Genes and Fate in White Teeth

*WordPress decided it didn’t like how I posted this  last b, so let’s see if this will fix the problem.

The bits of calcium, nerve and enamel which garnered titular honors in Zadie Smith’s novel are mentioned frequently throughout the first half of the book. However, though the characters’ experiences and the narrator’s metaphors and analogies continually refer to teeth, a central theme involving them has not yet emerged.

This is where the analyses we perform in class come into play. White Teeth treats genes with more consistency than the theme of teeth through the first half of the book; they are most often represented as something to struggle against and are perhaps analogous to fate or chance. For example, the entire opening of Irie’s section of the book is about her struggle against her appearance, which she inherited from her mother’s ancestry (221). Clara (described as being tall and thin in the second chapter of the book) did not pass her figure to Irie, to put it kindly. Irie is a heavy young woman who more resembles her grandmother and Jamaican ancestry than her parents. She also attempts to change her hair; she desires it to be straight, and ends up losing it as a result of her desperation to change her appearance. This appears to be a continuation of Clara’s struggle against her own genes and the unpopularity that they caused in her days as a schoolgirl. This theme is present elsewhere in the book as well, with the most notable example being in reference to the skin condition which afflicted Ali (Mickey’s father) and his brothers (204)

Another example of genes playing the role of chance is mentioned on page 136, where the chapter begins with:

“And the sins of the Eastern father will be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day.”

Genes seem to be the tools of higher powers in this passage, used to perform the task of meting out punishment. This passage and the references to genes in general fit well with the class discussions on the role of chance in literature and its use by authors as a way to explain events in their novels.

Teeth: Currently More Fixable Than Genes by 100%!

The bits of calcium, nerve and enamel which garnered titular honors in Zadie Smith’s novel are mentioned frequently throughout the first half of the book. However, though the characters’ experiences and the narrator’s metaphors and analogies continually involve the 32 white horses upon a red hill of riddle fame (first they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still), there has been little cohesiveness to the various mentions of teeth in the tale.

This is where the analyses we perform in class come into play. White Teeth treats genes with a bit more consistency through the first half of the book; they are most often represented as something to struggle against and are perhaps analogous to fate. For example, the narrator, when stating the history of O’Connell’s Poolroom, divulges the following information:

“1952 Ali (Mickey’s father) and his three brothers arrive at Dover with thirty old pounds and their father’s gold pocket-watch. All suffer from disfiguring skin condition.” (204)

Obviously, I am inferring the genetic link. However, I feel that the mention does not pass lightly as genes become a major theme only a few pages later.

The entire opening of Irie’s section of the book is about her struggle against her body, caused by what appear to be genes from her mother’s side. Clara (described as being tall and thin in the second chapter of the book) did not pass her figure to Irie, to put it kindly. Irie is a heavy young woman who more resembles her grandmother and Jamaican ancestry than her parents. She also attempts to change her hair; she desires it to be straight, and ends up losing it as a result of her desperation to change her appearance. This appears to be a continuation of Clara’s struggle against her own genes and the unpopularity that they caused in her days as a schoolgirl.

If fate does indeed play a major part in this novel (which I believe it does after the heavy discussion on the topic of writers’ use of chance and fate) and the aforementioned genes

For Mangal Pande and Lu Feng Zhe

“His name meant phoenix, a creature that would burst into flames upon its death and then rise again from the ashes.  The man himself was a father, a patriot, and an artist who lived during World War II and the Japanese invasion of China.  His contemporaries considered his works the epitome of Chinese traditional art.  At the height of his influence, he took gold in the Paris International Art Exposition in 1931.  He established and funded the Zheng Zhe Art College out of his own pocket and one of his paintings was given to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a gift from China.  He died just before the rise of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.  He was my great-grandfather.”

 

This was the opening to a speech I gave for Academic Decathlon in my junior year of high school.  It’s a true story.  Samad Iqbal isn’t the only one with a notable great-grandfather who was wronged by the bastards who wrote the history books.  In my great-grandfather’s case, he was wronged certainly (I never quite got the details of this story though, probably because of language deficiencies), but the main issue seemed to be that he was fast being forgotten.  By the time I was born he had been reduced to a couple of museum exhibits and a plaque on a university wall.  It’s a wonder this much survived after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution erased everything else.

