No.45 - The geology of Dante's Inferno

Did Satan become a meteorite?

"Creation/Fall" (Dan Wylie 2017; acrylic on canvas)

In the early 14th century Dante Alighieri, author of the matchless Divine Comedy, would not have known about meteorites. Yet the rocky architectures of his Inferno ironically suggest something just like that.

Inferno fascinates me for many reasons besides the religious and the ethical questions it raises. While teaching it again recently, it struck me how pervasive is the presence of rock in the poem, how elaborate its depiction, how intricate its relationships to both ancient mythologies and the geographies of Dante’s real Italian life.

Google “Dante’s Inferno + rock” and you’ll discover some pretty odd stuff, including some hard-rock bands who favour spicing their songs with diabolical imagery, and a route-map to a rock climb named Dante’s Inferno on Old Reservoir Wall in Eden Park, Ohio. Not many seem to have written at length about this aspect of the poem, though: I found one sketchy article, and a chapter in a book on mediaeval geology that I can’t presently access. No doubt there’s more out there, but why take the fun out of having my own run at it? I’m also having fun re-imagining the vivid landscapes in paint: as the character-pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil descend the multiple, narrowing circles of Hell, they are constantly encountering geological features: valleys and fissures and giddying cliffs, rivers of blood and swamps of boiling mud, jagged ridges and ditches, embankments and screes and a series of stone bridges. Those famously appalling words, Abandon hope all ye who enter here, are carved on a gateway of rock.

Oddly – and inexplicably – some features seem to have been built by the hand of man: the walls of the City of Dis halfway down, seemingly of “cast iron”, with “deep-dug moats” and huge towers sending undeciphered signals into the void; sarcophagi with carved lids; pathways. But even these apparently manufactured features, despite the paradoxical implication that eternal Hell is subject to change through time, have all the force of a terrible geological permanence.

Geological? The word ‘geology’ was only invented in 1795, and in Dante’s time knowledge of earth processes was still primitive. Much of what passed for science then was derived from the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle – and even his unflagging curiosity was available to Dante only indirectly through commentators such as the Persian Ibn Sina (a.k.a. Avicenna, d.1037) and Isidore of Seville. Aristotle had proposed something like continental tectonic-plate movement in his Meteorology (circa 350 BC); Isidore in his Etymologies (circa 610) aired the current theories of why the earth was demonstrably unstable:

The earth’s natural attribute is that of dryness, for if it is moist, that comes from a union with water. Of its motion some say that it is the wind in its hollows that, itself moved, moves the earth. ... Others maintain that lifegiving water moves in the earth and simultaneously shakes it, like a vessel, as for instance Lucretius (see On the Nature of Things). Yet others are of the opinion that the earth is “spongy”, and that its mostly hidden, collapsing interior shakes everything placed upon it. Also, an opening in the earth is created through the movement of water in the lower regions, or through repeated thunder, or through winds that erupt from cavities of the earth.

And Isidore, in his encyclopaedic geographical survey, notes the volcanic activity and visible lava of Mount Etna on Sicily and on the neighbouring Aeolian islands which “burn like Etna” and were “riddled with caves and tunnels” – real precedents for Hell which Dante would have read about, if not actually visited. Isidore, who took the actual existence of ancient mythic figures and places for granted, also described Paradise (“in the east”), thus:

A spring which bursts forth in the centre irrigates the whole grove and it is divided into the headwaters of four rivers. Access to this location was blocked off after the fall of humankind, for it is fenced in on all sides by a flaming sword, that is, encircled by a wall of fire, so that the flames almost reach the sky. Also the Cherubim, that is, a garrison of angels, have been drawn up above the flaming sword to prevent evil spirits from approaching, so that the flames drive off human beings, and angels drive off the wicked angels, in order that access to Paradise may not lie open either to flesh or to spirits that have transgressed.

 Isidore seemed to envisage a wheel-shaped Earth, but most, including Dante, knew it for a sphere, even if no one knew the full nature of its core. It is this mundane sphere with which the rebellious Satan, booted out of Heaven, calamitously collides. So massive is the impact that it at once creates the entire, funnel-shaped hollow of Hell, from one side of the planet to the other. In fact, only in the closing lines of Inferno, after they have traversed all nine terrible circles, does Virgil explain to Dante how this worked. They have just scrambled over the hairy flanks of Satan himself, locked in ice, and are about to emerge at the foot of Mount Purgatory, directly opposite on the globe from Jerusalem (I like to fancy this is Table Mountain):

On this side he fell down from Heaven; the earth,

Which till then had stood out here, impelled by fear

Veiled itself in the sea and issued forth

In our own hemisphere. And possibly,

What now appears on this side fled its berth

And rushing upwards left a cavity:

This hollow where we stand.

(Canto 34; Robert Pinsky’s translation)

In short, the shape of Hell is formed by the very earth shrinking from the repellent presence of evil.

