The Flight of Birds

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by Joshua Lobb


  The study of literature has been central to the project of animal studies in the humanities, whether as readings of animal metaphors in works like Mario Ortiz-Robles’ Literature and Animal Studies or in the more complex analyses of the interrelations between discursive and actual animals in the work of Woodward, McHugh and Cary Wolfe. Ortiz-Robles draws attention to the ways we might use fiction to ‘imagine alternatives to the way we live with animals’; more radically, McHugh views the animal–literary nexus as a site for ‘intervention’. Her work reconfigures literary analysis to demonstrate that human–animal relations ‘raise representational concerns about the interrelations of textual and political forms’ within our broader culture. These kinds of deployments with literature as a form of reading certainly can be seen, as David Herman puts it, to ‘question assumptions about the primacy of the human—and call for a rethinking of practices based on such assumptions’.25

  But how might writing as a practice be deployed to activate the critical imperative to ‘conceptualise and respond to “real”, embodied nonhuman animals’?26 One way might be to include creative strategies alongside critical ones; in other words, to write fictocritically. Anna Gibbs establishes that fictocriticism deploys fictional devices to ‘stage’ theoretical positions; Stephen Muecke puts it more simply, saying: ‘Fictocriticism tells a story and makes an argument at the same time.’27 It’s been described as an ‘undisciplined’ form, a mode of writing that moves between different registers and genres—formal and informal, disinterested and personal, factual and fictional.28 It’s a mode I’ve adopted in at least two of the stories in The Flight of Birds. Both ‘Six Stories about Birds’ and ‘Do You Speak My Language?’ move between two discursive modes: fictional narration placed next to scholarly and archival material like articles in Science or High Court transcripts. The ‘fictional’ element is often deployed at the moment when an idea becomes too urgent for the writer to embed it in the world of the story. Rather, the writer must use storytelling devices to immerse the reader in the ideas: to provoke what Helen Flavell describes as ‘an empathetic engagement’ with the theoretical material.29 Think of the way Virginia Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ violates ‘the first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever’ and instead tells the more engaging story of Judith Shakespeare, which releases them to ‘draw … their own conclusions’.30 Fictocriticism, then, has what Gerrit Haas calls an ‘interventionist edge’: an intention to engage the reader with a political position in an intimate way through fictional tropes. Haas traces the ‘marginal/ised provenances’ of fictocriticism as it is currently understood, particularly the way its formal approaches borrow from feminist, postcolonial and queer theories. He states that fictocritical writing ‘directs attention to our dominant textual practices and the particular functions they often serve within our wider discursive practices, such as differential identity formation in relation to the world and others’.31

  Several critics in animal studies take this approach. The most obvious example is J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, which presents a range of ideas crucial to animal studies through a framework of the fictional world of Elizabeth Costello.32 But the writing of Freya Mathews, Deborah Bird Rose, Alphonso Lingis and Ian Wedde (to name only a few) also place personal anecdotes and storytelling modes alongside more conventionally scholarly analysis.33 Indeed, even Rowland’s work, which directly questions stories as productive tools, can be seen as a form of fictocriticism: in the same way that he and the wolf Brenin ‘walk together’, sharing and challenging each other’s world views, so too does Rowland’s text let storytelling travel alongside more overtly academic theorisation. These creative approaches provide critics with different ways to explore the complicated ideas at work in animal studies.

  Discussing The Lives of Animals, Cora Diamond proposes that Coetzee creates a space for his readers to approach the ‘profound disturbance’ we feel when faced with animal death and the killing of animals in a much more embodied and sympathetic way.34 Unfortunately, the explicit mode of fictocriticism does not always have the desired effect. Marjorie Garber suggests that, rather than sanctioning a more embodied engagement with the ideas of animal studies, Coetzee’s strategy might in fact ‘insulate’ the reader from Costello’s views—they are, after all, only the ideas of a fictional character. Similarly, Elizabeth Anker finds the shifting registers in the text a ‘struggle’ and ‘hopelessly muddled’.35

  In order for fictocriticism to function as a useful rhetorical approach in animal studies, perhaps a more integrated approach to the fiction–theory nexus needs to be taken up. As Marvin and McHugh put it: ‘To account for these nonhuman agency forms, we have to change our ways of doing academic work and, at the same time, work to shift notions of what constitutes creative practice as well.’36 Arriving at a more expansive way of thinking about fictocriticism, the poet and performer Hazel Smith promotes ‘a fusion and exchange of critical and creative writing’. ‘Ideally,’ she writes, fictocritical writing should create ‘a symbiotic relationship between theory/criticism and creative work, so that they feed into, and illuminate each other.’ With Roger Dean, a composer/improviser who specialises in music cognition, Smith envisions a way of using critical material in a creative work in a more immersive way, an approach they call ‘research-led practice’. In research-led practice, the practitioner begins with a theoretical concept or scholarly idea and then investigates it using creative practice as a methodological strategy. In this conceptualisation of fictocriticism, theoretical ideas manifest themselves in a creative work not in dialogue with (or opposition to) the fictional mode, but fiction becomes a critical practice in its own right. The theory is in the writing: a thinking through writing.37

