ABSTRACT
Like the Latin original, Hughes’s 1997 volume Tales from Ovid marks the entry of humans into creation with both a change in what the world contains and how it is conceived. Hughes however also hints at the concomitant birth of technology. Prometheus’ ‘novel’ creations view the Earth in a new manner; this myth speaks to both the posthuman and the Anthropocene. Humans are a telluric force. Upended – and therefore implicitly destabilised – their
upturned gaze orders ‘disorder’ and ‘comprehends balance’. They both are a ‘novelty’ – a new form of technological animal – and have the capacity for ‘godlike novelty’, the power of invention, meaning that they can develop technologies that will shape Earth in new and increasingly alarming ways as the poem continues through The Golden Age to the conflict and ecological mismanagement that typify The Age of Iron. My chapter has a similar backbone. Beginning with Hughes’s presentation of the human as simultaneously tech-
nologically imbricated and animal, I address the co-development of humans and their environment through technology, particularly the relation of technology to questions of abstract thinking and embodiment, and ask how this impacts upon ecology. I then examine Crow (published 1970) as a project which approaches myth in terms of evolutionary adaptation before finally showing why, in Hughes’s clearest literary statement of his underlying ecological mythology, the world has to be saved by giant robots. Jonathan Bate’s reading of the above Tales from Ovid passage is indicative of
how critics have failed to deal with Hughes’s radical approach to technology and evolution. For Bate, Hughes offers a mythologisation of a failure to attend to the Earth: ‘Once man looked away from where he walked, the earth became vulnerable. The desire for transcendence, the aspiration to higher realms, was predicated upon a denial of biological origin’ (2001: 26). While this may chime with Hughes’s distrust of philosophies that privilege the spirit at the expense of the animal body, the denial of biological origin here is Bate’s. Hughes does not, here at least, show man turning away from earth or the deep-ecological dreams that Bate sees as corresponding to it, such as Schiller’s naïve or Rousseau’s state of Nature. Instead he locates different forms of cognition and technicity at the origin of the human – an emergent technological departure from the non-human animal that is itself biologically predicated. Hughes’s poem is better thought of as an instance of what David Wills calls
dorsality: ‘the name for that which, from behind, from the back of the human, turns (it) into something technological’. ‘In standing upright’ – the Promethean upending – ‘the simian turns anthropoid and, in so doing, immediately turns technological […] a fundamental realignment of the human in its relation to technology occurs with the upright stance’. Dorsality usefully describes not only how the technological turn comes through a physical mutation but how the technological capacity announces itself in unpredictable ways. Standing upright allows for different sorts of tool to be manipulated but it also widens the cortical pan, giving more room for the brain and more capacity for (technological) invention and abstract thought. For Wills, technology ‘defines and redefines the human, and does so downstream from the point at which a given technological creation was brought into effect’; it takes the human from behind (2008: 1, 8, 7). Although they do not emerge until after the idyllic Golden Age, the tech-
nological usurpations of the organic that mark the descent of man through Hughes’s poem’s four ages are already immanent and imminent with the inception of the human. The prelapsarian trees have ‘no premonition of the
axe | Hurtling towards them on its parabola’ (Hughes, 2003: 869). Here, despite the axe not having been fashioned yet, the suggestion is that the technological re-shaping of the Earth exists in potential. As the four ages progress, the humans develop instruments and techniques in different spheres: domestic (shelter, fires), agricultural (ploughs, husbandry) and martial (axes, longships). In this way ‘Earth | Was altered’ by the ‘novelty | Of man’. Hughes often speaks about art and culture in technological terms. He posits
the ritual origins of religion as a ‘technology to regain’ an animal ‘samhadi’ (bliss) lost at the last instance of hominid brain-evolution (‘Letter to Merchant – 29 June 1990’, 2007: 581). Notably, despite its ‘biological origins’, such bliss is not an escape from originary technicity but rather attained via the technological. In Hughes’s descriptions of his work, myths are ‘factories of understanding’. Myths are ways of externalising and sharing knowledge and their function changes across time, new ‘revelations open out of their images and patterns continually, stirred into reach by our own growth and changing circumstances’ (‘Myth and Education’, 1994a: 141). Any appeal to a simple, non-technological humanity is problematised from the outset as Hughes asks his readers to consider aspects of the ritual, mythic and poetic in terms of technology. At the same time Hughes never forgets that the animal affects the techno-
logical. While keen to assert that ‘language is an artificial human invention’ he gives it an evolutionary edge:
Its [language’s] credentials for stating the case are seized on by the animal need to manipulate, outwit, circumvent and gain power over its evolutionary (social) competitors or potential mates. The (dumb) animal in us understands this perfectly well.
