THE LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF PRO-ANIMAL THOUGHT: READINGS IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION Robert Ralston McKay Department of English Literature Submitted for the degree of PhD The University of Sheffield, May 2003 THESIS ABSTRACT This thesis analyses the representation of pro-animal thought in literary fiction published over the last thirty years. Recently, critics have begun eclectically to trace animal rights arguments in past literature, attaching criticism to politics in a familiar way (considering the recent history of the literary academy). However, they have neither explained the holistic picture of human-animal relations in individual texts, nor how such questions relate to a specific literary context. This thesis, on the other hand, involves more a pinpointing of the particular value of literary works for extending the horizon of current ethical debates about animals than a partisan mobilisation of literary criticism in the service of animal rights. To that end, each chapter offers a thoroughgoing reading of an important text in the story of contemporary fiction's ethical encounter with the animal. I contextualise these extended readings with more succinct discussion of the wide range of contemporary authors who represent pro­ animal thought. This approach requires several theoretical methodologies, though all are within the realm of feminist post-structuralism. Butler's work on the discursive production of sex illuminates the ethical representation of species in Atwood's Surfacing. The representation of animals (both literary and political) in Walker's The Temple of My Familiar is explained by situating the animal within feminist debates about the relation of literary writing to the discursive formation of race. Levy's avant-garde representation of the animal in Diary of a Steak is explained by placing a literary-theoretical reading inspired by Bakhtin and Irigaray within a broader cultural study of the BSE crisis. Derrida's recent work on ethics and the question of the animal helps me explore the literary representation of ethical vegetarianism in Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. My concluding remarks suggest how the results of my research might impact on the future role of animal ethics in literary criticism. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure One 120 Figure Two 120 Figure Three 149 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield supported this research with a Scheme B scholarship grant. Researching and teaching here has provided me with a collegial and fostering intellectual environment, one which has had a profound impact on me; I would like to acknowledge that influence. Most gratitude, however, must go to my supervisor Sue Vice for the stimulation, advice and intellectual contribution she has made to this project. During my time of research, I have worked with people whose research in areas adjacent to my own has inspired me and taught me a great deal: my colleagues in The Animal Studies Group (Steve Baker, Jonathan Burt, Diana Donald, Erica Fudge, Garry Marvin, Clare Palmer and Chris Wilbert). I would also like to thank generally those who contributed to the Millennial Animals conference that I co­ organised; that event has influenced this thesis in ways that are difficult to make clear but important to acknowledge. Cary Wolfe and Matthew Calarco have aided this project by discussing ideas with me, and by giving me access to manuscripts of work they had both written and commissioned. Of course, the responsibility for the ideas herein is entirely my own. On a more personal note, I have also had the benefit of supportive relationships which it would be an injustice to name only working or personal: I can sense the friendship of Marcus Nevitt, Andrew Jorgensen, and, especially, Elsie Walker on every page of this thesis. I would also like to thank my mother, Heather McKay, and her husband, David Clines; they have given me all the help I have asked of them throughout my postgraduate studies. Most importantly of all, I must acknowledge the indefatigable assistance, the constant inspiration, and the care and love given me by my wife, Gayle McKay, during the work that has culminated in this thesis. Without her, it simply would not exist. DECLARATION Parts of chapter two of this thesis appeared in Mouth to Mouth, June 2000 and in Society & Animals, 9.3 (2001). By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen [ ... ] I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But am I sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don't know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows)? Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 71 This thesis was written for the animals in whose lives I have shared, and with every single one of the others in mind. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Declaration Introduction From Pro-animal Literary Criticism to Reading the Literary Representation of Pro-Animal Thought 1 Chapter One 'Identifying with the Animals': Language, Subjectivity and the Animal Politics of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing 14 Chapter Two From Representation to Imagination: Getting Close to Animals with Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar 57 Chapter Three (Mis-)Reading the Avant-Garde Animal: BSE, Hysteria, and the Animal Politics of Deborah Levy's Diary of a Steak 101 Chapter Four Animal Ethics in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee 159 Concluding Remarks On Reading the Animal Ethics of Fiction 216 Appendix: Animals in Contemporary Literary Fiction 220 Bibliography of Works Cited 225 INTRODUCTION FROM PRO-ANIMAL LITERARY CRITICISM TO READING THE LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF PRO-ANIMAL THOUGHT For a long time the first sentence of this thesis was going to be 'this is a work of pro-animal literary criticism'. The project began as an exercise in politicised literary-history of the contemporary period. I was convinced that in the years since Peter Singer published his seminal essay , Animal Liberation' in 1973, there must have been literary writers who had used the resources of fiction to engage with the subject of humans' ethical relationships with animals. Singer's essay was the genesis of a book by the same name that would go on to motivate the global animal rights movement.1 Yet when I began researching there seemed (and there was) little prospect of finding criticism of contemporary writing that would even discuss, let alone champion, contemporary 'pro-animal literature' in the way that over the last thirty years or so there has been a body of work (however diverse) that delineated fields of study around contemporary feminist literature, post-colonial literature, or working-class literature, to name a few. As a result, I perceived a need to uncover contemporary texts that it would become important to consider from the point of view of their literary 1 'Animal Liberation', review of Animals, Men and Morals, edited by Stanley Godlovitch, Rosalind Godlovitch and John Harris, New York Review of Books, April 5 1973; Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Avon, 1975). Introduction 2 representation of animal ethics, in the way that a reader interested in those more established fields would very quickly find themselves led to read (confining oneself to a British context alone) Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984), for example, or Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), or James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late (1994). It goes without saying that such socio-cultural groupings of literary texts, amongst other things, chart the rise of identity politics and its effect on the politicisation of the literary academy. And of course the animal rights movement, as a social formation in English-speaking cultures at least, is far from immune to the workings of identity politics, as much evidence from the tactics of image-conscious pro-animal groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to the increasing availability on supermarket shelves of products specifically designed to promote 'vegetarian' consumption suggests.2 Yet despite the apparently conducive environment portrayed in this quick sketch-and it is not my intention here to delve further into either the sociology or the institutional politics-it is clear that specifically pro-animal discourses have made little impact on established patterns of academic literary reading, or (more pertinently) publishing.3 2 I do not want to imply that contemporary pro-animal thought has no historical roots; these are charted (for British society at least) in Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion, 1998). The modem movement is well defined by Gary 1. Francione, Rain without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). I will say more about vegetarian identities in chapter four. 3 This is not of course to say that there is not interest in animals per se, which we can find in some studies such as David Salter's Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature (London: D. S. Brewer, 2001); Christine Kenyon-Janes's Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (London: Ashgate, 2001); and Margot Norris's Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Ernst and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). In fact, there has been a profusion of work on animals in cultural studies over the last ten years, much of which I will mention in this thesis. When it comes to addressing animal ethics square-on, however, cultural studies as a whole lags far behind other disciplines, in particular analytic ethical philosophy, sociology and geography. Work Footnotes continue on the following page Introduction 3 Of course, uncovering important contemporary texts is only one strand m the complex weaving of feminist (or any other politicised) literary criticism.