Thinking Italian Animals

Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film

D. Amberson, E. Past, D. Amberson, E. Past

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137454775
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This bracing volume collects work on Italian writers and filmmakers that engage with nonhuman animal subjectivity. These contributions address 3 major strands of philosophical thought: perceived borders between man and animals, historical and fictional crises, and human entanglement with the nonhuman and material world.

Part 1

Ontologies and Thresholds

1

Confronting the Specter of Animality

Tozzi and the Uncanny Animal of Modernism

Deborah Amberson

Federigo Tozzi’s novel Adele contains an affecting description of the brutal death of a dog, killed by agricultural workers in order to protect the grape harvest from this canine scavenger.1 Tozzi describes the dog’s mounting unease as he is secured with a rope and led away by the head worker and his son. While walking to his death, the dog recalls a bitch he had met that morning and pauses in order to find her scent again. Jerked forward by the peasants, he becomes sad because he does not understand what is happening. On arriving at a fig tree, the peasants tie the dog, who, apparently overcome by emotion, performs gestures of submission. At this point, the son takes his rifle and shoots the dog in the muzzle. The dog falls backward and, wheezing rapidly, spills blood from his mouth down his chest. When he stands again with a gentle expression in his eyes, the son shoots him in the head. As he tries once again to stand up, staring all the while at his killer, the father finishes him off by striking him four times on the head with a shovel (Tozzi 555–57).

The numerous nonhuman animals that inhabit Tozzi’s literary world are, more often than not, subjected to a cruel fate not unlike that of the dog. These beasts, for the most part typical inhabitants of the Tuscan landscape, occupy a realm defined by a violence done unto them by the human. The bulk of this violence takes place in an agricultural domain constructed on a rational program of animal subjection and exploitation implemented in order to guarantee foodstuffs for humanity. Yet despite an apparent authorial denunciation of the instrumentalization and victimization of the nonhuman animal, Tozzi’s animals are not merely pathetic entities who elicit compassion. Instead, their inscrutable gaze, their predatory violence, and their capacity for suffering come to constitute an unfathomable menace for Tozzi’s young human protagonists struggling to negotiate the threshold of adulthood. In this unease before the animal, we might discern a quintessentially modernist or, more specifically, post-Darwinian anxiety before a purported biological kinship between human and nonhuman animality. Accordingly, the animal comes to constitute an uncanny presence, simultaneously familiar and alien, which provokes a series of often unpredictable human responses, including compassion, shame, repulsion, anguish, and violence. This essay charts Tozzi’s bleak portrait of human–animal relations as they evolve in Siena and its environs during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Exploiting the Beast

Turning initially to the domesticated animals of human agriculture, we discover a series of animal beings whom we might consider in the light of Jean-François Lyotard’s claim that “the animal is the paradigm of the victim” (28). Situated within a discussion of the differend, defined by Lyotard as “a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (xi), the animal is identified as a being “deprived of the possibility of bearing witness according to the human rules for establishing damages” (28). In the case of the aforementioned dog killed to protect the grapes, we note Tozzi’s focus on the dog’s inadequate attempts to communicate through whimpers (556) and “acts of submission,” and his efforts to elicit compassion from his killers by holding their gaze even up to his death (557). This description, arguably the most pathos laden of all Tozzi’s animal portraits, draws us into the mental interiority of the dog as he experiences a sense of disquiet on being bound and led away and a mounting sadness in the face of his failure both to understand his plight and to communicate his state of mind (556). What Tozzi seems intent on underscoring here is, very simply, the dog’s suffering. In so doing, he seems to echo, at least to some extent, Jeremy Bentham, who famously repositioned philosophies of animality by considering not the nonhuman animal’s lack of rationality or speech but rather his or her capacity for suffering: “[T]he question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, can they suffer?” (311). Tozzi suggests an ethical equivalence between the human and nonhuman animal, an equivalence noted by Franco Petroni, who writes that the nonhuman characters are almost always represented in the same manner as the humans, “almost as though their capacity for suffering was sufficient for them to be recognized by the narrative as our equals, endowed, like us, with a ‘soul’” (42).2

