Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film

To Richard Ford, with thanks

A poem is stored energy, a formal turbulence, a living thing, a swirl in the flow.

—William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology”

William Rueckert’s recycled lines from Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island on the biopoetic nature of verse get one thinking about Golding’s second novel The Inheritors (1955). Recounting the final days of a group of Neanderthals on the eve of their extinction at the hands of Cro-Magnon man, The Inheritors is quite literally a story about ecology and evolution. The novel’s central character is Lok, who with the rest of his tribe comes across a strange group of “new people.” The encounter proves deadly. One by one the People are killed, until only Lok, the last of his kind, remains. The Inheritors does not imagine but rather becomes (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) Neanderthal. Written almost entirely from the Neanderthals’ perspective in a language crafted especially for them, the story switches view in the final chapter, to look out of the eyes of modern man.

The Inheritors is poised against H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History (1920) and “The Grisly Folk” (1921), gothic texts that depict the Neanderthal as beastly and ruthless. As his epigraph, Golding quotes from The Outline of History:

“… We know very little of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this … seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature…. Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern man in his Views and Reviews: ‘The dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore … ’”

Golding dismissed Wells’s text as “the rationalist gospel in excelsis” and went on to tell Virginia Tiger that “it seemed to me to be too neat and too slick. And when I re-read it as an adult I came across his picture of Neanderthal man, our immediate predecessors, as being these gross brutal creatures who were possibly the basis of the mythological bad man … the ogre. I thought to myself that this is just absurd. What we’re doing is externalizing our own inside” (Golding qtd. in Tiger 71). But Golding’s rejection of teleological anthropology that depicts the destruction of the Neanderthals as a beneficial stage in civilized progress does more than reflect shifting attitudes in the Neanderthal debate.¹ The Inheritors is a bold ecopoetic experiment that gives rise to a new kind of literary sentience.

Although Golding’s method involves literary subversion, intertextuality does not diminish the remarkable autonomy of his prose. Craig Raine has argued that Golding’s sources stretch far and wider than Wells or Ballantyne. Raine finds Golding in the company of Aldous Huxley, Anthony Beavis, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Robert Southwell, and Kipling.² But sources finally “account for very little of any great work of art, however interesting they might be” (Raine 107), and Golding’s novels are their own solid sources—lonely creatures. Their unbrotherly, island prose is at times plainly weird. No wonder that so much in him concerns castaways and the shipwrecked. Golding’s mixed reception (the singling out of Lord of the Flies at the expense of his other work) is testimony to this singularity of his. In critical terms, too, The Inheritors is generous. It closely links postcolonialism and ecocriticism, critiques whose mutual affinities are only now beginning to be considered.³ Despite the tender evocations of the natural world, however, nature in Golding criticism often means the nature of man. Perhaps this is why The Inheritors produced few if any ecocritical readings but found avid readers in the neighboring area of science fiction.⁴

The fictional retrieval of an extinct sensibility (an ecopoetic feat par excellence) is the novel’s most astute and touching achievement. It is what I propose as the novel’s Neanderthal poetics. Golding’s is the first postcolonial fable, the “original sin” of colonization and genocide that inaugurated the vexed relations between man and nonman, relations whose deadly machinations can be traced in the rest of Golding’s postwar fiction written under the sign of Belsen and Hiroshima.⁵

The Inheritors is far ahead not only of its time but also of ours in that it exists—as a text and as a work of art—in the possibility of transcending the distinctions of species. Rather than combine human and nonhuman, Golding explores different modes of perception, Neanderthal and human being in the world. In Wells’s Outline of History and “The Grisly Folks” as well as The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)—science fictions that ostensibly deal with hybrid species—Wells nonetheless remains rooted in human perception. Dr Moreau is the archetypal mad professor whose godlike ambition finally destroys him. Moreau contains some powerful passages on the horrors of vivisection, but the novel’s humanized animals ultimately serve to critique the giddiness that scientific rationality can arouse in excellent but uninhibited minds. They offer little by way of an alternate sensibility.

Not species, but perception, then. What is this new way of being alive to the world that The Inheritors renders so palpable? I begin by discussing Golding’s commitment to material description and to the visual. Visuality has been especially pertinent in recent debates on nonhuman subjectivities, and I compare and contrast Golding’s ocular logic to Temple Grandin’s “thinking in pictures.” In the final section of the chapter I consider the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s concepts of natural history and the creaturely to The Inheritors’ own counterhistorical narrative.

Neanderthal perception is concrete and pictorial rather than abstract. It is a non-Cartesian sensibility rooted in embodied experience. Because of this, the People practice a commonality impossible for beings with a solitary consciousness. The Inheritors is a literary example of what Ralph Acampora calls “intersomatic” and “intercorporeal” relations.⁶ There is nothing paranormal about the People’s communication. Their intersubjectivity is continuous with their intercorporeal existence. Despite the Neanderthal’s fate, the novel’s tragedy is finally Cro-Magnon’s—our tragedy—the result of their constitution as mentally disparate entities, doomed to solipsism and that distinctly modern malaise, alienation.

Throughout most of the novel, the reader is immersed in Lok’s world as he sees and feels it, without narrational assistance. It takes some acclimatizing to appreciate emotional as physical states. We read, for example, that Lok “watched the water run out of her [Nil’s] eyes” (The Inheritors 69).⁷ There is no need to disclose an internal world with its furnishings of sadness, grief, or loss. These can be conveyed as colors and shapes, transposed from the inner to the outer world. So the “lights”

faint as the starlight reflected in the crystals of a granite cliff. The lights increased, acquired definition, brightened, lay each spark-ling at the lower edge of a cavern. Suddenly, noiselessly, the lights became thin crescents, went out, and streaks glistened on each cheek. The lights appeared again, caught among the silvered curls of the beard. They hung, elongated, dropped from curl to curl and gathered at the lowest tip. The streaks on the cheeks pulsed as the drops swam down them, a great drop swelled at the end of a hair of the beard, shivering and bright. It detached itself and fell in a silver flash, striking a withered leaf with a sharp pat.

