By Vinky Mittal
In Laura Jean McKay’s speculative novel The Animals in that Country (2020), a pandemic engulfs Australia and enables communication between humans and animals. The animal voices, typeset in a different font, float between comprehension and confusion. In one of her first encounters with the speaking animals, the protagonist Jean–an elderly woman who works at a wildlife park in the Australian outback–hears the voice of the mice in the cages:
On a
hillside. Run
to the wall.
You go, I’ll
make my way, one
and everyone.
Everything. The body. Run.
Jean refuses to accept this as the voice of the mice. She says, “Mice don’t talk like that. Mice talk about eating and fucking.” Jean, attempting to encrypt the animal voice in her linguistic register, uses assumptions from her own environment to understand the animal’s inner world. In this endeavour, she will fail again and again, throughout the novel.
The animal haunts the foundations of the Western philosophical canon as the human’s devalued other; the human is built on the exclusion of the animal. The condition of the animal is one of lack, precisely because of its inability to do what the human can: reason and use language. This difference, exemplified in the dichotomy of the human and the nonhuman, is our central inheritance from the Enlightenment. For Descartes, animals are merely ‘mechanisms’ or ‘automata’– they don’t speak, feel, or philosophize. For Heidegger, the animal cannot access the human ‘dasein’, a state he describes as deprivation, forever separating the animal from the human. Within this framing, the animal can never aspire to subjectivity, that hallowed status that is conferred upon the beings that serve as characters in the novel form. The animal can be looked at, perceived by the human, but the animal is denied the apparatus to look back. It's the autonomy of the gaze that grants humans subjectivity, but the animal is defined by the lack of this agency. A human observes. An animal merely sees. A human acts on intent. An animal only reacts. “Deer in the headlights,” is an insult, after all.
However, this framing begins to go awry in the twentieth century. Freudian psychoanalysis advances an imagination of language as a reservoir of parapraxes, slips, and unconscious thoughts– positing a world where linguistic control is not a possession of the human subject, but rather an illusion that is maintained through a fragile negotiation between the ego, id and the unconscious. Jacques Derrida, in his theory of deconstruction, builds further upon this to argue that there is no stable meaning to be found in a linguistic event; language, he says, is in a constant state of flux, and meaning is always deferred in its arrival. We know now, from both psychoanalysis and deconstruction, that we are not in as much control of our language as we would like to assume. The deception at the foundation of a unified human subject has been uncovered.
The contemporary novel challenges the centrality of the human being by its use of the animal, a tendency also reflected in the proliferation of literary animal studies as a discipline, which questions the human-first order by representing the animal as integral to the anthropocene. It is the animal who can displace the human from a position of dominance, and unravel the foundations of a world that crowns man as the master of Earth. The novel form does this by various means, including speculation, genre-experimentation, or by giving voice to the animals. The abundance of animals in the contemporary novel– created as a being of sense and voice– turns the canon of Western humanism around on its head. This abundance is reflected across geographies. McKay’s Animals in That Country, the title of which is drawn from a poem by Margaret Atwood, is based in Australia. In Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019), the narration is steered by a swarm of mosquitoes, who mirror the chorus from the Greek epics, telling the story of an intergenerational tragedy in Zambia– a novel that very tellingly descends into a story about an ecological crisis. In Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016), originally written in German, we witness the life of three generations of polar bears, and observe the geopolitics across East Germany and Europe through the lens of an animal voice. Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s Animalia (2019) was originally written in French; Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi: Or the Story of a Black Goat (2016), on the longlist for the national award for literature, was translated from Tamil. The list goes on.
It is not that animals did not appear in narrative form before. Consider, for instance, the recurrent image of the dog as a companion. Elisha Cohn tracks their presence across the works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Similarly, in South Asia, animals have long been an integral part of literary and oral texts, such as the Panchatantra and the Rajatarangini. The Jataka, or the early Buddhist tales, uses the animal form to tell stories of the Buddha’s reincarnations. Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale–written over 200 years ago–contrasts the mortality of a human life with the joy of the nightingale’s song.
What sets recent literary fiction apart, however, is the shift from animal as metaphor to animal as subject—a transition Susan McHugh helps explain as a “perforation of species boundaries” in her essay “Literary Animal Agents.” Unlike previous uses, McHugh points out, animals now become objects of sustained study. This proliferation of representations, intertwined with the development of literary animal studies, has implications for how we see the world and ourselves. We are, in effect, witnessing a conjunction between animal studies and fiction. Notably, this comes at a time of ecological crisis. In his 2016 nonfiction book The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh reflects on our moment of climatic catastrophe and suggests that the struggle of serious fiction to grapple with ecological crisis arises from our inability to imagine climate change as part of our collective consciousness. Equally important, Ghosh reminds us that Enlightenment and colonialist legacies frame nature as mere meteorological phenomena, rather than as an agential force. I would venture that animal agency, tied to the natural world, confronts a similar problem—and language is a crucial ground on which to fracture this perspective.
In NoViolet Bulawayo’s Booker nominated Glory (2022), a chorus of animal voices populates a political satire mirroring the fall of former president of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe. The protagonist, a young goat named Destiny, returns home to a scene of revolution. Set in an allegorical land that mirrors Zimbabwe, the narration, propelled by a chorus of animal voices, is exhilarating– scaffolding in its language the political explosion of a nation by authoritarianism and political instability. Bulawayo’s animals bear witness to this explosion and the revolution, mirroring contemporary moments in the world. Unlike McKay, Bulawayo’s animals speak with clarity, with a narration that mirrors the narrative of the human world. And yet, it is visceral:
The new Dispensation was such a show bird that very soon other parrots learned the strange new song that now seemed to always be in Jidada’s airs. It felt to the birds like another popular fad not to be left out of, and so in no time crows were cawing New Dispensation, owls were hooting New Dispensation, sparrows were chirping New Dispensation, canaries were singing New Dispensation, doves were cooing New Dispensation, hornbills and other birds were calling New Dispensation, and the cicadas were droning New Dispensation, bees were buzzing New Dispensation, crickets and grasshoppers and other insects were chirping New Dispensation so that Jidada’s hedges and trees and air and skies and even the jungles outside Jidada were all New Dispensation New Dispensation New Dispensation, yes, tholukuthi New Dispensation everywhere and New Dispensation all the time.
