Towards a Poetics of Posthumanism

Disability, Animality, and the Biopolitics of Narrative in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

Tom Z. Bradstreet

Ph.D. Dissertation

Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages

Faculty of Humanities

University of Oslo

2020

© Tom Zachary Bradstreet Tom Zachary Bradstreet 2020 Towards a Poetics of Posthumanism: Disability, Animality, and the Biopolitics of Narrative in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

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CONTENTS *

Acknowledgements 5

Introduction Rendering and Mattering: Aesthetic Disabilities, Humanist Forms, and Biopolitical Logic 7

Parallel Lives: ‘Subhumans’ Across Species 15

Disability and Animality in a Posthumanist Frame 22

The Ghost in the Machine: Two Examples 27

Aesthetic Disabilities and Humanist Forms 33

The Biopolitical Logic of Narrative Form 39

The Order of Things 45

Chapter 1 ‘Adequate Facsimiles of Humanity’: Temple Grandin and the Humanist Forms of Autobiography 49

The Price of Emergence 56

‘This Perhaps the Least Imaginable of All’ 62

Narrative as Rehabilitation? 71

Chapter 2 And Say the Parrot Responded? Voices of Reason in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible 75

Parrots and Parroting 82

Maiming the Killjoy 89

Colonialist Ablenationalism 103

Chapter 3 ‘Not an Amenable Subject’: Beyond the Sympathetic Imagination in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man 111

The Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination 117

Costello and Coetzee’s ‘Wounded Animals’ 117

What Is It Like to Be a Bloom? 120

‘Keeping Open the Question of Other Lives’ 122

Monuments to the Impossible 124

Animating Rayment 128

A Tortured Lesson: Costello’s Failed Restoration 136

Chapter 4 Conspiracies: ‘Becoming Without’ and ‘Breathing With’ in Paul Auster’s Timbuktu 141

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Extended Subjectivity, Companion Species, and ‘Becoming With’ 145

‘Writing the Self into Being’ 150

The Biopolitics of ‘Becoming Without’ 154

Narrative Voice and Esposito’s Third Person 162

Chapter 5 ‘High Drama to a Paralytic’: The Rhizomatic Arborescence of Richard Powers’s The Overstory 169

Powers and the Antinormative Novel of Embodiment 176

‘Everything a human being might call the story’ 180

Deleuze and Guattari Don’t Understand Trees 185

Focal Shifts, Cosmic Voices, and Rhizomatic Structures 189

An Affirmative Biopolitics of Narrative? 196

Coda Enabling Conditions: Disability, Animality, and Defamiliarisation 203

Notes 207

Works Cited 215 *

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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If I am literally made of my innumerable ‘others’, then this dissertation has more authors than could be counted, let alone thanked. Still, that needn’t render pointless the attempt to acknowledge at least a fraction of that multitude. Here are some of the players without whom this dissertation would not be what it is—without whom, in fact, it would not be at all.

First and foremost, I want to thank my supervisor, Michael Lundblad, whose expert guidance and unfailing support were offered with a blend of patience, understanding, enthusiasm, and generosity that distinguishes not only the best of mentors, but the best of humans. A thousand thanks go to my co-supervisor Cary Wolfe, whose intellectual rigour and originality of thought laid down vital challenges for me to negotiate; Jan Grue, who was unfailing in his willingness to help me despite not being formally associated with my dissertation; and Susan Schweik, whose impact on this project in her capacity as my mid-way evaluator and the sponsor of my research stay at U. C.

Berkeley was immeasurable. The opportunity to sit down and discuss ideas with scholars such as

Mel Y. Chen, Neel Ahuja, and Margrit Shildrick was a privilege I couldn’t have dared to expect.

Mexitli Nayeli López Ríos, my colleague, cage-mate, and friend, contaminated me in ways that a mere ‘thank you’ cannot hope to encompass, while Sara Orning’s arrival on Team BIODIAL managed what had seemed an impossible feat: to make an impeccable research group even better.

Gratitude is also due to my many fellow Fellows—you know who you are—as well as colleagues including Tina Skouen, Karina Kleiva, Heidi Ekstrand, Sarah Salameh, Cristina Gomez Baggethun,

Alba Morollón Díaz-Faes, and the one and only Matthew Williamson. This journey would not have started were it not for a number of other scholars who I have had the joy of knowing, and from whom I have had the pleasure of learning: Jonathan Roberts, Matthew Bradley, Stefan Helgesson,

Claudia Egerer, and Frida Beckman leap to mind.

I owe a world of thanks to my mother, Jan, who filled my universe with a lifetime’s worth of love and literature from day one; and my father, Graham, a man of stories whose faith in my ability to chart my own course has enabled me to do exactly that. Dan, Josh, Sam, Sophia, and Theo: I am not worthy. Ali, Jo, and Lyam: I love you all. Nora and Lindsay, Bill and Dawn: you’re never

5 forgotten. Ross, Suzanne, and Alex: you are wellsprings of rare inspiration, and I am so lucky to have become your kin. Jason, Hunt, Wilks, Wakefield, Howard, and the late, great Chris Brown: cheers, boys. Adam, Judith, Lee, and the dear, departed Rich Langell: gracias por todo. Sean,

Synne, Bertie, Chloe, Lina, and Jed: you’re boss. Maija, Björn, Max, Youssef, Tina, Anna, Nico,

Elof, Olov, Nina, Björn, Åsa, Nicholas, Maria, and Monica: tack som fan. Stine, Izelin, Bendik,

Alan, Karen, Sharon, Luke, Sarah, Brian, Andrew, Laura, Dave, Simon, Rachel, Hansy, Simone,

Stu, Jan Erik, Rikke, Mia, Luis, and Pål: tusen hjertelig takk. Rosie: you have become strong and wise beyond your years. I think about you every day. Oli: you bring light. Never stop doing that.

Jenny: you helped to make me who I was, saw me on my way, and let me go. I carry you with me, always. And Emma: you are so integral that I almost forgot to mention you. You are the angel on my left shoulder, and the devil on my right. I love both of them equally.

A few words of special gratitude are reserved for two people who have played exceptional roles in my life over the last three years. John: you have given me more than I thought possible. Eighteenth- century stationery, neon amino acids, and the worst hangover this side of the Charles Bridge—but also a hometown, a kaleidoscope of amazing memories, and a friendship verging on brotherhood.

Thank you. And Juliana: since the moment we met, you’ve shown me what it means to live the beautiful philosophy that fills these pages—to live well, together, in every moment of our endlessly fleeting lives. You are my companion species; I become with you every day. Thank you.

Finally: Uncle John. Words fail. This is for you.

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INTRODUCTION

Rendering and Mattering Aesthetic Disabilities, Humanist Forms, and Biopolitical Logic

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The way I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard

concepts … that some people do not consider it thought at all, but it is a way of thinking in

its own right. However, the thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn

your language, no matter how we previously thought or interacted.

Amanda Baggs, ‘In My Language’

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It begins with footage of what appears to be somebody’s home. The camera is mounted high in the room, near the ceiling, which occupies the top third of the image. Directly below is a large window, beyond which a bare tree is bathed in bright sunlight. Looking out through the glass is a silhouette: a person standing with their back to the camera. They are moving their arms—first both, then one, then the other—in a twirling motion, as if conducting a large orchestra, or wiping an array of invisible surfaces. The only audible sound is a long, thin, musical hum that slowly alternates through a small range of notes: a wordless chant. We see an object—a loop of wire, perhaps?—being scraped repeatedly against a hard surface. We see a hand rubbing the cover of a laptop, or maybe a laptop case. We see a piece of string dangling from above the top of the image, and a hand toying with it, just as a cat might toy with a loose thread of yarn. The hum-chant sounds constantly under a parade of images, until we see the same person rocking back and forth while rubbing their face between the pages of a magazine. Finally, we return to a close-up of the person’s hand conducting the world beyond the window. After three minutes and 12 seconds, the image fades to black.

Suddenly, the words ‘A Translation’ fly into the centre of the picture. The title soon gives way to footage of a hand moving back and forth under a stream of water pouring into a sink. As it does so, a computerised voice begins to speak:

The previous part of this video was in my native language. Many people have assumed that when

I talk about this being my language that means that each part of the video must have a particular

symbolic message within it designed for the human mind to interpret. But my language is not about

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designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant

conversation with every aspect of my environment. Reacting physically to all parts of my

surroundings. In this part of the video the water doesn’t symbolize anything. I am just interacting

with the water as the water interacts with me. Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is

an ongoing response to what is around me. Ironically, the way that I move when responding to

everything around me is described as ‘being in a world of my own’ whereas if I interact with a

much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings people claim that I am ‘opening up to true interaction with the world’. (Baggs, ‘In My Language’)

The text in question is a 2007 video artwork by the late autistic blogger and disability activist, Mel

Baggs. Titled ‘In My Language’, it is a representation of Baggs’s autistic subjectivity, of a mode of inhabiting and experiencing the world that derives from a nonnormative mode of embodiment. As the explanatory voiceover attests, however, it is also a scathing commentary on the discriminatory equation of the legibility of a person’s subjectivity with the value of that person’s life. Disabled people like Baggs have been subject to a long history of prejudice and violence premised on and legitimated by the notion that their bodies and minds—or, to borrow Wendy Wheeler’s felicitous term, bodyminds—are lacking in comparison with a normative human standard.1 In recent decades, however, a combination of interrelated developments has illuminated the richness and complexity of disabled subjectivities, thereby problematising this equation. The apprehension of subjectivities deriving from nonnormative embodiments—the cognitive and/or affective recognition of lifeworlds hitherto presumed to be rudimentary, if not absent—has been instrumental in changing the ways in which disabled people are viewed and valued. As a site where nonnormative modes of subjectivity can be rehearsed and explored, artistic representation is an optimal domain in which to advance this paradigm shift.2 What is especially interesting about ‘In My Language’ is that its two parts enact two distinct approaches to this undertaking. One approach entails tailoring the formal composition of a representation of disability to the operations of ‘normal’ human bodyminds to accord with conventional conceptions of legibility. The other approach, by contrast, involves using formal representational strategies to expand the field of ‘the legible’ beyond the limits of anthropocentric normativity.

Before the beginning of the expository ‘Translation’, Baggs’s representation of their lifeworld might seem disorienting.3 The viewer is confronted with a sequence of sounds and images that defy

8 straightforward interpretation; indeed, as Baggs affirms, the text cannot be interpreted, at least not according to any hermeneutics conventionally deployed by language-based thinkers in order to make meaning. For three minutes and 12 seconds, the text demonstrates no interest in minimising the cognitive dissonance that its representation of Baggs’s subjectivity is liable to inspire. Quite the opposite: Baggs seems to actively leave nonautistic viewers at a loss. The text begins not by telling us that ‘normal’ ways of thinking do not exhaust the full range of epistemological possibilities available to humankind, but by demonstrating this by immersing us in Baggs’s unique affective economy, setting us adrift in a domain in which normative ways of thinking are inappropriate. As

Baggs explains, their ‘native language’ comprises ‘constant conversation’ with ‘every aspect’ and

‘all parts’ of their ‘environment’ in a process of ‘ongoing response’ (Baggs). This ‘native language’ is physical rather than verbal, affective rather than rational, and inheres in relations between various beings and forces, human and nonhuman, rather than issuing directly from a discrete, autonomous human subject. In this disconcerting semiotic realm, the human is recast as but one constituent in a dynamic, more-than-human imaginary—and the formal constitution of the text is crucial to generating this effect. Baggs’s contention that they simply ‘[interact] with the water as the water interacts with [them]’, for instance, is enacted by the composition of the accompanying image. The close-up of Baggs’s fingers playing with the stream of water defamiliarises the experience of holding one’s hands under a tap by isolating the two agents involved, the fingers and the water, both of which are held in repetitive motion. Devoid of broader visual context, the human is relegated to a role as one of multiple actors in a situation of mutual, perpetual response. The first part of the text thus formally enacts the same posthumanist onto-epistemology it also thematises.

As the ‘Translation’ begins, however, the feeling of disorientation fades. Baggs’s explanation for this strange audiovisual experience neutralises the difference of that experience, rendering it legible to a nonautistic viewer. To that viewer, this may feel like the moment in which ‘In My Language’ opens up: there is an explanation for what we have seen, a way of knowing that it matters, and why.

And yet, in an important sense, this moment also marks a closing off. The voiceover ushers the viewer back to the limits of Baggs’s expansive, posthumanist lifeworld—a realm whose description as a world of Baggs’s own is ironic indeed—and Baggs opens up to true interaction with the world.

Except, of course, this shift actually entails a recession: from Baggs ‘responding to everything

9 around [them]’ to interacting ‘with a much more limited set of responses and only [reacting] to a much more limited part of [their] surroundings’ (Baggs). In Baggs’s own words: ‘The way I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts … that some people do not consider it thought at all, but it is a way of thinking in its own right. However, the thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn your language, no matter how we previously thought or interacted’ (Baggs). The ‘Translation’ thus ruefully enacts the same process it describes. Indeed, one might think of the voiceover as a kind of prosthesis, a formal device conjoined with a portrayal of Baggs’s subjectivity to wrangle it into alignment with a normative conception of what it means to be human. After all, the provision of this prosthesis benefits not the text’s autistic author, but its nonautistic viewers. Even as the ‘Translation’ proceeds, we see Baggs

‘speaking’ in their native language for the duration, which reinforces the sense that the voiceover is supplementary to an artwork that is already complete. The text continues to advance a posthumanist worldview, but it is now inscribed with a vital formal concession to humanist norms. In other words, it is by translating Baggs’s subjectivity into human verbal language that it can be made legible to a nondisabled audience, and this allows Baggs’s subjectivity to become meaningful, to matter—and yet this process reinscribes the same humanist norms to which the text takes exception, and which it means to contest. In order for their thinking to be ‘taken seriously’ and the value of their life affirmed, Baggs’s subjectivity must be rendered in humanist form.

The ethical stakes of this dynamic are clarified by the Introduction to Eva Hayward and Jami

Weinstein’s 2018 special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which the authors posit that humanism ‘delineates a normative standard of legibility by which all others are read, measured, controlled, disciplined, and assigned to fixed and hierarchical social statuses’, and that this

‘administration of norms’ is ‘the justificatory axle through which violent practices of exclusion, discrimination, and oppression are meted’ (195). In the present context, Hayward and Weinstein’s reference to a ‘normative standard of legibility’ is especially salient. ‘In My Language’ shows how the provision of a particular formal representational technique aligns Baggs’s text with that normative standard, thereby rendering their subjectivity legible—but at the cost of that which makes

Baggs’s text interesting, productive, and ethically significant: its attempt to decentre and unsettle a privileged concept of ‘the human’ historically constituted by the exclusion of its many ‘others’,

10 disabled people prime among them. These ‘others’ are not only human, however. In fact, the others against which this concept of the human has been defined most insistently are nonhuman animals— and, as in the case of disabled people, the opacity of animal subjectivities has been misappropriated as justification for the minoritisation and annihilation of countless nonhuman beings. Consider another presence in Baggs’s video: the dog who lies quietly on the sofa in the background, casts an occasional glance in Baggs’s direction, and yawns. Where viewers are likely to find Baggs’s behaviour compelling—to stare at it, whether in wonder, confusion, or contempt—the dog seems to find it unremarkable. Perhaps it has simply become accustomed to Baggs’s native language over time; perhaps it found nothing peculiar about that language in the first place. One way or another, however, Baggs’s performance seems to make sense to the dog in a way that will escape a majority of human viewers. What kind of sense it makes, of course, is impossible for us to know. The dog’s subjectivity, to an even greater extent than its human’s, remains illegible.

Inspired by the imperative to deconstruct this exclusionary concept of ‘the human’, a vibrant critical conversation regarding the incorporation of posthumanist onto-epistemologies into the calculus of artistic representation is well underway. However, no attempt has yet been made to begin theorising a posthumanist representational praxis—what this dissertation calls a poetics of posthumanism—by excavating the compromising formal conditions under which disabled and nonhuman subjectivities emerge into artistic representation—that is, by analysing how the formal conventions associated with a particular genre reinscribe the same humanist norms that a given representation of disability or animality may otherwise seem to challenge. The present dissertation undertakes precisely this project in the context of two genres of literature: autobiography and the novel. Despite important differences between them, both genres share a status as literary narratives, and thus avail themselves of a number of common formal conventions. Moreover, the histories of these genres are intimately intertwined. Indeed, as we will see, the development and consolidation of both genres owed a major debt to the ‘human’ of humanism: what Cary Wolfe calls a ‘specific concept of the human’ that

‘grounds discrimination against nonhuman animals and the disabled’ (What is Posthumanism? xvii).

The theoretical vocabulary used by this dissertation to investigate the complicity of particular formal representational techniques in the reinscription of humanist norms derives from Michel

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Foucault’s theorisation of a development that, like this ‘concept of the human’, came of age during the Enlightenment: the birth of biopolitics. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality (1990),

Foucault identifies a historical shift, beginning in the eighteenth century, from the exercise of a traditional sovereign power that wields ‘the ancient right to take life or let live’ to the operations of more complex, diffuse systems of governmentality whose power is instead to ‘foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (138, emphasis in original). Unlike the sovereign power it would supplement, if not supplant, this biopower is less punitive than it is productive—but what renders biopower problematic is what it produces, as well as the ends it serves. In Foucault’s account, the advent of technologies enabling the aggregation of data pertaining to the biological characteristics of large groups of people makes it possible to discern the shape of ‘normal’ human being for the first time. The definition and reproduction of the ‘normal’ subject is the telos of biopolitical power:

‘A normalizing society’, says Foucault, ‘is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life’ (144). The lives of those whose embodiments consign them to the periphery of the embryonic bell curve of normalcy are devalued by comparison with a ‘normal’ majority, and they become subjected to ‘practices of correction, exclusion, normalization, disciplining, therapeutics, and optimization’ (Lemke 5). Resonances between this procedure and Hayward and Weinstein’s account of humanism’s institution of a ‘normative standard of legibility’—and, indeed, the project of ‘In My Language’—are readily discernible. While this project stops short of conceptualising literary narratives as biopolitical apparatuses per se, it operates on the understanding that the formal operations of its primary texts proceed according to the logic of biopolitics, reproducing their constituent disabled and nonhuman animal characters in the mould of a normative humanist subject historically defined in opposition to animality and disability.

In sum, then, this dissertation employs biopolitics as a conceptual rubric by which to excavate the reinscription of the norms of humanism in the formal machinations of two types of literary narrative, and uses this process of excavation as the basis for sketching the contours of a poetics of posthumanism: a formal representational praxis that does not subject subjectivities deriving from nonnormative modes of embodiment to the violences of humanist rendering. Its journey towards a poetics of posthumanism proceeds in two stages. The long first stage comprises the first four chapters, each of which analyses one novel or memoir that represents subjectivities deriving from

12 disabled or nonhuman animal embodiments. Unlike earlier generations of literary and cultural texts that represented disabled people and nonhuman animals only to marginalise them, consign them to an exclusively (often derogatory) metaphoric function, or instrumentalise them by other means, these works engage the lived experiences of disability and animality in subtle, nuanced ways, evading established modes of representational violence theorised by literary and cultural studies scholars with an interest in disability and animality. Phrased differently, these texts reflect the vital changes to perceptions of disability and animality that have unfolded in recent decades. What extant scholarship on these primary texts has failed to recognise, however, is their common reliance on the deployment of formal strategies that bear a distinctly humanist inflection.

The texts analysed in the first two chapters—Temple Grandin’s autism memoir Thinking in Pictures

(2006) and Barbara Kingsolver’s postcolonial novel The Poisonwood Bible (2000)—make formal concessions of this variety without betraying any cognisance of the problematics they entail, thereby inadvertently betraying an enduring fidelity to the assumptions of humanism. Thinking in Pictures demonstrates this dynamic most clearly. Grandin’s memoir seeks to educate its nondisabled readers about the generative power of onto-epistemological diversity across species borders. In order to do so, however, it avails itself of the formal conventions of autobiography in such a way that Grandin is reproduced in the form of the ‘normal’ human subject. Grandin’s nonnormative subjectivity— what Wolfe calls her ‘powerful and unique form of abledness’—is reconciled into a normative mode of subjecthood (What is Posthumanism? 136). The Poisonwood Bible, a novel, is comparatively unfettered by the formal strictures of the autobiographical mode, and makes use of the relative versatility of the novel form to portray the subjectivities of its main disabled and nonhuman animal characters with great complexity. However, the text reinscribes humanist norms in another way: by treating these particular ‘forms of abledness’ as exceptional—that is, by distinguishing between a minority of disabled people and nonhuman animals that can be recovered into the neoliberal calculus of productivity (on the one hand), and a majority that cannot be recovered into this calculus

(on the other)—and then tasking those subjectivities with the textual labour of defamiliarising and critiquing the colonialist dogma espoused by their fellow characters. Not only are these disabled and animal protagonists privileged due to an approximate resemblance to the ‘normal’ humanist

13 subject; the text exploits their specific, limited differences from the norm, using them as sources of value extraction in the service of the novel’s overarching economy of meaning.

We find the same dynamic at work in the two novels analysed in Chapters 3 and 4—J. M. Coetzee’s

Slow Man (2006) and Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (1999)—but with one key difference. These texts marry portrayals of disabled and nonhuman subjectivities with a characteristically postmodernist self-consciousness regarding the viability of referentiality. By thematising their own aesthetic inadequacies, their representations of disabled and nonhuman subjectivities are recast as stagings, or dramatisations, of the same problematics they enact. In Slow Man, this is enabled by Coetzee’s employment of a metafictional conceit whereby one of novel’s main characters is also its implied author; in Timbuktu, it proceeds instead from Auster’s experiments in narrative voice. In both cases, however, the text demonstrates an awareness of the limitations of its own form, and of relations between these formal restrictions and the assumptions of the humanist tradition. Slow Man and

Timbuktu thus bear close comparison with the second part of ‘In My Language’. All three enact a formal reinscription of humanist norms, but in a self-conscious way, prompting readers to reflect on the question of how disabled and nonhuman subjectivities can be depicted without their being subjected to the surreptitious injustices of rendering.

The short second stage of my analysis comprises the fifth and final chapter, where the dissertation’s journey towards a poetics of posthumanism reaches a tentative destination. Drawing together insights from the previous four chapters and supplementing these conclusions with reflections on prior efforts to incorporate posthumanist onto-epistemologies into artistic form—from Louis van den Hengel’s account of ‘zoegraphy’ and Stuart Cooke’s account of an ‘ethological poetics’ to Cary

Wolfe’s theorisation of an ‘ecological poetics’ and David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s work on the ‘antinormative novel of embodiment’—this chapter reads Richard Powers’s novel The

Overstory (2019) as an exemplar of a poetics of posthumanism.4 In this remarkable novel, disabled and nonhuman animal subjectivities operate as fluid, dynamic components of a rhizomatic narrative structure that embodies the imperative, stated by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble:

Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), to ‘make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present’ (1).

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Parallel Lives: ‘Subhumans’ Across Species

At a first glance, studying disability and animality together may seem counter-intuitive, if not wilfully provocative. In her Literary Bioethics: Disability, Animality, and the Human (2020), Maren

Tova Linett observes that ‘for the most part, animal rights work has been devastatingly unconcerned with disability justice—indeed, it has contributed a great deal to the devaluation of disabled human beings—and disability rights activists have been wary … of making common cause with animals’

(Linett). This is hardly surprising. Animal rights activists, whose strategies often rely upon highlighting what nonhuman animals can do, are liable to have misgivings regarding the association of animals with a population defined in the popular imagination by what they cannot, while disability rights campaigners may be unlikely to embrace comparisons between disabled people and animals for fear of perpetuating conceptions of disabled people as belonging, or akin, to a different

(supposedly ‘lower’) species. In a chapter from the collection Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and

Madness (2018) on ‘The Horrific History of Comparisons between Cognitive Disability and

Animality’, Alice Crary calls such comparisons ‘intensely controversial’ and traces the ‘long history of the employment of animal comparisons in rhetoric urging the marginalization, abuse, and killing of [disabled] individuals’ back to Renaissance Europe (118-9). According to Crary, the most

‘harmful patterns of thought that bring animals together with cognitively disabled human beings’— and which ‘wind up informing Nazi propaganda’—are ‘connected to lines of reasoning that receive a decisive formulation in Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871)’ (119). It is here that Darwin ‘repeatedly likens cognitively disabled human beings to animals … with an eye to accounting for the “missing link” between human beings and their closest evolutionary antecedents’ (Crary 119).

Michael Lundblad engages Crary’s analysis in his article ‘Disanimality: Disability Studies and

Animal Advocacy’ (2021). Lundblad has pioneered animality studies, a field of research that grapples with ‘[c]onstructions of humans as animals or discourses of animality in relation to human cultural politics’, and is thus well positioned to explore the implications of Darwin’s reasoning

(Lundblad, ‘Introduction’ 3). Unlike human-animal studies, which places a greater premium ‘on advocacy, on better relationships and physical interactions’, animality studies attends ‘to human

15 populations that are oppressed and discriminated against as much as the other species inhabiting the same environments or discourses’ (Lundblad, ‘Introduction’ 4, 10). These include disabled people, and Lundblad observes that disability studies ‘has brought crucial attention to histories of disabled people constructed as somehow less than human, whether they have been explicitly animalized or dehumanized in other ways’ (‘Disanimality’ 766). Still, he identifies a lingering ‘discomfort … that many disability studies scholars and activists have with nonhuman animal advocacy today’ (766).

Lundblad coins the term disanimality to describe this ‘feeling of discomfort’ or ‘disruptive affect’ that he describes as ‘a site for critique’ and, more promisingly, ‘an opportunity for critical disability, animality, and human-animal studies to come together in more productive ways’ (766).

Nowhere is this disanimality more pronounced, and that critique more warranted, than in the work of the provocative ethicist Peter Singer, the first theorist referenced by Linett to substantiate her argument that animal rights activism has served to devalue the lives of disabled people. In 1975,

Singer published Animal Liberation (2009), a seminal work which popularised Richard Ryder’s term speciesism—that is, ‘discrimination against or exploitation of certain animal species by human beings, based on an assumption of mankind’s superiority’—in the course of contending that nonhuman animals should be entered into the utilitarian calculus of ‘the greatest good’ (OED).5

Developing Jeremy Bentham’s take on the ethical treatment of animals—‘The question is not, Can they reason?, nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’—Singer argues that all beings that are capable of suffering are also deserving of ethical consideration, irrespective of the species to which they belong (Bentham). Singer may have become synonymous with the term ‘speciesism’, but he lacks an equally nuanced understanding of ableism, which describes ‘discrimination in favour of non-disabled people’ (OED). As Linett explains, Singer’s crusade against speciesism leads him to conclude that ‘some humans are less deserving of consideration than some animals’ (Linett). ‘To do this,’ Singer ‘relies on the belief that certain capacities are what grant human beings more value than other animals: capacities such as rationality, self-consciousness, and self-awareness through time’ (Linett). His innovation is to identify these privileged capacities across species boundaries, granting that some nonhuman animals will evince them to a larger degree than some humans. This is how Singer is able to reason, as he does in Practical Ethics (1993), that ‘[w]hen the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total

16 amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed’ (186). Jan Grue and Michael

Lundblad note that this view ‘notoriously questions the value of the lives of disabled people’ and

‘provokes justified rage among many disability advocates’, including Harriet McBryde Johnson and

Eva Feder Kittay, both of whom have debated Singer on exactly this issue (Grue and Lundblad 118;

Lundblad, ‘Disanimality’ 772).6

Critiques of Singer’s argument abound. Linett astutely points out that Singer’s approach is at odds with his ostensible focus on the capacity for suffering, since ‘he grounds his views not on this passive capacity to suffer but on active capacities that he insists confer value and create “persons” out of most adult human beings and many nonhuman animals’ (Linett). We might also note that the capacities Singer understands to confer value on a given being are capacities traditionally associated with humanism’s exclusionary ‘concept of the human’, which implies that Singer’s anti-speciesist manifesto relies on an enduring belief in human exceptionalism (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? xvii). His cardinal transgression, however, is that he relocates the line separating ‘the human’ from

‘the animal’ without problematising the line itself. Rather, that line is retained and recalibrated to instead distinguish between humans and nonhumans who evince certain capacities (on the one hand), and humans and nonhumans who do not, and are therefore unworthy of the same level of ethical consideration (on the other). The comparatively ‘capable’ we is no longer only human, and the comparatively ‘incapable’ them is no longer only animal, but the distinction between a more or less ‘grievable’ we and a more or less ‘disposable’ them remains.7 Lundblad contends—correctly, in my view—that this makes Singer ‘perhaps the most problematic figure for suggesting ways to bring disability and animality together’ (‘Disanimality’ 772).

The disabled author, artist, and activist Sunaura Taylor presents a more promising conjugation of this complicated nexus. In Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (2017), Taylor draws parallels between speciesism and ableism, noting that disability studies and activism ‘call for recognizing new ways of valuing life that aren’t limited by specific physical or mental capabilities.

Implicit in disability theory is the idea that it is not specifically our intelligence, rationality, agility, physical independence, or bipedal nature that give us dignity and value’ (57). Taylor links these ideas to the plight of nonhuman animals when she observes that ‘one of the most ubiquitous arguments people use in support of our continued exploitation of nonhumans is that animals are

17 incapable of a myriad of cognitive processes that human beings engage in’ (58). For Taylor, the prevalence of this perspective ‘shows the extent to which speciesism uses ableist logics to function’, which renders ‘essential’ an examination of ‘the shared systems and ideologies that oppress both disabled humans and nonhuman animals’ (58, 57). Performing such an examination quickly reveals significant parallels between the histories of violence to which disabled people and nonhuman animals have been subjected. In both contexts, stigmatisation follows from the institution and veneration of a normative ideal masquerading as natural fact. In the case of nonhuman animals, that ideal is humanity; in the case of disabled people, it is normalcy.

The binary opposition of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ has deep roots. It was Aristotle who first defined the human as a rational animal, which engendered an understanding that ‘man was more rational than he was animal, leading many humanistic philosophers to … speak of man simply as a

“rational being as such”’ (Atterton and Calarco xvii, emphasis in original).8 This idea was cemented by René Descartes, who distinguished between animals, which he saw as machine-like automata, and human beings, to whom he attributed the faculties of the mind. Cogito, ergo sum, said

Descartes: I think, therefore I am.9 Fully-fledged being was thereby equated with a brand of intelligence reserved exclusively for humankind. The 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the

Origin of Species (2009) heralded the advent of evolutionary theory, whose assertion of a fundamental continuity between Homo sapiens and nonhuman species promised—or, perhaps more accurately, threatened—to bridge the gulf between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’. What transpired, however, was the institution of a hierarchical classification of living beings governed by a developmental logic that served to ratify the superiority of humans over the more-than-human world. The cult of human exceptionalism thus endured into the twentieth century, furnishing Martin

Heidegger with grounds on which to describe animals as ‘poor in world’, and allowing Jacques

Lacan—in a move that Jacques Derrida would later describe as ‘literally Cartesian’—to formalise the notion that animals are driven by instinct, rather than rational thought, by ‘[contrasting] reaction with response as an opposition between human and animal kingdoms’ (Heidegger 177; Derrida,

The Animal 123, emphasis in original).10 Animals may feel, but only humans really think. Animals may react, but only humans truly respond. This variety of logic has consistently been deployed to

18 police the species boundary, enabling humans to deem themselves superior to their nonhuman peers, and to diminish the ethical responsibility that humans hold with regard to animal life.

The opposition of ‘normal’ and ‘disabled’ is a much more recent construction. As Lennard J. Davis reminds us, the very concept of ‘normalcy’ only entered into meaningful circulation less than two centuries ago: ‘The word “normal” as “constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from, the common type or standard, regular, usual” only enters the English language around 1840’

(‘Constructing’ 3). The idea of the normal body that gained currency in mid-nineteenth-century

Europe was preceded by that of the ideal body: a ‘mytho-poetic’ embodiment unattainable by humankind (4). In a society that subscribes to this idea, the inevitable imperfection of human embodiment in comparison with a deific standard means that there is ‘no demand that populations have bodies that conform to the ideal’ (4). The requirement of conformity only emerges when ‘the ideal’ gives way to ‘the norm’, so that what constitutes an optimal form of embodiment becomes attainable—and, by extension, should be desired and pursued. Once this happens, disabled people become marginalised, condemned to the far side of a border separating the ‘normal’ from the

‘abnormal’—or, to borrow the title of Georges Canguilhem’s seminal study of the history of biology in the nineteenth century, the normal and the pathological.11 Bodily difference is reconceptualised as deviance or lack, and becomes subject to the imperative to be ‘fixed’, ‘cured’, or otherwise aligned with the norm. This ethos is most clearly articulated in what is known as the medical model of disability, which views disability as a defect of the individual body, a flaw or aberration to be remediated by means of medical intervention.

The idea of disability as a deficit of the individual body, and thus the responsibility of the individual human, was so pervasive that the term ‘medical model’ did not emerge until it was denaturalised by an alternative approach in the 1970s, when the U.K.’s Union of the Physically Impaired Against

Segregation (UPIAS) argued that ‘it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society’ (UPIAS). In 1983, Mike Oliver coined the term social model to describe this way of thinking about disability, which distinguishes the physical event of impairment from disability, a social phenomenon.12 The social model thinks disability as an effect of systems propagated by a society inhospitable to nonnormative forms of embodiment; in Davis’s

19 words, it recognises disability as ‘the social process that turns impairment into a negative by creating barriers to access’ (Bending 12). The social model is not without its critics, many of whom take issue with its translation of an understandable wariness about the risks of precipitating a dangerous renaissance in biological essentialism into a failure to legislate for bodily matter(s) at all.13

Whatever its flaws, however, the social model renders it viable to think disability in terms of discrimination: as a foreclosure of the possibility of expressing abilities different from those associated with the ‘normal’ human being. While its roots lie in the U.K., the influence of the social model has been global. The passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in

1990, for example, enshrined a version of the social model in U.S. law.

The dislocation of disability from the body to society makes it possible to think differential embodiment as something to be embraced, rather than merely tolerated and accommodated. We might consider, as Steve Silberman does, ‘the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity’, which posits that ‘conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder … should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions’ (16, emphasis in original). In a similar vein, disability studies scholar Rosemarie

Garland-Thomson has made what she calls ‘The Case for Conserving Disability’ (2012). In a powerful rejoinder to what she calls ‘eugenic logic’, which follows that ‘our world would be a better place if disability could be eliminated’, Garland-Thomson attends to ‘what disability-as-disability and disabled people-as-they-are contribute to our shared world’ (‘The Case’ 339-40, 343). While this argument is far from unproblematic—her framing of disability in terms of human biodiversity risks lapsing into a celebration of debilitating experience—it nevertheless testifies to an impressive sea change in attitudes towards disability that has unfolded within the last half century. Increasingly, disability is regarded as what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call a nonnormative positivism. In

The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015),

Mitchell and Snyder define a nonnormative positivism as a ‘nondialectical materialist account of disability’, one that ‘pursues disability as something other than the oppressed product of social constraints’ (5). Unlike the ‘egalitarian concept of disability’, which ‘has sought to free disabled people from the restraints of able-bodied oppression’, this theorisation allows for disability to be

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‘more fully recognized as providing alternative values for living that do not simply reify reigning concepts of normalcy’ (5, emphasis in original).

Attitudes towards nonhuman animals have followed a comparable trajectory over a similar timespan. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of a wealth of scholarship that blurs the boundaries upon which hierarchical taxonomies of the relative value of different lives have been constructed. Ethological research by the likes of Marc Bekoff, Irene Pepperberg, and Frans de Waal, among others, has shown that many faculties traditionally considered the sole preserve of human beings are also evinced by certain nonhuman animals, including those most commonly cited as exclusive to humankind: reason, language use, and self-consciousness.14 It has also demonstrated that nonhuman animals boast a diverse array of capabilities that human beings do not share. This scholarship has thus been instrumental in exposing the idea of some essential difference between human and nonhuman animals as an anthropocentric construct, while also revealing the manifold generative differences between and within different species.

At the same time, the project of rupturing the human/animal binary has been undertaken by scholars across the humanities. Since the publication of Singer’s Animal Liberation, the ‘animal turn’ has gathered enormous momentum. Prominent proponents include Donna Haraway, whose interest in deconstructing hegemonic ideas about ‘the human’—already central to her influential ‘A Cyborg

Manifesto’ (1991)—informs her work on ‘companion species’, which theorises the ways in which human and nonhuman beings ‘become with’ one another in various contexts.15 Jacques Derrida’s work on nonhuman animals has become a similarly indispensable reference point for all scholars invested in the so-called ‘animal question’. In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), Derrida coins the term animot, a neologism that combines the French terms for ‘animal’ (animal) and ‘word’

(mot), to critique the way in which the world’s vast and heterogeneous legions of nonhuman beings are corralled into the monolithic category of ‘the Animal’, the maintenance of which facilitates the distinction between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ on which theories of human exceptionalism and justifications of violence towards animals rely (47). Derrida also contends that numerous attributes supposed to be exclusive to humankind may be shared by nonhuman animals, and that some of these attributes may not even be present in humans in the first place. For Derrida, the ‘limitations’ of nonhuman animals must be radically reconceived. On the question of language, for example, he

21 is less interested in ‘“giving speech back” to animals’ than in the prospect of ‘acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation’ (The Animal 48). Building on foundations laid by

Derrida, Wolfe’s Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist

Theory (2003) begins ‘by suggesting that much of what we call cultural studies situates itself squarely, if only implicitly, on what looks … more and more like a fundamental repression that underlies most ethical and political discourse: repressing the question of nonhuman subjectivity, taking it for granted that the subject is always already human’ (1). Wolfe’s approach to questions of animal justice proceeds from the imperative to unpack the ramifications of this assumption— ramifications that extend far beyond the plight of nonhuman animals themselves: ‘the ethical and philosophical urgency of confronting the institution of speciesism’, Wolfe argues, ‘has nothing to do with whether you like animals. We all, human and nonhuman alike, have a stake in the discourse and institution of speciesism; it is by no means limited to its overwhelmingly direct and disproportionate effects on animals’ (7, emphasis in original). Like Derrida, Wolfe is particularly interested in relations between subjectivity and language, taking Wittgenstein’s famous contention that ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him’ as a springboard for questioning the authority by which ascriptions of linguistic ability can be made—a project that Mel Baggs, working in a disability context, would surely support (Wittgenstein 223).

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Disability and Animality in a Posthumanist Frame

The resonances between these two genealogies recommend thinking disability and animality in concert with one another. Nevertheless, while thinking speciesism as a derivative of ableism, as

Taylor does, represents a significant improvement on the ableist logic of Peter Singer, it remains that the two concepts have been cultivated to engage distinct histories of prejudice and violence. A more compelling way of reconciling the two—and the approach adopted by this dissertation—is through the frame of posthumanism. Like the term to which it is a response, posthumanism is multivalent term that has been defined and deployed in various ways by different theorists. One way to distinguish between these various theorisations is to consider what the prefix ‘post-’ is meant

22 to modify. For some, posthumanism refers primarily to what comes after the human—that is, what the human is becoming in the early twenty-first century. Quantum leaps in science and technology mean that the ‘augmentation’ of the human body is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In the era of bioengineering, the titular protagonist of Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is a material reality as much as it is a conceptual figure. Posthumanism’s association with technological futurity stretches back to the work that popularised the term, N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Become Posthuman:

Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999). As Colleen Glenney Boggs reminds us, posthumanism’s provocative challenge to ‘Enlightenment models of subjectivity’ derived from a reflection on the ability of modern technologies ‘to mimic core traits of the human’, and on ‘the role that that technology plays for unsettling our understandings of such binaries as culture and nature, biology and technology’ (8). This brand of posthumanism shows us that technology, an ‘other’ against which ‘the human’ has been defined, is in fact so intimately entangled with human life that the distinction between the two is unsustainable. Still, there are many other

‘others’ of which this is also true—including, importantly, disabled people and nonhuman animals.

This recommends an alternative understanding of posthumanism and its discontents.

For others, this researcher included, the ‘post-’ of posthumanism is better conceived as referring to what comes after humanism as a prevailing onto-epistemology. In this respect, my approach closely resembles that of Wolfe, whose What is Posthumanism? (2009) begins by making precisely this distinction. For Wolfe, Hayles’s use of the term ‘tends to oppose embodiment and the posthuman, whereas the sense in which I am using the term here insists on exactly the opposite: posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of being “after” our embodiment has been transcended—but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment, inherited from humanism itself, that Hayles rightly criticizes’ (xv, emphasis in original). The idea that the human could somehow transcend its messy corporeality bespeaks an a priori disavowal of animal being. Indeed, in The Open: Man and Animal (2004), Giorgio Agamben argues that our notions about ‘the human’ derive from a rejection of the animal aspect of human being: ‘the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man’ (16). ‘In our culture,’ Agamben says, ‘man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine

23 element’—or, to use the terms Agamben introduces in his theorisation of biopolitics, zoē and bios

(16). Lacking the latter ‘element’, nonhuman animals are relegated to lower positions in hierarchical conceptions of the relative value of different lives. However, the distillation of the privileged traits that make ‘the human’ human also excludes humans who do not exhibit these traits in ‘full’ or

‘proper’ measure—a demographic in which disabled people feature prominently. For disability studies scholars Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthom, and Katherine Runswick-Cole, disability ‘has always contravened the traditional classical humanist conception of what it means to be human’, which suggests the commensurability of disability studies and posthumanism (343). While ‘there is a time and a place for humanism’, and disabled people ‘continue to demand inclusion into this category’, the authors agree with the position, expressed by Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman

(2013), that ‘the old modernist idealisation of the unitary, rational, independent, dislocated, solitary, able-bodied subject has been revealed as a fiction’ (Goodley, Lawthom, and Runswick Cole 345).

As such, any effort to assert the humanity or personhood of disabled people cannot proceed without an examination of the manifold exclusions through which this fictive human subject is constituted.

This second variant of posthumanism aims to thwart these exclusions by stopping them at root. It eschews the imperative to expand the interlocking circles of legal enfranchisement, social recognition, political representation, and ethical consideration to encompass human beings and nonhuman animals that formerly languished beyond its remit, arguing that this approach would only serve to galvanise the figure of ‘the human’ to which it takes exception, since it is premised on an extension of the same normative standard it disputes. The paradigmatic manifestation of this liberal humanist approach is the discourse of rights. While it would be foolhardy in the extreme to overlook the success of the extension of rights in securing dramatic improvements in the lives of innumerable disabled people and nonhuman animals, humanist investments still inhere in the very concept of rights. For Wolfe, ‘the problem with both sides’ of the animal rights debate ‘is that they are locked into a model of justice in which a being does or does not have rights on the basis of its possession

(or lack) of morally significant characteristics that can be empirically derived’ (What Is

Posthumanism? 75, emphasis in original). This is problematic because, as Cora Diamond puts it, the concept of ‘the human’ ‘is a main source of that moral sensibility which may then be able to extend to nonhuman animals’ (‘Experimenting’ 353, emphasis in original). In other words, the

24 extension of rights to populations hitherto denied access to them is premised on the retention of humanism’s concept of ‘the human’ as its primary point of reference. This extensionist approach bears comparison with what Mitchell and Snyder, writing in a disability context, call inclusionism: the requirement ‘that disability be tolerated as long as it does not demand an excessive degree of change from relatively inflexible institutions, environments, and norms of belonging’ (Biopolitics

14). Again, the assimilation of a marginalised population into a framework designed to advance the claims of that group is compromised by the normative standard presupposed by that framework.

Wolfe neatly crystallises these problematics when he writes that ‘the philosophical and theoretical frameworks used by humanism’ to keep its ‘commitments’ to its ‘others’ ultimately ‘reproduce the very kind of normative subjectivity—a specific concept of the human—that grounds discrimination against nonhuman animals and the disabled in the first place’ (What is Posthumanism? xvii). The stripe of posthumanism to which this dissertation subscribes averts the threat of undermining its own project in this way by opting to deconstruct the normative standard of humanism—or, better, to show how, under pressure, that standard deconstructs itself.

The contingency of ‘the human’, its vulnerability to posthumanist pressure, is encapsulated by the beginning of Braidotti’s The Posthuman. In a clear nod to Haraway’s famous claim that ‘we have never been human’, Braidotti argues that ‘[n]ot all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history’

(Haraway, When Species Meet 1; Braidotti, The Posthuman 1). If ‘we’ are not only human, this is at least partly because we are materially constituted by an incalculable array of more-than-human others.16 However, Braidotti’s central point here is that ascriptions of humanness do not derive exclusively from membership in the biological category of Homo sapiens. The human is a biological entity perennially embroiled in a diverse range of complex interspecies entanglements, but it is also a concept, a ‘normative convention’ that is ‘highly regulatory and hence instrumental to practices of exclusion and discrimination’ (26). This is the ‘human norm’ that ‘stands for normality, normalcy and normativity’ (26).

Armed with an appreciation of humanism’s ‘specific concept of the human’ and its constitutive exclusions, we can return to Crary’s chapter to identify the spectre of this hegemonic figure in the

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‘distinctive logic’ behind the ‘horrific’ comparisons between disability and animality that proliferated in Darwin’s wake (121). For Crary, these comparisons ‘don’t simply involve, on the one hand, associations of cognitively disabled human beings with a specific kind of animal and, on the other, associations of animals of that kind with some significantly negative characteristic’; rather, disabled humans are sometimes ‘denigrated by association with traits that are precisely valued in the animals who possess them’ (121). Crary resolves this apparent paradox by reflecting on ‘the hierarchy of life-forms internal to evolutionary theory’ (122). As Crary explains, Darwin ‘is happy to dehumanize “idiots”—and the racialized “savages” he takes as their close kin—for resembling animals like monkeys’, even as he lauds monkeys themselves ‘for their human-like qualities’ (122). This means that ‘individual animals of “lower kinds” can be seen as exemplary and laudatory individuals insofar as they possess particular human-like traits that, as it were, “raise” them above their station, while at the same time individual cognitively disabled humans who are taken to possess similar traits—traits that seem to “lower” their station—can be looked down on as evidence of the waste of natural selection’ (122).

What is interesting about this logic is that it is concerned with the proximity or distance of a given being from the figure of the (supposedly fully evolved) human who sits at the pinnacle of a reified hierarchy of ‘stations’. Praise is reserved for nonhuman animals that approximate particular, privileged traits and characteristics, thereby moving closer to a venerated human condition, while disabled human beings are met with scorn for ‘falling short’ of the normative human standard they are meant to meet. In both cases, the barometer against which the qualities of the being in question are measured is that of ‘the human’; and, in both cases, the inevitable failure of the being in question to meet this normative standard means that they are branded as subhuman. Phrased differently, comparisons between disabled people and nonhuman animals need not be entirely ‘horrific’ if one recognises that they rely upon the prior performance of another, genuinely troubling comparison: between disabled people, nonhuman animals, and other supposed ‘subhumans’ (on the one hand), and the dominant figure of ‘the human’ (on the other). As Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar attest,

‘[w]hat counts as “human” is always under contestation’ (6).

A key site for the negotiation of ‘what counts as “human”’ is the arena of literary and cultural representation. Just as posthumanism is a fitting frame through which to think disability and

26 animality in tandem—enabling the fruitful cross-contamination of ideas between two fields of research that have tended to resist being theorised together—a posthumanist critical perspective can account for representational problematics that perspectives from either disability studies or animal studies alone might be liable to overlook. In the next section, I demonstrate the ethical potential of a posthumanist approach to novels and memoirs that represent disabled and animal subjectivities by engaging recent attempts to redress common forms of representional violence against disability and animality in the context of two types of narrative: the nonfictional disability memoir, and the fictional animal ‘autozoography’.

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The Ghost in the Machine: Two Examples

In literature, as in life, disability and animality are ubiquitous. As Clare Barker and Stuart Murray tell us, ‘disability features in literary production as a constant presence. And it does so across all time periods, from the earliest expressions of European poetry to the contemporary global novel, and all points in between’ (1). Lennard Davis observes that ‘once one begins to notice, there really is a rare novel that does not have some characters with disabilities’, and, even in the absence of major disabled characters, ‘any literary work will have some reference to the abnormal, to disability, and so on’ (‘Constructing’ 12). Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh make a comparable case for nonhuman animals, reminding us that animals ‘are to be found in virtually all traditions of literature, including sculpture, painting, drawing, folktales, poetry, music, and philosophy’ (1). Understanding that literary texts have the potential to reflect, recapitulate, and renegotiate popular attitudes towards minoritised populations, scholars have illuminated the myriad ways in which representations have contributed to (mis)conceptions of disabled people and nonhuman animals.

Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995), a seminal text for literary disability studies, identified the complicity of literary narratives in the fortification of the ideology of normalcy by analysing the ways in which disabled characters are marginalised and subjugated in works of nineteenth-century fiction. Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical

Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997) expanded upon this theme, exploring how physical disability is figured across a wide array of American literary and cultural texts, from Harriet

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Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to the ‘freak shows’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is here that Garland-Thomson coins the term normate, which ‘designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings’ (8). Three years later, Mitchell and Snyder published what is possibly the most referenced work in literary disability studies: Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000).

Mitchell and Snyder’s titular dynamic of narrative prosthesis describes the ways in which disability functions ‘as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potency, and analytical insight’ throughout the western canon (Narrative Prosthesis 49). In examples of narrative prosthesis, disabled characters are defined exclusively by their disabilities; they are interesting and useful to their respective texts only to the extent that they carry the symbolic burden of disability. And ‘burden’ is the appropriate term: physical or cognitive difference is framed as a deviation from, or threat to, the normal order of things, and must therefore be ‘corrected’ or

‘overcome’. There is thus a eugenic logic at work in examples of narrative prosthesis: the

‘abnormal’ is subjected to either normalisation or death—what Mitchell and Snyder, citing disabled historian and activist Paul Longmore, call ‘the “kill or cure” imperative’—both of which restore a normative status quo at disability’s expense (Narrative Prosthesis 164).

A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to theorising alternative representational strategies that refuse to recapitulate these problematic tendencies. However, even many texts that avoid subjecting disability to familiar modes of representational violence retain investments in the norms of the humanist tradition. One genre that would appear to be comparatively immune to accusations of such violence is the disability memoir; as Timothy Barrett affirms, disability memoirs have often

‘been constructed as offering a profound and politically progressive counterpoint to the medicalised, objectified discourses that surround disabled bodies’ (1570). Written in the first person from the perspective of somebody who is intimately acquainted with disability in all its complexity, a disability memoir is likely to problematise normalcy, rather than enforce it; to demystify disability, rather than exoticise it; to represent disability as a material reality rather than an organising metaphor; and to betray very little of the ‘aesthetic nervousness’ theorised by Ato Quayson in his book of the same name.17 However, Barrett also notes that disability memoirs have ‘been critiqued for being overly sentimental, reflecting a bourgeois individualism, and reproducing hegemonic

28 associations between disability and personal tragedy’ (1570). Barrett mines the history of autobiography to discern the provenance of these problematics, and finds that chief among the

‘interacting … trends’ behind the rise of the genre was ‘the emergence of a distinctive conception of “the individual” that can be located within seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Europe’ and was heavily ‘influenced by Enlightenment values, patriarchal capitalism, and political liberalism, among other social forces’ (1569, 1571). This figure closely resembles ‘the human’ of humanism even before Barrett describes it ‘as existing at a distance from the society that she/he confronted, as possessing a self-identical coherence across time and space that was capable of being narrated, and as constantly progressing towards economic, social, and political advancement’

(1571). Autobiography, it seems, was indebted to the humanist tradition from the start.

Although Barrett does not adopt a posthumanist perspective himself, he gestures towards the humanist pitfalls into which disability memoirs may fall when he notes that autobiographical life writing holds a ‘contentious position’ in disability studies because it threatens to ‘reinforce individualistic constructions of disability’ (1569). ‘Critiques of individualism,’ Barrett reminds us,

‘have rested at the conceptual heart of disability studies’ (1570). Barrett thus sets about elaborating three ways in which to ‘negotiate or mitigate the problem of individualism’: ‘by seeing the social in the personal’, ‘by recognising individualism as a social trend’, and by attending to the ‘boundary between autobiography/biography’ (1570). From a disability studies perspective, these methods accomplish Barrett’s aim of de-individualising autobiography. From a posthumanist perspective, however, these methods are inadequate to the task of excavating the humanist assumptions inscribed in the formal constitution of examples of the genre. Reading a personal account of disability as a venue for the negotiation of disability as social phenomenon may be useful, but it does little to challenge the individuating logics of the autobiographical mode. Meanwhile, framing individualism as a social phenomenon exposes the contingency of individualism, suggesting the potential for this trend to be supplanted by more promising alternatives, but it leaves the actual work of theorising those alternatives incomplete. Finally, the recognition that all autobiographies feature multiple personages other than the author is both true and fair, but it leaves the concept of the individual subject—and, with it, a central tenet of the humanist tradition—intact.

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Nonhuman animals, of course, cannot write autobiographies—but this has not prevented human authors from attempting to write such texts on behalf of their nonhuman peers. In the late nineteenth century, animal autobiographies, or ‘autozoographies’, attempted to represent the perspectives of nonhuman animal characters in order to foster empathy with their real-world counterparts. As

Margo DeMello tells us in the Introduction to the edited collection Speaking for Animals: Animal

Autobiographical Writing (2013), works such as Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel Black Beauty (2012) and Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1893) ‘used speaking animals to express the suffering of animals themselves’ (2). Sewell presents an especially interesting case. One of the reasons that Sewell felt such a strong affinity with horses was because she was disabled as a teenager, and relied upon horse-drawn carriages to travel around her hometown; she became an advocate for the humane treatment of her equine companions, and it was ‘her goal for Black Beauty to improve the lives of horses’ (Tsiang 60). In a 1910 article on Black Beauty for National

Magazine, Guy Richardson references an 1876 entry in Sewell’s journal, in which the author reveals that the ‘special aim’ of her ‘little book’ was to ‘induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses’ (Richardson 597). This is evident in the text itself, which demonstrates that violence against horses is not limited to individual cases, but is rather a barbaric social norm. In

DeMello’s words, Sewell’s narrative ‘includes the stories of a number of horses he meets, many of whom, like Black Beauty, suffered from the cruelty of their human owners’ (2).

Black Beauty remains an impressive accomplishment, borne of laudable intentions. However, from the vantage of the present day—and at the risk of inviting accusations of presentism—it is not self- evident that the autozoographical use of the first-person narrative perspective is an unproblematic means of portraying nonhuman animal subjectivities. One of the most obvious charges one could make against this approach—and, indeed, one of the most common charges brought against representations of nonhuman animals more generally—is that of anthropomorphism, which Onno

Oerlemans defines as ‘the projection of the characteristics of human subjectivity onto animal sentience and behaviour’ (Oerlemans 181). Many critics find anthropomorphism troubling because portraying nonhuman animals ‘as fully developed and seemingly human characters robs them of their difference from us and among one another’ (181). Implicit in the rendering of nonhumans into more relatable form is a need to frame the more-than-human world in distinctly human terms, which

30 risks diminishing the imperative that we apprehend the breathtaking heterogeneity of the more- than-human world, as well as the networks of ecological interdependency and responsibility that follow from it. By the same token, the human need to see the world ‘our way’ might instead be considered a product of the inevitable inability of humans to think our way into the being of another creature, and thus a helpful admission of the limitations of the supposedly ‘exceptional’ human being. Some critics have argued that anthropomorphism might actually stand to improve relations between humans and nonhumans. Marc Bekoff argues that anthropomorphism ‘does not have to discount the animal’s point of view’, and in fact ‘allows other animals’ behaviour and emotions to be accessible to us’ (‘Animal Emotions’ 867). Ecofeminist Val Plumwood makes a comparable point, arguing that the problems that may arise as a result of representing other species ‘pale before the enormity of failing to represent them at all, or of representing them as non-communicative and non-intentional beings’ (60-1). Frans de Waal theorises the opposite of anthropomorphism as anthropodenial: the ‘a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals when in fact they may exist’ (The Ape 69). As David Herman explains in his Narratology beyond the

Human: Storytelling and Animal Life (2018), anthropodenial ‘assumes … that nonhuman organisms are not like humans’, and thus risks fortifying the human-animal divide (6, emphasis in original).

One imagines that Sewell would be inclined to agree.

Still, this move engenders problematics of its own. Most obviously, the project of ‘giving voice’ to nonhuman animals begs the question of what kind of voice these nonhuman characters are endowed with. As my analysis of ‘In My Language’ has demonstrated, we cannot assume that all humans conceive of ‘language’ in the same terms, let alone nonhuman animals. Even to attempt to represent a nonhuman perspective in a literary narrative is to undertake a ‘translation’ of an unfathomable subjectivity into a decidedly human vocabulary. Setting aside this issue, we might reflect on the appropriateness of the singular first-person narrative perspective as a technique for representing nonhuman subjectivities. In his article ‘Animal Collectives’ (2020), Dominic O’Key identifies a

‘lack of an animal collective voice within fiction’—that is, of a first-person plural animal we—and finds this lack ‘symptomatic of the novel form’s individuating logics, which produce a conception of bounded personhood that is coded as ontologically human’ (74). While animal narration in the first-person singular ‘productively extends the realm of narrative possibility’ towards nonhumans,

31 it also ‘risks decollectivising animals’ and ‘foreclosing the liberatory horizons that much animal studies critique makes possible’ (74). O’Key argues that ‘the absence of we-narratives proper in animal-narrated fiction’ derives from ‘the formal and generic logics of the novel, which pressurize multispecies storyworlds into adopting a sole authorial “I”’ (82). This leads him to conclude ‘that literary autozoographies participate in a kind of liberal extensionism’, and thus may be ‘at odds with the very posthumanist horizon they are often tasked with making intelligible’ (83).

For O’Key, the novel’s ‘reluctance to take on the “we” would … be redolent of a politics which prioritises the sovereignty of the subject’ (83). I fully agree with this assessment. Less persuasive, however, is the contention that autozoographies that do ‘take on the “we”’ can unsettle the humanist concept of ‘the human’ in a comprehensive manner. Indeed, O’Key’s emphasis on the promise of the first person plural leaves room for his argument to be contested by a more thoroughgoing posthumanist approach, as we begin to notice when we think his proposed recollectivisation of nonhuman animals in terms of Derrida’s critique of the ‘catch-all concept’ of ‘the Animal’ in which

‘all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, his brothers’ are confined—this ‘in spite of the infinite space that separates the lizard from the dog, the protozoon from the dolphin, the shark from the lamb, the parrot from the chimpanzee’ (The Animal 34, emphasis in original). While O’Key stops short of herding all nonhuman animals into this category, and his insistence on thinking nonhuman life in terms of collectives and multiplicities represents a vital step towards the kind of posthumanist poetics this dissertation pursues, we might ask whether his call for a recollectivisation of animals nevertheless risks obscuring different kinds of difference between and within species under the sign of the first-person plural. Moreover, like the ‘sole authorial “I”’, the collective authorial ‘we’ is defined by its opposition with an implied ‘you’. Thus, while stories narrated by animal collectives put pressure on the individual ‘I’, the collective ‘we’ remains incapable of articulating forms of subjectivity that traverse species boundaries, and leaves the line that distinguishes ‘the human’ from ‘the animal’ largely in place. I venture an alternative approach in Chapter 4, which elaborates an account of an impersonal, third-person companion narration in the context of Paul Auster’s novel Timbuktu.

Individually and collectively, Barrett and O’Key identify the humanist subject as the ghost in the machine of many literary narratives, fictional and nonfictional.18 Furthermore, they both imply the

32 profundity of the imbrication of this figure in the formal operations of these genres: when Barrett identifies ‘the emergence of a distinctive conception of “the individual”’ as a keystone in the consolidation of the autobiographical mode, and when O’Key discerns an extensionist tendency in

‘the formal and generic logics of the novel’ (Barrett 1569; O’Key 82-3). These observations gesture towards the scale of the task of theorising a poetics of posthumanism in the context of narrative representations of disability and animality, and recommend a sustained reflection on how the normative logic of humanism came to infuse the formal conventions of both genres. The next section addresses that task by undertaking precisely that reflection. Since all but one of my chapters engage with works of fiction—and the one exception includes a discussion of relations between autobiography and humanism—this section will focus primarily on the humanist investments of the novel, before I move on to consider the biopolitical logic that guides their expression.

*

Aesthetic Disabilities and Humanist Forms

The relationship between the novel form and liberal humanist thought is widely chronicled. In his landmark 1957 study, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (2000), Ian

Watt identifies realism as ‘the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction’, and argues that this realism ‘does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it’—an approach informed by ‘a more dispassionate and scientific scrutiny of life than had ever been attempted before’ (10-11).

Interventions by Descartes and his contemporaries were instrumental in shaping the results. Watt describes the novel as ‘the form of literature which most fully reflects’ the Cartesian notion that the

‘pursuit of truth’ is an individual task to be undertaken via empirical means, and points to the work of Daniel Defoe as evidence (13). For Watt, Defoe’s 1719 work Robinson Crusoe (2001), routinely cited as the first novel written in English, ‘initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir’, which Watt calls ‘as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum was in philosophy’ (Watt 15). Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc. (2007), which investigates

‘sociocultural, formal, historical, and ideological conjunctions between human rights and the

33 novel’—and chimes with critiques of the anthropocentrism of rights discourse—describes Robinson

Crusoe as ‘a signal literary marker of the historical emergence of rationalized individualism’ (3,

46). Derrida expresses a similar sentiment in the second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign

(2011) when he identifies Robinson Crusoe as a text in which one witnesses the founding of the sovereign subject. Alone on a desert island, divorced from the world at large, Crusoe hears his name spoken back to him by the parrot, Poll, who Derrida characterises as ‘a sort of living mechanism that he [Crusoe] has produced, that he has assembled himself, like a quasi-technical or prosthetic apparatus, by training the parrot to speak mechanically so as to send his words and name back to him, repeating them blindly’ (Derrida, The Beast Vol. II 86, emphasis in original). This is tantamount to a ‘circular auto-appellation’—an act of self-naming—that consolidates Robinson’s subjecthood (Derrida, Beast Vol. II 112). As Wolfe reminds us, however, this ‘auto-appellation proceeds—and can only proceed—by means of the hetero-appellation’ of the prosthetic device that is Poll, and ‘Derrida’s point … is that this generalized expropriation could only ever be controlled or mastered—could only be turned into a perfectly “circular auto-appellation”—in the realm of fantasy. That is to say, on a “desert island,” as it were, where Crusoe explicitly figures his place in relation to the lands and creatures around him … in terms of sovereignty’ (Wolfe, Ecological 113).

Seen in this light, Robinson Crusoe not only depicts the founding of the sovereign humanist subject; it also exposes the dependence of that subject upon a misappropriation of nonhuman being as prosthesis. In Defoe’s novel, the relationship between human subject and nonhuman animal ‘other’ is not one of constitutive interdependence, but of expropriation in the service of self-reconciliation.

As Derrida phrases it, ‘Robinson Crusoe is not so much an autobiographical fiction as the fiction of an autobiography’—and a highly influential one, at that (88). From its very inception, the novel was preoccupied with a distinctly humanist conception of human life.

This preoccupation endured into the eighteenth century, and withstood severe pressure from the seminal scientific and philosophical interventions that characterised the Age of Enlightenment. Ian

Duncan’s Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (2019) explains how, starting in the mid-eighteenth century, human life bifurcated into individual and collective conjugations, and argues that the novel was crucial to their reconciliation. Duncan writes: ‘In man alone does the species as well as the individual have a history, according to late Enlightenment philosophical

34 anthropologists, who translated the old providential plot of human destiny into a civilizational progress toward perfection’ (2). In Duncan’s account, this narrative of individual and collective becoming was furnished with its ‘internal logic’ by an incipient epigenetic biology that ventured ‘a formative principle, the Bildungstrieb’, to account for ‘organic development from simple to more complex (advanced) states’ (2). However, this ‘developmental principle’ inadvertently ‘subverted the human exception it was meant to save’ once evolutionary theory ‘sank human species being within the general, irregular flux of terrestrial life. All natural forms, including the human, were subject to mutation’ (2). If this moment presented an opportunity for the novel to transgress the limits of its bourgeois origins and its humanist commitments, it was spurned. ‘The novel’s supposed aesthetic disability, its lack of form’ now rendered it an appropriate model for ‘the changing form of man’ (1). The novel thus became the ‘universal discourse’ of human history, ‘modeling the new developmental conception of human nature as a relation between the history of individual persons

… and the history of the species’ (2-3). In Duncan’s account, the novel’s defining feature, realism, thus became a ‘technical practice’ charged with ‘[defending] humanity’s place at the center of nature and at the end of history. Realism mounts its defense even as natural history evicts man from that privileged station’ (3).

Different scholars offer different accounts of when the novel was first deemed to evince an identifiable form. In Nicholas Dames’s telling, ‘[n]ovel theory—that loosely defined field of attempts to codify the generic uniqueness of a notoriously protean form—has often undertaken inquiries into the origins of the novel’, and the most popular of these many inquiries locates this realisation in a forty-year period straddling the fin de siècle (25).19 In The Physiology of the Novel:

Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007), however, Dames disputes ‘the persistent illusion that the Victorians had no theory of the novel’ by attending to the forgotten legacy of ‘experimental science upon nineteenth-century novel criticism and theory’ (2). Dames’s central claim is that ‘there existed for a period of time in the nineteenth century a literary theory that I will call “the physiology of the novel”’, a theory developed by a ‘coterie of scientists, journalists, and intellectuals who brought the experimental study of human physiology to bear upon the facts of novel-reading, as part of an attempt to theorize the force of the novel form in culture’ (3, 2). In

Dames’s interpretation, ‘the novel of the nineteenth century trained a reader able to consume texts

35 at an ever faster rate, with a rhythmic alternation of heightened attention and distracted inattention locking onto ever smaller units of comprehension’ (7). ‘From the vantage-point of the physiological criticism that engaged it,’ says Dames, the Victorian novel operated as ‘a training ground for industrialized consciousness’ (7). The Victorian novel can therefore be understood as a technical apparatus that produced a generation of readers biologically synchronised, as it were, to its specific shapes, rhythms, and velocities. The novel form thus participated in the creation of a particular kind of reading subject: a mass-produced subject fit to fulfil its prescribed role in a society increasingly characterised by imperatives of standardisation and productivity. It should go without saying, however, that relations between the norms of genre and those of readerly physiology were not unidirectional, as Dames’s discussion of the ‘operating assumptions’ behind G. H. Lewes’s novel theory confirms: ‘a physiological study of the cognitive act of reading can furnish a theorist with key rules of literary genre, since each distinct genre produces (and is intended to produce) different kinds of “receptivity”’ (Dames 38).20 In other words, it was not only the case that the bodyminds of readers of Victorian literature were conditioned by the novel form; that form was itself sculpted by the operations of its readers’ bodyminds—or, more accurately, by those of the average bodymind.

In order to appeal to the ‘receptivity’ of as large a readership as possible, examples of the Victorian novel would have been composed with a set of ‘normal’ physiological characteristics firmly in mind. The narrative form of the genre and the physical form of the reader thus reinforce one another in a kind of feedback loop: humanism’s concept of ‘the human’ solidifies increasingly rigid storytelling conventions, which further ramify the contours of that figure, in turn.

Dorothy Hale also locates the discovery that the novel ‘could be thought to have a form’ in the late nineteenth century, and argues that this realisation ‘made the representation of fictional characters an artistic task that entailed an ethical duty’ (Hale). ‘For Woolf, James, Faulkner and a host of other modernists,’ says Hale, ‘the art of the novel was indistinguishable from the ethical task of representing characters as autonomous individuals, defined by an identity distinct and different from their author’s’. By this point, what Watt calls ‘total subordination of the plot’ of the novel ‘to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir’ has been broken, but the movement from the representation of the self to the representation of the other has done little to challenge the veracity of the binary distinction between self and other. The characters represented remain ‘autonomous individuals’,

36 and it is precisely the internal coherence of these subjects that lends an ethical dimension to their representation in novelistic narrative. Again, this ‘autonomous individual’ bears close resemblance to an idealised humanist subject. If the novel’s alleged formlessness was, in Duncan’s felicitous phrase, the ‘aesthetic disability’ that made it fit to represent ‘the changing form of man’, the acknowledgement that the novel does have a form raises the prospect that it may not be equipped to represent humankind in all its variegated multiplicity. Without wishing to burden a single phrase with too great a weight of meaning, it is apt that this realisation effectively cures the novel of its

‘aesthetic disability’. Given the novel’s debt to the humanist tradition, it is logical to hypothesise that the figure that fits most comfortably into its form is that of the ‘normal’ human being. This being so, it becomes viable—imperative, even—to entertain the idea that certain formal strategies associated with the novel form might bear a humanist inflection, a notion that should be borne in mind whenever disabled people and/or nonhuman animals feature in its pages.

If the modernist acknowledgement that ‘the novel could be thought to have a form’ presages the advent of narratology—the field of literary theory ‘dedicated to the study of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation’—the poststructuralist acknowledgement that ‘elements of novelistic form … could tell the political truth’ portends the dismantling of the claims to universalism that narratology inherited from its structuralist forebears (Meister; Hale). An interrogation of the covert political investments of literary narrative form was pioneered by feminist narratologists like Susan S. Lanser in the 1980s. Lanser recalls a debate with her contemporary Nilli

Diengott, who ‘[argued] that “there is no need, indeed no possibility” of a feminist narratology because “feminism has nothing to do with narratology”’ (Diengott 49-50, qtd. in Lanser). A cynical commentator might find this persuasive: narratology is no stranger to critiques colouring it as overly schematic and totalitarian, and feminism certainly has little truck with so blunt an instrument. Yet the politicisation of narratology was the innovation of thinkers like Lanser, and the resistance of

Diengott and likeminded scholars proved futile. In a statement whose veracity now seems self- evident, Mieke Bal responded to the critiques of those who see narrative theory as ‘politically unconcerned’ by positing that ‘political and ideological criticism cannot but be based on insights into the way texts produce those political effects’ (13).

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An array of narratologies have proliferated in the wake of the path blazed by Lanser and her peers.

Queer narratology, for example, proceeds from the understanding that particular representational strategies are complicit in the reinforcement of a discriminatory heteronormative paradigm. A classic example is Judith Roof’s Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (1996), which grapples with the question of ‘how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform one another’ (xiv). Roof’s thesis follows that sexuality and narrative are ‘[i]nterwound with one another’, operating ‘within the reproductive and/or productive, metaphorically heterosexual ideology that also underwrites the naturalized understanding of the shape and meaning of life’ (xxvii). For Roof, this imbrication can be traced back to their ‘common progenesis in a specific, already heterosexual ideology’—what she calls ‘narrative’s heteroideology’ (xxvii). If, like heteronormativity, humanism is a prejudicial ideological tendency—if, as Hayward and Weinstein argue, its ‘administration of norms’ is indeed

‘the justificatory axle through which violent practices of exclusion, discrimination, and oppression are meted’—then the intimacy of relations between the rise of the novel and the growing hegemony of humanist thought suggests that certain narrative systems and structures may serve to galvanise humanist norms (1). This legitimates the project of developing a (post)humanist account of narrative form. In this respect, this dissertation claims close kinship with Herman’s Narratology beyond the

Human, which considers ‘how ideas developed by scholars of narrative bear on questions about the nature and scope of human-animal relationships in the larger biosphere, and vice versa’ (2). The most significant parallel between Herman’s project and this dissertation is a shared focus on the

‘enabling and constraining effects of different narrative media’ (2). Unlike Herman, however, my focus is on thinking not a ‘narratology beyond the human’ as species, but a ‘narratology beyond the human’ of humanism. The crucial difference here is that the beings whose exclusion serves to constitute this hegemonic figure are not limited to the biologically nonhuman; they also include an array of humans whose embodiments diverge from an idealised ‘human condition’. These ‘enabling and constraining effects’ thus bear on the representation of disabled people, too.

How do the formal operations of narrative representation align the unruly bodyminds of their disabled and nonhuman animal characters with humanist constructions of ‘the human’? In the following section, I argue that the vocabulary best equipped to theorise this procedure can be traced back to a development that unfolded concurrently with the formalisation of the unspoken pact

38 between humanism and the novel form, one for which extant accounts of the rise of the novel have yet to properly legislate: the birth of biopolitics.

*

The Biopolitical Logic of Narrative Form

As Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze remind us, ‘it is only today, at a moment that seems both belated and too soon, that a codification of the biopolitical is underway’ (1). As things stand, ‘there exists no perspective that would allow us to survey and measure the lines that together constitute the concept’s theoretical circumference’ (2). Biopolitics remains little more—or, indeed, less—than the rather awkward sum of its sometimes radically divergent theorisations.21 However, those various theorisations do share at least one common source: the work of Michel Foucault. Thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and, earlier, Martin Heidegger, may have been ‘doing biopolitics’ avant la lettre, but ground zero for the recent ‘biopolitical turn’ is commonly identified in ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, the final chapter of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality

(1990).22 As we know, it is here that Foucault traces a shift from the exercise of a sovereign power that wields ‘the ancient right to take life or let live’ to the machinations of apparatuses, or dispositifs, that exercise a power to ‘foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (138, emphasis in original).23

For Foucault, this shift was aided and abetted by technological developments that allowed humans to view themselves for the first time in terms of population, and thus to discern the shape of the

‘normal’ human being. Thomas Lemke explains that this procedure entailed ‘the dissociation and abstraction of life from its concrete physical bearers. The objects of biopolitics are not singular human beings but their biological features measured and aggregated on the level of populations.

This procedure makes it possible to define norms, establish standards, and determine average values’ (5). It is against this backdrop, where life itself ‘has become an independent, objective, and measurable factor’ that ‘can be epistemologically and practically separated from concrete living beings’ that the interventions of this biopower on individuals (what Foucault calls an ‘anatomo- politics of the human body’) and collectives (a ‘biopolitics of the population’) must be understood

(Lemke 5; Foucault, History Vol. 1 139, emphasis in original). Those whose bodyminds overspill the borders of the ‘normal’ become subject to the dictates of a power that works to align them with

39 that normative standard. In Foucault’s words: ‘Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm’ (144). This does not mean that the law vanishes; rather, it ‘operates more and more as a norm’: ‘the juridical institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses

(medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life’ (144).

Already, we can begin to see the complicity of biopolitics in the reproduction of a humanist onto- epistemology. The ‘normalizing society’ that Foucault cites as biopower’s ‘outcome’ is a society in which deviation from a normative concept of humanity becomes grounds for marginalisation—a phenomenon with which we are already familiar from Davis’s work on disability. While certain biopolitical theorists limit their thinking to the realm of humankind, this power over life is not exercised exclusively over human life. Boggs points out that animals ‘are integral to … a full understanding of biopolitics’, not only because ‘the “anatomo-politics” of the modern state … also exercises power over animal bodies’, but because ‘the differentiation between human beings and animals is the fundamental mechanism by which biopolitics exerts power’ (11). As Boggs notes, this latter point is central to Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times

(2009), which argues that ‘discourses and technologies of biopower hinge on the species divide’, that is, on the ‘production of species difference as a strategically ambivalent rather than absolute line, allowing for the contradictory power to both dissolve and reinscribe borders between humans and animals’ (11). Phrased differently, this ‘strategic ambivalence’ mediates the ascription of humanity—of fully-fledged personhood—allowing for the relegation of some human beings to what biopolitical philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls bare life. Agamben begins his Homo Sacer:

Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) by drawing an important distinction between two terms used by the ancient Greeks. Both words mean ‘life’, but they are ‘semantically and morphologically distinct’: zoē ‘[expresses] the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)’, while bios ‘[indicates] the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’ (1).

Where zoē describes the ‘bare life’ of mortal animal embodiment, bios refers to the personhood of the social and political being. This distinction maps onto the operations by which ‘the human’ is

40 ontologically distinguished from the more-than-human world. Unlike nonhuman animals, humans have bios, but some humans can be stripped of their personhood and consigned to zoē, the ‘bare life’ of raw bodily existence, and thereby rendered less grievable than disposable, less ‘person’ than

‘thing’.24

We see here that Agamben shares Foucault’s interest in the connections between the exercise of power over biological life and procedures by which the relative value of different lives is arbitrated.

Furthermore, his account of power’s retention of a subjugated exception—the figure of homo sacer, the ‘sacred man’ relegated to a condition of bare life—chimes with Foucault’s account of biopower’s complicity in the reinforcement of the norm.25 Nevertheless, Agamben’s biopolitics differs from Foucault’s in important ways—not least in his retention of the figure of the sovereign, the diffusion of which is central to Foucault’s formulation. Wolfe emphasises the need ‘to firmly distinguish between biopolitics and its declension towards sovereignty as constitutive and biopolitics as a relation of bodies, forces, technologies, and dispositifs which … could entail no such formal symmetry between sovereignty and bare life of the sort we find in Agamben’ (Before

33). While this dissertation does not subscribe to any one school of biopolitical philosophy, its overarching approach is more Foucauldian than Agambenian. There are two reasons for this. Firstly,

Foucault has a firmer grasp on the complexity of the operations of power under modernity. As attractive as the ‘formal symmetry’ of Agamben’s account may be, its opposition of sovereign power and bare life leaves little scope for thinking the range of alternative ways in which biopolitical power can be exercised. The second reason is related to the first. In legislating for a greater diversity of manifestations that biopolitical governmentality can assume, Foucault opens a space in which the operations of narrative systems can be analysed for their biopolitical effects. The ‘continuum of apparatuses’ into which the law is incorporated need not be limited to the ‘medical’ and the

‘administrative’, but should also include apparatuses of culture. We have already seen how

Victorian novels were composed with the shapes and rhythms of ‘normal’ human physiology in mind, and how these novels participated in the standardisation of their readers’ bodyminds, in turn.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer indication of the value of thinking the formal machinations of literary and cultural representations through a Foucauldian biopolitical frame.

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Shukin proffers a more specific entry point for thinking the biopolitical dimensions of literary representation. Her concept of ‘animal capital’ relies upon a recognition of the double meaning of the word ‘rendering’, which ‘indexes both economies of representation … and resource economies trafficking in animal remains’ (21-2). Shukin argues that, in the context of late capitalist society, these two definitions of ‘rendering’ are inseparable: ‘the accommodation of these two particularly divergent logics within the space of its one signifier is deeply suggestive of the complicity of representational and material economies in the reproduction of (animal) capital’ (51). Shukin’s

‘biopolitical theory of mimesis’ hinges on this notion that rendering is always material-semiotic

(21). Shukin is at pains to emphasise that her theory ‘is not an attempt to demystify mimesis, in

Marxist fashion, according to the belief that under the mystique of the mimetic faculty lie the real workings of power’ (51). Rather, her objective is to show ‘that mimesis constitutes the real working of power, at least partially. The material rendering of animals is not the empirical “truth” that gives the lie to its other, the representational economy of rendering; the two are the immanent shapes mimesis takes in biopolitical times’ (51, emphasis in original). As compelling as this conclusion may be, exploring biopolitical dynamics within the domain of aesthetic representation—the

‘representational economy of rendering’ upon which Shukin wishes to expand—remains a project worth pursuing in its own right. While I do not conceive of works of literature as biopolitical apparatuses, it is both viable and fruitful to read literary texts for formal strategies that operate in accordance with the logic of biopolitics. The chapters in this dissertation approach their respective primary texts from this perspective, reading their formal manoeuvres as exercises in the biopolitical management of disabled and nonhuman animal bodyminds. If, as Mitchell and Snyder contend, biopolitics ‘identifies the beginnings of a shift away from the punitive processes of confinement and legal prohibitions for disabled people’ towards a ‘massaging of ways to live one’s life appropriately within the community without disrupting the naturalized, normative activities of citizenship’, my account of the biopolitics of narrative is designed to demonstrate how formal strategies and techniques enact a ‘massaging’ of disabled and nonhuman subjectivities into the

‘naturalized, normative activities’ of narrative representation (Biopolitics 9).

This dissertation thus pursues the avenue of enquiry opened by Arne de Boever in Narrative Care:

Biopolitics and the Novel (2013), which raises the question of ‘whether there might be a relation’

42 between two contemporaneous developments: ‘the rise of the novel’ and ‘the rise of what Foucault calls governmentality and biopower’ (9). Evidence to suggest a connection is certainly identifiable.

De Boever notes that, in The Rise of the Novel, Watt’s ‘descriptions of what he considers the novel as a genre to accomplish … resonate with Foucault’s theorization’ of biopolitics (44). De Boever revisits Watt’s note regarding the ‘total subordination’ of the plot of the novel to the shape of autobiography, and argues that, ‘[w]ith the rise of the novel, everyday life—the present—works its way into the text. Such a shift from myth, history, legend, or previous literature to an original, life- like tale is connected with a shift from universals to particulars. With the novel, literature suddenly becomes interested in the lives of particular individuals’ (Watt 15; de Boever 44). For de Boever, this ‘sounds like a governmental project: as a literary form, the novel, and its desire to write the lives of ordinary people, could only be born from a similar mentality as the one Foucault describes in his lectures on governmentality and biopolitics’: ‘To govern the lives of ordinary people—to program their freedom of movement, regulate their health and reproduction, foster their life until the point of death—is both the project of governmentality and in a certain sense that of the novel’

(45). In the novel, ‘writers are experimenting with the governmentality that would become the political order of the day. The novel is exposed as a tense experiment in the governance of the present’ (45).

De Boever’s argument is corroborated by a text he engages at some length, Edward Said’s On Late

Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006), which makes the case that the simultaneous emergence of the bourgeoisie and the novel form explains the fact that, ‘for its first century, the novel is all about birth, … the discovery of roots, and the creation of a new world, a career, and society’ (4). Viewing these developments in tandem allows Said to identify the novel’s preoccupation with ‘the continuity that occurs after birth, the exfoliation from a beginning: in the time from birth to youth, reproductive generation, maturity’, and from there to identify in the novel what François Jacob calls ‘la logique du vivant’ (de Boever 9-10; Said 4-5, emphasis in original).26

In de Boever’s reading, Said’s analysis accrues a more explicitly ‘biopolitical dimension’ when he engages Gillian Beer’s interpretation of Eliot’s 1871 novel Middlemarch (2003), a reading that was

‘powerfully influenced by … Darwin’s plots for the patterns of generation’ (de Boever 10; Said

5).27 We are familiar with this logic from Duncan’s discussion of the Bildungstrieb, the

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‘developmental principle’ that conjugated individual and species life in terms of ‘organic development from simple to more complex … states’, thereby formalising notions of human exceptionalism (Duncan 2). With this in mind, the novel form may be less invested in the logic of the living than in the logic of a specific kind of living: that of the ‘normal’ human being, the maintenance of which is the telos of biopower, in Foucault’s theorisation.

While de Boever’s project is motivated by many of the same interests and concerns as my own, it pursues a rather different trajectory by quite different means. De Boever professes that his ‘use of the term “biopolitics” is very much informed by Foucault’, but his approach to the biopolitical dimensions of narrative representation appears to be more indebted to Agamben (9). The first of the two questions that Narrative Care proposes to address—‘what power is being wielded when the novelist is creating her or his characters?’—implies a conception of author as sovereign that recapitulates the ‘formal symmetry’ of (authorial) sovereignty and (characterological) bare life that

Wolfe problematises (8). This sense is reinforced by de Boever’s elaboration of a ‘pharmacological theory of the novel’ derived from the figure of the pharmakon, whose double meaning—central to

Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1981)—allows him to characterise storytelling as ‘characteristically pharmacological’ in its capacity to be either curative or poisonous ‘depending on how it is administered’ (141, 7). This sets the stage for de Boever’s reading of the novel ‘as a site where care’s imagination exists in a perpetual struggle with the novel’s biopolitical origins’ (13). By contrast, this dissertation takes these origins as a starting point for its adoption of the theoretical vocabulary of biopolitics as a means of illuminating the formal operations by which my texts align disabled and nonhuman subjectivities with a normative, humanist standard of legibility.

If, as Wolfe claims, ‘biopolitics is above all a “strategic” arrangement that coordinates power relations “in order to extract a surplus of power from living beings,” rather than “the pure and simple capacity to legislate or legitimize sovereignty”’, then it is incumbent upon scholars to investigate the coordination of these power relations in the representational economies of literary and cultural texts (Before 33).28 Questions abound. What forms of life are fostered by these representations, and at what cost?29 What kind of ‘surplus’ is ‘extracted’ from disabled and nonhuman characters, and how do these processes of value extraction proceed? According to what representational strategies are these texts arranged, and how might an answer to this question alter our understanding of the

44 value these texts accord to the lives of human and nonhuman beings misconstrued as ‘subhuman’?

Since the answers to these questions differ from one text to another, my chapters draw on different theorisations of biopolitics in order to make sense of the diverse ways in which these texts formally reinscribe the humanist coordinates they otherwise trouble. In addition to work by Foucault and

Agamben, I call on insights from other biopolitical thinkers at appropriate junctures throughout. In every chapter, however, we encounter narrative structures and techniques pressuring the bodyminds of disabled and nonhuman animal beings into conformity with, or the service of, the normative figure of ‘the human’ in accordance with a characteristically biopolitical logic.

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The Order of Things

In selecting my primary texts, I have attempted to strike a balance between the exemplary and the exhaustive. Despite its small size, my corpus is intended to represent a variety of posthumanist challenges to the humanist norms that the dissertation aims to excavate. Indeed, each of my chosen texts—all of which engage both disability and animality—has been received by critics as posing a specific challenge to those norms, whether by apprehending the generative power of ontological and epistemological difference, representing modes of constitutive trans-species relationality that transgress the borders of liberal individual subjecthood, exploring affective, embodied modes of kinship and understanding, or doing several of these things at once. Since posthumanism is not a monolithic category composed of neatly separable theorisations, it would be reductive to think of each of my chosen texts as corresponding precisely with the work of one theorist; by the same token, the fact that humanist norms manifest themselves differently from text to text recommends engaging a variety of theorisations. The corpus also ranges across the borders of genre and style. After devoting the first chapter to autobiography, I analyse four novels, two of which are written in a realist mode, two of which are written in a postmodernist mode. This diversity is fundamental to the trajectory of my argument. Each chapter marks a broadening of the scope of the dissertation, and a raising of the stakes involved. Chapters 1 and 2 investigate the formal reinscription of humanist norms in examples of the memoir and the novel, respectively, while Chapters 3 and 4 analyse texts that dramatise and critique their own aesthetic limitations, thereby thematising the

45 incommensurability of certain formal techniques with efforts to represent disabled and nonhuman animal subjectivities. If these chapters bring the problematics at hand into sharper focus, Chapter 5 offers a provisional answer to the question of how those problematics might be evaded.

The one respect in which the corpus lacks for diversity is arguably the most significant. Of the five authors I engage at length, Temple Grandin is the only one who is disabled. The principal reason for this has to do with the prime objective of this dissertation. This project is primarily an exercise in excavating the ways in which an enduring fidelity to humanist norms manifests itself in the formal constitution of autobiographical and novelistic representations of disability and animality. With this in mind, we might venture that this dynamic is always likely to be more readily identifiable in works written by authors who, not being disabled themselves, are unfamiliar with the experience of finding normative narrative practices ill equipped to represent the shapes and rhythms of their own lives.

The objectives of the dissertation also recommend delimiting my corpus to texts published within the last quarter of a century. While a posthumanist perspective can usefully be brought to bear on representations of disability and/or animality from any era, it is especially instructive in the context of literary works that redress forms of representational violence already theorised by scholars in disability, human-animal, and animality studies. Literary depictions of disability and animality have undergone, and continue to undergo, significant, encouraging changes; as works of contemporary literature, my primary texts reflect this shift. A posthumanist approach invites us to scrutinise the logic driving these changes and illuminates both the amount and the calibre of the work that remains to be undertaken if subjectivities deriving from disabled and nonhuman animal embodiments are to be apprehended without also being compromised in the same breath.

Notwithstanding the numerous factors that circumscribe my selection, a plethora of other narratives would have qualified for inclusion at the expense of the texts I ultimately opted to analyse. Mark

Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

(2007), Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2016), and

Carol Guess and Kelly Magee’s collection of short stories, With Animal (2015), are only the strongest of the alternative candidates I entertained while researching this project. Indeed, the strength of the historical bond between humanism and novelistic narrative, combined with the ubiquity of disability and animality in literary texts, means that any number of narratives might be

46 read for their residual formal humanist commitments. Ultimately, however, I allowed my decisions to be guided by considerations of balance, relevance, and, of course, personal interest. None but the most minutely choreographed corpus selection will be to the satisfaction of all readers. If mine is lacking, I hope that it compensates for this deficit in the scope of its theoretical engagements and the depth of its close readings. The first of those readings begins now.

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CHAPTER 1

‘Adequate Facsimiles of Humanity’ Temple Grandin and the Humanist Forms of Autobiography

*

The re-forging of the cripples, the mad, the diseased, and the traumatized as inferior is

based on the belief that they must be recast with care into at least adequate facsimiles of

humanity in order to be accepted into the realm of personhood.

James Overboe, ‘Ableist Limits on Self-Narration’ 279

*

In 1986, Temple Grandin published her first book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1986). While autism memoirs are now a popular nonfiction sub-genre, Emergence was among the first of its kind.

Until the mid-1980s, autism was an enigma, a ‘black box’ that resisted opening precisely because one of the main symptoms of autism is an apparent lack of social and communicative skills. Indeed, as the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks reminds us, autism was named to emphasise the ‘mental aloneness’ which presented as its ‘cardinal feature’ (Anthropologist 181). Prior to the publication of Emergence, Sacks writes, ‘it had been medical dogma … that there was no “inside”, no inner life, in the autistic, or that if there was it would be forever denied access or expression’ (‘Foreword’ xiii, emphasis in original). Autists were therefore separated from a ‘normal’ human majority by an epistemological chasm: one that needed to be bridged before it could be crossed, but needed to be crossed before it could be bridged. In writing Emergence, Grandin began to resolve this paradox— and it was not long before she was shepherding people across another age-old impasse: the gulf separating ‘the human’ from ‘the animal’. If Grandin’s renown was founded on the light she shed on the inner lives of autistic people like herself, it was confirmed by her illumination of the perceptual worlds of nonhuman animals, a project that began in earnest with her second book,

Thinking in Pictures (2006), which was first published in 1995. Grandin would revisit her special affinity with nonhuman animals in subsequent publications including Animals Make Us Human:

Creating the Best Life for Animals (2009) and Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of

Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005), whose titular reference to ‘translation’ speaks directly to the concerns of the present chapter, as we will see shortly.30

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As well as being a prominent spokesperson for autistic people, Grandin is a professor in animal science and a long-serving consultant to the livestock industry. This eclectic resume owes a large debt to the affinity she shares with nonhuman animals—an affinity that derives in large part from her autism. In Thinking in Pictures, Grandin argues that she can apprehend the world as a cow does—that she can adopt what she calls ‘a cow’s eye view’—because of similarities between

‘autistic thinking and animal thinking’, prime among which is the shared ability of autistic humans and nonhuman animals to ‘think without language’ (201). Unlike verbal thinkers, autists and animals both ‘think by associating sensory-based memories such as smells, sounds, or visual images into categories’ (201). For Grandin, this trans-species perceptual kinship, combined with her professional expertise, makes her qualified to design technologies and environments conducive to the improvement of the wellbeing of cattle reared for slaughter. In her own words: ‘My ability to think in pictures has really helped me to understand animal behavior and design better facilities for handling them’ (‘Avoid’ 197). However, the improvements Grandin has wrought extend beyond the autists whose cause she champions and the cattle who benefit from her ingenuity. By disseminating her findings and reflections in literature, Grandin has helped to engender a more widespread apprehension of disabled and nonhuman subjectivities. Thinking in Pictures is an exercise in doing exactly this.

In one of the most memorable passages in Grandin’s memoir, she describes using her legs to operate a special chute that she designed to hold cattle in a standing position while they are killed. In her reflections on using this apparatus—a device inspired by the ‘squeeze machine’ she invented in order to calm the sensory overflow that many autistic people experience—Grandin recalls that

‘[b]ody boundaries seemed to disappear’, that ‘the parts of the apparatus that held the animal felt as if they were a continuation of my own body’ (25). ‘It was almost a religious experience’, she says;

‘I was able to look at each animal’, to ‘make him as comfortable as possible during the last moments of his life … A new door had been opened. It felt like walking on water’ (26). In a chapter from

What Is Posthumanism? (2009) titled ‘Learning from Temple Grandin’, Cary Wolfe lingers on

Grandin’s recollections of this transformative experience to observe that ‘here, disability becomes the positive, even enabling condition for a powerful experience by Grandin that crosses the lines not only of species difference but also of the organic and inorganic, the biological and mechanical’

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(136, emphasis in original). In Wolfe’s view, then, Grandin’s encounter brings disability and animality together in a specific, distinctly posthumanist way. Grandin’s binary-dissolving trans- species meeting eludes the expansionist/inclusionist logic of the liberal humanist model by destabilising the boundaries that are supposed to distinguish human beings from the more-than- human world. In fact, for Wolfe, ‘Grandin’s example of the relationship between disability and trans-species affinity directs us toward the possibility’ of fashioning what he calls a ‘new and more inclusive form of ethical pluralism’ in a ‘profound’ and ‘broad-based way’ (139, 137, 139).

Describing Grandin’s experience of operating the chute as ‘a kind of dramatization of the category meltdowns identified canonically in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,”’ Wolfe argues that

‘disability here positively makes a mess of the conceptual and ontological coordinates that

Grandin’s rendering of the passage surely reinstates rhetorically on another level’ (136).

These ‘coordinates’ trace the shape of humanism, whose ‘fundamental anthropological dogma’ follows that ‘“the human” is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but … by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether’ (xiv, xv). For Wolfe, humanism’s ‘fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy’ frame ‘the human’ as a distillation of ‘higher’ abilities whose value correlates with their alleged exclusivity to humankind (xv). In Grandin’s case, however, disability—or, more accurately, the mutual introjection of disability and animality—scrambles these coordinates, blurring the oppositions that distinguish ‘human’ from ‘nonhuman’, the ‘natural’ from the ‘technological’, and so forth. In other words, Wolfe interprets this experience as a posthuman encounter that unsettles humanism’s cherished concept of ‘the human’, posing concepts of embodied understanding, trans- species relationality, and constitutive interdependence as challenges to privileged humanist ideals of rationality, individualism, and autonomy. Crucially, however, Wolfe also highlights the potential for these coordinates to be reinscribed via Grandin’s ‘rendering’ of her experience. Though he does not pursue this train of thought any further here, an important implication is discernible: Grandin’s translation of her posthuman encounter into literary form might be read as an exercise in galvanising the same humanist norms the encounter itself seems primed to problematise.

The present chapter makes precisely this argument: that Grandin’s portrayal of her posthuman encounter also tacitly promotes the very mode of humanism it appears to subvert—not only because

51 it represents an example of the instrumentalisation of disability in the service of hegemonic, anthropocentric hierarchies of value and systems of exchange, but because the form in which

Grandin chronicles this encounter, the memoir, can be read as a frame through which a normative humanist subjecthood is reconciled and reaffirmed. Grandin’s disability—or, in Wolfe’s words, her

‘powerful and unique form of abled-ness’—may indeed be the ‘enabling condition’ for her posthuman encounter, but the literary representation of that encounter may yet ‘enable’ the same humanist onto-epistemology from which her epiphanic moment of trans-species becoming decisively departs (What is Posthumanism? 136). This not only complicates the nature of Grandin’s accomplishment in Thinking in Pictures; it also has significant implications for conventional understandings of autobiography as an optimal venue for the representation of subjectivities deriving from nonnormative modes of embodiment.

Arguably the most telling term in Wolfe’s assessment is one with which we are already familiar: rendering. One of the things that makes Grandin such a fascinating figure—and, from the perspective of this dissertation, such a pivotal and contentious one—is that her posthuman encounter culminates in the death of the animal in question and its rendering into material for human consumption. Grandin has evidently reflected at length on the ethical stakes of her role in catalysing this process, describing herself as a ‘reformer who wants to improve the livestock industry’ and

‘[disagrees] with the advocates who want to abolish the use of animals for food’ (‘Avoid’ 208).31

In light of our earlier examination of what Sunaura Taylor calls ‘the shared systems and ideologies that oppress both disabled humans and nonhuman animals’, this may seem an unsteady position to hold (Beasts 57). How are we supposed to reconcile the idea that a trans-species encounter rooted in epistemological kinship and enacting a form of ontological hybridity should ultimately end up greasing the wheels of what Giorgio Agamben famously calls the ‘anthropological machine’, embodied here in the guise of the slaughterhouse (Agamben, The Open 37)? To return to Michael

Lundblad’s useful term, there seems to be a particular, unusual kind of ‘disanimality’ at work here

(‘Disanimality’ 766, emphasis in original).

Like Wolfe, however, I will refrain from devoting much attention to this issue. Suffice it to say that if justifications for violences perpetrated against disabled humans and nonhuman animals share a basis in those populations’ common construal as subhuman—as lacking in those faculties deemed

52

‘proper’ to the ‘normal’ human being—then Grandin’s deployment of her ‘powerful and unique form of abledness’ to facilitate the process of killing animals is problematic, to say the least (Wolfe,

What is Posthumanism? 136). However, we should also note that, beyond the abattoir, Grandin also participates in the production of another commodity intended for human consumption: her book.

Like the transmogrification of the nonhuman animal body, this procedure entails an act of translation, a procedure of rendering. Recalling Nicole Shukin’s insistence on the mutual imbrication of this term’s material and semiotic declensions, we can draw a parallel between the two types of rendering in which Grandin is involved.32 If the slaughterhouse can be understood as a biopolitical apparatus that effects a humanist rendering of nonhuman life, can Thinking in Pictures be understood as an instance of rendering disabled life in biopolitical times?33

Wolfe’s reading suggests that this may be so. On the one hand, Wolfe credits the coalition of disability and animality with ‘positively making a mess’ of the coordinates of humanism on the level of text—that is, in the story that Grandin is telling. On the other hand, Wolfe notes that these same humanist coordinates are ‘surely’ reinstated in the rendering of that story—that is, in the way the story is told. Wolfe’s reflection thus invites us to consider whether Thinking in Pictures formally reinscribes the same humanist norms it also problematises. Grandin’s overt fidelity to some of the central tenets of humanism encourages us to pursue this idea. In her contribution to the collection

Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory (2012), Grandin pledges allegiance to a version of the capabilities approach, writing that ‘[a]nimals with greater intelligence and social- emotional complexity such as apes, dolphins, elephants, and parrots should not be used for human food’ (209). She adds that ‘[a]s scientists learn more and more about animal behavior, the list of animals that should be placed in the intelligent group may expand’ (212). She even speculates on the prospect that pigs and cattle—the very creatures she has spent more than 40 years helping to die well—might ‘need to become part of that group’, venturing that ‘[a] pig and a dog probably have similar abilities’ (212). Even setting aside the admission that history might reframe her life’s work as ethically unsound—and on the terms of her own ethical beliefs, no less—Grandin demonstrates an evident commitment to the extensionist/inclusionist approach whose humanist aspects Wolfe has expertly excavated. Even Grandin’s refusal to countenance the ableist position held by Peter Singer bears shades of human exceptionalism. ‘To prevent people from morally justifying mass euthanasia

53 of the neurologically handicapped,’ she argues, ‘they have to be speciesists and value humans more than other animals’ (‘Avoid’ 214). Ultimately, ‘human life must be preserved because human life is precious. It has higher moral value because it is our own species’ (214). That Grandin justifies this point by relying on a ‘principle of animal behavior’—that ‘[m]ost animal species will avoid eating their own kind as their regular food’—does little to diminish its privileging of the ‘specific concept of the human’ around which the liberal humanist project revolves (Grandin, ‘Avoid’ 213;

Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? xvii).

This same figure haunts the formal operations of her autobiography. Thinking those operations through the vocabulary of Foucauldian biopolitical theory develops Wolfe’s interpretation of

Thinking in Pictures such that the posthumanist promise of Grandin’s trans-species encounter is offset by the humanist rendering of that experience in autobiographical form. Understood in the context of not only the medical apparatuses to which Foucault devoted such attention, but also the apparatus of the publishing industry and the conventions of genre, Thinking in Pictures presents as the product of a ‘technique of self-transformation’ that reproduces Grandin as a distinctly humanist subject.34 In his contribution to the collection Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease,

Disability, and Trauma (2007), James Overboe writes that ‘[t]he re-forging of the cripples, the mad, the diseased, and the traumatized as inferior is based on the belief that they must be recast with care into at least adequate facsimiles of humanity in order to be accepted into the realm of personhood’

(279). Thinking in Pictures enacts this process of recasting, re-presenting Grandin as an adequate facsimile of humanity. As I will demonstrate, Grandin’s memoir reads as a handbook for normate people who have close associations with autists. Furthermore, and as a means to this end, the text renders Grandin’s disabled subjectivity into a humanist representational grammar. This raises several important questions. Apart from a ‘powerful experience by Grandin’, who or what does

Grandin’s disability ‘enable’? Following the title of Wolfe’s chapter, what does it mean to ‘learn from Temple Grandin’? What are the stakes, the costs of doing so? And which beings are included in the ‘we’ that is supposed to be doing the learning?

I begin to address these questions by situating Thinking in Pictures in the genre of what G. Thomas

Couser calls autosomatography, that is, ‘first-person life writing about disability and illness (‘Body

Language’ 3). I use this umbrella term under advisement. As Couser tells us, illness and disability

54

‘are not the same, and we should be wary of confusing or conflating them’ (5). While illness ‘is properly addressed by the “medical model”’, disability ‘often does not require or respond to biomedical treatment’ (5). This distinction helps to explain the differential temporalities of illness

(often conceptualised as a ‘rupture’ in a life narrative that has hitherto followed a ‘normal’ trajectory) and disability (more readily thought as a permanent condition). As such, to write about autosomatography is to risk conflating experiences that are far from identical. Upon closer inspection, however, illness and disability refuse to be delimited quite so neatly. Like illness, disability can be experienced as a rupture: a person can become disabled at any time, as a consequence of either the event of impairment or subjection to the exclusionary mechanisms that define disability as a social phenomenon. The reverse process also possible. Furthermore, just as disability can be temporary, illness can be chronic. As such, it is not hard to imagine that a memoir written by a person with a chronic illness may bear closer comparison, thematically and formally, with one written by a disabled person than with one written by, for example, a cancer survivor who has returned to what Susan Sontag calls ‘the kingdom of the well’ (3). Put simply, experiences and representations of disability and illness may resemble one another very closely. As such, rather than referring to self-narratives of illness and self-narratives of disability as distinct genres, I refer to them collectively as works of autosomatography unless a distinction is required.

Tracing the genealogy of autosomatography sheds light not only on the contexts from which the genre emerged, but also on its objectives, its effects, and narratological features that examples of the form often share in common. Detailing these characteristics helps to establish the formal strictures of the autosomatographical mode and their complicity in the reinforcement of a humanist onto-epistemology. More immediately, they will provide the foundation for an analysis of the

Foreword to Thinking in Pictures, which was penned by the late neuroscientist, author, and acquaintance of Temple Grandin, Oliver Sacks. Sacks’s Foreword inadvertently exposes Thinking in Pictures as the literary expression of a process whereby the nonnormative positivism represented by Grandin’s ways of being and knowing is pressured into the generic mould of autosomatography, whose subscription to privileged, exclusionary humanist notions of rationality and autonomy is reflected in its emphasis on growth, overcoming, and resolution, and whose commitment to these ideas is also inscribed in its form: in its use of first-person perspectives that serve to individualise

55 their author-narrators; in narrative structures that abide by linear regimes of temporality and causality; in its attempts to engineer what Frank Kermode famously calls ‘a sense of an ending’; and in its adoption of modes of linguistic expression tailored for the normate epistemologies of verbal thinkers.35 In other words, Grandin must employ the vocabulary and grammar of the rational human sciences to elucidate a subjectivity that, as her memoir itself attests, both exceeds and problematises the humanist philosophy from which that vocabulary derives.

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The Price of Emergence

‘[A]utobiography has become a democratic genre’, says Susannah B. Mintz (435). ‘Now it is not so much the powerful who write autobiography, but autobiography that confers the power of self- authorship upon the individual. In the act of telling our stories, we materialise’ (435). If this is the case, then people with disabilities and illnesses have materialised on a meaningful scale only in the last 70 years. Instances of first-person life writing about illness and disability remained rare ‘until well after the birth of the clinic in the eighteenth century’, and only started to become common some two hundred years later (Couser, ‘Body Language’ 3).36 Explanations for their centuries-long absence and subsequent proliferation vary, with many foregrounding the impact of quantum leaps in medical science witnessed in recent decades. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins notes that ‘it is only in the twentieth century that serious illness’, hitherto ‘an integral and inseparable part of living (and dying)’, ‘has become a phenomenon that can be isolated from an individual’s life’, and therefore an experience worthy of being represented (‘Pathography’ 223). Hunsaker Hawkins further suggests that the proliferation of autosomatography may be ‘a reaction to our contemporary medical model’, one that is ‘so dominated by a biophysical understanding of illness that its experiential aspects are virtually ignored’ (223). Couser suggests an alternative connection when he observes that the genre

‘flourished concurrently with successive civil rights movements’—a connection that is bolstered by consideration of the slogan that has become synonymous with the disability rights movement,

‘Nothing About Us Without Us’, which emphasises the import of representation in an aesthetic sense no less than in a political one (‘Body Language’ 3).

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These contributing factors all speak to dynamics with which we are familiar from the Introduction.

Those people with nonnormative embodiments are differentiated from a ‘normal’ majority, suffer disenfranchisement as a result, and respond by articulating their experiences in artistic form in order to enlighten that majority, and thus to foster qualitative and quantitative improvements in representation. The beneficial effects of autosomatography, cited repeatedly throughout the body of scholarship that has developed around its proliferation, are consonant with both the means by which this response is ventured and the ends it is meant to serve.37 These effects include the healing potential of autosomatography, its appropriateness as a forum in which to articulate experiences of nonnormative embodiment and its effects, its aptitude as a strategy of educating a normate majority that has tended to treat disability and illness with contempt, and its potential as a means of

(re)claiming personhood. While this dissertation has no interest in diminishing the ameliorative effects of disability memoirs, it contends that these effects can only be deemed truly beneficial on the terms of the liberal humanist model whose limits are transgressed by the more ambitious project of posthumanism. Recalling that the cardinal sin of the liberal humanist model is that it ‘reinstates the normative model of subjectivity that it insists is the problem in the first place’, it is no surprise that one can begin to discern a problematic humanist tendency in the same aspects of autosomatography that critics have deemed praiseworthy (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 136). For all its merit, might the ‘healing potential’ of autosomatography bespeak a commitment to curing or overcoming an ‘abnormal’ somatic condition? Should responsibility for the performance of the epistemic labour of educating a normate majority fall to populations that have been minoritised by, and by comparison with, that very majority? What are the terms on which an ‘articulation of the experience of nonnormative embodiment’ is deemed legible? And what mode of being is presumed by the category of ‘personhood’ into which disabled people may wish to be (re)admitted by virtue of disseminating their self-narratives?

Answers to these questions begin to emerge once we recall Timothy Barrett’s identification of ‘the emergence of a distinctive conception of “the individual” that can be located within seventeenth- century and eighteenth-century Europe’ as a keystone in the rise of autobiography (1569). As we know, this individual was ‘influenced by Enlightenment values, patriarchal capitalism, and political liberalism, among other social forces’, was taken to ‘[exist] at a distance from the society that she/he

57 confronted’, ‘[possessed] a self-identical coherence across time and space that was capable of being narrated’ and ‘[progressed] towards economic, social, and political advancement’ (1571). The subject that Barrett describes as ‘capable of being narrated’ is clearly Cartesian in character—and the reference to ‘capability’, in particular, should give us pause. What does it mean to be ‘capable of being narrated’? This odd, passive construction implies that the onus for ensuring the legibility of a life—and, by extension, its value and meaningfulness—is on the autobiographical subject, rather than on the range of available narrative strategies through which that life can be represented.

This poses a serious challenge to people who inhabit and experience the world otherwise. In her article ‘Critical Autobiography: A New Genre?’ (2017), Laura Di Summa-Knoop ventures that ‘one of the distinguishing traits’ of autobiography is the notion that it is the ‘ability to structure life according to meaningful narrative connections’, rather than ‘a haphazard juxtaposition of events’, that ‘encourages the belief that we may be, cognitively, narrative beings or, as it is often argued,

“narrative selves”’ (Di Summa-Knoop). And yet, one of the principal features of autosomatography is its investment in the notion that different bodyminds perceive and inhabit the world in different ways, and that this complicates commonplace understandings of what qualifies as ‘meaningful’. In its dependency upon the successful discharging of a particular set of cognitive processes, as well as an apparent commitment to linear, teleological regimes of temporality, the ‘narrative self’ seems to presuppose a particular kind of self, a particular mode of subjecthood. Indeed, it suggests that the very concept already bears a strong humanist inflection. This being the case, it becomes plausible to hypothesise that the autosomatographical act entails the problematic reproduction of its disabled subject in the normative form of ‘the human’ of humanism.

