Literature and Animal Studies

Mario Ortiz-Robles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134740628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Why do animals talk in literature? In this provocative book, Mario Ortiz Robles tracks the presence of animals across an expansive literary archive to argue that literature cannot be understood as a human endeavor apart from its capacity to represent animals. Focusing on the literary representation of familiar animals, including horses, dogs, cats, and songbirds, Ortiz Robles examines the various tropes literature has historically employed to give meaning to our fraught relations with other animals. Beyond allowing us to imagine the lives of non-humans, literature can make a lasting contribution to Animal Studies, an emerging discipline within the humanities, by showing us that there is something fictional about our relation to animals.

Literature and Animal Studies combines a broad mapping of literary animals with detailed readings of key animal texts to offer a new way of organizing literary history that emphasizes genera over genres and a new way of classifying animals that is premised on tropes rather than taxa. The book makes us see animals and our relation to them with fresh eyes and, in doing so, prompts us to review the role of literature in a culture that considers it an endangered art form.

1 What is it like to be a trope?

This book is about the relation between literature, one of the oldest of human endeavors, and animal studies, one of the newest disciplines within the humanities. It seeks to find common ground between two very different approaches to the same question, or sets of questions pertaining to how humanity defines itself, and to whether or not this definition has something to do with the animal world. In mapping out this common ground, the present book will endeavor to address these questions by describing the new discipline called animal studies in terms that will be familiar to students of literature: What kind of characters do animals play in literature? What sorts of narratives do they inhabit? What is their figurative status? Why, how, to whom, and for whom do animals speak?

Animals have always been part of literature, but their presence, perhaps like that of dogs in some human cultures, has been as marginal as it has been constant. In the great epics of antiquity, Gilgamesh, the Hebrew Bible, and Homer, animals play significant, even necessary, roles, but no one would claim that these, the earliest of literary works, are essentially about animals. They are, if anything, about how humans became human. Indeed, from this perspective, literature can be said to be about how humans describe themselves as not animals. Yet, as the example of Ovid so vividly illustrates, this act of self-definition often entails using the figural resources of literature to imagine what it would be like for a human to be an animal, or for an animal to be human. In imagining such metamorphoses, the categorical distinction between humans and animals that literature would otherwise seem to be making becomes suspended in the metaphorical nature of language. Literature serves to separate humans from animals, but also to confuse and conflate them. In Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), Gregor Samsa is a human who, in becoming an animal, also becomes the living metaphor of his life as a human, which has resembled up to the point of his transformation that of the vermin he inevitably becomes. The presence of animals in literature, marginal yet constant, suggests that literature is that discourse whereby humans simultaneously declare their difference from animals, and take the measure of their suggestive similarities.

This might lead us to conclude that we are literary animals in the sense in which Aristotle speaks of humans as political animals. We certainly imagine ourselves as uniquely equipped to produce works of astounding verbal beauty and, at times, of plodding verbosity in which we render the world we inhabit as a world we share with animals. But, in the more than three millennia of literary history, literature has always represented animals without for all that speaking for them. Literature can be said to be literary to the precise degree that animals are made to speak in literature and, therefore, it might be more accurate to say that animals are the ones that really speak for literature. Modern science poses the question of whether animals have use of language; no one ever asks if animals use language poetically. This book will try to imagine what it is like to listen to animals as they speak in literature through the verbal inventions of humans. It will thus seek to defend a somewhat paradoxical thesis: animals as we know them are a literary invention.

Animals are as old as literature

Animals are as old as literature. This is to say that animals have been represented in literature since its beginnings. From the earliest epics, fables, parables, and plays, animals have donned a great variety of guises to become the privileged presences that show us how to be human. But it is also to say that animals are there at the very origins of literature. In most cultures, origin myths involve the separation of humans from a natural state in which the distinction between humans and non-humans has not yet been determined. In the story of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, for instance, Adam is given the task of naming the animals and, in carrying it out, becomes their overseer. In Eden, animals are not only named, however; they are also made to speak, as the example of one particular serpent best illustrates. The flood that seeks to make up for Eve’s heeding of the serpent’s call also becomes an opportunity for animals to be renamed, or at the very least reorganized, by the human who saves them under divine dispensation. Genesis, then, can be said to stage the origin of human culture as an event in which the act of naming separates humans from animals. At its own origins, literature tells us of humans’ invention of animals as animals. To say that animals are as old as literature, then, is also to say that they are not any older than literature.

