“A Relative, Really; Disturbingly Similar”: Nonhuman Animals in the Works of Olga Tokarczuk

In her literary work, Olga Tokarczuk consistently pays attention to the scandal of nonhuman animals’ involuntary suffering. Criticizing the ideology of human domination over nature and the unreflective replication of naturalized standards of behavior toward animals—manifesting, among others, in the tacit acceptance of the hunting “ritual” or the atrocities of industrial farming—she posits the el evation of empathy and insight to the rank of cognitive tools. In her essay “Maski zwierząt,” she encourages not only artists but everyone—starting with scientists who determine new research paradigms and ending with an average consumer of animal products—to use those tools in order to puncture our cultural prejudices and illusions and see beyond them the animal as an Other who is inconceivably close to us. This article attempts to respond to Tokarczuk’s challenge. It tries to decide the ontological status of nonhuman animals in her novels and short stories, reveal the horror of our perceptual inertia which enables systemic oppressions to flourish, and review some of the heterotopian alternatives imagined by Tokarczuk.