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!
