“As Closely Bonded as We are:” Animalographies, Kinship, and Conflict in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals and Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy

Abstract

Using the fiction of Ceridwen Dovey and Eva Hornung, this essay considers animalography as a medium to represent animal emotions, particularly when ties of kinship break down. It addresses the difficulties and power dynamics associated with speaking for nonhuman others, while engaging with Cynthia Huff’s cautions regarding the posthumanist life narrative.

Keywords:

• animalography
• emotions
• kinship
• strays

Acknowledgments

I thank Deirdre Coleman for introducing me to Dovey’s writing, and Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock for suggesting Hornung as a companion author for this essay. Jess, in particular, made a number of extremely important suggestions which have, I hope, strengthened the piece, while Gillian made me aware of Archer-Lean’s important article on Dovey, which appeared at the eleventh hour. I owe additional thanks to the anonymous reviewer, whose insightful suggestions were extremely helpful. My work on animals and emotions has been funded by the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (project CE110001011), and I am deeply grateful to the Centre and its Chief Investigators for the support and opportunities I have received. I also thank my new colleagues at the University of Otago, where I completed most of the writing of this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Huff, “After Auto, after Bio,” 279.

2 Bentham, Introduction, 311.

3 Creed, Stray, 100.

4 Huff and Haefner, “His Master’s Voice,” 153.

5 Haraway, When Species Meet, 97.

6 Mathews, “Living with Animals,” 4.

7 For a discussion of the critic’s sense of vulnerability when faced with the enigma of his cat, see Derrida, The Animal.

8 Huff, “After Auto, after Bio,” 280.

9 Creed reminds us that animal refugees take flight from war, climate change, and other human-engineered phenomena, even though news reports are prone to concentrate on the plight of human casualties. See Creed, Stray, 71–75.

10 Hielscher, “A Joyous Deception.”

11 Dovey, Only the Animals, 179.

12 Fudge, Pets, 10.

13 Herman, Narratology beyond the Human, 173.

14 Dovey, Only the Animals, 26, 20.

15 Dovey, Only the Animals, 204.

16 Dovey, Only the Animals, 206.

17 Dovey, Only the Animals, 206.

18 Disappointingly, Dovey’s otherwise beautiful and moving recent study of J. M. Coetzee’s work, Ceridwen Dovey on J. M. Coetzee (2018), does not engage with the novelist’s representations of animals. Archer-Lean offers a detailed and engaging analysis of the connections Dovey weaves between her dolphin protagonist and Coetzee’s academic character. As Archer-Lean asserts in “Revisiting the ‘Problem,’” “Dovey’s dolphin letter to Plath implies a push against the limit of realism as necessary to an empathetic animal representation.” Archer-Lean continues to argue that Dovey is, through “textual self-referentiality and posthumous dialogue between constructed characters,” affirming Elizabeth Costello’s proposal that “we are all of one kind.”

19 Dovey, Only the Animals, 207.

20 Bekoff, “Wild Justice,” 75.

21 Bekoff, “Wild Justice,” 75.

22 Bekoff, “Wild Justice,” 73.

23 Herman, Narratology beyond the Human, 194. Herman follows Plumwood’s assertion of anthropomorphism’s utility at a time of environmental crisis. See Plumwood, “Journey.”

24 Plumwood, “Journey,” 33.

25 Huff, “After Auto, after Bio,” 280.

26 Fudge, Pets, 5.

27 Fudge, Pets, 6.

28 See Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 45–61 and Feminism.

29 For a discussion of the significance of Franz Kafka’s story to both Dovey and Coetzee, see Archer-Lean, “Revisiting the ‘Problem.’”

