READING ANIMALS AND THE HUMAN-ANIMAL DIVIDE IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY FICTION Catherine Helen Parry A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Lincoln for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My wholehearted thanks to my supervisors Dr Rupert Hildyard and Dr Sîan Adiseshiah at the University of Lincoln. They were kind, thoughtful, and always right. I am also deeply grateful to Hilary Savory for friendship beyond the call of duty. Thank you to my daughters for their patience and support, and to Bonnie for her companionship throughout my doctoral studies. Most of all, thank you to Keith for making these writing years possible. 2 ABSTRACT The Western conception of the proper human proposes that there is a potent divide between humans and all other animate creatures. Even though the terms of such a divide have been shown to be indecisive, relationships between humans and animals continue to take place across it, and are conditioned by the ways it is imagined. My thesis asks how twenty-first century fiction engages with and practises the textual politics of animal representation, and the forms these representations take when their positions relative to the many and complex compositions of the human-animal divide are taken into account. My analysis is located in contemporary critical debate about human-animal relationships. Taking the animal work of such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe as a conceptual starting point, I make a detailed and precise engagement with the conditions and terms of literary animal representation in order to give forceful shape to awkward and uncomfortable ideas about animals. Derrida contends that there is a “plural and repeatedly folded frontier” between human and nonhuman animals, and my study scrutinises the multiple conditions at play in the conceptual and material composition of this frontier as it is invoked in fictional animal representations.1 I argue that human relationships with animals are conditioned by our imaginative shapings of them, and that the animals we imagine are, therefore, of enormous significance for real animals. Working in the newly established field of Literary Animal Studies, I read representations of ordinary animals in a selection of twenty-first century novels, including Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, E. O. Wilson’s Anthill, Carol Hart’s A History of the Novel in Ants, Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals, Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, Mark McNay’s Fresh, James Lever’s Me Cheeta, and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I interrogate how fictional animal forms and tropes are responding to, participating in or challenging the ways animals’ lives are lived out in consequence of human imaginings of them. There are many folds in the frontier between human and nonhuman animals, and my thesis is structured to address how particular forms of discursive boundary- 1 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p.30. 3 building are invoked in, shape, or are shaped by, the fictional representations of animals. Each of the four chapters in this study takes up one form of discursive boundary building – respectively, political, metaphorical, material and cognitive – between humans and other animals. Analysis is directed at developing concepts and critical practices which articulate the singular literariness of the human, ant, horse, donkey, chicken and ape representations encountered throughout my study. Understanding the ways we make animals through our imaginative eyes is essential to understanding how we make our ethical relationships with them. A key task for Literary Animal Studies is to make visible how literary animal representations may either reinforce homogeneous and reductive conceptions of animals, or may participate in a re-making of our imaginings of them. My study contributes to clarifications of the terms of this task by evolving ways to read unusual or unacknowledged manifestations of the human-animal divide, by giving form to previously unarticulated questions and conditions about how animals are imagined, and by evaluating literary re-imaginings of them. 4 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Animals and Literary Criticism ........................................... 6 CHAPTER ONE: Animal’s People: Setting Humans Apart .............................. 14 CHAPTER TWO: Ants, Multiplicity, Anonymity and Metaphorical Boundaries …........................................................................ 65 CHAPTER THREE: Fleshy Lives, Stitched Skins and Meaty Bodies ................... 112 CHAPTER FOUR: The Sameness and Difference of Apes .................................. 166 CONCLUSION: Knowing More, Feeling More ................................................ 219 5 INTRODUCTION ANIMALS AND LITERARY CRITICISM Human relationships with other animals are many and complex, and this thesis is about one particular and most forceful aspect of these relationships. The Western conception of the proper human proposes that there is a divide between such a human and all other animate creatures; relationships between humans and other animals take place across, and are conditioned by, this divide. The excision from the category of animal that humans give to themselves is taken to confer exceptional status, and leads to the privileging of human interests on the assumption that the animal lacks the qualities of the human. Both “the human” and “the animal” in this equation are imaginary creatures, and this thesis proposes that although we cannot encounter animals themselves through literature or literary criticism, we can find and test the making, re- making and un-making of the imagined animal we make ourselves against, and consider what the consequences of our imaginings may be for real animals. Such a literary critical enterprise would, until very recently, have been thought to serve little purpose beyond illuminating the figural and fabular beast, but literature teems with animal representations which exceed anthropocentric, symbolic interpretations, and this thesis and the field of Literary Animal Studies insists that the creatures of fiction are significant and meaningful in the lives of humans and animals. Literary Animal Studies was born at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a long overdue, specifically literary critical form of attention to human imaginings of the lives and deaths of animals. A tiny, scattered selection of critical texts about literary animal representations emerged through the 1980s and 1990s, and in the early twenty- first century they have been joined by a rapidly expanding – although still very small – body of work which engages with the complexity of literary animal production and the relationships, imaginative frameworks and ethical concerns encoded in it. In 2014 Robert McKay asked “what kind of literary animal studies do we now want or need?”, for such an infant field is still clarifying its questions and identifying the concepts, methods and language necessary to a forceful and scholarly literary critical practice.1 1 Robert McKay, ‘What kind of literary animal studies do we want, or need?’, Modern Fiction Studies, 60.3 (Fall 2014), 636-644, (p.637). 6 While there are many potential replies to McKay’s question, my study responds by identifying two key tasks for Literary Animal Studies. The first is to make visible how, in the twenty-first century, the location of imaginary literary animals in homogeneous, reductive categories may co-operate with the reinforcing of distinctions between sacred human life and disposable animal bodies. The second is to consider how the making of new, de-anthropocentrising concepts and ways of writing are evolving in animal representations. My study will participate in these tasks through readings of twenty-first century novelistic representations of nonhuman animals and ideas about exceptionalist distinctions between humans and animals, and by evolving new theoretical models and terminology which can help to articulate answers to difficult questions. It will pay attention to, but also maintain a tension with, contemporary scientific and philosophical thought, to develop new lines of enquiry on the textual politics of fictional animals. Of the very modest body of book-length titles dedicated to Literary Animal Studies, most pay some attention to the human-animal distinction; none of these titles, however, direct all their attention at the human-animal distinction in novelistic representations of ordinary nonhuman animals. This leaves an area that seems central to critical practice in the field of Literary Animal Studies dispersed across a small number of chapters and journal articles, or the parts of wider works.2 Responding conscientiously, as McKay argues Literary Animal Studies should do, to the predicament of animals in human and wild spheres, and against the backdrop of what may be a mass – global – extinction event,3 my study will make a sustained analysis of animals and the human-animal distinction, and consider the entanglements of animals with human technical, material, imaginative, political and discursive practices.4 Evaluating the forms of their literary textualisation, I hope to develop 2 Existing texts which allocate a proportion of direct attention to the representation of the human- animal distinction in novels include: Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, (2003); Anat