Eating One’s Friends: Fiction as Argument in Bioethics

Tod Chambers

Literature and Medicine, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 79-105 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2016.0005

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/629003

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Tod Chambers 79

Eating One’s Friends:

Fiction as Argument in
Bioethics
Tod Chambers

We may have mated with them; we may have eaten them. There’s
no way to know.
—Dale Clayton of the University of
Utah on confirming that two species
of early humans had had contact with
each other, as quoted in the Washington Post

Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of

live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does
not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals?
Who is not a cannibal?
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Edibility is inversely related to humanity.

—Marshall Sahlins, “La Pensée Bourgeoise”

In this essay, I argue that literature has been profoundly misunderstood

by scholars of bioethics.
Bioethicists in analyzing moral problems have often drawn upon
literary texts as sources for “rich cases,” for they have long recognized
that the traditional genre of the ethics case was limited in its portrayal
of the complexity of the moral landscape of actual medical practice.
This traditional utilization of literature in bioethics is critically examined
by James Terry and Peter Williams in an essay published in Literature
and Medicine: “Short stories and poems that are evocative, complex, and
imaginatively challenging have been used to supplement or supplant
the traditional case study as instruments for raising ethical issues. At
best, these literary works more vividly present moral questions and

Literature and Medicine 34, no. 1 (Spring 2016) 79–105

© 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press
80 Eating One’s Friends

even raise some kinds of issues that case studies leave out.”1 The
real purpose of Terry and Williams’s essay is to sound an alarm on
this casual, unreflective use of literature: while literary works may at
first appear to furnish desirable descriptions of moral problems, they
caution, these texts and bioethics cases have distinct, and at times
divergent, goals. In the description of these differing goals, one can
discern a series of binary oppositions:

cases literary works

abstract concrete
analysis aesthetic pleasure
rationality sensitivity and empathy
clarity ambiguity
actions (external) feelings (internal)
abstract generalization emotional charge
rational irrational
practical impractical

In many points of their argument, Terry and Williams seem to view

literary works—those entertaining, pretty objects—as distracting the
bioethicists from the real, hard work of moral deliberation.
In what follows, I agree with Terry and Williams’s concerns about
fiction but for quite different reasons, for I argue that literary works
are not passive descriptions of complex situations but rather active
arguments. Fiction does not simply reflect the world—or, as Terry and
Williams suggest, reflect too much of the world—but, by engaging the
reader in a particular presentation of the world, fiction argues for that
particular view. As Ronald Sukenick remarks:

narrative as reflection of “reality” is still reflection in both senses.

It is not merely that The Sun Also Rises advances an agenda as
surely as does Pilgrim’s Progress, but that in doing so it raises issues,
examines situations, meditates solutions, reflects on outcomes—that
is to say, the story line is itself a form of reasoning. The question
is only whether a story reflects thoughtfully, or robotically reflects
the status quo with no illuminating angle of vision of its own.2

Fiction, because it is free of the truth restraints of non-fiction, can

present an argument for a particular perspective on the world. Richard
Walsh points out that “to ask what a fiction is about is to ask what
it is doing: its argument is not what is written, but what is worked
Tod Chambers 81

through.”3 The argument worked through in novels and short stories

resides in the self-conscious dialogic relationship between substance
and form. This relationship becomes visible in two ways, the first by
angling the presentation of differing values toward a particular resolu-
tion. In his novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles, in one
of his many metafictional moments, explains this process by comparing
the work of fiction to a fixed fight in professional boxing. The writer
positions “conflicting wants into the ring and then describes the fight,
letting that want he himself favours win. And we judge writers of
fiction both by the skill they show in fixing the fights (in other words
persuading us that they were not fixed) and by the kind of character
they fix in favour of: the good one, the tragic one, the evil one, the
funny one, and so on.”4 This process of “fixing the fight” in turn per-
mits the writer “to show one’s readers what one thinks of the world
around one.”5 It is the power of fiction to argue for a way of seeing
the world by constructing an imagined space where conflicting values
are able to enter into struggle with one another and, most importantly,
a space where one of those values is portrayed as winning. The second
way is through what the Russian Formalists termed defamiliarization, the
process by which the writer uses the grammar of narrative to allow
the reader to re-see the world. For the Russian Formalists, a work of
art forces the reader or audience out of the customary and routinized
ways of seeing the world: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensa-
tion of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The
technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process
of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”6
Through defamiliarization and other techniques, art seeks to make us
aware of that which has become invisible, prompting a reckoning with
the way things are and helping imagine the way things could be.
In order to illustrate my own non-fiction argument about fiction’s
arguments I will consider the moral issues surrounding the species
divide between humans and animals represented in speculative fiction
that describes one species eating other species. Prior to this discussion,
I will explain why food classification is a particularly useful way of
examining the species divide, following the literary scholar Sherryl
Vint’s insight that “The ethics of who eats whom are central to the
human-animal boundary and its ideological work.”7 I will also look at
how cannibalism achieved the status of categorical imperative in moral
philosophy and in turn earned the scrutiny of cultural anthropologists
analyzing how the west has distinguished itself from the Other. Noting
82 Eating One’s Friends

some works of anthropology that share the goal of defamiliarization

with fiction, I will look more closely at three “cases” in speculative
fiction in which the categories of “who eats whom” become blurred.
Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow imagines an encounter on
another planet of two species that are initially seen as one, dramatiz-
ing and challenging the need that humans traditionally have had for
deindividualizing animals designated for eating. Michel Faber’s Under the
Skin posits an ongoing alien community on earth that essentially sees
humans as akin to cattle. Finally, Adam Hines’s graphic novel Duncan the
Wonder Dog presents an alternative earth in which all animals have the
ability to speak and understand each other yet all non-human animals
are treated in the same manner as they are in our own world. With
these analyses I wish to make the case that the discipline of literature
and medicine should move beyond its tendency to valorize realistic
fiction and instead should equally embrace the power of speculative
fiction to challenge fundamental assumptions in bioethics.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There,
Alice reaches the end of the chess board and becomes transformed
into a queen. She then finds herself at a banquet filled with “fifty
guests, of all kinds; some were animals, some birds, and there were
even a few flowers among them,” so Alice goes to the head of the
table and sits down between the Red and White Queens. The Red
Queen informs Alice that she has already missed both the soup and
fish courses but a plate of mutton is soon placed in front of Alice.
Having never carved a leg of mutton before, she grows nervous.

