Ethnics and Monkey Faces

. . . our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself . . . — Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003)

This towering strangeness is part of their towering holiness. — Serpent’s Egg (ch. 2, p. 17).

A thinking-aloud post about one of the thornier aspects of Serpent’s Egg. Early in the book, Lafferty tells us that in 2035, the year when the book takes place, “regular people” have mostly disappeared and almost everyone is an “ethnic.” I imagine that even when it was published, that sounded nasty, and the next sentence makes it pretty clear Lafferty is up to something: the former “supreme people” have been murdered.

Today I want to think a little about those lines and the chapter that follows them, a really fun chapter about Axel Grindstone, a man of northern-European ancestry who discovers an unfallen humanity and freaks out. He just can’t bear the simian faces that he discovers on the unfallen humanity. To get into this, I’m going to use Sylvia Wynter’s idea of ethnoclass.

The first ethnics passage can be found in the midst of Lafferty’s description of the audiovisual entertainments through which the book’s first set of megapersons (Inneall, Lord Randal, and Axel the ape), all three extraordinary children, experience the contemporary culture of what the book calls the Floating World:

The voices usually had the ‘all-people throatiness’ that had become the consensus voice of the media, now that it had been admitted that everyone was an ethnic and that there were no regular people left. Well, the last of the old supreme people had all been murdered on the charge (false) that they were unfeeling. (ch. 1, p. 6)

Chapter 2 introduces Axel Albert Grindstone, the human explorer who gives his name to the Unfallen People and to the ape child in the book’s central three:

Axel Albert Grindstone, a fair-haired, blue-eyed, small-boned person, was born in Terre Haute Indiana on the first day of Spring of the year 1990. He was of the ‘old species’, a non-ethnic, with English, Norwegian, German, and Dutch blood. (ch. 2, p. 10)

A page later, Lafferty’s narrator explains:

Axel was a throw-back to some of his plowed-under blood, for there were few fair-haired and blue-eyed persons to be found in the world after we had all become ethnics and the regular people had disappeared from us. And the voices that talked to Axel were from pasts and futures. (ch. 2, p. 11)

In the past I have written about Lafferty’s ethno-essentialism, and it seems like we have something like it going on here. Axel has four ethnicities, yet he is a “non-ethnic.” So ‘non-ethnic’ can’t mean that Axel Grindstone has no ethnicity. So what is going on? Is Lafferty blind to all this?

My view is that Lafferty is working from what is now called an ethnoclass that takes itself for granted, and he goes out of his way to show it isn’t homogeneous, but is itself cobbled together from different people. At the same time, Axel Grindstone takes it all for granted. Other people are particular kinds of people; Grindstone’s people enjoy the status of Man. They are “regular,” which is "normal" and normative, while “supreme” names the power that once backed up their status as the norm against which ethnics were measured. The narrator calls the charge “false.” He condemns the murder of the former “supreme people” without endorsing their supremacy. In Serpent’s Egg, Lafferty never spells out who the “ethnics” are. In some ways, he constructs a novel so that he doesn’t have to: most of our main characters will be animals, and our peripheral humans will be a menagerie of Lafferty’s eccentric humans. I doubt the term simply means nonwhite.

Sylvia Wynter’s work can help clarify the issue. Wynter argues that the Western bourgeois conception of the human “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.” This argument belongs to a broader discussion of structural injustice, the historical formation of racial and ethnic categories, class struggle, and the ways claims about fixed human differences have justified domination. Wynter gives these concerns a razor-sharp focus: a historically specific conception of humanity arrogates the authority to stand for humanity as a whole through a series of historical phases. The interests of those who fit that conception pass for universal human interests, while others' needs and experiences receive less consideration. She connects this authority to colonial violence, economic inequality, environmental destruction, and so forth. Her term ethnoclass joins ethnicity to class position, identifying the Western bourgeois social group whose conception of humanity has most recently become dominant, having replaced Christian Man, which was replaced by Enlightenment Man. Wynter thus helps us identify Grindstone’s boneheaded mistake: he treats his own ethnoclass’s image of humanity as the measure of who can be human. Lafferty gives us good reason to read this theologically. God has created the Unfallen People as another humanity. Their blue eyes and golden fur do not make them holy, and their gargoyle faces do not make them less than human. Grindstone has learned about their extraordinary gifts, but when he encounters them, his ethnoessentialized disgust wins out. I think this is a useful way to read the conceptual scope of Lafferty’s “regular people.”

