Exploring Human-Animal Relationships in Michel Faber’S Under the Skin (2000)

Exploring Human-Animal Relationships in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000)

Masterarbeit

Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Master of Arts (MA)

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

Vorgelegt von Iana Gagarina

am Zentrum für Inter-Amerikanische Studien

Betreut von: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. M.A. Roberta Maierhofer

Graz, 2020

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 1

2. The (seemingly) Familiar World...... 4

2.1 Hints, Foreshadowing, and Chekhov’s Guns ...... 5

2.2. Something is Rotten in the State of Scotland ...... 10

3. The Familiar Through the Lens of the Strange ...... 15

3.1 Defamiliarization in Under the Skin ...... 19

4. The Refamiliarized World ...... 22

4.1 Anthropocentrism: of Superior Humans ...... 26

4.1.1 Born This Way ...... 28

4.1.2. Woe from Wit ...... 32

4.1.3. I speak, Therefore I am Human ...... 38

4.1.4. Beyond Anthropocentrism ...... 44

4.2. Emotional Distancing: Language Will Tear Us Apart ...... 50

4.2.1. Three Strategies of Euphemization ...... 52

4.2.2. What is in a Name? ...... 57

4.3. Physical Distancing: See No Evil, Hear No Evil ...... 61

4.3.1. A Breach of Contract ...... 63

4.3.2. The Wall between Us ...... 66

Conclusion ...... 70

Works Cited ...... 72

1. Introduction Michel Faber is a Dutch-born author who was raised in Australia but has been living in the UK and writing in English since the late 1980s in genres of science fiction, short story, poetry and historical fiction, even though he prefers to disassociate his work as belonging to either this or that genre. His bibliography includes six novels with Under the Skin published in 2000 being his debut novel, five short stories and the only book of poetry Undying (2016) that is dedicated to his late wife Eva, whose death in 2014 has left an indelible imprint on Faber’s life and work, as Eva was the one who inspired him to put his work forward for publication, as well as she was behind their decision to move to the UK (Jordan). Affected by his loss, Faber has stated that his novel The Book of Strange New Things (2014) is his last one and that he will be writing no more. Whether keeping his word or not, Faber’s novels published during his rather short literary career of twenty years have received significant recognition. They earned him the titles “sly fabulist”, “a master of the spine-tingling page turner” whose imagination “visits the strangest of places and makes them real”, as well as has power to make “the Loch Ness monster look like an extrovert” (The Scotsman). Many consider his novels flesh-creeping, anything but predictable, weird, but nevertheless unputdownable (Maleney). Of his six novels, two were made into TV series: The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) as miniseries produced by the BBC in 2011 and The Book of Strange New Things was adapted as series “Oasis” in 2017. His Under the Skin novel, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Whitbread Award in 2000, was made into film in 2013 by Jonathan Glazer and, despite the fact it was a box office flop, received numerous accolades from British Independent Film Awards, New York Film Critics Online Awards 2014 (won in category Top Ten Pictures) and 70th Venice International Film Festival (Lyttleton). Glazer’s adaptation keeps up with the novel’s atmosphere of mystery, dark secrets and gradual disclosure of the chilling true course of events that Under the Skin is praised for. After watching a few minutes of the movie or reading a few pages of the novel, the question that inevitably arises is what is it really about? This is the novel’s synopsis that is also found on the editions published by Canongate Books, as well as the majority of online bookselling websites: “Isserley spends most of her time driving. But why is she so interested in picking up hitchhikers? And why are they always male, well-built and alone? An utterly unpredictable and macabre mystery, Under the Skin is a genre-defying masterpiece”. Isserley, as readers learn, is a female protagonist, however, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that she is far-off from what readers would perceive as female. She is an extraterrestrial involved in a farming business

1 and her job is to drive the road A9 in the Scottish Highlands to pick up men fit enough to be consumed, drug them and bring to the farm where her fellow co-workers, aliens just like her, would do the rest, namely, slaughtering and dressing the meat. This revelation, however, is never directly stated to readers and takes shape only if place all the clues and hints together, which casually rest on the pages of the novel and at first may seem unimportant. Similarly, the film’s synopsis found on many online sources for movie content, e.g. IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, is ambiguous and does not give away any information that would reveal the true nature of the protagonist portrayed by Scarlet Johansson. For example, the following is the film’s description from IMDb: “A mysterious young woman seduces lonely men in the evening hours in Scotland. However, events lead her to begin a process of self- discovery”. Indeed, Isserley, or as she is known in the film – the Female, is mysterious in many ways, but her being an alien is not what would immediately come to mind after reading such description. This plot twist, on the other hand, can easily be devalued by giving away too much information as it is done by Metacritic: “An alien seductress (Scarlett Johansson) preys upon hitchhikers in Scotland”. In the film, the only way for the audience to arrive at the truth is through visuals that are rarely broken by words. In the novel, however, language is the readers’ only key to the truth, which is its being a story that is more human, rather than humane. Under the Skin deals with themes that have occupied humanity for centuries, such as our place as well as of other living beings in the world, its hierarchy, and what defines a being as a human one. The central theme of Under the Skin is the human-animal relationship and the aspects of it that allow for the mistreatment of the latter, such as the belief in human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, and strategies often applied to mitigate possible feelings of guilt or remorse. This truth, however, is wrapped in many layers of secrets and hints that play on the readers’ social and cultural assumptions that mislead into believing in the familiarity of the depicted world. This thesis seeks to disentangle a narrative reel of thread in Under the Skin and find out how the world that resembles ours and appears familiar is created, how it gradually becomes strange and contradicting with the common notion of the familiar and reveals its alien side, as well as to discuss the implied impact of playing with notions of the familiar and the strange on readers. It is not easy to identify Under the Skin with a certain genre. As Virginia Harger- Grinling and Chantal Jordaan notice: “Nothing in this at times horrifying work is obvious. This novel is not merely a satire or even an allegory; it is a work of science fiction and of horror” (2003: 248). However, the novel, despite it seemingly clear and many times played out scenario of aliens infiltrating into human-inhabited planet, e.g. H.D. Wells’ The War of the Worlds 2

(1898), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972), Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1953), does not go easy on readers in terms of handing the state of affairs on the silver platter, that is, the alien activity. Rather, it is left to readers to collect all the clues and combine them to obtain a complete picture of who Isserley is, what is the nature of her business in Scotland, and why the novel is more about us than Isserley, as it can be read as an allegory of the human-animal relationship and violence against animals. In Сhapter 2 of this thesis, I will take into consideration what may at first glance appear as simple facts about the protagonist - whether it is her appearance, thoughts, or matter of interest in picking up hitchhikers, and expose these as highly misleading. Here I will guide readers through the novel’s inverted reality to collect the crucial puzzle pieces that point to this inversion and help figure out the theme of the novel, that is, the human-animal relationship. As it is a written work and its only way to give these facts to readers is through words, there is a large number of these that deserve to be discussed, as they function as clues that guide readers to the core of the novel, which both establish a familiar aesthetic and function as foreshadowing units of the extraordinary events, which act as catalyses and nuclei – a classification employed by Roland Barthes (1975), or Chekhov’s guns (1987). The need to look for the clues is expressed by the protagonist herself: “[…] she couldn’t figure herself out, either, and had to look for clues like anyone else” (Faber 39). Chapter 3 will discuss the purpose and implied effect on readers of the narrative’s careful and gradual disclosure of its alien secrets, that is, the destabilization of the established familiarity of the world in Under the Skin, rather than the normalization of the strange. Here I will draw on Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization and Leo Tolstoy’s theory of the dangers of automatization in fiction and life. Through what Viktor Shklovsky referred to as defamiliarization, Under the Skin can be regarded as a stepping out of a familiar environment that offers a new way of evaluating our present existence and beliefs, particularly those concerning animals. Looking through the estranged familiar: the human becomes animal, the alien becomes human, it is possible to reveal the ambivalent logic behind fundamental choices people make in regard to animals. Michel Faber created an alternative (and allegorical) world, where a group of extraterrestrials runs a small animal husbandry that farms humans and produces meat for the rich back on their planet. By focusing on the daily routines of the main protagonist, such as picking up hitchhikers for the meat production, the novel focuses on the aspect of choice both on the side of the aliens as well as the humans, and thus questions an essential definition of humanity, which will be discussed in Chapter 4.

In Chapter 4, I will establish the parallels between the choices of the aliens in the novel and ours in relation to animals. I will discuss how Faber explores the conventional understanding of the dominance of the human beings in a wider universe and how justifications for farming humans question this established assumption – which are the topics ecocriticism and environmental studies are preoccupied with, for which the works of Alwin Fill, Wilhelm Trampe, Carl Safina, and Guy Cook and Alison Sealey have been of invaluable use. Here I will also explore the factors that help create a gap, both emotional and physical, between humans and animals.

2. The (seemingly) Familiar World

The world in Under the Skin has many edges and layers that are not all available to readers at once. The novel offers only little glimpses of the global picture of events. With Faber’s refusal to classify his novel and market it as a work of science fiction, its synopsis does not state that the protagonist is an alien involved in a farming business and that her job is to pick up men that would fulfil the criteria of being fit enough to be consumed later, drug them and bring to the farm where her co-workers, aliens just like her, would do the rest, namely, slaughtering and dressing the meat. Almost all of the editions of the novel purposely do not state the true state of affairs and offer a following synopsis: “Isserley spends most of her time driving. But why is she so interested in picking up hitchhikers? And why are they always male, well-build and alone?” (2014). Providing readers with the description of the plot like the one given above in the introduction, which reveals that Isserley is in fact the alien that kidnaps male hitchhikers meaty enough for the rich aliens to consume, and specifying that it is a sci-fi novel, would most definitely kill all the intrigue the author wrapped so carefully in many layers. However, with a decision not to do so and withhold the truth from readers, the publisher allows to unwrap the story in which the actual course of events is shrouded in mystery. All what is left for readers is little hints and wordplays that are just like puzzle pieces and, when combined together and compared, they unveil the mystery about the protagonist and her business in Scotland, intending it to be a surprise and an unexpected turn of events, rather than a given, which is often not defamiliarized, but normalized and expected from the first pages. What makes Under the Skin the story about us is the topic it deals with that is very much on the agenda right now in our familiar world – the question of the human-animal relationship. In the novel, the familiar – us, human beings, are made strange by the alien logic. Animals, on the other hand, which, as argued by many ecocritics, e.g. Cook, Fill, Stibbe, have been long estranged, are made familiar. Thus, combining and comparing the clues, the strange world 4 infiltrated by aliens becomes refamiliarized and read as an allegory. However, readers have to follow the whole route of mysteries and ambiguities first in order to arrive at the realization of what the novel is communicating.

2.1 Hints, Foreshadowing, and Chekhov’s Guns

The novel opens up with these sentences: “ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch- hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to seize him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs” (Faber 1). With these, readers are immersed in the story in medias res and are provided with an answer to the first fundamental wh’ question who?, that is, Isserley, a female, as can be told by the use of pronoun she. The answer to the second question where? is a little further down the page: “Driving through the Highlands of Scotland was an absorbing task in itself; there was always more going on than picture postcards allowed” (ibid.). Though when? of the narration is not explicitly mentioned, the approximate period of time can be narrowed down to the time during which we live now on the basis of a car Isserley drives – red Toyota Corolla (ibid.: 4). Giuliana Adamo points out that there are five essential whs’ questions to every narration: “Who?- What?- When?- Where?- Why? [which] correspond perfectly to the so-called 'circumstances of the narration' that have been codified by Medieval rhetoric following Cicero' De Inventione” (1995: 93). The answers to what? and why? are to be found later in the story. Though it is already revealed in the introduction that Isserley is not a human being, but an alien, by providing such information in the very beginning of the novel, such as the definition of place, and a familiar one, such as Scotland, readers are enveloped by a feeling of familiar reality, supposing that the novel is read for the first time. What else contributes to a sense of reality in the novel is other toponyms, such as Dingwall, Inverness, Cromarty Firth – places that really exist and can be located on a map. Objects, too, for instance, supermarkets, gas stations, and cars do their bit of creating a familiar setting. Though it might seem as if at least three important questions are already answered, the actual answers are not that straightforward and before these will be learnt, there is a long thread of misleading sentences to detangle. One of the questions that may seem to be answered after reading the first pages of the novel is related to who the protagonist really is. Let us come back to the opening sentences: “ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to seize him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs” (ibid.: 1) With these sentences, readers may interpret Isserley’s intentions for what she needs hitch-hikers in a number of ways, but the option of them being slaughtered for meat and transported on another planet would probably not make the top of readers’ suggestions list. The guesses of her

5 intentions may also involve sexual connotations: “[…] you’d think you would be able to appraise him calmly as you drove, undress him and turn him over in your mind well in advance” (ibid.), which can be considered a red herring aimed at misleading readers into thinking that she is a woman of easy virtue but not an alien. After reading this sentence, readers may develop a strong belief in her indecent intentions as well: “[…] she imagined herself breathing heavily against him as she smoothed his hair and grasped him round the waist to ease him into position” (ibid.: 7). While these do communicate protagonist’s true train of thought, there is an understatement involved, which prevents readers from learning about the intentions these thoughts underpin right away. So far, these sentences offer bits of information that readers have to collect as puzzle pieces to complete the whole picture. In English terminology, the literary device of withholding information and revealing only small pieces of it, saving the reveal for later, is referred to as foreshadowing, which Faber brilliantly makes an important part of his storytelling. Foreshadowing is the narrative device that puts to work every element in the story to hint at future events or plot twists. These elements, or hints, e.g. words characters utter, names of places, descriptions, if casually mentioned by an author, may go unnoticed or seem to have little relevance to the story, but which, however, allow the story to progress logically and aim at teaching readers to pay attention to details. The device with which foreshadowing in Under the Skin goes hand in hand is Chekhov’s gun - a device that is often a subject of research and consideration as the fundamental principle of writing (Bitsilli). In his Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom, Valentine T. Bill documented the principle of this device: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there” (1987: 79). Faber’s Under the Skin has multiple rifles hanging on the walls. In the novel, everything that appears on the pages of the book, a label painted on a truck, for instance, is there for a reason. Many details introduced in the beginning are mentioned again at some point, such as the fact that the protagonist is in pain, that the hitch-hikers must never see her real eyes, or that she sacrificed a lot to be where she is right now. As the narrative progresses, these details, which can metaphorically be described as snowflakes, turn into giant snowballs overgrown with new circumstances that change the light these details are to be understood in. In this way, a seemingly innocent remark or what at first may be thought to be an unimportant detail, becomes complex storytelling device. These “guns on the walls” or moments that foreshadow the direction of events in the book are all scattered throughout the 6 twelve chapters of Under the Skin, which do not fire at the very end of the novel, as these would in many detective stories, but become relevant in the light of the events in the following chapters. Chapter 1 and Chapter 10 begin with almost identical sentences: “ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time. That’s what she’d always done” (Faber 197). These two sentences, though consisting of the same words, have different connotation and may be regarded as binary opposites. Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that all people are able to identify binary opposites, e.g. white and black or good and evil, and that our minds regard the world through such oppositions (1963). As Mary Klages notices: “Binary pairs, particularly binary opposites, form the basic structure of all human cultures, all human ways of thought, and all human signifying systems” (2017: 16). The ideas readers get about the protagonist from the opening sentence in the Chapter 1 change the direction from realistic towards the unrealistic ones, as in Chapter 10, supported by enough of Chekhov’s guns, the same sentence finally reveals the nature of the protagonist’s motivation. The binary opposition here is between familiar and alien, somewhat good and evil, when considering Isserley’s intentions. What these also illustrate is the extent to which binary oppositions depend on man-made concepts and how they reflect societies’ ideas and expectations. The sentences that reveal Isserley’s thoughts on what she imagines doing to a hitch- hiker, e.g. breathing heavily against him or easing him into position, may seem as straightforward implications of her carnal motives, but which, however, foreshadow completely opposite course of events (Faber 7). By the end of the Chapter 1, Isserley does touch one of hitch-hiker’s hair, however, with no sexual connotation involved. After drugging him with “icpathua” – an alien drug that works as a strong sedative, she puts a wig on him which presupposes touching his hair and exactly this is what she anticipates, since it signifies the last step in finding the right specimen and marks her day as successful. Faber continues to create an atmosphere of corruption around the protagonist’s persona and mentions this interesting detail about her car, which many that think that Isserley is interested in picking up men only with a view of having sexual relationship with them, can interpret it as a confirmation of their assumptions: “It [Corolla] had responded smoothly and placidly, made almost no noise, and had lots of room in the back – enough to put a bed in, even” (ibid.: 5). Faber does not seem to be wasting any words, and since everything has a relation to the story’s denouement and gets readers closer to solving the puzzle of what is going on and who Isserley really is, this seemingly unnecessary mention of her car, unless it is a product placement, does point to a crucial piece of information about the protagonist. With her routine so far described as only picking up male hitch-hikers and dreaming about touching their hair, 7 her mentioning of the space her car has automatically begs a question of what she really needs this much space for and whether it involves men she picks up. This detail about her car is a little Chekhov’s gun that comes in handy later in the story, where Isserley, tired of her job and suffering from backpain, drives long distances into the mountains to sleep there in peace. This atmosphere of corruption, or anticipation of lewd behavior on Isserley’s side, is obliterated in a scene in Chapter 2 in which she is examining the hands of one of the men: “His hands were grimy, but large and well-formed. They’d clean up nicely, with detergent” (ibid.: 26). What is remarkable about this sentence is the use of comma, even though it is not necessary. However, it allows readers to divide the sentence into two contrastive units, binary opposites, where the first part may presume care for a person and a want to see the true beauty behind all the dirt, while the second unit can be understood as a direct sign of the evil intentions that do involve care, however, not for a person but a product, in this case it is the human meat. The last sentence also demonstrates how Chekhov’s gun principle can be realized in the shortest period of time possible – within one sentence. The gun here is the deceitful first unit that is rather positive, which creates an impression of Isserley being interested in hitch-hiker’s hands and, therefore, in him as a person. The latter unit that specifies the method she would prefer to make his hands clean is where the gun fires. There is a similarity between the dramatic principle of Chekhov’s gun and a theory of levels of narratives proposed by Roland Barthes (1975). He distinguishes between three levels of narration: functional, the level of actions, and the level of narration, with three of them bonded together (1975: 243). The understanding of a narrative text depends not only, according to Barthes, on the simple unfolding of the events and tagging along behind the characters, but also on the realization that there are different levels to it: “To read a narrative (or listen to it) is not only to pass from one word to the next, but also from one level to the next” (ibid.: 244). The sentences mentioned above that foreshadow the truth about the protagonist in Under the Skin can be, therefore, identified as functional units. In his An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative, Barthes writes The "soul" of any function is, as it were, its seedlike quality, which enables the function to inseminate the narrative with an element that will later come to maturity, on the same level, or else- where on another level. If, in Un Coeur simple, Flaubert informs the reader at a certain point, nonchalantly as it seems, that the sous-préfets daughters in Pont-l'Eveque owned a parrot, it is because this parrot is to play an important role in Félicité's life: the enunciation of this detail (whichever linguistic form it may assume) constitutes a function, or narrative unit. (ibid.)

Just like Flaubert nonchalantly mentions the parrot, a little feathered Chekhov’s gun, Faber nonchalantly mentions Isserley’s intentions towards hitch-hikers and her thoughts about them. These may be regarded as functional units that both reveal the character of the protagonist and create familiar setting by playing with social perceptions of women driving alone with a desire to pick up male hitch-hikers only. The relevance of these elements to the story is often delayed, which contributes to the surprise value. Functions are not limited to sentences only in narrative text, but may be represented by sequences of sentences or lesser units, e.g. syntagms (ibid.: 247). Functional units, as Barthes explains, can be further subdivided into two classes: distributional, which are also referred to as functional, and integrative. These are often found in unequal proportions in narrative texts, e.g. popular tales are mostly functional, while psychological novels are integrative, that is, comprising of “indices”, or “less diffused concepts”, such as personality traits, information with regard to characters’ identity, notations of "atmosphere", or names of the places as in Under the Skin (ibid.: 247-248). Not all functional units are of the same relevance for plot development and can be subdivided into cardinal functions or nuclei, which are the units that “either initiate or resolve an uncertainty”, and catalyses, which functionality is “toned down, unilateral, parasitic”, but in no way redundant (ibid.: 249). Nuclei are integral to the story, while catalyses are integral to the discourse. The passages with Chekhov’s guns also function as catalyses, for the most part. They create a reflection of reality which is only later understood as false and unfamiliar. They provide ambiguous details about the protagonist, as well as her motivation, since a catalysis “[…] precipitates, delays, or quickens the pace of dis-course, sums up, anticipates, and sometimes even confuses the reader” (ibid.: 250), as much of them in Under the Skin do. The narrative of Under the Skin is almost entirely characterized by the principle of foreshadowing and Chekhov’s guns, which can also be referred to as catalyses. It allows Faber to exploit most of the events and words in the novel as guides that help readers join the story together by forming a complete whole. The novel is not limited to the examples of foreshadowing mentioned above. There are further units found still in the first chapter. For instance, the way Isserley describes the hitch-hikers, or people in general, also functions as foreshadowing. For her, they are “hunks on legs”, “hairy youngsters”, and “hideous animals” which only purpose is to breed. This is a very peculiar way of characterizing people, and, since Isserley’s motives are still unclear in the first chapter, the question of her true intentions arises again. Judging by her use of language, readers could speculate that she is motivated by some kind of trauma that makes her pick up people and hurt them. The given descriptions of people,

9 which, as the readers later learn, are not people in the alien sense - but animals, also create an impression that she is disgusted by them. Apart from introducing units that have relation to Isserley’s persona, there are these that point to the fate of the hitch-hikers as well. Faber introduces a huge gun, or a bomb, in the first chapter by mentioning a huge lorry labelled FARMFOODS, which is a functional unit, and which is deeply intertwined with the “hunk on legs” and “hairy youngsters” units. It creates a premise for these guns to shoot later in the story when the actual farm (Ablach Farm), where Isserley brings the drugged hitch-hikers to, is mentioned. This also creates a new environment for readers to interpret these signs and connect them into one after finding out that specifically these words hint at what is going to happen to the kidnapped hitch-hikers: they are going to be slaughtered for meat. There is another catalysis in Chapter 3 that is related to foreshadowing the fate of the kidnapped men, which is found in Isserley’s thoughts about one specific building: “This building must be protected from the elements and from the prying eyes of outsiders. It was the entrance to a much larger secret just below the ground” (ibid.: 56). This building is later revealed to be the farm with underground pens where the kidnapped hitch-hikers are kept. What expects hitch-hikers upon their arrival to Ablach Farm is also foreshadowed in Chapter 2 in a dialogue between Isserley and a man whose job is gathering whelks and supplying them to restaurants. Isserley does not know what the word whelks means, so she asks the man to explain what his job involves, to which he says: “You check when it’s low tide, go to the shore and just rake ‘em in. Soon as you’ve got enough, you give me a tinkle and I cone and collect” (ibid.: 31) At the first sight, this seems like an innocent explanation that bears little connection to the story, but Faber’s every word choice is deliberate. A parallel can be drawn between whelk gathering and Isserley’s job. Just like him, she goes on the road at “the low tide” – early in the morning and rakes men in her car. Once there is enough human meat, a ship comes and collects the finished product. Just like whelks are worth plenty in France and Spain, human meat is worth ten thousand liss in alien currency in a place where it is shipped to – a fortune for an ordinary person, or “a whole month’s worth of water and oxygen” (ibid.: 234) The presence of the whelk-gatherer in the narrative with his description of the job is another catalysis which ornaments the nucleus – a functional unit in Chapter 5, where the factory is mentioned for the first time from which the character of Amlis Vess freed four hitch-hikers, whom Isserley and Eswiss must bring back to the factory (ibid.: 97).

2.2. Something is Rotten in the State of Scotland

Apart from withholding information about Isserley’s interest in male hitch-hikers because “[she] wasn’t interested in females, at least not in that way” (ibid.: 3), Faber foreshadows her

10 alienness and otherness a lot as well. These instances, or catalyses, are evident in the particular vocabulary she uses to refer to men, e.g. “fleshy bipeds” (ibid.). Judging by these, it can be concluded that the difference between her and men is in the way they stand and walk. If she is not a biped herself, she cannot qualify as a human being and must be something else, therefore, the human race and her race are binary opposites, where the latter is favored over the former. The alien units begin to seep into the narrative, destabilizing the atmosphere of familiarity. One of the hitch-hikers notices that Isserley must be in pain, and it has something to do with the way she sits: “[…] like she had a rod up her arse” (ibid.: 28). There are other catalyses that point to her otherness, which concern legs and spine: “Standing upright sent a shock of pain through her spine” (ibid.: 38) The pain she experiences is so great that she has to exercise her body every day, otherwise it gets very bad and prevents her from doing her job. The pain, however, does not prevent her from admiring the beauty of nature and its gifts which could never be possible on her planet, e.g. oxygen that is produced by trees or water in free access, for which, in order to enjoy them, she had to make a sacrifice, namely, to “walk on two legs” (ibid.: 65). Our understanding of the word “human” includes exactly bipedal beings. If she walks or walked on more than two legs, she is by definition something else. The mentioned above examples function as catalyses that add to the nucleus - Amlis Vess’ arrival in Chapter 5, where it becomes clear that Vess Industries’ operations in Scotland include nothing but meat processing, and Isserley’s interest in hitch-hikers stems from her obligation to bring specimens. This is the moment where it becomes clear that the depicted world in Under the Skin is not a reflection of our familiar world - but a distorted one, where the strange, that is, aliens, are referred to as “humans”, whereas we, humans, are now referred to as “animals”, and on top of it all, hideous ones. Readers learn that Isserley works for the Vess Industries that is responsible not only for sending her on Earth to kidnap hitch-hikers, but for her body transformations as well, to make her appear more like an animal. In Chapter 5, readers are introduced to Amlis Vess, a son of a head of the Vess Industries, whose description functions as a trigger for many guns hanged in the preceding pages to fire. Out where Isserley comes from, Vess is a prototype of a male beauty: “He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen” (ibid.: 110). His characteristics, a functional unit, tell readers what a typical physiology of the creatures like Isserley looks like and give a clear picture of the otherness of their kind: “Like all of Isserley’s race (except Isserley and Eswiss, of course) he stood naked on all fours, his limbs exactly equal in length, all of them equally nimble” (ibid.). For Isserley, being quadrupedal is normal the way being bipedal is normal for every human reader of the novel. Her choice of words to refer to people, e.g. bipeds and hideous 11 animals, points to the fact that she herself does not belong to the human race herself. These words create a division, a binary opposition, between the alien race and the human race. However, in order for them to prove their significance and relevance to the story, a context is needed, which in this case is Amlis Vess’s description, the nucleus. She, of course, is not on her fours anymore, otherwise it would be problematic to get hitch-hikers in her car, or, which is more probable, she would attract too much attention and end up in a circus, minimizing all the chances for success of the Vess Industries. In the light of the context of new normality arises a point from which the many threads foreshadowing Isserley’s alienness can be traced back and understood as to what exactly they are about. In this new light, the theme of the novel also takes clearer shape, pointing to the topic of the human-animal relationships along with the human anthropocentrism that is strongly pronounced in the alien characters. These points will be discussed in the Chapter 3 of this thesis, but for now let us come back to disentangling a few other threads foreshadowing Isserley’s out- of-our-world-ness. While the problem of being quadrupedal has been surgically solved, Isserley has other physiological characteristics that people do not have and that could not be altered, forcing her to hide and divert attention from them. For instance, her giant and perfectly round eyes, which no hitch-hiker would ever think of as those belonging to human beings. She wears the thickest glasses possible to hide them, even though doing this hinders her vision and gives her constant headaches. Wearing glasses is not the only trick – surgeons that made her bipedal, have also gifted her with giant breasts that almost always get all the attention from men that get in her car. In order to have an excuse to show them off, the heater in her car is always on, which often causes difficulties while driving: “Her glasses were starting to fog up, but she couldn’t take them off now: he mustn’t see her eyes without them” (ibid.: 15). Up until the description of Amlis Vess is given that provides an idea of what Isserley looked like before her surgeries, the reason for her hesitance to reveal the eyes may be understood in many ways. It could be that the eyes hide anger behind them that many hitchhikers would find disturbing. It could also be that she wears thick glasses to make herself unrecognizable to the police. The alienness of her eyes does not escape the attention of one of the hitch-hikers who comes close to seeing her true nature through a wall build between him and Isserley by the means of huge fake breasts and glasses: “The irises were hazel and green, glowing like … like illuminated microscope slides of some exotic bacterial creature” (ibid.: 43). It cannot be denied that Isserley is some exotic creature. The references to her eyes function in accordance with the Chekhov’s principle and can be considered as fine threads that lead to

12 the core of the matter. If we consider all the Chekhov’s guns hanged by Faber as guiding threads, then Under the Skin would be the biggest ball of twine. Foreshadowing of Isserley’s alienness is realized through the choice of words she uses to refer to people, herself and things. It is often not what she does but what she says. Isserley always seems to be distancing herself from human beings by the use of these foreshadowing elements. These guide readers to the disclosure of the fact that she is not a human but a creature that before undergoing a surgery looked nothing like what readers would classify as a human being. Such distancing is not always manifested in her mentioning certain physiological characteristics of people she considers weird and rudimental like being bipedal. Isserley often expresses a feeling of connection to creatures we, people, have always wanted to stand out from – animals. By doing so, she alienates herself from human beings even more. Walking along the shores has become Isserley’s most enjoyable pastime. On the shore of the Moray Firth, she approaches a creature she has never seen before and the name of which she does not know. This creature, which in one of the many languages spoken on Earth is called sheep, resembles Isserley her kind the most. She tries to speak to the sheep but with no success: “It was so hard to believe the creature couldn’t speak. It looked so much as if it should be able to. Despite its bizarre features, there was something deceptively human about it” (ibid.: 62) This reference to the ability to speak as a predominant human characteristic points to the theme of the novel – the human-animal bond. Another catalysis in the narrative, which presence is in no way redundant, is the fact that she does not speak English well. If not speaking English were a criterion for recognizing aliens among us, a great percentage of people would fall into that category. To be more precise, she does not understand concepts that exist not only in the minds of English-speaking people, but the ones that are universal as well. Some of these concepts have a lot to do with music. The very first hitch-hiker Isserley picks up (and ends up kidnapping) wears a t-shirt with an AC/DC band logo. While many people know this band or at least find the name familiar, “she had no idea what on earth this might mean, and felt suddenly out of her depth with him [the hitch- hiker]” (ibid.: 14) This sentence, especially the idiom what on earth, points to the otherness of Isserley. The abbreviation AC/DC does not signify anything to her. She cannot make a connection between the word and the concept. Just like M People, Portishead, Bjork – “These last three names sounded to Isserley like varieties of animal feed” (ibid.: 124). Isserley struggles not only with the names of foreign music bands, but with the English language in general. In several dialogues in the novel, the hitchhikers’ lines are written in the way they are pronounced. For instance, “Gaun anywhir near Redcastle?” (ibid.: 34), “Ah’m oan a fuckin’ trainin’ schim’” (ibid.: 35), and “What yis goat stickin’ oot in front ae yi”. (ibid.: 37) 13

Scottish accents and dialects are said to be one of the most difficult ones to understand, so no wonder that a foreigner, or an alien like Isserley, may have difficulties deciphering what is being said. Isserley’s lines, on the other hand, are always given in orthographic transcription, which does not give readers an idea whether she has an accent or not. There is only one thing that is certain – she does not sound Scottish, or English in general, and the hitchhikers quickly get that – “’So where are you from, then?’ – he’d asked her” (ibid.: 54). The reason for giving two versions of transcription is to emphasize the fact that the protagonist is an alien element in the narrative. Isserley picked up most of the phrases she uses to communicate with people from various textbooks. She combines and matches various words from her existing vocabulary and does not allow herself any deviation from them, since these are enough to find out where the hitchhikers are going, whether they are expected there and whether they have anyone who would be looking for them. In the novel, readers find not only English words, but a few foreign, or rather, alien ones. There is a curious word Isserley often uses - vodsel. Let us take a look at this sentence: “It was a word she knew, but had only ever seen written – in fact, only this morning, a vodsel had spelled it out” (ibid.: 186). Vodsel appears in the novel for the first time in Chapter 3: “On the television, a vodsel chef was instructing an inept female how to fry slivers of kidney” (ibid.: 51). Based on these, it is clearly used to refer to a human being, but why not simply say human instead of introducing this unfamiliar word? It could be foreshadowing that Isserley is Dutch, since voedsel can be translated from Dutch as food, nutrition, or meal (Cambridge Dictionary). But just like other catalyses in the narrative, this one is employed to confuse readers into thinking that Isserley is a human being. As it is later revealed, neither she or Amlis Vess, or other men living on Ablach Farm, are Dutch, or humans in general. This Chekhov’s gun and the Farmfoods one are of the same caliber, as they both foreshadow the fate of the hitchhikers. What pulls the trigger of these guns is the description of what befalls these men after they are brought to Ablach Farm: “A fortune’s worth of raw meat, all neatly parceled into portions, swathed in transparent viscose, packed into plastic pallets” (ibid.: 157). This is what the hitchhikers Isserley picks up are destined to – to be fattened, slaughtered, packed, and shipped on a foreign planet. The aliens in Under the Skin have their own language, which, despite having one word that is a true friend in Dutch and alien, does not seem to have other words the meaning of which readers could make use of. Just like Isserley does not know what AC/DC, Bjork, or whelks mean, readers may be puzzled by icpathua, voddissin, serslida or mussanta, the meaning of which is never explained, indicating their alien origin (ibid.: 57). The names of Isserley, Eswiss, and Amlis, too, foreshadow the alienness of those whom they belong. 14

These three names owe to the same gun of the alien language, or, according to Barthes’s theory, these ornament the nucleus – the disclosure of the alien activity in Scotland. Alien words and names contain a repeating pattern - the use of prefixes iss- and suffixes -iss. In general, their language is characterized by the use of double letters, such as ‘ss’ and ‘dd’. Unlike other Chekhov’s guns spread out on the pages of the novel, this one is by far the most obvious and straightforward, since it does not allow much room for maneuver to sort through all possible hunches. There is just one hunch that comes to mind and that later proves to be the right one – Isserley must be an alien and these unknown words belong to the alien language. Faber’s Under the Skin is loaded with hints, threads, foreshadowing elements, or Chekhov’s guns of various calibers, that are aimed to bring readers closer to the truth, which is the fact that it is a story about the human-animal relationship and interaction, as well as various strategies employed in this relationship, deliberately or unconsciously, to distance oneself from animals and justify farming activities. These elements, whether the units that refer to the nature of Isserley’s interest in hitchhikers or to her alienness, intertwine with each other. By connecting them together, readers can see the complete picture. In this way, the seemingly unnecessary reference to the lorry labelled Farmfoods passing by, or the hitchhiker’s explanation of what whelk gatherers do, are important narrative units. As Barthes wrote, “Even though a detail might appear unequivocally trivial, impervious to any function, it would nonetheless end up pointing to its own absurdity or uselessness: everything has a meaning, or nothing has” (1975: 244-245). Elements like these do not appear on the pages out of the blue to disappear into oblivion later, on the contrary, they are integral vehicles of the narrative - a complex machine with moving parts, gears of which are Chekhov’s guns.

3. The Familiar Through the Lens of the Strange

It is almost certain that everybody knows where Scotland is, which Kingdom it is a part of, and what languages are spoken there. The most important fact about Scotland we know is that it really exists and, if money, time, visa, health, permitting, anyone can travel there anytime. Drive the A9 road, even. The only difference from Scotland Faber sets Under the Skin in is that the scenario of hitchhikers being kidnaped, farmed as animals, and transported to an alien planet is highly unlikely. Familiar Scotland does not have aliens, Isserley, Amlis Vess, or anyone who would know what mussanta or serslida mean. Despite obvious similarities with the familiar one, e.g. English-speaking people, beautiful nature, A9 road and places that exist on maps, fictional Scotland is not a realistic and reliable representation of the real world, but its distorted reflection.

The fictional world in Under the Skin draws upon social expectations, beliefs, and worldviews that are strongly present in readers’ familiar space, but the actual mirror image is strange. Humans are now referred to as animals and are considered to be less-developed species, while strange fur-covered quadrupedal creatures call themselves humans and the most intelligent, no less. By first creating an atmosphere of familiarity and withholding information about the true state of affairs, e.g. the meat factory underground, or the way the protagonist looked like before her surgeries, and then introducing elements that distort that familiarity, the author has better chances to keep readers’ attention. Such manipulations also allow seeing the familiar through the prism of the unfamiliar, and therefore, re-seeing it. The narrative structure of Under the Skin and Faber’s vagueness regarding the genre of the novel makes it possible to approach it without holding specific expectations that inevitably pursue particular genres, or without dismissing the novel due to its theme, that is, human violence against animals. The expectations that many readers hold towards science fiction are, among others, the presence of aliens, extraterrestrials, or plots set thousands of years into the future. The first condition of a sci-fi story is realized, since Isserley is the binary opposition of a human, which makes her other than human, therefore, an alien. Similarly to Harger-Grinling and Jordaan (2003), Sarah Dillon, too, writes: “Despite Faber’s denial, however, Under the Skin, with its story of an alien species farming humans on Earth for meat, is clearly science fiction” (2011: 134). Science fiction is surely on its way to get loose over the label of low-art that serves entertaining function only and is known for rendering “the content of its stories somehow "strange"”, as Simon Spiegel notices (2008: 369). Yet, the reason behind Faber’s wish to disassociate his novel from sci-fi, as it seems to me, is in the fact that such deliberate and careful wrapping of the story into secrets and foreshadowing elements, which does serve an important function, which will be discussed later, would undermine the effect of the chosen narrative strategy of Under the Skin, which is aimed at misleading readers and hiding its science- fictionality. Disagreeing with Darko Suvin’s statement that certain genres, e.g. science fiction, myth, and fairy tales, are estranged genres: “In SF the attitude of estrangement … has grown into the formal framework of the genre” (qtd. in Spiegel 370), Spiegel considers these genres, sci-fi in particular, everything but estranging ones. In “Things Made Strange: On the Concept of "Estrangement" in Science Fiction Theory”, he writes: “Although "unrealistic" characters populate fairy tales, they are not "strange" in the sense of Shklovsky or Brecht. They are not constructed to surprise, on the contrary, witches and fairies and the like are expected and hence they do not serve to de-automatize or to make strange whatever is happening in the story” (2008:

371). Therefore, for the readers already expecting the strange, this strange becomes naturalized and has little or no surprise value. Though it is the genre of sci-fi that allows the creation of unfamiliar worlds that are inhabited by characters with extraordinary powers, paranormal abilities, or unfamiliar physiques, which temporally and spatially are located further into the future or back into the past, or away from Earth as a planet, and which Under the Skin can be classified as on the basis of its extraordinary characters, there are more postmodern elements in the novel. Postmodern fictions are often characterized by deconstructuralism, as they absorb in themselves elements of other genres, e.g. detective fiction, sci-fi, fairy tales, and recycle them, as Paul Auster’s City of Glass (2009), or Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, (1967), producing a text that functions as a representation of and reflections on particular social or cultural changes or events. These fictions tend to place readers in distorted realities, where familiar rules, norms, and truths do not apply, making it impossible to make sense of the world or traverse it following a map of pre-existing knowledge or associations, for there is none (Geyh, Leebron, and Levy). In “Postmodern Fiction”, Brian McHale writes: “Postmodernist fictions […] often strive to displace and rupture these automatic associations, parodying the encyclopedia and substituting for “encyclopedic” knowledge their own ad hoc, arbitrary, unsanctioned associations” (1991: 48). What disrupts the familiarity of the world in Under the Skin is such substitution of encyclopedic knowledge, e.g. the input of “human” or “animal” returns with outputs that differ from the common knowledge, making the familiar concepts strange. Through the extraordinary characters and the improbable development of the events in Scotland, the traditional view on the human-animal relationship is de-automatized. The setting - Scotland, is described as it is: the A9 road, the Scottish Highlands, Scottish people speaking with Scottish accent. The encyclopedia-like facts about the country are not skewed. What is excluded from the common knowledge about it is the alien presence. Scotland has never been associated with aliens nor have they been detected there. A few articles try to prove the opposite, for instance, “Unexplained mysteries: Scotland's strangest alien encounters” (Daily Record & Sunday Mail 2015), or “UFO sighting: ‘Alien spaceship’ shot down over Scotland” (Express 2018). Still, such articles about alien encounters or their possible landings can be found in every country. Furthermore, the scenario of alien invasion or alien presence in this region was not played out in fiction before Under the Skin, which makes the discovery of the protagonist’s origin and job indeed unexpected and surprising, rather than expected and naturalized. Up until the description of Amlis Vess is given in Chapter 5, which is a turning point that signifies distancing from the familiar, readers find themselves in Scotland they know. The first sentence of the novel introduces a woman that has a heightened interest in male hitchhikers. 17

Since the narrative follows her daily trips and her thoughts about them, she is automatically identified as the protagonist, a female, a human. The Chekhov’s guns Faber hangs at different walls in the narrative, the ones that are related to Isserley’s word choice when referring to, e.g. men, may lead to considering her a former victim of abuse and, therefore, an object of readers’ sympathy and compassion, because chances are high that such reckless behavior may have dire consequences. Not only is it vague what the protagonist’s intentions are, but the ones of the hitchhikers as well, which may involve an innocent desire to get to point B or to rob a kindhearted driver who cared to stop, which puts the protagonist, a tiny woman she is, in danger. However, the introduction of Amlis Vess creates a preposition for the numerous Chekhov guns to fire and see the loaded meaning in the most unambiguous way possible. As a result, many ingrained social and cultural perceptions and expectations, among them regarding women as potential victims but rarely villains, are violated and inverted. In Scotland, where aliens that exist among people and silently kidnap them to slaughter like animals for later consumption are possible, Isserley is not a victim but a hunter that poses a threat to men that she picks up by unmercifully subjecting them to the killing floor. The protagonist’s thoughts involve justifications to what she does with confidence in people, vodsels, being on the lower level of the development, which only purpose in life is to breed, compared to her kind – the apex of creation. This makes it very difficult to like her. Moreover, feelings of hatred and wanting revenge may emerge, together with a desire to see Isserley fail and be caught. Not only does the narrative trick readers into considering the protagonist a human being (and the protagonist) to ambush them later, it portrays extraterrestrials that do not resemble human beings at all, but animals. As the last straw, these animal-resembling aliens consider themselves humans – the ones that are on a higher evolutionary level, while the bipedal creatures readers know under the name humans, are primitive beings, destined to be slaughtered for meat. In this way, the polarity gradually shifts from the familiar and usual to confusing and inverted reality. The mere fact that the aliens in Under the Skin consider walking on all fours to be the most fundamental “human” characteristic, which runs counter to a defining trait of human beings, that is, walking upright, illustrates that the reality in the novel is turned upside down, in which strange becomes normal. As a result of such manipulations with reality, familiar Scotland (and world), where being bipedal is characteristic of humans that are not normally eaten, and certainly not by aliens, but consume the meat from quadrupedal animals themselves, is defamiliarized.

