Scott Slovic on “Reading Cats & Dogs”
&
Nirmal Selvamony on “neo-tinai and Animals”
06 March 2021 | JAC, Periakulam
Professor Scott Slovic, founding President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), gave an impactful talk based on his just released book titled, Reading Cats & Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature, at the One Day International Webinar on Literary & Cultural Animal Studies, organized by the PG Department of English, Jayaraj Annapackiam College for Women (Autonomous), Periakulam, Theni District, Tamil Nadu.
Dr. Jeyapriya, Head, Department of English & Foreign Languages, Mother Teresa Women’s University, Kodaikanal, gave an insightful inaugural that elegantly set the tone and the ambience to this International Webinar.
Professor Scott Slovic alluded to Dr. Jeyapriya’s talk, and then went on to speak from his just released book on ‘Cats & Dogs’.
Excerpts from Professor Slovic’s Talk -
From the western American state of Oregon where I live, It’s Friday evening where I am, and it’s 8.30!
I’m going to talk to you about a new book, called,
Reading Cats & Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature (Lexington Books, 2021), that I helped to create in the past few years, and that helped to study particular aspects of animals and culture.
Specifically on companion animals in world literature.
The aspect of the field that I’ve been working on recently, really focusses on a sub category of animals that live with and among human beings sometimes on the edges of our society that have come to be called companion animals.
The image here on my first slide, is a leash or a lead where we often find ourselves connected with our animals, where we lead them and they lead us! We find ourselves connected never quite sure who is the leader and who is the follower. Especially if we achieve a meaningful reciprocity with these companions who share our lives.
So over the past few years I’ve worked with colleagues from France, Brazil and Netherlands, to compile a book that was just published in the first few months of this year!
The book consists of 14 chapters with contributors from 13 countries, ranging from Asia to Europe to Africa to Latin America, trying to give a snapshot of the many ways in which literary works from vastly different cultures contemplate companion animals, sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in strikingly different ways. And obviously this is not encyclopedic, and absolutely comprehensive, but nonetheless there’s such a range of different cultural perspectives represented we believe we’ve demonstrated that the idea of literary representations of animals is quite ubiquitous in diverse countries from around the world.
And some of the key themes in the book that are represented by the major sections of the book are stray and feral companions, which immediately disrupt the notion that, companion animals live immediately in our domestic spheres - that they share our households always, that we consider them family members.
In various cultures, companion animals are not really part of the household at all, but live their own independent lives. They have their own identities, communities, their own families and they live in our midst. But they have a kind of wildness and independence to their lives.
Part of the idea of the opening section is to disrupt and complicate the notion of what it means for a member of another species to be a human companion.
The second section focusses on the usefulness of companion animals. The idea that companion animals are not merely inhabitants of our experience but that they actually serve human beings in certain ways, and I mean that with a sense of agency, that they are not servile and underlings, but that they contribute powerfully to human experience.
When I say, ‘serve’ that can mean actually serving in practical ways such as protecting our homes or helping us in our farming or other kinds of activities. There is a chapter in that part of the book focusing on hunting dogs which will play a very useful role in literature for writers who are involved in the experience of hunting, but also they can be sources of inspiration for artists.
The third section emphasizes the idea of problematizing companion animals complicating our understanding of the way they are interrelated with human culture and also not assuming that companion animals always live positive lives amidst human society. There are many cases where companion animals suffer terribly, and really do not benefit at all from their interactions with human beings. There are chapters in this book that represent that, in a grim and dark way but also in a realistic way, trying to show the truth of our interactions of our animals that live closely among us.
And then finally, this is the part of the book that I will particularly emphasise when I talk to you today. There is an interesting epilogue in which the four editors from very different personal and cultural backgrounds offer personal essays about their own attachments to animal companions. We tell our individual stories.
The book emerged from a Conference that took place in Toulouse, France, in March of 2019 – so two years ago! And here we see images of the poster of the conference which later became the cover of the book, and this is the building – a beautiful castle like building where we held this meeting.
Actually the photograph for the poster and the photograph of the cover on the book is a picture of my own companion animal – a ten-year old German Shepherd dog named Hannah, and I’d talk more about Hannah later in this lecture, and in the photograph she’s sitting with a young friend of ours near our home, in Oregon.
