Human-nonhuman boundaries and inter-creatural empathy in Klara and the Sun, Fifteen Dogs, the Wonder that Was Ours and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

ABSTRACT

Engaging with issues of categorisation, human supremacy, and (the lack of) empathy, in this article I read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs (2015), and Alice Hatcher’s The Wonder That Was Ours (2018); novels that I argue are connected by their interrogation of biopolitically produced and policed boundaries between human and nonhuman beings, and by their focus on inter-creatural empathy and care. Through the lens of critical posthumanism, Agambenian biopolitics, and care ethics, I explore how these texts interrogate boundaries between animals, humans and techno-creatures, and I contend that they provide nonhuman and marginalised human characters with a (narrative) voice in order to challenge and undermine anthropocentric conceptions of subjectivity, agency and community. Mapping the novels’ portrayal of inter-creatural care relationships, I argue that affirming vulnerability potentially leads to the recognition of a “strange kinship” between human and nonhuman characters; and it is my ultimate claim that these texts turn proximity and porosity into productive and often transgressive inter-creatural entanglements, thereby disrupting processes of exclusionary differentiation, and opening the way to an imaginative exploration of new ways of being.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical posthumanism
• empathy
• nonhuman
• interdependence
• care
• inter-creatural kinship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While the term “interspecies” is often used to describe human-nonhuman relations, it usually refers only to biological species, and cannot be readily extended to the variety of creatures featured in the novels analysed here. Therefore, I have chosen to introduce the term “inter-creatural” to account for the ensemble of beings, of both technological and biological origin, that are involved in the (care-)relationships discussed in this article.

2. Affect is defined here in the sense of an “automatic, visceral response” (Weik von Mossner 2014, 1), as opposed to emotion understood “as consciously interpreted or narrated affect” (Bladow and Ladino 2018, 5).

3. As Tamás Bényei points out in his article on Dick’s novel, the ability to think rationally is abundantly present in androids – indeed, in this respect they far exceed many people, including the “chickenhead” Isidore; their mechanical quality is nothing else than a concentrated manifestation of the human capacity for reason, and thus they cast an ironic light on the Cartesian self-definition (2005, 212).

4. In Ishiguro’s novel, animals are noticeably absent. The AF only comes across animals while on a trip with the Mother: she sees a bull, and some grazing sheep, which take on symbolic significance in her mind while the Mother does not even notice them. The only person mentioned in the novel owning a dog is a homeless man living across the street from Klara’s store.

5. In Alexis’s novel, human intelligence and human mind or consciousness are used synonymously: the dogs not only find new thoughts in themselves, but new emotions and a new language as well.

6. For an in-depth discussion of disgust, see the article “Body, Psyche and Culture” by Haight et al. (1997), in which the authors develop the concepts of “core,” “animal reminder” and “sociomoral disgust.” Film scholar Julian Hanich’s “Dis/liking disgust” (2009) explores the notion from a phenomenological perspective.

7. Nussbaum’s twofold attention bears some similarity to the “duality” involved in Nel Noddings’ notion of care. Instead of empathy which she perceives as a form of projection, Noddings offers care as engrossment, meaning that one “receive[s] the other into [one]self” and by seeing and feeling with the other, “become[s] a duality” (2013, 30).

Additional information

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Zsófia Novák

Zsófia Novák is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her research interests include posthumanism, animal studies, ecocriticism and affect studies. She was co-organiser of “The View from the Anthropocene”, a multi-disciplinary, international conference. Her dissertation explores the implications of interspecies empathy in contemporary literature and cinema, focusing on relations between animals, humans, and (bio)technological entities. Her articles and reviews have been published in academic periodicals and online literary and cultural studies journals in English and in Hungarian.