Animal Geographies: Zooësis and the Space of Modern Drama Una Chaudhuri Modern Drama, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2003, pp. 646-662 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press DOI: 10.1353/mdr.2003.0022 For additional information about this article Access provided by Univ of Arkansas @ Little Rock (10 Mar 2014 10:58 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v046/46.4.chaudhuri.html http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v046/46.4.chaudhuri.html Animal Geographies: Zooesis and the Space of Modern Drama UNA CHAUDHURI All sit~s of enforced marginalisalioll - ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, COIl- eentration camps - have something in common with zoos. But i( ;s both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol. The zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and animals; nothing else . Berger 24 When we go to th e zoo, we take with us all our worries and joys, our heroes and vil- lains, and we dole them out to the various species, casting each one ill th e role best equippedfor it on the basis of a ccidental human resemblances. Morris and Morri s 172 Confined wilhin this catch-all concept, f .. } within this strict enclosure of this definite article ("the Animal" and not "a nimals"), as in a virgin forest, a zoo, a hunting or fishing ground, a paddock or an ahattoir, a space of domestication, are all th e li ving things that mall does not recognize as his fellows. his neighhors, or his Brothers Dcrrida. "The Animal Thai Therefore I Am" 402; emphasis in original The burgeoning field of animal studies offers a new perspective on that ove r- lap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesi s. In proposing the neologism "zooes is" for this new perspective, I hope to invoke, as a founda- tion for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama, the path-break- ing work of Cary Wolfe, whose tenn "zoontologies" suggests just how much is at stake for literature and the humanities in the "the question of the animaL" Noting the central role played by the figure of the animal and the category of animality in all those "seminal reroutings of contemporary theory away from the constitutive figure of the human " (Wolfe, Introduction xi) in the works of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , Jacques Lacan , Georges Bataille, Renee Girard, bell hooks, Michael Tau ss ig , and M odem Drama , 46:4 (Winter 2003) 646 Animal Geographies Donna Haraway, Wolfe also points out that work in contemporary sciences, especially cognitive ethnology and field eco logy , has decisively undermined " the old saws of anthropocentricism (language, tool use, the inheritance of c ultural behaviors)" (x i). These phil osophical and sc ientific deve lopments that bring the animal into view in new ways have also enabled new analyses of the many contexts in whi ch anim ali ty has been depl oyed rhetorically to oppres.

1. Animal Geographies: Zooësis and the Space of Modern Drama
Una Chaudhuri
Modern Drama, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2003, pp. 646-
662 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press
DOI: 10.1353/mdr.2003.0022
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Univ of
Arkansas @ Little Rock (10 Mar 2014 10:58 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v046/46.4.chaudhuri.
html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v046/46.4.chaudhuri.
html
Animal Geographies: Zooesis and the
Space of Modern Drama
UNA CHAUDHURI
All sit~s of enforced marginalisalioll - ghettos, shanty towns,
prisons, madhouses, COIl-
eentration camps - have something in common with zoos. But i(
;s both too easy and
too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol. The zoo is a

2. demonstration of the relations
between man and animals; nothing else .
Berger 24
When we go to th e zoo, we take with us all our worries and
joys, our heroes and vil-
lains, and we dole them out to the various species, casting each
one ill th e role best
equippedfor it on the basis of a ccidental human resemblances.
Morris and Morri s 172
Confined wilhin this catch-all concept, f .. } within this strict
enclosure of this definite
article ("the Animal" and not "a nimals"), as in a virgin forest, a
zoo, a hunting or
fishing ground, a paddock or an ahattoir, a space of
domestication, are all th e li ving
things that mall does not recognize as his fellows. his
neighhors, or his Brothers
Dcrrida. "The Animal Thai Therefore I Am" 402; emphasis in
original
The burgeoning field of animal studies offers a new perspective
on that ove r-
lap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesi s. In
proposing the
neologism "zooes is" for this new perspective, I hope to invoke,
as a founda-
tion for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama,
the path-break-
ing work of Cary Wolfe, whose tenn "zoontologies" suggests
just how much
is at stake for literature and the humanities in the "the question

3. of the animaL"
Noting the central role played by the figure of the animal and
the category of
animality in all those "seminal reroutings of contemporary
theory away from
the constitutive figure of the human " (Wolfe, Introduction xi)
in the works of
Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari , Jacques
Lacan , Georges Bataille, Renee Girard, bell hooks, Michael
Tau ss ig , and
M odem Drama , 46:4 (Winter 2003) 646
Animal Geographies
Donna Haraway, Wolfe also points out that work in
contemporary sciences,
especially cognitive ethnology and field eco logy , has
decisively undermined
" the old saws of anthropocentricism (language, tool use, the
inheritance of
c ultural behaviors)" (x i). These phil osophical and sc ientific
deve lopments that
bring the animal into view in new ways have also enabled new
analyses of the
many contexts in whi ch anim ali ty has been depl oyed
rhetorically to oppress
human groups, members of different "races," nati ons, ethniciti
es , classes, and
genders. The ideological " rhetoric of animality" (Baker 77-119)
is a wide-
spread cultural zooesis founded upon "the tradition al
onlological distincli on,

4. and consequent ethi cal di vide , between human and nonhuman
animals"
(Wo lfe, Introduction xx). The deconstruct ion of that
distinction, and the inter-
rogation of that divide, are the work of a critical zooes is.
Zooesis, as I conceive it, consists of the myriad performance
and semiotic
elemenlS involved in and around Ihe vaSI field of cultural
animal practices.
These include nOI on ly literary representations of animals (fro
m Aesop' s
Fahles to Will Self's Great Apes), nol only dramatic
representations of ani -
mals (fro m The Frogs 10 Equus), not only animal performances
in circuses
and on stage, but also such ubiquitous or isolated social
practices as pel-
keep ing, cockfighlin g, dog shows, equestrian di splays,
rodeos, bullfighting,
anim al sacrifice, hunting, ani mal sl aughle r, and meat-eating.
Com pri sing both
our actual and our imaginative interactions with non-human
animals, zoocsis
is the di sco urse of animality in human life, and its effects
permeate our social,
psycholog ical, and material ex istence.
Not the least important of the registers of this di sco urse are
space and place ..
As the title of an important recent anthology recognizes, there
are multifari ous
"an imal geographies" that sec ure, sustain, and complicate our
more famili ar
hum an ones (Wolch and Emel). Since (to paraphrase Ihe s
ubtitle of the same

