Animals, Animality, and Literature 9781108429825, 9781108595278

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i

A N I M A L S , A N I M A L I T Y, A N D L I T E R AT U R E

Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays, poems, and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field’s future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands. B ruc e B o e hrer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of Renaissance literature in the Department of English at Florida State University. His most recent single-author books include Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in European Literature (2010). From 2000 to 2008 he served as Founding Editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and he is editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (2007). Mo l ly H a n d is Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer in the Department of English at Florida State University. Her scholarly work appears in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme (31.1, Winter 2008); Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (2011); and the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Trish Henley and Gary Taylor (2012). She is currently at work on a book-length study of animal familiars in early modern English literature. B r i a n Ma s s u m i is the author of numerous works across philosophy, political theory, and art theory. His publications include 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014), and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

ii

Cam b r i dge Cr i ti cal Co n ce p ts Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentiethand twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation, and criticism. By addressing the origins, development, and application of these ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed, while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry. Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates, and specialists, as well as to those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy. Published Titles Animals, Animality, and Literature Edited by Bruce Boehrer , Molly Hand , and Brian Massumi Florida State University, University of Montreal Food and Literature Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University Time and Literature Edited by Thomas M.   Allen University of Ottawa The Global South and Literature Edited by Russell West- Pavlov University of Tübingen Trauma and Literature Edited by Roger   Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York Law and Literature Edited by Kieran   Dolin University of Western Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press

iii

Forthcoming Titles Orientalism and Literature Edited by Geoffrey   Nash University of Sunderland Terrorism and Literature Edited by Peter   Herman San Diego State University Technology and Literature Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto Affect and Literature Edited by Alex   Houen University of Cambridge Climate and Literature Edited by Adeline   Johns University of Surrey Decadence and Literature Edited by Jane Desmarais and David   Weir Goldsmith College and Hunter College

Published online by Cambridge University Press

iv

Published online by Cambridge University Press

v

A N I M A L S , A N I M A L I T Y, A N D L I T E R AT U R E Edi ted by B RU C E B O E H R E R Florida State University

M O L LY   H A N D Florida State University

BRIAN MASSUMI University of Montreal

Published online by Cambridge University Press

vi

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108429825 DOI: 10.1017/9781108595278 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, editor. | Hand, Molly, editor. | Massumi, Brian, editor. Title: Animals, animality, and literature / edited by Bruce Boehrer, Florida State University, Molly Hand, Florida State University, Brian Massumi, University of Montreal. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018014886 | ISBN 9781108429825 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English literature – History and criticism. | Animals in literature. | Animals in motion pictures. | Human-animal relationships in literature. | Human-animal relationships in motion pictures. | Animals (Philosophy) | Human-animal relationships – Philosophy. Classification: LCC PR149.A7A55 2018 | DDC 820.9/362–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014886 ISBN 978-1-108-42982-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

i

A N I M A L S , A N I M A L I T Y, A N D L I T E R AT U R E

Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays, poems, and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field’s future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands. B ruc e B o e hrer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of Renaissance literature in the Department of English at Florida State University. His most recent single-author books include Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in European Literature (2010). From 2000 to 2008 he served as Founding Editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and he is editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (2007). Mo l ly H a n d is Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer in the Department of English at Florida State University. Her scholarly work appears in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme (31.1, Winter 2008); Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (2011); and the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Trish Henley and Gary Taylor (2012). She is currently at work on a book-length study of animal familiars in early modern English literature. B r i a n Ma s s u m i is the author of numerous works across philosophy, political theory, and art theory. His publications include 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014), and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

ii

Cam b r i dge Cr i ti cal Co n ce p ts Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentiethand twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation, and criticism. By addressing the origins, development, and application of these ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed, while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry. Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates, and specialists, as well as to those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy. Published Titles Animals, Animality, and Literature Edited by Bruce Boehrer , Molly Hand , and Brian Massumi Florida State University, University of Montreal Food and Literature Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University Time and Literature Edited by Thomas M.   Allen University of Ottawa The Global South and Literature Edited by Russell West- Pavlov University of Tübingen Trauma and Literature Edited by Roger   Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York Law and Literature Edited by Kieran   Dolin University of Western Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press

iii

Forthcoming Titles Orientalism and Literature Edited by Geoffrey   Nash University of Sunderland Terrorism and Literature Edited by Peter   Herman San Diego State University Technology and Literature Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto Affect and Literature Edited by Alex   Houen University of Cambridge Climate and Literature Edited by Adeline   Johns University of Surrey Decadence and Literature Edited by Jane Desmarais and David   Weir Goldsmith College and Hunter College

Published online by Cambridge University Press

iv

Published online by Cambridge University Press

v

A N I M A L S , A N I M A L I T Y, A N D L I T E R AT U R E Edi ted by B RU C E B O E H R E R Florida State University

M O L LY   H A N D Florida State University

BRIAN MASSUMI University of Montreal

Published online by Cambridge University Press

vi

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108429825 DOI: 10.1017/9781108595278 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, editor. | Hand, Molly, editor. | Massumi, Brian, editor. Title: Animals, animality, and literature / edited by Bruce Boehrer, Florida State University, Molly Hand, Florida State University, Brian Massumi, University of Montreal. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018014886 | ISBN 9781108429825 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English literature – History and criticism. | Animals in literature. | Animals in motion pictures. | Human-animal relationships in literature. | Human-animal relationships in motion pictures. | Animals (Philosophy) | Human-animal relationships – Philosophy. Classification: LCC PR149.A7A55 2018 | DDC 820.9/362–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014886 ISBN 978-1-108-42982-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

i

A N I M A L S , A N I M A L I T Y, A N D L I T E R AT U R E

Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays, poems, and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field’s future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands. B ruc e B o e hrer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of Renaissance literature in the Department of English at Florida State University. His most recent single-author books include Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in European Literature (2010). From 2000 to 2008 he served as Founding Editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and he is editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (2007). Mo l ly H a n d is Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer in the Department of English at Florida State University. Her scholarly work appears in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme (31.1, Winter 2008); Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (2011); and the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Trish Henley and Gary Taylor (2012). She is currently at work on a book-length study of animal familiars in early modern English literature. B r i a n Ma s s u m i is the author of numerous works across philosophy, political theory, and art theory. His publications include 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014), and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

ii

Cam b r i dge Cr i ti cal Co n ce p ts Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentiethand twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation, and criticism. By addressing the origins, development, and application of these ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed, while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry. Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates, and specialists, as well as to those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy. Published Titles Animals, Animality, and Literature Edited by Bruce Boehrer , Molly Hand , and Brian Massumi Florida State University, University of Montreal Food and Literature Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University Time and Literature Edited by Thomas M.   Allen University of Ottawa The Global South and Literature Edited by Russell West- Pavlov University of Tübingen Trauma and Literature Edited by Roger   Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York Law and Literature Edited by Kieran   Dolin University of Western Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press

iii

Forthcoming Titles Orientalism and Literature Edited by Geoffrey   Nash University of Sunderland Terrorism and Literature Edited by Peter   Herman San Diego State University Technology and Literature Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto Affect and Literature Edited by Alex   Houen University of Cambridge Climate and Literature Edited by Adeline   Johns University of Surrey Decadence and Literature Edited by Jane Desmarais and David   Weir Goldsmith College and Hunter College

Published online by Cambridge University Press

iv

Published online by Cambridge University Press

v

A N I M A L S , A N I M A L I T Y, A N D L I T E R AT U R E Edi ted by B RU C E B O E H R E R Florida State University

M O L LY   H A N D Florida State University

BRIAN MASSUMI University of Montreal

Published online by Cambridge University Press

vi

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108429825 DOI: 10.1017/9781108595278 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, editor. | Hand, Molly, editor. | Massumi, Brian, editor. Title: Animals, animality, and literature / edited by Bruce Boehrer, Florida State University, Molly Hand, Florida State University, Brian Massumi, University of Montreal. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018014886 | ISBN 9781108429825 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English literature – History and criticism. | Animals in literature. | Animals in motion pictures. | Human-animal relationships in literature. | Human-animal relationships in motion pictures. | Animals (Philosophy) | Human-animal relationships – Philosophy. Classification: LCC PR149.A7A55 2018 | DDC 820.9/362–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014886 ISBN 978-1-108-42982-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

i

A N I M A L S , A N I M A L I T Y, A N D L I T E R AT U R E

Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays, poems, and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field’s future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands. B ruc e B o e hrer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of Renaissance literature in the Department of English at Florida State University. His most recent single-author books include Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in European Literature (2010). From 2000 to 2008 he served as Founding Editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and he is editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (2007). Mo l ly H a n d is Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer in the Department of English at Florida State University. Her scholarly work appears in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme (31.1, Winter 2008); Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (2011); and the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Trish Henley and Gary Taylor (2012). She is currently at work on a book-length study of animal familiars in early modern English literature. B r i a n Ma s s u m i is the author of numerous works across philosophy, political theory, and art theory. His publications include 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014), and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

ii

Cam b r i dge Cr i ti cal Co n ce p ts Cambridge Critical Concepts focuses on the important ideas animating twentiethand twenty-first-century literary studies. Each concept addressed in the series has had a profound impact on literary studies, as well as on other disciplines, and already has a substantial critical bibliography surrounding it. This series captures the dynamic critical energies transmitted across twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literary landscapes: the concepts critics bring to reading, interpretation, and criticism. By addressing the origins, development, and application of these ideas, the books collate and clarify how these particular concepts have developed, while also featuring fresh insights and establishing new lines of enquiry. Cambridge Critical Concepts shifts the focus from period- or genre-based literary studies of key terms to the history and development of the terms themselves. Broad and detailed contributions cumulatively identify and investigate the various historical and cultural catalysts that made these critical concepts emerge as established twenty-first-century landmarks in the discipline. The level will be suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduates, and specialists, as well as to those teaching outside their own research areas, and will have cross-disciplinary relevance for subjects such as history and philosophy. Published Titles Animals, Animality, and Literature Edited by Bruce Boehrer , Molly Hand , and Brian Massumi Florida State University, University of Montreal Food and Literature Edited by Gitanjali Shahani San Francisco State University Time and Literature Edited by Thomas M.   Allen University of Ottawa The Global South and Literature Edited by Russell West- Pavlov University of Tübingen Trauma and Literature Edited by Roger   Kurtz The College at Brockport, State University of New York Law and Literature Edited by Kieran   Dolin University of Western Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press

iii

Forthcoming Titles Orientalism and Literature Edited by Geoffrey   Nash University of Sunderland Terrorism and Literature Edited by Peter   Herman San Diego State University Technology and Literature Edited by Adam Hammond University of Toronto Affect and Literature Edited by Alex   Houen University of Cambridge Climate and Literature Edited by Adeline   Johns University of Surrey Decadence and Literature Edited by Jane Desmarais and David   Weir Goldsmith College and Hunter College

Published online by Cambridge University Press

iv

Published online by Cambridge University Press

v

A N I M A L S , A N I M A L I T Y, A N D L I T E R AT U R E Edi ted by B RU C E B O E H R E R Florida State University

M O L LY   H A N D Florida State University

BRIAN MASSUMI University of Montreal

Published online by Cambridge University Press

vi

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108429825 DOI: 10.1017/9781108595278 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, editor. | Hand, Molly, editor. | Massumi, Brian, editor. Title: Animals, animality, and literature / edited by Bruce Boehrer, Florida State University, Molly Hand, Florida State University, Brian Massumi, University of Montreal. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: Cambridge critical concepts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018014886 | ISBN 9781108429825 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English literature – History and criticism. | Animals in literature. | Animals in motion pictures. | Human-animal relationships in literature. | Human-animal relationships in motion pictures. | Animals (Philosophy) | Human-animal relationships – Philosophy. Classification: LCC PR149.A7A55 2018 | DDC 820.9/362–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014886 ISBN 978-1-108-42982-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

vii

Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

page ix xi xvii

Introduction: Beasts in the Republic of Letters

1

Bruce Boehrer and Molly Hand

P art I: Origins 1

Aristotle’s Zoology in the Medieval World

29

Pieter Beullens

2

Howling Wolves and Other Beasts: Animals and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages

43

Luuk Houwen

3

Medieval Blood Sport

57

William Marvin

4

Animals in Late-Medieval Hagiography and Romance

73

David Salter

5

Lions, Mice, and Learning from Animals in Henryson’s Fables

88

Gillian Rudd

P art II: D eve lopment 6

Animals, the Devil, and the Sacred in Early Modern English Culture

105

Molly Hand

7

Shakespeare’s Animal Theater

121

Bruce Boehrer vii

Published online by Cambridge University Press

viii

Contents

viii 8

Swift Among the Locusts: Vermin, Infestation, and Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century

136

Lucinda Cole

9

Classify and Display: Human and Animal Species in Linnaeus and Cuvier

156

Matthew Senior

10

Animal Subjectivities: Gendered Literary Representation of Animal Minds in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty

180

Deborah Denenholz Morse

11

Friedrich Nietzsche on Human Nature: Between Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies

197

Vanessa Lemm

Part III: C ontemporary Perspecti ve s 12

Opening Up a Dossier: Animals, Animalities, and Living Together with Roland Barthes

217

Michael Lundblad

13

Animal Unfamiliars: A Bestiary of Time-Travel Cinema

231

Alanna Thain

14

Theorizing Animals: Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben

248

Matthew Calarco

15

Becoming-Animal in the Literary Field

265

Brian Massumi

16

Animation and Animism

284

Thomas Lamarre

17

Becoming Mammoth: The Domestic Animal, Its Synthetic Dreams, and the Pursuit of Multispecies F(r)ictions

301

David Jaclin

18

Bush/Animals

319

Peter Kulchyski

Afterword

335

Colleen Glenney Boggs

Select Bibliography Index

Published online by Cambridge University Press

345 377

ix

Illustrations

I.1 Still from The Secret Life of Human Pups page 2 I.2 Interspecies pseudocopulation between a bumblebee and an orchid of the genus Ophrys 4 I.3 Puppy-play window display, 50 & Dean, Dean and Old Compton Streets, London, June 10, 2016 6 9.1 Illustration by Georg D. Ehret of Linnaeus’ sexual system of plant classification, from Genera Plantarum, Leiden, 1737 161 9.2 Model for the construction of a herbarium, from Philosopohia Botanica, 1751 162 9.3 Carolus Linnaeus, Anthropomorpha, 1760 165 9.4 Georges Cuvier, Leçons d’anatomie comparée, Paris: Crochard, Paris, 1805, 6 vols 169 9.5 Illustrations from Le Regne animal, Georges Cuvier, Paris: Baillière, 1829–44 171 9.6 Gustave Doré, “A Lesson in Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des plantes,” from the series, “The Different Publics of Paris,” Le Journal pour rire, Paris, 1854 173 9.7 Above: woman of the Bushman race. Following page: black-capped Capuchin monkey, both from Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Histoire naturelle des mammifères, Paris: Firmin Didot, 1819 175 10.1 Cover, Anna Sewell, Black Beauty 184 10.2 Cover, Anna Sewell, Black Beauty 185

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

x

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xi

Notes on Contributors

P ie t e r B e u l l ens is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Belgium. As an editor of the Aristoteles Latinus series, he studies the Latin translations of Aristotle’s scientific works and their reception in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. B ru c e B oe h rer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of Renaissance literature in the Department of English at Florida State University. The most recent of his six single-author books, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama, appeared from Cambridge University Press in 2013. He has also edited A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (2007), and from 2000 to 2008 he served as Founding Editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. C ol l e e n Gl e nney Bog g s is Professor of English at Dartmouth College, where she directed the Leslie Humanities Center from 2012–15. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature,  animal  studies, transatlantic studies, and the literatures of the American Civil War. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Mellon Foundation, she has published two monographs:  Animalia Americana:  Animal  Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (2013) and Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773– 1892 (2007). She edited the volume Options for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War (2016). Her work has appeared in American Literature, PMLA, Cultural Critique, and J19, among others. She co-edits the book series “Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures and Cultures,” and is currently serving on the PMLA Editorial Board. M at thew Cal arco is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, where he teaches courses in Continental philosophy and animal and environmental ethics. He is author of Zoographies xi

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xii

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(2008) and Thinking Through Animals (2015). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Altermobilities. L u c ind a C o le , Visiting Associate Professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is author of Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literatures, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740  (2016). With Robert Markley, she is general series editor of the book series, AnthropoScene. Her articles have appeared in such venues as  ELH,  Criticism,  Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies,  Configurations, Journal for Critical  Animal  Studies, and Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment. She is now writing a book on animals, empire, and the medical posthumanities. M ol ly H and is Entrepreneur in Residence and Lecturer in the Department of English at Florida State University. Her scholarly work appears in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme (31.1, Winter 2008); Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (2011); and the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton, edited by Trish Henley and Gary Taylor (2012). She is currently at work on a book-length study of animal familiars in early modern English literature. L u u k H ou wen holds the chair of Medieval English Language, Literature, and Culture at the University of Bochum. His main interest is in the later medieval period and he has published on Chaucer, the medieval natural world, the dissemination of knowledge and the encyclopaedic tradition, and, more recently, on medieval popular art and iconography. D av id J ac l in teaches in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies (ÉÉSA) at the University of Ottawa, where he also runs the HumAnimaLab (HAL). His work engages with issues pertaining to wildlife trafficking, green criminology and global conservation initiatives, and crosses the fields of media and cultural theory, anthropology, animal studies, and philosophy.  Published articles have appeared in venues such as Journal de Primatologie (2012) and SSI (2013, 2016). His second book, Les bouts de l’espèce. Cartographies nord-américaines, is under contract, while  Poacher’s Moon,  his  first experimental documentary (with Jeremie Brugidou) will screen in late 2018. In May 2017, as part of the Coral Triangle Expedition, he created (with Peter Nelson and Keshav Singh) an interactive kinetic installation depicting relationships between pathways of turtle migration and pathways of the exotic animal trade. The work was presented at the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Center in Hong Kong.

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P e t e r Ku lc h ysk i   (PhD, York University, 1988)  is a Professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada and co-director, with Diana Taylor, of the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas. He has published extensively on northern Indigenous history, law, politics, and culture in Canada. Among his nine books are  Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut (2005) and  Report of an Inquiry Into an Injustice: Begade Shuhtagotine and the Sahtu Treaty (2018). T h om as L am ar re is Professor of East Asian Studies and Communications Studies at McGill University and author of many publications on media, history, and philosophy, among them, The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media (2018). V ane ssa  L e m m is a Professor of Philosophy and Vice-President and Executive Dean, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Australia. She is the author of  Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy  (2009) and Nietzsche y el pensamiento politico contemporáneo (2013). She recently edited Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life and The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics and Neoliberalism (2014). M i c h ae l L u ndbl a d is Professor of English-Language Literature at the University of Oslo. He is the author of  The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture (2013), the editor of  Animalities:  Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human  (2017), and the co-editor, with Marianne DeKoven, of  Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory (2012). He is currently leading a multi-year collaborative research project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, on “The Biopolitics of Disability, Illness, and Animality” (BIODIAL). W i l l iam M arvi n (PhD University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) is a medievalist in the English Department at Colorado State University. He teaches mythology, Old English, Chaucer, and medieval European epic and romance. His work on hunting explores the evolving complex linking forest law, courtly ritual, and art. Currently he is tracking this complex in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur and its source mythologies. B r ian M assu mi   is the author of numerous works across philosophy, political theory, and art theory. His publications include 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), What Animals

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Teach Us about Politics (2014), and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011). D e b o rah D enenholz Morse is the inaugural Sara E.  Nance Eminent Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, where she was also one of four inaugural Fellows in the Center for the Liberal Arts, while serving as Vera W. Barkley Term Professor of English from 2014–16. She has written or edited eight books on Anthony Trollope, on the Brontës, and in Animal Studies (Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited with Martin Danahay [2007]). Her most recent monograph is Reforming Trollope: Race, Gender, and Englishness in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (2013), and she is near completion of a monograph entitled Brontë Violations. She has been awarded five teaching awards at the College and was a Plumeri Scholar from 2013–15. Gil l ian ( J ill) Rudd is a member of the English Department at the University of Liverpool where she has been teaching and researching since 1992. She has been long interested in green criticism, publishing Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature in 2007. Since then she has written various articles on animals and plants in medieval literature, including pieces in The  Oxford Handbook to Medieval Literature (eds. Greg Walker and Elaine Treharne, 2010), In Strange Countries: New Essays on Middle English Literature (eds. Anke Bernau and David Matthews, 2010), The Oxford Handbook to Ecocriticism (ed. Greg Garrard, 2013), and A Global History of Literature and the Environment (eds. John Parham and Louise Westling, 2017). She was also the collator and a contributor to “Animalia: A Paper Colloquium” for Studies in the Age of Chaucer (2012). D av id Salt er is a lecturer in medieval English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His principal research interests are in romance and hagiography. He is the author of Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with  Animals  in Medieval Literature (2001), and he is currently completing a cultural history of the Franciscan Order in England. M at t h ew Seni or is Ruberta T. McCandless Professor of French and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Oberlin College. He is the co-editor, along with David L.  Clark and Carla Freccero, of Animots:  Postanimality in French Thought (2015); he also edited A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment (2007), and

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co-edited, with Jennifer Ham, Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (1997). A l anna T h ain is Associate Professor of World Cinemas and Cultural Studies and Director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She also directs the Moving Image Research Laboratory (MIRL), devoted to the study of the body in moving image media. She is the author of  Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema (2017). Her current research projects include “Anarchival Outbursts: Dance and Movement Practices of Post Digital Media” and work on dissensuality. Her work can be found in  Parallax, differences,  Dance Research Journal, TDR, Senses of Cinema, the Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, Visual Anthropology Review, Music and Sound in Documentary Film and more.

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Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to Ray Ryan and Edgar Mendez at Cambridge University Press for their thoughtful feedback and guidance throughout the production process, and to the volume’s contributors for their incisive work. At Florida State University, two research assistants provided valuable help with the project: Jessica Cohen assisted with compiling the index, and Youssef Helmi assisted with the bibliography.

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Introduction Beasts in the Republic of Letters Bruce Boehrer and Molly Hand

On May 25, 2016, Channel 4 aired a one-off documentary entitled The Secret Life of Human Pups. Directed by Guy Simmonds, the program tells the story of several British men who have chosen in their personal lives to adopt the identity of dogs, men whose decision to live as such defines a growing international community committed to the practice called “puppy play.”1 The documentary’s principal figure, a theatrical sound and lighting technician named Tom, spends his free time in a £4,000 custommade latex Dalmatian suit (Figure I.1), an outfit that he claims allows him to emerge from the darkness of his backstage theatrical vocation and take a turn as “the center of attention.”2 And indeed, Tom’s exploration of his canine persona, Zentai Spot, has led in short order to a startling form of celebrity: not only has he appeared on television, but he has also attained the title of Mr. Puppy UK 2015, a distinction further enhanced by securing the bronze medal for second runner-up at the first Mr. Puppy Europe competition, held in Antwerp on February 20–1, 2016.3 Puppy play originated within the cosplay and leather communities, the Mr. Puppy Europe competition having itself evolved as a subsidiary venture of the annual Leatherpride Belgium festival. As a result, puppy play may most easily be understood as an erotic undertaking marked by the dynamics of dominance and submission typical of BDSM culture as a whole. But taken in any sense, it can hardly be called new. In fact, the antecedents of puppy play can be traced back through centuries of literary figuration. The English national poet offers as good a starting-point as any when, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1596), Helena notoriously exclaims, “I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,/ The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.”4 But there is much more. To confine oneself to early modern examples alone, there is George Turberville (c.1575), who complains, Indeed (my dear) you wrong my dog in this And show yourself to be of crabbed kind, 1

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Figure I.1

Still from The Secret Life of Human Pups. Source: Courtesy Channel 4.

That will not let my fawning whelp to kiss You first, that fain would show his master’s mind.5

There is the Spanish exile Antonio Pérez, sometimes proposed as a model for Shakespeare’s Don Armado in Love’s Labours Lost, who protests to Lady Penelope Rich in 1595 that I have been so troubled not to have at hand the dog’s skin gloves your Ladyship desires that … I have resolved to … flay a piece of my own skin from the most tender part of my body … to make gloves … The gloves, my Lady, are made of dog’s skin, though they are mine; for I hold myself a dog and beg your ladyship to keep me in your service upon the honour and love of a faithful dog.6

There are the celebrated love letters between King James I and George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, in which, among many other endearments, the latter celebrates “the time which I shall never forget at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog.”7 There are the thirty-five so-called “Little Beagle Letters,” in which King James addresses his principal secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, with sundry variations of this nickname, to which Cecil responds accordingly.8 Yet despite its often overtly prurient character, this language cannot always or entirely be understood as a product of the erotic imagination. In well-attested Renaissance fashion, Pérez’s letters to Penelope Rich (and Buckingham’s to King James) conflate the vocabularies

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of sexual service and patronage. James’ letters to Cecil, not remotely sexual in nature, locate themselves somewhere within the province of disability studies. And modern puppy players, too, describe their actions as resisting confinement to the erotic sphere. Zentai Spot’s alter ego, Tom, considers his canine role-play (which undid his engagement to his ex-fiancé Rachel) as “escapism,” while Guy Simmonds, director of The Secret Life of Human Pups, characterizes the puppy-play community as “a broad church of people from all walks of life,” including “gay, straight, transsexual, [and] asexual pups.”9 One searches for a theory of behavior that can fully account for the resonances of such discourse, just as one searches for a theory of the literary that explains its recurrence in poems, plays, letters, television documentaries, websites, and leather bars. It is around such subject matter that the scholarly discipline of animal studies has coalesced over the past quarter-century or so. Answering the perceived need for a field of organized inquiry that addresses the theory and practice of species difference, animal studies has sought, among other things, to understand the intense and perdurable imaginative pull that draws human beings to identify with nonhuman life. In the present case, thus, we might begin by noting the inadequacy of conventional psychotherapeutic terms such as “paraphilia,” which have been rejected by many therapists themselves for reducing behavior to the sexual dimension, for speciously associating it with various kinds of trauma, and for imposing discredited standards of heteronormativity in the process, but that nonetheless enjoy a zombie afterlife in the popular press, where they are still invoked to explain practices like puppy play.10 We might glimpse a way forward through Bakhtinian notions of carnival inversion – in which “the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover … that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life” – while noting that although Bakhtin helps decenter the heteronormative, he replaces this with the aridity of the late twentieth-century subversion-containment debate.11 Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performance,12 in turn, seems especially well suited to the histrionic element in puppy play, and Tom/ Zentai Spot’s professional identity as a theater worker only enhances the fit. Still, Butler’s specific focus on gender raises questions here, as does the notion of performance through which she understands it. To begin with, we might wonder just what is being performed in puppy play. The practice may arise from the culture of queer gender dissidence, but it just as clearly extends beyond the enactment of gender to that of species. By this measure it recalls various sorts of symbiosis

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Figure I.2

Interspecies pseudocopulation between a bumblebee and an orchid of the genus Ophrys. Source: Courtesy FLPA/Alamy.

and mimicry to be found in the nonhuman world, perhaps most notably the kinds of interspecies pseudocopulation associated with orchids of the genus Ophrys  – the so-called bee orchids (Figure I.2). But this parallel, suggestive as it may be, proves inexact. The bee orchid copies another species in order to interact with individuals of that species, essentially the same thing done by Ovid’s Pasiphaë when she “with unnatural passion deceived [a] savage bull by [a] shape of wood and bore a hybrid offspring in her womb.”13 Puppy players, by contrast, copy another species in order to interact with individuals of their own, thus embodying a mode of species imitation distinct from the bestiality exemplified by Pasiphaë and documented at length by scholars like Marjorie Garber and Midas Dekkers.14 By the same token, we need to consider just what it means, in the case of puppy play, to perform gender, or species, or gender/species relations. “I am your spaniel,” Helena tells Demetrius, thus activating the resources of metaphor, the paradigmatic figurative mode that insists on the identity of unlike things, but under erasure, with the tacit expectation that the hearer will understand “I am your spaniel” to mean “I am your spaniel, and yet am not one.” Theatrical performance, in turn, takes shape as metaphor

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embodied, put into action  – a relation complicated in Helena’s case by the fact that we witness a boy performing the identity of a girl asserting the identity of a dog. But what of non-theatrical performance (if we may use this concept without placing it, too, under erasure)? Is there a point at which Tom actually turns into Zentai Spot? Tom himself seems to think so. “You go so deep into the headspace that you just don’t stop to look and you don’t stop to think. You crave it, you want it, you wish for it,” he declares.15 To what extent, we might ask, do we find ourselves here beyond the space of imitation and beyond even that of identification – in the zone of affective contagion that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called “becoming-animal”?16 In any case, at the time and place of this writing (London, June 2016), puppy play seems to be having a moment. Not only is there the recent TV documentary, the new UK Mr. Puppy competition, and its European counterpart across the Channel in Antwerp. A  major Soho sex shop on Old Compton Street features puppy-play gear in its front window display (Figure I.3). And half a mile north in Fitzrovia, a Warren Street café called Coffee, Cake, & Kisses has begun hosting monthly “Wagging Tails, Wet Noses” events “for folks who get turned on by role-playing as pets and their owners.”17 Puppy play, it would seem, is an idea whose time has come. By Cary Wolfe’s account, “Animal studies … would probably not exist … in its current form” if not for two major scholarly developments of the late twentieth century: “the work done in field ecology and cognitive ethology over the last twenty years” and “the emergence of the animal rights movement in the 1970s [through] that movement’s foundational philosophical works, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and, later, Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights.”18 From this immediate connection, one could argue, animal studies has developed in one sense as the historical consciousness of the animal-liberation movement, tasked with uncovering its pre-history and intellectual precursors so as in turn to enable a revised version of history in the broader sense. In theory, this project should be inherently progressive, allied to Kenneth Burke’s understanding of “society as a function of education”:19 as activism influences scholarship, changing social standards of cross-species behavior elicit a new historical understanding that should, in the most optimistic formulation, clear the way in the classroom for still more social change. As for the new history thus produced, it contains much the same figures and events as the history it aims to supplement, but with differing emphases as required by the differing perspective. In classical studies, for

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Figure I.3

Puppy-play window display, 50 & Dean, Dean and Old Compton Streets, London, June 10, 2016. Source: Photo by Bruce Boehrer.

instance, new interest attaches to the Pythagorean school of philosophy (sixth century bce), not so much for its proto-Socratic focus on mathematics as for its belief in the transmigration of souls and its vegetarianism.20 Plutarch, too, solicits renewed attention, not for his Lives but instead for the two brief dialogues inserted in his Moralia (first–second centuries CE) that argue in favor of the reasoning capacities of nonhuman animals.21 In the Middle Ages, interest accrues to Saint Francis of Assisi’s Fioretti (late fourteenth century), where the saint’s sermon to his “Sisters the birds” and negotiations with “Brother Wolf ” gather the beasts into the collective body of Christ and into a kind of social compact with human beings.22 This gesture, in turn, seems consistent with the body of surviving medieval case law in which animals are accused, tried, and sometimes convicted of criminal misconduct – case law that, by interpellating these beasts within the justice system, coincidentally invests them with legal personhood and rights.23

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Continuing into the Renaissance, we encounter Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), sundered from his customary occult connections and now in the company of northern Europe’s leading humanists, Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), and Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), as the four deliver a scornful collective indictment of hunting and other forms of animal abuse.24 Thence the way leads, via English Puritanism’s fierce opposition to blood sport, to Enlightenment figures like Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), whose utilitarian advocacy of animal rights will later inspire Singer’s arguments in Animal Liberation.25 By this stage of events, institutional action has begun to catch up with debate: the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is founded in 1824, coming under royal patronage sixteen years later; the British Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835 is ratified to prohibit blood sports like bear-baiting and cock-fighting; and the Vegetarian Society is founded in 1847. With the dawn of the twentieth century, similar organizational and legislative initiatives continue globally, while on the literary level, the ethical treatment of animals becomes a feature of Fabian socialism à la G. B. Shaw and Henry Salt.26 By this point, the indigenous (and increasingly Anglo-centric) Western tradition of theriophily begins to merge with more exotic, post-imperial influences as well. Mohandas Ghandi first travels to London in 1887, bringing with him his Hindu/Jain vow of vegetarianism, and by 1927 he declares in his autobiography that “the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.”27 Nor is this encounter with Asian spirituality a one-off affair. Some forty years later, the Beatles embrace South Asian vegetarianism with varying degrees of success during their much-publicized meditation retreat in Rishikesh.28 Meanwhile, Gary Snyder spends the mid-1950s translating the selected Chan poetry of Han Shan (seventh–eighth centuries CE)  – in which vegetarianism comprises “perhaps the single most frequently recurring moral issue”  – while Jack Kerouac dedicates The Dharma Bums (1958) to their author.29 As even a thumbnail history like this confirms, there exists a 2,500year tradition of Western literary activity in support of the various propositions and commitments informing the modern animal rights movement: vegetarianism; belief in the rational capacities of animals; opposition to hunting, blood sport, and other forms of animal cruelty; conservationism; and the conviction that human and nonhuman animals belong within the same biological, spiritual, and ethical community. One purpose of the present volume is to explore and clarify this history. Such clarification becomes necessary for a number of reasons. For one thing, surviving records are not always reliable or consistent. In the case of

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Pythagoras, for instance, ancient sources contradict each other as to why and how fully he promoted vegetarianism. Iamblichus reports that Pythagoras enjoined the diet upon philosophers and legislators and practiced it himself, while allowing others “whose life was not entirely pure and holy and philosophic … to eat some animal food.”30 Diogenes Laertius relates both that the philosopher “forbade even the killing, let  alone the eating, of animals which share with us the privilege of having a soul” and, to the contrary, that he was “the first to diet athletes on meat,” then reconciles these tales by claiming that Pythagoras actually urged vegetarianism not to respect our spiritual kinship with animals but rather “to accustom [people] to simplicity of life.”31 However, more decisive testimony comes from the younger Seneca (4 bce –65 ce ), who recounts his own experience of adopting a vegetarian diet at the direction of his Pythagorean tutor, Sotion: “Pythagoras … held that all beings are interrelated, and that there was a system of exchange between souls which transmigrated from one bodily shape to another[, so that] it is a mark of purity to refrain from eating flesh.”32 This account, grounded in personal history, also agrees broadly with the summary of Pythagorean beliefs presented in Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Animal Food (late third century CE ), the most substantial classical treatment of its subject to survive.33 More confusing than such gaps and contradictions in the record, there is also the problem of anachronism. Although the key elements of the contemporary animal rights platform have had past advocates, these advocates do not as a rule present their views in anything like the configuration typical of modern animal-rights discourse, with the result that one may almost effortlessly exaggerate the currency of past pronouncements on the subject. In some cases, early proponents of animal-friendly policies have also espoused superficially unrelated practices of a discreditable nature, which need to be considered as part of their legacy. For instance, Sir Thomas More’s dislike of hunting and butchery loses luster when set alongside his record of tormenting Protestants.34 In other cases, the early exponents of kindness to animals seem not to have thought through the implications of their own views. Thus “Saint Francis’s love for birds and oxen seems not to have led him to cease eating them; and when he drew up the rules for the conduct of the friars in the order he founded, he gave no instruction that they were to abstain from meat, except on certain fast days.”35 In still other cases, early practices now associated with compassion for animals were originally instituted for rather different reasons. The Chan vegetarianism of Han Shan, for instance, “does not reflect an animal rights perspective that

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explicitly focuses on humane treatment” – at least not on the surface – nor do Beats like Snyder and Kerouac adopt it in any rigorous way.36 This last point opens onto the more specialized problem presented by anachronism as it appears under the aspect of ideological and ethical presentism. Since our species’ perception of moral growth is itself a function of the present moment’s relation to the past, it is easy to dismiss the work of past generations as inadequate. On this view, the Beats’ failure to adopt perfectly the dietary regimen of their own role model can seem to evince lack of seriousness at best, and at worst hypocrisy. But this verdict ignores the Beats’ importance as cultural catalysts, introducing Western letters to alternative ethical traditions, modeling (however imperfectly) forms of oppositional thought and political action, and preparing the ground, often in the face of withering detraction, for the social, philosophical, and literary movements – many of these animal friendly – that have carried on their legacy. Much the same things could be said of the Beatles’ trip to Rishikesh as well. An analogous problem (one more troublesome to modern animal-rights sensibilities) occurs in the case of figures like King James I of England and President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States: avid sportsmen whose fondness for the hunt paradoxically translated into strenuous efforts at wildlife conservation and habitat protection.37 Again, the reflex may be to dismiss such figures as hypocrites who did more harm than good. James, for his part, helped forge a durable and embarrassing bond of association between wildlife conservation and patrician privilege, while Roosevelt embodied “a pugilistic form of masculine self-fashioning” that underwrote his posture of aggressive nationalism by depicting the natural world as an object of conquest and domination.38 But the documentary record leaves no doubt about the sincerity of these figures’ attachment to the natural world, and their broader ideological commitments were in both cases normative for their historical moment. To denigrate their efforts without acknowledging these facts is to indulge in a distinctly self-privileging form of anachronism. All this being said, and despite the failings of specific individuals, one further feature of the Western theriophile tradition remains worthy of note: its repeated appearance in the company of related social-justice causes. Pythagoras not only advocated ethical vegetarianism; his school’s “carefully guarded conditions of membership … nevertheless allowed (for the first time in history, so far as is known) the admission of women as members.”39 The same Renaissance humanist educational theories that discouraged corporal punishment in the classroom discouraged it in the manège as well.40 By the eighteenth century, “the concern for animal welfare was part

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of a much wider movement which involved … the abolition of slavery, flogging and public executions [and] the reform of schools, prisons, and the poor law.”41 The Humanitarian League was founded in 1891 specifically to coordinate efforts on a wide range of related social issues: to promote animal welfare, to encourage vegetarianism, to oppose vivisection, to prohibit child labor, to improve prison conditions, to abolish torture, and so forth.42 This conjunction of causes does not relieve the advocates of animal rights from the need to make their own case on its own terms. But the common logic tying these various causes together does provide one’s moral compass with a reassuring directional register. On one level, the present volume thus studies the history of literary engagement with animals in the West, particularly as that engagement unfolds against the background of a developing animal-rights sensibility. On a separate but related level, our work also explores the logic of species difference  – the theory  – underlying this history. To glance back once more to Cary Wolfe’s derivation of animal studies from animal-rights philosophy and animal science, it is here, on the theoretical side of things, that the science makes its presence most manifest. From classical times to the seventeenth century, the dominant Western theoretical model for the difference between human and nonhuman animals could be found in Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul (mid-fourth century bce) and his related works on natural history. There the philosopher offers a proof for the soul’s existence by arguing back from “the derived properties of [the] substance … (as in mathematics it is useful for the understanding of the property of the equality of the interior angles of a triangle to two right angles to know the essential nature of the straight and the curved or the line and the plane).”43 In this manner – reasoning back from effects to causes – Aristotle establishes that “what has soul in it differs from what has not in that the former displays life,” then divides soul itself into five constituent properties: “the nutritive, the appetitive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking.”44 Proceeding thence to the question, “What is the soul of plant, animal, man?” the philosopher stipulates that the souls of plants have none of the foregoing properties “but the first, the nutritive,” whereas those of different animal species possess the powers of appetition, sensation, and locomotion in varying measure, while that of “man and possibly another order like man or superior to him” (gods? angels?) is also capable of higher reason.45 Over 1,500  years later, this same triage reappears as Saint Thomas Aquinas’ distinction (c.1265) between the vegetative, sensitive, and rational

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souls – possession of the second differentiating the animal kingdom from that of the plants, possession of the third marking humankind off from both.46 And some four centuries after Aquinas, the same scheme remains commonplace enough to figure in John Donne’s “Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day” (c.1627), where the poet uses it to describe his own spiritual diminution after the death of a loved one: But I am by her death (which word wrongs her) Of the first nothing, the elixir grown; Were I a man, that I were one, I needs must know; I should prefer, If I were any beast, Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest, And love; all, all some properties invest; If I an ordinary nothing were, As shadow, a light, and body must be there.47

For both classical pagans and later Christians, Aristotle’s philosophy offers an attractive account of species’ difference by positing a hierarchy of being in which the supposed inferiority of nonhuman animals manifests as a deficit in their spiritual anatomy: absence of the organ – the rational soul – that enables higher reasoning. But as Donne’s example demonstrates, the Aristotelian model also presumes slippage across the species barrier: despite their supposed lack of a sensitive soul, plants seek the sun and flee from shade, while the effects of magnetism suggest that even stones can “detest/ And love.” Nor is humankind on firmer ground:  notwithstanding their supposed possession of a rational soul, human infants and the mentally disabled clearly lack the faculties of higher reasoning, while archaic prejudice against the mental capacities of women and ethnic others also helped undermine the category of rational humanity. As Erica Fudge summarizes, There are natural born humans who can only be human because they possess the rational soul. Then there are humans in possession of the rational soul who require education to become truly human. Finally, there are humans who possess rational souls, can be educated, but are still less human than the human. Thus the category begins to collapse into absurdity.48

René Descartes’ beast-machine theory, first introduced in his 1633 Discourse on the Method, aimed to cut through this confusion, and its rapid popularity derived at least in part from the efficiency with which it redrew the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. Descartes mobilized a radical skepticism (recently associated with theriophiles like Montaigne) to insist that the operations of reason by themselves confirm

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human subjectivity as real:  that “in order to think, one has to exist.”49 Thus human beings demonstrate their consciousness by reflecting upon their circumstances and communicating their reflections to others, and one might suppose, in keeping with the findings of modern ethologists, that nonhuman animals would do something similar if less sophisticated in accordance with their own signifying regimes. For Descartes, however, nothing could be farther from the case: [T]here are no men so dull-witted and stupid, not even madmen, that they are incapable of stringing together different words, and composing them into utterances, through which they let their thoughts be known; and conversely, there is no other animal, no matter how perfect and well endowed by birth it may be, that can do anything similar … This shows not only that animals have less reason than man, but that they have none at all. For … it is unbelievable that the most perfect monkey or parrot of their species should not be able to speak as well as the most stupid child, or at least a child with a disturbed brain, unless their soul were of a wholly different nature to ours.50

It may be a vulgar error to conclude that Descartes regarded beasts as no more conscious than machines. For one thing, he “hedges his bets” on the subject, at some moments seeming to suggest that animals are capable of a lower-order kind of cognition; for another thing, he seems to be “collapsing the traditional functions of the organic soul [i.e., the Thomist/ Aristotelian vegetative and sensitive soul] into the body” without actually eliminating them.51 The result may be that Descartes allows some space for animal consciousness, while nonetheless insisting that this must be “of a wholly different nature to ours.” But Aristotle distinguished carefully between the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms  – a distinction still retained centuries later by Donne. Descartes, focused on human difference, tends to elide the other orders of creation, most notoriously in his broad-brush comparison of animals to automata: [I]f there were such machines having the organs and outward shape of a monkey or any other irrational animal, we would have no means of knowing that they were not of exactly the same nature as these animals, whereas, if any such machines resembled us in body and imitated our actions … , we should still have … very certain means of recognizing that they were not, for all that, real human beings.52

At such moments Descartes may not actually insist that animals are the equivalent of inert matter, but he reveals that for his purposes they might as well be. Worse still, whatever nuance might inhere in Descartes’ own thought on the species divide, his followers displayed no such subtlety and

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no scruples at all in pioneering the most bloody-minded and remorseless of animal research. In Nicolas Fontaine’s notorious recollection (1738), the Cartesians at Port-Royal administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they had felt pain. They said that the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck, were only the noise of a little spring which had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation.53

When George Orwell remarked that there are some ideas so preposterous only an intellectual could believe them, he might well have had Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis specifically in mind. At any rate, the animal trainers of Descartes’ day knew enough to dismiss his theory. William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, thus objected (1743) that “If [the horse] does not think (as the famous philosopher Descartes affirms of all beasts), it would be impossible to teach him what he should do.”54 But at the very least, the experiments at Port-Royal prove that academic opinions have real-world consequences, which in this case include a great deal of suffering and death. Nor did the consequences stop there, for the body of suffering and death thus created also opened up a whole regime of animal-based research, publication, and professional advancement. In this sense Descartes’ followers, enabled by the master himself, built their careers upon the bodies of the dogs and cats, mice and rats, horses and pigeons, and other beasts that they laughingly tortured into oblivion. Again, Cavendish well understood the self-serving tendency of the Cartesian philosophers, remarking that “What makes scholasticks degrade horses so much, proceeds (I believe) from nothing else, but the small knowledge they have of them, and the persuasion that they themselves know every thing.”55 But the Cartesians could not have served themselves so well had they not served others too. In particular, their views were designed to “safeguard … religion,” “For when [non-Cartesians] conceded to beasts the powers of perception, memory, and reflection, they were implicitly attributing to animals all the ingredients of an immortal soul, which was absurd; and if they denied that they had an immortal soul, even though they had such powers, they were by implication questioning whether man had an immortal soul either.”56 By thus protecting the interests of the church, Descartes helped insure the acceptance of his theory as well. Training a rigorous skepticism on the idea that beasts possess consciousness, he unquestioningly accepts the less

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obvious proposition that “reality … consist[s] of two basic, independent, and irreducible kinds of things: minds and bodies.”57 If he finds skepticism easy in the former case but not in the latter, that is arguably because the latter belief is a matter of personal convenience. This being so, it seems like poetic justice that the system of experimental science underwritten by Cartesian philosophy should ultimately annihilate Descartes’ species theory while in the process also undermining the speciesist foundations of Western religion. In both these processes, Darwin’s theory of evolution plays the decisive role. From the standpoint of Biblical literalism, of course, Darwinian science proves endlessly objectionable, but from the broader-minded perspective of the deists with whom Darwin studied at Edinburgh and Cambridge, evolutionary theory kicked away the main buttresses of Descartes’ thinking. In proposing that Homo sapiens develops out of nonhuman species, evolution implies that the difference between human and nonhuman is one of degree rather than kind; still more troubling, it also suggests that mind is not separate from body. In fact, neither of these propositions originated with Darwin himself. His grandfather Erasmus Darwin, for instance, had already considered the former, inquiring in 1790, “[W]ould it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the first great cause endowed with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity[?]”58 As for the connection of mind to body, when Darwin was still a student at Edinburgh, he had heard William Browne present a paper at the Plinian Society “in which he proposed that life itself was just a function of the way the body was organized and … that ‘mind, as far as one’s individual senses and consciousness are concerned, is material.’ ”59 This latter possibility sticks with Darwin, who considers it with typical humility in his notebook of 1838: Thought (or desires more properly) being hereditary it is difficult to imagine it anything but structure of brain hereditary, analogy points out to this. – love of the deity effect of organization. Oh you Materialist! … Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, it our admiration of ourselves.60

But Darwin’s particular contribution to evolutionary theory consisted more properly in parsing the process whereby morphological variations develop through inter- and intra-species competition for food and mates.

