by Joshua Lobb
The Pecking Order
‘The Pecking Order’ is a direct response to Carol J. Adams’ conceptualisation of factory-farmed animals as ‘absent referents’. I also draw on a range of scholarly material on the meat industry and human suppression of its violence, as well as studies of chickens: most obviously Annie Potts’ Chicken, but also Ralph Acampora’s ‘Epistemology of Ignorance and Human Privilege’, Karen Davis’ ‘Anthropomorphic Visions of Chickens Bred for Human Consumption’, Potts and Armstrong’s ‘Picturing Cruelty: Chicken Advocacy and Visual Culture’ and Hayley Singer’s ‘Writing the Fleischgeist’.79
‘Behind every meal of meat,’ Adams declares, ‘is an absence: the death of the nonhuman animal whose place the meat takes.’80 She elucidates a discursive process during which certain nonhumans shift from subjects to objects, and through which human cognition of animal suffering—and our complicity in their suffering—is eliminated. The process happens in a range of ways, both literal and linguistic. Factory farms and abattoirs, even when in close proximity to human places of living, are disguised or made invisible; dead animals are also packaged in such a way as to occlude their original source.81 As a writer, I am interested in the way language comes into play to erase the subjectivity of the killed animal: ‘to keep something from being seen as having been someone’.82 Adams traces the ways that humans translate the murder of animals into culinary language. The slaughtered cow is turned into ‘beef’, the dead pig becomes ‘pork’. In the case of birds, sometimes the original name is kept (‘duck’, ‘turkey’), but their bodies are dismembered and reconstituted, so that ‘many chickens’ wings become chicken wings’ or, worse, ‘chicken nuggets’.
In the story, reinstating the suppressed meaning in the word ‘chicken’ changes the perspectives of two characters: the daughter chooses to no longer eat animal products, and the man realises his complicity in cultural behaviours around eating meat. The daughter’s transformation occurs when she works out the linguistic game humans play: that ‘there’s a chicken in the farmyard … and there’s chicken you eat’. Once the daughter identifies the presence of the real animal she is able to see the violence we inflict on them. The man’s relation to the absent referent is not so transformative; rather, his response demonstrates the ways in which the dominant-discursive conception of meat is so insidious: it’s ‘easier’ (for the human) to choose to ignore the referent behind the signifier. Linda Martín Alcoff explains:
One of the key features of oppressive societies is that they do not acknowledge themselves as oppressive. Therefore, in any given oppressive society, there is a dominant view about the general nature of society that represents its particular forms of inequality and exploitation as basically just and fair, or at least the best of all possible worlds.83
The communal sites of the supermarket and the family backyard are used in the story to show up the ‘best of all possible worlds’ modern Australian humans have created. These are places of plenty and, more importantly, places that present the illusion of inclusion—where all (white, affluent) humans know their place. The man has experienced exclusion from social groups and tries to protect his daughter from this pain:
‘There are two words,’ I wanted to say. ‘There’s part: the word you use when you’re included, when you’re in on the conversation. ‘I’m part of the whole,’ you might want to say. And there’s part: when you leave the room, when you’re cut away from the rest of the group, when a quadrangle of children sneer at you, when you don’t know what happened on The Goodies last night, when someone catches you picking the bacon bits out of the potato salad.
Previously, the man has feigned amnesia as to why he continues to eat meat (‘I don’t remember what made me start eating it.’), but of course the story as a whole is an account of his remembering. To support this, in an attempt to keep the memory of the dead (animal) alive, I have structured the narrative to demonstrate, as Adams puts it, that even in the act of erasure ‘the absent referent is both there and not there’.84 Unlike in other stories in the novel—‘Nocturne’ or ‘Call and Response’, for example—I do not use section breaks to distinguish between temporal moments. Instead, the text is written as one long stream so that the different moments in the man’s life are constantly ‘present’. For instance, late in the story, two moments of hostility are brought together in successive paragraphs:
‘Made you step on the crack,’ the boy guffawed.