5. book) " politi cs and identity [are forged[ in Ihe nature-<:ul ture
borderlands,"
inhab itants of th at conceptuali zing zone are partic ul arly rich
carriers of soc ial
meaning. The animal is perhap s the most complex inhabitant of
the nature-
culture borderlands (other inh abitants are children , the insane,
Ihe "pri mi -
tive"); as s uch , the animal contributes powerfully to the
ideological productiv-
ity of this conceptu al boundary. From its limi nal positi on on
the marg ins of
hum an life, the non-human animal participates, willy-nilly, in
the construction
of such human categories as the body, race , gender, sex uality ,
morality, and
ethics. It intervenes deci sive ly also in the social constructi on
and cultural
meaning of space . Animal practices shape not only the specific
and actual
spaces in which they occur, but parallel and opposile spaces as
well, spaces to
which they are rel ated through the logic of the nature-<:ulture
divide th at
ena~les so much cultural meaning. Thus zooes is pertains not
only to, for
in stance, the zoo, the dog-run , the slaugh lerhou se , but also
the nursery, the
pl aygro und, the dini ng room.
As a complex ideologica l disco urse of space and pl ace,
zooesis offers a new
UNA CHAUDHURI

6. perspective on that privileged space of modem drama, the
family home . In the
plays I shall discuss here - Edward Albee 's The Goat (2002)
and Th e Zoo
Story (1959), and Terry Johnson ' s Cries from the Mammal
House (1984) -
zooesis rewrites the dramatic discourse of home from the point
of view of the
animal, figured either as the radically excluded Other , the very
exemplar of
homelessness (The Goat), or as the radically contained Other,
exemplar of
repression and imprisonment (Zoo Story and Mammal House).
The last two
plays explore the theme of human habitation through the figure
of the zoo,
which is represented as a boundary-making, language-wielding
material cul-
tural practice, and as such a practice that bears more than a
passing resem-
blance not only to the home but also to the theatre. The
performati vity that
links the human home to the animal house is perfectly captured
in the title of
Johnson 's play, in which human and non-human animals refuse
to be silenced
by the prison-house of cultural meaning.
These plays differ, however, in their relation to a central issue
of animal
studies, the two poles of which are captured by the first two
epigraphs of this
essay. Berger's insistence on the literalism of the zoo, and hence
on the actual
relation between human beings and animals, is in fact an

7. enonnous challenge
to the tradition of literary animal discourse. His "nothing else"
is nothing like
the simple limit implied by that brief phase . It is an injunction
to resist the
anthropocentric and metaphoric logic of most "zoo stories,'"
which invariably
"cast" animals, as Morris and Morris say, in anthropomorphic
dramas. This
anthropocentric zooesis, Jean Baudrillard has provocatively
argued , is the
foundation of modernity. In modernism, writes Baudrillard,
"animals mu st be
made to say that they are not animals" (129). They must join the
group of dis-
cursively colonized Others - the insane, children, "savages" -
upon whom
rationali sm imposes its hegemony, forcing them to speak in its
terms. Not
only do we exploit animals as beasts of burden and subjects of
scientific
experimentation, s"ays Baudrillard, we have also made them
creatures of som-
atization, forcing them to carry our symbolic and psychological
baggage . As
pets, as performers, and as literary symbols, animals are forced
to perform us
- our fantasies and fears, our questions and quarrels, our hopes
and horrors.
Refusing the animal its radical otherness by ceaselessly troping
it and render-
ing it a metaphor for humanity, modernity erases the animal
even as it makes
it discursively ubiquitous.
CASTING THE ANIMALS

8. An anicle included in the playbill for the Broadway production
of Edward
Albee's recent play The Goat exemplifies the tendency to
transform the ani-
mal into a sign, doing so in a way that reminds us of a
specifically theatrical
version of this practice: "The he-goat (see also SCAPEGOAT)
symbolizes the
powers of procreation , the life force, the libido, and fenility"
("What ' s the
Animal Geographies
word?" 2) . The article goes on to say that the word "tragedy"
comes from a
Greek word meaning "goat-song ." Thus, in one short note -
invoking one long
hi story - is the whole myste ry of the play apparently solved:
the shocking
story of Martin , a successful, happily married architect who
falls in love and
lust with a goat, is quickly translated into the latest in the
American theatre's
long quest for a dramatic formula that could bestow tragic
grandeur on the
common man. From thi s perspective, Martin would seem to be
just a higher-
class Willy Loman , yearning for the one thing materialist
success cannot
deliver: an experience of transcendence.
But s urely this is much too neat a parcel for the whole shame-
filled, guilt-

9. ridden mess of bestiality that spills out on stage in Albee's play,
shattering the
attractive lives that have been holding a flattering mirror up to
the audience.
This shattering is astonishingly literal: Martin's wife reacts to
every new reve-
lation about his love affair by grabbing some decorative item
off the shelves
of the tastefully decorated living room and violently smashing it
on the floor.
Her repeated (and increasingly deliberate) action clearly
establishes physical
destruction as an alternative strategy to the one that these
people have hitherto
favored in their dealings with the world: a conspicuously
literary strategy
composed of wordplay and repartee. Martin, especially, is a
stickler for correct
usage and a sucker for verbal cleverness. Early in the play, a
self-conscious
quotation from Noel Coward both acknowledges the dramatic
lineage that
Albee's couple has inherited and begins the process of
disavowing it.
The di savowal involves exposing the foundation of that
tradition in a partic-
ul ar co-articulation of animality with language to which
Jacques Derrida has
given the name "camo-phallogocentrism" ("Eating Well " t 13).
This portman-
teau term designates a di sco urse in which the threatening
multiplicity of ani-
mal lives is contained by language, reduced, and singularized.
The countless
species of non-human creatures. and the countles s members of

