Parallax bookreview,
Boria Sax
Crow
{
Charlotte Sleigh
Ant
(
Rebecca Stott
Oyster
(
Crow, Oyster, and Ant are three of the first books in a new series launched by Reaktion Books that will include at least 16 other titles. Already in print are Bear, Cockroach, Dog, Falcon, Parrot, Rat, Snake, Tortoise, and Whale, and forthcoming hooks include Tiger, Spider, Moose, Hare, Fox, and Bee. The series is called, simply enough, Animal, and each volume, obviously, is titled simply with the name of the animal discussed therein (though animals are never as simple as in our constructions of them: crow’, Sax informs, denotes numerous members of the family corvidae, including magpies, jays, cloughs, nutcrackers, jackdaws, blackbirds, ravens, and others). The series is, in a word, wonderful. These three books are consistent enough to demonstrate that the series has been sagaciously contracted and edited, though at the same time, each hook preserves a distinctness that reflects both its human creator and its non-human subject - are uniformly well-written, beautifully formatted and illustrated, and richly informative to an audience of specialists in a wide array of scholarly disciplines), amateur animal enthusiasts, and just plain readers.
Each book begins with a sketch of the subject animal’s geography and evolutionary history and then broadens into a wide-ranging cultural history with attention to myth, religion, science, commercial consumption (in the case of Oyster), semiotic resonances and artistic iconographies, and so on. They also include useful appendices with bibliographies, websites and associations relevant to the subject, and, in Stott’s volume, recipes and a listing of the world’s best-known oyster bars.
Readers will most likely begin
these books by thumbing through and looking at the high-quality eclectic
illustrations; and they may well spend a great deal of time reading the book
first this way, as I did, attracted by the fascinating pictures that do not
just amplify the text but tell a visual/cultural story of their own. In Ant, I
opened first to a weird photograph of ‘honey ant chocolates’, which depicts the
upper half of an ant’s body that appears to be crawling out of a large candy egg
beneath. Next we see a photograph of an Australian Aboriginal family digging
for honey ants, and then a full-page reproduction of an Aboriginal artwork, Honey Ant Dreaming. I would not have
realized, had I seen it outside of this context, that
the painting represents thousands of honey ants. (They look like merely dots,
arranged in lines and circles against a colorful banner of stripes.) More flipping around: a zany movie poster for ‘THEM’ - ‘The amazing
new Warner Bros. Sensation’ - a classic giant huge epic from 1954. A
monstrous, evil-looking ant holds a leggy and buxomly redhead in its mandibles
as a frenzied crowd panics below. (‘This city is under martial law until we
annihilate THEM’, threatens a cop; ‘Kill one and two take its place!’ screams a
woman fleeing from the horror.) There are details of ants illuminating a
medieval bestiary (which ‘often linked the ant’s acute sense of smell with the
Christian’s ability to distinguish orthodoxy from heresy’ (p.59),
and film captures from the animated film AntZ. We see a range of 19 and
200 century ant farms, and illustrations from John Swammerdam’s 18th century
study of insect life. The overall effect of the illustrations is to show how
varied and complex these animals (and images of these animals) are as they
meander through culture. These hooks are exhaustive surveys of each animal, but
at the same time they are grab-bags of oddly fascinating trivia. In Oyster, for
example, Stott extensively discusses, as one would expect, the mollusk’s sexual
indeterminacy, its reputation as an aphrodisiac, and the commercial history of
oyster culturing for food and the pearl trade. But her gastronomic survey of
oysters offers a range of fascinating unanticipated insights about class and
the culture of food. ‘Who eats oysters and where and when? On the street at an
oyster stall at midnight, in an oyster tavern cellar for breakfast with
friends, in a private inner room as part of an elaborate seduction ritual, or
at a banquet laid out with a 100 cut-glass and fine silver?’ (p. 56). Fresh raw
oysters, scarce and expensive, were a delicacy for the ancient Romans, but
Asians, who smoked and dried farmed oysters that were easily harvested from the
rocks, considered them more of a fall-hack food. In I 9tt century
For Camporesi they are she emblematic food of the enlightenment with their succulent light, taut and white clash, an expression of the Lebensgefűhl of the fledgling century, its hunger for light, trim and nimble bodies (alert and agile, like the new ideas and spirit) in stark contrast to the previous century’s floating, blown-out masses of flesh … Taste was transformed, excess and splendor were condensed as evidence of irrational dissoluteness: and it was in tins changing culture that oysters found new power and value on the table of the epicure as white delicate flesh: Oysters and truffles seized power, forcing all the strong dishes typical of ancient aristocrats into exile.’ (pp. 61-63).
In Crow, Sax elucidates the nuanced and sometimes illogical or
contradictory cultural resonances of these birds. Crows are usually black, so have frequently been
associated with mystical powers: their darkness. their slouching posture, an their
love of carrion, have helped to make crows symbols of death, yet few if any
other birds are so lively and playful. They indulge in such apparently useless
games as carrying a twig aloft, dropping the toy, then swooping down and catching
it. For no apparent reason, they may hang upside down by one foot or execute back
flips in flight. Crows in
In biblical passages, ravens
appear to be agents of God. For the Vikings, they were birds of omen: ‘A raven
with wings outstretched became the standard of Viking chiefs going into battle (p.
59). Bui the birds also had more
immediately fearful associations: ‘The idea of being eaten by animals at times
arouses a very primeval terror. Being left as a corpse for crows and ravens can
mean, in other words, being abandoned and cast out from human society. This was
the fate of criminals, whose bodies ‘sere left out on the gallows as a public
display ... Warnings against a life of crime often invoked the fate of being
eaten by crows and ravens’ (pp.65-66). In the 13th century, Moslems making
pilgrimage to Mecca were prohibited from killing animals: but crows were
considered so noxious that an exception was made for them. In 16th century
In all these books, there are many careful, evocatively observational passages like this one from Crow, ‘Foraging on their long, powerful legs, crows can appear to glide over the earth. Then they ascend almost effortlessly, flapping their wings only now and then, into the air like spirits. Though people gene rally do not think of them its such terms, crows are also remarkably graceful’ (p. 13). These authors are looking at at animals, and inviting us to took at animals, with a careful and polyvalent sensibility. Certainly they add their own prejudices to our sense of these creatures, but the distortions in these books seem less assaultive of the animal’s essence than many others have been. These compilations of wide ranging lore are so conscious of she variegations that human culture imposes on animals (Sax begins his volume with the parable of the blind men and the elephant) that readers realize these books do not pretend to capture the animal definitively or monolithically-- people have captured too many animals already, too cruelly and selfishly -but rather they mean to offer more of a smorgasbord of the animal’s existence in the cultural imagination. The resulting portraits are cubistic, polyvalent. And finally, in all three of these volumes the end product is a perspective on each animal that I find consummately respectful of the subjects (though I wish Stott had examined the ethics of harvesting oysters: readers with animal rights interests will of course expect this). I finished each book with a deeper appreciation of the posters that these animals possess, and the ways in which people base alternately tried to pay homage to and co-opt those powers These books are eminently useful: a nobody interested, for scholarly or other reasons, in a crow, or an ant, or an oyster. would be ill-advised to overlook these books.
Parallax bookreview,
The Charlesworth Group, Waketield +44(0)1924 369598 -