Amherst Reads Transcript

Adam Sitze: Hi, my name is Adam Sitze, I teach in the department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and today I'll be talking with Lindsay Stern whose book, The Study of Animal Languages will be released tomorrow, February 19th, 2019. Welcome Lindsay and congratulations on a phenomenal book.

Lindsay Stern: Thank you.

Adam: Why don't we start by just having you talk a little bit about the book and the process of writing it and how that happened.

Lindsay: It's hard to say exactly where a creative project starts but there was an afternoon when I walked into the office of professor Alexander George who teaches analytic philosophy here and he is notorious for keeping a gimmick lie detector on his file cabinet. This device would flash either green or red in response to surrounding noise and on the afternoon that I walked into his office, it was flashing red and it was a spring afternoon in April. No one was talking but the window was open and it was picking up the melody of a bird and declaring that the bird was lying.

So that image kind of lodged as like a co-on in my mind almost both because of the mystery it raised about what these sounds that we tend to tune out as gibberish might actually mean. And, as I started reading about the scientific attempt to know them and to code them, the absurdity of thinking that we could ever translate them into English. And out of that question that began as a kind of intellectual gode, characters formed and I found that fiction presented the kind of most fluid, dynamic, risky in some ways medium to explore the question.

Adam: Let's talk a little bit about some of the characters. So you have a family, I think it's safe to say. The novel is narrated by an analytic philosopher named Ivan Link who's 47 years old. It takes place, would it be fair to say, over several days I guess in the late winter, early spring?

Lindsay: Right.

Adam: Ivan is married to an ornithologist named Prue Baum and her father's name is Franklin Baum. Talk a little bit about how these characters came to you and maybe about why they came to you as vessels for the exploration of the problem of birdsong and truth and falsity.

Lindsay: This often happens, I'm told, but the very first scene of the book was a marriage scene between Prue and Ivan involving a catastrophic toast delivered by her brother and it was a booster rocket so the book totally outgrew it and in the final version, they elope. So it was both omitted literally and as a plot point. I was incredibly fortunate to get this crazy fellowship called the Watson where you have to leave the United States for a year and pursue a project of your own design and mine was to teach a combination of philosophy and creative writing at a few English speaking orphanages and to spend the other half of the year writing the first draft of a novel that became this one. But my first leg, I had, basically in a semi-cliched way I see now, declared that I was gonna go to Paris and live for free in this bookstore and write the first draft over a month's time. And so it was the hubris of youth. It's just a word of mouth thing but if you're interested in writing, you can go there, it's an open secret. And you just show up with some bags and you take the risk that they won't have you. But if they have spots you can sleep for free in it. It's also haunted.

Needless to say, the novel did not come and instead, I made pages and pages and pages of notes that were vital but many of them were kind of raw ideas and they didn't find a home in an essay form or a monograph form and I knew that they were kind of fermenting the novel I wanted to write but not really participating in that novel because they had no characters to belong to or to matter to.

And then I went to Cambodia and I was living in this guest house called Tactu and I was incredibly fortunate to meet one of my best friends there and to be able to connect with some of the most amazing people, through my teaching, that I've ever met who challenged me to think in ways that I hadn't really encountered as part of my formal education. And something about that environment combined with the relief of having left Paris, I think, enabled me to relax in such a way that the characters started finding their way on the page. And they started finding their way on the page through scenes. And that's when I realized that it was probably going to look more like a dramatic project as opposed to a stream-of-consciousness or a full dramatic monologue.

Adam: Which character came to you first? Or perhaps you're saying, in the scene that you wrote about the catastrophic toast, was it a number of characters that came to you at the same time?

Lindsay: It was always in Ivan's voice. Partly because I was so intrigued just by the first person point of view and how the voice of the ego acludes and reveals the forces that are producing it. And when you have a character speaking, it's presupposed there's an addressee. And there's a paradox in first person books too that, who is this person addressing? Especially if they don't acknowledge the addressee. But there's a constructedness about it. So that, the kind of falisty of that, intrigued me and felt like a more fertile medium to explore the mind than, for whatever reason, given that this project I knew was gonna deal with the codes of the mind and the sense of language be like that, it seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

So I guess given that, Ivan came first and then Prue speaking to him at that deleted scene and her brother. And Frank's father in law, his voice now opens the book but he didn't show up until I think the third chapter of the first draft and it was almost like this person came onto the page and I knew that he was bringing energy. And that's what told me that  he belonged in the beginning because he kind of woke Ivan up to me as a character. Before, he and Prue had been very static and their conversations had been even more stilted than they are. And stilted in a way that wasn't masking the kind of dilemmas that they're dealing with in their marriage. The writing wasn't alive yet and it was Frank who brought that.

