Animal Dreams by Brooks David;

Author:Brooks, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JFFZ: Animals & society
Publisher: University of Sydney
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Dougald’s Goat

Alex Miller and the ‘system … which as yet has no name’1

I’d like to open with the proposition that, in a great many narratives, there’s a place, a site, where they confess, or at least pay some acknowledgement to, the stories they have not followed in order to follow the story that they have. Their rejectamenta, their abject. And it is not just stories, it is concepts as well, even or perhaps especially ethical positions: sites where they acknowledge some of what has had to be set aside in order for those stories, concepts and ethical positions to come to be. I do not say that they in any way specify or itemise these unwritten stories or concepts or positions, or that their acknowledgement of them is anything but the vaguest symbolisation – indeed, it’s so much a matter of the subconscious that it’s hard to see how it could be much more – although in some cases they can take a pronounced and almost indisputable form.

In one of the bold philosophical projects of which I’ve sometimes dreamt I’d in fact go further and attempt to demonstrate a collateral premise, that much of our human ethics are based upon a separation from and rejection – abjection is a better term, since this is a matter of our identity and what we do to shore it – of the animal, and that it therefore should not surprise us to find the animal (/animals) haunting our ethical reflections. Alex Miller’s texts, I suggest, are ethical reflections – sometimes profoundly so – and are haunted in this way.

I do not have a name for it – this site or confessional locus that is like standing at the edge of a pit – but for the time being, thinking of Plato’s Timaeus and discussions thereof by Julia Kristeva (1983) and Jacques Derrida (1993a), I’m inclined to call it choratic. I could digress into an account of Plato’s concept of chora, and even digress, within that digression, into its curious relations to Cora or Kore, forebear of Persephone and Eurydice, in order to establish an Orphic dimension, but that is subject for a different paper.

If I were to attempt to identify the particular character and strength – the virtu2 – of Alex Miller’s writing I would talk first and foremost about its intuitive quality, an opening it comes so repeatedly to, not a border crossing necessarily, but certainly a border viewing. As if he were to take us over and again to a figurative door, somewhere within his subject, which, whether or not he or his protagonists accept to do so, the fiction itself then challenges its readers to pass through. This figurative door takes various forms – the transcultural in The Ancestor Game (where in fact there is a very literal red door), the ekphrastic in The Sitters, etc. – but the intuitive engine, the propensity within them is the same. For now, and because it is of particular concern to me, I

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