Abstract
Each of the novels in this chapter positions the death of the animal as fundamentally transformative of both self and text, using different formal strategies to depict, or react to, the death of the animal. Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing and Yannick Murphy’s The Call both use unique narrative structures in their accounts of the relation between human and nonhuman death and trauma in farm and agricultural settings. Keith Ridgway’s Animals and Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking depict the death of small wild animals in ways that disrupt both stable narrative perspective and the relation between word and image. Animal death, in each text, changes not only the stories the protagonists tell about animals but also the ones they tell about themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1981) Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press), pp. 74–75.
- 2.
Robert Pogue Harrison (2003) The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. xi.
- 3.
Thomas W. Laqueur (2015) The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), p. 55.
- 4.
Jim Crace (2000) Being Dead (London: Penguin), p. 210. See Sarah Bezan (2015) ‘Necro-Eco: The Ecology of Death in Jim Crace’s Being Dead’, Mosaic 48.3, 191–207 for an account that moves past a rhetoric of finitude to a more materialist approach.
- 5.
Robert Bringhurst (2002) ‘The Tree of Meaning and the Work of Ecological Linguistics’, Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 7.2, 9–22, p. 14.
- 6.
In a discussion of nineteenth-century fiction, Laqueur points to the prevalence of deathbed scenes as ‘a guarantee of the fictive facticity of the novel, the key to the reality effect’. Laqueur, Work, p. 409.
- 7.
Martin Heidegger (1982) On the Way to Language, trans Peter D. Hertz (New York: HarperSanFrancisco), p. 107.
- 8.
Jacques Derrida (2008) The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 160.
- 9.
Derrida, Animal, p. 160.
- 10.
Kari Weil (2012) Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 104.
- 11.
As Butler writes in relation to the inhumane treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, for instance, ‘[a] spurious notion of civilization provides the measure by which the human is defined at the same time that a field of would-be humans, the spectrally human, the deconstituted, are maintained and detained, made to live and die within that extra-human and extra-juridical sphere of life’. The treatment of such prisoners is made possible solely by their dehumanization. Judith Butler (2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso), p. 91.
- 12.
There is little work, either in scientific or philosophical texts, about the way a nonhuman animal might mourn for a human, as it perhaps implies a central anthropomorphism. Yet from the story of Greyfriars Bobby, the terrier in Edinburgh who, according to legend, waited by his master’s grave for 14 years, to this author’s own experience, many nonhuman animals certainly act, when faced with the loss of a human companion, in ways which in a human would be ascribed to grief and mourning.
- 13.
Rosi Braidotti (2010) ‘The Politics of “Life Itself” and New Ways of Dying’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press), pp. 201–218, p. 201.
- 14.
Agamben is reflecting, in part, on the work of Michel Foucault. Giorgio Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 7.
- 15.
Rosi Braidotti (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity), pp. 40, 123.
- 16.
Braidotti, ‘Politics’, p. 207.
- 17.
Braidotti, Transpositions, p. 235.
- 18.
Braidotti, Transpositions, p. 259.
- 19.
Simone Weil (2002) Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge), p. 32.
- 20.
Anne Carson (2005) Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Knopf), p. 179.
- 21.
Carson, Decreation, p. 179.
- 22.
Virginia Woolf (1947) The Death of a Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth), pp. 10, 9.
- 23.
Woolf, Death, p. 11.
- 24.
Woolf, Death, p. 10.
- 25.
The link between a dying moth and language also appears in Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm, which begins with a description of a moth flying into a candle and transforming into a wick, by the light of which Dillard is able to read. As with Woolf’s moth, this death leads Dillard to see that ‘[t]his is one world, bound to itself and exultant’; life, and sacrifice, are shared between all creatures. Annie Dillard (1977) Holy the Firm (New York: Harper & Row), p. 30.
- 26.
Rush Rhees (1999) Moral Questions, ed. D.Z. Phillips (Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 198. The selection of writings titled ‘The Death of a Dog’ comprises two letters dated November 1974, followed by a series of fragmentary writings from that date until February 1977.
- 27.
Rhees, Moral, p. 207.
- 28.
Rhees, Moral, pp. 210, 211, 220, 226.
- 29.