(TI 220)

In the essay “Golding’s Pity” Barbara Everett explains that the “‘pity’ of The Inheritors is not in Lok’s tears alone; it is in our witness and understanding of what causes them. The book requires the participation of the observer, the visitor to the Zoo—the reading self which, at first wholly absorbed in the People, at last comes to recognize itself in the New Men, our direct and destructive ancestors” (Everett 116). I find the reference to the zoo in this passage suddenly intrusive in the jarring of the urban depressiveness of zoos with The Inheritors’ feral setting. But the zoo is intended to negotiate the interspecies drama in The Inheritors and our position as readers within it. The image invokes the colonial subtext, which the novel shares, however loosely, with zoos. Everett speaks visually of the “observer,” not the reader, but vision is preceded by witnessing, an ethically and historically charged concept, discussed in some detail in the previous chapter. Everett suggests that we “see” these Neanderthals as we see zoo animals, that in both cases we face them with a measure of colonial guilt. More can be made of the analogy between readers and zoo-goers (as between novels and zoos), but I want to keep with Everett’s thread. “When Lok weeps,” she goes on, “something as much ape as man suffers—and we suffer with him that pain of the animals so hard to endure because inarticulate, out of reach or inconsolable” (Everett 117). The sentence falters a little between a creaturely approach that takes Lok and us (and inevitably also the Cro-Magnons) as fellow sufferers, commonly embodied beings—“suffering with him that pain of animals”—and that more conventional view of animal suffering as somehow other and remote.

Golding, however, does not treat nonhuman suffering as incommunicable. After losing his female partner Fa, Lok’s anguish is described in terms of physical momentum—but when an inarticulate, wordless howl is finally released from inside Lok, Golding calls it “man-sound”: “Lok began to bend. His knees touched the ground, his hands reached down and took his weight slowly, and with all his strength he clutched himself into the earth. He writhed himself against the dead leaves and twigs, his head came up, turned, and his eyes swept round, astonished eyes over a mouth that was strained open. The sound of mourning burst out of his mouth, prolonged, harsh, pain-sound, man-sound” (TI 190). Golding starts here conservatively enough (the animal as movement without language). Then comes the miniature coda: “man-sound.” This correction, this adjusting of the passage also reforms our assumptions about human articulacy and unintelligible animal “noise,” and it applies not only to this passage but to the novel as a whole. The Inheritors proceeds through such man-sounds, or animalized speech, as Neanderthal expression.

At the root of The Inheritors’ affective power, Everett finds W. H. Auden’s “the sadness of the creatures” (Auden qtd. in Everett 115): “our capacity to register in detachment the suffering of the creaturely estate, which men and animals have in common” (116).⁸ Pity for creatures—animal, human, Neanderthal—is “by virtue of their intense, their in fact humiliating existence in their own bodies” (117–18). In Everett’s essay “creatures” heal the rift between human and nonhuman, placing The Inheritors exquisitely in the interval—the open—the reconciliatory nonplace that Agamben described as “Shabbat of both animal and man” (The Open 92). The creature, then, is a figure that belongs at once to the distant past and the unforeseen future, which makes The Inheritors prehistoric science fiction.

If The Inheritors experiments with creaturely embodiment, the gesture is reversed in Golding’s subsequent novel Pincher Martin (1956), about a man struggling to stay alive on a tiny rock in the Atlantic. The narrative is nothing more than the unfolding of a mind, willing itself to survival in the icy water. Here Golding refutes Wellsian rationalism by the opposite means: stripping thought (and the castaway narrative) of all body. As Virginia Tiger points out, while Lok perceives without understanding, Pincher Martin is conscious without perceiving. Lok, who “attends scrupulously to the concrete” (Tiger 77), lives strictly through sense perception with only the slightest abstract consciousness of this life, while Pincher Martin purely and powerfully thinks, without living (76). As formal inversions, then, The Inheritors and Pincher Martin produce impossible knowledge of radical states. As a creature whose life is rendered solid and palpable, Lok signals a place where, thought free, only the body remains as pure vitality. Martin’s thought, conversely, achieves total bodilessness when, in the novel’s coda, we discover that he is actually dead.

The Inheritors’ language is elemental and aquiline; Golding’s strength is description: “I’d say I’m passionately interested in description, the exact description of a phenomenon. When I know what a wave looks like or a flame or a tree, I hug that to me or carry the thought agreeably as a man might carry a flower round with him” (Golding qtd. in Tiger 75). The novel is full of examples of language tracing the contours of a thing, state, or place. Trailing their way through the forest, the People reach the clearing of a dead tree: “Ivy had taken over, its embedded stems making a varicose entanglement on the old trunk and ending where the trunk had branched in a huge nest of dark green leaves. Fungi had battened too, plates that stuck out and were full of rain-water, smaller jelly-like blobs of red and yellow so that the old tree was dissolving into dust and white pulp” (TI 21–22). When Lok hears the new people speak, description renders the “shapes” of his incomprehension: “He could hear their speech and it made him laugh. The sounds made a picture in his head of interlacing shapes, thin, and complex, voluble and silly, not like the long curve of a hawk’s cry, but tangled like line weed on the beach after a storm, muddled as water” (104).