Adam: So this is a novel that ends with, the last word of the novel is 'begin' so maybe it makes sense to begin with the last character that you formulated, Franklin. Franklin is a vegetarian, he's a really compelling character, it would make sense to me why he would bring to the novel a kind of interruptive energy, almost a prophetic energy.

At one point, his daughter Prue says, "You think you're prophetic but in fact you're just a provocateur.” I think it's safe to say either he has a mental illness or he's diagnosed with a mental illness. And throughout the novel, there is a kind of subplot about him taking his pills or not or being dosed perhaps even against his will when he's hospitalized after a particularly manic episode. So talk a little bit about what Franklin personifies and maybe say a little about how you're exploring the limits of DSM IV or the limits of psychology or the limits of psychiatry through the character of Frank or Franklin.

Lindsay: So the DSM, The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of psychological disorders, I remember encountering the most recent edition back when I was doing the first draft and I was so struck by the fact that, according to this other study,  most people will qualify for some disorder that's codified in the manual over the course of their life. And that figure fluctuates a little bit, sometimes it's a little bit under 50%.

But details aside, the irony that to be normal, you're insane and vice versa felt to me like a little bit of a reductio ad absurdum of our current thinking about the mind. I mean I remember also, as part of writing this, I read a lot of the scientific literature on birdsong and there was one particular study that came out in 2011 and it was widely reported in the popular press with headlines like, "Scientists discover that birds tweet using grammar and that there's some evidence that they have syntax." Which Chomsky famously defined as the hallmark of human language and thought, although the relationship between the two have been hotly contested. I guess I was reading studies and I thought, on one level we're saying this but on the other hand, it would seem one would have to be psychotic to hear birdsong and really feel the presence of the language. So I guess it was within that margin that Frank started to come into being. I guess, I mean, he's somebody who's hyper attuned to the world and to the majesty of everyday objects. And that part of him announces itself in his manic episodes. I guess, through him, I was trying to think through why it is that that point of view, that kind of heightened attunement to things is unsustainable an potentially damaging. Of course, everyone would experience it differently but those were some of my own preoccupations that fit him.

Adam: It does seem that Frank is pitched perfectly between hearing things and having manic episodes. So at one point, he's at the aquarium with his granddaughter and his son in law and he confronts the attendant about why the sharks and all the various aquatic animals are being held captive and about how long they were being held captive and so forth and he takes a metallic umbrella and smashes the window to the tank trying to, it's not clear from the narration what he's trying to do. Perhaps liberate the animals, perhaps destroy the world in which incarcerated animals would be the objects of entertainment, it's not clear.

In that episode, he claims not to be hearing things but to be hearing things. He's so attuned that he says that they speak to me in the same way that music speaks to me, I'm directly affected by it. And in the same way that at the onset of the novel he's saying, "Well sometimes when you walk into Grand Central Station, everything signifies, everything is talking to me at the same time." But then, I guess my question would be how he then relates to Ivan, the analytic philosopher who narrates the novel, it's told from his perspective, he seems to have trouble hearing things. And a particular part of the interest and part of the skill, I think, and the power of the narrative is how Ivan actually can't hear the many messages that are coming at him. So if Frank hears too much, maybe Ivan can't hear enough. Tell me a little bit about the relationship between Franklin and Ivan. They do come to share something at the end. They have in common that all their life they've been waiting for something, the novel opens with this beautiful phrase, "All my life, I've been waiting for something and I found out that what I've been waiting for is just more waiting." Frank opens the novel in those terms. But tell me a little bit about how you imagine this relationship between Frank and Ivan and about how listening in particular, or about hearing, figures into that relationship.

Lindsay: I mean part of what I was trying to explore was, what's at work in this word, animal, that at least, in the law, means a thing. Animals other than humans are property in the U.S. and I think there's a little bit of madness in that. And I mean we know from the history of law that that same violence has been inflicted on numbers of the human community.

So I guess, I mean, what Frank does is crazy and it's also wounding to the person he cares most for but at the same time, it was important to me that he articulate some of the lunacy in that structure where one walks through a museum that participates in the illusion that law participates. That the beings with whom we share so much evolutionary history and with whom we can even make contact controversially would be relegated to non-persons who are non-sentient entities.

See, language starts breaking down when you think about animals and that's why I find them so fascinating. There's a quick anecdote that I encountered in a book by Alain Corbin who's a historian of bells for a course that I'm in. And it's a wonderful anecdote and I think it will help me answer your question about Frank and Ivan.

In the mid 1800's in a Southern French village called La Brues, there was a civil war that erupted over whether to ring the bell tower in thunderstorms. Half the town argued that you should ring the bell because it would ward the thunder off and the other half of the town argued that it would have the opposite consequence and that it would entice the storms. And so they came to blows, some people were wounded and died, and finally the mayor issued a decree saying, we're not going to ring the bells, it's too much of a risk. A few weeks later, a thunderstorm came and half the town fled to the belltower and started clanging it with all their might which is, of course, the last place you want to be in a thunderstorm as we now know.

