Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (65 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

Tags: #Women and Literature, #England, #History, #20th Century, #Literary Criticism, #General, #European, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Women Authors, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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How is it possible for people to live and love and be happy in such a wicked world? Or, conversely, how can the world be peaceful and happy, when it has such wicked people in it? Forget it. Go to sleep.
Of Birth and Fiction. Writers are always a little suspicious of their deconstructionalysts, as patients are of analysts. Perhaps there's a simpler explanation. I merely wanted to bring the subject around gracefully to
The
 
Page 202
Cloning of Joanna May,
this novel that Viking is just publishing, in which the whole business of birth takes a fictional twist; the kind of fictional twist indeed that real life so often these days takes, whether it's to do with sex, or the weather, or reproductive techniques. Now I understand my cunning, when the organizers of this event rang my secretary Jane and asked "what is her talk entitled" and Jane put the call on hold and looked across the room and asked "what is the talk about?" and I said, ''Why, Of Birth and Fiction, of course." I meant to talk about
The Cloning of Joanna May
.
Some hopeful readers do see the book as science fiction. No such luck, I say, this kind of thing is happening all the time, all around. Science Speculation takes it to the limits of doubt. It is the duty of writers, I say, to take these social implications on board. What I really mean is, how extraordinary, what a wonderful thing to write about: you need never be finished. Whole onion layers of plot and purpose to be peeled away, and yet more to come. I bit off more than I knew. Just as Joanna May had a piece bitten out of the back of her neck, by her ex-husband Carl, who was a dab hand at genetic engineering, and knows full well that cells taken from the back of the neck, good fresh bloodless tissue, are particularly rich in DNA.
Joanna May
is about a woman of sixty who discovers that thirty years ago, unbeknownst to her, she was cloned. This Joanna May, divorcée, childless, wealthy, lonely, discovers one day that she has four identical twins walking around the world. Suddenly, a family. Sisters, perhaps. Or are they daughters? They are younger than she is. Would they see her as mother, just because she was older? Would they grant her more wisdom, because she was sixty: or less, because she was older, understanding that the world itself gets wiser year by year, so that to have been born earlier is a positive disadvantage when it comes to wisdom? Clones, they are, at any rate. Replicas of Joanna May. Joanna May, given another chance; another stab at life, born to a different world, a different strata of society, a different education: Joanna May if only....
Joanna May is shocked at the discovery. Taken aback. These are her views when she hears what her ex-husband did to her.
The world turned upside down. I went to Carl's office to have it out with him, but he had it out with me, and took some living cells from my neck, what's more: the kind of good fresh bloodless tissue that's rich in DNA: he could grow all kinds of me from thathe's right. Ugly, headless, always miserable, always in pain: five-legged, three-headed, double-spined: every leg with perpetual cramp, all heads schizophrenic, and spina bifida twice over. If he wanted, if he could persuade them to do it, that isand he is a Director of Martins Pharmaceuticals, isn't he, and a benefactor of this and that: an interesting experiment, he'd say, a favour. You do this for me and I'll do that for you. Would
 
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they? Snip and snap, create a monster? Not if Carl May put it like that, probably not, but if he said, humbly, in the cause of knowledge, just let's see if we
can,
just let's see. Only the once, then never again. (For once is ethical, twice is not.) Then you never know. They might. But what should
I
care; what is it to do with me? 'I' wouldn't suffer. The 'you's' might. Poor distorted things ...
The world turned upside down: inside out, round and about; fire burn and cauldron bubble: bubbling vats of human cells, recombinant DNA surging and swelling, pulsing and heaving, multiplying by the million, the more the merrier: all the better, the more efficiently for biologists and their computers to work upon the structure of the living cell, the blueprints of our lives, decoding the DNA which is our inheritance. A snip here, a section there, excise this, insert that, slice and shuffle, find a marker, see what happens, what it grows: record it, collate it, work back and try again. Link up by computer to labs all over the world. Bang, goes Mr. Nobel's gun, and off they go, false starts and fouling, panting and straining, proud hearts bursting to understand and so control, to know what marks what and whichand better it. This DNA, this double helix, this bare substance of our chromosomal being, source of our sameness, root of our differencethis section gives us eyes, that segment of this section blue eyes: take it away and presto, no eyeslaid bare the better to cure us and heal us, change us and help us, deliver us from AIDS and give us two heads. And all of it glugging and growing in a culture of
E. Coli
the bacteria of the human colon, tough, fecund, welcoming, just waiting around all that time to do its stuff at our behesttoss it, turn it, warm it, start it; nothing stops it. Well why not?
I, Joanna May, beautiful and intelligent in my prime, now past it, am a woman plus repetitions, taken at my prime. Carl's fault, Carl's doing.
I am horrified, I am terrified. I don't know what to do with myself at all, whatever that means now. I don't want to meet myself, I'm sure. I would look at myself with critical eyes, confound myself. I would see what I don't want to see, myself when young. I would see not immortality, but the inevitability of age and death. As I am, so will they become. Why bother? Why bother with them, why bother with me? What's the point? I can't bear it. I have to bear it. I can't even kill myselfthey will go on. Now night will never fall.
Of Birth and Fiction.
I wrote another book, also published by Viking,
The Hearts and Lives of Men
. A much simpler, more humane, instructive kind of novel, with a cliff-hanger on every page and a heroine called little Nell, who was the fruit of love, not biological engineering, new reproductive techniques. There seemed to be trouble there too. I have a word to say about her birth.
Reader, I am going to tell you the story of Clifford, Helen and little Nell. Helen and Clifford wanted everything for Nell and wanted it so much and so badly their daughter was in great danger of ending up with nothing at all, not even life. If you want a great deal for yourself it is only natural to want the same for your children. Alas, the two are not necessarily compatible.
Love at first sightthat old thing! Helen and Clifford looked at one another

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