Animal Victims from Survival (Margaret Atwood)

 Introduction: Margaret Atwood in “Animal Victims” from Survival speaks about the dangers caused by human beings, especially the Canadians to animals. In symbolic tone, she also talks about how like animals, the Canadians are victimised by Americans, the imperialists. While she searches for animal stories in Canadian literature, she gets awe-struck as she comes across the animal stories written by Ernest Thompson Seton and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and also some other Canadian authors. Their stories reflect the very Canadian psyche. The Canadian ‘animal stories’ as a genre differs from English and American animal stories. So, she contradicts Alex Lucas’ views found in “A Literary History of Canada” through this essay, “Animal Victims”.

British Animal Stories: The Canadian literary ‘genre’ and its approach to the subject, animal-victim is unique. In British Literature, for example, in Kipling’s “Mowgli” Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows” and Beatrix Potter’s “Tales” animals are personified and so they are benign like the while rabbits in “Allice in Wonderland”. The animals have an organized hierarchy like the one in human world. When these animal tales were translated into other forms like cartoon movies, and song-dance, the animals were given human speech and human nature.

American Animal Stories: However, in American animal stories these animals are able to speak English but they are not the centre of action, because these stories are ‘hunting stories’ which depend on human or animal hunters. For example, the white whale in “Moby-Dick” the bear in Faulkner’s “The Bear” the lion in Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” the grizzlies in Mailer’s “Why Are We in Viet Name?” are endowed with magic symbolic qualities. So, the hunters try to match themselves against these animals and finally conquer them by killing. “Winning” over “Nature” enhances their stature. In fact, in American animal stories the success of the animal lies in terms of adjustment to people – as in Jack London’s “White Frog”. However, in the animal stories of Seton and Roberts, (the authors who are part Canadian and part American) the death of the animals is seen as tragic or pathetic because the stories are told from the point of view of animals.

Canadian Animal Stories: English animal stories are about “social relation”, Americans’ are about “People killing animals” and the Canadians’ are about “animals being killed”. For example, in “Moby-Dick” the white whale exclaims “Why is that strange man chasing me around with a harpoon”? and so we mourn for the struggle of the whaler but in Canadian, E.J. Pratt’s “The Cachalot” we mourn for the death of the whale. However, all these animal stories have tragic tone. Seton in the Preface of “Wild Animals I Have Known” states that “wild animal always has a tragic end”.  But in reality, it is not the animal which speaks and writes about its story but it is people who write it, like how the “Indian stories” until recently were written by the White people.

In Seton and Roberts stories animals are killed either by another animal or by men. Seton reverse the “Nature-as-Monster” pattern in “Lobo”, “The Springfield Fox” and “Redruff” and writes that animals in these stories suffered or killed by men and not by other animals. Hence Atwood says that “Seton and Roberts suggest “pathetic” than “tragic” end because in ‘tragic’ the hero should possess some tragic-flaw but in ‘pathos’ as a literary mode simply demands that an innocent victim suffer”. To explain ‘animal victim’ by Seton, Atwood also quotes the essay “Lives on the Hunted: The Canadian Animal Story and the National Identity” by James Polk. So according to Atwood one can understand the Canadian psyche from the animal stories. She painfully says that in Seton’s and Roberts’ stories only the individual animal is killed by men but in Fred Bodsworth’s “The Last of the Curlews” and Farley Mowat’s “Cry Wolf”, the Canadian concern on doomed-and-slaughtered-animals spreads far beyond the range of the ‘animal story’. The editor, Michael Ondaatjee of the book, “The Broken Ark” in the editor’s note reveals that in Seton-and-Roberts tradition men do not want to classify or treat animals as pets.

In Alden Nowlan’s “The Bull Moose” the moose is tortured before being killed, but the man is portrayed as a scarified-God-figure. In stories such as “Cain” and The Bull Calf” by Irving Layton, “Mountain” by Bill Bissett and the poem, “The Death of Animal” by Al Purdy, and “God Sour the Milk of the Knacking Wench” by Alden Nowlan the animals are shown as worth-sacrificing creatures.