If ‘logos’ derives itself from speech and word, the animal pulls us in the direction of the visceral, felt, and embodied. The animal sings, hoots, chirps, and buzzes. It is an economy of senses, through which the animal establishes its lived milieu, unlike the human’s stubborn insistence on the ‘word’. In the work of the German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll, this perceptual environment is termed the ‘umwelt’. Each species–human or the animal–activates a reality in the world through their perception of that world. For the animal, this sensory perception is markedly different from that of the human. Animals sense the world differently than we do, and in that endeavour, the world itself is transformed, because the world one experiences is a specific result of one’s perception of the world.
Uexküll’s work is revolutionary in understanding the animal semiotic through processes of sensory and motor perceptions. The animals seem to employ their entire bodies into their ‘speaking’. It is a hermeneutic of body, smell, sound, and words. In The Animals in That Country, Jean’s granddaughter, Kim, identifies this when she tells Jean: “You’ve got to look at them, Gran…. You have to look at all their whole body all at the same time, not just the bits” (68). With time, Jean begins to conjoin the verbal with the bodily– speaking about Sue, she says that her “messages grow teeth” (63). In another instance, she says, Sue’s “quiet for about five seconds before her body starts letting off hisses of meaning that build and burst” (64). Meanings, Jean says, “form out of hops, barks, and whiffs” (59). I find these to be the most significant inventions within McKay’s writing, where meaning does not remain the sole property of words, but is imagined in the contact between bodies and signs. A conjunction of language with the sensory and biological register that can frame the umwelt of the non-human. We see this also in Serpell’s Old Drift, the swarm of mosquitoes that doubles as the narrator, does not only use language. Marked in Italics, the chorus begins with their particular sound:“Zt. Zzt. ZZZzzzZZZzzzzZZZzzzzzzZZZZzzzzzzzzZZZzzzzzzZZZzzzzo’ona.”
In Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi (2016), as we follow the life of a black goat to its death, we are confronted with a similar perceptual apparatus. Consider, for instance, Poonachi’s perspective on the world around her:
Poonachi understood the extent of her intelligence on that day. Darkness fell and all the routes were closed. Left with no other option, she had to spend the night on the hill. Where could she stay? Could she lie down alone, surrounded by the darkness? She was scared. Just then she saw a big pond close by. Water hyacinth covered its whole expanse. She had never before drunk water that tasted so sweet. She wanted to get into the water and swim for a while. But the hyacinth covering the still water made her afraid. She suppressed her wish. Like a hand extending from the edge of the pond, she saw a rock protruding over the water. Wide at the bottom, it became progressively narrow and ended in a sharp point at the top. It looked like the right spot for her. Planting her hooves on the rock, she climbed to the top. No one could get up there. It gave her a sense of security.
We see, in these representations, a move away from animals as a construction of the human psyche– animal as companion, or animal as metaphor. We witness not only animals constructing a world as distinct from the human’s, as in Poonachi’s case, but also the human world constituted by the animal, as in the narratorial voice in The Old Drift. The animal is not outside the human world; the world is constitutive of the animal.
This newfound understanding is reflected across disciplines. The field of animal studies today is abound by journals, conferences, and special issues. McKay herself is an engaged literary scholar on the board of Australasian Animal Studies Association (AASA), serving as an editor for Animal Studies Journal, and co-edited a special issue of the journal on ‘Animal Cultures.’ The discipline titled ‘literary animal studies’ emerged in the 1980s and has been steadily growing in the 21st century, helmed by questions of animal agency, their experiential lives, and their representations in cultural objects. The discipline argues for literature’s capacity to foster meaningful relationships between the human and the non-human. As an interdisciplinary framing spanning literature, anthropology, and sociology, animal studies opens an avenue for the anthropocene to confront its destruction of the natural world, by centering the non-human as a participant and a sentient force.
Importantly, the ability to hear the animals in literature does not translate to a direct understanding. Neither does it activate an instant utopia. Rather, it is often expressed as a destabilising force. We see an example of this at the beginning of The Animals in That Country, when Jean misunderstands Sue's comfort and proximity, resulting in a canine bite that triggers an infection that Jean carries along throughout the novel. This initial moment of misrecognition between the two is reflected across the novel, as Jean wrestles with Sue's voice, attempting to understand the dingo. Between Jean and Sue, this comprehension is mired in a complex network of power relations–Sue simultaneously calls Jean queen, mum, and mother, without any clear logic or causation. The understanding between the human and the animal, illustrated in the relationship between Jean and Sue, unfolds slowly, as a progression. Interestingly, the gesture seems to be that it is one’s relationality with the animal that triggers understanding–the more time Jean spends with Sue, the more comprehensible she becomes. This encounter with the animal compels the human to ‘look’, and also questions what it would mean to truly look at the other: “I crouch. Really take a look at her. I’ve spent the last seven or so years staring at Sue, but I never saw her white chest talk two ways”. Fundamentally, these texts are invitations. They ask the human to consider the other on its own terms. Treating animals as beings with lives equal to our own is a remarkable endeavour, demanding the expanse of our full humanity – a call to our intellect, emotion, sense, and humility.
Vinky Mittal is a PhD student at the University of Southern California. She is interested in feminist studies and archives.