Speaking of Animals: Essays on Dogs and Others

Speaking of Animals

Human-Animal Studies Editor

Kenneth Shapiro Animals & Society Institute Editorial Board

Ralph Acampora Hofstra University

Clifton Flynn University of South Carolina

Hilda Kean Ruskin College, Oxford

Randy Malamud Georgia State University

Gail Melson Purdue University

VOLUME 7

Speaking of Animals Essays on Dogs and Others

by

Terry Caesar

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover design: Wim Goedhart This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress-in-Publication Data Caesar, Terry. Speaking of animals : essays on dogs and others / by Terry Caesar. p. cm. — (Human-animal studies, ISSN 1573-4226 ; v. 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17406-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Dogs—Anecdotes. 2. Animals— Anecdotes. 3. Human-animal relationships. 4. Human-animal communication. I. Title. II. Series. QL795.D6C18 2009 590—dc22 2009002745

ISSN: 1573-4226 ISBN: 978 90 04 17406 1 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

To Rosinha and Laska

CONTENTS Acknowledgements .....................................................................

ix

Introduction ................................................................................

1

DOGS IN ISOLATION Castrating Buddy ........................................................................

17

Inu, in Pain .................................................................................

29

Two More Dogs, One Philosopher ............................................

41

DOGS IN RELATION Dog Years: Life and Death in Dog Memoirs ............................

55

Dogs of Brazil .............................................................................

71

The Space of Animals ...............................................................

83

ANIMALS REAL, SPOKEN, TAMED Animals of Spain ........................................................................

99

Speaking of Animals ..................................................................

109

At the Circus: Under the Gaze of a Cat ...................................

125

BIG GAME Living with Animals ...................................................................

143

Kenya, Written ...........................................................................

161

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contents ONE PLANET, ONE PLACE

Emancipation and Death on Animal Planet .............................

183

Texas, with an Animal Out Back ...............................................

203

Works Cited ................................................................................

223

Index ...........................................................................................

229

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the help of the interlibrary loan librarians of St. Mary’s University, this book would have been harder to write. Without the critical comments of Brill’s two readers, this book would have never merited publication. Without my dogs Buddy and Inu (who helped just by being, respectively, dogs), publication would have felt less urgent. But without the love and support of my wife Eva, the whole enterprise would have simply been impossible to do. So I publish another book by speaking of her. Chapter 13 appeared in another form as “Learning to Live in Texas, Violently” in Ninth Letter, 4.1 (Spring–Summer 2007). Chapter 4 appeared in a shorter version as “Man Writes Dog” in The Common Review Summer 2008.

INTRODUCTION The advent of the word manifests the sovereignty of man. Man interposes a network of words between the world and himself and thereby becomes the master of the world. —Georges Gusdorf, Speaking

Raccoons Early in Philip K. Dick’s famous science fiction novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the hero, Rick Deckard, walks over to the animal “collection” of a large corporation. It is rich enough to own animals, he thinks; wild ones are entirely dead in this post-nuclear world, and live ones are in short supply on the open market. The first animal Deckard sees is a raccoon! “Never in his life had he personally seen a raccoon. He only knew the animal from 3-D Films shown on television” (40). The easiest way to characterize the ensuing pages is that they are written by a man who loves animals, but who, until he moved to his present home five years ago, had never personally seen a raccoon. Instead, I’ve seen countless raccoons in films or on television. In fact, I’ve seen myriad animals of all sorts in films and television. But few personally. I didn’t grow up on a farm. I’ve mostly lived in cities, where the only animals likely to appear are dogs and cats. The appearance of a raccoon constitutes an event, even, in a sense, a potentially lifedefining one, as the reader will see in the last essay on this book. Why mention any of this? Because, although each of the following thirteen essays was written to stand alone, they are also designed to be compared to each other, most obviously because some are explicitly personal. I’ve owned two dogs in my life. At present, I have two more. Each is the subject of a personal essay, at the outset of this collection. In the middle is an essay on animals in Spain, where I lived for half a year. I’ve gone on one African safari in my life. A long letter to a friend that I wrote about the experience is the subject of another essay near the end, in addition to a final essay that attempts to speak of animals in the context of a discussion in large part about the cultural construction of Texas, where I finally see a raccoon.

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How to speak of animals? This book is founded upon the belief that one way is personal, if only because there is a gap between words and experience. There’s an interesting moment, for example, in Barbara’s Smuts’s response to J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello about the fact that she never mentions her own relations to her cats. For whatever reason—“the still-strong academic taboo against references to personal experience” surely among them—Smuts judges as follows: “the lack of reference to real-life relations with animals is a striking gap in the discourse on animal rights contained in Coetzee’s text” (108). Smuts will attempt, she continues, to close this gap, “by speaking from the heart” about “nonhuman persons she has known—including gorillas, chimpanzees, and baboons, and concluding with her dog, Sufi. There is much evidence of the same felt gap in a wide range of academic work on animals. Matt Cartmill’s A View to a Death in the Morning describes the senseless act of “hunting” that he and his wife discovered one morning, an experience that is obviously at the center of his otherwise strictly academic (although increasingly antipathetic) discussion of hunting. Barney Nelson includes two personal essays among the six chapters of her book, The Wild and the Domestic, detailing her experience with hunting animals or with teaching, reading, and living among cows. Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet is full of references to her experiences at conferences or views of her friends as well as of celebrations of her own dogs, including an initial comparison of herself to one, Cayenne Pepper.1 Emails (her own and those of others) are sprinkled throughout the book. One chapter consists of letters to and from her father, as well as her own subsequent reminiscences. How can we explain this inclusion of personal experience in an academic context? One reason appears simple. If, whether from a rights-based perspective or from a broader cultural one, we are now disposed to treat animals as persons (in the words of the title of Gary Francione’s latest book) then we must develop a discourse that takes them personally—not as “objects” for use, consumption, or even study. Obviously this is easier to do for dogs than for raccoons, or for rac1 E.g. “One of us has a microchip injected under her neck skin for identification; the other has a photo ID California’s driver’s license” (15). Speaking of Haraway’s earlier, and much shorter, The Companion Species Manifesto, Carol Adams finds “something profoundly personal in it” that “feels uneven, as though it were cobbled together” (126). The manifesto, she goes on, feels in fact like an apologia, perhaps in part because of her aversion to animal rights, which compares very unfavorably, in any case, with Jacques Derrida’s famous essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am.”

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coons rather than tigers. Nonetheless, the model for our regard for the personhood of animals begins with our experience with our companion species, and so, for example, it comes very naturally for Alice Kuznair, in the midst of a discussion of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, to write that “I have spent hours trying to penetrate the minds of my whippets and despair of understanding them fully” (28).2 However, there are other reasons for writing about animals personally. In a chapter on “Sharing Suffering,” Haraway at one point asks of J.M. Coetzee the following very pointed question: “How do the relentlessly face-to-face, historically situated, language-defeating suffering and moral dilemmas of Disgrace meet the searingly generic, category-sated moral demands of The Lives of Animals?” (81). This is not, or not only, a rhetorical question, although it is a question about rhetoric. One answer: it is possible in the same text to strive to include both kinds of discourse (as Haraway’s own practice, not to mention Coetzee’s, demonstrates): narrative and discursive, fictional and historical—and personal as well as reflective, academic, impersonal. My own text offers another example of what such striving would look like. I write as the companion of two specific dogs as well as an inhabitant of a companion-species “world.” Moreover, I present myself as both a traveler and an academic. I read dog diaries and Derrida. I watch Animal Planet while watching out for “critters” (as we call them in Texas) in my back yard. Is it necessary to choose between such alternatives? It depends upon the inspiration as well as the occasion. Writing once more of Mary Austin, Nelson emphasizes that “she wanted to blur distinctions between formal literature and women’s gossip, between literature and storytelling, between literature and music, between prose and poetry, between fiction and nonfiction, between adult and children’s literature, and even between human and animal discourse” (133). A final reason for situating the personal even in academic writing about animals expresses an attempt, I believe, to mimic the power of the animal. Who is the animal? First and foremost, a particular one, on the model of Derrida’s 2 Speaking of how there is no “outside” from which to judge such basic questions as “multispecies” living and dying, Haraway writes that companion-species approaches “must actually engage in cosmopolitics, articulating bodies to some bodies and not others, nourishing some worlds and not others . . . looking back, holding in regard, understanding that meeting the look of the other is a condition of having [to?] face oneself ” (88). In practice, however, this seems easier said than done. The lavish textual display of When Species Meet also includes cartoons, photographs, eighty-eight pages of endnotes, and over two hundred human and nonhuman beings in the Acknowledgements.

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cat in his famous essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” Derrida, according to Kuznair, insists upon “the irreplaceable singularity of this creature (he isn’t speaking of a symbolic or imaginary cat). Its illegible, enigmatic look signifies the secret of a unique, total Other whose proximity is unbearable” (5). And yet such an Other proves nonetheless to be immensely provocative, taken as a being whose presence either can’t be “captured” (both of Nelson’s personal chapters are about how her actual experience with animals eludes her formal education) or else who can be represented finally only as an absent or muted referent (“muteness” is the title of Kuznair’s first chapter). Such a figure of otherness stands, in turn, for the particularities of selfhood itself—human no less than animal—conceived of in terms of its often hapless resistance to form, its ceaseless aspiration to creativity, its varied conflicts and contradictions. For example, is the tone or even the point of my relation to my own dog, after her surgery, necessarily lost, once I proceed to further deploy Heidegger’s vocabulary in order to analyze two short fictions about lost fictional dogs? If so, why? Or, if not, what might be gained through juxtaposing such different discourses? Speaking of Animals is offered out of the conviction that such questions are worth raising, over and over again, across a series of essays on dog memoirs, fictional treatments of big cats in the circus and television programs about snakes as well as on animals found during travel in Brazil, Spain, and Kenya. It’s one thing to demonstrate that my relation to my own dogs is not equivalent to my relation to the dogs who are the subjects of dog memoirs. It’s another thing to propose some discursive consequences concerning this lack of equivalence—and to believe that a larger purpose is served which has to do with a more searching, expansive, creative speaking (of animals, of anything) in the first place. I don’t explicitly so argue. Nonetheless, I do trust that my reader will recognize how the very existence of personal essays alongside more conventionally academic ones (possessing a tighter focus, a more even tone, and more works cited) puts the very question of purpose in play, in terms of its authority and singularity. Why do we want to write about animals in the first place? What of ourselves and our relation to them must be released, and what suppressed? A number of films about animals are also herein discussed. In his fine book on the subject, Animals in Film, Jonathan Burt writes that film reflects how bodies may interact but not minds “by not making the

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implied mutual alienation, consequent on the inability of animals to speak to humans, central to its configuration of human-animal relations and their histories” (31). In contrast, this is precisely what I would like try to accomplish. The fact that animals can’t speak to us—or can speak either in ways we dimly understand or not at all—means that it is left to us to speak “of ” them. Ideally, our speaking, in turns, allows them to speak through us. My title means not only to suggest both senses. (More on this in a moment.) It also means to evoke the larger spectacle of alienated speech—the possibility that all discourse is in some form alienated, most especially, perhaps, when one form can only operate through stifling another. Of Whom We Can Never Get Hold Where are animals to be found? In this book, they are to be found at the vet’s and on the streets as well as in movies and in books. They can be seen in other countries as well as at the circus and on television. There are separate essays about them and their representations in all these locations. I confess, though, that I wish there were more, as if the very category of animals—about which Derrida makes a well-known dissent—could somehow be built up again through enough instances. Consider jokes or toys. In jokes, the specific animals consist of the usual suspects, the better to make fools of us. Hence, the one about the woman who goes to the movies with her dog. Afterwards, a man comes up to her and expresses his puzzlement as well as admiration for the dog. “He laughed in all the right places, he cried in all the right places. You have quite a dog there. It’s incredible. I don’t understand.” “I don’t understand either,” replies the woman. “He didn’t like the book.”3 As toys, however, the animals can be more disturbing, especially within the narrative forms that primarily concern me here. In Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi movie, A-I, for example, there is a class of robots called mechas. Artificial children can be produced through cybernetic See Minahen’s discussion of the Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons. He concludes thus: “By switching and mixing modalities, by grafting the human on the animal, the animal on the human, what a moment ago seemed so normal and full of sense now appears senseless, ridiculous, laughable. Simply put, Larson’s comic project, like Ionesco’s and Beckett’s, seeks to break through the concealing familiarity of habit in order to expose the absurdity of what is and is not there” (248–49). 3

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processes to replace real ones. But what if a child mecha is subsequently rejected by his real mother? The narrative is based on this question, as suffered by an artificial child, David. When the real child for whom he has been chosen as a replacement reappears, his mother rejects David. The narrative plays itself out to a long epilogue, where first David prays at the feet of a mother-figure called the Blue Fairy. Then he and his teddy bear, Teddy, are frozen. Two thousand years pass. David is awoken by stick-figured aliens, because he embodies “the enduring memory of the human race.” What does he wish? To be reunited with his mother. But in order for her to be reborn, some trace of her body must be used. Where is it to be found? Teddy (unfrozen along with David) miraculously produces from a compartment in his stomach a strand of her hair. So mother and child can be reunited but, alas, only for a day. (The aliens have been unable to reanimate humans longer than this.) As the day wanes, and his mother begins to sleep, David lies down beside her and resolves to die with her. There is a final shot of Teddy, on the edge of the bed, his arms extended, moving toward the two sleeping figures. By virtue of his very existence, Teddy has functioned throughout A-I to make David, although a mecha, appear more akin to a human. Now, in conclusion, by virtue of his possession of David’s mother’s hair, Teddy becomes the repository of humanity—and ceases to be an animal-analogue. However, nothing quite prepares us, I think, by the last image of Teddy in motion on the bed. It is as if he is at once mechanical and human, less neither one than a hybrid of both. Teddy is all that’s left of life as we have known it. Thus, perhaps he embodies a spirit of something of whom we have not quite gotten hold—call it an animal—while both our own organic bodies as well as those artificial ones we have constructed each sink into oblivion. Another confession: I love these sorts of postmodern provocations. But I don’t discuss them in this book. Much of the reason is because of Steve Baker’s fine study, The Postmodern Animal. But not all. The rest can be explained on the basis of a remark Baker makes while discussing an account of the postmodern by Wendy Wheeler: “[f ]rom this perspective, the classic dualism of human and animal is not so much erased as rendered uninteresting as a way of thinking about being in the world” (17). On the contrary, I find the dualism between human and animal profoundly interesting. I don’t believe it can be escaped. All the ways I study it presume a divide between the categories of human

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and animal, even in the most abstract idioms of Heidegger or Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.4 Consider a passage given as the first of two epigraphs of Raymond Gaita’s book, The Philosopher’s Dog, where we read as follows: “The difference between human beings and animals is not to be discovered by studies of Washoe or the activities of dolphins. . . . [ T ]he difference is . . . a central concept of human life and is more a subject of contemplation than observation (though that might be misunderstood; I am not suggesting it is a matter of intuition.” The words beautifully express the project of Gaita’s book. Like him, I would offer a personal book whose purpose is “to show how much one can learn about our relation to animals (including our moral relations with them) by reflection of a philosophical kind on our lives with ordinary domestic pets—birds, dogs, and cats” (xiv). However, there are two obvious differences between Gaita’s beautifully quiet, lucid book (his phrase is, “mildly didactic”) and this one: mine is of a literary rather than strictly philosophical cast, and my own selection of animals is not limited to a sample of ordinary domestic pets. Indeed, what engages me more than anything else about even my dogs is their opacity or their separateness. It appears, at least to me, that these animals are actually more like the lions or cheetahs I saw in Kenya. I live alongside my dogs. But ultimately (no more than Alice Kuznair her whippets) I don’t presume to understand them. Lions or cheetahs I just don’t understand, except as exceptional and exceptionally wild beings who each embody what Isak Dinesen terms “the fugitiveness of wild things, who are, in the hour of need, conscious of a refuge somewhere in existence; who go when they like; of whom we can never get hold” (272). I like this last phrase so much I first contemplated it as the title of this book. “Of Whom We Can Never Get Hold”: precisely. Where is

4 At the conclusion of his discussion of Heidegger in his recent book, Zoographies, Matthew Calarco asks the following question: “Why does Heidegger repeatedly insist that man alone ek-sists? Could one not just as easily speak of ek-sistence without drawing single, insuperable lines between human and animal? Of course a less anthropocentric and more nuanced discussion of ek-sistence might still eventually give rise to certain distinctions and boundaries—but would these differences necessarily be essential, simple, oppositional, binary, and abyssal, and would they necessarily fall along a line dividing human from animal” (52–3). Of course Calarco’s answer would be, no. My own would be, alas, yes. But all praise to less anthropocentrism and more nuance.

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their refuge? Can even ordinary domestic pets—who of course cannot “go” where they like—share some space with wild animals? Notwithstanding the fact that dogs are not as fugitive as raccoons, and that elephants (even at the circus) are more fugitive than either of them, each one of the following essays is about what can be characterized as the fugitiveness of animals. Therefore, I’m suspicious of what we can learn from them, much less what can be said about them. Even with dogs, knowledge proves to be elusive (as well as too seductive—hence there is more here about dogs than any other animal), and the fact of it being elusive constitutes for me, I believe, the motive force for writing anything about animals in the first place.5 Are we to assume that even the most self-conscious and sensitive of our animal narratives speak exclusively and remorselessly only about ourselves, on the venerable basis of our human sovereignty? The question has been abstractly discussed in animal studies. For example, John Simons suggests that “the very processes which enable the nonhuman to be distinguished from the human are not processes derived from ‘nature’ but rather from the articulation of a particular linguistic process. This would mean that in naming the non-human the human effectively abolishes it, deletes it, or holds it sous rature” (66–67).6 Naming, however, is not the same as narrating, just as a linguistic process is not equivalent to a linguistic presence. I prefer Marcus Bollock’s articulation on the same question: “Animals may not participate in the world

5 In his long chapter on Derrida, Calarco concludes at one point: “[I]t is clear that the ontology Derrida offers here would forbid the possibility of making any kind of clean distinction between human and animal, not only because of the irreducible plurality of beings but also because of the multiplicity of becomings and relational structures between human and animal” (142). I take my implicit “stance” here before the fugitive animal to be less a “relational structure” than a “becoming.” What “becomes,” however, is more opaque than Calarco might prefer, if only because it appears to reveal (against all hoping) a distinction between human and animal after all. 6 Compare Barney Nelson: “I’ve never named a cow. Cows are not pets. The ‘too familiar’ relationship between person and pet seems disrespectful somehow. I’m sure an animal rights person would say not giving names to animals is simply distancing yourself from what you will kill and eat, but milk-pen calves and the steers who are kept up and put on feed for slaughter usually do get named and petted. Instead, I think that not naming an animal is a form of respect. Naming an old range cow is just something the cow wouldn’t like. She’s not a human and she’s proud of it. I got to know a lot of them quite well, but I always called them respectfully ‘that old high-horned cow who hangs out at the Last Chance’ or ‘that old one-eyed Hereford muley’ ” (127–28).

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of human speech, but the muteness that shrouds their senses always accompanies us in the realm of our language” (99).7 How? Bullock himself immediately goes on to develop his point through the example of selected narratives. (In particular, D.H. Lawrence’s novella, St. Mawr.) In one respect, this collection of essays simply offers an analysis of more narratives—a few from my own experience as well as the formal ones of others. Many of both are rather fatefully about death. Death seems to me unavoidable in writing about or living with animals. Recently, for example, a friend emailed me about how he had to club a wood chuck to death. It seems the creature had gotten under his tool shed. A neighbor explained how it would soon eat both my friend’s garden and his own “down to the fertilizer.” So they would have to trap the animal. He was subsequently caught by the leg. The rest of him was under the shed. The two men had to pull. So much for animals of whom we can never get hold. Then this one had to be killed. My friend used a hammer. “The wood chuck would not die after two blows. But it never uttered a sound.” He didn’t describe his actions further, only adding “the last time I killed something bigger than a bug was a robin with my BB gun. I felt like a fool for months after.” What haunts him now is that he killed something—the same stray killing that haunts (though no one mentions it in such personal terms) one of the finest recent collections of animal studies, Killing Animals. What moves me is that the little animal never spoke. Just so, it seems to me, animals, over and over again, not only elude their representation. They disappear into their silence. Another way to characterize the following pages: they comprise a series of reflections on what follows in our coexistence with animals from the simple, brute fact that they cannot speak. The worst consequence is that we can kill them, as if they had—or sought—no refuge.

Kuznair’s own first chapter is entitled, “Muteness.” Speaking in conclusion apropos of a painting by David Hockney, she states thus: “art tries to articulate loss and silence, and, in some measure, to compensate for them, yet art is also consciously marked by its deviation from its original model in the living animal” (66). 7

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There’s a lovely moment in the famous children’s book, Rascal, by Sterling North. (Discussed in my final chapter.) North has had to build a cage for his pet raccoon. Now it’s time to close the door for the first time. The boy can’t bear it. “Then the thought suddenly struck [ Rascal] that he was trapped, caged, imprisoned” (132). North runs away into the house, only to be pursued by Rascal’s voice “pleading, terrified—asking for me—telling me he loved me and had always trusted me.” Finally, the boy opens the wire door. “He clung to me and cried and talked about it, asking that unanswerable question.” Of course the raccoon can’t really speak. The communication is shamelessly—or childishly—anthropomorphized. But then follows a final sentence, which re-presents the communication in a different register: “So I took him to bed with me and we both fell into a fitful sleep, touching each other again and again for reassurance.” Although still anthropomorphic in nature, now the communication between human and animal is tactile. What exactly does the raccoon feel? Perhaps it can’t be put into words. But it can be put into touch. “That unanswerable question” can, it seems, be answered, in a way, despite the fact that the answer has to be brushed reassuringly by a word. What kind of recognition can we presume animals to have of us? Emmanuel Levinas has a short essay, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in which he describes a wandering dog, who appears one day in the German concentration camp where he was imprisoned, and proceeds to reappear, both at morning and evening, when Levinas and his fellow “rabble” return from work. The men give the dog a name, Bobby. “For him,” Levinas states, “there was no doubt that we were men” (53). However, what precisely follows from this? Levinas equivocates, to considerable subsequent discussion, prompting, for example, one philosopher, Peter Atterton (in a commentary following the most convenient translation of the essay) to conclude that Levinas “pulled on the reins of his discussion as soon as it appeared the animal question was threatening to take priority away from the human” (61). Part of the unanswerable question between North and Rascal has to do with this point: the “question” of animals threatens us, the more so the closer they get—either as pets or somehow as witnesses. As pets, even if we speak of them through speaking for them, it seems they can—and do—speak. As witnesses, again, even a Levinas is uneasy, continually positing a species divide at the same time he would celebrate

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the ability of a single—or singular—animal to cross it; thus, “this dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives” (49). In perhaps the best discussion of the Levinas essay, David Clark writes as follows: “Language is always the implacable human standard against which the animal is measured and always found wanting; but what if the ‘animal’ were to become the site of an excess against which one might measure the prescriptive, exclusionary force of the logos, the ways in which the truth of the rational word muffles, strangles, and finally silences the animal” (191)?8 Rascal in the young North’s arms constitutes, I think, such a “site.” His touch is muffled by the word at the same time it is “spoken” by this word. It may well be the case that we can see this sort of thing over and over again in narrative, better than we can in abstract discussion, where there are always answers to unanswerable questions, always words to supplement touches. Steve Baker has a nice defense of Derrida’s notion of the supplement, in which he emphasizes, first, that “the supplement exposes a lack or gap in the completeness of the original, a gap that it purports to fill.” His particular point is that the visual image of the animal works the same way in narrative, “bringing to light the disruptive potential of the story’s animal content. It limits the extent to which the narrative can patrol and control its own boundaries” (Picturing, 139; his italics). I don’t believe this potential is limited to the visual image. It seems to me “animal content” implicitly acts to disrupt any narrative. A recent one of my own—a version of Bobby—features a blind dog my wife and I found late one morning wobbling down the street, stinking of shit and moldy leaves. We were stunned, moved, delighted. A victim! We leaped to the dog’s challenge to our convictions about animals—giving him water, trying to keep our own dogs away from him, calling around, and eventually hoping the wretched creature would inch into a cardboard box we provided for the night. Next morning, miraculously, our vet called and mentioned a man who had reported a missing dog who was blind. He lived right up our street.

8 Haraway has a nice cautionary note: “Too much weight has been loaded on to questions and idioms of language in considering the doings of the great variety of animals and people alike.” The consequences are simple: “People always end up better at language than animals, no matter how latitudinarian the framework for thinking about the matter. The history of philosophy and of science in crisscrossed with lines drawn between Human and Animal on the basis of what counts as language” (Species, 234).

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Sure enough, he proved to be the dog’s owner. But he turned out to seem less concerned about him than we were. Little was clarified, whether the animal was indeed blind or just had a bad case of cataracts or exactly how he had escaped. Worst of all for us, the dog didn’t leave bearing his right name. We had given him one, “Stevie,” after Stevie Wonder. The owner, though, called him, “Tubby.” “Thanks a lot,” the man said, leading Tubby away on a rope. Tubby we might see again (even if he couldn’t see us). Stevie was gone forever. Our narrative of victimization turned out to have been wrong. The dog hadn’t been mistreated or dumped out of a car, as we had imagined. Or could it not have been truth that we wanted? “To tell stories about the pitiful plight of animals is to deny their Otherness, their autonomy” writes Vicki Hearne, “and thus to deprive us of one of their central benefits, for humans, of the fact that they exist. Everything in the universe is . . . Other, but animals are the only non-human Others who answer us without our having to travel to India and find the right guru” (Task, 264). Stevie/Tubby as Other? Agreed. But how to regard him as not pitiful, and instead as somehow answerable (or even an answer) to our questions? In fact, because initially the dog was so easily, or irresistibly, pitiable, he posed no questions at all to us.9 Only in the morning did he take on the aura of a creature more enchanted, just because he had survived the night. Stevie/Tubby at first light was suddenly less helpless, more mysterious. To what end? The animal wasn’t with us long enough to determine. If he had been, the “answer” would surely have had to do with his blindness, and how heedless he was of it, how stubborn, obdurate, and thoroughly physical he appeared. We were afraid to touch him. Finally, I don’t know why we named this animal. That we did suggests a need, perhaps, to shed the narrative of Pitiable Plight as well as to make contact with something of the dog’s power. In Adam’s Task Hearne has a little chapter on naming that argues that we humans have “an impulse to perform Adam’s task” and to do it in such a way as to accomplish two things: first, the “grammar” is designed to “make names that give the soul room for expansion,” and then to call

9 In her book on cats, Kathleen Rodgers distinguishes cats from dogs on exactly this point. For a whole variety of reasons, beginning with their dependence upon us, dogs are much easier to regard as victims.

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a specific animal through “language that is genuinely invocative and uncontaminated by writing” (169–70). I take my wife’s calling Tubby “Stevie” an example of this naming. If he was a dog in a fiction, I would have him not even responding to his real name, once his owner arrived. And in plain matter of fact, Stevie/Tubby didn’t, or at least didn’t seem to, as he proceeded to churn about after this or that smell, once I opened the garage door. However, the fact that the dog actually didn’t respond to his name already seems to me too fictional anyway, too solicitous of the theoretical issue of his “real” name or too evocative of the existence of a chubby little blind dog somehow beneath naming. Also, he too neatly anticipates another animal, the raccoon with which I conclude this book, whose appearance made no sense, and who, in such contrast to a blind dog, never got “room” to appear, never got away, and never received a name. What I would celebrate about animals is the fact that ultimately they either make no stable, coherent sense to us or else continually rebuke the sense that they do make; even our names for the most companionable of them are wondrously arbitrary. There is always another story to be told about them. We get real and fictional animals mixed up—as well as the manner in which we try to keep personal ways of dealing with them separate from philosophical ways. We go in search of animals all the time even though we presume to know where they are at all times. Animals are answers to questions we don’t even know we asked, where they are not embodiments of unanswerable questions, just because they exist, silently, among us. At the outset of her book, Animal, Erica Fudge puts the issue thus: “Animals are present all of the time in our lives, but frequently we treat them as if they were not there as animals. They are the limit case, if you like, of all our structures of understanding” (8). There’s a lovely moment in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, after Elizabeth Costello has finished her lecture and is asked by the college president if her own vegetarianism comes out of “moral conviction.” No, is the reply. “It comes out of a desire to save my soul.” When someone else asserts that “we have great respect for [vegetarianism],” Elizabeth is unyielding: “I’m wearing leather shoes,” she states. “I’m carrying a leather purse. I wouldn’t have overmuch respect if I were you” (43). Just so, when it comes to animals, if even Elizabeth Costello takes herself to be inconsistent (the difference between eating meat and wearing leather merely, she judges, “degrees of obscenity”) what hope is there for us?

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No one of the following essays attempts to propose why animals might constitute the “limit case.” On the other hand, each one variously presumes it, and is more or less content either to praise or to lament the decisive force of the limit.10 No narrative without its limit, no narrative about animals without animals as its limit. If there is any further argument to be made in the following pages about unanswerable questions as well as limits, it is merely to endorse Hearne’s lovely wish that our language about animals somehow includes their own speaking. Never mind that theirs would be “uncontaminated,” as ours is not, by writing.

10 Calarco closes his book by quoting Dona Haraway (“many people no longer feel the need for such a separation” [ between human and animal]) and then emphasizing his own position as follows: “In brief, we could simply let the human-animal distinction go or, at the very least, not insist on maintaining it” (149). However, in the narratives I study the distinction can’t be let go, while in the narratives I write, I can’t let it go.

DOGS IN ISOLATION

CASTRATING BUDDY [A] decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the unprogrammable application or unfolding of a calculable process. —Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law”

Everybody assured my wife and me that we had to castrate Buddy. Raising a male dog today without having him “neutered” is simply irresponsible—to the dog, to us, to the whole canine as well as the human race. Most kennels neuter as standard procedure before permitting a puppy to be adopted. Most veterinarians advise owners to have their males “fixed” if they’re not, the sooner the better. At the very first, however, the injunction to castrate seemed cruel and violent to us.1 What? Destroy such a central part of our new pet’s being? Out of the same responsible ownership principles that proscribe heart worm medicine or shots for distemper? Only gradually did Eva and I have to admit that responsible ownership was in fact a more complicated affair. Isn’t it crueler, for example, to let a male dog retain his sexual impulses and yet deny him any opportunity to exercise them? You can of course raise your dog without pondering such questions—or you can have him castrated as easily as you would have his tail cropped. But once you pause, the decision whether or not to castrate can become as agonizing as the later decision when to end your dog’s aging, infirm life. Indeed, perhaps the matter of castration can be more agonizing, since, unlike eventual death, it doesn’t necessarily have to be faced. It can be ignored. You can hope, for example, that your dog will never break free of his restraints, either to fight with another male or copulate with a female. Never mind that the consensus about castration would

1 I chose the word advisedly. An “injunction” is not necessarily legal. There is a difference between the SPCA, which advises “neutering” for all dogs, and New York City, which requires the neutering of all dogs adopted from city shelters. An injunction is, however, ideological in character, and it is this character I am addressing. It goes without saying the ideology is not total. But it would be rare, at least in the United States, to find a vet who did not advise the owner of a six-month old male dog (or cat) to have him “fixed.”

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say such hopes are fatuous; male dogs can only be allowed to continue in human society on condition that they are castrated. What about human analogies to the act? Unhelpful. No society castrates human individuals as a matter of social policy—not even mental defectives or radical criminals. Celibacy? It’s chosen. Impotence? It’s not a matter of human agency. Furthermore, the castration of male dogs is in no way comparable to the practice of abortion or the proscription of mood-altering drugs such as Prozac. There must be thousands, nay, millions of people for whom such questions are idle. Just do it! The procedure is “just ‘snip, snip,’ ” as one friend advised. And of course if we want to consider any individual dog—only one!—against some larger scale, worrying about castrating him seems absurd. Forget about the United States. Some 300 million dogs are estimated to exist in China, the vast majority either homeless or kept in cages by clinics before they are put down. Nonetheless, to the end I continued to feel that there was something at stake in the question of castrating Buddy—not only for him, obviously, but for the rest of us, especially if the act has become so routine it’s scarcely worth considering. If we should be advised not to care for animals in human terms—especially the species living most intimately with us—how are we supposed to care for them? 1 In the introduction to a recent book, Killing Animals, the editors state as follows: “The killing of animals is a structural feature of all humananimal relations. It reflects human power over animals at its most extreme yet also at its most commonplace” (4). Castrating animals can be taken as an expression of this same power, not as extreme but just as structural and arguably even more routine. The editors go on to mention that between five and nine million pets are euthanized each year in shelters throughout the United States. How many more dogs—just this one species alone—are castrated in veterinary offices as well as shelters? The subject does not appear in the indexes of some of the most sophisticated recent studies devoted specifically to dogs—not in Susan McHugh’s Dog, not in Alice Kuznair’s Melancholia’s Dog, or in Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet. Haraway simply mentions (in a letter) that her own Australian Shepherd, Cayenne, “was spayed when she was six

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and a half months old” (192). The mention is as part of her larger, ludic celebration of the dog’s youth and vitality, in which humping an “intact” male becomes an example of “pure polymorphous perversity” that makes “a mockery of reproductive heterosexual hegemony, as well as abstinence-promoting gonadectomies” (193). To Clare Palmer, this sort of celebration would be, I believe, yet another example of what she terms “an attitude of instrumentalism,” whereby not only surrender of dogs and cats to animal shelters seems more likely but arguments for “de-sexing” also become more earnest. She summarizes the usual reasons: unwanted offspring are prevented, and roaming is reduced, and as well as “other unwanted behaviors in the pets themselves” (182–83). However, Palmer asks, what of the animal itself ? “We cannot know whether de-sexing matters to a cat or a dog, and if it does, how much and in what ways. But it might be the case that there is a way in which de-sexing harms animals, even if it does not matter to them in the sense of being aware what they are missing” (183). What of the animal itself ? When it comes to castration—a term I want to continue to use in order to retain the actual circumstances of my own interest in the more comprehensive issue of “de-sexing”—not even Haraway pauses.2 That her own dog was spayed—note the passive voice—simply becomes the silent cause for Cayenne’s happy subsequent cavorting as “a female Klingon in heat.” Why was the dog spayed? Why ask? Presumably she was spayed for the same “instrumentalist” reasons all bitches are, for the good of the whole population of humans as well as animals. Palmer does distinguish “paternalistic” as well as instrumentalist arguments with respect to de-sexed animals: being less susceptible to disease, less likely to be harmed in fighting, or less able to suffer from thwarted sexual urges. But, she cautions, “the same kinds

2 McHugh—citing Beck and Katcher—notes “the reluctance of contemporary American owners to neuter male (but not female) dogs,” instancing it as an example of “historic uses of dogs as imaginative vehicles for human prejudices” (54). She goes on to discuss the deployment and then the redeployment of the very word, “bitch,” as illustrative of “the social backlash for all the metaphorical association of bitches with women, the transference onto dogs of the human male chauvinism or reactionary machismo that similarly limits and damages human lives” (56). Such a transfer is not my intention. I simply want to discuss a male dog in an idiom specific to it without implying either that this idiom means to be exclusive of the gonadectomies of females or that the gonadectomies of females are somehow easier to justify.

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of arguments also exist for humane killing” (186). The larger truth is the unspoken, decisive one: “both de-sexing and killing in animal shelters flow from the same underlying attitude toward pets . . . one of willingness to adopt dominating practices that treat animals as means to other ends” (183). In the name of what do we refuse such practices? In the name of the animal, taken as a being who has no voice, and who is presumed to have a direct moral claim upon us? So Matthew Scully argues, at the conclusion of a chapter, “Nature and Nature’s God,” in which he exhibits much impatience with such different theorists on animal rights as Roger Scruton and Peter Singer. Let us ponder philosophical and spiritual questions for ourselves, he argues, as long as our laws declare that we shall not subject animals to human cruelty, “as a matter of simple decency and an obligation of justice” (349). But of course with respect to castration, this is precisely what our laws do not do. There is every reason to practice it, there is little reason to question the practice. Indeed, there is no reason to mention castration specifically at all—and so even the passionate Scully does not. How can this silence be explained? Has the utter necessity for castration almost completely effaced some concern about its possible cruelty? We speak of treating animals “humanely.” But of course in this case if we treated domestic pets as we treated humans we would simply refrain from routinely castrating them as a matter of medical procedure, social policy, and moral imagination. 2 We didn’t choose Buddy from a shelter. He was brought to our door one evening by a neighbor, who saw him dumped out of a car. Why was he abandoned? Of course Eva and I will never know. But we continue to fancy that he was the worst of a Border Collie litter. Although his torso fur is black, while his chest as well as neck fur is white, Buddy is small for a male, and his white front legs are spotted with black. As a breed dog, he could be judged “impure.” And once thrown onto the street, he could have become a mutt, to use the second of the two basic categories McHugh employs for separate chapters in her discussion of dogs. Perhaps this much of his history explains why we were so reluctant to castrate Buddy. He wasn’t, or isn’t, either entirely a breed or a mutt.

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Of course either category of dog is subject to the imperative of castration. But the scandal of “unregistered” or “impure” dogs is that they have never been so subject, or even so considered. This is why they are mutts, free to breed according to their own principles. (The principles of breeds are consummately ours, as McHugh makes clear.) Even terminologically, mutts scandalize. “What shall I call the categorically unfixed dogs, even if I stay only in America?” asks Haraway (Manifesto, 88) It seems we need a special language, as she gives in the example of Puerto Rico, where “sato” is slang for street dog. We “adopted” our other dog, Inu, from a shelter. (The familial discourse is foundational for such a relation.) She came “fixed.” (The word suggests that her very sex is in need of repair.) Did this matter to Buddy? Hard to say, and no dog books I consulted provided any intelligence even in general terms about the problems in raising two dogs. More puzzling were the attempts Inu began making after awhile to mount Buddy, front as well as back. (Shades of Haraway’s polymorphous perversity.) Did the fact that Buddy was not fixed matter somehow to Inu? Or did she begin mounting him somehow to protest or counter his male aggressiveness? Among humans, sex is effectively transformed into gender, virtually at the moment of birth. Not so with dogs. From our first days with him, Buddy revealed himself to be an unregenerate male, from his insistence on butting open our bedroom door (Inu would never dream of such a thing!) to plunging into Inu’s food dish (she let him!). Only in the yard did Inu appear to hold her own, occasionally growling if Buddy grew too frantic in his attempts to “herd” her, like the sheep he would never know. A couple of weeks after Buddy came to us, we took him to get all his shots. The vet guessed he was seven months old. The matter of “neutering” came up before we left. The vet spoke about it as merely another “procedure,” one he recommended. Eva and I left shuddering at a decision we resolved to put aside as long as possible. Easier said than done. An old friend, who has two male Jack Russell terriers, was emphatic: not castrating Buddy would be wrong. She had “no qualms”: “My way of seeing it is that it’s more cruel to leave them with their balls and testosterone fully intact and then never to allow them to mate with another dog. It’s also more cruel to have the possibility of an unwanted litter for some hapless female.” At least these words had the virtue, to us, of putting the question of cruelty at the center of the decision to castrate or not. Another friend

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was even more passionate, especially about the consequences for future generations; make no mistake, they would exist, just as Buddy would surely escape and copulate if he got a whiff of a chance. She had lately seen five stray puppies come to the shelter during the half hour she was adopting her own second dog. They were terrified. “There’s no familiar food bowl. No favorite toy. No soft bed. Just a small concrete cell, a community food trough and strangers.” Most likely, these puppies would be euthanized. She recalled when she was a kid watching her stepfather drown some puppies, because their mother, tied to a tree, kept getting pregnant. But to me this argument smacked of instrumentalism, with the puppies-to-be-euthanzied now substituted for the dog-to-be-castrated. What of Buddy himself ? Ultimately, an idle concern. In human culture, Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov flourishes one of the great questions, when he asks his brother as follows: if one baby—just one—had to be tortured to death in order to make men happy, would you consent to be the architect? It would not be a great question if the answer was obvious or if even so much as posing the question did not make us uncomfortable. In dog culture, however, there is no question. Apparently, we can answer the question comfortably: yes. Not only are dogs are euthanized for human happiness; they are castrated as well for the same basic reason. With respect to castration, no less than with euthanasia, the species divide between human and canine is absolute.3 In the Introduction to Killing Animals, the editors raise the question of “what it means to kill in the name of humanitarianism (7, their italics). Raising the question about castration is no different, just because the answer is accomplished “procedurally” each day, one dog at a time, just one.

3 Jacques Derrida perhaps recalls Ivan’s question in the following lyrical passage: “Being able to suffer is no longer a power, it is a possibility without power. . . . Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability and the vulnerability of this anguish” (“Animal,” 396).

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3 How to ignore the poor puppy generations implicit in Buddy’s present (if nascent) sexual power? We tried. Just visit a couple of shelters or a bad part of town, my second friend had emailed. We declined. Yet gradually over the next two months a shadow of mortality (I don’t know what else to call it) came over Buddy. This beautifully playful dog was going to have to lose his balls. One Monday morning I called the vet and made an appointment for the next Friday. The right reasons would have it be that the decision to castrate is ultimately as simple as that. So why did it continue to trouble me so deeply? Two reasons. The first is the profound incommensurability between canine and human worlds. One day later in this fateful week the vet’s office was on the way to an errand. We stopped. The receptionist was very helpful. Castration? Not to worry. “It’s one of the easiest surgeries we do. In three years here I’ve never seen any problem.” She termed Eva and I “concerned parents.” “We’ll call you just as soon as Buddy’s out of surgery.” Come the inevitable Friday, Buddy bounced out of the car and loped into the vet as if the office were a playground. The disparity between what we knew and what the dog didn’t was garish. As parents everywhere learn, it’s painful to have to inflict pain on children you love, and the very best reasons don’t lessen the pain. But we weren’t Buddy’s parents. He wasn’t our child. By the time we let him go, I’m not sure how to characterize our relation to him, except to say that Buddy was a precious animal being in our care, and we had to believe that castrating him would not violate that being. Some people we knew said, he would change, others that he would not. Eva and I were desperate that Buddy somehow not lose his Derridean “singularity.” I am thinking of Jacques Derrida’s famous essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” arguably the most celebrated, cited discussion in the whole field of animal studies, where he states at one point: “I would like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular” (“Animal,” 415). Alas, though, not in this realm. Sexually, dogs are plural only—at least until after they are castrated. Then they can be singular again. If they remain uncastrated, they can of course still be singular, in theory. In fact, they will remain suspect, as so many potential threats to themselves, and, more important, to the human world.

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Initially, I wished to make an unspoken pact with Buddy. I would care for him as an animal. I would not comprehend him utterly as part of the human world. Buddy is a dog. He is not human. As an animal, he might be reducible to his sex drive. But as his master, I would not make this sex drive, in turn, reducible to my convenience, its own inconvenience (for lack of a better word) to him be damned. Trouble is, this drive, in turn, only operates in the human world. For him as for me, there is no other. His sexuality and its consequences live in this world. Finally, I suppose, the agony Eva and I both felt was founded in an inability to admit that a species divide granting his side its own integrity only yawned so wide for us but no wider. Dogs are not human, granted. Yet there are limits to how much difference we can extend to them. In practical terms, their sexuality defines these limits. It proves almost impossible not to grant Buddy’s sexuality to him, but only on the inescapable analogy of the dog to a human being. Finally, this analogy is fatuous. In human terms, we now had in our care a being who, if he were human, could be characterized as a sexual predator—with intact bitches all cast in the role of potential victims. So castration appears on the model of sterilizing, much less castrating, either particularly dangerous criminals or retarded humans. But of course such analogies are ridiculous. These actions are judged abhorrent because the victims are human beings. Dogs, on the other hand, are not. Indeed, one of the ways by which they are dogs is merely that they can be castrated—routinely, on a vast scale, for the best of reasons. What an ethical, moral, and ontological weight to land all at once on just one dog, poor Buddy! Thinking about him as ultimately just one among his kind seemed only to shrink his specific being to a black speck (and pretty scruffy at that). Why not better maintain that he should never have come into being in the first place? Rather than thank the person who dumped him from the car, we should criticize him for raising the dog in the first place! Eva and I increasingly felt like parents who agreed with all the reasons not to bring more children into the world.4 Trouble is, we found ourselves with a child anyway.

4 Compare Wendy Doniger, who—thinking of Kafka’s ape, Red Peter, who, according to J.M. Coetzee’s fictional character, Elizabeth Costello, “if [he] had any sense, would not have any children”—wonders, “do animals think like this?” She recalls a meeting with an animal-rights activist, who said he had no pets and “thought it cruel to keep them in a city.” Doniger is apologetic for her own pets in such circumstances,

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4 When he was presented to us after the operation, glassy-eyed and wagging, Eva voiced our deepest fear: “Oh, Buddy, what have we done to you?” He wasn’t the same dog. Yet by the time he went to sleep that first night, Buddy had become more animated. Inu didn’t need to keep her distance as much as we feared. The next two days (while Buddy’s sutures dissolved and we tried to keep the two dogs apart) he became more himself—nosing about, unfolding his plume of a tail, jumping up on your leg to lick you, running in fits and starts to drive you crazy. After another day, it was obvious: Buddy really hadn’t changed. So what had we done? Merely something that—everyone agreed—Buddy himself would never realize? Something—everyone further agreed—it was absolutely necessary to do? After a week or so, when Buddy and Inu resumed playing again as if nothing at all had happened, was this all that castrating Buddy finally meant? Nothing? Put another way, how could castration result in so little discernable consequence to the dog? Perhaps, I began to wonder, castrating humans ought to be reconsidered, either as a voluntary option for individuals or as a policy option for social theorists. The males in our sex-obsessed society might well consider at least how apparently easy—even safer or more contented—it can be to lose sex. But of course we cannot actually expect this to happen anytime soon. Even if “castration” ultimately takes place more in the symbolic than the biological world, it remains to us humans a violent action, albeit one which we have largely stripped of its terror insofar as the animal who lives most closely to us is concerned. Or have we somehow maintained it as a literal enactment of something—unspeakable in its terms because unspeakable in our terms? Once again, human and animal worlds are incommensurate, and yet because of this very fact, analogies between them appear to operate

but has to acknowledge “the violence done to them” by their restricted freedom. What would the activist himself do? “His answer was simple: neuter all the extant dogs and cats, and in twenty years there would be no more dogs and cats in the world. As with Greek tragic heroes, the ultimate right of all animals—in his view—was never to be born.” Doniger herself adds a final—feeble—sentence: “It seems to me that we can do better than that” (105–06). We can (it could be retorted) but they can’t. In any case, the activist’s proposal articulates one of many links between the logic of castration and the logic of euthanasia.

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more powerfully.5 With respect to castration, it is as if its routine practice on cats and dogs acts out in the literal realm of shelters and veterinary offices the same thing enacted in the symbolic realm of human culture everywhere. In each case, the price of entrance into human society is castration. If we truly granted animals otherness, most immediately those companions with whom we live, we would, I believe, forebear castrating them at all. The best analogy? Finally, there is none. It would overcomplicate the fact to try to explain how, for example, refusing to abort children fails as one possibility, despite the temptation to want to concede potentially fertilizing (or fertile) dogs their own integrity as singular beings on the model of according the same privilege to human females. One reason the analogy fails to hold is that canine sexuality continues to be comprehended in collective, or “plural,” terms. There is much irony in this at the present time, because some of the most sophisticated discourse about animals strives to comprehend them in precisely such terms. “In contemporary theory,” writes Cary Wolfe, “the power and importance of the animal is almost always its pull toward a multiplicity that operates to unseat the singularities and essentialisms of identity that were proper to the subject of humanism” (42). Wolfe is thinking especially of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. However, Deleuze and Guattari (or Wolfe for that matter) are not thinking of dogs. The subject of humanism is one thing. The safety of the human is quite another. One of the foremost presumptions of human society is that wild dogs are dangerous—to each other as well as to humans. Males in particular must be prevented from impregnating females as well as from forming packs or eating garbage.

5 The most notorious analogy is that Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello makes: “Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (Lives, 21). That a death camp is “so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation,” while the meat industry “is ultimately devoted to life,” does not, in her opinion, banish the analogy, especially not for animals. For a chilling description of just one industry, pork, see Scully, chapter six. He notes in passing that castration is necessary even though death usually comes by the time of puberty; consumers are known to complain of the “boar taint” caused by sexual pheromones in the males. Finally, Derrida just as passionately makes the same analogy of all manner of human practice on animals to Nazi extermination (“Animal,” 394–95).

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Of course we can pause: our own beloved pets? Dangerous? Even when we enclose them in yards and walk them only on leashes? The relation of the domesticated dogs in our own society to the homeless dogs of other, poorer, less developed societies—where dogs run wild as a matter of course—is difficult to discern. Indeed, we normally castrate our dogs just to sever that relation. Our castrated dogs will cease to be dangerous. Trouble is, they will, in a sense, cease to be dogs. This is ultimately what Eva and I tried to forestall in so haplessly delaying castrating Buddy. We wanted him to remain a dog, even at the price of him remaining a danger—to himself, to other dogs, even in various ways to us. Now, even though he appears unchanged, he’s a dog utterly subordinated to human terms, which are equivalent to castration itself, whether conceived of in Freudian terms as the necessary renunciation that constitutes the structural foundation of human society or in more rarified Lacanian terms as the threat upon which the whole formation of the Symbolic rests. Poor dogs. Our order of abstraction can dispense with them, for they present no challenge to it. Therefore, castration for them can become a fact, and not merely a threat. Speaking of the crucial importance of breeding to maintaining pedigree, Beck and Katcher, for example, note as follows: “The sexuality of the dog, like the sexuality of human beings, is always at war with social distinctions” (188). Precisely. We can’t have a race of mongrels, in either case. Once again, our routinization of canine castration—that we routinize it, silently, just as much as they we must do it—discloses how uncomfortably close the practice (whatever its benefits) is to the logic of our own symbolic placement in human society. One day Buddy appeared so accidentally and randomly. He wasn’t a stray, exactly. But he possessed something of the scandalous power of a stray, since he was not only unowned but also uncastrated. Never mind that this power can’t literally establish itself, for a stray is just as likely to be run over by a car as to be successful in scrounging for its next meal. Is not one profound reason we love animals because we need examples of unsponsored life among us? Once dropped out of a car, Buddy could have become a stray. For a time, he might have lived free from human law, had Eva and I not decided to adopt him, and therefore—inevitably, inescapably—made him subject to that law. Was our choice ultimately between castrating Buddy or bringing into existence either more homeless dogs or even a homeless Buddy himself

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(if he escaped)? If so, I’m glad Eva and I made the choice we did. I can’t be unhappy now that our dog is more securely ours, because we decided to castrate him. Nevertheless, I wish the logic of his castration did not abide as so exquisitely rationalized, so heedless of being in any way arbitrary, much less cruel. No wonder Derrida notes at one point that he has never noticed “a protestation of principle, and especially a protestation of consequence against the general singular that is the animal. Nor against the general singular of an animal whose sexuality is as a matter of principle left undifferentiated—or neutralized, not to say castrated” (“Animal,” 408). He goes on to protest against the very word, “animal,” as a function of protesting against the limit (variously defined) separating man and animal.6 In Buddy’s case, what would a protestation of principle resemble? Alas, he remains a pet, not a principle. It seems to me we have hardly begun to imagine his protest (never mind his principle), apart from imagining its threat, to what Derrida terms, in still another essay, “Eating Well,” the “carnivorous” sacrificial structure that orders the relation between human and animal. Myself, I can only honor the now hopelessly theoretical existence of an other Buddy, more difficult to love, more scruffy, possibly dangerous, far more wayward, and ultimately just himself, merely one particular being, simply because he has balls.

