Novel Creatures

Animal Life and the New Millennium

Hilary Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351122054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire et nature

Novel Creatures takes a close look at the expanding interest in animals in modern fiction and argues that the novels of this time reveal a dramatic 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 century, the other after the tragic events of 9/11.

1 Trials by Water

Aquatic Landscapes, Questionable Sacrifices in Yann Martel and Linda Hogan

The Aftermath of Pi

About his Booker Prize-winning novel’s appearance on the very day of 9/11, Yann Martel remarked, “And in a way, I don’t mind that … I don’t want to make great claims for my book, but it’s precisely works of art that will bridge differences created by fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden.” Martel saw his novel as offering the very antidote we would need after 9/11, and thus, he hoped for his book’s continued life. Tellingly, he saw the value of its ongoing life in its ability to “bridge differences” or expand awareness, just the aesthetic of shared consciousness we often see in pre-9/11 animal-themed novels. But what perhaps became more resonant about Life of Pi in the time just after 9/11 was its vivid description of a lone human cast adrift, surviving against all odds, with only a freed zoo tiger as lifeboat companion. Martel’s novel is one that begins with expansive meditations on religion, zoology, and even planetary ecology. But what it becomes is a stripped-down survivor tale that, by its end, is revealed to be likely a cover story for another, even more brutal series of post-shipwreck events. In this movement from making far-flung philosophical connections to detailing bleak facts of survival, Life of Pi presciently plays out in one text the pivot we will see in the animal-themed Anglophone novel from the years leading up to 2000 to the decade immediately after 9/11. Not only this, but it puts the ultimate burden for this pivot on readers themselves, when at the end, they are effectively asked to make a crucial decision. They may choose to believe either in the protagonist Pi’s fabulous sojourn at sea with the tiger Richard Parker or in an alternative story in which human survivors in a lifeboat resort to murder and cannibalism. A novel that seems to be about coexistence and sensibility becomes one about singular survival and sovereignty, the power to make extraordinary decisions in exceptional circumstances.

This formula becomes irresistible for so many of the post-9/11 novels that appear to be about animals or animality. Repeatedly, we see these novels focus on spaces where usual laws won’t apply, and here, animals are often associated with either extreme brutality or vulnerability as questions of human survival become paramount. Frequently, dual narrative structures established either through temporal alternations or embedded tales express a core ambivalence that seems to cut through these novels: a longing for lively stories and a suspicion of the narrative frames that would contain them. In other words, the desire to “bridge differences” in these texts maintains an uneasy coexistence with an awareness of ruptures.

In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben proposes that such a dual movement of thought is typical of inquiries into the concept of life. Much as we may seek to define some essential spark of life common to its many forms, what we often arrive at are endless divisions, categories, and classifications of types of life. Agamben sees this shift from attempts at definition to inevitable acts of division in both poetic and strategic terms:

And yet, this thing [life] that remains indeterminate gets articulated and divided time and again through a series of caesurae and oppositions that invest it with a decisive strategic function in domains as apparently distant as philosophy, theology, politics, and—only later—medicine and biology.

(13)

A poetic term for a break or pause, the “caesura” has a long history of migration, moving from literature to literary criticism, particularly Hölderlin’s discussions of Greek tragedy, to philosophy, notably discussions of the Holocaust and Martin Heidegger’s notorious Nazism.¹ Aptly, then, Agamben uses this term that has accrued the sense of a radical rupture to mean a moving boundary. A crucial point that Agamben makes about this moving line is that before it can be used to separate various categories in the world life, it has to have implicitly cut through human life first:

The division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human … passes first of all as a mobile border within living man, and without this intimate caesura the very decision of what is human and what is not would probably not be possible. It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex—and not always edifying—economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man….

(15–16)

If human animality and human organic life are seen as categories prior to outer designations of the animal or natural, then the lines we draw between types of life in the world are always expropriated borders, divisions far from home.