As for the details of the resulting stony architecture – Dante strikes an extraordinary balance between mathematical precision in the arrangement of sins-to-circles, and an atmosphere of monstrous chaos – these are often paralleled with geology on the surface:

Where a wall of mountains rises

To form fair Italy’s border above Tirolo

Lies Lake Benaco, fed by a thousand sources: ...

There, all the cascades Benaco cannot contain

Within its bosom join in one river that flows [and]

Soon spreads to a marsh...

(Canto 20)

Descriptions of parts of the underworld are similarly precise:

 

"Transitions" (Dan Wylie, 2017)

                                    We travelled across

            To the circle’s farther edge, above the place

            where a foaming spring spills over a fosse.

            The water was purple-black; we followed its current

            Down a strange passage. This dismal watercourse

            Descends the greyish slopes until its torrent

            Discharges into the marsh whose name is Styx.

                        (Canto 7)

This kind of precision is deftly melded with the landscapes culled and modified from the various Classical accounts of others’ visits to imagined Underworlds: Orpheus, Ulysses, Theseus, Aeneas. So, for example, the pilgrims cross two of the rivers of the Greeks’ mythical Hades, Acheron and Styx, with their respective grumpy boatmen. But Dante also draws on apocryphal Christian texts (there is surprisingly little about hell in the Bible itself). Of these, the most geologically interesting is the so-called “Harrowing of Hell”, first related in the Gospel of Nicodemus. This is a mythic event in which Christ, between Crucifixion and Resurrection, visits Hell in order to liberate a clutch of deserving souls – and in so doing causes a substantial earthquake. Dante knew about earthquakes in seismically unstable Italy, describing one in Canto 12:

                                    This side of Trento

There is a place a landslide fell and struck

The Adige’s flank: because of unstable ground

Or earthquake, rocks once tumbled from the peak

And formed a passage where people can descend –

Such was the footing we had in that ravine...

Indeed, on the bank of Acheron “the earth of that grim shore/ began to shake: so violently / I shudder and sweat recalling it now” (Canto 3). Earth tremor as psychological terror. At several points in the narrative Virgil and Dante have to negotiate the damage of the Harrowing: at one juncture, Virgil sort of slaloms down a loosened scree holding a terrified Dante in his lap like a baby; at another, the sixth of the ten rock bridges across the ditches of the Eighth Circle has collapsed, necessitating some awkward and exhausting climbing. The lithic architecture of this realm – Malebolge – is precise:

A wide deep pit: concerning its design

"Trust" (Dan Wylie, 2017)

I shall say more in time. A belt remains

Between the base of that high wall of stone

And the central pit, a circular band divided

In ten concentric valleys, as in a plan

Where guardian moats are successively graded

Around a castle’s walls.

            (Canto 18)

The sixth bridge was shattered, as one resident of Hell informs the pilgrims, 1265 years previously – that is, when Christ was 35, the poem being set at Easter, AD 1300. By negotiating the wreckage of the bridge, Dante and Virgil are in a way re-celebrating that event: the 35-year old Dante, following Christ into Hell, is in the process of resurrecting his own sin-bedevilled soul.

            One could write a lot more, but suffice it to end with a speculation that rock itself is so present in the poem that it is virtually a character in its own right. It almost has agency. In an unremittingly over-written but provocative recent book, Stone: An ecology of the inhuman (2015), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen avers:

The philosopher Michel Serres argues that stone is the foundation of story at every archaeological level of human history. ... Stone becomes history’s bedrock as lithic agency impels human knowing. Neither dead matter nor pliant utensil, bluntly impedimental as well as collaborative force, stone brings story into being, a partner with language (just as inhuman), a material metaphor.

Though he has little to say about Dante or Inferno, Cohen pertinently adds:

Thinking geologically brings the mediaeval and the modern into unaccustomed proximity and reveals how, when imagining deep time, a shared vocabulary of cataclysm reveals an abiding inclination to stories of rocky entanglement, to the making of exigent and unexpected art.

*******

No.44 - Swimming off Cape Town: Unexplored theme #23

Like most middle-class touristic people who visit Cape Town, I guess, I have now and then dunked my semi-naked body in one or another of the surrounding seas. Always there is someone in the water off Fish Hoek or Muizenberg, Kommetjie or Clifton Beach. What does it all mean? Why do some perform this strange ritual, while others are terrified? What is the social meaning of this liquid sensuality? How has the sheer geography of this ocean-girt city inflected the behaviour of its inhabitants? Can the disparate motivations of all those individuals add up to a pattern, an identifiable ripple in the fabric of our society?

Naturally, there are more writers in Cape Town than you can shake a fresh steenbras at, and many of them have written about swimming off Cape Town – as far as I know a wholly unexplored literary motif. 

I started thinking about this – or doing something in my head resembling swimming more than thinking – because in browsing the poetry journals, as one does, I couldn’t help noticing how many swimming poems there are. These are quite distinct from poems about the ever-present ocean itself – what Finuala Dowling called in one poem the “Mad Atlantic” – and distinct from perhaps equally numerous beach-walk poems. It’s the act of immersion that intrigues me, the contact of human skin and salt water, and the relations of this immersion to gender, class and race, to sharks and gulls and kelp, to pleasure and fear, to athleticism and escape, to baptism and reverence. Poems and novels begin to hint at the layered meanings that swimming bears for its various practitioners.

