paper for my postmodern class
Heather Beatty
Grandbois
Postmodern Fiction
05/19/08
Secretary of the Invisible: Embodying the Other in Postmodern Fiction
Or, Juntos
“Stories and myths are the connective tissue between culture and nature, between self and other, between life and death that sew the worlds together in their telling. And in the protective and connective body of the story the soul quickens. It comes alive.”
– Joan Halifax
Fear
I am awake in the dark heat of the night and I can hear the far off roar of machinery. There is a sense of pressure from the black air around me, from the quiet and persistent stirrings of my tribe, my Junto. Our bodies, sticky with sweat, brush against each other. Ada, my friend and comadre, hovers close and I know the diminutive shape of her bony back, her small head and perfectly curved nostrils as she breathes, carefully, discerningly. We move together toward the surrounding blackness, the mud the only cool under our feet in the close-crushing night air. The flies, omnipresent, still drone and hover, even in the dark, and I flick them away with my tail, wondering momentarily whether they are self-willed or simply fill the dark night with their incessant buzzing, mindless and monotonous. Ada and I move to the outside of the Junto as the tension grows. We are on the outskirts to the eastside of the flat, not far from the Boundary wall. We both move further east instinctively, sensing the threat of that sound, which grows louder, frightening and black and menacing. Where is my daughter? Corra is swift and as I think her, she comes to me, greeting me with her nuzzle to my cheek. We are together, I think, and my sigh rises in the dark. I know something is wrong when I hear Yerba, our matriarch, communicating softly through the sticky air. Her message tells us not to panic, to stand still, to stay close, but I sense that behind the message is the unknown, a dull nameless fear.
Postmodernism and Embodiment
To attempt to embody the Other, to imaginatively access foreign territory, J.M. Coetzee’s title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello explains when questioned about her beliefs, is the job of the writer. She considers herself a “secretary of the invisible” who records “all voices…as long as they speak the truth” (203-204). Deeply concerned with the invisible voices of the Other, with those whose voices are not readily accessible to prevailing human reason, Elizabeth Costello grapples with her role as the secretary from an ethical perspective. She asserts the reality of the experience of the Other, whether fictionalized or mythologized or tangible: “the ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive though now it is dying,” believing in it and “its blood too, this sacred liquid, sticky, dark, almost black” (211). And yet, as a scholar, she presents her ideas in cold terms of academic remove. Although she argues with herself that “Paul West was only doing his writerly duty” by “opening her eyes to human depravity in another of its manifold forms” she cannot accept the violent experience of reading Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg (178). She cannot fully reconcile herself with her own body and its reactions and expectations, and perhaps this is why we never see her actually attempting to encapsulate the voice of an animal.
Although she fails to take on the embodiment of a non-human animal voice, in the two chapters on “The Rights of Animals” Elizabeth Costello makes important arguments regarding the human misconception that animals have no thought-reason and therefore may be exploited. The fallacy, she argues, is that humans use human reason to come to this conclusion and to measure the animals’ reactions and behaviors. “Their whole being is in the living flesh,” she explains in order to convince a group of scholarly skeptics of the need to put oneself in the place of an animal. This empathy goes beyond imaginative speculation and must be enacted by embodiment of the animal, or the Other. She explains further: “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” (111). Here she hints at the central postmodern dilemma of human experience and language. If we have come to the point at which our language may be deconstructed to be shown as an immense series of constructions, then all is part of a simulacrum that begins, as Baudrillard comments, “with a liquidation of all referentials” (343). In this case, we are moving toward what Baudrillard calls “an explosion towards the center, or an implosion” which he further describes as “a reversion of energies towards a minimal threshold” as opposed to the further distancing concentric cycles of simulation in the modern world (373). In Baudrillard’s vision, the real in the postmodern world becomes not only distant but unnecessary and inaccessible until the point that all the posturing is undone and results in some catastrophic reversal.
Is that unavoidable distancing what writers like Elizabeth Costello contribute to when they attempt to give voice to the Other? She herself seems to agree with the inherent danger of the predicament of language in a postmodern world, realizing that actual embodiment, a state of “fullness of being” is a far cry from the words used to attempt to explain it. Her ambivalence about language and literature lead to her eventual stasis in the between-world of the Gate, not able to move on after her death.
This dilemma suggests a fairly pessimistic view of literature’s possible role in Baudrillard’s vision of the future. His overall view is undoubtedly a bleak one, in which our globalized culture spins out of control toward a “culminating point of available energy and the maximization of systems controlling all energy” which grow “as fast as (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities” (373). There is little to no hope in this equation. In his vision, all aspects of culture contribute to a negative “system of signs” (343) that end up replacing the real; this includes politics, science, sex, work, television, Disneyland, robberies, DNA: nothing seems to escape. Even his own discourse, the “critical mode, the analytic mode” comes into question as he cites the “vanishing point [which] is the horizon between reality and meaning” (365). However, in all his questioning of reality and meaning he avoids discussion of art as a meaningful cultural category. He does briefly mention Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” which he asserts was “still an attempt at a dramaturgy of life” that was the “last flickering of an ideal of the body, blood, and violence in a system already sweeping towards a reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood” (372). In other words, he gives credit to Artaud for his moving recreation of cruelty because at least it attempts to reflect a basic reality rather than retreating into nostalgia. But he fails to recognize the ability of other art forms, such as literature, to attempt a similar re-creative effect.
Can postmodern literature attempt to reveal the real and participate in a meaningful human endeavor? Perhaps more importantly, should it? John Barth offers a different vision of what postmodern fiction can do, a postmodern ideal that could embrace a novel like Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Barth proposes that a postmodern novel should “rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism,’ pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction,” synthesizing these apparent opposing forces (203). In other words, Barth’s ideal postmodern novel bridges the gap between the pre-moderns who “carry the torch of romanticism” and the moderns with their “difficulty of access” (201-202). A story like Elizabeth Costello’s which attempts to place ethical questions set in scholarly discourse within a greater story of an elderly woman facing death, uses both realism and experimental form to address a wider audience and bring up serious issues. The novel itself an invention, arguably a part of Baurdrillard’s simulacrum, manages to ostensibly puncture that mask of simulation by presenting an unflinching account of an academic’s evaluation of the nature of the power dynamics of the world around us, with all its implicit violence, blood and cruelty.