 

What exactly was the Cultural Revolution?  Factually it was an era of witch-hunting and violence incited by Mao Zedong from 1966 to 1969.  As Wikipedia puts it pleasantly, “many revolutionary elders, authors, artists, and religious figures were purged and killed, millions of people were persecuted, and as many as half a million people died.”  However, in China, nobody talks about it.  If it is mentioned at all, usually by my grandmother, it’s askance and in a lowered voice hinting of hatred and old pain.  My parents, being six years old when it began, do not remember it; it was normalcy for them.  It’s remarkable how ephemeral the past is.  To me, the Cultural Revolution exists as only text and the vestiges of a nightmare.

 

Thanks to the efforts of my grandfathers and the students of my great-grandfather, my great-grandfather’s name is gaining recognition again.  Newspapers articles are rediscovering him as an artist, last summer a ceremony was held in his honor at Suzhou University, and recently a television program was produced about his life.  My great-grandfather’s presence in my family had never diminished though.  My grandfather and his brothers fought long and bitterly between themselves over their father’s paintings, outsiders like art collectors and museum curators and con artists and stepchildren occasionally joining the fray.  The battle continues to this day.  Personally, I think it was the strife that kept him alive.

 

 

- Wenting Chen

End of Course Reflections from a Newly Enlightened Engineer

I must admit that I went into our course blithely. I was an engineer looking to fulfill his next to last humanities requirement, and as such I jumped at the title of the course. That is, the part of the course description that said Literature of Science and Technology, not the bit about genetics. I didn’t even learn that the course was to focus on biology and not technology until I heard Dr. Clayton announce the full title of the course on the first day. I looked around with a sinking feeling and realized that I was amongst English majors and Pre-Meds, not the Physics and Comp Sci majors I expected. It was a bit intimidating, given that I knew next to nothing about the ways of English in a university or anything pertaining to Biology. Thus it was with great trepidation that I decided to stay the course, thinking that at the least I would get to read a few books that would be more entertaining than Thermodynamics homework. Needless to say, my underwhelming expectations of the applicability of such a course were off base, and what have I learned from the course is much more useful to my future career than I imagined.

The art of literary analysis is a valuable one, as I have come to realize over the course of the semester. It can reveal a great many things about the way an author views the world, and it can be used to construct logical arguments in the defense of any matter that may be written about. In addition, ethics are a vital part of every decision that is made by an engineer. This course has gone over many of the considerations involved in making ethical decisions and policies with regard to research, which is invaluable to an engineer upon whom lives may depend. I first began to suspect that my perception of the course’s lack of utility in my future was unfounded when Dr. Clayton discussed why there should have been literary experts present on the congressional bioethics committee. I had never considered such a thing, and his elucidation of the topic made me realize the value of works that I had read merely for entertainment. For example, I read Brave New World almost ten years ago, before I had any idea that it could be anything other than a science fiction novel. I dissected books in my high school AP course, but never enjoyed it and never understood the import of reducing an otherwise enjoyable work of fiction into an extended allegory. Throughout the semester, the cautionary tales which our class has read, in addition to the scientific journals which we have reviewed in order to gain knowledge of our discussion material, have taught me that there is much more for an engineer in an English class than a simple degree requirement.

-barrinmb

Organ Harvesting in Literature

Since I did not do a digital media project, I would not have another chance to present the work I have done for my final project.  Also, talking about a research paper in the front of the class would not be very interesting.  So, I figured a blog on what I have been researching this semester might be the best way to share my work.

As we have learned throughout this class, science can have a major effect on literature.  There are books written on both current and future technologies.  The benefit of dystopia or science fiction novels is that they can show us the social consequences of implementing certain extreme technologies.  For example, in Never Let Me Go, the effects of harvesting organs from thinking, feeling human beings is explored.  The clones are shown to be emotionally damaged and have major identity crises because of their place in society.  While it may seem like we are a long way away from cloning humans for our own benefit, the future is closer than you think.  While this is not cloning, there have been instances of parents deciding to have another child in order to create a bone marrow donor for their ailing first child.  This new child will have to have identical antigens to the original child in order to be useful in donation.  Tests can be done prenatally to see if the fetus has the correct antigens.  From Never Let Me Go, we can see the potential complications to the identities of the new children conceived for this procedure.  Kids are created with the purpose of benefiting someone else through a procedure that does not benefit them and their parents are deciding their fate.  While this marrow donation is generally not life threatening, the lack of information and choice shadow that of the children in Never Let Me Go.