“You look a little shy; let me introduce you to that leg of

mutton,” said the Red Queen. “Alice—Mutton; Mutton—Alice.” The
leg of mutton got up in the dish and made a little bow to Alice;
and Alice returned the bow, not knowing whether to be frightened
or amused.
“May I give you a slice?” she said, taking up the knife and
fork, and looking from one Queen to the other.
“Certainly not,” the Red Queen said, very decidedly: “it isn’t
etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to.”8
Tod Chambers 83

The queen’s observation is approvingly cited in the cultural

anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason. Part
of Sahlins’s argument is that Marxist and utilitarian explanations of
cultural patterns are often inadequate when it comes to such social
questions as why we eat certain animals and not others, which can be
explained only in reference to a broader and contingent cultural logic.
In his examination of who and what humans deem edible, Sahlins
draws upon the work of anthropologist Edmund Leach, who argues
that the cultural logic of edibility is embedded in structural concepts
based upon the animal’s particular relationship to the human social
world. Leach observes that the human notion of what is “the edible
part of the environment” falls into one of three groups:

(1) Edible substances that are recognized as food and consumed as

part of the normal diet.
(2) Edible substances that are recognized as possible food, but that
are prohibited or else allowed to be eaten only under special (ritual)
conditions. These are substances which are consciously tabooed.
(3) Edible substances that by culture and language are not recog-
nized as food at all. These substances are unconsciously tabooed.9

Leach notes that anthropologists have traditionally been very keen

on examining the second category (e.g., Jewish prohibitions against pork),
but he contends that the third category, the unconsciously tabooed, is
also rich with cultural significance. In Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs,
and Wear Cows, social psychologist Melanie Joy asks us to imagine a
situation in which we are attending a dinner party and are served
a stew so delicious that we ask the host for the recipe and the host
obliges: “You begin with five pounds of golden retriever meat, well
marinated, and then.”10 Joy believes that after hearing that the meat
was dog, most Americans would have difficulty continuing to eat the
stew. Leach would agree with Joy’s belief and note that this reaction
would be found among his own tribe, the English. He reports that in
various parts of the world dogs are viewed as clearly within the first
category but the English’s refusal to eat dog lies in the third group:
to even consider dogs “food” would entail a radical revision of the
traditional English worldview, that is, it is “unconsciously tabooed.”
Cultural structuralists would argue that this demonstrates the relativ-
ity of our food practices, but they would be quick to point out that
relativity should not be equated with the arbitrary or the random.
Relative of course means relative to something and, in this case, which
84 Eating One’s Friends

animals are viewed as edible is relative to how a society classifies life

forms.11 In his discussion of English edibility categories Leach makes
an explicit connection between the English refusal to eat dog and their
refusal to eat humans, both objectively sources of nutrition:

of course, dogs are perfectively edible, and in some parts of the

world they are bred for eating. For that matter human beings are
edible, though to an Englishman the very thought is disgusting. I
think most Englishmen would find the idea of eating dog equally
disgusting and in a similar way. There are contexts in colloquial
English in which man and dog may be thought of as beings of
the same kind. Man and dog are “companions”; the dog is “the
friend of man.” On the other hand man and food are antithetical
categories. Man is not food, so dog cannot be food either.12

In his analysis of American edibility categories, Sahlins expresses

interest in a protest against a market in Westbrook, Connecticut that
began serving horse meat. In a news report of the protest, Richard
Gallagher, its organizer, states, “I think the slaughter of horses for
human consumption in this country is disgraceful. We are not at a
stage yet in the United States where we are forced to kill horses for
meat. Horses are to be loved and ridden. In other words, horses are
shown affection, where cattle that are raised for beef . . . they’ve never
had someone pet them or brush them, or anything like that.”13 As
this reasoning demonstrates, Gallagher assumes that it is the horse’s
social interaction with the human world that makes it inedible, not
its biological or ontological status, for one could easily imagine an
alternative society in which horses have the same form of interactions
with humans as cattle do.
The distinction between horse and cattle, companion and food,
is even finer in South Korea. The psychologist Hal Herzog in Some
We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat reports that in that country dogs
are both household companions and food. I have phrased that last
sentence wrong for it should read instead that, according to Herzog,
some dog breeds are classified as family and other breeds are classified
as food: “In markets in which both pet dogs and nureongi [a breed of
dog raised for food] are sold, the pets are physically separated from
the meat dogs and housed in different colored cages.”14 As Sahlins
observes, the logic applied here “appears to be differentiated by [the
dog’s] participation as subject or object in the company of men [sic].”15
He proposes a structural rationale, drawing on notions of familiarity and
Tod Chambers 85

closeness to help answer why Americans eat cows and pigs and yet
do not eat dogs or horses. “Dogs and horses participate in American
society in the capacity of subjects. They have proper personal names,
and indeed we are in the habit of conversing with them as we do
not talk to pigs and cattle.”16
The degree of our comfort with eating these animals is structur-
ally related to the degree to which we have, to use the Red Queen’s
categories, been introduced to them. Thus, on a continuum of being
more subjects than objects of our social world, the order would be
dogs > horses > pigs > cows. And so we return to the logic of the
Red Queen: one just does not cut into and eat entities to whom one
has been introduced. Or as Herzog puts it: “Dogs in American house-
holds are not animals—they are family members. And because family
members are people, eating a dog is tantamount to cannibalism.”17 But
what’s so wrong with cannibalism?
That eating one’s own species is wrong is so obvious that, along
with incest and bestiality, it has become the standard example of “the
extreme” in debates about cultural and ethical relativism. For instance,
in Toward a More Natural Science, bioethicist Leon Kass expresses distress
over the moral health of late twentieth-century society by noting that
its reducing of the human to a mere body seems shocking even when
compared (as he implies the two are similar) to “the nearly universal
prohibition of cannibalism.”18 Kass’s use of the word “nearly” is telling,
for it implies that there are those who are comfortable with cannibalism.
Within cultural anthropology, the contemporary western evaluation of
cannibalism has become entangled with that possibility: has there ever
existed a community that used humans as a nutritional choice? The
anthropologist William Arens argues—contra claims like Kass’s—that
there is no evidence that any human culture has ever accepted canni-
balism as a normal cultural practice. Arens argues that the sources for
accounts of cannibalism are not reliable and the physical archeological
examples also do not provide convincing concrete evidence to support
such a claim. He stresses that at one time or another, every people has
been accused of cannibalism. This accusation is part of characterizing
other groups as radically outside the accuser’s culture; because they
practice this “non-human” behavior, they are animals.
Arens’s empirical claims have not gone unquestioned.19 In Cannibal
Talk, anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere points out that cannibal-
ism has in fact occurred in a number of societies, although not as a
nutritional choice but rather “for the most part as kind of sacrament
associated with human sacrifice.”20 Still, Obeyesekere subscribes fully
86 Eating One’s Friends

