Sometimes you get exactly the thing you wanted, and by its nature it challenges you in ways that you weren’t prepared for. Which might be the best kind of gift. A little while back I penned a bit on what I would like to call extra-humanism, or the need for culture that moves away from the strictly anthropocentric perspective, that finds ways to express attitudes that value something in the universe — anything — besides us and our specific uses for the world.
Enter Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs, a delightful and tight little novel that brings the meddling Greek gods into a wager over whether dogs might be happy if they were gifted human intelligence. It’s a novel I picked out pique, without much anticipating how well it would speak to that niche. The plot goes that fifteen dogs in a Toronto kennel are blessed in the night by Hermes, swiftly figure out how to open their cages, escape into the streets, develop more advanced language, food gathering techniques, social structures, and create a kind of community in the park, eventually meeting mostly unhappy ends as they struggle to understand their place in a world in which they belong to neither the human nor dog world.
I think that, as I began the novel, I expected the central insight of the book to be a kind of referendum on human intelligence in the sense of its inescapably human qualities, that treated dog-kind as a kind of blank slate on which we would be reflected, a perfect outsider who could explore the value of our intellectual gifts without being socialized to accept any aspect or consequence of them. What I got instead was a little more frustrating and perhaps a good deal more valuable. The most striking development in the novel was how distinctly unhuman these dogs remained — remaining fixated on aspects of pack hierarchy, and trying to maintain that structure violently; skeptical of the concept of “love” while emphatic in the expression of “loyalty”; and despairing at their lack of belonging in the dog identity they had left behind. At one point, a pack leader bans the use of advanced language, insisting the dogs continue to communicate in the natural, limited vocabulary they have always used. Of course, this vocabulary is now just as alien to them, so many miles behind where they minds have now ascended, and so they end up crudely imitating each other’s imitations of dog expression, desperate to recover its authenticity. The struggles that consume the pack end up having very little to do with the nature of human intellect as we consider it, and everything to do with an imagined amplification of dog nature as filtered through that intellect.
This can be frustrating, sure — can’t a pack of dogs with all this freaking critical thinking figure out how to critique their own obsession with pack dynamics (although, fair, shouldn’t humans)? Where are the borders around “dog nature,” and how much more interesting might this effort have been if the dogs were able to leap past these petty obsessions to apply their new minds to becoming something more novel and dangerous than just hyper-competent versions of what they were?
But on the other hand, it’s rare for a book to posit any other border, any set of values outside of the human, to explore what the world would look like through those values, and to not care if the reader feels challenged or frustrated or gratified by them. Of course a work with a truly extra-humanist perspective is going to piss off some humans. That’s the point of expressing values we don’t necessarily share.
So I have to tip my hat in the end, because when you want more challenging work out there in the world, the best gift you can get in return is work that challenges what you thought that would look like, how it would feel, how it would subvert expectations that you have precisely because you’re conditioned to expect too limited a field of perspective.