Rhetoric and The Jurassic Park Franchise

Good commercial fiction is extremely effective at concisely presenting otherwise prolix or esoteric information. Good commercial fiction makes this information seem vital to the plot, and communicates it in a maximally interesting way: the tone should thrill, not lecture. By these standards, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World are not good commercial fiction: Lost World even opens with Ian Malcolm delivering a lecture. The former novel, however, manages something the latter does not; while its lectures are usually pretentious, its discussion of chaos theory is rhetorically convincing and soothing.

            This rhetorical coup is not a consequence of plot twists or of evocative prose. Crichton tends to favour declarative and compound sentences, so when the prose is clunky it is usually unobtrusively clunky. Sometimes, however, the semantic redundancy is unintentionally funny:

To whom should he send [the lizard]? The acknowledged expert was Edward H. Simpson, emeritus professor of zoology at Columbia University, in New York. An elegant older man with swept-back white hair, Simpson was the world's leading authority on lizard taxonomy. Probably, Marty thought, he would send his lizard to Dr. Simpson (Jurassic Park 20).

As is SOP with most thrillers and crime novels, Jurassic Park opens with suspicious and indeterminate death and injury. A construction worker’s chest is sliced open: his boss claims an industrial accident, but the wounds’ ragged edges appear saliva-foamed; a mysterious, apparently bipedal, lizard bites an eight-year-old girl holidaying in Costa Rica. Laboratory analysis (of saliva, again) reveals a protein so off-the-charts massive that the lab… well, we never find out what the lab does next, since its sole job is to confirm the growing sense of weird malevolence. Scientists and medics soberly resist the allure of speculation, but indulge the girl’s claim that the lizard that attacked her walked upright.

Actually, a trope common to both books is that children tend to be smarter, more observant, and more resourceful than adults, though the third film pushes this to ludicrous extremes by having Eric – a cherubic, soft-lashed, Haley Joel Osment-type – survive alone for a month on a dinosaur-infested island, during which time he discovers, and becomes proficient in the use of, gas grenades. This juvenile appeal is not a sophisticated bit of rhetoric, particularly when apposed with Ian Malcolm, celebrity chaos theorist, pontificating on the extinction of the human race; the notion that salvation lies in emulating children’s innate inquisitiveness is crushingly trite.

Crichton is not, however, responsible for the Jurassic Park series’ rhetorical nadir. Each book, and each film except the last, reinforces the notion that velociraptors are ferociously intelligent killers eager to flense and disembowel. They assuredly do not have a softer, domestic side: ‘The young [raptors] looked thin, undernourished. Poking around the periphery of the carcass, they were cautious, backing away whenever one of the adults snapped at them (Lost World 184).’ But with no source text to adapt, the latest movie gives the raptors an incongruous maternal upgrade. A paleontology student steals two raptor eggs, and the raptors are presumably mightily pissed-off. They trap the surviving characters but circle them, making aggrieved, uncannily corvine honks; and Alan Grant growls, ‘They want the eggs, otherwise we’d be dead already!’ But not content with this perspicacious display, nor with returning the eggs, Grant takes out a mould made of a fossilized raptor’s resonating chamber, which, ok, no one knows how it works, but he blows into it and produces a squawk that so nonplusses the raptors that they eventually leave. Admittedly, Jurassic Park’s premise already stretches scientific credulity, but this scene dissolves the last patina of plausibility; its rhetoric is flat-out invidious: it endorses a fallacious anthropomorphic compassion, legitimizes Dr. Doolittle-grade communication fantasies, and equates science with tendentious speculation. It is a scene that has zero regard for the viewer’s intelligence.

