Death and Compassion

Dan Wylie

Description

Indexed in Clarivate Analytics Book Citation Index (Web of Science Core Collection)
Acknowledgements

Introduction

Compassion for elephants?

Chapter 1 No simple sort of mirror: Compassion and the pre-colonial

Chapter 2 Experiment and devastation: Travelogue and the advent of zoology

Chapter 3 A most delightful mania: Hunters’ tales

Chapter 4 Not very good at remorse: Elephants in fiction

Chapter 5 A tear rolled down her face: Teen fiction and the elephant mind

Chapter 6 Bosses of the bushveld: Game ranger memoirs

Chapter 7 Repeatedly folded frontier: The ‘field-research memoir’

Chapter 8 The cult of the remnant: The elephants of Knysna and Addo

Chapter 9 The elephant was unhappy: Poetry as compassion

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• General
• Ecology
• Environment
• General officer
• Biography
• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776142200
• Langue: English

Extrait

Death and Compassion
Death and Compassion
The Elephant in Southern African Literature
Dan Wylie
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright Dan Wylie 2018
Published edition Wits University Press 2018
Poems Copyright holders, used with permission
First published 2018
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12018102187
978-1-77614-218-7 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-446-4 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-219-4 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-220-0 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-269-9 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
All poems remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced for the use of poems. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the poems reproduced here; please contact Wits University Press in case of any omissions or errors.
Copyeditor: Monica Seeber
Proofreader: Alison Lockhart
Cover design: Fire and Lion
Typesetter: MPS
Typeset in 11 point Simoncini Garamond
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Compassion for elephants?
1. No Simple Sort of Mirror: Compassion and the precolonial
2. Experiments and Devastation: Early travelogues and the advent of zoology
3. A Most Delightful Mania: Hunters tales and evasions
4. Not Very Good at Remorse: Elephants in fiction
5. A Tear Rolled down Her Face: Teen fiction and elephant mind
6. Bosses of the Bushveld: Game-ranger memoirs
7. Repeatedly Folded Frontier: The field-research memoir
8. The Cult of the Remnant: The elephants of Knysna and Addo
9. The Elephant Is Unhappy: Poetry as compassion
Afterword
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
T his book has been maturing over many years, and there are doubtless many helpers and discussants along the way whose contributions I have forgotten. Mostly, I read books, but I have tried to ground the study in the real elephant world, too. I have been to numerous game parks and elephant sanctuaries, sometimes just as a visitor in mufti , at other times in a more probing way. All of them yielded insights, experiences and conversations that affected my views. I have read many more books, articles and pamphlets, and seen more films, than I explore or can cite in this study, but they have made their subtle and cumulative impacts. All these direct and indirect influences I am thankful for. In particular I have had the inestimable pleasure of being close to elephants in various countries and quarters, most formatively in Zimbabwe s Mana Pools in the late 1970s, and most recently in Addo Elephant Park, near which I now happen to live. I am more than thankful for all these opportunities. They have changed my life.
Some conversations have been deep and ongoing, others brief but influential. Sometimes just a word of encouragement or interest, or the loan of a book, has been important to me. Of those I can recall, I thank Bob Bieder of Bloomington, Indiana, who opened the door to my writing Elephant for Reaktion Books; Mark Bowler, former Zimbabwe National Parks ranger; Jane Carruthers; Marion Garai of the Elephant Study and Action Group; Pat Irwin; Hennie L tter; Alan Northover; Wayne Matthews, who let me trundle around Tembe Elephant Park with one of his rangers; Michel Pickover; the late Norman Travers of Imire, Zimbabwe; Samantha Vice; Greg Vogt of the Knysna Elephant viii Park; and Wendy Woodward and her Animals Studies group at the University of the Western Cape, several members of which have been periodically supportive and intrigued.
Friends and colleagues in Grahamstown have weathered innumerable grumbles, comments and presentations about elephants over the years. I thank you one and all for being there; you know who you are. Students in the several years of my literary animals and ecology courses have helped stimulate, instruct and entertain me. The Department of English at Rhodes University has been a consistently sustaining place in which to conduct research. Rhodes University itself has for years provided funding for a project that they likely had given up as a lost cause, but I hope the result will vindicate their trust in me. Most memorable perhaps was being able to deliver my inaugural lecture on elephants, which the audience must have thought deeply odd for a literary scholar. I suppose it is. Conveniently, Grahamstown hosts both the Cory Library for Historical Research and the National English Literary Museum, whose combined archives have provided innumerable sources and leads, and their wonderful staff have helped me out year after year. Anonymous readers helped me refine the manuscript, as did Monica Seeber, my editor, Victoria Hume, and the whole crew at Wits University Press.
Above all I pay tribute to my mother, Jill Wylie, whose devotion to saving animals remains paramount in my experience. I hope I am continuing her legacy in some fashion, though I doubt I will ever write as lucidly and deftly as she.
I have been to a number of conferences and colloquia to present nascent thoughts on elephants in literature; some of those eventuated in journal articles on which certain chapters of this book are based, albeit much modified, as follows:
Elephants and Compassion: Ecological Criticism and South African Hunting Literature . English in Africa 28, no. 2 (2001): 79-100.
Elephants and the Ethics of Ecological Criticism: A Case Study in Recent South African Fiction . In Re-imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives , edited by Sue Kossew and Dianne Schwerdt, 175-193. New York: Nova Science, 2001.
The Anthropomorphic Ethic: Fiction and the Animal Mind in Virginia Woolf s Flush and Barbara Gowdy s The White Bone . ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) 9, no. 2 (2002): 115-132.
Why Write a Poem about Elephants? Mosaic 39, no. 4 (2006): 27-46.
Feral Whispering: Conservation, Community and the Reach of the Literary . English in Africa 41, no. 3 (2014): 119-140.
Touching Trunks: Elephants, Ecology and Compassion in Three Southern African Teen Novels . Journal of Literary Studies 30, no. 4 (2014): 25-45.
Introduction: Compassion for elephants?
A re you an elefriend? So asks a recent conservationist campaign for funds to help save elephants. What does the notion of friend mean here? Is it true friendship to pop a few spare bucks in a distant organisation s account? What historical and natural processes have made this appeal necessary or attractive? What is the role of words themselves - the coinage elefriend , for one - in forming and disseminating ideas of compassion?
Elephants are in dire straits - again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but resurged for a while in the twentieth, in the heyday of late colonial conservation efforts. Nevertheless, an estimated precolonial population of 26 million elephants now staggers at less than half a million - and is dropping at a terrifying pace. In one estimate, an elephant is being killed every 15 minutes. At that rate, in just a few short years they will be extinct north of the Zambezi - and the ivory merchants attentions are already turning towards the still relatively abundant herds of southern Africa. On the one hand, a network of profiteers that has no compassion whatsoever for elephants; on the other, an embattled scattering of conservationists, local and international, who literally weep at the fate of our most charismatic mammal. All the literature, art, sentimentality, scientific research, legislation, fencing and even weaponry in the world seems next to powerless to resist the fatal snares, bullets and poisons deployed by Mammon, the God of Markets.
At the same time, reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now almost a clich : their sheer size, high intelligence, rich emotional lives, capacity for mourning, caring matriarchal social structures, that enigmatic grace. In the twentieth century, a combination of conservation ethics and the aesthetics of the tourist gaze has profoundly affected the actual fate of elephants and their representation. Additionally, current ecological philosophies and sciences focus on the role of elephants within ecosystems, an angle gaining further importance from the gathering awareness of anthropogenic global warming and climate change.
It is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time. Elephants have been with us for tens of centuries. They are integral to our history. It would be more than shameful to see them exterminated in the wild. It is vital that we understand how and why people develop compassion - or fail to - and what stories we tell ourselves in order to sustain those attitudes. In this book I hope to contribute to that understanding. I might have structured the book in a number of ways, but have chosen to explore how people have expressed attitudes towards elephants in several key genres of southern African literature over some two hundred years. Genre plays an important role in structuring feeling and even consequent action. A reader is likely to respond differently to factual than to fictional texts, and differently again to poetry. I do not wish to overstate the case here: there is no simple one-to-one consequence of reading this or that. Modern-day hunters, for example, read older accounts not only to gain support for their own attitudes towards killing animals; they may deliberately conform in behaviour to that depicted in admired predecessors books and stories. In contrast, I am personally repelled by that very same hunting literature. Yet peop