What better landscape to capture the fluidity of borders and the exigent nature of life and death decisions than a watery one? Spanning the cross-millennial decade from 1994 to 2004, the cluster of texts I analyze in this chapter, from the novels of J. G. Ballard and Linda Hogan to those of Martel and Amitav Ghosh, all reflect on the caesura against the backdrop of aquatic landscapes—the high seas, boats, islands, archipelagos, or swampland. Moreover, as they meditate on crucial divisions that arise when we try to get at the essence of life, these novels encounter the realm of poetry, just as Agamben does. For all these texts, the crucial spark of animal life is embodied in emblematically poetic animals—the albatross (Coleridge), the tiger (Blake), and the panther (Rilke). As these novels pursue this vital spark and delve into the territory of the caesura, they juxtapose questions of the preservation of animal life and human life, and even the imagined continuance of the world. The post-9/11 texts, following Life of Pi, have to insist on an expropriated caesura that operates very much along Agamben’s lines and returns significance to human theological and political decisions. These novels may stage debates or force choices upon their readers, but their narrative structures move toward the closure of a decision. The 1990s texts, however, contemplate questions of life on a planetary scale as they open up the caesura’s space, refusing decisive narrative closure as they offer new and expansive ways of thinking about the lines that cut through the human as well as the nonhuman world.

Definitive Deaths

Particularly salient in any comparison of the two literary aesthetics of animal life that define the millennial divide is an examination of the ways in which they manage death and guilt. Reading Life of Pi alongside Hogan’s Power (1998) reveals many parallels since both center on mysterious deaths and equally mysterious animals. Both take place in aquatic landscapes and exceptional circumstances, either at sea after a shipwreck or on land after a hurricane. Both focus on wild cats: a tiger for Martel and a panther for Hogan. Both involve the question of fabricated accounts and likelier versions of key killings. And both stage crucial climactic judgment scenes that retrace significant events in their narratives. But where Life of Pi emphasizes solitary figures or isolated pairs—Pi, Pi and the tiger Richard Parker, Pi and his Martel-surrogate interviewer—Power navigates its way through communities: the native Taiga tribe with its remnants on reserve land or its somewhat assimilated diaspora on the fringes of mainstream Floridian society. While Life of Pi fundamentally examines the barely surviving life of a human, Power locates bare life in an animal: an emaciated yet legally protected panther that the text’s Native American protagonists feel compelled to kill according to ritual. Life of Pi asks which deaths are justifiable in the name of survival in imperiled human circumstances. Power asks whether a barely surviving belief in humanity’s place in a vast natural and spiritual realm, one in which an emblematic animal’s sacrifice is sanctioned, can still rejuvenate this world.

Before turning to a comparison of Martel and Hogan, however, it’s useful to examine two related works, also aquatic and focused on animal preservation, that chronologically bookend this pair and sketch outer limits in millennial texts’ handling of death. Both Life of Pi and Power use forms of narrative recursivity in that they contain final scenes in which characters’ accounts of events are held up to scrutiny. These late moments that reframe key events allow both texts to equivocate on the core thematic questions they raise. Thus, the novels explore the idea of a caesura by conjuring up gray areas of judgment, and this shared equivocal quality makes, as we will see, for an intriguingly close comparison. Their outer relations, Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994), however, are much more straightforward in their treatment of death. Thus, in The Hungry Tide, we see persistent resemblances to Life of Pi in the later novel’s evocations of the vulnerability of human life, even as it tries to counter its predecessor on so many political fronts. And a decade earlier, in Rushing to Paradise, we find a sharp satire that, charged with the energy of a millennial eschatology, unearths unwelcome connections between past twentieth-century crimes against humanity and potential future atrocities in the name of the animal. In Ghosh’s novel, key character deaths are crucial to the text’s utopian ideals. In Ballard’s, any character’s death is framed within the novel’s dystopian mode and can convey no ideal. Taken together, the two texts illuminate a crucial contrast between a utopian literary handling of death, what Victor Li has termed “necroidealism,” and a dystopian doubt-ridden use of death that we could call “necroskepticism.” While the post-9/11 novel of animality longs for a hopeful, utopian story, it is strangely energized by death and makes increasing narrative use of sacrifice. Its premillennial counterpart, however, persistently holds sacrifice up to scrutiny, attempting to lay it bare.

As this chapter’s conclusion will make explicit, in assembling this cluster of texts, reading them closely for the ways in which they bring together and pull apart the human and nonhuman, and giving the most space to the most narratively open-ended works, I am guided by three thinkers: Jean-Christophe Bailly, Ursula Heise, and Anna Tsing. It is Bailly’s sense of the unsettling thoughtfulness, or “pensivity,” that humans might feel in the face of nonhuman animals and the power of this very nonindependent, nonautonomous pensiveness to dislodge anthropocentrism that inspires me to stay with literary passages in which any human/nonhuman caesura becomes highly ambiguous. It is Heise’s commitment to diverse “imaginative and narrative possibilities—the multispecies fictions—of a cosmopolitanism that works through … assemblies toward multispecies justice” (18) that I follow in preferring pluralist narratives of uneasy judgments over ones of decisive closure. And it is Tsing’s capacious sense of the “assemblage” as “an open-ended entanglement of ways of being” (83), along with her ability to see such assemblages at work in minute details, far-flung histories, and eccentric undergrounds, that makes me want to turn back the clock and unearth the rich modes of engaging the planetary in premillennial fiction.

Postcolonial Ecology vs. Premillennial Eschatology

At first glance, the main features of Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise will seem to run counter to the dominant trends of animal-themed novels across the millennial divide. The Hungry Tide, a flagship text for postcolonial ecocriticism, is highly invested in giving balanced attention to environmental imperatives, animal worlds, and human needs. Ghosh’s beautifully layered narrative explores both the teeming aquatic life of the Sundarbans and the lingering aftermath of the 1979 Marichjhanpi massacre of island refugees.² These refugees are shown as victims, first of dislocating postcolonial border wars and then of corrupt government and police actions that make use of backing from global organizations of natural conservation. The novel seems all about balancing the needs for the ecological protection of imperiled species with respect for human life and local practices. Following three central characters—Piya, an American cetologist who has come to the region to research its dolphins; Kanai, a professional translator from New Delhi, with relatives in the area and boyhood memories of living with them; and Fokir, a local fisherman who becomes Piya’s guide—the novel incorporates these and several other perspectives. At times, the text even approaches entry into the perceptual worlds of aquatic animals as Piya closely observes them. In many ways, the novel is at pains to move the complex archipelagic world it richly documents from death to life.

By contrast, Rushing to Paradise details a takeover by animal rights activists of a fictional South Pacific island called Saint-Esprit (perhaps loosely modeled on Espiritu Santo). Formerly a French government nuclear test site, Saint-Esprit is also a breeding ground for the albatross, the bird in whose name the occupying activists declare the island a sanctuary. Garnering global media attention after early engagements with the French military in which one activist drowns and another is shot in the foot, the island becomes a crowdsourced cause, with new shipments of supplies and rare animals constantly provided by outside well-wishers. The sanctuary movement’s charismatic leader, Dr. Barbara Rafferty, sees the island as “a refuge for all living creatures” (94). When the French government temporarily cedes them the island, Dr. Barbara proclaims her historic mission to the media in planetary, millennial, and even messianic terms:

First, I want to thank the French President and the French people. They’ve saved a great deal more than the albatross. They’ve saved Saint-Esprit and its wild-life, and above all they’ve saved hope—hope throughout the planet for a better world, where all species can live together without fear. The twentieth-century is nearly over, but it still carries with it the terrible possibility of nuclear and chemical death. I want Saint-Esprit to be a beach-head, the doorway through which we step into the next century. Save the albatross, save Saint-Esprit, and save the twenty-first century ….