The Inheritors belongs alongside the best of nature writing, from Thoreau to J. A. Baker, but description can also verge on the fantastic. Describing (rather than explaining) things gives them integrity and a life of their own. So, “there were many birds on the island and they resented the people so that Fa and Lok began to move with great care” (127).

Lok’s ears spoke to Lok.

“?”

But Lok was asleep.

(43)

The book opens mid-motion (like a film), with Lok “running as fast as he could”: “Lok’s feet were clever. They saw. They threw him round the displayed roots of the beeches, leapt when a puddle of water lay across the trail” (11). These are animistic rather than anthropomorphic descriptions. They do not attribute human qualities to animals or body parts. They simply describe Neanderthal reality as it is experienced, determined by a sense that the various natural elements are interconnected, responsive, each alive in its turn, from birds to ears and feet. The world of The Inheritors is, then, a richly diverse but single plain. The multiplicity of elements implies an equivalence of value—a kind of moral flatland. Animals, plants, and things exist singularly, neither lower nor higher than the rest.

The most powerful way of achieving this evenness of life—the dignity of exteriority—so central to The Inheritors is through what Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor called the novel’s “visualizations” (73). Pictures are Golding’s most important means of natural description and the heart of the novel’s Neanderthal poetics. Pictures replace ideas. When Fa grows impatient with Lok, the novel’s gentle buffoon, she tells him he is less clever than a baby: “you have fewer pictures than the new one” (TI 134). Tiger points out that “the ‘picture’ renders, as no other device could, the life of the senses and instinct since the impression the reader receives of the outside world is of a series of still images” (83; my emphasis). John Bayley has argued that Golding’s uniqueness paradoxically lies in his impersonality. The weakness of a personal style results in what Dostoevsky called a “deeper realism,” which “could be described in terms of the properties physicists now associate with matter itself” (129). Deeper realism is unlike realism or naturalism, both of which—in the classic examples of Zola or Balzac—retain the author as meticulous chronicler or social scientist. Golding’s absence from his narrative breaks the contractual intimacy between author and reader and pushes the writing from realism toward what Bayley calls “actuality”: “the refusal of a writer like Golding to satisfy the reader’s expectation of a novel’s choreography of action into spectacle. It is the difference between ‘reality,’ which is a created matter, and ‘actuality,’ which is not” (132).

What interests me about Tiger and Bayley’s otherwise very different remarks is their shared technicality. Tiger’s “series of still images” and Bayley’s “actuality” do not belong to the world of literary criticism but to the mechanical world of film. Golding’s style, then, is peculiarly cinematic. The perceptual, visual focus of the narrative is not simply realistic, but photographic. The earliest films, made between 1895–1902, are known as “actualities,” a term that predates the division between the documentary and fiction film and captures at its purest the Bazinian essence of cinema as a photographically realist medium.

Consider the following passage describing Lok’s “thinking” process as the cinematic viewing of moving images. Smelling the presence of “another,” Lok follows the scent to the water’s edge, whereupon “one of the farther rocks began to change shape”: “Lok stood and let the pictures come and go in his head. One was a picture of a cave bear that he had once seen rear itself out of the rock and heard roar like the sea. Lok did not know much more about the bear than that because after the bear had roared the people had run for most of a day. This thing, this black changing shape, had something of the bear’s slow movement in it. He screwed up his eyes and peered at the rock to see if it would change again” (TI 79). Lok is not connecting the idea of the bear with the idea of the unknown intruder. He is rather following an arrangement or sequence of images—editing—a strictly visual recording in his head. An even stronger example of Lok’s fidelity to the series of stills and his (and initially our) inability to construct a general concept out of them (the problem of Antonioni’s photographer in Blow-Up) is his encounter with one of the new people:

Lok steadied by the tree and gazed. A head and a chest faced him, half hidden. There were white bone things behind the leaves and hair. The man had white bone things above his eyes and under the mouth so that his face was longer than a face should be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river…. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again.

His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat.

I do not want to push too far this analogy to the cinema but for one final point: the collective function or “picture sharing” among the People, which is an essential part of their particular form of life. Early in the novel, Nil, Fa, and Ha are trying to resolve the problem of crossing a river. “The three of them stood and looked at each other. Then, as so often happened with the people, there were feelings between them. Fa and Nil shared a picture of Ha thinking” (14). Watching the group’s elder Mal, the People realize his impending death in a kind of telepathic mise en abyme of pictures within pictures:

Quite without warning, all the people shared a picture inside their heads. This was a picture of Mal, seeming a little removed from them, illuminated, sharply defined in all his gaunt misery. They saw not only Mal’s body but the slow pictures that were waxing and waning in his head. One above all was displacing the others, dawning through the cloudy arguments and doubts and conjectures until they knew what it was he was thinking with such dull conviction.

“To-morrow or the day after, I shall die.”

(38–39)

And after Ha disappears by the river, having spotted one of the new people, Lok in his confusion “had no pictures” (78). The people are shaken by the incident, and this disrupts their instinctive togetherness, causing them to lose one another to an unfamiliar solipsism. The dread of separateness is brought home to Lok when he sees the group’s wise matriarch pass him by without noticing. Lok senses something is wrong: “all at once Lok was frightened because she has not seen him. The old woman knew so much; yet she had not seen him” (78). The looming presence of the new man marks the onset of the skeptical challenge of the separateness of minds. It makes Lok feel that he

was cut off and no longer one of the people; as though his communion with the other had changed him he was different from them and they could not see him. He had no words to formulate these thoughts but he felt his difference and invisibility as a cold wind that blew on his skin. The other had tugged at the strings that bound him to Fa and Mal and Liku and the rest of the people. The strings were not the ornament of life but its substance. If they broke, a man would die. All at once he was hungry for someone’s eyes to meet his and recognize him.

