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Alison Deming’s Zoologies is a collection of essays written into the tangled interface of human-animal interactions. The collection itself is the result of ten years of Alison’s work – and many the essays had been previously published in places like The Best American Science and Writing, Orion, The Georgia Review, and Isotope. As Ander says in his review of the book, the collection “seems to illuminate everything in the nexus between animal and human.” The content covered within the covers of the book is immense. Across the essays she wrestles with captivity, violence, companionship, animal intelligence, evolution, empathy, science, and art, among many others. Of these themes, she seems to blur the lines between these dualisms throughout the book: animal vs. human, violence vs. empathy, science vs. art, hope vs. grief.
Besides the complexities of the human-animal nexus, what really drives the book is grief. Alison uses the collection to “be present” to the alarming biodiversity decline that is sweeping the planet. She writes into the meaning of this loss – for the animals with which she has developed complicated relationships over the course of her life as a naturalist. She writes: “I feel I owe them my attention.” The grief of this planetary loss of animals is intertwined with her own grieving process of those closest to her: her partner, her mother, her uncle, and her brother.
Like many creative nonfiction writers, she breaks up large chunks of prose with section breaks indicated by a small bullet point in the center of the page. Alison uses these breaks throughout the book, and I was curious as to how this structural move helped facilitate her ability to address her major themes. In order to visualize how fragmentation of her prose impacted the structure of the book, I created another graph – this time looking at the length of “fragments” or chunks of prose as they were separated by section breaks, and not just chapters. Figure 2 shows the results of this exercise:
Figure 2: Zoologies broken down by page length of prose fragments over the course of the book
From my reading, this progression of fragments actually correlated pretty closely with the thematic development in the book. The first fragment “spike,” for example (labeled 44 in the graph), correlates with the second half of the essay called “The Feasting,” (composed of 4 and 6 page fragments) in which Alison discusses the death of her mother. As a reader, the pitch of this essay altered the course and “stakes” of the book. The grief Alison is addressing with biodiversity loss becomes inextricable from her personal grief with familial loss. From there, there is a cluster of longer fragments that I might actually classify as the “climax” of the book. I’ve placed this cluster within a square on Figure 2 for reference.
This cluster includes a very personal essay about raising her daughter (“The Pony, the Pig, and the Horse”, composed of 4 and 7 page fragments), reflections on cross-cultural perceptions of death (“Black Vulture,” 7 pages total), the death of her uncle (“The Trumpeter Swan,” 10 pages total), and a grief stricken piece about the death of her brother (“Liberating the Lobster,” 10 pages total). None of these latter three are fragmented at all.
This leads me to the question: what can fragmentation of prose (by either delineating clear chapters or inserting page breaks) do enhance a writer’s ability to pull readers into complex themes and ideas? In the first half of Alison’s book, this fragmentation allows her to juxtapose some of the thematic dualisms that she works to erode by the end of the book. One fragment will consist of an interview with a scientist – the next, a poetic insight on an animal’s life. With fragmentation, she places scientific writing directly next to mythologies. She places animals next to humans, she places grief next to hope. It’s a delicate and artful balance – likely informed by her long-held poetic intuitions. The fragmentation of chapters seems to play a major role in allowing her to play with these seemingly opposing themes; to set them in dialogue with one another without always connecting them explicitly. That way, in the breaks between sections, her readers get to do the work to fill in the blanks & thematic overlap between scenes and ideas.
The fragmentation also seems to help Alison modulate pitch over the course of the book. As I mentioned, the themes that she addresses are very intense: something as large scale and catastrophic as biodiversity loss – linked with her own reckoning with grief – can be tough for readers to invest themselves in over the course of the entire book. It seems that Alison recognizes this – and so often uses one fragment to address an intense topic – and then the next to back off a bit, talk about science, or introduce some humor. This seems to happen both within chapters and across them.
However, it seems fragmentation approach only gets Alison so far when it comes to engaging with the complexity of her ideas. There are clearly stories that she needs to tell without breaks in her prose, and these seem to allow for a depth in insight that is not always present in her shorter, or more fragmented pieces. While fragmentation demands that readers to connect ideas, and engage with their own realizations, these longer essays guide readers along further down the road of Alison’s wise understandings of her most complex themes, on her own terms. At the end of these longer pieces, she is still asking readers to wrestle with complexity – but she has more closely defined the terms of it.
For me, this raised questions about my own intentional use of prose fragmentation in my own work, particularly in the context of a collection of several pieces. In writing about intense subject matters, how should I use fragmentation to modulate pitch? To juxtapose informative text with reflective text? To put themes in conversation with one another? And then, in the end, what are the real limitations of these fragments? When should prose be non-fragmented – and what can it accomplish then, when it is allowed to run out, and run loose, that it may not accomplish otherwise? It seems that intentionally breaking up prose is a move that creative nonfiction writers employ frequently, but I haven’t always invested so much thought into what exactly this writing tool can help facilitate. Alison’s work in Zoologies suggests that using this tool can significantly shape the course of a longer works. Its effect, it seems, can redefine a reader’s experience.
Analysis by Katie Gougelet
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