Discussion Forum

Please post your weekly responses to the texts here, 150 words (Intermediate) / 300 words (Finalist), by midnight Sunday at latest (the night before our seminar). (The term “text” covers visual and filmic as well as literary materials.) This gives us all time to read everyone’s responses for the seminar and to formulate some thoughts ahead of time. In your response, try to develop *one* idea that connects at least two of the primary texts (when there is more than one primary text); you don’t have to refer to all of the primary texts in your response. Also be sure to include brief quotations from the texts to illustrate your point and include one question for the seminar. Ideally, rather than a general, speculative question that may or may not be answerable, and that may be a matter of opinion (i.e., do animals have feelings?) this should be a question that focuses our attention on and helps us to open up our readings of set texts for the week: i.e., what is the role of feeling in Vicki Hearne’s account of cross-species communication?  You may post more than once, especially if another seminar member’s response provokes a thought! While I do expect you to put some thought into your responses, I don’t expect well-crafted prose: responses can be fairly informal. (I won’t be marking for spelling, mechanics or referencing.) Please be prepared to present from your response in seminar if called on.

Week 10: The Swan Book

Animal symbols in the fantasy of escapism versus dealing with reality.

In Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, the uplifting mythology of white swans is juxtaposed with the reality of black swans, which are the animals which truly engage with the characters of the novel despite being overlooked and undervalued. The white swan is distant and unattainable, “her lost white swan” which leaves one “yearning” and “lonely” in searching for it (Wright, 41). As it represents hope, it’s absence reveals that Oblivia is hopeless about the condition of her life.
In contrast, the black swan is a mirror of Oblivia, who has an affinity for and kinship for the animal – they are both trapped in a bleak situation, mournful and hopeless. Warren saw beauty in both the black swan and Oblivia, and therefore took ownership over lives which ought instead to be free – he was “already claiming the mysterious swan as his own” from the moment he saw the beautiful creature (Wright, 112). This is paralleled in his capture of Oblivia, repeating the adverb to express the ease of his dominance: “Already, he possessed her life” (Wright, 155). The presence of the swans at this moment is what grounds her and does not leave room for delusions, forcing her to face the situation she is confronted with, it “made her realise that nobody ran from Warren” (Wright 155). Despite the negative connotation of the black swan, its connection with Oblivia offers comfort and healing in a situation where there can be no escape – “they would not leave without her” (Wright, 159).
Whilst stories about animals can offer guidance and hope, it is their tangible presence which offers practical support and makes us aware of our environment.

Week 7: Adam’s Task

What place does religion have in the discussion of animal rights?

Adam’s Task explores the implications of Western philosophy and theology on our understanding of animals, particularly domestic working animals. Hearne’s argument is founded by the idea that “for us naming the animals is the original emblem of animal responsiveness to and interest in humans, in Genesis, our first text.”, which assumes a Christian faith worldview of the reader, and for all humans (Hearne, 164). The foundations of her theories therefore are unstable and problematic, especially in her focus on human authority over animals as the original natural state of things (before the fall of man).

Hearne offers no explanation for why “Most of animate creation, responding to this failure [in obedience to God from Adam and Eve], turned pretty irrevocably from human command.”, becoming wild, whilst others remained malleable to human control (Hearne, 60). Why are “the dog, the horse, the burro, the elephant, the ox and a few others” the vessels through which we get a “second chance to repair our damaged authority”? (Hearne, 60). Not only is the logic of this belief flawed, but the idea that animals exist merely as an opportunity, consequence, or lesson for humans undermines their innate value and existence.

Katharine Mershon writes that Hearne has long been a controversial figure in training circles as an “outspoken advocate of … negative reinforcement”, even when research indicated many problems with the approach (Merhson). Whilst Hearne makes several insightful points about the undervalued importance of love and connection in our training relationships with animals and the complicated role of language, ultimately her emphasis on theology compromises the theory. There is a place for religion in one’s own ethical code, but the case for rights, including animal rights, should be based on facts, research, and experience to establish a coherent, consistent, and universally defensible stance.

