Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is a stirring tale about a broken circle of teenage friends. Tony, the author’s alter ego and the protagonist of the story, remembers school days, arguments about English literature, mocking comments from her teacher: what on earth would Ted Hughes’ poems be about if he ran out of animals one day?
Phil Dixon is obviously less interested in animals than in the casualness with which he scratches a monument, and that would typify Barnes’ wry characterization: male, white, self-righteous and cocky. But there is something else behind it, a disarmingly serious one, the author’s central question. It is a reference to the mystery of the ever-rekindling artistic imagination and invention, in which the wonder of creation is repeated and reflected. Even if Julian Barnes puts it more laconic in the book, of course: the fact is that Ted Hughes never ran out of animals.
Testimony to the beauty, wildness, freedom
The subject of the series “Wildwechsel” was that animals – as the extinction of species painfully proves – are not infinite in number, but infinitely interesting and in which long overdue upheaval the relationship between humans and animals is. Quotations from Ted Hughes’ poems about wild animals bear witness to the beauty, wildness, freedom of a poetic penetration into the essence of nature, which has nothing usurpatory about it, but also nothing sentimental. “Stable smell” now looks at what the agricultural world means and especially what cannot escape from it: cattle, horses, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, and – the pig, which is also an ideal transition in that it forms a subspecies of the wild boar. It was domesticated before the sheep, in Eastern Anatolia and China it was locked in gates and fed with food waste ten thousand years ago. If released again, the omnivore would survive.
Ted Hughes is still frightened by a single dead pig: At the start of the series “Barn Smell”
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The pig has often proved its cleverness to humans: it finds truffles and drugs, it is actually the better pointer when hunting, it performs in the circus, it pulls carriages, it comes when its shepherd calls it, and when one calls it it divides its habitat into kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. Just boredom hates it.
If you keep it inside and don’t provide variety and fun, it will tear your apartment apart. Pigs are good luck charms because they were once consolation prizes at fairs. All of these traits, and man’s many hilarious, amazing experiences with the animal we keep only to eat, sums it up in Ted Hughes’ great domestic pig poem, View of a Pig. It describes the terrifying sight of a dead pig, as heavy as three men, eyes closed, pink and white eyelashes, pig’s feet stretched out stiffly: “It was too dead”.