The predators in our minds

In Ursula K Le Guin’s essay First Contact, she speaks of an encounter with a rattlesnake in the tall grass on an old ranch in California. As her husband runs off to get help, she stays, eyes locked with the snake, a feeling as intense as falling in love, “a matter of life and death.” She thinks of that moment as a bond between creatures who do not usually relate to each other in this way.

Perhaps some of us have experienced such a moment, where to look at a creature is either a moment of absolute otherness or kinship, jolting us into a sense of sharing the same world but so far apart from one another. John Berger says that we become aware of ourselves as humans when we look at animals, especially when they look back.

Humans have tried to look at animals and understand this distance in different ways. There are natural history and behavioural accounts of the human gaze on the animal, whether the journal observations of Charles Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle that gave rise to evolutionary theory, or memoirs of behavioural studies from Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of

Man speaking about chimpanzees to Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir about baboons. But what are the limits of this ‘scientific’ gaze, and how might we consider the power hierarchy between humans and animals? How does fiction perhaps, to borrow from David Foster Wallace, consider the lobster?

Fiction has explored this distance and proximity — ethical, ecological, and emotional — in human encounters with animals in startling ways. Audrey Schulman’s fiction explores the breach of boundaries that can occur in the process of the human gaze on the animal in poignant and devastating ways.

In Theory of Bastards (2018), Dr Francine Burk, a psychologist in the near future, starts a job to study bonobo’s sexual behaviour in captivity. The novel is set in a time of extreme weather events, habitat destruction, and artificial intelligence, explores themes of desire, and survival, and asks what walls separate us from the animal. Her other novel The Dolphin House (2022) is based on a real-world experiment with bottlenose dolphins in the 1960s.

Our protagonist in this novel is a hearing-impaired woman Cora, who lives near and works with captive dolphins to teach them to speak English, in a male-dominated world of science.

The book is about her ability to grow close to the dolphins and understand them, and her eventual attempts to protect them and herself. Both women in these books struggle with patriarchal norms and constraints in their bodies, finding affinity with the animals they study. 

Bear (1976) by Marian Engel explores human whimsy in the face of an animal even further, telling us the story of Lou, a woman working to inventory the estate of a Colonel who owned a bear on a remote Canadian island. As she takes stock of the library, she comes in contact with the bear as a companion in surprising ways. 

In all these novels, the animals tell us something about the humans who meet them, querying the limits of our knowledge and endeavours. The books are about what John Berger calls the “animals of the mind”, in the face of a world where we marginalise real animals into corners of danger and violence. 

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.

The author is a writer and editor based in Mysuru. She enjoys non-fiction about politics and society, and the punny brilliance of Anthea Bell.