Mershon, Katharine. “The Theology of Dog Training in Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task.” Religions, vol. 10, no. 1, 2019, p. 25., https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010025.

Week 9: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / When Species Meet

“Do we prefer living with predictable sheep or with sheep that surprise us…?” (Haraway, 35)

The society of the Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? highly values animals as status symbols and as beings which require daily care and attention. Real animals are so valuable because they have become scarce on a planet which is becoming more uninhabitable for life, including human life, overtime. Owning an animal in this world is evidence of one’s dedication to sustaining life, connecting to nature, and demonstrating one’s own humanity – even if the motivation is not pure and the act is merely performative.
In When Species Meet, Haraway posits that considering the mere figure of the animal as a symbol is insufficient, that we must look the real animal in the eye and see them look back. In doing so, we may discover that an animal is “someone, not … a machine reacting” – there is more to animals than machined reactions, they give real responses, our relationship with them goes both ways (Haraway, 19). In the novel, the creation of artificial animals in a failed attempt to fill the gap left by declining numbers of real ones is a problem that Deckard faces: “’It’s not the same,’ Barbour finished. ‘But almost.’” (Dick, 9). The social stigma and shame of having a ‘fake’ animal is not the only problem Deckard has with his sheep – he struggles from the lack of true connection or companionship that he might only get from another living being. Representations and mimicry, however heart-warming or accurate, cannot substitute the real connection that happens when humans ‘meet’ animals, the physical world.
For Haraway, the vital questions of animals are not limited to their suffering but include “Can animals play? Or work?”, suggesting that these may be the true qualities that make life valuable and worth protecting (Haraway, 22). In reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, my question is: Can an android suffer? Or play? Or work? When does an ‘artificial’ animal stop being artificial? “The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.” (Dick, 211)

Week 5: The Lives of Animals

Masculine amorality: Are animal rights a ‘women’s issue’?

John Bernard, the fictional narrator of Coetzee’s Lives of Animals has an unfavourable attitude to women, especially “old”, “confused” elderly women, including to his own mother (Coetzee, 36). Labelling her advocacy for animal rights as a mere “hobbyhorse of hers” in a derogatory tone and feeling opposed to listening to her speak “once again on the subject of animal rights, particularly when he knows he will afterwards be treated, in bed, to his wife’s disparaging commentary.” (Coetzee, 16, 17). Are strong moral opinions about diet and the supposed inferior lives of animals ‘women’s subjects’? John “himself has no opinions one way or the other.”, whilst it’s a major point of contention between his mother and wife (Coetzee, 17). The narrative constantly undermines both women as petty, over-passionate, and an annoyance.
John Bernard presumes to know that the listeners at his mother’s lecture are as bored as he is, but we cannot trust his biased judgement, despite his disconnect from the issues. Why do we hear this debate through the amoral voice of John Bernard, rather than his wife, mother, or a more distant third person narrative?
He patronises women for investing in serious issues, depending on stereotypes – “Why can she not be an ordinary old woman …why can’t she stay home and open it [her heart] to her cats?” (Coetzee, 38). The protagonist also expresses hatred for lesser beings, heavily coded in the rhetoric of toxic masculinity, arguing that we despise animals “because they don’t fight back”, that helping them is a “waste” because “they won’t help themselves”, so they “deserve what they get” (Coetzee, 58). These statements could very well be used against vulnerable humans, and indeed it often is, not only against the prisoner of war as suggested within the text, but against refugees, migrants, the working class, and unemployed. While the victims can be any gender, the attitude is distinctly grounded in historic ideals of dominance, strength, opportunism, and insensitivity.