So yes, the obvious point: science fiction continually blurs the line between fact and fantasy. But the first Jurassic Park novel is rhetorically effective because it flatters the reader into believing she understands concepts that appear prima facie complicated, and it allays any nagging suspicion that the account with which she’s been presented is radically over-simplified. Chaos theory, and the domain of non-linear equations, ranks with rocket science and brain surgery as shorthand for intellectual difficulty, though the novel quickly retreats from the mathematical terminology of strange attractors in favour of folksy analogy:

If I have a weather system that I start up with a certain temperature and a certain wind speed and a certain humidity – and if I then repeat it with almost the same temperature, wind, and humidity – the second system will not behave almost the same. It'll wander off and rapidly will become very different from the first. Thunderstorms instead of sunshine. That's nonlinear dynamics. [It’s] sensitive to initial conditions: tiny differences become amplified (Jurassic Park 60).

This is the famous butterfly effect, and the rhetorical coup is the implied equivalence between it and the strange attractors mentioned on the previous page. This elision of the specific with the general implies that understanding an analogy is sufficient to an understanding of complex mathematics. Elsewhere, Crichton’s descriptions of how dinosaur DNA is extracted and of how the wildly complicated park is run are economical; comparing DNA sequencing to ‘putting a puzzle together’ is glib, but the confluence of high- , albeit quaint, technology (e.g. Cray supercomputers) and putative screenshots of a DNA molecule is undeniably cool, and evokes an atmosphere of genuine scientific possibility.

            It’s a shame, then, that irritatingly large percentages of Jurassic Park and The Lost World are devoted to Ian Malcolm making portentous pronouncements: ‘scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. […] There is no humility before nature (Jurassic Park 257).’ And each disquisition is usually followed by another character’s failure to understand it, so the point gets iterated. Rhetoric requires an understanding of its intended audience, something the novels and films evince maybe 49% of the time. But as Aristotle counseled, it is easier to blame than to praise.

Works Referenced

Crichton, Michael, Jurassic Park (London: Random Century, 1991)

--- The Lost World (London: Century Books, 1995)

Jurassic Park III, dir. by Joe Johnston (Amblin Entertainment, 2001)

Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers

Cynthia Ozick’s erudition is formidable, though it is not the claustral cerebration of Umberto Eco. It seems appropriate, however, to mention erudition up front, because The Puttermesser Papers is an awfully smart book but also an awfully humane one, though its humanity really becomes apparent only in its final section. The word awful, as admixture of fear and reverence, carries weighty metaphysical connotations (viz. Fear and Trembling); consider the verse from which Kierkegaard took his title: ‘as you have always obeyed – not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence – continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2. 12). For salvation, we always look up to something bigger than we are, something beyond our capacity for expression; this invokes not fear of the unknown but fear of the cannot-be-known: something absent and ineffable that still holds us in thrall. No wonder we tremble.

            Ozick’s collection of short stories explores, variously, female desire, the perils of art mediating life, and the nature of language. There are riffs on origins and purity, George Eliot, and John Milton. The scope is intimidating but is leavened by witty, stylish prose; this description of an Upper West Side apartment’s bathroom is a gem:

The bathroom sink, if you should happen to locate it in the dark (the light switch will be permanently hidden), is embroidered with the brown grime of its ancient cracks, like the lines of an astrological map; the base of the toilet, when you flush it, will trickle out a niggardly rusty stream (195).

Ruth Puttermesser, the stories’ eponymous heroine, is probably the sharpest knife in the drawer, though ironically her name means ‘butter knife.’ She dreams of becoming mayor of New York and transforming it into a city of aesthetic ideals: not just any ideals but Platonic ideals. Though a devotee of Socrates (she starts a political party called the ‘Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Idealism’), Ruth best identifies with his most famous student; her deference to Plato is worthy of her biblical namesake. Plato’s theory of the Forms holds that abstract ideals must lie behind our perceptions, but these ideals will be perpetually out of reach, their ‘completion deferred’ (66). But while in some sort of theosophic trance, Ruth intuits a possible solution to uniting the ideal with tangible: she creates a golem. Definitionally down-to-earth, the golem, we are informed, ‘is above all a realist’, though its Platonic link is nominally maintained when it christens itself Xanthippe (70). (Somewhat nonplussed by her creation, Ruth initially tries to name it Leah after Jacob’s less-favoured wife.)

