I reread “The Panther” by Rainer Maria Rilke quite often during the first couple years of the pandemic. Written in 1902, the poem describes a captive panther Rilke saw that year on exhibit at a menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. An otherwise powerful and graceful animal finds himself trapped, pacing tight circles in his cage (“der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht”). His world is just a thousand bars (“und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt”). A willful spirit has been paralyzed; his gaze has grown tired, hopeless.
I was drawn to this poem’s sense of paralysis and ennui during the pandemic, when many of us humans also felt trapped and bored. I’m certainly not comparing my experience of lockdown to that of Rilke’s panther, given that I, like many others, voluntarily distanced myself from the rest of the world to avoid catching or spreading the virus. By contrast, the panther is being held captive against his will.
However, I related to the captive animal in this poem differently, with a keener sensitivity, during the pandemic than I had previously. The Covid era has forced many of us to rethink the things we took for granted before, and imagine how things could be different after. Not just different, but better. It has been, in other words, an era of personal and collective reckonings.
Claire Fuller taps into this prevailing sense of reckoning in her novel The Memory of Animals precisely by setting the book in an eerily familiar world plagued by a global pandemic. In this world, the main character, Neffy, finds herself revisiting her past and, in particular, reckoning with memories of myriad injustices she has witnessed humans commit against animals.
The novel begins with Neffy, a disgraced and indebted marine biologist in her late twenties who volunteers as a paid human subject in a last-ditch vaccine trial to save humanity. However, the research trial quickly falls apart as the world outside the hospital descends into chaos. Neffy and a handful of surviving volunteers find themselves abandoned, essentially captive to circumstances beyond their control. Because the world outside feels perilously unsafe, they hole up in the hospital and wait to see if help comes, though without much hope.
During this time, Neffy writes letters in a notebook to a mysterious H, who (spoiler) turns out to be an octopus—but not just any octopus. H is a female octopus that Neffy met years ago while working at an aquarium. In these letters to H, Neffy laments how much time H spent in captivity under her watch: “You were known as a troublemaker: an octopus that liked to squirt the aquarists and refused to be handled.” Neffy remembers trying to connect with H by placing her hand in the water of H’s tank. “Soon you began to come out of your den when I approached your tank…Then finally a day came when you reached over the lip to wrap your arms around my wrist.” Neffy’s love for animals led her to work at the aquarium and also to regret some of what that work entailed.
“I wasn’t sure about it—confining animals in tanks,” Neffy writes in one letter to H. “But, I needed the money.” We might consider how Neffy seeks employment at an institution that confines animals because she finds herself limited—we might say, confined—by economic precarity (I needed the money). Fuller draws attention to how economic precarity in the human realm often leads to compromised or exploitative relationships with nonhuman beings. Justice for animals is a multispecies problem, then, insofar as it might not be achieved without also solving inequities in human communities, such as income inequality.
In her fourth novel, 2021’s Unsettled Ground, Fuller also draws attention to how inequitable economic conditions can make it difficult for people to maintain caring relationships with nonhuman beings. Unsettled Ground tells the story of Jeanie and Julius, 51-year-old twins who still live with their mother in the rural cottage where they grew up. They are quite poor. Julius bikes from one gig to the next, working as a day laborer; Jeanie and her mother Dot grow vegetables in their garden, which they sell for little money. When their mother dies unexpectedly, their landlord claims that Dot owed back payments on the cottage rent. Unable to pay the alleged debts, Jeanie and Julius are evicted and essentially become homeless. Eviction compromises their flourishing as human beings, but it also has negative repercussions for the nonhuman characters in the novel. For example, Jeanie and Julius live in an abandoned caravan in the woods after their eviction; one day a gang of thugs shows up and raids their makeshift home, and, in the chaos, Jeanie’s beloved dog Maude disappears. Similarly, Jeanie covertly returns to their boarded-up cottage after being evicted to tend her vegetable garden, which her former landlord would otherwise allow to perish. In these moments, economic precarity compromises the ability of central human characters to maintain the caring relationships with nonhuman animals and plants that they valued most.
