Are we human, or are we dancers?

First the Forests




The article ‘First the Forests’ relates in many ways to Zamyantin’s novel We. It talks about the fact that civilization is ‘attacked’ by the forests, just like the One State is attacked by nature. He uses symbols of nature to illustrate his ideas, like the idea that the forest was hiding the sky. This idea ‘explains’ our urge to look at the sky, to go up to heaven once we die and the thought that God might be in the sky waiting for us with all his love. The forest was hiding the sky which immediately puts the forest in a bad position. I thought that this thought related to the fog in the novel We. Once the fog appears, D-503 is sad, destabilized and his world is crumbling down. Also the Integral might have been built because the numbers were curious about what hides in the sky, they could have been curious about the secrets the sky is hiding from them. It is repeatedly said that the forest was there first, that in the beginning there was only dense forest. That links to the ‘ancient’ times in We, where the world is described as being dirty, uncivilized – nature. A thought brought up in our class discussion was that the forest might be due to the big flood, when Noah and the animals were the only ones that survived. Of course this is what is said in the bible, and therefore we cannot rely on that fact scientifically.


The main question that we discussed in our class discussion was: What does it mean to be human? Where is the difference between animals and machines? Some very interesting ideas came up, about the ideas that ‘First the Forests’ contains. The numbers living in the One State are like machines, they don’t have a free will, they do whatever they are told to do by the Benefactor, they don’t rebel themselves and they don’t have free time to do what they want. In ‘First the Forests’ humans are described as animalist creatures, that live in the forest just like every animal would do. They are covered with hair; they even look like animals before they come out of the forest. Also the ‘other humans’ that live outside the One State wall are hairy. In our discussion we thought that the idea of always coming back to where we started is very important in both We and ‘First the Forests’. Life is a cycle. When we’re not born yet, we’re all covered in hair which is like a funny fact because when we grow older and we approach our sixties or seventies, we get hairier. I did not know that and I find it amusing how this thought in ‘First the Forests’ is actually something that can be scientifically proven. Going back to the question “What is human?” we noticed that there is a fine line between being human and being a machine. This comes back to the two articles we previously read in class, about Individuality. It is important for us to keep some kind of individuality in our large society. I thought that the giants mentioned in the article could be like a mix of animal and human, just like I-330 in We. Talking about I-330, she is someone that seems to fit into her society but that really doesn’t. She understands what’s going on, she sees how everyone is turned into machines from the very beginning of their existence and she tries to save the people in the One State. She is also the one that opens D-503’s eyes, just like the Vulcan in ‘First the Forests’ is the one that opens everyone’s eyes and a Vulcan is something very natural.


In conclusion I would agree with the article in some points. I also believe that during our lives we sort of come back to who we used to be, before we were shaped by our environment. Not only physically we shrink after years of growing but we’re also brought back to the same questions we had as we were a child. A quote from a song that I know says ‘and any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all’. That seems like a harsh statement but I think that it is true in many ways. We can learn all about physics, geography or mathematics but do we really know anything at all?

"Questions of Conquest" by Mario Vargas Llosa and "Freedom and Democracy"

Mario Vargas Llosa writes in his article ‘Questions of Conquest’, that many countries seem to think that planting bombs is a way of showing self-determination and achieving justice. India in particular, he says, is fighting its battle with the past instead of facing the future. He asks himself the question: Was the discovery and conquest of America by Europeans the greatest fear of the Christian West or one of history’s monumental crimes? We don’t know what would have happened or developed in the cultures and populations that used to be the only humans on that Continent, and we will never find out the answer to this question. The main focus in the first paragraph of his article is that the most incredible things happen to the strongest populations due to stupidity. This he expresses in two other questions concerning India and Mexico/Peru.

Vargas Llosa mentions his old history teacher Raùl Porras Berrenchea, who once said that the destruction of the Inca Empire and the linking of its vast territories and peoples to the Western world was a crucial event in the destiny of Europe and America. Porras Berrenchea was about to make a book out of all his works and discoveries when sudden death put an end to his plans. The author then put himself the goal of reading and taking notes on the chronicles’ various themes, but principleally myths and legends that preceded and followed the discovery and conquest of Peru – notes that Porras Berrenchea had left behind. Vargas Llosa claims that these chronicles are the beginning of literary fiction as we understand it today, and that it’s possible to find everything in those notes.

