Found in Narration: Nonhuman Voices in Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth

Magdalena Jagodzka

doi:10.51865/jlsl.2021.11

Abstract

This article delves into the problem of nonhuman subjectivity in two literary texts: Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise with the first-person tortoise narration, and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth that employs the collective primate narrator. While nonhumans cannot actively participate in the act of creation of the text, their presence in the story, arranged by the author, conveys multiple meanings. Considerations of the narrative techniques are critical for negotiating the relevance of nonhuman actors. I argue that although each author finds different methods of giving voice to nonhumans and both ensure practical significance of animal particularity, nonhuman subjectivity should not be perceived as a fixed value of the presented literary texts.

Highlights

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution[1] has been shaking the foundations of claims about the distinctiveness of the human species even though humans reluctantly admit that the border between them and nonhumans[2] is far thinner than it has been engrained throughout the ages
This article delves into the problem of nonhuman subjectivity in two literary texts: Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise with the first-person tortoise narration, and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth that employs the collective primate narrator
I argue that each author finds different methods of giving voice to nonhumans and both ensure practical significance of animal particularity, nonhuman subjectivity should not be perceived as a fixed value of the presented literary texts

Summary

Multidimensional Relationship between Nonhumans and Literature

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution[1] has been shaking the foundations of claims about the distinctiveness of the human species even though humans reluctantly admit that the border between them and nonhumans[2] is far thinner than it has been engrained throughout the ages. As ‘we do not know enough about the role of conscious thought in determining human behaviour to extrapolate to any other species’, the attempts to embrace nonhuman cognition using not yet fully recognised human awareness may be futile.[11] This faulty logic leads to imposing questionable assumptions about nonhumans, and thereby over-interpreting their inner life. Whilst ‘the sophisticated descriptive models zoology, and the biological sciences more generally, provide for giving a comprehensive account of animal life are arguably infallible, or at least irrefutable in terms of the methods used to advance its insights’, literature as ‘the discipline within the humanities best equipped to account for the figurative character of our engagement with the world’ proves to be an essential tool for ethical, political and scientific considerations[18]

The Independent Nonhuman Narrator

Conclusion