Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice by Marian Scholtmeijer (review)

HUMANITIES 141 Mari'an Scholtmeijer. Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice University of Toronto Press. 330. $50.00, $18.95 paper The much-contested issue of 'appropriation of voice' in literary works has alerted us in recent years to some of the ways in which deep and urgent conflicts within our cultures can often be masked by those cultures' dominant voices. In many cases such conflicts can be aired via an effective (albeit simplistic) strategy, which involves a deliberate attempt to listen- to what hitherto neglected 'others' have to say about themselves and their experience of the world. But what are we to do when the other does not speak in the conventional sense of that word? How, for instance, do we gain access to the subjective world of the nonhuman animal? Marian Scholtmeijer's Animal Victims in Modern Fiction explores and critiques how various Western writers from Jack London to Stephen King have approached (or avoided) the problems inherent in any imaginative attempt to make animal realities available to human readers. The book is a manifestation of an apparently growing cultural awareness that there is something profoundly wrong with the relationship between the human and non-human beings who inhabit this world. Scholtmeijer maintains 'that nonhuman animals literally contest the anthropocentrism on which modern Western culture is founded, and that the meaning animals possess ... shakes what seems to be an almost congenital persuasion in humankind that nothing has value unless it has value for us.' Her proanimal -rights politics are readily apparent throughout, and her tone is sometimes crusading, but sympathetic readers will likely appreciate that Animal Victims clearly communicates the very great significance of the issues it investigates. Scholtmeijer begins with two helpful chapters in which she outlines the cultural and theoretical underpinnings of her study. The pivotal figure in her account of Western culture's understanding of non-human animals is, of course, Darwin, whose evolutionary theory dealt a ruinous blow to the illusory barrier separating 'man' from 'beast.' Yet the distinction survives, fraught with the sorts of telling contradictions upon which the literary critic has been known to feed. The theoretical argument, the subject of the second chapter, is more vexed, owing primarily to the non-human animal's extra-cultural and extra-linguistic existence. 'Culture eclipses animal identity but cannot eliminate it,' Scholtmeijer contends. 'Animal identity abides, waiting only for cultural recognition.' As she acknowledges , however, such recognition, no matter how well intended, is inevitably tainted by culture and hence anthropocentric. The power of the nonhuman animal resides, then, in that stubborn, silent abiding, a passive 142 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 refusal to be contained by hwnan constructions which exposes the partial and fallible nature of those constructions. From there the book turns its attention to a series of modern works dealing with animals in the wild (including London's The Calla! the Wild, Fred Bodsworth's Last of the Curlews, and Allan Eckert's The Great Auk) and in cities (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Thomas Mann's 'Tobias Mindernickel ,' Katherine Mansfield's 'The Fly,' and Giorgio Bassani's The Heron). Other chapters focus on animals variously implicated in questions of human sexuality (Grove's Settlers of the Marsh, Lawrence's The Fox, Steinbeck 's 'The White Quail,' and Webb's Gone to Earth) and on the roles they are made to play in modern-day myth-making (Flaubert's Salammbo, Findley 's Not Wanted on the Voyage and Faulkner's 'The Bear'). Finally, there is a disappointing chapter on 'The Doubly Victimized Animal,' in which Hemingway, Graeme Gibson, and Jerzy Kosinski are pilloried (most unfairly so, it seems to me) for having, in The Sun Also Rises, Communion, and The Painted Bird, 'put so much artistic effort into proving that, in truth, animal victims are negligible that their stories could easily be judged much more pernicious than any popular work of horror.' Ignoring the slight against the popular and the horrific for the moment (Stephen King's Cujo is the immediate target of that remark), I cannot see what is to be gained by such a harsh and simplistic condemnation . Scholtmeijer's readings of these texts are illuminating and even...