A cyborg bestiary: transgressing binaries and liberating the animal(s) in Katalin Ladik's Grass Cage (2004)

Abstract

The poetry volume Grass Cage (Fűketrec) by Katalin Ladik, a Yugoslavian-Hungarian poet, actress, and performance artist, reassesses multiple philosophical concepts related to the human and the nonhuman. The poet uses the traditional proto-scientific, theological, and didactic connotations of the bestiary to explore the potential of literary form. Theoretically grounded in Antonio Gramsci’s widely applicable definition of ideology and Donna J. Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, this paper examines how Grass Cage as a literary work violates the ‘traditional rulebook’ of the bestiary, creating a work of art that is horizontally democratized. It demonstrates how Ladik twists the concept of the bestiary in a typically postmodern fashion, inverting the direction of the proto-scientific examination, thus revealing a rampant world inside the (lyrical) subject while constantly blurring the lines between subject and object.