The Flight of Birds
Page 17
‘Six Stories about Birds’ is also the place where I begin to explore a stylistic strategy around naming conventions in the novel, one which calls into question the decisions we make to name (or to not name) different animal species in fiction. My decision not to name the characters in ‘What He Heard’ (instead, referring to them as ‘the man’, ‘the dog’ and ‘the lyrebird’) may not be noticed by the reader, but the apparent inconsistency around naming in ‘Six Stories about Birds’ is more overt: humans remain unnamed, but the budgerigar is given the name ‘Charlotte’. The decisions made by writers to name or not to name characters has been considered by literary theorists in many different, sometimes oppositional ways. For the purposes of my project I have drawn upon two critical arguments. The first is the premise that the act of not naming characters renders them powerless. Sam Sacks traces the ways that unnamed characters is a trope in a range of narratives about disempowered subjects: in dystopian fiction, in political parables, and in stories that focus on ‘those treated as background extras in the primary story lines of history’.55 In a slightly different way, D.A. Miller points up a hierarchy of value implicit in the naming conventions in realist writing. He argues that realism divides characters into two categories: ‘narratable’ and ‘non-narratable’. Narratable characters are those central to the narrative world, whose histories and thoughts must therefore be included in as much detail as possible; while non-narratable characters are those whose histories are not elucidated, whose thoughts are not explored or, in some cases, whose names are not even worth knowing.56 In the early drafting stages of The Flight of Birds it became clear to me that the protagonist’s grief places him in such a state that precludes his own sense of worth; as such, he does not deem himself worthy of narration. (This will become explicit in later stories like ‘And No Birds Sing’: the narration is full of provisional statements like ‘He’s not sure’; ‘It could be’—so much so that the character almost-admits that ‘there’s a smooth surface between himself and th[e] knowledge [of himself]’).
But if I wasn’t going to name the other protagonists, why name Charlotte? Other critics argue that the act of naming another subject (real or fictional) can in fact be seen as a form of domination, what Sigrid King calls naming’s ‘link to the exercise of power’.57 Historically, certain political organisations have used the naming (or, more accurately, re-naming) of oppressed groups to assert a discursive authority over them: European governments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries changing Jewish names to regulate tax collection; US slave owners changing Africans’ names to indicate ownership. The names inscribed on the individuals were often ironic (Washington, Jefferson) or belittling (Niemand/nobody, Wanzreich/rich in bedbugs). In fiction, writers use similar tactics to push their characters into comic positions (Dickens’ ‘Barnacle’ family in Little Dorrit, for instance), expose their shortcomings through ironic counterpoint (in the same novel ‘Edmund Sparkler’ is a dimwitted social climber), or even to denigrate (the frivolously named ‘Tattycoram’ for the Meagles’ replacement daughter/plaything). As King notes, these naming practices are a form of subjugation through which the characters find ‘only limitation’.58
In the context of the representation of animals, both of these theorisations—to name or not to name—hold particular potency. The decision not to name an animal can be seen as an act of devaluing the animal’s specific identity. In the child’s game of ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’, nonhuman animals are most often referred to in generic terms. A human may be located as ‘William Shakespeare’ or ‘Marie Curie’, but nonhumans are usually ‘an elephant’ or ‘a rhinoceros’, rather than a particular mammal living on the plains of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Rouben Cholakian calls this an ‘absorption’ of the singular into the collective, of the specific into the general.59
Part of my project has been to treat humans in the same way: to distance readers from the human subjects, perhaps even to encourage readers to regard the human characters as zoological specimens. A young man sitting in a granny flat that seems like a cage; a grown man devising more discursive cages for himself. Conversely, on the rare occasions when I do name animals the act of naming serves to subjugate or control them. Charlotte is one of only two characters named in the novel. In the story, several names are considered for the budgerigar, each of them working to undermine her identity: from the infantilising ‘Bunty’ to the bizarrely reclassifying choices of ‘Tiger’ or ‘Zebra’. Once Charlotte is chosen (an oblique reference to another fictional animal), this becomes a fixed term for the bird, overriding even her own corporeality: when one bird dies, the name simply transfers to another bird’s body.
