Erewhon by Samuel Butler

I’ll confess that I read this book for a silly reason. Apparently there’s a grocery store called Erewhon and in the latest season of White Lotus, one of the characters is carrying an Erewhon bag and someone online suggested that perhaps the bag serves a double purpose: to show the expensive tastes of the character but also to connect thematically to Samuel Butler’s (sort of) classic. So, I picked it up to see for myself. I’ll admit, there are some conceptual connections, but ultimately I don’t think the flash-second-frame of product placement is meant to be a key to the text that is White Lotus.

Erewhon is a novel first published, I believe, in 1927 and it follows the traditions of Robinson stories, that is, a person is stranded in a place unlike their home and needs to acclimate to a new way of life. These stories tend to be couched in social commentary with a touch of adventure, and in Butler’s case it definitely waxes philosophical. The main character is working abroad and is led to discover new territory because of some superstitions that forbid journeys out from the community spark his interest. After a disorienting journey, he ends up in Erewhon. The plot is pretty bare-bones, although he somehow learns a language and falls in love before running away again, and most of the chapters are philosophical discussions of how the Erewhonians live. I suppose it’s satirical but its intention is not necessarily always clear.

Some of the philosophical underpinnings of Erewhon that stand out are as follows:

• Technology is illegal; the main character is prosecuted for wearing a watch 

• Illness is illegal; your bad luck at the hands of the creator is a testament to not being deserving of good treatment

• Children must sign legal documents that they are responsible for their own miseries and whatnot because…

• The afterlife is, essentially, a perfect idyllic life and when you are dead you’re also unborn; in order to be born you have to leave the perfect paradise by killing yourself and committing to whatever misery life brings on

In the latter part of the book, there are lengthy chapters about the war over technology. Essentially, one philosopher (described as a prophet) describes the idea of machines rapidly evolving beyond their creators, so much so that they are no different from living beings and will eventually surpass all human capabilities. There’s a kind of reverence towards machines and then that reference is further extended into discussing animals. An opposing philosopher tries to argue that vegetables also deserve the same respect as animals and not to be interfered with. There’s a clear Darwinian influence there that challenges the distinctions between our hierarchies.

Returning to some of the main principles of Erewhon, the idea of misfortune being criminal is explained as follows: “You may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate” (110). The main character is perhaps guilty of such crime but there’s a paradox at the core of it: “the more you had been found guiltless of the crime imputed to you, the more you would have been found guilty of one hardly less heinous—I mean the crime of having been maligned unjustly” (110).

The discussion around machines is probably the most compelling, developed, and contemporaneously relevant part of the book. The philosopher discusses the rapid acceleration of machines. Again, this is 1927, but it’s so obviously applicable in the context of Artificial Intelligence. The philosopher discusses his fear of the “extraordinary rapidity” with which machines are developing. With a clear echo of evolutionary discourse, the philosopher writes “no class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward.” It then progresses in terms of a slippery slope argument where we might have to consider destroying current machines, despite being harmless, because of the dangers they might bring on later.

The initial stage of machines is that they “receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one traveling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. Had there been no driver, the callee would have been deaf to the caller” (229). At this stage, machines rely on human operators, but Butler notes the concern that “there was a time when it must have seemed highly improbable that machines should learn to make their wants known by sound [...] [but] may we not conceive, then, that a day will come when those ears will no longer be needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction?---when its language shall have been developed from the cry of animals to a speech as intricate as our own?” (229). Alan Turing eat your heart out.

The slippery slope argument continues to the result that machines surpass and essentially enslave mankind. Machines are superior to man in every way:

“The machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary; it is clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when the man is stupid and dull; it needs no slumber, when man must sleep or drop; ever at its post, ever ready for work, its alacrity never flags, its patience never gives in; its might is stronger than combined hundreds, and swifter than the flight of birds; it can burrow beneath the earth, and walk upon the largest rivers and sink not.” (232)

Meanwhile, man is described as “such a hive and swarm of parasites that it is doubtful whether his body is not more theirs than his, and whether he is anything but another kind of ant-heap after all” (232). That’s a pretty incredible observation in its own right: even back in 1927 we’re breaching the walls of the post-human. The question of how individual or “special” humankind is within nature and, heck, within technology is a thought-provoking exploration. By extension, though, and since machines are superior to mankind, Butler asks, “May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?” (232).

If there’s something the book does particularly well, it’s challenging the primacy of mankind. Butler continues on to note that “It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city. When we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think of corpuscles of blood traveling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town? No mention shall be made of sewers, nor of the hidden nerves which serve to communicate sensations from one part of the town’s body to another; nor of the yawning jaws of the railway stations, whereby the circulation is carried directly into the heart (232). The passage goes on, but I think it’s evocative enough on its own and my commentary would add very little to your own experience.