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Some 150 years after Darwin, this same process has become the object of sustained ethological observation among communities of primates, leading Jane Goodall to maintain that “chimpanzee history” can be traced through “major events” such as “a kind of primitive ‘war’ ” or “a ‘baby boom’ ” occurring under the leadership of particular alpha males.61 Proceeding from the kind of learned behavior that Cavendish saw as refutation of Descartes, Goodall continues that Chimpanzees, like humans, can learn by observation and imitation, which means that if a new adaptive pattern is “invented” by a particular individual, it can be passed on to the next generation. Thus we find that while the various chimpanzee groups that have been studied in different parts of Africa have many behaviours in common, they also have their own distinctive traditions. This is particularly well documented with respect to tool-using and tool-making behaviours. Chimpanzees use more objects as tools for a greater variety of purposes than any creature except ourselves and each population has its own tool-using cultures. For instance, … no East African chimpanzee has been seen to open hard-shelled fruits with the hammer and anvil technique that is part of the culture of chimpanzee groups in West Africa.62

In the case of the great apes, Goodall concludes, the evidence of fairly advanced mental processes has grown ever more substantial:  “There is proof that they can solve simple problems through process of reasoning and insight. They can plan for the immediate future. The language acquisition experiments have demonstrated that they have powers of generalization, abstraction, and concept-forming, along with the ability to understand and use abstract symbols in communication. And they clearly have some kind of self-concept.”63 The “language acquisition experiments” to which Goodall refers include the celebrated language projects conducted by Herbert S. Terrace with the chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky and by Francine Patterson with the gorilla Koko.64 But such experiments have not been confined to the anthropoid apes, nor even to the class of mammals. Consider, for instance, the work of Irene Pepperberg with the African gray parrot Alex. Over the course of roughly two years of training in the 1990s, Alex “achieved a rudimentary form of communication” with human beings such that “He could identify, refuse, and apparently request a limited set of objects for play or food, … also appeared to possess some limited facility for categorizing objects, … [and] also demonstrated a limited capacity to compose multiword phrases from separately acquired labels, which suggested that he might interpret human speech as a collection of discrete units.”65 Pepperberg herself

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remains cautious about the meaning of these findings, recusing herself from debates about whether this behavior actually constitutes communication, let alone human language. But she ends her study of Alex with a simple yet far-reaching observation: “wild Gray parrots have the capacity to reproduce environmental noises (e.g., sounds of a nearby stream) as well as conspecific and allospecific vocalizations – but they reproduce only the last two forms.”66 By discounting ambient sounds in favor of living voices, Pepperberg argues, these birds “choos[e] … what to ignore as well as what to process,” and this very “lack of reproduction [serves as] evidence of hierarchical learning and cognitive processing.”67 To be sure, this spontaneous discrimination between living voice and dead sounds is neither as deliberate nor as self-conscious as the process of rigorous self-doubt from which Descartes, using skepticism itself as proof, extracted his cogito. But the Cartesian cogito itself simply provided confirmation of thought processes that preceded it. By Descartes’ measure, it verified the intelligent existence of all human beings, not only that of the singular thinker who devised the proof itself. By the same logic, we may locate the basics of categorical thinking in the instinctive process whereby parrots group sounds into those to be attended to and those to be ignored. And we may note that human observers perform this same act in their turn when deciding whether to credit psittacine mimicry as evidence of rudimentary thought or to dismiss it as mindless, meaningless vocalization. If we draw the former conclusion, then we are left with an ironic spectacle: any wild African gray parrot will intuitively recognize its kinship with Descartes, whereas Descartes, for all his training and privilege, fails to return the favor. In the wake of these developments in philosophy and science, the question of the animal  – of animality’s relation to humanity as both its exterior limit and its interior other – has reasserted itself, with language as a principal focus of its reemergence. Jacques Derrida, writing in 1997, presents language as a double bind for those seeking to understand human/animal difference. On one hand, he dismisses as a kind of “violence or asinanity [bêtise]” the Cartesian impulse to “suspend … one’s compassion and depriv[e] the animal of every power of manifestation”; on the other hand, he discovers an equal if different violence in the anthropocentric impulse to “assign, interpret, or project” meaning onto the space of the animal other.68 This latter impulse assumes for Derrida a decidedly literary quality. Hence he frames his own aspired rapport with his cat as literature’s very negation: “[T]he cat I am talking about is a real cat … It doesn’t silently

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enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables.”69 Here is theory throwing down the gauntlet to literary history, locating the problem of the animal in individual animals’ simultaneous exclusion from and subjection to the linguistic order. But despite such moments, Derrida frustrates our instinct to see literature and theory in purely oppositional terms. For one thing, it would be hard to find a more self-consciously literary philosopher: Derrida’s celebrated puns and neologisms and allusions often seem to bear less resemblance to Kant or Aristotle than to “The Waste Land.” In the present case, these traits extend to Derrida’s coinage of the nonceword animot – a term that summons the idea of animals “in their plural singularity rather than their generality (i.e., The Animal)” while likewise pointing to “language and access to the being of beings” as “that which has been traditionally denied to animals.”70 And likewise, Derrida formulates his rejection of the literary through a catalogue of literary representations that itself constitutes a mini-history of cats in Western letters:  “The cat I am talking about does not belong to Kafka’s vast zoopoetics … [n]or is [it] Hoffmann’s or Kofman’s cat Murr … [It] isn’t Montaigne’s cat either, … [n]or does [it] belong … to Baudelaire’s family of cats, or Rilke’s, or Buber’s.”71 Here one encounters the Derridean notion of the trace – the excluded term that grounds any effort at differential meaning and whose absence therefore lies at the heart of any verbal summons – appearing as the ghost of the literary within philosophy. This seems especially fitting for a discourse of species difference, since among its other meanings the French noun trace carries the sense of Latin vestigia or animal tracks: the present absence of the beast within the human, of the non-verbal within the verbal. For Derrida, thus, the literary and the philosophical exist in something more complex than a simply oppositional relationship, and the same principle holds in the chapters assembled in this volume. Some of these explore the problem of the animal primarily from the literary-historical standpoint; others cast themselves mainly as theoretical exercises; but all strive to be aware of the challenges and resources presented by theory to literature and vice versa. More generally, our editorial practice has also striven for an inclusive approach to questions of genre and medium, with the result that the chapters do not limit themselves to conventionally theoretical or belletristic subject matter. Instead, they range across materials that may be considered in turn philosophical, biological, fictional, historical, poetic, dramatic, cinematic, televisual, digital, sociological, popular-cultural, ethnographic, and folkloric. Likewise, while Anglophone literary studies

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remain the nominal focus of this collection, we take a capacious approach to issues of chronology, language, and place, recognizing that the discourse of species difference predates the development of any English vernacular literature and transcends distinctions of geography, language, and nationhood. Thus our volume opens with a study of Aristotelian zoology’s medieval Nachleben and concludes with a chapter on Inuit spirituality. In between, readers will encounter discussions of everything from Scottish beast-fables to Linnaean taxonomy to German philosophy, together with treatments of established English authors from Shakespeare to Woolf. The order of contributions is roughly chronological, with the first section of five chapters, “Origins,” ranging across the long Middle Ages from the near limits of classical antiquity to the edge of the early modern. To begin with, two chapters address the bleed-over of classical philosophy and other forms of animal knowledge into the textual and social economies of the early Middle Ages. No classical philosopher casts a longer shadow over medieval literature than Aristotle, so it is appropriate to begin with Pieter Beullens’ discussion of Aristotelian influences on medieval natural history. Tracing the survival of Aristotle’s zoological treatises, first through translation and then more particularly through their assimilation to medieval commonplace books designed for preachers, Beullens emphasizes the ways the animal world served the Middle Ages not only as a material but also as a conceptual resource, to be drawn on not only for food, clothing, and sport, but also for instructional and devotional purposes. For his part, Luuk Houwen focuses on Saint Augustine, particularly his writings on the generation of monsters, as these travel into the works of Isidore of Seville, Gerald of Wales, and Marie de France, thus subjecting classical lore to a medieval sensibility that viewed monstrosity as an expression of the divine will. Proceeding deeper into the Middle Ages, William Perry Marvin studies the culture of the medieval hunt: its classical derivation, its later innovations, and the literature that developed around it from antiquity to early modernity. Marvin’s wide-ranging survey engages both non-literary texts (medieval hunting manuals like Gaston Phébus’ Livre de Chase) and more conventionally belletristic works. These latter, from Beowulf to Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, remind us that the English literary canon resists confinement by language and geography as much as does the history of humanity’s engagement with other species. Likewise, David Salter traces the function of animals in the two widely dispersed polyglot genres of medieval romance and hagiography. Focusing

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on the once-popular verse tale Bevis of Hampton, Salter examines how the poem’s beasts attest to Bevis’ heroism while simultaneously revealing the tensions of primogenitural status and religious affiliation that underlie the narrative. Finally, Gillian Rudd completes our survey of the pre-modern period by turning to another favored medieval literary genre:  the beast fable. Examining the neo-Aesopic, neo-Chaucerian fables of Robert Henryson, Rudd notes the conflict that arises between the symbolic and didactic purposes for which the fables appropriate their animal personae, on one hand, and the actual behavior of these same animals in the wild, on the other. For Rudd, this conflict has been traditionally resolved in favor of the appropriated symbol at the expense of the unaccommodated animal: a resolution that even today impedes our ability to understand beasts on their own terms. Part II of the volume, “Development,” covers the long early modern period (1500–1900). These chapters trace representations of animals in literary texts as well as developments of “thinking with animals” in emerging scientific and philosophical discourse. The section begins with two chapters focused on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture. Molly Hand’s chapter frames the animal familiar as a defining feature of the early modern discourse on witchcraft, and her zoocentric readings of witch pamphlets as well as drama – Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton and Middleton’s The Witch – illustrate that witchcraft, more frequently evaluated from an anachronistically anthropocentric perspective, was very much an animal crime. Hand’s chapter offers further insight into the complexities of early modern human–animal relationships as well as the development of “familiar” characters in early modern literature. Bruce Boehrer’s chapter brings to light less-studied animal entertainments that informed Shakespeare’s theater and early modern drama broadly speaking. In particular, Boehrer describes paratheatrical animal entertainments, among which bear-baiting was merely the most visible. If the early modern stage, stake, and scaffold were mutually constitutive spectacles, each implying the others, as Andreas Höfele has argued, Boehrer’s chapter, invoking myriad examples from the dramatic canon including Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Dekker, and Milton, usefully reaches beyond the “stake,” to consider other influential, popular animal pastimes, including non-violent entertainments such as dog-and-clown acts and animal street entertainments, as well as the pageantry of the royal hunt. Lucinda Cole’s chapter reminds us that the boundaries among species were yet uncertain in the eighteenth century and that commonalities among humans and “the slithering, swimming, flying, and galloping

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‘kind’ ” were cause for concern among those wishing to claim difference. Reading the works of Anthony Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, as well as physician Thomas Willis, and Jonathan Swift, Cole demonstrates how “vermin” comprised a significant category of “other” against which humans were defined, and shows, too, how characteristics associated with vermin  – rapid reproduction, swarming, infestation  – were ascribed to denigrated human populations such that we see an incipient discourse of demonization via “verminization.” Cole’s chapter highlights Swift’s discriminatory rhetoric, which draws on negative characteristics associated with vermin. Matthew Senior’s chapter, in turn, considers the codification of scientific racism, examining the scientific inquiries of Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) and George Cuvier (1769–1832). These “fathers of science,” Senior demonstrates, created classificatory systems that would underpin systematized racism for the centuries following. Though their worldviews, classification systems, and means of establishing boundaries among species differed, modern biology ultimately derives from the work of two men who, on the one hand, situated the human within the broader framework of a natural taxonomy, and on the other, distinguished white Europeans from other “less human” humans. Senior’s chapter attests to the extent to which racism is intertwined with speciesism, particularly as the latter is situated within the modern episteme. While Senior focuses on the establishment of speciesist and racist taxonomies, Deborah Denenholz Morse’s chapter considers how gendered narration becomes a powerful rhetorical tool for criticizing animal abuse. Morse argues that cross-gender narration in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty enables vocal resistance to animal cruelty and adds credence to the animal voices within the novel. Providing biographical and historical context for Sewell’s novel, Morse offers a careful reading of the novel to show how it presents and endeavors to transform Victorian ideals of masculinity. Her chapter ends by tracing the practice of cross-gender narration from Sewell to Margaret Marshall Saunders’ Beautiful Joe and Virginia Woolf ’s Flush, suggesting in the process that this narrative strategy “creates a powerful liminal space in which animal minds can exist.” The “Developments” section, then, displays an expansive view of the literary field, encompassing as it does early modern drama, philosophy, and natural history; Enlightenment scientific discourse; nineteenth-century novels, and in the final chapter, modern philosophy. Vanessa Lemm considers Friedrich Nietzsche’s “enigmatic term” homo natura, and revisits the debates around this term in order to situate Nietzsche’s “conception of human life as continuous with the life of other living beings.” Resisting

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anthropocentric views of Nietzsche’s conception of the human, Lemm finds in Nietzsche a notion of human becoming in a philosophical framework that accounts for both animals and plant life. The third and final section of our anthology pursues animal studies theory into its various contemporary applications, ranging from the conventionally belletristic to the philosophical to the cinematic and beyond. Michael Lundblad thus begins with a study of Roland Barthes’ late reflections on “idiorrhythmy”: the spatial instinct that drives living beings to seek particular accommodations of physical intimacy and distance. Moving from Barthes’ critique of solitude and spatial distance in Robinson Crusoe (1719) to more abstract questions of the relation between territory and subjectivity, Lundblad understands this relation as central to the maintenance of healthy intra- and inter-species intercourse. Proceeding to the new medium of cinema, Alanna Thain concentrates on the role of animals in films that explore the fantasy of travel through time, presenting the nonhuman beings in movies from Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror to David Cronenberg’s The Fly as modeling the self-alterity of the human in time: in effect introducing us to our chronological alienation from ourselves. Matthew Calarco, in turn, examines philosophical theories of species difference in the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, exploring how the two later philosophers revise Heidegger’s notorious characterization of nonhuman life as weltarm – poor in world. Brian Massumi then considers contemporary literary projects of animal imitation  – Thomas Thwaites’ GoatMan and Charles Foster’s Becoming a Beast – as these embody and/or clarify the Deleuzian concept of becoming-animal. Our three last chapters then explore the furthest reaches of animal studies and the various notions of interspecies relation the field presupposes. Thus, starting with Sergei Eisenstein’s meditations on the nature of cinematic animation, Thomas Lamarre ponders the implications of an art form in which all matter  – even the superficially inert  – seems imbued with agency. David Jaclin confronts the emerging fantasy of another kind of animation, or re-animation: the revival of extinct species – particularly the mammoth  – through cloning and the scientific manipulation of DNA. And Peter Kulchyski concludes our anthology, appropriately enough, by revisiting aboriginal models of human/animal relations, in the process tracing contemporary capitalism’s suppression of bush animality as a function of its annihilation of the bush itself. The title of a well-known poem by Philip Levine declares that “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” Levine’s poem, which first appeared in 1968, gives voice to the quiet but determined defiance of a pig who, while driven

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to slaughter, refuses to break down, to “fall/ on my side and drum my toes/ … or squeal/ and shit like a new housewife/ discovering television.”72 In the time since its first publication, however, this poem has evolved into something more than a manifesto of personal resistance: as E. O. Wilson has observed, “The human hammer having fallen, the sixth mass extinction has begun.”73 Animals are now passing from our lives in numbers we could hardly have imagined, and with consequences we cannot possibly foresee. One reaction to this passage has been the rise in critical animal studies that our anthology documents and extends; this recent development in scholarship seeks, among other things, to understand what we lose when we cut ourselves off from the fellowship of other living creatures. To this extent, we offer the following chapters as an act of protest and defiance like that of Levine’s poem, all the more emphatic for its hopelessness in the face of what is coming. Among other things it is our way of saying, with Levine’s porcine speaker, “Not me. Not this pig.”

Notes 1 Guy Simmonds, dir., The Secret Life of Human Pups, Channel 4 (May 25, 2016, 10:00 p.m.). 2 Tufayel Ahmed, “ ‘Secret Life of the Human Pups’:  Meet Britain’s Men Who Role-Play as Dogs,” Newsweek (May 24, 2016, accessed June 15, 2016, http://europe.newsweek.com/secret-life-human-pups-meet-britains-hiddencommunity-men-who-roleplay-dogs). 3 “Mr. Puppy UK” (June 19, 2016, accessed June 15, 2016, http://mrpuppy .org.uk/). 4 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.203–4, in G. Blakemore Evans, gen. ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 5 George Turberville, “To His Love, That Controlled His Dog for Fawning on Her,” 1–4, in Elizabethan Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Bob Blaisdell (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2005), 153–4. 6 A Spaniard in Elizabethan England: The Correspondence of Antonio Pérez’s Exile, ed. Gustav Ungerer, 2 vols. (London: Tamesis Books Limited, 1974), 1: 199. For Pérez’s possible connection to Love’s Labours Lost, see Felicia Hardison Londré, ed., “Elizabethan Views of the Other: French, Spanish, and Russians in Love’s Labours Lost,” in Felicia Hardison Londré, ed., “Love’s Labours Lost”:  Critical Essays (London: Routledge, 2001), 333. 7 See David Bergeron, King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 111. 8 See Alan Stewart, “Government by Beagle: The Impersonal Rule of James VI and I,” in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 101. 9 Ahmed, “Secret Life of Human Pups.”

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10 B. Terrance Grey, “What Are Infantilism and Diaper Fetishes?” (December 7, 2014, accessed June 17, 2016, http://understanding.infantilism.org/what_is_ infantilism.php); Ahmed, “Secret Life of Human Pups.” 11 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1984); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1986), 5. 12 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). 13 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 8.131–2 [p. 415]. 14 See Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Touchstone, 1997); Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, trans. Paul Vincent (New York: Verso, 1994). 15 Ben Travis, “The Secret Life of Human Pups: Channel 4 Documentary Casts a Light on Hidden Community,” Evening Standard (May 25, 2016, accessed June 17, 2016, www.standard.co.uk/stayingin/tvfilm/the-secret-life-of-human-pupschannel- 4- puppy- play- documentary- casts- a- light- on- hidden- communitya3256786.html). 16 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 242. 17 Alix Fox, “Feigning Cats and Dogs,” Time Out London, no. 2384 (June 14–20, 2016), 39. 18 Cary Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities,” PMLA 124.2 (March, 2009), 565. 19 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 331–2. 20 See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.  D. Hicks, 2  vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 2: 8.13–14, 33, 36–7. 21 Plutarch, “Whether Land or Sea Animals Are Cleverer” and “Beasts Are Rational,” in Plutarch’s Moralia, trans. Harold Cherniss and William Humbold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 12: 318–479, 492–533. 22 The Little Flowers of Saint Francis of Assisi, trans. Abby Langdon Alger (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898), 73, 94. 23 See E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1906). 24 See Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, “De Venatica et Aucupio,” in De Incertitudine et Vanitate Omnium Scientiarum et Artium (1662; facs., n.p.: Kessinger, n.d.), 327–31; Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, in The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1989), 40; Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (London: Penguin, 2003), 75–6; Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cruelty,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M.  Frame (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1965), 316–18.

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25 For Puritanism and blood sports, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 150–65; for Bentham’s view of animal rights, see his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1879), chapter 17, esp. 310–11 n. 2. 26 Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956), 774–83; Henry Salt, Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (New York: Macmillan, 1894), passim. 27 Mohandas Ghandi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, trans. Mahadev H. Desai (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 235. 28 Joshua M. Greene, Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2006), 94–6. 29 Paul Rouzer, On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 76. For Snyder’s translations, see Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2009). 30 Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, trans. Gillian Clark (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 48. 31 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 2: 8.12–13. 32 Seneca, Epistles 108.17–22, trans. Richard Gummere, 10  vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 5: 17–22. 33 See Porphyry, On Abstinence from Animal Food, trans. Thomas Taylor, ed. Esme Wynne-Tyson (London, Centaur Press, 1965). 34 For More’s record as an inquisitor, see James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 1999), 3–15. 35 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 198. 36 Rouzer 78. For Snyder’s and Kerouac’s reaction to Chan vegetarianism, see Eliot Weinberger, “Gary Snyder, the Art of Poetry No. 74,” The Paris Review 38.141 (Winter, 1996), 116; Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New  York:  Penguin, 1976), 22. 37 For King James’ animal protectionism, see Bruce Boehrer, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52–4; for Roosevelt’s conservationism and opposition to animal cruelty, see Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), esp. 13–21, 37–8, 46–53. 38 Sarah Watt, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 19. 39 Philip Wheelwright, ed., The Presocratics (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1966), 201. 40 See Juliana Schiesari, “Pedagogy and the Art of Dressage in the Italian Renaissance,” in Animals and Early Modern Identity, ed. Pia Cuneo (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 375–89. 41 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 184. 42 See Henry Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages (London:  George Allen and Unwin, 1923), 121–34. 43 Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. J. A. Smith, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 536.

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44 Ibid., 557, 559. 45 Ibid., 559–69. 46 Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3  vols. (New  York:  Benziger Brothers, 1947), Book 1, Question 78, Articles 1 and 2. 47 John Donne, “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day,” 28–36, in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 72–3. 48 Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning:  Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 58. 49 René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, trans. Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 29. 50 Ibid., 47. 51 Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes:  An Intellectual Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 166–7. 52 Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, 46. 53 Nicolas Fontaine, Memoirs pour servir à l’histoire de Port-Royal (1738), qtd. in Leonora Cohen-Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (1940; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1968), 54. 54 William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, A General System of Horsemanship (1743; facs. New  York:  Winchester, 1970), 122. This is the English translation of Cavendish’s Methode et Invention Nouvelle de dresser Les Chevaux (Antwerp, 1658). 55 Ibid., 13. 56 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 34. 57 Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1983; rpt. 2004), 21. 58 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, 2  vols. (London, 1794–6), 1:505. 59 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin:  Voyaging (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1995), 77. 60 Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844, ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 291. 61 Jane Goodall, “Chimpanzees  – Bridging the Gap,” in The Great Ape Project:  Equality Beyond Humanity, ed. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 12. 62 Ibid., 12. 63 Ibid., 13. 64 Herbert S. Terrace, Nim, A Chimpanzee Who Learned Sign Language (New York: Knopf, 1979); Francine Patterson and Eugene Linden, The Education of Koko (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981). 65 Irene Maxine Pepperberg, The Alex Studies:  Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 51. 66 Ibid., 326.

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67 Ibid. 68 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I  Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 18. 69 Ibid., 6. 70 Ibid., 41, 47–9; Matthew Calarco, Zoographies:  The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 144. 71 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 6–7. 72 Philip Levine, “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” in Not This Pig (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 17–21. 73 E. O. Wilson, The Creation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 91.

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CH APTER  1

Aristotle’s Zoology in the Medieval World Pieter Beullens

In general, attitudes towards animals in the medieval Latin West were dominated by their use value. Animals served as food for the hungry, game for the huntsmen, and personal aids for the labourer or the traveler. Thomas of Chobham, a cleric from Salisbury, pointedly formulated this view in his handbook for preachers (Summa de arte praedicandi), written around 1220: “The Lord created different creatures with different natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creatures we may contemplate not only what may be useful to us for the body, but also what may be useful for the soul.”1 This supremacy of man over beast found its theological substantiation in the words of the Jewish-Christian God in Genesis 1:26:  “Then God said:  ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground.’ ”2 As for animals in literature, the fable was arguably the only literary genre surviving from antiquity and dealing with animals that made a significant impact on the medieval mind. In fables animal behavior was used as a simile for human virtues and vices.3 It could thus be considered as “useful for the soul.” The existence of at least three manuscripts dating from as early as the ninth century documents that Phaedrus’ Latin fables in verse (first century AD) were available throughout the Middle Ages. Yet it seems that the bulk of medieval knowledge about the fables’ contents derived not from the antique forerunner in the field, but was gathered from later prose adaptations. A particularly popular version was the so-called Romulus, an anonymous reworking from the fourth or fifth century AD based on earlier material – but many other variants circulated in Latin and in vernacular languages.4 The genre did more than remain mere bookish wisdom, as some fables became part and parcel of the iconography of religious and secular 29

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architecture. In that context they were intended to be understood by both the educated and the illiterate. Animal representations based on the fables by Phaedrus and other authors can be recognized in twelfth-century sculptural works, such as the reliefs in the Porta della Pescheria of the Modena Duomo or the Portail de Saint-Ursin in Bourges.5 Questions regarding the relation between the buildings and their decoration have been an important issue in the scholarly debate.6 Similar questions could be raised regarding the occurrence of embroidered representations of eight different fables in the borders of the famous Bayeux Tapestry, which was most probably made shortly after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Whether one agrees with the argument that fables about deceit, such as “The Fox and the Crow” or “The Wolf and the Crane,” provided negative examples for chivalry and knightly behavior, the main iconographical theme of the tapestry, clearly their presence transcends a merely decorative function.7 As in literature, animals in iconography fulfill their utilitarian role as foreseen by the divine plan. Early in the new millennium an innovative literary genre started its rise. It displayed a comparable awareness that animals may usefully convey implicit or explicit messages. The intention of this kind of literature is plainly expressed by the French author Pierre of Beauvais in the preface to the so-called short version of his Bestiary, which eventually would become the name for most works in this genre: “Here begins the book which is called the bestiary, and it is named so because it speaks of the natures of beasts, for all the creatures which God created on this earth, he created so that they be examples of faith and belief for men.”8 Pierre’s work certainly deals with animals and their conduct, but they are not considered from a scientific point of view or as study objects in their own right. On the contrary, animal behavior is only deemed interesting as far as it provides suitable material for comparison with the envisioned religious conduct of humans. Pierre established his French text on the basis of the Latin version of a work known under the title of Physiologus.9 Its Greek model probably originated in Egypt in the second or third century AD, although the exact date is debated. Translations into Latin and numerous ancient and medieval vernacular languages had contributed to its popularity throughout the known world.10 Although the work bears in some manuscripts an attribution to famous authors, the most influential being John Chrysostom, it mostly circulated anonymously. Its title was derived from the recurring phrase “The physiologus says …” that introduces almost every chapter of the text. The content is a curious mixture of biblical references to animals

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and of information from ancient zoological works and traditional animal lore, combined in various degrees of scientific reliability. The informative part then gets a supplement in the form of an allegorical section. Here the reader is guided toward the deeper meaning of the animal behavior, which leads to an accurate interpretation of relevant biblical passages. The deer can conveniently act as an example to illustrate the compiler’s method. When a deer discovers a dragon, it drinks water from a source and spits it into the dragon’s lair, driving the dragon out and murdering it. The dragon symbolizes the devil, which is killed by the word of God. Some religious references in the story are obvious, like the allusion to the deer longing for water from the opening line of Psalm 42:2 and the water as an image for baptism. But at the same time ancient secular literature is not far away, since the alleged hatred between deer and snake is reported by Pliny (first century AD) among others. The way in which the snake from the original source changed into a dragon is an interesting example “to show how the author of Physiologus has reshaped the traditional material of his analogues to conform to a pre-conceived allegory.”11 There appears not to have been an authoritative version behind the manuscripts that transmit the text. Therefore, its order and composition display considerable variation. As a result, multiple forms of the Physiologus came into circulation: at least three different layers were uncovered in the transmission of the Greek version alone.12 The instability of the text and the frequent reordering of its content led to the point that revisions of the original work could no longer be labelled as copies of the Physiologus. From the early twelfth century onward they rather became new products on their own. The reworking of the original layer of material could go in different directions. Either the data remained in the new output, or parts of it were excised, and in addition information from other literary sources could be incorporated. Such manuscripts became commonly known under the conventional designation of bestiary. Virtually no physical copy belonging to the genre is completely identical to another, and it has proven extremely difficult to impose even a superficial classification on the extant body of manuscripts. The organization into families and subfamilies as proposed by James and McCulloch in the previous century formed the basis of a system of division that is still in general use – albeit with minor corrections and adjustments, especially to extend the classification of Latin manuscripts to include the variety of vernacular versions.13 In the physical appearance of bestiaries text and image went hand in hand.14 Some of these books were so lavishly illustrated that they still form the highlights of the libraries where they are housed. For their owners

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they must have served as showpieces by which they would astonish their visitors. Apart from the obvious display of wealth, their edifying content bore testimony to the moral and religious righteousness of the manuscripts’ patrons. The stories contained in those books and the representations of their contents became so well known that some of them are ubiquitous in later medieval religious iconography. A standard example is the image of the pelican tearing open its breast to revive its dead chicks, which served as a powerful reference for the medieval viewer to the Son of God who shed his blood to grant his followers eternal life. If this was the customary approach to animal behavior and only meaningful observations  – genuine or fictional  – were mentioned in view of their symbolical or allegorical meaning, it was highly unlikely that animals as irrational beings were to form the subject of scientific investigation in their own right. As a result, the major zoological treatises of antiquity were all but ignored in the Middle Ages. The Physiologus and the various forms of bestiaries display undeniable similarities to material drawn from ancient sources, in particular the commentaries on the six days of creation in Genesis by church fathers such as Ambrose and Basil (fourth century AD), as well as encyclopaedic works from later antiquity, represented by Solinus’ De mirabilibus mundi (third century AD) and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (seventh century AD). These authors mainly compiled information they excerpted from other sources with a pronounced preference for the wonderful and the marvellous aspects that they found in the books they read. Although these works only partially deal with zoological topics, their impact can be measured by the sheer wealth of medieval manuscripts, complete and fragmentary, that survive. In the case of Isidore’s Etymologiae, the number of extant copies, from the period between the seventh and the sixteenth centuries, must be estimated at well over a thousand.15 Solinus’ and Isidore’s ultimate resource was Pliny’s Naturalis historia (first century AD), in particular books 8–11 (about land animals, terrestria, water animals, aquatilia, birds, insects, and other small animals) and 28– 32 (about medicinal use of animals and animal products) of his gigantic encyclopaedia. Although Pliny was already in use as an authority to create a reliable calendar since the Carolingian age, the zoological sections of his work received much less attention throughout the Middle Ages.16 Still he had established some implicit epistemological premises that were taken for granted by the following generations. First of all, Pliny gathered his data in the library from written sources. Information from empirical observation was not considered to be superior in value – at least it is not very prominently present in his account. The purpose of his Naturalis historia was to

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collect the knowledge as it was documented by previous writers in a report as exhaustive as achievable, and to expose its natural order. Pliny aimed to reveal the innate structure of reality through the organization of his work. Information about animals was arranged according to large groups, based on their biotope (land, water, air). In the early thirteenth century, Alexander Neckam considered this arrangement as a clear reference to the idea that nature contained an intrinsic order according to the four elements.17 Within these classes Pliny displayed the information about the single species in a seemingly random order. Each section then explicitly stresses the specific characteristics of each animal, and in particular those elements that could be considered as something marvellous (mirabile), without attempting to look for resemblances in the behavior or the appearance of other species. Consequently, it would be pointless to assume the anachronistic concept of taxonomy in Pliny’s work. As far as this characteristic approach of zoological knowledge is concerned, Pliny’s encyclopaedia was perfectly compatible with the organizational principles of the Physiologus and the bestiary that originated from it. Pliny’s preference for the exceptional almost perfectly corresponded with the standards of the genre. As a result, excerpts from his encyclopaedia were eagerly incorporated into the existing bestiary texts, although Pliny was not always acknowledged as their source. On balance, the corpus of literary texts concerning zoology and animal behavior remained largely unchanged for nearly a millennium. The single most important new input, on both a quantitative and a qualitative level, came early in the thirteenth century with the arrival of Aristotle’s biological treatises in the medieval West in the form of new Latin translations. Obviously Aristotle had been an authority throughout the Middle Ages. The Latin translations made by Boethius in the early sixth century, as well as his commentaries and original works based on them, had established Aristotelian logic as the foundation of every form of higher education. In the twelfth century, new texts by the same philosopher had surfaced. They included more treatises from the field of logic, but also opened fresh views on Aristotle’s thoughts about natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics – areas of research in which his ideas were previously unknown in the medieval world. These translations arrived in two distinct waves. An important group of Latin versions was not based on the original Greek text, but on an intermediate Arabic rendering. Several of these translations were accompanied by commentaries and other treatises written by philosophers from the Arab world, both contemporary and from earlier periods. An enormous

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amount of translation work from the Arabic was shouldered by Gerard of Cremona, who was active in Toledo for most of the second half of the twelfth century. Almost simultaneously other translators like James of Venice and Burgundio of Pisa brought Aristotelian texts to their Latin-speaking audience through versions compiled directly from the Greek manuscripts. Some of these might have been brought from Constantinople, while others were retrieved from centers of Greek learning in Southern Italy. The intellectual movement that transferred these new translations from the various sites where they had been created to the hotspots of intellectual life can only be glimpsed at. Whether it was by an organized undertaking or due to the coinciding availability of these various texts, by the early thirteenth century the newly discovered Aristotelian treatises circulated in manuscript collections with a more or less standardized order. Conspicuously absent from these collections were the philosopher’s books on zoology. The lacuna was filled around 1220 by Michael Scot, a prolific translator in Toledo and at the court of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II in Sicily. Michael made Latin versions of Aristotle’s History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals, nineteen books in all, enough to fill a sturdy handwritten codex averaging well over 100 parchment pages.18 It may well be that the sheer volume of the works had discouraged Scot’s predecessors from undertaking the endeavor. Now the Latin world had Aristotle’s systematic treatments of animal behavior, anatomy, and procreation at its disposal. Scot complemented this work with the translation of the shortened commentary that the Persian philosopher Ibn Sīnā, or Avicenna, had written on these treatises in the eleventh century, which became known in the West as Abbreviatio Avicenne. Although Aristotle’s works circulated as separate entities in the Greek manuscripts of the time, Scot found only one long work divided in nineteen books in his Arabic model and transferred it in the same form to Latin. Consequently, references to Aristotle’s zoological works consistently refer to them as De animalibus without distinguishing the different works. The order imposed by the ninth-century Arabic translator, or by the copyist of the manuscript that he used as a model, became the standard sequence to read the report of the philosopher’s biological enterprise from the thirteenth century onwards. That situation hardly changed when by the mid-thirteenth century the same texts were translated again into Latin, this time directly from their Greek models. The undertaking formed part of an even larger project, conducted by the Dominican scholar William of Moerbeke, to make all

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of Aristotle’s works available in a Latin version based on the texts in their original language. His renderings were generally considered more adequate than Scot’s and closer to the wording of the initial text. Moreover, William’s corpus of translations was undeniably more complete, as it also included two shorter treatises about the Movement of Animals and the Progression of Animals, bringing the total of Aristotelian zoological books up to twentyone. That still did not reach the grand total of fifty books on animals that Aristotle allegedly had written, if Pliny was to be believed.19 As for William of Moerbeke’s Latin work, there is evidence that he translated every zoological treatise as a separate work. Yet they almost exclusively circulated in an order that was dictated by the sequence in which the books had been introduced to the Latin Middle Ages through the ArabicLatin version by Scot. Virtually every manuscript of William’s texts has the works in an identical order, the two newest and relatively short books, Movement of Animals and Progression of Animals, being wedged in between the longer History of Animals and Parts of Animals. This seemingly unimportant circumstance in the transmission of Aristotle’s zoological corpus betrays how the educational system had established a firm grasp on the circulation of texts, as books were standardized to comply with the requirements of teaching. The Dominicans, the religious order to which William of Moerbeke belonged, had stimulated a new and more efficient method to multiply handwritten books in university circles, which led to more uniformity in the production. Moreover, the Dominican friars took particular care in the preparation of their books, which some of them referred to as their arms.20 The professed goal of the Dominican order was to convert heretics and heathens to the truth of faith. Their working method relied on preaching. Unlike some earlier Christians, they viewed secular knowledge from antiquity not as contrary to divine revelation, but as a useful tool to serve the higher goal of spreading and illustrating God’s word. Creating an access to this newly available information, including the zoological knowledge in the Aristotelian corpus, was seen as a collective endeavor in which many members of the order could cooperate. Different methods were applied, but all contributed to the comprehensive project – the integration of science from antiquity to fit religious revelation.21 Previously it was inconceivable to think of nature as an independent force. Even church fathers such as Augustine (fourth century AD), influenced by the Neoplatonist doctrine, had regarded nature as an emanation of the divine power. As such it was intrinsically good, but could not be considered as a separate object of study. The search for causal relations

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within nature would implicitly challenge God’s omnipotence and free will, which could not be seen as subjected to the laws of nature. The twelfthcentury view, resulting in the popularity of Physiologus and bestiary literature, had opened new possibilities for the study of natural objects and zoological learning by using the device of allegory. The Dominican friars followed that line of thought. In their judgment, objections against the use of worldly knowledge were not compelling, provided that it served their purpose. While this stance was not an exclusive policy for their order, Thomas of Chobham had directed the usefulness of animals towards theology and religious learning: For there is no creature which may not preach that the God who created it is powerful, and that the God who gave it its order and form is wise, and that the God who conserved it in being is merciful. And – speaking in a wider sense – there is no creature in which we may not contemplate some property belonging to it which may lead us to imitate God, or some property which may move us to flee from the Devil. For the whole world is full of different creatures, like a manuscript full of different letters and sentences (or meanings) in which we can read whatever we ought to imitate or flee from.22

The idea that nature could conveniently show the path toward a better understanding of God may have taken root in broader circles, but no individual or organization put it more effectively and systematically into practice than the Dominicans did. The effort to spread knowledge of nature among their brethren and to digest it into useful tools for teaching and preaching took different forms, but almost always relied on organized collaboration. It became a commonplace among authors from the friars’ ranks to stress in their prefaces that they had been begged by their brethren to compose their works, which was a variation on a conventional statement of modesty. Albert the Great voiced the incentive he got from his fellow Dominicans in several prefaces to his commentaries, in particular in his prologue to his work on Aristotle’s Physics: It is our intention in natural science to satisfy as far as we are capable the brethren of our order. They have already asked us several years ago that we write such a book about the Physics, in which they would both have perfect instruction in natural science and from which they could also expertly understand the books of Aristotle.23

Some writers expressly added to this claim that they had been greatly helped by the joint efforts of these same brethren to compile and prepare the sources and the material, and did not summarize all original books themselves. Vincent of Beauvais said this about the books by Aristotle,

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“which in fact I  have never excerpted from, but took the excerpts from several brothers.”24 Evidence thus suggests that the study of animals did not necessarily occupy a fixed position in the output of this Dominican endeavor from the thirteenth century. In Thomas of Cantimpré’s encyclopaedia De natura rerum the chapters are clearly aimed at usability for preachers. The first sections deal with the human anatomy and the soul, followed by animals and plants, to conclude with lifeless nature. For the users’ convenience all quotations from ancient writers, in particular Aristotle, and from church fathers are brought together in alphabetically arranged units. While Thomas of Cantimpré’s work was limited to the natural world, his fellow Dominican and near-contemporary Vincent of Beauvais envisaged an even more encompassing project. He intended to put together a Speculum, a comprehensive collection of all human knowledge, including the study of nature, a history of the world from the fall of man onward, a survey of ethics and of other learning. The whole enterprise was completed after the death of the original author. Its only printed edition (not published until 1624 in Douai), is estimated to contain some six million words and was rightly compared to a “sequoia.”25 The core of Vincent’s work was his Speculum naturale, his survey of the natural world. He chose to order his material by the commonly accepted sequence of the six days of creation, which must have felt familiar enough for the preachers who would use the encyclopaedia. Animals take yet another position in Albert the Great’s major project to comment on the complete works of Aristotle. His intended readership was not in the first place the preacher preparing for the pulpit, but the advanced student training to become a member of the higher clergy. Albert stuck to the idea that nature as a whole forms a continuous line from God to the sensible world, and that its study is worthy to pursue since it points to the perfection that God provided in it. In correspondence with this view, Albert’s commentaries are in the order of eternity of their subjects. God ranks highest, therefore theology is the equivalent of Aristotelian metaphysics or the study of the first principle. Then comes mathematics, dealing with the unchanging ratios of numbers. The sensible world follows at a third level, descending from the regular movements of the celestial bodies to the motion on earth through space and time. The lowest level is occupied by animated living beings and the materiality of stones and minerals. Surprisingly, after his philosophical analysis of the animal world through a detailed commentary of Aristotle’s zoological books as he had read them in Scot’s Latin version, Albert returned to a more conventional approach

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of animal studies and added several books of encyclopaedic knowledge in the traditional sense. Albert largely relied on the compilation gathered by Thomas of Cantimpré for this part of his work, which documents how the Dominican enterprise of divulging ancient knowledge and promoting its accessibility must have been a collective effort. Furthermore, Albert’s method shows how the dividing lines were blurred between strictly scientific or philosophical discourses on animals and the deployment of zoological elements for exegetical purposes. For most preachers though, knowledge about animal behavior served practical needs and therefore would have needed convenient instruments, like shorter collections of widely applicable quotes from the classical authors. One of these florilegia, whose anonymous compiler excerpted Aristotle’s zoological works and organized the quotations under thematic headings, enjoyed a limited manuscript circulation.26 Yet it was clearly conceived as a tool and had no authority as a literary work in its own right. Accordingly, there was no objection to reusing it in other forms. Several chapters from the florilegium were incorporated in a posthumously modified version of Thomas of Cantimpré’s De natura rerum. At the same time the older sources of zoological knowledge were further exploited to collect useful quotations. One manuscript that contains the Aristotelian florilegium also holds similar anthologies from the works of Solinus and Isidore of Seville. As several other sections of the manuscript make reference to early thirteenth-century Parisian theological debates, we may safely assume that this type of thematically ordered collection of authoritative quotations belonged to the standard intellectual equipment of the theologian of the period.27 Individual preachers may have developed their own working material to plan their sermons. Just what this equipment might have looked like can be reconstructed from what appears to be the notebook prepared by an English friar from the same period.28 It is a small booklet written in an extremely tiny handwriting by one scribe, undoubtedly for his own use. The owner had collected a florilegium of quotations from different sources, with an emphasis on natural history. Traditional knowledge from the works of Solinus and Isidore of Seville and from the sacred scriptures is combined with lists of extracts from the newly translated works of Aristotle. The writer improved the accessibility of information by an intricate system of cross-references that link data regarding the same topic with material from different origins on separate pages of the volume. He also created diagrams that use association to divide key concepts into their logically constitutive parts.

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Unfortunately, the identity of the compiler of the notebook remains unknown and it is impossible to conclude how he used the material that he had gathered. There is, however, a corpus of commentaries on the sacred scriptures by a well-known preaching friar. A closer look at these provides a general idea of how medieval preachers incorporated ancient works on animals in their exegetical practice. In the first half of the fourteenth century, Thomas Anglicus or Thomas Waleys, another Dominican friar, wrote moralitates on numerous books of the Old Testament and incomplete commentaries on Augustine’s City of God and on the psalter.29 He shared his particular taste to incorporate ancient pagan writers into his exegesis with other contemporary British friars. They undeniably were indebted to the compilation work done by their predecessors.30 Yet Waleys clearly had a predilection for Aristotle’s zoological works, which he quoted abundantly. Most often these sentences turn up accompanied by the commentaries of Albert the Great and Avicenna, and it is not uncommon that Pliny and Solinus are mentioned as well. Waleys’ method is illustrated in passages where he introduces data about deer in his incomplete commentary on the first thirty-seven psalms.31 The Physiologus is totally absent from his list of sources, while Aristotle, Pliny, and Isidore of Seville, together with some early Christian authors, provide the necessary backdrop to authorize the letter of the Scriptures. The first example comes from Psalm 18, where verse 34 “Who made my feet swift as a deer’s” leads to the comparison of Christ to a deer. Waleys comments: “Christus is rightly compared to a deer for many reasons, first because the Philosopher says in his 14th book on Animals: A deer has no bile. The same goes for Christ, whose stay among us was without any bile of bitterness.”32 Waleys finds additional arguments for the similarity between Christ and the deer in Ambrose’s commentary on the Hexameron, which says that deer feed on venom (as Christ leads sinners to penitence), and in Pliny’s claim that the blood of a deer is a cure against serpents (as Christ is the medicine against demons). The initial word from the Scripture that prompted the allusion is thus confirmed by arguments from ancient pagan and Christian sources. Psalm 29, verse 9 “The voice of the Lord prepareth the stags” reminds the commentator of the previous passage in Psalm 18.33 The voice of the Lord prepares the deer, his children in the desert, for the long and difficult road, Waleys claims. He suggests several reasons to explain the choice of that image. Deer are fast and swift to jump over difficulties and rocky roads – no reference needed to back this claim, except for the other psalm.

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A further argument comes from Isidore of Seville’s account of deer crossing a river with their head resting on the back of their forerunner to make the burden lighter, which recalls Paul’s letter to the Galatians 6:2 “Bear one another’s burdens.” Finally, Aristotle is the last authority in the section: “As the Philosopher says in his 8th book on Animals: The horns of all animals are hollow except those of the deer, which are solid and have no cavity inside. Likewise, the horns of the sinners are also hollow, for all their power and glory are vain.”34 As these few examples from the work of Thomas Waleys show, all knowledge from the natural world was put to use to elucidate God’s plan for the world. New sources from antiquity had staked their claim to authority from the thirteenth century onward and Aristotle had taken pride of place among them. Yet animals retained their serving position in all kinds of literature. It took three centuries more before humanist scholars started to consider animals as worthy study objects in their own right. The first projects consisted in exploring the ancient sources for information, descriptions and nomenclature.35 Aristotle had preserved his place at the center of zoological attention – albeit in new Latin translations or in the Greek original. But the readers had turned from theologians to philologists.

Notes 1 D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars. Sermons Diffused from Paris Before 1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 233. 2 The Bible is quoted in the translation of the New American Bible. 3 See Francisco Rodriguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, Volume One: Introduction and From the Origins to the Hellenistic Age (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 4 See Gerd Dicke and Klaus Grubmüller, Die Fabeln des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Ein Katalog der deutschen Versionen und ihrer lateinischen Entsprechungen (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987), passim. 5 See Nathalie Le Luel, “L’âne, le loup, la grue et le renard: à propos de la frise des fables du tympan Saint-Ursin de Bourges,” Reinardus 18 (2006): 53–68. 6 Decorations were clearly planned in advance by the patrons of the buildings. It was their choice to include the secular fables known from the educational program and to incorporate them in a religious building. 7 Stephen D. White, “The Fables in the Borders,” in The Bayeux Tapestry and its Contexts: A Reassessment, ed. Elisabeth Carson Pastan, Stephen D. White, and Kate Gilbert (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014): 154–82. 8 Guy René Mermier, A Medieval Book of Beasts:  Pierre de Beauvais’ Bestiary. (Lewiston: Mellen, 1992), 3. 9 The earliest overview of the work and its history is in Friedrich Lauchert, Geschichte des Physiologus (Strassburg: Verlag Karl J. Trübner, 1889).

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10 See Nikolaus Henkel, Studien zum Physiologus im Mittelalter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976). 11 Michael J. Curley, Physiologus (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), xxvi. 12 Franciscus Sbordone, Physiologus (Mediolani; Genuae; Romae; Neapoli: Aedibus Societatis “Dante Alighieri – Albrighi, Segati et C.,” 1936). 13 See M.  R. James, The Bestiary:  Being A  Reproduction in Full of Ms. Ii 4.  26 in the University Library, Cambridge, with Supplementary Plates from Other Manuscripts of English Origin, and a Preliminary Study of the Latin Bestiary as Current in England (Oxford:  Roxburghe Club, 1928); Florence McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962). 14 For a study of the relation between text and image, Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries. Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 15 Baudouin Van den Abeele, “La tradition manuscrite des Étymologies d’Isidore de Séville. Pour une reprise en main du dossier,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes 16 (2008): 195–205. 16 Arno Borst, Das Buch der Naturgeschichte. Plinius und seine Leser im Zeitalter des Pergaments (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994). 17 Ibid., 264. 18 Charles Burnett, “Michael Scot and the Transmission of Scientific Culture from Toledo to Bologna via the Court of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen,” Micrologus 2 (1994): 101–26. 19 Pliny, Naturalis historia, VIII, 17. The thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar Roger Bacon echoed Pliny, claiming to have seen those books in Greek, see J. S. Brewer, ed., Fr. Roger Bacon. Opera quaedam hactenus inedita (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859), I:  473. His statement is highly unlikely, and it is far more probable that Bacon only read Aristotle’s zoology in the nineteen books by Michael Scot. 20 K. W.  Humphreys, The Book Provisions of the Mediaeval Friars, 1215–1400 (Amsterdam: Erasmus, 1964), 18. 21 Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996). 22 d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars, 233. 23 Albertus Magnus, Physica, ed. Paulus Hossfeld (Aschendorff:  Monas- terii Westfalorum, 1987), I.I, tr. 1, c. 1; p. 1, l. 9ff, ed.; my translation. 24 French and Cunningham, Before Science, 174. 25 Frits van Oostrom, Maerlants wereld (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1996), 310. 26 Pieter Beullens, “A 13th-Century Florilegium from Aristotle’s Books on Animals. Auctoritates extractae de libro Aristotilis de naturis animalium,” in Aristotle’s Animals in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Carlos Steel, Guy Guldentops, and Pieter Beullens (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1999), 69–95. 27 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 14726, see Young, Spencer E.  “Paris, BNF, Ms. lat. 14726:  Peter of Bar, Stephen Berout and Master G. A New Witness to William of Auxerre?” Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 50 (2008): 53–82.

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28 Rare Book and Manuscript Library University of Pennsylvania LJS 477, see Crofton Black, Transformation of Knowledge. Early Manuscripts from the Collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg (London: Paul Holberton, 2006), 136. The description of the manuscript here is partly based on an autopsy of the manuscript in August 2005 in Paris by kind permission of Lawrence Schoenberg, who had just acquired it. 29 Beryl Smalley, “Thomas Waleys O.P.,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 24 (1954): 50–107. 30 Ibid., 79, refers to the tabulae of the Fathers as an example. 31 Manuscripts and editions are listed in Smalley, “Thomas Waleys O.P.,” 67–9, and Fridericus Stegmüller, Repertorium Biblicum Medii aevi (Madrid: Instituto “Francisco Suárez,” 1955), 5: 395. Quotations from the commentary are taken from ms Troyes 1086 (online version www.bibliotheque-virtuelle-clairvaux .com/manuscrits/), checked against the London 1481 edition by John Lettou for William Wilcok as reproduced in the database Early English Books Online from the copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The pages of this edition are not numbered. 32 Assimilat se Christus cervo in proposito propter multa, primo quia dicit Philosophus 14. de Animal. Cervus fel non habet. Sic et Christus cuius conversatio nobiscum fuit absque omni felle amaritudinis (Ms Troyes 1086, f. 76v). 33 The translation is from the Douay-Rheims Bible, which renders the text from the Vulgate (“Vox Domini preparantis cervos”) that Waleys had in front of him. 34 Sicut dicit Philosophus 8. de Animal. Omnium animalium cornua sunt vacua preterquam cervi, que sunt dura et non est concavitas in eis. Sic et peccatorum cornua vacua sunt, quia omnis eorum potentia et gloria inanis est (Ms Troyes 1086, f. 136r). 35 Pieter Beullens, “Aristotle, his Translators, and the Formation of Ichthyologic Nomenclature,” in Science Translated:  Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medieval Europe, ed. Michèle Goyens, Pieter De Leemans and An Smets (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), 105–22.

