Q&A with Notes on Vermin Author Caroline Hovanec
This guest author post is a Q&A with Caroline Hovanec, author of the new book Notes on Vermin, from the University of Michigan Press. The book is available in hardcover, paperback, and open access.
In your book you describe the concepts of pest and vermin as, quoting Claude Levi-Strauss, a “floating signifier” that can symbolize many things. What first inspired you to write a book focused on vermin?
I started this project shortly after finishing my first book, Animal Subjects. That book focused on modernist writers’ and scientists’ encounters with animals, and on the fascination that they felt for the creatures who were the subjects of their gaze. I wrote about Virginia Woolf’s exploration of dog perspective in Flush, D. H. Lawrence’s belated respect for the garden serpent in his poem “Snake,” and H. G. Wells’s science fiction stories about the satisfactions of animal revenge against arrogant humans.
Around the time that I finished Animal Subjects, I started reading Sianne Ngai’s book Ugly Feelings, which is a study of negative emotions in literature. Ngai shows how affects like paranoia, envy, and irritation index blockages in political agency. Her book is not in the field of animal studies, but she does use animal metaphor, writing, “If Ugly Feelings is a bestiary of affects… it is one filled with rats and possums rather than lions, its categories of feeling generally being, well, weaker and nastier.” I think her animal metaphor is also picked up in the cover art for that book, which is a beautiful, weird, and kind of funny illustration by the artist Marcel Dzama that shows a woman and a reptile-man facing off against each other, guns drawn. The woman’s bottom half, where her legs would be, is made up of an abundance of little critters, which appear to be rodents with human faces, one of which has broken away and is crawling up the reptile-man’s leg and biting him.
I’m a pretty literal-minded reader, so when I read this line in Ugly Feelings, and when I looked harder at its cover art, I realized that rats, possums, and swarming critters were exactly what my first book had left out. What my earlier account had missed, and what Notes on Vermin takes as its point of departure, were the animals that don’t inspire fascination or respect, the animals for which we tend to feel repulsion or aversion or annoyance: the rats, roaches, pigeons, and parasites of the world.
Do you have a favorite example of literary vermin? Maybe one that strikes you as particularly unusual?
One of my favorites is also the most classic of literary vermin, Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I knew from the start that if I were going to do a study about vermin in literature, I would have to write about Kafka. But what I hadn’t remembered from reading The Metamorphosis in college was how funny it is, and how contemporary it still feels. The first chapter, in which Gregor wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant bug, is basically a slapstick comedy film in prose form. Kafka also stages a comedic misunderstanding between the insectile Gregor and the manager from his office job that reminds me of the constant ridiculous miscommunications in one of my favorite sitcoms, Frasier. Being vermin, for Gregor, is really alienating and really freeing at the same time. It hurts him to be loathed and shut away, but it does offer an escape from the dull and demeaning world of the capitalist workplace. I had remembered The Metamorphosis as being quite tragic, and it is. But I think its sense of humor and the deep humanity of its vermin figuration are just as important as its tragic form.
In the section about creepiness, you examine Freud’s concept of the Unheimlich — “experiences and objects that are at once unfamiliar and, on another level, ‘all too familiar.’” Could you give us an example of vermin that may be labeled creepy because of their physical or psychological familiarity?
Maybe the best example of this kind of creepiness is the possum. I see possums regularly on nighttime walks in my neighborhood, and glimpsed in the dark or in the partial lighting of street lamps and houses, they really look like giant rats, scurrying around with their long, bare tails. This is a misconception because they are not rodents at all, but marsupials, which is an entirely different order of animals. So there is the misleading familiarity of the rat in the possum’s appearance. What also makes possums creepy, I think, are their white pointy faces, and their hairless hands and tails. As a kid I once found a possum hiding under a table on our porch, and I thought at first that its face was a skull, its whiteness the whiteness of bone. They also have little pinkish fingers that look almost but not quite human, and prehensile tails that can wrap around things and that, for me at least, evoke the image of a severed hand (which Freud considers a classic example of the uncanny).
