Someone knows Of mice and men, the John Steinbeck novel transformed into classic plays and films, is a masterpiece. Actually, that’s his name Of mice and men (About mice and people). In the communist “us” the ideologues saw fit to invert the original terms, preferring man over animals, equally Marxist and National Socialist idiocy, thus rendering the name homocentric, Of mice and men. Although it was not for nothing, that is, not without deep thought, the American author put animals in the first place, fragility, vulnerability and innocence became the theme of the masterpiece. So Steinbeck did what he did not to suggest hierarchy and human supremacy between the kingdoms, but to point out the delicate essence of both—the need for tolerance and undivided compassion.

Unlike Steinbeck, most who think of the hyphen between union and consanguinity, temperament, or the relationship between man and animal, rather speak in lamentation of man’s false superiority, his impermissible arrogance, the all-too-frequent degradation of so-called “superior” man into the ugliest or most hideous animal. They are right and they are doing well, only that this is too popular an accusation, wailing or gossip, repeated in vain, everyone knows about it, but absolutely everyone cannot change that truth, stop it “in time” when it manifests itself. Nor does Steinbeck completely ignore this cruel and evil reality, inserting social realist and indelible clichés of racism and tyranny, revenge or mob crimes into the story. And the African-American in the story risks being put to death in the end, and poor Lenny Small, a retard turned irresponsible and unwitting murderer, has to be brutally murdered unless his best friend decides to put him to sleep, precisely out of love and mercy. Thus, the idea of ​​the “world” as a fierce protector represented as an “animal” is also illustrated here. For this pose, the saying “people and rats” would be more relevant.

Otherwise, the mice that actually appear in the same human story the writer tells are symbolic and exemplary, a parable or an element of a much more complex parable (from the point of view of psychology and anthropology). The dim-witted but strong giant that is Lenny compensates for his mental deficiency and the animal-hormonal infantilist in himself by being extremely delicate, gentle and protective of his pet mouse. He then goes on to be extremely caring and kind to the puppy, only to kill him through (another) pure mistake. And he also dreams that he will be able to raise rabbits, that he will be able to work on a farm. That’s all that concerns the presence of an animal element, relevant as a symbol of innocent pettiness, sacrifice, vulnerability, fragility. Characteristics that will be mirrored in reverse, because the physically powerful, but extremely weak socially and emotionally person will constantly reach the limits and proximity of the anti-social pest, always approaching the ultimately inevitable reality of extermination. The marginal, the disabled, the vulnerable are the face and likeness of the mouse, the puppy, to which we could add so many little lives, whose fault is that they have a different level of consciousness and being, that people consider them harmful or harmful, that they become disposable and oppressed due to the lack of social mechanisms of effective compassionate protection.

Hence, Staibeck overturned the general, self-evident idea that I summarized above as the specificity or animal perfection of the human being. His short story focuses on the fragility of small and vulnerable animals, a dimension that becomes tragic when animals eventually mix inappropriately with human society, also a mirror of natural human vulnerability and fragility that can be activated in the case of enough human minorities in conflictual contact with a human majority that can become beasts. Crime and revenge under an ethical pretext, the freedom given to aggression when groups and mobs are mobilized to believe that killing is just, are issues of conscience that Steinbeck makes public, visible, discoverable.

And there is another detail, central and unnoticed to him, consisting of the situation of the companion who becomes a loving and protective father or brother. Psychoanalytically speaking, it is the anti-Cain. A non-fraternal brother, because it is through the union or fellowship of friendship, escape from loneliness and the profession of a paternal model, but it will end, although empathy and compassion, also a crime. Because, overcome by circumstances, he decides to free both his mentally ill child brother from the condemning inadequacy of him, and himself, getting rid of an overwhelming, burdensome, exorbitant debt, as a result of which he himself shoots poor Lenny. Here man is no longer a cruel animal, but on the contrary. He is even more tender, merciful and empathetic, but also (morally) suicidal. Even if he acted out of a terrible instinct spontaneously discovered/tested, it can only be compared to very rare situations where a lioness, bitch or cat does not leave the corpse of her cub, guarding and mourning it, despite the dangers and the need for self-preservation or self-defense. Or a lioness, a bitch, and a cat who eat him if he’s already been killed, numbing his pain by the very act of reintegrating the body she gave birth back into herself. Details that contradict or exceed general expectations or morality precisely because they depart from what is the norm or convention of the natural somatic-social.

In fact, I had no intention of introducing you to a book, novel, play, or movie at all. This is just an introduction, be it long, for (re)acquaintance or a slightly shorter moral. Namely, that we humans have more than the reserve of aggression or malice that we occasionally attribute to our mammalian sisters (when they have to attack, acquire, feed or defend). Humans are not only animals. Without culture and civilization, without law, interest, possibility or justification for war, we remain vulnerable, fragile, unstable, easily destroyed, alienated or undone, bio-physiological, social, economic and affective crises constitute as many risks and influences, unstoppable internal influences. On other scales, humans are still mice. Cockroaches, flies, ants. – Read the whole article and comment on Contribuotrs.ro