Abstract
This chapter addresses British novelist Jon McGregor’s third novel, Even the Dogs, a story of loss, trauma, and abandonment narrated by a spectral chorus of departed drug-addicts and dossers relegated into invisibility. It thematises survival as experienced by a group of excluded characters sharing a high degree of precariousness, going from one fix to the next, and minimally assisted by public policies that fall short of care and keep them in that very condition, that is, that of survivors. To do so, it focuses on the elegiac dimension of the novel, lingers on the experiential presentation of survival, and ends up on the ethics of attention to invisibilities.
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Notes
- 1.
Agamben (2002, 33).
- 2.
Agamben (2002, 15).
- 3.
Agamben (2002, 34).
- 4.
Lyotard (2008, 9).
- 5.
Felman and Laub (1992, 6).
- 6.
Felman and Laub (1992, 80; emphasis in the original).
- 7.
Caruth (1996, 60).
- 8.
Caruth (1996, 61; emphasis in the original).
- 9.
Caruth (1996, 64; emphasis in the original).
- 10.
Didi-Huberman (2008, 26–27).
- 11.
Didi-Huberman (2008, 33).
- 12.
See Kennedy (2007, 2).
- 13.
In an interview, McGregor has confirmed, if need be, that he feels “the novel is very much concerned with mourning” and that the mourners are the key image of the novel; see McGregor (2010b, 241).
- 14.
- 15.
McGregor (2010a, 11).
- 16.
Felman and Laub (1992, 85). I am aware of the fact that Laub’s words are applied to non-fictional accounts, and that I am applying them to the field of fiction or what I have called above “fictional testimony.” Still, I am also conscious of the fact that all narratives, whether directly referential or fictional, are based on emplotment and figurative language, which produces a form of continuum between an ideal pole of total non-fictional transparency and another one associated with fictional opaqueness. My position is that the figurative and the fictional cannot be barred access from the responsibility of bearing witness. One of the ways of doing this ethically is by refusing to use older, all-purpose forms that fail to respect the singularity of the presented situation. This is where experimental fiction comes in, when it is devised, as is the case with Even the Dogs —and as was the case with Time’s Arrow, for instance—to provide an innovative, adapted formal solution to respect the singularity of the situation that it addresses.
- 17.
Felman and Laub (1992, 89).
- 18.
Kennedy (2007, 20 and 28).
- 19.
McGregor (2010a, 195).
- 20.
McGregor (2010a, 214).
- 21.
Ramazani (1994, 37).
- 22.
Levine (2006, 1).
- 23.
Clifton (2004, 24).
- 24.
McGregor (2010a, 102).
- 25.
Felman and Laub (1992, 84).
- 26.
Levine (2006, 4).
- 27.
Butler (2005, 32; emphasis in the original).
- 28.
Arnds (2012, 163).
- 29.
Latour (1993, 47).
- 30.
McIntyre (2002, 1).
- 31.
Agamben (2002, 17).
- 32.
On McGregor’s use of an opaque poetic prose, see, for instance, Alexander (2013, 748–749).
- 33.
McGregor (2010a, 122).
- 34.
McGregor (2010a, 142–143).
- 35.
Revault d’Allonnes (2016, np; my translation).
- 36.
Laugier (2014, 264).
- 37.
Pelluchon (2018, 61; my translation).
- 38.
Pelluchon (2018, 89; my translation).
- 39.
Bernard (2018, 68; my translation).
- 40.
Korte and Zipp (2014, 69–73).
- 41.
Ganteau (2015, 135–148).
- 42.
Le Blanc (2011, 41; my translation).
- 43.
Le Blanc (2011, 18; my translation).
- 44.
McGregor (2010a, 91).
- 45.
Le Blanc (2010, 176; my translation).
- 46.
McGregor (2010a, 134).
- 47.
Le Blanc (2009, 76; my translation).
- 48.
Le Blanc (2009, 13).
- 49.
Le Blanc (2009, 13; my translation).
- 50.
Le Blanc (2009, 91; my translation).
- 51.
Mirzoeff (2011, xv).
- 52.
McGregor (2010a, 158).
- 53.
Mirzoeff (2011, 24).
- 54.
Mirzoeff (2011, 4).
- 55.
Laugier (2014, 252).
- 56.
Le Blanc (2010, 176; my translation).
- 57.
Laugier (2014, 265).
- 58.
Pelluchon (2018, 31–33).
- 59.
Coole and Fox (2010, 16).
- 60.
McGregor (2010b, 221).
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Ganteau, JM. (2021). The Visibility of Survival: Even the Dogs and Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Attention. In: Freiburg, R., Bayer, G. (eds) The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83422-7_2
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