6 See Fudge, whose whole text is at war with its title. “By simultaneously using and laying bare the concept ‘animal’ as a cover-all for a disconcertingly wide range of relations,” she concludes, “I hope I have underlined the discomfort, the variety and the limitations of those relations. And from this, perhaps, it is not only the concept, but the lived relations that might come under scrutiny” (165).

INU, IN PAIN [A]nyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. (Their italics)

Sept. 2. Inu seems to have relapsed. During our daily noon stroll a block or so and back she drags her right hind leg. Usually, if I restrain her, she walks on it. It’s been twenty-four days since her FHO surgery. “FHO” stands for Femoral Head Osteotomy, the procedure of choice for mature dogs whose hip dysphasia is judged serous enough. Inu is four years old. She weighs forty pounds. Too young and too light for arthritis to cause her femur bone to pull away from her pelvis and then proceed to grind against it with each step! Yet a month ago Inu was starting to limp as badly as she’s limping now. The FHO sawed off the head of the femoral bone. No more boneto-bone contact. Now only cartilage and muscle that needs to be built up, so that the dog can eventually walk (and run) on all fours again. At present Inu is what her therapist refers to as “an FHO dog.” Post-op Inu now a member of a category! But how little I know of it—including how long in all likelihood before my dog is fully recovered, what dangers other than muscle atrophy to look out for, and so on. Instead, each noon and evening when we walk, step-by-step, I feel as if I’m just deliberately inflicting pain on this being I love. One reason I love her is for the distinctive, tender squeaks she gives out—sometimes high-pitched, other times closer to mewing—when something either excites or dissatisfies her. But today, again, the sound seems to express only pain. It seems to be a staple of our human history with animals that it changed once we ceased to consider our difference from them in terms of our ability to reason and instead began to see—with Jeremy Bentham—our similarity to them in terms of our common ability to feel pain. I feel close now to Inu because of her pain. But I don’t understand her better, because I don’t know how she understands the pain, if she can. Perhaps, like Isak Dinesen’s oxen, she just accepts it. Unlike them, though, Inu’s lot has not been all work, and, unlike them,

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she has never been whipped. Nonetheless, it’s not clear if Inu knows this, or if she can make such a comparison. So at the present time, confined to a small room and unable to move, Inu may be making her own mute statement of what Dinesen articulates for the oxen: “Such is life, and the conditions of the world. They are hard, hard. It has all to be borne, there is nothing for it. It is a terribly difficult thing to get the carts down the hill, it is a matter of life and death. It cannot be helped” (253–54). Inu has always liked to recline. She’s a sleeper. Outside, she calmly lies on the porch for hours, sniffing, sensing, and leaping into action only when squirrels appear above in the oak trees. I took great comfort once in reading somewhere that dogs are actually more like lions, lying about for hours and preferring calm. Now I take renewed comfort in this analogy because there’s not much for Inu to do inside (she’d try to run outside and could seriously injure her leg) except lie on her left side and sleep intermittently. If she was human, she’d go mad or get seriously depressed. I also read in Georgio Agamben’s The Open that “the man who becomes bored finds himself ‘in closest proximity’—even if it is only apparent—to animal captivation” (65). What does Agamben mean by “captivation?” He means the animal’s capacity to be “taken” by things. He means what Heidegger means. Trouble is, in order to understand what Agamben means, we have to work through (as he does) Heidegger’s distinctive vocabulary, and then increasingly we lose sight of Inu lying in a room on her side. Is she remembering the experience of lying outside? The answer would seem to be, no. Her animal calm, or rather her Heideggerean captivation to present circumstances, is what—in our terms—saves her. At the least, we would be bored. (As we are, “totally delivered over to something that obstinately refuses itself.”) Inu might simply be at peace. My wife and I lived for four years in Japan. We missed having a dog. Or perhaps rather, “dog” became the name of what we missed. So when we bought a large house with a large yard back in the U.S. how not to people it with a dog? But what kind? During two trips to the local pound, we wanted to adopt virtually every dog, even the ones with heart problems. Just as we were leaving the second time, we spotted a short-haired dog, white with mottled black spots and a black mask, alone in back of a distant cage. She had the squarish jaw of a pit bull. Her ears stood up

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like a rabbit’s. One ear was all black. The other was speckled. The dog came to Eva when we entered the cage and she extended her hand. What to call her after we took her home? We settled on “Inu,” which means “dog” in Japanese. Why this name? Not, finally, because Inu was the name of the dog we missed. More because “Inu” is the name of a creature at once particular and generic. What we missed was both Inu and an inu.1 Now, though, has the operation and now this long period of recovery caused Inu to lose her generic character? Most dogs don’t come down with hip dysplasia. Most just rest until they can chase squirrels, eat, and go on walks. “She won’t last,” Eva remarked last night. “This pain is going to cost her.” Now the most generic thing about Inu may be the pain she suffers each time she puts her right hind leg down. This pain has no name. Sept. 3. Inu walks better at night. She can even plop on a lawn, incline her head down, and reach her neck to scratch with her right hind foot. During the day she can’t do this. Her leg just flaps in the air. Each time I see this my heart aches. I’ve tried to scratch her myself. But this never satisfies her. I can’t inhabit the dog’s body. Scratching is one way Inu inhabits it as herself. Pain—has an element of Blank It cannot recollect When it began—Or if there were A time when it was not— It has no Future—but itself— It’s Infinite realms contain It’s Past—enlightened to perceive New Periods—of Pain.

Compare animals. Compare Inu. Her pain is all “blank.” (In Heideggerese the word would be, “empty.”) From our perspective, Dickinson’s

1 Compare Ethel Smyth, as described by Kuznair, who names each of her successor dogs, Pan, after the death of her first Pan. Kuznair comments: “Each new dog thus recapitulates a prior loss, marking a regressive attachment. In Freudian terms, Smyth cannot fully transfer love to another, completely different object and thereby successfully complete mourning. Yet, in this complicated bereavement, each new puppy marks the attempt to do so, as does her affirmation that the happiness she experienced is not lost on the dog’s death” (137). In a sense, naming Inu “inu” expresses our impossible attempt to short-circuit the transfer and go straight to the affirmation.

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great lines prove to be, perhaps, more consoling to us—if not our animals—than not. Inu doesn’t know where the pain comes from; she isn’t fraught over its origin, much less agonized over the contrast with how she used to be before the pain. (Were she so, she could not be so “captivated.” now to her circumstances.) Just so, she isn’t “enlightened” about its future; when “new periods” come, they come as if for the first time. Inu’s incision is barely perceptible now. The shocking first sight her flank resembled Frankenstein’s zigzagged forehead, with staples instead of sutures. Now the staples are gone. So are the two weeks when we had to sequester Inu in a room and put an “Elizabethan collar” on her all day round. Now, though the whole slab of fur on her right side that had to be shaved before the operation is not yet grown back, hair has grown out from pink, mottled skin. The incision is as if fading back into her body, almost like it was always there but never before visible. Sept. 5. No pain without its phases? Is Inu’s continued withholding of weight from her foot just a phase? How to measure her improvement, if any? If Inu can speculate to herself, she can’t indicate to me. (Thus C.S. Lewis’s question—about what might follow if animals indeed experience “a succession of perceptions” but not “a perception of succession”—remains a consummate, idle one. [Quoted by Scully, 7].) So far the only objective moment we have is when she returns home from therapy. When we started two weeks ago, Inu would come home and collapse immediately from time spent on the water treadmill and various other exercises. Not so today. Today she returns with a bright, eager look. If pain doesn’t have its felt phases, it at least has its days. This is one of the good ones. Squirrel sighting! Inu rushes to the sliding door and squeals madly. She can’t not do this. She’s an animal. Although we’ll never be sure what breeds Inu consists of—everything from Blue Heeler through rat terrier to English setter—one thing for sure: her blood rises to the scent of squirrel. But today I can’t slide the door open, as I’ve done for the nearly three years Inu has lived with us. After a minute or so, Inu seems to “realize” this. “Accept” it? How can we humans understand the behavior of a dog, when it simply ceases, and then the animal just lies on the floor? Must we purge Inu of subjectivity completely? After all, some dogs could exhibit resent-

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ment. Hence, we will conclude, a dog like Inu is a “good” dog. The idiom of subjectivity is restored. Myself, I can’t do without it in the first place. For me, an Inu who doesn’t realize or accept her present condition—even if she doesn’t understand why—is simply not Inu, any more than there is an Inu who somehow does not dash when squirrels appear. Once more, Agamben helps, as he explain Heidegger’s ontological paradox of the animal’s status thus: “The animal is at once open and not open—or, better, it is neither one nor the other; it is open in a nondisconcealment that, on the one hand, captivates and dislocates it in its disinhibitor with unmatched vehemence, and, on the other, does not in any way disconceal as a being that thing that holds it so taken and absorbed” (59). No wonder—he goes on—the animal is at once more intensely open that we humans can ever be and more totally opaque. Hopeless as this vocabulary is—one often has the impression of it talking to itself rather than its presumed referent—I know of none better to explain both the Inu who leaps to the scent of a squirrel and the Inu who then turns away. They’re the same dog, in the same way that her behavior is part of who she is, although she is reducible neither to her behavior or her instincts. Sept. 8. Last appointment with a therapist and interim evaluation. Not good. The musculature of Inu’s right hind leg is fully five cm smaller than that of her left. She’ll been fooling herself and us into believing more weight is being put on her right leg; in fact, she’s been shifting more not only onto her other rear leg but her front legs—as dogs do anyway, according to the therapist. I like this one. She’s our third. Name of Celeste, she uses words like “disparity” and “contractuality.” (Maybe she’s read Heidegger.) She knows dogs, and gives more measured exercises (forcing Inu’s head up, marching her up stairs) than the other two. Of particular importance: five good minutes each of day real weight-bearing walking, as opposed to the more idle kind, referred to by Celeste as “quality of life” but, she emphasizes, idle nonetheless. Nothing like a therapist unafraid to use big, or sarcastic, words. Bestcase scenario for full recovery? Her words are distressingly factual and no-nonsense: two months. Celeste recommends continued therapy. We can’t afford it. This round cost $250, on top of the $1,593 bill for the FHO surgery, and let’s not

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forget the $194 for the initial exams, including a radiograph. But of course it’s extremely uncomfortable to have to reduce Inu’s mobility to dollars and cents. Perhaps we’d decide differently if we didn’t feel that the hard burden of Inu’s recovery is not finally upon us. How much should life cost? Heidegger is no help here. It may appear to be an easier question with an animal than a human. It’s not. Speaking of “the growing ethos” whereby pets as well as humans are subject to the same imperatives for advanced “cures,” Donna Haraway argues that the operative goals ought to be “to improve current standards of care in vet practice, to reduce cancer burdens and provide supportive care guided by quality-of-life criteria, not by the goal of maximally prolonging life” (Meet, 62). (Maybe Celeste should read Haraway.) But of course the definition of “current standards of care” is not an agreed-upon fact. Is the FHO procedure part of it or not? “How long can that moderate veterinary approach to dog illness,” Haraway continues, “and acceptance of death as profoundly sad and hard but also normal, endure in the face of comparative postgenomic medicine and its associated affectional and commercial biopolitics?” She goes on for a few more pages to stir up these and related questions, only finally to reject the names of human kin for dogs, to question their analogies to workers, and to be deeply suspicious of canine presence as models, patients, or consumers. Where does this leave Inu and her additional $250 therapy? Still in our care, but now at its limits, that limit being, in turn, an example of the idea of an “actual encounter” with which Haraway escapes, closing her chapter by saluting “the ontological choreography that tells me about value-added dogs in the lifeworlds of biocapital” (Meet, 67). But the therapy doesn’t feel like choreography to me. Failing to shell out the $250 instead feels like my dog may not be able to walk because I refused to dance. Nothing is more sheerly poignant about Inu now than those times where she rushes to the door all set to go. She hasn’t internalized her infirmity. As an animal, she presumably can’t. She would walk as she always has, run as always, BE as always. To herself, she’s not an “FHO dog.” She’s perhaps not even a dog, or at least is a dog in some way which we can’t readily conceive, and which would surely surprise us if we could learn it. Seeing Inu panting so eagerly this day as I walk by the door, I think again of Wittgenstein: “If a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand him.” We wouldn’t even understand our dogs, whom we

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have so confidently enlisted in our own understanding of ourselves, in part because they always say what we presume them to say. Animal studies begins when this confidence is shaken. In her wonderful chapter, “Muteness,” Alice Kuznair—after discussing Vicki Hearne’s rejoinder to Wittsgenstein, Kierkegaard’s lesson from the Sermon on the Mount, and Levinas’s salute to a dog at a concentration camp—concludes as follows: “In the reticence of Hearne’s lion, the silence of Kierkegaard’s lilies and birds, and the reverence of Levinas’s dogs, the absence of language is conceived other than as deprivation. Moreover, the silence of the beasts becomes a model for the human; it inspires deference in reply” (35). This is lovely. And cautionary: maybe Inu’s rushing to the door is not—or not only—self-indulgence, but generosity. Her excitation is telling me the same thing as her silence: don’t worry, I’ll make it. Sept. 12. She is better. Although you have to restrain Inu carefully on her leash, lest she get excited or hasty and begin to bunny-hop, she walks on all fours now for extended periods of time—both noon as well as night. If this dog were human, I think, she could easily be persuaded now of the importance of always putting pressure her lame leg. Inu is not human. Yet I’d like to think now that she settles into her old fourlegged stride as if resuming an earlier mode of being in the world. Inu is not human. Yet (contra C.S. Lewis) I’d like to think she enjoys the experience of some division in time rather than an eternal animal present. Inu is not human. Yet I’d like to think the sheer pleasure of walking on all fours is to be preferred to its pain. This is the sort of emotional moment exemplified over and over again in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy’s When Elephants Weep. In other words—for the wordless animal we humans find that there are always other words, and in this instance Heidegger be damned—Inu’s emotional life may be becoming richer as her physical life is becoming stronger. “There are the lover and the beloved,” confides the narrator of Carson McCullers’s “The Ballad of a Sad Café,” “but these two come from different countries.” The beloved, it seems, is only a “stimulus” for the lover’s love—and the lover knows this, and suffers in solitude accordingly. The lover can be “any human creature on this earth,” while the beloved can be “of any description (26).” But can she be a dog? (In the story, it’s a dwarf.) Why not? Inu is my Beloved. She doesn’t do “cute” tricks. She doesn’t do any tricks, or

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licks. Although she can be petted, Inu usually doesn’t seem to enjoy it much. (One possible bloodline she has is a setter who, I read, doesn’t like to be touched.) She seldom comes up and presents herself for your attention. Inu seems content to be outside the house by herself or inside off to one side. Despite all this and more, though, I love her. In McCullers’s sense, I seem to love her not despite but because of her remoteness, which is the characteristic condition of the beloved, who is not kind and may even fear or hate the lover. Of course Inu doesn’t hate me. If she fears me, she fears me like a dog its master. Just so, her profound self-containment is not, I believe, a function of my feeling about her, as could well be the case if she were human. The relation of lover to beloved is one I’ve invested in her utterly, as a human being. I love Inu’s hard, muscular body, her black rabbit ears, her liquid brown eyes, and her furry white tail, which looks like an exclamation point. I love the times when she just appears, quietly, as if out of some deep seclusion. I love her eager look and happy smile when it’s time for a walk. I love her air of delicacy. Most of all perhaps, I love the whole sense of Inu as a being who asks very little of life, who walks very lightly on this earth, and who will leave it without anybody really knowing that she was here. “The lover,” McCullers’s narrator concludes, “craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain (27).” And what if the beloved is actually in pain? You are yourself pained, even in the case of a beloved who has four legs, is excited by nothing so much as the smell of squirrels, and would rather chew a book than read one. Noontime walk. Inu stops, sniffs, squeaks. Sometimes she’ll do only one of these things, sometimes she’ll do all three in succession—and then plop down on a neighbor’s grass. I just stand there, sniffing at nothing and inwardly squeaking with impatience. If I jerk Inu up, she’ll revert to three legs. So what to do? Sometimes I reflect, Inu has had little pleasure these months, so let her enjoy herself. And sometimes I just wish I was another dog. Again, as always, my relation to Inu as what Kuznair characterizes as one of “melancholic longing.” Not in this circumstance because of the animal’s grace or completeness. Quite the contrary. Inu in pain is graceless. Yet it comes to the same thing: “The melancholic pet owner longs for complete rapport and to know that the dualisms between

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animal and human are untrue. Yet she is saddened by the inevitable disjointedness and nonsimultaneity between herself and the extimate species” (7–8). Graceless words for a graceless dog, unspoken. Haraway’s Manifesto has an interesting disclaimer, speaking of adoption success stories or purebred ones: “I resist being called the ‘mom’ to my dogs because I fear infantilization of the adult canines and misidentification of the important fact that I wanted dogs, not babies. My multi-species family is not about surrogacy and substitutes. . . . We need other nouns and pronouns for the kin genres of companion species . . . Except in a party invitation or a philosophical discussion, ‘significant other’ won’t do for human sexual partners; and the term performs little better to house the daily meanings of cobbled together kin relations in dogland” (95–96). This is well said, to a point. Trouble is, our need for other terms continually clashes with the social reality of the language that actually obtains; that I want to resist being called Inu’s “father” doesn’t change the vet’s imperative for her to be listed in the records as bearing my family name. But there is worse trouble. Kuznair speaks of how certain personal narratives about dogs “invert the accepted hierarchy of affections.” In other words, far from being something condescended to as a pale substitute for human intimacy, “dog love has the potential to question the regulating structures and categories by which we define sexuality, eroticism, and love. . . . [T]he relation to the dog cannot be restricted to the singular role of guardian, lover, companion, or child but incorporates these modalities and shifts among them” (109). Other nouns and pronouns? We’re not going to get them. And even if we did, we might lose the radically other character of the relation that dogs make possible. It’s too personal, quiet, and calming to move out into the larger society in some aggressive or transgressive fashion, as Haraway appears to propose. Instead, we must be content with the shifting nature of the actual roles we enjoy with our dogs. Maybe this is why now I’m so unsettled now in my relation to Inu. She remains in pain. My role remains hopelessly restricted to that of nurse. I don’t want another language. I just want to shift into another role. Just as we often grow most restless when a long trip nears its end, or most thirsty when our thirst is at last about to be satisfied, is Inu somehow most pained now that she enjoys again the experience of being on all four legs? But only on walks. Why can’t she move around the

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house this way? (The rear leg still dangles, and there’s little pressure on it when she stops.) Why can’t she go outside without a leash? (The scent of one squirrel and she’d be off like a shot, unstable as a puppy.) Why must she continue to—let me use the fateful word—suffer? If Inu doesn’t ask this question to herself, must we insist that she experiences nothing like its force, if not its character? That is, is her pain only and utterly physical? Presumably this explains why, unlike us, she can’t suffer; her position on the chain of being, below ours, excludes her pain from possessing any “spiritual” content. (We recall Descartes: animals have no soul.) Instead, we are given to understand, Inu just emptily awaits the time when complete mobility on all four legs will be inexplicably returned to her, just as she awaits the two times each day when I appear with a leash to take her out for a walk. What “happens” while she waits—or if “waiting” even constitutes the right idiom—nobody really knows. Heidegger, though, presumes to, as Agamden explains and then qualifies the comparison of animal captivation to the unio mystica, in trope of the moth burned by the flame: “While mystical knowledge is essentially the experience of a nonknowledge and of a concealment as such, the animal cannot comport itself toward the not open; it remains excluded precisely from the essential domain of the conflict between disconcealment and concealment” (60). In other words, Inu suffers no conflict, neither temporally nor ontologically. Or if she suffers, it is not because of some conflict. How can we posit animal being? One answer: it can include suffering, provided we imagine that the suffering is not the product of conflict. But how can we imagine such a thing? Once more, how can we imagine the animal? Once again, it seems as if there is, undeniably, a species divide, and yet that this divide seems sustainable only through a language whose abstract character deprives the animal of its fundamental unity with us—in this case through its common suffering. Sept. 19. Has there recently been a moment in these walks when exercise time has become quality time? If Inu pauses, she usually still hops for a couple of steps before resuming movement on all fours. The lame leg eases onto the ground again like a plane gliding into a landing. Even here, though, there’s now an element of habit, I think, rather than of pain. It may now be the case that Inu can walk on all four legs, period. She doesn’t need to hop anymore. If so, would this mean that Inu is free from pain? No, because, inside, her lame leg still dangles, although here too you can see that she’s using it more, and more emphatically. Yet my whole sense of the

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dog is altering. Now it’s based less on Inu’s body than her—well, than let’s term it her soul. The mornings when she wakes up and can’t go out (except on a leash to pee); the afternoons when she sleeps (and can only dream of lying outside, sniffing); the early evenings when from the deck window she squeals at the squirrels scurrying yet again across the branches of the oak trees—these are the moments of her days that define her for me now. How can it be the case that at this time these same moments fail to define the days to her? In When Species Meet, Haraway has a chapter on agility training, in which she writes at one point: “The coming into being of something unexpected, something new and free, something outside the rules of function and calculation, something not ruled by the logic of the reproduction of same, is what training with each other is all about” (223). Sudden thought: all these weeks has this been what has been going on? I’ve been training Inu! Moreover, as in any training, she has simultaneously been training me? Training for what? Just to be able to walk and play normally (her), and just to be content to regard and love normally (me). Sept. 26. A moment inconceivable three weeks ago: Inu runs free in the yard. Not for long. I’m still afraid she’ll rupture or dislocate her leg. But it’s no longer a frog leg. I don’t believe I need to walk her round noon anymore. If Inu is not yet free from the expectation (mine) of pain, she may now be free of pain (hers). This moment could have taken another month before it was manifest. How explain why it happened now? Would Inu be able to explain it herself ? Marcus Bullock has a lovely essay in which he states at one point: “A creature without language cannot look at the world in terms of a metaphysics, but its impulses organize its world around it into an ordered field of impressions, resemblances, and warnings, which is what language does when animated by our own desires” (116). (And we might add, which is what Heidegger does when he judges this particular creaturely world to be both open and opaque.) Perhaps, if Inu could speak, she would say that she knew all along that this moment would appear. There was never any need to worry. All that remained was to wait for it—only it would be me “waiting,” not her. The biggest danger Inu now faces: Buddy, our other dog, a Border collie mix. Buddy is as different from Inu as their literal color difference of black and white—playful, physical, needy of human contact,

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and irrepressibly open, eager, happy. Furthermore, Buddy, it seems, has never known pain. Must I assume now that Inu will play with Buddy as heedlessly as if she too has never known it? How could having pain in the first place not include the visceral knowledge that it may happen again? Or can only humans be expected to know this, whereas animals simply resume each day their perpetual present? Bullock again: “The senses that measure out the space an animal inhabits, and the resources and dangers that space contains, serve the limbs and muscles that transform this space into a world without superfluity” (107). Maybe time isn’t the operative category, but simply body. To Inu, her pain was somehow necessary—until the moment when it was not, and instead became at that instant superfluous. Buddy, on the other hand, knows of pain only its superfluity. Sept. 28. Yesterday Inu & Buddy spent all day in the yard playing, running after squirrels in the trees, sniffing out scents of skunks from the night before, lying around. I still can’t believe it! Inu seems today again as strong as she ever did. It’s as if there is so suddenly an Inu not in pain in the place of the Inu who was in pain. (She seemingly accepts the one state in the same way that she accepted the other.) How can that pain be completely gone now? How can the Inu who always has been have replaced the Inu who was not as she always has been during the last two months? (Eva reminds me of how irritable our dog had become the month or so before that, snapping at Buddy and collapsing after walks.) Once more there is simply a dog, both Inu and an inu, no longer in pain. And once more she can resume a relation with another dog. One thing lacking in Heidegger’s critique is another animal. In this case, Inu may be especially happy to have Buddy to play with again merely in order to be free from the oppression (how can she not have felt it?) of my haplessly human relation, so fraught with compassion, history, ignorance, and language. To Buddy, on the other hand, the world is immediate, consisting of sounds and smells. It’s always in good health. And in this world a bark is a bark, not a word.

TWO MORE DOGS, ONE PHILOSOPHER Lost Clarice Lispector’s story, “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,” is difficult to summarize. Much of what a more conventional narrative would include—minimal exposition concerning the professor, much less setting and dialogue—is omitted. On this basis alone, the story (as both its brevity and its title suggest) has the character of a fable, while the fable, in turn, has the intensity of a vision. At the outset, a man is seen atop a hill, with a sack in his hand. Inside the bag is a dog. The man proceeds to bury it in a shallow grave. This dog, it develops, is a “substitute” for another, whom the man once owned. The dog he is now burying was found dead on the street. The dog he once owned—who was named Joe—probably still lives, elsewhere, “sniffing out that city where he no longer had a master.” By the end, we learn that the man has deliberately abandoned Joe. Why? On the most banal level, because he had to move and could no longer keep the dog. On the most philosophic level, as developed through an internal monologue with Joe, because the man felt morally—not to say spiritually—challenged by the dog, who forced him to “choose.” What precisely does the man choose in abandoning Joe? The possibility of not committing a “greater crime.” When the man regards the grave of the nameless, anonymous dog for a final time, he suddenly “unburies” him and thereby, we read, “renews” his crime, pleads to heaven for a “witness,” and in the final sentence descends the slopes of the hill toward what we are assured or what the man assures himself (point of view is collapsed) is “the intimacy of his home.” What is the meaning of this strange, disturbing story? Why is the dog named but not the man? Does the use of the word “crime” in the title enjoin us to read the story in ethical rather than philosophical terms? If ethical, what precise relation are we to presume man and dog to have? Merely one as subject to object? Or does the dog represent some portion of the man’s essential nature, which, once refused, must now be properly buried? “Of yourself,” he inwardly addresses the dog

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at one point, “you demanded that you should be a dog. Of me, you demanded that I should be a man” (144). What is the relation between human and animal that this story proposes? Of course it has many parallels in other Lispector texts, and we could make our reading of this particular one converge upon any number of them. Take, for example, one of her vignettes or “chronicles” from the volume, Foreign Legion, entitled “Conquered Love,” in which the narrator meets a man walking a raccoon down the street as if it were or perhaps thought itself to be a dog. The narrator is horrified at such confusion, concludes that the raccoon is a “victim of evil love,” and finally beseeches the animal to “pardon” his owner with “infinite love.” The last line of the text asserts the following qualification: “Before abandoning him, of course” (170). In “Crime,” by contrast, what we have is the apparent opposite: a man abandoning a dog without love. Lispector was fascinated by animals, or, more broadly, nonhuman species. Her fiction registers their presence in a wide variety of ways. Two of the stories in the volume where “Crime” appears, Family Ties, are named after animals (a chicken and a buffalo, respectively). One of her novels, The Passion According to G.H., consists of the narrator’s reflections on the body of a cockroach she has just crushed, considered (in part) as one of a class of “inhuman beings” who “realize the entire cycle [of fated destiny] without going astray, because they make no choices” (117). Macabea, the central character of The Hour of the Star, is compared at one point to “some vagrant bitch” who is “guided entirely by her own remote control” (18). Each of these texts reverberates in “Crime.” In his most recent book on Lispector, Earl Fitz notes that “[c]ritics have long felt that, for Lispector, animals represented some form of ‘primitive,’ prehuman (and therefore prelinguisitic) existence against which . . . women and men can orient and define themselves” (120). What I would like to do with “Crime,” however, is not to read it as part of a complex and enduring thematic in the author’s canon, but instead as a provocative dramatization of a larger philosophical problem of the relationship between the categories of human and animal in the whole of Western thought, as recently discussed in a short book on this subject, The Open, by the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. It is very difficult to give a summary of Agamben’s terse, rich discussion. At the end of his book, the central question is given as follows: “[I]n our culture, man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one

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of the two terms of the operation was also what was a stake in it” (92). Hence, Agamben speaks of the “machine” that governs the production of these operations, which at once seek to define humanity by transforming what he terms “anthropophorous” animality while simultaneously seeing the body as necessarily supporting humanity. No wonder the “caesura” between human and animal is first of all located within man. For Gambian, no thinker is more crucial than Heidegger, from whom the very idea of “the open” comes. The idea “names the unconcealedness of things,” a condition (or “domain”) of being available to human beings but closed to animals. Or rather, closed to animals by virtue of their distinct—biological—“captivation” to the world, at once far more intense than any relation possible to human beings and yet precisely because of this far more opaque. Agamben refers to this last state as one “not capable of disconcealing its own disinhibitor” (59). Animals, in other words, are paradoxically more “open” to life—conceived of as what Heidegger characterizes as “a domain which possesses a wealth of being-open”—because of the “poverty” of their being not-open to it. There are additional, inescapably ontological (from a human point of view) idioms for this last condition, particularly boredom. But lest we become unduly Heideggerified, let me try to use Agamben’s discourse in order to gloss Lispector’s story at possibly its most puzzling point of development: when the man at the end decides to unbury the dog he has buried. Why does he do this? To “rid himself of his crime,” as the story has it, i.e. at least both admit the original abandonment of Joe and console himself through ritualizing it? Ostensibly—and yet the inward presence of Joe prompts the man to speculate that the animal demands something more. What is the meaning of this demand? It testifies, first of all, to the presence of the animal inside the human. At the same time he seeks to transcend this presence he is forced to recognize the animal, and thereby begin a consideration all over again of what it means to be human in terms of what it means to be animal. The attempt to solve the last portion of the problem through a substitution of one dog for another does not suffice, any more than the ritual of literally burying the animal dispenses with the matter of what it is to be human. One definition of the human proposed by “Crime” is the following one: refusal to bury the animal. This refusal is part of the skein of divisions in the story: not only between human and animal, but between peopled home and deserted

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plain, life and death, and concealedness and unconcealedness. According to Agamben, this last division is of crucial importance to Heidegger, for whom it constitutes an “irresolvable struggle . . . which defines the human world [as] the internal struggle between man and animal” (69) By virtue of unconcealedness, the animal awakens “from its own captivation to its own capitavation,” whereas by virtue of concealedness the human awakens “to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open” (70). To recast Lispector’s ethical-emotional vocabulary into Agamben’s philo-dialectical one, we can say that in unburying the dog the man demonstrates to himself his own humanity, founded upon remaining open, precisely, to life, by refusing to conceal his “debt” (Lispector’s idiom) or his “captivation” (Heidegger’s) to the animal. This relation is not fixed. Indeed, insofar as the human is concerned, the relation becomes the constitutive principle of his very identity. (In “Crime,” this is the case as well with the animal, since it is a dog; Joe, imagined aimless on the street, masterless.) This may be why Lispector is on record as stating her disquiet about the story, with the conviction there is “something unfinished” about it, and that “I do not understand the Mathematics Professor, although I am convinced he is exactly as I have described him” (Foreign Legion, 147–48). An identity is not the same as a relation. A relation remains unfinished—even unto death. In unburying the dog at the end, the man effectively converts his [animal] identity back into a [human] relation with a specific animal, thus illustrating two things. First, as Agamben states, how one of two terms of the division is always at stake within it. Second, how, for a human being—in Heidegger’s terminology, as Agamben explains—“the open and the free-of-being do not name something radically other with respect to the neither-open-nor-closed of the animal environment. . . . The jewel set at the center of the human world and its Lichtung [clearing] is nothing but animal captivation; the wonder ‘that beings are’ is nothing but the grasping of the ‘essential disruption’ that occurs in the living being from its being exposed to a nonrevelation” (69). To explain this difficult passage solely in terms of the story: by unburying the dog, the man opens himself in an exact Heideggerian sense to the dead dog (whose eyes are described as open) and to the skies, as well as to his crime. Not only does he re-expose himself on the model of animal captivation. ( Just as earlier he tried, and failed, to love Joe as Joe so unreservedly loved him.) The man re-instates the quintessentially human dialectic that Agamben summarizes in the following manner:

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“The irresolvable struggle between unconcealedness and concealedness, between disconcealment and concealment, which defines the human world, is the internal struggle between man and animal” (69). That the struggle must remain a struggle—that a body, once un- or disconcealed, is not fated ever to remain so—I take to be the meaning of the final sentence of “Crime,” where the man begins to descend the hill and return home. How will it be with him when he gets home? Will he be less “cold?” (His “mathematical head” being the rather clichéd reason for his identity in the story’s title.) Will he resume a search to be condemned for his crime by some human institution? (None has been registered to date, thereby confirming the separation of animal and human by the human societal realm.) Will he now have the “courage” to pursue some “greater crime?” (The lesser crime of abandoning a dog representing the criminal on a lower order of being.) The story gives no indication. What we can conclude is that “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor” gives a powerful, intense enactment of the indissoluble relation between animal and human. In Lispector’s idiom, this relation forms the ethical core of human action. In Heidegger’s vocabulary, this relation constitutes the ontological center for human agency; as Agamben phrases the issue: “[T]he openness of the human world (insofar as it is also and primarily an openness to the essential conflict between disconcealment and concealment) can be achieved only by means of an operation enacted upon the not-open of the animal world” (62). What happens once this openness is lost? In lofty, sovereign tones, Agamben touches on this question at the end of The Open, where, viewed in light of the great totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, humanity is seen as bereft of all historical tasks and instead intent on preserving “natural life itself and its well being” (76). That is, the vital relation between animal and man has been lost, and Agamben confesses “[i]t is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human” (77). According to Heidegger, he continues, there are two scenarios possible for “posthistorical” man: either he seeks to govern his own animality through technology or else he seeks its abandonment. However, from the perspective of Lispector’s story, there is little doubt about the status of “the human” in either of these possibilities. Management of animality comes hard. Abandonment proves to be impossible. Instead, it remains crucial for man to

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preserve his own animality as something hidden and undisclosable as well as captivating and open. Found Anton Chekhov’s story, “Kashtanka,” is as well-known as Lispector’s “Crime” is not. Contrasts between the two do not end here. “Kashtanka” has been made into at least one film as well as a children’s book. One of the great realist narratives of an animal in the literature of the world, “Kashtanka” offers itself to its readers as a fully imagined society (including the relations of a dog to a cat, a duck, and a pig) rather than “Crime’s” narrowly-based, strenuous realm, where society has been attenuated virtually to the point of disappearance. Although the dogs in each are masterless, or rather, in Chekhov, subject to the experience of being without a master, Kashtanka is eventually restored to his old master. What are we to make of this, especially since the old master, unlike the new one, mistreats the dog cruelly? What are we to make of the fact that in the very last sentence Kashtanka, now found at the circus by his old master, remembers the life he as been living between now and the time he was lost as “a tangled, oppressive dream” (84)? It is possible, contends Agamben, to organize the relations between men and animals “only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place” (15–16). He means that the “caesura” between the human and the animal is located first of all within man. On the other hand, the character of Kashtanka suffers no such caesura. She is an animal, which means, in part, that her relations within men are wholly exterior. To put it another way, her environment is not “open,” in the precise Heideggerian conceptualization studied by Agamben. As always, animals to Heidegger are exquisitely driven beings, in thrall to “instinctual captivation,” and “open” to the world, but never able to “disconceal” it, i.e. gain some ontological access to the world (much less, like man, be able to form it). In effect, the animal has no world, except as a lack; or, as Heidegger explains: “The animal possess this being-open in its essence. Being open in its captivation is an essential possession of the animal. On the basis of this possession it can do without, be poor, be

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determined in its being by poverty. This having is certainly not a having of world, bur rather being taken by the disinhibiting ring—it is a having of the disinhibitor” (55). So what exactly does Kashtanka feel, apart from being tired, fearful, cold, and hungry, at the end of the first section, alone and without a home? She is in one sense nothing if not “open” to the world—that is, vulnerable to its accidents; in this respect, the animal is “captivated,” and enjoys this captivation as a possession. In contrast, a human being would not possess such captivation. Not only would it be too immediate, too circumstantial. It would be characterized by a lack—a lack of wider terms, of sense, of understanding. This same lack, in turn, both enables the animal to endure (i.e. be “poor”) and to remain at a level where the essential poverty of its endurance brings with it no further or more extensive terms. Thus, in the next section, Kashtanka responds to the “stranger” as someone who brings her inside, warms and feeds her, but not as someone who either confronts her with a choice between the new conditions and her former ones or else who liberates her. That instead Kashtanka is merely anew “taken by the disinhibiting ring” means that the world cannot reveal itself to her. Instead, there is only for the animal what is immediately present. Granted, Chekhov raises in Kashtanka’s mind the contrast between now and then. The animal remembers her former life. But it does not occur to her as something she has chosen, any more than she has chosen, or could choose, the life she has before her now. Even when the dog recalls an especially cruel trick the son of her master used to play, “the more lurid were her memories,” we read, “the more loudly and miserably Kashtanka whined” (70). Her whining, we might say, expresses the very voice of her captivation, the limit of her openness experienced as confusion, helplessness, and misery. This is so also at the end, when Kashtanka once more remembers, but in fact suffers captivation once again. As Agamben (commenting on Heidegger’s notion of primal animal boredom) explicates the matter: “Captivation appears here as a sort of fundamental Stimmung in which the animal does not open itself, as does Dasein, in a world, yet is nevertheless ecstatically drawn outside of itself in an exposure which disrupts it in its every fiber” (62). What would to man appear as “the world” (here at the end, recaptured) appears to the animal as exposure only—exposure which makes no sense, or, as Agamben emphasizes, “exposure without disconcealment.”

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The conclusion to “Kashtanka” perplexes as well as moves us because the “main character” is offered such a rich experience of disconcealment, including the difference between excitement and security, or work and ease, as well as between gratitude and love. Rich, that is, for a man. For an animal, the experience simply fails to occur. Elsewhere Agamben states as follows: “The irresolvable struggle between unconcealedness and concealedness, between disconcealment and concealment, which defines the human world, is the internal struggle between man and animal” (69). Such a struggle does not define the animal world. The animal, in contrast, suffers no internal struggle. When she does, she whines. Internal struggles are inert in the animal. In man they can be many things, foremost among them, productive. “Kashtanka” gestures at such potential by introducing the main character to others, namely, the cat, the duck, and the pig. But none of them modifies the dog in any way, nor does her new name, “Auntie,” which the new master bestows. The lessons Kashtanka learns are described as purely external—or rather what would be external if there was some principle of internality with which externality could enter into opposition or conflict. Instead, there is simply a moment, the narrator notes as if in passing, when Kashtanka “had grown quite used to her new life, and from a thin, long mongrel, had changed into a sleek, well-groomed dog” (76). Kashtanka is not a character as she would be presented in a children’s book. The conflict between her former life and her present one fails to occur because the dog is not modeled on a human being—who, to put it in Heideggerian terms, experiences (that is, takes on the burden of experiencing) Dasein. Instead, as Agamben explains, “Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being captivated, this anxious and resolute opening of the living being to its own being captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human” (70). But the animal, on the other hand, never awakens. If Lispector’s story traces the presence of the animal within man, Chekhov’s story does not trace the presence of the human within animal, for, in Agamben’s reading, there simply is no human within the animal. If it is “proper to humanitas to remain open to the closedness of the animal (73)” then in the same sense the reverse is not proper because it is not possible to animalitas. When the duck dies, Kashtanka experiences what could be termed intimations of her own death. But

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finally death is simply another thing to which the animal is not “open,” in a human sense—to which she can only be in any sense open by virtue of being closed. Kashtanka ends the night, once more, whining (80). But what of the circus? Why, of all things, is the stranger who rescues Kashtanka an animal trainer? And what is the meaning of her subsequently rescued by her original owners on the night of her circus debut? At the end of The Open Agamben engages in some reflections on the end of history and the assumption by humanity of “the mandate of the total management of its own animality” (77). By the time Chekhov wrote, we can say, the circus was already an example of this management, even as it was also, insofar as animal training was concerned, an example of how humanity, rather than still having “the form of keeping itself open to the undisconcealed of the animal,” sought to “open and secure the not-open of every domain, and thus [close] itself to its own openness” (77). In “Kashtanka,” it seems to me, we are meant to be suspicious of the circus. Training for it disciplines at the same time it releases animal energies. Furthermore, their public exhibition “manages” the very fact of animality through securing—exactly—the “not-open of every domain,” even the modest, unexceptionable spaces that abide in pigs, ducks, cats, and dogs, through which each can be trained. The narrative acts to stage the results, and then to rescue Kashtanka from further participation in them, as if to return to her—and to us—a private domain. Without such domains, there will be no animality for humanity to manage. Without any animality to manage, we will no longer be human. Thus, once away from the circus and in the street with father and son, “Kashtanka looked at their backs, and it seemed to her that she had been following them for ages, and was glad that there had not been a break for a minute in her life” (84). What to the human would constitute a vast “caesura” in being constitutes none at all to the animal. The whole story has been meaningless—“concealed”—to Kashtanka. Instead, the meaning resides—we realize anew—with us, in order that we might realize not only our profound difference from the animal realm. Agamben speculates that perhaps “the openness of the human world . . . can be achieved only by means of an operation enacted upon the not-open of the animal world” (62). The circus has constituted an example of such an operation. That is, Kashtanka and her fellows are made to perform in the human world. But they perform for us, not for themselves. “The world,”

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Agamben writes, following Heidegger, “has become open for man only through the interruption and nihilation of the living being’s relationship with its disinhibitor” (69–70). But, again in contrast, the circus does not constitute a disinhibitor to the animal, to whom it is given merely as an occasion for the dog to behave. The ontological status of the animal environment is—to the animal—no different when it is changed into the cultural status of the human environment. “Man” may be produced out of the difference between man and animal. On the other hand, “animal” is not. At the end Kashtanka becomes what she was, and we are asked, I believe, to be relieved that she no longer has to be subjected to an environment where she is bid to become something she is not. The world was never “open” to her in the way it is to us. In this respect, the narrative works in a reverse way from that of children’s story about an animal, where he or she learns some “lesson” at the end. Kashtanka learns nothing. There is nothing for her to learn—certainly not the most obvious thing it is given to us readers to learn: the difference between the one “captivation” and the other. Conceptualized Speaking of his cat, Derrida states thus: “Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (“Animal,” 379). In contrast, the “existence” of an entity referred to as “the animal” in Heidegger is so striking precisely because of its utter availability to conceptualization. In order to assist the process, “the animal” in Heidegger has no species, not to mention a gender or a name. Just so, in order to preserve its refusal, Derrida’s cat has a gender as well as a species, yet, strangely, no name. Why is this? Is it as if what he terms the cat’s “unsubstitutable singularity” would not so much be compromised by a name as somehow thereby committed to a narrative?1

1 Compare Derrida on John Ryle’s choice of the name, “Fido,” in Theory of Meaning. Why this name? A friend “whispers” to Derrida: “so that the example will be obedient.” (Postcard, 244). In terms of the absent name of the cat, it is so that the animal is free to be disobedient, or as Tom Tyler writes (comparing such animals to the exceptional snakes of the bestiary) “wild” and “indexical” (as opposed to being ciphers or stereotypes) “in the sense that they will not be pinned down. . . . to the extent that they resist reification, each maintaining a mortal existence that refuses to be conceptual-

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So it seems on the example of both Lispector’s and Chekhov’s narratives. Animals in each have names. Because they have names, they can not only become the basis for narratives, but, in turn, these narratives can be the foundation for establishing a resistance to conceptualization. Not a refusal. Outright refusal would be tantamount to avoiding narrative entirely—as in fact Derrida almost successfully does with his cat—and being committed instead to the labor of conceptualization. As it is, we note that Derrida effectively employs his animal’s refusal in order to renew his own peculiar labor, whereas both Lispector and Chekhov express through their respective narratives the resistance of both Joe and Kashtanka to—well, to the sort of reading I have given each, by employing Heidegger, or, to be more exact, Heidegger as read by Agamben. There is another profound difference. Both Lispector and Chekhov write fictions. Their animals are imagined rather than real, whereas both Derrida and Heidegger write philosophical reflections. Their animals are presumed to be real—to be encountered, in Derrida’s case, in one’s own actual bathroom, each morning. Indeed, they are so real, in Heidegger’s case, that their reality can be discussed as it were directly, without any attention to particularity; such particularity, on the other hand, is the very condition of fiction, even the abstract species of fable that Lispector writes. A Heideggerean “reading” of Lispector and Chekhov, therefore, necessarily ignores the resistance, not to say the refusal, of fiction. Fictional animals become no different than real ones—like Derrida’s cat (whose “reality” is, as he is well aware, a matter that can only be taken up at a “higher” level than narrative allows). In Heideggerean terms, which Agamben does not dispute, fictional animals are no less useful than real ones for constructing the generic animal of western philosophy, who is inseparable from, say, the cat who follows you each morning into your own bathroom. Of course Derrida is intent on deconstructing this same “animal” (not to say the whole idea of animality). Later in his essay, he cites one of the rare times in Being and Time when an animal is mentioned—in order to raise the question of whether the animal is “constituted by some ized” (“Quia ego,” 59). Of course, as I argue, the cat nonetheless makes available a certain kind of philosophical solicitation as well as refusal. She has in fact, already provoked a considerable literature. See, besides Tyler, Wood, Simmons, and Baker, The Postmodern Animal (183–90).

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kind of time”—and then wonders if the example of “this fiction, this simulacrum, this myth, this legend, this phantasm of what is offered as a pure concept . . . is not precisely pure philosophy become a symptom of the history that concerns us here” (“Animal,” 391). Agamben, however, is content not to wonder about this, and I have followed his assumption here, in order to see how the same “concept,” or rather how conceptualization itself, can be refused by animal examples, whether real or fictional. Of course they can be refused. In this respect, it is more important that the existence be specific (nothing helps like narrative) than that it be animal. It must be admitted, though, that in the face of such a powerful conceptualization as Heidegger’s what Derrida terms “the history of the philosophical animal” is not so easily banished. Whether our dogs are our own or others, whether real or fictional, we relate to them and read them through the ideas we have inherited as much as through the personal decisions we have made about them or the pain we have suffered with them.

DOGS IN RELATION

DOG YEARS: LIFE AND DEATH IN DOG MEMOIRS He’s taught me love, and what had I done with the lesson since his departure? Louise Bernikow, Dreaming in Libro

There’s a New Yorker cartoon by Bek that features a woman pointing an angry-looking finger at a dog. The caption reads: “Sit. Stay. Make up for everything that’s wrong in my life.” Poor dogs. More has never been more required of them. It’s no longer enough for them to be man’s (or woman’s) best friend. On the evidence of the current proliferation of best-selling non-fiction memoirs about dogs, they are expected to be man’s saviors. A seeming exception proves the rule. John Grogan’s Morley and Me is marketed with the subtitle: “Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog.” We fear the worst. We are not disappointed: Grogan’s Lab chews everything, eats everything, destroys everything. The decision of the author and his wife to get a dog before they have children is a disaster. And yet “love” eventually wins through “life” (which comes to include three children). Grogan concludes with “lessons” his dog has taught him: to seize the moment, to remain optimistic, and to be loyal. In memoir after memoir, it proves to be nearly impossible for an author to give a book-length account of his or her experience with a dog or dogs and not to present the relationship as one of great positive meaning. The subtitle of Ken Foster’s The Dogs Who Found Me is more unashamedly didactic than the title: “What I’ve Learned from Pets Who Were Left Behind.” Foster learns the same sort of lessons as Grogan, while enduring a catastrophic series of events: 9/11, a heart condition, the death of two friends, and Hurricane Katrina. His book tour has now led to a new book: Dogs I Have Met and the People They Found, many of both met on tour. Just so, Louise Bernikow’s Dreaming in Libro includes an account of the book tour for her previous book, Bark If You Love Me. Like Grogan or Foster, Bernikow is didactic: Dreaming is subtitled, “How a Good Dog Tamed a Bad Woman.” Unlike Grogan or Foster, Bernikow takes fateful intimations or seemingly chance epiphanies more seriously (she first saw her beloved Boxer, Libro, in the back of a police car) and so her relationship comes to have the character of something spiritual.

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As a reader in the Amazon.com site comments: “Libra is a Buddha in a brindle coat.” What to make of a dog that wakes up its owner at 3:30 am in order to alert her to the fact that her baby, born premature, is no longer breathing? A coincidence? A revelation? Visitations are another name for coincidences in dog memoirs. Allen and Linda Anderson’s Angel Dogs, for example, could not be more explicit in the subtitle: “Divine Messengers of Love.” The Andersons mean the words literally. In story after story, dogs are presented as having access to a supernatural world, much as their earlier Angel Cats (“Divine Messengers of Comfort”) and their later Angel Horses (“Divine Messengers of Hope”). Jon Katz is the author of a series of animal memoirs that at first anecdote could not seem more different. His recently published Dog Days continues the story of how he and his wife established Bedlam Farm in upper New York and continue to suffer through the joys and sorrows of rural life. The sorrows are many and varied: oppressive flies, chilling winters, misbehaving donkeys. The joys are simple: dogs. Katz delights in them all, especially in the attempts of his changing cast of Border Collies to learn how to herd sheep. In short, nothing supernatural. But wait. In the prologue to the second of his Bedlam Farm memoirs, The Dogs of Bedlam Farm, Katz concludes as follows: “So I can safely say a number of things about this book. It is about how several dogs led me to confront my own sense of humanity and challenged me to try to be a better human being. It’s about the startling degree to which dogs can enter and alter a human life” (xiii). The fact that such language is “humanistic” does not alter its spiritual valence. Katz’s dogs saved his life, as in the subtitle to a separate volume in the Bedlam series, A Good Dog, “The Story of Orson, Who Changed My Life.” How to assess these books? There are many more, whether or not one includes various collections of doggie stories or anecdotes, including the inevitable “Chicken Soup of the Soul” canine edition. Fathers or drugs might have become exhausted as foci for life writing. Not so dogs. One reason is because these dog memoirs—especially in contrast to those about fathers (absent) or drugs (suicidal)—are irremediably optimistic in nature. No matter the breed of dog or its behavior, the animal always teaches the owner something, which is profoundly valuable and life-enhancing.1 But there are other, less obvious reasons.