This animal capacity for suffering prompts Tozzi’s apparent denunciation of the agricultural exploitation of the nonhuman animal. Most pertinent here are the novels set in the world of farming—namely, the aforementioned Adele, With Eyes Closed (Con gli occhi chiusi), and The Farm (Il podere).3 The well-known scene of the castration of the farm animals in With Eyes Closed constitutes perhaps the most graphic indictment of agricultural violence.4 The young protagonist’s father Domenico habitually orchestrates a sweeping castration of his “beasts,” which shows little apparent discrimination, targeting cockerels, calves, dogs, and cats (72).5 The event is a spectacle drawing the amused workers to see the “dejected” cockerels “with bloodied feathers” and the calves “stunned by the castration, distressed, their eyes darker and more sullen” (72). Toppa, the dog, is also targeted and stands afterward with his tail tucked between his legs growling at those other dogs who draw near to him (73). The workers approve of this bloody event, remarking that, as a result of the castration, the animals “will get even fatter” (72).

This premeditated fattening of the farm animals draws us toward the question of the slaughterhouse and the human consumption of animal flesh, an issue about which much has been said in the field of animal philosophy. In “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” Jacques Derrida identifies the “sacrificial structure” of discourses that separate the “animal” from the “human” and, in so doing, open a place for “a noncriminal putting to death” of that “animal” (Points 278). Moreover, this is a gendered discourse that privileges the human male. In fact, Derrida identifies a “carnivorous virility” that underpins Western subjectivity, and accordingly, his “phallogocentrism” is reconfigured as “carno-phallogocentrism” (Points 280, italics in original). As such, the male subject “does not just want to master and possess nature actively” but also becomes the one who “accepts sacrifice and eats flesh” (Points 281).6 Adele offers a scene in which a family of agricultural laborers slaughters a pig. Faced with the “cut up and bloody” pig’s flesh, “their instincts become manifest” (550). Yet this particular reference to instincts does not reflect the commonplace and pejorative association of human physical appetites with “animal” behavior. Instead, it seems connected with a human instinct to dominate the animal world and, more specifically, the male acceptance of the animal sacrifice. This becomes clear when the father of the family threatens the dog when he sniffs around the meat. Apparently reinforcing a species hierarchy that places humanity at the top of the food chain, the father kicks the dog violently and drives him off with death threats: “If you touch this, I will shoot you” (551).

Violence, however, is not exclusive to humanity. Indeed, while Tozzi certainly underscores the suffering of agricultural animals at the hands of humanity, he also describes a nonhuman animal world defined by an internal brutality. Turning once again to Adele, we find a reference to a hen who unwisely entered a pig’s trough only to be snatched up in the mouth of the pig who would have killed her had a human not beaten him in turn with a stick (536). In the same pages we read of two hens placed in a henhouse where they are tortured and almost killed by the other hens: “[T]hey tormented them all day long, forcing them to run along the fence of the enclosure, under a hail of pecks. The following morning they were found still alive but with their heads entirely skinned. Blood still dripped over their yellow eyes” (537). With Eyes Closed offers the example of the aforementioned dog Toppa, who killed more than one dog “by biting them savagely on the backbone” and tore to pieces two other dogs who had dared to eat his food (100). Thus Tozzi’s animals, human and nonhuman alike, seem defined by a shared relation to violence. Accordingly, the world of living beings is not so much divided into humanity on the one side and animality on the other. It is, rather, divided across the various species barriers into predator (almost always male) on the one side and victim on the other, with each individual falling into the former category or the latter according to his or her position on a hierarchical chain of violent domination. The agricultural exploitation of the nonhuman animal, then, constitutes just one form, albeit probably the most systematized, of the violence and suffering that defines embodied being.

