2

The Animal Cure: Inhaling the other in Dean Spanley

In common with the gesture of reversal and displacement at the heart of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida asks, ‘What, then, is true mourning? What can we make of it? Can we make it, as we say in French that we “make” our mourning? I repeat: can we? … are we capable of doing it, do we have the power to do it?’¹ This chapter begins around a dining table set to stage conversations between men: narratives of the adventures of male dogs double that scene. That may not immediately evoke the work of mourning, but soon, it will. The chapter explores the double prescription of what I call an ‘animal cure’ as it is suggested by the beguiling film adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella, Dean Spanley.² My Talks with Dean Spanley does not self-consciously extend itself to support a politics or an ethics that would include animals; indeed, it remains close to the problems we readily associate with fables or allegory (in which animals habitually figure only as ciphers for human beings, as the ‘beast’ for human ‘sovereignty’).³ However, by pushing this film in light of the work of Derrida especially as that work affirms a certain kind of psychoanalysis that cannot secure its principles as those proper to the human, I want to bring its more radical potential to light while acknowledging the problematic scenography that the film fields.

The animal cure in the sense that holds stronger narrative endorsement in this film is not for a sick animal, or animals in general, if there were such a thing.⁴ Rather Dean Spanley enacts the ‘talking cure’ for melancholia as manifested in a cantankerous elderly man, Fisk (Peter O’Toole), by means of an animal. While the film self-consciously tells a tale of reincarnation – persuasively evoked through the cinematic convention of flashback, it is readily available to a conventional psychoanalytic understanding of the work of mourning as that which is best processed by enabling trauma to be put into words.5 In the canonical sense initiated by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s early studies on hysteria, that distressing experience for which language has been unable to give voice coincident with its occurrence, but which lives on symptomatically, can only be abreacted by finding the ‘words to say it’ in a subsequent therapeutic environment.⁶ In this film, the unmourned deaths of his late son, Harrington, and his wife prescribe Fisk’s extremely formal relationship with his surviving son, Henslowe. Meanwhile Henslowe (Jeremy Northam) becomes fascinated with the oddly convincing stories produced by the local clergyman – the eponymous Dean (Sam Neill), of his life as a dog when enjoying the scent of the rare Hungarian liquor, Tokay. Realizing that the dog, in whose name the Dean speaks, uncannily recalls the lost pet of his father’s childhood, Henslowe brings his animal cure into effect not by means of an actual psychoanalytic session but through reminiscences nonetheless, here provoked at the scene of a dinner party. From the moment that this pet, Wag, is ‘returned’ through the medium of the Dean’s apparent recollections, Fisk can begin to cry and thus to admit grief. Yet from this moment too, the intoxication with Dean Spanley fades: the normatively satisfying resolution of the last scene suggests a newly happy Fisk secured by a new pet dog.

Dean Spanley makes a series of doubles between humans and dogs: son and dog (Harrington and Wag), dog and Father (in the Dean and also in Fisk) and also of dog friends and human friends (Wag’s doggy friend and Wrather the ‘conveyancer’ (Bryan Brown), Henslowe’s fellow conspirator in the supply of Tokay).⁷ It self-consciously does this with the key scenes of the film too – men assembled around a dining table/dogs running through fields. By convening the entwined narratives through a ritual meal, metonymized by Tokay, Dean Spanley invites reflection on the primal feast and the legend of consanguinity between human clan and totem animal as invoked by, or indeed claimed by, Freud in ‘Totem and Taboo’.⁸ The cannibalism of the primal feast is one that initiates the possibility of representation along with its initiation of law and sociality, according to psychoanalytic and anthropological legend. It is thus an ‘origin story’ that is also bound to a firm end. As is perhaps suggested by the insistence on fathers, sons and brothers in the film chosen to open this book, this foundational representation is precisely of patri-arkhē: the Father at, and as the origin that is also the necessary destiny of, the law. Dean Spanley, in foregrounding the domestic ingredient of the dog as man’s best friend, enables discussion regarding mourning among humans and animals. However, rather than maintain the film’s loyal proximity to totemism, in Freud’s restricted sense, this chapter brings Derrida’s work to bear upon it.9 This involves not simply rethinking what it is to mourn and whether animals can be mourned as such but treating psychoanalysis as that which must itself be cured of the regime of representation that it so frequently endorses. Deconstruction does not frontally oppose psychoanalysis, since any such oppositional gesture remains locked into that which is opposed. Rather, by means of the ethics of what Derrida names ‘eating well’, it traces another ‘cure’, one that will shake up the hard-and-fast distinction between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’.

