Animal Geographies: Zooësis and the Space of Modern Drama

Animal Geographies: Zooesis and the Space of Modern Drama UNA CHAUDHURI All sit~s ofenforced marginalisalioll - ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, COIleentration camps - have something in common with zoos. But i( ;s both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol. The zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and animals; nothing else. Berger 24 When we go to the zoo, we take with us all our worries and joys, our heroes and villains , and we dole them out to the various species, casting each one ill the role best equippedfor it on the basis ofaccidental human resemblances. Morris and Morris 172 Confined wilhin this catch-all concept, f ..} within this strict enclosure of this definite article ("the Animal" and not "animals"), as in a virgin forest, a zoo, a hunting or fishing ground, a paddock or an ahattoir, a space ofdomestication, are all the living things that mall does not recognize as hisfellows. his neighhors, or his Brothers Dcrrida. "The Animal Thai Therefore I Am" 402; emphasis in original The burgeoning field of animal studies offers a new perspective on that overlap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesis. In proposing the neologism "zooesis" for this new perspective, I hope to invoke, as a foundation for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama, the path-breaking work of Cary Wolfe, whose tenn "zoontologies" suggests just how much is at stake for literature and the humanities in the "the question of the animaL" Noting the central role played by the figure of the animal and the category of animality in all those "seminal reroutings of contemporary theory away from the constitutive figure of the human" (Wolfe, Introduction xi) in the works of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Renee Girard, bell hooks, Michael Taussig, and Modem Drama, 46:4 (Winter 2003) 646 Animal Geographies Donna Haraway, Wolfe also points out that work in contemporary sciences, especially cognitive ethnology and field ecology, has decisively undermined "the old saws of anthropocentricism (language, tool use, the inheritance of cultural behaviors)" (xi). These philosophical and scientific developments that bring the animal into view in new ways have also enabled new analyses of the many contexts in which animality has been deployed rhetorically to oppress human groups, members of different "races," nations, ethnicities, classes, and genders. The ideological "rhetoric of animality" (Baker 77-119) is a widespread cultural zooesis founded upon "the traditional onlological distinclion, and consequent ethical divide, between human and nonhuman animals" (Wolfe, Introduction xx). The deconstruction of that distinction, and the interrogation of that divide, are the work of a critical zooesis. Zooesis, as I conceive it, consists of the myriad performance and semiotic elemenlS involved in and around Ihe vaSI field of cultural animal practices. These include nOI only literary representations of animals (from Aesop's Fahles to Will Self's Great Apes), nol only dramatic representations of animals (from The Frogs 10 Equus), not only animal performances in circuses and on stage, but also such ubiquitous or isolated social practices as pelkeeping , cockfighling, dog shows, equestrian displays, rodeos, bullfighting, animal sacrifice, hunting, animal slaughler, and meat-eating. Comprising both our actual and our imaginative interactions with non-human animals, zoocsis is the discourse of animality in human life, and its effects permeate our social, psychological, and material existence. Not the least important of the registers of this discourse are space and place.. As the title of an important recent anthology recognizes, there are multifarious "animal geographies" that secure, sustain, and complicate our more familiar human ones (Wolch and Emel). Since (to paraphrase Ihe subtitle of the same book) "politics and identity [are forged[ in Ihe nature-<:ulture borderlands," inhabitants of that conceptualizing zone are particularly rich carriers of social meaning. The animal is perhaps the most complex inhabitant of the natureculture borderlands (other inhabitants are children, the insane, Ihe "primitive "); as such, the animal contributes powerfully to the ideological productivity of this conceptual boundary. From its liminal position on the margins of human life, the non-human animal participates, willy-nilly, in the construction of such human categories as the body, race, gender, sexuality, morality, and ethics. It intervenes decisively also in the social construction and cultural meaning of space. Animal practices shape not only the specific and actual spaces in which they occur, but parallel and opposile spaces as well, spaces to which they are related through the logic of the nature-<:ulture divide that ena~les so much cultural meaning. Thus zooesis pertains not only to, for instance, the zoo, the dog-run, the slaughlerhouse, but also the nursery, the playground, the dining room. As a complex ideological discourse of space and place, zooesis offers a new UNA CHAUDHURI perspective on that privileged space of modem drama, the family home. In the plays I shall discuss here - Edward Albee's The Goat (2002) and The Zoo Story (1959), and Terry Johnson's Cries from the Mammal House (1984) zooesis rewrites the dramatic discourse of home from the point of view of the animal, figured either as the radically excluded Other, the very exemplar of homelessness (The Goat), or