Other Selves

Janice Fiamengo, Janice Fiamengo

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780776618500
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination begins with the premise, first suggested by Margaret Atwood in The Animals in That Country (1968), that animals have occupied a peculiarly central position in the Canadian imagination. Unlike the longer-settled countries of Europe or the more densely-populated United States, in Canada animals have always been the loved and feared co-inhabitants of this harsh, beautiful land. From the realistic animal tales of Charles G. D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, to the urban animals of Marshall Saunders and Dennis Lee, to the lyrical observations of bird enthusiasts John James Audubon, Thomas McIlwraith, and Don McKay, animals have occupied a key place in Canadian literature, focusing central aspects of our environmental consciousness and cultural symbolism.

Other Selves explores how and what the animals in this country have meant through all genres and periods of Canadian writing, focusing sometimes on individual texts and at other times on broader issues. Tackling more than a century of writing, from 19th-century narrative of women travellers, to the "natural" conversion of Grey Owl, to the award-winning novels of Farley Mowat, Marian Engel, Timothy Findley, Barbara Gowdy, and Yann Martel, these essays engage the reader in this widely-acknowledged but inadequately-explored aspect of Canadian literature.

PART I

Reading Strategies for Animal Writing

(B)othering the Theory

Approaching the Unapproachable in Bear and Other Realistic Animal Narratives

GWENDOLYN GUTH, HERITAGE COLLEGE

There is a moment in chapter nine of Bear in which Lou, archivist of 19^th-century local history, suddenly turns literary critic and critiques the theory at the heart of Marian Engel’s celebrated novel. It is the morning after the bear’s first foray into the octagonal house on the northern Ontario island—his pumping up the stairs toward the terrified Lou, and her gradual progression from cowering on the desk, to sitting just above him on a sofa, to rubbing her bare foot in the bear’s black pelt (suffused with the victory and splendour of her daring), to chiding herself, finally, for her foolishness, and brusquely ordering the bear back downstairs and outside. During the morning after this eventful evening, as she eats breakfast and trades a stare with the bear, Lou ponders her literary knowledge of animals, specifically her Canadian exemplars:

She had grown up reading many books about animals as a child. Grown up on the merry mewlings of Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne, and Thornton W. Burgess; passed on to Jack London, Thompson Seton or was it Seton Thompson, with the animal tracks in the margin? Grey Owl and Sir Charles Goddamn Roberts that her grandmother was so fond of. Wild ways and furtive feet had preoccupied that generation, and animals clothed in anthropomorphic uniforms of tyrants, heroes, sufferers, good little children, gossipy housewives….

Yet she had no feeling at all that either the writers or the purchasers of these books knew what animals were about. She had no idea what animals were about. They were creatures. They were not human. She supposed that their functions were defined by the size, shape and complications of their brains. She supposed that they led dim, flickering, inarticulate psychic lives as well.

He, she saw, lay in the weak sun with his head on his paws. This did not lead her to presume that he suffered or did not suffer. That he would like striped or spotted pyjamas. Or that he would ever write a book about humans clothed in ursomorphic thoughts. A bear is more an island than a man, she thought. To a human. (Bear 60)

To a human like Lou, and by extension Engel, the “anthropomorphic uniforms” forced upon animals by generations of Euro-Western literary tailors fit badly. For Lou, the thought of patterned pyjamas on Ursus americanus is as incongruous as the writerly impulse that would domesticate and alliterate the “inarticulate psychic lives” of non-human creatures in ways that invite ridicule (“[w]ild ways,” “furtive feet,” “animal tracks in the margin”). Though one might accuse Lou of fuzzy analytical thinking (the naturalist-minded efforts of Seton, Roberts, and Grey Owl are equidistant worlds away, after all, from the “merry mewlings” of Beatrix Potter, an epithet that does little justice to Potters dark, frightening, and satirical moments), we must allow that Engel’s character has lodged a time-honoured objection. The vanity of anthropomorphism that was critiqued by philosopher-poet Xenophanes in 6^th-century Greece and that continues to influence our present age is precisely the representation of the non-human other in human terms.¹ Having registered her dissatisfaction with anthropomorphism, however, Lou all-too-uncritically adopts an equally familiar and problematic paradigm by which to understand the bear: that of symbol. Marooned on a literal island, Lou imagines herself companioned by a furred figurative one: “A bear is more an island than a man … To a human’” (60), she thinks, transferring John Donne’s symbol of isolationist existence to the animal realm. The trouble, as Susan Fisher has noted, is that symbolism, every bit as much as anthropomorphism, “represent[s] the animal in terms of human structures of meaning” (258). Since representation of some kind is necessary to the incorporation of animals into a work of art, the following “formal and philosophical challenge” may well be put: How can one represent animals in literature “without resorting either to symbolism or anthropomorphism”? (Fisher 258).

