Reflections on the Killing of a Porcupine

Sterling silver brooch inspired by Wharton Esherick's 

woodcut illustration for D. H. Lawrence's  

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (Centaur Press, 1925)

Wharton Esherick Museum

 

 

I.

 

Perhaps due to a lingering sense of shame, Lawrence somewhat disingenuously calls his essay 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine' [1], when, in fact, the animal in question was very deliberatey killed by his own hand ...   

When he first encounters a large porcupine [2] on his ranch in New Mexico, D. H. decides to leave the poor creature alone; despite finding him repugnant and full of the same squalor that he identifies in bugs:

 

"The animal had raised all its hairs and bristles, so that by the light of the moon it seemed to have a tall, swaying, moonlit aureole arching its back as it went. That seemed curiously fearsome, as if the animal were emitting itself demon-like on the air.

      It waddled very slowly, with its spiky spoon-tail steering flat, behind the round bear-like mound of its back. It had a lumbering, beetle's, squalid motion, unpleasant. I followed it into the darkness of the timber, and there, squat like a great tick, it began scrapily to creep up a pine-trunk. [...]

      I stood near and watched, disliking the presence of the creature. [...]

      And he watched me. When he had got nearly the height of a man [...] he hesitated, and slithered down. Evidently he had decided, either that I was harmless, or else that it was risky to go up any further, when I could knock him off so easily with a pole. So he slithered podgily down again, and waddled away with the same bestial, stupid motion of that white-spiky repulsive spoon-tail. He was as big as a middle-sized pig: or more like a bear.

      I let him go. He was repugnant. He made a certain squalor in the moonlight of the Rocky Mountains. As all savagery has a touch of squalor, that makes one a little sick at the stomach."     

 

What's interesting here is how Lawrence uses the language of repulsion in order not merely to express his feelings at the time, but to justify his later action. Indeed, although he lets the porcupine go, he is already considering killing the animal: "Everyone says, porcupines should be killed; the Indians, Mexicans, Americans all the same. [...] It is a duty to kill the things." 

 

The only reason he didn't do so is because "it seemed almost more squalid to pick up a pine-bough and push him over, hit him and kill him". In other words, "the dislike of killing him was greater than the dislike of him".

 

Eventually, however, Lawrence overcomes what some would characterise as squeamishness and others see as an ethical disdain for violence and, on another clear moonlit night, he makes his first kill among the grasses and wildflowers: 

 

"There he lumbered, with his white spoon-tail spiked with bristles [...] His long, long hairs above the quills quivering with a dim grey gleam, like a bush.

      And again I disliked him."  

 

 After first seeking approval from his wife, Frieda, Lawrence goes to get his rifle from the house:

 

"Now never in my life had I shot at any living thing: I never wanted to. I always felt guns very repugnant: sinister, mean. With difficulty I had fired once or twice at a target: but resented doing even so much. Other people could shoot if they wanted to. Myself, individually, it was repugnant to me even to try.

      But something slowly hardens in a man's soul. And I knew now, it had hardened in mine. I found the gun, and with rather trembling hands, got it loaded. Then I pulled back the trigger and followed the porcupine. It was still lumbering through the grass. Coming near, I aimed."

 

Unfortunately, the trigger sticks - or, at any rate, Lawrence tells us that it sticks, perhaps for dramatic effect. So he has to release the trigger, aim and fire again. However, whilst the gun goes off with a bang this time, he misses, and the porcuine goes scuttling away:

 

"I got another shell in place, and followed. This time I fired full into the mound of his round back, below the glistening grey halo. He seemed to stumble on to his hidden nose, and struggled a few strides, ducking his head under like a hedgehog."    

 

The gun being empty and having no more shells to hand, Lawrence runs to fetch a wooden pole: "The porcupine was lying still, with subsiding halo. He stirred faintly. So I turned him and hit him hard over the nose; or where, in the dark, his nose should have been. And it was done. He was dead."

 

After again seeking reassurance from Frieda that he did the right thing, Lawrence concludes: "Things like the porcupine, one must be able to shoot them, if they get in one's way. One must be able to shoot [...] and to kill."   

 

 

II.

 

So, what then are we to make of this hardening of the soul and this volte-face on the question of killing animals, rather than simply let them be and acknowledge their right to life? I have to admit, I'm kind of disappointed ...

 

I much prefer the Lawrence who rejects the voices in his head telling him that real men feel no compunction about killing animals; the Lawrence who felt honoured by the presence of a snake drinking at his water-trough, for example [3]; or the Lawrence who mourns the death of a mountain lion killed by hunters: "What a gap in the world, the missing white-frost face of that slim yellow mountain lion!" [4] 

 

And I like the Lawrence who mocks Italian hunters in their velveteen corduroys, striding around the countryside shooting little birds - sparrows, robins, finches, etc. - in order to display their virility [5], rather than the one who mocks Buddhists for only eating rice and refusing to devour animals; or the Lawrence who talks about the need for man to establish himself upon the earth via the subjugation and/or destruction of "the lower orders of life".

As for the poor porcupine, he wasn't even eaten by the Lawrence's. Instead, they buried it, only for some other wild animal to dig up the body and consume it; "for two days later there lay the spines and bones spread out, with the long skeletons of the porcupine-hands". Soon, another porcupine - bigger and blacker-looking - appears at the tiny ranch: "That too is to be shot", writes Lawrence.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Refections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 347-63. Lines quoted are on pp. 349, 352, 353, and 354.    