(78)

The passage is heartbreakingly prophetic. Gestures and images (the frosty bite of wind, the tugging at strings) show not only what is inside Lok’s mind but the vital importance of the “how-ness” of his thinking: the binding ties between the People are not a metaphor (a political metaphor, for instance, of some social ideal). Intercorporeality is the form of their existence; if severed, the People’s existence is no longer possible.

This scene is also one of the first intimations of the change in Lok that encountering his modern successor brings about, the “upheaval in the brain” that makes him feel “proud and sad like Mal” (191). The only way Lok can understand this strange mutation is by situating it in a particular body: “Mal thinking” (193). Lok’s thinking is stretched from the montagelike linking of images toward an abstract connecting of elements whose meaning arises from the idea of likeness:

Lok discovered “Like.” He had used likeness all his life without being aware of it. Fungi on a tree were ears, the word was the same but acquired a distinction by circumstances that could never apply to the sensitive things on the side of the head. Now, in a convulsion of the understanding Lok found himself using likeness as a tool as surely as ever he had used a stone to hack at sticks or meat. Likeness could grasp the white-faced hunters with a hand, could put them into the world where they were thinkable and not a random and unrelated irruption.

(194)

This shift in thinking is from metaphor (fungi are ears) to simile (fungi are like ears). Lok revels in his new capacity for invisibly linking things by inserting a ghostly likeness between them. But this new and fabulous tool brings to an end the multiplicitous singleness of Lok’s world. No longer do things occur in the world as singular and independent. They now belong to a system of elements linked by “likeness,” subject to an ordering hierarchy. The world coheres into a thinkable whole at the same time that it divides into higher and lower categories of being. To be systematic rather than irruptive, then, things must lose their singularity, their integral life as objects, and become parts of a general metaphysical order of Being.

On observing the new people’s frantic rituals, their wild romps and the drinking of a putrid, intoxicating liquid, Lok rehearses his new similes, which finally yield the meaning of the new people:

“The people are like honey trickling from a crevice in the rock”…

“The people are like honey in the round stones, the new honey that smells of dead things and fire”…

“They are like the river and the fall, they are a people of the fall; nothing stands against them.”…

“They are like Oa.”

(TI 195)

Golding’s language follows the gradual shift away from the pictorial to the “half-knowledge, terrible in its very formlessness” that “filtered into Lok as though he were sharing a picture … but had no eyes inside his head and could not see it” (173). Abstraction itself is visualized as lacking eyes. Next, Golding describes Lok’s noting the new people’s canines, proof of their carnivorousness: “they were teeth that remembered wolf” (174). How easy it would have been for a less attentive writer (Wells?) to put down “recalled” instead of “remembered.” And how compromised the sentence would have been by this choice. For Lok, as yet unaccustomed to practicing likenesses, it is the man’s teeth themselves who do the remembering.

Pictorial thinking has become something of a hobbyhorse in animal studies as a path to “other” subjectivities, ungrounded in abstract reasoning or linguistic ability. “Thinking in pictures,” popularized in the work of Temple Grandin, also suggests (as yet undeveloped) connections between disability and animal studies. Grandin is an animal scientist and best-selling author who has written widely about her experiences as an autistic person in a nonautistic world. Thinking in Pictures (1995) and Animals in Translations (2005) both reached a wide readership.

I first came across Grandin in Errol Morris’s Stairway to Heaven (1998), one of his First Person documentary films featuring a typically zany American coterie.⁹ The film’s title refers to an improved cattle ramp and conveyor restrainer system Grandin designed for a large meatpacking plant at the beginning of her long career in the meat industry. With its penchant for the bizarre and the garish, Morris’s film is morally ambiguous, an ambiguity that all but dissipated as Grandin entered the mainstream.

In his foreword to Thinking in Pictures, Oliver Sacks describes Grandin as a “designer of livestock equipment, struggling for the humane treatment of animals” (xiv). Her story offers “a glimpse, and indeed a revelation, that there might be people, no less human than ourselves, who constructed their worlds, lived their lives, in almost unimaginably different ways” (xviii; my emphasis). But the human community need not be viewed in this way (the “normal” implied readers and the disabled whom Grandin’s experience in a sense speaks for). Community can be divided along very different, multiple, or multiply overlapping lines. How might an ethical vegetarian, for example—whether autistic or not—relate to Grandin’s story?

In contrast to Sacks, Cary Wolfe’s “Learning from Temple Grandin, or Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the Subject,” takes pictorial thinking as demonstrating the possibility of other subjectivities, ones not “drawn from the liberal justice tradition and its central concept of ‘rights,’ in which ethical standing and civic inclusion are predicated upon rationality, autonomy, and agency” (110). For Wolfe, what is at stake in Grandin’s work is precisely the transcending of a human community whose commonality overrides the appearance of difference. Wolfe is operating instead within a “fundamentally posthumanist set of coordinates” (110) that enable a provocative but fruitful encounter between animal studies and disability studies in line with earlier movements for social critique and reform, from civil rights to feminism and gay liberation, which transformed our understanding of society, culture, and the subject (110).

While agreeing that animal studies and disability studies intersect in potentially interesting ways, I have serious misgivings about the value of Grandin’s contribution to discussions of human-animal relations.¹⁰ Wolfe’s appropriation of Grandin rather problematically defers what I would argue are the essential ethical questions. It is worth stopping to look more closely at Grandin’s work in light of Golding’s The Inheritors, since both Golding and Grandin reach toward what Wolfe calls a “shared trans-species being-in-the-world” (122) that emerges out of modes of life explicitly or implicitly deemed “disabled.”