But it is not only on the fictional plane of myth that humans can be said to have invented animals. As Jacques Derrida’s use of the awkward neologism “animot” (a combination of “animaux,” the plural of “animal” in French, and “mot,” the word for “word”) suggests, the single term “animals” is something of a fiction since it is used to group together a vast multiplicity of living beings. The strict division Western culture establishes between humans and animals may itself be the product of a certain form of us-and-them literality whose origins are in fact literary in nature. This division can be traced back through the history of Western thought in the different iterations of the definition of the human as a privileged species of animal that has or has had something extra or supplementary appended to its animal nature: the human is a political animal (Aristotle); a promising animal (Nietzsche); an animal with soul (Descartes); a time-keeping animal (Heidegger); etc. In all of these cases, humans are distinguished from their non-human cousins on the basis of cognitive, spiritual, intellectual, and linguistic considerations. Most of us would likely agree that humans, endowed with big brains, are capable of doing things that other animals cannot accomplish, but it is also true that other animals are capable of doing things that humans can only dream of doing without the aid of technology, or at any rate of doing them better: flying, swimming, running, smelling, hearing, etc. It might indeed be worth considering in this context to what extent technology is guided by humans’ desire to become more like animals, or at the very least to make use of animal attributes that they don’t otherwise possess. Moreover, the ability of certain animals to do certain things very well would distinguish them from other animals that are not capable of doing them as well as they can, or of doing them at all. We might imagine a category in which bats, for instance, are defined as echo-locating mice, flying mice, or cave-dwelling mice, but we would not thereby be usefully distinguishing bats from, say, centipedes. The problem, in other words, is not that the categorical distinction established between humans and animals is not based on factual difference; it is that the difference thus defined would seem to make us categorically distinct from all other members of the animal kingdom. The difference between humans and mollusks is just as marked as is the difference between camels and sparrows. We all share a common origin, as Darwin postulated, but in nature difference is all there is. What’s more: difference is the very principle of evolution.

To suggest that the category “animals” is a human invention is thus not to deny the variety and diversity of life. On the contrary: it is to remark that the categorical distinction made between humans, on one side, and non-humans, on the other, is a figment of our imagination, a conceit that, by creating a rigid binary, in fact denies difference on a larger scale. There are of course many mechanisms, some discursive, some logical, some habitual, and others technological, that humans have devised to make this distinction hold and which have determined the way we have related to animals throughout history. The use of animals for food, clothes, tools, transport, war, labor, sport, devotion, and, of course, art has been made possible by the right we arrogate to ourselves to lord over the non-human world. Whether we imagine ourselves as the benign stewards of the planet, as the fearless captains of industrial progress, as disinterested pioneers in the search for knowledge, or as the selfless leaders of human emancipation from need, the fact remains that our relation to non-humans has most often been premised on our willingness to assert our domination over nature. The invention of the animal has thus been instrumental in the development of human culture by creating the conditions of possibility of our own invention as civilized beings. William Cronon’s contention that “wilderness” is a human invention is to the point here, for, even though many animals exist within the domains of human civilization, these domesticated beings serve as a reminder of our unnatural regard toward the non-human world, which only exists “out there” in the “wild” nature of our imaginations.

But Cronon is also right to insist that the human invention of wilderness is a historical phenomenon, pertaining to specific human cultures and to specific moments in human history. If I maintain that animals are a human invention in a general sense, it is not because this particular invention has no history of its own; it is because I take the strict separation between human and non-human worlds to be a structural necessity for first positing, and then advancing, the idea of civilization. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) is instructive in this regard for it tells the story of a shipwreck who must reinvent his life by wresting from nature the means to satisfy his basic needs and, in doing so, to reestablish his difference from nature, thereby claiming the authority granted by civilized life to control it. Critics have read Defoe’s novel as an allegory of the foundation of political sovereignty based on the concept of colonial protestant individualism, but little attention has been paid to the fact that Crusoe’s process of reinvention is entirely premised on the domestication of animals—goats, cats, a parrot—and the use he makes of them for food, clothes, shelter, and companionship. (He makes his famous umbrella, the most over-determined symbol of his civilized individuality, out of animal skins.) Crusoe’s story of human refashioning is all about the individual distinguishing himself from the other—non-humans, savages, cannibals, Friday, Spaniards—through a series of separations, the aim of which is a life of independent sovereignty in a state of nature.

