Toward History and the Creaturely: Intertextual Literary Value Space in Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Eating Animals'

Abstract

Jonathan Safran Foer's exploration of the language of human-nature engagements critically attends the value space as a site of the exchange of values located in society, transferred to environment and fed back to the individual. Over and above a creative representation of how the environment relates to human values and environmental sensibility, Foer discloses the unexplored areas of our humanity to outline engagements stimulated by a moral outlook which suggests the need for more meaningful relations, those born both from cultural and ecological relations together. He does this through an exploration of what constitutes the creaturely. Foer's narratological output to date, consistently figures familial relations as a literary value space wherein the geopolitical context colours idiosyncratic, historically contingent and localized inflections of values. Earlier novels suggest the many ways in which relations are understood in terms beyond value: intimacy, the familial and proximity inhere in a value space that operates beyond the parameters of utility and pleasure. In 'Eating Animals' (Foer, J. S. (2009). 'Eating animals'. London: Hamish Hamilton) Foer advances these ideas by outlining the relations between language, animality and family in order to deconstruct species barrier dualisms and to move beyond the language of intrinsic value. His text, therefore, highlights the capacities of the imagination to dwell on meaningful ideas of nurturing and of sustainable relations.