to what he feels is Arens’s most important insight, that the western

obsession with fantasies of “cannibalism must be seen as a European
projection of the Other,” which results in what he terms “savagism.”21
In the philosopher Catalin Avramescu’s “intellectual history”
of cannibalism, he observes: “Ancient, medieval, and early modern
sources tell us of savage nations of anthropophagi, who are described
as collections of strange beings, hybrids between animal and man. This
step is explainable: only a race of monsters could lead an existence
so alien to the rules of human life, and only for such a people could
the rule of nature be inverted.”22 In the various early encounters be-
tween Europeans and Africans, Brian Fagan notes that Africans “were
frequently described as ‘brutish,’ ‘bestial,’ or ‘beastly.’ Pages and pages
of early travelers’ tales abound with stories of cannibalism, warfare,
horrible diets, and dreadful tortures.”23 Cannibalism indicates that
humans have become monsters or animals, for it entails viewing the
human body as simply another form of meat and, in doing so, denies
humans their radical species break from animals.24 Once we recognize
that the history of cannibalism is in fact a history of humanity’s fear
of their animal nature, one understands why Avramescu sees that to
study the history of cannibalism is actually to study deviance: “My
cannibal is in the first place a scholarly creature, a personage who
animates theoretical texts, and only to a lesser extent, if at all, is he
subject for the anthropology of the abberant.”25 Cannibalism as an
idea, for Avramescu, is far more important to the western world then
its actual practice. Avramescu cites as evidence the many times can-
nibalism is explicitly discussed in the western philosophical tradition,
especially in discussions of natural law.
Cannibalism’s longstanding representation of extreme otherness
plays a critical role in a posthumously published essay by the cul-
tural anthropologist Ruth Benedict. In “The Uses of Cannibalism,” she
writes, “We have done scant justice to the reasonableness of cannibal-
ism. There are in fact so many and such excellent motives possible
to it that mankind has never been able to fit all of them into one
universal scheme, and has accordingly contrived various diverse and
contradictory systems the better to display its virtues.”26 In this essay,
Benedict gives examples in which cannibalism is the most civilized
thing to do: “It is necessary first to place beyond doubt the high moral
sentiments with which the custom has been allied.”27 In his reading of
this essay in relation to a discussion of Benedict as a stylist, Clifford
Geertz identifies this flipping of the strange and the normal as a key
rhetorical move of her work in general: “the culturally at hand is made
Tod Chambers 87

odd and arbitrary, the culturally distant, logical and straightforward.

. . . The Not-us (or Not-U.S.) unnerves the Us.”28 It has been observed
by Geertz and James Boon that a key intertext for Benedict’s essay
is Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” for Benedict’s essay is an
argument for cannibalism as a reasonable alternative to war, which in
its absurdity provides a criticism against the reasonableness of war.29
Swift’s argument performs the same ironic twist: the English treat the
Irish like livestock, so why not take the next natural and logical step
and simply eat them? Cannibalism remains in both cases an act so
extreme that the writers anticipate it will make readers realize that our
actions, by being shown to lead to cannibalism, are morally inappropri-
ate. This link between Swift and Benedict reveals how both artists and
cultural anthropologists have shared an interest in defamiliarization as
a form of social critique.
Defamiliarization in cultural anthropology, according to anthro-
pologists George Marcus and Michael Fischer, has been one of the
discipline’s key strategies for providing cultural criticism: “Disruption
of common sense, doing the unexpected, placing familiar subjects in
unfamiliar, or even shocking, contexts are the aims of this strategy to
make the reader conscious of difference.”30 According to Marcus and
Fischer, defamiliarization is accomplished in anthropology through the
application of two techniques: epistemological critique or cross-cultural
juxtaposition. Epistemological critique results from the anthropologists
going to the “periphery of the Euro-centric world where conditions
are supposed to be most alien and profoundly revising the way we
normally think about things in order to come to grips with what in
European terms are exotica.”31 Cross-cultural juxtaposition is a more
explicit form of cultural critique, for it matches an ethnography of
the Other to an ethnography of the anthropologist’s home base; here
Marcus and Fischer cite the classic example of Margaret Mead con-
trasting the experience of adolescence in the United States with that
of Samoans.32 Marcus and Fischer acknowledge the parallel between
art’s aim to defamiliarize and cultural anthropology’s, but they in-
sinuate that anthropology’s form of defamiliarization is superior, for
art’s defamiliarization rarely becomes “a springboard for a sustained
inquiry.”33 In the examples below I argue that this is a limited view
of the capacity of art.
As mentioned above, unlike the genre of the academic argu-
ment, the argument in fiction resides in “the formal articulation of its
substance, the substance articulated in its form.”34 Take for example
the way China Miéville opens his fantasy novel Perdido Street Station
88 Eating One’s Friends

with an account of interspecies sexuality that is both erotic and dis-

turbing. One of the reasons for this dual reaction is that the author
plays with narrative focalization. Focalization within narrative theory
concerns the vision from which represented events are viewed or “the
perspective in terms of which the narrated situations and events are
presented.”35 In the opening of Miéville’s novel, two species—human
and “khepri”—wake up in bed together. To describe the two animals
Miéville uses a shifting focalization, prompting the reader to see the
lovers as they are seen by each other. The khepri view of her human
lover is: “Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands; and the heads of
shaven gibbons”;36 for humans the khepri would be described as hav-
ing human bodies, legs, hands, and the heads of insects. It is this play
with physical form that permits the novel to create a tension between
the familiar and the radical Other. “She [the khepri woman] undulated
her headlegs at him and signed, My monster. I am a pervert, thought
Isaac [the human man], and so is she.”37
Narratologist Mieke Bal contends that to understand focalization
we must attend to the relationship between focalizer and the object
being focalized.38 In this scene of Miéville’s, the khepri woman is ini-
tially the focalizer and the human man the focalized object, but then
the relationship is reversed. With each new focalization, the features
that appear alien shift; readers see with the khepri how the alien is
like “us” but also must be understood as monstrous. This ability to
identify with the bottom half of the other but not the upper half is a
more striking, and literal, version of what rhetorician Kenneth Burke
has called “consubstantiality.”
For Burke, an argument is effective to the degree that it fa-
cilitates an identification between the speaker and the audience: “In
being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other
than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual
locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once distinct
substance and consubstantial with another.”39 Because others are able
to identify with us, we are able to persuade them. But persuasion
through identification for Burke is not only this direct association be-
tween a particular speaker and a particular audience. In a discussion
of Burke, Foss et al. provide an example of identification useful for
understanding the element of defamiliarization in Miéville’s work: “Men
and women . . . are consubstantial in that they share the substance
of humanness.”40 Miéville’s description of interspecies coupling is so
disorienting because readers can understand the attraction of one for
the other, that is, their humanness as a man and woman, but can
Tod Chambers 89

