The Wild Animal’s Story: Nonhuman Protagonists in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literature through the Lens of Practical Zoocriticism
Download 3.36 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
Allmark-KentC
|
particularly wilderness, holds i n defining national identity. Canada’s cultural producers literally ‘naturalized the nation’. (1, emphasis added) 4 4 The cultural producers Loo indicates are the early twentieth century landscape painters known as the Group of Seven, as well as some of the writers of animal literature I discuss here and Allmark-Kent 45 Imperial ideologies shape the production of culture so that a preoccupation with ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ (imagined as ‘pristine’ and ‘empty,’ echoing terra nullius fantasies) perpetuate and continue to shape a naturalized national identity. Yet, despite awareness that images of nature in Canada will always be loaded with colonial history, there remains also the inescapable reality of the stark contrast between the landscape’s “grandeur, immensity and variety” (Glickman 3) and the nation’s “sparse [human] population” (Crane 21). As Kylie Crane explains in Myths of Wilderness: Environmental Postcolonialism in Australia and Canada (2012), Canada is the second largest country in the world but one of the ten least densely populated, with a population density of 3.4/km 2 , most of which is concentrated in the S outh leaving “vast stretches of relatively uninhab ited regions” in the North (8). Hence if one looks at a map illustrating Canada’s population density, it is not surprising that one might feel as though these pockets of humans are scattered amongst much larger populations of nonhumans. It becomes clear then, that imperial ism’s fantasies of ‘emptiness’ are not only complicated by the obvious existence of Aboriginal cultures throughout Canada, but also the existence of wild nonhuman populations as well. Unlike the domesticated animal categorized almost exclusively as ‘food’ or ‘pet,’ the wild animal conveys a sense of nonhuman autonomy, agency and alterity; both separate and beyond human control. Of course the realities of environmental destruction and species loss complicate this further, but our focus here is the presence of animals in Canadian literature not the actual presence of animals in elsewhere in the thesis: Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts of course, as well as Fred Bodsworth, Roderick Haig-Brown and R.D. Lawrence (in Chapter Five), and Farley Mowat and Marion Engel who will be discussed later in this chapter. Allmark-Kent 46 Canada, and literary representations do not necessarily reflect reality. Like Wynn and Loo’s examples, the presences of ‘the wild’ and ‘wild animals’ are always felt in Canada, whether implicitly or explicitly: the beaver, caribou, loon and polar bear are always with you in your wallet, whether you ever see their living counterparts or not; and although you may see your city represented on a postcard with pictures of the moose, marmot or beaver, your domestic(ated) space is much more likely to be threatened by the intrusions of bears, coyotes or deer. The proximity of the animal presence in Canada, as implied by Fisher’s words and demonstrated by the examples given, seems to demand human response. How do we understand, categorize or act towards these animals? The inability to sufficiently answer this question and the resulting confusion that Fisher describes can be understood in two ways: first, the Ca nadian animal’s wildness conveys an impression of alterity and autonomous agency, such that Fisher’s categories—“victims, friends, predator, prey” (259)—seem inadequate and reductive. Secondly, the history of Canada’s complex and often contradictory, relationship with the natural environment, which oscillates between exploitation and protection, compounds the difficulties of understanding wild animals and results in ambivalence about our relationship with them. I begin by addressing the former concern, which seems to be expressed throughout Canadian literature. Although the agency of ‘the wild’ takes various forms, both negative and positive, there seems to be a sense of confusing unpredictability which manages to disrupt our ability to know, understand or predict the natural world. Even Atwood’s “dead and unanswering” nature seems nonetheless to convey a sense of agency : “Canadian writers as a whole do not trust Nature, they are always suspecting some trick [...] that Nature has betrayed expectation” (49). Allmark-Kent 47 This expectation is of course Eurocentric in origin, as Christoph Irmscher demonstrates in his analysis of early Canadian nature writing for The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (2004). He suggests that, from the perspective of these authors, the natural environment in Canada “follows none of the established rules, ” posing both a “physical challenge” and a “challenge to the powers of the writer” (95). Like Fisher he also utilizes the idea of confusion: the vast Canadian wilderness, “often confuses the human observer” leading to our feeling “uncertain” about our presence in the environment (95). Interestingly though, this effect seems to have continued both in Canadian literature and literary criticism. I argue that this Eurocentric settler anxiety has shaped what Irmsc her calls the “stubbornly anthropocentric” models of C anadian identity like Atwood’s “survival” or Northrop Frye’s “garrison mentality” (95). He asserts that this anthropocentrism is a “striking limitation, given the rather marginal presence of humans in a territory that includes such vastly different landscapes as [...] mountains, lakes, grasslands, forests and seashores ” (95). I suggest however, that Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism are so closely linked that this oversight hardly surprising. Both of these writers position the agency of the wild as problematic because it undermines the anthropocentrism of their Eurocentric settler mentalities; whereas from the perspective of Aboriginal cultures in which the dichotomy between humans and nature does not exist, the anti-anthropocentric agency of nature is less of a concern. Indeed, as I will argue later in this chapter, the alterity of the wild animal is accepted and often celebrated in novels by Aboriginal authors, typically using trickster figures like Coyote or Raven. Whether represented positively or negatively, Canadian literature by both Native and non- Native authors tends to recognize the agency of ‘the wild,’ and |
