Revenge of the Animals: An Analysis of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
As explored by Amitav Gosh in 'The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable', Nature is an uncanny thing. We often seem to forget it: to forget that it has its own agency. And it is only when disaster strikes that we seem to enter a temporary phase of recognition.
But what if we could no longer ignore? What if, Nature takes its revenge in the silent of the night, in a chilling quietude. This idea is explored in Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead - yes I know, it is a mouthful; by Olga Tokarczuk.
I came across this novel as I was trying to decide what to use my gift card on, and I was captivated by the cover - I know, quite a shallow reason. But reading it, it certainly has a refreshing style that I found to be very enjoyable, and it is a great book to read if you are interested in ecocriticism. However, it is quite a lot sometimes, so if you are reading it, do take it slowly.
Summary of the story:
Here is an excerpt from the blurb: "In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people. She’s unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by ‘one of Europe’s major humanist writers".
So, yeah, it is sort of a crime novel, but at the same time a novel about a bunch of other things. And spoiler alert here, my later discussion will involve a bit of the end, so please have a read of this book first if you don’t want to be spoiled!
Hunters and gatherers
In narratives, we can often infer the narrator’s position with Nature through the description or lack thereof. In this novel, there are some descriptive passages that highlight the beauty of Nature, but more importantly, the novel also presents a warning against our human attempts to impose order upon other living creatures. This is mainly illustrated through the theme of hunting. As implied in the blurb, all the men who are found dead are members of the local hunting club. Our protagonist Janina, upon learning this, comes up with what she calls her “Theory”, in which she claims that this murder is proof of the “Animals” exacting revenge on the hunters who have been poaching illegally. “And it had freed other living Creatures from him. Oh yes, suddenly I realised what a good thing death can be, how just and fair, like a disinfectant, or a vacuum cleaner" (p. 16). Here, the comparison between the death of one of the hunters like a disinfectant clearly underlines her position: she is with the “Animals”. The active tense “it had freed” emphasises the role of the Death even more. As a result, hunters are clearly depicted as the villain here, unlike other traditions where the wild animals are portrayed as the danger.
It thus begins to raise questions about our relationships with animals, especially in more traditional rural areas. In a way, I can’t help but think about the way some people have compared the current various situations using that 'cleansing' imagery, which in a way makes the warning in this novel seem even more pertinent. Moreover, as our protagonist suggests, “Nobody had protested, no thunderbolt had struck. And yet Punishment had come upon the devil, though no one's hand has guided death” , this shows that there are inevitable consequences to our huntings- and not just our literal huntings, but our arrogant philosophy of being the top; Natural justice will get us. The capitalisation of the noun “Punishment” gives it a sense of authority and something outside the human realm- almost like religious sentences. Its grand presence juxtaposes with the image evoked in previous sentences of “nobody had protested…'' which makes the punishment even more sinister as it thus suggests that it sneaks up on you.
All in all, through these examples, it suggests that Nature will in the end take revenge upon us, for our hubris and our arrogance. As it is put by Janina “In a pulpit Man places himself above other creatures and grants himself the right to their life and death. He becomes a tyrant and a usurper"(p. 237) as she watches the father preaches for the celebration of hunting season,
The Gothic Body
The body is not just for human. In this novel, the “Gothic Body” is not just about the human body, but also the Nature “body”, if you know what I mean. Through looking at it this way, it evokes the idea of a symbiotic relationship between the human world and Nature. Consequently it makes the warning even more insidious, because by disrespecting Nature and the other “Creatures”, we are disrespecting ourselves. So an example of this is the similar effect created through these two descriptions: “[At the Fox farm] The Sun was dazzlingly bright. Each blade of grass cast a sharp shadow, each branch resembled a skewer. It was silent as the grave... In a year or two it would vanish among the greenery, at best becoming a house of horror. It crossed my mind that one could set up a museum here. As a warning" (p. 145). The metaphor of “blade of grass cast a sharp shadow” subverts the rather typical pastoral picture of nature where things are often described as soft; now they are lethal. The simile of “each branch resembled a skewer” has an uncanny quality about it, provoking a rather uncomfortable feeling of something being off and menacing. Similarly, at the beginning of the novel when Janina found the first body, this is what it is described: “He was lying twisted in a bizarre position, with his hands to his neck, as if struggling to pull off a collar that was pinching him[…]His dirty vest was ripped at the throat. It looked as if the body had turned on itself, lost the fight and been killed.” (p. 6). The imagery is rendered morbid and uncanny with adjectives like “bizarre” and “twisted”, and again the thing that we often portray as benign or under our control is subverted with “it looked as if the body had turned on itself”. Imagine your body turning against yourself. What furthered this uncanny is the eerie separation between the mind and body evoked later in capitalised “Person” the same page “As I looked at Big Foot’s poor, twisted body I found it hard to believe that only yesterday I’d been afraid of this Person”.
Although this idea of the Gothic Body in Nature is perhaps something new, Nature and the Gothic is nothing new. Ever since the 18th century Romantics, Nature has been a big feature of the Romantic Gothics. As seen in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. This was made popular thanks to Burke’s philosophy of the Sublime, where the Sublime remains outside of a human being; it is situated in nature, and is the source of profound beauty that becomes almost threatening. Especially through their usage of pathetic fallacies, when looking through the lenses of ecocriticism, they can be seen as evidence of the symbiotic relationship between mankind and the environment, almost harmonious, but in a rather sinister light. If so, then actually these pathetic fallacies can be literary devices that show the spiritual power of nature, and its influence on our psychology; which again goes to show why we shouldn’t mess with Nature.
Tool for Animals
Agency. Although this novel does portray an awareness of a degree of agency in Nature, there is one detail that slightly undermines it - although this will definitely go into spoilers, so be aware if you want to check and read the novel first!
Anyway, it turns out our protagonist Janina claims she is the “Tool” for Animals, she is the tool by which the animals and Nature takes their revenge: through the murder of the members of the hunting club. Now, before that, before this revelation, it is theorised that these hunters were killed by animals themselves, which actually would make the whole revenge and punishment more interesting. Instead, these animals weren’t the perpetrators. This somewhat suggests again that ultimately, humans control humans, and that animals' realm can’t really penetrate the human realm. Therefore they require the ‘human mediator’. This twist actually makes the story lose a bit of its promising element of just an eerie story of animal revenge on the human hunters- for me at least.
If we keep separating Nature from Culture as raised by Gosh in 'The Great Derangement', we might
never be able to escape this structure that chains us to self-destruction. And a step to manifest this change can be done through world-building and storytelling.
Bibliography:
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures). 1st edition, University of Chicago Press, 2017
Tokarczuk, Olga, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel. Reprint, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018
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