But of course, I think what's so resonnant about story is the fact that both factions agreed on the relevant claim which is that the belltower could choreograph the actions of the sky. And so I think in their ways, Frank and Ivan, this was initially called "The Philosopher and the Madman." And to me, their dialectic and their kind of strife and their eventual harmony governed the movement of the book.

And I was interested in the ways that, on the one hand, they can't stand each other and they orient themselves toward the world in incommensurable ways but they both have this kind of, in my mind, tragic ambition for language and what it can do and how it can make things clear if only one could say it. But their attempts to do so kind of drive them out of the human community. And so in that sense, I think they're a little bit analogous to the bell story in the sense that they share more than they realize.

Adam: And so Frank errs on the side of hearing begins immediately and with his body and errs on the side of, or takes to excess, this idea that you can hear or communicate immediately with beings with whom we share the Earth. And that estranges him certainly from his daughter, Prue who confronts him later in the novel but also from indeed the entire legal law abiding community because he's detained after this. Let's talk a little bit maybe about Ivan and the way in which Ivan errs.

I'm struck first of all that Ivan lost his father at an early age and so Ivan is somebody who, over the course of the novel, again he's the person who's ego structures the narration, and so what we know largely is from his standpoint. That law seems, first of all to determine, or at least prepare the conditions under which he then has what might be called a crisis later in the novel where mounting rage and resentment and perhaps a sense of loss, just overcome him in ways that he doesn't understand.

And I'm curious, first of all, how his loss of his father at an early age plays into his relationship with his father in law. But I also would like to return to this point about analytic philosophy, he's an analytic philosopher, he's written a PhD thesis on a particular problem, which I'm hoping you'll describe, a philosophic problem. And he is really clear about the fact that animals do not talk. He has a fight with Prue later in the novel in which he says that frankly and forthrightly. In fact, he uses the study of animal languages, he puts it in quotes early in the novel. So he seems to disagree with the title of the novel, he seems to think that animals don't have language.

But talk a little bit about, if Frank errs on the side of communicating directly with beings, let's talk a little bit about Ivan and about his commitment to language, his commitment to maybe even meaning and about how that allowed you or how that created the occasion to maybe create an unreliable narrator.

Lindsay: Yes, Ivan objects to the phrase 'animal language' which many scientists and especially linguists would also object to and that actually gave me pause about the title because superegoically, I was anticipating their dismissiveness. The reason that they object to it is, I think, must more interesting than their objection and it has to do with this distinction between communication and language which to me is fascinating in that so traditionally communication refers to the exchange of information and language to that activity which we participate in that no other beings can.

And the dictionary definition is a tautology because it includes us in the definition, it's what humans do to communicate, so there's a kind of paradox bound up with even asking whether other beings have language. I think that's exactly why these two people felt fused to me in some way, Frank and Ivan, the analytic philosopher and the madman who potentially becomes the philosopher and vice versa depending on how one responds to it.

But I mean Ivan's someone who's trying to talk to being and he can't. He can't even really talk to his own wife. I mean that's part of what I was interested in exploring, the impulse to take the intimacy of consciousness as a problem to solve using syllogisms or mathematics which is how analytic philosophers sometimes treat the problem of solipsism. No matter what evidence you may have that other beings think and feel, their sensations and their thoughts will never belong to you in the way that yours belong to you.

But for Ivan, it's really painful partly probably because of his history and that's partly why I think Frank can speak to him in a way that others can't. That what Frank says riles him so much so that he unconsciously helps catalyze Frank's breakdowns in ways he doesn't understand but that his wife points out. So yeah, he's someone who in order to kind of deal with the world and deal with the chaos of life, resorts to strategies that end up exacerbating that chaos.

And one strategy that he has, just intellectually, is the use of a monograph that he publishes to solve the Gettier problem which you mentioned. But that is the idea that it's a challenge to the view that knowledge is justified true belief and it derives from a brilliant paper published in the 1960's by a philosopher named Edmund Gettier. And in it, he presents a few very brief thought experiments that show that that theory breaks down in certain circumstances.

So you can have a true belief and cite evidence for it and, therefore, you seem to have a justified true belief, but he gives us cases in which there's no connection between your evidence and the truth and it just happens to be the case that you had thought that they were connected. And so to Ivan, this is an incredibly troubling problem because it's important to him that he know why he knows something if he knows it.

