Volume One:
Dissertation
The Imagined Border: Humans, Animals and Biopolitics in Contemporary Australian Fiction
Lucy Neave
Candidate for a Doctorate of Creative Arts (DCA)
Western Sydney University, 2017
1
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my sincere thanks to Professor Gail Jones. Her insights into the novel and dissertation, and her generosity in reading and rereading sections of the thesis went far beyond my expectations. I am sincerely grateful for her support throughout my candidature.
Thanks are also due to my colleagues at the Australian National University for their feedback on sections of exegesis, especially to Dr Shameem Black, Dr Kate Mitchell and Dr Julieanne Lamond.
Anonymous reviewers and Dr Lou Jillett provided useful comments on articles and a chapter that ultimately became chapters of the exegesis.
Amanda Lohrey, Michelle Wildgen and Alistair Ong read and commented on the novel manuscript. At different points in the novel’s composition, their responses were revelatory.
Thanks to Professor Ivor Indyk for his feedback on early drafts, and to Associate Professor Paul Magee for lending me a bible.
I am grateful to James, Grace and Tom for helping me to focus on the world beyond the thesis.
2
Statement of Authentication
The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution
Sections from the Introduction have appeared in draft form in:
Neave, Lucy. ‘Creatureliness and Justice in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.’ In Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes. Edited by Louise Jillett, 19- 28. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016
Draft versions of Chapters One and Two were published as:
Neave, Lucy. ‘The “unimaginable border” and bare life in Eva Hornung's Dog Boy.’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2017): 1-14 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0021989417692389
Neave, Lucy. “‘The Distance between Them”: Sheep, Women, and Violence in Evie Wyld's All the Birds, Singing and Barbara Baynton's Bush Studies.’ Antipodes 30.1 (June 2016): 125-136
3 TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME ONE:
Abstract…………………………………………………………5
Dissertation
Introduction The Imagined Border: Humans, Animals and Biopolitics in Contemporary Australian Fiction…..……………...…………….6
Chapter One: The ‘unimaginable border’ and bare life in Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009)……………………………………………………………38
Chapter Two: Gender, Violence and Resistance in Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902) and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (2013) ………………………………………………………………...... 64
Conclusion………………………………………………………89
Bibliography for Dissertation and Novel……………………...97
VOLUME TWO:
Novel
The Flood is the Flawless Mirror for the Sky
4 Abstract
The Imagined Border: Humans, Animals and Biopolitics in Contemporary Australian Fiction This thesis examines the representation of animality in Australian literature by a close analysis of Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009) and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (2013). In these novels, the protagonists are exposed to violence because of their age, gender and circumstances, yet experience moments of connection with animals and the natural world that ameliorate their suffering and enable them to gain insight into animals’ worlds. Giorgio Agamben’s conception of ‘bare life’ and his monographs Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and The Open: Man and Animal provide a frame for thinking about the biopolitical lives of contemporary citizens. I also read moments during which humans feel embodied empathy for the creatures under their care. I argue that the act of empathy presents a form of resistance to ‘biopower’.
The Flood is the Flawless Mirror for the Sky: A Novel The novel takes up questions of animal-human relations in the narrative of a mother and daughter, Sarah and Bethany Francis, whose relationship is shaped by the ways in which they care for domestic and native animals. In the opening pages of the novel, Sarah’s life changes course because she diverges from the expectations of her religious family, and because she falls pregnant. Questions about sovereign authority and legal abandonment are treated obliquely; the plot moves from America to Australia and back again. Sarah nurses injured Australian wildlife at the expense of her bond with her daughter Bethany, whom she abandons for several months in an attempt to repair the relationship with her own mother. In the second half of the novel, Beth, a newly- graduated veterinarian, deals with news of her mother’s mysterious death and discovers that birds, animals and the natural world ameliorate her grief and her unresolved relationship with her grandmother. While Sarah’s care of animals is instinctive and builds on knowledge she has obtained from experience, Beth’s is influenced by her professional training. This contrast forms the centre of a plot based on complicated intimacies.
5
Introduction
The Imagined Border: Humans, Animals and Biopolitics in Contemporary Australian Fiction
The dogs’ lair was in the basement. They entered through a hole in the floor and clambered down a pile of rubble along a narrow, much-used path. Inside was dark. Somewhere puppies yelped and yabbered. And so it was, trotting with three dogs through ordinary lanes, past ordinary tenements, past ordinary lives, a lone boy crossed a border that is, usually, impassable—not even imaginable.1
Kelly doesn’t like me. She’s not like a dog really; she’s more disapproving than a dog. She sees things differently to the way most dogs do – she’s not into pats on the head, she won’t take food from my hand. I offer her the meat from my sandwich one time and she stands, looking through me until I feel embarrassed and put it back in the bread…She watches me in a way I recognize, but not from a dog.2
Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009) and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (2013), novels that won major Australian literary awards,3 represent close relationships between humans and animals, dramatizing and blurring the posited boundaries separating them.
In Dog Boy, the main character Romochka—the ‘lone boy’ of the quotation above— leaves the freezing apartment where he has been abandoned by his ‘uncle’ and finds his way onto the streets, following a feral dog he comes to call Mamochka—little mother. In joining Mamochka’s pack, Romochka becomes a ‘dog boy’, ‘cross[ing]’ the line delineating dogs from humans. The rhythmic repetition of the word ‘ordinary’ in this passage stresses the fact that Romochka’s metaphorical and psychological
1 Eva Hornung, Dog Boy (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009), 15 2 Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing (Sydney: Random House, 2013), 136 3 Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2010: ‘Prime Minister’s Literary Award’, Australian Government Department of Communications and the Arts, https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards; All the Birds, Singing was awarded the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2014 ‘Miles Franklin Literary Award’, Perpetual Trustees, https://www.perpetual.com.au/MilesFranklin
6 departure from the human world of tenements and lanes occurs as a result of ordinary circumstances in post-perestroika Russia: the probable death of his mother and his abandonment by her partner. Romochka is an ordinary child up until this point. What is remarkable is the traversal of the human-animal ‘border’, which is spanned when
Romochka enters the dogs’ den. A significant part of the novel’s project is an attempt to depict what is on the other side of the boundary: the dogs’ world. The novel is the means by which this passing from one world into another is both imagined, and made imaginable to a reader.
The posited ‘border’ between humans and animals is not explored as explicitly in All the Birds, Singing; the novel is more concerned with the position of women in the Australian bush. Nonetheless, in the excerpt given above, Kelly’s apparent ability to use human ways of looking and behaving is registered by the first person female protagonist of the novel, Jake. If Romochka becomes dog-like, Kelly, while never entirely shedding her canine nature, is ‘not like a dog really’: she’s ‘disapproving’ and refuses the bribe offered by Jake.4 Kelly’s strangeness as a dog contributes to the atmosphere in this section of the novel, in which Jake is being held against her will by an older man, Otto, on a remote outback property. Kelly’s refusal to be bought and her lack of affection for Jake heighten her isolation: not even the dog will be her friend.
Kelly is portrayed as a participant in (human) strategies for exerting authority. All the
Birds, Singing is notable not only for its representation of Kelly; the novel draws attention to the problematic metaphorical conflation of women with animals— especially sheep—in narratives set in the Australian bush by representing Jake’s care for flocks of sheep, and her treatment by Otto. Both novels address the question of
4 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 136
7 human-animal distinctions, are anxious about this border, and portray relationships between people and creatures that blur or contest it.
The debate about the distinctions between humans and animals and the consequences of these differences has engaged continental philosophy from René
Descartes to Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida to Giorgio Agamben, as well as scholars in the fields of biology and anthropology. Derrida’s essay, ‘The Animal that
Therefore I Am (more to follow)’ critiques what he terms the ‘supposed discontinuity, rupture, or even abyss between those who call themselves men and what so-called men…call the animal’.5 These differences are listed by Derrida as: ‘speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift and so on.’6 While many of these differences between humans and animals have been questioned in research into animal communication and discussed in articles for scholarly and general audiences,7 as Derrida acknowledges, his objection to the abyss between humanity and animality stems from a long tradition in philosophical thought about the distinctiveness of humanity. Derrida’s critique of both the genealogy of the conception of animality and the present-day treatment of nonhuman animals is on the grounds that the ‘abyss’ or
‘rupture’ has ‘a history’, a history analysed through his readings of the two opening sections from Genesis. More importantly for this thesis, he argues that:
Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘The Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’ there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living…These relations are at once close and abyssal, and they can never be totally objectified.8
5 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow),’ trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 399 6 Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am,’ 373 7 See, for example, ‘Animal Minds’, The Economist online: http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21676961-inner-lives-animals-are-hard-study-there- evidence-they-may-be-lot-richer-science-once-thought 8 Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am,’ 399
8 Derrida is contending that the sphere associated with ‘The Animal’ or ‘Animal Life’ is ‘heterogeneous’. The binary between humans and animals, which is constructed in part through discourse emerging from continental philosophy and from the Bible and
Greco-Roman myth, must therefore be contested. One reason for questioning the notion of abyssal difference is that animals are diverse creatures, who cannot be thought of as an indeterminate mass: an ‘infinite space…separates the lizard from the dog, the protozoon from the dolphin, the shark from the lamb’.9 The coarse opposition between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ is undone by thinking about the forms life takes. More significantly, humans are also animals. The wish to divide human and nonhuman forms of life can therefore never be a completed philosophical project.
The introduction to Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (2007) explicitly works to disrupt the idea of the abyss by arguing that it is misguided to think that humans and animals are separate. Haraway contends that both are knotted together, as are the technological and ‘natural’ spaces they inhabit through biological entanglements that include the microbial population that live on and within people. In
Haraway’s reckoning, humans and animals—particularly companion animals—form knots that involve an interweaving of different forms of life, producing and re- producing. She draws these ideas from ‘grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary’.10 The ‘ordinary’ for Haraway is situated in the encounters between humans and other beings in the ‘house, lab, field, zoo, park, office, prison’.11
This thesis examines the representation of animals, humans and their entanglements in literature. Its focus on fiction means that it cannot ‘grapple with’ the
‘ordinary’ and instead must explore the representational and metaphorical.
9 Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am,’ 402 10 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 3 11 Haraway, When Species Meet, 5
9 Nonetheless, the approach to the texts attempts to be sympathetic to Derrida’s objections to the human-animal binary and to Haraway’s idea of sites of interconnection. I interpret the similarities and sympathies between humans and diverse animals, and the particularity of these relationships. On a modest scale, the aim of this thesis is to concentrate on literary texts that represent connections between humans and particular species—in the case of the dissertation, primarily the ties between humans and dogs or sheep—and to ascertain what the figuring of these relationships means in contemporary fiction and its cultural contexts.12 My aim is to analyse instances of the abyss as explored in contemporary fiction, and to examine moments of sympathy and communication. As part of this process, the political implications of both making distinctions and connections between humans and animals arises. Observing differences is problematic because there is no neat oppositional relationship, and because as Matthew Calarco argues:
[t]he locus and stakes of the human-animal distinction are deeply political and ethical. For not only does the distinction create the opening for exploitation of non-human animals and others considered not fully human…but it also creates the conditions for contemporary biopolitics.13
That is, the opposition between humans and nonhuman animals creates estrangement, not simply of animals from humans, but also of people from other people. Discussing
Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal (1998), Calarco reflects on the persistence of the idea of abyssal difference between humans and animals as one that has biopolitical consequences for both humans and animals. The metaphorical conflation of species is equally vexed. Is a healing of the ‘rupture’ possible, and by what means?
12 The idea of the figure is important in Haraway’s monograph. The ‘figure’ is not simply a ‘representation or didactic illustration, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another’. Haraway, When Species Meet, 4 13 Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 94 (italics in original)
10 Ideally, in the pursuit of these questions this thesis would seek to avoid the pitfalls Derrida enumerates in his essay, which involve the use of the term ‘animal’ as a word denoting the nonhuman, given its long history and linguistic location as one half of the human-animal binary. The other problem concerns the anthropocentrism that is a feature of so much scholarship and art about animals.14 I have been unable to circumvent these dangers. To avoid the word ‘animal’ would entail marked syntactical convolutions. Given the anthropocentrism of the texts I examine, the thesis focuses to a large extent on human characters.
The thesis’ interest in human-animal differences and similarities has arisen from the volume of contemporary Australian literature that represents the relationships between humans and animals. Narrative nonfiction and fiction about animals has stressed the commonalities between humans and domestic and wild creatures, as well as their profound differences. Anna Krien and Delia Falconer have raised questions about the ethical treatment of nonhumans and the preponderance of animal metaphors in Australian fiction and poetry in essays for general readers,15 while J.M. Coetzee’s representation of dogs has been a significant area of recent inquiry in academic scholarship. This has included probing the relationship between human and animal rights, embodiment and belief in Elizabeth Costello (2003) in papers by Elizabeth
Anker and Fiona Jenkins,16 and a discussion of dogs’ salience as metaphors in
14 See Erica Fudge, ‘Introduction,’ Animal (London: Reaktion, 2002), 7-50 15 Anna Krien, “Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals.” Quarterly Essay 45 (March 2012). And: Delia Falconer, “‘All Me Make the Roar’: Some Animals in Australian Fiction,” Long View Essay Series, Wheeler Centre Online http://wheelercentre.com/projects/the-long-view/book/all-me- make-the-roar-on-animals-in-australian-writing/ 16 Recent work on animals in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction includes papers by: Elizabeth Susan Anker, ‘Elizabeth Costello, Embodiment and the Limits of Rights,’ New Literary History 42.1 (2011): 169-92 Fiona Jenkins, ‘Strange Kinships: Embodiment and Belief in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.’ Australian Literary Studies 28.3 (2013): 15-27
11 Disgrace (1999).17 The recent interest in animals in the Australian context has manifested in a series of novels, many of them by women. The number of short-listed and award-winning Australian literary novels published in the last ten years in which animals play an important role is long. It includes Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog
(2007), Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009), Gillian Mears’ Foal’s Bread (2012), Carrie
Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds (2012), Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (2013),
Sofie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep (2015), Charlotte Wood’s Animal People (2011) and more recently The Natural Way of Things (2015), an allegory in which women are imprisoned on a remote outback property and kill rabbits to survive. Ceridwen
Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014) comprises stories that are told from the perspectives of different animals. Many of these books exhibit a particularity in their evocation of the sympathies between humans and nonhuman creatures; some also probe the extent to which non-human subjectivity is accessible to human understanding.
While the novels on this list are diverse in terms of setting, narrative and the degree to which they dramatize human-animal relationships, a commonality across several of them concerns the position of the protagonist. Romochka in Dog Boy is abandoned, homeless and relies on a feral dog pack for protection, while Jake is held against her will on a remote property near Port Hedland in Western Australia. Other novels portray similarly disadvantaged characters, including Jimmy Flick in The Eye of the Sheep and Verla and Yolanda in The Natural Way of Things. This group of books is therefore distinct from Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace. Elizabeth
Costello and David Lurie are educated and upper middle-class. In many of the more recent Australian novels mentioned above, excepting The Lost Dog and Animal
17 James Ley, ‘The Dog with the Broken Back: Animals as Rhetoric and Reality in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee,’ Australian Literary Studies 25.2(2010): 60-71
12 People, principal characters are vulnerable because of their geographical location, their metaphorical proximity to animals—characters in Dog Boy and All the Birds,
Singing are directly compared to dogs and sheep respectively—homelessness or because of illness (Foal’s Bread) or gender (The Natural Way of Things; All the Birds,
Singing).
Little substantive scholarship exists about any of these books except for
Coetzee’s fiction.18 So far, there has not been a concerted effort to look at how recent
Australian fiction represents animals, or to map their prominence in Australian novels published since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The following reads two of these novels closely, Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, and asks how relationships between humans and animals are depicted in these books.
It examines the vulnerability of human and animal characters to violence, a notable feature of both novels, and many of the books mentioned above.19
Besides representing close relationships between their protagonists and creatures, especially dogs and sheep, the texts explore biopolitical questions. By
‘biopolitical questions’ I mean that through their portrayal of human-animal relationships, they explore the mechanisms and strategies by which life is regulated
(or abandoned) by the state. Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and ‘The Right of Death and Power over Life’ discusses the changes to power structures in nineteenth century western societies, arguing that in contrast to men of ancient times, who are
‘living animal[s]’ with the possibility of participating in the political sphere, ‘modern
18 Although research into Coetzee’s representation of animals provides a useful context for this study, it is beyond the scope of this thesis. 19 Violence is also prominent in Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds, Sophie Laguna’s The Eye of the Sheep, Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals and Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things.
13 man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’.20
As a result of capitalist imperatives, Foucault argues:
[m]ethods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them. Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of bio-power.21
Foucault contended that with modernity, new methods of power—which he regarded as neutral and diffuse—operated to regulate life, to the point that ending a life or going to war could be carried out to protect the population. This regulation took the form of
‘the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body’ and ‘the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life’;22 that is, bodies were disciplined on individual and collective or institutional levels. Further, the spatial and temporal organization of institutions facilitated a form of power that through its ability to observe and organize bodies was coercive rather than punitive.23 Key to the regulation of bodies are ideas about what constitutes the normal, whereby ‘The Normal is established as a principle of coercion in teaching…a hospital system…[and] in the standardization of industrial processes’.24
Agamben’s Introduction to Homo Sacer conceives of a lacuna in Foucault’s work, which consists of a failure to take account of the convergence of ‘political
20 Michel Foucault, ‘The Right of Death and Power over Life.’ In Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 45 21 Michel Foucault, ‘The Right of Death and Power over Life,’ 41-42 22Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978), 139. Italics in original. 23 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1995) 24 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184
14 techniques’ by which the integration of the care of biological life is taken up by the state, with ‘technologies of the self’: the binding of the subject to his or her identity and to ‘an external power’.25 Instead, he implies that the current political realm, or at least the political realm at the time of his writing, would necessitate a means of considering these two forms of power as operating in concert.26
While these notions of biopower might not appear directly relevant to the texts under discussion—Dog Boy and All the Birds, Singing after all, have emerged from political and cultural contexts distinct from those of Foucault and Agamben—the exercise of state and local power, the discipline of the child or the woman’s body, and what constitutes normality are a feature of both novels. In Dog Boy, the ultimate removal of Romochka from the dog pack is made at great cost to his and the dogs’ wellbeing, and is an attempt to return him to ‘normal’ humanity.