as the radically contained Other, exemplar of repression and imprisonment (Zoo Story and Mammal House). The last two plays explore the theme of human habitation through the figure of the zoo, which is represented as a boundary-making, language-wielding material cultural practice, and as such a practice that bears more than a passing resemblance not only to the home but also to the theatre. The performativity that links the human home to the animal house is perfectly captured in the title of Johnson 's play, in which human and non-human animals refuse to be silenced by the prison-house of cultural meaning. These plays differ, however, in their relation to a central issue of animal studies, the two poles of which are captured by the first two epigraphs of this essay. Berger's insistence on the literalism of the zoo, and hence on the actual relation between human beings and animals, is in fact an enonnous challenge to the tradition of literary animal discourse. His "nothing else" is nothing like the simple limit implied by that brief phase. It is an injunction to resist the anthropocentric and metaphoric logic of most"zoo stories,'" which invariably "cast" animals, as Morris and Morris say, in anthropomorphic dramas. This anthropocentric zooesis, Jean Baudrillard has provocatively argued, is the foundation of modernity. In modernism, writes Baudrillard, "animals must be made to say that they are not animals" (129). They must join the group of discursively colonized Others - the insane, children, "savages" - upon whom rationalism imposes its hegemony, forcing them to speak in its terms. Not only do we exploit animals as beasts of burden and subjects of scientific experimentation, s" ays Baudrillard, we have also made them creatures of somatization , forcing them to carry our symbolic and psychological baggage. As pets, as performers, and as literary symbols, animals are forced to perform us - our fantasies and fears, our questions and quarrels, our hopes and horrors. Refusing the animal its radical otherness by ceaselessly troping it and rendering it a metaphor for humanity, modernity erases the animal even as it makes it discursively ubiquitous. CASTING THE ANIMALS An anicle included in the playbill for the Broadway production of Edward Albee's recent play The Goat exemplifies the tendency to transform the animal into a sign, doing so in a way that reminds us of a specifically theatrical version of this practice: "The he-goat (see also SCAPEGOAT) symbolizes the powers of procreation, the life force, the libido, and fenility" ("What's the Animal Geographies word?" 2). The article goes on to say that the word "tragedy" comes from a Greek word meaning "goat-song." Thus, in one short note - invoking one long history - is the whole mystery of the play apparently solved: the shocking story of Martin, a successful, happily married architect who falls in love and lust with a goat, is quickly translated into the latest in the American theatre's long quest for a dramatic formula that could bestow tragic grandeur on the common man. From this perspective, Martin would seem to be just a higherclass Willy Loman, yearning for the one thing materialist success cannot deliver: an experience of transcendence. But surely this is much too neat a parcel for the whole shame-filled, guiltridden mess of bestiality that spills out on stage in Albee's play, shattering the attractive lives that have been holding a flattering mirror up to the audience. This shattering is astonishingly literal: Martin's wife reacts to every new revelation about his love affair by grabbing some decorative item off the shelves of the tastefully decorated living room and violently smashing it on the floor. Her repeated (and increasingly deliberate) action clearly establishes physical destruction as an alternative strategy to the one that these people have hitherto favored in their dealings with the world: a conspicuously literary strategy composed of wordplay and repartee. Martin, especially, is a stickler for correct usage and a sucker for verbal cleverness. Early in the play, a self-conscious quotation from Noel Coward both acknowledges the dramatic lineage that Albee's couple has inherited and begins the process of disavowing it. The disavowal involves exposing the foundation of that tradition in a particular co-articulation of animality with language to which Jacques Derrida has given the name "camo-phallogocentrism" ("Eating Well" t 13). This portmanteau term designates a discourse in which the threatening multiplicity of animal lives is contained by language, reduced, and singularized. The countless species of non-human creatures. and the countless members of those species, all captured in a single word: "The animal," says Derrida, "what a word!" ("The Animal That Therefore I Am" 392). Cary Wolfe summarizes Derrida's argument as follows: the Word, logos, does violence to the heterogeneousmultiplicity o[the living world by reconstituting it under the sign of identity, the as such and in general - not "animals" but "the animaJ." And as such, it enacts what Derrida calls the "sacrificial structure" that opens a space for the "noncriminal putting to death" of the animal- a sacrifice that (so the story of Western philosophy goes) allows the transcendence of the human, of what Heidegger calls "spirit," by the killing off and disavowal of the animal, the bodily, the materially heterogeneous, the contingent - in short, differance. (Animal Rites 66, emphasis in original) Albee's play traces an unraveling of the sacrificial