Con Slobodchikoff: Chasing Dr Dolittle

Towards the end of 'Chasing Doctor Dolittle', in a section about how he contrived to confuse a trail of ants, Slobodchikoff, author, animal behaviourist and Professor of Biology at North Arizona University, runs through a series of questions that he sometimes asks his students. First he asks who thinks that humans can think. And then who thinks dogs, then cats and finally ants. To the first question every hand every time is raised. To the second usually about two thirds, and then one third and then, finally, in response to the last question, most of the time, he says, not one hand is raised. Now I know very little about animals, except what I have picked up from the occasional David Attenborough documentary, but I think if I was in any of those audiences, well I think I would have raised my hand confidently in response to all four questions. If I could say that I might have not raised my hand for the fourth, I think perhaps I might have found this book to be more revelatory than I did. And I think it does set out to be revelatory.

In 'Chasing Dr DoLittle' the reader is invited to play the role of the eponymous doctor while the author assumes the role of his faithful parrot Polynesia, interpreting for the reader the whistles, grunts, groans and movements of a varied pageant of creatures including prairie dogs, honeybees, ants, lizards, chickadees, ravens, squid, whales, chimps and chickens. And as these creatures run, shuffle, swim and dance across the pages he offers his interpretations with the attention to detail characteristic of someone who loves what they do, and with the succinct and vivid language of a writer who likes his reader. Slobodchikoff, in his approach and in his style of writing, is not unlike Konrad Lorenz, and while he is perhaps never quite as charming or as endearingly surprising as Lorenz (I'm thinking here of 'King Solomon's Ring') he does sometimes, talking to the lizards on his front porch, or avoiding a swarm of angry African bees, come close.

The swarming African bees are terrifying. Their cousins, the everyday honeybees are much more civilised. Dancing circles and figures of eight, they can communicate to their fellow bees the distance to and direction of a nectar source, and can adjust any number of the variables to account for 360 degrees of direction, and for distances of anywhere between 300 feet to several miles. That's about 100,000 'words' for the combination of distance and direction. And Slobodchikoff would argue that they are words, without the inverted commas, in that each variable can be altered to change the meaning of the communication. The type of dance, whether a circle or a figure of eight, a waggle, shuffle or tremble, is, for example, equivalent to a noun, referring to a measure of distance, whereas the angle of the dance serves the purpose of an adjective, indicating direction. In much the same way an ant can alter the chemical make-up of deposited odour packets, as well as the distance between each packet, to communicate the distance, direction and quality of a food source. And the common variety household dog, in its anal secretions, can encode enough information to assemble a reasonably dependable Wikipedia entry.

Prairie dogs on the other hand don't need anal secretions, or Wikipedia to communicate. Their alarm calls are packed with information, about the type of predator in sight for example, whether it be a man, a coyote or a hawk, and about the colour, shape and size of the predator, as well as information about its distance and speed. It is the experiments which explore these calls which take pride of place in this book. In one such experiment three students are sent out into a colony of prairie dogs, each wearing a different coloured shirt, and the resulting calls of the dogs (who are not dogs, but rodents, like squirrels) analysed. Each call is a combination of different frequencies of sound, and in the analysis only one of the frequencies, the one associated with colours, changes. The students are sent out again and again, changing appearance, distance, direction and speed, and the resulting calls analysed. And the conclusion is that prairie dogs  seem to have something like a grammar. There are parts of their calls that serve as nouns (human, coyote, hawk), adjectives (yellow, blue, red), verbs (running, walking) and adverbs (quickly, slowly) and, what's more, the parts can be combined in different ways according to shifts in context.

To the same end Slobodchikoff offers the calls of the Carolina chickadee, which are made up of four syllables, arranged into different combinations according to whether the birds are foraging near the ground, or navigating their way through dense woods. When these combinations are played back to the birds in experiment conditions their responses are as they would be out of the laboratory, but when the four syllables are rearranged, artificially reconstructed and played back, the chickadees do not respond, or are confused, as we would be if someone were to rearrange the words in this sentence into a random order.

