From Peter Høeg’s "The Woman and the Ape"
"As deep down and as far as he could go - as a boy, in the country, on Jersey - Alexander Bowen had been a genuine animal lover. He had grown up taking a delight in being close to a cat or a dog, savoring the smell of a stable and deriving from the presence of cattle a peace of mind that required no explanation. He had made up his mind to become a
( Read more... )
On the other hand, there are some dishonest techniques used here.
First, Bowen's childhood love of animals may seem very natural and free at first glance, but every animal mentioned there is domesticated.
Second, for every kid who loves animals like that, there's another who feels the same way about trains and clockwork. In fiction, children (or foreigners, or noble savages, or the mentally ill, or animals) may arrive with the crude scribblings of a lazy author stamped all over their foreheads. But in real life, although they may have a valuable new perspective, that perspective is not any more The Infallible Voice Of God than any other.
Third, if anything, the biologist who studies a forest as s/he finds it is more of a realist and less a dreamer of deliverance than a farmer who wreaks radical changes on the landscape.
The homunculus is a rotten idea, and warmth and kindness are no mere illusions. But Høeg’s painting machines, cities, science, and finance as inherently and by definition worse than domesticated animals, farms, and medicine, and we're supposed to believe this judgment on what evidence? Because he says so?
At best, the good reasons are in another passage, and this passage uses dishonest rhetoric to support them. At worst, the good reasons are not there.
Reply
They aren't there.
I actually wouldn't recommend this book; I just found that quotation interesting enough to post. I had to read it for a course I was taking (i.e. The Philosophy of Literature) and I wasn't really impressed. If I had to pick one book from the ten that we read for the course I'd recommend "Blindness" by José Saramago. The writing style can be a little annoying at times (there are no punctuation marks, character names, or quotations), but after you get a few chapters in it grows on you, and the book just kinda flows along.
But yeah... don't waste your time on this book. My girlfriend was an English major and won't even take the book from me as a gift. She says she doesn't want it taking up room on her shelf. :-)
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment