Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction

242 Pages·2019·1.94 MB·English

by  Timothy C. Baker

Writing Animals
Language, Suffering,
and Animality in
Twenty-First-Century
Fiction
Timothy C. Baker
Palgrave Studies in
Animals and Literature
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the sepa-
ration of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as
the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have
codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly
other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to
animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of
animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read
as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human
concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplin-
ary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the
material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying
a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the
aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply
illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals
in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to
the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The
series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related
discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre
and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural
ephemera) with which English studies now engages.
Series Board:
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
Timothy C. Baker
Writing Animals
Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-
First-Century Fiction
Timothy C. Baker
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, UK
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-03879-3 ISBN 978-3-030-03880-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964719
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A
cknowledgements
My greatest debt is to my students in EL45KP All Too Human, whose
willingness to embrace some of these concepts and texts, and to bring
their dogs to class, has been an unending source of inspiration. Elizabeth
Anderson, Tara Beaney, Julia Kotzur, and Bob Plant provided invaluable
advice on individual chapters. I am also grateful for the help and support
of Jess Anderson, Sara Baume, Max Casey, Lisa Coen, Milly Davies, Ben
Doyle, Elizabeth Elliott, Robert Eaglestone, Andrew Gordon, Emma
Grey, Polly Grice, Katherine Groo, Peggy Hughes, Alan Macpherson,
Caroline Magennis, John Miller, Catherine Parry, Wayne Price, and David
Wheatley. Early versions of some sections were presented at conferences
and workshops in Konstanz, Lincoln, Loughborough, and York, and I am
grateful for the conversations they generated and the comments I received.
I had the great advantage of writing this book in the first years of the
British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, and the collegial
support from far-flung colleagues dedicated to studying twenty-first-
century literature has been a tremendous boon. This book is dedicated to
Woodruff, Digory, Buttons, two dogs named Pippin, and all the foxes
(and some of the gulls) of Old Aberdeen.
v
c
ontents
1 I ntroduction: Literary Animals 1
2 The Ape Speaks: Rereading Red Peter in the Twenty-First
Century 39
3 Ladies into Foxes: Narratives of Transformation 75
4 The Dying Animal 109
5 The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories 145
6 Look! A Squirrel!: Animals Writing 185
Bibliography 211
Index 231
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Literary Animals
Nonhuman animals haunt the peripheries of contemporary fiction. If ‘the
animal’, as Kari Weil has influentially written, ‘has functioned as an unex-
amined foundation on which the idea of the human and hence the human-
ities have been built’, this is perhaps especially true of the novel, where
animals often function as silent witnesses or points of comparison.1
Animals, framed either individually or as a collective identity, are the oth-
ers against which humanity measures itself. Animals take many forms in
fiction, whether representing a desire for a shared existence, as in many
children’s animal stories, or appearing as fundamentally unknowable, as in
the boom of animal horror in the 1970s.2 Whether the animal is pre-
sented, in an inherently anthropomorphic way, as a familiar whose shared
existence with humans can better help them understand their own lives or
as an other who exists outside the sphere of human comprehension, how-
ever, the presence of animals in fiction presents a continual challenge to
questions of linguistic representation.
The presentation of nonhuman animals as both a counterpart to and a
negation of human concerns can clearly be seen in a novel such as Deirdre
Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008). Molly Fox never appears in the
novel, but is the centre around which the unnamed narrator’s meditations
on art, language, memory, trauma, and friendship revolve. Fox is an actor
heralded for her ‘remarkable understanding of language’, which she uses,
one character claims, to blow ‘a hole through’ unreality and dullness.3
Language and art are set apart from lived experience in order to reveal it
© The Author(s) 2019 1
T. C. Baker, Writing Animals, Palgrave Studies in Animals and
Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9_1
2 T. C. BAKER
more fully. Various characters argue that ‘there’s a kind of truth that can
