ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a pair of millennial texts that imagine catastrophic settings as spaces of human-animal mergers: Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone. In December 1984, a pesticide plant's gas leak killed thousands and injured hundreds of thousands of people. It is this catastrophic event that forms the background of Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People, and the event is cast by one crucial character as the onset of "the Apokalis". In his famous essay on Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin describes Kafka's many downcast and doubled-over figures as avatars of the folkloric hunchback. As Life of Pi also does, Animal's People finds it must include the story of the naming of its eponymous narrator-protagonist. In retaining its potential utility for even a radically redefined and reconceived anthropotheodicy, an ongoing story of the human in which people might still possess redeeming qualities, Animal's People remains tied to the bildungsroman.