We will skirt the borders of this question by training a critical eye on Engel’s Bear, a novel simultaneously condemned as pornographic and celebrated as the Governor General’s Award winner for fiction in 1976. Engel scrutinizes the dilemma of animal representation by couching the almost fabular story of a woman’s sexual tryst with a bear within the framework of a novel that critic after critic praises for its believability, its realism. As New York editor Dan Wickendon put it in 1975, some months before the novel’s publication with McClelland & Stewart, Engel succeeds in making the reader “understand,” “accept,” and “take…seriously” a story that “could have seemed incredible, or unintentionally comic, or merely grotesque, or of sheerly prurient interest, or wholly disgusting, or a combination of all of these things” (Verduyn and Garay 149). The earnestness with which Wickendon renders his long list of potential pitfalls nearly slides into backhanded compliment, and seems to echo, tonally, those critical voices that praise Bear’s realist success while simultaneously gesturing to its ruptures—themselves figured in anthropomorphic or symbolic terms. Fisher, in 2001, finds Bear “remarkably convincing,” but her complete description denotes “a sly, remarkably convincing beast fable” (259; emphasis added). “Sly,” with its connotations of furtive craftiness, suggests something underhanded about the narrative, a deceptive wool pulled over readers’ eyes, a novelistic renard in sheep’s clothing. “Beast fable,” we recall, is the genre that Charles G.D. Roberts associated most fully with a utilitarian allegorizing of animals to codify human morality and passions, and from which he was eager to distance his own naturalist-motivated animal stories. I would argue that Engel’s method of approaching the unapproachable has something in common with the factual verisimilitude of Roberts; little, except as ephemera, to do with the animal-as-symbol articulated by Engel’s nationalist contemporaries in 1970s Canada; and much shared territory with the rigorously self-critiquing poetics of ecologically-minded nature poets such as Tim Lilburn and Don McKay. The inscrutability of the animal other, and not (as George Woodcock so mistakenly puts it) “humanity recognizing and uniting with its animal nature” (355), thus emerges as one of the more intriguing considerations raised by Bear.

The debate about whether or not animals constitute mere “vehicles for human qualities” (Ware xiv) leads to ontological and epistemological questions about animal consciousness that have been with us for some time and that bear directly on Lou’s musings about the “dim, flickering, inarticulate psychic lives” of non-human creatures (60). In 1910, American author Jack London defended himself against the label of “nature faker” by counter-charging that his attackers, John Burroughs and President Theodore Roosevelt, were “homocentric” and “distinctly mediaeval” in their belief that animals are mere non-rational “automatons” (196). Today, most philosophers would likely concur, rejecting the Burroughs-Roosevelt “Cartesian prejudice” for the following reasons: first, there is no ontological basis for denying the existence of the Cartesian mind in animal bodies; second, Descartes’ generalist arguments are problematically based in unsystematic, unscientific investigations that lack empirical verification (Allen n.p.).² Of the several categories of consciousness that are presently theorized or explored philosophically in relation to animals, at least two are familiar in concept, if not in name, from 19^th-century literary practitioners of animal fiction. “Access consciousness” refers to the idea that animals possess “mental representations” that can be accessed and transferred into a “global workspace” where they are then employed for “higher cognitive processing tasks such as categorization, reasoning, planning, and voluntary direction of attention” (Block qtd. in Allen screen 2). “Phenomenal consciousness,” which explores the “qualitative, subjective, experiential, or phenomenological aspects of conscious experience,” transfers conceptually to the animal realm in terms of considering, “in Nagel’s (1974) phrase, [whether] there might be something it is like’ to be a member of another species”—a condition that Nagel claims cannot be definitively known, imagined, or described objectively at all (Allen n.p.). When Jack London expends considerable ink arguing that the actions of his childhood pet, Rollo, were directed by simple reason (202–207), and when Charles G.D. Roberts claims that Blue Fox deduces by means of the “strictly rational process of putting two and two together” how to preserve his food by means of an underground cache and “the efficacy of cold storage” (“A Master of Supply” 57), both writers must be seen to be articulating the theory of access consciousness. When the little muskrat displays behaviours that suggest a longing for its burrow (“By the Winter Tide”), and the dragonfly larva wreaks a particularly savage kind of havoc on its insect neighbours (“The Little Wolf of the Pool”), we glimpse Roberts’s forays into the empirically murky realm of phenomenal consciousness.³

