Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Taylor, Sue. Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Desire. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000.

  Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Vol 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. 1979. Trans. Chris Turner, Stephen Conway, and Erica Carter. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

  White, Murray J. “The Statue Syndrome: Perversion? Fantasy? Anecdote?” The Journal of Sex Research 14.4 (Nov. 1978): 246-49.

  Wood, Gaby. Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. New York: Knopf, 2002.

  29

  Animal alterity: Science fiction and human-animal studies

  Sherryl Vint

  The project of bringing together science fiction1 (sf) and research in the emerging field of human–animal studies (HAS) might at first seem counterintuitive; indeed, when I spoke of my interest in researching animals in sf, a number of colleagues assured me that there probably were not that many. Although this book, by providing an overview of the many ways in which animals are present in sf, shows the degree to which such a conclusion is wrong, it is nonetheless not an unreasonable one for many readers of the genre to have reached. One does not tend to think of animals as belonging in sf for a number of reasons related both to the genre and to the assumptions that we make about animals and their place in Western cultural life. Animals, once central to human quotidian life, have steadily disappeared from human experience with the rise of modernity, whose processes of industrialization, urbanization and commodification have affected animal lives as much as human ones. Twenty-first-century society is no less dependent upon animal products than was the seventeenth (although many of the specific products may have changed, such as the replacement of animals used for transportation or the rise of animals used for biomedical research); yet a crucial difference between our use of animals and that of earlier cultural moments is that the use of animals in contemporary society is increasingly invisible: they are hidden away in laboratories and factory farms; slaughtered at mass disassembly plants and transformed into sanitized packages of meat; visible in mediated forms on Animal Planet or National Geographic television, but purged from city geographies. It is then not surprising that readers do not intuitively associate sf, “the literature of technologically saturated societies” (Luckhurst 3), with the presence of animals.

  Yet there are many reasons to connect sf and HAS. Both are interested in foundational questions about the nature of human existence and sociality. Both are concerned with the construction of alterity and what it means for subjects to be thus positioned as outsiders. Both take seriously the question of what it means to communicate with a being whose embodied, communicative, emotional and cultural life—perhaps even physical environment—is radically different from our own. One of the premises of this study, then, is that sf and HAS have much to offer one another: sf has a long history of thinking about alterity, subjectivity and the limits of the human which is precisely the terrain explored by much HAS, while HAS offers new and innovative ways to think about sf’s own engagement with such issues, situating it within a material history in which we have always-already been living with “alien” beings. Additionally, sf’s interest in thinking through the social consequences of developments in science and technology intersects usefully with key questions being worked out in HAS in an era of genetic transformation of animal species into “products” more suitable for human consumption, “factories” to produce useful chemicals or “models” to study disease. A central concern of HAS—and of this text—is the extent of our ethical duty to nonhumans with whom we share the planet, and both HAS and sf have much to say on this topic. Finally, in the past thirty years our discursive and material relationships with animals have changed radically, resulting in, on the one hand, what Derrida has called “unprecedented proportions of . . . subjection of the animal” (The Animal 25), and on the other increasing knowledge of animal cognition, communication skill and tool use, all of which reveal the tenuous nature of the firm and singular boundary between human and animal existence.2

  Sf contains many animals and a plethora of perspectives on the nature of animal existence, and is an excellent tool for thinking through the implications of these cultural changes. The texts explored in the following chapters have no single perspective on the question of animals and their place in our social world, but rather demonstrate the range of ways humans have thought about this issue, sometimes challenging conventional wisdom and advocating a position of sympathy for the animal, and at other times embodying cultural anxieties about potential erosion of the human–animal boundary, a line which has been used to secure notions of human subjectivity since at least Plato. Sometimes the animals seem incidental to a text and their presence offers us a window on their ubiquity in laboratory life, such as the farcical “The Feline Light and Power Company Is Organized,” by Jacque Morgan, which depicts an attempt to produce cheap power through the static electricity generated by “a plurality of cats” (320) trapped in a room. Similarly “The Hungry Guinea Pig,” by Miles J. Breur, is more interested in the details of the massive military assault necessary to destroy a giant guinea pig that has escaped from the pineal gland research lab than it is in the animal’s experience, even though the guinea pig is described as causing destruction through panic and fright, not malice. W. Alexander’s “The Dog’s Sixth Sense” does not even include the entire animal in the story, but instead focuses on the detective who becomes telepathic when he is given dog’s rather than pig’s eyes in his transplant surgery because he gains with the dog’s eyes its ability to read human thoughts. Although this story is premised on the observation that dogs seem better attuned to human communication than do pigs (which might lead one to knowledge of dogs’ cognitive skills), the story is not interested in exploring the ethics of sacrificing such creatures for their organs (the intelligence of pigs, the usual donors, is even further removed from the story’s view).

  More often, though, sf stories include animals because they are interested in what animals experience and in how our social relations with them might be transformed. Clare Winger Harris’s The Miracle of the Lily (1928), for example, ironically draws attention to the world we make through an ethic of “man” as “master of the world with apparently none to dispute his right” (49); domination is taken to such an extreme in a war against insects for control of crops that humans destroy “every living bit of greenery, so that in all the world there was no food for the insect pests” (49). Often stories explore the perspective of reversing the human–animal hierarchy, such as F. Pragnell’s “The Essence of Life” (1933). Humans are taken to visit a cat-eyed Jovian society by its pets, human-like beings who do not resent their subservient status but rather love their masters, who “are very humane and gentle, and have made poverty and want unknown amongst us” (443). The visitors offer “armies and guns” to help the human-like pets escape subservience, which is rejected as “obscene and traitorous” and as evidence that the Masters were right that on Earth “we shall find a race of men, lustful for power for its own sake, always ready to quarrel for the sake of quarreling” (443). The humans are there, it transpires, to be interviewed so that the Jovians might decide whether humans should be exterminated for the safety of the solar system, or whether “by careful selective breeding and developing, and above all, by the help of the Essence of Life, they might develop into quite unobjectionable and even pleasant creatures, like the domesticated men of Jupiter” (443). At times writers are even more directly polemical in their use of sf premises to question the treatment of actual animals in contemporary society. In an afterword to Slave Ship (1957), a novel about military use of animals to run unshielded nuclear weapons vehicles, Frederick Pohl draws his readers’ attention to existing research on animal language, then rejects the idea that humans can be defined as exclusive tool users or exclusive language users; instead, he suggests, “Perhaps there is room for a third definition of Man, not much better than the other two, but very likely not much worse: ‘Man, the snobbish animal . . . who clings to evolution’s
ladder one rung higher than the brutes beneath and saws away, saws away at the ladder beneath in an attempt to sever the connections between himself and the soulless, speechless, brainless Beast . . . that does not, in fact, exist” (147, ellipses in original).

  Grant Morrison’s We3 (2005) similarly explores the potential for sf to query the ethics of using animals within military applications, embedding his tale of cyborg, weaponized animals within larger discourses of the human–animal boundary which structure twenty-first-century life. A graphic novel of three chapters, We3 begins each with a “missing pet” poster of one of its animal protagonists: the dog Bandit who becomes 1; the cat, Tinker, or 2; and the rabbit, Pirate, later 3. These posters draw our attention to the widely disparate ways animals are integrated into human society. The posters show the animals in middle-class, domestic comfort, part of the home and family. The text indicates that these are individualized animals, named, known and loved by their owners: Bandit is “friendly and approachable,” Tinker’s individual markings are described in detail in text whose i’s are dotted with hearts, and Pirate “likes lettuce and carrots.” These posters are in stark contrast to the rest of the text in which we see the animals on their last mission, encased within armor and able to talk via implants in their heads. They are to be decommissioned, that is, killed, as their model is now obsolete. A sympathetic trainer enables their escape from the lab, and much of the rest of the book is about their attempts to find home which they define as “RUN NO MORE.” The contrast between pet animals (part of human social networks) and numbered lab animals (instrumentalized and turned into things) is made all the more poignant by I’s continual anxiety about whether he is “GUD DOG” and especially by his evident desire to help the humans he encounters, even though they are trying to kill him. In the end, he reclaims his name and sheds the armor, concluding that it “IS COAT NOT ‘BANDIT’” that is bad. While Pirate is killed, Bandit and Tinker, purged of their cyborg enhancements, find a metaphorical home with a homeless man who recognizes that they are not dangerous but merely outcasts like him. This draws our attention to the relationship between ways of marginalizing and exploiting animals and the ways in which the discourse of species is used to animalize and marginalize some humans.

  As Morrison’s tale makes clear, one of the things sf can do is convey some sense of the animal’s experience, in this case through the novum of technology which enables the animal to talk. Morrison’s use of all caps, phonetic spelling and numerals (for example, 2 for the word “to” as well as for Tinker’s new name) visually conveys animals’ liminal category in human culture: they are similar but not identical to us, caught up within human language and other semiotic systems but not native speakers, precariously positioned along the axis of the binary pair nature/culture. And yet literary representations of animals are precisely that, representations, filtered through human consciousness and language. Must such representations be rejected, then, as necessarily false or at the very least limited, able to tell us only what we think of animal life and nothing about actual animal experience?

  J.M. Coetzee explores the issue of animal experience and literary representation in The Lives of Animals (1999), the printed version of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and further in Elizabeth Costello (2003). In the Tanner Lectures, Coetzee constructs a story around the character of Elizabeth Costello, a novelist also called upon to give public lectures; the bulk of the text comprises the two lectures she delivers on animal rights, one called “The Philosophers and the Animals” and the other “The Poets and the Animals”; the expanded novel, Elizabeth Costello, includes this material and further background to Costello’s life and her struggles to understand the role of literature in ethical and intellectual life. Whether or not literature can convey some truth of animal existence, and in so doing enable its readers to perceive them as fellow beings and thereby to heal the instrumentalized and damaging relationship that Western culture has with animal life, is one of Costello’s central concerns. Coetzee’s own investments are more difficult to ascertain as Costello’s viewpoint is both expounded and challenged throughout the text, but at root they are interested in the same issue: the power of literature to shape subjectivity and all that flows from it. Costello refers to this as our capacity for sympathetic imagination.

  Costello argues that the tradition of philosophy has failed to enquire about animal life and instead has used animals as a foil against which to define the distinct features of the human, a position very similar to that taken by Derrida in his posthumously published The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008). Derrida, too, divides human conceptions of the animal into two camps: philosophers “who have no doubt seen, observed, analyzed, reflected on the animal, but who have never been seen seen by the animal” and thus “have taken no account of the fact that what they call ‘animal’ could look at them, and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin” (13); and the poets “who admit to taking upon themselves the address that an animal addresses to them,” but whose engagement with questions of animal–human relations is never from the point of view of “theoretical, philosophical, or juridical man, or even as citizen” (14). Derrida’s point, ultimately, is that the entire discourse of philosophy and ethics must be reconceived if one conceptualizes the animal—as poetry does—as another subject who looks upon and addresses the human; such thinking, he says, is “what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of” (7).

  Combining the poetic with the philosophical or juridical, then, will enable us to recognize the degree to which our entire philosophical tradition of subjectivity has been premised upon the separation of human from animal. Sf, more than any other literature, can defy this separation because its generic premises enable us to imagine the animal quite literally looking at and addressing us from a non-anthropocentric perspective, as in We3’s talking animals or the cat-like aliens of “The Essence of Life.” Further, the ideal that sf should in some way reflect both the content of current scientific knowledge and the scientific technique of logical extrapolation—although of course never rigorously enforced in the genre—means that the genre’s imaginings of animal being are inclined to incorporate knowledge gained from ethology (the scientific study of animal behavior) and thus to approximate what we know of animals’ experiences of their worlds. Such an impulse is present even in early sf written before the development of such holistic methods of studying animal behavior.