simultaneously feel disturbed by the alien’s bodily otherness. It is

this ability to create liminal discomfort that gives speculative fiction
a particular rhetorical power.
Realistic fiction can create moments in which identification is
confused, but speculative fiction can challenge identification on a
literal level, taking aim at one’s ontology as well as one’s morality,
and furthermore showing how ontological understandings can influ-
ence moral ones. A good example can be found in a line of Ursula
Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness: “The King was pregnant.”41
The reader comes to understand this alien race is not one in which
woman are thought of as men, but more radically one in which all
the people are neither gender save for times of reproduction, when
they could be either. This ontological shift—challenging the very gen-
der divisions so central to human society—shows us also how all of
our notions of masculinity and femininity can be upended. A similar
move was attempted by Margaret Mead in Sex and Temperament in
Three Primitive Societies, but Le Guin’s is the more radical: her project
uses ontological defamiliarization to lead the reader to rethink entirely
the degree to which biology shapes cultural notions and vice versa.
Speculative fiction is also a particularly rich area to examine
the issue of the species divide and its relation to cannibalism, for
this issue appears in numerous classic texts including H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine (1895), Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
(1961), Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog (1969), and Cormac Mc-
Carthy’s The Road (2006). As Mary Midgley phrases the fundamental
question: “Is cannibalism just the same thing as meat-eating, or is
there a significant difference?”42 One possible answer is that there is
no significant moral difference, and because there is no difference, so
one must conclude that eating meat is just as wrong as eating humans.
This is legal scholar Gary Francione’s stance, which he illustrates with
the hypothetical case of a man, Simon, stranded after a plane crash:

When a rabbit happens by, Simon is confronted with the choice of

killing the rabbit or starving. Just as we would be inclined to excuse
Simon if, under these extreme circumstances, he killed and ate a
human—which has in fact happened more than once—his killing the
rabbit would also be excusable. If, however, Simon were eventually
rescued, he would have no moral justification for continue to eat
rabbits any more than he would have a justification for continuing
to eat humans.43
90 Eating One’s Friends

Francione’s argument relies on being persuaded that the difference

between the human and the rabbit is a distinction that does not affect
either one’s moral status. And, as he himself observes, one must first
accept a prior anti-speciesism argument (his evaluation that killing
rabbits for food when one has access to non-animal food represents
harm equivalent to killing and eating humans). What I argue is that
speculative fiction persuades the reader one way or the other through
the narrative telling rather than through some prior analytical argu-
ment structure. In some instances, as I believe is especially true of
the issue of speciesism, such fiction can alter the reader’s perspective,
using techniques like defamiliarization to change one’s perception of
the world. In what follows, I examine three speculative fiction texts
that confront speciesism by exploring what constitutes cannibalism, and
demonstrate how fiction has the potential to convert the perception
of eating the rabbit from one of eating meat to one of cannibalism.

II

Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 novel The Sparrow uses identification to

critique our notion of the species divide, especially with relation to
use-value. She describes a Jesuit-funded journey to the planet Ra-
khat from which radio broadcasts of complex song cycles have been
detected on earth. When the humans first arrive on the planet they
are interested in whether they can survive on the various life forms
on the planet. They are primarily concerned that eating the native
food sources could potentially result in their poisoning, so they have
one of the members try what they describe as “a small amount of
roasted little green guy because the animals were abundant and easy
to catch.”44 He has no negative side effects after he “sucked the rest
of the meat from the little pair of legs” and the group continues
to experiment eating both animals and vegetables so that they can
transition from subsisting on food they brought to food “comprising
native elements.”45 Eventually the group comes to discover a gentle
alien race who live in communities.

Anne Edwards studied the anatomy. The two species were not gro-
tesque to one another. They shared a general body plan: bipedal, with
forelimbs specialized for grasping and manipulation. Their faces also
held a similarity in general, and the differences were not shocking
or hideous to Anne; she found them beautiful, as she found many
Tod Chambers 91

other species beautiful, here and at home. Large mobile ears, erect
and carried high on the sides of the head. Gorgeous eyes, large
and densely lashed, calm as camels’. The nose was convex, broad
at the tip, curving smoothly off to meet the muzzle, which projected
rather more noticeably than was ever the case among humans. The
mouth, lipless and broad.
There were many differences, of course. On the gross level,
the most striking was that the humans were tailless, an anomaly
on their home planet as well; the vast majority of vertebrates on
Earth had tails, and Anne had never understood why apes and
guinea pigs had lost them. And another human oddity stood out,
here as at home: relative hairlessness. The villagers were covered
with smooth dense coats of hair, lying flat to muscular bodies. They
were as sleek as Siamese cats; buff-colored with lovely dark brown
markings around the eyes, like Cleopatra’s kohl, and a darker shad-
ing that ran down the spine.
“They are so beautiful,” Anne breathed and wondered, dis-
tressed, if such uniformly handsome people would find humans
repulsive—flat-faced and ugly, with ridiculous patches of white and
red and brown and black hair, tall and medium and short, bearded
and barefaced and sexually dimorphic to boot. We are outlandish,
she thought, in the truest sense of the word . . . .46

