Comparative Literature, Companion Species and the Camel

Abstract

This article brings together theories of both real and literary animals’ readability within Animal Studies and of untranslatability within comparative literature more broadly. Through a focus on Ibrāhīm al-Kūnī’s al-Tibr, in comparison with Mahasweta Devi's ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha’, I read the central human-animal encounters through both their cultural specificity and the wider ‘animal tropes’ to which they point, situating them within local tradition and the flows of world literature. I then shift to an examination of how both texts, through interspecies encounter, theorize the very processes of readability and comparability which they invite. Animals, I suggest, emerge as sites of ‘secrets’, hinting at the dictates of censorship as they shield symbolic import, or at the local which must be preserved from appropriation, and, above all, at a dimension of ‘otherness’ which can never be fully grasped. In al-Tibr, I examine this through a reading of the camel as ‘ āya’ (sign), a central term within Arabic cosmology, and, in ‘Pterodactyl’, through Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's influential reading of ‘ethical singularity’ in the story.