To be sure, our conception of animals has changed drastically over time and continues to vary significantly from one culture to the next. Yet, most historians who study the history of human–animal relations agree that, at least in the West, the advent of industrialized modernity was decisive for the history of animals. Human–animal relations, as Harriet Ritvo has shown, underwent a radical transformation at the end of the eighteenth century when animals became “objects of human manipulation” as new economic realities, new technologies, growing global commerce, and abrupt demographic shifts increased the demand for animal labor and animal products. At the same time, the disappearance of animals from everyday life for the vast majority of urban dwellers made the presence of animals in cities as pets, zoo specimens, museum displays, and circus performers ever more imperative. These new roles for animals, categories that were largely created by a political logic that was for the first time based on biological quantification, changed the nature of the relation that had been established over thousands of years between humans and animals, giving rise to a new entity: the modern animal. Indeed, we can adapt Michel Foucault’s famous claim that “man” was invented at the turn of the nineteenth century to assert that the modern animal was invented at the same time; the two inventions are in fact part of the same process.

This historical “mutation,” as Foucault terms it, reconfigured our relation to animals in the form of an apparent paradox: on the one hand, a generalized cultural disavowal of the scale at which animals are killed in industry, science, and sport; on the other, the proliferation without precedent of discourses about animals through the development, institutionalization, and dissemination of knowledge about the natural world. Under different rubrics—natural history, comparative anatomy, phylogeny, embryology, genetics, ecology, etc.—the emergence of the biological sciences in the nineteenth century marks a decisive turn in the development of our knowledge of living beings and of the discourses that describe, catalog, and rationalize our complicated relation to animals. The institutional origins of literature as we know it today can also be traced back to this same period as a new referential relation to the world is inaugurated with the development of the two forms of literary empiricism that, mutatis mutandis, constitute for us the field of literature to this day: Romanticism and Realism.

Nature was of course a constant referent for the Romantics, but, despite the conspicuous presence of songbirds in its poetry, it is a nature that is oddly devoid of animal life. Romantic poetry occupies a landscape of the mind, which, excited by what it perceives in nature, emits through recollection a song that, though figured as the voice of a nightingale, is all poetic invention. The imagination is more subdued in Realism since, less spectacularly endowed with the power of composition, it is directed at the representation of social life. It arguably shares with the experimental sciences that are coming into being at the turn of the nineteenth century a binding empirical disposition toward reality, but Realism trains its considerable powers of description on human nature rather than on its relation to the non-human world. Modernism can be said to entangle these two modes of empiricism, inventing new representational forms to express, in a mode that may be described as a realism of interiority, the meanderings of consciousness as it records the social world it inhabits. As it enters the second half of the twentieth century, the mind can now only reliably reflect itself as it sings of a longing for songs of nature. To be sure, there are animals in this literary tradition, some even as famous as Moby Dick, but when we refer to modern literature we are not in general thinking of animals. It is mostly at the margins of this central canon—in children’s literature, in genre fiction, in memoirs—that we find traces of the literary animal. Like droppings on the forest floor, these traces of the animal in literature suggest a number of possible tracks, histories, plots, and scenarios that both blur and reaffirm the double structure that at once binds human to non-human, and keeps them categorically separate from each other.

The history of modern literature is thus the history of an absence; an absence made all the more poignant by the cultural embeddedness of animals during the same period. But this paradox is not limited to the history of literature. To assert that it is would be to consign animals to the domain of representations and to forget that there are “real” animals out “there.” Indeed, the human invention of the animal as a form of figuration informs other domains of knowledge, not the least of which is science. The most recent example of this form of figuration is the Anthropocene, the new epochal concept postulated by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen to account for the transformative influence of human action on the life of the planet. The dating of the Anthropocene is a matter of some dispute among geologists and environmental scientists, but, to the degree that the expansive scope and accelerated rate of humans’ environmental impact can be traced back to the use of fossil fuels, it can be argued that it began with the Industrial Revolution. Our collective actions have altered the atmosp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Preface
• 1 What is it like to be a trope?
• 2 Equids (might and right)
• 3 Canids (companionship, cunning, domestication)
• 4 Songbirds (poetry and environment)
• 5 Felids (enigma and fur)
• 6 Animal revolutions (allegory and politics)
• Glossary
• Suggested reading
• Index