Oryx and Crake is another good example of a potential organ harvesting technique, xenotransplantation, gone wrong.  Xenotransplantation in this case means that human organs are engineered in animals and they are harvested and transplanted to humans.  In this novel, human DNA is placed in pigs and those pigs, “pigoons,” grow human organs.  It all sounds very ideal at first, but the cautionary tale begins when the pigoons eventually escape and take on disturbingly human characteristics.  They keep watch over Snowman and employ relatively intelligent siege skills by cutting him off from most exits in the compound.

While the formation of specific human organs outside of the human body is probably the furthest from happening any time soon in the real world, there are already ethical concerns about mixing human DNA with that of other animals.  One research team stated, “Our studies on the fate of human hematopoietic cells engrafted in fetal pigs led us to find that some human cells actually fuse with swine cells and that the nuclei of the fused cells have chromosomal DNA of the two xenogenic partners” (Cascalho et al. 2006).  Combining Oryx and Crake and this scientific research, mixing of DNA is a real concern that exists right now.

Finally, I watched the movie Dirty Pretty Things (with Audrey Tautou) which is about kidney harvesting and selling on the black market.  Through my research I learned that live illegal kidney harvesting is happening today and the people who do it rarely gain a real benefit.  The short term benefit of money or a political favor does not turn out to be greater than the risks and health drawbacks from having surgery under poor conditions.  From this movie, it is clear that the poor or needy can be exploited even in a westernized world (this was set in London) and that those who sell their kidneys are not making an autonomous decision.

I hope this was interesting to you guys because I certainly learned a lot from researching these three harvesting techniques.  The moral of the story seems to be that we should look to all sources of information, whether scientific or fictional literature, to guide our foray into using live humans or genetically modified animals for their organs.  I hope everyone has a great summer.

-Nikki

1. Cascalho, Marilia, et al. “The Future of Organ Transplantation.” Annals of Transplantation 11, 2(2006): 44-47.

The Meaning Behind White Teeth

In a novel that addresses but does not resolve the irksome question of nature vs. nurture, Zadie Smith likewise presents us with a paradoxical title: White Teeth.  Teeth, a natural element of human life, meaning that everyone is born with baby teeth that are supposed to be replaced by permanent teeth, are not destined to be white.  In order to attain “white teeth,” one must not only brush them, but one must also regulate their diet, making sure to limit their intake of teeth staining products such as coffee.  As much maintenance as white teeth require, so too do straight teeth.  How many people do you know with “naturally” straight teeth?  I cannot think of one, and this may be presumptuous, but I bet anyone who says their teeth are naturally straight are lying to you.  But how many people can you think of with crooked or unsightly teeth?  Generally speaking, the only people that come to my mind do not reside within the United States or come from an older generation.  Now for a disturbing reality, I cannot think of a single undergraduate at Vanderbilt University that has revolting teeth. So what does this all mean?

I believe that Zadie Smith strategically chose the title White Teeth to capture the underlying way in which fake elements of society impose themselves upon people’s everyday lives, so much so that there exists naturalness within unnaturalness.  Various forms of the phrase “white teeth” are embedded within the novel, and they put forward the overwhelmingly strong presence of “white teeth” within modern society.  Two such examples include “white-toothed airline representatives”(349) and the “tanned man with white teeth”(362).  Both of these examples connote the fakeness within the characters possessing the white teeth; the impersonal smile and exchange of words within customer service oriented business professionals and the obvious altering of appearance in a vain attempt to achieve western beauty.  But despite these superficial exteriors, how much more abnormal would it seem if you were given your complimentary refreshment by a buck toothed individual and walked around Vanderbilt’s campus seeing only pale, white-skinned students?

