Abstract
Animals, writes Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘exist in a state of perpetual vanishing’: they haunt human concerns, but rarely appear as themselves. This is especially notable in contemporary Scottish fiction. While other national literatures often reflect the ‘animal turn’ in contemporary theory, the number of twenty-first-century Scottish novels concerned with human–animal relations remains disproportionately small. Looking at a broad cross-section of recent and understudied novels, including Mandy Haggith’s Bear Witness (2013), Ian Stephen’s A Book of Death and Fish (2014), Andrew O’Hagan’s The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (2010), Malachy Tallack’s The Valley at the Centre of the World (2018), James Robertson’s To Be Continued (2016), and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border (2015) highlights the marginalisation of both nonhuman animals and texts centred on them. The relative absence of engagement with animal studies in Scottish fiction and criticism suggests new opportunities for reevaluating the formulation of environmental concerns in a Scottish context. By moving away from the unified concepts of ‘the land’ to a perspective that includes the precarious relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and their environment, these texts highlight the need for greater, and more nuanced, engagement with fictional representations of nonhuman animals.
Highlights
In John Burnside’s short story ‘Slut’s Hair’, Janice, an abused wife, sits alone in her flat after a grotesque scene of forced amateur dental extraction by her husband Rob
The novels suggest that individuals can only be understood in relation to a larger community, human and nonhuman, and that a purely anthropocentric perspective needs to be replaced with one that takes account of the importance of interspecies connections. While both novels acknowledge the long agricultural heritage of their chosen regions, they do not dwell in nostalgia or romanticise the difficulties faced by the modern farming and fishing industries
There may be more accounts of Scottish birds than in 1934, but in fiction, certainly, human concerns are still frequently removed from a concern with their environment, while those texts that depict the comingling of species often emerge from and depict lands remote from the urban population centres, and are, perhaps, given a marginalised position in the ensuing critical accounts
Summary
In John Burnside’s short story ‘Slut’s Hair’, Janice, an abused wife, sits alone in her flat after a grotesque scene of forced amateur dental extraction by her husband Rob. Burnside’s story, where the mouse simultaneously exists as itself, a marker of the real, and as a symbol or metonym for human experience While this destabilisation is a common feature of literary representations of animals, the mouse’s inexplicable disappearance is curious in its own right, and represents a general trend in contemporary Scottish fiction. The pairings are separated according to the three central categories into which nonhuman animals are traditionally placed: the agricultural, the domestic companion, and the wild None of these novels have been extensively discussed in Scottish criticism; each might be considered, whether in terms of authorial profile, relation to the author’s other works, or generic and political perspectives, to be somewhat marginalised. Looking at these six texts in relation, both reveals the necessity of incorporating key themes in literary animal study in Scottish criticism and illuminates the peculiar vanishing of nonhuman animals in recent fiction
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