The Space Between - Identity and 'the Other' in Pomerance's the Elephant Man

It has been noted that the problem of pain is to the Christian as the problem of beauty is to the atheist. One seeks to resolve the certainty of suffering with the existence of a good god; the other struggles to explain the reality of beauty apart from intelligent design. Tennyson, in his rendition of King Arthur's death, suggests a jaded compromise: "O me! for why is all around us here/As if some lesser god had made the world,/but had not force to shape it as he would..." (Tennyson 434). Arthur has seen evidence of God through the beauty of nature but has felt His absence personally. The arbitrariness with which disease and disability afflict some people and not others implies an egregiously disinterested God. Perhaps, then, a god less potent, less good, less capable, has created the world, but has done so carelessly, with one hand behind his back; or perhaps he was well-intentioned but lacked the power to execute completely his vision. King Arthur continues, citing the potential of the "High god" to enter the world, and restore this flawed creation. Years after Tennyson penned Idylls of the King, several postmodern plays emerged which revived this notion of a detached, ineffectual deity. In The Elephant Man, Bernard Pomerance retells the story of Joseph Merrick, a man of monstrous physical deformity who is rescued from his life of ill treatment and introduced into society. Pomerance fashions a deeply religious script that relies largely on symbol and human representation. Frederick Treves functions doubly to illustrate both the hegemony of normality, and the "lesser god" lamented by King Arthur. John Merrick completes the binary as the marginalized other, but also acts as the "High God" for whom Arthur waited to "behold [the world] from beyond/And enter it, and make it beautiful" (Tennyson 434). As Merrick constructs the model of St Phillips, Pomerance creates a cumulative metaphor of a space in which the hegemony and the marginalized can exist together on equal footing. It is this neutral ground that allows our individuality to take shape.

Frederick Treves is first juxtaposed with divinity when his name, uttered by Merrick, is misunderstood as "Jesus." Later, the cynical agnostic, Carr Gromm, intentionally refers to him as Jesus, a designation that Treves neither accepts nor rejects. Instead, he asserts his plans to make Merrick as normal as possible, "like us" implicit in the term "normality." Merrick, who is familiar with the Bible, loves Psalms but expresses perplexity at the book of Job. Reminiscent of King Arthur's ambivalence, Merrick easily comprehends God in the context beautiful poetry, but struggles with "a just God [who] must cause suffering...merely then to be merciful" (Pomerance 19). Merrick then grafts this paradox onto Treves, asking "If your mercy is so cruel, what do you have for justice" (27)? This penetrating question follows a lengthy dialogue between Treves and Merrick, in which Treves' moral instruction to Merrick, evocative Old Testament law, has begun. Merrick, who does believe in god, nevertheless whittles away at Treves' moral superiority by exposing his doubt. With this loss of conviction, Treves loses power to replicate in Merrick the image of normality. Treves tries to create a world in which binaries topple and hegemonic and marginalized boundaries dissolve. His intentions, however, are impeded by impotence and by his subject's lack of faith. he assumes that we can exist together by erasing our differences and masking our weaknesses. however, Treves himself cannot forget that those variances exist. "Don't you know what you are?" he asks Merrick after Mrs Kendal has disrobed for him. His question not only intimates that somehow this situation was rendered more immoral by Merrick's condition, but reifies him, as if his condition made him less than human: note that Treves said "what you are" instead of "who you are."

After Merrick is rescued by Treves and brought to live at the hospital, people begin to fulfill wishes that Merrick never actually declares. Merrick's true desires seems relatively few and simple; among them, he wants companionship and an outlet for his dreams. According to history, Treves did not allow Merrick to have a mirror in his room, denying Merrick the advantage of visual affirmation of himself. On one hand, this may indeed have spared him more pain and uncertainty, for "If a mirror serves to reconfirm one's sense of one's own ego, the boundaries of the self, then Merrick's experience of looking into the mirror would reconfirm only the fluidity of his self, the instability of his ego" (Graham 94). On the other hand, the mirror provides a way to fortify the assurance of our existence. Sartre touches on this idea in No Exit, as the character Estelle muses about the lack of a mirror in Hell: "When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist...When I talked to people I always made sure there was