A Foucauldian framework developed from Discipline and Punish and The
History of Sexuality, as well as being based on societal changes from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, cannot fully take account of the importance of the representation of animals in the novels. Animals are significant to both books’ narratives and metaphorical associations. I therefore investigate the philosophical implications of embodied and psychological connections between humans and animals: how the proximity of Romochka to dogs in Dog Boy affects the treatment of him in the novel, and the meaning of an emphasis on closeness, rather than distance.
Besides augmenting literary scholarship engaged with representations of humans and animals, this line of inquiry has implications for thinking about traditions in Australian writing about the bush with regard to All the Birds, Singing.
25 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4 26 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5
15 The following also looks briefly at nineteenth and early twentieth century writing about the bush, in which animals play an important role. The stories of Barbara
Baynton are of relevance here. ‘The Chosen Vessel’ and ‘Billy Skywonkie’, in their focus on isolated rural women and descriptions of scenes of sheep slaughter, bear some similarities to sections from All the Birds, Singing. To what extent can Baynton’s stories be read as paradigmatic narratives about masculine violence in the Australian bush in relation to Wyld’s novel?
The introduction contextualises the primary texts and assesses possible approaches to them. It then describes and justifies the salient features of the overlapping theoretical frames used to analyse the texts, which include the idea of
‘bare life’ and an analysis of place in the novels.
Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009), Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing and Barbara
Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902)
Eva Hornung’s sixth work of fiction, Dog Boy (2009), was written after extensive research into dog packs and is based on the lives of street children raised by dogs in
Moscow, such as Ivan Mishukov.27 Romochka, whose name Hornung chose because it was a Russian diminutive of Roman and connoted Romulus,28 survives the winter by being nursed by Mamochka. The first half of the novel portrays Romochka’s existence as deprived of human contact, nutrition, education and light. As compensation, he is comforted and sustained by members of the pack; his dog ‘family’
27 Sophie Cunningham, ‘Dog’s Eye View: Sophie Cunningham Talks to Eva Hornung about her Latest Novel, Dog Boy,’ Meanjin 68.4 (Summer 2009) 171; Karla Armbruster, ‘Crossing an Almost Unimaginable Border: Review of Dog Boy,’ Society and Animals 22: 106 28 Deborah Bogle, ‘Running with the Pack,’ The Advertiser March 27 2009 online at http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/running-with-the-pack/story-e6frebt3- 1225698227155
16 is relentlessly loyal. The narrative in the second half of the book shifts focus when
Mamochka brings home a human baby, who Romochka names Puppy. When spring arrives, Puppy, by then a toddler, is captured by the authorities and taken to the Anton
Makarenko Children’s Centre,29 where he dies of pneumonia. Parts of the latter sections of the novel are focalised through a paediatrician, Natalya Ivanovna, and a child psychologist, Dmitry Patushenko. The changes in focalisation from Romochka’s close third person point of view, to a more omniscient voice, to the perspectives of
Dmitry and Natalya, reveal different angles on what it is to be a feral child, at the same time as showing Dmitry’s and Natalya’s attitudes to dogs and homeless children. The feral child as an object of study and scientifically-observed differences between humans and animals are rehearsed in the latter parts of the book.
Reviews of Dog Boy focused on Romochka as living between human and canine worlds30 and on the book’s grounding in Ivan Mishukov’s story.31 Some critics discounted the latter parts of the novel on the basis that Dmitry and Natalya repeat observations about Romochka that the reader has already made.32 In the only scholarship on the text, Greg Garrard takes up the idea of ferality, or the state of being feral. Garrard’s chapter concentrates on the potentiality of the feral as a threshold state: in scholarship, between the new disciplines of Animal Studies and Ecocriticism,33 that is, on the border of the sciences and the humanities; as interpolated between the human
29 The Anton Makarenko Children’s Centre is a fictitious institution. Anton Makarenko was a Russian educator who worked with street children and orphans in the early twentieth century according to G.N. Filanov, ‘Anton Makarenko,’ Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education XXIV. 1/2 (1994):77-91. 30 Phillip Womack, ‘Review of Dog Boy, by Eva Hornung,’ online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/6989134/Dog-Boy-by-Eva-Hornung- review.html; Bogle, ‘Running with the Pack,’ online. 31 Armbruster, ‘Crossing an Almost Unimaginable Border,’ 106; John Burnside, ‘Dog Boy by Eva Hornung’, The Guardian Online https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/13/dog-boy-eva- hornung 32 Womack, ‘Review of Dog Boy, by Eva Hornung’ online 33 Greg Garrard, ‘Ferality Tales,’ The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed Greg Garrard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 242
17 and the animal; and, as possessing a ‘subversive energy’ because of its resistance to dualities.34 Hornung’s text about a feral child is exemplary, according to Garrard, because of its ethics. Through the depiction of Romochka as both canine and human, it seeks to challenge human-animal binaries by portraying people and dogs as inter- differentiated.35 The implication is that dogs and humans are groups of equivalent cultural and social value.
Garrard’s focus on ferality is a useful approach to reading Dog Boy, and my analysis closely examines Romochka’s status as a border-dweller. In Chapter One, I also pay attention to the consequences of Romochka’s liminal status. I argue that the evocation of Romochka’s existence on the boundary between humans and animals, and the novel’s concomitant and repeated evocation of borders and territories enables the book to explore contemporary political and cultural preoccupations with border security. By portraying a vulnerable character living in a city’s edgelands, whose status as ‘dog boy’ is a literal transgression of the line between human and animal,
Hornung’s novel questions the cultural normalisation of surveilling and policing metaphorical and literal borders.
While the narration is at times external and omniscient in Dog Boy and the book is set entirely in a Russian city and its outskirts, Jake in All the Birds, Singing is a farmer on an unnamed island off the coast of England. The chapters set on the island, which are written in past tense, centre on Jake’s attempts to determine the identity of a creature that is killing her sheep. These chapters are interspersed with sections set in rural Australia, which are Jake’s recollections and unfold in present tense and reverse chronological order. The traumatic events of Jake’s past are written in present tense,
34 Garrard, ‘Ferality Tales,’ 242 35Garrard, ‘Ferality Tales,’ 255. In his discussion of the problematic nature of human-animal binaries, Garrard is drawing on Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010).
18 implying that these sections of the novel occur as traumatic flashbacks in her memory.
The reverse chronology of the Australian chapters in the novel eventually reveals that
Jake’s relocation to England was an attempt to escape the trauma she experienced, both in the outback while living against her will with Otto, and after she caused a fire near her home town. Her haunting by the creature that is killing her sheep on the island implies that her memories of her rural Australian past persist, not only in her mind, but in embodied form.
Reviews of the novel focused on it as a psychological excavation of Jake’s past,36 and on the depiction of Australian masculinity in the novel.37 While in his review, Geordie Williamson argues that Wyld is conscious of the ‘raw, wounded, dangerous edge’ of Australian masculinity and locates Jake in ‘a sexual interzone’,38
Natalie Kon-yu views the portrayal of Jake and the novel’s engagement with a typically masculine occupation, shearing, as further evidence for literary value being ascribed to a novel about the bush or subjects that highlight Australian masculinity:
‘the book features a female protagonist who, for most of the novel, could have been a male character’.39 Further, she finds the awarding of the Miles Franklin Award to the novel troubling because although it was authored by a woman, it ‘occupies hard-worn male territory’, and ‘is rewarded for precisely that reason’. Kon-yu cites praise for the novel that highlights the novel’s masculine tropes.40
Kon-yu’s comments about the novel’s reception appear relevant when the judges’ statements about the novel are taken into account. The judges’ comments note
36 Maile Meloy, ‘Isolation Unit: All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld,’ The New York Times Book Review 13 June 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/books/review/all-the-birds-singing-by- evie-wyld.html 37 Geordie Williamson, ‘Miles Franklin winner: An outsider’s dark view of Australian masculinity,’ The Guardian 27 June 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/australia-culture- blog/2014/jun/27/miles-franklin-winner-an-outsiders-dark-view-of-australian-masculinity 38 Williamson, ‘Miles Franklin winner,’ online 39 Natalie Kon-yu, ‘A testicular hit-list of literary big cats,’ Overland, 223 (Winter 2016): 15 40 Kon-yu, ‘Testicular Hit-List,’ 15
19 that All the Birds, Singing is ‘a road movie in reverse’ and ‘replete with adrenalin- fuelled escapades’,41 which, while serving as publicity for the novel and as justification for the committee’s choice, also stress the novel’s similarities to other
Australian fiction and films portraying settler heroism in the hostile bush. Wyld’s novel is by no means an uncomplicated valorisation of Australian masculinity and the relationship between masculinity and the bush, however, as Williamson’s review suggests. I argue that All the Birds, Singing instead portrays a predatory masculinity that is both a literal and spectral presence. Rather than being an heir to fiction that glorifies male settler heroism, Wyld’s novel, like Barbara Baynton’s stories, is a critique of the white masculine figures that are pervasive in bush narratives. Jake’s ambivalence about her gender is rendered in a more complex fashion than Kon-yu gives credit for. Her physique and laconic nature indeed allow her to be apprehended as an honorary man by fellow shearers. As Tim Lewis points out in his review, she
‘receives the highest accolade from her male colleagues of being “a good bloody bloke”’.42 On the other hand, Jake makes herself more muscular through exercise so that she is less vulnerable in a world hostile and violent towards women. She is equivocal about appearing feminine because of her very real fear of rape and violence, although the novel leaves open the possibility of a more profound ambivalence on her part in relation to her gender. This ambivalence is suggested especially in the sections set on an island off the coast of England. Chapter Two looks briefly at Jake’s liminal position in relation to gender norms, and focuses on her feelings of kinship for her sheep.
41 ‘Judges’ comments.’ 2014 Miles Franklin Literary Award Webpage. https://www.perpetual.com.au/MilesFranklin/Award-and-Recipients 42 Tim Lewis, ‘All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld – Review,’ The Guardian online 30 June 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/30/evie-wyld-birds-singing-review
20 Another observation made about the novel, and a significant one for this thesis, pertains to the nationality of its author. Williamson states that ‘All the Birds, Singing is clearly the work of a tourist’.43 Although Williamson does not explain this comment, the novel contains images of iconic Australian creatures, both famed and feared: a redback spider, a kangaroo, and a description of a coast teeming with life: ‘octopus, nudibranchs, sand sifters, crabs and urchins’.44 The only scholarly mention of Wyld’s novel, which also comments on the nationality of the author, is in an article by
Nicholas Birns titled, ‘Is Australian Literature Global Enough?’ Birns points out that
Wyld, while Australian in origin, ‘operates in British national and literary space’.45
Birns argues that the Australian literary field is capacious enough to admit and reward novels that are more or less global in their outlook, and to ask of the world a recognition that ‘Australia is as global as anywhere else’.46
The choice of novels for this thesis was inflected by the fact that the manuscript included herein is partly set in the United States. The novels discussed in the dissertation are interested in troubling boundaries, lines and borders, between humans and animals, and around gender in the case of All the Birds, Singing. The spectral presence of a predatory masculine figure in the English sections of All the Birds,
Singing and the movement across borders between the city proper and its margins in
Dog Boy do not in any way ‘trouble’ national borders, but ask questions about the porousity of boundaries and the meaning of the movement between areas.
In its portrayal of the vulnerable position of women and sheep in the bush,
Barbara Baynton’s ‘Billy Skywonkie’ and ‘The Chosen Vessel’ from Bush Studies
43 Williamson, ‘Miles Franklin winner,’ online 44 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 220 45 Nicholas Birns, ‘Is Australian Literature Global Enough?’ JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 15.3: 2 46 Birns, ‘Is Australian Literature Global Enough?’ 4
21 read as anti-pastoral precursors to All the Birds, Singing. I will discuss the idea of the anti-pastoral later in the Introduction. My engagement with All the Birds, Singing therefore takes into account Baynton’s stories which, according to Elizabeth Webby, reveal ‘the crudity, cruelty and crimes to which others turned a blind eye’47 in rural nineteenth century Australia. In several stories from Bush Studies, including
‘Squeaker’s Mate’, ‘Scrammy ’And’ and ‘A Dreamer’, dogs play an important role.
Rather than discuss the whole collection, which is beyond the scope of the thesis, I have chosen to focus on two stories which bear a close intertextual relationship with
All the Birds, Singing. The narratives of the stories I examine can be summarized as follows: ‘Billy Skywonkie’ is about the treatment of an unnamed woman who travels to a remote station in drought-stricken western New South Wales to take up a position as a housekeeper. When she arrives, a series of characters, including a roustabout,
Billy Skywonkie, make racist comments about her appearance. On arrival at the station, ‘Gooriaba’, she is rejected by the owner of the property because of her supposed ethnicity and discovers that she had been expected to become the boss’s mistress. The story ends when the woman is told that she will be taken back to the railway station, but is forced to witness Billy Skywonkie’s slaughter of a sheep.
In ‘The Chosen Vessel’, a woman in a remote bush hut, left behind to take care of her baby while her husband is away shearing, is killed by a swagman. As the swagman circles the hut after dark, the woman rushes out for help when she hears an approaching horse. The rider imagines that she is a vision sent from God and ignores her. Webby argues that in this story, Baynton is engaged in ‘expos[ing] the patriarchal double standard which treats women as “the Other”—objects to be worshipped or
47 Elizabeth Webby, ‘Introduction,’ in Bush Studies by Barbara Baynton (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1993) 4
22 abused’,48 suggesting that there is an apparent irony in the rider’s response to the woman. The rider imagines that the woman is an angel, when in fact she is in mortal danger. This story contrasts an idealized view of bush women with the violence and discrimination to which they were subjected.
The significance of animals as metaphors has been a productive thread in
Baynton scholarship. Leigh Dale notes the importance of animals in ‘A Dreamer’,
‘Squeaker’s Mate’ and ‘The Chosen Vessel’,49 as does Julieanne Lamond.50 Her approach to ‘Billy Skywonkie’ will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Two.
Animals have not constituted a significant area of inquiry in Wyld’s work, about which there is no scholarship to date, although animal imagery has been noted in reviews.51
Theoretical Approaches to the work of Hornung, Wyld and Baynton: The Idea of the Open
The main theoretical approach used to read the texts draws on strands in continental philosophy and literary scholarship that have engaged with Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, specifically his ‘Eighth Elegy’. ‘[T]hinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry’, Derrida contends.52 The central idea in the ‘Eighth
Elegy’, that of ‘The Open’, connotes a borderless surround experienced by animals and young children that is regarded with longing by adults. In Rilke’s high Romantic idea of the ‘The Open’, human relations with the sphere distinguish between animal and human ways of being in the natural world:
With all its eyes the natural world looks out
48 Webby, ‘Introduction,’ 13 49 Leigh Dale, ‘Rereading Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 53.4 (Winter 2011): 369-386 50 Julieanne Lamond, ‘The Reflected Eye: Reading Race in Barbara Baynton’s ‘Billy Skywonkie,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 53.4 (Winter 2011): 387-400 51 Williamson, ‘Miles Franklin winner’ online 52 Derrida, ‘The Animal that Therefore I am,’ 377
23 into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward, and surround plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom. We know what is really out there only from the animal’s gaze, for we take the very young child and force it around, so that it sees objects—not the Open, which is so deep in animals’ faces.53
Das Offene, or ‘the Open’, is that which die Kreatur (translated as ‘the natural world’ by Stephen Mitchell) ‘looks out into’. ‘The Open’ signifies a kind of freedom or
‘borderless surround’,54 both metaphorical and literal, that is inhabited by animals and children and constitutes the sphere of the natural world, but which is inaccessible to adults. In the ‘Eighth Elegy’ the crucial—and idealized—difference between humans and animals concerns animals’ ability to occupy this apparently borderless, ‘open’ sphere, in contrast to the domain ‘our eyes’ are turned towards, or ‘backward’. ‘Our’— the adult human’s—conception of the world is of a place that is enclosed, or
‘surround[ed]’. To view the world thus, as enclosed and finite, both in terms of objects and in terms of the possibility of death, is something that adults do to children, through forcing this means of seeing, this gaze ‘around, so that it sees objects’.
Neither Dog Boy nor All the Birds, Singing represent an ‘open’ domain to the extent of Rilke’s romanticised formulation: both books are distinctly of the early twenty-first century. In fact, in Dog Boy, boundaries, territories and borders are profuse. However, the nurturing of Romochka by the dog pack, which takes place in a womb-like den, although not literally open—it is enclosed, a refuge—is nonetheless situated in opposition to the world of boundaries outside. The spaces outside the dogs’ lair are criss-crossed with lines and borders and come to dominate the dogs’ and
53 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Eighth Elegy,’ The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Stephen Heath. (London: Picador, 1987), 192-197 54 Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 1
24 Romochka’s life as the novel progresses. The apparent borderlessness of Otto’s farm is a source of horror for Jake in All the Birds, Singing. When Jake tries to escape from the property by riding a bike through the bush she encounters no fence line, no demarcation beyond which she is safe: ‘All I want to do is keep going, if it takes a week of riding, if the sun kills me, I want to be at the coast…Away’.55 Instead, she encounters only mirage after mirage, a landscape devoid of water, a sun that is blisteringly hot, and the only nonhuman life ‘a whistler high up, riding the hot air.’56
As far as a borderless space exists in the novel, it is a hostile one. Instead of the blissful space of Rilke’s ‘Open’, characters in Dog Boy and All the Birds, Singing occupy a place of demarcations, or uninhabitable open spaces.
Eric Santner’s project in On Creaturely Life begins with a discussion of Rilke’s poem and responses to it by Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben. His discussion of ‘creaturely life’ in relation to the delineations between humans and animals and
‘antagonisms’ with respect to the ‘political field’ facilitates an examination of the relationship between binaries, boundaries and human-animal distinctions. In his exploration of ‘creaturely life’ in texts by Rilke, Walter Benjamin and W.S. Sebald, he provides a means by which ideas about humans and animals can be applied to literary texts. Although Santner never gives a concise definition of the term the
‘creature’, because the term is an evolving one and he is partly concerned with its genealogy, he writes:
My argument will be that this notion [creaturely life]…opens a new way of understanding how human bodies and psyches register the ‘states of exception’ that punctuate the ‘normal’ run of social and political life. ‘Creatureliness’ will thus signify less a dimension that traverses the boundaries of human and nonhuman forms of life than a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field.57
55 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 91 56 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 91 57 Santner, On Creaturely Life, xix.