Studying the immense outpouring of grief and mourning during the Victorian age—ranging from rescue projects, portraits, tombstones, and epitaphs to poems and 1

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I would emphasize three. First, the experience represented is extremely private. There is commonly no larger social world. Indeed, the human world either has been given up (especially after the death of a spouse) or at least will be slighted for a deeper, more intense connection with the animal world. Often, the connection is at first unwanted or unacknowledged—the dog appears quite by chance or for inexplicable reasons; as Katz writes, about agreeing to accept Orson when offered in an email by a reader from Texas: “I couldn’t explain to my wife, Paula . . . why I wanted this other dog. I didn’t know myself, it was just a feeling I had” (Good Dog, 9). Not only does such an accidental appearance establish the dog as a potential bearer of “otherworldly wisdom.” It situates the dog’s very existence as a symbolic occurrence in the life narrative of the owner. Notwithstanding the nature of the vignettes or the range of anecdotes any one memoir relates about the beloved animal, each narrative is richly and self-indulgently driven by human concerns, human motivations, and human meaning. “To me,” Katz remarks at one point in Dogs, “dogs offer a chance to keep working on the issues that prevent me from attachment to other human beings—impatience, judgmentalism, intolerance, and anger. I hope dogs lead me toward, not away from, people” (104). “One reason”—he adds—“I hope they help me to become a better human is so that I can apply those lessons to life with humans.” But does this in fact prove to be the case? Not only does such a desire run counter to the self-enclosed nature of the memoir itself.2 The possible

stories—Teresa Mangum gives the following overview: “Turning to aesthetic forms used to honor human dead and comfort the living, pet owners endeavored to give shape, significance, and legitimacy to the unfathomable loss they felt at the death of ‘mere animals.’ In so doing, pet owners would have to come face to face with the paradoxical nature of human-animal relationships. An animal’s death asks the human companion to reconcile personal, domestic experience of loss, on the one hand, with the tumult of animals and the uses and understanding of animals . . . on the other hand” (18–19). Contemporary memoirs of dogs at once offer the consolations of the memoir form to pet owners and implicitly develop its aesthetic possibilities. 2 In this respect, today’s memoirs continue the paradoxical work of nineteenth century pet owners, whose “every attempt to memorialize an animal,” as Mangum explains, “simultaneously acknowledged and more deeply buried the silent beings on whom they increasingly depended for intimacy and a meaningful emotional life” (30–31). She links this “burial” to the same dismay over animal cruelty and attempts to remove the spectacle of it from public view that inspired the RSPCA or the 1867 ban on public demonstrations of vivisections. “The paradoxical problem with mourning,” Mangum concludes, “was that memorialization idealized but also isolated the beloved pet as a being apart from the animal world of stray dogs, hunted animals, work animals, and

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expansion of its emotions into the human realm is seldom actually tested. In dog memoirs society has already failed. Rebirth must now come from elsewhere, and this is a second thing that must be emphasized about these books. They are not only popular because people like to read about dogs. People like to read about spiritual rebirth. Dog memoirs constitute one of the primary narratives of the drama of spiritual life in the United States today. And there is a final matter: death. No renewed life without it. In order for something to live, something has to die. In dog memoirs, this would be the dog. (Whether or not there has been a previous death of a spouse.) These books are about death—how to anticipate it, how to participate in it, how to survive it. Of course not every dog memoir includes the death of a dog. (Am inevitable subject so dreaded that Katz gives preliminary assurances in two of his books that “no dogs die in this book.”) But most do. Death is all but inescapable, if only to mark a space for closure, both to the intensity of the relationship between owner and dog as well as to the emotional life of the owner, who must learn to grieve in the process at least of gesturing towards a return to the human realm. However, these concerns are not easily balanced. Indeed, depending upon the examples one chooses, they may even be contradictory. And certainly allowance has to be made for the differences between, say, Dreaming in Libra and Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door. Lessons from a Freethinking Dog. Bernikow lives in New York City. Kerasote lives in Wyoming. Under these circumstances, it is remarkable that each book follows the same trajectory: chance first meeting through intimate shared experience between dog and owner to the animal’s long, painful death. In what follows, I want to provide a detailed analysis of two unusually rich, complicated examples of the dog memoir, before turning to some final questions about today’s practice. Because dogs live so proximately to us, we can, it seems, tell our own stories about ourselves through our stories about them. The narratives become preeminently ones of relation, and especially insofar as they ultimately come to embrace death, dog memoirs converge with those about beloved human relations, such

‘food’ animals” (31). For an entirely different discussion of mourning, which does not attempt to assess its cultural work, see Alice Kuznair, Melancholia’s Dog, chapter four; she does mention in passing that there are few public rituals or customs to commemorate the loss of a dog in North America.

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as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) or Calvin Trillin’s About Alice (2006).3 But of course dogs are not human beings, and so memoirs about them strain the limits not only of our need to represent death but to represent animals—both as different from us and as distinct from us. What are these limits? Every dog memoir explores them. Every one reminds us that it is possible to long for rebirth at the expense of enduring a relation, especially if the relation is with a dog, the animal who lives most proximate to us and yet who has no say in the matter of the “lessons” either its life or its death gives. 1 Mark Doty’s Dog Years is an extremely accomplished dog memoir. Doty decides to adapt Beau, a Golden Retriever, as a companion to his dying partner, Wally. Beau joins Arden, another retriever. Beau is younger but he dies first (seven years after Wally). By the time Arden dies some years later, Doty has another companion, Paul. Both men can’t bear to bury Arden in the garden, near Beau, and so let a vet cremate him, after a fatal injection. Unusual for a dog memoir, there is no ritual. Just as unusual, there is merely a one-page “Envoi,” about a little wolf toy given by one man to the other, whose silly mechanical cry comes to symbolize either a future space already being created for another dog or a past space in which a lost dog remains mourned. Doty is a celebrated poet, and his memoir works best as a fabric of elegantly stitched details and meditations. The first sentence of the book is: “No dog has ever said a word but that doesn’t mean they live outside the world of speech” (1). Soon he is citing Virginia Woolf, about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush: “Not a single one of his myriad sensations ever submitted itself to the deformity of words” (3). What distinguishes Dog Years particularly is its awareness of what

3 Kuznair summarizes the function of mourning in “autographical stories” thus: “They countervail depressive muteness and avenge against the passivity one experiences in the face of death. Writing here serves both as a testimony to the dog’s life and as a gift to the departed. It offers a farewell that acknowledges the departure of the beloved. But it also insists on sharing the testimony of loss with others in a bid to reverse the social foreclosure of grief ” (144). Again for some historical perspective, see Mangum’s “Dog Years, Human Fears.”

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might be termed the need for tact in all questions of representation. Doty is acutely conscious throughout that he is writing about, or rather on behalf of, a nonhuman being who commands no language. Take, for example, when Beau draws his last breath. His wide-eyed visage is characterized thus: “A look that would be read, were it a text in a language we knew, as What’s happening to me? (147). Earlier, Doty has detailed his wildly tearful response to a kitschy Disney remake of a dog and cat story, The Incredible Journey, as follows: “Never mind that my circumstances were genuinely heartbreaking [ With Wally in a rented hospital bed, in their living room.] I was managing that, somehow, but what I couldn’t bear was the representation of the heartbreaking” (34). Precisely. Hence, his unapologetic liking of an old photograph of a dog who can embody a “pure readiness” (45). Or hence—as if at the other extreme—his felt analogy of an almost-dead Arden (“trundling his way up the stairs”) to a drag queen impersonating an age-ravaged but indomitable Judy Garland (173). Whether the subject is a dog or grief over a dog, how to represent the unrepresentable? Dog Years in effect presents a rich range of strategies, from citing Emily Dickinson, Tolstoy, or Robinson Jeffers to wanting to say “Fuck you” to a woman who pets a wobbly Arden on the street and then blathers on about how we’re “all part of a cycle” (12). The sentiment and even the sentimentality of the writers have been tested, whereas those of the passerby have not. And yet, with respect to dogs, every day brings new challenges to earned emotion. Once, while Doty and Paul are on vacation to Mexico, they spot a stray on the street. The men are moved. Should they try to adopt? They decide, no. It’s just not feasible. They leave not before Doty realizes that the dog has “brought me something” (196). But how to phrase it? “[ I ]t is a cliché to say so.” Framing the matter this way makes the subsequent words appear under pressure, if not actually earned. The dog, it seems, has made Doty feel not only compassion but strength rather than despair. “She and I are both vulnerable, equally subject to the predations of illness and of time” (197). More, “despair is one note in the range of feeling that will pour through me over time, but I do not have to be frozen there. . . . Animal presences remain for me, as they have always been, a door toward feeling and understanding. . . . I write to bless the delicate head [of the dog on the street] the paw raised in hope. How should we

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know ourselves, except in the clarifying mirror of some other gaze?” (197).4 This seems to me a morally beautiful moment, and the beauty is forged through the care of its articulation. Doty does not grant the street dog words she cannot utter, much less emotions she may not feel. The dog is inevitably part of his larger human spiritual drama, rather than the reverse, and yet just enough is made of the common being animal and human share that even the final sentence of the above passage—which has to refer to the poet for the words to possess any meaning—can be construed nonetheless to refer as well to the dog. To say more would appear mawkish or mystical. So Doty writes no more. Besides, he has his own Arden to whom to return, whose death he will now have to face. In between this chapter and the one that gives an account of Arden’s death there is yet another short section, or “Entr’acte,” this one consisting of ruminations about another Dickinson poem. Throughout, these sections are never less than interesting, and yet, I believe, they are seldom more than interesting. Each one retards the narrative, or perhaps better, comprises the most obvious means by which the narrative refracts continually into notes, meditations, dreams, reminiscences, travels, and flights of various kinds of “poetic” fancy. What Dog Years gains at the site of particularized moments it loses on the level of overall narrative. Finally, of course the book is a narrative. But of exactly what, beyond its own delicacy? Ostensibly, the death of two dogs. But the death of each one is not equally treated, and that of Arden’s is arguably anticlimactic after that of Beau’s. More crucially, the death of Wally, Doty’s partner, is not directly or fully represented at all. Why is this? Because instead the death of one dog, even so many years after Wally’s death, and then the death of another, so many more years later, stands each time for the loss of the beloved human companion? No. And yet Doty proves

4 At the end of her chapter on intimacy, which discusses five texts, Kuznair salutes the authors as being “vigilantly mindful of the problems of projection and incorporation” and then continues: “Because these artists explore the divisions between man and beast, they recognize that they are cause for respect—not for the denigration or shaming of the animal or the equally disturbing projection of sentimental human emotion onto the pet” (135).

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unable to situate the unrepresented human death within the dynamics of the animal deaths that are represented. It is as if in trying to avoid producing an AIDS memoir he has only partially realized a dog memoir, at least according to its fundamental dynamic: as a narrative of the author’s spiritual rebirth. “What was I doing in the animal shelter,” Doty thinks, “thinking of adopting a dog at a time like this?” (75). He adopts Beau anyway, in a rare moment of almost willed ignorance. So far, so true to memoir type: the beloved dog comes accidentally or senselessly—and therefore the more irresistibly. Friends protest: “You’re taking care of a man who can’t get out of bed and you’re adopting a golden retriever?” (76; his italics). Doty doesn’t know what to say. Just so, in this memoir, he can’t quite bring himself to consider the fact that Beau represents a choice of life in the midst of death—his own life (and that of Beau’s), not Wally’s. There is no shame in this. Indeed, the nature of the dog memoir virtually requires such a choice on the part of the author. But Doty is reluctant to make it, and his narrative suffers as a result. There is a lovely moment just before Wally dies when Doty sees his lover touch Beau virtually for the last time. Or rather touch “all he represented: possibility, beginning, potential sweetness, vitality.” But of course such things are useful only to the living. Doty writes a concluding sentence: “Dear man reaching to the world: how I want to go when I do” (81). With this sentence Doty commits a turn toward self that only appears to baffle him during the rest of the memoir. It remains focused on his dogs. It struggles to refuse equal or more embracing focus on himself, as the beneficiary of a spiritual rebirth made possible by his dogs. Perhaps Dog Years contains too many deaths: Wally’s, Beau’s, Arden’s, and nearly at one point Doty’s own. (In a despairing moment on the Staten Island ferry. “I will not do what I want to do, which, I am mortified to admit, is to drown myself and my dog” (137).) Or perhaps the bearer of rebirth is actually embodied not by a dog but by another human being, Paul, Doty’s new companion—a relation which would have unbalanced a narrative centered on dogs. In any case, in so admirably avoiding the New Age blather and self-absorption characteristic of so many other dog memoirs, Dog Years ultimately has nothing else to substitute for them, except an exquisite consciousness about how difficult it is to represent anything, especially rebirth.

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2 A Good Dog could not be a greater contrast to Dog Years. Doty’s sculpted prose is beyond Katz’s range, which is content to do little more than move things along, amiably. If Doty is worried about all manner of fit between words and what they represent, Katz appears worried (if at all) merely about what his words refer to; Doty risks being too careful, while Katz risks being too careless. Each man presents a narrative, but if Doty’s is too expansive or diffuse, Katz’s is almost too concentrated and intense. Furthermore, if Doty’s narrative never quite establishes his need for rebirth or precisely how each of his dogs represents it, Katz is straightforward and open about how Orson (the good dog of the title) was intended from the outset to address Katz’s own problems—his family had broken up, his suburban life felt precious, he feared stagnating at midlife, and even his beloved Labs made him faintly bored. No wonder even at the end of his current volume in the Bedlam series Katz still recognizes “Orson, the dog who led me here” (267), meaning a new life on the farm, full of excitement and challenge. Speaking so candidly about your spiritual life, however, does not guarantee a satisfactory account of it. It is probably best, first, to set aside the fact that Orson actually appears in the first two volumes of the Bedlam series, in ways that are not always wholly consistent from those in the memoir devoted exclusively to him. (For example, in A Dog Year Katz reads up on Border Collies before Orson—then called Devon—arrives, whereas in A Good Dog he presents himself at this time as “understanding little about this kind of dog” [10].) Set aside even the suggestion of all this attention devoted to one dog as being indicative of something obsessive or unresolved in Katz’s very relation to him. We can begin instead with the title. Characterizing Orson as “a good dog” is simply misleading—less an accurate assessment of behavior than an indication of hope—for it ignores the fact that Orson is, well, a bad dog from the start. He’s aggressive and recalcitrant. He refuses to learn from commands; he fails to learn to herd sheep. He chases school buses, he breaks glass doors. Throughout, Katz is dedicated to the unremitting task of trying at once to make Orson good and to make good himself with Orson. He salutes the animal as most likely his “lifetime” dog: “His spirit seemed parallel to mine. There was a link, a connection that I couldn’t explain, But I

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felt it nonetheless” (48). Yet the feeling, it seems clear, is forged on the basis of Orson’s being, say, the sort of dog who disdains puppies or who can’t seem to help chasing sheep. After Orson goes after a Seeing Eye dog, Katz poses the question: “How do you love a dog like that? And, more interesting, why?” (47). These are of course two different questions. A Good Dog proceeds through ignoring the second and focusing on the first. Eventually you love an Orson by giving him not only standard veterinary care but special holistic therapy. You try not to judge Orson unfavorably in comparison to other, calmer or more instinctively gifted Border Collies. You cherish what you can—especially in Katz’s case, the times with Orson while riding an ATV (All-Terrain Vehicle), which the dog loves. But increasingly it becomes impossible to ignore how the dog is becoming “unraveled,” most alarmingly when he begins to “nip” people and then to attack them—once tearing off the T-shirt of a student helper and biting her just below the neck. After Orson rips the sleeve of a neighbor boy, Katz considers his choices: a more secure kennel for Orson, a new home, more specialist care, or euthanasia from the local vet. After careful deliberation, he chooses the last. His choice is unprecedented in dog memoirs, and has resulted in two things: increased sales and a steady volume of criticism from outraged readers; in a new afterword to a new paperback edition of A Good Dog Katz remarks that this book has sold more than his others, in the course of trying not so much to defend as restate his decision, in terms of the actual circumstances in which he made it. What Katz doesn’t seem to realize, however, is that writing a dog memoir in the first place is to enter into a formal contract with potential readers. Euthanasia violates the contract. We need to understand precisely why. The pain that Katz records in raising Orson accords perfectly with experience in dog memoirs. The owner’s frustration is understood as care. Even his or her anger can be comprehended as one aspect of love. Normally, such feelings continue even unto death. The death of Kerasote’s Lab mix, Merle, for example, is as agonizing and protracted as any in the current literature, and thereby fulfills the expectation that the animal’s death will be represented as the logical outcome of all the devoted emotion—both the owner’s and through him the dog’s—preceding it. However, euthanasia flies in the face of this logic. To read of the animal’s death as a function of the owner’s will—especially in comparison with owners who, like Kerasote, will go to any expense, any lengths to keep their dog alive—is to be shocked. Or, in terms of the title, A Good Dog, even betrayed. Many of Katz’s readers

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are clearly unable to recover. In fact, Katz doesn’t use the word, “euthanasia.” He doesn’t use the word, “murder.” (Only once speaking of the decision “to have [Orson] killed” (171).) He doesn’t describe Orson’s death—or rather how it can be characterized or explained—by any one word, and of course we must be mindful both of the poverty of our own cultural vocabulary for such an action as well as the author’s own suffering in deciding upon it. I would explain the outraged response of so many readers differently. Not only at the end does A Good Dog disclose an author’s spiritual life less sure and more troubled than we have been led to suspect. In having the dog killed rather than cared for, the book substitutes both suicide and murder for the author’s presumed rebirth. To take the first of these: again, Katz repeatedly emphasizes the rare depth of his identification with Orson. As he writes at the end: “Orson radically altered my life. He came at a pivotal time and provoked—with no conscious part in the process, I’m sure—a series of actions and reactions that caused me to change almost everything about the way I lived and worked and thought” (200). Well and good. According to the symbolic terms of the dog memoir contract, the animal represents the owner. But then we see the result of the equation when Katz decides to kill Orson: he decides to eliminate the “animal” portion of himself. (In Katz’s case, the unconscious impulse to take chances, to be ornery, willful, or spirited.) To put the matter bluntly: it is as if Katz suddenly decides to commit suicide—to eliminate his animal self. No amount of authorial commentary will banish the action being comprehended precisely in this way. At the very end, Katz continues to write as if to counter it: “Orson reenergized my work. He reconnected me to nature, brought me to the farm, introduced me to the pleasure of other animals, led me to true friends, cracked open my consciousness, deepened my spirituality and sense of possibility” (209–10). But after Orson’s death, such words appear to testify more to a psychological contraction into the most private areas of an individual psyche rather than to an expansion some a wider spiritual realm. Such a wider area is what the dog memoir is founded upon, sanctioned by generosity rather than selfishness, for it is crucial that the dog not appear as finally some “episode” in the human’s development.5 5 Speaking in her chapter on intimacy about the authors and photographers to be discussed, Kuznair states: “It is paradoxically the foreignness of the dog’s being that grants intimacy with them its power,” In turn, this leads to another reversal, whereby “it is not the human being (traditionally male) who is the paragon of virtue or the

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Put another way, it is important that in speaking of the dog’s importance to him, the owner be understood to be providing far more of a tribute than an apology. The memoir, after all, functions not only as the owner’s autobiography. In addition, it effectively becomes the dog’s biography. As Raymond Gaita states, “we do not write biographies of animals.” The stories we do tell—he goes on—do not add up to biographies because the animals make no choices. “Life neither presents them nor denies them opportunities. They cannot rejoice in their life nor can they despair of it” (The Philosopher’s Dog, 79). What this means is that the author of a dog memoir is under an obligation to reveal another’s story—even if that of another species—as its own and not exclusively that of the person who wields the only available language. If in one respect Katz commits his own suicide in killing Orson, in another respect he murders Orson, because he simply cancels the biographical dimension of A Good Dog. In effect, Katz stops writing and kills his subject. Granted, Orson never had a separate life apart from Katz. But it turns out that this does not mean the dog’s life could not be considered apart from his owner—glimpsed this way often past his words, accessible at times as otherwise despite the given interpretation of his actions. After Orson’s death, Katz’s “shaman” suggests that, notwithstanding the “timeless” connection between Orson and Katz, “animals simply find a way to let go when it’s time. He had simply had enough” (214). Of course this is possible. Anything is, or was. The time for more possible life, though, has ended. In choosing to kill Orson, Katz rewrites Orson’s biography in terms of his own autobiography for a final time. Nothing more of Orson’s biography can show through, including more of the memoir itself as an autobiography founded upon its relation to another being. In theory, it might seem to matter if the being is a dog rather than a human being. In practice, this doesn’t appear to be the case, and the risks of deciding to sever the relation might apply with greater force if the “other” is a dog, who is finally helpless and cannot even speak. Authors of dog memoirs do not give such lavish accounts of the animal’s death only stable referent against which the animal is measured and deemed, inevitably, to fall short, but the contrary. With the animal now the one bestowing care, the meaning of ‘animal caring ethics’ is given a new twist” (113). My point is not so much to fault Katz’s own peculiar relation to his dog, but to indicate how difficult this relation is to represent against a background of other written relations to dogs that render Katz’s almost unrepresentable.

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out of sheer love. They honor formal constraints as well. In choosing to kill Orson, Katz finds himself in the position of an owner who not only appears not to have loved his dog enough. He also appears as an author who has chosen death rather than rebirth. 3 In his distinguished study of autobiography, How Our Lives Become Stories, Paul John Eakin states his belief that, in contrast to the way we normally think of autobiography, “all identity is relational” and so “the definition of autobiography must be stretched to reflect the kinds of self-writing in which relational identity is characteristically displayed” (43–4). Among examples of “relational life,” in which autobiography becomes in part the Other’s story, he mentions four of the most common: the father-son relation, the mother-daughter, the father-daughter, and the mother-son. The list could be expanded. I would add another: the owner-dog relation. Dog memoirs, precisely, give “the self ’s story viewed through the lens of its relation to some other key person” (86). Eakin continues: “we might call such a person the proximate other to signify the intimate tie to the relational autobiographer.” A dog fits this definition better than most people, since he or she seldom leaves the owner’s home—or even the owner’s side—except in the company of the owner. Indeed, “proximity” is so crucial to the case of dogs in particular—sons and daughters grow up and leave home, fathers and mothers move into new homes themselves—that the presence of another human being threatens to usurp their basic claim to relation, at least from the perspective of a memoir. We have noted this in Doty’s case. It is with good reason that authors of dog memoirs either live alone or try to suppress mention of anyone else’s presence if they don’t. Of course, no matter how relentlessly an owner anthropomorphizes a pet, since a dog is not a “person” in the same way a human being is, the kind of autobiography that can be produced is more restricted in kind. Bonds are more fixed than those between father and son. Troubles are more limited than the ones between mother and daughter. Perhaps the difference alone explains why dog memoirs tend to the formulaic; experience in them is simply more subject to how ultimately limited are the ways an animal’s life can be unfolded within the life of the human who sustains it, and who throughout possesses quite literally the power of life and death over it. (Part of what is so disturbing about Katz’s book

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is how it finally reveals this last fact in particular.) “The lessons these identity narratives are teaching, again and again,” concludes Eakin in his chapter on relational identity, “is that the self is dynamic, changing, and plural” (98). With respect to dogs, though, relational selfhood may become arrested, grow static, and just stay monotonous. And of course, in any case the duration the relation is likely to be much shorter than with a human family member. Given the vast difference between the kinds of experience possible to human beings and their families in comparison to human beings and their dogs, it is nothing short of amazing, therefore, how varied the texture of dog memoirs actually is. The private nature of the relation can open out. The accent of rebirth can be played down. The moment of death can be elided. In some memoirs, identity itself can appear to flow as if it were the more protean for being the less human. “Actually,” writes Bernikow early in Dreaming of Libro, “the longer we lived together, the more our life took on the quality of a buddy movie” (49). Later, she summarizes: “Like most old married couples, neither Libro and I at this point cared much for making new conquests, especially if they seemed difficult from the start” (150). Later still, she remarks: “Mine was the panic known to single moms with sick children” (183). What is her basic relation with the dog?6 This is not the only question to pose. More broadly, how culture-specific is the nature of dog memoirs? From, say, a Japanese perspective, the memoirs I have mentioned are likely to appear hopelessly American. Or perhaps just haplessly contemporary. If we seek a wider temporal as well as cultural reference, J.R. Ackerley’s celebrated memoir (one of the first of its kind in English) My Dog Tulip will do nicely. It is a very British performance. (One reason, surely, the book was not published in the United States until a decade after its original England publication in 1956.) The note of social comedy is never far from the surface, 6 In a real sense, failure to pose the question equates with the desire to write a dog memoir, whereas success in asking the question equates with a desire not to—and instead, produce the sort of academic book perhaps best exemplified to date by Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet. Haraway, for example, thinks of Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body while she watches her neutered female trying to mount her intact male (193). From the perspective of dog memoirs, inside When Species Meet is a dog memoir struggling to get out, while being repeatedly buried in such sentences as the following: “The needed morality, in my view, is culturing a radical ability to remember and feel what is going on and performing the epistemological, emotional, and technical work to respond practically in the face of the permanent complexity not resolved by taxonomic hierarchies and with no humanist philosophical or religious guarantee” (75).

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as Ackerley strives to find the best vet for his German Shepherd—he terms her an Alsatian—the most suitable place in London for her to pee or excrete and the happiest male with whom to mate. There is a lovely characteristic moment early in the memoir after Ackerley has mentioned that one day in Wimbledon woods Tulip has added her urine to his, “after I had been obliged to void.” “How touched I was! How honored I was!” he exclaims. With how much irony? It is difficult to say. Now—the passage continues—Tulip always makes a point of returning to the spot “to sprinkle her own drops upon mine.” Ackerley concludes thus: “So I feel that if there ever were differences between us, they are washed out now. I feel a proper dog” (57). Irony? Undoubtedly. Yet deployed so carefully and in the interests of such fine discrimination that the intellectual basis of the humor gets swept up into a larger emotional relation, no less emphatic for being no further explored. Who could resist the temptation today? In terms of contemporary practice, Ackerley’s selfhood does not seem to be at stake for him. He willingly concedes it to the dog. Rather than Tulip functioning as a phase in his owner’s biography, the owner locates a space for himself in the animal’s biography. This is entirely consistent with Ackerley’s self-effacing way throughout the memoir.7 It may be the case that Tulip was as valuable a spiritual guide for him as any dog is represented as being for the authors of current American memoirs. But Ackerley uses an entirely different vocabulary, especially with the word, “proper.” The word is quintessentially British, eminently social. A “proper” dog, we might say, is one who knows his station and acts according to its dictates. Here, Tulip effectively educates Ackerley not to take himself to be better than he thinks he is. In today’s idiom, in this urinary occasion the dog prompts the owner to “accept his animal nature.”

7 My emphasis here is quite different than that of Kuznair, who finds (on the basis of another passage) that Tulip’s look bodes an “unsettling disjuncture” between canine and human to Ackerley (64). Compare Susan McHugh, who finds—on the basis of yet another example, the suffering of Tulip’s puppies—that Ackerley is led “ultimately to question his own assumptions about sex and identity” (156); in other words, the worlds of canine and human become quite—if disturbingly—symmetrical. Rather than attempt to arbitrate between these readings, I would stress that my simpler point is merely the contrast in surface and idiom Ackerley’s text provides to today’s very American practice (where moments such as those both Kuznair and McHugh evidence would undoubtedly be subject to far more authorial agonizing).

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Back inside the vocabulary of My Dog Tulip, however, the only question is whether Tulip is something more civilized, described by Ackerley’s favorite vet as being “a good girl.” That is, how willing will she prove to be to be swabbed or probed on yet another vet’s table, and at what cost to her spirit, or rather what Ackerley terms her “stature?” “No tigress she,” he writes, “but—must I face it?—an ordinary dog.” This leads him to give the following salute: “Tulip never let me down. She is nothing if not consistent. She knows where to draw the line, and it is always in the same place, a circle around us both. Indeed, she is a good girl, but—and this is the point—she would not care for it to be generally known” (30). So how can Ackerley presume to make it known? Again, he adapts the point-of-view of the animal, and tries to reconcile what might be imagined of her own needs with the inescapable needs of civilized human discourse. Moments like these in My Dog Tulip remind us that the imperatives of today’s life narratives about dogs need not be the only ones. It is not necessary to long for rebirth in order to write a dog memoir—at least in theory. It is not even necessary to detail the dog’s death; Ackerley merely mentions Tulip’s in one remarkable sentence, his last: “Whatever blunders I may have committed in my management of this animal’s life, she lived on to the great age of sixteen-and-a-half ” (172). How can Ackerley rest content with just one sentence? Finally, we may well ask why it is imperative today for others to write so many more sentences. Our current need to be saved by our dogs—especially after the loss of a loved one—puts enormous pressure on autobiographies about them. It doesn’t transform animals into human beings. But the pressure does threaten to turn dog memoirs into spiritual autobiographies. Ackerley’s memoir reminds us that the “lessons” we presume our dogs to teach us can suffer when they must be made explicit. At the moment of death—when the gap between the animal’s death and the meaning of its life (for itself, for us, for some wider “cycle”) is especially painful to consider—wisdom just as easily lies in refraining from writing anything at all.

DOGS OF BRAZIL In cities, villages, and rural areas all over the world, many dogs live parallel lives among people, more or less tolerated, sometimes used and sometimes abused. No one term can do justice to this history. —Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto

On the curb at a taxi stand outside the bus station in Londrina: a dog. He’s just lying there, legs outstretched, jaw to the ground. If a signature dog could be presumed for the streets of Brazil, it would be a scruffy dog such as this—dirty yellow, boxer-sized, self-absorbed. Like this one, the national dog wouldn’t appear emaciated and he wouldn’t seem threatening. After a few days, a visitor will have seen so many versions of him that it will be easy to cease to notice; the dog won’t notice you unless he smells food. Does a taxi driver own this particular dog? Probably not. Who does? Possibly no one. Most likely he’s a street dog, a product of pure circumstance, from his birth to his present state, explicable merely because someone nearby fed him or continues to do so. This dog could be gone from here tomorrow, but not necessarily because he was picked up and immediately put to death by the prefectural dogcatcher popularly known as the carrocinha, or “little cart.” Any Brazilian city has one. There are of course also animal welfare organizations in Brazil as well as leash laws. But none of these things function as they do in the United States or Europe because dogs aren’t culturally situated in the same way.1 The reason can be simply stated:

Indeed, apart from the United States and Europe, dogs are scarcely studied as culturally situated at all. Breeds are, by definition, constituted genetically, apart from culture; it simply doesn’t matter in what country they are born and raised. Mutts, on the other hand, are saturated by culture, but, again by definition, lost in (or to) a species aggregate, no matter how any one country regards them or how freely they are left to roam. To the extent that there is some discussion of dogs in terms of their national origin, this is either of breeds or of specifications on the model of breeds, as Haraway, for example, makes clear in her mention of a program for strays in Puerto Rico, which flies a select number of dogs per week to no-kill shelters in the United States. “At the very least,” she writes, “the notion that the only proper dog is a sterile 1

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Brazil is much closer to its rural past, in which dogs were workers, not pets. Indeed, although dogs (like cats or birds) are doted upon in the major cities of Brazil much as they are as anywhere else in the world (supported by a culture that includes pet food stores and available high-end medical treatment) dogs are still not widely comprehended as objects of affection. Instead, dogs remain workers—enjoined to guard property or monitor livestock—just as they have always been, back on the farm. On the streets of towns and villages throughout the vast country, dogs still roam the streets with reference to their traditional functions. There are few subsidized spray/neuter programs. In the cities, however, dogs lack such a clear reference. Instead, a dog such as this one in Londrina is effectively unemployed. Unless he constitutes a danger, he can be left to take his chances on the margins of human society, an object of indifference. What follows is a series of stories and reflections about various dogs both on and off the streets met during a month’s travel around central and southern Brazil with my wife, who was born in Brazil. An argument develops, but only amid circumstances that foster enduring contradictions. There are just too many dogs in Brazil, in too many places, even if there are only two basic ones—individual homes or the streets—where they can have life and being. Bobbie Bobbie is the name of a two-month old black lab. Someone who lives in the neighborhood offered the dog to the family of my wife’s niece. Her three kids were mad to say yes. Now Bobbie lives out of a doghouse, in a narrow concrete strip of enclosed area outside the family’s downstairs apartment. Outside the apartment is the sprawling working class area of Sao Paulo known as Villa Industrial, whose hilly, jagged,

dog . . . brings us smashing into a world of biopower and its technocultural apparatus in the metropole and the colonies” (91). Elsewhere, she conjures up “dogland” which “turns out to be built from layers of locals and globals” (63). Compare Clare Palmer, whose treatment of animal shelters has the following disclaimer in a footnote: “The emphasis in this essay is on domestic dogs and cats in a US context. The issues discussed here may not map exactly onto the situation in Europe and may be quite far removed from how dogs and cats are regarded in developing countries’ (146).

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forbidding streets always have a few stray dogs on just about any block, day or night. How do these dogs survive? Are they all products of unwanted—or even unknown—litters? Doesn’t anyone ever think to call some city agency about them? Some are emaciated. All are wary of humans, as if alert either for a handout or a kick. A pet dog in the United States does not have to be understood against such a background. A pet dog in Brazil does. How not to see Bobbie as lucky? He’s now safe from the streets. He still has to abide at the sufferance of humans. But he can be raised to expect that they will care for him. Such care, in turn, will mean that he won’t easily be able to care for himself, should he somehow find himself on the streets. Bobbie is like one of those chimps in nature documentaries who has been somehow abandoned by his parents. Now in order to survive he must be raised by humans, with one major difference: one day Bobbie will not have to be returned to the wild. Tiradentes One evening four years ago in Ouro Prato, the beautiful capital of colonial Brazil, Eva and I gave a few scraps to a mangy dog outside a bakery just off Tiradentes Square. Tiridentes is one of the heroes of Brazilian history, a military officer hung on this spot as the ringleader of a plot to declare a republic and thereby gain independence from the Portuguese King. Now we return to wonder, though, about this dog, rather than Tiradentes (whose statue is at the center of the square). We had forgotten about the animal. In fact, we now remember that we proceeded to feed the dog a second night, and then a third. Each night he followed us across the square. I do not remember what he looked like—just a mid-sized, short-haired, dun-colored thing. Even if we remembered, how to trust that a dog looking at all similar who appears this night—the bakery is still at the same corner—would in fact be the same dog? Anyway, no dog appears. We just leave some bread on the sidewalk. Another dog will eat it. Did Tiradentes have a dog? The historical record doesn’t mention it. Does anyone in Ouro Preto remember the dog Eva and I fed four years ago? Probably he’s dead now. In any case, he’s just a member of a succession—yet another stray to regard or ignore by residents of the city, still another poor creature on whom visitors can take pity. The

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dog never could do anything to distinguish himself. He is, or was, as we say, “just a dog.”2 Wrong Turn Eva’s cousin takes a wrong turn off the main road between Ouro Preto and Mariana (another lovely colonial town) and suddenly we are in the country. No houses. Sugar cane fields higher than the car. As we plunge down a steep cobblestone road, furrowed in dirt, suddenly to one side a pack of dogs appears, running. The leader is a pit bull, loping along wide-eyed, his jaw eager and open. What if we weren’t in the car? Would these dogs attack us? As dogs, they are not as wholly wild as if they were, say, jaguars; dogs still emerge out of human society, however apart from it some now abide as effectively feral. The problem of these dogs, though, is that they constitute a pack. Even strays can form, dissolve, and re-form in packs. Packs are dangerous to humans. As a companion animal, a dog is a safe singular being, before he or she is anything else. The sight of this pit bull, particularly, is thrilling. No doling out wellintentioned bread to him! He and his like in Brazil move according to different principles than mere strays; for all I know, this packs hunts. It functions like a rebuke to any sentimental notion a visitor might have about the dogs of Brazil. Some of them can kill you.

2 Beck and Katcher note that many strays are in fact roaming pets and assert that “the stray population is actually maintained by the continual abandonment or escape of dogs that spent at least part of their early lives in the protection of a home environment” (228). These dogs survive by scavenging for food. “Actual predation—that is, hunting for food—appears to be extremely rare in the urban environment,” the authors assert, and then for the only time in their discussion allow for national differences in this connection, whereby emaciated or starving dogs are far more likely to be seen “in countries where the human standard of living is significantly lower,” unlike even the poorest sections of the urban United States, where “there appears to be enough residual protein to be found to support our outcast dogs” (233). See also Griffiths, Poulter, and Sibley, “Feral Cats” in Philo and Wilbert, Animal Spaces. “[P]eople ‘need’ to imagine marginal spaces,” the authors conclude, “both as abject spaces to which feral cats, Gypsies, and other elements of the ‘wild’ can be consigned and as spaces of desire where wildness can be recovered” (69).

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Work of Art We visit an artist’s studio in Mariana where a woman performs wonders with wood. On display are such objects as baroque angels and shaved Christmas trees. Each piece is superbly polished. And wood is not all. There is a prize-willing Nativity fashioned out of nails and bolts. To look is to want to purchase—everything. But this stuff is too good for off-the-street tourism, and so we end up buying nothing. As we leave a little sausage-shaped dog churns out from the back of the house. A board stops him. He’s only got three legs, and one of the remaining ones is splayed. We extend our hands, then draw back when the woman cautions that the dog is “a little dangerous.” She explains that he was born without a front leg. Why would an artist keep the dog, if not as a living reminder of what art is? Not one of her objects is perfect, however much it aims to be; the art lies in the aiming. The dog, on the other hand, was born imperfect; the care lies in granting his imperfection its own integrity. Who was it said, art is art because it is not truth? This dog is an image of truth. Eva’s cousin suggests a final thing: the artist identifies with the dog. It’s hard to say exactly how. To herself, is she somehow similarly incomplete or even maimed? With each piece of wood, does she strive to refashion herself into something better, whereas the dog, poor thing, can only remain what it is? Get It Over With We arrive at the home of Eva’s youngest brother, Zico, in Campo Grande to find a family in crisis. Their dog, Fred (which Brazilians pronounce, “Freddie”), has just been diagnosed with leishmaniosis, an infectious disease caused by parasites now common to Mato Grosso do Sul. It seems it is fatal. No wonder Fred, whom we last saw ten years ago, looks like a skeleton. Plus he’s vomiting and shitting blood. Fred is eleven. He’s just a curly-haired, dirt-gray mutt, whom the family took in off the street. But the dog is cute, lively, irrepressible. He has his own scruffy ways. He’s lasted, which is why his listlessness is now so painful to see. Maria, Zico’s wife, is particularly distraught. During the day Fred is her only companion. Once he drove off a man who had climbed the wall around her backyard.

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Now Fred has to be put down. The family can’t face it. So two days later, Eva forces the issue, and schedules a time for Fred at the university clinic where he was diagnosed. Bottom line: leishmaniosis is communicable to humans. Even if he could survive, Fred is now dangerous to his family. So next day the youngest son, Marcelo, drives Fred, Maria, Eva, and I to the clinic at the fateful hour. While the four of us go inside, he stays outside, unable to bear the moment of Fred’s death. But wait! Before the fatal injection is administered, a follow-up exam in given. This gives Eva the opportunity to check the papers from the first exam. Incredibly, Marcelo misread them. The expelling of blood seems a separate issue. Fred has a stomach ulcer. Medication for it should have been given three days ago. On the other hand, the leishmaniosis can be treated. The treatment is expensive. ($500–$600 dollars.) Fred will always carry the disease. But, provided his liver is strong enough, he can recover from it. Biggest surprise: it’s not been definitively proven that the disease can be passed to humans. The discussion takes close to an hour. Fred just stands utterly still atop a metal table. Life gleams in his button eyes, yet he’s as good as dead. All we have to do is say the word, at some variance with the medical profile as we now understand it, yet—it could easily be argued—not enough, especially considering both his age and the expense for his continued life. Fred himself can’t say a word. He’s become what he is: a dumb animal. “Let’s get it over with!” cries Maria, tearfully holding onto him. Eva and I can’t assent. Instead, we offer to pay for the treatment, if Fred’s liver is up for it. Meantime, we can buy the special food as well as medicine for the ulcer. How can Maria refuse? She doesn’t. Marcelo is overjoyed when he gets back outside. Even Fred suddenly scampers about—sniffing another dog, straining to smell a tree—as if he knows that his death sentence has been lifted. Facts of Life How much is a dog’s life worth? Just one dog—in a city where hundreds, even thousands of dogs roam the streets. Against such a background, our decision to fund Fred’s continued life seems senseless. (Eva noticed a dog shelter—privately run—advertised in the paper, the first she’s ever seen in Brazil.) Next day, we leave, with Fred not visibly better. He won’t eat unless fed by hand.

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An internet search reveals that leishmaniosis is not fatal to humans, although it causes painful, long-lasting sores. There seems to be no question the disease is communicable, although not directly. The main “animal reservoir”of leishmaniosis is the domestic dog, from whom the disease is spread, via a sand fly. This probably means that Fred should be dead. The more I consider it, the decision of Eva and me to stay his execution over against the resignation of a family to comply with it represents an intersection of the new pet culture of a rich country with the older farm culture of a poorer one. No doubt there are plenty of bourgeois people even in Campo Grande who care for companion animals; a couple pet stores at which we stop until we find Fred’s food would not be out of place in Rio de Janeiro or Los Angeles. Yet most of the residents are either farmers or work for farms (like Zico). On the farm, you cut your losses. Dogs die. It’s a fact of life, not a tragedy. At home, though, you can afford to delay your losses. Dogs needn’t die. You put off their deaths as long as you can, and then you mourn them, as if the dogs were—inescapably—human. Finally, Fred is simply not the same being to Eva and me that he is to his family. To us, Fred, to the very end, lives at the center of human life; to them, Fred inhabits the margins—and dies there. Mongrels Back in Maringa, a city which is no less rural than Campo Grande but whose streets are not so dusty, a woman crosses a downtown street with a tiny white poodle on a leash. On the near side of the street, some sort of indistinct homeless dog sleeps coiled like a snake in a bit of grass at the base of a tree. Dogs, dogs, dogs. I see them everywhere. Those apart from humans have no lives, only presences. Compare beggars or homeless people who suddenly come up to you or else loom into view lying in doorways or on cardboard in sidewalks. You can give money to these people, if only because you can infer something of their lives. But dogs? What can you give them? On what basis even extend them recognition? In China, the very word, “dog,” is pejorative. Not so much in Brazil, although the Portuguese word for “dog”—cachorro—is not entirely free of negative connotations. The common term for a stray dog is—viralata—or “can turner”—dismissive of the animal (and highly contemptuous when applied to humans).

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The presence of so many dogs on the streets continues to trouble some basic understanding of who or what this species is. I meet with an old friend. He’s a highly educated man, a college professor, born in Europe. Back outside after lunch, I spot some emaciated creature just ahead of us. Poor dogs in Brazil, I remark, in English. “You mean, mongrels?” he blurts, incredulously. Baleia One of the great deaths in Brazilian literature is the death of a dog, in Graciliano Ramos’s famous naturalist novel, Barren Lives (1938). The dog’s name is Baleia, which means “whale,” a grimly ironic name for such a humble creature, barely described, who accompanies a family of four as they make their way through the drought-swept Northeast, wandering in search of work and food. The two sons do not even have names. Baleia is represented with enormous sympathy, as if to compensate for the way she is treated by his family, “the victim of falls, kicks, and butts,” we read at one point. However, the animal is not sentimentalized. “As far as she was concerned,” we read elsewhere, “kicks were a disagreeable and necessary fact of existence.” It is difficult to demonstrate how straightforwardly Ramos characterizes the dog, a creature of appetites and smells, little more. Eventually, when it becomes obvious Baleia is dying, the father shoots her with a musket. But the shot is poor. The dog flees, and thereupon suffers a slow death, bleeding, while hearing the sound of goats that she should be leading to the water hole and dreaming of her beloved cavies (a kind of rat). No one really mourns her death the next day. Life goes on, relentlessly. Baleia is such a consummate product of rural culture that the sympathy of her depiction in this novel seems to a reader today quite unexpected. How to explain it? In terms of the aesthetic disposition of the narrative, whereby the dog becomes a kind of resource with which to assess human life? Or, more simply, because of our ignorance of—not to say our estrangement from—rural culture? It is not without compassion, even to dogs. However, the compassion has limits, whereas our far less rural compassion does not.

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Born Free Eva was born in a tiny village, name of Cafeara. The name does not even appear on a map. Finally, after twenty years, we visit. Cafeara turns out to be a real human settlement of a couple thousand people, in the middle of lush sugar cane fields. Eva’s relatives own one of the largest farms. The spread includes at least four dogs. I do not learn the breed—probably some mix of pit bull, Rotweiler, and other bulky, muscular types. Docile as puppies when you greet them in the company of people who live on the farm, they are nevertheless not companion animals. You have the feeling they would take it as a personal insult to be “petted.” As we wound our way to the farm across the furrows of a red dirt road, two or three dogs appeared. They proceeded to scamper alongside the car. These were not like the pack between Ouro Preto and Mariana. No air of threat or predation. These dogs seemed to run for the sheer vigor of it, excited and, well, free. The strays back in Maringa might have it so good. But of course farm dogs are no more “free” than city dogs are. At one point the owner of this farm indicates how the ear of one of his dogs (he has a name; I forget) is swollen to twice its size because of a wasp bite. He also notes how one of his legs is gimpy, from having been run over by a car, twice. Is it just as likely, I wonder, that he was left to heal himself as that he was taken to a vet? Feeding the Hungry Eva’s younger sister lives in an apartment in a large housing development outside Londrina. We have been visiting here for twenty years. Now the development is becoming surrounded by other housing that you can only characterize as a slum. There is crime, there is garbage in vacant lots. Inevitably, there are also dogs wandering the streets who appear far more famished than they do in Maringa. Two of them are outside a bakery where we stop to buy some bread. One is or has recently been pregnant. The other has just narrowly missed being smacked by a plastic bag in the hands of a garbage man swinging it into his truck. Now these dogs inch toward us, but warily, warily.

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Eva buys a sausage roll to give to the pregnant one. No luck. The animal just won’t get close enough. The other dog—male—edges her off. But he won’t get much closer himself. So we have to tear off bits of the roll and toss them into the street. The male, backing off first at each throw, gets the food every time. What to do for these dogs? In the US some at least would be in shelters. Some of these would have some slim hope of being adopted. Here they’re hopelessly embedded in human society, even as they are consigned to its periphery. Here we can feed them. But we cannot save them. Kelly A friend introduces me to her two year-old Golden Retriever bitch, Kelly. Kelly lives like Bobbie in Sao Paulo, out of a doghouse in an even smaller and narrower concrete strip in the back of a house. Kelly is not allowed inside. Paloma mentions that the dog sleeps each night below the bedroom window of her and her husband. Kelly is all balls and bones when I go outside to have a talk with her. Whether she chases any of either one or not, a ball or a bone constitutes a sort of vocabulary through which a human can communicate with her. There is just not much to say, in terms of the fact that there is just not much room for such a large dog to play. Lucky Kelly, though. Within her limits, she’s well fed and well cared for. I ought to be delighted—or relieved—to see a dog in such a happy situation in Brazil. Instead, I’m depressed. What strikes me is not what she enjoys outside but what she can’t enjoy inside. That’s the trouble with dogs: they vex our margins. Either we push them so far away dogs seem separate from us or else we move them so close dogs appear inseparable. Digested and Rebuked Here we go again. Sunday afternoon in Curitiba. We have saved some chicken from lunch to give to a dog. Now to find one. Wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly there is none to be found. Where are the needy when you need them? There’s one sleeping beside a newspaper kiosk on Praça Tiradentes. We approach, chicken in hand. The dog continues sleeping. We lay the

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chicken in front of his nose. The dog might be dreaming of chicken but he’s not smelling it. Only banging on the pavement wakes him up. Then he quickly devours the chicken. We move away before he’s finished. What if he follows us, and gets hit by a bus while crossing the street? You don’t want your charitable act to be snuffed out before it’s digested. Or rebuked before it is manifest. We cross the street, walk to one side of the cathedral, and there pass buy a few men sprawled on pieces of cardboard thrown across sidewalk. They look more or less asleep. But where is their chicken?3 Leeloo I have never liked Yorkshire Terriers. They have always seemed the epitome of an utterly humanized animal: created to be cared for, cared for to be caressed, caressed out of self-regard. I have never so much as touched a Yorkie until now, when we spend our last week staying with Eva’s niece and her family. They have a Yorkie bitch named Leeloo, age one. Damned if the little bugger does not prove irresistible. For one thing, she does not yap, like a poodle. For another, she has a principle of quiet, unlike other terriers I have known; if not lying still, the dog mostly trots about, as people move around the apartment. Most winning of all is the way Leeloo just hops onto your lap and settles right in, sometimes after a few licks or nips. She is like a dog suddenly delighted to transform herself into a cat! Leeloo’s favorite among her toys is a stuffed dolphin, almost as big as she is. She will come with the dolphin in her mouth. You are expected to pull on it, whereupon Leeloo will growl and pull back. But of course

3 In Dog, Susan McHugh writes of the category of the “mongrel” as follows: “A creature with little or no monetary value, who represents canine not human sexual selection, and whose mixed or unrecoverable past parallels those of the so-called degenerate races of people . . . the mongrel dogs symbolizes even as it stakes out the limits to this process of seeing ourselves as well as other people in dogs” (136). Subsequently, she explores the representation of similarities between outcast dogs and homeless people, in novels, films, and even travel books that extends right up to the present, where the similarities have now fused into an identity, in terms of common social oppression if nothing else. Beck and Katcher also note the similarity, and add: “Most people will admit that our treatment of homeless people lacks humanity, but they are much less likely to admit the same of our treatment of outcast dogs” (235).

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the dog herself is the real plaything—a toy not only in size but in function. Everybody plays with Leeloo. Why else does she exist? There is no route to the outside from this second floor apartment. Unlike Bobbie, Fred, or Kelly, Leeloo is wholly a creature of the inside—a consummate breed dog. There is no point comparing her to other companion animals, much less mutts or stray dogs who live on the street. What a strange, almost ironic dog for me to wind up with during my last week in Brazil! Compared to most of her kind, Leeloo is virtually another species—one we humans have created to live alongside us, as if in defiance of countless other dogs, who live in another country, yet have no home there. Coda Just before we leave Brazil, we learn of Bobbie’s sudden, shocking, sad fate. The husband of Eva’s niece has been having an affair. Apparently he is now out of control at home. The dog has become his object of aggression. First he demanded that Bobbie be given away. Then he threatened to kill him. The children were shocked. His eldest son, age eleven, is closest to the dog. Or was. One night he took Bobbie to a neighbor whom he saw walking a dog that resembled Bobbie. Guilherme begged the man to take him. First he refused, eventually he relented. At last report, the man still has the dog. Guilherme’s grandparents now have the boy. It is not clear exactly why. All we know is, that first night without Bobbie, he refused to sleep. We will eventually learn more. On the other hand, we will never learn more about Bobbie. As a dog in Brazil, he was always closer to the street than we imagined. Fred died, one month to the day after we left Brazil.

THE SPACE OF ANIMALS What are animals doing in the narratives we construct for ourselves in literature and film? Of course it depends upon the narratives, as well as the animals. The fox in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Fox” and the dog in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” are quite different and function in quite different ways. Just so, the cat in Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters and the tiger in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, or the horse in the classic Western film, Lonely Are the Brave, and the donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard, Balthassar. It may be true, as Randy Malamud states in a recent book: “We situate animals beyond the pale, out of sight and out of mind, making it easier for us to sublimate their various plights” (6). But this is in life—in labs, zoos, and factory farms. In fictional narratives, the situation is more complicated. Why? I want to suggest a very simple reason: because the more they share narrative space with us, the more of where animals actually dwell apart from us demands to be somehow conceded or represented.1 How much more? It depends of course upon the specific narrative (as well as the particular animal). I would only insist that some ultimate comprehension of animals within the imperatives of our human sociocultural realm does not abolish the space for some other comprehension of them, which is often the burden of a narrative to disclose, usually in some literal way. Even in the case of the four literary narratives 1 Just so, those who dwell apart from us—whether in laboratories or farms (which we either can’t or don’t see) or zoos—are never more explicable in their very separateness than in terms of space, or rather, its lack. For example, speaking of the hog farms he visits in North Carolina, Matthew Scully writes: ‘Confinement’ doesn’t describe their situation. They are encased, pinned down, unable to do anything but sit and suffer and scream at the sight of the gods” (265). This lack of space effectively forbids narrative. John Berger suggests the same thing about zoos: “However you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than foot from you, looking outward in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal” (260; his italics). He means that their space is artificial—and so he continues: “Beyond its edges there may be real space.” For more on this issue, see the collection of essays by Chris Philo and Christ Wilbert, especially the final one by Owain Jones, “(Un)ethical Geographies,” in which he calls for “the need to open up” the “messy” spaces of “non-human others” (ranging from areas where wolves live to goldfish bowls) which are “far from being spaces where nothing of concern is happening, but rather are spaces where the ethics of the encounter [ between human and non-human] are not being told” (281).

