and set it adrift within the generalized animal sensorium as “merely” the equal of
the dog’s sense of smell or the horse’s sense of touch (and in some contexts,
inferior to those)—is to appreciate more fully Derrida’s observation that “a de-
hierarchization of the senses displaces what we call the real, that which resists all
appropriation.”
94In other words, Grandin’s comments on the superior seeing-power of cows displace the prevalent metaphor that seeing is knowing. Indeed in the light of some famous perception experiments in which humans routinely fail to see the obvious when distracted,95 we could say that seeing represents a failure to know, or the ability to know just what we want to know. This unfavourable comparison to some animal sight causes the uncomfortable and radical
displacement of the defining human characteristics of knowledge and reason.
But what if an animal doesn’t have a face, or if it has a face that is not so easy to gaze into? What if it has a face which isn’t going to return our gaze? Consider, as David Foster Wallace urges us to, the lobster. In his infamous essay, written for Gourmet magazine, as their reporter at the Maine Lobster Festival in August 2004, he notes that lobsters are “not nice to look at,”96 yet the thrust of the article is concerned with the ethics of cooking and eating lobster: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” He focusses on questions of suffering and pity and produces an article which must have left a rather unpleasant taste for the organisers of the festival. Further limitations of the epiphany of the face concern the comments of Hearne who notes that sight is not the primary sense for all animals: we may return the gaze of a cat or a bear, but less so that of a mole or a bat. These questions suggest that, as Derrida points out, Levinas’ ethical interaction is inherently anthropocentric and just as human rights cannot simply and unproblematically be expanded to encompass the rights of nonhuman animals, it seems that the face to face interaction is limited in such a way as to enact a violence
93
Jacques Derrida, “Others Are Secret Because They Are Other,” in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 156.
94
Cary Wolfe, “Learning from Temple Grandin: Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the Subject.,” in What Is Posthumanism? (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 133–4.
95
Grandin and Wolfe mention a number of experiments which record instances of what has been called “inattentional blindness.”
96
David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 235–54.
towards certain nonhuman animals. This would include animals that do not gaze as well as those with which it is difficult to form a relationship. Fish, for example.
To return, briefly, to Manley Hopkins’ trout, what makes it irreducibly singular is not its face, but the sense of its markings being “in stipple.” To the narrator, these markings are irreducibly beautiful and, as we have seen, marked by mystery. Let’s consider the stipple in the light of a story cited by Grandin. Oliver Sacks’ classic book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat97 narrates the tale of a medical student, who, having taken amphetamines and dreamt about being a dog, woke up with “super-heightened perceptions” including a powerful sense of smell and the ability to discern dozens of shades of colours which he had never before seen. Grandin surmises that “the most likely explanation is that he always had an ability to smell like a dog and see fifty different shades of brown, but he just didn't know it and couldn't access it.” For the rest of us “Fifty shades of brown turn into just one unified colour: brown.”98 In other words, within the complex colouring of the stippled marking of a trout are many more colours than humans are able to discern. Indeed the “brinded cow” in the same poem must be precisely an example of an animal with fifty shades of brown rather than a mere “couple-colour.” In this sense, the dapple, stipple, freckle etc., are all examples of a relative lack of human perception and serve to mark the limitations of what we can see and what we can know. They also mark a space where the human fails to discern the difference between individual animals. This is in marked contradistinction to trout themselves, who can, it seems, recognise and remember other individual trout.99
Derrida repeatedly connects being caught in the gaze of a nonhuman animal to the experience of vertigo. What he names as “the vertigo of the beast”100 is the dizziness caused by the
recognition of nonhuman being—“the fact that there is being rather than nothing.”101 The vertigo of the beast names the unsteadiness caused when the human-animal division is no longer an absolute abyss. It is a gaze into the “point of view of the absolute other”102 which causes the deep structures of carnophallogocentrism to spin. As I hope to demonstrate, the vertigo of the beast is best evoked by literature and is evoked most powerfully when the alterity of nonhuman animals is apparent and where the privileging structures of humanism come undone.
97
Oliver W. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, 1st Touchstone ed (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
98
Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to
Decode Animal Behaviour (New York: Harvest, 2005), 65.
99
Shannon L. White and Charles Gowan, “Brook Trout Use Individual Recognition and Transitive Inference to Determine Social Rank,” Behavioral Ecology 24, no. 1 (January 2013): 63–69.
100
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 66.
101
Ibid.
102
Ibid., 11.