Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 134 Lynn Turner 8 Animal Melancholia On the Scent of Dean Spanley What, then, is true mourning? What can we make of it? Can we make it, as we say in French that we ‘make’ our mourning? I repeat: can we? … are we capable of doing it, do we have the power to do it? But also, do we have the right? Jacques Derrida1 This chapter will explore the prescription of what I call an ‘animal cure’ in the beguiling film adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella, Dean Spanley (2008), directed by Toa Fraser.2 Dean Spanley does not self-consciously extend itself to support an ethics that would include animals, indeed it comes close to the problems we readily associate with fables or allegory (in which animals habitually figure only as ciphers for human beings). However, as I hope to show, close reading allows for some productive leeway in the relations it proposes and questions it provokes. The animal cure in this film is not for a sick animal, or animals in general if there were such a thing. Rather Dean Spanley enacts a cure for melancholia as manifested in a cantankerous elderly man, Fisk (Peter O’Toole). Fisk’s extremely formal relationship with his surviving son, Henslowe (Jeremy Northam), is stymied by the unmourned deaths of his wife and other son, Harrington (Xavier Horan). Meanwhile Henslowe becomes fascinated with the oddly convincing stories produced by the local clergyman, the eponymous Dean (Sam Neill), of his life as a dog when enjoying the scent of the rare Hungarian liquor, Tokay. Realising that the dog, in whose name the Dean speaks, uncannily recalls the lost pet of his father’s childhood, Henslowe effects his animal cure through the means of a dinner party. From the moment that this pet, Wag, is ‘returned’ through the medium of the Dean’s apparent recollections, Fisk can begin to cry and thus to admit grief. Yet from this moment too, the intoxication with Dean Spanley fades: the resolution of the last scene proposes a happy Fisk accompanied by a new pet dog. Dean Spanley makes a series of doubles between humans and dogs: son and dog (Harrington and Wag), dog and Father (in the Dean and also in Fisk), and also of dog friends and human friends (Wag’s doggy friend and Wrather the ‘conveyancer’ [Bryan Brown], Henslowe’s fellow conspirator in the supply of Tokay).3 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 135 Animal Melancholia It is able to do this with the key scenes of the film too – humans assembled around a dining table/dogs running through fields. In convening the entwined narratives through a ritual meal, metonymised by Tokay, Dean Spanley invites reflection on the primal feast and the legend of consanguinity between human clan and totem animal as invoked in Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agrement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913).4 Ostensibly telling a tale of reincarnation and one that is persuasively evoked through the cinematic convention of flashback, this film enables discussion regarding mourning among humans and animals, specifically the dog as man’s best friend. This chapter will explore these interwoven themes in light of Jacques Derrida’s investigations into the work of mourning as related to an ethics of what he names ‘eating well’. Totem and Tokay The body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic. Julia Kristevav5 Most of the proliferating commentaries on The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) concentrate on Derrida’s encounter with the animal in or as his deconstruction of the persistent philosophical support for human exceptionalism.6 Yet observant readers will have noticed that, in reference to his own ‘zootobiography’ Derrida remarks that his writings have ‘welcomed’ animal differences on the ‘threshold’ of sexual differences.7 The word ‘welcome’ draws attention to an ethics of hospitality to the other, rather than a manifesto of rights: Derrida’s transfigured autobiographical texts welcome sexual and animal others.8 While this kind of welcome includes the complication of being hostage and not simply host to unknown others, Derrida nevertheless offers a scene of hospitality that moves away from canonical autobiographical and philosophical negation or abjection of those others in the name of the subject that calls itself man.9 The scenes of hospitality that structure Dean Spanley, however, echo these problematic processes of negation or abjection, not least in regard to the primal feast that Freud deduces must have occurred at the origin of culture.10 For Freud, this feast is a ritualised exceptional event that permits the clans of ‘primitive’ cultures to kill and to eat their totem, a specific animal with whom they assume a consanguinous relation (the ‘truth’ of sexual reproduction being unknown). Without this ritual such a meal would have been strictly taboo, both murderous and cannibalistic. As codified and momentous event, the ritual both breaks the law and founds it. Interleaving numerous anthropological sources, Freud works in the present of his clinical observation of animal phobias. His phobics exhibit ambivalence – that is both love and hate, towards the feared animal, and Freud finds continuity between primitive and modern cultures in support of the theory of psychoanalysis: ‘It was 135 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 136 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE the same in every case: where the children examined were boys, their fear related at bottom to their father, and had merely been displaced on to the animal.’11 Regardless of any doubt raised by the absent question of girls, the primal meal requires greater finesse and Freud further entrenches the father at the origin of culture by supplying a revised wish for which the primal feast is already a dilution. Consanguinity is of no consequence: our animal ancestry is a displacement of patriarchy (literally the father is the origin). Freely borrowing from Charles Darwin, Freud imagines the overcoming of this primal father by the ‘company of brothers’ who murder and eat him.12 Such is the enormity of their guilt that the father is resurrected in name and in/as law, without even having to die since the wish to so dispatch him would have been force enough for psychic reality. As feminist scholars such as Kelly Oliver and Elissa Marder have remarked, Totem and Taboo glosses over both modes of kinship that predate the nuclear family as well as the scattered incoherent references to feminine fancies and maternal deities in the rush to render the father original, necessary and human.13 Retaining the notion that affective response to criminal events found culture as law, Julia Kristeva invokes not only the murder and cannibalism of the father, but also incest with the mother.14 Most of the literature following Derrida on the question of the animal has remained within his philosophical terrain, targeting the Cartesian legacy of such thinkers as Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan, yet Oliver has shown that female thinkers such as Kristeva also demand to be rethought in light of the human exceptionalism that they too legislate. Thus I introduce her with caution. In Kristeva’s case, alongside the human and masculine route to language – the abject haunting of any borders recalls not only the body of the mother – through ‘our personal archaeology’– but also, on a wider scale, animality, expelled as ‘representative[s] of sex and murder’, or lawlessness.15 Indeed animal and sexual differences traverse the same horizon. Kristeva might address Freud’s notorious blind spot regarding femininity, but she does not offer a feminist counter model (as she herself acknowledges). The uncertainties of Kristeva’s mother offer no ‘solace’ to the subject. Moreover, Kristeva endorses the requirement that the social rest upon the exchange of women between men, indexing the symbolic exchange of signs, for fear of the untutored lawlessness of the mother.16 While the figure of the mother is not immediately in evidence in the homosociality of Dean Spanley, the liminal nature of abjection means that her direct representation is not the issue.17 Given the encoding of the scene of the meal as both paternal and fraternal in Freud and Dean Spanley, Kristeva provides a useful supplement through her attention to the abject power of particular substances. Signally, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), food as ‘the natural’ opposes the sociality of man; food as ‘oral object’ recalls the archaic relations between human and m/other.18 Food can always ‘defile’.19 Having set the table with the spectres of cannibalism and incest, I want to turn to Dean Spanley. Thursdays tablet a dry ritual between Fisk and Young Fisk (as 136 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 137 Animal Melancholia Henslowe is schematically addressed by his father). ‘Young Fisk’ arrives at his father’s house and they address matters of fact, untouched by affective involvement. Henslowe himself ironically refers to their scheduled meetings as rituals, and ones that he wishes ‘dismantled’. An altogether more fascinating ritual transpires for Henslowe with Dean Spanley. Underlining the displacement of father for Father, Henslowe arranges his meetings with the Dean on Thursdays. Not unaware of this substitution, Fisk makes his own: when they do manage to get together for a (Thurs)day out, Fisk pointedly trips up a young boy (i.e. in lieu of Henslowe). At first, procuring the Dean’s favourite liquor is simply to facilitate their meeting and to allow for the Dean to expound upon the unlikely topic of reincarnation (one Fisk characteristically dismisses as ‘poppycock’). Almost immediately the Dean is implicated in that very topic as his unusual degree of pleasure inhaling Tokay – the script positions him as ‘entirely focused in his nose’ – leads him to wish for the ‘olfactory powers of the canine’.20 More disconcertingly, as he continues with increasingly outré remarks, his first person becomes uncannily canine. He does not mimetically sound canine, rather his sudden marked interest in cats, smells and the love of a master evokes the point of view of a pet dog. At this early stage in Henslowe’s intoxication with the Dean, no images flesh out his narration as flashback in the manner cinema habitually treats evidentially as memory. We have to take his word for it: certainly Henslowe is fascinated. The clue to the change in perspective comes through an unusual comparison. The Dean opines that ‘to pull a dog away from a lamppost is akin to seizing a scholar in the British Museum by the scruff of his neck and dragging him away from his studies’. Making kin of the inhalation of urine and the study of books threatens the clean and proper body (inhalation of urine is not named as such but the comparison follows swiftly on from the Dean’s appreciation of the Tokay consolidating their metonymic connection). Dog and (human) scholar are made of the same stuff, and up to the same activity. Traces of urine are read by a dog like writing is read by a scholar.21 By implication, to urinate is to write (to leave a trace, one vulnerable to erasure), to smell is to read. Metaphor assumes that the meaning of the term of comparison anchors that to which it is compared. Here, however, the scholar is already doglike, seized by the ‘scruff of his neck’. Later, in the climactic sequence, it is Fisk who makes a similar comparison in which his wife calls him away from reading Balzac, ‘rather like dragging a dog away from a lamppost’. In both cases there is no mention of the word ‘urination’, which is tidily metonymised by the lamppost. Even as metonymy – a relation of comparison based on proximity, the abject contact between urine and study is finessed. In the latter scene the Dean describes the pleasures of eating a whole rabbit, fur, bones, guts and all, waxing lyrical about the smell of fear. Although