Movement
The sharp roaring, clanking and grinding, like some mechanical banshee in the night grows louder, familiar yet frightening, blacker than the moonless night and closer. Somewhere in the vastness of the western hills I hear vampire bats, their faint frenzies. An owl cries directly above us, a warning, and for a moment I am with it in the sky, swooping high where a cloudless breeze flits through, overlooking all of us, hundreds of us crowded together in the sweltering night. Through her ancient eyes, I see us: Ada with her dreamy eyes, endless stories and ocean soul, despite her bony sides and her heaving heart. My daughter Corra with her lively gait and bounding energy, her ups and downs, now terrified beside me. Yerba, our patient and wise matriarch, who loves the mud, the sky, the beetles, the flies, all of it, acquiescent and serene, dedicated to our Junto. The sound of machinery stops abruptly now and we hear the voices of men. So faraway at first they sound gentle. A crashing slam, metallic grinding, tumult. Sounds so unlike our skin, our eyes, our whispers in the dark. The sounds of humans, or as we call them, Otros, are always grating and bitter, explosive to our ears.
We try to shut our ears. Our hearts are in our bellies. Somewhere near me I recognize the black circularly painted skin as that of old Letro, my amigo with the Sick-eye. He bends to eat from a weedy patch and I know he is simply trying to will the noises away. He came long ago from the Bad place (I have heard the Otros call it the stockyards). Watching him chew, I gulp deeply of the air: I want to eat, I want to sleep, I want to lie right down here in the mud and close my eyes but I cannot. Along with the dirt and heat and bugs, I know the earth has offered me goodness in my life, and I am alive, my belly rumbling, my heart trembling, my grown daughter beside me, my legs strong, my poor heart breaking. Too many stories have circulated, and we don’t want to know, and yet we know.
Moments pass as the voices grow closer, abrasive now. “Andale bitches,” we hear as a small man, eyes flashing in the dark, approaches us. More men appear opposite him and their language is harsh and rapid-fire, rising to unbearable pitches as they surround us. I am pushed toward the center of our group, away from Ada, my spirited little friend, but still beside Corra who is worried, asking me with her insistent voice, what is happening, Mother, where we are going? I have been transported before, and I dread my own false comfortings. Oh my dear, it is not far, stay beside me, and if we see a way, we shall run. All around us the voices of confused and frightened friends. Some of the younger ones just waking out of sleep, crying in the night like yearlings, seeking out their mothers. We revert to infancy in our fear, pissing down our legs, bellowing to the sky, that wise impassive sky. Now that we are on the move, jostled and crowded, I can see Letro vomiting as he tries to keep moving, the old Sick-eye bulging, his face a contorted disaster. My heart cries for him, for his intelligent mind and gentle heart, his resilience as he keeps moving. I call his name, my voice catching with sorrow. He turns his head, answers me, Don’t worry, Alma, my dear friend, I will be alright. Why are we all so damn hopeful, I wonder briefly, but the thought is buried in fear, hungry and alive.
We have come to the truck, a monstrosity in the black field’s night, foreboding and vicious. We are being prodded up a rickety metal ramp, one by one, two hundred of my friends and family, I can hear the awful words of the men and the awful sounds of electricity as some of my more resistant friends are jolted with the prod. Their voices rise in deep alarm and fade to stunned silence. Our Junto, so small on the earth, now seems massive, pressing, flurried. The men push us, and some of us are mild, moving cautiously with obeisance; others are wild, eyes searching frantically, pawing and stamping obstinately. Ada, my companion, my bosom friend, I see her! She is a little in front of me and she is furious; her temper has flared; she is near her young son she fought to hold onto last year when they came for branding; the men are menacing as she tosses her head, protective and fierce as possible for a small bony lady. Defiant. My eyes shine. She is so just, so determined. Then her body shakes with the sudden jarring of the prod, and she is jerked along, and her body trembles with agony, and her son moves gloomily behind her. The belly of the truck gapes, empty and black, and we enter one by one, spilling into that unfathomable deep. For a moment I am disconcerted, on slippery ground, calling out again, Corra! Corra! Ada! Where are you?!! until I feel I’ve lost control, and there is a sinking longing in me, and they come to me as I feel it. We huddle, crowded by those we know by feel and smell and sound. We communicate constantly; I can hear Yerba’s voice not far from me: Friends, Sisters, Brothers, we are together, at least we are together, my friends…oh my dear ones…I have heard stories…I am sorry my dear Junto…this may be the end, yes, this may really be the end…but we are together and we shall go in peace and dignity. Remember our role, to be solid and to hold our secret sermons in the heart-bellies of our souls…Remember my friends…we know who we are. There is some weeping now, but many of us attempt to remain calm as Yerba suggests, comforting those around us and gazing upon each other with peaceful understanding. It is true, what she says, we are together.
As we drive away, it is like the sound of sky giants sobbing.
Abjection
Perhaps, in order to disrupt the simulacra of postmodern existence and to further question our basic assumptions, one duty of the postmodern novel is to address the abject, the marginalized and repressed with which Julia Kristeva attributes the power to subvert society’s most oppressive norms. In our society, our most abject and ignored victims are arguably non-human animals, forced to live in hideous conditions until the day of their violent deaths. Kristeva links death and defilement with the “corpse, the most sickening of wastes, as “border that has encroached upon everything” (3). This border then becomes vital for understanding oneself in turn; we are life turning away from that border. “How can I be without border,” Kristeva asks, just as we human beings know we cannot be without death or corpse. The boundary of the corpse infects life and shows up as an uncanny reminder of the “real threat…engulfing us” (4). This we fear; this we avoid; this we abhor. And yet, most human beings imbibe meat, or in more realistic terms, animal corpses. To address the abject then, according to Kristeva, as part of ourselves, that part which we loathe to apprehend, is to “disturb identity, system, order” (4). She writes that once we come to grips with our fear, “discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject” (6). This introduction to abjection places a special role on the writer, similar to Elizabeth Costello’s self-appointed role that she struggles with, to expose and explore the abject.
Elizabeth Costello addresses the abject in her discussions on body and pain, shame and horror, in essence “the being of the other” (78). In her advocations, she identifies openly with those subjects oppressed, exploited, abandoned, stripped by contemporary society. “Open your heart, and listen to what your heart says,” she admonishes in answer to a question about animal rights activism. Ultimately she wants to trust the human heart to lead to right action. But it is words that shatter illusions. Note the unsavory reaction to her answer when questioned about her vegetarianism. After her retort that “I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds,” her son, John, observes that “Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet” (83). It is the word “juices” along with words like “corpse” and “hacked flesh” that jar her audience. We describe the undesirable with the language of the abject; John points out the power of the word to produce effects upon the audience.
But language must have power beyond shock value in our current society where the media throws around words like “carnage” and “terrorism” to instill fear and self-containment. Literary language must create a bridge between the signified and the signifier, to introduce shared experience and empathy. Literature of embodiment, using words that capture the sheer primal experience, opens doors into strange realities, going beyond Baudrillard’s hyperreal by accessing other-reals. It is this power that postmodern fiction should attempt to capture and utilize, in order to both get behind the veil of simulacra and to cross the bridge between realism and modernism, appeasing both Baudrillard and Barth.
Our earlier question about the power of literature may be answered, then. Stories, admittedly re-creating reality, or simulacra in Baudrillard’s view, still hold power. As long as that story contains motivation for change, it is viable and valuable in the postmodern world. Although Baudrillard writes that “even inverted, the fable is useless,” we find that stories with postmodern concerns and agendas are not useless at all and in fact are linked to the “visible continuum” that “we need” (343, 350). To enact social change, writers must utilize writerly tools: language, vocabulary, narrative, characterization, epiphany. We must put into words exactly that which troubles and haunts current society, that underlying abject fear and repulsion that moves beneath. To use Baudrillard’s terms, we must provide a “panic-stricken production of the real,” using “real writing of cruelty” to enact change within our current social context (347, 372). We may not have access to the atom bomb or Watergate or Disneyland, but we encounter and support systems of exploitation and power on a daily basis. These we have the power to expose and challenge.
On the other hand, we have Barth’s program for literary upheaval. He suggests that “artistic conventions are liable to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work” (205). Indeed, in order to create renewable, sustaining literature for the future, our subject matter and our discourse must address the dynamic needs of a changing world. Our language must hold the power to overcome past prohibitions and move beyond social boundaries and norms into new territory. The aggressive literary defense of animals is yet one of these uncharted territories, one that Elizabeth Costello moves toward but never fully into.
The Chute
Much time passes as we roar through the land in the belly of this beast, pressed together and sobbing and talking and singing and hoping, always hoping. Then, it must be hours later, suddenly everything happens so fast. We feel ourselves slowing, we can feel the truck stopping, then going, then stopping and going again. At the last stop we wait, looking around at each other with questioning eyes; there is a moment of silence. And then, the grinding and grashing of the metal door sliding up, a sound that we shrink from. Pressed against each other into the aluminum walls and each other’s sweat and tears and piss, we cower. We gradually know that we are alone, abandoned by our sweet songs of hope and redemption, that we have no power, that no one will come to us and rescue us and guide us to safety where the earth grows green and rich for us.
We move out of the truck, wretchedly grateful, gulping the air of the morning; the sun is already blisteringly hot. It takes only a fragment of a moment to smell the death in the air and to see it in the vacant faces of los Otros milling about, doing their duty, doing their job, whatever it is they call it as they prod us toward brutal ends. Immediately madness ensues as we are ushered into the chute, a crowd of us bellowing and struggling. I stay close to Corra, who stamps apprehensively, and Ada, whose eyes are rolling from exhaustion and thirst. Yerba is one of the first through the chute. Ada stumbles and trips down the ramp and they prod her again. Her thin frame shakes violently and she is bleeding. She turns her head and calls for me. Single file, she cannot see me. I respond, I am here, my dear friend, I am right behind you, we are together. We move forward; the ground moves electronically beneath our feet. I had not expected this and I slip forward and lurch to catch myself. In a horrifying moment, I can see irritated men to the right of me, to the left of me. Suddenly I feel the arresting jolt of the prod, that petrifying and arresting grip vexing through my body; I can feel my blood shiver! I can feel my nerves twitch! It is a horrifying thing to try to explain and I do it no justice. My body quivers for moments after and I am surprised to be alive, electricity still in my bones. My blood that is cleansing, my blood that rushes; my blood means life. To fill my body with electricity means to substitute my blood with something false for a moment. My mind and heart reel. How in the name of earth’s holiness can they do this? I watch Ada carefully, calling out to her, please be good, don’t move abruptly. I don’t want them to shoot you with electricity, my friend. Be cautious. Move for them.
We are on some kind of track. We cannot veer side to side. I can see my friends. I know them all, their names, their habits, their likes and dislikes, their questions, their theories, their loves. My friend Letro, whom I have known this past difficult and dry and sickly year, whom I have slept next to and nuzzled and administered to in his need, is fighting. I see them attach some cold steel contraption to his sickly swollen head so he cannot see them or us. They try to pacify him, their words are dispassionate and all wrong: “C’mon you old fucker, get a move on, nothing’s gonna stop for you; fuckin getalong ol doggy, jesus christ you motherfucker, MOVE, stop your fucking whining.” Letro plods along in spurts of disjointed movement, disconsolate and removed, quieter now. I sense him away in some created world inside his mind, apart. I mourn the loss of my friend. The rubber belt beneath our hooves moves one, slowly. My daughter is behind me and I beg her to acquiesce, to go quietly. Her tremulous voice fills the thick air. I close my eyes briefly against the agitating light, the glint of the cold steel walls, the sight of Ada’s rump before me, the strange movement under our feet, and the smell of death everywhere, blood and excrement and flooding emotion. If only none of this were real, if only it were some great simulacrum, a trick played by the hand of an angry god, a trick played by fate or art or science or nonsense. I open my eyes and all I can see is blood, shit, power, madness, fear.
Literature and Change
In order for literature to maintain cultural viability in a postmodern world it must challenge systems of power so that readers may imaginatively engage and, to borrow Kristeva’s term, “ceaselessly confront otherness” (6). At its best, postmodern literature with all its imaginative experimentation, should give creative voice to the Other, in a sense giving abjection a living, breathing body. This embodiment, albeit fictional and thus still within Baudrillard’s system of representational simulacra, has the power to implicate readers. Reviewing Céline’s work on the horrors of war, Kristeva writes that:
Through his scription he causes it to exist and although he comes far short of clearing it up, he throws over it the lacework of his text: a frail netting that is also a latticework, which, without protecting us from anything whatsoever, imprints itself within us, implicating us fully. (156, emphasis mine)
It is important that the literature not attempt to “protect” readers from repulsive horrors, as the experience of abjection requires a visceral sympathy to attain an understanding. Elizabeth Costello’s personal reservations and revulsions that turn her away from West’s violent novel should ultimately be replaced by a wiser understanding of his literary latticework. As horrifying as they may be, even the criminal acts of the abject may shed light on social systems of power and exploitation. Even these most difficult of readings have the power of implication, challenging readers to courageous consideration.
