The Wild Animal’s Story: Nonhuman Protagonists in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literature through the Lens of Practical Zoocriticism
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Green Grass, Running Water
is to subvert and lampoon the Christian hierarchy of God, man, and beast. When a dream of Coyote’s becomes personified, he calls it Dog, but the dream Allmark-Kent 58 disagrees: “I am god says that Dog Dream. ‘Isn’t that cute,’ says Coyote. ‘That Dog Dream is a contrary. That Dog Dream has everything backward.’ But why am I a little god? Shouts that god” (King 2). It is in the inexplicable or unexpected that we find the strength of the trickster’s agency. Coyote cannot be made to satisfy expectations of ‘animals’ because he cannot be contained in that category. As Sandlos remarks, he “is not merely an aspect of reality; reality is instead an aspect of Coyote” (112). Likewise, in Kiss of the Fur Queen , Highway depicts the Cree trickster figure Weesageechak. The novel follows the lives of two brothers, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis, as they survive and attempt to heal from the abuses they suffer within the residential school system. Weesageechak makes many subtle and varied appearances in the novel, the first of which is as the “Fur Queen,” a beauty queen dressed in “a floor-length cape fashioned from the fur of arctic fox, white as day. She had her head crowned with a fox- fur tiara” (9). Operating as a somewhat ambiguous guardian spirit for the boys, she makes herself known in different guises. At one point, looking like a voluptuous singer, an “arctic fox,” she introduces herself to Champion (renamed Jeremiah in residential school) as “Maggie Sees. It used to be Fred but […] I changed” (231). After which she proceeds to list her many names: “Miss Maggie Sees. Miss Maggie-Weesageechak-Nanabush-Coyote-Raven-Glooscap-oh-you- should-hear-the-things-they-call-me-honeypot-Sees, weaver of dreams, sparker of magic, showgirl from hell” (233-4). As Highway explains in his author’s note, she is: “‘Weesageechak,’ in Cree, ‘Nanabush’ in Ojibway, ‘Raven’ in others, ‘Coyote’ in still others” (np). Indeed, in Ravensong, Coyote/Weesageechak/Nanabush oversees and orchestrates events as Raven: Allmark-Kent 59 Change is serious business —gut-wrenching, really. With humans it is important to approach it with great intensity. Great storms alter earth, mature life, rid the world of the old, ushering in the new. Humans call it catastrophe. Just birth, Raven crowed. Human catastrophe is accompanied by tears and grief, exactly like the earth’s, only the earth is less likely to be embittered by grief. Still, Raven was convinced that this catastrophe was planned to execute would finally wake the people up, drive them to white town to fix the mess over there. Cedar disagreed but had offered no alternative. (14) Raven’s plan is to heal the gulf between the Native and white communities through an influenza epidemic. Sandlos describes Coyote’s appearance in Green Grass as that of “an anti-fixer who makes the world right by unleashing his destructive energy” (109). Despite the vastly differing tone of these two books, we can see that Raven also attempts to heal through destruction. Moreover, through these contrasting appearances of Coyote/Weesageechak/Raven, we can also perceive that each manifestation is “merely one aspect of an elusive protagonist” (101). Recognition of the trickster as all of these figures simultaneously, requires our fundamental acceptance of ‘not-knowing.’ The human-animal subversions of Elle and Not Wanted on the Voyage are somewhat less complex, although both are used to deconstruct European, Christian hierarchies. In a novel heavy with postcolonial criticism and satire, Elle explores the experiences of a young French woman in the sixteenth-century who is abandoned on a small island off the coast of Canada. Removed from her Calvinist uncle’s ship for her ‘uncivilized’ behaviour, she is left to survive in a harsh, ‘New World.’ In a parody of nineteenth-century topes of ‘going Native,’ however, Elle gains both an Aboriginal lover (Itslk) and the shamanistic ability to transform into a bear. As she shifts between woman and bear, she finds herself increasingly unknowable to other humans. This becomes a form of power, however, facilitating her survival and enabling her to finally seek revenge on her Allmark-Kent 60 uncle, the General. Back in France, she and a ‘fellow’ bear kill him, but her physical form during the attack is unclear. She appears to be partway between woman and bear: “Hairy one, ain’t she? Coming right out of her clothes. Always knew there was something uncanny about her ” (201). Moreover, her attacks seem particularly ursine: “I swat my uncle […] I slash the General’s moaning form […] I lift my nose and grunt, shake my head till my lips slap together” (201). The ambiguity of the scene is simultaneously disturbing (for both the witnesses and reader) and empowering (for Elle and the previously imprisoned bear). After the General is dead and they leave the scene, Elle questions the awareness of the crowd : “What do the grave-haunters see? Two bears loping through a gate, dis appearing into the night” (201). In Not Wanted on the Voyage the alterity of nonhuman experience also defamiliarizes the animal-human divide and, most importantly, the illusion of human superiority. “As a postmodern re-writing of Noah’s ark,” Fisher explains, the text “considers things from the beasts’ point of view, and paints Noah / Dr. Noyes as a grim, lustful patriarch-not the benign father I remember from the Sunday School flannelboard” (4). She observes, moreover, that while the an imals do suffer on the ark at the hands of Dr. Noyes, “their cool observation of his crimes gives them narrative power ” (4). They do not suffer in silence like Atwood’s victimized animals. Indeed, Mottyl the cat (the main nonhuman character) and the other animals of the ark can talk. Fisher perceives this ability in a “postmodern” context, in which the talking animals not only “challenge the rightfulness of human dominion,” but also enables the reader a temporary illusion of “the slipping away of human subjectivity” (4). Ultimately, however, Dr. Noyes’ supreme acts of violence—upon both humans and animals—silence the nonhumans. Scholtmeijer argues: Allmark-Kent 61 At the novel’s conclusion, the ark’s ‘ no ’ has become literal, one sign of its triumph being the loss to the animals of their voices. The sheep, which used to sing hymns, can only repeat ‘Baaaa’s,’ and the whispers which had produced dialogue in the mind of the cat Mottyl have died. Since God, Yaweh, has also died earlier in the novel, the silencing of the animal s’ voices leaves humankind alone in a mute world just like that which anthropocentrism gives us. (244-5) The ambiguity and alterity of the Canadian literary animal increases the anti- anthropocentric strength of these narratives. As each demands acceptance of our inability to know the animal, the errors and arrogance of human-centred thinking are exposed. Indeed, if we return to Fisher’s description of the confusing Canadian animal —“are they victims, friends, predator, prey?” (259)—we can see that both the trickster and postmodern pseudo-tricksters are all of these things at once, and much more. In fact, even the realistic animals of the ‘failure of knowing’ narratives tend to occupy two or more of these categories simultaneously. Her use of the phrase “the animals among us” (259) also helps to illuminate the ubiquity of these nonhuman characters. These texts are not animal fiction , as such; they are human narratives into which the animal presence intrudes unexpectedly. Like the ‘incongruous’ wild animals who enter human environments, these nonhuman characters cannot be contained physically or imaginatively. As I have demonstrated, attempts to control them, to force their compliance with our anthropocentric expectations, cause great harm to all the animals of the text, whether human or nonhuman. It should be clear, therefore, that such representations hold little in common with the fantasy of knowing the animal. Indeed, each text seems to expose the very impossibility of this fantasy. Nevertheless, as I will demonstrate in a following chapter, a different form of anti-anthropocentric potential can be found in these fantasies. Moreover, I argue that their ability to act as a conduit between the living animal and the Allmark-Kent 62 human reader may be worth the sacrifice of the literary animal’s imagined agency. |