by then we are regularly treated to visual flashbacks of Dean Spanley in the guise of Wag the spaniel learning about the world from his roguish mongrel friend (clearly meant to be Wrather), this visceral desire is overheard by Mrs Brimley, the housekeeper (Judy Parfitt). Literally peripheral to the proceedings, her mortification is presented as comic. She hears something that 137 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 138 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE she should not and cannot understand, unaware that she is listening to the Dean as a dog. Dean Spanley is at pains to make sure that our guts are never turned (as we, audience, metonymically join with the enraptured homosocial circle of Henslowe, Fisk and Wrather). While Mrs Brimley has prepared the food (and insisted on preparing something more special than the ‘hotpot’ to which Fisk habitually constrains her), this is not the meal at stake for the assembled men. That they eschew the tradition of leaving the table in order to enjoy port in separation from any ladies that might ordinarily be present to remain at the table confirms which meal is in focus. They partake of the story of downing an entire rabbit mediated by the aroma of Tokay in order to share in the memories voiced by the Dean. Unable to be seen, smell is elusive. It lends itself to the uncanny tale of Dean Spanley, posing the unfathomable question of whether the Father was once a dog, while the domestication of that dog points back to Fisk (again containing the impure legend of consanguinity).22 The film supplements smell’s invisibility with the Dean’s rhetorically exaggerated appreciation of the Tokay. This rhetorical exaggeration is given clearest visual expression in the climactic dinner sequence. There, in close-up, the Dean raises his glass to his nose, reminiscing about the delicious smell of fear, the classical soundtrack swells and the film cuts to the comedically rapid appearance of sheep being chased over a hill by dogs delirious with olfaction. Becoming virtually airborne in their haste, the white clouds of leaping sheep evoke their own scent. In his discussion of smell and Freud, Akira Lippit refers to its paucity of visible trace as an immateriality that bars smell from forming a ‘semiotic system’.23 In this view a scent could never form a sentence. In view of current work on ‘new materialisms’ however, we might not be so quick to assume that a) smell is immaterial, or that b) materiality guarantees signification.24 Tokay is elusive. Wrather, the ‘conveyancer’, sniffs it out, squirrelled away in the wine cellars of the wealthy, though he soon dispenses with a finder’s fee for the sake of a place at the table with the Dean. It is not disgusting. Even if Tokay is rather syrupy, it is not presented as abject. One does not even have to bother the mouth by drinking it. Tokay is taken by nose. Intoxication with Tokay is not coarse inebriation. This rarefied liquor is claimed as ostentatiously cultural. Rather than confirm human desire over animal need, the Dean imagines that a dog might appreciate its aroma all the more. Perhaps the ritualised, exceptional consumption, Dean Spanley (2008) 138 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 139 Animal Melancholia the elevated palate required to appreciate Tokay protests too much and defends against the possibility that pollution inheres in food. For Henslowe and Wrather this liquor is instrumentally the vehicle for the Dean’s transport. Fisk blunts the allure of the Tokay not by emphasising disgust but dismissing it as nothing more than ‘fermented grapes’. Outright disgust would too easily register the psychoanalytic mode of repression. Freud famously narrates – albeit in a brief footnote itself banished to the bottom of the page – the vertical elevation of man as coterminous with the predominance of the sense of sight, with both verticality and visuality set against the horizontal and olfactory order of the animal.25 Closer to the earth, closer to the sexual and excretory organs of other four-legged animals, this plane is one foregrounding the sense of smell. Defending against a disgusting smell then bespeaks the desire for the sexuality it indexes.26 The Dean’s elevation of Tokay might be read in this context, especially given the homosociality the dinners also convene, as eliminating women and cultivating men – and male dogs. Yet for Fisk, Tokay occupies no extreme, it is neither disgusting nor wondrous. In common with his reduction of Mrs Brimley’s culinary repertoire to the economically descriptive ‘hot pot’ and his curt reduction of things that have ‘gone to the trouble of happening’ including the deaths of his wife and son, as ‘inevitable’, Fisk dampens social engagement until he recognises his dog in the Dean. Scents and sentences For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality, but also of the ear, the eye and all the ‘senses’ in general) the metonymy of ‘eating well’ [bien manger] would always be the rule. Jacques Derrida27 In the material already introduced there is a mounting sense of the sociality at stake in the consumption of food in excess of a supposedly simple nutritional need. While Freud has laid out the primal feast as a scene in which animality is exchanged for (human) paternity, and Kristeva has indicated the feminine as well as animal territory mapped by the mouth also haunting this feast, it is Derrida that names an ethical imperative to eat well.28 Eating well does not equate to fine dining. Rather the ‘good’ (underlined by his translator’s emphasis on the original ‘bien manger’) speaks to an ethics that for Derrida cannot be resolved into a calculable formula. Sara Guyer notes that ‘un homme de bien’ is not merely a ‘good’ man, but a man of property and that ‘bien’ is connected to the Greek ‘oikos’ drawing together ‘the home … the “proper” … the private … the love and affection of one’s kin’.29 Not only are we always in a relation of ‘eating the other’’ and being eaten by them, but the ingestion the verb indicates is limited neither to food nor to intake by mouth. In the ‘Eating Well’ interview Derrida himself exclaims, ‘What is eating?’, having so expanded this ostensibly self-evident category, now re-posed as 139 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 140 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE the ‘metonymy of introjection’.30 Contiguous with eating, introjection names the psychic process of identification and itself metonymises the work of the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on whom Derrida implicitly draws, albeit in a modified fashion.31 For Freud, Abraham, Torok and Derrida we must ‘eat the other’ if we are to form our own ego, that is to say, our earliest identifications with others occur as a form of ingestion that we are obliged to swallow. For Derrida, the ‘must’ here refers to an ethics of infinite hospitality – one takes in the other but does not decide which other. At the same time there is a ‘cannot’ in that we cannot measure or decide how much of that other to take in: the critical interface of literal and figural ensure that we cannot totally appropriate the other through this ingestion. That the ostensibly physical practice of eating and ostensibly psychical process of introjection may be said to share a border not only points to the difficulty of forming a clear succession or separation between literal and figural, but also between need and desire and thus, for Derrida, if not for Abraham and Torok, between humans and other animals.32 Departing from the metaphysical conceptual path that orders and interlinks these terms leads Derrida to pose the ethics of the ‘One must eat well’ as offering an ‘infinite hospitality’.33 This infinite hospitality strikes at the ‘‘carno-phallogocentric’ heart of metaphysics in calling into question the structure of sacrifice that it conserves.34 This mouthful of a term brings Derrida’s existing critique of the conceit unifying the presence of the word with that of the phallus (phallogocentrism) into contact with a carnivorous appetite. Even ethical thinkers with whom Derrida shares ground such as Emmanuel Levinas fall foul of the configuration of sacrifice. While a ‘Thou shalt not kill’ may be invoked, even as a first principle, Derrida draws attention to the way in which killing is managed such that a ‘noncriminal putting to death’ symbolically and legally distinct from murder is reserved for some beings.35 This Levinasian ethical law implicitly addresses a human community, for whom the killing of non-humans does not count. Explicitly affecting animals, the sacrificial loophole for legal killing can and has been turned on humans, frequently figured animalistically as ‘vermin’, for example. As Freud describes, so Derrida critiques this community, which, moreover, privileges brotherhood: the virility associated with the carno-phallogocentric subject is indeed that of the ‘adult male, the father, husband, or brother’ demanding a sacrifice.36 Rather than legislate anew, invoking a new law on which we could always rely, the Derridean ethics of infinite hospitality keeps the question of what it is to eat well open. Refusing to sequester symbolic anthropophagy as a human practice distinct from literal cannibalism committed by the untutored, animals, those who lack the law, Derrida implies that vegetarians also ‘eat meat’ in the place where eating and introjection touch.37 Harking back to my remarks on early identification as a form of ‘eating the other’, there is a metaphoric carnivory at stake that is not definitively refused by the practice of a vegetarian diet. This metaphoric ingestion is not necessarily organised linguistically (i.e. it is not clear that for Derrida metaphoric carnivory as part of a practice of identification is not performed by nonhuman 140 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 141 Animal Melancholia species).38 The contiguity between eating and introjection provokes another conceptually challenging question: ‘In what respect’ Derrida asks, ‘does the formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the question … still carnivorous?’39 The carnivory of the question is given with the caveat ‘formulation … in language’. This question recalls the Freudian understanding of language acquisition as the substitution of breast for word: in the crossover between the metaphysics of presence and psychoanalysis a suite of metonymies, milk, breast and mother, each bound to the psychoanalytic fantasy of satisfaction, gives way to the substitution of language. The question further opens toward a limitrophic subject – one whose borders ‘grow’ – for whom no orifice is immune to the ingestion of the other.40 Where Levinas poses the face as that which says ‘Thou shalt not kill’, Derrida displaces the humanism that the face proposes with all the orifices, thus weakening the association with literally speaking subjects.41 In Abraham and Torok’s work on mourning, framed in binary combat as ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, they distinguish these processes in ways that lend themselves to thinking about Fisk’s abrupt dismissal of pain.42 In Derrida’s ‘Foreword’, called ‘Fors’ for their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1986), he warns against the ‘limitations’ of a ‘linguisticistic’ reading of their work, one easy to make since it stems from the very ‘base of the[ir] enterprise’.43 This reading overdetermines the mouth as the privileged oral locus of ‘verbal language’, one whose presence fills the gap left by the breast.44 Speech comes first, and speech is presence (the metaphysical problem inherited by psychoanalysis). Derrida underlines the inadvertent fracture in this logic: the substitution is ‘partial’, presence is a ‘figure of presence’.45 Psychic life is in mourning from the start. Abraham and Torok differentiate mourning and melancholia through two different relations to the literal and the