The Inheritors’ thinking in pictures underlies the reader’s experience of the novel’s protagonists, who could easily enough be considered “subnormal.” But the similarity between Golding and Grandin renders their differences all the more striking. It also implies that championing ulterior subjectivities does not in itself generate a new ethics if the question of power is left unaddressed. As Everett showed, Golding’s text places creaturely pity at its center. Pity is a very different thing to “humane treatment” and far closer to Weil’s notion of the “vulnerability of precious things.” In chapter 1 I discussed Weil’s distinction between justice and rights. Welfare is equally foreign to the notion of justice.

Grandin attributes her lifelong connection with animals to her autism, manifested in part by her hypervisual thinking and tactile sensitivity. Her identification with cattle perception—and the emphasis in this case significantly falls on animals’ perceptual models, not on animals’ lives—allows Grandin to design “better” (more humane and more efficient) devices for industrial packing plants. Grandin never doubts that animals have an internal world, since she sees her own mental life as mirroring that of animals:

When a well-respected animal scientist told me that animals do not think, I replied that if this were true, then I would have to conclude that I was unable to think. He could not imagine thinking in pictures, nor assign it the validity of real thought. Mine is a world of thinking that many language-based thinkers do not comprehend….

It is very likely that animals think in pictures and memories of smell, light, and sound patterns. In fact, my visual thinking patterns probably resemble animal thinking more closely than those of verbal thinkers. It seems silly to me to debate whether or not animals can think.

(Thinking 186–187)

But does thinking in pictures really get one closer to the being of a cow? Cows have elaborate social structures and complex familial attachments. Their lives rather than their minds are significant in ways that Grandin barely addresses. Thinking in Pictures is the story of a mind’s becoming transparent to itself, an avowedly Cartesian story, which quickly turns into a tale of betrayal. Grandin’s ability to see from a cow’s point of view allows her to enter into their midst like a spy. Her insider’s perspective makes killing them easier. Grandin’s story raises many questions, some of which are the ones that interest Wolfe, but others seem to me more fundamental: questions about the relationship between subjectivity and ethics, about the industry Grandin is involved in, and about our own relationship to the masses of animals killed by that industry. Ultimately the question is this: What would these animals have to become, and become in our eyes, to be creatures that it is forbidden to kill? ¹¹

If Grandin’s story is about the enabling power of disability, there is a kind of “virtual autism” that her work actively (if unintentionally) fosters when the most pressing ethical questions are skipped. Wolfe speaks of “inattentional blindness,” the fact that “what we think of as ‘normal’ human visuality does not see—and it (necessarily) does not see that it does not see” (“Learning” 113). An inattentional blindness is evident in the responses Grandin’s work often provokes in the mode of “not asking” rather than of “not seeing.”

The theme of unasked questions is explored in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. When the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler conducted his behavioral studies of apes in Tenerife, Costello tells her audience, he wanted to see whether apes could think instrumentally.¹² Bananas suspended from the top of the cage, just out of reach, prompted the chimpanzees, the most talented of whom was called Sultan, to pile up crates to reach the food. Costello points out that the experiment could have triggered any number of questions for the apes, of which “How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?” is the least interesting. Sultan could have thought: “Why is he starving me?” or “What have I done?” or “Why has he stopped liking me?” (TLOA 28). “At every turn,” Costello concludes, “Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled toward lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus toward acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied” (TLOA 29). By inquiring into the learning capacities of apes, Köhler wards off—in himself as much as in his experimental subjects—a set of questions that belong to a different category of thought, which Costello unashamedly ascribes to the higher order of pure speculation. For Costello such purity of speculation is more likely to arise in Sultan than in Köhler. This sort of speculation is not Cartesian, but reminds one of Weil’s creaturely cry of the heart against injustice: “Why am I being hurt?” (“Human Personality” 93). This question never surfaces in Grandin’s work, and there is no reason to assume that she hears it. Instead, Grandin is concerned with the practicalities of injustice: the administration, management, and minimization of suffering. “But the cry ‘Why am I being hurt?’ raises quite different problems, for which the spirit of truth, justice, and love is indispensable” (“Human Personality” 93).

Like Sultan, readers of Grandin are propelled toward the less interesting thought when otherness becomes a functional rather than an ethical issue. Like Sultan, we locate ourselves at the instrumental level and reject speculating about the consequences that a creaturely fellowship with animals (which Grandin readily acknowledges) might entail. I am not suggesting Grandin is disingenuous in claiming a connection with animals. But this affinity is rooted in an instrumental, precisely inattentive relationship, in which fellowship and love are displaced, allowing Grandin to make her home in an industry that turns animals into food.

In pivotal moments in her narrative, and despite being an atheist, Grandin describes her work in spiritual terms. For Grandin, moreover, the industry maintains its dignity partly through an appeal to religious animal sacrifice. At the end of the book, Grandin describes a dream of placing her hands on the white walls of the Swift meat packing plant as “touching the sacred alter” (Thinking 227). In another passage (which Wolfe too finds richly troubling), Grandin is at a kosher plant equipped with the restraining chute she designed:

I had to force myself to relax and just allow the restrainer to become part of my body, while completely forgetting about the levers….

Through the machine, I reached out and held the animal. When I held his head in the yoke, I imagined placing my hands on his forehead and under his chin and gently easing him into position. Body boundaries seemed to disappear, and I had no awareness of pushing the levers. The rear pusher gate and head yoke became an extension of my hands.