One might start with two extracts from poems by well-known Capetonian poet and academic Kelwyn Sole. In “Poems of the sea for me”, the ocean is both “motherland” and “fatherland”:

Here

to run closer

and dive in

means to

come to

a jolt of blindness

a mordancy of salt

that only shocks

until it passes, and

the swimmer

can perceive

differently

to before

- my fatherland’s the sea (New Contrast 39:48)

Sole’s poem “Ocean” sounds more cynical about our condition. Perhaps the sea (as Natal poet Douglas Livingstone repeatedly suggested) is our ultimate origin, to which we subconsciously long to return – so we at some level feel weirdly in exile on land:

                                    the sea

does not coddle its children;

we hunker down through squalls,

trust to skidding compasses

past sleeting rain and windscream

merely to be exiled, again and again,

finally stranded ashore: and come

to ourselves walking upon doctrines

of rock                         or sand

Often immersion in the sea is used as a metaphor for something else – the progression of a love-relationship, for example.  This is the case in Rosamund Handler’s “Letter from...”

the cowed hush of waves

made me feel

ephemeral at twenty-two

the lichened rock

to which I clung

rigid as the face of a dead man

winter again

so many seasons untraceable

yet I recall how it was:

how I could have let go

if only you had held fast 

(New Contrast 148:19)

Sarah Frost’s “From the sea” takes this kind of figuration a bit further, here depicting the struggles of the poet herself:

You, poet, alone, immobile, at your keyboard,

the night sighing, a stranger at your back.

You wrestle the anger of the invisible,

lay it down. Stop picking at the scab of ‘not good enough’,

that makes you mute, look around.

Poets shoal within reach,

also surfacing to breathe. (New Contrast 151:11)

This makes for a nice segue to a novel which is also centrally about a poet and the sea, Finuala Dowling’s lovely What Poets Need, whose cover actually depicts a man swimming. The novel’s protagonist, struggling poet John Carson, regularly escapes into the water. Sometimes he has kids in tow:

Another still, hot day dawned, buzzing with the expectations of school holidays. This morning I took Sal, Harriet and Vera’s Alan with me when I went down for my swim at Dalebrook pool. Alan so loved it he stood before me shivering and thin in his towel, asking could we stay there all day ... On the slippery back wall of the tidal pool, Sal fights with him (hand to hand combat) but then steps back in her little Speedo costume and says, ‘I’m the princess. I don’t fight’. (176)

The following passage is particularly suggestive.

I swim there [Fish Hoek] at least once a week, usually because the tidal pool here is empty of water or too full of people. The men who swim at Fish Hoek corner in the morning are very interested in the water temperature. ’16.9’, they like to say, heartily, reading from a thermometer pendant. The women just stride in, adjusting their bathing caps and laughing as they catch waves on their boogie boards. I’m sort of friendly to them, but quite relieved once I’ve passed the breakers and am alone.

            I thought today about those few seconds before you’re properly ‘in’ cold water: how unpleasant it feels as you stand there clutching your unwilling sides. It must be fear of the evolutionary step backwards: back to the old amphibian life. Then, when you’re in, how lovely it is, all cares gone.

In that, you can feel the subtle pressures of gender roles, tensions between companionship and solitude, dress fashions, the imprint of scientific models. And there are more (so to speak) undercurrents in the next extract: sensitivity to seasonal changes, seaborne occupations, modes of leisure, the interface of sea and human architectures – and the internally liberating effect of the swim itself:

In October, you can still see whales breaching, and hear them blowing. Always on calm days there are kayaks gliding, and in almost all weathers, a fishing boat near the horizon. I rest my arms on the wet wall, look across at Simon’s Town bay in the distance and the harbour with its protective dolosse in the foreground, and say to myself, This is your life. It is hard to believe I am so lucky. (195)

The assumption that “swimming is always therapeutic” can be deceptive, though. John Carson takes his ailing 70-year old mother swimming:

 ... I stayed with her till she seemed to be swimming at her ease. Then I struck out as usual, aiming for the round house at Sunny Cove as my marker. I turned back at one point to check on her, but she wasn’t there. I was puzzled, peering. Something was wrong. I swam back inshore as rapidly as I could. Two men – a father and son, I think – were lifting my mother’s frail, limp body out of the water. She’d decided to cut her swim short, she’d been returning to the shore, when a wave had come from behind and felled her.

            We helped her to her feet. She spluttered and staggered ... She hardly spoke again after that, though she lived another two weeks. (204)

The antithesis between the therapeutic and the dangerous swim is also featured in perhaps the best-written of the novels I touch on here: Justin Cartwright’s White Lightning (2002). The rather unfortunately-named James Kronk has returned from England to the Cape to tend his dying mother. He tries to reintegrate by, among other things, connecting with ‘nature’ through mountain walks – and swimming:

The fuzzy lights on the lower levels of the mountain are visible in the biscuit twilight as i enter the water. I catch a wave easily – they are strong but benign, rolling resolutely to the beach – and then another. The water always feels warmer after the sun has set, warmer and more viscous. I emerge from the waves a better man, towel myself, and sit at the water’s edge. (180).

But the mad Atlantic is fickle, and late in the novel Kronk’s own internal and societal unravelling (I won’t reveal too much) is reflected in turbulent weather. He is chased into the sea by some angry pursuers. This is escape for real, rather than escapism:

The grey waves are huge. The wind is holding them back so that they rise and fall sharply, their crests dispersed by the wind. Gulls cry in their cold-hearted fashion. Here on shore the rain and the mist are so low that the tops of the sand dunes are obscured, but out to sea, some miles away, a filtered light strikes the water, forming a silver island within the bay. ... I run in up to my waist  and then dive into a breaker. As I emerge from this mountain of water, another huge wave follows and tumbles me over, so that I am rolled towards the beach, where the seven men are waiting. ... I am beyond the breakers now, swimming steadily, breast-stroke. My plan is to swim far out of sight and wait until night falls, perhaps an hour away, and then come ashore in the dark. ... I keep swimming ... out to where my father nearly caught the biggest Red Steenbras ever seen ... (237).

I won’t spoil the ending for you. But it’s a reminder that for all the swimmers taking their pleasure, there are those who failed to swim, and died: so many shipwreck victims, the Xhosa chieftain Makana, who drowned trying to escape from Robben Island in 1819, to the famously suicidal Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker, who walked into the ocean to drown in 1965. In the very first poem of André Brink’s selection of translations, Black Butterflies (2007),  entitled “Escape”, Jonker wrote of death in water as a liberation from her own mental distress:

From this Valkenberg [mental hospital] have I run away

and in my thoughts return to Gordon’s Bay

...

Washed out my body lies in weed and grass

in all the places where we once did pass.

So, more or less, it transpired. But let’s end on a more cheerful note – a scene from, of all places – Agatha Christie’s one southern African-set crime thriller, The Man in the Brown Suit (1924):

I caught a fast train to Muizenberg and got there in about half an hour. It was a nice trip. We wound slowly round the base of Table Mountain, and some of the flowers were lovely. My geography being weak, I had never fully realized that Cape Town is on a peninsula, consequently I was rather surprised on getting out of the train to find myself facing the sea once more. There was some perfectly entrancing bathing going on. The people had short curved boards and came floating in on the waves. It was far too early to go to tea. I made for the bathing pavilion, and when they said would I have a surf board, I said “Yes, please.” Surfing looks perfectly easy.  It isn’t. I say no more. I got very angry and fairly hurled my plank from me. Nevertheless, I determined to return at the first possible opportunity and have another go. I would not be beaten. Quite by mistake I then got a good run on my board, and came out delirious with happiness. Surfing is like that.  You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself. (94)

So much for being at sea on a “plank”.

*****

No.43 - Great White Stories

I thought it wasn’t going to happen. They phoned to say the weather was too bad.  It was: an icy wind was blustering in off the South Atlantic, whipping the sea into opaque soapy breakers, offshore a blistering of whitecaps. I settled for a peek at a huddle of miserable-looking African penguins on the old slipway of the Betty’s Bay whaling station. Plinths carried blurry sepia photos of the historic slaughter. This little group of penguins is also the remnant of a far larger population, drastically reduced because the over-fishing of their food sources. There are few oceanic species that have escaped the depredations of humans – not even the great predators.

The following day another call: the weather looks to improve, perhaps we are on after all; would I like to make myself available? For a mere 1600 clams, why not? I drive down to the coast again; the day is overcast and a little ruffled, not ideal but calm enough for the boats. Sightings are possible though not guaranteed. After a briefing delivered with rough humour, seventeen of us board the rather diminutive boat: an international coterie of hopeful and slightly nervous gawkers: an English accountant, a Spanish couple (she gung-ho, he reticent), a pair of American women, a family group of over-exuberant Mancunians. We churn and bounce out across the green swells, cold spray slashing back across the sides.  Then slow and drift to a stop.  There are several boats out here already, slopping fish oil into the sea and attracting flocks of gulls and skuas.  And, hopefully, great white sharks.

We have been divvied into small groups, the none-too-substantial looking cage winched around to the side and roped tight, and we have wrestled ourselves into the clammy rubber of wetsuits.  Mine has a rent in the shoulder I hope wasn’t the result of a bite.  We wait.  The chum slicks the surface of the sea to the west; a sailor is dunking the head of a tuna on a rope and dragging it back and forth hopefully. (Tuna is also pretty endangered, incidentally.)  The time seems ripe: we don masks and clamber over the side. This is not so much a shark-dive as a human-dunk. I am caged in with the raucous group from Manchester. Perhaps big fish don’t worry about squeaking yells and appalling jokes, but I do wish they’d shut up; it seems disrespectful.

At any event, more or less on cue, a couple of great whites make passes at the tuna head in front of us, two-metre whipping shapes. People yell “Down!” but there’s not too much to be seen under water, visibility poor after the storms of the day before. Still, one shark bangs up against the cage a foot from my nose, a slick of violent grey, the raked gills, the famously indifferent eye, gone in two seconds. I know they must be tough animals, but it can’t be good thrashing into corners of metal.

Indeed, emerging from this mildly exciting encounter, I feel deeply ambivalent about the whole enterprise. There are too many tourist boats out here, greasing the sea with fish-oil and guts and noise. The sharks attracted in expend a good deal of energy for no reward, and with unpredictable effects on their hunting and communal lives, and thus on the ecosystem more generally. I understood we would have a marine biologist on board, underlining putative links between the tourist outings and research; but we have only a professional diver effectively on vac from repairing North Sea oil rigs. I ask him about the allegation that chumming has exacerbated shark attacks on humans; he predictably denies it, claiming that tagged sharks show they only stay in the bay for 4 to 7 weeks, too short to learn any dependency on chumming. The chum is pure fish, no mammal material permitted.  In any event, attacks on humans are minimal to almost vanishing-point: according to posters back at the office, 419 people die annually from faulty toasters, maybe 4 in shark attacks – and up to a hundred million sharks are killed by humans.  Not even our great oceans can sustain that level of slaughter.

The arguments for and against cage-diving are fierce and various (see here). The usual argument ‘for’ is that the experience is uniquely educational – but in fact one learns little from watching a three-metre shark thrash at the tuna head for a few violent seconds. Not that I’m not glad to have seen it, but the situation is shot through with a certain artificial contrivance, a edge of intrusiveness. There’s a certain kind of education best accessed through film and literature, and through just leaving the animals alone.

Of course, being that kind of guy, I started fossicking about for shark literature. There are numerous web sites advertising “shark poems”, most of them for kids and a large number of them very bad. I did find one poem, by Australian Rachel Mead, which captured my own feelings about the shark dive beautifully – we are “human bait”, she says, “exhibiting ourselves to the wild”, ultimately unable to remember much about the vibrant glimpse one is accorded:

It’s difficult to know what to tell you, what I saved

from that oddly geometric world, the hard blue planes

speared with light, the hollow toll of cage on boat,

those plates of cold sliding between wetsuit and skin.

South African writing on sharks seems as sparse as the sharks themselves. Such references as exist are usually more symbols of something else, something in ourselves, not about the sharks themselves. Sydney Clouts’s poem “The Shark”, for example, is about lovers in a forest, the circling shark an image of some unspoken inner fears.  In Henrietta Rose-Innes’ novella Shark’s Egg, we are a little closer, though inevitably land-bound.  On the opening page, the protagonist Joanna recalls beach-combing near Cape Town and finding

a curious black pod, with a spine the length of her little finger at each corner.  When she picks it up it leaves a neat impression in the damp sand.

            Look, look here, what’s this?

            Her mother turns it over carefully with her pale fingers. It’s a shark egg, she says, her voice regretful, handing it back to the child. Some people call them mermaid’s purses.

            ... At home, sceptical, she cuts the object open with a pair of nail-scissors. Inside, the embryo is still alive, a perfect little shark no bigger than a new tadpole. It gapes and thrashes its tail, at last expires. ... Joanna is shaken, and for days feels deeply guilty.

            But also powerful: she has killed a shark.

Later in the novel, Joanna works in an aquarium, and sees real sharks – but always in their entrapment, separated from them by translucent glass.

South African-born writer Basil du Toit has a poem about a shark.  It, too, is dead: the poem is entitled “Unravelling a Shark”, depicting a post-mortem in which the shark is reduced to the mechanical:

Slabs of plumbing run the length of its body

like the dust bag in a vacuum cleaner;

its works are as plain and practical

as the rubber windpipes in a car’s engine.

And then the shark becomes symbolic of humans once again:

...sometimes we use the mauling ethics

of the shark: betraying, and moving on,

leaving behind us the shocked and shattered meat

of marriages, girlfriends, daughters.  (Older Women, Snailpress, 1996)

Not much justice accorded the deceased shark.  In 1987, Etienne de la Harpe wrote “Shark”, in which the speaker descends in a dive through a rainbow of watery lights towards a vision of death itself,

And meeting the true host of this

dark ocean sky:

all long-lethal lethargy, of tapered steel-grey,

and blunt with a deadness of eye. (25/25, 1989)

I haven’t searched much further – but isn’t there a work out there that honours the shark, for the shark’s sake?