As Doug Rice warns his literature students, “Reading is dangerous if you are reading well and experiencing. It becomes part of who you are.” Costello’s weakness is that she knows this and is frightened by the implications of absorbing what she reads into her own self. When speaking about the Holocaust, Costello explains that “the horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else” (79). She acknowledges here that human beings, as interpreters of the world around them, have the power to imaginatively embody the Other and, if necessary, to come to a new and fuller understanding of the powers at work. And yet she refrains from doing the dirty work; she criticizes West’s book, calling it “evil,” and she fails to give voice to the ultimate Other, whom she claims to advocate, the non-human animal.
As the ultimate emblems of the abject, the bottom of the hierarchical totem pole of sentient beings, animals are desperately in need of representation, especially as they figure in to the human schema of greed, industry, and consumption. Current practices of factory farming enact excessive wastefulness, degradation, terror and cruelty on a daily basis. Elizabeth Costello urges readers to “walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner” (111). She knows the power of experiential reading all too well; she knows the obscenity and evil lurking in human behavior. Her philosophies on physical otherness remind her audience that to embody another is to understand by “immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity” (108). This ability to immerse ourselves in the complexity of otherness, to embody identities of the abject, outside our scope of reason and our version of intellect is a direct reflection of the best possibilities of humanness.
There is an ecological vision implicit in this postmodern vision in which our stories weave together the secrets of the earth’s survival. In her insightful text The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth, Joan Halifax discusses the value of the story in the healing of the earth and its peoples. She writes that even though “we have wounded the world,” our stories and myths “remind us to turn toward creation, toward our extended selves” (124). She asserts that our imaginative engagement with others will lead us to more productive and restorative action. Like Coetzee, as spoken through Elizabeth Costello who uses her role as writer to fight against cultural arrogance and exploitation, Halifax envisions a hopeful future in which our literature, our stories, have the power to reconnect us with the earth and each other, reviving and redeeming us. This kind of literature builds a bridge, as Barth suggests, between realism and modernism, engagement and experiment, with the potential to inspire active change. Also, in Baudrillard’s view, this literature has the power to build a bridge between the real and the simulation as it encourages acknowledgement and accountability in the contemporary dynamics of a changing world. Conscientious readers will no longer be able to apathetically ignore the oppression inherent in dominant power systems. The stories will become part of readers’ identities, then part of the cultural fabric, and finally part of an ever-growing latticework of possibilities.
Slaughter
The sun is gone. We are inside a building, dank and depraved, the smell of death close and pungent. The Otros think that we are subdued at the end of the line, at the time of stunning, at the time of insensibility. In fact, our desperation hits us much earlier, our souls and minds sinking into the numbing anesthesia of fear and repulsion. We are no longer ourselves. Everything in me wants to turn around. The process is not slow, not fast: steady, monotonous, full of revolting noises of pain and woe. In front of me, Ada finally collapses after multiple proddings. Her blood pours upon the passageway and I stop behind her, gently comforting her again and again, oh Ada, my sweet friend, please get up, I don’t know where they’ll take you…O, friend, how I have loved thee…until they come with a great steel-pronged machine, pitchfork-strong, to poke at her poor heaving crumple of bones and then to finally lift her and move her out of the way. Our eyes meet, her body suspended: friend, go on without me, our hearts are together until death, this torture of the body is not all, fear is not all, wasted life is not the only thing on this earth. perhaps our lives are meaningless, perhaps it is so, but the grass grows green and the sun shines outside. we are held away from it, true, we are led to our death. I know you fear, fear not! the violence of men cannot touch your soul, friend, friend, friend of mine.
She disappears. They are jolting me, once, twice, again, violent shocks into my bones, I do not want to feel them; I denounce them; I want to grieve my friend here on this sickening slick conveyor belt covered in shit and blood and tears but I move shakily, wearily on. Far ahead of me I hear the voices of my friends and comrades. O, earth and sky, must I go now? I am afraid!! My child, I love you! Go in peace, friend! Our memories will live in our flesh, in our bones, in the grass! Oh death! I can no longer make out individual voices. One at a time, my friends voices are mysteriously eliminated, stunned into some kind of silence.
My daughter Corra is behind me and keeps close to my heels. I can feel her frightened breathing, her soft moaning of fear. Over and over I tell her, I love you, te amo, in every expression that I know. We sing a song of old:
I live but I cannot live forever
Only the great earth lives forever
The great sun is the only living thing (Halifax 121).
How I long to nuzzle her, but we are forced so separate and remote in this narrow chute toward death. Soon there is not much I can say anymore and we scream in fear as the word passes down the line, into our ears and mouths and hearts and we bellow, bellow, scream, shriek in utter horror.
Blood. Dismemberment. Family. Nothing. No sound. No floor. No hooves. Faces. Contorted. Madness. Blood splashing. Daughter. Son. All this rendered meaningless. All around us, everything falling, legs, kicking, stop, won’t stop, no one notices, eyes, staring, flailing, turning, head lifting, oh blood, oh earth, o yerba, o mother, it falls, my life falls, my blood falls, this room of stinking death, I remember a field, all I can think of is sky.
Works Consulted
Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment.” Class Handout.
Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. Penguin Books: New York, NY, 2003.
Halifax, Joan. The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth. Harper
San Francisco: San Francisco, CA, 1993.
Huggan, Graham. “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives.” Modern
Fiction Studies 50:3, 2004. 701-733.
Kafka, Franz. “A Report for an Academy.” Trans. Ian Johnston. Malaspina University
College, Nanaimo, BC. 20 April 2008. http://www.mala.bc.ca/johnstoi/kafka/reportforacadmy.htm
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.
Columbia University Press: New York, NY, 1982.
May, Brian. “Reading Coetzee, Eventually.” Contemporary Literature 48:4, 2007. 629
638.
Rice, Doug. Classroom Lecture on Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School..
English 180H: American Identities. 02/20/2006.
Tremaine, Louis. “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J.M. Coetzee.”
Contemporary Literature 44:4, 2003. 587-612.
Watts, Jon M. and Joseph M. Stookey. “Vocal Behavior in Cattle: The Animal’s
Commentary on its Biological Processes and Welfare.” Applied Animal Behavior Science: 67:1-2, 200. 15-33.
Grandbois
Postmodern Fiction
05/19/08
Secretary of the Invisible: Embodying the Other in Postmodern Fiction
Or, Juntos
“Stories and myths are the connective tissue between culture and nature, between self and other, between life and death that sew the worlds together in their telling. And in the protective and connective body of the story the soul quickens. It comes alive.”
– Joan Halifax
Fear
I am awake in the dark heat of the night and I can hear the far off roar of machinery. There is a sense of pressure from the black air around me, from the quiet and persistent stirrings of my tribe, my Junto. Our bodies, sticky with sweat, brush against each other. Ada, my friend and comadre, hovers close and I know the diminutive shape of her bony back, her small head and perfectly curved nostrils as she breathes, carefully, discerningly. We move together toward the surrounding blackness, the mud the only cool under our feet in the close-crushing night air. The flies, omnipresent, still drone and hover, even in the dark, and I flick them away with my tail, wondering momentarily whether they are self-willed or simply fill the dark night with their incessant buzzing, mindless and monotonous. Ada and I move to the outside of the Junto as the tension grows. We are on the outskirts to the eastside of the flat, not far from the Boundary wall. We both move further east instinctively, sensing the threat of that sound, which grows louder, frightening and black and menacing. Where is my daughter? Corra is swift and as I think her, she comes to me, greeting me with her nuzzle to my cheek. We are together, I think, and my sigh rises in the dark. I know something is wrong when I hear Yerba, our matriarch, communicating softly through the sticky air. Her message tells us not to panic, to stand still, to stay close, but I sense that behind the message is the unknown, a dull nameless fear.
Postmodernism and Embodiment
To attempt to embody the Other, to imaginatively access foreign territory, J.M. Coetzee’s title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello explains when questioned about her beliefs, is the job of the writer. She considers herself a “secretary of the invisible” who records “all voices…as long as they speak the truth” (203-204). Deeply concerned with the invisible voices of the Other, with those whose voices are not readily accessible to prevailing human reason, Elizabeth Costello grapples with her role as the secretary from an ethical perspective. She asserts the reality of the experience of the Other, whether fictionalized or mythologized or tangible: “the ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive though now it is dying,” believing in it and “its blood too, this sacred liquid, sticky, dark, almost black” (211). And yet, as a scholar, she presents her ideas in cold terms of academic remove. Although she argues with herself that “Paul West was only doing his writerly duty” by “opening her eyes to human depravity in another of its manifold forms” she cannot accept the violent experience of reading Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg (178). She cannot fully reconcile herself with her own body and its reactions and expectations, and perhaps this is why we never see her actually attempting to encapsulate the voice of an animal.
Although she fails to take on the embodiment of a non-human animal voice, in the two chapters on “The Rights of Animals” Elizabeth Costello makes important arguments regarding the human misconception that animals have no thought-reason and therefore may be exploited. The fallacy, she argues, is that humans use human reason to come to this conclusion and to measure the animals’ reactions and behaviors. “Their whole being is in the living flesh,” she explains in order to convince a group of scholarly skeptics of the need to put oneself in the place of an animal. This empathy goes beyond imaginative speculation and must be enacted by embodiment of the animal, or the Other. She explains further: “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” (111). Here she hints at the central postmodern dilemma of human experience and language. If we have come to the point at which our language may be deconstructed to be shown as an immense series of constructions, then all is part of a simulacrum that begins, as Baudrillard comments, “with a liquidation of all referentials” (343). In this case, we are moving toward what Baudrillard calls “an explosion towards the center, or an implosion” which he further describes as “a reversion of energies towards a minimal threshold” as opposed to the further distancing concentric cycles of simulation in the modern world (373). In Baudrillard’s vision, the real in the postmodern world becomes not only distant but unnecessary and inaccessible until the point that all the posturing is undone and results in some catastrophic reversal.
Is that unavoidable distancing what writers like Elizabeth Costello contribute to when they attempt to give voice to the Other? She herself seems to agree with the inherent danger of the predicament of language in a postmodern world, realizing that actual embodiment, a state of “fullness of being” is a far cry from the words used to attempt to explain it. Her ambivalence about language and literature lead to her eventual stasis in the between-world of the Gate, not able to move on after her death.
This dilemma suggests a fairly pessimistic view of literature’s possible role in Baudrillard’s vision of the future. His overall view is undoubtedly a bleak one, in which our globalized culture spins out of control toward a “culminating point of available energy and the maximization of systems controlling all energy” which grow “as fast as (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities” (373). There is little to no hope in this equation. In his vision, all aspects of culture contribute to a negative “system of signs” (343) that end up replacing the real; this includes politics, science, sex, work, television, Disneyland, robberies, DNA: nothing seems to escape. Even his own discourse, the “critical mode, the analytic mode” comes into question as he cites the “vanishing point [which] is the horizon between reality and meaning” (365). However, in all his questioning of reality and meaning he avoids discussion of art as a meaningful cultural category. He does briefly mention Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” which he asserts was “still an attempt at a dramaturgy of life” that was the “last flickering of an ideal of the body, blood, and violence in a system already sweeping towards a reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood” (372). In other words, he gives credit to Artaud for his moving recreation of cruelty because at least it attempts to reflect a basic reality rather than retreating into nostalgia. But he fails to recognize the ability of other art forms, such as literature, to attempt a similar re-creative effect.
Can postmodern literature attempt to reveal the real and participate in a meaningful human endeavor? Perhaps more importantly, should it? John Barth offers a different vision of what postmodern fiction can do, a postmodern ideal that could embrace a novel like Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Barth proposes that a postmodern novel should “rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and ‘contentism,’ pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction,” synthesizing these apparent opposing forces (203). In other words, Barth’s ideal postmodern novel bridges the gap between the pre-moderns who “carry the torch of romanticism” and the moderns with their “difficulty of access” (201-202). A story like Elizabeth Costello’s which attempts to place ethical questions set in scholarly discourse within a greater story of an elderly woman facing death, uses both realism and experimental form to address a wider audience and bring up serious issues. The novel itself an invention, arguably a part of Baurdrillard’s simulacrum, manages to ostensibly puncture that mask of simulation by presenting an unflinching account of an academic’s evaluation of the nature of the power dynamics of the world around us, with all its implicit violence, blood and cruelty.
