Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
this is probably reflected in attitudes to feral animals in appropriate settings: that is,
in marginal spaces characterised by dereliction or uncultivated nature. Berger (1980:
9) has asserted that '[a]nimals have gradually disappeared. Today, we live without
them,' meaning that we no longer have that intimate relationship with animals
which characterised peasant cultures. Particularly, we could argue either that urban
living has resulted in the incorporation of animals into the private sphere (as pets),
or that urban culture has removed them to a real or imaginary 'wild' or to some
rural past (in Baker's terms, to 'the authentic reality of the good meat-eating
peasant': Baker, 1993:13).
We can see this removal of animals as a loss which might be compensated to
some extent by imagining or encountering wild animals on the fringes of cities and
in interstitial spaces. There seems to be a need to retain a space for wildness or to
recover a time when people had a more intimate relationship with animals. Jackson
(1981:66), in her writing on fantasy and the Gothic, has suggested that people's
fears (and desires) are commonly located in unnatural figures, but we could argue that
animals which are imagined or whose wildness and danger are exaggerated similarly
embody deeply rooted fears and desires. In Jean Genet's portrayal of dusk (quoted
by Minh-ha 1996:101-102), he captures the ambiguity of this transitional time in
the expression entre chien et loup, between dog and wolf, that is, a time of day when
one cannot be distinguished from the other, and he also describes it as 'the hour of
metamorphoses when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf' (our
emphasis). This quotation exemplifies the ambiguously unheimlich, the strangely
familiar, which, according to Freud, entailed
that class of the frightening which 'arouses dread and horror in the old and
long familiar' (Freud, 1919 [1990]). [The uncanny] has 'the power to signify
the development of meaning in the direction of ambivalence, from that which
was familiar and homely [heimlich] to that which has become unfamiliar,
estranging [unheimlich] '.
(Chisholm 1993:436; see also Wilbert 1998; Wilton, 1998)
Wildness in cats is, on the one hand, 'unsettling' 1 because it contradicts the idea of
the cat as a domestic, pet animal close to humans, and, on the other hand, it is a
source of desire. In psychoanalytical terms, a fascination with wild cats and with
wildness in cats signifies a repressed longing for intimate contact with the natural
world.
Representations of the wild cat, often 'sighted at dusk', convey a sense of the
unheimlich, a repressed relationship with wild nature. There have been hundreds of
'sightings' of large wild cats annually in Britain since the Surrey puma in the 1960s,
and some of the evidence—footprints, prey which could only have been killed by a
large cat like a puma—is quite convincing. However, many of the sightings are
probably imagined or they could be ferals of exaggerated dimensions (Bottriell
1985). Some of these reports convey a strong sense of dread. Thus, in regard to the
celebrated Beast of Bodmin:
Search WWH ::




Custom Search