AUDIO 

The Idea of Alienation

Why do aliens pervade so much Science Fiction? We don’t even know if extraterrestrial aliens exist and even if they do if we shall ever meet them. But the idea is a recurring one, ever since War of the Worlds. And, of course, monsters of various sorts have been present in all literature at all times, reflecting our fears of the unknown. What is out there? Each of us is alone, locked in the prison of the self, constantly confronting other people whose intentions we cannot be sure of, who can change in an instant from friend to foe. We fear domination and abuse by someone more powerful because it is a real possibility. But there’s more to this fascination than loneliness and fear. Perhaps we also fear ourselves. What is inside us? We can never be sure.

Sometimes these two fears – of the outer and inner world — merge when we encounter someone markedly different from ourselves, whether the difference be that of race, gender, nationality, or sexual preference. Those who react to the different Other with intense fear and hatred are, psychologists say, reacting to something within, some buried part of the self. Racially prejudiced whites deny their so-called “dark side.” The serial killer hates his victims because they represent his own powerlessness. The homophobic male who is compelled to beat up gay men is fighting his own homosexuality. Making the Other into a scapegoat and taking out one’s frustrations on him or her is a way of trying to destroy a part of the self — if I can obliterate this Other, then I can get rid of my own unwelcome impulses.

The aliens in the stories we read last week are not extraterrestrials. They are the ignored or rejected or monstrous Others. 

“Alien Jane” by Kelley Eskridge

Many thanks to Kelley for joining our discussion and contributing so many insights into SF in general and her story in particular.

Seeing the events of the story through Rita’s eyes, we only gradually learn of Jane’s condition. We know from the beginning that there is something wrong or Jane would not have been hospitalized; then we learn that she is in the hospital because she has deliberately hurt herself pretty badly, peeling the skin off her arms and legs in a desperate attempt to feel pain. We think, perhaps, that she is one of those people who gets pleasure from their own pain. But then we see her inadvertently chew her lip through. She does this not because it is masochistically pleasurable but because she doesn’t realize she is doing it. It is Rita’s friend Terry Louise who nails it: “Frankenjane, feels no pain.” Jane has a congenital condition known as “Hereditary Sensory and Autonomic Neuropathy Type-5.”

Rita also has harmed herself. She tells Jane:

"I met Suze in that place for girls where they sent me...but it was too late and I felt so bad and I tried—
“I thought of Jane’s arms and legs.
“They have to put you in here for that..”

She is deliberately vague here, not wanting to spell out her suicide attempt, but we can reconstruct her history through this brief description. Because of her anger problems—expressed so violently that her parents give her up to the courts, she is first sent to a “place for girls” for spitting at the judge assigned to her case. But she is still hurting emotionally. She tells Jane that she felt “so bad” that she “tried,” but then she pauses. She doesn’t tell us what she tried to do but it makes her think of Jane’s self-mutilation, her wounded “arms and legs.” When she says that “they have to put you in here for that” she is referring to attempted suicide.

The two women seem to be opposites – Jane wants to feel pain; Rita wants to escape it. Jane’s anger is turned inward. Rita turns her anger against anyone conveniently around. But she is confined to the mental ward not for her outward-turning rage, but for turning her anger against herself through the attempted suicide.

Once Rita sees that Jane cannot feel pain – when Jane bites her lip through—her attitude toward Jane starts to change. The turning point comes when they are lying side by side in their room and Rita wonders: "if Jane and I lay in the same room long enough, would we start breathing together?” She is beginning to identify with Jane, and it is shortly after this she tells Jane the sad story of her own emotional pain, mistreatment by the people who were supposed to care for her, her parents, who don’t understand her own difference and try to force her to be someone she is not. Like many young girls, puberty for her was a time of unwelcome change – her freedom to be herself and run in the grass and climb trees was taken away.

“They decided it was time for me to start being a girl like my sisters and my mother, and they took away my overalls and made me put on shoes that hurt my feet. I tried to climb anyway, and my dress got caught around my waist and under my arms so I couldn’t move, and I knew I could never run in those shoes.”

When her father locks her in the closet for her disobedience, she retaliates by burning her doll—a fitting symbol of what he wants her to become-- in his chair.

Jane in turn reveals why she refused to shake Susan’s hand (which Rita may have attributed to homophobia) --  Jane envies Rita her relationship with Susan: “I thought... how lucky you were that someone would touch you like that. And then she held out her hand to me...I couldn’t take it. It would kill me right now to have anyone be that nice to me. I’d rather spend all day with those doctors poking wires in me.”  It doesn’t matter to her whom Rita loves; it is love that matters, and Jane has none until Rita befriends her.

By the end of the story Jane is dead or near death.

But the other casualty is Dr. Rousseau, the once-empathic psychiatrist who sacrifices Jane for the sake of her career.

Early in the story, Dr. Rousseau chastises her intern Tommy Gee for telling Jane that she doesn’t have to be a subject in Dr. Novak’s experiments. We learn then that she had once written a letter critical of Dr. Novak, one which she has retracted. She now wants Jane as one of his subjects and when Tommy Gee protests, she cuts him off with a curt “Thank you, Doctor.” Rita tells us “that didn’t sound like any voice I’d ever heard come out of Rousseau.”

