‘O Caledonia’: A noir novel for the Anthropocene
In the novel, animalish Janet struggles to gain acceptance in the 'flawed and cruel' world of humans. She finds it bewildering that the worth of animals goes unrecognized.
CHELSEA JACK FITZGERALD: Elspeth Barker’s newly reprinted 1991 noir novel O Caledonia. Barker’s first and only novel set in postwar Scotland — dubbed “one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century” by author Ali Smith — was recently republished by Scribner just months after the author’s death…
After a cold opening, the novel travels back in time through the brief but intense life of a girl named Janet who, like Barker, moved with her family to a remote Scottish castle shortly after World War II. Lines between Barker’s life and her fictional protagonist’s run throughout the novel; both attend an all-boys preparatory school established by their parents and cope with social ostracism by turning to the company of books and animals…
Imaginative and animalish, Janet struggles to gain acceptance in the “flawed and cruel” world of humans. To get by, Janet seeks shelter in the nonhuman world, riding bareback through the woods and on the wild moors near her home at the castle. Animals, which she loves “without qualification,” give her comfort. She finds it bewildering that their worth (much like her own) goes so unrecognized: “Everywhere there was hideous cruelty to animals. Once as she rode past the sawmill she saw a deer hanging in an open-sided lean-to. They had chopped off its head and its legs to the knee”…
Janet questions the ethics of bringing more human life into the world. She notices that humans often do more harm than good, especially toward animals. Her actions suggest that humans should first try to do better, toward one another but also towards animals, before increasing their presence.
Janet models “wakefulness” in a damaged world. Philosopher Thom van Dooren has used this term to describe a way of paying attention to disappearing forms of life in the Anthropocene, an epoch shaped by the disproportionate and often devastating impacts of humans on the planet, including climate change, but also biodiversity loss and mass extinctions. When I say that Janet models this kind of wakefulness, I am thinking of a scene where she buries a squirrel that was struck by a car. This is one of several animal burials in the novel…
We also see multispecies solidarity when human and nonhuman characters negotiate oppressive conditions together. Janet cares for animals, but animals also care for Janet when people fail to do so… O Caledonia approaches multispecies solidarity by identifying how seemingly different groups experience like forms of oppression. For example, Barker repeatedly draws attention to manmade disabilities… The novel recommends multispecies alliances because membership in the same species does not guarantee solidarity…
In addition to maimed soldiers, we see how human actions disable both the myxomatosis rabbits and Claws, who, disfigured, was flung to the ground to die. Janet “worried about his crossed bill,” and if he would ever learn to feed himself. As he healed, “she was glad to see that his damaged beak was only a slight handicap. He could fend for himself.”
Likewise, women and animals are both forced into captivity. In one chapter, Janet’s mother exiles Cousin Lila — a strange but harmless spinster who lives with them but prefers whiskey and, like Janet, the company of animals — to an asylum called Sunny Days… Later, Vera takes her children to the zoo, where she insists the animals have “some freedom” despite the enclosures. “Janet stood watching the monkeys. How dispiriting to think that these were close relations”…
What kind of consideration do we owe nonhuman beings? Utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer famously — and controversially — asked this in his 1975 book Animal Liberation. In it, he argues against “speciesism,” the idea that human life has greater sanctity than nonhuman life. We owe equal consideration and humane treatment to animals, he says, because they can suffer and experience pleasure. The next part is where things get dicey. He points out that some animals are more cognitively capable than some humans, and yet we value the lives of those humans without question. Singer attributes this bias to speciesism, which he compares to racism and sexism. If we believe the lives of severely disabled people are worth protecting, he asks, then why not animals?
“It is easy to see where this logic can lead and why so many disabled people regard Singer as, well … scary,” disability scholar Sunaura Taylor says. We need a vision of multispecies solidarity, she argues, one that refuses to value nonhuman life by devaluing the lives of some humans. Taylor sees disability and animal rights as connected, insofar as ableism has oppressive consequences for both groups. Humans justify eating animals because they do not endow animals with the same abilities to experience suffering. Likewise, when social structures or attitudes lead a disabled person to feel less than, or merely tolerated, that signals ableism…
O Caledonia makes it unclear how, and if, humans can repair a damaged world. That mystery of the novel remains unsolved even after we learn who killed Janet. However, Barker suggests that there is no hope if humans persist in overlooking the second corpse. SOURCE…
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