“The organisms were not intelligent. They could not tell him how to keep himself alive, free, and able to find new hosts. But they became intensely uncomfortable if he did not, and their discomfort was his discomfort. He might interpret what they made him feel as pleasure when he did what was necessary, desirable, essential: or as pain when he tried to do what was terrifying, self-destructive, impossible. But what he was actually feeling were secondhand advance-retreat responses of millions of tiny symbionts.”
The relationship between physical drives and mental control is brought up repeatedly throughout Clay’s Ark. The extraterrestrials, which are never named, use pleasure and pain as their only control mechanisms. The lengths the people infected will go to end pain or gain pleasure are almost limitless. Each character struggles with nearly uncontrollable drives to spread the organisms further. They are enslaved by the microscopic organisms, yet seem to be able to live with this enslavement as long as they feel they maintain some control. Early in the story, Eli struggles with not raping a woman, “He stood where he was, perspiring heavily in the cold night air and struggling to remember that he had resolved to be a human plus, not a human minus. He was not an animal, not a rapist, not a murderer” (469). As long as Eli gives in a little bit to his captors, he is able to maintain control. If he deprives them long enough though, animalistic instincts will take over. “He had an unconscious will to survive that transcended any conscious desire, any guilt, any duty to those who had once been his fellow humans” (470). Later in the story, they maintain their partial humanity by allowing the strong desire to spread the organisms with consensual sex instead of rape whenever possible. In this way, they live in community, raise and love their children, and help each other out. In contrast, the car family, though not yet infected, seems even less human than Eli’s community. They rape and kill whenever they feel like it. Though they theoretically could control themselves with no subconscious drives, they chose to give in to their depraved minds, imprisoning and abusing other human beings. Constantly throughout the story, those in Eli’s group say “we are not rapists,” almost as if they need to repeat it aloud over and over in order to make it true. The statement only goes so far though. True, they never rape, but they do force people to become part of their community by taking them in and imprisoning them until they submit. Their minds are overtaken so their desires become biological rather than a mental choice. Clay’s Ark questions and blurs the binary of the mind and the body, the physical and the mental. “Mind over matter” is a popular phrase used in sports, pain, and other areas of life. In Clay’s Ark, biology (“matter”) sometimes simply consumes the individual. At one point, a rabbit runs across Blake’s path, “A jack rabbit leaped into his path, and without thinking, he leaped after it, caught it, snapped its neck” (593). In this case, the physical overtook the mental because the physical had not been satisfied quickly enough with food. Various other examples occur throughout the story, and the only way “mind over matter” is controlled is through partially giving in to the alien organisms; a deconstruction of the binary.
I have a two-part question:
Have Eli’s people found “freedom” in giving in to the extraterrestrials controlling them just enough to maintain some mental/physical control? What is significant about the way sex is used as a form of determining “humanity” (consensual versus rape), and is forcing non-infected people to join them just another form of rape?
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