Animal Perception and Literary Language

Donald Wesling

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783030049690
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Theorie der Literaturkritik

Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds. Donald Wesling considers how humans, evolved from animals, have learned to code perception of movement into sentences and scenes. The book first specifies terms and questions in animal philosophy and surveys recent work on perception, then describes attributes of multispecies thinking and defines a tradition of writers in this lineage. Finally, the text concludes with literature coming into full focus in twelve case studies of varied readings. Overall, Wesling's book offers not a new method of literary criticism, but a reveal of what we all do with perceptual content when we read.

© The Author(s) 2019

Donald WeslingAnimal Perception and Literary LanguagePalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04969-0_4

Begin Abstract

Animalist Thinking from Lucretius to Temple Grandin

Donald Wesling¹

(1)

University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Donald Wesling

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1 Imbroglios of Humans and Nonhumans, Once Again

The time of this essay is also the time of three should-be classics of animal-love, personal narratives by two women (one USA, one UK) about caring for and feeding predator birds, and one by a man (UK) who not only studies but lives in wild places and eats with badgers, otters, foxes, red deer, and swifts.¹ These are not pet stories. Living with (or as) a wild animal is mostly like a religious conversion, on this showing, because it must utterly change your life to accommodate creature-time, creature-space, creature-scent like the “citrusy piss of … voles”: sustaining the total being of the predator species, either by literal feeding or by literal sharing. The choice is extreme, and the need to make it comes from unusual psychological pressures, but animalists question not the need as we track the human behavior out to the edge of what we all do and are.

Stacey O’Brien and the barn owl:

Suddenly Wesley stopped making the repetitive ear-splitting noise and started squawking like a parrot. I had never heard an owl make anything like that sound…. In apparent pain, he squawked and his body convulsed. He shuffled around and grabbed my arm between his knees while holding onto my hand with his beak. With every convulsion, his knees gripped my arm.

Maybe he had epilepsy?…. The convulsions continued. With one last shuddering spasm he threw his head back and gave a great cry of pain and [then] seemed to return to normal.

It was over. He was okay. He flew up to his perch and started preening himself….

I was stupefied. Then I noticed a small drop of white fluid on my arm and finally realized what had just happened. My owl had just consummated his commitment to me—on my arm….

I slowly got up and went over to my microscope, pulled out a slide, and scraped the droplet off my arm. I flicked the light on and focused the scope. There they were—energetic strands of barn-owl life force, racing for the goal . (107–108)

* * *

Helen MacDonald and the goshawk:

And then I’d reach down and put my hand on the bunched muscles of the rabbit, and with the heel of one hand at the back of its head where the fur was soft and tawny, I’d pull once, twice, hard on its back legs with the other, breaking its neck. A fit of kicking, and the eye filming over. I had to check the rabbit was dead by very gently touching its eye. Everything stopping. Stopping. Stopping. I had to do this. If I didn’t kill the rabbit, the hawk would sit on top of it and start eating; and at some point in the eating the rabbit would die. That is how goshawks kill. The borders between life and death are somewhere in the taking of their meal. I couldn’t let that suffering happen. Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human. Kneeling next to the hawk and her prey, I felt a responsibility so huge that it battered inside my own chest, ballooning out into a space the size of a cathedral. (196)

* * *

Charles Foster living in a self-dug badger sett in mid-Wales:

Badgers trade… airy pleasures for darker, stickier, mucusy, damper, rougher pleasures. Dropping my head was like going from Shubert in the conservatoire to a candlelit bordello where you wade through beer to bed. If I had to pick one word for a badger’s experience it would be intimate. Grass and bracken stems brush your face. … Water shudders off grass into your eyes. Things slide away. Slide, hop, rush. You don’t just absorb the world; you make it. You make the fear that rustles away on every side.

When a badger goes out, its object is to bump into food. This system of incontinent collision with the wood makes the badger more a creature of the wood than any other inhabitant. We bustled and grunted and elbowed and pushed and pressed our noses into the ground. And even we smelled something: the citrusy piss of the voles in their runs within the grass; the distantly maritime tang of a slug trail, like a winter rock pool. … But most of all we had what we clumsily called the earth: leaves and dung and corpses and houses and rain and eggs and horrors. (54)

These writers arc back to the Pleistocene. Between these three animalists and the creative ice-age brain that drew in manganese on cave walls in the Dordogne, fashioning bison heads that bulge out at us because they use irregularities of rock face and making a blur of animal legs to suggest the creature in motion, there is a difference in method but a complete overlap of attitude.

