In Only the Animals, celestial bodies and space symbolize the close relationship between humans and animals across time and place—a relationship that’s sometimes mutually beneficial, but sometimes violent. This symbolism is clearest in the story “I, the Elephant, Wrote this,” as the elephant narrator grows up hearing stories and legends about elephants whose souls now take the form of constellations in the sky. All the elephants in the stars died because people killed them, so the constellations are ways to remember the history of human-animal relationships. In “A Letter to Sylvia Plath,” the dolphin Sprout expands on this idea. She notes that because of the close relationship between ancient people and dolphins, people found the shape of a dolphin in the starry sky and named the constellation after dolphins (Delphinus). The stars, in this sense, are both records of positive relationships between people and animals, as well as proof of a past that, at times, has been violent and cruel.
Part of the book focuses on outer space itself, and in this section the symbolism becomes more sinister. In the tortoise Plautus’s story, the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is at its height—and in the quest to get a man on the moon, both countries send animal test subjects, or “proxy astronauts,” into space to see if living beings can even survive in space. Most of these animals, Plautus explains, are “one-way passengers,” meaning that they die at some point in their journey. And while Plautus is proud of animals’ contributions to science, the book nevertheless underscores the implications of sending dozens of animals to space, in many cases knowing they’re going to die. Indeed, though Plautus sees her time orbiting the moon as the pinnacle of her lifelong quest to understand solitude, the solitude she experiences in her space capsule is one that humans imposed upon her. While the stars sometimes symbolize a more generous, giving relationship between humans and animals in the book, space itself represents a relationship where animals have little power.
Stars and Space Quotes in Only the Animals
The Soviets were sending animals into space like there was no tomorrow (which, for the animals, there mostly wasn’t), desperate to finalise their research on the viability of manned space flight and the effects on living creatures of prolonged weightlessness and radiation from the Van Allen belts, and get a man on the moon before the Americans. They’d heard rumors that the Americans had sent a bunch of black mice into space and the cosmic rays had turned them grey; this would be undesirable in humans.
But there is mechanical trouble while he’s up there and instead of getting sips of water or tablets, he starts getting zapped by the electric pads wired to the soles of his feet. He gets back to earth, gets out of the capsule and the NASA guys are smiling, holding his hands, but Enos is fucking mad. This used to make me laugh. But up in space, I just had to think about this, about Enos getting buzzed on his feet for doing the right thing—the right thing! what he’s been trained to do!—and I wanted to bite somebody’s face off.
“Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,” the matriarch warned. “It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.”
As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy—we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
We take killing a human very hard. It is as taboo for us as killing our own babies. We recognise in you what your ancients used to recognise in us and understood as sacred a long time ago, when killing a dolphin was punishable by death. You used to think of us as being closer to the divine than any other animal on earth, as being messengers and mediators between you and your gods. You honoured us with Delphinus, our own constellation in the northern sky.
Stars and Space Symbol Timeline in Only the Animals
