The basic argument of Charles Fosterâs nonfiction book Being a Beast (2016) is simple: dominant modes of human living at the start of the twenty-first century have blunted our sensory capabilities and harmed nonhuman creatures, and that is why we should revitalize our senses and environments by actively trying to live and think like other animals. In one chapter, for example, Foster recounts how he attempted to get closer to the life world of otters. As you might expect, jumping into a river at night and trying to listen below the waterline turned out to be a rather uncomfortable exercise at first:
Such scenes are taken to confirm that living like these nonhuman animals reawakens our senses and helps us âto thrive as a human beingâ (68, emphasis in original), given that we have devolved into âunsensory, unmindful creaturesâ (124). Foster remains acutely aware of the fact that human minds and bodies cannot actually become those of the otters, badgers, foxes, and other species he shadows and describes in this contemporary instance of nature writing. Human bodies are adapted to other environments and process sensory information differently, after all. Yet exercises in cross-species sensing remain possible, he insists, seeing that at least some creatures have comparable sense receptors and inhabit environments we too can explore. Though mindful of the projectâs limitations, Foster hence rejects a classic skeptical argument about human-animal relations: âWittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we couldnât understand a word it was saying, since the form of a lionâs world is so massively different from our own. He was wrongâ (21). More could be said about this project, which won the Ig Nobel Prize for biology in 2016, but the crucial point for my purposes here is that it touches upon some of the main themes of the present book. Across a broad range of twenty-first-century writing, readers encounter spirited critiques of contemporary human society and its treatment of other life forms, and this predicament as well as its solution is repeatedly cast in sensory terms, as a failure in cross-species communication rooted in the poor listening skills of absent-minded humans, necessitating a fundamental recalibration of our hearing apparatus, which tunes it to what I will call the multispecies soundscape. There are differences too. Most of the cases I analyze in the following chapters are instances of fiction rather than nonfiction, concentrate mostly if not exclusively on sound, ponder the role of acoustic media alongside seemingly immediate experiences like those narrated by Foster , and devote more attention to the experiences of humans listening to animal voices than to the life worlds of animals or humans acting like animals. Going forward, I will also reflect critically on attempts to expand the reach of human listening, which deserve praise for bringing into view different lives but also invite criticism when they boost our sensory confidence in ways that appear incompatible with a more-than-human outlook (âCall yourself a human?â). But all of these examples share Fosterâs interest in recent biological findings, promote a similar form of sensory revitalization, and raise questions about acoustic contact between various species.When my head broke back up through the film of foam âŚ, I had a ⌠skin of seamless ears like the compound eyes of a bluebottle, each of them sucking in sound. This, to begin with, was far too much sensation for sense. My brain knew what to do with sound beamed into the sides of my head. It couldnât cope with sounds from my little toe and my shoulder. It got dizzy with overload and with the unaccustomed angles ⌠But then my brain ⌠realised that it was up to the job of co-ordinating the broadcasts from each of its distant ⌠outstations and swelled proprietorially, announcing that its body was ⌠capable of doing new, strange stuff. âHave you never heard with your knee?â it said. âHa! Call yourself a human?â Sound travels more than four times faster in water than in air. When youâre down in the water, relying mainly on sound âŚ, distances are exhilaratingly shrunk. A crayfish clattering across gravel fifty yards away sounds as if itâs at the end of your arm. The water filling your ears is a megaphone. (94â5)
Examining similar scenes of listening, the present book charts how early twenty-first-century writers represent the multispecies soundscape and reflects on the relations between human and other animals as they are mediated by an array of competing sonic media, the novel especially. It is primarily aimed at three audiences: students and scholars of literature and culture who want to learn more about sound and the human-animal interface; students and scholars who work on animals and the environment more broadly, and would like to understand how nonhuman sounds acquire cultural meaning, in a literary context especially; and students and scholars investigating sound and listening who want to broaden the remit of their research beyond the scope of the human. But I hope the book also caters to the interests of a more diffuse group of readers, who may simply be fascinated by the noisy creatures who inhabit its pages, including echolocating Irrawaddy dolphins, loud Tasmanian devils and quiet Tasmanian tigers, musical crickets, birds, and frogs, rumbling African and Asian elephants, laughing and signing chimps, injured dogs and horses with racing hearts, threatening vampires with silent bodies, and several deafened marine mammals, including Cuvierâs beaked whalesânot to mention numerous talking and roaring humans. Alternatively, general readers might be drawn to the bookâs account of distinct communities of listeners, who experience the sounds of other creatures in ways inflected by their professional status as scientist, recordist, hunter, composer, linguist, vet, doctor, cowboy, submarine captain, or sonar technicianâor by more personal, less specialized exchanges with nonhuman animals. As I explain below, this book is not an introduction to biosemiotics or bioacoustics, the two scientific disciplines that study animal communication systems, nor is it an ethnographic study of actual listeners, which summarizes observations of and interviews with anonymized real-life informants. But it tackles related topics in comparing divergent human responses to animal sounds, the changing cultural meanings ascribed to nonhuman vocalizations and other creaturely vibrations. Approaching these topics through the lens of contemporary novels appears strange at first, because literature is conventionally believed to be entirely silent, fictional, and anthropocentric. That is why this introduction clarifies the conception of literature, animals, sounds, and media that underpins my approach, and that explains why this traditional view of the novel is not the whole story, not today, and not in earlier times either. If we adjust our approach slightly and retune our ears, as listeners and readers, we will find that this flexible literary genre provides vital resources for social debates on human-animal relations and the urgent interdisciplinary conversations of the environmental humanities.
