Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The concluding story of Bark is “Thank You for Having Me”—a sweetly ironic title for an elegy of an era in a woman’s life, as in the life of a culture. The first line suggests a singular and yet eccentric loss: “The day following Michael Jackson’s death, I was constructing my own memorial.” The mourner also laments the death of an old, lost love, which is a way of lamenting her own youth: “Every minute that ticks by contains too little information, until it contains too much.” Not unlike other characters in Bark, the middle-aged protagonist broods on mortality with a striking lyricism:

  Without weddings there would be only funerals. I had seen a soccer mom become a rhododendron with a plaque, next to the soccer field parking lot. . . . I had seen a brilliant young student become a creative writing contest. . . . And I had seen a public defender become a justice fund. . . . I had seen a dozen people become hunks of rocks with their names engraved so perfectly upon them it looked indeed as if they had turned to stone.

  “Thank You for Having Me” contains within it the germ of a mother-daughter story, an examination of the fraught relationship between a woman who’d imagined herself doomed to “being a lonely old spinster” and her fifteen-year-old “gorgeous giantess” daughter Nickie, though on its surface it’s an amusing account of an outdoor New Age wedding in Midwestern farm country in which the bridesmaids wear pastel of the hues of pharmaceuticals: “one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam; the other the pale daffodil of the next lowest dose of clonazepam.” The divorced mother feels a kind of guilt for having brought up her daughter in so abbreviated a household: “Mothers and their only children of divorce were a skewed kind of family dynamic, if they were families at all. . . . [The dialogue between them] contained more sibling banter than it should have.” Like the rejected wife of “Paper Losses,” this divorcée recalls the rude abruptness with which her husband left her, with no warning: “He had said, ‘You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.’” Aloneness is the middle-aged divorcée’s most obsessive concern, a kind of compulsive mantra:

  If you were alone when you were born, along when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why “learn to be alone” in between? If you’d forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. By gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand.

  A story about grim events, “Thank You for Having Me” manages not to be a grim story, ending with an antic dance between a middle-aged man whose ex-wife has just married another man and the neighbor whose husband left her to raise their daughter alone. It’s a dance of pure pointless joy, a dance to celebrate a wedding, a dance to celebrate the sheer fact of being alive, for now: “I needed my breath for dancing, so I tried not to laugh. I fixed my face into a grin instead, and, ah, for a second the sun came out to light up the side of the red and spinning barn.” At such illuminated moments even the consolation of the most eloquent irony can be set aside.

  Bark: Stories

  by Lorrie Moore

  EMOTIONS OF MAN AND ANIMALS:

  KAREN JOY FOWLER

  He who understands baboons

  would do more toward

  metaphysics than Locke.

  Charles Darwin

  In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin breeches the presumed gap between species by matter-of-factly conflating, in passages fascinating and rich in detail, close examinations of human beings and “lower animals” (by which Darwin meant “non-human animals”); his subject is “the principle of direct action of the excited nervous system on the body, independently of the will and in part of habit.” Not what might be self-described by individuals possessing language but rather what is displayed—“behavior”—is the object of the scientist’s inquiry.

  While most of Darwin’s text deals with the phenomenon of emotions in man, in a number of chapters in The Expression of Emotions he takes pains not to distinguish between “man” and “lower animals” by commingling species under such headings as “Serviceable Associated Habits,” “The Principle of Antithesis.” and “Action of the Nervous System.” Darwin’s implicit thesis is the likeness of man and “lower animals,” not their unlikeness. (Darwin’s great work Origin of Species appeared in 1859; Descent of Man in 1871.) As man has a “voice,” so do animals have “voices”: “Cats use their voices much as a means of expression, and they utter, under various emotions and desires, at least six or seven sounds.” The cat’s “purr of satisfaction . . . is one of the most curious.” A dog will make sounds resembling laughter, and a “bark of joy often follows a grin.” A consideration of man in agony or pain is naturally extended to other species in kindred situations: “There is said to be ‘gnashing of teeth’ in hell; and I have plainly heard the grinding of the molar teeth of a cow which was suffering acutely from inflammation of the bowels. The female hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens, when she produced her young, suffered greatly; she incessantly walked about, or rolled on her sides, opening and closing her jaws, and clattering her teeth together” and so back to man again, whose eyes “stare wildly as in horrified astonishment” and whose body is covered in perspiration: “Hence the nostrils are generally dilated and often quiver; or the breath may be held until the blood stagnates in the purple face.”