Which, I think, is a peculiar way to see the world but one that I found compelling hence my majoring in analytic philosophy. But anyway, that was one of the most fun parts, just as a fiction writer, to kind of show how his life ends up enacting that problem. But to not try to do so in a schematic way. He of course has evidence that his marriage is failing, it is, but his evidence bears no relationship to that fact even though he's just published what he thinks is a solution to the problem.

Adam: And I just want to read the chapter or this from chapter 17 where he describes his solution to the Gettier problem because it involves something else that I wanted to ask you about or simply to remark upon. "My solution to the Gettier problem rests on a thought experiment. To the question, how can we really know anything if we cannot rule out the possibility that our knowledge might be true simply by chance. I pose the following case, an archer draws his bow in a thunderstorm aiming it at a passing hawk. Though his technique is poor, the wind carries his arrow to the bird which falls dead."

One of the things I admired about the novel, especially on second read, is just how subtly you show us that our speech, our idioms, when I'm flapping my hands when I'm talking, when I call somebody a birdbrain, or when I see that students flock to a professor, or that someone has batty ideas, I think you do a really splendid idea just demonstrating how fully birds inhabit our ordinary speech in just the same way, it seems to me, that Frank - at one point, in a party, he stands up on a table and starts ranting about how the products of cows are everywhere in our life and their kind of absent presence.

And I thought, even Ivan's not aware of it, but there are birds and the killing of a bird in internal to his solution to this philosophic problem in a way that seems antithetical to the way that his wife thinks about birds which I know we need to get to. So I just wanted to remark upon that. But this might be a good time to talk a little bit about their marriage because the Gettier problem and particularly the inflection of it that involves inaccurate beliefs that actually lead to right conclusions seems to structure a pivotal moment in the novel where Ivan rushes to a bookstore and, maybe you can tell us what happens next. I mean many people will have read the novel but is this a spoiler alert? Are we supposed to be doing this?

Lindsay: I actually had Amherst Books in mind, 'cause you just use scaffolding of places and mine doesn't have too. So he misreads the voice of a friend of his wife who had called her and thinks that they're having an affair and bolts into the bookstore where he's giving a reading and confronts him.

And at this point, people who have encountered him will know that he's a pain and his voice is so saddled with his attempts to tamp himself down. And even the writing of the first third of the book was a strain at times because of that and at this point it started to write itself, a little bit earlier than this. But once he starts breaking down I just had to observe really, it didn't feel like writing because it felt like his libido was freed so to speak, even though he's destroying his life.

And so the language itself, his point of view in that sense, it's free and he is himself finally but it's too late because it's happening at the wrong time and it's as a result of a misunderstanding. I mean it felt to me like he was having a slow motion kind of catharsis. (Inaudible 29:34) once defined a novel as the change, and I'm gonna get this a little bit wrong. He spoke it out loud at a reading but the change in a character's personality prompted by a loss it does not understand.

I think something gets unlocked, tragicomically  it ruins the material aspects of his life. But to me it's wonderful what happens to him. He finally starts to live.

Adam: He cries for the first time.

Lindsay: Right.

Adam: He had talked about his inability to cry earlier. He hasn't had the ability to cry in years, he says. And then finally, after this cathartic moment, he's able to cry. And in a way the madman and the philosopher reach agreement on a definition of philosophy and up till that point, they hadn't agreed at all. In fact Frank seems scornful almost, at times, of what it is that Ivan does.

But I just want to read from the last pages here where Ivan and Frank are together in Frank's department in Vermont. " 'It's funny' I say."this is Ivan talking, " 'I've been alive for almost half a century and I don't know the first thing about anything.' 'Amen.' Frank slaps his knee, rousing Cordelia." Who is his cat. "I trail off, 'I used to think life would go like this, you get bashed around a bit, fuck up, lose people, and in the process figure out what really matters but now.' He sips from my water glass." It's Ivan still talking. " 'It's more like figuring out your life was never about you to begin with. You're not the hero, you're just someone in the cast.' 'I'll be damned.' Frank says. 'You're starting to sound like a philosopher.' "

So it's almost as though that catharsis and, as I said, the last word of the novel is 'begin' and so the catharsis in some way brings him into alignment, perhaps better attunement, with Frank. He himself becomes Frank in the adjectival sense, he begins speaking frankly or kind of candidly in alarming, disturbing ways to his colleagues.

But it's almost like the ability to speak truth in this novel, both in Frank and in Ivan, are incommensurable with the procedures that a college has or for regulating true statements. Tenure among them or true false machines inside or outside offices as well. This is novel about a marriage, certainly, and I want to get back to that, but it's also a novel about speaking the truth and nobody being able to hear it. He finally becomes a philosopher or his father in law says, you're finally beginning to sound like a philosopher at the very moment when he's lost his job as a philosopher.

Prue also speaks the truth in a way that seems to ruin her tenure case. So what is this novel saying, in each of these three characters, to speak the truth and an inability of, let's say the academy, to hear them.