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CH APTER  2

Howling Wolves and Other Beasts Animals and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages Luuk Houwen

Modern Western culture traditionally assumes a very clear dividing line between the realm of the animal and the human. This holds profound consequences not only for the way animals are regarded, both in literature and in everyday life, but also for how they fit into our systems of knowledge and knowledge formation. In recent years this fundamental differentiation has been increasingly questioned in such fields as animal rights and ethics, law, psychology, neuroscience, biology, and ethnography.1 Whether this distinction also holds true for the Middle Ages is the subject of this chapter, which will show that this distinction is not so clear-cut in the period as may at first appear. The medieval period inherited the classical hierarchical model of the Great Chain of Being, in which human beings occupy a position below the angels but above animals, plants, and inanimate matter.2 Genesis 1:26, which gave humankind a clear mandate to use the fishes of the sea, the fowls of the air and all animals on the earth as they saw fit, further strengthened this position, the effects of which are felt to this day. On the other hand, medieval theories about the soul suggest that the human–animal divide need not necessarily be regarded as one of kind, but could be seen as one of gradation. Medieval theories about the soul exemplify this with their distinction between the soul’s three different divisions: the vegetative, sensitive, and rational parts. The vegetative part of the soul was thought to be responsible for nutrition, growth, and procreation, and was held to be less susceptible to the will than the sensitive and rational parts. The rational part consisted of thought (intellectus) and will (voluntas) and was limited to human beings only. The sensitive part of the soul was thought to be shared by animals and humans alike and was further subdivided into two other realms, an apprehensive and a motive power. These different parts of the soul were located in different cells in the brain according to medieval medical theory.3 Such theories about the soul suggest that the distinction between men and beasts is not as absolute as might be assumed; however, 43

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none of these theories account for monsters. If we want to know where they fit into the creation we will have to consider different discourses, academic as well as popular. In what follows the reflections on the monstrous by St. Augustine (354–430) and Bishop Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) in De civitate dei and the Etymologiarum sive originum respectively serve as a starting point. Werewolves and the companions of Ulysses whom the witch Circe transforms into beasts will further illustrate monsters, transformations, and hybridization. That monsters fired the imagination of medieval writers and their audiences is clear from the surviving texts. A wide range of monsters adorn the pages of the Beowulf manuscript and other Old English texts, from the polyglottal and cannibalistic Donestre in the Wonders of the East to the equally cannibalistic Mermedonians in Andreas.4 If the Anglo-Saxon period teemed with monsters, those of the later Middle Ages with its profusion of extant texts would require a multi-volume work to enumerate.5 What unites all these monsters and sets them apart from human beings is not just their size and shape but also their habitat. Monsters inhabit margins. On maps they litter the edges of the known world,6 in manuscripts they populate the margins and the bas-de-page,7 in churches they generally adorn such out-of-reach places as roofs (gargoyles), corbel tables, capitals, and misericords.8 In literature they are located in Scythia or Parthia, in the forests of medieval romances, or in other indeterminate places like fairyland.9 It is at the margins that categorizations and classifications dissolve and that different discourses intermingle, and it is this violation of established boundaries and categories that makes monsters and hybrids ideal candidates for the exploration of such concepts as the self and identity, dehumanization and demonification, and the marvellous. Augustine touches upon monsters on various occasions in De civitate dei, whereas Isidore, who is heavily indebted to St Augustine, treats monsters at the end of Book 11 of his encyclopedia, the Etymologiarum sive originum, which, despite its title, is not so much concerned with the derivation of words, as with their essences. Rather than assuming an arbitrary relationship between a word and what it represents, Isidore held that the name of things revealed something about their essential nature and his discussion of monsters bears this out. Isidore discusses monsters in a section devoted to portents (XI.iii).10 The use of portenta has a long history that stretches all the way back to classical antiquity, where together with the term monstra it used to denominate unusual births and later also unusual races such as Cyclops, Cynocephali, Blemmyans, Panotians, and the other Plinian races, so called because Pliny popularized them in his Historia Naturalis.11

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That Isidore is aware of both senses of the word is shown by his discussion and subsequent classification of monsters, which include these Plinian races. Right at the start of this section on portents Isidore, following St Augustine, addresses the fundamental problem monsters pose to Christianity, when he quotes Varro that portents are “quae contra naturam nata videntur” (beings that seem to have been born contrary to nature), a position he naturally rejects since monsters are also part of God’s creation (“sed non sunt contra naturam, quia divina voluntate fiunt”).12 Instead he suggests monsters or portents are not created contrary to nature, but “contra quam est nota natura” (contrary to what is known nature), thereby moving the problem away from God and placing it in the realm of human beings, who are incapable of fully understanding their origin. Monsters, he elaborates, are either beings of transformed appearance (portenta), like the Umbrian woman who gave birth to a serpent, or mutations (portentuosa), like someone born with six fingers (XI.iii.6). Only the former, he states, are signs of divine will. Isidore’s subsequent taxonomy, which distinguishes between twelve types of monsters (XI.iii.7–12), also introduces the categories by which the monstrous has been conceptually organized from the Middle Ages to our own time.13 Isidore first singles out size and distinguishes between monsters bigger than human beings, like giants; those smaller, like pygmies, and those with body parts of an unusual size. The superfluity or absence of body parts defines the next two types. Then come partial or complete transformations: some monsters are made up of human and animal parts, whereas in others human beings are completely transformed into an animal, as in the case of the woman who gave birth to a calf. Still others reveal a change in the location of features, like eyes in the forehead or breast, while others are born with premature features, like those born with teeth or grey hair. Some combine several of the features mentioned already. The penultimate group is made up of hermaphrodites, and Isidore concludes his list with the monstrous races. That these also encompass some of the types mentioned earlier, like giants and dog-headed people, does not appear to matter but shows instead how indebted Isidore is to both the grammarians with their word definitions and what for want of a better term I would call the narrative tradition represented by Pliny, Solinus, Augustine, and others. It goes without saying that the norm against which Isidore judges monstrosity is that of the (male) human body. It will also be clear that Isidore’s taxonomy can be expanded ad libitum. Augustine, like Isidore, not only accepts the existence of monsters but also holds that human beings can be transformed into other beings. He

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accepts the existence of incubi who lust after women, and giants who were born of the union of the “sons of God” and the daughters of men before the Deluge (Gen. 6:1–4), as well as those born at a later date (XV.23). He also accepts the monstrous races discussed in pagan histories but is a little less credulous than Isidore and argues that although it cannot be doubted that some monstrous races exist, it does not necessarily follow that all of them are actually real (XVI.8).14 On the whole, however, Augustine accepts such marvels and even wonders rhetorically how, in view of a world filled with wonders, anyone can doubt that God can raise the dead and change their substance after the Last Judgment (XXI.7–8). He does state quite categorically though that only God can effect transformations; those carried out by demons are not true transformations but mere illusions (XVIII.18). Since monsters can be seen as omens both Augustine and Isidore also accept that monsters can be expressions of divine glory or punishment, an idea that is echoed as late as the sixteenth century when Ambroise Paré in his Des monsters et prodiges lists as the first two “origins” of monsters the “glory of God” and the “wrath of God.”15 Isidore ends Book 11 of the Etymologiae with a brief chapter on metamorphoses of men into animals (XI.iv De transformatis). Here he relates how Circe transformed Ulysses’ companions into beasts, how some Arcadians were selected by lot who would be transformed into wolves after swimming across a certain pond, and how the companions of Diomede were transformed into birds. He reports that such transformations may be realized by means of magic charms or poisonous herbs, and he underscores the veracity of these accounts with reference to such “natural” transformations as bees being born of the decaying flesh of calves, beetles from horses, locusts from mules, and scorpions from crabs (XI.iv.3).16 In De civitate dei Augustine provides the same examples (XVIII.16–17) but goes into greater detail, particularly regarding werewolves. He observes: To bolster up this story Varro adduces the equally incredible tales about the notorious witch Circe, who transformed Ulysses’ companions into animals, and about the Arcadians who were chosen by lot and swam across a certain lake and were there changed into wolves and lived in the desolate parts of that region in the company of wild beasts like themselves. However, if they had not eaten human flesh they used to swim back across the lake after nine years to be turned back into human beings. To crown all, he expressly names a certain Demaenetus, telling a story of how he tasted the sacrifice which the Arcadians made to the god Lycaeus according to their custom, with a boy as the victim, whereupon Demaenetus was transformed into a wolf. Then in the tenth year he was restored to his proper shape; he trained as a boxer and won a prize at the Olympic games. This same historian also

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thinks that the reason for the surname Lycaeus, given to Pan and to Jupiter in Arcadia, can only be this transformation of human beings into wolves, which they supposed could only be effected by divine power. For ‘wolf ’ in Greek is lykos, and the name Lycaeus is evidently derived from it. Varro also asserts that the Roman Luperci took their origin from these mysteries, which were, we might say, the seed from which they developed.17

For Augustine these transformations, if they happened at all, are plainly the work of demons, as he makes quite clear in the next chapter (XVIII.18),18 and are therefore illusions rather than real metamorphoses. On the other hand, Pliny, who claims to base his account on the Greek “Evanthes,” dismisses the werewolf tale in his Natural History with the exasperated statement that “mirum est quo procedat Graeca credulitas:  nullum tam inpudens mendacium est ut teste careat” ([i]t is astounding to what lengths Greek credulity will go; there is no lie so shameless as to lack a supporter).19 Some eight centuries later Gerald of Wales relates a similar story but locates it in Ireland. In Distinction 2 of the Topographia Hibernica, which gives an account of the wonders and miracles of Ireland, he relates how a priest traveling from Ulster to Meath was sitting by an open fire one night when he was approached by a wolf begging the priest to give his dying wife the last rites.20 The wolf explains that he and his wife were originally from the medieval Irish kingdom of Osraige (Ossory) but had been transformed into werewolves by Saint Natalis for the duration of seven years. If they survived this period they would be returned to their human form and two others would take their place. No reason is offered for the transformation, but it appears to be a punishment of sorts. The priest follows the wolf and finds his mate in the hollow of a tree, where he administers the last rites. But he shies away from giving her the last communion and claims he does not carry the viaticum with him. The wolf points to the likely container for the sacred wafers and proceeds to strip his wife of her hide down to the navel. When an old woman appears underneath the wolf ’s hide the priest relents and administers the Eucharist. This charming tale can be interpreted at different levels, but also sheds light on Gerald’s conception of the monstrous. Most pertinent in this respect is what it tells us about the nature of the werewolves. The fact that their transformation is brought about by a man of God rather than the devil suggests it is no mere illusion. But how real is this transformation? Gerald’s werewolves are “sympathetic” ones. They act like rational human beings. The he-wolf exemplifies this when he acts against his bestial nature by approaching the priest at the fire where, after the rites have been duly performed, he also keeps the priest company. He addresses the priest using

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human language and sets him at ease by showing he is a fellow Christian. He cares for the spiritual welfare of his mate and removes any lingering doubts in the priest’s mind about whether it is appropriate to give the Eucharist to an animal by revealing the old woman underneath. This same act further demonstrates that we are dealing with a real physical transformation and not an illusion. Does this then mean that we have a form of metempsychosis here? Gerald seems to rule this out when he reveals that the wolf ’s body is only skin deep. Apart from that, these werewolves behave like human beings. Yet no medieval reader would have overlooked the role of the Eucharist in this tale. On the one hand it forces the wolves to reveal their human nature, but on the other it is a potent reminder of the liturgical miracle of transubstantiation in which the substance, though not the form, of the host is changed into that of the body and blood of Christ. In a section that only appears in later recensions of the Topographia21 Gerald elaborates on the “transformation” reported by the priest.22 He argues that the divine nature taking on human nature for the salvation of mankind is on a par with the transformation of a human being into an animal. Christ preserved his dual nature just as the werewolves are both lupine and human. But, he continues, does this make them rational creatures, even if they did walk on all fours and inclined towards the earth? If anyone were to kill them would that be a case of homicide? To answer that he calls on Augustine23 and his account of the monstrous races about whom “[e]t quicquid hominis definitionem, animal scilicet rationale mortale, sub quacunque forma recipit, illud hominem esse vera ratione testator” (true reason declares that whatever answers to the definition of man, as a rational and mortal animal whatever be its form, is to be considered a man).24 In what follows it becomes clear that Gerald, like Augustine before him, believes that demons can only change the outward appearance but not the nature of human beings, whereas God has the power to transform natures fully “either for vindicating his judgments or exhibiting his divine power,” as the examples of the transformations of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt and of water into wine at the Wedding of Cana show, or to change only their outward appearance, as in the case of the werewolves. He declines to discuss the reverse process, the transubstantiation, in which the form remains the same but the substance changes. Its comprehension, he claims, far surpasses the powers of the human mind.25 By using a popular story illustrating one of the many marvels of Ireland, Gerald manages to clarify the nature of transformations and the agents responsible for it, while at the same time entertaining his audience. That the marvels of Ireland can also have a darker undertone becomes clear

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when we place them against the backdrop of the island’s colonization. In 1185 Gerald accompanied Prince John, the son of Henry II, on an expedition to Ireland in an unsuccessful attempt to quell rebellious AngloNorman nobles, to consolidate the Anglo-Norman colony and to reassert royal authority. Gerald’s family owned land in Ireland and he was an apologist for Anglo-Norman intervention there.26 Gerald’s use of Ireland as a setting for his werewolf story could be read as part of the rhetoric of colonialism, which insists that the nation to be conquered is really quite uncivilized and requires outsiders to reform it. The werewolf story fits into this type of colonial fantasy in that it contributes to the impression that Ireland really is a barbaric nation. An occasional marvel may enhance the reputation of a nation (or a family), but too many marvels place such a nation on the margins of civilized society. But there is more to Gerald’s story than this. Before the werewolf and priest go their separate ways in the morning, the priest asks whether the invaders of Ireland will remain for a long time and be established there. The werewolf then prophesies that the Irish have only themselves to blame for the invasion because they have lived such sinful lives, and that as long as the invaders walk the path of righteousness God will be on their side and their conquest will remain secure.27 This impudent piece of colonial propaganda exploits another colonial fantasy, namely that the Irish actually welcome the presence of the colonizers. The illustrations that adorn four of the thirty or so manuscripts of the Topography,28 also underline a colonial ideology revolving around constructions of bestial Irish sexual desire with images of a woman embracing a goat and a lion. Other illustrations enhance the otherness of Ireland by hybridizing its subjects, as for instance an ox-man and a maned and bearded woman who is not only ambiguously gendered but possibly also the hybrid offspring of a human and an animal.29 An analysis of the werewolf story along these lines may also explain why Saint Natalis is punishing the inhabitants of Ossory. Just as Demaenetus was transformed into a wolf for tasting the sacrificial animal intended for Lycaeus, so the inhabitants of Ossory were perhaps being punished for having been bad Christians.30 If Gerald uses his werewolf tale to ponder questions of identity and the nature of the monstrous, Marie de France manages to give a werewolf story an interesting twist in her Anglo-Norman lay Bisclavret (c.1150). Bisclavret is a good and handsome Breton baron who conducts himself nobly and is one of his lord’s closest advisers. Three days a week this baron disappears from his home and this troubles his wife. When one day he returns in high spirits his wife, afraid he might have a lover, confronts him and asks him where he has been. He explains that during these days he wanders

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through the forest transformed into a wolf, and feeds off the animals he captures. When the wife wants to know what he does with his clothes, he explains that he takes them off and hides them in a hollow stone near a chapel. Upon learning this, she is filled with fear and decides to leave him. She now accepts the advances of a lover and asks him to collect the clothes. A year later the king’s men pursue Bisclavret in a hunt. When he is cornered he runs up to the king, begs for mercy, and kisses his foot and leg. The king returns to court with him where the wolf behaves impeccably and is loved by all. When his wife’s new husband appears at court one day Bisclavret attacks him. Later while accompanying the king on another hunt, Bisclavret attacks his former wife and tears her nose off when she presents herself to the king. On the advice of a wise counsellor (“uns sages huem”) the king has the wife tortured, and she confesses her crime. When Bisclavret’s clothes are returned to him his modesty demands that he puts them on in the privacy of a room, where he changes back into his human form. The king later finds him there fast asleep on the bed. His former wife and husband are exiled and we are told that some of the daughters she bears later are born without noses. Marie introduces this lay with a reminder that the werewolf (“garualf ”) is a savage, man-eating beast, but in the tale that follows Bisclavret behaves not as an animal but as a noble human being. The only times he even comes close to acting in accordance with his animal nature is when he attacks his wife and her lover. But even in these instances the human desire for revenge rather than a beastly appetite turns out to be the driving force. At all other times he behaves like a loyal vassal to his lord. When he is cornered by the king’s hunters and begs for mercy, his clasping his lord’s legs with his paws and kissing his feet re-enacts the commendation ceremony in which a vassal pays homage to his lord.31 At court he is gentle, accompanies the king everywhere and even sleeps nearby. Unlike Gerald’s werewolf he lacks speech, so his actions need to be interpreted by others,32 but in all other respects they are very similar. What makes Marie’s tale so interesting is not the werewolf, but his wife. Women in Marie’s lays are normally positive characters, but that is not the case here. The lay is blatantly misogynist in tone and content.33 By convincing her husband to divulge the secret of his “true nature,” the wife acts like a second Eve, and when she then betrays him she is transformed into the monster she fears in him.34 She uses a man she does not love to destroy the one she loved until only a moment ago. She becomes the ferocious man-eating monster, the “garualf,” of the introduction. Her true nature is revealed the moment she learns about his true nature. But his true nature, as we have

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already seen, is far from savage. Bisclavret may have been transformed into a werewolf, but he remains human, whereas the wife’s transgression (and culpability) is revealed in her actions and in the daughters without noses, whose appearance suggests they have inherited the sin of the mother.35 The real monster of Marie’s lay is the one that Augustine and Isidore no doubt also have in mind when they allude to the transformation of Ulysses’ companions into animals. This monster, much more pervasive in medieval literature than its beastly equivalent, is the monster within. In the Odyssey Homer relates how, after arriving at the island home of the sorceress Circe, Odysseus sends some of his men to survey the land. Circe invites them into her home, where her food is spiked with a magic potion, which turns the men into swine. When Boethius (c.480–524 CE) relates this story in the De consolatione philosophiae (523), the men are turned into different animals corresponding to the vices they are disposed to:36 Vela Neritii ducis Et vagas pelago rates Eurus appulit insulae, Pulchra qua residens dea Solis edita semine Miscet hospitibus novis Tacta carmine pocula. Quos ut in varios modos Vertit herbipotens manus, Hunc apri facies tegit, Ille Marmaricus leo Dente crescit et unguibus. Hic lupis nuper additus, Flere dum parat, ululat. Ille tigris ut Indica Tecta mitis obambulat.37 [The ship of Ulysses And his ocean-wandering fleet The south-east wind drove to the isle Where the fair goddess dwells Sprung from the Sun’s seed, Who mixes for each new guest An enchanted cup. Her herb-skilled hand Thus changes them in various ways: This one the shape of boar conceals, That one a lion of Africa Grows fangs and claws;

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Luuk  Houwen Another just becoming one with wolves, While he essays to weep, but howls; Another like an Indian tiger Prowls tame around the house.]

In the lines that follow Boethius leaves no doubt that Circe’s herbs can only produce a change in appearance and not a change in nature,38 but that vices can transform people into monsters much worse than the ones produced by Circe’s poisons, because although the vices leave the body unaltered they corrupt the mind, thereby truly transforming men into beasts. The Middle English translation brings this point to the fore very well: “But thilke venyms of vices todrawen a man to hem moore myhtyly than the venym of Circes, for vices ben so cruel that they percen and thorwpassen the corage withinne, and, thogh they ne anoye nat the body, yit vices wooden to destroyen men by wownde of thowht.”39 As Boethius explains so eloquently here, there is no greater monster in the world than the monster within.40 As we have seen, medieval writers are well aware of this notion and only too happy to speculate about and even exploit for literary purposes the dual nature of humankind this view of things implies. In the process, these writers remain free to contemplate the nature of change in general as well as particular transformations and the identity issues that accompany them; likewise, the same writers can address issues of demonic enchantment and distinguish these from cases of divine punishment. However, it is important to bear in mind that when medieval authors reflect on monsters and the monstrous they do so because they are first and foremost trying to come to terms with the creation as a reflection of the divine will. In the Middle Ages the distinction between the animal and the human world was much more fluid than it would become in the centuries to follow. As a result, medieval treatments of the species divide only bear a superficial resemblance to our modern discussions of the same subject. Linnaean taxonomy and phylogeny did not just provide a scientific foundation for the human–animal divide, they also severed the link with the creationist model of the Great Chain of Being and the underlying psychological and theological theories of the soul and its parts. As a result, the divisions have deepened and it has become increasingly difficult to conceive of ourselves as a mere rung in a ladder rather than the pinnacle of evolution.

Notes 1 See, for example, Tom Regan, Animal Rights and Human Obligations, trans. Peter Singer (Englewood Cliffs:  Prentice-Hall, 1989); Peter Singer, ed., In

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2 3 4 5

6 7

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Defense of Animals:  The Second Wave (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2006); Dale Peterson, The Moral Lives of Animals (New  York:  Bloomsbury Press, 2011); Gary Francione and Anna E.  Charlton, Animal Rights:  The Abolitionist Approach (Newark:  Exempla Press, 2015); Roy F.  Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Barbara J.  King, How Animals Grieve (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2013); Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:  The Reinvention of Nature (New  York:  Routledge, 1991), and more recently When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Cf. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), chapter 2. For a more detailed discussion see L. A. J. R. Houwen, “Fear and Instinct in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” in Fear and Its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Anne Scott (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 20–6. For the monsters in the Beowulf manuscript, see Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Ipswich: Brewer, 1995). Although such a work does not exist, there have been some attempts at dealing with monsters and hybrids more broadly. See, for example, John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); David Williams, Deformed Discourse:  The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Toronto: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1996); Ulrich Müller and Werner Wunderlich, eds., Mittelalter Mythen 2:  Dämonen, Monster, Fabelwesen (St Gallen:  UVK, 1999); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants. Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Udo Friedrich, Menschentier und Tiermensch:  Diskurse der Grenzziehung und Grenzüberschreitung im Mittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2009). See Asa Simon Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 2006), passim. See, for example, the works by Michael Camille, especially Image on the Edge:  The Margins of Medieval Art (London:  Reaktion Books, 1992)  and Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of a Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chapter 5. Monsters on English misericords are discussed throughout Christa Grössinger’s book The World Upside-Down:  English Misericords (London:  Harvey Miller, 1997). For gargoyles see Alex Woodcock, Gargoyles and Grotesques (Oxford, United Kingdom:  Shire Publications, 2011)  and J.  R. Benton, “Gargoyles: Animal Imagery and Artistic Individuality in Medieval Art,” in Animals in the Middle Ages:  A Book of Essays, ed. N.  C. Flores (New  York: Garland, 1996), 147–65. The Mermedonians of Andreas live in a conflated Scythia/Parthia, see also Shannon N.  Godlove, “Bodies as Borders:  Cannibalism and Conversion in

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13 14 15 16

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Luuk  Houwen the Old English Andreas,” Studies in Philology 106, no.  2 (2009):  137. For the forest as a liminal space see Corinne J. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance. Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993). In Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas the eponymous knight confronts the three-headed giant Sire Olifaunt in “the contree of fairye,” and in the alliterative Morte Arthure Arthur fights a giant on top of Mont St Michel. All references are to Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarvm sive originvm libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), which is cited in the text hereafter. The translations are based on The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Friedman, Monstrous Races, 108. For some recent discussions see Lisa Verner, The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages (New  York:  Routledge, 2005), 38–9; Jennifer Neville, “Monsters and Criminals:  Defining Humanity in Old English Poetry,” in Monsters and the Monstrous in Medieval Northwest Europe, ed. K.  E. Olsen and L. A. J. R. Houwen (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 106–7; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 34; Douglas Rolla Butturff, “The Monsters and the Scholar: An Edition and Critical Study of the Liber Monstrorum” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana, 1968), 15–16. Jeffrey J.  Cohen claims this notion can already be found in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, but provides no reference:  “The Order of Monsters:  Monster Lore and Medieval Narrative Traditions,” in Telling Tales:  Medieval Narratives and the Folk Tradition, ed. Francesca Canadé Sautman, Diana Conchado, and Giuseppe C.  Di Scipio (Basingstoke:  Macmillan, 1998), 41, and also in “The Limits of Knowing:  Monsters and the Regulation of Medieval Popular Culture,” Medieval Folklore 3 (1994): 10. Williams, Deformed Discourse, 107. In the next chapter (XVI.9) Augustine actually dismisses the existence of the Antipodes as a mere flight of the imagination. Ambroise Paré on Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L.  Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3. Augustine explicitly acknowledges this possibility in De civ. Dei XVIII.18. Isidore is here lumping together two processes that are only superficially related in so far as both involve a transformation. However, metamorphosis involves a change of species whereas spontaneous generation is a form of asexual reproduction. For the background of the latter notion see James Lennox, “Teleology, Chance and Aristotle’s Theory of Spontaneous Generation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 20 (1982): 219–38. St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. H.  Bettenson (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1986), 781–2. All translations are based on this text. For the Latin text see Sancti Aurelii Augustini: De Civitate Dei, ed. Bernhard Dombart, Alfons Kalb (Turnholti:  Typographi Brepols, 1955), XVIII.17.

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18 “Proinde quod homines dicuntur mandatumque est litteris ab diis vel potius daemonibus Arcadibus in lupos solere converti” (my emphasis). (For that reason it seems to me that this phenomenon, which is generally talked about, and that has been recorded in literature, could have happened [assuming that it did happen] in the way I have suggested – I mean the habitual changing of human beings into wolves by Arcadian gods [or rather demons]). 19 Pliny the Elder, Natural History III Books VIII–XI, trans. H.  Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1983), VIII.xxxiv.81. Pliny has a few additional details not mentioned by Augustine, such as the fact that the man chosen belongs to the clan of a certain Anthus and that he hangs his clothes on an oak tree before he swims across the lake. 20 All references are to Giraldi Cambrensis. Opera. V: Topographia Hibernica et Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. J. F. Dimock (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867), 209. The translations are from The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis: Containing the Topography of Ireland, and the History of the Conquest of Ireland … the Itinerary Through Wales, and the Description of Wales … trans. Thomas Forester, Richard Colt Hoare, and Thomas Wright (London: George Bell and Sons, 1905). 21 This section belongs to the fourth recension; see Topographia Hibernica, 104, note 1. For a recent discussion and study of the different versions see Amelia Lynn Borrego Sargent, “Visions and Revisions: Gerald of Wales, Authorship, and the Construction of Political, Religious, and Legal Geographies in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Britain” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011), 13–32. 22 Topographia Hibernica, 104–6; Topography of Ireland, 82–4. 23 De civitate Dei, XVI.8. 24 Topographia Hibernica, 105; Topography of Ireland, 82. 25 Caroline Walker Bynum notes a peculiar twelfth-century fascination with hybrids and transformations and argues that tales such as the one by Gerald of Wales show both the fascination with and fear of what she calls “speciescrossing, body-hopping, metamorphosis”:  “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” in Metamorphosis and Identity (New  York:  Zone, 2001), 110. 26 Marie Therese Flanagan, “Anglo-Norman Invasion,” in Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia, ed. Seán Duffy, Ailbhe MacShamhráin, and James Moynes (London: Routledge, 2005), 17–19. Flanagan also notes that in the Expugnatio Gerald consistently exaggerated the role of his own relatives in the invasion (17). 27 Topographia Hibernica, 103; Topography of Ireland, 81. 28 Sargent refers to Michelle Brown who suggested Gerald may have been directly responsible for or supervised an illustrative program while sojourning at Lincoln: “Visions and Revisions,” 24. 29 Rhonda Knight, “Werewolves, Monsters, and Miracles: Representing Colonial Fantasies in Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hibernica,” Studies in Iconography 22 (2001): 60–8. See also David Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 132.

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30 Knight, “Werewolves,” 74, notes that Marcher propaganda also constructs the Irish as bad Christians and that by seeking out the priest, even though he is Irish himself, the werewolf enacts what the colonizers themselves hope the Irish themselves would do. 31 Noah D. Guynn, “Hybridity, Ethics, and Gender in Two Old French Werewolf Tales,” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 164. 32 It is odd that on the occasions of the second attack and the presentation of Bisclavret’s clothes the king needs to be told the significance of this by a wise man. 33 For a divergent opinion see Guynn, “Hybridity, Ethics, and Gender.” 34 The case for this is forcefully made by several critics such as Matilda T. Bruckner, “Of Men and Beasts in Bisclavret,” Romanic Review 81, no. 3 (1991): 251–69; Paul Creamer, “Woman-Hating in Marie de France’s Bisclavret,” Romanic Review 93, no. 3 (2002): 259–74; Amanda Hopkins, “Bisclavret to Biclarel via Melion and Bisclavret: The Development of a Misogynous Lai,” in The Court Reconvenes: Courtly Literature Across the Disciplines, ed. Barbara K. Altmann and Carleton W. Carroll (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 317–23. 35 Two werewolf tales in Old French, Bisclarel and Melion, are closely related to Bisclavret. In both the misogyny is more explicit than in Marie’s tale. Bisclarel even starts with a misogynist preface in which readers are warned that it is foolish to marry a “fame de jolive vie” (1–2) and ends with the warning that men should not reveals secrets to their wives. For an edition with translation of the texts see Amanda Hopkins, ed., Melion and Biclarel. Two Old French Werwolf Lays (Liverpool: Liverpool Online Series Critical Editions of French Texts 10, 2005). 36 The connection between animals and sins is a well-established one; see M. W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1952), 245–9 (Appendix I: “The Association of Animals and Sins”). 37 Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy in Boethius, The Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester (London: Heinemann 1978), IV, m3, 1–16. 38 Consolation, IV, m3, 27–32. 39 Tim William Machan, ed., Chaucer’s Boece. A  Critical Edition Based on Cambridge  University Library, Ms Ii.3.21, ff. 9r–180v (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008), IV, m3, 23–7. 40 For the human–animal dichotomy see also Luuk Houwen, “The Beast Within:  The Animal–Man Dichotomy in the Consolation of Philosophy,” in Boethius Christianus? Transformationen der Consolatio Philosophiae in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Reinhold F. Glei, Nicola Kaminski, and Franz Lebsanft (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 247–60.

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CH APTER  3

Medieval Blood Sport William Marvin

From the introduction of domestic dogs maybe 12,000  years ago to the late-medieval advent of gunpowder, hunting in Europe thrived chiefly by inciting animal-on-animal violence. Once the horse had been domesticated, one needed to harness the predatory ways of hound and hawk so as to cooperate as a team. Because hounds and mastiffs fought to the death, they acted not as partners so much as co-rivals in the hunt, until they could be brought off their prey and a hunter could deliver the mort and claim control of the quarry. Hunting praxis cultivated the finest balance between spurring the ferocity of hunting instinct in the animal team to a critical point, then calling in discipline to halt (except in the case of wolves and foxes) their destruction of the prey.1 Such a techne required the hunter to share life in stable, kennel, or eyrie with animal partners and co-rivals to foster their trust and cultivate his or her authority over them their lives long. Furthermore, this labor had to be begun anew with each member added to the hunting team. The intensity of such repetition, the constraints of animal power, and the use of weaponry of limited killing capacity infused pre-modern hunting culture with a conservatism so deep it prospered through millennia by the same methods in widespread international contexts. Guns, with their fire-borne killing ballistics, changed all that. One outcome of this transformation was that firearms proved so lethal that something more had to be done to keep hunters from falling prey like Actæon to their own gunfire – namely shooting licenses.2 The primary sources of multiple realities of hunting in this era are the technical treatises, except in the impoverished case of the medieval West. Until the fourteenth century, hunting arts in Europe had been conserved almost wholly by oral tradition. Living closely with animals, having to depend on them in moments of risk, and dealing intimately with their mortality suggests depths of experience with animal consciousness among medieval hunters, to which the textual record for its lateness does scant justice. And whereas canonical authors like Chaucer, the Gawain poet, 57

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Malory, or Shakespeare (an alleged poacher) may have hunted, most poets evidently did not. So to cast for a higher ground surmounting animal and discourse, the zone between experience and authority as medievals might say, we must investigate the circumstances of a durable but violent coexistence. The highest courtly form was the chase parforce, which by design favored animal species and sexes that could be pursued in a high-speed run along a more-or-less direct course for miles. To safeguard these species, kings exalted these animals as “beasts of the forest,” inducing centuries of poaching-as-social-war, but also preventing their extinction from the wild during most of the medieval period. The telos of the hunt remained, as ever, death of the prey, the agency that transformed the living being to flesh. For elites empowered by this agency, their animal partners/co-rivals and prey enabled them to live a social myth – or personal realization – of a sovereignly self-resourcing life, freed in a zone of timeless action prior to “civilization” with its dubious matrices of control. Animals made it happen, but the fantasy depended on blood.

Vert and Venison There could be no venisona (fauna) to hunt without the vert (flora) that sheltered them; the circumstances of cervine life, for example, shed light on this critical connection. Deer certainly have always browsed in woods, but the red deer (cervus elaphus) chiefly have fed on grasses and heather tops, an evolutionary legacy of their life and migration from the Asiatic steppe. Their young, however, must lie in the nest as long as two weeks until they can stand, helpless in the meantime against the predation of wolves, foxes, or eagles. The vert therefore – the cover of high heather, woods and bracken – was essential to the survival of deer in Western Europe and Britain.3 The Holocene ecosystem no longer sustained anything like the colossal Urhirsch from long before the last Ice Age, whose glaciers scoured the earth to leave vast belts of boulder-clay where they receded c.10,000 bce. Upon these clays rose the oak and ash wildwood of pre-historic Britain, with beech thriving on the clay-capped uplands while elm, maple, and linden woods populated sandier lowlands.4 As the red deer, along with reindeer, elk (moose), and aurochs, repopulated the northern temperate zone at the pace of revegetation, the scope and nature of this early wildwood bore directly on species’ success and adaptation pressures.5 The mid-twentieth-century view that even as late as Domesday Book (1087 CE) England was so heavily wooded as to present to the eye “an almost unbroken sea of tree-tops”6 has been revised. It has since been argued

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that by the eighth century CE the ancient wildwood consisted only of “woodlots” with names and boundaries, about 20 to 25 percent of England in toto, and that by Domesday Book all that remained was about 15 percent woodland and wooded pasture.7 By the time the first hunting treatises were composed in English, the woods were down to 7 percent. If the postIce-Age wildwood seemed to blanket the land,8 its sea of treetops hid tracts of pasture or heath that had never been wooded, or but sparsely so.9 Red deer needed open ground for grazing and mating. Without the vital energy of spring grasses the male could never rebuild his antlers to stand a chance in the rut.10 More to the point, a red-deer stag (about four feet at the withers) needed open ground also for running, for he was fully capable of a gallop that could outrun a wolf, up to forty-five miles per hour flat-out.11 The smaller roe deer by contrast (the buck at only two feet one inch at the withers and one quarter the hart’s weight) were more adapted to extensive woods where they could capriole and did not require speed for safety. Thus it was the red deer who evinced the fullest adaptation to a savannah-like terrain in which they could hide their young at the verge of woods, graze or browse close by, range in altitude with the season, mate in the open, run for their lives, duck in thickets or waterways for cover, and let their vulnerable patriarchs retire to sanctuary after the rut. A dawn and nightfall seasonal intercourse between wood and pasture had defined the province of red deer since time immemorial. When alert or ruminating they stood tail to the wind so as to catch any scent from behind while scanning forward, kicking an ear back to note any curious sound, thus gaining a 360-degree prospect. So fleet were they and sagacious that without extra help or horse and hound (i.e., a boost of speed and scent), a hunter could forget it and go home. Why then even hunt the stag? Evidently there had been diverse reasons since the age of knapping flints with antler before Neanderthal times.12 Clearly it was not directly the Romans who ennobled the chase; they saw hunting as work for slaves. Theirs was a city life whose “huntings” and gladiatorial shows were devoted to staging spectacular public slaughters.13 But the Celts and the Germani, whose roaming cadres of warrior elites practiced raid and hunt as if one and the same, self-identified with the stag in ways not unlike the “Scythians” of the Eurasian steppe, except the former revered also boar and bear. Once literacy enabled the Germanic peoples to codify their laws, they lost no time stating penalties for crime involving trained hounds and hawks.14 Still, the transformation of hunting to an elite European art form had to await a fusion of barbarian prestige with the hegemonic authority of Rome. This moment came when Charlemagne became Holy Roman Emperor (800 CE) and inaugurated a renewal of crafts.15

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Forest and Paradise When the Normans imposed their forest law on England, where the fauna had never been anyone’s property but free for the taking, it lit furious outrage. Within a few years the new order forced upon prime parts of the country an innovation that the Carolingians had developed in successive steps over less-settled terrain. The forest law reserved to the king the exclusive right to harvest the vert and to hunt certain species in marked zones, monopolizing the timber and hunting rights there. This was a conqueror’s prerogative enforced with brutality:  Hamlets and whole villages had been uprooted to establish the New Forest in Hampshire (1079), which still reflects the oak and beech, heath and bog savannah of the ancient woodlands. By the reign of the Angevin king Henry II (1154–89) the woodlands may have been down to 12 percent of the countryside, but the royal forest covered maybe 30 percent of the country. A hated judicial regime had arisen to adjudicate the forest law as distinct from the common law: Every discovered carcass of a “beast of the forest” called forth an inquest of foresters and verderers to summon the nearby intra-forest townships in order to determine the cause of death. Inspired by timber penalties, lock-downs during fawning months, and mutilations inflicted by gangster-like foresters on all dogs kept within forest bounds, defiance gained critical mass, as expressed in the baronial attack on royal prerogative in the reign of King John. Within two years of Magna Carta (1215), a Forest Charter affirmed the constitutionality of limiting the king’s right to afforestation.16 It took a fund of cleverness to rationalize such an egregious monopoly. Richard FitzNigel (Henry II’s treasurer from 1158), who expounded upon the king’s revenue in his Dialogue of the Exchequer, had to admit that the controversial laws were arbitrary and “not called ‘just’ without qualification, but ‘just, according to forest law.’ ”17 It is in the forest that “king’s chambers” are, and their chief delights. For they come there, laying aside their cares now and then, to hunt, as a rest and recreation. It is there that they can put from them the anxious turmoil native to a court, and take a little breath in the free air of nature. And that is why forest offenders are punished only at the king’s pleasure.18

The penetralia regum, “inner chambers of kings,” suggests an enclosed sanctuary for the royal pleasure, indulged with force on the bodies of deer and intruders.19 What FitzNigel offers in fact is not a viable definition of the forest legality, but a fantasy of the ancient Asiatic hunting park, called the “paradise,”20 which since Domitian and Gratian had allowed those few

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Roman emperors who dared follow the hunt in Greek style to hide behind closed walls, lest they be compared to idiots like Nero or Commodus.21 More than a pastoral idyll, the walled paradise (a Persian, ideally landscaped playground) figures in the provenance of the locus amoenus trope in poetry.22 No medieval king needed such a thing until Charlemagne built a huge multi-walled park by Aachen that enclosed meadows, streams, woods, and fields full of game.23 Here his international connections enabled his personnel to adapt the intense complex of techne that had been cultivated in Near- and Central-Asian paradises for millennia. But the Normans incited an uproar by applying what was effectively park-law to the scope of the deer range, calling it “forest.” How different was the world of Beowulf (MS c.1000) where the power equation linking deer and king, embodied in the hall Heorot (the Hart), seals Hrothgar’s hegemony over tributaries whom he commands to build it but also arouses Grendel’s predations on it (64–98).24 Grendel tears the flesh out of Heorot on a nightly basis, but forbears from attacking Hrothgar personally (140). Hrothgar nonetheless stares at Grendel’s tracks (132f.) and later imagines the subject position of the hunted hart, who, perhaps like himself, if given his druthers would prefer being torn apart by hounds to stepping one hoof in the Grendel-mere (1368–72). Yet once we learn not just that Grendel still lives with his mother, but that she feels bound to avenge his death, we must recognize that these are “trolls” with kinship ties, however accursed. “It is always better / to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning,” agrees Beowulf (1384b–85). The fact that Grendel cannot lay hands on the gifting-chair (166–9) reveals the core metonymy of Heorot: the throne from which Hrothgar dispenses golden treasures (with God’s sanction) stands in for the authority of lord of the hunt to endow his followers with pieces of the kill – which he could not have achieved without their subordinate cooperation. His remaining rival Grendel, denizen of a wilderness outside the king’s control, rises up to seize the Hart himself, effectively denying to Hrothgar the appropriation of this authority until he is finally saved by Beowulf.25 To assess the dragon crisis that erupts during Beowulf ’s reign of the Geats, we must recall how such a rare beast was dealt with in Germanic myth and saga. Sigurd has not a chance of slaying Fafnir until Odinn instructs him to dig a pit or ditches, hide there, and gouge the creature in the heart when he quits his lair on the heath and goes his usual way (just follow the spoor) to drink.26 This could be good advice for slaying a short-legged ruminant too dangerous for a horseless man, like an aurochs who would drink before he fed (as was still hunted on the continent in Charlemagne’s day), but it is an

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awkwardly un-heroic way to encounter a dragon. Moreover, Fafnir never immolated anyone’s fields and hall, which shows that Beowulf ’s unnamed dragon acts more like a vengeful horde of invaders. Both dragons bear a cursed relationship to their elemental hoard of gold – the transformational agent of heroic prestige  – and Beowulf ’s failure to master the beast and survive eventuates in the eclipse of his people. Hrothgar’s deer-hall and the dragon’s hoard figure therefore as analogous sites of contestation for prestige in which kings reach out for what they cannot control, proving individually unable to stave off the doom of total loss. Looking forward to the day of Henry II, a devotee of King Arthur, francophone romance told another story. In the Erec of Chrétien de Troyes (1169), whose allusion to the wedding and coronation at Nantes suggests a direct link with Henrican marital politics,27 King Arthur declares to his knights that he shall hunt the cerf blanc as in the day of Pendragon. His nephew Gawain at once anticipates trouble. We have all known for a long time what tradition is attached to the white stag: he who can kill the white stag by right must kiss the most beautiful of the maidens of your court, whatever may happen. Great evil can come of this, for there are easily five hundred damsels of high lineage here … and there is not a one who is not the favourite of some valiant and bold knight, each of whom would want to contend, rightly or wrongly, that the one who pleases him is the most beautiful and the most noble.28

The transference presumed here between masculine exotic deer and maiden shows how the gold of epic has been feminized by a new erotic of prestige. The “great evil” stems not from primitives, but from the baronial rank at court – the very people who first patronized the poets of romance. Only the one who slays the white hart “by right” is authorized to distinguish prestige; this should be, and in the event proves to be, the king. Something must be done to bring the court into accord with his lofty and arbitrary judgment. Enide, who enables Erec to achieve the prize of the sparrow hawk (a less ambiguous feminine reflex) and win her, seems too superb for any of the knights to gainsay the king’s choice of her to reflect the exquisite virtue, to embody the cerf blanc, of his nobility. Though Arthur seals this blessing with a kiss, as a royal king should (because this is all about his pleasure), Erec subjects Enide to severe trials of proof through which she accommodates herself to her husband’s chivalric calling. If the cerf blanc lives on in her, at their second-nuptials-cum-coronation as infeudaries it is still Arthur who proves the “powerful and generous” master; for “Alexander, who conquered so much that he subdued the whole world and was so generous and rich, was poor and miserly” compared to King Arthur.29 Henry

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II was not just King of England, but Count of Anjou, Duke of Aquitaine, and lord of the ancient Carolingian and Norman forests appertaining to these titles; he ruled a “whole world” greater than the king of France.

Literacies A medieval forest must be read inter alia as a fantasy of a hunting park, or paradise, extended by royal power to cover as much of the kingdom that mattered to the monarch’s surplus of noblesse. Kings’ writs to their sheriffs, foresters, and wardens recorded a steady dispatch of hunting personnel in the service of wildlife management,30 but as yet no need arose to textualize the practice and views of these specialists, so rigorous was the oral transmission of their art. By the fourteenth century this state of affairs was changing. After King John, the crown juggled its waning revenues with the advantages of selling off some of the forests together with more licenses for assarts (clearing rights), warrens (for ground game), and the imparkation of deer. Domesday Book cites 37 parks; by 1300 over 3,000 had entered the records in England and Wales.31 Agro-pastoral dynamism having reduced woodland to 7  percent had now increased the importance of parks for most any kind of hunting. Like any status symbol they were costly to maintain, needing habitat landscaping, winter-feeding, restocking, repair, and surveillance to keep everything and everyone in fine fettle. Deer-leaps, openings by which wild deer could enter the park but not escape, cost extra (to cover the king’s loss). Yet no really fine disport could be had in company without knowing how it was done at court. Enter the hunting treatise, its textual conventions not yet formally established, but dedicated to its reader’s desire to learn priorities together with the right way to speak about them. Ironically, these early attempts yield scant detail to show how professional hunters were in fact the most experienced naturalists of the period – masters of the art of “woodmanscraft.”32 Originally, the main technical advantage of a park arose from its utility as a training ground for the study and interpretation of animal signs, skills that were then deployed under more duress for the king’s forest hunts. The more expansive the park, the less it felt like captivity; the deer, typically crossing tracks with immured domestic species such as cattle, swine, and horses as they would in the open woodlands remained always on hand for closer study. Taking for example the requirements of the chase parforce in the forest, the first problem is to harbor (locate) a warrantable hart in his covert around daybreak.33 A quiet leash-hound with a trained nose and the hunter’s advanced literacy in tracking (visualizing the animal from its sign)

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sets the business afoot. Perhaps several harts may be traced, but only one will be best. Hart must he be because the hinds, who herd up in defense, will not run straight; it would be scandal to have stupidly harbored a great hind, however splendid. So one must infer from the deer’s sign (hoofprints, scat, wallow, browsing and scratching damage on the vert) not just sex but his weight, age, feeding venue, most recent direction, gait, and the size of his antlers, which hopefully will be so royal that one might catch a downwind glimpse of them rising above his covert like branches. There placidly chawing his cud after he has watered and then fed, he will assuredly hear or scent anything nearby. His freedom from teeth and hands means everything to him; he must be approached as if waiting for you, which he is. So the hunter’s judgment of electing him must usually be made without visual contact. Rival harborers are out questing as well, equally appointed to rendezvous before the master of the hunt to determine which individual should be chased. Decorum accepted that they empty deer scat from their horns onto the breakfast board so everyone could argue about them. Most of the basics for this task could be acquired with convenient onsite training in a sizeable park, for the deer acted tame only while being fed. Since Xenophon (430–355 bce), book-literate hunters and falconers had occasionally enlightened their peers with knowledge gleaned from experience and experiment. In England, however, no king had thought to exalt the forest by expounding upon the arts that were designed to flourish there, suggesting that no king since Alfred was as literate and knew as much about it as did his huntsmen. But Master William Twiti (d. 1328), who hunted for Edward II, left (perhaps merely notes for) a short prose tract in question-and-answer format, L’Art de Vénerie (1330),34 from which one could never guess that he may well have known more about his art than Xenophon did. Probably, Twiti never killed fawns so as to lure their mothers, as Xenophon had done;35 for fawns could be raised by surrogate nursing in parks. Beginning with the hare, because all the fine terms are used for the hare (la sunt les beles paroles), Twiti’s instruction veers toward other species fit for chasing as opposed to hunting up, tearing as opposed to flaying, etc. Bits of detail about pasturage and habits are hidden amidst what is mostly an excursus on horn- and voice-calls for directing the hounds. What Twiti has to say about the hart includes jargon for naming the parts of his antlers (beam, branch, and tine).36 In the contemporaneous translation, The Craft of Venery (there was already a demand for such literacy in English), the voice-calls to hounds code-switch to Anglo-Norman. There also follows a supplement for its target audience on “the warding of woods, forest,

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free chase, of park-perquisites for foresters, and of the good instruction of parkers,” which simply identifies the particular hides or joints of flesh that are due to the personnel  – the non-discretionary rules of park hunting. It would be a mistake not to contrast the hide-bound narrowness of the book with the fact that Twiti spent a long career on the move in the royal establishment (as evidenced by writs), and that still in the 1320s he had a complete array of taxonomies and methods for hunting red and fallow deer, roe deer, boar, bear, hare, fox, and wolf. His was a life shared one way or another in deep familiarity with these beings, and in all weathers. Tame park deer, we must recall, are not friendly; they have merely lost their fear of caretakers with regard to feeding.37 Vex them, and one may be stomped or gored, or both. At least Twiti shared life also with horse and hound, who were all individually named and known. Nothing complements Twiti better than the contemporaneous Queen Mary’s Psalter, so-named because Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots, 1542–87), a lover of shooting like her cousin Elizabeth Tudor (Queen of England, r. 1558–1603) was the first monarch known to have owned it.38 While the text consists of a calendar and poorly rendered psalms, the margins abound with adroit brush-drawings of courtly hunting and hawking scenes. Even stylized, the features of hounds of diverse breeds and horses in various gaits are lovingly rendered in poses stately and swift, whereas the hart flies panting, then thrusts out his tongue in pain when he feels teeth in his flank (plates 7–9). On strikingly equal terms, women appear riding singly and astride, blowing the horn, stable-hunting with bow and greyhound (she shoots the stag in the head), clubbing rabbits in their warren, ferreting for rabbits, and hawking afoot and a-horseback with brachet hounds (6, 12, 18–19, 25–7), often without male attendants. Almost none of this diversity could have been inferred from Twiti’s description.39 Between 1360 and 1379 a brighter dawn began to break in France with two verse-treatises of lasting influence,40 but not until 1389 did the sun rise on a new vista in the likeness of Gaston III, Count of Foix, called “Phoebus” for his amazing hair. His prose Livre de Chase committed its first fourteen chapters to the nature and ways of the red deer, reindeer, fallow deer, wild goat, roe deer, hare, rabbit, bear, wild boar, wolf, fox, badger, cat, and otter, before proceeding to the nature and care of dogs (alaunts, greyhounds, running hounds, spaniels, and mastiffs). The masterly illuminations of the MS Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, fr. 616 depict the males and females of each species, herding in their various habitats in characteristic activities and stages of growth. Later chapters distinguish as many methods for hunting these animals. When Edward of Norwich, second Duke of York (“Rutland”

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in Shakespeare’s Richard II), chose Gaston Phoebus for an English translation to edify “Prince Harry” (The Master of Game, c.1410), he also redacted the content for English usages. Thus he promotes the hare to first position among the game, frequently remarks on differences among hunters “beyond the sea,” shares personal opinions (he hates cats), censors the sections on netting and traps, but adds a disquisition on bow-and-stable methods for the royal hunt in England.41 Yet for all the insight Edward brings to the text, the best material remains Gaston’s, who could illustrate beyond the illuminator’s skill to depict. For example, the hart hath more witte [saigesses] and malice to save hym self than eny othere beest or man, for there nys noon so good hunter in the world which may thenk the grete malice and gynnes [subtilitez] that an hert can do, ne there nys non so good hunter ne soo good houndes, that mony tymes faillen to sle the hert and that is by his wytt and by his malice and by his gynnes [et ce est par son sen et par sa malice et par sa subtilité].42

Malice and subtlety (i.e., ruses) in the service of intelligence? How are these terms not just as appropriate to the hunter and the art? “Subtle” methods might include baiting, snares, decoys, disguise in deer skin and antlers, calling in deer voice, or Xenophon’s (malicious?) slaying of fawns. Let the hart give voice to his favorite ruses, and he might roar of the maddening tricks he plays to get the hinds’ attention and make them ovulate.43 Gaston Phoebus’ grudging respect implies not just an unacknowledged sense of the hart’s cognitive and moral equality; it betrays fear of his superiority.

Speed Hunting “affords the best training for war,” says Xenophon, citing the soldiers’ need to endure over rough terrain in any weather, to take a heading at speed over any kind of ground, and, if chased, to exploit woods and defiles to save themselves: “for their familiarity with the business will give them knowledge that others lack.”44 Of course, these points mirror exactly the problems faced by the deer too; but the hunter must train himself up to the deer’s instinctual and deeper “familiarity.” For both enter the same phenomenology by having to (a)  register sudden stimuli, (b)  assess the level of threat, (c) process the immediate time-distance-ground problems, and (d) execute the run with maximum potential for speed and stratagem. The latter is what Phoebus means by “malice,” the ruses of a hart royal (12–18  years old), who fully comprehends that he shall be known by his hoof-prints (he can scent, too) and will try to canter among other deer to

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confound the spoor. Obstacles six feet high hardly impede his bounding flight. He will head down the length of waterways and leap out so as to leave no scent on the bank. Even with his broad armament of antlers he will launch into very dense and (for him, too, at speed) dangerous woods, for no other reason than to exploit his muscle, experience, and daring “to save himself.” He will double-back and cross, running in his mind the extended challenges of (c) above, conserving strength as he can to keep going. English shares with West Germanic the double semantic of “speed” (OE spēdan) to mean “thrive, succeed” as well as “go fast”; it was a choice inheritance from Indo-European, whose reflexes show that “speed” evinces a suffix added to a full grade of the verb for “thrive.”45 That is, “thrive” is the older meaning, but speakers had been equating it with “quickness” for millennia – a legacy first of the horse, then reinforced by the horse-bow chariot rig. Because the treatises dare not go very far into the experience of the hunted, we must also quest elsewhere. In the exempla-collection Jacob’s Well (fourteenth century) we find a scene in which a victim falls prey to the “Wild Hunt” of the demonized Wodan. It is a harrowing little ghost story in which a knight meets a dead woman caught in the terror of fiends pursuing her. He dismounts, draws his sword, and winds her long hair around his arm to make her stand the ground with him as “the helle-huntere, wyþ his helle-houndys, com ny.” But the dead woman, bound for flight, finally tears the hair free from her head, “and sche ran away.” Yet the fiends “all for-rentyn here … and leydin here over-þwert on a brennyng feend, and so wyþ horrible cry, born here in-to helle.” When the knight opens her grave next day he finds her corpse with the hair torn off, and returns it to her head. His epitaph makes it clear that she figures as an allegory of the soul, hunted to damnation for lechery and lack of penitence.46 But the story’s energy focuses on the stark apperception of becoming the hunted. She is a dead woman with a body, agonizingly aware of doom but suspended in no safe zone of humanity. Arrested in place, she is “torn” between staying put or running – classic “deer in the headlights” in the act of perceiving mortal danger (i.e., [b] above).47 Powering up to speed changes consciousness. It is mostly body power as long as one runs in the open, just watching the ground. But as obstacles near and turns close in radius, speed feels like it is increasing even as one may be slowing down. Maintaining the pace must therefore call forth the powers of hyper-focus. For example, consider two motorcyclists leaning fast into a tight curve. All things being equal (machine, rider experience and fitness, speed and point of entry to the turn, road surface, curve radius, camber, gradient, visibility, wind, loose or slippery hazards), if one of them crashes it is because that rider failed to assess conditions quickly enough so

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as to scrape off speed to keep to a safe line through the curve. Deer, horse, and hunter had to deal equally with comparable problems in the line of pursuit, for on the ground no one has speed or safety without traction. A scene of anarchic hyper-focus affords one of the funnier highlights in the Le Morte d’Arthur (1470) of Sir Thomas Malory, a true devotee of his cult’s founder, Sir Tristram. At the moment when Tristram has reconciled a mortal grudge with Sir Lamorak, out roars the Questing Beast with Sir Palomides in hot pursuit. The latter is a Saracen rival of Tristram’s for the love of La Belle Isode; he is bitterly, self-consciously aware of his failure to match Sir Tristram, yet the chase of the Questing Beast is his adventure. The Beast veers closely enough that, as if without even noticing, Sir Palomides drives Lamorak and Tristram both from their saddles with one spear thrust. It was never and will never be so easy for him again. Commiserating with the scandalous discomfiture of these two lords, Malory (in a rare aside) strikes a note resonant with Gaston Phoebus vis à vis the hunter and the superiority of the hart. “Here men may undirstonde, that bene men of worshyp, that man was never fourmed that all tymes myght attayne, but somtyme he was put to the worse by malefortune; and at som tyme the wayker knyght put the byggar knyght to a rebuke.”48 Be not amazed, therefore, if the hunt calls forth superpowers in lesser-seeming creatures. The Questing Beast rises forth as a personal calling and curse. Malory would know that breaking bones falling from horseback, head trauma inflicted by low branches or rocks, even drowning, competed easily with shooting casualties for men and women both. Hardly could it be otherwise wearing no armor or impact-protective clothing, dispensed with for speed; or dressed in the period-vogue of yeomanly greens and greys. The chase could go on not just for many miles, but for days. In 1194 King Richard I (Cœur de Lion) chased a hart from the forest of Sherwood to Barnesdale in Yorkshire, where he lost him – “a run this of nearly forty miles,” remarked one who knew the way.49 In 1520 the king of France, hunting “the great stag of Bryon” with a pack descended from Norman wolfhounds, had to quest for him two days, chased him all day on the third, and lost him at nightfall. They identified his spoor on day four and harbored him again, slaying him within a halfhour. Once dead, they marveled to find he was just a fourteener.50

Blood Before the twelfth century, the ritualized “un-making” of the deer carcass had been chiefly a staged affair between a king or magnate and his huntsmen, bonded by a blood-and-flesh tribute to the majesty of the royal chase. In the

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Roman world, hunters had almost always been slaves, but medieval kings still needed professionals to do all the work. The techne first leapt from the park during the intense consolidation of a new military, horse-enthroned identity (the “chivalric”). Contemporaneous with the flowering of heraldry, tournament sport, “courtly love,” and a unique religio-martial ethos, hunting arts fitted perfectly in the new arsenal of class-defining practices.51 Tristan, of old a devotee of the Celtic stag-god, became the Arthurian knight-progenitor of (as Malory said) “all the good termys of venery and of huntynge,” by which he means the whole panoply of lore and method “that thereby in a maner all men of worshyp may discever a jantylman frome a yoman and a yoman from a vylayne.”52 But it was in twelfth-century romance (a field of baronial and bourgeois, not royal, patronage) where “dighting the venison” arose as a topos of self-revelation. Amplifying a scene in his French sources, Gottfried von Strassburg (Tristan, c.121053) turned Tristan into the man who revitalized hunting such that it became de rigueur for the male persona, the Elvis of medieval venery. Thus Tristan (while an unknown youth stranded in Cornwall) rolls up his sleeves and instructs the king’s ignorant hunters in his own back-home style, i.e., the lore of unmaking, preparing the lord’s perquisites, and feeding the hounds. But in 1,199 verses (so long does it take) there is not one mention of blood. As high art, “un-making,” “breaking,” and “dighting” (i.e., Gottfried’s enbesten and zewirken) euphemized the blood-letting and slaughter of reality. But not all were equally squeamish; least of all, perhaps, the English, who never regarded woodmanscraft as slaves’ work.54 When trying to hide, leaving a blood spoor is about the most self-revelatory thing one could do, mostly beyond one’s power to control. Shooting deer with bow or crossbow, coursing them with greyhounds, or chasing them to the end with scent hounds never yields an instantaneous death, which explains why, without a legal dispensation for tradition, these practices have been criminalized since the twentieth century in Europe on ethical grounds. In medieval Europe, the wild Otherness of deer evidently put them in a different class of beings, subject to demonstrative liberties of violence.55 Their screams and agony meant victory to the hounds, who were later wrought into a frenzy and fed upon the hart’s chopped-up organs, with “bred baþed in blod [and] blende[d] þeramongez,”56 piled up at the site of the kill on a spread of his excoriated hide. English “quarry” derives directly from the French term for this blood-feast, the cuiree, named for the deer’s hide  – another euphemism, or trope for guilt, however sublimated by metonymy. Much more can be said about the afterlife of the hart as expressed by the hunters’ transformation of his hide, bones, flesh perquisites, and head

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(or trophy),57 but by this point his consciousness has long fled to the “vndiscouered Countrey, from whose Borne/ No Traueller returnes.”58 The very art itself, levelled like castles and feudalism by the furious power of gunpowder weapons, was able nonetheless to live on for centuries as an elite, anachronistic preserve reduced to a hunt on “vermin” (i.e., the fox). It was an art-and-power complex from which all kinds of parks (including those for horse racing and steeplechase) became its most popular legacy, together with the wildlife-management regimes of the modern national wilderness park – a hybrid of public paradise and democratized forest.

Notes 1 Thomas T. Allsen, The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 52–82. 2 Howard L. Blackmore, Hunting Weapons (New York: Walker, 1971), 219–20. 3 Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, British Game (London:  Collins, 1946), 180–9; John Fletcher, Deer (London: Reaktion, 2014), passim. 4 W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Folio Society, 1955/2005), 62. 5 Fletcher, Deer, 11–37. 6 Hoskins, English Landscape, 62. 7 Oliver Rackham, Woodlands. The New Naturalist Library, vol. 100 (London: Collins, 2006), 64–5. 8 Since A.  G. Tansley, The British Islands and their Vegetation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), passim. 9 Franciscus Vera, Grazing Ecology and Forest History (Walingford: CABI, 2000), passim. 10 Fletcher, Deer, 39–40. 11 Garry Marvin, Wolf (London: Reaktion, 2012), 27–8; George A. Feldhamer and William J.  McShea, Deer:  The Animal Answer Guide (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 21. 12 Fletcher, Deer, 39. 13 J.  K. Anderson, Hunting in the Ancient World (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1985), 84. 14 Kurt Lindner, Die Jagd im frühen Mittelalter (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1940); Robin S. Oggins, The Kings and their Hawks: Falconry in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 37. 15 William P.  Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), 90–3. 16 Charles R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979); Raymond Grant, The Royal Forests of England (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1991). 17 FitzNigel “Dialogus de Scaccario”: The Course of the Exchequer, and “Constitutio Domus Regis”: The Establishment of the Royal Household, ed. and trans. Charles Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 60.

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Ibid. William P. Marvin, Hunting Law, 67–72. Allsen, Royal Hunt in Eurasian History, 34–51. Edward Gibbon, citing Ammianus Marcellinus, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781; London: Penguin, 1994), III: 27, p. 21. Cf. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter (1948; 10th ed. Bern: Francke, 1984), 191–209. Notker, Gesta Karoli, in Quellen zur Karolingischen Reichsgeschichte III, ed. R. Rau (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982), 388–91. Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf (New  York:  Norton, 2001). Cited in text hereafter. Marvin, Hunting Law, 17–45. The Lay of Fafnir in The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyn Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 157–65; The Saga of the Volsungs, trans. Jesse L. Byock (London: Penguin, 1990), 63–5. See Chrétien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances, trans. William Kibler (London: Penguin, 1991), 6. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 119. John Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk:  The Art of Medieval Hunting (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 172–86. Susan Lasdun, The English Park: Royal, Private and Public (London: Vendome, 1991), 5, compared with John Fletcher, Gardens of Earthly Delight: The History of Deer Parks (Oxford: Windgather, 2011). Allsen, Royal Hunt, 67. Cummins, Hound and the Hawk, 33–9. La Vénerie de Twiti, ed. Gunnar Tilander (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1956). See Xenophon:  Scripta Minora, ed. and trans. E.  C. Marchant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), §9. See The Art of Hunting, ed. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm:  Almqvist and Wiksell, 1977). Fletcher, Deer, 78. Kurt Lindner, ed., Queen Mary’s Psalter (Hamburg: Paul Parey, 1966). Cited in text hereafter. For discussions of Twiti and English treatises after this, see Anne Rooney, Hunting in Middle English Literature (Cambridge:  D. S.  Brewer, 1993), 7–20; and David Scott-Macnab, The Middle English Text of “The Art of Hunting” by William Twiti (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009). See also Cummins on park hunting, Hound and the Hawk, 47–67, and Richard Almond, Medieval Hunting (Phoenix Mill:  Sutton, 2003). All these authors make much ado of the particularity of English ways; yet some measure of diversity was in fact the rule, for one adapted techne to circumstances wherever necessary. Henri de Ferrières, Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio; and Gace de la Buigne, Roman des déduis. See B. van den Abeele, La Littérature Cynégétique (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 46–9.

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41 Master of the Game by Edward, Second Duke of York, ed. William A. BaillieGrohman and F. N. Baille-Grohman (London: Chatto and Windus, 1904), 20. 42 Gaston III, Count of Foix, Gaston Phébus: Livre de chasse, ed. Gunnar Tilander (Karlshamn: E. G. Johanssons Boktryckerim 1971), 64. 43 Fletcher, Deer, 35, 45. 44 Xenophon: Scripta Minora, §12: 1–4. 45 Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 84 (s.v. spē-1). 46 See text and discussion of gloss in Rooney, Hunting in Middle English Literature, 36–7. 47 Rhetorical displacement of this kind had been in use since Oppian (second century CE); witness the “birth pangs” of hounds in acute anticipation, quoted in Cummins, Hound and the Hawk, 18. 48 Le Morte d’Arthur, ed. S.  H.  A. Shepherd (New  York:  Norton, 2004), 293, lines 32–5. 49 John Manwood, A Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forest (London, 1615; facs. Amsterdam, 1976), 42v; Patrick Chalmers, A History of Hunting (Philadelphia, 1936), 162. 50 Ibid., 115. Thus he was four tines short of the statelier deer. 51 Werner Rösener, “Jagd, Rittertum und Fürstenhof im Hochmittelalter,” Jagd und höfische Kultur im Mittelalter, ed. Rösener (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1997), 123–48. 52 Morte d’Arthur, 405, 231. 53 von Strassburg, Tristan, ed. K. Marold (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1977). 54 It was the view of Edward of Norwich that whoever was to deal with the deer “shuld undo hym þe moost wodmanly and clenly þat he can, and þe wondred ye not þat y say woodmanly for it is a poynt þat longeþ to a woodmannys craft, and þough it be wel sittyng to an hunter for to cun don it, never þe latter it longeþ moor to wodemannys craft þan to hunders … [For] þer nys no woodman ne good hunter in Engelond þat þei ne can do it wel inow and wel better þan I  can telle hem” (Edward 2nd Duke of York, Master of the Game, 100). 55 Garry Marvin, “Wild Killing: Contesting the Animal in Hunting,” in Killing Animals, ed. The Animal Studies Group (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 10–29. 56 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd ed. revised by Norman David (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 1361. 57 Cummins, Hound and the Hawk, 41–6; see also A. Pluskowski, ed., Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies:  Animals as Material Culture in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxbow, 2007); and Steve Baker, “Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead,” in Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies, ed. Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh (New York: Routledge, 2014), 290–304. 58 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies:  A Facsimile Edition, ed. Helge Kökeritz (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1954), 3.1.82.

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Animals in Late-Medieval Hagiography and Romance David Salter

Introduction: Animals and Human Identity Towards the end of the Odyssey, as the long-anticipated moment of Odysseus’ homecoming finally approaches, Homer presents us with a touching scene of reunion and recognition, when the hero is momentarily re-united with his faithful hound, Argus, after an absence of twenty years. Arriving at the gates of his palace in the guise of a beggar, Odysseus sees his old hunting dog lying unwanted and forsaken in the dirt. Argus is too weak to get up to greet his master, but hearing Odysseus’ voice, he drops his ears and wags his tail in recognition, before immediately succumbing to old age and dying.1 The fleeting reunion between Odysseus and Argus was evidently intended to elicit feelings of pathos. The poignancy of Argus’ old and decrepit state is emphasized, as is the neglect he has suffered during Odysseus’ long absence, and the tear that Odysseus wipes away when seeing his old dog is testament to the strong emotional bond that unites them. The relationship between the two, then  – in which the steadfast loyalty of Argus is reflected in feelings of pity and affection from Odysseus – is presented as reciprocal, and is couched in affective terms. But as well as eliciting our sympathy and demonstrating their mutual affection, what is perhaps most significant about their encounter is that Argus shows himself capable of seeing through his master’s disguise. It is striking that after an absence of twenty years, none of the Odyssey’s human protagonists is able to recognize Odysseus – not even his wife, Penelope. The one exception is Odysseus’ old slave, Eurycleia, although she only recognizes her master when – washing his feet – she glimpses the scar on his thigh that he received while hunting as a young man.2 Argus therefore possesses a sensitivity and perceptiveness which the Odyssey’s human characters lack. Northrop Frye has noted that Odysseus has come to be viewed as the model or archetype of the literary trickster, and yet the disguise that he adopts so successfully in the 73

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latter part of the Odyssey – misleading both loved ones and enemies alike – cannot deceive his faithful old dog.3 While the literary culture of the Latin Middle Ages acknowledged Homer as one of the foremost classical authors, the actual text of the Odyssey was not generally available to readers in Western Europe before the Renaissance.4 Knowledge of the Greek language was extremely rare prior to 1400, and the first post-classical Latin translation of the Odyssey, which enjoyed a very limited circulation, was completed only in 1362 by Leonzio Pilato, and it was not until the fifteenth century, with the emergence of humanism in Italy, that the narrative itself began to be more widely disseminated.5 But although late-medieval authors and readers would have been unfamiliar with the scene between Odysseus and Argus, it nonetheless anticipates in one important way the numerous encounters between humans and animals that are such a mainstay of medieval romance and saints’ lives. The episode prefigures the central narrative role played by animals in scenes of recognition, where they possess powers of perception and comprehension lacking in humans. Like Argus, animals in romance and saints’ lives are able to penetrate the layers of disguise and concealment that mislead the narratives’ human protagonists, and as a result they arrive at unerring judgments about the protagonists’ true identities: judgments they instinctively communicate through a variety of easily comprehensible behaviors and gestures. And it is precisely the animals’ lack of moral choice and individual agency in these texts that enables them to perform this narrative function. Entirely subject to instinct, animals are represented as incapable of calculation and duplicity, so unlike the human characters in these stories who frequently engage in deception and concealment, it is the lot of animals to cut through the web of human falsehoods and fabrications. My discussion of late-medieval literature will therefore focus on the ways in which animals tend to gesture beyond their own selves to reveal truths about the men and women they encounter. Romance and hagiography are arguably the two most popular and prestigious literary forms of the later Middle Ages, and as we shall see, animals perform a range of crucial narrative and symbolic functions in each genre. The sheer abundance and diversity of fauna to be found in these texts is striking, encompassing legendary beasts such as griffins, unicorns, and cynocephali (dog-headed giants believed to inhabit the remote East); “exotic” animals (from a European perspective) such as lions, leopards, and elephants; as well as the more familiar species indigenous to Europe, which the writers and readers of these texts would have encountered on a daily basis. And this

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broad spectrum of animal types is matched by the full gamut of aesthetic, affective, and religious responses that their representations were designed to elicit, from wonder, excitement, fear and revulsion, to feelings of companionable affection and moral edification. Amid all of this teeming variety, however, a number of recurring patterns and thematic preoccupations do emerge. Romance and hagiography are both forms whose primary concern lies with their human protagonists, and, however prominently animals figure in these texts, they are always ancillary to the main focus of the narrative, which is the exploration of the hero’s unfolding identity. These texts’ treatment of animals, then, is profoundly anthropocentric in character: their narrative role is almost always to reveal, disclose, or confirm something about the human protagonist, or his or her social, cultural, or religious milieu. In romance, where the hero’s true nature is frequently concealed beneath a deliberately adopted disguise, or otherwise masked by the passage of time and the physical toll of long years of adversity (as in the Odyssey), animals are often instrumental in the eventual revelation, disclosure, or discovery of his or her identity. But as we shall see, they are also capable of affirming and acclaiming the heroic qualities of the protagonist, including nobility, courage, and moral goodness. Animals can therefore confer legitimacy on the hero, validating and vindicating his or her heroic status. In saints’ lives, on the other hand, it is the holiness of the protagonist that animals avow and herald, and their obedience and acquiescence to the saint is understood as a restoration of the original state of harmony enjoyed in Eden before the Fall, when Adam and Eve were believed to have exercised a divinely ordained authority over the animal kingdom. In this chapter, I will examine the principal human–animal encounters in Bevis of Hampton, a fourteenth-century Middle English text that  – although almost entirely unknown today – was enormously popular and influential throughout the later Middle Ages and well into the early modern period.6 This text has been characterized by modern critics as belonging to a hybrid literary form that combines elements both of romance and of saints’ lives; a sub-genre which has been variously identified by a number of different labels, the most common of which are hagiographical romance, homiletic romance, penitential romance, pious romance, and secular hagiography.7 The heroes of these texts tend to have two distinct but overlapping identities that come to the fore in different narrative contexts: they are both knights and saints (or, rather, they are knights who are able to project a saintly aura or presence). Hagiographical romances like Bevis of Hampton therefore seek to integrate and synthesize the spiritual and

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secular impulses of their two component genres, projecting a vision of the hero as a figure capable of reconciling religious piety with worldly honor. In Richard Kaeuper’s words, the protagonists of these texts achieve their holiness through a “fusion of prowess and piety,”8 courageously fighting for the Christian faith, and suffering pain and hardship, as a form of penance in the process. I have chosen to focus my discussion on Bevis of Hampton because in many respects its treatment of animals – which figure extensively in the text – can be seen as offering a compendium of the symbols, motifs, and narrative patterns we find in romance and hagiography more broadly. (It is, perhaps, this compendious quality that helps to account for the tale’s enduring popularity over the course of several hundred years.) I will focus on human encounters with three different types of animals in Bevis of Hampton:  lions, horses, and dragons. These three animal species figure most prominently in the tale, and there is a clear narrative and symbolic logic to their presence. The pre-eminence of lions in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom was uncontested during the medieval period. The bestiary tradition identifies the lion as “the king of beasts,” and their undisputed ascendancy among their fellow creatures meant that they were considered the natural companions of both royalty and saints, and they came to be associated with religious and secular forms of authority.9 Horses are also bound up with the identity of the romance hero. As commentators have frequently pointed out, the origins of knighthood as an institution  – reflected in the etymology of the word chivalry from cheval – can be traced back to the mounted warrior, and the horse remained constitutive of the knight’s identity throughout the high and later Middle Ages.10 And while lions and horses were seen as worthy companions for the heroes of romance and hagiography, the dragon  – the only mythical creature we will be considering – was viewed as an appropriate adversary for the hero; a monstrous antagonist that, in the fierce crucible of combat, was able to test and so prove the hero’s credentials as a Christian champion. The narrative episode we will examine, in which Sir Bevis battles a dragon, self-consciously alludes to the legend of Saint George, which is deliberately deployed to assert Bevis’ claim to a kind of heroic, warrior sanctity. Romance and saints’ lives are highly conventional literary forms, and there is a marked tendency in these narratives to draw on and endlessly recycle a relatively limited repertoire of tropes and formulae, and this is certainly the case in relation to animals. Indeed, as mentioned above, one of the reasons to discuss Bevis of Hampton is precisely its exemplary quality: the many narrative episodes in which animals feature in the text

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are typical of hagiography and romance more widely. But in the first of the sequences we will examine, in which the eponymous hero, Bevis, and his beloved, Josian, encounter a couple of lions in the desert, the highly conventional nature of the interaction actually draws attention to what is singular and idiosyncratic about it. A number of unresolved sources of tension between the two lovers variously involve conflicts of religion (Josian is a Muslim while Bevis is a Christian), ethnicity and nationality (Josian is “oriental” while Bevis is English), and differences of rank and social status (Josian is the daughter of the king of Armenia while Bevis is the exiled and dispossessed son of an earl). As we shall see, by acting in the manner required both by narrative convention and political and religious ideology, the lions inadvertently highlight these underlying strains in the lovers’ relationship, and in doing so they draw attention to the ways in which animals can offer a critical, even subversive commentary on the action, exposing the ideological contradictions and fault lines in the text itself.

“The lyouns might do hur noo wroth” In an extended narrative sequence almost at the midpoint of Bevis of Hampton, the eponymous hero, Bevis, and his soon-to-be wife, Josian, are catapulted through a series of escalating threats and dangers: a succession of fabulous episodes which would seem to reach a suitably dramatic climax in the exotic location of a cave in the desert. Escaping the Damascus dungeon in which he has been incarcerated for seven years, Bevis rescues his beloved Josian, who has been coerced into marrying a neighboring sovereign, King Yvor. Having successfully evaded capture by Yvor’s vassals, Bevis and Josian, along with Josian’s chamberlain, Sir Bonefas, take refuge in a cave, only for Bevis to be compelled to leave his companions after a couple of days to search for food. In his absence, two fierce lions appear; they attack Sir Bonefas, killing him and his horse, but are powerless to hurt Josian, who is protected both by her royal birth, and her virginity (her marriage to King Yvor having remained unconsummated): Forth went Beves in that forest, Beestes to sheete he was ful prest, Als sone as he was forth yfare, Two lyouns ther com yn thare, Grennand and rampand with her feet. Sir Bonefas then als skeet His hors to him thoo he drowgh

shoot;

ready

Gnashing;

standing (as lions rampant)

very quickly drew

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And armyd him wel ynowgh And yave the lyouns bataile to fight; Al to lytel was his myght. The twoo lyouns sone had sloon That oon his hors, that other the man. Josian into the cave gan shete, And the two lyouns at hur feete, Grennand on hur with muche grame, But they ne myght do hur no shame. For the kind of lyouns, ywis, A kynges doughter, that maide is, Kinges doughter, quene and maide both, The lyouns might do hur noo wroth.

armed himself appropriately too feeble;

prowess

shut herself Gnashing;

ferocity

nature virgin harm

(lines 2375–94)

The image of two wild lions incapacitated at the feet of the pure and royal heroine, rendered harmless by her mere presence, conforms to an archetype that – with relatively minor variations – can be found in countless romances and saints’ lives. The legends of the desert fathers provide a particularly rich seam of examples of lions who recognize and defer to the authority of saints, becoming in the process their faithful companions and helpers, with the lives of Saint Jerome and Saint Paul the Hermit offering perhaps the two most popular instances of this phenomenon in the Western hagiographical canon.11 Significantly, the legends of Jerome and Paul both share with Bevis of Hampton a Middle Eastern setting, so that the desert location of Josian’s adventure with the lions strongly recalls the topography of the miraculous animal encounters of these two saints. Similarly, the archetype of the docile lion is a familiar trope in romance, even in those romance narratives that – unlike Bevis of Hampton – have a European setting, where lions are obviously not indigenous. Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain, The Knight of the Lion), which was translated into Middle English in the fourteenth century,12 provides possibly the most iconic example of the faithful lion in the medieval romance tradition, but a closer parallel to the experience of Josian can be found in the fourteenth-century Middle English romance Octavian. Here, the daughter of the king of Germany, having become the consort of the emperor of Rome, is falsely accused of adultery, and is abandoned in the wilderness at her husband’s command. Lost and without protection, she encounters a ferocious lion who befriends and guards her and her child, thereby vindicating her claim to innocence.13 The frequency with which the figure of the docile or faithful lion is found in romance and saints’ lives tells us a good deal about the two literary

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genres, and the ways in which they imagine and understand the relationship between humans and the natural world. Most obviously, perhaps, it draws attention to the highly conventional nature of these two forms, and the close affinities that exist between them. In both romance and hagiography, the role of lions in particular – and of animals more generally – is to affirm the heroic qualities of the protagonist, whether he or she is a saint, a knight, or a princess. The heroes of these two genres are therefore assumed to have a natural authority that extends beyond the limits of human society to encompass the animal kingdom as well, and it is striking that wild animals – at least in certain circumstances – are thought to be capable of recognizing and respecting the dominion that humans exercise over them. Interestingly, lions do not appear to distinguish in these texts between secular and sacred authority; they respond to the holiness of a saint and to the nobility of a princess in comparable ways. Thus, in Bevis of Hampton, we are twice told that the lions attach equal weight and significance to Josian’s moral qualities – symbolized by her virginity – and her royal status as the daughter of a king, and crucially, it is the coalescence of both of these elements in Josian that prevents the lions from harming her. Virginity is the feminine virtue most prized in traditional literature, and as we find with many romance heroines, Josian’s sexuality – the nature and the extent of her sexual experience – is the subject of anxious speculation in the text from a number of different quarters.14 For instance, Bevis himself is incredulous that Josian has managed to remain a virgin after seven years of marriage to King Yvor (line 2200), and earlier in the narrative, Josian’s father suspects that she has consummated her relationship with Bevis, prompting the narrator to protest her innocence in indignant and outraged terms (line 1213). The text’s preoccupation with female sexuality in general, and its particular anxiety about Josian’s virginity, is reflected in the injunction of Bevis’ confessor, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who forbids Bevis to marry a woman who is sexually experienced (lines 1965– 9). However, while appearances would seem to count against Josian, the unexpected arrival of the lions vindicates her claim to virginity. One of the narrative functions the lions therefore perform is to provide irrefutable proof of Josian’s standing as a virginal princess of royal blood. In other words, the lions’ role is to confirm that she is a figure of high moral worth and social status who is an eligible bride for Sir Bevis, both in terms of her family background (which is never in doubt), and her personal, sexual history (which is). But while the lions’ deference to Josian in Bevis of Hampton is a familiar narrative trope from romance and saints’ lives, this particular incident is

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distinctive in that the lions do not go on to become Josian’s companions and helpers. The conventional trajectory of these narrative episodes is for the lions to befriend the human protagonists and to perform some service for them, but this does not happen in Bevis of Hampton because it is solely Josian’s authority that the lions recognize. Significantly, they do not extend the same respect and deference to Bevis. So when Bevis returns to the cave where he had left Josian in his search for food, he comes under immediate and ferocious attack from the very lions who had been rendered harmless by his beloved. What ensues is a desperate struggle between Bevis and the lions (lines 2395–500): a bloody conflict between man and beast that actually exposes the principal fault lines – concerning questions of class, gender, ethnicity, and religion  – that divide the two lovers. The failure of Bevis to exercise the same spontaneous authority over the lions that Josian had so effortlessly commanded is registered by the text as an affront to his masculine dignity, and it both reflects and compounds the social anxiety and insecurity Bevis experiences from the very outset in relation to his lover. Although the literary conventions of courtship in romance dictate that the male lover should adopt a position of humility and submission relative to his beloved, Bevis does not assume this lowly status voluntarily but rather by social necessity (as already noted, he is the exiled and dispossessed son of an English earl while Josian is the daughter of a reigning monarch), and he struggles to accept this disparity in their social standing with good grace.15 In attacking Bevis after they have submitted to Josian, the lions therefore pointedly highlight the gulf in social status and esteem that separates the two lovers, and Josian inadvertently adds to Bevis’ feelings of shame and humiliation by offering to assist him in his battle by holding one of the lions while he fights the other (lines 2408–11). Bevis rebukes Josian by telling her that he will gain no honor if aided by a woman, and when she persists in intervening in the battle on his behalf, he threatens to kill her unless she withdraws from the action (lines 2470–8). For a romance hero to threaten to kill his lover obviously represents the most extreme violation of the tenets of knightly conduct, but in this instance, strikingly, Bevis’ egregious breach of the chivalric code elicits no reproof; neither Josian nor the text itself express any disquiet at his threat.16 This reflects the fact that for Bevis, the encounter with the lions involves not simply a physical struggle against a couple of ferocious beasts, but also a challenge to his sense of masculine autonomy. The lions force into the open what Bevis finds most difficult about his relationship with Josian; that she is his social superior and he is her dependent, and he interprets

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Josian’s attempt to save his life not so much as an offer of help but as a further threat to his already compromised masculinity. The turbulent nature of Bevis and Josian’s relationship only settles down once the couple are married and Josian finally comes to accept her husband’s sovereignty over her, thus removing the source of his insecurity. Bevis’ rejection of Josian’s help in fighting the lions therefore represents his attempt to assert an active, dominant masculinity, and to move his relationship with Josian into closer alignment with the patriarchal norms of late-medieval society.17 Josian’s encounter with the two lions initially seems to be a straightforward rehearsal of the well-established literary trope of the wild lion rendered peaceable and submissive in the presence of royalty and holiness. But, as we have seen, it is complicated by the fraught nature of her relationship with Bevis. Although the conventions of courtly love ascribe a lowly and servile position to the male lover, Bevis’ insecurity prevents him from accepting this arrangement with equanimity, and the failure of the lions to respond to him with the same deference they show Josian represents another wound to his self-esteem. The presence of the lions can therefore be said to highlight the extent to which the text is conflicted in its gender politics. The lions’ actions signal Josian’s superiority over Bevis, but their instinct would appear to be at odds with the ideological position of the text itself, which seems anxious to assert Bevis’ rival claim to ascendancy.

“Sire Beves, the Cristene knight” Part of the text’s discomfort, however, can be ascribed to the ethnicity and religious identity of the heroine, and the apparent anomaly of the lions revering a “Saracen” princess from Armenia (albeit one who is soon to convert to Christianity), while at the same time seeming to disparage a heroic English Christian knight. In many ways, Bevis of Hampton presents a starkly polarized view of relations between Christianity and Islam.18 Bevis’ knightly deeds are frequently portrayed as religious in motivation, and the text revels in the sheer savagery and destructiveness of the violence that Bevis often unleashes on those Muslims who he sees as enemies of the Christian faith. (The text’s combination of contempt for and ignorance of Islam is perhaps most strongly in evidence when Bevis desecrates a Damascus mosque – or “mameri” [line 1350] – killing its priest, throwing the assembled idols into a ditch, and scornfully laughing at the witnesses he has terrorized [lines 1348–57].) This sense of Christianity as an embattled faith in perpetual conflict with Islam is also reflected in the courtship and eventual marriage of Bevis and Josian. In marrying Bevis, Josian agrees to

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accept the sacrament of baptism, an act that not only absorbs her into the Christian community, but that in the context of the tale also symbolizes her renunciation of her Islamic beliefs and inheritance. As all of this might suggest, Bevis of Hampton embodies an understanding of religion that is almost entirely untroubled by conventional moral precepts. In the tale, Christianity represents more a feeling of solidarity and group identity  – a sense of belonging to a community that considers itself imperiled and under attack  – than a complex system of faith and worship defined and codified by particular beliefs, ritual practices, behavioral norms, and ethical duties. Because Bevis exemplifies a popular notion of warrior Christianity in which the interests of the faith are defended and advanced through force of arms, it is not surprising that this is primarily how he engages with the animal kingdom as well, and his superhuman capacity to overcome and destroy even the most ferocious of beasts is presented as a sign of his divinely favored status. Thus, we are told that Bevis is finally able to dispatch the second of the two lions he fights through “Godes grace” (line 2490), and after his triumph he makes a point of thanking God, to whom he credits the victory (line 2499). Susan Crane has noted that Bevis’ success in battle is repeatedly ascribed to a combination of his own efforts and divine assistance, and the same holds true for his violent encounters with animals; not only does Bevis acknowledge divine aid for his victory over the lions, but in an earlier struggle – having first invoked the aid of Jesus and the Virgin Mary (line 804) – he is able to kill a terrifying wild boar, once again on account of God’s grace (line 812).19 The Christian symbolism of these violent encounters with animals is most fully realized, however, in the lengthy account of Bevis’ protracted battle with – and hard won victory over – the dragon (lines 2735–910). No other instance of combat in the text is charged with such religious significance, and nowhere else is Bevis’ heroism seen to be so clearly deployed to a religious end, and so dependent on the shaping and sustaining power of divine grace. During the battle, Bevis repeatedly calls on the help of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, as well as invoking the aid of Saint George (line 2817), and even the anonymous narrator becomes sufficiently exercised and agitated by Bevis’ perilous predicament to implore God to come to his assistance:  “Helpe him [i.e., Bevis] God, that alle thing wrought!” (line 2784). That this is Bevis’ only encounter with a mythical beast lends the episode a miraculous quality not so evident in his other animal interactions, and this supernatural element is further heightened by a number of narrative details. On the site of the battle there is a holy well

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whose water has the miraculous power both to heal Bevis of his wounds and to prevent the dragon from approaching within a distance of forty feet. (The narrator informs us that these magical properties were transmitted to the water by a virgin who bathed in the well in the past [lines 2802–10]). In an act that has something of the symbolic quality of baptism, Bevis resorts on a couple of occasions to immersing himself in the well in order to take refuge from the dragon’s onslaught, and to restore his strength and heal his wounds (lines 2793–820 and 2850–6). The symbolism of baptismal immersion, with its archetypal associations of death and rebirth, is further suggested when, at his lowest ebb, Bevis believes himself to be on the point of death. Covered in dragon venom (a particularly toxic substance that causes the skin to become leprous), Bevis implores God for deliverance, citing as precedent the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (lines 2838–9). Although it occurs at the midpoint of the narrative, Bevis’ victory over the dragon feels like a dramatic climax to the action. As the baptismal symbolism and the invocation of Lazarus’ name suggest, Bevis undergoes a kind of martyrdom, experiencing a symbolic death and rebirth in the holy well. The pivotal significance of this moment is further suggested by the fact that, on emerging from the well for the second time, Bevis gains the upper hand in the contest, first putting the dragon to flight by praying to Jesus and Mary (lines 2859–70), and then vanquishing the beast, whose defenses are fatally compromised when it hears Bevis’ prayer (lines 2871– 86). And it is fitting that in this culminating moment, Bevis seeks the aid of  – and so comes to identify with  – Saint George, the dragon-slaying patron saint of England and scourge of the Islamic East. An animal also figures prominently in the final incident whereby Bevis manifests his saintly identity: his death. After recounting the heroic deeds of its eponymous hero, the narrative concludes in typical hagiographic manner by describing his pious end, and it is striking that Arundel, Bevis’ horse (who, of course, has fully shared in his master’s life of adventure), assumes as important a role in this rite of passage as Josian. Bevis dies – providentially it is implied – on the same day as Josian and Arundel, and he is interred in a chapel dedicated to Saint Lawrence, with the narrator calling on God to have pity on the souls not just of Bevis and Josian, but of Arundel as well (lines 4596–620). The text’s concern for Arundel’s postmortem fate – its hope that he might share the same blessed destiny as his master – points once again to the centrality of animals to these tales, and to the ways in which literary representations can blur the boundaries between humans and animals by absorbing animals into the sphere of human

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concern, conferring on them, and entitling them to, feelings of compassion and sympathy. But the narrator’s prayer for the repose of Arundel’s soul also flies in the face of religious orthodoxy. The gates of heaven were believed to have been closed to animals because the Church taught that they lacked immortal souls.20 The narrator’s exhortation to God to have pity on Arundel therefore reflects what we might call the “popular” rather than orthodox nature of the tale’s engagement with religious doctrines and ideas. As we have seen, Bevis of Hampton does not unduly concern itself with subtle questions of theology and religious ethics.21 Rather, the text expresses the confident hope that its hero’s valour and piety will merit his eventual salvation, and it deploys animals – often with little regard for orthodox religious doctrine – to communicate and confirm Bevis’ status as divinely elect.

Conclusion When we consider the treatment of animals in medieval hagiography and romance, its most characteristic – we might even say defining – feature is the ubiquitous and insistent presence of the miraculous and the supernatural. These texts present us with a vision of the animal kingdom, and of the natural world more generally, heightened and transformed both by the power of God’s grace and the superhuman presence of the hero. Inevitably, then, the representation of animals in these texts diverges from the lived experience of their readership, for whether in the interests of religious edification or of pleasure-seeking dramatic spectacle, this literature offers its audience a glimpse of an unfamiliar world. But while hagiography and romance do not tell us – or even purport to tell us  – much about the animals that inhabit the fallen, sub-lunary world, they do powerfully explore the full range of human reactions, responses, and attitudes towards the animal kingdom. As we see in Bevis of Hampton, feelings of antagonism, fear, and revulsion are very much in the foreground, and this reflects a strong sense of the “otherness” of nonhuman creatures, which is a persistent theme in the portrayal of animals in both genres. However, this is not the only story. As we see with Bevis’ horse, Arundel, these texts also give expression to a hankering for a more companionable relationship with animals. There is often assumed to be a strong sense of affinity – even of shared identity – between the protagonist and his or her animal companion. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, romance and saints’ lives testify to the imaginative power of animals, and in particular to their central role in shaping and defining humanity’s perception and understanding of itself.

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Notes 1 Homer, Odyssey, Volume II: Books 13–24, Loeb Classical Library 105, ed. and trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1919), Book 17, 174–9. 2 Homer, Odyssey, 262–3. 3 See Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 68–9. 4 The esteem that Homer enjoyed during the later Middle Ages is reflected in Chaucer’s inclusion of him in his catalogue of the five pre-eminent classical authors (along with Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius), at the end of Troilus and Crisyde. See Troilus and Criseyde in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Book V, line 1792. Dante similarly reveres Homer, who he calls the “sovereign poet” (“poeta sovrano”), and Homer is the first of the four great Pagan poets to greet Dante and Virgil on their entry into Limbo, where the souls of the virtuous Pagans reside. See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno, ed. and trans. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), Canto 4, line 88. 5 The historical development of Greek studies during the Latin Middle Ages is sketched out by L.  D. Reynolds and N.  G. Wilson in Scribes and Scholars:  A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1990), 118–21. Reynolds and Wilson also discuss the circumstances behind the appearance of Pilato’s translations of Homer in the 1360s (Scribes and Scholars, 146–7). See also Richard Hamilton Armstrong, “Translating Ancient Epic,” in A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2005), 185–6, and Alberto Manguel, Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey: A Biography (London: Atlantic, 2007), 94. 6 All quotations from Bevis of Hampton are taken from the edition of Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, which is based on the text of the Auchinleck manuscript (early fourteenth century). See Four Romances of England:  King Horn, Havelock the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston, ed. Ronald B.  Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999); hereafter cited in text. There are six extant manuscript versions of the Middle English romance, and their relationship both to one another, and to the Anglo-Norman source text, Boeuve de Haumton, is briefly explored in the Introduction to this edition (187–9). Helpful discussion of the complex textual history of the romance, along with a variety of critical and theoretical approaches to its engagement with questions of nation, religion, race, and gender, can be found in a recently published essay collection:  see Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjevic, ed., Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008). 7 See, for instance, Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London:  Routledge, 1968), 127–8; Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knight:  A Study of Middle English Penitential Romances (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1990), 144–78; Susan Crane,

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Davi d Salter Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley and London:  University of California Press, 1986), 92–133; and E. M. Bradstock, “Sir Gowther: Secular Hagiography or Hagiographical Romance or Neither?” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 59 (1983), 26–47. A number of the essays collected in Rosalind Field, Phillipa Hardman, and Michelle Sweeney, ed., Christianity and Romance in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), address the ways in which romance narratives seek to reconcile the secular impulses of heroic action and adventure with the values and principles of religious faith. Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 47. For the Bestiary’s account of the lion, see Richard Barber, ed. and trans., Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford M.S. 764 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999), 23–9. For a brief introduction to the bestiary tradition, see David Salter, “Bestiary,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Roland Greene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 138. On the origins of chivalry, see Maurice Keen, Chivalry (Yale: Yale University Press, 1984), 18–43. The leonine encounters of Jerome and Paul the Hermit were widely disseminated in the Middle Ages, and both feature in the enormously popular thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives, The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea) of Jacobus de Voragine, the Dominican Archbishop of Genoa. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), I: 85 (for Paul the Hermit), and II: 213–14 (for Jerome). The ubiquity of lions in the lives of the desert fathers is discussed by Alison Goddard Elliott in Roads to Paradise:  Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover, NH and London:  Brown University Press, 1987), 144–67. See also David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 11–24. For a translation of Yvain into modern English prose, see Chrétien de Troyes, “The Knight with the Lion (Yvain),” in Arthurian Romances, trans. William W. Kibler and Carleton W. Carroll (London: Penguin, 1991), 295–380. See also, Ywain and Gawain, ed. Albert B. Friedman and Norman Harrington, Early English Texts Society, Original Series, 254 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). See Octavian, ed. Frances McSparran, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 289 (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), lines 460–8. On the centrality of virginity to notions of female heroism in romance, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 218–68. See also Frye, The Secular Scripture, 71–93. For a discussion of the particular significance of Josian’s virginity, see Corinne Saunders, “Gender,

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Virtue and Wisdom in Sir Bevis of Hampton,” in Fellows and Djordjevic, ed., Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, 162. There is an extensive literature on the subject of courtly love. The classic account in English still remains C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially 1–54. The first of the four characteristics of the courtly lover that Lewis enumerates is “Humility” (Lewis, Allegory of Love, 2). Josian disparages Bevis’ parentage when she calls him a “cherl” (line 1117), which The Middle English Dictionary defines as a “bondsman, serf, villein, peasant; servant.” According to the Middle English Dictionary, the term was frequently used “as a term of contempt or abuse.” Bevis’ lack of moral refinement has prompted Derek Brewer to identify him more as a popular folk hero than a chivalric knight. See Brewer, “The Popular English Metrical Romances,” in A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 48. My discussion of this narrative episode is indebted to the reading of Sir Bevis of Hampton in Siobhain Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity:  The Auchinleck Manuscript (New  York and London:  Routledge, 2005), 76–7. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, a number of critics have argued that the representation of Islam in the literature of the Middle Ages should be understood as an Orientalist fantasy that reflects medieval Western fears and prejudices about the religion and culture of the East, rather than the lived religious experience of Eastern peoples themselves. Hence, in Bevis of Hampton, Joisan and her “Saracen” co-religionists are presented not as monotheistic adherents to one of the three Abrahamic religions, but as polytheistic pagans who worship the false idols “Mahound,” “Apollyon,” and “Termagant.” See, for instance, Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity, 1–4; Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 209–10; and Norman Daniel, Heroes and Saracens:  An Interpretation of the Chansons de Geste (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 1–20. See also the notes to lines 531, 558, and 1380 in Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury’s edition. Crane, Insular Romance, 105. For traditional Catholic teaching on this question (which finds its classic formulation in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae), see Paul Badham, “Do Animals Have Immortal Souls?” in Animals on the Agenda:  Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamomoto (London: SCM Press, 1998), 181–2. See also Petroc and Eldred Wiley’s essay in the same volume, “Will Animals be Redeemed?” 190–200. Raluca Radulescu has explored the extent to which chivalric ideas  – and the ideology of knighthood that underpins and informs romance more generally  – are compatible with religious orthodoxy. See Radulescu, “How Christian Is Chivalry,” in Christianity and Romance in Medieval England, ed. Field, Hardman, and Sweeney, 69–83.

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Lions, Mice, and Learning from Animals in Henryson’s Fables Gillian Rudd

It can be no surprise that a volume dedicated to animals in the literary field should include a chapter on fables, for fables continue to be one of the places where we as young humans make our earliest encounters with animals in literature, soon appreciating that animals in books do very different things from animals in real life. More likely than not, they are also very different animals from those we physically encounter in our own lives, whether as companions, workers, or the food on our plate. Few of us are like Aquinas and have a lion as our study mate, and even Aquinas’ lion did not talk, or at least not as far as we know. Talking is of course a hallmark of a fabular beast, as is a capacity for reason and a tendency to moralize aloud. These attributes make it easy for readers to forget the animal actuality of the characters in these simple stories and read them as at best common metaphors and at worst, people. The fact that the fable genre carries the expectation of a moral that translates both the action of the story and the protagonists into human terms and types only encourages this habit of overlooking the animals and animal world within the text in favor of the humans who put them there. The expected relation between human and animal is thus that the animal will be subsumed into the human world as it fulfills its apparent function of being a vehicle for human understanding. This expectation is further compounded by the common assumption that the education conducted through animal fables will be a straightforward one, with humans learning from animals in a very direct way, that is, through example. Fables present animal characters acting in particular ways in given scenarios; we see the outcome and, in light of that, judge the wisdom or folly of their actions; from that we decide which of the animals we should emulate, if any. The animals themselves are not credited with complex or deep emotions, instead, events unfold as they do because they rest on a set of behaviors or relations that humans have already associated with the animals concerned. These may spring from observed fact – cocks crowing, cats catching mice, 88

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or foxes working out how to get into chicken enclosures – or they may be more emblematic: cocks are vain, foxes sly, lions brave, mice timid. Once such traits are identified they quickly become defining attributes, meaning we cannot help but see the actual animal through them, or, more precisely, fail to see the actual animal because of them. A  circular relationship is thus established whereby we learn about morals by learning about animals and their metaphorical significance; we then re-play those metaphors onto the real-world counterparts so strongly that a fox cannot trot across a field without being suspected of nefarious intent. This is a step beyond characterizing the medieval worldview as one in which the natural world and the animal life within were regarded as a book of allegories, written by God to instruct humans, and takes us to the position where, as Joyce Salisbury puts it, “images of animals in the exemplar literature imposed a value on real animals.”1 This process continues to underpin much of our human/animal relations today, ensuring that fables convey more than moral lessons alone. At the same time as transmitting social values, fables train us to read figurative literature by encouraging us to look through the surface to an underlying metaphorical meaning. Recently we have begun to re-assess this response and to value more the material world reflected in that surface text. It is that shift in interpretive focus that has led to the kind of insight expressed by Salisbury and makes fables a richer genre for literary study than their simplicity and familiarity may lead us to expect. If it is unsurprising to find fables discussed under the heading of animals in literature, it ought to be equally unsurprising, and it is to be hoped, equally apt, to find that discussion taking Robert Henryson as its main focus. Writing in the second half of the fifteenth century, Henryson remains an elusive figure, chiefly known for being a schoolmaster and a moralist, facts that, as Hugh MacDiarmid remarked, “were against him” in the 1920s. But Henryson also had his champions, including M.  M. Grey, who asserted his “genial humour” and “power of giving very real and animated representation to every day things, as in The Fables.”2 Despite that unthinking categorization of animals as “every day things,” the concept of “animated representation” is appropriate for the current re-appraisal of the way animals function in literary texts. It suggests a degree of autonomy denied by purely metaphorical interpretations, freeing animals from being solely vehicles for moral instruction and hinting at an interest in narrative force and entertainment. The co-existence of the desire to instruct and the desire to entertain is made visible in Henryson’s prologue to the fable of “The Lion and the Mouse.” Here a world-weary (and surprisingly gentrified) Aesop questions the value of telling stories in a world where preaching

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has no effect: “For quhat is it worth to tell ane fenyeit taill / Quhen haly preiching may nathing availl?”3 For Felicity Riddy and Priscilla Bawcutt these lines and others like them typify Henryson’s unease about his gift for narrative, but if so, it is notable that in this particular example the answer to Aesop’s defeated cry of “what’s the point?” comes from Henryson himself, whose response narrows the scope from all fiction, with its latent associations of deception (“fenyeit taill”), to the genre of animal fables, which offers the chance of the reader taking away some moral lesson almost unawares: “Quha wait nor I may leir and beir away / Sum thing thairby heirefter may availl?” (1402–3). Henryson helpfully summarizes the combination of expectations and attitudes invoked when we read animals in fables in the first stanza of “The Cock and the Fox”: Thocht brutall beistis be irrationall, That is to say, wantand discretioun, Yit ilkane in thair kyndis naturall Hes mony divers inclinatioun: The bair busteous, the wolf, the wylde lyoun, The fox fenyeit, craftie and cautelows, The dog to bark on nicht and keip the hows.

(397–403)

He begins by reminding us that the reason beasts are “brutal” is that they are unable to discriminate and thus lack the kind of moral understanding of their own behavior that could lead to judgment. Immediately following on this sweeping and thoroughly anthropocentric assertion is a reminder that each species has its own particular natural inclination or instinct, which, as the use of “though” and “yet” indicates, acts as a counterpart to human judgment. The brief list of examples that follows does more than simply rehearse the associations found in fables; it also illustrates that some animals are regarded as more complex than others. Thus the lion is simply “wild” and the wolf gets no epithet at all, as if being a wolf speaks for itself. The fox is, as we would expect, deceptive (fenyeit), crafty, and cunning (cautelows), but the bear appears to be the least knowable, signaled by the use of the adjective “busteous,” a word that Henry Wood in his 1933 edition noted was “an epithet of very wide application” but that encompasses strength, sturdiness, ferocity, and bravery, among other things.4 The most domesticated beast is of course the dog, who barks at night and guards the house. The dog’s position as fully absorbed into the human world is subtly indicated by the fact that his “natural inclination” is less a character attribute than a social function. True, a dog’s natural inclination is to bark at danger, and the role of guard dog makes use of this, but

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the shift from the simple adjectival epithets applied to other animals to the full clause describing what the dog does indicates the closer relationship that exists between humans and dogs than between humans and any of the other animals in this list. We will see this close association in action in the discussion of a couple of Henryson’s Fables that follows. The views expressed in this introductory stanza are not particularly original to Henryson. Rather, they function to set out the rules we subconsciously follow when reading fables, and indeed when thinking about animals more generally. Many of the associations of particular traits with specific species found expression in Isidore of Seville’s magnificent encyclopaedic Etymologies (compiled between 615 and the mid 630s), the popularity of which contributed to the further dissemination of the set of what-everyone-knows about animals. Isidore’s influence may indeed be perceived right at the start of Henryson’s tale here, as the Etymologies tells us: “The term ‘beast,’ properly speaking, includes lions, panthers, tigers, wolves, foxes, dogs, apes and other animals that attack each other either with their mouth or their claws, excepting serpents.”5 We can thus see that Henryson’s examples of the natural inclinations found in animals reflect the concept of what a “beast” is set out by Isidore. Isidore himself drew on a variety of sources for his work, and in his turn became one of the sources that fed into such popular works as bestiaries and the Physiologus, which, in the twelfth century, underwent a change in presentation so that the list of beasts within it reflected the order used by Isidore in Book XII of the Etymologies, on animals.6 The point here is not one of literary influence (important as that is) but of the pervasiveness of the assumptions about, and attitudes towards, specific species that inform fables and natural history in equal measure and, therefore, more subtly but no less powerfully, our continuing treatment of animals both in life and in literature today. The fable of “The Cock and the Fox” provides a ready example. This tale most obviously conveys the dangers that come with vanity as we hear of a cock whose pride in his voice allows him to be tricked into closing his eyes as he crows, thus making it easy for the flattering fox to snatch him. The fox is then tricked in his turn when he is encouraged to believe that he can talk his way out of being hunted down by pursuing dogs. As is often the case with fables, the protagonists bemoan their own folly; in this case Chantecleir, the cockerel, admits he was “unwyse” (579) while the fox comments that he was more fool for not remaining quiet rather than speaking (581–2). Significantly, neither reproaches himself for the moral failing he is taken to represent. The cock makes no mention of vanity, only of the folly of doing what the fox asked and closing his eyes, while

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the fox regrets only that he opened his mouth to speak, not that he tricked Chantecleir into being his prey in the first place. The animals are thus led to regret the consequences of what they are, but are not expected to understand why they are that way or required to change in any way. The genre cannot permit such change, since in order for fables and stories like them to work, cocks must be eternally vain, foxes eternally cunning, and both open to being tricked. Henryson draws attention to the figurative nature of the story twice over, first by inviting us to “suppose” (586) it is a fable and then by describing it as heaped with figural symbols:  “overheillit with typis figurall” (587). “Overheillit” here suggests almost over-burdened; as the fable as a genre is already figurative, so to add extra figurative tropes seems otiose. Despite any such indication of over-embroidered metaphor, Henryson goes on to offer a fairly simple interpretation of the story in which the cock represents people who take too much pride in their family and connections, while the fox represents those who delight in flattering and misleading others. He leaves it to the attentive reader to note that predator and prey share a besetting failure: pride in their voice, whether its loudness or persuasiveness. So perhaps there is an additional lesson here, too: that we are most vulnerable to attack from those who share our own weaknesses. The reminder that fables are figural is also a reminder of the familiarity of the genre, its world, and its rules. Among these last is the principle that animals talk to each other only when there are no conscious humans present. “The Cock and the Fox” offers a case in point, for only when the widow who owns the chickens has fainted dead away at the realization that the fox has made off with her prime cockerel are the three hens able to talk among themselves (493–4). Once they have had their say, the widow revives (542). This trope is similar to the one specifying that toys come alive only when no humans are around as witnesses and, similarly, it marks the shift from real to imaginary world in a way that sets aside any need to account for the animals’ sudden acquisition of speech. However, while it seems to be the case that in fables any animals may talk, it is not the case that every animal actually does; nor is every animal able to converse with every other animal even in the same tale. This creates some interesting anomalies and differences between different versions of the same fable, as a brief comparison between Henryson’s “The Cock and the Fox” and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale (which Henryson clearly took as a source) will show. In Henryson, Chantecleir encourages Lowrence (the fox) to tell the pursuing dogs that he and the cock are friends, and have been for a year. This

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carries with it the presumption that the dogs will understand the notion of inter-species friendship and so assume that the fox is simply carrying the bird away for a social visit. This presumption is not explicit in the tale, but without it, Lowrence’s strategy simply will not work. In contrast, Chaucer’s dogs need not understand speech, because his Chauntecleer makes the fox open his mouth not to engage in persuasion, but to boast that he has born his prey safely to the woods where the pursuit has no chance of finding him.7 Unlike the explanation Lowrence is encouraged to offer, this kind of triumphalism does not actually need to be understood. One might even say Chaucer’s fox is being encouraged to crow. Moreover, humans are among those giving chase in Chaucer’s version, so their presence ought to prevent the animals speaking. The fact that Chaunticleer is able to talk to Russell may therefore indicate some considerable distance between them and the pursuit, although since the narrative refers to them as “this cok” and “the fox” (3405) rather than by name, the distance may not be all that great. This may seem a tendentious point, but it serves to show how deeply embedded some of the conventions of fables are. Henryson’s reference to the “overhaullit” nature of figurative meaning in fables thus applies to the detail of plot device as well as the richness of symbolic interpretation. Likewise, Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest urges his listeners to take “the moralite” while also admitting that many will want to treat his tale as simple entertainment, “a folye” (3438, 3440). For all their apparent directness, fables open the way to a variety of responses, including ones that seem to buck the moral intent entirely, in this case by noting that the apparently foolish and vain cock nevertheless has the wit to talk his way out of danger. Such a reading may take the chaff of narrative entertainment in preference to the grain of moral instruction, but it celebrates our own ability to read fables in the way we are led to believe they ought to be read, that is as stories ostensibly about animals, but really about humans. This in turn reveals one of the most deep-rooted assumptions about ourselves: that humans are not animals, or if so, they are very advanced animals. That advanced status is manifested in our ability to reason, not just react, and that in turn means we admire animals according to how clever they appear to be to us. Such truisms scarcely need rehearsing, but we do well to remind ourselves of them from time to time and, in the case of the tale of the cock and the fox, to admit that we really blame the fox for being stupid enough to fall for a version of his own trick, rather than for making off with a bird. Equally, the cock deserves to fly free because he has proved to be the more quick-witted of the two. The dominant value system here is thus revealed to be grounded on intelligence rather than

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moral probity. The paradox that leads us to admire the fox even as we label him a villain is thus resolved in a series of ways: first by depicting his type of intelligence as deceitful craftiness (which must be denigrated), rather than straightforward cleverness (which must be admired), then by presenting him as due punishment for the cockerel’s pomp, and finally by seeing him out-witted. Significantly, in neither version does the fox get caught by the hounds. Instead the story ends with the cock flying back to his roost and the fox thwarted but alive, leaving the honors for intelligence finely balanced between the two. If such balance is true of cock and fox it may reflect the fact that these animals occupy similar positions with regard to the human world. As a domesticated animal, the cock is obviously entirely within the human domain and is even housed within the compounds of a human dwelling, since the henhouse is evidently close to the widow’s house. In contrast, the fox is a known intruder into this space, one who, according to Henryson, regularly steals poultry (422–3). The widow seems unable to stop him, despite a thorny thicket surrounding the coop (419), which affords the fox cover rather than preventing his entry. In the world of the tale this fox is a frequent visitor, just as foxes remain familiar but wild animals who intrude into human domains today, allowing us to check our own current reactions to actual cocks and foxes against the associations elicited by fables. We cannot help but interpret a cockerel’s physical drawing up of his throat to crow with the kind of drawing up we humans do when about to sing, declaim, or when just feeling particularly pleased with ourselves. The difficulty here lies in knowing how much of what we see is the result of observation alone and how much is projection of responses learnt from stories. Probably it is impossible to disentangle the two since, as Isidore demonstrates, we identify an animal partly by matching what we see against a set of already encoded assumptions and values. Thus he explains the term vulpes (fox) as deriving from volupes, which expresses the animal’s light-footedness, “for they are ‘shifty on their feet’ (volubilis+pes) and never follow a straight path but hurry along tortuous twistings” (Etymologies XII. ii.29.253). It is hard to lose those shifty associations, especially when, as here, the description of the animal’s bearing is both accurate and vivid. Thus we look for evidence of the clever trickster in our encounters with foxes, but are less likely to seek out evidence of cunning in a chicken. Such an attitude may be something of an injustice to chickens, but our conviction of their stupidity and the high value we give to intelligence together help explain the tension between the moral most readers expect and the one Henryson actually gives in the first of his Fables, “The Cock and

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the Jasp.” In this tale, a cockerel happens upon a precious stone, the jasper, while scratching around a dungheap in quest of food. Unusually, there is no other animal in this story, so we are treated to the cock’s soliloquy, which is prompted by this find. In this case, the bird reveals a full knowledge of human value systems, as he acknowledges the monetary value of the jewel (“worth sa mekill gold” [84]) but also remarks that it is totally useless to him. He would rather scratch in the dirt in hope of finding some corn to fill his belly than extol the virtues of an inedible stone. Disquisition over, the bird goes his way, bidding the gem rise to find its proper place in some king’s crown and remarking that it offers no gain to him, just as he offers none to it (108–12). It is hard to quibble with this bird’s logic – the jasper is indeed of high value as a gem, but useless as a foodstuff – and so we might expect the moral to be that we all should reject worldly wealth as hollow and empty of nourishment, turning our attention instead to the real needs of this world. Such is not the conclusion we are urged to draw, however. Rather the cock is shown to be an ignoramus who rejects knowledge in favor of base, physical needs. For casual readers today this seems a particularly arcane reading, resting as it does on the seven virtues attributed to jasper in particular and on a wider metaphor of the stone as a symbol of spiritual wisdom.8 Once apprised of this knowledge, we are able to make sense of the moral Henryson offers, and thus also stop falling into this cockerel’s error, but the fact remains that in the world of the fable itself, the cock has done the right thing. It might not have harmed him to swallow the stone, but it would not have done him any good either, beyond, perhaps, contributing to the necessary grit in his crop. The tension between the cock as the vehicle for the fable’s moral and as a realistic animal protagonist encapsulates a central paradox of fables, which is also central to their function, namely that animals within the fabular world operate within human value systems at the same time as exemplifying behavior appropriate to the animal world in general, or to a specific species. Thus we accept without comment that the realistic bird that scratches on a dungheap will, upon coming across a bit of stone, embark upon a discourse prefaced by a summary of the various ways humans regard such stone. Monetary worth, social and aesthetic value, and lapidary knowledge all figure in the five stanzas that make up this cock’s disquisition upon the jasp, but no sooner are such aspects mentioned than they are set aside and we are reminded that the speaker is a bird scraping with its feet for food: “I had lever ga skraip heir with my naillis” (92). This blurring of, and insistence upon, the divide between human and animal world is necessarily at the heart of fables. This allows animals to

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be vehicles of moral instruction or social satire, but it also ensures that they reflect the attitudes and concerns prevailing at the time of a work’s composition. Joyce Salisbury has pointed out how the choice of animal participants in the twelfth-century fables of Marie de France and Odo de Cheriton reflect their respective priorities and milieus.9 As Salisbury demonstrates, Marie favours predators as protagonists. Proportionally more of her tales are populated by noble and courtly beasts, such as eagles or lions, than those of her main sources (Phaedrus and Babrius), which strike a more or less equal balance between animals associated with nobility and those deemed common, such as oxen, dogs, or donkeys. Odo, in comparison, tells tales featuring a wider range of animal species, including tortoises, toads, ravens, and doves, as well as dogs, horses, and goats. However, although Odo may seem to work within a world of animals his audience was likely to encounter in the flesh, his protagonists are in many ways no more part of the real world than Marie’s. Both draw so fully on a literary tradition to convey social messages of right behavior, whether of courtiers or churchmen, that the real-world relations between the humans hearing the tales and the animals featured within them are more or less completely ignored. Dogs in these fables are thus by and large despised as stupid or cowardly, despite being central to the lives of many among the audience, whether as hunting animals, guard dogs, or simply companions. This is in sharp contrast to the detailed knowledge of dogs presented in Gaston de Foix’s Livre de Chasse (1387–9) or Edward of Norwich’s translation of it, The Master of the Game (1406–13), both of which were widely read. Here, owners are expected to understand the needs and special natures of individual types of hound, including the best way to kennel them and how to recognize and treat sicknesses. For example, Edward recommends placing six small stones covered in straw in the kennels, “that the hounds might piss against them.”10 Such detail shows real attention to the habits of the actual animals, as well as concern for their welfare. Salisbury further points out how Marie removes ambiguities within the social hierarchy of her beasts. For her, lions, like eagles, are never hunted, but are unassailed kings ruling by right of force and noble presence rather than by dint of cleverness or wit.11 She is thus selective in what she transmits of the bestiary or Physiologus tradition. While Henryson does not follow the predator/prey hierarchy in the order of his Fables, he does retain the broader aspects of the lion tradition. Thus his Lion is king of the beasts, and in his fable of “The Lion and the Mouse,” also solitary. However he is both predator and prey, a fact crucial to the unfolding of the story.

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Henryson’s “Lion and Mouse” is a dream vision as well as a fable, two established genres folded into each other, layering the concept of dreams as revelation of hidden truths with the moral teaching associated with fables. The Prologue to the fable opens with the familiar trope of the poet-persona wandering in a landscape until falling asleep. He dreams he is approached by a figure who identifies himself as Aesop, although a modern reader would be forgiven for not guessing this, given that he is well-dressed and carries an expensive swan-feather pen, inkhorn, gilded pen-holder, and silken bag, as well as a roll of paper. In short, this gentleman-scholar is a far cry from the illiterate Phoenician slave we might expect him to be. He is also conscious of his role as moral instructor, describing his work as well known to learned clerks (1375–6) and lamenting that so few are devoted to God’s teaching (1392). This sense of the hopelessness of the task leads him to demur at first from telling a story, although he is soon persuaded. All this sets up the tale that follows as very clearly a moral fable, with the added gravitas of being told by Aesop himself. The story itself is simple enough: a lion dozing in the sun is run across and played over by a group of mice. He wakes, irritated, and catches one, who pleads for her life on the grounds that the mice meant no harm, and indeed assumed the lion was dead, otherwise they would never have danced over him as they did. This only enrages the lion, who rather pompously declares that even if he had been a straw dummy, they ought to be so in awe of him that they would pay their respects regardless: the mouse must hang for treason. At this, the mouse switches tone and appeals to the lion’s nobility: he should bear in mind the obligation for a king to be merciful; moreover, it is demeaning for a noble beast like a lion to stoop to such insignificant prey; finally who knows when he might be in need of the kind of help only the small and insignificant may offer? There are several elements here that show the links between animals in fables and those in the accounts of them found in Isidore’s Etymologies. The most obvious is that the lion is assumed to be king of the beasts, a view so deeply accepted that it leads to a rather pleasing circularity typical of the Etymologies: the term “leo” is Greek, “And the Greek word leo is translated as ‘king’ in Latin because he is the ruler of all the beasts” (XII.i.6.ii.3.251). We are told there are three types of lion and that they never hurt a human unless they are starving; moreover, they are incapable of becoming angry with humans unless hurt. In all they are tender-hearted beasts, sparing those who lie prone, and allowing captives to return home. It is this last quality the mouse seems to invoke in her second attempt at pleading

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for mercy, and luckily for her it works. Had she read the full entry, she and her fellows might not have been quite so carefree in their play, as Isidore also tells us, “Even when they are sleeping their eyes are watchful” (XII .i.6.ii.5.251)  – although perhaps the very fact that this lion was evidently not watchful gives some support to her claim that they assumed him dead. Perhaps Henryson’s mice were relying on The Middle English Physiologus for their information. Although it is more specific on the matter of sleeping lions not closing their eyes (“ðanne he lieð to slepen, / Sal he neure luken ðe lides of hise eȝen” [12–13]), it fails to mention their continually alert state. Fortunately, the mouse knows her bestiary lore enough to know that mouse meat is considered poisonous to lions, calling it “contagious” and “unhailsum” to strong lions, especially those accustomed to venison (1492–5). In fact the bestiaries tell us that “We call certain very small creatures lion-killers” because their meat poisons lions and as a consequence, lions hunt but do not eat such creatures, preferring to kill them by stamping on them,12 which may account for this lion not immediately consuming what would appear to be a very handy snack. Finally, the mouse appeals to their respective metaphorical roles and the code of conduct they embody by reminding the lion that the mighty should take pity on the weak, as an act of mercy but also of canny governance, as who knows when the powerful may need the help of the powerless? We can be in little doubt over the likely subsequent events: we know that the lion must find himself in difficulties and that the mouse will extricate him, as indeed proves to be the case when the lion is caught in a net and the mouse and her fellows gnaw through it to set him free. The lion has been driven into the ropes by a group of hunters and their dogs, intent on trapping the lion to prevent him harrying their livestock, a key detail of hunting practice that shows the lion as prey, and also picks up the lion’s very anthropomorphic threat of hanging the mouse for treason (1460). Upon finding himself trapped, the lion is initially fully animal, unable to free himself and roaring in distress (“Welterand about with hiddeous rummissing” [1524]). Significantly, it is only when he ceases to roar and reverts to speech that the mouse hears him, recognizes his voice, and comes to his aid. The story thus leaves the reality in which villagers come together to deal with a lion who harries their livestock, and returns to the fabular world in which lions are king and mice will pay a debt of honor. As the story shifts from one mode to the other the hunters and their dogs melt away, much as they do in “The Cock and the Fox,” leaving unsolved the

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question of how the mice have time to gnaw through what must be quite substantial ropes, or the fox time to attempt wheedling the cock down from the tree, before the hounds are upon them. The fact that neither lion nor fox is caught is due to the focus of their respective fables, which lose interest in elements once they have served their purpose, but the lack of a gory end also allows each tale to be regarded as a “prettie fabill” (1386) of the kind the dreaming Henryson requests of Aesop in the Prologue to “The Lion and the Mouse.” Neat tales lead naturally to good moral interpretations, it is implied, and of course Aesop complies with the request, concluding “The Lion and the Mouse” with clear, if politically careful, explanations of the allegory: lazy monarchs give rise to reckless subjects; merciful acts encourage others to act mercifully; who knows how or when the mighty may be overthrown by ill-luck and be in need of help; men who are harried will seek out ways to get equal. The string of interpretations elaborates on the simpler moral offered at the end of the tale proper, which is that the lion is freed by little beasts because he had pity. As with “The Cock and the Jasp,” we may feel this fable is rather overwhelmed by the morality heaped upon it, but there is another element tucked away in the fabric of the fable that reveals something more about the way we think of the nonhuman world. That element comes towards the end of the description of the landscape in this fable’s prologue. As mentioned above, it is a typical dream-vision setting: birds sing, flowers bloom, the sun shines, and the smells are remarked upon as contending with the song of the birds over which should dominate (“Contending quha suld have the victory” [1341]). This contest proves interesting, as it indicates our human habit of distinguishing between flora and fauna and the conflict that exists over where we place ourselves in relation to the two. Since we are animals we ought to align ourselves with fauna, but our apparent need to distance ourselves from other animal species makes that an uncomfortable allegiance, eliciting careful statements about rational ability and the way fables are explained as offering simplified ways of exploring moral behavior through inferior species. If we live by the dichotomy implied by the stated rivalry between flowers and birds, we must conclude we are more at home surrounded by vegetation than by animals. In this case, the appealing image of the poet stretched out in the shade among the flowers under a hawthorn (1342–5) is more than an ideal description of a summer’s day; it is also a tacit indication that in the contest between song and scent, the plants have won over the birds. Such a conclusion cannot be conscious, and may not be right, but the posited connection between the human and

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plant worlds carries on in the image of rot used by Aesop as he despairs of the use of telling stories about animals: Now in this warld me think richt few or nane To Goddis word that hes devotioun. The eir is deif, the hart is hard as stane, Now oppin sin without correctioun, The e inclynand to the eirth ay doun, Sa roustit is the warld with canker blak That now my taillis may lytill succour mak.

(1391–7)

[Now I think there are very few or none in this world who are dedicated to God’s word. The ear is deaf, the heart as hard as stone, now sin is open, without correction, the eye always cast downwards to the earth, the world is so rotted by black canker that now my tales can be of little help.]

The image of cankerous decay is deliberately disturbing – no sense of the rotting down beloved of good compost makers here. Rather a prevailing focus downwards on the earth leads to being closed off from all that ought to command our attention. Clearly the contrast is between earthly and heavenly matters, but the language also betrays a sense that too close an association with the vegetative world can lead only to putrid decay. If our human focus is on the plant world, tales about animals will not help us, however pretty they may be and, as we have seen, that moment of despair is alleviated by the requests for a story of “ane brutall beist” (1400). This replaces the dichotomy of flora versus fauna with the safer one of rational versus irrational animal – human and beast – from which we are trained to learn. It is on that premise that Aesop consents to continue, but in doing so Henryson implies that while we readily learn from animals, we resist learning from plants. Fables and encyclopedia entries, such as Isidore’s or those of the Physiologus, purport to show us real animals in the real world while encouraging us to read both animal and habitat symbolically. These animals may exist absolutely in their own terms, but are visible to humans due to their metaphorical value. Now, in the twenty-first century, the challenge is to reverse that process and overturn generations of value system created by this habit of reading animals rather than seeking to get to know them. We must stop valuing the metaphorical over the actual. Or so it seems at first. In fact, however, the perpetual appeal of fables may suggest that rather than attempting to replace one value system with another (comprehension of the metaphorical with appreciation of the real) we would get further by embracing the richness of this apparently simple and simplistic genre. Fables reveal not only how we

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are taught to think about, with, and through animals, but also how we see those animals. More, they have shown us what human groups value, and the paradoxes surrounding those values. A cock who delivers a disquisition on the hollow value of a gemstone may symbolize the ignorant and spiritually impoverished who turn away from high concepts as incomprehensible and irrelevant, but at the same time who will gainsay the pragmatic knowledge of a bird who knows that a jewel, however precious to a different species (in whose language he just happens to be fluent), is worthless to him. A stone is a stone is a stone, but a worm is a meal.

Notes 1 Joyce E. Salisbury, “Human Animals of Medieval Fables,” in Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 49. Salisbury discusses the theme fully in The Beast Within: Animals and Bestiality in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994). A similar point is made by Hanneke Wirtjes in her discussion of the Physiologus who cites the case of the depiction of the eagle who is credited with deliberately scorching itself by flying too close to the sun, then plunging into the sea in order to emerge rejuvenated. See Hanneke Wirtjes, ed., The Middle English “Physiologus,” Early English Text Society 299 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), lxxi. 2 Robert Henryson, Henryson:  Selected by Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Hugh MacDiarmid (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1973), 8.  In his introduction to a selection of Henryson’s poetry in Penguin’s Poet to Poet series, MacDiarmid provides an overview of Henryson’s reputation and standing specifically as a Scottish poet. 3 Robert Henryson, Fables, in The Complete Works, ed. David J.  Parkinson (TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, Kalamazoo, MI:  Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), lines 1389–90. All references to Henryson’s Fables will be to this edition and cited parenthetically by line number in the text. 4 The Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson, Schoolmaster of Dunfermline, ed. H. Harvey Wood (1933, repr. Edinburgh: the Mercat Press 1978), 225, n8. 5 Book XII Animals (De Animalibus), ii. Beasts in The “Etymologies’ ” of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 251. Subsequent references to this work will be cited by book, section, and page number parenthetically in the text. 6 Hanneke Wirtjes, ed., The Middle English “Physiologus,” lxxiii. 7 See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, VII. 3405–13, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry Benson et  al. (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008). All citations will be to this edition and provided in parentheses in the text. 8 As Parkinson points out, Henryson’s account of the seven virtues of jasper seems to reference the popular medieval encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus. Isidore, in contrast, is rather dismissive of it.

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9 Salisbury, “Human Animals of Medieval Fables,” 49–65. 10 Edward of Norwich, The Master of the Game, ed. William A. Baillie-Grohman and F. N. Baille-Grohman (1909, rpt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 125. 11 Salisbury, “Human Animals of Medieval Fables,” 52–3. 12 See Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Bodley 764, trans. Richard Barber (London, The Folio Society, 1992), 26.

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CH APTER  6

Animals, the Devil, and the Sacred in Early Modern English Culture Molly Hand

Stories of animal familiars abound in the literature of English witchcraft, both in prose pamphlets and in drama. Familiars, often referred to as “spirits in the shape of ” or “in the likeness of ” certain animals, occupy a central place in early modern demonological discourse. Proffered as narrative evidence but absent from trials, debated among demonologists, suggesting to modern readers embodiments of the devil as well as domestic pets,1 committing acts of violence on human and fellow nonhuman animals, kept in cozy baskets and offered food and drink (warm milk, cake, and in more lurid tales, blood), animal familiars merit careful consideration in the investigation of animals and animality in early modern culture. In what follows, I examine the familiar by way of witchcraft accounts as well as drama, including Rowley, Dekker, and Ford’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621) and Middleton’s The Witch (1616), to consider how this unique phenomenon took shape in the literature of the time period. Early moderns’ relationships with animals were complicated. Familiars further complicate matters. This chapter explores how that is so and highlights crucial implications of this rich topic to animality studies as well as early modern cultural studies. Historical studies of English witchcraft have long recognized the special place of the animal familiar within the early modern context. Keith Thomas refers to the “peculiarly English notion that the witch was likely to possess a familiar imp or devil, who would take the shape of an animal, usually a cat or dog.”2 “Familiars,” Clive Holmes tells us, “the creatures kept by the witch … and employed to execute her designs, are a phenomenon virtually unique to the English form of witchcraft.”3 James Sharpe echoes the sentiment:  “although it is clear that witchcraft in England is best understood in the light of a broader European context, witchcraft there, as in any other region in the period, had its peculiar characteristics. Perhaps the most striking of these is the presence of familiar spirits.”4 Orna Alyagon Darr concurs that familiars “were a distinct English cultural 105

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concept.”5 But for all this recognition of the familiar’s peculiarity, the phenomenon has been the subject of more historical than literary investigation, and the former is, itself, a limited body of work. Acknowledging the need for further inquiry, Sharpe comments that “one element in any future research into familiars must be an analysis of early modern attitudes to animals, and of the relationship between the human and animal worlds.”6 This chapter responds to Sharpe’s call to situate familiars in the context of early modern “thinking with animals” and human–animal relationships. Building on Stuart Clark’s observation that early modern habits of mind expressed and were informed by a profound belief in the devil and the reality of demonic forces in the world,7 it offers further insight into the complexities of early modern human–animal relationships as well as the development of “familiar” characters in early modern literature. To read animal familiars as signifying in animal and spiritual realms reinforces certain things we already understand about early modern culture:  that animals were freighted symbols; that early modern habits of mind were above all religious; that religious patterns of thought composed a semiotic cultural fabric in which much signified along a spectrum of the sacred; that, even as the force of what Clark refers to as “thinking with demons” cannot be underestimated, it coalesced with and was informed by other vectors of thought, including “thinking with animals.” In addition, the study of animal familiars also demonstrates the centrality of animals to specific cultural discourses  – witchcraft, demonology, magic  – around which studies more frequently tend toward the anthropocentric. For early moderns, I argue, an animal familiar was both an animal and a demon that was good to think with. Situating the demonic in the context of Western philosophy and literary representation, Ewan Fernie contemplates the paradox of evil, the elements of the demonic that make it not just attractive but necessary as a creative and aesthetic force. “The demonic is evil, for sure, in its violent hostility to being. And yet, it involves a potential for creativity over against what merely is, which is something other than evil – and indeed, if we are to pay heed to contemporary philosophy and culture, may be a central component of the Good.”8 Along these lines, Terry Eagleton considers, Evil … is a form of transcendence, even if from the point-of-view of good it is a transcendence gone awry … Maybe all that survives of God is this negative trace of him known as wickedness, rather as all that may survive of some great symphony is the silence which it imprints on the air … Perhaps evil is all that now keeps warm the space where God used to be.9

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Early modern English culture displays a particular fascination with evil in just this way; in fact, while Eagleton is thinking in a post-World War II context, it seems entirely possible, and appropriate, to read the demonic as a sacred “space where God used to be” in early modern literature. As John D. Cox elaborates, this is one way to read representations of the devil in early modern drama.10 I suggest familiars form a special case of an animal body as a site of the demonic and/as sacred. The divine is recognized in its absence and its opposite. “No devil, no god” (as well as the homophonous imperative it implies, “know devil, know God”) best sums up Renaissance thinking on the virtue of the demonic. This was not simply rhetoric. Understanding the devil in all his forms, studying the myriad ways in which the Enemy assailed the creaturely world, was not a discrete activity taken up by select demonologists – quite the contrary, as Stuart Clark’s work thoroughly illustrates. Exploring witchcraft theory in early modern culture as “an intellectual resource,” Clark places demonology within a larger framework of semiotic discourse and intellectual history. In early modern thought, opposition was an organizing principle and signifying practice; the argument from contraries, a crucial pattern in early modern thought and debate, locates witchcraft as an inversion of Christian belief and practices. Above all, to understand the literature of witchcraft broadly, and the special place of the familiar specifically, it must be clear that for early moderns the devil was not just a concept: “The battle with Satan and his hierarchy of demons was … a literal reality for most devout Englishmen.”11 The devil was let loose in the world to tempt and plague fallen human beings, but he was also there in his capacity as “God’s hangman,” an agent of divine retribution. And in this latter capacity, too, the animal familiar has a special status as an embodiment of the sacred in the literature of witchcraft. Much as the discourse of possession casts the possessed human being and his or her community as being tested by the devil – the possession story as conversion narrative and as testament to the godliness of the individual and the community12 – so the phenomenon of the animal familiar suggests the experience of witchcraft was one of an encounter with a spiritual realm that transcended simple bargains with the devil. The early modern providential worldview, which discovered sacred resonance in all manner of natural phenomena, could situate the animal familiar within the broader symbolic framework of a global divine narrative. Yet representations of the devil and of witchcraft remained unstable, and the demonological debate was precisely that: a debate, with people like Reginald Scot and George Gifford (and on the continent, Johann Weyer)

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coming down on the skeptical side, and authorities including James VI/ I and William Perkins (and on the continent, Jean Bodin) promulgating belief. Of the essential instability generating the debate, Clark writes: As a figure of thought … contrariety is inherently ambivalent. It seems to promote order and coherence by fixing meanings in a clear-cut and economical relationship. But by defining contraries in relation to each other it entails a constant and ultimately unresolvable semantic exchange between them. The mind only settles on the meaning of one contrary by confronting the meaning of its partner; whereupon the semantic dependence of the second term on the first becomes just as apparent, and the initial act of understanding is unsettled. In this logical sequence there is neither simultaneity, nor priority, only deferment of meaning. As a consequence, the very feature from which discursive stability is sought works all the time as an agent of instability, with the paradoxical results that, to the extent that the argument a contrariis succeeds, it is also self-destructive.13

Broadly speaking “the demonic” may be thought of as a sign operating in the early modern semiotic structure, but it is a sign both unstable and capacious. As an experience, the demonic indicates both the presence and the absence of its opposite. God tested humans by allowing the devil to assail them; indeed, the godly were more likely to have their faith tested – hence the frequency of possessions among zealous Protestant communities. On the other hand, the felt presence of the demonic in the world at large was a result of the fall; believers felt the profound gravity of this loss, looking forward to a reunion with the divine in the afterlife. In Catholic communities, specific objects and places were loci of the sacred – relics, the church, biblical sites. In post-Reformation England, human – and animal – bodies became sites of demonic and divine possession. In his recent work, Andreas Höfele argues powerfully that the theatre’s family resemblance to animal baiting and the spectacle of punishment bred an ever-ready potential for a transfer of powerfully affective images and meanings. The staging of one of these kinds of performance is always framed by, always grounded in, an awareness of the other two; it always implies their absent presence, a presence never quite erased and sometimes, indeed, emphatically foregrounded.14

To follow Höfele in referring to mutually informing signs at constitutive play in the early modern “semiosphere,”15 I consider the animal, the devil, and the sacred in this framework, focusing on animal bodies as loci for the interplay of the demonic and the divine. In the discussion that follows, I focus first on animal bodies in two prose accounts of witchcraft, and the discussion then turns to dramatic representations of familiars.

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If familiars are so crucial an aspect of early modern demonological discourse, and of early modern “thinking with animals,” then why have they not been the subject of more extensive research? One reason has to be a general skepticism toward a phenomenon now dismissed as superstition. Another is the absence of animal familiars as evidence in trial proceedings. But familiars are so crucial to some of the prose literature that to ignore them entirely as figments of the imagination is to overlook the importance of animals as narrative evidence.16 Familiars were also taken seriously enough in the cultural context to be incorporated into the 1604 Act Against Witchcraft: “if any person or persons … shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit: or shall consult, covenant with, entertaine, imploy, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose,” the convicted person “shall suffer paines of death as a Felon.”17 Because early moderns regarded familiars not just as spirits but as actual animals, current readers would do well to do the same. As Erica Fudge argues, “When we recognize the literal meaning of animals in numerous early modern texts, what emerges is a vast body of literature that is in fact concerned not only with humans but also with animals.”18 Similarly, Karen Raber both demonstrates and calls for emphasis on animal bodies in early modern studies.19 If a reader focuses on animal, rather than human, players in the witchcraft accounts, it becomes clear that, in some cases at least, witchcraft accusations were not really “about” humans at all. W. W.’s A True and Just Recorde (1582), the lengthy witchcraft pamphlet from which Reginald Scot gathered names of familiars for The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) – names that, in turn, made their way into Middleton’s The Witch – serves as an example. If we focus upon the incidents dealing with animal agents and victims, W. W.’s account becomes a startling illustration of the extent to which witchcraft, in this and many cases like it, was an animal crime. In this account, Ursley Kempe (alias Grey), one of several women accused of witchcraft, is said to have four familiars:  Tyttey (a gray cat), Tyffin (a white lamb), Pygine (a black toad), and Jacke (a black cat). She herself confesses to Justice of the Peace Brian Darcy that she has “four spirits, wherof two of them were hees and the other two were shees: the two hee spirites were to punishe and kill unto death, and the other two shees were to punishe with lameness, and other diseases of bodily harme and also to destroy cattell.”20 In this, her first confession, Kempe further confesses to having sent these familiars to torment human neighbors as revenge for offenses against her (“she sent the spirit Jacke to plague [her sister-in-law] for that her sister [-in-law] had called her whore and witche”).21

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A zoocentric reading of the account resists the impulse to dismiss Kempe’s familiars as fictional elements in the narrative. They are described as animals and the text demands that we read them as such. But this and other accounts, again, feature animals not just as agents of witchcraft, but also as victims (of cruelties inflicted both by humans and other animals). James Serpell is correct in observing that familiars almost never inhabit the bodies of livestock,22 but if we turn our attention to animal victims as well as agents, livestock appear to feature prominently as the former. For example, in one of the examinations in the account, the informant John Tendering explains that his neighbor William Byet had a cow that was thought to be bewitched. The cow “had eaten nothing, and was not likely to live, & … he and his servants severall times had lifted at the said cowe to raise her upon her feet, but they could not make her to arise or stand.” In the face of such trouble, Byet’s solution was to “fetch straw, and to lay the same round her: … he himselfe took an Axe, minding to knocke her upon the head, and so to burne her.” But when the fire was lit, “the said Cowe of her selfe start up, and ran her way until it came to a wood stack and there stood still, and fell a byting of stickes, bigger than any mans finger, and after lived and did well.”23 Tendering’s account gives no information about why exactly the cow was thought to be bewitched. Further along in the winding collection of confessions and information, however, another accused, Elizabeth Bennet, confesses that she had a falling out with Byet and his wife: Byet calling her oftentimes olde trot and olde witche, … did banne and curse this examinat and her Cattell, to which this examinat saith, that she called him knave, saying, winde it up Byet for it wil light upon your selfe: and after this falling out this examinat saith, that Byet had three beastes dyed, whereof hee seeing one of them somewhat to droope, he did beat the saide Cowe in such sorte (as this Examinat saith, that she thought the said Cow did die thereof. This examinat saith further, that Byets wife did beate her swine severall times with great Gybets, and did at an other time thrust a pitchforke through the side of one of this examinats swine, the which Durrant a Butcher did buie, and for that when he had dressed it, it proved A  messell, this Examinat saith, she had nothing for it but received it againe, &c.24

Bennet reports having been visited by two familiars: Suckin, a male “being blacke like a Dogge,” and Lierd, a female “being red like a Lyon.”25 Bennet initially refuses the temptation. She prays, the familiars depart, they reappear, she prays again, and so forth. Finally, the familiars try to kill her by throwing her in a fire (or they are tempting her to commit suicide, a

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typical feature of both witchcraft and possession narratives, in which the demonic presence tempts humans to do themselves in). Bennet shows the visible scar from the burn she receives on her arm to the inquisitor Brian Darcy. Later, while Bennet is milking a cow (a red cow with a white face, she specifies),26 Suckin and Lierd return, the latter this time in the shape of a hare, frightening the cow and causing Bennet to spill her pail of milk. The spirits leave her alone after that for another three months at least. Bennet’s narration is disjointed, as Marion Gibson notes; the information that follows turns away from a self-defense (Bennet praying, the spirits departing) and toward a self-incrimination or confession. And the confession hinges on Bennet seeking revenge on the Byets for mistreating her and her animals, for Byet had oftentimes misused her … and her Cattell, she saith, that she caused Lyard [Lierd] in ye likeness of a Lion to goe & plague the saide Byets beastes unto death, and the spirite returning tolde this examinat that it had plagued two of his beastes, the one a red Cow, the other a blacke. And saith that the spirite told her, that hee plagued the blacke Cowe in the backe, and the read [red] Cowe in the head.27

Bennet also relates that Suckin took it upon himself to bewitch Byet’s wife to death, but that she did not command this. The dog Suckin acted of his own accord and “to winne credit with this Examinat,” explaining to Bennet, “I know that Byet and his wife have wronged thee greatly, and done thee severall hurtes, and beaten thy swine, and thrust a pitchforke in one of them.”28 In Bennet’s case, then, her own animals are victims of her neighbors’ cruelty. Her neighbors injure her animals as a semi-licit means of tormenting Bennet herself. Animal bodies form the landscape across which this neighborly dispute is played out. The animal familiars whose “services” Bennet finally accepts wreak vengeance on animal bodies as well as human ones – Byet’s cattle and his wife are lamed and killed. Powerless as property, in the shape of familiars, animals become powerful agents for enacting revenge for wrongs done to fellow animals as well as sympathetic humans. Skeptical modern readers may find it difficult to imagine a lion laming cows in an English pasture or a dog “plaguing” a woman to death, and yet that is exactly what the accounts insist we do. As these passages illustrate, animals are the impetus and the foci of actions and reactions (the belligerent interaction, the retaliatory abuse, the act of revenge) and the foundation upon which accusations and confessions are built.

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Many more examples can be drawn from A true and just Recorde (in part because it is so very long), but I turn now to Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch (1621), upon which The Witch of Edmonton is based. As with A True and Just Recorde, a zoocentric reading of the account brings to the forefront the central role of animal bodies. In the first place, Goodcole, whom we might call a professional crime writer as well as a chaplain at Newgate gaol, describes Sawyer’s pact with a dog and details her reasons for making such a pact, including a desire for revenge against Agnes Ratcleife who “did strike a Sowe of [Sawyer’s] in her sight, for licking up a little Soape where shee had laide it.”29 On her deathbed, the victim confirmed “that if shee did die at that time shee would verily take it on her death, that Elizabeth Sawyer her neighbor, whose Sowe with a washing-Beetle she [Ratcleife herself ] had stricken, and so for that cause her malice being great, was the occasion of her death.”30 Sawyer’s motive, then, is injury to her animal property, and she intends to exact revenge with the help of an animal familiar “on the bodies of Christians and beastes.”31 Just as A True and Just Recorde is primarily about animal bodies as agents and victims, as means of exacting revenge and as reasons for doing so, so Sawyer is motivated by “malice and envy, for if any body had angered me in any manner, I would be so revenged of them, and of their cattell.”32 Asked by Goodcole to elaborate further on the nature of her familiar, Sawyer says he would come to her “always in the shapes of a dogge and of two collars [colors], sometimes of blacke and sometimes of white.”33 She goes on to explain that the dog would sometimes suck her blood, a common feature of human–familiar relationships, and that he would sometime speak to her and sometimes bark, the latter form of communication to confirm that he had carried out the mischief she required. In addition to barking, the dog behaves doggily in other ways. Sawyer explains, “I did stroake him on the backe, and then he would becke unto me, and wagge his tayle as being therewith contented.”34 Goodcole’s narrative insists that Sawyer’s familiar is a devil, referring to him constantly as such. But the dog’s dogginess must have captured readers’ imaginations, including those of Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, who emphasize the companionate relationship between Sawyer and Dog in their play. The playwrights render Dog as a pet, but also as a performing animal, a Mephistophelean devil who helps Elizabeth Sawyer with acts of revenge, and an agent of divine retribution. In Act 5 of The Witch of Edmonton, Dog returns to Sawyer, whom he has been serving as a familiar in exchange for her body and soul, but his coat has changed from black to white, and he comes now to betray her rather

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than to offer her aid. Before the dog materializes, Sawyer is woeful in his absence, “Not see me in three days? / I’m lost without my Tomalin.”35 When Dog appears, Sawyer is confused: Sawyer: Dog: Sawyer: Dog: Sawyer: Dog:

Why dost thou appear to me in white, As if thou wert the ghost of my dear love? I am dogged, list not to tell thee, yet To torment thee. My whiteness puts thee In mind of thy winding sheet. Am I near death? Yes, if the Dog of Hell be near thee. When The Devil comes to thee as a lamb, Have at thy throat. Off, cur. He has the back Of a sheep, but the belly of an otter: Devours by sea and land. Why am I in white? Didst thou not pray to me? (5.1.32–42)

Dog, who was before Sawyer’s only friend and helpmeet – “my dear love” as Sawyer refers to him – now appears as a kind of chimerical Cerberus: a hell hound in the cloak of a lamb; not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but a slippery otter, devouring but also purging the world of evil. Dog is an unusual character, not least in the singularity of the dramatic role: in no other early modern play does an animal character feature so prominently.36 Dog is the glue that binds the disparate plots of this tragicomedy. He is by turns festive and fierce, affectionate and aloof. A protean creature, Dog provides an avenue for exploring the figure of the animal familiar at the intersection of early modern discourses on animals and demonology. Through Dog, animal, devil, and sacred powerfully converge in a dramatic literary representation. Reading The Witch of Edmonton through the lens of Clark’s argument regarding the complex ways in which demonology is woven into the intellectual fabric of early modern English culture, David Nicol emphasizes Dog as the embodiment of evil.37 Nicol’s reading is a useful response to critics who dismiss Dog as an expression of superstition, or even of “silliness,”38 and who thus read as incoherent a play that is really about bigamy, murder, and the complex social fabric of a particular rural community, but a view of Dog strictly as a devil is complicated by a historicized and zoocentric understanding of familiars more broadly. Familiars were not understood as, nor portrayed as, devils per se in earlier (pre-Jacobean) accounts;39 even W.  W.’s True and Just Recorde offers a

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more complex view, with familiars doing harm but also seeking justice, as we have seen. Emma Wilby’s elucidation of the links between English and Scottish fairy beliefs and representations of animal familiars suggests further nuance, as “fairy beliefs played a more significant role in the creation and promulgation of beliefs concerning the stereotypical witch’s familiar than has been hitherto acknowledged.”40 Taking a more global view, Boria Sax observes connections exist among animal familiars in English and European witch literature and figures such as shamanic animal helpers as well as animal mascots of saints and deities. Familiars, Sax suggests, were demonized and ultimately deprived of their spiritual power by the cultural adoption of Descartes’ rationalist philosophy; this deprivation enabled the subjugation and humanization of animals as livestock and pets respectively.41 If we can resist the impulse to cast the familiar strictly as a devil, then an opportunity emerges to read the familiar as a helpful spirit embodied in an animal, one thought to help humans in exchange for food, shelter, and affection (and sometimes for human blood and sex). Certainly some accused witches understood their familiars as such, and even Dog himself, while sometimes appearing as a devil, also appears as a helper and affectionate companion to Sawyer, and as a festive prankster and friend to young Cuddy Banks, to whom he explains, “Dogs love / where they are beloved. Cherish me, / and I’ll do anything for thee” (3.1.120–2). Meg Pearson’s summary of Dog in Witch of Edmonton applies to how we can read familiars in the literature of witchcraft broadly speaking: Tommy the Dog, devilish familiar to Elizabeth Sawyer, exists to destabilize. He rattles the characters within The Witch of Edmonton, unmoors the audience’s expectations, and explodes the mechanics of the witch play genre by representing near total mobility. Dog determines how he will appear, changes his role at will, and wanders in and out of each and every plot in the play.42

Pearson suggests that, by way of Dog, the play presents stasis, the inability to change, as what is truly evil. If Dog is a devil, he is also an “agent of justice.”43 “The play,” Pearson concludes, “encourages a consideration of Dog as an agent of some kind of morality.”44 Dog plays the devil as “God’s Hangman.” But Dog is also the only intimation of a God – the “negative trace” of the divine – in an Edmonton where the divine spirit seems totally absent, a kind of hell on earth, as both Pearson and Cox note,45 which explains the omnipresence of the play’s Cerberus-like lead. By contrast, the cat familiar in Thomas Middleton’s The Witch plays a minor role, but Malkin shares with Dog a propensity to festive and

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spectacular performance. These are animal familiars who like to sing and dance. Dog “fawns and leaps” (2.1.244 s.d.); he “plays the morris” (3.4.51 s.d.); he enters “shrugging as it were for joy, and dances” (4.2.65 s.d.). The cat Malkin plays a fiddle,46 and more spectacularly, descends from the heavens and then rises again, singing with his mistress: Hecate: I will but ‘noint, and then I mount. A spirit like a cat descends. Voice [from offstage or above]: There’s one come down to fetch his dues: A kiss, a coll, a sip of blood – And why stay’st so long [Cat:] I muse, I muse Voice [from offstage or above]: Since the air’s so sweet and good. Hecate [to Cat]: O, art thou come? [Cat:] What news, what news? [Hecate:] All goes still to our delight: Voice [from offstage or above]: Either come, or else [Cat:] Refuse, refuse. Hecate: Now I am furnished for the flight. Firestone [aside]: Hark, Hark, the cat sings a brave treble in her own language. Hecate (going up [with Cat]): Now I go, now I fly, Malkin, my sweet spirit, and I. O, what a dainty pleasure ‘tis To ride in the air When the moon shines fair And sing and dance and toy and kiss!47

Marion O’Connor notes that the lines attributed to Malkin rhyme with a cat’s “mews,” in considering Firestone’s aside – either the cat sings in its own language (O’Connor does observe the gender confusion – Malkin is a he-cat, and the line refers to “her own language”), or it sings in Hecate’s.48 The ability to speak (and sing?) in a human tongue is, after all, one of the powerful distinguishing features of animal familiars. Malkin is hardly threatening in the same way Dog is, and appears only twice in the play. But this is true of the witchcraft plot in general – the play is, in fact, more focused on the sordid drama unfolding at court. Hecate and her coven are deliberately beside the point.49 Yet, of Malkin’s few lines, his inquiry “What news, what news” suggests he participates

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in Hecate’s schemes and is aware of her machinations. Like Dog, Malkin is a companion animal  – a pet who provides Hecate with affection, a creature with whom she can “sing and toy and dance and kiss!” But like Dog he is also a familiar – a spiritual being who has power and agency independent of his mistress and who materializes where and when he pleases, it seems. While The Witch of Edmonton was written and performed within the same year that witnessed the trial of Elizabeth Sawyer and the publication of Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet on the Sawyer case, The Witch, although based on contemporary events as well, does not draw explicitly on a witchcraft proceeding for its witch plot.50 Instead, Middleton invokes Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, which it seems he knew quite well.51 In particular, the names of Hecate’s fellow practitioners of magic come from passages in Scot’s skeptical treatise, which were themselves referring back to earlier witchcraft accounts. As we have seen, Titty and Tiffin, Suckin and Pidgin, Liard and Robin are all names of animal familiars in A True and Just Recorde. Scot also refers to Hoppo and Stadlin, Hellwain and Puckle, mentioned in Krämer and Sprenger’s notorious Malleus Maleficarum, and Middleton borrows these as well. Indeed, some of Hecate’s speeches are lifted nearly verbatim from Scot.52 Why do borrowed names of familiars matter? In some ways, Middleton is simply doing the same as dramatic predecessors like Marlowe and Jonson in incorporating genuine material from other sources to lend the witchcraft of his play authenticity.53 Whereas Witch of Edmonton features Dog’s physical animality as well as his spiritual force, The Witch takes names from the animal familiars they once identified and ascribes them to human characters. Only Malkin serves as an explicit representation of the familiar creatures on which he is based. Witch of Edmonton, then, plays up the significance of the animal familiar in each of the play’s subplots (and, by extension, in the original witchcraft case on which the play is based), a feature that does not absolve the human characters of their sins but at least suggests some divine/demonic intervention. The Witch, on the other hand, deemphasizes the animal familiar as agent (as also with the witch) in favor of accentuating humans’ own culpability and complicity in creating and perpetuating the ills of this world. If playwrights could choose how and whether to feature animal familiars and to what extent they wished to highlight their animality, the performance of these dramatic works nevertheless highlights the animal body as a locus for the demonic and the sacred. Similarly, prose literature such as A True and Just Recorde – and the events on which such accounts are based – suggests how irreducible are the animal bodies in the events described.

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Like the drama it inspired, the body of prose work presents familiars as composite creatures in which the demonic and the divine resided comfortably. Perhaps surprisingly, animal bodies feature even more prominently in the prose accounts, as familiars’ activities are described in detail, as are their crimes against fellow animals. Animal familiars can tempt current readers toward two troubling interpretations:  first, as vehicles for the demonic, strictly as symbols of evil, or, second, as domestic pets imbued with magical qualities by zealous witchfinders, motivated accusers, or gullible eye-witnesses.54 The former metaphorical reading and the latter literal one overlook the complex representations and rich history of the familiar in early modern English literature. In particular, such readings fail to locate the familiar on a more complex spectrum of the sacred – one that includes the demonic both as something like the sacred absence of the divine, the “negative trace,” and also as “God’s hangman” – and within a broader view of animality in early modern culture. Familiars spoke. They acted of their own accord. They carried out the wishes of their humans; they also functioned as agents of divine retribution. They acted like the animals they were. They avenged wrongs against abused humans and animals by injuring other humans and animals. Some were composite creates, made up of parts of many animals – Dog compares himself to an animal with the cloak of a lamb and the belly of an otter, but other familiars were quite literally described as compound beasts.55 The latter fact is one element that works against our reading of familiars as animals, but I suggest we resist the urge, once again, to dismiss them as imaginary. This doesn’t mean we can’t read the politics of a witchcraft account or consider the familiar’s function as narrative evidence; on the contrary, when animals have been restored as central to the narratives, such readings go far in illustrating to what extent early modern witchcraft was very much about animals and animal crimes. On stage, familiars are designed to entertain, not least through festive performances of song and dance. Malkin is an ambiguous familiar spirit – seen not wreaking havoc but merely flying with his mistress in the moonlit night. Dog serves more explicitly as a stage devil, but he is a devil as “God’s hangman,” agent of divine justice. But Malkin’s “mews” and Dog’s barking as well as his affectionate behavior also foreground and insist upon the animality of these animal familiars. With early modern witchcraft accounts and the drama of the Jacobean “witch vogue,” as well as other texts in which familiars are invoked, zoocentric readings highlight the crucial presence of familiars and other animals and provide a nuanced reflection of early modern thinking with – and interaction with – animals and demons.56

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Notes 1 See James Serpell, “Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets:  The Concept of the Witch’s Familiar in Early Modern England, 1530–1712,” in The Human/Animal Boundary:  Historical Perspectives, ed. Angela N.  H. Creager and William C. Jordan (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 157–90. 2 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971, repr. London: Penguin, 1991), 530. 3 Clive Holmes, “Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines in Early Modern England,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L.  Kaplan (Berlin; New  York; Amsterdam: Mouton, 1984), 97. 4 James Sharpe, “The Witch’s Familiar in Elizabethan England,” in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies, ed. G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 220. 5 Orna Alyagon Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch:  Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 143. 6 Sharpe, “The Witch’s Familiar,” 227. 7 Clark writes, “the subject of witchcraft seems to have been used as a means for thinking through problems that originated elsewhere and that had little or nothing to do with the legal prosecution of witches; hence my adoption of the somewhat Levi-Straussian title Thinking with Demons to convey this sense of demonology as an intellectual resource”; see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), viii. 8 Ewan Fernie, The Demonic:  Literature and Experience (London:  Routledge, 2013), 10. 9 Terry Eagleton, On Evil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 65, qtd. in Fernie, The Demonic, 18. 10 See John D.  Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama:  1350–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially chapters 6–8. 11 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 562. 12 See Philip Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), introduction and passim. 13 Clark, Thinking with Demons, 135. 14 Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 12. 15 Höfele borrows the term “semiosphere” from Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind:  A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London and New  York:  Tauris, 1990), 123–4; see Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold, 13. 16 See Darr, Marks of an Absolute Witch, 3–4 and chapter 6. 17 1 James I, C. 12; the full statute as well as the Elizabethan statute of 1563 are included as appendices in John Newton and Jo Bath, eds., Witchcraft and the Act of 1604 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 18 Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning:  Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 4.

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19 See Karen Raber, Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 12. 20 W. W., A True and Just Recorde, sig. 2A8, in Marion Gibson, ed., Early Modern Witches:  Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (London:  Routledge, 2005), 83. 21 Ibid., 84. 22 See Serpell, Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets, 170. 23 W. W., A True and Just Recorde, sig. 2A5v, in Gibson, ed., Early Modern Witches, 81. 24 Ibid., sig. B6v–B7, in Gibson, ed., Early Modern Witches, 90. 25 Note the frequent mention of the familiars’ gender in this narrative. To fully evaluate the significance of animal gender is beyond the scope of this chapter but would certainly be worth exploring at greater length. 26 The colors black, white, red, and grey appear repeatedly in this narrative, in describing various animals. Like gender, color may be an important sign worth further consideration in another context. 27 W. W., A True and Just Recorde, sig. B8v, in Gibson, ed., Early Modern Witches, 92. 28 Ibid. 29 Henry Goodcole, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, sig. B2, in Gibson, ed., Early Modern Witches, 305. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., sig. Cv, 308. 32 Ibid., sig. C2, 309. 33 Ibid., sig. C2v, 309. 34 Ibid., sig. D., 313. 35 Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, The Witch of Edmonton, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (London: A & C Black, 2005), 5.1.5–6. This edition cited in text hereafter. 36 See Meg Pearson, “A Dog, a Witch, a Play:  The Witch of Edmonton,” Early Theatre 11.2 (2008): 92–4, for a useful consideration of Dog’s lesser dramatic counterparts and predecessors. 37 See David Nicol, “Interrogating the Devil: Social and Demonic Pressure in The Witch of Edmonton,” Comparative Drama 38.4 (Winter 2004/2005): 425–6 and passim. 38 Ibid., 425. 39 See Sharpe, “The Witch’s Familiar,” and Serpell, “Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets.” 40 Emma Wilby, “The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England and Scotland,” Folklore 111.2 (2000): 283. 41 Boria Sax, “The Magic of Animals: English Folk Trials in the Perspective of Folklore,” Anthrozoös 22.4 (2009): 317–32. 42 Pearson, “A Dog, a Witch, a Play,” 89. 43 Ibid., 100. 44 Ibid., 107. 45 Ibid., 91–2, and Cox, The Devil and the Sacred, 176.

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46 Thomas Middleton, The Witch (1621), ed. Marion O’Connor, in The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.2.229 s.d. 47 Ibid., 3.3.48–64. 48 Ibid., 3.3.57–8 n. Bruce Boehrer’s consideration of similar confusion in Gammer Gurton’s Needle may be salutary: “Mr. S. [the playwright] seems to have paid little attention to Gib – so little, indeed, that he does not even get the cat’s gender right … Recent critics have seen this instability as a glance at the transvestism whereby college students played the women … but this strikes me as overartful. A simpler explanation for the inconsistency is that Mr. S. just did not care much about the cat’s sex and assumed – insofar as he thought about it at all – that nobody else would either”; Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 108. 49 This is not the first time Middleton invokes witchcraft – about which he is skeptical – to highlight a legitimate contemporary social injustice by comparison. See Molly Hand, “Now is Hell Landed Here Upon the Earth:  Renaissance Poverty and Witchcraft in Thomas Middleton’s The Black Book,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 31.1 (Winter 2008): 69–94. 50 See O’Connor’s introduction to the play in The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton. 51 See Molly Hand, “ ‘More Lies than True Tales’:  Scepticism in Middleton’s Mock-Almanacs,” in The Handbook of Thomas Middleton, ed. Trish Henley and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 314–15. 52 See Middleton, The Witch, 1.2.37–42, 102–6, 159–61 (and accompanying annotations). 53 See, for example, Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588/89), in English Renaissance Drama:  A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et  al. (New  York:  Norton, 2002), 245–86; Ben Jonson, Masque of Queenes (1609), in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Hereford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52), 7: 354–62. 54 Serpell cautions that “the witch’s familiar … had complex origins, and cannot easily be explained in terms of a simple theory of misconstrued pet ownership. Rather, it represented a gradual conflation of several different ideas and phenomena”; “Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets,” 179. 55 The most well-known examples of hybrid familiars are found in Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (London, 1647), which displays the creatures on its title-page illustration. 56 An abbreviated version of this piece was shared in the seminar, “Shakespeare and the Creaturely World,” led by Rebecca Ann Bach, at the 2017 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. I  am grateful to the seminar participants for their feedback.

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Shakespeare’s Animal Theater Bruce Boehrer

Shakespeare’s relationship to the bear garden, long a matter of lurid cliché, has lately undergone excellent discussion by scholars like Christoph Daigl and Andreas Höfele.1 More remains to be said, however, about the broader context within which this relationship occurs:  specifically, the wider range of quasi-theatrical animal entertainments available to early modern Londoners in search of leisure-time amusement. In fact, bear-baiting provided only the most visible and (ironically, given its contemporary literary reception) perhaps the most respectable of these entertainments. But other such pastimes also leave their imprint upon Shakespeare’s plays, and their influence upon the theater  – and particularly upon Shakespeare  – deserves to be considered in aggregate. Most students of bear-baiting know Sir John Davies’ epigram on Publius, the “student at the Common-law,” who “leaues his Bookes” for the “filthy sports” of the bear garden, abandoning his very humanity “As downe among the beares and dogges he goes.”2 And equally famed is Ben Jonson’s contempt for the “durty … and … stinking” bear-baitings held at the Hope Theater between performances of Bartholomew Fair (1614), ursine spectacles Jonson associates with the lowest of the theater’s attendees, “the vnderstanding Gentlemen o’the ground.”3 But bear-baiting also pleased the highest strata of society, as for instance at Queen Elizabeth’s celebrated 1575 progress-visit to Kenilworth Castle, whose ursine entertainers are described by Robert Laneham as reversing the barrister-to-beast transformation of Davies’ epigram: “Well, Syr, the Bearz wear brought foorth into the court, the Dogs set too them, too argu the points even face to face; they had learned Coounsel also a both parts.”4 Indeed, Jonson’s disdain for the bears in Bartholomew Fair betrays the poet’s own insecurity, tacitly acknowledging the real problem:  far from being too base for the poet’s comfort, the bears in fact were too respectable. For the most part, Shakespeare’s references to bear-baiting do not share Jonson’s and Davies’ concern with social distinctions, but in one case they 121

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do. “You are afraid if you see the bear loose, are you not?,” Abraham Slender asks Anne Page at the outset of The Merry Wives of Windsor (c.1599): “I have seen [the famed fighting bear] Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain; but (I warrant you) the women have so cried and shriek’d at it, that it pass’d.”5 The jest here centers upon the clumsiness of Slender’s efforts to woo Anne, whom he seeks to impress with his physical courage in a context he assumes she will find threatening. The result in fact highlights Slender’s incompetence. Not only does he fail as a suitor, misunderstanding the conversational skills required of courtship; his boasts of courage ring hollow as well, since they strain so obviously to impress. In this case, bear-baiting seems a pastime of limited and boorish appeal, unsuited for feminine company and deceptive as an index of personal bravery. To this extent Shakespeare seems to acknowledge the shifting nature of the sport’s social significance, which remains invested in residual ideals of martial valor even as it comes under increasing pressure from emergent models of drawing-room courtesy. Apart from this, however, Shakespeare’s references to bear-baiting all focus on its violent and compelled nature. “Bear-like” and “tied to a stake,” Macbeth must “fight the course” of his oncoming enemies (5.7.1–2); likewise “tied to th’ stake,” Gloucester too must “stand the course” (King Lear 3.7.54) as his eyes are gouged from his head. After Julius Caesar’s death, Octavius describes himself and Antony as “at the stake,/ And bay’d about with many enemies” (Julius Caesar 4.1.48–9). English mastiffs “run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear and have their heads crushed like rotten apples” (Henry V 3.7.143–5) – perhaps courageously, perhaps in folly. In general, where Davies and Jonson see bear-baiting as nuisance, Shakespeare sees it as trauma. The former view urges contempt for bad manners; the latter invites compassion for suffering. On the level of genre, this distinction marks the broader difference between satire and tragedy. So Shakespeare and his contemporaries could draw on bear-baiting as material and model for two essentially violent genres of theatrical entertainment, arguably because animal-baiting helps render such entertainment intelligible. It participates in very broad and ancient patterns of pastime that, by Shakespeare’s day, had been absorbed into the basic narrative sequences of theatrical spectacle. Hence, in part, Jonson’s discomfort:  the bears engage in semi-theatrical behavior that, by its very nature as such, challenges the theater’s integrity in the sense both of its self-containment and its moral rectitude. If the theater carries within itself other forms of entertainment that precede and shape and enable it; if those forms of entertainment lack the theater’s investment in moral instruction and civic virtue; if in fact the forms of entertainment in question do

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not even focus upon human beings or rely upon human language; then in what sense may the theater be understood as self-contained, or selfdetermining, or improving, or humane, or even human? We encounter here what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have called “the processes whereby the low troubles the high”: a recurring semiotic pattern “in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing ‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for this Other.”6 The bears may have supplied a particularly visible example of such conflict, but they were by no means the only animal performers to leave their mark upon the early modern theater. More downscale forms of beast entertainment likewise appear in Shakespeare’s plays, and in those of his contemporaries, and collectively these pastimes betray the stage’s investment in cross-species theatrical activity. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.1594) offers a famous case in point in its comic business with the dog Crab, the servant Launce’s companion animal, whose various transgressions not only comprise the most complex dramatic role Shakespeare ever composed for a nonhuman performer but also exploit the acting conventions of Elizabethan canine street entertainers. Richard Beadle has traced Crab’s descent from classical and medieval “clown-and-dog acts,” particularly as exemplified in Shakespeare’s day by the highly popular antics of Richard Tarlton.7 Tarlton seems to have worked regularly with a dog, who assisted him in a variety of tricks and jests including ones that drew on the animal’s ability to feign human affect by howling and appearing to weep. By contrast, Crab’s inappropriate pranks, which generally offend human emotional decorum in the service of comic effects, offer “a representation of nature as the uncivilized that stands against the rational civility that is understood to be truly human.”8 For its part, Tarlton’s career, extending as it did from itinerant solo clowning to membership in the elite Queen’s Men, demonstrates how the repertoire of the street performers could reappear – along with the performers themselves – on the Shakespearean stage. Beyond all this, Tarlton and his dog, like their descendant Crab, betray an affinity with further forms of animal street-entertainment, like the “wel-educated Ape” of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, who will “come ouer the chaine, for the King of England, and backe againe for the Prince, and sit still on his arse for the Pope, and the King of Spaine” (Induction 17– 20). Like the bears, this ape offers Jonson an emblem of lowbrow popular amusement:  the very kind of pastime against which he seeks to define his own enlightened and improving neoclassicism. But the clowning of a trained street ape could hardly be more déclassé than the antics of the dogs introduced onstage in plays like John Marston’s Histrio-mastix (1599), Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (c.1608), and

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Jonson’s own Every Man Out of His Humour (1600).9 Nor could the trained ape have in itself been any more plebeian than the bear that famously pursues Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale (c.1611) – and that was very possibly on loan from the nearby kennels of Paris Garden.10 Indeed, any difference in status between ape and bear would have been purely associational: Jonson’s imagined performing ape would have belonged to a street mime, whereas two of the bears at Paris Garden in 1614 were royal property, polar bears kenneled there, together with a young lion also owned by the crown, for reasons that remain unclear. As Barbara Ravelhofer has shown, these beasts resided on the Bankside from 1609 at least into the early 1620s under the supervision of the Master and Serjeant of the Bears, Philip Henslowe, who, together with his son-in-law and business partner, Edward Alleyn, received about £18 per year for their maintenance.11 Given their association with the Bankside theater business, Henslowe and Alleyn could easily have arranged for trained bears to make the passage from stake to stage. As for the employment of bears for purposes other than baiting, Desiderius Erasmus noted in the early 1500s that “In Britain many persons keep groups of dancing bears.”12 It would presumably have been easy enough to induce a trained bear to gambol across the stage in pursuit of the actor playing Antigonus, and surviving records indicate that early modern bear aficionados took by no means as much caution with the beasts as modern spectators might be expected to. Not only does Slender boast about taking Sackerson by the chain – thereby attesting to then-current standards of masculine bravado. In June of 1609 a Bankside bear “kild a child, that was negligently left in the Beare-house,” the kennels being apparently open to interested gawkers.13 Indeed, even as late as 1767 and as far away as New York City, a British visitor could confront a chained bear in the same haphazard spirit: I took the liberty of taking Bruin by the ears, which he instantaneously resented by making a snatch and bite at my right leg: but I luckily sprung clear of him, and thought myself exceedingly well off with a good silk stocking torn, the calf of my leg much scarified, and a general laugh against me:  But Bruin did not reign long, for a few days after he made a more successful snatch at a black Boy, who he killed on the spot, and was the next minute shot through the head.14

These witnesses join others as well, perhaps most memorably Lord Byron’s companion bear Bruin, who shared the poet’s rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1805, and whom Byron once jocularly proposed for a fellowship there.15 Such examples, confirming the very casual nature of early modern interaction with beasts now kept under careful restraint,

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also point to the commonplace employment of such animals not only for blood sport but also for various kinds of non-violent amusement. In any case, if the bear that first chased Antigonus across the Globe stage was indeed a living beast, it would not have been one of the rare white bears boarded on Bankside by the crown. These would have been reserved by their color for more special theatrical employment, as for instance when Jonson’s masque Oberon, performed at Whitehall in January of 1611, caused Henry, Prince of Wales, to enter the festivities “in a chariot … drawne by two white beares” (295–7 s.d.). This moment in Jonson’s masque has been cited as a possible influence upon the bear scene in The Winter’s Tale, but it also recalls an earlier courtly entertainment, one cited in its turn as a possible influence upon proceedings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1596).16 In this case the occasion was Prince Henry’s baptismal feast, celebrated on August 30, 1594 at Stirling Castle, where, amidst a group of allegorical personages, “there came in to the sight of them all, a Black-moore, drawing (as it seemd to the beholders) a triumphall Chariot … decked with all sortes of exquisite delicates and daintes.”17 This chariot, the account continues, “should have been drawne in by a Lion (but because his presence might have brought some feare to the nearest or that the sight of the lights & torches might have commoved his tamenes) it was thought meet that the Moore shoulde supplie that roome.”18 This anecdote gives us a rare and welcome anticipation of modern public-safety concerns, and its relevance to A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been grounded in this very fact. As he and his band of mechanicals rehearse their play “Pyramus and Thisbe” for its own upcoming court performance, Bottom worries that “to bring in (God shield us!) a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing” (3.1.30–1) – a concern that seems to echo the last-minute substitution of Moor for lion at Henry’s baptismal banquet. But the echo is facetious, Bottom’s concern for the well-being of his audience being grounded in his own failure to distinguish between theatrical illusion and lived reality. As a result, the jest seems to extend to the issue of audience safety as well, an issue Shakespeare introduces in ways designed to render it ridiculous by association. In any event, Henry’s baptismal feast confirms that in some cases, at least, dangerous wild animals were cast for quasi-theatrical appearances, notwithstanding the fact that, in this instance, the casting was then revised. So on one hand, animal-baiting held considerable importance as a cognate spectacle to the early modern theater. This is particularly true of bearbaiting, but Henslowe and Alleyn also stabled bulls alongside their bears, and other related pastimes such as badger-baiting and even lion-baiting (practiced

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by King James at the Tower in the early 1600s)19 also deserve mention here. On the other hand, however, the theater drew material and inspiration from another order of animal entertainment entirely:  the non-violent spectacles common to street and to palace in which various species – dogs, apes, bears, horses, and even lions – were induced through training to offer amusement to spectators. If we remain with this latter group of animal performers for a moment longer, we might add one further observation: while the performing animals of Shakespeare’s theater clearly owe their being to traditions of public animal performance dating back to classical antiquity, the tricks of the street performers are notably absent from the stage itself. To illustrate this point, let us return to the previously mentioned theatrical use of dogs in such plays as Two Gentlemen of Verona, Histrio-mastix, The Roaring Girl, and Every Man Out of His Humour. In the first of these, as has been noted, the onstage dog appears to reference traditional dog-and-clown acts whereby animals were encouraged to mimic human emotion. However, Crab invokes these tricks specifically by negation:  while his appearance onstage draws on traditions of such performance, his own behavior violates human emotional and social decorum, in the process emphasizing the distance that separates him from the “gentleman-like” (4.4.17) company (both human and canine) in which he finds himself. Likewise, water-spaniels appear onstage in both Histrio-mastix and The Roaring Girl, where they serve not to cut capers or perform elaborate tricks but rather to foreground the class-specific interests of the duck-hunting citizen characters they accompany. And in Every Man Out of His Humour, Puntarvolo’s dog distinguishes himself by his “lack of performativity,” serving not as a curiosity in his own right but rather as an expression of his owner’s mania for the Elizabethan pastime of traveling upon returns.20 In all these cases the focus shifts from the animal’s apparent imitation of human character to the owner’s projection of his own character onto the animal in question. Jonson offers the best contrast here. The “wel-educated Ape” of Bartholomew Fair entertains by counterfeiting human spiritual and political loyalties (pro-English, anti-Papist) and communicating these loyalties to others. The knight Puntarvolo’s dog in Every Man Out of His Humour, by contrast, offers no attempt at communication and no evidence of personal allegiance. Instead, his membership in the play’s community of human characters is effected entirely by his owner’s quixotic insistence on treating him as a comrade – an insistence that generates much mirth for characters and audience alike. Indeed, since Puntarvolo’s role in Every Man Out extends from one confusion of species (wagering £5,000 upon his and his dog’s safe return from a trip to Constantinople) to another (“shedding funerall teares” over the dog’s untimely demise [5.5.17]), the knight’s character functions

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largely as a satire on the affective structures of pet-ownership – this practice first becoming “a normal feature of the middle-class [English] household” in the 1500s and 1600s.21 In a case like this, the performing animal serves not as a marvel in himself but as an accessory to his owner’s personality, helping to illustrate its affectations and social embedment. Given the early modern theater’s heavy indebtedness to Renaissance humanism, it makes sense that it should present companion animals mainly for this purpose of clarifying and embodying the defects of its human principals; Shakespearean drama has long been understood, after all, as a drama of character. We might revisit this point through another species pressed into the service of the street entertainers:  the horse. Late Elizabethan England held no more celebrated non-violent animal performer than Morocco the Intelligent Horse, who, together with his owner and trainer, a Scotsman named Banks, traveled widely both in England and abroad while performing a variety of feats that involved the apparent capacities to reason and to understand language. Especially famed for his dancing, Morocco was also credited with skills such as “the power,/ To tell an honest woman from a whore,” to “knowe … a Spaniard from an English-man,” and to “finde your purse, and tell what coyne ye haue.”22 Taking their routine to such continental cities as Paris, Orleans, and Frankfurt, horse and owner endured repeated charges of witchcraft, including the rumor that both were burned for this same offense in Rome by papal command.23 For most of their career, however, Banks and Morocco held forth in London, where they maintained various ties to the theater business. One account claims they played a notable trick upon Tarlton himself during a performance at the Cross Keys Inn, where the Lord Chamberlain’s Men kept their winter quarters from 1594 to 1595, six years after Tarlton’s death.24 Other evidence suggests that during these same years in the mid-1590s, Banks and Morocco held a kind of residency at the Bel Savage Inn: that, at least, is the setting presumed by the 1595 satirical dialogue Maroccus Extaticus, which purports to transcribe “a discourse betwixt Banks & his bay horse from Bel-savage without Ludgate.”25 Like the Cross Keys, the Bel Savage regularly hosted troupes of players, including  – if William Prynne is to be believed – the Lord Admiral’s Men, who found themselves terrified by “the  visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage at the Belsavage Playhouse, in Queene Elizabeths dayes, … whiles they were there prophanely playing the History of Faustus.”26 In accounts such as these, horse and players take turns occupying the same performance space, play to the same audiences, and endure the same allegations of conjuring and impiety. Beyond this, three surviving early modern plays call upon horses to appear with the players onstage.27 The most elaborate of these, the

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anonymous Thomas of Woodstock (c.1591–5), goes out of its way to bring horse and actors face to face in a scene that pits the play’s eponymous hero, an exponent of such traditional virtues as thrift and modesty in apparel, against a richly attired messenger from King Richard II’s court. Arriving at Woodstock’s gate, the messenger in question refuses to dismount for fear of “fouling on his feet,” with the result that Woodstock must admit both horse and rider to his presence.28 As Teresa Grant notes in her excellent discussion of this scene, the ensuing entrance upends contemporary stage conventions in which horsemen, arriving “at the gate rather than actually on the stage,” make their onstage appearance on foot;29 in the process, it also enhances the complex mundus inversus motif through which the play delineates Woodstock’s downfall. The encounter between foppish, mounted messenger and plain-clad, unmounted lord reverses conventional iconography in which “the rider of the great horse proclaimed … his social superiority,” literally looking down upon his pedestrian companions.30 This reversal, in turn, extends into the messenger’s patronizing misrecognition of Woodstock as a servant, whom he pays to tend to his mount. The scene then conflates confusions of rank with confusions of species as Woodstock holds a one-sided conversation with his four-legged charge: Come on, sir, you have sweat hard about this haste, yet I think you know little of the business:  Why so I  say; you’re a very indifferent beast, you’ll follow any man that will lead you … Faith, say a man should steal ye – and feed ye fatter, could ye run away with him lustily? Ah, your silence argues a consent, I see. (3.2.161–74)

The point, of course, is that the messenger’s mount has no judgment, no language, and therefore no consent to offer. He is exactly the opposite of a Morocco: an unaccommodated horse, a horse without tricks, a horse whose appearance tells us more about his owner than about his own interiority, such as it might ever be. As Grant has observed, there remains some controversy about whether Woodstock’s theatrical horse was a real beast, as opposed to an artificial substitute such as a pantomime horse or hobby horse.31 The play’s single surviving manuscript contains stage directions that clearly call for “a spruce Courtier” to enter “a-horseback” and for a servant to “Exit … with the horse” (3.2.132 s.d.; 3.2.198 s.d.). Yet as Grant notes, “the dialogue sets up the appearance of a real animal, but works well if, instead, [a] fake animal were to be used as if it were real.”32 This fact, in turn, arguably derives from the exigencies of performance: while it might sometimes be possible to stage the messenger’s entrance with a live horse trained to manage the crowded, cramped, and elevated

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conditions of the early modern stage, there would surely be occasions when no such beast was available and the show would have to proceed nonetheless, mutatis mutandis. This same rule, in turn, could easily influence other scenes with performing animals as well, as for instance the dog scenes in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Every Man Out, etc. As entertaining as trained performing animals might be, they were scarce enough to force playwrights to accommodate their possible absence, thus encouraging theatrical practices that invoke the traditions of trained-animal performance by negation, without relying upon the actual performance ability of such animals. I have elsewhere argued that the literary interest in delineating human character develops out of philosophical redefinitions of the human as these occur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,33 but one might argue that the logistics of the early modern stage contribute in their own way to the turn toward human character-depiction. In this view, the theater foregrounds figures like Faustus and Hamlet because it was easier for the players to find themselves an Alleyn or a Burbage than to come by a Morocco. In any case, problems with animal performance distinguish at least one famed seventeenth-century dramatic production while in the process demonstrably contributing to a focus on human character that would have been impossible without them. The work in question is John Milton’s Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle (1634), whose villain Comus makes his initial stage entrance “with … a rout of Monsters headed like sundry sorts of wilde Beasts, but otherwise like Men and Women.”34 Comus’ ability to transform human beings into such figures derives from his mother, Circe, whose “mighty Art” he “excells” (63), but as Marjorie Nicolson observed fifty years ago, Milton makes a change from the Circe legend. Circe’s victims became animals going upon all-fours. Anyone who has directed amateur theatricals knows how awkward such a transformation would prove. When Comus changes human beings, the transformation affects only the heads, “all other parts remaining as they were,” so that the “rout of monsters” appear wearing papier-mâché heads, with arms and legs free for dancing.35

Jonson’s Masque of Augurs (1622) had brought “three very Beares” (136) and their master onto the stage of Inigo Jones’ banqueting house at Whitehall to dance a round before King James I. By contrast, Milton found the available pool of nonhuman talent insufficient for such a course and instead made a virtue of necessity by focusing his poetic attention on the one part of the human anatomy he could and did bestialize: Soon as [Comus’] potion works, the … human count’nance, Th’express resemblance of the gods, is chang’d

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In Milton, the face becomes a privileged zone for the depiction of character in the sense of “moral qualities strongly developed or strikingly displayed” (OED “character” sb. 12), qualities the poet stages in terms of species difference. As “th’express resemblance of the gods,” the “human count’nance” offers access to an otherwise-invisible essence: Hamlet’s “capability and god-like reason,” the divine potential that humanism posits within the human. But the bestial heads of Comus’ followers attest to another potential entirely:  the “power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life,”36 a descent Milton associates in particular with the “leud and lavish act of sin” (465). Emerging into or receding from visibility, the “resemblance of the gods” thus becomes “express” in the word’s root sense, as an extrusion of the divine into the realm of sensory experience. Over the course of his poetic career, Milton worries repeatedly about this process of expressing the divine, which he comes to recognize as the particular responsibility of the sacred poet. In “Lycidas” he imagines the dead Edward King hearing “the unexpressive nuptial Song,/ In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love” (175–6); in Paradise Lost Satan, landing on the sun, finds the place “beyond expression bright” (3.591), and just a few pages earlier the poet himself calls on “holy light, offspring of Heav’n first-born,” for inspiration even as he wonders, “May I  express thee unblam’d?” (3.1, 3). Such language, which becomes a distinctive motif of Milton’s encounters with sacred inspiration, aspires beyond Derridean différance toward a meaning that is “not expressive, not, that is, a sign of a presence that is elsewhere.”37 But this same language also points toward a structuring absence central to the category of humanity itself, whose oscillations between divinity and bestiality confirm that “the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man.”38 This cluster of concepts – involving faciality, species difference, expressivity, and the emergence of the sacred amidst the profane – makes its first appearance in Milton’s work in the Mask, where it develops out of a problem with the performance of animals onstage. So various sorts of quasi-theatrical animal-entertainment  – baitings, street performances, and appearances in masques and related spectacles – leave their imprint on the early modern stage, in the process raising questions about the nature of the human and its relationship to other forms of life. But finally, we must also note the Shakespearean drama’s engagement with another sort of animal pastime entirely, one not occurring in theaters and not primarily designed for the amusement of spectators, but nonetheless drawing upon the same spectacular energy that animates the

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stage: the hunt. As Roger Manning has observed, early modern hunting practices were frankly designed to put power and privilege on display: The ceremonies of public worship or the execution of the King’s laws at the quarter sessions and the assizes had been refined over the centuries to achieve the greatest possible dramatic effect. A gathering of the aristocracy and gentry, mounted on their great hunters with dogs and beaters at their feet, or pursuing a stag through the woods and fields to the accompaniment of the music of the hounds and horns, was another spectacle that a countryman was unlikely ever to forget.39

To this extent the hunt functioned as a sort of performance, one meant to convey a message about the sovereign’s authority within both the social and the natural order. Queen Elizabeth seems to have taken this aspect of her sport quite seriously. Even before her coronation, in April of 1557, one reads of her being “escorted from Hatfield to Enfield-chase, by a retinue of twelve Ladies, clothed in white satin on ambling palfries, and twenty yeomen in green, that her Grace might hunt the hart,” her ladies and she being met upon their entry into “the chase, or forest, … by fifty archers in scarlet boots and yellow caps, armed with gilded bows; one of whom presented her with a silver-headed arrow, winged with peacock’s feathers.”40 The extant account of this event ends by noting that “Sir Thomas Pope had the devising of this show,”41 thus confirming the scripted character of such semi-theatrical entertainment. Nor was this kind of display a passing fancy. Throughout her career, the queen’s hunting excursions retained the character of staged events, as for instance during the celebrations at Kenilworth, where pageants and animal-baitings, feasting and hunting all combined in a giddy round of multimedia festivity that only ended when “on [the queen’s] last day of hunting Sylvanus, god of the woods, appeared and urged her ‘forever to abide in this country,’ running alongside her horse and promising to double the number of deer in the chase … if only she would consent never to leave.”42 The size of the crowds attracted by such sport can in turn be gauged by King James’ startled response to them, when he succeeded Elizabeth to the English throne: If [the people] came to him in troops, as they usually did to Queen Elizabeth, he would passionately swear and ask the English nobles what they would have. They would answer, they came out of love to see him. Then he would cry out in Scottish, “God’s wounds! I will pull down my breeches and they will also see my arse!”43

Here a king temperamentally inclined to view his hunting as private release responds with indignation to subjects trained to view it as public spectacle.

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Against this backdrop, the hunting scenes written into early modern drama acquire a metatheatrical quality, as if the playwrights who composed them understood them to enact and embody their own realities. In Shakespeare, for instance, the hunt-gone-wrong of Titus Andronicus (c.1593; 2.3) points to the political, social, and spiritual imbalances at the heart of the Roman state itself. Thus the tragic action that begins with Lavinia’s rape ends with the cannibalistic consumption of Chiron and Demetrius: parallel confusions of hunter and hunted, eater and eaten, as these distinctions conventionally operate across the species barrier. Likewise, the hunt-goneright of As You Like It (c.1599) raises questions about who best respects the natural world of that play:  the deposed Duke Senior, who poaches his own erstwhile game; the usurping Duke Frederick, who technically now owns the game his deposed brother poaches; the melancholic Jaques, who sees all humanity as “mere usurpers, Tyrants, and what’s worse,/ To fright the animals” (2.1.61–2); or the aristocratic hunter who usurps a dead deer’s “leather skin and horns” onstage (4.2.11). The venatus interruptus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1), in turn, marks the limits of human authority in that play, not only frustrating Theseus’ desire for sport but returning his own subjects to him along with a reminder of their ability to elude his governance. Falstaff’s appearance at the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor (5.5), where he dons a buck’s head to impersonate the ghost of Herne the Hunter, does something similar, reversing Falstaff’s venereal pursuit of Mistresses Ford and Page while releasing Falstaff himself into a realm of fairy enchantments impervious to his own intrigues. In each of these cases but the last, the hunt is staged in its historical form as “an adjunct to courtly pageantry”;44 in the last case, by contrast, it seems more akin to popular shaming rituals like the skimmington ride. Class associations notwithstanding, in all of these cases Shakespearean hunting works across the species divide to stage authority:  the corrupt authority of Tamora and her sons, the usurped authority of the foresters in Arden, the limited authority of Theseus, the informal authority of Windsor’s womenfolk. It seems odd that all of these scenarios should date from the poet’s Elizabethan period, whereas his Jacobean plays offer considerably less hunting-related material. One is tempted to wonder whether this shift somehow accommodates the transition from a monarch who understood the chase largely as public spectacle to one who viewed it instead mainly as private recreation. In any case, however, other Elizabethan plays use the chase to illustrate issues of private privilege and its conflict with the common good. Thomas Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), for instance, enacts an aristocratic hunt that – like many of its historical counterparts – entails the flagrant transgression of property rights and potential property

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damage as well: the privileged twits Hammon and Warner pursue their deer over a hedge and right into the Lord Mayor’s close,45 where it is dispatched and the carcass hidden by servants hostile to them. In a case like this, the dramatic depiction of hunting anticipates the sport’s later devolution into a private pastime for privileged elites. But Shakespeare’s treatment of the same material suggests the fundamentally theatrical character it retained for early modern spectators. Here again, as with the bears of the bear garden and the performing animals of inn-yard, street, and pageant-hall, we encounter a form of animal entertainment that bequeaths its structure, actors, and intellectual preoccupations to the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. To this extent we might revisit Giorgio Agamben’s claim that “the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man,” noting that it passes within the Shakespearean theater as well.46

Notes 1 Christoph Daigl, “All the World Is But a Bear-Baiting”: Das Englische Hetztheater im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Theatergeschichte, 1997); Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2 Sir John Davies, The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. (London, 1876), 2:41. 3 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52), 6: Induction 159– 60, 49–50. Further references to Jonson are to this edition. 4 Robert Laneham, Account of the Queen’s Entertainment at Killingworth Castle, 1575, in John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1788), 1:15. 5 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1.1.291–2, 295–7. Further references to Shakespeare are to this edition. 6 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 5. 7 Richard Beadle, “Crab’s Pedigree,” in English Comedy, ed. Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and John Kerrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12–35, esp. 12, 13, 18–21. 8 Erica Fudge, “ ‘The Dog Is Himself ”: Humans, Animals, and Self-Control in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in How To Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays, ed. Laurie Maguire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 194. 9 See John Marston, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1610), sig. C2r; Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, ed. Paul Mulholland (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1987), 2.1.399 ff.; Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, 2.1.ff. For discussion of the dogs in these plays,

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17 18 19 20

21 22 23

Bruce Boehre r see Teresa Grant, “Entertaining Animals,” in A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, ed. Bruce Boehrer (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 95–117. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 3.3.58; see Barbara Ravelhofer, “ ‘Beasts of Recreacion’: Henslowe’s White Bears,” English Literary Renaissance 32.2 (Spring 2002): 287–323. John Stow, The Annales, or a Generall Chronicle of England (London, 1615), 895. See Ravelhofer, “Beasts of Recreacion,” 287–93. Desiderius Erasmus, Adagia, 4.4.54, trans. and ed. John N. Grant and Betty I. Knott, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Beatrice Corrigan et al., 86 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–2000), 36:99. John Britton and E.  W. Brayley, Memoirs of the Tower of London (London, 1830), 359. William Owen, Narrative of the American Voyages and Travels of Capt. William Owen, R.N., ed. Victor Hugo Paltsits (New York: New York Public Library, 1942), 26. Ravelhofer, “Beasts of Recreacion,” 311–12. See John Somers, 1st Baron Somers, ed., A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, 13  vols. (London, 1809), 2:179; Harold F.  Brooks, “Introduction,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F.  Brooks (London:  Routledge, 1979), xxxiv. William Fowler, A True Reportarie … of the Babtisme of the Most Excellent, Right High, and Mightie Prince, Frederick Henry ([Edinburgh], 1594), sig. C1r. Ibid., sig. C1v. See Stow, The Annals, 835–6, 865, 895–6. For discussion see Daigl, “All the World,” 136; Daniel Hahn, The Tower Menagerie (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2004), 85–115. Bruce Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 145. For detailed discussion of these cases, see Grant, “Entertaining Animals,” 105–9; Boehrer, Shakespeare Among the Animals, 145–68; and Bruce Boehrer, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), 133. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World:  Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 110. Richard Braithwaite, A Strappado for the Diuell (London, 1615), 159; Thomas Nashe, Haue with You to Saffron-Walden (London, 1596), sig. D2r; Thomas Bastard, Chrestoleros (London, 1598), 62. See Jean de Montlyard and Sieur de Melleray, Les métamorphoses ou l’Âne d’or d’Apulée (Paris, 1612), 407–10; Thomas Morton, A Direct Answer vnto the Scandalous Exceptions, Which Theophilus Higgons Hath Lately Obiected (London, 1609), 11; Jonson, Epigrammes 133.155–8; Samuel Holland, Don Zara del Fogo (London, 1656), 114. For detailed discussion of Morocco, see J.  O. Halliwell-Phillips, Memoranda on Love’s Labours Lost, King John, Othello, and on Romeo and Juliet (London, 1879), 21–57; Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning:  Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2006), 123–33, 138–46; Hannah Velten, Beastly London:  A History of Animals in the City (London:  Reaktion, 2013), 126–77; and Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 1–18.

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24 See Richard Tarlton, Tarltons iests Drawne into These Three Parts (London, 1613), sigs. C2r–v; M.  C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare in His Context:  The Constellated Globe (Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1989), 163. 25 John Dando and Harrie Runt, Maroccus Extaticus (London, 1595), 3. 26 William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), 556. 27 See Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 117. 28 Thomas of Woodstock, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 3.2.120. Further references are to this edition. 29 Grant, “Entertaining Animals,” 109–11. 30 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 29. 31 Grant, “Entertaining Animals,” 111–12. 32 Ibid., 111. 33 Bruce Boehrer, Animal Characters:  Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), passim. 34 John Milton, A Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 94–6. Further references to Milton are to this edition. 35 Marjorie Nicolson, A Reader’s Guide to John Milton (1963, rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), 74. 36 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A.  Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1956), 7–8. 37 Catherine Belsey, John Milton:  Language, Gender, Power (Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 1988), 4. 38 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 16. 39 Roger B.  Manning, Hunters and Poachers:  A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England 1485–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 33. 40 John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London, 1823), 1:17. 41 Ibid. 42 Carolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth (New York: Summit, 1983), 282. 43 Sir John Oglander, A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander Kt. Of Nunwell, ed. Francis Bamford (1936; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), 196. 44 Edward Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt:  A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18. 45 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953–61), 2.1, 2.2. 46 A shorter version of this essay was presented to the 2016 World Shakespeare Congress, hosted at Stratford-upon-Avon and King’s College, London, from July 31 to August 6, 2016. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions of the WSC audience, and for the efforts of the conference organizers.

