Only the Animals

by

Ceridwen Dovey

Only the Animals: Somewhere Along the Line the Pearl Would Be Handed to Me: Soul of Mussel Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
The mussel Sel first meets Muss after he decides that everything is dead. Sel’s friend Gallos introduces him to Muss; Gallos had taken up residence on Sel’s pier in the Hudson River to write poetry. Supposedly, Muss grew up poor on a farm out west and somehow made it to New York City. It annoys Muss to be told what to do, what to attach to, and when to “secrete threads from his byssus pit.” He left behind a girlfriend because he couldn’t stand to “have his spirit stolen bit by bit.” They were all looking for a new way of being. Muss told them all about his cross-country journey and insisted that this is the end of “untrue knowledge.” Sel agreed.
The title of this story comes from Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, and the story itself is a retelling of the novel. Choosing to revisit Kerouac’s novel, but with mussel characters instead of humans, allows readers to see the mussels as living beings worthy of consideration. Particularly for readers familiar with On the Road, this makes it clear that these mussels are just as interested in freedom and a freewheeling lifestyle as Kerouac’s characters are.
Themes
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At first, Muss and Gallos talk for 8 or 10 hours straight. Gallos laps up everything Muss says. Sel listens but usually says nothing when they sit down for chats. Muss and Gallos talk about seeing shoelaces that remind them of seaweed, and of how that reminds them of how sad garbage is. Finally, Muss says that he’s tired, so they must “stop the machine.” Gallos argues until Sel voices his support for Muss—and then, Sel tells them that he thinks they’re maniacs, but he wants to see what happens to them.
The phrase “stop the machine” comes from Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler, a collection of Kerouac’s journal entries about his travels.
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Spring arrives. As it gets warmer, Sel knows he has to follow Muss across the country to see how he grew up. They’ll go all the way to San Francisco, where Muss has a girl who will host them. Sel can’t convince his own girl to accompany them, but Muss counsels that Sel can find a girl elsewhere. Though Sel’s girl is unhappy, Sel still moves away. He curses life for being so sad.
Sel’s desire to follow Muss across the country drives home the importance of friendships, both for people and for animals. Mussels don’t have the relationships with people that other animals in the collection do, but they nevertheless can form bonds with each other within the logic of this story.
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Muss, Gallos, and Sel hitch a ride on a cargo ship. Muss says they have to move quickly across the U.S. or they’ll dry out. Soon, as Muss promised, they’re on the road in a crate, watching the stars above them. Midway across the country, they come across zebra mussels that frighten Sel. Gallos reminds him that the zebra mussels are different, and that different is exactly what Sel wants. They attend a party where there will be girls, though they know they can’t stay too long in the fresh water or they’ll die. But they go to the party anyway, because Muss needs girls like most blue mussels need saltwater.
Again, the constant repetition that the mussels are “on the road” is a nod to the source material (Kerouac’s On the Road), while the desire for new experiences and sex speak to the concerns of Kerouac and the rest of the beat generation. The beat generation prized the freewheeling lifestyle that Sel, Muss, and Gallos are currently pursuing—a lifestyle that included alcohol, drugs, and sex. When Sel is initially afraid of the zebra mussels, it suggests that a fear of difference isn’t just something that affects humans and may instead be universal.
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The mussels meet Muss’s cousin on an exposed pipe. They’re shocked that there’s no space, just zebra mussels. They’ve almost covered the bottom of the lakes and there are no native mussels left. At the party, Sel asks some girls about the native pearly mussels. The girls close their shells, but Sel persists. He tries to explain that he grew up hearing about the mussels out West. They supposedly had such beautiful shells that the humans who found them named each one as they pulled them out of the water. When Muss is done with his zebra mussel girl, the mussels get into a box of bait. Sel feels like he’s starting to dry up and thinks about names of native pearly mussels. Gallos works the names into a little poem, which he recites by shouting.
One of the main ideas of On the Road is that its characters idolize the American West and desperately want to see and experience it. Here, Sel shows that as a mussel, he also idealizes the West—but for him, the West is essential to understanding who he is as a mussel. This passage underscores humans’ role in the pearly mussels’ absence. Freshwater mussels are often the victims of climate change, so even if Sel isn’t aware of it, people are changing his world. Recording the pearly mussels’ names, though, is a way to remember a history that seems to be fast disappearing.
