My Dog Tulip, Fluke and Sylvia each contain themes or elements which appear calculated to offend, or at very least to unsettle the dominant ethics of their respective cultures. The subversive potential derives largely from the texts' anti-anthropocentric or anti-humanist stance, and their conflation of representations of human and non-human animals. At times shocking or confrontational material arises which is not intrinsically of this type, suggesting that that the anti-anthropocentrism of the narratives is caught up in a general questioning or rejection of majoritarian ethics. The dog, with its textual connotations of freedom, release, and instinctual expression becomes a central part of a pattern of iconoclasm which ultimately, and ironically, affirms valued attributes of the human spirit which are represented as repressed or denied by the dominant social codes of modern western culture.
As mentioned, each of the texts employs a technique to ameliorate or to delay the impact of the subversive material. The purpose and execution of this amelioration is not always identical, though each relies upon conventions or devices of a particular form or genre: In Sylvia the serious subtext is kept at a comfortable distance by the play's comic form. In My Dog Tulip the respectable, detached and amused narrative voice renders the potentially offensive material sufficiently ambiguous to reduce the risk of immediately alienating a mainstream audience. At the same time, it acts as a Trojan horse, increasing the impact of the anti-anthropocentric material in the text's final chapter and appendix. Ackerley's screening device in this and other non-fiction texts relies upon the conventions of the texts' respective genres. Peter Parker notes that in Hindoo Holiday, My Dog Tulip, and My Father and Myself Ackerley employs the guise of 'the innocent abroad, the inexperienced pet-owner, and the family historian (three standard 'types' usually to be avoided.') (316,7) To somewhat similar effect, James Herbert employs an almost juvenile narrative style in Fluke. Coupled with the fact that Fluke starts out as a new-born puppy, the effect is such that the earlier part of the narrative often achieves an open, naive tone reminiscent of a children's story - a convention whose betrayal in the story's final pages reinforces the shockingness of Fluke's final scene.
This passage, in which Fluke relates his early impression of humans, based partly on information provided by 'more experienced dogs', is typical of the juvenile narrative voice employed throughout most of the novel. The other dogs tell him:
how there were males and females, like us, and that they call
their puppies children. If they kept repeating a sound to
you, sometimes kindly, sometimes harshly, than that
was probably your name. (22)
The same naive style is employed when Fluke describes a dream in which he experiences his first recollections of his former human family: 'a female people was walking towards me, kindness radiating from her, nice sounds coming from her jaws.' (24) This credulous, immature tone never completely abates, despite the numerous traumatic events which occur in the course of the story (almost all of Herbert's more brutal or intense scenes were omitted from the heavily sanitised 1995 film adaptation, but even this watered-down version is 'painful to watch' according to Marjorie Garber (1996: 259) )
The naive, bantering narrative style of Fluke leaves us unprepared for the final chapter of the story, in which it is revealed that Fluke has been narrating the entire tale to a specific human audience - a tramp, who, for the duration of tale's telling has been lying in the gutter, dying, and semi-delirious with pain from terminal stomach cancer. This revelation becomes less surprising if we consider that Herbert's usual genre is the horror novel. His grounding in supernatural fiction might also account for Fluke's casual revelation in this chapter that during his travels he once met 'a goat who thought he was Jesus.' (190) The goat is, of course, popularly associated with Satan in Judaeo-Christian culture, and what makes Herbert's pairing of these binary opposites all the more scandalous is that given the transmigratory mechanics of Fluke, the goat might well have been telling the truth.
What is more unsettling about the final chapter of Fluke is the transformation in the tone of the narrative voice. There are signs in the preceding chapters that Fluke's attitudes are changing, however the final scene is set three years on from the events related in the rest of the story, and in the intervening period Fluke's evolution has continued. He has now almost entirely abandoned his human identity, becoming largely feral. He scorns domestic dogs because they are 'too subservient to man', and admits that it is only in occasional moments of 'complete lucidity' such as this one, prompted by his discovery of the dying man, that he fully recalls having been human.
He has developed, he concedes, an 'impersonal attitude' (177), a consequence of learning 'acceptance'. This new acceptance is unsettling, as it seems to extend to a fatalistic indifference to other people's suffering. Fluke exhibits no real sympathy for the dying tramp's condition. He hopes the story of his life will help prepare the man for death, but his dominant mood seems to be objective curiosity. He enquires, "Do you believe me? Or do you think your pain is driving you mad?" (188) Nothing in Fluke's earlier, puppy-ish narration has prepared us for this fatalistic indifference. He doesn't even stay to comfort the dying man at the moment of his death; he cheerfully abandons him, in order to have sex with an in-season bitch on a neighbouring farm.