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Swift Among the Locusts Vermin, Infestation, and Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century Lucinda Cole In his Askemata, or Philosophical Regimen, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, holds up for examination the idea of “life,” subjecting it to what he calls the “contraries.” “Life what?” he asks: To whom in common? volatiles, reptiles, aquatics and the amphibious kind, flocks, herds, and the herd of mankind. What is it in the foetus? what in a worm? what in the vegetables? … Those with their mouths up catching nourishment here and there; these with their mouths downwards, fixed to a place, and sucking their nourishment from the earth, what difference in the anatomy? Where is there any art of curiosity in the one more than in the other? Pipes and juices; and in that other sort, a more subtle juice; spirits that agitate to and fro, and strings and wires that move the engine.1

In this passage, Shaftesbury signals at least a general understanding of debates within natural philosophy about differences between humans and other animals: for comparative anatomists, “[p]ipes and juices” were a common way of describing the nervous system. “Spirits” or “animal spirits,” terms used since Galen in the second century to describe the animating “stuff” of the nerves that traveled through supposedly hollow or fibrous tubes, were still mysterious in the eighteenth century and the subject of complex debates.2 Modern critics often cast the problem  – “Life what?”  – as a conflict between the competing principles of mechanism and vitalism, machines and spirit.3 That Shaftesbury frames his question by pointing to “reptiles, aquatics and the amphibious kin, flocks, herds, and the herd of mankind” indicates that fundamental matters of organic difference are at stake in his argument. His concern, in other words, is less about the nature of animal spirits than about creatures’ positions on a traditional “Great Chain of Being.”4 What distinguishes the “herd of mankind” from the slithering, swimming, flying, and galloping “kind”? As most students of philosophy recognize, in his published writings Shaftesbury marks off as his proper study “men” or human 136

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“intelligences”  – what he elsewhere calls “the virtuoso science.”5 In this respect, he follows his former tutor, John Locke, who begins his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) by recasting the anthropocentric tradition of Cartesian philosophy that takes human intelligence as a founding principle of inquiry: “Since it is the understanding,” Locke writes, “that sets man above all other animals and enables him to use and dominate them, it is certainly worth our while to enquire into it.”6 Yet Shaftesbury’s questions about the distribution of “Life” and “curiosity” speak directly – if nervously – to those creatures that René Descartes, Locke, and others marginalize in their quest to understand “understanding.” “Are human bodies,” Shaftesbury asks, “of such kind that intelligence is confined to these, and can nowhere lodge besides? What if a worm should happen to have intelligence, would he not reason better?” (85). In posing a question about the relationship between physiology and intelligence, Shaftesbury recalls the studies of human and animal brains conducted in the late seventeenth century by (among others) the physician Thomas Willis, a key figure discussed later in this chapter. If intelligence can “lodge” in nonhuman bodies, Shaftesbury confronts a problem; such a mind lies beyond the Lockean ideas of perception and experience that were so influential in the early eighteenth century. Ultimately, and in ways that have far-reaching implications, Shaftesbury decides that questions about nonhuman intelligence are unanswerable: “But I know men, and other intelligences I know nothing of ” (85). Confining his philosophy to humans, he shunts to the side the rest of the animal world. “Why talk of other minds?,” he asks. “What matter is it where they reside, and how the sovereign mind has disposed them; whether in these bodies, or in the others…? If thou hast a mind thyself, be thankful that it has fallen to thee; make use of it that thou shouldst do, and this is enough” (85). In this chapter, I want to return to some of the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inquiries about the nature and extent of animal intelligence marginalized by Shaftesbury’s pivot to epistemological ground zero. In particular, in science, theology, and literature discussions of sentience and sapience placed Shaftesbury’s worm and other “vermin” into differentiated categories that, paradoxically, served as the “other” against which the “human” was defined. Between 1660 and 1730, the creatures that Aristotle had declared “imperfect” – mice, insects, and other beings supposedly born from putrefaction and therefore without souls  – were pressed into the service of naturalists and philosophers trying to answer the question, “Life what?”7 Writing in 1627, Francis Bacon emphasized the ability of what were then called “insecta,” or creatures bred from mud or

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dung, to exemplify the wonders of the Book of Nature: “[T]he Nature of Things,” he writes in Sylva Sylvarum, “is commonly better perceiued, in Small, than in Great, and in unperfect, than in perfect, and in Parts, than in whole: So the Nature of Vivification is best enquired in Creatures bred of Putrefaction.”8 With the invention of the microscope, Bacon’s “unperfect” beings took on new significance; during the late seventeenth century, flies, gnats, frogs, earthworms, eels, and snakes served as experimental subjects for Ulessa Aldrovandi, Thomas Moffet, Francesco Redi, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Martin Lister, Robert Hooke, Jan Swammerdam, and Marcello Malpighi, among others, who not only overthrew assumptions about spontaneous generation and metamorphosis but created the nascent field of comparative anatomy.9 Shaftesbury’s questions about “reptiles, aquatics and the amphibious kind” reflect, in some measure, how important a scientific endeavor the study of vermin had become and how crucial a role inquiries into “imperfect creatures” played in rewriting conceptions of the Book of Nature. The first section of this chapter explores the significance of vermin by examining the nervous systems of worms and other imperfect creatures as compared to those of humans. Questions about the life, intelligence, and the reproduction of vermin helped Thomas Willis and other comparative anatomists define the limits of the human in the decades immediately before the flowering of Restoration and eighteenth-century satire. In 1664, Willis published Cerebri Anatome or Anatomy of the Brain, his groundbreaking study in neuroanatomy, followed by the Latin edition of De Anima Brutorum, or Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (1672), which was translated into English in 1683.10 In these texts, he describes neurological structures in oysters, worms, and other creatures in order, he says, to show the “vast difference” between the souls of these creatures and those of humans (44). In the second section, I turn to the eighteenth-century writer most preoccupied with vermin and human– animal difference, Jonathan Swift. Often, Swift’s depictions of vermin function primarily as a way of deflating human pretensions, as with the King of Brobdingnag’s characterization of humans in Book 2 of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) as “the most pernicious race of odious little vermin … to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”11 Beginning with A Tale of a Tub (1704), Swift often draws on classical figures and modes  – inversion, personification, allegory  – featuring insects and other imperfect creatures: “The Battle of the Books,” the prolegomena to Tale of a Tub, dramatizes a conflict between ancient and modern learning represented by bees and spiders. Some critics have argued that Swift directly parodies

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Willis as the embodiment of modern science.12 What interests me, though, are those moments when vermin seem to infest Swift’s writing, particularly during his tenure as Dean of Saint Patrick’s in Dublin. I focus on contemporary infestations of insects that threatened agriculture in Ireland and explore how and why these crises inflected Swift’s representations of rapidly reproducing human populations, especially Ireland’s poor. By reading Swift’s depictions of vermin in relation to eighteenth-century natural philosophy, we can begin to chart some of the contours of an incipient anthropocentrism, its verminous others, and the politicizing effects of images that link voracious insects to denigrated human populations.

Souls and Animal Spirits in Comparative Anatomy Natural philosophers, from Bacon on, argued that the “imperfect” creatures shared a complex sensory system with humans. Bacon claims in Sylva Sylvarum (1627) that the “Insecta have Voluntary Motion, and therefore Imagination,” a belief he supports by the evidence of ants going “forwards to their Hills” and bees who “admirably know the way, from a Flowry Heath, two or three Miles off, to their Hives” (177). While he is willing to admit that gnats and flies have a more “mutable” imagination than bees and ants, he insists that most of the “insecta,” just like dogs, apes, and humans, have a sophisticated “sense of Feeling” located in the head (177). Reasoning from the example of bees, he argues that if they goe forthright to a Place, they must needs have Sight: Besides, they delight more in one Flower, or Herbe, than in another, and therefore have Taste: And Bees are called with Sounde upon Brasse, and therefore they have Hearing; Which shewith likewise that though their Spirit be diffused, yet there is a Seat of their Senses in their Head. (177)

By “spirit” Bacon means the animal spirits that, as G. S. Rousseau argues, were in the forefront “of all theories explaining life” between 1400 and 1800.13 The head, or “Seat of the Senses,” housed or served as a kind of switchyard for the animal spirits that, after William Harvey’s work on circulation (1628), began to be conceived by many naturalists as part of a network conjoined by blood. Neuroanatomists sought to identify what was described variously in the seventeenth century as a fluid, an ether, or a fire. The cornerstone of this tradition is Willis’ 1664 Cerebri Anatome (Anatomy of the Brain) the first text, according to Rousseau, to argue unequivocally that the “seat of the soul is strictly limited to the brain” or, in the words of Jess Keiser, that “most mental faculties (such as imagination, memory,

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and basic forms of reasoning) could be attributed to the forms of animal spirits navigating the nervous system.”14 Cerebri Anatome went through four editions within a year; over the next century these ballooned into twenty-three editions. It was not, writes Carl Zimmer, “the work of an atheist.”15 The project of Cerebri Anatome is in keeping with Willis’ theological imperative:  to locate in animal bodies proof of divine workmanship, reflected in neuroanatomical differences that mirror and reinforce the order of creation.16 Summarizing the differences readers should expect to encounter between “perfect” and “imperfect” creatures, Willis writes: Concerning the Heads of living Creatures … it was observed … that there was a notable Analogy between man and four-footed Beasts, also between Birds and Fishes; For when the first Inhabitants of the new-made World were produced, as one day brought forth Fowls and Fishes at once, another in like manner Man and four-footed Beasts; so there is in either twin species a like form of the Brain; but between the Child of the former, and this of the following day, there is found a great difference as to those parts. For as much therefore as Men and four-footed Beasts have got more perfect Brains, and more alike among themselves, we have Ordered our Observations from their Inspection; Then afterwards we shall deliver the Anatomy of the Brain in Fowls and Fishes. (Anatomy 6)

Willis’ treatise replicates the Biblical order: God created denizens of the waters and sky on the fifth day, man and land animals on the sixth.17 (That God created “creeping things” – themselves regarded as “imperfect” – on day six as well does not seem to trouble Willis’ scheme.) In this theocentric view, humans and quadrupeds are “twin species” in the same way that birds and fish are, their “perfect” brains reflecting or reaffirming their origins and place in the divinely created order of nature. Humans retain their place atop the Great Chain of Being, a theological position now reinforced by what Willis asserts is anatomical evidence. Cognitive differences among the “more perfect” creatures are primarily but not exclusively manifest in the texture of the cerebral cortex or the surface of the brain that distills or distributes the animal spirits. These, produced by arterial blood, are conveyed to the grey cortex, “and then carried through white matter, the brain stem, and through the nerves into the rest of the body:  muscles, organs, and fibrous membranes.”18 Higher cognitive faculties require “free and changeable” pathways for the circulation of the animal spirits (60). The cortex of humans and the more perfect animals, then, is characterized by variegation  – “uneven and broken, with turnings, and windings and rollings about, almost like those of the Intestines,” but the brains of “lesser

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four-footed beasts” and “Fowls and Fishes” are “plain and even” (59). Because imagination, memory, and reasoning are related to the complexity of these neuroanatomical “gyrations,” humans are able to think and act beyond the instinct that governs other animals.19 In Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, Willis examines in more detail the similarities and differences between humans and animals who share a “sensitive” or “vital” soul. The question of animal “souls,” he admits, is a subject “almost worn thread-bare” by ancient and modern writers (38). It had been reanimated earlier in the seventeenth century by Descartes who, driven by religious anxiety, had at times relegated animals to the status of unthinking beast machines: “There is none which sooner estrangeth feeble minds from the right way of vertue,” Descartes complains, “then to imagine that the soul of beasts is of the same nature as ours.”20 Like other English naturalists, Willis rejects Descartes’ argument, hoping to find through dissection differences in degree as well as kind. In comparative anatomy, he explains, the manifold and wonderful wisdom of the Creator is manifested; so are by the same discovered, even in the smallest and most despicable Animals, not only mouths and limbs, but also hearts, being as ‘twere so many altars and hearths to perpetuate this vital flame. Here the reader will meet with very skillful and accurate Dissections of the Silk-worm, Oyster, Lobster, Earthworm; as also of divers Brains; and first, of that of a Sheep … And secondly, of a new one of a Humane Brain … That so by confronting these Brains, the vast difference of the Soul of a Brute and that of a Man may the better be shewn. (152)

By devoting his attention to the corporeal soul that unites humans and the other animals, Willis tries to demonstrate the “vast difference” between them. Although most of Two Discourses lives up to its title – to examine the relationship between the “soul of brutes” and that of the “vital” or “sensitive” in man – it is framed by an odd and telling discussion of whether nonhumans and humans share an incorporeal soul. Willis explicitly rejects the idea that the “Soul of the Beast is an Incorporeal Substance, or Form,” a belief he associates with the “Platonick Fiction, concerning the Soul of the World,” nor can he stomach the beliefs of Originists, a heretical Christian sect that believed in the preexistence of souls. Although admitting that he can “be a little solicitious, for [the souls of ] the almost infinite multitude of the more perfect Beasts, which have liv’d, and do live,” Willis balks at the notion that vermin can lay claim to any kind of “Incorporeal” soul (4). In challenging this “Fiction” he asks:

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Luci nda  Cole Yet where do many Myriads of Souls, even innumerable, of Insects and Fishes, which are daily produced, subsist, and what do they? The Bodies of very many of these serve only as Food to other Creatures. And for that the Souls to these Bodies, serve chiefly to preserve them only for a little time, and as it were pickle them to keep them from putrefaction, there is no need that these should be therefore immaterial and immortal. (4)

These purely instrumental beings, as ephemeral as the mayfly, serve either as part of a great food web or as proof of God’s power to scourge a sinful humankind. When “Egypt was infected by Divine Punishment,” he continues, “with Swarms of Fleas, Flyes, and other Various Kinds of innumerable Insects, and that the same also abounded every where, it is not easily to be Conceived, from whence so many Souls were so suddenly Called, and into what places, the same being by and by separated, could be placed” (4). This convoluted sentence, intended to counter the logic of metempsychosis, suggests that because the sheer number of fleas, flies, and swarming things described in the ten biblical plagues boggles the mind, it is impossible that they could house individual (“freed” or “separated”) souls. Willis raises the possibility of insect ensoulment, then, only to reject it. The soulless insects help ground a chain of differences. Bruno Latour argues that modernity set itself the task of separating two realms, one characterized by a free-thinking subject, the realm of humans and politics, and one inhabited by mute objects, the realm of “Nature” that, through scientific investigation can be made to “speak the truth.” These “nonhumans,” writes Latour, “lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are even more reliable than mortals, to whom will is attributed but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way.”21 This is the function of vermin in comparative anatomy: worms, oysters, and lobsters “speak the truth” not by demonstrating their similarities to humans, as dogs, cats, and foxes do, but by manifesting their quiet, cold difference, their proximity to “life” defined as an animating force, like fire. In Two Discourses, Willis argues that the corporeal soul lies “hid in the Blood, or Vital Liquer” and can be described as a “certain fire of flame” (5) whose sustenance is “supplied from sulphur or some other nitrous thing in the air” (6). Historical precedents for this definition of life can be found in Critias, Empedocles, and, significantly, in the Scriptures, where “eating of Blood is forbidden, because it is the Life, or the Soul” (2). On the basis of the description, Willis places living creatures into three classes according to the “Various Constitution of the Vital Humour”: those without blood (insects, certain fishes, oysters, lobsters, and crabs); those with “less perfect” or frigid blood (earthworms, some fish, frogs, serpents, lizards); and those

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of “more perfect” or hot blood (fowls and four-footed beasts) (7). Each class of animals has varying concentrations of the “vital” liquor, and consequently different kinds of corporeal souls, with the soul of hot-blooded brutes being “a Rule or Square, by which others more inferior ought to be measured, and as the same actuating the humane body” (18). In this respect, Willis’ argument for the “hot-blooded” nature of mammals comes close to being an empirical phenomenon. In the “more perfect creatures,” he asserts, animal spirits appear as “a certain fire or flame”: anyone witnessing the exhalations of a furry beast “may well believe,” writes Willis, “that the blood doth truly flame forth, and that Life is not so like to flame, but even flame itself ” (7). The souls of “less perfect, or frigid animals,” in contrast, are characterized by their proximity to a heat that is, and is not, metaphoric: “although we do not say the soul is properly flame,” Willis writes, “yet (which is next to it) we say it is a most thin heap of subtil particles, and as it were, fiery, a certain spirituous breath” (7). Even lower down the chain of being, earthworms, some fishes, frogs, serpents, and reptiles have a false fire, and therefore merely the appearance of life: “we suspect the Souls of these [creatures], though of a fiery nature, to have not a flamy Hypostatis” but a breathy vapor “hardly or not at all inkindled, like an ignis fatuus or false fire, … destitute of sensible heat” (13). In arguing for a “vast difference” between classes of animals based on the presence and motion of animal spirits in the blood, Willis created a structural, neuroanatomical basis for the uneven distribution of “life” across species that corresponds to his theological assumptions. What his imperfect creatures “indicate,” ultimately, is not simply complexity of design but proof of a larger and more enduring system – an anthropocentric Great Chain of Being – than that represented by the nerves, heart, and brain alone.22 Vermin also help Willis and other natural philosophers address a knotty problem: the presence and nature of the animal spirits. Although the “Ancients,” he writes, “did declare the Soul to be Fire, and the more modern Fire or Flame,” these must be regarded largely as figures for the operations of the corporeal soul “which cannot be perceived by our Senses, but is only known by its Effects, and Operations” (6). In living creatures, the presence and workings of animal spirits can be deduced through evidence of nervous response or what was referred to as “irritability.” Vanishing “after life is extinct,” he writes, animal spirits “leave no Foot-steps of themselves” (6). This is especially the case with humans and other “more perfect” creatures, who expire shortly after decapitation. The nervous systems of earthworms, in contrast, help make visible the

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presence of animal spirits, the “impressions, influences, and secret ways of the workings of the sensitive soul” (6), markedly in the throes of death. When worms, eels, and snakes are cut into pieces, argues Willis, they will “move themselves for a time” (5), thereby making “real” otherwise largely untestable assumptions about the extension and divisibility of the corporeal soul, later developed by the anti-materialist Robert Whytt, into a theory of involuntary motion. “Any difficulties which may appear in this matter,” Whytt writes, “are owing to our ignorance of the nature of the soul, of the manner of its existence, and of its wonderful union with, and action upon the body.”23 If even “small and inconsiderable bodies” must be “referred to the agency of an immaterial principle,” he continues, how much more critical it is to acknowledge as the “author” and “sustainer” of this “system” an “Incorporeal Nature every where and always present, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness.”24 Although Willis may have been less generous in his dualism than Whytt – although he was unwilling to extend an incorporeal soul to frogs, vipers, and butterflies – he shared with Whytt a theological agenda and an experimental program built on the souls of vermin.

Vermin Infestation in Colonial Ireland In Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of a Tub, and “On Poetry: A Rhapsody,” Swift satirizes natural philosophers like Willis who, in his view, conflate reason with the mechanical operations of the brain.25 “For, it is the Opinion of choice Virtuosi that the Brain is only a Crowd of little Animals,” he writes in Tale of a Tub, “but with Teeth and Claws extremely sharp, and therefore, cling together in the Contexture we behold, like the Picture of Hobbes Leviathan, or like Bees in perpendicular Swarm upon a Tree, or like a Carrion corrupted into Vermin, still preserving the Shape and Figure of the Mother Animal.”26 Swift literalizes the “Animal” in animal spirits, recasting Willis’ figures for the “vital flame” in the nervous system as a host of swarming biting creatures. He satirizes the thesis that “life” can be rendered as proximity to a heat that all creatures share: “nothing less than a violent Heat can disentangle these Creatures from their hamated Station of Life, or give them Vigor and Humor, to imprint the Marks of their little Teeth” (305). And in a play on Willis’ term “irritability,” Swift imagines that bites from these “little Teeth” are responsible for poetry, eloquence, and politics. In “On Poetry:  A Rhapsody,” a poem about misplaced human ambition and pretensions to wit, this satire reappears in a different register: “So, Nat’ralists observe, A Flea/ Has smaller Fleas that

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on him prey;/And so these have smaller yet to bite ‘em,/ And so proceed ad infinitum.”27 Throughout Swift’s work, the differences between insects and worms, dogs and cats, are less important than those between ensouled humans, conceived as God’s imperfect agents on earth, and the creatures over which they had been given dominion. At the same time, Willis’ fascination with the agential qualities of imperfect creatures irrupts in Swift’s writings as a kind of verminous unconscious: that is, the anatomist’s individual specimens reappear in his texts as swarms of creeping, flying, and slithering beings that both define and threaten the sociopolitical and theological order. In Thoughts on Various Subjects, Swift claims that “storms and tempests, unfruitful seasons, serpents, spiders, flies, and other noxious or troublesome animals” do not, as some think, signify “imperfection in nature,” but instead act as a “spur to industry”: “wherever God has left to man the power of interposing a remedy by thought or labour,” he writes, “there has he placed things in a state of imperfection, on purpose to stir up human industry, without which life would stagnate, or indeed rather could not subsist at all.”28 By “life” Swift means, of course, “civilized” life, human existence characterized by God-given reason. Swift’s human is an animal, as he explains in a letter to Alexander Pope, rationis capax, capable of behaving reasonably – and much of Swift’s work sets itself the quixotic task of encouraging reasonable behavior, both through exhortation and satire.29 Although his talking horses have received a great deal of critical attention, Swift’s vermin are more numerous and, in some ways, more revealing.30 Vermin in his works multiply after 1713, when he assumed the position as Dean of Saint Patrick’s; because Saint Patrick banished snakes (another kind of vermin) from Ireland, ridding the land of noxious creatures is part of Swift’s brief as Dean. His 1726 “Verses On the Drying Up of St. Patrick’s Well” is written from the perspective of an angry Saint Patrick, transformed into a satiric scourge of English and Scots interlopers. Having driven “the venom’d serpent from thy land,” St. Patrick tries to warn his increasingly “degenerate” countrymen about the threats posed by hordes from across the Irish Sea: millions of the croaking race; Emblems of insects vile, who spread their spawn Through all thy land, in armour, fur and lawn; A nauseous brood, that fills your senate walls And in the chambers of your Viceroy crawls.31

This language of infestation gains its satiric edge by multiplying these “Emblems” into a plague of devastation; rather than poisonous snakes,

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Saint Patrick is confronted by “a brood” that threatens the livelihoods of the Irish. Swift’s satires in the 1720s about the Irish coinage savaged William Wood, the English owner of a copper mine who, having received the patent to coin Irish farthings and halfpence, reduced the amount of copper in the currency. In “Wood: An Insect,” Swift compares Wood first to a wood-louse and then to a woodworm burned in “his own melted copper,” “for our fear’s at an end with the death of the maggot.”32 In turning his political enemies into insects, Swift not only draws on a long tradition of plague poems, but effectively robs his adversaries of their rational souls.33 Their “corporeal souls” reduce Wood and his ilk to the basest of instincts. It would be a mistake, however, to treat such representations as merely figural, as part of a semiotic removed from a creaturely world. As in Willis’ natural philosophy, Swift’s vermin function both as theologically inflected images, often as plagues or scourges sent forth by an angry God, and as real creatures that swarm and multiply. Insect infestations were endemic in Irish history, and while modern readers may have to consult editorial notes to figure out what a wood louse is, during the early modern period, Ireland was subjected to multiple infestations of insects – variously referred to as grasshoppers, beetles, and locusts – that devastated the land, spoiled harvests, and exacerbated food shortages. David Powel writes in The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales that in 1584 “Ireland was destroied with strange wormes having twoo teeth, which consumed all that was greene in the land. These seeme to be Locusts, a rare plague in these countries, but often seene in Africke, Italie, and other hot regions.”34 Letters published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society mention four distinct “invasions” of locusts, beetles, and other devouring insects between 1684 and 1697 – in Cambridgeshire, Connough, Galway, and Wales – and two more in 1737 and 1748.35 By far the most vivid description of such an infestation, however, occurs in a letter by Thomas Molyneux, like Swift a member of the Dublin Royal Society, to St. George Ashe, Lord Bishop of Clogher, Swift’s life-long friend.36 In 1697, according to Molyneux, locusts in Ireland consumed so many trees and hedges that summer looked like “the depth of winter”; they invaded houses where they “would often drop on the Meat as it was dressing in the Kitchin,” and fall from the ceilings “into the Dishes as they stood on the Table” (744). A second generation of locusts, still in the maggot stage, crept underground to devour the roots of corn and grass, thereby ruining “both the support of Man and Beast” (744). Molyneux interprets this event in biblical terms as a “plague” that tests Ireland’s

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faith, and, like Willis and other natural philosophers, subjects this potential environmental disaster to providentialist interpretation. The “rage” of this plague, Molyneux writes, was checked both by fortunate winds and God’s foresight in having the locusts serve as a food source for starving animals. Swine and poultry, he reports, began to watch for the locusts to fall from trees: And when they came to the Ground eat them up in abundance, being much pleased with the Food, and thriving well upon the Diet. Nay, I have been assured that the poorer sort of the Native Irish (the Country then labouring under a Scarcity of Provision, had a way of dressing them, and lived upon them as Food; nor is it strange that what fattened our domestick Poultry and Hogs, should afford agreeable and sufficient Nourishment for the Relief of Man. (746)

Hungry Irish people are allied, by virtue of this diet, with the Jews of Exodus: “Forseeing the great Dearth and Scarcity that these Vermin might one Day bring upon his People,” writes Molyneux, Moses “gives them a sort of Hint what they should do” when the locusts and beetles have destroyed provisions (753). Rather “than starve,” Moses tells the Israelites, “they might eat, and live upon, the filthy Destroyers themselves, and yet be Clean” (753). Although Molyneaux’s “locusts” were probably may bugs,37 his account nevertheless suggests that to live in Ireland at the turn of the eighteenth century was to see the biblical plagues of swarming creatures as a disaster that might recur at any time. The striking image of “Native Irish” preparing and cooking insects gives us a sense of the deep and threatening relationships between sudden infestations and “a Scarcity of Provision.” Although, according to John Walter and Roger Schofield, Ireland “escaped the famines of the 1690s and 1710s that wreaked havoc elsewhere in Europe,” as the Irish economy became “heavily export-oriented” in the early eighteenth century, the country experienced “a vital loss of flexibility in food supply” that “for many was fatal”  – even before the bad harvests of 1718–19 and 1726–9, and the famine of 1740–2.38 James C. Riley argues persuasively that, before 1740, insects also may have been responsible for high European mortality rates because food shortages and malnutrition were endemic across much of the continent.39 Food supplies during Swift’s tenure at Saint Patrick’s, in particular, were put under severe pressure by the prolonged dearth in Scotland, whose hungry poor often found their way into Ireland. It is discomfiting but not surprising, then, that vermin infestations were pressed into the service of biopolitics. When not turning Wood into an insect, Swift uses the language of infestation to describe the poor moving

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through Ireland in search of food, characterizing them as a “swarm” of invading insects that strip Ireland of its already scarce resources. In A Proposal for Giving Badges to the Beggars in All the Parishes of Dublin (1737), Swift complains that “Strollers from the Country nestle themselves where they can find the cheapest Lodgings, and then infest every part of the town.”40 Claude Rawson argues at length that Swift’s portrayal of beggars hearkens back to earlier depictions of the Irish as cannibals and also mimics contemporary accounts of Amerindians, but the image of infestation in this case is as much biopolitical as it is ethnographic.41 A key part of Swift’s proposal is to pay the Bellowers, those employed to drive “Foreign Beggars out of the City,” a better salary, one that “would make it their Interest to clear the Town” of what he calls “Caterpillars” (23). In the agricultural world of the eighteenth century, caterpillars can refer to locusts, beetles, and grasshoppers in early stages of development, and these insects were agents of the kind of devastation that Molyneux describes. In 1737, the same year Swift published A Proposal for Giving Badges, John Boyle, the fifth Earl of Orrery (who later authored a biography of Swift) describes how that summer the “cornel [cherry] trees became covered with caterpillars,” that ate all the leaves and shrouded trees in a web “of so pure and glossy a color that the whole tree shone in the sun as if it were cased in burnished silver.”42 Orrery quickly modulates his lyrical description of the infested cherry trees by linking caterpillars to disease: “pestilential disorders,” he claims, may be “nothing else than prodigious flights of invisible flies” that are multiplied from worms “bred in putrid carcases … and being raised from thence into the air, are wafted not only from one body to another, but even to distant countries” (292). This account suggests how Swift’s references to caterpillars put the poor into the verminous role of depleting already-scarce food supplies, and thereby creating the conditions for “pestilential disorders” – infections of the Irish body politic. Swift’s description of the displaced poor as an infesting swarm doubtless makes us uncomfortable. Galway in particular, he writes, is overrun with a “perpetual Swarms of Foreign Beggars” (Badges 11). Even though he deploys similar language in satires against critics, papists, and Whigs, for Swift to treat beggars as a “swarm” is to dehumanize an already-vulnerable group. Their defining characteristics are the insects’ ability to reproduce quickly and their penchant for devastating food stores. Swift alludes to this reproductive capacity several times:  as the beggar’s “Litter of Brats,” his “Equipage of Children,” and his “Brood” (9, 10). Ireland is “the only Christian Country,” he claims, where “People contrary to the old Maxim, are the Poverty and not the Riches of the Nation; so the blessing of Increase and Multiply is by us

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converted into a Curse” (13–14).43 His language walks a fine line between a discourse of environmental sustainability and a discourse of extermination, found in a Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, where Swift advocates – this time satirically  – shocking solutions for population control:  cannibalism and castration. In 1737, Swift’s extreme solutions for the poor around Dublin include banishing the Irish beggars from the cities to their home villages, where they could at least grow food, and returning Scots beggars to Scottish shores: those in Galway, he writes breezily, might be “banished in a Month without Expence and with very little Trouble” (11). Underwriting Swift’s proposals is fear of an agricultural landscape laid bare by swarms of hungry creatures, “verminous” by virtue of their unsustainable numbers in an economy of scarcity. Nor was he alone in representing the migrating poor as somehow related to swarming insects. The tendency in Swift studies, though, has been to collapse a complex environmental history into a kind of symbolic morality play, whereby humans, in the words of the Brobdingnagian king, parade through the pages as “the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface if the Earth.”44 To take seriously the implications of vermin in Swift’s late political works is to acknowledge the extent to which he imagined the health of the body politic in terms of protective and prohibitive forms of spatial assignment. A Proposal for Giving Badges, then, like Molyneux’s report to the Dublin Royal Society, opens a window to the porous boundaries separating theology, politics, and discourses of the natural world, even as it reminds us that caterpillars, locusts, and beetles are as much a part of Irish history as are the Plantation of Ulster, the repeal of Poyning’s Law, and the 1798 rebellion. In exacerbating food supplies already ravaged by Englishmen, insects, and other animals, beggars are forced into a symbolic role as swarming invaders threatening the fact and quality of human life.

Conclusion: Tangled Up in Vermin In different ways, Willis and Swift demonstrate that the oppositions defining our traditional understanding of the Enlightenment  – ancient and modern, reason and feeling, mechanism and vitalism  – take place within a creaturely world in which insects, worms, caterpillars, and other “imperfect” creatures served constitutive, biopolitical functions. Theological debates about the nature of vermin – cold-blooded, voracious, but still agential within a providential universe – spilled over from science into poetry and policy intended to define and organize human life so as

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to distinguish it from that of the “beasts.” Again, Willis and Swift are by no means representative of the century as a whole. Janelle Schwartz’s 2012 study Worm Work:  Recasting Romanticism argues that later in the century scientific analyses of vermin were “raised to a fever pitch”; new investigations into polyps and parasites helped create the conditions for reimagining the linear Great Chain of Being as “a nonhierarchical mesh,” a continually evolving “web of life” epitomized by the work of Erasmus Darwin.45 The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society (1803) describes the complex ecological relationships that, for him, characterize the flux of microscopic and insect life: when a Monarch or a mushroom dies, Awhile extinct the organic matter lies; But, as a few short hours or years revolve, Alchemic powers the changing mass dissolve; Born to new life unnumber’d insects pant, New buds surround the microscopic plant; Whose embryon senses, and unwearied frames, Feel finer goads, and blush with purer frames.46

Following Lucretius, Darwin depicts new material life, emerging from the processes of decay, as more capable of feeling than the old. Reimagining discredited theories of spontaneous generation, he outlines a view of Nature in which vermin and Man are, if not kindred, at least distant cousins. “Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,” he writes, “arose from rudiments of form and sense/ An embryon point, or microscopic ens.”47 Configuring what Schwartz calls “a fluid unity” from “seeming disparity,” Darwin’s Nature is “an eternal and infinite collection of beings” always in the process of being created and passing away.48 This neomaterialist perspective reminds us that humans exist with other creatures (“mushrooms” with “Monarchs”) in living ecologies; as Michel Serres puts it, we are “not separated, but plunged, immersed in the Biogea, in cousin company.”49 Vermin provide a point of entry to this living ecology not because they are constitutively different from other animals, but because they make explicit what life has in common. In Serres’ words, neither scientifically nor morally can humans “claim to be subjects in the midst of a world of objects.”50 Whether in the form of parasites (mites and lice), biting things (flies, locusts, and mosquitoes), or competitors for food (rats and mice), vermin both support and trouble eighteenth-century anthropocentric assumptions and established orders. Yet, as Swift’s writing reminds us, there are limits to the political effectiveness of these preoccupations with vitalism and materialism, both in the

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eighteenth century and now. Although they may flatten out the differences among humans, animals, and things in the name of a materiality that draws humans toward “a greater appreciation of the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans,” as Jane Bennett puts it, such framing devices can also sidestep questions of value.51 Neovitalism, writes Karen Barad, “takes everything to be living, without necessarily asking after the ways in which particular kinds of animate-inanimate distinctions come to matter for particular purposes of particular kinds of flourishings for particular beings.”52 Swift’s writings, in this context, remind us that vermin remained powerful and often deadly signifiers in social and political discourse. Despite Willis’ celebration of their exquisite design, “imperfect creatures” were regarded, at best, as inferior prototypes of human development and, at worst, as inhuman plagues on the body politic. As underdeveloped zoological others, they grounded scientific notions of human perfection and perfectibility; as the rapidly reproducing embodiments of impoverishment, they helped anchor notions of citizenship intrinsic to early modern notions of the theologically inflected state. To study vermin in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe, then, is necessarily to acknowledge both animals and animality, how imperfect creatures were pressed by theology into the formation of its scientific, aesthetic, and political constructions.

Notes 1 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (London: Macmillan, 1900), 252. Hereafter cited in the text. 2 On conceptions of the nature, distribution and function of the animal spirits see F.  J. Cole, A History of Comparative Anatomy from Aristotle to the Eighteenth Century (New  York:  Dover, 1975); John W.  Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces:  Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Sidney Ochs, A History of Nerve Functions:  From Animal Spirits to Molecular Mechanisms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the relationship between animal spirits and literature, see G.S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts:  Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). On the relationship between Willis and John Locke, see Jess Keiser, “Nervous Figures:  Enlightenment Neurology and the Personified Mind,” ELH 82 (2015): 1073–1108. 3 See Catherine Packham, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism:  Bodies, Cultures, Politics (Basingstoke:  Palgrave, 2012). Twenty-first-century interest in this

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4 5 6 7 8

9

10

11 12

13 14

Luci nda  Cole philosophical problem has been renewed in new materialism; see Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), and Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New  York:  Norton, 2011). This essay, alternatively, emerges from animal studies, with which there are unexplored connections. On the Great Chain of Being, see Arthur O.  Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times:  Volume One, ed. Douglas Den Uyl (Indianapolis:  Liberty Fund, 2001), 333. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London, 1690), 1. See Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 1–23. Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: Or, The Natural History in Ten Centuries, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D.  Heath (rpt. New  York:  Garrett Press, 1968), 2:  557. Hereafter cited in the text. On insects and Renaissance science, see Brian Ogilve, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2006); Brian Ogilve, “Order of Insects:  Insect Species and Metamorphosis Between Renaissance and Enlightenment,” in The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014), 222–45; and Anna Marie Roos, Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639–1712), the First Arachnologist (Leiden: Brill, 2011). The Latin edition of Cerebri Anatome was published in 1664, then translated into English by S. Pordage in 1681. I will be using a reset version of the original English edition, Thomas Willis, The Anatomy of the Brain, the 1681 Edition, Reset and Reprinted, with the Original Illustrations by Sir Christopher Wren (Tuckahoe, NY: USV Pharmaceutical Corp, 1971). The 1672 text, De Anima Brutorum, was translated as Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, Which Is That of the Vital and Sensitive in Man (London, 1683). Future references to both texts will be cited parenthetically. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Albert Rivero (New  York:  Norton, 2002), 111. F. N. Smith, among others, makes this argument throughout Language and Reality in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979). On whether Swift had direct access to Willis’ writings, see Marjorie Perlman Lorch, “Explorations of the Brain, Mind, and Medicine in the Writings of Jonathan Swift,” in Brain, Mind, and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth Century Neuroscience, ed. Harry Whitaker, C.  U. M.  Smith, and Stanley Finger (New York: Springer, 2007), 345–52. Rousseau, Nervous Acts, 18. Ibid., 165; Keiser, “Nervous Figures,” 1082.

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15 See Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain – And How It Changed the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 187. 16 On the relationship between Willis’ neuroanatomy and theology, see Rina Knoeff, “The Reins of the Soul: The Centrality of the Intercostal Nerves to the Neurology of Thomas Willis and Samuel Parker’s Theology,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 59 (2004): 426. 17 Genesis 1: 20–31. 18 Alfred Meyer and Raymond Hierons, “On Thomas Willis’s Concepts of Neurophysiology, Part One,” Medical History 9, no. 1 (1965): 2. 19 “In human brains the pathways are far more and greater … than in any other living Creature; the relationship between the absence of these ‘gyrations’ and instinct is best exhibited by his description of a cat’s brain:  the ‘gyrations’ are regular or in a certain figure and order:  wherefore this Brute thinks on, or remembers, scarce anything but what the instincts and needs of Nature suggest” (Willis, Anatomy, 59–60). On negative cultural attitudes towards the cat see Karen Raber, “How to Do Things with Animals: Thoughts on/with the Early Modern Cat,” in Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, ed. Raber, Ivo Kamps, and Thomas Hallock (Bastingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 93–114. 20 René Descartes, A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason, and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences (London, 1649), 96. 21 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 23–4. 22 In odd ways, Willis’ “Amphibious Animal” prefigures and anticipates the posthuman recognition of the problem inherent of defining the human along purely Cartesian lines. In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben argues that the human is not a “biologically defined species,” but “exists historically” only in a tension between the human and the animal: “[man] can be human only to the degree that he transcends and transforms the anthropophorous animals which support him, and only because, through the action of negation, he is capable of mastering, and eventually destroying, his own animality”; The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 12. 23 Robert Whytt, An Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions in Animals (1751), rpt. in The Works of Robert Whytt (Birmingham: Gryphon, 1984), 207. 24 Ibid., 208. 25 On Swift’s creaturely imagery in the context of eighteenth-century materialism, see Kate E.  Tunstall, “The Early Modern Embodied Mind and the Entomological Imaginary,” in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives, ed. Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 202–29. 26 Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: John Nutt, 1704), 304. All quotations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 27 Swift, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1733), 259, ll. 351–4. 28 Swift, The Works of D.  Jonathan Swift, 9  vols., 7th ed. (Dublin, George Faulkner, 1752), 1: 284.

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29 The Works of Rev. Jonathan Swift (London, 1801), 14: 38, September 29, 1725. 30 Recent criticism on this subject includes Ann Cline Kelly, “Gulliver as Pet and Pet Keeper: Talking Animals in Book 4,” ELH 74, no. 2 (2007), 323–49; Anne Barbeau Gardiner, “ ‘Be Ye as the Horse!’: Swift, Spinoza, and the Society of Virtuous Atheists,” Studies in Philology 97, no. 2 (2000), 229–53; and Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment:  The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 103–17. 31 “Verses Occasioned by the Sudden Drying Up of St. Patrick’s Well near Trinity College, Dublin,” in Jonathan Swift:  The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (London: Penguin, 1983), 375, ll. 40, 54–8. 32 “Wood: An Insect,” in Complete Poems, ed. Rogers, 282, ll. 36, 40. 33 The role of locusts as invading armies or colonies reappears in the plague poems of Drayton, Wither, and Cowley, then in “The Seditious Insects” in 1708 (by an unknown author) where “Hostile Vermin” corrupt Britain’s “Ancient Hive of Aristaean Bees.” On insects in plague poems see Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 49–80. 34 Quoted in David E. Thornton, “Locusts in Ireland? A Problem in the Welsh and Frankish Annals,” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 31 (1996): 40. 35 See Martin Lister, Two Letters Formerly Written to Mr. H.  O, by Dr.  M.  L. Ist. concerning Some Very Aged Persons in the North of England. 2d. about the Projection of the Threads of Spiders, of Bees Breeding in Cases Made of Leaves, of a Viviparous Fly, and of Great Numbers of Maggots Observed at the Time of the Plague, A. D. 1666, in Philosophical Transactions 14 (1684): 592–8; William Molyneux, A Letter from William Molyneux Esq. Secretary of the Philosophical Society of Dublin Note to a S. of the R.S. Giving an Account of the ConnoughWorm, in Philosophical Transactions 15 (1685):  876–9; and John and Philip Skelton, A Letter from the Right Hon. John Earl of Orrery to Martin Folkes Esquire, Pr. R. S. Inclosing an Account of the Cornel-Catterpillar, Contained in a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Philip Skelton to His Lordship in Philosophical Transactions 45 (1748): 281–96. 36 Thomas Molyneux, A Letter From Dr. Thomas Molyneux, Fellow of the Royal Society, to the Right Reverand St. George, Lord Bishop of Clougher; Concerning Swarms of Insects, That of Late Have Much Infested Some Parts of the Province of Connought in Ireland in Philosophical Transactions 19 (1695–7):  741–56. Referred to hereafter in the text. 37 Apparently these were not locusts but may bugs or cockchafer (melalontha vulgaris) although locusts had earlier invaded England. See Dublin University Magazine: A Literary and Political Journal 18 (1841): 750. 38 John Walter and Roger Schofield, “Famine, Disease, and Crisis Mortality in Early Modern Society,” in Famine, Disease, and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, ed. Walter and Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 33. 39 James C. Riley, “Insects and the European Mortality Decline,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 4 (1986): 833–58.

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40 Swift, A Proposal for Giving Badges to the Beggars in All the Parishes of Dublin (Dublin, 1737), 23. 41 See Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 183–203. 42 Skelton, A Letter from the Right Hon. John Earl of Orrery, 283. 43 Clayton D.  Lein argues that Swift, for partisan reasons, overestimates the population of Ireland, which had been reduced by famine and English enclosure. See “Jonathan Swift and the Population of Ireland,” EighteenthCentury Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 431–53. 44 Gulliver’s Travels, 111. 45 Janelle A. Schwartz, WormWork: Recasting Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 50. 46 Quoted in Schwartz, Worm Work, 54–5. 47 Ibid., 50. 48 Ibid., 67. 49 Michel Serres, Biogea. trans. Randolph Burks (Minneapolis:  Univocal, 2012), 107. 50 Ibid., 107. 51 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112. 52 “Intra-Actions,” interview with Karen Barad by Adam Kleinmann, Mousse 34 (2012): 80.

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Classify and Display Human and Animal Species in Linnaeus and Cuvier Matthew Senior

Anthropogenesis is what results from the caesura and articulation between human and animal. This caesura passes first of all within man. – Giorgio Agamben1 Species difference itself is fraught with anxieties about race and reproduction. – Mel Y. Chen2

Between 1937 and 1974 a plaster cast of the body of Sara Baartman, the woman known as the Hottentot Venus, was on display at the Musée de l’homme in Paris, accompanied by her skeleton, and her brain in a specimen jar. Describing the exhibit, historians Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully note that artists had painted the cast in flesh tones and added details such as a “a trompe l’oeil of hair,” and breasts with aureoles and nipples. “Sara Baartman’s eyes are closed,” the historians write, “but she seems to be downcast. Her lips are parted as if she were about to speak.”3 Before coming to the Museé, the anatomical exhibit of Sara Baartman had edified and instructed visitors at the Muséum de l’histoire naturelle from the time of Baartman’s death in March of 1815 until 1937. Millions of spectators also viewed the exhibit at the Universal Exhibition of 1889. The skeleton and brain (plus the excised genitalia, preserved in alcohol elsewhere in the Museum) were the result of a post-mortem dissection performed by Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), one of the most learned zoologists of his day. Cuvier’s colleague Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire had written a letter to the Paris police, requesting that Sara Baartman’s body be brought to the Muséum, “in order to acquire new information about this singular race of the human species.”4 Cuvier was particularly interested in the buttocks and the genitals of the deceased Khoisan woman. Like other members of her ethnic group, Sara Baartman was presumed to possess an extra fold of skin around her genitals, the so-called tablier or apron. In his post-mortem report, “Observations on the Cadaver of a Woman Known in Paris and London by the Name of 156

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the Hottentot Venus,” Cuvier put an end to speculation. “I have the honor to present to the Académie the genital organs of this woman, prepared in such a fashion as to leave no doubt about the nature of her tablier.”5 (One cannot read this without thinking of Jack the Ripper or the similar anatomical outrage inflicted on Lulu, the heroine of Frank Wedekind’s play by the same name.6) Curiosity and prurient interest also surrounded the large buttocks of Khoisan women. This condition, known as steatopygia, was one of the anatomical singularities exploited by Sara Baartman’s unscrupulous handlers, who brought her from Cape Town in 1810 and exhibited her in what Crais and Scully aptly label “ethnopornographic freak shows” in London and Paris.7 Approximately sixty years before Cuvier’s dissection of Baartman, another famous natural historian, Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), had shown similar interest in a fourteen-year-old girl from Jamaica, who he believed might be an example of an intermediate species between Homo sapiens and the higher apes.8 Linnaeus was unable to examine the young woman, but he asked a collaborator in London to verify if the young female, like the Venus Hottentot, possessed anatomical features distinguishing her from other humans, such as an orange iris and pupil, a nictitating membrane (like that of a cat) covering her eyes, or the extra fold of skin around her sexual organs – the tablier that Cuvier was able to confirm in his autopsy of Sara Baartman years later. The works of Linnaeus and Cuvier are monuments in the history of biology and summations of two scientific paradigms. Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae (1735) is a definitive example of natural history, a visible display and a binomial naming of the order of nature in its entirety. Cuvier’s Leçons d’anatomie comparée (1800–5) is one of the founding texts of modern biology. Cuvier’s contemporary Lamark coined the word “biology” and outlined the principles of this new science in his Philosophie zoologique (1809). André Pichot names Lamark “the true inventor of biology, as the science of life or living beings.”9 Michel Foucault gives the title of inventor of biology to Cuvier, arguing that Cuvier is the true precursor of Darwin in establishing such principles as “the sovereignty and invisibility of function,” the abandonment of the scale of nature, and the incorporation of temporality into the structure of living organisms.10 As we will see, Cuvier dramatically insists on the specificity of life and outlines a holistic and dynamic theory of animal life, analyzing and comparing deep anatomical structures according to function, not arbitrary surface characteristics chosen simply for classification. Cuvier was the first to understand animal anatomy from the point of view of adaptation for survival in a specific milieu; he also

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constructed a new ordering of nature from the lowest organism to the highest, based on a rigorous neuro-cerebral hierarchy. In comparing Linnaeus and Cuvier, one is confronted with two different visions of nature; two different systems for ordering, displaying, and naming animals; two different systems for defining the boundaries between humans and animals; and two systems for separating humans according to species and race. Not surprisingly, given the centuries-long pattern of Western ethnocentrism, the natural historian Linnaeus and the modern biologist Cuvier created systems that elevated Europeans and Caucasians over other classes of humans. Linnaeus’ scheme for classifying plants, animals, and humans appears in the tables of his Systema Naturae and the illustrations of his Philosophia Botanica (1751) and other works. The Swedish naturalist’s anthropology is on display in a print from his Anthropomorpha (1760), consisting of four primates, two of whom are human and two are not, standing side by side, in varying degrees of uprightness (Figure 9.3). Cuvier’s biology and anthropology are illustrated in the innumerable anatomical drawings and studies of skulls, skeletons, and other organs in the Anatomie comparée (Figure 9.4). In general, anatomical distinctions between humans and animals continue to decline and fade as Cuvier conducts his comparative project, but differences between races of humans are sharpened and deepened. The inventor of modern biology, celebrated by Foucault, was also one of the founders of modern scientific racism.11 Much is currently being written about the history of race during the Enlightenment, including discussions of Linnaeus and Cuvier.12 The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the zoological paradigms that informed the classification and display of humans and animals in the work of these two decisive figures in the history of biology and to determine if methods used to classify plants and animals influenced ways of classifying humans, and vice versa.

Linnaeus and Natural History “Without a system, chaos would reign.” – Linnaeus13

The voluminous illustrated works of Renaissance natural historians such as Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, and Pierre Belon were marked by a new degree of realism in the depiction of animals. In Gessner’s Historia Animalium (1551), strikingly accurate engravings of crocodiles, beavers, and monkeys share the page with fanciful mermaids, tailed men, and monsters.