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Quotes
The mussels hit the West Coast pretty far north. Being on the road was great, but they’re not quite ready for it yet with their soft bodies and their unformed philosophies. They hitch a ride to Bremerton, Washington, where Muss grew up. Muss has told stories about his father, who’s been on the farm so long that he’d forgotten he could be free if he’d just let go. But when they get to the farm, they can’t find Muss’s father. Several old mussels say that Muss’s father was harvested, and one says that Muss and his young friends shouldn’t take chances. Muss howls with grief, so Gallos and Sel lead him out into the water and avoid the seagulls at night.
Within the logic of this story, mussels have far more freedom than they do in real life—mussels do have some capacity to shift around, but they generally don’t have the ability to just let go like Muss thinks is best. But still, within the logic of this story, Muss gets at the idea that what traps people—or animals—are their thoughts. Just as it’s possible the dog in “Hundstage” died in part because he wouldn’t eat much meat in an attempt to please Himmler, Muss suggests that it’s the idea that a person is trapped that traps them.
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In the morning, they find the battleship. It’s a gorgeous “vessel of adventure,” and it’s exactly what they’re looking for. There’s already a community of mussels on the side, so the Sel and his companions decide to join. The toxic stuff the humans put on the hull doesn’t keep the mussels off; it just keeps them high. Sel and his friends secrete just enough so they can hang on, but not enough to get stuck in a routine. Their goal is to detach. A mussel named Bluey joined the group at the farm. The four talk often about how to practice non-attachment while depending on attaching to the hull for survival.
The aside about the chemicals on the ship’s hull making the mussels high is another nod to the story’s source material and the beat generation—drug use was a major element in beat culture. It also suggests that people aren’t as skilled at controlling wild animals as they might think they are. And the simple fact that the mussels attach themselves to a ship instead of something natural, like a rock, speaks to the interconnectedness between humans and animals.
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Bluey feels lonely all the time. He likes to watch his byssal secretions harden and believes that the mussels’ sadness stems from fighting their byssus threads. True bliss, he believes, will come only if they give in and attach. Despite this, Bluey still knows he has to have an adventure before he settles down.
Byssus threads what allows a mussel to hold onto a given surface. It is, in other words, what makes a mussel a mussel. Bluey thus seems to propose that they need to accept their nature as mussels—while Muss seems to think they need to transcend their nature as mussels by moving around.
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Muss and Gallos aren’t certain about attaching to a U.S. Navy vessel, but Sel doesn’t care. He just wants to be moving somewhere interesting. So when the battleship starts to move and the hull vibrates, it feels great. The seascape changes around the mussels, and Sel notices every new thing he passes. Some days, the mussels starve because the ship is going too fast for them to filter, but on other days, the ship slows down, and the mussels gorge themselves. The other mussels tell stories. One talks about being attached to a life raft with a human shipwreck survivor. The man had given up, jumped off, and drowned.
When the mussels get to move around while still staying attached to something (the Navy battleship), it shows that with human help, mussels can, to a degree, transcend their nature as immobile bivalves. And especially when Sel talks about struggling to eat on some days and gorging himself on others, it suggests that in this state, the mussels are beholden to the people steering the ship. The mussels may think they’re more in control than they actually are.
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When the water is very still, the mussels can sense the men above them. They usually only hear the cooks or the engines, but one day they hear a whistle and someone calling everyone to the deck. The mussels wait, but they’re disappointed when the voice dismisses the drill.
Despite being wild animals, the mussels are still very interested in the people on the ship and the possibility of seeing combat. This implies that the war (World War II, given the story’s date) will affect the mussels, too, and that humans and animals are intimately connected.
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Since Sel and his friends are in the middle of the hull, they don’t have a hard time hanging on. A few other mussels fall off when it gets stormy, which always makes Bluey sad. But they lose some and gain others. Blue mussel larvae continually latch on. One grows up into a beautiful girl. Muss loves her, but she’s more interested in Sel. Soon, Sel loves her. He’s glad that Muss lies awake at night and listens to them talk. Sel tries to talk the girl into spawning, but she’s too nervous. When he asks what she wants out of life, she yawns. This offends Sel; she seems too young to be tired. She tells Sel her story, and Sel realizes why this girl is different: she doesn’t want to settle down.
Just as the human characters throughout the collection are at the mercy of the natural world, here the mussels are, too. Though they can try to keep themselves attached to the ship’s hull by choosing the perfect spot to latch on, their success isn’t guaranteed. Again, Sel’s attempts to court this girl read as distinctly human, which continues to encourage readers to feel empathy for the book’s animals and see the similarities between humans and animals.
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The girl disappears one day when Muss and Sel get into a fight over the nature of reality. Bluey gets sad and Gallos gets jealous, but Muss and Sel forgive each other later. Muss makes Sel repeat, “Experience is all.” Sel wants to climb into Muss’s mind—he’s never felt this way about anyone else.
