zooesis and the space of modern drama

8/13/2019 Zooesis and the space of modern drama

1/18

Animal Geographies: Zoosis and the Space of Modern Drama

Una Chaudhuri

Modern Drama, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2003, pp. 646-662 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: 10.1353/mdr.2003.0022

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Amsterdam Universiteit (11 Dec 2013 16:06 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v046/46.4.chaudhuri.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v046/46.4.chaudhuri.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v046/46.4.chaudhuri.html


2/18

Animal Geographies: Zooesis and theSpace of Modern DramaUNA CHAUDHURI

All t ~ s of enforced marginalisalioll - ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, O l-eentration camps - have something in common with zoos. But i( s both too easy andtoo evasive to use the zoo as a symbol. The zoo is a demonstration of the relationsbetween man and animals; nothing else .

Berger 4

When we go to the zoo, we take with us all our worries and joys, our heroes and villains, and we dole them out to the various species, casting each one ill th e role bestequippedfor it on the basis ofaccidental human resemblances.

Morris and Morris 172Confined wilhin this catch-all oncept, f } within this strict enclosure of this definitearticle ( the Animal and not animals ), as in a virgin forest, a zoo, a hunting orfishing ground, a paddock or an ahattoir, a space ofdomestication, are all the livingthings that mall does not recognize as his fellows. his neighhors, or his Brothers

Dcrrida. The Animal Thai Therefore IAm 402; emphasis in original

The burgeoning field of animal studies offers a new perspective on that over-lap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesis. In proposing theneologism zooesis for this new perspective, I hope to invoke, as a foundation for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama, the path-breaking work of Cary Wolfe, whose tenn zoontologies suggests just how muchis at stake for literature and the humanities in the the question of the animaLNoting the central role played by the figure of the animal and the category ofanimality in all those seminal reroutings of contemporary theory away fromthe constitutive figure of the human (Wolfe, Introduction xi) in the works ofJacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , JacquesLacan, Georges Bataille, Renee Girard, bell hooks, Michael Taussig , andodem Drama , 46:4 (Winte r 2003) 646


3/18

Animal GeographiesDonna Haraway, Wolfe also points out that work in contemporary sciences,especially cognit ive ethnology and field ecology, has decisively underminedthe old saws of anthropocentricism (language, tool use, the inheritance of

cultural behaviors) x i). These philosophical and scientific developments thatbring the animal into view in new ways have also enabled new analyses of themany contexts in which animality has been deployed rhetorically to oppressum groups, members of different races, nati ons, ethnicities , classes, and

genders. The ideological rhetoric of animality (Baker 77-119) is a widespread cultural zooesis founded upon the traditional onlological distinclion,and consequent ethical di vide, between human and nonhuman animals(Wo lfe, Introduction xx). The deconstruct ion of that distinction, and the interrogation o that divide are the work o a critical zooes is.

Zooesis as I conceive it consists o the myriad perfo rmance and semioticelemenlS involved in and around Ihe vaS I field of cultural animal practices.These include nO on ly literary representations of animals (from Aesop'sFahles to Will Selfs Great Apes , nol only dramatic representations of ani mals (from The Frogs 10 Equus , not only animal performances in circusesand on stage, but also such ubiquitous or isolated social practices as pelkeeping, cockfighling, dog shows, equestrian di splays, rodeos, bullfighting,animal sacrifice, hunting, ani mal slaughler, and meat-eating. Compri sing bothour actual and our imaginative interactions with non-human animals zoocsisis the di scourse of animal ity in human l e, and it effects perm eate our social,psychological, and material existence.

Not the least important of the registers of this di scourse are space and place .As the title of an important recent anthology recognizes, there are multifari ousanimal geographies th at secure, sustain, and complicate our more famili ar

human ones (Wolch and Emel). Since (to paraphrase Ihe subtitle of the samebook) politics and identity [are forged[ in Ihe nature -


4/18

UNA CHAUDHURI

perspective on that privileged space of modem drama, the family home. In theplays I shall discuss here - Edward Albee s The Goat (2002) and h e ZooStory (1959), and Terry Johnson ' s Cries from the Mammal House (1984) -zooesis rewrites the dramatic discourse of home from the point of view of theanimal, figured either as the radically excluded Other, the very exemplar ofhomelessness The Goat), or as the radically contained Other, exemplar ofrepression and imprisonment Zoo Story and Mammal House). The last twoplays explore the theme of human habitation through the figure of the zoo,which is represented as a boundary-making, language-wielding material cultural practice, and as such a practice that bears more than a passing resemblance not only to the home but also to the theatre. The performati vity thatlinks the human home to the animal house is perfectly captured in the title ofJohnson 's play, in which human and non-human animals refuse to be silencedby the prison-house of cultural meaning.These plays differ, however, in their relation to a central issue of animalstudies, the two poles of which are captured by the first two epigraphs of thisessay. Berger's insistence on the literalism of the zoo, and hence on the actualrelation between human beings and animals, is in fact an enonnous challengeto the tradition of literary animal discourse. His nothing else is nothing likethe simple limit implied by that brief phase. t is an injunction to resist theanthropocentric and metaphoric logic of mo st zoo storie s,' which invariably