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studied by Marian Scholtmeijer, each of which she finds engaged in a species of mythic presentation that abstracts the animals from the actual circumstances of their lives, at least two, Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone and Beat Sterchi’s Cow act to depict these circumstances in some literal detail.2 “If one chose, she writes for example, one could learn a little about cows from the italicized discourse of the agricultural manual contained in Cow (382).” The purpose of Cow may be to convey spiritual knowledge. But it does not neglect material circumstances concerning its animal vehicle. Of course when we do include them—whether, say, as mystical figures of transcendent mystery or displaced emblems of violence—arguably any representation of an animal ultimately still serves our own representation of ourselves. As John Simons concludes: “Every time we represent an animal we are, however hard we try and however much we wish it was different, engaging in an act which, to a greater or lesser degree, appropriates the non-human experience as an index of humanness” (87).3 Nevertheless, the appropriation takes different forms—and so Malamud suggests that lyric poetry might provide the best medium for “knowing” animals. But what about narratives in which such “knowing” does not appear to be important? (Lyric poetry of course has the advantage of being able to dispense with narrative entirely.) Some space usually has to be either inferred or represented, if only to explain or justify the appearance of the animal in the first place. In the introduction to a recent collection of essays on insects, Eric Brown writes that, as part of its function as a kind of Other (not only to human beings but to animal studies), the insect world “must be mediated—by art, artifice, technol2 The ultimate space is of course utopian, as Alexander Wilson explains: “Western cultural history is full of examples of desire to live in a world of nature uncontaminated by human presence. Yet this quest for paradise . . . is not just a negation of modern civilization. It is also a positive reaching out to embrace the other animals that inhabit this earth” (126). Karla Armbruster cites these words at the conclusion of her discussion of Dian Fossey, herself a prominent example of a scientist who actually attempted to live in the space of her beloved gorillas, and who eventually founded a research center nearby. That Fossey was murdered by locals demonstrates that her cherished space was always fraught with political factors; she was able to construct no narrative either to exclude or include them. (Nor was the movie with the same title as her book, Gorillas of the Mist.) As Armbruster puts it: “Ultimately, Fossey’s construction of her connection with gorillas across the culture/nature boundary is one that excluded the possibility of any other connections” (221). 3 Compare Derrida: “Always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and as man” (“Animal,” 405).

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ogy—as an (almost) impossibly different creation” (ix). The world of most other animals, on the other hand, does not have to be so mediated, especially the more proximate (ranging, say, from cats to foxes) they are to our own. Nevertheless, where do even members of our companion species go when they run away? And what about the ones who don’t live with us? Animals who aren’t members of companion species and yet who live proximate to us (sometimes visible, sometimes not) have to live somewhere. How can we imagine it, and to what purpose, insofar as we ourselves are concerned? “[W]hat we know about [animals] is an index of our power,” John Berger writes, “and thus an index of what separates us from them” (257).4 Yet in our narratives what we see repeatedly is the limits of our power, conceived of, exactly, in terms of what we presume to know, but in fact do not, beginning with the apparently simple question of the space of animals and where they abide, either separate from us or at some unrepresentable limit of our imagining. Let the instance of the killing of the moose in the recent film, Into the Wild, indicate this limit. Moreover, let this instance stand for a wider dramatization of nonhuman experience to be found in narratives more conventionally set in society, where the presence of animals is so familiar, even comforting, that at first it seems to be idle to inquire why they are there at all. Both Alice Munro’s recent story, “Runaway,” as well as Vittorio de Sica’s classic film, Umberto D, reveal, however, that in fact the goat in the story as well as the dog in the movie are present because each variously stands for what we don’t know—about animals as well as ourselves. Indeed, in the instance of the moose in Into the Wild, we are confronted with something that we can’t know. 1 Alice’s Munro’s story, “Runaway,” begins with a woman, Carla, seeing another woman, Sylvia, driving back to her home after a holiday in Greece. Is Carla the referent of the title? She is married to Clark, 4 As he has just examined: “animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.” For a striking example of our consequent separation from them, see again Scully, who mentions a scientific study “to design a cost-efficient group-housing system for pigs,” only to conclude on the basis of a control group that pigs who have an “appropriate environment” still bear an amazing resemblance to . . . pigs (273–74).

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an angry, moody man. The couple lives on a farm, where they board horses. It develops that Carla has done some housekeeping for Sylvia as well as cared for her late husband, Leon, a famous poet, during the months before he died. When the two women speak once more, Carla suddenly breaks down in despair over her marriage, and Sylvia offers to help her leave Clark by taking a bus to Toronto. On the bus, Carla waivers. “While she was running away from him—now—Clark still kept his place in her life,” she thinks. “But when she was finished running away . . . who would she put in his place? What else—who else—would ever be so vivid a challenge” (34)? She gets off the bus, calls Clark, and asks him to come for her. Later, Clark visits Sylvia, ostensibly to return some clothes she has lent Carla, in fact to warn Sylvia to stay out of his and his wife’s life. By the story’s end, the couple seems reconciled, while Sylvia takes an apartment “in town,” after leaving a letter of appreciation to Carla, which Carla burns. In effect, through her final departure Sylvia becomes another version of Carla, who has much earlier already left home after meeting Clark, whom she named a “Gypsy Rover” and whom her stepfather dismissed as a “drifter.” All three of the principal characters become runaways, and their actions are explicable purely on a human level, where the desire to get lost (from family, from known circumstances) is almost inseparable from the need to live within the same conditions. Any yet, what this account of the story leaves out is Munro’s careful embedding in “Runaway” of another order of existence, represented by a goat. The goat is a half-grown kid named Flora. Clark once brought her home. At the outset of the story, Flora has disappeared. Clark thinks that Flora “might have just gone off to find herself a billy” (10). The night Clark goes to confront Sylvia about Carla, the goat suddenly appears out of the fog like an “apparition.” “The goat from outer space. That’s what you are,” Clark says to Flora. (40). In the concluding note that Sylvia leaves Carla, she recalls the moment when Flora appeared, and thereby miraculously dissolved the tension between her and Clark. She refers to Flora as a “good angel” (46). Why has Munro chosen to re-present the emotions and desires among her characters in terms of an animal level? The easiest way to answer this question is to say that otherwise these things are unrepresentable. For example, the relation between Sylvia and Clark could be sexual. Or if not precisely this, then the two are “united” on the basis of

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something primal expressed by Sylvia in her letter when she characterizes Flora as “an ordinary little animal [who] probably spent her time away getting herself pregnant.” The “bond” that “springs up” between Sylvia and Clark when Flora appears left them, she states, “united in the most unexpected way, [u]nited in their humanity—that is the only way I can describe it” (45). The two marriages among the four principal human characters of “Runaway” are childless. The appearance of Flora represents to Sylvia and Clark especially the disturbing spectacle of life’s generation, free of personal fears and felt commitments as human beings experience these things. In large part, this is why we find it so difficult, not to say finally impossible, to run away—from a marriage, from a family, from anything. Not so animals. They come and go as biology dictates. They are not subject to our social constraints, and, indeed, therefore they easily come to appear wondrous, magical, and otherworldly. Animals remind us of who we are, through demonstrating who we are not. This is what, I believe, Simons means when, speaking of the human naming of the non-human that thereby effectively abolishes it, he notes paradoxically how “the very act of naming and, therefore, abolishing the non-human is, simultaneously, an act of abolishing the human, too” (67). Hence, we have a narrative in which Flora has run away but not disappeared. Had she utterly vanished, she would not be available for human representation. And yet the fact that she could vanish marks her realm as different from ours, and reveals to us that vanishing is not the same thing as running away. We need to see the difference, although we cannot enact it, or at least the principals in “Runaway” cannot. Where would we vanish, if we could? As humans, we have no name for this space, except to indicate that it is where, as animals, we would flee. As always, knowledge—to recall Berger—acts to separate us from animals, especially our knowledge of them. Yet in this instance we have something more complicated: a knowledge based at least in part upon what we don’t know. We don’t even know where Flora goes—or abides—when she vanishes. (Therefore she becomes a mysterious figure, even if not in this instance one invested with “spirituality.”) In a decisive sense, perhaps, we don’t even want to know, except insofar as this ignorance is useful in staging how animals are separate from us.

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Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D is one of the classics of world cinema, as well as one of the touchstones of Italian neorealism. This story of an aging pensioner who faces eviction from his room because he cannot pay his landlady is not only celebrated because of its detailed recreation of post WWII Rome in ruins. It is memorable because of its portrait of a man and his dog; Umberto has only his little terrier, Flike. Although separated at one point during the course of the film, the two are inseparable. As a respondent states on the Amazon.com site to the DVD copy of the movie: “This film is a must for dog lovers.” Indeed. Although Flike is not precisely “cute,” as dogs are depicted in countless films—before and since—he is “irrepressible,” a characterization that participates, I think, in the same stereotype commonly given in our narratives about dogs, who most often function as heightened instances—disruptive, comic, lovable—of ourselves.5 Until Umberto D leaves his apartment with his dog for the final time, Filke seems utterly comprehended in terms of the human world. He dutifully trots on his leash, he contentedly sleeps on his master’s bed, he agreeably sits up on his hind legs with an unturned hat when Umberto D makes a pained attempt to beg for money. When he is suddenly lost, Umberto D finds him in a city pound and gladly pays the fee, as if to demonstrate that the dog is utterly dependent upon his master for his survival. The nonhuman world of the dog only begins to assert itself when Umberto D tries to leave him at a “kennel.” The owner seems too uncaring, the other dogs too mean. His master has no choice but to retrieve him, only to try to let Filke go again, later, at a park. But the family of the girl to whom he gives her refuses to let their daughter keep the dog. “Who will take care of him?” Umberto cries. Once more, Flike only exists by virtue of human sufferance, and yet now he is more emphatically not equivalent to human terms. Umberto tries to leave the dog with some boys in the park, and then to flee, hiding by the side of a train crossing. But Flike steps off the path and

5 This “heightening,” in turn, is an extension of “cuteness.” “In our society,” Kuznair remarks, “the canine companion is just irresistibly cute” (2). No wonder she has to effectively repudiate a whole canine discourse, which “tends to disparage the affective, immediate ties between man and the four-footed . . . [involving] such difficult concepts as intimacy, compassion, propinquity, and mourning over their death” (3).

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easily finds his master, who scoops him up, stands on the train tracks, and apparently awaits the train to kill them both. With this act, Filke becomes equivalent to human terms once more—and, no more than his master, he still has no home. But wait. The oncoming train suddenly terrifies the animal, which squirms out of Umberto’s arms, onto the ground, and to one side of the tracks. Umberto himself steps back just in time to escape the train as it rumbles past. Not only is the dog once again not equivalent to his master’s comprehension of him. It seems that Flike has what can only be characterized as a will of his own will to live. He flees when Umberto tries to retrieve him. In continuing to call his dog, and then tempting him with a pine cone to perform his “signature” trick standing up on hind legs, Umberto effectively participates in his dog’s own continued being. Could this being only have been made manifest in terms of another, nonhuman world, which has existed all along, albeit apart from political demonstrations and housing plans? In one respect, to the very end, Flike continues to represent the fact that Umberto doesn’t fit into the social world; nobody wants him, he is utterly alone.6 In the final analysis, however, Umberto emerges as himself represented by Flike, who refuses to be abandoned and who refuses to die. No wonder the conclusion of the film is justly characterized by its “ambiguity.” What is undecidable is not so much whether Flike “forgives” Umberto D for trying to kill him; such a characterization hopelessly humanizes the animal and dissolves the boundary between its world and that of the human. The ambiguity has more decisively to do with the source of the symbolic itself: in “Umberto D,” does meaning derive from the human or from the animal? To phrase the same question differently: can we tell them apart? The movie gradually reveals a realm underlying the socio-political. This deeper realm is the one to which the animal runs. Flike gives us access to it, although, once again, it cannot be exactly located. Unlike the goat in “Runaway,” the dog is completely dependent upon human agency, and has recourse to no home other than that available in human society. This makes Umberto D’s final actions with Flike the Susan McHugh examines Lars Eighner’s Travels with Lizabeth as but the latest in a line of narratives “suggesting how the parallel conditions of homeless people and stray or feral canines enabled a strikingly different pattern of representing dogs to challenge the dominance of breed narratives at the end of the twentieth century” (163). 6

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more unsettling, because the terms of his mastery with the dog must be renegotiated all over again, lest the dog run away. Where in fact would he go? Once more, a narrative barely offers us a glimpse. Yet I would argue that the space is crucial for explaining—again—what an animal is doing in a narrative in the first place. Neither goat nor dog “saves” us. They only make themselves available for our appropriation at all in the form of something absent or absenting from our society. And to where would these animals retire instead? Nominally, nature; it is no accident that the end of the remorselessly urban Umberto D takes place in a park, seemingly on the city’s edge; the park becomes a species of “contact zone,” enabling the natural to mingle with the social as well as animals with each other and with humans.7 But it appears to be crucial that the location not be particularized lest it only become open to human “utopian” designs. To cast the matter once again into the Heideggerian idiom of Georgio Agamben’s profound meditation on man and animal, The Open, animal space is Undisclosable, equivalent to the very space of the earth. Indeed, according to Heidegger, the work of art moves the earth into the “open” of the world in order to reveal the earth as closed in upon itself. Hence, “the animal is the Undisclosable which man keeps and brings to light as such” (73). Yet the crucial revelation is that the disclosure can go no further. Authorized by the “wordless” nature of the earth itself, animal being is closed to us. No need to pursue Agamben’s terse treatment of how Heidegger manages to try to avoid escaping the “metaphysical primacy” of animality in positing man’s own “existing essence.” (Critics such as Simons or even Malamud are very less eager to make such an escape.) Suffice merely to note, first, how each of these very different narratives in fact suggests such primacy—Flora’s will to generation being a counterpart to Filke’s will to survival, and each one respectively re-presenting the human vicissitudes of the same fundamental energies. Contra Hei-

7 Donna Haraway has lately employed this term, whose origin she traces to postcolonial studies, wherein Mary Pratt—who adapts the term from linguistics—foregrounds how “a ‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other . . . often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (quoted by Haraway, Species, 216). Hence, the “improvisational” nature of Flike’s actions in the park is not obscured by a more overarching, “diffuse” account of his “domination” by Umberto D, if not Man.

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degger, we can say that animal being is, after all, not closed to us—if only because there is always more of it to be brought to light. Second, it should be emphasized that each work takes undisclosed animal space to be the source of further narrative. This is more explicit in “Runaway” than in Umberto D. At the end of the story, Flora appears to be gone again. Perhaps she is dead, thinks Carla, looking to the edge of the woods, holding in her hand a tiny skull, and trying to quiet her desire to run away again. Or perhaps Flora is not dead; Clark may have chased her away or set her lose somewhere. “Not to have her around, reminding them” (47). But of course we humans always have animals “around” in some form or other. They bear the burden of our representations. But in spatial terms they also suggest others, at once more elusive and more peculiar to themselves. The best of our own narratives can barely speak of these other representations, which must necessarily remain undisclosed. The world—our world, the human world from which we want to flee or which has no place for us—will only transform them into more familiar stories. In addition, animals—closed in upon themselves, subject to laws that we can only partially explicate—have their life and being literally elsewhere, and are not finally human at all. 3 How far do we want to go into the space of animals? A recent film, Into the Wild, once again stages the trope of “disappearance,” but this time the vehicle is a human being rather than an animal. Unlike Grizzly Man—a similar film released around the same time—Into the Wild has ostensibly nothing to do with animals. They are simply irrelevant to the purpose of Christopher McCandless, twenty-four at the time of his death, who intends to get as far away from “civilization” as he can. Eventually he hikes north to Alaska, and then finally subsists for 112 days inside a derelict bus on a diet of rice and wild plants. He also traps and shoots rabbits and squirrels, until one day he decides to kill a moose. He shoots one. (In a sense, his decision to do so is based on merely on the fact that he has a gun.) Then what to do? He cuts up the carcass into pieces, while trying to remember the advice of a man he had met in North Dakota about avoiding maggots. Too late. By the time he hauls some of the carcass into a makeshift pit where it can be smoked, rot

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has set in. The screen suddenly bursts into a riot of maggot-infested viscera, over which the camera lingers. Several reviewers labeled the images “gross.”8 McCandless eats nothing of his kill, and records in his journal guilt over shooting the moose in the first place. A last moment in the sequence shows him on a rise looking down haplessly on a pack of wolves, prowling about the carcass, tearing at the flesh. Why is there this sequence in the first place, especially the graphic presentation of bloody meat? One explanation can be provided by the concept of the Real, as theorized by Jacques Lacan. Purely phantasmic, the Real is a formless, horrifying, primordial image, which (as Lacan’s foremost interpreter, Slavoj Zizek explains) “at its most radical, has to be totally de-substantialized. It is not an external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the fissure within the symbolic network itself ” (72). Transposed into the circumstances of the film, the rotting meat of the moose so graphically presented becomes the face of “the wild.” But not as a location, such as “the north” or “Alaska.” Not even as an “idea” that can function for us in some sort of “spiritual” economy. The rotting meat instead shimmers on the screen as a bloody mess that refuses integration into any symbolic network. It’s too raw. It can’t be cooked. As such, the rotting meat bears a provocative correspondence to another powerful explanatory scheme, Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal.” Their idea of human-animal relation is based on affinity rather than identity, multiplicity rather than unity, and alliances rather than syntheses. The Deleuze-Guattari version of the real consists of “the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that becoming passes. . . . [A] becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself . . . [and] has no term, since its term in turn exists only to be taken up by another becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first” (38–9). But what we actually see in Into the Wild is McCandless’s failure to become-animal, despite the bare conditions of his extreme ascetic existence. The limits of his becoming are set by the killing of the moose and his failure to ingest any of it. Forced to stare as wolves 8 In fact they may represent the insect trope of what Eric Brown characterizes as “overwrought abundance, a rhetoric of excessive, swarming, teeming congestion” (xxii). Quickly, though, a “mammalian bias” overwhelms the maggots, and a more palatable pack appears in the form of wolves.

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eat the carcass, he becomes a “fixed term,” a human being after all, who cannot eat contaminated meat, who does not even know how to cook it before it gets contaminated. The “becoming” of the animal, on the other hand, is effectively celebrated by the wolves, who can eat the carcass, in part ultimately because they too are animals, and can remake themselves as animals by consuming their own flesh. It seems to me entirely appropriate that the moose should be eaten by a pack of wolves, since, as Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, every animal has its “pack modes” and “we do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity” (40). McCandless looking down as the wolves eat is the very image of such fascination. But not for its subsequent transformation into becoming animal. The young man sought out the wild because of his scorn for the human “pack.” On the explicit narrative level, the film exhibits its own nervousness about what he might thenceforth become by deliberately restaging McCandless’s earlier familial troubles—and thereby restoring him to the socio-cultural “pack.” On the freer imagistic level, however, he becomes an example of the category that Deleuze and Guattari term, “the anomalous,” from which ideally emerges the figure of the sorcerer. Alas, though, McCandless cannot realize this figure, and the scene with the wolves marks the limit of the “alliance” he could make with animals. He can live like a wolf but he can’t eat like one. He can’t join an animal pack. “If we imagined the position of a fascinated Self,” conclude Deleuze and Guattari, “it was because the multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside” (46). In the person of its hero, Into the Wild gives us a full dramatization of such an “inside,” one that the human agents in “Runaway” and Umberto D, variously taut with their respective breaking points, can only disclose. In contrast, McCandless really would be “a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” (45). Trouble is, he can’t, because he fails to be able to live in the space of animals. Not only does this space prove to be too real (in the Lacanian sense). It proves to be a space finally inimical to humans. What are we ultimately to do with the space of animals? If our efforts to approach this space are fated either to be impossible or deadly, what sort of imaginative relation can we attain? Can we “think” one? Of course, once more, it depends upon the particular animal. Animal

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space is simply different between a goat and a dog, while each of these is quite different yet again from the space of a wolf. Nonetheless, we can at least try to make a general distinction based not only upon the degree of our separation but upon its kind. In their introduction to the collection, Thinking with Animals, the editors, Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, state as follows: “Thinking with animals is not the same as thinking about them” (5). Thinking about them preserves our “separation” from them (to recall Berger’s point for a final time), whereas thinking with animals easily becomes more personal and direct; “thinking with animals,” the editors write, “can take the form of an intense yearning to transcend the confines of self and species, to understand the inside or even to become an animal” (7). Thus the “schizoanalysis” of Deleuze and Guattari. Thus also the narratives analyzed here. It may be the case that virtually any narrative in which an animal is in some way prominent expresses this same “yearning,” which I have been trying to explicate as a literal space. Yet in contrast to Into the Wild, both “Runaway” and Umberto D appear to be far more “about” animals than “with” them. In each, space can either be presumed in some way or in some form made visible. Not so in Into the Wild, where the space of animals, especially the maggots, is given at once as hopelessly abstract and appallingly literal. What is nonhuman becomes simply inhuman. Its space testifies not to our power but our death. We can’t go there. The ”alliance” we might seek to make in the space of animals would lead only to our dissolution. “If we imagined the position of a fascinated Self,” conclude Deleuze and Guattari, “it was because the multiplicity toward which it leans, stretching to the breaking point, is the continuation of another multiplicity that works it and strains it from the inside” (46). In the person of its hero, Into the Wild gives us a full dramatization of such an “inside,” one that the human agents in “Runaway” and Umberto D variously taut with their respective breaking points, can only disclose. In contrast, McCandless really would be “a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” (45). Trouble is, he can’t, because he fails to be able to live in the space of animals. Not only does this space prove to be too real (in the Lacanian sense). It proves to be a space finally inimical to humans. “Runaway” tells a consoling story (for humans) about this space, which is not made visible. Umberto D tells an unhappy story (for animals) about the same space, which is imagined as barely conceivable. Into the

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Wild tells a much grimmer story, in which we see why we humans comprehend the space of animals but only to a point, after which we don’t want to know and only become traumatized through further encounter. In this space lies not beauty or spirituality but instead bloody flesh, horrible maggots, impossible multiplicities, and eventual death.

ANIMALS REAL, SPOKEN, TAMED

ANIMALS OF SPAIN Cats and Pigeons One day while living in Spain for four months I saw a cat, then a pigeon. In foreign countries, you see lots of things as if for the first time. Insofar as animals are concerned, you begin with the most mundane ones, even if you find yourself in a country where the burden of national representation is taken up by one transcendent iconic animal. The cat was one of several in a courtyard behind the building where I taught. Mostly they just lounged about in our human space, tails sometimes erect and twisting, though I’m not sure why, because some women in the college canteen usually fed them. Did the cats still become alert to an odd mouse or bird appearing amid rows of Bushes and flowers? This particular morning there was something different: the jet black cat had an eye missing. Instead of an eye, there was just its absence—a dark hole. I was afraid to look closely. What about the hole? Would it become inflected? “This cat’s going to die,” my wife said. If so, what should the proper human response be? Just a shrug? After all, there are many cats. You can’t rescue them all. And just to care for one might involve considerable effort; in the case of this partially sightless one, you’d have to try to scoop it up and take it to a vet. Best to hope that one of the canteen women would do this instead. Late that afternoon came the pigeon, waddling along a narrow sidewalk, a hundred yards in front of me. I expected it to scurry skyward once I got closer. It didn’t. Instead the bird tipped badly to one side, like a tiny plane that had landed the wrong way. Assuming he would be terrified if I got even closer, I stepped off the sidewalk, into the street, and around the pigeon. Then I noticed his left wing, which had collapsed and was dragging over the pavement. The bird couldn’t fly. If he couldn’t fly he would surely die—most likely killed by a cat. Again, what should my response be? A pigeon is after all just a pigeon. Even more than cats, pigeons abide in an aggregate, here two or three pecking the ground, there twenty or thirty taking flight. Why bother with just one pigeon? What sort of singularity could he possibly represent? Or solicit?

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The cat I might see again. This pigeon I never would. So, I just kept walking, although every few steps I looked back. By the time the street curved, and I saw the pigeon for the last time, he was just a speck. Who could care about a speck? At this moment, had I been headed toward rather than away from it, the speck would not have been recognizable as a living being. Dogs Nothing I saw in Spain moved me as the sight of a dog early one afternoon on a street in Avila. He was only a mutt, walking just ahead of some sort of bum or homeless man. I remember the man’s shoes. The laces weren’t tied. The soles were worn. I never saw the man’s face. What riveted me was the face of the dog. The mutt was stricken. Because he was afraid of being abandoned? Probably. Big liquid eyes bulging, he kept glancing back at the man. The dog’s curly, dun-colored fur was matted. It seemed as if the man could no more afford to groom the animal than he could afford to groom himself. Each of them was, well, lost. Yet perhaps the man could bear to lose the dog, whereas the dog could not bear to lose the man. Forget about cats or pigeons. Dogs best embody the claim of animals upon us. Cats and pigeons live among us. Yet, however differently and variously, each either has access to or abides in another, separate realm. Dogs—unless they are feral—have only our human realm in which to have their being. What moved me on that Avila street was the terror a dog can feel if that realm threatens to vanish. To some dogs, or breeds, the threat seems never to cease to exist. A sentimental notion? Sure. Attributing our sentiment to animals is our fundamental human way of overcoming the “species barrier,” and relating to them. It may not be correct. It will be coherent. To me, not to see possible abandonment in the stricken face of that dog would have been not to see it at all. I think again, as I thought that day, of a Goya painting in the Prado, entitled Perro semihundido. It shows a dog—thick snout, flat ears—peering over a ridge. Just that. The ridge slopes upward. It is colored burnt yellow, without a shred of vegetation. The sky is a slightly lighter shade of the same color, extending up in a straight horizontal line that encompasses two-thirds of the space of the canvas.

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The title of the painting might be translated, “dog semi-sunk.” Since his eyes remain bright and his face follows the upturned ridge line, the dog could just as easily appear semi-risen. But then we realize that the color of both earth and sky give him little to rise to. And of course because the rest of his body is not visible in the painting, the animal (whose coat matches more the color of earth than sky) may as well have slid downwards. The face of the dog doesn’t clarify matters. He looks sad. But not disconsolate, not stricken. It is hard to say much more about the painting until we realize one thing: no human being is pictured. If we like, we can imagine one out of the frame, at which the sunken dog stares—perhaps imploringly. Why does Goya omit a human?1 In part in order to depict a dog already subject to the claims of the earth, because he has lost contact with the human realm. Just so, we might add, a dog is pictured at all not only because Goya wants to paint a dog. He paints one who is reduced to little more than a speck amid the amber haze of the canvas because otherwise there would be only color, nothing else. Perro semihundido could be an exercise in pure abstraction. As it is instead, we have a world we can recognize because it contains a dog. The dog grounds the painting. The dog stands for a world in which things rise or sink. Because of the dog, there is a stark image of the world in which, or rather to which, we can all be lost. Bulls Is there a “Spanish” attitude toward animals? Undoubtedly. But you can’t see it in the streets, where people walk dogs (for example) with regularity and generally seem no more or no less affectionate to them than can be observed in most Western countries. If there is a distinctive attitude, it has to do with Spain’s national icon, the bull. Is there 1 This is as much as anything the reason to object to what is evidently the standard reading of the painting, as “an image of Everyman in despair,” according to McHugh (Dog, 132). “[I]ts position at the bottom of an overwhelmingly flat, bleak canvas suggests the futility of struggle in ‘a malevolent environment,’ ” she continues, citing a scholar of art history. Such images “not only contrast with the security and domesticity of the breed dog (such as Lanseer’s Her Majesty’s Favorite Pets) but also more importantly represent the broad social structures of poverty and exploitation upon which these rarefied social worlds of luxury and wealth depend.”

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another nation on earth whose identity is so summarily given over to an animal as Spain to a bull?2 At times during four months in Spain I felt explanations for bullfighting could be neatly divided into two: those who saw the bull as a god and those who saw it as a victim. As a god, the bull is worshiped—ceremonially set up to be presided over and then slain by the priest-matador. As a victim, the bull is punished—elaborately set up to have punishment inflicted upon him, and then to be killed. To the one explanation, the ritual is crucial; the bullfight is ultimately a religious spectacle. To the other, the ritual is nonsense; the bullfight is finally nothing more than a cruel slaughter. On an intellectual level it is possible to reconcile these two explanations through the figure of the bull himself. You don’t have to accord him some sort of divine origin in order to agree, nevertheless, that the bull possesses immense power in the bullfight. Otherwise, why go to such lengths to weaken him (often, it is said, with drugs before he enters the ring) and only then to kill him? Come to this, why even stage the entire ceremony?3 Emotionally, however, the reconciliation won’t wash. At least it didn’t for me. Although I had initially intended to see a bullfight, the first few minutes of the first one broadcast on television disabused me. So much blood! Reading Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon hadn’t prepared me. The bull quickly becomes a pincushion. Never mind the prissy figure of the matador. Some of those who come before are even more revolting, especially the men who toss another on top of the bleeding bull in order to have the man be soaked in blood. The bull as victim? Over and over again, I met Spaniards young and old for whom the religious ground of bullfighting had simply van-

2 See Steve Baker’s second chapter on the iconography of power in Picturing the Beast, especially the use of “actual living animals” which often has “uncomfortable consequences either for the animals themselves when they are called upon to act out their unwitting role as the random bearer of a ‘universal ‘ meaning or the arbitrary totem of some group or other” (66). His point throughout is that the animal “sign” (the British bulldog, the American eagle, and so on) is always arbitrary when it is called to signify national identity. Furthermore, even though largely “drained of their animality,” we must not forget that these images still constitute “positive” examples of the culture’s chosen iconography (71). 3 To Gary Marvin, the point is control, and therefore the bull becomes the wild animal—the wild of animality—upon whom the human being, specifically the male human being—imposes his will. But my point is not to discuss bullfighting in any scholarly detail but rather to preserve the formal play of a traveler’s reflections.

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ished. To most of them, regarding the bull as a “tragic” figure if not a “sacred” victim seemed as nonsensical as it did to me. The bull was just a victim, period. Over and over again, I heard that most Spaniards just don’t care about bullfights anymore. The majority of people who attend them now are tourists. I don’t know how the Spanish represent bulls for themselves; if, for an example, we take the outsize one-dimensional iron figure of the horned beast you see at points on the vast Castilian plain (originally the product of an advertising campaign for whisky), the bull remains the same traditional figure of strength and power. However, this is not exclusively the same bull pictured on postcards. Set aside the fact that postcards are for tourists. You can’t produce any according to what you imagine other nations to think of you if you ignore what you think of yourself. On the evidence of postcards, the Spanish aren’t sure, either way. Tourist shops are full of postcards featuring cutesy bulls—horns softly curved, forelocks fluffed, eyes like puddles, and bodies as rounded as teddy bears. These images of bulls are indistinguishable from toys. Or if not toys, then toy-like. There is a postcard (I began to collect them) of the smiling figure of a tiny matador extending a flower to a gray bull who has risen up on his hind legs like a horse. The bull is three times the size of the matador. But his eyes are bulging. Whether crazed or not, the animal looks more comic than threatening. Another card in the series—each one reads, “España,” across the top—shows the same huge bull (now black) with his head to the ground, snorting at a man who has a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. Is the man drunk? Surely. (His hat has popped off his head.) Is he a tourist? Just as surely. Is he about to be gored or trampled? No! The atmosphere of the yellow and red postcard is bold and light. The bull may appear frightening. Only frightening like the villain in a cartoon. The Spanish postcards of bulls or bullfighting that are different from these playful ones have to do with the running of the bulls in the streets. One is a black-and-white photograph, dated 1975, of a bull striding down a sidewalk while just above three men hang down from balcony floors and a fourth presses his body into a window while standing in the sill. The men look silly. The bull looks triumphant. Perhaps my favorite postcard shows a huge bull trampling an indistinct crowd of men, each dressed in white with red bandanas around his necks. The bottom portion of the card reads, “Pamplona. San

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Fermin.” The interesting thing is how the bull—horns like hooks, hoofs like iron—is imagined as if soaring away into the top right of the picture. He has already trampled the men. Now he has reared up and might well be ready to take off and fly. What is such a being? We can barely imagine. This monster can only be glimpsed in a couple of the commonly available postcards. One from the “España” series shows a big black bull with a mean-looking row of teeth standing in the middle of a bunch of tiny red and white stick figures. Each has been variously toppled. But they won’t die. Against a neon blue background, the fierce bull presides over disorder rather than death. The overturned men are just specks. One falls to earth while holding a little parachute in one hand that reads, “poor me.” Cranes I never visited the zoo either in Madrid or Barcelona. I never rode a horse. The closest I got to anything wild was watching some BBC Nature show late in the afternoon on one of the Spanish channels, featuring wolves or bears. It wasn’t necessary to understand the narrator’s knowing commentary (dubbed in Spanish) in order to marvel at the beauty of the animals.4 But I did not so much as touch a single Spanish animal during four months, unless a few pats on the head of a puppy count, just once, during an evening stroll along the main street of Alcala de Henares. The most enduring relation I had with animals in Spain was with cranes, for which the ancient university town (birthplace of Cervantes) is famous. Erect, noble-looking cranes on either side of a shield constitute

In her discussion of animals in the global television marketplace, Cynthia Chris discusses how in the 1990s wildlife documentaries proliferated around the world through the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and the National Geographic channel. Links were established with local cable organizations in Europe and Asia. The assumption throughout was that the “content” of such programming was “culturally nonspecific.” According to an Animal Planet executive: “There is an interest in the Siberian tiger whether you’re in America or Cuba or Czechoslovakia [sic] or anywhere in-between. . . . It crosses borders and media platforms better, and more economically, than any other form of TV” (109). Or again, in the words of an executive of British Sky Broadcasting: “This kind of programming transcends borders. It’s not considered American or British or whatever. Unlike general entertainment or comedy, it goes easily from country to country” (109). 4

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the University of Alcala’s crest, while real cranes are everywhere atop university buildings in the center of town. Their nests have been built up along the sides of chimneys or steeples. Occasionally, you can look up to see a crane flying nestward with a stick or branch in its beak. I never bothered to learn whether only males are solely responsible for nest construction or if females pitch in too. From the outset, what struck me over and over again was the relationship of these birds to earth. Of course cranes are birds. Their element is air. And yet the only reason to take flight at all seemed either to hunt for food for babies in the nest or to obtain materials for the further construction of the nest itself. Cranes don’t flutter. Other birds do, not cranes. At most, cranes glide—necks stretched, legs draped under their bodies. But they always appeared to me in their long sweeping motion to be spiraling downward, as if their element was in fact not air at all, or only air insofar as it could return to earth. Easy for humans to identify with cranes because the birds exist in pairs, for the purpose of raising a family. Yet I fancied that the logic of our engagement with cranes lies in something else: in order to raise a family, they have to build a nest, and in order to build a nest they have to root themselves in the earth. The city had a special exhibit on cranes during the months I lived there. It detailed how decades ago volunteers made sure the surrounding area had enough of the brush and drift wood the cranes commonly use for their nests. Otherwise, the birds, who migrate from Africa, might go elsewhere. I saw their nests as far north as Avila. But not in nearby Salamanca. Why not? Once more, cranes never coalesced for me as objects of knowledge. I was content observing two in particular every day from my bedroom window. The nest was on the crest of a roof, several buildings away. It always reminded me of a termite nest, only shorter and squatter. In the morning, the cranes were seldom visible. In the evening, they usually were, especially after babies were born. Were there two? Three? Hard to be sure. Did only the mother feed them? (Through regurgitation.) Did one of the parents always remain in the nest? (So it seemed.) Finally I just delighted the sight of these cranes, rather as I delighted in the bronze statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the middle of Calle Major. One morning one of my students told how a crane had shit on her head. Woops! Then I began to notice how besotted with white feces were so many of the corners and streets around town below crane nests. The birds might look beautiful. Their excrement doesn’t. It became

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possible to be more sympathetic to the shocking proposal—shocking to me, anyway—by the Bishop a few years ago. Since the Cathedral was an especially favored site for nests, his idea was to electrify the spires so the birds would not settle there. So many townspeople protested that the plan was never adopted. To these people, presumably, the cranes constitute a responsibility. I’d like to imagine that even the Bishop secretly delights in their clacking. What does this distinctive sound mean that cranes make with their beaks? Somebody said it was amorous. Another just said it was merely “communicative.” I never learned, as if, it seems to me now, I never quite wanted to. It’s not that instead I was content to mystify the birds; a moment’s thought revealed my vast ignorance about their origins, their migratory patterns, and their scavenging. Perhaps I simply preferred them to stand broadly for the imagination of an animal world that appeared to be whole and entire. The space of animals! No matter that it is an illusion. The birds were scarcely free from human care or threat. What animal is anymore in our thoroughly human world? The wildest bears or boars on the Spanish peninsula could surely be wiped out in a generation of hunting. Meanwhile these cranes persist high up and away from our society, flapping and shitting and clacking to their own rhythms, with which we have to make our peace, if we want them to continue to live among us, in some way resembling how they have for centuries. For many people of Alcala, accepting their town’s cranes continues to be a struggle. If they’re not careful, most of some eighty nests around town could vanish very soon, like specks. That enough townspeople still do not want these nests to disappear is finally very moving to a mere visitor. If I died, and then was subsequently reincarnated as an animal in Spain, I’d rather not, please, be a pigeon, a cat, or a dog. Each is too vulnerable to human settlement or human whim. It might seem more “noble” to be a bull, but only if I was not set loose into a bull ring, thank you. Best of all to be a crane, if you don’t mind. They’re not free from humans. But they remain free enough to continue to stand as one emblem for our own aspiration to freedom. Of course there is every geographical reason why these cranes are as peculiar to Spain as the panda is to China or the kola bear is to Australia. The nice thing, though, is that for the moment anyway the cranes survive as purely local beings, abiding beneath some overarching

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machinery of national representation like improbable cats or pigeons. The earth is full of such creatures. One way each is different from us humans is that none has to be grounded in terms of one nation only. Could one reason that we love animals be that they can travel without passports?

SPEAKING OF ANIMALS Do you want to know what jaguars think about? You don’t know? Eh, then you better find out: the jaguar only thinks about one thing—that everything’s pretty, really pretty, for ever and ever. That’s all she thinks about the whole time, all day long, always the same thing and nothing else, and she goes on thinking this as she goes on the prowl, eating, sleeping, doing whatever she’s doing . . . When something upsets her, she suddenly bares her fangs, roars, gets furious, even without thinking, for at this very moment she’s stopped thinking. Only when everything calms down again does she go back to thinking as before. —João Guimarães Rosa, “My Uncle, the Jaguar”

What are the boundaries between us and animals? J.M. Coeztee’s character, Elizabeth Costello, is quite emphatic: “there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (35). Elizabeth, as a novelist, cites not only Joyce’s Molly Bloom but Ted Hughes’s jaguar in his two poems, “The Jaguar” and “Second Glance at a Jaguar.” However, Hughes’s animal is not conceived as speaking. What if an animal is so conceived? There are many examples from children’s literature and cartoons, some of the best of them (ranging from the British Rupert Annuals strip or Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar to Art Spiegelman’s Maus) studied by Steve Baker, who concludes thus about the convention: “It is the simple fact that everyone, including quite young children, knows that animals don’t really talk, which prompts genuine delight in the anomalous convention of the talking animal” (Picturing 159).1 Yet how far can the bonds of the sympathetic Baker has earlier cited Bruno Bettelheim: “To the child trying to understand the world, it seems reasonable to expect answers from those objects which arouse his curiosity. . . . A child is convinced that the animal understands and feels with him, even though he does not show it openly. . . . In animistic thinking, not only animals think and feel as we do, but even stones are alive. . . . And since everything is inhabited by a spirit similar to all other spirits (namely, that of the child who has projected his spirit into all these things) because of this inherent sameness it is believable that man can change into an animal, or the other way around” (123). Baker, however, registers his skepticism about the presumption of such a clear-cut distinction between sophisticated adult (who knows among other things that animals cannot speak) and naïve child. 1

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imagination be stretched? Suppose in our incredulity we venture into realms where animal speech is not transparent and in fact is positively antipathetic to us? The actual speaking of animals may not be the same as us, speaking through them. What precisely is at stake in imagining the speaking of animals? That we become more like animals or that animals become more like us? For instance, after a discussion of the film, Babe, Erica Fudge writes, “[w]e want animals to speak—that is an overriding desire that many of us share—and yet a speaking animal could be a very disturbing thing” (89). She goes on to cite Wittgenstein’s famous dictum:—“if a lion would talk we would not understand him”—and then returns to Babe, to the effect that a speaking animal must be considered as saying things we don’t want to hear. Or to put the matter another way, it seems that a human being who would become an animal must imagine the animal as having a language that we will not (or will not want to) understand. At this point we are returned to a more venerable problem: what are the consequences of the fact that, unlike us, animals have no language? Of course we can redefine key terms, either unpacking the specious unity of the concept, “animal,” or else expanding the human-centered confines of the term “language.” Thus, for example, Cary Wolfe, discussing “the Wittgensteinian lineage,” urges “a conventionalist understanding of the shared dynamics of a world building that need not, in principle, be tied to species distinction at all. On this account, not the world but simply a world emerges from building a shared form of life through participation in a language game” (5). If what we are interested in are the representational possibilities of fictional narrative, Wolfe’s point would appear to be an especially happy one. The world of any one example (Babe or any other) is, after all, merely a single one, a “game” played according to rules of its own devising. In such a world, a human being can not only become an animal. He can talk like one. Take as a singular instance the story, “My Uncle, the Jaguar,” by the great Brazilian writer, João Guimarães Rosa, written in the first person, in which a former hunter of jaguars tries to explain his situation to a visitor. The men are in the middle of a jungle. They drink rum. The former hunter, who lives alone now, claims to be the son of Indians. He’s had various names. Now he has no need of one. The narrator is not a jaguar. Yet he claims to have eaten jaguars as well as to have eaten what they eat. Moreover, he claims even to look like a jaguar (he asks the visitor for his mirror) and, more generally, to be able to see

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in the dark or to run like a wild deer. In fact, the narrator lives almost entirely apart from human society (wearing only an old pair of pants), and his life is completely explicable in terms of jaguars—those he has been attracted to (especially a female named Maria-Maria), those he has killed, those he has regretted killing, and those he has dreamed of becoming. The narrator is not a jaguar. Yet no humans have ever wanted anything much to do with him, he seems merely to have been “dumped” in this jungle and told to kill jaguars, and he now is overcome with so total an identification with them that on more than one night “I felt a sudden urge . . . a desperate urge to turn into a jaguar, me, a great big jaguar” (332). Once, he claims to have woken up, covered with blood. His horse was dead, torn to bits and half-eaten. At the end of the story he describes how another time he woke up with the taste of blood in his mouth and the bodies of a farmer and his family, bitten, dead at his feet. “I’m a jaguar . . . didn’t I tell you” (340). Understandably, at this last disclosure the visitor draws his revolver. The narrator protests—he was only joking. As it appears he is about to be shot, his language dissolves into untranslatable gibberish: “Nhenhenhém . . . Heeé! . . . Hé . . . Aar-rr . . . Uhm . . . Ui . . . Ui . . . êeêê . . . êê . . . ê . . . (342).” Untranslatable, that is, in terms of either the original Portuguese in which the story is written or the English into which it has been translated. More, untranslatable with respect to human language itself. We recall that throughout the narrative is replete with the narrator’s strange interjections, phrasal pauses, and tags such as “tá-há,” “Tiss, n’t, n’t,” “N’t, m’p aah,” “teité,” “Nhem,” “Erê,” “uê,” and so on. He is not a jaguar. Yet many times he speaks like one. Or is this how we are to understand a jaguar speaks? If “My Uncle, the Jaguar” does not attempt to give us jaguar language it at least expresses what we take to be jaguar sounds. Therefore, the story is at least at considerable remove from, say, those stories by Kafka (the most famous being “The Metamorphosis,” but also including the narrators of “Investigations of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”) where an animal speaks, as an animal, but speaks in our human language. Most fictional narratives about speaking animals work this way.2 Rosa’s narrator, by contrast, seems uncomfortable

2 Most range from attempts to proximate animal language as a kind of deformed English to straightforward expressions of another language as in fact no different from

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in our language, as if he has learned another but isn’t yet fluent in it. At one point he describes how, in order to lure the mother from her lair he used to impersonate the cubs: “I miaowed and miaowed, jaguarainhém, jaguarahhinhenhém . . . (325).” Ultimately, the question of how sympathetically close a human being can be to becoming an animal reduces itself thus to the issue of language. Here, apropos of Wittgenstein, we have an example of a jaguar (rather than a lion) who talks. Can we understand him? At times in “My Uncle, My Jaguar” we at least understand the narrator to be exhibiting the spectacle of a jaguar talking. That we cannot understand him better seems less important than that we see he is using the rudiments of another, nonhuman language. The narrator becomes an example of a man speaking-animal. His utterance demonstrates, before anything else, that such a thing is possible; there is a “world” in which it can actually be so. Other worlds of course are just as possible. The horse and animal trainer, Vickie Hearne, has a relevant rejoinder to Wittgenstein: “The lovely thing about Wittgenstein’s lion is that Wittgenstein does not say his lion is languageless, only that he is not talking”—a remark that is “a profundity rarely achieved, because of all it leaves room for” (Animal Happiness, 169). What it leaves room for is “not the reticence of absence, absence of consciousness, say, or knowledge, but rather of tremendous presence,” of “all consciousness that is beyond ours” (170). With respect to Rosa’s jaguar, what we have is not the presence of an animal in itself but instead its presence—or intimations of its presence—in another, who, we might say, happens to be human.

our own. Examples of the former are undoubtedly more interesting. So, for example, Teresa Mangum notes as follows: “Beginning in the 1890s, Rudyard Kipling wrote several stories narrated by elderly dogs in abysmal dog English nearly too embarrassing to quote” (“Dog Years,” 40). Readers have apparently looked more kindly—to pick another example—on Donald McCaig’s celebrated novel, Nop’s Trials, in which dogs curse each other by such utterances as, “thou scat.” See Ziolkowski for a survey of canine narrators. For a distinguished example of a “language game” by an animal narrator who is not a dog, see Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, whose story of African elephants is told in clipped, laconic form, laced with special idioms, by a young cow. Mangum’s observation apropos of nineteenth century “mad dogs” can, I believe, be extended—at least as a general rule—to all other species of animals: “Little wonder that when mute or muted creatures speak, they speak in the voices of sentiment, suffering, abjection, or forebearance for the readers who must be persuaded to suspend cultural assumptions about any others, including humans deemed nonhuman, and suddenly submit to unimaginable, inarticulate selves” (“Dog Years,” 45).

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The register of this presence is speech, which comes about by the narrator’s contact with a jaguar consciousness so powerful that something of its power can be appropriated by, or through, human language. It turns out that Elizabeth Costello’s sympathetic imagination is bounded; animal and human language remain separate, or at least separable. And yet a human being has been represented as becoming an animal, so fully that the being, or it may be even the “consciousness” of the animal, can be articulated. An animal exists not only to be spoken about but actually himself to speak. 1 The subject of the first chapter in Alice Kuznair’s Melancholia’s Dog is muteness. The animal arguably closest to us in our lives finally brings us no closer to understanding it—or to constructing a narrative in which it can be represented as actually speaking in some form. Kuznair discusses an especially provocative example of one, Charles Siebert’s short novel, Angus, narrated by a Jack Russell terrier, who is dying. What animates Angus’s language is not so much its inadequacy as its ignorance. Angus desperately wants to understand himself, as a function of understanding us. “What are we” he asks at one point, “that we don’t live up to your notions and yet end up living entirely for you” (33)? But he doesn’t understand us. As Kuznair states, instead of the usual opacity of an animal’s thoughts, “Siebert dialecticizes this presumption by making the dog unknowable precisely because it mirrors back to the humans their own lack of transparency” (60). However, what we normally get in narratives either of or about the speaking of animals is the lack of any such dialectic. Either the animal simply has no separate “consciousness” that can somehow be expressed as such through our language or else our language seamlessly substitutes for some other verbal expression an animal could conceivably possess. A recent novel by Patrick Neate, The London Pigeon Wars, illustrates each of these alternatives. Italicized passages in the words of a pigeon are interspersed into the main plot about seven young Londoners and their friend, Murray, who acts at once to disrupt and animate them as well as, more strangely, the pigeons. The pigeon introduces himself by winking that “I scope that the peepniks don’t say ‘bird-brained’ for nothing” (3). He continues in this vein, mixing into more or less conventional English a species of distinctive pigeon-idioms and never

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losing his self-consciousness about his human audience, to whom, at one point, he pleads: “I’m saying, suspend your superiority, because our pigeon pettiness was certainly significant to us” (243). Quite so, we might reply, for such pleadings reveal that Neate cannot free some sort of pigeon-ese from the very idioms of our fatefully “superior”—more encompassing—language. No wonder the final thing the pigeon-narrator declares is, words fail me. The narrator possesses no consciousness out of which his own words (basically satiric) could succeed.3 He is not human. Yet human determinants utterly dictate his representation. Consider as another example of the same problem arguably the most well-known story in English of human transformation into an animal, David Garnett’s “Lady into Fox.” At the moment of her transformation, the woman cries out to her husband: “What am I now become? Have pity on me husband, have pity on me for I am your wife” (380). But she only says these words, “with her eyes, as if indeed she spoke to him.” The limits of her new world are now indicated by her language. If she can still speak, she can no longer speak so that her husband can understand her. The lady never says a word throughout the ensuing narrative. Her husband simply translates her looks or actions into his language. He never attempts to teach his vixen wife to speak. When he eventually sees her with cubs, he is temporarily jealous, until he reasons as follows: “Can a man have his honor sullied by a beast? I am a man. I am immeasurably superior to the animals. . . . Were I to lust after a vixen, I was a criminal indeed. I can be happy in seeing my vixen, for I love her, but she does right to be happy according to the laws of her being” (417). Whatever these laws consist of, they do not include language. Language marks the species boundary between animal and human. Hence, the concluding poignancy, once the vixen has been attacked by hounds and, mortally wounded, leaps into her husband’s arms: “Then at that moment there was a scream of despair heard by

3 Compare Kafka’s dog narrator, who has such a consciousness—but lacks a language in which this consciousness might be expressed. Kuznair’s comment about Kafka’s dog succinctly clarifies much of the dilemma concerning the speaking of animals: “The dog states as his purpose or goal to reveal the essence of dogdom. This essence, however, proves to be its silence; consequently, because he too is a dog, he cannot impart what it is that dogs know” (23). Siebert’s Angus, it might be added, through his very ignorance of humans, can impart something of this essence, which emerges as sheer anguish at his incomprehension before what she terms his “Lacanian desire of the Other” (60).

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all the field that had come up, which they declared afterwards was more like a woman’s voice than a man’s. But yet there was no clear proof whether it was Mr. Redbrick, or his wife who had suddenly regained her voice’ (429). That the two have become indistinguishable merely signals a final transformation of the one, from life into death. A scream represents a final moment of contact between nonhuman and human. But the sound does not allow the moment to be further articulated. Once more, language forms the basis for a convergence of two beings who, as animal and human, respectively, remain utterly apart and distinct from each other. The animal cannot be imagined as possessing a language. Or, if this vixen can, then in order to make an intelligible sound, she can only be represented—just for an instant—as becoming human once more. What about the sounds that animals actually make? Are these capable of developing into meaning—our meaning—through a process of deliberate, systematic language learning? In literature, as in the laboratory, the animal of choice remains the ape.4 Its obvious biological resemblance to humans makes the ape a uniquely compelling figure for us to imagine animal being for ourselves. How do we do this? Once more through constructing narratives where in fact the reverse appears to be happening—the assumption of human for animal being. The basis is language, either as a model (e.g. for the symbolic colored counters through which the scientist teaches his favorite ape, Alice, to communicate in Peter Dickinson’s too-little known detective story, The Poison Oracle) or as the linguistic structure itself. Peter Høeg’s novel, The Woman and the Ape, stages an unusually interesting scene of language instruction, once the ape, named Erasmus,

4 See Wolfe for an overview of recent studies, 54–5. Also, see Haraway’s long note in Species, 372–73 (on the proposed scientific distinction between language in a broad sense (FLB) and language in a narrow sense (FLN), as well as, more generally, Fudge, Animal, chapter three. For an especially trenchant analysis of the narrative form of the questions raised in scientific work, see Burns, who summarizes thus: “The basic difficulty of the animal story genre . . . is to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of anthropomorphism—which uncritically imputes a human-like consciousness to animals—and anthropocentrism—which presumptuously denies consciousness to other animals” (342). Later, he makes the following speculation: “The so-called ‘prisonhouse’ view of language, characteristic of both philosophy and literary theory in their post-structuralist phases, can be viewed as part of an anthropocentric ideology that, perhaps unintentionally, reinforces already ‘antimentalist’ biases by suggesting that thought depends wholly upon language, and is, therefore, the exclusive property of human beings” (346).

