Max’s relationship to biological determinism, like his relationship to Marxism, is fleeting at best. Eleanor, his intellectual foil who has heard this argument many times before, breaks down Max’s determinism in an extremely moving passage where she describes Max’s determinism as being “in cahoots” with her cancer:
Eleanor They’ve cut, cauterized, and zapped away my breasts, my ovaries, my womb, half my bowel, and a nutmeg out of my brain, and I am undiminished. I’m exactly who I’ve always been. I am not my body. My body is nothing without me, that’s the truth of it.What’s particularly striking is that, faced with this plea, Max immediately sacrifices his stance on the mind/body debate, even if it is only out of respect for his wife. He tells her that “I know your mind is everything,” a notion which Eleanor quickly rejects:
She tears open her dress.
Eleanor (cont.) Look at it, what’s left of it. It does classics. It does half-arsed feminism, it does love, desire, jealousy, and fear—Christ, does it do fear!—so who’s the me who’s still in one piece?
Eleanor Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.
Max’s lack of absolute conviction to biological determinism is inextricably related to his half-hearted loyalty to the Communist Party. At the beginning of the play, Max maintains that he has stayed with the Party based on his belief “that between theory and practice there is decent fit.” But in this scene with Eleanor he exposes a fundamental flaw in that line of reasoning: the practice of Communism, in Stalin, Husák, and most other actualized forms, did not match the goals of the theory. He can’t reconcile the material form of Soviet Communism with the grand ideas of Marxist Communism. Whereas Marx sought to liberate the masses from the shackles of their labor-based relationship with the ruling class, the ruling classes of the Soviets used the awareness of that relationship to exert totalitarian control over their subjects. In biological determinism, Max finds a safe, supportable materialism that can be substituted, however poorly, for the ideological materialism of Marxism that can no longer be justifiably defended. It is not all that surprising, then, that later in the play we learn that Max had actually left the Party in secret several years before the time he still claimed to be a member.
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