Narrating Animality in Barbara Gowdy ’ s The White Bone

Niniejszy artykuł stanowi interpretację powieści kanadyjskiej autorki Barbary Gowdy z 1998 roku zatytułowanej The White Bone (Biała kość). Akcja powieści toczy się w Kenii w latach 80. XX wieku – a więc w okresie największego w historii kraju „słoniobójstwa”. Jej bohaterami są właśnie słonie, poszukujące mitycznego Bezpiecznego Miejsca. Powieść Gowdy często klasyfikowana jest jako postkolonialna, bo narracja prowadzona jest na przekór dyskursowi kolonizacji. Jednocześnie stanowi ona próbę opowiedzenia doświadczenia słoni, narrator zaś staje się tu tłumaczem i łącznikiem między zwierzętami dwóch różnych gatunków. Wyobrażenia dotyczące tego, co zwierzę myśli i czuje zawsze odbywają się kosztem antropomorfizacji tego zwierzęcia. Przedstawiona tu analiza sugeruje jednak, że antropomorfizm nie musi pociągać za sobą antropocentryzmu, a może wskazywać drogę do empatii.

Animals write.

Helene Cixous
On March 27, 2015, Daily Mail published an article entitled "A Mother Never Forgets" about a female elephant who "spent eleven hours desperately trying to pull her baby free from a muddy well-before villagers lent her a helping hand." 1 The story quickly went viral through the social media, with the photographs of the animal pair "[walking] off into the sun together" 2 gathering hundreds of thousands of Likes. The stupendous popularity of this narrative, I suspect, stems from its focus on what is believed to be human, rather than animal, nature. Through eleven hours of digging, the female elephant proved her unconditional devotion to her child, which is a defining characteristic of the prevalent image of the mother. This is why she eventually deserved "a helping hand." Importantly, however, it is not merely the female elephant that is metaphorically ennobled through the events described in the article; it is humans, who, as a species, have brought elephants to the very edge of extinction, that are redeemed by them.
In reading the piece then, we can experience quasi-cathartic elation analogous to the emotion ascribed to white viewers of 1991 Dances with Wolves, or other white-savior movies: we may be saddened to see a savage, yet noble, culture in the process of being destroyed, and yet we are likely to feel deeply touched by our own humanity validated by this very sadness.
Although "we construct our so-called [human nature] against the animal and the animalistic," 3 the Daily Mail article connotes the permeability, rather than separateness, of the categories of "human" and "animal": "a mother never forgets" because of her human predilection for self-sacrifice and her elephant memory. Other stories blurring the borderlines between the two categories have followed in great numbers, the most recent ones including a highly disturbing piece of news about scientists in China who "have produced monkey embryos containing human cells," 4 and a much less disturbing viral post on Stella, the "Talking Dog," who speaks twenty-nine words using communicative buttons. 5 Such permeability, with all its problematic complexity, has undoubtedly been the focus of human-animal studies which aims at a redefinition of human-animal relations, and at subverting the humanist notions of "human" and "animal." The underlying assumption of this article is, likewise, that although "culture does not allow unmediated access to animals themselves" 6 and "the creatures that occupy our taxonomies are never purely nonhuman," 7 "our concepts and practices are never purely human" 8 either. However, regardless of the fact that theorists within the field agree that humans are animals, the question remains of whether or not it is suited for them to write/speak (for) other animals-and what this might entail. The problem of how to write animals without repeating our old colonial gestures (i.e., without stereotyping, sentimentalizing or romanticizing them) inspires my reading of Barbara Gowdy's 1998 novel The White Bone, which focuses on the ways in which the author writes/translates elephants against dominant discourses of "hegemonic centrism." 9 My main goal is to show that this transgressive text aims at imagining a novel meeting place for human and non-human animals; its unique attributes notwithstanding, however, the narrative does anthropomorphize elephants, which is why I first refer to the problematic nature of anthropomorphism as such.
We turn maudlin, writes Margaret Atwood is her poem "Mourning for Cats," over animals who "look like us / at least a little." 10 Whereas the attribution of human characteristics to animals befits Disney's or Pixar's animated movies featuring animals that talk, behave and sometimes dress like humans, there seems to be no place for it within the academia. Anthropomorphism is, in the words of Nik Taylor, "a dirty word of the scientific discourse." 11 Interestingly, however, it is possible to see anthropomorphic attributions as what calls into question the superiority of humans, and challenges "the morality of our social practices." 12 From this perspective, the danger of anthropomorphism is seen not in the very act of interpreting animals as "human-like," which they arguably, sometimes, are, but rather in "missing [or demeaning] all that is peculiar and proper to [an animal]" and not to a human. 13 The problem, in other words, is not anthropomorphism as such, but anthropocentrism inscribed within it. It is, therefore, important to stress that even though Gowdy makes use of anthropomorphism in her novel, 14 she writes against anthropocentrism, and against various discourses of power, one of colonialism in particular. In this sense, the novel can be-and has been-classified as postcolonial. Concurrently, in its focus on "giving testimony to an experience that cannot be spoken or that may be distorted by speaking it," and on "the violence done to animals and their habitats," 15 animal studies also bears affinity to postcolonial or trauma studies. 16 Consequently, it faces the problem of "[attending] to difference without appropriating or distorting it" and of [avoiding] the sentimentality and romanticization" 17 in its representations of animals. Such stereotypical idealization, in fact, characterizes both the Daily Mail article and the representation of Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, which I mentioned above.
Coincidentally, sentimentality excepted, the events described by the Daily Mail relate to those described in The White Bone. At the outset of the narrative, an elephant mother named She-Moans-And-Moans gives birth to the story's main protagonist, Mud. Bitten by a cobra, she then collapses and dies, trapping the newborn's hind legs under her body. After many hours of hopeless attempts to save the child, the elephant family-the She-Ms-abandon Mud who later manages to free herself, and is adopted by another clan-the She-Ss. The direct inspiration for Gowdy's novel, however, was yet another text of/on? elephants: a 1993 documentary narrated by zoologist Cynthia Moss, entitled Echo of the Elephants, in which a matriarch named Echo leads her family through Kenya's Amboseli National Park. 18 To make her quest story plausible, Gowdy spent time observing the animals and learning about them, and chose the realistic setting of Kenya during "an era […] of 'unprecedented slaughter' (57), in which [the country] lost two-thirds of its elephant population to poachers between 1981 and 1989 alone (Barbier et al. approach, consequently, has been described as "holistic" since she draws on cultural studies, "anatomical science, natural history, personal observation and imagination." 20 The process of "writing elephants" that she engages in is, at the same time, the process of tracking: of reading and interpreting the signs left by them. The author of The White Bone, therefore, uses facts as a substructure of the novel, and then proceeds to make "imaginative [leaps, ones] of fully imagining […] what it would be like to be that big and gentle, to be that imperiled and to have that prodigious memory." 21 On its most basic level, then, the representation of animals in the novel is consistent with present-day scientific research. It is now known, for example, that elephants "exhibit a high order of intelligence acquired through learned experience." 22 Their social life is "organized around tightly knit matriarchal units that [have] distinct but widely overlapping home ranges and would associate in larger kinship groups without any territorial aggression." 23 We know that elephants "have elaborate grieving practices that include a form of burial and visits to gravesites," 24 as well as "the ability to transcend individual experience" (i.e., understand what other elephants feel). 25 "African elephants can distinguish human languages, gender, [ethnicity] and ages associated with danger." 26 Regardless, however, of the current data, within Western culture elephants are still the very embodiment Otherness, who, like "prisoners of war [are] put on public display for the entertainment of the victorious" 27 in zoos and circuses. Even though terminology has changed, and circuses and zoos are now selfproclaimed Noah's arks, or protectors of exotic animals, keeping them safe from poaching and extinction, they have "emerged from what was essentially a showcase for colonial conquest, 28 as it was "imperial expansion [that] not only made the large-scale capture of exotic animals possible, but also increased demands for such displays." 29 Regardless of the modern setting, Gowdy's elephants are undoubtedly the victims of colonialism as they are slaughtered for their ivory, the "white gold" which is the overt symbol of the colonization of Africa. For 20  the humans in the story, elephants become "absent referents" 30 that is, they are ivory and meat. The colonial traces in Gowdy's novel are also manifest in her "recuperation of a marginalized literary tradition" 31 : the 19th century jungle stories: Gowdy's elephants have much in common with [Rudyard] Kipling's celebrated jungle creatures: they talk, debate and interact with one another within a stratified social structure; they inhabit a quaintly honour-bound, quasi-Biblical realm of religious legend and cosmogenic myth. But there the resemblance ends. For one thing, Gowdy's elephants, unlike Kipling's beasts, are endowed with a painful consciousness of their condition -a consciousness largely shaped by the memory of who they (individually) are, and what they (collectively) must once have been.
