this page is for documenting literary abuse,
the kinds and consequences of.
the literary abuse of birds
birds are innocent creatures that often and unbeknownst to their species are victims of literary abuse. Since they are not interested in discovering this wrong and touting it for themselves, I have taken it upon myself to elaborate. There is all manner of literary abuse going on in literature today, but one occurs when some everyday thing is slung into a story, novel, or other piece of literature solely to highlight that work’s literariness. It is a kind of false enhancement. I won’t even try to define literariness; if you’re reading this with interest, you already have a good idea. The basic fallacy here is that if I put a lot of birds in my book, others will see it as not simply literary, but still more literary.
Birds, more than other creatures, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of abuse, I believe, for several reasons:
1. literature has a long history of using birds to make itself more impressive. see, the bible. see, ‘a great mortality of birds’ (7th c.), snatched up by B.Williams. see, romantic poetry. abusing birds is thus a way to signal one’s knowledge of the history of literature and therefore, one’s qualification to be included in the club.
2. birds have fantastic names, more so than other creatures. see, blue-footed booby. see, sharp-shinned hawk. see, titmouse. see, snowy egret. ”Snowy egret” is practically a poem in itself. When strung together in a list, the effect is indeed quite literary. Example : “As we waited for a parrot to show, he told me about the other birds — American woodcocks and Chinese geese and turkey vultures and gray catbirds and boat-tailed grackles — that he and his buddies had sighted among the sepulchres of Green Wood during his birding days.” (Netherland, 208). It’s a fine sentence.
3. the overeducated white male given to writing novels is also given to birding for hobbysport.
4. given their history in literature, birds are easy symbols.
Writers guilty of the literary abuse of birds, most recently:
1. Joseph O’Neill, Netherland, various birds. This is a great novel, but the birding interest is too neatly patched onto the character of Chuck and the birds are overworked as meaningful things. I was never convinced they were a real part of Chuck — partly because what Chuck says about birds is often related in the reported speech of a paragraph, in the narrator’s paraphrasing, and I can never believe anything about a character if it’s told so much in the narrator’s voice, it’s just too unreal. In fact the only point of using such paraphrasing is to make it more unreal/surreal, or, for the writer to keep careful hold of his lengthy, reverie-like sentences. O’Neill does start off promisingly, however, with this observation of Times Square:
“And whereas others felt mocked and diminished by the square’s storming of the senses and detected malevolence of Promethean impudence in the molten progress of the news tickers and in the fifty-foot visages that looked down from vinyl billboards and in the twinkling shouted advertisements for drinks and Broadway musicals, I always regarded these shimmers and vapors as one might the neck feathers of certain of the city’s pigeons–as natural, humble sources of iridescence. (It was Chuck…who pointed out to me how the rock dove’s gray mass, exactly mirroring the shades of the sidewalk concrete and streaked with blacktop-colored dorsal feathers, gratuitously tapers to purple glitter.)” (21-22)
This image kept recurring in my head, and it’s enough bird for the whole book. It makes a real effort to enliven a bird, something you ignore every day. Yet a few pages later we are subject to this long reported speech of Chuck’s about the bald eagle, which appears to be writerly research, writerly convenience for symbolic meaning, dumped in. It’s a narration with historical ominousness, very like Sebald, who also makes this list.
“He told me that in 1782…Congress concluded that the bald eagle would make an appropriate symbol of national power and authority, and so it was decided that the bird, depicted with its wings outspread, its talons grasping an olive branch, etcetera, should be adopted as the emblem for the great seal of the United States. Chuck dug into his pocket and otssed me a quarter to remind me…. Not everybody agreed with the decision, Chuck reported. He took back the coin. Benjamin Franklin thought the turkey a better choice and considered the bald eagle– a plunderer and a scavenger of dead fish rather than a hunger, and timid if mobbed by much smaller birds– an animal of bad moral character and in fact a coward. ‘I love the national bird,’ Chuck clarified. ‘The noble bad eagle represents the spirit of freedom, living as it does in the boundless void of the sky.’
I turned to see whether he was joking. He wasn’t. From time to time, Chuck actually spoke like this.”
This doesn’t work for me. I just start to feel embarrassed for the bird. It’s so cheesy that the narrator has to acknowledge its cheesiness in order to hide/excuse its cheesiness as a part of the character of Chuck. I don’t think that the bird writing diminishes the quality of the novel;but it is a literary abuse of birds. How much better off would we be if Congress _had_ listened to Franklin, really? Later, there is a good story by Chuck much later about catching a semp, a songbird – but Chuck does not need to be a lifelong birder to relate/have this story.
2. Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, the Sandhill Crane. Powers is a good writer; the cranes are very nicely described but are only a symbolic landscape, to evoke powerful feelings about the way we crap on earth and how all things disappear, but it’s mostly our fault. I’d rather read Leopold himself anyday. Unfortunately for this explication, I didn’t finish the book; I grew so tired of the lazy contrast of city professors (Weber) to country dudes (Mark) in a typically boring but beautiful place (Nebraska) I just couldn’t stomach it. For once, couldn’t the country folk be smarter than the city folk, just once? He should have written the whole thing in Mark’s voice. Bad bird line: “No one can say what a bird might have seen, what a bird might remember.” (278).
3. W.G. Sebald, all books, many birds. Sebald is of course guilty of the literary abuse of birds, but it’s so much a part of his writing–his wünderkammer/crypt exposure of history, natural and ‘human’, that I can barely fault him for it, he sold it so well. It’s possible he reinvented the literary abuse of birds. Or, if birds, then everything – trees, silkworms, Egypt, deserts, emigrants, attics, telescopes, Napoleon, war, Nabokov, butterflies, and so on. As always, though, when you pull a quote out from its covers, it does look a tad overdone:
“And how fine a place the house seemed to me now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion. However, on emerging into open air again, I was saddened to see, in one of the otherwise deserted aviaries, a solitary Chinese quail, evidently in a state of dementia, running to and fro along the edge of the cage and shaking its head every time it was about to turn, as if it could not comprehend how it had got into this hopeless fix.” (36, Rings of Saturn).
And, after a 1987 hurricane hits the land near his house in Norfolk, destroying the forest:
“Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally heard a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating song punctuated by theatrical silences, there was now not a living sound.” (268 Rings of Saturn)
I must be too fond of Sebald, for I cannot but admire this sentence, and its observation of birds. There were many mornings, in the thicket of East Palo Alto, the towhees, finches and scrub jays grew so loud on the patio that I regretted feeding them.
a literary bird
The consequences of the literary abuse of birds are, sadly, unforseen. Yet, also dire. If I may speak for birds when I say that such abuse affects the lives of real birds everywhere, even the nightingales whom no one ever sees because they think, it’s just a literary bird, I will.
Writers who you’d think would be guilty of the literary abuse of birds, but are not:
1. Bruce Chatwin
2. Marilynne Robinson
3. Michael Ondaatje
I’m not totally sure about this, though, so correct me if I’m wrong…or add to my list.
