The animals we mourn

From the Epic of Gilgamesh to thanatographies, literary works have long been a means to contemplate the death of a close individual: a parent, a partner, a child, a friend. Literary lament traditionally involves anthropomorphized animals in the mourning ritual. Animals, plants or even stones mourn humans or larger than life heroes, but the opposite has rarely been the case. Despite their significant role in reverence and Homo sapiens’ long-term dependency on other lifeforms for sustenance, non-human animals have largely been excluded from themselves becoming subjects of literary mourning.

On stories and bees (Part I)

In Work on Myth, German philosopher Hans Blumenberg suggests that the overwhelming anxiety of the unintelligible, unnarrated reality around us might have been the origin of storytelling, embodied by myths. Drawing on the Western literary canon, we could say that, in the beginning, there was not the ‘Act’, as Goethe writes in Faust, nor the ‘Word’, as John writes in his gospel, but ‘Fear’ – the fear that drove us to act with the word, to group individual things and creatures into categories, creating the first metaphors that would help us make the world graspable and, possibly, easier to dominate. According to Blumenberg, naming things has an apotropaic function, causing the magical feeling that gives us a sense of agency over our environment.1

The strange event of another human dying counts among our most fear-inducing moments. More than anything else, the sight of a corpse threatens us with the collapse of meaning and the dissolution of comforting binary oppositions such as life and death, giving us a feeling of vertigo and disorientation.2 Death disrupts discourse, but, at the same time, provokes conceptualization that helps tame such disruption. Our mortality is the image source of many religions, including Christianity. We are told we became mortal because Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Later, we were salvaged by Jesus’s macabre death on the cross – the beginning of the true crime genre.

According to widely accepted anthropological narrative, Homo sapiens was able to develop higher cognitive and symbolic abilities, including language, due to the surplus of energy obtained from meat consumption. 3 But a recent study by Crittenden suggests that, gradually, less chewing was involved in human calorie consumption, leading to our molar teeth shrinking. This development might have been due to an energy spike – essential to the brain’s growth – from eating honey, an incredibly rich source of glucose and, indeed, protein due to the remnants of bee larvae that our ancestor were not able to eliminate from the comb.4 Not only did bees, together with other pollinators, play a key role in securing plant food of benefit to us and the animals our ancestors ate, but their honey may have provided the surplus needed for a cognitive leap. In other words, we might as well say that in the beginning, there were ‘Bees’.

Nature: (un)romanticized

Traditionally, literary laments for dead people, or rather ‘heroes’, employ personified animals and non-living objects to show the sheer weight of loss. This trope can be traced to the oldest surviving epic in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the almost four-thousand-year-old tale, after the death of Enkidu, the ‘wild’ friend of King Gilgamesh, the meadows wail like his mother, and trees and rivers cry. The bear, hyena, panther, cheetah, stag, jackal, lion, wild bull, deer, ibex – all the beasts of the wild are summoned to mourn Enkidu at his funeral.

Gilgamesh, master of animals, depicted on an orthostat from the Royal Buttress, Carchemish, Gaziantep province, 8th Century BC. Image by Dosseman via Wikimedia Commons

Later, trees gather to hear the dirge of Vergil’s Orpheus after a snake kills his beloved Eurydice. In Ovid’s rendering, Orpheus lures stones to come listen to his singing. Similarly, in Theocritus’s first Idyll, which has a pastoral setting with two goatherds engaging in a singing contest, Thyrsis lists various species and even non-living objects that lament the death of Daphnis. The meaning of nature for different ancient cultures may have been varied, but this literary trope endured.

It took thousands of years before nature was conceived as something worth grieving. One of the achievements of ecocriticism – a strand of literary theory focused on literature concerning nature – has been a paradigmatic shift which, on the one hand, debunks the anthropocentrism of some authors and, on the other, raises the status of certain previously marginalized poets.

