Ep. 12 – Novelist Lindsay Stern on “The Study of Animal Languages”

“We spent most of our evolutionary history surrounded by other beings, not having conquered the earth, and with a very limited material culture,” Stern says. “There are tremendous emotional costs to becoming the only act in town, costs that I think we feel in how we relate to one another and how we think about who we are. One way to look at these draconian, absurd experiments [on animals] going on all over the world is to see them as a symptom of that.”

In March of 2016, a group of scientists reported a discovery from the forests of central Japan. Writing in Nature Communications, Dr. Toshitaka Suzuki and his team announced that compositional syntax, the property of speech that enables it to “express limitless meanings,” was not unique to human languages. It had been observed in the vocal system of a bird. The paper sparked a flurry of tweets. It was also picked up the popular press, and for good reason. Given the putative role of syntax in expressing higher order thought in humans, its presence in an avian vocal system suggested that when a bird sings it is not simply naming a stimulus in its immediate environment but, rather, expressing a thought.

“It’s amazing, the parts of yourself you can reach [writing fiction],” Stern says. “It’s an endless surprise, and that’s part of what makes it frightening.”

In the acclaimed new novel The Study of Animal Languages, published last month by Viking-Penguin and written by When We Talk About Animals co-host Lindsay Stern, a biologist named Prue conducts a similar experiment in her laboratory at a New England liberal arts college. Like the actual study, hers is picked up by the popular press, touted as evidence that animals have yet another capacity we assumed made us unique. But in a speech at the heart of the book, where she announces her findings, she suggests that the study teaches us more about ourselves than it does about the animal in question. The Study of Animal Languages has already been hailed by Vanity Fair, the New York Journal of Books, The Washington Independent, Southern Living, NYLON, BUSTLE, Literary Hub, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and the New York Post as a tragicomedy of errors that explores our increasingly vexed relationship to the natural world and to each other.

Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow, and a PhD candidate and Franke Fellow in comparative literature at Yale. The Study of Animal Languages is her first novel. In this episode, Stern speaks about her new book, the limitations of conscience, the spiritual costs of the Anthropocene, and fiction’s capacity to explore the motives behind our search for animal minds.

Recommended books:

Kanzi’s Primal Language by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, William Fields, and Pär Segerdahl

“Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang

Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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