Some background on Blue Eyes

by Simon Collings

Blue Eyes, my forthcoming book (out 15 April from Zimzalla), might be read simply as a nonsensical tale about two anthropomorphic animal characters, intended solely to amuse. But there is a more serious intent behind this sequence of absurd conversations and word games involving a tapir and an armadillo.

Animal characters have not featured much in my stories until now. Projecting ‘human’ characteristics onto non-human creatures has always seemed to me a dubious exercise and one which detracts from their essential ‘otherness’. Equally, attributing so-called ‘animal’ qualities to human actions (usually in a pejorative way: ‘you dog!’) raises questions about the cultural construction of ‘animality’ in relation to ‘human nature’.

Both anthropomorphism and zoomorphism are common in literature, and with Blue Eyes I wanted to produce something which questioned and challenged these familiar tropes. The best approach I could devise was through satirical parody, pushing the narrative to a level of absurdity which destabilises conventional ‘readings’ of the text. I also included elements of word play which draw attention to the gap between ‘word’ and ‘thing’, particularly with reference to animals (birds) and body parts.

My thinking around these questions benefited from reading the chapter ‘Animals’ in Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2012. Towards the end of that chapter he quotes Richard Kerridge saying: ‘conventional plot structures require forms of solution and closure which seem absurdly evasive when applied to ecological questions with their extremes of timescale and complexities of interdependency.’ Blue Eye, as with all my writing, is deliberately plotless and unresolved.

I hope the reader laughs when reading the book but also that they experience a certain disquiet, an inability to comfortably locate where this writing is coming from. I hope this feels liberating. One of the ways we can begin to shift our relation to the more-than-human world, and we desperately need to do this, is by questioning the cultural assumptions and values we bring to our discourse about it. Of course, how you read this book and what you bring to it is entirely up to you.