The Literature of Animals, Sex and Sports
You can find great literature in the most unexpected places.
Erotica
A while ago I thought I’d try my hand at erotica, just once.
I guess something came over me as I saw the bewitching changes in my pregnant wife’s body and thought, why not channel some of that energy into other, more creative avenues than mooning over a tired, volatile woman?
So far so rationalised.
There was just one problem: this was erotica, and erotica wasn’t cool.
And yet, if ever I needed a reason to write anything, that was it. What self-respecting fool would back down from an impossible challenge?
Besides (as I warmed to my subject), who ruled erotica uncool? Surely something as magical as blah blah blah could never be yada yada yada?
It was dirty, sure. But did it need to be?
It sucked as literature, that was true too. Apparently almost entirely without exception. But what stopped anyone from writing good erotica?
Also, it hadn’t the faintest interest in a storyline. A beginning and a happy ending, that was it. Well, I thought. I bet I could give it a good goddamn middling.
I was sure I could write something beautiful with my wife as my muse. Something put together properly, with love. Weaved through with a thread of mystery and gloss that started in one place and ended in another.
Sure, it would be hard to show something of the searing bond we had without being too racy, but hells, did I relish the assignment. Except not in the way that sounded.
So I did it, and I’m frankly, unabashedly pleased with how it turned out. Turns out all that’s needed is an inexhaustible passion for your subject and the burning desire to do right by it.
I honoured love and sex. I honoured my wife and our brief cosmic interlude. Erotica too, I suppose. If Henry Miller and Erica Jong didn’t write so fearlessly and revealingly on the topic, I might not have felt the need to honour a bankrupt genre, but honoured it I did, with what turns and flourishes avail. Literature too, I’d like to think. If someone wrote an illuminating piece of erotica because of it — even if mine wasn’t much good — the cause of enduring literature would have been served.
With it, I wanted to achieve one thing: Show that all writing deserves to be judged on its own merit, and not some scandalised societal aversion to something perfectly OK. On thinking for oneself and appreciating and choosing for oneself and having supportable views of one’s own concerning its appropriateness.
Aka growing the fuck up.
Anyway, here it is, if that’s your sort of thing. Writing, I mean. About whatever the fuck you choose.
Sports
Sports writing too, can be beautiful. (Obviously.)
Yes, sports writing and erotica aren’t exactly synonymous or frequently approached with any designs on artistry. (The latter more than the former.) But whyever not?
My point exactly. Absolutely no reason for it.
For a case in point, here’s an exalted piece of sports fiction by Hemingway:
I was nuts about the horses, too. There’s something about it, when they come out and go up the track to the post. Sort of dancy and tight looking with the jock keeping a tight hold on them and maybe easing off a little and letting them run a little going up. Then once they were at the barrier it got me worse than anything. Especially at San Siro with that big green in-field and the mountains way off and the fat [racial slur] starter with his big whip and the jocks fiddling them around and then the barrier snapping up and that bell going off and them all getting off in a bunch and then commencing to string out. You know the way a bunch of skins gets off. If you’re up in the stand with a pair of glasses all you see is them plunging off and then that bell goes off and it seems like it rings for a thousand years and then they come sweeping round the turn. There wasn’t ever anything like it for me.
Maybe I’ll just spend a minute on a few other notable examples of the sort of sports writing that ought to make you want to have a little lie-down to recover.
For a heart-stopping, heart-breaking account of a horse race, there’s this passage from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy:
He was flying towards the Irish barricade, Frou-Frou and he both together saw the barricade in the distance, and both the man and the mare had a moment’s hesitation. He saw the uncertainty in the mare’s ears and lifted the whip, but at the same time felt that his fears were groundless; the mare knew what was wanted. She quickened her pace and rose smoothly, just as he had fancied she would, and as she left the ground gave herself up to the force of her rush, which carried her far beyond the ditch; and with the same rhythm, without effort, with the same leg forward, Frou-Frou fell back into her pace again.
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy: Chapter 25
I’d obviously like to treat myself and you, dear reader, to equal billing of a whole bunch more, but here are just a couple of sentences that ought to convince you of the literary mastery of a wealth of sports loving writers. A proud, to-this-day exciting and defiant tradition with exactly one adherent in my household.
Here’s William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying:
Then Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an illusion of wings; among them, beneath the upreared chest, he moves with the flashing limberness of a snake.
And lastly, AE Coppard, perhaps my favourite of this kind of writing, in Black Dog:
The doe shot away over the curve of the hill and was gone. She did not merely gallop, she seemed to pass into ideal flight, the shadow of wind itself. Her fawn body, with half-cocked ears and unperceivable convulsion of the leaping haunches, soared across the land with the steady swiftness of a gull.
Of course, the much-loved excerpts above are more a mixture of sports and animal-centric writing, the latter part of which is the kind of surprisingly literary writing I really wanted to write about in the first place before I went and got distracted.
(For pure sports writing, try David Foster Wallace, George Orwell’s anti-sports essay The Sporting Spirit, or Pete Davies’s One Night in Turin, which filled me with the most delicious schadenfreude.)
But moving swiftly on, to the more encompassing genre of nature-centric writing.
Nature fiction
I recently realised that I haven’t, not to my satisfaction anyway, found my stride in writing about animals, whom (yes ‘whom’, not ‘which’) I love with all my heart. More than any human, in fact, save immediate family, true loves, real friends and John McEnroe.