[…] And for another, unlike Kipling's dutifully rewarded colonial subjects, they are condemned to move through a shiftless post-imperial world defined as much by human as animal savagery […]. 32 Along the same lines, Graham Huggan sees the novel as "responsive to [Joseph Conrad's] Heart of Darkness" in its representation of humans-the "hindleggers"-as "inexplicably savage, seemingly delighting in desecration and lacking any language that can be understood." 33 Such a representation questions the apparent evolutionary superiority of homo sapiens: the novel's animal protagonists, in fact, believe that humans used to be elephants who broke the most sacred of laws-tasted meat-and fell, losing their elephant features. According to elephant myths, there used to be open communication between the species-elephants were able to read human minds-but now, like insects and snakes, humans remain impenetrable in their depravity ("From the minds of snakes and insects could be heard only a faint chiming. From the minds of humans came a silence so absolute and menacing that many of those who heard it foreswore mind talking altogether"). 34 Elephants, on the contrary, are complex, compassionate beings who are superior to the "hindleggers" both in their own view, and-implicitly-in the view of the narrator. Interestingly, however, in Mud's vision of the mythical Safe Place the elephants head towards, humans seem transformed into benevolent helpers. For her "depiction of [who appears to be] evil (African) ivory poachers and good (Western) conservationists" 35  has, in fact, been countered by critics, although she never refers to a specific ethnicity of the humans she describes. Consequently, despite the fact that she contrasts the two species, the narrator seems to suggest that there is no imaginable safe place without humans, as their fate is now inextricably linked with that of the elephants.
In order to tell the story of Mud, her friend and mind-talker Date-Bed, sign reader (link-bull) Tall Time, and other protagonists, the narrator of the story assumes the role of an interpreter. Not only does she chronicle the elephants' search for the eponymous white bone-a small bone of a newborn elephant which points to the Safe Place-but she also construes various motives behind their behavior, and deciphers their complex cosmology. Gowdy "out-imagines" scientific research "in order to support her belief that elephants are conscious in both the phenomenological and self-reflexive senses." 36 The reader learns, for instance, that elephants indeed remember everything-they are memory 37 -which is a "litany of losses." 38 The females assume family names as they reach maturity (Mud is renamed She-Spurns), whereas the males' names remain the same ("the reason a bull does not change his name is that a bull is not changed." 39 The families are matriarchal, and each has elephants endowed with unique talents (a leader, a mind-reader, a visionary, a nurse). They have matriarchal religion and believe that tuskless elephants are denied paradise, which makes the crimes of the ivory-hunters even more horrific. 40 They have stories and songs, they fall in love, have sex, and-with the exception maybe of the time of estrus-unquestionably good manners. Jokingly, the narrator views the elephants-even the big bulls-as sentimental "[t]o a degree that we would call maudlin." 41 The category of "we" includes both the reader and the narrator who has a grasp of Elephantese and translates the story-however imperfectly-into human terms.
