A Typology of Islands Part 5 - The Island as 'Individual'.

Meditation XVII by John Donne, "The Wandering Island" by A D Hope, The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago (again!)

Recently my brother and I were discussing the history of the individual. When was the individual born? Those are simple words. But they make a very complex question. What exactly is intended by the term ‘individual’ here? What would it mean for her/him/it to be born?

Obviously the term cannot be understood as an anatomical one. Human beings have always been ‘individual’ entities – they are not, except in certain unfortunate circumstances joined to one another at the hip. Humans have always been ‘individual’ in that sense.

In another sense of ‘anatomy’, though,  humans never have been and never will be individual. We are all born of a mother and father, we are all subject to our bodies’ efficiency, health and ultimately, mortality. Individual? Don’t make me laugh.

What, then is the sense of ‘individual’ in this question? I took it to mean something like ‘capable of independent or reflective thought’. What I immediately understood as the individual was that iteration of human being living, thinking and feeling after the retreat of religious dogma, the loosening of the shackles of feudalism, the growth of cities, the emergence of the depersonalised bureaucratic nation state, the birth of the concepts of human rights and responsibilities and the revolution in communications technologies.

An obvious objection to taking these contexts as definitive is that there is nothing at all ‘individual’ about the thinking, feeling and action that happen most of the time in the contexts that I am sketching out, namely, technologically saturated,  late capitalist, secular, democratic states.

If you take individual to mean ‘atomised’ ‘isolated’ ‘deracinated’ then there are lots of 'individuals' breathing in and out, walking, talking, thinking and feeling in these very technology – driven, capitalist, secular, democratic, nation states.

On the other hand if you take ‘individual’ to mean ‘free’ or ‘having free choice’ then it becomes less easy to maintain that the individual has or ever will be born.

Perhaps it is possibility – rather than the practical unlikelihood – of being an individual that is all I need to locate on the timeline.

Moments such as Gallileo’s “Eppur si muove”  have to considered as ‘individual’ – in the sense that his utterance articulates an act of defiance and a declaration of intellectual/epistemological  freedom from his intellectual and epistemological context. He said something true and something new. That was the act of an individual.

And yet, what about the existentialists’ notion that individuality is too difficult, too anguished to be an actually liveable option for most human beings?

Long before that, Rousseau understood the difficulty facing human beings when confronted with the choice of taking up the freedom of the social contract. Ultimately he sees that the recalcitrant must be ‘forced to be free’!

Who wants to be an individual under those circumstances - pain or coercion?  

John Donne had no time for this nonsense of being an 'individual'. 

The metaphor of the island as intolerable human individuality is most famously expressed in Meditation XVII of John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall steps in my Sicknes published in 1624:

Meditation XVII
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Donne’s image of pieces of Europe being washed away must have been in Jose Saramago’s mind as he wrote The Stone Raft. 

Saramago agrees with Donne – the isolation of the human being is a bad thing – it signifies death: 

“Pedro Orce, who is old and already beating the first sign of death, which is solitude…..solitude is to blame, solitude can sometimes become unbearable…”

Saramago sees a remedy for this problem. In fact it is the very separation of the Iberian peninsula from Europe that gives rise to the remedy. This catastrophe re-makes social relations so that his characters find in one another, true friendship, real meaning, a longed for but perpetually deferred sense of longing. The movement of the island makes it possible for these individuals to overcome their atomised, secular, disinterested, contractual individuality. 

For Saramago, love and child rearing are the solution to the ills that beset the deracinated meaningless life of the individual.

Where Donne pities the individual man, Saramago holds him in contempt.

No man is an island? "Thank God" is Donne’s reason why not.  

Love and childrearing are Saramago’s reasons why not.

Another poet who took up the theme of the individual as an island is the Australian poet A D Hope. 

Hope's take on the 'Island - as - Individual' metaphor is far more pessimistic than Donne's or Saramago's.

His poem “The Wandering Island” is depressing but in a very Mid- Twentieth Century way, it is also ‘authentic’.

A paraphrase of this poem could be: “No man is not an island”.

“The Wandering Island”

You cannot build bridges between the wandering islands;
The Mind has no neighbours, and the unteachable heart
Announces its armistice time after time, but spends
Its love to draw them closer and closer apart.

They are not on the chart; they turn indifferent shoulders
On the island-hunters; they are not afraid
Of Cook or De Quiros, nor of the empire-builders;
By missionary bishops and the tourist trade

They are not annexed; they claim no fixed position;
They take no pride in a favoured latitude;
The committee of atolls inspires in them no devotion
And the earthquake belt no special attitude.

A refuge only for the ship-wrecked sailor;
He sits on the shore and sullenly masturbates,
Dreaming of rescue, the pubs in the ports of call or
The big-hipped harlots at the dock-yard gates.

But the wandering islands drift on their own business,
Incurious whether the whales swim round or under,
Investing no fear in ultimate forgiveness.
If they clap together, it is only casual thunder

And yet they are hurt—for the social polyps never
Girdle their bare shores with a moral reef;
When the icebergs grind them they know both beauty and terror;
They are not exempt from ordinary grief;

And the sudden ravages of love surprise
Them like acts of God—its irresistible function
They have never treated with convenient lies
As a part of geography or an institution.

As instant of fury, a bursting mountain of spray,
They rush together, their promontories lock,
An instant the castaway hails the castaway,
But the sounds perish in that earthquake shock.

And then, in the crash of ruined cliffs, the smother
And swirl of foam, the wandering islands part.
But all that one mind ever knows of another,
Or breaks the long isolation of the heart,

Was in that instant. The shipwrecked sailor senses
His own despair in a retreating face.
Around him he hears in the huge monotonous voices
Of wave and wind: ‘The Rescue will not take place.’

Hope’s final stanza examines my earlier claim that a moving island is a living island and rejects it outright. 

Human beings are islands. Moreover, human beings are wandering, deracinated, tormented and doomed forever to find only heartbreak and rejection in the search for love, community, belonging. 

The wandering island is a metaphor for what it is like to be an individual, properly understood. Lived without apology or alibi  the individual is a sorry, despairing,  isolated, fallen being who cannot, will not be rescued from that state.

This wandering island is, as I said, very much of its time. Living in the ghastly shadows of World War Two, writing in the same historical moment as Existentialism, the Theatre of the Absurd and watching the advance of consumerism and capitalism it is not surprising that Hope produces such hopelessness.

Of course, I don't want Hope to be right but lately I've been wondering.