Lives of the Monster Dogs: A Novel

Introduction

BY JEFF VANDERMEER

It is heartening to revisit Kirsten Bakis’s unique and provocative Lives of the Monster Dogs in the context of a special twentieth-anniversary edition, in part because the novel is unique, but also because there is cause for celebration that a book so eccentric has received (rightfully) so much attention.

When first published in 1997, Monster Dogs was translated into multiple languages, adapted for the stage, and included on the New York Times Notable Books list. Among other honors, the novel became a finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. This in a year that saw publication of Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, to give a sense of just how outside of the norms Bakis’s novel fell in both intent and focus.

Monster Dogs attained mainstream respectability while still retaining a kind of cult status that has only grown with the years. Yet success in several directions is not always the fate of novels like Monster Dogs; hybrids tend to be misunderstood and often have trouble finding an audience or sympathetic reviewers. Because hybrids are composed of both new thought and old parts, they seem to exist, on an elemental level, in uneasy contrast … and yet over time this seeming lack of harmony gathers its own kind of symphonic power. One of the pleasures of Lives of the Monster Dogs, then, is that it strives to exist in a place between—a transitional space that brings with it on the one side established ritual and hierarchy and an adherence to acceptable social mores, and on the other madness, violence, and disturbing imagery more generally associated with the grotesque. The brilliance of the approach, and its bravery, is that Bakis wants to show you not just what happened on her version of the island of Dr. Moreau, so to speak, but the aftermath. Where did the animals end up? How were they haunted? How are we haunted?

Similarly, the novel hybridizes suspension of reader disbelief. On one level, the novel wants you to believe in uplifted dogs who display a humanlike intelligence. On another level, the novel knows you cannot really believe in this as presented, and thus the reader must sometimes struggle, in the way good art often makes us struggle, to find other structures and contexts in which to place the characters and events. Yet also: intelligent dogs are walking around New York City. This is fact.

In the best possible way, these contradictions are inconvenient and rude on the part of the author—to not ground us in one thing or the other, either the reality or the allegory/subtext. To leave us in the middle distance, trying to figure out how we are supposed to feel—even as, despite ourselves, we plunge into an unbroken fictive dream where we find the dog characters both sympathetic and complex. Being uncomfortable while also being entertained speaks to wanting to be true to dog characters like Ludwig von Sacher, Klaue Lutz, and, of course, Mops Hacker, leader of the dog revolution.

Moments of Dr. Moreau–like immediacy and a commentary on not just the idea of the mad scientist but on science in general inform sections of the novel, like those documenting the experiments of Augustus Rank, creator of the monster dogs. This is the night, tonight, when I will finally do it, and I feel as if I could just fly, Rank writes, and it is with a kind of horror that we recognize such enthusiasm and delight attending to a hall of the grotesque. Yet we shouldn’t be horrified—we should recognize that intense curiosity about the world is amoral. After all, Alexander Humboldt is the godfather of environmentalism, and yet he killed more than four thousand frogs trying to figure out how their limbs moved, and herded horses into marshes writhing with electric eels to see what would happen. A fair number of his experiments occurred under the patronage of the same royal family that funds Rank’s, in fact.

You could call that the cost of scientific inquiry or you could call that cruel and unacceptable. You could say that the monster dogs are the end result of a single-minded obsession that becomes its own reward for their selfish creator, or you could say that scientists have always been known to reclassify the unethical as acceptable and overlook cruelty if expedient to successful results. The pressures on me are unbearable, Augustus Rank writes. We have the sense that even if Rank were not a mad scientist, he would become one because of institutional directives.

In that context, is it important that Augustus Rank is a special kind of psychopath, or is that incidental to the point? What is clear is that the way in which the monster dogs come into being speaks to how, everywhere in human society, unresolved issues in the bedrock of our institutions and our history rise up and become alive and the source of conflict in the present. Complicit in the monster dogs’ rise and their introduction to polite society in New York is their bloody history—both that required to secure their freedom and that visited upon their ancestors to give them sentience. That they wear fancy clothes and adhere to certain standards of etiquette can’t protect them from the past. Are they then doomed because of their history?

*   *   *

DOGS AND other talking animals abound in literature in part because they hold a mirror up to human behavior, even if this is a sadly regressive trope at best, a kind of human propaganda. When we make animals talk in fiction, the context often becomes the lesson to be learned, as in Aesop’s Fables or in the pointed political commentary of Animal Farm. Rare is the Watership Down that becomes iconic and makes us think of the actual lives of animals, that tries to inhabit a different mode of being. Instead, in the modern era, we’re bombarded by clichéd memes of wise owls and cute otters superimposed with slogans that infantilize or spread misinformation about actual animal behavior.

