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Benjamin Hale: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

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Benjamin Hale The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. His untimely outbursts ultimately cost Lydia her job, and send the unlikely pair on the road in what proves to be one of the most unforgettable journeys — and most affecting love stories — in recent literature. Like its protagonist, this novel is big, loud, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and amazingly accomplished. goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human — to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.

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My feelings about the human race are complex. I love them and I hate them. More on this later. I’m telling you all this, I think, to underline the sense of relief, the feeling of having been specially selected for salvation that I felt when Lydia came to rescue me from having to spend the rest of my life in the company of these animals.

It is probably not a coincidence that I was the lowest-ranking male in the habitat. If I had been higher up on the dominance hierarchy I might not have wanted to leave as badly. But because I was the lowest rung on the ladder, I had nowhere to go but up. Or out, away. I fled. I fled into the arms of the human race, into the arms of a woman.


Фото

There must have been an aura of angelic luminescence encircling Lydia’s blond head, placed on those shoulders way up there on the very top of that long and beautiful human body. I saw her standing there in the doorway to the inside of our habitat — the door painted to disappear into the wraparound mural of the jungle scene, the door the zookeepers used to enter the habitat at feeding time. The door opened, and there stood Lydia, accompanied by one of the brownshirts. My father furtively stepped on the cigarette he’d been smoking.

“Rotpeter!” the brownshirt barked.

Rotpeter shrugged his shoulders, like, What?

“What have you got under your foot?”

Nothing, he shrugged.

“Don’t give me that, I can smell it all over you — it stinks like a bar in here.”

“You let him smoke?” said Lydia, horrified.

“God no! He learned to smoke from watching people, and now some idiots still throw him cigarettes even though we put up a sign.”

“How does he light them?”

The brownshirt sighed in pained, embarrassed resignation. “He’s got a lighter hidden around here somewhere.”

Lydia gave the brownshirt a look that an intervening social worker might give a neglectful parent when she sees the home is cluttered with unhygienic detritus.

“Oh, you poor baby,” said Lydia to me, realizing at once the shameful extent of the ugliness, the neglect and emotional abuse I had suffered in this hellhole, this prison, this degrading and dehumanizing panopticon in which I had grown up.

And she bent down to me and again held out her arms, like a saint, and she called to me:

“Come here, Bruno. Come to me.”

I raced into her arms, planting kisses of gratitude on every exposed patch of that glabrous, supple, sweetly aromatic human flesh I could reach. She’d come back! Come back for me! She must love me, too!

My mother grunted at her and suspiciously licked a glob of filth off of her thumb. My mother always knew I had a thing for human girls, and strongly, strongly disapproved of it. Of course, it was difficult for even me to tell precisely what my mother was thinking because she was so disastrously inarticulate. Like most chimps, hers was a vocabulary consisting entirely of signs — grunts, gestures, noises, postures, faces, and so on — signifiers with amoebic and inconstant sets of signifieds depending entirely upon the ephemeral context of the immediately present moment. She had in her communicative arsenal not one thing that could truly be called a word, which I think of as a sort of compact ball of signification — the use of which can change depending on the situation, but the meaning of which is firmer and less psychologically elastic than a nonlinguistic sign. Yes, conversations between chimps certainly do occur, thoughts of a certain sort are indeed communicated between them, but it would be absolutely impossible to translate them into human language, because these nonlingual conversations occur outside the sphere of activity that is capturable by the tools of the text; these communications happen entirely within the Theatre of Cruelty, within the realm that is ineffable, a dreamlike mode of communication halfway between thought and gesture, based not in words but in mentality and physicality, in the raw language of the nonsymbolic sign.

IV

I suppose the time to divulge the nature of my earliest sexual stirrings is now, Gwen. I had not yet come into full sexual maturity at this time. As I said, I think I was about six years old. Chimps — especially those in captivity — reach puberty at a younger age than humans. I was an unusual case. I always have been.

The other chimps in the zoo were perfectly content to mate among their own species — it seemed only natural; I don’t think any of them really even gave it any serious thought. But even my earliest sexual proclivities lay elsewhere. My father couldn’t have cared less, but I believe my mother found this — in her view—perversion of mine deeply disturbing.

There was only one female chimp close to my age living in the habitat: little Céleste. I will describe Céleste for you carefully, because she played an important part both in the development of my early consciousness and in landing me in my current situation. I gather that it was hotly anticipated and hotly hoped among the zoo management that either I or else my elder brother, Cookie, would one day couple with Céleste and impregnate her, thereby furnishing the Lincoln Park Zoo with additional chimps. Céleste was acquired from the Indianapolis Zoo when she was two years old and given to our poor aunt, who was as barren as Sarah, to raise as her own. (Keeping us apart for the first two years was a bulwark against the Westermarck effect, so that one day we might find each other sexually appetizing, as we had not been desensitized in early childhood to one another’s pheromones.) So Céleste was introduced to me when she was two years old, and I was three and a half.

Céleste never particularly bonded with Cookie, who was about eight years old at the time and much bigger than us, and was habitually boorish, brutal, and crude with her (Cookie took after our father in all the worst ways); but Céleste and I developed an adamantine emotional bond, a connection, primitive and deep, that needed no words to express it and needed none to understand. We often cuddled together in a warm tangle of slender hairy limbs, and, our two hearts, each the size of an avocado pit, beating softly in unison within a physical proximity of mere centimeters and our lazy young brains dopey with the natural tranquilizers of childhood love, we would fall asleep, in a nest of rushes, in a hot band of Chicago sunlight streaming through the window. Together, Céleste and I sweetly aped the bonding activities that we saw the grown-ups performing: with her fingers she would delicately pick the bugs and crumbs and weeds out of the fur on my back, and then she would turn around and let me do likewise unto her. We explored every inch of our habitat, Céleste and I, together we overturned everything in it that could be overturned, our young minds’ cups brimming over with environmental stimuli, the mysteries of existence rushing headlong into our eager consciousnesses.

I will relate one brief incident from my early childhood with Céleste, one of the few definite memories from this time in my prelinguistic life that I still carry with me, secreted away somewhere deep in the squiggly crevices of my tender electric brainflesh. I was playing with Céleste. We were playing with a hat. I don’t know how it got into our habitat in the first place — it must have come in the same way as the frog, these curiosities, these artifacts from the outside world that accidentally wandered in to become such important semantemes in the early development of my consciousness. Most likely the wind had blown this hat off of the head of a zoogoer, across the moat, and into our habitat — this being the one American city to claim the apropos moniker of “the Windy.” But this hat — I now realize, as I reconstruct the memory knowing what I now know — was a woman’s hat, a woman’s sun hat. It was beige, wide-brimmed, shallow-crowned and flat, made of straw — tightly woven slats of thin shiny straw. It was festive, festooned with a wide band of diaphanous silk on which was printed a design of blue and red and purple flowers, which wrapped around the crown of the hat and was secured in place with a bow. Perhaps at the time Céleste and I imagined — as I now imagine — that this hat had previously lived on top of the head of a beautiful woman. There were even — as I recall — a few long threads of human hair caught in the interstices of the hat’s weave, possibly red hair, almost invisible except upon close viewing, sleek and strong, as long as my forearm and well-nigh impossible to break with the hands. This hat was a magical object to us, a portent from the gods lying on the ground: beautiful, weird, otherworldly, bright.

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