Plus: André Alexis on his Giller-winning philosophy for poodles,
André Alexis, on the problem of art confronted with order, in the wake of winning this year’s $100,000 Scotiabank Giller prize for his novel Fifteen Dogs
André Alexis says he’s feeling a bit tired, when I meet him outside Toronto’s ritz-Carlton hotel around 11:30, the morning after he won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. After staying up late to celebrate with his family, Alexis has been on the interview circuit since 7 a.m. His publicist, veronica Simmonds of Coach House books, warns me that we will need to pause our conversation for a few minutes midway through, so that Alexis can FaceTime in for an interview with a noon-hour television show. So he’s fatigued, and of course I understand why, but he looks happy as hell, refreshed and raring to go, an excited kid on Christmas morning.
In the lobby of the hotel, where the annual ceremony is held, we run into Alexander MacLeod, a juror for this year’s $100,000 prize. For the first time, this year’s prize jury was made up of five rather than three members, and MacLeod says he thinks it’s a magic number. With a slightly bigger jury, there’s less room for coercion and more for consideration, he explains, shaking Alexis’s hand, “that’s the beauty of five. No one person can run everyone else over.”
It was an inspiring and diverse shortlist, and as we take our seats in the cafe, Alexis mentions how pleased he was to see such a range of perspectives represented by the jury, the presenters, and of course, the literature being celebrated. It’s a fitting observation from the author of Fifteen dogs. The novel is a tender and elegant exploration of the perpetual problem of human consciousness, and the ways that gift is likewise a curse — we all have it, but to so many different ends and in light of infinitely unique experiences. What unites us in consciousness is also what divides us, our sense of our own separateness from everyone, and everything, else.
The novel is the second in Alexis’s current five-part project, what he calls a “Quincunx,” where he aims to explore the same handful of ideas and themes from the distinct vantage points offered by applying certain classic genre constraints to narrative. “Sort of like beckett’s trilogy — they don’t necessarily share characters, but there is a strong connection in the thematic concerns,” Alexis explains. The first in the series, Pastoral, was, yes, a pastoral approach to the themes of faith, place, love, power and hatred that will connect the five books. Fifteen dogs is an apologue, an ancient Greek form for moral fables, frequently positioning animals as characters who may stand in for human experiences. The form embraces pointed details that exaggerate, sometimes cartoonishly, the intended moral of the story. Here, the apologue form allows Alexis to simplify the experience of consciousness, and, more importantly, to access the problem of the mind by way of an immense, dog-loving heart.
The dogs are granted consciousness as a lark, part of a bet between the gods Apollo and Hermes. If even one dog, having been cursed with a human perspective on the world, dies happy, then Hermes will win the bet, against all odds. “It’s the idea of faith rather than the faith itself that’s interesting to me,” Alexis says, telling me he’s a confirmed agnostic, sharing a practical skepticism with majnoun, one of his canine characters. “What do humans actually imagine when they believe something without examining it intellectually and in profound depths? That interests me, how do humans behave — or in this case, how do dogs behave — when they want something more.”
majnoun, a large black Poodle, finds himself in an unlikely friendship with a human woman, Nira, after learning to speak passably in english. The two bond over films and music, and compare their tastes and cultures. In one genius piece of comedy, Alexis has majnoun calmly explain to Nira that her husband, miguel, is clearly the leader of their pack; he’s the biggest, after all. She, a thoroughly modern woman with great taste in books and cinema, is enraged at the idea. One day, Nira asks majnoun if he believes in God; she explains the concept to him and he nods yes. She’s aghast: “How can you believe such a ridiculous thing,” she demands. “I suppose you believe God is a dog?”
When I mention the scene to Alexis, he flashes a wide smile. “His approach to this is, ‘Sure, it’s a good idea, might exist, might not exist, what do I know?’ ” In the novel, majnoun’s cultural background, coming from canine culture as he does, is influencing his position, a factor that all-too-human Nira doesn’t take into account. “He believed only that the ‘god’ Nira had described was possible, the same way he believed a bitch perpetually in heat was possible. A ‘master of all masters’ was an idea, but it was one that did not concern him, so he could not understand Nira’s contempt.” He’s got other things to worry about, more interesting smells to sniff out.
“maybe it’s convenient for a novelist,” Alexis says when I ask him another question about faith and fate, “but I’m really agnostic, in that I don’t believe that we have the tools to answer what is at the origin of this thing that we’re all going through.” Not that that’s prevented him from trying. In fact, Fifteen dogs is, in it’s way, a coded tour of Western philosophy. “This is where we get into problems,” Alexis says with a smile. “The novel is in fact a potted history of philosophy. you recognize, in some instances, St. Anselm’s Ontological Proof of God’s existence, you’ll recognize Hegel’s theorem on master and servant, you’ll recognize Wittgenstein’s ideas about language.” He shakes his head. “What happens when they’re given human consciousness? Well, they re-do human philosophy.”
even the form of consciousness that the dogs take is rooted in the philosophical tradition.” The idea of consciousness that I give them is a parody of Kant,” Alexis explains. “Kant says we can’t help but see in three dimensions, we can’t help but perceive time. So the Kantian sense of consciousness is what’s given to the dogs; it’s not a full on human consciousness with all of its niceties.” The dogs instead are limited in their abilities, but the cynic in me would argue that those precise limits are often placed on members of our species. “They constantly talk about time, and order, because these are the things that Kant accepts as part of how we think. The idea of language is really important, but not so much as language itself. They have a language before they’re given this human language capacity. but their language is based on this very primal thing, very strong communication.”
The lives of the dogs are changed forever when the gods interfere, visiting consciousness upon the 15 poor beasts that happen to be spending a night at a veterinary clinic in Toronto. As they wake through the night, they begin to realize their worlds have changed, and they learn to open their cages and set their sights on a new canine order. Atticus, a Neapolitan mastiff, mistrusts the new way of the world, thinking they should strive only for continuing in the old ways of being dogs, unburdened by the new consciousness and this more nuanced sense of language. “He wants dogs to be dogs. And he doesn’t question that,” Alexis explains. “He has the chance to question that with majnoun, but he doesn’t. He refuses to allow for the possibility of newness and change. but what does that lead to? Well, it leads to a nostalgia for a state that you have left behind. And to some extent, that’s the problem with faith. If you look at what happens with Atticus, as to the idea of what happens with faith in Pastoral, you see different versions of the idea.”
One element of consciousness causes a very particular problem for Atticus. With their new, nuanced appreciation for language and ideas, the dogs are the first of their kind to discover art. A mutt named Prince (who I personally picture as some kind of Terrier cross) invents puns in their new shared tongue, and it’s bewildering and pleasurable even as it’s unnerving. The role of an artist complicates the way Atticus wants the dogs to understand the world. Art, Alexis says, “can’t be controlled and it can’t be put on the scale. What do you do with it? Well, (Prince) can do this, which is pleasurable to us but gives him status, that’s a problem. because if you give him status for being an artist, where does he fit in?” The artist represents an exception to both the implicit and overt ways we understand the world. Alexis mentions Paul Fussell’s book Class as a source for thinking about the way artists exist apart from the clearly understood world of status and order. “They could be poor, they could be rich, but in any case they don’t quite belong on the scale — they’re separate, doing this other thing that makes them very different to class. I took that idea seriously, the artist becomes a problem for those who want order, because where do you put them?”
Soon enough, Prince is composing poems, ones Alexis modelled on the Oulipian idea of poems for dogs, wherein the language embeds the phonetic sound of a dog’s name so clearly that any good pooch could hear it; the idea is that the dog will literally recognize itself in the poem. “It isn’t the mere language I admire,” Alexis says. “It’s the artistry. It’s how he’s able to create, and what happens with that creativity, that artistry, is what he’s able to do with what is essentially a curse. To be assigned a completely different way of thinking, one that alienates you from the creatures that are like you, and to turn it into a gift, into something that is cherishable. That’s the one aspect of the novel that you could say is pretty Pollyanna, in the sense that I believe in our ability to transform, visually, sonically, through the arts, through our creativity, this thing that is mysteriously and incredibly violent.” Prince’s poems are a great achievement, but they also signify a transformation of the experience of being alive. “Life is something that we pretend is not violent, but what helps us deal with the world, what helps us love the world, is our ability to transform it,” Alexis says. “And that’s what I love about Prince. Not his poems as poems, as words, but his poems as works of art. As transforming experience into something that lasts longer.”
each of the dogs in the novel becomes a kind of model for thinking about and experiencing the world, both as it actually is and as it appears when transformed by art. Alexis, whose quiet speaking voice seems perfectly in keeping with his prose, simultaneously showcasing great capacities for both tenderness and extreme rigour, reflects back on his aims with the novel. He wonders if it’s a disservice to readers to explain away the philosophical underpinnings of the book. Fifteen dogs charms more than it challenges, and while Alexis is grappling with big ideas and worrying over ideological, metaphysical and cognitive concerns, the book’s strength lies in his ability to transform these huge questions into art. He wanted, he tells me, to arrive at a different place, through a different means, than Kant and Hegel, the Greeks and Heidegger. “What I’ve always loved about philosophy are the questions, but I’ve always hated the answers.”