The human visitors come to discover that these are a gentle

alien race who seem to have a life akin to that of Eden: little conflict,
strong communal ties, everyone vegetarian. Unlike the Jesuit in James
Blish’s science fiction novel A Case of Conscience, who finds an alien
community that lacks sin and concludes that it must be the creation of
Satan, Russell’s Jesuit experiences spiritual joy at discovering the lack
of sin. There is, however, no singing in this group, and the humans
begin to suspect that they may be in the boondocks away from the
species’ more sophisticated brethren. As the tale progresses the human
group makes the startling discovery that there are two sentient species
on Rakhat: Runa and Jana’ata. The Runa, while highly intelligent and
social, are a source of food for the Jana’ata, who raise the Runa in
the same way we raise cattle. One character in Children of God, the
sequel to The Sparrow, refers to a Runa as “a cow with an opinion.”47
The power of Russell’s story resides in that, whereby the reader
comes to identify with the Runa as the humans in the narrative do,
from the introduction of the Jana’ata (who physically closely resemble
the Runa), the species is felt to be engaging in cannibalism. Here the
92 Eating One’s Friends

more intelligent species has bred the Runa for food, physical plea-
sure, and labor. Russell, who was trained as an anthropologist and
has written about cannibalism, has created a novel of estrangement
around the way we classify life, inviting us to identify first with the
Runa before forcing us to reclassify them as products for use. I do
not wish to suggest that the issue of the species divide is the central
theme of Russell’s work, for she is clearly invested in larger questions
of faith and theodicy. In tackling those larger questions, though, she
indirectly critiques the species divide as well.
The narrative rhetoric of The Sparrow’s defamiliarization is accom-
plished through a manipulation of the sjuzet, the narrative discourse
that controls how entities and events are presented.48 Since the account
is told to the current expedition in flashbacks from the perspective
of the last surviving Jesuit, Sandoz, who has lost his faith, Russell is
able to manipulate the presentation of information, so the reader first
identifies with the Runa (as the landing party does) and then later
shares their extraordinary shock in realizing their status as a product
from the perspective of the Jana’ata, who they come to see as more
highly developed intellectually and culturally, that is, as more akin
to the humans.
With each new event, the interrogation of the surviving Jesuit
provides an interpretive gloss that both explains and in many instances
further confuses the categories that had been set at the beginning of
the narrative. For example, Sandoz explains that the Jana’ata use the
Runa for sexual intercourse without the fear of pregnancy:

“Sex with Runa partners carries no risk of pregnancy or even

of disease, as far as I know. For this reason, Runa concubines are
commonly used as sexual partners by individuals whose families
are complete or who are not permitted to breed.”
Felipe, shocked, asked, “Do the Runa consent to this?”
It was Mephistopheles who laughed. “Consent is not an issue.
The concubines are bred to it.” He looked at each of them in turn
as they took in the implications and then hit them again. “The
Runa are not unintelligent and some are marvelously talented, but
they are essentially domesticated animals. The Jana’ata breed them,
as we breed dogs.”49

Russell’s narrative continually shifts back and forth from the

present to the past and then back; in these shifts, the tragedy of the
expedition’s fate becomes clearer. It is related to the humans’ inability
Tod Chambers 93

to see the Runa as animals and thus as worthy of protection in the

same manner that aliens, coming to earth and living among cows and
identifying with them, would then defend the cows from slaughter
from humans. The reader identifies with the humans and the humans
identify with the Runa. When the humans farm the land (a skill the
Runa lack) and give the additional food to the Runa, these animals
begin to breed; this breeding, which the Jana’ata have to this point
carefully controlled, means the Jana’ata need to reduce the herd. This
they do, and many of the humans are killed as they try and protect
the children of the Runa. The reader’s continual movement from
identification to estrangement makes the actions of the Jana’ata both
understandable and disturbing. If one simply agrees with the Jana’ata
worldview, one also has to accept that one can have a domesticated
pet that one on occasion eats.
Our human need to keep radical psychological distance between
ourselves and some animals permits us to do the same as the Jana’ata
do, but the Jana’ata show us that this distance is really just an illu-
sion, a fairy tale. We are either the Jana’ata or the Runa, or rather we
can choose to be either one or the other. In Why We Love Dogs, Joy
argues that humans require a series of psychological barriers such as
deindividualization in order to construct perceptions that permit us to
view certain animals as being objects for use, which she terms “carn-
ism.” She explains that deindividualization entails viewing individuals
solely through their membership in a group, so we lose the ability
to see individual beings but rather merely a class. This process, she
argues, is essential in order for us to be able to eat animals.50 It is
through defamiliarization that The Sparrow constructs a similar argu-
ment; we, the Runa, become individualized and then deindividualized
in a manner that draws a categorical distinction between the sentient
beings we identify with and love and the ones we objectify and eat.
In The Others, Paul Shepard echoes this sentiment when he argues,
“A large part of the logic of animal rights involves the similarity of
animals and humans—how they feel pain, communicate, think, respond
emotionally, and so on. But when it comes to killing and eating ani-
mals . . . we suddenly become very different from them, superior in
morality, intellectually estranged, nature’s stewards, custodial keepers
and architects.”51
94 Eating One’s Friends

III

While The Sparrow examines the species divide through the manner in
which humans misread the species divisions on an alien planet, Michel
Faber’s novel Under the Skin intentionally causes the reader to initially
misread the novel’s genre category and then uses this misreading to
force the reader to rethink the cultural categories of non-humans as
objects for consumption. The paratexts of the novel suggest that Under
the Skin should be categorized as crime fiction; the cover flap summary
of the book, for example, presents the following information:

Isserley cruises the roads of the Scottish Highlands sizing up male

hitchhikers. She is looking for beefy specimens with big muscles. She,
herself, is tiny—like a kid peering up over the steering wheel—and
wears the thickest corrective lenses anyone has ever seen. Scarred
and awkward, yet strangely erotic and threatening, she is a remark-
able and unforgettable character.
Her hitchhikers are a mixed bunch—trailer trash and traveling
postgraduates, thugs and philosophers. As she drives them deeper
and deeper into the mysterious splendors of the Scottish wilds, they
open up to her revealing a complex and varied picture of life on
earth—but Isserley is listening for other clues. Clues about who
might miss them if they should disappear. If she decides they’re
worth the risk, she takes them farther than they ever dreamed of
going. But takes them where?
What we see on the surface in this terrifying and yet mov-
ing novel is deceiving. Michel Faber takes us on a heart-thumping
ride through dangerous territory—our own moral instincts and the
outer boundaries of compassion. Under the Skin is a grotesque and
comical allegory, a surreal representation of contemporary society
run amok—it announces the arrival of an exciting talent.