‘Tap tap tap tap,’ my almost-friend sneered behind him.
My father-in-law said, ‘What’s got her goat?’
This deviation from conventional ways of marking the passage of time ‘rub against readerly habits’, as Haas puts it, displaying in an embedded the way that language can be manipulated to occlude unwanted meanings.85 Similarly, the spectre of the man’s father looms over his relationship with his daughter:
I watched her from across the table, licking off the gluey marinade to reveal the chlorine-white meat underneath, forcing the stringy flesh into her mouth. Her eyes glinting blackly, looking at me murderously.
My father watched me from across the table, his nails tapping against the marble.
Through this formal yoking, the man is not able to forget the traumatic referent hidden by the signifiers ‘It’s what we do in our family.’ Despite all this, though, the chicken is still eaten, and the man still avoids thinking about the millions of birds suffering and dying for human gratification. In this story, the man is not able to free his consciousness from his own concerns to accept the lives of other animals. As Cary Wolfe argues: ‘As long as this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species …’ then strategies like the justification of killing animals through the manipulation of language ‘will always be available’.86
Nocturne
Whereas in other stories I have accommodated spaces for potentially meaningful cross-species encounters, in ‘Nocturne’ I take a different, even contradictory, approach. Some critics in the field counsel against any act of ‘speaking for’ nonhuman animals: this is based on a line of argument in broader critical theory that sees representations of others as ‘discursively dangerous’: an act that strengthens the speaker at the expense of the spoken-for.87 While I think that, as Plumwood and Alcoff note, a speaking position is not inevitably imbued with hegemonic power, the ‘speculative exercise’ I undertake here is to explore the following premise: if I should not ‘speak for’ birds, what happens if I avoid representing them entirely?88 Might this encourage, as Armstrong suggests, ‘significances, intentions and effects quite beyond the designs of human beings’?89 What might this kind of story look like?
‘Nocturne’ explores this idea through the writing of the poet Mark Tredinnick. In his essay ‘Days in the Plateau’, Tredinnick relates an anecdote about driving on a track at night in the Blue Mountains:
my lights picked out a shape on the tarmac. A shape that said lump of wood. I pulled alongside it. Thinking cat or possum. But it was frogmouth …
I wound my window down, and she turned her amber eyes upon me without moving her head. She’d heard the car and seen the lights, and made of herself a broken branch. This is how frogmouths disappear. They raise their beaks and petrify.90
The sentence ‘This is how frogmouths disappear’ is the frame for the story: I test out ways that birds might make themselves disappear from the textual nets we cast over them.
‘Nocturne’ refers to several stories we write that could be identified as discursively dangerous: from news articles to poetry. In the opening section the human does not interact with a real bird, only representations: ‘He’s seen pictures on the internet. Grumpy, crumpled faces, staring at the camera, enduring the human gaze.’ The images of the frogmouth are deliberately envisioned through anthropocentric analogies: ‘downturned old-man eyebrows’; ‘beaks … wide and flat, like
a schoolboy’s cap’; ‘torsos … like Banksia Men or fluffy boom mikes’. The birds are transformed into human playthings: their ‘heads hinge open like a hand puppet’. The most damaging is the tale of the bird of sorrow, the nightjar who stands in for human depression.
As a counter to these narratives I create an opportunity for the frogmouth to fly away from the stories being told about her. In the story the human and a real frogmouth do not in fact cross paths. The story begins: ‘He’s never seen a tawny frogmouth, not in real life.’ More importantly, at the end of the story the text conceives a different kind of space for the frogmouth, one which might allow for the bird to determine her own subjectivity. As with the lyrebird in ‘What He Heard’, I use negative syntax to describe the bird’s action: ‘But this bird doesn’t want to snatch you away; she has no desire to scratch at your face.’ In this depiction, the bird might avoid inclusion in the human’s vision: ‘you won’t recognise her lying there’; ‘you’ll pass by’ without seeing her. I’m not sure if this grants more or less agency to the frogmouth—or if my strategies around the lyrebird endorse a stronger relationship with birds. As Richard Terdiman has shown us, sometimes a total refusal to engage with a discourse only reinforces the perceived superiority of dominant power.91 However, I do believe that there is something valuable in keeping a respectful distance from others, both literally and literarily.