Northamptonshire poet John Clare lived between 1793 and 1864, his life overlapping those of better known poets of the era such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Revisiting Clare’s bird poems and comparing them with those of other English, so called romantic poets, shows the singularity of Clare’s interaction poetics in relation to the environment. Unlike the other poets, who anthropomorphized nature, and birds in particular, as projection walls for their philosophical concepts and theories of poetry, Clare’s writing is based on concrete interactions and encounters, as well as detailed observations of the appearance and behaviour of animals. In The Nightingale’s Nest,5 as well as other bird poems, Clare describes the bird in great detail in situ.  His poems take the form of situations. We could even say that they happen, rather than give an aloof account of a floral or faunal symbol. The poet’s rich use of deixis – ‘And list the nightingale – she dwells just here.’ – locates the reader at the encounter. The poem can communicate adventure – ‘let’s be hush’ – or even frustration when the bird suddenly disappears – ‘I watched in vain: The timid bird had left the hazel bush’. But it ultimately instils a sense of protection – ‘We’ll leave it as we found it: safety’s guard of pathless solitudes shall keep it still’.

Clare’s nest poems, a subgroup of his bird poems, depict bird homes as precarious places in constant danger of being plundered by hungry cats or violent little boys. They are ecological poems par excellence, depicting the nest as home (oikos) threatened together with its inhabitants. They render something usually depicted instrumentally or in opposition to humans as relatable, with the sensitivity usually reserved for human households. According to Judith Butler, for a life to become grievable, its significance must be understood in the first place: ‘The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of life.’6 More precisely, for a life to become grievable, it must be understood as a life, not a romanticised symbol.

Intimacy and the imaginable

Our empathy towards non-human beings is openly discriminatory. Many are perfectly content to eat meat from a pig while petting a cat but not vice versa. A similar bias affects our emotional response towards human beings too. As children, we believe in the innocent thought that death does not concern us, our parents or our favourite teachers. to other people, often limited depending on their gender, ethnicity, religion or social background, and has much wider implications.

As the reading of Clare’s poetry above suggests, one of the accessible ways to feel compassion for previously ungrievable lives is to extrapolate criteria from ‘my group’ to ‘another group’ – whether birds or citizens of Palestine (the subjects of Butler’s Frames of Wars). However, being compassionate with, or more specifically mourn, a whole group of beings is naturally quite demanding and, perhaps more importantly, verges on the betrayal of every singular being that is part of a given group.

Writing about 9/11, ‘the most “significant” atrocity of current times’, William Watkin draws, among others, on Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing, stressing exactly this dilemma.7 It seems unimaginable to grieve the loss of thousands of lives at once. And yet, that’s what most public events and media seem to do. Language gives us the power to categorize singular entities and make them ‘summable’. Language also gives us the power to categorize singular entities and forget their singularity. In Watkin’s words, ‘language is, in fact, woefully inadequate when it comes to naming lost objects because language summarizes while the object of being is singular. Singularity is not the same as personality or individuality; it can instead be defined primarily as a guarantee that a subject is always more than the words used about them.’8

Thanatographies, or autobiographical prose narratives about love, loss and mourning, focusing – as did elegies long before them – on the death of a single close person and therefore avoid the urge to collect singular entities into groups. Yet they too need to seek ways of not generalizing, not turning a singular life into a banal biographical narrative of ‘birth, and copulation, and death’, to use T. S. Eliot’s provocatively anti-climactic verse.

After Maria Handke decided to end her own life, Peter Handke wrote her biography in 1972, which, on one hand, was intimately framed and, on the other, presented an aloof portrait of a woman struggling to make a life for herself in a patriarchal world. Handke decided to represent his mother’s voluntary death in The Sorrow Beyond Dreams as an exemplary case, metaphorically placing an entire narrative between quotation marks.

Peter Esterházy’s A szív segédigéi (Helping Verbs of the Heart), written in 1985 after the death of his mother, overtly alludes to Handke’s thanatography on many levels and presents a fascinating exercise in ventriloquism, juxtaposing his own vignettes about her death with quotes from Handke’s book and other literary works, touching upon the topic as if a series of antidotes.

The Viennese poet Friederike Mayröcker spent years writing about her long-term partner and avantgarde poet Ernst Jandl, dedicating several books to him, including in 2001 Requiem für Ernst Jandl (Requiem for Ernst Jandl), Die kommunizierenden Gefäße (The Communicating Vessels) in 2003 and Und ich schüttelte einen Liebling (And I Shook Myself a Beloved) in 2005. The last work is a self-consuming lament in which Jandl only flickers as ‘EJ’, a cipher of Mayröcker’s lost love.