10. those species,
all captured in a single word: "The animal ," says Derrida,
"what a word! "
("The Animal That Therefore I Am" 392). Cary Wolfe
summarizes Derrida's
argument as follow s:
the Word, logos, does violence to the heterogeneous
multiplicity o[the living world
by reconstituting it under the sign of identity, the as such and in
general - not
"animals" but "the animaJ." And as such, it enacts what Derrida
calls the "sacrificial
structure" that opens a space for the "noncriminal putting to
death" of the animal- a
sacrifice that (so the story of Western philosophy goes) allows
the transcendence of
the human, of what Heidegger calls "spirit," by the killing off
and disavowal of the
animal, the bodily, the materially heterogeneous, the contingent
- in short,
differance. (Animal Rites 66, emphasis in original)
Albee 's play traces an unraveling of the sacrificial logic
Derrida describes,
for here the animal that has been sacrificed to - and for - the
power of lan-
UNA C HAUDHURI
guage creeps back into view. While the opening of the play
shows us a life-
style dominated - even defined - by language , the body of the
play takes us as

11. far into non-verbal territory as textual drama can go. The final
moments com-
plete the play' s endorsement of breakage, for the "solution" to
the hero's
dilemma entails smashing the rules of reali stic drawing-room
drama by dis-
playing the everyday brutality of animal slaughter in a space
thai programmat-
ically excludes (to use Hamlet's phrase) such "country matters"
(3.2.115). It
goes one long literal step beyond Harold Pinter's famou s
formula for menac-
ing reali sm - " lllhe weasel under the cocktail cabinet" (qtd. in
Taylor 323)-
by dragging animality out of hiding and into plain view:
exposed, center-
stage, rhere for all to see.
What does it mean to see the animal? In the title of a 1977 essay
that has
become a classic of modem animal studies, John Berger asked
the question,
"Why Look at Animals?" Like Baudrillard later, Berger
addresses the place
(or rather non-place) of animals in modernily , and comes to the
chilling con-
clusion that we are currently living through their final
vanishing: a "h istoric
loss," as he puts it, " irredeemable for the culture of capitalism"
(26). Animals
are commercialized as images, reduced as ever-more reali stic
toy s, infan-
tilized as Disney characters, denatured as pets, and - most
significantly for
Berger - monumentalized in zoos. " In zoos," he says, "they
constitute the liv-

12. ing monument to their own disappearance" (24). Thus , animal s
can no longer
perform the vital function for whi ch human beings had long
prized them: their
ability to foster in us a kind of self-consciousness that is impo
ss ible to attain
within the human spec ies itself. The look between man and
animal, says
Berger, is a recognition across the abyss of sameness and
difference by which
animals are related to us: "With their paraliel lives, animals
offer man a com-
panion ship which is different from any offered by human
exchange. Differ-
ent because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of
man as a
species" (4).'
For Berger, the "loneliness of man as a species" - which had for
centuries
been affirmed in the look between man and animal- has in
modern times been
bartered for a false sense of mastery, to which animal s are reg
ularly sacri-
ficed : s pectacularly in zoos, but also psychologically and
imaginatively, as
fantasy images, as nostalgic markers of a lost rural idyll, and, of
course, as
pets. In an analysis that anticipates Deleuze and Guatarri's more
·famous cri-
tique of the pet as an "Oedipal" animal (240), Berger rega rds
the pet as a key
element in "that universal but personal withdrawal into the
private small fam-
ily unit, decorated or furnished with mementoes from the
outside world,

13. which is such a distinguish ing feature of consumer societies"
(12) . Berger 's
description of the modern home perfectly describes the set of
the Broadway
production of Tlte Goat, which exemplified the
commodification and domesti-
cation of the alien, the exotic, and the natura l.
Interest ingly , this model modem home of the play does not
include a pet,
Animal Geographies 65 1
except perhaps discursively, through Albee's subtitle - "Who is
Sylvia?" By
naming hi s goat Sylvia, Albee's hyper-literate Martin may be
uncon sc iou sly
channeling Shakespeare's Love's Labors Losr, but audience
members might
also be reminded of A. R. Gurney's 1995 play , Sylvia, whose
eponymous
characte r is a dog. Gurney's play is a ruefu l meditation on the
pet as Oedipal-
ized animal, for the dog Sylvia (like Albee's goat Sy lvia, only
platonically)
also triangulates a married coup le, alm ost to the breaking
point. By re placing
the dog w ith a goat, Albee exposes to view (much more vio
lently than Gur-
ney) the us ually occluded signify ing structure of the modern
animal , which
balances separation and longing , disdain and de sire. Intere
stingly, Derrida's
recent philosophical explorat ions of the fig ure of the animal al

14. so center upon
the pet - in fact his own pet, a cat. Derrida essentia ll y reverses
Berger's ques-
tion, "W hy look at animals?" asking rather why animals look at
us , or at least
what it mi ght mean to entertain the possi bility that they
actively regard us
instead of simply receiving our gaze, pas sive ly or at best
reactively .
To breach the modern world' s systematic occ lu sion of animali
ty is also to
dist urb the delicate eco logy of ani mal symbol ism. By
bringing a rea l goat into
his story, Albee both invokes and disavows the entire
symbology of the scape-
goat. In the same way, he challenges the tragic formula of a
heroic longing for
transcendence by bringing in the coarse subject of bcstiality .
Although Martin
insists on call ing his experience an "epiphany" (82) and
identifying the object
of his adoration as Sylv ia's "so ul " (86), none of the other
characte rs can resist
describing it - repeatedly and hilariously - as "goat-fu ck l ingl"
(48). It is not
Martin 's love for the anima l that vio lates taboos and threaten
s to "br ing 1 .• ,1
down" the family (89); it is the fact th at this love is physical,
sex ual- hetero-
sex ual! - corporeal. The presence of this most transgress ive of
sex ualities
strain s the tragic formula to the limit.
Animality also breaks the frame of drawing- room drama by
recontextuali z-