  Cattle, horses, dogs, cats, monkeys, birds—and man: all are subject to emotions, thus the “expression” of emotions of an involuntary, visceral nature. “With all or almost all animals, even with birds, Terror causes the body to tremble.” Wrinkling the face, furrowing the forehead, mating- and fighting-cries, cries of fury, erection of the hair, dilation of nostrils and of pupils of the eye, muscular contortions of the body—all cross species boundaries. Chapter sub-headings include “Sneering, Defiance: Uncovering the canine tooth on one side”; “Depressed Corners of the Mouth”; “Oblique Eyebrows” “Weeping.” (Darwin presents a good deal of firsthand observation on the infants in his household of whom there were, over the years, at least ten of his own.)

  “Joy and affection” are attributed to monkeys no less than to human beings. Monkeys are seen to blush and redden as a man might do, and a young female chimpanzee is seen to throw a temper tantrum very like that of “a child in the same state.” Darwin notes having felt “through the saddle” the beating heart of a terrified horse as he has, with astonishing acuity, noted the symptoms of a terrified canary as it turns “white about the base of the bill.” A (human) mother who loses her child may be “frantic with grief . . . walks wildly about, tears her hair or clothes, and wrings her hands.” Dogs can be “downcast,” cats “express affection,” monkeys can be “insulted.” Primates display almost as many emotions as human beings, and some of these are nuanced; one of numerous illustrations in the book is a line drawing of a “disappointed and sulky” chimpanzee. (Woodcuts, photographs, and drawings of the faces of animals and humans add to the particularly Victorian flavor of this book, in which the banal and the extraordinary, the average and the grotesque, are brought together as “illustrations” of the text. Physiognomy, largely faded in our time, was explored with great seriousness in the nineteenth century.)

  A secondary work of Darwin, the 390-page Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals would likely have been a major work by another nineteenth-century scientist, and in its highly persuasive, resolutely unpolemical juxtaposing of “man” and “lower animals” it would surely have aroused controversy. All that is so cogently argued in Descent of Man is taken for granted here. The author’s natural empathy for his heterogeneous subjects crosses species-boundaries with the conversational air of an individual making points to an audience of his peers so self-evident that they need scarcely be defended: who could doubt that the grief, terror, and suffering of human beings is different not in kind but merely in degree from the response to “horrid tortures inflicted in foreign lands on exhausted animals”? Ever the Victorian gentleman, Darwin is careful always to designate “lower animals” even as, by thi
s usage, he is suggesting that there exists a “higher” being that is in fact an “animal”: man.

  It isn’t surprising that Darwin exerted a considerable influence on the provisions of the Cruelty to Animals Act passed into law by the British parliament in 1876, which governed the (licensed) animal experimentation of scientists. Before this, grotesque and sadistic “experiments” were sometimes committed on helpless animals, often for demonstrative and educational purposes rather than for scientific research; after this, animals used in experiments had to be anesthetized whenever possible, and only experiments required for scientific research were qualified to be licensed. (Though Darwin believe that vivisection was essential for scientific research he felt strongly that it should not be performed “for mere damnable and detestable curiosity. It is a subject that makes me sick with horror, so I will not say another word about it, else I shall not sleep tonight.”

  In the late twentieth century, highly influential major works of philosophy and ethics began to be published in the field loosely described as “animal rights,” notably Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983), both of which have become classics. The argument for animal rights is fundamentally a moral and epistemological argument for a restructuring of the conception of “consciousness”—is it uniquely human?—and of the very concept of “animal.” Singer has been particularly eloquent on the issue of “speciesism”—the belief that the human species is not only superior to all other species, but can use (or misuse) these species as they wish, an injunction that seems to have a Biblical, i.e., Godly, imprimatur. Traditionally, moral philosophers calibrate degrees of moral behavior with the fastidiousness of Thomists arguing how many angels might dance on the head of a pin, yet have seemed, on the whole, unequipped philosophically to extend a principle of morality to those beings Darwin called “lower animals,” now called, in some enlightened quarters, “non-human animals.” (A philosopher-friend estimates that less than 2 percent of books on moral philosophy include the word “animal” in their indexes.) Both Singer and Regan have challenged this as a highly limited conception of morality; Regan argues that animals have “certain basic moral rights” and that “recognition of their rights requires fundamental changes in our treatment of them.” Both philosophers reason from hedonistic-Utilitarian principles of the greatest good for the greatest number—which is to say, the least pain for the greatest number of “sentient beings.” Singer argues that animals need not be acknowledged as having “rights” for us to wish to alleviate their suffering—that they are capable of feeling pain, and that pain is a negative experience, should be enough for us to have a moral obligation to refrain from inflicting needless pain upon them. Though “animal rights” and “animal liberation” ethics tend to be overwhelmingly vegetarian, and opposed to the eating of animals, yet the argument can be made, as Singer has done, that there is nothing inherently evil in eating animals if they are not raised and slaughtered inhumanely—which is the case, unfortunately, for the vast majority of animals at the present time. For further discussions of “animal rights” see J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), Jeff McMahan’s The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (2002), Cass Sunstein’s “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer” (2002). For a richly polemical discussion of the relationships among patriarchal culture, the exploitation of women and of animals, and the politics of meat-eating, see Carol Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990).

