Let me say first, that my editor teases me constantly because every time he calls me I have a new animal story. I tell him about how I am hand feeding a malnourished tortoise, or about how my cat likes to go on walks with me and my dog, often traveling with us for several miles, or about the raccoons that make mayhem of the fountain in our back yard, washing the avocadoes from our tree until the entire fountain is a pond of soupy guacamole. I have a lot of animals and I think about animals a lot, though which is the consequence of the other, I would be hard pressed to say.
Animals in fiction are difficult. They are often used symbolically, as the rabbit is in For Whom The Bell Tolls, or humorously as in Flush. My early work was riddled with animals. I couldn't write a story without one. But why? The animals were hardly ever central to the story line, and yet they kept appearing. In The Violin Face, there is a praying mantis named Henry. Eddie gives it to Thora as a gift, and towards the end of Chapter 1, she thinks: "I thought about Henry, and his complicated jade body, and the box with the mesh lid. And it seemed like there was something terribly sad about it because he was supposed to mean something because he was a gift, but he didn’t because he was just a bug and alive, and he couldn’t take all the weight of having to mean something on top of that. Like we were trapping him, not just in the box, but by making him be a present at all."
This snippet of Thora's thinking is as close as I have come in my work to expressing my own feelings about animals, which are in turn deeply indebted to the work of J.M. Coetzee. Not only do animals provoke for humans memories of another life, a life without consciousness, without ego or id. But they represent, in much of Coetzee's work and in mine, the unknowable face of the Other in a Levinas-ian sense. The thing that can never be incorporated into the Same, into the Self. The speechless thing that nonetheless sees, feels, understands, but which cannot and will not share its experience with you. The part of creation we cannot communicate with.
In this way, animals represent for me, not only in fiction, but in life, the central mystery of the universe. They challenge the ontology of Heidegger by their very voiceless presence. They complicate theories of subjectivity and objectivity. They thwart most systems of thought. If you don't believe me, look up C.S. Lewis's answer in the Screw Tape Letters to the question of animals in an afterlife. I learned early on that systems of thought that ignored or unsatisfactorily answered the question of animals, were ignoring other important things as well. Any ethical thinking must take animals into account, or as Levinas makes so evident, there is a danger of treating humans like animals. Thus slavery, thus the Holocaust, thus the Armenian Genocide. I believe for myself, and I think Coetzee would agree, that until we change our fundamental thinking about animals, genocide will not become an anomaly but a recurring historical norm. After all, what do we really mean when we say, "treated like an animal"?
If we use the phrase about the treatment of a human being, we mean that the human's dignity will be violated. When we use it about animals, we mean that our own purpose for the animal will override the animal's purpose for itself. A cow is not free to be a cow, but will instead be treated as and transformed into Beef. Even the custodial thinking of Green Peace-ers, while certainly less objectionable, reflects a worldview that assigns animals the role of retarded children: innocents needing proper care from the capable hands of the human race because they do not have the capacity to understand or control the events of the world to arrange what would be best for them in the long run. They propose, in fact, that animals become wards of the state. Anyone who has ever resided, even for a short period, in foster care would warn you that this model is deeply flawed and never works out well for the ward.
I think cats are a good place to start when considering animals. If you have ever spent a good amount of time with domesticated cats, you will appreciate that they aren't quite like any other animal and that whatever their experience of reality is, it departs almost entirely from human experience. It is impossible to look into a cat's eyes, those otherworldly globes, even as you stroke it, even as it lies on your chest, drooling from pleasure, and not know that you have no idea what the cat truly is. Cats may be angels in disguise or demons. But they are the least terrestrial of domesticated animals and their relationship to the world is the most evidently mysterious. Which is why cats are associated with witches, and also why, at least I think so, they recur time after time in Murakami's work, usually as the instigation of a descent into the unreal or the otherworldly.
I am most interested in cats because people don't have very much desire to tell them what to do. Cat-worship, in an Egyptian sense, has died out and yet the current relationship between humans and domesticated cats is very close to such a practice. You care for a cat, you stroke it and you feed it and what does it give you in return? Not obedience, not even loyalty really. It does not help you hunt or track or protect like a dog would. While a well trained dog would never attack you or bite you even under duress, a cat thinks nothing of clawing or biting if it feels its autonomy is being violated. You do not teach cats tricks to prove your mastery over them nor do you dress them up in human clothes, as has become the fad with small dogs.
If you are a cat lover, you have a cat simply because you want a cat around. Because you love them and you are honored that in their own mysterious way they love you back. I often think that if aliens were ever to come to this planet, they could not possibly be as alien as cats are. As strange and removed from the world of ideas and logic.
So I think it is a good idea, if you are writing fiction, to think about cats and make sure that the world you write about accommodates cats. If there is no room for the otherness of a cat, then you are writing a fantasy, a purely human dream created to reconfirm your own suspicions of the world. For myself, in my attempts to write a new version of magical realism, cats are really the only way I can think about it. I have no interest, as Murakami does, in descending into the world of cats. Of leaving the terrestrial in favor of the other worldly, cats being the most evident portal to other worlds. Instead, I want to build a realism that accommodates both humans and cats, both the self and the other. Whatever the gap is between reality and our perception of reality, I want my work to make it begin to glow and become more visible. I want the static of the gap to fill the work until it is vibrating, pulsing, and eventually combustible.
In closing, I must tell you, the tortoise I have been carefully nursing back to health, hand feeding three times a day, rubbing with tinctures and ointments, swaddling with heat lamps and towels, has died.
I don't know where she's gone now that she is no longer in her strange little body. That wrinkly skin, that unreadable face. But now it's my job to bury her in the garden. My job to mourn for a creature I never understood and face a world that is far more mysterious than we will ever accept.
Comments