Becoming (in)human. The search for an alternative present in Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk

Abstract

The paper presents a reading of Helen Macdonald's non-fiction book H Is for Hawk, that focuses on the adoption of the temporal perspective of a predator (the instantaneousness of the attack and capture of the prey) instead of the typically human way of addressing the temporality spreading over a past, a present, and a future (memory, mourning, anxiety). Rethinking the inherited cultural practice of keeping and taming goshawks, the British writer narrates the process of mental merging with the female goshawk she trains. Through her engagement as an austringer (keeper of hawks), she also questions such categories as gender, class, and nationality. In parallel to her own experience, she reads the personal story of yet another transgressive austringer, the homosexual author T. H. White. This double line of vital/textual experience deconstructs the dominant cultural stance of heterosexual masculinity and sketches a peculiar queertopia.