Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

The novel repeatedly focuses on the value of life by asking which lives matter. On this subject, Janina stands in opposition to the traditional values of her culture. Most people don’t consider the source of the meat they eat and that an animal was slaughtered to provide it. They don’t think about the fur coats that keep them warm or the animals that suffer in cages before being skinned. Even pet animals like dogs or cats become prey if they stray onto a hunter’s property.

The powers that be in Janina’s little village favor human life over all other species. In addition, they have allied themselves with one another to reinforce the notion of human dominance by engaging in the practice of sport hunting. The commandant represents the power of the law. Innerd represents the power of wealth. The president represents the power of politics, and Father Rustle represents the power of the church. Each man benefits in some way from conspiring with the rest. To them, value is reckoned in personal benefit. An animal may be valuable for its fur or its meat, but its life has no intrinsic worth other than what can be extracted for human use. Janina sees this power dynamic at play in the photograph that displays her dead pets. She says,

If not for the corpses lying at their feet, one might have thought these people were celebrating a happy event, so self-satisfied did they look. […] The masculine odor of tanned hide, oiled shotguns, alcohol and sweat. Gestures of domination, insignia of power (254).

To the hunters, dead animals symbolize their superiority—their dominion over nature. This perception is diametrically opposed to Janina’s. To her, all lives have value. All living creatures have souls. She is as upset by the murder of a deer as she would be at the murder of a human child. At one point in the story, she can’t contain her outrage against the society that fails to assign a spiritual value to animal life. Her choice of language as she berates a policeman is particularly telling:

What sort of a world is this? Someone’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth...Shoes, sofas, a shoulder bag made of someone’s belly, keeping warm with someone else’s fur, eating someone’s body, cutting it into bits and frying it in oil...Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening? This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience (106-07).

Janina does not say “something” is made into shoes. She says, “somebody.” She accords respect to her fellow creatures by speaking of them in human terms. To her, the value of an animal lies in its very existence, not the price that can be assigned to its various dismembered parts.