(Thinking 25)

the parts of the apparatus that held the animal felt as if they were an extension of my own body…. During this intense period of concentration I no longer heard noise from the plant machinery. I didn’t feel the sweltering Alabama summer heat, and everything seemed quiet and serene. It was almost a religious experience. It was my job to hold the animal gently, and it was the rabbi’s job to perform the final deed. I was able to look at each animal, to hold him gently and make him as comfortable as possible during the last moments of his life. I had participated in the ancient slaughter ritual the way it was supposed to be. A new door has been opened. It felt like walking on water.¹³

(25–26)

A rare comment on the killing of animals from Weil’s Letter to a Priest is worth citing in this context: “people must have thought in very ancient times that God is actually present in animals killed to be eaten; that God in fact descends into them for the purpose of offering himself as food to man. This notion turned animal food into a communion, whereas otherwise it is a crime, unless we adopt a more or less Cartesian philosophy” (Letter 11). Weil concedes that animals killed for food outside a communion are killed immorally, unless one accepts Descartes’s feeble notion of animals as mere automata. Golding’s Neanderthals share a similar distaste for unreflective, automated consumption of flesh. They eat discarded meat, but ask forgiveness from the animal whom they devour. Meat consumption in The Inheritors is both graphic and subject to a prohibition:

The doe was wrecked and scattered. Fa split open her belly, slit the complicated stomach and spilt the sour cropped grass and broken shoots on the earth. Lok beat in the skull to get at the brain and levered open the mouth to wrench away the tongue. They filled the stomach with tit-bits and twisted up the guts so that the stomach became a floppy bag.

All the while, Lok talked between his grunts.

“This is bad. This is very bad.” … “This is bad. But a cat killed you so there is no blame.”

(54)

The Neanderthal goddess Oa does not require sacrifice to bridge the chasm between heaven and earth. Communion needs no ritual, because it is a living fact. This is why the prehistoric world of The Inheritors is also premystical. The prohibition on meat is thus the affirmation of unimmediated contact between creatures and creator. In this sense alone the Neanderthals’ world is prelapsarian. With the arrival of the new people, we are immediately transported to the symbolic order of ritual sacrifice (and cannibalism), a mystical world empty of God.

Despite their common emphasis on the picture as a gateway to nonhuman alterity, then, Grandin and Golding offer starkly different versions of the idea of communion. Quite unlike Golding, whose object of pity and love is the vanquished and downtrodden creature, Grandin’s breakthrough moments, during which she reaches something approaching religious ecstasy (“like walking on water”) are not moments of communion with other lives. They are moments that celebrate the body-made-docile by a feat of technology. Wolfe is quick to relate this moment of seamless assemblage of the human, animal, and mechanical to Donna Haraway’s idea of the cyborg (“Learning” 117). The kosher slaughter scene can be read as a hybrid site of encounter, not simply in terms of merging organic and inorganic matter through the killing apparatus but in terms of the histories, traditions, and myths that enmesh the lives of all of Haraway’s critters. But Grandin’s veneration of smooth contaminations remains morally numb. Her accounts disclose what Diamond describes as “a kind of pitilessness at the heart of welfarism, a willingness to go ahead with what we do to the vulnerable, a willingness to go on subjecting them to our power because we can, because it suits us to do so, and it has suited people like us for millennia” (“Injustice and Animals” 141).

A final aspect of Golding’s “thinking in pictures” has to do with the issue of historical consciousness. The Inheritors takes the form of a memory, an image sparked by the sudden and visceral presence of the past. Golding is reminiscent of Benjamin, who wrote that “the true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (“Theses” 247). The Inheritors does not lay claims to factual accuracy about Neanderthal existence. At stake for Golding is not history itself but the nature of historical knowledge. And in this book and others Golding regards history, conservatively, as essentially tragic.

What moments of terror and triumph! What acts of devotion and desperate wonders of courage! And the strain of the victors was our strain; we are lineally identical with those sun-brown painted beings who ran and fought and helped one another, the blood in our veins glowed in those fights and chilled in those fears of the forgotten past.

—H. G. Wells, “The Grisly Folk”

The slightly maniacal passage toward the end of the “The Grisly Folk” illustrates Wells’s comportment toward the historical. In their sense of what constitutes historical consciousness, Golding and Wells stand at opposite ends of Benjamin’s historiographical models in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: on the one hand historicism, with its primarily social democratic and progressive agenda, and on the other historical materialism, which for Benjamin looks to the fragmented and catastrophic past in order to salvage it in the name of revolutionary-messianic hope.¹⁴

Golding calls historicism into question in three ways. First, he rejects the idea of rational progress, which propels Wells’s vision of human evolution. Second, The Inheritors allegorically transcends its prehistoric setting by, as it were, foreshadowing modern European genocide. If, as Golding believes, Wells’s monstrous Neanderthals are none other than our own projection, then historiography must proceed reflexively to expose the truth that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (thesis 7, “Theses” 248). Last, Golding rejects anthropocentric history and opens up the historical to a nonhuman dimension, which, in his own historical reflections, Benjamin called the creaturely.

First subversion. The Inheritors responds to what Coetzee described as Benjamin’s “call (in the ‘Theses’) for a history centered on the sufferings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors” (Inner Workings 64). History told from the perspective of the winners is not really history at all. Ronald Beiner’s observation that Benjamin’s “historiography is an unremitting struggle on behalf of the dead” (427) is remarkably suited to The Inheritors as an attempt to mend a broken past. “Where the historicist sees an inert ‘chain of events,’ the historical materialist sees a broken vessel in need of repair, a ruined past in need of salvation, a forsaken ancestor in need of awakening (thesis IX)” (Beiner 427; my emphasis). The Inheritors is not merely a tale about forsaken ancestors but a bridge in time, linking the ruined prehuman past with Europe’s postwar present. It is no accident, then, that Golding treats the “subhumans” of a bygone era with such profound pity, since he is writing from a future in which celebrating what Wells called “true men” proved deadly false. From past to present, then, human progress is delusional.