Totem and Tokay

Most of the still proliferating commentaries on The Animal That Therefore I Am concentrate on Derrida’s encounter with the animal in or as his deconstruction of the persistent philosophical support for human exceptionalism.¹⁰ Yet observant readers will have noticed that, in reference to his own ‘zootobiography’, Derrida remarks that his writings have ‘welcomed’ animals on the ‘threshold’ of sexual difference.¹¹ ‘More precisely’, as he immediately follows, ‘sexual differences’. I take this gesture to index the fall of the concept and the affirmation of differences unmanaged by dialectics (a form otherwise inherited and maintained by psychoanalysis). The word ‘welcome’ draws attention to an ethics of hospitality to the other, rather than a manifesto of rights: Derrida’s transfigured autobiographical texts welcome sexual and animal others without their advance being disclosed in advance.¹² While this kind of welcome includes the complication of being hostage and not simply host to unknown others (he remains indebted to Emmanuel Levinas in this regard), Derrida nevertheless offers a scene of hospitality that moves away from canonical autobiographical and philosophical negation or abjection of those others in the name of subject that calls itself man.¹³

The scenes of hospitality that structure Dean Spanley, however, echo these problematic processes of negation or abjection, not least in regard to the primal feast that Freud deduces must have occurred at the origin of culture.¹⁴ Drawing on numerous anthropological sources, Freud positions this feast as a ritualized exceptional event that permits the clans of so-called ‘primitive’ cultures to kill and to eat their otherwise protected totem, a specific animal with whom they assume a consanguineous relation (sexual reproduction being unrecognized). Without this ritual, such a meal would have been wholly taboo. As a codified and momentous event, the ritual both breaks the law against parricide and founds it. Drafting ‘Totem and Taboo’ into the service of the Oedipus complex – the only factor that can offer persuasive explanatory force to the sheer dread of incest evidenced but not explained by anthropological acknowledgement of the universality of the incest taboo – Freud draws in the present of his clinical observation of animal phobias. His modern phobics exhibit ambivalence – that is both love and hate – towards their feared animal, and thus Freud finds continuity between primitive and modern cultures in support of the theory of psychoanalysis: ‘In every case it was the same: the fear was basically of the father, where the children under examination were boys, and had merely been displaced on to the animal.’15 Regardless of any doubt raised by the absent question of girls, the primal meal requires greater finesse, and Freud further entrenches the father at the origin of culture by supplying a revised wish for which the primal feast is already a dilution. The consanguineous imagination of shared blood is of no consequence: our animal ancestry is merely a displacement of patriarchy. Freely evoking Charles Darwin (without any actual reference), Freud imagines the overcoming of this primal father by the ‘band of brothers’ who murder and eat him.¹⁶ Such is the enormity of their guilt that the father is resurrected in name and in/as law, without even having to die since the wish to despatch him would have been a force enough for psychic reality. As feminist scholars such as Kelly Oliver and Elissa Marder have remarked, ‘Totem and Taboo’ glosses over both modes of kinship that predate the nuclear family as well as the scattered incoherent references to feminine fancies and maternal deities in the rush to render the father original, necessary and human.¹⁷ As scholars such as Deborah Bird Rose demonstrate, totemism cannot be confined to the European imaginary of a primitive past but lives on in divergent ways in indigenous modernities.¹⁸

Retaining the notion that affective response to criminal events found culture as law, Julia Kristeva not only invokes the murder and cannibalism of the father but also reminds the readers of Powers of Horror that incest with the mother drops away from Freud’s attention by the end of ‘Totem and Taboo’.19 Most of the literature following Derrida on the question of the animal has remained within the philosophical terrain that he indicates, targeting the Cartesian legacy of persons such as Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan, yet Kelly Oliver has shown that female thinkers such as Kristeva also demand to be rethought in light of the human exceptionalism that they too legislate. Thus I introduce her with caution, peripherally in the case of Dean Spanley, but more frontally and in connection with texts in addition to Powers of Horror in the following chapter. In Kristeva’s case, as Oliver points out, alongside the human and masculine route to language, the abject haunting of any border does not only recall the body of the mother – through ‘our personal archaeology’ – but also, on a wider scale, it recalls the animality that was otherwise expelled as ‘representative[s] of sex and murder’, or lawlessness.²⁰ For Kristeva, we might say that where animal and sexual differences traverse the same horizon, they do so as a threat that cannot be accommodated to human sociality – and yet that threat is itself moderated by the return of the singular concept of difference.

Kristeva might address Freud’s notorious blind spot regarding femininity, but she does not offer a feminist counter model (as she herself acknowledges). Moreover, Kristeva endorses the requirement that the social rest upon the exchange of women between men, indexing the symbolic exchange of signs, for fear of the untutored lawlessness of the mother and the hunger of her animal bite (this problem in her work is explicitly addressed in the second chapter of this book).²¹ While the figure of the mother is scarcely in evidence amongst the homosocial cast of Dean Spanley, the liminal nature of abjection means that her direct representation is not the issue.²² Given the encoding of the scene of the meal as both paternal and fraternal in Freud and this film, Kristeva provides a useful supplement through her attention to the abject power of particular substances. Signally, in Powers of Horror, food as that which traverses the mouth threatens the sociality of man; food as an ‘oral object’ recalls the archaic relations between human and m/other.²³ ‘The body’, she says, ‘must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic’.²⁴ Thus food can always ‘defile’.²⁵

Having set the table of this chapter with the spectres of cannibalism and incest, I want to turn to Dean Spanley. Thursdays table a dry ritual between Fisk and Young Fisk (as Henslowe is schematically addressed by his father). ‘Young Fisk’ arrives at his father’s house and they address matters of fact, untouched by affect. Henslowe himself ironically refers to their scheduled meetings as rituals, and ones that he wishes were ‘dismantled’. An altogether more fascinating ritual transpires for Henslowe with the Dean. Underlining the displacement of father for Father, Henslowe arranges his meetings with the Dean on Thursdays. Aware of this substitution, Fisk makes his own: when they do manage to get together for a (Thurs)day out, Fisk pointedly trips up a young boy (i.e. in lieu of Henslowe).