The biopolitical theorist best positioned to illuminate this dynamic is Michel Foucault. As we know,

Foucault’s original theorisation of biopolitics found biopower to boast a powerful tendency towards normalisation: the ‘historical outcome’ of the law’s ‘[incorporation] into a continuum of apparatuses … whose functions are for the most part regulatory’ is a ‘normalizing society’ (History

Vol. 1, 144). The transmogrification of law into norm entails a shift towards personal responsibility for one’s conformity to the norm. This procedure is clarified by Foucault’s capacious definition of the word government, which, as Shelley Tremain explains in Foucault and the Government of

Disability (2005), refers not simply to ‘state-generated prohibitions and punishments’ and ‘global

58 networks of social, economic, and political stratification’, but also to ‘normalizing technologies that facilitate the systematic objectivization of subjects as deaf, criminal, mad, and so on’, as well as

‘techniques of self-improvement and self-transformation’ such as ‘weight-loss programs’, ‘fitness regimes’, ‘psychotherapy’ and ‘rehabilitation’ (8). The proliferation of such techniques signals the enactment of the operations of government by its own constituents. The business of government becomes, in large part, the business of self-government. ‘For despite the fact that power appears to be merely repressive,’ Tremain reminds us, ‘the most effective exercise of power, according to

Foucault, consists in guiding the possibilities of conduct and putting in order the possible outcomes’

(8).

The agile management of these ‘possibilities of conduct’ establishes the terms on which the biopolitical ‘fostering’ of life can occur: the directions it can take, the forms it can assume. As we remember from the Introduction, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder posit that ‘biopolitics identifies the beginnings of a shift away from the punitive processes of confinement and legal prohibitions for disabled people’ towards a ‘massaging of ways to live one’s life appropriately within the community without disrupting the naturalized, normative activities of citizenship’ (Biopolitics 9).38

Such ‘naturalized, normative activities’ represent the available ‘possibilities of conduct’, silently instantiated and imperceptibly demarcated by the dictates of biopower. In ‘Foucault and “the Right to Life”: From Technologies of Normalization to Societies of Control’ (2013), Abram Anders writes that biopower ‘extends the mechanisms of disciplinary societies through an intensification of individuals’ relationships to themselves and their own self-governance’ (Anders). Foucault himself phrases it more succinctly in ‘The Subject and Power’ (1982): ‘it is a form of power that makes individuals subjects’ (781). Although Foucault does not use the term ‘biopolitics’ in ‘The Subject and Power’, it is clear that, several years after introducing the biopolitical problematic, the power at issue here is biopolitical in nature. Echoing his account of biopower, Foucault describes the power of the state as ‘both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power’, and proceeds to track its development through to the eighteenth century, when the state emerges as a ‘sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that [their] individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns’, the objective of which is

‘salvation’ in the secular guise of ‘health’, ‘well-being’, and ‘security’ (782, 783, 784). Foucault

59 proceeds to elaborate ‘two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (781). In the context of Grandin’s memoir, and of autosomatography at large, this double meaning is crucial. Thinking in Pictures is an expression of both Grandin’s self-identification and her being ‘subject to someone else by control or dependence’. This ‘someone else’, I argue, is the iteration of herself allowed by the ‘possibilities of conduct’ left open to her by contemporary neoliberal society, a representation of a self that lives life ‘appropriately’ and poses a minimal challenge to ‘the naturalized, normative activities of citizenship’ (Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics 9).

If the representational possibilities of conduct available to people with disabilities and illnesses are circumscribed in accordance with the logic of humanism, how can that self-understanding be articulated? Or, as Mintz phrases it, ‘what happens when illness or disability conditions the course of life in such a way that conventional narrative shapes don’t apply? How then does a subject write him- or herself “into existence”’? (436). James Overboe offers an acute, if disheartening, answer in the quotation from which this chapter takes its title: by carefully recasting themselves as ‘adequate facsimiles of humanity’ (279). By evoking the Platonic forms, this phrase elegantly encapsulates the supposedly ‘natural’ character of the liberal humanist subject, and the resultant imperative that representations of its nonnormative others assume the form of legible imitations.

How, then, does the legibility of the humanist subject manifest itself in the formal constitution of autobiography? For Di Summa-Knoop, an autobiography is first and foremost a narrative, and must therefore evince ‘a structure based on the importance of causal connections and on the achievement of closure’. This understanding of the minimum requirements of narrative, which is typical of many narratological accounts, is taken from Noël Carroll’s structural analysis of narrative in his article

‘Narrative Closure’ (2007). But do these specific formal features really have to be in evidence for a narrative to be designated as such? Since examples of the new genre of ‘critical autobiography’ in which Di Summa-Knoop’s article is interested are narratives that subvert those conventions, we have no option but to answer this question in the negative. This effectively denaturalises narrative forms characterised by clear ‘causal connections’ and a Kermodian ‘sense of an ending’, exposing these features as value-laden mechanisms that serve to render the beings, events, and perspectives they are charged with representing. In the context of works of autosomatography—which address

60 deviations from ‘normal’ regimes of progress and development, and for which a conventional resolution is often inappropriate—these mechanisms warrant particularly close scrutiny.

The critique I pursue here is not unprecedented: numerous scholars have analysed problematics associated with the disability memoir.39 In most cases, these critiques are rooted in insights from disability theory, rather than the domain of posthumanism, and yet it is not difficult to extrapolate these arguments into this more expansive terrain. Barrett, for example, is correct in his observation that ‘[c]ritiques of individualism have rested at the conceptual heart of disability studies’, but such critiques are also characteristic of the posthumanist philosophical tendency (1570). Yet, as we have seen, all three of the means by which Barrett argues that ‘researchers can negotiate or mitigate the problem of individualism’ are not ambitious enough to properly excavate the humanist norms that manifest themselves in the formal constitution of autobiography (1570). Of the three approaches, the most promising is to attend to ‘the slippery boundary between autobiography/biography’—but not in the way that Barrett, following Liz Stanley, proposes.40 Barrett endorses an acknowledgement that all autobiographies necessarily feature multiple personages other than the author. This is both valid and valuable, but it does little to deconstruct the concept of the individual subject. A more interesting approach is to entertain the Derridean notion that writing in the first person is always an engagement with alterity.

In Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology

(2011), Derrida challenges the assumption of self-proximity that phenomenologist Edmund Husserl ascribes to the moment of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’, arguing that this moment is marked by a hiatus that separates the self into speaker and hearer (56). This hiatus is the ‘trace’, the mark of différance.

If différance describes the dependency of the meaning of a given sign upon reference to other signs from which it differs, it equally describes the fact that the ‘I’ cannot be invoked without reference to third parties that are ‘not-I’. For Derrida, then, all auto-affection, autobiography included, is always hetero-affection—and this has major consequences for the figure of the human, as he explains in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008): ‘if the auto-position, the automonstrative autotely of the “I,” even in the human, implies the “I” to be an other that must welcome within itself some irreducible hetero-affection … then this autonomy of the “I” can be neither pure nor rigorous; it would not be able to form the basis for a simple and linear differentiation of the human from the

61 animal’ (95, emphasis in original). The posthumanist ramifications of this point are extrapolated by

Wolfe in his concept of double finitude, which describes ‘our finitude not just as embodied and vulnerable beings who are dependent on our environments and who need care, but also as ones who, to enter into communicative relations and social bonds with others at all (human or non-human), are by necessity subjected to the “not me” and “not ours” of semiotic systems characterized by différance and the trace that, as Derrida puts it, must “be extended to the entire field of the living, or rather to the life/death relation, beyond the anthropological limits of ‘spoken’ language”’ (Wolfe,

Ecological 72).41

To deconstruct the boundary between biography and autobiography in this way is to verge on the posthumanist understanding that the self is always already constituted by its many ‘others’, human and nonhuman, as opposed to retaining humanist assumptions regarding the agency of beings that can be neatly delineated—assumptions that chime with the liberal humanist model whose limits

Wolfe has elucidated. The intransigence of these assumptions in many autobiographies invites us to seek a means of ‘de-individualising autobiography’ that amounts to more than a reminder that no individual exists in a vacuum. De-individualising autobiography along posthumanist lines demands an interrogation of the formal conventions of the autobiographical mode through which conceptions of the self that exists ‘at a distance from … society’ and has a ‘self-identical coherence across time and space’ are constituted. In order to consider the workings of these mechanisms as they operate in Thinking in Pictures, I want to turn back to the start of Grandin’s memoir, to Sacks’s Foreword.

Sacks’s appraisal of Thinking in Pictures betrays a subscription to the same humanist ideals that

Grandin’s trans-species affinities trouble, and gestures towards the manifestation of those ideals in the formal composition of the text itself.

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‘This Perhaps the Least Imaginable of All’

Sacks’s credentials announce him as an eminent choice to write the Foreword to Grandin’s memoir.

As Jason Tougaw notes, Grandin may have produced a ‘classic’ of the genre of the ‘brain memoir’, but ‘Sacks is its most influential progenitor. With his case histories and autobiographical writing,

[he] created unlikely best sellers out of nonfictional neurological narratives’ such as The Man Who

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Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1998) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (173-4). The latter is a collection of seven medical case studies of people with different neurological conditions, one of whom is Grandin; indeed, the collection takes its title from Grandin’s description of the feeling she has in certain social situations. However, Sacks also authored an autosomatography of his own, A

Leg to Stand On (1998), in which he recounts the consequences of a severe leg injury he sustained during a climbing expedition. A dramatic mountaintop rescue was followed by a lengthy period of convalescence during which Sacks felt a profound sense of estrangement towards his broken limb.

Ultimately, however, his recovery was punctuated by a series of epiphanic moments that paved a route back to the physical and mental condition he enjoyed prior to the accident.

The vast majority of the neuro-narratives analysed by Tougaw ‘take the form of a quest—for new knowledge, understanding, healing, adaptation’ (174). Given his role as the genre’s pre-eminent practitioner, it should come as little surprise that Sacks’s memoir assumes the same shape. For

Hunsaker Hawkins, the ‘organizing metaphor’ of A Leg to Stand On is the ‘journey myth’: ‘The time he spends as a patient recovering … turns out to be very much like a pilgrimage’ akin to the

‘spiritual pilgrimages’ in the writings of Dante and Saint John of the Cross (‘Pathography’ 238).

Indeed, his journey sees him pass through all ‘three phases’ of what anthropologists call a ‘rite of passage’: ‘separation’, ‘transition’, and, finally, ‘aggregation or incorporation, in which individuals return to the world they have left, reassuming prior status, rights, and relationships’ (238). This trajectory is strongly redolent of innumerable literary narratives, including the work often cited as the founding narrative of Western literature, Homer’s Odyssey (2018). For Sacks, like Odysseus, the return—in this case, Sacks’s ‘[emergence] from self-absorption, sickness, patienthood, to the spaciousness of health, of full being, of the real world’—is a moment of desired, triumphant resolution (Sacks, A Leg 156, qtd. in Hunsaker Hawkins, ‘Pathography’ 240).

Sacks’s narrative thus represents a textbook example of what Couser has termed ‘the tyranny of the comic plot’, which describes a ‘strong preference in the literary marketplace for a positive “narrative arc”, i.e., a happy ending’ (Recovering 75; ‘Body Language’ 4). Again, the roots of this narrative arc run deep, harking all the way back to Shakespeare’s comedies—in which characters take leave of their ‘normal’ selves before returning to familiar form—and far beyond. From the perspective of disability studies, this arc is ‘tyrannical’ because it presupposes the desirability of rehabilitation, of

63 a return to a ‘normal’ state of being. While this may be comparatively unproblematic in the case of many illness autobiographies (where illness is conceived as a disruption to be rectified by medical intervention), it is highly problematic in the case of self-narratives about disability—including the type of neurological narrative in which Sacks is so expert, and of which Thinking in Pictures is meant to be a ‘classic’ example. And, as in his own memoir, there are strong shades of Sacks’s fidelity to the narrative structure of the comic plot in his short Foreword to Grandin’s memoir.

Sacks’s Foreword is a peculiar document: both descriptive and evaluative, genuinely admiring and inadvertently condescending. In Thinking in Pictures, Sacks says, ‘we can see, and relive, what it was like for Temple as a child—the overwhelming sensations of smell and sound and touch’ (xiv).

He continues: ‘We can also share, even if we cannot wholly understand, the extraordinary passion and understanding for cattle which consume Temple’, and ‘we get a glimpse—this perhaps the least imaginable of all—of her total bewilderment about other people’s minds’ (xv). According to Sacks,

‘[w]e sense all this despite (or perhaps partly because of) the touching simplicity and ingenuousness of Temple’s writing, her curious lack of either modesty or immodesty, her incapacity for evasion or artifice of any kind’ (xv). I want to draw particular attention to the last two of these assertions.

To Sacks, the idea that Grandin is ‘bewildered’ by other epistemologies is especially difficult to imagine—and yet Sacks later describes Thinking in Pictures as ‘deeply moving and fascinating’ because ‘it provides a bridge between our world and hers, and allows a glimpse into a quite other sort of mind’ (xviii). From this latter assertion, we may infer that the ways in which autistic people think are no less bewildering to Sacks than the ways in which normate people think are bewildering to an autist like Grandin. The difference is that, for Sacks, Grandin’s bewilderment at the normate mind is itself bewildering, whereas his own bewilderment at the autist’s ‘other sort of mind’ is not confusing in the slightest. Thus, there is a double standard at play: Grandin’s inability to think her way into the mind of another is treated as barely credible, whereas the inability of normate people to think their way into an autistic mind is a given. By invoking the familiar discourse of ‘bridge- building’, Sacks reinforces the idea of a fundamental divide between a normate ‘we’ and an autistic

‘them’. Moreover, the double standard he perpetuates implies that autistic people bear responsibility for performing the work of bridging this divide, of translating their experience into a semantics intelligible to a normate readership.

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There is a particularly cruel irony to the latter expectation, because one of the faculties autists are commonly deemed to lack is theory of mind (ToM). This term was first used by the psychologist

David Premack and the primatologist Guy Woodruff in an article from 1978. ‘In saying that an individual has a theory of mind,’ they write, ‘we mean that the individual imputes mental states to himself and others’ (515). The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology offers a more detailed definition of ToM as people’s ‘intuitive understanding of their own and other people’s minds or mental states, including beliefs and thoughts’ (Colman). The same source references research that suggests ‘that a theory of mind is fully developed only in human beings, but that people with autism spectrum disorder are severely impaired in their ability to understand mental states and to appreciate how mental states govern behaviour. Without a theory of mind, social behaviour is disrupted and the cooperative principle breaks down’ (Colman). Grandin briefly mentions ToM when she references developmental psychologist Uta Frith’s position that ‘many people with autism are not able to figure out what another person may be thinking’ (Grandin, Thinking in Pictures 157). While Grandin admits that ‘autistics with severe cognitive deficits are unable to look at situations from the vantage point of another person’, she contends that she herself has ‘always used visualization and logic to solve problems and work out how people will react, and I have always understood deception’ (157).

Whether this represents conclusive evidence that Grandin does indeed have ToM is not for me to determine. What is certain is that ToM is not a faculty that most autists exhibit to a significant degree.

Maria Almanza takes up the question of autism and ToM in her article, ‘Temple Grandin’s Squeeze

Machine as Prosthesis’ (2016), in which she reads Grandin’s squeeze machine—the homemade contraption Grandin uses to calm her sensory overload—as a prosthetic device that, like the boundary-blurring cattle chute it would go on to inspire, mediates between the autist and the world in order to open new affective potentialities. Central to Almanza’s argument is ‘the neurotypical’s inability to imagine and reflect on what may seem like a radically different way of experiencing the world. Recognizing the importance of the squeeze machine would require one to recognize the autist’s desire for interaction in the face of sensory overload’ (168). Crucially, Almanza points out that this idea ‘seems particularly difficult for proponents of theory of mind’, because ‘[s]uch a revelation would require the acknowledgement of autistic agency and the desire for social

65 interaction—an assertion that seems to undermine the very foundations of theory of mind’ (168).

While ToM ‘might suggest a fundamental lack of social relation,’ Almanza says, ‘the autist’s aversion to the social may, in fact, be the result of hypersensitivity rather than “sensibility”’ (168).

An appreciation of the squeeze machine therefore blurs the distinction between neurotypicals, who can imaginatively approximate the thoughts and emotions of another person, and autists, who are supposedly unable to do so.

The potential implications of Almanza’s point are wide reaching. The fact that ToM does not (or cannot) account for the kind of social engagement that is made possible via the catalyst that is the squeeze machine suggests that ToM may itself bear the hallmarks of humanism. This suggestion is lent credence by the fact that the article in which Premack and Woodruff first introduced the concept derived from research into the cognitive abilities of chimpanzees—and, moreover, that the problems

Premack and Woodruff posed their simian subjects in order to measure those abilities relied on a distinctly anthropocentric definition of ‘intelligence’.42 While further exploration of the concept of

ToM falls beyond the scope of this chapter, Almanza’s point regarding the ‘neurotypical’s inability to imagine and reflect on what may seem like a radically different way of experiencing the world’ does not. At the very least, this point flags a crucial hypocrisy in Sacks’s assessment of Grandin.

The difference that normate people struggle to comprehend is the threshold that Grandin is expected to cross in order for her to be understood, her mode of being to be apprehended, and her claims to personhood to be legitimated. It is not difficult to discern a biopolitical aspect to this dynamic.

Sacks’s admission that Grandin’s difficulty in apprehending other people’s minds is the ‘least imaginable of all’ of her idiosyncrasies testifies to the hegemony of normate epistemologies, while the praise he reserves for Grandin’s conformity to these dominant ways of thinking legitimises and endorses the imperative that autistic people assume responsibility for aligning those ways of thinking with the epistemological norm. Indeed, one might even think of ToM as a technology of normalisation that identifies its own absence as a deficit, and enjoins autists to compensate for this deficit to be granted admission into the realm of fully-fledged personhood.

Not only must Grandin follow this prescriptive agenda; she must do so via the medium of human verbal language—despite the fact that she thinks without language, ‘in pictures’. In the book, she herself makes the point that she ‘would be denied the ability to think by scientists who maintain

66 that language is essential to thinking’ (186). This contention can be disputed by taking recourse to the more capacious definition of ‘language’ offered by poststructuralist thinkers like Derrida—and enacted, as it were, by a text like Mel Baggs’s ‘In My Language’. However, just like the scientists whose assumptions she contests, Grandin betrays no cognisance of the potential promise of such a redefinition. Rather, she persists in equating ‘language’ with words—and the irony of Grandin advancing her point via the medium of words is testament to the intransigence of the attitudes and assumptions that her argument means to contest. This brings us to the second of Sacks’s comments to which I want to draw our attention, in which he associates the things that ‘we’ learn from Grandin with the ‘touching simplicity and ingenuousness’ of her writing. Implicit in this contention is the idea that, courtesy of Grandin’s autism, Thinking in Pictures operates as some sort of transparent word-mirror: an unadulterated reflection of events as they happened. This is highly problematic.

Every representation is a re-presentation: a recreation of the world, a making new—and Thinking in Pictures is no exception. Textual evidence abounds. Throughout her memoir, Grandin deploys a variety of conventional literary techniques, including a system of metaphors. In the first chapter, she writes that she is ‘going to use what I call visual symbol imagery to help you understand how the different parts of the normal brain communicate with each other’, before proceeding to compare the brain to a ‘big corporate office building’ with multiple departments (27). Autistic people, of course, are supposed to be uncompromisingly literal-minded; the irony of an autistic person taking recourse to the art of metaphor surely requires no elaboration. Meanwhile, the very fact that Grandin uses metaphor illustrates one way in which she adapts to the expectations of a normate readership.

It is not only that Grandin takes her nonnormative epistemology and wrangles it into metaphoric expression for the benefit of a normate reader. Rather, her use of metaphor is a product of her life- long attempt to make meaning of a world that thinks on terms different to her own. In other words,

Grandin uses metaphor not simply to make herself understood, but also to make herself understand.

‘Growing up,’ she says, ‘I learned to convert abstract thoughts into pictures as a way to understand them’ (17). These ‘concrete symbols’ helped her to grasp ‘abstract concepts such as getting along with people and moving on to the next steps in my life, both of which were always difficult’ (17).

Navigating a major life change required ‘a way to rehearse it, acting out each phase in my life by walking through an actual door, window, or gate’ (18). In order to progress in a normate world,

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Grandin had to adopt and master an epistemological device characteristic of normative ways of thinking. The accessibility of Thinking in Pictures as a text is a product of her successful adoption of this technique. Necessitated by the demands of staying afloat in a society that, until very recently, has expended precious little energy trying to understand autism, this development now becomes the means by which Grandin tries to foster that understanding. Having been forced to elaborate this system, she must now deploy it for the benefit of the same ‘normal’ population that required her to adopt it in the first place. According to Grandin, these ‘door and window symbols have enabled me to make progress and connections that are unheard of for some people with autism’ (21). However, this does not mean that the use of symbolism is reserved for so-called high-functioning autists like

Grandin. Indeed, there are other, ‘more severe cases of autism’ in which ‘the symbols are harder to understand and often appear to be totally unrelated to the things they represent’ (21). While they may fail to abide by conventional representational correspondences, these symbols ‘may provide the only tangible reality or understanding of the world’ for an autistic person (21). Grandin cites

Ted Hart, ‘a man with severe autism’ who has ‘almost no ability to generalize and no flexibility in his behavior’, describing him as having ‘no common sense’ (22). However, ‘common sense’ is only

‘sensical’ because it is common. Hart does have an understanding of the world, even if that understanding may be different from the understandings of non-autistic people. The key difference between Grandin and Hart is that only the former has learned by heart the ‘normal’ correspondences between signifier and signified. This puts her in a position to explain autism itself by employing a metaphor that will make sense to her normate readership.

Setting aside the particulars of stylistic convention, we can consider the issue of generic convention, and thus the overarching shape that Grandin’s representation assumes. Thinking in Pictures is a memoir—albeit not necessarily an entirely typical one. Rather, it is an unusual hybrid of personal reflection, scientific report, and instruction manual; indeed, most of its eleven chapters—each of which focuses on a particular aspect of living with autism—follow a trajectory through these three

‘stages’: memories and anecdotes are extrapolated into general statements about autism, which are then substantiated by scientific evidence and translated into practical advice for autistic people— or, more accurately, their normate friends, relatives, and colleagues. In the chapters that focus more heavily on the treatment of cattle, this advice tends to be targeted at nonautistic people who work

68 with livestock. The repetition of this trajectory casts Grandin’s book as an attempt to enlighten a presumed normate readership: to inform them about the different ways in which autistic people— and, indeed, certain species of nonhuman animal—apprehend the world. Grandin’s extrapolation from the individual to the universal enacts her becoming representative of and for a minoritised group, adopting the role of spokesperson on behalf of autistic people at large.

This extrapolation seems to reflect Grandin’s ‘thinking pattern’, which ‘always starts with specifics and works toward generalization’ (16). As such, one might argue that the structure of her memoir mirrors the way in which Grandin’s brain processes information. Crucially, however, Grandin explains that this process unfolds ‘in an associational and nonsequential way’ (16). This chimes with the associative character of the way that autistic people think—a point that Grandin emphasises on numerous occasions. Grandin writes that many autistic people ‘have difficulty stopping endless associations’, and that these associations cultivate unconventional understandings of causality (9).

She identifies one example in Charles Hart’s memoir Without Reason (1989), in which the author discusses his autistic son’s statement, ‘I’m not afraid of planes. That’s why they fly so high’ (qtd. in Grandin, Thinking in Pictures 9). In the son’s mind, says Grandin, ‘planes fly high because he is not afraid of them; he combines two pieces of information, that planes fly high and that he is not afraid of heights’ (9-10). Another example—one more relevant to the question of narrative—comes from a discussion of the extent to which autism is hereditary, in which Grandin cites research which found that non-autistic parents of autistic children shared some of their children’s traits, and illustrates this finding by referencing how these parents constructed narratives (206). When ‘asked to make up a story,’ Grandin says, thirty-four percent of these parents made up ‘a rambling, plotless story without a clear beginning, middle, and end’ (206). For Grandin, this example typifies the

‘associational visual thinking’ characteristic of autistic people: ‘It is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It is not done in any particular order’ (206).

While the memoir itself is arranged thematically, rather than chronologically, the chapters that comprise Thinking in Pictures all work from the specific to the general in a decidedly orderly fashion. The procedure is not ‘associational and nonsequential’, but linear and aetiological, tracing concrete connections between the different stages of her life, between her experience and that of other autistic people, and between human beings and nonhuman animals. In this way, Thinking in

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Pictures comes to resemble the technical drawings in whose composition Grandin is so expert: a rigorously scientific document that makes even her epiphanic experience operating the cattle chute reducible to another stage in a linear narrative of progress and overcoming. Grandin says that, upon operating the chute, it felt as though ‘[a] new door had been opened’ (26). This is not the opening of what Aldous Huxley once called ‘the doors of perception’, but another one of her figurative doors, another ‘breakthrough’ that ‘enabled [her] to adapt to autism’ (19).43

Thus, it is not simply that Grandin’s ‘powerful and unique form of abledness’ is deployed in the service of enlightening a normate majority; it is also that this mobilisation of her abledness entails a compromise of that abledness, a stripping of exactly that which makes it powerful and unique— and this compromise is bound up with the normativity of autobiographical convention (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 136). This point is corroborated by analysis of a particularly illuminating passage from Sacks’s Foreword. Comparing Thinking in Pictures with Emergence, Sacks observes that

‘[w]riting did not come easily to [Grandin] at first, not because she lacked verbal facility, but because she lacked an imagination of other minds’ (xvi). According to Sacks, the result was an early draft of Emergence that was punctuated by ‘strange discontinuities (people injected suddenly into the narrative without warning, for instance); casual reference to incidents of which the reader had no knowledge; and sudden, perplexing changes of topic’ (xvi). Grandin’s early writings thus bear many of the same hallmarks as the ‘rambling, plotless’ stories written by more than one third of the parents of autistic children. However, for Sacks, ‘[w]hat is remarkable’ about Grandin is that she

‘has developed some genuine appreciation of other people and other minds … in the ten years that have passed since writing Emergence. And it is this which now shows itself in Thinking in Pictures, and lends it a warmth and color rarely seen in her earlier book’ (xvi, emphasis in original).

What Sacks appears to be describing is a procedure of normalisation made manifest in linguistic expression. Of course, the project of Grandin rendering her experience in words is already a translation, already a compromise. Yet even within the parameters set by the use of the medium of language, the contours of Grandin’s nonnormative subjective experience are shaped by, and in accordance with, normative formal narrative convention. Grandin’s first draft of Emergence might represent something like a formal literary enactment of her subjectivity, analogous to the first three minutes and 12 seconds of Baggs’s ‘In My Language’. Thinking in Pictures, by contrast, is a

70 translation, a rendering of that experience—one that raises the question of whether the project of representing the experience of disability in conventional, generic, autobiographical form may often entail the perpetuation of some of the same humanist assumptions that disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism problematise.

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Narrative as Rehabilitation?

Recent scholarship on autobiographical illness narratives, or autopathography, offers a means of thinking this awkward compromise whereby nonnormative subjectivities are tailored for dominant epistemologies via their translation into normative narrative form. In ‘What Can Narrative Theory

Learn from Illness Narratives?’ (2006), Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan observes that ‘[n]arratology gives insightful accounts of order but has no tools for—and no interest in—an analysis of randomness’

(245). As such, ‘[i]llness narratives may be seen as an extreme test case that highlights some limitations of narratology’ (245). Thinking in Pictures grapples with disability, rather than illness, and so cannot be described as an autopathography—yet Rimmon-Kenan’s commentary on the limitations of narrative theory still invites us to ponder the idea that autobiography’s commitment to normative regimes of temporality and problematic notions of progress, overcoming, and resolution makes it ill-equipped to render the ways of being and knowing to which nonnormative modes of embodiment give rise. Meanwhile, Amy-Katerini Prodromou argues that the ‘crises’ of illness and trauma ‘threaten to destabilize self’, and can ‘fragment or negate sense of self. Yet paradoxically, in narratives of loss, where the self experiences a loss of stability, the impulse towards creating a stable self is actually more immediately apparent’ (64). Thinking in Pictures is not a ‘narrative of loss’: Grandin’s narrative does not help her to reconstruct anything, since nothing has been shattered. Still, Prodromou’s association of the representation of subjectivities rooted in nonnormative embodiments with the autobiographical impulse towards a reconciliation of coherent selfhood suggests once again that Grandin’s memoir formally reinscribes the same humanist mode of subjecthood that it seems well positioned—indeed, determined—to unsettle or decentre.

Returning to Foucault, we might identify the provenance of this phenomenon in the circumscription of the possibilities of conduct effected by the apparatus that is the publishing industry. Publishing

71 houses retain a monopoly on deciding which stories enter the mainstream cultural consciousness, and the imperative of profitability has a significant bearing on these decisions. Under neoliberalism, major publishers have fallen in line with what Mitchell and Snyder describe as ‘the Fordist trend of mass producing products for an average, normative everyman’ (Biopolitics 71). If, as Di Summa-

Knoop argues, ‘[t]he stories told in memoirs are not only … real; they are, for the most part, relatable’—if ‘they are often our stories, accounts of experiences we may have had’—then publishers are liable to focus on narratives that will resonate with their ‘average, normative’ audience (Di Summa-Knoop, emphasis in original). As a result, autosomatographies are implicated in neoliberal circuitries of power that rely upon a process of normalisation commensurate with the logic of rehabilitation. As Mitchell and Snyder remind us, Henri-Jacques Stiker’s account of ‘the birth of rehabilitation’ involves ‘the mid-twentieth-century entrance into an age of normalization— one that fully coincides with the development of neoliberalism—wherein all citizens are increasingly subject to the dictates of how to be more alike than different from each other’

(Biopolitics 14).44 This privileging of ‘likeness’ speaks to the imperative that narratives of disability and illness be intelligible and relatable, and thus to the characteristics of autosomatography as a genre. As Di Summa-Knoop reminds us, genre theory ties together the formal features of a given text and the conditions for the possibility of its emergence; by accounting for ‘features such as writing style, the social and historical milieu of a work, its publishing history’, and ‘what kind of readers it targeted’, genre illuminates the mutual imbrication of social norms and their formal equivalents (Di Summa-Knoop). To write in a genre is to negotiate the norms of that genre. To write autosomatography is thus to negotiate the norms of humanism—norms so naturalised that they are often practically invisible. As the author of Thinking in Pictures, Grandin negotiates exactly these norms, reproducing herself in the mould of the humanist subject even as her words testify to what

Sacks admiringly calls ‘a quite other sort of mind’. If Grandin’s autistic subjectivity is mobilised in the service of improving animal welfare in industrial farming facilities, it is also mobilised as an exercise in representing the internal lives of autistic people and nonhuman animals, of rendering them apprehensible by recourse to a language and a grammar of which normate readers will be able to make sense—or, rather, a specific, circumscribed brand of sense.

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Grandin herself takes a balanced view of autism and the forms of abledness to which it gives rise.

Unsurprisingly, she cherishes the unique faculties granted her by her autism, and takes issue with the ways in which disabled people have been construed as less capable (and, by twisted extension, less valuable). In addition to the assertion that she ‘would be denied the ability to think by scientists who maintain that language is essential to thinking’, she advises that ‘[t]eachers need to help autistic children develop their talents’, contending that ‘there is too much emphasis on deficits and not enough emphasis on developing abilities’ (186, 105). She even claims that ‘[w]ithout autism traits we might still be living in caves’ (122). On the other hand, a latent fidelity to onto-epistemological norms pervades Thinking in Pictures. Grandin’s desire to learn is explained with reference to the fact that ‘[m]ore knowledge makes me act more normal’ (31). She praises Lynn Kern Koegel and

Claire LaZebnik’s Overcoming Autism: Finding the Answers, Strategies, and Hope That Can

Transform a Child’s Life (2004)—a deeply problematic title—for being ‘full of practical teaching methods’ (53). Indeed, the occasions on which Grandin advocates the pursuit of normalcy are far too numerous to recount here. Grandin writes that she is ‘motivated by tangible accomplishment’ and declares that she ‘[wants] to make a positive contribution to society’, but this ‘contribution’ appears to entail a significant measure of conformity with normative modes of being, thinking, and communicating (92). Thinking in Pictures embodies this compromise between the representation of

‘powerful and unique [forms] of abledness’ and the reaffirmation of the normative forms of subjectivity those forms of abledness are primed to challenge (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 136).

For Wolfe, Grandin’s experience with the cattle chute points towards a mode of engagement that exceeds the limits of humanism in encouraging, progressive ways. I could not agree more. However, if we read Thinking in Pictures as a work of literature, it may be that even this posthuman encounter does not fully elide the ‘residual humanism’ of which Wolfe is understandably wary (Wolfe, Animal

Rites 188).

*

73

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CHAPTER 2

And Say the Parrot Responded? Voices of Reason in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible

*

My hesitation concerns only the purity, the rigor, and the indivisibility of the frontier that

separates—already with respect to “us humans”—reaction from response and in

consequence, especially, the purity, rigor, and indivisibility of the concept of responsibility

that is derived from it.

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am 125

*

In Chapter 1, the conceptual rubric of rendering served to illuminate how the formal strictures of the autobiographical mode, conditioned by the imperatives of legibility and relatability, reproduce

Temple Grandin in the mould of the rational, autonomous humanist subject, even as her memoir advances an account of the generative power of onto-epistemological heterogeneity across species lines. We saw how Grandin is abstracted from her trans-species affinities and individualised by the adoption of a first-person narrative voice and perspective; how she is embroiled in a narrative of progress, development, and overcoming that models a trajectory towards the ‘naturalized, normative activities of citizenship’; how she employs representational techniques and modes of linguistic expression symptomatic of ‘normal’ bodyminds; and how she does all of the above in the service of enlightening a presumed normate readership (Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics 9). In

Chapter 2, our attention turns from autobiography to fiction, and, more specifically, to Barbara

Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible (2000). As we saw in the Introduction, as a literary genre, the novel is distinguished from autobiography by its fictionality and relative formlessness, which

Ian Duncan describes as the novel’s ‘aesthetic disability’—a ‘disability’ that, like Grandin’s autism, can be reinterpreted as a ‘powerful and unique form of abled-ness’ that ‘enables’ the portrayal of humankind in all its diversity and multiplicity (Duncan 1; Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 136).

However, the spectre of the ‘distinctive conception of “the individual”’ whose emergence Barrett cites as among the most formative contributors to the genre of autobiography still haunts the formal conventions of this more versatile, capacious mode of representation (1571). Poisonwood avails

75 itself of the novel’s aesthetic disability to engage disabled and animal subjectivities in a less direct, more open way than Grandin’s memoir, only to reinscribe humanist norms by different means.

The novel tells the story of the Prices, a family of American missionaries who move to the Belgian

Congo in 1959. Led by Nathan, the heavy-handed Baptist paterfamilias, the Prices uproot their lives in Bethlehem, Georgia, and move to the village of Kilanga to assume a post recently vacated by their predecessor, Brother Fowles. Narrated variously by Nathan’s wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters, the novel traces the family’s trials and tribulations as they unfold against the backdrop of the advent of Congolese decolonisation, following the fates of the various characters through familial rupture, diaspora, and revelation over nearly thirty years. If this narrative has captured countless imaginations—as its bestseller status and nomination for the Pulitzer Prize testify—it has also attracted a significant and variegated body of responses from literary critics. Even a cursory survey of this criticism reveals a variety of feminist, theological, and narratological engagements with the novel alongside a more predictable range of postcolonial readings.

Encouragingly, such a survey also reveals a small but significant body of critical work that engages the novel from a disability studies perspective. This work tends to respond to three aspects of the novel’s representation of disability, neatly summarised in the title of Jeanna Fuston White’s article

‘The One-Eyed Preacher, His Crooked Daughter, and Villagers Waving Their Stumps’ (2009). The

‘one-eyed preacher’ is Nathan, whose impaired vision—a legacy of his traumatic military service, during which time he escaped the Bataan Death March—is made to symbolise his profound cultural and ideological ‘myopia’. The ‘crooked daughter’ is Adah, one of the novel’s five narrators, and the only one who is disabled. Adah has hemiplegia, a physical impairment characterised by

‘[p]aralysis of one side of the body’ and ‘usually caused by a lesion in the opposite side of the brain’

(OED). The ‘villagers’, meanwhile, are the many residents of Kilanga with physical impairments and other bodily ‘abnormalities’, including Mama Tataba, who is blind in one eye, Tata Kuvundu, who has six toes on one foot, and Mama Mwanza, who lost both her legs in a fire.

Critics approaching The Poisonwood Bible equipped with insights from disability studies have taken umbrage at its portrayal of Nathan on the basis that it reprises the problematic trope of the

‘one-eyed man’. White notes that Nathan’s ‘one blind eye … represents the crippling of his soul as

76 well as his body’, and that ‘his short-sightedness ultimately results in a social disorganization that undermines the communal character of the village and initiates the collapse of his own family’ (133-

4). That Kingsolver should rely on this complacent shorthand is especially surprising when one considers the nuance and complexity with which she engages with disability in her portrayals of

Adah and the other disabled residents of Kilanga—portrayals that critics have lavished with praise.

Stephen D. Fox, for example, admiringly observes that Adah is a ‘total personality’ with a ‘fully subjective perspective’ who ‘evades the role of metaphor’ (409-10). White interprets Poisonwood’s depiction of the native residents of Kilanga through the work of Lennard Davis, arguing that,

‘[l]acking a concept of the “normal” body,’ the villagers allow Kingsolver ‘to explore a culture that does not operate in accordance with the concept of the “normal.” Instead, they reflect a culture that operates within the concept of an “ideal body”’—an ideal that is, by definition, unattainable (135).45

By extension, White argues that ‘disability does not exist in Kilanga because neither the concept of social exclusion based on impairment, nor the concept of medical restoration of some idealized

“whole” conditions the culture’s response to the body’ (137, emphasis in original). While I share popular misgivings regarding Kingsolver’s portrayal of Nathan, and agree that there is a great deal of merit in her representations of Adah and the villagers of Kilanga, I nevertheless consider these readings of disability in Poisonwood to be insufficient. I will return to this contention shortly.

Given that the novel represents a similarly large cast of nonhuman animal characters—and that

Kingsolver’s oeuvre, which includes works titled The Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (2003),

Pigs in Heaven (1993), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating (2007), and Flight

Behaviour (2012), has attracted sustained ecocritical attention—the relative scarcity of animality and human-animal studies perspectives on Poisonwood is somewhat surprising. The instances in the novel that would reward such an approach are numerous and diverse: Nathan invokes a discourse of animalisation in his appraisal of the ‘heathen’ locals; he fails to grasp that the river in which he aims to baptise them is populated by crocodiles; one of the Price daughters, Ruth May, dies after being bitten by a snake; the village is decimated by an infestation of fire ants; and another daughter, Rachel, briefly converts to vegetarianism in the aftermath of a brutal, indiscriminate attack on the local fauna by the starving villagers—an episode in which the boundary between human and nonhuman seems to dissolve into the sinister creatureliness of a rapacious ‘animal’

77 bloodlust. There is also a conspicuous lack of animal studies scholarship on Methuselah, the pet parrot inherited by the Prices from Brother Fowles, and a prominent presence in the first half of the novel. This absence is perhaps best explained by the insistence with which Methuselah asks to be interpreted as symbolic of the Congo as the nation grapples with the promise and threat of the moment of decolonisation. Having been imprisoned in the ‘care’ of the colonisers and ‘educated’ in a language not his own, he is ‘liberated’ by his supposedly benevolent imperial masters, only to subsequently die as a result of the effects of his incarceration and concomitant ‘unpreparedness’ for freedom. Adah makes a comparison between Methuselah and the Congolese population when she observes that he is ‘exempt from the Reverend’s rules … in the same way Our Father was finding the Congolese people beyond his power’, and describes him as ‘a sly little representative of Africa itself’ (72). The parallels between Methuselah and the local Congolese population are reinforced by those drawn between the parrot and the other of the ‘two boarders’ inherited by the Prices: Mama

Tataba, who, according to Adah’s twin, Leah, ‘was to live with us and earn a small stipend by doing the same work she’d done for our forerunner’ (46). As Leah explains, housekeeper and parrot alike

‘had been trained by him in the English language and evidently a good deal else’ (46).

Leah’s conflation of Mama Tataba and Methuselah is problematic on several counts. From a disability studies perspective, we might observe that inherent in the comparison of a disabled woman with a nonhuman animal is a latent implication of a common deficit that needs to be rectified or overcome. From a postcolonial perspective, the notion that two indigenous constituents suddenly become ‘lodgers’ upon the arrival of a group of white settlers is plainly troubling, as is the related suggestion that both need to be educated in the English language. An animality studies perspective, meanwhile, would highlight Mama Tataba’s animalisation—and, specifically, the species of animal with whom she is being compared. Received wisdom dictates that parrots are unique in their ability to mimic human verbal language, to mechanically repeat words and phrases they have heard. The implication is that Mama Tataba’s use of English amounts to little more than mindless, mechanical

‘parroting’. Collectively, these overlapping perspectives suggest that this conflation, voiced as it is by the young, naïve Leah, represents a pointed critique of the complacency of the colonialist imagination, of the Western values it imposes, and of the consequent misrepresentation of its many

78

‘others’ as subhuman. However, another reading becomes possible if we entertain the notion that

Methuselah’s speech amounts to more than mere mimicry. What if this parrot is not parroting?

This question marks the starting point of my analysis. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, I argue that it is possible to read Methuselah’s ‘parroting’ as a form of response, rather than a simple reaction, and, further, that this allows for a fresh interpretation of Methuselah as a complex, three- dimensional character who, like Adah, has his own ‘subjective perspective’ and ‘evades the role of metaphor’ (Fox 409-10). Seen in this light, The Poisonwood Bible successfully immunises itself against accusations of recapitulating the trope of reducing nonhuman animals to a purely symbolic role. Furthermore, just because Methuselah responds like a human, and does so in human verbal language, does not mean that the text is culpable of anthropomorphism. My premise—which is supported by primary textual evidence as well as secondary ethological research—is precisely that

Methuselah can respond, that he can speak in the English language, albeit in a fairly rudimentary manner. As such, Poisonwood’s representation of Methuselah does not involve projecting the

‘characteristics of human subjectivity onto animal sentience and behaviour’; in fact, to conceive of it as such might itself betray a characteristically humanist insistence on the exclusivity of response, and of ‘language’, to humankind (Oerlemans 181). Similarly, the texture and nuance of the novel’s representation of Adah is such that it cannot be interpreted as an instance of narrative prosthesis.

Adah’s disability has certainly conditioned her character in profound ways, and it participates in advancing the plot, but, to quote Jan Grue’s description of narrative prosthesis, it operates as neither

‘an artificially introduced narrative impetus’ nor ‘an overdetermined, symbolically hypersaturated device of characterization’ (Grue, ‘Fantastical’). Poisonwood may rely on Adah’s disability for its

‘representational power, disruptive potency, and analytical insight’, but this does not exhaust the novel’s engagement with the complexities of Adah’s embodiment (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative

Prosthesis 49). Fox is correct: Adah is not reducible to her disability. Rather, the novel treats her disability as a nonnormative positivism, recognising that her disability ‘[provides] alternative values for living that do not simply reify reigning concepts of normalcy’ (Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics

5). On closer inspection, however, the formal operations of Poisonwood retain a subscription to humanist norms—and evidence can be identified in the instrumentalisation of the same features of

Adah and Methuselah’s subjectivities whose representation is ostensibly so praiseworthy.

79

In The Biopolitics of Disability, Mitchell and Snyder argue that the requirement of productivity is symptomatic of a prevailing neoliberal ethos which holds that the value of a particular bodymind correlates with the labour—whether physical, epistemic, or affective—it is able to perform. Long deemed incapable (and, by extension, ‘invalid’) disabled people have historically been omitted from the calculus of productivity altogether. However, the (qualified) successes of a liberal democratic model fuelled by an extensionist/inclusionist logic have resulted in disabled people becoming subject to what Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer call ‘the work speed-up or productivity imperatives of neoliberalism’ (137). The result, according to Mitchell and Snyder, is the opening of a rift between those disabled bodies that can be recuperated into the calculus of productivity—a population they call the ‘able-disabled’—and those that resist such assimilation (Biopolitics 12).

‘Diversity missions,’ they write, ‘expand the inclusion of some nonnormative bodies … while further solidifying those nonnormative, less easily integrable bodies marginalized by the apparent flexibility of inclusive objectives’ (72). Like these initiatives, Poisonwood’s representation of its main disabled and nonhuman animal characters is not as inclusive as it first appears. Rather, and in accordance with the suspect priorities of neoliberal inclusionism and the operations of biopower,

Kingsolver’s novel charges Adah and Methuselah’s subjectivities with the performance of forms of textual labour that their unique embodiments render them especially well qualified to perform—a manoeuvre that ‘[reifies] the value of normative modes of being developed with respect to ablebodiedness, rationality, and heteronormativity’ (2). The textual work that Adah’s disability is conscripted into performing is the epistemic labour of deconstructing the religious and colonialist grand narratives declaimed by her father. Meanwhile, the faculties that derive from Methuselah’s nonnormative bodymind are instrumentalised by the novel to expose the destructive potential of the missionary mindset and the fissures it prises open within the Price family. Phrased otherwise, Adah and Methuselah’s unique subjectivities are expressed through narrative voices that serve to engineer a dramatic irony that is integral to the novel’s overarching anticolonial critique.

This instrumentalisation is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, there is a distinctly humanist aspect to its inclusionist recuperation of disability and animality into the calculus of productivity within the novel’s economy of meaning, since Adah and Methuselah’s value to the novel correlates directly with the textual work that their distinctive interpretative and communicative abilities can

80 be made to accomplish. Secondly, the novel’s conscription of Adah’s subjectivity into the service of its anticolonial critique represents a betrayal of her refusal to perform her disability, which she explicitly states throughout the narrative. Thirdly, this instrumentalisation is effected by subjecting

Adah and Methuselah’s extraordinary bodyminds to narratological manoeuvres closely analogous to specific strategies of biopolitical control. In other words, the biopolitical management of Adah and Methuselah’s bodyminds on the level of story is itself governed by the greater or lesser utility of their unique subjectivities on the level of narrative form. The government of Methuselah’s physical health is well described by the theorisation of debility developed by Jasbir K. Puar in The

Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), while the government of Adah’s biological life is better described in terms of the policy of ‘will not let die’ that Puar associates with the act of maiming (Puar, The Right to Maim 139). In both cases, the characters are capacitated and debilitated as the abiding priorities of the text require. Finally, the novel’s instrumentalisation of Adah’s distinctive voice leads to her adopting the role of spokesperson on behalf of a diverse, international constituency of disabled people. Adah is thus a member of the privileged minority that Mitchell and

Snyder call the able-disabled. The fact that her disability supposedly qualifies her for this role is all the more problematic given that Adah, a white American settler, is the only disabled character to be granted a voice in a text that also features numerous Congolese characters with physical impairments. Ironically, this undermines the same anticolonial critique that Adah’s ‘powerful and unique form of abledness’ is enlisted to strengthen (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 136).

In sum, the complexity of Kingsolver’s portrayals of Adah and Methuselah means that they do not serve familiar functions of narrative prosthesis or what Elaine Freedgood, writing about the role of objects in Victorian literature, eloquently calls ‘symbolic servitude’ (11). However, the value of their nonnormative embodiments manifests itself instead in their provision of a different narrative function which, paradoxically, entails the recapitulation of the humanist assumptions that the representation of those modes of embodiment, and the abilities they confer, promise to unsettle. It is on this basis that we can characterise the voices of Poisonwood’s main disabled and nonhuman characters as voices of reason—not only because they are charged with exposing the religious and colonialist beliefs of their fellow characters as sophistry, but because the instrumentalisation of their ability to do so is tantamount to their endowment with qualities and characteristics associated with

81 a brand of humanism that is ultimately inimical to their interests. To graduate to a thoroughgoing consideration of this dynamic, however, we must first address the idea that reading Methuselah’s speech as an exercise in mimicry is insufficient as an explanation of the function he serves in the novel, and what an alternative reading of his linguistic abilities tells us about the biopolitical logic of The Poisonwood Bible.

*

Parrots and Parroting

Methuselah is an African grey parrot, and thus a member of the only avian species whose brain boasts what is known as a ‘shell song system’. Song system structures are common among birds, but ‘the parrot brain uniquely contains a song system within a song system’, which researchers deem a key reason as to why parrots ‘exhibit the most advanced vocal mimicry among non-human animals’ (Chakraborty et al. 1). We see this faculty in action in the first section, or ‘Book’, of The

Poisonwood Bible. During his captivity, Methuselah has accrued an extensive vocabulary of words and phrases, some of which lead Nathan to doubt his Irish predecessor’s ecclesiastical credentials.

Adah recalls Methuselah’s ‘two best phrases in our language’: firstly (imitating Mama Tataba),

‘“Wake up, Brothah Fowels! Wake up, Brothah Fowels!”’, and then (as if in response), ‘“Piss off,

Methuselah!”’ (71, emphasis in original). Nathan is unimpressed. ‘“That,” the Reverend declared,

“is a Catholic bird”’ (71). The comedic value of this line relies on the understanding that Methuselah cannot comprehend the words he is repeating, which means that his words cannot express any religious affiliation. Methuselah is just ‘parroting’ Brother Fowles. His alleged failure to understand the words he speaks is echoed by the OED definition of ‘parroting’: ‘To repeat (words, ideas, or actions) mindlessly or mechanically; to repeat the words, ideas, or actions of (another person) without apparent understanding or thought; to mimic’ (OED, emphasis added).

However, not all Methuselah’s interjections are quite so innocuous. When he says ‘Damn’ for the first time, Nathan is convinced that the word has been taught to him by a member of his family, and becomes obsessed with uncovering the guilty party. Leah recounts her father’s reaction: ‘“I fail to understand,” said Father, who understands everything, “why you would have a poor dumb creature condemn us all to eternal suffering”’ (81). Methuselah’s vocal ejaculation—the first of many—thus

82 exposes the punitive nature of Nathan’s religious and colonialist agenda and its negative effects on his wife and four daughters. Indeed, his verbal interjections presage the realisation that if the Price household contains a ‘poor dumb creature’ who will lead everyone to damnation, it is none other than Nathan himself. The power of these interjections appears to derive from the mindlessness with which Methuselah repeats the words he has heard: because his repetition of these phrases is mechanical, he functions like a word-mirror in which the Prices can see themselves for who they really are. The mechanicity of the parrot’s ‘speech’ means that his representation of events is fully reflective of reality, unblemished by artistic license. He does not engage in mimesis, but in mimicry.

Given the ease with which Methuselah can be read as a symbol of the Congo and its people, it is tempting to read his ‘parroting’ through Homi Bhabha’s celebrated account of colonial mimicry.

Bhabha identifies mimicry, which ‘repeats, rather than re-presents’, ‘as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge’ (126, 128, emphasis in original). His definition of ‘colonial mimicry’ proceeds as follows:

[T]he desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the

same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an

ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess,

its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is

therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. (126, emphasis in original)

Reading Poisonwood through Bhabha’s account of mimicry invites us to think of Methuselah’s speech as an act of repetition that exposes the ambivalence of colonial discourse towards its racial others, while also highlighting the ambivalence of humanist discourse towards its nonhuman others.

The mindless mechanicity of a parrot’s mimicry echoes the Cartesian distinction between human and nonhuman animals even as the act itself is named after a rare breed of animal that imitates human speech. What makes parroting parroting is precisely the fact that the language repeated

‘without … understanding or thought’ is human verbal expression. It is as though the parrot who parrots operates as a test case for the mind/body dualism that is contested by posthumanism: one speaks mindfully, the other mindlessly. However, a later passage, also narrated by Leah, encourages us to entertain an alternative reading:

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Methuselah is not dumb. He imitates not just words, but the voices of people that spoke them. …

Furthermore, Methuselah didn’t just imitate words, he knew them. It’s one thing simply to call out,

“Sister, God is great! Shut the door!” when the spirit moves him, but he’ll also call out “banana”

and “peanut” as plain as day, when he sees these things in our hands and wants his share.

Oftentimes he studies us, copying our movements, and he seems to know which words will

provoke us to laugh or talk back to him, or be shocked. We already understood what was now

dawning on my father: Methuselah could betray our secrets. (81, emphasis in original)

Methuselah’s speech is not mindless, but considered: Leah insists that he understands the words he speaks, notes his powers of observation, and is convinced that his verbal exertions are intended to elicit a reply. Rather than simply reacting, Methuselah seems to be responding to the humans with whom he shares a home.

As Derrida reminds us in his lecture ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’, Jacques Lacan—to whom the lecture is dedicated—‘expressly contrasts reaction with response as an opposition between human and animal kingdoms’ (The Animal 123, emphasis in original). According to Derrida, Lacan not only holds the animal ‘within the imaginary and unable to accede to the symbolic, to the unconscious and to language … but the description of its semiotic power remains determined … in the most dogmatically traditional manner, fixed within Cartesian fixity, within the presupposition of a code that permits only reactions to stimuli and not responses to questions’ (122, emphasis in original). Lacan’s reading holds that when bees ‘appear to “respond” to a “message” … they merely obey a fixed program, whereas the human subject responds to the other, to the question from or of the other’ (123). Derrida characterises this discourse as ‘literally Cartesian’, and proceeds to refute these claims, following Lacan’s opposition between reaction and response back to a distinction between the ability to pretend and the ability to pretend to pretend (123). Lacan grants the former ability to nonhuman beings who evince dancity, that is, ‘the capacity to pretend by means of a dance or a lure, by means of the choreography of the hunt or seduction, the parade that is practiced before lovemaking or as a movement of self-protection when making war’, but reserves the latter ability exclusively for humankind (Derrida, The Animal 128). Unlike humans, says Lacan, ‘an animal does not pretend to pretend. He does not make tracks whose deception lies in the fact that they will be taken as false, while being in fact true ones, that is, that indicate his true trail. Nor does an animal

84 cover up its tracks, which would be tantamount to making itself the subject of the signifier’ (Lacan,

‘Subversion’ 305, qtd. in Derrida, The Animal 129-30, emphasis Derrida’s).