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flees his keepers in the company of the heroine, Madeline. Madeline is smitten. “I don’t know when you” she says to Erasmus, “that is, animals . . . I mean apes, grow up. But I’ve often wondered when humans do. And now I know” (161). She means that she feels emancipated from the empty alcoholic stupor of her previous existence. Now she has a mission, as having been “chosen” for “something important.” Exactly what depends upon the nature of Erasmus, who at first only speaks by parroting individual words Madeline utters, but later engages in whole conversations! However, not before he and Madeline first have sex. After this the lovers enter a special game preserve outside London, St. Francis Forest, first established in an attempt to re-create the Garden of Eden, lately reborn under the Institute of Animal Behavioral Research (headed by Madeline’s husband) as a sort of pure site for the Darwinian struggle of the fittest. We read that initially Madeline assumed that the ape’s “language skills were at too low a level for it to understand all the subtle little ways in which human lovers are constantly reassuring one another that they and their love are alive and well” (183). But no. The need for such assurance has simply never occurred to Erasmus. We are not told whether he communicates this to Madeline through language—either hers or his. In fact, despite all the attention the novel gives to language, the function of Erasmus is to embody something beyond it, as we see confirmed when a lesson in Danish conditional conjunctions (of all things!) is interrupted, in order that the lovers can reach “the outer limits of language,” whereupon they discover that their love is not sufficient unto itself (194). Erasmus is thereupon revealed to be “not so much an ape as a human being” (219). Thus he stands forth before a distinguished assemblage of individuals in some way significantly involved with animals, declaring that he and his kind can no longer attempt to fit in to human society and asking only that the audience remember “how hard it is to tell, in each one of us, where the part that you call human ends and the part you call animal begins” (245). If readers of The Woman and the Ape need a reminder, Madeline discloses she is pregnant at the end, with a baby, who, like an angel, “for all we know, [is] one-third god one-third animal and one-third human” (261). What does it all mean? In one emphatic respect, that apes grow up to be apes like Erasmus (he departs on a ship with a number of others) means that we humans are rebuked by a higher order of being, rather than—as in “Lady into Fox”—confirmed in our own superior status

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by the existence of a lower order. A doctor tells Erasmus: “We thought we could learn something about those homids which came before man. But you are not what went before. If anything, you are what comes afterward” (237). In other words, we thought we could see how much like you we could become; instead, we discover you are more unlike than like us. You possess—the doctor could have continued—more erotic power. You exhibit more acute moral discrimination. The only qualification to Erasmus’s status as “coming afterward” is represented by his language. It is ours. No wonder The Woman and the Ape eventually casts off the drudgery of Erasmus learning the Danish conditional. His purpose is simply to speak. That he speaks of his difference from us (as apes customarily do in fiction) is in a sense beside the point. The miraculous thing is that an ape speaks at all. This enables us to recreate the animal intelligibly in our terms. Insofar as verbal communication is concerned, our terms are the only terms. In this novel, as in so many others about apes, we are not prompted to wonder if the animal has some language of his own. What makes Kafka’s fable of Red Peter, “A Report to an Academy,” so unusual is that the ape does gesture at the existence of another language. Granted, he allows that his animal “origins” are today as comparably distant to him as they are to the gentleman of the Academy. Nonetheless, of his earlier despair while trapped in a cage, he states that “what I felt then as an ape I can only represent now in human terms, and therefore I misrepresent it, but although I cannot reach back to the truth of the old ape life, there is no doubt that it lies somewhere in the direction I have indicated” (176). Erasmus, in contrast, indicates nothing of this old “truth,” much less the inadequacy of expressing it, or himself, in human terms. Red Peter does possess a separate consciousness, even if the language he has at his disposal to express it is the same as ours. But this consciousness is not—or no longer—innocent. Heinz Politzer notes that “Kafka’s speaking animals have lost the innocence traditionally ascribed to nature without gaining human stature, whatever this stature may be” (91). By comparison, most stories of speaking animals keep their innocence in reserve (Erasmus is returning to it at the end of The Woman and the Ape) so that the closeness we solicit from them has some basis. In Kafka, though, we are permitted so such illusions. Red Peter disdains our notions of freedom, and desires only “a way out,” which turns out to be “the way of humanity” (183).

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Therefore, in deigning to shake hands, smoke his pipe, drink schnapps, and enjoy sex with a chimpanzee, Red Peter becomes altogether too much like a human not to be a human. (To be accurate, he does “[take] comfort as the apes do” to a female chimp who looks “bewildered.”) The ultimate irony of “A Report to an Academy” is that the animal who affords such a consummate humanized vision is in fact so similar to us (Red Peter claims to be as civilized as the average European) that we can only draw away, both from his clear-eyed cynicism and from the dissatisfactions of “the thick of things” we humans have made for him to escape into. Just as ironic is the fate of his first teacher, who was almost turned into ape himself by contact with Red Peter’s ape nature. Instead of a being humanized by a man, a man is simianized by an ape! (And then taken to a mental hospital, from which, however, he was soon released.) Far from being innocent, ape nature is powerful and dangerous to humans. No wonder it is necessary to have the animal exclusively speak so that we can understand him. Again, we recall Erica Fudge’s point that if we want an animal to speak we had better be prepared for something we don’t want to hear. We might desire to get as close to animals as we can. But—in stories that represent a man as becoming an animal or even ones that represent an animal becoming human—not too close.5

5 Since my subject is the speaking of animals, let me not pursue the related problems presented by humans without language, either severely retarded (i.e. so-called “deaf and dumb”) children or else various examples throughout history of the “wild child.” It turns out that a human being without language is nonetheless not reducible to, say, an ape; in almost all cases, the question such a human being presents to the human community is how to learn language—as a condition of realizing his or her humanity. For an especially compelling treatment of the wild child, see Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys; his conclusion in cautionary in this connection: “[ I ]n writing this book, one thing has become apparent to me: some residual element of human nature is not contained in language. . . . We know when someone is human—although what distinguishes an ape from a human, or a wild child, is unclear” (238). Finally, Haraway quotes from an unpublished paper by Cary Wolfe, entitled, “Learning from Temple Grandin, or Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the Subject,” which argues against the “ubiquitous and practically mandatory” following assumption in both the social sciences and the humanities: “If no language, then no subject and no interiority worth the name.” Wolfe, summarizes Haraway, puts animal studies and disability studies together differently, proposing, for example, to consider the relation between a service dog and a blind human as an example of “a shared trans-specific being-in-the-world” (Species, 371–72).

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2 It is one thing to represent an animal on the model of a human being. It is quite another to represent another being on a human model. What place do animals have in such an equation? If in the one case, we express a desire to get close to animals, in the other case, do we express a desire to be done with them?6 There exists a whole category of contemporary artistic practice which has been characterized by Steve Baker as “animal-skeptical,” which, as opposed to “animal-endorsing,” questions “culture’s means of constructing and classifying the animal in order to make it meaningful to the human” (Postmodern, 9). Later he writes, apropos of a particular postmodern account, that “[f]rom this perspective, the classic dualism of human and animal is not so much erased as rendered uninteresting as a way of thinking about being in the world” (17). Consequently, it is surprising to revisit certain classic animal-skeptic fictions in order to discover either how animal-endorsing they turn out to be or how animal-endorsing they at least strive to be. Of no fiction of this kind is this more true than Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In the celebrated postmodern film, Blade Runner, adapted from the novel, there are only two animals, an owl and a snake, each a “replicant.” However, in the novel there are a number of others, ranging from the electric sheep the main character, Rick Deckard, and his wife keep on the roof of their apartment building to the “genuine” (the novel’s word) goat he buys at the end. Perhaps the clearest measure of the film’s animal-skepticism is that it does away with animals almost entirely. The clearest measure of the novel’s animal-endorsement is that it struggles to retain them.

6 Or, if it is possible to create—or imagine—non-organic beings wholly subject to human control, what further need for organic ones, whose difference from us, while provocative, can never as satisfactorily match the exciting promise of technoscientific creatures such as—most famously—Donna Haraway’s cyborgs. See her “Cyborg Manifesto,” reprinted in Simians. In her later The Companion Species Manifesto we read at the outset as follows: “I appropriated cyborgs to do feminist work in Reagan’s Star Wars times of the mid-1980s. By the end of the millennium, cyborgs couild no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed for critical inquiry. So I go happily to the dogs to explore the birth of the kennel to help craft tools for science studies and feminist theory in the present time. . . . Having worn the scarlet letters, ‘Cyborgs for earthly survival!’ long enough, I now brand myself with a slogan only Schutzhund women from dog sports could have come up with, even when a first nip can result in a death sentence: “Run fast; bite hard!” (4–5).

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Empathy with animals forms the basis for distinguishing between humans and the artificial humans, or androids. The response is hardwired. It can’t be faked. Virtually all of the questions of the test Deckard administers to suspected androids deal with animals. Androids invariably flunk. At one point near the end, the remaining three androids from the most advanced replicant program see a spider. One is especially curious: why do spiders have so many legs? She proceeds to clip off four; as a protesting human looks on; the spider “crept miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out. A path to freedom. It found none” (207). In the post-nuclear world of Do Androids, there are no wild animals left on earth and few live animals. The few live ones are carefully bred and sold on the open market as private possessions. Indeed, animals are so precious to humans that at the end when Deckard comes upon a toad he is incredulous, since the animal was believed to be extinct. His wife is skeptical when he brings the toad home; it might be “electrical.” In fact, it is; the wife locates the tiny control panel. Yet the couple is resigned. “The electric things have their life, too. Paltry as those lives are” (241). She orders some artificial flies for the toad from an “animal accessories” store. Such an action, as well as the considerable empathy toward animals demonstrated by the couple, complicates once more what could easily appear to be a simple symmetry throughout between human and android and real and electric.7 Earlier, Deckard has considered the symmetry: “The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered . . . a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animals. Both viewpoints repelled him” (42). As the narrative develops, however, he exhibits considerably sympathy for androids. A fellow bounty hunter tests him, in order to see “if we included androids in our range of empathetic identification, as we do animals” (141). Deckard tests positively, especially so for female androids. No wonder he later sleeps with one. Afterwards, he explains to her that, although she is not legally alive, biologically she is. Unlike “false” animals, she is an organic entity (for whom, alas, the problem of cell replacement has yet to be solved).

7 Eric Brown notes thus in his introduction to Insect Poetics: “The insect world must be mediated—by art, artifice, technology—as an (almost) impossibly different creation” (ix). The novel effectively literalizes this statement.

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Trouble is, in the world of Do Androids empathy for androids cannot function. Androids may help unsettle the polarity between real and electric, but the supervening polar opposition between human and android remains. Both real and electric animals ultimately define what is quintessentially human, but androids threaten this definition, which is why they must be sought out and killed. The novel explores the emotional cost (to humans) of the threat, but can construct no narrative through which some concern for androids is made equivalent to the concern Deckard’s wife has at the end for the care and feeding of her new electric toad. Such concern can be lavished precisely because the animals are not human. In effect, then, empathy for animals functions in Do Androids as a guarantee that humans will remain human, or rather can be certified as being human, despite the existence of androids who replicate the entirety of human physical structure, including its organic basis. In other narratives, there may be other guarantees—or none at all. What distinguishes Dick’s novel is how it strives to retain the existence of animals in the construction of human being, while at the same time imagining the creation of androids whose strength and intelligence would enable human being to be dispensed with. Furthermore, the fact that animals are silent—we cannot speak to them—becomes in Do Androids one locus of our feeling for them. Androids, on the other hand, can deceive us through their words, just as much as we can deceive ourselves. Their language is ours. They have no other. Consequently, in a technoscientific context, it is possible to reconsider the question of how close a human being can be represented to being an animal. The answer: not close at all—and a good thing, too! And the answer to the more urgent question, how close is another being already to becoming human? Too close—and a bad thing, too! We can be sure it’s a bad thing not because of ourselves, for whom androids—or robots, cyborgs and so on—remain exciting or inevitable technological developments. But because of our animals, whose realm is irremediably Other than ours, even when they are electric. Therefore animals are of inestimable value to our whole imagination of ourselves as human, especially, it seems, the closer other beings get to human beings. Boria Sax divides animals into five categories of “lore” or “traditional knowledge” (metamorphosed, divine, demonic, satiric, and political) and concludes that “our current estrangement from animals seems to have revived some of the numinous qualities they had in the archaic past” (276). “No animal,” he concludes, “completely lacks humanity,

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yet no person is ever completely human. . . . For us, animals are all the strange, beautiful, pitiable, and frightening things that they have ever been . . . When we contemplate the inner life of animals, myth is finally our only truth” (277). Central to this myth is the conviction that they either have or could have a language, which is ours. And even if not ours, their language remains one in which we humans are someone present, or in which at least we can somehow imagine ourselves. The conviction that animal communication can be understood by us on the model of language is so strong that it permeates scientific discourse. Charles Siebert’s recent article, “Planet of the Retired Apes,” for example, describes various attempts on the part of private organizations as well as the federal government to house chimpanzees now retired from lives as research subjects in laboratories throughout the country. The centerpiece is the new Chimp Haven sanctuary in Florida. There are an estimated 2,500 captive chimps in the United States, few of whom have known the wild. To the director of Chimp Haven, they are, Siebert writes, “animals who have essentially become hybrids of us and them, a cosmopolitan monkey for whom a sudden and complete severance from us and our ways would constitute the next form of abuse” (33). Some of these chimps demonstrate a sense of self-awareness, feel sorrow and remorse, and both learn and use American Sign Language. At another facility—whose inhabitants are waiting to be shipped to Florida—Siebert’s escort recalls a night when renovations to cages had been completed, chimps had been allowed to move into their outer quarters, and everybody could see the sky for the first time. As she sat on the steps of her trailer, she could hear the animals talking. “I understood some of it. It was, Look at the stars and Look at the moon, and what do you think all of that is about? But then they started saying something I didn’t understand. I struggled to make sense of what it was. And here’s what I think they were saying. They were announcing themselves to the world. They we saying, we live here. We exist” (63).8

8 Compare the following comment of Nigel Rothfels , while discussing “the illusion of freedom” created by Carl Hagenbeck’s original parks and exhibits and maintained right up to the present at such sites as Disney’s Animal Kingdom: “These idyllic settings mask the fundamental nature of an animal’s captivity . . . [and] the animals in our new zoo exhibits, surrounded by plants and fabricated trees, face a much more difficult time finding a voice with which to query their audience” (Savages, 198).

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What to conclude? These actual chimps are in the profoundest sense as distant from being Sax’s numinous figures as can be imagined. Instead, they are almost completely subjugated, beaten, ours. And yet when we listen to translations of what they say from those actual human beings who are closest to them, what we hear is something so different from what we would imagine human beings to utter in such conditions as to constitute, rather literally, a different species. Where is the bitterness or outrage we would expect these animals to feel? Can they have no notion of freedom? It appears they do not suffer in these ways. Or, if they do, they either have no language for it or else they possess a nature that overcomes suffering with an acceptance of the world that we have no language for. Once again, our efforts—imagined or real—to get close to animals both emerges from and ends with the question of language. We can’t imagine a human being becoming an animal without it. Paul Shepard has a lovely statement of (in effect) the numinous animal and our ideal relation to it: “We seem frantic to contact some intelligence more assured than ourselves, to be blessed in their witness of our mutual presence, to be given their surety that life is real and purposeful, even as the purposes lie beyond our grasp” (141). Alas, though, we have only fictions—or “myth,” in Sax’s idiom—about precisely what this intelligence would consist of or how its purposes might be expressed.9 In these fictions the idea of language remains central. The “grasp” we would have of animals consists of words—those they themselves speak (both to each other and to us) as well as those we use to understand and represent animals to ourselves. How could it be otherwise? How can we imagine anything apart from language? And yet how can we maintain some idea of the numinous qualities of animals if the language we have to attribute to them were not in fact somehow different than our own? The very thing that would deliver us into the

9 Better “myth,” in any case than science. Burns quote from a recent study, Wild Minds, in which the author, Marc Hauser, while exploring similarities between the brain structures of humans and other animals, notes that “many of the behavioral problems dogs experience can be treated with the same type of pharmacological drugs that work on human psychiatric disorders” (Quoted, 349) We might be heartened by this example, until we realize that comprehending our dogs as mentally ill will not easily lead to imagining them “sympathetically,” not to say numinously. For another take on Hauser, see Haraway, who contrasts his work with the more “generous” (with respect to the varied mental and emotional lives of animals) work of Marc Bekoff (Species, 374–76).

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fullness of the animal world thus proves to be the thing that prevents us from making contact with it. It seems impossible not to imagine animals speaking. How else can we model ourselves upon them? And yet it appears equally impossible not to be left, in even our finest fictions, with the realization that we have just been speaking of animals, whose language—as we attribute it to them—only reveals how frantic we are to have them be like us.

AT THE CIRCUS: UNDER THE GAZE OF A CAT Now you tell me. When you were a child and you went to the circus what was it you remembered afterwards? The clowns? The acrobats? The sideshow? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll tell you the thing I remembered the most. I remembered the animals. The elephants, the roar of the lions, the dog and pony, the dancing bears. Am I right? —a character in Robert Hough, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark The animal “has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.” —Jacques Derrida

Once on a street in Lisbon a whoop went up from our tour group. Some had spotted a kid sitting on the pavement while playing an accordion and singing. Set in front of him upon a little cardboard mat was a chihuahua. The dog held a tiny tin bucket around his neck. Every once in awhile when the kid hit a high note singing, the dog would join in with a full-throated, chin-up howl. It was hard to hear it. But you could see it. What a hit! Coins (including my own euro) veritably poured into the bucket and into a larger pan in front of the dog. Our guide mentioned that the kid had appeared on TV the night before. A reporter claimed he was the most successful businessman in Lisbon at the present time. Evidently nobody mentioned a competitor, less than a block away, about the same age and with the same breed of dog. But there the similarity ended. This dog didn’t sing. It wasn’t even clear that he was trying. Worse, he looked as if he was scared, just sitting on his haunches, shivering. The effect was pathetic, rather than delightful. No wonder few tourists lingered and few coins had accumulated. Back up the street, one dog was performing. Here, another dog was just . . . existing. Either he hadn’t been trained or he couldn’t be trained.

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To put the difference another way: only one dog could have been in a circus. These days it’s more likely to see some sort of performing animal on the street than “under the big top.” The days may not be over when an assortment of animals would be unloaded from a train that pulled into town, while tents were being set up by another assortment of men who drove stakes into the ground. But these days are colored with nostalgia now for most Americans, while the specific contact with animals that circuses made possible seems eroded, as Helen Stoddart indicates, because of laws policing the nature of animal display and performance. At least in the United States and the United Kingdom, she writes, “the re-establishment of legitimacy has not been, and therefore seems unlikely to be, achieved” (75). Nevertheless, we can continue to insist upon a distinction between the public exhibition of an animal who is designated to perform and one who is designated to be exhibited. Mere exhibition of one or more animals is a common feature of a carnival or a sideshow. An animal sanctuary, on the other hand, shades into a zoo. Circuses are not zoos—even if many had and still have a moment of formal public viewing at the menagerie, where crowds mill about, as in Sara Gruen’s recent novel, Water for Elephants, “viewing the animals on their way to the big top” (285). To Red Peter, the ape in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” the difference between performing and simply being is quite crucial. As he explains: “When I was handed over to my first trainer in Hamburg I soon realized that there were two alternatives before me: either the Zoological Gardens or the variety stage. I did not hesitate. I said to myself: do your utmost to get on to the variety stage; the Zoological Gardens means only a new cage; once there, you are done for” (183). He succeeds. Although the exact nature of the “performance” he mentions giving nearly each evening is not clear, and does not appear to have specifically to do with a circus, it at least offers him “a way out.” Can we say the same of ourselves? Granted, as Stoddart notes, “the Romantic celebration of man’s benevolent mastery over nature . . . no longer has any purchase over contemporary imaginations for whom the dominant public discourses in relation to nature centre on environmental protection (against the force of human exploitation) rather than domination” (76). And yet, I would argue, that at the circus we ourselves are permitted a way out of the hopelessly, remorselessly exploitive status to which animals have been relegated. At a circus, no less than at a zoo, animals may not return our gaze; as John Berger famously writes, they

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have become the objects of our knowledge, and “the fact that they can observe us has lost all significance” (257). However, this is precisely why performance matters—to us, if not to the animals. On the basis of their performance, it is possible to admire the beauty of horses, the skill of elephants, or the ferocity of tigers. Of course, as Berger claims, “[e]verywhere animals disappear.” Zoos, he continues, constitute “the living monument to their own disappearance” (261). But circuses are not zoos. In circuses animals reappear, and if we attend to fictional accounts, even their maintenance and especially training are not wholly reducible to neglect and cruelty.1 At the circus, trained animals still emerge before us trailing something of their ancient promise as well as their enduring mystery. 1 The star circus animal of Water for Elephants is a bull elephant named Rosie. At one point in the novel we are given a detailed description of her act. She enters (to the tune of a waltz) with the trainer’s wife, Marlena, atop her head. He lifts her off with his trunk and onto the ground, whereupon he proceeds to follow Marlena, who is blowing kisses to the crowd. Then human and animal engage in an elaborate mock-competition with large and small rubber balls, Marlena eventually “losing” to Rosie, when the elephant crowds with all four feet onto a ball and succeeds in rolling it a short distance. The crowd loves it. A shower of money follows. What precisely is the crowd applauding? Rosie? Later in the novel, when the circus is breaking up and its animals have to be sold to another circus, Jacob, our narrator, conspires with Rosie (or so it seems) to dupe a potential buyer into thinking that the elephant is a dumb, unresponsive creature who, as Jacob claims, just stood in the menagerie and received candy. Is the crowd presumed to know that Rosie, like any elephant, could normally “do” nothing more than this? Perhaps earlier they have seen her quiet and passive in the menagerie. For a wide-ranging account of real circuses, on the other hand, especially their repackaging of wild animals as “colleagues” and “partners,” see Schwalm. Zoos, meanwhile, are repackaging, as high-tech immersion exhibits, according to Nigel Rothfels. “Ever-more realistic exhibits at zoos exist . . . . because people have come to dislike looking at animals behind bars and in small-glassed-in rooms and prefer exhibits in which animals appear to be living in nature” (“Immersed,” 219). 1

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Could the crowd be applauding Marlena? But in fact Rosie outwits her—and again, there is an implicit comparison to be made, this time in contrast to Marlena’s work with horses, who are “transformed” at the moment of their performance into vital, snorting animals, whom Marlena leads with her whip, five white and five black, through a series of rotations, climaxed by a lone one walking upright all the way round the ring and then the rest pirouetting in place. Marlene, we read, gives each section of the audience a chance to “adore” her (202). Unlike the act with the elephant, this one with the horses is an exhibition of the power of the human trainer over her animals. The elephant, however, is not so easily trained. We may assume the crowd knows this—and therefore applauds not so much the animal or the human as the spectacle of the two of them, acting in concert. Of course the script is human. An elephant standing on a ball has no correlate in nature. Yet this fact only seems to enhance the appreciation that the crowd gives, as if the animal has not so much been beaten into subjection as persuaded to participate in play. The difference is crucial. The embracing power of the animal is repeatedly emphasized, as for a final time in the act she drops her trunk, and then raises Marlene aloft.2 How dangerous is an elephant? The circus act described in Water for Elephants is not an exploration of this question. But, I believe, the question forms a basis for the act. Meanwhile, the narrative of the novel at once confirms the question and answers it when Rosie—who has been abused throughout by her nominal trainer, Marlena’s husband—drives a stake through his head. This man, August, is killed not only because the other animals are stampeding (or because the husband is a rival to Jacob for Marlena’s affections). He is killed because he is a poor trainer. Because it is a novel about circuses, Water for Elephants is a novel about

2 Compare how Haraway discusses training her dog for agility trials: “Training requires calculation, method, discipline, science, but training is for opening up what is not known to be possible, but might be, for all the interacting partners. Training is, or can be, about differences not tamed by taxonomy” (223). She goes on to cite the work of a French ethnologist about the mimetic matching exhibited by skilled human riders and educated horses, and then—after allowing for differences in each type of activity—concludes thus: “The nonmimetic attunement of each to each resonates with the molecular scores of mind and flesh and makes something out of them both who was not there before” (229). The same general claim could, I believe, include the particular kind of “creation” exhibited by elephant and trainer.

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animals, and because it is a novel about animals, it is a novel about training them. Rather than providing some exact account of methods, Gruen’s novel situates training in a scheme of moral allegory. Not only is Jacob’s relation to animals presented as more a matter of duty than empathy. He remains with the circus as a veterinarian (even though not fully certified) because his father was one, and continued to be one long after he ceased getting paid. As Jacob declares, “I am the only thing standing between these animals and the business practices of August and Uncle Al” (146). We are meant to be surprised when he discovers—quite by chance—that Rosie is responsive to the Polish language. Polish proceeds to enact the burden of the distinctive contact a trainer must make with an animal and, in addition, suspends the taint of its commercial purpose. To put the matter another way, by training Rosie through uttering commands exclusively in Polish Jacob regains his “coherence.” I take this word from Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task, where she reads the eventual turning away from Adam and Eve by most of animate creation in the following way. “One may say that before the fall, all animals were domestic, that nature was domestic. After the fall, wildness was possible and most creatures chose it, but a few did not. The dog, the horse, the burro, the elephant, the ox and a few others agreed to go along with humanity anyway, thus giving us a second chance to repair our damaged authority, to do something about our incoherence” (48). Why Polish? It assumes the character of an unfallen language. Hearne writes that “the dog or horse trainer’s special interest in ‘wild and uncontrollable’ animals assumes that the degree of violence in a dog’s resistance to authority may indicate the depth and power of response a dog might give when the gap between command and obedience is closed” (48). With an elephant, the violence of the possible resistance comes implicit in the animal’s very bulk, although both the immediacy and fullness of Rosie’s response to the sound of Polish closes the gap much too quickly.3 Thereby, Water for Elephants is turned into a popular

3 This is precisely the gap studied in scholarly literature, as, for example, several of the essays in the Daston and Mitman collection attest. How to read the gap? Haraway pays tribute to Hearne but only obliquely, “because I wanted to emphasize the positive-method training approaches she never stopped despising” (368). In other words, Haraway prefers to ignore the gap, whereas Hearne never ceases to recognize it.

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narrative not about the nature of training animals but about the results of such training on humans. For Jacob, the results are simple. He gains the strength to oppose August as well as the conviction to love Marlena. If for the animal, training enables her to trust her willingness to be rightly commanded, for the human, training enables him to trust himself—not only to command but to exercise his own “animal” (the adjective is inescapable) nature. That Rosie stands for Jacob in her killing of August is as clear as the fact she stands for him later in his more settled, aging existence, once Jacob takes a position with the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and Rosie, “getting on in years,” accompanies him there. (Along with Marlena and children.) With this last narrative development, Rosie effectively disappears, and a zoo is now substituted for a circus, as if to ratify—recalling Berger—how the animal now becomes a monument to her own disappearance. By the end, we are entitled to wonder if this disappearance was not a forgone conclusion. Although provocatively suggestive of the most intimate form of contact between man and some of the rarest of animals—a contact conceivable only within the formal structure of a circus—Water for Elephants finally succumbs to the fate of most fictions about man and beast. The mystery of the latter is converted into knowledge for the former. Consider, for example, Cary Wolfe’s essay in which he notes Stanley Cavell’s objection to Wittgenstein who wants reroute “ ‘the [skeptic’s] idea that the problem of the other is the problem of knowing the other,’ when in fact one of the most valuable things about our encounter with the supposedly ‘mute’ animal is that it ‘sooner makes us wonder what we conceive knowledge to be” (3). Alas, in the novel we already know what knowledge is. It is a language—for the purpose of interspecies communication, Polish. In as it were already “speaking” this language (rather than being trained to do so), Rosie loses her mystery. We are left with her wondrous ability to perform. But this ability does not of itself suffice to “open” the circus world of Water for Elephants to the sheer otherness of the animal. Ultimately we have a state of affairs that Wolfe characterizes as follows: “the animal other matters only insofar as it mirrors, in a diminished way, the human form that is the ‘source’ of recognizing animals as bodies that have sensations, feel pain, and so on” (10). If what we desire is the otherness of the animal, we need better fictions.

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2 By the early 1920s, according to Robert Hough, Mabel Stark had the best known “cat act” in the American circus. His novel, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, draws on Stark’s letters as well as her vanity press autobiography in order to imaginatively construct the act from the inside. Consequently, the novel becomes a unique representation of wild animal training. In Hough’s narrative, tigers are fearsome as well as fickle. They wound terribly with a mere thumbnail or a casual flick of a paw. Nevertheless, they can be trained. Stark’s favorite, Rajah, comes to her as a cub, a present from her husband. Raja stays with the couple until he grows too large and unwieldy. Stark smuggles him outside of their living quarters in a duffel bag. Even when the tiger has to be caged, she takes him for walks along public streets and occasionally lets him run free along the Santa Monica beach. His ring training emerges “naturally,” in the sense that with Rajah, “the natural inclination was toward physical contact” (146). (“You get a tiger with good balance, you make him your ball roller. You get a tiger likes waving his paws in your face, you put him in your sit-up chorus. You get a cat that’s heavy and graceless, last thing you do is send him jumping through a burning hoop” [147].) So Stark encourages him to jump and lie on her, on signal. Her training partakes of her initial experience with a whip (she has to train herself to control it properly) and with other tigers, in which training does not consist of the usual technique of merely “battering” the animals into submission. Earlier in the ring, for example, she anticipates a tiger moving toward her thus: “I looked into a tiger’s mind like it was a shelf in a grocery store, and again I knew exactly what it was he was planning. Which was, Think I’ll act as if nothing’s concerning me and then rip her stomach clear out, just to see the look of surprise on her face (108). Stark steps aside before his forepaw shoots out. “I could see muscles reticulating beneath the surface, like a fit man’s, only it was covered in orange-and-black fur and ended in a fluffy white dangerousness.” She hits him on the nose with her whip, the shock “the only real way to get the word vulnerable rumbling through the head of a tiger” (109). One more smack and the animal slinks back to its pedestal. Such scenes constitute an illustration of sound animal training as Vicki Hearne argues in Adam’s Task. Training, that is, is not simply a matter of the trainer uttering commands. (With the implicit threat of physical intimidation or even abuse; see Stark’s outrage at Clyde Beatty’s

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“pitiful excuse for an act” [244–48].) Or even distributing rewards, although Stark does commend a technique called “gentling,” whereby whenever her animals perform competently she hums “good little kitties” or “purr[s] in their ears until they started purring right along, a sound like a motor idling” (111). The animals have to be listened to. Their bodies have to be read. Up to the performative moment, the trainer shares the same relation to the animal as an ethnologist. A shared world between animal and human must be constructed in order for the animal to perform, based upon mutual respect and trust. At one point Hearne states as follows: “With horses as with dogs, the handler must learn to believe, to ‘read’ a language s/he hasn’t sufficient neurological apparatus to test or judge, because the handler must become comprehensible to the horse, and to be understood is to be open to understanding, much more than it is to have shared mental phenomena” (107). And so, we could add, with tigers. The trainer must be able to comprehend her cat at the sheerest muscular level. Since she is human, granted, the comprehension will be translated on the model of language—and so these above tigers “speak.” But it is clear that to Stark at times her translations are feeble approximations, examples of what Hearne terms “the sketchiness of the tokens of English” (71).4 With Rajah, though, these “tokens’ cease to matter. The relationship he has with Stark is purely physical. There is an instance during training when he almost suffocates her, in apparent protest against having to be “acquainted” with other cats and then having been knocked down by one. She blames herself for “hurrying things.” Later, in public, what the “rubes” see as her immanent death during the performance, Stark only sees as security. Rajah leaps off the pedestal and on top of her, she then rolls over on top of him. Stark interprets the ensuing applause as follows: “a crest one part relief and one part resentment at having

4 Haraway is fond of citing the biologist Barbara Smuts, who “after decades of careful scientific field studies of baboons and chimps, cetaceans, and dogs, celebrates the ideal of copresence,” something we taste rather than something we use. In mutuality, we sense that inside this other body, there is ‘someone at home,’ someone so like ourselves that we can co-create a shared reality as equals” (236). The fact that, unlike scientific study, the relation of animal to human is founded on “use” should not blind us to the “shared reality “ that makes possible the public performance. Even Haraway, however, is skeptical about the presumed equality between her and her dog while training. A “cat act,” on the other hand, can only display such reality in the form of human mastery.

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been scared witless and one part disappointment they weren’t there the night Rajah the wrestling tiger ripped apart his trainer.” Finally, the din transforms itself into laughter, “the laughter caused by people realizing they’ve been had and had bad” (157) The loop extending from the training in the ring to the performance in the arena has been almost entirely wordless, and the performance has been the more successful because it does not have to be mediated through language. At this moment, we see an intimate interaction between animal and human unique to the circus. Or rather, uniquely represented by the circus, wherein Stark’s relation to Rajah is explicable as a form of play. Haraway glosses agility interaction between human and animal as follows: “Unexpected conjunctions and coordinations of creatively moving partners in play take hold of both and put them into an open that feels something like an eternal present or suspension of time, a high of ‘getting it’ together in action, or what I am calling joy” (241). Away from the ring, however, such joy is another matter—as it is, one night, as Stark records it, even inside the ring, when Rajah (“roaring the way a male tiger does when so occupied”) ejaculates onto her black leather uniform (163). The relationship between Rajah and Stark throughout is in fact charted as much as a relation between a male and a female as between an animal and a human. Earlier, when once she and her husband are having sex, Stark is accidentally pinned against the young Rajah, and the animal becomes part of her sexual sensation. (The next instant the tiger wakes up, and tries to defend Stark, much to the husband’s anger [141–42].) Rajah becomes one reason why she and the man divorce. Much later, and far more horribly, Rajah accidentally kills another husband. The act is not represented, nor—Stark maintains—is Rajah’s eventual fate as reported in the newspapers; he was not actually put down but instead sold to a Mexican circus (394). This is all to say, I believe, that the circus contains the potential excess in the relationship between animal and human, by virtue on insisting that this excess not be included as part of the public spectacle, which partakes, in turn, of a formal definition of each participant with regard to mutual trust and responsibility. The excess has to do with either sex or death; the intimacy of training can activate energies that result in either consequence. Neither has any place in the public spectacle. Stark is embarrassed at the presence of Rajah’s “spunk.” The point of her training has been to make use of, say, the sexual logic of her relation to the tiger. As the historical person, Mabel Stark, wrote in a letter from which Hough quotes, in the act she was pulled to the ground and

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grabbed “you know [how] a male tiger grabs the female by the neck and holds her and growls till the critical moment is over” (426). This moment might be available to the animal. It is not, however, available to the human (or the woman)—at least in her role as an animal trainer. Indeed, were Stark not a trainer in a circus, it is difficult to conceive why she would enjoy such an intimate relation with a tiger in the first place, much less how such intimacy could be made intelligible to human society. (Or even in Deleuze and Guattari’s rarified scheme of “becoming animal.”)5 Whether or not tigers, like horses, have what Hearne terms “their own grammar of time,” the possibility of sex with them takes us to the limit of what we can know about them, and only, I think, the license of art, in the form of the circus, justifies our encounter with that limit. Compare horses. Speaking of “horsemanship at the highest levels,” Hearne writes that “nothing short of the tremendous artistic task of training them in such a fashion that they can be released from time could ever justify our interfering with their greater serenity, our imposing our stories and our deathly arithmetics on their coherent landscapes” (165). We recall Stoddart who maintains that it is exactly the horse who was traditionally at the center of the circus’s romantic appeal, and thus who is so ironically now being removed through legislation from the center of the ring “in order to regain the legitimacy it once secured” (76). Perhaps the horse’s example—much less the above argument—is too grand for tigers. If we take Stark’s point, the male tiger at “the critical moment” simply regards—or seems to—even the human female as female rather than human. The “coherence” of the “landscape” of a tiger may be more accommodating to difference, even or especially species difference, than we humans can comprehend. In any case, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, unlike Water for Elephants, opens the circus world to us as something whose animal energies constitute a “language” of their own, a language we can understand only at great risk, and one 5 See the comment of a critic cited by Steve Baker, apropos of filmmaker and performance artist Carolee Schneemann’s recording of how she receives, each morning, deep mouth kisses from her cats: “Schneemann’s interspecies eroticism is not exclusively a carnal experience, nor merely a confrontation with society’s proscriptions against such sensual behaviors” (“What Does,” 71) In more positive terms, Baker glosses Schneerman as providing what Deleuze and Guattari term “the ‘violence’ of those instants of upheaval for the human self in which it may take on, for example, ‘the yellow eyes of a feline’” (72–3).

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whose very grammar we cannot learn by substituting for it our notions either of what a language is or how it is learned. 3 Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is perhaps the most celebrated fiction in recent years about a man and an animal. Much of the reason is that the animal is, incredibly, a tiger, and that his relation with a human takes place, more incredibly, during the 227 days when the two of them are alone in a 26-foot lifeboat. The ship transporting the tiger, along with a number of other wild or exotic animals, sinks. How to explain why the survivor, Pi Patel, succeeds in avoiding being eaten by Richard Parker? (The tiger was named after the man who hunted his mother, and then found him as a cub.) Explanations begin with the fact that Pi is the son of a zookeeper, thereby providing him with an automatic degree of authoritative experience with animals comparable to that enjoyed by Jacob—the son of a veterinarian—in Water for Elephants. The Pondicherry Zoo provides a foundation for a formal staging of the “shipwreck” narrative. The zoo itself, though, does not suffice to explain anything that happens between animal and man on the lifeboat, despite the fact that a decisive moment between the two—when Pi, famished, has caught a fleshy dorado and Richard Parker, equally famished, is crouched to attack him for it—is explained as follows when the two face off: “Any zookeeper will tell you that a tiger, indeed any cat, will not attack in the face of a direct stare but will wait until the deer or antelope or wild ox has turned its eyes” (280). Pi stares the animal down, and achieves his dominance. However, this dominance—indeed, the whole relation between the two beings—is far more explicitly characterized throughout in terms of a circus. Earlier, Pi has mentioned a circus trainer, and how he must be careful to remain dominant at all times, exquisitely sensitive to the importance of social rank in an animal’s life (54–6). Later, in the lifeboat, he asks himself thus: “Didn’t I have here a perfect circus ring, inescapably round, without a single corner for [Richard Parker] to hide in?” (207). He has (he adds) all the time in the world. A whistle hanging from one of the life jackets could function as a whip. Of course Pi begs the question of whether you can have a circus without an audience. We might say that the audience insures that the animal act set to transpire within the ring remains a formally satisfying

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one, accountable to conventional notions of beauty and art. In this respect, without an audience, there can really be no circus. However, this does not prevent Pi from warming to the analogy anyway, rising to his feet, and shouting like a ringmaster to an imaginary audience. The tiger cringes, snarls, claws the air and backs off. In effect, Pi turns the animal into the audience. The “act” in fact becomes his, Pi’s—there being no way for it to achieve some further, external form—and its sources founded upon his own power, i.e. his ability to induce fear. As we have seen, such logic is implicit in any audience’s response to the trainer—among other responses. Yet what the circus ultimately offers an audience is the spectacle of trainer and animal acting in unison. What Life of Pi offers is merely an account of the preceding training (Pi mentions that he has now to devise a “training program” [211]) only. In this respect, the novel constitutes yet another one about animals in a circus, this time without the actual circus. As such, it merely registers the circus’s disappearance (whether because of concern about animal rights or any other reason). Behind Life of Pi lies the whole sprawling machinery of circus life—variously detailed both by Water for Animals and The Final Confession of Mabel Stark (each with an aged narrator, consciously looking back)—now contracted to a tiny space, in which one animal and one man struggle for dominance. The man wins. In the scene of training in circus novels, the man always wins, for he is able to assert his dominance. Pi explains why. Not only is the animal less ferocious; as Pi emphasizes, the tiger (in possession of “a full system of cautionary signals”) really does not want to attack him. More importantly, the man can use his superior intelligence—whose definition, as always, is based on a model of language—in order to understand his antagonist: “Eventually I learned to read the signals he was sending me. I found that with his ears, his eyes, his whiskers, his teeth, his tail and his throat, he spoke a simple, forcefully punctuated language that told me what his next move might be” (261). Hearne might not approve of the end of this understanding. In her story—as for Haraway’s—the purpose of animal training is for the trainer to achieve cooperation, not power. Nonetheless, as we see in Life of Pi, training is once more forged within the framework of an intimacy between animal and human that is intense and rare—indeed, perhaps the more intense and the rarer if the animal is as wild and dangerous

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as Richard Parker is.6 No narratives about the relation between such powerful animals and man are comparable—not ones based on nurture (the most venerable of which is the film, Born Free) and certainly not ones based on zoo keeping. The narrative of training is the best we have, and for it, insofar as tigers are concerned, the framework of the circus is required. Life of Pi demystifies this narrative—not only because the novel does away with a literal circus framework (and therefore its inescapable ideological and commodified principles variously studied by Schwalm and Stoddart) but because it transforms the whole dynamic of training itself into a question of life or death. Hence, a certain logic emerges with particular force: training allows a man to assume his rightful dominion over animals. Speaking of his deliberate display of Richard Parker’s own feces to him, Pi explains as he blows his whistle: “I made clear to Richard Parker that it was my right, my lordly right, to fondle and sniff his feces if I wanted to. So you see, it was not good zookeeping that I was up to, but psychological bullying” (266). All that is left to him now insofar as training is concerned is the analogy of his whole experience with Richard Parker to zoo keeping, since training has been effectively exposed as equivalent to bullying. Thus later, shortly before the two reach land, Pi declares: “I came to the sad conclusion that I could no longer take care of Richard Parker. I had failed as a zookeeper” (305). On the contrary, though, it can be argued that he only fails as a zookeeper because he first succeeds as a trainer. Zookeeping might have disposed Pi to be a trainer. But training, not zoo keeping, is responsible for Pi’s survival in the lifeboat with a tiger. Furthermore, training has only come about at all, as Life of Pi shows in careful, measured detail, through minute study, proper naming, and shared intimacy with the animal. And there is something more: training has been based upon a devotion to the animal that brings out his own capacity to be devoted himself. Pi refuses such idioms. It may be that the life-and-death conditions of his relation to Richard Parker prevent him from employing them. Yet

6 Faulting Derrida for not inquiring into what his own cat might have been feeling or thinking, Haraway asks: “Why did Derrida not ask, even in principle, if a Gregory Bateson or a Jane Goodall or Marc Bekoff or Barbara Smuts or many others have met the gaze of living, diverse animals and in response undone and redone themselves and their sciences” (21)?

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when Pi returns to an explicit consideration of training for a final time, once he and the tiger are on the island, his words assume the force of a tribute: “Whatever the cause, the strain he was under meant that he continued to show a readiness to oblige; more, that he felt a need to oblige” (345). So Pi strives to restore the lost relation between the two by training the tiger to jump through a hoop. The relation cannot last. Once the two leave the island together—“I could not abandon Richard Parker. To leave him would mean to kill him” (357)—the animal eventually leaves for good, when they reach land again in Mexico. He doesn’t even look back before plunging into the jungle. “Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive,” Pi relates, “moved forward and disappeared forever from my life” (359). Some hours later, now at last reunited with members of his own species, Pi expresses his thanks to the animal, with more emotion than he has ever permitted himself: “I will never forget you, that is certain. You will always be with me, in my heart” (361). Finally, what narrative for such feeling? Not one of love. (How different if the tiger had been female!) Yet one not entirely divorced from love, either. At the center of Life of Pi is the protracted experience of training, a narrative still so unusual that its coordinates have yet to be charted. Setting the discourse of Deleuze and Guattari to one side, for whom the dyad of trainer and animal could easily be reconstituted in the name of a “multiplicity,” Hearne’s discourse of training remains the most intense we have. In Animal Happiness, for example, she writes as follows: “The lion trainer, in interaction with the lion, is engaged in exchanges that create overlap between his consciousness and the lion’s, which does not mean that the trainer loses himself, become emptied, but rather that he is for a while inside the fullness of lionhood” (171). So Pi with his tiger. Even—we must hasten to add—against Pi’s most conscious, coercive instincts. That he is not a better trainer is only to say that his training lacks the achieved, external form provided by a circus act. Nonetheless, the novel mounts a kind of muted tribute to the power of this framework, in which any subsequent form between wild animal and trainer comes about. Hearne claims (in an article about the trainer of a chimp act playing in Las Vegas) that knowledge of animals survives in the circus, as well as in YMCAs, “shabbier parts of parks,” and racetracks. She sees in these places “the miracle that was unavailable to Job, the miracle of generative cooperation between a man and some

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wild animals” (176). In Life of Pi we have yet another imperfect circus fiction about this miracle. It is not of course without its irony—the same irony that Stoddart notes with respect to the horse, “around whose skills and potential the very ring of the circus was measured” (76). The result? Today the horse no longer has a stage on which to exhibit the very fullness of his idea.7 Or to put it another way, in our desire to protect the animal from our domination, we risk losing its power, which is why we have always been moved to “dominate” it (but the word is too simple) in the first place. Perhaps worse, we lose the reason we once wished to display the animal’s power—not only as a function of our own but as a tribute to that of the animal. Insofar as it still includes animals (domestic or wild) the circus survives, even its restricted and legislated form, as a principal human means for subjecting animals to our designs, and, in the process, discovering over and over again that we have no choice but to comply with designs of their own.

7 The dog, on the other hand, does, if we consider the fields or even arenas in which trial competitions take place. But there is a crucial difference: these spaces are in fact celebrations of the “copresence” of human and animal, considered as a team, rather than of the wonder of the animal, considered apart from the human being whose training has made a performance of such wonder possible at all. Horse events, Haraway notes, “are among the sporting parents of dog agility” (209). She favors the term, “contact zone,” for agility courses, as an indication of how participants are formed at once in relation and out of unequal relations of power.

BIG GAME

LIVING WITH ANIMALS In their well-known discussion of “Becoming-Animal,” from their book, A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari distinguish among three types of animals. First, individuated ones, on the model of family pets. Second, “State” animals, those treated in divine myths or used as a basis for structures and archetypes. Third, “demonic” animals, which can form a pack or multiplicity. Their interest is in this last category. Of course they allow that even a cheetah can be treated as a pet, or even one sheep can become a favorite from among those in the pack. Depending upon the animal, it might be easy or difficult to discover its “mutiplicity-grade” (40). In any case, this “grade” is, to them, what matters, for multiplicity is what fosters animal becoming, pack affects, and a whole range of anomalous positioning at the fringes of human society. Far more simply, we usually distinguish among two types of animals: domestic and wild. The domestic ones we can live with. From them we draw what has come to be known as our companion species. As Donna Haraway explains in her The Companion Species Manifesto: “The term ‘companion animal’ enters US technoculture through the postCivil War land-grant academic institutions housing the vet schools. That is, ‘companion animal’ has the pedigree of the mating between technoscientific expertise and late industrial pet-keeping practices, with their democratic masses in love with their domestic partners, or at least with non-human ones” (14). The wild ones we cannot live with. They are not precisely convertible into Deleuze and Guattari’s third type, but on the basis of this type we can understand the primary reason for our intuitive characterization of “wild” animals: most abide apart from us as multiplicities, in packs. In a discussion of hunting animals, Gary Marvin states a definition in more general terms: “Wild animals are free from the constraints of an enduring and engaged life with humans—they resist humans by remaining hidden or distant, refusing to form a close relationship with them” (26).1 1 In a footnote, Marvin registers the need for a more “nuanced” definition of wildness, once the human socio-cultural context is considered, e.g. are game birds raised for shooting “wild,” or animals that live in national parks? (29) More nuance, and the question of even whether the grizzlies of Katmai National Park are unproblematically wild could be raised; see my discussion of Grizzly Man, below.

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Instead, we could add, these animals form (or are formed by) relationships among themselves. Of course not all relationships are packs, and not all packs are wild, although Deleuze and Guattari might contend that even the cows, chickens, and pigs that we eat are not immune from the power of what they describe as contagion—in these cases stampeding or scattering, even transmitting disease—as opposed to the stability of safer, more contained and filiative reproductive structures. In the pack lies the power of animals—any animal. In the pack of wild animals lies their peculiar destructiveness, for, much as we might strive to individuate and name them, we cannot normally allow them into our social space, lest they proceed to trample it through different principles of propagation and proliferation. However, how does this fact comport with what another scholar, Chris Wilbert—in a rich discussion of animal attacks that ranges from “man-eating” lions to dingos, Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds, to the widely syndicated television show, The World’s Most Dangerous Animals—suggests what is widely felt at the present time as “a move toward accepting that we live in complex worlds with other beings, worlds that could be remade to more resolutely include animals with people, not in some romantic sense, but realistically, knowing that this carries risks” (46).? On the one hand, we have wild animals inimical to human life (and being celebrated for it). On the other hand, we have them as part of a broad new understanding of the whole nonhuman realm (consisting not only of animals but of everything from buildings to wind currents) as fascinating in itself and worthy of serious study if we want to rethink the things that shape as well as threaten us.2 How can we reconcile these

2 Our imaginative space is another, albeit concurrent, matter. The success of the recent programs “Meerkat Manor” and “Orangutan Island,” for example, on the television cable channel, Animal Planet, illustrates how merely naming individuals in a pack can serve to tame it (even if, in each case, we do not choose to incorporate it any further into our society). Cynthia Chris’s Watching Wildlife does not explicitly deal with this question and yet everywhere touches upon it, as, for example, when she notes that amid the “commercialization” and “globalization” of the 90s the wildlife genre “downplayed classic wildlife filmmaking tropes of pristine, unpeopled, timeless nature, and called upon ideologies of nature as both a brutal force and a resilient resource worthy of, even requiring, human stewardship” (120). We did not need wildlife TV to recreate nature for us in order to see it as something to be dominated or to present wild animals as beings to be disciplined in order to imagine them living among us. And yet there seems little question that the very idea of incorporating the most dangerous creatures into our society has been immensely influenced by television programs showing various improbable orphan cubs (grizzlies, rhinos, leopards) being raised by members of professional organizations or by well-meaning families.