As Barthes writes over a year after his mother’s death, this relation finally exceeds language or expression: ‘I write my suffering less and less yet it grows all the stronger, shifting to the realm of the eternal, since I no longer write it.’ Roland Barthes (2010) Mourning Diary, ed. Nathalie Léger, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang), p. 215.
- 30.
The poet Eileen Myles writes that once humans ‘empty [their] minds of presence and absence, of poetry as it relates to actual speech, as place as opposed to time’, they ‘are dog’. Eileen Myles (2017) Afterglow (A Dog Memoir) (New York: Grove), p. 133.
- 31.
Evie Wyld (2013) All the Birds, Singing (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 1.
- 32.
Yannick Murphy (2011) The Call (New York: Harper Perennial), p. 3.
- 33.
Lucy Neave (2016) ‘“The Distance Between Them”: Sheep, Women, and Violence in Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing and Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies’, Antipodes 30.1, 125–136, p. 126. Neave reads the two narratives as causally connected, arguing that Jake’s ‘haunting by the creature that is killing her sheep implies that her memories of her rural Australian past persist in embodied form’ (p. 126).
- 34.
Paul Alpers (1996) What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 22, 91.
- 35.
Carol J. Adams (2016) ‘Woman-Battering and Harm to Animals’, in Adams (ed), The Carol J. Adams Reader: Writings and Conversations 1995–2015 (New York and London: Bloomsbury), pp. 115–153, p. 140.
- 36.
Colleen Glenney Boggs frames this opposition in terms of ‘animality’, which she defines as ‘the structural position that is the opposite of humanity’, a position that can be occupied both by animals and humans, and ultimately ‘unsettles the distinction it is meant to establish’. Colleen Glenney Boggs (2013) Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 49.
- 37.
Carol J. Adams (2010) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, twentieth anniversary ed. (New York and London: Bloomsbury), p. 88. Adams draws repeated attention to the interpenetration of images of butchery and sexual violence in popular culture.
- 38.
Adams, ‘Woman-Battering’, p. 143.
- 39.
Butler , Precarious, p. 31. As Karl Steel reads Butler’s argument in relation to depictions of violence done by, rather than to, animals, ‘[h]umans and their animal property are not in turn properly vulnerable to animals; however, all animals are potentially properly vulnerable to at least some set of humans, and most are vulnerable to all’. Karl Steel (2011) How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), p. 67.
- 40.
Cathy Caruth (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 7.
- 41.
Allan Young (1995) The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 7.
- 42.
Donna Haraway (2012) ‘Species Matters, Humane Advocacy: In the Promising Grip of Earthly Oxymorons’, in Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad (eds), Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 17–26, p. 18.
- 43.
Simone Weil (2005) ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, in Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy (New York: New York Review Books Classics), pp. 1–37, p. 20.
- 44.
In the words of Jean-Louis Chrétien, ‘[t]he call that is sent to me makes me problematic to myself, uncertain of my own boundaries and of my power. The question and the call are one.’ Jean-Louis Chrétien (2004) The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 48.
- 45.
Mary Costello (2013) ‘The Animal Gaze’, Guernica (June 3): https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-animal-gaze/. Accessed 21 June 2015.
- 46.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1975) Duinesian Elegies, trans. Elaine E. Boney (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 45.
- 47.
Martin Heidegger (1992) Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), p. 155.
- 48.
Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 157.
- 49.
Giorgio Agamben (2004) The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 58.
- 50.
Agamben, Open, pp. 21, 77.
- 51.
Weil, Thinking Animals, p. 121.
- 52.
Weil, Thinking Animals, p. 121.
- 53.
Keith Ridgway (2007) Animals (London: Harper), pp. 1–2. Original emphasis.
- 54.
Ridgway never specifies the gender of either the unnamed narrator or their partner, K; for consistency with other critical writing on the novel, the pronoun ‘he’ will be used here.
- 55.
Yoshiki Tajiri compares the work of Beckett and Coetzee in relation to animals by identifying a pattern of ‘self-conscious monologue, […] the awareness of language and consciousness as a burden and the concomitant desire to identify with the supposedly self-sufficient and unmediated mode of things and animals’. Yoshiki Tajiri (2013) ‘Beckett, Coetzee and Animals’, in Mary Bryden (ed), Beckett and Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 27–39, p. 33. The same pattern clearly applies to Ridgway’s novel.
- 56.
Georgie Carroll (2015) Mouse (London: Reaktion), p. 135.