Derrida’s riposte comprises three main points. In the first instance, he argues that ‘[i]t is difficult

… to identify or determine a limit, that is to say, an indivisible threshold between pretense and pretense of pretense’ (133). For Derrida, pretence ‘presupposes taking the other into account; it therefore supposes, simultaneously, the pretense of pretense’, which Derrida sees as ‘a simple supplementary move by the other within the strategy of the game’ (133). In other words, the distinction between an original pretence and the ‘pretense of the pretense’ is moot, since the possibility of the latter is already inscribed in the possibility of the former. Secondly, returning to a central theme of the first lecture in his series, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’,

Derrida raises the question of ‘what knowledge or what testimony’ would permit one to ‘calmly declare that the animal in general is incapable of pretending pretense’, noting that Lacan fails to reference any relevant ethological research that might substantiate (or undermine) his sweeping contention (133, emphasis in original).46 Finally, Derrida sets aside the task of critiquing Lacan’s argument that ‘the animal’ is incapable of pretending to pretend and opts to concentrate instead on the question of whether one can assume that humans are capable of doing the same: ‘Were we even to suppose—something I am not ready to concede—that the “animal” was incapable of covering its tracks, by what right could one concede that power to the human, to the “subject of the signifier”?’

(135). According to Derrida, just because the track—that is, the trace, the ‘other’ that the sign inevitably leaves in its wake, and which confers meaning upon that sign—can be erased, ‘does not mean that someone, God, human, or animal, can be its master subject and possess the power to erase it. On the contrary. In this regard the human no more has the power to cover its tracks than does the so-called “animal”’ (136, emphasis in original).

This three-pronged counterattack punctures Lacan’s rationale for distinguishing humans from nonhuman animals in a manner that allows us to reconsider whether acts of mimicry performed by nonhuman animals are as ‘mindless’ and ‘mechanical’ as we might believe. Specifically, it invites us to reconsider whether the speech of parrots is mere ‘parroting’, or whether it represents a more complex phenomenon. Unlike Lacan’s theory, this idea does have a body of ethological knowledge to support it—notably, the work of psychologist Irene Pepperberg, whose work with an African

85 grey parrot named Alex has demonstrated that when a member of this species speaks, one cannot assume that it is mindlessly reacting to external stimuli. As Pepperberg reveals in The Alex Studies:

Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (2002), the capacities of grey parrots are far more extensive than is conventionally assumed. Pepperberg’s research revealed that Alex could be taught to count, to classify objects based on shared characteristics such as colour and size, and to understand abstract concepts.47 Pepperberg is interested in Alex’s linguistic capacities only to the extent that they represent a means by which his cognitive abilities can be assessed, but they remain fascinating—and important—in their own right.48 Alex developed a small but significant vocabulary of words that he could combine in a variety of ways. We should note that these skills were not so much illuminated by Pepperberg’s research as they were acquired by Alex as a result of extensive training—and, moreover, that these skills were acquired under very specific conditions.

As such, Alex’s abilities cannot be taken as representative of those of an African grey parrot in the wild, or of his species in general. Nevertheless, the abilities demonstrated by Alex and chronicled by Pepperberg testify to the capacity of grey parrots for complex forms of communication—and, besides, we already know that, like Alex, Methuselah has been trained to speak English by Brother

Fowles. As such, Leah’s contention demands to be taken seriously. The parrot of The Poisonwood

Bible might not be ‘parroting’ after all.

This reading presents us with the prospect of an animal communicating via human verbal language thanks to faculties deriving from his particular form of embodiment, and thereby undermining a colonialist discourse dependent for its construction on the appropriation of others against which it defines itself and over which it establishes its dominion. This is very different from the idea of

Methuselah spouting mindless reactions at convenient moments in order to assist with exposition, plot progression, and (human) character development. The difference is not in the type of textual work that Methuselah performs, but in what this textual work means in this fresh context. To paraphrase Fox’s interpretation of Kingsolver’s depiction of Adah, reading Methuselah through

Derrida casts the parrot as a character with his own personality, his own subjective perspective: as irreducible to metaphoric function. As such, his participation in the text’s critique of religious and colonialist hubris cannot be characterised as the crude instrumentalisation of the voice of mimicry, but must be interpreted instead as the expression of a complex nonhuman animal subjectivity. This

86 represents an important challenge to the humanist assumptions that readings of Methuselah as

‘mindlessly’ fulfilling a purely allegorical function would only serve to reinforce.

However, this does not mean that the novel’s representation of Methuselah is unproblematic. His servitude to the text may not be symbolic, but his unique capabilities are nevertheless deployed by the text to serve its broader ends—and the value of his life correlates directly with his usefulness in this regard. Proof of this correlation can be identified by considering the circumstances surrounding his death at the end of Book Two. Here, again, it is tempting to lapse into an allegorical reading of

Methuselah, since he dies on 30 June 1960, the day that Congolese independence was declared and

Patrice Lumumba was inaugurated as the nation’s new Prime Minister. This reading may assume one of two possible forms. Along with Adah, we could read Methuselah’s passing as symbolic of the country’s newly won liberty: ‘At last it is Independence Day for Methuselah and the Congo. …

After a lifetime caged away from flight and truth, comes freedom’ (226). However, with the benefit of historical hindsight—and given the novel’s foreshadowing of the fact that this freedom will be sabotaged—we could read the parrot’s passing as symbolic of the fact that the nation’s new dawn is doomed to be a false one. However, if Poisonwood’s representation of Methuselah is as nuanced as I am suggesting, a more compelling interpretation follows that, as soon as he has completed the epistemic labour the novel requires of him, he is allowed to die.

This interpretation is supported by a consideration of the debilitating conditions that enable the parrot to perform the textual work into which he is conscripted. Methuselah, whose Biblical name implies an unrivalled longevity, has spent so long in captivity that, upon his release by Nathan, he occupies a liminal state: he can still fly, but no longer has the strength to live independently in the wild. As such, he is bound to remain in Kilanga, expelled to the fringes of a chronotope he cannot escape. In Adah’s words, ‘Methuselah, like me, is a cripple: the Wreck of Wild Africa’: ‘For all time since the arrival of Christ, he had lived on seventeen inches of a yardstick. Now he has a world.

What can he possibly do with it? He has no muscle tone in his wings. They are atrophied, probably beyond hope of recovery. Where his pectoral muscles should be, he has a breast weighed down with the words of human beings: by words interred, free-as-a-bird absurd, unheard!’ (169).

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Adah’s evocative insinuation that Methuselah’s flesh has been hollowed out and the palpable weight of human language poured into the vacancy articulates the stakes of his debilitation by the novel: only by weakening his physical body can the text exploit his verbal capacity. The humanist aspect of this dynamic is clear. As we saw in the previous chapter, Wolfe holds that the ‘anthropological dogma’ of humanism follows that ‘“the human” is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature, the biological, and the evolutionary, but … by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether’ (What is Posthumanism? xiv, xv). Adah’s commentary here seems to describe the consummation of these humanist ‘fantasies of disembodiment’: Methuselah’s body is emptied out and repurposed as a vessel for words, a receptacle that contains exactly that which is supposed to make the human human (xv).

‘[A]fter four months of liberation’, says Leah, Methuselah ‘still hung around our house mumbling.

It was very strange to hear the voices of our own family members coming from the tree branches’

(185-6). The narrative thus keeps Methuselah at arm’s length: on the fringes of the village, but close enough that his words echo through the community. He is released from incarceration as if on the condition that he will not fly away, that he recall the words he has been taught and speak them back as a commentary on, and to, the forces that have expelled him. His physical condition is inextricable from his textual function. According to the same logic, the death of Methuselah can also be read as contingent upon the requirements of the narrative. By the end of Book Two, the internecine fractures that his verbal interjections help to prise open, and that herald the demise of the Price family and their ‘noble’ mission, have deepened and multiplied beyond repair. His textual work accomplished,

Methuselah becomes expendable, and the process of debilitation to which he has been subjected is brought to a close.

In The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar distinguishes debilitation from disablement by noting that the former ‘foregrounds the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled’ (xiii-xiv). I both find this distinction persuasive and share Puar’s definition of the concept, which is adapted from Julie Livingston’s definition of debility. As Puar explains, Livingston defines debility ‘broadly to encompass “experiences of chronic illness and senescence”’, and shows that

‘historically many bodily infirmities “were not regarded as disabilities: indeed they were “normal” and in some cases even expected impairments” (Livingston 113, 120, qtd. in Puar, The Right to

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Maim xvi). Puar excludes disability from the domain of debility, thereby emphasising the distinction between the two—and this distinction casts debility as a useful rubric through which to think the novel’s management of Methuselah’s bodymind. Framing debilitation ‘as a normal consequence of laboring, as an “expected impairment”’, Puar writes, ‘exposes the violence of what constitutes “a normal consequence”’ (The Right to Maim xvi). In Methuselah’s case, the causal relation between labouring and debilitation is reversed—his ability to labour is a consequence of his debilitation, not the other way around—but this does nothing to diminish the violence of the arrangement. His conscription into the textual labour required of him is framed as a ‘normal consequence’ of an originary debilitation. The novel keeps him on retainer, as it were, uncaged but unfree, disallowing his life ‘until the point of death’ (Foucault, History Vol. 1 138).

In the next section, we will see that Poisonwood’s appropriation of Adah’s hemiplegia bears close comparison with its appropriation of Methuselah’s shell song system. However, there is one vital difference between the two cases: unlike Methuselah, Adah does not die. In fact, her own ‘voice of reason’ is so pivotal to the text’s overarching economy of meaning that her death is impermissible.

Puar’s theorisation of the act of ‘maiming’ provides the conceptual tools with which to make sense of this dynamic as an instance of biopolitical control. Firstly, however, I will discuss the specific type of textual labour that Adah’s particular form of abledness is enjoined to perform.

*

Maiming the Killjoy

As the novel begins, we are presented with Orleanna’s enigmatic introductory word-picture, Leah’s first salvo of God-fearing enthusiasm, Ruth May’s first literal Biblical interpretation, and Rachel’s first burst of grumpy teenage entitlement—and only then, like a bolt from the blue, Adah: ‘Sunrise tantalize, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo pink. Any morning, every morning.

Blossomy rose-color birdsong air streaked sour with breakfast cookfires’ (35). Adah’s voice is alliterative, associative, synaesthetic—a heady cocktail spiked with strange twists of rhyme and the unfamiliar taste of neologisms. At this stage, we have already inhabited the village of Kilanga for more than thirty pages, but when Adah speaks, it is defamiliarised, presented to the reader anew. It is not long before she references the faculty that informs her impressionistic perspective:

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A wide red plank of dirt—the so-called road—flat out in front of us, continuous in theory from

here to somewhere distant. But the way I see it through my Adah eyes it is a flat plank clipped into

pieces, rectangles and trapezoids, by the skinny black-line shadows of tall palm trunks. Through

Adah eyes, oh the world is a-boggle with colors and shapes competing for a half-brain’s attention. The parade never stops. (35, emphasis added)

The mention of ‘a half-brain’s attention’ refers to Adah’s hemiplegia. In her highly idiosyncratic manner, Adah walks us through the etymology: ‘Hemi is half, hemisphere, hemmed-in, hemlock, hem and haw. Plegia is the cessation of motion’ (40, emphasis in original). As a result of what she ironically calls ‘an unfortunate fetal mishap’, Adah was ‘born with half my brain dried up like a prune’; as a result, ‘I do not walk fast or well. My right side drags’ (40).

Adah’s hemiplegia means that she is not as mobile as her sisters, but it also affords her a remarkable mental dexterity that confounds the other members of her family. Reflecting on her schooldays back in the United States, Adah recalls calculating the cost of the grocery shopping more quickly than the shopkeeper and his cash register—a feat that ‘never failed to draw a crowd’ (68). If ‘calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery’, poetry is ‘far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award!’ (69). Yet Adah has mastered the art of the palindrome, too. Indeed, the ‘Adah eyes’ that result from her hemiplegia allow her to read forwards and backwards: ‘When I finish reading a book from front to back, I read it back to front. It is a different book, back to front, and you can learn new things from it. It from things new learn can you and front to back book different a is it?’ (69). She continues: ‘This is another way to read it, although

I am told a normal brain will not grasp it: Ti morf sgniht wen nrael nac uoy dna tnorf ot kcab koob tnereffid a si ti. The normal, I understand, can see words my way only if they are adequately poetic:

Poor Dan is in a droop’ (69, emphasis in original).

There is much to unpack here, including the terms on which the undifferentiated mass of ‘the normal’ can make sense of modes of expression made possible by nonnormative forms of embodiment. That, of course, was a key point in the previous chapter’s analysis of Grandin’s memoir—but here I want to focus on the question Adah poses, rather than the forms into which she manipulates it. In this tale of a missionary family descending on the Belgian Congo in order to haul the ‘heathen natives’ into the light of God’s boundless benevolence, one book—the Good Book—

90 looms especially large. The Bible governs the lives of the Price family in every conceivable respect; its words double as guidance, solace, or punishment as circumstances dictate. When one of the sisters is deemed guilty of some transgression, for example, her punishment is ‘The Verse’: copying out one hundred verses from the Bible, the last of which will communicate a moral appropriate to the offence in question. In the Price household, the Bible is forever being read, quoted, and transcribed. However, only one member of that household can read backwards. What ‘new things’ might be learned from Adah’s reading Holy scripture back to front? Does Adah’s reading render the Bible a ‘different book’?

I do not mean this question literally; Adah does not actually read the Bible in reverse. Still, her facility with palindromes signals an equivalent ability to read against the grain of the Biblical narrative imposed by Reverend Price on his family and the local Congolese population. The result is a critique of Baptist orthodoxy—and of Nathan, its unquestioning disciple—that is all the more potent for its surreptitiousness. Just as Adah spies on the mercenary Eeben Axelroot, overhearing messages which refer to the sabotage of Congo’s nascent foray into the project of decolonisation,

Adah’s facility with words allows her to navigate the fractures and inconsistencies in her father’s preachings, and to identify the political subtext that simmers beneath their surface. Perhaps nowhere in the novel in this demonstrated more clearly than in Adah’s repeated references to her father’s failed attempts to translate the word of God into the local language, Kikongo. Adah finds in Kikongo a multiplicity of meanings capable of encompassing the contradictions of which she sees herself composed; she identifies especially strongly with the word bënduka, which signifies both ‘the bent- sideways girl who walks slowly’ and ‘a fast-flying bird, the swallow with curved wings who darts crookedly quick through trees near the river’ (355-6). By contrast, Nathan has no appreciation for the nuances of the local language, repeatedly preaching to his congregation that ‘Tata Jesus is bängala!’ (638). Nathan has learned that bängala means ‘precious’, or ‘dear’, but is unaware of that which is evident to Adah: when pronounced the way Nathan speaks it, bängala actually means

‘poisonwood’.

I reiterate this well-worn point neither to emphasise Nathan’s ignorance nor to highlight Adah’s linguistic dexterity, but to describe the foundations upon which another dynamic is constructed— one that extant disability studies scholarship on Poisonwood has so far failed to identify. It is

91 certainly encouraging that Adah’s disability can be interpreted as the wellspring of an aptitude for creative defamiliarisation and incisive critique, that is, as a basis for an unorthodox mode of reading, in every sense of the word. However, as in the case of Methuselah, Adah is here being made to perform a particular brand of textual work; and, as in Methuselah’s case, this work is not symbolic:

Adah does not so much stand metaphorically for disruption as she is a disruptive force in her own right. Adah’s is the epistemic labour of deconstructing religious and imperial conversion narratives, and the performance of this work is testament to the depth and subtlety of her representation, as the aforementioned critics have noted. However, my analysis of the compromising conditions under which the Prices’ parrot performs his work invites us to do likewise with Adah—and it is here that the cases of Adah and Methuselah diverge. The mobilisation of Adah’s disability is problematic in its own ways, prime among which is the hypocrisy of the novel requiring Adah to accomplish this textual labour even though the character herself is explicit in her refusal to perform her disability.

Secondly—and further to my discussion of Methuselah’s debilitation—we must consider the ways in which Adah is required to ‘keep up’ with her fellow narrators, what this says about the imbrication of disability in neoliberal modalities, and what this means for the novel’s posthumanist credentials. Pursuing this line of argument allows us to read Poisonwood as subjecting Adah to formal manoeuvres akin to the operations of the policy of ‘will not let die’ discussed by Puar (The

Right to Maim 139). I will take these points one by one.

In the introductory article to their 2014 special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural

Disability Studies on ‘Cripistemologies’, Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer adapt Sara

Ahmed’s figure of the feminist killjoy for a disability context. Reflecting on the fact that her chronic back pain makes it difficult for her to meet the personal and professional expectations presupposed by ‘normal’ embodiment, Johnson writes that she has reached a ‘place of crip wilfulness, which sounds like a mean place of stubborn resistance, but feels like a calm relinquishing of fantasies that

I can force things (situations, bodies, emotions, sensations) to be other than they are’ (Johnson and

McRuer 136). Johnson proceeds to describe this feeling as ‘a refusal to act in accordance’ with a

‘system of compulsory able-bodiedness’ that ‘requires individuals to mask, suppress, and disregard discomfort in the process of determining what is possible, of what we are capable’ (136). Johnson thus allies herself with the figure of the ‘killjoy’, a term that Ahmed, writing in a feminist context,

92 reclaims as a locus of ‘productive misalignment with cultural instructions to be (or act) happy in oppressive circumstances. If a cruelly optimistic culture insists that we fake it till we make it’, the killjoy ‘refuses to play along’ (Johnson and McRuer 136). Ahmed herself describes the killjoy as a

‘non-reproductive agent’, a multivalent term that signifies a refusal to perform in accordance with expectations about what a given bodymind should produce, as well as a broader refusal to reproduce normative ideas and hegemonic discourses (Ahmed, ‘Queer’). The crip killjoy retains this ethos of refusal. As Dan Goodley, Kirsty Liddiard, and Katherine Runswick-Cole say, the crip killjoy, like its feminist equivalent, actively ‘resists imposed positionings by normative society’ (211).

As I will argue, the reference to ‘imposed positionings’ in this quotation is particularly relevant to the ways in which Adah is ‘enabled’ to perform the textual work with which she is charged. First, however, we must note that the hypocrisy of this imposed positioning, and of the text’s deployment of her form of abled-ness more generally, stems from the fact that Adah fits the description of the crip killjoy very closely indeed. Consider, for example, her decision not to speak, in spite of the fact that she can. Regarding the medical opinion that (incorrectly) predicted that she would never be able to talk, Adah declares herself ‘prone to let the doctors’ prophecy rest and keep my thoughts to myself’ (41). Of course, to speak would be to prove that prophecy wrong, to expose the failings of a powerful, prescriptive medical discourse, to surprise and disrupt the diagnostic gaze. However, it would also entail aligning herself with a hegemonic normate majority that abides by and perpetuates a culture of ableism—a culture that Adah knows all too well, and refuses to reproduce. The crip killjoy embodies a politics of resistance to the ethos of what Goodley, Liddiard, and Runswick-Cole call ‘the neoliberal-able table that only recognises self-sufficiency’—a table at which disabled people are ‘strangers’: ‘To be or become disabled is to work against a normative ableist culture that pursues its own happiness through a celebration of individual autonomy’ (211). This is the work that Adah undertakes. Feeling herself to be an outsider, she refuses to sit happily at the metaphorical table.

While clearly conditioned by an upbringing that has seen her imagined variously as gift and burden, genius and fool, Adah’s aims and desires do not seem guided by a determination to prove herself to anyone else. ‘The Congo,’ she says, ‘is only a long path that takes you from one hidden place to another. … I am determined I will walk that path, even though I do not walk fast or well’ (40). The

93 syntax of the latter sentence is significant, and easily misread: Adah is not determined to ‘walk that path’ because she does not ‘walk fast or well’; she simply wants to walk it, cognisant that her impairment will affect how long it takes her to do so. Adah steadfastly refuses to conform to any of the expectations that might be associated with her disability. Importantly, however, Adah’s role as a crip killjoy is in conflict with the role into which she—or, rather, her disability—is conscripted by the text.

This conflict manifests itself in her relationship with time. Adah’s desire to walk the long and winding road of her adoptive country is revisited when she recalls an afternoon on which she and her twin, Leah, are sent to retrieve water. To do so, they must take the forest path, which Adah imagines as if it were a capillary in the body of the African continent:

It went to Léopoldville. It went to Cairo. Some of these stories were bound to be true, and some

were not; to discover the line between, I decided to walk. I became determined to know a few steps

more of that path every day. If we stayed long enough I would walk to Johannesburg and Egypt.

My sisters all seemed determined to fly, or in Rachel’s case, to ascend to heaven directly through

a superior mind-set, but my way was slowly and surely to walk. What I do not have is kakakaka,

the Kikongo word for hurrying up. But I find I can go a long way without kakakaka. (167, emphasis in original)

Adah’s lack of kakakaka is not just a surmountable obstacle. Her ‘slow, slow body’, tedious though it might render certain tasks, also has its benefits: ‘without kakakaka,’ she observes, ‘I discover sights of my own’ (167-8). What Adah is describing is known as crip time. For Alison Kafer, who popularised the term as a response to theorisations of queer time that she considers problematic from a disability studies perspective, crip time ‘requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of “how long things take” are based on very particular minds and bodies’ (27). It is a challenge to regimes of what Elizabeth Freeman, in

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), terms chrononormativity: ‘the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity’ (3). ‘Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock,’ Kafer writes, ‘crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds’ (27). Indeed, this passage from Poisonwood recalls Simi Linton’s memoir My Body Politic (2007), in which Linton describes the different sights she discovers by navigating Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum in each of her two wheelchairs. Linton observes that her

94 experience is ‘quite different’ when she is using her motorised chair rather than a manual one (188).

‘When I am moving quickly,’ she writes, ‘I notice the play of light on the walls, I am attentive to the overall theme of the exhibit, or the progression of a single artist’s work over time. At a slower pace I focus more on individual pieces’ (188). Linton professes that she prefers the latter experience to the former (188).

If crip time reveals the contingency of normate time, Adah reinforces the problematics of the latter in typical fashion when she observes that, like so many words in Kikongo, kakakaka has a second meaning: the word that means hurry-up also translates as dysentery. During the rainy season, the large number of casualties claimed by an outbreak of this disease prompts a barbed comment from the aspiring doctor-poet: ‘They are all dying. Dying from kakakaka, the disease that turns the body to a small black pitcher, pitches it over, and pours out all its liquid insides’ (211, emphasis in original). The subtext is clear: that which Adah lacks, that which defines her—even in Kikongo, which she otherwise finds so accommodating and liberating—is recast as an impairment of its own.

However, the problem for Adah is that her opportunities to ‘bend the clock’ are few. Nowhere is this made plainer than in one of the most regularly quoted passages in the novel. ‘The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering,’ Adah declares (591). ‘Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you, or get The Verse. We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right’ (591, emphasis in original). In isolation, this sentiment stands as a potent critique of the normative regimes of temporality that require Adah to keep up with a normate majority, or else suffer the consequences.

However, that critique is undermined by a reflection on the ways in which Adah is positioned by the novel in order to perform the textual labour it needs her to accomplish. An analysis of this positioning exposes a cruel irony in her declaration that the only reason ‘we’d like to be able to get places quickly’ is ‘because we have to keep up with the rest of you’. Adah’s textual labour requires her to ‘keep up’ with the members of her family with whom she shares narratorial duties.

Kingsolver distributes these duties among the five female members of the Price family in a structure that Anne Marie Austenfeld calls a ‘revelatory narrative circle’: an egalitarian narrative framework characterised by a democratic ‘invitational rhetoric’ (294, 297). Establishing a pattern to be repeated throughout the text, the very first character to contribute to the ‘narrative circle’ is Orleanna. As the

95 novel opens, Orleanna’s use of the second person seems directed at the reader of the novel; she asks us to ‘[p]icture the forest’ and, in its midst, ‘a woman with four girls in tow’ (5). She continues:

The daughters march behind her, four girls compressed in bodies as tight as bowstrings, each one

tensed to fire off a woman’s heart on a different path to glory or damnation. Even now they resist

affinity like cats in a bag: two blondes—one short and fierce, the other tall and imperious—flanked

by matched brunettes like bookends, the forward twin leading hungrily while the rear one sweeps the ground in a rhythmic limp. (5-6)

That the characters are arranged in this particular constellation is no mistake. Within a few chapters it becomes clear who is who in this lineup: Leah is ‘the forward twin’, followed by ‘short and fierce’

Ruth May and ‘tall and imperious’ Rachel, while Adah brings up ‘the rear’. Significantly, the position of each character in the lineup doubles as their position in the queue as they wait to contribute to the ‘narrative circle’. Orleanna opens the novel with a soul-searching reflection—and excruciating self-interrogation—that alludes to the events that she and her daughters will disclose explicitly in the pages to follow. Leah is the first of those daughters to speak, followed by Ruth

May, Rachel, and, finally, Adah. This pattern is repeated in the second of the novel’s five sections.

If it is not maintained throughout the rest of the narrative, this owes more to developments in the plot—Ruth May’s death, for example—rather than any deliberate attempt to rearrange this symbolic order. Leah ‘leads hungrily’ as a matter of routine; Adah, by contrast, is never the first to speak.

Not only is she the last of the narrators to speak her first words, but, as Austenfeld notes, she is also the ‘last living voice’ we hear in the novel (296). Adah comments on the physical manifestation of this arrangement, and gestures towards the twisted logic that informs it: ‘Last of all came Adah the monster, Quasimodo, dragging her right side behind her left in her body’s permanent stepsong sing: left … behind, left … behind’ (76, emphasis in original). ‘This is our permanent order’, she says:

‘Leah, Ruth May, Rachel, Adah. Neither chronological nor alphabetical but it rarely varies (76).

The mirroring of the physical order in which the Prices walk by the arrangement of the novel’s narrative column warrants attention. As already discussed, the textual labour with which Adah is freighted entails defamiliarising and critiquing perspectives ventured and recapitulated by other members of her family. In order to accomplish this, the novel positions her to ‘bring up the rear’ of the narrative column. In the first part of the novel, Leah’s unabashed adoration of Nathan and her

96 commitment to the missionary cause are quickly undercut by Adah’s scathing commentary on their father’s behaviour and the cultural misunderstandings that expose the hubris and the futility of his attempts to convert the locals to Christianity. Meanwhile, Rachel’s vanity and xenophobia bespeak an ideology of American exceptionalism at variance with the nuanced appreciation of cultural difference Adah goes on to venture. Adah thus ‘sweeps the ground’ in a figurative sense—and, as we have seen, her ‘rhythmic limp’ (i.e., her hemiplegia) is fundamental to her ability to do so.

However, Adah’s impairment is also the reason that she lags behind in a literal sense, which means that she routinely finds herself exposed to threats with which her nondisabled siblings do not have to contend. While one could argue that Adah’s ability to perform her work of defamiliarisation and critique actually depends on the debilitating experiences associated with occupying this position, I am more interested in Adah’s survival of these experiences. Her unlikely durability testifies to her indispensability to the text, and thus the biopolitical logic by which the formal operations of the novel abide.

The perspectival benefit to the novel of Adah’s occupying a position at the rear of the narrative column is closely tied to the vulnerability associated with the prospect of being overlooked and ‘left

… behind’ (76, emphasis in original). Adah is alert to the danger of this eventuality; indeed, the narrative demands this alertness of her in no uncertain terms. Adah’s interpretation of the ‘fetal mishap’ that caused her hemiplegia speaks directly to this threat: ‘we were inside the womb together dum-de-dum when Leah suddenly turned and declared, Adah you are just too slow. I am taking all the nourishment here and going on ahead. She grew strong as I grew weak. (Yes! Jesus loves me!)

And so it came to pass, in the Eden of our mother’s womb, I was cannibalized by my sister’ (40).

Variations on this speculative prenatal scenario recur throughout the novel. When Leah and Adah return home with the water that they have been sent to retrieve—more ‘nourishment’ that they bear together—Leah marches on ahead, leaving Adah trailing behind. Adah returns home, alone and unnoticed, just in time for one of the locals, Tata Ndu, to arrive at the Prices’ home with news that his son has ‘seen the marks of the little girl who drags her right foot, and the lion tracks, very fresh, covering her footprints. He found the signs of stalking, the sign of a pounce, and a smear of fresh blood’ (172). Adah, presumed dead but actually lying in a nearby hammock just out of view of her relatives, witnesses the breaking of the news of her own demise.

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Later, Adah has an even closer brush with death. When a plague of fire ants descends on Kilanga, the Prices rush to escape their house and move to safety. Leah and Rachel have already vanished by the time Adah makes it to the front door. Confronted by ‘a nightmare vision of dark red, boiling ground’, Adah looks to her mother, who has Ruth May bundled in her arms: ‘I spoke out loud,’

Adah says, ‘the only time: help me’ (367). Seeing that Nathan has already rescued Rachel, and finding her own arms full, Orleanna leaves Adah to fend for herself: ‘She studied me for a moment, weighing my life. Then nodded, shifted the load in her arms, turned away’ (367). Plastered with the insects, Adah is caught in a stampede and trampled underfoot. Her mother has made a decision that doubles as a death sentence, and were it not for the chance intervention of Leah’s future husband,

Anatole, she would surely perish. As with her close encounter with the lion, Adah here avoids death—a death framed as all but inevitable because of her disability—thanks to an intercession that verges on the miraculous. Time and again, Adah is placed in positions of mortal peril, only to be rescued by plot twists sufficiently arbitrary as to test the reader’s suspension of disbelief. The novel repeatedly insists upon demonstrating that Adah’s hemiplegia confers a heightened vulnerability and dependency, only to disavow that vulnerability as soon as it has been reaffirmed. These brushes with death therefore appear to represent, if not an invincibility, then an indispensability. Far from suggesting that the fall of the sword of Damocles is imminent, the frequency and gravity of the threats with which Adah is confronted serve to reinforce the sense that Adah is not allowed to die.

Indeed, the point is precisely that the sword remains suspended: her disproportionate vulnerability never translates into the death it makes so probable. If, as I have argued, Adah is mobilised by the text on the basis of the epistemic labour that her disability qualifies her to perform, then her death, the silencing of her voice, cannot be allowed to occur. If the nature of Adah’s textual work explains why she is positioned at the back of the narrative column, the indispensability suggested by her multiple improbable escapes testifies to the importance of that work.

This sense of indispensability is reinforced by two other features of Adah’s characterisation which collectively reveal that, contrary to critical consensus, Kingsolver’s portrayal of Adah does in fact rely upon well-worn disability tropes: her seeming agelessness and apparent omniscience. The former becomes apparent once we compare Adah’s representation with that of her family members.

While her sisters’ voices develop incrementally throughout the novel—tracing their character arcs

98 over years, across borders, along gauntlets of complex, diverse psychic and affective responses to their missionary misadventure and its aftermath—the tone of two characters remains unchanged from first to last: Orleanna’s and Adah’s. Still, there is a difference between the two. Orleanna is the only constituent of the narrative ‘circle’ whose chapters are all recounted from the fixed vantage point of the present day. Adah, meanwhile, is caught in the flow of time alongside her sisters—yet there is little to distinguish her final chapter from her first. This is not to say that Adah has not grown, or learned, or changed in the interim, but that, unlike her sisters, her voice is lexically, syntactically, and attitudinally constant.

Adah’s immunity to the temporal rules that govern her sisters’ narratives is related to another aspect of her representation: her apparent omniscience. I have already noted Adah’s accrual of information about covert political operations thanks to her spying on Eeben Axelroot, a mission whose success clearly owes much to the ‘many advantages’ of the silence she prefers to keep (41). ‘When you do not speak,’ she says, ‘other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations’ (41). This sentence aptly describes Adah’s role in the novel: as silent witness, covert analyst, and ruthless critic whose findings are silently chronicled in a notebook, written backwards so as to be unreadable to her relatives. Her ‘Adah eyes’ grant her (in)sight into that which is invisible to the so-called ‘normal’. The sense of timelessness connoted by the relative constancy of her narrative voice is thus complemented by the sense that she boasts a comprehensive view over the events of the novel as they unfold. This panoramic perspective is clearly articulated in her final chapter, in which she draws on the medical knowledge and scientific background she has accrued since returning to the U.S. in order to elaborate a grand, unifying historical and ecological vision that starts with God’s childhood and the birth of humankind in the Rift Valley’s

‘caldron of bare necessities’ and proceeds to trace the genesis of ‘voodoo, the world’s oldest religion’, before stating, with unerring conviction, that ‘God is everything, then. God is a virus.

Believe that, when you get a cold. God is an ant. Believe that, too’ (632). Here we find an echo of the ‘wicked hoodoo Adahs’—which, in the first part of the novel, Adah claims are unshackled by life in the Congo—finally hardened into the brute confidence of aphorism (66). This may seem a far cry from the Adah of her first chapter, in which she declares that, unlike the other members of her family, ‘Adah unpasses her judgments’—but even now, six hundred pages later, Adah is still

99 unpassing judgements (38). Her specific brand of scientistic paganism, in place from the outset of the novel, persists in unpassing the judgments of her father and exposing them as sophistry. In this way, Adah is cast as a kind of seer: an oracle, or disabled sage.

This in itself is a problematic disability trope. If the ‘one-eyed man’ symbolises a broader, figurative

‘myopia’, the incredible insight of the seer represents the kind of ‘compensatory, mystical power’ that disabled characters are often granted, especially in works of fantasy (Harvey and Nelles,

‘Cripples’, qtd. in Donnelly, ‘Re-visioning’). Endowing disabled characters with compensatory superpowers presupposes that disability entails a fundamental, incontrovertible deficit that demands a kind of reparation: a condescending infusion with (often magical) abilities that also serves to exoticise disabled people—othering them, confirming their supposed essential difference from a

‘normal’ human majority. Adah does not think of her disability in these terms, however. This is demonstrated late in the novel when, after returning to the U.S. and starting medical school, Adah meets ‘an upstart neurologist’ who thinks that ‘an injury to the brain occurring as early as mine should have no lasting effects on physical mobility’, and thus that Adah has been ‘acting out a great lifelong falsehood’ (521). Despite being ‘unprepared to accept that my whole sense of Adah was founded on a misunderstanding between my body and my brain’, Adah submits herself to ‘an experimental program of his design’ that confirms the neurologist’s suspicions (521-2, emphasis in original). ‘I am losing my slant’, she declares—but this is not cause for celebration (521). ‘Will I lose myself entirely if I lose my limp?’ she wonders (522). ‘Will salvation be the death of me?’

(522). Seventeen years later, Adah answers in the affirmative. By January 1985, she has lost her slant, and, with it, her ‘ability to read in the old way. When I open a book, the words sort themselves into narrow-minded single file on the page’ (590). ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘I still limp purposefully around my apartment, like Mr. Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of seeing and thinking’ (590).

Had her ‘Adah eyes’ been nothing more than compensation for a desirable but unattainable ‘normal’ embodiment, Adah would not lament their loss. Still, while it is to the novel’s credit that it represents

Adah’s ‘cure’ as something much more complicated than a triumphant inauguration into the realm of normalcy, there is a cruel irony to Adah losing her ‘powerful and unique form of abledness’ only once the novel has exhausted her subjectivity as a resource (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 136).

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Just because the novel shows that her ‘powers’ are not compensatory does not mean that the text has not exploited those powers throughout the narrative.

To be very clear, Adah is no more literally omniscient than she is literally ageless: it is simply that she is represented as less concretely grounded in and beholden to the spatio-temporal specificities that govern her sisters’ renderings of what are, in many cases, the same events that Adah recounts in her contributions. This, perhaps, is what it means to be at the tail end of the narrative column: walking with a ‘rhythmic limp’, keeping one’s own time, invisible to her peers, but with the full scope of the expedition firmly in sight. Because of her hemiplegia, Adah is in the unique position of seeing things in their entirety. The way in which she is positioned to perform her epistemic labour extends beyond her physical situatedness, and the mortal vulnerability this entails, to encompass her residence in a metaphysical realm inaccessible to the other members of the Price family. Indeed,

Adah’s faux-precarity, quasi-omniscience, and pseudo-agelessness all testify to the ways in which her biological existence is governed by the novel. Earlier, I showed how Methuselah’s physical debilitation functions as a prerequisite for the performance of the labour the novel requires of him, discussed how this complicates interpretations of this performance as testament to Poisonwood’s recognition of onto-epistemological difference, and excavated the biopolitical logic of this dynamic.

If the management of Methuselah’s bodymind was described by Jasbir Puar’s concept of debility, the government of Adah’s biological life is better described by the policy of will not let die that

Puar associates with the act of maiming.

The Right to Maim opens with the identification of a particular feature of the ongoing conflict between Israeli ‘security’ forces and the Palestinian population in Gaza: the deliberate maiming of the latter by the former. In the Preface, Puar situates maiming in the context of a ‘logic long present in Israeli tactical calculations of settler colonial rule—that of creating injury and maintaining

Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them’ (x). Since maintaining a debilitated Palestinian population serves the Israeli administration’s ends, maiming represents ‘a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable’

(xviii). Maiming therefore exemplifies biopolitics ‘deployed through its neoliberal guises’, which

Puar describes as ‘a capacitation machine. Biopolitics seeks capacitation for some as a liberal rationale … or foil for the debilitation of many others. It is, in sum, an ableist mechanism that

101 debilitates’ (xviii). While there are clear, significant differences between the literal maiming of the

Palestinian people and the figurative maiming—or narrative maiming—of Adah in Poisonwood, the structural dynamics of the phenomenon are consistent across these contexts. Puar explains that

‘debilitation is extremely profitable economically and ideologically for Israel’s settler colonial regime’ (145). ‘Many sectors take on the “rehabilitation” of Gaza in the aftermath of war’—‘Egypt, the Arab Gulf states, NGO actors’, even Israel itself—and this ‘overall assemblage’ ultimately

‘works to feed back into the economic and ideological validation of Israel’ (145). Poisonwood enacts an analogous move. The novel renders Adah (as) disabled and profits from the subjectivity that arises as a result, mining her perspective for the angles it offers on the text’s (post)colonial theme.

Puar also offers us a theoretical basis for conceptualising Adah’s apparent indispensability in a section on ‘The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism’, which includes a discussion of a policy she calls

‘will not let die’ (139). Puar explicitly distinguishes the operations of this policy from the operations of biopolitics as theorised by Michel Foucault, arguing that the Israeli government’s ‘purportedly humanitarian practice of sparing death by shooting to maim has its biopolitical stakes not through the right to life, or even letting live, but rather through the logic of “will not let die”’ (xviii). Puar further distinguishes the policy she identifies in the Israeli maiming of the Palestinian residents of

Gaza from Lauren Berlant’s concept of slow death, which Berlant describes as ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence’ (754). ‘The general emphasis of the phrase,’

Berlant explains, ‘is on the phenomenon of mass physical attenuation under global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination and governmentality’ (754). ‘If slow death is conceptualized as primarily through the vector of “let die” or “make die”’, Puar argues, maiming functions as “will not let die” and, its supposed humanitarian complement, “will not make die.” Maiming masquerades as “let live” when in fact it acts as “will not let die”’ (139). As we have seen, Adah’s disability confers an acute vulnerability that never translates into the demise it threatens. Poisonwood will not let Adah die, because to do so would prevent her from continuing to perform the textual labour of defamiliarisation and postcolonial critique that her hemiplegia enables her to perform. Although

Puar does not discuss epistemic labour in The Right to Maim, she engages with the operations of

102 this form of work in her essay ‘Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and

Capacity’ (2009): ‘If the value of a body is increasingly sought not only in its capacity to labor but in the information that it yields—and if there is no such thing as excess, or excess info, if all information is eventually used or is at least seen as having imminent utility—we might ask whether this is truly a revaluing of otherwise worthless bodies left for dying’ (164, emphasis added). As I have demonstrated, the value of Adah’s body to The Poisonwood Bible is linked to the information that her disability enables her to identify, (de)construct, and (re)articulate. Viewed in this light, the positive critical consensus regarding the novel’s depiction of her disability—that the text represents a ‘revaluing’ of a body that other texts would ‘leave to die’—looks questionable indeed.

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Colonialist Ablenationalism

If, as Puar argues, ‘biopolitics seeks capacitation for some as a liberal rationale (in some cases) or foil for the debilitation of many others’, then the majority of this chapter has been devoted to cases in which Poisonwood avails itself of formal mechanisms to strategically capacitate its disabled and nonhuman characters so that the novel can initiate processes of value extraction from the forms of abledness engendered by their extraordinary bodyminds (The Right to Maim xviii). As established at the start of the chapter, however, the novel boasts substantial casts of disabled humans and nonhuman animals—but only Adah and Methuselah are capacitated in this way. Now, finally, I argue that their capacitation functions not only as the expression of a ‘liberal rationale’ to which criticism of the novel from a disability studies perspective has responded so positively; it also doubles as ‘foil for the debilitation’ of the text’s numerous disabled and nonhuman others. Adah in particular can be read as exemplifying a ‘privileged minority’ of disabled people—a minority whose privileging is grounded in the textual labour she is able to accomplish—as opposed to a disenfranchised majority with which Adah has little in common besides the fact of being disabled.

Mitchell and Snyder’s concepts of ablenationalism and the able-disabled will help to make sense of the postcolonial problematics attendant to this dynamic.

Mitchell and Snyder contrast the exclusion of ‘deviant’ bodies under liberalism with the neoliberal imperative to improve bodies instead. The echoes of Foucault are clearly audible: what distinguishes

103 the operations of biopolitics from the exercise of sovereign power is of course the impulse to foster life, rather than actively dispense with it. According to Mitchell and Snyder, this imperative— whose insistence on ‘getting better’ is itself problematic—also comes at a price: a form of ‘national service’ whereby ‘the nation is enabled by its claims to have relinquished a more restrictive, carceral mode of social treatment … towards its non-productive members’ (Biopolitics 15). In an overt nod to Puar’s theorisation of ‘homonationalism’ in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer

Times (2007), Mitchell and Snyder refer to this ‘enabling’ as ablenationalism. Ablenationalism also bears comparison with maiming, since both are processes of ‘value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable’, processes that masquerade as inclusionism or humanitarian care.

Like maiming, ablenationalism effects a further injustice by distinguishing between those disabled bodies from whom useful labour can be extracted and others who are not in a position to serve this same purpose. Where the dividing line between valuable and ‘invalid’ bodies once fell along the bell curve of normalcy, it can increasingly be located in the fissure that separates those who make a more or less tangible contribution to the neoliberal status quo—a ‘privileged minority’ that

Mitchell and Snyder call the ‘able-disabled’—from those who do not (Biopolitics 44, 12). In the authors’ account, certain forms of nonnormative embodiment are privileged at the expense of others on the basis of what they are considered able to accomplish. They are capacitated by virtue of an expansion of the definition of labour that qualifies as valuable. The spectre of the humanist subject lingers in the shadow cast by the retention of a (recalibrated) conception of ability as the vector according to which value is ascribed to different lives in neoliberal times. That this spectre is not always perceptible, veiled as it is by the ‘progressiveness’ of the incorporation of disabled people into the mainstream, makes it all the more pernicious.

The boundary between the ‘privileged’ site of Adah and Methuselah’s (dis)abilities and a general, comparatively imperceptible condition of debility falls along the familiar contours of (post)colonial problematics which require scrutiny. As discussed earlier, much of the scholarship that champions

Kingsolver’s representation of Adah also observes that Kilanga’s cast of characters with physical impairments is unusually extensive. Ruth May notices this too, and addresses it with characteristic bluntness: ‘When you look out the door, why, there goes somebody with something missing off them and not even embarrassed of it. They’ll wave a stump at you if they’ve got one, in a friendly

104 way’ (63). From Ruth May we learn that Orleanna uses these impairments as a way of remembering the names of her neighbours: ‘Sometimes she says to us or just herself, Now Tata Zinsana is the one missing all his fingers, isn’t he? Or she’ll say, That big gouter like a goose egg under her chin, that’s how I remember Mama Nguza’ (63). Using a physical impairment as a mnemonic device may be problematic, but it is also testament to the prevalence of impairments in Kilanga, and therefore to a different standard of normalcy. As White observes, this notion is corroborated by no lesser an authority than Adah herself. ‘Here,’ Adah says, ‘bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace. In the way of the body and other people’s judgment I enjoy a benign approval in Kilanga that I have never, ever known in Bethlehem’ (88). As we know from the work of Lennard Davis, the inevitability of falling short of a deific standard of bodily perfection renders moot the point of measuring oneself against any such standard, or constructing a ‘norm’ in its stead.49

Again, it is tempting to dwell on what seems like an unusually progressive representation of disability. However, while thinking ‘bodily damage’ as ‘a by-product of living’ may resonate with contentions that disability is always potentially imminent (as the result of an accident) and/or effectively inevitable (as a product of ageing), this mode of dissolving the disabled/nondisabled binary risks flattening the category of disability: of overlooking its manifold variegations, internal contradictions, and intersectional entanglements.50 Orleanna highlights these complexities when, in reply to Nathan’s sorrowful observation that the locals are ‘[b]roken in body and soul’, she suggests that the local villagers might ‘take a different view of their bodies’ (64). Nathan’s predictable reply that ‘the body is the temple’ is met with another riposte from his long-suffering wife: ‘Well, here in Africa that temple has to do a hateful lot of work in a day. … Why, Nathan, here they have to use their bodies like we use things at home’ (64, emphasis in original).

It goes without saying that Orleanna’s distinction between us and them, between here and there, betrays a subscription to the binary logics by which colonialism operates, and which postcolonial scholarship has for so long dedicated itself to dismantling. However, it can also be understood as an acute (if inadvertent) reflection on the uneven topography of the category of disability, especially when viewed through a transnational lens. Consciously or otherwise, Orleanna illuminates the way in which the fact of physical impairment is woven into the fabric of life in Kilanga. To concentrate

105 on the seamless needlework in this metaphorical weave, as Adah does, is to flirt with romanticising disability.51 Just as importantly, it also risks neglecting to question why impairments are so common to begin with. As Pieter Verstraete, Evelyne Verhaegen, and Marc Depaepe demonstrate in ‘One

Difference Is Enough: Towards a History of Disability in the Belgian-Congo, 1908–1960’ (2017), disability—and specifically the mutilation of plantation workers—was pivotal to the colonisation of the Congo under King Leopold II of Belgium. The managers of the many rubber plantations that proliferated during Leopold’s reign ‘used some dehumanising and painful methods’ to increase production, including severing the hands and feet of workers whose work-rate and output did not meet the required standard (409).52 Disability was not simply an outcome of the punitive colonial agenda, however; it was also ‘an important ingredient in the justification of colonial activity’ (418).

For Verstraete, Verhaegen, and Depaepe, ‘it could be said that for the colonisers all black people could be considered disabled’ according to the metric of ‘psychological intelligence test scales’

(418). With a heavy measure of irony, the authors write that ‘[t]hese poor, primitive, savage, and backward black individuals … simply could not and would not be able to survive without the blessings of colonial and civilising education’ (418). In an uncanny, twisted echo of the logic of the medical model of disability—and recalling Darwin’s notion of people with cognitive disabilities as the ‘missing link’ between humans and animals in the chain of evolutionary descent—a European education was considered the appropriate ‘treatment’ for the ‘cognitive disability’ conferred by the simple fact of being black, and so failing to meet the normative standard of European ‘intelligence’.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that the ascription of a concocted cognitive disability legitimated the conscription of Congolese people into forms of slavery that resulted in actual physical impairments as a matter of routine. What, then, are we to make of the fact that Kingsolver’s novel is populated by bodies that are used as things, and that these bodies are almost exclusively black?

Are these bodies used as ‘things’ by the text, too?

To the extent that the disabled residents of Kilanga are instrumentalised by the Prices as sources of secular ‘enlightenment’—that is, to the extent that their ways of living and dying serve a didactic purpose for missionaries who will later leave the Congo, carrying their hard-learned ‘lessons’ with them like souvenirs—the latter contention seems well-founded. Even Adah’s epiphanic experience of ‘benign approval’, despite evincing a laudable ethos of acceptance towards people with cognitive

106 and physical impairments, derives from her exposure to a society whose people occupy a state of debility that is alarmingly general. The knowledge accumulated by the Prices as a result of this exposure is expressed in statements that obscure the distinction between a comparatively privileged site of disability and this general condition of debility. For example, we might recall the passage, quoted above, in which Adah declares on behalf of the disabled community that ‘[w]e would rather be just like us, and have that be all right’ (591, emphasis in original). By corralling all disabled people under the same umbrella, Adah adopts the role of spokesperson for a population whose impairments and disabilities derive from different causes and manifest themselves in very different ways. Were the disabled Congolese characters in The Poisonwood Bible granted the opportunity to contribute to the novel’s ‘narrative circle’, would they concur that it ought to be ‘all right’ for them to be impaired as a result of hazards unimaginable to the vast majority of citizens of the U.S.—and, indeed, as a result of the manifold dangers attendant to the project of colonialism itself?

The novel’s treatment of Methuselah is markedly different from its treatment of the majority of the text’s population of nonhuman animals, too. Not one of these other nonhumans is represented as boasting a capacity equivalent or analogous to Methuselah’s voice. Rather, and in keeping with more traditional representations of nonhumans, these animals generally function as either meat or metaphor. Ruth May’s death provides a clear example of the latter. In the context of a novel about a family of Baptist missionaries, the fact that Ruth May is killed by snakebite, and that her death sparks the exodus of the female members of the Price family from Kilanga, cannot be overlooked.

If Kingsolver’s representation of the text’s disabled Congolese characters problematically suggests that the local residents occupy a kind of idealised prelapsarian state, the intervention of the serpent heralds the Prices’ departure from this strange Eden, freighted with a dark understanding that would have been better left unknown. The snake itself is lost in this heavy-handed symbolic set-piece, reduced to performing the role of one of the most timeworn of literary shorthands. It appears in the text exclusively to teach the Prices the oldest and most devastating of life lessons.

The novel’s instrumentalisation of nonhuman animal figures is evidenced most obviously in an episode in which the residents of Kilanga converge on a hilltop to hunt the local fauna—an event

Rachel calls ‘the most despicable day of my life’ (418). ‘Lambs to the slaughter,’ she says: ‘We were, or the animals were, I don’t even know who I feel sorry for the most’ (418). Certainly, the

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Price daughters’ recollections of this bleak night do linger on the suffering of the animals in question, but, as in so many instances in the novel, the episode seems designed mainly to furnish the Prices with a brutal experience that helps to lay the groundwork for their secular ‘enlightenment’ and eventual break from Nathan. Ironically, however, the knowledge inspired by their witnessing the indiscriminate torture and slaughter of nonhuman animals is the knowledge that the line between

‘human’ and ‘animal’ is rather more porous than they would hitherto have admitted. Adah, for example, recalls that ‘[o]n the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals’ (415).

What we encounter here is a clear example of the Darwinist ‘discourse of the jungle’, a discourse which, as Michael Lundblad argues in his book The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-

Era U.S. Literature and Culture (2013), ‘produces new constructions of animality as “naturally” violent in the name of survival’ (2). Adah’s identification of the animality of the human hunters thus reflects a problematic evolutionary discourse of ‘survival of the fittest’. This is rendered even more troubling by the text’s implication that the Prices have been reduced to the ‘baseness’ of life in Kilanga and to the ‘primitivism’ of members of the local community. According to Rachel, ‘[t]he villagers transformed into brutish creatures before my very eyes, with their hungry mouths gaping wide’ (419). Leah, recounting the heated dispute among the villagers regarding the division of the spoils following the conclusion of the hunt, remembers that ‘[i]n the end we all crept home with our meat, feeling hunted ourselves’ (424). Admittedly, Rachel’s characteristic xenophobia demands that we read her description of the villagers as ‘brutish creatures’ as a satire of the colonial imaginary.

Accounting for Leah’s reflection, however, is not so straightforward. Leah, who will go on to marry

Anatole and become a fervent advocate for Congolese decolonisation, inadvertently fashions a complex, problematic imaginative order in which the civilised Americans are the innocent victims of the rabid threat posed by their less-than-human neighbours, even as they carry the carcasses of the animals they have hunted back to their home. Thus, the many nonhuman casualties of the hilltop bloodbath are not simply killable (in a way that Methuselah is not); indirectly, their deaths also serve to galvanise a racist, colonialist animalisation of a black, African population. Literally and figuratively, their bodies are used as ‘things’. However, they are of a quite different order of things to that of Methuselah. Unlike the talking parrot, but just like the Congolese residents of Kilanga

108 with physical impairments, they serve an instrumental, prosthetic narrative function undergirded by their eminent disposability.

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These examples not only represent further evidence that Kingsolver’s representations of disability and animality are more problematic than extant readings tend to allow; they also call the sincerity of the novel’s abiding anticolonial sentiment into severe question. As I have demonstrated, these two features of the text are intimately intertwined. Poisonwood conscripts Adah and Methuselah’s

‘powerful and unique [forms] of abledness’ into its critical project, only for the foregrounding of their specific abilities to obscure other disabled and animal characters who are not granted a voice

(Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 136). As I have also tried to show, however, even this controversial privileging does not amount to a thoroughgoing revaluation of Adah and Methuselah’s lives. In fact, their lives are valuable to the extent that their specific modes of embodiment can be exploited as sources of value extraction, and the process of extracting this value depends upon the narrative exercising control over their extraordinary bodies in a characteristically biopolitical manner. This, finally, is the basis on which The Poisonwood Bible can be read as a novel whose capacitation of its constituent disabled and nonhuman characters paradoxically doubles as a recapitulation of the same humanist norms that the novel otherwise contests.

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CHAPTER 3

‘Not an Amenable Subject’ Beyond the Sympathetic Imagination in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

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I am not an amenable subject, as you will discover before long. Walk away. I won’t detain

you. You will find it a relief to be rid of me. And vice versa.

J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man 89

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In both of the primary texts analysed thus far, the framing of disabled and nonhuman animal subjectivities as nonnormative positivisms that unsettle humanism’s ‘concept of the human’ is itself undermined by the compulsion of disabled and nonhuman animal characters into narrative forms and functions that bear a clear humanist inflection (Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? 136). The novels analysed in Chapters 3 and 4 present us with a different vantage from which to explore the ways in which the rendering of nonnormative subjectivities in literary narratives serves to reinscribe the same normative assumptions that representations of those subjectivities seem to contest. Unlike The

Poisonwood Bible, J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (2006) and Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (1999) both evince a characteristically postmodernist self-consciousness of the contingency of the act of literary representation. Even as they launch their respective attempts to represent the subjective experiences of disability and animality, they thematise their own aesthetic limits and inadequacies, prompting readers to reflect on whether those attempts are successful—or, rather, whether such an attempt can ever be successful. Indeed, Slow Man, the subject of this chapter, is an example of what Coetzee scholar David Attwell, in a discussion of the author’s early works, calls ‘situational metafiction’— that is, ‘a mode of fiction that draws attention to the historicity of discourses, to the way subjects are positioned within and by them, and, finally, to the interpretive process, with its acts of contestation and appropriation’ (20).

