Abstract
In Shire, a brief collection combining fiction and memoir, Ali Smith offers several different combinations of the human, the natural, and the book. In ‘The Beholder’ the recently bereaved narrator notices a spot on her chest that she can only describe as ‘woody, dark browny greeny, sort-of circular, ridged a bit like bark’.1 This spot, which initially defies clear linguistic categorisation, soon develops into a rose bush, specifically the David Austin variety Young Lycidas, named after Milton’s elegy. Milton, the narrator explains, deserved to have a rose named after him because ‘he was a great maker-up of words’, notably ‘gloom’ and ‘lovelorn’ (27). The narrator’s partial metamorphosis allows her to express or even embody not only the emotions she has repressed after her bereavement, but the very language necessary for them. While she can only describe her myriad troubles as ‘the usual’, the very unusual growth in her chest ultimately allows her to engage with the world, as the rose petals are spread across the city by the wind (11). As in Smith’s earlier novel Girl Meets Boy and Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy, both of which are couched in the language of myth and fairy tales, physical transformation is not only liberating, but allows for the revelation of the protagonists’ inner identities and ultimately a sharing of individual experience.
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Notes
Ali Smith (2013) Shire (Woodbridge: Full Circle), p. 20.
Giorgio Agamben (2004) The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 15. As Donna J. Haraway argues in a discussion of the work of Nancy Harstock and Sandra Harding, this antithesis between man and nature is an essentially patriarchal tradition that can be challenged by feminist and humanist discourse, as Smith’s example might show.
Donna J. Haraway (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association), p. 80.
Timothy Morton (2007) Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), p. 81.
Walter Scott (2006) Count Robert of Paris, ed. J.H. Alexander, Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, vol. 23a (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 3, 259–260.
Upon meeting Count Robert, for instance, ‘[t]he Sylvan looked fixedly upon Count Robert, almost as if he understood the language used to him, and, making one of its native murmurs, it stooped to the earth, kissed the feet of the knight, and, embracing his knees, seemed to swear to him eternal gratitude and fidelity’ (Scott, Count Robert of Paris, p. 174). The shifting pronouns here indicate the degree to which Sylvan straddles the human and animal worlds. As Clare A. Simmons argues, not only does the orangutan show human compassion, but ‘the more meritorious humans are those who act more like animals’; throughout the novel, the categories of human and animal are continually blurred. Clare A. Simmons (1990) ‘A Man of Few Words: The Romantic Orang-Outang and Scott’s Count Robert of Paris’, Scottish Literary Journal, 17.1, 21–34, p. 29. Evan Gottlieb goes further in suggesting that the treatment of Sylvan suggests Agamben’s notion of the ‘open’, as discussed below.
Evan Gottlieb (2013) Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 129–130.
Gilbert Simondon (2011) Two Lessons on Animal and Man, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal), pp. 73, 60.
James Hogg (2005) Altrive Tales, ed. Gillian Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 162.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 22.
As Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson point out, the situation is even more complicated than it first appears: the narrator loses linguistic control at times, while a neighbouring tribe believes that the orangutans have the capacity for speech. Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson (2009) ‘Empire and the “Brute Creation”: The Limits of Language in Hogg’s “The Pongos”’, in Alker and Nelson (eds), James Hogg and the Literary Marketplace: Scottish Romanticism and the Working-Class Author (Farnham: Ashgate), pp. 201–217, p. 214. While their concluding suggestion that ‘The Pongos’ suggests ‘the potential of a cross-border fertilization between classes, cultures and ethnic groups’ is perhaps overstated (217), Hogg’s story does suggest the degree to which the separation between human and animal is inherently artificial.
Jacques Derrida (2008) The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. MarieLouise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 27.
Hannah Arendt (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 4.
Lisa Johnson (2012) Power, Knowledge, Animals (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 141. As Johnson argues, rethinking the ‘truth’ about animals ultimately involves rethinking the idea of ‘truth’ itself (33).
Jacques Derrida (2009) The Beast and the Sovereign, ed. Michel Lisse, MarieLouise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), vol. 1, p. 25.
Martin Heidegger (1995) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), p. 193. See Cary Wolfe for a summary of critiques of Heidegger’s position.
Cary Wolfe (2013) Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. 73–86.
Walter Scott (1997) Redgauntlet, ed. G.A.M. Wood with David Hewitt, Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, vol. 17 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 89. This is, of course, the same Major Weir discussed in Chapter 1.
Kelly Hurley (1996) The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 10.
Judith Halberstam (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press), p. 23.
Akira Mizuta Lippit (2000) Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 1.
Christopher Whyte (1998) The Warlock of Strathearn (London: Cassell), pp. 50–51.
Steven Shakespeare (2012) ‘Articulating the Inhuman: God, Animal, Machine’, in Charlie Blake, Claire Molloy, and Shakespeare (eds), Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (London: Continuum), pp. 227–253, p. 227.
Matthew Calarco (2008) Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 75.