logic Derrida describes, for here the animal that has been sacrificed to - and for - the power of lan- UNA CHAUDHURI guage creeps back into view. While the opening of the play shows us a lifestyle dominated - even defined - by language, the body of the play takes us as far into non-verbal territory as textual drama can go. The final momentscomplete the play's endorsement of breakage, for the "solution" to the hero's dilemma entails smashing the rules of realistic drawing-room drama by displaying the everyday brutality of animal slaughter in a space thai programmatically excludes (to use Hamlet's phrase) such "country matters" (3.2.115). It goes one long literal step beyond Harold Pinter's famous formula for menacing realism - "lllhe weasel under the cocktail cabinet" (qtd. in Taylor 323)by dragging animality out of hiding and into plain view: exposed, centerstage , rhere for all to see. What does it mean to see the animal? In the title of a 1977 essay that has become a classic of modem animal studies, John Berger asked the question, "Why Look at Animals?" Like Baudrillard later, Berger addresses the place (or rather non-place) of animals in modernily, and comes to the chilling conclusion that we are currently living through their final vanishing: a "historic loss," as he puts it, "irredeemable for the culture of capitalism" (26). Animals are commercialized as images, reduced as ever-more reali stic toys, infantilized as Disney characters, denatured as pets, and - most significantly for Berger - monumentalized in zoos. "In zoos," he says, "they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance" (24). Thus, animals can no longer perform the vital function for which human beings had long prized them: their ability to foster in us a kind of self-consciousness that is impossible to attain within the human species itself. The look between man and animal, says Berger, is a recognition across the abyss of sameness and difference by which animals are related to us: "With their paraliel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species" (4).' For Berger, the "loneliness of man as a species" - which had for centuries been affirmed in the look between man and animal- has in modern times been bartered for a false sense of mastery, to which animals are regularly sacrificed : spectacularly in zoos, but also psychologically and imaginatively, as fantasy images, as nostalgic markers of a lost rural idyll, and, of course, as pets. In an analysis that anticipates Deleuze and Guatarri's more ·famous critique of the pet as an "Oedipal" animal (240), Berger regards the pet as a key element in "that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit, decorated or furnished with mementoes from the outside world, which is such a distinguishing feature of consumer societies" (12). Berger's description of the modern home perfectly describes the set of the Broadway production of Tlte Goat, which exemplified the commodification and domestication of the alien, the exotic, and the natural. Interestingly, this model modem home of the play does not include a pet, Animal Geographies 65 1 except perhaps discursively, through Albee's subtitle - "Who is Sylvia?" By naming his goat Sylvia, Albee's hyper-literate Martin may be unconsciously channeling Shakespeare's Love's Labors Losr, but audience members might also be reminded of A. R. Gurney's 1995 play, Sylvia, whose eponymous character is a dog. Gurney's play is a rueful meditation on the pet as Oedipalized animal, for the dog Sylvia (like Albee's goat Sylvia, only platonically) also triangulates a married couple, almost to the breaking point. By replacing the dog with a goat, Albee exposes to view (much more violently than Gurney ) the usually occluded signifying structure of the modern animal, which balances separation and longing, disdain and desire. Interestingly, Derrida's recent philosophical explorations of the figure of the animal also center upon the pet - in fact his own pet, a cat. Derrida essentially reverses Berger's question , "Why look at animals?" asking rather why animals look at us, or at least what it might mean to entertain the possibility that they actively regard us instead of simply receiving our gaze, passively or at best reactively. To breach the modern world's systematic occlusion of animality is also to disturb the delicate ecology of animal symbolism. By bringing a real goat into his story, Albee both invokes and disavows the entire symbology of the scapegoat . In the same way, he challenges the tragic formula of a heroic longing for transcendence by bringing in the coarse subject of bcstiality. Although Martin insists on call ing his experience an "epiphany" (82) and identifying the object of his adoration as Sylvia's "soul" (86), none of the other characters can resist describing it - repeatedly and hilariously - as "goat-fucklingl" (48). It is not Martin's love for the animal that violates taboos and threatens to "bring 1 .