The Pig, Unspeaking
Horrific Language and Nonhuman Semiosis in Miyazawa Kenji’s “The Pig of the Furandon Agricultural School”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.24438Keywords:
Miyazawa Kenji, anthropocentrism, nonhuman animals, extralingual representation, onomatopoeia, biosemioticsAbstract
This article examines the representation of human language and its limits in the short story “The Pig of the Furandon Agricultural School” (c. 1921) by the early twentieth-century Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji. The story features a domesticated pig, fluent in human language, who is slaughtered for his meat despite displaying a level of linguistic ability generally perceived as exclusively human. The pig’s literacy does not save his life; rather, it renders his experience of the human world more horrific, as he overhears what humans say about his edible body, peruses a death consent form he is subsequently coerced into signing, and comes to realize the transformation into meat that awaits him. In Miyazawa’s story, therefore, the nonhuman animal’s understanding of human language proves irrelevant to a pre-existing hierarchy of lives organized along species lines. As the pig becomes aware of his fate, the text ceases to textualize his speech and psyche, as if refusing to further territorialize the pig within human semantics, while continuing to describe how he appears, sounds, and behaves through onomatopoeia. This article foregrounds the ways in which Miyazawa’s depiction of the pig exposes the limits of human language and offers a glimpse of a world not entirely bound to an anthropocentric semiotic system.
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