In both of these novels, justice for animals does not have to come at the expense of justice for humans, and vice versa. Justice is not a zero-sum game. It is a multispecies project that involves correcting inequitable conditions that ultimately impact human and nonhuman animals alike.
If humans are to pursue justice for animals, how might we take nonhuman perspectives into account? Animals do not verbally communicate in the way humans do, so it is not obvious how humans can determine what an animal would consider just or good. This was a dilemma Rilke obviously thought about, too. His panther does not speak, but we see the animal pacing in his cage. He is restless and frustrated. Readers can imagine the animal’s inner life—his sense of hopelessness—behind an impassive, silent gaze in this translation by Martin Greenberg:
Except that now and then you see the curtain
of the pupils in dead silence rise—
an image enters, passes through the shoulders’ tight-drawn
stillness to the heart, and dies.
We do not need the panther to speak to imagine that his captivity is a great injustice.
How can we really know what animals want, or what they view as just or good? This is a question philosopher Martha Nussbaum approaches in her recent book Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. Nussbaum encourages readers to imagine that “animals are speaking all the time about what they want and what they don’t want.” Not literally, of course, but animals indicate their preferences through their behaviors and how they perceive the world around them. Nussbaum argues that “minimal justice is achieved only when a creature, in this case each variety of animal, has the opportunity to live a flourishing life of that species’ own kind.” This can only be realized when people recognize that each animal has its own capabilities, modes of perception, and goals.
The problem seems to be a lack of human imagination. Rilke suggests as much in another poem from his 1922 collection Sonnets to Orpheus. In it, he writes:
See the plate on the gaily laid table:
those fish, their strange expressions.Fish are mute…,one used to think. Who knows?
But is there not finally a place where what fish language
would be is spoken without them?
Rilke pushes readers to consider how failures of human imagination result in speciesism, or the idea that human life has greater sanctity than nonhuman life. This kind of thinking has been used to justify the capture, commodification, exploitation, and consumption of animals as food. Not coincidentally, the main character in Claire Fuller’s new novel is a strict vegetarian, and also someone who pays attention to how animals perceive the world around them and communicate their preferences without words. “An octopus is believed to be the only invertebrate aware of being in captivity,” Neffy writes in one of her letters to H. “They will repeatedly squirt water at lights to make them short circuit. They will grow depressed and listless if they aren’t provided with enough stimulus…and many will try to escape, climbing out of their tanks and heading for different waters.” Like the fish in Rilke’s sonnet, octopuses are not voiceless. They voice despair in captivity, and a desire for freedom, just without words. The problem, Neffy suggests, is that humans fail to recognize or respect their demands.
The Memory of Animals feels like a timely literary intervention, given how the pandemic drew attention to the close entanglements between humans and nonhuman animals. Consider, for example, the ongoing debates about the possible zoonotic origins of Covid. For years scientists have been trying to figure out if and how Covid might be traced back to people selling live animals at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. There have been many different theories, none conclusive, about the virus jumping from an animal (maybe trafficked pangolins or raccoon dogs) to humans. I won’t reveal who suffers the consequences of this phenomenon in The Memory of Animals, but suffice it to say, Fuller’s new book compliments other pandemic novels, such as The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay, that push readers to imagine how zoonotic spillover might lead to reconfigured relations and ethics between humans and animals.
It is worth acknowledging that a lot has been written about the limits of the pandemic novel as an emergent genre, and whether anyone will actually want to read these books in the future, given our collective trauma and fatigue. Admittedly, Fuller’s pandemic novel is not her best, and other critics have noted that certain devices and sections in the book feel “gimmicky” and “cumbrous” at times. Still, I wonder if The Memory of Animals has caught more flack than it deserves. The strength of the book is not necessarily the plot or the characters, but rather how the author uses a pandemic, and the feelings of captivity and despair that emerge in the context of a pandemic, to pose questions about what multispecies justice can and should look like.