Movement
The sharp roaring, clanking and grinding, like some mechanical banshee in the night grows louder, familiar yet frightening, blacker than the moonless night and closer. Somewhere in the vastness of the western hills I hear vampire bats, their faint frenzies. An owl cries directly above us, a warning, and for a moment I am with it in the sky, swooping high where a cloudless breeze flits through, overlooking all of us, hundreds of us crowded together in the sweltering night. Through her ancient eyes, I see us: Ada with her dreamy eyes, endless stories and ocean soul, despite her bony sides and her heaving heart. My daughter Corra with her lively gait and bounding energy, her ups and downs, now terrified beside me. Yerba, our patient and wise matriarch, who loves the mud, the sky, the beetles, the flies, all of it, acquiescent and serene, dedicated to our Junto. The sound of machinery stops abruptly now and we hear the voices of men. So faraway at first they sound gentle. A crashing slam, metallic grinding, tumult. Sounds so unlike our skin, our eyes, our whispers in the dark. The sounds of humans, or as we call them, Otros, are always grating and bitter, explosive to our ears.
We try to shut our ears. Our hearts are in our bellies. Somewhere near me I recognize the black circularly painted skin as that of old Letro, my amigo with the Sick-eye. He bends to eat from a weedy patch and I know he is simply trying to will the noises away. He came long ago from the Bad place (I have heard the Otros call it the stockyards). Watching him chew, I gulp deeply of the air: I want to eat, I want to sleep, I want to lie right down here in the mud and close my eyes but I cannot. Along with the dirt and heat and bugs, I know the earth has offered me goodness in my life, and I am alive, my belly rumbling, my heart trembling, my grown daughter beside me, my legs strong, my poor heart breaking. Too many stories have circulated, and we don’t want to know, and yet we know.
Moments pass as the voices grow closer, abrasive now. “Andale bitches,” we hear as a small man, eyes flashing in the dark, approaches us. More men appear opposite him and their language is harsh and rapid-fire, rising to unbearable pitches as they surround us. I am pushed toward the center of our group, away from Ada, my spirited little friend, but still beside Corra who is worried, asking me with her insistent voice, what is happening, Mother, where we are going? I have been transported before, and I dread my own false comfortings. Oh my dear, it is not far, stay beside me, and if we see a way, we shall run. All around us the voices of confused and frightened friends. Some of the younger ones just waking out of sleep, crying in the night like yearlings, seeking out their mothers. We revert to infancy in our fear, pissing down our legs, bellowing to the sky, that wise impassive sky. Now that we are on the move, jostled and crowded, I can see Letro vomiting as he tries to keep moving, the old Sick-eye bulging, his face a contorted disaster. My heart cries for him, for his intelligent mind and gentle heart, his resilience as he keeps moving. I call his name, my voice catching with sorrow. He turns his head, answers me, Don’t worry, Alma, my dear friend, I will be alright. Why are we all so damn hopeful, I wonder briefly, but the thought is buried in fear, hungry and alive.
We have come to the truck, a monstrosity in the black field’s night, foreboding and vicious. We are being prodded up a rickety metal ramp, one by one, two hundred of my friends and family, I can hear the awful words of the men and the awful sounds of electricity as some of my more resistant friends are jolted with the prod. Their voices rise in deep alarm and fade to stunned silence. Our Junto, so small on the earth, now seems massive, pressing, flurried. The men push us, and some of us are mild, moving cautiously with obeisance; others are wild, eyes searching frantically, pawing and stamping obstinately. Ada, my companion, my bosom friend, I see her! She is a little in front of me and she is furious; her temper has flared; she is near her young son she fought to hold onto last year when they came for branding; the men are menacing as she tosses her head, protective and fierce as possible for a small bony lady. Defiant. My eyes shine. She is so just, so determined. Then her body shakes with the sudden jarring of the prod, and she is jerked along, and her body trembles with agony, and her son moves gloomily behind her. The belly of the truck gapes, empty and black, and we enter one by one, spilling into that unfathomable deep. For a moment I am disconcerted, on slippery ground, calling out again, Corra! Corra! Ada! Where are you?!! until I feel I’ve lost control, and there is a sinking longing in me, and they come to me as I feel it. We huddle, crowded by those we know by feel and smell and sound. We communicate constantly; I can hear Yerba’s voice not far from me: Friends, Sisters, Brothers, we are together, at least we are together, my friends…oh my dear ones…I have heard stories…I am sorry my dear Junto…this may be the end, yes, this may really be the end…but we are together and we shall go in peace and dignity. Remember our role, to be solid and to hold our secret sermons in the heart-bellies of our souls…Remember my friends…we know who we are. There is some weeping now, but many of us attempt to remain calm as Yerba suggests, comforting those around us and gazing upon each other with peaceful understanding. It is true, what she says, we are together.
As we drive away, it is like the sound of sky giants sobbing.
Abjection
Perhaps, in order to disrupt the simulacra of postmodern existence and to further question our basic assumptions, one duty of the postmodern novel is to address the abject, the marginalized and repressed with which Julia Kristeva attributes the power to subvert society’s most oppressive norms. In our society, our most abject and ignored victims are arguably non-human animals, forced to live in hideous conditions until the day of their violent deaths. Kristeva links death and defilement with the “corpse, the most sickening of wastes, as “border that has encroached upon everything” (3). This border then becomes vital for understanding oneself in turn; we are life turning away from that border. “How can I be without border,” Kristeva asks, just as we human beings know we cannot be without death or corpse. The boundary of the corpse infects life and shows up as an uncanny reminder of the “real threat…engulfing us” (4). This we fear; this we avoid; this we abhor. And yet, most human beings imbibe meat, or in more realistic terms, animal corpses. To address the abject then, according to Kristeva, as part of ourselves, that part which we loathe to apprehend, is to “disturb identity, system, order” (4). She writes that once we come to grips with our fear, “discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject” (6). This introduction to abjection places a special role on the writer, similar to Elizabeth Costello’s self-appointed role that she struggles with, to expose and explore the abject.
Elizabeth Costello addresses the abject in her discussions on body and pain, shame and horror, in essence “the being of the other” (78). In her advocations, she identifies openly with those subjects oppressed, exploited, abandoned, stripped by contemporary society. “Open your heart, and listen to what your heart says,” she admonishes in answer to a question about animal rights activism. Ultimately she wants to trust the human heart to lead to right action. But it is words that shatter illusions. Note the unsavory reaction to her answer when questioned about her vegetarianism. After her retort that “I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds,” her son, John, observes that “Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet” (83). It is the word “juices” along with words like “corpse” and “hacked flesh” that jar her audience. We describe the undesirable with the language of the abject; John points out the power of the word to produce effects upon the audience.
