Consumption-as-Domination: On Charles Foster’s ‘Being a Beast: Adventures across the Species Divide’
Book Review by Margaryta Golovchenko
Margaryta Golovchenko talks about the connection between humans and animals in Charles Foster’s book.
Charles Foster
Nonfiction (Nature) | 256 pages | 8.1” x 5.4” | Reviewed: Paperback
978–1–250–13221–5 | Reprint Edition | $16.00
Picador | New York | BUY HERE
I’d hoped to write a book that had little or nothing of me in it. The hope was naïve. It has turned out to be (too much) a book about my own rewilding, my own acknowledgment of my previously unrecognized wildness, and my own lament at the loss of my wildness. I’m sorry. (p. 5)
So ends the prologue to Charles Foster’s Being a Beast: Adventures across the Species Divide. It is a book that picks up on the centuries-long, cross-cultural interest in animals that can be found in folktales and religious practices, scientific research, and more recent experimentation. This interest can been split into two parts: the desire to understand the animals themselves, how they live and see the world compared with humans, and the desire to understand ourselves in relation to animals in order to see through their eyes. Both can be found in Foster’s book, but there is a particular interest in the latter, as Foster sets out not only to learn about several animals but to live and gradually transform himself into them. Consisting of a prologue, an introductory chapter, five chapters dedicated to five different animals that Foster both studied and attempted to “embody,” and an epilogue, Being a Beast sounds both ambitious and promising for its apparent attempt to mend the disengagement between the human and the animal.
It took me the introductory first chapter (“Becoming a Beast”) and the first chapter (“Earth 1: Badger”) to see already just how contradictory and amiss things were in Foster’s project. In fact, as I delved deeper into the book, I noticed the theme of consumption becoming more prominent with each consecutive chapter. It was not only the literal consumption of food or the habits of the animals, both of which were necessary for Foster’s “survival” within his own set parameters. Eventually, the consumption became evident as a kind of dismissal and exaggeration rather than as a genuine understanding of the animals he was studying. While Foster attempted to be self-deprecating in order to show his vulnerability and humbleness in taking on such a challenging feat as becoming an animal, the careful reader will pick up on the moments that make Foster’s earlier words sound like a farce. Foster doesn’t hide this, in fact, stating:
I preferred almost any confection to the Real Thing. I preferred my ideas of badgers and the wild to real badgers and real wilderness. (p. 45).
With that in mind, it becomes easier to understand how his actions, like putting a badger skull on a stick for “no reason I can identify clearly” (p. 74), and statements such as admitting not just his “wilderness fetishism” but also his desire for “the land to bear [his] mark” (p. 72) align. Such moments become rifts in the fabric Foster tries to cover the reader with, much like the little ripples that make protagonists in dystopian sci-fi or fairytales realize the impending danger and run the other way. Being a Beast can perhaps best be described as a fetishization, a kind of alternative coming-of-age book that is nonfiction rather than fiction, where the protagonist is older rather than younger, and where the animal world acts as a vehicle that makes the self-realizations possible. It is a kind of animal version of the “manic pixie dream girl,” if you will.
There are certainly some very interesting observations in Being a Beast, as well as useful scientific reasoning and explanations that the curious reader will find helpful. One of my favorites was Foster’s point that
[p]rofessional biologists don’t like talking about animal emotions. (p. 39).
It was a point I never considered, mostly due to my very minimal knowledge of the animal world. It was interesting to think of the language we use when talking about animals and how we acknowledge or negate their existence. However, it was the framework within which these observations were situated that ended up diminishing their importance and making it easy to overlook them (admittedly, this was also due to the fact that Foster had a tendency to ramble or get too complex with his explanations). Similarly, there were also times when Foster’s first-person, almost confessional, voice proved detrimental. Take, for instance, the following passage, in which Foster states that he believes otters are so manic, so consumed “by their desire to consume” that they don’t have the time to construct a self:
How do I know this about otters? I don’t, of course. It has no neurobiological basis at all [. …] But I can’t help my intuition. And I don’t apologize for it much. (p. 87).
Here it is worth raising the question of what exactly Being a Beast is, whether it is more nonfiction and “light science” for the masses, or if it is an autobiographical tale, an account of one man’s adventures and the conclusions he drew from them. The best answer is probably that the book is a hybrid, with an added suspicion that Foster was trying to be as accessible and as appealing to the reader as possible. It didn’t feel like a book that was particularly interested in getting the reader to understand everything about each animal, although much of the information was certainly there. Yet it was also not entirely self-conscious of its own position as a hybrid, as Foster’s dismissal of shamanism demonstrated:
I don’t for a moment deny the reality of true shamanic transformation [. …] But it is arduous and, for me, too downright scary for regular use. And it’s too weird for its results to be convincing to most. (p. 11).
One of the big questions I had was why Foster decided even to address shamanism, in that case. After all, there are some ironically mystical passages in Being a Beast, the most noteworthy one being the description of the spirit otters who guarded the heavenly gate and
won’t beckon you in with welcoming paws to a scrumptious eel feast if they see you limping or bearing, wrapped in lily leaves and red ribbon, a mere effigy of yourself. They demand the real thing. (p. 101).
Foster’s prejudice toward shamanism was just one of the biases found in his prose. If some readers will find his asides to be funny, lightening an otherwise focused and (somewhat) serious exploration of the boundary between animals and humans, then for me they were either awkward or supported my confusion about what Foster’s “real” stance was. There are too many examples to discuss in-depth: Foster’s belief that you could give a summary of Russian history and politics by listening to people speak in Russian, even if you didn’t understand a single word (p. 27); his statement that if the hole of their badger sett caved on his son, Tom, that it would be an inconvenience of paperwork (p. 35); and his observation that many people in Japan are, often unknowingly, married to fox spirits and that unhappy unions make fox exorcism a profitable business (p. 117). The one I paused on the longest was the following, as it was directly tied to Foster’s project. It was his statement that he
[didn’t] wish [cats] ill: [he] just unwish[ed] them [and was] religiously committed to the removal of their reproductive apparatus. (p. 149).
It is here that Being a Beast comes full circle. Foster’s account of his experiences living as an animal are not an explanation or resolution to the question of what it means to be an animal or a human. Instead, Being a Beast is another example, another step in the long process of people coming to terms with the fact that there are many things we, as humans, are not able to do as well as animals, and that that is completely all right. By disagreeing and mentally arguing with much of Foster’s points and thoughts — I cannot judge this book for its scientific accuracy because, as I mentioned before, I am not knowledgeable in zoology or animal behavioral science — Foster made me much more conscious of my own relationship with animals. As the saying goes, “bad experience is also experience,” and Being a Beast creates another opening for discussion not just about animals but also on how we understand other cultural perceptions of them, of beliefs and decisions to incorporate or reinterpret said animals into various aspects of culture. Reading Being a Beast was an exercise in open-mindedness and questioning whether we truly need to understand everything. It also made me aware of a more important boundary than animal or human, namely the boundary that lies between consumption-as-domination and understanding-as-acceptance. This is an issue we need to put more focus on — otherwise, we run the risk of thinking like Foster, who argues that
the sort of love I’m talking about (whatever it is) is necessarily reciprocal. I can’t really love X unless X loves me. (p. 217).