Magpies
The story ‘Magpies’ takes as its starting point the accounts presented by animal behaviourist Gisela Kaplan in her Australian Magpie: Biology and Behaviour of an Unusual Songbird and her attempts to move readers away from ‘moments of friction’ between humans and birds. Kaplan notes: ‘We [humans] regard ourselves as “benign” and magpies as “aggressive” because we perceive these attacks to be unprovoked. Whether or not we deserve the title of “benign” intruders is a matter of opinion.’92 In the work, I explore how the stories and metaphors we construct around magpies contribute to this friction. To translate the ideas into fiction I use Malewitz’s tactic of ‘code-switching’: a textual operation to confound or undermine conventional modes of representation. Malewitz tenders that a textual animal:
might gain a temporary agency and legibility at the moment when it has ceased to function according to its assumed use value … In other words, a literary animal’s agency can come into being when its behavior within a narrative temporarily exhausts, confuses, or transforms the use to which it has been put.93
Malewitz’s approach involves drawing attention to a particular ‘anthropocentric rhetorical device’ and imbuing it with ‘conflicting’ values: this process causes a ‘changed relationship’ between humans and animals, as well as a change to the kinds of stories humans might be able to tell about animals.94 In the story, I shift ‘magpie metaphors’ across different characters and scenarios, complicating the discursive codes. I apply the different behaviours to different characters in the story to challenge the binaries of benign–aggressive or victim–aggressor. The office leader is most often the magpie: ‘Her black wings open and [Peter is] assaulted by the flash of white shards.’ At other times Peter, the victim of bullying, becomes the magpie. His safe haven in the stationery cupboard borrows its description from an account of a magpie’s nest in areas close to human habitation:
the outer layer of the magpie’s nest may also incorporate wire, clothes hangers, fabric from hessian bags, binder’s twine, silver paper, strips of clear plastic, rope, and even small adornments such as clothes pegs. The inner layer is like a second nest … and much finer in structure. Materials used are softer and more densely packed.95
At some points the characters are both magpies, relating to each other as what Kaplan calls dominant or marginal roles in the flock of the office: dominant magpies ‘walk along an imaginary territorial borderline … They pace up and down, like a border patrol’; marginal magpies, like Peter in his final meeting, ‘standing … for hours “hugging” and facing the tree, beaks often pointing at the bark or touching the tree and adopting crouching postures without feeding or drinking’.96 By using these code-switching images I aim to undermine the fixed human understanding of magpies by offering up multiple stories—and multiple metaphors—about their behaviour. At the end of the story, the narrator concedes that it is possible to see his manager as not only a bully but also a comforter of her colleagues. In the same way, I propose that a multiplicity of visions of magpies might free them from the harm caused by a single authoritative version. Fiction will always include analogy; even if we try to write plainly, without metaphor, the reader can always read even the simplest action as symbolic. But if fiction presents a multifaceted representation of an animal, one which does not fit neatly into human comparison, perhaps we might see beyond the metaphor, to see textual animals as animals.97 Thus, the story involves a ‘changed relationship’ between humans and animals as well as provoking a change to the kinds of stories humans might be able to tell about animals.
And No Birds Sing
‘And No Birds Sing’ is a creative rumination on the relationship between the particular and the planetary that was stirred by my almost-meeting with the black cockatoos on the bridge. Several scholarly texts inform its structure and content. In his essay, ‘Extinction, Encountering and the Exigencies of Forgetting’ Rick De Vos writes about his interactions with stories about the great auk—as well the moment he is faced with an actual (albeit stuffed) bird. De Vos’s essay showed me the ways I had been seduced by narratives of extinction and offered me alternative ways to think about it. In a similar way, Probyn-Rapsey’s ‘Nothing to See—Something to See: White Animals and Exceptional Life/Death’ gave me the colour palette. Thom van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction gave me the phrase the ‘dull edge’ of extinction and the idea that an individual (bird or human) is ‘a single knot in an emergent lineage: a vital point of connection between generations’: this provided me with a temporal shape for the work. Finally, Ursula K. Heise’s Imagining Extinction: the Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species illuminated for me the anthropocentric value many human texts place on nonhuman species extinction.98
These critical works do not pose identical views of how we do—or, better yet, should—respond to the loss of a complex biodiversity. Part of Heise’s project is to demonstrate the ways the stories we tell about extinction tell more about human cultural concerns than the loss of a particular species: the death of the final passenger pigeon ‘stands in’ for the disappearance of the American frontier; the extinction of the Hokkaido wolf comes to symbolise the shift from traditional to modernised Japan.99 De Vos takes this further, proffering that the stories we tell about extinction are a discursive strategy to ‘forget’ our culpability in the real animals’ deaths, a process of removing the connections between our forward-thinking ‘actively and methodically separating the history of another species and its extinction from our own history, anticipating and denying any connection’.100 The stories of the last great auk, the disappearance of the dodo, the final days of the passenger pigeon in Cincinnati Zoo, De Vos states, are not legitimate engagements with the overwhelming loss of a species. Rather, the stories are imbued with a kind of substitute grief: an aesthetically appealing performance the human can indulge in without being overwhelmed by the comprehension of the real deaths. They become merely a list of names, like the list that accompanies my story, separated from real lives—and real deaths.101
Counter to De Vos’s views, van Dooren argues that the story of an individual animal’s death—or, even, a direct contact with their dying moments—is an essential part of humans confronting the knowledge of extinction in a meaningful way. The power of grief, he argues, is when the focus is on the particular, the specific living being. When it comes to the final moments of extinction, there is only one animal, and we must accept that knowledge. He cites Glenn Klingler’s description of the last Hawaiian Ho’okena bird: ‘after it lost its mate it cried out for weeks … a terribly high-pitched sound, like an i
nconsolable moaning … The Ho’okena bird is so obviously looking for company, but there is none to be found—nowhere’.102 And we too can grieve with the Ho’okena, and the last great auk, and the last passenger pigeon. Van Dooren says: ‘Mourning offers us a way into an alternative space, one of acknowledgement and respect for the dead.’ As Thomas Attig puts it: ‘As we grieve, we appropriate new understandings of the world and ourselves within it.’103 It may even prevent further deaths of species. Van Dooren proposes that ‘learning to mourn extinctions may also be essential to our and many other species’ long-term survival’.104
These complex understandings of extinction weave in and out of ‘And No Birds Sing’. I draw directly on De Vos’s work in my descriptions of the human’s use of the accounts of bird extinctions as ‘a cover story … to paper over the real experience’. It’s a way of discursively managing any grief he might feel for the birds, in the same way that his father eulogises his mother into a story that removes any sense of her as a real embodied being: ‘something to say to people when there’s an empty space in the conversation’. To overcome the potency of these structures (about the death of the human and the extinction of the birds), Attig says: ‘We … become different in the light of the loss as we assume a new orientation to the world.’105 This proves to be a difficult task for the character—and for me as a writer. In the end I yield to the human’s need to mourn without shame: ‘he wails. The wail washes over everything … the wail will always be there … he will never stop wailing’. He is grieving for his mother, but he is also grieving for others: for the rosella he killed, for the budgerigar he failed to protect, for the chickens he’s eaten. He wails ‘by the side of the road, in the vestibule staring at an open doorway, at a barbecue over a plate of chicken wings … Even the birds will hear it’. The wail returns us to Rose’s lament, included at the beginning of these field notes. It also takes us towards Diamond’s reading of Elizabeth Costello. Diamond sees Costello as ‘wounded’: overwhelmed by humanity’s violence towards animals. She writes:
