Shady Beasts, Animal Transgression, and Identity
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toward another identity disease rising to prominence in the nineteenthcentury, hysteria, will provide a closing glimpse at the instability of
identity interred along with animal confrontations. The specter of the
fixed self in relation to a knowable and stable world has all but
disintegrated by the end of the classic film, Ghostbusters (1984); selves
have become shady beasts. Bill Murray calls attention to the instability
with his infamous mass-hysteria speech: “You could accept the fact that
this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions . . . Human
sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass-hysteria!” The taboo of
human sacrifice and the relative impossibility of dogs and cats living
together strike the viewer as hysterical, violating the possibility of a fixed
self perceiving a world against which it maintains a steady relationship.
Civilization itself and our human relationships are in question in
Ghostbusters, faced with the engagement of animal corpses, as Byron
foreshadowed, and as American culture has adopted whole-hog through
animals appearing in the works of Woody Allen and Eminem, and
countless other shady beasts. We need to keep a close eye on these shady
beasts lest we lose sight of ourselves.
Ashford University
Notes
Chase Pielak
* Byron skewers his contemporaries as unintelligible in his dedication to Don Juan\
Eminem asks his listeners, “You think I give a damn about a Grammy?” in “The Real
Slim Shady;” and Woody Allen notoriously critiques New York life in classics like Annie
Hall (1977), his first Oscar nominated film.
^ Byron is not unique among Romantic period authors, and his “Inscription” is not unique
among his texts. A more thorough treatment of Byron’s animal texts and the ways in
which Romantic period literature shapes our understanding of animals is presented in
Exhuming Beasts: Memorializing Animals in Romantic Period Literature (forthcoming at
Ashgate).
^ It’s worth considering the heights to which Byron gestures in the inscription: class
upheld by birth, religion claiming a sole exclusive heaven and the doctrines of
substitutionary forgiveness and hierarchical creation, and cultural institutions including
slavery and funerary memorialization are heights of a sort; they are some o f the defining
relationships by which humans came to understand themselves, and they are all troubling.
^ Derrida writes in The Politics of Friendship on the impossibility o f the
perhaps: “Now, the thought of the ‘perhaps’ perhaps engages the only possible
thought of the event-of friendship to come and friendship for the future. For to
love friendship, it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning;
one must love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than
that of the ‘perhaps.’ Such a thought conjoins friendship, the future, and the
perhaps to open on to the coming of what comes— that is to say, necessarily in