On My Dog Tulip
tags:
biography, criticism, dog lit, memoir, nonfiction
As I read J.R. Ackerly’s book My Dog Tulip, there were moments when I found myself wanting to know more about the narrator: Did he have a lover? What did he do for a living? But as the narrative progressed, these details, I realized, were irrelevant. As someone with a tendency either to overindulge in personal details or eliminate them altogether, I was struck by J.R. Ackerley’s success at focusing My Dog Tulip around Tulip in a way that enabled the reader to believe the seemingly neurotic Ackerley could be any dog lover. By avoiding unnecessary personal details about his own character, Ackerley illuminates the complicated and indescribable love between a dog owner and his dog and the lengths to which a dog owner will go to give his pet a life much like he would want for his own offspring.
One of the ways Ackerley does this is by posing series of questions. In doing so, Ackerley demonstrates how good questions do not simply get answered later. By showing the narrator’s thought-process, these questions also invite the reader into the dog owner’s head. For instance, Ackerley asks, “Now that she had improvised a WC for herself, would she not return to it every night? And what could I do to circumvent this? Should I, for instance, strew sheets of brown paper in front of the dressing table where the rug had been?” Though the narrator surely knows the answers, he poses his questions in such a way that the reader finds him- or herself in the head not of the person writing the narrative but of the dog owner at the time that the story was unfolding. This yields tension by creating a rift between what the narrator actually knows and what the narrator has not yet shared. We are left wondering, then, when the narrator and the narrator’s former self will reconcile to discover the answers to these questions. This seems like an obvious technique, but it is not one that I find myself utilizing nearly enough. While reading My Dog Tulip, I found myself returning to the essays on which I was working to insert questions in hopes of creating a similar tension.
Unlike a human’s biographer, the dog’s biographical memoirist does not have the luxury of asking the subject how she felt about something or why she did a particular thing. (Of course, the power dynamics inherent in the interviewer/interviewee relationship hardly guarantee that we get the so-called truth, but they can provide an answer for the writer to analyze or do with as he or she pleases.) Ackerley’s challenge in My Dog Tulip, then, is to speculate about what Tulip felt and why she behaved as she did. Often Ackerley seems to assume an omniscient understanding of his dog. How, I wondered, does he know that Tulip would prefer for others not to know that she was really a “good girl,” as he says she did? Likewise, how did Tulip recall the streets where the two vets’ offices were? Did she really remember the route after one visit, even though she could not have known where they were going when they walked there initially? Did she recognize its scent? And if so, why does Ackerley never speculate about Tulip’s sense of smell? On a more philosophical level, I wondered where the dog owner’s understanding of his dog comes from. Is it inherent in their bond? Or is it possible that Ackerley’s attempts to explain Tulip’s behavior are figments of his imagination, attempts to explain that which cannot be communicated in the English language? Might it be the case that in saying Tulip recalled the streets where the two vets’ offices were, Ackerley was projecting his own worries and fears — he certainly didn’t want to take her back to the vet! — onto Tulip? We can speculate about what our pets want, but those assumptions are always based on human language, a type of communication dogs cannot use. Had Ackerley acknowledged this and speculated about the answers to such questions, My Dog Tulip would have better illuminated the complex and unexplainable nature of the relationship between dog and dog owner.
It would be naïve to say that Ackerley never explores these communication and interpretation troubles, of course. When Tulip relieves herself inside after Ackerley, assuming she wants to play with the cat, refuses to take her out, the narrator acknowledges that he doesn’t always know what Tulip wants. But by suggesting that this was the first time he had misunderstood her, Ackerley draws into question his reliability as a narrator in earlier scenes where he explains her behavior without exploring what led him to believe this is what she was trying to tell him.
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