July/August 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Rants and Ratbots

Joy Williams, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals. New York: Lyons Press, 2001

'Gadzooks!'

On Thursday, May 2, I scanned the front page of the Boston Globe and felt my eyes stutter and my ears crinkle at the lower front page headline, "Scientists produce 'ratbot'--first radio-controlled animal." Was this the Globe? It was, indeed. Said creature, "funded in part by the U.S. military," is being marketed to taxpayers on the premise that "ratbot technology could be used in search and rescue operations or to clear mines." We do not yet have a word for the semantic trick being played here, wherein a living creature--albeit a rat--is made to surrender its animal qualities and take on the hybrid identity of techno-commodity. (The two neologisms that come to mind, "de-ratifying" or "de-ratting" would presumably carry other connotations.) Rest assured, however, that it won't be long before we read of creatures being "de-animalized." Two weeks ago, I'd have considered such a word, perhaps even the necessity for it, well, specious--and more than a little ridiculous.

In the interim, however, I've read Joy Williams' Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, a collection of essays on the world and our collective stance toward it, a compendium of considerations ecological, natural, moral, and political which, brought together like separate colors of the spectrum, emerge from Williams as a steady beam of white light, piercing the twilight of the human present and the darkness of our future. Williams grabs hold of her reader immediately, with the opening of "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp:"

"I don't want to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately--that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point?"

From here on, Williams keeps adjusting her grip on us, by turns aggressive, wry, ironic, outraged, sarcastic, witty, responsible, even tender. But never superior, even in those instances when she is morally superior. (In "One Acre," Williams describes her thirty years as caretaker of five adjacent lots on a lagoon in Florida, and her eventual sale of that property--at a considerable discount, because of conservation restrictions she permanently attached to the deed.)

Despite the aggressive sound of the book's opening, this is no harangue. Nor is it a dry, reasoned argument filled with statistics. Nor is it merely emotional. It is an examination and interrogation of those attitudes comprising American ideology with respect to our planet and the creatures who must share it with us. Other reviewers have mentioned Joy Williams' affinities with Annie Dillard and Cotton Mather, even Jorge Luis Borges. To me, she reads like Joan Didion after an Outward Bound experience. Her closing essay, "Why I Write," seems to acknowledge that affinity, recycling the title of one of Didion's most frequently anthologized essays. Williams' mind, like Didion's, gravitates toward the telling, almost cosmically metaphorical, detail. And like Didion, Williams skewers and dissects euphemism and pretension, putting under a microscope the language by which our realities are constructed. In "The Animal People," for instance, she levels her gaze at "animal rights furor:"

"When a seventeen-year-old with cancer wanted to go to Alaska and kill a Kodiak bear and was sent to do just that, thanks to the generosity of the Make-a-Wish Foundation, it set off what the papers referred to as "an animal rights furor." The extent of that furor caused others to be more "objective" about the situation, saying things like 'Hey, it'll make the poor kid happy, it's a legitimate wish, and it's something he can do with his dad.'"

In "The Case Against Babies," Williams takes an unpopular stance on a subject most congenially avoided. But if you think public debate of such issues is uncomfortable, stick around until 2150 and try to find a glass of potable water. As Williams puts it, "the argument that western countries with their wealth and relatively low birth rate do not fuel the population crisis is, of course, fallacious... The US population is growing faster than that of eighteen other industrialized nations, and, in terms of energy consumption, when an American couple stops spawning at two babies, it's the same as an average East Indian couple stopping at sixty-six, or an Ethiopian couple drawing the line at one thousand."

That is a stunning statistic. Even if we assume, as I do, that these multiplication factors are at least partly attributable to high infant-mortality rates and the virtual (or, in the case of Ethiopia, the near perfect) absence of industrial infrastructure, the distance Americans have traversed since Thomas Jefferson articulated his agrarian ideal is staggering.

In "Cabin Cabin," Williams compares Henry David Thoreau to Ted Kaczynski, implicitly marvelling at our culture's different treatment of them, the former having been canonized (literarily, at least) and mainstreamed, but the latter remaining a singularity without reference, a unabomber. Kaczynski's critique of capitalist culture is so threatening that he had to be discredited mentally. His lawyers, Williams notes, "arranged for a psychiatric examination without his consent, an examination that concluded that he was fit to stand trial even though he was a 'sickie,' or in more psychologically precise terms, a paranoid schizophrenic awash in delusions (the worst one being that technology is the vehicle by which people are destroying themselves and the world)."

Other excellent essays question the value of hunting ("The Killing Game") and tourism ("Safariland"). The most personal essay here, "Hawk," is an elegy to Williams' German Shepherd, guaranteed to move anyone who has pet a dog.

Williams is best known as a fiction writer (her stories have been frequently included in the Best American Short Stories annuals) and her fourth and latest novel, The Quick and the Dead, was widely reviewed; writing for The New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler called it "odd, intelligent, unsettling and sometimes spectacularly uningratiating." Certainly that description would apply to these essays, which challenge the misdirections of personal choice and public policy leading us toward a kind of eco-nightmare.

As for the ratbot, whose brain has been surgically equipped with three "electrodes," two for turning and a third for "rewarding the animal... [with] a fleeting feeling of intense euphoria" similar to a hit of crack cocaine--am I really the first to understand that whatever its dubious potential as a mine-sweeper, the ratbot would make a spectacularly efficient delivery system for biological or chemical weapons? After all, rats earned their stripes during the bubonic plague. And that was before laptops.

--David Thoreen teaches writing and literature at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.

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