Why Animal Sounds Now?
Before turning to more specific case studies, I will address a number of important preliminary questions. Why should we study animal sounds, and what can the humanities contribute to our understanding of these nonhuman sonorities? Is this not a topic that should be reserved for scientists specialized in fields like ethology and bioacoustics? How does my argument compare to research in biosemiotics, animal studies, and sound studies? How do cultural artifacts in various media represent nonhuman voices, and why do I approach these questions through the lens of literary texts? What does this book contribute to recent debates in literary studies, and what sort of methodological framework will I be applying to my case studies? All of these questions will be dealt with in the next paragraphs, which position my project vis-Ă -vis existing scholarship, frame the bookâs subsequent chapters, and spell out the projectâs social, literary, and academic rationale. To make these points more concrete, the introduction features a more extended second example too, which will again take us below the waterline.
But let me begin by answering why we should study these acoustic phenomena and their cultural lives at the start of the twenty-first century. One reason for examining nonhuman voices in recent fiction is simply that the novels inspected in the coming pages are particularly attuned to what I have labeled the âmultispecies soundscapeâ. Even if it is true that modern literature has always recorded this ambient audio in one way or another, as we shall see, this book still claims that its representation has recently diversified and intensified, a process that requires proper analysis and contextualization. But there are additional environmental and literary reasons for attending to these sounds at the start of the twenty-first century. First of all, we are living in a period of systemic biodiversity loss in which wild nonhuman species and their sounds are disappearing at an alarming rate because of human activities, in what scientists argue is a mass extinction event on the scale of the catastrophe that caused the disappearance of the dinosaurs and up to 75% of all plant and animal species roughly 66 million years ago (Kolbert 2015). While my account does not reiterate the apocalyptic rhetoric encountered in popular culture and underlines the complexity of the biodiversity debate in Chap. 2 and our sonic ties to domesticated creatures in Chap. 5, this ongoing extinction event remains an important context for this book, not just because of its ecological and moral ramifications, but because the resulting anxiety informs most contemporary responses toward animal sounds. An instructive example is the What is Missing project of American artist Maya Lin (2009â), which repurposes audio clips from large-scale acoustic archives in art installations that function as a âglobal memorial to the planetâ, as the accompanying website phrases it (see Dimock 2013). As such initiatives indicate, there is an overlooked acoustic dimension to cultural practices involving âmultidirectional eco-memoryâ (Kennedy 2017) or âplanetary memoryâ (Bond et al. 2017). If human activities are causing animal voices to disappear, they are also adding increasing volumes of noise to the environment, outcompeting the signals of other species in a sonic contest that explains, scientists argue, why the vocalizations of animals like bats, whales, tamarins, and nightingales become louder in circumstances where the presence of human noises would otherwise mask their attempts at communication, resulting in the so-called Lombard effect (Brumm and Todt 2002). A similar effect obtains in the cultural realm, my book argues, as the omnipresence of human noise in contemporary society gives rise to a louder natural soundscape in the novels of environmentally sensitive writers too, who are amplifying these fragile voices at a time when the available bandwidth has narrowed considerably.
Another reason for studying these nonhuman voices is that our heightened awareness of their vulnerability forces writers and critics to reexamine and reevaluate literary form and tradition. How have other periods and cultures responded to animal sounds, and what can twenty-first-century novelists contribute to the environmental imagination of their precursors? As Jacques Rancière asserts in The Politics of Literature (2011), âall political activity is a conflict aimed at deciding what is speech or mere growlâ, a process that âreconfigures the distribution of the perceptibleâ by âmak[ing] audible as speaking beings those who were previously heard only as noisy animalsâ (4). If disenfranchised populations are often silenced by categorizing their voices as politically irrelevant âgrowlsâ, in other words, this process can be reversed by redrawing the map of the audible. Developing this argument in Literature and Animal Studies (2016), Mario Ortiz Robles redirects our attention to the many literal growls in literary history:
Robles rightly notes that literature has noticed animal sounds from the start, in line with the fact that no textual feature is âmore visibly literary, nor more visibly discreditedâ than âthe giving of voice to animalsâ (180). Indeed, while we can easily locate numerous examples of these sounds in literary texts, it cannot be denied that past reading protocols have largely ignored these âgrowlsâ, by reinterpreting texts about speaking animals as allegories or by quarantining them from ot...In Rancièreâs formulation, a âpolitics of literatureâ implies that literature intervenes as literature in the political process, helping to determine what is visible and what is audible. ⌠But animals of course are already audible in literature, if we would only care to listen. The copious catalogue of howls, barks, meows, growls, purrs, chirps, warbles, tweets, and the many other audible voices of the ânoisy animalsâ that inhabit [the literary archive] suggest that in order to make animals count politically, we must first reconfigure the distribution of the perceptible within literature [which requires] a politics of reading since animals have been speaking in literature from its inception, even if they have not always been audible. (144, emphasis in original)