*****

No 42 - Animal victims in Zimbabwean literature

I’m probably always pursuing too many ideas at once, too many interests. Occasionally two independent strains of enthusiasm will intersect and spark something intriguing. I try, for example, to keep something of an eye on the literature coming out of my homeland, Zimbabwe. At the same time, colleagues here at Rhodes University and at the University of Stellenbosch have cooked up a conference, with hopefully a book of edited essays to follow, on dogs in southern African literature. We hope to fill an obvious gap in local animal-studies scholarship; I’ve alluded in previous blogs to how pervasive the presence of dogs is, yet there’s been little sustained study. The conference, taking place at Stellenbosch next fortnight, will begin to address the neglect.

So I decided to address the two interests at once, and present a paper on the presence of dogs in some recent Zimbabwean fiction which deals with the post-2000 ‘land reform’ process. Two novels in particular – Graham Lang’s Place of Birth and Ian Holding’s Unfeeling – incorporate a strong canine presence. Dogs are, in the first instance, guards and companions, especially to the white farmers’ youngsters who are protagonists in these stories. Some dogs accompany these youths as they hunt little game across their farms; other packs of dogs accompany black youths doing much the same. Above all, though, the dogs are victims of political processes and associated violence in which they have no agency. In both novels, the white farmers’ dogs are slaughtered as violent land take-overs unfold: they become ciphers, stand-ins, symbols, for all the land dispossession and racist abuse local peoples feel to be the driving dynamic of their recent history. The animals generally are also soft targets, both in the sense of being unable to defend themselves and as a vector for emotional vulnerability: killing them can strike at the heart of whites’ affection and psychological well-being. In fact, I have entitled my conference paper, “Auntie Marsha, they’ve killed the dogs” – the first post-attack cry from Holding’s traumatised young protagonist.

These novels are far from the first to include a canine element in the Rhodesia-Zimbabwe land story. In the 1970s, Laurens van der Post wrote a somewhat prescient novel of black military take-over and white flight, A Far-Off Place, and then its sequel, A Story like the Wind. The fleeing young farmer-boy protagonist, Francois, is importantly accompanied by a super-supportive dog Hintza (named after the Xhosa chieftain). Hintza is, perhaps inevitably, a Rhodesian Ridgeback.

Someone mentioned that an even earlier writer, Doris Lessing, had written a dog-related story. I’m not sure I’ve discovered the story in question, but I’ve been struck, in re-reading Lessing’s 1951 collection, This was the Old Chief’s Country, of the frequency of animal victims in them.  Several are related in some detail: animal presences were seen as important to a fluid and fragmentary white community searching for an ethical centre. The examples I find illustrate perhaps three fundamental, and intricately interlocking, facets of white belonging on the land: the defended homestead; agriculture; and the wilderness.

In the first aspect, dogs feature regularly as guardians of the rural farmhouse – and suffer for it. Lessing’s story “Little Tembi” foreshadows much later white Rhodesian fiction, including the fate of the dogs in Lang and Holding. Tembi is a Shona orphan partly supported by a farming family; but the subtle abuses he suffers he avenges by stooping to theft. So the family buys two large fierce dogs. The wife, Jane, resents being

greeted on her way from house to storerooms  by the growling of hostile dogs who treated everyone, black and white, as an enemy .... They bit everyone who came near the house, and Jane was afraid for her children. However, it was not more than three weeks after they were bought that they were found lying stretched in the sun, quite dead, foam at their mouths and their eyes glazing. They had been poisoned ...

Such are the hazards, Jane’s husband Willie grumbles, of living in “this damned country”. Of course, many whites continued to live there, sometimes bound by an undeniable love.

Part of that love seemed to be for the activity of agriculture itself – the second aspect. Here too Lessing was both unsparing in her depictions of grimy and fractious white domestic lives, and generously adventurous in her portrayals of black characters. Some of her Rhodesian contemporaries vilified her for it.  Her portrait of a cattle driver, ‘The Long One’, in her story “The Nuisance”, is a subtle concoction of admiration and ethical doubts:

In his own line he was an artist – his line being cattle. He handled oxen with a delicate brutality that was fascinating and horrifying to watch. ...It was like watching a circus act; there was the same suspense in it: it was a matter of pride to him that he did not need to use the whip. This did not by any means imply that he wished to spare the beasts pain, not at all; he liked to feed his pride on his own skill. Alongside the double line of ponderous cattle that strained across acres of heavy clods, danced, raved and screamed the Long One, with his twelve-foot-long lash circling in black patterns over their backs; and though his threatening yells were the yells of an inspired madman, and the heavy whip could be heard clear across the farm, so that on a moonlight night when they were ploughing late it sounded like the crack and whine of a rifle, never did the dangerous metal-tipped lash so much as touch a hair of their hides. If you examined the oxen as they were outspanned, they might be exhausted, driven to staggering-point, so that my father had to remonstrate, but there was never a mark on them.

In this situation, the lines between cultural norms and compassion, between cruelty and mere utilisation, are blurry.

