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Behold an Animal Behold an Animal The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter- ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/fl ashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi- tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit- erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit- erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor A complete list of titles begins on p. 254. Behold an Animal Four Exorbitant Readings Thangam Ravindranathan northwestern university press | evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2020 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2020. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Ravindranathan, Thangam, author. Title: Behold an animal : four exorbitant readings / Thangam Ravindranathan. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2020. | Series: Flashpoints | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2019046422 | ISBN 9780810140714 (paperback) | ISBN 9780810140721 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810140738 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: French fi ction—21st century—History and criticism. | Animals in literature. Classifi cation: LCC PQ683 .R38 2020 | DDC 843.9209362—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046422 For Ravishing Devi and Devilish Ravi, my mother and father In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger . I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger. Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or fl imsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausi- ble size, or all too fl eeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird. — Jorge Luis Borges Contents Acknowledgments xi Prologue 3 Chapter 1. Melancholy of Horsepower: Jean- Philippe Toussaint, with Eadweard Muybridge 13 The sound of hooves.— Exodus.— Split second.— A time without humans.— Zahir the invisible.— In the night.— Horse in the air.— Icarus. Chapter 2. Man of the Forest: Éric Chevillard, with La Fontaine and Poe 55 Wolf trap.— The Passing (or “I am a wolf”).— Chape- chute.— The unequal animal.— What song the Sirens sang.— Without the animal. Chapter 3. Vague Dog: Marie NDiaye, with Beckett, Levinas, Deleuze, Leibniz 89 What can you explain to dogs?— A kind of grimace.— Nowhere in itself.— Placebo (Levinas’s dog).— Vague dog.— Petites perceptions (The Leibniz- Bayle- Deleuze dog).— The relation woven nightly (Beckett’s dog).— Not I.— Dog of the outside.— Find it (The last dog). Chapter 4. Barely a Hedgehog, Strictly Speaking: Marie Darrieussecq, with Ponge, Kafka, Carroll, Deleuze, Derrida 151 World without rupture.— Something rather than nothing.— Detour 1: Writing with hedgehog.— Rolled up in a ball.— Detour 2: The mollusk and the hermit crab.— Grin without a cat.— You can’t be certain that I haven’t done it.— The Cat and the Hedgehog. Epilogue: The Case of the Hermit Crab 203 For the bits of hedgehog were bits of hermit crab, you see. Notes 217 Index 249 Acknowledgments In fact a kind of joy sustained me through the writing of this book. The garden by night brimmed and my soles wore thin. Many conver- sations and friendships through these years knowingly (and sometimes unknowingly) made place for dogs and bits of hedgehog. Animals led me ultimately down the longest and most affecting road I could fi nd through literature and philosophy; and the night unexpectedly endeared me to the day. My inexpressible appreciation goes fi rst to Timothy Bewes, won- drous companion and fearsome reader; and to my playmates and chief co- conspirators in the night: Michelle Clayton, Virginia Krause, Jess Regelson, Antoine Traisnel, Tina Tryforos, David Wills, Vazira Zamindar. What follows emerges in so many ways from these deep imaginative affi nities and immense solidarities. I am sincerely grateful to Dick Terdiman, Susan Gilman, Gianna Mosser, Christi Stanforth, Nathan MacBrien, Steven Moore, and the wonderful Anne Gendler at Northwestern University Press, for their support and hard work on this book. An especially warm thank you to Warren Motte and Stephanie Posthumus, whose close, thoughtful read- ing of the manuscript was a great help, and a real honor. For reading/hearing and believing in this work at various points, I wish to thank ever so warmly Elizabeth Weed, Denise Davies, and the differences team at Brown; the Cogut Institute for the Humanities; Jonathan Strauss and the faculty and students of French at Miami Uni- xi xii ❘ Acknowledgments versity, Ohio; Derek Schilling, Jacques Neefs, and the faculty and stu- dents of French at Johns Hopkins; Suzanne Guerlac, Jacques Khalip, Elissa Marder, Alain Romestaing, Pierre Saint- Amand, Allan Stoekl, and Alain Trouvé. A special thanks to my friends in French Studies at Brown, including Stéphanie Ravillon, Gretchen Schultz, Lewis Seifert, and Annie Wiart. Without such a community of intelligence and sympa- thy, I might not have continued. I have been inspired and accompanied throughout by writers, teach- ers, colleagues, and friends. But also by my students: I’d like to mention here especially St. Clair Detrick- Jules, Christine Dreyer, Liana Ogden, Antonia Shann, Christian Suarez, Sonja Stojanovic— sometimes, when my thoughts made little sense to me, they picked them up and put them together again. Warm thanks to my amis d’enfance—Nathalie Dupont, Éric Trudel, Gaspard Turin— and to my sister, Sadhana Ravindranathan, for believing in me; to the animalistas Connie Crawford, Nancy Jacobs, Thalia Field, Iris Montero, Ada Smailbegovic, for generative, inspiring exchanges; to kindred beings whose paths have run closely alongside mine and to whom I knew my questions mattered deeply: Branka Arsic´, Ariella Azoulay, Réda Bensmaïa, Stuart Burrows, Hannah Freed-Thall, Cary Hollinshead- Strick, Joanna Howard, Maurizia Natali, Adi Ophir, Jessica Severens. For vital spaces real and unreal over the last many years in which to write, think, speak, not speak, dwell, and grow quietly, I am indebted to my dear friends Clotilde Baret, Arundhati and Neel Chattopadhyaya, Beatrice Jauregui, and Prakash Megha. Thank you, fi nally, to my amma and bubu, for being my strength and inspiration. An earlier version of chapter 2, “Unequal Metrics: Animals Passing in La Fontaine, Poe, and Chevillard,” was originally published in differ- ences 24:3, 1– 35. Copyright 2013, Brown University and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. All rights reserved. I am grateful to be able to republish it here by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher, Duke University Press. Behold an Animal Prologue In the old days I had too much respect for nature. I put my- self in front of things and landscapes and let them alone. No more of that, now I will intervene. I was then at Honfl eur and was getting bored. So I reso- lutely brought in some camel. [Alors résolument j’y mis du chameau.] — Henri Michaux There was a time not so long ago when the presence of animals in a story made its world appear more compelling and complete, more like our own. There were the bullock-carts and horse- drawn carriages, the cattle and fowl, the hunting dogs and running prey, the horses that shared men’s fate in battle, the ominous or auspicious bird, the occa- sional ferocious beast. Such authenticating references to a known world would have worked rather like what Roland Barthes memorably called the reality effect: so whole and uncontroversial that those places in the text seemed to draw their substance from reality itself, as if dispensing with the operations of language or “meaning.” “We are the real,” such elements seemed to say; in them a certain danger (of what derives its certitude precisely by excepting itself from analysis) vied with a certain laziness.1 At these points, the text claimed to be connecting with— even directly borrowing from— the very fl esh of the world, apparently with- out need (and therefore beyond suspicion) of mediation or construc- tion. True, Barthes was writing about how Flaubert’s and Balzac’s prose registered the material texture of, say, Western, urban, bourgeois life, then served it up as sheer (or mere) reality. But the assumption and confi dence he described—namely, that words in a text can point directly at real things and lives— encapsulate more fundamentally the wager of literary realism itself.
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