found only by becoming animal-like, dirty, fleshly and vulnerable. Gregor’s and Josefine’s final metamorphosis is described as follows in the stage directions:
The parents are in the midst of a cockroaching and noise-machine building. Gregor and Josefine are naked or nearly naked and dirty. They build an insect with their bodies. The insect is agile, supple, playful, curious and completely un-, pre- and posthuman. The bodiliness is intimate, erotic. No dialogue, only the clicking and krr-ing of an insect. They alternate playing insects with the construction of the noise machine. Everything they do and hum, the sounds and rhythms, suggest a factory. It is a factory that makes itself, a machine that builds itself. They become the process. (Anker 2015:71, my translation)
According to Braidotti (2013:1–2) and Wolfe (2003b:ix) it is in the posthuman condition that the distinction between human, animal and machine is questioned and becomes vague. Gregor and Josefine cross the boundary and become animal and machine all at once. They transform into a posthuman creature which falls outside all classificatory structures.
In his well-known essay “The animal that therefore I am” Derrida (2002:400) considers language to be the biggest barrier between humans and animals. According to Palmeri (2006:84) “articulate language along with its abstraction and figurations, fails [in the process of becoming-animal] giving way to uninterpretable sounds.” Gregor and Josefine cross this boundary by communicating only in sounds and building a noise machine from which incoherent bits of conversations and other noises are emanating.
Becoming-animal is a return to the flesh that leads to the intertwining of human and non-human animal. It is a condition that is characterised by movement, change, transformation and new possibilities. In Samsa-masjien this transformation is not without vulnerability and pain. It is ultimately the story of two people who have to face the decaying of body and mind, and death. Following on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory, Braidotti (2006:144) writes: “Death is the ultimate transposition, though it is not final. The sacralisation of life in Christian ethics is challenged by Deleuze’s theory of the becoming-animal/insect/imperceptible: Zoe carries on, relentlessly […].” Braidotti (2006:138) makes a distinction between Zoe and Bios: “Life is half animal: Zoe and half discursive: Bios.” Within traditional, anthropocentric thought Zoe is considered to be inferior toBios and is associated with the “other”: everything that is irrational, embodied and monstrous. According to Braidotti (2006:138) Zoe is, however, central in the nomadic subjectivity associated with becoming-animal: “Nomadic thought loves Zoe and sings its praises by emphasising its active, empowering force against all negative odds.” Gregor and Josefine’s insect-machine-becoming can be seen as a way to accept their own mortality rather than denying it. Death is not the end, though, but another phase in the constant change and movement of the nomadic subject.
Keywords: becoming-animal;Félix Guattari; Gilles Deleuze; human-animal studies (HAS); posthumanism; Samsa-masjien; Willem Anker
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