GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2019/20
GAVIN O’HEA
‘“An Introduction to the Hovkaander,” by Dr François Didion’
The hovkaander (Taraxius dionysia), to which I have devoted my life’s work, is the only known extant species in the family Taraxiae, and is one of the best-documented evolutionary examples of a shapeshifter. Thought to have developed in tandem with humans through a process of host-parasite coevolution, the hovkaander began to take its current form (changeable though that form may be) around 300,000 years ago, coinciding with the development of the human capacity for cumulative culture. A hovkaander survives by attaching itself to a human community, taking the form best suited to the sabotage of any performances or rituals that are significant to that group’s cohesion, identity or wellbeing. It lingers in the community only as long as its intervention goes undiscovered, denying the community catharsis and feeding on the psychic energy of the resultant discontent.[1]
The fossil record confirms that early hovkaanders had a fixed form, resembling gaunt, upright, bipedal mustelids, and that their mimicry was limited to their vocal apparatus, which they used to disrupt human gatherings through the simulation of the cries of predators or rival tribes. However, as the performative arts diversified,[2] so too did the forms of the hovkaander, until, as George Lewis Burgess observes in his controversial work The Skin Changer’s Banquet, “the myriad of shapes available to the hovkaander seem to rival the endless possibilities of art itself.”[3] My work, indebted to the Barcelona School as well as to Burgess’s iconoclastic approach, has focused on the degree to which this relationship is reciprocal. The emergence of genre in Ancient Greek theatre, for example, may have been a response to hovkaander predation, for a failure to adhere to the strict formal expectations of comedy or tragedy would reveal the shapeshifter’s presence among the performers.[4] This would not, however, have prevented a hovkaander from derailing a performance through the infiltration of the audience, which affords the hovkaander the anonymity of the group and has thus established itself as the creature’s most consistent strategy for survival. I bore witness to sources during my residency at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens that suggest playwrights would sedate hovkaanders and smuggle them into the audiences of rivals at the Dionysia, so that they would awaken and undercut the performance just as it reached its climax.[5] It is thought, therefore, that hovkaander influence on the patterns of human artistic development could be enormous, though quantifying it is an elusive process, since an artist whose performances have become host to a hovkaander tends to fall into obscurity after a series of disappointing receptions.
The position of the Barcelona School, as first postulated by Josep Miguel Font, is that the extent of the hovkaander’s parasitic relationship with humanity may extend even further. I recall a lecture of Font’s I attended as an undergraduate in which he cited the example of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln during a performance at the Ford Theatre, an event that surely would have spoiled the evening for all others present. Using this example as a springboard, he theorised that any number of political assassinations could have been perpetrated by the hovkaander, on the basis that all political discourse is essentially performative. Anthrozoologists of the Exeter School tend to reject Font’s arguments on the basis that they are too general in their understanding of performance, and fail to account for the specific, ritualised type of catharsis that derives from the artistic tradition. My close professional history with Josep Miguel Font perhaps clouds my ability to pass an objective judgement on the matter, but at the very least I’ll concede that the Exeter School’s rebuttal highlights the centrality to the debate of the “Problem of Catharsis”: whether political or social spectacle is distinct from the spectacle of a staged performance.
Though he became notorious for his work on the future of human-hovkaander relations, in his early career Burgess had a fondness for the study of the introduction of the species into The Americas, and it was his work in this field that led him to abandon the orthodoxy of his University of Exeter colleague Thomas Warburton and embrace a continental solution to the Problem of Catharsis. He often cited the example of blue-footed booby populations on the pacific coast of South America, which have declined steadily since the accidental introduction of the hovkaander to the continent by Dutch mariners in the 17th century.[6] For the longest time it was unclear what had precipitated this decline, until the 1980s when a team led by Ecuadorian naturalist Gabriela Estrada Hoffman captured footage of a hovkaander intervening in the male booby’s courtship dance by appearing as a group of indignant howler monkeys and feeding on the bird’s resultant sexual frustration. Burgess argued that this proves the ability of the hovkaander to feed on the disruption of any ritualised, performative behaviour, not merely the collection of activities that we tend to call the performing arts. The response from Warburton and his acolytes, alongside no small amount of slander and vitriol,[7] was to accuse Burgess of constructing a deceptive argument, that to use the blue-footed booby as evidence of a broader relationship between the hovkaander and human culture was to disregard the specific evolutionary relationship that produced the hovkaander in the first place, and that, besides, the performing arts come from a desire to create, and are therefore a close psychic relative of courtship. Burgess did, however, find an unlikely ally in this debate, in the shape of Josep Miguel Font, who applauded his contribution to the foundations of the Barcelona School argument. During this time, many saw Burgess as the progenitor of a bold new alternative that transcended the clannish allegiances of Barcelona and Exeter, but this was before the descent he made with me into the catacombs of Paris and the ensuing publication of The Skin Changer’s Banquet that heralded his decline.