• ,1 down" the family (89); it is the fact that this love is physical, sexual- heterosexual ! - corporeal. The presence of this most transgressive of sexualities strains the tragic formula to the limit. Animality also breaks the frame of drawing-room drama by recontextualizing its inhabitants in a wider world. Animal plays, including the ones under discussion, often contextualize their inter-species encounters within "ecosites ," heterotopias of "nature" in culture. Others stage literal destructions of the traditional stage spaces of realism: lonesco's herds of rhinoceroses famously thunder in the wings, red ucing bourgeois spaces to rubble. Alan Strang, the young protagonist of Peter Shaffer's Equus, attacks the theatron's privileged organ, the eye, by blinding the horses he loves: animality and theatricality cancel each other out. Elizabeth Egloff's 1993 play, The Swan, in which one of the three main characters is the eponymous bird, ends with the following stage direction: "There is a hl/ge noise: glass breaking, the world breaking, a tree cracking" (54). In Albee's play, the recontexualization is less cosmological and more sociological. The move from dog (as in Gurney) or cat (as in Derrida) to goat is also a move out of the urban domestic sphere of modernity, a move towards, to use Hamlet's phrase again, "country matters" (the salacious pun is perhaps even more apt here than in Shakespeare!). UNA CHAUDHURI For indeed it is the country - that most paradigmatic of all eco-sites - that unleashed all the chaos to begin with: we learn that Martin fell in love with Sylvia, the goat, while he was country house-hunting, or, as he says, "barn hunting" (40). The circumstances, as he reveals them, point to the cultural codes within which the country is embedded. "Stevie and 1 had decided it was time to have a real country place - a farm, maybe - we deserved it." " Beyond the suburbs," says his friend Ross, and Martin agrees: "Yes, beyond the suburbs" (40). His epiphany, as he later calls it, was strikingly site-specific. It began with a landscape, a fantasy-laden vision of a certain kind of place: I stopped at the top of a hill I.. .} and the view was ... well, not spectacular, but ... wonderful. Fall, you know?, with leaves turning and the town below me and great scudding cloudsand those country smells. I.. .J The roadside stands, wilh com and other stuff piled high, and baskets full of I... ] beansand tomatoes and those great white peachesyou only get late summer I...J And from up there I could trace the roadsout toward the farm, and it gave me a kind of shiver. (41 ) Martin's tragedy, if such it is, might have less in common with the scapegoat tragedies of ancient Greece than with that spatial bifurcation of human community Raymond Williams investigated so brilliantly in The Country and the City. Noting the extraordinary variety of meanings those two words have, Williams nevertheless identified their structural relationship - as opposites as key to their ideological functioning: On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city hasgathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associationshave also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reachesback into classical times. (t) Almost four decades before The Goat, Albee had given more straightforwardly tragic expression to the cultural geography that increasingly separates human beings from other animals, both human and non-human. In The Zoo Story, Albee pointedly contextualizes modern alienation within another paradigmatic eco-site: the city park. The play is set, famously, in Central Park. As discussed in the emergent field of cultural landscape studies (see Chaudhuri 22'-26) the city park is one of those "middle landscapes - gardens, parks, or other natural landscapes situated outside the overstimulating city but short of the primitive wilderness" that have "a long history in American culture and Western thought [... ) joining pastoral scenery and civilization" (Hanson 17). In the nineteenth century, the vogue for such middle-landscapes joined social- Animal Geographies engineering programs seeking to remedy the perceived threat posed to health and morality by urbanization and industrialization: "American city planners created parks as pieces of country in the city, restorative retreats that would offset the stress, noise, grime, overstimulation, debauchery and disorder of city life" (17). New York's Central Park, is, of course, a model of the genre, as well as a paradigm of American landscape architecture, being one of the greatest achievements of the father of that field, Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted's approach to landscape architecture produced works of complex naturalistic mimesis in which every effort was made to conceal the artifice of the design, to disguise cultural interventions to the point that the end product would not be recognized as a built landscape (most visitors to Central Park assume that it is a "natural" landscape). Occupying an ideological middle ground between John Muir's radical notion of nature as "temple," and Gifford Pinchot 's utilitarian view of nature as "workshop" (Spirn t t2), Olmsted exemplified the more common, and infinitely more ambivalent relationship of modernity to nature: nature as culture's majestic Other alld its malleable creature. It is perfectly fitting, then, for his masterpiece, Central Park, to be the setting of one of American drama's most poignant enactments of that ambivalence. The action of Zoo Story suggests that the park is not just any space; rather it is so complicated a response to the increasing dichotomization of city and county as to be something of a geopathological syndrome. Both the characters approach it desperately, as a potential solution to the problem of city life, though Jerry is more conscious of (and more extreme in) this project than Peter, who is content to use the park as per the culture's instructions, as a brief respite from bourgeois pressures and domestic oppression. In the course of the play, Jerry manages to tum the park into a weapon, effectively reversing the planners' intention