Abstract
Jonathan Safran Foer’s exploration of the language of human-nature engagements critically attends the value space as a site of the exchange of values located in society, transferred to environment and fed back to the individual. Over and above a creative representation of how the environment relates to human values and environmental sensibility, Foer discloses the unexplored areas of our humanity to outline engagements stimulated by a moral outlook which suggests the need for more meaningful relations, those born both from cultural and ecological relations together. He does this through an exploration of what constitutes the creaturely. Foer’s narratological output to date, consistently figures familial relations as a literary value space wherein the geopolitical context colours idiosyncratic, historically contingent and localized inflections of values. Earlier novels suggest the many ways in which relations are understood in terms beyond value: intimacy, the familial and proximity inhere in a value space that operates beyond the parameters of utility and pleasure. In Eating Animals (Foer, J. S. (2009). Eating animals. London: Hamish Hamilton) Foer advances these ideas by outlining the relations between language, animality and family in order to deconstruct species barrier dualisms and to move beyond the language of intrinsic value. His text, therefore, highlights the capacities of the imagination to dwell on meaningful ideas of nurturing and of sustainable relations.
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Notes
- 1.
See Holland’s use of Attfield’s definition of intrinsic value in this volume (2011).
- 2.
My thoughts are largely influenced by William James (James 1890: 237–248).
- 3.
The IPCC has reported that transport constitutes 13.1% of greenhouse gas emissions while the UN has reported that the livestock sector is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions (Foer 2009: 280–281).
- 4.
Kafka speaks of a law that negates living and thinking only for oneself.
- 5.
This particular example also reifies the self-enclosed human ego, problematizes fixed gender and incorporates the other (the non-animal human) as one’s cultural offspring. Paul Carter (2010) argues that echoic framing – the repetition of some sound shapes and names – contingently incorporates the encounter between peoples and place within the moment of naming
- 6.
This sense of being apart or not absorbed might inform what Derrida means by humans as ‘questioning entities’ (Baker 2006, p. 71). Conversely, ‘Derrida’s resistance to the philosophical doxa that language constitutes an absolute boundary between animal and human involves identifying animals with the immanent otherness of logos, something he achieves by suggesting the tropological sites of language, specifically metaphor, are animal’ (Shukin 2009, p. 33). For direct relevance to Heidegger see Derrida (1991) and Derrida (2002); for full context consult Shukin (2009, pp. 29–42). A more informative application of Heidegger’s distinction between the poverty of animals and human openness is offered in Wendy Wheeler’s clarification of being spellbound (2010: 46).
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Bristow, T. (2012). Toward History and the Creaturely: Language and the Intertextual Literary Value Space in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals . In: Brady, E., Phemister, P. (eds) Human-Environment Relations. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2825-7_6
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