In other words, if animals can alter the grammar of their communications according to context, then animals, whether dogs, cats or ants, squirrel-like rodents or chickadees, can think. This is the central premise of the book, though not necessarily its most interesting. Of equal interest are the evolved means by which animals have learned to communicate, like the squid who can flash one colour on one side to warn off a rival, while at the same time flashing a different colour on its other side to attract a mate. And then there are the curious rumbles, gurgles and clicks which make up the rhyming songs of the humpback whales, sung for the most part on their journeys to and from breeding grounds.

Of equal interest too, though only briefly discussed, is the idea that animals perceive time differently, from one another and from us. Human speech played at sixteen times slower than normal speed is much like whale song, and sped up eight to ten times is much like birdsong. So although to us a whale's song might sound like a series of grunts and groans,   and a bird's song a nonsensical twittering, to a whale and to a bird, who perceive time slower and quicker respectively than we do, each may sound much like a sentence would to us.  And perhaps that explains, by way of a hastily cobbled end, why Polynesia was so much smarter than the doctor.

House Mother Normal by B.S. Johnson

After writing a discussion of Chris Ware's Building Stories last month, in which I discussed some common ground between that book and B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, I thought I'd have a look online and find out which of Johnson's books were available these days. Coincidentally, it turned out that this month is the 80th anniversary of Johnson's birth, and later this year will mark the 40th anniversary of his death. As a result, Picador have seen fit to republish a few of his novels that were long out of print, and have in recent years only been available in an omnibus edition. One of these books is House Mother Normal.

It's weird, really, that Johnson fell off the map in the way that he did. He might still be languishing in obscurity were it not for Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography. Why is it that Johnson was so long out of print and so little known in his own country while novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec are available in most decent English bookshops? Unlike those two, and unlike his hero Joyce for that matter, Johnson never really wrote a book that was difficult to read. Some argue that his lack of popularity is simply down to the fact that Johnson's experimental modernist approach to fiction is at odds with English literary culture. All our big names of the last 30 years have been formal conservatives working in a tradition about which Johnson was scathing. We don't mind it when the French, or even the Irish, engage in high modernism, the argument goes, but when a working class Englishman tries to reinvent the novel, we see him as a pretentious irritant.

Well, maybe. But reading House Mother Normal, I was struck by some other issues that may account for Johnson's lack of readers.

House Mother Normal takes the form of eight stream of consciousness monologues from inmates (there is no better word) of an old people's home, preceded by an introduction from the House Mother of the title, who seems to be the sole carer in the institution. At the end of the book, House Mother gives the reader her own monologue and a short closing statement. Each monologue is 21 pages long, and the pages are numbered accordingly. This is because the monologues are simultaneous—while they focus mostly on a given narrator's thoughts and reminiscences, they occasionally make reference to what is happening in the room, and these external events can be found in exactly the same place in each account. For example, a song the characters sing together appears about halfway down the fifth page of each chapter. Part of the experience of reading the book is the process of trying to piece together what is going on in the care home from these fragmented accounts. I found myself flipping back to previous chapters to build a picture of what was happening to the characters. It seems clear from pretty early on that they are being subjected to abuse, but of what kind?

The old people are put to work on banal tasks, made to play a perverse version of pass the parcel, set to jousting one another, and then forced to watch the House Mother "entertain" them. Quite what this entertainment involves does not become clear until the House Mother gives her own account at the end of the book, but it is repeatedly described as "filth." What is in the package the old people play pass the parcel with? It is several chapters before that is revealed. All we know at first is that the contents represent "a dirty trick." And, even once we find out what the parcel contains, it makes no sense beyond an act of saddening cruelty. Here we're staring to get to the problem with the book. But we'll come back to that.

