Tag Archives: animal advocacy

Gonzo Girl

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sharp-objects

‘Domestic Noir’ is nothing new, just a rebranding of an old genre – one with which the author of Gone Girl (2012) has long been familiar: Gillian Flynn’s bestselling if less stellar debut, Sharp Objects (2006), is a stylish crime thriller too.

Psychologically fragile and hiding a shameful secret, Camille Preaker (the main female characters sport icky or ironic names, like mom Adora and half-sister Amity), is assigned under protest to cover a story about a serial killer of girls (i.e. female children, not women) in her former hometown.

Not the most original concept. So what compelled me to read on? I’m tired of genre tropes and trappings, and though its dialogue’s snappy, Flynn’s first novel isn’t as complex as her twisted breakout Gone Girl. Still, I crave the sort of subversiveness that energises both works, a transgressive tendency some feminists have condemned. Flynn’s not afraid to make women look bad. And Camille’s rich mom’s a prime suspect (at least for Detective Richard Willis, Sharp Objects’ #1 romantic interest). So to signify her wickedness, Flynn gives her a pig farm. For readers too naïve re pork and bacon production to judge Adora, Camille reports:

Most sows are inseminated, brood after brood, till their bodies give way and they go to slaughter. […] Pigs are extremely smart, sociable creatures, and this forced assembly-line intimacy makes the nursing sows want to die. Which, as soon as they dry up, they do.

Even the idea of this practice I find repulsive. But the sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. Like watching a rape and saying nothing (p. 159).

And Camille’s 13-year-old half-sister likes to watch: ‘But that violent streak—the tantrum, the smacking of her friend, and now this ugliness. A penchant for doing and seeing nasty things (p. 161).’

Cruelty to animals goes with inhumanity, at least from an intersectional perspective. And ditto, in the small-town milieu Flynn skewers, so there’s no shortage of suspects:

Back in high school, he saved the hooves of all the deer he killed, always had the latest pair in his pocket, and would pull them out and tap drumbeats with them on whatever hard surface was available. I always felt like it was the dead deer’s Morse code, a delayed mayday from tomorrow’s venison (p. 170).

Her empathy for deer doesn’t stop Camille eating steak with Richard. Yet eating meat doesn’t stop her critiquing it: ‘All those milk-fed, hog-fed, beef-fed early years. All those extra hormones we put in our livestock. We’ll be seeing toddlers with tits before long (p. 181).’ The latter could also be read as a comment on her half-sister’s precocity.

Camille’s as critical as she’s pretty. And for all her apparent fragility, she rejects paternalism, however well meant or PC on the surface. Over dinner, Richard probes for a local history of violence, and she recalls how, at a party, some boys had sex with a drunken 13-year-old. She doesn’t say that girl was herself but when Richard calls it rape, she says: “You’re sexist. I’m so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination (p. 176).”

A sometimes frustratingly passive character (Flynn’s no slave to genre rules), Camille nonetheless provokes eventual resolution through her continued if ambivalent presence. In contrast to a recent domestic noir sensation, The Girl on the Train (in which active if interchangeable characters travel where the plot takes them, with routine stops at standard stations), character drives Sharp Objects’ narrative. Camille might be romantically challenged, but as a character she’s fleshed out, down to the placement of (spoiler alert) the words carved into her skin: she self-harms.

And through the course of the story, this habit reflects unflatteringly on not just her family and one of her lovers but also the culture at large. Here, as in Gone Girl, ideas appear to interest Flynn more than genre tics, and the metaphor of inscribing skin (a stock trope when killers cut their victims), adds a layer more typical of literary fiction.

Flynn’s looseness re genre conventions extends to her debut’s denouement. With the plot’s unravelling, or obligatory tying up, more or less summarised, an action revealing Camille’s state of mind assumes greater importance. Denied a happy ending, she’s left with a dawning awareness of how real care or parenting might feel.

‘I had a dream.’

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the vegetarianIt’s easy to read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, a novel in which a woman goes vegan (and beyond), scandalising her family and disrupting her marriage, as a critique of repressive patriarchal Korean culture. But to stop there, with a sigh of relief at our relative freedom to eat as we please, would be to do Han’s masterpiece an injustice.

Haunted by violent dreams, the reticent Yeong-hye shuns meat, mortifying her husband, while her father tries to force-feed her. At this point, in the first of three linked novellas, it’s easy to empathise or even identify with her resistance; not hard to understand why she’d slash her wrist. And when, in the second part, she has sex with the artist husband of her sister, it’s easy to see his besotted objectification of her as an improvement on her cold-blooded businessman husband’s rape.