25
Creatureliness for Santner therefore principally pertains to human subjectivity, a human subject’s experience of the political, in the form of modern governance.58
Being-creature, then, is a result of the difficulties of existing as human in modernity: the experience of violence; ‘a chronic state of agitation and disorientation’59 which is psychic, and a consequence of subjection to arbitrary sovereign authority, despite the existence of a legal system: this form of governance is termed the ‘state of exception’.60 For Santner, creatureliness is integral to human subjectivity in the modern era, and is exemplified by Kafka’s universe, where ‘the law is everywhere and nowhere’ and does not ‘cohere, even in fantasy’.61 Here, the border or boundary is salient: Santner views a human’s relation to things as ‘crossed with borders, articulated within a matrix of representations that position him, qua subject, over against the world, qua object of desire and mastery’.62 Santner’s disambiguation of both the ‘state of exception’ and the genealogy of Agamben’s conception of bare life, which is a similar idea to that of the creaturely, provides background that helped to develop an approach to the texts under discussion here.
Ultimately, though, Agamben’s explicit engagement with the distinctions between humans and animals in The Open: Man and Animal and his focus on the idea of ferality makes his a more relevant framework for the discussion of Romochka’s and
Jake’s characterisation. In order to engage with characters’ biopolitical existence in
58 In the first chapter of On Creaturely Life, Santner argues that ideas about human subjectivity emerged from work by Heidegger, Agamben and others on the differences between humans and animals, provoked in part by Rilke’s description of ‘the Open’. 59 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 21. 60 Agamben’s State of Exception (2005) was published in English a year before Santner’s On Creaturely Life (2006). Santner appears to draw on Carl Schmitt, who first coined the term in his Politische Theologie (1922): Santner, On Creaturely Life,18-22. 61 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 22. 62 Santner, On Creaturely Life, 1-2
26 Hornung’s work in particular, I have principally drawn on Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life and The Open: Man and Animal.
Bare Life in Dog Boy and All the Birds, Singing
Romochka as a feral child, and his occupation of a liminal space, can be interpreted through Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, Agamben traces the genealogy of an ancient figure, homo sacer or sacred man, the person who ‘can be killed and yet not sacrificed’, who in modernity is excluded from and captured within ‘the political order’.63 Bare life entails political exclusion, lack of legal protection and the simultaneous subjection to sovereign authority, a form of existence that is marginal in relation to sovereign power. Although
Agamben does not concisely define bare life, he argues in relation to the two strands of power discussed by Foucault that bare life is located at:
the hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power… the two analyses cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power…64
Agamben claims that his intervention consists of an examination of the nexus between juridico-institutional and biopolitical forms of power; that is, power exerted by the judiciary and institutions (such as the police) together with power exerted through a diffuse network that includes the regulation of the body. ‘Bare life’ is therefore a far more pessimistic and absolute expression of the fate of the individual subject in relation to the machinations of the state than Foucault’s; the idea of biopower in
Agamben’s formulation is more oppressive and pervasive. His formulation of
63 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8-9 64 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6
27 biopower explicitly takes account of the ‘state of exception’, the suspension of the law by the sovereign agency until stability can be restored. He argues that the ‘state of exception’ is a political strategy for democratic and totalitarian states alike, in which
‘everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life’.65 Bare life, a subject’s biopolitical existence, is the primary object of sovereign rule, while the state of exception is ‘the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rest[s]’.66
Characterization of the state sovereign and dramatization of the political situation are not features of the literary texts under discussion here. Instead, in Dog
Boy and All the Birds, Singing I argue that the lived experience of a form of bare life is portrayed. Further, Agamben’s and Santner’s formulations of the ‘state of exception’ emerge primarily from hegemonic first world states, whereas Hornung’s and Wyld’s novels represent locations that are relatively distant from sovereign power.
For Agamben, though, the human-animal distinction has political consequences and is achieved by means of the ‘anthropological machine’.67 This is the mechanism by which humans are excluded from ‘humanity’ or political participation and are concomitantly subjected to sovereign agency. In The Open, the
‘machine’ emerges from and constitutes biological, philosophical and anthropological discourses, such as Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae (1735) to both distinguish the ‘true’ human or citizen from the subhuman; it is a post-Darwinian mechanism. The application of knowledge emerging from natural sciences, Agamben implies, facilitates the ‘isolat[ion of] aspects of the human animal and exclu[sion of] them from humanity proper’.68 Further, it situates the human and the animal in relation to
‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’, terms that pertain to political exclusion and simultaneous
65 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9 66 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9 67 Agamben, The Open, 37 68 Calarco, Zoographies, 92
28 inclusion in the sphere of sovereign power. Agamben describes the anthropological machine thus:
[Modern and Pre-modern] machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which—like a ‘missing link’ which is always lacking because it is already virtually present—the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself—only a bare life.69
The ‘anthropological machine’ as the mechanism whereby ‘bare life’ is produced provides a means of discussing the situation of characters who are compared to or treated like animals in Dog Boy and All the Birds, Singing. ‘Bare life’ is a threshold state; in the terms of this framework, the feral child is the intermediate case, existing at an articulation between human and animal, man and non-man. Agamben employs the plural caesurae, which when used in prosody is derived from the Latin verb caedere, ‘to cut off’ and refers to the place in a line of verse where the metrical flow is cut off or stopped.70 The anthropological machine creates multiple ‘breaks’, rather than a singular gulf between the human and not fully human. These divisions are never an entirely completed project in the novels under discussion here; they are always shifting and conditional.
It is worth considering if Dog Boy and All the Birds, Singing constitute
‘anthropological machines’ by enacting strategies that emphasize shifting breaks in
‘being human’. Or, to what extent they explore the implications of political exclusion at the border between the human and nonhuman. Agamben argues that biopolitics in
69 Agamben, The Open, 38 70 Robert Greene, and Stephen Cushman (eds), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edition. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 174
29 contemporary states—democratic or totalitarian—renders the biological and ‘animal’ aspects of human existence more and more vulnerable to state intervention and simultaneously, abandons those judged outside ‘humanity’.71 To what extent do All the Birds, Singing and Dog Boy participate in this mechanism, and to what degree do they critique it?
Principally, I use Agamben’s formulations of bare life and contemporary political systems to interrogate Romochka’s position. Romochka presents an extreme case. He is outside the political sphere, abandoned by, and yet subject to, state power.
Other characters in Dog Boy are similarly vulnerable, yet Romochka’s estrangement from citizenship is stark. A similar approach is used to discuss Evie Wyld’s All the
Birds, Singing in Chapter Two. The impediment to this approach concerns Agamben’s acknowledged gender blindness.72 I view Jake as a femina sacra, a woman who can be killed but not sacrificed, who is abandoned by the law. Geraldine Pratt, who devised the term femina sacra,73 uses Agamben’s biopolitical philosophy to think about sovereign abandonment, rather than sovereign violence. She implies that ‘bare life’ in its capaciousness as a term allows for considering people who are cast off or forgotten by the state. Her focus is on the potential for Agamben’s work to be used to consider disenfranchisement that results in part from gender and race-based discrimination.74
71 Calarco, Zoographies, 94 72 See Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield, England: Acumen 2009), 115; and, Adriana Cavarero, ‘Equality and Sexual Difference: Amnesia in Political Thought,’ in Beyond Equality and Sexual Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, ed. G. Bock and S. James (New York: Routledge, 1992) 73 Geraldine Pratt, ‘Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception’, Antipode 37.5 (2005): 1068 74 Pratt, ‘Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception’, 1068-1069
30 Place in Fiction by Hornung, Wyld and Baynton
A valid theoretical approach for the discussion of Wyld’s and Baynton’s fiction derives from research that has looked at Australian fiction set in the bush as belonging to an anti-pastoral tradition. Paul Alpers argues that a hallmark of the pastoral is
‘herdsmen and their lives’.75 Ruth Blair, in her discussion of Australian pastorals cites
Leo Marx, who argues that most literature termed pastoral ‘manage[s] to qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture’76 Wyld’s novel goes further than calling into question an illusion of peace and harmony, and there are no green pastures in the Australian sections of the book. From the first paragraph of All the Birds, Singing, it is evident that in the environment (and in Jake’s consciousness) there is no peace, only death or the threat of death. Wyld writes:
Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding. Crows, their beaks shining, strutting and rasping, and when I waved my stick they flew to the trees and watched, flaring out their wings, singing, if you could call it that. I shoved my boot in Dog’s face to stop him from taking a string of her away with him as a souvenir, and he kept close by my side as I wheeled the carcass out of the field and down to the woolshed.77
This is no place of fecundity; rather, ‘another sheep’ implies that this is not the first animal that Jake has lost. While her impulse is to protect the carcass, she is forced to fend off the crows and her dog. The sheep is newly dead, and also resembles something to be consumed; there is nothing sacred in the body, only ‘vapours rising…like a steamed pudding’ and ‘souvenirs’. The actions of the animals, their movements: the crows’ ‘strutting and rasping’, ‘flaring’ their wings and ‘singing’, are more active than
75 Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22 76 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 25 cited in Ruth Blair, ‘Amanda Lohrey’s Vertigo: An Australian Pastoral,’ Australian Literary Studies 30.2 (2015): 119-120 77 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 1
31 the narrator’s ‘waved’ stick. In this first paragraph, the ‘natural world’ is a more than equal match for Jake. The death of the sheep, and Jake’s evident confusion as to the reasons for its death, adds a layer of menace to the novel’s beginning.
Wyld’s novel affords what Terry Gifford in Pastoral (1999) calls ‘the fundamental pastoral movement’ of ‘retreat and return’.78 In All the Birds Singing,
Jake’s retreat to Otto’s isolated farm is an attempt on her part to seek respite from her work as a prostitute, a job that puts her very existence at risk. In the anti-pastoral,
Gifford writes: ‘the natural world can no longer be constructed as “a land of dreams” but is in fact a bleak battle for survival without divine purpose’.79 Jake experiences her
‘retreat’ to Otto’s farm in these terms. Further, All the Birds, Singing is a critique of the idealization of the pastoral vision in Australian fiction, the idea that the rural place is a site of genuine escape from the pressures of urban life, and that through the experience of living in the bush it is possible to encounter something transcendent or divine. It is also a direct challenge to the idea that Australian masculinity is a heroic and benign force in such places. Similar aspects of bush life—the brutality of its inhabitants, and the threat of violence to women—are revealed in Baynton’s ‘Billy
Skywonkie’ and ‘The Chosen Vessel’. Although no ‘retreat’ to the bush is implied in
‘The Chosen Vessel’, the ‘transcendent vision’ experienced by the religious rider is shown to be a chimera. Thinking about Wyld’s and Baynton’s work as anti-pastorals is relevant for the analysis of the texts in Chapter Two. The pastoral lens does not provide a productive means of interpreting Dog Boy.
Places inhabited by protagonists in All the Birds, Singing, Dog Boy and
Baynton’s stories can be read as spaces of exception. Recent scholarship has examined
78 Gifford, Pastoral, 1-2 79 Gifford, Pastoral, 120
32 postcolonial Australian fiction such as Kim Scott’s Benang as depicting spaces that are outside the rule of law, or as colonial spaces where the ‘state of exception’ is or has been operational. Russell West-Pavlov, drawing on the work of Agamben and
German jurist Carl Schmitt, argues that exclusion and inclusion are integral components of the juridical workings of postcolonial states.80 Agamben argues that
Schmitt’s doctrine ‘implies a zone that is excluded from law and that takes the shape of a “free and juridically empty space” in which sovereign power no longer knows the limits fixed by the nomos as the territorial order’.81 Nomos here, or law, becomes
‘unfixed’ in certain ‘free and juridically empty spaces’. I argue that such places, where the law is suspended, are in evidence in Wyld’s and Hornung’s novels and facilitate the legal abandonment of the novels’ protagonists. Although Dog Boy is set in Europe, it portrays domains that bear a resemblance to postcolonial spaces of exception, where geographical zones are excluded from the rule of law and sovereign power is not limited by statutes.
Paranoid and ‘Reparative’ Reading82
The foregoing—and what follows in Chapters One and Two—entails what Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick might describe as a paranoid theoretical approach to the critical project. I read the texts for their representation of bare life in a state where a child psychologist and paediatrician study, diagnose and attempt to normalize a child who has crossed the species barrier (Dog Boy), using a pessimistic frame in the form of
80 Russell West-Pavlov, ‘The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony,’ Australian Literary Studies 26.2 (2011): 2 81 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 36 82 I borrow the term ‘reparative reading’ from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You’, Touching Feeling, Eds Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michele Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)
33 Agamben’s ‘bare life’. Further, I read the text as an allegory for the current treatment of refugees and the homeless by wealthy western countries. In relation to All the Birds,
Singing, I argue that by reading the novel symptomatically it is possible to interpret the text as revealing the lives of women exposed to violence in the Australian bush, and as a critique of Australian narratives that valorize sublimated violence: towards women, the environment and, very indirectly, the country’s indigenous inhabitants.
Suspicious reading practices, which Sedgwick discusses in relation to queer theory,
‘represent a way, among other ways, of seeing, finding, and organizing knowledge’.83
In The Limits of Critique, while acknowledging the importance of Sedgwick’s essay,
Rita Felski advocates using the term skepticism rather than suspicion, since ‘paranoia stains suspicious reading with overtones of pathology and manic obsession’, and because skeptical reading practices, which are heterogeneous, have a long history.84
A skeptical approach to the texts is arguably a mimetic response to the texts themselves. Both texts represent suspicious characters. Romochka does his utmost to evade the militzia,85 who he knows are hunting him in the last chapters of the novel.
Dmitry and Natalya exhibit paranoia about leaving Romochka to live with dogs. Jake is so damaged by her experiences in the Australian outback that she often senses the presence of predatory figures when none are there. Other characters in the novel, such as the police, judge Jake to be unduly suspicious. When she goes to the police, convinced someone is killing her sheep, the sergeant responds: ‘“Sheep die all the time—it’s like they’re trying to get killed”’.86
83 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, 130 84 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 42-43 85 ‘Militzia’ is the Russian word for police. ‘Militzia’ has military connotations in English, but has been in use since the revolution. According to Posin, the ‘Politzia’ were associated with the Czarist regime and the secret police. J.A. Posin, ‘Problems with Literary Translation from Russian into English,’ American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 13.1(1955): 11 86 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 37
34 These justifications aside, could the novels be approached using a less skeptical frame? Sedgwick’s tentative strategies for reparative reading are associated with interpreting texts not for what they obscure, but for what is evident on the surface, and for what manifests as hopeful or surprising: ‘it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise’, she writes.87 More recently, ‘surface reading’ has been advocated by Steven Best and Sharon Marcus in their introduction to a special issue of
Representations.88 Sedgwick, who does not delineate reparative reading practices at any length, argues for the value of such practices at the end of her essay:
…it is not only important but possible to find ways of attending to such reparative motives and positionalities. The vocabulary for articulating any reader’s reparative motive toward a text or culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual or reactionary that it’s no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives…No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to the project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantastic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.89
While the elucidation of what ‘Reparative Reading’ consists of is incomplete— reparative reading is defined as much by what it is not, ‘paranoid’ or ‘suspicious’ reading, as by what it is—in the above quote, this form of reading involves the
‘extracting of sustenance’ from texts. The reparative position entails examining a
‘different range of affects, ambitions and risks’. When discussing Dog Boy and All the
Birds, Singing, I devote short sections of the following chapters to these other affects, to argue for an ethical response that respects the animal as a textual presence.
87 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’, 146 88 Steven Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction.’ Representations 108.1 (2009): 51-75. 89 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’, 150-151
35 My reparative reading therefore takes account of the moments in the texts when the posited abyss between humans and animals is bridged, and the affects associated with kinship between different species. In both novels, connections between humans and dogs or humans and sheep, which are distinct from the violent conflation of human and animal bodies, are attended by forms of embodied empathy.
The performance of empathy entails a feeling of identification with another person or animal. Further, in empathetic relations in All the Birds, Singing in particular, Jake feels on an embodied level what she imagines her flock experiences. These moments in the texts, which are often associated with maternal figures, are an integral component of the novels’ evocation of the interwoven nature of human and animal lives.
In both novels, too, the ‘reparative impulse’, which emerges from relations between people or people and animals, occurs in culture that is hostile, and in which feelings of affinity provide the only apparent form of resistance to the biopolitical environment that the characters occupy. It is therefore important to read All the Birds,
Singing and Dog Boy not only for the dreadful circumstances of their protagonists and the adverse conditions of their lives, but for the ‘surprising’ extent to which kinship is possible under such circumstances.
Although the prevalence of animals in novels by Hornung, Wyld and in
Baynton’s stories has been acknowledged in secondary material on the texts, the recognition of the political implications of the representation of animals has not figured in scholarship. I argue that Wyld and Hornung are portraying relationships between creatures and humans to explore significant political and social questions, as well as issues of representation in Australian literature. They do this by troubling the idea of the abyss. Both Hornung’s and Wyld’s work enacts and problematizes the
36 divisions between humans and animals. In All the Birds, Singing, gender binaries are a site of anxiety, while in Dog Boy, physical spaces and the divisions between them are contested. While I critically interpret thematic aspects of the texts—as revealing troubling aspects of contemporary western culture—in the latter parts of each chapter
I also pay attention to scenes in the novels that can be read reparatively.
37
Chapter One
The ‘unimaginable border’90 and bare life in Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy
(2009)
In the following, I examine the distinctions and connections between humans and animals in Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009). The protagonist of the novel, Romochka, occupies a space between human and nonhuman worlds. I argue that in dramatizing this threshold the novel evokes what it is like to live as a dog, from the perspective of a character who attempts to become as dog-like as possible. The book concomitantly traces the consequences of transgressing borders. The most evident boundary in the book is the one between humans and animals. This line is comparable to physical delineations in the novel associated with different territories, such as the zones inhabited by the homeless—bomzhi—and citizens, or ‘house people’, as well as the tracks and territories of different packs of dogs. Physical marks on the bodies of characters emphasise the retribution exacted for crossing or dwelling on boundaries.