At first, procuring the Dean’s favourite liquor is simply to facilitate their meeting and to allow for the Dean to expound upon the unlikely topic of reincarnation (one Fisk characteristically dismisses as ‘poppycock’). Almost immediately the Dean is implicated in that very topic as his unusual degree of pleasure inhaling Tokay – the script positions him as ‘entirely focused in his nose’ – leads him to wish for the ‘olfactory powers of the canine’.26 More disconcertingly, as he continues with increasingly outré remarks, his first-person narration becomes uncannily canine. He does not mimetically sound like a dog; rather, his sudden marked interest in cats, smells and the love of a master evokes the point of view of a pet dog. At this early stage in Henslowe’s intoxication with the Dean, no images flesh out his story as a flashback in the manner cinema habitually treats evidentially as memory. We have to take his word for it and Henslowe’s fascination for our own. The clue to the change in perspective within the Dean – from human to canine – comes through an unusual comparison. He opines that

to pull a dog away from a lamppost is akin to seizing a scholar in the British Museum by the scruff of his neck and dragging him away from his studies.

Making kin of the inhalation of urine and the study of books threatens the clean and proper body (inhalation of urine is not named as such, but the comparison follows swiftly on from the Dean’s appreciation of the Tokay consolidating their metonymic connection and collapsing the latter’s ostensible remove from more abject fluids).²⁷ In this contagious comparison, dog and (human) scholar are made of the same stuff, and up to the same activity. A dog reads traces of urine like a scholar reads writing.²⁸ By implication, to urinate is to write (to leave a trace, and one vulnerable to erasure); to smell is to read. Metaphor assumes that the meaning of the term of comparison anchors that to which it is compared. Here, however, the scholar is already dog-like, seized by the ‘scruff of his neck’. Later, in the film’s climactic sequence, it is Fisk that makes a similar comparison in which his wife calls him away from reading Balzac: ‘rather like dragging a dog away from a lamppost’. In both cases there is no mention of the word ‘urination’, which is tidily metonymized by the lamppost. Even as metonymy – a relation of comparison based on proximity – the abject contact between urine and study is finessed. In the latter scene the Dean describes the pleasures of eating a whole rabbit, fur, bones, guts and all, waxing lyrical about the smell of fear. Although by then we are regularly treated to visual flashbacks of Dean Spanley in the guise of Wag the spaniel, learning about the world from his roguish mongrel friend (clearly meant to be Wrather), this visceral desire for the fear-drenched rabbit is overheard by Mrs Brimley, the housekeeper (Judy Parfitt). Literally peripheral to the proceedings, her mortification is presented as comic. She hears something that she should not and cannot understand, unaware that she is listening to the Dean as a dog. Dean Spanley is at pains to make sure that our guts are never turned (as we, audience, metonymically join with the enraptured homosocial circle of Henslowe, Fisk and Wrather). While Mrs Brimley has prepared the food (and insisted on preparing something more special than the ‘hotpot’, to which Fisk habitually constrains her), this is not the meal at stake for the assembled men. Indeed the film gives scant attention to any food as such, in spite of such protracted attention to the mise-en-scene of dining. That they eschew the tradition of leaving the table in order to enjoy port in separation from any ‘ladies’ that might ordinarily be present to remain at the table confirms which meal is in focus. They partake of the story of downing an entire rabbit mediated by the aroma of Tokay in order to share in the memories voiced by the Dean.

Figure 2.1 Inhale (My Talks with Dean Spanley, 2008, Dir. Toa Fraser, UK/New Zealand).

Unable to be seen, smell is elusive. It lends itself to the uncanny tale of Dean Spanley, posing the unfathomable question of whether the Father was once a dog, while the domestic status of that dog points back to Fisk (again containing the impure legend of consanguinity).²⁹ The film supplements smell’s invisibility with the Dean’s rhetorically exaggerated appreciation of the Tokay. This rhetorical exaggeration is given clearest visual expression in the final dinner sequence. There, in close-up, the Dean raises his glass to his nose, reminiscing about the delicious smell of fear, the classical soundtrack swells and the film cuts to the comedically rapid appearance of sheep being chased over a hill by dogs delirious with olfaction. Becoming virtually airborne in their haste, the white clouds of leaping sheep conjure their own scent. In his discussion of smell and Freud, Akira Lippit refers to its paucity of visible trace as an immateriality that bars smell from forming a ‘semiotic system’.³⁰ In this view a scent could never form a sentence. Need we, however, be so quick to assume either that smell is immaterial or that materiality secures signification.

