ABSTRACT
In Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), George Saunders presents a grotesque tableau of a Victorian Christmas, with Jane Ellis, ‘a beautiful child in white, with a long rope of hair hanging down my [her] back,’ gazing curiously into a butcher’s shop, its festive display consisting of ‘a marvellous canopy of carcasses: deer with the entrails pulled up and out and wired to the outside of the bodies like tremendous bright-red garlands; pheasants and drakes hung head-down, wings spread by use of felt-covered wires.’ To assuage a burgeoning tantrum, Ellis’s father buys her a deer carcass which he straps to the carriage; they drive on with ‘the limp deer dribbling behind its thin blood-trail’ (Saunders 2017: 76) across the beautiful countryside. Tempting as it is to read this incident as reassuring evidence of our emergence from a barbaric past, more challengingly, it highlights the ongoing human tendency to overlook nonhuman suffering and reminds us of the complexities of cross-species relations, which are alternately sublime and horrific, playful and violent.