At its core, House Mother Normal is a collection of Beckett influenced stream of consciousness monologues which present the reminiscences of eight elderly individuals, each given a distinct and convincing voice. That said, one of them is too preoccupied with hellish pain in his anus to reminisce so very much, and at least two others are demented to the point of being largely unintelligible. To represent a lack of mental agility in some of his characters, Johnson uses stretches of blank space on the page, a technique which can feel a bit contrived (is there ever a time when the mind is completely without content?) but which is also effective and at times genuinely distressing. To drive home his point about the decline of the mind with age, he also arranges the monologues so that they become progressively more senile as the book goes on, such that the reader can get a sense of what it might be like to lose ones faculties entirely. This dimension of the book shows some real compassion, mixed with a real bleakness. The characters sit and relive parts of their past as best they can until the day comes when their confusion becomes too great. The lives Johnson gives his creations are fully imagined, realistic and scattered with striking details and pathos. As a passionate atheist, and also someone committed to truth in writing, Johnson uses the book to stare down what he perceives to be the inevitable horror of aging and dying. As House Mother says in her closing passage, "worse times are a-coming, nothing is more sure."

This is grim stuff, make no mistake, but it's made all the grimmer by the fact that this is also a book about abuse of the elderly and institutional sadism. House Mother is a monstrous character; so much is clear from early on. She beats her charges with a "twitcher," she feeds them food which she literally considers too poor for her dog, and she organises a farcical jousting game in which two of the more able inmates (or "friends" in House Mother's parlance) push two people in wheelchairs towards each other. The two people in the wheelchairs have to try to strike each other with mops. The game ends with a severely confused man being knocked unconscious.

Here is one of the core issues with the book. Every event that does not take place only in the mind of one of the characters is either an act of exploitation or an act of abuse. Further, the abuse is of an active and perverse kind and I found it deeply sickening. It is often said of Johnson that his books are infused with black humour. A case in point is Andrew Motion's foreword to this edition, in which he claims the author's novels are "lit with bleak comedy." A part of what makes House Mother Normal quite an unpleasant book to read is the suspicion that the acts of degradation and humiliation the characters are subjected to are supposed to be read with a guilty mirth. This possibility seems all the more likely when you know that the book's full title used to be House Mother Normal: A Geriatric Comedy.

It's not more than a couple of years since hidden cameras showed a nurse in an English residential home walking into the room of a frail old woman and punching her in the head unprovoked. The kind of abuse presented in this book is not so far from what still happens today, and it is not amusing. If Johnson wanted this side of the book to be funny on any level, he shot himself in the foot by making the characters convincing and human enough for the reader to empathise with and pity them. If he hadn't done that, but had instead created a farcical tone and two dimensional characters, maybe the insanity of the abuse could have been slightly funny, but this approach would have undermined everything the book says (very effectively) about the decline of human life.

So what I'm getting at here is that House Mother Normal presents a hellish view of life, but also makes you question whether you are being asked to laugh at something which you find deeply shocking and sad. It seems to look for humour where there is none. On the other hand, this is a grim, sometimes scatological, rather perverse, but in some ways brutally honest book about an area of life that most writers either sentimentalise or avoid. It makes the reader look at fears most people try to forget, and then says explicitly: this is coming to you.

In his foreword, Andrew Motion is at pains to point out that Johnson's book is a call to celebrate life in the here and now. I don't buy that. Or at least I would say that if the book is anything of the sort, then it fails on that level, just as it fails on the level of comedy. It is not the tricksy modernist structure that makes the book difficult (in point of fact, the textual innovations make it more readable), but rather the abject nature of the content. Not that House Mother Normal is a bad book. It is far from a being bad. Purely on the level of execution and writing alone, it is excellent. But it is a foul book with a grim vision; it is dark and almost unremitting, with only occasional flashes of beautiful humanity that make it all the more sad and disturbing. So, perhaps it is not so surprising after all that Johnson's work has struggled to find a wider readership.