And thirdly, the wilderness, as threat or refuge, always looms on the edge of the domesticated fields and gardens.  It can be full of its own, independent violence: in “A Sunrise on the Veld” the boy-focaliser comes upon a buck being consumed alive by ants. He doesn’t bring himself to shoot the dying animal, since “this is how life goes on, by living things dying in anguish”, and he is overwhelmed by a “swelling feeling of rage and misery and protest”. So some characters seem to express that protest by exercising a countervailing compassion upon wild animal life; others respond by being indifferent to it. This is the difference between Major Carruthers, ethical English landowner, and Van Heerden, rough Afrikaner potential employee, in the story “The Second Hut”. The shabby quarters Carruthers offers Van Heerden have been colonised by a spider, “vast and glittering, shaking gently, glaring at them with small red eyes, from the centre of the web. Van Heerden did what Major Carruthers would have died rather than do: he tore the web across with his bare hands, crushed the spider between his fingers ... ‘It will do fine’ he announced.”

The ethical split starkly represented here, symbolic of a certain racism, is captured within a single character in the story “Leopard George”. The young farmer George finds himself having to hunt down a man-eating leopard.  The build-up is related with incremental delicacy, the outcome with wrenching ambivalence:

Image by Cindy Dardagan Britz

The low, ground-creeping thing showed a green glitter of eyes, and a sheen of moonlight shifted with the moving muscles in the flank. When the shape stilled and flattened itself for a spring, George lifted his rifle and fired. There was a coughing noise, and the shape stayed still. George lowered the rifle and looked at it, almost puzzled, and stood still. There lay the enemy, dead, not a couple of paces from him. Sprawled almost at his feet was the leopard, its body still tensing and convulsing in death. Anger sprang up again in George: it had all been so easy, so easy! Again he looked in wonder at his rifle; then he kicked the unresisting flesh of the leopard, first with a kind of curiosity, then brutally. Finally he smashed the butt of the rifle, again and again, in hard, thudding blows, against the head. There was no resistance, no sound, nothing.

Such killing is, in the end, utterly empty. Inflicting death on the animal, in the end, reveals nothing but the emptiness within ourselves.

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No 41 - Animals in the (post)apocalypse

A recent issue of Africa Geographic highlighted what it called an “Elephant Apocalypse” – meaning that elephants are (yet again) coming under intense pressure from ivory hunters.  The word “apocalypse” has become so loose that it more or less equates with “disaster”, or “severe damage”, rather than the complete cleaning-of-the-slate envisaged in the original Apocalypse relayed by John in the Book of Revelation.

Not that it’s easy to discern just how much destruction there is in that phantasmagoric prophecy, as it unfolds through its various bizarre and terrifying stages.  Just what is unveiled – apocalypse derives from the Greek for an unveiling or uncovering – is weirdly obscure.  My own question, though, is this: while the fate of sinful and repentant humans is obviously the central concern in Revelation – what is said of the fate of other species?

The short answer is: not much.  In one of the early stages of God’s ravaging of earth, one third of the earth, its forests and animals, are slated for termination.  Well, we humans are close to achieving that rate of extinction all by ourselves.  Thereafter, a number of nightmarish symbolic animal hybrids appear on both good and evil sides of the equation: four great “creatures” with animal features worship the Lord; four vari-hued horses bear the forbidding horsemen; locusts bear scorpion-like stings; a woman sprouts eagle’s wings; Jesus is the raging Lamb and Satan a “beast” with ten horns and seven heads or a vomiting serpent.  But these are obviously all metamorphic symbols of a distraught imagination; and until the last chapter, when John dismisses dogs, along with various human miscreants, “outside”, there is no sign of real animals at all, and certainly no concern for their moral or ecological well-being.

This sort of existential neglect still affects the views of many Christians today, though thankfully it’s being countered by movements within various churches advocating – instead of a Genesis-based “we command the earth” attitude – forms of ecological stewardship, sometimes including animal rights.  One can find arguments, drawing on a very different selection of Biblical quotations, placing animals firmly within God’s glorious creative ambit.

Meanwhile, humankind, with no apparent intervention from the divine, is visiting its own apocalypse upon the animal kingdom: nearly half of all non-human species destroyed just within the last 40 years.  Another form of literature – science-fiction or speculative literature – has for a long time been projecting this man-made catastrophe into our imagined future.  In these fictional apocalypses, there are almost always survivors left on earth to muddle through the aftermath, often in the company of animals.

Back when nuclear holocaust seemed imminent, Edwin Muir wrote his famous poem “The Horses”, in which horses re-emerge to save humans from their post-technology plight.  In the more misanthropic treatments, animals outlive the humans.  This is the case with American poet Anne Sexton’s 1962 poem “Venus and the Ark”.  In this slightly tongue-in-cheek updating of the Biblical Noah’s Ark story, a rocket mission is launched, bearing various odd animal species and two human PhDs, to colonise Venus – at which point Earth itself is obliterated in a nuclear war. Stranded on Venus, the captive animals get restless, and the two scientists release them:

  Trees sprang

            from lichen, the rock became a park ...

            it grew quick and noisy with

            a kind of wonder in the lonely air...

            and the waters grew, green came

            taller and the happy rats sped

            through the integrated forest...