Under the Skin has the same cool existential tone one finds in the
crime fiction of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith, supporting the
paratexts’ classification of it. Yet its genre is revealed to be science
fiction when we learn that Isserley is not human but actually part of
a group of aliens, capturing male humans to castrate them and fatten
them up to be sent home as meat.
Isserley herself is in exile from her home planet, having under-
gone extreme plastic surgery to make her appear to be an attractive
female human to lure the male hitchhikers. Her encounters with her
Tod Chambers 95

prey are also particularly disturbing in that she first engages them in
personal interviews to see if they have any family members or friends
who will mark their absence. She is essentially culling from the herd
our own alienated isolated members as a lion would kill the weak-
est of a herd of gazelle. Isserley is the narrative’s focal character and
because of this we come to identify with her isolation. Yet at the same
time we come to see ourselves, that is, the humans, as being simply
“vodsels,” the name these aliens have for humans, that is, animals for
eating. At one point during her journey Isserley encounters a sheep:
“Iserley approached stealthily, balancing gingerly on the fingers of
her feet. She barely breathed, for fear of startling her fellow-traveller.
It was so hard to believe the creature couldn’t speak. It looked so
much as if it should be able to. Despite its bizarre features, there was
something deceptively human about it, which tempted her, not for the
first time, to reach across the species divide and communicate.”52 When
Isserley reflects back on her decision to take on this task, she thinks
both about her choice between this and the alternative, being sent to
live in the “New Estates,” which would end in a short unpleasant
life underground. She recalls her original decision on learning that she
would be sent to this planet: “to stay healthy and beautiful against
the odds. Refusing point-blank to be changed physically would be
her revenge on the powers that be, her recoiling kick of defiance. But
would she have had a hope, really? No doubt everybody vowed at first
that they wouldn’t allow themselves to be transformed into a beast,
with hunched back, scarred flesh, crumbling teeth, missing fingers,
cropped hair” (67, emphasis in original). Faber cleverly switches the
language within the narrative so that human beings are not referred
to as “human beings” but instead as vodsels and the words “human
beings” refers to Isserley’s species.
When the group on earth has a visitor, the son of the food com-
pany’s owner, Isserley becomes concerned about how he will perceive
her: “Amlis Vess, never having seen her before, would recoil. He’d
be expecting to see a human being, and he would see a hideous
animal instead. It was that moment of . . . of the sickening opposite
of recognition that she just couldn’t cope with” (79). When several
of these beasts are released by Amlis as an act of animal activism,
Isserley helps recover them to the farm:

The vodsel had lumbered to a standstill, and now stood cower-

ing in the torchlight, naked and sluggish. Clouds of bright steam
swirled around its head as it struggled for breath. Removed from
96 Eating One’s Friends

the warmth of its pen, it was pathetically unfit for the environment,
bleeding from a hundred scratches, pinky-blue with cold. It had the
typical look of a monthling, its shaved nub of a head nestled like
a bud atop the disproportionately massive body. Its empty scrotal
sac dangled like a pale oak leaf under a dark acorn of a penis.
A thin stream of blueish-black diarrhoea clattered onto the ground
between its legs. Its fist swept the air jerkily. Its mouth opened wide
to show its cored molars and the docked stub of its tongue. (106)

Later Amlis discovers that the vodsels have language: “‘No-one told
me that they had a language,” marveled Amlis, too impressed, it
seemed, to be angry. ‘My father always describes them as vegetables
on legs.’ ‘It depends on what you classify as language, I guess,’ said
Isserley dismissively” (183).
When Isserley shows a sheep to Amlis he asks if they have ever
used this animal for meat. Isserley is shocked by the suggestion: “Is-
serley blinked repeatedly, fumbling for something to say. How could
he even think of such a thing? Was it a ruthlessness that linked father
and son? ‘They’re . . . they’re on all fours, Amlis, can’t you see that?
They’ve got fur—tails—facial features not that different from ours
. . .’” (252–53). The issue of identification through physical similar-
ity makes Amlis and Isserley see the sheep as consubstantial, which
makes Isserley see Amlis’s question as akin to suggesting cannibalism.
The irony, of course, is that Isserley now appears more like a vodsel
and thus, by her own logic, she should see the eating of vodsel as
barbaric and the eating of sheep as normative.
This physical identification with the Other has parallels to the
phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas’s argument for the importance of
face as “first philosophy.” For Levinas the face of the Other and our
responsibility to the Other precede any discussion of philosophical
ontology. By responding to the face of the Other, we come to know
ourselves, that is, contra Heidegger’s grounding his philosophy in
Dasein, Being, Levinas wishes instead to see Being as only known in
the encounter with, and recognition of, the face of an Other’s being.
“Prior to any particular expression and beneath all particular expres-
sions, which cover over and protect with an immediately adopted
face or countenance, there is the nakedness and destitution of the
expression as such, that is to say extreme exposure, defenselessness,
vulnerability itself.”53
H. Peter Steeves, a philosopher, has observed the speciesism in
Levinas’s ethics. In “Lost Dog, or, Levinas Faces the Animal,” Steeves
Tod Chambers 97

analyzes a narrative Levinas recalls of a stray dog, Bobby, that visits

the concentration camp in which Levinas was confined by the Nazis.
Levinas recalls that when the dog happily greeted the concentration
camp prisoners it seemed an act of “respect,” a moment of re-cognizing
that they were still essentially human beings. But Steeves notes that
in his discussion of Bobby, Levinas seems to not have similar respect
for the animal: “Bobby, we learn [from Levinas], has neither ethics nor
logos. He is animal and therefore subhuman. He is (truly) what the
Nazis were trying to make (falsely) their prisoners: ‘a gang of apes,’ ‘no
longer part of the world,’ ‘chatters of monkey talk’—‘signifiers without
a signified.’ These are parallels around which Levinas dances carefully:
the human and the animal, the Nazi and the prisoner, a meal of meat
and the Holocaust.”54 For Steeves, Levinas at first seems almost to see
the dog as a moral being but then withdraws this argument, lapsing
into speciesism because he cannot confront the alternative. “[T]o deny
the animal face is to fear the demand it will make,” Steeves explains.55
Is granting “face” possible when encountering an animal for
which there is no human face? Of course in Faber’s novel, the face
the two “human beings” are discussing is a sheep and the animal
they cannot identify with is the vodsel. The focalization of the novel
makes us see the human, not the sheep, as an Other. It forces us to
see ourselves as we view animals that we eat for meat, revealing to
us our radical need to refuse identification with the Other because it
does not have a face to which we feel responsibility.