But in the third part, when Yeong-hye renounces all food, if not sunlight, having begun to identify with trees, some so-far-sympathetic readers may feel distanced, and interpret Yeong-hye’s subversive acts as symptoms. And madness is one of the novel’s main themes, but it’s not confined to Yeong-hye. Though she rates diagnoses of ‘anorexia nervosa’ and ‘schizophrenia’, the story still stands as an indictment of brutal Korean – and Western – society.

Some feminists or vegans, prone to literal reading, might feel betrayed that Yeong-hye succumbs to delusion, finally rejecting her own humanity. But it’s easy to misread characters (or creatures) if they don’t speak, or not in ways we understand. Which possibly makes it easier to compartmentalise compassion and, for instance, shun animal exploitation through ‘veganism’ than to renounce the ego, and know kinship with plants, not just animals.

Late in the novel, accused by Yeong-hye of being the same as psych-ward staff, her sister, In-hye, yells, ‘I’m acting like this because I’m afraid you’re going to die!’ After a silence, Yeong-hye asks, ‘Why, is it such a bad thing to die?’

No fate is worse than death from the perspective of the ego, which madness, by definition, unseats. But don’t all spiritual practices exist to free us from the ego’s prison – practices that represent the antithesis of today’s cult of the self? That Han, now 45, was ‘a very ardent Buddhist’ in her twenties comes as no surprise. And for critic Laura Miller, ‘the novel transmits a feeling of great stillness’.

Readers perplexed by the ambiguous ending might question Han’s intentions, and critics’ labels – fable, parable, allegory etc. – offer answers. But despite all analyses, the story retains rare power to haunt.

‘Buddhism is looking at things very clearly, without any preconceptions,’ Han says. ‘I don’t have religion any more, but that’s what I try to do in my writing.’

Besides Ourselves

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Beside OurselvesIn Karen Joy Fowler’s ingenious novel about the ill-defined line between human and animal nature, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), one character is wanted by the FBI for blowing up research labs after freeing the caged animals.

Asked in an interview what she thinks of animal rights–inspired crimes, Fowler says: ‘I believe in science and medical research.’ And it’s the politically correct response in today’s social climate – implying that some studies (experiments) are necessary for human health (presumably conducted ‘humanely’, though of course that’s relative). But Fowler’s probing novel hints at deep ambivalence. And it’s underpinned, if not at all burdened, by her extensive research.

As with the orang-utan in Monkey’s Uncle (1994), a novel about insanity by the late, great Jenny Diski, it’s relevant that Fowler’s simian character is female. Like Diski’s fiction, Fowler’s tends to feature nonconformist women. Given the overlap, now and historically, between exploitation of animals and oppression of women (and non-whites and the poor), why don’t we see more such inventive animal advocacy novels?

Could part of the problem be that animals can’t speak English, write books and essays, or use social media? Instead, humans speak for them, in cartoons, ads etc., reducing them to comics or corporate puppets. Meanwhile, scientists pick their brains, literally, and we eat their flesh (often disguised by euphemisms, processing, batter, sauce or whatever). A few humans speak for them in an attempt to awaken our empathy. Yet the rhetoric of animal libbers can easily be ignored unless their activism rates as news – an excuse for pro-corporate governments to tighten repressive laws.

One of the greatest gifts of a novel (if sometimes underrated in a market favouring entertainment) is the space for readers to empathise or even identify with the other, rather than with the character who most resembles them. Fiction remains one way to reach a wide audience not just through the habitually defensive, separative intellect, but by engaging the more inclusive, compassionate imagination.

Instead of speaking for animals, a common children’s book strategy, Fowler lets readers fill in the gaps. As the human narrator, Rosemary, tries to make sense of her childhood, we learn quite a bit about Fern, her twin, before we know she’s a chimp. (No wonder Rosemary can’t keep her hands to herself, and relates vertically, as well as horizontally, to the world.)

Kafka’s short story ‘A Report for an Academy’ – about an ape who escapes his cage by mimicking human behaviours, and written after Kafka had become a vegetarian – supplies all the epigraphs throughout Fowler’s novel. In his thoughtful Overland article ‘Carrion Call’, Thomas Wilson asks why the vegetarian reading of texts is ignored, compared to postmodern, post-colonial and feminist readings, when all of these share social justice concerns. And Fowler acknowledges this intersectionality:

If we can’t bear to look at what we are doing, then we shouldn’t be doing it. Of course, this precept reaches far beyond our relationship with our fellow animals into our politics, our environmental policies, our wars, and our prisons. A lot of what the animal rights activists do is simply make us look. I’m all in favor of that.