for the space: instead of a safe outlet for the aggression engendered by (unnatural?) urban life, the park turns into a stage for a quiet modern agon that pits humans against animals, men against women, the "upper-middle-middle-c1ass" against the "Iower-upper-middle-class" (20), and individuals against themselves. The Zoo Story might have been more accurately called The Park Stmy. There is actually no zoo in it (nor, for that matter, a zoo story, although one is repeatedly promised by Jerry). But the displacement of the zoo by the park in the play (and vice versa in the play's title) is a key to its account of modem metropolitan experience. The role of animality in characterizing the space and action of the play makes that account classically modernist, with the animal standing in, as so often in modernism, for the descent into primitive emotionality . The descent begins, in this case, by establishing space as a deterministic force. There may be no zoo in The Zoo StOlY, but the one that Jerry keeps mentioning is real enough, and the play is at pains to locate it quite specifi- UNA CHAUDHURI cally, with numerical coordinates like street numbers. Jerry's insistence on distances and directions ("I've been walking north. [... j IButj not due north" 11 2-13 J) sets the stage, as it were, for a distinctly territorial encounter, with both characters making significant cultural assumptions about each other based on the city's cultural geography of East Side, West Side, Greenwich Village, and so on. The play's symbolic approach to geography extends even to statements of philosophical principle (or perhaps the parody of such) as when Jerry solemnly declares that "sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly" (2 I). The cumulative effect of all these geographical references is to frame the sociological and psychological action of the play within a deterministic spatial logic. The park begins to appear as a kind of vortex of tragic self-discovery. It is a "heart of darkness" where (like all such sites in modernism) the human . descent into primitive emotionality is figured as animality. Just as the zoo is displaced here, so is the zoo slOry. In its place we get a dog story. Not, one might say, a shaggy dog story, for "The Story of Jerry and the Dog" is anything but pointless. Rather, it is a kind of modern beast fable, packed with ethical implications. The dog Jerry first tried to tame and then tries to kill (first to kill "with kindness" and then to "just kill," as he says 131Il is a grotesque version of the household pet as Oedipalized animal. It belongs to Jerry's hideously amorous landlady and resembles the hell hound to which Jerry explicitly compares it: a black monster of a beast: an oversized head, tiny, tiny ears, and eyes ... bloodshot, infected, maybe; and a body you cansee the ribsthrough the skin. The dog isblack, all black; all black eKcept for the bloodshot eyes, and ... yes ... and an open sore on itsI... J right forepaw; that is red, too. And oh yes; (he poor monster 1... 1almost always has an erection 1.. .1that'sred, too. And I... 1there's a gray-yellow-white color, too, when he bareshis fangs. (30, emphasisin original) The landlady's horror-cartoon of a pet is contrasted with the pets in Peter's house - two cats and two parakeets, one for each of his two daughters . These Disneyfied animals, benign enough at first, become disturbingly humanized during Peter's hysterical giggling fit: "Oh, hee, hee, hee. I must go. I.. .J After all, stop, stop, hee, hee, hee, after all, the parakeets will be getting dinner ready soon. Hee, hee. And the cats are setting the table" (38). His fantasy turns his home, as Peter himself says, into a zoo, just as Jerry's description of the inhabitants of his rooming house - each as distinctive as a species, and each locked into his or her tiny enclosure - recalls nothing so much as the zoo that he has recently visited, where everyone is "separated by bars from everyone else, the animals for the most part from each other, and always the people from the animals" (40). Thus the zoo that fails to appear in a story nevertheless saturates the symbolic space of the play, redefining Animal Geographies 655 modern metropolitan life as bestialized, partitioned, and brutally confined. Albee's modern city dwellers venture into the park as into a wilderness, hoping to find some account of their being in the world more satisfying than the one offered by their various urban stations. Their story is, finally, an instance of the privileged trope of modernism, "the traumatic encounter with the primitive that threatens to activate the animal in all of us" (Wolfe, Animal Rites (85). The zoo story turns out to be only a park story, its zoo displaced and "useld l," as John Berger puts it, "as a symbol" (24). In the end, the only animals we see in the play turn out to be Peter and Jerry themselves: Jerry's death cry is that of "an injuriated andjatally wounded animal" (47, emphasis in original), and Peter learns that "it's all right, you 're an animal. You're an animal, too" (49). Ultimately, then, The Zoo Story remains captivated by the figure of the human, sacrificing the animal to that figure by turning it into a metaphor. The actual animal returns, with a vengeance, in The Goal, where its presence is stunningly literal. It is also, however, utterly beyond dramatic resolution. The appearance of the animal, in all its fleshly embodiment, brings the human story to a screeching halt. The family stands paralyzed. There is nowhere to go: neither