cast animals, as Morris and Morris say, in anthropomorphic dramas. Thisanthropocentric zooesis, Jean Baudrillard has provocatively argued, is thefoundation of modernity. In modernism, writes Baudrillard, animals mu st bemade to say that they are not animals (129). They must join the group of discursively colonized Others - the insane, children, savages - upon whomrationali sm imposes its hegemony, forcing them to speak in its terms. Notonly do we exploit animals as beasts of burden and subjects of scientificexperimentation, sys Baudrillard, we have also made them creatures of som-atization, forcing them to carry our symbolic and psychological baggage. spets, as performers, and as literary symbols, animals are forced to perform us- our fantasies and fears, our que stions and quarrels, our hopes and horrors.Refusing the animal its radical otherness by ceaselessly troping it and rendering it a metaphor for humanity, modernity erases the animal even as it makesit discursively ubiquitous.

CASTING THE ANIMALS

n anicle included in the playbill for the Broadway production of EdwardAlbee's recent play The Goat exemplifies the tendency to transform the animal into a sign, doing so in a way that reminds us of a specifically theatricalversion of this practice: The he-goat (see also SCAPEGOAT) symbolizes thepowers of procreation, the life force, the libido, and fenility ( What 's the


5/18

Animal Geographiesword?" 2) . The article goes on to s y that the word "tragedy" comes from aGreek word meaning "goat-song." Thus, in one short note - invoking one longhi story - is the whole my stery of the play apparently solved: the shockingstory of Martin, a successful, happily married architect who falls in love andlust with a goat, is quickly translated into the latest in the American theatre'slong quest for a dramatic formula that could bestow tragic grandeur on thecommon man. From this perspective, Martin would seem to be just a higherclass Willy Loman, yearning for the one thing materialist success cannotdeliver: an experience of tran scendence.

But surely this is much too neat a parcel for the whole shame-filled, guiltridden mess of bestiality that spills out on stage in Albee's play, shattering theattractive lives that have been holding a flattering mirror up to the audience.This shattering is astonishingly literal: Martin's wife reacts to every new revelation about his love affair by grabbing some decorative item off the shelvesof the tastefully decorated living room nd violently smashing it on the floor.Her repeated (and increasingly deliberate) action clearly establishes physicaldestruction as an alternative strategy to the one that these people have hithertofavored in their dealings with the world: a conspicuously liter ry strategycomposed of wordplay and repartee. Martin, especially, is a stickler for correctusage and a sucker for verbal cleverness. Early in the play, a self-consciousquotation from Noel Coward both acknowledges the dramatic lineage thatAlbee's couple has inherited and begins the process of disavowing it.The di savowal involves exposing the foundation of that tradition in a particular co-articulation of animality with language to which Jacques Derrida hasgiven the name "camo-phallogocentrism" ("Eating Well" t 13). This portmanteau term designates a discourse in which the threatening multiplicity o animal lives is contained by language, reduced, and singularized. The countlessspecies of non-human creatures. and the countless members o those species,all captured in a single word: "The animal ," says Derrida, "what a word "("The Animal That Therefore I Am" 392). Cary Wolfe summarizes Derrida'sargument s follows:

the Word logos does violence to the heterogeneousmultiplicity o[the living worldby reconstituting it under the sign of identity, the s such and in general - not

animals but the animaJ. And as such, it enacts what Derrida calls the sacrificialstructure that opens a space for the noncriminal putting to death of the animal- asacrifice that so the story of Western philoso phy goes) allows the transcendence ofthe human, o what Heidegger calls spirit, by the killing off and disa vow al o theanimal, the bodily , the materially heterogeneous, the contingent - in short,differance. Animal Rites 66, emphasis in original)Albee s play traces an unraveling of the sacrificial logic Derrida describes,

for here the animal that h s been sacrificed to - and for - the power of lan-


6/18

UNA CHAUDHURI

guage creeps back into view. While the opening of the play shows us a lifestyle dominated - even defined - by language, the body of the play takes us asfar into non-verbal territory as textual drama can go. The final momentscomplete the play' s endorsement of breakage for the solution to the hero'sdilemma entails smashing the rules of reali stic drawing-room drama by displaying the everyday brutality of animal slaughter in a space thai programmatically excludes (to use Hamlet's phrase) such country matters (3.2.115). tgoes one long literal step beyond Harold Pinter's famous formula for menacing realism - lllhe weasel under the cocktail cabinet (qtd. in Taylor 323)-by dragging animality out of hiding and into plain view: exposed, centerstage, rhere for all to see.

