Page - 64 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

DEGENERATION AND EUGENICS AS THEMES WITHIN NORDENHOLT’S MILLION Contemporaneous fears of degeneration are central to the novel’s advocacy of population selection and the necessity for control of that population by “high- er men”.73 Importantly, the threat to human survival and development is not only external, in the form of the blight, but also internal, arising from what the text presents as the nature of humanity. Nordenholt sends Flint to London to understand human nature deprived of the veneer of civilisation. This insight is invaluable for developing Flint’s recognition of the need for controlling the sur- viving population until it can be shaped into a less-base people. Nordenholt tells him, “I want you to see what it [human nature] amounts to when you take off the leash. Of course the brute is the basis.”74 Accordingly, an entire chapter of Nordenholt’s Million is dedicated to educating Flint by emphasising the fragility of civilisation. As Nicholas Ruddick notes, this chapter – “Nuit Blanche”, with its sense of a night that is never fully dark – is a “phantasmagoria of embodied anxieties”, chief among which is the vision of humanity consumed in crisis by its baser instincts.75 “Nuit Blanche” charts Flint’s journey amongst a starving population turning to cannibalism, ritualism and barbarism and, as such, com- ments critically on human nature and the tenuous façade of civilisation. Flint’s passage into the Thanatotic burning landscape of London highlights the horrors “at the roots of humanity” and draws attention to humanity’s links to its animal ancestry. Flint laments that the “trail of the brute’s over everything” and on his return, Nordenholt emphasises that this must be taken into account as plans are made for the future development of civilisation.76 Cumulatively the encounters during “Nuit Blanche” emphasise that the ca- tastrophe has exposed people’s hidden natures. The collapse of law and the onset of mass starvation outside the Nitrogen Area create unrepressed, animal- istic individuals. As a result of his experiences of barbarity during his long night in London, Flint understands that “the old civilisation went its way, healthy on the surface, full of life and vigour […] yet all the while, at the back of it there lurked in the odd corners the brutal instincts, darting into view at times for a moment and then returning into the darkness which was their home”.77 While these traits are associated with the entire population (just as they had been in H. G. Wells’s 1898 disaster novel The War of the Worlds in its subtler treatment of the same ideas), here they are linked directly with foreigners (a Jew stere- 73 See Stone 2002, passim and MacKenzie 1990, 150. 74 Connington 1923, 149. 75 Ruddick 1994, 117. 76 Connington 1923, 182. 77 Connington 1923, 181. 64 | Jennifer Woodward www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 51–68