city nor country, neither apartment nor zoo. The animal is understood quite literally as a defeat of meaning, a black hole in the family's comfortable universe: "one of them has been underneath the house, down in the cellar, digging a pit so deep!, so wide!, so ... HUGE! ... we'll all fall in and r...J never ... be ... able .. . to ... climb ... out .. . again - no matter how much we want to, how hard we try" (tOI-2). Between the unmeaning (or resistance to meaning) of the literal animal and the unmeaning (or surfeit of meaning) of the animal as metaphor lies another kind of zooesis, which I now propose to explore in Terry Johnson's extraordinary zoo story, Cries from the Mammal House. A crucial characteristic of this kind of zooesis is the fact that it begins with - and returns us to - an understanding that animals are, above all, themselves, not us, not metaphors, not convenient codes for our prejudices. It is a salutary reminder, this "nothing elsc" of the animal, even jf it is onc we humans can sustain only fleetingly. For, as Wolfe puts it, "even though the discourse of animality and species difference may theoretically be applied to an other of whatever type, the consequences of that discourse, in institutional terms, fall overwhelmingly on nonhuman animals, in our taken-far-granted practices of using and exploiting them" (Introduction xx, emphasis in original). NOTH ING ELSE Cries from the" Mammal House is a veritable compendium of animal practices, including zoo-keeping, velerinary medicine, animal-behavior-based psychology , repopulation of endangered species, euthanasia, animal worship, bestial- UNA CHAUDHURI ity, taxidermy, trafficking in exotic animals, slaughtering, butchering, and meat-eating. The play's cataloguing of the many ways in which humans relate to animals is a principal strategy of its remarkably non-reductive zooesis. The play's highly differentiated and pluralistic view of animality is also reflected in its title. I called the playa zoo story, and indeed it is set in a zoo, but the play's title is the first of its many interventions into the homogenized and impacted view of animals that Derrida identifies as the key strategy of camophallogocentrism . In using the less familiar, more archaic term "mammal house" in the title of the play, Johnson disturbs that comfortable dissociation we have achieved between the words "human" and "animal," and forces us back into the biological field we prefer to distance ourselves from. From its title onwards, the logic of Johnson's play fosters the re-recognition of animals as humankind's "neighbors" (to use Derrida's term I"The Animal that Therefore I Am" 402D, but does so within a tragic view of eco-history (similar to the one expressed in Caryl Churchill's recent play of ecocidal apocalypse, Far Away), asking whether this recognition comes too late. In an instance of inspired zooesis, the play opens with a direct address to the audience that is cleverly doubled as a dialogue with an animal: Staring "straight ahead ofher," Anne speaks "directly to the audience": Listen! This isn't the real world. This is a zoo. You think you'd preferthe real world? Foraging for yourself instead of opening that mouth forwhatever we choose to drop into it? Nothing but nature between you and the horizon? You dream of it as a sort of freedom, the real world? Elephants might ny. Let me tell you, when we stole it from you, this dream of yours, the weapon we used was our intelligence. And now the world's been stolen from us by a small elite of our own species and the weapon they used was money. So we sit in our enclosures, our horizons painted on glass, ourmouths wide open ... but instead of education, selfrespect and common decency, we are fed television, charge cards and bloody families. (141) By explicitly articulating the modern-life-as-zoo metaphor within a zoo, and especially by embedding it within a surprising instance of cross-species address, Anne's speech exposes to critical view the kind of metaphoric zooesis that, in Albee's Zoo Story as in so much other animal discourse, effectively displaces the animal. Just as the word "mammal" in the title overwrites and reactivates the deadened word "animal," the word "house" nudges new meanings into the sentimentalized "home." Human and non-human animals share this mammal house, making the play's title function much like the title of J. M. Coetzee's boundary-blurring animal text The Lives of Animals. Coetzec's "animals" include not only those of whom his protagonist speaks, but also those surrounding her - her son, daughter-in-law, grandchildren - through whose Animal Geographies "lives" (lives that we see as normal; lives like ours) her so-called extreme views on animals are refracted. Here, in Johnson's play, the "cries" coming from the mammal house belong to both human and non-human animals, with neither group displacing or muting the other. The effect is that the lives of the animals begin to appear as complex and various as human lives always automatically do. As the play opens, a middle-aged man named Alan is reluctantly taking possession of a small-town zoo he has just inherited from his father. As his first act of ownership, he must kill the zoo's most popular exhibit, an elephant, which was, in a manner of speaking, responsible for his father'S death. At the very outset, then, zooesis is at work: the merging of the issue of the animal's criminal culpability with the more familiar family plot provides a brilliant twist on the old theme of the revenge of a father'S murder. Instead