15. ing its inhabitants in a wider world. Animal plays, including the
ones under
discussion, often contex tualize their inter-species enco unters
within "eco-
sites," heterotopias of "n ature " in culture. Others stage literal
destructions of
the traditional stage spaces of reali sm: lonesco's herds of
rhinoceroses
famous ly thunder in the wings, red ucing bo urgeois spaces to
rubble. Alan
Strang, the young protagonist of Peter Shaffer's Equus, attacks
the theatron's
privi leged organ, the eye, by blinding the horses he loves:
animality and theat-
ricality cance l each other out. Elizabeth Egloff's 1993 play, Th
e Swan, in
which one of the three main characters is the eponymous bird,
ends wi th the
following stage direction: "There is a hl/ge noise: glass
breaking, the world
breaking, a tree cracking" (54) . In Albee's play, the
recontexuali zation is less
cosmological and more sociologica l. The move from dog (as in
Gurney) or cat
(as in Derrida) to goat is al so a move out of the urban domestic
sphere of
modernity, a move towards, to use Hamlet 's phra se aga in,
"country matte rs"
(the salacious pun is perhaps even more apt here than in
Shakespeare!).
UNA CHAUDHURI
For indeed it is the country - that most paradi gmatic of all eco-

16. sites - that
unleashed all the chaos to begin with: we learn that Martin fe ll
in love with
Sylvia, the go at, while he was country hou se-hunting, or, as he
says , " barn
hunting" (40) . The ci rcumstances, as he reveals them, point to
the cultural
c odes within which the country is embedded. "S tevie and 1 had
decided it
was time to have a real country place - a farm, maybe - we
deserved it."
" Beyond the s uburb s," says his fr iend Ross, and Martin
agrees: "Yes,
beyond the subu rbs" (40). Hi s epiphany, as he later calls it,
was strikingly
site-specific. It began with a landscape, a fanta sy-l aden vision
of a certain
kind of place :
I stopped at the top of a hill I .. . } and the view was ... we ll,
not spectacular, but ...
wonderful. Fall , you know?, with leaves turning and the town
below me and great
scudding clo uds and those country smell s. I .. . J The roadside
stand s, wi lh com and
other stuff pil ed high, and baskets full of I ... ] beans and
tomatoes and tho se great
whi te peaches you onl y get late summer I ... J And from up
there I could trace the
roads out toward the farm, and it gave me a kind of shiver. (41 )
Martin 's tragedy , if such it is, mi ght have less in common
with the scape-
goat tragedies of ancient Greece than with that spatial
bifurcation of human
communi ty Raymond Willi ams investigated so brilliantly in

17. The Country and
the City. Noting the extraordinary variety of meanings those
two words have,
William s nevertheless identified their structural relationship -
as opposites -
as key to their ideological fun ction in g:
On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of
peace, innocence ,
and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an
achieved centre: of
learning, communi ca ti on, light. Powerful hostil e associations
have also developed:
on the city as a place of noise, worldline ss and ambition; on the
country as a place of
backwardne ss, ignorance, lim itation. A contrast between
country and city, as
fundamental ways of life, reache s back into classical times. (t)
Almost four decade s before Th e Goat, Albee had given more
straightfor-
wardly tragic expression to the cultural geography that
increasingly separates
human beings from other animals, both human and non-human.
In Th e Zoo
Story, Albee pointedly contextualizes modern alienation within
another para-
di gmatic eco-site: the city park. The pl ay is set, famously, in
Central Park . As
discussed in the emergent field of cultural landscape studies
(see Chaudhuri
22'-26) the city park is one of those " middle landscapes -
gardens, parks, or
other natural landscapes situated outsi de the overstimulating
city but short of
the prim itive wilderness" that have "a long history in Ameri

18. can culture and
Western thought [ ... ) joining pastoral scenery and civilization"
(Hanson 17).
In the nineteenth century, the vogue fo r such middle-
landscapes joined social-
Animal Geographies
engineering programs seeki ng to remedy the perceived threat
posed to health
and morality by urbani zation and industrialization: "A merican
city planners
created parks as pieces of country in the city, restorative
retreats that would
offset the stress, noise, grime, overstimulation, debauchery and
disorder of
city life" (17).
New York's Central Park, is, of course, a model of the genre, as
well as a
paradigm of American landscape architecture, being one of the
greatest
achievements of the father of that field , Frederick Law
Olmsted. Olmsted's
approach to landscape architecture prod uced works of complex
naturali stic
mimesis in which every effort was made to conceal the artifice
of the design,
to disguise cultural interventions to the point that the end produ
ct would not
be recognized as a built landscape (most visitors to Central Park
assume that
it is a "natural" landscape). Occupying an ideological middle
ground

19. between John Muir's radical notion of nature as "tem ple, " and
Gifford Pin-
chot 's utilitarian view of nature as "workshop" (Spirn t t 2),
Olmsted exem -
plified the more common, and infinitely more ambivalent
relationship of
modernity to nature: nature as culture's majestic Other alld its
malleable
creature. It is perfectly fitting, then, for his masterpiece ,
Central Park, to be
the setti ng of one of American drama's most poignant
enactments of th at
ambivalence.
The action of Zoo Story suggests that the park is not just any
space ; rather it
is so compli cated a response to the increasing dichotomization
of city and
county as to be something of a geopathological syndrome. Both
the characters
approach it desperately, as a potential solution to the problem
of city life,
though Jerry is more conscious of (and more extreme in) this
project than
Peter, who is content to use the park as per the culture's
instructions, as a brief
respite from bourgeois pressures and domestic oppression. In
the course of the
play, Jerry manages to tum the park into a weapon, effectively
reversing the
planners ' intention for the space: instead of a safe outlet for the
aggression
engendered by (unnatural?) urban life, the park turns into a
stage for a quiet
modern agon that pits humans against animals, men against
women, the

20. " upper-middl e-middle-c1ass" again st the "Iower-upper-
middle-class" (20),
and individuals against themselves.
The Zoo Story might have been more accurately called The Park
Stmy.
There is actually no zoo in it (nor, for that matter, a zoo story,
although one is
repeatedly promised by Jerry). But the di splacement of the zoo
by the park in
the play (and vice versa in the play's title) is a key to its
account of modem
metropolitan experience. The role of animality in characterizing
the space and
action of the play makes that account classically moderni st,
with the animal
standing in, as so often in moderni sm, for the descent into
primitive emotion-
ality. The descent begins, in thi s case, by establishing space as
a deterministic
force. There may be no zoo in The Zoo StOlY, but the one that
Jerry keeps
mentioning is real enough, and the play is at pains to locate it
quite specifi-
UNA CHAUDHU RI
cally, with numerical coordinates like street numbers. Jerry's in
sistence on
di stances and directions ("I've been walking north . [ . .. j IButj
n ot due north"
11 2-13 J) sets the stage, as it were, for a di stinctly territorial
encounter, with
both characters making significant cultural assumptions about