3.1 Defamiliarization in Under the Skin

The artistic technique of defamiliarization has always existed in arts, but it received its name only in 1917 after Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian literary theorist, published his essay “Art as Device”, in which he coined the term. In Shklovsky’s homeland it is known as “ostranenie” that is derived from an adverb “stranno”, which can be translated as strangely, funnily, or curiously. In Russian, this adverb is used to characterize a perplexing situation or state of affairs that contradict its usual being and therefore is surprising or suspicious. For example, an extensive heat wave in December in Austria is stranno. Human-eating aliens in Scotland is stranno as well. Ostranenie, or defamiliarization, in this way, transforms a usual into unusual and often impossible, or provides an unusual perspective on certain events or phenomena, making these events seen as if for the first time, which, as Shklovsky argued, is the main task of art as human activity: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The 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” (2017: 16). Defamiliarization cannot be regarded as a concept with a clear-cut interpretation. When Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright, borrowed Shklovsky’s concept to apply it in his theory of epic theatre, which later became known as distancing or estrangement effect in performing arts, he translated it into German as “die Verfremdung” or “der Verfremdungseffekt”, which was translated back into Russian as “alienation” – a term often used in Marxism that refers to a completely different philosophical tradition (Spiegel 370). Defamiliarization is ideally supposed to counter the process of automatization in reading and, consequently, in life. According to Shklovsky, the most important activity readers should do while reading is to draw parallels and make sense of encoded messages. However, when these messages are repeatedly presented in one similar way, the novelty and excitement for readers is lost. Human brain works in such a way that it only recognizes phenomenon at its full capacity when it experiences this phenomenon for the first time. After the novelty of a certain phenomenon wears thin, the brain puts a label on it and generalizes it or automates (Oleynikova 110). For example, if a character in a novel refers to himself or herself as human, automatically the image of a typical representative, which meets the conditions required to be classified as such, pops up in the brain. The process of automatization hinders seeing the multifaceted nature of many phenomena, because the brain regards them as familiar and fully experienced. In his “Art as Device”, Shklovsky examines the implementation of defamiliarization in literary texts and essays of Leo Tolstoy, who himself was also meditating on the consequences

19 of automatization. In his diary entry on February 28, 1897, Tolstoy wrote: “I wiped away the dust in my room and walking around, came to the divan and could not remember whether I had dusted it or not. Just because these movements are customary and unconscious, I could not remember them, and I felt that it was impossible to” (The Journal of Leo Tolstoy 1895-1899). The same applies to reading as well, since the human brain is not eager to see through already assigned labels when recognizing an object or a specific situation it is already familiar with. The process of perceiving the world with ready-made and familiar associations that are automatically generated and, therefore, require no mental activity, makes life, as Tolstoy believed, meaningless and worthless: “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been” (Diary Entry March 1, 1897). There is a strong element of truth to his belief, since walking through life trapped by the ingrained beliefs and being incapable to perceive it as a space that holds endless mysteries, truths and answers, leaves little room for what could excite or engage, provoke reflection on or re-assessment of the familiar concepts and phenomena that are often taken for granted. Viktor Shklovsky, as it seems, could not concur more with Tolstoy’s views. The diaries of Leo Tolstoy and his 1886 Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse helped Shklovsky to demonstrate the significance and the role of art in people’s lives. It also helped Shklovsky to show the way art functions as a remedy against such automatization that can “recover the sensation of life” by not taking it easy on readers by depicting the world as is but, on the contrary, defamiliarizing it: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The 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” (Shklovsky 2). In “Art as Technique”, Shklovsky refers to Leo Tolstoy’s Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse (1886) as an example of the use of the defamiliarization technique. The first four chapters of the work depict a rather familiar surroundings somewhere in the Russian Empire. Readers are introduced to the keeper Nester, the groom Vasya, and the horse nicknamed Strider. The dimensions of time and place do not seem to be skewed and defamiliarized. It is the dimension of characters that under no circumstances readers could encounter in the real world that is skewed. It is, however, not Nester or Vasya that tells a story of Strider, but he himself, the horse, is given a voice and tells his story in his own words starting from Chapter 5. Until then, in the first four chapters, it is very unlikely that readers can foresee this twist coming, particularly not in 1886, when the story was published. Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse was not said to be a story for children or a fairy tale, in which case the presence of the horse addressing readers would not be out of place against 20 other fantastic creatures or animals that often are the main characters in such genres and are naturalized and expected. Tolstoy’s story is allegorical in its nature, where one reality is shown through the prism of another one. In this way, horses represent the gutless society that complies with the rules that are made by the unknown for the unknown reasons. Tolstoy created the collective image that reflected some of the typical features of Russian men of that period who worked hard their whole life for the benefit of boyars, only to end up unaccounted for, just like Kholsomer, as if they never existed. Tolstoy’s main creative challenge was to show the present class society situation during his time through allegorical images in order to fully convey the ambience of its flagrant injustice, the horrors of slave labor, and the prevailing impunity for dehumanizing those that did not belong to upper-class. The question that can be asked here is whether the defamiliarization principle was really necessary to portray the Russian Empire of that time. Why not call things by their rightful names? The answer to this question is found in Tolstoy’s diaries that Shklovsky later discusses in his essay “Art as Technique”. Giving the horse a voice allows to address a timely, and, therefore, a somewhat touchy, topic of class inequality from a new perspective, preventing any automatic associations from occurring in readers’ minds, as it would be the case if Tolstoy had replaced Kholstomer with a human peasant. By giving the voice to the unusual, the narrative allows readers to see their reality as if for the first time and triggers the most important response an author would expect – readers really start to heed and listen. In 2000 Michel Faber publishes his Under the Skin in which he introduces aliens to Scotland - the beings that under no circumstances could appear there. The fact that Faber refuses to classify his novel as science fiction, the introduction of the extraordinary (the dimension of characters) into ordinary and familiar (the dimension of space) and giving the voice to this extraordinary, allows to draw parallels between Tolstoy’s and Faber’s works. The use of the defamiliarization technique with the intention to make people listen to what their extraordinary characters have to say about the reality outside the narrative is what makes both Under the Skin and Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse much alike. Both of them offer a different angle to look at the state of the world. Another similarity between these two works is the fact that they both withhold the extraordinary dimension to enhance the impact of defamiliarization. In Faber’s novel, this impact on readers would arguably have been lesser, if it were presented as sci-fi from the outset where in the description Isserley’s true nature and interest in picking up male hitchhikers would be unmasked. This would leave no room for imagination and the possibility of speculation, as it provides ready-made images and answers to appear in readers’ minds, contradicting with 21

Tolstoy’s and Shklovsky’s, since such automatism of ideas in art was what they were trying to overcome. With defamiliarization being a powerful means for highlighting certain events and draw people’s attention to them, by telling a story that is set in a defamiliarized place in the Russian Empire and is told from an unexpected narrator’s point of view, Tolstoy made a more successful attempt to reach out to his readers and jolt them to face unjust and cruel reality of the established living conditions and already predetermined life of peasants. Faber’s Under the Skin, too, where many familiar concepts, such as stranger (male) danger, and the definitions of humans and animals, are reversed, ensures attention to the story he reaches out to his readers with to look at the state of the world from a new angle, together with a higher chance of being heard.

4. The Refamiliarized World Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories that individuals or nations live by and you change the individuals and nations themselves. ―Ben Okri (1996:21)

By defamiliarizing the familiar world and common knowledge about it, e.g. what creature is the most intelligent one and what makes it such, Under the Skin provides an unusual and fresh perspective on the present state of the world and the relationship between the living beings in this world, which is rather a turbulent one. The novel is the mirror reflection of our treatment of animals. The strategies the alien characters use to justify their violence towards animals, e.g. linguistic and emotional ones, have been at the center of attention, study, and dispute of a relatively new field of ecocriticism. Ecocriticism is a child of literary and cultural studies that goes by more than one name. The field is known as environmental criticism, nature writing, literary ecology and green cultural studies (Zapf). It is also a very young field that has been rapidly emerging since the 1990s – a time when interdisciplinary approach was propagating at many fields and merging disciplines as well as points of view. Before that, it would have been out of question, owing to a belief that there had to be a strict distinction between various fields of research, e.g. mathematics and literature, with everyone focusing on what they know best without causing a stir by inviting themselves and their opinions in fields lying at the opposite end of their spectrum. One example of an interdisciplinary work that breaks such belief is works by Linda Hutcheon, a professor of English, and her husband Michael, a professor of medicine, who analyze opera combining literary and medical knowledge (Heise). Even though ecocriticism as a study began in the 1990s with the foundation of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) in 1992 “to promote the

22 exchange of ideas and information pertaining to literature that considers the relationship between human beings and the natural world”, the seeds of the field can be found in 1978 in William Rueckert’s essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (Glotfelty and Fromm, 1996:18). Rueckert’s essay is the first one to use the term “ecocriticism” that he coined and defined as “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature, because ecology (as a science, as a discipline, as the basis for human vision) has the greatest relevance to the present and future of the world” (ibid.: 107). Since then, various anthologies, journals and essays have been published that aim at defining the scope and methods of this new field with Lawrence Buell, Cheryll Glotfelty, Greg Garrard and Ursula K. Heise being at the cradle of its creation. It is also possible to suggest that the makings of ecocriticism date back to the 1960s- 1970s with the emerging threats of climate change making people increasingly concerned about global warming. The fact that Earth is on the verge of its imminent destruction triggered the deconstruction of many beliefs about the planet and challenged the confidence in the belief that natural resources on Earth are infinite. The issue of climate change may have also led to the realization of the interconnectedness of everything on Earth, which was later adopted by academia as well. The interconnectedness in ecology manifests itself in the effects on natural world, both negative and positive, that are a result of people’s actions towards it, e.g. global warming, which is not a natural phenomenon, but a result of people’s consumerist attitude and actions that are destructive for ecosystem and, consequently, people’s lives. William Rueckert is right in every sense for emphasizing the vital importance of ecology. The question that can be asked here is how exactly ecology can be applied to the study of literature? The answer to this question can be found in a wide range of essays. Thus, Ursula K. Heise, in her “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism”, writes that ecocriticism is expected to analyze modernist cultural representations and notions of human beings, nature, ecology, and non-human beings, in order to call a critical reconceptualization of these notions with a view to engage in debates concerning finding “more sustainable ways of inhabiting the natural world” (2006: 506). Literature poses a trove of information for ecocritics to study and reflect on, since it documents people’s lives, fears, beliefs, trends, worldviews. This view supports Greg Garrard, who defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship of the human and the nonhuman, throughout human cultural history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself’” (2004: 3). This relationship, together with the ways it changes over time, has been captured in literature. In this way, Under the Skin can be read as a reflection on the existing definitions of the human and the animal. Novels or poetry, in most cases, do not speak about the environment as 23 scientists would, however, they still offer a rich field for environmental research, as they contain certain truths about the ways people treat and think of nature and its vital components such as oceans, forests, animals and people, as well as reveal factors that for many serve as justifications for their decisions and actions. Which of these are harmful and destructive for the natural world are an area of contestation within the field. Lawrence Buell, too, emphasizes the importance of literature in environmental research, since “the success of all environmentalist efforts finally hinges not on ‘some highly developed technology, or some arcane new science’ but on ‘a state of mind’: on attitudes, feelings, images, narratives” (2001: 1). Ecocriticism, which started as a movement that celebrated pristine environments, now poises significant cultural and political relevance with its call for a revaluation of the relationship and attitude people exhibit towards nature. Considering that in literature, knowledge is accessed through words, a careful study of language and its units has been given special attention and importance. The field that analyzes interaction between language and environment is ecolinguistics, which is a steadily developing interdisciplinary branch of linguistics. While ecocriticism focuses its research and analysis on literary works, ecolinguistics examines a wider spectrum of sources, e.g. journals, advertisement, novels, poetry. Imminent danger of the destruction of the life-supporting systems of the planet called into question various beliefs about nature and people’s actions towards it. Arran Stibbe calls such beliefs “stories that we live by” (2015: i). He considers ecolinguistics to be of particular importance in revealing these stories, analyzing and challenging which would “contribute to the search for new stories” (ibid.). Since language transports ecological as well as unecological thinking and ideas that influences the way people think about and act towards nature, it is not surprising that the fields of linguistics and literature have entered into a dialogue about ecology. As Michael Halliday, a linguist, puts it: “Classism, growthism, destruction of species, pollution and the like [. . .] are not just problems for the biologists and physicists. They are problems for the applied linguistic community as well’’ (2001: 199). Ecolinguistics examines the way environmental topics, such as climate change, genetic engineering, land use, human-animal interactions, appear in texts and media, as well as the way these topics are framed, e.g. through the use of metaphors or allegories. An analysis performed by ecolinguists has already revealed several issues regarding the use of language in the environmental debate, as various studies show (cf. Mühlhäusler; Schultz). One of the issue has to do with the vocabulary that contains words that are either semantically vague or involve misleading encoding. In his “The structure of environmental concern: Concern for self, other people, and the biosphere”, Schultz gives several examples of misleading words 24 and terms and offers alternatives, e.g. instead of “land clearing” use “native vegetation removal”, or “human-induced climatic dislocation” instead of “climate change” (2001: 113- 114). The aliens in Under the Skin, too, tend to use violence-muting terms, which will be discussed later. There is another topic of interest of ecocritics and environmentalists, which is Human- Animal Studies, which is also known as Animal Studies. This interdisciplinary field, which combines research in the humanities and science, aims its research at analyzing the ways language mirrors human-animal interactions, and the elements that influence these interactions, e.g. stereotypes, linguistic anthropocentrism, euphemisms, anthropomorphism. Animals have always been an integral part of human life: as tools for industrialization, as sources for meat, as companions. Animals often appear in films and books, where they are treated in a number of different ways. Throughout the years, the human-animal relationship has experienced profound changes and transformations. Today, in the face of ecological crisis, the study of this relationship deserves to be a key area of research in linguistics and literature (Cook and Sealey 311), since, as various studies and publications argue, e.g. Holtmeier, Stibbe, Fill, our lives are not possible without animals that perform a vital role in ecosystem. Therefore, it is crucial to study people’s linguistic choices that refer to animals in order to find out whether these contribute to or detract from taking measures towards preserving and sustaining human- animal coexistence (Cook 592). The importance of studying linguistic choices stems from the fact that they help to reveal various worldviews and opinions concerning nature, flora and fauna, they are encoded with, which influence and guide people towards acting in one or another way, resulting in either positive effects on the ecology, or harmful ones. The aim of ecolinguistics is to analyze these choices and locate the negatively impacted ones, which often inhabit advertisements, films, and literary texts. Regarding texts, Cook and Sealey state: “The analysis of texts themselves may be complemented by the investigation of the stated beliefs and purposes of those who produce language about animals; the perceptions and reactions of those who receive it; and the social, economic, ideological and historical contexts of that production and reception” (2017: 311). Michel Faber’s Under the Skin takes such contemporary and controversial matter of the human-animal relationship and superimposes it on its fictional world, where our logic and beliefs connected to this matter are projected through the alien characters, their decisions and worldview, which makes this fictional world seem like a distorted mirror reflection of our world. The questions of how people differentiate and distance themselves from animals, how do they justify killing them, and what role does language play in representing and shaping opinions about animals, are imposed on the fictional world in Under the Skin, where people are 25 a source of meat and are by alien logic considered animals, whereas aliens refer to themselves as human beings. The world in the novel is chameleon-like. It transforms from the familiar to strange, and then becomes refamiliarized. The refamiliarized world is a demystified one – no more mysteries and secrets, now all the cards are put on the table. In the second stage, the world appears unfamiliar and impossible due to the introduction of alien participants and their strange logic, and reintroduction of the already known characters that were thought to be humans as aliens. Observing how this logic motivates and guides the alien characters, the world in the third stage begins to appear more familiar than ever. It is in the third stage we learn that the world created by Faber actually illustrates human logic and our model of behavior towards nature and animals that are often challenged by ecocritics and environmentalists, where the alien characters - the new humans, act in similar ways to people, which allows us to perceive this alternative world as allegorical. This model of behavior and its foundation – anthropocentric worldview and the belief in human exceptionalism, as well as their consequences – emotional and physical detachment from animals, will be discussed below drawing on the findings presented in the fields of ecocriticism and ecolinguistics.

