We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

UK edition, courtesy and copyright Serpent's Tail 2014

Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Plume) is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2014). Karen has written six novels and three short story collections. She lives in Santa Cruz, California. 

The novel's narrator and window into the story is Rosemary Cooke, who inhabits three ages: her 5-year-old, 22-year-old, and mid-forties selves, growing up in the town of Bloomington, Indiana. She heads off to the University of California, Davis to distance herself from a family tragedy. As a child, Rosemary talked continuously and at college she rarely speaks at all, especially not about her family, circumspect about her parents and introducing herself as someone who lost a sister and has a brother that travels frequently. The narrative zips back and forth in time over almost 40 years, focusing on a few months of Rosemary's college days in 1996, and slowly discloses how her sister, Fern, disappeared. Rosemary goes to Davis for other reasons--she's searching for her brother, Lowell, and it's the last place anybody saw him. He absconds after Fern's leaving and becomes a radical animal rights activist, a fugitive from the FBI, occasionally sending cryptic postcards from various locations. She sees him in Davis again for the first time in 10 years, where he describes Fern's current living conditions. The book begins in the middle of the story. In Chapter 1 we meet 22-year-old Rosemary.

Starting in the middle allows Rosemary to first emphasize the similarities of Fern to any other sister, delaying the reveal about Fern's identity until page 77, "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister," notes Rosemary. "You're thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet." Adds Karen, "I wanted to talk about Fern as a sister for a while before talking about her as a chimpanzee. I wanted you to first think about Fern as a human being with a stress on the being." 

During the early 1970s, they're raised as twins until Rosemary is 5 and they're part of a nature vs. nurture experiment carried out by her father, a psychology professor at the University of Indiana. Developmental milestones were being compared, as well as assessing what Fern's language capabilities were if she was raised as human. The experiment was abruptly terminated and Fern disappears; we don't learn more about her departure until the end of the novel, in the present of 2012. "She was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half," Rosemary says. "The neural system of a young brain develops partly by mirroring the brains around it. As much time as Fern and I spent together, that mirror went both ways." She's referred to as monkey girl by other children and she's taken on certain chimp traits--she's impulsive, possessive, and demanding and she sees the space around her vertically as well as horizontally.

"Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile. This is exactly what Fern did," Rosemary notes. "What seems not to have been anticipated was my own confusion." 

The story is about language, kinship, sibling loss, and two sisters unlike any other sisters.

An excerpt:

I always used to believe I knew what Fern was thinking. No matter how bizarre her behavior, no matter how she might deck herself out and bob about the house like a Macy's parade balloon, I could be counted on to render it into plain English. Fern wants to go outside. Fern wants to watch Sesame Street. Some of this was convenient projection, but you'll never convince me of the rest. Why wouldn't I have understood her? No one knew Fern better than I; I knew every twitch. I was attuned to her.

"Why does she have to learn our language?" Lowell asked my father once. "Why can't we learn hers?" Dad's answer was that we still didn't know for sure that Fern was even capable of learning a language, but we did know for sure that she didn't have one of her own. Dad said that Lowell was confusing language with communication, when they were two very different things. Language is more than just words, he said. Language is also the order of the words and the way one word inflects another.

Only he said this at much greater length, longer than either Lowell or I, or certainly Fern, wished to sit still for. It all had something to do with Umwelt, a word I very much liked the sound of and repeated many times like a drumbeat until I was made to stop. I didn't care so much what Umwelt meant back then, but it turns out to refer to the specific way each particular organism experiences the world.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied.

When the Kelloggs first raised a child alongside a chimpanzee, back in the 1930s, the stated purpose was to compare and contrast developing abilities, linguistic and otherwise. This was the stated purpose of our study as well. Color me suspicious.

The Kelloggs believed that their sensationalistic experiment had sunk their reputations, that they were never again taken seriously as scientists. And if I know this now, our ambitious father surely knew it then. So what was the goal of the Fern/Rosemary Rosemary/Fern study before it came to its premature and calamitous end? I'm still not sure. 

But it seems to me that much of the interesting data is mine. As I grew, my language development not only contrasted with Fern's but also introduced a perfectly predictable x-factor that undermined all such comparisons.

Ever since Day and Davis published their findings in the 1930s, there's been a perception that twinness affects language acquisition. New and better studies took place in the 1970s, but I'm not sure our parents were looking in their direction yet. Nor would such studies have been completely relevant to a situation such as ours, where the twins had such disparate potentials.

Though Fern and I were sometimes separated while the grad students observed us, we spent most of our time together. As I developed the habit of speaking for her, she seemed to develop the expectation that I would. By the time I turned three, I was already serving as Fern's translator in a way that surely retarded her progress.

So I think that, instead of studying how well Fern could communicate, our father might have been studying how well Fern could communicate with me. That there was a vice versa here, a tabloid-ready vice versa was unavoidable but unacknowledged. Here is the question our father claimed to be asking: can Fern learn to speak to humans? Here is the question our father refused to admit he was asking: can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees?

One of the early grad students, Timothy, had argued that in our preverbal period, Fern and I had an idioglossia, a secret language of grunts and gestures. This was never written up, so I learned of it only recently. Dad had found his evidence thin, unscientific, and, frankly, whimsical.

***

"When I began thinking about the book, I was intimidated by how little I knew about chimps; I consoled myself that I did know quite a lot about psychologists [her father was one]," says Karen. "So I read all the accounts of cross-fostered chimps that I could find and, yes, there are several of these. Many of them are referenced in my novel. I read a ton of other stuff as well, about chimps and bonobos in labs, in the wild, on preserves. I know I'm pushing the limits in many ways, but I wanted Fern's behaviors to be as plausible as I could make them, so I depended on these non-fiction accounts."

The story is inspired by an actual experiment in the 1930s, the work of Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, scientists at Indiana University who raised their son Donald alongside a chimp, Gua, for nearly a year, in a compare and contrast effort. Although it was predicted that Gua would pick up human behaviors, which did occur, Donald also picked up chimp behaviors, which was not anticipated and was one of the main findings. The Kelloggs wrote a book based on the experiment, The Ape and the Child, published in 1933.