Mario Vargas Llosa writes in the next section of his article, that The Inca Empire achieved a feat that only few empires have achieved before: they managed to survive hunger in an immense region in a way that every region had enough to eat. They had reached a level that not even Spain had reached at that point, focusing on social, military, agricultural and handicraft development. The Inca Empire was a state where individuality had no importance and where an individual’s free will was taken away by religion which turned the population into a laborious and efficient one. This relates in a way to the novel ‘We’ by Zamyatin because individuality and free will are non-existent in the ‘One State’ the main character is living in. The religion in the Inca Empire was mainly political which also refers to the before stated book ‘We’ since the ‘Benefactor’ in the novel could be compared to a very political god that has power over the whole state. Another relation to the book is that it states that the Inca Empire was capable of fighting and defeating the natural elements, but had trouble defeating the unexpected.

According to Mario Vargas Llosa, today, we haven’t yet fully developed a notion of individual sovereignty. We got our language and our name from our parents and grandparents but they also told us that every evil we do can be blamed on the devil. I’m not sure if I agree with that, because not everyone is religious and believes that there is a devil. When we try to integrate a population with another, the population being integrated has to pay the high price of giving up their culture, their language and their beliefs. That is cruel and harsh, and according to Vargas Llosa, that is also something we got from our ancestors. In conclusion he says that ancient literature gives testimony to the discovery and the conquest and that in the chronicles we learn a lot about the roots of our problems today and about the challenges we face in our everyday life that we still haven’t answered.

The second article, ‘Freedom and Democracy’ is a chapter from a book. It talks about the illusion of Individuality, like the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual in a fascist regime. The author says that we are happy to be free to express our thoughts because freedom guarantees our individuality. The author thinks that “the suppression of sponanteous feelings, and thereby the development of genuine individuality starts very early, as a matter of fact with the earliest training of a child”. He explains that independence, individuality and the capacity for noticing negative qualities in others all develop when we are children and that the adults that are around us when we grow up have an immense influence on our individuality. We learn how to be friendly to others, how to be polite and cheerful but in the process of all that we lose the capability of expressing our thoughts and opinions. “In our society emotions in general are discouraged”, he states. Without emotions we’re weakened, we lose our sense of tragedy and the individual existence is badly developed. Cultures before our time had a higher development of individuation, but when it comes to death, all cultures and religions have a different way of dealing with their sense of tragedy. Some people picture death as nothing but a shadowy continuation of life, others made death unreal saying that there is a life after death in heaven. We pretend that elements like death do not exist, because they are removed from our sight. In the chapter it also says that school influences our individuality in the very first stages of our lives by teaching us facts that are true but at the same time it discourages our original way of thinking and having a relative regard on all truth. The author says that we don’t have a structuralized picture of the world and that we don’t know what we know. We tell ourselves that we need certain things but we don’t know if it’s what we want, or if in fact it is someone else’s will.

Both articles talk about the importance of individuality and how nowadays this individuality isn’t very developed. The first article tells us that also in ancient times like in the Inca Empire, individuality and free will were small of existence. They weren’t important, what counted was the big picture. I find it fascinating how in history some things have changed so much and other stayed just the same as they were before, even if it got a little better. We got freedom but don’t know what to do with it, we can do what we want but we don’t know what we want.

'On Language' by Zamyatin

Zamyatin's 'On Language' discusses the use of language today and in ancient times. In his story he asks himself the questions: What is the difference between poetry and prose? And is there such a difference?

He claims that this difference only exists in the old theories of literature, and that poetry and prose are really one and the same. According to Zamyatin, in the newest literary theory there are only two categories of all literary work: lyrical and epic. He says that if there was a difference between poetry and prose, it would be that poetry occupies itself with the lyric, and prose with the epic writings. Then he starts to make a difference between the epic writer and the lyric writer by saying that a lyricist is a narrator about himself and that the epic writer is mostly an actor. He describes how the epic writer and the lyricist have different duties to fulfill. One has to experience only himself, and the other must experience the emotions of ‘tens, often thousands, of other alien personalities’. Zamyatin describes it as if epical work was a journey through interplanetary space and lyrical work was a journey on our own planet where we live. The novel We would fall in the category ‘epic’ since it happens in the future and is completely invented based on the author’s predictions of the future. Zamyatin makes it clear that a writer should always be able to adapt to the language the characters in his novel would talk in. In We he does that very well, one doesn’t even notice that he is just making predictions because he makes it sound so natural.

In his novel We, the language he uses is very mathematical, making everything scientific. He criticizes our ways of living and makes our fears look normal. For example freedom and happiness, which we discussed in class, aren’t existent anymore and the One State has full control over the people. We always fear that we’re alone, unhappy, not free to do what we want and that we don’t have privacy. Exactly these three points are what the core of their lives.

Personally I find that what he preaches in ‘On Language’, he perfectly applies to his novel We.