4.1 Anthropocentrism: of Superior Humans

In Russian language, one may often find a peculiar term in literary texts that refers to animals – братья наши меньшие, which can literally be translated as “our little brothers” or “little fellows”. This phrase was can be found in Sergei Yesenin’s 1924 poem “By Degrees We Find We’re All Departing”, in which he compares animals to our little brothers. This is the excerpt from the poem in the original: “Счастлив тем, что целовал я женщин / Мял цветы, валялся на траве / И зверье, как братьев наших меньших / Никогда не бил по голове” (17-20). In various translations of the poem, e.g. in Vagapov’s one, the actual phrase is omitted, however, the implied meaning of naming animals as such is incorporated instead: “I am happy, I have kissed a woman / I have slept in grass and flower-bed / And I never, like a decent human / Hit a dog or kitten in the head” (17-20). Calling animals our little brothers or fellows suggests people’s responsibility to treat them with care, since animals, as the adjective little suggests, are inferior to us and depend on our help. In various Russian-speaking countries, this phrase has been picked up by pet stores, animal shelters and animal clinics, to invite everyone who is not indifferent to the lives and well-being of animals. On the other hand, it is possible to suggest that considering animals our little brothers reveals our stance and views regarding them, namely, that we, human beings, are superior and that it is us who the rest of the world has to revolve around. In Under the Skin, the

26 alien characters that consider themselves humans and the only intelligent species, treat us as farm animals relying on their confidence in our inferiority. Such blind faith in human superiority has been defined as anthropocentrism. The readers can locate the dislike for the human race coming from Isserley already on the first page of the novel, to which point her vocabulary choices related to men she sees on the road, which all imply negative connotation, such as “a hunk on legs”, “a fleshy biped”, “beasts”, “hideous animals” with “chimpanzee eyes” that are “crawling” on the planet’s surface (Faber 1;3;64;75;77;72). While readers may be puzzled at first to find such evident mockery of men, it may also be mistaken for her general dislike for the masculine gender for reasons at first unclear. Soon we find out that Isserley does not limit her anger and mockery towards males only but considers both males and females as inferior beings. In her and her fellow-aliens’ opinion, all bipedal creatures – us, humans, are located at the bottom of the hierarchy and exist with the sole purpose to breed, while the aliens believe they possess that something sacred that no other species does, which gives them the right to call themselves humans and exploit the ones that differ from their understanding of intelligent creatures (ibid.: 59). It is worth considering various factors the aliens believe to be the basis of their human, intelligent and, therefore, exceptional nature, since these are deeply intertwined with, or, rather, reflect the beliefs occupying our societies. It seems that the question of human nature has fascinated philosophers for centuries and has been occupying the minds of many of us. The question of our uniqueness and attempts to identify factors that would separate us from the rest of the natural world, is found, as an early example, in Greek philosophy, which is still at the core of many debates intended to disprove the earlier beliefs, or, on the contrary, to provide more examples and facts that would support them and preserve our status of the species which life is the most valuable. The paradigm of human exceptionalism, according to A Dictionary of Environment and Conservation, suggests that “humans are different from all other organisms, all human behavior is controlled by culture and free will, and all problems can be solved by human ingenuity and technology” (Park 2007). What anthropocentrism also involves, as follows from the definition given to “anthropocentrism” in The Cambridge Dictionary, is “considering humans and their existence as the most important and central fact in the universe”, which for many, not only aliens in Under the Skin but us as well, serves as justification for the abuse of natural resources and animals. Even though various studies proclaim that now is the high time for radical changes in people’s behavior in the face of an eco-catastrophe (cf. Fiskio, Buell), for many to drop the anthropocentric worldview may constitute a bigger challenge than to start taking steps toward helping the environment, where the difficulty of changing perspective from anthropocentric to 27 biocentric or ecocentric one may lie in the stories we live by, as Arran Stibbe calls them, where the prevailing story is the one proclaiming man the apex of creation (Stibbe 2015). The story of exceptionalism of men is indivisible and, in many ways, interwoven with the topos of difference. It implies men’s constant search for grounds to use in order to separate mankind from animals and grant itself a higher status that would justify the exploitation of beings with a lower status. Such highly anthropocentric paradigm, which influences most of people’s behavior and decisions, is mirrored in Under the Skin and can be located in the insights into the aliens’ thoughts, as well as their actions towards the “creatures crawling there”. One of the aspects of such worldview is the belief in it being an inborn cluster of information, an innate behavior, stored in people’s minds, just like web making in spiders or nest building in birds, which shapes our thinking about the world and influences our performance in it. If it were the case, the problem of anthropocentrism could be taken out of the agenda, since naturalia non sunt turpia, that is, what is natural is not dirty, as Virgil noted in Georgics (McDonough 2000).

4.1.1 Born This Way

The question of innate ideas is one of many aspects of the nature versus nurture controversy that asks whether people behave the way they do because they are born so with behavioral model stored in their brain, or is it their personal experiences in life that shape them. Literature is keeping up with fields of psychology and philosophy with authors immersing themselves in exploration of various aspects of this issue and offering their literary perspective on them, e.g. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), or Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762). In philosophy, it was Plato who offered his first classic theory of innate ideas and indicated that such ideas are stored in people’s timeless souls, like mathematical truths. He stated that these ideas or truths are forgotten once the soul is incarnated into a body but can be recovered in a process of remembering, or “anamnesis”, rather than learning (Plato’s Phaedo 1911). The doctrine of innate ideas flourished in the seventeenth century with French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes being its most influential and remarkable proponent. Following the main concepts of innate ideas, namely, the conviction that there are certain basic inborn concepts that are stored in human beings, which suggests a pre-established structure of the human mind, Descartes claimed that these concepts are placed in people by God, and the idea of God is the most fundamental innate idea. Just like Plato, Descartes believed that learning restores the knowledge that has always been there. In his Meditations of First Philosophy, he writes: “On first discovering them it seems that I am not so much learning

28 something new as remembering what I knew before” (2013: 44). In his letter to Voetius, he adds

[W]e come to know them [innate ideas] by the power of our own native intelligence, without any sensory experience. All geometrical truths are of this sort – not just the most obvious ones, but all the others, however abstruse they may appear. Hence, according to Plato, Socrates asks a slave boy about the elements of geometry and thereby makes the boy able to dig out certain truths from his own mind which he had not previously recognized were there, thus attempting to establish the doctrine of reminiscence. Our knowledge of God is of this sort. (Descartes 1643 AT 8b:166–67)

In this spirit, are anthropocentrism and the belief in human exceptional place among other species inhabiting our planet the innate knowledge we are born with? In a situation, where anthropocentric beliefs were inborn ones, transmittable and inheritable in a form of genetic memory, just like traumas and phobias, the question of whether these beliefs have to be challenged would not arise. Criticism of people’s actions, which are influenced by such, supposing, natural and inborn beliefs and instincts, runs against the principle so often stressed in various environmental writings, that is, nature knows best and is the best creator. The cause of environmental issues must then stem from factors other than people’s beliefs in their exceptionalism. While many prefer to hold such convenient opinion, numerous articles in the fields of history, philosophy, and psychology reject similar statements and claim that anthropocentrism and the blind faith in human exceptionalism are products of our upbringing and cultural background, rather than being an innate idea (cf. Merchant, Naess, Hosford). The questioning of the validity of innate ideas theory dates back to the time it first appeared. Contrary to Plato and Socrates’ views, which supposed that knowledge is stored in people’s souls, Aristotle’s views, on the contrary, were more empirical in their nature. He proposed that ideas exist independently from the human soul and can be actualized through experience. In his De Anima (On the Soul), Aristotle compared the human mind to a blank writing tablet - tabula rasa, with which people are born with and which shall be filled with knowledge and ideas through experience. It was, however, John Locke who popularized the notion of tabula rasa and argued that what people know about the world is founded primarily on their experience, which suggests that this knowledge and ideas cannot be same for everyone, since people’s experiences differ in many ways. Therefore, it is unlikely that human exceptionalism or beliefs that are defined as anthropocentric are innate ideas that have been pre-planted in people’s minds either by God or as a part of a natural design. According to Robert Renehan, the confidence in human beings

29 possessing reason as the most distinctive trait that sets us apart from the rest of the natural world is merely a creation of formal Greek philosophy, rather than an idea, or the truth, recovered in the process of anamnesis. In his “The Greek Anthropocentric View of Man”, Renehan writes that “[t]his attitude, that man is a rational animal, has been for so long an accepted commonplace in Western culture that its specifically Greek origin is seldom a matter of conscious reflection” (1981: 240). Anthropocentrism, then, is an acquired belief, which has been bred into us and is a product of our upbringing, rather than an inborn property. Being products of upbringing and cultural practices, anthropocentrism and the variety of beliefs people hold about themselves and animals can not only be easily acquired but also easily replaced by other beliefs that emerge from different upbringing and surroundings. Since the protagonist in Under the Skin and her alien counterparts are the inverted images of the human beings, their ideas about and attitude towards the human race are likely to stem from their upbringing and what or who has or has not surrounded them but not dictated by their inherent evil nature. More and more studies conducted in the field of developmental psychology confirm that one of the stories we live by, namely, anthropocentrism, is an acquired perspective that emerges in the early ages of people’s lives (cf. Ross, N., Medin, D. L., Coley, J. D., Atran, S.). Their findings provide data proving that people do not universally begin with an anthropocentric perspective but acquire it. To such conclusion also came Patricia Herrmann, Sandra Waxman and Douglas Medin, who examined reasoning patterns in children aged three to five from the U.S. and presented their findings in “Anthropocentrism is not the first step in children’s reasoning about the natural world” (2010). They found that three-year-old children show no sign of anthropocentric attitude, while five-year-old ones do, both predominantly from urban areas. The study also shows that children from rural areas, both aged three and five, do not show a tendency to privilege humans over nonhuman animals when reasoning about biological phenomena, which may be due to their richer experience with animals than of children raised in urban areas (Hermann et al.: 9982). Starting at an early age, people’s ideas about themselves and animals begin to take shape. These are influenced by children’s books and movies, the majority of which project anthropocentric points of view (Waxman). Books for young children often tend to present the natural world in distorted ways, which is facilitated by the use of anthropomorphic language to describe animals and their activities, e.g. driving a car, wearing clothes, liking certain foods such as pizza, or endow animals with human speech. There are many books that place their animal characters in anthropomorphic settings, which are therefore fantastical ones and not realistic, e.g. Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952) by E.B. White, The Rescuers by 30

Margery Sharp (1977). Considering that the purpose of such books is to introduce its young readers to the natural world and educate them about animals in a playful way and with some degree of familiarity to maintain their interest, presenting animals in biologically realistic manner may discourage them from reading or hearing animal stories at all. However, as a growing body of research concludes, the exposure children to highly anthropomorphized animal stories increases the possibility of developing anthropocentric worldview later on (Marriott, 2002; Sackes et al., 2009; Ganea et al., 2011). Anthropocentric worldview also stems from the absence of or limited contact with animals. The result of exclusion of animals from people’s lives is echoed in the alien treatment of cattle in Faber’s novel. The aliens approach vodsels with full confidence in knowing the true purpose of their existence, their value, and the ways they are different from their breeders, which makes them perfectly suitable for being slaughtered and makes the violence against them justified, even though they have never lived in a close proximity with them, as vodsels are not found in the alien home world. A number of historians suggests that the makings of human anthropocentrism can be traced back to Judeo-Christian theology with God, as stated in the Bible, creating man in his own image who has dominion over nature and other species (Genesis, 1:28-29). In his 1967 article “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis”, Lynn White, a medieval historian, argued that it was Western Christianity that encouraged people to reject their previous spiritual bond with nature, e.g. believing that trees were homes for spirits and, therefore, sacred, and adopt the anthropocentric stance instead, which still dominates over many cultures. Lynn states that “Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends (1967: 4). The seeds of anthropocentrism are also found in classical philosophy, Aristotle’s, Plato’s, Plotinus’s, Proclus’s theories in particular, according to which there exists a hierarchy of species, the Great Chain of Being, or the Scala Naturae - hierarchical structure of all life, where men are placed above animals, or beasts, and plants, with God, a Divine Creator, at the top from whom everything else descends (Cook and Sealey: 313). This concept appears to pervade the majority of literary works, including not only the modern but the Medieval ones as well, e.g. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”, where the pilgrims are divided into three social estates: the Church, the Nobility and the Peasantry, which all occupy different levels within the chain with the Church dominating over the Nobility and the Peasantry. A representation of the universal hierarchy concept is also evident in a medieval song “Sumer is icumen in”, where the order of descriptions confirms the hierarchical division of all matter by 31 beginning in the first stanza with the descriptions of plants and moving towards animals in the second. Exceptionalism continued to gather momentum during the early modern period. Industrial Revolution, which begun in the 18th century, finalized the separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world. As Carolyn Merchant, an ecofeminist and historian, argues, Industrial Revolution “challenged the hegemony of mechanistic science as a marker of progress” and “could be implicated in the ecological crisis, the domination of nature, and the devaluation of women in the production of scientific knowledge” (2006: 513). 4.1.2. Woe from Wit

The Scientific Revolution begun with the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. With this publication, ideas about the way the universe works, were reopened for discussion. All the emphasis switched to reason, adding another distinctive trait for people to use to distance themselves from animals, which is the possession of intelligence. One of the key philosophers whose work influenced the thought during the Enlightenment, which was initiated by the Scientific Revolution, was John Locke, who wrote in his “Second Treatise of Government” that reason is the natural law that should govern human actions (1689). As a result, new perspectives and opinions on the universe emerged that debated old assumptions to help humanity rethink the questions concerning our place in the world and what rights we have in this world. Such opinions became the new truth when science gained unprecedented significance during the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution transformed agrarian and rural societies, predominantly in Britain, into industrial and urban ones by implementing one of the core values of the Enlightenment - a belief in progress and that the present is better than the past and that the future will be better than the present (Merchant). A means for making the world a better place is then science and reason. Manufacturing, which prior to the Industrial Revolution was often done at homes using hand tools, shifted to machinery and factories, resulting in an increased number and variety of goods. The standard of living for many people, working classes excluded, as their conditions remained challenging, improved (Smelser 1967). And all of that was made possible by the rational creatures – humans, a species that possesses a capacity to reason, think logically and apply their knowledge of science to better their living conditions. The hunger for raw materials was growing. An inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution – the exploitation of natural resources, did not seem to be a matter of concern to such an extent it is now in the 21st century, as it then was driven and justified by a strong belief in the

32 exceptionalism of human beings that was fueled by the principle of the means justifying the ends. Dystopian science-fiction novels and short stories can be viewed as the most fruitful ones in terms of producing plots and creating worlds that depict the aftermath of the devastating effects of human exploitation of natural resources and abuse of the rest of the natural world. J.G. Ballard, for instance, is known for his post-apocalyptic depictions of the future of our planet that has either become uninhabitable due to global warming as in The Drowned World (1962), or abandoned with people leaving to inhabit other planets after the overuse of the resources led to drained oceans and unbearable climate as in his short story “Deep End” (1961). Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) also provide terrifying visions of the future that are such as a result of human actions. Under the Skin is keeping up with the dystopian science-fiction novels and their grim futures. The echoes of the consequences initiated by the Industrial Revolution can also be found in Under the Skin. It is not our planet, however, that is depicted suffering, but the alien one. Though Isserley never delves into the history of her world, it may be assumed that it represents our world in the aftermath of continuous destructive actions towards it. On her planet, life exists under and above the ground. Underground, which is also called The Estates, live the poorest segments of the population that must be engaged in hard labor under hazardous working conditions to make oxygen for the population, the Elites, that live above the ground. The work performed underground resembles that of the mineworkers who mine the oxygen pits hidden at the heart of the Estates Peering closer despite her revulsion, Isserley noticed the hundreds of tubes, thick as industrial hose, draped over the rim all round, disappearing into the glutinous murk at intervals of a few metres. One of these tubes was being reeled in by an indistinct mechanical agent, the sheer glistening length of it a clue to how deep the crater really was. After some time, at the very end of the tube, attached to it by an artificial umbilicus, emerged a baggy diver’s suit enslimed in black muck. Still clutching a spade-like implement in its gloves, the diver’s suit slithered clumsily onto the concrete rim and struggled to raise itself to its knees. (Faber 118)

For those who live underground, the concept of the sun rising and setting, which fascinates Isserley every time she sees it, is unknown, since they may already have forgotten what the sun is after working in the dark for so long. Isserley always notices the beauty of the world, especially the sky that appears unlimited, unlike the scenery in the Estates. She cannot help but enjoy the realization that “[m]illions, billions, maybe trillions of trees were making oxygen without human intervention” (ibid.: 119). Back where she comes from, oxygen is a luxury only the rich have access to. Water in free access, which often falls from the sky, is a 33 miracle to Isserley and every one of her kind. When the word about these wonders available to everybody gets out, the possibility to come there to see and enjoy it themselves becomes a dream of the inhabitants of the depleted planet, who are willing to do anything it would take, even to replace Isserley and undergo similar body mutilations. One can observe that the living and working conditions on the alien planet embody the majority of predictions about what planet Earth is going to be like in the nearest future: bad air, overcrowding, lack of medical care, and the wide gap between rich and poor. While some of the predictions, such as poor medical care, are now not predictions but realities in some places in the world and have been such for some time, the ones that involve environmental change as a result of human actions are now translating into reality as well. Faber’s alien world with its lack of sunshine and inability to produce oxygen without the help of oxygen plants has a lot in common with places like China and India, where breathing in polluted air, gases and smoot has become a major challenge and has negative impact on people’s health, e.g. causing premature deaths (Kaiman). Air pollution constitutes one of the most evident consequences of excessive man-made environmental pollution through air emissions from plants, factories, cars, which during the Industrial Revolution established themselves as indicators of the intelligent human mind and, therefore, put humans on a higher level than animals, as well as allowed certain liberties with animals and the rest of the natural world. Since Isserley does not indulge in long meditations and reflections about her home planet because they bring painful memories back, it is difficult to judge the reason for Isserley’s planet’s airless and sunless condition, which in fact can be caused by a number of factors. It might be its natural state after all. Nevertheless, Under the Skin may be read as a warning against the probable consequences and horrors of such race toward perfection and progress. Not only does Under the Skin warn against the possible exhaustion of the planet as a result of harmful human intervention, but it also allows readers to unravel the major factors concerning the nature of human beings that are often used to draw a distinction between humans and animals. Isserley compares her species to ours in terms of differences and offers readers her definition of a true human being. She lists practices, habits, and typical appearance – the fundamental blocks the possession of which denotes a human. A great number of theories concerning the fundamental blocks of the true human has been proposed throughout the history of philosophy and literature. As Marie-Louise Mallet states, these theories mainly aim at breaking the connection with animals, where animal is often defined in a negative light (2008: x).

In a foreword to Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), Mallet notes that the tradition in philosophy Derrida is deconstructing attempted to come up with as many uniquely human traits as possible to emphasize the divide between people and animals, which are: “[…] deprived of whatever is presumed to be ‘‘proper’’ to the human: ‘‘speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense [feinte de feinte], covering of tracks, gift, laughing, tears, respect, etc.” (Derrida x). To this list, which, as Derrida observes, “is necessarily without limit” (ibid.: 135), Isserley contributes with more factors. In Under the Skin, people are treated as animals since they, according to the alien logic, “[…] couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist, nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn” (Faber 174). This logic resonates strongly with the anthropocentric ideas present in our non-fictional world. What is interesting, is the fact that the alien concepts are given in the alien language, which makes it impossible for readers to decipher them. Moreover, writing these in the alien language contributes to their conviction of the rudimentary human consciousness that grants them a place at the end of the food chain, since they, just like human readers of the novel, cannot make sense of the alien words. The concepts of slan, siuwil and hunshur can in fact can be replaced by any word in any language spoken on Earth and make appear a certain country, a nation, a culture, or a group of people, inferior to or underdeveloped and rudimentary compared to the one that displays the qualities referring to these words. To be an underdeveloped country means “having a relatively low economic level of industrial production and standard of living (as from lack of capital)” according to Merriam Webster’s Dictionary. It also involves poor health care and education. The problem with labeling a country as underdeveloped is this term often being imposed on people from that country as well. Aliens’ suiwil, mesnishtil, and slan can be replaced by words related to abilities and skills people learn at school. Thus, any nation that is classified as underdeveloped with low literacy rate can be described in accordance with the protagonist worldview in Under the Skin: they, underdeveloped people, cannot not write, they cannot not read, they have no concept of quizzes or encyclopedias; their communities are so rudimentary that they do not seem to need iPads or laptops. There are countless cultures in the world that are unique in their own way. People create culture, which is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (Tylor 35

1920). People often use a culture they were brought up in as a standard and a matter of course. Not finding certain characteristic beliefs or customs proper to that culture in other cultures may result in considering these as inferior ones. This preconception opens doors to a degrading treatment of those who belong to the inferior culture. Much evidence drawn from world history shows how the “inferior” people, e.g. indigenous communities, have always been a target of a series of discriminatory laws and practices and, consequently, deprived of land and natural resources within their territories. John Fage writes in his A History of Africa (1995): “Mid-and late-nineteenth-century Europeans were generally convinced that their Christian, scientific and industrial society was intrinsically far superior to anything that Africa had produced” (Fage 322). The three C’s underpinning the colonization of Africa, namely, civilization, Christianity and commerce, which European imperial powers sought to spread, serve as the most prominent example of exceptionalism that is purposely blind to unfamiliar practices and views diverse cultures and nations as savage, if they deviate from the norm. The list of differences between people, nations, cultures, is, as Derrida rightly observed, can continue indefinitely with more distancing factors coming to light. In many cases, the engine driving this constant search for differences already presupposes ill-natured intentions and actions, e.g. exploitation of natural resources, territorial conquest, exclusion from formal or informal networks, boosting one’s self-esteem. Differences between people can be used as a weapon to degrade one another in order to take profit from a particular situation. It does not make anthropocentrism come as a surprise with its constant urge to separate human beings from the rest of the natural world and maintain the idea of, as stated in The Cambridge Dictionary: “Considering humans and their existence as the most important and central fact in the universe”, to guarantee a replenishing source of food and to reassert the belief in the importance of the human race. In order to uplift her race in importance and distance it from the animal one, Isserley provides readers with clearly defined aspects that refer to people’s mental abilities, appearance and habits that, in her opinion, are not found in animals. The fact that we, people, sleep on those weird constructions we call beds is, according to the protagonist, an indicator of our brutishness, since true human beings, in this case, the aliens, sleep on the ground (Faber 92). The idiom “to go to bed” does not exist in the alien language and is unknown to Isserley’s kind that came with her to Scotland. Underwent multiple spine surgeries to appear more animal-like, Isserley can no longer sleep like a human being and prefers the animal manner instead, which is one of the many factors that make her doubt and question her own humanness.