As discussed in the Introduction, I interpret Romochka’s occupation of the human-animal border through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life. His formulations of bare life and contemporary political systems are used in this chapter to analyse Romochka’s situation as an extreme case. He is outside the political sphere, abandoned by, and yet subject to, the state. He is further ostracised because of his dog-
90 Armbruster, ‘Crossing an Almost Unimaginable Border,’ 4
38 like qualities. The anthropological machine provides a means of reading and generalising his situation; further, this chapter discusses to what extent the novel itself functions as a kind of ‘anthropological machine’.
At the same time as exploring the costs of being-animal, Dog Boy depicts a loyal and nurturing dog family, who protect Romochka as far as possible from threats to his wellbeing in the form of cold, hunger and violence. While the novel undoubtedly traces the effects of animalising the vulnerable, it also attempts to show the protagonist’s relationships with individual dogs and the warmth of the feral dog pack.
Romochka is not the only threshold-dweller in the novel; dogs are able to read his mood and gestures as much as he is able to read theirs, to the extent that the dogs are as capable of negotiating human-animal boundaries as are people in Dog Boy.
Hornung’s fiction is notable for its attention to ethical questions of Australian and international import, particularly around the predicament and treatment of refugees. The novel published before Dog Boy, titled Marsh Birds (2006), is about a child who flees Baghdad for Damascus and waits in a mosque for his family to meet him. Stories from Mahjar (2003) trace the lives of migrants to Australia.91 The emphasis on boundaries in Dog Boy coincides with an amplification of the surveillance of Australian national borders, and an acknowledged change in policy towards refugees. This policy entails punitive prevention in border control: punishment of refugees who attempt to arrive in Australia by boat by detention of asylum seekers in off-shore immigration centres, an approach which has been observed since the mid-
1990s by criminologists engaged in studying Australia’s penal policies.92 Dog Boy is
91 Eva Hornung was formerly called Eva Sallis. She published Marsh Birds and Mahjar using Sallis as her surname 92 Malcolm M. Feeley and Jonathan Simon, ‘The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and Its Implications,’ Criminology 30.4 (1992): 449-474. And Leanne Weber, ‘Policing the Virtual Border: Punitive Preemption in Australian Offshore Migration Control,’ Social Justice 34. 2 (2007): 77
39 interested in the excoriating consequences of demarcations between inside and outside, both for those excluded from the city or political life and, to a lesser extent, for those who are citizens. My sceptical reading of the novel involves interpreting it as an allegory that critiques the policing of literal and metaphorical boundaries.
Despite the novel’s setting in Russia, it emerges from a postcolonial Australian literary context. As Paul Sharrad argues, it ‘draw[s] critical attention’ to the complexities of ‘liberal democratic ideals’ and how ‘they operate to shore up a national and global imperial status quo’.93 Although the narrative takes place in Russia, then, and concentrates on Russian social problems such as the increase in the post- perestroika homeless population, and the role of the militzia, or police, it also draws attention to people who are marginalised in cities by reason of homelessness—the predicament of many in western democracies—and the spaces inhabited by disenfranchised people. In its depiction of the lawlessness of the city’s outskirts—the reader assumes that Hornung is writing about Moscow, because of the descriptions of the city, but it is never named—Dog Boy references zones where the rule of law is weak, or applied differently to people who are not judged to be citizens. I will therefore examine these spaces and the preoccupation with territory, lines, boundaries, and inscribed and surveilled bodies. The consequences of inclusion, exclusion and legal abandonment will then be explored. The last part of the chapter will address the representation of Mamochka’s maternity. In conclusion, I will analyse Romochka’s participation in the dogs’ clan as constituting moments when the abyss between humans and animals is bridged.
93Paul Sharrad, ‘Which World, and Why Do We Worry About It?’ In Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature, ed. Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012), 2
40 Ferality and the ‘unimaginable border’
The critical response to Dog Boy registers the protagonist’s positioning on a boundary between dogs and people, and between wild and tame. Greg Garrard, in ‘Ferality
Tales’ uses Agamben’s The Open to examine the notion of the feral in Dog Boy. He references Agamben’s discussion of Linnaeus’ attempts to classify within the species
Homo sapiens ‘a variant’, the ‘wild child’ or enfant sauvage: children, such as Victor of Aveyron, presumed to have been raised by animals in the late eighteenth century.94
Agamben argues that these children, the response to them on the part of men of the
Ancien Regime, and the ‘attempts to recognize themselves in them and ‘humanize’ them, reveal an awareness of the precariousness of the human’.95 What Agamben suggests is that enfants sauvages are ‘messengers of man’s inhumanity,’ not only by demonstrating how easy it is for children to become wild or feral, to live among beasts, but also because the existence of wild children suggests that there is very little delineating tame from wild, man from animal: that the border between the two ways of being is porous.
Like the texts Agemben refers to, Hornung’s novel suggests an easy crossing over from the human world to a canine one, an affinity on the part of dogs for humans and humans for dogs. When Romochka first follows Mamochka to the dogs’ lair, he:
…wriggled himself close, buried his cold nose in the mother dog’s hair and sticky skin, and then the hot milk was his. It slid, rich and delicious, down his throat and into his aching belly…After a while his hands warmed up and he reached for her damp belly and stroked her with his fingers as he drank, feeling out her scabs and scars and playing his fingers along her smooth ribs. She sighed and laid down her head.96
94 Agamben, The Open, 30 95 Agamben, The Open, 30 96 Hornung, Dog Boy, 17
41 Romochka is so hungry and cold that he does not hesitate to nurse from a mother dog.
In exchange for milk, he strokes Mamochka. Her ‘sigh[ing] and [laying] down her head’ implies that to be touched by a human child gives her pleasure. Hornung’s description of this first interaction asserts that this kind of bond, lactating bitch with human child, is ‘natural’, longed for by Romochka and Mamochka, and that a desire for this closeness, which is reflected in the rhyme of their names, lies latent within dogs and children. Part of his longing appears to be for a mother, kinship and family, but there is also something wholesome about his presence in the den, which protects him from the city. To read the novel reparatively includes examining sections where
Romochka’s participation in animal or ‘creaturely’ life insulates him from the cold and from the other homeless children and their habits, such as glue sniffing. In this episode, the novel gestures towards the animal realm as ideal, or at least as a space that provides sustenance in comparison to the harshness of the adult human world.
Romochka’s canine family tries to protect him from wild dogs, gangs of skinheads and from the authorities. In the exchange between Mamochka and the child, the book suggests that some unacknowledged interspecies connection comes to the surface and is expressed. The expression of something buried seems particular to dogs and children; most of the other animals in the novel are prey. In addition, the integration of Romochka into the pack and his willingness to feed from a dog demonstrates the extent to which being human is conditional on enculturation, a process that happens by degrees. Puppy, the baby adopted by Mamochka later in the novel, walks on all fours and is without language. These characteristics are associated with Homo ferus, Linnaeus’s observed ‘biological’ variant.97 Romochka observes that:
Puppy spoke only the language of dogs. Puppy seemed to be able to smell out everything there was to know. Puppy would smell and smell at something,
97Garrard, ‘Ferality Tales,’ 243
42 standing long in contemplation. Puppy would wake up and smell every corner, quickly, appraisingly, for all that had happened in his absence. Puppy ran, fleet and fluid, on four legs.98
For Romochka, who aspires to be a dog for much of the novel, Puppy is an ideal creature. The emphasis on the sense of smell—the word is repeated four times in the paragraph—reflects Romochka’s disquiet about his own sensory failings. The repeated sentence structure, ‘Puppy…’ sets up an opposition between Romochka, who is unable to ‘smell out everything’ and walks on two legs, and Puppy, who travels,
‘fleet and fluid’ on four. Although Romochka is described as a border dweller by
Garrard, the novel portrays degrees of border-dwelling. Puppy is even more feral than
Romochka.
Dog Boy, then, troubles the border between human and canine, but importantly, Romochka’s alliance with dogs has political consequences. Becoming canine results in political exclusion: being regarded, at best, as homeless, a Bomzh
(literally without fixed abode).99 A woman says to him, ‘Filth! Bomzh! Animal!’ as though these terms are equivalent.100 Romochka repeats these words to himself, which stress his status as an outsider, and signal his recognition of what he has become. To be an animal is to be homeless and to be filthy, to be outside the sphere of civilization.
Romochka’s exclusion from the realm of citizenship is legible, and his estrangement from citizens exemplifies the treatment of people who share his outsider status such as other homeless children and undocumented immigrants.
98 Hornung, Dog Boy, 152 99 Homelessness was criminalised during the Soviet years. People without residency permits were denied access to medical care and social services, according to: D.H. Smith, ‘Homelessness.’ In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture ed. T. Smorodinskaya, K. Evans-Romaine and H. Goscilo (New York: Routledge, 2007), 254 100Hornung, Dog Boy, 89
43 An important aspect of the dogs’ world pertains to the limited role of spoken language, as is emphasized also in philosophical discourse about human-animal distinctions. Romochka soon determines that to be canine is to integrate the senses differently, to rely on body language, gesture and touch. Early in his time in the dogs’ lair, Romochka tries to tell his littermates a story. Hornung writes:
‘Once upon a time there were some dogs. Very good dogs who always brushed their teeth’…he was very pleased with the words falling into that dark space, pleased with how much words were changing everything. But just then the puppies behind lost interest’.101
Words, here, have little power; they change nothing. It is impossible for Romochka to keep the puppies’ attention with a series of sentences. The dogs’ lives are not built on stories, on ‘once upon a time’, but on other rituals: the ritual of the older dogs’ return to the den with food for the puppies, for example: ‘Everything was ritual’, Dog Boy asserts.102 ‘Ritual’ is the word used, although ritual is customarily closely associated with human spiritual practices. In Dog Boy, ritual means the acts that the dogs perform repeatedly, such as when they return to the den, or the ‘ritual’ of marking out territory.
The irony is that Hornung uses language and a term associated with humanity to evoke the rich sensorium of Romochka’s canine life, the reassuringly repeated behaviour of the clan and to describe smell and touch. The novel explores one of the re-iterated differences between humans and animals, the lack of language, and uses language to evoke the border between the species, yet through detailed sensual description of odours, touch and sound.
Later in the novel, the role of language again comes to the fore. When
Romochka enters an apartment to steal clothes and toys for Puppy, he encounters a
101Hornung, Dog Boy, 25 102Hornung, Dog Boy, 29
44 small white dog, who attacks him. In the scene after Romochka subdues the dog through fighting, he speaks to it:
‘Brave little doggie,’ he murmured. ‘You fought the monster, even though he was as big as a Stranger and you were small. Brave little doggie.’ He felt his words changing everything, not just between him and the dog, but between him and the place. He sensed his limbs: long and smooth, a boy’s legs and arms. His ears, he knew, were flat to the sides of his head, not pointed and hairy.103
In the opening of the novel, when Romochka was playing with the puppies, he laboured under the misapprehension that his ‘words were changing everything’—a phrase that is ironic. In contrast, in this scene, the phrase is repeated without irony.
Romochka’s speech in the apartment, rather than in the dogs’ den, signals to the small dog that Romochka is human. He also recognises himself as a boy, a thought that is reinforced by his words and by seeing himself in a mirror. While Romochka’s human- ness is a source of discomfort to him, his condescension towards the dog, ‘Brave little doggie’, re-iterates the differences between dogs and people and confers a confidence on Romochka that becomes embodied. In speaking, ‘[h]e sensed his limbs: long and smooth’. In this way, while the novel depicts Romochka and Puppy as occupying a threshold between humans and dogs, it also points to the caesurae between species.
The text becomes a kind of anthropological machine itself, emphasising the importance of language at times, while revealing the transitory and conditional state of being human.
Closed paths and inscriptions
The spaces in Dog Boy bear a resemblance to postcolonial and other geographical spaces of exception, where zones are excluded from the rule of law and sovereign
103 Hornung, Dog Boy, 162
45 power is not limited by statutes. Likewise, physical spaces have been excluded from
Australian jurisdiction in the case of islands that have been excised from the ‘migration zone’. In 2002, in an effort to stop asylum seekers arriving by boat on small islands close to the continent, the Australian government deemed that certain islands were not included in the migration act and refugees landing there would not be afforded legal rights.104 Inclusion and exclusion of people can be mapped onto physical spaces.
The idea of bare life has been used to interpret these spaces in postcolonial texts, such as Kim Scott’s Benang105 and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying.106
Russell West-Pavlov refers to a line drawn on a beach described in Watkin Tench’s
1788, his journal of the first years of the settlement at Sydney Cove. The line was inscribed by the English in an initial meeting between a landing party of English soldiers and the indigenous Eora people and served as a boundary to keep the Eora people at a safe distance, yet allow for communication.107 According to West-Pavlov, the line in the sand ‘takes on the character of an inaugural gesture in which inside and outside, symbolically, are marked out’.108 It is the original act on the part of colonists to designate who is inside, and where the other, in this case the Eora people, belong.109
The ‘outside’ consists of ‘free and juridicially empty spaces’, enabling a kind of limitless sovereign power.110 Such places, where the law is suspended, are in evidence in the novel.
104 Cynthia Banham, ‘Excising of islands a dangerous game, legal experts warn,’ The Sydney Morning Herald December 19 2002. www.smh.com.au 105 Russell West-Pavlov, ‘The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony,’ Australian Literary Studies 26.2 (2011): 1-19 106 Wendy Knepper, ‘In/Justice and Necro-natality in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying,’ Journal of Commonweatlh Literature 47.2 (2011): 191-205 107 Watkin Tench, 1788 (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000), 45 108 West-Pavlov, ‘The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler-Colony,’ 6 109 West-Pavlov, ‘The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler-Colony,’ 6 110 West-Pavlov, ‘The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler-Colony,’ 6 (West-Pavlov draws on Agamben’s Homo Sacer and the work of Carl Schmitt here)
46 The space the dogs occupy on the outskirts of Moscow is one where sovereign power is not limited by a legal code and where people living there, or the homeless, are pestered and worse by the militzia, who are a corrupt and mercurial arm of the state, rather than a force for order. In the zone where Romochka lives with the dogs near a rubbish dump that resembles ‘Svalka’, the largest landfill in Europe,111 the militzia ‘charged in now and then, demolished everything, arrested or robbed the people and killed the dogs; then, in a day or two, the village would be rebuilt’.112 The people living on the edge of the dump draw their living from it, as do Romochka and the dogs in the early parts of the book. The illegality of their dwellings exposes them to violence and arbitrary treatment, but the space around the garbage dump remains
‘free’, in a sense. As Romochka observes, ‘the village and the forest immediately behind it was all open trails. No clan could close it’.113 There is a direct parallel here in Romochka’s thinking between humans and dogs, who both form clans. Neither can fully ‘close’ the forest or the village, meaning neither humans nor dogs can restrict access to these places, or control what happens there.
Boundaries, territories and ‘closed paths’ are important motifs throughout Dog
Boy. The idea of territory and the marking out of territory is portrayed first in relation to the dog clan, who mark out an area for Romochka and the puppies to play. With time, Romochka develops an ‘awareness of territory that was almost unconscious’.114
For dogs, rules and rituals govern behaviour around territory: Mamochka never crosses the ‘closed paths’ of a larger clan.115 These closed paths serve as boundaries that exclude Romochka’s pack and the (canine) regulations around these borders are
111 ‘Svalka’ is depicted in a documentary film, ‘Something Better to Come’, directed by Hanna Polak 112 Hornung, Dog Boy, 44 113 Hornung, Dog Boy, 44 114 Hornung, Dog Boy, 45 115 Hornung, Dog Boy, 45
47 well-defined. Human territories and zones of influence emerge as being important as the novel progresses, and the emphasis on territory suggests that territorial markings are as important to people as they are to dogs. The inner, more prosperous parts of the city are difficult for Romochka to enter and cross. When he and one of the dogs in his pack, White Sister, catch the subway and end up in a wealthy area, they have moved over an invisible line. After being asked for papers by the militzia, Romochka and
White Sister try to run away. For Romochka, the inner, prosperous areas of the city, occupied by ‘house people’ rather than bomzhi, are ‘closed’,116 and the centre of the city is hostile: ‘His deepening impression of the city was its bareness; how hard life was going to be until they made it home. There was nothing to be found here…[In the evening] scared, fast-moving bomzhi began to appear here and there…’117
The consequences of transgressing physical boundaries, especially the inner city, are serious: Romochka is both excluded from citizenship and the privileged areas of the city, and included in its jurisdiction. On this occasion, he is captured by the militzia and transported to a police station. While imprisoned, Romochka hears the leader of the unit discussing wild children. ‘“Feral kids are worse than rabid dogs.
Worse than adults too, and they reckon there’s millions. Never solve anything unless we get rid of them. Put it down, I say”’.118 This expository line of dialogue about the attitude to feral children on the part of the militzia reveals that because of his homelessness and lack of a family, Romochka is only worthy of being ‘put down’. By virtue of having crossed a border into a privileged area of the city, and because he has left the sphere of the civilized and become feral, he is considered beyond help. The scenes when Romochka is held in a local lockup for days reveal how few rights he
116 Hornung, Dog Boy, 127 117 Hornung, Dog Boy, 127-128 118 Hornung, Dog Boy, 135
48 possesses. At the same time, these scenes depict his agency. Romochka’s dog boy is also a performance: ‘his savage bite, raking claws and incredible speed [were] shown off to a never-ending stream of amused militzia’.119 He is exhibited as feral child, and acts the part of dog boy by refusing to speak and behaving savagely. He kept ‘within the boundaries of dog self and never let on that he heard [the militzia]’.120 While later in the novel, Romochka apprehends—and cannot eschew knowledge of—his own humanity, when captured by the militzia he consciously takes on the role of dog, hiding in a ‘dog self’, which:
insulated him to a degree from his own thoughts and feelings. He was a dog: words meant nothing. He was a dog: numb grief and wild joy were the boundaries within which all feeling was stretched. His self was a dog’s self, a set of known trails, ways and places to be, between these boundaries.121
In this passage, again, Dog Boy uses a repeated sentence structure: ‘He was a dog:…’. Again, Hornung emphasizes the role of language, but in this instance the phrase, ‘words meant nothing’ is understood to be ironic. Romochka’s performance as a dog is aspirational, rather than actual. As well, the scene emphasizes the importance of territory to his worldview, as though the territory of the dog and the
‘dog self’ can be ‘known’. This scene acknowledges his longing ‘for true doghood’, which would enable him to ‘understand only [the militzia’s] bodies, not their words’, and which would enable him to continue to occupy this known place: to be a dog is to know oneself in Dog Boy’s formulation.122 Romochka is burdened with language and therefore with other, less certain ways of knowing. Having half-inhabited a canine consciousness, he idealises that way of being and is capable of performing it. But in this scene, occupying the threshold between human and canine worlds is depicted as
119 Hornung, Dog Boy, 136 120 Hornung, Dog Boy, 137 121 Hornung, Dog Boy, 136 122 Hornung, Dog Boy, 137
49 burdensome, exposing Romochka to danger in the form of the militzia, but more significantly to knowledge that asks questions about who he is.
