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

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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
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