of a murderous human "beast," this play's reluctant Hamlet or Orestes, Alan, must dispatch a real animal. Thus tile opening moments of the play link a venerable dramatic tradition with a now well-documented but still little known piece of legal history -the trial and execution of animals. Whether an animal can be responsible for acrime is decisively answered here in the negative, by invoking the complex history of animal display out of which the modern zoo evolved. It seems that the old man was killed when, in an act of drunken nostalgia, he had entered the elephant's cage to be photographed with the animal, attempting to recreate a moment from the distant past of the zoo, when he was photographed "holding out a contract for the elephant to sign" (144). The old photograph evokes the ancestry of zoos in traveling menageries and animal entertainments, in the so-called bad old days ("Bloody silly," the son calls the photograph [1441) before the invention of the modem and socalled scientific zoo, which frowns on the anthropomorphizing of captive animals (while reluctantly participating in it - in practices like public feedings and named "zoo pets" - to appeal to a decidedly voyeuristic and unscientific public ). In the context of cruel animal captivity thus evoked, the animal appears as a victim, and its "execution"as the final injury in a life of insults. Absurd, unjust, and unethical as the decision is, the animal must be "put down," and the play's first exchange evokes some of the most common arguments and excuses heard in current debates about animal rights. There is the pragmatic argument: "If I don't, somebody else will." There is also the "lesser of two evils" argument: "I'm a qualified surgeon. I can kill I... ] mOfe humanely than any policeman" (142). But the play is less interested in ethical argumentation than in developing a dramatic discourse - a zooesis - based on the cultural existence of the debate: Alan must not only kill the innocent elephant but spend much of the play euthanizing many other animals, once it is learned that the zoo is bankrupt and has to be closed down. Thus one major line of the play's action is a kind of reversal of the Noah story, with animals being systematically destroyed instead of systematically saved by human UNA CI-I AU DHURI beings. Creature by creature, species by species, Alan administers the right dose of poison needed to extinguish each living being. The last syringe is for himself, making him a kind of inverse Adam, with no animals left to name, and no reason to live. This animal extinction plot is countered by the story of David, Alan's brother, a biologist specializing in the rescue and rebreeding of endangered species. His current project takes him (and, surprisingly, the play itsel!) to Mauritius, where, in addition to the pink pigeons he is seeking to rebreed, he also finds a secluded tribe who worship a group of dodo birds that have survived the famed extinction of their species. On the island he also encounters a rich mixture of human cultures. from which he acquires a kind of new family to replace the obliterated one back in England. Significantly, the human diversity is characterized (by the ludicrously conservative colonial wife Lady Palmer) as "a sort of religious zoo" (173). Her disquisition neatly demonstrates the complex and contradictory use of the animal in constructing ideologies of difference: I draw the line at black magic. I... IIt·sa silly game that requiresthe slaughter of innncent creatures. lIsperpetralOrsdeserve the wrath of the Lamb. I hate this heathen island, Mr Ramsay. I believe it was created by God as a sort of religious zoo; a place we might observe all the half-baked idiotic ideologies of the world clamouring for attention and disappearing up their own belief systems. Eventually the Chrislianethic wi ll rise triumphant. ( 172-73) Although this speech occurs in an exchange between two western characters , it does not function in the way of those Orienralist representations that tum non-western people into a colorful background for the dramas of Europeans . David's new friends in Mauritius quickly exceed their stereotypes (a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian convert, a "Revolutionary Marxist"1173!) and begin to play vital roles in the play's increasingly complex and stylistically risky exploration of cultural geographies. A key strategy of this exploration involves establishing a dialectic between two spaces, two worlds: the "home-world" of late-twentieth-century England and the distant "other-world" of Mauritius. The contrasts between the two the dying Mammal House and the teeming island, systematic extinction and uncontrollable evolution - eventually produce, in the play's final act, a wholly unexpected new social configuration, a new world, as it were. "Paradise" .