* * *

Following the description of four attributes of animalist thinking in chapter “Attributes of Animalist Thinking,” here I will invent and describe a tradition of eight writers who are concerned with the human–animal dividing line, worried about where, or whether, to place it.

My Eight:

• Lucretius
• Michel de Montaigne
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• John Muir
• Alphonso Lingis
• Laurie Shannon
• Brian Massumi
• Temple Grandin

Sometimes conscious of the writing of predecessors in this set, sometimes not, all of these paragons write in companionship with fellow animals. Usually, for them the companionship is so intense that it seems as if the dividing line is no big deal. That is what makes them Animalists. To show what links these writers across differences of era, intellectual provenance, and genre, I will begin each of my eight profiles by headnotes, relating each thinker to the attributes of Creativity, Embodied Mind, Dialogism, and Amplification of Affect.

Why these eight, beyond prior acquaintance in my teaching of ecological literature with Coleridge and Muir and beyond several years of recent reading in the others? First, there is the wish to define a tradition of animalist thought in intellectual history: a mental set with regard to the humAnimal imbroglio, with inclusion based on emphatic display of the four categories generated in the previous chapter. (Temple Grandin is the exception, for reasons of force of will and personality explained in my account of her writings.) The tradition has historical reach back to the birth of the Common Era, through the early modern to Romanticism, nineteenth-century ecology, and four contemporaries. To some extent, the writers are themselves aware of being in relation to named predecessors, notably with Montaigne arcing back to Lucretius and Shannon arcing back to Montaigne. Second, this group of eight covers phases of the overall issue, including the disciplines of philosophy, natural history, and literary scholarship; it seems important that two of these figures, Massumi and Grandin, show a simultaneously theoretical and practical interest in autism . These writers are obsessively concerned to include heavy perceptual content and to meditate on what the role of perception is in knowledge, and in language, and all of them focus on the physical properties of animal bodies. Also, they show engagement with actual nonhuman animals, naming and describing, and often loving them. The third and last reason is to show the wide range of genres animalists take to think with, from immense Latin theological-descriptive poem in Lucretius to autobiography in Grandin, with changes over time in the development of the preferred medium of the essay as a trial of thought .

Only humans can be Animalists ! and only humans need be. We keep the term animalist for now, but if humans require a better term they will find it. However if the imbroglio-division can be re-thought, re-valued, re-described it can never entirely be abolished, especially as we must encounter these thinkers through writing. The skill of alphabetic, syllabic, hieroglyphic, ideographic, and other types of obsessively thumb-oppositional writing separates the Animalist from all nonhuman animals, even as always and everywhere that skill connects the writer with her species’ and her own animal perceptions.

So the subject matter of this chapter doubles back to that of chapter “Imbroglios of Humans and Nonhumans” and Jacques Derrida’s declaration of career-long commitment to animalist perception and interpretation. It is well to remind ourselves of those seminars Derrida gave between the late 1990s and 2003. Continually in nine hundred pages of lectures that his editors and translators have published, Derrida insists that the stakes of our questioning of a reigning discourse are very high: redefining the proper of the human by pressuring propriety as such, redirecting ethics to the porous human–animal boundary, taking thought to its defeat in the encounter with a truly wild animal on its own ground. After such overthrow of a whole way of thinking and speaking, we may well be within a new era of what some are calling the posthuman, but that description seems to be a manifesto-way of admitting how massive will be the act of changing our minds so that we can care for the animal outside and admit the animal inside. Certainly, Cary Wolfe, the author of an influential book on the posthuman, argues that human cannot be relegated by declaring it surpassed: speaking of what we need to take from Derrida’s late thought on the animal that we are, Wolfe writes:

[I]t requires us to attend to that thing called ‘the human’ with greater specificity, greater attention to its materiality, and how these in turn shape and are shaped by consciousness, mind, and so on. It allows us to pay proper attention, with Maturana and Varela, to the material, embodied, and evolutionary nature of intelligence and cognition, in which language, for example, is no longer seen (as it is in philosophical humanism) as a well-nigh-magical property that ontologically separates Homo sapiens from every other living creature. Rather, it may now be viewed as an essentially non- or ahuman emergence from an evolutionary process—what Maturana and Varela call the emergence of ‘linguistic domains’ from larger processes of social interaction and communication among animals including but not limited to Homo sapiens. That radically ahuman evolutionary emergence in turn makes possible language proper and the characteristic modes of consciousness and mentation associated with it, but remains tied (as in body language, kinesics, and more general forms of symbolic semiology) to an evolutionary substrate that continues to express itself in human interaction .²