metaphoric. Rather than introject the lost other as a metaphor, the melancholic incorporates that lost other as an object that thus refuses metaphoricity.46 Melancholic incorporation involves the fantasy that one eats this object precisely ‘not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside into the pocket of a cyst’.47 This ‘cyst’ is the secret ‘crypt’ in Abraham and Torok’s terms, into which the one for whom the melancholic fails to mourn is squirrelled away. Secret, Abraham and Torok oppose the withheld path of incorporation to the sociality of introjection. For them ‘Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation, means channelling them through language into a communion of empty mouths’ (empty by virtue of the process of weaning).48 As Derrida writes ‘Introjection speaks … . Incorporation keeps still, speaks only to silence or to ward off intruders from its secret place.’49 This crypt of language depends, for Derrida, on the logic of a primary substitution for the maternal breast configured as presence. Language, cryptic or otherwise, is here caught in the logic of re-presentation. Of course Derrida gives emphasis to the supplemental nature of the substitution of breast by word: supplemented, the breast loses the sense of an originary completion 141 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 142 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE (without thereby falling into a logic of lack). Rather than the full presence of the breast, metonym of the mother’s body, metonym of nature, Derrida posits an original writing: general ‘hieroglyphia’ precedes possibility for thinking the crypt.50 This does not push the supposed ground of ‘nature’ further ‘back’ but rewrites it as writing already.51 Thus the general writing of nature also disperses the singular path to language as the human response to lack. Ingestion that does not necessarily pass by way of the mouth immediately evokes the nose for Dean Spanley, as well as the ears for his audience, while the crisis in language summons Fisk. Pet seminary Fisk is blunt. He neither ‘wastes’ words by indulging their figural capacities, nor worries about offending others. The congregated guests around the dinner table in the climactic sequence are at first beholden to his stories, ones they have not come to hear. We hear how his late wife dragged him from Balzac to aid their two sons, out on a rowboat on a stormy Lake Windermere.52 Mocking her fears, the cantankerous Fisk addressed the storm intoning ‘Give Up Your Dead!’, as if they were already deceased. Fisk’s disregard for emotional responses evidently predates the death of Harrington (fighting in the Boer War, his body was never recovered). At dinner, once the Dean has again become the focus of attention, we learn the incorporative extent to which Wag and Harrington share the same fate, both marked by a ‘non-criminal putting to death’. It is the Dean’s desire to remain at the table that again prompts the olfactory metaphor spurring his uncanny reflections. Leaving the table would be equivalent to having a bath ‘when one ha[d] just gotten comfortable in one’s smell’.53 Bodily, animal, smell is thus brought into proximity with the bouquet of Tokay as a form of clothing, troubling its primary horizontality in Freudian legend. Bathing, cleanliness, lead to the embarrassment of nudity.54 The séance-like scene in the dark environment of the book-lined room housing the dinner resumes. Or, in Derrida’s neologism the ‘animalséance’ resumes: Leonard Lawlor unpacks this term as both ‘animated impropriety’ and as a ‘session of the animal’ (session having both a psychoanalytic and an occult implication).55 Fisk is astonished. Before he can issue an insult, the Dean resumes his otherworldly discourse. Speaking from the twinned crypt of Harrington and Wag, he makes casual reference to being called Wag by the Master. Fisk is transfixed. The Dean’s ensuing stories entrance Fisk even more than Henslowe, and in transferential style he soon responds as the Master in question, even recognising himself as one who administered an occasional beating (to the raised eyebrows of Henslowe). The tales to which Fisk is party bring the whole group together. Here we gain a clearer picture of urination as a writing practice, of the enticing smell of fear and of friendship between dogs (the ‘unmastered,’ unnamed stranger, and Wag, domesticated, his species loyalty divided by a love of the Master). This picture is fleshed 142 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 143 Animal Melancholia Dean Spanley (2008) out by luscious flashbacks cinematically coded as first-person memory in that they are attached through successive sequencing to the Dean but shot from a low angle, from a dog’s eye view. The latter gives credence to the Dean’s story and draws those who see these sequences – the cinematic audience – into the film through that canine viewpoint, making dogs of us all; exuberant dogs often taking up the whole frame, dogs in the prime of life, sometimes with a slightly self-consciously comedic feel produced through a slow-motion close-up of wind in their coats, all suggesting yes, those times were fantastic. Fisk is particularly taken with the Dean’s assurance that, to find home, after running unfettered through farmland with his pal, he had only need turn towards it.56 This confidence mystifies Fisk since Wag had disappeared, like Harrington, and no body had been recovered. Yet the dogs do not arrive home, since, as the film shows while the Dean cannot tell, a farmer shoots them dead. Fisk is rapt. As he stares at the Dean, the scene cuts back to that same field in the same light, but this time with his son Harrington riding a horse across it. With the sound of gunshot, the scene cuts and we see Harrington lying dead in the field as the Dean narrates Wag’s last thoughts of ‘home in [his] heart and the master waiting. No, no pain.’ The Dean’s audience are visibly affected (indeed it would be hard to remain unmoved). Fisk, weeping gently, touches the Dean’s hand affectionately. With new consideration for the feelings of others, Fisk retires, saying that he is ‘put in memory of Harrington’, the son whose name he uses for the first time in this film. Finding him crying in the hallway, the surprised Mrs Brimley asks Fisk if he is all right. ‘He was shot’, he replies, showing his pain and opening the crypt. The personal pronoun is ambivalent as to which death it refers, Harrington or Wag. Both shot: the dog as an animal trespassing on a farmer’s land and as an animal that can be killed without criminal offence, indeed without truly ‘dying’, merely perishing according to Heidegger; the son as a soldier, engaged in the lawful practice of killing those designated ‘enemy’, is himself so killed, a casualty of war.57 The Dean’s apparent recollection gives a representation to the traumatic absence of any such for Fisk, and one that affirms ‘no pain’. In contrast to the formerly inexplicable disappearances of Harrington and Wag, Mrs Fisk died of grief for her son, in emotional pain ‘enough for both of us’, in Fisk’s encrypted opinion. Yet the film shows no engagement with Fisk’s grief for his wife – who remains nameless, only his belated double mourning for son and dog. 143 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 144 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE ‘Eating’ Wag as metaphor (by taking in the Dean’s narration) allows the name of Harrington and sociality to resurface.58 Talking now with uncharacteristic familiarity, Fisk hugs Henslowe, calls him by name too and volunteers to see him next on any day of the week. ‘One moment you are running along, the next you are no more’, a tearful Fisk utters, with the pronoun again lending ambivalence to its reference. Substitutable, the second person could indicate Henslowe, Harrington, Wag, Fisk himself or any other. With the animal cure pronounced and Fisk returned to sociality and/as paternity, fascination with Dean Spanley fades: this Father too has been figuratively consumed. Henslowe next finds his father – not ensconced in the parlour but outside playing with a spaniel.59 A dog has replaced the Dean. A dog comes home and ‘home’ is returned to itself. Watching Henslowe watching his father, the film frames Mrs Brimley next to the painted portrait of Mrs Fisk. Mrs Fisk, nominally the maternal figure in the film, is never mentioned in Fisk’s restored sense of feeling, but is nevertheless symbolically assembled through this representation with the group approving Fisk’s joy in his new pet.60 In the spirit of doubles dogging this film, Mrs Brimley metonymises the maternal – but a maternal already in service to the father/law. Employed as the housekeeper, she literally maintains clean borders rather than threaten their collapse in Kristevan abjection.61 Later in the film, talking to her late husband in the form of the chair in which he used to sit, Mrs Brimley refutes the idea that she would ever cook anything so disgusting as a whole rabbit.62 Is the new spaniel a substitute for Wag or Harrington? Maintaining totemic ambivalence over whether humans and animals are distinct or consanguinous, Henslowe’s closing voiceover suggests that reincarnation might be something to greet with anticipation, and that, should he be reborn as a dog, he hopes to belong to a ‘master as kind as [his] father’. Given that Fisk had affirmed that he beat Wag (only) when it was necessary, and the Dean had spouted the colonialist view requiring the colonised to love their colonising masters – characteristically confusing servant with dog – this wish too remains thoroughly ambivalent. What is clear, however, is that not any animal could induce this cure for Fisk. I have indicated that the animal in the Dean is domesticated rather than wild, indexing Fisk rather than unleashed animal others. The film also deliberately repudiates felinity. The Dean reviles cats, berating their lack of understanding of the sport of the chase, and Swami Prash (Art Malik) specifically expels them from proximity to man (the generic is categorically specific) early in the film. Speaking of reincarnation at the event that first brings the protagonists together, the Swami vehemently rejects enquiries after a feline soul made by women in the audience. In spite of its scenes of hospitality, Dean Spanley does not welcome animality, rather its feminine taint and concomitant disrespect for (the law of) the master is held at bay while the film maintains a domesticated totemism commanding masculine descent. Derrida asks what would happen to fraternity should an animal – or a sister – enter the scene.63 Dean Spanley splits between negative and affirmative 144 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 145 Animal Melancholia readings: the symptomatic containment of the animal precisely as man’s best friend, absorbing the dog within the discourse of friendship and ingenious pointers to deconstructing the conceptual hierarchy of man and animal. Laurence Rickels has recently ascribed to the pet the role of inoculation against death.64 A loyal Freudian, he means specifically paternal death (the primal feast is lived every day).65 Prescribing carno-phallogocentrism anew, Rickels posits the eating of meat as that which develops resistance to the pain of loss.66 Eating meat is indeed an ‘animal cure’ (as food preservation). If the pet’s death is unmournable for Rickels, this is because this classical traffic in substitution is one-way (pets rehearse human death but no-one does so for them). Rhetorically maximising his own ambivalence regarding pet death, Rickels refers to ‘cut[ting] their losses with the paternal economies of sacrifice, substitution, and successful mourning’.67 Whether this means breaking from or mixing in with such economies, the prospect of successful mourning brings me back to Derrida and to Dean Spanley. Just desserts I began this chapter with an epigraph from Derrida asking whether ‘we’ are ‘capable’ of true mourning. This phrasing resonates with his deconstruction of the habitual framing of human response versus animal reaction.68 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, rather than simply extend the ability to respond to animals, Derrida questions the way in which ability is construed as the proper of the human (the ability to speak, respond, reason, etc.) and proposes a ‘weak ability’ in the common question ‘can they suffer?’ (i.e. are they able to suffer?).69 Here he asks do we have the ability to mourn?70 His implication troubles the binary confidently asserted as ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ by Abraham and Torok, a division that circulates the one for whom we ‘successfully’ mourn and encrypts the one for whom we fail to do so. Getting to the leeway in Dean Spanley to go beyond a beguiling human narrative in which dogs feature decoratively has demanded a critical engagement with the crime that founds culture in Freudian legend, the primal feast. The sexism of that feast required the addition of Julia Kristeva. The human exceptionalism of psychoanalysis as linked to the metaphysics of presence brought Derrida into the scene. At numerous junctures I have drawn on Derrida’s deconstruction of the classical methods of distinguishing man from animal to affirm ways in which Dean Spanley departs from these methods: writing is habitually thought as the communicative medium of the human, this film invites us to think of dogs as beings who also write; for the Dean, scent is a form of clothing with which animals – like humans – also hide themselves. The film also modifies the cinematic convention of the point-of-view shot to sympathetically and plausibly draw us into a canine environment. However, Dean Spanley also employs a masculinist ruse that risks fettering its departures from the discourse on ‘the animal’: when dogs are pulled back from writing – with urine – this is at the hands of a female figure whose action is 145 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 146 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE tantamount to toilet-training; elements that might usually impart abject revulsion – sniffing urine, eating entire rabbits – and thus bespeak the defilement of the Kristevan mother, are elevated to ritual events. In so doing, the film risks maintaining a virility in which man’s best friend is indeed like man, rather than following through on Derrida’s insight that the general condition of writing affects the ‘living in general’ and cannot secure impermeable borders.71 Ending on the son’s desire for a good Father who will treat him, even discipline him, like a pet dog endorses classically satisfying narrative closure. Our inability to decide how and when we eat the other nurtures resistance to such ends.72 Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Mnemosyne’, trans. Cecile Lindsay, in Memoires for Paul de Man, rev edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 31. 2. Dean Spanley is now published as one volume containing both Lord Dunsany’s novella My Talks with Dean Spanley and Alan Sharp’s screenplay Dean Spanley, ed. Matthew Metcalfe with Chris Smith (London: HarperCollins, 2008). 3. Hunting for more Tokay, Wrather takes Fisk to the Nawab, who coincidently refers to the Dean as Old Wag Spanley, referring to the name he was known by at Oxford by virtue of his initials (Walther Arthur Graham Spanley). 4. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics [1913], trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1950). 5. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 102. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. MarieLouise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Among the best commentaries are Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) and Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 7. Ibid., p. 36. 8. Derrida references numerous examples in The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 37–8, e.g. ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoff Bennington, with drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 21–92. 9. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005). 10. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 136. 11. Ibid., pp. 127–8. 12. Ibid., p. 142. 146 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 147 Animal Melancholia 13. See Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 248–57; and Elissa Marder, ‘The Sex of Death and the Maternal Crypt’, in parallax vol. 15 no. 1 (2009), pp. 5–20. 14. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, especially Chapter 3, ‘From Filth to Defilement’, pp. 56–89. 15. Kristeva, Powers, pp. 12–13. The widespread uptake of an overgeneralised notion of abjection as border disturbance in 1990s visual culture frequently neglected Kristeva’s specificity regarding the maternal and animal borders of the subject. 16. Ibid., pp. 63, 61. I deconstructed the assumed stability of this structuralist conception of exchange in Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Lacanian-inspired feminist film theory of Elizabeth Cowie in ‘The Course of a General Displacement/The Course of the Choreographer’, in Martin McQuillan and Ika Willis (eds), The Origins of Deconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 50–66. The same critique applies to Kristeva. 17. The film’s narrative of reincarnation might itself be understood as a topic invested in minimising maternity. 18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 75. 19. Ibid., p. 75. 20. Sharp, Dean Spanley, pp. 193–4. 21. The Dean says as much later in the film, during one of the ‘animalseances’. 22. With so many doubles structuring this film, together with the uncertainty regarding the veracity of the Dean’s memories and the status of reincarnation, Freud’s ‘uncanny’ is strongly evoked. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Art and Literature, vol. 14 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 336–76. 23. See Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000), p. 123. It is ambiguous as to whether Lippit agrees with this view. 24. See for example, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms (Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 2008). 25. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ [1929], in the Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12, Civilization, Society and Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 288n1. 26. See Lippit, Electric Animal, pp. 125–7. 27. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject’, in Elizabeth Weber (ed.), Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 282. Originally published in Topoi vol. 7 no. 2 (1988), pp 113–21; Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 28. Ibid. 29. Sara Guyer, ‘Albeit Eating: Towards an Ethics of Cannibalism’, Angelaki vol. 2 no.1 (1997), p. 64. 30. Derrida, ‘‘Eating Well’,’ p. 282. 147 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 148 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE 31. Prior to ‘Eating Well’, Derrida had already published ‘Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986), pp. xi–xlviii. 32. In an essay contiguous with the concerns of the present one, I further discuss this problem of succession; see ‘Hors d’Oeuvres: some footnotes on the Spurs of Dorothy Cross’, parallax vol. 19 no. 1 (2013), pp. 3–11. 33. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 34. Ibid., p. 280. 35. Ibid. Levinas’s inability to think the ‘face’ as anything other than human has now been the topic of extensive debate, e.g. John Llewelyn, ‘Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)’, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 234–45; or Simon Glendinning, ‘Le Plaisir de la lecture: Reading the Other Animal’, parallax vol. 12 no.1 (2006), pp. 81–94. 36. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 281. 37. Ibid., p. 282. 38. This opens too huge a question to be properly addressed here, briefly: if nonhuman animals are viewed as only eating in response to need then they might as well be described as Cartesian animal-machines. It would be extremely interesting to pursue the question of symbolic carnivory in nonhuman animals as yet another place in which lines between species change rather than remain static. 39. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 40. See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 29–31. 41. Sara Guyer elaborates this point in ‘Buccality’, in Gabrielle Schwab (ed.), Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 80–1. 42. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’[1972], in The Shell and The Kernel, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 125–38. 43. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p. xxxvii. 44. Ibid., p. xxxvii, emphasis original. 45. Ibid., pp. xxxvii, xxxviii, emphases original. 46. Derrida redescribes this demetaphorisation as a ‘hypermetaphorization’, ibid., p. xxxviii. 47. Ibid., p. xxxviii, emphasis original. 48. Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, p. 128. 49. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p. xvi 50. Ibid., p. xxxix. 51. Vicki Kirby is currently doing much to bring out this underappreciated vein of Derrida’s thought; see ‘Original Science: Nature Deconstructing Itself’, Derrida Today vol. 3 no. 2 (2010), pp. 201–20. 52. The script makes the direct analogy (Sharp, Dean Spanley, p. 243), deleted but deducible in the film itself. 148 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 149 Animal Melancholia 53. Dunsany, My Talks with Dean Spanley, 247. 54. Nudity is very much at stake in Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, together with clothing positioned as a form of technology. I have discussed this at length elsewhere; see ‘When Species Kiss: Some Recent Correspondence between animots’, Humanimalia vol. 2 no.1 (2010), pp. 60–85. 55. See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 4; Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, p. 135n6. 56. Erica Fudge argues that a prime function of the pet is to ‘come home’; see Pets (Stocksfield: Ashgate, 2008). 57. For Derrida’s critique of the difference between the proper death of Dasein and the perishing of the animal in Heidegger, see Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 30–1. 58. Sharp’s script has Fisk also mention Wag to Mrs Brimley, but this is edited out of the film (Dean Spanley), p. 267. 59. In spite of Fisk’s earlier protestations that he could never hope to have another dog like Wag – one of the ‘seven great dogs’ alive at any time according to his idiosyncratic mythology. 60. Henslowe showed his own distress over her death earlier in the film. 61. The picture frame enclosing Mrs Fisk might also be read in this light. 62. Rather more jovial than the melancholic Fisk, Mrs Brimley is not unlike him in her literality: when someone dies, that is all there is to it; she may be talking to a chair but it was just like that when her quiet husband was alive. 63. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 12; and Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 149. 64. Laurence Rickels, ‘Pet Grief’, in gorillagorillagorilla, Diana Thater ex. cat. (Köln: Walter König, 2009), p. 71. 65. As Claire Denis might say, ‘Trouble Every Day’, in light of her film of that name and the cannibalism afflicting her protagonists (France, 2001). 66. Rickels, ‘Pet Grief,’, p. 72. 67. Ibid. 68. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 8. 69. See Lynn Turner, ‘When Species Kiss’, p. 73. 70. Kelly Oliver reverses the stakes and asks after the now established ability of elephants to mourn in her chapter ‘Elephant Eulogy’ in my The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 71. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 27. 72. I thank Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon for their assiduous editorial advice. 149 

Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 134 Lynn Turner 8 Animal Melancholia On the Scent of Dean Spanley What, then, is true mourning? What can we make of it? Can we make it, as we say in French that we ‘make’ our mourning? I repeat: can we? … are we capable of doing it, do we have the power to do it? But also, do we have the right? Jacques Derrida1 This chapter will explore the prescription of what I call an ‘animal cure’ in the beguiling film adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella, Dean Spanley (2008), directed by Toa Fraser.2 Dean Spanley does not self-consciously extend itself to support an ethics that would include animals, indeed it comes close to the problems we readily associate with fables or allegory (in which animals habitually figure only as ciphers for human beings). However, as I hope to show, close reading allows for some productive leeway in the relations it proposes and questions it provokes. The animal cure in this film is not for a sick animal, or animals in general if there were such a thing. Rather Dean Spanley enacts a cure for melancholia as manifested in a cantankerous elderly man, Fisk (Peter O’Toole). Fisk’s extremely formal relationship with his surviving son, Henslowe (Jeremy Northam), is stymied by the unmourned deaths of his wife and other son, Harrington (Xavier Horan). Meanwhile Henslowe becomes fascinated with the oddly convincing stories produced by the local clergyman, the eponymous Dean (Sam Neill), of his life as a dog when enjoying the scent of the rare Hungarian liquor, Tokay. Realising that the dog, in whose name the Dean speaks, uncannily recalls the lost pet of his father’s childhood, Henslowe effects his animal cure through the means of a dinner party. From the moment that this pet, Wag, is ‘returned’ through the medium of the Dean’s apparent recollections, Fisk can begin to cry and thus to admit grief. Yet from this moment too, the intoxication with Dean Spanley fades: the resolution of the last scene proposes a happy Fisk accompanied by a new pet dog. Dean Spanley makes a series of doubles between humans and dogs: son and dog (Harrington and Wag), dog and Father (in the Dean and also in Fisk), and also of dog friends and human friends (Wag’s doggy friend and Wrather the ‘conveyancer’ [Bryan Brown], Henslowe’s fellow conspirator in the supply of Tokay).3 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 135 Animal Melancholia It is able to do this with the key scenes of the film too – humans assembled around a dining table/dogs running through fields. In convening the entwined narratives through a ritual meal, metonymised by Tokay, Dean Spanley invites reflection on the primal feast and the legend of consanguinity between human clan and totem animal as invoked in Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agrement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913).4 Ostensibly telling a tale of reincarnation and one that is persuasively evoked through the cinematic convention of flashback, this film enables discussion regarding mourning among humans and animals, specifically the dog as man’s best friend. This chapter will explore these interwoven themes in light of Jacques Derrida’s investigations into the work of mourning as related to an ethics of what he names ‘eating well’. Totem and Tokay The body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic. Julia Kristevav5 Most of the proliferating commentaries on The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) concentrate on Derrida’s encounter with the animal in or as his deconstruction of the persistent philosophical support for human exceptionalism.6 Yet observant readers will have noticed that, in reference to his own ‘zootobiography’ Derrida remarks that his writings have ‘welcomed’ animal differences on the ‘threshold’ of sexual differences.7 The word ‘welcome’ draws attention to an ethics of hospitality to the other, rather than a manifesto of rights: Derrida’s transfigured autobiographical texts welcome sexual and animal others.8 While this kind of welcome includes the complication of being hostage and not simply host to unknown others, Derrida nevertheless offers a scene of hospitality that moves away from canonical autobiographical and philosophical negation or abjection of those others in the name of the subject that calls itself man.9 The scenes of hospitality that structure Dean Spanley, however, echo these problematic processes of negation or abjection, not least in regard to the primal feast that Freud deduces must have occurred at the origin of culture.10 For Freud, this feast is a ritualised exceptional event that permits the clans of ‘primitive’ cultures to kill and to eat their totem, a specific animal with whom they assume a consanguinous relation (the ‘truth’ of sexual reproduction being unknown). Without this ritual such a meal would have been strictly taboo, both murderous and cannibalistic. As codified and momentous event, the ritual both breaks the law and founds it. Interleaving numerous anthropological sources, Freud works in the present of his clinical observation of animal phobias. His phobics exhibit ambivalence – that is both love and hate, towards the feared animal, and Freud finds continuity between primitive and modern cultures in support of the theory of psychoanalysis: ‘It was 135 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 136 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE the same in every case: where the children examined were boys, their fear related at bottom to their father, and had merely been displaced on to the animal.’11 Regardless of any doubt raised by the absent question of girls, the primal meal requires greater finesse and Freud further entrenches the father at the origin of culture by supplying a revised wish for which the primal feast is already a dilution. Consanguinity is of no consequence: our animal ancestry is a displacement of patriarchy (literally the father is the origin). Freely borrowing from Charles Darwin, Freud imagines the overcoming of this primal father by the ‘company of brothers’ who murder and eat him.12 Such is the enormity of their guilt that the father is resurrected in name and in/as law, without even having to die since the wish to so dispatch him would have been force enough for psychic reality. As feminist scholars such as Kelly Oliver and Elissa Marder have remarked, Totem and Taboo glosses over both modes of kinship that predate the nuclear family as well as the scattered incoherent references to feminine fancies and maternal deities in the rush to render the father original, necessary and human.13 Retaining the notion that affective response to criminal events found culture as law, Julia Kristeva invokes not only the murder and cannibalism of the father, but also incest with the mother.14 Most of the literature following Derrida on the question of the animal has remained within his philosophical terrain, targeting the Cartesian legacy of such thinkers as Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan, yet Oliver has shown that female thinkers such as Kristeva also demand to be rethought in light of the human exceptionalism that they too legislate. Thus I introduce her with caution. In Kristeva’s case, alongside the human and masculine route to language – the abject haunting of any borders recalls not only the body of the mother – through ‘our personal archaeology’– but also, on a wider scale, animality, expelled as ‘representative[s] of sex and murder’, or lawlessness.15 Indeed animal and sexual differences traverse the same horizon. Kristeva might address Freud’s notorious blind spot regarding femininity, but she does not offer a feminist counter model (as she herself acknowledges). The uncertainties of Kristeva’s mother offer no ‘solace’ to the subject. Moreover, Kristeva endorses the requirement that the social rest upon the exchange of women between men, indexing the symbolic exchange of signs, for fear of the untutored lawlessness of the mother.16 While the figure of the mother is not immediately in evidence in the homosociality of Dean Spanley, the liminal nature of abjection means that her direct representation is not the issue.17 Given the encoding of the scene of the meal as both paternal and fraternal in Freud and Dean Spanley, Kristeva provides a useful supplement through her attention to the abject power of particular substances. Signally, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), food as ‘the natural’ opposes the sociality of man; food as ‘oral object’ recalls the archaic relations between human and m/other.18 Food can always ‘defile’.19 Having set the table with the spectres of cannibalism and incest, I want to turn to Dean Spanley. Thursdays tablet a dry ritual between Fisk and Young Fisk (as 136 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 137 Animal Melancholia Henslowe is schematically addressed by his father). ‘Young Fisk’ arrives at his father’s house and they address matters of fact, untouched by affective involvement. Henslowe himself ironically refers to their scheduled meetings as rituals, and ones that he wishes ‘dismantled’. An altogether more fascinating ritual transpires for Henslowe with Dean Spanley. Underlining the displacement of father for Father, Henslowe arranges his meetings with the Dean on Thursdays. Not unaware of this substitution, Fisk makes his own: when they do manage to get together for a (Thurs)day out, Fisk pointedly trips up a young boy (i.e. in lieu of Henslowe). At first, procuring the Dean’s favourite liquor is simply to facilitate their meeting and to allow for the Dean to expound upon the unlikely topic of reincarnation (one Fisk characteristically dismisses as ‘poppycock’). Almost immediately the Dean is implicated in that very topic as his unusual degree of pleasure inhaling Tokay – the script positions him as ‘entirely focused in his nose’ – leads him to wish for the ‘olfactory powers of the canine’.20 More disconcertingly, as he continues with increasingly outré remarks, his first person becomes uncannily canine. He does not mimetically sound canine, rather his sudden marked interest in cats, smells and the love of a master evokes the point of view of a pet dog. At this early stage in Henslowe’s intoxication with the Dean, no images flesh out his narration as flashback in the manner cinema habitually treats evidentially as memory. We have to take his word for it: certainly Henslowe is fascinated. The clue to the change in perspective comes through an unusual comparison. The Dean opines that ‘to pull a dog away from a lamppost is akin to seizing a scholar in the British Museum by the scruff of his neck and dragging him away from his studies’. Making kin of the inhalation of urine and the study of books threatens the clean and proper body (inhalation of urine is not named as such but the comparison follows swiftly on from the Dean’s appreciation of the Tokay consolidating their metonymic connection). Dog and (human) scholar are made of the same stuff, and up to the same activity. Traces of urine are read by a dog like writing is read by a scholar.21 By implication, to urinate is to write (to leave a trace, one vulnerable to erasure), to smell is to read. Metaphor assumes that the meaning of the term of comparison anchors that to which it is compared. Here, however, the scholar is already doglike, seized by the ‘scruff of his neck’. Later, in the climactic sequence, it is Fisk who makes a similar comparison in which his wife calls him away from reading Balzac, ‘rather like dragging a dog away from a lamppost’. In both cases there is no mention of the word ‘urination’, which is tidily metonymised by the lamppost. Even as metonymy – a relation of comparison based on proximity, the abject contact between urine and study is finessed. In the latter scene the Dean describes the pleasures of eating a whole rabbit, fur, bones, guts and all, waxing lyrical about the smell of