Similarly, “white teeth” subversively addresses the issue of language.  We definitely speak much differently with a set of full teeth than we do without our two front teeth.  Along the lines of language, Smith seems to associate native language and natural teeth to truth.  For example, Clara works hard at losing her native dialect to speak “proper English.”  Moreover, Clara even uses fake teeth to attain an aesthetically pleasing exterior and to aid her in speaking properly.  Smith shows the extent to which this causes Clara to be untrue to herself and insinuates that it may be at the “root” of her problems.  When Clara speaks with Joyce and she questions where “Irie gets [her brain genes] from, the Jamaican or the English,” rather than answer truthfully, she lies(294).  Clara finds herself left alone in “frustration and anger” “as the front door closes behind [Joyce]”(294).  She internally questions, “Why had she said Captain Charlie Durham?  That was a downright lie.  False as her own white teeth”(294).  She goes on to think that “Captain Charlie Durham wasn’t smart” and ultimately concludes that “Charlie Durham was a no-good djam fool bwoy”(294).  Although Clara at the start of the paragraph says in proper English what she concludes at the end, the same expression in her native tone seems more genuine and more convincing of Durham’s stupidity.  Likewise, at the end of the novel when Iqbal finds out the truth of Archie’s prior failure to kill Dr. Sick, “realiz[ing] that he has been lied to by his only friend in the world for fifty years… Samad tumbles into the Bengali vernacular”(441).  Through Clara and Iqbal, Smith suggests that our most true moments, one’s in which we are most in touch with our emotions, are verbally displayed in our native language.  But because the characters in an attempt for assimilation seldom speak in their native language, the natural has again become unnatural.

Therefore, the title White Teeth addresses a common theme within Smith’s book, the transformation of the natural to unnatural.  Yet, unlike the ambiguous resolution between the nature vs. nurture debate, Smith does connote truth with the natural and fake with the unnatural.

Nicole Shen

Like Tears in Rain.

It’s the last day for blog entries, second to last day of class, and I figured it was about time to rescind my first polemic blog entry about literature being unable to define humanity.

The human condition–that curious mix of mortality and desire–has been one of the most prevalent (albeit sometimes buried) themes brought up in the reading for this course. In my first blog I made the statement that a genetics-based approach defining humanity was really the only way that humanity could be defined–after all, what are humans but large, moving clumps of replicating genetic code? But I think that literature can at least give us a shorthand way of making snap-judgments about an organism’s humanity (or lack thereof).

First of all, to be human, an organism must be aware of the idea of its own demise. As Michael Persinger puts it, “anticipation of our own demise is the price we pay for a highly developed frontal lobe.” Second, it must be capable of having a desire that transcends its own instinct to replicate. (This is why Crake is such an intriguing character–in expressing his desire to destroy the human race and create a new one, he demonstrates his own humanity.) I believe that this is why martyrs have such a powerful emotional impact, while those who achieve their dreams without severe personal sacrifice do not.

The “gom jabbar” of Dune is a device designed to test for human-ness. It is a little box that, when you stick your hand in, inflicts extreme pain. Pulling your hand out while the gom jabbar is active will expose your skin to a very poisonous needle. Thus, the subject must either endure the pain or die. (The gom jabbar is similar in many ways to the research paper for this class that is due in a few short hours.) On a literal level, the gom jabbar does not make sense as a test of human-ness–but it does on a metaphorical level.

The gom jabbar represents life, I think. And the decision to keep your hand inside–that’s humanity.

-cskene

A Few More Thoughts on Oryx and Crake (Just Because I Liked It So Much)

I didn’t read the perceived competition for Oryx as being an integral part of the storyline. To my mind (and my surprise, as well) Oryx only played a bit part in the part of the book that took place before the catastrophe. I saw the story as being much more about the homosocial relationship between Jimmy and Crake than the triangle that Atwood inserted near the end. Their interactions drive the story, provide metaphors, and lead up to the microbial holocaust that occurs. Oryx is a very neutral character, never committing to anything or anyone (Jimmy and Crake included) except the Crakers. I found her character a bit annoying to be honest; Oryx’s refusal to answer Jimmy’s questions just strikes me a bit like Alsana in White Teeth during the maybe-maybenot phase she went through (however, since he’s only doing it out of some masochistic curiosity, maybe I shouldn’t blame her). In addition, Crake appears to be much more interested in his plans than anything else, and as a result the only real connection (aside from Oryx’s description of their physical intimacy) I saw him have with Oryx was when Jimmy looked at them and saw that (or perceived to see) Crake was in love with Oryx. It just seemed to me throughout the book that Crake merely used people, which I read as going along with the metaphor for his representation of the artificial. He lacked emotion throughout the book, and Jimmy’s emotion (again, playing the role of natural in the metaphor) just filled the void that Crake left. If anything, they almost seemed to be a Yin and Yang representation of the same person. That is, they were polar opposites, even to the point that their friendship seemed a bit out of character to me.

To expound on the natural versus artificial metaphor, however, it is very convenient that Crake died as the artificial world died around him. Houses, airports, cars, and trains no longer had meaning as technology and its uses died with its creators, humankind. Jimmy, on the other hand, as the representative of nature, survives with the Crakers.