The other individual named in The Flight of Birds is Peter, the hapless worker in the story ‘Magpies’. Like Charlotte, Peter’s agency is continuously undermined: talked about rather than talked with. The narrator reflects: ‘When he’s out of earshot—or when we assume he’s out of earshot—our conversation turns towards him.’ The naming of Peter separates him from the collective camaraderie of the office workers; in Cholakian’s words, ‘collectivization serves a depersonalizing purpose: it defines a primordial lack and original hurt’.60 In this way, ‘Six Stories about Birds’ begins a larger conversation about the stories we tell about all animals—human and nonhuman—and the damage our stories can cause.
Call and Response
‘Call and Response’ returns to von Uexküll’s idea of Umwelten, this time concentrating on the environments made by aural perception. In his essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ John Berger presents a vision of the human–nonhuman confrontation in which two species look ‘across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-comprehension’.61 But what happens if, rather than looking, we listen to nonhuman animals?
Here, I imagine two ways we could bridge the aural abyss. The first is to conceive a cross-species harmony: a song that incorporates all of ‘nature’. In this, it resonates with the ornithologist F.S. Mathews’ belief that ‘birds with their music are the revelation of a greater world, one with just such a boundless horizon as that which we view from the mountain’s summit marvelling that it is indeed the same narrow world we live in’.62 The other is to assert a combative relationship between Umwelten, one which Frédéric Neyrat says ‘humans tend to deny their precarious status as living beings intertwined with the becoming of the ecosphere’.63 Neither of these is adequate: in the story the protagonist struggles to find an authentic way to perform what Alex Aisher and Vinita Damodaran call ‘the multispecies assemblages that come together in place’.64
But how might we do this? In ‘Call and Response’, I highlight the inadequacies of our representations of nonhuman voices. The narrator makes a range of comparisons to try to describe the bird calls he hears. These analogies are deliberately clumsy, phrases that would make his ‘literary mother roll over in her grave’:
One call sounded like the release of a half-filled balloon, the spittly plastic ends flapping together as it zips around the room. One trebled like a baby giggling; another, a polite cough: short, tentative, as if it was asking permission to join in the fun. Another was a melodious metal detector: slow metronomic beeps and then, as it neared its target, increasing in tempo and delight. It was impossible to get the descriptions right. One was R2D2; another was Monkey from the TV show, whistling for his cloud. Another, an off-kilter Mr Whippy van: half a phrase of ‘Für Elise’ and then a sudden dissonant clang.
These analogies don’t seem to affect the birds in the bush, but one bird in the story is harmed by symbolic representations. When the human is kept awake by the call of a koel the bird is subsumed into images that are just as clumsy as the comparisons of the birds in the bush, but these ones are also unsettling and violent: the call hurts ‘like a migraine that was gripping my cheekbones’, it ‘gashes’ and ‘hacks’ and ‘lacerates’. By imposing these images onto the bird’s call the human is able to justify an actual assault against the bird: ‘I grip the splintery handle and smash the br
oom into the trunk [of the koel’s tree] … I hack the trunk again, and again, and then again.’ The experiment I undertake here demonstrates the inadequacy of metaphor to create a meaningful space of encounter; we need other ways of depicting cross-species attentiveness. Perhaps we can return again to Grosz’s speculative readings of nonhuman practices. Grosz conceives the songbird’s call as ‘the opening up of the world itself to the force of taste, appeal, the bodily, pleasure, desire—the very impulses behind all art’.65 The narrator of ‘Call and Response’ is still trapped by his own linguistic snarls, but Grosz gives me another means of thinking about the way we might write stories about birds. In challenging the distinction we conventionally make between human and nonhuman art production, I might begin to change our way of thinking, from ‘How can I write about birds?’ to ‘What might a bird’s story look like?’ or, in this case, ‘What might a bird’s song sound like?’
