Mourning Humans and Other Animals through Fictional Taxidermy Collections

Lydia Millet’s Magnificence (2012) and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s The Green Lion (2015) stage various repurposings of taxidermy collections as acts of mourning that loft fragile alternatives to the melancholia, narcissism, and depression that haunt histories of mass killings. Set at the turn of the twenty-first century, a period marked by what affect theorist Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism,” or a perverse desire for the obstacles to flourishing, these novels frame larger questions concerning to what vital effects uses of lifeless bodies frustrate recovery efforts in our time. Telling stories not of single objects of taxidermy but rather of what accrues along with their collections, these novels explore why this particular form of representation proves ripe for decolonizing affective politics at the intersections of genocides, extinctions, and related horrors.