I sometimes fear that my own career may be doomed to mirror that of Burgess, for my earliest work in the study of reciprocity in human-hovkaander relations were also with regard to the history of the species in The Americas. One case study that fascinated me endlessly in my Barcelona days was that of the American avant-garde composer Donald Steel. In 1956 he wrote a piece for any combination of instruments entitled Six-Minute Surprise, in which the score instructs the musicians to play not a single note for the duration of the performance. His stated aim was to encourage an audience to engage with the ambient sound around them in the same way they would a piece of music. However, as his private journals attest, he anticipated that the introduction of a hovkaander to the performance, in the Dionysian tradition, might produce a facsimile of human music in an attempt to disrupt the ambience and subvert audience expectation, opening new possibilities for aleatory through “preparing” a hovkaander the way one might a piano. During the piece’s debut, for which Steel illegally imported a hovkaander to the United States from Italy, the creature set off the venue’s sprinkler system and then proceeded to assume Steel’s appearance and defecate on a child.[8]
An elegant counterpoint, perhaps, to the abandon with which the hovkaander feasted upon the avant-garde of the 1950s, is to be found in the alternative music scene of the 1980s, where a chaotic or disruptive environment was often seen as desirable for an authentic concert-going experience, and in which the species was therefore slow to take root. There are fringe theories that propose that the eventual absorption of that movement’s luminaries into the mainstream was a consequence of hovkaander predation, arguing that the only way to actually rob such an audience of its catharsis would be to take their scene away from them, but the Barcelona and Exeter Schools are united in their assertion that this would be contrary to a social parasite’s basic need to sustain itself without killing the host. What interests me, however, is that this scene’s resistance to the hovkaander is not an anomaly, but instead seems to belong to a pattern, known as Kessler’s Rule, that extends to most countercultural movements.
Using the Barcelona School’s position on the Problem of Catharsis as a foundation, I attempted in my youth to map Kessler’s Rule onto the countercultural landscape of the May 1968 events in my native France; the crux of my argument was that the gradual, inevitable reassertion of the old cultural hegemony in the following years was suggestive of an enormous hovkaander population feeding on the discontent of the country’s workers and students. I understand now with age that the immutability of our society comes not from some vast, parasitic horror, but from a fear that is profoundly human. Indeed, at the time Font, who supervised much of my Barcelona work himself, cautioned against such analysis, arguing that it overstepped the humble bounds of our remit as anthrozoologists. I recall the comment he left on the first draft of my thesis, in a laconic Catalan that the translation will no doubt spoil: “leave such things to the poets, brother.”
Years later I thought again on Font’s words when George Lewis Burgess sat down and explained to me, at a café on Rue Monge, the reason for his visit to Paris, and I told him that his hypothesis belonged to the realm of speculative fiction.
A performance, he said, is received at the point of action, where it is experienced by an audience. The written work, on the other hand, must be altered at the point of writing, not reading, to manipulate the reception. These two points in time could be vastly divergent, with no localised point of catharsis, providing a clear defensive barrier against any hovkaander that might seek to intervene and parasitise a written work. Nevertheless, insisted Burgess, there was a distinct chance that the hovkaander had already evolved to surpass that barrier.