In the final moments perhaps the koel is able to free himself from the discursive control of the narrator. The narrator can’t stop the koel from calling out and, defeated, the human stumbles back into his house. The koel is left alone ‘crying into the void, waiting for a response’. It’s only in the last sentence of the story that the word ‘koel’ is used to describe the bird—although this is a human name it is better than having his song called a ‘lacerating whoop’. The bird, on his own, and on his own terms, keeps calling. To build on Woodward’s discussion of the meeting points between humans and other animals, moments like these are ‘surely indicative not of the inscrutability of the animals themselves but of the humans’ inability to respond to being addressed by a nonhuman animal’.66
Flocking
One of the focuses of the story ‘Flocking’ is the ways we use groups and communities to make us feel safe, but also the ways these collectives can trap us in confining systems of meaning. The story is enlivened by an observation made by Philip Armstrong and Laurence Simmons in their work Knowing Animals. They point out that the concept of collective terms or nouns of multitude first came into language through the practices of mediaeval European hunters who used collective terms to characterise and control their prey.67 But what happens to the subjects once they’ve been collected? Berger famously asks us to read Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows through the lens of ‘this is the last painting he completed before he died’.68 In my mind, the painting has already been infected with death: above the thick waves of yellow wheat hover a murder of crows. Why a ‘murder’? How better to control nonhuman animals than to describe them in abstract and often disparaging nouns: a pitying of turtledoves, a siege of herons, a weight of albatrosses? The nouns ‘demonise’ the birds, transforming them into a threatening ‘contagious transport of impersonal affects’. Armstrong and Simmons conclude that the birds don’t operate as individuals but ‘as one’; they have been discursively ‘herded’. Collective nouns, then, are another example of human stories about birds.
How might humans come to understand this discursive control? How might we experience this in our own bodies? In ‘Flocking’, the human boy, like the birds, is incorporated into a range of collective nouns: the birds of the subtitles in the story, and also ‘a seminar of students, a shuffle of colleagues, a kinship of a new family’. Like the birds, he becomes part of a discourse, ‘paper-thin’, not real.
Do You Speak My Language?
On the surface, ‘Do You Speak My Language?’ appears to be the story in the novel least concerned with the lived experiences of birds. The apparent focal point of the story—the court case brought against Men at Work—is an entanglement of human devising. However, moving alongside this discussion is a continuing exploration of the question ‘What might a bird’s story look like?’ The emphasis here is on challenging the dichotomy human–animal and reconfiguring it into Grosz’s notion of ‘the human within the animal’. Thus, the question generates another: ‘What might a human’s voice sound like if we thought of it through avian terms?’ As in ‘Six Stories’ I begin with the flipside question: ‘What might a bird’s voice sound like if we thought of it through human terms?’ Many of the scholarly and cultural texts I include in the story value humans over birds, constructing a human-centred vision that is as narrow as the law’s tight grasp on creative collaboration. Sarvasy’s notion of ‘warblish’ is less focused on bird calls than it is on human manipulation of the calls into stories; the scientific accounts of kookaburra kinship make a point of comparing the birds’ behaviour to human social structures.69
However, the fictocritical context also creates a space for these accounts to be viewed from multiple angles and thus undermine a singular hegemonic control. In order to promote a multifaceted conversation, I concentrate on a communicative act common to both humans and birds: that of repetition. In some contexts a repetition of a phrase or an idea is part of creative and collaborative processes (as in the singing of a round or chorus songs or intertextual homage) or an indicator of a community (as in shared language or intergenerational activities). In other contexts, though, repetition is treated punitively (as in cases of copyright infringement or mimicry used to deceive rival birds) or as a pathology (the spiralling thoughts of depression or obsessive-compulsive disorders). By intermingling these different ways of thinking in a ‘speculative exercise’ the work sparks new ways of thinking about the creative act—for both humans and birds. In the end, building on Jonathan Lethem’s reading of language as a ‘commons’, it emphasises the productive ways we might consider connections and commonalities across species lines.70 The question might become: ‘What might a bird–human story look like?’