(93–94)

But as the novel progresses, Dr. Barbara is revealed to have other designs. Arguing that “Men exhausted themselves building the world” and “Their genes have been poisoned by all that aggression and competition” (217), she holds specifically males accountable for the inhuman crimes of the twentieth century. She comes to envision not an egalitarian multispecies peaceable kingdom, but an ecological utopia based on an ideal community of women. In her new gender hierarchy, young men will be used merely for hunting and breeding, while infant, infirm, or dissenting males will be given a “rest” or euthanized. The single-minded nature of Dr. Barbara’s mission is matched by the novel’s narrative style. Far from inhabiting any animal’s perspective or shifting point of view among characters from different backgrounds, the novel is focalized only through Neil, the sixteen-year-old Dr. Barbara first inspires to join her cause. Yet Neil is hardly a convert. Fascinated instead with nuclear weapons, military test sites, and death generally, he studies Dr. Barbara even as he follows her. Through his eyes, we see this ecological utopia, meant to atone for the sins of the twentieth century, become a death camp where all are at risk.

A surface contrast between Ghosh and Ballard becomes clear. In form and theme, The Hungry Tide seems a novel of capacious human-animal cosmopolitanism set in an archipelagic environment where, in the words of the opening, “the boundaries between land and water are always mutating, always unpredictable” (6). As befits this setting of multiple, evanescent islands, the novel adjudicates among several perspectives, narrates across more than one language and genre, and advocates for attending simultaneously to the environment and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Rushing to Paradise, set primarily on an isolated, self-proclaimed island sanctuary, appears instead to play out perfectly a dystopian logic of biopolitics. Here, we watch as the politicization of a concept of natural life that is supposedly severed from past human history inexorably leads to a politics of death. This course follows the logic Agamben outlines in Homo Sacer, whereby the history of modern Western politics is seen as the history of human biological life’s increasing appropriation as an object of governance. Along this trajectory, moreover, democratic and totalitarian governments have each in various instances transformed into the other, making their differences unclear. The more the mere fact of living becomes a matter of governance, the more customary political categories enter a gray zone, or, as Agamben states, “Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction” (122). He further proclaims,

If there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones.

(122)

Far from a space of cosmopolitan mediation, the sanctuary of Saint-Esprit, declared in the name of animal life’s preservation and in opposition to all dominant forms of twentieth-century politics, rapidly becomes a fatally unclear zone that inspires arbitrary measures.

Ballard portrays a fatal political descent into the realm of the caesura in brutally concrete terms. The island sanctuary’s international community falls under the protection of no national government, care of the albatross and other animals entails no clearly defined human work, and inhabitants’ attention inevitably turns to internal divisiveness. As Dr. Barbara tells Neil when she cuts off food supplies to a band of German hippies she deems parasites, “But we do have to draw the line. In fact, a lot of lines are going to be drawn in the next few weeks. And you’ll help draw them, Neil …” (100). This focus on a continual separation of the ideal Saint-Esprit community from various undesirable elements leads Dr. Barbara to enact her dream of creating a female-dominant utopia. She covertly sacrifices several lives to this end until outer forces finally return to restore the island to order. Thus, Ghosh and Ballard appear to take diametrically opposed approaches to borders. While Ghosh appears to give us a novel that moves across divisive boundaries, Ballard shows us a radical political community based on continual line drawing, almost a pure politics of the caesura that can find nowhere to stop.

Yet a crucial difference between Ghosh’s and Ballard’s novels is that the latter sanctions none of the deaths it includes. The deaths in Ballard’s novel underscore the feared intimate connection between a politics of animal life that comes to privilege women, that is, an extreme and extremely gendered zoopolitics, and the past twentieth-century history of the atrocities of biopolitics. Both politics, whether of nature and animal life or of man’s natural or animal life, converge at the point of thanatopolitics. Yet, although the island dystopia thus illustrates a line of conceptual thought, the deaths that occur the...