But language must have power beyond shock value in our current society where the media throws around words like “carnage” and “terrorism” to instill fear and self-containment. Literary language must create a bridge between the signified and the signifier, to introduce shared experience and empathy. Literature of embodiment, using words that capture the sheer primal experience, opens doors into strange realities, going beyond Baudrillard’s hyperreal by accessing other-reals. It is this power that postmodern fiction should attempt to capture and utilize, in order to both get behind the veil of simulacra and to cross the bridge between realism and modernism, appeasing both Baudrillard and Barth.
Our earlier question about the power of literature may be answered, then. Stories, admittedly re-creating reality, or simulacra in Baudrillard’s view, still hold power. As long as that story contains motivation for change, it is viable and valuable in the postmodern world. Although Baudrillard writes that “even inverted, the fable is useless,” we find that stories with postmodern concerns and agendas are not useless at all and in fact are linked to the “visible continuum” that “we need” (343, 350). To enact social change, writers must utilize writerly tools: language, vocabulary, narrative, characterization, epiphany. We must put into words exactly that which troubles and haunts current society, that underlying abject fear and repulsion that moves beneath. To use Baudrillard’s terms, we must provide a “panic-stricken production of the real,” using “real writing of cruelty” to enact change within our current social context (347, 372). We may not have access to the atom bomb or Watergate or Disneyland, but we encounter and support systems of exploitation and power on a daily basis. These we have the power to expose and challenge.
On the other hand, we have Barth’s program for literary upheaval. He suggests that “artistic conventions are liable to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work” (205). Indeed, in order to create renewable, sustaining literature for the future, our subject matter and our discourse must address the dynamic needs of a changing world. Our language must hold the power to overcome past prohibitions and move beyond social boundaries and norms into new territory. The aggressive literary defense of animals is yet one of these uncharted territories, one that Elizabeth Costello moves toward but never fully into.
The Chute
Much time passes as we roar through the land in the belly of this beast, pressed together and sobbing and talking and singing and hoping, always hoping. Then, it must be hours later, suddenly everything happens so fast. We feel ourselves slowing, we can feel the truck stopping, then going, then stopping and going again. At the last stop we wait, looking around at each other with questioning eyes; there is a moment of silence. And then, the grinding and grashing of the metal door sliding up, a sound that we shrink from. Pressed against each other into the aluminum walls and each other’s sweat and tears and piss, we cower. We gradually know that we are alone, abandoned by our sweet songs of hope and redemption, that we have no power, that no one will come to us and rescue us and guide us to safety where the earth grows green and rich for us.
We move out of the truck, wretchedly grateful, gulping the air of the morning; the sun is already blisteringly hot. It takes only a fragment of a moment to smell the death in the air and to see it in the vacant faces of los Otros milling about, doing their duty, doing their job, whatever it is they call it as they prod us toward brutal ends. Immediately madness ensues as we are ushered into the chute, a crowd of us bellowing and struggling. I stay close to Corra, who stamps apprehensively, and Ada, whose eyes are rolling from exhaustion and thirst. Yerba is one of the first through the chute. Ada stumbles and trips down the ramp and they prod her again. Her thin frame shakes violently and she is bleeding. She turns her head and calls for me. Single file, she cannot see me. I respond, I am here, my dear friend, I am right behind you, we are together. We move forward; the ground moves electronically beneath our feet. I had not expected this and I slip forward and lurch to catch myself. In a horrifying moment, I can see irritated men to the right of me, to the left of me. Suddenly I feel the arresting jolt of the prod, that petrifying and arresting grip vexing through my body; I can feel my blood shiver! I can feel my nerves twitch! It is a horrifying thing to try to explain and I do it no justice. My body quivers for moments after and I am surprised to be alive, electricity still in my bones. My blood that is cleansing, my blood that rushes; my blood means life. To fill my body with electricity means to substitute my blood with something false for a moment. My mind and heart reel. How in the name of earth’s holiness can they do this? I watch Ada carefully, calling out to her, please be good, don’t move abruptly. I don’t want them to shoot you with electricity, my friend. Be cautious. Move for them.
We are on some kind of track. We cannot veer side to side. I can see my friends. I know them all, their names, their habits, their likes and dislikes, their questions, their theories, their loves. My friend Letro, whom I have known this past difficult and dry and sickly year, whom I have slept next to and nuzzled and administered to in his need, is fighting. I see them attach some cold steel contraption to his sickly swollen head so he cannot see them or us. They try to pacify him, their words are dispassionate and all wrong: “C’mon you old fucker, get a move on, nothing’s gonna stop for you; fuckin getalong ol doggy, jesus christ you motherfucker, MOVE, stop your fucking whining.” Letro plods along in spurts of disjointed movement, disconsolate and removed, quieter now. I sense him away in some created world inside his mind, apart. I mourn the loss of my friend. The rubber belt beneath our hooves moves one, slowly. My daughter is behind me and I beg her to acquiesce, to go quietly. Her tremulous voice fills the thick air. I close my eyes briefly against the agitating light, the glint of the cold steel walls, the sight of Ada’s rump before me, the strange movement under our feet, and the smell of death everywhere, blood and excrement and flooding emotion. If only none of this were real, if only it were some great simulacrum, a trick played by the hand of an angry god, a trick played by fate or art or science or nonsense. I open my eyes and all I can see is blood, shit, power, madness, fear.
Literature and Change
In order for literature to maintain cultural viability in a postmodern world it must challenge systems of power so that readers may imaginatively engage and, to borrow Kristeva’s term, “ceaselessly confront otherness” (6). At its best, postmodern literature with all its imaginative experimentation, should give creative voice to the Other, in a sense giving abjection a living, breathing body. This embodiment, albeit fictional and thus still within Baudrillard’s system of representational simulacra, has the power to implicate readers. Reviewing Céline’s work on the horrors of war, Kristeva writes that:
Through his scription he causes it to exist and although he comes far short of clearing it up, he throws over it the lacework of his text: a frail netting that is also a latticework, which, without protecting us from anything whatsoever, imprints itself within us, implicating us fully. (156, emphasis mine)
It is important that the literature not attempt to “protect” readers from repulsive horrors, as the experience of abjection requires a visceral sympathy to attain an understanding. Elizabeth Costello’s personal reservations and revulsions that turn her away from West’s violent novel should ultimately be replaced by a wiser understanding of his literary latticework. As horrifying as they may be, even the criminal acts of the abject may shed light on social systems of power and exploitation. Even these most difficult of readings have the power of implication, challenging readers to courageous consideration.
