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Literary animal tales really all about us

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George Orwell's Animal Farm was a satire on Soviet Communism written during WW2
George Orwell's Animal Farm was a satire on Soviet Communism written during WW2
When authors write fictional stories about animals, often they’re writing about the human predicament. Author Ceridwen Dovey discovered this is often the case in researching her collection of short stories 'Only the Animals'. As she tells Sarah L’Estrange, writing the book was a literary education. 
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From when our parents read us our first books we are introduced to animals in stories.

There’s Black Beauty, Charlotte’s Webb, The Wind in the Willows, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Bambi. In fact, there are too many animal tales to list.

While you might think of animal stories as children’s fodder, adult authors have plumbed this metaphoric resource too.

Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other.

Ceridwen Dovey is one of them. She’s a South African-born Australian-based writer. Her latest book is a collection of short stories called Only the Animals. In the book she inhabits the lives of 10 animals killed during 10 conflicts of the 20th century: a cat is killed in the trenches of World War One, an elephant dies during the civil war in Mozambique and a tortoise dies at the height of the Cold War. 

The animals channel the lives and works of writers who’ve used animals in their own stories including Czech writer Franz Kafka, French author Collette, Australian storyteller Henry Lawson and British poet Sylvia Plath.

The title of her book is taken from a quote by American academic Boria Sax who founded the group Nature in Legend and Story, which asks what it means to be human and wonders whether only the animals can know. 

‘The beauty of animals is that they can mean absolutely anything and everything,’ says Dovey. ‘Once you start digging into it it just keeps throwing up new ways to write about ourselves and our place in the world. Each author seems to take it on in a completely different way.’

Dovey's book gives a sense of how varied the use of the animal metaphor can be. Kafka, for instance, used creepy crawlies in his book The Metamorphosis and an ape in his short story Report to an Academy.

‘Through his use of animal figures he’s always siding with the humiliated.’ 

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Despite the shame and disgust that pervades these stories, Dovey says there’s ‘a perverse strength that the human narrators take from the identification with things that are small and creeping’.

In the case of Report to an Academy, Dovey says it’s a comment on the destabilising effect of Darwin’s theory of evolution on the social fabric.

‘That self disgust and humiliation that’s built into the animal characters is his way of showing that his generation was still processing what it meant to be so close to apes and of having lost that sense of a perfect pristine past.’

Another writer Dovey discovered had an affinity with animals in their literature is the British author and feminist Virginia Woolf. She’s known for her books Orlando, To the Lighthouse and the influential essay A Room of One’s Own.

In contrast to Kafka, Woolf uses animals in a very different way. 

‘She was using them to experiment with forms of biography,’ says Dovey.

Dovey uses the example of Woolf’s book Flush. It’s a biography of the British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the perspective of Browning’s spaniel, Flush.

‘While it’s very playful, it’s very much an experimental feminist use of animals and a really unusual way of looking at the creative process. Both showing how irrelevant it can seem from an animal’s view but also how in that moment of creation the author is really isolated and alienated from everything around her.’

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Dovey is particularly drawn to a scene in the book in which Flush observes Browning while she’s writing—Flush and Browning both feel alone as the poet moves her pen across the page.

‘Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another,’ wrote Woolf. ‘She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other.’

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Of course one of the most well known books about animals is George Orwell’s political satire Animal Farm. The novel is about animals living on a farm that revolt against their treatment by humans and take over, only to treat each other in a similarly inhumane manner. In her research, Dovey discovered that the book was originally called Animal Farm: a fairy tale.

‘It interested me that he had described it that way because to me it seems very far from a fairy tale.’

Other 20th century writers have also used the fairy tale trope featuring animals in their work including the Portuguese Jose Saramago and German Gunter Grass, Dovey points out. While they also wrote political books, she says ‘they’re still honouring the power the animal has as a sort of oracle that has its roots in the tradition of the fable genre’ 

In Animal Farm, on the other hand, ‘that sense of the power of the animal as seer’.

Different writers use animal metaphors in different ways. Some authors try to enter the world of the animal, like Woolf, while others like Orwell and Kafka use animals to satirise human behaviour. What unites these animal stories, however, is that though they appear to be about animals, they are really about us. 

Animal People delves into the complex relationship between humans and animals.

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Animals, Animal Science, Animal Behaviour, Lifestyle and Leisure