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  • The Twenty-First Century as Place of Choice: Peter Dickinson’s Eva
  • Millicent Lenz (bio)

In one of the lectures Leonard Bernstein gave at Harvard in the 1970s in a series on the future of music, he speaks of the twentieth century as “the century of death” and of Gustav Mahler as “its musical prophet” (313). Mahler’s musical vision was of “the death of society, of our Faustian culture,” yet his music confronts the “Ultimate Ambiguity”—“the human spirit”—and the paradox “that as each of us grow[s] up, the mark of our maturity is that we accept our mortality; and yet we persist in our search for immortality. We may believe it’s all transient, even that it’s all over; yet we believe a future. We believe” (317–18).

Some would disagree with Bernstein’s claim that Mahler’s music sounds a death knell for humanity, but few would quarrel with his expression of a persistent human search for immortality even in the face of threatened extinction. A similar paradox may be found in Peter Dickinson’s speculative novel Eva. On the one hand it shows humankind compulsively engineering its own destruction, and on the other seeking a kind of immortality through technology—specifically, through usurping the bodies of chimpanzees. In Dickinson’s ironic scenario the presumed future does not belong to the human species, but to chimpanzees whose society has been forever changed by the incarnation of a human—Eva—into chimpanzee form. Eva is a speculative fable, a cautionary tale, raising the question of the fate of the human species. Earlier in this century the composer Charles Ives in his composition “The Unanswered Question” probed the future destiny of music: given the breakdown of musical structure and tonality, the bases of the Western musical tradition, where do we go from here? (Bernstein, 5, 268–69). In a literary context. Dickinson [End Page 172] implies a parallel question: given the breakdown of the human will to live, a universal malaise of spirit, coupled with the disastrous consequences of greed, abuse of the environment, overpopulation, and the seemingly inevitable collapse of the ecosystem, how can we correct our otherwise calamitous trajectory toward the abyss? Yet paradoxically, there is an affirmative element in the story of Eva, and it emerges from her capacity for a choice of futures, a uniquely human gift.

Eva is set in a dystopian future time when the earth suffers from overpopulation, violence, and extreme pollution, in a city that spans the globe. This is a world where the big animals and their habitats have vanished; the prairies and jungles are gone; all wilderness has been destroyed to make way for more and more people and their escalating consumer demands. Eva, a teenage girl, wakes from a coma to find she has been in a fatal automobile accident and, as Dickinson himself describes it, “in order to give her a life of a kind, her mind and personality have been transfixed into the body of a chimpanzee called Kelly” (“Masks” 162). Eva’s scientist father, along with another zoologist, Joan Pradesh, has successfully carried out what they call “neuron transfer” and in addition made it possible for Eva to “speak” through a computer keyboard. They fail to realize that when this outer shape has been imposed on her, “her inner shape will learn to conform to it” (“Masks” 162).

Eva, having been brought up in close and affectionate association with Kelly and the other chimps who are subjects of her father’s and Joan Pradesh’s research, painfully but successfully adapts to the transplant, but it is clear that the success in her case can not be replicated. Other similar operations are disastrous; the humans and chimps upon whom the process is tried go into mortal despair and die screaming. Eva’s parents differ in their response to Eva’s new embodiment. The father quite coolly accepts it, seeing her as helping to advance his field of research, neuron memory; the mother, in contrast, finds the change of her beautiful daughter into what Eleanor Cameron has described as “squat, hairy little creature who knuckles along close to the ground and has to communicate...

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