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
|
on the Voyage by re-telling the Biblical story of the Great Flood. He prioritized
the voices of the people and animals ‘not wanted’ on Noah’s ‘voyage,’ thus highlighting and challenging their silence in the original narrative. Likewise, Baird’s zoocentric reimagining explores the individuality and unique perspectives of the slaughtered whales whose biographies were effaced in both Melville’s narrative and by the whaling industry. In other words, she demonstrates that each of these objects of utility were irreplaceable subjects of a life. S he also resists the erasure of Moby Dick’s animality when he is read as a symbol and not as an animal. Baird explains that whilst he is “regarded by academics as a Metaphor [sic], ” she could not help but read him as a character “as vital and as interesting” as any of the humans (275). By finding herself unable to participate in anthropocentric reading practices, she became “convinced” that there was “another story submerged within the narrative, lurking just below the surface as it were” (275). Uniquely, White as the Waves reveals the importance of ‘recovering’ these erased animal biographies. I want to emphasize the significance of such literary work, since every text containing even a single nonhuman animal must also contain a ‘submerged’ animal story. Zoocentric re-imaginings of anthropocentric, canonical texts can reveal the ways in which nonhuman objectification and exploitation are reinforced in literature. Illustrating the ubiquitous but often silent presence of animals demonstrates their speciesist depiction as objects of utility rather than subjects of a life. Moreover, I suggest that such work could pose a striking challenge to Allmark-Kent 235 anthropocentric literary analysis by exposing the ways in which reading animals as ‘allegory’ and ‘metaphor’ erases their presence. In these ways, then, I suggest that we might consider one final element of our re-contextualization of the wild animal story. As I have demonstrated, the majority of nineteenth-century Canadian literature depicted animals as objects, rather than individuals. Thus, might we not think of Seton and Roberts as, in effect, reimagining these anthropocentric texts? Are their biographies of hunted animals not nineteenth-century Canadian hunting narratives reimagined from a zoocentric perspective? Of course much of the ‘recovered’ biography in White as the Waves is predetermined both by Melville’s narrative and the history of Mocha Dick, but I suggest that Baird’s imaginative speculation helps to reveal the anthropocentric construction of the white whale’s 1 ‘monstrous’ identity. His rare albinism shapes this perception through the very fact of making him memorable and recognizable to human eyes, that are usually unable to distinguish between members of the same species without forming individual relationships first. His distinctive whiteness prevents the whale’s encounters with humans being attributed to multiple individuals. Indeed, one of the other sperm whales notes Whitewave ’s albinism and the multiple harpoons in his body, and thinks to himself: “He is marked so they [the whalers] can find him” (Baird 230, emphasis original). Like Haig- Brown’s tagged salmon, Lawrence’s white puma, or some of Seton ’s and Roberts’ animal heroes, the white whale has an identity imposed upon him by human observers. This act of recognition gives these animals 1 By ‘the white whale’ I am referring to the merged identities of Mocha Dick, Moby Dick and White-as-the-Waves, since all three share obvious essential characteristics. Allmark-Kent 236 apparent singularity, w hich we often signify through naming (‘Mocha Dick,’ ‘Spring’ and ‘Lobo’) to stop them being seen as simply an object amongst others. Once recognized and signified in this way, continued human observation leads to our acknowledgement of nonhuman intelligent agency but curiously enough, it can also lead to the belief that these observed individuals are somehow unique —in the white whale’s case, both more violent and more intelligent —than the unobserved mass of the species. Hence, in the context of early nineteenth century whaling culture, the fact that the white whale has seemingly survived multiple attacks transforms his identity into something monstrous: “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chief ly what I hate” (Melville 157). Significantly, if we compare the white whale and the white puma with the protagonists in the other texts here, we can see that those animals are not sought individually. When they are caught or killed it is by chance, and to the hunter they are simply an object among many. This is not the case for the puma or the whale whose human-constructed identities make them the target for human attack. When they retaliate and are recognized, the hunter’s mandate changes; they are no longer hunting for personal gain, they are eliminating a dangerous ‘man-eater’. Both the whale and the puma become tangled in an ambiguous dichoto my of ‘hunter’ and ‘hunted,’ epitomised by Starbuck’s famous cry: “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him” (528). Although Lawrence is not reimagining any particular text, he does refer back to stories and accounts of pumas