The Human Animal in Fiction
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13534640500448684
ISSN1460-700X
Autores Tópico(s)Narrative Theory and Analysis
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. In a story like ‘The Burrow’, for example, the narrative continually retracts or negates itself, by rescinding previous statements and undoing earlier points. This allows the narration to perform, paradoxically, the animal's inability to narrate. 2. Mieke Bal writes, ‘Narratology is the theory of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacles, events; cultural artifacts that “tell a story”. Such a theory helps to understand, analyse, and evaluate narratives. A theory is a systematic set of generalized statements about a particular segment of reality’. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), p.3. 3. Mieke Bal, Narratology, p.5. 4. The non‐human actor may be something other than an animal in Bal's scheme, however. For example, she cautions against the unjustified human fleshing out of ‘paper characters’. Bal points to Albertine, a figure of Marcel's obsession in Proust's novel, as an example of a paper character who is frequently treated as though she were fully humanized rather than merely a creation of the imagination, p.116. 5. Mieke Bal, Narratology, p.114. 6. Nigel Rothfels explains that the essays in Representing Animals share the common idea that ‘the way animals are understood is bound in time and place.’ He also points out ‘that the careful scrutiny of that understanding reveals not only important limits to our knowledge of animals but important limits to our knowledge of ourselves’. Nigel Rothfels, ed, Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p.xii. 7. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 8. Albert Camus, The Stranger [1942], trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1957). 9. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999). 10. Roy F. Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.ix. 11. Roy F. Baumeister, The Cultural Animal, p.9. 12. Roy F. Baumeister, The Cultural Animal, p.10. 13. Roy F. Baumeister cites as an example of a non‐human cultural practice ‘the potato‐washing pattern among Japanese monkeys on the island of Koshima’, p.14. The monkeys began washing sweet potatoes because the dirt on them abraded their teeth – a practice that was then handed down to subsequent generations. 14. A more expansive sense of the human as possessing a symbolic order is offered by Jean‐Francois Lyotard, when he writes, ‘A human, in short, is a living organisation that is not only complex but, so to speak, replex’. He refers here to the fact that human beings collect and process information in a huge storage system. Jean‐Francois Lyotard, ‘Can Thought Go On Without a Body?’ in Posthumanism, ed. by Neil Badmington (New York: Palgrave, 2000) pp.129–140 (p.132). 15. Anorexia nervosa presents a different and as yet poorly understood version of fasting, whose etiology with respect to physiology or culture remains puzzling. See Roy F. Baumeister, p.161. 16. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, ed. by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray (Boston: Bedford, 1997), p.233. 17. Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray [eds], Bedford Glossary, p.234. 18. Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz, Literary Terms: A Dictionary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p.156. 19. Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (New York: Signet, 1964). 20. Frank Norris, McTeague, p.5. 21. Frank Norris, McTeague, pp.27–28. 22. Frank Norris, McTeague, p.28. 23. Frank Norris, McTeague, p.29. 24. Eric J. Sundquist, ‘Introduction: The Country of the Blue’, in American Realism: New Essays, ed. by Eric J. Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp.3–24 (p.13). 25. Eric J. Sundquist, ‘Country of the Blue’, p.13. 26. William E. Cain, ‘Presence and Power in McTeague’, in American Realism, ed. by Sundquist, pp.199–214 (p.213). 27. See my Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 28. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.1; reviewed this issue. 29. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 30. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2002), pp.369–418; Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview’, in Who Comes after the Subject? ed. by Peter Connor, Eduardo Cadava and Jean‐Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991) pp.96–119. 31. Ursula K. Heise, ‘From Extinction to Electronics: Dead Frogs, Live Dinosaurs, and Electric Sheep’, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. by Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp.59–81 (p.77); reviewed this issue. 32. Marie‐Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 33. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, pp.55 and 56. 34. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.56. 35. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, pp.56–58. 36. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.63. 37. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, pp.63–69. 38. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.71. 39. Lubomir Dolezel defines akrasia as ‘incontinence or weakness of will’, p.70, and finds its earliest account in the work of Aristotle, p.246, n.29. He notes that ‘For the ancient philosophers, akrasia became a cause celebre because it stood out as a paradox within their rational philosophy of acting’, p.70. 40. The authors of the deliberately silly Madame Bovary's Ovaries offer a patently biological explanation for sexual jealousy and its punishment in literature, as seen in their discussion of Othello. David P. Barish and Nanelle R. Barash, Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (New York: Delacorte, 2005), pp.14–23. 41. Roy F. Baumeister discusses addiction in relation to questions of free will; The Cultural Animal, p.303. 42. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.72. 43. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.70. 44. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.56. 45. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.24. 46. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.2. 47. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.23. 48. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.56. 49. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.40. 50. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.64. 51. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.41. 52. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.52. 53. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.38. Rosalind Coward makes the rather extreme statement that ‘Sex in human society is never instinctual; sex is always an activity wrapped in cultural meanings, cultural prescriptions, and cultural constraints.’ Consequently, for her ‘male aggression is more likely to be the ritualistic enactment of cultural meanings about sex’. Rosalind Coward, ‘The Instinct’ in Posthumanism, ed. by Neil Badmington (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp.14–22 (p.18). 54. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.60. 55. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.61. 56. The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles, 3rd ed., prep. by William Little, ed. by C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), p.1084. 57. C. T. Onions [ed], Oxford Universal Dictionary, p.1298. 58. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.71. 59. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.72. 60. Lubomir Dolezel, Heterocosmica, p.71. 61. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.75. 62. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.76. 63. Albert Camus, The Stranger, p.152. 64. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. by Amy Guttmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 65. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.1. 66. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.9. 67. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.11. 68. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.25 69. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, pp.158–59. 70. Rosalind Coward would disagree with David Lurie's formulation. She writes, ‘Because the relations between the sexes are unequal, sexual relations are imbued with meanings about dominance and subordination. What we encounter in rape, then, has nothing to do with the rituals of mating according to seasonal patterns, as in the animal world’, ‘The Instinct’, p.18. 71. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.199. 72. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.185. 73. Derek Attridge also connects Lurie's opera in the novel with the animals, and comments on the relationship between these two themes. ‘These strands don't soften the work's blows or provide a way out for any of its characters, but they do lead the ethical and political issues raised by the fictional events I've sketched into different, and less summarizable, territory’. Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p.174. 74. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.89. 75. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.90. 76. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.90. 77. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.146. 78. Attridge summarizes the significance of the values that Lurie protects in his care for the bodies of the dead dogs as ‘products of human culture through and through. Yet in this absurd misapplication of the terms of human culture to dead animals there is an obstinate assertion of values more fundamental, if more enigmatic, than those embodied in the discourses of reason, politics, emotion, ethics, or religion – those discourses that govern the new South Africa and much else besides’, p.186. 79. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.74.
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