by Lynn Turner
in Animality & the Moving Image, eds. L. Macmahon & M. Lawrence, 2013.
The beguiling 2008 film adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella, Dean Spanley, prescribes what I call an ‘animal... more
The beguiling 2008 film adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella, Dean Spanley, prescribes what I call an ‘animal cure’ for the melancholia of an elderly man. This man, Fisk, maintains an extremely formalised relationship with his surviving son, Henslowe, with whom he can scarcely discuss the recent deaths of his wife and his other son. Henslowe becomes fascinated with the highly convincing stories produced by the local clergyman, the eponymous Dean, of his life as a dog when enjoying the scent of the Hungarian liquor, Tokay. Realising that the dog, in whose name the Dean speaks, uncannily recalls the inexplicably lost pet of his father’s childhood, Henslowe effects his animal cure through the means of a dinner party. From the moment that this pet, Wag, is ‘returned’ through the medium of the Dean’s apparent recollections, Fisk can begin to cry and thus to admit his grief. Yet from this moment too, the intoxication with Dean Spanley fades: the last scene sees a happy Fisk accompanied by a new pet dog.
Through the inhalation of Tokay, the Dean is transformed. His olfactory intake of the other speaks of an identification named in the narrative as reincarnation but that invites speculation on death, mourning, transference and friendship among and for animals, specifically the dog (as man’s best friend). Women may inhabit the periphery of this film, but the motivation and the action of Dean Spanley remain within the homosocial preserve of men and/as male dogs. With the turning point of the film located around the dinner table, this homosociality has the sense of Freud’s legendary ‘band of brothers’ enjoying the primal feast. They gorge on the adventures told by the Dean as these adventures are gorgeously depicted by the film matching human voice-over to canine action. Dean Spanley thus finesses, as did Freud, whether identification with the ancestor ritually consumed at such feasts, was with an animal or the Father.
This essay will explore the different ‘mouth-works’ of mourning named as introjection or incorporation by Abraham and Torok (in light of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’) in the twin deaths haunting Dean Spanley. The terse Fisk and loquacious Dean exemplify these processes. Incorporation denies loss, such as that of bereavement, keeping pain incommunicatively buried. Fisk radically reduces linguistic expression and likewise reduces eating to the functional typically involving the same food (the descriptive ‘hot pot’). He thus refuses metaphor – the means by which meaning would circulate in the world. The Dean, in contrast, produces a sociality through his stories, albeit unconsciously. Given form at the dinner party in which words and food – in this case Tokay – are exchanged, the Dean inadvertently teaches Fisk how to ‘eat well,’ in Derrida’s phrase, which is to say how to mourn, releasing melancholia’s hold. This essay will explore how animals specifically that exceptional animal or exception to animality, the pet dog, figure in the ‘communion of empty mouths’ that spur humans towards linguistic community. It will ask after the undoing of the narrow psychoanalytic construal of language through Dean Spanley’s emphasis on scent and Derrida’s notion of the trace, as well as the uneven relation to mourning for humans and for animals that the film stages.
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