THROUGH OTHER EYES
Animal Stories by Women
Irene Zahava, ed.
Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1988
190pp., $8.95 paper
In Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's short novel La Chatte, written in 1933, a young man who has just married prefers sleeping on the divan with his cat to sleeping in bed with his wife. She finally grows so jealous that she pushes her rival off the balcony of their ninth-floor apartment. The cat is saved by an awning that breaks the fall, but the young husband leaves his wife, preferring to be alone with Saha, his cat.
La Chatte is not included in this unusual anthology of animal stories by women; if it had been, it would serve as an odd counterpoint to stories that demonstrate an almost mystical bond between women and animals, a bond that decidedly excludes men. The stores collected in Through Other Eyes: Animal Stories by Women are, with few exceptions, by contemporary writers, composed in a social and political climate far different from that of Colette. What these authors share with the French author, however, is a consuming interest in the relationships between humans and animals, and in the way that humans and animals communicate with one another.
One of the strangest and most haunting examinations of the bond between a female human and a female animal in this collection occurs in "One Whale, Singing," a dreamy, poetic story by Keri Hulme, whose 1985 novel, The Bone People, won her critical acclaim. The story's two main characters are a pregnant woman on a cruise with her husband, and a female humpback whale, also pregnant, migrating south alongside the boat. The husband, a somewhat overdrawn caricature of the pompous academician, mocks his poet wife when she suggests that people and animals can communicate: "'That's the trouble with you poets,' he said fondly. 'Dream marvels are to be found from every half-backed piece of pseudo science that drifts around. That's not seeing the world as it is. We scientists rely on reliably ascertained facts for a true picture of the world."' While it is difficult to believe that anyone really talks this way (his wife's response is, appropriately, silence), Hulme is using the couple, rather heavy-handedly, to set up the conflicting and widely divergent views we humans hold on who we are in relation to the other species with whom we share--however ungenerously--our planet. It is a question that is, with the growing momentum of the animal rights movement, becoming more and more difficult to ignore.
"We can conclusively demonstrate," the husband continues, this time reading from notes for a lecture he is preparing, "that to man alone belong true intelligence and self-knowledge." While he declaims, the whale, "deep under the keep of the ship, sported and fed. Occasionally, she yodelled to herself, a long undulating call of content." And the woman, who seems to be submerged in a reverie that mimics the watery depths of the whale's habitat, surfaces for a moment to tell her scoffing husband that humans
may be on the bottom of the pile, not the top. It may be
that other creatures are aware of their place and purpose
in the world, have no need to delve and paw a meaning
...
Read Full Article
|