Tokay is elusive. Wrather, the ‘conveyancer’, sniffs it out, squirreled away in the wine cellars of the wealthy, though he soon dispenses with a finder’s fee for the sake of a place at the table. Tokay is not disgusting. Even if it is rather syrupy, it is not presented as abject. One does not even have to bother the mouth by drinking it. For the purposes of Dean Spanley, Tokay is taken by nose. Intoxication with Tokay is not coarse inebriation. This rarefied liquor is celebrated as ostentatiously cultural, even with aristocratic connotations given its origins in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rather than confirm human desire over animal need, the Dean imagines that a dog might appreciate its aroma all the more. Perhaps the ritualised, exceptional consumption, the elevated palate required to appreciate Tokay protests too much and defends against the possibility that pollution inheres in food. For Henslowe and Wrather this liquor is instrumentally the vehicle for the Dean’s transport. Fisk blunts the allure of the Tokay not by emphasizing disgust but by dismissing it as nothing more than its source components: ‘fermented grapes’. Outright disgust would too easily register the psychoanalytic mode of repression. Freud famously narrates – albeit in a footnote itself banished to the bottom of the pages even as its girth takes up most of those pages – the vertical elevation of man as coterminous with the predominance of the sense of sight, with both verticality and visuality set against the horizontal and olfactory order of the animal.31 Closer to the earth, closer to the sexual and excretory organs of other four-legged animals, this plane is one foregrounding the sense of smell.³² Freud even singles out the dog as both a ‘faithful friend’ and one whose name is appropriated as a ‘term of abuse’, since, he says, ‘it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement, and that is not ashamed of its sexual functions’.³³ Defending against a disgusting smell then bespeaks the desire for the sexuality and the animality it indexes. The Dean’s elevation of Tokay might be read in this context, especially given the homosociality the dinners also convene, eliminating women and cultivating men – and male dogs. Yet for Fisk, Tokay occupies no extreme: it is neither disgusting nor wondrous. In common with his reduction of Mrs Brimley’s culinary repertoire to the economically descriptive ‘hot pot’ and his curt reduction of things that have ‘gone to the trouble of happening’, including the deaths of his wife and son, as ‘inevitable’, Fisk dampens social engagement until he recognizes his dog in the Dean.

Scents and sentences

In the material already introduced we have a mounting sense of the sociality at stake in the consumption of food in excess of a supposedly simple nutritional need. Freud has laid out the primal feast as a scene in which animality is exchanged for (human) paternity, a greedy paternity that also founds the law, culture, history, etc.; Kristeva indicates the feminine as well as animal territory mapped by the mouth that also haunts this feast. It is Derrida that names an ethical imperative that opens upon all the senses in general: ‘one must eat well.’³⁴ We must be clear this ‘eating well’ does not equate to fine dining or good manners. Rather the ‘good’ (underlined by his translator’s emphasis on the original ‘bien manger’) speaks to an ethics that for Derrida cannot be resolved into a calculable formula. Sara Guyer notes that ‘un homme de bien’ is a not merely a ‘good’ man but a man of property and that ‘bien’ is connected to the Greek ‘oikos’, drawing together ‘the home, … the “proper”, … the private, … the love and affection of one’s kin’.35 Not only are we always in a relation of ‘eating the other’ and being eaten by them but, Derrida tells us, that the ingestion the verb indicates is limited neither to food nor to intake by mouth: ‘For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality, but also of the ear, the eye-and all the “senses” in general) the metonymy of “eating well” [bien manger] would always be the rule.’³⁶ In the ‘Eating Well’ interview conducted by Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida himself asks, ‘What is eating?’, having so expanded this ostensibly self-evident basic need, now re-posed as the ‘metonymy of introjection’ and as a question carrying philosophical weight.³⁷

Contiguous with eating, introjection names the psychic process of identification and itself metonymizes the work of the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, from whom Derrida implicitly draws, albeit in a modified fashion.³⁸ For Freud, Abraham, Torok and Derrida, we must ‘eat the other’ if we are to form our own ego; that is to say, our earliest identifications with others occur as a form of ingestion that we are obliged to swallow. Yet Derrida departs from psychoanalytic canon: the ‘must’ here refers to an ethics of infinite hospitality – one takes in the other but does not decide which other. At the same time there is a ‘cannot’ in that we cannot measure or decide how much of that other to take in: the critical interface of literal and figural ensures that we cannot totally appropriate the other through this ingestion. That is not the departure. But that the ostensibly physical practice of eating and ostensibly psychical process of introjection may be said to share a border does not only point to the difficulty of forming a clear succession or separation between literal and figural; it consequently also points to the difficulty of distinguishing between need and desire – themselves synonyms for nature and culture – and thus, for Derrida, if not for Abraham and Torok, between humans and other animals.