The vodsels’ lack of understanding of the alien concepts, e.g. slan and hunshur, is used by aliens as one of the grounds justifying their portrayed treatment. Vodsels are less developed beings which conscious is rudimentary, that is, they do not possess the specific qualities that only human beings do. To be a reasonable species means being endowed with “the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways”, as defined in Marriam Webster Dictionary. The animals, that is, us, appear to the extraterrestrials in Faber’s novel as “mentally defective”, “imbecile”, inferior, and ignorant, lacking mental capacities to find meaning in their lives or make sense of the beautiful world they inhabit (Faber 78). The world will not miss these lesser creatures which existence passes unnoticed and which do not contribute to learning and improving the world they live in, so why not use them as a fuel for the creatures possessing the minds capable of rational thinking? – a conviction widely used to defend farming and consumption of animal products not only by the extraterrestrials in the novel, but in our world as well (cf. Norcross; Clement). Human exceptionalism is underpinned by a firm belief that people are the only ones who possess unique abilities such as intelligence and rationality, which animals lack. The human race is the only one that has made a significant progress in learning and applying knowledge: from the discovery of fire and its controlled use to building factories and inventing technologies that make our lives easier and more enjoyable, e.g. mobile phones, the Internet, airplanes, cars, while the same cannot be said about animals. There has never been a documentation of a dog inventing the telephone or koalas initiating deep space exploration and discovering that there are billions of galaxies. Animals’ only purpose is to breed, leaving more pressing matters to the power of the human mind to deal with, as anthropocentric views suggest. However, coming back to the very definition of intelligence that universally refers to the humans’ ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly, the means for measuring it are somewhat ambiguous. Such ambiguity makes it possible to exclude certain groups of people from belonging to the human species and, in fact, include certain animal species. The word “intelligence” is originally of Latin origin - intelligentia or intellēctus, meaning “understanding”, which derives from a Latin verb intelligere - “to understand” or “to comprehend”, that is, to be able to make sense of the world, according to Marriam Webster Dictionary. In this case, are people with mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia, which is characterized by hallucinations they often have difficulties separating from reality, are intelligent beings due to their hindered ability to make sense of the actual world, or is the requirement of an intelligent being is a mere possession of the mind capable to make sense of any world, real or imagined? Moreover, does the ability to acquire knowledge must include 37 knowledge in all disciplines, e.g. mathematics, languages, archaeology, where one’s advanced understanding of one field and poor understanding of the others leads to a limited understanding of the world unlike those succeeding in all fields? It seems that there is no one simple way to measure intelligence or to provide a definition to the term that would work for all humans. One solution may be to stop claiming intelligence or reason in humans as a unique trait separating humans from animals, since, as numerous studies suggest, various animals, such as dolphins and chimpanzees, show the level of intelligence higher not only than of people with severe intellectual disabilities, but healthy ones as well (cf. Safina, Reiss, Goodall). Since the question of intelligence in humans and animals is surrounded by ambiguity and controversy, there is a large number of theories and studies that either reassert human- exclusive intelligence or the ones that disprove such conviction (Descartes; Chomsky). The ones that support the assertion that humans are the only wise species to walk the earth offer a wide variety of definitions of intelligence and ideas concerning the necessary components of a true wise being. These date back to the early Greek though and are evident in Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings, which, as Renehan states, “[…] were to be of central importance in the proliferation of this outlook” (1981: 241). Michio Kaku, an American theoretical physicist, highlighted three crucial components of intelligent beings, which he listed in his Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century (1997). To Kaku, an intelligent form of life possesses some form of eyes, two or more, stereoscopic ones in particular, that of a predator and a hunter, rather than the ones that are located on the sides of the skull that belong to the prey and less intelligent animals, e.g. rabbits (Kaku 320). Another basic criterion is hands. In humanity’s case it was the possession of the opposable thumbs which separated us from animals which were “originally used to grab tree branches”, and “were key to our manipulating the environment” (ibid.: 320). The last indicator of an intelligent being, according to Kaku, is the capacity for language to “accumulate knowledge and culture” and to communicate that knowledge to the next generation (ibid.: 321). Since it is only humans who possess all three of these components, they are granted the status of intelligent creatures and subsequently the right to decide the faith of the less intelligent ones, that is, animals.

4.1.3. I speak, Therefore I am Human

Kaku’s third component of intelligent life - the capacity for language, resonates not only with many other cases of exceptionalism that proclaim the capacity to acquire language as human- specific only, but is evident in the extraterrestrials’ convictions in Under the Skin as well. During her walks in the Scottish Highlands, Isserley often stumbles upon the sheep - the

38 creatures that resemble to Isserley her species the most. As a consequence, they are granted a more friendly description as her “fellow-travellers” and a share of empathy, which allows readers to assume that she regards them as equal to her, judging by the word fellow used, as opposed to “hideous animals” or “creatures” she uses when talking about animals, that is, us (Faber 63). The sheep are also the only ones she considers communicating with on equal footing: “It was so hard to believe the creature couldn’t speak. It looked so much as if it should be able to. Despite its bizarre features, there was something deceptively human about it, which tempted her, not for the first time, to reach across the species divide and communicate” (ibid.). It is not only the sheep Isserley has empathy for, but an unidentifiable creature from a horror movie on TV as well, which “resembled a giant insect and waved pincers like a crab, but advanced clumsily on two legs” (ibid.: 146). The creature is not her species alike in terms of appearance and is a villain in the movie which presence is undesirable to a female, as evident in her hysterical screams. However, Isserley makes no remarks on the creature’s evil intentions. Moreover, upon seeing a male shooting the creature from a flamethrower, Isserley expresses regret over the death of “the poor insect creature writhed in agony” (ibid.). The factors responsible for causing such reaction may be her attitude toward these two people, which are animals to her, as well as the sounds produced by the creature: “Its dying cries, barely audible above the din of animal orchestrations, were alarmingly human-sounding, as sibilant as sexual passion” (ibid.). These sounds may appear to Isserley as if uttered by her own kind but in a foreign language. It seems that the capacity to produce sounds, particularly those that the brain recognizes as belonging to a human being, in both Isserley’s case and ours, is crucial in identifying a friend or a foe. Even though Isserley’s job consists in extracting information from the hitchhikers about the likelihood of them being reported as missing, which is performed in a form of a conversation during which she interrogates them, and which requires the capacity for language of both sides, the hitchhikers are still dismissed as animals and, therefore, foes. Isserley never mentions to the factory workers that the kidnapped men can talk not only to the ones of their kind, but have potential for learning the alien language as well. The fact that the animals they slaughter speak never crosses the aliens’ minds, as they firmly believe in their unique possession of this ability. The only character in the novel that does not seem to share this view is Amlis Vess. He comes to Scotland to see the farm himself and visits the lower floors where the animals are kept. This makes Isserley fear that this visit will plant an idea in his mind that they do possess language: “Just for an instant Isserley forgot that the vodsels were tongueless, and was alarmed at the thought of them communicating with Amlis Vess, but she calmed down when the mouldy man

39 laughed coarsely and added, ‘We says to him, “Do the animals talk back to you then?”’ (ibid.: 159). One vodsel manages to find a straw and makes a desperate plea for help by writing mercy in the dirt (ibid.: 171). Neither Vess nor Isserley know the meaning of the word. To Vess, the fact that the animal tries to convey a message or a concept through a written symbol, which does not represent a word to him, since his race may be using a completely different script, is still an indicator of his capacity for language and communication. Yet, his surprising discovery is put off by Isserley: “It depends on what you classify as language” (ibid.). Knowing that vodsels can in fact communicate threatens to dispel a perception the aliens have about their level of intelligence, that is, their rudimentary consciousness, which Isserley eagerly cultivates and is unwilling to give up, even when she witnesses the opposite. In order to drive such thoughts away she has a theory ready

The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions. (ibid.: 174)

To Isserley’s alien counterparts, the absence of language ability in the vodsels they slaughter is a primary indicator of their unintelligence, which they use as a justification for their violent actions towards vodsels. The capacity for language, or, rather, its absence, functions as a primary ground used to separate animals from humans not only by the aliens in Under the Skin, but applies to our world as well, where the possession of language constitutes “possibly our favorite human distinguishing mark”, as Mary Midgley notices (1978: 206). Indeed, language is arguably the most easily detectable ability and a sign of an intelligent mind than the ability to solve mathematical equations or understand subjects such as chemistry. However, just like with intelligence, there is an ongoing debate concerning the definition of language, which makes it not that straightforward to exclude all animals from possessing it. As Robert Louden observes, the definitions vary from one field to another, where in philosophy language refers to a different concept than in linguistics or primatology, with no universal definition as to date (2009: 374). Aristotle maintained that human beings are the only ones who have language, while not denying that animals have other systems for communication, since there is a distinction between logos and phōnḗ, meaning sound or voice. Many animals, as Aristotle asserted, do possess phōnḗ, that is, a sound with a meaning that is caused by the soul, which enables animals to express two states. In his Politics, he writes: “Their

40 nature has come this far, that they have a perception of the painful and the pleasant and indicate these things to each other” (Book 1: section 1253a). Vodsels in Faber’s novel then, too, have phōnḗ and are able to recognize the state of pain which the one in the pens tries to convey to Amlis Vess. Logos is, however, different from phōnḗ, as it is a more unique communicative system that allows its possessors - human beings, to communicate through abstract concepts beyond pain and pleasure and to indicate perceptions of “good and evil and just and unjust (Aristotle 1253a). As Louden explains, Aristotelian logos “enables its possessors to make obligations to one another, to create legal systems, and to form political communities. Logos here is shorthand for the capability to conceptualize good and evil, and it is claimed to be both an essential and unique capacity of human beings as well as something that makes the polis possible (Louden 374). In this case, logos cannot be attributed to animals, since they do not exhibit the capacity to discuss general concepts as humans do, nor can animals evaluate such concepts. Louden refers to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Irene Pepperberg’s separate studies that are concerned with observing animals and their language capacities as examples that support Aristotle’s claim that animals do not possess logos (ibid.: 376). Savage-Rumbaugh worked with a bonobo named Kanzi, a chimpanzee raised in a laboratory, who, as she claims, acquired language in the same manner as children do, but who “cannot plan ahead as we do, organize large societies, or produce complex tools, calendars, and religions” (qtd. in Louden 376). Pepperberg worked with Alex, an African gray parrot, and claimed that he showed understanding of the categories “like”, “same”, and “different”, could count to six, but still had limited communication skills that never went above answering questions about concepts he had already learnt, e.g. what Alex wanted or where he wanted to go (ibid.). To Louden, these two animals’ inability to communicate about concepts that go beyond what they were taught by humans, confirms the fact that they have no perception of “good and evil, and of just and unjust”, and therefore their language is nothing like human language (ibid.). It is doubtful that extraterrestrials in Under the Skin are acquainted with the concepts of logos and phōnḗ, but it is highly likely that their opinion regarding their language and that of the animals is in many ways similar to that of Aristotle. Isserley does have conversations with the hitchhikers, however, she seems to consider vodsels’ communication abilities as those of a dog barking to its owner back when hearing “treats” or “walk”, or Alex the parrot who could count to six. At the same time, Isserley, who had to learn animal language, that is, English, just like Kanzi and Alex, cannot be said to show the capacity to think beyond concepts behind words she already memorized, e.g. the word “mercy” that the vodsel writes in the mud that she does 41 not understand. When asked by Amlis Vess about the meaning of it, she decides not to read the word aloud because “[f]or her to speak the word at all dignified it with the status of being a word in the first place” (Faber 172). In order to dismiss the idea that she begins to develop about her kind and animals in fact sharing many similarities regarding the presence of verbal and written symbols that stand for various concepts in their languages, despite their obvious differences, e.g. script or phonology, she tries to disillusion Vess and herself by saying that the word in the mud is “just a scratch mark that means something to vodsels, obviously” (ibid.). To grant the scratch mark a status of a word would mean that Isserley is “dignifying the vodsels […] with both writing and speech” (ibid.). This, however, runs the risk of attributing vodsels with more importance, which potentially could hinder their factory farming. Spending a lot of time with animals, Isserley cannot help but wonder, each time pushing this thought away: “But isn’t it true, she asked herself, that they have that dignity? […] Just look at these creatures! Their brute bulk, their stink, their look of idiocy, the way the shit oozed up between their fat toes” (ibid.). However, does not the fact that the scratch mark is endowed with meaning that probably all vodsels would recognize and understand mean that the vodsels do have a communicative system, which implies that their intellectual capacity is much higher than Isserley and other aliens believe it to be, since the capacity for language has been singled out as the most tangible indicator of an intelligent mind? Though to us, readers, the answer is positive, as we know that vodsels are in fact us and have the same language ability as we do, and we are intelligent beings, to Descartes, the answer would be negative. The animals in Under the Skin, despite being our mirror-images, can be read as an illustration of our treatment of animals where the same set of judgements about their intelligence apply. Just like Aristotle, Descartes denied that animals possess the same capacity for language as humans do. Instead of Aristotelian concept of logos, he declared that the human capacity for speech is verâ loquelâ, that is, true language or “genuinely linguistic competence” that is characterized by “the creation every day of new sentences, unlinked to specific behavioral stimuli, is something which could not in principle be produced by a purely mechanical stimuli”, as John Cottingham summarizes (2008: 121). Thus, human language is an act of free will and creativity, which is not restricted to the needs, instincts, natural impulses or passions. Despite the fact that certain animals have necessary organs to produce sounds as humans do, e.g. magpies and parrots, which Descartes mentions to illustrate his point in Meditations, this does not mean that they will ever be able to speak as people do, since their acts of sound-producing are driven by instincts, not thoughts, and they show no signs of thinking about what they are saying (1637/1960: 42). 42

There is no doubt that language with everything it includes, e.g. words, grammar, speech, is man’s most crucial invention and the most powerful tool. Some consider man’s particular use of language, as well as its purpose, as the only evidence needed to draw a distinction between us and animals. Others, like Donna Haraway, argue that language contributes to “the fantasy of human exceptionalism” (2008: 11). People endow shallow written symbols and uttered sounds with meaning that may refer to feelings, ideas, memories or intentions that appear in our intelligent minds. Language is our means of creating a bridge from the inside - our minds and hearts, to the outside world. This is a well-known fact to all of us fellow readers of Under the Skin but is denied and ignored by the alien race which means for communication may be distinctly different. This points to another distorted mirroring of our world. In the novel, readers are given accounts of dialogs taking place between aliens that are documented in an understandable and familiar to us way. It makes us acknowledge that they have the capacity for language just like we do, and this may lead us to automatically granting the aliens the status of intelligent beings. The aliens, however, remove us from the club of intelligent beings, unable to fully comprehend our ways of life and accept the differences from theirs. Yet we, vodsels, are well aware of who we are. Similarly, animals, the ones outside the fictional space of the novel, are well aware of who they are and possess other systems and means for transferring meaning, which, even when these are different from our definition of language or ideas of what communication should look like, are equally significant. This has been proposed by several conservationists, ecologists and environmentalists (cf. Safina, Bekoff, Fill, Trampe). Even Descartes’ views on animals may be read as if not supporting but at least not denying the fact that animals are exhibiting intelligent minds. John Cottingham (1985) and Peter Harrison (1992) suggest that it is a matter of a closer readings of the Cartesian corpus which reveals that Descartes’ opinion regarding animals being non-sentient and unintelligent machines may not be that straightforward. Though Descartes attempted to rationalize and establish criteria for the mind or the soul, he, as Harrison points out, repeatedly emphasized the possibility of his opinions being untrue (1992: 226). In the letter to Plempius, Descartes wrote that the reason for not providing strong arguments for his view regarding soul was “partly for fear of writing something false while refuting falsehood, partly for fear of seeming to want to ridicule received Scholastic opinions” (1637). Similar claim is found in the letter to Henry More in which Descartes stated that there is no evidence of a thinking soul in animals but added that “though I regard it as established that we cannot prove there is any thought in animals, I do not think it is thereby proved that there is not, since the human mind does not reach into their hearts” (1649). John Norris, a 43 follower of the Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, too, was preoccupied with the question of the minds of animals in his An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World: “Reason does most favour the side which denies all Thought and Perception to animals, yet, … our Reason deceive us, as ‘tis easy to err in the Dark” (1704: 100). Animal hearts and minds are indeed a mystery to us, forcing us to look for similarities between them and ourselves. When finding differences, people often use these to create a gap between us and animals, instead of acknowledging the possibility of the disparate modes of life and capacities being equally important. Various practices or customs that animals perform often seem strange and pointless to us, which leads to the assumption that these are nothing compared to the practices and customs of human beings. The constant use of the human life activities or bodily functions as a standard model or a generic template for “normality”, the deviations from which point to the alienness, is at risk of reinforcing anthropocentric and exceptionalist beliefs and values, which have been proven to be harmful for every living organism on our planet. To many, the idea that animals have capacity for language, can experience emotions similar to ours, and have their specific modes of life that are not restricted to mere breeding may appear as oversentimental that in fact has nothing to do with reality or stems from, as Isserley in Under the Skin puts it, “a tendency to anthropomorphize” (Faber 173). However, a growing body of research underpinned by scientific evidence, not assumptions or emotion- driven conclusions, suggests otherwise, which breaks the pre-existent anthropocentric beliefs. With more evidence available, as Jane Goodall remarks, “[t]he behaviorists, those who believe animals are little different from machines, preprogrammed to respond predictably to a variety of stimuli, are gradually losing ground to those who take a more commonsense attitude to what and who animals are” (2002: 11).