[2] The North American porcupine is a large, stocky rodent, usually dark brown or black in colour with white highlights. Short-sighted and slow-moving, its most distinguishing feature, of course, is a thick coat of quills, which can number up to 30,000 in a fully-grown animal and which cover its entire body except for face, feet and underbelly. Quills are essentially modified hairs formed into sharp, hollow spines and are used defensively (although, like skunks, porcupines can also produce a distinctively unpleasant odour to warn off would-be predators). Contrary to popular legend, they cannot shoot their quills. Porcupines are solitary herbivores and largely nocturnal. They range all over North America and usually make their homes in hollow trees or dry rocky areas. They are preyed upon by wolves, bears, mountain lions, and fishers. Many farmers and ranchers continue to consider them a pest.     

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Snake', The Poems Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 303-05. Admittedly, Lawrence throws a log at the snake in order to scare him away, but he immediately regrets it: "I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!"  

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Mountain Lion', The Poems Vol. I, ibid., pp. 351-52.

[5] D. H. Lawrence. 'Man is a Hunter', in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 217-21.

To read an earlier (related) post on the prickly politics of Lawrence's vitalism in the above essay, click here.  

Elephants Can Be Murderous Too

Illustration from An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681), by Robert Knox

I have received an email from someone who read the recent series of elephant posts published on Torpedo the Ark: the tragic tales of Tyke, Topsy, Mary and Chunee.

Describing themselves as an elephant lover and a passionate supporter of animal rights, they write to thank me for displaying "compassion with innocent, gentle and highly intelligent creatures forced to suffer needless cruelty at the hands of man".

Now, whilst it's true that I do sympathise with wild things in captivity and dislike all forms of cruelty to animals, I think it should also be mentioned that elephants - which are undeniably intelligent - are not always so gentle. And I'd never describe them as innocent; certainly not in the way in which I suspect my correspondent is using the term.

For not only are wild elephants - particularly the young males - prone to violent and aggressive behaviour (in India, they regularly enter villages at night, damaging property and causing human fatalities), but beasts co-opted into human society have long been complicit in warfare and capital punishment.

Execution by elephant, for example, was once common throughout SE Asia; the supposedly gentle giants happily crushing, dismembering, or impaling prisoners with weaponised tusks. The animals were not only smart and versatile enough to be trained in the sophisticated art of torture, but seemed to derive pleasure from the opportunity to exercise power, inflict pain and test out their deadly skills on unfortunate victims.

The point is this: you can throw someone to the wolves or to the lions if you simply want them to be torn to pieces; but if you really want to extend their suffering and have them murdered by an animal rather than merely killed, then you're going to have enlist the help of an elephant.    


Note: the spectacle of elephants executing captives both horrified and fascinated European travellers and there are numerous written accounts. The practice was eventually suppressed by the colonial powers that controlled the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

Lawrence, Derrida, and the Snake: It's Time for Man to Make Amends

Snake is one of Lawrence's most widely known poems, subject to numerous critical readings. But perhaps the best of these - certainly the one that most interests at present - is Derrida's. For it's a reading in which the question of interspecies ethics is paramount, i.e., how should we behave when confronted by the non-human otherness of the animal. 

The fact that we need to develop a new type of ethics and form a new relationship with animals can, I suppose, be regarded as a given. For the old relationship, determined by an implicitly anthropocentric moral philosophy in which the human subject is granted dominion over all other creatures and can treat them or eat them as he will, is clearly not satisfactory or working very well; unless, that is, one actively desires to continue the industrial slaughter of domestic beasts and further the mass extinction of wild things.

I certainly don't want this and, contrary to what some readers mistakenly believe, torpedo the ark doesn't mean exterminate all life forms. Rather, it means destroy the human coordination and exploitation of animals - the making them march two-by-two into captivity and containment within a system described by Derrida as carnophallogocentric; a system in which they are turned into just another natural resource to be processed and negated in their uniqueness of being.  

In his poem, Lawrence as narrator attempts to approach and to know a real snake - not merely an idealized construction or symbol - with a mixture of respect and due reverence. He's not entirely successful, but he tries. Thus he accepts that he is ethically accountable for his behaviour, including his cruelty, towards the snake and this is what fascinates Derrida in his reading. This and the fact that Lawrence openly challenges Judeo-Christian fears regarding snakes that are biblically rooted within our culture. As Anna Barcz notes:

"Derrida does not treat the poem as a challenge to literary criticism; he reads it, paying attention to details, as a sort of guidebook, a summary of human and other species' history of complex relationships and emerging problems. This results in a philosophical interpretation ... [that] sheds light on the issue of human and animal rapprochement and distance, not directly but also not far from the vantage point  of many critical, anti-speciesist and anti- or post-humanist accounts." 

Derrida is convinced that Lawrence's short verse effectively anticipates and contains his own animal philosophy in poetic form, as it touches upon just about everything that he himself is concerned with in a lecture series entitled The Beast and the Sovereign. Like Lawrence, Derrida concludes that we as humans have something to profoundly regret in the history of our relationship to the animal; a pettiness to expiate. 

This healing process begins when we recognise both the victimhood and the sovereignty of the snake; that he has been unfairly persecuted and that he is, in fact, an uncrowned king - one of the true lords of life.

Notes:

Anna Barcz, 'On D. H. Lawrence's Snake That Slips Out of the Text: Derrida's Reading of the Poem', Brno Studies in English, Vol. 39, No. 1, (2013), pp. 167- 82. Lines quoted are on p. 170.  

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Vol. I, Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (eds.), (Chicago University Press, 2009); see the 'Ninth Session' for Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem Snake.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Snake', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in The Poems (Volume. 1), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 303-05.