Departing from the metaphysical conceptual path that orders and interlinks these terms leads Derrida to pose the ethics of the ‘One must eat well’ as offering an ‘infinite hospitality’.³⁹ This infinite hospitality strikes at the ‘carno-phallogocentric’ heart of metaphysics in calling into question the structure of sacrifice that it conserves.⁴⁰ This mouthful of a term brings Derrida’s existing critique of the conceit unifying the presence of the word (logocentrism) with that of the phallus (phallogocentrism) into contact with a sacrificial logic of transubstantiation.41 It arises in the interview with Nancy by virtue of the title of the journal issue, in light of which frame ‘Eating Well’ takes place: ‘Who Comes After the Subject?’ While the topic of ‘the Subject’ is nominally in question, Derrida finds it reinstalled in the maintenance of the ‘who’ and still levelled against a ‘what’ of lethally lesser status. In contrast, Derrida refuses ‘to see the “who” restricted to the grammar of what we call Western language, nor even limited by what we believe to be the very humanity of language’.⁴² Even ethical thinkers with whom Derrida shares ground such as Emmanuel Levinas fall foul of the configuration of sacrifice. While a ‘Thou shalt not kill’ may be invoked, even as a first principle, Derrida draws attention to the way in which killing is managed such that a ‘non-criminal putting to death’ symbolically and legally distinct from murder is still set aside for some beings.⁴³ (I return to the linked problem of the death penalty as such in the last two chapters of this book.) This Levinasian ethical law implicitly addresses a human community, for whom the killing of non-humans does not count.⁴⁴ Explicitly affecting those we call animal, the sacrificial loophole for legal killing can and has been turned on humans called animals, often through pestilential figures such as ‘vermin’ (notoriously in anti-Semitism and especially in the context of the Holocaust, but that ugly self-justifying rhetoric of pestilence that has returned to current political events at the time of writing with particular regard to immigration). As Freud describes (in ‘Totem and Taboo’), so Derrida critiques this community, which, moreover, privileges brotherhood: the virility associated with the Judaeo-Christian carno-phallogocentric subject is indeed that of the ‘adult male, the father, husband, or brother’ demanding a sacrifice.⁴⁵

The contiguity between eating and introjection provokes another conceptually challenging question: ‘In what respect’, Derrida asks, ‘does the formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the question … still carnivorous?’⁴⁶ The carnivory of the question is given with the caveat ‘formulation’ ‘in language’. While Derrida himself does not flesh out the full archive of thought being redrawn here, his question recalls the Freudian understanding of language acquisition as the substitution of breast for word: in the crossover between the metaphysics of presence and psychoanalysis, a suite of metonymies, milk, breast and mother, all bound to the psychoanalytic fantasy of satisfaction, give way to the substitution of language.47 However, that retention of meat for word is given an uncanny breadth if his invocation of all the senses in general is brought into contact with another analytic frame, that of Melanie Klein. While Klein is only fleetingly referenced across Derrida’s corpus, we cannot miss the reciprocity with her 1936 text on ‘Weaning’:

the child receives his main satisfaction through his mouth, which therefore becomes the main channel through which the child takes in not only his food, but also in his phantasy, the whole world outside him. Not only the mouth, but to a certain degree the whole body with all its senses and functions, performs this ‘taking in’ process … the child breathes in, takes in through his eyes, his ears, through touch and so on.⁴⁸

Perhaps it is here that ‘Klein perhaps opens the way’, the highly elliptical point on which Derrida finished his first essay on Freud.⁴⁹ Where Levinas poses the face as that which says ‘Thou shalt not kill’, Derrida displaces the humanism that the face proposes not just with the mouth but with all the orifices, thus weakening the association with speaking subjects.⁵⁰

Rather than legislate anew, invoking a new, improved, law on which we could always rely, the Derridean ethics of infinite hospitality keeps the question of what it is to eat well open. Refusing to sequester symbolic anthropophagy as a human practice distinct from literal cannibalism committed by the untutored, animals, those who lack the law, Derrida implies that vegetarians also ‘eat meat’ in the place where eating and introjection touch.⁵¹ Harking back to my remarks on early identification as a form of ‘eating the other’, there is a metaphoric carnivory at stake that is not definitively refused by the practice of a vegetarian diet. As we are starting to gather, the place where eating and introjection touch may vary! Thus it is not necessarily organized linguistically, and its implications may stretch beyond humans, including those who practice a vegetarian or vegan diet. To take seriously this demotion of the mouth as the ostensibly privileged path to introjection, a process that finds its due outcome in speech, is to invite the question of non-human ingestion, non-human carnivory and thus non-human modes of signification.

In their work on mourning, framed in binary combat as ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection Versus Incorporation’, Abraham and Torok distinguish these processes in ways that lend themselves to thinking about Fisk’s abrupt dismissal of pain.52 In Derrida’s ‘Foreword’, called ‘Fors’, for their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, he warns against the ‘limitations’ of a ‘linguisticistic’ reading of their work, one easy to make since it stems from the very ‘base of the[ir] enterprise’.⁵³ This reading overdetermines the mouth as the privileged oral locus of ‘verbal language’, one whose presence fills the gap left by the breast.⁵⁴ Speech comes first, and speech is presence (the metaphysical problem inherited by psychoanalysis). Derrida underlines the inadvertent fracture in this logic: the substitution is ‘partial’; presence is a ‘figure of presence’.⁵⁵ Psychic life is in mourning from the start.