4.1.4. Beyond Anthropocentrism

But what and who are animals? The answers to these two questions may range depending on a person’s beliefs, upbringing and experience with animals. In this way, animals are friends, companions, children, machines, vodsels, food, bodies to experiment on, drawings in children’s books. These all, however, stem from people’s perspective and according to the animals’ use to people. If it were possible to ask animals these questions, the listed above answers would doubtfully be on their minds, but there is no denying that they are aware of who they are. Yet do they have emotions, do they go to work like people have to, can they experience stress, do they have language? These questions, the latter, in particular, seem to appear on the agenda more often than the others in order to determine whether animals deserve different treatment. However, the most important question may be missing here, as Carl Safina notes: “Permissible

44 questions are “it” questions: about where it lives, what it eats, what it does when danger threatens, how it breeds. But always forbidden is the one question that might open the door: Who?” (2015: 1). Goodall’s answer to the question concerning the conscious mind of animals has a lot in common with Descartes’ opinion and Marc Bekoff’s statements. In the foreword to Bekoff’s Minding Animals she writes: “[…] even though it may be difficult for science to prove beyond all doubt that animals have emotions, it is equally impossible for science to prove that they do not” (2002: 10). The difficulty lies in people’s tendency to build on a set of human emotions and capacities as a model and trying to find these in animals. Not exhibiting the characteristic human criteria does not imply animals’ inferior intellectual skills or the fact that they deserve a smaller place in the sun. Contrary to Descartes, Safina believes that people are made to believe that animals’ inner world is a mystery: “But like a child who is admonished that what they really want to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mind – if there is such – is unknowable” (2015: 1). As Protagoras of Abdera postulated: “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not” (Plato 152a). This statement seems to reflect the essence of anthropocentrism. Animals may have some sort of language – sounds they use to communicate with each other or try to communicate with us, but it is never given a status of a real language, since, compared to human languages, it lacks certain creativity. Animal consciousness and that of humans are two different notions. As Safina puts it: “We assume that we are the world’s standard, that all things should be compared to us. Such an assumption names us overlook a lot” (2015: 20). Recalling his experience observing elephants in Kenya in Beyond Words, Safina expresses the essence of what it takes to get closer to understanding animals: “Watch. Simply listen. They will not speak to us, but to one another they say much. Some of it, we hear. The rest is beyond words” (ibid.: 8). Indeed, had Isserley in Under the Skin observed vodsels and regarded them as they are, instead of constantly making binary oppositions, she might have realized that the two species share a lot in common and are equally intelligent, as far as we can judge on the descriptions of the extraterrestrials provided in the novel. In Beyond Words, Safina asks: “But what is a ‘human emotion’? When someone says you can’t attribute human sensations to animals, they forget that human sensations are animal sensations. Inherited sensations, using inherited nervous systems” (ibid.: 29). Human sensation of love then is in no way different to that of animal love. Despite the fact that the theme of love has been exploited, glorified, and documented in arts since the dawn of time, it does not make it anything beyond a natural instinct, which is similar for both people and animals. In their When 45

Elephants Weep, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy write that it may pose an equal challenge to find out if animals and people love, for example, their babies: “They may say they love their baby, but how do we know they are telling the truth? Ultimately we cannot know exactly what other people mean when they speak of love” (1994: 73). But that does not change the fact that love happens in the brain, in both human and animal. Throughout her journey in Scotland, Isserley proceeds to admire its nature which with its free access to water and oxygen is unthinkable back in her world where oxygen has to be mined for. Enjoying nature seems to have a calming effect on her and reminds her that despite the fact that she will be suffering for the rest of her life due to the surgeries, the reward is worth it: “A luminous moat of rainwater, a swarm of gulls following a seeder around a loamy field, a glimpse of rain two or three mountains away, even a lone oystercatcher flying overhead: any of these could make Isserley half forget what she was on the road for” (Faber 2). To her, the fact that water falls from the sky as a free gift for everyone, both rich and poor, is “miraculous” (ibid.: 56). The same fascination goes for the “natural” production of oxygen with the help of millions of trees that grow under the blue sky, a seeming eternity (ibid.: 118). Isserley is not the only one, however, who is enthralled by the wonders of nature. Amlis Vess expresses similar feelings after seeing the ocean himself, the stars, and being able to breathe freely. With this, he reminds Isserley once again that her suffering may not be completely meaningless – she has an unlimited access to see and experience these wonders for which “there are hundreds of people begging for the chance” (ibid.: 242). Their home can never compete against Earth in beauty, as their existence mainly takes place indoors and involves “money, sex, drugs, outrageously expensive food (- ten thousand liss for a fillet of voddissin!)” (ibid.: 260). However, animals are the ones who Isserley never considers to be sharing her own feelings and excitement about wonders of nature with. In alien minds, animals exist solely functioning in accordance with a certain biological program that is restricted to breeding and feeding. The animal mind is, therefore, not capable for such acts of admiring the beauty of the surroundings, which is left for the more evolved creatures – people. Since the protagonist in Under the Skin approaches vodsels already prejudiced, little does she know that they, too, can appreciate the beauty of nature with its unlimited sky, large bodies of water, and miraculous stars. This is evident in several glimpses into hitchhikers’ thoughts that they keep to themselves and do not share with Isserley but us: “It was so mind-blowing the way it could all hang suspended up there, all that solid water, enough of it to bury a whole country in tons of white powdered ice, all of it just floating, way, way up there as easily as a cloud. A miracle” (ibid.: 200). 46

The sense of beauty is not exclusive to human beings, since other animals appear to be minding the beauty of their surroundings and admiring it as well, which proves that animals do not merely function like machines, but they are aware of the environment and are able to make sense of what they see. In “They are Us”, Geza Teleki, a conservationist, recalls his experience of studying chimpanzees in East Africa. At Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Teleki observed two male free-living chimpanzees climbing to the top of a ridge, shaking hands and then watching the sunset (1993: 296). This episode made Teleki think about the fact that human beings and animals have more in common than we think: “But for minor differences - a few inches in height, some extra body hair - there on a ridge in Africa had stood two colleagues performing a greeting ritual seen daily on any campus in America” (ibid.). Adriaan Kortlandt, an ethologist, witnessed a similar behavior of wild chimpanzees which he documented in his “Chimpanzees in the Wild”: “Once I saw a chimpanzee gaze at a particularly beautiful sunset for a full 15 minutes, watching the changing colors until it became so dark that he had to retire to the forest without stopping to pick a papaw for his evening meal” (1962: 131). These acts of sunset watching may be driven by the same interests that people and animals have. Reflecting on Kortlandt’s experience, Safina writes: “If they really are admiring the sunset, it’s probably for no deeper reason than that it looks pretty to them. Same as us. Perhaps they feel a sense of wonder, the raw material for the question to which humans hammered the answer of religion” (Safina 25). While the answer to the question of whether animals make sense of their surroundings and admire it the way we do is pretty straightforward – yes, the one regarding language is still uncertain. Seeking the same variations and uses of human language in animals prevents the seekers from finding out about the various languages that animals speak, which may also be characterized by different dialects and vocabulary, and dismiss these as meaningless sounds triggered by instincts, not minds. Even if some animals exhibit a capacity to learn or mimic words they often hear from human beings, e.g. birds and gorillas, they will never be able to use the language like people do. Do animals have language then? Marc Bekoff answers: “If by "language" we mean human language, the answer is no. Nonetheless, bees and other animals perform very complex behavior patterns in the absence of human-like language” (2002: 109). The purpose of any language, whether it is German or Russian, is communication and transmission of information, memories, and knowledge. It is, however, one of many ways along with gestures and facial expressions to convey what one thinks or intends. Language provides us, human beings, with a way to show other human beings what is going on in our minds. Animals, too, communicate with each other and us, not with words though, but through other complex ways that may even be too complex for such intelligent creatures as humans. 47

One example of such complex messaging system is found in plants that use flowers to convey information to their pollinators. Honeybees’ dance, as Karl von Frisch detected, is another equivalent to human language: “Put another way, bees can "interpolate visual in formation, exhibit associative recall, categorize visual information and learn contextual information," abilities that are taken to be evidence of thinking” (qtd. in Bekoff 109). As Safina sums it: “From crustaceans and insects and octopuses on up, millions of species communicate using scents, gestures, postures, hormones and pheromones, touch, glances, and sounds” (Safina 79). These may be examples of different languages of animals. To carry a certain action first requires a thought - an impulse in the brain. Then a person or an animal acts in accordance with its abilities to interpret that impulse (Smith 2011: 23). Since animals cannot communicate with us using words as we do to talk to each other, the slaughtering is made much easier by the belief that their screaming has nothing to do with them being in pain or comprehending what is about to happen. If cows or pigs could scream in English, for instance, begging not hurt them, the whole farming process would be hindered by human aggravated sense of morality. In Under the Skin, Isserley and Eswiss are the only characters that know about vodsels having some sort of language. The factory workers, however, do not, and before they get an opportunity to hear them talk, vodsels’ tongues are cut off to prevent that, which, if not performed, could mobilize their sympathy to the hitchhikers and slower the production. In the reality that the novel is mirroring, the fact that makes the killing of animals much easier is their lack of ability to communicate their feelings to us in a way people would unequivocally understand, that is, with words. As many behaviorists and conservationists agree, the absence of certain ability in animals that is found in humans is not an indicator of animals being less intelligent and therefore less important or not deserving the right to live as humans do. Both the likeness and the diversity have to be accepted and celebrated. Bekoff notes: “It is also important to emphasize that little is to be gained from comparing, for example, the cognitive or emotional "level" of a chimpanzee to that of a human child, for each individual does what he or she needs to do to adapt to the demands in his or her own world” (2002: 38). Communication in animals, despite its differences with human communication, is nevertheless rich, diverse, and serves its purpose. Elephants, for example, can communicate with each other with sounds that are rumbles to us, which often are too low frequency for the human ear to catch. Their rumbling can also travel through the air and the ground for other elephants to hear (Safina 78). Even though these sounds mean nothing to humans, to elephants, the meaning of these sounds is as clear as our words to us. These sounds may be their vocabulary which are accompanied by a number of gestures and body movements to convey information. 48

Vervet monkeys, too, have the capacity for language with calls that have various meanings, just like words. As Jared Diamond observes in The Third Chimpanzee, “[…] wild vervets have a natural form of symbolic communication based on grunts, with slightly different grunts to mean “leopard”, “eagle” and “snake” (2006: 39). These calls are not inborn in vervet monkeys but acquired, and younger monkeys of age about six- or seven-months often utter calls incorrectly or misunderstand them, which resembles human children learning their first words. Klaus Zuberbühler found out that titi and colobus monkeys’ calls are arranged in specific ways, like syntax, to add additional information to their calls, e.g. whether they see or hear a threat (2002: 294). Safina argues: “We’ve tended to be lazy about other animals’ vocabularies. We say merely that dogs “bark” or “whine”. That’s like saying people “speak” or “scream” and leaving it at that” (Safina 90). Yet, with their sounds, rumbles and screams, animals are able to communicate with their own kind and make themselves clear. Animals, and even plants, use various tools for communicating and transferring knowledge, memories, and information about the world, which may include sounds, gestures, bodily movements, and scents. Despite the fact that animals are incapable of building phrases and uttering words like human beings do, they are conscious, and their lives are meaningful. Studying animals in ways that do not include a mere comparison of animals to human beings is a relatively new enterprise. For many, to accept the fact that both animals and people are conscious whose lives are of equal worth may be challenging, since there exists another crucial separating factor - appearance. Appearance is more obvious than feelings and mental capacities. It does not require brain scans or long observations but a quick glance to decide whether it is a human being standing before us. That being must be bipedal above all. Everyone and everything which deviates from the characteristic build of a human body is dismissed as animalistic. Distinct appearance and physical features are the easiest tools in a toolshed that anthropocentrism can offer. Differences in looks, skin colour, and body physique are often used and abused to exclude and devalue those who do not fit into the established standards of normality with its typical features that vary depending on groups of people and cultures that set themselves as a standard. Since people have become pretty good in finding more and more appearance-based reasons to dehumanize the not-fitting ones, it is hardly a surprise that such discrimination has been extended to animals as well, since they are the easiest target. Keeping beings that are identical to humans in terms of physique, e.g. bipedal, erect posture, in pens, and slaughtering them for meat would seem an immoral and inhumane business. For Isserley, to consume a creature for food that looks so much like her kind goes against her morals. To her and Amlis Vess, the sheep seem the closest to their kind, which 49 makes the aliens consider the sheep as equals. However, being against violence towards any animal, bipedal or quadrupedal, Amlis asks why they do not capture the sheep too, since, as the killing has been initiated, they might take everyone indiscriminately as well without establishing excuses for one kind but not the other (Faber 240). His question perplexes Isserley: “They’re … they’re on all fours, Amlis, can’t you see that? They’ve got fur – tails – facial features not that different from ours …” (ibid.). There is a high probability that Isserley’s reasoning resonates strongly with people’s points for not farming other people like animals and make steaks out of their flesh. A number of Greek philosophers were preoccupied with external differences between human beings and animals. As Diogenes Laërtius stated, Plato first defined man as a featherless biped, which did not sit right with Diogenes the Cynic, who brought a plucked chicken into Plato’s Academy to show that Plato’s definition was in fact flawed (Hicks 1972). This made the Academy to revise the definition and add “with flat nails” to it (ibid.). Since Greek antiquity, a clearer definition of a human in terms of physique and appearance has been given, e.g. in The American Heritage Dictionary: “A member of the primate genus Homo, especially a member of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other apes by a large brain and the capacity for speech”. We, people, however, tend to not rely on definitions of human beings regarding their representative physique but trust our sight with the help of which we are able to isolate another human being instantly. Distinct appearance and the belief that animals are in every way inferior greatly contribute to the anthropocentric worldview and provide people with a number of excuses and justifications for the continuation of their violent treatment of animals. Though there is an ever- growing body of research that proves otherwise, that is, animals’ lives are as rich as ours and their minds are not rudimentary, the problem with learning and comprehending this information is the way we organize our lives and societies that exclude animals from it, which makes it nearly impossible for the new data to cut through existing prejudices that have been accumulating for a long time.

4.2. Emotional Distancing: Language Will Tear Us Apart

In Under the Skin, Isserley and the factory workers seem to be constantly distancing themselves from acknowledging the suffering of vodsels they slaughter by means of emotional shutdown. They exhibit no remorse treating animals the way they do. This attitude, as has been discussed above, stems from the aliens’ anthropocentric worldview and the belief that the creatures they kill are incapable of feeling pain or fear. Such preconception about animals’ emotional blindness results in the same lack of emotions in the aliens. A product of such anthropocentric

50 worldview is a terminology with a set of words used to talk about animals that reinforces the dominance of the alien race and emphasizes the inferiority of human beings they farm. A closer look at Isserley’s choice of vocabulary to describe and talk about humans helps to decipher the encoded stance towards them, which is anthropocentric and devaluing. By referring to vodsels as “hideous animals”, “beasts that miss fingers” with “chimpanzee eyes” or with legs that reminds her of “a pair of giant salmon” (Faber 108), the protagonist deliberately denies vodsels the same worth and rights, as she creates a gap that separates human beings from animals. Such descriptors may both confuse readers by creating an illusion of the protagonist being a human being in our understanding of the definition, as well as demonstrate the power of language to create distinctions, which may apply not only to animals, but other humans as well. A number of conservationists, biologists, and philosophers of animal rights, e.g. Singer (1975) and Regan (1983), have provided grounds for undermining the existing beliefs in animal inferiority. Since such beliefs are also encoded in our words, it is language that deserves special attention and introduction of new terms that do not have anthropocentric subtext, since how “we speak about other animals is inseparable from the way we treat them” (Dunayer 2001: 9). Isserley’s comparisons of vodsels to inanimate objects, e.g. creatures with “twig-like fingers”, “spindly fingers”, or referring to vodsels as “a fortune’s worth of raw meat” (Faber 157) contribute to their devaluing. Joan Dunayer objects to such devaluating vocabulary with its reference to animals as to something rather than someone, since it “groups them with inanimate things and obliterates their sentience and individuality” (2003: 61). In acts of people’s emotional distancing from animals that often results in mitigating one’s possible guilty conscience, language is the initial means of making such emotional alienation possible. Since language is one of the most powerful anthropocentric tools, studying the ways animals are represented in literature and media is of particular importance, as Guy Cook and Alison Sealey state (2017). Such analysis and the study of language is predominantly performed in a recently arisen area of linguistics – ecolinguistics, which focuses its efforts at uncovering encoded beliefs and attitudes towards animals of those who produce language about them. Cook writes that the significance of such research lies in the fact that “[…] when human beings talk and write about animals, they inevitably do so from a human perspective, and what animals are is often taken to be what they are in relation to human beings” (ibid.: 312). In this way, in relation to human beings, animals are sources of food, labor, or danger, companions and friends, a commodity, but not just animals. The vocabulary aliens use in Under the Skin reveals their uncompromising stance towards the bipeds. With the words such as “beasts” or “imbecile creatures”, which are 51 entrenched in aliens’ common usage, the possibility of a change in the human-vodsel relationship dies out with each passing day and increases the emotional gap between them atrophying aliens’ compassion. Such relationship may be read as an allegory to the present tendencies and state of affairs in our human-animal communication. The intentional classification of animals in many human languages into categories according to their use and value does not contribute to the much-needed change towards a more compassionate and humane relationship with the human Other. Not only do words have the power to bring people together, but also to set them apart, which applies to the rest of the natural world and its vital units as well. The absence or presence of certain words in human vocabularies influences the way speakers perceive the world and themselves and how they act in the world. Written symbols cannot be meaningful on their own and separated from concepts they are endowed with or objects they are pointing to. Throughout their life, words may lose one meaning and acquire another, which points to the fact that a crucial condition for words staying meaningful is their use. In his highly influential Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1953/2009: 43). To illustrate his point, Wittgenstein makes an analogy between a toolbox and language, since “functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects” (ibid. :11). Such variety of functions one word may have makes it possible to manipulate the reality by naming an event or an act with a word that has previously been carrying a positive connotation. Let us take the word “mercy”, for example. While in many cases this word has a positive connotation and appeals to people’s inner goodness, it can also be used to cover up one’s harmful actions. In Under the Skin, this is evident in Isserley’s attempts to convince Amlis Vess that the vodsels are not safe in the wild and that by keeping them safe underground, they do vodsels a favor and show the goodness of their hearts. 4.2.1. Three Strategies of Euphemization

One word may have several uses for different purposes, which may range from mitigating sad thoughts to whitewashing harmful practices and detaching people from experiencing an emotional connection to other people or animals. Wilhelm Trampe has coined the term Euphemization to refer to the practice of using language to cover up violence against animals and their suffering, as well as to “draw attention to lexical phrases that veil and justify acts depriving voiceless animals of their right to a natural life” (2017: 325). The use of various euphemisms, or “words of good meaning” or “good omen”, which derive from the Greek word

52 euphemia, in discourse involving animals, often results in linguistic deception and the change of linguistic perspectivization, changing the mood from negative to a more automized and feelingless one. Trampe stresses the importance of studying various euphemisms that most human languages are flooded with. It is particularly important for the field of ecolinguistics, since “for the ecolinguist, language is a part of nature just as nature is part of language” (ibid.: 326). The vocabulary people use to talk about animals is in control of our ideas about the natural world and our actions towards it. Trampe suggests that the role of euphemization here is crucial: “Identifying strategies used in euphemizations and analyzing and categorizing them from an ecolinguistic viewpoint always means comprehending them as elements of forms of life in the sense of Wittgenstein: “And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (ibid.). Since euphemisms may be seen as a response to particular needs of a society or a group of people, the developments in that society with the circumstances that lead to the creation of euphemisms have to be considered as well. Euphemisms that are related to animals have been given rise by the growing demand for meet and land, which are used to whitewash farming business, deforestation and other acts of destruction of animals’ homes. The acts of presenting violent and harmful acts regarding animals in a better light can be divided into three categories or strategies proposed by Trampe, which are: utilization, reification, and taboos or tabooing (ibid.: 329). The vocabulary Isserley and her colleagues in Under the Skin use can be placed within these categories of euphemization, as they are aimed at hiding the true colors of the alien business in Scotland. Utilization, the first strategy Trampe proposes in his “Euphemisms for Killing Animals and for Other Forms of Their Use”, is an anthropocentric vocabulary used to categorize animals as useful objects. Depending on the usefulness of an animal to human beings, various categories to that animal apply. The degree of domestication of animals also influences the choice of a category they are put into, which may include pets, livestock, farm animals, wild animals. The treatment of animals is different for each category, where pets would often receive more care and attention. Examples of the existing categories of animals in relation to their use may include food (honeybees and milk cows), hunting (hunting dogs and falcons), clothing (fur-bearing animals, feathered animals), domesticated meat animals (ibid.: 331). Seeing animals only in the light of their usefulness to us, which is fueled by the use of euphemisms, greatly facilitates the creation and the widening of an emotional gap between human beings and animals, since such vocabulary erases the possibility of perceiving animals as autonomous entities. In Under the Skin, Isserley makes the same distinction between alien creatures she meets in Scotland based on their usefulness to her. She refers to unknown species simply as 53

“creatures” and “animals”. To the animal category she includes a broad spectrum of beings that are of no use to her business – sheep, whelks, dogs. The bipedal creatures, however, are of more interest and value, thus they are categorized as vodsels, which means livestock or food. In animal husbandry, the euphemisms related to the age or lifecycle of an animal may also apply, e.g. in Under the Skin vodsels are often subcategorized into youngsters and monthlings. The second euphemization strategy – reification, employs “profit-motivated and technically engineered optimization strategies” with the focus on specific useful characteristics of an animal (ibid.: 330). This contributes to the objectification of animals and hinders the possibility of seeing animals as subjects that have the right to life regardless of their usefulness or uselessness to human beings

Animals become management objects which are to be utilized with respect to productivity (e.g., meat, milk or laying productivity) and are to be exploited and optimized. To achieve the highest possible degree of productivity, animals are subject to intensive breeding processing. When milk cows or hens do not meet their milk or laying production quotas, these units are replaced by others—comparable to machines which are also replaced when they do not perform to the desired output capacity. (ibid.: 332)

Such reification is evident in the aliens’ vocabulary as well. When talking about vodsels that are kept in the underground farm, Isserley often uses a euphemism “meat” to refer to them, such as “a fortune’s worth of raw meat” (Faber 157), “meat coasts 10.000 liss – months’ worth of oxygen” (ibid.: 234), “the meat tries to communicate with us” (ibid.: 173), “there’s no similarity between us and our breakfast” (ibid.: 164). The aliens also use production and manufacturing vocabulary to describe the farming process as well, e.g. “this stuff grows, we harvest it and ship home” (ibid.: 229). The third strategy of euphemization that Trampe identifies is taboos or tabooing (2017: 332). This strategy seeks to replace words that are likely to trigger a range of emotions, as taboos are primarily related to improper, touchy or immoral topics, with acceptable and somewhat innocent euphemisms. The taboo subjects or activities may include offensive or vulgar language, death, abortion, race, religion. The death of animals is on the list of taboo topics too, however, death and intentional killing of animals employ different and anthropocentric categories than those used for humans, which leads to people’s emotional detachment from animals (cf. Mahlke, 2014; Trampe, 2015). Animals can die, die off, perish, expire, be put to sleep, be shot down (Trampe 333). Instead of saying “the dead body of an animal”, the euphemism “carcass” is often applied instead. What these euphemisms hide and downplay is people’s involvement in processes that lead to animals’ deaths.

