Abstract
This chapter combines the focus on intertextual transformation in Chap. 2 with more literal metamorphoses, specifically transformations between fox and human. Sarah Hall’s Mrs Fox and Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman focus on the relation between physical and literary transformation, where changing bodies parallel changing texts. The second section highlights the way encounters with foxes lead to psychological transformation, whether in the posthuman approach of Emma Geen’s The Many Selves of Katherine North, the focus on individual change in Paula Cocozza’s How to Be Human, or the global scale of Aminatta Forna’s Happiness. Each novel, in very different ways, explores the relation between language and bodies, and suggests the importance of change as the basis of any interspecies relationship.
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- 1.
David Abram (2014) ‘Afterword: The Commonwealth of Breath’, in Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (eds), Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), pp. 301–314, p. 312.
- 2.
David Abram (2010) Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage), p. 189.
- 3.
Abram, Becoming, p. 229.
- 4.
Charles Foster (2016) Being a Beast (London: Profile), p. xi.
- 5.
Lucy Jones begins her study of British foxes with a juxtaposition of their status as ‘comfortably familiar’ in the country and as ‘an intriguing flash of bright-eyed wildness in our towns’. Lucy Jones (2016) Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain (London: Elliott and Thompson), p. 1. Currently, as she notes, there are more than 10,000 foxes living in London, and many in other urban environments (p. 211); foxes may be just as familiar in cities now as in the country.
- 6.
In Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, for instance, Dad finds a dead fox by the side of the road, ‘looking more still-born than road-killed’, and cannot decide if it is appropriate to bring it home to his children. Max Porter (2015) Grief is the Thing with Feathers (London: Faber), p. 35.
- 7.
G.K. Chesterton (1974) ‘Introduction’, in Aesop’s Fables, trans. V.S. Vernon Jones (London: Heinemann), pp. v–xi, p. viii.
- 8.
Tom Tyler (2012) Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 49.
- 9.
Beryl Rowland (1973) Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), p. 76.
- 10.
R.B. Parker (1976) ‘“Volpone” and “Reynard the Fox”’, Renaissance Drama 7, 3–42, p. 4. See also Martin Wallen (2006) Fox (London: Reaktion), pp. 45–52. Caxton cautions that his readers ‘shall more understand and feel the foresaid subtle deceits that daily be used in the world, not to the intent that men should use them, but that every man should schew and keep him from the subtle false shrews that they be not deceived’. William Caxton (1960) The History of Reynard the Fox, ed. Donald B. Sands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 45. Nevertheless, Reynard takes on the role of folk hero.
- 11.
Hans-Jörg Uther (2006) ‘The Fox in World Literature: Reflections on a “Fictional Animal”’, Asian Folklore Studies 65.2, 133–160, p. 138.
- 12.
Mario Ortiz Robles (2016) Literature and Animal Studies (London and New York: Routledge), p. 69.
- 13.
Sebastian Schönbeck (2018) ‘“‘Sire,’ says the fox”: The Zoopoetics and Zoopolitics of the Fable in Kleist’s “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking”’, in Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann (eds), What is Zoopoetics?: Texts, Bodies, Entanglement (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 81–100, p. 96. Kleist uses the figure of the fox in La Fontaine’s fable to argue that speech is not an impediment to thought if the two occur simultaneously; rather, the fox illustrates the importance of not formulating a thought completely before it is uttered. Heinrich von Kleist (2004) ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking’, in Selected Writings, ed. and trans. David Constantine (Indianapolis: Hackett), pp. 405–409, p. 408.
- 14.
Melissa Harrison (2018), ‘Foreword’, in A Black Fox Running, by Brian Carter (London: Bloomsbury), pp. vii-xvii, p. x.
- 15.
Benjamin Myers (2014) Beastings (Hebden Bridge: Bluemoose), p. 1.
- 16.
Fiona Melrose (2016) Midwinter (London: Corsair), p. 1.
- 17.
Bruce Clarke (2008) Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 2.
- 18.
Clarke, Posthuman, p. 46.
- 19.
Rosi Braidotti (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity), p. 133.
- 20.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, p. 145.
- 21.