Abraham and Torok differentiate mourning and melancholia through two different relations to the literal and the metaphoric. Rather than introject the lost other as a metaphor, the melancholic incorporates that lost other as an object that thus refuses metaphoricity.⁵⁶ Melancholic incorporation involves the fantasy that one eats this object precisely ‘not to introject it’, as Derrida puts it, ‘in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside into the pocket of a cyst’.⁵⁷ This ‘cyst’ is the secret ‘crypt’ in Abraham and Torok’s terms (one that we should read in a linguisticistic manner): the one for whom the melancholic fails to mourn is squirreled away within it. Abraham and Torok oppose the withheld path of incorporation to the sociality of introjection. For them, ‘Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation, means channelling them through language into a communion of empty mouths’ (empty by virtue of the process of weaning).⁵⁸ As Derrida writes, in summary of Abraham and Torok, ‘Introjection speaks … Incorporation keeps still, speaks only to silence or to ward off intruders from its secret place.’⁵⁹ This crypt of language depends, for Derrida, on the logic of a primary substitution for the maternal breast configured as presence. Language, cryptic or otherwise, is here caught in the logic of re-presentation. Of course Derrida gives emphasis to the supplemental nature of the substitution of breast by word: supplemented, the breast loses the sense of an originary completion (without thereby falling into a logic of lack). Rather than the full presence of the breast, metonym of the mother’s body, metonym of nature, Derrida posits an original writing: general ‘hieroglyphia’ precedes possibility for thinking the crypt.⁶⁰ This does not push the supposed ground of ‘nature’ further ‘back’ to a more secure place (in which it remains inert and precisely ahistorical) but rewrites it as writing already.⁶¹ Thus the general writing of nature also disperses the singular path to language as the human response to lack.

Ingestion that does not necessarily pass by way of the mouth immediately evokes the nose for Dean Spanley, as well as the ears for his audience, while the crisis in language summons Fisk.

Pet seminary

Fisk is blunt. He neither ‘wastes’ words by indulging their figural capacities nor worries about offending others. The congregated guests around the dinner table in the climactic sequence are at first beholden to his stories, ones they have not come to hear. We hear how his late wife dragged him from Balzac to aid their two sons, out on a rowboat on a stormy Lake Windermere.62 Mocking her fears, the cantankerous Fisk addressed the storm intoning ‘Give Up Your Dead!’ as if they were already deceased. Fisk’s disregard for emotional responses evidently predates the death of Harrington (fighting in the Boer War, his body never recovered). At dinner, once the Dean has again become the focus of attention, we learn the incorporative extent to which Wag and Harrington share the same fate, both marked by a ‘non-criminal putting to death’.

It is the Dean’s desire to remain at the table that again prompts the olfactory metaphor spurring his uncanny reflections. Leaving the table would be equivalent to having a bath ‘when one ha[d] just gotten comfortable in one’s smell’.⁶³ Bodily, animal, smell is thus brought into proximity with the bouquet of Tokay as a form of clothing, troubling its primary horizontality in Freudian legend. Bathing, cleanliness, leads to the embarrassment of nudity (I return to the question of nudity in detail in Chapter 5). The séance-like scene in the dark environment of the book-lined room housing the dinner resumes. Or, in Derrida’s neologism, the ‘animalséance’ resumes: Leonard Lawlor unpacks this term as both ‘animated impropriety’ and as a ‘session of the animal’ (session having both a psychoanalytic and an occult implication).⁶⁴ Fisk is astonished. Before he can issue an insult, the Dean resumes his otherworldly discourse. Speaking from the twinned crypt of Harrington and Wag, he makes casual reference to being called Wag by the Master. Fisk is transfixed. The Dean’s ensuing stories entrance Fisk even more than Henslowe, and in transferential style, he soon responds as the Master in question, even recognizing himself as one who administered an occasional beating to Wag (to the raised eyebrows of Henslowe).

The tales to which Fisk is party bring the whole group together. Here we gain a clearer picture of urination as a writing practice, of the enticing smell of fear and of friendship between dogs (the ‘unmastered’, unnamed stranger and Wag, domesticated, his species loyalty divided by a love of the Master). This picture is fleshed out by luscious flashbacks cinematically coded as first-person memory in that they are attached through successive sequencing to the Dean but shot from a low angle, from a dog’s eye view. The latter gives credence to the Dean’s story and draws those who see these sequences – the cinematic audience – into the film through that canine viewpoint, making dogs of us all: exuberant dogs often taking up the whole frame, dogs in the prime of life, sometimes with a slightly self-consciously comedic feel produced through a slow-motion close-up of wind in their coats, all suggesting that yes, those times were fantastic.

Figure 2.2 Exhale (My Talks with Dean Spanley, 2008, Dir. Toa Fraser, UK/New Zealand).

