Abstract
Terry Pratchett was a fertile fantasy writer whose forty-one Discworld novels contain several fascinating philosophical ideas about the body. Although the magic, unnatural character of the represented world may ignite generic or allegorical interpretations, in this paper I interpret some subtexts and subplots as thought experiments. Focusing on the body, I will discuss the golems as an experimentation with perfect labor, labor rights, and ownership of the body, while an ongoing golem subplot in Making Money experiments with engendering. Igors are a kind of species in the Discworld, through which Pratchett can investigate the questions of bodily identity in the age of advanced transplantation technology. In Unseen Academicals, a personalized myth of the orcs gives him the opportunity to reason about genetic design and its interaction with socialization and education policy, and to do so while also considering the moral and social risks.
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Notes
At least this is a lesson one can learn from Carpe Jugulum.
I quote the second, revised edition, but this part of the introduction (“The story starts here…”) is also in the 1999 edition.
It is far from accidental that my description of the Pratchettian parody sounds similar to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, cf. (Butler 2004, pp. 83–87). As Kevin Paul Smith put it, “Pratchett […] is perhaps the nearest we have to Bakhtin’s written folk humour” (Smith 2007, p. 157, italics in the original). For Bakhtin, parody is a carnivalesque device to start with (Vice 1997, p. 152).
According to unnatural narratology, reading allegorically is one of the possible strategies for naturalisation (Alber 2016, p. 52).
A thought experiment may seem similar to allegory, but I do not think it is the same. Allegory is like a statement as "this is that," or "this is how things work." In a thought experiment, the result is not known in the beginning; it is rather like saying “let us see what happens if…” At the end, however, we try to apply the results to our own world, which makes it similar to allegory, but application usually is not a simple equation.
Witches Abroad is a novel in which the power of stories features as the central theme. For a more political interpretation of how stories influence human behaviour see Smith (2007), pp. 133–163.
Putnam checks the mind/world relationship with the idea of a brain removed from the body and held in a vat of nutrients; since a computer gives electronic impulses to the nerve endings, the person to whom the brain used to belong does not have any chance to realize that something has changed in his or her condition (Putnam 1981, pp. 5–8). Matrix may have made Putnam’s the most well-known thought experiment recently.
In Making Money, an even more ancient generation of golems is excavated; they are like beautiful porcelain sculptures. However, they also seem to represent a more original version of the myth, since they are warriors. Lord Vetinari and Moist von Lipwig work hard to find a solution for how to get rid of the golem army, which will only function as the gold standard of the Ankh-Morpork bank, buried under earth for ever (except for a short cameo role in Raising Steam).
It was Lord Vetinari who first found it necessary to avoid “it” when referring to golems. “By the way, ‘it’ is a ‘he’. An honorific in this case, clearly,” he explains to Lipwig (Going Postal, p. 26).
Another ingenious Pratchettian play with the tradition is about the sex of the dwarfs, who always appear with long beards, both in stories and in yard pottery. In the Discworld, all the dwarfs have long beards, but some of them are female. Male and female dwarfs are equally strong and have approximately the same posture, and their sex is a personal business difficult to ascertain. They wear the same clothes and weapons and do the same work. This situation may seem to constitute a society of perfect gender equality. However, in later Discworld novels, some female dwarfs in Ankh-Morpork start experiencing this traditional dwarf behaviour as oppressive, since the generally requested default masculinity prevents them from expressing their femininity. When some dwarfs start wearing skirts, jewellery, and make-up, it will be as shocking for dwarf fundamentalists as young dwarfs making friends with trolls, and the judgmental, sometimes aggressive reaction of old, conservative dwarfs proves retrospectively that the unisex default masculinity of dwarfs was indeed oppressive. Cf. Held (2014), pp. 10–13.
We should remember that Wagener’s film also used a masculine pronoun in the title: how he came to this world. The masculine pronoun in the German original is not decisive, since it may simply refer to the grammatical gender of the noun: Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam. In the popular elaborations the artificial creature always looks—by default, again—a man (or at least a boy, as in a recent movie, Doron Paz and Yoav Paz’s The Golem, 2018).
In the Jewish folklore tradition, a golem cannot speak and is not intelligent at all: “From here, the Yiddish term goylem figuratively came to denote an idiot, fool, or clumsy fellow” (Barzilai 2016, p. 3). Pratchett’s golems can speak, but they obviously do not have human organs of phonation. The upper case of every word they project seems to suggest an echo inside the mass of clay. In Raising Steam, even a golem horse can speak if it is required to do so by its master.
As Maladict, the vampire in Monstrous Regiment, puts it: “We had an Igor at home. Wonderful workers. Very reliable. Very trustworthy. And, of course, so good at stitching things together, if you know what I mean” (Pratchett 2003, p. 58).
Igor (or rather Ygor) first appears as Frankenstein’s servant in the 1939 movie Son of Frankentstein.
To quote Maladict again: “Of course, if you’ve met one you have in a sense met them all.” And again about Igorina’s unprofessional and ugly stitching: “It’s a Look. Like... tribal markings, you know? They like them to show” (ibid.).
Even in a country where such experimentation is not explicitly forbidden, the legal environment might make it a punishable offence. China “lacks laws governing gene editing,” but He Jiankui was sentenced to 3 years in prison in 2019 for experiments in gene editing, which resulted in the first designer babies Lulu and Nana (Wee 2019). Although the Shenzhen court did not say the experiment itself was an offence, it turned out that to secure the circumstances for the experiment, He had to break the law. For the risks and the ethical issues of He’s experiment see Musunuru (2019) and Regalado (2019). The alleged purpose of the experiment was to make the babies HIV-resistant.
Monstrous Regiment speaks only about religion and does not say much about Nuggan, the god himself. However, he appears in The Last Hero, where a Nugganite even confronts him in a very angry manner for the terrible life he enforces, and where even Offler, an old god feels “sympathy for any human whose god banned chocolate and garlic” (Pratchett 2001a, p. 81, italics in original).
For example, Jehovah’s witnesses’ objection to blood transfusions is one of the central topics of Ian McEwan’s 2014 novel, The Children Act.
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Hajdu, P. Terry Pratchett’s thought experiments about the body. Neohelicon 47, 75–87 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00533-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00533-2