Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings by Thangam Ravindranathan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings by Thangam Ravindranathan Derek Schilling (bio) Thangam Ravindranathan. Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings. Northwestern UP, 2020. 253 pp. ISBN 9780810140714 and 9780810140721. So forceful in the 1990s was the new historicist turn away from deconstructive readings of literature and philosophy that once familiar critical gestures have, in the new millennium, come to acquire an obdurate strangeness. Readers who enter (unawares?) a textual thicket without hors-texte find themselves wandering, and wondering if language is so wrought as to endlessly undo the work of reference it was enlisted to support. The eccentricity of deconstruction today betrays an empiricist and quantitative bent within literary studies; it is likely also the by-product of retrospective assessments of the dual legacy of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, a legacy that has been dissected from the standpoint of discourse, institutions (including that of “French Theory”), and even biography. In mistaking deconstruction for its outward manifestations and treating it as historical artifact, might a generation of scholars have come to forget that an animal as restive as deconstructive reading was never fully domesticated in the first place? At its bristling best, always unequal to itself, it has remained —like poetry in Derrida’s celebrated reading “Che cos’è la poesia?”—a hedgehog of sorts, now gathered into an impossibly compact, inscrutable ball, now unfolding its spines the better to probe its surroundings. The exemplary Behold an Animal reminds us that, even as we take pains to measure the literary record against such hypostases as reality, history, or materiality, we must not give up on literariness and on paradox as a means to place thought under tension. Far from a critical approach circumscribed in a place and a time, suggests Ravindranathan, deconstruction continues to name the very possibility of reading. Its title borrowed from a quip by Nietzsche on the impossibility of definition (“Behold, a mammal”), Behold an Animal turns on a question that is simple only on its face: “What do (we think) we see when (we think) we see an animal in a text?” (5). G.W. Leibniz’s distinction [End Page 844] between (unconscious, immediate) perception and (conscious, reflexive) apperception is relevant here (199): texts ask of us, argues Ravindranathan, not only that we identify or recognize animals when they appear literally in a story, but that we follow their tracks into corners of the text where they are not, are no longer, or have yet to appear. Acutely attentive to the “distribution” (5) of realism and un-realism in the figural economy of late modern and contemporary texts, the author maintains that animals call for peculiar forms of readerly attention, as if to acknowledge their receding presence in everyday life and, indeed, in the biosphere itself. Where animals—say, a draught horse—once served in works of literature to index the real and to foster, following Barthes, a “reality effect,” works by such post-realists as Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Éric Chevillard, Marie NDiaye, and Marie Darrieussecq posit animals as “riddled entities, ‘vague’ places where literature most self-consciously admits the weirdness of its commerce with the world” (4). The animal calls for “exorbitant” readings that allow us to follow complex pathways of thought along which reference breaks down and a generative intertextuality takes hold. Thus Ravindranathan purports to read core texts of fiction “with” key moments in the history of philosophy (Blanchot on the siren’s song; Levinas on the concentrationary guard dog Bobby in “The Name of a Dog”; Deleuze on Lewis Carroll’s Alice; the sorities paradox of the heap and the grain of sand . . .), or “with” other literary texts, whether by the same author or by others, from Homer to Michaux. Barking dogs in NDiaye’s En famille put us on the trail of other canines in Mon cœur à l’étroit, Trois femmes puissantes, or Ladivine; Chevillard’s Sans l’ourang-outan prompts a re-reading of voice, language, and animality in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the rue Morgue” with La Fontaine’s fables as a stopover point. Any reader who harbors prejudice against the literary subfield of animal studies should be prepared to abandon their preconceptions from...