Precariousness,kinship,and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

Abstract

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

Introduction

Judging from the growing number of critical reflections on the logic and logistics of the neoliberal political economy, precarity is the socio-cultural shorthand of our time. Its two dominant strands derive from several major contemporary concerns, of which biopolitics and ecopolitics receive a structurally highlighted position. Both converge on the issues of state, sovereignty, and the subject as tethered to the modalities of reason and governing that, to recall Michel Foucault’s insight, take their premise from the market as a measure of truth. This economic rationality, which drives the neoliberal politics of life, in turn forges new social forms of obedience achieved through specific modes of individualization wherein the subject is called to take responsibility for his and her own welfare and wellbeing. Conceived as an agent of self-regulation and economic self-investment, the neoliberal subject is cast as a homo economicus, “someone who pursues his own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interest of others” (Foucault, 2008/2004: 270).

Since their delivery in 1979, Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics have proved a durable springboard for theorizing the political consequences of establishing a social order where “the economy produces political signs that enable the structures, mechanisms, and justifications of power to function” (2008/2004: 85). Wendy Brown’s robust critique in Undoing the Demos (2017/2015) of neoliberal rationality’s assault on democratic structures, in particular, has demonstrated how “a permanent genealogy of the state from the economic institution” (Foucault, 2008/2004: 84) has worked to damage and gradually dismantle the political structures of citizenship and social solidarity. To quote Brown, neoliberalism empties out “democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it” (2017/2015: 39). In this line of thought, much like governmental action, which answers to the criteria of failure or success rather than legitimacy or illegitimacy, the neoliberal biopolitical subject is a mobile effect of reasoning which posits human agency as a form of capital, whose freedom is simultaneously produced and delimited by the obscurity of market forces. Unsurprisingly, then, the ascendance of neoliberal biopolitics finds companionship in “the culture of danger” (Foucault, 2008/2004: 67), whose tinkering with the relays of freedom and insecurity brings about new modes of social relation to power. As Brown reiterates, appropriated by the market, neoliberal subjects “have no guarantee of security, protection, or even survival” (2017/2015: 37). They thus operate as the biopolitical quotient of the economic gamble.

Correlative to the notion of insecurity as a social condition is the current intellectual debate around vulnerability and its extensions in a set of intersecting categories of precariousness, precarity, and precarization (Butler, 2006/2004; Butler, 2016/2009; Lorey, 2015/2012). All of these categories highlight our bodies’ interlacements with the world. Judith Butler’s thinking has been instructive here. It is the public dimension of our shared corporeal existence, she explains, that makes us vulnerable to the precariousness of life in the dialectic of inside/outside. As a material anchor of subjectivity, the body heaves into view the shared vulnerability of sentient beings and the limitations of their agency: “the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence” (Butler, 2006/2004: 26). Crucial to this view of the social foundation of precariousness as an ontological condition is the understanding of how vulnerability partakes of the logic of normativity that produces “frames of recognition” (Butler, 2006/2004: 5) for apprehending what constitutes a precarious life. As Butler goes on to argue, “a life has to be intelligible as a life, has to conform to certain conceptions of what life is, in order to become recognizable” (2016/2009: 7; emphasis in original).

This is to say that social normativity distributes vulnerability in a way that sets up structures of precarity, which Butler defines as a “politically induced condition” (2016/2009: 26) of exacerbated precariousness. Tied to the discursive practices that ascribe meaning to life, precarity emerges as a result of the unequal distribution of social interdependence and injurability, whose prevalent consequences are loss and grief. For Butler, precarity, as a political effect of social ordering, serves to explain how, by distinguishing between grievable and non-grievable lives, social norms furnish us with frames for understanding precarious existence. However, as well as “a presupposition for the life that matters” (Butler, 2016/2009: 14), grievability may also be viewed as part of the conceptual retinue of vulnerability, which, in foregrounding a field of affective intensity and ethical bonds, exceeds existential precariousness in its capacity to generate emotional reciprocity and moral attachments. This certainly links up with Erinn Gilson’s observation that far from being coterminous with precariousness, vulnerability “allows us to experience reassurance, sustenance, love, and even courage” (2016/2014: 64) and can therefore provide an affective and effective source of resistance against precarity.

