Embodying the ‘Animal’: Beyond Metaphor and Allegory in Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone

Abstract

In the history of Western intellectual thought the category of the ‗animal‘ has been always a liminal one which has simultaneously generated and thereby sealed off the domain of civilisation‘ against itself. It has persisted as a Visceral Other, often haunting civilised imagination. The post-Enlightenment celebration of universal reason in the European consciousness and the Cartesian split between the mind and the body merely served to intensify this difference, serving further as an effective tool of justification for colonising the rest of the world. However, what had begun along the familiar Enlightenment trajectory of suppressing the latent and recalcitrant strain in the reasonable mind ended at the turn of the 19th century through the new realisation of a fast disappearing store of ecological resources across the world. While the representation of animals in fiction has largely restricted itself to two identifiable strategies-either through the fabula (Coetzee‘s The Lives of Animals) or the allegory (Orwell‘s Animal Farm)-Barbara Gowdy‘s novel, The White Bone (1998) is built upon this peculiar tension of imparting to animals which are, strictly speaking, ‗characters‘ in the most loose sense of the term. Gowdy keeps the elementary structure of the ‗beast fable‘ intact, while ‗humanising‘ elephants on a quest for the mythical White Bone, a sacred relic that would secure their lives from the range of the poacher‘s rifle forever, in order that she can summon an effective-if only provisional-resistance in the order of language against the layered silence which is generally born out of a crisis in representing animals who are themselves by-products of an inescapable anthropocentrism in the history of Western literature. This paper hopes to explore the novel‘s exposition of this crisis through an ecocritical reading that is also persistently problematized by a half-ironic resolution of its postcolonial concerns.