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two views? I want to concentrate upon one way: cinematic narratives about wild animals that depend upon a desire to have wild animals survive among us. In these films, camels, cheetahs, lions and grizzly bears abide not in marginal social areas (most prominently, zoos), but actually inside our homes, or, barring that, just outside our domestic spaces, now reconfigured to intersect with theirs. What are the dynamics of such narratives? How far can wild animals be imagined as at once being wild and subject to the constraints of human society? I choose film because literary narratives usually represent these questions in a more “spiritual” way. As Marcus Bullock—examining Lawrence’s St. Mawr and Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea—explains: “What they do achieve by foregrounding the vital experience of an encounter with another kind of being makes us feel what it might mean to renounce the authority of the reigning social order altogether” (114). However, on this basis, he suggests that we must contend with the possibility that “literary representation of animals really does only conjure up its own particular obviousness, another kind of forgetting and self-deception, or even a willful self-intoxication” (109). This “literary” logic might, in turn, be reason enough to consider only film apparently driven by an opposite desire: not to renounce the authority of the social order but to repossess it. Of course this yearning is not confined to film; nor is film immune to its own “intoxications.” Nonetheless, film seems to provide the most provocative means of displaying the desire to extend the boundaries of our human habitation to include the wildest examples of nonhuman species who live outside it. In Animals in Film, Jonathan Burt posits “the animal image” as “a form of rupture in the field of representation” (11). Although he does not go on to stipulate exactly why, I would maintain the reason is simple: the animal on film inescapably records—or, if employed as imagery or rhetoric, recalls—the real animal. Animals don’t “behave” as animals. They are animals. Thus their function as “unstable” signifiers (as Burt goes on to remark) or thus the persistence of ethical questions that arise “most severely at the point at which the line between the fictitious and the real animal is most difficult to draw” (12).3 The animal in film presented as real is real. Or even the line between domestic and wild. The special scandal of the Mexican movie, Amores Perros (2000) is that the fighting dogs in it have been trained to be so vicious that they can only be comprehended now as wild. Hence, the public controversy that arose over the release of the film, or its “questionable” rating from the American 3

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Elsewhere Burt notes the following: “The notion of the animal image as natural and the human image as one of artifice reiterates the traditional belief that animals are closer to the real than humans” (137). In films that propose to consider the prospect of living with wild animals not all of the species are predators who could conceivably regard humans as threats, if not prey. But most are. Even the exceptions constitute some sort of danger to human society, which is, arguably, the danger of nature itself, as over against the structures we would erect against it, in order to protect ourselves.4 Perhaps this is what makes films that express the yearning to live with wild animals among us so compelling. The prospect is doomed to failure. We humans need our “artifice,” just as animals need their “nature.” And yet, if only camels, cheetahs, lions, and bears could somehow be accommodated. Or else, with this last animal, if only we could absorb grizzlies through reestablishing our settlement alongside them. And with the example of the first, if only one—just one—camel could somehow miraculously appear one day already among us. 1 Jerzy Stulter’s Film, The Big Animal (2000)—from a script by the late, celebrated Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski—tells a story of how a certain animal might live in society. The animal is a two-humped

Humane Association. Alice Kuznair finds that in its exclusive attention to the question of whether or not the dogs were actually harmed during the making of the film the media “disavows the film’s dramatic portrayal of the consequences of animal death and hence the necessity of recognizing propinquity with the dog” (172). Once again, of course, it is never easy to incorporate wild animals into our society, even under the guise of our dogs. 4 Another way to deal with this danger is to kill it. Steve Baker’s latest reading of postmodern practice, this time in the representation of animal death, does not phrase any motive quite this way. (His initial illustration is a drawing of a cat or a rabbit, with the following words underneath: “I am dead.”) And yet his rich presentation of examples everywhere suggests that, despite the stated rights-based justifications of many contemporary artists who stage the spectacle of animal death, not only will aesthetic criteria not hold but even ethical criteria. “The dead animal of botched taxidermy,” Baker concludes, “is precisely Derrida’s animal at unease with itself. Art gives physical form to that unease by botching the animal body” (“Animal Death,” 93). Interestingly, none of his illustrations is of a large or wild animal, suggesting both that the rest are already dead (i.e. victimized) and that there could yet remain some class of animals who are very much alive (and might victimize us).

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camel, left by a traveling circus. The circus designates both a conventional space already established within the human realm and a restricted space that rigidly forbids exit for the animals—trained but not domesticated—who live in it. There is an originary moment when the camel simply appears, like magic, in the garden at the home of a bank clerk, Mr. Sawicki, while he and his wife eat dinner beside an open window. A camel! Mr. Sawicki is soon seen strolling with it though the village. He apparently accepts the animal as he would any other; it constitutes less an intimation of some other realm than merely an additional fact in this one. The villagers, though, are mostly uncomprehending. Horses, doves, and goats comprise the animals who live among them. Camels make no sense at all. There is talk of “wild Africa” having arrived. But nothing “spiritual” or “redemptive” follows from this perception. Indeed, quite the reverse. Soon there is a mandate from the village government for Mr. Sawicki to pay a tax (“you must pay something”)—if only it could be decided how a camel fits into the tax chart. Alas, it doesn’t. Further objections follow. Villagers write to the town counsel that the animal “creates an unwanted sensation.” It might carry germs of an “African” strain of venereal disease. We recall Deleuze and Guattari on the implicit animal logic of infection and contagion. Furthermore, the camel is of no use to the community. One use is repeatedly raised by a photographer, who wants to take commercial photographs of the camel. (And thereby subject it to a familiar structure of the second kind of animal classification Deleuze and Guattari sketch.) But Mr. Sawicki steadfastly refuses to allow the animal to be incorporated into the commodity system (eventually, dressed an as “Arab,” he stalks off the set of a television commercial) as confidently as he continues to have it accompany him as he walks all over town. To Mr. Sawicki the animal simply belongs. One night the camel suddenly fails to move his jaws, as he customarily does, while Mr. Sawicki plays his flute. Later that night the couple wakes up with a start and runs down to the special barn they have constructed for his habitation, right alongside their own house. The camel is gone! His warm body can still be felt. Man and wife run out into the streets. But they never find the animal, and no explanation is ever given of who stole it, or why. He disappears, in effect, as mysteriously and suddenly as he once appeared. There was no visible transition from his earlier state to his present one, and there is no visible transition now of his

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passage to a new state. Although earlier schoolchildren have participated in a contest to name the camel—thereby gesturing at individuating him, according to the terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s first animal classification—no name was ever bestowed upon him. One day, Mr. Sawicki, inconsolable, goes to the town fair and meets a boy wearing gloves and hat made of camel hair. The boy also shows in his hand a little plastic toy camel. In the last scene of the movie, Mr. Sawicki and his wife have traveled to Warsaw and gone to the zoo. It is winter. There are three camels to be seen. As the snow flurries, both humans and animals, although separated, respectively rub up to each other. None of the camels can be recognized as the one who has disappeared. Yet it seems something of the communion between man and beast that he had made possible can still be found among his kind in the zoo. Among a number of interpretations of this rich, poetic film, I would emphasize two. First, an animal who is not a member of what a policeman at one point characterizes as “normal human animals” can only live in human society in two places: in the symbolic form of toys and in the material space of zoos. We can argue whether or not each is finally only a version of the other. I would emphasize a somewhat different point: commodification and institutionalization each acts to control the propagation of the animal, as a living being. Without such control, even a camel (which is of course not a predator) becomes dangerous. It poses a challenge to our structures. It could become—and already is—contagious. Second, a camel is an example of an animal who is too “big” to live in human society. As a town official demands of Mr. Sawicki at one point: “What if everyone wanted to have a camel?” If so, society as we know it would collapse. Camels take up too much room. Moreover, they will be moved to seek out their own kind, under principles which our “Oedipal” or “mythic” structures cannot ultimately comprehend. (What “archetypal” meaning, say, can a camel have?) At least such seeking is the only visible explanation that the narrative holds out to us. The camel is last seen in terms of multiplicity. He has become part of a pack. Of course the camels are in a zoo, which continues as the only legitimate space in which wild animals can abide within human society. How can a camel be “wild?” Because it can only survive in a zoo. The fact that it ceases to continue to live with the Sawickis in the village

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testifies to the animal’s “wildness” ( just as the fact it reappears—or can only reappear—in a zoo testifies to its inevitable domestication). Yet precisely on the basis of Mr. Sawicki’s acceptance of the big camel—so docile, so compliant, so improbable—we see something of the dream of its possible inclusion among us. The Big Animal lends this dream no particular “spiritual” meaning, unless it is this: our society is as it is in part because a camel must be omitted from it. 2 Discussing the controversy surrounding the dog fighting scenes in the violent Mexican film, Amores Perros. Burt notes, once again, “a refusal to read the animal image as an image. This split within the animal image—the artificial image that cannot quite be read as artificial—is one that ruptures all readings of it” (162–63). The films of Carroll Ballard offer unusually compelling examples of how the “split” operates, because each of them strives to structure this “rupture” as itself a narrative, whereby an animal (a horse in The Black Stallion, geese in Fly Away Home) must first be incorporated into human society before it can become free of it; the “artifice” is this incorporation. Take Ballard’s latest, Duma (2005), set in South Africa, the story of a boy and his cheetah. A baby cheetah gets lost one day. The boy, Xan, and his dad pick it up from the side of a road. “He’s going to go back to the world he came from [short pause] one day,” father cautions son. No matter. The boy falls in love with the cheetah, naming him, “Duma,” which means “cheetah” in Swahili. The act of naming is individuating—and therefore domesticizing. Duma becomes an improbable pet on the farm. Yet the father never ceases to gesture to the distant mountains where inevitably he and his son will have to return the animal. Then one day the father is dead, mysteriously, after having driven away with some men. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the cheetah thus rather literally ceases to be an “Oedipal” animal. Xan’s mother rents the farm. She, son, and cheetah move to the city, to stay in the apartment of an aunt. One day Duma escapes, and prevents Xan from being bullied at school. Thereafter Xan flees back into the country with the animal in the sidecar of his father’s motorcycle. Their nominal destination is “where dad said.” But the motorcycle runs out of gas. What to do?

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A black man appears, a drifter named Ripkuna. First he wants to sell Duma. “You don’t sell a friend,” Xan warns. Once this commodified logic is refused (on the basis of which Duma would be reduced to a “model”), adventures follow. Eventually, in the company of Xan and Duma, Ripkuna makes his way back to his own village, having to acknowledge that he has failed to make his fortune in society, as he once hoped to do. However, first Ripkuna must die and be symbolically reborn, after being attacked by a storm of insects (and then healed by his kinsmen). Meanwhile, Duma sees another cheetah and leaves Xan’s company. Animal and human narratives converge explicitly when Ripkuna declares to Xan, “Finding Duma’s true home took me back to mine.” Is the human story symmetrical with the animal one? Only with respect to Ripkuna. Speaking again of Amores Perros, Burt writes that “the transformative potential of the animal . . . . . . gives the animal the role of something like a transitional object” (180). Its “rupture” of the human story, in other words, works to guarantee some stable notion of the natural, as over against the artificial. In Duma, we are to understand, I think, that Ripkuna belongs in his village, in precisely the same way that Duma belongs in the wild. With respect to Xan, however, the relation is more complicated, beginning with the death of his father. Why does he have to die? So that Xan may assume his position, as he literally does on the motorcycle, with Duma now assuming the son’s place in the sidecar. But this is not to say that Duma “symbolizes” the boy—any more than he stands for his father when the animal protects Xan, right to the end, by warding off threatening lions at the edge of Ripkuna’s village. Finally, the realm of wild animals simply lies elsewhere than the human realm. This is the basis of the animal “rupture.” At most, the two realms overlap. But they never coincide, as we see most dramatically in the conclusion, which finds Xan and his mother back on the farm, with the son driving a tractor, just as his father once did. The farm represents their true home. Duma is, alas, necessarily absent from it, alive elsewhere in his own true home. Xan remembers his father’s words about Duma: “His wildness is something he knows without knowing it.” We know it, though, just as we realize that the narrative of Xan’s coming-of-age appropriates the narrative (or “transformative potential”) of Duma’s return. Duma’s story becomes a phase in Xan’s development. The life of wild animals is presumed to be complete in itself. The life of human beings is not,

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which is why we need the example of animals such as Duma in order to understand ourselves better. Wild animals exist in a wholly other realm, which we cannot know even as we celebrate its mystery and power. Hence, its poignancy when it intersects with our world, for the two can never become one, from the very outset. Curiously, though, the initial moments of “Duma” fail to clarify exactly how the cub becomes lost. Was it rejected by the mother? Attacked by the father? Could this realm somehow not be complete in itself ? Or, worse, could it be dependent upon us (as in fact is the life of this particular cub). Films such as Duma are actually in a delicate position regarding Nature, which exists to be at once celebrated and mystified, in relation to human society. Thus, the end of The Big Animal can be seen as more coherent (Burt would use the word, “cohesive” [180]) than the beginning of Duma. The camel simply disappears; we don’t care where it goes because the important thing is that it could not survive in our society. On the other hand, the cheetah suddenly appears; we must not forget from where it comes because the important thing is that, since the cub cannot survive in our society, we should care for it until the animal can once more be free—or at least apart from us. Thus, the animal—effectively split within its own nature as well as in our narratives about it—becomes fraught with the seductions of what Deleuze and Guattari would term “multiplicity.” (Duma’s true animal nature is demonstrated once another cheetah appears.) By comparison, a camel is not “wild” in the same way a cheetah is, and so The Big Animal need not worry about how urgent the question is of an animal’s being incorporated within human society. However, Duma is typical of films—especially films set in Africa—that are inescapably founded upon this question. 3 Born Free (1966) is arguably the most celebrated film ever made about a wild animal. The basic story, from the book by Joy Adamson, is well known: Joy and her husband, George, a game warden in Kenya in the 1950s, rear a lion cub, Elsa (one of three), whose parents have been killed. In fact, they are both shot by George, after the male kills a native woman, who has been washing her clothes from a river. In the idiom of the film, this makes the male a “man-eater.” Man-eaters are

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simply too dangerous to human society. They must be killed.5 (Later George shoots another lion, who eats goats.) From the outset, “Born Free” never questions the human necessity to kill lions, as a function of declining to investigate the possible priority of the animal world to the human world. What is “freedom” in Born Free? It is a condition that arises because of one thing never interrogated either in The Big Animal or Duma: zoos. The Adamson’s raise Elsa in order to rescue her from the fate of a zoo in Rotterdam. (Where in fact the other two cubs are transported.) The equation appears to be simple: no zoo, no freedom—or at least life in the wild not defined according to such unashamed human terms. As it is, “freedom” testifies to the utter characterization of life in the wild according to our terms. “I don’t want her to go to a zoo,” Joy cries to her husband. “I want her to be free.” So Elsa must learn. Her freedom becomes at once her destiny as a wild animal and her educational mandate as a wild animal formerly raised in human society. The nadir of Elsa’s education is reached after the Adamsons eventually resort to leaving her alone in the wild for a week. They return to find the lioness limp and injured. “She can’t do anything a lion must do to survive,” George cries out in despair. It is as if Elsa is a species of adolescent, who must learn to do things for herself, but can’t. Born Free explicitly raises this comparison, as a way of indicating that the model for Elsa’s education is a hopelessly human one. No matter that in Elsa’s case the point is to learn how to divest yourself of society rather than how to attain a position within it. Of course in order to be “free” Elsa must give up the constraints of human life in order to enter into the constraints of life in the wild. As the film demonstrates, Elsa cannot simply initiate some sort of “relationship” with a lone male lion nor can she enter into a pride without fighting with another female for her place. We could just as easily posit that Elsa is learning subjection to the laws of nature rather than freedom. (And those laws, in turn, are the laws of “multiplicity,” 5 In other words, we are still not in an era, where, as Wilbert explains, the very idea of a “man-eater” is “contested.” (There is no concern in the movie about human settlement being in any way responsible for such attacks.) At the present time, when “we are experiencing changing ethical and practical views about human-nonhuman intra-actions that are moving from a concentration upon what can be termed domination to a more complex view,” even an attack by a man-eating lion can even be conceived of as an “experiential encounter,” even if (Wilbert qualifies) “not of course in the sense of actually being harmed” (44).

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in Deleuze and Guattari’s idiom.) However, the logic of Born Free is remorseless: as long as Elsa avoids a zoo she is being—or learning to be—“free.” Even if this freedom is far more negative than positive, it remains freedom, and therefore far superior to life in a zoo, which would mean enslavement, period. In effect, a more recent film like Duma can afford to exhibit so little curiosity about life in the wild, because some forty years previous Born Free confronted it so directly, saturating the whole notion of the wilderness with a thoroughly human idealistic conception. Of course the freedom of the wild has limits, also established by human reasoning: when animals pose an immediate danger to humans, they can be killed; the salutation to freedom in Born Free, we recall, arises precisely because of such an action. In fact, the whole of animal life is circumscribed by human life, whether washing clothes in rivers or managing a game preserve. However, the film does not see it this way, lest Elsa’s story be disclosed as, finally, a story about human life. We need “freedom.” Do animals? Is it “freedom,” as we understand it, that defines their own life in the wild? Once more in Born Free it becomes almost impossible to represent the realm of wild animals on their own terms, except insofar as these terms are destructive to us. Thus, not only does Elsa’s father kill a woman. Elsa and her siblings break things in the Adamson house, until they have to be prevented from entering. These actions make the animals truly wild, i.e. unable to live alongside human beings. In effect, the moment of destruction marks the space of the wild, insofar as humans are concerned. We can make symbolic use of this space. But we can’t know it, at least in any way comparable to how we would know our own social space. Born Free leaves it to us, for example, to try to imagine what terrible things happen to Elsa during the week she is left in the wild to herself. (At the end of the film she is seen with cubs of her own, as if to testify that these terrible things are nonetheless generative to animals.) Presumably, it would be even more unimaginably terrible if we tried to imagine what would happen to us. Symbolic use of the space of the wild is one thing. Actual participation in it on our part would be quite another thing, and deadly. ( Just so, it would be deadly for the animals as well; as Burt notes in a brief mention of the film, the Adamsons’ have to resist the temptation at the end to handle the cubs, lest they turn them into pets and destroy their wildness [182].) Our human freedom ends at the edge of the wild, where the life of wild animals begins. We only try to follow them past

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this edge as a consequence of their being unable to follow us, and to be included in our society. 4 Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man (2005), provides the finest visual record we have of a human being living among wild animals. David Treadwell made over one hundred hours of video during his thirteen summers of traveling to Katmai National Park in Alaska and pitching a tent among the grizzly bears who live there. He had no weapon. Herzog edits the video footage, provides commentary, and interviews a few people who know Treadwell, including an ex-girlfriend. Treadwell and his current girlfriend were killed by a grizzly in 2003. Treadwell inadvertently recorded his own death, although there are six minutes of audio only, since he left the lens cap on. Herzog films himself listening on headphones to the audio but he does not share the tape with us. What to make of Grizzly Man? Some critics were rarely moved. The footage of the grizzlies is beautiful. The self-presentation of Treadwell is astonishing, by turns exultant, rambling, and demented; at times, he is a veritable God of the Wilderness, while at other times he is merely a former actor whose nature activism is born out of his own failure. Some critics were repelled by this same presentation. Treadwell is just loony, and his love of the grizzlies pure sentimentality. He slept with a teddy bear in his tent! As the pilot who took him and his girlfriend on their final trip to Katmai declares of Treadwell’s attitude to the animals: “He was treating them like people in bear costumes.” How to treat grizzlies on their own terms? Treadwell himself never raises the question. At one extreme he addresses them, and us, as their protector: “I will die for these animals!” Thus, he arrogates to himself the right to name them (“Mr. Chocolate,” “Aunt Melissa”) as if he had created them. At another extreme, Treadwell variously expresses his desire to be a bear. Perhaps the most remarkable moment is when he exults over “Wendy’s poop,” as he terms the excrement. It’s still warm. Imagine, just a moment ago it was “inside of her.” The man himself wants to enter there. In effect, the array of attitudes, emotions, and perspectives Treadwell demonstrates about, and to, the grizzlies simply acts to ignore them, at least on the visual level. So often, the enormous, furry shapes just loom

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silently in the background as Treadwell discourses to his camera. What do the grizzlies think of him? How can they let him be so close? Do they somehow take him to be “other” than themselves? How could they not? Treadwell doesn’t suggest answers to any of these questions. Instead, the grizzlies themselves become, in toto, a species of massive Answer to any question. All Treadwell has to do is gesture toward them. In terms of the formulations of Deleuze and Guattari I have been employing, the bears are rare among “demonic” species in not abiding as a pack; this fact alone might explain why Treadwell is able to find a space among them—without being immediately subject to pack energies. However, in the video footage the grizzlies are continually seen as a series of shifting collectivities, as if to enforce an understanding of them as multiple; as Deleuze and Guattari write, “we should not confuse these dark assemblages, which stir what is deepest within us, with organizations such as the institution of the family and the State apparatus” (41). It is suggested in the film that Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed because they arrived in the park late in season. The single bear who killed them may have felt he needed additional food for hibernation. In other words, the logic of the grizzlies may be (to us) chillingly simple. They don’t need protection or redemption. They need food. But how can a human being try to live among wild animals according to this logic? It seems almost impossible for even a Treadwell to sustain some core identity of himself as merely an animal’s food. Instead, how wondrous Treadwell’s continual self-invention! We should not be surprised: yet again a narrative of wild animals becomes a resource for a more embracing narrative of human be-ing. (If not a kind of grim joke on the lavish category of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-human.”) However, Grizzly Man gives us something more tense and provocative through Herzog’s commentary. As at least one reviewer remarked, the film demonstrates the tension between two quite different ideas of Nature; in the American, Nature is everything but death, while in the European, Nature is nothing but death. Herzog declares late in the film: “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos, and murder.” Grizzly Man doesn’t “prove” this claim, or any claim. But it does dramatize how any view of wild animals either is going to be founded on their ability to kill human beings or else on the ability of human beings to kill them. Furthermore, a film about the wilderness will necessarily either swerve away from death or else strive to confront it directly. (Another

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nature documentary popular around the same time as Grizzly Man, March of the Penguins, has it both ways, although the accent is far more on birth than death.)6 Either way, though, death marks the moment where animal and human narratives intersect. In this context, no wonder Herzog chooses not to play the six-minute audio. The bear’s “murder” of the two humans cannot be redeemed by (or in) a human narrative. Death is the easiest name for what is unrepresentable (to recall my earlier discussion of the dead reindeer meat in Into the Wild ) or, in Heidegger’s terminology, Undisclosable. More than any other category of animals, wild animals are deadly to us—not merely to our bodies but to our narratives. We can only follow them so far, and then no further. In terms of the inescapable “rupture” of the animal image proposed by Burt, the reason that even an “artificial” image of a wild animal cannot be exclusively so read is that this image is founded on death. And within this death is another: the exhaustion of any desire for animals as wild as the grizzlies somehow to live among us. Possible habitation can only take place where they are, not where we are. Indeed, in Grizzly Man possible habitation is founded on the collapse of the social itself, for once Treadwell gets to Katmai National Part he discovers no social organization into which he could attempt to integrate himself. (As opposed to be able to abide in a marginal fashion, out of a tent.) The only such organization that exists remains the human society he has rejected, for whom he makes his video footage and to whom he rants. Even in its absence, the desire at least to see these animals among us, in some literal or (recalling Burt) “transitional” form, haunts the film, despite the fact that the hundred hours of video footage could only have come about in the first place through the death of social. 5 We can of course nevertheless continue to try to represent wild animals securely within our human realm; that artificial images of them can never quite be read as artificial (or even wholly as real) does not mean that our need to construct such images must cease. Significantly, each

6 See Chris’s brief discussion, where the “design” of penguin behavior is discussed as provoking “another ideological contest over the interpretation of natural facts and images of them” (207).

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of the above films has scenes or sequences involving men and animals of astonishing beauty. In The Big Animal, for example, there is a moment where Mr. Sawicki, his wife, and the camel are shown all eating dinner. The camel is outside the window. Mr. Sawicki calmly picks up bits of lettuce from a dish on his table, and passes them to the camel, who calmly chomps on the food and chews it in his great rubbery jaws. The realms of human and animal worlds are seamlessly joined. The camel is simply one of the family. In Duma we have something more apparently competitive. Father and son at one point early on are shown in their motorcycle racing with the cheetah, who runs alongside, his muscular body stretched to the full. (A good example of how the animal body “ruptures” an “artificial” juxtaposition.) The machine goes faster and faster. The animal keeps pace—even at sixty miles an hour and more! The two aren’t racing. Duma doesn’t “win.” Yet the scene exists not only to exhibit his remarkable speed but to show for a precious instant two forms of the phenomenon of velocity, side-by-side, as if, impossibly, each was a version of the other, or even the same. The sequence of a vacation to the Kenyan coast in Born Free is its most obviously idyllic vision of man and animal, co-existing. George, Joy, and Elsa frolic in the shallow ocean waters. The lion pokes at a beach ball with his paws. He clambers beachward through the water alongside Joy, his skin soaked like a kitten’s. There is no one else about. Once more, the animal effectively becomes a member of a family. No larger social world need be imagined. If only, we feel, such unity between man and beast could last. Grizzly Man, alone of these films, presents no such moments—with grizzlies. Concord with them exists only in Treadwell’s mind. And yet, so strong is the need to render the wildest of creatures or climates as somehow hospitable to man that even in this film there are brief scenes of harmony—with foxes. One in particular is shown nuzzling up to Treadwell. Never mind that it resembles a dog or that Treadwell has a name for the fox, thereby positioning it in the category of a pet. This particular fox is not deadly. Treadwell has known it for over ten years. Each of these moments is out of narrative time, and yet explicable by its tensions. Since in each case the narrative is visual, it may be that film itself, better than literature, provides more compelling examples of how human and animal realms can mingle. “[ T ]he ability of the nonhuman to find a place in the world,” writes John Simons, “depends

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upon its taking up of a linguistic space prepared anteriorally for it by the humans who name it” (66). Granted, film has its own grammar; its difference from linguistic space is not absolute.7 Yet we forget its anterior structure, since part of film’s peculiar grammar is give each image as immediately and referentially true.8 No matter the “artifice” of its narrative enclosure. The lion we see in Born Free is not composed of words. Simons concludes his book thus: “The non-human . . . forces us to think outside the textual language and offers a transgressive route not only across species boundaries, but also between the closed formal universe of the linguistic artifact and into the material world in which it exists” (172). On the contrary, though, the material world already constitutes the basis of film. Therefore, much of what Simons terms the “transgressive route” has already been crossed, or, rather, seems to have been. (Interestingly, he goes on to give an example from film.) Furthermore, if the examples of “the non-human” are wild animals, then arguably we might be prompted to think differently about how our perceptions have been structured or could be re-structured. That is, we might think of (or at least respond to) the “the nonhuman” being flagrantly represented as “human.” This is exactly what each of the above moments imagines. Of course the representation cannot last. Not one of the above instances is offered as something that lasts, or even something that has been or can continue to be narrated. Instead, in various narratives where the very location of wild animals remains absent, elusive, mysterious, or deathly, there appear images—images only—of non-human and human entirely apart from species boundaries. It is as if these boundaries had simply disappeared. They are where we are. Of course the images of these animals are each firmly on our side of the boundary. (They do not constitute examples of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “becoming-animal.”) We humans have no desire to see ourselves eating as camels eat or playing in the water as lions actually play in the wild among themselves. No anterior “linguistic space” 7 For another discussion of the humanly constructed figure of the “screen animal,” see Creed. 8 Such a presumption at least plays over the surface of every artist in Baker’s above discussion of contemporary representations of animal death; see especially his last two examples, which juxtapose a forest photo-wall displaying both a recycled trophy-kill taxidermy faun and a rifle scope with an enamel plaque of a sign found outside a milking barn on land used for hunting that is literally shot through with bullet holes.

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prepares us for such a desire. However, no cultural space more than film reveals how deep and acute remains our human need to include every known animal within our realm, even those wild ones whose own realm cannot quite fully appear, except insofar as we occasionally glimpse the death to us that would follow if we went there.

KENYA, WRITTEN Is there a more bankrupt travel narrative than that of the African safari? Not one in which “big game” is killed. Just one in which it is photographed, usually in game parks, where, as Chris Wilbert notes, “animals are protected by conservation policies” and therefore have become “a resource for tourists mainly from wealthier, more developed regions of the world” (37). Of course the conservation policies now guarantee that the animals will be “captured” by cameras or videocameras only, rather than guns. (Or else at least that the wealthy who still have the means to enjoy private safaris in order to bring home trophies will not easily find a publishing venue if they want to write about the experience.) But this results in a human relation to the animals no happier than that of a spectator to them in a zoo. In the words of John Berger’s celebrated critique of the latter, “Why Look at Animals?” animals there “are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. . . . The more we know, the further away they are” (257).1 Worse, even conservation policies, Wilbert continues, stem from colonial models “that tended to exclude local people from large swathes of protected land” (37). In other words, even the conservationist narrative is enmeshed in the colonialist narrative, and each is now inseparable (if

1 Of course African game parks are not zoos. In zoos, contends Berger, “animals “constitute the living monument to their own disappearance” (261). In parks, however, the animals, even if observable according to the same historical and cultural logic, are not yet “monuments,” merely by virtue of the fact that they continue to live where they have always lived. Nevertheless, the differences are arguably less decisive today than the similarities, beginning with how safari parks continue to be stocked in part on the basis to what Alexander Wilson terms “the African referent,” which “has to do with the stature of African animal species, both physically in the savannah and culturally in imperial myths about Africa and ‘big game hunting.’ Safari parks are an example of how colonialism continues to be part of the whole idea of the zoos, and perhaps of parks of all kinds” (251). Just as Wilson does not pause to try to distinguish safari parks from zoos, it would be easy to find safari parks ultimately indistinguishable from African game parks, where the respective difference in each of the physical location of the animals does not govern seeing as much as their common cultural location. Finally, though, it should be noted that by “parks” Wilson is emphasizing the human construction (or “culture”) of nature, whereby the latest principles—models of ecosystem, ideas of habitat—“acknowledge the wall or hedge between civilization and the natural world; but at the same time refuse to push that wall further into the bush” (254). African game parks, on the other hand, do provide that push—if not the bush itself.

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not indistinguishable) from upon the supervening narrative of tourism.2 Not only is the individual on safari heir to the whole heritage of Western colonialism in Africa. He or she is a tourist, who enters an African game park though literally buying into the same fundamental premise as that of animal theme parts, ecotourism sites, zoos, and aquariums. As Jane Desmond explains: all “meld commerce with the salvage paradigm of a vanishing wilderness. They are in fact huge industries based on the idea of nature as one of the last bastions of idealized authenticity in the postmodern era and on animals as exemplars of wildness” (148). A tourist, virtually by definition, cannot refuse paradigm, idealization, or exemplars. “The industries based on looking at animals,” she writes, “what I am referring to as animal tourism, sell an experience of the natural through exposure to wild animals, whether or not the particular animals have ever lived in or even seen the mythical wilderness they are tied to in our imaginations” (147). However, what if they actually do still abide in the physical wilderness itself ? What difference, if any, does it make to the tourist experience? Moreover, does the wilderness have to be “mythical” in order to be a wilderness in the first place? Diamond’s critique—heavily indebted to Berger—is not designed to answer such questions, except to presume that they matter, in order to disclose the problems implicit in even the newest zoo designs, wherein “the key omissions of hunting, breeding, and species interaction remain, resulting in a false realism based on the material presence of the body but divorced from the full range of bodily practices” (150). So one goes on safari today in order to behold animals who display “the full range of bodily practices?” If “species interaction” remains, is the travel experience become more “genuine? Or could it be the 2 An interesting, or fatal, example is provided by the Epilogue of Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist, where she argues about the importance of conservationists dealing with local bureaucracies. What about tourism? Its profits might help. On the other hand, the survival chances of the animals themselves are “little improved” by tourism, and so Fossey goes on to stress a policy of policing and enforcing the boundaries of their “limited habitat” that effectively discourages, not to say forbids, tourism. (For a slightly different criticism of Fossey, see Adams and McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa, and for a critique of gender as well as political representation in films about her, see Dona Haraway, Primate Visions) Tourism in any case becomes an inescapable fact in virtually any narrative of Western presence in Africa, even the ones written by field biologists such as Robert Spolsky, whose A Primate’s Memoir is increasingly forced to register the existence of tourists who force him to pose for pictures with anesthetized baboons, whose lodges provide work for his own assistants as well as for assorted local Masai, and whose garbage may well have been one distinct reason for the devastating TB outbreak that kills most of his beloved baboons at the end.

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case that such “interaction” only vexes genuineness the more, without authenticating it? What precisely would we maintain about a safari, in contrast to a zoo? Although a cage is certainly not the same thing as a game park, would we argue nevertheless that the zoo provides the ultimate rationale for both, or that the park has to be “managed” by humans no less than the zoo—and managed finally in the name of the same idealizing cultural script?3 Just so, what about the figure of the traveler? If a big game park can be rather generously considered, say, on the model of a “contact zone,” do the various kinds of unscripted or improvisational encounters available there—among humans and even between humans and animals—nonetheless exempt the traveler, who is, as ever, the very image of the colonialist authority? His eye functions through taking itself for granted while conferring significance upon everything as being entirely natural and good.4 Not so. “Nature is part of culture,” states Alexander Wilson. “Our experience of the natural world . . . is always mediated. It is always shaped by rhetorical constructs like photography, industry, advertising, and aesthetics, as well as by institutions like religion, tourism, and education” (12). But the pleasure of the traveler on safari in Africa is to forget about all this, as well as his own participation—not to say indulgence—in the work of rhetorical construction. Several years ago I went on a safari tour of Kenya for one week. Excerpts from a long letter about it to a friend follow, introduced and stitched together by a few of my own comments. I don’t take up in any direct or sustained way the hapless futility—political, theoretical,

3 Wilbert notes that “many tour companies guarantee the experience of viewing the animals that they are selling tourists. Such commercialized concerns, and unrealistic views of the powers of animals can lead to very domesticated and highly managed forms of supposed ‘wildness’. . . . As such, we can see that wildness is not ‘outside the compass of human society,’ as some place where people are not to be found. Rather, animals, plants, people or landscapes designated as wild continue to be ‘routinely caught up within multiple networks of human social life’ in complex ways” (44–5). His quotation is from Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies. 4 I am thinking of Mary Louise Pratt’s travel trope of The-Monarch-of-All-I Survey, as described in the final chapter of Imperial Eyes. Of course this trope is not timeless; Pratt traces its ruses and developments into the present, where there is some inevitable presence of “the returning gaze of the others, now demanding recognition as subjects of history” (220). Insofar as the travel text of Africa is concerned, these others might be best recognized by (and in) the memoirs of Peace Corps workers; see the ones by Packer and Tidwell. Also demanding recognition is “another monolithic voice,” Pratt notes, that of mass tourism, against which, Pratt notes, “the depth-creating powers of the travel writer must compete” (221).

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epistemological—of such a tour. Nevertheless, I must trust that this futility can be felt in the writing, along with the hopeless wonder or the precious rarity of the whole experience. My account is as full of questions and other texts as it is of descriptions of the animals themselves, as if I am simultaneously trying to testify to the inescapable mediation of my experience and yet somehow escape the mediation through being sufficiently self-conscious about it. My experience didn’t feel fraudulent then. It doesn’t feel fraudulent now. But of course it helps to have written about it in a personal letter—that most casual, unreasoned of textual forms—where I wasn’t obliged to register what of the safari might have appeared impure, suspect, and even reprehensible. With animals, as with so many other things, no matter our convictions (myself, I detest tourism, dislike photography, and disbelieve in paradise), it seems we are fated to do things that we shouldn’t do. One of them is, go on safari in the first place. Another is, to write about it. 1 Is the best writing about big game (or anything else) in Africa elegiac? “I had a farm in Africa,” begins Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; she goes on to record a whole life there. What can a tourist presume to add to Out of Africa? I had a week in Kenya. How to invoke a nostalgia in any way comparable to Dinesen’s? I wouldn’t. All that we have in common is the sense that our respective experiences—so different in time, scale, and depth—were nonetheless founded on a similar lived emotion, and that this emotion expresses something profound about experience itself in Africa: that it’s felt as a condition of being already gone. I tried to bring it back with every word of my letter. Take the first time I saw lions. Lions! Outside zoos! Our group entered a game park, Masai Mara. What is it like to see lions in their own habitat for the first time in your life? In part, it is seeing what you expect to see. How can you not expect the placidity, say, from a lifetime of occasionally watching nature films on television? For the rest, though, you couldn’t quite anticipate how the placidity feels. I quote from my letter. A few minutes after we entered the park—after an hour or so driving along rutted gravel roads as bad as any in Crete—our driver stopped, announced we were going on a ‘game run,’ popped the roof of the van (it seated ten), and drove off onto a

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smaller dirt road, then into a grassy meadow. Soon we saw other vans stopped, always a sure sign of something spotted—and there they were: a pride of seven or eight lions. Eventually round them was a semicircle of seven vans and one auto, all no more than fifteen feet from the animals. Later I got used to how utterly oblivious they are to the spectators. At first it seemed unbelievable. I mean, there they are, looking like lions are supposed to look, yet so placid as to be tame. I suppose the reason is that such vans—and the tourist industry that produces them—have been in existence long enough that these predators know there is no danger. (So much as open a door and it’s another matter.) Or is it that they are predators and so know no danger from anything else anyway? Of course to attribute attitudes is to anthropomorphize, so one does want to claim that the lions ‘accept’ human presence. Indeed, our presence was so fully, so garishly there with these lions that one is bound to have thoughts about the presence itself. Before this scene, I suppose I thought I’d feel the poignancy of these rare, wild animals reposing under a human gaze that is now ultimately responsible for their survival. Not quite. I just felt immensely thrilled to be able to witness something I never thought I would. No matter that after awhile the lions weren’t even particularly interesting. (The fact that they failed to do something ‘lionesque’—a deep growl, a savage glare—can easily turn into disappointment that they don’t.) They were simply beautiful. Whether suggesting beauty in repose, or beauty with no need for violence—they were finally beautiful for what they were, and not what they represented. Trouble is, what were they? That the lions can actually be seen becomes almost the least interesting thing about them. What matters far more is what it means to see them, and to see them where they belong.5 To put it another way, it’s as if their sheer physical being is their “meaning.” However, this meaning, in turn, is inextricably tied up with how the lions recline under our gaze as well as how their occasion abides the moment of that gaze. Result? I write to describe the lions less and instead to speculate more about the mysteries in which the

5 Of course I use this word advisedly. They belong to the land, not to tourists with cameras. Nonetheless, if one wants to maintain that at the present time the lions can only belong to the land as a condition of belonging to the tourists (whose income supports the maintenance of the park, without which, in turn, there would effectively be no more land upon which lions can continue to survive), then I’m not entirely sure how to reply. This seems to me the sort of objection based not so much upon seeing as seeing through, while being utterly dismissive of the difference between a game park and a zoo—a difference that presumably matters to lions, as it does to tourists. Without directly saying so, except once, my whole letter amounts to an attempt to reinstate the importance of this difference.

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animals lounge as if—to them—nothing like some division between being and its representation existed. Take another day, another safari, another game preserve, and another animal. It was late one afternoon. We had been in search of a leopard. (No luck.) Amboseli, unlike Masai Mara, features herds of wildebeast. Also called gnu, I make a knowing aside to my friend. You know, the bearded-looking, almost clownish horned things, approximately the size of a zebra only thinner and sloped to the rear, who lope off with their heads lowered in nature films, often being chased by leopards. Suddenly, I continue, our driver turned off the road. Illegal here and in all other parks besides Masai Mara. ‘Cheetah,’ he murmured. He drove in front of a rocky knoll, and there it was: a cheetah, tautly curled, not even its tail moving, magnificently resplendent, while wildebeast scurried past him. The cat didn’t seem interested in them, nor them in him. (You’ve probably read that prey seem to know when predators are on the prowl, and Africa affords few more stirring spectacles than great herds of several different animals serenely grazing while some predator rests not far off.) More surprising, the cheetah disdained interest in us! Presumably he doesn’t know there are only some 750 left on earth. I found it impossible not to behold—that’s the word I want—and not in part just behold the rarity of the sight. Such “spotting” doesn’t come easy. That’s one reason why it comes as a gift, and takes on, for a few precious minutes, the character of a vision. Inevitably, one immediately asks, or hopes, of a vision that it last. Of course it didn’t last. What did are the words for it, preserved in a letter that tries to avoid settling for a routine narrative—we did this, we saw that (“we” principally including a Canadian couple, with twin six year-old daughters)—in order to reflect upon more ecstatic moments quite out of time. Trouble is, everything in these days was all of a piece. (There were really only three days, not counting a first day in Nairobi and a couple more largely spent traveling among reserves.) As much as this cheetah, I loved, say, the stray sights of warthogs (or boar), who always scurry away from the road with their squat legs churning and their tails straight up, like outraged matrons who have fallen on some great impropriety. Of course a tourist doesn’t normally “behold” warthogs. So I didn’t. Yet I couldn’t exclude them from my narrative even if I couldn’t urge my narrative to include them as objects of visionary power. During that first day alongside the lions or on the third before the cheetah, I simply hoped that my observations could acquire the character of revelation, if I was careful and reflective enough about what I was seeing. And yet there was always the sense of being caught up in a tourist narrative, which would take care of itself, whatever you hoped for indi-

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vidually. In the most literal way being able to see these fabulous animals meant standardized routines: you got up early, had a buffet breakfast, got into a van, and drove away from the lodge. If the first subsequent animal didn’t offer some vision, there was always the chance that the next one could—and no matter that you probably wouldn’t be able to “capture” any of this in words. Guidebooks, of course, were available if you required descriptions or clarifications. Perhaps I wrote the following letter just to try to write my way out of a guidebook. 1 First Day We hardly got out of the lodge entrance before we had to stop for three giraffe. I was to see hundreds but never again so closely. They looked as if they could reach demurely into the open roof of the van and pluck one of us out like a tasty new thorn. (Their stomach acids must be powerful indeed; one of the white thorns from the trees they eat pierced the toe of my tennis shoe as if it had been shot from a blowgun.) How to avoid writing of their elegance, or the grace of their long slowmotion stride? Giraffe are everywhere, usually in groups, sometimes appearing startled, more often than not just cool and reserved. Once in awhile you can spot one eating grass with its legs splayed. I found few sights in Africa more evocative than the timeless spectacle of others towering over acacia trees and chomping on their tops. So often in these vast grasslands you have the sensation of gliding in a yellow sea, where giraffe take on the aspect of serpentine sea creatures. Yet again from a great land distance they can look indistinguishable from trees, and the soft down spots of their skin emerge as the color of the earth itself, considered now as the sudden configuration of calm flecks of motion. Down the ridge and past the ostriches. I have nothing compelling to say about ostriches. They were always too far away and trotted further away when we approached. Also off in the distance: impala. (The ones with twisted horns.) More warthogs hurried away from the roadside, piglets, as always, taking the rear. Our driver identified for us a single yellow-beaked stork and the men in the van duly pointed their cameras. Soon immensities of topi, Thompson’s gazelles, and zebra. ‘But if another animal eats a zebra, then most of the animals will be gone,’ blurted one of the twins, furrowing her little brow. ‘They’re so cute!’ opined the other, about Thompson’s gazelles. In a way, what else can one say about these lovely creatures? Can you visualize them? You know, the ones that have a tan coat, black-and-white stripes underneath, with white buttocks

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and tiny black tails. (Grant’s gazelle’s are the same, only bigger. Don’t ask me who Thompson or Grant was.) In my mind’s eye now, these animals appear in one big mass, since we must have come upon thousands, in herds of hundreds. Although invariably delicate when seen in smaller groups or even singly (the arched-back horns of the males resembling hats with wings or war bonnets), the happiest sight for me was not of a fugitive beauty but instead one more liquid, percolating—as if the gazelles were so many black-on-white toy boats, tails always twirling, twirling like little rudders. Thompson’s are the one who are wont to take startled, bouncing leaps on all fours. Did this behavior develop to enable them to spot predators over high grass? Undoubtedly. Yet what about the times when they appear to bounce more spontaneously, just for the sheer exhilaration of it? They weren’t in high grass; your smart prey is always careful to stay away from it. At another moment I thought of the leaping Masai warriors who entertained us last night at the lodge. Topi don’t do much of anything, except make curious grunting or huffing noises when moving out into high gear. (To hear this!) They are also a species of antelope—of course you know that antelope, unlike deer, have hollow horns rather than antlers—but these black-blue or brown creatures are too bulky and too lazily ruminant to compel the attention other antelope receive from the human photographer. Also, from the aesthetic point of view there are just too many of them at Masai Mara. I never could engage any other point of view. Seeing herds of topi was seeing improbable herds of horned cows. Another animal I had no fresh response to: zebra. We didn’t come upon thousands upon thousands as I’d anticipated, and those we did see always loped or galloped away. Their ears are cute; the twins had a searching discussion about the respective merits of gazelle and zebra, which, I believe, turned on this point. The zebra I envision now are en mass, completely still, and most memorable for a sort of perspective they afforded: instants when the whole surface of the sun-washed land in every direction was barrel-shaped and black-and-white striped. The whole world was zebra. Once we saw a couple of impala crossing horns like men used to cross swords. Was this in fact just a kind of “sportive” sparing? O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts! Even when there were no animals to pick out there was picturesqueness everywhere: a single thorn tree, for example, gnarled like a shriek against an immense sky. Or a topi standing so nobly atop a small mound surveying the landscape. (All kinds of antelope like to do this.) Far off once in the distance, we glimpsed a herd of elephant, almost a shimmer, moving as if underwater. Occasionally there were outcropings of big granite rocks known as “kopjes,” some of the oldest stone on earth on grassland soil, once built out of ash blown westward from the Highland volcanoes. This mineral gives the flat, plain world form, like the animals.

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In fact, one of the most interesting things on safari is how things that move come to resemble things that don’t. Lions resemble sandstone rocks, elephants become gray boulders, and giraffes are tapered yellow fever trees. The shadows cast by areas of brush or by much larger green ridges ( for the land isn’t all flat) surely, you feel, contain something. But nothing moves. We stopped at the hippo pool in a stretch of the Mara River. We had seen a lioness reclining in some shade half a mile away, so I suppose this was why there was a warden with a rifle on duty. The vegetation on each side of the bank was tropical: cacti, palms, ferns. The hippos could barely be glimpsed, periodically bobbing to the surface with their bulbous periscope eyes. They’re actually more available to the senses to hear—sounding alternately like barking seals or the foghorn of a tugboat. Many vans about. I overheard an elderly American, complete in one of those canvas safari hats bwanas are supposed to wear, exclaim, ‘It’s just like Disneyland.’ Presumably he had expected nature red in tooth in claw. If you did, sorry, we never saw it. The closest was this very day, after we changed a flat. Happily, we could see for miles all round when we all got out of the van (Not that any selfrespecting leopard couldn’t have been lurking ten feet away in some short grass). At one point there appeared an impala, completely frozen. ‘Might be leopard,’ our driver, John, explained, with considerably more casualness than the impala, who must have been thinking the same thing. So this is how prey get preyed upon, I thought, as our party wandered a bit from the road, all eyes alert for a single sight. We never saw a thing. The impala was still frozen when we drove away. Does all this convey something of what it’s like to take one of these “game runs?” The game seldom just appears. You have to concentrate very intently to see it. The times when we did see something were far outweighed by the times when we saw nothing at all. At some point I thought this is just as it should be and all of a piece with the nature of life as it was here. We were alien to it, granted, but Misai Mara is not a zoo or one of those drive-through “safari-lands.” What this great area subjected us to is akin to the experience of the animals themselves—the silences they inhabit and that inhabit them, or the unremitting attentiveness staying alive mandates. Finally, we ourselves were cast in the role of predators, albeit visual ones. It’s hard work. The landscape is at once so immense and so monotonous that your concentration can’t last very long. And concentration is of course concentration on something. Maybe we’re most different from the animals because they know what to concentrate on, while we don’t. Compared to us, the attention of the above impala was immeasurably less dispersed, quite literally and urgently focused on, or by, the issue of life rather than death. The only kinship between human and animal I’d argue is how the act of seeing shades imperceptibly, even with us, into some larger activity of “sensing.” This is the sort of thing Dinesen is talking about when she writes: ‘out in the wilds I had learned to beware of abrupt movements.

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The creatures with which you are dealing are shy and watchful, they have a talent for evading you when you least expect it. No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal’ (15). Or, she could have added—if superfluously—no human. We ourselves come upon every inch of this land far too abruptly. 2 The First Day (late), the Second (early) What about photographs? In my letter, I refer to a few, enclosed. But I didn’t take many, because I was worried about having the lens substitute for my own eyes. Perception was one thing, I reasoned, while photography was quite another. I wanted my own perception to be free from the impulse to convert it into pictorial form at every turn. Result? I fretted about this constantly, while feeling humiliated by the huge lenses on the bulky cameras of my companions. The one who had the biggest shot so thoughtlessly he might as well have had a rifle. At least, though, mass tourism has had one happy consequence: weapons have been exchanged on safari for cameras. (Excluding special high-end hunting trips. My father had lately seen pictures from one. “Pure gore,” he told me, revolted.) This leads me to expatiate on the disappearance of what I term “the Hemingway moment.” I just reread The Green Hills of Africa. Not what I expected. The ethic to ‘kill cleanly’ is one a man can still respect. We begin with a statement such as ‘the way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal ‘(12)—which sends Papa off in search of a greater kudu. (The big antelope.) Finally he gets his bull, after shooting other antelope, as well as rhino, buffalo, lion, oryx, zebra, ducks, geese, etc. along the way. But it’s a crafted narrative way; the last kill is a ‘too excited’ one. Compare another time: ‘I was a son-of-a-bitch to have gut-shot him’ (272). Green Hills is not a record of a slaughter but of a loss.6 His discriminations are not (as I believe he would have phrased it) morally up to his actions. The green hills get bloody. Trouble is, Hemingway needs his actions for the discriminations, all of which are virtually visceral in nature. ‘This was the kind of hunting I liked.’ he writes at one point (in a book filled with displaced conversions of writing into hunting) ‘No riding in cars, the country broken up instead of the plains, and I was completely 6 See Gary Marvin, who concludes thus: “hunting can be interpreted as a ritual event that celebrates the wild animal and the human attempt to engage with it and one in which the animal is sacrificed as the culmination of that celebration” (“Wild Killing,” 26). See also Cartmill, A View.

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happy’ (55). So why the need to be ‘shooting well?’ Why not just walk? (In fact, it’s now possible to take ‘walking safaris.’) Well, then there’s no danger, no ‘excitement’—and all the (existential, virile) rest. One can question this imperative in so many ways today that it’s astonishing it was not already outmoded by 1935. Write your own essay on how it did become outmoded. Make sure you mention the pleasing irony whereby the Hemingway moment made available to other writers tropes (such as the city as “jungle”) they could appropriate for their own domestic circumstances. Don’t neglect to note that Hemingway himself eats everything he kills (but how can one eat a rhino?), saving only hides and horns; of course you’ll have to emphasize nevertheless that the fact he kills in the first place remains unquestioned. That is, today he’s a son-of-a-bitch to have pulled the trigger at all (and has spawned worse sons-of-bitches who probably now get their guides to aim and fire). Green Hills contains this lovely statement: ‘A continent ages quickly once we come’ (284). (‘We’ presumably not including the natives who have always lived there!)7 And so we’re still coming. Is the oldest of continents (which I believe now admits the oldest scientifically verified Record of Man) getting too old? Hence, don’t we—‘we’—now move to preserve it in various ways? And yet, and yet. Was it not gone already by the time Hemingway wrote about it? ‘It was gone and I never had it again.’ Not the last words of the book but its central ones. (The actual conclusion is the resolve to write a book about ‘it.’) No essays—or just this much of a one—on the decline and fall of the Hemingway moment. It merely seems to me a good thing that we—‘we’—have evolved to a phrase in human awareness whereby we are now content to take pictures of the animals we once shot and killed. Don’t ask Africans fighters or victims in current civil or tribal wars. Just ask your greater kudu. He’ll tell you, the more murderous fantasies that can be symbolically rather than literally acted out, the better.8

7 For a history of these game parks that emphasizes their exclusion of the local populations (and, more generally, Western distrust to this day of African ability to manage the parks according to ecologically as well as politically sound principles), see Adams and McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa. 8 For a counter view, see James Ryan, who concludes thus: “The contrast between the activities of individual hunters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the large-scale, professionalized photographic safaris in Africa of the 1920s and 1930s might therefore be interpreted as signaling a wider transformation in European attitudes toward wild animals: a shift away from indulgent slaughter to enlightened conservation. Yet, as I have shown, the photographic hunting that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century was far from exempt from cruelty or killing. . . . Organized photographic hunting in fact marks a shift in the terms of domination, away from a celebration of brute force over the natural world, to a more subtle though no less powerful mastery of nature through colonial management” (217).

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I’m using (up) too much of my own experience in order to write about it. Back to the afternoon of that first full day via a bit of Hemingway: ‘Then the plain was behind us and ahead were the big trees and we were entering a country the loveliest I had seen in Africa. The grass was green and smooth, short as a meadow that has been mown and is newly grown, and the trees were big, high-trunked, and old with no undergrowth, but only the smooth green of the turf like a deer park and we drove on through shade and patches of sunlight following a faint trail’ (217–18). Isn’t this lovely? I saw this! Once more, it’s all I can do just to point—since if I can’t gesture at the thing itself, then at least there are words which ‘capture’ it. Another surprise for me is, though we should not have been so ‘happy’ because we were driving in a van, how accurately this description represents the lower end of Masai Mara. All that’s missing are the high ridges—‘the green hills of Africa’—ruffled almost to the top with thick woods sloping up from the bottom. Long shadows embedded with green cover the plain. What’s in there? You can’t see it. ‘You’re free fellows, come out,’ chorused the twins. Nobody came. There were only the usual herds and not many of those. But O it was beautiful. Those ridges seemed so vigorous, so close. I’ve never seen such “noble”—inescapable Dinesen-esque adjective!—as this. I really can’t describe it. Noble and exciting. On the way back to the lodge, there was a lioness, right on the road. And then to the right, a male, on the prowl. He just strode straight ahead through the grass, with baleful, determined eyes and a full, flaxen-colored mane. The only disappointment (if I can put it this way) is that to me he strode as if with a caption underneath: “lion on the prowl.” How can something be simultaneously thrilling and clichéd? Suddenly, the lion just plopped down on a grassy mound. We continued ahead to his mate, who slowly moved off the road and in another instant invisibly into the grass. Do you know that James Dickey poem, “The Heaven of Animals?” It’s a vision of heaven as only animals could imagine. Here’s a few stanzas: For some of these It could not be the place It is, without blood. These hunt, as they have done, But with claws and teeth grown perfect, More deadly than they can believe. They stalk more silently, And crouch on the limbs of trees, And their descent Upon the bright backs of their prey

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May take years In a sovereign floating joy And those that are hunted Know this as their life, Their reward . . .

When did I consciously remember this poem? It may have been with this lion. Though, as I said, we never saw blood, had there been one of ‘those who are hunted’ about, this lion would have drawn blood. A heaven of animals could only be what Masai Mara in fact is: a site of perpetual renewal of life and death, or a symbiosis of predator and prey wherein each enacts its appointed destiny. To be at this place feels more like bearing witness rather than seeing. Witness to what? Here we are again at the limits of seeing. At the least, we behold an ideal place; at the most, a religious one, to which we can only give, like Dickey, the name of ‘heaven’. The next morning we didn’t see anything either. (That is, leopard or rhino.) Yet for me this was the time during which the land was on view at intervals that became timeless. For example, at one point over a small rise there loomed herds of antelope, topi, water buffalo, zebra and gazelle, all grazing like so many luminous dots, faintly golden, drenched with light. To see became—again—vision. There’s a stunning passage in Out of Africa comparing the early morning earth of the African highlands to a sea bottom, with the animals passing by like submarine life (220). Now, that’s one way to describe what I saw, then. Other ways would aim at a surface glistening with such freshness, purity, and self-containment that it could only appear as if it had all just been created. A world careless of its own existence! Indifferent to us! To imagine it as somehow both beneath the earth and as the earth’s fulfillment seems exactly right. It’s paradise. Today we would say it’s an ‘ecosystem.’ But what is this if not a transformation of one idiom into another? The older one remains. One could not expect humanity to give up the power of one of its greatest myths. Maybe Eden is the most powerful one because it is the myth of our own origins. Not to believe that the earth does not still have the power within itself to return to the state in which it existed before man would seem to me to have to give up the very earth itself. 9 What is that line of

9 Curiously, in one of the few touristic narratives of being on safari known to me, Francine du Plessix Gray, whose scathing account could not be more demystified than mine, comes to the same view: “For if animals remain the victims of our white man’s fantasies, there might come a day when we shall have to cease looking a wildlife altogether in order to ensure its survival. We might have to close off African game parks from men as radically as the French closed off the Lascaux caves—to preserve on their walls the ideograms of animals deteriorated in human-tainted air” (164).

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Stevens about nothing being as clear as the sun when seen in the light of its first idea? Eden is our first idea. This particular African morning, it was pretty clear. Elspeth Huxley begins The Flame Trees of Thika, her account of growing up in the highlands, by describing the two-day journey she made in an ox cart with her mother in 1913. She can hardly remember all the animals they saw. ‘The animals are still there in unsuspecting millions, they did not know that they were doomed’ (11). Today, what are we to do with the knowledge that we have? The landscape continues to be ravaged by overgrazing, subsistence farming, erosion, poaching. Let’s not even consider the imperialist/conservationist politics of Us vs. Them. All I can say is that I came to experience a religious imperative. A reserve or a game park is ultimately not an ecological but a spiritual conception. The time when virtually the whole of Kenya or Tanzania was effectively a vast reserve is gone forever. We need these areas now like a vision of our own perfection. We need the reality of a world so astonishing, pristine, self-perpetuating, and “newly created” (Dinesen’s phrase) that it excludes us entirely, like the absence of original sin. I remember smiling when, that first day, one of the twins exclaimed, ‘they’re so pretty, the way God made them.’ ” 3 Third Day On the third day we drive back toward Nairobi, in order to be able to spend the night southward, at Lake Naivasha Hotel. In his fine collection, Which Tribe Do You Belong To? Alberto Moravia characterizes it thus: “the hotel has no relationship with Africa; it has a relationship only with the West, of which it is both an emanation and an outpost” (111). No wonder next morning I missed even so modest a creature as a beaver, which one of the men claimed to have glimpsed. On to Amboseli, one of the smaller parks. I never got a very clear sense of the whole. It doesn’t continually open out, like Masai Mara, but instead constricts at various points into marsh, plain, meadow, scrub, and savannah. I suppose it’s a dry lake basin. It felt like easing across the salt flats of Utah. In Amboseli we at last have a close encounter with two dangerous animals—close enough to banish further thoughts. We stopped in front of a lone water buffalo. Mean fuckers; my camera isn’t good enough to show the most dangerous animal in Africa, especially the flat, curving horns that frame the head and make it resemble a knight’s helmet. Local wisdom has it that they get angry and charge. This fella just stared, as hundreds did at Masai Mara as well as the hundreds more we were to see here. (What a difference when

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you see an individual animal, apart from its mass.)10 No, not stare, but glare. The water buffalo is the only animal I saw that glares. Its only predators are lions. At Masai Mara we had encountered up close only one elephant, a mid-sized one who, as our van circled closer, kept moving off with his leafy ears as if in slow motion, like a big fish. At Amboseli we drove up to a few herds, each among a small forest of trees largely stripped of their bark and either collapsing or decaying. This forest had the air of something rank and humid, like a jungle. The elephants slouched out like apparitions—massive and monumental. Another van had stopped in front of us. One elephant hulked right up to it and almost stuck his trunk into the window. Another got nervously close to us. A third decided to give what might have been a “threat display” by hosing himself down with dirt and stomping. Not a sound out of any of them. The big pedal ears, the rippling flanks, the fire-hose trunk: these animals seem forever to be in motion, swaying, even when still. I wish they had not moved off after awhile. I never felt threatened, yet these elephants possessed less innocence and more wildness than any I’ve ever seen, beginning, I think, when my grandmother took me to my first circus when I was six. The most interesting thing is that these are the only animals who actually look at you; unlike the water buffalo, there seems to be something behind the look. Why is this? It can’t be just because elephants are so big. (In The Tree Where Man Was Born, Peter Matthiessen quotes a game warden who allows of them: ‘It’s a nice life. Long, and without fear’ [143].) Perhaps the question is just an imponderable one about these ponderous beasts, like why their eyes are so small or their ears so large. Nonetheless, I’d like to imagine that elephants can afford to regard humans because they are blessed with such excess of being—the very thing that prompts us to seek out so many human qualities (wisdom and so on) in them. Later we spend a most wretched hour being jolted up and down a road hardly more than a trail, in the middle of a short grassland, trying to overtake a larger herd of elephants. They eventually vanished in a wide line of wood. Deep in the middle of it: what? In what condition are the trees? Back from where we had come, I recalled an elephant about to wreak some havoc upon a tree. I believe that wherever elephants have been one will have the sense of some great violence having been done. 10 Apologies to Deleuze and Guattari, whom I have cited several times in the course of this book; this water buffalo compels precisely because he does not recall a pack. In their critique, though, he can mark what they term a pack “borderline.” As they explain: “sometimes it is a specific animal that draws and occupies a borderline, as leader of the pack. Sometimes the borderline is defined or doubled by a being of another nature that no longer belongs to the pack, or never belonged to it, and that represents a power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as a trainer etc. In any case, no band is without this phenomenon of bordering, or the anomalous” (44).

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In fact, this proved true of Amboseli as a whole. We didn’t actually see any violence. There was often a sense of it. Partly this was because of the more acute, acrid savannah atmosphere and partly because there was more feel of closeness between predator and prey. A couple times I saw some skulls, picked clean, baking in the sun, and once the brittle skin of a portion of an elephant, which resembled the slice of a tire off the Interstate. Moravia has an essay where he sees the skeleton of a buffalo and finds ‘another characteristic of nature where man is absent: death undisturbed, left to itself ’ (35). In another, while traveling to the great African lakes, he notes the monotony of their sheer size, the presence of disease, the absence of any cultivation, and concludes that ‘eternity is, in fact, squalid’ (141). Well, it’s not all Masai Mara, anyway, and farewell the green hills. Ambolseli’s green might be a heaven of animals. But it’s not paradise. On to Mt. Kilimanjaro Buffalo Lodge. Up at 5:30 am the next morning, for our last shot at a rhino. Alas, no. More than two hours of aimless driving. Another driver told ours that he had seen a rhino earlier. (The vans always stop to check with each other about the latest sightings. When is somebody going to get the bright idea to install CB radios?) So once more we squinted and we strained, we rocked and we rolled. (Same lumpy cow pasture land, occasionally flattened into dusty desert or high grassland.) But no rhino. There’s a lovely musing in Dinesen where she speaks of ‘the fugitiveness of wild things, who are, in the hour of need, conscious of a refuge, somewhere in existence; who go when they like; of whom we can never get hold’ (272). So went our rhino. Thinking of him now, it was as if we had found him, only found him there, where we couldn’t have found him, and didn’t. This rhino was like the leopard in Masai Mara we never did see, to whom we had been subjected instead to the vacant, hopeless process of seeking. How rare to have had the animal’s fugitiveness on our very pulses! Could it have turned out to be disappointing if we had actually found him?11 I often reflected on how the things we saw shaded into the things we didn’t see. We didn’t really see the hippos, for example, and even to see all the lions was almost always to miss the lion-like attributes for which they are celebrated. I do think we saw a few wild dogs or oryx (the ones that resemble unicorns) but I’m not sure.

11 Apologies also to Burt, whose argument has been cited earlier about the “rupture” of the animal image in film, based on our “refusal to read the animal purely as an image” (162). In this case, however, the rhino is, or was, available finally only as an “image” (derived from film!) and so, I think, its felt or experiential “reading” could continue as simple or unproblematic as before, without suffering any division between being “artificial” and “natural.”

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I know a few dik-dik—the smallest gazelle—scampered across our roads (the drivers always identified them and seemed to have a special fondness for these little creatures) but I can hardly be said to have “seen” them in a more than fleeting way. Similarly with the largest antelope, the eland. I just can’t visualize what guidebooks give as their “dowager” aspect. The eland were just too undifferentiated from all the other antelope, and at some level of perception antelope come to intermix with so many other creatures. Matthiessen writes that ‘awareness of animals brought with it an awareness of details—a shard of rose quartz . . . the gleam of a scarlet-crested sunbird in the black lace of an acacia’ (69). Can it be merely because I haven’t spent his time with animals that I want to urge the extent to which this is not true? Consider the way in which elephant-colored boulders become boulder-colored elephants or, conversely, the way in which a cheetah stands out so utterly distinct as to become unbelievable, phantasmagorical. Details shimmer into the composite—everything becomes all of a piece or part of an idea. Maybe what I want to express is simply that this African experience—especially since I’ve been writing this letter—seems to have afforded me the rarest experience of unity, including the unity of something and what it is not. Even books fit. Matthiessen again, on something you’ve surely seen a picture of, a gerenuk: ‘This extraordinary creature, stylized even to the carved eyeline and the bronzy gloss that gives its form the look of well-oiled wood, browses habitually on its hind legs, tail switching, fan ears batting, delicate hooves propped on the swaying branches’ (96). Until I read this description, I’d forgotten that I saw this antelope, several times. Then the times rushed back, or a few of them. These words etch the lineaments of what I actually did see, so ephemerally and so imperfectly, during the course of two or three days less than one month ago. But you will have been wondering about the name of that hotel. It’s at the slope of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Approaching Amboseli, I got very excited at any mountain that could be the famous one. (It’s actually located in Tanzania.) But it proved too cloudy to see it. On this next morning, though, the clouds dissipated by 9 or so and you could make out the snow at the summit. (Over 17,000 feet.) But only photographs reveal that the top doesn’t rise to a point but looks level, like a crater. From ground level it is possible to discern deep rivulets of age (what else to term it?) cut into the mountain all the way up. It has a shape that resembles what a shape would be if it had no shape. Like so much in Africa, Mt. Kilimanjaro looks ponderously, impassively prehistorical. The great animal sighting this once and only Amboseli morning proved to be seven lions, lying in all different directions across a sandy mound. They seemed littered there, and yet they appeared more stark and savage than the very first pride at Masai Mara. One got up after awhile and strode right towards us, in measured, lumbering strides. I was sitting in the front seat of the van. I could have rolled down

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the window, reached out, and touched this lion! I could hear the muffled sound of her padded feet. She (I think a she) ignored the van completely. The others except one soon followed, at almost timed intervals. We watched the uneven column, until the first lion slipped into high grass. 4 A Letter Left That’s it. The letter goes on to describe a chaotic tourist stop at a Masai village, on the way to a final uneventful safari evening at a last reserve, Svevo West. We stopped for a stroll into the bush to another hippo pool, where there were lots more hippos, lots more visible. (One of our party filmed two who seemed to be, I swear, fucking.) Then we walked the half mile or so back to the van, whereupon we could be once more pleased—i.e. relieved—to see any more of the animals we had been seeing; during the walk, anything on four legs would’ve had me frightened. The landscape gradually becomes blood-red on the ground, with rocky green hills distant and sun-bleached sagebrush stretching back. I thought of the American southwest. But I don’t believe there are any baboons in New Mexico. That’s it. Again, the note of what was seen turning into what was not. Or rather, what was seen turning into what was not, as a function of enhancing the status of the visible? My letter is rife with such sublimities—unless I want to call them fatuities. I’d never before seen so many animals in such a short time. I haven’t since. (Not even at zoos, which I’ve only visited a handful of times during subsequent years—twice, in London and Beijing, respectively, just to see pandas.) Am I primarily responding in this letter to their plentitude? Pratt notes how “in the 1960s and 1970s, exoticist visions of plenitude and paradise were appropriated and commodified on an unprecedented scale by the tourist industry” (221). Am I to conclude now that an experience that I tried to earn had in fact already been prepared for me? More, I believe, I am responding in writing to the rarity of these animals, with the plentitude part of that rarity. Let their fugitive nature also stand for the same thing. Most of the animals we humans encounter day-by-day have no refuge—or even if they do (a special corner, a spot under the furniture, a remote bit of bush outside) it’s part of our known world. We come to them as if we can get hold of them. We don’t encounter them as if they could disappear. Take that cheetah: how many less of him are there now? That particular cheetah is surely dead. In fact, with the possible exception of

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many of the Amboseli elephants, all of the actual animals I saw years ago are now dead. Meanwhile, what changes? Just to take an obvious example: cell phones, to enable quicker communication among drivers and guides. In addition, the vans are surely bigger, the roads over which they travel more numerous if not more smooth—and so on. The tourist industry may not have become in recent years that much larger in Kenya. But it’s surely more efficient, and its impact on the great game parks more significant in ways only another safari could reveal.12 About seeing: at the level of the individual tourist, the biggest change may have come about because of the digital camera. It shrinks to a nanosecond the interval between the moment of perception and the moment of the photograph. If I went on safari again today, I’d take a cheap digital, and again hope to retain much of my own perception—call it verbal—once the needs of brute visual immediacy had been satisfied. This time, though, I’d fail more than last time. Elsewhere in my letter is mentioned that the most photographically indulgent of our party had taken by the last day 14 rolls of 36 pictures each. With a digital camera, you could take that many shots in a day or less. Just so, in a digital age, it might seem the more futile to write a letter about what the whole experience meant, even if you still want to ponder what couldn’t be seen—not to say the whole tourist industry, your complicity in it, and its and your complicity in perpetuating colonialism. And about my letter: insofar as the words strain to become images— or at least beg for their authority to be made good on the basis of their accuracy to the things to which they refer—does an accumulation of words finally not amount to much the same thing as a comparable accumulation of images? Not entirely. Photographs are too obvious. Words are not. You can see the strain to “capture” something in, or though, words; you can’t see it—or see it nearly so immediately and easily—in photographs. And if the words have to do with animals, there is this

12 For there is always, I suspect, another safari to be taken. Gray again: “We are going to kill these animals with sentiment. Having slain and trapped wild creatures for food, domesticated them for our amusement, and hunted them for sport, we are now decimating them by our fantasies of wilderness” (159). However, not only can this sort of critique not adequately or clearly distinguish, let’s say, my own safari from that of Matthiessen in Sand Rivers. Also,it fails to consider that the stern warning of impending wildlife decimation has a history as long as the game parks themselves, and, moreover, may well be an internally constitutive feature of modern tourism (whereby the going was always better in the past before the real hordes arrived).

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consolation: what you can’t see forms such a constituent part of seeing that even what you can’t write—or can only write poorly—occupies a necessary place. What place, precisely? You write a long letter to figure it out. The place is not the same as that occupied by animals. (They might take what we mean by paradise to be merely a quotidian fact). It’s certainly not the same as a place that would presume to be a substitute for the words of animals. (If they could speak, they might just tell us to go away and leave them alone). The textual space instead is one in which once more—as in Dinesen, as in Hemingway—the animals can disappear. They’re complete in themselves. Your words aren’t necessary for them. They’re permanent. You only saw them for a few days. They have to be allowed to vanish, and you have to be content to write of them just in order to see them go.

ONE PLANET, ONE PLACE

EMANCIPATION AND DEATH ON ANIMAL PLANET Any hour of the day, any day of the week, you can tune to Animal Planet, the cable television channel owned by Discovery Communications, launched in 1996 and (according to the website) “dedicated to the unique relationship between people and animals.” You might find yourself watching such programs as Wild Rescues, Most Extreme, Miami Animal Police, Seven Deadly Strikes, or Growing Up Leopard. After a few minutes, whatever the focus or accent of any particular show, you will undoubtedly learn something: bear cubs need to be rescued after their mothers are routinely shot by Russian hunters, the African painted dog is its own species, baby penguins have to break their shells, badgers dig a new burrow almost every day, and caribou hooves are like snowshoes. But the array of shows on Animal Planet does not primarily consist of narratives of knowledge. The most important thing about the array may be the array itself. Since the channel has so much air time available, it can afford to program a wide range of examples from the established genres of nature films. It is with good reason that Cynthia Chris begins her history of wildlife film and television shows, Watching Wildlife, by invoking Foucault’s idea of the heterotopia, which is constituted by real places, in which real sites can be found. “The knowledge contained within the heterotopia,” she writes, “is . . . selected, framed, edited, and interpreted, according to an array of social forces and cultural contests over meaning” (xi). Considered solely in terms of its wildlife programming, Animal Planet (not to say television itself, solely with respect to its wildlife programming) becomes a heterotopia. It has a history. Chris traces the channel’s emergence out of the prominence of animals on television in the 1970s and 1980s, the establishment of the Discovery channel in 1985, the growth of more cable and satellite channels in the 1990s, and the increase of fiction and nonfiction feature films throughout these decades. Why the wildlife genre at all? Low cost and high returns on footage as well as specific programs. The Animal Planet channel was a product of a “growth spurt,” as Discovery entered the global market through divisions in Europe, Asia, and even Africa. Initially Animal Planet programming included game shows, a talent show, a new Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom production,

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and, most popularly, beginning in 1996, The Crocodile Hunter, starring Steve Irwin, and then, beginning in 2000, The Jeff Corwin Experience, featuring a man who used to star on the Disney Channel. What to make of Animal Planet? At any one moment in its brief history it appears to be both sensitive to larger programming trends throughout television as a whole (network as well as cable) and reliant upon venerable formulas of wildlife filming since its inception. All these formulas are underwritten by a basic polarity. “Critics of animal films,” Jonathan Burt writes, “have long observed an opposition between scientific and entertainment values, an opposition that usually translates across a series of polarities with truth (usually understood as objective scientific truth) education and detached observation on the one side and commerce, entertainment and pleasure on the other” (Film, 92). The distinctive fact about Animal Planet may be that the totality of its programming can reflect this opposition in so many different ways that there are times when the opposition appears to be effectively silenced. Take the most popular show on the channel at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, Orangutan Island, a successor to an earlier Planet hit, Meerkat Manor. The program features a large cast of animals, each of whom (contrary to the usual practice of nature films) is named.1 Soap opera complications at once run through individual episodes and stretch across them: love affairs, status struggles, and so on. A meerkat or an orangutan will inevitably be expelled from the group. Another will die. All the animals have stereotyped roles, including the one who doesn’t know his role. Years ago in Harper’s, Charles Siebert referred to television nature shows (speaking apropos of one on elephant seals) as “extravagant animal opera, dramatizing, scoring, voicing in human terms the vast backdrop of inhuman action” (47). Compared to Siebert’s examples, the “backdrop” itself has now been transformed into something already humanized. Consequently, there is less of the animal to translate into human terms. Or, to put it another way, “entertainment values” are now

Donna Haraway, speaking of how pets are not allowed personal pronouns in conventional journalistic practice, remarks: “Within this frame, only wild animals in the conventional Western sense, as separate as possible from subjugation to human domination, can be themselves. Only wild animals can be somebody, ends not means. This position is exactly the opposite of the grammar reference books’ granting derivative personhood only to those animals most incorporated into (Western) humanlike sexuality and kinship” (Species, 207). 1

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already so unashamedly foregrounded that any other values (presumably educational) have slipped into the background, and so the terms of the “opera” have been reversed; the “inhuman” action becomes so attenuated, there is very little left to draw from. Siebert was writing in 1993, well after the rise of Disney-driven allegorical, unpeopled animal narratives but slightly before an explosion of cable programming that resulted in new variations of classic wildlife narratives as well as new cable channels and global markets for them. The narrative model for Orangutan Island stretches as far back as the year-long-following-of-asingle-species model developed as far back as the British short, The Private Life of the Gannet (1934) to the 1982 premier episode of the PBS show, Nature. However, by 2008 American television has suffered the rise of (among other things) so-called “reality shows.” In tune with the recurrent flexibility of the wildlife genre to reinvigorate itself by incorporating formulas from other television genres, Orangutan Island emerges as a reality show featuring animals. (Animals, in turn, are arguably more “inhuman”—fearsome insects, deadly tigers—in reality shows featuring humans.) The important thing about the animals in Orangutan Island is how they interact with one other—like a group of teenagers convened by MTV—from a central platform that has been constructed in order to create an instant “family” and to facilitate its interaction. The show is founded upon a larger, more embracing, and arguably never more urgent narrative—that of the Endangered Species. The causes are the usual ones: human greed and indifference, in this case, illegal logging in Burma, which has orphaned the orangutans and made it necessary to try save some thirty-five by raising them together. Forced sociality, however, is contrary to their solitary, nomadic nature. This fact, although mentioned on-line, is not emphasized in the show itself, which, instead, promotes an accompanying narrative—that of Emancipation. A “ground-breaking rescue project,” we are told, is the “last hope” for the animals, whose platform represents their chance to “live free.” The function of human beings in this narrative is to be prominent, but not too prominent, lest “freedom” become visible as just another aspect of endangerment, in which the animals have already disappeared—only this time to be reborn as “characters” on a television series.2

2 Just as they much earlier disappeared into their “roles” in the “theatre” of animal displays and parks originally conceived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Carl Hagenbeck, as examined by Nigel Rothfels in his history of the

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And the intersection of logging interests with media interests? Animal Planet may not be directly responsible for the endangerment of the orangutan population. Yet it directly benefits from it, for without this endangerment there would be no “backdrop” (to use Siebert’s term) from which the experiment in community living that is Orangutan Island could come about, and be filmed. If the purpose of the narrative of Endangered Species is to occlude the whole question of the politics of logging (it’s just something that unfortunately “happens”), the purpose of the narrative of Emancipation is to release a torrent of sympathetic emotion for the spectacle of animal victims (“something must be done”). The interaction between these two narratives, in turn, makes entertainment possible. Each acts to allay either our suspicion that the animals may be being exploited or our possible skepticism that their antics are finally just pointless and frivolous. But there is more. While the antics continue—e.g. the dominant female “Sheriff Daisy” takes a jackfruit from Nadi who refuses to share it with Alibabba—the screen suddenly opens to reveal a segment entitled, “The O Files.” This typically happens two or three times during a half-hour episode. Each “file” states a question of a scientific nature and then proceeds to answer it. What does a orangutan “kiss” mean? It means “back off ” or “go away.” Other than fingers and toes, what is the most useful orangutan body part? Its lips. And so on. Thus a space is opened up in the fabric of entertainment for a thread of education to operate—either as another form of entertainment or as something quite different, more factual, and scientific. (The “Lemurisms” on a subsequent show, Lemur Kingdom, a combination of Orangutan Island and Meerkat Manor, function in the same way.) In any case, the terms of Burt’s standard opposition do get restated, even in a program wholly given over to one side of the equation. Arguably “The O Files” have an additional function: they preserve the persistence of the orangutans as animals, or at least as nonhumans. Their physical actions and features neither “translate” into ours, nor modern zoo, Savages and Beasts. Discussing in his conclusion the veil over the vexing matter of how contemporary aquariums come by the fish they exhibit (and by extension zoos their animals), Rothfels very pointedly writes as follows: “I bring forward these criticisms of contemporary popular aquariums . . . in order to suggest to those who would too easily dismiss a figure such as Carl Hagenbeck for caring more about money than animals and people that they pause and consider their own interactions with the exotic animal business, including watching Animal Planet on cable and Zoboomafoo on public television” (205–06).

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possess the same significance as ours. Furthermore, their very differences from us cannot be completely integrated into the narrative formulas of human society, no matter how complete these formulas hold sway in each episode. The narrator may, for example, inform us that, once Nadi is ready to return to the platform (she has been bitten by a snake) after a stay in the clinic, “she should be happy. But her anxious jaw shows she’s uneasy.” So it appears to us. And who are we to dispute the narrator’s authority? Yet the precise look of the animal’s jaw can recall another physical feature—the look of her lips when they appear to kiss, but which in fact apparently signifies something quite different. It is the case, in other words, that the orangutan body proves to be more mysterious to humans than any one narrative can explicate. Once more, we see Burt’s split within the animal image—simultaneously artificial and real—that ruptures all readings, or in this instance, narrations. (Animals, 113). Hence, the mandate of “The O Files” emerges as one to record certain dissonant, awkward, or curious “bits,” which each have to be conceded to the animals, as animals, and who are therefore not entirely imaginable according to the lived experience of our own human script. Chris has an entire chapter on the subject of Animal Sex, which concludes, unsurprisingly, that “we are apt to find in nature, cast for the retelling, the stories that we ourselves wish to see and hear” (166). Artificially constructed “reality” sites seem to enable the telling of these stories as never before.3 And yet it appears we still cannot prevent the appearance of other stories, much less the abiding opposition in the wildlife genre itself between science and entertainment. 1 Is it the burden of science to pursue the difference between animals and ourselves, and thereby to enable its transformation into human narratives? From the programming of Animal Planet it often seems so. Not every one of its many programs is weighed so wholly on the side of entertainment as Orangutan Island. But the majority of its programs are. “[L]ike the disciplines of science,” Helen Tiffin remarks, “popular wildlife

Of course, these sites are also the logical development of wildlife films as they developed in the United States, whose history is traced by Gregg Mitman in Reel Nature. As he succinctly puts the matter in his Epilogue: “We only know nature because we intervene” (208). 3

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television programs, dominated as they often are by photographic opportunities, are also wary of anthropomorphism while remaining, inevitably, anthropomorphic in their conceptions” (243). It might be a worthwhile exercise to try to distinguish the examples shown on the Discovery Channel or on the National Geographic channel from the ones shown on Animal Planet (which has always had a reputation for being more “gentle” and “cuddly”). It would also be, I believe, purely an academic exercise.4 What Tiffin suggests—and what critics such as Burt or Derek Bousé investigate—is that animals (as subjects, as technical provocation, as “imagery”) were central to the very origins of motion pictures. Animal Planet merely continues the project by giving it an unprecedented scope. One result is that it is possible to see the project, as a project, in some strict technical sense, as if for the first time. Take Anaconda Adventure, in which one Austin Stevens (“herpetologist and adventurer,” as listed on the Animal Planet webpage) goes to South America in search of an giant anaconda. This proves difficult. Anacondas are elusive. “To find my giant, I need to move on,” Stevens exclaims at one point, after an ultrasound scan in murky water turns up a pregnant female. Finally, somewhere in the Peruvian Amazon, he does find a giant of sorts, but only measuring fifteen feet. He had hoped for twenty or more. Such giants are rare and getting rarer, he informs us at the end, since they are increasingly hunted for their skins. The customary Endangered Species narrative, however, does not stage the search; Stevens expresses no interest in preserving the giant anaconda. Indeed, no explicit rationale is given, except, in essence, the photographic opportunity itself. It is presented in the venerable form of

Chris states that “in response to Discovery’s aggressive launches of Animal Planet throughout markets targeted for the National Geographic Channel, executives at National Geographic sought to differentiate their network by invoking National Geographic’s prestigious history as a noncommercial entity devoted to scientific discovery and education” (111). However, she also notes National Geographic’s gravitation to “charismatic hosts”—the most charismatic and successful of whom arose the year Chris’s book was published, Cesar Milan, host of the phenomenally popular The Dog Whisperer. In this respect, Animal Planet counters with Victoria Stillwell, host of It’s Me or the Dog. On the basis of the one contrast alone, a viewer would be hard-pressed to say which show rightly belongs on which network, and may well instead exclaim at how the success of one show (or one charismatic host) can reconfigure the coordinates of an entire cable network, no matter its stated aims or official identity. 4

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a quest adventure.5 The goal is merely to see a giant anaconda, and to enable us to see one in turn, both through Stevens’s own photographs (a camera is slung around his neck at all times) as well as the moving images we see as the program itself. At climatic moments—for example, when Stevens encounters a giant iguana—we viewers see both Stevens’s still shots as well as moving images from an unseen camera. In a distinct sense, we may as well be witnessing the origins of film all over again, whereby an animal provides a compelling subject for a camera to go in search of, using the latest technology. The fact that Stevens is a professional photographer distinguishes him from such fellow adventurers as Steve Irwin or Jeff Corwin. It also functions to lay bare the nature of the project that these men have in common. Its purpose simply to produce a photograph. But can this alone suffice? Harriet Ritvo has an essay entitled “Animal Planet” in which, as an environmental historian, she surveys the twin effects of hunting and domestication by humans on animal populations, and concludes as follows about how complicated and vexed are the effects of the programs on Animal Planet as well as other examples where “animals clog the airwaves”: “Many of these programs present an environmental context and elegiac environmentalist message, at the same time they celebrate the physical triumph of fit, canny trappers or photographers (hunters transformed to suit modern sensibilities) over dangerous beasts. It is often hard to know who is the hero of the story, let alone what the moral is meant to be” (138). Precisely, I would argue. First of all, such undecidability allows the technical project to continue, because it is of its essence to be either indifferent to consequence (the camera itself merely records) or else to be rife with it, through the medium of a human mediator (who can himself be a photographer or merely a “host”). Mediation is certainly essential for the particular accent of adventure. However, even this accent seems to be inseparable from the beginning of the medium as it appeared on television; all historians of wildlife filmmaking term the first “camera hunters” to be “adventurers” by the turn of the last century, most prominently Martin and Osa Johnson (in the South Seas,

5 Two distinct post-Disney paradigms emerged for wildlife TV shows in the 1960s, according to Chris. “The organizing principle of both was a quest—for a particular animal and for observations about it from which knowledge could be produced—undertaken by an intrepid naturalist-host, like [ Jacques] Cousteau or [Marlin] Perkins, or by a celebrity scientist such as Jane Goodall” (55).

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in Borneo, in East Africa).6 Moreover, adventure in its current guise does not prevent someone such as Stevens from exclaiming, repeatedly, over the brilliance or beauty of a turtle or a snake, at the same time he imparts such seemingly different “scientific” facts as that anacondas give birth to thirty or more babies. Of course it is possible to argue that the quest absolutely requires a “hero.” Certainly some programs emphasize heroism more than others—and few today more than those of Stevens himself, who is twice bitten on another show while in search of Africa’s seven deadliest snakes and who courts death yet again on yet another show in search of India’s king cobra (whom he eventually finds, to spectacular visual results). In contrast, the more well-known Corwin is probably more accurately described, as in fact he is on the Planet website, as a “wildlife host.” But if we must, in addition, have a “moral” for animal stories, the most important one, it seems to me, can be revealed as maddeningly simple: photography itself is an unproblematic good. It abides apart from any specific rationale, which is, in turn, why so much ambiguity attends its purpose, much less why the precise opposition between entertainment and science can seem so pervasive as to be virtually constitutive of any narrative. Akira Mizuta Lippit has a provocative argument in Electric Animal about how “the animal look can be seen as a continuation of the photographic look,” which came about during the course of the nineteenth century, in turn, as a primary example of how technology of all sorts from telephones to physics incorporated animality into itself (condensed in “From,”124). He speculates that cinema itself developed animal traits “as a gesture of mourning for the disappearing wildlife” (130) In essence, “the medium provided an alternative to the natural environment that had been destroyed and a supplement to the discursive space that had never opened an ontology of the animal” (130). Animal Planet continues the incorporation, at once registering further mourning of vaster animal disappearance and celebrating renewed visibility of what of animal life still remains. 6 “[F]ilmmakers such as the Johnsons,” writes Chris, “had usually taken for granted that the ‘nature’ they found in far-off places was there for the taking. In contrast, the True-Life Adventures [the shorts and features produced by Walt Disney] wistfully acknowledge that nature, especially North American nature, is precious and that it is at risk, but that risk is always paired with reassurances that the threat is contained, and the future full of hope: the animals at hand, safely populous, offer their images as proof ” (39).

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The Animal Planet channel is aptly named. It refers not merely to the existence of animals “on” the planet but to the creation of an alternative medium to enable animals to continue to exist (albeit as “electric,” in Lippit’s sense). Incorporation of animality, in turn, brings about further development of the technical means—most obviously photographic ones—by which the continued existence of animals can be detected, tracked, studied, and preserved, as well as narrativized. In the process, new linkages can be forged among business, ecological, and media interests; a recent Animal Planet announcement declares a more “adult” makeover of channel offerings, including chimpanzee rescues, animal grooming contests, a new tagline and fresh musical tracks. Some of these linkages have already been advanced on the channel webpage, which features blogs, fan sites, guides and games. This webpage alone reveals how misleading it can be to discuss Animal Planet solely as a medium for the production and marketing of television programs. The channel also represents a technological space for the creation of new animal environments. 2 At one point in his discussion of the famous 1979 BBC documentary series, Life on Earth, after duly saluting how “a spectacular filmic vision of the world’s wildlife [is] achieved with great technical ingenuity,” Burt wonders about the precise logic of the visual array. He detects the following “self-reinforcing cycle”: “The act of linking the images creates the vulnerable networks that will be best served by looking at them in appreciation rather than acting upon them detrimentally” (47) In other words, our viewing is hopelessly passive. Rather than the series constituting a point of entry into the natural world, we are in fact situated at its closure. The “articulation” of even the most pastoral form of this world (as Burt goes on to explore in a number of examples, primarily movies), is, in other words, made by technology and—as he implies—finally on behalf of technology. But what about the voice that literally makes the articulation? Nature and animal films are narrated. What is the status of the narrator? Writing in 1993, Siebert reveals that this voice had already become something of a cliché. He refers to “that hushed, somber, guilt-tinged tone that has become the hallmark of nature show narration” (47). This is the same utterance that by the 1970s Jacques Cousteau was already

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in the process of breaking up with a more emotional, exclamatory, “immersive” articulation, as the subsequent contemporary practice has come to be known. Out with the offstage omniscient narrator. In with a first-person one, visibly face-to-face with us as well as the animals. In the recent Animal Planet announcement, the newly appointed general manager, Marjorie Kaplan, according to the New York Times, signals the departure of “a voice of God narrator” by mocking it.7 Before this voice is gone completely, however, we might pause to try to assess its significance, and to wonder if in fact we really are now witnessing its demise. For example, the voice of God (as I will refer to it) was almost always male. Can we now expect Animal Planet to feature female voices in the future? Perhaps. But on the evidence of broadcasts at the beginning of 2008, such a future is not promising. The jocular, knowing narrator of Meerkat Manor and Orangutan Island is male. Among regularly scheduled programs, only one woman (Lyndal Davies) is listed among the “presenters,” and only one more woman (Victoria Stillwell of the It’s Me or the Dog show) presides over a regularly-scheduled program. Furthermore, neither presides over a searching, complete view of some aspect of the animal world, on the model of David Attenborough (in the above BBC series) or Austin Stevens (of today’s “immersive” generation). This narrative voice remains male. Of course there is a difference between Attenborough and Stevens. The former would never exclaim, as the latter does at the end of his Seven Deadliest Snakes of Africa, “The whole trip was fantastic. A real adventure.” Create a nature show as an adventure, cast the narrator as the adventurer, and such responses become appropriate—even obligatory. The narrator-hero becomes, though, even more male, in accordance with the adventure script, which features long hours in the bush or on the road, always solitary (as befits travel conventions), and then leads to dangerous confrontations with harsh conditions or wild animals. The adventurer’s knowledge of animals encountered along

7 She also signals another return of what has been called “Fang TV,” a renewed concentration on the aggressive behavior of top predators, such as sharks and lions. Chris makes clear, however, that critical debate about “sensationalism” in television wildlife programming goes back at least to 1991. Furthermore, Mitman cites the criticism of Bosley Crowther, the influential New York Times movie critic, to the repeated “incidents of violence and death” in Disney’s famous nature feature, The Living Desert, in 1953.

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the way—when he deigns to impart it—is just as expert and definitive as that of the old patriarchal narrator.8 Consider the example of a new Animal Planet series, Escape to Chimp Eden, which promises at least more gender nuance to this narrator, by casting a “host” who is ostensibly less of an adventurer and more of a nurturer—akin to the animal police and clinic doctors or nurses who regularly appear on the animal “precinct” shows or the newer “petfinder” programs that bring together pets in need with families looking to adopt. Many of the professionals in these shows are women. While the host of Escape is a man, Eugene Cussons, his warrant—from the Jane Goodall Institute, no less—is to nurture imprisoned or abused chimpanzees back to health, However, as “rescue director,” he must first free the chimps from various kinds of imprisonment, and so the first episode features him traveling to Angola, commandeering veterinarians and drivers, and breaking into cages. In the process, Cussons takes on the character of an “avenger,” righting wrongs not even recognized. In other words, in addition to its retooled gender formulas, Escape becomes an unusually interesting example of the Emancipation narrative, albeit one no less founded upon its usual contradictions: in order to be “free” the animals must be caged, and in order to be “wild” they must be taught by humans. We would not expect the old voice of God to entertain these contradictions; this voice is thoroughly impersonal and completely assured. We might expect Cussons to entertain them. He does not, declaring instead, for example, “I want to teach [the chimps] what they need to get back to the wild.” Not only does the Emancipation narrative absorb all questions about its own rectitude, even when the one who enacts the narrative stands before us as our narrator. (In contrast, Lone Droscher-Nielsen, who leads the “project” that is Orangutan Island, is rarely seen and only speaks as a supplementary voice.) This narrative continues to situate its objects as powerless victims, who by definition need our nurture and who have no voice.

8 See Haraway, Primate Visions for a gender-inflected reading of the National Geographic Specials in which Jane Goodall appears as a “virgin priestess,” and then subsequently develops as both a mother and a woman, in order to further demonstrate an idealized intimacy with nature. It might be speculated that one emphatic reason for the absence of female narrators in wildlife television is that their authority, according to the highly conventionalized gendered representations of the genre, would inevitably become too intimate, too “personal,” thereby undermining the pretensions to science, the more “objective” because, in turn, male.

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Speaking in her study, Animal, of H.G. Wells’s novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Erica Fudge wonders how “somehow, in contemporary culture, we manage to live like Moreau: to have an understanding of a shared origin, and shared capacity, but also, and simultaneously, to believe in the human right to dominion” (21). The voice by which we humans continue to narrate animal life on television provides one clear reason. It may no longer be “the voice of God.” (Despite the fact that this voice still resounds in many shows, especially ones involving insects or sea creatures, not to mention the older nature programs recycled country-by-country throughout the world.) The voice may now be more evidently and comprehensively ours—individual and emotional, as well as puzzled or tentative. Yet we have not found a logic whereby our voice gives up the ultimate ground of its authority over animals, which is our right to dominion itself. The life we now recognize as sharing with animals remains the same life in which we exercise our dominion. Its basis in wildlife shows is the narrative of Emancipation. The animals we used to preside over (as if by Biblical right) are the same ones we wish today to emancipate—and emancipate from us. The best way we can emancipate them at present is on the basis of the “reality” format, though constructing special enclosures in which they can learn to be animals again, while we provide their food, attend to their illnesses, and care for their general welfare. None of this of course means that we have to conceive of ourselves as “dominating” them anew. Yet our nurture does not cease to be another exercise of human power just because we call it by different names.9 More to my point, our very narrative does not cease to be exclusively ours just because we now seek more intimate kinds of contact with animals. We humans remain the only beings who speak. Fudge writes in hope that “if we acknowledge some of the—frequently cruel—contradictions in the ways in which we live with and think about animals we might be on the road to creating a new language. The language will not precede the lived relation, a renewed acquaintance with the lived relation will, I hope, help us create another language” (12). Maybe so. But a consideration of even those human beings, like Cussons, whose lived relation with a wild animal is more rare, intimate, and dedicated than most of us will ever have the opportunity to enjoy, reveals that a

9

Matthew Scully’s Dominion is the most eloquent expression of this view.

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new language is hard to come by, and an actual dialogue still proves all but impossible to achieve. Too much of Cusson’s narrative authority remains patriarchal, deriving from an earlier God-like voice, to which the animal, as victim, can make no reply.10 Perhaps this authority can only be relinquished if the narrative itself is opened up to wider, more reflective dimensions that explicitly search out the complexities of human and animal boundaries. I am thinking for example, of Sarita Siegal’s article on the function of anthropomorphism in the shaping of her documentary, The Disenchanted Forest, about orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra. In this article, as well as the documentary itself, we get closer to the complex modes of communication that the animals do possess, and therefore to the replies they do make to the humans who care for them. Emancipation, in other words, does not necessarily mean that the animals are without a language, even if popular narratives about them continue to leave animals effectively silenced.11 3 There are too many programs on Animal Planet to be able to discover, or even posit, a prototypical moment for all of them. But if one could be imagined, it would be the following: the moment when a wild animal, orphaned once its mother was killed by hunters or poachers, and subsequently raised by humans, must be returned to the wild. It has

10 Escape to Chimp Eden is caught between two different ideological dispensations, one relying upon, as Chase characterizes them “classic wildlife filmmaking tropes of pristine, unpeopled, and timeless nature,” while the other represents nature “as both a brutal force and as a reliant resource, worthy of, and even requiring, human stewardship.” In one, humans refrain from intervening; in the other, they must. Increasingly at the present time, aggressive masculine “identity formations” proliferate, displacing earlier stoic, grandfatherly, or patrician models of authority. In effect, Sessions has first to aggressively intervene to rescue the chimps, before he can activate a softer, more nurturing relation to them. The result is a contradiction, and it is tempting to speculate that wildlife programming at the present time is hopelessly enmeshed in the same contradiction. 11 Repeatedly in When Species Meet, Haraway calls attention to the work of the “bioanthropologist,” Barbara Smuts, especially, as an example of one who has “met the gaze of living, diverse animals, and in response undone and redone themselves and their sciences” (21). See her long footnote about Smuts’s past and recent work—now with dogs, once with baboons—on p. 312. “Closely interacting bodies tend to tell the truth,” Haraway quotes Smuts as claiming. On the other hand, the standard narrative voice in the wildlife genre is this voice because he never interacts.

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taken months or years. Much care has been lavished. A strong bond between human and animal has been formed. How to relinquish the care now, how to face the loss of this bond? The human caregivers can only weep, as the Toronto zookeeper does, for instance, at the conclusion of Growing Up: Polar Bear when her young charges are released into an “enclosure” with two adult females. Viewers can only weep along with her. The moment of return to the wild is central to the narrative of Emancipation, which sponsors, in turn, the abundance of animal rescue programs. In these, since the animals are individually mistreated or abused within human society rather than endangered apart from it as a separate species, there need be no further attention paid to the animals once healed. Indeed, they are probably best last seen (as they often are) in shelters awaiting adoption, because reintegration to human society has none of the emancipatory drama built into the moment of return to the wild. How can we assess our viewing of this moment? Derek Bousé, who emphasizes the importance of the “orphan” theme in structuring nature films generally, is skeptical about the worth of films that “move further away from depicting nature on its terms and more toward dramatically recreating it in terms set by the visual media” (192). In other words, Animal Planet today, intent upon more “adult” programming that in practice means adopting the formulas and codes (e.g. so-called “reality” shows or now even crime dramas) of the popular networks or cable shows. For his part, Siebert would go further. The “artifice” of nature films is simply false. His own walk in the woods is “an experience exactly the opposite of watching a nature show.” In nature, he suffers his own insignificance, as he feels “the daring to linger in a non-specific, unnarrated, and ongoing anonymity, a prolonged visit with that absence of us” (50). Nature films, on the other hand, position us too comfortably and abstractly. They implicitly reinforce our dominion over what we behold. Burt, however, is not so sure. For one thing, much footage is about places that few could ever afford to visit themselves. “Nor does it make much sense to suggest that one should valorize experience over spectatorship with creatures that it would be detrimental or dangerous to interact with” (Animals, 220). More generally, he writes elsewhere, “the ethical potential of animal films cannot necessarily be mapped onto their truth value. There is, in other words, constant vacillation between the relative advantages and disadvantages of detachment

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from or attachment to animals” (Animals, 165).12 If so, the real problem with the Emancipation narrative is that it acts to attach us to animals without vacillation. What viewer can refuse the spectacle of orphaned wolf cubs, lovingly hand-raised for years, twenty-four hours a day, by an entire family, now freed into the wild? In a very distinct sense, this moment offers us—as well as the animals—the exact opposite of what we see in zoos, where of course any idea of the “wild” is only a simulacrum; even if the animals on display are members of an endangered species, it is difficult to regard them in zoos as having been emancipated. But there is more. Randy Malamud’s central objection to zoos is as follows: “I regard the zoo’s fundamental, imperial inequity to be its absolute establishment of a one-way powerbased relationship between viewer and subject, which is undesirable in and of itself, and, more dangerously, sets the tone for manifold other human practices that exploit animals and nature based on principles of non-reciprocity” (230). We bestow our look upon animals. They do not return the look. Indeed, citing Joel Rudinow on the dynamics of voyeurism, Malamud argues that we don’t want the look returned. In other words, the hopeless inequity I have emphasized in nature films as embodied between narrator and subject is the same one Malamud locates in zoos between viewer and subject. One could pursue further parallels; for example, the “tinkering” with innovations and adjustments zoos regularly make in order to afford the visitor more “natural” vistas is akin to the same technical changes that television programs make. Malamud, however, tries to differentiate between zoos and programs at precisely this point. Documentaries and nature shows, although vulnerable to the same criticisms—he cites Siebert approvingly—are ultimately to be preferred to zoos because they are less “tainted” by commercial capitalism (appearing at the low end of the television industry), more genuinely insightful (granting the necessity for “some sort of sociocultural mediation”), and almost always

12 Wilson notes, for example, that “at the very least, Disney’s anthropomorphism allows animals to be addressed as social beings, and nature as a social realm. This suggests a breach in the species barrier between human and animal. The conservation and preservation documentaries inist on that barrier and reject the possibility of interspecies intimacy. . . . Anthropomorphism in thus not a program, but an historical and strategic intervention, a step on the way to understanding that the wall between humans and the natural world is not an absolute. It is permeable, movable, shifting, able occasionally to be leaped over—as it always has been by hags and shamans” (154–55).

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show animals “in situ, behaving naturally” (234). There is also one final benefit: “Television shows about animals explicitly acknowledge the distance between us and them, unlike zoos, which pretend that animals are very close to us” (234). Hence, Malamud concludes thus: “I believe television shows can accomplish ecological advocacy as effectively as zoos—probably even more so, since the medium of television is so conducive to promotion” (234). Ten years later, though, this last point looks to be the problem rather than the solution, at least insofar as Animal Planet is concerned, especially in light of its new format, which “promotes” the channel with a commercial vengeance. Malamud could not easily have imagined such shows as Meerkat Manor or Orangutan Island, in which, granted, the “situ” of the animal remains, the better to be wholly transformed into human characters, formulas, and conventions. Of course—again—these are not the only programs on the channel. Yet their logic is pervasive. Arguably, animals are, exactly, “closer” to us than they were a decade ago, because, so paradoxically, they are more distant—yet more endangered, further subject to all manner of human ravages on their environment, and therefore even more in need of being emancipated. Escape to Chimp Eden at first appears, in contrast, to be the sort of program that Malamud would approve, until we realize that, far from being contextualized, it is precisely the natural context of the animals that must be constructed. I would conclude by returning to the question of language, which functions, as always, as the basis for defining our difference from animals. Malamud considers language in nature films merely as a means of conveying information. Language needs to be emphasized in these films as something far more constitutive: because animals don’t speak, human beings can. As Burt argues in a celebrated article, “The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom,” there are consequences to the fact that animals do not speak in representations of them in films: “One of the ironies of animals’ not speaking is that so much should be written about the animal as a symbol conveying human meaning” (290). Yet the consequences of not speaking are not limited to irony. The status of the animal as a victim is thereby assured, not to say, at the same time, revealed. And what is the revelation? Simply put: the necessity for the category of the animal to exist to be sacrificed, so that the category of human can continue. In an interview, “Eating Well,” Jacques Derrida speaks openly about such things as how we presume that the commandment,

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“thou shalt not kill,” applies only to humans and he ultimately considers how the “sacrificial structure” opens a space for the “non-criminal putting to death” of the animal—a sacrifice that thereby allows for the transcendence of the human (113). We should not expect an Animal Planet program on this subject anytime soon. However, in Lippit’s previously-cited sense of the cinema as having developed by embodying animal traits as a gesture of mourning for the disappeared wildlife, I would argue that the whole of the channel’s programming has already anticipated such a presentation. That is, the sacrifice in some displaced form is enacted on each show, from the various reality-based “Animal Precinct” ones where mistreated domestic pets and strays are saved from death to the latest narrativebased series or adventures where wild animals are saved from extinction (and often restored to the wild). A program hosted by yet another “adventurer,” Nigel Marven, entitled Prehistoric Park, features computeranimated recreation of already extinct creatures such as mammoths and dinosaurs so that they too can be “saved!” The explicit or implicit subject of all this programming is death, which is averted so that, each time, in many various ways, we can reconstitute ourselves as having attained dominion over it, and over animals (representing “the animal,” or the body) through it. The animals are comprehended as victims not only so that we can exercise our responsibilities for their welfare. They are victims so that we can understand ourselves with respect to these responsibilities, whose articulation is what makes us human. Derrida traces the status of the human subject in the original discourses on man and animal (or Other) of such thinkers as Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. We do not, I trust, have to follow him there simply in order to understand why the fact of death must remain so deeply troubling on Animal Planet—desired as well as feared. Too much death and the life of animals loses its sacrificial character; it becomes bloody, random, and pointless.13 Too little, however, and the

13 To Burt, in still another article, slaughter of animals, precisely, is central to modernity. Take the meat industry, despite the existence of different moral, religious, and even scientific positions to it. “[T]he weakness of all these positions lies in their focus, the unit of analysis if you like, on the act of killing rather than on the whole system of mass slaughter and what it entails” (“Conflicts Around Slaughter,” 138). He concludes as follows: “Despite the claim to neutrality by some animal welfarists, there is no self-evident, transcendent moral position around the mass slaughter of animals, divine or secular” (139).