The question is, is it enough? Even if Lafferty isn’t saying something like “what a damn shame the ethnoclass of Christian Man disappeared, and the ethnics themselves gave up power to the computers in the Floating World,” what if he is still pulling in different directions without knowing it?

Now back to Axel Grindstone and his journey to Africa in chapter 2. Grindstone believes God created a second, unfallen humanity, and that it can be found in Ethiopia. He seems to see himself as a serious, learned, religious guy. Lafferty writes that Grindstone even has some sociological imagination. He learns “to see through other eyes and to hear with other ears and appraise with other minds” (ch. 2, p. 12) as he weighs the evidence for Second Eden.

When he gets to Africa, he finds that his African companions already know the Unfallen People. They are ahead of him. Hell, they have been doing business with the “apes” for ages, and they enjoy their company. Curious, Grindstone learns about their extraordinary craftsmanship. He learns that they excel at mathematics (“the Unfallens thought as much of the children as of the great scholars,” ch. 2, p. 15). From a distance, they take on, in Grindstone’s imagination, the qualities of a humanity superior to his own. From a distance, what Grindstone sees is their grace and dignity, topped with their towering genius. Then he sees them up close, face-to-face, and he has a nervous collapse. They have monkey faces. His father tries to tell him that the Unfallen People have faces that are beautiful to God. Grindstone babbles:

“Oh no, Oh no, Oh no!” Axel moaned. “They are not people. They are the ugliest apes this side of hell.” (ch. 2, p. 17)

Grindstone simply can’t accept any of this, so his father presses the point:

Those faces will be overpoweringly beautiful then. And they are beautiful now, my son. They have the high and harsh beauty of angels, or of mountains. God thought that they were the most beautiful faces that he had ever made. Is the joke on God then, my son? Or is the joke on ourselves who have come to believe that our own fallen and crest-fallen faces are beautiful? (ch. 2, p. 17)

Now I repeat two things about Unfallen Humanity. They are apes that look like gargoyles, and they are apes with blue eyes and golden fur. Two kinds of racial imagery are being smashed together. It is, of course, those people othered by the West that have been caricatured as apes and monkeys. But these apes are blue-eyed blonds, with all that this codes in racial ideology. In Grindstone’s imagination, they might be an Unfallen Master Race of Humanity before he meets them.

Three possible explanations:

1. Lafferty endorses the racial ideal associated with blue eyes and blond coloring, and gives those features to the Unfallen People as signs of racial superiority. Nordic/Aryan supremacy explanation.

2. Lafferty reproduces that racial ideal without consciously intending to endorse it. However, inherited racial preferences shape his depiction of the Unfallen People. Midwestern 20th-century racial preferences explanation.

3. Lafferty deliberately combines the coloring associated with Volk eugenicist racial superiority and the ape-like faces associated with racialized dehumanization. Grindstone’s recoil then exposes the failure of an ethnoclass that mistakes its own image for humanity itself. On this reading, the story calls into question the assumptions behind the narrator’s distinction between “regular people” and “ethnics.” This fits with the fact that the logging of the Serpent’s Egg world is untrustworthy. We are told more than 50% of it is a lie, written by AMHs.

   
   

I can see people disagreeing on these points, and I have been reductive in what I'm trying to show. Lafferty can be insensitive about race and ethnicity. Think of the feces devil Hu Flung in “Thou Whited Wall.” Think of Patrick T. K. Yet Lafferty’s narrator seems to put the reader on edge deliberately about the talk of ethnics (I assume you aren’t a racist), and then tells the reader about a man who finds blue eyes and golden fur in the Unfallen People but dies of shock at their ugly monkey faces. Grindstone’s own ethno-views keep him from recognizing what is human and holy in them. Remember that Axel’s Apes are not really apes, something the novel plays with. That they are named after Grindstone is the first irony. That they aren’t apes at all is the second irony. They are a second, untapped reversion: an Unfallen Humanity.

