Writing Animals

Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Timothy C. Baker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030038793
• eBook ISBN: 9783030038809
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book surveys a broad range of contemporary texts to show how representations of human-animal relations challenge the anthropocentric nature of fiction. By looking at the relation between language and suffering in twenty-first-century fiction and drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches, Baker suggests new opportunities for exploring the centrality of nonhuman animals in recent fiction: writing animal lives leads to new narrative structures and forms of expression. These novels destabilise assumptions about the nature of pain and vulnerability, the burden of literary inheritance, the challenge of writing the Anthropocene, and the relation between text and image. Including both well-known authors and emerging talents, from J.M. Coetzee and Karen Joy Fowler to Sarah Hall, Alexis Wright, and Max Porter, and texts from experimental fiction to work for children, Writing Animals offers an original perspective on both contemporary fiction and the field of literary animal studies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Timothy C. BakerWriting AnimalsPalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Literary Animals

Timothy C. Baker¹

(1)

Department of English and Film Studies University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

Timothy C. Baker

End Abstract

Nonhuman animals haunt the peripheries of contemporary fiction. If ‘the animal’, as Kari Weil has influentially written, ‘has functioned as an unexamined foundation on which the idea of the human and hence the humanities 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 others 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 presented, 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, however, 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 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 responsibility. 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 linguistic communication and the ability to create art that exceeds the individual. For all its human concerns, however, the novel also includes brief appearances 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 fundamentally artificial: it represents something real, and yet displaces that reality 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 standstill. 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 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 formulate a response to its appearance. Both the cow and hedgehog sit outside 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 separation 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 psychology. 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 explanations, and with understanding their world. Rather than a clear scene of reincarnation, Evans presents birth and death as traumatic experiences that are shared by both human and nonhuman animals: bodily experience is fundamentally violent, and resists clear categorisation.

Both novels afford only glimpses of animal life: the nonhuman animal hovers at the fringes of the narrative, representing everything that language cannot encompass. The animal is not the proper material of fiction, these texts suggest, but any narrative that focuses solely on the human is necessarily partial and incomplete. This central absence is a crucial question for any critical study of animals in fiction. As Mario Ortiz Robles notes, not only are texts about animals often placed at the fringes of the literary canon, but ‘these traces of the animal in literature suggest a number of possible tracks, histories, plots and scenarios that both blur and reaffirm the double structure that at once binds human to nonhuman, and keeps them categorically separate from each other’.⁶ This bidirectional action is present in both Evans’s and Madden’s novels: the glimpses of animal life simultaneously indicate the place of the human in a larger world of creaturely life and distinguish the human from other creatures. While both novels certainly privilege human experience, the brief depictions of nonhuman animals allow the authors to gesture towards a more inclusive perspective in which humans share the world, and their experiences, with other creatures, and in which language is not the sole marker of value.

The relation between fiction and animality has been extensively explored in recent years. A number of influential critics have drawn attention to the relation between ‘real’ animals and the often more metaphorical portrayals of animals in fiction. Susan McHugh, for instance, has argued that this tension ‘present[s] tremendous opportunities for recovering and interrogating the material and representational problems specific to animality’.⁷ Considering the politics of textual representation, she argues, can lead to broader understandings of human-animal relations more generally. Catherine Parry’s Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction meanwhile argues that ‘the creatures of fiction can, and indeed must, be read as significant and meaningful in the lives of humans and other animals’.⁸ While both authors are careful to avoid establishing a correlation between fictional and real animals, their studies suggest that studying the appearance of animals in fiction leads to a better unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Literary Animals
• 2. The Ape Speaks: Rereading Red Peter in the Twenty-First Century
• 3. Ladies into Foxes: Narratives of Transformation
• 4. The Dying Animal
• 5. The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories
• 6. Look! A Squirrel!: Animals Writing
• Back Matter