We colonize animals with our good intentions and our wanting to simplify them into something familiar—and also to place them at arm’s length from how we self-define. But in exploring the lives of its monster dogs through diary entries and other personal accounts, Bakis performs the difficult work of making us think, again, in a hybrid fashion: about both animal intelligence and human intelligence.

Cherished childhood texts like The Wind in the Willows—whose influence we often internalize and carry over into our adult perceptions of nature—contain nonthreatening, cute, and largely sympathetic portrayals of wildlife taking on human roles. But Monster Dogs removes the soft focus and instead grapples with our industrialization of animal life, with Rank’s fascistic dream of a perfect army of dog soldiers contrasted with the gritty and sometimes maddening, sometimes saddening portrayal of the monster dogs living in New York. Their past doesn’t provide the comfort of nostalgia; it’s a fatal context, and their estrangement in the present removes any possibility of security. Step by step, Monster Dogs walks away from our received wisdom about animals by dint of chronicling the dogs’ origins, their fight for freedom, and the all-too-complicated reality of their new life, which sees them begin to fall ill.

The cliché specific to dogs, of their being man’s best friend, beyond containing its own outdated norms by excluding half the human population, simplifies the complex questions surrounding domestication. Dogs are special in that they occupy a transitional zone between the human and the nonhuman worlds. In a sense, they are conduits between civilization and the wilderness, nature and culture. We have bred them to work for us and to be our companions in a series of long-term experiments that have occurred over thousands of years. Rank’s experiments are just more of the same severe bending of the animal world to our will, conducted in a bloodier way across a shorter time frame. Of the creation of Rank’s dog servants, Bakis writes, Their brains were altered when they were puppies, and they were fitted with small temporary hands and voice boxes. What is this description but rendering clunky and thus visible the process, largely invisible to the average citizen, of turning wolves into human companions?

The science of the lives of canines is also an interesting subject when considering Monster Dogs. Domesticated dogs display sharp recall, being able to remember names and objects for relatively long periods of time. Dogs can also apparently tell when their owners are lying and pick up on many social cues we have long believed beyond their ken. You could say that dogs are already, in their way, intelligent.

But it is perhaps more interesting that dog breeds that were never domesticated display more acute intelligence and more refined pack skills than their cousins. It is telling that Augustus Rank, like most mad scientists, is more interested in making the animal human than in trying to understand what sort of intelligence his animals might already possess and might be enhanced to create a dog whose sentience is not humanlike but wholly canine: entirely separate from the human.

The theories behind recent advances in biomimicry hold that technology, including biotech, that follows the same paths as natural organisms and ecosystems results in favorable outcomes because it doesn’t push against the way the world works. In Monster Dogs the disconnect the dogs feel from human life, even as they try to mimic it, comes not just from feeling set apart from society, un-integrated with it, but because the way their intelligence was created works against the theories behind biomimicry. They have been made in the image of their creator—a startlingly specific and rigid societal code learned from the creator compounding the errors of an all-too-human (and thus flawed) method of genesis. When dogs like Ludwig von Sacher begin to fail in this environment, the failure is both societal and formative. When we say the mad scientist goes against nature, we should take it to mean, in this case, a failure of the imagination.

Yet Bakis is wise to juxtapose the messy and ethically challenged viewpoint of Augustus Rank with not just the self-determining characters of the monster dogs but also an outside observer: the human character Cleo Pira. This is part and parcel of a kaleidoscopic montage approach that requires Cleo to be a frame for the narrative fragments presented by Bakis so that we can examine multiple first person accounts without the novel becoming episodic … but also so, through Pira, we can judge the many ways in which the monster dogs become both integrated into and estranged from New York society.

Bakis’s deep understanding of how culture mythologizes history allows her to demonstrate how it takes away the bloodshed, the confusion, teaching us how to assign meaning to what may at the time have seemed meaningless. We even, through Pira, are able to experience an operatic, fictionalized version of Mops Hacker’s rebellion. The real Hacker’s diary contains entries like 1. MOPS HACKER has no Friend. 2. The Dogs his People call him Deluded. The opera version, on the other hand, stylizes him, makes him remote and heroic, as opera does, with lines like Dogs with hands to grasp a sword and aim a gun / And minds to understand how wars are won. The opera legitimizes Mops by further uplifting him through an elevated diction that he clearly did not possess. And thus the simplification of history continues.

All of this inquiry into the past is in the service of Cleo’s struggle to understand, to be won over, just as the reader wants to be won over. But won over to what? To seeing the monster dogs as real, and in doing so to acknowledge them as people, as having personhood as a group, and then to seeing each monster dog as an individual with a separate and unique personality and viewpoint. Cleo as the empathic and yet rational counterbalance to Augustus Rank exemplifies, for much of the novel, the best of our modern, liberal approach to life.

Yet Cleo isn’t immune from irrationality, or from becoming over-involved, because Cleo and all of us human beings are still, of course, animals ourselves. Cleo experiences strange dreams toward the end of Monster Dogs, even as the exterior strangeness of events accelerates, as if her subconscious is trying to make sense of her being so close to what is unfamiliar or outside of norms. When we think of issues like emotional intelligence, the ways in which Cleo can and cannot connect with the monster dogs, are we really sometimes thinking of adherence to politeness and of reinforcing social norms? What happens when someone or something exists within that pattern that we don’t believe belongs there? Where does the monstrous reside then?

The monstrous has many permutations, for the word is a marvelous one, full of a rich complexity. Monstrous can mean obsolete or grotesque or frightening or repulsive or malformed. It can mean a person or act seen as wrong or inhuman—or it can simply mean huge, larger than life. As if Bakis knows this, the novel never quite stabilizes in such a way as to set the reader on solid ground—it simply reaches for ever more original patterns, culminating in an epic party thrown by the monster dogs that becomes as grotesque and sprawling and untidy as you might expect.

Souls are not bound by time in the same way that living bodies are, Ludwig writes toward the end of the novel. And yet, trapped in these imperfect vessels, souls are still subject to the laws of the universe, which never fail us. The New York Times called Monster Dogs a dazzling, unforgettable meditation on what it means to be human. But with the benefit of hindsight, it seems more as if Monster Dogs is an unforgettable meditation on both animals and humans, and the ways in which we are entangled, and the ways in which neither can escape the methods of our genesis and our upbringing.

Preface

In the years since the monster dogs were here with us, in New York, I’ve often been asked to write something about the time I spent with them. It’s also been suggested that I edit the unfinished manuscript left behind by their historian, Ludwig von Sacher, partly because I wrote a lot of articles about the dogs when they were here, and partly because I was Ludwig’s friend.

I wanted to do both of these things immediately, but I also wanted to do them slowly, and well. I guess I was waiting for something—for Ludwig’s papers to reveal some hidden meaning, for the events I remembered to sift themselves into an identifiable pattern—and it always seemed on the verge of happening.

Now it’s been over six years since they were here, and I’m beginning to think that’s how it will always be, that I will always be just on the verge of being able to recall and understand everything in the right way. It’s as if all the things we see and remember are parts of a long equation that always adds up to a seamless, irrefutable proof of the present—but that’s the problem: the present changes from one moment to the next. We never arrive; there isn’t any place to arrive.

So I’ve put Ludwig’s papers together in order, including some of his journal entries along with the unfinished manuscript, and I’ve described as best I could what happened in the years he was writing them, which was when I knew him.

I’d like to thank Lydia Petze, who was also Ludwig’s friend, for her help, and most of all for the sustaining friendship she’s extended to me and, more recently, to my husband, Jim Holbrook, and our daughter, Eleanor, the first child in the world (I proudly believe) to be blessed with having a Samoyed for a godmother.

When Ludwig began his manuscript it was called The History of the Monster Dogs, but later he changed the title to Lives of the Monster Dogs. I think (though this is just a guess) that he might have had a plan to add biographies of the living dogs and to have those form the main part of his book, although at the time he stopped writing he hadn’t even begun to do that. Whatever the reason, Lives of the Monster Dogs is written on the top sheet of his manuscript, which has been sitting on my desk for the better part of the past six years. The book you’re holding now isn’t exactly the one for which the title was intended, but I felt, somehow, that I couldn’t call it anything else.

Even now, we’re still inundated with books, movies, and documentaries about the monster dogs. Mine is not the first or the last version of their story. But I knew the monster dogs and I loved them, and I hope that, in my own way, I have done a good job of telling their story. I meant to.

Cleo Pira

New York City

October 2017

Prologue

FROM THE DIARY OF LUDWIG VON SACHER

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 16, 2009

The past is obscure. It is blurred by dust and scratch marks, hidden by wide pieces of brown tape, soot, and mold stains. I am sifting through old documents that are oxidizing and crumbling as I touch them; things that have been burning, slowly, for a hundred years, throwing clouds of tiny particles into the air. Particles that once carried information—a bit of ink in the downstroke of a d, an infinitesimal part of a space between words—now fly out, disorganized and meaningless, into the world.