In thesis 13, Benjamin rejects progress because it implies movement “through a homogeneous, empty time” (“Theses” 252). Progress subdues time under the banner of the Future. As deeply ideological, the idea of progress denies whatever introduces difference into humanity’s steady onward march. Belief in progress paradoxically excludes the possibility of what Benjamin called a “messianic” intervention, which is, after all, history’s saving grace: the idea that history does not merely rehearse as eternal the transitory dogmas of the present but throws up each moment (miraculously) anew as a temporality rent from the continuum of history and so pregnant with the possibility revolution: “Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history” (thesis 16, “Theses” 254). In an altogether more whimsical tone (befitting Benjamin’s Arcades project rather than the “Theses”), Golding describes history as a hodgepodge of objects washed up by time. “We stand among the flotsam,” he says at the end of “In My Ark,” “the odd shoes and tins, hot-water bottles and skulls of sheep or deer. We know nothing. We look daily at the appalling mystery of plain stuff. We stand where any upright food-gatherer has stood, on the edge of our own unconscious, and hope, perhaps, for the terror and excitement of the print of a single foot” (105).

Golding avoids the pitfalls of narrative history (the “once upon a time”) by rendering the past pictorially as a fleeting, fatal moment of farewell. Like Benjamin, Golding also writes from a sense of history’s alterity. It is fitting, therefore, that The Inheritors draws to a close with man’s failure to see. As the new man, Tuami (“tu-ami”: you/r friend), journeys forth into the unknown, Golding switches from solid land to water. Man’s ascent is replaced by the horizontal pushing through darkness: “Tuami looked at the line of darkness. It was far away and there was plenty of water in between. He peered forward past the sail to see what lay at the other end of the lake, but it was so long, and there was such a flashing from the water that he could not see if the line of darkness had an ending” (TI 233).

To discuss Golding’s second and third subversions of historicism, I turn to Benjamin’s concepts of natural history (Naturgeschichte) and the creature (Kreatur) as considered by two influential commentaries on Benjamin. In Walter Benjamin’s Other History Beatrice Hanssen proposes to reinterpret much of Benjamin’s work “in light of an aspect of his philosophy of history … the ethico-theological call for another kind of history, one no longer purely anthropocentric in nature or anchored only in the concerns of human subjects” (1). Natural history, as Benjamin used it, “referred to a process of transience and to a logic of decay that radically undermined Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of human history, anchored in categories of human freedom and historical teleology…. Benjamin’s positive validation of natural history was meant to overcome the limitations of historical hermeneutics, whose category of ‘meaning’ (Sinn) remained grounded in the understanding of a human subject” (Hanssen 3). Benjamin recognizes in history a foreign element, a kind of natural growth, which sweeps human legibility into history’s catastrophic pileup. Benjamin’s 1928 (failed) Habilitation thesis The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Trauerspiel) “spelled out this original conception of a natural, nonhuman history, coupling it with a critique of the philosophy of the subject, which would culminate in his redefinition of the theological concept Kreatur” (Hanssen 1–2).¹⁵ Benjamin replaces the agent—the one who, as we say, “makes history”—with the creature overtaken by or lost in history. Natural history does not simply admit nature as a backdrop or mise-en-scène. It reveals nature as what is fundamentally temporal about history—mutability, transience, and decay—the passing of the historical order into ahuman nature, the passing of man into nonman, of soul into matter.

We can begin to appreciate The Inheritors as an exercise in Benjaminian historiography that refutes human teleology by attending not to historical subjects but to creatures of history—Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon alike—whose lives are a snapshot of the past and the demand for a new kind of history. This is how, in “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” Erica Fudge formulates Benjamin’s importance for a nonanthropocentric view of history: “History and humanity are, as the humanists proclaim, coterminous, but a history can be written that does not celebrate the stability of what was, what is, and what shall be. Instead history should reinterpret the documents of the past in order to offer a new idea of the human. No longer separate, in splendid isolation, humans must be shown to be embedded within and reliant upon the natural order” (Fudge 15). Creaturely history, then, reabsorbs the human in nature and paves the way for radically other histories inclusive of nonhuman life.

Eric Santner’s On Creaturely Life takes a different view of the significance and ramifications of natural history and the creaturely. By Naturgeschichte Santner understands Benjamin to be exposing the ahuman opacity at the heart of human history, signaling—as Agamben does—a creaturely dimension within the human. “In Benjamin’s parlance,” Santner explains, Naturgeschichte does not simply allude to the idea that “nature also has a history but to the fact that the artifacts of human history tend to acquire an aspect of mute, natural being at the point where they begin to lose their place in a viable form of life (think of the process whereby architectural ruins are reclaimed by nature)” (Santner 16). One can think of natural history as a sort of double take: a thing that survives beyond its historical context is reified as a natural object (it “lives” beyond the death of its symbolic order). But, seen from the other direction, an expired historical context leaves relics seeming “denaturalized” (since history is to us a kind of “second nature”). The lifeless object is merely “historical,” while the historical relic is purely elemental: “natural history is born out of the dual possibilities that life can persist beyond the death of the symbolic forms that gave it meaning and that symbolic forms can survive beyond the death of the form of life that gave them human vitality. Natural history transpires against the background of this space between real and symbolic death, this space of the ‘undead’” (Santner 16–17). This undead historical space gives rise to a new historical subject. No longer an agent at home in history, this new subject is Unheimliche, or creaturely.

