Re: Bear Stories

[Greg Garrard <g.garrard@bathspa.ac.uk>]

I've had quite a bear-heavy reading list for my 'Animal Writes' module here
at Bath Spa - though I've also included some otters and pigs to keep it a
bit relevant for British students. I use Engel's 'Bear' and compare it to
Marie Darrieusecq's extremely odd dystopian metamorphosis narrative 'Pig
Tales', and Faulkner contrasted with 'Bears Discover Fire', a Terry Bisson
short story from 'Future Primitive'). I also do a week on bear films,
covering Disney's 'Brother Bear', Artaud's 'The Bear' and of course 'Grizzly
Man'. The latter gives me an opportunity to indulge my
Sartre-meets-Schwarzenegger Herzog impression Richard kindly notes, but also
to consider the futile shuttling between the hapless, demented
anthropomorphism and the allegedly unillusioned existential nausea we find
before and behind the camera respectively. I'm afraid most students find it
as unintentionally hilarious as I do, in part I suspect because it allows
them to indulge national stereotypes of both Germans and Californians as
utterly lacking in ironic awareness.

I remember reading Sartre's account in 'La Nausee' of Rocquentin staring at
a tree root and being utterly revolted by its blank facticity. I guess I was
rather impressed by it at first, and yet it's really just another version of
Cartesian solipsism. Which is neatly paradoxical in the context of 'Grizzly
Man', because it is the object of the documentary - Treadwell - who exhibits
all the puerile melodramatic subjectivity (whilst submitting himself to the
bears even unto death), while Herzog assumes an objective narrative
authority (even interposing himself between us and the horrible death-tape)
that is at the same time utterly solipsistic. Oh God, now I'm really
confused...
Greg