Further to Fly
One of the significant theoretical frames for this story is Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the ‘contact zone’, which enters into discussions about human–nonhuman interaction via Donna Haraway.71 Pratt defines contact zones as meeting places between cultures; specifically points of ‘highly asymmetrical relations of power’, as in the relationship between invader and first inhabitants or masters and slaves. The contact zone is usually viewed as a discursive site, in which one person’s culture is suppressed, transmogrified or even destroyed by another’s. The contact zone I’ve created in my story is, initially at least, more literal—but it becomes discursive. What was central for me in the story was the way the human takes this moment of impact and refashions it to erase the bird from his life story. ‘Such are the dynamics of language, writing, and representation in contact zones,’ Pratt states.72 The stories we tell about our moments of contact with animals affect real animals. Many of us are able to recall ‘The time I hit a … [bird, or other nonhuman animal]’, but the stories we tell to structure these events don’t often change our future actions. Researchers into the effect of human–animal road accidents have shown that there is little or no correlation between human awareness of the violence cars can cause animals and the adoption of mitigation strategies to reduce these impacts.73 Rather, what happens is that drivers tend to reduce the trauma by creating narratives that mitigate culpability (‘It just jumped out at me’) or obfuscate the death of the animal with a concern for something else (‘The damage to the car was negligible’). Daniel Lunney argues that this creates ‘a culture of denial’. Like the protagonist of ‘Further to Fly’, we raise a discursive shield to protect ourselves from facing the injury or death of another living being.
The later sections of the story make textually manifest Melissa Boyde’s discussion of ‘vested and invested interests’ in the stories we tell about animals: the animals we choose to represent and the ones whose traces we remove from our narratives.74 I employ what Raymond Malewitz calls ‘self-cancelling language’ to erase the bird from the human’s perception of the moment. I use negative descriptions to describe the contact between the man and the rosella, even before the moment of impact. The first appearance of the flock of rosellas is presented in a state of confusion. The man can’t see them because he is ‘momentarily mesmerised by the flecks of dust in the air’; when they do come
into his ine of sight he can only decipher parts of the birds, not the whole: ‘their wings were flapping too fast, they were a dazzle of red and blue’. Even when he does take control of his vision, he is unable—or, more accurately, unwilling—to articulate the particular interaction between himself and the bird:
He wondered what that thump had been.
He had a fairly good idea what the thump had been.
The final sequence of the story takes the negative depiction to the extreme, as the man considers a range of possible narratives he could spin around the event—all the things that ‘didn’t happen’:
He didn’t move closer to the grille, kneel down in the dust and look into the bird’s cloudy eyes. He didn’t reach his hand past the sharp plastic and, gently, scoop out the broken body. He didn’t take the bird and wrap it in a towel he kept in the glove compartment and he didn’t take the bird to the vet in the next suburb.
During this process the bird waits ‘for what was [really] going to happen’, which is of course that the man constructs a story that minimises the impact of the death of the bird on the human’s psyche: the bird’s corpse is locked away behind a roller door and then erased from the man’s consciousness. The man uses his linguistic power over the moment to justify and even forgive his violent act: he creates a story which justifies his decision not to take any action to alleviate the bird’s suffering. In this moment the rosella ‘is both held and not held’, literally and narratively.75
By making explicit the discursive operation of denial I raise questions to change our actual interactions with animals with whose habitats we intersect.76 In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello declares to her audience: ‘Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life.’77 Rose and van Dooren argue that we don’t even need to hold dying animals to feel compassion for them. They state: ‘The lives and deaths of [animals] … are here with us, entangled with ours, and short of ecocide they will remain so. Their presence can be understood as an ethical call, and the call can be experienced as a responsibility.’78