I organized the conference with Francoise Besson in the hopes of introducing her to Zelia Bora and Marianne Marroum – and encouraging them to do a book together, these colleagues all of them from literature, are people that I've met in some of my world travels to give lectures on various aspects of ecocriticism and environmental literature. In my travels I’ve often met colleagues whom I thought should really meet each other, and work on interesting projects together.
In this case, we were able to bring Zelia from Brazil and Marianne from Lebanon to France for a week to participate in a conference and also tour around and see something of the countryside.
We saw some donkeys in the field, and they were so excited! All three of them have a particular love for cats and all three of them live with many cats in their homes.
They had a strong sense of my own interest in companion animals and asked me to join the editorial team. Part of the sense came from my role in organizing the conference on animal love which pursues a variety of different aspects of animal love, not only the affection and attachment from humans towards non-human animals, and from animals towards humans, but also the way animals themselves interact with each other and display certain types of interests and detachment.
This image here is from the very final session of that 2019 conference where I proposed that we had a group reading - a kind of a collective reading - of a famous poem about humans and animals – by the American poet Pattiann Rogers, the poem is called, “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself”.
Here is the picture of me reading the English version of the first part of the poem, and my colleague reading a French translation.
Here’s a little passage from the poem showing how confused we are, as human beings, in the way we think about animals - Our conflicted and contradictory attitude towards animals and these are some of the words from Patttiann Rogers –
We adore them and we curse
them. We caress them and
we ravish them.
We want them
to acknowledge us and be
with us.
We want them to disappear
and be autonomous.
We abhor their viciousness
and lack
of pity, as we abhor our
own
viciousness and lack of
pity.
We love them and we
reproach them,
just as we love
and reproach ourselves.
It’s kind of a fascinating unpacking of the conflicted complicated ambivalence we feel toward all animals.
And I think may be it’s a nice idea, if I contribute nothing else to this conference, for me at least - to invoke Patiaan Rogers’ elegant words which reveal the complexity of human thinking about animals. And if you were to look at the larger poem which I believe you can find online, you can see the many different layers of the way Rogers thinks about people and animals.
Here’s a picture of how we all lined up, participant after participant to take turns reading passages from this beautiful poem about animals and people.
So two years after the conference, and, we now have the book “Reading Cats and Dogs”. And here are a few very broad lessons.
There is a vast amount of literature across the wide world that directly or obliquely addresses the complexities of our relationships with animal companions, but relatively little literary criticism concerned with this literature in a multinational context.
And that’s actually what the book is. Apart from the epilogue which is a personal collection of four personal stories of the editors’ attachment to companion animals.
The rest of the book is literary criticism focusing on a variety of different textual representations of how different cultures respond to and contemplate relationships with other species. Particularly cats and dogs, but not only cats and dogs.
We thought the title ‘reading cats and dogs’ had a catchy sound to it. Kind of like the old saying, raining cats and dogs, when it’s raining really hard; and we thought reading cats and dogs played with that familiar phrase, and also has a sort of a double entendre in that it implies reading the literature of cats and dogs, and actually reading the lives of cats and dogs, and in a broader sense, other species.
Also, one of the broad lessons of this project has been the idea that animals who live among us - may also live poignant lives beside or on the fringes of human society, as stray or feral – or even wild – presences.
And I’m sure in your own lives in India, you can take many examples of this – you feel that you have some kind of relationship with animals that are really up to their own business – you are not controlling them, no human being is controlling them – and yet humans do form certain kinds of attachments to them nonetheless. And this came through pretty strongly to me in reading the articles we received for this book – that there is a strong interest in the independent autonomous lives of animals who are also in a certain sense, companions to human beings.
The opening section includes chapters about stray and feral animals in the US, South Africa, Russia, Turkey, Kuwait, the UK, Sri Lanka, and China.