“I promise you, François, it’s not without precedent. Have you encountered the plant Schistostega wandalica?”
I confessed that I had not.
“It’s a moss,” he continued, “a marvellous thing, really. As far as we know it only grows in this one cave in Mongolia, where it covers a series of Palaeolithic wall paintings. The interesting part is not one speck of moss touches unpainted wall. Now, what does that tell us? Well, it tells us that the moss must be incapable of growing without the paintings, that it feeds on them somehow, right? Naturally, one would assume that the moss synthesises chemical energy from the pigment. And yet, - here’s the clincher - the paintings are perfectly preserved, not a trace of damage to the colour. It’s not feeding on the painting. it’s feeding on the art.”
The hovkaander, he believed, had developed a similar adaptation through convergent evolution, in response to the selective pressure of our cultural shift towards writing. This he could prove to me if I would accompany him on an expedition into the catacombs of Paris in search of the Graveyard of Books.[9] He confessed that his initial interest in the Graveyard had been purely personal, as a lifelong bibliophile, but that he had subsequently begun to see in the pattern of anti-climax that attended the folklore of the place the unmistakeable hand of hovkaander manipulation. There was a specimen down there, he was sure, and it was feeding on the library of Alain Hirsch. Furthermore, he told me with an air of boyish pride, he had managed to track down Rosalie Menard, who as a young punk had rediscovered the Graveyard, and that she had given him an old hand-drawn map of the area so that he might find the creature himself. All he needed was a credible witness.
Our entry point was a narrow opening hewn into the wall of a métro tunnel, bristling with graffiti and smelling faintly of rainwater. As we descended the graffiti grew sparser until the walls were of bare stone, and the damp air hung in our throats. I shone my torch onto the wooden boards, fractured as though by humans or animals, that splayed from the frame of an arched door, and Burgess told me with quiet delight that this was the place.
The hovkaander, like the great white shark, does not fare well in captivity, and seems incapable of adapting to zoos or menageries, where it finds itself as the spectacle of performance, and thus starves in a futile attempt to disappoint its audience. They’re roving, migratory creatures, dependent on the ignorance of their host, and they tend to move on as soon as their presence is known. I cannot say that what we found in the Graveyard of Books was a hovkaander, but I know for certain that it had been there undisturbed for decades. It looked like a rock, hemispherical and smooth, perhaps the size of a golden retriever, and it sat on an old reading table at the room’s heart. Books lay open in concentric circles around the table as far as the walls, upon which more books were arranged in efficient rows, like the walls of a wine cellar. The books on the floor that I stooped to examine seemed to share no common subjects or themes; some were liturgical, others were histories or biographies or poetry, and one, in the far corner of the room, was a beautifully illustrated bestiary. Candles were arranged in such a way that no book was obscured by the shadow of another, and all books could be read, for someone with sufficiently sharp eyesight, in clockwise semi-circular arcs that tracked the curvature of the rock’s face, like the rings of a gas giant.
In The Skin Changer’s Banquet Burgess claims that when he returned to catalogue these books the rock had disappeared, and he later observed that many of the texts in Hirsch’s collection, which had previously been forgotten, were undergoing a process of critical reappraisal. He insisted for the remainder of his life that the hemispherical rock we encountered in the Graveyard of Books was a massive, engorged hovkaander, and that to appear as a rock would be a form ambiguous enough to rob our expedition of the conclusive answer that would offer us catharsis.[10] I did not share his conviction, and Font cautioned me against further involvement, fearing how it might reflect on the Barcelona School. Burgess and I met only once more, at the reception after a TEDx event in Manchester where he was poorly received. He had become a grandfatherly figure, very Methodist, and he spoke about fishing as a boy on the River Dart.