fear. Although by then we are regularly treated to visual flashbacks of Dean Spanley in the guise of Wag the spaniel learning about the world from his roguish mongrel friend (clearly meant to be Wrather), this visceral desire is overheard by Mrs Brimley, the housekeeper (Judy Parfitt). Literally peripheral to the proceedings, her mortification is presented as comic. She hears something that 137 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 138 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE she should not and cannot understand, unaware that she is listening to the Dean as a dog. Dean Spanley is at pains to make sure that our guts are never turned (as we, audience, metonymically join with the enraptured homosocial circle of Henslowe, Fisk and Wrather). While Mrs Brimley has prepared the food (and insisted on preparing something more special than the ‘hotpot’ to which Fisk habitually constrains her), this is not the meal at stake for the assembled men. That they eschew the tradition of leaving the table in order to enjoy port in separation from any ladies that might ordinarily be present to remain at the table confirms which meal is in focus. They partake of the story of downing an entire rabbit mediated by the aroma of Tokay in order to share in the memories voiced by the Dean. Unable to be seen, smell is elusive. It lends itself to the uncanny tale of Dean Spanley, posing the unfathomable question of whether the Father was once a dog, while the domestication of that dog points back to Fisk (again containing the impure legend of consanguinity).22 The film supplements smell’s invisibility with the Dean’s rhetorically exaggerated appreciation of the Tokay. This rhetorical exaggeration is given clearest visual expression in the climactic dinner sequence. There, in close-up, the Dean raises his glass to his nose, reminiscing about the delicious smell of fear, the classical soundtrack swells and the film cuts to the comedically rapid appearance of sheep being chased over a hill by dogs delirious with olfaction. Becoming virtually airborne in their haste, the white clouds of leaping sheep evoke their own scent. In his discussion of smell and Freud, Akira Lippit refers to its paucity of visible trace as an immateriality that bars smell from forming a ‘semiotic system’.23 In this view a scent could never form a sentence. In view of current work on ‘new materialisms’ however, we might not be so quick to assume that a) smell is immaterial, or that b) materiality guarantees signification.24 Tokay is elusive. Wrather, the ‘conveyancer’, sniffs it out, squirrelled away in the wine cellars of the wealthy, though he soon dispenses with a finder’s fee for the sake of a place at the table with the Dean. It is not disgusting. Even if Tokay is rather syrupy, it is not presented as abject. One does not even have to bother the mouth by drinking it. Tokay is taken by nose. Intoxication with Tokay is not coarse inebriation. This rarefied liquor is claimed as ostentatiously cultural. Rather than confirm human desire over animal need, the Dean imagines that a dog might appreciate its aroma all the more. Perhaps the ritualised, exceptional consumption, Dean Spanley (2008) 138 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 139 Animal Melancholia the elevated palate required to appreciate Tokay protests too much and defends against the possibility that pollution inheres in food. For Henslowe and Wrather this liquor is instrumentally the vehicle for the Dean’s transport. Fisk blunts the allure of the Tokay not by emphasising disgust but dismissing it as nothing more than ‘fermented grapes’. Outright disgust would too easily register the psychoanalytic mode of repression. Freud famously narrates – albeit in a brief footnote itself banished to the bottom of the page – the vertical elevation of man as coterminous with the predominance of the sense of sight, with both verticality and visuality set against the horizontal and olfactory order of the animal.25 Closer to the earth, closer to the sexual and excretory organs of other four-legged animals, this plane is one foregrounding the sense of smell. Defending against a disgusting smell then bespeaks the desire for the sexuality it indexes.26 The Dean’s elevation of Tokay might be read in this context, especially given the homosociality the dinners also convene, as eliminating women and cultivating men – and male dogs. Yet for Fisk, Tokay occupies no extreme, it is neither disgusting nor wondrous. In common with his reduction of Mrs Brimley’s culinary repertoire to the economically descriptive ‘hot pot’ and his curt reduction of things that have ‘gone to the trouble of happening’ including the deaths of his wife and son, as ‘inevitable’, Fisk dampens social engagement until he recognises his dog in the Dean. Scents and sentences For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality, but also of the ear, the eye and all the ‘senses’ in general) the metonymy of ‘eating well’ [bien manger] would always be the rule. Jacques Derrida27 In the material already introduced there is a mounting sense of the sociality at stake in the consumption of food in excess of a supposedly simple nutritional need. While Freud has laid out the primal feast as a scene in which animality is exchanged for (human) paternity, and Kristeva has indicated the feminine as well as animal territory mapped by the mouth also haunting this feast, it is Derrida that names an ethical imperative to eat well.28 Eating well does not equate to fine dining. Rather the ‘good’ (underlined by his translator’s emphasis on the original ‘bien manger’) speaks to an ethics that for Derrida cannot be resolved into a calculable formula. Sara Guyer notes that ‘un homme de bien’ is not merely a ‘good’ man, but a man of property and that ‘bien’ is connected to the Greek ‘oikos’ drawing together ‘the home … the “proper” … the private … the love and affection of one’s kin’.29 Not only are we always in a relation of ‘eating the other’’ and being eaten by them, but the ingestion the verb indicates is limited neither to food nor to intake by mouth. In the ‘Eating Well’ interview Derrida himself exclaims, ‘What is eating?’, having so expanded this ostensibly self-evident category, now re-posed as 139 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 140 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE the ‘metonymy of introjection’.30 Contiguous with eating, introjection names the psychic process of identification and itself metonymises the work of the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on whom Derrida implicitly draws, albeit in a modified fashion.31 For Freud, Abraham, Torok and Derrida we must ‘eat the other’ if we are to form our own ego, that is to say, our earliest identifications with others occur as a form of ingestion that we are obliged to swallow. For Derrida, the ‘must’ here refers to an ethics of infinite hospitality – one takes in the other but does not decide which other. At the same time there is a ‘cannot’ in that we cannot measure or decide how much of that other to take in: the critical interface of literal and figural ensure that we cannot totally appropriate the other through this ingestion. That the ostensibly physical practice of eating and ostensibly psychical process of introjection may be said to share a border not only points to the difficulty of forming a clear succession or separation between literal and figural, but also between need and desire and thus, for Derrida, if not for Abraham and Torok, between humans and other animals.32 Departing from the metaphysical conceptual path that orders and interlinks these terms leads Derrida to pose the ethics of the ‘One must eat well’ as offering an ‘infinite hospitality’.33 This infinite hospitality strikes at the ‘‘carno-phallogocentric’ heart of metaphysics in calling into question the structure of sacrifice that it conserves.34 This mouthful of a term brings Derrida’s existing critique of the conceit unifying the presence of the word with that of the phallus (phallogocentrism) into contact with a carnivorous appetite. Even ethical thinkers with whom Derrida shares ground such as Emmanuel Levinas fall foul of the configuration of sacrifice. While a ‘Thou shalt not kill’ may be invoked, even as a first principle, Derrida draws attention to the way in which killing is managed such that a ‘noncriminal putting to death’ symbolically and legally distinct from murder is reserved for some beings.35 This Levinasian ethical law implicitly addresses a human community, for whom the killing of non-humans does not count. Explicitly affecting animals, the sacrificial loophole for legal killing can and has been turned on humans, frequently figured animalistically as ‘vermin’, for example. As Freud describes, so Derrida critiques this community, which, moreover, privileges brotherhood: the virility associated with the carno-phallogocentric subject is indeed that of the ‘adult male, the father, husband, or brother’ demanding a sacrifice.36 Rather than legislate anew, invoking a new law on which we could always rely, the Derridean ethics of infinite hospitality keeps the question of what it is to eat well open. Refusing to sequester symbolic anthropophagy as a human practice distinct from literal cannibalism committed by the untutored, animals, those who lack the law, Derrida implies that vegetarians also ‘eat meat’ in the place where eating and introjection touch.37 Harking back to my remarks on early identification as a form of ‘eating the other’, there is a metaphoric carnivory at stake that is not definitively refused by the practice of a vegetarian diet. This metaphoric ingestion is not necessarily organised linguistically (i.e. it is not clear that for Derrida metaphoric carnivory as part of a practice of identification is not performed by nonhuman 140 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 141 Animal Melancholia species).38 The contiguity between eating and introjection provokes another conceptually challenging question: ‘In what respect’ Derrida asks, ‘does the formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the question … still carnivorous?’39 The carnivory of the question is given with the caveat ‘formulation … in language’. This question recalls the Freudian understanding of language acquisition as the substitution of breast for word: in the crossover between the metaphysics of presence and psychoanalysis a suite of metonymies, milk, breast and mother, each bound to the psychoanalytic fantasy of satisfaction, gives way to the substitution of language. The question further opens toward a limitrophic subject – one whose borders ‘grow’ – for whom no orifice is immune to the ingestion of the other.40 Where Levinas poses the face as that which says ‘Thou shalt not kill’, Derrida displaces the humanism that the face proposes with all the orifices, thus weakening the association with literally speaking subjects.41 In Abraham and Torok’s work on mourning, framed in binary combat as ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, they distinguish these processes in ways that lend themselves to thinking about Fisk’s abrupt dismissal of pain.42 In Derrida’s ‘Foreword’, called ‘Fors’ for their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1986), he warns against the ‘limitations’ of a ‘linguisticistic’ reading of their work, one easy to make since it stems from the very ‘base of the[ir] enterprise’.43 This reading overdetermines the mouth as the privileged oral locus of ‘verbal language’, one whose presence fills the gap left by the breast.44 Speech comes first, and speech is presence (the metaphysical problem inherited by psychoanalysis). Derrida underlines the inadvertent fracture in this logic: the substitution is ‘partial’, presence is a ‘figure of presence’.45 Psychic life is in mourning from the start. Abraham and Torok differentiate mourning and melancholia through two different relations to the literal and the