I’m just thinking off the top of my head about animal
novels. What are they for? Watership Down, Animal Farm. Charlotte’s Web. Some are allegories. Others feature animals to create an
alienation effect – to highlight irrational aspects of our own behaviour that
we have ceased to notice because of our entailment in the symbolic order of
ideology. Others still use different animals
to represent different human behavioural types and to characterise, within the
scope of some marionette-steered coda or other.
I didn’t want to do this, but did want to impose limitations: a language
devoid of human referents – very hard to achieve and fundamentally impossible
if etymology, logic comes a-knocking.
But also a convenient way of avoiding mobile phones; hashtags; stuff
that wrecks suspense and pins you to the mundane concerns of now... too much x-box. And the quoting, name-dropping, the necessary
web of allusions which is a secret handshake, passive-aggressive, with the
reader. Foxes don’t do that. Not that we should aspire to the timeless, to
ahistory, which is an easy myth that contains so many easy answers – as if we
could stop the world and subject it to our examination, our judgement! Just lose some of the baggage. And get some defamiliarisation, like good old
Coleridge (foxes don’t do that). “Thinking
off the top of my head” – foxes have heads, so they might use that idiom. And they might have dark thoughts or be cold
to each other. But they wouldn’t be on
the ropes or on the back foot. And they
don’t have such connotations or collocations.
If they are blinded then they literally or metaphorically cannot see - they
don’t use screens to keep the sunlight from their dens.