Fisk is particularly taken with the Dean’s assurance that to find home, after running unfettered through farmland with his pal, he had only need to turn towards it.⁶⁵ This confidence mystifies Fisk since Wag had disappeared, like Harrington, and no body had been recovered. Yet the dogs do not arrive home, since, as the film shows while the Dean cannot tell, a farmer shoots them dead. Fisk is rapt. As he stares at the Dean, the scene cuts back to that same field, shot in the same light, but this time with his son Harrington riding a horse across it. With the sound of gunshot, the scene cuts, and we see Harrington lying dead in the field as the Dean narrates Wag’s last thoughts of ‘home in [his] heart and the master waiting. No, no pain’. The Dean’s audience are visibly affected (indeed it would be hard to remain unmoved). Fisk, weeping gently, touches the Dean’s hand affectionately. With new consideration for the feelings of others, Fisk retires saying that he is ‘put in memory of Harrington’, the son whose name he uses for the first time in this film. Finding him crying in the hallway, the astonished Mrs Brimley asks Fisk if he is alright. ‘He was shot’, he replies. But this time the direct statement reveals his pain and opens the crypt.

Figure 2.3 Cry (My Talks with Dean Spanley, 2008, Dir. Toa Fraser, UK/New Zealand).

The personal pronoun is ambivalent as to which death it refers, that of Harrington or Wag. Both shot: the dog as an animal trespassing on a farmer’s land and as an animal that can be killed without criminal offence, indeed without truly ‘dying’, merely perishing according to Martin Heidegger; the son as a soldier, engaged in the lawful practice of killing those designated ‘enemy’ is himself so killed, a casualty of war.⁶⁶ The Dean’s apparent recollection gives a representation to the traumatic absence of any such for Fisk, and one that affirms ‘no pain’. In contrast to the formerly inexplicable disappearances of Harrington and Wag, Mrs Fisk died of grief for her son, in emotional pain ‘enough for both of us’, in Fisk’s encrypted opinion. Yet the film shows no engagement with Fisk’s grief for his wife – who remains nameless, only his belated double mourning for son and dog.

‘Eating’ Wag as metaphor (by taking in the Dean’s narration) allows the name of Harrington and sociality to resurface.67 Talking now with uncharacteristic familiarity, Fisk hugs Henslowe, calls him too by name and volunteers to see him next on any day of the week. ‘One moment you are running along, the next you are no more’, a tearful Fisk utters, with the pronoun again lending ambivalence to its reference. Substitutable, the second person could indicate Henslowe, Harrington, Wag, Fisk himself or any other.

With the animal cure pronounced and Fisk returned to sociality and/as paternity, fascination with Dean Spanley fades: this Father too has been figuratively consumed. Henslowe next finds his father not ensconced in the parlour but outside, playing with a young spaniel.⁶⁸ A dog has replaced the Dean. A dog comes home and ‘home’ is returned to its orderly self. Watching Henslowe watching his father, the film frames Mrs Brimley next to the painted portrait of Mrs Fisk. Mrs Fisk, nominally the maternal figure in the film, is never mentioned in Fisk’s restored sense of feeling but is nevertheless symbolically assembled through this representation with the group approving Fisk’s joy in his new pet.⁶⁹ In the spirit of doubles dogging this film, Mrs Brimley metonymizes the maternal – but a maternal already in service to the father/law. Employed as the housekeeper, she is bound to maintain clean borders rather than threaten their collapse in Kristevan abjection (the picture frame enclosing Mrs Fisk might also be read in this light). Later in the film, talking to her late husband in the form of the chair in which he used to sit, Mrs Brimley refutes the idea that she would ever cook anything so disgusting as a whole rabbit.⁷⁰

Is the new spaniel a substitute for Wag or Harrington? Maintaining totemic ambivalence of whether humans and animals are distinct or consanguineous, Henslowe’s closing voice-over suggests that reincarnation might be something to greet with anticipation, and, that should he be reborn as a dog, he hopes to belong to a ‘master as kind as [his] father’. Given that Fisk had affirmed that he beat Wag (only) when it was necessary, and the Dean had spouted the colonialist view requiring the colonized to love their colonizing masters – characteristically confusing servant with dog – this wish too remains thoroughly ambivalent.

What is clear, however, is that not any animal could induce this cure for Fisk. I have indicated that the animal in the Dean is domesticated rather than wild, indexing Fisk rather than unleashed animal others. The film also deliberately repudiates felinity. The Dean reviles cats, berating their lack of understanding of the sport of the chase, and Swami Prash specifically expels them from proximity to man (the generic ‘man’ is categorically specific) early in the film. Speaking of reincarnation at the event that first brings the protagonists together, the Swami vehemently rejects enquiries after the possibilities of a feline soul made by women in the audience. In spite of its scenes of hospitality, Dean Spanley does not welcome animality; rather, its feminine taint and concomitant disrespect for (the law of) the master is held at bay while the film maintains a domesticated totemism commanding masculine descent. Derrida asks what would happen to fraternity should an animal – or a sister – enter the political sphere.71 Dean Spanley splits between negative and affirmative readings: the symptomatic containment of the animal precisely as man’s best friend, absorbing the dog within the discourse of friendship and ingenious pointers to deconstructing the conceptual hierarchy of man and animal.