What does it mean to see the animal? n the title of a 1977 essay that hasbecome a classic of modem animal studies, John Berger asked the question,Why Look at Animals? Like Baudrillard later, Berger addresses the place(or rather non-place) of animals in modernily, and comes to the chilling con

clusion that we are currently living through their final vanishing: a h istor icloss, as he puts it , irredeemable for the culture of capitalism (26). Animalsare commercialized as images reduced as ever-more reali stic toy s infantilized as Disney characters, denatured as pets, and - most significantly forBerger - monumentalized in zoos. In zoos, he says, they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance (24). Thus , animals can no longerperform the vital function for which human beings had long prized them: theirability to foster in us a kind of self-conscio usness that is impo ss ible to attainwithin the human species itself. The look between man and animal, saysBerger, is a recognition across the abyss of sameness and difference by whichanimals are related to us: With their paraliel lives animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as aspecies (4).'For Berger, the loneliness of man as a species - which had for centuries

been affirmed in the look between man and animal has in modern times beenbartered for a false sense of mastery, to which animals are reg ularly sacrificed : spectacularly in zoos, but also psychologically and imaginatively, asfantasy images, as nostalgic markers of a lost rural idyll, and, of course, aspets. In an analysis that anticipates Deleuze and Guatarri's more famous critique of the pet as an Oedipal animal (240), Berger rega rds the pet as a keyelement in that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small fam ily unit, decorated or furnished with mementoes from the outside world,which is such a distinguish ing feature of consumer societies (12). Berger 'sdescription of the modern home perfectly describes the set of the Broadwayproduction of Tlte Goat which exemplified the commodification and domestication of the alien, the exotic, and the natura l.

Interestingly, this model modem home of the play does not include a pet,


7/18

Animal Geographies 65 1except perhaps discursively, through Albee's subtitle - Who is Sylvia?" Bynaming hi s goat Sylvia, Albee's hyper-literate Martin may be unconsciouslychanneling Shakespeare's Love's Labors Losr but audience members mightalso be reminded of A. R Gurney's 1995 play, Sylvia, whose eponymouscharacte r is a dog. Gurney's play is a rueful meditation on the pet as Oedipalized animal, for the dog Sylvia (like Albee's goat Sylvia, only platonically)also triangulates a married couple, alm ost to the breaking point. By re placingthe dog with a goat, Albee exposes to view (much more vio lently than Gurney) the usually occluded signifying structure of the modern animal , whichbalances separation and longing, disdain and desire. Interestingly, Derrida'srecent philosophical explorations of the figure of the animal al so center uponthe pet - in fact his own pet, a cat . Derrida essentia lly reverses Berger's question, Why look at animals?" asking rather why animals look at us , or at leastwhat it might mean to entertain the possibility that they actively regard usinstead of simply receiving our gaze, passive ly or at best reactively.

To breach the modern world' s systematic occ lusion o anima li ty is also todist urb the delicate ecology of animal symbolism. By bringing a rea l goat intohis story, Albee both invokes and disavows the entire symbology of the scapegoat. In the same way, he challenges the tragic formula of a heroic longing fortranscendence by bringing in the coarse subject of bcstiality. Although Martininsists on call ing his experience an "epiphany" (82) and identifying the objectof his adoration as Sylvia's "soul " (86), none of the other characters can resistdescribing it - repeatedly and hilariously - as "goat-fu ckl ingl" (48). It is notMartin 's love for the animal that violates taboos and threatens to "bring 1 1down" the family (89); it is the fact th at this love is physical, sexual- heterosexual - corporeal. The presence o this mo st transgress ive o sexualitiesstrains the tragic formula to the limit.

Animality also breaks the frame of drawing-room drama by recontextualizing its inhabitants in a wider world. Animal play s including the ones underdiscussion, often contex tualize their inter-species encounters within ecosites," heterotopias of n ature in culture. Others stage literal destructions ofthe traditional stage spaces of realism: lonesco's herds of rhinocerosesfamous ly thunder in the wings, red ucing bourgeois spaces to rubble. AlanStrang, the young protagonist of Peter Shaffer's Equus, attacks the theatron'sprivileged organ, the eye, by blinding the horses he loves: animality and theatricality cancel each other out. Elizabeth Egloff's 1993 play, Th e Swan, inwhich one of the three main characters is the eponymous bird, ends wi th thefollowing stage direction: There is a hl/ge noise: glass breaking, the worldbreaking, a tree cracking (54). In Albee's play, the recontexualization is lesscosmological and more sociologica l The move from dog (as in Gurney) or cat(as in Derrida) to goat is al so a move out of the urban domestic sphere ofmodernity, a mo ve towards, to use Hamlet 's phra se aga in, country matte rs(the salacious pun is perhaps even more apt here than in Shakespeare ).


8/18

UNA CHAUDHURI

For indeed it is the country - that most paradigmatic of all eco-sites - thatunleashed all the chaos to begin with: we learn that Martin fe ll in love withSylvia, the goat while he was coun try house-hunting, or, as he says , barnhunting (40). The ci rcumstances, as he reveals them, point to the culturalcodes within which the country is embedded. Stevie and 1 had decided itwas time to have a real country place - a farm, maybe - we deserved it.

Beyond the suburbs, says his friend Ross, and Martin agrees: Yesbeyond the suburbs (40). Hi s epiphany, as he later calls it, was strikinglysite-specific. t began with a landscape a fantasy-laden vision of a certainkind of place:

I stopped at the top of ahll . } and the view was ... we ll, not spectacular but ...wonderful. Fall , you know ? with leaves turning and the town below me and greatscudding clo uds and those country smell s I . . Th e roadside stands wi lh com andother stuff pil ed high and baskets full of I... ] beans and tomatoes and those greatwhi te peaches yo u onl y get late summ er I .. J And from up there I could trace theroads out toward the farm, and it gave me a kind of shive r. 41 )Martin 's tragedy, if such it is, mi ght have less in common with the scape

goat tragedies of ancient Greece than with that spatial bifurcation of humancommunity Raymond Williams investigated so brilliantly in The ountry andthe City. Not ing the extraordinary variety of meanings those two words have,Williams nevertheless iden tified their structur l rel tionship s oppositesas key to their ideological functioning:

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of li fe: of peace innocence ,and simple virtue. On the city hasgathered the idea of an achieved centre: oflearn ing, communi cation light. Powerful hostile association shave also developed:on the city as a place of noise wo rldline ss and ambition; on the country as a place ofbackw ardne ss ignorance limitation. A contrast between country and city, asfundamenta l ways of life reache sback into cla ss ical times. t)Almost four decades befo re h e Goat Albee had given more straightfor

wardly tragic expression to the cultural geography that increasingly separateshuman beings from other animals, both human and non-human. In h e ZooStory Albee pointedly contextualizes modern alienation within another paradi gmatic eco-site: the city park. The pl ay is set, famously, in Central Park. Asdiscussed in the emergent field of cultural landscape studies (see Chaudhuri22'-26) the city park is one of those middle landscapes - gardens, parks orother natural landscapes situated outside the overstimulating city but short ofthe primitive wilderness that have a long history in American culture andWestern thought [ .. ) joining pastoral scenery and civilization (Hanson 17).In the nineteenth century, the vogue for such middle-landscapes joined social-


9/18

Animal Geographiesengineering programs seeking to remedy the perceived threat posed to healthand morality by urbanization and industrialization: American city plannerscreated parks as pieces of country in the city, restorative retreats that wouldoffset the stress, noise, grime, overstimulation, debauchery and disorder ofcity life (17).

New York's Central Park, is, of course, a model of the genre, as well as aparadigm of American landscape architecture, being one of the greatestachievements of the father of that field , Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted'sapproach to landscape architecture produced works of complex naturalisticmimesis in which every effort was made to conceal the artifice of the design,to disguise cultural interventions to the point that the end product would notbe recognized as a built landscape (most visitors to Central Park assume thatit is a natural landscape). Occupying an ideological middle groundbetween John Muir's radical notion of nature as tem ple, and Gifford Pinchot 's utilitarian view of nature as workshop (Spirn t t 2), Olmsted exemplified the more common, and infinitely more ambivalent relationship ofmodernity to nature: nature as culture s majestic Other lld its malleablecreature. t is perfectly fitting, then, for his masterpiece, Central Park, to bethe setti ng of one of American drama's most poignant enactments of th atambivalence

The action of Zoo Story suggests that the park is not just any space; rather itis so complicated a response to the increasing dichotomization of city andcounty as to be something of a geopathological syndrome Both the charactersapproach it desperately, as a potential solution to the problem of city life,though Jerry is more conscious of (and more extreme in this project thanPeter who is content to use the park as per the culture s instructions as a briefrespite from bourgeois pressures and domestic oppression. In the course o theplay, Jerry manages to tum the park in to a weapon, effectively reversing theplanners ' intention for the space: instead of a safe outlet for the aggressionengendered by (unnatural?) urban life, the park turns into a stage for a quietmodern agon that pits humans against animals men against women theupper-middl e-middle-c1ass again st the Iower-upper-middle-class (20),

and individuals against themselves.The Zoo Story might have been more accurately called The Park Stmy

There is actually no zoo in it (nor, for that matter, a zoo story, although one isrepeatedly promised by Jerry. But the di splacement of the zoo by the park inthe play (and vice versa in the play's title) is a key to its account of modemmetropolitan experience. The role of animality in characterizing the space andaction of the play makes that account classically modernist, with the animalstanding in as so often in moderni sm for the descent into primitive emot ion-ality. The descent begins, in this case, by establishing space as a deterministicforce. There may be no zoo in The Zoo StOlY but the one that Jerry keepsmentioning is real enough, and the play is at pains to locate it quite specifi-


10/18

UNA CHAUDHURI

cally with numerical coordinates like street numbers. Jerry s insistence ondistances and directions ( I've been walking north. [ . .. j IButj not due north11 2-13 J sets the stage, as it were, for a distinctly territorial encounter, withboth characters making significant cultural assumptions about each otherbased on the city's cultural geography of East Side, West Side, GreenwichVillage, and so on. The play's symbolic approach to geography extends evento statements of philosoph ica l principle (or perhaps the parody of such) aswhen Jerry solemnly declares that sometimes a person has to go a very longdistance out of his way to come back a short distance co rrectly 2 I) . Thecum ul ative effect of all these geographical references is to frame the sociological and psychological ac tion of the play within a deterministic spatial logic.The park begins to appear as a kind of vortex of tragic se lf-discovery. It is aheart of darkness where (like all such sites in modernism) the human

. de scent into primitive emot ionality is figured as animalityJust as the zoo is di splaced here , so is the zoo s ry. In its place we get a dogstory. Not, one might say, a shaggy dog story, for The Story of Jerry and theDog is anything but pointless. Rather , it is a kind of modern beast fable,packed with ethical implications. The dog Jerry first tried to tame and thentries to kill (first to kill with kindness and then to just kill , as he says 13 1Ilis a grotesque version of the household pet as Oedipali zed anima l. t belongsto Jerry's hideously amorous landlady and resembles the hell hound to whichJerry explicitly compares it:

a black monster of a beas t an oversized head, tiny, tiny ears, and eyes ... bl oodshot,in fected, maybe; and a body you can see the ribs through the skin. The dog isblack,all black; all bl ack eKcept for the bloodsho t eyes, and ... yes ... and an open sore onitsI ... J rig t forepaw; that is red, too. And oh yes; he poor monster 1 1almo stalways has an erec tion 1. .1 hat s red, too. And I ... 1 here s a gray-yellow-w hitecolor, too, when he bareshis fangs. 30, em phasis in orig inal)The landlady 's horror-cartoon of a pet is contrasted with the pets in

Peter's house - two cats and two parakeets, one for each of hi s two daughters. These Disneyfied animal s, benign enough at first, become disturbinglyhumanized during Peter 's hysterical giggling fi t: Oh, hee, hee, hee . I mustgo. I . .J After all, stop , stop, hee, hee , hee, after all , the parakeets will begetting dinner ready soon. Hee, hee. And the cats are setting the table (38).Hi s fantasy turns his home, as Peter himself says, in to a zoo just as Jerry'sdescription of the inhabi tants of his rooming house - each as di stinctive as aspecies, and each locked into his or her tiny enclosure - recalls nothing somuch as the zoo that he has recently visited, where everyone is separated bybars from everyone e lse, the animals for the most part from each other, andalways the people from the animals (40) . Thus the zoo that fail s to appearin a story nevertheless sa turates the symbolic space of the play, redefining


11/18

Animal Geographies 655modern metropolitan life as bestialized , partitioned, and brutally confined.Albee's modern city dwellers venture into the park as into a wilderness, hoping to find some account of their being in the world more satisfying than theone offered by their various urban stations. Their story is, finally, an in stanceof the privileged trope of modernism, "the traumatic encounter with theprimitive that threatens to activate the animal in all of us" (Wolfe, AnimalRites (85). The zoo story turns out to be only a park story, its zoo di splacedand useld l " as John Berger puts it, "as a symbol" (24). In the end, the onlyanimals we see in the play turn out to be Peter and Jerry themselves: Jerry'sdeath cry is that of an injuriated andjatally wounded animal (47, emphasis in original), and Peter learns that it's all right, you 're an animal. You'rean animal, too" (49).

Ultimately, then, he Zoo Story remains captivated by the figure of thehuman, sacrificing the animal to that figure by turning it into a metaphor. Theactual animal returns, with a vengeance in he Goal where its prese nce isstunningly literal. t is also, however, utterly beyond dramatic resolution. Theappearance of the animal, in all its fleshly embodiment, brings the humanstory to a screeching halt. The family stands paralyzed. There is nowhere togo: neither city nor country neither apartment nor zoo. The animal is understood quite literally as a defeat of meaning, a black hole in the family's comfortable universe: "one of them has been underneath the house, down in thecellar, digging a pit so deep , so wide , so ... HUGE ... we'll all fall in andJ never ... be ... able .. . to ... climb ... out .. . again - no matter how muchwe want to, how hard we try" (tOI-2) .

Between the unmeaning (or resistance to meaning) of the literal animal andthe unmeaning (or surfeit of meaning) of the animal as metaphor lies anotherkind of zooesis, which I now propose to explore in Terry Johnson 's extraordinary zoo story Cries from the Mammal House. A crucial characteristic of thiskind of zooesis is the fact that it begins with - and returns us to - an understanding that animals are, above all themselves, not us, not metaphors notconvenient codes for our prejudices. It is a sa lutary reminder, this nothingel sc o the animal, even jf it is onc we humans can sustain only fleet ingly.For, as Wolfe puts it, "even though the discourse of animality and species difference may theoretically be applied to an other of whatever type, the consequences of that discourse in institutional terms fall overwhe lmingly onnonhuman animals in our taken -far-granted practices of using and exploitingthem" (Introduction xx, emphasis in original).

NOTH ING ELSECries from theMammal ouse is a veritable compendium of animal practicesincluding zoo-keeping, velerinary medicine, animal-behavior-based psychology, repopulation of endangered species, euthanasia, animal worship, bestial-


12/18

UN CH UDHUR

ity, taxidermy, trafficking in exotic animals, slaughtering, butchering, andmeat-eating. The play s cataloguing of the many ways in which humans relateto animals is a principal strategy of its remarkably non-reductive zooesis. Theplay s highly differentiated and pluralistic view of animality is also reflectedin its title. I called the playa zoo story, and indeed it is set in a zoo, but theplay' s title is the first of its many interventions into the homogenized andimpacted view of anim als that Derrida identifies as the key strategy of camophallogocentrism. In using the less familiar, more archaic term mammalhouse in the title of the play, Johnson disturbs that comfortable di ssociationwe have achieved between the words "human" and "animal," and forces usback into the biological field we prefer to distance ourselves from .

