Animal Narrators and Resonant Silences in “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang and Sila by Chantal Bilodeau
Date
2022-11-22
Authors
Major Professor
Advisor
Committee Member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract
In Wild Ones, Jon Mooallem writes that whenever he contemplated the fact that polar bears “might stop existing,” he would become “viscerally uneasy”—and so, he admits, he “usually didn’t,” even as he was writing about them (85). His confession is illuminating: how do we mourn for the losses caused by humanity in the Age of the Sixth Mass Extinction? The effects of climate change are too complex to hold in our minds and our ability to process extinction on a planetary scale is also thus limited. Yet animal characters may bypass the “viscerally uneasy” feelings produced when considering climate change, in part because they circumvent culpability and represent an innocence that many humans would desperately like to claim as their own. In this way, animal narrators open a space for readers to mourn, to sympathize—and sometimes even empathize—with the suffering caused by planetary imbalance for an increasing number of beings, including humans.
In this chapter, I analyze two texts that employ animal narrators as prisms for viewing the effects of, and the suffering caused by, climate change as it escalates to also endanger human communities. Specifically, this paper interrogates how anthropomorphization works as a literary device that may open a space for emotion or affect in two texts, “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang (2015) and Sila by Chantal Bilodeau (2015). Each approaches anthropomorphization differently, but with common goals: to articulate the trauma of other-than-human approaching extinction events as the same forces causing extinction imperil human communities. In “The Great Silence,” a parrot details the human search for “intelligence” in the vast scope of space, even as most humans simultaneously ignore the many intelligences that surround us on this planet. The parrot narrator thinks about how the forest may fall silent, mimicking the silence humans think they hear from our solar system, and meditates upon both species-specific extinction and planetary extinction. Sila also contains other-than-human narrators, polar bears, as they struggle for survival in a quickly changing landscape alongside Inuit communities who similarly struggle. As the play unfolds, Sila argues through the polar bears—iconic darlings of the climate crisis—that “extinction” is not just a threat to singular species, but to entire ecosystems, and will inevitably impact the human communities with which specific species are related and intertwined.
Through animal narrators, these two texts create a space for readers to see from other-than-human views, to perceive the world differently, uncomplicated by human politics or the messiness of blame. These narrators can communicate loss and suffering in a more “pure” form—however problematic that may be—and these texts show that lack of agency to fight extinction isn’t solely the experience of other-than-human animals—human communities can and do suffer similarly.
Series Number
Journal Issue
Is Version Of
Versions
Series
Academic or Administrative Unit
Type
Book chapter
Comments
This accepted book chapter is published as Burke, B.R. (2022). Animal Narrators and Resonant Silences in “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang and Sila by Chantal Bilodeau. In: Borkfelt, S., Stephan, M. (eds) Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11020-7_8. Posted with permission.
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG