dream_labyrinth | Feb. 3rd, 2007

I've just finished another book by Robert Merle, Le propre de l'homme. It seems to not have been published in English, which is a pity.

So, to understand what I am talking about here, I need to give a bit of a background:

The book is about an American anthropologist and his wife, who adopt a chimpanzee to teach her to talk and raise her, basically as a scientific programme but soond developing into more.

They get Chloe, as they call her, from a zoo - the zoo wants to give her away because her mother has killed her previous child and they don't want to run the risk. In their house (a sheep farm), they built a room for her that is pretty much a playroom except for the barred windows.

The narrator, Dr. Dale, and his wife Suzy learn Ameslan (American Sign Language, for those like me who had never heard that word before) from Emma, a mute woman who also becomes Chloe's nanny. Chloe learns the language quickly, but also develops, as the Dales wanted, an understanding of English. She doesn't understand everthing, but certain key words.

But there are also many problems: Once, when Chloe sees herself in the mirror and then the housekeeper's grandchild, who is about the same age, she gets sad because she is, as she puts it, "ugly" - which for her is not only a word describing the looks of something but also the character, therefore making her depressed for days.
She also destroys pictures she sees of her biological mother, and considers "ape" a swear word, and her human family can't figure out whether or not they should try to make her understand that she is not a human.

Some people in the village don't like her, one woman claiming that it's against God's will to teach an animal to speak, others saying that Chloe is dangerous. That group gets an ego boost when Chloe, on a trip to the store with a farm hand, is verbally attacked by a local boy. She understands what he says and jumps at him. The farm hand pulls her back and drives off with her, and the boy throws stones after the car, but he then goes home to tell his father that the animal has tried to bite him, so the Dales get some trouble with the local population.

Interestingly, Chloe remembers what the kid said, as three years later, she repeats those words of herself after the housekeeper harasses her - in Spanish, which Chloe can't understand, but she understands the intention. She becomes sad and depressed and later calls herself a filthy ape, and refuses to sleep in her bed but makes herself a bed on the floor next to the dog.

The difficulties increase to dangerous proportions when Chloe becomes a teenager. She is at that time stronger than her human family, and increasingly difficult to manage. First she attacks the girlfriend of Dale's son out of jealousy, then bites the son when he punishes her. Later she tries to kill the Dales' cat (of whom she is jealous because the cat is allowed in rooms she is not allowed to enter, and whom she dislikes because when she was younger she tried to pet the cat and the cat scratched her). More and more, the Dales realise they have to do something, but Suzy doesn't want to give up her "child", and Dr Dale doesn't want to put Chloe into a zoo.

Then some local men organize a hunt near the farm house. The Dales' dog, whom Chloe likes a lot, has been put on a leash to stop him from running with the hunters, but he barks so much that Chloe releases him.
He is shot, and that turns out to not have been an accident. Tom, the brother of one of the most ardent haters of Chloe shoots the dog because his brother said it would ruin the hunt, and he brags about it in front of Chloe. Chloe steals his gun and breaks it, then he attacks her, and it takes the combined efforts of the hunters and the Dales to seperate the two. The guy swears to kill her.
He is mentally retarded, but his brother doesn't consider him a danger to anybody and refuses to have him committed and even taught him to shoot. However, the women in the village think him very much a danger, as he follows them around and stares and they don't think he'd stop at staring if given a chance.

The death of the dog poses a new problem for the Dales, because now they have to explain to Chloe what dying means. She asks why people die, and is shocked to find the head of her family can't explain and can't do anything about it.

Shortly after that, the Dales admit to themselves that they have reached a dead end: Chloe doesn't seem to learn any more, she doesn't seem to develop any new skills. They wonder whether the scientific project is at an end, and what this will mean for them.

But then one night Tom, the guy who vowed to kill Chloe, breaks into their bedroom with a gun and a hunting knife, telling them he's going to kill Chloe who sleeps in the next room. Then he tells Suzy to undress, and when she refuses, fire a shot into the wall. Chloe runs into the room and attacks him, and they fight. In the end, she bites his throat but dies herself because he managed to stab her.

throughout the book, there is that question of what makes humans human, what it is that seperates us from animals. Chloe can talk, she has and expresses likes and dislikes, she has a remarkable memory.
What she doesn't have is a head for numbers - teaching her to calculate is doomed from the start as she can'd deal with numbers larger than five. Death, even though it is a difficult concept for her to understand, she seems to understand after an explanation.
She invents games. She invents words by combining words she knows. She is able to tell lies, she does have an imagination.

So what is it that makes us so different?

In the book, a belief of an African people, the Oubi, is mentioned: they think that God made humans and apes at the same time. He gave them the earth and told them to work. The human did, but the ape didn't see the need to work and decided to just use what the world offered without work. God saw that, and to punish the ape for violating His law, He made the ape ugly.
But when He saw the ugly chimp, He took pity in him. He couldn't go back on His word, but to make up for it He taught him music.

Is the only thing that makes us special our work?