Even more speculative is the theory—and literary rendering—of animal “self-consciousness.” In its “second-order character (’thought about thought’),” this theory involves a creature’s capacity to represent to itself its own “mental states,” and is linked to “theory of mind” questions—that is, whether or not non-human animals can attribute mental states to others (Allen screen 2). Such extended “‘humanizing’” (the derogatory term is London’s) can be perceived in Roberts’s “The King of the Mamozekel” in Kindred of the Wild—a “rounded animal biography” (Ware xix) that may, in part, have perpetrated Burroughs’s 1903 attack on that collection.⁴ Roberts’s bull moose holds grudges and enacts revenge (on a representative porcupine family), feels “chagrin,” “wrath,” and “shame,” and climactically surmounts a lifelong fear of bears not merely to rescue its threatened offspring but in order to wipe out “fear itself” (99). To the extent that such a story “force[s] us to recognize the possibility that animals are capable of modifying their instinctive behaviour patterns” by “applying intelligence to memory” or indeed that animals can existentially “remak[e] themselves at particular critical moments in their lives” (Ware xix), Roberts’s “King” enacts a literary version of animal self-consciousness. A plethora of arguments rushes in to smother the self-consciousness theory, of course—everything from Jane Jacobs’s claim that non-human animals have no foreknowledge of their own mortality⁵ to Lev Vygotsky’s argument that imagination constitutes a “specifically human form of consciousness” that is “totally absent in animals” (Vygotsky screen 3). But the truth is that animals cannot be interrogated about their mental states—or rather, that we have not yet discovered a non-linguistic way to question them in this regard; thus, though we must contend with a lack of evidence that they possess mental states, we do not, conversely, have evidence that they lack mental states altogether. In short, we simply do not know.⁶ In the absence of empirical data, Roberts’s self-actualized moose may well be an accurate—possibly even a realistic—portrayal.

Whose definition of realism prevails, we might well ask, in terms of literary representation? In her compelling critique of Roberts’s animal stories, Misao Dean reminds us that “the ideology implicit in realistic technique” problematizes the idea that language is a transparent conduit for material reality. Given that “all realistic works rely on the evocation of cultural codes which are ideological,” “construct[ing] the real rather than reflect[ing] it” (Dean 3), there can be no such thing as transparent realism uninflected by authorial intention (i.e., by what an author chooses to signify as “real”). In this sense, the same Roberts who, in “The Animal Story,” his 1902 prefatory essay to The Kindred of the Wild, offered his literarily-rendered “psychology of animal life” as a radically new alternative to no fewer than three existing modes of animal story (the anthropomorphic moral fable, the “frankly humanized” creations of Kipling and Sewell, and the instinct-privileging naturalist writings of Burroughs) (“The Animal Story” 220, 221)—this same Roberts can be seen to be speaking within what Dean calls “the masculinist discourse of the early twentieth century”: each of his predominantly male creatures “masquerade[s] as other’” but in reality reifies, in Dean’s words, “the ideological subject offered to turn-of-the-century readers of realist fiction” (5). This is an important and fascinating argument. But one wonders still: is Blue Fox (engaged in diligent winter stockpiling) really just an “animal expression of the Protestant work ethic” (Dean 8)?

John Sandlos disagrees, countering that Roberts and Seton consciously created “a hybrid literary form that sat on the boundary between natural science and fiction” (75)⁷ Sandlos may be interpreted as suggesting that certain critics commit their own version of the anthropomorphic fallacy in that they concentrate exclusively on the ideological or symbolic components that make literary animals into human constructs and thereby “refuse to acknowledge the material, biological, and ecological concerns that inform Seton’s and Roberts’s works”: refuse to consider, for example, how “observed animal behaviour” might function “within a larger ecological and philosophical framework” (75). Such a framework, of course, is that of cognitive ethology, an “interdisciplinary” and “comparative science” in which careful field observation in the natural environment becomes a key component in assessing “the evolution of cognitive processes” in non-human animals (Bekoff and Allen 313). It is a field whose proponents might well accept Roberts’s contention that animal psychology can be inferred from animal behaviour; and that, evincing careful observation and “keep[ing] well within the limits of safe inference,” Roberts’s own stories offer an underlying “motive” for animal behaviour that “affords the most reasonable, if not the only reasonable, explanation of that action” (Roberts qtd. in Whalen 238). Such words might well form as succinct a defence of the realistic mode as Roberts ever articulated for his fiction.

When Atwood launched her famous victim thesis in Survival (1972),⁸ chapter three claimed, with bipolar intensity, that although the animal story in Canada described the real lives of real animals from “inside the fur and feathers,” “from the point of view of the animal” (the italics are Atwood’s), it was equally true that “realism, in connection with animal stories, must always be a somewhat false claim,” given that animals neither speak nor write a human language; hence “[i]t’s impossible to get the real inside story” (74–75). Although this apparent contradiction would seem fertile ground for a kind of postmodern theorizing, Atwood’s point is rather that animals are symbolic in literature, functioning always as projections of particular human meanings, as anthropomorphic representations. Atwood is at pains to differentiate her country’s cultural products from the animal stories of England and America, the former represented by furry-suited class-conscious rarefications (by Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, and Rudyard Kipling, for example) and the latter characterized by Frontier-style hunters and hunted (by Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway, among others). Her subsequent Canadian articulation casts the doomed and dying, murdered or maimed creatures of “realistic” animal stories and poems in the symbolically representative role of culturally-threatened Canadians themselves: “Canadians are the killed,” we are the ones “nearly extinct as a nation” (79).

Sandlos objects to the reductionism of Atwood’s bald allegorization in which suffering and dying animals are merely the “direct re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• “The Animals in This Country”: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination
• Part I. Reading Strategies for Animal Writing
• Part II. Animal Writers
• Part III. The Politics of Animal Representation
• Index