Perhaps the clearest example of such destabilisation in contemporary literature is Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (2009) which tells the story of two feral girls raised by wolves in 60 numbered fragments, including fiction, non-fiction, and memoir, as well as including photographs and embedded photographs. In Kapil’s work, the destabilisation of species boundaries is necessarily tied to the destabilisation of generic and textual boundaries.
- 22.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), p. 6.
- 23.
Tim Ingold (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge), p. 76.
- 24.
Helen Oyeyemi similarly examines the relation between names and identity in Mr Fox (2011), where the story of the author St John Fox, his creation Mary Foxe, and ultimately some nonhuman foxes challenges the boundaries between fact and fiction as well as between different species.
- 25.
David Garnett (2013) Lady into Fox (Mineola, NY: Dover), p. 26.
- 26.
Chris Baldick (2004) The Modern Movement, Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 226–227.
- 27.
Tim Youngs (2013) Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the fin de siècle (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 198.
- 28.
Derrida employs the word to assert the importance of ‘carnivorous virility’ in the definition of citizenship: ‘it suffices to take seriously the idealizing interiorization of the phallus and the necessity of its passage through the mouth, whether it’s a matter of words or of things’. Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) ‘“Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Edwardo Cadava, Connor, and Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 96–119, p. 113. As such, it is not Silvia’s meat eating that is the problem, but that she takes control over the death of the animal, depicted elsewhere in the novel (through hunting) as a fundamentally male pursuit.
- 29.
Carol J. Adams (2016) ‘After MacKinnon: Sexual Inequality in the Animal Movement’, in Adams (ed), The Carol J. Adams Reader: Writings and Conversations 1995–2015 (New York and London: Bloomsbury), pp. 295–329, pp. 303, 307.
- 30.
Youngs, Beastly, p. 197.
- 31.
The story was originally published in Comma Press’s The BBC National Short Story Award 2013 anthology, republished as a stand-alone text by Faber in 2014, and subsequently included in Hall’s story collection Madame Zero (2017).
- 32.
Sarah Hall (2014) Mrs Fox (London: Faber), p. 1.
- 33.
Elizabeth Grosz (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), p. 209.
- 34.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2013) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury), p. 277.
- 35.
Rosi Braidotti (2011) Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 94.
- 36.
Timothy Morton (2007) Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), p. 17.
- 37.
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 117.
- 38.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, p. 118.
- 39.
Clarke, Postmodern, p. 53.
- 40.
Royall Tyler (ed and trans) (1987) Japanese Folktales (New York: Pantheon), p. 115.
- 41.
Wallen, Fox, p. 67.
- 42.
Kij Johnson (2000) The Fox Woman (New York: Tor), p. 9. Kitsune is not ordinarily a proper name, but the word both for ‘fox’ and ‘come and sleep’. Michael Ashkenazi (2003) Handbook of Japanese Mythology (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO), p. 150.
- 43.
Joan Gordon (2017) ‘Intersubjectivity and Cultural Exchange in Kij Johnson’s Novels of Japan’, in Isiah Lavender III (ed), Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press), pp. 244–256, p. 244. For Gordon, while Kitsune and Yoshifugi’s diaries are relatively familiar in their narrative form, Shikujo’s pillow book is by far the least conventional narrative in the novel; while Gordon reads this as offering the possibility of revelation, it also opens the novel to charges of cultural appropriation. Helen Dixon’s Playing Fox (1988), drawing from some of the same tales as Johnson, presents a sophisticated parallel between interspecies and intercultural exchange, while Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh (2001) intriguingly uses similar stories as a prologue to its narrative of sexual and racial politics in America.
- 44.
Mary Douglas (1994) ‘The Pangolin Revisited: A New Approach to Animal Symbolism’, in Roy Willis (ed), Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 25–36, p. 26.
- 45.
Shikujo does, however, argue that foxes feel pain, lust, and passion; it is only joy that she sees as fundamentally human (95). Kitsune, on the other hand, sees pain as the central human attribute that is not shared by other animals (366).
- 46.
Rosi Braidotti (2011) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 7.
- 47.
Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 25.
- 48.