Week 7

Hearne describes the working relationships between humans and dogs as dependent upon learning to talk with one another, the wider a dog’s vocabulary becomes, the more the human is able to trust him. This is an issue Hearne says is evident in human relationships as well, that “speaking well elicits trust”. She contrasts the wild animal, who may comprehend but not respect (and thus is not ‘talking’), and the domesticated animal, whose “apparent command of human language may be limited, but his respect for language commands him”. She gives the example of John Judge and his police dog Rinnie, where Rinnie is reprimanded for biting the victim of a crime, but a lie detector test later determines that the victim was in fact conspiring with the perpetrator. In this case, the human and the mechanical is privileged over the animal, and the relationship has broken down. There is a responsibility of the handler to trust and respect the “superior knowledge” of the dog as the dog is expected to respect and conform to the handler’s language. I do feel that Hearne’s examples highlight the inherent inequality in working relationships between human and animal, where the human is the one endowing the dog with both language and purpose. Though the human must trust that the dog has taken on language, the dog is assumed to be distrustful when up against another human who has been deemed trustworthy. This speaks to Berger’s assertion in Why Look at Animals?,

“Between two men the two abysses are, in principle, bridged by language. Even if the encounter is hostile and no words are used (even if the two speak different languages), the existence of language allows that at least one of them, if not both mutually, is confirmed by the other.”

I also question the impulse behind why the dog is perceived as untrustworthy, despite the handler having a relationship with the dog and not with the human: we know that humans can practice deception, can dogs? And why should they do so?

Week 10 Response

Reading The Swan Book, I was reminded by the week 1 reading, ‘Identity’ in The Others: How Animals Made Us Human by Paul Shepard. The novel has the mythic qualities of a fable, incorporating characters reminiscent of folklore such as Obliva as the figure of the young orphan girl with a connection to the natural, characters known only by their occupations or place in society such as the swamp people and The Harbour Master, Warren Finch as the prince. We also see many examples of tales being told, particularly by Bella Donna, who tells Oblivia fairy tales of swans along with the similarly magical story of her people. Focusing specifically on the chapter ‘Swan Maiden’, we see multiple fairy tales: in Finch’s mind he is carrying out a love story, saving the princess who came to him in a dream as a swan from her struggle in the waters of the swamp people, but Oblivia, the swan-child in a woman’s body, she is being ripped from her home by the figure in the cautionary fables which warn young girls of men who wish to harm them. She uses the tales told by Bella Donna as a weapon against him,

“The girl fought back by reciting, in Bella Donna’s high-tilting voice, the many swan maiden fantasies that have vanquished men who hunt swans. She screamed the story of the hunter, that of a fisherman, another of the man in the woods – of their capturing swan women that always eventually escape. Stories she knew well about escaping.” (156)

Shepard writes that “the fairy tale dramatizes intrinsic childhood worries which the youthful listener unconsciously interprets as his own story and his own inner self”, and as such, Oblivia’s desperate attempts to recite the fables of swan hunters and swan maidens are a way of her childlike mind making sense of human reality through ideas of animals. However, as the wider story of The Swan Book works with ideas of fabulation, experimenting with form, style, time, and blurring and fusing the self with the natural world, Oblivia’s understanding of the swans in her fables do not act simply as reflections of humanity, but also as an act of becoming.

Week 8 Response

Coetzee’s Disgrace there is an ongoing issue of the boundaries of language and human communication. As a communications professor, Lurie’s frustrations with the English language comes to a head in a passage where he thinks about speaking to Petrus about his life,

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa (…) Pressed into the mould of English, Petrus’s story would come out arthritic, bygone. (117)

The issue of the English language being an unfit medium of understanding the truth of the ‘other’ takes on a new dimension in terms of the relationship between Lurie and the dogs he puts down, where language in general is disregarded for the sensory. Though Lurie initially disregards Bev Shaw’s assertion that the dogs can “smell your thoughts”, the novel concludes with him considering the intimate relationship between the dog about to be put down and him as a benevolent executioner, able to guide the dog through what he cannot understand as he dies. Lurie imagines the dog’s sensorial abilities, how he will soon be greeted with the “soft, short smell of the released soul” and react with bewilderment as he begins to lose consciousness, and how he can treat him with respect and care despite killing him. The dwelling on the imagined animal experience speaks to Cavell’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s lion, that the “problem of the other is [not] the problem of knowing the other” but in fact “one of the most valuable things about our encounter with the supposedly ‘mute’ animal is that it ‘sooner makes us wonder what we conceive knowledge to be’” (Wolfe, 2013). Is it possible that the ‘otherness’ of the dog is more palatable to Lurie than the mix of familiarity and otherness of Petrus? Perhaps for Lurie the complete muteness and absence of language of the animal gives way more easily to a reimagining of knowledge than a language barrier between humans.

