Abstract
Following the recent “animal turn” in literary studies, which has inspired scholars to revisit traditional human-centered interpretations of texts narrated by animals, this article focuses on the convergence of animal studies and trauma theory. It offers new animal-centered close readings of Tolstoy’s Strider and Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, paying attention to animal pain rather than seeing it, and the text as a whole, as an allegory of human society. Like many other authors of literary fiction featuring animal narrators, Tolstoy and Bulgakov employ a kind of empathic ventriloquism to narrate animal pain, an important project which, however, given the status of both the animal and trauma outside human language, and thus susceptible to being distorted by it, produces inauthentic discourse (animal-like, rather than animal narration); therefore, these authors get closest to animal pain, not through sophisticated narration, but through the use of ellipses and onomatopoeia. Ultimately, any narratological difficulty with animal focalization is minor compared to the ethical imperative of anti-speciesist animal-standpoint criticism, and the goal is to reconceive the status of animals in literature so as to change their ontological place in the world, urging that this critical work and animal rights advocacy be continued in the classroom.
Highlights
Following the recent “animal turn” in literary studies, which has inspired scholars to revisit traditional human-centered interpretations of texts narrated by animals, such as Theodore Ziolkowski’s catalogue of “talking dogs” [2], this article focuses on nonhuman animals as “a limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power”: the convergence of animal studies and trauma theory, both of which
The present purpose is to reorient ostensibly animal-centered but human-centric interpretations so as to demonstrate what texts such as Strider and The Heart of a Dog reveal about animal narrators and animals in general, urging that this critical work and animal rights advocacy be continued in the classroom
Tolstoy’s Strider and Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog have been read as social and political commentaries, and even critics who have focused on the first-person animal narrators in these short novels, through philological, historical, political, and narratological lenses, have seen the animal experience as Humanities 2016, 5, 84; doi:10.3390/h5040084
Summary
Following the recent “animal turn” in literary studies, which has inspired scholars to revisit traditional human-centered interpretations of texts narrated by animals, such as Theodore Ziolkowski’s catalogue of “talking dogs” [2], this article focuses on nonhuman animals as “a limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power”: the convergence of animal studies and trauma theory, both of which “raise questions about how one can give testimony to an experience that cannot be spoken or that may be distorted by speaking it” ([3], pp. 3–4). Tolstoy’s Strider and Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog have been read as social and political commentaries, and even critics who have focused on the first-person animal narrators in these short novels, through philological, historical, political, and narratological lenses, have seen the animal experience as Humanities 2016, 5, 84; doi:10.3390/h5040084 www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities. 573) discourse of animal trauma and the empathic ventriloquism invented by human authors to vocalize, and focalize, nonhuman animal perspectives To demonstrate that it is, possible to avoid aestheticizing animal violence and cannibalizing their experience for human gain, I engage in what Donovan calls “animal-standpoint criticism.”. In the view that “animals are seats of consciousness–subjects, not objects; that they are individuals with stories/biographies of their own, not undifferentiated masses; that they dislike pain, enjoy pleasure; that they want to live and thrive; that in short they have identifiable desires and needs, many of which we human animals share with them” ([14], p. 204)
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