To appreciate why this, Fluke's final moment in the story, is of special significance in terms of the text's anti-anthropocentrism, it is necessary to trace the history of his sexual feelings through the course of the story, and how they form an indication of the progress of his Becoming. Fluke quickly deduces that Rumbo, his canine companion for most of the first half of the story, is a fellow ex-human. Rumbo however refuses to acknowledge the fact, doggedly avoiding the subject whenever Fluke raises it, and becoming 'deliberately vague' (78), or 'confused and irritable' (79) if Fluke continues to press him on the matter. In retrospect, Rumbo's condition anticipates Fluke's own state in the story's final scene. Rumbo is also 'a Romeo', who 'loved the ladies' (67), and when Fluke becomes an adult dog, Rumbo becomes concerned about his asexuality. Fluke remembers:
He couldn't understand my lack of interest in the opposite
sex and told me repeatedly I was old enough to feel
some stirring in my loins at the scent of a ripe female
body. I was puzzled myself, but really couldn't muster
any inclinations whatsoever towards the female of my
species; I suppose my instincts weren't yet canine
enough. (96)
In fact there are no females of Fluke's species in the story at all until around three-quarters duration, when he encounters the wild vixen, who he 'sensed rather than saw... was a she.' (135), and who he eventually admits is 'quite attractive really' (138). Nevertheless Fluke is still obsessed with his quest to reintegrate himself with his human family. When eventually he manages to find his way back home, a problem arises:
time as a dog, I felt physical feeling stir, a hunger
aroused. I wanted my wife, but she was a woman and I
was a dog. (168)
Fluke quickly abandons his objective, finally accepting the badger's advice about giving up the remnants of his former existence. Three years later, he concludes the narrative of his life by telling the dying tramp:
I've philosophised with a donkey on existentialism's possible
influence on art, ethics and psychology. I've sung with
birds and joked with hedgehogs.
And I've made love to seven different bitches. (190)
He adds: 'Time's running out for you now; death's nearly here'. Fluke, however, can't wait around for the final curtain.. He wants to know if the tramp can 'smell that heavy sweetness in the air'. It's a 'lady friend... on a farm three fields away', and her 'scent is really becoming too much to ignore.' (190).
Herbert holds Fluke's canine sexual awakening as a trump card to be played in the final paragraph of his narrative, because it represents the ultimate proof of Fluke's transformation and 'acceptance' of life as a dog; his Becoming-animal. It is also evident that in view of the naive, juvenile style of the earlier part of the narrative, and the sudden compression of time at the story's end, which telescopes the changes in Fluke's personality, the revelation is calculated to be provocative, if not shocking. Killing a rabbit is one thing; it is something a human might do, after all - but this final act by Fluke is orders of magnitude beyond what most readers would pardon in a human hero. Fluke abandons a dying man, without apology, in order to engage in perhaps the most socially outrageous act a human might perform. Fluke, by his own account, is presently in a state of 'complete lucidity' as to his human origins. If his identity is still marginally human at this moment, then so is his final act, even if it is an act which signifies the final destruction of his humanity, as well as the ultimate betrayal of the children's story-book style of the earlier narration.
That Herbert chooses this sexual image to represent the extinction of Fluke's humanity is consistent with the ultimate prohibition which Judaeo-Christian culture places around bestiality. Having taken the time to prove to a dying man that the Christian version of spirituality is entirely false, Fluke goes on to demonstrate that acceptance of the nature of the afterlife involves embracing modern Christian society's greatest taboo.
James Serpell comments on the nature of this taboo, in In the Company of Animals. He notes that many world religions posit the origin of humankind in zoophilic unions (33-4), but observes that that under the emphatically anthropocentric Christian belief system, bestiality came to be regarded as 'the most horrendous and unspeakable of sins' (158). He goes on to remark:
'Such an extreme reaction to what is, in effect, a relatively
harmless activity was not in the least surprising.
Bestiality is, after all, the ultimate anti-anthropocentric
act. As one seventeenth-century English moralist put it,
'It turns man into a very beast, makes man a member
of a brute creature.'