30 Dovey, Only the Animals, 57.

31 Dovey, Only the Animals, 59.

32 Dovey, Only the Animals, 60.

33 Dovey, Only the Animals, 60.

34 Dovey, Only the Animals, 64.

35 Dovey, Only the Animals, 69–70.

36 Dovey, Only the Animals, 71.

37 Archer-Lean, “Revisiting the ‘Problem.’”

38 Haraway, When Species Meet, 41.

39 Sutherland also stresses the close connections between humans and elephants in his biography of the Victorian show-elephant Jumbo. As he expresses it, “anthropomorphism [in relation to elephants] is not out of place. Pliny, the first historian to write at length about elephants, claimed that ‘of all animals, the elephant is the closest to man in intelligence.’ And closest to the man-child in its capacity to suffer. Many zoologists would agree.” See Sutherland, Jumbo. Sutherland continues to draw attention to the elephant’s capacity for grief, offering a graphic account of the sensory assault which the baby elephant that grew up to become Jumbo must have experienced through witnessing his mother’s slow death. If this were not enough, parts of the mother elephant were then roasted and eaten, which Sutherland imagines in an appropriately grizzly manner.

40 Sutherland, Jumbo, 45.

41 Dovey, Only the Animals, 168.

42 Dovey, Only the Animals, 168–169.

43 Haraway, When Species Meet, 98. Dovey shows humans to be capricious and predatory, and what is all the more shocking is that the siege of Paris lasted for only five months. As Baumgarthuber has noted in “Ill-Starred Lives,” the city’s wealthy managed to consume 220,000 sheep, 40,000 oxen, and 12,000 pigs before running out of animals that were bred to be food. The apparently staunch companion animals, dogs and cats, were eaten first, along with 70,000 horses, before the Parisian elite turned its attention to more exotic beasts, including the “pets of young Paris,” Castor and Pollux, whose carcasses yielded 1500 kilograms of meat, which sold for sixty francs per kilogram.

44 Dovey, Only the Animals, 169–170.

45 Dovey, Only the Animals, 173.

46 Derrida, The Animal, 26.

47 Fudge, Pets, 18–19.

48 Fudge, Pets, 19.

49 Armstrong, Sheep, 50.

50 In his sensitive interpretation of the data generated by scientists to prove the sheep’s powers of recognition, Armstrong notes, “Beyond the clinical language, we can clearly hear the voices of the sheep.” See Armstrong, Sheep, 51.

51 Mathews, “Living with Animals,” 9.

52 Mathews, “Living with Animals,” 41.

53 Haraway, When Species Meet, 35, 36.

54 Hornung, Dog Boy, 11—although the narrator repeats this phrase throughout the novel whenever Romochka is faced with a choice.

55 Hornung, Dog Boy, 51.

56 Hornung, Dog Boy, 59.

57 Hornung, Dog Boy, 59.

58 Hornung, Dog Boy, 59.

59 Hornung, Dog Boy, 281.

60 Hornung, Dog Boy, 246.

61 Hornung, Dog Boy, 61.

62 Hornung, Dog Boy, 90.

63 Hornung, Dog Boy, 90.

64 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 44.

65 Hornung, Dog Boy, 81.

66 Hornung, Dog Boy, 131.

67 Rose, “How to Love.”

68 Hornung, Dog Boy, 96.

69 Creed, Stray, 100–101.

70 Hornung, Dog Boy, 135.

71 Hornung, Dog Boy, 135.

72 There are other factors that prevent Romochka from completely assimilating with the pack, including the fact that his sense of smell is nowhere near as refined. While the dogs are able to track him, wherever in the city he may be, he is left helpless several times because he is unable to smell them or to find his way home.

73 Hornung depicts similar instances of interspecies empathy in her later novel, The Last Garden, most notably when Melba, a horse, grieves for her dead fowl, Lucie, and the human protagonist Benedict is “swamped” by both her misery and his own.

74 Hornung, Dog Boy, 81.

75 Creed, Stray, 100.

76 Mathews, “Living with Animals,” 18.

77 Creed, Stray, 162.

78 Haraway, When Species Meet, 300.

79 Jolly, “Survival Writing,” 481.