Brian Dillon
Through the works of Kafka, Berger, Sebald, and more, Kate Zambreno’s book reflects on our perceptions of nonhuman animals and
our own animal nature.
Animal Stories, by Kate Zambreno,
Transit Books, 167 pages, $17.95
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It’s six am as I write this, and in my backyard Belle the border collie puppy, who got me out of bed an hour ago, is studying keenly the avian life of southeast London. To the usual blue tits, magpies, resident woodpecker, and tearaway parakeets are added this morning a nervous red parrot (someone’s pet on the lam) and the lazy runway approach of a huge heron. What are these things of the air, wonders Belle in her twelfth week on earth: What do they want, what are they thinking, and what, if anything, do I owe them? Or so her thoughts may seem when one observes up close the investigations of a dog. In Animal Stories, their short book about our relations with captive or owned (as if) creatures, Kate Zambreno quotes John Berger, who says that when you look at a pet you see only yourself. The first part of Zambreno’s volume, “Zoo Studies,” is a personal, historical, and philosophical reflection on the gap between human and animal perceptions of each other. The second, “My Kafka System,” considers the tragicomic implications of our own animal being.
Berger is one of several—mostly male and mostly European—authors and artists Zambreno invokes when thinking about animals. These interlocutors include W. G. Sebald, Vladimir Nabokov, Walter Benjamin, J. M. Coetzee, and Chris Marker. “Zoo Studies” is partly a literary-critical and pedagogical project, related to a lecture series Zambreno delivered at Sarah Lawrence College in the fall of 2021 and spring 2022. Writing in 1991, Berger says that a zoo is a kind of theater, but a theater where each group, human and animal, thinks it is the audience and the other a spectacle. The modern (that is, nineteenth-century) zoo is distinct from the collector’s menagerie or cabinet of curiosities in that it’s designed for communal and not private looking—just like the phantasmagoria, diorama, and cinema: all subjects for Benjamin. In his novel (of a kind) Austerlitz, Sebald, under the influence of Berger, describes the infinite sadness in the eyes of zoo-bound animals. These remind him of the gazes of philosophers, notably Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously wrote: “If a lion could speak, we would not understand him.”
The academic, or pseudo-scholarly, remit of “Zoo Studies” means we also learn a great deal about the history of zoos—which is in large measure a history of death. A zoo animal is never more renowned and beloved than when it has died. Jumbo the Elephant—so large he gave his name to largeness itself—was captured as a calf in Sudan in 1860 and passed around for a few years until he was installed at London Zoo, where he became aggressive and depressed, grinding his tusks against the walls of his prison. Sold by the zoo to P. T. Barnum—“dishonourable to common humanity,” wrote John Ruskin in outrage—Jumbo was struck and killed by a railway locomotive three years later. Barnum sold off elephantine body parts as souvenirs and had the hide stuffed so that Jumbo could rejoin the circus. This is not even the most doleful zoo story in the book; the killing of captive animals by their keepers in wartime has its own special ghastliness. Often this has been done out of desperation—their meat was needed—or in the interests of public safety, as when London Zoo dispatched all its poisonous snakes during the Second World War. In Japan, however, around the same time, the culling was done to acquaint the public, and especially children, with the necessity of bloody sacrifice.
If this were all Zambreno had done—tracing a certain history of colonial and commercial exploitation of animals, and some of the ways writers have given us to think about that shameful history—then Animal Stories would be an interesting exercise in cultural-natural history. But this is also for Zambreno an intensely personal endeavor, in which they “report” on their visits to the zoos of New York, before and after pandemic lockdowns. What exactly is an adult, and a parent, looking at when they tour a zoo with a child or two? A memory of their own early trips to the zoo, and some hope of passing on—what? Horror, pity, laughter, at best a curiosity ill-served by fences and moats? Profound questions animate “Zoo Studies,” but Zambreno often stops a train of thought or inquiry before answers appear, sections ending in rhetorical questions—they may as well be speaking to a lion. No doubt this is intentional, and perhaps a way of setting themself at odds with the writers they quote: all too willing to pronounce.
Animal Stories feels more intimate and more achieved in its second half. “My Kafka System” is an increasingly fragmented essay—or, as Zambreno posits, possibly a story—about the writer: his own animal fictions, such as “The Burrow,” “Josephine the Singer,” and, of course, The Metamorphosis; his travels around Europe on vacation, and the journals he kept; his minor ailments and hypochondria, well in advance of the tuberculosis that killed him; his indelible shame at being embodied. Along the way, Zambreno tells a tale about the officious inhumanity of their academic employer that makes the very tired adjective Kafkaesque signify again. Here, Zambreno’s method is mostly a narrative one, and they acknowledge a debt to the way Sebald, in Vertigo, retells aspects of Kafka’s life. (Literary biography recast in impassioned, metaphorically pregnant miniature: another precursor might be Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives.) As “My Kafka System” progresses, distinctions fall away between Kafka himself, the blighted salesman Gregor Samsa, the ambiguous animals in Kafka’s short stories, the exhausted and overworked author, and a reader who is more and more convinced of their own animal nature. Convinced also that, although in places one might wish for more assertion and conclusion from Animal Stories, Zambreno’s provisional, note-like approach to their subject is the aptest one.
Brian Dillon’s books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism. His memoir Ambivalence: An Education will be published in 2026 by Fitzcarraldo Editions and New York Review Books.