From its title onwards, the logic of Johnson s play fosters the re-recognitionof animals as humankind's neighbors (to use Derrida's term IThe Animalthat Therefore I Am 402D but does so within a tragic view of eco-history(similar to the one expressed in Caryl Churchill's recent play of ecocidalapocalypse, Far Away), asking whether this recognition comes too late. In aninstance o inspired zooesis, the play opens with a direct address to the audi-ence that is cleverly doubled as a dialogue with an animal: Staring straightahead o her, Anne speaks directly to the audience :

Listen This isn't the real world . This is a zoo. You think you d prefer the realworld? Foraging for yourself instead of opening that mouth forwhatever wechoose to drop into it? Nothing but nature between you and the horizon? Youdream of it as a sort of freedo m, the real world? Elephan ts might ny . Let me tellyou, when we sto le it from you, this dream of yo urs, the weapon we used was ourintelligen ce. And now the world's been sto len from us by a small elite of our ownspecies and the weapon they used was money. So we sit in our enclosures, ourhorizon s painted on glass, ou rmouths wide open ... but instead of education, se lf-respect and common decency, we are fed television, charge cards and bloodyfamilies. (141)y explicitly articulating the modern-life-as-zoo metaphor within a zoo,

and especially by embedding it within a surprising instance of cross-speciesaddress, Anne's speech exposes to critical view the kind of metaphoric zooesis that, in Albee s oo Story as in so much other animal discourse, effectivelydi splaces the animal.

Just as the word "mammal" in the title overwrites and reactivates the dead -ened word "animal," the word "house" nudges new meanings into the sen ti-mentalized home. Human and non-human animals share this mammalhouse, making the play s title function much like the title of J. M. Coetzee sboundary-blurring an imal text The Lives o Animals. Coetzec's animalsinclude not only those of whom his protagonist speaks, but also those surrounding her - her son, daughter-in-law, grandchildren - through whose


13/18

Animal Geographieslives (lives that we see as normal; lives like ours) her so-called extreme

views on animals are refracted. Here, in Johnson's play, the cries comingfrom the mammal house belong to both human and non-human animals, withneither group displacing or muting the other. The effect is that the lives of theanimals begin to appear as complex and various as human lives always automatically do.As the play opens, a middle-aged man named Alan is reluctantly takingpossession of a small-town zoo he has just inherited from his father. As hisfirst act of ownership, he mu st kill the zoo's most popular exhibit, an elephant,which was, in a manner of speaking, responsible for his father'S death . t thevery outset, then zooesis is at work: the merging o the issue o the animal'scriminal culpability with the more familiar family plot provides a brillianttwist on the old theme of the revenge of a father'S murder. In stead of a murderous human beast, this play's reluctant Hamlet or Orestes, Alan, must dispatch a real animal. Thu s tile opening moments of the play link a venerabledramatic tradit ion with a now well-documented but still little known piece oflegal history -the trial and execution of animals.Whether an animal can be responsible for acrime is decisively answered here

in the negative, by invoking the complex histo ry of animal di splay out of whichthe modern zoo evolved. t seems that the old man was killed when, in an act ofdrunken nostalgia, he had entered the elephant's cage to be photographed withthe animal attempting to recreate a moment from the distant past of the zoowhen he was photographed holding out a contract for the elephant to sign(144) . The old photograph evokes the ancestry of zoos in traveling menagerie sand animal entertainments, in the so-called bad old days ( B loody silly, theson ca lls the photograph [1441) before the invention of the modem and socalled scientific zoo, which frowns on the anthropomorphizing of captive an i-mals (while reluctantly participating in it - in practices like public feedings andnamed zoo pets - to appeal to a decidedly voyeuristic and unscientific public). In the context of cruel animal captivity thus evoked, the animal appears asa victim , and its executionas the final injury in a life o insults.Absurd, unjust, and unethical as the decision is, the animal must be putdown, and the play's first exchange evokes some of the most common arguments and excuses heard in current debates about animal rights. There is thepragmatic argument: If I don 't, somebody else will. There is also the lesserof two evils argument: I'm a qualified surgeon. I can kill I .. ] mOfehumanely than any policeman (142). But the play is less interested in ethicalargumentation than in developing a dramatic discourse - a zooesis - based onthe cultural existence of the debate: Alan mu st not only kill the innocent elephant but spend much of the play euthanizing many other animals, once it islearned that the zoo is bankrupt and has to be closed down. Thus one majorline of the play's action is a kind of reversal of the Noah story, with animalsbeing systematically destroyed instead of systematically saved by human


14/18

UN CI-I AUDHURI

beings. Creature by creature, species by species, Alan administers the rightdose of poison needed to extinguish each living be ing. The last syringe is forhimself, making him a kind of inverse Adam, with no animals left to name,and no rea son to live.