(as David calls Mauritius 116t I) is restored to the family. The zoo is saved, the family is rescued. Not surprisingly, the agent of this renaissance is an animal. Johnson's choice of animal for the role of ecological messiah is nothing short of inspired, for he places, at the center of his play's ironic apotheosis, the creature who constellates, more than any other,' all the grimness and peculiarity of the human relation to non-human animals: the dodo. Animal Geographies The extravagant and unexpected happy ending the play affords all its characters - all happily united in England - reads like an ecological parable : David makes the biological find of the century (that the dodo, posteranimal of extinction, is in fact not extinct) because he had in his possession , when he arrived in Mauritius, a stuffed dodo. This moldy specimen of taxidermy is from the old zoo-keeper's collection ("[a [nything died, he'd have it stuffed. And the meat roasted for his gourmets' circle" [t52!), and David has brought it to Mauritius to barter with the local museum for museum facilities. But for David's Creole assistant, Victor, the dodo is a sign that David is the fulfillment of a prophecy, and he leads David to his vi llage, "a village so high up it wasn't even on the map. It's a small community descended from a bunch of slaves who thought fuck it and ran off. They live in almost total isolation: Victor was their city-man" (207- 8). In the village, David is "introduced" to the mythically stupid birds in a suitably outlandish fashion: They lined up this gigantic lid, and there was the pit. 1was scared oul or my wits. They picked me up and threw me in it I couldn't see a thing, except their races up above smiling as ir they thought they were doing me a ravour. So (looked around. It was very dark. t couldn', make much out. Something was moving. I presumed it was there to eat me. Then someone lowered down a torch; the pit filled with thaI lovely naming torchlight '" and there was something there. In the middle of the light it stood, blinking itseyes and wondering why on earth it had been woken up at this ungodly hour. It was a dodo. And it looked at me, , swear to God, and il opened ils beak and it made the daftest sound I've ever heard. And there were females roosting and younguns being sat on, and all around me these grinning bloody conservationists, showing off their handful of gods for the very first time. (208) David himself gives the meaning of the play's ecological parable: "I was just in the right place at the right time" (208). By this time, however, the notion of place - and further the question of what makes a place "right" - is anything but simple. The play has deployed the figure of the animal - or rather, remembering Derrida's warning about that singular - the figure of animals . to remap the cultural geography of late-twentieth-century Europe as a rapidly emptying "mammal house," its inhabitants engaged in an ecocide that will eventually ensure their own extinction. "What' s the matter with you all?" David asks his niece when he first arrives on the scene. "We're related," she answers (t62). Not rcally. Or not enough. The last act includes a lengthy scene of introductions , in which the conditions of a more creative, more sustaining relation , are enacted. Not surprisingly. this new relation is one that centrally involves both human and non-human animals. Once introduced to each 660 UNA CHAUDHURI other, all the characters gather around a crate that David opens: "From the crate there issues an absurd cry which echoes around the mammal house" (209). The cry of the dodo, absurd in itself but more absurd in its absence, invites an imaginative rethinking - beyond the human - of the figures of home, family, relationship. Like The Zoo Story, Cries from the Mammal House rcads the zoo as a site of our culture's anxieties about its alienation from nature and from our animal selves. Unlike Albee's play, however, this one does not abandon the zoo to its metaphoric fate. Instead it undenakes a complex and differentiated zooesis, engaging a wide range of actual animal practices. This zooesis explores the possibility and argues the necessity of reintegrating the animal into modem consciousness. That this is a difficult, perhaps even futile, project is signaled by the play's ironic ending, its "dodo ex machina." An additional, and rigorously theatrical, acknowledgement of the animal's vexed relationship to cultural meaning is made through the mimetic strategies explicitly called for in a note at the stan of the play: "all live animals should be invisible, and mimed by the actors. All dead animals, in whatever condition, should be present" (140). Thus the play's dialectic of spaces is overlaid with a performance dialectic that enacts the tragic contingency of the animal in the modem world. Flickering in and out of mimesis, the animal shapes and reshapes the spaces of human culture. In the same way, various modes of zQoesis, such as the troping of the animal to the reflexive and critical interrogation of its place among us- either reproduce or excavate the humanist assumptions that determine the geography of modern drama. NOTES I "The zoo alleges that it can tell a story, itsown story - roughly along the lines of, 'Here isa zebra.. .' The zoo story, instead, more routinely tellssomething like 'Here is a voyeur'; 'Here is a victim'; 'Here isa sadist'; 'Here is a corpse'" (Malamud 55). 2 The "companionship" Berger has in mind is very different from the sentimental· ized relation prescribed by pet keeping. Interestingly, in recent times animal wei· fare groupshave attempted to alter that relation partly by seeking 10 displace the word "pet" with the phrase "companion animal." In this as in other initiatives of progressive politiCS, nomenclature becomes symbolic battleground in the struggle for change. 3 Several recent studies (Fuller, Quammen, Correia) trace the cautionary case of the dodo's brief sojourn in human company: a mere ninety years from discovery to extinction, as well as its grip on the human imagination and itstransformation into the poster·animal of extinction. Animal Geographies 66 1 WORKS C ITED Albee, Edward. The Goal, or Who Is Sylvia? 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