Project Proposal: Three Little Pigs

Our relationship with other animals is vexed and conflicted. Animals are neighbours, food, pets, pests, friends, curiosities, creatures imbued with spiritual significance, and so on. We read stories of anthropomorphic animals to our children and then serve them up the cooked flesh of these same animals on the dinner table. “Mary had a little lamb” is disconcertingly ambiguous. Our conflicting views about animals reveal an anxious tension in the inescapable fact that we ourselves are animals: making sense of who we are as human animals requires coming to terms with the “animal” half of that expression as much as the “human” half.

My aim is to develop three short plays and three essays about the indistinct distinction between humans and animals, which complement, rather than comment on, one another. The three plays are a trio of black comedies called Pork, Ham, and Bacon, which will be staged together under the title Three Little Pigs. Each play uses dark humour to unearth some aspect of our conflicting attitudes toward animals.

The essays are not so much commentaries on the plays themselves, but rather comment on the plays obliquely by exploring in a philosophical idiom some of the themes I explore in the dramas. The first essay explores the question of a distinction between humans and animals, and why it should matter to us. The second explores the distinction between philosophy and literature, made particularly pertinent by the juxtaposition of play scripts and essays that I propose, but also brought into relation with the first essay by J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, which worries the human/animal and literature/philosophy distinctions simultaneously. The final essay connects our anxieties about the human/animal distinction to our anxieties about mortality: the most salient feature of our animality is that we are condemned to die, and our diet of dead animals is a constant and painful reminder of this fact.