This allows Ozick to dramatize a particular post-structuralist preoccupation: do we wield language or vice versa? Ruth imprints her golem’s forehead with ‘three letters that are the Hebrew word for truth’ (46), but as Xanthippe, animated but not alive, becomes language’s manifestation, Ruth quickly loses control over her. She is Ruth’s ‘amanuensis’, but her tone is ‘erratic’ and an ‘awful pastiche’ (51). Ruth’s own language often fails to impress: when ordered to make Ruth’s bed, Xanthippe interprets ‘make’ as ‘makeover’ and buys a Statue of Liberty lamp and a ‘blue bedspread [covered] with pictures of baseball mitts’ (52). Xanthippe’s defence, ‘all the stores around here are closed on Sunday’, does little to placate Ruth: ‘When I said to make the bed I just meant to straighten the blankets, that’s all.’ An early caution: if one cannot control language, one cannot control a golem.

This odd couple kvetching is fun and keeps the story’s high-conceptual concerns from weighing too heavily; but more fun, and more ambitious, is the way in which Ozick mixes linguistic play with an examination of female desire.

In Timaeus, Plato adduces an idiosyncratic contribution to the science of sexuality: the titular character portentously attributes ‘all varieties of disease’ to a malevolent womb ‘wandering in every direction through the body, clos[ing] up the passages of breath’. (2607-2609) Ruth has internalised this ancient fear of unchecked female sexuality, and has effectively sublimated desire to idealism.  She irks her lover by reading aloud from Plato’s Theaetetus, though in the passage she reads, Socrates warns of ‘the Thracian maidservant who exercised her wit at the expense of Thales, when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a well (23).’ Ruth is both maidservant and Thales, but though chaste, her creation Xanthippe is gravid with sexual yearning.

Ozick cleverly alloys ideas of linguistic uncertainty with gender. Male desire inevitably trumps female desire: after all, foundational to Freudian theory is the notion that a girl envies her father’s phallus. Xanthippe, however, upends this binary: her libido and her waistline grow, and her ‘despairing will’ to procreate terrorizes New York City, which ‘sweats and coughs in her terrifying embrace (86-87).’ Libidinal language has run amok, and no one is prepared for incarnate female desire. New York politics may be used to sex scandals, but not on this scale.

The golem tale is an obvious centrepiece, but Puttermesser Papers’ last story is the most affecting.  Ruth perpetually substitutes art for life, to the extent she imagines herself to be George Eliot; when she dies she attains the paradisiacal ideal she craves, but at a cost. Paradise is necessarily timeless, and ‘where there is no time, there is no endurance.’ (234) Ruth may be ‘perfectly fulfilled! – in her sexual parts, in the golden beauty of her child, in the gold of Plato’s eyes, and in the newest heat of her mind,’ but her joys are evanescent. The final pages are gorgeously, unbearably sad: ‘everyone who is supernally happy in Paradise, happier than ever before, will soon become preternaturally unhappy, unhappier than ever before.  A dream that flowers only to be undone will bring more misery than a dream that has never come true at all (234).’ It may be a variation on the ‘better to have loved’ cliché, but Ruth has loved knowledge, and her knowledge inheres her Fall. She aspired to the Platonic ideal, and the world seemed all before her, but through Eden she must take her solitary way.

Works Referenced

Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers (London: Vintage, 2000)

Plato, Timaeus <http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/concord/texts/timaeus/files/timaeus1.html#2605>

Introduction

Dear Person Reading This:

I have started this blog to try to alleviate writer’s block, and to get me habitually producing work. It will feature reviews-cum-essays of books and maybe the odd film, and each piece will be c. 800-1000 words long. The format will be essayistic, hopefully in a non-pejorative sense, and there’ll probably be a focus on themes rather than on plot. Artistic criticism has, I think, two primary functions: to advise a reader whether the art being discussed is worth consuming, and to evaluate the aesthetics of said art to help a reader form her own critical opinion. The pieces will probably be biased towards the latter; it remains to be seen whether this will be to their detriment.

Updates may be a bit irregular, particularly at first. Comments are welcomed but please keep them civil.

I hope you enjoy reading my work.

Alex