Grief writing can also stem from violent death. Jean Genet’s Pompes funèbres (Funeral Rites), published in 1948, on Jean Decarnin’s death in the Second World War is, quite unsurprisingly for Genet, full of blasphemous images including a grotesque scene of copulation with the Führer. Szilárd Borbély wrote the elegy collection Halotti pompa after his parents were brutally murdered during a burglary in 2000. It cries out in twentieth-century baroque language suffused with references to blood. Vous n’aurez pas ma haine (You Will Not Have My Hate), from 2016, is Antoine Leiris’s reaction to the murder of his wife Hélène during the Bataclan club terrorist attack.

Thanatographies are deeply concerned with the life of an individual. They oppose group discourses, trying to develop narrative and formal techniques that seem appropriate in the face of singular loss. This traditional scope, framed within an intimate human relationship, can be seen as rather limited should we reconsider how our ability to tell such stories developed from our relationship to animals – devouring them and what they produce.

Empathy with non-human beings

Apart from the likes of Clare, numerous writers have tried to see the world from an animal’s point of view. Tolstoy’s short story Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse, which famously served as an example for Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of defamiliarization, confronts the reader with an unusual perspective, disturbing the automated workings of everyday language.9 The story’s language is anthropocentric, the horse being just another serf, but the focalization combined with the tragic end of the horse offer a rare change in the hierarchies of attention.

Going a step further, Czech author Josef Karel Šlejhar, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, tells a story of an orphaned boy that befriends an enfeebled chicken disowned by its own mother. The mutual empathy between two creatures, whose lives are precarious and ostentatiously ungrievable, end in one of the most interesting scenes in what today would be fashionably called eco-writing: the boy Lojzík dies of starvation and general exhaustion with the ‘ chicken snuggling up closely to his lifeless body. The Melancholic Chicken, written in 1889, has long been part of the Czech school literary canon and was made into a movie in 1999.

Flora and its suffering seem to be even more peripheral to our attention than that of fauna, even if, as mentioned, trees play a crucial role in Ovid’s version of the Orpheus myth. Czech literature offers several examples of heightened empathy with macroflora that acknowledge trees and forests as entities that should be protected for their own sake, rather than for economic or other reasons. Šlejhar’s novel The Linden Tree from 1908 takes a stance against the callousness of an agricultural entrepreneur who wants to cut the lime tree down. Another Czech writer Josef Váchal portrays the decline of the Bohemian Forest at the Czech-Bavarian border, partly due to its romanticization and overtourism, in his 1931 wood-cut-illustrated collection of essays, Šumava umírající a romantická (Bohemian Forest Dying and Romantic). The trope of an orphic gesture that induces empathy through loss is omnipresent in nature writing. Indeed, eco-anxieties and solastalgia (pre-traumatic stress caused by negatively perceived environmental change) are to a great degree anthropocentric, because they stress the loss of environment as home for humans.

A leap of imagination

Vinciane Despret, a contemporary Belgian philosopher, combines philosophy, animal studies and fiction, drawing on the study of authors such as Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Donna Harraway, as well as her own ethological field research. In her recent book Autobiographie d’un poulpe et autres récits d’anticipation (Autobiography of an Octopus and other anticipatory stories) she reintroduces Ursula Le Guin’s term ‘therolinguistics’, a post-humanistic utopian discipline that attempts to understand the communication practices of ‘wild beasts’. In her chapter ‘Autobiography of an Octopus, or the Community of Odysseuses’, a group of therolinguists works on the translation of an auto-thanatography of an octopus discovered in the sea near the French Calanques National Park. Found after the author’s death, it expresses urgent anxiety concerning its dwindling life and the future of its species. According to the speculative narrative, the two are deeply related because octopuses believe in metempsychosis, which here signifies the transmigration of identity, or possibly the ‘soul’, after death into a new-born body of the same species. However, as octopuses were dying out in the narrative and became extinct at the point of the thanatography’s discovery, there’s a good chance the author never had the chance to reincarnate. The octopean text captures the moment when a community of non-human animals is on the verge of extinction. It ascribes to octopuses not only the ability of using language and writing but also of telling stories, or more specifically performing literary mourning. Death is no longer joyful because it doesn’t lead to reincarnation, reflective of religious ‘end-of-the-world’ eschatologies.

