address them
[…]
and
address
them from down there, from a wholly other origin” (382). In
The
White Puma
, the animal-human encounter enabled the hunter to recognize that
animals are sentient, for the first time. As noted these visual exchanges often
result in the human’s increased empathy or sense of kinship with the
nonhuman, although it takes an exaggerated form in Grove’s book.
In a quite literal
‘
fantasy of knowing the nonhuman
’
, Wawa-quee chooses
to communicate with F.P.G.
telepathically
. Grove does not give the details of
how this exchange operates but after the encounter the narrator seems to hold
the knowledge of Wawa-
quee’s life:
I knew that I was not yet I. I walked and acted like a human being; but my
mind was that of an ant; I had lived her life; and her memory was mine. I
could look back upon all she had gone through; and it devolved upon me
to put down a record of what, by some miracle, had been communicated
to, or infused into, my consciousness. I cannot, therefore, claim that what
follows is my work.
It is the work of Wawa-quee, the ant; and it must be
read in that sense
. I merely set it down under compulsion. (Grove 25,
emphasis added)
Here, again, we find an emphasis on the role of nonhuman
biography
as a
means of enabling empathy. By
knowing
her life, he has acquired a new
zoocentric perspective. In the ultimate act of the empathetic imagination, F.P.G.
is human with the “mind” of an “ant” (25). She is no longer ‘uncanny’ or ‘alien.’
Recalling the similarities observed between F.P.G. and Seton
’s depiction of
himself, it is possible to read this scene as a criticism of the fantasy of knowing
the animal. By emphasizing the strangeness and alterity of the ant, Grove may
be parodying Seton’s impossible claims that he can
know
and
interpret
the lives
of
animals. Thus, there is the possibility that F.P.G. is simply deluded.
Nonetheless, the practical zoocriticism framework prioritizes zoocentric
interpretations of texts and I am compelled by the possible clue that the novel
Allmark-Kent 203
“must be read in that sense” (25). If we accept the challenge to read Wawa-
quee
as an ant
, our efforts are validated by the strength of her defamiliarizing
zoocentric perspective. If we do
consider Wawa-
quee’s ways,
we are presented
with a rich imaginative speculation that challenges anthropocentric and
speciesist thinking. This depends, of course, on whether we allow ourselves to
be
seen seen
by a fictional ant.
We must also consider how
reading the novel “in that sense” impacts our
understanding of the text as a whole: it is a “picture of antdom […] essentially
true to fact,” but also the “product” of an “ant’s imagination” and “pure fiction”
(8). It has also been “communicated to” and translated by a human (25). The
mediation of the ant’s story is explicit; it is not a
direct
expression of her
consciousness but a human impression of it. The distinction cannot be
overlooked as it provides a strategy for both disrupting the ‘accuracy’ of the text
and maintaining the imagined agency of the ant. It is F.P.G. who claims to
know
the ant, not Grove. Again, he is protected from
‘nature faking’ accusations by
distancing his authorial voice. In an essay otherwise preoccupied with allegory
and anthropomorphism
—disregarding wholly the possibility of reading these
ants
as ants
—Salvatore Proietti remarks: “Only by feeling directly from inside
the Other’s experience, only by going beyond the mediation of language and
the barrier of an irremediably mendacious subjectivity, can real knowledge be
attained” (369). This is true of F.P.G. (if we read the novel “in that sense”) but in
order for the reader to experienc
e this “real knowledge” it must return to the
“mediation of language.” Thus, it becomes an interpretation. Indeed Grove
opens the introduction by stating that all knowledge of nonhumans is mediated
by the bias of the human observer: “according as the human-race conceit of the
investigator was strongly or weakly developed, the behaviour of these insects,
Allmark-Kent 204
especially ants, was placed either in contrast or in comparison with the
behaviour of man” (12). Therefore, we can regard
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