The novel’s central metafictional conceit is its implication that one of its secondary characters, the fictional author Elizabeth Costello, is in fact the author of Slow Man itself. The novel thus performs a staging, or dramatisation, of Costello’s efforts to represent the life of Slow Man’s disabled

111 protagonist in fictional form. As such, there is a crucial distinction to be made between Costello’s logic as it is represented in the text—a distinctly humanist logic, in the interpretation I develop here—and the logic of the text itself, whose dramatisation of Costello’s authorial approach doubles as a critique of that approach. These metafictional gymnastics suggest that Slow Man comes much closer to enacting a poetics of posthumanism than either Grandin’s memoir or Kingsolver’s novel— not by positively enacting such a poetics, but by exposing the insufficiency of certain, normative representational strategies as means of representing disabled and nonhuman subjectivities. In other words, Slow Man gestures towards the possibility, and maybe even the necessity, of a posthumanist poetics, but without enacting that alternative itself.

The novel begins when 60-year-old Paul Rayment is hit by a car while cycling along Magill Road in Adelaide, Australia. Within three pages, Rayment is in hospital; within five, his right leg has been amputated above the knee. The rest of the novel is, at root, an account of Rayment’s fraught negotiations with his new, unwanted reality and its implications: for navigating the world, and, relatedly, for his sense of self. One third of the way through the novel, with Rayment still mired in resentment of his new, supposedly ‘diminished’ condition, he receives an unexpected visitor:

Elizabeth Costello (79). The two have never previously met, and, despite her renown, Rayment is only vaguely aware of her work, but she seems to know a great deal about him. The justification for her sudden appearance begins to clarify when, within moments of entering Rayment’s home,

Costello recites a passage with which readers of Slow Man are already familiar: ‘The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air, and so forth’ (81, emphasis in original).

Rayment quickly draws the unsettling conclusion that he is being written into a novel of Costello’s invention. What the reader knows—but Rayment cannot—is that these are the very first words of

Slow Man, which indicates that Costello’s current work-in-progress is nothing less than Slow Man itself. This uncanny moment marks Slow Man as a work of metafiction, suggesting that Costello is the author of Rayment’s narrative, and that Rayment is thus subject to her ‘authorial authority’

(Marais 202). Just as his impairment has left him dependent on the ministrations of the nurses who care for him in his home, his disability has seemingly left his life story dependent on the creative whims of an intrusive stranger.

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Costello’s agency over Rayment’s story is not total, however. Her growing exasperation at his steadfast refusal to commit himself to a course of action reveals that, though she may be the implied author of Slow Man, she cannot force him to acquiesce with her vision of how his narrative ought to progress. Rayment and Costello, character and writer, are thus dependent upon one another. This perspective informs many critical responses to Slow Man, which eschew an analysis of asymmetrical power relations between author and authored, opting instead to characterise the relationship between Costello and Rayment as one of constitutive interdependence. Mike Marais, for example, insists that ‘the text makes it quite clear that Costello is as dependent on Rayment as he is on her’, noting that ‘she “follows” him throughout’ in ‘a state of servitude’; she is ‘mastered by Rayment because she is enthralled to the invisible by which she has been inspired to write’ (202).

In Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature

(2012), Alice Hall reads Costello and Rayment’s relationship—which, building on the work of Zoë

Wicomb, she finds paralleled in the relation between carer and patient—through Michael

Davidson’s account of a ‘dialectics of dependency’ (Hall 93).53 Pieter Vermeulen makes a similar point, arguing that ‘the relation between author and character, far from being a matter of unidirectional domination, is in fact a relation of reciprocal dependence’ (664).

Read in these terms, Slow Man’s central relationship seems to epitomise a posthumanist ethos of perpetual, mutual becoming. Indeed, these readings paint the mutual imbrication of Costello and

Rayment as so profound that it exceeds the logic of mere interaction, and instead more closely resembles the dynamic of intra-action detailed in Karen Barad’s posthumanist account of agential realism.54 Barad builds beyond new materialist and speculative realist theorisations that emphasise the entanglement of the countless animal, vegetable, and mineral bodies that collectively constitute and populate the world, to posit that the very notion of discrete entities which live with and among one another in more or less intimate proximities is itself in need of revision. Barad substitutes the term ‘objects’ for ‘phenomena’, which she describes as ‘relations without preexisting relata’, and replaces the idea of interaction, ‘which presumes the prior existence of independent entities’, with the concept of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’ 815, emphasis in original).

According to Barad, ‘relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions’ (815). In other words, beings do not exist independently of their

113 relations, but materialise through those relations. In this way, Barad’s philosophy explodes the reified contours of individual embodiment and independent subjectivity essential to the humanist tradition, reframing existence as a state of radical openness and generative vulnerability. The figure of ‘the human’ is not simply deprioritised, but deconstructed. This, it seems, is the constellation into which Rayment and Costello, character and author, have been thrust. However, as I argue in this chapter, an intertextual reading of Costello’s character calls this conclusion into question.

Costello may be a stranger to Rayment, but Coetzee’s readers are no stranger to Costello. Indeed,

Slow Man is the fourth of Coetzee’s works in which she features. She made her debut when Coetzee was invited to deliver Princeton University’s Tanner lectures in 1997. Coetzee’s lectures in fact took the form of two short stories in which Costello, like her own author, takes up an invitation from a prestigious university to give a short series of talks. The expectation among the faculty at the fictional Appleton College is that Costello will discuss her career as a novelist; instead, she opts to deliver two treatises on the plight of nonhuman animals. These stories formed the centrepiece of

Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (2001), which also features responses from Peter Singer, literary scholar Marjorie Garber, Indologist Wendy Doniger, and anthropologist and psychologist Barbara

Smuts. Four years later, the stories were republished as two of the eight chapters (or ‘lessons’) that comprise Coetzee’s academic novel Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2004), a piecemeal portrait of the artist as an older woman in which the eponymous author reckons with the meaning of her life’s work. Costello makes two more appearances in Coetzee’s fiction: in the 2004 short story ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, and then again in Slow Man.

Still, Costello remains most closely associated with the stories in which she first featured, ‘The

Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’. Her concern in these ‘lessons’ is not just with flagging the genocidal character of industrial farming practices and declaiming the anthropocentrism of rights-based approaches to animal justice, but with interrogating the aesthetic and ethical issues attendant to the project of apprehending and representing the lived experiences of nonhuman animals. It is here that Costello famously attempts to demonstrate the epistemological shortcomings of analytic philosophy as a means of thinking relations between human beings and nonhuman animals, and proposes a mode of embodied understanding effected by the sympathetic imagination—a faculty she associates with the act of literary creation—as an alternative. These

114 stories depict Costello arguing that literary representation, which is supposed to be incapable of accessing ‘the real’ by definition, can in fact catalyse a process whereby one can inhabit the being of another creature, to inhabit something closely akin to what theoretical biologist Jakob von

Uexküll calls a being’s Umwelt: its ‘self-centred subjective world, which represents only a small tranche of all available worlds’; or, more succinctly, a ‘situated animal subjectivity’ (de Waal, Are

We Smart Enough 8; Uhall 22, emphasis in original).55 Costello’s argument has its critics, both within and without the text. I will return to these contentions in due course. What is beyond doubt is Costello’s commitment to this idea—and this must be borne in mind when Rayment opens his door to find her standing on his doorstep.

Despite the fact that both have inspired large bodies of scholarship, critics have not yet been inclined to think the relationship between Rayment and Costello in Slow Man in terms of Costello’s account of the sympathetic imagination. Such a reading is both eminently viable and potentially illuminating. Given her position regarding the feasibility of inhabiting another being’s lifeworld— and the crucial role that literature can play in effecting this process—it is logical to hypothesise that

Costello’s implied authorship of Rayment’s narrative is predicated on her exercising the same faculty whose virtues she preaches in the earlier works. This chapter accepts this premise, using it as a foundation from which to excavate the humanist dimensions of Costello’s authorial engagement with Rayment via the sympathetic imagination, and so to complicate the aforementioned readings of the nature of the relation that binds Rayment and Costello together.

At a first glance, enlisting Costello’s account of the sympathetic imagination as a means of exposing her tacit subscription to humanist norms may seem counter-intuitive. After all, this account is ventured as a means of avoiding the risk of recapitulating philosophy’s tendency to ‘inadvertently

[reinscribe] the priority of the human’ (Anker 175). This logic only applies, however, if we find that account persuasive. I argue that Rayment’s refusal to acquiesce with Costello’s ‘advice’ as to how his narrative should progress marks the limits of the sympathetic imagination—a faculty she insists knows no bounds—and that, confronted with these limits, Costello encourages Rayment to actively pursue a normative narrative trajectory informed by animacy hierarchies that privilege the liberal humanist subject. Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

(2012) makes the case that animacy hierarchies ‘conceptually [arrange] human life, disabled life,

115 animal life, plant life, and forms of non-living material in orders of value and priority’ in accordance with the measure of animacy that different bodies are perceived to exhibit (13). Since autonomous, nondisabled, adult, human males are typically ascribed the greatest measure of animacy, they are installed at the peak of these conceptual arrangements. This figure, of course, bears a very close resemblance to the figure of ‘the human’ around which the humanist project revolves—and this indicates that animacy hierarchies harbour ideological investments at variance with the priorities of

Costello’s project, as well as those of the present dissertation. Upon becoming disabled, Rayment becomes the ‘slow man’ of the novel’s title: not just because of his restricted physical mobility, but also because of his refusal to embrace life in his altered physical condition. His becoming disabled precipitates a fall from the apex of a traditional animacy hierarchy into a domain in which his claims to fully-fledged personhood are no longer beyond dispute. This, I argue, is the process that Costello intends to reverse—and ‘reverse’ is the operative word. Like Marijana, Rayment’s nurse and the subject of his ‘unsuitable passion’, Costello is an expert in the art of restoration (85). The only way in which she can release Rayment (and herself) from their unlikely bond is by bringing his narrative to a conclusion, and the only means by which she can think to enact this is by bringing Rayment back to life—that is, to as close an approximation of his ‘normal’ self as possible (Slow Man 159).

This process of (re)animation betrays a tacit subscription to the logic of conventional animacy hierarchies, and manifests itself in Costello’s attempt to cast Rayment as the active, autonomous protagonist of his own disability Bildungsroman.

Chen’s theoretical project hinges on a reconsideration of what qualifies as ‘life’ or ‘liveliness’, on asking whether the ‘particular political grammar’ of dominant animacy hierarchies might be problematised in such a way that the borders demarcating the ‘constrained zones of possibility and agency’ afforded to beings and entities that exceed the limits of the humanist ideal are destabilised

(Chen, Animacies 13). Costello’s project, by contrast, adheres to the retrograde biopolitical logic that Chen disputes, thereby inadvertently pledging allegiance to humanist principles at odds with prevailing perspectives in disability studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanism—including, importantly, the position held by Costello herself. Reading Coetzee’s representation of disability in

Slow Man through his engagement with animality in Elizabeth Costello thus casts the former text as a dramatisation of an author meeting the limits of the sympathetic imagination, and resolving

116 this conundrum by trying to sculpt the life of her subject according to narrative conventions based on, and tailored for, the body of the autonomous, humanist subject. Rayment insists that he is ‘not an amenable subject’ for the narrative Costello is attempting to compose (89). I am inclined to agree.

Costello wants to return Rayment to an approximation of the life he led prior to the accident, a normative life that conforms to a normative narrative structure. She fails to grasp that the accident represents a rupture in Rayment’s bodymind and biography so radical that it inaugurates a new mode of being-in-the-world. Rayment becomes a ‘new original’ whose personal story puts pressure on the narrative structures Costello attempts to impose upon him (245). In taking recourse to the orthodoxies of conventional narrative systems, she not only betrays the fundamental principles that undergird her account of the sympathetic imagination; she also unwittingly raises the more general prospect that particular orthodoxies of novelistic narrative may themselves be complicit in the perpetuation of exclusionary humanist norms. In doing so, she inadvertently introduces the question of what kinds of lives are available and appropriate for rendering in literary narrative. Costello’s venture beyond the limits of the sympathetic imagination suggests that certain formal conventions of novelistic narrative may themselves be limited in their capacity to represent the lived experiences of disability and animality.

*

The Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination

Costello and Coetzee’s ‘Wounded Animals’56

The long list of theoretical lenses through which Coetzee’s fiction has been analysed must now include disability studies, which has illuminated disability as a thematic current that runs right throughout his body of work. This interest is most evident in his later novels, although, as Paweł

Wojtas reveals in his analysis of ‘fictionalizations of bodily dysfunctions’ in Coetzee’s 1974 novel,

Dusklands (2004), it was an aspect of his fiction from the very start (71). Upon closer inspection, disability emerges as a perennial feature of Coetzee’s work. The spectre of mental illness haunts his portrayal of Magda in In the Heart of the Country (2004); blindness is a central motif in Waiting for the Barbarians (2004), a novel whose plot hinges on the relationship between the Magistrate and the blind ‘barbarian girl’; in Aesthetic Nervousness (2007), Ato Quayson ventures a compelling

117 reading of the eponymous protagonist of Life & Times of Michael K (2004) as autistic; in Foe

(1987), Friday has had his tongue cut out by a former slave owner; and, most explicitly, Age of Iron

(1998) centres on the relationship between Mrs. Curren, an ageing woman with terminal cancer, and Vercueil, who has a disfigured hand. It is in Slow Man, however, that Coetzee’s interest in disability seems finally to reach a critical mass.

Similarly, Coetzee’s long-standing preoccupation with nonhuman animals has intensified over time.

His interest in these relations announces itself at various junctures throughout his career, from

Barbarians, via Michael K, to Disgrace (2000), and, as Louis Tremaine notes, it can be traced all the way back to Dusklands, with its ‘skeletal hound’ and dismembered insects (Dusklands 72, qtd. in Tremaine 588-9). This interest is reflected in a large body of critical work that responds to these engagements. Individual novels like Disgrace have spawned entire cottage industries of human- animal studies scholarship, while perspectives from Singer, author of Animal Liberation (2009), and Smuts, author of Sex and Friendship in Baboons (1985), are woven into the fabric of The Lives of Animals. Though neither novel invites this perspective with the same insistence as Coetzee’s previous work, recent articles by Eleni Philippou and Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice analyse the role of nonhuman animals in two of Coetzee’s most recent works of fiction, The Childhood of Jesus

(2014) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), arguing that (as Philippou puts it) these texts evince ‘a remarkable thematic and conceptual shift in the manner in which Coetzee speaks to the animal’—a shift that hinges on ‘an oppositional binary that could loosely be described as the corporeal versus the otherworldly or spiritual’ (218). In this same connection, Nowak-McNeice ventures a reading of the Jesus novels through Derrida’s concept of ‘divinanimalité’ (6). Irrespective of the primary texts they analyse, however, critical reflections on nonhuman animals in Coetzee’s novels seldom fail to refer back to Costello, whose philosophical—or, better, anti-philosophical—response to the mistreatment of nonhuman animals has come to serve as something of a theoretical touchstone, both for Coetzee scholars invested in the so-called ‘animal question’, and for human-animal studies scholars at large.

Elizabeth Costello is not only a book about nonhuman animals. In fact, only three of the eight

‘lessons’ that make up this odd novel engage the plight of animals in any significant way. Taking the text as a whole, one could feasibly make the case that it is less concerned with animals per se

118 than it is with questions pertaining to the viability, authority, and ethics of literary representation.

These questions are explored throughout Elizabeth Costello, from its first ‘lesson’ (‘Realism’), via its sixth (in which Costello grapples with the ethical stakes of depicting the horrors of the

Holocaust), to its last (in which, apparently marooned in posthumous Kafka-esque limbo, she must grapple with the nature of her vocation as a writer in order to be granted safe passage into the afterlife). Importantly, however, these questions are also central to the two chapters that address nonhuman animal life most directly, ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the

Animals’. As such, to treat Coetzee’s interest in nonhuman animal life and his preoccupation with the complexities of signification as distinct concerns—as Garber, Doniger, Smuts, and Singer all arguably do in their ‘Reflections’ on The Lives of Animals—would be to miss a key point of overlap.57 And it is this overlap, above all else, which best explains why Elizabeth Costello has captured the imaginations of so many literary scholars in human-animal studies and related fields of research. For Costello, literature represents a medium via which a corporeal, affective mode of engagement with nonhuman animals can be enacted. By eliding the limitations of philosophical thought—which Costello argues is prone to abstraction, fosters what Cora Diamond (following

Stanley Cavell) calls ‘deflection’, and, crucially, reaffirms the primacy of the humanist subject— this mode of engagement allows for a reassessment of the ethical responsibilities humans hold with regard to the lives of animals.58

Costello’s argument consists in more than merely disputing long-standing philosophical positions that sanction violence against nonhuman beings. Rather, she disputes the very grounds on which these positions, and their counter-positions, have been articulated and debated. As Elizabeth Anker explains, Costello’s recapitulation of ‘familiar anxieties about the tyranny of instrumental reason and the exclusionary structure of rights’ is but one manifestation of a broader condemnation of ‘the misguided logic driving the animal rights movement’, which ‘inadvertently reinscribes the priority of the human in its very defense of the capacity of animals for humanlike interaction’ (175, emphasis added). ‘For Costello,’ as for Cary Wolfe and likeminded posthumanist thinkers, ‘an alternative to rights must not occasion another analytic abstraction that would either occlude the contingent vulnerability of embodiment or erect another subject-object divide, with all its implications for the species hierarchy as well as other forms of sociopolitical oppression’ (178). Costello’s position may

119 be difficult to express, especially in the language and according to the structures of the very same philosophical discourse whose limitations she wishes to escape. However, if anything, this difficulty only testifies to the boldness of the position she adopts. Costello ventures a means of collapsing the supposed gulf between human self and nonhuman other, and identifies literature as a medium by which this process may be catalysed. In Michael Malay’s words, Costello ‘finds in poetry an entirely different mode of relating to the world, one which allows for the kind of sympathetic attachment she thinks philosophy has denied itself in relation to animal life’ (153).

What Is It Like to Be a Bloom?

To understand how this process is supposed to work, it is necessary to work through Costello’s account of the sympathetic imagination, which begins with a reflection on Thomas Nagel’s famous question: what is it like to be a bat?59 Nagel concludes that, to experience bat being, one would

‘need to be able to experience bat life through the sense modalities of a bat’, and that is impossible

‘because our minds are inadequate to the task—our minds are not bats’ minds’ (Elizabeth 77, 76).

Costello disputes this conclusion, deeming Nagel’s ‘denial that we can know what it is to be anything but one of ourselves’ to be ‘tragically restrictive … and restricted’ (76). Costello draws a broader and more fundamental parallel between human and nonhuman life. ‘To be a living bat is to be full of being,’ she says; ‘being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being’ (77). In this context, questions pertaining to the species boundary are nothing more than

‘secondary considerations’ (77). Costello goes on to reflect with incredulity on the Holocaust—an event she compares to industrial farming practices—and on the indifference of Nazi soldiers to the plight of their victims in the concentration camps. For Costello, these soldiers ‘did not say, “How would it be if I were burning?”’ (79). Instead, ‘they closed their hearts’ and foreclosed the possibility of exercising ‘a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another’ (79, emphasis in original). Circling back to Nagel, Costello maintains that this faculty ‘has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object, the “another”, as we see at once when we think of the object not as a bat … but as another human being’ (79). ‘[T]here is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another,’ she declares (80). ‘There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. If you want proof, consider the following’ (80):

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Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to

think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did not, I

cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event, the point is, Marion Bloom never

existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into

the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat

or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life. (80, emphasis in

original)

Irrespective of how persuasive one finds her logic, Costello’s argument that she can inhabit the lifeworld of a nonhuman animal is premised on her success in thinking her way into the existence of Molly Bloom from James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses (2008). For Costello, it seems, the ability to know what is it like to be a fictional being is the decisive test of the sympathetic imagination.

Furthermore, as she explains in ‘The Poets and the Animals’, an author’s successful exercise of this faculty can be discerned—or, better, felt—in the text that is ultimately composed.

Among the texts Costello deems exemplary in this regard are Ted Hughes’s poems, ‘The Jaguar’

(2003) and ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’ (2003). Unlike Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem ‘The Panther’

(1966), in which Costello understands the eponymous animal to figure ‘as a stand-in for something else’, Hughes’s jaguar poems ‘[body] forth’ their subjects in a dynamic, visceral way (97). Unlike

Rilke, ‘Hughes is feeling his way towards a different kind of being-in-the-world’, and in doing so, allows his reader to ‘know the jaguar not from the way he seems but from the way he moves. The body is as the body moves, or as the currents of life move within it. The poems ask us to imagine our way into that way of moving, to inhabit that body’ (95-6).60 She goes on: ‘With Hughes it is a matter … not of inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body. This is the kind of poetry

I bring to your attention today: poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead the record of an engagement with him’ (96). Developing Costello’s reading, Malay notes that ‘Hughes is partly sculpted by the animal’ he represents; ‘his engagement with the jaguar mesmerizes him. This is because Hughes tries to inhabit another body—and in so doing relinquishes some degree of intellectual control over the other’ (157, emphasis in original).

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‘Keeping Open the Question of Other Lives’

Based on the evidence accrued so far, we can confirm that Costello does exercise the sympathetic imagination in her dealings with Rayment. If she is the author of Slow Man—if Rayment is ‘quite literally the “sentence,” the medium and form through which she gives herself up to … her inspiration’—then it stands to reason that Costello’s composition of Rayment’s narrative, like her composition of Molly’s, relies on her deployment of this faculty (Marais 203). The first intimation of the reasons behind her appearance on his doorstep verifies this reading. ‘“So,” she says. “I am rather a doubting Thomas, as you see.” And when he looks puzzled: “I mean, I wanted to explore for myself what kind of being you are. Wanting to be sure,” she proceeds, and now he is really losing her, “that our two bodies would not just pass through each other”’ (81). I wanted to explore what kind of being you are: just as she might want to explore what it is like to be a bat, or a chimpanzee, or an oyster; just as she might want to explore what it is like to be Molly Bloom.61 The fact that Rayment has a physical disability, and that Costello only arrives in his life in the aftermath of his becoming disabled, only lends further credence to this contention. Rayment is interesting to

Costello because of his impairment—or, more specifically, its ramifications: ‘You came to me, that is all I can say. You occurred to me—a man with a bad leg and no future and an unsuitable passion.

That was where it started’ (85). Had the accident not happened, it seems that Costello would not have been inspired to write Rayment’s story. This makes sense in light of the somatic dimension of the sympathetic imagination, and of the mode of embodied understanding it engenders. In order to write Rayment, Costello must know what it is like to inhabit his body, the mortal vulnerability of which has been thrown into stark relief. We should also note that, like Hughes’s jaguar, Rayment is not simply the subject of Costello’s narrative, but a participant in a relationship of reciprocal dependence. As much of the aforementioned scholarship on Slow Man attests, Costello cannot force

Rayment to follow any course she might wish him to pursue. Just as he is now beholden to her, she is beholden to him. The accident may have been ‘where it started’, but Costello admits that ‘[w]here we go from there I have no idea’ (85). ‘Have you any proposal?’ she asks (85). Rayment does not.

‘Give up on me,’ he tells her (89). ‘I am not an amenable subject, as you will discover before long.

Walk away. I won’t detain you. You will find it a relief to be rid of me. And vice versa’ (89).

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Rayment’s self-assessment is not inaccurate: he is not an ‘amenable subject’ for an author who wishes to engage with him via the medium of the sympathetic imagination. By his own admission,

Rayment tends towards the cold clarity of rational thought rather than the messier operations of raw feeling. Reflecting on his sexual history, Rayment concludes that he is ‘not a man of passion. He is not sure he has ever liked passion, or approved of it. Passion: foreign territory; a comical but unavoidable affliction like mumps, that one hopes to undergo while still young, in one of its milder, less ruinous varieties, so as not to catch it more seriously later on’ (45-6). It is instructive that

Rayment should employ illness as a metaphor for affect. Not only does this demonstrate his disdain for states of emotional and physical turbulence; in doing so, it also establishes the scale of the task with which Costello is faced. Costello, who wishes to establish a form of embodied understanding with her subject, finds herself bound and beholden to a being for whom understanding has little, if anything, to do with the body. As such, even if we find convincing the argument that Costello attempts to bring the sympathetic imagination to bear on Rayment’s narrative, it is less obvious that the attempt is successful.

Perhaps this should not be surprising. After all, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, despite Costello’s impassioned conviction, such a project can never be truly successful. In Elizabeth

Costello, her proposal is met with scepticism by her hosts, with worried concern by her son, John, and with incredulity by her philosopher daughter-in-law, Norma. Admittedly, much of the reasoning behind these characters’ misgivings miss the very point that Costello is trying to make—and yet similar misgivings have been expressed by a number of commentators, including, most notably,

Coetzee himself. In an interview with the Swedish publication Djurens Rätt (Animal Rights),

Coetzee states that there is ‘a strong argument to be made that it is impossible for a human being to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, whereas through the faculty of sympathy … it is possible for one human being to know quite vividly what it is like to be someone else’ (Engström and

Coetzee). Coetzee’s position is not ironclad—he vacillates between declaring that ‘it is not possible to write about the inner lives of animals in any complex way’ and allowing that ‘[inhabiting] the consciousness of an animal’ is ‘at least very difficult’—but the abiding sentiment is one of scepticism. Even if this were possible, he says, it would entail a heavy dose of personification. An analysis of his fiction corroborates this idea. Sam Durrant cites the resistance of Coetzee’s numerous

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‘figures of otherness’ to ‘the attentions of their sympathizers’—Michael K is arguably the strongest example—as proof that the author’s fiction repeatedly and ‘unequivocally rehearses the failure of the sympathetic imagination, the failure of the literary endeavor itself’ (120).

Still, this need not mean that the promise of the sympathetic imagination can be dismissed out of hand. Perhaps it simply requires redefining. Durrant goes on to argue that this very failure ‘is a precondition for a new kind of ethical and literary relation, a relation grounded precisely in the acknowledgement of one’s ignorance of the other, on the recognition of the other’s fundamental alterity. It is as if attentiveness to the difference of the other becomes possible only in the wake of the failure of the project of the sympathetic imagination, the failure to think one’s way into the reality of other lives’ (Durrant 120). In the wake of this failure is an admission, a humility in the face of that which demands attentiveness despite—or precisely because of—its refusal to submit to understanding. In ethical terms, the attempt to know the other as such can be deemed successful only if one paradoxically acknowledges the impossibility of that project. The ‘real’, which exists beyond the grasp of referentiality, can be signified only by the mark of its own absence, by the impossibility of its own signification. The successful exercise of the sympathetic imagination entails an admission of its inevitable limitations. In Durrant’s words, Coetzee’s fiction ‘does not ultimately tell us what it is like to be an ape but works simply to dislodge a particular tradition of enquiry into animal intelligence’ (127). The ‘“true” work of the sympathetic imagination’ inheres in ‘keeping open the question of other lives’ (127).

Monuments to the Impossible

The inclination to ‘keep open the question of other lives’ is evident in the composition of the texts in which Costello identifies the sympathetic imagination at work. This is demonstrated by engaging with Michael Malay’s reading of ‘creaturely encounters’ in the works of Henry David Thoreau,

Cavell, and Coetzee (142). Malay takes the admission that Costello ‘never explicitly spells out a theory regarding the relations between poetry and animal life’ as a prompt to develop her readings of Rilke and Hughes (153). While Malay correctly notes that ‘a definition would be antithetical to her purposes, for what seems to attract her in poetry is precisely its indefinability’, he also observes that ‘a kind of thesis emerges during her seminar’: where ‘[s]ome poems … are capable of their

124 own deflections in relation to animal others’, ‘other poems seem to resist this especially well’ (153).

In Costello’s phrasing, Rilke’s ‘Panther’ is really ‘a stand-in for something else’; in Malay’s words, it is little more than ‘a trope for trapped energy—and it is energy, not the animal, that is the subject of Rilke’s poem’ (Coetzee, Elizabeth 95; Malay 154). By contrast, in Hughes’s ‘Jaguar’ poems,

‘[i]mages and associations are not projected upon the creature, … but seem to emerge from the speaker’s close observation of how the jaguar actually acts and moves’ (154). Malay’s reading— performed only millimetres over the text—sees him venture that Hughes’s use of repetition ‘has the effect of propelling the poem forward as we read in anticipation of similar cadences’ (154-5). Yet, even as ‘the poem surges forward’, other examples of repetition engender ‘a sense that it also looks back at itself’ (155):

The poem’s repetitions sweep us backwards in the movement of going forwards, a dense layering

of sounds and energies which seem, at the verbal level, to mirror something of the jaguar’s hunched

‘running’, the ducking movement of its head, and the sway of its hip as it goes ‘in and out of joint’.

Unlike ‘The Panther’, in which the creature is a ‘stand-in for something else’, the creature in Hughes’s poem seems to be muscling its way into language, ‘Like a cat […] under cover’. (155)

Malay brilliantly connects the reflexive temporality engendered by the poem’s rhythm with the jaguar’s physical movements; the poem’s prospective and retrospective gestures together foster the impression of a pure present of bodily immanence. Again: ‘The body is as the body moves, or as the currents of life move within it. The poems ask us to imagine our way into that way of moving, to inhabit that body’ (Coetzee, Elizabeth 95-6).

This profound attentiveness to the body is one of two key features that Malay identifies in ‘Second

Glance at a Jaguar’. The other is the poem’s admission of its own limits. As successful as Hughes may be in helping us to ‘inhabit that body’, it remains that, ‘as with any poem about any animal,

Hughes cannot escape the prism of language. The jaguar is necessarily described within an all-too- human framework’, and is thus ‘tangled up with human concerns and projections’ (Malay 155).

Malay cites the accumulation of ‘extreme (and self-consciously outlandish) descriptions of the jaguar’ as proof that Hughes’s poem ‘owns up to these inescapable contingencies’ (155). Yet, for

Malay, the poem nevertheless

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manages to gesture towards the jaguar’s otherness, not by transcending figures of speech (an

impossible task in a poem), but by underscoring the provisional nature of each of his descriptions.

By amassing a dizzying array of images to describe the creature, only to then summarily dispense

with those images, the poem foregrounds both the inadequacy of its previous images and a sense

that future images, however precise, will also fail to capture something of how the jaguar moves.

The portrait Hughes completes is also a monument to the impossibility of a complete portrait.

(155)

Malay’s experiment—doing the close reading that Costello never performs herself, in the spirit of

Costello’s own ethical philosophy—demonstrates how the exercise of the sympathetic imagination is supposed to translate into poetic language, how it is meant to work in practice. Yet, like Durrant,

Malay appears to identify the ‘true work’ of the sympathetic imagination in the acceptance that a

‘complete portrait’ of the other is impossible, and in the resultant imperative to ‘keep open’ the question of what it is like to be the other. This is entirely commensurate with Costello’s view when she posits that Hughes’s poetry ‘does not try to find an idea in the animal’—the ‘energy’ of Rilke’s panther, for example—‘but is instead the record of an engagement with him’ (Elizabeth 96). In ethical terms—and Costello would have no option but to agree—Hughes’s poem is successful because of its ambivalence towards its subject, its consciousness of its own aesthetic inadequacy. If

Rilke’s ‘The Panther’ fails because it ‘[finds] an idea in the animal’, Hughes’s ‘Second Glance’ succeeds because it declines to petrify its subject in any such conceptual arrangement.

In substantiating Costello’s argument, Malay presents us with the beginnings of a blueprint for a posthumanist mode of literary engagement with ‘others’ that are never fully knowable as such.

However, it is important to note that Malay’s analysis, like Costello’s, engages exclusively with poetry, which raises the question of whether this blueprint is portable across different genres—a vital question in the context of this dissertation’s journey towards a poetics of posthumanism in the context of literary narratives. Closer scrutiny of Malay’s argument allows us to answer this question in the affirmative. Malay’s corroboration of Costello’s position that particular poems ‘are capable of their own deflections in relation to animal others’ while other poems ‘resist this especially well’ suggests that the relative success or failure of a given literary work is not determined by mode or genre, but hinges on the deployment of certain representational techniques, formal manoeuvres that may be more or less closely associated with a given genre, but are not necessarily exclusive to any

126 particular one (Malay 153). This is borne out by Malay’s reference to Hughes’s ‘extreme (and self- consciously outlandish) descriptions of the jaguar’, which recalls Onno Oerlemans’s perspective on the generative potential of anthropomorphism in literary fiction.

In his discussion of Barbara Gowdy’s novel The White Bone (2000), Oerlemans identifies three

‘categories of anthropomorphism’ in the text: the ‘realistic (scientific)’, the ‘plausibly hypothetical’, and the ‘implausible and fantastical’ (190). It is his reading of the third of these categories that chimes with Malay’s analysis of ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’. This ‘third kind of anthropomorphism

… consists of features of elephant consciousness that seem wildly implausible and utterly unknowable’: the ability to see into the future, for instance (194). These features are so otherworldly that, for Oerlemans, they represent the novel’s attempt ‘not just to suspend disbelief … but also to provoke it’ (194). This ‘[highlights] the intrinsic embarrassment of the anthropomorphic act itself, refusing to let us forget … that we are uncomfortable moving beyond species borders, or that the discourse and history of anthropomorphism contain within it an extraordinary commitment to a fixed hierarchy among species’ (195). This embarrassment ‘[forces] readers to recognize the limits of our belief about other animals, to draw and redraw the boundary between human and other animal species, and individual animals’, and this recognition finally ‘[deconstructs] the very concept of anthropomorphism, forcing us to question which aspects of being and consciousness are, after all, purely human’ (195). In Oerlemans’s reading of Gowdy, as in Malay’s reading of Hughes, the representation of ‘self-consciously outlandish’ dimensions of animal being is tantamount to an admission of the ‘inescapable contingencies’ of the attempt to ‘capture’ a nonhuman animal in literary form in the first place—a manoeuvre that, paradoxically, restores to literature the ethical potential to represent nonhuman animal life without reinscribing humanist norms. We will touch on a similar dynamic in Chapter 5, which reflects on Cary Wolfe’s claim that the ‘excessive rhetoricity’ of the bird poetry of Wallace Stevens inaugurates a nonrepresentational ecological poetics, marking a posthumanist shift in emphasis ‘from “being” to “doing”’ (Ecological 89, ix).62

Malay’s reading is not only a blueprint, however. For our purposes, it is also a barometer, a mark against which Costello’s behaviour in Slow Man can be measured. If we accept Coetzee’s metafictional premise and treat Costello as the implied author of Slow Man, it stands to reason that the novel should present as a record of her engagement with Rayment, rather than an effort to ‘find

127 an idea’ in him. Costello is sufficiently impassioned in her defence of the sympathetic imagination that one would expect her to be rigorously committed to practicing in Slow Man what she preaches in the earlier novel. Faced with Rayment’s resistance to her entreaties, Costello could choose to respect the limits of his knowability and allow his ponderous narrative to progress at its own pace— even if this means that very little actually happens. She could choose to recognise that the aesthetic failure of Slow Man is, in ethical terms, a productive failure. An analysis of Slow Man paints a quite different picture. Unlike Hughes, Costello pays remarkably little heed to how Rayment ‘actually acts and moves’. Hughes’s use of repetition is fundamental to the success of his poem, but Costello finds Rayment’s repetitions tiresome and inconsequential. She demonstrates no consciousness of the ethical potential of her envisioned narrative’s aesthetic inadequacy. Faced with Rayment’s refusal to submit to the instruments of her invention, Costello does not allow Rayment to languish in the illegible opacity of his own being. Rather than ‘keeping open the question of other lives’,

Costello evinces a powerful impulse towards closure. Time and again, and with an archaeologist’s fervour, she insists that Rayment divulge the minutiae of his life—the materials she requires in order to bring Rayment (back) to life, and thus to bring his narrative to completion.

It is the connection between an authorial investment of ‘life’ and the requirements of conventional narrative structures that I am interested in here. As the novel progresses, it becomes evident that

Costello has a ‘tragically restrictive … and restricted’ idea of where Rayment’s narrative should lead, and what is required in order to reach it (Coetzee, Elizabeth 76). A reading of the discourse she employs in her dealings with Rayment will help to illuminate the biopolitical dimensions of these authorial manoeuvrings, as well as the humanist values those manoeuvrings enforce.

*

Animating Rayment

If Costello’s latent fidelity to humanist norms in Slow Man is not immediately apparent, that is perhaps because she seems to embody the opposite tendency, especially compared with Rayment.

Seen from one perspective, as critics have observed, Costello’s arrival in Rayment’s life instantiates a posthumanist brand of interdependence, one that also lies at the heart of her account of the sympathetic imagination. It is Rayment who is determined to remain individual, autonomous. Early

128 in the novel, given some hospital paperwork to complete, he observes that, ‘for the purposes of the form, he is unmarried: unmarried, single, solitary, alone’, and compares his pre-accident solitude with that of ‘certain male animals’ (9, 25). He repeatedly insists that he would ‘prefer to take care of myself’ (10). In fact, he is so thoroughly determined not to be a burden on anyone else that ‘even if the worst comes to the very worst’, he thinks, ‘I will be able to take care of myself’—that is, to end his own life (17, emphasis in original). When he becomes infatuated with his carer, Marijana, this determination begins to wane. He castigates himself for never having had a child; he fantasises about the prospect of being together with Marijana and becoming a father figure to her children; he insinuates himself in their lives with offers of financial assistance, (supposedly) without expectation of repayment. But whether or not one reads this as a marker of a genuine sea change in Rayment’s values, his subscription to humanist norms endures. This is best exemplified by his determination to live without a prosthesis. Fielding questions about his disability from Marijana’s youngest child,

Ljuba, Rayment explains that ‘I have no screws in me. If I had screws I would be a mechanical man.

Which I am not’ (56). Rayment’s insistence on the integrity of his ‘natural’, unalloyed body—which could, under different circumstances, be interpreted as a refusal to conform with the problematic requirement that bodies appear ‘whole’, or ‘complete’—is instead a refusal to acknowledge the fact that the human body is always constituted by countless nonhuman others. Donna Haraway famously contended that ‘we have never been human’ (When Species Meet 1). In word and in deed, Rayment insists upon the opposite.

Seen from another perspective, however—and this is the point I want to emphasise—it is Costello who imposes humanist norms upon Rayment. These norms can be identified in the mode of being- in-the-world presumed by the representational strategies through which she attempts to reinvest

Rayment’s life with the vitality it is supposed to have lost. Despite her protestations to the contrary, these attempts are regular and potent. Shortly after her arrival, Costello assures Rayment that

‘[m]ost of the time you won’t notice I am here’; her involvement in his life will amount to nothing more than ‘a touch on the shoulder, now and then, left or right, to keep you on the path’ (87). Within seven pages, however, she has already assumed a more active role, pointing out to Rayment the likely ramifications of his offer to pay for Marijana’s son, Drago, to attend a prestigious college

(94). Not content with having identified a fault in Rayment’s plan, she proposes an alternative: a

129 meeting with ‘the woman in the lift with the dark glasses’, who briefly caught Rayment’s attention in an earlier scene at the hospital (95).

As in Rayment’s case, Costello’s familiarity with the life story of this mysterious woman—named, incredibly, Marianna—is uncanny, and extends to a conviction that Rayment and Marianna are already ‘acquainted’ through a photograph, taken by the former and featuring the latter, many years previously (96). It later transpires that Marianna is subject to Costello’s authorship, too: ‘She came to me as you came to me’, says Costello to Rayment: ‘A woman of darkness, a woman in darkness.

Take up the story of such a one: words in my sleeping ear’ (115, emphasis in original). Indeed, it is as though Rayment’s obsession with Marijana is the product of a typographical error, a deviation from a course plotted for him by Costello whereby he falls in love with Marianna instead: ‘I say to you: Why not see what you can achieve together, you and Marianna, she blind, you halt?’ (97). Met with Rayment’s characteristic reticence, Costello sets aside any history Rayment may share with

Marianna and adopts a more diplomatic approach: ‘Let me not press you. Let us build your side of the story on the premise that you have had only that single glimpse of her, in the lift. A single glimpse, but enough to ignite desire. From your desire and her need, what will be born? Passion on the grandest of scales? Once last great autumnal conflagration? Let us see. The issue is in your hands, yours and hers’ (98, emphasis added). Already we can see here that Costello is invested in encouraging a very specific, very familiar kind of romance.

The meeting between Rayment and Marianna does take place, but it does not spark the grand passion that Costello has in mind. In fact, it inspires nothing beyond an awkward, fleeting sexual encounter and a post-petit-mortem that leaves Marianna in tears. While it is certainly possible to read this failure as a self-fulfilling prophecy borne of Rayment’s childish determination to reject

Costello’s constructive criticism, it can equally be read as the inevitable outcome of her contrived

(and borderline offensive) pairing of two disabled strangers. Rayment is no more prepared to submit to the artifice of Costello’s envisioned narrative than he will submit to the artifice of a prosthetic leg. By way of response, Costello tries to impress upon Rayment the value of narrative: ‘Nothing that happens in our lives is without a meaning, Paul, as any child can tell you’, she chides him (96).

‘That is one of the lessons stories teach us, one of the many lessons. Have you given up reading stories? A mistake. You shouldn’t’ (96). What she fails to recognise, however, is that Rayment is

130 already authoring his own story; it is just not the kind of story she has in mind for him. Rayment is not interested in Marianna. His love is for Marijana, and his story—however slow, however uninspiring—must blossom from that root.

Costello does not deny that Rayment boasts agency over the progress of his own narrative. In fact, she reminds him of this very fact on multiple occasions: ‘I say it again: this is your story, not mine.

The moment you decide to take charge, I will fade away. You will hear no more from me; it will be as if I had never existed. That promise extends to your new friend Marianna as well. I will retire; you and she will be free to work out your respective salvations’ (100). However, as she continues to speak, the complexities of her agenda come into focus: ‘Think how well you started. What could be better calculated to engage one’s attention than the incident on Magill Road, when young Wayne collided with you and sent you flying through the air like a cat. What a sad decline ever since!

Slower and slower, till by now you are almost at a halt’ (100, emphasis in original). If we were still under the impression that the novel’s title referred solely to Rayment’s restricted physical mobility, this quotation tells us otherwise. Rayment is the titular ‘slow man’ because he makes so little progress—or, more accurately, so little of the kind of progress that Costello is able, or willing, to narrate. His has become the life of slowness and agitation, of long days and longer nights of boredom and melancholy and longing—inappropriate materials for the novel that Costello is evidently determined to compose.63

As the plot develops, Costello’s entreaties increase in force and specificity. Halfway through the novel, after asking Drago for his opinion on whether Rayment should pursue an affair with

Marijana, Costello professes that, along with all the other major characters in the text, she is unhappy: ‘I am unhappy because nothing is happening. Four people in four corners, moping, like tramps in Beckett, and myself in the middle, wasting time, being wasted by time’ (141). The reference to Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (2010) tells its own story. It is not long before

Rayment demands that Costello leave his house, only for the two to be reunited by the riverside, where Costello is feeding the ducks. In what reads as a disingenuous and manipulative move,

Costello presents Rayment with the uncomfortable facts of her homelessness and hunger, before abruptly adopting a more conciliatory tone: ‘As I keep telling myself, Have patience, Paul Rayment did not ask you to descend upon his shoulders. Nevertheless,’ she says, ‘it would be a great help if

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Paul Rayment would hurry up’ (160). Their meeting ends in a hostile stalemate, but their subsequent estrangement is brief. Twenty pages later, Costello returns: ‘she is back, perhaps because she cannot give up on him, but also perhaps because she is not well’ (181).

If she is indeed ailing, it has done little to quench her fire. As the text inches towards its denouement,

Costello’s exasperation reaches new heights when she takes umbrage at Rayment’s intention to send Marijana’s husband, Miroslav, a letter in which he applies for a role as godfather to the Jokić children:

Two days for your word to reach Marijana, two days for her word to come back: we will all expire

of boredom before we have a resolution. This is not the age of the epistolary novel, Paul. Go and

see her! Confront her! Have a proper scene! Stamp your foot (I speak metaphorically)! Shout! Say,

“I will not be treated like this!” That is how normal people behave, people like Marijana and

Miroslav. Life is not an exchange of diplomatic notes. Au contraire, life is drama, life is action,

action and passion! Surely you, with your French background, know that. (227, emphasis in

original)

Costello’s frustration is not so much at the absurdity of Rayment’s proposal, as at the manner in which he intends to make it—and this frustration fuels her explicit imploration that he behave like a conventional protagonist. Latent in her condescending explanation that ‘[t]his is not the age of the epistolary novel’, that ‘normal people’ have ‘proper scenes’, is an accusation that Rayment is abnormal, and that the story of his life is curiously flat, misshapen, as a result. Costello enlists the heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary (2004) as a blueprint for Rayment to follow: ‘We only live once, says Alonso, says Emma, so let’s give it a whirl! Give it a whirl, Paul.

See what you can come up with’ (229, emphasis in original). ‘[S]o that you can put me in a book’, he replies (229). ‘So that someone, somewhere might put you in a book’, Costello counters (229).

‘So that someone might want to put you in a book. Someone, anyone—not just me. So that you may be worth putting in a book. Alongside Alonso and Emma. Become major, Paul. Live like a hero.

That is what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?’ (229, emphasis in original). For Costello, legitimate protagonism of one’s own narrative depends upon a successful enactment of a specific mode of heroism characterised by raw affect and decisive action rather than the cool, rational deliberation to which Rayment tends (230). Her expression of this position amounts to much more than the ‘tap on the shoulder’ to which she earlier promised she would

132 restrict herself. In fact, it is nothing less than a coercion of the ‘slow man’ of the novel’s title into the mould of a classical hero, one whose heroism is predicated on a dramatic assumption of individual agency and made manifest in a narrative arc of tangible progress and overcoming.

Costello’s emphasis on the conditional calls to mind a famous passage from the Poetics, in which

Aristotle makes the distinction between history and tragedy by arguing that ‘the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary’ (77). In order for Costello to bring Rayment’s narrative to fruition, and thereby finally sever the bond between them, Rayment must take the action that is

‘probable or necessary’ in order for his narrative to progress towards resolution. To borrow a

Foucauldian term with which we are already familiar, the ‘possibilities of conduct’ available to

Rayment are circumscribed in accordance with the requirements of a narrative mode that is no less specific—and thus exclusionary—for its enduring ubiquity (Tremain 8). Rayment has to make the

‘happening’ happen. As Costello reminds him on multiple occasions, he has to ‘[p]ush’ (83).

Two features of this imperative bear a humanist aspect that warrants examination. The first is

Costello’s call for Rayment to take action. Repeatedly, and with an insistence that intensifies as the novel proceeds, Costello tries to make the ‘slow man’ of the novel’s title speed up. In doing so, she betrays a tacit subscription to what Mel Y. Chen describes as ‘a particular political grammar, what linguists call an animacy hierarchy, which conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of non-living material in orders of value and priority’ (13). In Animacies

(2012), Chen explores the ‘fluidity and contingency’ of the concept of animacy, and observes that it not only ‘works in different ways for different cultures’ but also ‘indicates different hierarchicalizations of matter’ (29). Consequently, it is important ‘to distinguish between relatively dominant formulations of animacy hierarchies and relatively subordinated ones’—and that is what

Chen does (29). One particularly dominant formulation is identified in the work of linguist John

Cherry, which ‘asserts that an adult male who is “free” (as opposed to enslaved), able-bodied, and with intact linguistic capacities, one who is also familiar, individual, and positioned nearby, stands at the top of the hierarchy as the most “animate” or active agent within grammars of ordering’ (Chen

27). A rational, autonomous, nondisabled adult male replete with ‘intact linguistic capacities’—one could hardly wish for a more accurate description of the figure of ‘the human’ that anchors the

133 humanist tradition. Meanwhile, in comparison with this dominant figure, other ‘objects, animals, substances, and spaces are assigned constrained zones of possibility and agency’ (13).

Chen’s objective is to explore (and explode) the borders that delimit these ‘zones of possibility’.

‘What if nonhuman animals, or humans stereotyped as passive, such as people with cognitive and physical disabilities, enter the calculus of animacy,’ Chen asks; ‘what happens then?’ (3). Chen poses this question with a view to destabilising conventional animacy hierarchies and the value systems constructed upon them. Indeed, animacy makes for such an effective conceptual rubric exactly because it allows Chen to think beyond traditional understandings of ‘inanimate, deadness, lowness, nonhuman animals (rendered as insensate), the abject, the object’ (30). When Chen talks about disabled people and nonhuman animals ‘entering into the calculus of animacy’, they are not talking about an entrance into the calculus of traditional animacy hierarchies, but a reformulation of the logic upon which oppositions such as ‘dynamism/stasis’ and ‘life/death’ rely (3). Costello’s project, by contrast, appears to abide by a more traditional logic—and it is at this stage that the biopolitical aspect of the relation between Costello and Rayment begins to clarify. For Costello, the resolution of Rayment’s narrative requires that he display a dynamism characteristic of dominant conceptions of what constitutes a valuable life, rather than the deathly stasis in which he finds himself entrenched. For Chen, ‘animacy hierarchies are precisely about which things can or cannot affect—or be affected by—which other things in a specific scheme of possible action’ (30). Costello needs Rayment to climb back up the ‘politically dominant’ animacy hierarchy so that he can exercise what qualifies as meaningful agency within the scheme of possible action allowed by

Costello’s envisioned economy of meaning (30).

In this connection, we might consider the figures of two nonhuman animals enlisted to describe

Rayment. Thrown from his bicycle on the novel’s opening page, Rayment flies through the air ‘like a cat’, a simile that Costello approvingly deems well ‘calculated to engage one’s attention’ (100).

Later in the novel, however, Costello describes Rayment as having a ‘tortoise character’ (228).

‘Why do you call me a tortoise?’ Rayment asks (228). ‘Because you sniff the air for ages before you stick your head out’, she replies (228). ‘Because every blessed step costs such an effort’ (228).

Costello insists that she is not asking Rayment ‘to become a hare’, but the implication remains: feline leaping is preferable to the methodical and contemplative plodding to which he tends (228).

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This should come as no surprise: as we already know, Costello is profoundly impressed with Ted

Hughes’s exercises in inhabiting the rippling, sinuous body of the captive jaguar. On reflection, however, one cannot help but wonder whether Costello would lavish the same praise on an equally nuanced portrayal of a testudine subject in a terrarium. Her rhetorical flattening of the hierarchical

‘animal kingdom’ in Elizabeth Costello—‘I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life’—is not borne out by her rhetorical manoeuvres in Slow Man, which betray a lingering attachment to the dominant animacy hierarchies whose biopolitical effects Chen excavates, and thus to the same humanist ideals with which Costello elsewhere takes issue.

The imperative to assume of a greater measure of animacy (as the term is conventionally construed) is not merely a tacit pledge of allegiance to humanist principles in itself; it is also a prerequisite for

Rayment’s narrative to reach its denouement, and thus for Costello and Rayment to be liberated from the odd partnership into which they have been thrust. In other words, Costello not only tries to coerce a disabled character into modes of action to which he is resistant; if he acquiesces, the result will be the reinstitution of individual autonomy for both. This is the second humanist aspect of Costello’s imperative: if Rayment follows her lead, the bond of interdependence between them, and on which many critical examinations of Slow Man concentrate, will be broken. Rayment’s exercise of the particular mode of agency advocated by Costello will see their Baradian relation of intra-action revert to one of simple interaction. Costello may usher Rayment away from a life of waiting and solitude towards a life lived outdoors, among the countless others with and through whom he and his life could be remade—but this posthumanist vision is premised on his regaining a decidedly humanist brand of autonomy. Were it not for the accident, Rayment would not have found himself drawn into the complex relations of interdependence he now attempts to negotiate, and may never have had cause to reassess the nature of his entanglement with the world at large.

Though Costello does not explicitly advocate that Rayment overcome his disability, she nevertheless ramifies a normative onto-epistemology utterly at odds with the attitudes she expounds in her discourse on nonhuman animals.

As we have seen, the relation between the calibre of a being’s animacy and the value attributed to its life is itself related to the question of what makes a life suitable for rendering in narrative. Latent

135 in Costello’s exhortations is the notion that the life of a tortoise, for example, would be inappropriate for such rendering, at least in comparison with the more palpably dynamic life of a more visibly

‘active’ creature. This invites us to entertain the idea that certain bodyminds lend themselves to representation in novelistic narrative more than others—or, more accurately, that particular conventions of novelistic representation are so naturalised that certain bodyminds exceed (and thereby expose) the limits of their representational capacity. In other words, some aspects of worldly existence overspill the limits of even this most versatile of literary forms. A reflection on the history of the novel might seem to recommend against pursuing this line of enquiry. One feature of the novel form that distinguished it from earlier literary modes was the kind of formal malleability that one might deem a prerequisite for the portrayal of diverse, mutable bodyminds. As Ian Duncan explains in Human Forms (2019), ‘late Enlightenment anthropology supplied a new … novelistic subject—unformed, malleable, finding himself in time—as well as a new conception of the novel’s alleged formlessness, now legible as a technical equipment—temporal extensiveness, openness to contingency, internal heterogeneity and variability—for the representation of evolutionary becoming’ (3). However, the variable suitability of the ‘technical equipment’ of the novel for the representation of different types of beings exposes the investment of the novel form in particular, normative regimes of spatiality, temporality, and causality. If we acknowledge that disabled humans and nonhuman animals understand and experience time and space in ways unfathomable to a normate human being, it becomes plausible to speculate that representational strategies typical of the novel may better reflect the operations of ‘normal’ bodyminds than those of the countless human and nonhuman beings whose embodiment departs from that norm. In the last section of this chapter,

I explore this prospect by turning my attention to the novel’s conclusion, and to the terms on which

Rayment and Costello finally part company.

*

A Tortured Lesson: Costello’s Failed Restoration

In Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012), philosopher Catherine

Malabou juxtaposes ‘the usual order of things’, in which the ‘changes and metamorphoses of a life

… appear as the marks and wrinkles of a continuous, almost logical process of fulfillment’, against

136 exceptional cases in which, ‘[a]s a result of serious trauma, or sometimes for no reason at all, the path splits and a new, unprecedented persona comes to live with the former person, and eventually takes up all the room’ (1). In such cases, a ‘new being comes into the world for a second time, out of a deep cut that opens in a biography’ (2). Rayment’s accident may or may not qualify as the kind of rupture Malabou has in mind, but it certainly precipitates a radical change. Like literature itself, his disability defamiliarises the world, forcing him to apprehend it anew and to reevaluate his place within it. The fragmentary, disorientating scenes with which the novel begins—the moment he is struck by the car; foggy recollections of being rushed into hospital; a confrontation with his body, which now feels foreign to him—read like a portrait of a kind of birth, a new beginning that requires an unlearning of old ways of being. Slow Man can thus be read as a kind of Bildungsroman, a novel of (re)formation in the wake of a traumatic event that requires one to inhabit the world differently.