As innuendo, bestiality also looms throughout Sylvia. Whereas Fluke 'saves up' this concept for a flourish in the final scene, by which time the text's screening devices have been dropped, Sylvia permits the zoophilia idea to lurk throughout the play, never brought into clear focus, and continuously offset by the comic context; permanently displaced by the play's ambiguity about species.
In Sylvia the capacity to shock is linked to the conventions of comic presentation, creating an indeterminacy not unlike that which exists in the play's presentation of human and dog. In fact, to avoid being shocked, it is necessary for an audience to continually re-adjust their impressions of Sylvia's hybridity. The play's capacity to offend is generated by the same ambiguity about species which keeps that offence from being fully realised. At times, to avoid connotations of bestiality it is necessary to think of Sylvia as a human: for example when Greg calls her 'Baby' and 'sweetheart', asks Kate 'Isn't she fucking gorgeous?' (41), becomes jealous about her affair with Bowser, or tells Leslie that Sylvia has 'this great little butt. Everyone comments on her butt. When she sashays down the street, she kind of wiggles it back and forth. A lot of people stop to pat her, just because of that butt.' (109) This is not an entirely satisfactory solution though, because if Sylvia is imagined as human, one is left with the image of a man leading a woman down the street on a leash. In fact, to avoid being offended when Greg hits her with a newspaper, and Sylvia says 'Even when you hit me, I love you' (5), it is suddenly necessary to think of her as a dog. As the audience is continuously presented with a human actor portraying a canine persona, this shift in conceptualisation is always being achieved, but never fully. The play sets up an ambiguity about species which isn't resolved. For its comic effect, its shock value, and its ability to keep that shock within acceptable bounds, Sylvia relies upon a notion of species which is vague and fluid. If Sylvia becomes either a woman or a dog, the play becomes deeply troubling. Instead Sylvia, like Leslie, remains ambiguous. Ironically Sylvia's success in dismantling species barriers comes largely from the conceptual work the audience is forced to do in order to read the play as a comedy.
Gurney told Cameron Stewart that Sylvia polarises people along nationalistic lines. It was a huge success in America (Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News calls it 'one of the most involving, beautiful, funny, touching and profound plays I have ever seen'), and received positive reviews in Australia, however it fared poorly in England, where David Hughes of the Mail on Sunday called it 'nauseating if not sick', and Nick Curtis of the Evening Standard remarked: 'Quarantine restrictions need to be tightened if frothing American plays like A.R. Gurney's are to be released into the West End.' This remark seems suspiciously like a riposte to Greg's comment 'Snooty Limey fucks!', when he finds out about British quarantine restrictions on dogs.
Outraging the English may not be something which Gurney sets out deliberately to do. Joseph Ackerley's anti-anthropocentrism however, is carefully focused on British middle class humanism and moral propriety. According to Peter Parker, 'There is no doubt at all that Ackerley thoroughly enjoyed shocking people' (317). In particular it is obvious he delighted in shocking 'the English', whose sense of decorum he found so 'repulsive.' His customary way of conveying this disdain is to employ a narrative style which affects an air of genteel understatement and restraint, whilst describing vulgar or scandalous events. His final book, the autobiographical My Father and Myself, begins with the orderly announcement: 'I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1916.' (11) (an earlier draft is supposed to have begun with 'My father's penis was twelve inches long' (Parker: 317) His article 'I am a Beast', begins with the statement, 'I dislike children'. To illustrate this point, he goes on to recall an incident in which a child was mauled by a lion at a zoo. Ackerley expresses sympathy for the lion. (Parker: 405)
Ackerley's elegantly fashioned and decorous prose is such an unlikely vehicle for prurient material, that it is able to induce a hesitation in the reader as to whether the material really is offensive. This seems to have been Ackerley's intent. 'It is the wrinkled nose, not the lifted brow that I fear', he wrote; and though he was 'not anxious to spare the feelings of the philistines', he conceded: 'If people are disgusted they won't read' (317,8). Some of Ackerley's morally scrupulous contemporaries were evidently beguiled by this device. When We Think the World of You won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 1962, the cheque was presented to Ackerley by Lord Longford (Ackerley had wanted 'a naked boy' on stage) famous at the time for his anti-obscenity campaigns. Ackerley, on the other hand, was a life-long and vocal critic of censorship, and although We Think the World of You had been heavily modified to avoid libel and obscenity lawsuits, and Ackerley's own summary of it was, 'Homosexuality and bestiality mixed' (Parker: 315), Longford claimed he had read it twice, and described it as a 'delicate, beautifully written tale by one of our most distinguished man of letters' (393).
