Zoonotic Affinities

Zoonotic AffinitiesWoman-Dog Sickness and Multispecies Becoming in Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and Virginia Woolf ’s Flush Phillip Drake (bio) Elena Ferrante’s depictions of women, family, and gender politics appropriately have received considerable attention from the media and her fervent readers. In her second novel, the devastating Days of Abandonment,1 these issues are inflected by a fraught woman-dog relationship. After her husband deserts her and their two children to live with his young lover, Olga, the narrator, becomes increasingly unhinged, culminating in a daylong hallucinatory fugue that threatens the safety of everyone in the household. It is during the height of Olga’s delirium that Otto, the family’s beloved German shepherd, suffers an excruciating death from an apparent poisoning. In the moments preceding this death, Otto and Olga dwell alone together in momentary kinship through shared abjection and shame. Exposed to Otto’s frail and degrading body, Olga’s thoughts drift out of a self-obsessed haze. Suddenly, she begs forgiveness as she caresses Otto’s head, and Otto responds by opening his eyes and staring back with “the look of the friendly dog who, instead of accusing me, asked forgiveness for his condition.”2 The plea for forgiveness is met with another plea, her shame with his shame. This transitional moment of shared suffering and shame, which finds Olga suddenly regaining the mental clarity to initiate the restoration of her world, lends itself to plural readings. In activating Olga’s transformation, Otto’s death betrays shades of human exceptionalism, as his nonhuman life becomes instrumental, disposable to some extent, in service to the restoration of order for the novel’s human characters. At the same time, the death scene presents an intense moment of [End Page 69] “face-to-face, body-to-body subject making,”3 a Levinasian encounter that expresses the alterity, dignity, and ethical claims of both Otto and Olga. But while the “face” discloses the alterity of discrete individuals in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, multispecies accounts of cobecoming offer a more “contaminated” reading of this scene that disturbs the integrity of “self-contained” individuals in moments of encounter. Contamination is fundamental to life, insists Anna Tsing: “Staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. . . . The evolution of our ‘selves’ is already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration.”4 We are “born pre-polluted,” notes Alexis Shotwell, “our bodily boundaries are penetrated and traversed by viruses, chemicals, and microbes.”5 Using Donna Haraway’s phrasing, contamination can manifest as interspecies “sharing suffering,” in which humans “learning to share other animals’ pain nonmimetically [becomes] an ethical obligation, a practical problem, and an ontological opening. Sharing pain promises disclosure, promises becoming.”6 Through embodied, empathetic procedures, sharing suffering produces novel avenues for relation and transformation that are generated via an impulse not simply to represent or replace but to foster understanding with contaminating and contaminated others. Through readings of Days of Abandonment along with Virginia Woolf ’s Flush: A Biography—another novel that features an intimate, face-to-face death scene involving a dog and a sick and potentially infectious woman—this article explores interspecies contamination in the form of zoonotic threat. Zoonoses typically are defined as diseases that are capable of passing from nonhuman animals to human animals, but I use the term more loosely to identify infectious agents that move in either direction between the interconnected bodies of any animal species, like various strains of influenza, Lyssavirus (rabies), and Toxoplasma gondii (toxoplasmosis).7 I prefer this looser definition because it decenters the human animal in chains of infection to prompt more expansive consideration of precarious bodies in ecological communities. Importantly, actual zoonotic organisms never explicitly manifest in either novel, but both novels feature biosocial threats that operate zoonotically their capacity to move disease between human and nonhuman bodies. These biosocial threats, from poisons and fleas to gender-based [End Page 70] inequity and experimental medicine, “infect” both woman and dog, diminishing the health, dignity, and comfort of both in a state of shared precarity. In these two novels, the

Affinities · Biology · Political science · Veterinary medicine · Zoology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Law · Medicine