Tozzi’s young human protagonists are closer in kind and in status to the oppressed animal than to the persecutor, repeatedly falling foul of a social and economic order constructed on a calculating violence—a violence, it bears repeating, that is almost always gendered as male. While this despairing identification with the animal victim certainly relates to the critically well-trodden question of the protagonists’ failure (or refusal) to enter an adulthood personified in the figure of the hypersexualized and brutally tyrannical father,7 it is also central to Tozzi’s treatment of animality. Indeed, the sexualized brutality of human adulthood is frequently displayed by dominating a nonhuman animal, as is amply demonstrated in a single example from With Eyes Closed. Domenico inflicts what Luperini terms a “test of strength and virility” (7) on the young protagonist Pietro when he insists that the boy master an unruly horse. The father’s whip, identified by Luperini as a sadistic-phallic emblem of the authority of the “father-master” (8), is raised to Pietro’s nose as he is threatened by his father for ultimately failing to dominate the horse (Tozzi 34).

Pietro’s failure or refusal to master this animal body constitutes, I would suggest, a broader rejection of a particular social (and agricultural) configuration personified by the brutal and sexualized father figure, whose duty, as Sandro Maxia underlines, is that of affirming, imposing, and guarding order and continuity (59). This rejection, moreover, is not limited to With Eyes Closed but is also apparent in the novels of inheritance—namely, The Farm and Three Crosses (Tre croci).8 Indeed, Debenedetti extends his Oedipal reading with the claim that the “property” inherited by Remigio Selmi, protagonist of The Farm, and by the Gambi brothers in Three Crosses symbolizes paternal authority (98). More important, the heirs’ failure or refusal to make an economic success of their inheritance suggests the negation of the capitalistic fetishization of property (86). Here, Debenedetti intuits what, I would argue, is a programmatic albeit subtle denunciation of a specifically capitalist rationalization of objects and beings as abstract resources. It is this principle of exploitative instrumentalization that Remigio attacks as he negates the economic properties of the farm.9 Remigio’s rebellion against the paternal model of exploitation of bodies becomes even more radical when he himself accepts the status of the sacrifice, a status more conventionally attributed to the nonhuman animal of agriculture. Walking in front of Berto, a farm worker who not only is armed with a hatchet but has made clear his hatred for the young farm owner, Remigio feels increasing fear at the proximity of his employee (399). He wants to turn around to smile at Berto, but he finds himself unable to do so. In fact, Remigio evidently senses danger, but he repeatedly does nothing to protect himself, as though he is already resigned to his fate as sacrificial victim. He continues to walk forward, and finally Berto, “enraged [. . .] struck him with the hatchet on the back of the neck” (399). In dying, Remigio appears to refuse the status of male subject who accepts and eats the animal sacrifice. Instead, he offers himself as animalized “thing” to Berto’s hatchet and becomes a scapegoat for the violent exploitation of animal bodies needed to guarantee economic success in the domain of agriculture and, more generally, human supremacy in the world.10

The Unfathomable Animal

To characterize Tozzi’s young protagonists as steadfast defenders of the animal victims of agriculture would, of course, be erroneous. Such a view does not begin to account for the anxiety and disgust frequently felt by the protagonists before the world of animality and, specifically, before the gaze of the animal. In Tozzi’s literary universe, the animal gaze is disconcerting, encompassing that same enigmatic variety acknowledged by Derrida, who imagines himself observed naked by an animal gaze “behind which there remains a bottomlessness, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive and impassive, good and bad, uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret” (Animal 12). Wherein lies this unsettling force of the animal gaze? For Derrida, when this “wholly other” animal being who dwells in “intolerable proximity” returns our gaze, it challenges human efforts at self-delineation from the throng of living beings. In short, the animal gaze discloses the precipitous and even preposterous edges of the category of the human: “[T]he gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human [. . .] the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself” (Animal 12). For Georges Bataille, the animal gaze carries a similar force, introducing a sameness that remains utterly unfathomable and opening before the human “a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me” (2, italics in original).

This presence of a familiar and simultaneously unknowable animality becomes even more disconcerting in light of Charles Darwin’s publication of his theories on evolution, a scientific mechanism that, to state the obvious, insists on a biological continuity between human and animal species.11 Carrie Rohman stresses the increased centrality of animality to a post-Darwinian world still reeling from the “catastrophic bl...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Mimesis: The Heterospecific as Ontopoietic Epiphany
• Introduction: Thinking Italian Animals
• Part 1: Ontologies and Thresholds
• Part 2: Biopolitics and Historical Crisis
• Part 3: Ecologies and Hybridizations
• Contributors