21. each other
based o n the city' s c ultural geography of East Side , West
Side , G reenwich
Village , and so on. T he pl ay's symbolic approach to
geography extends even
to statements of phil osoph ica l principle (or perhaps the
parody of s uch) as
when Jerry solemnly declares that "sometimes a person has to
go a very long
distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly"
(2 I) . The
cum ul ative effect of all these geographical references is to
fram e the socio log-
ical and psychological ac tion of the play within a deterministic
spatial logic.
The park begins to appear as a kind of vortex of tragic se lf-di
scovery. It is a
"heart of darkness" where (like all such sites in modernism) the
human
. descent into primitive emotionality is figured as animality.
Ju st as the zoo is di splaced here , so is the zoo slOry. In its
place we get a dog
story. Not, one might say, a shaggy dog story , for "The Story
of Jerry and the
Dog" is anything but pointless . Rather , it is a kind of modern
beast fable ,
packed with ethical implic ations. The d og Jerry first tried to
tame and then
tries to kill (first to kill "with kindness " and then to "just kill ,"
as he says 13 1 Il
is a grotesque version of the h ousehold pet as Oedipali zed an
im a l. It belongs
to Jerry's hideously amorous land lady and rese mbles the hell
ho und to which

22. Jerry expli citly compares it:
a black monster of a beas t: an oversized head, ti ny, tiny ears,
and eyes ... bl oodshot,
in fec ted, maybe ; and a body you can see the ribs through the
skin. The dog is black,
all black; all bl ack eKcept for the bloodshot eyes, and ... yes ...
and an open sore on
its I ... J right forep aw; that is red, too. And oh yes; (he poor
monster 1 ... 1 almost
always has an erection 1 .. . 1 that' s red, too. And I ... 1 there 's
a gray-yellow-white
color, too, when he bare s his fangs. (30, emphasis in orig inal)
The landlady 's horror-cartoon of a pet is contrasted with the
pets in
Peter's house - two cats and two parakeets, one for each of hi s
two daugh-
ters. These Disneyfied ani mal s, beni gn enough at first,
become di stu rbingly
humani zed during Peter 's hysterical giggling fi t: "Oh, hee,
hee, hee . I must
go. I .. . J After all, stop , stop, hee, hee , hee, after all , the
parakeets will be
getting dinner ready soon. Hee, hee. And the cats are setting the
table" (38) .
Hi s fanta sy turns his home, as Peter him self says, into a zoo,
jus t as Jerry's
descript ion of the inhabi tants of his rooming house - each as di
stinctive as a
species, and each locked into his or her tiny enclosure - recalls
nothing so
much as the zoo that he has recently visited , where everyone is
"separated by
bars from everyone e lse, the animal s for the mos t part from
each other, and

23. always the people from the anim als" (40) . Thu s the zoo that
fail s to appear
in a story nevertheless saturates the symbolic space of the play,
redefi ning
Animal Geographies 655
modern metropolitan life as bestialized , partitioned, and
brutally confined .
Albee's modern city dwellers venture into the park as into a
wilderness, hop-
ing to find some account of their being in the world more
satisfying than the
one offered by their various urban stations. Their story is,
finally , an in stance
of the privileged trope of modernism, " the traumatic encounter
with the
primitive that threaten s to activate the anima l in all of us"
(Wolfe , Animal
Rites (85). The zoo story turns out to be only a park story, its
zoo di splaced
and "useld l, " as John Berger puts it, "as a symbo l" (24). In the
end, the only
animals we see in the play turn out to be Peter and Jerry
themselves: Jerry' s
death cry is that of "an injuriated andjatally wounded animal"
(47, empha-
sis in original), and Peter learns that "it's all right, you 're an
animal. You're
an animal, too" (49).
Ultimately, then, The Zoo Story remains captivated by the
figure of the
human, sacrificing the animal to that figure by turning it into a

24. metaphor. The
actual animal returns, with a vengeance, in The Goal, where its
presence is
stunningly literal. It is also , however, utterly beyond dramatic
resolution. The
appearance of the animal, in all its fleshly embodiment, brings
the human
story to a screeching halt. The family stands paralyzed. There is
nowhere to
go: neither city nor country, neither apartment nor zoo. The
animal is under-
stood quite literally as a defeat of meaning, a black hole in the
family's com-
fortable universe : "one of them has been underneath the house,
down in the
cellar, digging a pit so deep! , so wide!, so ... HUGE! ... we'll
all fall in and
r ... J never ... be ... able .. . to ... climb ... o ut .. . again - no
matter how much
we want to, how hard we try" (tOI-2) .
Between the unmeaning (or resistance to meaning) of the literal
animal and
the unmeaning (or s urfeit of meaning) of the animal as
metaphor lies another
kind of zooesis, which I now propose to explore in Terry
Johnson 's extraord i-
nary zoo story, Cries from the Mammal House. A crucial
characteristic of this
kind of zooesis is the fact that it begins with - and returns us to
- an under-
standing that animals are, above all , themselves, not us, not
metaphors, not
convenient codes for our prejudices. It is a salutary reminder,
this "nothing
el sc" of the animal, even jf it is onc we humans can sustain

25. only fleet ingly.
For, as Wolfe puts it, "even though the discourse of animality
and species dif-
ference may theoretically be applied to an other of whatever
type, the conse-
quences of that discourse, in institutional terms, fall
overwhelmingly on
nonhuman animals, in our taken-far-granted practices of using
and exploiting
them" (Introduction xx, emphasis in original).
NOTH I NG ELSE
Cries from the" Mammal House is a veritable compendium of
animal practices,
including zoo-keeping, velerinary medicine , animal-behavior-
based psychol-
ogy, repopulation of endangered species, e uthanasia, animal
worship, bestial-
UNA CHAUDHURI
ity , taxidermy, trafficking in exotic animals, slaughtering,
butchering , and
meat-eating . The play 's catalog uing of the many ways in
which humans relate
to animals is a principal strategy of its remarkably non-
reductive zooesis. The
play 's highly differentiated and plurali stic view of animality is
also reflected
in its title . I called the playa zoo story, and indeed it is set in a
zoo, but the
play' s title is the first of its many interventions into the
homogenized and

