Mongrel nation: animality and Empire in the novels of J.G. Farrell

Abstract

The novels of J.G. Farrell (1935–79), reveal a writer preoccupied with the cultural representation of Britain in an era of post-imperial decline. Farrell's ‘Empire trilogy’ illustrates a national consciousness examining its chequered past through focus on Ireland in Troubles (1970), the Indian Rebellion of 1857 in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and the fall of Singapore in The Singapore Grip (1978). In doing so, Farrell's novels feature a notable proliferation of flora and fauna, particularly his use of dogs as representative of national character and the changeable state of British society under attack. This article argues that Farrell's novels explore the state of post-imperial Britain through a sustained focus on dogs and animality. In situations marked by degradation and decline, Farrell gradually collapses the boundaries of order and disorder, obedience and disobedience and man and beast, inviting comparisons between the animal instincts of the dogs that populate his novels and those of Britons fighting for survival.

Keywords::

• post-war literature
• J.G. Farrell
• post-imperial
• post-colonial
• contemporary fiction
• Spaniels

Funding

This work was partly supported by The Wellcome Trust under grant number: 100559/Z/12/Z.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1.Crane, J.G. Farrell: The Critical Grip; Boccardi, The Contemporary British Historical Novel; Dix, Postmodern Fiction and the Break Up of Britain; Morey, Fictions of India; McLeod, J.G. Farrell.

^2.Montague, “Laureate of a Declining Empire,” The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/laureate-of-a-declining-empire-1.1252668?page = 1

^3.Brock, “Epitaph for the Empire,” Observer Magazine, 73–5.

^4.Farrell's unfinished novel The Hill Station looked set to continue this theme with its focus on the religious crises of the 1870s. The novel is incomplete, however, as Farrell drowned in an accident near his home in Ireland before its completion.

^5.McLeod, J. G. Farrell, 99–100.

^6. In terms of recent publications within animal studies of relevance to Farrell and his subject matter, John Miller's “Rebellious Tiger, A Patriotic Elephant, and an Urdu-speaking Cockatoo: Animals in ‘Mutiny’ Fiction” (Journal of Victorian Culture) covers the period, style and authors that Farrell seeks to satirise in The Siege of Krishnapur. In this article, Miller focuses on the elephant, a potent signifier of Indian identity, but not the dog, as a symbol of loyalty. Similarly, in their introductory article to the same issue entitled “Victorian Animals”, Miller and Claire Charlotte McKechnie state their interest in exploring “the ways in which Victorian culture produced a set of ideas about animals and human-animal interactions that were modulated or often problematized by the material lives of animals themselves”, and in how the animal itself was used for “widely divergent political and aesthetic ends” (439). Such an exploration is of relevance to Farrell's novelistic take on Victorian animals, in which he sought to perform a similar process of consideration of the political lives and significance of animals.

^7. Goodman, “This Time it's Personal: Reliving and Rewriting History in 1970s Fiction” in Hubble, The Decades Series, and “A Great Beneficial Disease: Colonial Medicine & Imperial Authority in J. G. Farrell'sThe Siege of Krishnapur.”

^8.Sandbrook'sSeasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974–1979 provides extensive information on various plots, rumored and substantiated, that threatened the stability of Britain in the 1970s.

^9. See Boccardi, The Contemporary British Historical Novel.

^10.Skabelund, Empire of Dogs, 8.

^11.Farrell, Troubles, 48–9.

^12. Spaniels, of course, have a well-known literary pedigree; Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography published in 1933 tells the life story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's pet cocker spaniel. For further information and analysis see: Dubino, “Evolution, History, and Flush; or, the Origin of Spaniels” in Czarnecki and Rohman, “Virginia Woolf and the Natural World.”

^13.Judah, An Ancient History of Dogs, 46. Troubles, 122. Similarly, in her chapter “Bitches From Brazil” Susan McHugh addresses the significance of breed in relation to projections of national character, an idea that emerges alongside standardisation of dog breeds in the nineteenth century (Rothfels, Representing Animals, 189).

^14.Farrell, Troubles, 202.

^15.Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir, 117–18.

^16.Farrell, Troubles, 232–3.

^17.Farrell, Troubles, 281.

^18.Farrell, Troubles, 323.

^19.Farrell, Troubles, 74.

^20.Smith, THE BLOODHOUND AS DETECTIVE, 1, British Periodicals, 436

^21.Farrell, Troubles, 52.

^22.Farrell, Troubles, 383–4.

^23.Skabelund, Empire of Dogs, 7.

^24.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 87. Diaries and eyewitness accounts of the Indian Mutiny, used often in their original form throughout the novel, inform The Siege of Krishnapur extensively. See Hartveit, “The Imprint of Recorded Events in the Narrative Form of J.G Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur” in English Studies 75, no. 4.

^25.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 121.

^26.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 289.

^27.McLeod, J.G. Farrell, 61.

^28.Polehampton, A Memoir, Letters & Diary of the Rev. Henry S. Polehampton, M.A 108-9. I am grateful to the Wellcome Trust for the Small Grants award (grant number: 100559/Z/12/Z) and the permission of Trinity College, Dublin which made it possible for me to access these sources in November 2012.

^29.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 41.

^30.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 142–3.

^31.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 268–69.

^32.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 142–3.

^33.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 119.

^34.Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 213.

^35.Skabelund, Empire of Dogs, 69.

^36. J.G. Farrell, typed manuscript copy of The Siege of Krishnapur, item #9138, Trinity College Archive, Dublin, 311.

^37.McLeod, J.G. Farrell, 80.

^38.Raphael Samuel'sTheatres of Memory provides a comprehensive overview of conservation movements and the revival of interest in folk art in Britain since the Second World War.

^39.Farrell, The Singapore Grip, 35.

^40.Farrell, The Singapore Grip, 256–7.

^41.Farrell, The Singapore Grip, 256–7.

^42.Farrell, The Singapore Grip, 256–7.

^43.Palika, The Howell Book of Dogs, 225; Judah, An Ancient History of Dogs, 1.

^44. The image has been widely reproduced both commercially and in historical publications. See Holsinger and Schofield, Visions of War, 99.

^45.Skabelund, Empire of Dogs, 45.

^46.Farrell, The Singapore Grip, 303.

^47.Calarco, Zoographies, 149.

^48.Farrell, The Singapore Grip, 516.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Goodman

Sam Goodman is Lecturer in English & Communication at Bournemouth University. He is currently researching the intersection between medicine and Anglo-Indian fiction of the post-Second World War period, and is the author of British Spy Fiction & the End of Empire (Routledge, 2015). He is also the editor of Medicine, Health & the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities (Routledge, 2013) with Victoria Bates (Bristol) and Alan Bleakley (Plymouth).