(Non)Human Bodies

Contributors

İnci BİLGİN TEKİN (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor at İstanbul Bilgi University, English Department. Bilgin Tekin has published on adaptation studies, postcolonial and feminist literature, contemporary drama, Shakespeare studies, and posthumanism.

Özden SÖZALAN (Ph.D.) is Professor and Head of English Department at İstanbul Bilgi University. She has published books and articles on contemporary theories of literature and theater. Her recent research interest involves environmental literature.

Özlem KARADAĞ (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor at İstanbul University, Department of English Language and Literature. Her scholarly work focuses on theater studies, ecocriticism, and trauma studies, along with poetry, literary adaptations, and contemporary literary theories.

Cihangir GÜNDOĞDU (Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor at İstanbul Bilgi University, Department of History. Gündoğdu has published books and articles on Late Ottoman History and Modern Turkish Republic. His recent research interest involves history of nonhuman animals.

Canan ŞAVKAY (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor at İstanbul University, Department of English Language and Litetraure. She has published books and articles on contemporary literature. Şavkay’s research interest involves environmental literature and posthumanist theory.

Sinem YAZICIOĞLU (Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor at İstanbul University, Department of American Culture and Literature. Her research interest covers urban studies, trauma studies, geocriticism, postmodernism, and commodification.

Nilay KAYA (Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor at İstanbul Bilgi University, Department of Comparative Literature. Kaya’s research interest includes travelogues, visuality and literature, modern Turkish literature, and Bronte studies.

Onur BÖLE (Ph.D.) is Doctor of English Literature and part-time lecturer at İstanbul Bilgi University, Department of English. Böle’s research interest covers utopia, dystopia, speculative fiction, and posthumanism of the Self.

Özge EJDER (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Department of Philosophy. Her research interest includes theory of art, architecture, aesthetics, and continental philosophy.

Zeynep TALAY TURNER (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor at İstanbul Bilgi University, Department of Comparative Literature. Her research interest involves ←7 | 8→Philosophy and Literature, Ethics, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, and Philosophy of Self.

Introduction

The idea that every entity inhabiting this world has both physical and emotional connection to one another has become even more central after the unexpectedly rising pandemics which blocked our lives globally, challenging all man-made classifications and distinctions including gender, race, ethnicity, class, and religion. The collectively traumatic experience of Covid 19, in various aspects, has emphasized that interaction between human and nonhuman bodies is inevitable and potentially harmful. The fact that Covid which was caused by a virus, transmitted from animal to human body, ended up in a fragmented but mutual presence of human and electronic bodies, is indeed situationally ironic. In other words, while the threat, as usual, was thought to stem from nature, the human body, in lockdown, sought protection in closed and isolated buildings, assisted by high technology.

The rising question is whether this has really been an original experience… In what way is contemporary man’s desire for protection from the potentially destructive effect of nature different than ancient man’s urge to get settled? The well-known proverb “Chaos is the law of nature, order is the dream of man” reflects on the opposing perspective, surrounding the well-known “nature” and “culture” debate, since the earliest settlement. Nonhuman body, even by the term, is defined in relation to the privileged positioning of the human body. Drawing on Foucault, on whose ideology the theoretical knowledge on oppression builds, it should be noted that power relations are man-made and arbitrary. (26-29) This idea paves the way for the contemporary posthumanist understanding which negates the old assumption that the human race is at the center of any worldly interest. The recently rising trend within the posthumanist wave, namely ecocriticism, questions this anthropocentric perspective which locates the human body as the subject while commodifying all its others.

From a sociohistorical perspective, the nonhuman body can be located at the crossroads of the natural and the supernatural, the familiar and the scary, the orderly and the chaotic while such intersection also blurs the Cartesian understanding of mind and body as binary opposites. Man’s obsession with alternative bodies, namely nonhuman, dates back to classical antiquity and finds its earliest representation in myths and fairy tales. Thus Joseph Campbell neglects the association of mind with body in his celebrated work The Power of the Myth ←9 | 10→and accommodates the nonhuman in his broad understanding of consciously governed bodies: “The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a set of purposes. But there is consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness.” (18) In this respect, Campbell offers an inclusive definition of the thinking subject as “the whole living world”. Campbell’s lines echo as the Green Knight carries his head, riding his horse after his fight with Sir Gawain and shouts in full consciousness that they would be meeting again in one year’s span. The archaic representations of human in a nonhuman world, surrounded by semi-gods and nymphs, fairies and monsters are embedded in the very time, called prehistoric ages. Before the foundation of the earliest city state, human body is but a primitive explorer joining them amidst the deep woods, wavy seas under the dark sky. The hidden, unknown aspect of nature, which comes by the night, has therefore been subject to an ever-adaptive context, lending itself to different times and genres. This is the axis involving the nonhuman body, which in turn finds its location not only in Rapunzel, Snow White, Cindrella, Sleeping Beauty, The Miller’s Daughter, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and The Beanstalk, and other fairy tales but also in The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and The Green Knight. The list can be extended to Early-Modern and Modern literature, including Spenser’s Faery Queen, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, O. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, E. Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Caryl Churchill’s Skriker, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and many others. In other words, literary engagement with the supernaturally nonhuman body dates back to myths, fairy tales and classical literature while it extends to Romantic poetry and Gothic fiction as well as speculative fiction and fantastic metafiction.

Human mind’s obsession with the nonhuman body can also be read as a figurative reflection of his own inner struggle between “human” and “nonhuman” aspects of his own body. The fact that “culture” was initially defined as the binary opposite of “nature” is inevitably linked to paradoxical self-estimate of man, in his everlasting desire and motivation to keep his passion and dignity together. His mind, at certain points of decision-making, becomes a battleground of dilemmas and his body a tool for experimental behavior. As Freudian psychoanalytical theory suggests, the “id” or “anima” is no less influential in ego formation than the “superego”(18-20). In other words, chaotic is the instinctual and orderly is the reasonable. Given this context, one can trace the necessity for half-human half-animal representations to man’s “collectively unconscious” (Jung 437-440) search for an alternative body where id can act freely but be justified and still relate to human. From Greek Odyssey’s one-eyed giant Cyclops to Anatolian myth of the snake woman, Shahmaran, or from the Egyptian male human-faced lion, ←10 | 11→Sphinx, to the repetitive figure of mermaid in fairy tales, human and nonhuman bodies were thought together as one unifying body, which in turn challenges their opposing location.