Butler echoes the survival of the fittest discourse and how lower animals progress because of struggle: “the weaker die, the stronger breed and transmit their strength” (235). The application of this in machines is pretty compelling: “The machines being of themselves unable to struggle, have got man to do their struggling for them: as long as he fulfills this function duly, all goes well with him—at last he thinks so but the moment he fails to do his best for the advancement of machinery by encouraging the good and destroying the bad, he is left behind in the race of competition; and this means that he will be made uncomfortable in a variety of ways, and perhaps die” (235). It’s a little surreal to think about how we shift from creating and maintaining machines for our own benefit and then becoming reliant on them “So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can rach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all.” We can see pretty easily how we are forced to play into the logics of technology: Google expects certain things from you to to make the searches work, for example. We also rely on charging our devices and guiding our lives around digital storage and streaming: “How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?” (235).

In any case, the book offers a glimpse into a moment in history that was asking the same kinds of questions we have today. The plot is pretty lacking—I was hoping for an experience more like his The Way Of All Flesh, which I read a million years ago and remember unexpectedly loving—but there’s enough here to grapple with, even if it reads a little bit dry by modern standards.

Happy reading!

Symptômes by Catherine Ocelot

    The opening of Catherine Ocelot’s graphic novel Symptômes is fantastic. Ocelot begins by celebrating a new episode of Grey’s Anatomy airing. She then confesses, though, to hypochondriac tendencies and illustrates all kinds of amusingly terrible maladies, to which the doctors, without fail, respond, “ok! We’re going to operate!” The scan reveals a spontaneous decomposition of his organs: we operate; a parasite is turning a person’s skin into tree bark: we operate; my eye fell out and my mom put it in a ziplock bag: we operate. The tone and style of the book is communicated so wonderfully in just a few pages it’s hard to resist its allure.

While the main character is undeniably Ocelot, a number of different vignettes comprise the whole of the novel. There are six women united by being part of, essentially, “Lonely People Anonymous.” Each tells their story and there’s a great deal of tenderness and humour in the approach, culminating with Ocelot getting surgery while the other women watch on and debate whether to smile at the surgeons, eating muffins, and then saying “hey the surgeon is looking, smile now!” and then being presented in a very funny panel with no text.

In fact, Ocelot’s visual storytelling is impeccable. First, her art style is free and easy, casual even—and yet, it looks like it was done, colour and all, with pen, which probably took far more hours than first appears. The art style also ranges from sparse to explosively surreal, but it consistently has a softness to it that elevates the storytelling. In case it’s unclear from the title, Symptômes is in French and French is not my first language, so the visuals were a great addition (or even replacement) for text, and some of the chapters were completely text-free. One short chapter shows two women standing ankle-deep in water; one woman is crying and the other woman is holding onto her. As the woman continues to cry, the water becomes more forceful and the woman hanging onto her is pulled away. The woman continues to cry and the other woman disappears under the water and is pulled away. It feels like a tragic allegory. In another wordless chapter, there are two women sitting by water while beautiful, multi-coloured ducks and birds drift by. One woman seems to be speaking about peacocks and crying and the other woman consoles her and goes through a transformative process, becoming a multicoloured bird herself until two gigantic peacocks appear before them on the horizon. In another nearly wordless chapter, a woman takes care of a house plant for a man who says nobody had ever devoted so much attention to his plant. The two sleep together and he asks her to stay the night; there’s a tenderness between them before she gets up in the middle of the night, puts on her winterwear, and leaves his house, leaving the plant she cared for framed in the window. Ocelot matches the visual style of the chapters to the stories they’re telling and, even without words, she creates such beautiful, tragic stories of loneliness, regret, and isolation.

The text and images can often pair to create the humour of the book, as well. I already mentioned the funny scene at the side of the operating table, but there’s also a scene where Ocelot is at the doctor listing things that are wrong with her. He essentially says that she’s a hypochondriac and needs to stop thinking about her body. The perspective then changes to Ocelot’s point of view. As the doctor says she needs to stop thinking about her body, you see his face and then all kinds of medical charts on the wall documenting the parts of the tongue, the foot, the upper body organs, and so on. Ocelot’s acerbic wit is just perfect comedic timing.

One of the scenes I think might resonate with a lot of people is when Ocelot voices a theory about everyone being connected by threads, reminiscent of Jane Eyre. Ocelot says that there are threads running between everyone and that’s why we have feelings of being watched or that we’re going to run into someone. The chapter follows colourful threads and builds towards a beautiful scene of her laying in a hammock made of the threads connected to others. The message is that when you have connections to many people, you’re able to rest easy in a hammock of their support. Then, you turn the page and see people wrapped in thread, being squeezed as people have trouble connecting. It’s a lovely chapter that could stand alone, but thematically works in this collection.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Between the art style, the clever writing, the loving care towards the characters, the humour, and the touching themes, the graphic novel has a lot to offer—not to mention that I was able to read it in an afternoon. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Happy reading!