There’s a dreaminess to childhood rebellion, the moments when children viscerally understand that the adults don’t know what they are doing. Some of the most memorable moments in European arthouse films of the 20th century capture this phenomenon for the purpose of critiquing authoritarianism and the adult world order in all its arbitrary, unjust, cruel ugliness. The aesthetics of these moments shift the viewer into a fantastical space, making powerful use of the dream, the subconscious, the whimsical, and the irrational to show the flaws in the system, the ruptures in what we take to be true simply because we’re gotten used to perceiving reality in the accepted way. In these films, explanations are provisional, and may at any moment be upended.
One such film is Jean Vigo’s masterpiece Zero de Conduit. Childhood rebellion takes on a surreal visual quality when the children engage in a pillow fight and it’s captured in slow motion. A boy is made king and hoisted into the air on a makeshift throne; the other boys parade around the room. In Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, which went on to inspire Guillermo del Toro’s dark fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth, a young girl is bewitched by the film Frankenstein, and is fooled by her older sister into believing a sheepfold is the monster’s house, and there meets a fugitive whom she helps.
Johanna Stoberock’s immersive and visionary postmodernist allegory Pigs fits into the same tradition as these anti-authoritarian fantastic films. It’s an allusive novel keenly aware of the hypocrisy of the adult order, and governed by the knowledge that children today are under threat from the carelessness of adults. In Pigs, four children live on an isolated island where the world sends its abundant trash. The children “were afraid of the gray water, of the sea in a mood of despair. It wrapped the island like a scarf made of grief. It made you choke with tears to touch it.” The children — Luisa, Andrew, Mimi and Natasha — feed the trash to pigs. The pigs are alternately beatific and menacing, conjuring, without explicit reference, the emotional power of both Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies. They occasionally bite off the children’s fingers, and the children simply accept the pigs’ casual violence as the way things are; there’s no other way forward because the ocean is dangerous, too. Less casual is the violence of the adults with whom the children share the island.
The adults live in a luxurious villa on the island. They’re grotesque and menacing and also, oddly, slightly funny, the way adults in Roald Dahl’s children’s books often are. “They drank espresso and smoked cigarettes and plugged their noses dramatically whenever the children got too close.” The women wear red lipstick and stilettos, the men have waxed handlebar mustaches. Their oblivious, cocktail party chatter is streaked with viciousness and obliviousness. They are interested mostly in what they consume, and throughout, an observant reader would be right in wondering whether these characters are any different than the wealthy adults of America, willing to continue destroying our planet, while children of all backgrounds are involved in climate strikes.
One day, a boy washes up in a barrel. Is Eddie a child or is he, given his manner of arrival, garbage? The children are not quite sure. Eddie looks exactly like Luisa, the child in whose point of view we are most often placed; the children decide he’s her twin. While the other children accept their strange parentless situation as trash collectors responsible for feeding the pigs, he remembers a life with his parents in civilization. From the start, Eddie is trouble. When Luisa gives him a stale sandwich to feed the pigs, he eats the sandwich. He doesn’t know any of the island’s rules, nor does he care that there are rules, and so he violates them all. Eddie doesn’t have any interest in falling in line with the other children, and Luisa feels guilty for not liking him. But it turns out Luisa is right to be unnerved by Eddie’s unwillingness to fall in line with the island’s ecosystem, his sense of self-importance.
When the children are hunted and captured by the adults, scooped up in a net and carried away, Luisa’s resentment towards Eddie surfaces. In the middle of the night, she crawls over him to get away from the opening, aware that the adults may remove the child closest to the opening and brutalize the child they take. When the grownups come and take Eddie, she turns her back and shuts her eyes, and the next time the children see him, Eddie has morphed into an adult — as cruel and greedy as the others.
Meanwhile another castaway washes up on the shores of the island. Otis is separated from his wife Alice and his son. While in civilization, he was not a particularly good husband or father, and he’s plagued by regret, at one point thinking in anguish:
“What he’d like to feed the pigs were the hours he’d wasted watching television, the times he’d snapped at his son for calling for a drink of water when he should have been asleep, the times when he said he had to be alone when he really wanted more than anything to be close to another person. He wanted to tear his heart out of his chest and carry it outside and toss it over the fence to the pigs.”