Well, I always come back to the writer names above. Coppard showed that you could write something as good as anything else in literature, about a hare being chased by a whippet. It was so very good, on first reading (and ever since), that it would be a hitherto life-long ambition to match it, in whatever writing I attempted. I found the same stuff in Faulkner, without the greater (but still compact) truths of Coppard, and in Tolstoy, without the economy of Coppard. And of course in Hemingway, who is something else entirely, but sometimes deigns to stop by and partake of the good stuff before crisply slipping into eternal themes or joyful life or suffering, but with a short fiction limitation in narratives like Coppard.
I realised I wanted to write something with all of these. Fiction, first and foremost, because that is the dream of the true writer. Nature fiction, not animal-centric alone but including the environment as a whole, natural as well as built, intruding our ecological heritage with digital signal and night-time light and noise and thorough-faring hurry and economic hegemony, becoming a new environment. Ecological fiction that not only melded old and new environments but delved in the meaning to be found in all microcosms; the custodial relationship between man and nature, the bond between creatures, and us as self-humbled creatures too. That considered long-term economic and epochal natural cycles and the histories of communities and families and relationships. Epic fiction, occasionally.
Did fiction like it exist? (And could I do it? And was it worthwhile?)
I googled…
When my kids were small, I watched Shopaholic with them at least five times. We loved it. Much to my surprise, my 20-year-old daughter now thinks it’s the biggest load of crap. I suspect internalised prejudice against ‘girly’ preoccupations.
To me, it’s obvious that Shopaholic is a prescient work of genius. In the scene above, “Rebecca”, a clueless fashion columnist who is sacked and finds herself in a more exacting reporting environment, is given an assignment by her new editor, who spikes her first attempt and tells her to come up with a proper angle on the topic (APRs). Stumped, she turns to Google, typing “good angles on APRs”.
In 2019, it was been unthinkable to throw such a query out into the world. Today, we have X, subreddits, Quora and of course AI, all of which you would put such a natural language query to — in complete good faith, if only to avoid the answers, learn from them, and come up with something different.
Actually, I chatted…
AI is like Googling with better answers. That is 100% what ChatGPT is for. So I ChatGPT’d my main query about pre-existing examples of the sort of natural fiction I wanted to write, and here’s a much-shortened account of how that went.
Q: List all subgenres of animal-human interaction fiction.
A: It’s called “animal fiction” or “animal-centred fiction”. It includes:
- Animal Fantasy, such as “Watership Down” by Richard Adams, which features a society of rabbits with their own language and culture.
- Talking Animal Stories, such as “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White, in which animals can talk and communicate with humans.
- Animal Allegory such as George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, in which animals represent human traits, societal roles or political factions.
- Nature-Centered Fiction that emphasise the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world, often featuring animals as central characters, such as Jean Craighead George’s “My Side of the Mountain”.
- Animal Protagonists in Human Worlds, such as “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London, which follows a domestic dog’s journey into the wild.
- Magical Realism with Animals, in which animals and humans coexist in a world with magical part to everyday life, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.
Q: My story features animals in the wild and human environments. They do not speak, they are not protagonists, they do not communicate or have human-like abilities, it is not fantasy, the perspective is not from the human or the animal’s side but is an all-knowing third-person perspective of wherever the action is in their interconnected drama. What subgenre is that of animal fiction?
A: Based on your description, your story appears to fall within the subgenre of “Nature-Centered Fiction” within the realm of animal fiction. In nature-centered fiction, animals are not anthropomorphized, they don’t possess human-like abilities or communication, and they are not the main focus of the story. Instead, the story revolves around the interconnected drama of both the natural world and human environments.
Q: Name some examples.
A: Certainly, here are some examples.
- “The Secret Life of Bees” by Sue Monk Kidd
- “The Overstory” by Richard Powers
- “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame
- “H is for Hawk” by Helen Macdonald
- “The Jungle Book” by Rudyard Kipling
- “The Call of the Wild” by Jack London
Q: Only 2 seems to apply. The novel interweaves the lives of characters, human and non-human, with a focus on trees and forests. The others all have a fixed perspective. 1 is the girl’s perspective. 3 is the animals’ perspective. 4 is the author’s perspective, 5 is Mowgli’s perspective. Whose perspective does the novel follow in 2?
A: Correct. “The Overstory” features multiple interconnected storylines, each focusing on different characters’ perspectives, both human and non-human. The book gives significant attention to trees and forests as well as the interactions between people and nature.
Q: My ideal story is one story witnessing the experiences of multiple characters, animals and environments. It does not ever give one single perspective, for example the feelings of any of those, it just describes their situations, environment, histories etc., and the meaning of it. None of these stories apply.
A: It sounds like your story takes a more observational and neutral stance, providing descriptions of various characters, animals, and environments without delving into their emotions or perspectives. Given this unique approach, your story might not fit neatly into a traditional subgenre of animal fiction. However, it does seem to fall within the realm of “Environmental Fiction” or “Eco-Fiction,” which often emphasizes the relationships between humans, animals, and the environment without necessarily focusing on individual characters’ emotions or perspectives.
Q: I feel temporarily satisfied.
A: I’m glad I could assist you!
So what’s my point?
Look, the story is already 9 minutes long, 2 of which is AI-generated, so we’re pushing it. Let’s just say that if I found a near-unique subgenre in eco-fiction, broke another, and found happiness and inspiration in both — enough to write an essay about it, that can’t be a bad thing.
Plus, I wrote about something important, utterly disregarded and infinitely better than us, without hating on humanity, as much as it deserves it.
Here’s the 3-minute short fiction in question. Read, like, comment, subscribe, write.
Happy form-breaking, spacelings.
More eco-fiction to follow!