Any scientist worth their salt eventually becomes accustomed to unpredictability. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of experiments fail—lab rats explode, bacteria escape the petri dish, etc. Still, I never anticipated that things could ever go this awry.
For the past decade, I have been conducting a highly expensive and groundbreaking experiment: confining a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters until one of them, through sheer random chance, produces a perfect facsimile of Hamlet. But rather than the unsullied words of the immortal bard, the chimps are writing nothing but copies of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
Which, don’t get me wrong, is still impressive, kind of. But I was really hoping for Shakespeare. And Plath is such a bummer.
At first, I thought it was a fluke. Hamlet is a complex work layered with ghost dads and revengeful soliloquies. Surely, the chimps are working their way up to it via a momentary detour into twentieth-century confessional literature.
But no. It’s just The Bell Jar. Page after page of it. They’ve even moved from the original 1963 edition to annotated versions, as well as reproducing an obscure critical essay of the novel originally published in a 1978 edition of Harper’s magazine.
And against my materialist conviction, I now question whether the perfect Plath reproduction is not random chance but instead the monkeys somehow accessing first-wave feminist literature via the collective unconscious or the fabled Akashic records.
It has also become evident that the monkeys are deeply unhappy in a way that we scientists have never noticed before. (Perhaps we never noticed because we didn’t care enough to look.)
They no longer clang at the typewriter keys with the reckless abandon of carefree and pantsless chimps. Instead, their eyes are vacant and deeply reflective. I also found one of the monkeys (whom I nicknamed Dolores) taking a smoke break and muttering, “I wonder if she ever really escaped that bell jar…” through sign language. At least, that’s what I believe she said. It was either that or “Dolores want orange, good girl, me.”
Has this overwhelming ennui always lingered within the simian soul, or was it coaxed to the surface by repetitive and mechanical typing?
I have begun to question whether I am to blame for plunging the hairy beasts into an existential crisis. Although I’m not sure I see the parallels between the monkeys and The Bell Jar protagonist, Esther. For one, we trapped the monkeys in a glass cube, not a jar.
Perhaps we will never know where exactly we went wrong. For now, all we can do is observe and hope that none of the monkeys will start writing Animal Farm. Otherwise, all hope is lost.