Here, the mussels experience jealousy, sadness, and love, just like humans—yet another moment in which the book suggests that humans and animals aren’t as different as they seem.
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Some of the other mussels on the hull start to get nervous. They insist there’s a dog whelk trying to invade the mussel bed. They plan to tether it, but Bluey insists it’s wrong to starve another creature. Both Muss and Gallos support the cause, but Sel doesn’t know what he feels. He stays put while Muss and Gallos join the hunt, and he wishes he’d gone too.
Dog whelks are predatory sea snails. The mussels’ fear that this creature will eat them (and their choice to tie it up and leave it for dead) shows that these animals are capable of the same kind of fear and cruelty as their human counterparts.
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Another girl comes along to distract Sel. They become physically intimate, but Sel is too sad to continue. After a while, she asks if Sel thinks it means something that he and his friends are all “on the same boat.” Sel insists the sea is a “great leveler.” He continues that sometimes he hates it here, but he can’t decide if he wants to stay here forever or run away.
Saying that the mussels are all “on the same boat” is a play on the idiom “in the same boat.” But in this case, the mussels are all literally attached to the same boat and in the same general situation.
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In the morning, the girl tells Sel to stay hungry. He’s onto something, living so spontaneously. She assures him that he’ll get there if he can survive, but there’s no virtue in moving quickly toward death. She advises him to live slowly and die old. When Sel insists that he’s just one of millions of mussels, she says that he’s his own little world. The girl moves on and not long after, Muss and Gallos return. They’d tied up the dog whelk and left it to die. Hearing this, Bluey doesn’t talk to them for days, so Sel makes a speech. He insists that they can’t do that sort of thing when they’re sailing. They have to live together, so they have to pitch in and not mess things up for everyone else.
Sel’s responses to this female mussel seem to show that he doesn’t think he matters much. In his mind, he’s just one in a world full of mussels—and indeed, it’s not often that people are asked to care about an individual mussel, like Sel; people usually think of mussels in the collective and as food. But later, when Sel makes his speech to his friends urging them all to cooperate, it again shows that these mussels are very human-like. They, like people, have to watch their behavior and act kindly to protect and maintain their friendships.
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The ship stops in Astoria, Oregon. It’s there for a few weeks, giving the mussels time to get in trouble in the bay. Bluey, though, gets homesick and decides to return to the farm. He misses sharing food with his family and knowing he can latch onto something for good. Sel, Muss, and Gallos don’t understand Bluey’s feelings, but they sadly let him go. After Bluey’s departure, Sel gets restless, but fortunately the ship moves out a few days later. The battleship is moving slowly north and west, though, so the mussels mope. On this ship, they’re never going to get to San Francisco. Sel says something that he’d be happy to die in San Francisco in a soup, but Muss insists there’s no glory in death—just nothingness.
Bluey loves his family and wants to be close to them, and he finds the familiar environment of his home farm comforting. It’s possible to read his choice to go home as an embrace of his true mussel nature—back at the farm, he’s going to attach to something, like a normal mussel. Sel, Muss, and Gallos, though, have to confront again that they don’t have the kind of power to dictate their movement that they’d like. They’re attached to a ship, so they must go where it goes.
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Sel, Gallos, and Muss talk about nothingness. Muss insists they turn bright orange when they’re cooked. He also insists that humans don’t eat mussels’ byssus threads and don’t consider them to be part of a mussel’s body, even though to mussels, the threads are the root of who they are. Gallos says that if they find themselves in a pot, they should keep their shells closed so the humans won’t eat them. Sel thinks this is useless—if they’re dead, they’re dead.
When Gallos warns his friends to stay closed to avoid being eaten, he misses an important point: if a mussel is in a pot of water in someone’s kitchen, they’re going to die anyway. This is what Sel realizes is true—once a mussel ends up in a person’s bucket, their chances at living are next to nothing. People sometimes have absolute power over animals.
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A few weeks later, the battleship slows down in water that’s warm and salty. The ship puts down anchor in a harbor with many other battleships like it. Muss floats around and returns with the news that they’re in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Weirdly, the temperature and salt brings on a mass spawning. Every mussel spews sperm or eggs into the water with wild abandon. They spawn and eat as much as they can, getting fat and happy.
The detail that the mussels are in Pearl Harbor in 1941 is ominous foreshadowing for readers—it seems as though the mussels will be there to experience the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Readers can then assume that the mussels’ lives will soon end, all because of a human conflict in which they have no stakes.