It would not be the first text to be characterised as such. G. Thomas Couser, for example, describes

Simi Linton’s memoir My Body Politic (2007) as ‘a kind of disability bildungsroman’, and parallels between Linton’s memoir and Coetzee’s novel recommend that Slow Man be described in the same terms (Signifying 186). Both begin with road traffic accidents that alter their protagonists’ bodies radically and irrevocably, thereby inaugurating their new lives as disabled people. Both Linton and

Rayment have no option but to learn how to apprehend and navigate the world afresh. Nevertheless, there is an important difference between the two texts in terms of what this process of (re)formation actually entails. As Tanja Reiffenrath explains, Linton’s story progresses through ‘a sequence of scenes in which the disabled body yields her pleasure and in which the dichotomy of ability and disability is dissolved’, eventually reaching a key scene in which a group of disability activists dance together (158). Here, ‘dancing is re-defined, since the dancers do not attempt to imitate standard forms of dance or mask their difference … but instead create and celebrate alternative forms of movement’ (158). This acceptance and celebration of bodily difference is the telos of a

Bildungsroman in which the protagonist’s development is towards a new way of being-in-the- world, one suited to the bodymind she has come to inhabit. By contrast, the Bildungsroman that

Costello is eager to compose is trained in a different direction, one that confirms her investment in the humanist values from which she is supposedly so eager to depart. The conclusion of the novel provides ample evidence to support this argument.

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At the end of Slow Man, Rayment, accompanied by Costello, visits the Jokić family at their home.

He is convinced that Drago has taken an antique photograph from his collection and replaced it with a copy, and he wants the original returned. Marijana’s reply to the accusation is surprising: ‘What is this thing, original photograph? You point camera, click, you make copy. That is how camera works. Camera is like photocopier. So what is original? Original is copy already’ (245). Rayment’s response speaks volumes. ‘That is nonsense, Marijana. Sophistry. A photograph is not the thing itself. Nor is a painting. But that does not make either of them a copy. Each becomes a new thing, a new real, new in the world, a new original’ (245). Rayment’s logic, consistent throughout the text, follows that an approximate representation of something is permissible only if the act of rendering entails a change of medium. If the copy is of the same medium as the original, it is worthless, even contemptible. His commitment to this idea is demonstrated again soon afterwards. It transpires that

Drago, far from wishing to steal from Rayment, has been hard at work building something for him: a bespoke recumbent bicycle to replace the bike he lost during the accident, the likes of which he can no longer ride. Rayment is filled with gratitude, and humbly accepts the gift, but quietly retains misgivings: ‘He has never ridden one before, but he dislikes recumbents instinctively, as he dislikes prostheses, as he dislikes all fakes’ (255). The recumbent is, after all, just another bicycle, a direct replacement for an original that, to all intents and purposes, is lost forever.

Predictably, Costello is enthused by the prospect of Rayment using this ingenious device—but, this time, Rayment declines to voice his resistance. He is content to let the matter rest, just as he is content to indulge Costello’s romantic theory that a passing motorcyclist is Drago: ‘It was probably not Drago. Too much of a coincidence, too neat. … But let them pretend nevertheless that the one in the red helmet was Drago. “Ah Drago,” he repeats dutifully, “ah for youth!”’ (262). Costello has the ‘neat’ ending she has been attempting to fashion, replete with Rayment ready to ride a bike for the first time since the novel’s first words, and he allows it, thereby allowing the novel to finally reach its conclusion. However, the textual evidence strongly suggests that he remains committed to a different course of action—or, rather, inaction. Costello has attempted to restore Rayment, using language to manipulate him into a fresh version of his old self: the human equivalent of a prosthetic leg, or a recumbent bicycle. She has not allowed Rayment to be the new person he has become as a result of the ‘deep cut’ in his biography, opened by the accident, and ratified by his disability.

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The final sentence of the novel sees Rayment and Costello finally part ways: ‘he leans forward and kisses her thrice in the formal manner he was taught as a child, left right left’ (263). The novel concludes with their bond being broken, and, intriguingly, three words—left right left—strongly redolent of walking. The implication of this quiet reference, I think, is not that Rayment has been restored to the mode of being-in-the-world he enjoyed prior to the accident. Rather, it is that he has escaped the narrative scaffolding that Costello has constructed around him, and is now able to move forward in a direction entirely his own. What this direction may be, we do not know—and that is precisely the point. In exiting the stage set by Slow Man, Rayment is leaving behind his old ways of inhabiting the world and, with them, the old, familiar structures by which meaning was made of his life. He is not simply leaving Costello; he is leaving behind an economy of meaning that is unfit for his purposes under his renovated circumstances. Like Michael K fleeing into the wilderness as the Medical Officer vainly attempts to cast nets of meaning over his disappearing figure, Rayment escapes the metaphorical ‘camps’ that would coerce him into belonging within a normative, humanist onto-epistemology.64 He evades the ‘idea’ Costello has determined to find in him in search of structures that do no violence to the being he has become. ‘With a little ingenuity, it seems to me, Mrs Costello,’ says Rayment, ‘one can torture a lesson out of the most haphazard sequence of events’ (198). This is precisely what she has done in Slow Man, and what, with the novel’s dying words, he has managed to escape. On the other side of the novel’s final page—signified, as it were, by the mark of its own absence—is the promise of a more versatile, capacious poetics, one that does not insist upon aligning Rayment with a normative brand of protagonism fuelled by a traditional conception of animacy. In leaving the operations of such a poetics to the imagination, the novel confirms its own aesthetic limitations, and its metafictional critique of the humanist commitments manifest in Costello’s authorial approach is brought to completion.

Towards the end of the novel, apparently without irony, Costello accuses Rayment of sounding like a character from a work of fiction. ‘[T]he more I listen, the more convinced I am that the key to your character lies in your speech’, she says (231). ‘You speak like a book’ (231). What she fails to recognise is that this artifice is of her own making. Confronted with the limits of the sympathetic imagination, she has blazed forward as if she could in fact inhabit Rayment’s being, dismissing all evidence to the contrary. ‘Mr Rayment, rhyming with payment,’ Costello says at one point (192,

139 emphasis in original). ‘Rhyming with vraiment’, he retorts (192, emphasis in original). Vraiment: really, truly; the reality that Costello only thinks she can access. Convinced that she can know ‘what kind of being’ Rayment is, she has ended up ‘finding an idea’ in him, instead. Costello would argue that if she can know what it is like to be another human, then she can know what it is like to be a nonhuman animal. But this is not the only way to bypass the species divide. As I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, a more persuasive theory—a very Derridean one—would follow that one cannot know what it is like to be a nonhuman animal, and so one cannot know what it is like to be a human, either. It is Costello, not Rayment, who is mistaken. It is Costello, not Rayment, who is overburdened with nostalgia for a lost past—the past, perhaps, of Madame Bovary—and insists upon the value and viability of rehabilitation.

Indeed, it appears that her nostalgia is not simply for Rayment’s lost mobility, but for an antiquated conception of animacy on which a highly circumscribed understanding of the basic requirements of novelistic narrative relies. For all his avuncular grumblings, Rayment seeks to construct and inhabit the kinds of new kinship formations on which much posthumanist theory insists. If his attempts to do so are misplaced—and, as the long-suffering Marijana would attest, they surely are—this is because he is ill advised by the implied author who takes up residence in his home and in his life.

It is Costello, not Rayment, who must reappraise her approach. In the final reckoning, her need for

Rayment to live a narratable life says more about the limits of what she considers ‘narratable’ than it does about Rayment’s struggle to come to terms with his renegotiated circumstances. Slow Man’s metafictional conceit—one made possible by the versatility of the novel form—ends up revealing that this versatility can be made to serve some thoroughly normative ends.

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CHAPTER 4

Conspiracies ‘Becoming Without’ and ‘Breathing With’ in Paul Auster’s Timbuktu

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The only person that has a plural, even when it is in the singular—or rather, precisely

because it is in the singular—is the third. But this is because, strictly speaking, it is a non-

person. Its peculiarity … resides in it being neither singular nor plural. It breaks down the

traditional opposition, typical of the semantics of the person, between these two modes. By

not being a person, by being constitutively impersonal, it is both singular and plural.

Roberto Esposito, Third Person 108-109

*

‘Mr. Bones knew that Willy wasn’t long for this world. The cough had been inside him for over six months, and by now there wasn’t a chance in hell that he would ever get rid of it’ (Auster, Timbuktu

3). So begins Paul Auster’s novel Timbuktu (1999), a tale of a man and his dog—or, perhaps more appropriately, of a dog and his human. The dog is Mr. Bones, ‘a hodgepodge of genetic strains— part collie, part Labrador, part spaniel, part canine puzzle’ (5). The human is Willy G. Christmas, a homeless amateur poet and inventor with a history of mental health issues and now, finally, a grave illness. The novel’s opening line marks Mr. Bones’s grudging admission that Willy’s illness is one from which he is unlikely to recover. This prophecy proves well founded. The first half of Timbuktu follows the pair as they suffer through Willy’s final days on the mean streets of Baltimore; the second chronicles Mr. Bones’s increasingly desperate attempts to survive, and to fashion a new life for himself, in the wake of Willy’s passing.

For Mr. Bones, the prospect of Willy’s imminent demise is nothing short of terrifying, and not only for the reasons one might immediately expect:

What was a poor dog to do? Mr. Bones had been with Willy since his earliest days as a pup, and

by now it was next to impossible to imagine a world that did not have his master in it. Every

thought, every memory, every particle of the earth and air was saturated with Willy’s presence.

Habits die hard, and no doubt there’s some truth to the adage about old dogs and new tricks, but it

was more than just love or devotion that caused Mr. Bones to dread what was coming. It was pure

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ontological terror. Subtract Willy from the world, and the odds were that the world itself would

cease to exist. (4)

These opening sentences advertise the relationship between Willy and Mr. Bones as far deeper and more complex than conventional conceptions of dog as ‘man’s best friend’ allow. Willy’s presence in Mr. Bones’s life is so pervasive as to have become constitutive of his world—indeed, of the very possibility of being. On the level of plot, the profundity of this bond is emphasised through the punctuation and complication of the narrative’s linear chronological progression by analepses via which the reader learns how Willy and Mr. Bones came to be such dedicated companions. On the level of form, it is emphasised by Auster’s decision to deploy an omniscient third-person narrator and write in the free indirect style, which allows him to focalise the narrative through a variety of perspectives, prime among which is that of Mr. Bones. In combination with the two characters’ explicit testimony regarding the depth of their friendship, Timbuktu’s temporal malleability and perspectival reflexivity render the text a multi-faceted portrayal of the generative power of inter- species relationality.

Inspired by developments in human-animal studies, posthumanism, and related fields of research, numerous critical responses to Timbuktu interrogate the calibre of the novel’s central interspecies relationship. Wendy Woodward’s 2014 article on ‘“Disabilities” and Trans-Species Connections’ in three works of fiction, Timbuktu included, is exemplary in this regard. Woodward reads her chosen texts as representing human characters as ‘profoundly connected to nonhuman animals’ and, more specifically, as ‘[foregrounding] deep affiliations between cognitively disabled humans and their dogs’ (27-8). Taking her lead from Cary Wolfe’s insistence ‘that we think beyond constructing service animals, like guide dogs, as merely instrumental in the quest for the disabled human to be seamlessly incorporated into the liberal social formation’, Woodward identifies in these narratives what Wolfe calls an ‘irreducibly different and unique form of subjectivity’ (What is Posthumanism?

141). This subjectivity ‘is neither Homo sapiens nor Canis familiaris, neither “disabled” nor

“normal,” but something else altogether, a shared trans-species being-in-the-world constituted by complex relations of trust, respect, dependence, and communication’ (28, emphasis in original).

Despite this dissertation’s determination to think disability and animality together, my interest in

Woodward’s article does not derive from its attempt to do the same. Rather, I want to highlight this

142 article for two (related) reasons. Firstly, as I have already suggested, it exemplifies the burgeoning critical and theoretical focus among literary scholars on the generative potential of relations between humans and nonhuman animals, arguably best exemplified by Susan McHugh’s Animal Stories:

Narrating across Species Lines (2011). McHugh’s monograph concentrates on two types of text that represent complex forms of interspecies relationality, which she classifies as ‘Intersubjective

Fictions’ and ‘Intercorporeal Narratives’, respectively (25, 113). These terms double as excellent descriptors of the portrayals of ‘trans-species connections’ in which Woodward is interested.

Woodward comments on Timbuktu’s ‘intertwining’ of human and nonhuman animal perspectives, and describes the bond between Willy and Mr. Bones in terms of Ralph Acampora’s concept of symphysis, a ‘jointly held form of bodily consciousness’ which traverses and unsettles species boundaries (Woodward 36; Acampora 114). Woodward’s intervention is therefore emblematic of a posthumanist approach that attends to narratives which eschew the privileging of an autonomous human subject to focus on identifying and analysing complex modes of interspecies kinship and mutual becoming.

Secondly, I am interested in the conclusion that Woodward reaches: that although ‘[t]rans-species affinities may be sources of love and interconnection … not one [of these affinities] prevails’ in the three texts she analyses (39). ‘To reach the ethical core of all these narratives,’ says Woodward, ‘is to be assured … that the sharing of trans-species being is, in itself, a potential source of joy, love and creativity, but its very groundlessness and vulnerability cannot hold within cultures which negate the nonhuman and those with disabilities’ (39). While I am not entirely persuaded by the means by which Woodward reaches this conclusion, her identification of the contingency of these relations represents a promising starting point for my reading of Timbuktu as a dramatisation of the reemergence of a humanist mode of subjecthood from a posthuman condition of shared trans- species being. As such, my aim is not so much to critique Woodward’s interpretation of Timbuktu as to build upon it, demonstrating its limitations in the process. Like Woodward, I read Timbuktu as a representation of a posthuman subjectivity; and, like Woodward, I understand death as a force that disrupts ‘the potential for trans-species relationships’ in the novel. However, where Woodward understands death as ‘an undeniable contradiction of the humanist subject’, I understand Willy’s death to catalyse the reinscription of humanist subjecthood, instead (26). Reading Willy and Mr.

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Bones’s ‘trans-species connection’ through the work of Vinciane Despret and Donna Haraway, this chapter argues that man and dog have together fashioned what Despret calls a mode of extended subjectivity. Willy’s death engenders two significant, related developments: Mr. Bones’s incipient understanding of himself as an individual being who must navigate an anthropocentric world on his own, and his emergence into the domain of narrative agency. In the same moment that the fact of

Willy’s death becomes irrefutable—that is, in the very first line of the novel—the protagonists’ extended subjectivity is curtailed, and Mr. Bones slips into a state of what Judith Butler calls precarity. This shift marks Mr. Bones’s inauguration into a humanist mode of subjecthood of which his role as the principal focaliser of the narrative is both the product and the expression.

In this respect, Timbuktu bears close comparison with Slow Man. Since Costello is the implied author of that novel, her presence is its ‘enabling condition’: without Costello, Slow Man would be a very different story—if it could even be to begin with. As we have seen, however, the ballad of

Paul Rayment, as written by Costello, can be represented only on the terms of a humanist narrative grammar—and since this grammar is unfit for the purpose of representing Rayment’s life story,

Rayment parts ways with Costello, thereby exiting the narrative into which she has attempted to write him, and drawing Slow Man to its close. This chapter argues that Timbuktu also relies on an

‘enabling condition’—namely, Willy’s demise. Willy’s passing severs the posthumanist mode of trans-species subjectivity that he shares with his canine friend, and this pressures Mr. Bones into the mould of the autonomous humanist subject—a subject ‘fit’ to assume responsibility for the focalisation of a literary narrative. Like Slow Man, then, Timbuktu presents as a dramatisation and critique of the inadequacy of the technical equipment through which it is bound to (mis)represent its protagonist. It formally embodies the same humanist commitments that its representation of Mr.

Bones’s subjectivity attempts to challenge; indeed, its enactment of those commitments actually constitutes that challenge. Unlike Slow Man, however, Timbuktu does more than gesture towards the possibility of an alternative representational praxis, that is, towards a poetics of posthumanism.

In fact, it actively demonstrates one means by which such a poetics might be enacted: the creation of a heteroglossic narrative voice which encompasses a rich multiplicity of human and nonhuman perspectives that are not simply inextricable, but indistinguishable from one another.

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The identification of this voice represents a development of the argument elaborated by Dominic

O’Key’s article ‘Animal Collectives’ (2020), which was discussed in the Introduction. We recall

O’Key’s insistence that ‘the lack of an animal collective voice within fiction is symptomatic of the novel form’s individuating logics, which produce a conception of bounded personhood that is coded as ontologically human’ (74). Animal narration in the first-person singular may ‘[extend] the realm of narrative possibility towards’ nonhumans, but it does so in a manner that ‘risks decollectivising animals’, thus ‘foreclosing the liberatory horizons’ made possible by animal studies and obscuring the same ‘posthumanist horizon’ it might otherwise clarify (74). Where O’Key proffers a collective animal voice in the first-person ‘we’ as a riposte to the limited capacity of the novel form to sustain a representation of nonhuman animal subjectivity, I argue that Timbuktu offers a more compelling, posthumanist formal counter to the novel’s ‘individuating logics’. Roberto Esposito’s scholarship on relations between personal pronouns and the category of personhood in his book Third Person

(2012) offers us a basis on which to think the narrative voice of Timbuktu as an impersonal narrative voice that inaugurates a mode of what we might call companion narration.65

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Extended Subjectivity, Companion Species, and ‘Becoming With’

Philosopher of science and human-animal studies scholar Vinciane Despret opens her article ‘The

Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds’ (2008) by questioning the validity of the ‘we’ that she takes to underpin most, if not all, philosophical attempts to address the so-called ‘animal question’. Echoing Derrida’s critique of the corralling of innumerable nonhuman beings into the monolithic category of ‘the Animal’, Despret cites the response of fellow philosopher (and animal trainer) Vicki Hearne to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (in)famous contention that ‘[i]f a lion could talk, we could not understand him’: ‘What does he mean? That if my lion Sudan started talking to me, we would stop being able to understand one another?’ (Wittgenstein 223; Hearne 168).66 For

Hearne, Wittgenstein’s premise makes little sense. Her faux-naïveté demonstrates that, to her, it is self-evident that she and Sudan comprise their own ‘we’, with their own ways of communicating with one another. By contrast, Wittgenstein’s ‘we’ presents as an exclusively human collective whose definition of what qualifies as communication is profoundly anthropocentric.67 For Despret,

145 this ‘we’ represents ‘an enrolment, a collective capture in a problem whose terms, which are given from the outset, we have to accept’ (124). Yet Despret refuses to accept this ‘we’, and the rest of her article sketches the (necessarily fluid) contours of a more capacious first-person plural, one she describes in terms of extended subjectivity: a mode of subjectivity collectively fashioned and inhabited by human and nonhuman; a discursive space in which both are implicated, but into which neither is ultimately subsumed.

Despret’s paradigmatic example of relationships in which this kind of extended subjectivity is co- created is that of those between livestock and their breeders. Along with her colleague, Jocelyn

Porter, Despret researched these relations by interviewing numerous breeders, specifically those

‘who we thought would be both interesting and interested in our questions’ (129). Porter and

Despret started from Porter’s premise that ‘an interesting and reliable manner of talking about the relations between breeders and their animals was to consider that they were working together’—a premise which ‘permits the multiple aspects of their relationship to be thought in a way that other concepts cannot grasp: the judgement that animals make about humans, … the contrast between exploitation and collaboration, the question of the sentiment of accomplishment, that of gift and exchange’, and so on (129, emphasis added). The same spirit of collaboration also informed their methodology. Wary of the asymmetrical power relations that characterise much scientific research, they eschewed the ethos of detachment by which scholars traditionally abide, and asked the breeders to participate in the formulation of the questions they would answer (132). This approach, which works on the understanding that ‘problems are only interesting if they interest’, led to numerous testimonies affirming that ‘animals know us in a manner that is sometimes incomprehensible for us’ (132-3). In Despret’s account, human and animal are thus implicated in an oscillating dance of educated guesswork vis-à-vis the perspectives and intentions of one another: ‘Meanings are constructed in a constant movement of attunement, which makes them emerge’ (125, emphasis in original).

It is through this process, viable only on those farms ‘where humans and animals talk to each other, make each other propositions, get on and present modes of subjectivity to each other’, that extended subjectivities emerge (133). ‘The breeding apparatus,’ Despret states, ‘is an apparatus that creates subjectivities’ (133). According to Despret, these farms are ‘situations in which humans and animals

146 work together. They are, above all, situations in which humans and animals accomplish things together. I could say it again in other terms … [T]hey are situations of the extensions of subjectivity.

What makes us “one of us” for beings of one species will, like a proposition, overlap with what will become “one of us” for beings of another species’ (128-9). This theory recalls the philosophy of

Donna Haraway, and specifically her work on companion species and processes of becoming with.

At the beginning of When Species Meet, Haraway writes that ‘[t]o be one is always to become with many’ (4, emphasis in original). The beings we conceptualise as individuals are, for Haraway, not simply always entangled with but endlessly constituted and reconstituted by their innumerable others. The stasis of nouns cedes to the dynamism of verbs: in any given interaction—or, in Karen

Barad’s phrasing, intra-action—‘[t]he partners do not precede the meeting; species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters’ (4). Haraway pushes the point: ‘[t]he partners do not precede the relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with: those are the mantras of companion species’ (17). We can see here that the category of companion species describes the highly mutable, deeply intimate relationships that make, unmake, and remake the vast, diverse array of beings imbricated in them. The dynamic, multitudinous character of the supposedly individual self is elegantly encapsulated by the interplay between the singular and the plural when Haraway describes ‘meeting my companion species, who are my maker’ (4).

According to the terms of Haraway’s philosophy—and, indeed, of Barad’s agential realism—the beings who (re)constitute the principal characters in Timbuktu are so numerous as to be untraceable.

All beings ‘become with’ a massive, variegated, cast of others, human and nonhuman. The concepts of companion species and extended subjectivity, however, are less universal; they become relevant only under certain (temporary, contingent) circumstances. Not every ‘other’ can be described in the terms of companion species, and extended subjectivities are the product of highly specific forms of relationality—yet both concepts are pertinent to the trans-species relationship at the heart of

Timbuktu. The first half of the novel is saturated with evidence of Willy and Mr. Bones working together, both in specific situations and in a more general sense. The nomadic life of a homeless man and his dog demands this kind of cooperation; indeed, Willy’s original rationale for bringing

Mr. Bones into his life is based on his need for help in negotiating the challenges of sleeping rough:

‘He thought of a gun, but weapons were abhorrent to him, and so he settled on the next best thing

147 known to man: a bodyguard with four legs’ (27). At first blush, this reasoning might smack of crude instrumentalism, not least in view of the troubling metaphorical comparison between weapon and pet. However, their relationship quickly graduates beyond the status of a straightforward practical arrangement. Willy and Mr. Bones become vital sources of guidance, fascination, protection, solace, and inspiration for one other, not simply willing but wanting to hear what the other has to say, irrespective of the potential for messages to get lost in translation.

Thus constellated, they accomplish things together: survival, certainly, but other things as well.

They conspire to pull off a deception that requires Willy to pretend to be blind, with Mr. Bones playing the role of his seeing-eye dog (120). Willy, infatuated with the notion that dogs can experience aesthetic pleasure, sets about designing and constructing a ‘symphony’ of smells—an

‘olfactory art … an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it’—and enlists Mr. Bones as his research assistant (41). The spirit in which the experiment is conducted recalls the ethos of

Porter and Despret’s methodology. The design process is shot through with constant conversation between researcher and research subject, so that the distinction between the two begins to blur:

Willy ‘asked for his opinions, solicited his advice, and begged his indulgence to serve as a guinea pig for the numerous trials and errors that followed. The dog had rarely felt so honoured, so implicated in the throb of human affairs’ (41). The notion of a dog being ‘honoured’ by his

‘implication in human affairs’ might appear problematic, were it not for the fact that the idea behind the experiment is borne of Willy’s implication in the throb of canine affairs: ‘Mr. Bones was a dog, and the truth was that Willy took pleasure in that dogness, found no end of delight in watching the spectacle of his confrere’s canine habits’ (36-7). Mr. Bones frames their project as a shared enterprise: ‘They were collaborating on something important, enduring hardships together in the name of scientific progress’ (42). Their common attempt to investigate nonhuman subjectivity is thus itself premised on a process of ‘becoming with’, of fashioning and inhabiting a form of extended subjectivity. Willy attends to Mr. Bones’s needs and desires in more direct, selfless ways, too. When the dog speaks, his human listens: ‘Mr. Bones was always free to put in his two cents, and whenever he did so his master would give him his full attention, and to look at Willy’s face as he watched his friend struggle to make like a member of the human tribe, you would have sworn that he was hanging on every word’ (7). Willy even fantasises about an ‘Independent Republic of

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Dogs’ and his assumption of a (subservient) role in that hypothetical country: ‘I’d move there and work for you, Mr. Bones. I’d fetch your slippers and light your pipe. I’d get you elected prime minister. Anything you want, boss, and I’d be your man’ (85). These speculative achievements are flights of fancy, but they are also extrapolations of the very real successes made possible by their constant cooperation.

Through this process, Willy and Mr. Bones do not simply become interdependent; they become with one another, (re)producing one another in the comprehensive sense in which Haraway employs that term. Consider again the opening paragraphs of the novel, and Mr. Bones’s sense that ‘[e]very thought, every memory, every particle of the earth and air was saturated with Willy’s presence’, leading him to conclude that Willy’s death would literally be the end of the world (4). Though Mr.

Bones does not explicitly express concern that his own ontological existence is under threat, this worry is latent in his inability to imagine the world continuing to exist after Willy’s passing, let alone in anything resembling its current form. Interestingly, when Willy does eventually die, Mr.

Bones—who has been forced to seek refuge elsewhere, but feels the event happening across the distance separating them, as if by a sixth sense—betrays a fearful conviction that his own existence and Willy’s are indeed inextricable. In the ‘fatal moment’, Mr. Bones collapses to the ground ‘as if the very air had flattened him’ and lies there, motionless (97). What follows is a peculiar vision of something between an imitation of death and the lived experience of it: ‘He felt that his body was about to disintegrate, that his vital fluids were going to spill out of him, and once he had been sucked dry, he would be turned into a stiffening carcass, a lump of former dog rotting in the Maryland sun’

(97). Here is the clearest indication of the symphitic connection that Woodward finds characteristic of the relationship between Timbuktu’s human and nonhuman animal protagonists.

Needless to say, Mr. Bones’s body does not literally disintegrate. After a brief period lying prone on the ground, and ‘as unexpectedly as it had come on, the heaviness began to lift, and he felt his life stirring inside him once again’ (97). Yet even this ostensibly positive feeling remains dubious, foreshadowed as it is by Mr. Bones’s realisation, shortly after leaving Willy’s side for the final time,

‘that the world wasn’t going to end. He almost felt sorry about it now. He had left his master behind, and the ground had not caved in and swallowed him up’ (87). This complicated sentiment is followed by a telling passage:

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As Mr. Bones trotted along the sidewalk, listening to a siren approach the area he had just left, he

understood that the last part of the story was about to begin. But it wasn’t his story anymore, and

whatever happened to Willy would have nothing to do with him. He was on his own, and like it or

not, he would have to keep moving, even if he had nowhere to go. (87-8, emphasis added)

What is happening in these paragraphs, during this period in which Mr. Bones is separated from

Willy—first physically, and then finally via the intuition that he has died? The world does not end;

Mr. Bones does not cease to exist. But Mr. Bones does undergo a profound change, and that change is expressed here in terms of a separation of narratives. It is implied that Willy’s story and Mr.

Bones’s story were, if not one and the same, then mutually constitutive to a degree that now, suddenly, midway through the novel, they no longer are. This is not to say that Willy disappears from the text. He remains present in Mr. Bones’s dreams and in flashback sequences—that is, on the level of plot. On the level of story, however, he is absent, departed, and can make no further contribution to the shared narrative that he and Mr. Bones have ‘written’ together. Mr. Bones is now ‘on his own’, not only in the sense of literally navigating the world without his companion, but also in the sense of his narrative no longer being co-authored by him. In the next two sections, I will address these two manifestations of Mr. Bones’s isolation. I first turn to scholarship addressing relations between autobiography and selfhood in the wake of trauma to conceptualise Mr. Bones’s assumption of narrative agency, before turning to Judith Butler’s illuminating distinction between precariousness and precarity to discuss his enforced solitude on the level of story. As we will see, these two developments are intimately intertwined.

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‘Writing the Self into Being’

Relations between narrative and selfhood have recently emerged as a topic of interest at the intersections of trauma studies and illness studies. Amy-Katerini Prodromou, for example, puts these lines of enquiry into conversation with one another in her monograph Navigating Loss in

Women’s Contemporary Memoir (2015), which contains a chapter titled ‘“Writing the Self into

Being”: Narrative Identity in Memoirs of Loss’. Here, Prodromou performs close readings of several illness narratives in order to explore the extent to which an assumption of authorial authority doubles as a mechanism by which to reconstruct a self fragmented by the experience of loss. Writing

150 in a feminist context, Prodromou argues that ‘[t]he autobiographical act … challenges postmodern theories of fragmented subjectivity by offering the possibility of the creation of a unified self’ (61).

As such, it ‘potentially has enormous implications for female autonomy’ because, in the words of

Paul John Eakin, whose Living Autobiographically (2008) Prodromou cites on numerous occasions, this creation gives rise to ‘more self, more agency, not less’ (Prodromou 61; Eakin 85). While the impetus towards greater agency is a progressive one according to the terms of a feminist project that endeavours to dismantle stereotypes of women as passive and dependent, the complex character of agency and the politics attendant to its attribution might give us pause. What ‘agency’ is assumed in the act of autobiographical self-reconciliation? As my analysis of Thinking in Pictures suggested, the agency in question sounds suspiciously like that which many human and nonhuman animals mischaracterised as subhuman are popularly deemed to lack, the accrual of which is a prerequisite for their being afforded full measures of legal, social, political, and ethical recognition.

Anticipating concerns of this variety, Prodromou acknowledges that ‘the desire or need for a whole, stable self’—one who boasts the aforementioned agency—‘at first sounds much like the traditional male autobiographical quest for autonomy’, another alleged virtue that is in fact deeply problematic

(61, emphasis added). In the face of these incipient rejoinders, Prodromou takes recourse to Eakin’s distinction between self and identity, and, specifically, the ‘idea of self that, while desiring stability, is nevertheless composed of multiple identities’ (62). ‘This theory of subjectivity’, according to

Prodromou, ‘reconciles the dichotomy inherent in these different concepts of self as either whole or fragmented’—a reconciliation that is significant ‘for the construction of female subjectivity’ because it simultaneously retains an accrual of agency and allows for the plurality of subjectivity

‘which has been so essential to theories of female selfhood’ (62). However, understood in this way, the self remains a coherent, unified whole. Eakin, following neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, refers to this dynamic in terms of homeostasis—that is, as affected by external forces, yet nevertheless presupposing the existence of a discrete, internal self equal to the challenge of regulating those forces and mitigating their effects.68 This is a far cry from the relative radicalism of posthumanist theories like Haraway’s ‘becoming with’, Despret’s ‘extended subjectivity’, and Barad’s ‘agential realism’, and is insufficient in scope to encompass the dynamic evinced by the relationship between

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Willy and Mr. Bones. Willy’s death represents a rupture in Mr. Bones’s world that his sense of self—indeed, his self itself, co-authored by Willy—cannot simply assimilate.

Returning to a quotation analysed in a different context back in Chapter 1, Prodromou argues that traumatic experiences ‘threaten to destabilize self, and often do fragment or negate sense of self.

Yet paradoxically, in narratives of loss, where the self experiences a loss of stability, the impulse towards creating a stable self is actually more immediately apparent’ (64). Timbuktu is, in its way, an illness narrative: it can be read as a pathography of Willy related through the perspective of his canine companion. However, for my present purposes, it is not Willy’s sense of self that is at issue; it is that of Mr. Bones, and the contingency of that sense of self upon his personal trauma, his own experience of loss. Throughout the novel—from its first line to its last, in fact—we can identify a significant body of textual evidence testifying to both an ‘impulse towards creating a stable self’ and, more importantly, the dangerous upshot of following this impulse—or, rather, being coerced into doing so. If the profundity of the relationship between man and dog exceeds the scope of a homeostatic theory of multiple identities and is better described in the more ambitious, capacious terms of posthumanist theory, then, for Mr. Bones, the promise of self-reconciliation rapidly begins to resemble the threat of imprisonment in a mode of liberal individualist subjecthood inimical to his interests. This self-reconciliation finds its expression in Mr. Bones’s assumption of the same type of narrative agency associated with and conferred by the act of autobiographical writing.

This assumption of narrative agency can be traced back to the opening sentence of the novel—not just because of the fact that this is where the narrative actually begins, but because of the watershed moment its opening words relate. Mr. Bones’s long-standing hope that Willy will recover is ‘by now’—at this very moment, the same moment Timbuktu begins—revealed to be vain (3). It is no coincidence that Mr. Bones’s voice emerges into the domain of narrative agency at the same instant in which he is forced to ruefully admit the fact of his human’s imminent demise. In a proleptic echo of the experience he will later endure in a literal sense, Mr. Bones responds to the dissolution of

Willy’s presence by assuming the agency associated with the autobiographical act. Long before his resigned affirmation that his story has separated from Willy’s own—indeed, as if in preparation for that event—Mr. Bones assumes responsibility for the final knockings of their common narrative.

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It is important to note that this responsibility is not total. Mr. Bones is not in fact the narrator of the novel; as I have already established, Timbuktu is written in the free indirect style. However, this is not evident to all critics who have written about Timbuktu. Distinguishing between various types of

‘talking animal’ narratives and the functions that these speaking nonhuman animals perform, Karla

Armbruster characterises Timbuktu as an example of what Alice Kuzniar, in Melancholia’s Dog:

Reflections on Our Animal Kinship (2006), calls the cynomorphic tale. Such narratives depict dogs

‘gifted with human speech’ who ‘act as mouthpieces for philosophical commentary on human society’, usually in the form of ‘social critique’ (Armbruster 17-18). Armbruster contrasts such tales with texts that ‘seem to take the question of how a nonhuman experiences the world more seriously, using omniscient narrators to provide the perspective of animal protagonists’ (18). Though she does not venture a detailed typology of speaking animal narratives, I nevertheless dispute Armbruster’s classification of Timbuktu. Auster’s novel can certainly be read as a work of social critique. Equally certain, however, is the seriousness with which it explores Mr. Bones’s experience of the world— an exploration conducted not by granting Mr. Bones a mastery of human verbal language, but by employing an omniscient narrator akin to those Armbruster identifies in literary works such as Jack

London’s The Call of the Wild (2004) and Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (2000).

Timbuktu’s narrative voice is in fact more amorphous than cynomorphic. It guides the reader deep into the sophisticated workings of Mr. Bones’s canine consciousness, but it also transgresses the boundaries of his brain, slipping in and out of his mind at junctures that are not always readily identifiable. Auster’s deployment of such a fluid narrative style is noteworthy in itself, insofar as it might be characterised as the formal embodiment of a posthumanist ethos of becoming; in fact, it might even be read as a form of extended subjectivity in itself. I will return to this idea in the final section of this chapter. For now, it is sufficient to acknowledge the fluidity of this voice while also reaffirming that Mr. Bones’s perspective is the principal frame for its expression, and to mark the coincidence of the beginning of the narrative with the realisation expressed by its opening sentence.

This coincidence—which is anything but coincidental—invites us to consider relations between Mr.

Bones’s impending solitude, his coercion into a humanist subject position conducive to flourishing within the confines of contemporary society, and his accrual of narrative agency.

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The Biopolitics of ‘Becoming Without’

The narrative responsibility assumed by Mr. Bones is paralleled by his assumption of exclusive responsibility for his own survival and welfare. I have already addressed the immediate aftermath of those moments in the narrative in which Mr. Bones and Willy are separated from one another: first physically, when Mr. Bones leaves Willy’s side for the final time, and then metaphysically, when Mr. Bones intuits that Willy has passed away. As we have seen, on both occasions, the drama of the separation is followed by the anti-climactic realisation that Mr. Bones is still alive and that the world continues to turn. But what does Mr. Bones do with this realisation? What happens next?

The work of Judith Butler offers a way of conceptualising the shift that Mr. Bones undergoes, and enables the excavation of the biopolitical pressures under which Mr. Bones suddenly finds himself.

In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) and Frames of War: When Is Life

Grievable? (2009), Butler develops what has since proven to be an influential distinction between the states of precariousness and precarity. The former term denotes a universal human condition of vulnerability, while the latter describes the experience of marginalised and disenfranchised people whose lives are open to the specific physical, social, political, and economic threats. This distinction not only allows Butler to theorise the relative value ascribed to different lives and bodies, but allows her to unmoor ‘precariousness’ from its negative connotations, and to recover it as a descriptor of human existence at large. For Butler, ‘life, conceived as precarious life, is a generalized condition’, and ‘under certain political conditions it becomes radically exacerbated or radically disavowed.

This is a schism in which the subject asserts its own righteous destructiveness at the same time as it seeks to immunize itself against the thought of its own precariousness’ (Frames 48). Indeed,

Butler’s definition of precariousness resonates strongly with some core tenets of the posthumanist philosophy discussed throughout this dissertation. The constitutive vulnerability of the self—its openness to ‘others’ that were never ‘other’ to begin with—is central to Haraway’s conviction that

‘the partners do not precede the relating’, to Barad’s reconceptualisation of subjects and objects as fluid materialisations within matrices of becoming, and to Wolfe’s position that ‘“we” are always radically other, already in-or ahuman in our very being’ (What is Posthumanism? 89).

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Such parallels help us to understand how Butler’s distinction lays the groundwork for her argument that a universal condition of precariousness should not be disavowed, but should be embraced as a counter to the pernicious, unevenly distributed condition of precarity. Butler parses the concept of vulnerability and advocates an acknowledgement of collective interdependence—an inconvenient truth in the era of hyperindividualism and attempted self-immunisation against the manifold

‘threats’ that loom beyond the borders of one’s body, nation, or race—as a means of redressing an imbalance whereby certain bodies are exposed to threats that are specific, contingent, and extreme.

In Timbuktu, we can identify an inverse correlation between precariousness and precarity. As the death of Willy draws nearer and Mr. Bones is forced to confront the imminent reality of solitude and self-reliance, the openness and vulnerability—the precariousness—that has characterised their humanimal companionship gradually diminishes. The spectre of precarity, of the dangers attendant to a mongrel being forced to navigate an anthropocentric world in isolation, rises in its stead, and crystallises in the moment in which Willy passes away.

After bemoaning Willy’s failure to teach him to read—or to hang a sign around his neck with instructions for a kindly passer-by—Mr. Bones sets about the grunt work of survival. He starts at the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: he must find food. However, having never been in ‘the habit of hunting and foraging for himself’, he finds that ‘whatever lupine instincts he had been born with had long since atrophied and disappeared’ (91). ‘Now that Willy was gone, he would have to unlearn everything he knew and start all over again’ (91, emphasis added). This is an interesting sentence. Willy’s absence does not merely require Mr. Bones to learn things he has never had cause to learn before, but to unlearn a way of living, a mode of being-in-the-world. In view of the evidence accumulated above, this unlearning can be read as an inversion of the trajectory— extrapolated by Despret from an argument developed by Hearne—of the relationship between a lion and her tamer: ‘Constructed with her tamer through the invention of a dialect, a constant attention towards the other, through doubts and vital risks engaging them both and above all through the possibility of not understanding everything,’ writes Despret, lion and tamer would ‘both be referred to another mode of existence’ (Despret, ‘Beginnings’ 126). This ‘mode of existence’, the logical conclusion of a trajectory whose Harawayan undertones are clear, is the hybrid ‘third space’ of extended subjectivity. However, Mr. Bones is no longer co-inventing a dialect; now, his attention

155 must be directed solely towards himself. He is unlearning, or becoming without. His subjectivity is now his alone: having been ‘extended’, it is now retracted.

What are the circumstances under which it becomes necessary for Mr. Bones to direct all his attention towards himself? If he can no longer communicate in the dialect that he and Willy have fashioned together, in what dialect must he speak now that Willy is gone? Answers to these questions are suggested by the worldview, articulated by Willy and internalised by Mr. Bones, that human society largely holds nonhuman animals in contempt unless they boast features, qualities, or capacities from which human society can benefit—or, alternatively, demonstrate capabilities that hew closely to those demonstrated and privileged by human beings. Mr. Bones’s awareness of the standards he must meet if his life is to be deemed valuable is made clear on multiple occasions. He recognises that, in effect, ‘[a] dog alone was no better than a dead dog’ (4). He reflects ruefully that if he ‘had belonged to some recognizable breed, he might have stood a chance in the daily beauty contests for prospective owners’ (4). He knows that ‘if he made a nuisance of himself in front of the wrong person, he’d be carted off to the pound—the place from which no dog ever returned’

(91). And when he befriends a boy named Henry Chow, he has misgivings—inspired by Willy’s predilection for racial stereotypes—about living in close proximity to an Asian-American family for fear of being butchered by the proprietors of a Chinese restaurant.

Though these eventualities do not materialise, Mr. Bones discovers that Willy’s warnings were well founded. The instant he leaves Willy’s side, the police attempt to capture him; later, he is attacked by children who quickly grow tired of his company; and when Henry’s father discovers that his son has fashioned a makeshift home for Mr. Bones outside his house, he is apoplectic, leaving Mr.

Bones no option but to run away. Mr. Bones admits to having felt ‘pity, and a touch of disdain’ for lone, homeless dogs he encountered in the past: ‘The loneliness of their lives was too brutal to contemplate, and he had always kept himself at a safe distance’ (91). Now, within thirty minutes of bidding Willy farewell, he recognises that ‘already he was one of them’ (92). Circumstances have cast Mr. Bones into a previously unthinkable solitude. His luck seems to have changed when he is eventually adopted by a middle-class family in a suburban neighbourhood. After a promising start, however, it transpires that his mistreatment has not ended; rather, it just manifests itself differently.

To become a viable pet, Mr Bones must meet a laundry list of requirements: he must be found to

156 be healthy, must stay outdoors, must look presentable, and has to be neutered (141-2). Even in the limited domain granted to him—the garden—his movement is severely restricted. As he views it,

Mr. Bones is ‘turned into a prisoner. They had chained him to this infernal bouncing wire, this metallic torture device with its incessant squeaks and echoing hums, and every time he moved, the noises moved with him—as if to remind him that he was no longer free, that he had sold his birthright for a mess of porridge and an ugly, ready-made house’ (144).

Interestingly, the ‘freedom’ Mr. Bones has lost is the freedom of the itinerant existence he enjoyed with Willy—that is, the life of a homeless human being. Homelessness may connote a lifestyle to which few humans aspire, but Mr. Bones is a dog, and, as anyone who has ever uttered the magic word to a canine friend will attest, dogs like to go for walks. As such, ‘[a]s far as Mr. Bones was concerned, he was the luckiest creature on the face of the earth’ (30). But no longer. Several pages earlier, Mr. Bones has a dream in which Willy advises him ‘to go straight to the top, Mr. Bones.

Find out who’s boss. Find out who makes the decisions, and then attach yourself to that person.

There’s no other way’ (121). In suburbia, Mr. Bones has done exactly this, but at a barely tolerable cost. The awful conditionality of his admission into the household is reemphasised when the human members of the Jones family take a vacation—a trip of which Mr. Bones is apprised by eight-year- old Alice, and on which he (mistakenly) assumes he is invited: ‘it never occurred to him that he wasn’t included in Alice’s we and us’ (166, emphasis in original). Perhaps nowhere in the novel is there a clearer indication that Mr. Bones’s (formerly extended) subjectivity has been retracted. This, after all, is Wittgenstein’s we: the ‘we’ with which Despret opens her article, and to which her concept of extended subjectivity is a response.

It is not that Mr. Bones does not derive any pleasure from aspects of his adoption into this middle- class family. In Alice he finds a kindred spirit, a companion arguably closer in character to Willy than any other human being he meets. Alice talks to him incessantly, never questioning his ability to understand, and ‘spent most of her time in a world of imaginary beings, and she brought Mr.

Bones into that world and made him her partner, her fellow protagonist, her male lead. Saturdays and Sundays were full of these screwball improvisations’ (156-7). In this idyllic scenario is the tempting promise of once again fashioning an extended subjectivity with a ‘two-leg’ (133). Indeed,

‘improvisations’ would seem an apt term to describe the dynamic Despret identifies in the relations

157 between Sudan the lion and her tamer. In these ‘imaginary worlds’ lies the potential to cocompose another trans-species ‘dialect’. For the most part, however, Mr. Bones is bound to listen to the confessional outpourings of the mother of the family, Polly, a role whose successful performance is rewarded with the privilege of entering the house, a privilege forbidden by Polly’s husband, Dick.

Mr. Bones develops great affection for Polly, but she is a different kind of interlocutor than Willy, and their relationship is instrumentalised and commodified in a manner that would have been unimaginable in the context of Mr. Bones’s former mode of existence. Letting Mr. Bones into the house is not simple altruism, but an act of defiance against Dick: ‘Instead of arguing about themselves, Dick and Polly now argued about him, using the dog as an excuse to advance their separate causes’ (160). Mr. Bones prefers to interpret Polly’s vociferous insubordination as ‘battles

… fought on his account’ (160). More persuasive, however, is the disheartening conclusion that he is now little more than a proxy for the unspeakable ingredients of a disintegrating marriage.

The few pleasures and joys Mr. Bones experiences are not only compromised; they must also be earned via demonstrable fidelity to the highly restrictive human expectations of what a dog should be and how it ought to behave. Anything short of a convincing performance of this prescribed role is all but certain to result in his banishment, and thus a marked decrease in his life expectancy. Mr.

Bones does his best to imitate the exploits of his canine peers: first on the streets, when his attempts at hunting birds end in his ‘barking out of rage and defeat’; then with the boys who go on to torture him, setting aside his apathy towards the act of retrieving objects in order to ‘keep them entertained’; and once again with his new family (95, 98). The price for safe passage into the human home is the performance of a repertoire of tricks that are requested of him. Concerned that even this may not be sufficient, Mr. Bones takes the initiative: ‘Instead of standing around while his future hung in the balance, why not try to impress Dick with some canine derring-do, some spiffy dog thing that would turn the tide in his favor?’ (140). His chosen act—some ad-libbed sprints around the garden—is physically painful, and amounts to ‘torturing himself on behalf of … a noble cause’ (140). This cause is nothing less than the safeguarding of his own life and livelihood, and its price is the performance of a specific role ascribed to his species by humankind. Mr. Bones has to learn how to be a dog—or, more accurately, ‘a dog’: the dog of the popular imagination; the dog, prefixed with the definite article; the dog who stands not only for himself, but is representative of a self-serving

158 human conception of optimal dogness. Derrida warns against this homogenising manoeuvre when he writes that ‘my cat, the cat who looks at me in my bedroom or bathroom, … does not appear here to represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race’ (The Animal 9). Rather, [w]hen it responds in its name … it doesn’t do so as the exemplar of a species called “cat,” even less so of an “animal” genus or kingdom

… [I]t comes to me as this irreplaceable living being’ (The Animal 9, emphasis in original).

At this stage, we are confronted with a situation in which Auster, a human author, is attempting to imitate the subjective experience of a dog, who in turn must attempt to imitate the mindset of a human in order to successfully embody a highly circumscribed conception of ‘dogness’. Moreover, this mode of dogness is itself a composite of (supposedly) human and (supposedly) nonhuman traits and behaviours. As Mr. Bones’s experience with the Joneses makes clear, successful conformity means displaying qualities ordinarily associated with human beings—certain kinds of intelligence, a measure of ‘civilised’ restraint—while also requiring him to abide by the supposed norms of his own species. Every reversal in this convoluted train of thought is marked by the binary opposition between ‘human’ and ‘animal’. Mr. Bones, who is neither dog nor human, but rather a product of a trans-species relationship of mutual becoming, must be simultaneously human and nonhuman. He must straddle the species divide that Willy’s death, combined with the norms of an anthropocentric,

‘dog-eat-dog’ society he must now negotiate alone, have contrived to reinstitute.

For Mr. Bones, the demands of straddling this boundary prove thoroughly debilitating: affectively, psychically, physically—and, ultimately, fatally. Three days after discovering that he will not be part of the Joneses’ vacation, ‘he felt the first of several painful twinges in his abdomen, and over the next two and a half weeks the pains spread into his haunches, his limbs, and even into his throat’

(168). ‘The symptoms,’ we learn, ‘were still too vague to produce any outward manifestations … but as the days wore on, Mr. Bones felt less and less like himself’ (169). Mr. Bones blames the vet for failing to detect any signs of illness—but the fact that his medical check-up was so recent, allied with the final clause of the sentence quoted above, suggests a different diagnosis. Is it coincidence that Mr. Bones’s health begins to deteriorate, that he feels ‘less and less like himself’, as soon as he finds himself alone again? If the self in ‘himself’ is not a self-reliant Cartesian ‘I’ but a dynamic assemblage with multiple ‘authors’, the demands of solitude are liable to be profoundly alienating.

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Before feeling the first of those ominous ‘twinges’, he reflects upon the injustice of not being taken on holiday: ‘Willy had never left him behind. Not once, not under any circumstances, and he wasn’t used to this kind of handling. Perhaps he had been spoiled, but in his book there was more to canine happiness than just feeling wanted. You also had to feel necessary’ (168). To be necessary is to be indispensable; to be unnecessary is to be expendable. The line drawn by Mr. Bones between being wanted and being needed is the line between being extricably entangled with and having become with, that is, to have co-composed—in the dual sense of co-authoring and co-constituting—a material-semiotic (humanimal) assemblage. If the loss of the latter mode of being inaugurates Mr.

Bones’s retreat into an liberal individualist mode of subjecthood of which the narrative of Timbuktu is both the product and the expression, the acknowledgement that his relationship with his new

‘companions’ more closely resembles the former seems to initiate a relentless physical collapse redolent of Willy’s own. Mr. Bones is separable, extricable, and his humans’ family holiday is the proof. It is upon watching Dick and Alice drive off after leaving him at Dog Haven—the five-star kennel where he will stay while the Family Jones is away—that Mr. Bones ‘had his first inkling of the trouble he was in. It wasn’t just a case of the blues, he realized, and it wasn’t just because he was scared. Something was seriously wrong with him, and whatever mayhem had been brewing in him lately was about to come to a full boil’ (170). From this point, to paraphrase the first lines of the novel, the thing inside Mr. Bones slowly and inexorably assumes a life of its own.

Eventually, a moment’s respite allows him to formulate a plan and to gather the strength to execute it. As he is shepherded into a car to return to the vet, Mr. Bones escapes his keepers and bolts into the wild. His aim is to return to the Jones residence, but this is futile: the house is empty and impenetrable, and, besides, he does not have the strength to reach it. Instead, hearing the sound of traffic, he comes to the side of a busy road and decides to attempt a crossing, knowing that his chances of survival are close to nil. On multiple occasions earlier in the narrative, he has fantasised about an afterlife—a domain he knows as Timbuktu—‘where dogs would be able to speak man’s language and converse with him as an equal’ (50). The ‘man’ in question refers both to Homo sapiens and, more specifically, to Willy, with whom Mr. Bones desperately hopes to be reunited.

Now, ‘[a]ll he had to do was step into the road, and he would be in Timbuktu. He would be in the land of words and transparent toasters, in the country of bicycle wheels and burning deserts where

160 dogs talked as equals with men’ (185). He runs out into the flood of speeding vehicles. ‘With any luck,’ the novel concludes, ‘he would be with Willy before the day was out’ (186). It is too easy to read Mr. Bones’s faith in the existence of Timbuktu as an expression of Mr. Bones’s eternal ‘love and undying loyalty’ for his dead companion (91). More convincing, I think, is to interpret this faith as a formalised articulation of Mr. Bones’s desire to forever inhabit the ‘third space’ of Despret’s extended subjectivity, a hypothesis lent credence by the fact that Timbuktu is literally an imaginary world of Willy and Mr. Bones’s invention. If the text begins with—indeed, is inaugurated by—the retraction of Mr. Bones’s subjectivity, it concludes—indeed, is closed by—the potential for that subjectivity to be extended once again, this time in death, where the threat of its being curtailed is no longer a concern.

The idea that it is only in death that extended subjectivity can be sustained calls to mind Foucault’s argument that, if ‘[n]ow it is over life … that power establishes its dominion’, then ‘death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most

“private”’ (History Vol. 1 138):

It is not surprising that suicide—once a crime, since it was a way to usurp the power of death

which the sovereign alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the right to

exercise—became, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into

the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the

borders of the interstices of power that was exercised over life. (138-9)

From the moment he and Willy part ways, Mr. Bones has to contend with numerous exercises of biopower, the most extreme of which is the requirement that he be castrated. The price he pays for his (limited, conditional) care is the forced concession of his ability to procreate, just as the cost of his (relative, contingent) security is his incarceration in a partitioned section of his new ‘home’. For a dog accustomed to a radically different mode of existence, these compromises finally prove intolerable, and Mr. Bones ‘escapes’ the ‘optimising’ machinations of biopolitics by exercising his

‘private right to die’. His subjectivity thus re-extended—at least hypothetically—the narrative ends.

Just as Rayment steps off Slow Man’s final page and thereby leaves behind a narrative framework that has incessantly tried to align him with a normative, humanist standard of legibility, Mr. Bones

161 steps into the stream of traffic and re-enters an extended subjectivity that lies beyond the limits of the narratable.

