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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the sepa-
ration of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as
the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may
have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a
wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and
to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations
of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally
read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically
human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of inter-
disciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with
the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embody-
ing a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how
the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply
illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals
in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to
the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The
series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related
discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre
and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural
ephemera) with which English Studies now engages.
Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Sakonboon Sansri / EyeEm / Getty Images, Image ID: 917822526
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Roselien and Jasper, and their wonderful sounds,
and for Liesbeth, who listens to it all with me
Preface
This book is the result of what was supposed to be a short, easy project.
Why would there be much to say about the sounds of nonhuman animals
in written texts, let alone in novels? Surely my attempt to fill this gap in the
secondary literature could be squeezed into a quirky, easily contained
argument, I imagined, with few loose ends. But I kept discovering materi-
als and having experiences that were relevant to my developing narrative.
As my wife Liesbeth gave birth to our second child in this period, we spent
the last few years listening attentively to wonderful baby language and
creaky baby monitors, for instance, while buying children’s books with
embedded bird sounds and worrying about the sleep-disrupting noises of
airplanes that pass above our home on the way to Brussels airport. Nor did
I expect this project to involve many interlocutors when I first started it in
2014. Yet new publications about animals and their nonhuman acoustics
continue to appear in a wide array of fields even as I am finishing these
pages. What seemed to be a relatively simple argument about noisy ani-
mals and beastly humans hence kept changing and mutating while I read
the work of contemporary novelists as well as contemplated that of aca-
demics in various disciplines. Complicating things further, I moved to a
new university immediately after finishing the first outline of this project,
forcing me to learn and perform numerous new tasks besides writing and
thinking about animal voices and human listeners. Valuable time was lost,
moreover, in writing grant proposals that went nowhere. For all of these
reasons, this project ended up taking much longer and being more com-
plicated than I first anticipated. Most importantly, I learned that there is
actually quite a lot to say about the novel and what I will be calling the
vii
viii PREFACE
multispecies soundscape. Indeed, I hope you will read and finish this book
thinking that there is even more to say, and will pinpoint one or more
loose ends that I failed to see—and listen to—along the way, so that we
can continue the exciting interdisciplinary conversation profiled in the
coming pages.
If I managed to finish the book despite these challenges, that is largely
due to my wonderful colleagues and to several groups of people who have
shown that the academic world can be a remarkably stimulating and gen-
erous community. At the universities of Leuven and Ghent, I want to
thank my main teachers and sources of inspiration, Dirk de Geest, Jürgen
Pieters, and the inimitable, indefatigable Jan Baetens, for introducing me
to the rabbit hole that is literary studies. Other colleagues have enriched
my time at these institutions, most notably Pieter Verstraeten (whose pre-
mature departure from the field is nothing short of tragic), Pieter
Vermeulen, Anneleen Masschelein, David Martens, Sascha Bru, Stef
Craps, Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, and last but not least, Hilde
Moors. Michel Delville, Liesbeth Korthals-Altes, Maarten De Pourcq, and
Tom Toremans were kind enough to invite me to the universities of Liège,
Groningen, and Nijmegen, and to the Brussels campus of KULeuven for
teaching activities that I fondly remember. I would also like to extend my
gratitude to the students and PhD students I have had the pleasure of
working with, especially the students of my contemporary literature course
at University College Maastricht, and the talented Nicolas Vandeviver, for
always responding graciously to my probing questions. But I should thank
Robert Pogue Harrison, Isabel Hoving, and my friends at the Benelux
Association for the Study of Art, Culture, and the Environment (BASCE)
too, as their subtle encouragements at a crucial stage in my career helped
to lead me astray and to discover the weird and wonderful world of eco-
criticism and the environmental humanities. In addition, this project has
benefited from the advice and inspiration provided by my former col-
leagues at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University,
the research group Arts, Media, and Culture in particular. Several people
offered direct help and encouragement, and made me feel at home there
from the start, most notably Emilie Sitzia (and her inexhaustible supply of
dark chocolate), Aagje Swinnen, Renée van de Vall, Lies Wesseling, Merle
Achten, Sophie Vanhoonacker, and Rein de Wilde. It was also a happy
coincidence that my time at Maastricht was spent on a research project
that corresponded well with the expertise of my new colleagues, in
PREFACE ix
my wonderful wife Liesbeth, who endured it all, I want to say sorry as well
as thanks. If I have had to work on this long book occasionally, and was
lost in thought when I should really have been paying attention to the
sounds at hand, know that I was thinking about the other part of my life
whenever I returned to reading and writing. And you can rest assured: I
think this book is finished now.
One section of Chap. 2 first appeared in a different form in:
Ben De Bruyn. “Anthropocene Audio: The Animal Soundtrack of the
Contemporary Novel”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57.2
(2016): 151–65.
An early version of Chap. 3 was published as:
Ben De Bruyn. “Polyphony Beyond the Human: Animals, Music, and
Community in Coetzee and Powers”. Studies in the Novel 48.3
(2016): 364–83.
2 Biodiversity’s Bandwidth 47
4 Multispecies Multilingualism133
Index 291
xi
List of Figures
xiii
CHAPTER 1
When my head broke back up through the film of foam …, I had a … skin
of seamless ears like the compound eyes of a bluebottle, each of them suck-
ing in sound. This, to begin with, was far too much sensation for sense. My
brain knew what to do with sound beamed into the sides of my head. It
couldn’t cope with sounds from my little toe and my shoulder. It got dizzy
with overload and with the unaccustomed angles … But then my brain …
realised that it was up to the job of co-ordinating the broadcasts from each
of its distant … outstations and swelled proprietorially, announcing that its
body was … capable of doing new, strange stuff. ‘Have you never heard with
your knee?’ it said. ‘Ha! Call yourself a human?’ Sound travels more than
four times faster in water than in air. When you’re down in the water, relying
mainly on sound …, distances are exhilaratingly shrunk. A crayfish clattering
across gravel fifty yards away sounds as if it’s at the end of your arm. The
water filling your ears is a megaphone. (94–5)
Such scenes are taken to confirm that living like these nonhuman animals
reawakens our senses and helps us ‘to thrive as a human being’ (68, empha-
sis in original), given that we have devolved into ‘unsensory, unmindful
creatures’ (124). Foster remains acutely aware of the fact that human
minds and bodies cannot actually become those of the otters, badgers,
foxes, and other species he shadows and describes in this contemporary
instance of nature writing. Human bodies are adapted to other environ-
ments and process sensory information differently, after all. Yet exercises
in cross-species sensing remain possible, he insists, seeing that at least
some creatures have comparable sense receptors and inhabit environments
we too can explore. Though mindful of the project’s limitations, Foster
hence rejects a classic skeptical argument about human-animal relations:
‘Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand a
word it was saying, since the form of a lion’s world is so massively different
from our own. He was wrong’ (21). More could be said about this proj-
ect, which won the Ig Nobel Prize for biology in 2016, but the crucial
point for my purposes here is that it touches upon some of the main
themes of the present book. Across a broad range of twenty-first-century
writing, readers encounter spirited critiques of contemporary human soci-
ety and its treatment of other life forms, and this predicament as well as its
solution is repeatedly cast in sensory terms, as a failure in cross-species
communication rooted in the poor listening skills of absent-minded
humans, necessitating a fundamental recalibration of our hearing appara-
tus, which tunes it to what I will call the multispecies soundscape. There
are differences too. Most of the cases I analyze in the following chapters
are instances of fiction rather than nonfiction, concentrate mostly if not
exclusively on sound, ponder the role of acoustic media alongside seem-
ingly immediate experiences like those narrated by Foster, and devote
more attention to the experiences of humans listening to animal voices
than to the life worlds of animals or humans acting like animals. Going
forward, I will also reflect critically on attempts to expand the reach of
human listening, which deserve praise for bringing into view different lives
but also invite criticism when they boost our sensory confidence in ways
that appear incompatible with a more-than-human outlook (‘Call yourself
a human?’). But all of these examples share Foster’s interest in recent bio-
logical findings, promote a similar form of sensory revitalization, and raise
questions about acoustic contact between various species.
Examining similar scenes of listening, the present book charts how
early twenty-first-century writers represent the multispecies soundscape
1 INTRODUCTION: MULTISPECIES FICTIONS AND THEIR ACOUSTIC… 3
and reflects on the relations between human and other animals as they are
mediated by an array of competing sonic media, the novel especially. It is
primarily aimed at three audiences: students and scholars of literature and
culture who want to learn more about sound and the human-animal inter-
face; students and scholars who work on animals and the environment
more broadly, and would like to understand how nonhuman sounds
acquire cultural meaning, in a literary context especially; and students and
scholars investigating sound and listening who want to broaden the remit
of their research beyond the scope of the human. But I hope the book also
caters to the interests of a more diffuse group of readers, who may simply
be fascinated by the noisy creatures who inhabit its pages, including echo-
locating Irrawaddy dolphins, loud Tasmanian devils and quiet Tasmanian
tigers, musical crickets, birds, and frogs, rumbling African and Asian ele-
phants, laughing and signing chimps, injured dogs and horses with racing
hearts, threatening vampires with silent bodies, and several deafened
marine mammals, including Cuvier’s beaked whales—not to mention
numerous talking and roaring humans. Alternatively, general readers
might be drawn to the book’s account of distinct communities of listeners,
who experience the sounds of other creatures in ways inflected by their
professional status as scientist, recordist, hunter, composer, linguist, vet,
doctor, cowboy, submarine captain, or sonar technician—or by more per-
sonal, less specialized exchanges with nonhuman animals. As I explain
below, this book is not an introduction to biosemiotics or bioacoustics,
the two scientific disciplines that study animal communication systems,
nor is it an ethnographic study of actual listeners, which summarizes
observations of and interviews with anonymized real-life informants. But
it tackles related topics in comparing divergent human responses to animal
sounds, the changing cultural meanings ascribed to nonhuman vocaliza-
tions and other creaturely vibrations. Approaching these topics through
the lens of contemporary novels appears strange at first, because literature
is conventionally believed to be entirely silent, fictional, and anthropocen-
tric. That is why this introduction clarifies the conception of literature,
animals, sounds, and media that underpins my approach, and that explains
why this traditional view of the novel is not the whole story, not today, and
not in earlier times either. If we adjust our approach slightly and retune
our ears, as listeners and readers, we will find that this flexible literary
genre provides vital resources for social debates on human-animal rela-
tions and the urgent interdisciplinary conversations of the environmental
humanities.