Precarity boosts the “social positionings of insecurity” (Lorey, 2015/2012: 16) and inequality, which atomize the body politic into self-interested economic agents. To this extent, its dynamic provides a good laboratory for the study of an ethics of vulnerability under the auspices of neoliberal biopolitics. In this, I follow Gilson’s thinking about “an immanent ethics”, which addresses us through a set of recognitions:

that we all share in a common vulnerability; that particular forms of vulnerability, or precariousness, are often differentially distributed; that we possess a capacity for aggression that can lead us to abuse others in their vulnerability and the expression of which we must mitigate in order to conduct ourselves ethically; and that the vulnerability that we share binds us to one another in a way that we cannot undo or ignore. (2016/2014: 73)

Notably, Gilson’s theorizing of the ethical bonds that organize social life in the shared experience of vulnerability jars with the current neoliberal emphasis on individual economic agency, which, as Isobel Lorey argues in State of Insecurity, “is the precondition for the Western liberal governing of everyone’s body and self” (2015/2012: 26). This is to say that in an attempt to regulate precariousness through biopolitics and thus ensure economic benefit for the state, neoliberal governing ends up installing a social order where “[t]hrough attending to what is one’s own, the ties to others are dissolved, relational difference is segmented” (2015/2012: 26). In other words, defined as “responsibilized individuals”, who “are required to provide for themselves in the context of powers and contingencies radically limiting their ability to do so”, we become “expendable and unprotected” (Brown, 2017/2015: 134). Such expendable people remain oblivious to the power of social solidarity achieved through reciprocity and care. For Lorey, the sad outcome of this socio-political process is the governmental hijacking of insecurity by means of precarization as “a normalized political-economic instrument” (2015/2012: 39). By virtue of its regulation of social insecurity, neoliberal governance yields power from glossing over precarious life through appeals to what Lorey calls “virtuoso labour”, which constitutes the paradox of performance without content as a form of servitude: “when the presence of others is reduced to a capitalized product relation, the compulsion to prove one’s own virtuosity becomes a self-referential and competitive servility” (2015/2012: 86).

Insofar as it works to consolidate the grip of neoliberal reason over subjectivity, the pursuit of “virtuoso labour” renders problematic the praxis of an ethics of vulnerability. In fact, by making the subject amenable to biopolitical control, “virtuoso labour” exposes what Gilson calls the “framework of the epistemology of ignorance” (2016/2014: 74). Such a framework champions an “entrepreneurial subjectivity” (2016/2014: 98), rooted in a social ideal of “strength, competency, and impermeability” (2016/2014: 83). By extension, the constructed epistemic agent assumes the tropological signature of the state, whose mode of existence derives from closure of ethical relationality that may challenge the coherence of its self-interpretation and self-discipline. This is why against the master narrative of economic efficiency and political docility, Gilson offers the model of “epistemic vulnerability” (2016/2014: 93). This model posits modes of uncertainty and inquiry as foundational to our social relations, whether in learning or love: “To be epistemically vulnerable […] is not just to be open to new ideas, but to be open to the ambivalence of our emotional and bodily responses in nuanced ways” (2016/2014: 95). Put differently, “epistemic vulnerability” reconfigures neoliberal subjectivity along the lines of ethical bonds, in which everyone lives enmeshed with others as recipients of affect and care.

As a conceptual mode of dealing with social insecurity and the politics of precarity, “epistemic vulnerability” also calls our attention to the discursive frames that condition the political (mis)recognition and (mis)handling of the current climate crisis. The climate crisis’s close relation to human activity is encapsulated in the emergent events of the Anthropocene, to which the dominant response of global politics has been split “between knowledge and denial” (Colebrook, 2014: 10). Substantially, it is because, as Timothy Clark observes, “[t]he Anthropocene blurs and even scrambles some crucial categories by which people have made sense of the world and their lives” (2018/2015: 9) that we lose sight of it as “an emergent ‘scale effect’” (2018/2015: 72), whose material footprint varies across bioregions, microclimates, social classes, and individual subjects. The material discrepancies in the scale of the Anthropocene as a global phenomenon may account for the incongruence of critical views on the issue and their attendant social politics. Philosopher Timothy Morton, for example, defines it through the lens of Object Oriented Ontology, contending that “nothing can be accessed all at once in its entirety” (2018: 33). Least of all, he argues, can the Anthropocene be accessed, as it has the bearing of a hyperobject, “a thing so vast in both temporal and spatial terms that we can only see slices of it at a time” (2018: 125). This complicates our ecological awareness of structurally relevant contexts and impedes political action that ties environmental concerns to neoliberal commercial angst. In this respect, “[f]ree-market economists and demographers”, Greg Garrard reminds us, have been amongst the most vocal supporters of the “cornucopian” thesis, “arguing that the dynamism of capitalist economies will generate solutions to environmental problems as they arise, and that increases in population eventually produce the wealth needed to pay for environmental improvements” (2010/2004: 16–17). This stands in stark contrast to Brown’s argument that “[n]eoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity” (2017/2015: 44). Indeed, the cornucopians prefer to think that correlations between the use of natural resources and population growth work in favour of both, adjusting the dynamics of abundance and dearth through an ever-expanding social network of hands and imaginations (Garrard, 2010/2004: 17). What this reasoning fails to address, however, is how capitalism itself “is an anthropocentric discourse that cannot factor in the very things that ecological thought and politics require: nonhuman beings and unfamiliar timescales” (Morton, 2019: 6).