The potentially offensive material in My Dog Tulip is plentiful. In large part it consists of uninhibited descriptions of Tulip's anatomy or behaviour. He describes her in the act of defecation, remarking 'it always pleases me to see her performing this physical act...' (31). An entire chapter is devoted to this subject. He also mentions the smell of her anal glands, which he notes 'I myself do not find disagreeable' (43) He provides descriptions of her genitals, of her sexual overtures to him when she is in heat; his inserting suppositories into her vagina, and several of his mostly unsuccessful and occasionally ludicrous attempts to mate her. These graphic depictions are not merely deployed for shock value. They anchor the narrative in uninhibited physical imagery, and firmly establish the motifs of reproductive cycles, nature and corporeality which eventually provide the poetic momentum for the book's climax, 'The Turn of the Screw'. There is however a definite sense that Ackerley is confronting his audience with these graphic images of bestial life - as Sylvia puts it: 'Shit. Piss. Fuck.'(20) - in order to suggest how superficial, alienated and banal modern human existence has become by comparison. The portrayal of the human characters in My Dog Tulip supports this idea. They are generally shown to be pompous, pathetic or ineffectual, and their real-life names have been replaced with unflattering pseudonyms. For example, the owners of one of Tulip's prospective mates are a Mr. and Mrs. Blandish. The Blandishes are a well-mannered and 'prosperous' middle-class couple. Unlike Ackerley, who has cultivated his dog's beastliness, the Blandishes have trained their Alsatian Max to act as a butler: he retrieves Mr. Blandish's matches and hat on command. Despite their attempts to reduce him to servility, the Blandishes derive an obvious vicarious thrill from the idea of their dog's virility. Mr Blandish anticipates Max's mating with Tulip:
'His other wife bit him in the shoulder.' he chortled, rubbing
his hands; 'but he won't at all mind a few more bites
when his time with Tulip comes!' He said this with
such gusto that I glanced again involuntarily at Mrs.
Blandish, who was smiling roguishly at him with her
small, even teeth.' (62)
The subversive kernel of this scene is the vague impression that, even in the midst of such ostensible decorum and human supremacy; the human and the canine are melding. Max is turning into a human, fetching hats and matchboxes. Alternatively, the image of Mrs Blandish's small even teeth, seems irresistibly canine.
Even where there is no evidence of vicarious enjoyment, the humans in My Dog Tulip seem to identify dogs with some missing and important aspect of their own lives. Mr Plum, who owns Chum, another of Tulip's prospective mates, is a pathetic figure, saddened by his dog's infidelity ('He goes up to anyone' (69)). He is depressed that life with Mrs. Plum, who is 'not that keen on dogs', doesn't allow him the time he used to spend with Chum. 'I'd love to have him in with me like I did in my bachelor days', he says morosely. (74). Then there is Tulip's vet, Mrs Canvey, another figure from real-life, and the only human in My Dog Tulip not to receive an embarrassing pseudonym. It is she who gives to Ackerley the notion of Tulip as his 'savage lover and protector.' She tells him never to let anyone else feed Tulip - as Ackerley interprets it, because 'she wished to perpetuate the romantic situation which she herself had created and cherished.' (26) In their own way each of the human characters in My Dog Tulip, including Ackerley himself, perceive their dogs as the key to some more vital, sensual, romantic or exciting way of apprehending existence. They differ in the extent to which they are able to access this experience; some vicariously, some imaginatively, some seem forever barred from it.
Some of the other 'shock tactics' in My Dog Tulip are more blatantly anti-anthropocentric, calculated to offend the idea of human uniqueness and supremacy. During the chapter 'Liquids and Solids', immediately following his account of Tulip's pleasure in urinating on decomposing flesh, Ackerley describes an afternoon walk during which they came upon a human corpse being fished out of the river. 'I should have been interested to see how she behaved toward it', he remarks, 'but there were other spectators standing by, and I thought it wiser to call her off.' He then discusses the human practice of presenting animal heads in butcher shop windows, with their features arranged so that they appear to be grinning, or winking at the customer. 'Humans are so arrogant', he comments: '...any supposed indignity to their dead would be a very different matter' (45)
Ackerley's use of the word 'humans', and the phrase 'their dead', as if he were so disgusted that he would prefer to think of them as another species, is telling. What we begin to sense by the end of My Dog Tulip is a sort of re-arranged Scala Naturae, based upon Ackerley's order of merit, with animals at the top, humans underneath, and quite conceivably with British humans at the very bottom. Ackerley's most impassioned attacks on British 'decency' occur when it interrupts the free public copulation of canines. Throwing a bucket of water over a pair of mating dogs can result in the rupturing of the bitch 'by having shocked out of her the instrument which Nature had constructed to remain indefinitely locked within', but this 'is of small concern to the outraged puritan mind prating of public decency and the corruption of the young.' (150).