Scene 10 furnishes a look at two ways in which Merrick is able to form an understanding of his identity. He is without the benefit of a mirror, but he still demonstrates an astute comprehension of what is signified by our relation to other people. "Do you know what happens when dreams cannot get out?" he asks Mrs Kendal. Until now, he has been alone. It is peculiar to imagine that thoughts did not exist before he had meaningful human contact, but it is a profound and precise truth, and one that Martin Buber examines in his book I and Thou: "Individuality makes its appearance by being differentiated from other men" (Buber 62). It was not enough for Merrick to have infinite space into which his thoughts could travel. He needed the space to be defined by another human being. Thus, Mrs Kendal serves as a sounding board for Merrick's thoughts, demonstrating that we need other people both to receive and to rejoin, to give our thoughts shape and significance. It is the emptiness between two points that give definition to the points themselves. So the emptiness becomes fullness, "not like the blood that circulates in you, but like the air in which you breathe" (Buber 39).

While Merrick and Mrs Kendal talk, Treves enters: "You are famous, John. We are in the papers...Look, it is a kind of apotheosis for you" (Pomerance 34). The second way in which Merrick learned about himself was in other people's reactions. "To look at himself in the papers is to learn to look at himself as others see him..." (Graham 95) When he was managed by Ross, all he ever received was revulsion. People reacted in fear, panic, shock, even moral outrage. Once Merrick is brought to the hospital, Treves apparently goes through a string of nurses who all flee from Merrick. Now, Treves insinuates that by receiving such attention in the papers, Merrick's position is not only elevated, but exalted. Immediately after Treves' announcement, Mrs Kendal (once again, presuming to dictate what is best for Merrick) asks permission to bring more visitors, asserting that he "would benefit by...being acquainted with the best, and they with him" (Pomerance 34). Merrick's deification begins subsequently.

John Merrick is an unlikely figure to assume the role of the higher god. Yet the people with whom he becomes acquainted respond to his otherness by exalting him, as if tacit in his vile appearance is a paragon of inner virtue. Scene 11 is an intriguing parallel to the accounts of the wise men's visit to the young Christ. It is Christmas time, and members of British royalty, bearing gifts, flock in ostensible deference to Merrick. Like the gold, frankincense, and myrrh offered to the Christ child, the silver and ivory toilet articles have ho practical value for Merrick. However, after presenting their useless gifts, they begin to pour "his or her own content into the expressionless Merrick..." (Graham 90). And, as men often do, instead of allowing god to serve as standard by which to teak our own blemished humanity, we fill the altar with worthless gifts, demanding in exchange the right to "[polish] him like a mirror, and shout hallelujah when he reflects us to the inch" (Pomerance 64).

The beginning of scene 11 and the end of scene 12 are marked by Merrick's building the model of St. Phillips, suggesting that his construction never ceases during these scenes. "After each has said how Merrick is so 'clearly like me,' the final spot falls on Merrick 'placing another piece on St Phillips,' building a context in which his identity can never be fully known, his self never reduced to a mirror of others" (Graham 99). This marks a need that exists for all men. What we have to offer needs to be esteemed beyond its potential benefit to others; that which can be known of us needs to be valued as inherent and unique to us, not for how it reminds someone of themselves. Only one place can foster that kind of mutual deference. "Scene 12 underscores the need for the church as a place where Merrick can be understood as an image of the God who is never fully graspable, knowable, possessible" (99). Merrick is clearly not a god, nor the image of a god, but an image of the God, the creator, who molded all men after His likeness. However, he becomes god-like when he builds the model of St Phillips, perhaps in quiet protest of his "benefactors" who are trying to assimilate him into a society into which he will never fit. The only way for such widely divergent worlds as Merrick's physical abnormality and spiritual richness and the hegemony's spiritual poverty to coexist is not by merging them, but by acknowledging the space between them.

Works Cited

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York, 1958.

Graham, Peter, Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters. Johns Hopkins University Press; Baltimore, 1992.

Pomerance, Bernard. The Elephant Man. Grove Press, New York 1979.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Vintage Books, New York 1955.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Poems and Plays. Oxford University Press, London. 1967.