So Jane and Rita aren’t the only aliens here. Rousseau seems to be losing her humanity. By the time she tries to save Jane, it is too late, and even then she does not follow through: “Novak put one arm around her and led her away, saying softly, persuasively, ‘Don’t be upset. I didn’t mean to upset you. Jane will be fine with me, I promise, she’ll be fine, and you can still manage her therapy, keep an eye on her, why don’t we just go have a cup of coffee and talk it over.’” Her desire for success in her career overrides her human concern for the welfare of her patient. This is the last time that Rita sees Rousseau, but it is significant. To Rita, Rousseau was once “an amazon, a mother confessor, a carrier of fearlessness.” But no longer.

The next day Tommy Gee tells Rita that “she’s gone,” and Rita doesn’t know if he’s referring to Jane or Rousseau. But Rita-–disillusioned about the protectiveness of the hospital environment and now aware that pain is part of life-- has become strong enough to chance life in the outside world. It’s as if both Jane and Dr. Rousseau had to be sacrificed so that Rita could live. She is now free to be herself, Rita “who runs in the grass.”

Kelley Eskridge says that in the real world Dr. Novak’s experiments could not proceed so quickly without the apparatus of grants and paperwork, and surely there would be safeguards to protect Jane from the scientists. But we have all heard of times these safeguards haven’t worked.

And we all have in our heads the image of the cold, if not outright evil, scientist, eager to experiment on the helpless for the “advancement of science,” unable to empathize, to feel another’s pain. This figure is a staple of SF, from Dr. Frankenstein onward, and has unfortunate parallels in our world, not only in Nazi Germany but, for one instance, our own Tuskegee experiment.

The sadistic exploitation of the powerless is a hideous part of human history. Rita describes the lab techs who are experimenting on Jane: “they stared at us with the glazed otherplace look of people caught in the middle of some terrible thing like rape or butchery, the kind of act so horrible that while it is happening the doing of it removes you from all human space.” Jane herself comments upon the people in the lab who “hate me because I didn’t make them stop, and now they have to know this thing about themselves. They’ll never let me go.” This thing that they know about themselves is that they are, in effect, monsters: Confronted with someone less powerful, even an ordinary human being can do terrible things, and some would rather destroy their victim than look at themselves.

In this story, there are no aliens from outer space, just people alienated from society and from each other or people who cannot face their own monstrousness. Concepts literally true in SF are metaphors here:

• “Maybe they don’t talk on whatever planet she’s from.”
• “Jane was like the star of one of those old flying saucer movies where the alien takes over your body, so you look like a human but you’re not.”
• “..when I look at them they aren’t human anymore, they aren’t the people that bring me ginger ale and smile at me. They’re the people that turn up the dial...”

.

"The Belonging Kind" by John Shirley and William Gibson

What is metaphor in “Alien Jane” is reality in “The Belonging Kind.”  In his first mention of the woman he follows and eventually mates with, Coretti tells us that “[s]he swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke [.... ] she moved through her natural element, one bar after another.” We don’t realize until later that this is not just good writing but literally true. Bars are literally Antoinette’s “natural element.”

Coretti, in contrast, doesn’t "belong anywhere in the city." His ex-wife told him he “dressed like a Martian,” a metaphoric statement at the same level as Rita and Terry Louise’s gossip about Jane, a signal of difference. The backgrounded ever-changing woman and her companions whom he follows through the city are at home there, it is only near the end of the story that we learn what they are and how they came to be:

“Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.

“A kind of animal that lives only on alcoholic beverages. With peculiar metabolisms they convert the alcohol and the various proteins from mixed drinks and wine and beers into everything they need. And they can change outwardly, like a chameleon or a rockfish, for protection. So they can live among us. And maybe, Coretti thought, they grow in stages. In the early stages seeming like humans, eating the food humans eat, sensing their difference only in a vague disquiet of being an outsider.”

He has just told his own story. He too has grown non-human in stages and we have watched him throughout the story become more and more himself. By the end of the story he has found out who he is and so have we.

Coretti realizes that he is one of those creatures, seeming human but feeling alien. Though he is by profession a linguistics  teacher and knows a lot about human languages and dialects, he cannot seem to say the right thing or strike the right tone,  unlike the creatures who are able ironically to perfectly mimic the denizens of the bars they visit. But by the end of the story this is no longer a problem.  His evolution is complete, and he has finally found a group with whom he belongs.

These bar-hoppers have evolved into “[a] kind of animal with its own cunning, its own special set of urban instincts." The culture of big cities with their vibrant nightlife of clubs and bars has caused a jump in evolution. The metaphor “bar fly” suggests already a non-human creature inhabiting bars.The story makes this literal.It’s an imaginative, and very funny, if slightly creepy, concept.

This Week:

This week, we start reading Childhood’s End, a classic SF novel about contact with aliens who, this time, are not of earth and who represent still another facet of the human psyche.