Significantly, dogs in the novel also perform. When Romochka and White Sister are lost, Romochka notices that the dog is behaving oddly. Romochka observes:
At first he couldn’t work out who she was speaking to, who she was eyeing with that friendship glance and tail, that pleading, that little dip of her ears. Then he realised it was people. Any people. White Sister was so hungry now that she was begging, turning from him, breaking all the rules and behaving like a stray.123
White Sister is ‘speaking’ to someone, but this speaking involves a series of gestures which are addressed to people. The gestures are repeated, almost ritualistic. Her
‘performance’ which entails acting like ‘stray’, Romochka interprets as having to do with her desire to survive. The repetition of ‘people’ reinforces the extent to which
Romochka views White Sister’s act as a betrayal: she has turned towards people, and away from him.
Towards the end of the novel, Romochka is captured by a skinhead gang and taken to a warehouse. These scenes, which are some of the bleakest in the novel, further reveal Romochka’s vulnerability: the boys who capture Romochka and torture him do so because they see him as other, and because the zone that he inhabits is on the city’s fringes and outside the law. In Romochka’s estimation: ‘House boys hated bomzh boys so this was going to be a clan thing’.124 Bomzhi and house people belong to different clans; the territory of house boys excludes the homeless. As part of this scene, Romochka again performs the role of dog boy. Hornung writes:
‘Fuck yourself,’ Romochka croaked, and they all turned and stared at him in sudden silence. The boys surrounded him, poking him with sticks. ‘Say it again, again, again!’ they chanted.
123Hornung, Dog Boy, 132 124 Hornung, Dog Boy, 169
50 These boys wanted him to speak, so he spoke. They wanted him to cry, so he cried, fat tears running down his cheeks and chest. They wanted his fear, so he gave it to them.125
The boys who attack Romochka and hold him in the warehouse are originally surprised by the fact that he speaks. In this scene, though, Romochka’s words change nothing; instead, they result in a further demand on the part of the boys that he perform. To occupy the space between dog and child requires acting. Like the scene in the lock up, other characters coerce responses from Romochka. The repeated phrase, ‘They wanted…’ emphasizes the boys’ demands. In response, Romochka delivers.
Lines and borders are important not simply in the physical city: they are also inscribed on the bodies of characters. Part of the torture inflicted on Romochka in this scene entails the tattooing of the word ‘собака’ into his chest, meaning dog.126 Despite
Romochka’s ability to speak, he is branded with the word ‘dog’, implying that he is not human, and that his position in relation to the house boys’ ‘clan’ is always outside.
Again, in this scene, Hornung’s novel depicts a fundamental instability in the state of being human.
Other people in the novel are similarly inscribed. A woman, Pievitza, who lives in the shanties on the edge of the rubbish dump, is ‘horrifically disfigured by the scar of a deep knife or axe wound that had cut through her brow above one eye, through her nose, and down through her lips and her chin’. Her face is cut into two halves and the scar ‘makes her look as though she is smiling’.127 Pievitza’s grin is in fact a measure of her sadness, a clownish mask. She loses her daughter, Irena, and late in the novel appears to be trying to sell her baby. The scar serves as a metaphor for the costs of regulating the boundaries between those who live inside and outside the city, and
125 Hornung, Dog Boy, 170 126 Hornung, Dog Boy, 171 127 Hornung, Dog Boy, 278
51 between humans and animals. Romochka and Pievitza both bear scars that result from and further their marginalisation. The borders in Dog Boy—whether people belong inside or outside—are mapped onto the characters’ skins.
Paternalism, surveillance and policing of borders
The human-animal border within humanity is a site subject to surveillance and intervention. This border is explicitly discussed in the context of the idea of the feral child as an object of study. Dr Dmitry Patushenko references the study of children raised by dogs when Puppy is captured:
When he first saw the tiny, hairy child crouched half naked, shivering in the corner of the militzia van, Dmitry felt an upwelling of revulsion and pity. Then, as he pulled back a syringe of tranquiliser, a strange thrill of delight tempered by shame. This was a frontier. Voila! The human animal: a living manifestation of a failed attempt to cross over that great divide… He found himself horrified, yet hopeful that the “raised by dogs” part would prove verifiable’.128
For Dmitry, the feral child is on a ‘frontier’, is a ‘human animal’. Like the militzia who keep Romochka locked up, Dmitry feels ‘horrified’ at the sight of the feral child.
Puppy as ‘border dweller’ (he is re-named Marko by Dmitry and Natalya) inspires a visceral reaction, which ultimately prompts Dmitry’s decision to separate Romochka from the dogs. Further, Dmitry’s observation that the child is ‘a living manifestation of a failed attempt to cross over that great divide’ signals his beliefs about the abyss between humans and animals.129 The fact that his beliefs about the impossibility of crossing this divide are reinforced gives Dmitry pleasure, ‘a strange thrill of delight’.
Romochka’s and Dmitry’s views of Marko are different. While Dmitry regards Marko
128 Hornung, Dog Boy, 197 129 ‘The great divide’ bears a resemblance to Derrida’s ‘abyss’ and the ‘abyssal’ distinctions between humans and animals that Derrida critiques other philosophers for in ‘The Animal that Therefore I am (more to follow)’
52 as a failure, a creature who has been unsuccessful in becoming canine, Romochka views Marko’s ability to smell and move on all fours with envy. For Dmitry, Marko’s existence and behaviour reinforces the idea that humans are unable to be anything but human; for Romochka, Marko is an almost perfect dog.
An anxiety about the border between those who live outside the city, and those who are citizens, is dramatized in the latter parts of the Dog Boy. Romochka observes the necessity of hiding aspects of himself which would mean that he were placed in the first category, in relation to his visits to the children’s centre to visit Puppy/Marko:
‘[b]eing a dog had kept him in that cell as Belov’s begging tool. Being a child now seemed to keep him free’.130 To be a child is to be more distant from bare life than if one is a dog. The Children’s Centre uses hidden cameras throughout to observe the children’s behaviour. Children are both objects of scientific interest and subject to the paternalistic efforts of doctors and child psychologists: the aim is to make them
‘normal’, so that they can enter the city as citizens, rather than as damaged orphans.
Their presence in the centre is critical to their rehabilitation. Children in the centre are microchipped, enabling them to be tracked if they escape. Patushenko explains this to
Romochka by showing him ‘a small disc.’ He says, ‘“We put one of these inside
Marko’s body. It sends a signal, like a little beeping you can’t hear. If he got lost the militzia could find him wherever he goes, just by following the signal”’.131
The Children’s Centre, with its extensive mechanisms of surveillance and the practice of microchipping children, bears a close resemblance to the idea of panopticism outlined in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Foucault writes:
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects,
130 Hornung, Dog Boy, 217 131 Hornung, Dog Boy, 223
53 even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary. 132
Dmitry Patushenko’s explanation of the microchip has the effect of convincing
Romochka that any effort to free Marko from the Children’s Centre will be thwarted.
Romochka, as a result of this explanation and of seeing the screens that show footage from hidden cameras, is aware that he is being watched, and thus realises that he is
‘visible’, and—if he were tempted to try to rescue Marko—knows that any attempt would be futile. Power functions in the novel in the diffuse Foucauldian sense.
Agamben argues that the modern citizen is ‘a two-faced being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties’.133 The novel goes further than this, depicting not only the risks to citizens of sovereign power, but also the extent to which people are implicated in its machinations. While Natalya and Dmitry are not surveilled in the same way as wards of state in the children’s centre and are not under threat, they exercise forms of self-regulation. Dmitry is careful about who he attaches himself to, trying to select children for the centre he runs ‘with clinical detachment’.134
Natalya disciplines her body with gymnastics and attempts to mould the children in the centre in her image by inducing the girls to take part in her classes.135
For Dmitry and Natalya, Romochka’s existence is a reminder of how easy it is to be cast out, as well as a challenge: they want to know if he can be rehabilitated.
Their decision to separate him from the dogs culminates in their urging of the militzia to capture him: there is a sense of panic and danger around the idea that a child could live outside civilization and with animals. The militzia use a cook at an Italian
132 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200 133 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 125 134 Hornung, Dog Boy, 201 135 Hornung, Dog Boy, 202
54 restaurant, Laurentia, who is the victim of human traffickers,136 to poison the dogs in an act which stresses that Romochka’s life requires intervention and that the dogs are expendable. Natalya and Dmitry are therefore implicated in an inhumane act, which
Romochka interprets as the murder of his family. While they would appear to be sufficiently empowered to run the children’s centre, their thinking about the boundaries between humans and animals, and the danger posed by crossing the abyss that exists between those inside the city and outside its borders, is bound up in the ideology and workings of the state.
The final scene in the novel suggests one of the costs of crossing the human- animal border, as it is posited by the authority figures in the novel. It depicts
Romochka after he has been brought to Natalya and Dmitry’s apartment and shaved, cleaned and drugged. To make amends for having killed his dog family, Natalya and
Dmitry bring three of Mamochka’s puppies from the dogs’ den and give them to
Romochka:
His face is in profile. He strokes the pups until they sleep. Then he stands and begins to weep, his shoulders tense and shaking. He turns. His face is raised towards you now, and he is sobbing earnest, mouthing a scream. He stays like this, his body stiff, his fingers outstretched. He stops. His breathing stills and he stands limp at the window for a while, his eyes huge and dark in a white face. Then he turns swiftly and, bending down to the puppies, bites through each of their skulls in turn. He has chosen to stay.137
For the first time in the novel, the reader is directly addressed in this scene. The lines,
‘His face is raised towards you now, and he is sobbing in earnest’, have a beseeching quality, as though Romochka as a child brought conditionally into a warm and comfortable apartment is begging the reader for understanding or compassion. One
136 Hornung, Dog Boy, 99 137 Hornung, Dog Boy, 290
55 interpretation of this scene is that Romochka is rejecting Natalya and Dmitry’s attempt to make peace with him. They have orchestrated the poisoning of his dog family;
Romochka is saying, perhaps, that he cannot be brought around by the gift of puppies.
But the last line in the book, ‘He has chosen to stay’, suggests that this is more than a contrary or performative act on Romochka’s part: his grief is overwhelming, boundless. In crushing the puppies’ skulls, Romochka is acknowledging that his dog
‘nature’ cannot survive with Natalya and Dmitry. When read in light of an earlier instance in the novel—Mamochka killed her puppies in a brutal winter because they could not have endured—Romochka’s behaviour appears to reference an attempt at survival.138 His act mimics hers, in that he is acknowledging that his canine self cannot endure the conditions. The puppies could be read as metaphors for this self. By deciding to ‘stay’, meaning to stay human, Romochka must symbolically kill the canine part of himself. Further, he is acknowledging that he must—in order to be human—exercise forms of self-regulation, even if these seem extreme. To become part of humanity is to violently police the human-animal division within the self, to guard against being aligned with animals. It is ironic that Romochka does this using what might be considered an animalistic act. The regulation of borders—between animals and humans, and also between wild and civilized, and city and fringes—is depicted as violent. At the same time, Romochka, like others who are brought into the city from a marginalized location, is constructed as a figure with a violent history, pleading for understanding.
138 Hornung, Dog Boy, 57
56 The Figure of the Mother in Dog Boy
All four maternal figures are positioned in relation to borders: human, animal, inside and outside. The mothers include Romochka’s dog mother, Mamochka, who is the most significant maternal figure; Romochka’s human mother, who exerts a powerful influence despite her absence; Pievitza and Natalya.
In Romochka’s imagination, his deceased human mother has a continued regulatory influence over his behaviour. Early in the novel, when Romochka is abandoned in his mother and ‘uncle’s’ apartment, he recalls what his human mother might say, a directive to keep him safe: ‘His mother had told him never to go out the door, never to wander off, never to go down the lane by himself even if Uncle sent him’.139 His mother guards against the crossing of boundaries, advising Romochka to stay inside, rather than go outside. It is implied that Romochka’s mother is a prostitute who hasn’t returned home, perhaps because she has met with a violent end; she advises
Romochka because she understands the dangers that are ‘outside’. Later, Romochka thinks of her when he is den-bound in a bitter winter and ‘the Strangers’—wild dogs from the north—are circling the church where he and his clan lives: ‘[His mother] had managed somehow to get past the Strangers, to come checking up on him, making sure he wasn’t sucking snot or holding onto his penis. She wouldn’t approve of either the dogs or the Strangers’.140 At this moment, Romochka remembers his mother as a figure of power, an apparition who restores order, but one who also remonstrates with him about his behaviour, ‘making sure he wasn’t sucking snot or holding his penis’, both acts of a child. The mother of his memory, with her ‘pretty face’ that was ‘[h]airless’141 would defend him from the ‘Strangers’, rescue him and again reinforce the idea that
139 Hornung, Dog Boy, 10 140 Hornung, Dog Boy, 71 141 Hornung, Dog Boy, 71
57 he behave like a well-mannered child. Her disapproval of the ‘dogs’ and the
‘Strangers’ and her restoration of Romochka to a world of warm, lit rooms, reinforces the idea that Romochka’s human mother is invested in keeping Romochka on the human side of the human-animal abyss, and is a force working for Romochka’s inclusion in the civilized sphere.142
Mamochka sustains and protects Romochka. As Romochka is tortured by skinheads, he thinks, ‘Mamochka, Mamochka, mother, mother, come for me, come for me now. Come quickly and bring all the teeth we have’.143 The dogs appear to heed his call. The dogs’ manifestation in the warehouse reinforces Romochka’s (and the reader’s) view of their loyalty. Further, their appearance seems almost miraculous.
There is no possibility of recourse to the law in this scene; Romochka relies on his
‘clan’ for rescue. It is notable that Romochka is mentally calling out for his dog mother, not for the clan as a whole. The scene implies that there is an almost telepathic connection between Mamochka and Romochka; the dog mother is most attuned to
Romochka, and throughout the novel she appears at opportune moments to discipline or to help him. She possesses special capabilities: she reads human and canine body language, predicts the attack of the Strangers and understands when Romochka is in danger. As Romochka dwells on a line between humans and animals, so too does
Mamochka in her ability to communicate with people and to understand Romochka’s needs. Her rescue of a second abandoned child, Marko, while intrinsic to the workings of the narrative, in human terms would be interpreted as compassion, or a sense of responsibility. This is in contrast to Natalya’s attitude to poor women with babies begging outside subways. Natalya ‘looked at [the mother’s] outstretched hands and
142 Hornung, Dog Boy, 71 143 Hornung, Dog Boy, 170-171, italics in original
58 filthy rags, even the weak blue babies they held, as though they were remote from her; an affront to everybody’.144
The third mother in the novel, Pievitza, has been discussed previously in this chapter. In a late scene in the novel, Dmitry and Natalya encounter her holding a baby.
Pievitza ‘thrust the whole bundle towards Natalya. The baby was only weeks old, its malnourished face almost like that of a baby chimpanzee: small, wizened, with bulging vacant blue eyes and blue lips. Its mouth was dry and crusted. It reeked of petrol’.145
Earlier in the novel, Romochka notices that men with guns patrol the village on the edge of Svalka: ‘They took the babies off their mothers and gave them to other women.
Young children too were swapped around’.146 The lack of value given to the bond between landless mothers and children is suggested here; they are entirely at the mercy of the plainclothes militzia, who are able to swap mothers’ babies at will. The portrayal of Pievietza shows the gendered effects of this kind of violence, and its consequences for the bonds between mothers and their children, which result partly from their marginalisation and partly from the fact that they are impoverished.
Natalya, the final maternal figure in Dog Boy, advocates taking in Romochka as a foster child and with Dmitry is responsible for bringing him back to the human fold. Natalya and Dmitry’s first act, though, is to make Romochka over as a human, as if by treating him as an animal—de-lousing, shaving and bathing him—they can transform him into a child. However pessimistically the novel regards the future of the three members of the family, Natalya and Dmitry make compromises, imagining the apartment as containing Romochka and two dogs. Natalya, like Romochka’s original
144 Hornung, Dog Boy, 202 145 Hornung, Dog Boy, 278 146 Hornung, Dog Boy, 83
59 mother, it is implied, will also keep Romochka under surveillance and will attempt to ensure that he remains human, that he stays on the human side of the ‘border’.
The figure of Mamochka can be interpreted reparatively. In the beginning of the novel, Romochka tries to live by her codes of behaviour. While for a time, he and three young dogs stop people walking in alleys and take their shopping bags, after a while he begins to beg with the dogs instead: ‘This kind of hunting was less fun but he felt good about it…He was sure Mamochka would approve’.147 Mamochka exemplifies the ability of dogs to negotiate the border between the human and the animal by her ability to communicate with humans, her patterns of behaviour (which in human terms could almost be called an ‘ethics’) and her ability to take on the role of mother to two human children. She disciplines the dogs and children in the pack:
‘Mamochka raised her head and shoulders from her puppies and that was enough to end fights or quell food rows’.148 In many respects, Mamochka is a force for order; she protects Romochka and teaches him about territory and hunting. Although as a dog she represents the ‘other side’ of the border, it is through the figure of Mamochka that the arbitrary nature of the border—not so much in political terms, but as a line or abyss delineating humans and animals—is highlighted. Romochka troubles the human side of this border, through his taking on of canine characteristics and his attempt to become-dog. Mamockha, apparently with less effort, blurs the line between canine and human through her ability to communicate and what could be called compassion.