In many languages, including English, German, Russian, there are different names for animals and their meat. Cows, when they become objects of interest to people, become objectified as beef, pigs become pork, sheep become mutton. In Under the Skin, the captured hitchhikers stop being just animals or vodsels but are referred to as “voddissin” (Faber 57). Even though the term voddissin originates from an alien language and thus there is no translation, readers can figure out that it signifies the meat from the captured men, just like pork or beef. The result of replacing taboo words with euphemisms is the fact that death and suffering of an animal becomes linguistically invisible. The degree of guilt over the violent treatment of animals is also mitigated. Along with many ecolinguists, Trampe calls for a reconsideration of the ways people talk about animals. The three strategies he outlines prove the urgency of such reconsideration, as they result in people’s detachment from animals and, as a result, from the rest of the natural world through the use of vocabulary that does not reflect the true state of affairs. The use and abuse of euphemisms also lets people escape responsibility for their actions because “[t]he linguistic shift of perspectivization removes the agents, i.e., the human being, from active participation and thus responsibility, as for example when speaking of a species becoming extinct, and is a barrier in the realization and assumption of responsibility” (Trampe 335). Cathy B. Glenn, too, studies the ways animals are euphemized. She, however, refers to such use of language as doublespeak

Doublespeak is a style of discourse within factory farm industry discursive practices that— although descriptive—is intentionally misleading by being ambiguous or disingenuous I argue, then, that doublespeak (alongside advertisements) promotes particular ways of knowing nonhuman animals: we take for granted that “farm” animals are objects for our use and consumption. (2004: 64)

Glenn stresses the fact that the discourse in farm industry is highly influential in shaping the way people think about animals, and, subsequently, how they treat them. Discursive strategies in farm industry, she writes, add fuel to the practices that are cruel and environmentally dangerous (ibid.: 65). To better illustrate the role of language in the human- animal relationship, Glenn refers to William Cronon’s metaphor of nature as a commodity and nature as a virtual reality: “[nature] is a profoundly human construction. This is not to say that the nonhuman world is somehow unreal or a mere figment of our imaginations—far from it. But the way we describe and understand that world is so entangled with our own values and assumptions that the two can never be fully separated” (qtd in Glenn 2004: 66).

Both Trampe and Glenn highlight the fact that there exists a vast number of euphemisms that are employed to hide cruel practices behind them and deceive people into thinking that farm animals live a happy life and do not suffer. Doublespeak also hides in the very term animal agriculture as it has replaced livestock industry. As Dunayer points out, “industry could set off environmental warning bells, whereas agriculture is generally understood as a safe, natural practice” (2001: 125). The terms beef, veal, pork, as Glenn notices, are dangerous human constructs that erase the beingness of animals and objectify their body parts instead (Glenn 69). A term euthanized belongs to doublespeak as well, as it linguistically hides actual ways animals are often euthanized by not specifying a method of the procedure, which is not always performed by an injection that puts an animal to sleep, but may, as with piglets, involve “holding a piglet by its hind legs and forcefully hit the piglet’s head against a hard surface such as concrete” (ibid.: 70). What seems to be more inhumane, is that “[o]ften, the piglets are still conscious after the first attempt to kill them” (ibid.). The way aliens use language in Under the Skin seems to be mirroring many cases of Trampe’s euphemization and Glenn’s doublespeak with their word choice erasing the beingness of the living beings they slaughter. Such erasure can be detected in their use of production euphemisms, e.g. “this stuff grows, we harvest it and ship home” (Faber 229), and in Amlis Vess concluding: “This whole trade is based on terrible cruelty” (ibid.). A further example of doublespeak that neutralizes the extent of the violence is evident in Vess’s sharing plans of the Vess Industries: “In fact,’ […] ‘meat is so valuable that they’re actually trying to make it grow in laboratories” (ibid.: 234). For the alien consumers, however, the word meat, which is probably written on the packaging, points to a commodity, a finished product, which hides the fact that it belonged to a living being, which facilitates emotional withdrawal. This mention of the ideas Vess Industries has regarding growing meat in laboratories may be another fragment of the reality outside the novel that it distortedly mirrors. A more or less similar scenario is played out in Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian science fiction novel Never Let Me Go (2005) about human clones that are only “born” to donate organs later in their life and die shortly after the extraction. Though advances in technology and science provide an ever-increasing number of resources to grow meat in laboratory, the so-called cultured meat, and there has been a number of successful attempts (cfs. Perez Ortega, Rogers), there are many who do not share the excitement about a possible replacement for farm industry (cfs. Agapakis, Fox, Fisher, Specter). Cultured meat may solve the problem of environmental degradation, since meat production is one of the major sources that contribute to climate change, according to Food and Agriculture Organization: “Livestock raised to produce meat use 30 % of ice-free land and 8 % 56 of global fresh water, while producing 18 % of global GHG [greenhouse gas], which is more than the worldwide transport sector” (qtd. in Petetin 171). Still, there are many controversies surrounding the question of the production of cultured meat that relate to ethical concerns and implications. One of such concerns comes down to the actual reason for the degradation of nature, that is, people’s firm believe that nature can be harnessed and bended according to people’s needs. In regard to growing meat in laboratories or creating animal-like beings that would feel no pain and be indeed unconscious, Michael Fox believes that it will further contribute to the mechanization of animals and “will contribute (and arguably is now contributing) to our own species’ self-destruction as well as to the devastation of the environment. And even if we somehow escape or postpone this fate, it may help to usher in a “brave new world” so repugnant in its artificiality none of us would wish to inhabit it” (1999: 166). 4.2.2. What is in a Name?

Judging by the vocabulary the alien characters use, it may not present a difficulty for readers to grasp anthropocentric attitudes in Under the Skin. However, what is not said or asked in the novel also contributes to the widening emotional gap between humans and animals. Allowing passengers into her car and initiating conversation with them to find out about them and the likelihood of their disappearance being reported to the police, Isserley in Under the Skin rarely asks hitchhikers for their names. This may be interpreted as a precautionary measure to avoid unnecessary contact with a hitchhiker if she decides not to take him, as he might tell someone about his experience and the listener could happen to be someone she has once given a ride too. In this case, the lies Isserley tells these men about herself would not add up and would cause suspicion, since every hitchhiker gets a new story. At the same time, not asking for hitchhikers’ names may also be interpreted as a contradiction to a strategy Isserley pursues of extracting useful information from them, which consists in interrogating her possible victims and, at the same time, averting their attention from seeing her inhumanness, or, rather, inanimalness, by the means provided to her by a surgeon: “Isserley leaned back against her seat, extended her arms, and let him see what he might be getting” (Faber 41). If she is trying to establish the trust of the passengers and make them talk by intentionally putting on revealing clothes as if she is willing to get to know these men better, confirming some of the hitchhikers’ ideas regarding what she really might be looking for on the road: “Women don’t dress like that, he thought, unless they want a fuck” (ibid.: 34), asking for their names and introducing herself could be a strategic move and a nice ice-breaker. She, however, abstains from doing so and there might be a couple of reasons for that.

What is in a name? Every human being must be given a name. Names are a truly brilliant human invention. We use names to identify each other verbally or using documents such as passports. Names may be regarded as a confirmation of our existence that carry significance and often memories of us. Names also often carry information about their holders regarding cultural background, gender, ethnicity. It is a generally accepted fact that people have names, first and last ones, as a rule. Animals, too, are given names, but not all of them, with the exception of a small circle of animals that people prefer to surround themselves with. Names, just like terms family, son, daughter, job or slavery, are usually reserved for people, however, animals that spend time with people the most, such as dogs, cats, hamsters, fish, horses, which fall into the category of companion animals, that is, the ones keeping people company, receive names as well. Many of these names are unlike typical human ones, e.g. Anna, Jana, or Fritz, and refer to a physical quality or a personality trait of an animal. These could be, for example, Bruiser Woods, Elle Woods’ chihuahua in the movie Legally Blonde (2001), Fuzzy, Woofer, Snuggles, Simba, or Peanut. There is also a tendency to name companion animals according to the colors of their fur: Red, Black, or White. Recent name charts suggest that companion animals are now more likely to be given human names. In Australia, for example, the top five names for male dogs are Charlie, Max, Buddy, Oscar and Milo, while the most common names for female dogs are Bella, Molly, Coco, and Ruby (Mad Paws). In the United States, dog lovers also prefer human names for their companions, such as Rocky, Annie, Luna, Milo, Bailey (Hsieh and Uy 2020). Madpaws explains When it comes to surging trends among dog monikers, Australia has seen a tidal wave of human names. It’s a pattern that walks hand-in-hand with the growing role dogs play in the lives of their Owners. With more and more Millennials opting for animals over children, dogs are increasingly evolving into companions for their Owners. As such, Pet Owners are now humanising their dogs more than ever. (Madpaws 2020)

The tendency to humanize has also touched cats’ names with the most common names for females being Luna, Bella, Lily, Lucy, and Kitty (Aldrich). Popular names for male cats include Oliver, Max, Charlie, Jack, and Simba (Nationwide Pet Insurance). The humanization of companion animals has gone as far as to begin issuing pet passports that contain information about animal’s name, species, breed, owner, and veterinarian (USDA APHIS). Interestingly, pet passports issued in the U.S. and European Union countries contain name field, while pet passports issued in Ukraine and Russia make a distinction between human name and animal name, as evident in the field кличка (klichka), meaning nickname, in pet passports (Dogcatvet).

The naming of an animal may be seen as an act that recognizes and reaffirms the existence of the named animal, as if providing a tangible proof. What also arises from giving names to animals is a moral obligation to care and protect them, as well as a closer emotional connection. Named animals become full members of human families. Unnamed animals, on the other hand, are often categorized and thought of as wild ones and do not receive the same privileges. In Under the Skin, Isserley may be deliberately not asking the hitchhikers’ names to maintain the emotional border that separates her from wild animals, as well as to free herself from any moral obligation before them. Such emotional border greatly simplifies her work. Instead of the names of the captured men, aliens in Under the Skin use euphemisms, e.g. monthlings or voddissin. The same practices apply to animals: “Whereas one of the primary acts of validation of a new-born human being is the confirmation of its name, nonhumans are usually accorded a name only at the general level of a taxonomic kind” (Cook and Sealey 317). Not only terms or euphemisms, but numbers can be applied to animals as well, especially for animals used in laboratories. Recalling her experience of working with chimpanzees in the 1960s, Jane Goodall noticed that they were never given names but numbers (qtd in Cook and Sealey 317). In “The Discursive Representation of Animals”, Cook and Sealey found that “[a]nimals with individual names are likely to have a distinctive status, classified as ‘pets’ or ‘members of the family’, whereas respondents working with harm animals told us that the minority they named were likely to be kept longer than others and be known for their ‘character’” (2017: 317). To avoid granting captured hitchhikers any status other than of meat for human consumption, extraterrestrials in Under the Skin turn to every psychological trick, whether deliberately or unconsciously, to mitigate their guilt and responsibility before the beings they slaughter. Isserley may be the only one out of all her kind to learn hitchhikers’ names from reading their ids and passports, but she still fails to attribute them the same importance of names she and her species use to refer to one another. The process of distancing and shutting down guilt is facilitated by people constructing the walls that prevent any emotion from slipping through: “’We are doing a job here,’ the Chief Processor reminded her sternly. ‘Feelings don’t enter into it’” (Faber 219). Not having proper names or being referred to with terms that are mainly related to their use to human beings, animals, both in Under the Skin and in our world, are most likely to remain objects of violent treatment. To leave behind anthropocentric terms is not an easy enterprise. Nevertheless, the need for changes in the vocabulary is urgent. In his The Language Impact, Alwin Fill gives an example of the dangers of using wrong terminology

When Rudolf Virchow, in the nineteenth century, discovered a certain type of cells in the brain, he named them ‘Gliacells’ (glia = Greek ‘glue’), because he thought their main function was to provide the ‘glue’ for holding together the brain cells. This name prevented researchers from attaching higher importance to these cells, until after an investigation of Einstein’s brain their significance for storing information and for creativity was discovered. (Bild der Wissenschaft Sept. 2008, qtd in Fill 2010: 250)

As with Virchow’s Gliacells, the use of euphemisms to talk about animals and behavior towards them prevents both researchers and users of these euphemisms from seeing animals as they are and uninfluenced by the terms that objectify them. This task proves to be less manageable when, as Goatly points out, “The most common animal metaphors for humans are pejorative, suggesting that it is desirable to distance ourselves from animals, both conceptually and emotionally” (2006: 34). There are many examples of pejorative metaphors in Under the Skin, e.g. beasts, creatures, and hideous animals, which extraterrestrials use to talk about bipedal creatures. The list of negative attributes that contribute to emotional distancing may include “cow – unpleasant woman, monkey business – dishonest or bad behavior, swine – unpleasant, unkind person, loan shark – rapacious money lender, chicken – coward” (Goatly 2006: 26-28). Alongside with Goatly and Fill, Dunyer also recognizes the danger of using existing euphemisms that downplay the full extent of actions behind them, as well as of attributing negative characteristics to people by referring to animals, e.g. cow or chicken. Dunyer suggests that relanguaging animals as subjects rather than objects would constitute an effective remedy to overcome the emotional gap that exists between animals and humans. In her Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (2001), she discusses the problem of speciesism and attempts to uncover how “deceptive, biased words sustain injustice toward nonhuman animals’’ and construct linguistic lies (qtd. in Cook and Sealey 320). Apart from relanguaging, another way to transform the human-animal relationship from abusive to the one acknowledging animals as independent subjects is to refrain from buying and consuming animal products, which would result in farming industry suffering financial loss and subsequently suspending its operations. In Under the Skin, Amlis Vess expresses similar views: “Anyway, it’s not your minds [factory workers] I need to change’” (Faber 226). Amlis Vess also suggests that “[p]eople need to be told what’s being done with their blessing” (ibid.: 245). Cathy Glenn believes it is an effective way to bring much needed change

Because the use of factory farm animal products supports a clearly cruel and environmentally dangerous industry, choosing nonuse (that is, refusing to buy products associated with factory farming) is an ethically sound choice. Much like the refusal to purchase goods created by slave labor in developing countries sends a message to the offending corporation, the rejection of 60

products from an industry that routinely inflicts suffering on nonhuman animals can also send a message. (2004: 78)

William Cronon, too, suggests that the implementation of new terminology may only constitute one of the many components needed for the change in human-animal relationships. The option of nonuse must also be given serious considerations: “Learning to honor the wild— learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other—means striving for critical self-consciousness in all of our actions. It means that deep reflection and respect must accompany each act of use, and means too that we must always consider the possibility of nonuse” (qtd in Glenn 78).

4.3. Physical Distancing: See No Evil, Hear No Evil

Though language, as discussed above, constitutes a powerful means of creating realities in which animals have distinct purposes and value, as evident from words and phrases they are referred to within these separate realities, the process of relanguaging can never be fully successful in changing people’s beliefs about animals without one crucial component – the presence of real, physically tangible animals, in people’s lives. Making theories about the purpose of animals and the reason for their existence without them actually being around and without observing their behavior that is unguided by people’s interests will eventually lead nowhere and runs the risk of producing more far-from-truth speculations. According to Guy Cook, “[t]his situation gives rise to many different and often irreconcilable ways of talking about animals, and current debates about human-animal interaction are frequently polarized and based on incompatible standpoints, such as those of animal rights and human exceptionalism” (2015: 587). The extraterrestrials in Under the Skin approach the bipedal creatures already prejudiced and riddled with consumerism. Without prior contact with any living creature on Earth, Isserley and her colleagues step out into the new territories firmly believing in their supremacy. To Isserley, the belief in her kind’s supremacy does not presuppose care for those inferior and in need, but, on the contrary, it enables her to exploit and take advantage of the inferior bipedal creatures. The aliens’ worldview excludes creatures from the circle of worthy ones that differ from them in terms of appearance, and mental capacities. Only Isserley, Eswiss and Amlis Vess get the chance to learn that the bipedal creatures have language and are able to produce meaningful sentences, which means that they both may have the same level of intelligence. This crucial observation confirms Vess’s assumptions about the unethical side of his father’s business and makes him eager to go back and spread this information to the consumers of voddissin. Amlis would never have the chance to make that 61 observation, if he had not visited the pens himself to assess the situation and conclude that “[t]his whole trade is based on terrible cruelty” (Faber 229). The fact that meat production initiated by the Vess Industries involves inhumane practices and violence is only known to the ones employed to perform production tasks. This creates a great information gap: the men employed in production have never encountered or observed animals in “the wild”, outside the pens, and little do they know that animals can speak and drive cars. They work with the tongueless beings, which are now mere objects. Isserley, on the other hand, visits the actual pens only twice: right after her arrival when they were still empty and to look for Amlis Vess, where she witnesses the conditions animals are kept in for the first time. To her, the fate of animals after she brings them to the farm is a mystery. Unawareness of consumers of animal products in regard to the process of obtaining these products in Under the Skin echoes the situation of our physical distancing from animals. The majority of people, too, have little knowledge about the processes and stages of production, just like the protagonist in the novel: “In response to increased demand for meat, increasingly intensive and industrialized animal livestock farming has led to a situation where, in the ‘developed’ world, the raising, slaughtering and butchering of animals are increasingly invisible to their consumers” (Cook 589). Staying away from the process and not seeing the stages animals go through on farms greatly dulls the feelings of remorse and compassion, as if not seeing the violence changes the fact that it exists. In Under the Skin, meat consumers are far away from the place where their food is produced and are unlikely to ever visit the factory, enjoying the benefits from such interplanetary gap between them and animals. The farm workers are also physically detached from vodsels, since they never get the chance to leave the farm due to their alien appearance. They only get to work with tongueless animals that cannot express their pain in the way the alien characters would understand. Steve Sapontzis notices that it is the case for neo-Cartesians that do not take animals’ crying or bellowing for complaining or expressing pain but the linguistic ability to say so (2012). To this conclusion, he argues, came people that rarely find themselves within close proximity to animals: “These philosophers doubtless convince themselves of this while alone with their thoughts in the quiet of their studies. Out in the world, people know better; they know that the experience of pain is not a judgment and can be had without putting a name to it” (2012: 122). People out in the world who live with or close to animals, e.g. in rural areas, nature reserves or sanctuaries, do know better that animals experience pain as well many other emotions. However, these emotions are often disregarded by those witnessing them, farmers, 62 for instance, as less important than human emotions, giving in to anthropocentric worldview and in fear of losing jobs. Still, spending more time with animals allows to uncover the depth of their characters and develop an emotional bond, which imposes special obligations before animals, e.g. protecting their welfare. Despite the fact that many animals demonstrate the same levels of intelligence and sociality, e.g. dogs and pigs, they are often placed within different spheres of care, where one is treated with care and love, while the other receives what can be defined as the direct opposite of care, which is often the case for farm animals. James Serpell defines such situation as “the paradox of pigs and pets” (1996). In Under the Skin, Serpell’s paradox would characterize the situation of human-animal relationship better if it went by “the paradox of vodsels and sheep”, where there are similarities between these two species but the treatment of which is markedly different. It is natural that upon spending a lot of time with animals and learning about them, e.g. noticing that they have personalities, likes and dislikes, our opinion and attitude towards these living and breathing creatures would probably change for the better, as well as our moral thinking that guides our actions and choices. However, the types of animals that could be granted that much attention are often restricted to dogs and cats, while sponges, for instance, rarely given that much love and attention. In this way, dogs and sponges are placed within two distinct spheres of people’s care. It is rather difficult to start loving and caring for rainworms or snails the way we care for companion animals. On the other hand, there is a number of animal advocates that argue that rainworms, snails and farm animals should not be treated as people’s pets because such relationship is guided by a pure emotion, rather than acknowledging the moral responsibilities or rational grounds for all animals’ right for self-importance (Clement 2011). Thus, Peter Singer claims that people’s attitude towards animals should not be clouded by emotion: “Neither of us [his wife] had ever been inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses in the way that many people are. We didn’t “love” animals. We simply wanted them treated as the independent sentient beings that they are” (1992: ii).

4.3.1. A Breach of Contract

To treat animals as independent sentient beings includes acknowledging the fact that they do not exist to fulfil people’s needs. The way pets are often treated is an extra privilege and not an absolute must that has to apply to all animals. The reason why dogs and cats receive the care they do, apart from the established emotional connection, may stem from the obligations that inevitably come with such companionship. According to Grace Clement, “[…]

63 it would be better to say that we have duties to take care of our companion animals simply because we have made them our companions. We have, in effect, entered into a contract agreeing to take care of our companion animals, and we must fulfill that contract” (2011: 7). The fact that a certain animal is made into a pet presupposes particular limitations on his or her life that people have to compensate with a special treatment and love. Robert Goodin identifies one of the limitations as vulnerability, particularly to humans: “By domesticating them, we have deprived them of much of their capacity (and most of their will) to protect themselves against cruel masters. That renders them peculiarly vulnerable to their owners [giving rise to] peculiarly strong responsibilities on the part of owners to protect them” (1986: 181–182). Daniel Engster, too, maintains that it is the fact that animals are made dependent on humans entitles them for an absolute obligation for care (2006). In what Clement defines as a “contract”, the care constitutes a special provision which the human side often fails to perform (2011: 51). Bernard Rollin lists the following violations of such contract

There is indeed a contract between humans and companion animals, and animals are holding up their part well, but humans significantly failing to do so” through practices such as “mass euthanasia of companion animals for convenience, puppy mills, public ignorance of companion animal needs; perpetuation by breed standards of vast numbers of genetic defects leading to great suffering and premature death. (2005: 114)

These, however, are not the only violations. If making an animal dependent on a human being constitutes a basis for his or her right to a special treatment, then farm animals are entitled for the same care as pets, which they, however, never receive. Just like dogs and cats, cows and pigs are made into farm animals to whom the same limitations of freedom apply. What they get in return is the total opposite of care. There is also a difference between the degree of vulnerability of pets and farm animals. While pets are subjects to people’s protection from possible threats that come from the outside world, in farming, the threat comes from people, since making farm animals vulnerable and dependent on humans seems to be the initial goal. In this case, these animals’ forced dependence is abused, as many become unable to survive on their own anymore. In Under the Skin, the captive hitchhikers undergo major body transformations that take away they former mobility and characteristic body shape: “Monthling vodsels, with their quarter-tonne of stiff flesh, were not so springly” and “[r]emoved from the warmth of its pen, it was pathetically infit for the environment, bleeding from a hundred scratches, pinky-blue with cold” (Faber 98-100). The bipedal animals end up in the farm against their will, and it is

64 also doubtful that the changes they undergo are desirable. Extracted from their natural habitat, they are made fully dependent on the aliens, who, according to the contract, have to provide them with care and protection, rather than let them end up minced. The mirroring of the abuse of the farm animals’ dependence on human beings questions the existing inconsistency concerning those that are recognized as subjects of people’s care and those that actually receive it. Despite the fact that there are animal advocates who claim that how people feel about animals should be irrelevant in judging what animal deserves non-violent and non-objectifying treatment, the role of emotions should not be discarded entirely. On the contrary, emotions function as reminders that the same feeling of wanting to care and protect may arise when spending the same amount of time with any animal, not just pets. Just because people are unable to keep all the animals in the world as pets to develop emotional bonds with them and, therefore, begin to reconsider their actions, does not mean that these are less worthy. The fact that people love and want to care for their pets should be seen in a broader context as our general capability to develop emotional connection to all animals, excluding no one. The emotional attachment to animals may arise not only to dogs and cats but to farm animals as well, such as cows and pigs. Farmers, after spending a significant amount of time with their livestock, are likely to get personally attached to them, which often causes feelings of injustice when slaughtering takes place. To prevent possible hindering of meat production stemming by farmers’ awoken feelings of guilt or remorse, various distancing strategies are employed. Serpell writes that: “It is not so much that we avoid killing the animals with which we are friendly. It is more the other way around. Unconsciously or deliberately we either avoid befriending the animals we intend to harm, or we fabricate elaborate and often mythological justification for their suffering that absolves us of blame” (1996: 210–211). The idea that it is them - the aliens in Under the Skin, who uproot vodsels from their natural habitat and who, therefore, have to provide them with care and protection, is dismissed. The aliens are guided by the belief in their exceptionality and confidence in vodsels’ worthless existence. Based on the excerpts that give little glimpses on what life back in Isserley’s world is like, the presence of other kinds of beings there is unlikely. The aliens also do not keep pets there, which could teach them about compassion. However, what is interesting, is the fact that the protagonist, who spends more time with vodsels than anyone else and actually communicates with them, is impermeable to any feelings towards vodsels other than hate and contempt.

4.3.2. The Wall between Us

Day after day, Isserley drives her car and picks up men - her potential victims and engages them in a conversation. While some passengers are uneager to talk and prefer to keep to themselves, occasionally rewarding Isserley with rare one-word answers, the others, on the contrary, reveal their chatterbox nature and are happy to share even private details of their lives, such as problems with partners or spouses, financial troubles, past traumas, dreams and plans for the future. Yet Isserley seems to remain detached from these animals, despite her regular presence among them. A firm belief in her species’ exceptionality plays a huge role in Isserley’s decisions. But such detachment may also stem from the trauma Isserley received from her body- transforming surgery. The constant pain she suffers from every day leads her to building an unbreakable wall around herself which shutters the suffering of others and allows to concentrate on her pain only, as if existing with vodsels in two separate realms. The aliens in the novel have paid a high price to escape the conditions they were living in. Enjoying even the smallest aspects of their new surroundings, such as not having to mine for the oxygen and having free access to water, they are not willing to ruin their new lives with the luxuries it comes with by attributing too much worth to the creatures their jobs mainly depend on. As one of them says: “’We are doing a job here’” (Faber 219). This sentence perfectly illustrates the presence of the wall that the alien characters build to protect themselves from changing their opinions about the creatures they slaughter, just like farmers Serpell writes about. Isserley is, no doubt, the one who made more sacrifices. With all the manipulations done to her spine, her painless existence will never be possible. To have an unlimited access to free air and water “[…] all she had to do in return, when it came right down to essentials, was walk on two legs” (ibid.: 65). The layers of Isserley’s body had been peeled off, the ones that defined her, e.g. her hair, which “had always been her best feature, back home” (ibid.: 67). Her feminine parts were also removed, making her consider herself as a “denuded freak, the gargoyle girl” (ibid.: 93). Stripped naked of the familiar features, which erased parts of her personality, and in constant pain, Isserley’s core is now bare and bleeding. To protect what little is left of her and mitigate the trauma, the protagonist grows a new layer and convinces herself that “[s]he was […] doing a job only she could do. Nothing Amlis Vess thought or said could change that: nothing. She was indispensable” (ibid.: 71). Her self- imposed belief in her indispensability provides the much-needed comfort and refuge from the memories of what had been done to her body. Isserley is not willing to acknowledge the

66 sentience of the beings she brings to the slaughterhouse or let the idea slip into her head or heart that what they are doing is cruel and immoral because “work was the cure” (ibid.: 65). Drowning herself in work, driving almost every day and trying to keep up with the norm of meat that has to be brought to the farm that she established for herself, Isserley receives that much-needed feeling of supremacy over other aliens, which prevents her from going insane from the realization of the immoral side of her job or her suffering being for nothing. For this reason, Isserley steps out in the new territories with a solid set of beliefs about the creatures she has to capture. She distances herself from knowing about them in every possible way. She visits the pens only twice and avoids the crowds of vodsels, as she does not see the need to condescend to them. The trauma has sharpened Isserley’s exceptionalist worldview and narrowed down the circle of the worthy ones. Not even her colleagues are honored the place within that circle. She believes that her job makes her better than anybody else, which only she does on the entire planet, because “[s]he was doing a job no-one else could do, and coming up with the goods year after year” (ibid.: 62). Isserley looks for every possible way to diminish the competences of her colleagues: “[it would] make clear to him that her job was not an easy one. Pampered dilettante that he was, he probably imagined it was like picking wildflowers from the side of the road […]” (ibid.: 89). Isserley also clings to the idea of her indispensability: “she was an invaluable part of the business, he [Amlis] a thorn in its side” (ibid.: 74). The novel reflects on one of the strongest points people appeal to in order to distance themselves from acknowledging the pain of others, whether the others are animals or humans, which is their personal degree of suffering or trauma. Just like the protagonist, everyone has a story to tell about their traumatic experiences. Many, though, tend to compare their misfortunes to the ones of others, as if there exists a scale with various gradations of misery. The more one suffers, the greater his or her excuse to, for instance, be rude, take someone’s life, steal. The list of the excuses is actually endless and highly personalized. Isserley in Under the Skin uses her trauma to distance herself from everyone else. Physically separated from vodsels, the chances of seeing them for who they are, which would potentially make Isserley reconsider her relationship with vodsels, are low. Aaran Stibbe in Animals Erased writes: “Animals are disappearing, vanishing, dying out, not just in the physical sense of becoming extinct, but in the sense of being erased from our consciousness” (2012: 1). Enrobed in pain, Isserley, too, erases vodsels from her consciousness, and, as a result, life. Why bother caring for the fate of some unfamiliar animal, which largely implies farm animals, or a person, if you yourself definitely take more heat than them, e.g. by being, in your opinion, not that pretty, smart, or rich, or all of the above, by losing a job, or undergoing a spinal 67 surgery to become bipedal and fly on another planet to escape your world where oxygen has to be mined for. This is the protagonist’s stance: “How lucky this cosseted young man was, to have a ‘worst fear’ that concerned the welfare of exotic animals rather than any horrors he himself might have to face in the struggle for survival” (Faber 230). The fact is, we cannot know for sure what the others are going through in their lives and our own experiences are often highly subjective. William, one of the hitchhikers, has this to say: “That’s what lying had done to the world. All the lying that people had been doing since the dawn of time, all the lying they were doing still. The price everyone paid for it was the death of trust. It meant that no two humans, however innocent they might be, could ever approach one another like two animals. Civilization!” (ibid.: 205). William, though Isserley will never learn his name, internally meditates on the impossibility of human interaction free from prejudices, stereotypes, and expectations. He wants her to know that he will not hurt her but never finds safe words to communicate it. He “longed to ask” about Isserley’s story as he noticed her pain (ibid.: 200). He wants to comfort her, and she wants him dead. The train of thought readers get access to fully illustrates William’s point. Isserley approaches him believing she knows him, when in fact she does not: “She was still unable to speak, the hitcher was evidently unwilling to. As always, it was up to her. Everything was up to her” (ibid.: 205). The lying William meditates on, which may be understood as living by set of beliefs that are out of step with reality but exist for personal gain and convenience, prevents Isserley from even considering that he may have personality or intentions that are different from those of typical vodsels: “He was obviously a typical male of his species; stupid, uncommunicative, yet with a rodent cunning for evasion. She would talk to him, and in return he would grunt, surrender one-word answers to her cleverest questions, lapse into silence at every opportunity” (ibid.: 206). There is a huge gap between Isserley and other hitchhikers as well. Many notice that she is in pain and want to help her out but never dare to ask directly, leaving Isserley confident that no one cares. Other aliens, too, notice her pain and want to comfort her: “I just … we’re just trying to help, that’s all” (ibid.: 141), but she refuses their every attempt at helping, distancing herself in every possible way from the others by living alone in a cottage, not eating with everybody else in the canteen, and not visiting to the farm herself, which only sharpens her loneliness and anger, as well as increases the gap between her and animals. People’s physical separation from animals and the unawareness of the conditions and processes farm animals are subjects to makes it easy to speculate about the non-understanding and non-feeling animals, which greatly contributes to anthropocentric worldview that many see as the reason for our planet’s degradation. There is only a handful of places in the world where 68 people live in the close proximity with animals whose existence is not controlled in any way, as they are not kept by people as pets or domestic animals. Urbanization seems to have burnt the majority of bridges between us and the rest of the natural world. As John Berger writes

During the 20th century, the internal combustion engine displaced draught animals in streets and factories. Cities, growing at an ever increasing rate, transformed the surrounding countryside into suburbs, where field animals, wild or domesticated, became rare. The commercial exploitation of certain species (bison, tigers, reindeer) has rendered them almost extinct. Such wildlife as remains is increasingly confined to national parks and game reserves. (qtd. in Cook and Sealey 312)

Cook and Sealey, too, notice the difference in human-animal relationships in modern times: “Contemporary relations between humans and other animals contrast with those of earlier periods in the extent to which living animals have largely become—at least in urban, industrial societies—marginal to human experience” (ibid.). To make up the deficit of nature in their lives, some people move out of the cities to rural areas. Many start animal sanctuaries or invite other animals to share the space with, e.g. pigs, sheep, horses, not expecting anything in return but simply enjoying the companionship. While this may seem like a great solution to overcome both emotional and physical gap that exist between animals and people, there are still many who would find such change to their lives impossible to implement. It may be the lack of resources or general dislike of such way of life that prevent people from moving out of cities. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are more and more ways to nature-lize modes of life in big cities, as for many the idea of being separated from nature and its other vital parts “sit[s] uneasily with a growing need to understand and maintain the co-existence of humans and other animals in a time of rapid environmental and economic change” (Cook 589). These may include greening one’s apartment, house, or surroundings, creating mini urban jungles. Inhabitants of cities now have the possibility to enjoy the company of animals, often not only dogs and cats, but, for instance, sheep and pigs, as well, in specialized cafes, which also often function as sanctuaries or foster homes for these animals. The strategies of emotional and physical distancing gradually erase people’s will to go out and prove for themselves if the existing believes about animals, the ones concerning their level of intelligence or worth, are true or wrong. It is crucial not to blindly trust the existing theories about animals, which are often products of the minds that are emotionally and physically distanced from animals, or, as Isserley in Under the Skin puts it, the ones that “are born into a life of lazing around and philosophizing”, but to go out and see for ourselves if these are true or wrong (Faber 231).

Conclusion

Under the cover of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin lies a story about a woman named Isserley who spends her days driving in Scotland and picking up male hitchhikers. She seems to have a type: tall, big muscles, good health, single. When unspoiled by premature exposure of the truth about the protagonist, e.g. by marketing the novel as sci-fi or stating in the description that Isserley is an alien, the true state of affairs remains vague. Operating with the notions of the familiar, such as setting, and human characters that perform typical human activities, e.g. driving cars, Faber leads readers away from the novel’s strangeness and purposely delays this realization. As stated in the introduction, the goal of this thesis was to act as a guide that takes readers on a journey through the tangled thread of misleading information in the narrative, such as the protagonist’s motivation, appearance, background, that can be metaphorically regarded as puzzle pieces. These pieces, as if nonchalantly left by the author on the pages of the novel, act in accordance with the Chekhov’s gun principle, which may go unnoticed by readers, e.g. the lorry with a label “Farmfoods” on it, but become meaningful and unequivocal as the narrative unfolds. The narrative in Under the Skin can also be broken into units proposed by Roland Barthes – nuclei and catalyses, as well as indices, which bear similarities to the Chekhov’s gun, as they all presuppose that there are no useless parts in the narrative. These functional units – nuclei, which drive the narrative and allow it to progress, and catalyses that ornament the nuclei, e.g. the glimpses of Isserley’s appearance and the fact of the surgery, as well as her opinion of mankind, bring readers closer to the realization that they are not immersed in familiar Scotland, as the events in Under the Skin are impossible, but in its distorted reflection. Here the strange – being quadrupedal as a characteristic of human beings, a thick coat of body fur that makes a person beautiful, and upright posture as a sign of a creature which consciousness is rudimentary, becomes the new normal. Despite such alien notions, the story the novel tells is fundamentally about us – human beings, and our treatment of animals. Under the Skin is a reflection of the time it is written in and prevailing beliefs of this time concerning animals – their purpose, essence, and factors people tend to appeal to make animal slaughter justified. However, in order for readers to arrive at this conclusion they have to take many rides with the protagonist and follow her thread of thoughts carefully, as the familiar perception of reality is defamiliarized. By destabilizing the familiar concepts – the aliens refer to themselves as humans, whereas people become animals, Michel Faber has higher chances to highlight these familiar concepts. As Shklovsky postulated, the purpose of art is to represent events in such a way that these are seen and experienced as if for the first time, which

70 allows readers fresh eyes on these events (2015). The technique of defamiliarization that Under the Skin employs acts as a remedy against perceiving the reality with ingrained beliefs regarding the theme of the novel, that is, human-animal relationships. This master thesis aimed to identify the stumbling blocks in this relationship, since the portrayed treatment of animals in Under the Skin, as well as in the reality it mirrors, is anthropocentric, unfair and based on prejudice. The aliens, just like people, are preoccupied with finding more and more factors to separate themselves from the rest of the natural world, which, as discussed, is often fueled by the need to come up with justifications for its abuse. These factors, or unique traits, evident in both Under the Skin and reality outside the novel, concern appearance, mental capacities, and the level of intelligence the most evident indicator of which is the capacity for language. Not finding these unique traits in other beings, e.g. being bipedal with erect posture and able to produce meaningful phrases like humans do, automatically dethrones these beings from the circle of worthy ones. Under the Skin also allowed to draw parallels between the treatment of vodsels and farm animals and disentangle particular justification strategies that are often employed in farming to turn off guilt and remorse. These strategies were divided into emotional and physical ones which both aim to separate humans from animals. The former is made possible by the believed unique trait of humans – the capacity for language, where the existing vocabulary, euphemisms, in particular, as Wilhelm Trampe noticed, hide the violent practices behind neutral words or, on the contrary, evoke negative feelings towards animals by categorizing them as e.g. vermin. The latter strategy greatly dulls any feeling of wrongdoing towards farm animals by means of physical separation from them and unawareness of the stages in farming. For meat consumers, such unawareness often proves no wrongdoing. In conclusion, Under the Skin does not offer a remedy for the violence against animals, except for the possibility of non-use of animal products that is subtly hinted at. It seems to me that Faber, alongside with various ecologists and conservationists, such as Marc Bekoff, Diana Reiss, Peter Mühlhäusler, and Carl Safina, advises readers to go out and see animals for who they are, rather than seeing them through the lens of the numerous existing prejudices and labels or reading someone’s conclusion about animals and trusting it without proving for themselves.

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