The children adopt Otis since he’s been washed up on shore. Initially he’s skeptical of their story, noticing there’s no garbage coming in from the ocean and thinking, “Maybe the garbage thing was all in the kids’ imaginations. A lot of the things they said didn’t make much sense. Grownups catching children in a net? Who knew what to believe.” After their claims about the ocean turn out to be true, he tries to save them from the cruelty of the adults, but is there any way to really save them? And will saving them allow him to save himself or will he simply fall victim to the adults himself?
Often, an allegorical mode is used specifically because the subject is too dangerous to be faced head-on with tangible, realistic, empirical details. Speaking in symbols, casting a kind of enchantment, is the safer route, the only route by which what is being said might be accepted by a reader. Pigs falls within a tradition of questioning, oblique enchantments, written to evoke a dream state, to give singular expression to many anxieties, rather than to call up a one-to-one correspondence with the world’s many tangible problems. The threat of climate change looms in the novel, but so, too, do the threats of consumerism and gluttony. And while the anxieties the author addresses in the novel could have resulted in a more paranoid book, Pigs feels innocent, suggestive more of an author’s anguish about the world’s condition than her anger or blame. It is a fable for adults, a fairytale whose violence is akin to The Brothers Grimm rather than anything Disney might offer.
The lyrical style of Pigs reflects its central fairy-tale binary: the innocence of its child characters set against the indifference of the natural world and the evil of the grown-ups. Its sentences cast their spell by blurring the boundary between fairytales and the familiar or organic. For instance: “The path the children followed extended out forever, and behind them it disappeared: each pig ended her song and opened her mouth and prepared to swallow the discarded world whole.” Is the path’s disappearance to be taken as figurative or literal within the context of the story? It’s not entirely clear. Likewise, are we to take it the pigs are truly singing? They have sung before in this novel, not for any particular reason — their singing, as well as the ocean’s singing, serve as a refrain throughout the book — but here, their singing serves as a precursor to swallowing the “discarded world,” thereby evoking themes of gluttony and waste.
The style also reinforces the book’s allegorical form: “From a distance all four children became a single laughing creature, all part of a tangled body that breathed in the salty air of the sea, and the golden light of the sun and breathed out messy, chaotic laughter.” Here, midway through the novel, the author reiterates that these four children are meant to be read as stand-ins for the world’s children, not individual children with separate personalities, but children with a shared, collective interest in our planet. And yet, Stoberock evokes tangible aspects of many people’s childhoods, including “tangled” and “messy, chaotic laughter” and sea air to give life to the symbolic function of the sentence.
Like Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, an allegory of freedom about a young baron who climbs into a tree and spends the rest of his life in an arboreal fantasy, Pigs resists mechanical interpretation. The dreamy language and presence of irrational events reflect the headspace of the children of the island, in whose perspectives we most often find ourselves. It’s a novel for intrepid readers with intense interest in what we owe other human beings, what we owe children, and what we owe our world. In a world full of so much apathy towards suffering, so much unwillingness to look at all — never mind look closely — is there any escape from human cruelty? As with Lord of the Flies, the island setting intensifies the drama of this question, but the question of what’s owed to the world, to our children, to the future, is a question with relevance for everyone.
By eschewing the empirical and factual, Pigs defamiliarizes the moral failure of today’s adults to protect our collective children and their futures. We’re forced to examine this moral failure, stripped of political or personal allegiances. In A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L’Engle wrote “Nothing important is completely explicable.” While she is thinking initially of her marriage, she goes on to say “A great work of art never palls because there are always new insights to be found: has anyone ever learned at what the Mona Lisa is smiling? Or what El Greco’s St. Andrew and St. Francis are talking about across a gap of eleven hundred years? I was in The Cherry Orchard for two seasons, one on Broadway, one on the road. Chekhov had something new to teach me every single performance.” Pigs is not completely explicable either, but its mysteriousness is a thing of beauty, and allows us to keep revisiting the text to plumb its meaning.
[Published October 1, 2019 by Red Hen Press, 272 pages, $16.95 paperback]