Lindsay: I think you're picking up on something I was trying to explore, absolutely, which is what the institutionalization of an attempt to speak the truth or discover the truth that one could say the academy participates in the muzzling of that. But to me, I mean, you could accuse any institution of any variety of things. But to me what ha such pathos in the sense of the institution of the university is that it wants to move beyond those limits.

In a class that helped sow the seeds of this book which you taught, Plato and the poets, we read the whole sweep of Plato's works from the Apperatic Dialogues to the later works culminating in the laws. And one argument that you introduced us to was the view that Plato, even in his love of his mentor, Socrates, Plato who introduced Socrates' truth to us today, put to death figuratively Socrates in the later works. In his pivot away from the form of speech and the gentle undoing that Socrates encouraged in anyone he encountered on the street into the kind of system building that no longer had a place for Socrates, all in the name of love and all in the name of his protagonist.

And I just thought that was a beautiful and heartbreaking tragedy in itself that transcends its sequence. I never thought of this or of kind of wanting to write a campus novel or a kind of comedy about academia I guess because it came from a place, maybe ingenuous place, of love for the academy and love for an institution that unabashedly tries to learn for the sake of discovering as opposed to becoming a knowledge factory.

I mean as Socrates teaches us, to love something doesn't mean to kowtow to it and praise it constantly and yeah, I think that those were the kinds of institutions and how they try and fail to honor the attempt to seek truth was absolutely on my mind.

Adam: Let's talk about Prue because Prue is involved, it seems to me, in that exact dilemma. Prue is the daughter of Frank and has been invited to give a prestigious speech at the college where both Ivan and Prue teach. She studied critical theory which Ivan hates and she works on the study of animal languages.

She herself is, her mother is the child of holocaust survivors, so there's a kind of sense in which loss determines her life as well. But I want to talk about her speech. So the novel has three parts and in the first part, Ivan goes to pick up Frank and they're preparing for the speech and part one ends with the speech itself and part two deals with the immediate aftermath of that speech, a party in particular, and part three is what we've already talked about. It's Ivan's release and his new beginning but in a way the destruction of his material life as a philosopher.

But let's talk about Prue. Prue, there's a speech where she makes really profound claims and in some way it's related to the way that her father, a vegetarian, thinks about animals. but in a way it's dealing with her love of her own discipline. I want to read some of the passages that are really just barbed here and talk about hem as a kind of example of Socratic critique.

She talks about two experiments, the first experiment, and I'm quoting from a speech she gives and viewers need to imagine a very agust ceremony. The president's there, the dean is there, all the students are there, there are members of the public. It's a really wonderful occasion. So all eyes are on her, she's wearing a set of pearls that occupy Ivan's attention because he doesn't recognize them and he thinks they've been given to her by somebody else.

And this is what she says, " 'The first experiment represents that second dimension of science, basic research conducted for the sole purpose of furthering knowledge about the animal question. It demonstrates that voles, like humans, that the apparent silence between them is actually seething with sounds.' " Because the experiment shows that voles that are companions in some way behave differently in stress situations than voles who are solitary.

And so the experiment she's describing indicates that animals essentially, voles in particular, have modes of communication that escape our ability to understand them. I mean the first thing I have to say is, "silence seething with sound" sounds like a description of the field that this novel is able to observe. It seems like one of the conclusions that I came away with as a reader is that part of the vocation of the novel is to actually perceive this field of silence seething with sound in a way that it's protagonists can't.

Not from a God's eye perspective but from perspective that's neither philosophy, nor biolinguistics, nor the kind of prophetic kind of almost arrogance of somebody who immediately understands animal. So to me, The Study of Animal Languages, equally pertains to the languages that take place between Prue and Ivan.

But in any case, " 'Taken together, the experiments teach us a third obvious and more important lesson. That lesson will be my subject today. It's not about voles,' Prue says, 'but about the life sciences and it may have already occured to you. How, you might be wondering, can the same field of inquiry interpret the same animal, the vole, as both a being with a voice and simultaneously a proxy for human flesh.' " And I left out that essentially, the voles had been experimented on in other ways.

" 'Why, moreover, does its status, the vole's status as a human proxy, not prevent us from torturing it? The answer', she says 'is that the life sciences are pathological. Year after year, in paper after paper, we biologists interpret other animals as two contradictory phenomenon, subjects of their own worlds and objects to mutilate.' "

This is a really profound criticism of the way the life sciences treat animals. And, to me, it's mirrored by the inability of the analytic philosopher in the story, Ivan, to think clearly about animal languages. Or rather his idea of clarity prevents him from acknowledging that there is something like an animal language. Tell me a little bit about what she's after in this speech. In a response to a question, she claims that this is out of love. That she's making this critique of the life sciences out of love. Is she a reliable narrator in that instance. Help us understand why she makes this speech in the first place.