I don’t know if I will ever finish my research, and I want to leave some record of my endeavors: if not the finished paper, then at least a description of my attempt to write it. I’ve recently developed an illness, or psychological disorder, which comes on periodically and may soon prevent me from working. I must record what I know while I can still think clearly.

I am searching through these documents for the history of my race, hoping to organize the information before it disintegrates into a chaos of dust. We are a race of monsters, recently created, so our history is short. I am reading the writings of our founder, a Prussian scientist who drew up the plans for us in 1882, but our race did not come into being until nearly a century later.

The name of the scientist was Augustus Rank, and he conceived the idea of a race of super-intelligent dogs, with artificial hands and voice boxes, to be used for military purposes, and devoted his life to creating them. He was fascinated by prosthetic devices—the possibilities. Many hideous animals were made before we were perfected.

What do you have to say, Augustus? I have here on my desk a pile of manuscripts and a pile of photocopies, taken from a microfilm, which are barely legible. He kept a diary. Some of the entries are short, some hard to make sense of.

Nearly ran out of cocaine today, but faithful M. came after dinner, just in time.

That one is easy: he was a driven man; I can imagine him in his laboratory, late at night, eyes wide, working fast, thinking fast.

Disposed of R.S. today: had been complaining.

That one is more difficult. I suppose R.S. was a person who worked for him; I’m sure Rank drove him hard. But Rank didn’t fire R.S. or let him go. He had a small colony of followers and assistants from whom he demanded obedience, devotion, and secrecy. He could not let a dissenter escape into the world.

When I am done I won’t need the people anymore. The dogs will be my people, perfect extensions of my will. I, who am now one man, will become an army—an army of dogs. They will be absolutely obedient to me. Their minds will be my mind, their hearts will be mine, their teeth will be my teeth, their hands will be my hands …

He was a man who wanted to control things, to extend himself beyond the boundaries of his body. He demanded obedience from his human followers, but it could never be perfect—there would always be dissenters, people who questioned him. Humans could not be perfect extensions of his will. But we could. No human loyalty can equal the fanatic devotion of a dog.

I am trying to imagine Augustus Rank as I read his diary. There are pictures of him. He looks the part of a mad scientist: stiff collar and wild hair, dark staring eyes. The photographs, like the documents, have not been well preserved. Because of the blotches and stains, the dust on the microfilms and the crumbling edges of the papers, I seem to hear his voice through a heavy static, coming from far away.

I can’t imagine him clearly, because he has no real smell. His scent is not human—it’s the smell of oxidizing paper, dried ink, old photographic chemicals, brown tape used to hold the documents together. I can smell the history of the papers: human hands that have touched them, and the gloved prosthetic hands of dogs, the years spent in cold vaults underground, in the library, the hours inside my briefcase. Everything has left a residue, but there is no trace of Rank anymore. It was too long ago.

Do I think that being able to smell him would help me to understand the history of my race? What is it that I am trying to find out?

At this point I take off my pince-nez and wipe the lenses on the fur of my thigh. Without my spectacles I cannot see very well. I look around my room. I can make out, blurrily, the gleam of brass and lacquered wood, mirrors and polished mahogany. I occupy a ground-floor apartment in the West Village. Most of the other dogs live uptown in palatial homes, and seek out publicity and one another’s company, but I enjoy being away from them. I see my kinship with them, and our shared culture, as a weakness, not something to be preserved. Our culture is outdated; it has nothing to do with the world we live in now. It was forged in the secret city in the Canadian wilderness built by Rank and his followers at the turn of the century, and it has not changed in a hundred years.

Ten years ago, we rebelled against the people of Rankstadt. These were the descendants of Rank’s followers who for four generations had lived in the hidden city. Because of their utter isolation from the rest of the world, they had retained the styles and culture of the town’s nineteenth-century Prussian founders. They had perfected us a few decades before and we lived as slaves to them in that insular town, although we were stronger and smarter than they. Of course we rebelled.

We looted the city and took their gold and possessions. But we knew nothing of what lay beyond the borders of Rankstadt. Neither humans nor dogs had crossed them during our lifetime, and so we not only were strangers to the rest of the world, but had not even heard stories of it, except for those which had been passed down by our masters’ great-grandparents from the previous century.

For three years after gaining our freedom we lingered in the ruins of Rankstadt. Yet finally we could not remain there, among the collapsing houses of our former masters, and so we set out into the wilderness of Canada and traveled for some time, keeping ourselves hidden from humans but sometimes visiting isolated farms and small towns to observe them. We lived by hunting and scavenging, in temporary camps where we made fires and shelters for ourselves. We were like pioneers, striving to cling to civilization in our manners and customs, but of necessity existing very often, and very uncomfortably, like