Abstract
This chapter in part bridges the two previous chapters, which provide some historical and theoretical background, with the subsequent chapters that focus more closely on readings of specific primary texts in particular contexts. Hence, this chapter attempts to do both, as it proceeds from a general discussion of anthropomorphism as a literary technique, placed in the specific context of slaughterhouse fictions, on to readings of two specific texts, which both overtly employ so-called anthropomorphic characters in the form of speaking nonhuman animals. Through discussion and readings of James Agee’s short story ‘A Mother’s Tale’ (1952) and Neil Astley’s postmodern eco-fable The End of My Tether (2002), and their slaughterhouse depictions specifically, the chapter argues for what rich literary uses of anthropomorphism can do for nonhuman animals.
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Notes
- 1.
For the present discussion, I will stick to using the terms ‘anthropomorphism’, for the projection of human characteristics onto other animals (or the representation of other animals as having such characteristics), and ‘zoomorphism’, for the projection of other species’ characteristics onto humans (or the representation of human characters as having particular features of other species). Yet it is worth noting that even these terms are used differently in current debates and that, indeed, the line between the two is often blurry or dependent on perspective.
- 2.
One might of course argue that Cartesian dogma about animals as automata without thoughts similarly overreaches beyond the realistic in the opposite direction.
- 3.
It is worth noting, though, that Spiegelman’s use of animal allegory is complex and has numerous effects, not all of which necessarily defamiliarize, and his narrative at times draws explicit attention to ways in which the form can be problematized (see, e.g. Baker 2001, 139–49; Gavrilă 2017, 69–72; Herman 2011, 168–69; McGlothlin 2003, 183). In the 2011 book MetaMaus, Spiegelman discusses the animal metaphors at length, including how they ‘allowed for a distancing from the horrors described’ (149).
- 4.
- 5.
It should be noted that even when there is significant merit or historical evidence that lend authority to allegorical or metaphorical readings of animal stories, it is hardly the case that these texts do not (also) tell us something about nonhuman animals (see, for example, discussions on Animal Farm in McHugh 2011, 181–85 and Asker 1996, 60–70). Helen Tiffin, for instance, points out how ‘allegories depend on the constant interplay of difference and similarity for their effect’, for which reason animal allegories—including Animal Farm —rely on particular assumptions about ‘the species boundary’ that should not be overlooked when reading them (2007b, 252–53).
- 6.
I return to both these novels in Chap. 7.
- 7.
The novel displays a consciousness of the universality of such tropes through a number of direct and indirect intertextual references. At one point, for instance, a character reads a few lines from Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (1917), in which soldiers ‘die as cattle’ (Astley 2002, 98).
- 8.
Leading ecocritic Greg Garrard defines the concept of allomorphism as an ‘avowal of the wondrous strangeness of animals’ and a difference perceived as ‘a kind of superiority’ (see Garrard 2012, 154, 167), in which sense the superiority of nonhuman animals in The End of My Tether arguably makes them allomorphic rather than anthropomorphic. However, this inversion of hierarchical structures is only gradually revealed to the reader. In this discussion, I will continue to consider the animals as anthropomorphic insofar as they share abilities of speech and thought with human characters.
- 9.
The Morrigan is a female figure, who is originally from Irish mythology, in which she is typically associated with war and fate, but also often with the land and animals, especially livestock. In the words of one study, the Morrigan ‘oversees the land, its stock and its society. Her shape-shifting is an expression of her affinity with the whole living universe of creatures, bird, animal and human’ (Herbert 1996, 145).
- 10.
Although he considers it only briefly, and does not consider any of its slaughterhouse scenes, Neil Cornwell places Astley’s novel firmly within the absurdist in his study of The Absurd in Literature (2006, 286–7).
- 11.
I discuss the theme of rurality in relation to slaughterhouse fictions in further detail in Chap. 5.
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Borkfelt, S. (2022). Anthropomorphism and the Abattoir. In: Reading Slaughter. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98915-6_3
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