The difference between Hanssen and Santner emerges at this point. Santner reads creatureliness in the tradition of German Jewish writing (Benjamin, Kafka, Scholem, Freud, and leading up to W. G. Sebald) profoundly marked by the experience of fascism: “For Benjamin, natural history ultimately names the ceaseless repetition of such cycles of emergence and decay of human orders of meaning, cycles that are, for him—and this is where the Schmittian background can be felt—always connected to violence” (17). As the reference to Carl Schmitt makes clear, the creaturely assumes a distinctly political or biopolitical flavor. Creatureliness is “less a dimension that traverses the boundaries of human and nonhuman forms of life,” as it does for Hanssen, “than a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field” (xix).

Located at the point of an evolutionary/colonial handover, The Inheritors brings together biology, politics, and history in one seamless gesture. Critics tend to overlook the political import of Golding’s work, focusing instead on its universal and existential dimensions. Yet Golding’s use of natural images, materials, and locales (islands, water, rocks) is not as symbolic “Anywheres” but is also historical. “Although set in the distant past,” Paul Crawford writes in Politics and History in William Golding, “and lacking the surface details specific to World War II … The Inheritors powerfully suggests the sociopolitical context of contemporary genocide” (Crawford 69).¹⁶ The Inheritors, then, is not an escape from history into fable but an example of “the mutual imbrication of nature and history” (Hanssen 16) whose meaning can only be transcribed allegorically.

Benjaminian allegory is inherently linked to natural history: “Benjamin’s theory of allegory,” writes Hanssen, “unearthed the debris of human history…. Under Benjamin’s critical gaze, allegory was transformed into the figure of natural history” (15). For Adorno as well, “allegory was to be understood as a constellation that comprised the ideas of nature, history, signification, and transience—a constellation that, without fusing these terms, preserved their facticity and uniqueness” (15). How precisely is this constellation worked out in The Inheritors?

Much has been written on Benjamin’s notion of allegory, most often in the context of his critique of modernity. Bainard Cowan explains that allegory is an experience rather than a concept, arising from “an apprehension of the world as no longer permanent, as passing out of being” (Cowan 110). Richard Stamelman writes that “allegory could be called the trope of death: the language of fragmentation, decay, and erosion which death speaks or writes…. In allegory, an absent and unrecoverable meaning is joined to an excessive and overdetermined language” (Lost Beyond Telling 53). Hanssen points to Benjamin’s characteristically convoluted and idiosyncratic use of allegory at the end of The Origin of German Tragic Drama (97–102). She exposes the redemptive dimension of allegory as a leap from the contemplation of the ruination of meaning in the world to the realm of divine resurrection (100–101). Redemption is implicit for Benjamin precisely in the allegorical apprehension of the unbridgeable gap between the sign and transcendent reality. This is a negative theology (again reminiscent of Weil) that is at once pessimistic and yet structurally open to mystery.

In Richard Ford’s novel The Sportswriter (1986), about a man’s life following the death of his young son, Ford’s main character, disillusioned novelist-turned-sportswriter Frank Bascombe, says to his ex-wife (known only as X): “there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they’re over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and the liberal arts” (Ford 22).¹⁷

As a novel about transience, The Inheritors avoids the consolations of literature that Frank Bascombe dislikes. Golding opens mid-motion with the drumbeat of Lok’s feet (thorn bush in hand) and ends with Lok’s body pressed sideways against the hollowed earth (TI 221). If there is transcendence here, it is lowly, not vertiginous. Like Ford’s novel, The Inheritors is an exploration of a terrain. In Golding we are most probably in northern Europe, while Ford’s novel is filled with the minutiae of suburban New Jersey. In The Sportswriter, familiar American tropes (highways, late-night bars, driveways, and motels) are never conventionally iconic, and the novel’s scrupulous descriptions are mainly domestic (mail-order catalogues, backyards and street curbs, the faintly lit windows of the family home spied from inside a parked car).

There is also the theme of the dead child. In The Inheritors, Lok cannot see what Fa already knows—that Liku, the little Neanderthal girl captured by the new people, has been cannibalized:

“Now there are only Fa and Lok and the new one and Liku.”

For a while she looked at him in silence. She put out a hand and he took it. She opened her mouth to speak but no sound came. She gave a shake of her whole body and then started to shudder. He could see her master this shudder as if she were leaving the comfort of the cave in a morning of snow. She took her hand away.

“Come!”

(TI 198–199)

Although parenting for the People is a communal, not a couple’s, affair, Golding makes the loss of the child strike at the core of life, as shattering a blow as could be imagined in the confines of the nuclear family. Some thirty thousand years separate Golding’s wild savannah from Ford’s New Jersey suburb, but the distance is dwarfed by the sense in both novels of the inevitable and indifferent passing of time, the true sense of life’s “inheritance”: “Some things can’t be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature’s consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don’t know that and who can’t forget, and for whom such knowledge isn’t a cornerstone of life” (Ford 229–230).

After Fa’s death, Lok curls up on the ground clutching the ancient Oa and prepares to be swallowed up by time. In the closing passages the new people strive blindly on, urged by restlessness and fear. Golding and Ford are writing of persons struggling to understand the losses they incur in a world whose precise workings are temporal and opaque. Contingency is where allegory and natural history coincide and where the so-called realism of Ford meets Golding’s so-called fantasy: “The great achievement of the allegorical mode of representation was, as Benjamin put it … that it rendered a sense of life bereft of any secure reference to transcendence, life utterly exposed to the implacable rhythms of natural history” (Santner 18). Santner’s explanation rings as true for Golding as it does for Ford and sums up all the sorrow and the pity cooped up in these two understated works.