147 Hornung, Dog Boy, 93 148 Hornung, Dog Boy, 20
60 The Other Side of the Border
While the foregoing largely engages in a sceptical reading by focusing on the problematic nature of lines and borders highlighted in the novel, it is important to note that Dog Boy also portrays an idealized group of dogs who care for a human child and evokes their sensual and embodied experiences. The book explores not only the privations of dwelling on a border and the consequences of living outside citizenship, but also the richness of what is ‘on the other side’. Early in the novel, Mamochka is on heat and the other dogs ‘lingered over her and followed her around the lair, savouring it’.149 Although Romochka can’t smell Mamochka’s odour, he knows that something has shifted and when Mamochka and Black Dog mate and do nothing else for several days, Romochka,
felt the pressure of an obscure happiness. He watched in tune with the other dogs, who were lying with him around the edges of the dance. There was no envy. A serious satisfaction hung in the air, and in this he half guessed that they all, himself included, had worked and hunted, for this; and that with Mamochka and Black Dog’s dance their summer was fulfilled.150
The dogs form a community, in which mating provokes ‘no envy’ and where the collective effort of finding food and eating culminates in an act that will ensure the clan’s survival. While Hornung’s portrayal of the dogs is idealized in this scene
(wouldn’t Mamochka be attracting attention from dogs from all over the region?), the
‘obscure happiness’ Romochka feels is pleasure that arises from the fact that each member of the community contributes to the clan’s persistence. In Hornung’s description of the dogs’ mating, there is a sense of expanding time, a life beyond the one lived by the members of the pack.
149 Hornung, Dog Boy, 55 150 Hornung, Dog Boy, 55-56
61 The idea of kinship is also important in the continuity of the clan in a bitter winter, when Romochka has to stay home in the lair and the dogs bring food back for him. When he nurses from Mamochka, he ‘suck[s] a mouthful …and kiss[es] it into a sibling’s lapping mouth. They wove around expectant, when he was drinking’.151Although Romochka is a small child in this part of the book, he is attuned to the bodies of his ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ and feels something akin to empathy for their hunger. While they bring him food from outside, he feeds them mouthfuls of milk to keep them alive. Of course, not all of the interactions between the dogs are positive; there are instances of jealousy and rivalry. It is notable that Dog Boy focuses not simply on the harsh consequences of policing boundaries, but presents an alternative in the form of community that stands in contrast to the relationships between the human characters in the second half of the novel.
My reading of Dog Boy, while intended to examine the extent to which animals and humans are portrayed as bridging abyssal differences by examining embodied and psychological connections between them, necessarily has explored the political ramifications of these connections. Dog Boy expresses what it is like to live estranged from any form of political power and exposed to violence. Language and the ability to speak provide some agency, but their ability to change Romochka’s position depends on the circumstances. The book’s focus on a child whose closest bond is with dogs throws the relationships between humane animals and animalistic people into relief.
Romochka’s dog life results, in part, in his othering, yet is his greatest source of comfort. The evocation of an idealized canine community allows for a consideration of the sympathies between children and dogs. Further, the complexity of a life that from the outside appears spare and deprived calls into question preconceptions about
151 Hornung, Dog Boy, 68
62 those who live on the literal or metaphorical edges of modern cities. More significantly, the novel suggests the costs of living in modernity, which entail surveillance, the policing of borders, and being implicated in violent interventions conducted by the state.
63
Chapter Two
Gender, Violence and Resistance in Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies
(1902) and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (2013)
In Chapter Two, I extend the discussion of animals in Australian fiction to examine the relationship between women and sheep in Evie Wyld’s second novel, All the Birds,
Singing (2013). I situate this novel in relation to Barbara Baynton’s collection of stories, Bush Studies (1902), using Baynton’s stories as paradigmatic Australian narratives about women exposed to masculine violence in the bush, focusing on ‘Billy
Skywonkie’ and ‘The Chosen Vessel’. I argue that Baynton and Wyld each establish a series of shifting connections between women and animals. In Baynton’s stories and in All the Birds, Singing, women and animals are at times conflated by male characters and as a result of their own phenomenological experience of the world, and are at other times distanced from each other. The gendered conflation of women with animals paradoxically re-inscribes the abyss between human and nonhuman forms of life.
Embodied connections, on the other hand, as represented in All the Birds, Singing (and in Dog Boy) have the capacity to evoke productive and non-hierarchical entanglements across species borders.152
While Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and The
Open: Man and Animal inform my discussion of the physical and metaphorical proximity of animals and women in Wyld’s and Baynton’s texts, using Agamben to examine the fictional depictions of the bare life of women is problematic. Agamben’s oeuvre is widely acknowledged by feminist scholars to exhibit gender blindness. As
152 See Haraway, Donna, When Species Meet, 5
64 is noted by Catherine Mills in her monograph, The Philosophy of Agamben, Agamben
‘excludes…women from [his] philosophical lexicon’.153 Although the lives of women in All the Birds, Singing and Baynton’s stories could be considered bare, the books are not only about the experience of ‘bare life’. The texts’ focus is masculine violence against women, which is made possible by the characters’ distance from the rule of law. Rather than being subjected to sovereign violence, women in ‘Billy Skywonkie’,
‘The Chosen Vessel’ and All the Birds, Singing have no recourse to legal protection.
At the same time, women in these stories are directly compared with sheep, who are slaughtered in all three texts. The alignment of women with animals re-asserts the idea that men and animals exist in opposition; women’s association with the animal places her on the creaturely side of the abyss and in mortal danger.
To read the texts as being about the historical and present-day treatment of women in the Australian bush and to discuss All the Birds, Singing in relation to the
Australian anti-pastoral tradition represents a straightforward approach to reading
Wyld’s novel. It is important to note, however, that the protagonists are not without agency. Jake, in particular, has strategies for resisting the conflation of human and animal bodies. In addition, an analysis of All the Birds, Singing would be incomplete if it failed to take account of the connections between Jake and sheep in the novel, a relation that is embodied and empathetic. To discuss the close ties between Jake and animals, I use the idea that human and animals share embodiment as a primary condition of consciousness after Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Nature: Course Notes from the College de France, he argues that humans and animals can be conceived non- hierarchically and refutes Cartesian distinctions between them. He writes:
the human cannot appear in its qualitative difference by the mere addition of reason to the animal (body).
153 See Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben, 115
65 The relation of the animal to the human will not be a simple hierarchy founded on an addition: there will already be another manner of being a body in human being. We study the human through its body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addition of reason, but rather, in short in the Ineinander with the animal (strange anticipations or caricatures of the human in the animal), by escape and not by superposition…there is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal…154
Embodiment, and the experience of embodiment, attains primacy in Merleau-
Ponty’s Nature and inflects the subject’s experience of the world, even though the
(phenomenological) study of animals is necessarily limited by anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. Nonetheless, ‘there is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal’, which emerges through embodiment. In my ‘reparative’ reading of All the Birds, Singing later in this chapter, I examine how the novel represents kinship between Jake and sheep, and to what extent this kinship is experienced by Jake in embodied form. Resistance to masculine forms of power, I argue, consists not by an explicit and public politics, but in the mental act of empathy.
Although Merleau-Ponty’s idea of kinship emerges from his phenomenological approach, my reading is not intended to be a phenomenological one. Rather, this chapter concentrates on representations of violence, largely directed towards sheep and women in the fiction under discussion, as a way of thinking about what explicit representations of violent acts imply about Australian fiction set in the bush.
154 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the College de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 214 (italics in original)
66 Bare Life, Gender and Postcolonialism
Agamben’s conception of bare life occludes the role of gender. In part, this is because it does not overtly challenge the idea that women are excluded from the political sphere because of their estrangement from the polis. They are absent from the city on the basis that they are aligned with ‘reproductive life’. This view—which admittedly is not explicit in Agamben’s work—is referenced early in Homo Sacer, when ‘bare life’ is distinguished from ‘the sphere of oikos, the ‘home.’155 Homo Sacer does not discuss gender; therefore, the idea that women are situated outside the polis remains unchallenged.
In both All the Birds, Singing and stories from Bush Studies, the characters suffer not from a politically-imposed ‘bare life’ as a consequence of sovereign violence, as does Romochka in Dog Boy, but from the absence of law, or the abandonment by the law as a result of their physical location. The ‘sovereign’ and the sovereign’s representatives in the form of institutions such as the police and the judiciary, are absent in Baynton’s and Wyld’s texts. It is rather that the ‘outlaw’ aspects of the law, the fact that the characters live far from centres of power, enable men to occupy powerful positions in relation to women and to commit violent acts.
National and state law are so distant as to be irrelevant.
Scholarship on justice in colonial societies has focused on the frontier as a space where land is contested by colonizers and indigenous peoples; where the law has been used by colonizers as a means of dispossession. 156 According to Julie Evans, the frontier is initially ‘a legal space of violence’ in international law, where international law pertains to ‘a space of violence where European sovereignty was in
155 Here, Agamben is directly referring to Aristotle’s Politics. He cites Politics 1252a, 26-35, in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 2 156 Some historians date ‘frontier wars’ as ending in 1838, see John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars: 1798-1838 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002)
67 the process of constitution and other sovereignties were in a process of suppression’.157
By ‘other sovereignties’, Evans means indigenous sovereignties. Evans sees the frontier as a place marked by the transition of the legal space of violence in international law, to a ‘space of legal violence’ in domestic law, which constitutes a more codified ‘subjection to violence and discrimination’ directed towards indigenous people.158 Evans’ paper focuses on the initial violence and use of what she terms ‘the application of exceptional procedures such as outlawry, martial law…and exemplary executions to name just some of their arsenal of legalised violence and discrimination’ committed to exterminate indigenous people, and to justify the taking over of land.159
According to Evans, ‘neither violence, nor the frontier, begins, or ends, with settlement. Rather, both inhere—and thereby persist—in the very concept of sovereignty.’160 By this argument, Evans contends that violence is intrinsic to the nature of colonial and postcolonial sovereignty; that sovereignty can only be maintained through violence or the threat of violence. At the same time, the idea of the edge of a state persists also in sovereign states, be these frontiers literal or metaphorical. Postcolonial spaces under exceptional forms of governance as construed by West-Pavlov by way of Schmitt and Agamben have been discussed in the
Introduction and in Chapter One. In thinking about Baynton’s and Wyld’s texts, there is little sense of organized, state-sanctioned ‘sovereign violence’ in the terms set up in
Agamben’s Homo Sacer or by Evans. Jake and the women in Bush Studies are threatened in part because of their proximity to animals. In All the Birds, Singing and
157 Julie Evans, ‘Where Lawlessness is Law: The Settler-Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence,’ The Australian Feminist Law Journal 30 (2009): 21 158 Evans, ‘Where Lawlessness is Law,’ 5 159 Evans, ‘Where Lawlessness is Law,’ 21 160 Evans, ‘Where Lawlessness is Law,’ 21
68 Bush Studies, male characters are able to see women as associated with animals, particularly with sheep.
Place, Sheep and Australian Fiction
In employing sheep as conspicuous metaphors in their work, Baynton and Wyld participate in an Australian literary tradition in which sheep are utilized as symbols.
As nationalistic ciphers, they appear in nineteenth-century folk songs, celebrated for their meat—the forbidden eating of the jumbuck in ‘Waltzing Matilda’161—and for their wool, in ‘Click Go the Shears’. 162 Leigh Dale argues in ‘Empire’s Proxy: Sheep and the Colonial Environment’, that the merino was more than the source of wool, which provided capital, and enabled a narrative of ‘prosperity and progress’ to be constructed around the colony.163 In ‘Billy Skywonkie’ and in All the Birds, Singing the land is drought-stricken and the sheep barely survive; they are by no means the symbol of the landed aristocracy’s good fortune associated with the squatter’s jumbuck in ‘Waltzing Matilda’; rather, they signal the texts’ engagement with the anti- pastoral form.
‘Billy Skywonkie’ appears to reference the severe drought Eastern Australia suffered in the late 1890s.164 Starving sheep indicate that the property to which the unnamed woman is being taken is infertile and in some sense degenerate. Billy
Skywonkie tells the woman:
‘No sign er rain. No lambin’ this season; soon as they’re dropt we’ll ‘ave ter knock ‘em all on ther ‘ead!’ He shouted an oath of hatred at the crows
161 Paterson, A.B. ‘Waltzing Matilda (lyrics).’ 1895. Images Australia website. http://www.imagesaustralia.com/waltzingmatilda.htm 162 ‘Click Go the Shears.’ 1946. Australian Folk Songs. http://folkstream.com/022.html 163 Leigh Dale, ‘Empire’s Proxy: Sheep and the Colonial Environment.’ Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire, ed. Helen Tiffin, 1-14 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 3 164 Garden, Don. ‘The Federation Drought of 1895-1903, El Nino and Society in Australia.’ Common Ground: Integrating the Social and Environmental in History. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010)
69 following after the tottering sheep that made in a straggling line for the water. ‘Look at ‘em!’ he said. ‘Scoffin out ther eyes!’ He pointed to where the crows hovered over the bogged sheep. ‘They putty well lives on eyes! “Blanky Bush Chinkies!” I call ‘em. No one carn’t tell ‘em apart!’165
The woman is met with the vision of crows ‘Scoffin out’ sheep’s eyes. The images this scene conjures are nightmarish: a degraded landscape, in which the sheep are starving and set upon by crows. ‘Blanky Bush Chinkes’ is a racist reference by which
Skywonkie asserts that the crows are indistinguishable from each other. Skywonkie’s comment about ‘Chinkies’ is also an attempt to obtain a response from the woman he is taking to the homestead, whom he assumes is Chinese. The sheep—which ought to connote prosperity—suffer in a drought-stricken landscape and are weak and beset by crows, birds that are native inhabitants but which Billy orientalizes and views as predatory. This is no idyllic pastoral landscape, but one in which even if sheep manage to have lambs, their offspring will be ‘knock[ed]…on ther ‘ead’. A contrast is made between the sheep, who are eyeless in this scene, and the woman who observes
Skywonkie carefully: his face, clothes and actions, imagining his teeth as ‘worn stepping stones’.166 The act of looking on the part of the woman is repeated in this story and is also notable in All the Birds, Singing. Baynton portrays the woman as trying to find her bearings in a strange and potentially dangerous place, aligned with neither the sheep nor the crows, despite Skywonkie’s implied comparison of her to the birds.
In the Australian sections of Wyld’s novel, the ewes are also in poor shape.
Jake observes:
As we get closer I can see how ill they look—patches of wool missing, ribs poking out. There’s a smell of shit and you can see the maggots eating their
165 Baynton, Bush Studies, 97 166 Baynton, Bush Studies, 97
70 hindquarters. Man up, I tell myself, he’s an old bloke, he’s doing the best he can. 167
The ewes here, which Jake regards with a mixture of pity and disgust, are— like the sheep in ‘Billy Skywonkie’—half-starved. While Jake exhorts herself to ‘man up’ and attempts to explain Otto’s treatment of the sheep on the basis that ‘he’s an old bloke’, she is also unsettled by her encounter with them. As she holds a sheep, she
‘can feel [the ewe’s] heartbeat through me, and she smells bad’.168 Already, in this scene, Jake senses the ambivalence with which sheep and women are regarded by
Otto, and her own physical connections to the flock. Otto’s mistreatment and slaughter of his ewes signals his disregard for his property as a farm. The hostility of this place, and the fact that shearing shed is used both for shearing and for sheep slaughter, heightens Jake’s discomfort. In both ‘Billy Skywonkie’ and All the Birds, Singing the condition of sheep in a harsh landscape amplifies the sense of threat female characters feel in these places.
The sheep in Baynton’s and Wyld’s fiction become the voiceless and unknowing agents of environmental damage. In this way, the texts demonstrate recognition of the way grazing animals physically altered the land, an impact, Dale notes, which ‘constituted colonization’,169 at the same time as becoming an unwitting aid to white invasion and occupation. Besides changing the fragile soils and plant life of Australia’s interior, merinos were a means by which white settlers could displace responsibility for the fate of indigenous people onto their cattle and sheep, through ‘a persistent effacing of the acts of dispossession’.170 Dale quotes the ‘Shearer in
Australian Literature’ entry from the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature
167 Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 133 168 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 134 169 Dale, ‘Empire’s Proxy’, 6 170 Dale, ‘Empire’s Proxy’, 5
71 (1994), which discusses the ‘opening of new pastoral areas’, rather than, as Dale mentions, the acts committed by the people who brought the sheep. 171 The invasion by white settlers is thus euphemized and the transformation of the landscape is attributed to grazing, rather than, as Dale writes, to the ‘agency of the colonists’.172
Neither of Baynton’s stories under discussion nor Wyld’s novel explore the historical or present day dispossession of indigenous people, but ‘Billy Skywonkie’ and All the Birds Singing portray marginalized indigenous characters. Billy views all women, including his wife Lizer, who is Aboriginal, as commodities: ‘any red black- gin was as good as a half chow any day’,173 by which he compares the unnamed woman’s race to the race of his wife. In All the Birds Singing, Denver, an older
Aboriginal boy Jake has a crush on at school, is unfairly blamed for a fire that Jake started, and is severely burned.174 Characters’ attitudes to indigenous people are registered in Baynton’s and Wyld’s work. The presence of sheep and the absence of traditional indigenous connections to the land connote the taking of Aboriginal land.
In Wyld’s novel and in ‘Billy Skywonkie’ farm animals are associated with environmental destruction. More importantly, rural locales are spheres in which sheep die from the harsh environmental conditions or are killed, and where women’s lives are threatened. The bush is represented as a violent, lawless and barren place. The evocation of degraded landscapes inhabited by sheep invites contrast between
Baynton’s and Wyld’s work and other Australian fiction set in the bush that presents a more bucolic view of rural and settled Australia, such as Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds (2013).
