Uncanny Pets

Abstract

Companion animal stories following this standard pattern hence construct inter-and intra-species-relations as mutually exclusive, and give clear preference to intraspecies over inter-species relations. The ideological foundation of this formula is thus the exact opposite of ideas of "becoming-animal" (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 262), "becoming with" (Haraway 2008, 3), "species cosmopolitanism" (Nayar 2014, 126), or Haraway's new concepts of "tentacular thinking" and the "chthulucene" (2016, 30). Companion animal stories following this pattern continue into the 21 st century with famous new authors and readerships as enthusiastic as ever. A prominent example would be the British author Gill Lewis, whose stories such as Sky Hawk (2011) explore bonds between children and (often rather unusual) animal companions, yet ultimately seek to reconstruct the human as a stable category. However, in the past two decades companion animal stories have emerged that challenge this framework, reconstructing not only the representation of the human/companion animal bond but also questioning and re-inventing the idea of 'humanness' as such. In the following, I will focus my attention on two 21 st-century companion animal stories that both challenge the 20 th-century pattern and open up posthuman narrative spaces, albeit, as I will argue, with vastly different outlooks towards the constructive potential of the posthuman they imagine: Matt Haig's The Last Family in England (2004) and Lynn Truss's Cat Out Of Hell (2014). Matt Haig is an author one would not normally associate with posthumanism, as the central agenda of his books is generally the re-discovery of the human as a stable and closed entity, i.e. of the human as a humanist category. The extraterrestrial alien in Haig's most famous novel The Humans (2013) has to make a stark either/or decision whether to be alien or human. In order to become the one, he has to categorically reject the other. In The Last Family in England the quest for rediscovery of the human happens through the eyes of a dog, an English family's pet Labrador who experiences the pitfalls that might befall interspeciecism when it collides with an unyieldingly anthropocentric philosophy. Caught in his mounting obsession with his self-ordained duty to keep his human family safe, the Labrador comes to question and ultimately discard the humanist categories that previously structured his life, finding nothing but an abyss beyond. Ten years after Haig's companion animal story Lynn Truss, generally better known for her non-fiction than for her fiction, published a very different story. Cat Out Of Hell is, as the novel's title implies, not a family pet tale, but a horror satire in which a retired librarian teams up with an immortal satanic cat to kill the cat's evil human master who is in league with the devil. Far more central to the story than the fight against evil, however, is an ongoing re-negotiation of borders between animal, human, and technology that prove increasingly permeable and unstable. Neither of the t...

Animals’ Mobilities in Popular Fiction: Time, Duration, and Desire in Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey

“…Johnson (2000) refers to The Incredible Journey in passing, reducing the novel to a pets-in-peril-in-the-wilderness variation of a formulaic "survival theme." Höing (2019), most recently, assimilates Burnford's novel to the "strikingly simple" formulas of "traditional" animal stories for children, bolstering anthropocentrism by drawing "simplistic" distinctions between "nature" and "culture" (p. 69).…”