  This mode of fictocriticism—what I call ‘implicit fictocriticism’—may be a more productive way to engage with these particular ideas of animal studies than the more explicitly fictocritical approach. According to Smith and Dean, in implicit fictocritical writing ideas can be transformed to inspire new ways of thinking about ethical dilemmas, and perhaps find alternative ways of interacting with the worlds around us.38 This can include the nonhuman world. As an example of implicit fictocriticism, consider Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, which as Wolfe notes can be seen as an alternative version of The Lives of Animals. In his comparison of the texts, Wolfe observes that, like The Lives of Animals, a significant concern of Disgrace is ‘our moral responsibilities to nonhuman animals’.39 Unlike the explicitly fictocritical approach taken by Coetzee in his representation of Elizabeth Costello, though, the tactic in Disgrace is to present the theoretical ideas through scene and action. For instance, late in the novel the narrative concentrates on the trauma the protagonist David Lurie faces when he participates in the killing of ‘superfluous canines’ at an animal welfare clinic. Coetzee describes Lurie’s reaction:

  He had thought he would get used to it. But that is not what happens. The more killing he assists in, the more jittery he gets. One Sunday evening, driving home in [his daughter’s] kombi, he actually has to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake.40

  Wolfe submits that the trauma is all the more powerful because it is presented not as a declaration of an idea, but an embodiment. ‘It’s an “unspeakability”’, Wolfe argues, ‘not only the unspeakability of how we treat animals … but also the unspeakability of the limits of our own thinking in confronting such a reality.’ It’s theory through experience, through writing. As Coetzee says elsewhere, ‘There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination … we understand by immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity.’41 While I think this distinction between the two texts is probably too simplistic (I am as moved by Elizabeth Costello’s articulated grief as I am by David Lurie’s mute howl), I do believe that there is room for more implicit fictocriticism as part of the rhetorical strategies
of animal studies. In this, I echo the sentiments of artist and activist Sue Coe, who states that: ‘It’s never one thing that creates change. It’s multiple exposures to different facets that creates a different heart.’ Such an embedded fictional approach to the complexities of animal studies might also support McHugh’s call to ‘locat[e] narrative as a zone of integration’ whereby ‘the content questions regarding animals and animality arise inextricably from this play with narrative form’.42

  In The Flight of Birds I have used McHugh’s notion of a ‘zone of integration’ as a crucial strategy to conceive and shape the stories I tell with birds. Each of the twelve stories that comprise my novel takes as its starting point a question or concern raised by critics in animal studies (or related fields) and tries to present a different facet of the idea through fiction. Some of the texts and ideas I draw upon will be well known to readers in the field; some sit perhaps at the edges or even cross the fence from other adjacent fields: animal behaviour and ethology, posthumanism, art and literary theory. In the writing I’ve undertaken what Haas calls ‘speculative and rhetorical exercises’ around a particular concept.43 It is not my intention to challenge or undermine arguments raised in the field of animal studies; rather, I aim to take these arguments and explore what happens when they are transposed into fiction. Each story is a ‘testing place’ taking different, even contradictory, propositions and exploring the ways they might be amplified in the fictional space.

  By taking this experimental approach, I’m drawing upon a formal strategy that can also be found in and around animal studies. In her investigations into art and animality, Elizabeth Grosz speaks of thinking speculatively when it comes to engaging with animal practices.44 Grosz’s project resonates strongly with The Flight of Birds for other reasons, too. Her tactic is to subvert the view of human as a more privileged form of animal, and human art as a practice reliant on this privilege. She asks: What happens when ‘we place the human within the animal’? Under this hypothesis, art becomes ‘the consequence, the unexpected, unpredictable effect, of the coupling of a milieu or territory with a body’: a result of an experience and, more importantly, an encounter in a place. By thinking about creative practice as animal practice, Grosz suggests that we may be able to see beyond ‘the concepts, meanings, and values art represents’ and instead immerse ourselves in art’s ‘capacity to affect and transform life’. We agree to contemplate ‘what art does’ as well as ‘what it means’.45 An acceptance of Grosz’s approach in relation to my project moves me beyond the initial questions I asked on the bridge (How can I write about birds?) to speculations about the lived knowledges of birds.

  In the next section of these notes, I will outline the particular ‘speculative and rhetorical exercises’ I undertook in each of the stories in the novel. The stories can be divided into two kinds of experiment. The first set of stories (‘Flocking’, ‘Further to Fly’, ‘The Pecking Order’, ‘Magpies’, ‘And No Birds Sing’ and ‘Aves Admittant’) are direct applications of ideas emerging from animal studies in their creative exploration of the relations of violence and care (sometimes simultaneous) between humans and birds. The second set of stories (‘What He Heard’, ‘Six Stories’, ‘Call and Response’, ‘Do You Speak My Language?’, ‘Nocturne’ and ‘The Flight of Birds’) ask broader questions, following Grosz’s approach. Can we place the human within the animal? Can we think beyond the differences between humans and birds and begin to immerse ourselves in the world of birds? Or, to pose it as a writer’s question: What might a bird’s story look like?