Fred Botting (1999) ‘Future Horror (The Redundancy of Gothic)’, Gothic Studies, 1.2, 139–155, p. 149;
Berthold Schoene-Harwood (2000) Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 104. For Schoene-Harwood, the violence of the novel is not an end in itself, but a way to deconstruct traditional models of patriarchy and suggest the birth of an independent Scotland as a ‘vibrant communal conglomerate, aware of its own constitutive self-and-otherness’ (103). David Pattie similarly approaches the novel from a political perspective, arguing that in The Wasp Factory ‘Scottish identity is nothing more than a performance, designed to hide our real, warped natures from others and from ourselves’.
David Pattie (2013) ‘The Lessons of Lanark: Iain Banks, Alasdair Gray and the Scottish Political Novel’, in Martyn Colebrook and Katharine Cox (eds), The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland), pp. 9–27, p. 14.
Victor Sage (1996) ‘The Politics of Petrifaction: Culture, Religion, History in the Fiction of Iain Banks and John Banville’, in Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (eds), Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 20–37, p. 27.
Iain Banks (1990) The Wasp Factory (London: Abacus), pp. 183–184.
As Lucie Armitt argues, the novel demonstrates ‘the manner in which environment, at the end of the twentieth century, is as deeply ingrained with issues of haunting as it was during the Victorian period’. Lucie Armitt (2011) Twentieth-Century Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), p. 68.
This same set of relationships appears in Jocelyn Ferguson’s Rope Tricks, which similarly concerns a girl with a boy’s name living in a secluded part of Scotland with a father who has lied to her about her past. The novel opens with the protagonist George walking in a field of sheep wearing a gas mask, appreciating their ‘awe’ of her superiority. Jocelyn Ferguson (1994) Rope Tricks (London: Virago), p. 4.
David Punter (2011) ‘Pity: Reclaiming the Savage Night’, Gothic Studies, vol. 13.2, pp. 9–21, p. 13. As a novel by a Dutch-born, Australian-raised, Scottish resident author that itself can most readily be considered science fiction, Under the Skin will only receive limited treatment here. Punter does, with reservations, make claims for discussing it under the rubric of contemporary Scottish Gothic, however.
As Sarah Dillon notes, this act of renaming shows ‘how the difference between human animals and nonhuman animals is not one of possession of language, but one created by language’. Sarah Dillon (2011) ‘“It’s a Question of Words, Therefore”: Becoming-Animal in Michael Faber’s Under the Skin’, Science Fiction Studies, 38, 134–154, p. 140.
Michel Faber (2001) Under the Skin (Edinburgh: Canongate), p. 171.
Eric L. Santner (2006) On Creaturely Life: Rilke/Benjamin/Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. xix, 114.
Elspeth Barker (2010) O Caledonia and Short Stories (Norwich: Black Dog), p. 11.
As Evan Gottlieb argues, Radcliffe’s repeated descriptions of landscape and buildings in heavily aestheticised terms can be seen as encouraging her readers ‘to adopt a more cosmopolitan, even tolerant, outlook on the rest of the world’. Evan Gottlieb (2013) ‘No Place Like Home: From Local to Global (and Back Again) in the Gothic Novel’, in Gottlieb and Juliet Shields (eds), Representing Place in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830 (Farnham: Ashgate), pp. 85–101, p. 95. While O Caledonia is far more localised than Radcliffe’s narratives, with the exception of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne as discussed in the Introduction, Gottlieb’s account of the ‘expansion-contraction-enrichment’ paradigm in Romantic Gothic is certainly applicable: in presenting Scotland’s Northeast as simultaneously stifling and sublime, Barker foregrounds the way in which Janet perceives Auchnasaugh both as its own isolated world and as something intrinsically universal.
The portrayal of Auchnasaugh also prefigures the castle in Banks’s apocalyptic fantasy A Song of Stone, where the castle is simultaneously ‘a civilised thing’, a reminder of a world untouched by apparently global warfare, and ‘a figment of the cloud, something dreamed from mist-invested air’. Iain Banks (1998) A Song of Stone (London: Abacus), pp. 123, 255.
Monica Germanà (2010) Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing: Fiction since 1978 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 143. Similarly, Carol Anderson positions Barker’s novel as a reworking of the Gothic elements of Scott’s Lay.
Carol Anderson (2000) ‘Emma Tennant, Elspeth Barker, Alice Thompson: Gothic Revisited’, in Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (eds), Contemporary Scottish Women Writers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 117–130, p. 125.
As Aileen Christianson writes, for many critics, writers such as James Kelman are taken as emblematic of a more ‘authentic’ ‘Scottish’ condition than writers like Barker, ‘[b]ut for those of us brought up as women in Scotland, O Caledonia contains an authenticity of response to the condition of Scottish womanness that Kelman cannot offer’. Aileen Christianson (2007) ‘The Debatable Lands and Passable Boundaries of Gender and Nation’, in Bjarne Thorup Thomsen (ed.), Centring on the Peripheries: Studies in Scandinavian, Scottish, Gaelic and Greenlandic Literature (Norwich: Norvik Press), pp. 119– 129, p. 123. Punter, conversely, frames the novel as ‘an oblique introduction to nineteenth-century Scottish Gothic’, arguing that its importance lies in the use of features found in Scott, Hogg, Stevenson, and Margaret Oliphant.