Lindsay: When she makes it, my understanding was that there's nothing in it that she would want to disavow and I think that that remains pretty much true over the few days that the novel takes place. But it's, as I hope will shine through in different ways, it was important to me to have one chapter that was just pure unadulterated speech and it's not in quotation marks either.

So but then to iind of explore how it is not heard or heard selectively and ramifies through people in certain ways and gets taken up for different purposes and that the whole thing is, in a way, her own speech act of saying, I'm claustrophobic in my marriage and in my career.

But that's not something that is clear to her when she says it. I think that it's coming from a genuine place in that anyone who takes a look at the literature on animals and animal models will detect a puzzling fact which is, in science they call it basic research versus applied research. So basic research conducted just for the sake of learning about other worlds, animal minds, et cetera, animal communication systems. And applied research, funded by the pharmaceutical industry conducted to develop drugs in the animal that then impact how we think and how we navigate the world.

I think what she's reacting to in a hyperbolic way is this dissonance and, you could say, unbridgeable abyss between treating the animal as a human proxy for developing the drugs that will keep us sane and treating it as this kind of alien to explore.

And so I think she's kind of responding to that feeling of feeling like there's something crazy that we're doing and we keep doing partly out of inertia and partly out of it's just how we've done things in the past. It was important to me that she be saying something for which one could make some kind of argument that there be something legible in what she was saying but that it also be so frated, as it clearly is, with the kind of crisi she's going through. And like Ivan, she doesn't really understand the kind of difficulties that she deals with which explain why she's spending her life with this person with whom she’s clearly terribly matched.

Back to your point about Frank and Ivan, these are two people who are both passionately interested in language and yet, unlike the bell example, there's nothing uniting, they seem to have an affinity but they could not be more extranged. And the seem to be both looking for a birds eye view of things. Him in his sense of a totalizing picture, her in her sense of a bird's actual point of view but that circle can't be squared in that case.

Adam: It's quite striking that the three characters that we've all talked about each miss the mark. They each misrecognized the speech of animals. They're passionately invented in each case in the question but in some way the novel stages a series of missed encounters with that.

So she's struggling with a contradiction internal to the life sciences, Ivan just totally forecloses on the question and really needs to in order for his own philosophical study of language to remain coherent, and Frank proposes to have immediate communication with animals. So what is the novel teaching us about what it means to be with animals? You know we're faced with the mass extinction of animals, this is going on during our lifetime and we are in a moment where there is a massive factory farming of birds on an ongoing basis.

Lindsay: So the novel is definitely saying something or engaging in this question. yeah, it's a question that haunts me and I mean, I think if you want to think about complicity, animals present a really fertile point of departure for that. I mean we're sitting on chairs that are made from their bodies so there's no opportunity really to live in such a way that you're not making use of instrumentalizing them, participating in suffering in some way. And that's, I think, what Frank reacts to.

But what I think is almost most interesting about the animal question is this fiction that it often invokes that these are these other interesting beings, almost like aliens, and oh, we should keep them around so that maybe we can learn more from them or enjoy touring their preserves which is an almost colonial kind of spirit. Whereas I think the real question is the human animal and how we've gotten to this vertiginous place of having conquered the Earth and realizing that we're going to be the only act in town.

There's a great Richard Wilbur poem about this called, "Advice to a Prophet" where he asks in his gentle yet subtly subversive way where we will find ourselves once all of the ways that we've understood ourselves, the bird brains, the battiness, the flocking, animals infuse not only our world physically but also our language. And I think that bodes poorly for how we will relate to each other and ourselves once they're gone.

So what I find compelling about thinking with animals is the kind of absurdity and comedy and horo that it brings home about how we're relating to ourselves and what we've been doing here. So far from kind of recruiting interesting tidbits in the way that popular science journalism does. I mean in useful ways but in ways that if one's sense of the animal is limited to that, it participates in the illusion that they are not about us and what we're doing. So I think that's why this wound up as a story about humans.

Adam: Let's talk about forgiveness a little bit because it seems to me that one way that Prue is able to think about the relationship to animals and what it means to be with animals right now is proposed to her by a novelist whose name is Dalton Field, is that right? Who seems to have interesting ideas about what it means to be in a marriage or at least to be in a love relationship and also what it means to think about the problems that she thinks about in her lecture.

I'm gonna read a passage where he intervenes in the question and answer after her lecture. We've already had one person storm out by this point, Jeremiah Wood, an ornithologist who championed Prue's application leaves and he'll later write an email saying, I can't basically support your tenure anymore after this. You have John Sawyer, professor of linguistic who poses an extremely sharp question that she doesn't entirely respond to but it's in response to his question that she says, "I love my field." Which had prompted my question about Socrates earlier.

