Book Reviews

Worldviews 9,1_BRev_f6_138-153 3/5/05 8:19 AM Page 138

BOOK REVIEWS

John Simons, Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002. xii + 218 pp. ISBN 0-333-74514-0 HB £55.00.

How does a literary scholar engage with the reality of the suffering of animals? This is a question asked by John Simons in Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. Simons wants to break down the wall he believes has been built between the academy and the space of public debate in order to question the continuation of the speciesism that besets human-animal relations. Towards the end of his book Simons cites figures on the rise of vegetarianism as evidence that the academy needs to respond to the growing interest in animal welfare in the outside world, and he argues that “if we consider our work on animals as a deed rather than a word we can begin to break out into the world beyond the text.” (p. 183) For Simons, reading the animals in literary texts becomes itself an act of political engagement. The “we” that Simons invokes in this discussion is a problematic one in this book though, as it is never really clear at whom the text is aimed. The inclusion of a lengthy chapter entitled “The Animal in Some Contemporary Thought” ( pp. 13-37), which includes a discussion of work by, among others, Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Carol Adams and Mary Midgley, signals that Simons assumes his reader needs such an overview. This is something that is reiterated by the presence of the following chapter, “Animal Rights in History” (pp. 38-60), which traces some debates from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. This history is told in more detail by various historians referred to by Simons (although he mis-spells Hilda Kean’s name throughout the book) but his summary overview here suggests again that he is aiming to introduce readers unacquainted with the dis- cussions to some of the material. This is fine, and such introductory material might well open up this growing field to new scholars. But there is a problem here. In the next chapter, “A Chapter of Vulgar Errors” Simons assumes a particular and fairly substantial knowledge of certain critical debates taking place in literary studies in the 1980s

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and 1990s. This discussion makes sense only if the reader is assumed to be a literary scholar not working in animal studies—and thus makes the “we” he invokes at the end difficult to comprehend. But these chapters are in many ways a preamble to the literary chapters of Simons’ book and here he does highlight some useful ways in which the literary scholar might use their skills to think about—and to engage with—questions of animal welfare. Simons has three main literary chapters which focus on symbolism, anthro- pomorphism and transformation, and he covers a lot of ground; from Ovid to Babe, from Marsilio Ficino to Jonathan Swift. There are benefits to Simons’ range of materials—he shows how far the animal has been a part of literary representation across history. But there are also problems; books are dealt with too swiftly—Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales is discussed so briefly that it is hard to comprehend what it is that Simons is trying to say (p. 156). Likewise, while he does spend a little more space discussing J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (London: Vintage 2000) (pp. 168-9) Simons irons out many of the complexities of this fascinating novel that has so much to say about animals and about the use of animals in fiction. The brevity of Simons’ discussion means that he sidesteps many ambiguities; and these are ambiguities that are, I think, central to the moral and political import of the novel. The nature of the animal in Disgrace is not always as clear-cut as Simons seems to imply. For example, on his first day helping out at the Animal Welfare League, David Lurie, the disgraced English lecturer who has walked away from a hearing for sexual misconduct with a student, is confronted with a “goat, a fullgrown buck... One half of his scrotum, yellow and purple, is swollen like a balloon; the other half is a mass of caked blood and dirt. He has been savaged by dogs . . .”. (Coetzee, p. 82) This goat is a symbol; that is, it is a goat—a representation of a real animal—but it is also, surely, an image of the sexually dan- gerous Lurie himself. Here, in his new surroundings in rural South Africa, Lurie’s assistance in euthanazing animals is not only a means by which he himself is “emotionally and morally transformed” (Simons, p. 169); he also sees himself—self-pityingly—as an injured animal brought forward to be destroyed. This recognition of the symbolic quality of the animals challenges Simons’ analysis that in this novel the “relationship with the non-human world releases love as a trans- forming experience” (p. 169). Whatever my disagreement with some of his readings of particular