The spaces inside women

Bun in the Oven, ©Amelia Biewald

Do you know what carrying a child inside you does to your idea of space, of what you own? Even the poorest man takes for granted that he holds clear title to the space inside his skin. Oh, but ask a man about a woman, and he'll tell you that her body is so very different from his, that it holds empty spaces that stretch and hold mysteries, that measure time with strange and bloody clocks — whose empty spacer are those? Who holds their precious title? Ask a man again, and he'll argue that the case is not so simple when the sex is switched. The mere pockets of air inside men that erupt in belches and farts are of little account, but the spaces inside women are meant by God for so much more that women's ownership of them is clearly only ever provisional. Those empty spaces cannot be left unoccupied for no reason — they are intended to be penetrated, colonized, stuffed to bursting. The rule of men: all spaces must be filled.

— from Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, by Dexter Palmer.

A final depth of debasement

But here is what you need to understand — here is why you are in danger. Here is why you must speak, and why you must not allow us to speak for you. Because history is an act of continuous collective imagining, and the perception of truth is a constant, unending negotiation, with others, and with oneself when one is alone.

It took a few chapters for me to warm to this book. While not exactly Dickensian, it's weighted with a cast of colourful characters, social inequalities, and 18th-century thinking. Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen, by Dexter Palmer, feels claustrophobic, but ultimately that adds to the experience. I love this book.

It's the age of progress and of backward medicine. It's the Age of Reason, but very few people are actually enlightened, and fewer still care enough to struggle to achieve that state. Much is made of the village's surgeon diligently working his way through John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

The story revolves around Mary Toft, an actual historical figure who allegedly gave birth to seventeen rabbits, albeit dead, partial, and dismembered. (Yes, it was a hoax.)

The book is not really about that. It's about the people who believed her.

Dr John Howard is the attending physician, the man midwife, who struggles to reconcile what he sees with own eyes with what he know to be possible. Young apprentice Zachary is confused, but he respects his elders and generally keeps silent while he observes and grows into his courage. His father is a man of the cloth who is also called on to witness the abomination and can offer no insight into the strange workings of his God.

The Atlantic calls it a novel tailor-made for the scam era: why would anyone believe the unbelievable? What profound evidence would bring a person to disregard common sense? It's as if strength of one's conviction is directly proportional to the humiliation that would be suffered by revoking it. As Dr Howard surmises, perhaps the only difference between a hoax and a miracle is the number of people who believe in it. When we find we our not alone in our belief, no matter how peculiar, when it is shared, the belief is shored up.

But the heart, no, the guts of the story, behind the willingness to believe, or to hope, is humanity's depravity. What depths of perversion are people capable of devising?

"If I were to use a woman's mouth as a chamber pot — and you would be surprised how little money it takes to acquire this service, if one has agents in the proper quarters: the money I paid her was replaced in my coffers in the time it took me to finish pissing — then we would both be aware that the perversion was one that required human inventions, and so the woman would believe she was a lesser person than I am, but she would still consider herself a person. To do what she did was humiliating, without doubt, but it is not a thing an animal would do. Slaves, I imagine, must think the same way, when they see that their chains are forged by human hands, that their freedoms are circumscribed by human laws. They may view themselves as lesser people, which would please me, but they would still view themselves as people, which is not entirely satisfying. Such a transaction of humanity favors me, but it is not quite as favorable as I would wish: I want a better bargain, and I know I can drive one.

"What I want, Zachary, and what I have yet to see thus far, is to witness a human not merely humiliating himself but doing a thing that he knows only an animal would do, not a human. A final depth of debasement from which one could not return. Do you understand?"

Lord M expounds to Zachary on the "value" of his finances as a preamble to a freakshow's main attraction and the theory of the cat. The lords for some years have been conducting a social experiment, establishing a betting pool of sorts, to determine how much money would induce a man to eat a cat, alive. Without implements of human inventions, without preparation, such that the cat dies in the process of being eaten.

But only a human would draw up a trial such as this, and no animal would be motivated by money, so Lord M's net gain remains somewhat muddled. Zachary is horrified, no less by the entertainment than by his companions' enjoyment of it.

I find myself thinking a lot about this book long after turning the final page. (I am continually astounded to discover people's limits or lack thereof, by which I am learning to define my own boundaries, in matters of all nature, but especially those that are usually hidden and sexual — sex is after all a very human act.)

"Cities are complicated," said John. "They can be both the beautiful thing you believed them to be and the dark think you did not imagine they could be. The one does not obscure the other."

Zachary was silent.

"People, too," said John more quietly.

Palmer succeeds in making everything about this novel oppressive — from Mary's domestic circumstances and her cramped birthing chamber overflowing with medical professionals to the bustling markets and gin bars of London. At the end of it, one craves the fresh air of Enlightenment.

About Mary Toft
Atlas Obscura: Why Historians Are Reexamining the Case of the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
The Paris Review: An Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits
OMG Facts: This Woman Made Doctors Believe She Gave Birth To Rabbits
US National Library of Medicine: The Doctors in Labour; or a New Whim Wham from Guildford

Excerpts
Chapter III: A Concerned Husband
Chapter IV: A Birth

Interesting

When I was seventeen, I had a very good year. In fact, it may even have started when I was sixteen. I developed a crush on an older man. Even if it started with a crush on his cat.