attacking tourists, we can see that both authors use the biographical narrative structure to demonstrate the possibility that animals vilified as violent and dangerous, are responding to a threat posed Allmark-Kent 237 by humans. Seton’s story of his hunt for Lobo and his pack never postulated any motivation beyond the wolf’s unusually high enjoyment of killing; whereas the white puma and the white whale only begin their attacks after hunters kill their families. The defamiliarizing effect of this speculation is strengthened in Baird’s case through her animal-centric reversal of a canonical novel. It is difficult to date the precise setting of White as the Waves but it spans the life of the male sperm whale protagonist whose birth I approximate as at the end of the eighteenth century, since he is around fifty or sixty years old when encountering Ahab. We are able to witness the development of the whaling industry across the early nineteenth century and observe the change in whale societies before and after human contact. As in other speculative narratives, Baird’s animal cultures are fully formed with histories, myths, origin stories, and unique dialects for the “nations of whales” (222). Unlike Grove and Gowdy however, Baird emphasizes the relationship between survival of the species and survival of the culture: the Lore of the cachalots —bulls gather it, the cows absorb it and transmit it like milk to the calves. It spreads through each cachalot generation, a vast resource of our knowledge, our culture —lost forever. Our social organization, even our rules of etiquette —all will disappear. It’s happening now. The work of millennia is being lost, and once it is gone it may never be completely recovered. [...] Whole family pods have been devastated by the loss of their matriarchs. The pods split up and wander aimlessly, without purpose until they are killed too —because they’ve lost their survival skills, as well as all our cachalot wisdom and tolerance. Even if we do escape extinction and survive in small numbers, what kind of whales will we have become? (195) We can see here not only the links between survival of the species and survival of culture but also the effects of species loss on both the population and the individual. In Last of the Curlews, Bodsworth makes a tentative gesture towards the profound question, what are the consequences of near-extinction for the behaviour, experiences, and survival chances of the remaining individual(s)? Allmark-Kent 238 Bodsworth postulates that there would be some impact on the lone curlew but his insistence that the bird is driven entirely by instinct prevents further engagement with this question. As I have argued, Bodsworth’s awkward response to the stigma against anthropomorphism and ‘nature faking’ is to depict an individual capable of cognitive and emotional complexity but described with reductive, objectifying language. Writing forty years later about a species recognized for its intelligence, long-term memory, and multifaceted social relationships, Baird openly addresses this question. Indeed, she does not simply consider the possibility but explores the potential consequences at length. Moreover, the ‘unspoken question’ of Bodsworth’s curlew is also expanded upon by Baird. Whitewave knows and understands that his species is threatened with extinction, and even that humans are the precise cause: This isn’t just an act of Nature, like a red tide poisoning the sea, or an attack by orcas. This is —this is wrong [...] When have cachalots ever died in such huge numbers? [...] Everyone we know has been killed — everyone. [...] Nature has produced an aberration: a predator that is too efficient, an organism that evolves so rapidly its prey is too efficient, an organism that evolves so rapidly its prey is unable to adapt and survive. (180-1) As addressed by many of the texts here, one of the defamiliarizing effects of the wild animal story is the possibility that animals we comfortably imagine to be ‘dumb’ and ‘unthinking’ are conscious, knowing witnesses to our acts of violence. The killing of animals is a structural feature of all human-animal relations. It reflects human power over animals at its most extreme and yet also at its most commonplace. (The Animal Studies Group, 4). W e might consider the possibility that in the whale’s “inscrutable malice,” Ahab may be detecting the uncanny potential of the conscious animal, witnesses the slaughter of their species, and it is the unsettling implications of this for our Allmark-Kent 239 collective guilt as a species that is the “inscrutable thing” he “hate[s]” (Melville 157). Baird’s whales are not all-knowing, of course; her speculative depiction of cetacean cultures includes an exploration of the gradual accumulation and transmission of knowledge. Whitewave describes this process in the extract above, but the implications of this slow process for creatures without technology in a vast ocean are illustrated tragically when Whitewave encounters humans for the first time. Rumours of whaling ships circulate amongst cetaceans in the first third of the novel, but with no experience of humans and no reason to fear them, he (like many others) does not heed the stories: “No creature attacks without provocation” (Baird 