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Eventually, the water looks milky from all the larval mussels. After a few months, though, those drifters settle down as juveniles amongst the other mussels. It dawns on Sel, Muss, and Gallos that they’ve wasted their freedom—now, they’re the elders in the colony. The juveniles keep coming up and asking about the search for meaning. Sel finds this ridiculous. Life is about the journey—he can’t fathom that the next generation thinks life should have meaning. Gallos has a nervous breakdown. He moves in with a radical colony, but it doesn’t reinvigorate him. He becomes huge and stops writing poetry, so Muss and Sel stop visiting.
Even though mussels don’t care for their young like people do, it’s still a major shock for Muss, Sel, and Gallos to realize that they inadvertently became elders in the community. The youth expect them to be able to answer their questions about the world and the way it is, just as human children look to their parents and other adult mentors for guidance. The idea that life shouldn’t have meaning seems to fit particularly well with Sel, as a mussel, given how little he can control about his life. 
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Then, Muss and Sel meet the lobster. The mussels are frightened at first, but once they start talking, they learn that the lobster is on a journey to have experiences, just like them. He’s been around the world, and he doesn’t eat the mussels because he’s fasting. He wants to think more clearly. The lobster insists that the war will arrive here soon, so the mussels should be careful—mussels will be the food of choice once humans start rationing meat.
When the lobster warns the mussels that people will soon try to eat them, the book alludes to the fact that during World War II, due to rationing, mussels did indeed become popular meat alternatives. These animals become, once again, just a source of sustenance for people who—as in “Red Peter”—couldn’t deal without eating meat.
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One morning, the lobster gives Sel and Muss a speck of something that will help them “see beyond the here and now.” Sel hallucinates that he’s stuck in a rainbow. Muss and the lobster talk incessantly as Sel silently watches the colors. He occasionally hears the lobster say that Europeans can only import philosophy to America now. The lobster says he stalked Sartre for a while, hoping Sartre would put him on a leash and take him for walks. Later, Sel starts listening again and hears Muss and the lobster talking about mussels’ poetry. They’re all so high that they laugh when a starfish moves in, hoping to eat a mussel. At the last minute, the lobster scares it away. Then he gives the mussels another speck.
Lobsters are far more mobile than mussels, so it stands to reason that they have more power than their bivalve counterparts. It’s possible to see this when the lobster waits until the last second to scare away the starfish, a common mussel predator. The mussels, as mostly immobile shellfish, have to rely on the whims of other creatures—like other sea animals and humans—to survive. The drug use in this passage is also an overt reference to On the Road; psychoactive drugs were a large part of the beat generation’s culture and appear throughout the book.
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Muss goes silent, Sel’s drug trip becomes grayscale, and the lobster sings something sad as church bells ring on land. Something enters the water and comes toward them fast. The mussels and the lobster admire it until it hits the battleship. The lobster dies instantly; the hull that Muss and Sel are attached to blasts out into the port. The ship shudders as bombs hit it again and again. Suddenly, the water is teeming with things that shouldn’t be there—helmets, legs, and arms.
The “something” that enters the water is the first bomb dropped in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Even though the mussels and the lobster aren’t part of World War II (aside from their potential role as food once rationing kicks in), they can’t avoid getting roped in. War affects everyone and everything—even the animals.
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Sel thinks they should embrace this moment of collapse, but they’re too freaked out. A man with no legs tries to climb onto Sel’s bit of hull, and Sel feels like the force of the bombs is going to make his body implode. The water heats up from the oil fires. Remembering what Gallos said about surviving in boiling water, Sel tries to close his shell. He can’t; half of it is gone. He and Muss know what Muss has to do to survive. He must drop off and sink to the cooler water below. Muss lets go and lands in amongst the mussels they created.
Though the story focuses on Sel’s experience of the bombing, this passage underscores the human consequences of the bombing. Sel only mentions this one injured man (and the disembodied limbs in the previous passage), but they’re certainly not the only people dying in Pearl Harbor alongside the mussels. And Sel isn’t spared—not only is he going to cook in the ocean, but he also has no way to protect himself after losing part of his shell.
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Sel panics, but calms down as he thinks of the sunset over the Hudson River. He used to watch it and think that nobody knows what’s going to happen, aside from that they’ll grow old. He panics again when he thinks that he wasn’t supposed to die like this. Where will Muss be without Sel looking at him? He wishes everyone good luck with the “spawning, living, and the dying.” He thinks of Muss until he dies.
Sel wishes everyone good luck with their lives and interestingly doesn’t specify that he’s only talking about mussels. Living, dying, and having sex are things that all creatures—human and animal—do, and Sel acknowledges that here. Again, animals and people aren’t so different; their base concerns are more or less the same.
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