André Alexis tries to answer a question we've all wondered: what if dogs had human consciousness?
CBC Radio | Posted: February 7, 2023 6:45 PM | Last Updated: February 7, 2023
In his award-winning novel Fifteen Dogs, André Alexis imagined what would happen if our canine friends were given human consciousness. He tells Tom about the acclaimed stage adaptation of his book, on now at Crow's Theatre in Toronto, and how dogs can show us what it means to be human.
The full interview with André Alexis is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power.
Tom: I want to start with a hard hitting question, given that this is the CBC and we're here to take people to account. Of all of the dogs you've had in your past, what is your favourite?
Andre: Oh, that's a tough one. You know, it's funny because I adore Leah — er, Laila. Leah is my partner's daughter, Laila is the dog that Catherine and I had. And in some ways, the poodle that is played by Tom Rooney is based on Leah. But, you know, the real source of that poodle was a black poodle named Perkins, who we met while walking dogs, as you do. And I swear, if the word "regal" applies to any being, it applies to Perkins. He was amazing. You were in the presence of Perkins, and that consideration and calm and majesty is something that I really reacted to. And so Tom's character, Majnoun, is based on a black poodle named Perkins, who I encountered maybe five times in my life before Perkins died.
Wow. I mean, I would have thought it would have been a dog that would have lived with you. ... What is it about dogs that made you choose them to write a story that ultimately is, at least to me, about what it is that makes us human? Why did you choose dogs?
It's a complicated question. Because of Leah, because of Perkins, because of the other dogs in my life, it would be easy to say that I've really loved dogs in my life, but I've also been afraid of them. I was bitten by a dog when I was younger. They make me wary. They are an animal that catches my attention in a way that is more fraught than with cats. I love cats and have enjoyed having cats... at one point I think I was living with six or seven cats, and I liked them all. They were kind of independent and they let you go — so it's a good relationship, but it's not as interesting a relationship as the relationship that I've had with dogs. And so because there's that spiky fear, fascination and also a great love, it made it a more immediate subject for me.
There's Fifteen Dogs the novel that you wrote, and then there's Fifteen Dogs the theatrical experience, which is something else. I want to give folks an idea of what we see in the play. These are dogs played by human actors. It's not like Cats, like no one's running around on all fours in a dog costume. Did seeing your own book that way, humans playing dogs given human consciousness, did that make you think about what it is to be human in a different way?
First of all, seeing an adaptation is extremely weird because you've spent X amount of time creating this thing within this medium. ... Having spent that time making it into a novel, to see it within such a different context is extremely hard to describe. It's like, "this is good, I like the performers," but it's just weird hearing my words — some of them literally my words — coming from that stage, coming in that medium. And so, it's a way to, I guess, reexamine my own words or my own thinking from a different perspective. But really, one of the most interesting insights for me in watching it was watching the reaction to a Toronto audience when Bloor Street is named, when The Beaches is named. And I realized that what's going on when these areas are named is a way of asserting that humans, in fact, demarcate their territory as dogs do.
The full interview with André Alexis is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power.
Interview produced by Jennifer Warren.