IV

As seen above, one of the falsehoods that the owner’s son has been
told is that vodsels lack any language. When he questions Isserley,
she responds: “it depends on what you classify as language I guess”
(183). Implied in this exchange is that if vodsels had language then
one would have to question whether it was appropriate to eat them.
A similar argument has been made by the English philosopher R.
G. Frey; he argues against the notion that non-human animals have
“rights,” for non-human animals do not possess language.56 Frey con-
tends that if non-human animals do not possess language then they
cannot possess the features necessary to entail our responsibility to
them in terms of rights. While he acknowledges that many animals
communicate with each other and some animals may have awareness,
this is different from crediting them with the ability to hold interests,
98 Eating One’s Friends

beliefs, and desires, which he takes to be necessary to grant a living

being rights in the way that we do for humans. At times Frey’s ar-
gument relies upon a Chomskyian view of language as requiring the
ability for linguistic competence, which is different from the “primitive
systems of communication” of the other animals and is hardwired
into the human animal. Frey’s argument seems to be a sophisticated
philosophical game in which one has to play with his pieces (Chomsky-
centered linguistics) and toward particular goals (beliefs are necessary
for rights); further implied is that not only is there a radical division
based on language between humans and non-human animals but that
the hardwiring of the human is superior to that of other animals. In
his science fiction species war novel, Mort(e), Robert Repino provides
a counterargument from the point of view of the Queen of a colony
of ants who have developed into highly educated beings:

After years of study, the Queen found human language to be a

primitive self-defeating form of communication, light-years behind
the instantaneous clarity and subtle nuance of her chemicals. Human
speech could mean everything and nothing at once. How could a
species procreate, build, innovate, and survive with such an appall-
ingly inadequate system, she wondered. . . . Whereas knowledge
was stored with the Queen, ensuring almost complete infallibility
from the moment a pair of antennae came into contact, humans
would have to bicker over translations, authorship, historical context,
symbolism, and meaning. They had to rely on the faulty memory
of storytellers, the biased interpretations of scribes, and the whims
of inefficient bureaucrats in order to pass down their collected
knowledge. In a way, she was disappointed.57

But putting aside which form of communication is superior,

what if Frey were to encounter an animal that had language in the
manner he thinks necessary? Would this naturally lead to a world
that supported a notion of rights extending beyond the species bar-
rier? Duncan the Wonder Dog is a graphic novel by Adam Hines that
imagines this scenario, showing what could be called an alternative
universe in which non-human animals as well as humans have the
capacity of speech and can understand each other.
The representation of language in Hines’s work is particularly
important. The rhetoric of comics functions through a relationship
between text and image. The various relationships between these two
has been classified by cartoonist Scott McCloud in his Understanding
Tod Chambers 99

Comics: word specific, picture specific, duo-specific, additive, parallel,

montage, and interdependent.58 Word specific is that category of combi-
nations in which the pictures act as illustrations of a description but,
for McCloud, do not “significantly add to a largely complete text.”59
In the category of picture specific, the words “do little more than add
a soundtrack to a visually told sequence” similar to the sound effect
or speech captions that might appear in a silent movie.60 In duo-specific
comics panels, the words and the pictures relate the same informa-
tion. In additive panels, either of the two elaborates on the other. In
parallel combinations, the words and the picture communicate different
information. In montage, the words are portrayed in the picture as a
part of that picture. In interdependent combinations, which McCloud
notes are the most common, the pictures and words work together to
create a message that neither by itself could communicate. McCloud
notes that in this configuration one of the parts might be more es-
sential than the other.
Hines’s novel has the feeling of a scrapbook. The pictures include
a complex presentation of simulacra of clippings from newspapers,
textbooks, diaries, as well as the traditional images of comic panels.
These scraps and clippings at times overlap the more traditional comic
representation, creating an effect of language layered upon images. The
most common interaction between texts and pictures is the category of
the “interdependent,” with each necessary in order to convey narrative
meaning. The novel seems intentionally confusing to read. It lacks a
single sustained narrative, and its layering of words upon pictures and
pictures upon words make its world difficult to interpret. I suggest
that Hines’s intention is to have the novel as muddled and confus-
ing as the moral issues surrounding the various boundaries we have
constructed between humans and animal Others.
Early in the book Hines presents what seems to be random panel
drawings of parts of New York City mixed with ticket stubs and frag-
ments of newspapers concerning a boxing match.61 The scenic drawings
include humans who are often dwarfed by the physical landscape of
city constructions. Hines does provides a number of word balloons
with these scenes, but they are word balloons that contain only im-
ages or icons. In one panel featuring the bay of New York City and
the Statue of Liberty, two people near the statue are “saying” images
of the American flag to each other in word balloons; on the far right
side of the panel, one tiny figure has a word balloon with a picture
of a whale (6). In the ocean there are two boats, with word balloons
hovering above them, but the ships are too small to see any humans
100 Eating One’s Friends

(6). (One is of a picture of a small sailboat; the other is a word bal-

loon of stars.) As these scenes continue, we zoom in to images of
groups of humans who have word balloons of language rather than
symbols. There are also a number of images of animals standing but
with no images or language coming from them.
These seemingly voiceless animals are revealed to us, however,
as possessing the same language abilities as humans. Hines presents
a scene of a monkey sitting in a cage reading a book. A tiger in a
cage nearby starts the conversation with a word balloon that reads:
“What are you reading?” and the two continue an exchange about
the book, which is about the mathematician Pythagoras (16). The tiger
asks who Pythagoras was and the monkey replies, “Oh, I think he
was human—from the way they talk about him” (17). As the story
unfolds we see that this imagined world differs from our own only in
that the animals are able to talk to each other and to humans, not in
how they are thought of or treated. The power of this rhetoric is that
at times the vital importance of the interdependence of the various
modes of representation. If we eliminated the word balloons of the
animals (and even those of the humans) the narrative of this book in
its initial chapters would be difficult to see as anything but a silent
presentation of everyday life within our own world. With the addition
of the word balloons for the animals, Hines defamiliarizes our world
in such a way as to make the ordinary, everyday relationship between
humans and animals seem utterly barbaric.
Take for example a scene in which a cow is lying down at the
back of a truck in a rain storm. There are two men pictured yelling
at the cow to get up. At first their speech is coming from outside the
panel: “Don’t—don’t you want to go with your friends? It’s not that
far of a walk,” then there is a panel of the two men with one saying,
“I know those stupid rumors have been spreading, and they’re not
true. Why would we raise you for all this time and then just kill you?
It doesn’t make any sense!” (67, emphasis in original). A few pages
later we come back to this story, but now the men are inside a house,
explaining to a woman that they tied a rope around the cow’s neck
to drag it out of the truck, and it fell and broke its leg. One of the
men is shown looking out the window, and the next panel shows an
image of the cow lying on the wet ground with the two feet of a dog
nearby. After the man tells the dog to get away, the dog retorts: “Why?
He’s dead,” and the man replies, “No, he’s not. That’s still good meat”
(69). In a series of panels one of the men is sitting near the cow and
tries to convince the cow again that the rumors are not true. The cow
Tod Chambers 101