But he raises a question and Ivan by this point is already a little bit on the verge of a kind of (Inaudible 51:21) like jealousy towards Dalton. He's beginning to nurse a sense of kind of sense that there's something going on between Dalton and Prue and I'm just gonna read Dalton's question. Dalton, by the way, for viewers who haven't read the book, Dalton is author of a novel called Forgive Me Not so that would be relevant.

"A shuffling as the microphone is passed. 'I think it's magnificent.' The questioner booms, 'Your implication that we're not the wiser animals but the demented ones. That insanity, not wisdom, explains our dominance.' " This is Ivan talking. "Dalton, his legs are crossed, one arm draped across the back of a neighboring seat probably occupied by someone he doesn't even know. 'Not homo sapiens but homo infermum.' He adds, 'Why else would we have vandalized the Earth.' Give me a fucking break, I think, as I close my eyes Quinn whispers..." Quinn is a colleague. "Quinn whispers, 'He's great.' "

This is Dalton again, " 'You've raised the question of what other animals might say to us if we would listen.' He continues, 'What, I wonder, would you say to them?' 'Ah.' Prue smiles mischievously, 'Good question. I don't know, forgive me?' The reference to his book title prompts a ripple of warm laughter from the in the know. 'Fair enough.' He says. 'I could break his knees.' "

And I guess maybe it's inaccurate to say that the jealousy is still forming because the jealousy is perfectly pronounced at that point. But it seems to me that forgiveness, that's really the last word of her lecture. You know he says, "What, I wonder, would you say to the animals. Forgive us." It strikes me that that's related to a passage that Ivan reads from Dalton's novel right in the moment when he's about to go over the edge. As their marriage is breaking up.

And what I'm driving at or why this occurs to me is that it strikes me if humans are the measure of all things and therefore if the proposition of modern civilization is that everything revolves around humanity, that's a profoundly lonely argument. So I'm just gonna read this passage. This is from Dalton Field's novel, Forgive Me Not and this happens right before Prue and Ivan break up. And I'm gonna ask you about forgiveness in a love relationship and also forgiveness and what it means for the animals to forgive but I want to read this passage first.

Essentially, Dalton is writing a passage about lovers and he's basically saying it's no one's fault that they were so lonely. Now I'm quoting from his novel, "It is possible that this loneliness was a condition of the altered love that awaited them later in life. They would feel for each other a new and quiet warmth, she imagined, consisting in their having acknowledged their failure to disclose themselves to one another and forgiven it."

So I want to read that again 'cause it's really, that seems to me a really emblematic statement particularly given what Prue and Ivan then later say in the novel when they are essentially realizing that they are going to dissolve their marriage and go their separate ways. 'Cause it seems to me they don't forgive themselves. "They would feel for each other a new and quiet warmth, she imagines, consisting in having acknowledged their failure to disclose themselves to one another and forgiven it."

So I guess, what is this novel teaching us about the role of forgiveness? I should say, you're the author of two books, forgiveness also figures into the 2012 novel that you wrote, Town of Shaddows.

Lindsay: What you're hearing is not sort of my premeditated ideas that got fleshed out here but really my thinking with you on this. There's a book that came out called Love in the Anthropocene a couple years ago by Bonnie Nadzam and the philosopher Dale Jamieson and in it they ask what the anthropocene, the emergence of humans as a geologic force on the planet but with that the kind of transformation of the natural world into an artifice will do to our ability to relate to each other and to love. And they invoke an idea from Iris Murdoch about mature love, or really any love I guess, as honoring the autonomy of the loved object.

So they're asking, can one develop a healthy relation to something that is a projection. So I mean probably not, at least that was Murdoch's wager. But no, I mean I think that it's the kind of think that's so staggering when you try to think about like if there were an interspecies UN like how we would fare.

And there's this really wonderful philosopher named Anthony Weston about the seeming paradox of the safer we get the seeming more frightened we become and I think there's a corollary in the forgiveness, guilt, Anthropocene situation of kind of sort of the more we acknowledge the kind of harm we're doing and the wonders that nature holds. And the more that science this thing that, in the West, kind of famously disavowed its relationship to nature and declared other beings ghostless machines is now rediscovering terms like sentience and consciousness in them and publishing them in their scientific papers.

Even as we acknowledge that, there's this inner shrinking I think from what it would mean to actually think that. Because if we actually thought that and we actually treated other beings as sentient or as persons, as some have argued we should, that would be devastating for us. Because then our entire history would show up to us in a very different way. It doesn't have to be dramatic, I mean you can think about the recent ruling in India, a judge declared all non-humans persons which had implications for humans of course. I think the legal term is en loco parentis.