- 57.
Cora Diamond (2008) ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ in Stanley Cavell, Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 43–89, p. 74.
- 58.
Matthew Calarco (2009) ‘Toward an Agnostic Animal Ethics’, in Paola Cavalieri et al., The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 73–84, p. 82.
- 59.
Ed Madden (2015) ‘“Even the animals in the fields”: Animals, Queers, and Violence’, in Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbála Faragó (eds), Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 105–118, pp. 114–115.
- 60.
Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen (2015) ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.2–3, 183–207, pp. 188–189.
- 61.
Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley (1988) ‘The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas’, trans. Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 168–180, pp. 168–169. For a more extended analysis see Peter Atterton (2011) ‘Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility Toward Other Animals’, Inquiry 54.6, 633–649.
- 62.
Emmanuel Levinas (2000) God, Death, and Time, ed. Jacques Rolland, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 12.
- 63.
Emmanuel Levinas (1969) Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), pp. 50–51. Original emphasis.
- 64.
Emmanuel Levinas (2006) Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), p. 64.
- 65.
John D. Caputo (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), p. 277.
- 66.
Sara Baume (2017) A Line Made By Walking (London: William Heinemann), p. 2. The British edition, discussed here, embeds the photographs in the body of the text, in a variety of aspect ratios, while the simultaneous Irish release uses more closely-cropped versions, all perfect squares, as chapter frontispieces and the American edition elides the photographs entirely. As the Heinemann edition was the first to go through the editing process, however, and may more closely represent Baume’s original intentions for the text (personal correspondence, 31 October 2017), this will be the basis for the following analysis.
- 67.
These modifications cannot, of course, be seen in the book itself, where the images are presented in rather grainy black and white, highlighting yet another barrier or absence.
- 68.
Steve Baker (2013) Artist/Animal (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 12. Original emphasis.
- 69.
Akira Mizuta Lippit (2000) Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 184.
- 70.
Raimond Gaita (2004) The Philosopher’s Dog (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 93, 86.
- 71.
Steve Baker (2001) Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), p. 4.
- 72.
Baker, Picturing, pp. 120–121. The process of embedding the photograph in the text reinforces the extent to which all photographs ‘take their meaning only from the broader economy of statements and discourses’. Mark Reinhardt (2007) ‘Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique’, in Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (eds), Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 13–36, p. 25.
- 73.
See Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri (2008) ‘Introduction: Photographic Interventions’, Poetics Today 29.1: 1–29, p. 8.
- 74.
As Elizabeth Edwards argues, many analyses of photography see photographs as ‘detached from physical nature’; she advocates a renewed attention to the ‘way in which people construct themselves and are constructed through others’ through the material photograph. Elizabeth Edwards (1999) ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’, in Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (eds), Material Memories (Oxford and New York: Berg), pp. 221–236, p. 226. While Frankie makes almost no mention of the materiality of her photographs, her self-formation through consideration of the photograph as object certainly supports Edwards’s claim. The different cropping of the Irish and British editions slightly changes the reader’s perception: in the British edition, more of the background is available, so that the animals appear at least partially situated in a recognisable world—and are embedded in the text—while the square images of the Irish edition, presented against a blank background, show the animals as completely detached.
- 75.
Andy Stafford (2010) Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), p. 182.
- 76.
Long’s ‘A Line Made by Walking’ (1967) is a photograph of a single line of trampled grass that the artist produced by walking back and forth in a field, but shows no human actors.
- 77.
John Berger and Jean Mohr (1995) Another Way of Seeing (New York: Vintage), pp. 281, 86. Baume names Berger’s book as a central source for her novel. Sara Baume (2017) ‘Matchstick Men & Thingamyjigs: Five Picture Books That Influenced Me’, Foyles (20 February). www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Biblio/Detail.aspx?blogId=1585. Accessed 17 October 2017.
- 78.
Nancy Pedri (2008) ‘Documenting the Fictions of Reality’, Poetics Today 29.1, 155–173, p. 156. See also Stephen Bann’s argument that ‘the degree of abstraction in photographic reproduction […] establishes the image as more than a simulacrum. […] What is restored is not language but life, not the symbolic but the real.’ Stephen Bann (1984) The Clothing of Clio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 15.
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Baker, T.C. (2019). The Dying Animal. In: Writing Animals. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9_4
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