As Boria Sax argues, in many cultures stories of the animal bride often ‘tell of a perfect love, able to triumph over weakness, foolishness, and even death. They also acknowledge that human society is not necessarily where such love is to be found.’ Despite often having tragic endings, they suggest the possibility of a harmonious life that exceeds the boundaries of the human. Boria Sax (1998) The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature (Blacksburg, VA: McDonald and Woodward), p. 161. Johnson, however, suggests that such harmony is made possible through individual desire, rather than following a mythic template, and as such indicates that both parties in such a relationship have equal agency.
- 49.
Braidotti, Metamorphoses, p. 99.
- 50.
Lauren Berlant (2012) Desire/Love (Brooklyn: Punctum), p. 8.
- 51.
Dominic Pettman (2017) Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less than Human (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 8.
- 52.
As Braidotti writes ‘it is in language, not in anatomy, that my gendered subjectivity finds a voice, becomes a corpus, and is engendered’. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, p. 132.
- 53.
Donna J. Haraway (2016) Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 33.
- 54.
Emma Geen (2016) The Many Selves of Katherine North (London: Bloomsbury), p. 5.
- 55.
Ingold, Perception, p. 94.
- 56.
Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (1998) ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3, 469–488, p. 482.
- 57.
N. Katherine Hayles (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 3.
- 58.
Hayles, How We, p. 203.
- 59.
Rosi Braidotti (2013) The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity), p. 2.
- 60.
Rosi Braidotti (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity), p. 107.
- 61.
Morton, Ecology, pp. 98–99.
- 62.
Jakob von Uexküll (2010) A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 144. As he writes earlier, the idea of a world which is correctly perceived by humans is a comforting myth: ‘We comfort ourselves all too easily with the illusion that the relations of another kind of subject to the things of its environment play out in the same space and time as the relations that link us to the things of our human environment. This illusion is fed by the belief in the existence of one and only one world, in which all living beings are encased. From this arises the widely held conviction that there must be one and only one space and time for all living beings’ (p. 54).
- 63.
Paula Cocozza (2017) How to Be Human (London: Hutchinson), p. 7.
- 64.
Michelle Superle (2012) ‘Animal Heroes and Transforming Substances: Canine Characters in Contemporary Children’s Literature’, in Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely (eds), Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 174–202, p. 174.
- 65.
Haraway, Manifestly, p. 103.
- 66.
Paul de Man (1984) The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 241. See also Barbara Johnson (1998) ‘Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10.2, 549–574, p. 549.
- 67.
Pettman writes that ‘[w]e blind ourselves to crucial possibilities if we think – dogmatically, as it were – that human-to-human love is more important than the love a woman has for an animal’. Pettman, Creaturely, p. 96. Lingis likewise argues that ‘animal emotions’ – including the love for animals – ‘make our feelings intelligible’. Alphonso Lingis (2003) ‘Animal Body, Inhuman Face’, in Cary Wolfe (ed), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 165–182. Although both critics are anxious to dissociate their arguments from support for bestiality, however, neither fully considers the extent to which nonhuman animals might consent to, or take part in, expressions of interspecies love, which makes for uncomfortable reading.
- 68.
Aminatta Forna (2018) Happiness (London: Bloomsbury), p. 9.
- 69.
For a discussion of Hall’s politics of rewilding in a Scottish context, see Timothy C. Baker (2016) ‘Writing Scotland’s Future: Narratives of Possibility’, Studies in Scottish Literature 42.2, 248–266.
- 70.
As a number of postcolonial trauma theorists have argued, the Westernised, psychoanalytic approach that is foundational to trauma studies frequently fails to take account of colonial pasts. Stef Craps suggests, in a reading of Caryl Phillips, that postcolonial trauma fiction can enact ‘a kind of empathy that combines affect and critical awareness’ and ‘open up a space for cross-cultural encounters in which differences are not eradicated but inhabited’. Stef Craps (2008) ‘Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood’, Studies in the Novel 40.1–2, 191–202, p. 201. These cross-cultural encounters certainly underlie Forna’s novel, and perhaps extend to the interspecies relations she depicts. See also Irene Visser (2011) ‘Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.3, 270–282.
- 71.
Alexis Shotwell (2016) Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 10.
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Baker, T.C. (2019). Ladies into Foxes: Narratives of Transformation. In: Writing Animals. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9_3
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