171 Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1994), 691, qtd. in Dale, Empire’s Proxy, 5 172 Dale, ‘Empire’s Proxy,’ 5 173 Baynton, Bush Studies, 104 174 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 199
72 Distance and Conflation in Baynton’s fiction
In Baynton’s stories, a tension exists between the metaphorical connections between women and sheep, and the distinctions between them. The final scene of ‘Billy
Skywonkie’ appears to establish an equivalence between the unnamed woman and a ewe awaiting slaughter. At the end of the story, the woman watches as Billy
Skywonkie sharpens his knife and prepares to slit the sheep’s throat.
He bent and strained back the sheep’s neck, drew the knife and steel from his belt, and skillfully danced on the edge of the blade. She noticed that the sheep lay passive, with its head back till its neck curved in a bow, and that the glitter of the knife was reflected in its eye.175
The woman, who does not speak in this scene, observes the lack of resistance on the part of the animal, despite its discomfort. She also notes Skywonkie’s skill with the knife and steel. This is the only ability that Skywonkie possesses in the story: he is otherwise portrayed as a hapless drunk. There is a paratactic move in this passage, in that while it is implied that the steel is ‘danc[ing] on the edge of the blade’, the syntax implies that Skywonkie himself may be dancing. The scene shows his prowess with knives and reveals his lack of hesitation when it comes to the act of killing.
The passage, which has been cited in several papers on Baynton’s work176 appears to portray the woman and the sheep as equally helpless and at Skywonkie’s mercy. The woman neither responds to characters’ racist comments about her appearance earlier in the story, nor resists their treatment of her.177 Julieanne Lamond, who is primarily writing on race in ‘Billy Skywonkie’ makes this observation:
…the point is that [the woman] ‘notices’ what is happening. She seems to be the passive subject of the gaze but…[t]he final image of the story is not, as is often
175 Baynton, Bush Studies, 109 176 See, for example, Leigh Dale, ‘Rereading Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 53.4 (Winter 2011): 369-386; and Julieanne Lamond, ‘The Reflected Eye: Reading Race in Barbara Baynton’s ‘Billy Skywonkie.’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 53.4 (Winter 2011): 387-400 177 Baynton, Bush Studies, 98 & 104, for example
73 suggested in readings of Baynton's stories, simply an example of the collapsing or conflating of woman and sheep. It is also an acknowledgment of the distance between them.178
Lamond argues that the woman is not wholly passive, because she ‘notices’ the sheep’s apparent acceptance of its fate. By using the word ‘distance’, Lamond implies that Baynton is rendering the woman’s subjectivity as distinct from the ewe’s. The
‘distance between them’ pertains to the degree to which the woman witnesses the violence about to be inflicted on the animal and apprehends it as bearing a relationship to ‘her intended role at the station as a physical sacrifice of some sort’:179 the expectation that she was meant to become the boss’s mistress. In witnessing the moments leading up to the sheep’s death, the woman understands that she is still threatened by the presence of Billy Skywonkie. Her ability to see the knife reflected in the creature’s eye, which the sheep cannot physically see, suggests what constitutes the ‘distance’ between the woman and the ewe. Again, here, seeing confers a kind of limited power on the part of the woman. ‘Distance’ exists in the woman’s realization of the animal’s suffering and in her glimpsing of her own predicament. As Lamond argues, there is an obvious difference in how Baynton imagines the ewe and the woman. Even in moments of apparent passivity, women in Baynton’s stories are able to establish a form of psychological distance using observation in which to figure their own gendered humanity. In this way, ‘Billy Skywonkie’ re-inscribes some of the differences between humans and animals. This rendering of distance, which makes the text an anthropological machine in a limited sense, is nonetheless not straightforward.
Connections between sheep and women as subject to men’s authority and violence are also made using imagery in Baynton’s ‘The Chosen Vessel’ (1902). In
178 Lamond, ‘The Reflected Eye,’ 397 179 Lamond, ‘The Reflected Eye,’ 397
74 this, the final story in Bush Studies, a young woman who is unable to fight off the advances of a swagman is killed. Her dead body is first misapprehended as belonging to ‘a ewe’ by the boundary rider who finds her: ‘“it’s been a dingo right enough!...down in the creek—a ewe and a lamb, I’ll bet; and the lamb’s alive!”’.180
The ‘lamb’, it emerges, is the woman’s child, who survives. Baynton writes:
Yes, the lamb was alive, and after the manner of lambs of its kind did not know its mother when the light came. It had sucked the still warm breasts, and laid its little head on her bosom, and slept till the morn. Then, when it looked at the swollen disfigured face, it wept and would have crept away, but for the hand that still clutched its little gown.181
The sentimental application of ‘lamb’ to the child, with its Christian connotations,182 heightens the sense of the child’s helplessness. The repetition of ‘little’ emphasizes the child’s youth and innocence. The death of the mother is made more horrific through the glimpse of her face and the portrayal of the child’s incomprehension. The dead mother’s inability to let go of the child’s gown implies that the child will always recall what happened to her mother: the child cannot let go of the memory.
Interestingly, animal metaphors are also used to describe male characters in
‘The Chosen Vessel’. The boundary rider, when assuming that several sheep had been killed, first attributes the killing to ‘a dingo’. The woman initially fears the swagman who comes to her door because of ‘the look of his eyes, and the gleam of his teeth’.183
Baynton, here, pragmatically aligns men with predatory animals, while associating women and children with prey. The animalistic actions of men are enabled by the absence of legal protection for women and by their isolation. Further, Hennessey, a man riding to town, ignores the woman’s appeals for help, thinking that she is a vision
180 Baynton, Bush Studies, 137 181 Baynton, Bush Studies, 137 182 Abraham is tested by God in Genesis 22, when he is asked to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God; sheep are frequent symbols in the New Testament 183 Baynton, Bush Studies, 133
75 from God to encourage him to vote for the candidate in the election endorsed by the
Catholic priest. Women in Baynton’s stories are misconstrued by men. In ‘The Chosen
Vessel’, the woman is thought to be a religious apparition, then a sheep. The woman’s actual circumstances: alone, with a small child in an isolated hut, are overlooked.
Embodied Conflation and Reparative Identification in All the Birds, Singing
All the Birds, Singing both installs and problematizes the way that women’s and animals’ bodies are thought about as different from men’s, and as vulnerable. The novel juxtaposes the physical relationships between men and sheep, and men and women in order to link women and sheep as subject to the desires of men, whether amorous or violent. When Otto teaches Jake how to shear, she observes,
[w]hen he has [the ewe] pinned on the boards, a strange gentleness comes over him, I can see it on his face. It’s like how he looks at me when we screw. ‘You don’t want her to be sitting on her tail,’ he says, ‘cause that’s not comfortable.’184
Later, when Otto kills a sheep, Jake can see that he ‘has a hard-on through his shorts’.185 In these scenes, Jake and Otto’s livestock are directly compared to each other. Otto’s desire is not for the sheep, one assumes, but stems from his ability to exert power over an ovine body, and by extension, over Jake’s. In these physical interactions, his expression and body language are the same, ‘gentleness’ or desire.
Jake and the flock are therefore bodies from which Otto demands passivity or treats with violence if they transgress his authority. His gentleness in one scene is no assurance that he will not commit an act of violence at a later time. In these sections of the novel, the characters’ expressions and the bodies of sheep and women are emphasized. Otto also talks to Jake about how to care for her body as a shearer: ‘if
184 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 142 185 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 95
76 you don’t use [your back] it’ll never get strong, so you’ll just have to get used to that ache’.186
Jake also conflates women and ovine bodies in All the Birds, Singing. In her imagination, the bodies of Otto’s dead wife, Carole, and the ewes are mixed up. She is convinced that Otto has killed Carole and believes that her body has been dumped with the bodies of the dead sheep. This is a source of horror for Jake, whose hand
‘trembles’ when she sees Kelly with a woman’s shoe ‘hot pink and to fit a very small foot’, fetched from a place to which she has seen the dog ‘dragging’ carcasses and burying them.187 Jake’s terror, here, causes her to feel empathy for the dead woman.
Baynton and Wyld emphasise the dead bodies of women and animals; women’s and animals’ bodies are mistaken for each other. Jake thinks that Kelly is dragging a sheep carcass from the paddock to under the house until she sees Kelly with a shoe; the boundary rider assumes that the dead woman is a ewe, until he comes closer in ‘The
Chosen Vessel’.
Even though Baynton’s stories and All the Birds, Singing portray women’s and sheep’s bodies as being subject to similar treatment at the hands of men, ‘Billy
Skywonkie’ and Wyld’s novel allow for more nuanced readings of these metaphorical connections. Jake’s recognition of how Otto looks at her suggests a distinction between her and Otto’s ewes on the basis of Jake’s subjectivity. Like the woman in
‘Billy Skywonkie’, she ‘notices’ and watches herself being watched: ‘He stares at me, an unbroken gaze that prickles the hair on the back of my neck’;188 ‘Otto looks at me through a narrowed eye’.189 In both cases, Otto looks at Jake in a manner which from
Jake’s perspective is threatening. In response to the threat posed by Otto’s gaze, Jake
186 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 142 187 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 114 188 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 94 189 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 95
77 opens up a distance between her body and those of the ewes by working to build a muscular physique: ‘I get quietly out of bed and I do push-ups in the dark’.190 One reading of her attempts to shape her physicality is that she is trying to make herself less vulnerable, by making herself more apparently masculine. As discussed in the
Introduction, her name, Jake, also signals her equivocation about her gender, and suggests that the development of a muscular body has to do with a more profound ambivalence with thinking about herself as a woman. Unlike the woman in ‘Billy
Skywonkie’, who can only register the gazes of Billy Skywonkie and ‘the Konk’— another man who comes to look at her—Jake tries to create a distinction between herself and the apparently passive bodies of Otto’s stock.
Jake observes that sheep and women appear to be conflated in Otto’s mind, yet she feels empathy for the ewes. She imagines them thinking ‘One by one’ 191 when
Otto chooses one for slaughter, signaling an act of identification. She resists killing an animal under Otto’s orders, initially because she knows her acquiescence will make her a participant in, rather than simply a witness to, his violent acts. Ultimately, she is forced to cut the ewe’s throat, because of her attempt to escape from the farm. Jake thinks initially, ‘I am sorry for my bad behaviour, I want to tell [Otto], I want to say I won’t do it again, I promise’.192 It is possible, too, that Jake finally agrees because she recognizes that he ‘likes [her] best when she is small and like a child’, a thought that causes her to accept the ‘challenge’.193 When her participation in the butchery becomes inevitable, she imagines that through killing she will ‘show [Otto] that I am stronger
190 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 119 191 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 93 (italics in original) 192 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 95 193 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 95
78 than he thinks, and the sheep…will be the sacrifice’.194 For Jake, the act is used to symbolize her capacity for violence and thus distinguish herself from Otto’s livestock.
Otto gazes at Jake and at the ewes with a similar expression; it is implied that he murdered his wife in the same place that he slaughters the sheep, and the corpses of Carole and his stock are intermingled. His apparent belief in the interchangeability of women and animals suggests that he is forcing Jake to slaughter the sheep instead of killing her himself. Another way of reading this scene, then, is to view it as an exchange: Jake has to commit a metaphorical act, in which an ovine body is exchanged for hers. This is the consequence of the imposed conflation of women and animals; if they are interchangeable, then one can be killed in place of the other. There is also a suggestion of self-slaughter.
The killing of the ewe is rendered more complex, though, by Jake’s embodied experience of the act, registered in her first person, present tense perspective:
in one motion I cut her throat, as deep and hard as I can, I want her to be dead before she knows about it, but she still writhes about under me as blood pours out of her, and as her strength goes, so does mine, but I hold her to me, I press my face into the wool at the back of her head.195
Her violent and reluctant slaying, ‘in one motion,’ causes her strength to fade as the animal’s ‘strength goes’. Killing is therefore not empowering; nor does the event create much distance between the two of them. Instead, the slaughter is a shared physical event, in which Jake feels the last movements of the ewe beneath her as
‘blood pours out’, rather than watching the ewe’s death.196 In response to the physical sensation—the emphasis here is on feeling, rather than seeing—she presses her face
‘into the wool at the back of [the sheep’s] head’. Rather than being repulsed by the
194 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 95 195 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 96 196 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 96
79 experience, she draws closer, hiding or burying herself. The experience is embodied not just on the level of proximity. The one long sentence that describes this moment is broken up with commas which function like the last gasps of the sheep and Jake’s shuddering and emotional breaths. The bodily nature of the event, it is implied, resides in the paired respiration of Jake and the dying creature, which is legible in the prose.
In this passage, the metaphorical connections between women and animals are rendered more complex by their contact: kinship between Jake and the sheep exists, and it is physical, felt.
By resisting the estrangement of animals from humans, which in the novel is achieved by the act of looking, and by stressing their empathetic and embodied connections, Jake works against Otto’s view of sheep (and women) as wholly other.
In this way, Wyld’s novel, like the work of Coetzee, can be read by way of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s view of humans and animals as sharing embodiment as a primary condition of consciousness.197 According to Merleau-Ponty:
…the relation of the human and animality is not a hierarchical relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship. Even mind is incredibly penetrated by its corporal structure: eye and mind…The human body, in this perspective…[is understood] as esthesiological body and erotic body in a relation of intercorporeity in the biosphere with all animality…198
As Kelly Oliver argues, if humans and animals are ‘lateral’ kin on the basis of a shared penetration by the mind of the ‘corporal structure’ (interestingly, ‘eye and mind’), then ‘humanity does not emerge from animality’; nor is the human separate from the animal.199 Merleau-Ponty is not rejecting the idea of evolution here, so much as navigating between ‘biological continuism and metaphysical separationism’:200 the
197 Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach us to be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 219 198 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 268 199 Oliver, Animal Lessons, 220 200 Oliver, Animal Lessons, 220
80 idea that humans are privileged on the basis of their metaphysics. Humans, according to Merleau-Ponty, are not alone in the relation of the body to the world, or Umwelt
(sensory environment), a term Merleau-Ponty uses from Jakob von Uexküll.201 The body, in Merleau-Ponty’s estimation, is not a ‘mass of matter’ but a ‘standard of things’ that has the ability to perceive and reference something other than itself, with which it has sensory ‘attachments’. Although in Nature he makes a distinction between sea urchins and dogs—dogs being described as ‘higher animals’—he sees the distinctions between higher animals on the basis of consciousness as inadequate.
Rather, the fact of embodiment is primary and enables a form of consciousness of the world, shaped by the senses.202 It is this sense of embodied connections, which Jake understands empathetically, that can be emphasized in a reparative reading of the novel.
The embodied associations between Jake and her flock are also significant in the sections of the novel set on an English island. In these chapters, Jake takes in
Lloyd, who is grieving for his dead partner by performing rituals with his partner’s ashes at the ‘furthest points of Britain’,203 but her strongest connection is with her dog and ewes. In the scene when she rounds up the sheep and brings them into the shed for lambing, she acknowledges: ‘I could feel it, the ripple going through the sheep, the new feeling for some of them, the old familiar ache for others’.204 This ‘familiar ache’ is caused by the onset of lambing. The feeling passes through Jake and the animals as a ‘ripple’ as though they are part of one entity, although there is no suggestion that
Jake wishes to be a mother. Further, Jake says ‘I felt like I could lie down in the hay
201 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds and Animals and Humans with, A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph O’Neill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010) 202 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 216 203 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 161 204 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 184
81 with them, a pang, just for a moment, of what it must be like to give birth to something’.205 Jake’s ewes’ pain is not distant and separate, but imagined to the point that it feels embodied, a ‘pang’ that she shares. In this passage, the novel stresses the connections between Jake and her animals, rather than a hierarchical relationship.
Through her embodied connections with her ewes, Jake is acknowledging a shared physicality.
Dog, Jake’s companion in the island sections of the book, is another important figure in the novel. Dog is far more impulsive and volatile than Kelly, Otto’s dog. His actions cannot be controlled by Jake or by Lloyd. Attempts to make Dog ‘normal’ and well-trained fail. When Lloyd attempts to discipline him, reading instructions from a dog-training manual about how dogs should learn their names, Jake warns Lloyd:
‘“Dog is four years old, and he knows he’s Dog already,” I said. “You’re just pissing him off. He’ll bite you.”’ After Lloyd shouts ‘No’ several times to discourage Dog from barking, ‘Dog made six high-pitched yips, wiggled his arse and lunged at Lloyd’s face. After impact, Dog seemed free of rage, and trotted happily back towards the house, his work completed.’206
All the Birds, Singing portrays Dog anthropomorphically; Dog could, in fact, be a kind of analogue for Jake, who is also represented as idiosyncratic and
‘untrainable’. This is despite his name, which implies that he is simultaneously an archetypal dog. The observations about Dog’s body language from Jake’s perspective imply that she interprets his behavior with ease: ‘Dog couldn’t take anymore and barked his warning bark, the high-pitched one that meant Get lost.’207 While Jake is able translate Dog’s barks, she also draws on Dog’s abilities as a creature who can
205 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 185 206 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 121 207 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 120, italics in original.
82 perceive things that Jake and other human characters cannot see: ‘“The human eye senses movement before all else”’ Lloyd says, quoting from a National Geographic article. ‘The human eye’ in All the Birds, Singing is an organ of power, yet it is also represented as of limited use. Dog is able to sense the presence of someone outside the house in the island sections of All the Birds, Singing before the other characters are aware of it.208
Jake and Dog are not directly likened to each other, but rely on each other: Dog for ‘translation’ and regulation, Jake for protection and for Dog’s perceptions. This is not an empathetic relationship so much as a strategic one. In contrast, Jake’s empathy for her sheep constitutes resistance to the idea that animals are wholly estranged from humans. The dog-human connection in fiction by Baynton, Hornung and Wyld is a specific cross-species association; close relationships of this kind, in which humans and animals can communicate, nurture and protect each other, are not apparent in interactions between people and any other creature in the texts.
The Creature in All the Birds, Singing
Besides portraying the bush as a violent place, Wyld suggests that the threatening presence that inhabits the Australian sections of All the Birds, Singing—in the form of
Otto—remains present in Jake’s mind in a place distant from its origin. Jake longs to leave the violence she has suffered in Australia behind, but the creature who stalks and kills Jake’s ewes in the island chapters makes it clear that this is impossible. If sheep and women are metaphorically connected, the creature also represents a threat to Jake.