94). Of course, this statement becomes darkly ironic when the whalers attack a nearby calf only moments later, and the graphic slaughter of a nursing pod beg ins. Amidst the violence, Whitewave’s mate goes into labour but is harpooned before the calf is born. Like Mocha Dick who was supposedly seen defending a mother and her calf, Whitewave guards the body of his mate for hours afterwards: He lifted his whole headcase out of the water and snapped his jaws repeatedly at the ship, as though it were another bull-whale he could challenge to a duel. It paid him no heed. [...] Taking up a defensive position by his mate’s body, he gave another aggressive jaw-clap and pounded the water with his flukes. He heard a sound like the chattering laughter of gulls rise in response from the man-creatures in the boat. A harpoon on its long line snaked out from the lead boat, and bit deep into his side. The pain shocked him back to his senses. (105) Whitewave attacks the boats, killing “all that came within the range of his jaws” and “stationing himself beside Moontail” until the whalers give up and the ship moves away (106). Throughout the rest of the novel, he tries to spread knowledge of human violence but is only believed when the other whales begin to recognize the huge numbers in which their species are dying. We can approximate then, that Baird suggests it takes at least a few decades for Allmark-Kent 240 awareness of whalers to spread throughout the cetacean communities. Like Gowdy’s speculations about the production of nonhuman knowledge through the elephant’s ‘superstitions’ or Bodsworth’s consideration of the impact of species loss on survivors, these ideas could make valuable “hypotheses” (Whitehead 371). Interestingly, Whitewave’s awareness of the whalers leads him to become obsessed with trying to comprehend their enigmatic behaviour. Baird reverses the discussion the debates of cetacean intelligence that shape Moby Dick, and like Grove and Gowdy, she presents a caricature of anthropocentrism and speciesism : “Men are animals, nothing more: you speak of them as though they are intelligent” (186). She strengthens her speculative representation and her defamiliarizing depiction of humans, whilst the humorous ignorance of the whales suggests the possibility that we too are ignorant of their intelligence. Yet on another level, whilst Baird reminds us of our own animality, she also supports a dichotomy between ‘intelligence’ and ‘animality’. This begs the question, if the ‘intelligent’ species of the book are not animals, then what are they? Perhaps from their perspective, it is not ‘humans and animals’ but ‘cetaceans and animals’. Whilst this is undoubtedly problematic and based on hierarchical, anthropocentric principles, the very fact that it is jarring and contradictory does reveal the arbitrary distinctions between humans and animals, sentient and non-sentient beings. This of course aids in the construction of a species-specific persp ective, as well as Baird’s disruption of human arrogance. As the novel progresses and Whitewave’s attempt to understand humans is continuing, he decides to adopt as much of a non-violent life as a predator can: I moved with you [...] into the sphere of harmony and kindliness —the Sphere of Order; and from now on I will be part of it. The Sphere of Allmark-Kent 241 Violence must claim only the smallest part of me, as much as I need to live and to save other lives. Everything I do, from my choice of prey to my relations with other whales, must be reflections of the higher sphere. (167) T his dichotomy between ‘intelligence’ and ‘animality’ develops into one betwe en ‘intelligence’ and ‘violence.’ Based on his experience, it seems inevitable that human violence would constitute the opposite of his non-violent intelligence. From this perspective, his opposition to humans and intelligence is not surprising. Whilst collectively humanity is complicit in violence against animals and the destruction of their habitats, it is undoubtedly problematic to homogenize this. All humans are culpable to differing degrees and many of the authors here reflect this, particularly those presenting a retrospective account of species loss. Haig-Brown, Bodsworth, Gowdy and Baird all provide historical perspectives of varying techniques and time periods. Bodsworth’s scope is longest, using archive materials to provide an account from 1772 to 1955, although the narrative itself covers only a year or so. Apart from the tragic death of the curlew’s mate, the thousands upon thousands of other dead curlews in the novel are restricted to the bland numbers of the historical records. Baird’s novel is the only other to provide such a pronounced historical perspective. Her speculative depiction of Whitewave as a witness to the growth of the American whaling industry is of course much more intense than Bodsworth’s carefully distanced perspective. In common with Grove and Gowdy, she incorporates a limited amount of magic as a plot device, but this is restricted to the visions that Whitewave experiences, partway between dreams and premonitions, used to juxtapose the status of whale populations throughout history: Visions came to him, crowding into his brain. He saw man-ships, but they had grown incredibly vast, larger than