*

Narrative Voice and Esposito’s Third Person

Thus far, I have attempted to demonstrate that Timbuktu stages the process whereby Mr. Bones, robbed of his human companion and suddenly contending with the pressures of a society which ascribes him value on the basis of a problematic set of criteria, becomes incarcerated in a humanist mode of subjecthood, and that his assumption of narrative agency is the formal expression of this imprisonment. I concluded the previous section by arguing that Willy and Mr. Bones’s humanimal extended subjectivity can only be re-extended via their reunion in the afterlife, in a realm called

Timbuktu. But a question remains: why is the novel named after this domain? Timbuktu seems a curious choice of title for the narrative when Timbuktu is what lies precisely beyond the last word of the text. If Timbuktu names a realm of Willy and Mr. Bones’s collective imagining, a realm in which human and animal will be able to communicate in a dialect intelligible to both, then we may want to ask whether Timbuktu, Auster’s novel, can be described in the same terms. This becomes viable as soon as one reflects at greater length on the novel’s complex narrative voice. To pursue this reflection, I turn to biopolitical theorist Roberto Esposito’s Third Person: Politics of Life and

Philosophy of the Impersonal (2012). Esposito offers us a vocabulary with which to think Auster’s use of the free indirect style as a mode of resistance to the pressures under which Mr. Bones becomes without his companion and assumes the role of the individual, legible humanist subject.

Esposito begins Third Person by contending that ‘[i]f there is an unquestioned assumption in contemporary debate, it involves the value universally awarded to the category of person’ (1). The

‘entrance’ of a living being ‘into the regime of personhood’, he says, ‘is what lends it unquestionable value’ (2). Esposito explains this equation by arguing that the ‘function’ of the category of person is that of ‘bridging the … chasm between the concept of human being and that of citizen’ (3). The dispositif of the person is thus designed to encompass the biological and political conjugations of human life: zoē and bios.69 However, observing that the increased currency of the concept of personhood has not translated into a diminution in the injustices to which it is meant to respond,

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Esposito argues that personhood is not as conceptually watertight as is generally assumed. He locates the problem in a latent fissure between the biological and political domains that personhood is supposed to unite: ‘Some difference from the body was already implicitly at the core of the notion of person’, he says (8). ‘No matter how inextricably personhood is linked to a living body, the two are not wholly coextensive; and indeed what is most intrinsic to the person, that which allows it to pass into the afterlife, is precisely the fact that it is not coextensive with the body’ (8). As such, although ‘the definition of the person … is now extended, at least in law if not in fact, to all living beings’, it is extended ‘only with respect to their moral or rational part. Personhood, it might be said, is that which, in the body, is more than body’ (11). In a passage that recalls the separation of the human into its upper (human) and lower (animal) aspects—the latter to be disavowed—Esposito writes that

In response to the biopolitical, and afterwards thanatopolitical line, which tended to unify person

and body by crushing the former into the biological matter of the latter, modern personalism, in

all its expressions, re-establishes in every individual the separation between personal subject and

human being. In this way subjective right, rather than being inherent to the entirety of the human

being, applies only to the upper part, which is rational or spiritual in nature, exercising its dominion

over the remaining area, which is devoid of these characteristics and therefore thrust into the

regime of objecthood. Having rights, from this point of view, really means being subjected to one’s

own objectification. (11-12)

Phrased otherwise, ‘personhood is qualified as the sovereignty that each human being exercises over his or her animal being’—that is, a ‘non-human aspect’ that is ‘inside the human being’, and which ‘in the first case is destined to overcome us and in the second to be mastered by us’ (12).

These concerns motivate and constitute Esposito’s challenge to the allegedly ‘unquestionable’ value of personhood, a challenge he executes by drawing on French linguist Émile Benveniste’s work on personal pronouns—specifically, the radical difference of the third person from the first and second.70 As Esposito explains, Benveniste ‘[insists] on the difference of the third person’ since ‘it is the only one that does not have personal connotations, to the point where it can be defined as a

“non-person”: not only because it refers to something or someone that cannot be circumscribed within a specific subject—in the sense that it can relate to everyone and no one—but, more profoundly, because it completely evades the dialogical regime of interlocution inside of which the

163 other two remain fixed’ (15). Channelling Benveniste, Esposito claims that the first-person I and second-person you are mutually constitutive and definitional, and, further, that the relation between them is marked by a power imbalance: ‘the I cannot help but exert an effect of mastery over [the you], since that alterity is logically dependent on the definition of the I itself’ (105-6, emphasis in original). In other words, the you ‘can never be anything but non-I’ (106, emphasis in original).

‘[W]hat continuously passes back and forth between’ the I and the you, Esposito argues, ‘is the role of “subject”, a role that only ‘the one who calls itself I’ in a given moment can occupy (106, emphasis in original). The I and the you are therefore locked in a perpetual, oscillating dance of subjectivisation and desubjectivisation.

By contrast, the third person ‘escapes a dialectic of this sort’ (106). Indeed, not only does it evade entrapment in a closed system of mutual definition; it also evades and defies the logic of personhood, the biopolitical effects of which Esposito has already excavated. The ‘extraneity’ of the third person ‘to the dialectic between I and you’—an extraneity which ‘also makes it extraneous to the logical mode of the person’—is explained by the fact that, unlike I and you, ‘the third person—the non-person—always refers to an objective type of external referent’: either it ‘does not refer to anyone at all’ or ‘can be extended to everyone. One might say that it is situated precisely at the point of intersection between no one and anyone: either it is not a person at all, or it is every person. In reality,’ says Esposito, ‘it is both at the same time’ (106-7, emphasis in original). This makes the third person ‘most unusual’: ‘it escapes the inevitable mirroring experienced by the first two’, and is also the highest degree plural’ (108). In fact, since ‘the first- and second-person plurals

… are not a pluralization’ but ‘an extension in the form of a collective person’, the third person is

‘the only true plural’ (108, emphasis added). Esposito continues:

The only person that has a plural, even when it is in the singular—or rather, precisely because it is

in the singular—is the third. But this is because, strictly speaking, it is a non-person. Its peculiarity

… resides in it being neither singular nor plural. It breaks down the traditional opposition, typical

of the semantics of the person, between these two modes. By not being a person, by being

constitutively impersonal, it is both singular and plural. (108-9)

I have elucidated Esposito’s theory of the third person at some length due to the connection it draws between the realms of the biopolitical and the linguistic. This renders it a useful means of thinking

164 the interplay between Mr. Bones’s ‘becoming without’ on the level of story and his accumulation of narrative agency on the level of form. In light of the analysis performed above, we can argue that

Willy’s passing prompts the dissolution of the ‘third space’ of extended subjectivity and precipitates the petrification of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ in the alternating subject and object positions of the mutually constitutive first and second person. The relationship between them, and through which they are produced, has been ‘both singular and plural’: a they which exceeds the logic of personhood altogether. However, Willy’s impending death reaffirms that logic, rends man from dog in line with the rupture inherent to that logic, and reinstitutes a normative mode of subjecthood that finds expression in Mr. Bones’s accrual of narrative agency.

Again, it should be remembered that this accrual does not extend to Mr. Bones’s adoption of the first-person I; rather, it is registered by his emergence as the novel’s principal focaliser. It is this distinction between the first and the third person, and the fact that Timbuktu is written in the latter, that allows us to identify in the novel’s narrative voice a mode of resistance to the normative, anthropocentric, individualising trajectory dramatised by Timbuktu, as well as the biopolitical pressures that participate in its enforcement. This is the other reason I introduce Esposito’s theory here: because it proffers a terminology that enables us to identify in Auster’s novel a uniquely literary articulation of the persistence of extended subjectivity, of ‘becoming with’, beyond the moment of death—the threshold that, according to Foucault, marks the limit of biopolitical power.

Simply put, Auster’s use of the free indirect style can also be understood as itself an expression of extended subjectivity. In the context of the novel’s thematic concerns and metafictional aspects, the barely perceptible percolations of the perspectives that together comprise the novel’s narrative voice can be read as formal manifestation of a posthumanist ethos according to which different voices conspire, in the multiple senses of that word. They ‘conspire’ not merely in the sense of working together but in the sense of breathing together: they are collectively composed in the (seemingly singular) exhalation of the narrative.71

The general imperceptibility of the shifts between these different voices—or, in the parlance of chemistry, between different ‘compounds’ of these voices—is highlighted by exceptions to the rule: jarring instances in which the apparent continuity of the narrative voice is punctuated by an abrupt change in emphasis. For example, a description of Willy’s ploy to accomplish his two dying wishes

165 in one fell swoop suddenly references ‘previous paragraphs’, thereby spotlighting an implied author who seems conscious that his or her words are being committed to paper (8). Soon afterwards, Mr.

Bones’s rendition of Willy’s cold reaction to his father’s death—‘No, it wasn’t hard to adjust to life without that bag of explosives. It didn’t take any effort at all’—is immediately followed by another dissonant lurch out of Mr. Bones’s consciousness: ‘Or so reckoned the good Herr Doktor Bones.

Ignore his opinion if you will, but who else are you prepared to trust?’ (15). However, even these occasional vocal rifts are usually bridged by the persistence of one of the narrative’s chorus of voices. In the example above, for instance, Willy’s distinctive tone and flamboyant vocabulary permeate Mr. Bones’s original reflection and the omniscient narrator’s subsequent interjection. In fact, Willy’s voice features heavily in the complex of voices that conspire in Timbuktu’s narration: not simply when his speech is quoted, but because traces of his idiosyncratic manner of speaking can be detected in Mr. Bones’s own reflections. The following, drawn from one such reflection, could have been lifted directly from one of Willy’s verbose soliloquys (and, not incidentally, refers explicitly to the genetic provenance of those soliloquys): ‘When it came to talking, this sixty-eight- year-old Mom-san could hold her own with anyone, and once she let fly with one of her interminable monologues, you quickly understood why her offspring had turned into such a champion chatterbox’ (31-2, emphasis in original). Just as Willy’s mother’s voice has contaminated that of her son, Willy’s voice has contaminated that of his canine friend. Mr. Bones’s perspective is inscribed with the ‘trace’ of his master’s voice—the trace that, as discussed in Chapter 2, ‘can always be erased or erase itself’ but that nobody, not ‘God, human, or animal’ has the power to erase (Derrida, The Animal 136, emphasis in original). The narrative voice of Timbuktu is thus a

Russian matryoshka doll of perspectives nested one inside the other—or, more accurately, inside one another, simultaneously containing and contained by one another. It is more than the sum of its many parts: a monstrous, hybrid ‘dialect’ in which reside relational and communicative possibilities foreclosed by the strictures of physical isolation and ‘individual’ expression.

Timbuktu, then, can be read as the dramatisation of a nonhuman animal’s doomed negotiation of the imperative to conform to a humanist mode of subjecthood, articulated through his emergence into the calculus of narrative agency. The postmodernist self-consciousness of that dramatisation, demonstrated by the textual evidence above, colours Timbuktu as a critique of that same imperative.

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Crucially, however, the articulation of this emergence remains incomplete and ambiguous. The humanimal extended subjectivity that is foreclosed at the moment of the narrative’s inauguration comes to manifest itself in the layered, textured multiplicity of a hybrid narrative voice of which

Mr. Bones’s perspective is only the most obvious component—if one can even speak of separate

‘components’ in the first place. This suggests that logos, while associated with and expressive of a humanist ideology, is nevertheless capable of formally embodying an ethos of posthumanist heterogeneity—that is, of gesturing towards its own alternative. The description of Mr. Bones as ‘a hodgepodge of genetic strains—part collie, part Labrador, part spaniel, part canine puzzle’—might equally apply to Timbuktu’s narrative voice, of which Mr. Bones’s perspective is one major ‘strain’

(5). But whereas Mr. Bones’s hybridity diminishes his chances of being adopted by another human being after Willy’s death, the multiplicity and hybridity of Timbuktu’s narrative voice articulates a posthumanist rejoinder to those forces which demand conformity to a specific ‘recognizable breed’

(4). Timbuktu, like the realm of Timbuktu, is the expression and the embodiment of the humanimal

‘dialect’ whose foreclosure it describes. In this, it evinces what, following Haraway, we might call a mode of companion narration.

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In this chapter’s analysis of Timbuktu, we have seen human beings and nonhuman animals working together and ‘becoming with’ one another, only for death to precipitate a ‘becoming without’ that is finally offset by their ‘breathing with’ one another via the novel’s impersonal narrative voice.

The novel’s apprehension and representation of extended humanimal subjectivity and trans-species relationality thus coexists alongside, and is closely bound up with, a reinscription of humanist norms. Finally, however, Mr. Bones’s death, combined with the persistence of the trace of mutual, constitutive trans-species becoming in the text’s narrative voice beyond Willy’s demise, illuminates

Timbuktu as a critique of the pressures—at once biopolitical and narratological—that force Mr.

Bones’s retreat into the normative frame of a humanist mode of subjecthood. The manifestation of posthumanist relationality in the novel’s heteroglossic narrative voice is especially significant, not least because the fundamental inseparability of its component ‘strains’ is secured by the rendering of this voice in written language. O’Key rightly observes that the novel’s ‘reluctance to take on the

“we” would … be redolent of a politics which prioritises the sovereignty of the subject’ (83).

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Timbuktu does not rise to the challenge of ‘[taking] on the “we”’, but only because it does something more interesting, something more posthumanist. The final indistinguishability of the human and nonhuman perspectives that comprise the text’s narrative voice means the question of who speaks— a question predicated on the a priori existence of an individual agent who is doing the speaking— is subordinated to a posthumanist logic whereby beings are produced by their relations, rather than vice versa. The same could not be said of a version of Timbuktu written in the first-person plural, narrated by a ‘we’ comprising Willy and Mr. Bones. The first-person ‘we’ designates a multiplicity, but one that is still constituted by discrete beings that happen to be embroiled in a common plight.

Furthermore, the ‘we’ still presupposes the existence of a ‘you’ from which it can be ontologically separated in a decisive manner. By contrast, Timbuktu enacts a uniquely literary form of resistance to the formal ramification of the contours of the liberal humanist subject.

In Thinking in Pictures, Grandin is fastened into the first-person perspective of the version of herself permitted by the possibilities of conduct afforded her by the genre of autosomatography. In The

Poisonwood Bible, the number of narrators is multiplied, but this gives rise to a ‘narrative circle’ whose dialectical dynamic provides the grounds on which its disabled and nonhuman constituents are manipulated and instrumentalised. Slow Man is written in the free indirect style—and, given its metafictional premise, one could make the case that its narrative voice articulates something akin to the extended subjectivity shared by Willy and Mr. Bones—except, as we have seen, Rayment and Costello’s bond is haunted by a Hegelian master/slave dialectic that renders every one of its words the site of an ongoing power struggle between character and author, self and other, I and you.

It is only in Timbuktu that the ethical potential of an impersonal narrative voice endures. Even as the novel appears to demand that Mr. Bones assume a humanist subject position, its narrative voice embodies the porousness of the boundaries traditionally taken to delineate that subject. In doing so, it signals that we have reached a crucial juncture on this dissertation’s journey towards a poetics of posthumanism. In the final chapter, our attention turns towards a novel that might represent a destination: Richard Powers’s epic ecological parable, The Overstory (2019).

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CHAPTER 5

‘High Drama to a Paralytic’ The Rhizomatic Arborescence of Richard Powers’s The Overstory

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To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for

something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is

failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as

the struggles between a few lost people. But Ray needs fiction now as much as anyone.

Richard Powers, The Overstory 477-8, emphasis in original

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Ray Brinkman is one of the nine main human characters in Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Overstory (2019). The passage above is found towards the end of the novel, some years after Ray has a brain aneurysm that leaves him paralysed. Unable to move all but a few muscles,

Ray is ‘left to do what he has had to do for half a dozen hours a day, every day of this new-found life: stare out the window onto the backyard’, where flora and fauna go through their motions (478).

Life quietly following its natural rhythms: ‘High drama to a paralytic’ (478). At a first glance, this sentence seems ambiguous. Is this a sardonic commentary on the relative poverty of stimulation available to a person in Ray’s circumstances, or an earnest articulation of how those circumstances can reinvigorate one’s appreciation for the overlooked wonders of the more-than-human world?

Reading on, the answer clarifies: ‘The wind throws out gossip … There’s danger everywhere, readiness, intrigue, slow-motion rising action, epic changes of season … Full-out, four-alarm, symphonic narrative mayhem plays out all around them’ (478-9). For Ray Brinkman, the erstwhile property lawyer long inclined to see trees as commodities, nonhuman life has been radically defamiliarised by his disability, and his notion of what counts as ‘high drama’ reworked beyond recognition. Suddenly, it is possible for him to speculate on the prospect of a fiction that transgresses the limits of human solipsism, and to frame such a project as an undertaking of the most profound ethical significance.

As our epigraph suggests, Ray holds little hope that such a text exists—and perhaps with good reason. Until now, this dissertation has been an exercise in demonstrating that even narratives that

169 actively prompt a reappraisal of the value of disabled and animal lives rely on formal conventions that recapitulate the same humanist norms that undergird the devaluation of disabled people and nonhuman animals. Even as these narratives enjoin us to apprehend the generative power of ontological and epistemological diversity, to entertain the radical potential of the imagination as a means of inhabiting other lifeworlds and developing potent, affective modes of kinship, and to acknowledge that trans-species modes of relationality are processes of mattering (in a very literal sense), a humanist logic remains woven into the fabric of their formal constitution. Moreover, the examples of this dynamic collected in this project cannot exhaust the full range of manifestations it may assume. Given the ubiquity of disability and animality in literature, as well as the intimacy of relations between the form of the ‘normal’ human being and the formal devices through which literary narratives make meaning, the examples analysed herein may represent little more than the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. That said, they might yet prove sufficiently diverse to function as grounds on which to join Ray in his speculation on how the world might be storied otherwise. In other words, the negative image of the various conclusions drawn in the previous chapters might gesture towards something resembling a poetics of posthumanism.

The majority of this dissertation has worked towards such a poetics negatively, that is, by excavating the different ways in which humanist assumptions manifest themselves in the formal operations of contemporary literary narratives. However, this should not imply the absence of attempts to define a posthumanist poetics positively. In a lecture titled ‘Posthumanist Literature?’ (2015), for example,

Stefan Herbrechter installs the relationship between posthumanism and literature at the heart of efforts to develop a critical posthumanism that ‘asks who will continue to do the reading’, and how this will be done, when ‘the hero of the story is no longer human, or writing and reading aim to move beyond anthropomorphism’, and underscores the importance of distinguishing between two conjugations of the junction where ‘posthumanism’ and ‘literature’ meet (Herbrechter). On the one hand, Herbrechter ventures a literature of the posthuman: a ‘literary engagement with all figural aspects of human becoming or unbecoming, demise, renewal or transformation’. On the other, he posits a posthumanist literature, whether ‘digital or analogue, print or computational, textual or hypertextual, multimodal, symbolic or representational’, which tries ‘to imagine and to articulate what it is like to be posthuman or human otherwise by creating new subjectivities and, importantly,

170 formal innovation’. Where a literature of the posthuman would encompass all texts that engage with posthumanist ideas, a posthumanist literature designates a more exclusive, intriguing category.

Herbrechter’s emphasis on the importance of ‘formal innovation’, combined with his reference to the voluminous range of different media through which it might be constituted, suggests that any posthumanist literature worthy of the name would not restrict itself to representing a posthumanist worldview; it would also enact a posthumanist onto-epistemology on the level of form. Not incidentally, the distinction between the two maps precisely onto the distinction between the two sections of ‘In My Language’, the video artwork discussed at the start of the Introduction. While all of Baggs’s text is of the posthuman, only its first three minutes and 12 seconds display the formal fidelity to posthumanist ideas that distinguishes the kind of poetics of posthumanism towards which the present dissertation has been working.

Critical discussions regarding the development of a ‘posthuman literature’ are well underway. Louis van den Hengel, for example, poses the question of ‘how to think and how to write a life that does not have any human body or self at its center, a life which is in fact fundamentally inhuman, yet which connects human life to the immanent forces of a vital materiality’ (2). By way of a response, van den Hengel argues for ‘the capacity of contemporary art to extend life—and life writing— beyond the figure of the human organism’, and pays special attention to bioart and performance art as ‘sites for the articulation, negotiation, and transformation of life in a posthuman mode’ (1). Van den Hengel recognises the ‘apparent contradiction of “posthuman auto/biography”’, but insists that

‘specific art practices’—the tissue engineering used by Australia’s Tissue Culture & Art Project, for example—can enact precisely this mode, and makes the further claim that practices of this sort can ‘contribute to the theoretical development of autobiographical scholarship’ (2). In a clear nod to the vocabulary of biopolitics, van den Hengel names this ‘radically post- or non-anthropocentric approach to life narrative’ zoegraphy. This describes ‘a mode of writing life that is not indexed on the traditional notion of bios—the discursive, social, and political life appropriate to human beings—but which centers on the generative vitality of zoe, an inhuman, impersonal, and inorganic force which … is not specific to human lifeworlds, but cuts across humans, animals, technologies, and things’ (2, emphasis in original). In bioart of this variety, the human is but one participant in a more-than-human becoming that generates ‘assemblages of bodies, technologies, and selves that

171 not only challenge the methodological paradigm of the so-called linguistic turn, but also require a reconsideration of the foundational categories of life and death’ (4).

The premium van den Hengel places on the participation of more-than-human actors and forces in artistic creation is echoed by Stuart Cooke’s account of an ethological poetics, ‘a study of nonhuman creative forms’ (302). ‘Poetics’, Cooke declares, ‘is a multispecies affair’, and conceiving of it as such requires us to think of art not in terms of ‘a single end point—be it a painting, a poem, or a recording—but rather to imagine a complex system in which, depending on the circumstances, different constellations might form at different times’ (303). An ethological poetics focuses on

‘[t]he forces in such systems … rather than the categorical status of a material object’, which turns

‘the focus of analysis’ towards ‘the work’s affective capacity, or the study of those observable forces that the work releases’ (303, emphasis in original). Cooke elaborates his theory with reference to the Albert’s lyrebird, an avian species native to the rainforests of eastern Australia, interpreting the lyrebird’s complex, multimodal ‘song cycles’ as emblematic of a poetics ‘that draws on, and acts as a nexus for, an entire material-semiotic field’ (319). Cooke elaborates how, as part of the lyrebird’s poetics, ‘various other forest life-worlds are called on’ in what amounts to a ‘performative iteration’ of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famous example of the orchid and the wasp: ‘no genetic filiation between lyrebird and branch, or lyrebird and any of the other myriad species he imitates, is necessary; the composition brings together different organisms into a singular becoming’ (319). Describing the multidirectional, horizontal relations between the lyrebird and its supposed ‘others’ in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual figure of the rhizome—a figure to which we will return later in this chapter—Cooke affirms that his ethological poetics proceeds from the characteristically posthumanist understanding that, far from being ‘premade containers into which things can be placed’, ecologies are ‘created and shaped by the organisms within them’ (321).

Indeed, Cooke explicitly allies his poetics with ‘the ethical reconstitution proposed by posthumanist scholars like Karen Barad and Donna Haraway’ (321).

While the adventurous theoretical work performed by Cooke and van den Hengel clearly supports the value and viability of a posthumanist poetics, we are still left with the question of how such a poetics might come to manifest in the formal constitution of a literary text. After all, both thinkers expand definitions of ‘writing’ beyond the realm of words. When Cooke compares the lyrebird’s

172 act with Gerald Bruns’s tripartite definition of poetry, for example, it is not with the intent of incorporating the former into the latter, thereby making nonhuman semiosis a blueprint for some hypothetical posthumanist formalism (320).72 Rather, the parallel is drawn to show that nonhuman animals are already doing this thing that humans call ‘poetry’. Thus, while we can carry forward the two theorists’ common emphasis on the rhizomatic interplay of more-than-human forces on our journey towards a poetics of posthumanism, neither ‘zoegraphy’ nor an ‘ethological poetics’ can be said to represent a destination in itself.

A more useful alternative—one that also takes its lead from birdsong, but whose emphasis is on the posthumanist potential of the written word—is ventured by Cary Wolfe in Ecological Poetics; or,

Wallace Stevens’s Birds (2020). Wolfe identifies in Stevens’s bird poems an ‘equivocal’ poetics marked by an ‘excessive rhetoricity’ that ‘[foregrounds] the inescapably performative and iterative nature of meaning’ (89, 93). Harking back to his earlier work—and, specifically, his concept of double finitude—Wolfe reminds us that this meaning is not ‘limited to the domain of the human’

(92). If the first form of finitude that humans share with nonhuman animals is ‘the evolutionary, biological fact of our physical vulnerability and mortality, our mammalian existence’, the second form of finitude is a common ‘subjection to and constitution in the materiality and technicity of a language that is always on the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity’ (Wolfe,

What is Posthumanism? 89). In other words, human and nonhuman animals share more than a status as ‘embodied and vulnerable beings who are dependent on our environment and need care’ (Wolfe,

Ecological 72). Wolfe argues that ‘to enter into communicative relations and social bonds with others at all (human or non-human)’, we ‘are by necessity subjected to the “not me” and “not ours” of semiotic systems’ more fundamental than those circumscribed by ‘the anthropological limits of

“spoken” language’ (Ecological 72, emphasis in original).

In Wolfe’s view, the ‘excessive rhetoricity’ of Stevens’s poetry ‘stages the bond between human beings and animals, their shared finitude, but in a posthumanist and nonrepresentational way: not by the poets refusing, as it were, to be “human” (refusing, that is, to be “expressive,” “responsive,” and not merely rhetorical) but rather by their foregrounding (through the inescapably performative, rhetorical, and iterative nature of the utterance) the impossibility of being “human,” if by “human” we mean something indexed to a secure cordoning off of the difference between genuinely

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“responding” and merely “reacting”’—the Lacanian opposition that has traditionally ‘underwritten the hierarchical ontology of “the” human over “the” animal’ (92-3, emphasis in original). In true

Derridean style, Wolfe’s ecological poetics is thus founded on a deconstruction of the human, based on the common imbrication of human and nonhuman animals in semiotic systems much broader than ‘language’ conventionally conceived. This imbrication manifests itself on the page in the guise of a rhetoric which embodies the contingency and provisionality of all communication, which is ultimately neither human nor nonhuman, but inhuman—or, recalling our discussion of Esposito’s

Third Person at the end of the previous chapter, impersonal.

Where van den Hengel and Cooke admit nonhumans into the calculus of artistic production, Wolfe remains more steadily focused on what Cooke calls the ‘single end point’ of the human-authored literary work (303). Wolfe is interested in poetry, rather than autobiography or the novel, which necessarily limits the relevance of the insights offered by his Ecological Poetics to the present context. Significantly, however, the feature of Stevens’s poems that Wolfe finds most interesting— its ‘excessive rhetoricity’—is not exclusive to poetry (89). It is not difficult to imagine a narrative availing itself of the same technique: performing rhetorical manoeuvres that problematise its own referential authority and thereby highlight ‘the inescapably performative and iterative nature of meaning’ (93). Moreover, the deployment of an excessive rhetoricity is not the only formal strategy capable of illuminating this ‘performative and iterative nature’. In Chapter 3, I compared Michael

Malay’s identification of Ted Hughes’s ‘extreme’, ‘self-consciously outlandish’ descriptions of his jaguar with Onno Oerlemans’s identification of the otherworldly abilities with which Barbara

Gowdy endows her fictional elephants in her novel The White Bone (2000) (Malay 155). These abilities, says Oerlemans, provoke a disbelief that ‘[highlights] the intrinsic embarrassment of the anthropomorphic act itself’, which prompts us ‘to recognize the limits of our belief about other animals’ and thus ‘to question which aspects of being and consciousness are … purely human’

(195). As in Wolfe’s reading of Stevens, the potential for a work of literature to spark a reappraisal of relations between human beings and nonhuman animals is fulfilled not by attempting to represent a nonhuman ‘other’ with perfect clarity, but by foregrounding the inevitable provisionality and contingency of all means by which this impossible challenge might be approached.

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Wolfe, Cooke, and van den Hengel thus offer us a select repertoire of concrete materials that may help us to identify the kind of formal commitment to posthumanism lacking in the texts analysed in the previous four chapters, and thus to answer the question Ray asks himself as he stares out over his backyard—and, indeed, the question that Powers, through Ray, self-consciously poses his readers. Is The Overstory a novel that ‘[makes] the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people’? (478, emphasis in original). Is it, like Thinking in Pictures and The Poisonwood Bible, a narrative that fails to follow its posthumanist thematics through to their logical formal conclusions? Is it, like Slow Man and Timbuktu, an exercise in demonstrating its own insufficiency as a medium through which to represent a vision of the world in which ‘the human’ is decentred—an insufficiency no less insufficient for being exposed as such, even if there is ethical value to its admission? Or could it be that Powers’s novel succeeds in formally embodying the posthumanist worldview it advertises? In what follows, I perform a close reading of Powers’s novel in an attempt to answer these questions.

Ordinarily, this close reading would be prefaced by a survey of salient insights from extant critical engagements with the text—but, given how recently The Overstory was published, no such corpus yet exists. In lieu of such an overview, then, I want to linger briefly on the final chapter of Mitchell and Snyder’s The Biopolitics of Disability (2015), in which the authors seek examples of what they call ‘antinormative novels of embodiment’: works of fiction that ‘explore disabilities as sites of radical human mutation wherein much of the creativity of the species lies’ (180). The antinormative novel of embodiment does not necessarily enact the poetics of posthumanism in which I am interested, but Mitchell and Snyder’s analysis represents an effort, analogous to my own, to locate texts that avoid recapitulating a particular brand of representational violence. Moreover, their focus on the novel as a genre renders their analysis a vital supplement to the theorisations of ‘zoegraphy’,

‘ethological poetics’, and ‘ecological poetics’ sketched above—even if they pay significantly less attention to the formal operations of their chosen primary texts than to their thematic engagements.

Most importantly, however, two of the antinormative novels identified by Mitchell and Snyder are by Richard Powers. As such, their chapter represents a good point of departure for my own attempt to find in The Overstory an alternative to narrative representations of disability and animality whose formal operations serve to inadvertently galvanise the hegemonic figure of ‘the human’.

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Powers and the Antinormative Novel of Embodiment

In The Biopolitics of Disability, Mitchell and Snyder’s search for ‘alternative representational systems developing in novelistic portrayals of disability during late liberalism’ leads them to identify two of Powers’s novels—The Gold Bug Variations (1992) and The Echo Maker (2007)— as ‘antinormative novels of embodiment’ (26, 180). These texts dispute ‘those aspects of market- based fetishizations of difference that threaten to rid more radical formulations of disability of the promise they hold for fashioning alternative lives’ (26). The authors name these ‘representational reversals of disabled people’s embodied innovation in contemporary novelistic employment strategies’ the capacities of incapacity, and they position their analysis of antinormative novels of embodiment as a kind of belated coda to Narrative Prosthesis (2000): these texts redress the brand of representational violence investigated in the earlier work (26). ‘With the antinormative novel of embodiment,’ Mitchell and Snyder contend, ‘plot turns increasingly rely on the revelation of the normative body’s secreted “dysfunctionality”’ and ‘emphasize normalcy as reliant on a mechanistic adherence to scripts of pathology in other bodies to maintain fictive formulas of normative embodiment’ (181). In other words, these texts undermine the cultural positioning of the disabled body ‘as a derivative identity, secondary and inferior to norms of able-bodiedness’, not by asserting that disabled people are just as capable as nondisabled people in their own ways, but by denaturalising and deconstructing the normative standard from which the very notion of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ identities derives (181). This is in keeping with the thrust of this dissertation, whose posthumanist vantage has been adopted to expose the tacit investments of literary narratives in the naturalised, normative standards set by humanism.

My own analysis differs from Mitchell and Snyder’s in two respects. Most obviously, my focus is not exclusively on depictions of disability, but also encompasses portrayals of nonhuman animals

(and, by extension, all beings mischaracterised as ‘subhuman’). More importantly, I take issue with

Mitchell and Snyder’s employment of a Darwinist logic to theorise the ‘narrative adaptation’ that the antinormative novel is supposed to epitomise (181). The authors venture that ‘these narratives provide a repertoire of tools to expose examples of what Darwin called in Origins of the Species

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[sic] (1859) “descent with modification” (the random, mutating path of evolution that links all organisms to a shared evolutionary history of ancestral structures and potentially adaptive futures)’

(180-1). These texts ‘represent forms of narrative adaptation moving consciously away from … representational deployments of disability as a metaphor of individual and/or social collapse’ (181, emphasis added). We remember from the Introduction that the unifying promise of this ‘shared evolutionary history’ is compromised by the complicity of evolutionary theory in the construction and reification of hierarchical conceptions of the relative value of different lives. Cast as the most thoroughly ‘developed’ of living beings—the telos of processes of natural selection—the privileged figure of ‘the human’ bestrides the apex of these hierarchies, meting out its injustices via self- serving comparisons with its manifold ‘others’. The antinormative novel of embodiment, then, is framed in terms of a Darwinist logic that cannot be unmoored from troubling notions of ‘natural selection’ and the ‘survival of the fittest’. This is, at best, a curious organising principle to employ when attempting to theorise a mode of representation that thinks disability as a creative, disruptive force rather than a ‘derivative identity’.

Still, these qualms do nothing to undermine the quality of the close readings that Mitchell and

Snyder perform, nor, as it happens, to diminish the usefulness of those readings as we approach The

Overstory. These readings advertise Powers’s preoccupation with the creative potential of processes of genetic variation that resist standardisation, the ancestral bonds between human and nonhuman animals, and the role of disability in exposing the coherence of the individual, autonomous, rational human self as a fiction—ideas that all bear an identifiably posthumanist inflection. The Gold Bug

Variations, for example, is interpreted as an attempt ‘to capture the haphazard process by which four basic codings, the building blocks of life, result in complex human organisms founded on principles of diversity’ (183). For Mitchell and Snyder, ‘Powers’s novel exposes … the fallacy’ of efforts to reduce this creative, dynamic, disorderly process to ‘perfectly controlled repetition’—the

Human Genome Project’s attempt ‘to copyright a normative map of genetics’, for example—and shows that such efforts ‘miss the very point of genetic diversity as an engine that produces so many organismic variations’—that is, mutations (183). The ‘replication process’ in which Gold Bug is interested should therefore be interpreted ‘in a Deleuzian manner where the “play” in an otherwise homogenizing system cultivates revelations of difference’ (184). In other words, ‘genetics produces

177 massive variation within the species rather than the standardized, average, universal body; or, perhaps more accurately, the massive degree of repetition involved in genetic sequencing introduces myriad opportunities for difference to emerge’ (184). E unibus pluram: this is the posthumanist gist of Gold Bug, in Mitchell and Snyder’s interpretation.

In The Echo Maker, meanwhile, ‘the protagonist, Mark Schluter, is diagnosed with a rare form of traumatic brain injury from a closed head trauma’, a situation ‘taxonomically specified as Capgras syndrome’ (Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics 196). In the parlance of neuropsychology, Capgras is

‘a form of identity misrecognition disorder where the subject experiences itself as alienated from longtime relations now turned foreign’ (196). For Mark, these ‘relations turned foreign’ include relations with his wife, Karin. However, when a world-renowned psychologist by the name of

Gerald Weber is drafted in to treat Mark, Weber ultimately decides against ‘treating’ him (in the conventional sense of the term), and opts instead ‘to provide a bridge for Karin to accept Mark as a changed person who will not return to preaccident normalcy’ (197). ‘Nobody’s ever who they were,’

Weber tells Karin (Powers, The Echo Maker 58). ‘We just have to watch and listen. See where he’s going. Meet him there’ (58). We will recall from Chapter 3 that Costello cannot find it in herself to accept Rayment for the person that he has become, and her attempts to return him to ‘preaccident normalcy’ are central to the reinscription of humanist norms in Slow Man. Rayment’s narrative would look very different were he beholden to the ‘authorial authority’ of Weber, who understands the radical contingency of the supposedly singular, coherent self (Marais 202). Via its portrayal of disability, The Echo Maker stages the posthumanist realisation, or remembrance, that the ‘I’ is in fact a literal, embodied response to the perennial flux of its environment, its world.

In fact, the novel goes further than this. As Mitchell and Snyder explain, ‘Mark revises Weber’s explanation for Capgras by explaining that the true failure … is that our brains learn to be inattentive to most of the details that define ourselves in relation to others as a shifting, dynamic process’ (199, emphasis in original). As such, Capgras syndrome ‘becomes a truer experience of consciousness in that it remains attentive to the minutely shifting nature of dynamic organisms—so much so that most of us jettison the details in order to impose the fiction of coherence upon, and for, each other’

(199, emphasis in original). As previous chapters of this dissertation have established, the act of imposing the fiction of coherence—or, indeed, fictions of coherence—upon disabled and nonhuman

178 subjectivities does a great deal more for normate humans than it does for disabled people or animals themselves. What Capgras recovers is, to a large extent, that which humanism has disavowed. While an analysis of the formal operations of The Echo Maker falls beyond this chapter’s remit, Mitchell and Snyder’s analysis presents Powers’s novel as a fiction of incoherence in which, to quote Wolfe, disability becomes the ‘enabling condition’ for the dissolution of the oppositions on which the constitutive exclusions of humanism depend (What is Posthumanism? 136). These include the human/animal binary: in Mitchell and Snyder’s account, Mark’s experience of Capgras enables him to ‘[recognize] another series of details that most humans fail to access: our ancestral proximity to birds and other species as a marker of desirability rather than a failure of human dominion over nature. Mark’s experience of his disabled body provides an opportunity for the reestablishment of his belonging to the animal world’ (199). Here, again, Powers uses disability ‘as an agency that operates by virtue of an exposé of normative cognition’s defining insufficiency’—and, in doing so, opens a window on the grand tapestry of biological kin of which the world at large is composed, and in which humankind is inextricably imbricated (199).

Despite being framed according to a troubling Darwinist logic, Mitchell and Snyder’s readings of

Gold Bug and The Echo Maker establish Powers as a novelist who is profoundly attuned to the generative potential of biological and epistemological diversity, the affective potentialities opened by subjectivities deriving from nonnormative modes of embodiment, and, more fundamentally, the fictions propagated to fulfil a humanist promise of coherence—and, by extension, legibility. The persistence of these thematic currents across several novels bodes well for the prospects of reading

The Overstory with the notion of a poetics of posthumanism in mind. Moreover, Mitchell and

Snyder’s reading of Gold Bug via Deleuze’s concept of ‘play’ recalls Cooke’s account of the lyrebird’s ‘ethological poetics’ through Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the orchid and wasp, lending credence to the notion that a poetics of posthumanism—one inscribed in the novel’s formal composition—might be rhizomatic. Combined with the conclusions drawn throughout the previous four chapters, as well as the array of salient theoretical interventions surveyed earlier in this one, these observations set the stage for a Deleuzian analysis of The Overstory itself.

*

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‘Everything a human being might call the story’

In thematic terms, The Overstory is as posthumanist a literary narrative as one could hope to encounter. Indeed, its interest in relations between human beings and the more-than-human world is so intense that its call to acknowledge their constitutive interdependence—and thus to apprehend the nature of the challenge posed by the unfolding climate crisis—occasionally threatens to harden into the rigid didacticism of a manifesto. Each of the novel’s nine principal characters experiences a variation of the same ecological awakening, and the nine converts are all prepared to commit to the ramifications of their epiphanies, even if it means risking life and livelihood. When Douglas

Pavlicek’s plane is shot down during the Vietnam War, a tree breaks his fall and saves his life; upon being discharged from the military, he becomes obsessed with the threat of deforestation. Neelay

Mehta becomes disabled upon falling from a tree, only for trees then to inspire him to construct an online universe that is perpetually remade by its legions of users. Olivia Vandergriff awakens after a near-death experience to find that she can hear voices instructing her to preserve the world’s forests. The list goes on. The lives of the nine protagonists, all of whom are unacquainted at the beginning of the story, start to intersect as the narrative unfolds. Five of them are brought together by a shared commitment to environmental activism. Patricia Westerford writes a pioneering book,

The Secret Forest, that other characters go on to read. There is no single protagonist, but rather a network of actors whose lives touch one another in different ways, directly or indirectly.

The characters’ respective epiphanies engender a number of reflections that resonate with the core tenets of the posthumanist philosophy in which this dissertation is interested. Patricia’s research in dendrology leads her to conclude that, among trees, ‘[t]here are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation’ (179). After a long, arduous therapy session, one of Mimi Ma’s patients comes to recognise herself as ‘an animal, a mere avatar’, and to recognise Mimi as another ‘stuff- imprisoned spirit, deluded into thinking it’s autonomous’ (504). To an accusation that his behaviour is unreasonable, Douglas comforts himself with the conviction that ‘reason is what’s turning all the forests of the world into rectangles’ (454). Occasionally, the characters engage directly with the same critical conversations in which this dissertation has intervened. Ray reads an article—this is before his accident—arguing that trees should have legal standing, and finds that ‘[t]he terrible logic

180 of the essay begins to wear him down’: ‘Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law. So why shouldn’t trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains be able to sue humans for theft and endless damages?’ (312). Before long, Ray’s ‘whole self is dissolving. All his rights and privileges, everything he owns. A great gift that has been his since birth is being taken away. It’s a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant’s: As far as non-humans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man’ (314, emphasis in original). Other references to the limits of humanist thought are equally explicit. Adam, for example, looks forward to lecturing on ‘Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect’ (540, emphasis in original).

These posthumanist proclamations are interspersed with numerous reflections on the nature and limits of storytelling. Patricia’s remarkable career in dendrology is inspired in part by the copy of

Ovid’s Metamorphoses that she is given by her father on her fourteenth birthday, and by its opening words: ‘Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things’ (147, emphasis in original). When Nick and Olivia spend ten months living in the crown of an ancient redwood tree, they turn to literature to pass the time. ‘They read two fabulous novels, one three years old and the other a hundred and twenty-three’, the second of which brings Olivia to the verge of tears (367).

Nick assumes that she has fallen in love with the characters—but the truth is more complicated:

‘they’re all imprisoned in a shoebox, and they have no idea’, she says. ‘I just want to shake them and yell, Get out of yourselves, damn it! Look around! But they can’t, Nicky. Everything alive is just outside their field of view’ (367, emphasis in original). Olivia’s frustration at the solipsism of the human species—and at the way in which this is enacted by her Victorian novel—is foreshadowed by a passage in the first chapter of The Overstory, when one of Nick’s ancestors flicks through a collection of photos of the chestnut tree that has stood on his family’s farm for centuries: ‘The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward … growing at the speed of wood’ (19, emphasis in original).

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From the outset, then, The Overstory announces an interest in the anthropocentrism of narrative representation. References to the humanist limits of narrative punctuate the text. Adam ‘tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations’, only to then ‘[throw] it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead’ (414). Patricia follows up her reflection that ‘[l]ife will not answer to reason’ with an observation with which Elizabeth Costello would surely agree: ‘meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it’ (167, emphasis in original). Dorothy picks up a book about trees, and ‘remembers … why she never had the patience for nature. No drama, no development, no colliding hopes and fears. Branching, tangled, messy plots. And she could never keep the characters straight’ (523-4). And, of course, Ray sits by his window, his life slowed to ‘the speed of wood’, reflecting on the one feature shared by all of the novels that he and his wife have read together (19). ‘Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive—character—is all that matters in the end’, he finds (477, emphasis in original). But this is ‘a child’s creed, … just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court’ (477). Like the poststructuralist theorists of the mid-twentieth century, Ray has grown weary of the cult of

‘characterological individuality’—but where the poststructuralists found the character to have been subsumed by social, political, and economic structures of human invention, Ray finds it to be subsumed instead in the vast, timeless ecological systems of the world at large (Barthes 95).73 From a perspective capable of appraising a canvas of such magnitude, ‘everything a human being might call the story’ is not enough. In fact, as we recall, ‘the world is failing precisely’ because humans restrict their understanding of story to the dimensions and rhythms of human being (477).

Or, more specifically, those of normal human being. Ray’s reflections are made possible by the perspective he cannot help but adopt upon becoming disabled. It is a perspective that his wife,

Dorothy, can appreciate, but not share. She ‘envies’ the ‘patience’ of Ray’s ‘slowed mind’ and ‘the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything’ (573). Ray is not the only character in the novel whose disability engenders a preoccupation with life beyond ‘the human’. Neelay’s limited opportunities for

182 participation in ‘normal’ society provide the circumstances under which he dedicates himself to building a virtual universe, and, finally, an online game ‘with the goal of growing the world, instead of yourself’ (517, emphasis in original). Patricia, meanwhile, ‘said nothing until past the age of three’, prompting her parents to ‘think that she must be mentally deficient’ (141-2). It transpires that the real reason behind Patricia’s speechlessness is ‘a deformation of the inner ear’ (142). Forced to wear ‘fist-sized hearing aids, which she hated’, Patricia’s speech ‘started to flow at last’—but it still ‘hid her thoughts behind a slurry hard for the uninitiated to comprehend. It didn’t help that her face was sloped and ursine. The neighbours’ kids ran from her, this thing only borderline human’

(142). An outcast from the first, Patricia eschews the human world and immerses herself instead in the world of trees, those other ‘borderline’ beings with which, as she explains in The Secret Forest, humans still share one quarter of their genes. As in The Echo Maker, each character’s ‘experience of [their] disabled body provides an opportunity for the reestablishment of [their] belonging to the animal world’—or, to be precise, the nonhuman world (Biopolitics 199).

The Overstory invites its readers to partake in this paradigm shift at numerous junctures. One good example can be identified amidst a standoff between environmental activists and law enforcement officials, where the novel’s descriptions of the protesters take an interesting turn. Focalising events through the perspective of a passing driver, Powers shows us ‘a mountain lioness’ whose ‘tail swishes between sleek hind haunches’ and whose ‘noble, whiskered head lolls on her neck as she inspects a snagged banner’, as well as a cougar, ‘young, lithe, and clothed only in a body-stocking, with the words A change is gonna come on her shoulder’ (288, emphasis in original). When tensions reach boiling point, Powers again opts to imbue his descriptions with a strange ambivalence: ‘The cameras linger on something remarkable in the throng: a herd of wild animals. Antlers, whiskers, tusks, and flapping ears, elaborate masks on the heads of kids in hoodies and bomber jackets. The creatures die, fall to the pavement, and rise again’ (477). In both instances, Powers makes clear that the ‘animals’ in question are human, but not before giving the metaphor a moment to sit on the page, unresolved. At a first glance, Olivia and her fellow protesters are animals—and this sense endures even after it becomes evident that they are not. For a few moments, the activists are liminal creatures who occupy the borderlands between ‘human’ and ‘animal’. Just as in the 14-year-old

Patricia’s reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this passage seems ‘to be less about people turning

183 into other living things than about other living things somehow reabsorbing, at the moment of greatest danger, the wildness inside people that never really went away’ (147).

Thus, not only does The Overstory represent several of its characters becoming disabled; the ambiguity of Powers’s descriptions paints Olivia and the other protesters as neither human nor animal, but as something more closely akin to what Deleuze and Guattari call becoming-animal.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the term becoming does not refer to a literal process of assuming an altered form, and it is not ‘a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification’ (A

Thousand Plateaus 237). Rather, it denotes a state of being, or being-in-contact, that ‘lacks a subject distinct from itself’ and ‘produces nothing other than itself’ (238). In the symbiotic event of a wasp pollinating an orchid—an example we remember from Cooke’s account of his ethological poetics— what transpires is ‘not imitation … but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp’

(10). Like all becomings, this becoming ‘produces nothing by filiation’ (238). ‘There is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid’, but, crucially, ‘no wasp-orchid can ever descend’ from this assemblage (238). Becoming is non-dialectical: it entails no synthesis, no offspring that would represent its completion. And becoming is non-hierarchical: it ‘is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent’ (238). For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is ‘always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms’ (238, emphasis in original). In short, ‘becoming’ has nothing to do with vertical progression or regression, but describes instead an identifiably posthumanist, horizontal trans-species entanglement.

Like the novels analysed in my earlier chapters, The Overstory seems destined to receive a positive critical reception from any disability and animal studies scholars who consider it worthy of critical attention. As in those chapters, however, we are left to grapple with the question of whether the novel’s commitment to a posthumanist onto-epistemology extends to its formal constitution. Is this literature of the posthuman also a posthumanist literature? The title of the novel suggests that

Powers has reflected on exactly this question. The word ‘overstory’ is no poetic neologism; in fact, it has two longstanding definitions. In its noun form, it refers to ‘[t]he highest layer of vegetation in a forest or woodland, usually the canopy-forming trees’, while the infinitive verb ‘to over-story’

184 means ‘[t]o cover with a series of paintings, so as to narrate a story or stories’ (OED). In combination with the novel’s repeated references to the limits of ‘everything a human being might call the story’, these definitions suggest Powers’s novel is designed to transgress the spatio-temporal dimensions of so-called ‘normal’ human being and to resituate humankind in an expansive more-than-human imaginary (19, emphasis in original). To determine whether it does so successfully, let us return to the figure through which Deleuze and Guattari’s non-dialectical, non-hierarchical phenomenon of

‘becoming’ abides: the rhizome.

*

Deleuze and Guattari Don’t Understand Trees

For Nikolas Rose, an important (if sometimes overlooked) contributor to the biopolitical turn,

Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987) represents ‘the most radical alternative to the conventional image of subjectivity as coherent, enduring, and individualized’ (Inventing 170). Not all biopolitical thinkers are so effusive in their praise for A

Thousand Plateaus, however. In When Species Meet (2007), Donna Haraway launches a fierce broadside against Deleuze and Guattari, arguing that she finds little in their volume but ‘scorn for all that is mundane and ordinary and the profound absence of curiosity about or respect for and with actual animals, even as innumerable references to diverse animals are invoked to figure the authors’ anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist project’ (28). ‘Derrida’s actual little cat’, Haraway adds, wryly, ‘is decidedly not invited’ (28). Yet, as Frida Beckman argues in her Between Desire and Pleasure: A

Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality (2013), this critique is built on selective evidence. ‘Aiming to prove

Deleuze and Guattari’s lack of interest in real animals,’ Beckman writes, ‘[Haraway] quotes them saying “Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool”’ (Beckman 128; Haraway, When Species Meet 29;

Deleuze and Guattari 265, emphasis in original). ‘Had she looked beyond the one text she quotes’, however, Haraway ‘would have discovered how Deleuze explains the statement … by saying that what he cannot stand is not animals per se but rather the human relationship with the animal’

(Beckman 128-9, emphasis in original). Beckman argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s commentary on the ‘foolishness of liking cats and dogs is not really a statement about animals at all, but about humans’: ‘It is not the animal in itself, … but the human relationship to the animal that needs to be

185 rejected’—a contention in which Haraway would likely find a great deal of merit (Beckman 128).

Even Haraway herself is compelled to admit that, like her own scholarship, Deleuze and Guattari’s project endeavours ‘to get beyond the Great Divide between humans and other critters to find the rich multiplicities and topologies of a heterogeneously and nonteleologically connected world’

(Haraway, When Species Meet 28).

Key to Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt to overleap this ‘Divide’ is their juxtaposition of two figures: the arborescent and the rhizomatic. Both words have their roots in the nonhuman realm: arborescent means ‘tree-like’, while a rhizome is an ‘elongated, usually horizontal, subterranean stem which sends out roots and leafy shoots at intervals along its length’ (OED). If Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of these terms to describe two antinomical conceptions of knowledge encourages us to consider their work in a posthumanist context, their advocacy of rhizomatic thinking—evidenced by the structure of A Thousand Plateaus itself—verifies an affinity with posthumanism’s insistence on generative relationality between heterogeneous actors across and beyond species borders. The strength of this affinity is confirmed by reflection on the ‘approximate characteristics of the rhizome’ that Deleuze and Guattari enumerate in the first chapter of their book (7). The first two principles, of connection and heterogeneity, follow that ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different to the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order’ (7). The principle of multiplicity follows that, unlike arborescent ‘pseudomultiplicities’, which retain a ‘unity’ that ‘[serves] as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject’, authentic multiplicities have ‘neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature’ (8). The principle of asignifying rupture follows that a rhizome ‘may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants,’ they say, ‘because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed’

(9). Finally, the principle of cartography and decalcomania follows that ‘a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure’

(12). These characteristics distinguish the rhizome as a model of culture whose political potential lies in its eschewal of all manner of hierarchical arrangement and classification:

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To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect

with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses. We’re tired of trees. We

should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of

arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving

or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.

(15, emphasis added)

Evolutionary theories of development from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ lifeforms; animacy hierarchies; ideas of human exceptionalism; the logics of extensionism and inclusionism: all evince an arborescent structure themselves, or are founded on systems of thought indebted to the logic of arborescence.

Such a logic is incommensurate with posthumanism, and its structure therefore incompatible with any poetics that purports to enact a posthumanist onto-epistemology. This being so, The Overstory instantly seems an unlikely exemplar of a poetics of posthumanism. After all, one need only consult its page of contents to notice that Powers’s novel is structured like a tree.

The Overstory comprises four parts. The eight chapters that make up the first part, ‘Roots’, introduce the main characters, who then become acquainted, in different constellations and at varying degrees of separation, in the 250 pages that comprise the second part, ‘Trunk’. These connections continue to develop into ‘Crown’, in which the characters’ personal narratives reach their individual and collective crisis points. By the time we reach ‘Seeds’, circumstances have divided the characters from one another again. Each is left to reckon with the legacy of their ecological epiphany and its effects, bearing the lessons they have learned into the afterlives of their awakenings. At first blush, then, The Overstory not only seems more preoccupied with portraying ‘the struggles between a few lost people’ than making ‘the contest for the world’ seem equally compelling; it opts to incorporate those struggles into a unified, arborescent narrative structure (478). Ironically, then, Powers risks allowing his more-than-human theme to become the organising principle for a novel primarily concerned with human entanglement, thereby consigning his ostensible nonhuman subject to an instrumental prosthetic role. From this perspective, The Overstory, far from departing from the dynamic identified in my other primary texts, actually replicates that dynamic exactly. This reading only holds, however, if one neglects to heed the discovery made by Patricia Westerford in the seventh chapter of the novel, when her research takes her to ‘a forest east of town’ (157).

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It is here that Patricia finds a tree ‘under full-scale insect invasion’—and when she studies samples taken from the infected tree and its neighbours, ‘she finds something that even she isn’t ready to believe’ (157). ‘Only one conclusion makes any sense’ to her: ‘The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other’ (158, emphasis in original). These findings are soon condensed into one sentence of the groundbreaking paper that will later launch her academic career: ‘The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community’

(158, emphasis in original). Her research is widely discredited before finally being accepted as scientific fact—and while the character is fictional, the research is not. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), notes that trees are connected by ‘joint structures of fungus and root’ known as mycorrhiza (‘Arts of Inclusion’, emphasis in original).