Late 20^th Century Canadian Literature: Dave Godfrey’s “Death Goes Better with Coca-Cola” is also about animal as victim. But the link such as ‘death with coca-cola’ has a significant relevance to Konrad Lorenz’s book “On Aggression” because in the book Lorenz portrays the destructive effect of the so called “higher culture”. Like this “The Generation of Hunters” has an allusion such as ‘America – ‘the conquering nation’ is the killer and ‘Canadians’ are the killed. In fact, Canadians too are hunters of moose or fish which is like that of American towards them. In Aldon Nowlan’s poem, the hunter image of Americans hunting the Canadians continues. According to Nowlan, as the Americans gets bored off hunting animals turn their attention on Canadians: “Canada is the place where Americans now come to hunt. The dead bear is Canadian, a trophy to be taken from ‘here to ‘there’ and ‘there’ is seen as civilized, safe, non-wild, a place of rituals that have lost their meaning and of fake surfaces, of living skins turned into rugs. The function of the Canadian ‘guides’ is curious; they are the middlemen, converting their own live reality to dead trophies so they can sell it” (Survival 80). Thus, in Canadian literature ‘animal as victim’ is a persistent image.

Scientific Survey: A Biologist, Desmond Morris conducted a survey of people’s reactions to animals and the discovery is that ‘the animals’ that people choose depend on the size of it and also the age of people: small children like ‘parental’ animals like bear and elephant; slightly older children prefer white mice and squirrels; adolescents like companion or sexual-power figures like dogs and horses; childless couples tend to favour cats, lapdogs and house birds; elderly people in England tend to identify with threatened or nearly-extinct species. But in Canada people join in animal-salvation campaigns such as protest over slaughter of baby seals and the wolf. But Canadians are interested in ‘fur trade’. So according to Atwood, from the point of view of animals Canadians are as bad as the people involved in slave-trade.

New Revelation and Perception: However, Canadians empathy for animals has a new revelation in the present century as they realized that they are also at near-extinct as a nation: “the culture threatens the ‘animal’ within them”.  Seton says that “The animals are us”. In Quebec, the animal story is different because the French Canadians view themselves as animals that are victimized, conquered and exploited. For example, in Seton’s “The Trail of the Sandhill Stag” the narrator corners a stag after a long hunt but can’t shoot because during the meaningful gaze he realizes that the stag is his brother. The French Canadians’ views differ from the English Canadians’ because the English psyche always thinks about “winning over”. In Morris’ findings it is noted that the English Canadians identify themselves with animal image as they feel that they are ‘threatened victims, because they need to confront the “superior alien technology”. So, Atwood views this transformation invariably in the “Position” matrix. According to her “there comes a point at which seeing yourself as a victimized animal -naming your conditions, as the crucial step from the ignorance of Position One through the knowledge of Position Two to the self-respect of Position Three – can become the need to see yourself as a victimized animal, and at the point you will be locked into Position Two, unable to go any further”. (Survival 82).

 

This instinct of ‘Positions’ is explored in Graeme Gibson’s “Five Legs” and “Communion” Putting Gibson’s patterns together we find “animal victim’ in Canada. In another version of “Communion” by Riton, the central character like Felix escapes to America but finally dies while trying to save his American identity. He killed a child accidently like how Felix who killed his pet dog and becomes a psychotic to kill himself. So according to Atwood, Canadians are in two conditions (i) exploited victims and (ii) those who need to be exploited victims – the first could be changed by altering the external environment but the second also involves the alteration of self, of the way we see ourselves.

Optimism in Canadian Literature: Still Canadian Literature finds tone of optimism by the contributions of writers like Michael Ondaatje. In his animal poems, the animals are more likely to incorporate vitality and energy than to be suffering victims. Joe Rosenblatt’s book, “Brumblebee Dithyramb” has a number of animal poems, in which Rosenblatt sees animals as “centres of irrepressible vitality” which cannot be matched with human vitality. In Layton’s poem “A Tall Man Executes A Jig” a tall man in his venture of finding revelation resists temptation, witnesses the suffering but does not curse. Ultimately, he wins in the end. This kind of optimism, according to Atwood certainly withholds the spirit and identity of Canadians in the international arena.

Conclusion: Thus, in “Animal Victims” Atwood brings out the thematic pattern, ‘animal victim’ in Canadian literature in two senses – one is that the Canadians’ animal killing nature and the second is that the Canadians as ‘killed’ or ‘the pathetic victims’ in the hands of Americans or the so-called higher-culture or technology. According to Atwood the great Canadian animal-victim tradition is akin to the Tall Man’s experience – the “restraint is heroic”.