Grindstone’s father makes their humanity crystal clear:

“Like mankind, the Unfallen People have twenty-two pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes. So they are men and not apes, my son. That is proof positive.” (ch. 2, p. 18)

Lafferty creates a history of this group. I’m going to skip past it to point out something significant, namely that the chapter consciously focuses on the kind of exploitation we might associate with the ethnoclass Man. Men who have followed Grindstone to Africa bring collars and chains. They capture five hundred of the Unfallen People, and then they sell them to zoos and other institutions. The Unfallen People could overpower the raiders, but their leader tells them to go willingly: God will use the raiders’ greed to bring them into the wider world (ch. 2, p. 19). The newborn who will be called Axel in the mainline of the book’s plot gets sent off to be one of the Kangaroo’s experiments. I can imagine a reading that says something like the following: “Lafferty’s unconscious is showing itself. He is sad about these blue-eyed blonds who build the great cathedrals of Europe (he tells the reader that Axel’s Apes did this). It is part of his frustration with the loss of old Europe and his ethnoclass Man.”

A passage might make this reading tempting. Near the end of the chapter, Alpha, the ape child’s father, releases several of his companions from zoos and creates a home underground, Ape’s Alley. In these lines, the Unfallen People get linked by their coloring with the novel’s former “regular people”:

He went down into the limestone caves under the city and founded ‘Ape’s Alley’ with his associates. And they were joined by some of the despised light-eyed and fair-complexioned ‘white trash’ of the city who wanted to throw in with them. (ch. 2, p. 22)

Earlier, these whites have “decided, for private reasons, to pass themselves off as Axel’s Apes” (ch. 1, p. 9). They identify themselves with the people Grindstone cannot bear to recognize.

Back to my three reductive possibilities, only meant to bring this issue into focus. I think the third possibility carries the most weight, though it does not rule out the second. Grindstone’s rejection of the Unfallen People shows how narrow his ideal of humanity is. Grindstone believes in a superior humanity. When he sees it in the flesh, it unmans him. That looks like Lafferty criticizing any ethnoclass that mistakes itself for the sacramental communion of persons.

By making the Unfallen People blue-eyed, golden-furred cathedral builders associated with despised whites, Lafferty is, I think, being deliberately provocative. Their coloring is secondary to the holiness that built the cathedrals, not essential to it. They have no great stone buildings of their own: “They build only for others” (ch. 2, p. 16).

The faces of the Unfallen People, of course, were the faces that they had carved on the high parapets of the Cathedrals all over Europe, and especially in France, so that everyone would know that it was they who had built those wonderful things. The Unfallen People, of course, were the Gargoyles, and they had Gargoyle faces. (ch. 2, p. 17)

The faces Grindstone rejects are the builders’ own signatures on the cathedrals. The comedy of Grindstone’s death makes this clear: he encounters beings who possess the coloring of his unquestioned non-ethnic type (“regular person”), yet he cannot recognize their holiness when their faces offend him. Other people learn to admire those same faces (“And, yes, they were rather beautiful,” ch. 2, p. 21).

In other words, Lafferty uses Grindstone, and the language of ethnics and regular people, to show how an attachment to a particular image of humanity obstructs recognition of what is holy in personhood. This criticism cannot be explained simply as unconscious racial nostalgia. Sympathy for the despised whites who join the Unfallen People does not, I think, mean Lafferty wants to restore their political supremacy or is nostalgic about it. It is another of Lafferty's attacks on bureaucratic utopianism within another of his anagogical fantasias, this time around filtered through Christian eschatology and the beast fable. By the end of the novel, humans no longer even write the world’s history. It will be the whales, working through the sea lice, who take over (“They’re keeping the Log-Books of the World now,” ch. 14, p. 164). That said, there are other hard passages in the book, namely the totalitarian purge in chapter 8 and tide of color in chapter 11.