Despret works in a human language – namely, French – showing the obvious limits encountered every time we try to include anything that has been long excluded from writing. Death has been portrayed through personifications for thousands of years. But without this extrapolation, a leap of imagination even, we cannot get closer to portrayals that would make intimacy with non-human animals imaginable on a grander scale.

Marginalized humans also appear in Despret’s story. The Community of Odysseuses, mentioned in the chapter’s title, known as autistic people in the twentieth century, are born in symbiosis with non-human beings. Their modes of perception enable them to understand patterns that are inaccessible to other people. They become translators of animal languages, or ‘interpreters’, or more precisely, ‘experimenters with meaning’. The intention of the text seems to be to make this characterization, or even heroization, of Odysseuses empowering to those groups of people whose neurobiological development is often classified as ‘pathological’. It would be easy to challenge such an instrumentalization of a specific brain condition as flawed or even unethical. However, the most problematic dimension of the Odysseus’ position in the narrative is at the same time the most thought-provoking. Odysseuses are, due to their neurodiverse character and position of translators, peripheral, or rather liminal beings. Putting them on the border between ‘normal’ human and non-human animals, Despret makes this distinction crumble and collapse in an overtly utopian manner. Odysseuses as intermediaries are instrumentalized in the sense that they help Despret dissolve oppositional categories and create a spectrum. Now the leap of imagination does not need to be so great.

On stories and bees: Parents versus insects (Part II)

Grieving other human beings in thanatographies – typically and other family members – presents a paradox. As far as we consider life to be something positive, we are indebted to our parents who ‘gave’ us life. But they themselves probably wouldn’t be alive to reproduce if it weren’t for good sustenance. The pollination of crops by insects such as bees contributes to securing this nutrition. From this perspective, it might even make more sense to grieve the loss of bees rather than our grandparents, parents, partners or children.

In 2004 the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina), native to Southeast Asia, was accidentally introduced to Europe through France from eastern China. Since then, they have proliferated across Western Europe, even reaching across the channel to the UK. The hornet prays on pollinators and are a top predator of honeybees, dismembering them, feeding them to their young. The colonies of V. velutina are up to three time larger than those of the European hornet Vespa crabro and exert much stronger predation. Attacks of V. velutina on colonies of Apis mellifera, or the western honey bee, can cause colony losses of up to 30%.10 This mass invasion costs European economies dozens of millions of euros every year: nest destruction and the reduction of honeybee colony sizes has a direct economic impact.11 But focusing on profitability, closely related to productivity, had weakened the honeybee even before the hornet’s arrival on the scene: in breeding bees to be more productive, we have rendered them less aggressive and less effective against invasive predators; and both intensive agriculture and pesticide use has further diminished their resilience.12

If we accept the theory that bees contributed significantly, albeit indirectly, to the development of our ability to speak, tell stories and write them down, we might want stories that would make their decline imaginable. What should we expect of the great works of an apian literary tradition? A collection of elegies or thanatographies mourning individual bees that we occasionally see or representations of the collective in bee hives? A deep time epic telling the story of how Homo betrayed their tiny donor kin, forgetting its indebtedness? A theralinguistic grammar exposing unsuspected complexities of bee language? A speciesistic, heroic epic in the style of the medieval Song of Roland, portraying the famous deeds of bees, which fight off the hornet invasion and, inadvertently, secure the continuation of European (agri)culture, dependent on their pollination (the blown-up story, in which the Frankish leader Roland stands his ground against Arab Muslims, but is himself the original aggressor, helped establish the self-aggrandizing tradition of Christian knighthood)?

All of this is, of course, speculation, and I am happy to leave this job of inventing these narratives to writers of texts that are normally called fiction in the English language. It is trite to claim that reading helps us develop empathy. More importantly, reading fiction gives us the opportunity to experience our emotions without necessarily activating self-defence mechanisms.13 Reading fiction and switching our attention between reference and referent, we can experiment with our emotions and, with an easy conscience, feel stronger for dying bees than for our parents, whose existence has been made possible by the pollinators. In other words, the leap of imagination is easier when we’re allowed to think anything. We know how difficult it is to lose a loved one. Suppose we extend this sympathy to other dying beings (and I don’t mean your dog). Suppose that we extrapolate this sympathy to all things living.