Niroshini Gunasekara (University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka) – her house is a refuge for abandoned cats, 12 of them;
About Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family, she writes:
“Animals play an important role in [the author’s father’s] life. They are mainly stray animals or wild creatures who are as solitary as he was. These stray animals were social outcasts whom we consider with affection, although they are kept at a distance due to accepted social norms.” (96) She writes about dogs, polecats, a cobra etc, and various other animals that abound in MO’s family in Sri Lanka.
There’s also a very interesting chapter about stray cats in Turkey. Shows how intricately interwoven in the neighbourhood these street cats are, even though they are technically not owned by anyone.
The next two sections of the book focus on the usefulness of Companion Animals and Problematising Companion Animals... ...
That brings us to the end of Professor Scott Slovic’s impactful talk.
*****
Now over to Dr Nirmal Selvamony’s Talk -
[Excerpts]
I would like to dedicate this talk to my friend and colleague Lakshman who passed away three years ago. He was a rationalist and also an atheist. His email address also used in Latin form of the words reason and rational in English – rationious – he used to send me emails every now and then.
This particular story that I am going to narrate to you now, is about an amazing story he shared with me.
It’s about Laurence Antony, an international conservationist from South Africa, and he is the author of three books including the best seller ‘The Elephant Whisperer”.
I quote this message that Antony sent me. Antony bravely rescued wildlife and rehabilitated elephants from all over the globe from human atrocities including the courageous rescue of Baghdad zoo in Iraq, animals during US invasion in 2003.
On 07 March 2012, Laurence Anthony died. He is remembered and missed by his wife, two sons and two grand sons and numerous elephants.
Two days after his passing, the wild elephants showed up at his home, led by two large matriarchs. Separate wild herds arrived in droves to say goodbye to their beloved man friend. Walking slowly for days making their way in a solemn one-by-one cue from their habitat to his house, Laurence’s wife was especially touched, knowing that the elephants had not been to his house prior to that day for well over three years.
A total of thirty one elephants had walked over 112 miles to get to his South African house. Witnessing this spectacle, humans were obviously in awe not only because of the supreme intelligence and precise timing that these elephants sensed about Laurence’s passing away, but also because of the profound memory and emotions that the beloved animals evoked in such an organized way, but yet they knew where they were going.
The elephants obviously wanted to pay their deep respects honouring their friend who had saved their lives. So much respect that they stayed two days and two nights without eating anything.
And one morning they left, making their long journey back home. This narrative that Lakshman sent me ends with this quote – something in the universe is greater and deeper than human intelligence.
The second story is about my meeting with Jane Goodall the ethologist on 22 January 2007.
[On an aside, this blogger was also blessed to be with Dr. Nirmal on this particular day. You may want to read the blog report of that particular Jane Goodall event at the British Council, Chennai, on our blog HERE.]
As you know, she is a renowned conservationist who spent many years studying chimpanzees in Africa. In a conversation with her in the lawns of the British Council, over a cup of tea, she narrated an incident she witnessed in the jungle in Africa. She said, she saw the chimpanzee standing in front of a water fall on a moonlit night, in a posture which could only be described as one that was appropriate in an act of prayer. That’s my second story.
From these two stories and also from our own good intuitions we know that the argument that the other animals can neither produce a tolkaapiyam or a computer is no good to prove the superiority of humans.
If responsible good life which ensures such life for all beings is the parameter of superiority, I’m sure you’d all agree with me that humans will fare very poorly, won’t they?
Now we know enough about other animals to know that we do not know enough about them.
Study about other animals or Animal Studies should help us not only to know enough about other animals but also make us realise our ignorance about them, the infinite distance between them and us.
Unless we realise this distance between them we have no hope of realizing how our being interpenetrates theirs. Animal Studies supposedly helps focus on animals, and human and other animal relations, but Animal Studies in the Humanities especially Ecocriticism has to pay attention to all non-human entities - plants, land, water, among others.
To gain understanding of human relation to the nonhuman world, and to engage with everyday human – non-human interaction, animal studies has to dialogue with studies of other constituents of the non human world like Plant studies, Earth Studies and so on.
Why?
We are already a community of human and non-human members. At tinai, an oikos, scholarly attention to just one member of this primordial home, like anthropology or Animal Studies will not do!
To be continued…
Dr. Nirmal with the vibrant Organising Team!
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