26. impacted view of anim als that Derrida identifies as the key
strategy of camo-
phallogocentrism. In using the less familiar, more archaic term
"mammal
house" in the title of the play, Johnson disturb s that
comfortable di ssociation
we have achieved between the words "human" and "animal," and
forces us
back into the biological field we prefer to distance ourselves
from .
From its title onwards, the logic of Johnson 's play fosters the
re-recognition
of animals as humankind's " neighbors" (to use Derrida's term
I"The Animal
that Therefore I Am" 402 D, but does so within a tragic view of
eco-history
(similar to the one expressed in Cary l Churchill's recent play of
ecocida l
apoca lypse, Far Away), asking whether this recognition comes
too late. In an
instance of inspired zooesis, the play opens with a direct
address to the audi-
ence that is cleverly doubled as a dialogue with an animal:
Staring "straight
ahead of her," Anne speaks "directly to the audience":
Li sten! This isn't the real world . This is a zoo. You think you'd
prefe r the real
world? Foraging for yourself instead of opening that mouth for
whatever we
choose to drop into it? Nothing but nature between you and the
horizon? You
dream of it as a sort of freedom, the real world? Elephan ts
might ny . Let me tell
you, when we stole it from you, this dream of yo urs, the

27. weapon we used was our
intelligen ce. And now the world's been sto len from us by a
small elite of our own
species and the weapon they used was money. So we sit in our
enclosures, our
horizon s painted on glass, ou r mouths wide open ... but instead
of education, se lf-
respect and common decency, we are fed television, charge
cards and bloody
families. ( 141)
By explicitly artic ul ating the modern-life-as-zoo metaphor
within a zoo,
and especially by embedding it within a surpri sing instance of
cross-species
address, Anne's speech exposes to critical view the kind of
metaphoric zooe-
sis that, in Albee's Zoo Story as in so much other an imal
discourse, effecti vely
di splaces the animal.
Just as the word "mammal" in the title overwrites and
reactivates the dead -
ened word "animal," the word "house" nudges new meanings
into the senti-
mentalized "home." Human and non-human animals share this
mammal
house , making the play 's title function much like the title of J.
M. Coetzee's
boundary-blurring an im al text The Lives of Animals. Coetzec's
"animals"
include not only those of whom his protagonist speaks, but also
those sur-
rounding her - her son, daughter-in-law, grandchildren - through
whose

28. Animal Geographies
"lives" (lives that we see as normal; lives like ours) her so-
called extreme
views on animals are refracted. Here, in John so n's play , the
"cries" coming
from the mammal house belong to both human and non-human
animal s, with
neither group displacing or muting the other. The effect is that
the lives of the
animals begin to appear as complex and various as human lives
always auto-
matically do.
As the play opens, a middle-aged man named Alan is reluctantly
taking
possession of a small-town zoo he has just inherited from his
father. As his
first act of ownership, he mu st kill the zoo's most popular
exhibit, an elephant,
which was, in a manner of speaking, responsi ble for his
father'S death . At the
very outset, then, zooesis is at work: the merging of the issue of
the animal's
criminal culpability with the more familiar family plot provides
a brilliant
twist on the old theme of the revenge of a father'S murder. In
stead of a mur-
derous human "beast," this play's reluctant Hamlet or Orestes,
Alan, must dis-
patch a real animal. Thu s tile opening moments of the play link
a venerable
dramatic tradition with a now well-documented but still little
known piece of

29. legal history -the trial and execution of animals.
Whether an animal can be res ponsible for acrime is decisively
answered here
in the negative, by invoking the complex history of animal di sp
lay out of which
the modern zoo evolved. It seems that the old man was killed
when, in an act of
drunken nostalgia, he had entered the elephant's cage to be
photographed with
the animal, attempting to recreate a moment from the distant
past of the zoo,
when he was photographed "holding out a contract for the
elephant to sign"
(144) . The old photograph evokes the ancestry of zoos in
traveling menagerie s
and animal entertainments, in the so-called bad old days ("B
loody silly," the
son ca lls the photograph [1441) before the invention of the
modem and so-
called scientific zoo, which frowns on the anthropomorphizing
of captive an i-
mals (while reluctantly participating in it - in practices like
public feeding s and
named "zoo pets" - to appeal to a decidedly voyeuristic and
unscientific pub-
lic). In the context of cruel animal captivity thus evoked, the
animal appears as
a victim , and its "execution" as the final injury in a life of
insults.
Absurd, unjust, and unethical as the decision is, the animal must
be "p ut
down," and the play's fir st exchange evokes some of the most
common argu-
ments and excuses heard in current debates about animal rights.

30. There is the
pragmatic argument: " If I don 't, somebody else will." There is
also the " lesser
of two evils" argument: " I'm a qualified s urgeon. I can kill I ...
] mOfe
humanely than any policeman " (142). But the play is less
interested in ethical
argumentation than in developing a dramatic discourse - a
zooesis - based on
the cultural existence of the debate: Alan mu st not only kill the
innocent ele-
phant but spend much of the play euthanizing many other
animals, once it is
learned that the zoo is bankrupt and has to be closed down. Thu
s one major
line of the play' s action is a kind of reversal of the Noah story,
with animals
being systematically destroyed instead of systematically saved
by human
UNA CI-I AU DHURI
beings. Creat ure by creature, species by species, Alan
administers the right
dose of poison needed to exting uish each living be ing. The last
syri nge is for
him se lf, making him a kind of in verse Adam , with no animal
s left to name,
and no rea son to live.
Th is anima l extinction plot is countered by the story of David,
Alan' s
brother, a biol og ist specializing in the rescue and rebreeding
of endangered