Our own accounts of Derrida on animalist perception, and of Maturana and Varela on embodiment, have profited from and must resonate with what Wolfe says so succinctly. He is right to state that from now on the human, as a scaled-down and demythologized description, depends on “posthumanist theoretical and methodological innovations.” Not only that, but his version of the posthuman focuses on commitments at the heart of animal studies.

Already in my first chapter, I have touched on the scene of recognition between Derrida and the little cat in his house: the cat he refuses to say belongs to him, and the meaning of whose glance may well be the origin of thinking. Nearly everyone who reads Derrida wants to quote this charming scene! Derrida gives examples of responses to cats from Baudelaire, Rilke, Buber, Lewis Carroll, but none more relevant than the one from Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond” on Montaigne’s cat, that classic piece of cat-affection we will ourselves quote in its place, below. As for Derrida, being seen naked, he says he is “ashamed for being ashamed” (The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 4), and he explicitly makes this moment a quizzing commentary on the Book of Genesis, where God gives humans contradictory assignments, though both involve control: stewardship over nonhuman animals, and dominion over those beasts of the field.

The picture of Derrida naked before the cat is a fine recent instance of Bernard Williams’ point in Shame and Necessity, that “shame continues to work for us, as it worked for the Greeks, in essential ways”; that shame “requires an internalized other… [and so] embodies intimations of a genuine social reality”—shame “mediates between act, character, and consequence.”³ A far different philosopher from Derrida, Williams makes a historical judgment on the final page of his book. To Williams’s statement that we are “in an ethical condition that lies not only beyond Christianity, but beyond its Kantian and Hegelian legacies” (166), Derrida might reply that these very legacies, with their violence against the animal-in-the-human, are still dominant, still our assignment. We are beyond, perhaps, only in the sense that we can now speak of the contradictions of anthropocentrism and of its language .

Also on his final page Williams makes another, even more surprising historical remark, which I will use as my link to the in-your-face materialism of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, a poem that dates from half a century before the birth of Christ: “In important ways,” says Williams, “we are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime” (166). Bernard Williams takes Greek tragic drama as his primary documents, but classicist Catherine Osborne, in her 2007 study of humanity and the humane in Ancient philosophy and literature, studies the earliest vegetarians , and she concludes that “for both [Plato and Aristotle]… conceptual capacities are continuous between animals and humans… [There is no] strong divide between those animals which can bring concepts to bear in their understanding of the world and those that cannot.”⁴ So we were, arguably, nearer to animals in classical Greece than we have been in the Christian era .

2 Lucretius

Creativity: In The Nature of Things we have an epic with nature as its heroine. When a swerve occurs in the fall of atoms, human and nonhuman beings, along with material things, are created by movement of new atoms into the empty space. The poem is packed with examples of natural history, which demonstrate a dynamic and deified nature, who at the very first lines of the poem is addressed eloquently in the guise of Venus, goddess of copulation and generativity.

Embodied Mind: In life, soul and mind are conjoint and corporeal in Lucretius’ poem. The author invents for Latin a special term for soul, namely anima, and the anima is strictly and only corporeal as the source of thinking and feeling, and finds its expression in the profound validity of sense impression. There may come a separation after death, but not in life. Nearly the whole of Book 3 is devoted to why and how mind comes to be embodied, in Epicurean doctrine.

Dialogism: The entire poem in six Books and 7500 lines is spoken to the dedicatee, Gaius Memmius, praetor in 58 BC and governor of Bithynia in 57. Near the opening of each Book, the author renews his intimate address by naming the auditor and mentioning the teaching function of the poem: the aim is to expound the Epicurean philosophy to the one who hears and the others who overhear. In the beautiful opening lines of Book 1, the poet’s direct speech to Venus is another salient reminder of the claim of public discourse.

Amplifica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Imbroglios of Humans and Nonhumans
• Perception, Cognition, Writing
• Attributes of Animalist Thinking
• Animalist Thinking from Lucretius to Temple Grandin
• Perception and Expectation in Literature
• Afterword: Alphabet for Animalists
• Back Matter