Laurence Rickels ascribes the role of inoculation against death to the pet.⁷² A loyal Freudian, he means specifically paternal death (the primal feast is lived every day). Prescribing carno-phallogocentrism anew, Rickels posits the eating of meat as that which develops resistance to the pain of loss.⁷³ Eating meat is indeed an ‘animal cure’ (but this time as food preservation). If the pet’s death is unmournable for Rickels, this is because this classical traffic in substitution is one way (pets rehearse human death but nothing and no one does so for them). Rhetorically maximizing his own ambivalence regarding pet death, Rickels refers to ‘cut[ting] their losses with the paternal economies of sacrifice, substitution, and successful mourning’.⁷⁴ Whether this means breaking from or mixing in with such economies, the prospect of successful mourning brings us back to Derrida and to Dean Spanley.

The trace of a cure

I began this chapter with Derrida’s question regarding whether ‘we’ are ‘capable’ of true mourning. This phrasing resonates with his deconstruction of the habitual framing of human response versus animal reaction.⁷⁵ In The Animal That Therefore I Am, rather than simply extend the ability to respond to animals, Derrida questions the way in which ability is construed as the proper of the human (the ability to speak, respond, reason, etc.) and proposes a ‘weak ability’ in the common question ‘can they suffer?’ I return to the difference upon which Derrida insists by means of this alteration in emphasis in Chapter 5. In this chapter the question remains do we have the ability to mourn?⁷⁶ Were ‘ability’ to be classically adhered to, then any sense of the unconscious would be betrayed (affected, as it surely must be, by desires that my conscious mind would disown). Such is the pull of the conceptual field from which ‘ability’ derives that even psychoanalysis struggles to disengage. Derrida troubles the binary confidently asserted as ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, by Abraham and Torok, a division that circulates the one for whom we ‘successfully’ mourn and encrypts the one for whom we fail to do so.

The last chapter of this book becomes obliged, by the focal demands of White God, to attend to autopsic architectures made theorizable in light of Derrida’s seminars on both The Death Penalty and The Beast and the Sovereign. The violence of the law overseen by the latter figures is obscured by the ostensibly genteel environment of the fable – the fabulous work of Dean and dog in Dean Spanley. But a rare sense of autopsy secures them. In addition to its regular usage as the medical practice of the dissection of a corpse, autopsy names ‘intimate commerce’ with the gods: it thus speaks to the totemic, to participation by means of ingestion.⁷⁷ The eleventh session of The Beast and the Sovereign provides a scene a good deal more dramatic than that of Spanley by virtue of exorbitant scale and insistence on the primacy of absolute vision: a King oversees the ‘inspectacular’ autopsy of an elephant.⁷⁸ This intimate commerce is overwhelmingly signalled as a visual ingestion, for which the tools of the autopsy are merely the herald. The séance of Spanley may open the route to an olfactory ingestion, but that opening is obscured in so far as the two scenes, the dinner table and the dog’s adventures, conscious and unconscious, are resolved by the narrative production of the (equivalent) missing bodies of dog and son and secured in the cure of Fisk from his melancholia. Yet in the course of this traffic in bodies and the imaginary light of the Sun King, Louis le Grand, Louis XIV, illuminating and thereby governing his court and the body of the world’s largest land mammal, a traffic that is seemingly one way and reflective only of the enduring autopsic vision of this absolute sovereign, Derrida opens up the cura of curiosity:

The culture of curiosity thus organizes the showing of curiosities for curious crowds, but the same culture of curiosity also had ambitions to treat, to care for, if not to cure. Or even to liberate by locking up differently. The cura of this curious curiosity always hesitated between two forms or two aims of what is always a treatment.79

The animal cure of Dean Spanley patently cares about shepherding a more loving relation between fathers and sons (and, on the face of it, who would tarnish that aim?). Carried by scent as the trigger of memory, the film has invited us to think of dogs as beings who write and humans as those who may be clothed by smell. In so doing it approaches curing philosophy and psychoanalysis of their persistence in dividing the human from the animal. But that new proximity, that intimate commerce of ingestion, is defended against by means of the masculinist ruse that fetters its departures from the discourse on ‘the animal’: when dogs are pulled back from writing – with urine – this is at the hands of a female figure whose action is tantamount to toilet-training; elements that might usually impart abject revulsion – sniffing urine, eating entire rabbits – and thus bespeak the defilement of the Kristevan mother, are ‘cleaned up’ and elevated to ritual events. Spanley even ends with the son’s expressed desire for a good Father who will treat him, and even (lawfully) discipline him, like a pet dog, endorsing classically satisfying narrative closure. Rather than remaining attached to a virility in which man’s best friend is indeed like man, his fellow man, we must risk the insecurity of following through on Derrida’s insight that the general condition of writing affects the ‘living in general’, cultivating, as further chapters in this book will show, ‘differences that grow’.⁸⁰