only be expressed through artifice’ (117) and, indeed, that one can
‘redeem suffering through beauty’ (163). Language and art, which are
always linked in the novel, are thus positioned as a central human respon-
sibility. Each of the characters, present and absent, reflects on the ‘moral
responsibility […] to be fully human’ (200), and largely concludes, like
the philosophers discussed below, that humanity in part consists in linguis-
tic communication and the ability to create art that exceeds the individual.
For all its human concerns, however, the novel also includes brief appear-
ances by two nonhuman figures, one known through its unreality and one
even more mysterious.
Fox keeps a fibreglass cow in her garden, which astounds the narrator:
‘[t]he fake cow was absurd, and it baffled and astonished me that Molly of
all people should buy such a thing and put it in her garden. I mean, what
was the point of it’ (24, original emphasis). The cow is lifelike, but funda-
mentally artificial: it represents something real, and yet displaces that real-
ity into a context where it no longer makes sense. The cow is not symbolic
so much as a challenge to the human characters’ assertions about the value
of art. The cow is not beautiful or redemptive or psychologically revealing:
it simply exists, and cannot be explained. The garden also contains another
creature, however, a living hedgehog that is mentioned early in the novel
but only described in the final paragraph, which is entirely devoted to it:
And then I heard something rustle nearby at the bottom of a trellis.
Lumbering, slightly awkward but moving with surprising speed nonetheless,
it was a hedgehog. It had noticed me now, and it came to a complete stand-
still. Even when I stood up and moved towards it, it didn’t budge, and so I
was able to inspect it at my leisure. How strange it was, with its crown of
brown spines and its bright eyes, its squat feet and pointed snout. It looked
completely other, like a creature that had arrived not from a burrow beneath
the ground, but from another planet. I moved closer again and still it stood
there, immobile. It was only when I drew back that it scampered off once
more. At the foot of a climbing rose it came across the champagne cork that
had shot off into the undergrowth when Andrew opened the bottle. The
hedgehog stopped for a moment, sniffed it, tapped it with its foot, sniffed it
again. Inscrutable, mysterious, it moved on once more and then disappeared
into the shadows and was gone. (220, original emphasis)
The hedgehog is uncanny in the truest sense, completely familiar and
completely other. Its appearance in the novel’s closing sentences gestures
INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ANIMALS 3
towards a world that the characters cannot fully inhabit, a world without
language or aesthetics. The nonhuman animal can be described through
language, but it cannot be understood, and the narrator is unable to for-
mulate a response to its appearance. Both the cow and hedgehog sit out-
side the novel’s central concerns, and present a challenge to its inherent
anthropocentrism.
As Colleen Glenney Boggs argues, ‘animals appear in texts as disruptive
presences that challenge our understanding of textual significance and
figuration. “Animal representations” are an interface where the literal and
symbolic meet and unsettle the terrains of modern taxonimization.’4 This
is precisely the tension that Madden’s novel explores: both cow and
hedgehog disrupt the narrative, and form a challenge to the narrator’s
own understanding of the world. Likewise, they challenge the binary sepa-
ration not only between human and nonhuman but also between real and
unreal: the artificial cow and the living hedgehog make the narrator both
question her friendship with Fox and reconsider her own place in the
world. The nonhuman animal cannot be anything other than represented,
seen through a linguistic prism that it does not share. Madden’s novel,
ending on this opaque note, thus calls into question the ability of language
to represent the world at all, given that there are so many experiences,
human and nonhuman, that it cannot encompass.
Peripheral animals, however, are also used to help explain human psy-
chology. Like Molly Fox’s Birthday, Diana Evans’s 26a (2005) is largely
concerned with human experience. Its central characters, the twins Georgia
and Bessie, are introduced, however, in a scene that approaches magical
realism as it blurs the boundaries between human and nonhuman life. Just
before their birth, the twins are described as small, nondescript animals,
scurrying through the undergrowth until unexpectedly being hit by a car:
‘That was the memory that stayed with them: two furry creatures with
petrified eyes staring into the oncoming headlights, into the doubled icy
sun, into possibility. It helped explain things. It reminded them of who
they were.’5 A few pages later, after being born as humans, the twins look
at their pet hamster, named Ham, and see in his eyes the fundamental
question they share: ‘What am I’ (5). Ham is rarely mentioned again in the
novel, and the strange scene of their birth is never fully explained. Instead,
these moments of taxonomic breakdown and the blurring of identities are
used to suggest the difficulty the twins will later have with causal explana-
tions, and with understanding their world. Rather than a clear scene of
reincarnation, Evans presents birth and death as traumatic experiences