8-Jonathan Franzen: His Bird Solution

I. English, American, Postmodern Birds

8. The last chapter of Lutwack’s book opens a final field of investigation into the links between birds and literature challenged by a new reality that began to emerge when it was published in the mid-1990s, almost at the same time as Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination⁹–a time when the growing threat of species extinction was beginning to loom, while up until then only the dodo seemed to be concerned. To give just a few figures: 40% of bird species have disappeared over the past twenty years in Europe. According to The Guardian,

40% of all 10,000 or so bird species are in decline in the face of threats such as agricultural expansion, logging, invasive species and hunting. […] The world’s population of seabirds, a group that includes gulls, terns, albatrosses and others, has dropped by around 230m, a 70% slump, over the past 60 years due to slightly different group of maladies that also includes overfishing and plastic and oil pollution^10.

As a consequence, writers of the new millennium cannot entirely treat the avian subject as former authors did, their representation being necessarily more elegiac and their relation also more ethical than the one of novelists and poets who lived in an environment that was still alive, if not less threatened. Following this perspective, critic Travis Mason, a specialist in “avian poetics” speaks more of representing a loss than a presence and deploying “an (avian) aesthetic of (avian) absence”¹¹. In the past twenty years, a significant number of American novelists other than Franzen have called attention to this growing threat, going as far as comparing the ecological disaster to the other major historical catastrophe at the beginning of the millennium. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his novel published in 2005, Jonathan Safran Foer seems to suggest a visual equivalent between black birds fluttering on one of the three opening photographs of the book and human bodies falling from the towers on 9/11 in the closing pages. A little story told by the main protagonist of the novel, Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy whose father died in the attacks, not only explains the significance of the title but also invites to draw a further parallel between birds smashing into the towers’ windows and the planes that were flown into the World Trade Center.

“During the spring and autumn bird-migration season, the lights that illuminate the tower are turned off on foggy nights so they won’t confuse birds, causing them to fly into the building.” I told her, “Then thousand birds die every year from smashing into windows,” because I’d accidentally found that fact when I was doing some research about the windows in the Twin Towers. “That’s a lot of birds,” Mr. Black said. “And a lot of windows,” Ruth said. “Yeah, so I invented a device that would detect when a bird is incredibly close to a building, and that would trigger an extremely loud birdcall from another skyscraper, and they’d be drawn to that. They’d bounce from one to another”¹².

13. Published in 2001, this metafictional approach to birds already seemed to announce their fate and a future in which their representation could ultimately be reduced to only being the image of an image representing an absence.

II. “The bird that therefore I am”

Among his peers, Jonathan Franzen is undoubtedly the writer most familiar with birds and their extinction in the real world over the last twenty years. This disappearance has necessarily induced an equal change in his approach to and in the writing of their existence.

While not an ornithologist per se, he is the writer who has certainly birded most or seen the greatest number of birds since his interest–if not his “compulsion”¹⁴–started some twenty years ago: several thousands and up to more than a thousand a year at times, as he explains in “The Essay in Dark Times”.

It happened that by going to Ghana I’d given myself a chance to break my previous year-list of 1,286 species. I was already over 800 for 2016, and I knew, from my online research, that trips similar to ours had produced nearly 500 species, only a handful of which are also common in America. If I could see 460 unique year species in Africa, and then use my seven-hour layover in London to pick up twenty easy European birds at a park near Heathrow, 2016 would be my best year ever (10).

The breakthrough environmental legislation of that era, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and the Endangered Species Act, had attracted the support of President Nixon and both parties in Congress precisely because it made sense to old-fashioned Protestants, like my parents, who abhorred waste and made sacrifices for their kids’ future and respected God’s works and believed in taking responsibility for their messes¹⁷.

18.

The discovery of the avian and animal world therefore leads Franzen to a form of ontological redefinition, where he seems to abolish the boundaries between human and animal, where the look at the other allows him to grasp his own animality, to grasp himself as a bird, leading as for Derrida, to the following self-portrait: “The [animal], the bird that therefore I am”¹⁹. The original experience of the new-found identity that Derrida describes, feeling ashamed to be seen naked by a cat, “naked as a beast” (5), which makes him coin the term “animalséance” (4), resonates with the identical shame felt by Franzen, “feeling ashamed of being a birder” (Birding, 19) or being “[t]o [his] shame what people in the world of birding call a lister” (The End of the End of the Earth, 9). Like Derrida, Franzen also concludes that birds are not that different from humans:

[T]hey’re more similar to us than other mammals are. They build intricate homes and raise families in them. They take long winter vacations in warm places. Cockatoos are shrewd thinkers, solving puzzles that would challenge a chimpanzee, and crows like to play. […] Chickadees have a complex language for communicating, not only to each other but to every bird in their neighborhood, how safe or unsafe they feel from predators. (“Why Birds Matter”, 36)

They looked like a little band of misfits. Like a premonition of a future in which all birds will either collaborate with modernity or go off to die someplace quietly. What I felt for them went beyond love. I felt outright identification. […] [T]he way they looked […] my outcast friends, […] was how I felt. I’d been told that it was bad to anthropomorphize […]. It was, in any case, anthropomorphic only to see yourself in another species, not to see them in yourself. (189)

III. Birds and the Great American Novel

ethical values” (38), and that if “we are more worthy than other animals”, “our ability to discern right from wrong [should] make us more susceptible to the claims of nature” (39-40). Franzen thus aligns himself with Derrida on his analysis of man’s “subjection of the animal” as the manifestation of his moral cruelty, as he describes in The Animal That Therefore I Am:

However one interprets it, whatever practical, technical, scientific, juridical, ethical, or political consequence one draws from it, no one can today deny this event—that is, the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal. Such a subjection […] call be called violence in the most morally neutral sense of the term. (25)

Derrida even goes so far as to speak of “genocide”, in agreement with the thought of Adorno who formerly analyzed the holocaust as the consequence of a murderer’s mad gaze or distorted perception of other men as being ‘only animals’²⁷. But Derrida takes a further step by calling attention to the violence now inflicted on animals and comparing today’s endangered species to the former assassination of people.

No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one’s breath away. (25-26)

Franzen shares this vision of man as a criminal subjecting the animal world, as it was first commanded in Genesis. That commandment was commented in detail by Derrida who relates the taming, domination, domestication or “subject[ion of] the fish of the sea [or] the flying creatures of the heaven” to their calling and naming (15-18) and subsequently coins the term animots (47) to simultaneously suggest the ideas of evil (maux), word (mots) and animal (animaux). In the last decade, Franzen has consequently been proposing an ethical approach to the ecological question and the fate of birds, but one which has gradually moved away from a guilty and apocalyptic Puritanism – as mentioned earlier in “My Bird Problem” – and is increasingly inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi. This new influence has led him to launch a controversy with the Audubon Society and many climate activists, a position expressed in a series of essays no longer of merely autobiographical content but also “practical, technical, scientific, legal, or political”, as Derrida invites to evaluate the consequences of human cruelty on the animal world.

IV. The “Carbon Capture”

Farther Away, particularly in the text entitled “The Ugly Mediterranean” where Franzen, after he had targeted the cat as the first killer of birds in Freedom, now denounced the hunters of Cyprus:

Every spring, some five billion birds come flooding up from Africa to breed in Eurasia, and every year as many as a billion are killed deliberately by humans, most notably on the migratory flyways of the Mediterranean. […] While Europeans may think of themselves as models of environmental enlightenment—they certainly lecture the United States and China on carbon emissions as if they were —the populations of many resident and migratory birds in Europe have been collapsing alarmingly in the past ten years. […] A world of birds already battered by habitat loss and intensive agriculture is being hastened toward extinction by hunters and trappers. Spring in the Old World is liable to fall silent far sooner than in the New.<29

The New Yorker once called him, as a new kind of “climate changer” who merely uses the tools of his writings and controversial texts. “With public opinion”, he said, “there’s weather, and then there’s climate. You’re trying to change the climate, and that takes time” (21).