1980s–2000s Texts

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates the survival of each form of literary animal representation: the realistic fantasy of knowing, the speculative fantasy of knowing, the failure of knowing, and the acceptance of not knowing. Each style is reflected in the four texts addressed in this chapter. Two fantasy of knowing narratives, R. D. Lawrence’s The White Puma (1990) and Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (1998), reveal that core characteristics of the wild animal story still survived a century after their creation. Likewise, perennial concerns about human uniqueness and our ability to know other animals resurface in the failure of knowing and acceptance of not knowing texts, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), respectively. Unusually, three out of the four books mirror contemporary cognitive ethology by depicting other animals as capable of consciousness. The fourth, Life of Pi, reflects a resistance to any narrowing of the human-animal divide and expresses a fear of anthropomorphism instead. All written at the turn of the twenty-first century, these four texts are united by questions of ‘survival.’ Unlike older examples of animal fiction, this uncertainty of survival extends beyond individuals or single species to the survival of ecosystems, humanity, and even ‘nature’ itself.