These mycorrhizal webs ‘connect not just root and fungus, but, by way of fungal filaments, tree and tree, connecting up the forest in entanglements’ (Tsing, ‘Arts of Inclusion’). ‘Next time you walk through a forest,’ Tsing advises, ‘look down. A city lies under your feet. If you were somehow to descend into the earth, you would find yourself surrounded by the city’s architecture of webs and filaments’ in ‘a lively scene of action and interaction’ (‘Arts of Inclusion’):

There are many ways to eat here and to share food. There is recognizable hunting in the city: for

example, some fungi lasso little soil worms called nematodes for dinner. But this is just the crudest

way to attune one’s digestion. Mycorrhizal fungi siphon energy-giving sugars from trees for their

use. Some of those sugars are re-distributed through the fungal network from tree to tree. Others

support dependent plants, such as mushroom-loving ‘mycophiles’ that tap the network to send out

pale or colourful stems of flowers. (Tsing, ‘Arts of Inclusion’)

Powers knows this well. Indeed, if there is one point The Overstory is at pains to emphasise, it is that trees have been misunderstood. Trees do not stand alone, but are interconnected: literally, underground, with and through a complex network colloquially known as the ‘Wood Wide Web’.74

They communicate, among themselves and with other nonhuman beings. Like her real-world peers,

Patricia finds that, ironically, trees are not arborescent—or, at least, they are not only that. Rather, they are rhizomatic. And, upon closer inspection, so is The Overstory.

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*

Focal Shifts, Cosmic Voices, and Rhizomatic Structures

The Overstory begins with two sentences, simple and inconceivable: ‘First there was nothing’;

‘Then there was everything’ (3, emphasis in original). This oblique reference to the Big Bang quickly gives way to a more local, though no less thought-provoking, scene:

Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages.

A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back,

as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune

down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than

any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by standing still. The woman does exactly that. Signals rain around her like seeds. (3, emphasis in original)

Before long, these ‘signals’ are setting the woman a task: ‘Close your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough. What hovers right above you? What floats over your head right now—now?’ (3, emphasis in original). As the messages accumulate, a theme starts to emerge: ‘All the ways you imagine us

… are amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above’; ‘If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning’; ‘Listen. There’s something you need to hear’ (4). As Patricia will later discover for herself, the trees are indeed signalling—here, directly to a human subject teetering on the cusp of communion with the nonhuman world.

Several features of this opening passage warrant inspection. Firstly, it is notable that the only entities named and specified are trees; everything else—the city, the woman, everything one would expect to be named—remains general and indeterminate. The woman’s anonymity—the lack of precisely the kind of characterological individuality that, in Dorothy Hale’s account, endowed the modernist

‘representation of fictional characters an artistic task that entailed an ethical duty’—suggests her to be representative of humankind in its entirety (Hale). Moreover, it is as though the text itself is

189 answering the trees’ entreaty: to apprehend the ‘unseen’ drama of life running its courses. The experience of reading the passage is similar to that of rotating the lens on a camera: the contours of humankind and its constructions are cast into obscurity as the details of the arboreal world are thrown into relief. The provenance of the narrative voice is also unclear. Later in the text, italics are used to represent the enigmatic voices that Olivia can suddenly hear after her near-death experience, voices that guide her ecological awakening and lead her to The Free Region of Cascadia and its activist community. Is this the same voice that narrates the beginning of the novel? It is the voice of an omniscient narrator, certainly, but it seems to issue from a different source than the majority of the novel’s narration. The main body of the passage is italicised, while thoughts, quotations, and other asides are not—a reversal of the norms of formatting that reinforces the sense of a shift in focus: of the foreground receding into blurriness, and the background sharpening into clarity. The strangeness of this shift is well explained by Timothy Morton in The Ecological Thought (2010).

According to Morton, ‘[t]he ecological crisis’—Powers’s main theme—‘makes us aware of how interdependent everything is’, and, ‘[s]ince everything is interconnected, there is no definite background and therefore no definite foreground’ (30, 28). ‘If there is no background and therefore no foreground’, however, ‘then where are we? We orient ourselves according to backgrounds against which we stand out. There is a word for a state without a foreground-background distinction: madness’ (30). Morton argues that this recognition of ecological interdependency results in

a creepy sensation that there is literally no world anymore. We have gained Google Earth but lost

the world. ‘World’ means a location, a background against which our actions become significant.

But in a situation in which everything is potentially significant, we’re lost. It’s the same situation

the schizophrenic finds herself in. She is unable to distinguish between information (foreground)

and noise (background). So she hears voices coming from the radiator, yet hears speech as

meaningless burble. Everything seems threateningly meaningful, but she can’t pin down what the

meaning is. (30)

This, of course, is also the same situation in which Mark, the protagonist of The Echo Maker, finds himself after his accident. Like Capgras, ‘the ecological crisis has disrupted our normative sense of foreground and background’—and the start of The Overstory does likewise (Morton 110). By giving voice to this strange, nameless authority at the beginning of the text, Powers asks us to expand our conception of what qualifies as ‘meaningful’. As the novel unfolds, many characters will comment

190 on the dangerous solipsism of Homo sapiens; here, at the beginning of the novel, Powers alludes to the same tendency by overturning representational norms. Like Baggs’s ‘In My Language’, the text submerges us in a realm in which expectations are subverted and conventional interpretative tools suddenly feel insufficient.

This dislocation of ‘the human’ is also enacted by the unthinkably massive scales traversed by this omniscient perspective. One cannot be more or less omniscient, of course, but seldom is a narrator situated so explicitly on a metaphysical plain. First there was nothing; then there was everything: the first words of the novel issue from before the beginning of time, housed in short, declarative sentences that endow this scientific chronicle of the origins of the universe with a Biblical authority.

This is a cosmic omniscience that bespeaks a kind of global consciousness. Immediately, then,

Powers responds to the unique interpretative challenge that is posed by the looming climate crisis.

Scholars such as Timothy Clark and Amitav Ghosh have argued that, unlike the existential threats of previous decades—nuclear war, for example—climate change is neither sudden nor photogenic, but rather unfolds on geographical and historical scales that far exceed those on which human life is lived.75 For Clark and Ghosh, this disjuncture threatens to fatally undermine our attempts to respond to the most profound threat faced by humankind in modern times. Fostering the widespread apprehension of climate change that is required for meaningful social change to occur, they argue, requires the development of representational strategies that transgress the limits of human being and grasp the monumental dimensions of our current predicament. The Overstory wastes no time in announcing its determination to reach far beyond the spatial and temporal scales of human life.

From page one, the narratives of its human characters are situated within a frame of massive posthumanist proportions.

It is not simply that Powers begins the novel with this ‘cosmic’ narration. Each of the novel’s four parts opens with an interjection from this diffuse, anonymous narrator, as if to prevent the reader from becoming too comfortable in the manageable dimensions of a familiar humanist chronotope.

At the beginning of ‘Trunk’, a man ‘sits at a desk in his cell in a medium-security prison’ trying to

‘translate’ the patterns of a wooden desktop (193, emphasis in original). ‘For a moment, the rings resolve from out of the angled cut. He can map them, project their histories into the wood’s plane’— but the moment does not last: ‘still, he’s illiterate’ (193, emphasis in original). Again, another

191 unidentified ‘everyperson’ finds himself ‘trying to learn’ the ‘alien script’ of trees and finding that understanding narrowly eludes him: ‘If he could read, if he could translate… If he were only a slightly different creature, then he might learn all about how the sun shone and the rain fell and which way the wind blew against this trunk for how hard and long’ (193-4, emphasis in original).

The pattern repeats at the beginning of ‘Crown’: ‘A man in the boreal north lies on his back on the cold ground at dawn’ and marvels at the ‘evergreen tips’ that ‘sketch and scribble on the morning sky’ (443, emphasis in original). ‘What are those treetops like?’, he wonders, only to decide that they are ‘nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their existence. Likeness is the sole problem of men’

(443, emphasis in original). The man goes on to reflect that he ‘wouldn’t need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this—this, the growing rings of light and water and stone—would take up all of me, and be all the words I need’ (444, emphasis in original). The man’s yearning is for a state of pure being: beyond metaphor, beyond language, beyond all systems that circumscribe what qualifies as meaningful, what matters.

The passage at the start of the final section, ‘Seeds’, approaches the perceptual interstice between

‘the human’ and the more-than-human world from a slightly different angle. ‘Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day’, it begins (591, emphasis in original). ‘First there is nothing.

Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells’ (591, emphasis in original). And then, suddenly, ‘there is everything’: shortly after midday, one cell ‘enslaves a couple of others’; by mid- afternoon, ‘animals and plants part ways’; after 11pm, ‘life grows aware’; ‘modern man shows up four seconds before midnight’; ‘cave paintings appear three seconds later’; and then, ‘in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself’ (591-2, emphasis in original). This condensation of the history of the universe into a

24-hour frame collapses incomprehensible magnitudes into apprehensible form. Situated in the most comprehensive context imaginable, ‘the human’ is made to look recent, contingent, and very vulnerable indeed.

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By referring back to the opening of the novel in this final ‘cosmic’ interlude, Powers appears to bring his novel ‘full circle’. Aesthetically, this endows the text with a feeling of closure—but, on reflection, this is not so much a return as it is a continuation. Come the stroke of midnight, ‘most of the globe is converted to grow crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again’ (592, emphasis in original). The Overstory is thus bookended, as it were, by a short history of everything, on the one hand, and an allusion to the unwritten history of an ineffable future, on the other (3, 592). Between these extremes, the human narrative of Powers’s novel—‘everything a human being might call the story’—presents as a fleeting, contingent materialisation of bodies caught in a state of endless flux: a conglomeration of

Baradian intra-actions (19, emphasis in original). This impression is further cultivated by the composition of the first and last passages of that human narrative. The first full chapter of the novel, the first of its ‘Roots’, introduces us to Jørgen Hoel, recently arrived in the United States from his native Norway (5). Like many of the early immigrants to the U.S., Jørgen plans to avail himself of the unique promise of the new country, to build a new life from scratch. Meanwhile, the novel’s final paragraphs—the last of its ‘Seeds’—return us to Jørgen’s great-great-great-grandson, Nick, who likewise finds himself on the cusp of an unknown future. Having constructed a giant inscription from fallen trees with the help of a band of strangers, Nick declares that he should ‘be getting back’

(625). ‘Back where?’ asks one of his new friends (625). ‘Good question’, he replies (625). All the reader learns of Nick’s future is that ‘the next project beckons’ somewhere in ‘the north woods’

(625). The Overstory thus concludes with the promise of sheer potentiality: by wild, diffuse tendrils grasping forward into a kind of divine nothingness; by ‘Seeds’ whose future flourishing is left to the imagination. The text reaches its tendrils deep into the past—in ‘Roots’, as in the Old Testament, generations rise and fall within the space of sentences—and far into an uncertain tomorrow. The

Overstory does not have one beginning, but many; and it does not offer the ‘sense of an ending’ so much as the sense of a tipping point, of a milestone in an endless, cosmic becoming.

Within this immense frame, the novel’s human protagonists are ceaselessly embroiled in their own becomings—and this has a decisive bearing on the novel’s representation of disabled and nonhuman subjectivity. While the principal characters are all clearly individuated in line with their specific, personal ‘Roots’, they all share in common an experience of trauma that, directly or indirectly, has

193 led to their respective ecological awakenings—to a felt sense of kinship with the more-than-human world. As we know, only some of the characters are coded as disabled, and only some are figured as nonhuman, but the broader point here is that their embodiments and their subjectivities are fluid, mutable. None of the protagonists is reducible to a fixed onto-epistemological status; rather, they all are constituted by their vulnerability to a world that is always in the process of reconstituting them. Individually and collectively, the characters cross and recross the lines that distinguish

‘disabled’ from ‘normal’ and ‘human’ from ‘nonhuman’ with a frequency that destabilises those lines beyond repair. The most obvious examples of this are instances in which a character’s trauma is immediate and irrevocable: Neelay’s epiphany after falling from the tree; Olivia’s ‘rebirth’ following her accidental electrocution; and Ray’s growing attunement to life processes unnoticed prior to his aneurysm. The most instructive example of this dynamic, however, occurs when

Patricia—now a renowned dendrologist, her reputation strong and her legacy secure—delivers a lecture titled ‘The Single Best Thing a Person Can Do for Tomorrow’s World’ (556).

The presentation proceeds without any indication of what this ‘single best thing’ might be until

Patricia starts discussing Tachigali versicolor, a remarkable tree that ‘flowers only once’ (569).

Patricia explains the process by which this flowering occurs: ‘The dying mother opens a hole in the canopy, and its rotting trunk enriches the soil for new seedlings. Call it the ultimate parental sacrifice. The common name for Tachigali versicolor is the suicide tree’ (569, emphasis in original).

She picks up a vial of extract taken from the tree and decants a drop into a glass of water: ‘The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can’t escape. She lifts her glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things’ (569, 583, emphasis in original). It is strongly implied that, by drinking the extract of the ‘suicide tree’, Patricia commits suicide herself. If this is the case, we can read Patricia’s act as an imitation of Tachigali versicolor: a performance of the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ undertaken to ensure that the fruits of her life and work can foster generations of future flourishing.

In entomological circles, suicidal altruism of this sort has been identified among some species of ant and termite in a phenomenon known as autothysis. This occurs when the insect’s internal organs spontaneously rupture, and it serves the wellbeing of the colony in one of two ways: either the

194 corpses of the dead insects help to protect the colony’s territory from invaders, or the insect secretes a deadly substance that kills the insect and its assailant all at once.76 In either case, autothysis is a function of a rhizomatic structure: it is the literal ‘asignifying rupture’ that shifts the

‘determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions’ of the colony. Patricia’s suicide, if that is what has taken place, can be similarly interpreted as an act of suicidal altruism committed in the service of her ‘colony’—a colony that, for a woman who was once nicknamed ‘Plant Patty’, is certainly not only human (156).

The warm tone of Patricia’s final paragraphs reflects the spirit of generosity in which this act is committed, and bespeaks the posthumanist values in which her worldview is rooted. Patricia’s death is not an end, because she does not understand the world to be populated by beings that are discrete and finite. Her research has equipped her with the knowledge that human beings are not simply contiguous, but continuous with the world at large. For this pioneering dendrologist, death is not annihilation, but transformation: from a human form in which she has never been fully comfortable into the plant matter with which she has always felt a special kinship. This reconceptualisation accentuates the promise that Foucault attributes to death in his original biopolitical formulation:

‘Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion’; ‘death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it’ (Foucault, History Vol. 1 138). When death is conceived not as a void, or abyss, but as a medium through which subjects are transfigured, becoming with one another in new ways, this ‘escape’ from power assumes a radical political potential, one that razes traditional animacy hierarchies and answers Haraway’s call to ‘make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present’ (Staying 1, emphasis added). Of course, Patricia’s death is never confirmed—but this ambiguity can itself be read as a deconstruction of the binary oppositions on which the humanist tradition relies, up to and including

‘the life/death relation’ (Derrida and Roudinesco 63). Indeed, the entire cast of The Overstory blur the ‘conceptual and ontological coordinates’ of humanism in a manner that recalls Wolfe’s reading of Thinking in Pictures: by ‘[crossing] the lines not only of species difference but also of the organic and inorganic, the biological and mechanical’ (What is Posthumanism? 136).

Patricia’s disappearing act is just one especially illustrative example of the way in which The

Overstory abides by Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of asignifying rupture. The narrative is

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‘shattered’ at certain spots—Olivia’s death is another key instance—but it ‘[starts] up again on one of its old lines’, or else on new ones. The narrative also abides by the principles of connection and heterogeneity, since each of its sub-narratives inflects all the others, to the extent that the contours of each sub-narrative often become indistinct. Less obviously, the novel can be said to abide by the principle of multiplicity: not by eschewing subject and object entirely, but by encompassing an excess of subjects and objects, a surfeit that amounts to a matrix of shifting ‘determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions’ in which no one component serves as an indispensable ‘pivot’

(Deleuze and Guattari 8). By virtue of its medium, The Overstory cannot technically abide by the principles of cartography and decalcomania: all novels are of course reducible to some ‘structural or generative model’ (12). Even so, the novel’s internal structural coherence is complicated by the celestial framing of its human drama, the radical contingency of which is exposed by the text’s intermittent gestures towards the colossal complexity of the cosmic percolations that are its conditions of possibility—gestures made by employing an omniscient narrator who speaks in the kind of impersonal voice also identified in Timbuktu. Like the forests into which Nick disappears in its final paragraph, The Overstory’s arborescence is, in fact, rhizomatic. Having destabilised the borders that distinguish the ‘normal’ from the ‘disabled’ and the ‘human’ from the ‘nonhuman’,

Powers’s novel also unsettles the distinction at the heart of the theoretical project of A Thousand

Plateaus—and, in doing so, confirms its viability as an exemplar of a poetics of posthumanism. The

Overstory abides by the logic of the Metamorphoses: it represents ‘the human’ turning into other things—or, better, into the countless things that were never ‘other’ to begin with. Formally no less than thematically, it is a becoming: ‘a satisfying story’ that is also ‘a meaningful one’; a chronicle of ‘the struggles of a few lost people’ that refuses to ‘mistake life for something huge with two legs’ and represents the ‘contest for the world’ in glorious technicolour (478).

*

An Affirmative Biopolitics of Narrative?

All my previous chapters have deployed the theoretical vocabulary of biopolitics to make sense of the formal machinations by which my primary texts reinscribe humanist norms. This chapter’s turn from the wary excavation of concrete problematics to the speculative identification of promising

196 alternatives need not prevent us from persisting in thinking the formal operations of The Overstory in biopolitical terms. If it is not immediately apparent how one might go about doing this, it might be because biopolitics usually connotes a negative valence, and is easily conflated with the ‘negative politics of death’ known as thanatopolitics (Lemke 90). While the work of numerous biopolitical philosophers would seem to justify such an equation, other thinkers have attempted to theorise the

‘politics of life itself’ in more positive terms.77 Roberto Esposito, for example, ventures an account of an affirmative biopolitics: ‘a politics that is no longer over life but of life’ (Bíos 11, emphasis in original). Esposito’s biopolitical philosophy centres on the paradigm of immunisation, which sees the political concepts of security, property, and freedom as fuelled by the logic of immunity, which

‘protects and promotes life while also limiting its ‘expansive and productive power’ (Lemke 90).

‘[T]o the extent that the logic of immunity secures and preserves life,’ explains Thomas Lemke, ‘it also negates the singularity of life processes and reduces them to a biological existence. This

“immunitary logic” leads from the maintenance of life to a negative form of protecting it and finally to the negation of life’ (Lemke 90). The Nazi death camps represent the ultimate manifestation of this logic.

To advance his account of an affirmative biopolitics, Esposito reverses the three dispositifs that he has employed to characterise the Nazi bio-thanatopolitical project: ‘the normativization of life, the double enclosure of the body, and the preemptive suppression of birth’ (Bíos 157, emphasis in original): ‘The attempt we want to make is that of assuming the same categories of “life,” “body,” and “birth,” and then of converting their immunitary (which is to say their self-negating) declension in a direction that is open to a more originary and intense sense of communitas. Only in this way … will it be possible to trace the initial features of a biopolitics that is finally affirmative’ (Bíos 157, emphasis in original). This biopolitics would replace ‘the self-destructive logic of immunity’ with

‘a new concept of community’, one whose ‘essential foundation’ is the ‘constitutive vulnerability, openness, and finitude of individual bodies and the collective body’, bodies that ‘defend themselves against … identification, unification, and closure and articulate an immanent normativity of life that opposes the external domination of life processes’ (Lemke 91).

There are obvious resonances here between Esposito’s account and the reading of The Overstory I have elaborated above. The individual and collective bodies represented in Powers’s novel refuse

197 straightforward ‘identification, unification, and closure’, and it is precisely their ‘constitutive vulnerability, openness, and finitude’ that encourages us to read The Overstory as rhizomatic.

Moreover, the novel strongly implies that a ‘politics of life’ represents a powerful rejoinder to a sovereign power over life. As the text progresses, its disparate protagonists are increasingly subject to acts of governmental intervention. Mimi is severely injured when law enforcement loses patience with the environmental protests in which she has taken part. Olivia and Nick are bullied from their adopted home in the canopy of Mimas, the giant redwood, by violent forces from above and below.

Adam is escorted out of his lecture theatre, into a police car, and off to a lifetime behind bars.

However, some characters do manage to escape the grasp of human control. We have already seen how Patricia exercises her ‘individual and private right to die’, transgressing ‘power’s limit’ by undertaking a transition from human animal to vegetal matter (Foucault, History Vol. 1 139). The end of Nick’s story—which is also the conclusion of the novel—represents a similar subversion of human governmental authority. Nick walks off into the forest, leaving the massive word he has constructed from fallen tree trunks—‘STILL’—behind him (624). Here, the narrative voice abruptly changes key once again:

The learners will puzzle over the message that springs up there, so near to the methane-belching

tundra. But in the blink of a human eye, the learners will grow connections. Already, this word is

greening. Already, the mosses surge over, the beetles and lichen and fungi turning the logs to soil.

Already, seedlings root in the nurse logs’ crevices, nourished by the rot. Soon new trunks will form the word in their growing wood, following the cursive of these decaying mounds. (624-5)

Like van den Hengel’s bioart, Nick’s creation is a form of zoegraphy: it is the writing of a life ‘that does not have any human body or self at its center’, a ‘fundamentally inhuman’ life that ‘connects human life to the immanent forces of a vital materiality’ (van den Hengel 2). Even its composition is a product of cross-species collaboration: the impracticalities of moving such large objects mean that the shape of the design is ‘more discovered than invented’ (Powers, The Overstory 604). Having evaded arrest for his role in the act of ecoterrorism that killed Olivia, Nick has become an odd kind of fugitive who practices a fugitive art of resistance: an art composed in concert with his more-than- human kin, an art so wild that it cannot be bought, sold, or censored.

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Initially, then, the biopolitical logic of The Overstory seems well described by Esposito’s account of an affirmative biopolitics. However, his theorisation of a power of life is far from unproblematic.

In fact, for Wolfe, it is ‘unworkable both philosophically and pragmatically’ because of Esposito’s

‘insistence on “the principle of unlimited equivalence for every single form of life”’ (Wolfe, Before

58, 56).78 The problem for Wolfe ‘is that if all forms of life are taken to be equal, then it can only be because they, as “the living,” all equally embody and express a positive, substantive principle of

“Life” not contained in any one of them’ (57). On this basis, Wolfe contends that Esposito’s alternative to a traditional ‘indexing of biopolitical norms’ amounts only to its ‘other extreme, a sort of neovitalism that ends up radically dedifferentiating the field of “the living” into a molecular wash of singularities that all equally manifest “life”’ (59). ‘Is there not a qualitative difference between the chimpanzee used in biomedical research, the flea on her skin, and the cage she lives in—and a difference that matters more … to the chimpanzee than to the flea or the cage?’ he asks (83). ‘I think there is’ (83). This enables Wolfe to identify a ‘specific challenge’ that is ‘entailed by thickening and deepening, rather than flattening, our description of the worlds and networks we share’, a challenge he begins to meet by reflecting on the procedure by which value is ascribed to a given entity (83). This procedure involves at least two parties: the valuer, and the being who is valued. Another way to say this is that ‘questions of value … necessarily depend on a “to whom it matters”’ (84). This calls the notion of intrinsic value into question. But Wolfe goes one step further, returning to his concept of double finitude to venture that this to whom it matters ‘need not be— indeed, … cannot only be—human, either in the sense of excluding by definition nonhuman animals, or in the sense of a “human” who is not always radically other to itself, prosthetically constituted by the ahuman and indeed inorganic. If the capacity to “respond,” to be a “to whom,” is not given but rather emerges, is brought forth, out of a complex and enfolded relation to the “what,” to its outside’, then ‘the addressee of value … is permanently open to the possibility of “whoever it may be”’ (84, emphasis in original). As such, a ‘nonperspectival ethics’—an ethics ‘imagined fundamentally as a noncontingent view from nowhere’, and which can, on that basis, ‘declare all forms of life of equal value’—starts to look idealistic, if not naïve (85). Wolfe phrases it succinctly:

‘From what vantage would it be judged that the equilibrium invoked by Esposito is achieved?’ (85).

As Wolfe admits, it is tempting to understand the point that ‘any norm is unavoidably perspectival’

199 as ‘[dictating] relativism, solipsism, or autoimmunitary closure’—but Wolfe is insistent that it does exactly the opposite: ‘an ethics of pure equilibrium without decision, without discrimination … would be, paradoxically, unethical’ (86, emphasis in original). ‘It’s not that we shouldn’t strive for unconditional hospitality and endeavor to be fully responsible’, Wolfe says; ‘it’s simply that to do so, it is necessary to do so selectively and partially, thus conditionally, which in turn calls forth the need to be more fully responsible than we have already been’ (86).

Does The Overstory legislate for vital ‘qualitative differences’ between its human protagonists and the trees that are its subject—and a difference that matters more to humans than trees—in the way that Wolfe advocates? (83). I think it does—and I think it does so by retaining a focus on the plight of clearly individuated humans, each with their own distinct ‘Roots’, even as it relocates humankind to its proper place in the posthumanist order of things. As Clark, Ghosh, and likeminded scholars have argued, apprehending the phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change requires the adoption of a posthumanist perspective—and yet this same perspective also risks belittling the significance of humankind, even as the very term ‘Anthropocene’ testifies to the breathtaking geological power humans have assumed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Having negotiated this paradox throughout the novel by alternating between human and cosmic scales, Powers resolves it in a key passage towards the end of the novel, in which ‘the human’ is abruptly brought back into focus through disconcertingly generous eyes.

For the duration of her crusade to prevent the Californian redwoods from being destroyed, Olivia follows the instructions of voices she can suddenly hear after her accidental electrocution. One of the messages these voices convey is that ‘The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help’ (613, emphasis in original). Olivia and Nick are given to understand that these ‘wondrous products’ are trees—until the end of the novel, long after Olivia has died, when Nick is forced to entertain an alternative theory: ‘From nowhere, in a heartbeat, Nick understands’ what the voices

‘must always have meant. The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help. Not them; us. Help from all quarters’ (613, emphasis in original). What may initially seem to be an impermissible betrayal of the posthumanist values to which The Overstory clearly subscribes is, on reflection, nothing of the sort. When we describe our attempts to forestall the unfolding climate crisis as efforts to save the planet, we are quite literally incorrect: even if we make the planet

200 uninhabitable for our own kind, the overwhelming majority of what comprises Planet Earth—trees included—is sure to outlast us. By refusing to conflate ‘the human’ and ‘the world’, The Overstory enables us to apprehend the vulnerability of humankind at this unique historical juncture. If this entails a redrawing of the boundary between ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’, that boundary is of a very different calibre to that which inoculates ‘the human’ against its many ‘others’.

*

Humans are not the same as other animals, and we are indeed a ‘wondrous’ breed. If posthumanism is to prove similarly influential, it will have to persuade our solipsistic species that the same is also true of other species—and, importantly, that much of what makes us wondrous comes from a place that is only ever superficially ‘without’. To that end, a poetics of posthumanism should prove a valuable resource. Midway through Powers’s novel, Adam tells Mimi that ‘[t]he best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story’ (420). This is true—up to a point. That literary narratives can foster modes of apprehension in ways to which philosophical argumentation can only aspire is beyond dispute. However, as this dissertation has argued, the kind of paradigm shift that is required in order to foster an apprehension of the value of disabled and nonhuman lives requires the composition of stories that do not restrict themselves to the shapes, rhythms, and dimensions of ‘normal’ human being. Now, perhaps more than ever before, we need narratives that make disabled people and nonhuman animals matter without taking recourse to processes of rendering which galvanise the too-familiar contours of the privileged, exclusionary figure of ‘the human’.

*

201

202

CODA

Enabling Conditions Disability, Animality, and Defamiliarisation

*

In 1916, Viktor Shklovskij published ‘Art as Technique’ (2004), an essay that introduced one of the concepts with which the Russian formalist has become synonymous: defamiliarisation. In his own words, defamiliarisation refers to the capacity of art ‘to recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, in order to make the stone stony’ (16, emphasis in original). Unlike the practical language of everyday communication, ‘[t]he purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known’ (16). Meanwhile, ‘[t]he technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’

(16). Defamiliarisation thus describes the act of representation as re-presenting: as presenting again, differently, thereby short-circuiting extant interpretative heuristics. As both the title and the content of ‘Art as Technique’ attest, many other artistic media also evince this remarkable faculty; and yet it seems especially pronounced when it is enacted via the medium of words, signs that are always already finely wrought translations of something seen, or heard, or felt. In order to return the world to us in fresh, reinvigorated form, defamiliarisation must first take it away and make it strange. To make the world new, literature first makes it hard, awkward—in a word, illegible.

By this point, the ethical import of the defamiliarising potential of literary portrayals of disability and animality should be clear. As this project has shown, literary narratives are expertly equipped to denaturalise exclusionary, inherited assumptions regarding the value of disabled and nonhuman lives. Lawrence Crawford’s analysis of resonances between the concept of defamiliarisation and

Derrida’s concept of différance—one of this project’s most influential theoretical touchstones— captures the nature of that ethical potential precisely. For Crawford, ‘Shklovskij’s formulations of his theory of defamiliarization oppose life to death, the vital to the fossilized, created fullness to eroded emptiness, a graphic image to effacement and the empty algebraic symbol, aesthetic perception to habitual recognition, the lively force and beauty of a word at its coining to worn

203 stereotype and dead metaphor’ (209). As we know, disabled people and nonhuman animals have long been ‘stereotyped as passive’ by juxtaposition with the (supposedly fully animate) nondisabled human—as deathly, if not fossilised—and these associations are fostered by the assumption that the inner lives of members of both populations amount to little more than an ‘eroded emptiness’ (Chen,

Animacies 3). What is more, Crawford’s references to ‘dead metaphor’ and ‘the empty algebraic symbol’ accurately describe the roles that disability and animality have been ascribed throughout literary history. In each their own ways, and with varying degrees of success, all of the narratives analysed in this project seek to redress such forms of representational violence by articulating the fullness of disabled and nonhuman animal subjectivities—that is, by defamiliarising disabled and nonhuman being. However, this dissertation’s journey towards a poetics of posthumanism has also established the ethical potential of the reverse dynamic, a dynamic whereby disability and animality themselves defamiliarise formal conventions of narrative representation that contrive to reinscribe the norms of humanism.

The defamiliarising potential of disability and animality is advertised throughout this dissertation.

Indeed, on reflection, I am struck not only by the regularity with which the word defamiliarise and its derivatives feature among its pages, but, more interestingly, by the context in which these terms appear most frequently. In Chapter 2, Adah’s hemiplegia is described as ‘the wellspring of an aptitude for creative defamiliarisation and incisive critique’; Chapter 3 argues that Rayment’s disability ‘defamiliarises the world, forcing him to apprehend it anew and to reevaluate his place within it’; while Chapter 5 opens with the reflections of Ray Brinkman, whose brain aneurysm has

‘radically defamiliarised’ his view of the nonhuman realm. In every instance, defamiliarisation is invoked not as a faculty of artistic representation, but as one deriving from a nonnormative mode of embodiment: what Cary Wolfe might describe as a ‘powerful and unique form of abledness’

(What is Posthumanism? 136). I am not the first to come to this conclusion. In Concerto for the Left

Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (2008), Michael Davidson draws an analogy between

‘the Russian formalist idea that works of art defamiliarise routinized patterns of thought and usage’ and the challenge that disability poses to ‘ingrained attitudes about embodiment’, reading his selected texts as ‘parable[s] about the work—the practice—of disability in making normal life strange’ (xvi, xxiii). Davidson’s account of what he calls a ‘critical disability aesthetics’ includes a

204 comment that chimes clearly with the argument elaborated over the course of this dissertation: ‘by framing disability in the arts exclusively in terms of social stigma, on the one hand, and advocacy, on the other’, says Davidson, ‘we may limit disability aesthetics largely to thematic matters, leaving formal questions under-theorized’ (xvii, 2). If this dissertation makes any meaningful contribution to the critical conversations in which it intervenes, it is surely the imperative to allow disabled and nonhuman animal subjectivities to avail themselves of their ‘forms of abledness’ to defamiliarise the formal conventions of narrative storytelling—and, from there, to operate as the ‘positive, even enabling condition’ for a poetics of posthumanism (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? 136, emphasis in original). Indeed, one might legitimately ask whether literature will be able to fulfil its immense ethical potential until we have thoroughly investigated the mutual imbrication of narrative form and humanist values.

Literary narratives must embrace the ‘aesthetic disability’—the formlessness, the openness, the vulnerability—that the petrification of their formal conventions has contrived to disavow (Duncan

1). This is not a call to reinvent autobiography or the novel so much as it is a call to recognise the ethical import of the countless texts that languish in obscurity because they have dared to conclude that, when all is said and done, these genres are in fact sufficiently versatile, sufficiently malleable to represent the immense continuum of subjectivities, human and nonhuman, that make the world what it is—or, rather, what it is always and forever in the process of becoming. The voices are there, whether or not we give ourselves the opportunity to hear them. Like a dog listening to its human reading a novel aloud, like a cat peering at a naked French philosopher, we might find that the meaning of a poetics of posthumanism eludes us. We might find that it refuses to submit to the

‘tragically restrictive … and restricted’ range of interpretative tools that we have decided we have at our disposal to ‘decode’ it (Coetzee, Elizabeth 76). If we decide that this means that we can take nothing from it, then that is our loss—not only a human loss, but a loss for a ‘we’ that is not only human, and never has been. Alternatively, we may find it in ourselves to approach the subjectivity presented to us like the proposition that it is. Like a parrot in the African jungle, we may even find it in ourselves to respond.

*

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NOTES

*

1 Wheeler coins this term, which contests the Cartesian mind/body dualism—a crucial cog in the machinery of humanist thought—in The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (2006), 18.

2 I use the term ‘apprehension’ because it encompasses both rational and affective forms of understanding. As Judith Butler writes in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), apprehension ‘can imply marking, registering, acknowledging without full recognition. If it is a form of knowing, it is bound up with sensing and perceiving, but in ways that are not always—or not yet—conceptual forms of knowledge’ (5).

3 I refer to Baggs using the personal pronoun ‘they’ in light of Baggs’s self-description as ‘genderless’. Baggs’s obituary in the New York Times remarked that ‘[m]any friends and admirers posting about Mx. Baggs’s death on social media used gender-neutral pronouns, while others used the traditional feminine ones’ (Genzlinger).

4 In van den Hengel’s ‘Zoegraphy: Per/forming Posthuman Lives’ (2012); Cooke’s ‘Toward an Ethological Poetics’ (2019); Wolfe’s Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds (2020); and Mitchell and Snyder’s The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015), respectively.

5 Ryder coined this influential term in a leaflet of the same name. See Ryder, ‘Leaflet’ (1970).

6 McBryde Johnson describes her 2002 meeting with Singer in her memoir Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life (2005), where she writes that Singer ‘simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along’ (201). Kittay gives an account of her encounter with Singer at a conference in 2008 in her article, ‘Comments on Alice Crary’s “The Horrific History of Comparisons between Cognitive Disability and Animality (and How to Move Past It)” and Peter Singer’s Response to Crary’ (2019).

7 The term ‘grievable’ is borrowed from Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), which examines the frames through which distinctions are made ‘between valuable and grievable lives on the one hand, and devalued and ungrievable lives on the other’ (22). In Butler’s account, ‘those whose lives are not “regarded” as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death’ (25).

8 See especially Chapter 13 of Book One of The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (1923), 30-33. Here, Aristotle states that ‘the soul has two parts, one irrational and the other possessing reason’, and that ‘the irrational part of the soul is common, i.e. shared by man with all livings things, and vegetative’ (31, emphasis in original).

9 This famous phrase first appeared in Descartes’s 1637 work Discourse on the Method (1991): ‘But immediately I noticed that while I was endeavouring in this way to think that everything was false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking’ (36, emphasis in original).

10 See Lacan’s ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (84-86) and ‘The Subversion of the Subject And the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’ (305-306) in Écrits: A Selection (1977).

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11 See Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (1991). Canguilhem’s work had a significant influence on the thinking of Michel Foucault, who wrote the Introduction to the edition of the book referenced here.

12 See Oliver’s Social Work with Disabled People (1983).

13 Janine Owens provides an excellent summary of problematics relating to the social model in ‘Exploring the critiques of the social model of disability: the transformative possibility of Arendt’s notion of power’ (2015). For Owens, ‘criticisms of the social model of disability may be divided into three different points of observation; embodiment, oppression, and an inadequate theoretical basis’ (388). The different models of disability that have been theorised as alternatives to the social model are numerous. They include: the identity model; the human rights model; the cultural model; the economic model; and the charity model.

14 See, for example, Bekoff’s ‘Animal Emotions: Exploring Passionate Natures’ (2000), Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do (2018), and The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter (2007); Bekoff and Pierce’s Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (2009); Pepperberg’s The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (2002); and de Waal’s The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist (2001), and Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016).

15 See especially Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003) and When Species Meet (2007).

16 For an excellent example of an accessible introduction to the biological contingency of the human being, see Ed Yong’s dazzling account of the human microbiome, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life (2016), which offers a singular reminder of the vital role of bacteria in human life. For Yong, bacteria are not foreign bodies hell-bent on assaulting our immune systems so much as indispensable components of our very being. Indeed, this human-microbe symbiosis is so profound that Yong toys with revising his title: ‘perhaps it is less that I contain multitudes and more that I am multitudes’ (24, emphasis in original).

17 Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (2007) analyses instances in which ‘the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability. The primary level in which it may be discerned is in the interaction between a disabled and nondisabled character, where a variety of tensions may be identified. However, in most texts aesthetic nervousness is hardly ever limited to this primary level, but is augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such as the disposition of symbols and motifs, the overall narrative or dramatic perspective, the constitution and reversals of plot structure, and so on. The final dimension of aesthetic nervousness is that between reader and the text’ (15).

18 In The Concept of Mind (1984), Gilbert Ryle repudiates the Cartesian mind/body dualism, describing it ‘with deliberate abusiveness, as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine”’ (15-16). ‘My destructive purpose’, says Ryle, ‘is to show that a family of radical category-mistakes is the source of the double-life theory. The representation of a person as a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument’ (18).

19 According to Dames, this period was ‘book-ended by Henry James’s 1884 polemic “The Art of Fiction” and the twin masterworks of, respectively, Continental and Anglo-American novel theory, Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1920) and Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921)’ (25).

20 Dames is quoting from Lewes’s Principles of Success in Literature (1891), 128.

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21 A provisional canon of biopolitical philosophy is emerging. In addition to the many works by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this canon would likely include Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004) and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009); Roberto Esposito’s Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2008), Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (2010), Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (2011), Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View (2015), and Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal (2012); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004); Achille Mbembe’s ‘Necropolitics’ (2003); and Cary Wolfe’s Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2013). Interventions from a new generation of biopolitical thinkers continue to advance and expand the field. These interventions include Neel Ahuja’s Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (2016); Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012); Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017); and Alexander G. Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014).

22 See, for example, Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968), Between Past and Future (1993), and On Violence (1970). Kathrin Braun offers an interesting reading of Arendt’s work on temporality alongside Foucault’s theorisation of biopolitics in her article ‘Biopolitics and Temporality in Arendt and Foucault’ (2007). Meanwhile, Timothy Campbell incorporates Heidegger into the continuum of biopolitical thinkers with whom he engages in Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (2011).

23 Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze remind us that the notion that ‘this little text eventually would launch its own share of articles and books was not at all clear in 1978’, when it was first published in English (3). Indeed, ‘[t]he text’s concluding passages on biopolitics … seemed anomalous if not aberrant: apparently unconnected to the pages that preceded them, these passages also would seem disconnected from the two further volumes of The History of Sexuality Foucault would publish before his untimely death in 1984’ (4). In fact, it was not until the intervention of Agamben in 1998 ‘that Foucault’s long-dormant text on biopolitics was reactivated in its current form’ (4). If Foucault’s theory of biopower did not immediately capture the imagination, this is perhaps because it was only ever partial, provisional, and suggestive; as Thomas Lemke attests, ‘Foucault’s use of the term … is not consistent and constantly shifts meaning in his texts’ (Lemke 34). Explicitly or implicitly, and to greater or lesser extents, biopolitical questions are a feature of many of Foucault’s most celebrated works, including The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (2008), The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1994), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995), History of Madness (2006), Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1988), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1994), Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78 (2007), and Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (2004).

24 See biopolitical philosopher Roberto Esposito’s Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View (2015), which problematises the age-old distinction between the categories of ‘person’ and ‘thing’, respectively, by taking recourse to the human body as an entity that occupies a liminal position between ‘person’ and ‘thing’.

25 Agamben develops his argument through the ancient Roman figure of homo sacer, the ‘sacred man’ whose rights of citizenship are revoked but who nevertheless remains subject to the dictates of the law. His life is thus ‘included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion’ (8). As such, homo sacer is the mirror image of the sovereign, who is both inside the law (to the extent that he is subject to it) and outside the law (insofar as he has the power to 209

suspend it). It is by enacting this suspension, inaugurating the ‘state of exception’, that the ‘bare life’ of zoē is produced. The law exploits the paradox of including life in the juridical order as an exclusion, revoking its membership in society while retaining power over it. See also Agamben’s State of Exception (2005).

26 See Jacob’s The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (1973).

27 Beer’s reading can be found in her book Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2010).

28 Wolfe is quoting from Maurizio Lazzarato’s ‘From Biopower to Biopolitics’ (2002), 103.

29 The phrase ‘form of life’ recalls Agamben’s The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rule and Form-of-Life (2013), which forms part of a book series that began with Homo Sacer (1998). Here, Agamben turns to the Franciscan monastic tradition for the resources by which ‘to think a form-of-life, a human life entirely removed from the grasp of the law and a use of bodies and of the world that would never be substantiated into an appropriation’ (xiii).

30 Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human were both co-written with Catherine Johnson.

31 Grandin explains and justifies her position in ‘Avoid Being Abstract When Making Policies on the Welfare of Animals’, her contribution to the collection Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory (2012).

32 See Shukin, Animal Capital (2009), 21-22.

33 A reference to the subtitle of Shukin’s Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009).

34 In Foucault and the Government of Disability (2005), Shelley Tremain names ‘techniques of self-improvement and self-transformation’ among the manifold manifestations of government in Foucault’s broad understanding of the term (8). I return to Tremain’s reading of Foucault later in this chapter.

35 See Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (2000).

36 Couser is of course referring to Michel Foucault’s history of the medical profession, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1994).

37 This development was first heralded by Hunsaker Hawkins’s 1993 book Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (1999), continued by Arthur W. Frank’s 1995 work The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, Ethics (2013), and cemented by Couser’s own Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing (1997).

38 Mitchell and Snyder emphasise that this shift is not total, arguing that ‘most’ of the ‘punitive processes of confinement and legal prohibitions’ that biopower appears to replace ‘continue today on a somewhat reduced scale, often in secreted for-profit institutions, and as morally questionable practices within neoliberalism’ (9).

39 Critiques of first-person life writing about disability can be found in works including Lennard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995); the ‘Introduction’ to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s edited collection The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability (1997); and Mitchell’s article ‘Body Solitaire: The Singular Subject of Disability Autobiography’ (2000).

40 See Stanley’s ‘On Auto/Biography in Sociology’ (1993).

41 Wolfe is quoting from Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco’s For What Tomorrow…: A Dialogue (2004), 63.

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42 Many of the problems that Premack and Woodruff posed their simian subjects in order to determine whether they boasted ToM were the same problems that the German psychologist and phenomenologist Wolfgang Köhler posed his chimpanzees in the experiments he conducted at his research facility on the island of Tenerife during the First World War, the findings of which would be published in Köhler’s The Mentality of Apes (1927). Literary animal studies scholars may be familiar with Köhler’s experiments from J. M. Coetzee’s short story ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’, in which the fictional author Elizabeth Costello speculates on the thought processes that Köhler’s most promising pupil, Sultan, went through in the course of his being experimented upon (Elizabeth 72). As Köhler attempts to measure his intelligence, Costello muses, Sultan is constantly ‘driven to think the less interesting thought’; all possibilities of conduct other than fidelity to a ‘normal’ human epistemology are foreclosed (Elizabeth 73). We will return to Costello at greater length in Chapter 3.

43 I borrow this phrase from Huxley’s 1954 essay ‘The Doors of Perception’ (2004), an account of Huxley’s experience of experimenting with the mind-altering psychedelic substance, mescaline.

44 Elaborated in Stiker’s A History of Disability (1997).

45 See Davis, ‘Constructing Normalcy’ (3-4). A more detailed discussion of the historical relationship between the ‘ideal’ body and the ‘normal’ body is provided in the Introduction to this dissertation.

46 For an excellent discussion of examples of deception among nonhuman animals, see Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say If We Asked Them the Right Questions? (2016), especially the chapter ‘P for Pretenders: Can deception be proof of good manners?’ (123-130).

47 Pepperberg affirms that ‘after approximately two years of training by and interacting with humans, Alex achieved a rudimentary form of communication: contextual/conceptual use of human speech. He could identify, refuse, and apparently request a limited set of objects for play or for food’ (51). She further observes that Alex ‘learned to form categorical classes. He could comprehend a vocal question, extract the relevant category from the question and from an object that could be classified in multiple ways, and respond with the label for the one, correct instance of this category’, and could also ‘vocally label the quantity of a specific subset of objects in a complex heterogeneous array’ (61, 123). Pepperberg’s data imply that ‘a nonhuman, nonprimate, nonmammalian subject has … an overt level of numerical competence equal to that of humans on the present task’, and ‘the “take home-message” is that we should not underestimate the numerical capacities of nonhumans’ (124).

48 Pepperberg emphasises the distinction between cognitive and linguistic abilities: ‘Researchers who train animals to use a human-based code in order to study nonhuman cognition often lose sight of the code as an investigative tool and argue instead about the extent to which the code is equivalent to human language’, she says, clarifying that these researchers ‘compare human and nonhuman linguistic rather than cognitive abilities’ (34, emphasis in original). The implication is clear: ‘we must remember that the power of inter-species communication is best exploited by focusing on how an animal’s use of a vocal code facilitates investigations of its cognitive abilities, rather than on what the animal’s use of the code itself implies about such abilities’ (35).

49 See Davis, ‘Constructing Normalcy’ (3-4).

50 The contingency of disability is emphasised by numerous disability studies scholars, including founding figures such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Extraordinary 14) and Lennard Davis (Bending 36).

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51 I am reminded here of Nirmala Erevelles’s critique in Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (2011) of what she considers to be a utopian vision of disability ventured by Robert McRuer at the end of his Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006). To McRuer’s optimistic question—‘What might it mean to welcome the disability to come, to desire it?”—Erevelles offers the important reminder that desire is always historically and economically contingent (McRuer 207, qtd. in Erevelles 27).

52 I was unable to access Verstraete, Verhaegen, and Depaepe’s article in any language other than Spanish. As a Spanish speaker, and in the absence of an English translation, I translated these quotations into English myself.

53 See Wicomb’s ‘Slow Man and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing’ (2009), and Davidson’s ‘Introduction: Dialectics of Dependency’ (2007).

54 Elaborated at length in Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007). The central tenets of Barad’s account are discussed more concisely in her article ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’ (2003).

55 For a comprehensive discussion of the concept of Umwelten, including the famous example of the Umwelt of a tick, see Uexküll’s 1934 work A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with a Theory of Meaning (2010).

56 In ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’, Costello reflects on Franz Kafka’s 1917 story ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1993), in which an ‘educated ape, Red Peter, … stands before the members of a learned society telling the story of his life—of his ascent from beast to something approaching man’ (Elizabeth 62). Costello reads Red Peter not as ‘an investigator of primate behaviour’ presenting scientific findings but as ‘a branded, marked, wounded animal presenting himself as speaking testimony to a gathering of scholars’, and draws a comparison between Red Peter and herself: ‘I am not a philosopher of mind but an animal exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak’ (70-71, emphasis added). In this context, the phrase ‘wounded animal’ implies something of the vulnerability that must be apprehended for the sympathetic imagination to be operationalised. Thus, the term ‘wounded animals’ not only serves as an apt descriptor of the many disabled and nonhuman that populate Coetzee’s fiction; it also suggests a mode of engagement with these supposed ‘others’ that transgresses the limitations of philosophy. For more on Coetzee, Costello, and relations between philosophy and literature, see Steven Mulhall’s The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (2009).

57 All four of the ‘Reflections’ that flesh out The Lives of Animals engage with Costello’s argument regarding the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals without properly legislating for the fact that this argument is represented in a work of fiction. Acknowledging this fact might have dissuaded the commentators from assuming an equivalence between Costello’s position and Coetzee’s, and enabled a more nuanced conversation about the problematics of trying to represent nonhuman subjectivities in literary form.

58 In ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’ (2003), Diamond searches for a means to describe the phenomenon whereby ‘an understanding of the kind of animal we are is present only in a diminished and distorted way in philosophical argumentation’ (11). She settles on Cavell’s term deflection, which she glosses as follows: ‘Cavell writes about the philosopher who begins (we imagine) from an appreciation of something appalling … But the philosopher's understanding is deflected; the issue becomes deflected, as the philosopher thinks it or rethinks it in the language of philosophical skepticism. And philosophical responses to that skepticism, for example, demonstrations that it is confused, further deflect from the truth here … I simply want the notion of deflection, for 212

describing what happens when we are moved from the appreciation, or attempt at appreciation, of a difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moral problem apparently in the vicinity’ (11-12).

59 See Nagel’s hugely influential article ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ (1974).

60 While we must be careful not to conflate the positions held by Costello and Coetzee, this perspective recalls Coetzee’s overarching characterisation of his body of work, proffered in a 1992 interview with Attwell. ‘If I look back over my own fiction,’ Coetzee says, ‘I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not “that which is not,” and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body in its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt’ (Doubling the Point 248, emphasis in original). It is little wonder that this reflection has since been cited by so many Coetzee scholars. If there is one preoccupation that haunts all of Coetzee’s novels, it is the problem of realism: of the inevitable infidelity of word to world, and the threats— and, less obviously, the opportunities—opened by the impossibility of unmediated signification. In this quotation, Coetzee points directly at the real—at that around which his fiction circles, and which seems destined to evade the grasp of referentiality—and, like Costello, locates it in the flesh and bone of embodied existence.

61 For the avoidance of any doubt as to whether the Costello of Slow Man is the same character who appears in the earlier works, Rayment later finds several copies of The House on Eccles Street during an expedition to his local library. Further confirmation that Costello’s character is consistent across the works in which she features is plentiful, and includes Rayment’s vague recollection that ‘he has come across articles by her in the press, about ecology or animal rights’ (82). There is even a reference to Costello’s being ‘notorious for something or other’ (82). Could this be an oblique reference to Costello’s controversial appearance at Appleton College?

62 Wolfe is referencing the title of Humberto Maturana and Bernhard Poersken’s From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition (2004).

63 The phrase ‘slowness and agitation’ is borrowed from Mel Y. Chen’s ‘Slowness and Agitation: Materialities of Race-Disability’, a keynote lecture delivered at ‘Posthuman Entanglements: An International Symposium on Disability, Illness, and Animality’, which was hosted by the BIODIAL research project in Oslo on 15 May 2018.

64 Attwell, Politics 92. The phrase ‘nets of meaning’ echoes a turn of phrase used by the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians as he muses on his relations with the barbarian girl: ‘So I continue to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another over her’ (89). Meanwhile, the reference to ‘metaphorical “camps”’ is taken from a reflection by the eponymous protagonist of Life & Times of Michael K as that novel reaches its denouement: ‘Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of all the camps, out of all the camps at the same time. Perhaps that is enough of an achievement, for the time being’ (182).

65 The term ‘companion narration’ owes an obvious debt to Haraway’s concept of ‘companion species’, which was first introduced in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003) and developed in subsequent works including, significantly, When Species Meet (2007).

66 Derrida ‘would like to have the plural animals heard in the singular. There is no Animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single, indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of “living creatures,” whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity. This does not, of course, mean ignoring or effacing everything that separates humankind from the other animals, creating a

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single large set, a single grand, fundamentally homogenous and continuous family tree going from the animot to the homo … That would be an asinanity’ (Derrida, The Animal 47, emphasis in original).

67 As Wolfe reminds us in Animal Rites (2003), Hearne’s response to Wittgenstein’s is not entirely damning (45). Indeed, she finds his statement to be ‘the most interesting mistake about animals that I have ever come across’, because ‘Wittgenstein does not leap to say that his lion is languageless, only that he is not talking’ (Hearne 167, 169). This distinction leaves space to entertain the prospect of reflecting upon ‘all consciousness that is beyond ours’, on nonhuman animals as other- or more-than-human, rather than subhuman or less-than-human (Hearne 170).

68 See Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999) and, more recently, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018).

69 Esposito refers to ‘the “dispositif” of the person’ in order to highlight ‘its performative role—I mean a role productive of real effects’ (Third Person 9).

70 See, for example, Benveniste’s ‘The Nature of Pronouns’ and ‘Relationships of the Person in the Verb’, both of which are reprinted in the 1996 anthology The Communication Theory Reader, edited by Paul Cobley.

71 The OED outlines the etymology of ‘conspire’ as follows: ‘French conspire-r (15th cent. in Littré) (= Provençal cospirar, Spanish conspirar, Italian conspirare), < Latin conspīrāre lit. “to breathe together”, whence, “to accord, harmonize, agree, combine or unite in a purpose, plot mischief together secretly”’.

72 For a comprehensive overview of Bruns’s definition of poetry, see his The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics (2012).

73 Finding ‘the agency of the individual’ to have been subsumed by the operations of capitalism, poststructuralist thinker Alain Robbe-Grillet condemned ‘the novel of characters’ to the past, while his contemporary Roland Barthes took aim at ‘the ideological illusion of characterological individuality’, declaring that ‘[w]hat is obsolescent in today’s novel is not the novelistic, it is the character’ (Robbe-Grillet 28; Barthes 95).

74 As Robert Macfarlane explains in a 2016 article for The New Yorker, ‘[r]oots and fungi combine to form what is called a mycorrhiza: itself a growing-together of the Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza). In this way, individual plants are joined to one another by an underground hyphal network: a dazzlingly complex and collaborative structure that has become known as the Wood Wide Web’ (‘The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web’).

75 See, for example, Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015) and Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).

76 Zoe Cormier, writing in the journal Nature, explains that ‘[s]elf-destructive behaviour is common among the sterile worker castes of eusocial insects such as termites and honeybees. The workers forego reproduction, so they are free to evolve altruistic behaviours that benefit the colony as a whole rather than themselves as individuals. Defensive suicidal rupturing—termed autothysis—has evolved … in a number of termite species’ (Cormier, ‘Termites’).

77 This turn of phrase is borrowed from Nikolas Rose’s study of contemporary molecular biopolitics, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (2007).

78 Wolfe is quoting from Esposito’s Bíos (2008), 186.

*

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