'Lucy and Jem live on the Tasman Peninsula near Eaglehawk Neck, where Lucy is recovering from major surgery. As she tries to navigate her new body through the world, she develops a deep fascination with the local octopuses, and in doing so finds herself drawn towards the friendship of an old woman and her son. As the story unfolds, the octopuses come to shape Lucy's body and her sense of self in ways even she can't quite understand.
'The Octopus and I is a stunning debut novel that explores the wild, beating heart at the intersection of human and animal, love and loss, fear and hope.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Writing the Nonhuman : The Octopus and I : Anthropomorphism and Posthumanism in Narrative
Hobart
:
2018
18507644
2018
single work
thesis
'Representing a nonhuman animal consciousness in literature is problematic, because we human animals cannot know what nonhuman animals think, or indeed, how nonhuman animals think. This means that when we imagine a nonhuman animal consciousness, we have no choice but to use the tool we have available to us: human language. By shaping nonhuman animal thought with human language, we anthropomorphise the animal: we shape (morphos) its internal sequences with human (anthropos) language.
'This thesis mobilises recent debates in critical animal studies and posthumanism as a conceptual framework to investigate anthropomorphism as a narrative device. Drawing upon Bruno Latour’s conceptualisation of text as an anthropomorphous construct, and theoretical debates in the humanities spearheaded by Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe and Donna J. Haraway, which challenge structures of human privilege organised around a narrow and implicitly ableist conceptualisation of the human subject, this thesis contends that while a piece of writing will be anthropomorphic on a very fundamental level, it does not mean that it must be anthropocentric, and does not mean that it must serve or reify the speciest logic of humanism. Rather, the act of shaping nonhuman animal consciousness with human language forces us to bump up against the limits of humanism and so see the structure for what it is: a historically specific model of both comprehending the world and maintaining the supremacy of a specific idea of Man.
'This thesis is part exegesis, part artefact, and the two uneven halves are foreshadowed by an introduction. The exegesis is a theoretical meditation on anthropomorphism’s humanist and posthumanist potential. It takes as its case study Cerdiwen Dovey’s collection of short stories, Only the Animals—a sustained, creative examination of anthropomorphism as both a literary device and thematic concept. The novel is a story about a breast cancer survivor, some other humans, some mutton birds (or short-tailed shearwaters), some Australian fur seals, and some octopuses who make Eaglehawk Neck, on the Tasman Peninsula, and its surrounding waters, their home. While the majority of the novel is focalised through its human characters, this narrative is crosshatched with stories focalised through the nonhuman animals whose lives brush up against the lives of those humans. It is driven by the following questions: how might anthropomorphism, as a literary device, produce a posthumanist frame for, or thread of, the narrative? In other words, what might these anthropomorphic animal stories do to the larger human-focussed, or anthropocentric, narrative? How might they unleash new or different ways of experiencing the story? The novel is titled The Octopus and I.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'In her critically acclaimed debut novel The Octopus and I (2020), Tasmanian author Erin Hortle relished the beauty of the waters surrounding Hobart.'
'Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.' (Publication abstract)
'There are many qualities to the octopus that render it strange, or weird, to a human mind: its cold, slippery body. Its excess of creepy tentacles. Its dissonant, almost chimerical structure. Its aloof intelligence. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, science fiction and horror writers fixed upon the figure of the octopus as the ultimate expression of eldritch dread. Cthulhu sprouted from the hallucinatory imagination of HP Lovecraft, and attacks by giant cephalopods became a staple of the maritime adventure novel. In an essay on the teratology of Weird horror, novelist and literary critic China Mièville links the historical emergence of the genre, around about the fin-de-siècle, to a growing sense of nihilism in the face of an oncoming crisis. To the writers of the Weird, writes Mièville, this formless being with an inexplicable surfeit of limbs was a reflection of the ‘chaotic, amoral, [and] anthropoperipheral universe’ they found themselves in.' (Introduction)
'The Octopus and I opens with a short chapter in the voice of an octopus, heavily pregnant, attempting to cross the isthmus at Eaglehawk Neck, near Port Arthur. “My body is brimming is pulsing is purring is ready,” the octopus narrates, “… the moonlight envelops me caressing my arms as they caress the kelpy floor the kelpy shore.” This is a gesture that sets up the book’s thematic and stylistic concerns: the novel is largely about the interconnections between the animal and human worlds, and the ethical problems that our relationships with different kinds of life forms often elide. Animals – the octopus, a mutton bird, a pair of seals – are important characters here, and while Erin Hortle’s attempts to enter their subjectivity aren’t always this successful, they provide a continual counterbalance to the dramas played out in the human characters’ lives. The book is very much a work of ecological fiction, a genre that is becoming increasingly common in Australian literature, and in which octopuses – because of their intelligence and strangeness – frequently occur.' (Introduction)
'There are many qualities to the octopus that render it strange, or weird, to a human mind: its cold, slippery body. Its excess of creepy tentacles. Its dissonant, almost chimerical structure. Its aloof intelligence. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, science fiction and horror writers fixed upon the figure of the octopus as the ultimate expression of eldritch dread. Cthulhu sprouted from the hallucinatory imagination of HP Lovecraft, and attacks by giant cephalopods became a staple of the maritime adventure novel. In an essay on the teratology of Weird horror, novelist and literary critic China Mièville links the historical emergence of the genre, around about the fin-de-siècle, to a growing sense of nihilism in the face of an oncoming crisis. To the writers of the Weird, writes Mièville, this formless being with an inexplicable surfeit of limbs was a reflection of the ‘chaotic, amoral, [and] anthropoperipheral universe’ they found themselves in.' (Introduction)
'Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.' (Publication abstract)