  For example, Edward Rementer’s The Space Bender posits a society of intelligent beings evolved from cats rather than from primates, and speculates on the different cultural world that might emerge under such conditions. Careful to avoid anthropocentric hubris, the story’s protagonist concludes,

  I could not decide if our system or theirs was better. The callous selfishness of King Tabi in regard to the welfare of his people was truly appalling, but, as he, himself, pithily remarked, is our paternalism altruistic or does it largely gratify a simian desire to poke our noses into some other fellow’s business? (847)3

  Thus sf offers a wider scope than does most literature for enabling animal agency to become part of the quotidian world, as well as space to attempt to grasp animals as beings in their own right rather than as beings defined through their place in human cultural systems. In addition to this specific concern with science, sf’s long history of exploring questions of alterity and particularly of the boundary between human and other sentient beings—frequently explored through robot or AI characters—further positions it as uniquely suited to interrogating the human–animal boundary.

  Why is it important that such ideas are explored through sf as a literature? Elizabeth Costello insists that it is only through the capacities cultivated by literature that we become able to be seen by the animal, to engage with it as a fellow being. She rejects the perspective of “behaviorists” who limit understanding to “a process of creating abstract models and then testing those models against reality. What nonsense. We understand by immersing ourselves an
d our intelligence in complexity” (Coetzee 108). Thus only the worldbuilding of fiction, something at which sf excels, is adequate for conveying the fullness of life before it has been contained within the reductive categories we use as shorthand to constrain the complexity of the world into units that can be grasped by rational thought. It is never entirely clear the degree to which Coetzee endorses Costello’s position, but at the very least we can conclude that the question of whether literature enables us imaginatively to inhabit the animal’s perspective is one that compels us to re-examine literary realism more broadly. This understanding of literature is similar to Derrida’s suggestions that his entire work has been about the question of the animal’s place in philosophical systems and notions of human subjectivity, that it “was destined in advance, and quite deliberately, to cross the frontiers of anthropocentrism, the limits of a language confined to human words and discourse” (The Animal 104). Derrida sees this as not necessarily a question of giving speech back to animals but “of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise and as something other than a privation” (The Animal 48). Costello, writing in a more passionate idiom, puts it thus: “If I do not convince you, that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal being. That is why I urge you to read the poets who return the living, electric being to language” (Coetzee 111).

  Erica Fudge points out that “a humanist arrogance lurks dangerously nearby” (Pets 46) the argument that human imaginative power is unlimited and might effectively capture an animal’s perspective. In Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee positions this issue of the poet’s access to animal experience within a broader series of deliberations which impel us toward the conclusion that, however imperfect, literature’s ability to convey the experience of the animal being is no more or less problematic than any literary representation. Costello gains fame as a novelist for a book written from the perspective of Molly Bloom, one that counters the canonical representation of this woman’s perspective as conveyed by a male writer. As one reader tells Costello, reading this book made her realize “that Molly didn’t have to be limited in the way Joyce had made her to be, that she could equally well be an intelligent woman with an interest in music and a circle of friends of her own and a daughter with whom she shared confidences” (14). One might suggest that Costello was able to offer something of Molly’s perspective that Joyce could not because, as a woman, she shares an embodied experience with Molly, unlike Joyce. While there is a degree of insight conveyed by this fact, at the same time Coetzee is careful to remind us that this is not the whole story either, first by a series of exchanges Costello has with an African writer which reveals the problems of becoming the voice of his “people” for a white audience, and second through Costello’s insistence that “If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life” (80). The embodied, vulnerable being that we share with animals is emphasized elsewhere by Costello and, it would seem, also by Coetzee, reminding us that humans, too, are animals, despite a long philosophical tradition, mostly strongly associated with Descartes and Heidegger (in different ways), that insists upon a separate kind of being for human subjects.4