Materiality presents a good premise for examining the human and nonhuman as conceptual corollaries of the simultaneously scaled and shared phenomenology of vulnerability. The significance it has accrued in contemporary discourse of material ecocriticism signals a shift towards a recalibrated view on the ontological divide that organizes our thinking about human subjectivity, the species boundary, nature–culture entanglement, and the unequal spread of Anthropocene-related climate change events. In phenomenological terms, the material parameters of life are our primary ground of enmeshment with the world, recalling Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of flesh as “an element of Being” (1968: 139), which structures the “reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched” (1968: 147). As such, these parameters constitute the depth of an “intercorporeity” (1968: 141) that assembles body and consciousness into a biosemiotic cluster. For Merleau-Ponty, the ontological implications of the primordial properties of flesh have to do with “a new type of being, a being by porosity, pregnancy, or generality” (1968: 149). Therein the sentient subject finds itself enfolded into the moral economy of world-making. Placing emphasis on reciprocal openness to the world, this line of reasoning posits humans and other life forms in a chiasmic intertwining premised on the logic of kinship and care, as championed in Donna Haraway’s thinking about “companion species” (2008: 16), Stacy Alaimo’s ideas of “multispecies cooperatives” and “transcorporeality” (2016: 32), and Glenn Albrecht’s notions of the “symbioment” (2019: 102) and “solastalgia” (2019: 38). As a defining feature of the creaturely condition, the body is shown to assume its capacity to overstep its boundaries, exposing all beings to biospheric inter-connectedness that generates ever-evolving structures of responsibility and obligation and upsets the relays of man’s ontological appropriation and epistemological subordination of the biotic world.

The emphasis on “multi-species lifeworlds” (Herman, 2016: 2) and cross-species vulnerability, while challenging the epistemological stability of nature and the moral boundaries of human agency, has interesting implications for the domain of art and culture more broadly. Studying literary narratives through “a creaturely prism”, Anat Pick argues in Creaturely Poetics, “consigns culture to contexts that are not exclusively human, contexts beyond an anthropocentric perspective” (2011: 5). For David Herman, too, “[d]eveloping innovative approaches to the study of fictional narratives that feature nonhuman beings, particularly in their interactions with human characters, has the potential to bridge cultural and scientific understandings of humans’ ties with and responsibilities to broader biotic communities” (2016: 2). In this work, Herman takes the view that the human capacity for imaginative thought may potentiate new understandings of cross-species links that flourish in empathy and material solidarity as a precondition for undoing the anthropogenic damage to the planet. However, as Christine Marran persuasively argues in Ecology Without Culture, cultural narratives tend to employ the biological world largely in the service of human interest. Within such a self-serving approach, nonhuman materiality gets eclipsed by humanistic claims and histories of oppression are framed in terms of allegory and/or the anthropomorphic fallacy (2017: 6). Tied to the life of a particular human community, images of nature operate as “biotropes”, wherein the “natural elements are made to perform human value” (Marran, 2017: 11). Instead of the tropological enslavement of nature in discourse, which reifies the anthropocentric bias, Marran calls for “obligate storytelling”, which “emphasizes the bond, the fetter, the bowline, the ligare, of one being to another at the level of thought and matter” (2017: 27; emphasis in original). Keen to jettison cultural humanism as a conceptual source of industrial modernity’s depletion of nature, Marran imagines an ecopoetics, where language is coterminous with bios as oikos, constituting an aesthetic ontology, which “attend[s] to relations that pertain at a transcorporeal level” (2017: 28). Under the auspices of obligate storytelling, in other words, language may be thought of as a permeable threshold of the lived reality of companion species.

In the flesh: Vulnerability as genealogy

“The fate of the Neanderthals”, write Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse in The Neanderthals Rediscovered, “has been a mystery for more than 150 years” (2018/2013: 15). In this respect, Canadian author Claire Cameron’s forays into the Pleistocene era in her novel The Last Neanderthal are an interesting example of fiction’s attending to our ideas about our fossil kin and the human role in their extinction. Arguably, also inbuilt in the novel’s interest in Neanderthal life is the contemporary concern for species disappearance as a legacy of the Anthropocene. Here, as Claire Colebrook notes, extinction has at least three senses: the sixth great extinction, extinction of species, and human self-extinction (2014: 9). Propped up by the idea of life as “an embodied process of understanding” (Iovino and Oppermann, 2014: 4), my reading of the novel examines both its symbolic and symbiotic imaginaries. I take as my aim to highlight the affective histories of bodies as “living texts that recount naturalcultural stories” (Iovino and Oppermann, 2014: 6). In this, I borrow from Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s insight in Material Ecocriticism that stories are found in and founded on matter, thus bringing about “a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces” (2014: 1). Finally, by considering the material–semiotic ¹ dimension of vulnerability evoked in the narrative use of figures and tropes that put us on notice to both precariousness and precarity, I reflect on the novel’s conceptual attempts at obligate storytelling. In alliance with “epistemic vulnerability” (Gilson, 2016/2014: 93) in the experience of finitude, obligate storytelling inclines us toward a critical revision of the rubric of biopolitical subjectivity and human exceptionalism.

The ethical coordinates of obligate storytelling in The Last Neanderthal orient both the formal arrangement of the narrative and its diegetic plane. In formal terms, the text is suggestively framed by an epigraph from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The quote highlights the significance of genealogy, magnified in the visual presentation of the novel’s Neanderthal family’s lineage and the glossary of their speech: “Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are” (Eliot, qtd. in Cameron, 2018/2017: n.p.). ² The sentiment is echoed in the two-fold nature of the narrative itself, which alternates between the point of view of Girl, the novel’s eponymous Neanderthal, and that of Rose, a Canadian archeologist excavating her remains in today’s France. In this regard, the archeological site is an important trope of material history and a field of affective intensity, in which the novel establishes its empathetic connections between the two protagonists and two timescales. Consider the injunction of the novel’s Prologue:

When you are close enough, press the skin of your palm against hers. Feel her heat. The same blood runs under the surface of your skin. Take a breath for courage, raise your chin, and look into her eyes. Be careful, because your knees will weaken. Tears will come to your eyes and you will be filled with an overwhelming urge to sob. This is because you are human. (5)

Here two tropes — reading as a material encounter and archeology as a trope of human “auto-inspection” (Finlayson, 2010: 2) — consolidate into the novel’s conceptual effort to rethink the complexity of what constitutes humanity. The emphasis on the body and its capacity for affect informs the novel’s split narrative technique by virtue of its figuration of vulnerability. This not only questions our dominant misconceptions about the Neanderthals as oafs, but also draws parallels between the Pleistocene precariousness and Anthropocene precarity. In other words, the corporeal premise of the two narrative angles functions as an affective ligament by which humans are invited to perceive themselves through the refraction of Neanderthal optics. Such a notion is reinforced in the alignment of the Prologue to the photographic reproduction at the novel’s end of Neanderthal and human bodily remains locked in an embrace. We are reminded here of Papagianni and Morse’s cue that “one of the most interesting moments in prehistory” was when the “two human species roamed over the same territory” (2018/2013: 21). In equally material and metaphorical terms, Cameron shows that modernity is sedimented with and surrounded by its Pleistocene ancestry as well as haunted by its own possible demise.

The flux of precariousness in the protagonists’ lives assumes its structural significance from the narrative emphasis on Girl’s vulnerability to the violence of nature, on the one hand, and Rose’s “epistemic vulnerability” (Gilson, 2016/2014: 93) as an archeological practice, on the other. Her discovery of the shared grave amplifies uncertainty: “Perhaps they had been placed in this position by someone who thought they would want to face each other in death. They might have lived together” (25). Rose’s intellectual openness to Girl’s story is reminiscent of how archeologist Matt Edgeworth sees digging as a way of “following the cut” (2012: 78), a practice which brings to surface knowledge that arises from attentiveness to the materials responding to the archeologist’s skilled hands. Because an archeological site “is a space where artefacts and structures from other times and places break out into the open” (2012: 77), digging becomes a mode of encounter, where the “unfolding cut, in the context of our work upon it, configures our experience in such a way that we are obliged to follow it and see where it goes, and in what direction it takes us” (2012: 78). By no means depriving the archeologist of agency, “following the cut” may be viewed as an act–event, where the material exposure of the past precipitates the affective exposure of the present: it is a cut that connects and narrates. In Gilson’s terms, “following the cut” in Cameron’s novel makes manifest an “epistemic vulnerability” (Gilson, 2016/2014: 93), which acknowledges the ethical bonds between species. This allows Rose to claim that “there was probably a range of reactions to contact, from violence to sex to friendship” (55).

It is by “following the cut” (Edgeworth, 2012: 78) across time that The Last Neanderthal unveils the material and moral links which connect the human lifeworld to that of the Neanderthals. Like the site of excavation, Girl’s story opens in medias res, by focusing on the body as a perceptual apparatus: “It was the warmth that Girl would remember. The night, the specific one she often thought about later, the one that turned out to be among the last they had together, had been filled with warmth” (9). Notice how the sense of touch is called to presence by the power of bodily memory in order to make us mindful of Girl’s cognitive agency: her consciousness interprets the experience her body has stored within. Lest we think that this is limited to physical instinct, Cameron brings forth the affective bonds that sustain “the body of the family” in a state of material enmeshment and mutual constitutiveness: “That is how they thought of themselves together, as one body that lived and breathed” (9). The family’s emotionally coded self-perception is suggestive of Martha C. Nussbaum’s theorizing of emotions as “part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning” (2001: 1). This is so apt that we may think of Cameron’s Neanderthals as moral agents comparable to modern humans. Evoking the memory of Girl’s sleeping in “the tangle of bodies” (10), the narrative calls our attention to the sharing of both physical and cognitive space crucial to Neanderthal survival:

The protective layer of bone and muscle blurred. The edges of their shapes melted into the warmth. Thick lashes hit cheeks, breaths came slower, and the weight of long limbs fell away. When one had a dream, the others saw the same pictures in their heads, whether they were remembered in the morning or not. It wasn’t just their bodies that connected in sleep; it was also their minds. (10)

The narrative emphasis on the fluidity of Neanderthal subjectivity has several implications for our reading of the extent to which corporeal vulnerability shapes the Neanderthal family dynamics in its multispecies world. The communal dimension of Girl’s selfhood derives from her understanding of life as symbiosis: “It was how her blood spread heat to the bodies she loved. It was how she stayed alive” (11). Precariousness, Cameron shows, is the defining quality of Neanderthal life, most evidently conveyed through verbal portrayals of the starving body. The description of Big Mother’s emaciated form is a case in point: “The pain made her body feel like dry meat. A clutch of wiry gray hairs lifted from her chin, and large breasts lay proud and flat over her belly. The thick skin on her face showed the trail of a tear” (13). Our interpretive attention is drawn to the affective register of Neanderthal life, informed by a nuanced appreciation of their constant wager with imminent starvation and the threat of turning into “deadwood” (89) and going to “the other side of dirt” (64). The moral premise of such material descriptions throughout the novel is the idea that the body operates as “an ontogenetic clock”, which “turns, waltzes and rolls like an eddy” (Serres, 2012/2010: 178), perforating the material texture of the world through its own vulnerable exposure. It is what makes the body coextensive with the tomb figured as an archeological dig, in which Rose and her team “follow the cut” (Edgeworth, 2012: 78) to establish connections between different scales of time and place.

The haptic frame of Neanderthal sociality in Cameron’s novel highlights the conceptual links between precariousness and the performance of affective labour, which is routed through the concerns of life and death. Here too, the body is oriented symbiotically, as a figural passage for the world, shaping its creaturely life through becoming. The novel’s Pleistocene universe is one of interspecies kinship and contiguity, so that “If the family made a kill, many of the animals would also get a good feeding” (37). Girl’s fondness for Wildcat, in particular, recalls Haraway’s theorizing about companion species as coeval multiplicities at the shared table of life: “And so that was where their friendship rested: between hunger and opportunity. It didn’t lessen their bond” (77). Even Neanderthal speech has an “animalized” (Pick, 2011: 57) quality, grasping the material–semiotic interdependence of species: for example, Big Mother “called a body that talked too much a crowthroat” (17) and their youngest, adopted, member Runt. The boy, we learn later, is the homo sapiens whose remains Rose finds next to Girl’s.

Hunting, too, is part of the novel’s relational ontology, in which all organic forms enmesh with one another, as suggested in this series of similes: “Like the bears, the family had the soft feet of predators that allowed them to sneak up on prey. Like the cave lions, they had eyes that faced front to judge the distance from a target. Like the birds, they could make sounds in their throats to call to one another and warn of danger” (37). What this figural logic suggests is that the family’s life as flesh is unthinkable without the material ligaments of nature, which subtend the “reciprocal zoomorphism” (Yates, 2017: 39) that guides their actions. In the Pleistocene world, Neanderthal emotional life has a broad ambit. For instance, Girl empathizes not only with her family members, but also with the hunted animals: “Girl walked on the ice to the calf. He didn’t run and let her take a small horn in her hand. She braced his head against her thigh. She gave him a pat, a moment of warmth” (65). What brings the novel’s Neanderthals and animals together in the emotional perimeter of their world is the sense of the shared vulnerability tied to embodied life. As Nussbaum reminds us, “Emotions are responses to these areas of vulnerability, responses in which we register the damages we have suffered, might suffer, or luckily have failed to suffer” (2004: 6). In The Last Neanderthal, what the family do is coeval with what they think and feel: it “could mean a chance to eat. It could even mean a change to the order of the land” (61). Nature here is not a background for cognition and material arrangement, but a source of being which casts vulnerability as oscillation between death and survival, tacitly echoing Haraway’s dictum that “the body is always in-the-making; it is always a vital entanglement of heterogeneous scales, times, and kinds of beings webbed into fleshly presence, always a becoming, always constituted in relating” (2008: 163).

This dynamic of becoming is nowhere more pronounced than in the significance attributed to sexual reproduction. Girl’s position in the family is fundamentally determined by her status as “the last girl” (21), invested with the responsibility of becoming the next Big Mother. The arrival of sexual maturity, literalized in bodily heat, amps up Girl’s corporeal vulnerability as a site of material–semiotic exchanges that define life in terms of “the essential difference between something living and something dead” (25). Extending the idea that Girl’s “body took shape from the land” (40), Cameron has her mating with her brother Him, even though her “job was to live outside their family by winning another place at the fish run” (69). In this, Girl and Him break Big Mother’s prohibition delivered in the form of shadow storytelling about “a brother and sister who had developed a taste for each other” and by choosing to live with the fish, ended up conceiving children “with eyes that stayed open in their heads like the fish in the sea” (20). While we understand Big Mother’s story as an injunction against incest and its attendant biological impact — literalized in her son Bent’s deformed body — Girl herself interprets the story as “a tale that reinforced their way of life” (21). Importantly, Bent’s death during a bison hunt reanimates the porosity of the family’s material boundaries: “They hummed and swayed and tried to fill Bent with warm from the family” (64; emphasis in original). The description of the siblings’ intercourse that follows Bent’s loss is laden with similar implications, heaving into view the ontological weight of symbiotic life:

The land came together inside them. Everything that his senses took in — the scents and patterns on the sand, the sound of the river water running close by, and the sway of the branches on the trees — turned inward toward her. Rather than scanning the land and listening to it, he was inside of it. Just then, just there, Girl became land. She was what fed him and kept him alive. (80)

Cameron rehearses the well-established metaphor of woman as land, whose conceptual reach in Western biopolitics has played into the hands of dominant power structures operating “to the disadvantage of women, nature and the quality of human life” (Plumwood, 2003/1993: 21). In the Neanderthal world, however, the logic of the trope is shown to be a corollary of precariousness, urging the body to connect one’s vulnerability to another’s, especially when it follows the experience of grief. All the more ironic is how the land’s symbiotic reciprocity through vibrating pinecones, chirping birds, stirring bears, and chattering badgers proceeds through paradox, wherein Girl and Him’s mating leaves the others exposed to assault. This vulnerability is further exacerbated with Girl’s eviction from the family and the ensuing leopard attack, during which she loses everyone except Runt, ending up as a metonymic sign of the family, whose memory she carries in her womb: “Girl was pregnant” (141).

In the dirt: Knowledge through care

The trope of the pregnant body performs the labour of obligate storytelling by calling our attention to the suggestive parallels between Girl’s and Rose’s material–semiotic conditions. The two female protagonists operate as alter egos in the paradigm of female vulnerability, for, like Girl, Rose is pregnant. There is, however, another aspect to Rose’s pregnancy: her delivery is yoked to her digging, so that the unfolding cut materializes more than one umbilical cord, reprising both the novel’s epigraph’s and Haraway’s view on bio-legacies: “When species meet, the question of how to inherit histories is pressing, and how to get on together is at stake” (2008: 35). The narrative description of Rose giving birth heaves into view the symbolic significance of material continuity: “I growled and yelled and didn’t stop, and time didn’t move in a linear way. Every body that had come before mine, every change in our species’ structure over millennia, every reflex of my ancestors’ muscles came into play. I pushed and pushed through more years than I knew there were” (229). It is unsurprising, therefore, to find animal metaphors in Rose’s references to her pregnancy: “How could I have already turned into a cow?” (31). Caitlin’s, her primatologist colleague’s, scepticism about Rose’s insistence on uninterrupted work has a similarly creaturely lens. In response to Rose’s accusation that Caitlin makes her sound like an animal, the primatologist answers: “You are” (201). As a variation on this tropological set, Rose’s partner Simon assumes the form of a Neanderthal, terrifying a little girl in an IKEA car park: “He was suddenly large and fierce, his lips pulled back to show his teeth, eyes wide” (170). If the novel’s Neanderthals are shown to be like animals, modern humans are shown to be like Neanderthals, recalling Butler’s quip that “animality is a precondition of the human” (2016/2009: 19).