Week 10 Response

This week’s text Swan Book made me question the role of animal bodies, and perhaps by extension, human bodies, as scripts or vessels for history. The first chapter is particularly concerned with this as it forms a central concern in Aboriginal culture of folklore, specially in this text as new histories start to be made as the collective consciousness comes to be more and more distorted, e.g. they start blaming Oblivia for their condition. Bella Donna’s entire history is intertwined with swans and when she arrives at the swamp, they look at Bella Donna’s translucent skin and bones as a sign of her history. Therefore, my question concerns how bodies can be read as signs of history, transcending use of language. This opens up a different perspective of our interaction with animals and how they are embodied as on paper, animal bodies are arguably our only material ways of understanding them.

Forum Post Week 10

For this week’s readings, I was particularly taken by some of the themes conveyed in Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction by Thom van Dooren.

More specifically, I was intrigued by the intricacies of extinction and what the notion of extinction means concerning the question of the animal. The failure of integration seems particularly important when considering the case of the dodo. An animal that would not assimilate or integrate into the culture of European wildlife that was brought to Mauritius in the early renaissance period. The implication of human causalities in affecting the existence of creatures that lived in a closed system seems extremely relevant when considering our relationship to the animal. In some ways, this particular case study as shown in the introduction to the text sets a precedent for the extent to which humans and animals can exist among one another in a globalised system. The text outlines its interest in biological co-dependency and the need for change in the ways that humans view animals and their finetuned ecosystems. The text initially situates the human as an invasive and damning force before going on to explore individual extinction cases among avian species, however the subtext remains the same. In what way has humanity failed to steward the animal? What are the ramifications of our failure to maintain our world and our relationships with animal life? The anthropocentric notion of human importance and expansion resides at the centre of this problem and other texts like Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep provide a closer look at the potential fallout of human caused extinctions and the re-evaluation of the value we place on such creatures.

Week 10 Forum Contribution.

This week’s content for me drew upon ideas of ‘becoming-animal’ and how they may relate to the literary connection between Bella Donna and the swans within The Swan Book (Especially within the chapter: ‘The Dust Ends’). Here, rather than a non-genealogical connection as described by Deleuze and Guattari, Bella Donna’s seemed crafted through the experience and re-telling of ‘the stories of all those people in her life that she had seen escaping from their lost countries, taken to sea by a swan’ (74). Where her affinity draws from the lived and told; a ‘molar’ experience that is perceptible and exists within an arborescent model (having occurred in the past and thus being genealogical in nature) (Deleuze and Guattari).

However, what interests me here is the idea expressed within ‘Becoming-animal’ that any type of animal, whether Oedipal, Jungian or Demonic, can all lend to the concept of ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari). Initially the connection between Bella Donna and the swans seems rooted in either the Oedipal or Jungian form- it is sentimentalized, yet also holds symbolism in storytelling and within the narrative as a whole. Yet, through this expansion from the singular to the species, does the figure of the swan become greater than its act within stories, moving closer to the concept of ‘becoming’?

The novel often parallels characters to the swans’ actions, and vice versa; as can be seen in the swans ‘still sitting on the ground, heads tucked under their wings… dying in their eerie pact’ after the death of Bella Donna (91). This ‘pact’ arguably creates a sense of fluidity in identity, that can flow between both the idea of the swan and of the human, like the ‘fibre’ described by Deleuze and Guattari that is ‘strung across borderlines’ and ‘constitutes a line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattar 46).

Would Bella Donna and the swans’ relation be an act of ‘becoming’ or an act of sentimentalism/idolization?