  Like all experiments, the stories don’t always turn out the way I expected. Sometimes the ideas are overshadowed by the human characters’ (and writer’s) anthropocentric blind spots. Sometimes a critical point loses its urgency when absorbed by fiction. They are undoubtedly human stories and it is possible to read the represented birds merely as projections of the protagonist’s psyche. Nonetheless, there is a concerted attempt to devise tactics to break this human control, and to discover glimpses of other subjectivities. As Plumwood says: ‘Considering your own interests does not imply that you cannot also consider others’ interests.’46 I don’t pretend to provide solid proofs, irrefutable answers to the questions I’ve posed. Indeed, one of the benefits of writing as a critical practice is that it provides sites of provocation rather than resolution. It allows for encounters.

  Encounters in Flight

  What He Heard

  This story is my first attempt at putting into practice the question ‘What might a bird’s story look like?’ It is informed by Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of ‘Umwelten’ as described in his ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men’ in which von Uexküll argues that the earth comprises habitats formed by the sensory values of particular animals or groups of animals.47 An Umwelt creates a different ‘relationship between a living subject and its object’, unique to each animal’s consciousness.48 Part of the point of the story is that it is extremely difficult to get away from our own perceptions and preconceptions of the world. In other words, our understanding of our environment is tied to our own hegemonic ‘centrisms’. The dog views the environment in the bush in terms of ‘scent lines’. The human transforms the bush to reflect his own anxieties: eucalypts become ‘talon-scratched’, rocks are ‘ossified’. But the story is also about reckoning with other ways to engage with the world, ‘manifold and varied as the animals themselves’.49 An Umwelt contains within it different sets of relations between species such as birds and flowers, and ticks and mammals. These change according to the needs of the agents contained within it. Building on von Uexküll, Grosz writes:

  There are no stable objects, equally and always perceived in the same way for all living things; no one sun, moon, or stars, just as there is no single space or field, time or rhythm, no universal within which we can locate all living things. One and the same object on entering different Umwelten becomes different. Each species perceives what it needs and can use from its world.50

  What happens, then, if we consider a relationship to the space which is different to the human? Can we creatively imagine another animal’s Umwelt? One of the things I determined very early on in the project as a whole was that I couldn’t attempt to represent a bird’s voice: this, I believe, could only lead to the clumsiest kind of ‘speaking for’. Nevertheless, I was interested in providing spaces where we might imagine a nonhuman environment. What I have tried to create in ‘What He Heard’ is a meaningful space for the lyrebird to inhabit that also provides us, as humans, with an opportunity to perceive it. The story contains the only scene in the work as a whole where a human is not present.

  The lyrebird is scratching the dirt in the gravelly corner. He lifts his head. His larynx vibrates. Out of his beak come three short notes. The second is microtonally higher than the first and third. This is followed by a long high trill. The noise he is making is not full of sadness or pain. The lyrebird is not thinking about lost or abandoned children. His head pivots. The dwindling light points out a speck in the dirt. The lyrebird pecks and then he sings his song again.

  Granted, the story is still written by a human and using a human mode of communication. But part of my strategy to avoid anthropocentric representation has been to allow for the bird’s perspective to be acknowledged, even if it can’t be realised. What the lyrebird is thinking is not depicted. Rather, readers are given the viewpoint in terms of negatives: ‘the lyrebird is not thinking about lost or abandoned children’; his song ‘is not full of sadness or pain’. Readers are kept on the outside of the lyrebird’s pivoting head, but are given the opportunity to speculate on what the bird might be thinking. We could use this, as von Uexküll suggests, ‘to build up the animal’s specific world with them’.51

  Six Stories about Birds, with Seven Questions

  In order to consider what a bird’s story might look like it is also necessary to determine the shape and function of human stories about birds. We can compare the two and show up the w
ays our stories undermine our relationships with birds, even those stories that aim to strengthen the connection. In this explicitly fictocritical work I uncover the myriad ways we frame birds so that they are, to use Plumwood’s conception of instrumentalism, ‘denied, subsumed in or remade to coincide with human interests’.52 The birds become helpers and punishers in fairy tales; sacred objects or fashion accessories or symbols of power in the stories we tell about our past; markers of spirituality and transcendence in our poetry and music. Even in ostensibly ‘objective’ scientific discourses, birds are remade within human structures of knowledge.

  A larger framing device for ‘Six Stories about Birds’ is Adrian Franklin’s essay ‘Relating to Birds in Postcolonial Australia’.53 Franklin carefully traces European settlers’ interactions with Australian birds, before moving on to the founding of organisations like the Australasian Ornithologist Union in 1901 and the Gould League of Bird Lovers in 1909, with animals being seen as exemplars of the exotic bush to specimens that can be recorded and controlled. More important for my project is his examination of contemporary Australians’ relationship with birds. Franklin presents a complex account of human–bird interactions: some establish an anthropocentric hierarchy of owner and pet; others present a potential for mutual care. In this they echo Grosz’s vision of a spectrum of human–nonhuman interactions, from ‘worlds they sometimes share with us, [to] worlds waiting to be invented, [to] worlds that may inform our understanding of our own inhabited worlds’.54

 

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