Poetry and Animals

OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID191

being “in love with this vicious creature. That I would submit my female
opening to this brute. That after we had love on the kitchen floor I would
put him in the oven, after breaking his head with a frying pan.” In “The
Adventures of a Turtle,” what looks like a turtle is in fact an elaborate
marionette controlled by the “true turtle, wearing long underwear” in a
“small room” somewhere inside the shell.^50 Edson’s animals reveal and
revel in the notions that everything is always hybrid, that categories are
as false as they are real, and that these categories find their origins in
human language rather than the world. Edson’s animal poems antici-
pate Derrida in exploring the idea that human-animal distinction is at
the root of the structures of language, form, and power, and that hybrid-
izing categories might be a form of creative resistance. Edson’s poems
incite powerful, visceral effects. For Edson, the poet is a monkey, mixing
and matching arbitrary signs. In removing or confusing intentionality
and referentiality, Edson’s texts can come to seem like enclosed systems.
It is an axiom of hybridity, however, as it is of animality, that nothing
is one thing, that nothing is closed off. Even in Edson’s work, which is
almost obsessively focused on the human-animal divide, a notion of the
animal not as language or trope but as a living, breathing, and sentient
body comes back, a return of the repressed. In “Where Charity Begins”
scientists (symbols here of machinelike productivity) turn animals
into people, almost. “The dog-boy still has a tail, and keeps lifting his
leg.”^51 “But charity begins at home,” begins the last paragraph. “Now
they want to see if they can become animals.” Scientists want to reverse
engineer the process, as it were. This is an expression of human domi-
nance of nature, but also a recognition that a return to the animal is
where charity begins—at home, the cliché goes. Crossing the boundary
that divides human and animal might produce an aberration or freak
but is also a sign of an imagination that is always testing the constraints
of ideas of the human.