Clive (the cat) would sit in the middle of the sidewalk outside his shop, beside the bakery I frequented. Soon enough, I was frequenting his shop, pretending to be in the market for retro clothing. Pretending to have the guts to be in the market for retro clothing. Pretending to be the kind of cool I hoped to one day actually be. You know, university student cool.

He gave me a poem he'd written about his cat.

Some friends and I took to cutting class, the period after lunch, to hang out at the shop, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

We talked about what I was reading (he asked; I guess even then I always carried a book with me). That was my Somerset Maugham phase. He knew them all. My crush deepened. He told me to read Butler's The Way of All Flesh; I did.

He asked what I thought about one book or other, I honestly forget which, and I said it was interesting, and he berated me for lazy thinking. And I've never used the word since, unless I was prepared to expand on an argument.

(He also taught me that when someone is lighting your cigarette, you must look him in the eye.)

As an editor, I've been telling this story to my writers for years. You write "interesting," and I will delete it. Tell me why it's interesting, or if you need to build up to a full explanation, at least give me a flavour: unexpected, playful, nostalgic, frightening.

So when I came across the following passage in Dexter Palmer's Version Control, I had some rethinking to do.

If the worst thing a physicist could say about a statement is that it was "false," the best thing he could say is that it was "interesting." This was different from saying it was true: most true things were, in fact, uninteresting. Interesting statements lived on the twilit boundary between fact and question; they held the promise of revealing something unexpected and new about the world, and thus were to be treated with respect. The physicists Rebecca met always seemed to be on the lookout for something interesting, a claim or proposition that seemed to possess some kind of rare interior light.

Rebecca came to understand that Philip's constant repetition of the word "interesting" meant that he was offering what he saw as the most precious of compliments.

Most of my writers are engineers. I am trying to understand "interesting" from their perspective.

But my crush was not a physicist. And I've been hardwired over thirty years to think "interesting" was boring.

See also
The word "interesting"
"Interesting" is a Boring, Overused, and Lifeless Word

The best of all possible worlds

"So here is the question. Given that the information you have is necessarily imperfect. Given that the history of events is necessarily under-determined. The history that you choose to believe will determine the person that you are. If only in a small way. You will be a person who chose to see the world one way instead of another. And that choice will color the way you see the world, and your future, and your image in a mirror. You will never be able to determine conclusively why she acted as she did. But you can determine what kind of person you want to be.

"I can tell you this. That in the absence of perfect information, I choose to believe in the version of events that would occur in the best of all possible worlds."

Version Control, by Dexter Palmer, is a time-travel story. Only, without much time travel. And don't call it a time machine; the physicists in this story prefer "causality violation device."

This is the story of Rebecca, a customer service rep for an online dating service, and her physicist husband Philip, and all their issues. Set in the near future, Version Control covers marriage, grief, alcoholism, friendship, internet dating, self-driving cars (and the insurance implications thereof), racism, white privilege, male privilege, academia, big data, mass personalization, and secession of the Dakotas.

"If everyone could get on the same page and realize that we live in the future, we wouldn't have to deal with this bullshit."

There's a government conspiracy (possibly several). And some questions regarding free will and predetermination.

This is a future where Ronald Reagan is on the 20 dollar bill. At least some of the time.

I first heard about this novel during the 2017 Tournament of Books, where it was noted that "Version Control feels like 400 pages of realist, suburban minutiae with 100 pages of genuinely engaging science fiction slapped on at the end." The ensuing discussion sold me that Version Control was a must read.

In general, I'd say I like science fiction more than I like suburban minutiae. But I also rather like minutiae (it's the suburban stuff I'm not so keen on). What's interesting here is the effect of something as massive as time travel on the minutiae of an otherwise very ordinary existence.

So I read a few hundred pages sharing Rebecca's sense that something was out of whack, with no evidence of any kind that the time machine actually worked. And it was absolutely engrossing.

Who's to say what the best of all possible worlds is? Though the novel's ending is in some ways troubling, ultimately I find in it a hopeful message urging an acceptance of this world as the best of all possible worlds, as it cannot be proven otherwise.

Discussion of Version Control in the Tournament of Books:
Opening Round (vs My Name Is Lucy Barton)
Quarterfinals (vs The Mothers)
Semifinals (vs The Underground Railroad)

Arrogance

Arrogance: that featured among Philip's colleagues, too, though that was more a matter of mien than anything else. If there was one subject about which they tended to be cavalier, it was the ease of doing anything in life besides physics. They were quick to let you know that, in addition to practicing that best and most worthy of all the sciences, they were, as Philip said about himself, "intrinsically multidisciplinary": they'd casually mention that they'd just cycled their first century, or were doing a show with a local band, or were nearly finished with building a kiln. It was as if the stereotype of the physicist as a bespectacled dweeb was something they felt it was their duty and obligation to strive against. And though they never seemed to be quite as skilled at their extracurricular activities as their pride in them might have indicated, if they were perhaps unlikely to play in professional orchestras or chalk up record-beating times in marathons, then it was even more unlikely that top-level violinists and athletes were doing science on the side, as a hobby. Rebecca was never sure whether there was something about physics as an occupation that made it a magnet for the arrogant, or whether the process of becoming acclimated to the culture of physics involved developing a certain conceit about oneself if one was to succeed, but either way she got the impression that arrogance was often a benefit to physicists, rather than a liability.

— from Version Control, by Dexter Palmer.