now speaks for the first time: “I saw . . . up on the mound (breath)
. . . I saw the building (breath) . . . before they moved it . . . and in the
dirt (breath) . . . I saw them in the dirt (breath) . . . going in (breath)
. . . But I didn’t see any (breath) . . . going out (breath) . . .” The
man then states: “If you think a broken leg is bad, pal, just keep
talking. . . . just keep talking and we’ll see” (73, emphasis in original).
A central narrative in the book concerns a group of animal rights
activists who have bombed buildings in protest. The animal rights activ-
ists are non-human animals and so the notion termed animal liberation
by the philosopher Peter Singer takes a substantially different meaning
in Hines’s novel. Hines also emphasizes that once there is a form
of universal communication, the ability of any animal to eat another
animal becomes difficult to justify. In an interview, Hines responds to
a query about “the difference between the animals in this world and
ours,” by stating that “Animals’s [sic] train of thoughts are completely
unknowable, and just that I made them knowable and relatable I think
does the reality a disservice. But in trying to show how ‘we’re all in
this together[,]’ I hope it justifies the cheat.”62 In Duncan the Wonder
Dog, Hines takes Frey’s critique against animals and asks whether the
true reason for the difference that humans perceive between species
is driven not by communication or ability, but rather by one basic
human need: to think ourselves superior to other animals.

The discussion above of how speculative fiction can force us to re-

think the species divide demonstrates how fiction in general conveys
arguments through the rhetoric of its form. My choice of speculative
fiction in particular has been deliberate, for I argue that its fantastical
elements can be a rich source not only for bioethics but also for the
discipline of literature and medicine itself. The tendency within literature
and medicine to focus on realist fiction has unnecessarily limited its
source material; conversely, that material rarely provides unique argu-
ments for bioethics. This tendency within both bioethics and literature
and medicine to analyze primarily realist fiction indicates a presump-
tion that fiction is most useful when it strives toward a philosophy
of mimesis, when its form does not get in the way of its content.
This is a perspective on literature that the scholars of literature and
medicine have rarely attempted to correct. Even a special theme issue
on science fiction in Literature and Medicine was titled “Science Fiction
102 Eating One’s Friends

and the Future of Medicine.” In her introduction to that issue Anne

Hudson Jones observes that “writers of science fiction have helped
prepare us for the extraordinary advances in medicine and biomedical
technology.”63 Once again realism seems to be the primary justification
that literature must make to those interested in morality and medicine.
Such a view suggests that fiction really has nothing to say, that it
simply sits there, awaiting others’ assertions about it. This, I suspect,
is one of the reasons that Terry and Williams can critique literature as
a source for moral deliberation by pointing out that “literature tends
to elaborate” rather than “pare down and simplify” the representa-
tion of actual moral problems in medical practice.64 This statement
makes sense only if we assume that literature exists to provide virtual
ethnographic cases for a bioethicist to analyze. If even realist fiction
seems too elaborate for Terry and Williams, there really is no place
for speculative fiction. But in many ways it is the extreme anti-realist
examples that stand to help bioethics most.
I stated at the beginning of this essay that Terry and Williams are
correct to be suspicious of fiction. If we actually take fiction seriously,
we will realize that it is not presenting the world but representing it
and, in doing so, is arguing for a particular presentation of that world.

NOTES

1. Terry and Williams, “Literature and Bioethics,” 1.

2. Sukenick, Narralogues, 3.
3. Walsh, Novel Arguments, 18.
4. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 406.
5. Ibid.
6. Shklovsky, Lemon, and Reis, “Art as Technique,” 12.
7. Vint, Animal Alterity, 33.
8. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 200.
9. Leach, Laidlaw, and Hugh–Jones, “Animal Categories,” 326.
10. Joy, Why We Love Dogs, 14.
11. See for example Mary Douglas’s famous analysis of the coherent cultural
logic underlying kosher food laws (Purity and Danger, 55).
12. Leach, Laidlaw, and Hugh–Jones, “Animal Categories,” 327.
13. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, 172.
14. Herzog, Some We Love, 187.
15. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, 174.
16. Ibid.
17. Herzog, Some We Love, 187.
18. Kass, Toward a More Natural Science, 113.
19. See Osborne, “Does Man Eat Man?”
20. Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, 2.
21. Obeyesekere, 2, 9.
Tod Chambers 103

22. Avramescu, Intellectual History, 85–56.

23. Fagan, Clash of Cultures, 24.
24. Hurn, Humans and Other Animals, 22.
25. Avramescu, Intellectual History, 2–3.
26. Benedict and Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, 44.
27. Ibid., 45.
28. Geertz, Works and Lives, 106.
29. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes.
30. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 137.
31. Ibid., 137–38.
32. Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa.
33. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 137.
34. Walsh, Novel Arguments, x.
35. Prince, Dictionary of Narratology, 31. For a discussion of focalization, see
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method.
36. Miéville, Perdido Street Station, 10.
37. Ibid.
38. Bal, Narratology, 146.
39. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 21.
40. Foss et al., Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, 190.
41. Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness, 100.
42. Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 102.
43. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights, 158.
44. Russell, The Sparrow, 194.
45. Ibid., 195.
46. Ibid., 225.
47. Russell, Children of God, 212.
48. Sjuzet is a term from Russian formalism that indicates the order of events
as presented to the reader. This is in contrast to the fabula, which is the order of
events if they were presented in their chronological order. Contrast the fabula of
“The queen died and then two weeks later the king died” with a particular sjuzet
of “The king died. Two weeks earlier the queen had died.”
49. Russell, The Sparrow, 329–30.
50. Joy, Why We Love Dogs, 203–4.
51. Shepard, The Others, 315.
52. Faber, Under the Skin, 66. Further references are to this edition and will
appear parenthetically in the text.
53. Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 83.
54. Steeves, “Lost Dog,” 22.
55. Ibid., 25.
56. Frey, Interests and Rights.
57. Repino, Mort(e), 40.
58. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 153.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Hines, 7. Further references are to this edition and will appear paren-
thetically in the text.
62. Hudson, “Talking with Adam Hines.”
63. Jones, “Editor’s Column,” vii.
64. Terry and Williams, “Literature and Bioethics,” 6.
104 Eating One’s Friends

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