4 B. DE BRUYN
audible voices of the ‘noisy animals’ that inhabit [the literary archive] sug-
gest that in order to make animals count politically, we must first reconfigure
the distribution of the perceptible within literature [which requires] a poli-
tics of reading since animals have been speaking in literature from its incep-
tion, even if they have not always been audible. (144, emphasis in original)
Robles rightly notes that literature has noticed animal sounds from the
start, in line with the fact that no textual feature is ‘more visibly literary,
nor more visibly discredited’ than ‘the giving of voice to animals’ (180).
Indeed, while we can easily locate numerous examples of these sounds in
literary texts, it cannot be denied that past reading protocols have largely
ignored these ‘growls’, by reinterpreting texts about speaking animals as
allegories or by quarantining them from other writings with the help of
rigid distinctions between genres (fables versus novels), audiences (chil-
dren versus adults), and uses (pedagogy versus science). This is all the
more striking because reading itself involves listening to what appears to
be inert matter. Interrogating the trope of silent nature, Christopher
Manes has observed a fundamental paradox in modern humanist critiques
of animism: ‘nature has grown silent in our discourse, shifting from an
animistic to a symbolic presence’ (17), despite the fact that ‘our relation-
ship with texts is “wholly animistic”, since the articulate subjectivity that
was once experienced in nature shifted to the written word’ (19).
When animals are taken seriously, moreover, writers and readers have
privileged some sounds and species over others, as is illustrated by the
famous trope of birdsong. Comparing classic nineteenth-century exam-
ples of the avian lyric, Daniel Karlin finds that this poetic genre paradoxi-
cally exhibits a strong tendency ‘to affirm the primacy of human language,
with all its failures and defects, over the ineffable ideal of song to which it
claims to aspire’ (60). Even when poets do justice to the real-life behaviors
and vocalizations of a certain bird species, they end up assimilating it to
their human purposes, figuratively ‘caging’ the animal in rhyme, conven-
tion, and allegory. Robles likewise finds fault with reductive, overly sym-
bolical representations of nonhuman song in terms of love, melancholy,
and poetry. But he also points out, more appreciatively, that the songbird
of Romantic poetry is ‘at the root of our renewed impulse to think of
nature differently, to think of it as the place of songbirds’ (88). The work
of John Clare is often singled out in this respect. According to Matthew
Rowney, Clare’s poetry anticipates ‘our contemporary ecological moment
in which all sorts of sounds have become and are becoming extinct’ (23),
1 INTRODUCTION: MULTISPECIES FICTIONS AND THEIR ACOUSTIC… 7
for it allows us to hear that ‘as the land became enclosed, so too did the
soundscape’ (28). In responding to these developments, Rowney
finds, Clare steers clear of literary clichés and transcribes birdsong in a way
that attempts to be ‘as empirically accurate as possible, to capture, as nearly
as language and context would allow, the actual sound’ (30). British
Romantic poets are not the only writers who have revised conventional
representations of birdsong. If we cast a wider net, Robles informs us, we
learn that poems can also foreground the ‘sheer strangeness’ of animal
sounds, via a shift from melodious birdsong to the elusive ‘croaks of cor-
vids’ (110), as in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1845), and that literary
texts may question the ‘universality’ of the nightingale as a poetic species
by disclosing, as in Pablo Neruda’s Arte de pájaros (1966), that less famous
songbirds like the tapaculo resonate more loudly in other cultures (106)—a
point I return to below. In listening closely to bird species that are not
consecrated by literary tradition, Robles concludes, creative poets have
endeavored ‘to make nightingales of them all’ (107). This is another rea-
son for analyzing the contemporary novel’s animal audio; now that we are
newly aware of these voices and their vulnerability, we should study how
literature enables us to access these sounds and redistributes the audible,
by putting beautiful voices on a pedestal along reductive, conventional
lines or by incorporating more creatures in the text’s soundscape, making
nightingales—or tapaculos—of them all.