Ackerley's shock tactics, and, in the appendix, his outbursts of indignation, are directed most specifically at audience which has strongly internalised the Aristotelian, Judaeo-Christian anthropocentric model; which regards animals as inferior creations, or utilitarian objects. Peter Parker comments, 'Of all Ackerley's books My Dog Tulip is the one which still shocks people, often provoking an instinctive response of embarrassment or disgust' (316) - yet many readers do not apparently find My Dog Tulip offensive, and its reviews, on the whole, were extremely positive, and continue to be so. In an attempt to establish some sort of demographic profile for the reader who might object to Ackerley's content, I asked the owner of an American Dog-bookstore to describe for me the reactions of her customers to My Dog Tulip, She writes:
People who love the book... aren't obsessed with being
dominant in all aspects of the dog's life... People who
tell me the book offended them have so far all been
involved in the breeding, selling, and showing of dogs
(occupations that, as far as I know, are of only casual
interest to people in the pro-"Tulip" group).
This is corroborated somewhat by amazon.com's reader reviews of Marjorie Garber's 'Dog Love', in which the only respondent who claims to have been badly offended by the book is identified as a professional dog breeder and shower. Considering Ackerley's determination that Tulip will remain, as Forster puts it, 'a dog of dogdom and not... an appendage of man', perhaps it is significant that the book finds such opposition amongst people whose profession involves a continuous reiteration of human superiority, and canine obedience; a strictly demarcated power relationship.
In My Dog Tulip, Fluke and Sylvia anthropocentric concepts of human uniqueness and exclusivity are dismantled, and species barriers are eroded by modes of egalitarianism which elevate the status of the canine protagonist. The themes of freedom, transformation and instinctual liberation which emanate from these processes are often imbedded in the wider context of a questioning of the civil and emotional proscriptions of mainstream society. Nevertheless, Ackerley, Gurney and Herbert take steps to ameliorate the immediate impact of this subversive material. These measures would be unnecessary if the texts were not concerned with reaching a wider audience, and, although My Dog Tulip is presently out of print, each of the three texts attained considerable popular success, despite their sometimes controversial subject matter.
The re-negotiation of concepts of humanness, animality and human uniqueness is a process which continues to occur across a variety of discourses, and its popularity in fiction and film continues to escalate: in the period during which I prepared this essay, the appearance of human-canine crossover texts has continued unabated. Published last month was The Whistler, an Australian science-fiction novel featuring a reincarnated dog who remembers his former human lives. At the cinema this month, Eddie Murphy talks to the animals as the 1990's Doctor Doolittle, while on video, Jack Nicholson is transformed by canine affiliation in As Good as it Gets, and Disney releases Air Bud - a movie about a golden retriever who becomes an integral member of a basketball team. In the past few weeks the Animorphs marketing concept - texts featuring children who have the ability to turn into animals - has been unleashed.
Not merely do these texts continue to blur the distinction between species; the assault on anthropocentrism seems now to be sufficiently 'mainstream' for it to have penetrated children's entertainment. Perhaps the most extreme inversion of the Scala Naturae comes in the form of All Dogs go to Heaven - the television series of which currently screens in the United States on the Warner cable TV channel. In this vision of the afterlife, the Christian Heaven, complete with Gabriel's Horn, is populated solely by dogs. Humans, it seems, don't make it.
Greg, Ackerley, and Fluke are transformed by their liaison with a canine Other; reconnected with some quality or sensibility which had been occluded by modern life. There is one other factor common to all the stories: the canine does not solicit the human; it yields up powers which transform, but it does so passively, even unknowingly. Sylvia admits, 'I'm only a dog.' (130) Perhaps more than anything it is this state of being 'only' - the imperceptibility toward which all Becomings aspire, which holds the power of redemption for the modern, urban humans in these texts.
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