Adam: So I want to return to this question of forgiveness, forgiveness is on the one hand on the table in the novel. Dalton field proposes it as the mode of the relation that we should adopt towards the animal kingdom. And it's hard to know whether Prue is joking or not when she says forgive me. But forgiveness is also on the table in the relationship between Prue and Ivan.

That's not just any relationship, that's a relationship that I think in some ways is allegorical to a college in that she's from the natural sciences and he's from the department of philosophy and arguably from the humanities. And so what holds for them in their marriage is in some way allegorical of how a college relates to itself.

But I want to read this passage again and then I just want to kind of go to Ivan and Prue at the end of the novel. So Dalton says, I guess in a relationship in which loneliness has been mitigated, There's something like a forgiveness for the failure of of each to disclose themselves to another which is a really interesting way of thinking about love, I think.

So that's what Dalton says, they disagree over Dalton at that point, and then at 215, later in the novel, Prue and Ivan are talking to each other and this is right after Ivan has had this whole crisis. He's had a catharsis, he's cried for the first time in a long time, and she has just said, I'm gonna take this fellowship and she's basically leaving and implicitly leaving him.

So they're in the center for ornithology, which she helped found, "They're gazing up into the branches where a pair of finches are pecking at each other. 'I've been so lonely with you.' She says.  I take her free hand, stroking the back of it with my thumb but it stays limp. ' I've been lonely too.' I say." And then they go on to talk about their marriage.

Do they forgive each other at the end here and that's why they go their separate ways or do they not forgive each other for not disclosing themselves and that's why they go their separate ways?

Lindsay: I think that part of what they were dealing with, at least my sense, is anger at themselves for having misunderstood themselves to such an extent that they tethered their lives to a person who was clearly not right for them and so I think there's forgiveness going on here but it's also sort of forgiveness of themselves and that's what enables them to kind of just speak to each other for the first time.

There is something that drew them together that they don't understand but the dissonance is such that it's just too costly. But so I think, and that's what I think made it especially sad for me to go through it in the writing process, was realizing that they hadn't reached a relation to themselves that they were able to kind of share their lives with another person.

Because on the one level, they're not a good match but that's a little bit of a cop out answer because I think both of them really struggle with their relationship to themselves and that prevents them from forming a robust mutual  understanding from forming a partnership in general. So in a way, for me, and it's a relationship that I think, ironically because Frank's the crazy person, but to me he has a much more healthy relationship to himself than either one of them do.

He's not superegoic concerns about success, professional success don't really torment him because he's so tormented by other things. But what I think the marriage teaches them and ultimately why I think it's wonderful that they were married is that they realize this about themselves, that they had kind of been cramped in themselves, and that they're now in a place where they can kind of sally forth in a more authentic mode.

Adam: They both say at the end, in various ways, what were we thinking? What was I thinking? For the first time, these two people whose job is to know seem to come into self knowledge. And it's interesting and they wouldn't necessarily even know whether they were disclosing or not because they don't have that self knowledge.

Lindsay: I think especially because they do have witnesses in the sense of the birds but there's of course an abyss there that has been there throughout but now they're literally there in this shrine to the attempt to know another mind, failing to disclose themselves but still reaching I think a more healthy relation to themselves. And therefore, like to their ability to relate moving forward.

Adam: Why don't we shift a little bit and talk more generally about the process of writing and how you imagine the reader. What do you hope that readers take from your book?

Lindsay: I mean I guess I could only hope that they would feel as I felt finishing it which was freer to approach old questions in new ways.

Adam: I'm sure some viewers watching this are themselves aspiring writers, what advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Lindsay: Well cultivate rejections. As a teacher of mine once said, get enough that you can wallpaper at least a bathroom with them because if you don't, you're really not doing yourself a service. Yeah, I mean you do it because you have to, it's a crazy thing to do. it's a form of controlled psychosis. But it's also, if you want to do it, you know it's the most thrilling thing you'll ever experience when you're doing it and when it's flowing.

So I would say just if you have to do it, then organize your life in such a way that you can do it and you can cultivate that as opposed to kind of getting cowed by how difficult it is to be a capital W writer. I think laboratories started as appendages of museums where alchemists would smelt iron. For me, it's always been helpful to think about fiction writing, and writing creatively of any kind, in that way. As something that sustains you but that is a little bit off center in a way that peripheral vision can enable you to see more.

So I would say be a little suspicious of advice because it's usually just nostalgia disguised as someone had said, who I forget. yeah, just do it if you have to.

Adam: Well on that note I think, I want to congratulate you again, your novel The Study of Animal Languages comes out tomorrow on Viking Press, no less. It's been a great pleasure to speak with you today and I look forward to reading your next one.

Lindsay: It's been a joy, thank you so much.