31. species. Hi s current project takes him (and , surpri singly, the
play itse l!) to
Maurit ius, where, in addit ion to the pink pi geons he is
seeking to rebreed, he
also finds a sec luded tribe who worsh ip a group of dodo birds
th at ha ve sur-
vived the famed ext in ction of their species. On the island he
also encounters a
rich mixture of human cultu res. from whi ch he ac quire s a
kind of new family
to re pl ace the obliterated one back in England. Significantly,
the human diver-
sity is characte rized (by the ludi cro usly conservative colonial
wife Lad y
Palmer) as "a sort of reli gious zoo" ( 173). Her di squisition
neatly demon-
st rates the complex and contradictory use of the animal in
constructin g ideolo-
gies of difference:
I draw the line at black magic. I ... IIt· s a silly game that
requires the slaughter of
innncent creatures. lI s perpetralOrs deserve the wrath of the
Lamb. I hate thi s
hea th en island , Mr Ramsay. I beli eve it was created by God
as a sort of religious
zoo; a place we might observe all the half-baked idiot ic
ideologies of the worl d
clamou ring for attention and di sappearin g up their own belief
systems. Eve ntually
the Chr islian ethi c wi ll rise triumphant. ( 172-73)
Although th is speech occurs in an exchange between two
western charac-
ters, it does not function in the way of those Orienralist
representa tions that

32. tum non-western people into a co lo rful backgro und fo r th e
dramas of Europe-
ans. David 's new friend s in Mauritius qu ickly exceed their
stereotypes (a
Hi nd u, a Buddhist , a Christian convert, a " Revo luti onary
Marxi st"1173!) and
begin to pl ay vi tal roles in the play's increasingly comp lex
and styli stically
ri sky explorati o n of cultu ral geographies.
A key strategy of thi s exploration in vo lves establi shi ng a di
alectic between
two spaces, two worlds: the " home-world" of late-twentieth-
century England
and the di stant "othe r-world " of Mau ritiu s. The contrasts
between the two -
the dying Mammal Ho use and the teeming island, system atic
extinction and
uncontrollable evolut ion - eventually produce , in the play 's fi
nal act, a wholly
unexpected new socia l config uration, a new world, as it were.
"Paradi se" .(as
David call s Mauritiu s 116t I) is restored to the fam il y. The
zoo is saved , the
family is rescued. Not surprisingly, the agent of thi s
renaissance is an animal.
Johnson 's choice of an imal for the role of ecologica l mess iah
is noth ing short
of in spired, fo r he pl aces, at the center of his play's ironic
apotheosis , the crea-
ture who con ste llates, more than any other,' all the grimness
and peculiarity of
the human relati on to no n-human an imals : the dodo.

33. Animal Geographies
The extravagant and unexpected happy ending the play affords
all its
characters - all happily united in England - reads like an
ecological para-
ble : David makes the biological find of the cent ury (that the
dodo, poster-
animal of extinction, is in fact not extinct) because he had in his
posses-
sion, when he arrived in Mauritius, a stuffed dodo. This moldy
specimen of
taxidermy is from the old zoo-keeper's collection ("[a [nything
died , he ' d
have it stuffed. And the meat roasted for his go urmets' c ircle"
[t52!) , and
David has brought it to Mauritius to barter with the local
museum for
museum facilities. But for David's Creole assistant, Victor, the
dodo is a
sign that David is the fulfillment of a prophecy , and he leads
David to hi s
vi ll age, "a village so high up it wasn't even on the map. It 's a
s mall com-
munity descended from a bunch of slaves who thou ght fuck it
and ran off.
They li ve in almost total isolation: Victor was their city-man"
(207- 8). In
the village, David is "introduced" to the mythically stupid birds
in a suit-
ably outlandish fashion:
They lined up thi s gigantic lid, and there was the pit. 1 was
scared oul or my wits.
They picked me up and thre w me in it I couldn't see a thing,
except their race s up

34. above smiling as ir they thought they were doing me a ravour.
So (looked around.
It was very dark. t couldn', make much out. Something was
movin g. I presumed it
was there to eat me. Then someo ne lo wered down a torch; the
pit filled with thaI
love ly naming torch li ght '" and there was something there . In
the middl e of the
light it stood, blinking its eyes and wondering why on earth it
had been woken up
at this ungodly hour. It was a dodo. And it looked at me, , swear
to God, and il
opened ils beak and it made the daftest sound I've ever heard.
And there were
femal es roosting and younguns being sat on, and all around me
these grinning
bloody conservation ists, showing off their handfu l of gods for
the very first time.
(208)
David himself gives the mean ing of the play's eco logical
parable: " I was
just in the right place at the right time" (208). By this time,
however, the
notion of place - and further the question of what makes a place
"right" - is
anything but s im ple. The play has deployed the figure of the
animal - or
rather, remembering Derrida 's warning about that singular - the
figure of ani-
mals. to remap the cultural geography of late-twentieth-century
Europe as a
rapidly emptying "mammal house," its inhabitants engaged in an
ecocide that
will event ually ensure their own extinction. " What' s the
matter with you all?"

35. David asks hi s niece when he first arrives on the scene. "We're
related," she
answers (t62).
Not rcally . Or not enough. The last act includes a lengthy scene
of intro-
ductions, in wh ich the conditions of a more creative, more
sustaining rela-
tion , are enacted. Not surpri singly. thi s new relation is one
that centrally
involve s both human and non- human anima ls. Once
introduced to each
660 UNA CHAUD HUR I
other, all the characters gather around a c rate that David open
s: "From the
crate there issues an absurd cry which echoes around the
mammal house"
(209). The cry of the dodo, absurd in itself but more absurd in
its absence,
in vites an imaginative rethinking - beyond the human - of the
figures of
home, family, relation ship.
Like Th e Zoo Story, Cries from the Ma mma l House rcads the
zoo as a site
of our culture's anxieties about its alienation from nature and
from our ani mal
selves . Unlike Albee's play , however, thi s one does not
abandon the zoo to its
metaphoric fate. Instead it undenakes a complex and di fferenti
ated zooesis,
engaging a wide ran ge of actual animal practices. This zooesis