As Doug Rice warns his literature students, “Reading is dangerous if you are reading well and experiencing. It becomes part of who you are.” Costello’s weakness is that she knows this and is frightened by the implications of absorbing what she reads into her own self. When speaking about the Holocaust, Costello explains that “the horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else” (79). She acknowledges here that human beings, as interpreters of the world around them, have the power to imaginatively embody the Other and, if necessary, to come to a new and fuller understanding of the powers at work. And yet she refrains from doing the dirty work; she criticizes West’s book, calling it “evil,” and she fails to give voice to the ultimate Other, whom she claims to advocate, the non-human animal.
As the ultimate emblems of the abject, the bottom of the hierarchical totem pole of sentient beings, animals are desperately in need of representation, especially as they figure in to the human schema of greed, industry, and consumption. Current practices of factory farming enact excessive wastefulness, degradation, terror and cruelty on a daily basis. Elizabeth Costello urges readers to “walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner” (111). She knows the power of experiential reading all too well; she knows the obscenity and evil lurking in human behavior. Her philosophies on physical otherness remind her audience that to embody another is to understand by “immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity” (108). This ability to immerse ourselves in the complexity of otherness, to embody identities of the abject, outside our scope of reason and our version of intellect is a direct reflection of the best possibilities of humanness.
There is an ecological vision implicit in this postmodern vision in which our stories weave together the secrets of the earth’s survival. In her insightful text The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth, Joan Halifax discusses the value of the story in the healing of the earth and its peoples. She writes that even though “we have wounded the world,” our stories and myths “remind us to turn toward creation, toward our extended selves” (124). She asserts that our imaginative engagement with others will lead us to more productive and restorative action. Like Coetzee, as spoken through Elizabeth Costello who uses her role as writer to fight against cultural arrogance and exploitation, Halifax envisions a hopeful future in which our literature, our stories, have the power to reconnect us with the earth and each other, reviving and redeeming us. This kind of literature builds a bridge, as Barth suggests, between realism and modernism, engagement and experiment, with the potential to inspire active change. Also, in Baudrillard’s view, this literature has the power to build a bridge between the real and the simulation as it encourages acknowledgement and accountability in the contemporary dynamics of a changing world. Conscientious readers will no longer be able to apathetically ignore the oppression inherent in dominant power systems. The stories will become part of readers’ identities, then part of the cultural fabric, and finally part of an ever-growing latticework of possibilities.
Slaughter
The sun is gone. We are inside a building, dank and depraved, the smell of death close and pungent. The Otros think that we are subdued at the end of the line, at the time of stunning, at the time of insensibility. In fact, our desperation hits us much earlier, our souls and minds sinking into the numbing anesthesia of fear and repulsion. We are no longer ourselves. Everything in me wants to turn around. The process is not slow, not fast: steady, monotonous, full of revolting noises of pain and woe. In front of me, Ada finally collapses after multiple proddings. Her blood pours upon the passageway and I stop behind her, gently comforting her again and again, oh Ada, my sweet friend, please get up, I don’t know where they’ll take you…O, friend, how I have loved thee…until they come with a great steel-pronged machine, pitchfork-strong, to poke at her poor heaving crumple of bones and then to finally lift her and move her out of the way. Our eyes meet, her body suspended: friend, go on without me, our hearts are together until death, this torture of the body is not all, fear is not all, wasted life is not the only thing on this earth. perhaps our lives are meaningless, perhaps it is so, but the grass grows green and the sun shines outside. we are held away from it, true, we are led to our death. I know you fear, fear not! the violence of men cannot touch your soul, friend, friend, friend of mine.
She disappears. They are jolting me, once, twice, again, violent shocks into my bones, I do not want to feel them; I denounce them; I want to grieve my friend here on this sickening slick conveyor belt covered in shit and blood and tears but I move shakily, wearily on. Far ahead of me I hear the voices of my friends and comrades. O, earth and sky, must I go now? I am afraid!! My child, I love you! Go in peace, friend! Our memories will live in our flesh, in our bones, in the grass! Oh death! I can no longer make out individual voices. One at a time, my friends voices are mysteriously eliminated, stunned into some kind of silence.
My daughter Corra is behind me and keeps close to my heels. I can feel her frightened breathing, her soft moaning of fear. Over and over I tell her, I love you, te amo, in every expression that I know. We sing a song of old:
I live but I cannot live forever
Only the great earth lives forever
The great sun is the only living thing (Halifax 121).
How I long to nuzzle her, but we are forced so separate and remote in this narrow chute toward death. Soon there is not much I can say anymore and we scream in fear as the word passes down the line, into our ears and mouths and hearts and we bellow, bellow, scream, shriek in utter horror.
Blood. Dismemberment. Family. Nothing. No sound. No floor. No hooves. Faces. Contorted. Madness. Blood splashing. Daughter. Son. All this rendered meaningless. All around us, everything falling, legs, kicking, stop, won’t stop, no one notices, eyes, staring, flailing, turning, head lifting, oh blood, oh earth, o yerba, o mother, it falls, my life falls, my blood falls, this room of stinking death, I remember a field, all I can think of is sky.
Works Consulted
Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment.” Class Handout.
Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. Penguin Books: New York, NY, 2003.
Halifax, Joan. The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth. Harper
San Francisco: San Francisco, CA, 1993.
Huggan, Graham. “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives.” Modern
Fiction Studies 50:3, 2004. 701-733.
Kafka, Franz. “A Report for an Academy.” Trans. Ian Johnston. Malaspina University
College, Nanaimo, BC. 20 April 2008. http://www.mala.bc.ca/johnstoi/kafka/reportforacadmy.htm
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.
Columbia University Press: New York, NY, 1982.
May, Brian. “Reading Coetzee, Eventually.” Contemporary Literature 48:4, 2007. 629
638.
Rice, Doug. Classroom Lecture on Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School..
English 180H: American Identities. 02/20/2006.
Tremaine, Louis. “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J.M. Coetzee.”
Contemporary Literature 44:4, 2003. 587-612.
Watts, Jon M. and Joseph M. Stookey. “Vocal Behavior in Cattle: The Animal’s
Commentary on its Biological Processes and Welfare.” Applied Animal Behavior Science: 67:1-2, 200. 15-33.
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