David Punter (2012) ‘Scottish Gothic’, in Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 132–144, p. 132.
Like many of the incidents in the novel, this passage is in part autobiographical; in a volume of non-fiction, Barker mentions a similar scene: ‘This horrible moment was used by my heartless publishers on the cover of the paperback edition of my novel O Caledonia’. Elspeth Barker (2012) Dog Days: Selected Writings (Norwich: Black Dog), p. 155. The death of Janet’s pet jackdaw Claws by flying into the side of a castle is likewise taken from Barker’s own life (Dog Days, pp. 14–17). The elements that seem most exaggerated or clearly Gothic are those, perhaps, closest to life.
The scene is also reminiscent of Ewan Tavendale’s imprisonment in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Grey Granite where, tortured by the police, he becomes ‘not Ewan Tavendale at all any more but lost and be-bloodied in a hundred broken and tortured bodies all over the world’. Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1995) A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite, ed. Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics), p. 137. In both novels the overblown comparisons reveal the characters’ naivety at the same time that they are completely sincere.
As Heidegger argues, because they are not able to speak, animals cannot ‘experience death as death’. Martin Heidegger (1982) On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper), p. 107. The relationship between death and language, he writes, remains unthought, but highlights the central role of language in human understanding.
Thompson herself places The Falconer as an ‘attempt to pay homage’ to Daphne du Maurier as well as ‘a more personal account of why people may have supported appeasement’. Alice Thompson and Susan Sellers (2012) ‘Writing Historical Fiction: Thoughts from Two Practitioners’, in Katharine Cooper and Emma Short (eds), The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 222–236, p. 223.
Alice Thompson (2008) The Falconer (Ullapool: Two Ravens), pp. 54–55.
Sarah Dunnigan (2011) ‘Alice Thompson’s Gothic Metamorphoses: The Allusive Languages of Myth, Fairy Tale and Monstrosity in The Falconer’, Gothic Studies, 13.2, 49–62, p. 54.
As Deleuze argues in his reading of Foucault, the archive is always doubled by the diagram or the map. Gilles Deleuze (2013) Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (London: Bloomsbury), p. 37. This doubling is well illustrated in Linda Cracknell’s Call of the Undertow, in which a cartographer visiting Caithness teaches map-making skills to a strange child ultimately revealed to be a sel-kie. While the cartographer argues that maps ‘usually just show real things’, the child sees them as a storytelling device.
Linda Cracknell (2013) Call of the Undertow (Glasgow: Freight), p. 66. The maps both characters make reveal not only the town’s secrets, but their own; maps are a way of collecting and revealing information that might otherwise be repressed.
Timothy C. Baker (2010) ‘Collecting Islands: Compton Mackenzie and The Four Winds of Love’, Scottish Literary Review, 2.2, 85–106, p. 97.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2013) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury), p. 274.
Theodor W. Adorno (1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press), p. 79.
Martin Seel (2005) Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 61.
John Berger (1980) About Looking (London: Writers and Readers), pp. 2–3.
John Burnside (2002) The Locust Room (London: Vintage), p. 275.
Rosi Braidotti (2013) The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity), p. 67.
Defenders of animal experimentation often argue that such hesitancy or revulsion is based solely on anthropomorphism. As Jane Dwyer cautions, scientists must learn to remove any expectation for reciprocal affection or human-like emotions from animal subjects; ‘feeling the pain of anthropomorphism is part of our growing up to be responsible members of the natural world’. Jane Dwyer (2007) ‘A Non-Companion Species Manifesto: Humans, Wild Animals, and “The Pain of Anthropomorphism”’, South Atlantic Review, 72.3, pp. 73–89, p. 88. From this perspective, Paul’s horror at the treatment of animals is based on his misunderstanding of scientific methods, and Tony’s ability to approach moths and rabbits equally is commendable.
John Burnside (2008) Glister (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 51.
Peter Sloterdijk (2011) Neither Sun nor Death, trans. Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)), p. 328.
Florian Niedlich (2013) ‘Finding the Right Kind of Attention: Dystopia and Transcendence in John Burnside’s Glister’, in Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard (eds), Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 212–223, p. 220.
Jacques Derrida (2011) The Beast and the Sovereign, ed. Michel Lisse, MarieLouise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), vol. 2, p. 113.
Eugene Thacker (2010) After Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. xv.
Rudolf Otto (1958) The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 14. Otto’s influential text is full of references to tropes associated with Gothic, notably haunting and the uncanny as well as ghosts and phantoms.
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Baker, T.C. (2014). Metamorphosis: Humans and Animals. In: Contemporary Scottish Gothic. The Palgrave Gothic Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457202_5
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