Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium

173 Pages·2018·4.285 MB·English

by  Hilary Thompson

Novel Creatures
“Novel Creatures is at once a course in applied sociopolitical philoso-
phy and a novel in itself. Through the course of its four chapters, I felt
as if I had read the ten novels explored and met each cast of charac-
ters. Through the lenses of Agamben, Benjamin, and Kafka, I achieved
an embodied sense of knowing what a post-historical state of human/
animal hybridity may achieve.”
Dawnja Burris, Assistant Professor of Media Studies,
The New School, USA
Novel Creatures takes a close look at the expanding interest in animals
in modern times and argues that the novels of this period reveal a dra-
matic shift in conceptions of “creatureliness.” Scholars have turned to
the term “creaturely” recently to describe shared aspects of human and
animal experience, thus moving beyond work that primarily attends to
distinctions between the human and the animal. Carrying forward this
recent scholarship, Novel Creatures argues that creatureliness has been
an intensely millennial preoccupation, but in two contrasting forms—
one leading up to the turn of the millennium, and the other appearing
after the tragic events of 9/11.
Hilary Thompson is Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College,
USA. She teaches and publishes on contemporary literature, particularly
on questions of the animal and globalization. Her work appears most
recently in the volumes The City Since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television
and Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth-
and Twenty-First-Century Literature.
Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
In recent years, many disciplines within the humanities have become
increasingly concerned with non-human actors and entities. The envi-
ronment, animals, machines, objects, weather, and other non-human be-
ings and things have taken center stage to challenge assumptions about
what we have traditionally called “the human.” Informed by theoretical
approaches like posthumanism, the new materialisms, (including Actor
Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and similar approaches)
ecocriticism, and critical animal studies, such scholarship has until now
had no separate and identifiable collective home at an academic press.
This series will provide that home, publishing work that shares a con-
cern with the non-human in literary and cultural studies. The series
invites single-authored books and essay collections that focus primarily
on literary texts, but from an interdisciplinary, theoretically-informed
perspective; it will include work that crosses geographical and period
boundaries. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into es-
tablished subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature
Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies
Rebecca Ann Bach
Race Matters, Animal Matters
Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1838–1934
Lindgren Johnson
Plants in Contemporary Poetry
Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination
John Charles Ryan
Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture
Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation
Rebecca Totaro
Novel Creatures
Animal Life and the New Millennium
Hilary Thompson
Novel Creatures
Animal Life and the New Millennium
Hilary Thompson
First published 2018
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ISBN: 978-0-8153-5689-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-3511-2207-8 (ebk)
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To Gail and Bill

Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction: Shared Catastrophe and the Call 
of the Creaturely 1
1 Trials by Water: Aquatic Landscapes, Questionable
Sacrifices in Yann Martel and Linda Hogan 18
2 Ringing in Animals and Eras: At the Circus with
Sara Gruen and Angela Carter 51
3 From Farm to Fable: Harvesting Humans in
J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Michel Faber 88
4 Dwelling in the Future: Human-Animal Apocalypses
in Indra Sinha and Barbara Gowdy 120
Coda: Tania James’s Millennial Elephant 145
Works Cited 151
Index 157
Acknowledgments
Energy from many inspirational sources has gone into this book. At
Bowdoin, I have received generous support, both intellectually from col-
leagues and materially from the College’s Faculty Research Fellowship
in 2014–2015. I’m especially grateful to my colleagues in the English
department and to my students in Animal Life, The Animal and the
Human, After Kafka, and Cosmopolitanism and Creaturely Life. The
rich environment of dynamic conversation and random reading recom-
mendations that Bowdoin provides has enabled my work immeasurably
so that it’s impossible for me to imagine having undertaken this project
elsewhere. Specific thanks go to Joanna Kass, Michael Tucker, and Rachel
Sturman for promoting the work of Barbara Gowdy, Michel Faber, and
Anna Tsing, respectively, at key moments. Also to Quinn Rhi, without
whose inspiration my course After Kafka would never have been taught.
Over the course of writing this book, I lost three of my own educational
mentors, who represented for me the fields of postmodernist feminism
(Patsy Yaeger), postcolonial literatures (Chelva K anaganayakam), and
modernist poetry (Frederick Flahiff). Remembering their classes and
guidance, I realize the extended importance teachers can have and the
debt this book and I owe them. I wish to thank, too, readers and sup-
porters of the manuscript at various stages, especially Dawnja Burris,
and also Karen Raber and Jennifer Abbott at Routledge.
I’m grateful, too, to family, Gail, GB, Beatrice, Andrew, and Evan,
who have kibitzed, coached, kept the faith, and even discreetly kept
their distance at all the right times. In addition to family, other people
in my corner, the friends and companions on my “spirit team,” have
been, again, Rachel Sturman, Paul Hoffman, Jayanthi Selinger, Jeff
Selinger, Linda Sinclair, Leila Virtanen, and Sarah Miles. I thank them
for their comradeship throughout. And to Belinda Kong, who has en-
livened musing over vegetables and poring over drafts: May we throw a
thousand shillings into the Serpentine so they will yet return.
Introduction
Shared Catastrophe and the
Call of the Creaturely
Creatureliness in Context
“A premonition of the imminent end of the world is always a shot in the
arm for the arts,” said Angela Carter in 1978, adding, “if the world has,
in fact, just ended, what then?” (“Alchemy” 507). The first observation
sums up a mood in late twentieth-century fiction, while the question that
follows might recall for many the unexceptional morning of January 1,
2000. It’s not surprising, moreover, that an intimation of an end to hu-
man history might spark thoughts of the animal. Giorgio A gamben, in
The Open: Man and Animal, sees the question of human/animal differ-
ence as not just any philosophical problem. Rather, this question is “so
decisive for our culture” because it produces the category of the human,
and if we think about an end to this decisive operation, we’re led to
think of our beginnings: “Paradise calls Eden back into question” (21).
Eleventh-hour humans turn not merely to the topic of animals but to the
question of how something that names itself “human” and names its
others “animal” ever began to tell its story.
We might call the primordial zone from which these distinctions
emerge “creatureliness,” a broad category encompassing both human
and animal that has become increasingly appealing in recent discussions
of human representations of animality. As I will elaborate in subsequent
chapters, ideas of the creaturely emerged prominently in turn-of-the-
millennium engagements with Walter Benjamin. In his work, scholars
found fertile ground for reconceptualizing the human in proximity to
the animal.1 The folkloric hunchback, in particular, often exemplifies for
Benjamin the doubled-over, downcast human who is at once shrunken
and drawn to the earth. In his essay on Franz Kafka, whose work he
claims is filled with such contorted figures, Benjamin hails the hunch-
back as “the little man who is at home in distorted life” (“Franz Kafka”
811). The scholar Eric Santner, in his reading of Benjamin, gives special
attention to this hunched human form as a signature trait of “creaturely
life,” a condition of animalized subjection to power that he sees as be-
longing distinctively to humans (24–26).2 Thus, for Santner, although
“creature” itself is a capacious category, the sharp paradox of being