36. explores the
possi bility and argues the necess ity of reintegrating the an
imal into modem
cons ci ousness.
That this is a diffic ult, perhaps even futile , project is signaled
by the play's
iron ic ending, its "dodo ex mac hin a." An addition al, and
rigorously theatrical,
acknowledgement of the animal's vexed relationshi p to cultural
meaning is
made through the mimetic strateg ies explicitly called for in a
note at the stan
of the play: " all live animals should be invisibl e, and mimed
by the actors. All
dead animals, in whatever condition, sho uld be present" (140).
Thu s the
play's dialectic of s paces is over laid with a performance
dialectic that enacts
the tragic con tingency of the animal in the modem world .
Flickering in and
out of mimesis, the ani mal shapes and reshapes the spaces of
hum an culture .
In the same way, vario us modes of zQoesis , such as the
troping of the ani mal
to the reflexive and critical interrogati on of its place among us
- either repro-
duce o r excavate the hum anist ass umptio ns that de term ine
the geography of
modern drama.
NOTES
I "The zoo alleges that it can tell a story, its own story - roughly
along the lines of,
'Here is a zebra .. .' The zoo story, in stead, more rout inely te

37. lls something like
'Here is a voyeur'; ' Here is a victim ' ; 'Here is a sadist'; 'Here
is a corpse'"
(Malamud 55).
2 The "companionship" Berger has in mind is very different
from the sentimental·
ized relation prescribed by pet keeping. Interes tingly, in recent
tim es an imal we i·
fare groups have attempted to alter th at re lati on partly by
seeking 10 di splace the
word "pet" with the phrase "compani on animal." In this as in
other initiati ves of
progress ive poli tiCS, nomenclature becomes symbol ic
battleground in the struggle
for change.
3 Several recen t stud ies (Fuller, Quammen , Correia) trace the
cautionary case of the
dodo's brief sojourn in hum an company: a mere ninety years
from discovery to
ext inction, as well as its grip on the human imagination and its
transformati on into
the poster·anim al of ex tinction.
Animal Geographi es 66 1
WORKS C ITED
Albee, Edwa rd . Th e Goal, or Who Is Sylvia? New York:
Overlook, 2003.
--- _ The Zoo Story . The American Dream and The Zoo Story.
New York: Signet,

38. 1961. 5-49·
Baker. Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, l dentity , and
Representation . Manchester
an d New York : Manchester UP, 1993.
Baudrillard. Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. She ila
Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor:
U or Michigan p , 1994.
Berger, Jo hn. " Why Look at Anima ls?" 1977. About Looking.
New York : Pantheon,
1980.1-26.
Chaudhuri, Una. "Land/Scapeffheory." Land/Scope/Theater. Ed.
El inor F uchs and
Una C ha udhuri. Ann Arbor: U of Mich iga n P, 2003. 11-29.
Coelzee, 1. M. The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy G utm ann .
Prince ton: Prin ceton UP,
1999·
Corre ia, Clara Pinto. Return of th e Crazy Bird: Th e Sad,
Strange Tale of the Dodo.
New York : Copernic us, 2003.
Dele uze, Gilles, and Fel ix Guattari. A Th ousand Plateaus:
Capita lism and Schizo-
phrenia. Tra ns. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis and London: U of
Minne sota P,
1987·

39. De rrida, Jacq ues. "The An imal That Therefo re I Am (More to
Follow)," Trans, David
Wills. Critical Inq uiry 28 .2 (Winter 2002): 369-4 18.
--- . '" Eating Well' or the Calc ulati on of the S ubject." Who
Comes after the Suh -
jet;t? Ed . Eduardo Cadava. Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy .
New York : Ro ut-
ledge, 199 I. 96- 11 9.
Egloff, Eli zabeth. Th e Swan. New York: Dramati sts Play
Service, 1994.
Fuller, Errol. Th e Dodo: From Extinction to Icon. New York :
Ha rper Collins , 2002.
Gurney, A. R. Sylvia. New York: Dramati sts Play Se rvice,
1996.
Hanson, E li za be th . Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in
American Zoos. Prince-
ton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2002.
Johnson. Terry. Cries from the Mammal House: Plays; One.
London: Methue n, 1993.
137-209.
Ma la mud, Rand y. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals
in Captivity. Basi ng-
stoke : MacMillan , 1998.
Morris, Ramona, and Desmond Morris. The Giant Panda . Rev.
Jonathan Barzdo. Lon-

40. don: Kogan Page, 198 1.
Qua mmen, David. Th e Song of th e Dodo: Island
Biogeography in an Age of Extinc-
tions. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Shakespeare, William . Hamlet. Ed. Haro ld Jen kins. The Arde
n Shakespeare. Lo nd on
and New York: Roulledge , 1982.
Spirn , Anne Whiston. "Constru c ting Natu re: The Legacy of
Frede ri c k Law Olmsted ."
Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Ed. William C
ronon. London and
New York: Nonon, 1995.
662 UNA C HA UD HURI
Taylor, John Russe ll . Anger and After: A Guide to the New
British Drama. Lo nd on:
M ethuen, 1962 .
" What 's the Word?" The Goat Gazett e 1.4 (June 2002): 1-2.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City . Oxford: Oxfo
rd UP, 1973.
Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, th e Discourse
o/Species, and Posthu-
manist Theory . Chicago and London : U of Chicago P, 2003.

41. --- , Introduct ion . ZoontoJogies: The Question of th e Animal.
Ed . Cary Wolfe.
Minneapoli s and L ondon: U of Minnesota p. 2003. ix- xx iii.
Walc h, Jen nifer, and Jod y Ern e l, eds. Animal Geographies :
Place, Politics, and Iden -
tity ill the Nature-Culture Borderlands. Lond on : Verso. 1998.
My introduction is following below: please consider my main
point and my grammar. Or you can continue the rest of it. Thank
you.
Bonfire of the Brands
I don’t think that Neil Boorman is right in arguing that his
lifelong focus on brand name goods and status was causing him
pain. Also, I won’t help even though destroying all of his brand
name possessions. One’s social status doesn’t depend on
external factors such as clothes and brands because someone is
to be successful due to internal factors such as individuals’
abilities, education degree, and attitude.