a whole pod of whales: and they were made not of land-weeds but of something harder and crueller, Allmark-Kent 242 rock-solid and impenetrable, and they had huge mouths that gaped wide. Dead whales were drawn into these mouths [...] Nothing could escape them. Swift, hard-hulled ships raced through the sea at impossible speeds, but no boats were lowered: the whales were killed by lightning- harpoons that flew through the air from th e ships’ bows with a flash of fire and smoke, and when struck the whales died in agony, torn apart from within while they still lived. (196-7) Unsurprisingly, considering her blunt and gruesome approach to achieving the effect of defamiliarization here , Teresa Toten’s review of the novel for the May 1999 issue of Quill and Quire concludes: “White as the Waves left me with the uneasy feeling that there was a story somewhere in this lesson” (Toten). Yet Baird’s heavy-handed critique is less controversial than Grove’s for instance, since her whale conservation message would be widely accepted in 1990s Canada. It is perhaps because she is communicating a lesson and encouraging support for cetacean protection, that her defamiliarizing negative representations of humanity are softened by a few reassuring exceptions. In common with some of the authors here, Baird does distinguish between the mass slaughter of industrialized whaling and Aboriginal subsistence hunting: few ship-men come to my ocean [...] We have native men, but these only use little boats. They have heavy shaggy pelts that cover them completely, except for their faces [...] The furry men have always killed our kind and the beluga’s—but never in such numbers that we had any fear for our peop le’s survival. These men are few in number and they respect the Balance, as do we. (120) She does somewhat romanticize this narwhal’s perspective, who seems hardly to mind the hunting of his species, which feeds into the idealized image of Aboriginal peo ples ‘in harmony’ with nature. Yet she also romanticizes the modern activity of whale watching as well. Towards the end of the novel, one of Whitewave’s visions presents “an alternative future to the nightmare visions he had seen before” (262). It describes a whale watching boat: Allmark-Kent 243 a strangely-shaped boat moving alongside some spouting grey whales. He wanted to clang a warning, but suddenly he saw to his surprise that the humans aboard this boat had no harpoons in their hands. They were gesticulating and shouting, starting at the great grey backs that arched through the waves alongside them —looking, but not harming; extending limbs that were empty of weapons, that reached only to touch. [...] Longing filled him at this gentle scene. (262) Yet organizations such as the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society cite extensive research on the detrimental effects of whale watching, which can result in both short and long-term consequences for the physical condition, behaviour, distribution, and reproductiv e success of targeted cetaceans. Baird’s idealized human-animal encounter —rather like Gowdy’s idyllic wildlife reserve at the end of The White Bone —reveals attitudes typical of her time, and indeed the majority of the research indicated by WDCS, was published after Baird’s novel. Both authors express the need to envisage an optimistic future, a necessary exception to their profound criticisms of humanity’s relationship with wild animals, even Grove gestures towards this by using the telepathic interspecies communication between F.P.G. and the ant Wawa-Quee. The idea that these animals will recognize our rare moments of benign behaviour, and perhaps even ‘forgive’ our violence and exploitation, provides a reassuring fantasy. It is nonetheless an act of guilt-soothing ventriloquism, and in these moments the alterity and autonomous agency of the nonhuman (already problematic in the wild animal story’s ‘fantasy of knowing’) is undermined further. Here is the uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of these texts: the sacrifice of alterity and agency, together with the ‘disrespectful’ ventriloquizing treatment of literary animals, is used in the hope of garnering support for the respectful treatment of real animals. Returning finally to Moby Dick, we can see this change in the white whale’s agency when we juxtapose Melville’s and Baird’s texts. Interestingly, in Allmark-Kent 244 her comparison of English, American and Canadian representations of animals, Margaret Atwood seems almost to predict the writing of White as the Waves: English animal stories are about ‘social relations,’ American ones are about people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animal being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers. As you can see, Moby Dick as told by the White Whale would be very different. (“Why is that strange man chasing me around with a harpoon?”). (74) The subtext here is that Moby Dick as told by a Canadian would be ‘very different.’ Of course, as argued in my chapter “Other Animals,” I do not quite agree with Atwood’s generalizations but her comparison demonstrates the wild animal story’s fantasy of knowing the nonhuman. In What Animals Mean in the Download 3.36 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
|