For Cameron, corporeal vulnerability unfolds as an ontological condition that connects modern humans to their Pleistocene cousins, highlighting the power of the empathetic imagination used in the service of care, cognition, and creativity. In fact, perhaps we need to recalibrate our protocols of empathy into a measure of compassion, which, as Nussbaum explains, differs from empathy in its concern for value: it entails “recognition that the situation matters for the flourishing of the person in question” (2001: 316). In The Last Neanderthal, the dramatic edges of the protagonists’ vulnerabilities are primed for our compassionate consideration, through which we may unlearn the cognitive habits that nourish the logic of anthropocentrism and human arrogance. The trope of “following the cut” (Edgeworth, 2012: 78), in particular, delivers an epistemic modality bound to a mobile ethics of care through the sharing of pain, which “promises disclosure, promises becoming” (Haraway, 2008: 84).

Paradoxically, the corporeal ties that foreground the material similarities in Rose’s and Girl’s lives also set them apart. Hungry and heavy with child, Girl is an embodiment of life keyed to the fluctuations in nature and her companion species as oikos. Thinking herself abandoned by Runt and driven to the brink of death, Girl kills both Wildcat and her newborn baby, saving only his bent arm-bone as a reminder of her past: “Girl buried the bones near a tree so that the baby would grow into the trunk, but she kept the small arm bone. She tied it into the softest hide, then looped the pouch to her belt. Until the day she died, she would wear that bone to remember” (264). The precariousness of Neanderthal life, we understand, is not singular to Girl, but part of the ontological mesh, to which she is exposed as a sentient being. Rose’s postpartum anxiety, on the other hand, derives as much from her physical exhaustion as from social insecurity. This produces her sense of precarity and makes her consider killing her son Jacob: “There was only so much strength to go around and it wasn’t enough. I snatched him up. Only one of us could live” (256). She is stopped by Caitlin, who rescues both mother and son by helping them rest. The novel plays on narrative echoes and structural homologies. Caitlin’s care, we understand, stems from her own loss of her baby during depression. This is where Cameron tips the scales of being: the ontological weight of motherhood unfolds “athwart the lines of so-called species difference or kingdom” (Yates, 2017: 13), connecting Rose, Caitlin, Girl, and other women in a shared vulnerability of the female body.

Arguably, Rose’s new appreciation of Caitlin’s kindness and care emerges from a shift in her own recognition of her susceptibility to biopolitical power. Unlike Girl, who is a symbiotic agent of the Pleistocene world, Rose operates as a neoliberal subject, loaded into the discourse of homo economicus, whose vulnerability is highlighted not only in her challenging of the assumptions about Neanderthals, but also in her financial insecurity: “I’d spent hours on my cell phone assessing my prospects for funding a more substantial dig on the site. I was affiliated with a university, but its trustees were not sufficiently moved to cough up more than a paltry sum” (46). Rose’s partner Simon is caught up in a similar tangle of neoliberal precarity. Having given up a tenure-track position in Bristol to be with Rose, he ends up working as a temporary adjunct, with few prospects for anything more than a summer course and little income to fall back on: “Our mortgage was enormous by any standard. Like people in New York or Sydney or Vancouver, we lived hand to mouth no matter how much we tried to cut back and pare down” (108). On top of this, Rose discovers that she is not covered by the National Health Service and cannot go back to London to care for her infant son. This may explain why she refuses to go on an unpaid maternal leave and relegate her work to others. In fact, during her pregnancy, she not only flies to the US to secure financial support for her project from the Ancient History Museum, but also expresses animosity towards Caitlin, when she arrives to share in the archeological duties. Rose’s pregnancy feeds into her fear of losing authority and epistemological control over her site: “The authority had shifted. The change in me now felt complete. I had turned into a vessel for the baby” (202). In a ridiculous feat of “virtuoso labour” (Lorey, 2015/2012: 86), she has her assistant design a contraption that allows her to “lie facedown” at the site: “My belly hung down, but it rested in a crate and was cradled in a blanket to protect it while I worked” (194). It is only when her sanity and her son’s life come under threat that Rose learns to appreciate the value of kinship and care: her empathy for Girl leads to compassion for Caitlin as a grieving mother. By reciprocating vulnerability Rose graduates from a neoliberal curmudgeon to a caregiver.

