SURVIVAL

CHAPTER 3: ANIMAL VICTIMS

      SYNOPSIS

Introduction:

     -Presentation of Animal Characters   British literatures

     - Animal images & Animal subject of American Literature

     - The Canadian Animal Stories & the tone & the subject matter & the message

     - The two Genres of the Animal Stories

     - The Animal Poems of the Canadian Lit. of 19th Century

     - The prose of the C19th Canadian Lit. with animals.

Introduction:

     In contrast to the view of Nature as Monster, so prevalent in Canadian Literature, the Canadian animal story is about the Canadian sense of the inveriably ill-fated victimization and failure amounting to death sometimes Atwood has named this the "important facet of the Canadian Psyche" and she invites an interested reader to start reading animal stories of Canada to be able to understand the victimization complex as the very typical Canadian sensibility.

Presentation of Animal Character in American, British and Canadian Literature:

     Stories ostensibly about animals are common in British literature such as Kipling's Mowgli stories, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind In the Willows or Beetrix Potter's tales or Carol Levis's Alice in Wonderland these animals are clothed in human clothing of fury-zippered suits and speak fluent English and are assigned places in a hierarchical social order, which is essentially British or British colonial (as in the Mowli's stories) by the Mowgli stories, the Toaad of "Toad Hell" is an upper-class twit and the stoats and ferrets which invade his mansion are working class louts and scoundrels.  The fact that these books can be easily translated into plays, ballets and cartoon movies and complete with song, dance, speech and costume, is an indication of the essentially human nature of the protagonists.  The happy endings of these stories are significant that they are British (humna) stories.  Animals appear in American literature minus clothes and the ability to speak English.  In American literature animals are not the centre of the action.  American literatures present stories of animal hunting subject.  The hunter is the centre of action and not the hunted, as in Canadian literature.

What do the American literature about animals and animal images:

     There are five examples that Atwood presents to show how the American "Success" stories are subjects about the real animals as the "hunted failures" and the men as the "successful hunter".  They are: the white whale in Moby Dick, the bear in Faulkner's "The Bear", the lion in Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", the grizzlies in Mailer's Why Are we In Viet Nam?, and the deer in James Dickey's Deliverance.  All these animals are endowed with magic symbolic qualities such as 'Nature', 'mystery', 'challenge', 'otherness', what lies beyond the Frontier, and 'energy, Violence and Wildness of Nature'.  The "hunter" man tries to conquer them by killing them and assimilating their magic qualities of energy, Violence and wildness of Nature, thus winning over Nature and enhancing his own stature.

     American stories are thus Quest stories.  They talk about quest of success until death, the never-to-find-death being the end of success.  They are also a comment on the general imperialism of the American east of mind, the Winning principle.

     In certain of the American Stories, as it is in Canadian stories, the animals are shown to be successful, but the success being measured in terms of the "animal's adjustment to people" ------- as in Jack London's White Fang, where the wolf dog mistreated when it was young begins by hating men but ends up lovign them.

The Canadian Animal Stories: The tone, the point of view, and the subject matter.

     Sir Charles. G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton have written animal stories that are called as "realistic" animal stories.  While the English Animal stories are about "social relations", the American ones are about "people successful over animals", the Canadian animal stories are about "animals being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the far and feathers empathetically.  Hence Canadian animal stories are almost invariably failure stories, ending with the death of the animal.  The Canadian animal stories are told from the animal's point of view as not just tragic stories but "pathetic" stories.  The death of the animals are pathetic because they cannot help themselves: Animals are innocent victims in Canadian literature.

 The Victor - Victim Game positions as applied to Man - Animal stories of Canada.

     Seton and Roberts present a situation of Nature in which the animal is always a pathetic victims.  No mstter how brave, cunning and strong he is, he will be killed eventually, either by by other animals (which these authors do not seem to mind too much; it is part of the game) or by men.  Seton reverses Nature - as - Monster pattern and shows man as a threat and a villain.  The animals suffer much more through men, with their (men's) snares, traps, chains and poisons.  These animals are pathetic innocent victims who suffer.  They are not shown as active tragic victims with a tragic flaw in Canlit.

James Polk says in his essay, "Lives of the Hunted: The Canadian Animal Stories and the National Identity":

These doleful endings and the member of stoic moose, tragic bears, grouse dying in the snow, woodchucks devoured, Salmon failing to make it upstream, grief-stricken wolves adn doomed balls of fur, feathers and guills squealing for dead mothers tend to intill a certain fatalism in the reader...

Message of the Stories:

     The "ealistic" animal stories of Seton and Roberts are symbolic stories which present animals as victims as the Panchatantra or Jataka tales of India.  They are a specific genre of Canadian literature adn they symoblize a specific trait of the Canadian national psyche such as the inevitable victimization.  They are also stories real animals who are shown to be perpectually on their heels, running for their lives.  Peading them makes the readers be instilled with the sense of Canadian fatalism.

The Two Important Genres of the Real Animal Stories:

     Among the Real Animal Stories, there are two genres of fiction -- One is the stories about the death of individulal animals and the other is the stories about the death or extinction of a species of animals.  fred Bodworth's The Last of the Curlews and Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf show the marked difference between the earlier Seton adn Roberts stories and the later Bodsworth and Moweat ones is that in the former it is the individual who dies and in the latter it is the individual who dies and in the latter it is the species who dies.  The Bodworth's and Mowat's stories also talk about the whole Arctic ecological balance as threatened by the white man's short-sighted and destructive policies.  Man is again the villain here, but on a much larger scale.

Animal poem of the 19th Century Canadian Literature:

     The Broken Ark is an authology of poems edited by Michael Ondaatje, where the majority of the poems are about animals either dead or dying, their death often caused by man.  There are also other poems that talk about domesticating animals, in this anthology. The reader is asked to sympathize with the animals in either case, and not with man.

     Irving Layton’s “ The Bull Calf“ and Al Purdy’s “The Death of Animals”. And Alden Nowlan’s  “GOD Sour the Milk of the Knacking Wench” are poems in which animal deaths are juxtaposed to the trivial human action, with the human activities seen as casual.  Such a portrayal shows ironically that the humans are replacing the animals by killing them.  In other words, humans are shown as possessing animalistic killer instinct.

     Looking at the animal images as passive victims from position four, Canadian literatures show the double-sided image the man ought to possess as his personality ----- The one side, though is of a victimization syndrome, to be balanced well against the animalistic aggressive tendency to kill.  This is called as the “heroic restraint” of the Canadian animal-victim tradition.