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In The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) Carol Adams argues that
animals have become absent referents, whose fate is transmuted into a metaphor for someone else's existence or fate. Metaphorically, the absent referent can be anything whose original meaning is undercut as it is absorbed into a different hierarchy of meaning; in this case the original meaning of animals' fates is absorbed into a human-centered hierarchy. . . . The absent referent is both there and not there.
(53)
Against this system of representation in which animals function as absent referents she proposes a method of critical reading based on a "vegetarian's privileging of the literal" (117). In this practice meat loses its fungibility as a signifier and is reconnected to the literal death of animals. Adams' call to return to the literal meaning of texts and representation is simultaneously compelling and puzzling. What, after all, is the "original meaning" of a subject both within and outside of discourse? How can critics claim to know the literal meaning of a sign? Does this claim to represent literal meaning occur from a place somehow beyond language and discourse? Is Adams guilty of what Michael Riffatere calls the "referential fallacy" (231), wherein the critic claims to bypass textuality and interpretation and access the extra-discursive object itself? As critics, what hermeneutical approaches might we use that pay heed to Adams' privileging of the literal without abandoning the import of metaphor, metonymy, and the act of critical interpretation altogether?
Adams' theory of the absent referent, and the questions that dog her theory, inform my reading of Marian Engel's Bear (1976) and J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals (2001). Both texts are concerned, in their form and content, with representing animals beyond the logic of the absent referent but are also skeptical about any claim to literality. Despite both texts' struggle to represent animals, however, critical readings of the works reveal an unnerving consensus that interprets animals strictly as absent referents. Louis Tremaine, for instance, argues that "Coetzee's personal interest in and respect for the conscious lives of animals are quite genuine, but the insight these passages hold for a reader of Coetzee's novels bears more importantly on human experience, on the human condition of 'embodiedness'" (598; emphasis...