In a metaphorical sense, the grave Rose excavates is a powerful sign of grief, which organizes the novel’s conceptual resources around the issue of anthropogenesis. Recalling Butler’s thinking about grievable life, the Neanderthal family’s experience of death materializes a lens through which we are called to examine our own finitude in the folds of time. As a mode of transformation, death, too, is shown to be inherent in symbiosis. This is related in an episode where the family bury a brother, Fat Boy, under a tree to make sure “that the life from that body had transferred to the tree” (90). What the material apertures of Rose’s excavation site call into question are the conceptual premises of human exceptionalism framing the dominant view of the human–Neanderthal encounter. In Cameron’s novel, Girl, a Neanderthal, and Runt, a homo sapiens, are equally subjected to the laws of symbiosis and reciprocity as social conditions of material finitude. Having lost the rest of the family, Girl and Runt take care of each other and thus ensure each other’s survival. Despite Girl’s acute perception of Runt’s difference, her affection for him never falters; in fact, her responsibility is largely predicated on her sense of the boy’s vulnerability: “Runt’s limbs were oddly slim. His chest was as narrow as a leg. Girl had got more used to his looks, but at first she’d worried that his bulging eyeballs might pop out of his head” (146). A material sign for the species boundary, Runt is not just the prime recipient of Girl’s affection and care, but himself becomes an agent of Girl’s survival. Toward the end of the novel, Cameron stages an interspecies encounter, where the starving Girl meets a human female who had been looking after Runt after he wandered away: “The woman looked into Girl’s eyes. As she did, tears welled up in her own. She pressed the skin of her hand against Girl’s larger hand. The same blood flowed under their skin. Their hearts beat at the same time. They shared a single thought: We are not alone” (268; emphasis in original). Thousands of years later, Rose joins in reciprocal empathy: “I know that if I had ever been fortunate enough to meet her, I would look into her eyes and know her. And maybe she could know me. We are much the same” (272).

What this humility fleshes out is the significance of geological dust — humus — in the novel’s conception of subjectivity. In foregrounding material and emotional reciprocity as an ontological structure, for which the photographic reproduction is a powerful visual trope, Cameron thinks in sync with Michel Serres’s observation about how the subject emerges from the condition of subjection, which is to say how all humans originate in humus. In this respect, then, the novel’s burial site is also a site of origin, enfolding and materializing the subject as an object of time: “The subject lies below place’s reference, a tumulary stone. Object: steele, cippus, gravestone. Subject: buried corpse” (Serres, 2015/1987: 121). By dint of the novel’s unfolding cut, the Pleistocene remains offer a material testimony of subjecthood, whose ontology bypasses the species divide to rest in the humility of being. Implicit in the visual reproduction of the gravesite with Girl’s and Runt’s bones is an ethics of kinship and care, which mobilizes a hominin alliance: “The two skulls lay together in the dirt. They faced each other, their eye sockets level, as though they had been looking at each other in their last moments of life” (Cameron, 2018: 55). In this, the novel swipes at the questions of ontological difference, reiterating Butler’s call to rethink the human as “a value and a morphology that may be allocated and retracted, aggrandized, personified, degraded and disavowed, elevated and affirmed” (2016/2009: 76). Predicated on humility, Cameron’s figuration of care reaffirms an ethics of vulnerability that structures our obligations to material history in deep time as much as in contemporaneity. In concert with its call “to follow the cut” (Edgeworth, 2012: 78), the novel’s temporal scene mobilizes a series of material–semiotic openings, where ancestral traces are shown to be not quite anterior, but interior to human social formation.

Conclusion

Split into two timelines, The Last Neanderthal works not unlike a clepsydra seeping the narrative dust of the past into the present and thus reflecting on the trajectories of endurance and extinction, which alert us to the precariousness of embodied life. Insofar as it is reinforced through the emphasis on corporeal vulnerability, the narrative’s chiasmic shape foregrounds an isomorphism anchored in the female body as a timepiece in its own right, testing the conceptual parallels between Neanderthal and neoliberal subjectivities within the bracket of kinship, continuity, and care as premises of anthropogenesis. Seen in this light, the narrative emphasis on symbiotic life and its material–semiotic ligaments recasts vulnerability as a moral compass that steers the life of the novel’s hominins: Girl and her family in the Pleistocene age, Rose and her team in the twenty-first century. However, rather than positing humans as the ultimate inheritors of the earth, Cameron re-imagines Neanderthal life as a sign of an origin that exceeds our biological conception of time embodied in Girl’s fossilized remains. Not only do the excavated bones speak of precariousness as a shared originary condition, but they realign Rose and Girl in the economy of matter, which negotiates the affective coextensions of material and maternal phenomenologies. In fact, the name of Rose’s son, Jacob, by subtly recalling the biblical narrative of a stolen birthright, calls into doubt the very logic of speciesism that addresses humans as the world’s rightful heirs. For Cameron, humans and Neanderthals are agents of both corporeal and “epistemic vulnerability” (Gilson, 2016/2014: 93). Insofar as they are species, they entail ways of looking (species is a cognate of specere, from Latin “to look”) and thus are constituted by existential reciprocity rather than biological separation. Amplified for empathy and compassion, the novel’s structures of vulnerability prime their readers for a renewed attention to creaturely categories, which organize the conceptual resources of contemporary biopolitical imaginaries. As a result, in the novel’s obligate storytelling, becoming human is neither an ontological nor biological condition, but a contingency and possibility enacted through material–semiotic ligatures, which bear as many flaws as potencies.