metaphoric. Rather than introject the lost other as a metaphor, the melancholic incorporates that lost other as an object that thus refuses metaphoricity.46 Melancholic incorporation involves the fantasy that one eats this object precisely ‘not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside into the pocket of a cyst’.47 This ‘cyst’ is the secret ‘crypt’ in Abraham and Torok’s terms, into which the one for whom the melancholic fails to mourn is squirrelled away. Secret, Abraham and Torok oppose the withheld path of incorporation to the sociality of introjection. For them ‘Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation, means channelling them through language into a communion of empty mouths’ (empty by virtue of the process of weaning).48 As Derrida writes ‘Introjection speaks … . Incorporation keeps still, speaks only to silence or to ward off intruders from its secret place.’49 This crypt of language depends, for Derrida, on the logic of a primary substitution for the maternal breast configured as presence. Language, cryptic or otherwise, is here caught in the logic of re-presentation. Of course Derrida gives emphasis to the supplemental nature of the substitution of breast by word: supplemented, the breast loses the sense of an originary completion 141 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 142 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE (without thereby falling into a logic of lack). Rather than the full presence of the breast, metonym of the mother’s body, metonym of nature, Derrida posits an original writing: general ‘hieroglyphia’ precedes possibility for thinking the crypt.50 This does not push the supposed ground of ‘nature’ further ‘back’ but rewrites it as writing already.51 Thus the general writing of nature also disperses the singular path to language as the human response to lack. Ingestion that does not necessarily pass by way of the mouth immediately evokes the nose for Dean Spanley, as well as the ears for his audience, while the crisis in language summons Fisk. Pet seminary Fisk is blunt. He neither ‘wastes’ words by indulging their figural capacities, nor worries about offending others. The congregated guests around the dinner table in the climactic sequence are at first beholden to his stories, ones they have not come to hear. We hear how his late wife dragged him from Balzac to aid their two sons, out on a rowboat on a stormy Lake Windermere.52 Mocking her fears, the cantankerous Fisk addressed the storm intoning ‘Give Up Your Dead!’, as if they were already deceased. Fisk’s disregard for emotional responses evidently predates the death of Harrington (fighting in the Boer War, his body was never recovered). At dinner, once the Dean has again become the focus of attention, we learn the incorporative extent to which Wag and Harrington share the same fate, both marked by a ‘non-criminal putting to death’. It is the Dean’s desire to remain at the table that again prompts the olfactory metaphor spurring his uncanny reflections. Leaving the table would be equivalent to having a bath ‘when one ha[d] just gotten comfortable in one’s smell’.53 Bodily, animal, smell is thus brought into proximity with the bouquet of Tokay as a form of clothing, troubling its primary horizontality in Freudian legend. Bathing, cleanliness, lead to the embarrassment of nudity.54 The séance-like scene in the dark environment of the book-lined room housing the dinner resumes. Or, in Derrida’s neologism the ‘animalséance’ resumes: Leonard Lawlor unpacks this term as both ‘animated impropriety’ and as a ‘session of the animal’ (session having both a psychoanalytic and an occult implication).55 Fisk is astonished. Before he can issue an insult, the Dean resumes his otherworldly discourse. Speaking from the twinned crypt of Harrington and Wag, he makes casual reference to being called Wag by the Master. Fisk is transfixed. The Dean’s ensuing stories entrance Fisk even more than Henslowe, and in transferential style he soon responds as the Master in question, even recognising himself as one who administered an occasional beating (to the raised eyebrows of Henslowe). The tales to which Fisk is party bring the whole group together. Here we gain a clearer picture of urination as a writing practice, of the enticing smell of fear and of friendship between dogs (the ‘unmastered,’ unnamed stranger, and Wag, domesticated, his species loyalty divided by a love of the Master). This picture is fleshed 142 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 143 Animal Melancholia Dean Spanley (2008) out by luscious flashbacks cinematically coded as first-person memory in that they are attached through successive sequencing to the Dean but shot from a low angle, from a dog’s eye view. The latter gives credence to the Dean’s story and draws those who see these sequences – the cinematic audience – into the film through that canine viewpoint, making dogs of us all; exuberant dogs often taking up the whole frame, dogs in the prime of life, sometimes with a slightly self-consciously comedic feel produced through a slow-motion close-up of wind in their coats, all suggesting yes, those times were fantastic. Fisk is particularly taken with the Dean’s assurance that, to find home, after running unfettered through farmland with his pal, he had only need turn towards it.56 This confidence mystifies Fisk since Wag had disappeared, like Harrington, and no body had been recovered. Yet the dogs do not arrive home, since, as the film shows while the Dean cannot tell, a farmer shoots them dead. Fisk is rapt. As he stares at the Dean, the scene cuts back to that same field in the same light, but this time with his son Harrington riding a horse across it. With the sound of gunshot, the scene cuts and we see Harrington lying dead in the field as the Dean narrates Wag’s last thoughts of ‘home in [his] heart and the master waiting. No, no pain.’ The Dean’s audience are visibly affected (indeed it would be hard to remain unmoved). Fisk, weeping gently, touches the Dean’s hand affectionately. With new consideration for the feelings of others, Fisk retires, saying that he is ‘put in memory of Harrington’, the son whose name he uses for the first time in this film. Finding him crying in the hallway, the surprised Mrs Brimley asks Fisk if he is all right. ‘He was shot’, he replies, showing his pain and opening the crypt. The personal pronoun is ambivalent as to which death it refers, Harrington or Wag. Both shot: the dog as an animal trespassing on a farmer’s land and as an animal that can be killed without criminal offence, indeed without truly ‘dying’, merely perishing according to Heidegger; the son as a soldier, engaged in the lawful practice of killing those designated ‘enemy’, is himself so killed, a casualty of war.57 The Dean’s apparent recollection gives a representation to the traumatic absence of any such for Fisk, and one that affirms ‘no pain’. In contrast to the formerly inexplicable disappearances of Harrington and Wag, Mrs Fisk died of grief for her son, in emotional pain ‘enough for both of us’, in Fisk’s encrypted opinion. Yet the film shows no engagement with Fisk’s grief for his wife – who remains nameless, only his belated double mourning for son and dog. 143 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 144 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE ‘Eating’ Wag as metaphor (by taking in the Dean’s narration) allows the name of Harrington and sociality to resurface.58 Talking now with uncharacteristic familiarity, Fisk hugs Henslowe, calls him by name too and volunteers to see him next on any day of the week. ‘One moment you are running along, the next you are no more’, a tearful Fisk utters, with the pronoun again lending ambivalence to its reference. Substitutable, the second person could indicate Henslowe, Harrington, Wag, Fisk himself or any other. With the animal cure pronounced and Fisk returned to sociality and/as paternity, fascination with Dean Spanley fades: this Father too has been figuratively consumed. Henslowe next finds his father – not ensconced in the parlour but outside playing with a spaniel.59 A dog has replaced the Dean. A dog comes home and ‘home’ is returned to itself. Watching Henslowe watching his father, the film frames Mrs Brimley next to the painted portrait of Mrs Fisk. Mrs Fisk, nominally the maternal figure in the film, is never mentioned in Fisk’s restored sense of feeling, but is nevertheless symbolically assembled through this representation with the group approving Fisk’s joy in his new pet.60 In the spirit of doubles dogging this film, Mrs Brimley metonymises the maternal – but a maternal already in service to the father/law. Employed as the housekeeper, she literally maintains clean borders rather than threaten their collapse in Kristevan abjection.61 Later in the film, talking to her late husband in the form of the chair in which he used to sit, Mrs Brimley refutes the idea that she would ever cook anything so disgusting as a whole rabbit.62 Is the new spaniel a substitute for Wag or Harrington? Maintaining totemic ambivalence over whether humans and animals are distinct or consanguinous, Henslowe’s closing voiceover suggests that reincarnation might be something to greet with anticipation, and that, should he be reborn as a dog, he hopes to belong to a ‘master as kind as [his] father’. Given that Fisk had affirmed that he beat Wag (only) when it was necessary, and the Dean had spouted the colonialist view requiring the colonised to love their colonising masters – characteristically confusing servant with dog – this wish too remains thoroughly ambivalent. What is clear, however, is that not any animal could induce this cure for Fisk. I have indicated that the animal in the Dean is domesticated rather than wild, indexing Fisk rather than unleashed animal others. The film also deliberately repudiates felinity. The Dean reviles cats, berating their lack of understanding of the sport of the chase, and Swami Prash (Art Malik) specifically expels them from proximity to man (the generic is categorically specific) early in the film. Speaking of reincarnation at the event that first brings the protagonists together, the Swami vehemently rejects enquiries after a feline soul made by women in the audience. In spite of its scenes of hospitality, Dean Spanley does not welcome animality, rather its feminine taint and concomitant disrespect for (the law of) the master is held at bay while the film maintains a domesticated totemism commanding masculine descent. Derrida asks what would happen to fraternity should an animal – or a sister – enter the scene.63 Dean Spanley splits between negative and affirmative 144 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 145 Animal Melancholia readings: the symptomatic containment of the animal precisely as man’s best friend, absorbing the dog within the discourse of friendship and ingenious pointers to deconstructing the conceptual hierarchy of man and animal. Laurence Rickels has recently ascribed to the pet the role of inoculation against death.64 A loyal Freudian, he means specifically paternal death (the primal feast is lived every day).65 Prescribing carno-phallogocentrism anew, Rickels posits the eating of meat as that which develops resistance to the pain of loss.66 Eating meat is indeed an ‘animal cure’ (as food preservation). If the pet’s death is unmournable for Rickels, this is because this classical traffic in substitution is one-way (pets rehearse human death but no-one does so for them). Rhetorically maximising his own ambivalence regarding pet death, Rickels refers to ‘cut[ting] their losses with the paternal economies of sacrifice, substitution, and successful mourning’.67 Whether this means breaking from or mixing in with such economies, the prospect of successful mourning brings me back to Derrida and to Dean Spanley. Just desserts I began this chapter with an epigraph from Derrida asking whether ‘we’ are ‘capable’ of true mourning. This phrasing resonates with his deconstruction of the habitual framing of human response versus animal reaction.68 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, rather than simply extend the ability to respond to animals, Derrida questions the way in which ability is construed as the proper of the human (the ability to speak, respond, reason, etc.) and proposes a ‘weak ability’ in the common question ‘can they suffer?’ (i.e. are they able to suffer?).69 Here he asks do we have the ability to mourn?70 His implication troubles the binary confidently asserted as ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ by Abraham and Torok, a division that circulates the one for whom we ‘successfully’ mourn and encrypts the one for whom we fail to do so. Getting to the leeway in Dean Spanley to go beyond a beguiling human narrative in which dogs feature decoratively has demanded a critical engagement with the crime that founds culture in Freudian legend, the primal feast. The sexism of that feast required the addition of Julia Kristeva. The human exceptionalism of psychoanalysis as linked to the metaphysics of presence brought Derrida into the scene. At numerous junctures I have drawn on Derrida’s deconstruction of the classical methods of distinguishing man from animal to affirm ways in which Dean Spanley departs from these methods: writing is habitually thought as the communicative medium of the human, this film invites us to think of dogs as beings who also write; for the Dean, scent is a form of clothing with which animals – like humans – also hide themselves. The film also modifies the cinematic convention of the point-of-view shot to sympathetically and plausibly draw us into a canine environment. However, Dean Spanley also employs a masculinist ruse that risks fettering its departures from the discourse on ‘the animal’: when dogs are pulled back from writing – with urine – this is at the hands of a female figure whose action is 145 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 146 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE tantamount to toilet-training; elements that might usually impart abject revulsion – sniffing urine, eating entire rabbits – and thus bespeak the defilement of the Kristevan mother, are elevated to ritual events. In so doing, the film risks maintaining a virility in which man’s best friend is indeed like man, rather than following through on Derrida’s insight that the general condition of writing affects the ‘living in general’ and cannot secure impermeable borders.71 Ending on the son’s desire for a good Father who will treat him, even discipline him, like a pet dog endorses classically satisfying narrative closure. Our inability to decide how and when we eat the other nurtures resistance to such ends.72 Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Mnemosyne’, trans. Cecile Lindsay, in Memoires for Paul de Man, rev edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 31. 2. Dean Spanley is now published as one volume containing both Lord Dunsany’s novella My Talks with Dean Spanley and Alan Sharp’s screenplay Dean Spanley, ed. Matthew Metcalfe with Chris Smith (London: HarperCollins, 2008). 3. Hunting for more Tokay, Wrather takes Fisk to the Nawab, who coincidently refers to the Dean as Old Wag Spanley, referring to the name he was known by at Oxford by virtue of his initials (Walther Arthur Graham Spanley). 4. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics [1913], trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1950). 5. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 102. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. MarieLouise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Among the best commentaries are Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) and Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 7. Ibid., p. 36. 8. Derrida references numerous examples in The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 37–8, e.g. ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoff Bennington, with drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 21–92. 9. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005). 10. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 136. 11. Ibid., pp. 127–8. 12. Ibid., p. 142. 146 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 147 Animal Melancholia 13. See Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 248–57; and Elissa Marder, ‘The Sex of Death and the Maternal Crypt’, in parallax vol. 15 no. 1 (2009), pp. 5–20. 14. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, especially Chapter 3, ‘From Filth to Defilement’, pp. 56–89. 15. Kristeva, Powers, pp. 12–13. The widespread uptake of an overgeneralised notion of abjection as border disturbance in 1990s visual culture frequently neglected Kristeva’s specificity regarding the maternal and animal borders of the subject. 16. Ibid., pp. 63, 61. I deconstructed the assumed stability of this structuralist conception of exchange in Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Lacanian-inspired feminist film theory of Elizabeth Cowie in ‘The Course of a General Displacement/The Course of the Choreographer’, in Martin McQuillan and Ika Willis (eds), The Origins of Deconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 50–66. The same critique applies to Kristeva. 17. The film’s narrative of reincarnation might itself be understood as a topic invested in minimising maternity. 18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 75. 19. Ibid., p. 75. 20. Sharp, Dean Spanley, pp. 193–4. 21. The Dean says as much later in the film, during one of the ‘animalseances’. 22. With so many doubles structuring this film, together with the uncertainty regarding the veracity of the Dean’s memories and the status of reincarnation, Freud’s ‘uncanny’ is strongly evoked. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Art and Literature, vol. 14 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 336–76. 23. See Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000), p. 123. It is ambiguous as to whether Lippit agrees with this view. 24. See for example, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms (Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 2008). 25. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ [1929], in the Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12, Civilization, Society and Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 288n1. 26. See Lippit, Electric Animal, pp. 125–7. 27. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject’, in Elizabeth Weber (ed.), Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 282. Originally published in Topoi vol. 7 no. 2 (1988), pp 113–21; Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 28. Ibid. 29. Sara Guyer, ‘Albeit Eating: Towards an Ethics of Cannibalism’, Angelaki vol. 2 no.1 (1997), p. 64. 30. Derrida, ‘‘Eating Well’,’ p. 282. 147 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 148 ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE 31. Prior to ‘Eating Well’, Derrida had already published ‘Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986), pp. xi–xlviii. 32. In an essay contiguous with the concerns of the present one, I further discuss this problem of succession; see ‘Hors d’Oeuvres: some footnotes on the Spurs of Dorothy Cross’, parallax vol. 19 no. 1 (2013), pp. 3–11. 33. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 34. Ibid., p. 280. 35. Ibid. Levinas’s inability to think the ‘face’ as anything other than human has now been the topic of extensive debate, e.g. John Llewelyn, ‘Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)’, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 234–45; or Simon Glendinning, ‘Le Plaisir de la lecture: Reading the Other Animal’, parallax vol. 12 no.1 (2006), pp. 81–94. 36. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 281. 37. Ibid., p. 282. 38. This opens too huge a question to be properly addressed here, briefly: if nonhuman animals are viewed as only eating in response to need then they might as well be described as Cartesian animal-machines. It would be extremely interesting to pursue the question of symbolic carnivory in nonhuman animals as yet another place in which lines between species change rather than remain static. 39. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 40. See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 29–31. 41. Sara Guyer elaborates this point in ‘Buccality’, in Gabrielle Schwab (ed.), Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 80–1. 42. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’[1972], in The Shell and The Kernel, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 125–38. 43. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p. xxxvii. 44. Ibid., p. xxxvii, emphasis original. 45. Ibid., pp. xxxvii, xxxviii, emphases original. 46. Derrida redescribes this demetaphorisation as a ‘hypermetaphorization’, ibid., p. xxxviii. 47. Ibid., p. xxxviii, emphasis original. 48. Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, p. 128. 49. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p. xvi 50. Ibid., p. xxxix. 51. Vicki Kirby is currently doing much to bring out this underappreciated vein of Derrida’s thought; see ‘Original Science: Nature Deconstructing Itself’, Derrida Today vol. 3 no. 2 (2010), pp. 201–20. 52. The script makes the direct analogy (Sharp, Dean Spanley, p. 243), deleted but deducible in the film itself. 148 Laurence Chapter 8:BFI 25/09/2015 08:57 Page 149 Animal Melancholia 53. Dunsany, My Talks with Dean Spanley, 247. 54. Nudity is very much at stake in Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, together with clothing positioned as a form of technology. I have discussed this at length elsewhere; see ‘When Species Kiss: Some Recent Correspondence between animots’, Humanimalia vol. 2 no.1 (2010), pp. 60–85. 55. See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 4; Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, p. 135n6. 56. Erica Fudge argues that a prime function of the pet is to ‘come home’; see Pets (Stocksfield: Ashgate, 2008). 57. For Derrida’s critique of the difference between the proper death of Dasein and the perishing of the animal in Heidegger, see Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 30–1. 58. Sharp’s script has Fisk also mention Wag to Mrs Brimley, but this is edited out of the film (Dean Spanley), p. 267. 59. In spite of Fisk’s earlier protestations that he could never hope to have another dog like Wag – one of the ‘seven great dogs’ alive at any time according to his idiosyncratic mythology. 60. Henslowe showed his own distress over her death earlier in the film. 61. The picture frame enclosing Mrs Fisk might also be read in this light. 62. Rather more jovial than the melancholic Fisk, Mrs Brimley is not unlike him in her literality: when someone dies, that is all there is to it; she may be talking to a chair but it was just like that when her quiet husband was alive. 63. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 12; and Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 149. 64. Laurence Rickels, ‘Pet Grief’, in gorillagorillagorilla, Diana Thater ex. cat. (Köln: Walter König, 2009), p. 71. 65. As Claire Denis might say, ‘Trouble Every Day’, in light of her film of that name and the cannibalism afflicting her protagonists (France, 2001). 66. Rickels, ‘Pet Grief,’, p. 72. 67. Ibid. 68. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 8. 69. See Lynn Turner, ‘When Species Kiss’, p. 73. 70. Kelly Oliver reverses the stakes and asks after the now established ability of elephants to mourn in her chapter ‘Elephant Eulogy’ in my The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 71. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 27. 72. I thank Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon for their assiduous editorial advice. 149