The Trouble with Dogs for a Writer

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From The New Yorker:

Dogs have never interested me, perhaps because we didn’t have a dog when I was growing up, and because I was afraid of those there were in the neighborhood, even of Alex, the good-natured and kindly golden retriever that belonged to the Kanestrøms and followed the children of the family when it had to but obviously preferred their father, whom I often saw it gazing up at with a devoted and expectant look, tail wagging. The problem was when I encountered it alone, for then it barked at me, and I couldn’t handle those barks, they overruled everything I knew about the dog’s temperament, and I would remain standing on the gravel path in front of the house, unable to walk past it and ring the bell. Dag Lothar often found me in that position, frozen to the spot outside their house while the nice dog stood there barking at me. It didn’t help that, as a human being, I was intellectually and, presumably, also emotionally superior to the dog—that I knew how to read and write, draw and paint, tie my shoelaces, butter my bread, buy sweets at the shop, and take the bus on my own—for the loud, aggressively monotonous sounds it made trumped all that; when I stood there facing it only those sounds mattered. The dog’s barks were like a kind of law, they marked a boundary I couldn’t cross, and it was the dog that enforced it.

. . . .

Although I have sought out arenas where anger and loud voices are considered unsophisticated—first university, later the literary establishment—I have still been behaving as expected of me, for I have always had within me that fear of doglike aggression, and, whenever I have encountered it, in the form of an angry motorist, for example, or an angry girlfriend, every time I have yielded to it and become paralyzed. The only area where I have defied it has been literature. At times I think that is what literature is for, that literature is a place where one can express oneself freely, without fearing the law of the father, the law of the dog. That literature is the arena of the cowardly, the Colosseum of the fearful, and that authors are like pathetic gladiators who freeze up when a dog barks at them but retaliate and assert themselves and their rights as soon as they are alone.

. . . .

Has a single good author ever owned a dog? Hamsun didn’t have a dog. Tor Ulven didn’t have a dog. Did Duras have one? I find that hard to imagine. Ibsen, did he have a dog? No. Faulkner? I believe he did. In that case, perhaps his position in the literary canon ought to be reconsidered? Virginia Woolf also had dogs, but only so-called lapdogs, which are too small and pet-like to cause fear in anyone, so they don’t count.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

15 thoughts on “The Trouble with Dogs for a Writer”

  1. “The Trouble with Dogs for a Writer”

    The New Yorker’s problem is that they have dogs instead of writers …

  2. I can’t believe I read this essay, in which an author did nothing but put forth the belief that a dog is responsible for their not writing, or the degradation of their literary aspirations or… what, I have no idea. I can’t even.

    This is 2 minutes of my life I won’t get back, and now another 8 or 10 I’ll have to spend deeply breathing and reminding myself that joining the brigade of ‘someone’s wrong on the internet’ outrage rioters is not going to help or change anything. -_-

    • M C A Hogarth, On a positive note, your comment saved me from wasting my time reading the OP, for which I thank you. So there’s that.

    • Thank you! I couldn’t get through the first paragraph without my eyes glazing over. I resisted reading more.

      I do think my lack of owning a pet could be a blind spot, as I often don’t consider scenarios where dogs might come in handy for plot points. Or cats for that matter. I pretty much don’t imagine them as characters unless they’re sapient and/or humanoid.

  3. Whatever you might say about dogs, they have this in their favor: they don’t make a habit of walking over your keyboard when you’re working the computer.

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