Even though scholars from the field of human-animal studies have often focused on bodily or sensory communication between the two species-their mutual other-worlding-Gowdy's interest is predominantly in the human language, and the ways it can be used to read and write animals. Thus understood, language is a flawed medium, too narrow to incorporate an elephant who makes sense of the world where "everything exists for the purpose of pointing to something else" 42 through visions, mind-talking, and sign-reading. "The White 36 Soper-Jones, "When Elephants Weep," 274. 37 Gowdy, The White Bone, 83. 38 Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 77. 39 Gowdy, The White Bone, 4. 40 Whether or not ritual behaviors actually observed in apes, elephants, and dolphins can be classified as "religious" ones has been a matter of debate, and depends on one's definition of "religion." Nonetheless, by means of endowing her protagonists with religious beliefs, Gowdy questions yet another anthropocentric privilege. 41 Gowdy, The White Bone, 2. 42 Gowdy, The White Bone, 135.
Bone contains much direct speech, but interweaves dialogue with a third-person narration which can incorporate comments on that communication, reminding us that this is a form of translation from a very different vocal source." 43 For this reason, the narrative abounds in footnotes, and is appended by the map of The Domain (the territory where the story is set), the family tree of central elephant families, and a glossary. To communicate with one another the elephants use a formal timbre, infrasonic rambling, telepathy, and touch, the complexities of which evade the narrator. The way the animals calculate the passage of time is also too intricate for the narrator to understand. 44 Moreover, she seems to purposefully bring to light the artificiality of language and the limitations of translation (e.g., in the dramatic circumstances of Mud's mother dying, another elephant, She-Measures, utters a highly unlikely statement: "The probability of your falling on the newborn is exceedingly high." 45 On another occasion the narrator remarks that "the moon arrives not at all"). 46 Importantly, in the story which uncovers the barbarity of ivory-hunters and expressly separates elephants from their human enemies, it is the figure of the narrator/translator who acts as an intermediary between the two cultures. As imperfect as her translation is, therefore, it indicates a contact zone between the two species, which makes it possible for the reader to feel for the novel's heroes. Emotional response is, I believe, to be expected from the story of unmerited slaughter of some of its main protagonists. If the reader finds himself/herself mourning the dead elephants, it is an unfamiliar experience in the culture which incorporates animal death mostly through eating, 47 and in which this eating is not seen "as contact with another animal because it has been renamed as contact with food." 48 "Between the [animal] and our plate," as between an elephant and ivory, "lies the necessarily hidden 'aporia'" 49 of butchery. Gowdy's might be a risky strategy as "representations of torture or suffering may […] in a contradictory way be another way of allowing us not to see the animal -to look away." 50 This unavoidable exposure, however, is a gesture of "refusal to read the animal image purely as an image" 51 in the culture which under-represents animal death and is invested in safeguarding the split into "meat" and "pet," through which the animal disappears.
Quite unscientifically, human-animal studies has turned to emotions and feelings, which "has brought a new focus on the notion of anthropomorphism, regarded not only as a problem, but also as potentially productive critical tool that has similarities to empathy within recent historical research." 52 The shift towards critical empathy or, in the words of J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello's "sympathetic imagination," has found its reflection in the English language. The verbal form of the word "animal"-like the verbal form of the word "queer"-discloses the "semiotic performativity of human/animal relationships." 53 Animaling her novel of elephants, Barbara Gowdy subverts the traditional dichotomy between humans and animals and invites the reader to imagine "a site of thinking otherwise," 54 the way Mud imagines the Safe Place. The concept of place (and displacement), in fact, has been crucial for both animal, and postcolonial, studies; the question of where the Other is "in place or out of place" has to be seen, in the words of Phillip Howell, as "an eminently ethical question." 55 In conjuring up the Safe Place for her elephants, Gowdy includes them in "moral community" 56 and thus speculates the possibility of "a non-exploitative future" 57 not only for them, but also for other non-human animals. that deals with the interpretation of Canadian literary space through the prism of agoraphobia.