Rather unwisely, the mission had neglected to include a breeding pair of humans!  A non-human ecosystem begins it all again: on their dying day they perceive “two fish creatures stop/ on spangled legs and crawl/ from the belly of the sea.”

As for fiction, many of us will have read Margaret Atwood’s futurist trilogy, especially the first, Oryx and Crake. The sequels – The Year of the Flood and MaddAdam (2014)– don’t quite match up, in my view, and there is always something just a bit obvious about Atwood.  She has insisted – not to everyone’s satisfaction – on a distinction between science-fiction, involving the technology-obsessed realms of time travel or other-planetary improbabilities, and speculative fiction, which takes current real-world trends and extrapolates them into a plausible future.  Most of the animals in the MaddAdam trilogy are clones and hybrids of various sorts – pigoons and the like – created by biotechnology which already exists.  Nevertheless, it still feels a little overblown and improbable, delivered with a certain teenage-y jocularity that doesn’t convince me of Atwood’s seriousness.

Much closer to a conventional and almost over-serious realism is another speculative trilogy: Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” series, set in a near-future Washington DC.  Government agencies, politicians and scientists grapple with abrupt and massive climate change.  In the first volume, Forty Signs of Rain (2004) the city is flooded by deluges of near-biblical scale.  Animals don’t appear much, but Robinson is thoroughly informed on current climate science.

Animals feature more strongly in the second volume, Fifty Degrees Below (2005), in which the polar ice-cap melts, causing a catastrophic shift in the offshore Gulf Stream (this is already happening).  The central character of the novel kind of goes feral: temporarily homeless, he builds a treehouse in a well-wooded park, which he shares with various animals.  Many of these have escaped from zoos and are having to adapt to changing climate – though many of them are having trouble with the rapid onset of unprecedentedly savage winter (again, this has already been happening).  Robinson conceives of a kind of multinational microcosm of the world’s animals: tapirs and okapi, jaguars and zebras.  The protagonist is especially fond of a group of gibbons, with whom he communicates after a fashion:

Other days he woke and could only struggle to escape the knot his stomach had been tied into during the night. Then it took the gibbons to free him. If they were within earshot, and he heard them lift their voices, then all was immediately well within him ... It was another gift. Sometimes he just listened, but usually he sang with them, if singing was the right word.  He hooted, whooped, called...

If Robinson here hints that animals presences are, if not actually vital to our lives, at least of therapeutic value, he is later in the novel both more scientific and less optimistic.  He notes that because of acidification of the oceans and temperature changes, the tiniest, almost invisible animalcules of the ocean – phytoplankton – the base of the pyramid upon which all other life rests, not excluding helping govern the oxygen-CO2 balance – are also threatened with extinction.  And at this point of the novel – set only marginally in the future – Robinson’s characters, scientists and policy-makers alike, are forced to realise that certain climate-change effects are now “unmitigable”: there is simply nothing that humans can do to halt the catastrophic processes that they themselves have induced.

Animals feature in at least two other perhaps less well-known post-apocalyptic novels.  One is John Updike’s Toward the End of Time (1997), which is as much a complaint about the ravages of old age as about a vaguely “post-war” future America – an unusual foray for the usually thoroughly realistic Updike.  The feisty essayist David Foster Wallace, despite being an Updike fan, gave this work a thorough mauling, claiming there was far too much introspection about the protagonist’s waning sexuality.  At any rate, it opens with a chapter entitled “The Deer”: some environmental awareness and animal issues are encapsulated in the main couple’s conflict over a deer.  It eats the wife’s roses, so she badgers her octogenarian husband to go out and shoot it with a shotgun – but by the time he totters out there it has always vanished...

Far more wacky is a final novel by the now unfairly-neglected Bernard Malamud, God’s Grace (1982).  Here the protagonist just happens to be alone at the bottom of the Marianas Trench in a submersible when nuclear holocaust overtakes the world.  He surfaces to find himself alone on the ocean with only one companion – a chimpanzee who has survived on board the mother ship, once subject to horrible experiments.  The chimp has learned to speak in human language, in fact (another in a long literary tradition of speaking apes, from Franz Kafka to Jeannette Winterson).  As the title indicates, there is quite a bit of discussion about what role God has played in this weird apocalypse (God converses, too).  When the pair eventually wash up on a remote island, they find other chimps, who also begin to learn human speech independently...

Few writers – Cormac McCarthy in The Road excepted, perhaps – seem willing to envisage a future without animals.  But with Donald Trump and Co apparently quite happy to make (nuclear-) warlike noises as well as to ignore environmental degradation, the fate of animals, including human animals, is looking as bleak as it has ever done. And one wonders, in our Trumpish ‘post-truth’ world, what is the role of fiction in affecting human consciousness.  Updike’s narrator in Toward the End of the Time ironically comments: “I never read fiction; after all its little hurly-burly what does it amount to but more proof that we are of all animals the most miserable?”  Yet this very outpouring of future scenario-building evidences our unquenchable – dare one say animal? – capacity for hope.

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