Extinct and Undying Species: Animal Fetishism in Green Lion and How the Dead Dream

Abstract

With theoretical grounding in a materialist ecocritical approach, this article considers two recent novels that stage human longing for contact with critically endangered species: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Green Lion (2015) and Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream (2007). The article traces parallels between the characters’ animal fetishism—their mystical beliefs in the healing powers of animals—and what Nicole Shukin has theorized as an emerging ethos of neoliberal capitalism that obscures environmental destruction and nonhuman suffering by foregrounding animal vitality and flourishing within the capitalist system. Both novels invite a critical stance towards their respective characters’ animal fetishism, yet through the texts’ own animal representations the novels risk rendering nonhumans as spectral and ahistorical signifiers, contributing to the circulation of commercialized animal imagery. The novels thus risk colluding with a market regime bent on reproducing impressions of “undying animals,” as the sixth mass extinction of species unfolds.