Again, perhaps I missed the deeper meaning and Crake was taking Oryx out with him when he killed her and thereby essentially forced Jimmy to kill him, but guess I I just saw Oryx as being secondary in the past storyline. However, she was a major (although absent) character in the storyline taking place in the days after the disease swept the world, so maybe I just didn’t notice her as much when Jimmy wasn’t hallucinating.

-barrinmb

Morality & Determinism

As Prof. Clayton has pointed out, the repeated theme in all of the novels that we have read and films we have watched is that of chance versus destiny. Novelists are wrangling with the meaning of the genetic code: what can we be made to do through our genetic makeup, how are we restricted and how are we autonomous, what is fate and what is serendipity? Novelists are not alone in wondering about this: scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, and humorists are all interested in these issues. Humanity is intent on discovering its own innate nature.

Much of these musings have centered around the issue of morality. For example, Professors Goodenough and Deacon, a biologist and anthropologist respectively, published an article in 2002 arguing that our moral frames of mind arise from our primate prosocial capacities–that is to say, our interests in hierarchy, nurturing the young, strategic reciprocity, alliances, empathy, and hostility towards outgroups–and thus are ultimately all the same, regardless of which language and religion they are couched in. Morality is determined.

And then at the other end of the spectrum of academic importance, we have this ludicrous video produced by a group of British comedians. It is dry humor, as British comedy tends to be, but it examines the same issues of determinism by reversing a common story in the world of genetics: instead of Christian scientists looking for the gay gene, we have gay scientists looking for the Christian gene. By doing so, it presents the idea of genetic determinism as patently ridiculous.

Who do we look to in this debate? Are the Benedict Lamberts of the world more reliable sources of information than the Zadie Smiths? When talking about something as subjective and mutable as human nature, is science the best way to go about getting an answer?

-Anna Musun-Miller.

Caribbean Literature and Genetics

I am currently taking another English class which focuses on Caribbean literature. We discussed Zadie Smith and the literary charactertistics of Caribbean literature that Smith embodies, specifically the use of memory. Memory and its effects on Caribbean literary characters is a common theme throughout Caribbean literature that also manifests itself in White Teeth. Part of my final project for the other class included the following paragraph:

Some Caribbean novels tackle the tension between an idealized past and a more accurate portrayal of history by exploring both facets through the point of view of different characters. Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth is an example of the convergence of both methods interwoven in one story. One of the main characters Samad Iqbal harps upon the achievements and notoriety of his great-grandfather Mangal Pande. According to Samad, Pande was a brave revolutionary, a “hero, and every act [Samad] has undertaken in this war has been in the shadow of his example” (Smith 84). However, Pande was drunk rebel that fired the first shot of the mutiny in an attempt to kill himself. Samad aligns his and his family’s identity with the bold acts of an imagined revolutionary rather than accept that his son Millat is a promiscuous, domestic terrorist and his other son Magid is a soulless, eugenics scientist. The family’s lineage does not deserve the credit that Samad frequently and publically bestows, yet he focuses his attention on a glorified past to distract himself and acquaintances from his destructive children. An idealized past is favorable to an uncertain and traumatic present. However, another main character Clara Jones offers an alternate perspective on history. She is much more objective as she reflects upon the her past and its numerous problems. A childhood defined by her mother’s constant warnings about the end of the world, judgment day, and the division of the saved and the sinners is not forgotten or idealized by Clara. She even warns her own mother not to try to convert her daughter Irie, “filling her head with a whole lot of nonsense…the buck stopped with me and it ain’t going no further” (Smith 326). Clara abandons her memories as if “her world just disappeared, the faith she had lived by had receded like a low tide” and protects her family from its effects rather than forcing it upon them like Samad (Smith 38). The differences between the two characters offers the reader a clear distinction between people clinging to a romanticized past instead of facing the present and people abandoning the past in favor of the possibilities and opportunities of the future.

For me, the challenge with the novel White Teeth was to somehow combine the Caribbean theme of memory which is prevalent throughout the novel with the genetic theme that underlies all of the novels we have read in this class. An idea that the combination of the two genres presented was that the memories and histories of the families that comprise the main characters of the novel live in their genes. The hereditary characteristics of genes and DNA allow the histories of these families to literally live on through the generations in human form rather than just oral tradition. It could be a stretch, but by discussing the novel in two very different contexts, I felt that there had to be a connection between the two. What do y’all think?

 

Rachel