Even after Burgess’s death, Warburton and his acolytes continued to denounce The Skin Changer’s Banquet whenever they could. Most of their outrage was directed at the book’s incendiary conclusion, in which Burgess reiterates his claim that if the hovkaander were to find ways of preying on the written work, where the point of reception is staggered across many individual readings over an extended period of time, then it would become capable of sustaining itself on a single meal for as long as a once-celebrated writer’s gradual descent into ignominy. He asserts that this development has already begun, and that when hovkaander control of the written work is total we will adapt to become a post-linguistic culture of unfiltered shamanic experience. The first sign, however, will be a tendency for works of literature to come to an abrupt and disappointing end;
Footnotes
[1] Though some draw comparisons between the hovkaander and the ibrox, which compels its host to make poor life choices and then feeds on the wasted potential, there are no confirmed taxonomic similarities, as the hovkaander is a shapeshifter belonging to the order Metamorphidae and the ibrox a predatory thought-form of the order Cogitaridae. For further reading on the ibrox, I recommend The Language Virus in Fiction and Reality, by William Stewart Morrison.
[2] Allow me to clarify my use of certain terms in this essay to refer to the arts. When I use the term ‘written work’ this perhaps reveals my logocentric bias, for I have never been a great visualiser, but I use this term broadly to signify all of the arts that are mediated in some way, whether they be written, drawn, painted, recorded, captured or generated. The ‘performative arts’, by contrast, are taken to mean those directly expressed through a human conduit, and directly received by a live audience in real time.
[3] George Lewis Burgess, The Skin Changer’s Banquet (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2006), p. 19.
[4] In The Skin Changer’s Banquet, Burgess speculates that the very existence of writing may have emerged due to the selective pressure of hovkaander predation upon performance.
[5] The taxonomic name of the hovkaander, taraxius dionysia, derives from its pivotal role in the shaping of these performances, and sources of the time often conflate the creature’s actions with the will of Dionysus himself. One can find an excellent discussion of the hovkaander’s significance to ancient Greek religion in Marina Kessler’s essay ‘Mythological Story Structures and the Taraxian Climax’.
[6] Though the exact etymology of the word ‘hovkaander’ remains unclear, it derives from Dutch, and was adopted into English during this period. Some English-language sources of the time use the cognate word ‘bobcander’, but this has fallen out of usage, with the notable exception of in the Anglophone Caribbean. In the Spanish of South America, the prevailing term is the related ‘jócander’, in contrast to the Iberian ‘tarajión’. In French we call the creature ‘l’eaucandre’.
[7] In an interview with National Geographic, Warburton once famously described Burgess as a “bloody Dartington pagan”.
[8] My fascination with this anecdote is a little morbid, but I must confess that my childhood in 1970s Paris among the soixante-huitards impressed upon me a certain anarchic delight in the unexpected that I have yet been unable to shake. George Lewis Burgess once suggested that it was inevitable, with such a tendency, that I should be drawn to study so unpredictable a species as the hovkaander.
[9] The Graveyard of Books (La Nécropole du Livre) was thought, for much of the 20th century, to be an urban myth. In 1934 the catholic priest Alain Hirsch received from God a vision of the Second World War, and had a vault built into the catacombs as a place to hide his extensive personal library from the Nazis. Hirsch was shot and killed in 1943 by Willy Schröder, a German soldier who was drunk on guard duty, and no written records survived the war to testify to the Graveyard’s existence. However, in 1986 a group of squatters broke into a cavern housing a large number of books dating to the 1930s and earlier, which is believed to be Hirsch’s elusive vault. At the time there was an outcry among conservative politicians, who used the incident as a pretext to clamp down on squatting, and the Archdiocese of Paris quickly laid claim to the site, boarding it up and threatening action against any who might seek it out.
[10] No traces of hovkaander DNA could be obtained from the Graveyard of Books, but this alone was not enough to satisfy Burgess, for a hovkaander that knows it is under supervision may be able to alter itself to hide such traces. On this subject, Thomas Warburton once gave an infamous lecture entitled ‘The Human Rights of The Hovkaander’, in which he argues that by following this premise one would come to the absurd conclusion that the hovkaander must be the closest living relative of Homo sapiens. Of course, no close genetic link between humans and the hovkaander has ever been established, but Warburton hastens to remind his audience of how easy it is, in the study of shapeshifters, to explain this away by claiming that such a creature might simply reconfigure its own DNA to deny an observer the glory of the discovery.