The creature hovers on the edge of many of the scenes on the island. For example, it
208 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 105
83 appears directly after Jake’s acknowledgement of the ‘ripple going through the sheep’ and before she attends to the birthing ewes. Jake observes:
The hiss of leaves in the wind and from behind the shed, a single low sheep call. I felt it, the skin on my back prickling like something stared hard at me from behind the dark. It was holding its breath but it was there. In the doorway I breathed in the manure and warmth and blood of what was happening. I could make out three who were shifting about, unsettled, one who threw her head back, curling her upper lip.209
The threat posed by this unnamed creature is present from the moment of birth: in
Jake’s imagination it ‘stared hard at me’. Its effect on Jake is akin to Otto’s, in that the
‘skin on [Jake’s] back [prickles]’. Jake believes that the thing is there, but cannot see it. Here, her perspective evokes the uncanny. The customary weather and actions of the sheep who are about to lamb, are juxtaposed with the sense that there is some other creature present. In this passage, the creature is apprehended as part of the natural world. The creature appears with the ‘hiss of leaves’. While it holds its breath, denoting some hesitation, Jake breathes in ‘the manure and warmth and blood’.
There is slippage between whether the creature attacking Jake’s flock is human or animal, real or imagined. In a scene when Jake takes a bath, she hears ‘someone’ climbing the stairs.210 She tries to convince herself that she is hearing Lloyd, but soon afterwards she hears the creature ‘pant[ing] deep in the back of its throat’.211 Unlike a wild animal, the creature enters the house, seeks Jake, then leaves, yet it ‘pants’ like a dog or a wolf. The predatory qualities of Otto and Clare, a male shearer Jake encounters, are present in its characterization (Clare also comes to threaten Jake when she is in the bathroom). The creature’s more human qualities are evident from the first chapter, when Jake’s neighbor, Don, says, ‘But I’ve never seen anything round here
209 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 184 210 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 187 211 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 187
84 flense an animal like that’.212 To ‘flense’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘to cut up and slice the fat from’ or ‘to flay or skin’. Both definitions have been used historically in relation to hunting whales or seals; the word dates from 1820.213 The first phrase in the novel states that the dead sheep has been ‘mangled and bled out’.214
‘[Bleeding] out’ and skinning or flensing a sheep are human acts.
Jake’s evident paranoia suggests that she is not a wholly reliable narrator. She suffers from nightmares and imagines or hears a beast or an intruder in her house at night. In his review of the novel, Geordie Williamson asserts that Jake is suffering from zooscopic hallucinations as a result of the trauma she suffered in Australia.215
Lloyd’s corroboration of Jake’s belief in the existence of a predatory creature complicates this reading. Lloyd glimpses the creature in the last scene of the book.
Wyld writes:
‘I see it,’ he whispered, and I looked and saw a shadow beneath the green canopy, where maybe something moved. ‘What do you see?’ ‘It’s huge,’ he said in a voice that did not sound like his own. ‘It’s here— it’s just here.’ ‘And you see it?’ Something crunched in the undergrowth. ‘Should we run?’ I said, but I didn’t think we would. It moved deeper into the woods and we stayed standing, watching and listening. ‘My god,’ said Lloyd quietly. I looked down and saw that we were holding hands.216
The creature’s identity remains unresolved by the book’s end. It is difficult to see in its entirety, even though in Lloyd’s estimation ‘It’s huge’. The repetition of the
212 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 8 213 Oxford English Dictionary online 214 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 1 215 Williamson, ‘Miles Franklin winner,’ online. ‘Zooscopy’ is a form of hallucination in which imaginary animal forms are seen (Oxford English Dictionary). One of the uses of the term in the OED relates to the alcohol poisoning: ‘This condition of zoöscopic hallucination is one of the commonest among the phenomena of alcohol poisoning’ (Science 1890). Both Jake and Lloyd consume a lot of whiskey in the island sections of the novel. 216 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 227-228
85 verb ‘see’ juxtaposed with Jake’s inability to see it in its totality, further suggest its part-real, part-imaginary nature. This is the closest Jake ever comes to ‘seeing’, but in this scene all she can glimpse is ‘a shadow…where maybe something moved’. Jake’s reaction to it in earlier sections of the novel, its killing of her sheep and its human characteristics align it with masculine figures like Otto. Lloyd’s acknowledgment of its existence implies that the creature is real, and not simply the product of a Jake’s traumatic past; it is also ‘real’ in as much as it kills Jake’s stock. A suspicious reading of the creature would interpret it as a metaphor for predatory masculinity that both stalks Jake and persists in novels set in the bush. The creature’s inclusion in All the
Birds, Singing is an admission of the presence of these figures even in novels attempting to critique the valorization of masculinity in bush fiction. Its nature—as a human-animal creature—initially inspires terror on the part of Jake. She views the unsettling of the boundary between the human and animal with what may be a conflated masculine and animal body with fear, although in this scene the creature— partly because it is seen—appears to be losing its power.
To read the novel in a more reparative light involves focusing on the relationship between Lloyd and Jake. Lloyd is one of the few male characters represented positively in the book. It is notable that the friendship between Jake and
Lloyd develops alongside their care for sheep during lambing, in their differing relations with Dog and because of Jake’s fear of whatever is killing her sheep. Lloyd assists Jake when the sheep are giving birth. Wyld writes:
One ewe with triplets was not interested in the smallest one. It struggled to get close to her and got squashed out by the other two. After a while it settled itself down on its own and cried. I picked her up and she didn’t struggle, wrapped her in a blanket and gave her to Lloyd to hold while I made a bottle ready. ‘Not sure she’ll make it,’ I told him. ‘Why is this all so sad?’ he asked.217
217 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 195
86
Jake delegates the task of feeding and caring for the lamb to Lloyd, who is portrayed as unfamiliar with lambing and animal husbandry. His acknowledgement of the affects associated with caring for animals is in contrast with Jake’s lack of expressed sentiment about dead sheep or lambs that have been abandoned. In this scene, Lloyd’s care for the lamb has a further resonance. Jake comes from a large family; her mother had triplets, and she was ignored at their expense. Lloyd’s expression of sadness and his taking of the lamb in his arms is an indirect admission of his care for Jake. Their friendship is cemented when Lloyd admits his grief about losing his male partner, and Jake realizes, because she is afraid that someone is entering her house when she’s there alone, that she ‘didn’t want to go back to the house without [Lloyd]’.218
While Lloyd remarks on the size of the creature, for the first time he and Jake do not feel threatened; instead, they are able to observe the beast, if only partially. In fact, for Lloyd, the creature is fascinating. Jake and Lloyd’s friendship, exemplified by their holding hands, as well as their companionable drinking, represents a close relationship in which no future romance is possible, given Jake’s history and the fact that Lloyd is gay. Nonetheless, Jake and Lloyd are paranoid, hard-drinking and grief- stricken characters, whose attempts to care for each other may well be doomed.
Jake and Lloyd’s association, then, grows out of Jake’s ‘lateral’ relations with her flock, in opposition to a predatory being that appears to have a conflated man- animal body, and also in contrast to the violent relations that characterize Jake’s past.
By the end of the novel, Jake and Lloyd’s relationship appears to be ‘lateral’, and far less vexed than any liaison Jake has experienced. If All the Birds, Singing is an
218 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 162
87 exploration of how to live with the trauma of the past and the menace of the future, then it inheres in non-hierarchical alliances between humans, and humans and animals.
88
Conclusion
This study takes up the question of the abyss delineated in Derrida’s essay, ‘The
Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ to examine the human-animal binary, its political consequences and the potential in contemporary fiction to represent humans and animals as proximate. In probing these questions, the thesis augments contemporary scholarship on the representation of creatures by analysing recent and early twentieth century Australian fiction. Further, it provides a methodology for interpreting the political dimensions of fiction that includes animals as important figures in the narrative. In the following, I summarise the main findings of the study and examine the implications of these findings for further research. The last section discusses how the novel that forms a major part of this thesis, The Flood is the
Flawless Mirror for the Sky, articulates with the project’s research questions. The scope of the thesis precludes extensive discussion of the novel manuscript; an analysis of my own writing is also not consonant with doctoral work conducted at Western
Sydney University.
In the light of Derrida’s essay and Haraway’s contention that humans, animals and non-living others participate in ‘subject- and object-shaping danc[es] of encounters’,219 which constitute fundamentally interactive ways of being, the thesis asks: How are humans and animals represented as proximate? What forms does this closeness take in literature? What does the metaphorical conflation of women and animals mean in contemporary fiction? And, what other ways of relating between species are depicted in recent Australian fiction? A broader question concerns the political and cultural sources of the current concentration of literature about animals
219 Haraway, When Species Meet, 4
89 in the Australian literary field, a question that requires further inquiry and is beyond the scope of this thesis. In my readings of the novels, I use what I term sceptical and reparative frames after Rita Felski and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
In Dog Boy, the protagonist’s bare life involves estrangement from any form of political power and the concomitant exposure to state power and extra-judicial violence, a situation that is portrayed as customary for homeless or otherwise disenfranchised people dwelling on the urban fringes. In All the Birds, Singing, which
I argue takes up concerns about the treatment of women in the bush explored in ‘Billy
Skywonkie’ and ‘The Chosen Vessel’ from Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies, the protagonist is similarly politically disengaged and unable to access legal protection.
The limits of the power of spoken language and the role of performance emerged from a close analysis of Dog Boy. Reading All the Birds, Singing facilitated consideration of questions about animality and gender, and the role of looking versus feeling. These threads are analysed in relation to the spaces the characters inhabit: the city fringes versus ‘the bush’. The focus on territory and demarcations, while examined by Russell
West-Pavlov and Julie Evans, signals a productive scholarly approach to postcolonial texts portraying vulnerable women and children, which could be applied to other contemporary novels about animals.
Closeness occurs both by what I term ‘conflation’—the bringing together of animals and humans, especially in terms of bodies, and the direct likening of the animal to the human body—and in terms of inscription, the writing or marking of the body with the Russian word for dog in Dog Boy, for example. This conflation, I argue, either facilitates acts of violence towards humans (and animals), or constitutes an act of violence itself. Metaphorical or embodied conflation of children or women with
90 animals calls attention to the divide between men and nonhuman others, deepening the abyss between citizens and those who are denoted other.
Close relationships between characters and animals are also represented in All the Birds, Singing and Dog Boy. These ways of being are not in opposition to the metaphorical conflation of animals and humans, but exist alongside it. I read these forms of closeness by using Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of ‘lateral relationships’ and
‘shared kinship’. Embodied proximity in the novels is explored from a human perspective, although dogs in All the Birds, Singing and Dog Boy are portrayed as being able to ‘read’ people, especially Mamochka and White Sister in Dog Boy and
Kelly in All the Birds, Singing. The representation of dog-human interdependencies shares similarities with Donna Haraway’s conception of animal-human relationships as characteristically interwoven. At the same time, the extent to which these connections are idealized varies. In Dog Boy, the pack is portrayed as an ideal community. The particularities of the relationships between protagonists in both novels with dogs and sheep undercut simple binaries.
Maternal-child relations in Wyld’s and Hornung’s novels become a site of possible cross-species connection. Romochka’s embodied relations with Mamochka constitute a blurring of the species boundary. He is dependent on a dog and, with time, the pack’s dependence on him for food and defence improves their chances of survival
(as when he frightens some homeless men who start camping in the church above the den, for example).220 Romochka and the dog pack are shaped by each other, their behaviour changed, their way of occupying the city’s edgelands altered by their co- existence. Jake’s acknowledgement of the sensations her ewes experience when giving birth constitutes embodied empathy. These embodied feelings, which extend to bonds
220 Hornung, Dog Boy, 119-120
91 between the human characters in the texts, are thematically important, but are represented as having little political weight. Mamochka is poisoned, her role as
Romochka’s most reliable maternal figure and protector never acknowledged. The feelings Jake has for her sheep drive her to protect them, but it is not clear if this will make any difference to the predatory figure that is a presence in the closing pages of
All the Birds, Singing.
The Flood is the Flawless Mirror for the Sky
The questions and findings discussed in the thesis—that recent contemporary
Australian fiction about animals concomitantly interrogates political questions of national importance; that empathetic affect and the representation of maternal-child relations counterbalances the portrayal of the consequences of the abyss between animals and humans; and that the delineation of the abyss entails important questions about gender—are further explored in the novel manuscript included here.
The novel concentrates on maternity and the experiences of pregnancy and giving birth, especially in its first one hundred pages. It contains three sections. The first is from eighteen-year-old Sarah’s perspective and follows Sarah’s journey from her home in Poughkeepsie, New York, to Sandpoint, Idaho, where she discovers that she is pregnant, to Sydney, Australia, where she is sent to give birth. It focuses on
Sarah’s feelings for her unborn child and her desire to keep the baby when it is born, as well as to be reunited with her own mother. This part of the novel draws on
Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) for its evocation of Sandpoint, Idaho (the town is called Fingerbone in Robinson’s novel), a text that unusually combines
Biblical imagery with a feminist orientation. The second and third parts of the novel are mainly focused through Bethany Francis, Sarah’s daughter.
92 In its evocation of women’s lives, the novel examines the limits of legal protection for women, even women who are not living on isolated properties in the
Australian bush. Beth, who is a veterinarian, feels empathy for animals under her care
(particularly a mare and foal); her relationship with her own mother is vexed. The different time periods represented—the 1970s and the early 2000s—highlight changes in gender relations. Sarah and Beth take care of sick animals, and their actions are compassionate, but the animals are largely domestic and disempowered, although in some sections of the novel they are represented as possessing distinctive (and inaccessible) subjectivities.
The manuscript examines moments in human life that are most transparently
‘creaturely’, in that they involve an embodied experience such as birth, death or near- death that are common to humans and animals. At these moments, the characters in the novel might have a momentary embodied understanding of what it is to be a biological being, and of the vulnerabilities of creatures. Including a veterinarian as a character in the novel enabled me to probe these experiences. However, the manuscript, like the novels discussed in the thesis, is unquestionably anthropocentric.
Sarah’s character and narrative facilitates the writing of embodied experiences common to humans and animals. It is through Sarah’s pregnancy and giving birth, and her vulnerability as a mother distant from her family and at the mercy of larger forces, that I am able to explore what it feels like to be a creature. While the novel is not overtly about the experience of biopolitical power on those living at its mercy, Sarah’s sections of the novel touch on that experience in chapters set in an unmarried mother’s home. Sarah’s attitude to her experiences is also different to Beth’s, since for Sarah there are similarities between caring for animals and caring for children, whereas Beth is childless and would like to remain so. Beth’s training as a veterinarian necessarily
93 gives her a more distant, objective attitude to birth and death, and to regard the lack of agency associated with being an animal with horror.
The novel manuscript, then, represents maternal figures. In the portrayal of mother-daughter relationships. The Flood emphasizes the mother’s story, of which
Beth is largely unaware. Marianne Hirsch notes in her landmark The Mother/Daughter
Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989) that:
[t]he sympathy we could muster for ourselves and each other as mothers we could not quite transfer to our own mothers. Although as mothers we were eager to tell our stories, as daughters we could not fully listen to our mother’s stories. This inability, this tragic asymmetry between our own two voices, was so pervasive as to be extremely difficult to discuss. It revealed the depth and the extent of ‘matrophobia’ that exists not only in the culture at large, but also within feminism, and within women who are mothers.221
Admittedly, Hirsch is writing almost thirty years ago, although I would argue that matrophobia and the ‘tragic assymmetry’ between the voices of mothers and daughters persists. This thesis does not directly address the question of matrophobia in the culture at large or within feminism. The novel does examine the asymmetry between a mother’s and a daughter’s voice, however, by portraying close third person perspectives from both. It depicts the conditions of Sarah’s existence and her subjectivity and writes sympathetically about her. In the quotation above, Hirsch discusses the lived experiences of mothers—her contemporaries—who are also daughters, and their inability to ‘fully listen to our mother’s stories’.222 In The Flood is the Flawless Mirror mothers and daughters try but usually fail to listen to each other.
The breaks and interruptions in the stories passed down or told by mothers to their children and by daughters to their mothers are explored by the novel.
221Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 26 222 Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 26
94 In Hirsch’s chapter on female family romances published in the nineteenth century, she draws on Irigaray’s definition of western culture as matricidal. Irigaray and Hirsch observe that in nineteenth century novels, such as those by Jane Austen and the Brontës, the connection between mother and daughter must be severed in order for the daughter to become a woman.223 At the same time, Irigaray asserts that without
‘verticality’, without a connection between generations of women, ‘the ethical order of love cannot take place’.224 The books in this thesis also feature matricide as part of their narratives. The major event in the stories at the beginning and end of Bush
Studies—‘The Dreamer’ and ‘The Chosen Vessel’—is the death of a mother.
Romochka’s biological human mother and Mamochka die in Dog Boy. Although
Jake’s mother is still alive, Jake has severed all connections with her. Jake’s nostalgia for a time before she caused a fire and was held hostage by Otto includes a memory of her mother: ‘Soon I will go home and there’ll be Mum squirting cream into her drink. The place will smell of chip fat and laundry.’225 Her nostalgia is not for an ideal mother, by any means. Parts of ‘The Chosen Vessel’ are focalised by the mother, but in the other texts, mothers are not in possession of a voice in the narrative.
The texts I have discussed in this thesis, including The Flood, therefore exhibit commonalities, not simply in their portrayal of the relationships between humans and animals and the human associations that are changed as a result of these relations. The texts feature violence, often associated with bare life, and maternal death. Violence and maternity, which are features of other texts representing animals including
Mateship with Birds (2012), The Natural Way of Things (2016), Only the Animals
(2014) and Coming Rain (2015) deserve further critical attention. The foregoing has
223 Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 43 224 Irigaray, Ethique, 106 qtd. In The Mother/Daughter Plot, 43 225 Wyld, All the Birds, Singing, 229
95 provided an approach to reading the large and growing number of texts that represent human-animal and maternal-child relations by analysing books sceptically using a biopolitical frame and by applying reparative strategies. This methodology can be applied to similar novels as a way of thinking about what these texts are saying about contemporary Australian culture.
96
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