Th is animal extinction plot is countered by the story of David, Alan'sbrother, a biologist specializing in the rescue and rebreeding of endangeredspecies. Hi s current project takes him (and, surprisingly, the play itsel ) toMaurit ius where, in addition to the pink pigeons he is seeking to rebreed, healso finds a secluded tribe who worship a group of dodo birds th at have survived the famed ext inction of eir species. On the island he also encounters arich mixture of human cultu res. from which he acquire s a kind of new familyto re place the obliterated one back in England. Significantly, the human diversity is characterized (by the ludicrous ly conservative colonial wife LadyPalmer) as a sort of religious zoo" ( 173). Her di squisition neatly demonst rates the complex and contradictory use of the animal in constructin g ideologies of difference:

I draw the line at black ma gic. I .. IItsa silly game that requires the slaughter ofinnncent creatures. lIsperpetralOrsdeserve the wrath of the Lamb . I hate thishea th en island Mr Ramsay. I beli eve it was created by God as a sort of religiouszoo; a place we might observe all the half-baked idiot ic ideo logies of the wo rldclamou ring for attention and di sappearing up their own belief systems Eve ntuallythe Chr islianethic wi ll rise triumphant. 72-73Although th is speech occurs in an exchange between two wes tern charac

ters, it does not function in the way of tho se Orienralist representa tions thattum non-western people into a co lorful background fo r th e dramas of Europeans. David 's new friend s in Mauritius qu ick ly exceed their stereotypes (aHindu, a Buddhist, a Christian convert, a "Re volutionary Marxist"1173 ) andbegin to pl ay vi tal roles in the play's increasingly complex and stylisticallyri sky exploration of cultural geographies.

A key strategy of thi s exploration in vo lves establi shing a di alectic betweentwo spaces, two worlds: the "home-world" of late-twe ntieth-century Englandand the distant other-world" of Mau ritiu s. The contrasts between the two -the dying Mammal House and the teeming island, systematic extinction anduncontrollable evolution - eventually produce, in the play 's final act, a whollyunexpected new socia l config uration, a new world, as it were. Pa radi se .(asDavid call s Mauritius 116t I is restored to the fam ily. The zoo is saved, thefamily is rescued. Not surprisingly, the agent of this renaissance is an animal.Johnson 's choice of animal for the role of ecological messiah is noth ing shortof in spired, for he pl aces, at the center of his play's ironic apotheosis, the creature who constellates, more than any other,' all the grimness and peculiarity ofthe human rela ti on to non-human an imals : the dodo.


15/18

Animal GeographiesThe extravagant and unexpected happy ending the play affords all its

characters - all happily united in England - reads like an ecological parable: David makes the biological find of the century (that the dodo, posteranima l o extinction, is in fact not extinct) because he had in his posses-sion, when he arrived in Mauritius, a stuffed dodo. This moldy specim en oftaxidermy is from the old zoo-keeper's collection ( [a [nything died, he'dhave it stuffed. And the meat roasted for his gourmets' circle [t52 ) , andavid has brought it to Mauritius to barter with the local museum for

museum facilities. But for David s Creole assistant, Victor the dodo is asign that David is the fulfillment of a prophecy, and he leads David to hi svi llage, "a village so high up it wasn't even on the map. It 's a small community descended from a bunch of slaves who thought fuck it and ran off.They live in almost total isolation: Victor was their city-man (207- 8). Inthe village, David is introduced to the mythically stupid birds in a suitably outlandish fashion:

They lined up this gigantic lid and there was the pit. 1wa s scared oul or my wits.They picked me up and threw me in it I couldn t see a thing except their race s upabove smiling as ir they thought they were doing me a ravour. So (looked around.It was very dark. t couldn', make much out. Something was mo vin g. I presumed twas there to eat me. Then someone lowered down a torch; the pit filled with thaIlovely naming torch light ' and there was something there . In the middle of thelight it stood blinking itseyes and wondering why on earth it had been woken upat this ungodly hour. It was a dodo. And it looked at me , swear to God and ilopened ils beak and it made the daftest sound I 've ever heard. And there werefemal es roosting and younguns being sat on and all around me these gr inningbloody conservat ion ists showing off their handfu l of god s for the very first time.(208)David himself gives the mean ing of the play's ecological parable: I was

just in the right place at the right time (208). By this time, however, thenotion of place - and further the question of what makes a place right - isanything but s im ple. The play has deployed the figure of the animal - orrather, remembering Derrida 's warning about that singular - the figure of ani-mals to remap the cultural geography of late-twentieth-century Europe as arapidly emptying mammal house, its inhabitants engaged in an ecocide thatwill eventually ensure their own extinction. What's the matter with you all?David asks hi s niece when he first arrives on the scene. We're related, sheanswers (t62).Not rcally. Or not enough. The last act includes a lengthy scene of introductions, in wh ich the conditions of a more creative, more sustaining relation, are enacted. Not surprisingly. thi s new relation is one that centrallyinvolves both human and non -human animals. Once introduced to each


16/18

660 UNA CHAUDHU Iother, all the characters gather around a crate that David opens: From thecr te there issues an bsurd cry which echoes around the mammal house(209). The cry of the dodo, absurd in itself but more absurd in its absence,in vites an imagina tive rethinking - beyond the human - of the figures ofhome, family, relationship.

Like h e Zoo Story, Cries from the a mmal House rcads the zoo as a siteof our culture's anxieties about its alienation from nature and from our ani malselves . Unlike Albee s play, however, thi s one does not abandon th e zoo to itsmetaphoric fate. Instead it undenakes a complex and di fferentiated zooesis,engaging a wide range o actual an imal practices. This zooesis explores thepossibility and argues the necess ity of reintegrating the an imal into modemconsciousness.

That this is a diffic ult, perhaps even futile , project is signaled by the play'sironic ending, its dodo ex mac hina. An additional, and rigorously theatrical,acknowledgement o the animal s vexed re lationship to cultural meaning ismade through the mimetic strategies explicitly called for in a note at the stanof the play: all live animals should be in visibl e, and mimed by the ac tors. Alldead animals, in whatever condition, sho uld be present (140). Thu s theplay's dialectic of spaces is overlaid with a performance dialectic that enactsthe tragic contingency of the animal in the modem wor ld . Flickering in andout of mimesis, the animal shapes and reshapes the spaces of human culture.In the same way, vario us modes of zQoesis , such as the troping of the animalto the reflexive and critica l interroga tion of its place among us- either rep ro-duce or excavate the humanist assumptions that determine the geography ofmodern drama.

NOT S

I The zoo alleges that it can tell a story, itsown story - roughly along the lines of,'Here isa zebra .. .' The zoo story, instead, more rout inely te lls something like'Here is a voyeur '; 'Here is a victim ' ; 'Here isa sadist'; 'Here is a corpse'(Malamud 55 .

2 The companionship Berger has in mind is very different from the sentim entalized relation prescribed by pet keeping. Interesting ly, in recent tim es an imal we ifare groupshave attemp ted to alter that re lation partly by seeking 1 di splace theword pet with the phrase co mp anion animal. In this as in other initiatives ofprogress ive politiCS, nomenclature becomes symbol ic battleground in the strugglefor change.

3 Several recen t stud ies (Fuller, Qu ammen , Correia) trace the cautionary case of thedodo's brief sojourn in hum an company: a mere ninety years from discovery toext inction, as we ll as its grip on the human imagination and its transformati on intothe posteranim al of ex tinction.


17/18

Animal Geographi s 66 1WORKS C ITED

Albee, Edward . The Goal or Who Is Sylvia? New York: Overlook, 2003._The Zoo tory .The American Dream and The Zoo Story. New York: Signet,

1961. 5-49Baker. Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals ldentity and Representation. Manchesterand New York: Manchester UP, 1993.Baudrillard. Jea n. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. She ila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor:

U or Michigan p, 1994.Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? 1977. bout Looking. New York: Pantheon,

1980.1-26.Chaudhuri, Una. Land/Scapeffheory. Land/Scope/Theater. Ed. El inor Fuchs and

Una Chaudhuri. Ann Arbor: U of Mich igan P, 2003. 11-29.Coelzee, 1. M. The Lives ofAnimals. Ed. Amy Gutmann . Prince ton: Princeton UP,1999Correia , Clara Pinto. Return of the Crazy Bird: The Sad Strange Tale of he Dodo.

New York: Copernicus, 2003.Deleuze, Gilles, and Fel ix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-

phrenia. Tra ns. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P1987

Derrida, Jacq ues. The An imal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), Trans, DavidWills. Critical Inquiry 28 .2 (Winter 2002): 369-4 18.

. ' Eating Well' or the Calculation of the Subject. Who Comes after the Suh-jet;t? Ed. Eduardo Cadava. Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Ro ut ledge, 199 I 96- 9.

Egloff, Eli zabeth. The Swan. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1994.Fuller, Errol. The Dodo: From Extinction to Icon. New York : Harper Collins, 2002.Gurney, A. R. Sylvia. New York: Dramatists Play Se rvice, 1996.Hanson, E lizabe th . Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos. Prince

ton and Oxford: Prince ton UP, 2002.Johnson. Terry. Cries from the Mammal House: Plays; One. London: Methuen, 1993.

137-209.Malamud, Randy. Reading Zoos: Representations ofAnimals in Captivity. Basing

stoke : MacMillan, 1998.Morris, Ramona, and Desmond Morris. The Giant Panda. Rev. Jonathan Barzdo. Lon

don: Kogan Page, 1981.Quammen, David. The Song of th e Dodo: Island Biogeography in an ge of Extinc-

tions. New York: Scribner , 1996.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. Londonand New York: Roulledge , 1982.Spi rn, Anne Whiston. Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Ed. William Cronon. London andNew York: Nonon, 1995.


18/18

662 UNA CHA UD HURITaylor, John Russe ll .Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama. London:

Methuen 1962.Wh at's the Word? The Goat Gazette 1.4 (June 2002 : 1 2.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford UP , 1973.Wolfe, Ca ry. Animal Rites: American Culture the Discourse o/Species and Posthu-

manist Theory. Chicago and London : U of Chicago P, 2003.- , Introduct ion. ZoontoJogies: The Question of the Animal. Ed. Cary Wolfe.

Minne polis and London: U o Minnesot p. 2003. ix- xx ii i .Walch, Jennifer, and Jod y Ern el, eds. Animal Geographies : Place Politics and Iden-

tity ill the Nature-Culture Borderlands. London: Verso. 1998.

zooesis and the space of modern drama

Documents