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life of animals loses its redemptive force; it becomes remote, abstract, and soft. What I have been discussing as the Emancipation narrative strives to preserve both life and death ideally in equal balance, holding out the prospect of life each time an animal is in danger of death and yet offering sufficient intimation of death so that when an animal does survive the structure of sacrifice is felt to continue powerful and vital. Zoos, stresses Malamud, “capitalize on spectators’ commitment to lovingly preserving what they simultaneously destroy” (231) So do nature shows. The difference is, on television we can see the commitment reasoned in far more detail, and, on a twenty-four hour television channel such as Animal Planet, available for ceaseless re-presentation. It is even possible from time to time to catch glimpses of death—something that zoos keep invisible. Whether or not the retooled Animal Planet (with a new logo that does away with an image of an elephant, trunk high, for a script of the channel’s name with the “m” tilted sideways to suggest teeth) actually programs more shows displaying the spectacle of death, we can expect that if the flagship ones continue to be modeled so openly on human society death will be less visible because it will not be able to shed its “criminal” (to recall Derrida) as opposed to sacrificial character. Finally, we want animals to be like us but not so much that they fail to be able to stand for us and bear our meaning. In order to do this, they must be victims—situated as such by our narratives as well as our ideals. “I want to be an orangutan,” smiles Lone Droscher-Nielsen, after she climbs back down from a platform, over a hundred feet high, to which she has climbed in order to coax her animal charges onto it, after they became fearful of the net stretched around the platform to prevent the orangutans from falling. It seems perverse to suggest such dedication is misguided. I am not suggesting this. What I am arguing is, first of all, how death is omnipresent in such programs. It is always the same death, which, in addition, takes place so that we can realize the same humanity. In the case of this woman, who risks death in a way that also stands for us, we see that the finest exercise of her humanity is to wish to relinquish it in order to assume the identity of another species. Of course she can’t. But she can speak of the wish, and, merely in so speaking, highlight much of the sacrificial structure upon which her enterprise depends. We honor people whose devotion to animals is so total. At the same time, though, we should not fail acknowledge how

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such devotion depends upon a dynamic that it enforces as well as begs to be released from. We can give voice to this dynamic. Animals can’t. That’s why they’re animals—as we have situated them—and why we’re not. It seems to be wonderfully clear to us why a human being would be moved to exclaim that she wants to be an orangutan. It seems to be still barely imaginable why an orangutan would say—just once—that she wants to be a human being.

TEXAS, WITH AN ANIMAL OUT BACK Texas? Nationally, if not globally, we’ve all heard it before about Texas. The state is crude. It is big. It is proud. It is so utterly swollen with its own identity as to be, well, not exactly distasteful to anybody else, perhaps, but absurd and tiresome, with everything from the fabled fanaticism of its high-school football fans or the move-over aggression of its pickup trucks to the lacquered courtesy of matrons north of Dallas or the dry integrity of ranchers east of Houston. Ho hum. To everybody other than Texans, it is easy to regard the state and its people not only as a source of jokes but finally as one big joke. I so regarded it, anyway. For years, until I came to live there, Texas was one of the few places in the U.S. I assured friends that I had no desire to visit, much less settle. None of them was a Texan. Few of them knew Texans. Some friends had lived here for a time, mostly recently a former student. He moved to Houston when his wife (from Arizona) got a job there. Houston? At first, it seemed a punishment. They lived in Houston for three years and tried to seek out its surprisingly rich (to them) culture, while never getting used to the oppressive heat, the unrelenting courtesy, the division between Anglos and Mexicans, and the traffic. When his wife was offered a job in Seattle, they accepted on the spot. During the course of my whole life, I have passed through Texas four times: twice across the entire state, once by train and once by car, and twice—by car—across the Panhandle. Except for the first time—more on this in a moment—we only ever stopped for the night. Consequently, the profoundly flat, dusty, actual Texas never became as real for me as the profoundly stereotyped, muscular, imaginary Texas of countless movies, television shows, songs, and novels. Texas is not merely the name of a state. It is the name of someone else’s narrative—America’s, perhaps the world’s. Or rather, Texas names a vast horde of narratives. Now I find myself not simply living in a geographic area. I reside in a cultural space, consisting of a history of movies as well as a source of jokes, an anthology of songs, and a canon of literature—all about Texas, that fabled site of Apaches, cattle drives, oil rigs, the Pedernales River, the Chisholm Trail, and home on the range. Movies seem to have mattered the most to me. Deal with narratives, however, and you

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are likely to discover that you are only repeating a prior one, perhaps most particularly when you are striving to write your own, or at least write your own distinctive presence into another. What brings these narratives of Texas together? Violence, probably. It is of course a profoundly American theme, not at all exclusively Texan. Yet it might be accurate to claim that much of the reason violence is so American is because, in turn, it is so profoundly and pervasively Texan. And if we Americans do not necessarily think of the matter in this way, the world does. For example, a new friend who has lived here in Texas (except for brief periods in Tennessee and Ohio) all her life tells the following story. She is Hispanic. Once, in Spain, she tried to pass with a shopkeeper as Mexican rather than Texan. Texas, after all, is a global icon. Although in any one occasion you cannot be certain, the mention of Texas usually stirs up too much emotion. However, this time an accompanying friend slipped, and disclosed the true origin of the two women. “Texas!” the shopkeeper exclaimed. “You’re from that state where they kill people!” And not just people. Animals. That first time across the state was with my uncle, who drove me at summer’s end from Georgia, where he lived, back to California, where my mother lived. One afternoon on a highway outside Snyder, Texas, he suddenly cried out: “We hit something!” He swerved the car. What? We never found out, as we narrowly missed overturning into a ditch. The axle of my uncle’s Nash was damaged. We had to stay two nights in Snyder while a garage ordered new parts. One night we walked around the town center, its rough red brick buildings so different and more unyielding than anything I’d seen in Georgia. It was as if Snyder was trying to protect itself against something. But what? The movie theater featured a movie starring Doris Day. Most likely, our car had hit a rock. But my uncle swore the thing was moving. An armadillo? But surely one of Texas’s signature animals is too soft, too small. We never decided what had caused the accident. Today I like to imagine it was a feral hog. Texas has the largest population of feral hogs—nearly two million. Of course they move in packs and are not normally to be found near major highways. Nonetheless, they forage everywhere, and constitute such a significant problem for ranchers and farmers especially that the state allows them to be hunted year-round, with no limit on number or size. I like to imagine it was a feral hog that quiet day so long ago because hogs are ugly, while

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armadillos are, well, cute. You can’t buy postcards in Texas picturing feral hogs. Trouble is, though, if you now live in a state that depends upon so many already having been killed—nonhuman as well as human beings—you won’t be able to get off so easily by identifying in advance the thing that either could kill you or that you might have to kill. In a state that has such a violent history as Texas, it might appear that the presence of animals in this violence is marginal. Or else that animals are simply the victims of human violence. But it’s not that simple. Violence is never simple, not even violence involving animals—armadillos, hogs, grakels, rattlesnakes—that have somehow to continue their life and being at the edges of our human settlement. There might be better places on the planet to learn directly about violence or animals. Texas arguably remains the premier American location to experience their interconnection. In Texas, there’s always an animal in front of you—or out back. You could conceivably be killed by some animal. You might even have to kill one. 1 The first purchase I made as a new resident of Texas was a little plastic magnet in the shape of the state. At the top there is a tiny revolver. Underneath it are the words, “We don’t dial 911.” $5.95 and, to me, worth every penny, as a perfect symbol of much that I loathe about Texas: its gun culture, macho swagger, and proud separateness from the rest of the United States. Real Texans, presumably, already have their slogans etched in their hearts. New Texans have to stick the words where they can, the better to learn them. Or, as it may be, the better to sneer at them. My first purchase was an exercise in irony, and it remains on my refrigerator door, lest I forget. In fact, 911 is probably as responsive here in Texas as anywhere else in the U.S. But how many other states stage for its tourists a repudiation of 911 community values? Of course the question is too harsh. The tourist is supposed to smile. The trinket is offered with a knowing wink. That Texas may not be exactly gone. But it is, as we say, “a thing of the past,” and the slogan finally means no more than playful references to the Minute Men in Massachusetts or to Paul Bunyan in Minnesota. Except that “we don’t dial 911” is not a thing of the past, because it is perfectly conversant with any number of other slogans, the most famous of which is the

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following: “Don’t mess with Texas.” I fell in love with this one, too, and another plastic magnet, in the form of a lone star, also adorns my refrigerator door. I’ve never heard anybody actually utter these last words, yet I have no doubt that they beat deep in the heart of many, if not every, Texas-born male. Speaking of the love Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer has for hunting and killing, D.H. Lawrence wrote as follows: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” (62). Lawrence never visited Texas, but he got as close as New Mexico. Close enough, I believe. Never mind the “essential American” soul. (For one thing, Lawrence seems not to consider that it could be female.) The “essential” Texas soul as it is represented in tourism is precisely as Lawrence characterizes it, with the proviso that we make a comic discount for the “killer” part. Of course the people who hate Texas refuse to do so, and so emphasize the logical consequence of the “killer” part, reflected in, say, the fact that the death penalty is enforced far more in Texas than in any other state. I have a British friend who likes to joke with me about the death penalty. Is it being used for captured illegal immigrants? If not, it should be! Have I been engaged in political activity to this end? Why or why not? I’m trying, I plead. Give me time. I haven’t even bought a pick-up truck yet, much less a gun. What I’m actually trying to do is to make my imaginative peace with a state that officially celebrates its love of violence. The other day at my Fitness center I overheard a group of middle-aged men joking about their just-concluded racquet ball match. One said to the other: “I outta bring my little .32 and shoot ya.” Haw haw. These were men who drive SUV’s rather than pick-up trucks. How many of their counterparts in the rest of the country would use such an example? The night before, the sportscaster on a local television station, speaking of a crucial game in the playoff series between the San Antonio Spurs and the Los Angeles Lakers, concluded: “It comes down to, give me the gun.” Is it really possible that I had never before in my life heard this particular expression? Don’t mess with Texas. Why? Because Texas is armed. The explanation, as opposed to the injunction, is probably so obvious it does not have to be mentioned. But obvious to whom? Outsiders? Until very recently I was one, and it was not obvious to me. Native Texans? More likely they know about how crucial it has been in Texas to be armed, since they learned in school. Consider, for instance, a moment in a standard history, T.R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star. Fehrenbach is about to

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discuss the spectacle of frontier violence, now centering upon Native Americans. North Americans, he emphasizes, chose to conquer the land and came to look upon themselves as a chosen people. “This sense of being a chosen people, which was tribal and biblical,” he continues, “was an enormous Texan strength rather than a weakness. . . . Hypocrisy toward warfare was never part of the Texan ethos. The generations that moved across the Sabine were already bred to certain hatreds and war. . . . To hold this land, Texas developed the pervasive beliefs that Indians must be eliminated and Mexicans must be dominated” (447) So far, so good. This is history from the point of view of the victors, so it is important that we understand today what attitudes they brought to the fight, and what strengths these attitudes made possible. How we should evaluate them today, though, is another matter. Fehrenbach’s subsequent comments illustrate how difficult it is to try to formulate a position from which violence can now even be critiqued, never mind repudiated. “These views,” he continues, “were not palatable to many other Americans but they cannot be fairly rejected or criticized by those who failed to share the Texas experience” (448). Why not? Two reasons. The first has to do with the brute fact of history itself. “Once the future Texans committed themselves to moving onto Mexican soil and Indian range, such attitudes were inevitable, and necessary, if they were to prevail. There was a great struggle for this soil; palatable or not, this fact cannot be ignored.” The second reason has to do with pragmatism. If the violence and tribalism may have separated Texans from other North Americans, “Texas experience, in the 19th century, permitted few illusions. Texans had to be pragmatic to prosper and warlike to stay alive.” Fehrenbach compares them to the Israelis in the next century as well as to the Normans in Saxon England. Such comparisons serve not so much to justify as to exculpate Texans from a realm where the “illusions” of later centuries seem idealistic, rootless, even fatuous. In order for Texas to come into being, it had to be violent, period. It now seems to follow historically if not logically that in order for Texas to remain Texas today, the violence of the past cannot be repudiated. It does not follow, in virtually any respect, that violence against animals is part of this history. Indeed, historians, even animal historians, study national or state formation as a purely human phenomenon. In this case, animals are merely part of the “soil.” A species divide bars their possible inclusion alongside other subjugated groups, such

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as Mexicans or Indians. Animals played no part in any “struggle.” If anything, they were, and are, merely part of its enduring substance. Even, say, the history of cattle becomes a history of cattle ranching. Insofar as animals merit mention at all, they function as the unspoken stuff of history, like sagebrush. 2 Consider the presence of animals in some of the great classic Hollywood films about Texas. One is Home from the Hill (1960), where Robert Mitchum plays the rancher father, George Hamilton his whimpy son, and George Peppard his unacknowledged bastard son. Why is Hamilton whimpy? Because he is afraid of boars and cannot hunt. The formula is so venerable as to be embarrassing: a man becomes a man by virtue of becoming a hunter. That is, a man becomes a man through violence, specifically, violence against animals.1 An even better example is Giant (1956), arguably the most celebrated Hollywood movie about Texas. “That sure is a beautiful animal,” exclaims Rock Hudson, upon first seeing Elizabeth Taylor atop her black stallion (which the rancher has come East to buy). Ostensibly he is speaking of the horse. Yet he might be just as well speaking of the woman. In a short time, both woman and horse are on their way on a train back to Texas with him. From the very outset, whether as things of beauty or as commodities, animals share a common identity with humans. By the time cattle replace horses on the screen (whose first two images are of Texas herds, followed by an Eastern fox hunt), we see that cattle and women have one thing in common: each can be, or rather must be, “branded.” In due course, the stallion has to be put down by Hudson; the animal was injured after fatally throwing his spinster sister, who had 1 Or, in a displaced form against women. Hence, Matt Cartmill notes that “[s]ome of the feelings many hunters express—the murderous love and other incoherent emotions, the Hemingwayesque anxiety about sexual identity, the relish for doing delicious evil, the false and contemptuous affection for the victim, the refusal to think of the victim as an individual—are also common feelings among rapists” (240). “Perhaps the real social pathology linked to hunting is not war,” he concludes, “as the hunting hypothesis would have it, but rape.” Home from the Hill offers ample evidence of this equation; although Mitchum does not rape his wife (or any woman) he cannot “rule” her as he can hunt and “master” boars, while his son’s failures with women are represented by his inability to hunt.

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mounted the horse only to brutalize him (and thereby act out in displaced form her jealousy of her husband’s new wife). To this point, Giant has presented a symbolic struggle between horses (“Eastern,” feminine, refined) and cattle (Texan, masculine, practical). Cattle win. But then the narrative proceeds to play out another struggle, between cattle and the future. Cattle represent the enduring values of the land. However, these values become endangered over time. As Hudson’s son (who wants to go to Harvard and be a doctor) cries out to his mother: “I don’t want to live my life pushing cows around.” The future is lavishly personified by James Dean, a moody ranch hand especially loathed by Hudson. (The plot never clarifies this loathing, although—shades of Home from the Hill—it suggests that Dean is some sort of bastard, explicable either through Hudson’s father or his sister.) Giant has already displayed a number of boundaries—based on sex and race as well as species. With Dean, we get another divide: class. And, once oil bubbles up from a small portion of his inherited land adjoining Hudson’s vast ranch, Dean immediately begins to act out a spectacular ascent into stratospheric wealth. (And nonstop drunkenness.) Eventually, he even succeeds in buying out Hudson, once it becomes clear to Hudson that there is no one—that is, no man—to whom he can leave the ranch to continue as it has always been. The future belongs to oil, not cattle. Oil is now in the hands of Dean, not Hudson. Dean’s character is named, Jett. We first see him riding a jalopy and then lounging in the back seat of a roadster. A ranch hand, he is never associated with its cattle. Later, once the oil begins flowing, his name appears on the sides of oil trucks. Finally, his name becomes the name of an airline. In effect, “Jett” names a transformation of the land, considered in terms of animals, specifically cattle, into a materialization, considered in terms of oil, and visible by (or as) machines. The machines, in turn, result in a dematerialization of the land. Machines merely skim its surface (where they do not transcend it). Animals, on the other hand, embody the land itself. The movie’s penultimate scene shows Hudson and family (wife, youngest daughter, daughter-in-law and her son) driving back home in an automobile. He has announced his intention to “get back to the land.” Meanwhile, the rest of his family flies overhead. If the respective vehicles are going in the same physical direction, they move in opposite temporal directions—and according to entirely different terms. A whole series of boundaries underwrites Dean’s ascent. Hudson’s decent, on the other hand, has been traced with respect to each one

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of these boundaries being crossed; his daughter-in-law is Mexican, he is now more allied with his wife and her domestic realm, and, when he finally stops at a diner (and then fights with the owner when he refuses service to a family of Mexicans) he participates in a far more lowly class position than any heretofore. One could argue, though, that each of these boundaries has been possible to cross because the most fundamental one was already breached from the outset: that between animal and human. “If only I hadn’t bought that horse,” laments Hudson, after his sister’s death. But of course he had to buy the horse as inescapably as he fell in love with Taylor. In an article about writing the history of animals, Erica Fudge calls for us to “write a history which refuses the absolute separation of the species,” based on a rethinking whereby “the meaning of ‘human’ is no longer understood in opposition to ‘animal’ ” (“Left-Handed Blow,” 16). Giant illustrates an example of a movie that refuses this separation—if only to refigure it on other levels. There is more. Cattle can be understood in opposition to oil in part because they are not understood in opposition to man. On the basis of the movie we can ask: how did cattle become the prototypical Texas animal? Not merely through a history of bovine cross breeding and cattle drives (there is a moment in Giant where Hudson rhapsodizes to Taylor about such things, a herd of hundreds milling in the background) but through a representation of this history. Cattle become the Texas animal because humans have constructed their own identity through these animals, even while cattle ranches turn into oil fields. Cattle have proven capable of absorbing the violence—against them as well as against other humans through them—implicit in their own construction.2 Not so, though, for other, less obvious and more singular animals, away from the ranch and closer to the urban areas where most of us live. 2 Curiously, although first Hudson, and then Dean, actually hit each other on two separate occasions, the two men never actually fight. Is this because it is obvious on the symbolic level who would have to win, or because it is not so obvious? Even if the future clearly belongs to oil, Giant everywhere appears to want to equivocate nevertheless, and so, for example, the romance between Hudson’s youngest daughter and Dean never quite takes place—he never proposes and it seems she might not accept if he did. Instead, a drunken Dean is last glimpsed bemoaning the loss of Elizabeth Taylor. She might embody, in turn, her own equation to Texas, since at the end she declares to her husband, “I belong here.” However, she was not born and raised in Texas. Cattle are.

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3 There are no raccoons in Giant. In such contrast to cattle, there is no history for which they could stand. Raccoons simply constitute a mid-size class of mammals native to all of North America (and now to Japan as well as northern portions of Europe). These animals are not remote from human settlement, like bobcats, or even smaller, feral cats, about which Huw Griffiths, Ingrid Poulter, and David Sibley write as follows: “[they] occupy a range of relationships with human populations, from a proximal but non-tactile one to a distant relationship, collapsing in the extreme into these fantastic images of a threatening animal ‘other’ ” (61). The same might be said about raccoons, who are not precisely perceived as potentially transgressive or “out of place” (like foxes, badgers, and wild boar) despite the fact that they too belong to a realm on the other side of the boundary between urban civilization and animal nature. Why are raccoons not perceived as transgressive? Because they already live in close proximity to us? (Hence, our cars as well as our guns are the reasons why their actual lifespan is so short—just two or three years.) Because a young one could conceivably be raised for a time as a companion animal? (The possibility is certified by law in Texas.) I would say that the reason is at once more simple and more “literary”: racoons are not transgressive because they are “cute.” One distinct reason they are cute is because a particular raccoon, named Rascal, is the subject of a famous children’s book of this name, Rascal (1963), by Sterling North. Rascal is presented as mischievous rather than transgressive, clever rather than threatening, and disruptive rather than destructive or violent.3 From the moment when eleven year-old North (or rather his dog) finds him in the woods as a baby in a hollow tree stump, the boy proceeds to raise him, in defiance of the experience of his friend whose father shot a raccoon in his chicken coop the week before or of the ensuing threats of a minister concerned about the security of his own henhouse. To a degree, Rascal becomes the standard story of a boy and his pet, alone against the uncomprehending world. The fact that,

3 The characterization of the book is enhanced and extended by film. A Walt Disney film adaptation was made in 1969, and a fifty-two episode Japanese anime version was made in 1997.

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like Rascal, North is himself without his mother (who died four years previous) is not underlined. It nonetheless forms the bias for understanding Rascal as an animal who can be included within the human realm. North’s own father is away much of the time. Like Rascal, the boy has no family. Alas, however, the book’s narrative nonetheless relates the young animal’s steady separation from the human realm. Initially an innocent victim (compared to a quail chick or a puppy), Rascal soon becomes a guilty criminal, raiding town patches at night for sweet corn. Thus he must be collared, and then eventually caged. “Buying a collar and leash for my pet raccoon was like buying a ball and chain for a dear friend.” writes the boy. “But I thought it would be wise to have Rascal’s approval and assistance; it might lessen his terror when he found out that his freedom had vanished” (108). At this point, Rascal assumes the character of an Emancipation narrative: Rascal’s imprisonment is in fact by human civilization, from which he must be freed.4 However, Rascal doesn’t really “symbolize” anything—that is, anything human. Yet by virtue of the animal’s very placement in history, his existence does come to take on a wider meaning. The book begins in May, 1918. The nation is still at war. The fact is emphasized throughout the memoir; Rascal himself “contributes” to the war effort by helping search for tin foil and picking peas. North is especially worried about his older brother, fighting in Europe. In effect, in his very daily doings Rascal offers an escape from history, into a parallel but alternate narrative world in which something that doesn’t belong—a baby raccoon—is gradually, inexorably, justly restored to where it does belong. By the end, both narratives either end as they should or incline to end as they must. In history, an Armistice is declared. Tyranny has been vanquished. The town of Brailsford Junction celebrates. Meanwhile, in nature, North prepares himself for winter hunting by oiling his muskrat traps—until he is caught up short by one of the pictures in a hunting catalogue, showing a raccoon caught in a trap. The boy hugs Rascal. He puts away his traps. He writes as follows: “Men had stopped killing each other in France that day; and on that day I signed a permanent

4 Elsewhere, North writes as follows: “It seemed to me a wicked thing, to take a wild raccoon kitten from the woods—a little animal who loved speed and adventure and exploration—and to imprison him like an animal at the zoo. I had seen the big cats and the bears pace up and down in their cages in hopeless misery. Would Rascal yearn like that for his lost freedom?” (118).

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peace treaty with the animals and the birds. It is perhaps the only peace treaty that was ever kept” (161). This is the only moment in the book where the worlds of nature and history are explicitly brought together. We recall the subtitle of Rascal: “A Memoir of a Better Era.” It is better in one very distinct respect: if it was once not possible to renounce the killing of other humans, it was possible to renounce the killing of animals. The connection between the two bloody sites remains one of the most controversial in animal studies. On its basis, Derrida—speaking of “the unprecedented proportion of this subjection of the animal”—can notoriously assert as follows: “No one can deny seriously, or for very long, that men do all that they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves, in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide” (Animal, 394). The moment the young North sees the picture of the trapped raccoon in a hunting catalogue may not be comparable to the discovery of genocide. And yet, to the boy, the sight of the picture is so momentous that the “genocide” implicit in a world war can be justly summoned to represent the spectacle of human cruelty to animals. Rascal is set in northern Wisconsin, not Texas. There are of course great dissimilarities between the respective histories of each state. One of North’s neighbors, for example, is Norwegian. The most exciting event in Brailsford Junction is the annual Irish Picnic and Horse Fair. However, the hunting catalogue alone suggests the existence of a larger, common culture, at least insofar as animals are concerned. “Killing an animal is rarely simply a matter of animal death,” writes the Animal Studies Group in its introduction to the collection, Killing Animals. “It is surrounded by a host of attitudes, ideas, perceptions and assumptions. Humans are deeply invested in animal killing both at the level of the complicated industrial and scientific processes that are used in controlling the animal body and in the cultural forms of conduct and ritual that codify things like hunting practices, butchery, and sacrifice” (4). The renunciation of one practice, for one animal, is at the emotional center of Raccoon. The practice takes place everywhere, and the animal in question can be found anywhere in the United States. Although the wilderness to which North leaves Rascal at the end is very specific to northern Wisconsin, the act of returning the animal to what the boy calls his “natural life in the woods” is located in an ethical rather than a geographical universe. Just so, could the boy have performed his act

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at any time? Perhaps. But it seems to me the actual narrative that comprises Rascal insists differently: an ethical act was performed because of the historical circumstances of a peculiar time, in which—to put it too bluntly—the global killing of humans by each other made possible as well as precious a very local, private space in which the preservation of one animal by one human could be treasured. Such a “surround”—ranging from halfway around the world to one’s own backyard—is of course almost impossible to pin down in any decisive or explanatory way. Ultimately, who can say what influences us to do what we do? In the writing of animals, in any case, it seems easier for humans to opt for the expression of moments out of place and time (if only because then each species can occupy the same emotional plane). There is an especially lovely example in Rascal, where the boy and his raccoon are pictured (there is a literal illustration by John Schoenherr) in a tree, the one reading his copy of Westward Ho, the other dozing above on his favorite limb. “We were tree dwellers, my raccoon and I,” North states, “and we rather wished we would never have to set foot on earth again” (116). Back on earth are (among other things) world wars and hunting catalogues. On earth, it is highly significant that a human can read a book, while an animal can’t. Moreover, an animal in a book may well count more to humans than an animal in a tree. At least, in the case of raccoons this seems to be the case. Granted, who wants to kill a raccoon? It would be like killing Rascal! Yet raccoons lack any historical cultural distinction (never mind historical importance) in the United States. And, finally, it is probably easier, albeit for very strange, elusive reasons, to kill a raccoon in southcentral Texas than it would be in northern Wisconsin. 4 My neighborhood frame shop has some lovely wide, mounted photographs of the three major Texas cities. (No cattle or raccoons, please.) The skyscrapers of Houston and Dallas are as impressive as sculptures—cool, distant, contemporary. Perhaps Houston is too sleek to resemble, say, Philadelphia, and Dallas is a bit too small to compare with, say, Chicago. Nonetheless, with these pictures we could just as well be pretty much anywhere in the United States. Urban Texas can undoubtedly be distinguished from other major American cities.

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However, the place to begin is not Houston or Dallas but San Antonio, where I live. The picture of it in my frame shop features no uniform facade of skyscrapers in the distance. Downtown San Antonio is not as impressive as Houston or Dallas. What it does have is an ample foreground of trees, not yet dominated by buildings, business, and, by implication, the whole high capitalist global interlock of aspiration and assurance. San Antonians like to say that they live in “the word’s largest small town.” Residents of the ninth largest city in the U.S. say it as if they mean it, and they mean it, I believe, because so many of them-60% and counting—are Hispanic. If Texas constitutes that part of the United States that likes to think of itself as separate from the United States, San Antonio constitutes that part of Texas that likes to imagine itself as separable, or even separate, from Texas, simply by virtue of its proximity to Mexico. Of course a significant Hispanic population inhabits the entire state. San Antonio, however, is where this population comes together in its largest, most intensely assembled urban mass, which attends Church regularly, celebrates Fiesta annually, and speaks Spanish ubiquitously. I was at once astonished and delighted. Born in Illinois, growing up in California, and working for most of my life in Pennsylvania, I was enabled by San Antonio to adjust to living in the violent, vulgar, oppressive Texas of my whole cultural experience. This wasn’t Texas! The people were too pervasively brown, their courtesy too consistently soft and genuine. Few wore stetsons or boots. Fathers felt respected, women walked around at ease with themselves. Television “News at Ten” seemed full of car crashes rather than robberies or murders. The city was ingloriously overweight—#2 or #1 in the US, depending upon whose survey you followed—but people did not seem so neurotically agonized about it as elsewhere. Is it possible that I even heard a few good-natured jokes? In one sense, San Antonio appeared to me as just the newest version of anywhere—an indisputable American anywhere, granted, but then consider merely all the Spanish spoken, flowing in and out of English everywhere; one day at a bookstore I was transfixed to overhear an older couple circulating amid the two languages so smoothly it became the aural equivalent of watching them swimming in a river that had no name. In another sense, San Antonio quickly became for me the nodal point for an impossible border area between the United States and Mexico. I especially remember the first time my wife and I

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drove back from Laredo, to which we had gone only to be able to go across the border, to Nuevo Laredo. Nuevo Laredo had been a great disappointment—smaller than the Tijuana of my southern California adolescence, and more squalid than Nogales, which was where I had last visited Mexico, fifteen years ago. Ah, but the land outside Laredo! That was another matter. It seemed so forbidding, so dry, so desolate. It felt like nowhere. Or, to put it another way, it felt like the pages of a book. When I asked my literary friends to tell me the name of the best novel about Texas, the same one kept coming up: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Rereading it, I discovered versions of that land outside Laredo everywhere. Consider, for example, the following passage: “They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with dry goat turds and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes or the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their own covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god” (136). I especially like the phrase, “without reference.” The genuinely Texan note is the “autonomous” one. There is that in Texas, beginning and ending with the land, which only has reference to itself.5 McCarthy’s stylish, tortured realm is no less material for becoming everywhere metaphysical—and so it makes more than historic sense that the narrative takes place on the Texas-Mexico border of the 1850s. In the same way, I first thought San Antonio happily permitted me to imagine living in Mexico rather than Texas. Now I realize San Antonio casually permits me to imagine living by means of continually alternating references to both Mexico and the United States. Where am I? It depends on the day, the occasion, the mood. No need to worry about “reference.” My San Antonio is not Houston or Dallas. But it is not only a typical suburban city bulging with the requisite Wal Marts, Home Depots, and Denny’s, or the more distinctive military city ringed by an army base as well as two air force bases. San Antonio is not nowhere. Yet it comfortably opens onto nowhere. And where is nowhere most visible? Not in the dreary coastal plain south to Corpus Christi or the dreary

5 Compare Giant, whose narrative, try as it might, cannot proceed without reference to the East.

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prairie north to Dallas or even in the dreary desert plain west to El Paso. Nowhere is of course located in the mind. If you insist on looking out, though, you don’t have to look farther than your own backyard, in which you will find not dry goats turds but actual live animals that you had forgotten about. 5 Before settling in Texas, I chanced to read a special The Economist piece on, of all places, Texas. Subtitle: “The Future is Texas.” Why so? Because it is becoming California—diverse (the Hispanic population), powerful (all those recent presidents), self-confident (the venerable “gusher elite”) and so on. Or to put the issue another way, America is soon to be more like Texas than California. Thus, the “Texification of America,” which means in effect more politically savvy Republicanism, under the auspices of the state’s “incredible creativity,” especially in the face of such “inhospitable” land. Interestingly, the magazine article concludes with the material fact of the land itself. Notwithstanding such horrors as pollution, poor state planning, and the prison system, “the ability of Texans to impose their will on the land is indeed remarkable.” Cormac McCarthy, it seems to me now, could not put it any better. If he put it this way, however, he would be writing for The Economist rather than for himself. Since he is writing for himself, McCarthy’s main character, a huge Nietzschian homicidal maniac named Judge Holden, puts his relation to the land in the following way: “This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation” (199). This is undoubtedly remarkable. It is also mad. The sort of discourse represented by The Economist rather necessarily neglects certain consequences of the “imposition” that it celebrates, such as the possibility of madness. Creativity is one thing. Violence is another. Or can it be that each is a part of the other? No state, it seems to me, confounds the distinction more than Texas, a state whose literary visions of itself are so frighteningly soaked in violence. Consider only Mary Kerr, from her celebrated memoir, The Liar’s Club, about Leechfield, Texas: “The sheer stink of my hometown woke me before dawn. The oil refineries and chemical plants gave the whole place a rotten-egg smell. The right wind could bring you a whiff of the

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Gulf, but that was rare. Plus the place was in a swamp, so whatever industrial poisons got pumped into the sky just seemed to sink down and thicken in the heat” (33). Here the violence—for lack of a better word—has already taken place. Or rather, it is still taking place in the present, and there is nothing to be done except to suffer it. We are very far from the wondrously expansive, Melvillean rhetoric of the Judge, unless we want to read in such a description a sort of plea for the restoration of such rhetoric. Of course, whether or no, the Judge is already anticipates the issue. In one of his last grand flights he concludes that “each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone” (330). Opposites? How can resigning yourself to destiny be equivalent to protesting it? How are we to understand the logic through which Mexico and Texas keep turning into each other? How can local culture be so decisive? And come to this—I now have to ask out of the very literal, stony ground of my own Texas experience—how can fiction become fact? Neither my wife or I thought we would have to face killing anything when we bought a house. No more than Texas is Pennsylvania, however, San Antonio is not a little town in western Pennsylvania; nature, sparser here, is also closer. Awhile after we moved in, we first heard noises in the chimney. Probably raccoons, we were advised. Raccoons? You mean, Rascal? No, those dirty, ratty, real things. One morning we saw one by the pool and were convinced of the connection to the occasional, persistent chimney noises. A company called Critter Control set a trap on the roof. Three mornings later there was the raccoon in it. When the Critter man came to take it away, we thought we were done with Nature black in tooth and claw. Wrong. One morning, two weeks later, there was another raccoon to be behold! He wobbled and swayed. There seemed a good possibility he was rabid. What to do? The critter headed for one area in our wooden deck we had wired closed, then to another area. It was also closed.. When he slinked toward a third area we had neglected, my wife jumped up from the breakfast table, ran outside, picked up a wooden stick, and hit the animal to prevent him from getting under the deck. But he slipped in anyway. Ten minutes later, my wife screamed. I ran downstairs. The animal had reappeared. She had hit it again. I got a plastic garbage container

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and threw it over the stunned animal, panting on the ground. Then I put a large block of wood on top of the upturned container. Surely the raccoon would be dead—perhaps from suffocation, since the temperature was scheduled to hit 100 when we returned a few hours later from our appointment. It wasn’t dead. I had a shovel in my hand when I knocked over the container. The raccoon was alive and upright, swaying in the most helpless, stricken way. “I can’t hit him,” I pleaded. “I just can’t.” My wife grabbed the shovel, and proceeded to clobber the raccoon over the head, again and again. It fell to the ground but kept struggling to get up. Finally—mercifully—it stopped struggling, its teeth set in a death rattle. I took the shovel from my wife’s hand, lifted the animal’s body, and dumped it into a box, which we then put into a plastic garbage bag. A couple of hours later, a special city department for dead animals collected the bag. We were still trembling, still recalling the violent deaths of animals or in our lives. By then I had remembered the cow I had seen killed in my best friend’s father’s slaughterhouse, when I was ten years old. The sight haunted me for years. After its throat was cut, the animal stood there, swaying, just as the raccoon had when I overturned the container. Apologies to all manly Texans, but I just could not kill the raccoon. Faced with the necessity to kill something larger than an insect for the first time in my life, I was not up to the deed. Now it seems to me that this necessity represents the most defining event so far of my residence in Texas. It appears easy to settle here. Same as anywhere else, you buy a home, establish a circle of friends, determine the most convenient supermarket, and discover favorite restaurants. Yet laying down what McCarthy’s Judge might term “claim” to a place is not as easy as you might think. Or at least, it is not so easy in Texas, where your claim to “autonomous” life has to be remorselessly purchased as the expense of another’s claim. From an impossibly dispassionate perspective, of course, the raccoon had as much claim as my wife and I did. But he was weaker, to the measure that our human “dispensation” was, and is, stronger. This dispensation is not a matter of ideals or values. This animal was rabid. Or if not, how much could we ultimately afford to care? The raccoon was a threat to property—if not directly to our lives—and so we had to kill him. I wish it did not have to be so. One thing, however, to repudiate violence and another thing to avoid it. It seems to me now entirely

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appropriate that it has proved impossible to avoid violence here in Texas, albeit in a form that to many people—not only Texans—might seem more comic than anything else. (“I think I’m finally adjusting to living here,” I remark to some friends. “How?” “Killing something.” Lots of knowing laughter.) How do you lay claim on a place? When the place lays claim on you. I’ll never be a Texan. “Don’t mess with Texas” will always be ironic to me. I hate pickups almost as much as violence. No stetsons or boots, thank you. Most of the cultural representations of Texas that have comprised my life will die hard in my actual experience here. Yet I never expected any of these representations to demand something of me, which I have to feel ashamed to admit that I could not provide. My wife and I have pounded wooden stakes into the ground, on the last remaining side of the deck where the raccoon tried to enter. But the ground is hard. A few of the stakes cannot be driven very deep. There are rocks everywhere. Enough stone to make a man fear, well, that, yes, the very nature of the ground is stone, so a man—in this sort of Texan vocabulary, it is always a man—has to be pretty hard himself just to live here. Or hard enough anyway to have had to act upon a harsh truth about animals and our relations with them: animal planet ends in your own back yard. Worse, all manner of speaking of animals seems to vanish when one particular animal looms there, dangerously. Then you’re going to have to consider killing it. How could this be? Of course it could have happened anywhere. But it happened to me in Texas, where, it seems, it had to happen, if it was going to happen at all. Let the raccoon represent some animal in Kenya I never noticed, or some furry image on a late-night Animal Planet program I barely glimpsed. Or even let the raccoon stand for a Buddy I never castrated or an Inu I never nursed. Most of all, though, let him be Orton, for then I become Jon Katz. As Katz’s experience suggests, the decision to kill an animal—any animal—might well be unrecoverable, as well as indefensible. I don’t want to defend my own decision. Instead, I want to register its incoherence, on the basis of so suddenly having found myself in my own backyard, in the position of a hunter, participating in what Matt Cartmill has described as “the armed confrontation . . . between sinful human history and the timeless harmonies of nature” (242). Cartmill’s point is that this confrontation is an illusion; each condition is part of the other, or as he summarizes: “the human condition is simply one aspect of the animal condition” (243). Well and good. I believe it. So

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I’ve tried to write the forgoing pages. But animals themselves can’t speak to this particular unity between human and animal, and we ourselves can only ask for their silent forgiveness as once more—in our own personal versions of Texas—we find ourselves in position to clobber them over the head.

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INDEX Ackerley, J.R.: My Dog Tulip, 68–70 Adams, Carol, 2 Africa, 147, 161–81, 190, 192 Agaben, Georgio: The Open, 30, 33, 42–52, 90 Amores Perros, 149–50 Anderson, Allen (and Linda Allen): Angel Dogs; Angel Cats; Angel Horses, 56 Animal Planet, 3, 90, 104, 144, 183–201, 220 Animals: as angels, 56–8; as caesura, 43; as children, 24, 37, 67–8, 118, 144, 196; as dialectical term, 49, 61; as food, 13, 28, 92–3, 171, 199; as imaginative limit, 13–14, 26, 42; as national icon, 102, 106–07; as performers, 126–8; as spiritual beings, 12, 38, 42, 56–8, 65, 84, 87–8, 121–3, 145, 149, 174; as sexual beings, 17, 116, 118, 133–4, 187; as trainees, 39, 49, 88, 125–26; 126–39; as uninteresting dualism, 119; as rupture, 145–149; as victims, 11–12, 28, 102–03, 170, 173, 198–9 Animal sanctuary, 123–24 The Animal Studies Group: Killing Animals, 9, 18, 22, 213 Anthropomorphism, 7, 10, 16, 100, 115, 165, 188, 197 Apes, 115–18, 126 Armadillos, 204 Armbruster, Karla, 84 Au hasard Balthassar, 83 Babe, 110 Baboons, 162, 195 Baker, Steve: The Postmodern Animal, 6, 51; Picturing the Beast, 11, 102, 109, 119, 134, 146 Ballard, Carroll: Duma, 149–57 Beck, Alan (with Aaron Katcher), 19, 27, 74, 81 Benikow, Louise: Dreaming in Libro, 55; Bark If You Love Me, 55, 58, 68 Benjamin, Walter, 3 Bentham, Jeremy, 29 Berger, John: “Why Look at Animals?”, 83, 126–7, 130, 161–2

Bollock, Marcus, 8–9, 39–40, 145 Born Free, 137, 151–8 Eric Brown: Insect Poetics, 84, 120 Brown, Norman O.: Love’s Body, 68 Buddy, 17–28, 39–40, 220 Bulls, 101–03 Burt, Jonathan: Animals in Film, 4, 145–6, 149, 150–1, 153, 156, 176, 184, 186–88, 191, 196, 198–99; “Conflicts Around Slaughter,” 199; “The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom,” 198 Calarco, Matthew: Zoographies, 7–8, 14 Camels, 146–49, 157 Cartmill, Matt: A View of Death in the Morning, 2, 170, 208 Cartoons, 3, 5, 55, 109 Cattle, 209–10, 219; cows, 8 Cats, 2, 4, 12, 46, 48, 50–1, 60, 99–100, 106; tigers, 125–39 Cheetahs, 7, 145, 149–51, 157, 166, Chekhov, Anton: “Kashtanka,” 46–50 Chimpanzees, 193 Circus, 8, 49–50, 126–36, 147, 175 Coetzee, J.M.: Lives of Animals, 1, 3, 13, 2; Elizabeth Costello, 2, 13, 24, 26, 109, 113 Cranes, 104–6 Cyborgs, 119, 121 Daston, Lorraine (with Gregg Mitman): Thinking with Animals, 94 Death, 9, 31, 34, 82, 92, 100, 102, 113, 115, 128, 146, 154, 179, 192, 199, 200; acceptance of, 34, 57–8, 60, 61–2; as animal space, 95; as art, 146; Baleia, 78; foundational, 156; Fred, 82; hunting (human), 170–71; hunting (animal), 172–73; individual, 31; as sacrifice, 198–200 Deleuze, Gilles (with Felix Guattari): A Thousand Plateaus, 7, 26, 29, 92–3, 134, 138, 143, 147, 149, 155, 158, 175 Derrida, Jacques: “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, 2, 3–5, 8, 11, 28, 84, 125, 137, 146, 213; “Force of

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Law,” 17, 22–3, 26; “Eating Well,” 28, 198–200 Desmond, Jane, 162 Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1, 119–121 Dickinson, Emily, 6, 61 Dickinson, Peter: The Poison Oracle, 115 Dickey, James: “The Heaven of Animals,” 172–3 Didion, Joan: The Year of Magical Thinking, 59 Dinesen, Isak: Out of Africa, 7, 29–30, 164, 169–70, 173–4, 180 Disney, 169, 185, 189–90, 192, 197, 211 Dogs: abandoned, 20, 41–2; beloved, 36; cute, 88; dying, 75–6, 77; lost, 101; mentally ill, 111, 123; missing, 11; performing, 125, 128; stray, 71–2, 73–4, 77, 79–80; 89; see also Animals Doniger, Wendy, 24–25 Dostoevsky, Ivan: The Brothers Karamazov, 22 Doty, Mark: Dog Years, 59–63 Eakin, Paul John: How Our Lives Become Stories, 67–8 The Economist, 217 Elephants, 126–30, 175, 200 Fehrenback, T.R.: Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans, 206–8 Fitz, Earl, 42 Fossey, Dian: Gorillas in the Mist, 84, 162 Foster, Ken, 55 Foucault, Michel, 183 Fox, Paula: Desperate Characters, 83 Francione, Gary, 2 Freedom, 79, 126, 151–54, 158, 185, 188, 212; see also, Narrative, emancipation Fudge, Erica: Animal, 13, 28, 110, 115, 118, 194; “The Left-Handed Blow,” 210 Gaita Raymond: The Philosopher’s Dog, 7, 66 Garnett, David: “Lady into Fox,” 114 Gazelles, 167–68, 177 Giant, 208–10 Giraffe, 167 Goodall, Jane, 193 Gowdy, Barbara: The White Bone, 84, 112

Gray, Francine du Plessix: Adam and Eve in the City. Selected Nonfiction, 173, 179 Goats, 86–7, 91; goat turds, 216, 216 Grizzlies, 154–56 Grogan, John: Morley and Me, 55 Gruen, Sara: Water for Elephants, 126–8 Haraway, Donna: The Companion Species Manifesto, 2; When Species Meet, 3, 11, 14, 18, 39, 68, 195, 18–28, 115, 118–9, 123, 128–9, 132–3, 136–7, 139, 143 Hearne, Vicki: Adam’s Task, 12, 14, 35; Animal Happiness, 112, 129, 131–4, 136, 138 Heidegger, Martin: 4, 7, 30–1, 33–35, 38–40, 50–52, 90, 199; animal captivation, 30, 38, 44; open, 33, 39, 45–7, 48–50; undisclosable, 156 Hemingway, Ernest: 102, 145; The Green Hills of Africa, 170–2, 180 Herzog, Werner: Grizzly Man, 154–6 Hippos, 169, 178 Høeg, Peter: The Woman and the Ape, 115–6 Hogs, 204–5, 208 Home from the Hill, 208–9 Horses, 128, 132, 134, 139, 149, 208–09 Hough, Robert: The Final Confession of Mabel Start, 125, 131–6 Huxley, Elspeth: The Flame Trees of Thika, 174 Jaguars, 109–12 Jokes, 5, 215 Jones, Owain: “(Un)ethical Geographies,” 83 Kafka, Franz: “The Metamorphosis,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” 111, 114; “A Report to an Academy,” 24, 117, 126 Katz, Jon: Dog Days; The Dogs of Bedlam Farm, 56; A Good Dog, 57 Kerasote, Ted, 58 Kerr, Mary: The Liar’s Club, 217–8 Killing, 9, 17, 22, 42, 59, 85, 91, 154, 172–73, 199, 204, 205, 206, 219, 221; as conscious choice, 63–7; hunting, 91; indefensible, 220; mass practice, 26, 213; ritual, 102; of man by animal, 128, 133, 144, 151,

index 152; ritual, 102, 198–200; structural feature, 18, 20 Koala bear, 106 Kuznair, Alice: Melancholia’s Dog, 2–4, 7, 9, 18, 31, 35–37, 58, 59, 61, 65, 69, 88 Lacan, Jacques, 27, 92, 114 Larson, Gary: The Far Side, 5 Lawrence, D.H.: St. Mawr, 9, 145, 206; “The Fox”, 83 Leishmaniosis, 75–7 Levinas, Emmanuel: “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” 10–11, 35, 199 Lewis, C.S., 32, 35 Lions, 7, 30, 34–5, 138, 151–54, 157, 165, 172, 178 Lispector, Clarice: “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,” 41–51; Foreign Legion, 42; Family Ties, 42; The Passion According to G.H., 42; The Hour of the Star, 42 Lonely Are the Brave, 83 Malamud, Randy: Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, 83, 90, 197–200; “Zoo Spectatorship,” 197–200 Mangum, Teresa: “Dog Years, Human Fears,” 57, 112 Martel, Yann: Life of Pi, 83, 135–9 Marvin, Gary: “On Being Human in the Bullfight,” 102, 143, 170 Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, (with Susan McCarthy): When Elephants Weep, 35 Matthiessen, Peter, 175, 177, 179 McCaig, Donald, 112 McCarthy, Cormac: Blood Meridian, 216, 217, 219 McCullers, Carson: “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” 35–36 McHugh, Susan: Dog, 18–21, 69, 81, 89, 101 Minahen, Charles, 5 Moravia, Alberto: Which Tribe Do You Belong To?, 174, 176 Munro, Alice: “Runaway,” 85–6 Naming, 8, 12, 31, 37, 48, 50, 63, 77, 87, 144, 148–9, 154, 184, 209, 211 Narrative, 8–9, 11, 14, 50–1, 61–3, 66, 68, 83, 89, 91, 93, 130, 138, 145, 156–58, 161–2, 188, 193–4, 203–4; another story, 13, 50–2, 91;

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boundaries, 11; Endangered Species, 185–86, 188, 193–4; literal space, 94; memoir, 66–8, 70; model, 185; of training, 137–38; of wilderness, 145; representation of otherness, 130 Neate, Patrick: The London Pigeon Wars, 113–4 Nelson, Barney: The Wild and the Domestic, 2–4, 8 North, Sterling: Rascal, 10–11, 211–14 O’Connor, Flannery: “Good Country People,” 83 Other, 4, 12, 26, 28, 67, 84, 114, 119, 130, 199; gaze, 61 Oxen, 29–30 Palmer, Clare, 19, 72 Panda, 106 Perro semihundido, 100–1 Pigeons, 99–100, 113–114 Philo, Chris (and Chris Wilbert): Animal Spaces, 74, 83, 144, 161, 163 Politzer, Heinz, 117 Pratt, Mary Louise: Imperial Eyes, Travel Writing and Transculturation, 90, 163, 178 Raccoons, 1, 10, 15, 42, 211–214, 218–220 Ramos, Graciliano: Barren Lives, 78 Red Peter (Kafka), 24, 117–8, 126 Representation, 60, 62, 64, 66, 69, 76–7, 81, 83–4, 91, 131, 133, 145, 153, 156, 165 Rodgers, Kathleen, 12 Rosa, João Guimarães: “My Uncle, the Jaguar,” 109–112 Rothfels, Nigel: “Immersed in Animals,” 127; Savages and Beasts, 122, 185–6 Ryle, John: Theory of Meaning, 50 Safari, 161–81 Sax, Boria: “Animals as Tradition,” 121, 123 Scholtmeijer, Marian, 84 Scully, Matthew: Dominion. The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, 20, 26, 32, 83, 85, 194 Siebert, Charles: Angus, 113; “Planet of the Retired Apes,” 122 Sica, Vittorio de: Umberto D, 88–90 Simons, John: Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation, 8, 84, 87, 90, 157–8

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Snakes, 188–190 Space, 5, 43–4, 74, 83–97, 106; absolute, 22; Real (Lacan), 93; refuge, 7, 9; Undisclosable (Heidegger), 90 Species divide, 5–6, 10, 12, 38, 100, 114, 158, 197, 207 Spielberg, Steven: A-I, 5–6 Smuts, Barbara, 2, 132, 137, 195 Spiders, 120 Sterchi, Beat: Cow, 84 Stoddart, Helen: Rings of Desire. Circus History and Respresentation, 126, 134, 137, 139 Stulter, Jerzy: The Big Animal, 146–7 Time, 32, 40, 49; as being-open, 46; boredom, 48; divided, 35; succession, 32 Toads, 120 Tourism, 161, 162, 163, 165, 178, 179, 205 Toys, 5–6, 59, 81, 103, 148 Trillin, Calvin, 59

Wheeler, Wendy, 6 Wilderness, 150, 162–64, 195–97, 213 Wilson, Alexander: The Culture of Nature. North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez, 84, 161, 163, 197 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 34, 110, 112, 130 Wolfe, Cary: “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion. Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” 26, 118 Wolves, 92 Woodchuck, 9 Woolf, Virgina, 59 Writing: alienation from animals, 70; animal disappearance in, 179–80; contamination of animal speaking, 14; unavoidable constitution of narrative, 164 Zoos, 83, 122, 126–7, 130, 135, 145, 148, 152, 161, 162–4, 200, 212