Thinking Like a Rat: Grotesque Interspecies Relations, Narrative Hospitality And Posthuman Assemblages in Katherina Hacker’s Die Gäste

Abstract

This article analyses how Katharina Hacker’s 2022 novel Die Gäste experiments with interspecies relations that upend the anthropocentric view of planetary life to bring into view an ethics of narrative hospitality. Focusing on the role of the animals, especially the rat protagonists, I argue that the novel employs anthropomorphism to refute the reductive view of the rat as a lower-order animal without cognition and emotions, while also rejecting the common allegorization of the animal protagonist as a human actor in animal disguise. Drawing on the Kayser versus Bahktin debate of the grotesque in dialogue with posthumanist theories, the article shows how Hacker combines the carnivalesque strand of the grotesque with anecdotal rendition as narrative modes that make possible the kind of interspecies assemblages that posthumanism advocates. By inviting the reader ‘to think like a rat’, the novel explores ways of overcoming speciecism and human exceptionalism in favour of an entangled and relational world view.