  In children’s literature as in fables, fairy tales, and Disney fantasies, talking animals abound; these usually affable “animals” are human beings in disguise, sheerly anthropomorphic concoctions rarely betraying any genuine or alarming animal nature. Yet, the fantasies tend to be benign, and sympathy for animals is the rule, with no acknowledgment of the adult caste system of “species” that would automatically render them inferior beings, if not food. In literature for adults, imaginative evocations of animal consciousness are rarities. A relatively little-known novel by the Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone (1999), a kind of tragic epic of African elephants narrated from the perspective of the elephants, undertakes to cross the boundary between species in an extraordinarily visceral, sensuous, and poetic rendering of language unparalleled in contemporary literature. You need not believe that elephants can think in language—(in this case, a highly lyric English language)—to be enthralled by the author’s imaginative immersion in her subject, a brilliantly inspired melding of research into the lives of African elephants and the creation of a distinctly original, indeed sui generis alternative world. Inevitably, in a time in which African elephants are being ravaged by poachers, and their species endangered by incursions into their natural habitat, The White Bone is not a casual reading experience. It will linger long in the memory, like an intensely unnerving yet wonderfully strange dream.

  Less stylistically inventive than The White Bone, and less ambitious in scope and vision, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is nonetheless a boldly exploratory evocation of a cross-species relationship that begins as a somewhat naïve but well-intentioned scientific experiment and ends as something like domestic tragedy, with consequences that destroy a family and permanently traumatize a sister and brother—and a “non-human animal” named Fern. Like the documentary film by James Marsh, Project Nim (2011), which depicts a similar ill-considered and eventually doomed experiment involving an infant chimpanzee brought to live in close contact with human beings, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is less about the scientific background and rationale for such experimentation than it is about an intensely emotional, nonverbal, and visceral relationship between “sisters” of whom one happens to be a “human” and the other “non-human.” In both the film and the novel, immediate sympathy is evoked for the innocent young primate, brought into a domestic household rife with its own, secret undercurrents of emotion and power struggles; in both, the innocent young primate is smotheringly loved, refashioned into a quasi-child, eventually erupts in violence and is feared, and expelled from the human household. In both documentary and novel, an initially reasonable yet finally tyrannical and unfeeling professorial father-figure exerts his terrible, irrevocable power: in Project Nim, this villainous figure is Columbia University Professor of Psychology Herbert S. Terrace, chief investigator in a now-notorious experiment of the 1970s undertaking to determine if a chimpanzee (“Nim Chimpsky”: punning on “Noam Chomsky”) raised in close contact with human beings could develop communication skills akin to “language”; in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the villainous figure is University of Indiana Professor of Psychology Cooke, father of Rosemary Cooke and “stepfather” of chimpanzee Fern, who undertakes a near-identical experiment into the possibilities of cross-species communication, involving a young female chimp instead of a male, with identical results—expulsion for the chimp-subject, remorse and regret for the human participants, a failed and discredited experiment. Terrace’s punishment was his exposure in Project Nim as the very embodiment of the coldhearted, manipulative and irresponsible scientist, exploiting not only the lovable chimp Nim but also an indeterminate number of young woman assistants: beyond ridicule of his science was disdain for his very appearance (hairstyle, Burt Reynolds mustache) and the type of car (BMW) he drove. That Terrace maintained the unpopular stance that chimps can’t be taught to use “language” as human beings use it was held against him, as if scientific integrity were a matter of special pleading, and a research scientist should be swayed by political or sentimental pressures; it was seen as particularly reprehensible that Terrace ended his experiment, and his relationship with Nim, with shocking abruptness as soon as he saw that the experiment had failed, and shipped Nim away to a research facility in Oklahoma.

  Unlike the notable Terrace, who has published much important work in the behavior of animals, Fowler’s Professor Cooke is an undistinguished academic so shortsighted he fails to consider that bringing a young chimpanz
ee into his household as a month-old infant to grow up alongside his infant daughter might have disastrous consequences. Cooke seems not to know that a wild, congenitally undomesticable animal would eventually be impossible to control and dangerous in any household. Nor does Cooke do anything to mitigate the harm to both his daughter and son precipitated by the abrupt expulsion of their “sister” Fern of whom the son Lowell says bitterly: “She deserved to be missed and we missed her terribly.” We know early on that Cooke will not be an ideal caregiver to a young animal when he deliberately and stupidly runs over a cat with his car, his young daughter Rosemary as a witness. (Rosemary naïvely wonders: “Was my father kind to animals?”)