I’ve just finished reading a wonderful essay that I think you should all go and check out here.
Half book review, half something more, Mark Dery riffs on a book by Gordon Grice, “Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals”. It’s an entertaining and thoughtful essay on its own, but it also makes me really want to read the book, too.
Dery starts with a hint at the animal nature of mankind:
Do you, like me, rejoice in the knowledge that you could eat an adult mouse whole, if you wanted to? …. The rodent’s bones are “no more troublesome than those of a catfish.” In medieval England … “a mouse on toast was thought to cure colds.”
But he quickly segues into the corrolary: if humans are animals, then animals are not human — and investing animals with anthropomorphic desires and motivations doesn’t help anyone.
Grice does an end run around the Free Willy/Jaws binary, the culture/nature version of the virgin/whore dualism. “I often read accounts that point out what the human victim did ‘wrong’ before she was attacked by a bear or a shark,” he writes. “Many writers depict virtually all animal attacks as ‘provoked’ by the victim.” (The blame-the-victim rape narrative, transposed into the key of When Animals Attack.) “On the other side, some writers are at pains to paint dangerous animals as monsters of cruelty.”
In truth, he suggests, nature isn’t so much malevolent as indifferent.
The indifference often lends itself to misinterpretation, but any “meaning” comes straight from human perception, both Dery and Grice suggest.
The essay is nice — but it’s filled with so many grace notes that are lifted straight from Grice’s book, that I’m desperate to read it, too. Dery seems in love with Grice’s writing, as well, saying it’s as if “Cormac McCarthy turned his hand to nature writing.” High praise, but it seems appropriate, with passages like these:
With grim relish, Grice tells of a toddler “whose mother smeared his hand with honey so that she could shoot video of him playing with a black bear. It ate his hand.” (That’s a Grice signature: the devastating punchline, a short, sharp , declarative sentence that serves as a kind of a black-comedy rimshot.)
We learn that a grizzly can fit a human head into its mouth: “If the person is lucky, the skull slides out like a pinched marble.” (Like his noir forebear, Raymond Chandler, Grice has a nice way with the simile.)
Sure, books like these can seem somewhat voyeuristic — mainly, we’re reading for the frisson of the macabre — but this one seems particularly well-done. And Dery’s essay is nicely done as well.
I particularly enjoyed the clever touch of ending with a mirror image of the beginning. Sure, it’s no trouble for a human to eat a mouse. So what kind of trouble does a human pose to a grizzly?