The other thing that contributes to the possum’s creepiness is its behavior. Possums are known for “playing dead” when they are approached by something threatening. They just freeze up on the ground, and perhaps the predator will believe they are dead and move along. Really this is not a deliberate deception, but an involuntary fainting. Still, the familiar appearance of a dead animal, combined with the surprise of that dead animal later getting up and scurrying away, gives possums a similar kind of creepiness to the zombie, an impression of unnatural reanimation after death.
For all these reasons, I think, possums strike many people as creepy, but what I find most interesting is that I’m not sure this creepiness is universal at all. In my research, I also learned about Native folk tales in which the possum plays the role of a buffoon. There are Choctaw and Cherokee stories, for example, in which the possum originally has a beautiful fluffy tail, about which she is excessively vain. The other animals, tired of Possum’s vanity, trick her into cutting or burning off all her silky fur, leaving her tail bare and ugly for ever more. So it seems to me that there is a lot of cultural variability in an animal’s meaning; what seems creepy to me, in my cultural context, might seem funny or foolish or clever or sneaky or any number of other things to someone else.
Are there cases you discuss in the book where the person or group of people labeled as vermin embraces the label, forming a sort of self-aware ‘vermin group identity’?
Yes! There are actually quite a few of these cases. One that I really like is Rawi Hage’s 2008 novel Cockroach. This is a tragicomic narrative about an unnamed Middle Eastern refugee living in Montreal; this protagonist has survived a suicide attempt and is now dealing with passive aggression from his new host country as well as with traumatic memories from his old country. Periodically, this character will transform into a cockroach, a bit of magical realism that expresses something about how he is hailed by the Canadian state and perceived by white Québécois. But it also expresses something about his defiance and his own sense of a gadfly-like identity.
In one of my favorite passages from the book, this character is rejected for a restaurant job by a racist maître d’ and issues a long, mocking rant in response: “I promised him that one day he would be serving only giant cockroaches on his velvet chairs…. And you’d better get used to the noise of scrabbling and the hum of fast-flapping wings fanning the hot food, my friend, and you had certainly better put up a sign: No laying eggs and multiplying is allowed in the kitchen or cupboards or walls…. All shall be changed to accommodate soft, crawling bellies rolling on flat plates.” I love this as an image of vermin revolutionary futurity that is also and really about immigrant futurity. What the character is saying here is, today we are too dark and poor and foreign to even work for you, but tomorrow all of your luxuries will be for us. There’s a refusal to be apologetic for his presence in this city and in this nation that I find very powerful.
What do you hope readers will take away from Notes on Vermin?
One very basic but very important takeaway is that we need to be alert for political utterances that use vermin rhetoric to dehumanize perceived enemies and targeted minorities. I think most people who read my book will already be aware of and opposed to how fascists and authoritarians have used vermin imagery to promote and excuse violence, against Jews, against immigrants and refugees, against socialists and leftists. Yet this vermin rhetoric persists and continues to be effective in stirring up fear, disgust, and aggression. That in large part is why reclamations of vermin are common in modern and contemporary literature—because these writers are deconstructing and rejecting others’ use of this imagery to dehumanize and destroy marginalized people. There is still a need to speak out against, and to educate about, the dangers of vermin politics.
I also hope that my readers, especially those who are students, will walk away from this book with a new or renewed excitement about theory. I had a lot of fun, while writing this book, with revisiting some of the greatest hits of theory—Freud, Foucault, bell hooks, Walter Benjamin—and some newer ones—Anna Watkins Fisher’s The Play in the System, Adam Kotsko’s Creepiness—and reconsidering them from a vermin-oriented perspective. There is so much hand-wringing about theory today, on one side from those who see it as this intimidating fortress or gauntlet that wards off access to scholarly discourse, and on another side from those who think theory has ushered in the death of the humanities, that it’s too political, too much outside our disciplinary purviews, etc. Yet I think there is a real intellectual excitement and empowerment that comes out of the explanatory ambitions of theory, and that we as humanists should not be so quick to cede. The foray into different theorists’ work was something I really enjoyed about writing this book, and I hope readers will be inspired to do some theorizing of their own.