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Describing the mimetically portrayed animals, art historian Lucien Braun speaks of “natural portraits” and “never before seen fidelity.”14 However, beasts and men from fables, legends, and the writings of Pliny continued to cram the pages of natural history tomes. As Ernst Mayr critically observes, “Pliny rather than Aristotle was evidently his [Gessner’s] ideal … he was obviously not interested in classification. The species are listed alphabetically in each volume of his Historia Animalium.”15 During the seventeenth century, with the publication of works such as John Jonston’s Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus libri (1657), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (1685), and Joseph Tournefort’s Éléments de botanique (1694), a break was made with Renaissance natural science. The trend towards realism continued; imaginary creatures disappeared (with some notable exceptions), and the first rigorous classificatory systems appear. In a luminous passage from The Order of Things, Michel Foucault argues that natural history was vastly simplified and purified during the seventeenth century: It is understandable that the first form of history constituted in this period of “purification” would be the history of nature. For its construction requires only words applied, without intermediary, to things themselves. The documents of this new history are not other words, texts or records, but clear spaces in which things are juxtaposed:  herbariums, collections, gardens; the locus of this history is a timeless rectangle in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside another, their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features, and thus already virtually analyzed, and bearers of nothing but their own individual names.16

Animals and plants are not shown in their natural habitat interacting with other species in their ecological milieu, but rather displayed side by side with species they resemble, often artificially stretched out and posed for maximum visibility in order to highlight differentia. Plants and animals are captured in a snapshot, an unvarying “timeless rectangle,” to use Foucault’s phrase. In an introduction to the later editions of the Systema Naturae, Linnaeus explained that he sought to represent such a vision of nature in his work. “I saw the eternal, all-knowing, all powerful God from the back … I tracked his footsteps over nature’s fields.”17 In another passage, Linnaeus represents himself as Adam in the Garden of Eden, contemplating “an entirely complete collection of natural objects.”18 The gaze of the natural historian is that of a collector who sees nature in its entirety, arranged according to a preexisting logical order that God has created, not man. According to this

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vision, nature is a chain of beings waiting to be arranged and labeled by the naturalist. In his classification of plants, Linnaeus focused on the shapes and structures of plants related to their reproductive cycle. In a passage from his Philosophia Botanica (1751), a book admired by Rousseau, Goethe, and others, the famous botanist defines succinctly the principles of his classificatory system: “I have worked out a sexual system according to the number, relative size, and position of the stamens, together with the pistils.”19 With this new system, botanical classification was revolutionized and founded on an entirely new basis. For whatever reason, Linnaeus seemed to take delight in anthropomorphizing the sexual life of plants. He calls the anthers of flowers the “male genitals of plants” and the stigmas, “the female genitals.”20 “Therefore the calyx is the bedroom, the corolla is the curtain … the generation of vegetables is done by means of the falling of the pollen from the anthers onto the bare stigmas, so that the pollen bursts and blows out the seminal breeze, which is absorbed by the liquid of the stigma.”21 What is most illustrative of Foucault’s classical episteme in Linnaeus’ system is the schematic reduction of plants to a single moment of their existence in a visible, measurable form. Among all of the countless variable parts of plants, Linnaeus focuses primarily on the reproductive parts of plants, namely the flower that always comes first, and the fruit or seed pod that follows. Figure 9.1, an illustration of the sexual system of plants from the 1736 edition of the Species Plantarum, allows one to see the logic of the herbarium and the timeless rectangle. What we see is a side-by-side comparison of the stamens (the male part of the flower) and the pistils (the female part that receives the pollen and passes it on to the seeds). At the very top of Linnaeus’ classificatory system, at the level of the class, all plants and flowers are grouped together according to the number of stamens and pistils in their flowers. Class one, with one stamen, are called monandria (one husband); class two, with two stamens, diandria (two husbands); class three, with three stamens, triandria (three husbands), and so on. The first ten classes count the number of stamens from one to ten, and the next fourteen classes are based on variations in the number and position of the stamens and pistils, arriving at a total of twenty-four different configurations that Linnaeus called his “divine alphabet.” Indeed, in the Ehret illustration, the classes of flowers are inscribed with the letters of the alphabet, from A to Z. Another classificatory device mentioned by Foucault as typical of classical natural history is the herbarium. Fittingly, Linnaeus drew up plans for

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Figure 9.1 Illustration by Georg D. Ehret of Linnaeus’ sexual system of plant classification, from Genera Plantarum, Leiden, 1737. Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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Figure 9.2 Model for the construction of a herbarium, from Philosopohia Botanica, 1751. The herbarium is an upright cabinet with numbered shelves for each of the twenty-four classes of plants. Each species of plant is represented by a sheet of paper bearing the binomial name of the plant, with distinguishing leaves and flowers glued to the page. Source: LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden.

a herbarium and included exacting specifications for constructing one in the Philosophia Botanica. It consists of a cabinet seven and a half feet high, sixteen inches wide, and one foot deep. “The cupboard has room for 6,000 dried plants glued to sheets of paper.”22 An illustration for the herbarium was included in the Philosophia Botanica (Figure 9.2). The cabinet contains twenty-four shelves corresponding to the twentyfour classes of flowers. Individual species of flowers are bound together in bundles, according to their genera, and placed in the slot corresponding to their class. Linnaeus gives detailed instructions for using the herbarium:

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A HERBARIUM is better than any picture, and necessary for every botanist.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Plants should be gathered when they are not wet. No parts should be removed. They should be slightly spread out, but not bent. The fruit-body should be present. They should be dried between dry pieces of paper, as quickly as possible, short of using a hot iron, in a press, with slight pressure. They should be glued with fish-glue. They should always be kept on sheets, only one to a page The sheet should not be bound. The genus should be written above. The species and explanation on the back. Those of the same genus should be placed within a band of linden bark. They should be arranged methodically.23

One of the innovations of the herbarium is that the individual sheets are not bound together in a volume, allowing new species to be added and indexed by re-arranging the sheets in a series.24

The Names of Things Concerning binomial names, Linnaeus writes “If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost too.”25 In addition to serving as memory aids, the taxonomic names are part and parcel of the mental, linguistic, and visual operations at work in the herbarium. In this display, the word is affixed to the thing – attached with fish glue, one could say. The name and the particular kind of ordered, measured knowledge that the image conveys are bound together. There is a kind of momentary transitivity between the word and the thing. One sees and understands each plant as both a species and a member of genera, an order, and a class. There is thus a literal and material, as well as a mental and conceptual seeing. The animal or the plant in the timeless rectangle also invokes the beginning of time. The organism is present, in its specificity, exactly as it was on the first day of creation, and as it will replicate itself throughout eternity, according to Linnaeus’ belief in the fixity of the species. Arranging plants in a series and reciting their names is a sort of scientific litany whereby all of the plants and animals on earth are named and arranged in their proper

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order: Dianthus alpinus, Dianthus amurensis, Dianthus anatolicus – the first three of over three hundred species of carnation.

Anthropomorpha Linnaeus was in constant search of sexual and reproductive differentia to distinguish genera and species of animals, as he had done with plants, but he only achieved relative success in this quest. He did invent the new class of “mammals” based upon morphology related to the reproductive system, as in plants. He continued to search for morphological differences in the sexual organs of animals and humans to establish specific differences. In successive editions of the Systema, he progressed from Aristotle’s original five classes of animals (Quadrupedia, Aves, Amphibia, Pisces, Insecta) to his own list of six classes (Mammalia, Aves, Amphibia, Pisces, Insecta, Vermes). In the first edition of the Systema (1735), humans were placed in the class of Quadrupedia and were declined as:  Class:  Quadrupedia; Order: Anthropomorpha; Genus: Homo; Species: Diurnus. This is a defining moment in the history of human and animal classification. For the first time in history, the human is placed squarely within natural history. Linnaeus was the first to categorize man, taxonomically, as belonging to the class of Anthropomorpha, comprised of humans, apes, and sloths. Prior to Linnaeus, the human had been defined as a rational animal. However, on the basis of the ontologically separate and superior soul, man had always been excluded from the tables of natural history. “Linnaeus was the first to place man in a system of biological classification,” Gunnar Broberg writes, “and he made the first serious attempt to divide mankind into a number of races.”26 Figure  9.3 is from a separate publication by Linnaeus, entitled Anthropomorpha, where he speculates about the close proximity between humans and other human-like creatures.27 From right to left in the engraving, moving from the most distant to the nearest relative of man, we see what we now know to be a pygmy chimpanzee (which Linnaeus called Simia sylvanus). To the left of Simia sylvanus, stands an orangutan, which Linnaeus called Simia satyrus. Next come what, during the nineteenth century, were called missing links: two additional species in the genus Homo: Homo caudatus, man with a tail, and Homo troglodytus, cave man. Homo sapiens is not in this line-up. To summarize, again, moving from right to left, we see: a pygmy chimpanzee (now known to be a member of the ape family), an orangutan, and two different, additional species of humans. One can appreciate some of Linnaeus’ confusion. Reports were

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Carolus Linnaeus, Anthropomorpha, 1760. 1. Troglodyta, Bondt; 2. Lucifer, Aldrovandi; 3. Satyrus, Tulp; 4. Pygmaus, Edwards. Source: Department of Special Collections, Mudd Library, Oberlin College.

Figure 9.3

coming in from travelers to the interior of Africa, Borneo, and the Far East concerning new populations of humans and animals. Linnaeus was also driven to look for intermediaries between humans and simia by the belief that, as he often wrote, “Nature makes no leaps.”28 He assumed there would be intermediate species between humans and apes. It is startling, nonetheless, to see that Linnaeus adopts, uncritically, a visual source from the end of the Middle Ages, which goes all the way back to Pliny: the tailed man from Bernhard de Breydenbach’s, Opusculum sanctorum peregrinationum ad sepulcrum Christi venerandum (1486). The visual source for Homo troglodytus is also dubious, coming from Jacob Bondt’s, Historia Naturalis Indiae Orientalis (1658). One could say that the natural history of man, having just begun, found itself in its infancy, several centuries behind the natural histories of plants and animals, in a state reminiscent of Renaissance natural history, where real and fanciful creatures were mixed together indiscriminately. Another name Linnaeus used for his cave man, the dark sibling of Homo sapiens, was Homo nocturnus, “night man” – “The Child of darkness which turns day into night and night into day and appears to be our closest relative” – as opposed to the name first used for Homo sapiens: Homo

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diurnus.29 Beyond the mythical balance between day and night, Linnaeus called these humans “night humans” because he received reports that a tribe living in Africa preferred to live in caves and avoid the sun. “They walk upright and have short fuzzy hair like a Negro, although it is as white as chalk. The eyes are round, with orange pupils and irises, while the upper eyelid partially covers the lower one, giving the appearance of a squint.”30 It is highly probable that what Linnaeus was describing and cobbling together with images of primates were cases of albinos living in Africa. In later editions of the Systema, Homo caudatus and Homo troglodytus disappeared, but two species of humans still persisted in his classificatory system:  Homo sapiens (consisting of five varieties) and Homo monstrosus, which included the Patagonian, the Hottentot, the Mountaineer, the American, the Chinese, and the Canadian. Homo sapiens, the separate, superior species to all of the monstrous humans, includes a “wild man” and varieties from Europe, Africa, America, and Asia. The differentia of the European are: “fair, sanguine, blue-eyed, gentle, inventive, and governed by laws”; Asiatic Homo sapiens is “sooty, melancholic, rigid, haughty, covetous, and governed by opinions”; African Homo sapiens is “black, phlegmatic, relaxed, crafty, indolent, negligent, and governed by caprice.”31 Throughout Linnaeus’ work appear statements such as:  “As a natural historian, I  have yet to find any characteristics which enable man to be distinguished on scientific principles from the ape.”32 The general thrust of Linnaeus’ taxonomy is to define humans as primates, and to expect to find intermediate species that bring man even closer to the higher apes. On the other hand, like Aristotle, Linnaeus sets man apart:  “Above all other animals, man is noble in his nature, inasmuch as, by the powers of his mind, he is able to reason justly upon whatever discovers itself to his senses, and to look with reverence and wonder upon the works of Him who created all things.”33 As if to indicate that the ultimate differentia of the human were mental and not physical, Linnaeus listed in the place of distinguishing characteristics for the genus Homo the Delphic injunction, Nosce te ipsum (“Know thyself ”). This could be taken several ways. It could mean that man’s distinguishing characteristics transcend the physical. Or Nosce te ipsum could be an invitation to the reader to recognize his or her true self in the form of a primate very close to other primates. Linnaeus’ Nosce te ipsum could be read as an anticipation of Derrida’s “Ecce animot.”34 There is a kind of push and pull in Linnaeus’ anthropology. The “father of primatology” includes humans in the tables of natural history for the first time, situated very close to apes. But with the discovery and naming

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of brother species of Homo sapiens – monstrous and nocturnal humans – and with a further hierarchy within Homo sapiens elevating inventive Europeans over indolent Africans and rigid Asians, one cannot avoid the suspicion that Linnaeus sought to create buffer species between European Homo sapiens and recently discovered cousins in other parts of the world. As European man was naturalized and placed among the animals, there was a compensatory gradation of animality within human ranks, a tendency that would worsen further with Cuvier and modern biology.

Cuvier and Biology As one of the inventors of modern biology, Cuvier understood human and animal bodies to be networks of vital organs, working in unison with other specifically structured organs to facilitate life in a particular natural milieu. As opposed to the static representation of living creatures arranged in taxonomic tables, Cuvier understood and sought to convey the constantly moving, dynamic essence of life. A  recurrent expression for life in his treatises is a tourbillon (vortex). In the opening pages of Leçons d’anatomie comparée the anatomist paints a dramatic portrait of the difference between life and death. Let us examine, for example, the body of a woman in the state of youth and health: the curved and voluptuous forms, the graceful suppleness of her movements, the sweet warmth, and cheeks tinged rose with voluptuousness, eyes flashing with the spark of love or the fire of genius … everything seems united to produce this charming being.

The tone quickly changes however. An instant suffices to destroy this prestige:  often without any apparent cause, movement and sensation suddenly cease; the body loses its warmth, the muscles slacken, the eyes become pale, the cheeks and lips are livid. This is only the prelude to more horrible changes: the flesh turns blue, green, and black; it attracts moisture; parts of it evaporate, other parts flow away in a putrid purulence. … [I]n a word, after a few days, only a few scraps of earth and minerals remain; the other elements have evaporated into the air and water to form new combinations.35

In this stark, materialistic description of life and death, the living body is only a momentary aggregate of minerals and chemicals, no different from the elements into which it will decompose. What sustains and defines life are the specialized organs, each of which makes possible the specific operations of life. The digestive system enables nutrition and growth, the

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function of the lungs is breathing, muscles permit movement, the heart promotes circulation, and, most important of all, the nervous system endows the body with sensation and the coordination of movement. The living organism is thus understood from a completely different temporal perspective compared to the timeless rectangle of natural history. Life is now, in its essence, a continuous, precarious balance of organic functions. The way to explore and display the newly-defined organic essence of life differs entirely from the outward display of characters in natural history. The essence of life is now internal, hidden in the processes and functions of vital organs. The new reality of life, in a sense, is not visible at all. The most important aspect of each organ is its invisible function, not its visible form. Thus dissection becomes the chief arm of the new science. [A]natomy, by really cutting up bodies into patterns, by dividing them up into distinct portions, by fragmenting them in space, discloses the great resemblances that would otherwise have remained invisible; it reconstitutes the unities that underlie the great dispersion of visible differences … [I]t is now the real divisions of anatomy that will make it possible to form the great families of living beings.36

A Neuro-Cerebral Hierarchy The truly distinguishing characteristics of a creature retreat from the surface of the body to the internal organs. The external, visible characteristics that Linnaeus and others sought to display are consigned to supporting roles. Organisms can only be meaningfully compared according to their internal anatomy (see Figure 9.4). The vital organs are ranked in order of their importance for sustaining life. The fundamental organs necessary for life are the circulatory and the nervous systems, which enable and coordinate the most elementary functions of life: movement, sensation, and, at the higher levels, mental activity and thought. Cuvier is generous in granting consciousness and thought to higher animals, but he erects a rigorous system of ranking based on the complexity and location of the nervous system in the body: The higher the nature of an animal, the larger the size of the brain and the more its sensitive powers will be concentrated in the brain; the lower an animal is on the scale, the more the nervous system is dispersed; in the most imperfect forms, the entire substance of the nervous system is embedded in the substance of the body.37

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Figure 9.4 Georges Cuvier, Leçons d’anatomie comparée, Paris: Crochard, 1805, 6 vols. Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4: forearm, hand, and elbow joint from sphinx baboon; Figs. 5, 6, 7: front leg, paw, and elbow joint from a cat; Fig. 8: bear paw; Fig. 9: seal foot; Fig. 10: dolphin flipper. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Man is distinguished from all other animals by the size of the brain: “No quadruped approaches man in the size and folds of the hemispheres of the brain, that is to say, in the parts of that organ that serve as the principal instrument for intellectual operations.”38 As opposed to Linnaeus, who composed an external tableau of plants and animals, Cuvier constructed, in the vast galleries devoted to comparative anatomy in the Muséum de l’histoire naturelle, and in the tomes of his Anatomie comparée, an exhaustive archive of the skulls, bones, and organs of every animal and exemplary human “race” he could acquire. In the Anatomie, speaking with all of the authority of the professor at the Jardin des Plantes and permanent secretary of the department of physics of the Académie des sciences that he was, Cuvier distinguishes three races of humans: “The Caucasian, to which we belong, is distinguished by the oval beauty of the head; it is this race which has given birth to the most civilized peoples (peuples) and those that have dominated others”; “The Mongolian is recognizable according to its prominent cheekbones, flat face, narrow and oblique eyes, and straight black hair. This race has founded great empires … but its civilization has always remained stationary”; and “The black race (la race nègre) is confined to the south of the globe; its color is black, the hair is curly, the skull is compressed, the nose flat; its prominent muzzle and large lips obviously relate this race to monkeys. The scattered tribes (peuplades) who compose this race have always remained barbarous.”39 The black race alone is labeled a peuplade not an organic nation or peuple, such as the French people, who through the French Revolution had recently attained sovereignty. In the first page of illustrations accompanying Le Règne animal, the prototype for the Caucasian race consists of an “Apollon antique,” presented in the frontal and profile perspectives conventional to natural history illustrations (Figure 9.5). The second page of illustrations consists of a comparative study of the skulls of the three races. It is within this framework of comparative anatomy that Cuvier conducted his dissection of Sara Baartman. In “A Lesson in Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des plantes,” Gustave Doré satirizes the anthropological arrogance and blindness of Cuvier and his public. In this illustration for “The Different Publics of Paris” (1854), a professor of comparative anatomy thrusts a human skull towards his audience in a cramped lecture hall. The human students and their professor hardly seem superior to the crocodile and other animals suspended above them, who cast a fraternal and ironic glance towards the viewer of this image (Figure 9.6).

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Figure 9.5 Illustrations from Le Regne animal, Georges Cuvier, Paris: Baillière, 1829–44. Above: 1. ancient Apollo (Caucasian race); 2. one of the Siamese twins (Mongolian race); 3. portrait of Atyr, the Sudanese keeper of the king’s giraffe at the Jardin des plantes (Ethiopian race). Following page: 1. skull of Circassian (Caucasian race); 2. skull of Chinese person (Mongolian race); 3. skull of a Nègre (Ethiopian race). Source: Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC.

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Figure 9.5

(continued)

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Figure 9.6 Gustave Doré, “A Lesson in Comparative Anatomy at the Jardin des plantes,” from the series, “The Different Publics of Paris,” Le Journal pour rire, Paris, 1854. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Notre Boschismanne Faithful to his thesis that internal organs are most important in comparative anatomy, Cuvier bases his racial diagnosis of Sara Baartman on the brain and skull of the deceased woman. The question of the tablier is of minor importance; it is an external detail. Cuvier notes that the interior reproductive system of his subject is in all other regards similar to others he has examined. The tablier is, however, a “special attribute of her race.”40 The head offers more sure means for distinction, because it has been more thoroughly studied. In order to classify nations, the head has always been used, and, in this respect, our Bushwoman (notre Boschismanne) presents very remarkable and singular distinctions. Her skull as well as her face present a striking combination of nègre and Kalmyk traits. The nègre, as is well known, has a pronounced muzzle and a compressed face and skull on the sides … In this regard, above all, I have never seen a human head that more resembled that of a monkey than hers.41

Part of Cuvier’s demonstration consisted in proving that Sara Baartman was not a Hottentot, but rather, based on the accounts of a Dutch general

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who had traveled throughout South Africa, a member of the Boschismanne (Bushman) race. Cuvier refers to Sara Baartman throughout his report with a familiar, condescending notre Boschismanne, all the more incongruous and insulting given that he barely considers her to be human.

Racism as Zoophobia The shape of the skull and the size of the brain are most diagnostic for Cuvier in determining the race of Sara Baartman. Because of these attributes, the small Boschisman tribe belongs to the black races of Africa. The destiny of any individual or population with such skull features is determined by “the cruel law which seems to have condemned to an eternal inferiority races with compressed skulls.”42 In addition to his judgments about the skull of Sara Baartman, Cuvier piles on dozens of anatomical details, seeking to establish associations between her race and primates. Remarking that any Parisian could have seen Sara on display at the Palais Royal – and doubtless drawing on his own observations of her when she was brought to the Museum for three days in the spring of 1815, at the insistence of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, to be sketched by the painter Léon de Wailly,43 and included as an illustration entitled “Femme de race Boschismanne” (Woman of the Bushman Race) in Geoffroy’s Histoire naturelle des mammifères (see Figure  9.7). Cuvier observes: “Her movements had something brusque and capricious about them, which recalled those of a monkey. Above all, she had a way of protruding her lips, absolutely similar to what one observes in an orangutan … Her ear was similar to that of several types of monkey.”44 Cuvier’s racism rises to a paroxysm when animal traits are detected in a human face and body. Here, racism is linked to and in some sense enabled by natural history and zoology. A “specific” kind of hatred surfaces – racism takes the form of a zoophobia directed at certain species. Consciously or unconsciously, in his denigration of the body and face of Sara Baartman, Cuvier is connecting with the anti-simian rhetoric of Buffon and others.45 In other passages the celebrated anatomist’s contempt seems directed at the mixture of two races he deemed to be inferior. The most repugnant aspect of our Boschismanne was her physiognomy: her face was part nègre (on account of the thrust of the jaw, the obliquity of the incisors, the thickness of the lips, the recessed chin), and part Mongolian (on account of the enormous size of the cheekbones, the flattened base of the nose, forehead, and arches over the eyebrows, and the narrow eye-openings).46

The final degree of Cuvier’s descent into pseudo-scientific racism is marked by an inexplicable and gratuitous contempt for an ugliness he

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Figure 9.7 Above: woman of the Bushman race. Following page: black-capped Capuchin monkey, both from Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Histoire naturelle des mammifères, Paris: Firmin Didot, 1819. Source: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York.

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Figure 9.7

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perceives in Sara Baartman that escapes the bounds of any biological or anthropological evaluation. He mentions the “brutal appearance of her face,” “her blackish lips, monstrously swollen.”47 For some reason, a diminutive, deceased African woman who has led a life of quasi-slavery and exploitation offended the modern anatomist’s standards of beauty. We recall Cuvier’s remarks about the “oval beauty” of the Caucasian head and the Antique Apollon that represents the Caucasian race in Le Règne animale. Cuvier’s racism is more pronounced and visceral, literally and figuratively, than that of Linnaeus. We may speculate that the rapid advance of industry and science in Europe from the time of Linnaeus until the early nineteenth century gave Cuvier an added sense of superiority and arrogance. In his very person he embodied the advancement of Western science. His revolution in biology had convinced him of the importance of anatomical details, and he doubtless extrapolated wildly in constructing his theories of biological racism. In the end, there remains an inexplicable excess of contempt and disgust in the racism of Georges Cuvier, as deep and mysterious as the inner recesses of the human and animal bodies he explored.

Notes 1 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79. 2 Mel Y.  Chen, Animacies:  Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 148. 3 Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 139. On Sara Baartman see also Gérard Badou, L’énigme de la Vénus hottentote (Paris: JeanClaude Lattès, 2000); Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 204–42; Bernth Lindfors, ed. Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Zoe Strother, “Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Bernth Lindfors, ed., Africans on Stage (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1999), 1–60. 4 Letter from Geoffroy-Saint-Hillaire, qtd. in Badou, L’énigme de la Vénus hottentote, 137. 5 Georges Cuvier, “Extrait d’observations faites sur le cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentotte,” Mémoires du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle 3 (1817): 259–74, 266.  6 Frank Wedekind, “Lulu: A Monster Tragedy,” Plays 1 (London: Bloomsbury, 1993). 7 Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, 71. 8 Gunnar Broberg, “Homo sapiens: Linnaeus’ Classification of Man,” in Linnaeus, The Man and His Work, ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 185. On Linnaeus see also Wilfrid Blunt, The Complete Naturalist: A

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Mat thew Seni or Life of Linnaeus (New York: Viking, 1971) and Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). André Pichot, Histoire de la notion de vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 588. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge: 1989), 264. On the role of anatomy in the emergence of the concept of race during the Enlightenment, see Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness:  Science and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); for a discussion of Cuvier as scientific revolutionary and inventor of modern racism, see Ulrike Kistner, “Georges Cuvier, Founder of Modern Biology (Foucault), or Scientific Racist (Cultural Studies)?” Configurations 7 (1999): 175–90. On the history of racism during the Enlightenment, see C.  Loring Brace, Race Is a Four-Letter Word:  The Genesis of the Concept (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2005); H.  F. Augstein, ed., Race:  The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol, UK:  Thoemmes Press, 1996); Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans:  Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990); Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (London: Blackwell, 1997). Linnaeus, qtd. in Tore Frängsmyr, ed., Linnaeus, The Man and His Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 22. Lucien Braun, Conrad Gessner (Geneva: Slatkine, 1990), 61. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought:  Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 168. Foucault, The Order of Things, 131. Linnaeus, qtd. in Sten Lindroth, “The Two Faces of Linnaeus,” in Tore Frängsmyr, ed., Linnaeus, The Man and His Work (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1983), 12. Ibid., 25. Carolus Linnaeus, Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica, trans. Stephen Freer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 68. In this passage and many others Linnaeus sounds like Freud, who similarly proclaimed he had revolutionized psychology by discovering unconscious sexual drives and conflicts at the heart of human behavior. Ibid., 104. Ibid. Ibid., 330. Ibid., 18. On the herbarium see Charlie Jarvis, Order Out of Chaos:  Linnaean Plant Names and Their Types (London:  The Linnean Society of London, 2007), 166–84, and Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnaeus’ Herbarium Cabinet: A Piece of Furniture and its Function” Endeavour 30 (2006): 60–5. Jarvis, Order Out of Chaos, 169. In comparison to earlier schemes for naming plants and animals, such as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, Linnaean names contain no truths hidden in their etymologies, nor do they evoke resemblances or “signatures” written on the surface of the objects to which they refer. As exemplars of the Classical theory of language, which prevailed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Linnaean names are arbitrary and conventional signs.

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26 Broberg, “Homo sapiens,” 157. 27 The Latin text of the Anthropomorpha, a thesis written by Emmanuel Hoppius under the direction of Linnaeus, was published in volume 6 of the Amoenitates Academicae (Stockholm, 1763), accessed February 28, 2018, www. biodiversitylibrary.org/item/15498#page/1/mode/1up. An English translation of the Anthropomorpha and other texts by Linnaeus related to humans and apes can be found in Thomas Bendyshe, “On the Anthropology of Linnaeus,” Memoires of the Anthropological Society of London 1 (London 1863–4), accessed February 28, 2018, https://archive.org/details/memoirsreadbefor01anth. For additional commentary on Linnaeus’ human and simian species, see Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment:  The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003) 15–41. 28 “Nature does not make leaps. All plants exhibit their contiguities on either side, like territories on a geographical map.” Carolus Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica, 40. 29 Qtd. in Broberg, “Homo sapiens,” 184. 30 Ibid. 31 Carolus Linnaeus, A General System of Nature, 7 vols. (London: Lackington, 1905), I: 9. 32 Carolus Linnaeus, Anthropomorpha, in Amoenitates Academicae (Stockholm: 1763), vol. 6, translated in Thomas Bendyshe, “On the Anthropology of Linnaeus,” Memoires of the Anthropological Society of London 1 (London 1863–4), 444. 33 Carolus Linnaeus, A General System of Nature, I: 1. 34 Derrida, Jacques, “The Animal That Therefore I  Am (More to Follow)” in The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Will, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 48. 35 Georges Cuvier, Leçons d’anatomie comparée, 7  vols. (Paris:  Baudouin, 1805), I: 2. 36 Foucault, The Order of Things, 269. 37 Georges Cuvier, Le Règne animal, 5 vols. (Paris: Déterville, 1829), I: 31. 38 Ibid., 74. 39 Cuvier, Règne, 80. In the interest of historical accuracy, I  have retained the egregious racist epithet nègre in my translations of Cuvier. Not to do so would be to contribute to erasure and forgetting of this deplorable yet crucial moment in the history of biology and scientific racism. 40 Ibid., 34. 41 Cuvier, “Extrait,” 271. 42 Ibid., 273. 43 On Leon de Wailly and other painters of Sara Baartman, see Badou, L’énigme de la Vénus hottentote, 132–43. 44 Cuvier, “Extrait,” 263, 264. 45 For the history of attitudes towards monkeys, see H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952). 46 Cuvier, “Extrait,” 264. 47 Ibid.

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Animal Subjectivities Gendered Literary Representation of Animal Minds in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty Deborah Denenholz Morse Introduction: Animal Minds and the Quintessential Victorian Humane Text Recent widely read books such as Barbara King’s How Animals Grieve (2013) and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016) have brilliantly expanded the scholarly conversation about animal consciousness that Darwin broached from a biological perspective in 1872 with The Expression of the Emotions in Humans and Animals.1 But while proving the evolutionary kinship between humans and other animals was integral to Darwin’s study, King and Godfrey in the twenty-first century are compelled by a different imperative: that of recognizing animals as our fellow creatures in order to save them from the human animal. Godfrey dedicates his book to “all those who work to protect the oceans.” King states that her study of animal grief is important because of what it teaches us about the need for activism on behalf of animals: The more we understand that the chimpanzee (or cat or rabbit) confined to a biomedical lab feels his life and his friend’s death in the next cage over, and that the dairy cow sorrows over the repeated loss of her calves as they’re taken away to slaughter, the more we work effectively towards animal welfare. Each one of us can do something for animals. Maybe you’re all about educating children in wildlife conservation, or working to get cats and dogs spay-neutered. Or maybe you decide not to eat animals anymore. Whatever works for you, it all makes a difference.2

King’s and Godfrey’s humane impulse was shared by the most famous late nineteenth-century literary representation of animal consciousness, Englishwoman Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877). Sewell’s literary strategies were based upon close observation of her horse hero as well as upon extraordinary human imagining and empathy nurtured by Sewell’s devout Quaker background. Sewell loved and was surrounded by animals. Sewell’s 180

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sympathy for animals was “shaped by her mother, whose interest in natural science was coloured by her belief in the divinity of all living things. From an early age the Sewell children were taught to be kind to animals, and in later life when Anna witnessed animal cruelty it ‘roused her indignation almost to fury.’ ”3 Sewell was greatly concerned about cruelty enacted against her beloved horses by people of all social classes, although she wrote Black Beauty for both rural and urban working-class male handlers of horses in particular  – for grooms, cabbies, stable-boys, and ostlers. Sewell’s most pressing concern was the use of the cruel bearing rein, which held horses’ heads up fashionably high at the cost of great discomfort and a shortened life span. Her book was written in urgency and pain, when she was dying from the effects of what may have been an autoimmune disorder.4 It is reasonable to suggest that her own suffering infused the suffering she depicts so powerfully in the consciousness of Black Beauty and in the speeches of the many other equines who voice their outrage against human injustice. Sewell, who had depended upon horses to carry her about since she was lamed at the age of fourteen, was an accomplished rider and driver; her detailed familiarity with stables, grooms, and the care of horses resisted gendered expectations of horse knowledge. Sewell biographer Adrienne Gavin tells us how surprised – and at times judgmental – Sewell’s readers were about the extent of her “stablemindedness,” which some found unfeminine.5 But brewer and anti-bearing rein campaigner Edward Fordham Flower enthused: “[Black Beauty] is written by a veterinary surgeon[,] … by a coachman, by a groom; there is not a mistake in the whole of it … How could a lady know so much about horses!”6 The subjectivity of late-Victorian Black Beauty would perhaps be more recognizable to contemporary theorists on animal minds than we might think. The most recent studies of equine and canine cognition, for instance, demonstrate the subtlety both of horse and dog communication with humans. Not only scientific studies, but influential popular essays and entire issues of scholarly journals have been devoted to this newly emerging academic field.7 For science journalist and equestrian Wendy Williams, such developments have been “a long time coming … For most of the history of horse domestication, we’ve assumed that communication between humans and horses was unidirectional. Humans order. Horses obey. But [now] we see that communication could be a two-way street. Horses do try to communicate with humans. Most of us just don’t try to learn their language.”8

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Gender-Bending Animal Consciousness in Black Beauty Certainly Anna Sewell did try to “learn their language” in Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, which Sewell promises is “Translated from the Original Equine.” Issues of language, voice, and translation are intertwined in this novel purporting to be the autobiography of a horse. The fiction that Beauty tells his own story in his own language to his human auditor and translator (Sewell herself ) is partly a reflection of Sewell’s attentiveness to horse expressiveness over her entire life. Although the “language” Sewell derives from the “original equine” of course consists of English words expressing her own sharply observed love of horses and their individual “personalities,” Sewell not only voices her own outrage in Black Beauty’s subjectivity, but also puts into human words the communication, gesture, stance, and “language” that she knows from empirical observation to be expressions of the equine mind. The result is an amalgam of human and equine subjectivity, and of female and male sensibility.9 Further, Sewell merges her female human voice with that of her male horse from the very title page of her story; the male animal needs a woman translator. The overarching strategy of crossgender narration that inflects this touchstone animal-subjectivity text is both essential and innovative in portraying animal consciousness. Sewell was always in pain of varying degrees while writing Black Beauty, a novel marked by animal pain upon nearly every page. The suffering that Jeremy Bentham identified as the key to humane action toward animals – significantly quoted by germinal animal studies philosophers Peter Singer and Cary Wolfe10 – is evidenced in Black Beauty’s experience and in the stories told to him by beautiful, rebellious Ginger, rambunctious pony Merrylegs, courageous Crimean War hero Captain, anxious sweettempered Peggy, and the other horse companions Black Beauty meets along his cruel and unrelenting way toward the moment when he at last falls in a London street under an unbearably heavy load. In part, Black Beauty works to transform the very Victorian ideal of masculinity itself against which it was created. Although the issues of gender and masculinity have been engaged in other discussions of Sewell’s novel, the focus has not been upon the novel’s pervasive resistance to male violence and sexual dominance as voiced through an equine narrator who is himself almost certainly gelded and is never portrayed as an exemplar of male sexuality.11 Several scholars have viewed this subdued male sexuality as an inheritance from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the prototype for Sewell’s animal liberation narrative;12 this view is perhaps most provocatively argued by Peter Stoneley, who is concerned with both texts’ exposure

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of the black male body to desire and punishment.13 A year before Stoneley, Moira Ferguson argued that Sewell “linked slavery to cruelty and helped to rechart the map of Englishness along gendered lines.”14 Kristen Guest describes Black Beauty as a masculine subject caught between the cultural imperatives of sentimentality and capitalism, and as an exemplar of the Christian gentleman who “embraces the values of hard work, earnest effort, and fair play central to contemporary conceptions of normative masculinity.”15 Black Beauty’s performance of gender is arguably even more subtle, a negotiation of his author’s human feminine consciousness and his own masculine animal mind. In Black Beauty, this gendered narrative interstice expresses the need to control masculine cruelty and sexuality. This liminal space is most vividly created through the strategic alignment of Beauty with female horses, from his mother Duchess to his female double Ginger. This borderline gendered space is suggested before most editions of Black Beauty are ever opened, flaunted by many of the cover illustrations on the book’s dust jackets and book covers through the decades. These visual portals to the text often feature a gentle horse next to a beautiful young woman, as the genre expectations of children’s literature demand (see Figure 10.1). These lovely girls and young women often wear upper-class riding habits, indicative of Beauty’s early days at Earlshall  – ironically the place where both Ginger and Beauty are ruined. An undated American edition from M. A. Donahue & Company in Chicago has only a beautiful woman with dark hair in a late-Victorian, Gibson-Girl style and a serious expression; she seems to be holding a bouquet of wildflowers. “Black Beauty” is blazoned in large letters above her framed portrait (see Figure 10.2).16 Formal aspects of the autobiographical genre also can be interpreted as expressing a gendered interstice of narration. I have written elsewhere of the gravitas lent to Sewell’s text by its explicit invocation of the autobiographical genre, the genre of magisterial works such as John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873) and John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864): As part of this lofty literary genre, Beauty’s account is given … the gravity of true history and the compelling authenticity of personal and religious confession … Sewell also places Black Beauty’s narrative in the genre of working-class autobiographies… At the same time, its subjective viewpoint, from Beauty’s imagined animal perspective, gives powerful credence to the claims of animal interiority, to animal capacities to love, to be dutiful – and to suffer pain.17

The autobiographical genre includes fictional autobiography like Black Beauty, of course, but recent studies of the book have neglected the gendering of some of Sewell’s most famous prototype narrators.18 Two

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Figure 10.1

Cover, Anna Sewell, Black Beauty.

influential earlier fictional autobiographies, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849–50), demarcate the lineaments of this genre. In both works the protagonist seeks a lost home, journeying from place to place, unable to settle. This yearning for a place like the originary birthplace – Blunderstone Rookery with only his mother Clara for David – reappears as the imagined return to Birtwick Park in Black Beauty. The first line of David Copperfield – “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”  – reminds us of the sense of communal responsibility that Sewell also espouses as early as her inclusive title, Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions. Everyone, not simply the eponymous character, needs to be a hero – a Mr. Peggotty, or Tommy Traddles, or Agnes Wickfield in Dickens’ novel, a John Manly, Joe Green, or Jerry Barker in Sewell’s. Yet Jane Eyre’s journey, marked by both class and gender oppression, particularly anticipates Black Beauty’s pattern of inclusion and exclusion based upon species. The instability marked by repeated exclusion is only resolved in the final idyllic pastoral space of both novels, at Ferndean with Rochester

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Cover, Anna Sewell, Black Beauty.

for Jane and in the countryside with the Blomefield ladies for Beauty. There is an important difference, however: Jane is turned out or must escape from succeeding places, but she has freedom to choose her path after she leaves Gateshead. She decides to leave Lowood, to escape Thornfield, to reject St. John at Marsh End, and to find Rochester at Ferndean. As valuable property that must be used for work, Black Beauty must instead choose only to be patient, kind, and dutiful. Even Jerry Barker, about whom Beauty tells us he “never knew a better man,” cannot afford to take him to the country where he would be happy and avoid suffering – and “so I was led away to my new place.”19 This element of instability is marked for Beauty – unlike for Jane Eyre20  – by the constant changing of his name, from “Darkie” at Farmer Grey’s “plantation” (again with the obvious slave-narrative analogies), to “Black Auster” at Earlshall Park, to “Jack” at Jerry Barker’s, to “Blackie” with the carter Jakes. His identity as Black Beauty is only stabilized at the novel’s end, when he is again called by the name given him by Squire Gordon’s kind wife at Birtwick Park. The autobiographical genre, however, forces Sewell’s readers to dwell not upon Beauty’s value as property, but instead upon his worth as a sentient being and a fellow suffering creature.

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The girls and women who witness Beauty’s worth and educate others to treat him humanely are in large part based upon Anna Sewell herself.21 In this way, “Anna” speaks for Beauty within his memory, in the kindly but insistent female voices raised on his behalf, which his words in later age recall, words Sewell claims are in turn “translated from the original equine” so that human readers can understand and learn from them. These witnesses give voice to Christ’s teachings, but also to the fierce suffering of the woman writer evoked in Black Beauty’s recollection of his own suffering. The “lady” who demands that the carter Jakes stop and take off the cruel bearing rein as Beauty is straining to carry “three hundred-weight more” up a hill while being whipped mercilessly recalls the young girl Anna Sewell who refused to give a dead blackbird to the man who shot him when it landed in the Sewell garden, chastising him in her simple Quaker speech: “No, thee cruel man, thee shant have it at all.”22 Although the social dynamic of this encounter may leave readers uncomfortable, Sewell’s nameless “lady” is happy to use her class authority to educate the ignorant Jakes, as well as to comfort his beleaguered horse “Blackie” with caresses, in a haptic recognition of the horse as sentient being: “She stroked and patted my neck as I had not been patted for many a long day” (Sewell 152). Elsewhere, the young girl who stands up to the aptly named Skinner, begging her father not to overburden Beauty as Skinner insists, also echoes Sewell’s own voice:  “ ‘Papa, papa, do take a second cab,’ said the young girl in a beseeching tone; ‘I am sure we are wrong; I  am sure it is very cruel’ ” (155). Although the young girl speaks twice against the inhumane treatment of poor Beauty, the “blustering” father and the cruel Skinner overrule her. Of course the feminine voice resonating with Sewell’s own indignation speaks truly, and Beauty falls in the street under the heavy load, a spectacle of cruel and violent usage by men like those the RSPCA went to great – and sometimes dangerous – lengths to report:23 I got along fairly until I came to Ludgate Hill, but there, the heavy load and my own exhaustion were too much. I was struggling to keep on, goaded by constant chucks of the rein and use of the whip, when  – in a single moment  – I  cannot tell how, my feet slipped from under me, and I  fell heavily to the ground on my side; the suddenness and the force with which I fell, seemed to beat all the breath out of my body. I heard a sort of confusion around me, loud angry voices, and the getting down of the luggage, but it was all like a dream. I thought I heard that sweet pitiful voice saying, “Oh! that poor horse! It is all our fault.” (156)24

Indeed, the very Dedication evokes Black Beauty as inhabited by the human feminine voice and animal masculine voice in a liminal gendered

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space: “To my dear and honored MOTHER, whose life, no less than her pen, has been devoted to the welfare of others, this little book is affectionately DEDICATED.” During the writing of the novel, ailing Anna dictated to her mother, who served as her amanuensis; this relationship then reappears between Black Beauty and the equine translator and writer Anna Sewell. At the beginning of his narrative, Black Beauty tells of his mother’s admonitions and says he has “never forgotten [her] advice; she was a wise old horse” (10). Elsewhere, too, Black Beauty’s voice merges with that of his mother, as when he recalls her early warnings to mind his high breeding and not misbehave: These colts are very good colts, but they are cart-horse colts, and of course, they have not learned manners. You have been well bred and well born; your father has a great name in these parts, and your grandfather won the cup two years at the Newmarket races; your grandmother had the sweetest temper of any horse I ever knew, and I think you have never seen me kick or bite. I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift your feet up well when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play. (9–10)

This advice is cited by scholars who focus either upon the slave-narrative parallels in Black Beauty or upon its problematic social dynamics and the class prejudice voiced by the aristocratic (or slave-named) Duchess.25 However, the passage is also compelling in gender terms, as the old female mare tells her colt to be “gentle and good” – conjoined adjectives generally associated with female rather than male acculturation. If Black Beauty were a filly, Duchess’ advice might be the same. When Beauty stumbles and throws drunken Reuben Smith,26 who does not realize his horse has lost a shoe and is in great pain, Beauty thinks back to his youth with Duchess: I stood watching and listening. It was a calm sweet April night; there were no sounds, but a few low notes of a nightingale, and nothing moved but the white clouds near the moon, and a brown owl that flitted over the hedge. It made me think of the summer nights long ago, when I used to lie beside my mother in the green pleasant meadow at Farmer Grey’s. (84)

Black Beauty’s description is beautiful in its evocation of a peaceful rural night, with the only other animals he notices the owl and the nightingale, both as free to fly as he is captive to his dire situation on the road, Reuben Smith’s dead body nearby. There is something almost literary as well, however, about his description of the “low notes of a nightingale” – a bird associated since Ovid with female art and female suffering, and evoking Shakespeare and Keats. The moon seems to recall Romantic iconography, and Black

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Beauty thinks back to his early “summer nights long ago, when I used to lie beside my mother in the green pleasant meadow at Farmer Grey’s.” This scene of close bodily proximity to the maternal and connection to the feminine not only echoes back to Duchess but also reverberates forward to the final scene of Beauty’s reprieve, when he seems at last to be in the care of two gentlewomen, Vicar Blomefield’s daughters (women not unlike Anna Sewell and her mother Mary), and is imagining his youth at Birtwick Park with the grey pony Merrylegs and the spirited thoroughbred mare Ginger. In Sewell’s novel, peace and tranquility are found only in rural spaces, apart from the Jerry Barker urban chapters, where the model Christian working man Jerry and his loving family create a nurturing community for horse and humans amid the modern London streets – chapters that include a reverently remembered Sunday of frolicking in the country, which prompts Beauty to admit, “I had not been in a field since I left poor Ginger at Earlshall” (124).27 The discourse of rural Englishness for Sewell involves a reluctant but involved acceptance of the Victorian horse’s imbrication in urban English life. Significantly, however, Beauty will return to an idyllic rural space in his older age, cared for not only by the sisters of the vicar who was Squire Gordon’s friend and frequent visitor, but also by loving and pastorally named Joe Green, who recognizes Beauty from the horse’s best days at Birtwick Park with Ginger and Merrylegs. About these days and their sensory pleasures Beauty says feelingly: It was a great treat for us to be turned out into the home paddock or the old orchard. The grass was so cool and soft to our feet; the air so sweet, and the freedom to do as we liked was so pleasant; to gallop, to lie down, to roll on our backs, or to nibble the sweet grass. Then it was a very good time for talking, as we stood under the shade of the large chestnut tree. (24)

Significantly, just after this near-edenic orchard scene, Ginger undermines the idyll by telling the story of her abuse by men. Beauty’s best friend Ginger can be viewed as his feminine double, the only other thoroughbred horse that Beauty knows and loves from his early days (although he is aware of the skittish mare Lizzy, who throws the kindly Lady Anne at Earlshall). Fiery Ginger is as angry at her mistreatment by men as Beauty is resigned to do his duty. Perhaps Ginger is the unruly aspect of Sewell’s own marginalized life as an invalid spinster, as Adrienne Gavin has suggested: Black Beauty’s narrative reveals the strongly self-denying aspects of Sewell’s nature, her obedience (to God), and her ability to endure pain without complaint. Ginger’s embedded narrative by contrast reveals the suffering, inner rage, and sense of injustice she must have felt about her physical condition. Although in some ways symbolically similar, Ginger and Black

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Beauty reflect the dichotomy between self and soul or between body and spirit with which Sewell herself struggled.28

Although Black Beauty’s own feminine aspect derives from Sewell’s proto-feminist imagination of his subjectivity, her portrayal of the mare Ginger’s mind and experience is even more devastating. Ginger voices the rebellion of a mistreated female animal and articulates the pain of her breaking-in as a perceived rape, as a number of scholars have written:29 But when it came to breaking in, that was a bad time for me; several of the men came to catch me, and when at last they closed me in at one corner of the field, one man caught me by the forelock, another caught me by the nose and held it so tight I could hardly draw my breath; then another took my under jaw in his hard hand and wrenched my mouth open, and so by force they got on the halter and the bar into my mouth; then one dragged me along by the halter, another flogging behind, and this was the first experience I had of men’s kindness, it was all force. (25)

Ginger’s story provides the crux of any feminist reading of Black Beauty. The beautiful chestnut mare is highly aware of the injustices visited upon her psyche and body, and she voices her outrage repeatedly throughout the early sections of the novel, all faithfully remembered and recorded by Beauty in his narrative as an integral part of his own story. In the one instance in the novel of a woman acting more cruelly than a man or boy, the countess at Earlshall, who we know only as Lord W’s wife, an aristocratic woman who knows nothing about the nature or good treatment of horses, demands that the fashionable bearing reins be tightened until the carriage horses, Ginger and Black Beauty, suffer extreme pain. The countess causes this suffering in order to make her carriage horses look fashionably spirited when she visits a duchess. In “A Strike for Liberty,” Ginger rebels with authentic fire rather than simply the false appearance of spirit, and “she was a match for them, and went on plunging, rearing, and kicking in a most desperate manner” (74). It is the one time that Ginger inflicts pain on any of the men complicit in her suffering.30 The Earl’s son begins the mistreatment, which will continue until Ginger’s terrible death on the streets of London. Her back has been strained and her “wind” (breathing and endurance) damaged by this young aristocrat, who is too heavy for her and runs her too hard. Like Squire Gordon’s son, who dies while recklessly foxhunting, the male upper-class scions in particular seem unworthy of their more thoughtful and knowledgeable fathers, kind Squire Gordon and his old friend the earl. Yet even the earl is too fashionable to have “knees like these in my stables,” as he laments after Black Beauty is injured through Reuben Smith’s drunken negligence, even

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though Beauty has saved his daughter Lady Anne when thrown from the skittish horse Lizzie: “Blantyre … told Lord George that he was sure the horse knew of Annie’s danger as well as he did” (81). Thus Beauty is sold, and the equine friends are separated without a chance to say goodbye – another instance Sewell represents of the lack of control animals (and by implicit reference to Stowe, enslaved people) have over their lives; the two horses are able to have one last conversation, however, in which Ginger laments “here we are – ruined in the prime of our youth and strength – you by a drunkard and I  by a fool; it is very hard” (87). When Beauty meets Ginger again years later, the once beautiful chestnut mare is near death and has quit rebelling; she tells him that she has come to know that “men are the strongest, and if they are cruel and have no feeling, there is nothing that we can do but just bear it, bear it on and on to the end” (132). Ginger is broken down in body as well as in soul: The beautifully arched and glossy neck was now straight, and lank, and fallen in, the clean straight legs and delicate fetlocks were swelled; the joints were grown out of shape with hard work; the face, that was once so full of spirit and life, was now full of suffering, and I could tell by the heaving of her sides, and her frequent cough, how bad her breath was. (13)

The representation of Ginger as a broken female horse calls to mind the familiar literary trope of the fallen woman who dies a prostitute in the streets. Ginger is “used up by men,” who say they must get their money out of her flesh. She significantly tells Black Beauty in this final encounter that “You are the only friend I ever had” (132). Beauty here as elsewhere embodies a kind of feminized masculinity that wants only friendship from the beautiful mare. Ginger’s story ends in great physical and psychological pain – although disturbingly, neither Beauty nor the reader know with certainty whether Ginger actually dies and is free from her suffering. We only know that Beauty sees a dead horse being carted away from the cab-stand, and that he “believes it was Ginger” (132) – an indicator of the indeterminacy of horses’ lives and the inability of horses (again, like enslaved people) to discover the fates of closest friends and family. Beauty does not ever see his other best equine companion, the pony Merrylegs, again either after Birtwick Park days with Squire Gordon, although in London he fears he sees a pony very like Merrylegs carting heavy loads and being whipped by a “big rough boy” and must anxiously assure himself that Vicar Blomefield promised never to sell the grey pony, “and I think he would not do it” (133). The negotiation of nationhood in relation to this gendering is also disturbing, since the name Ginger connotes Irish ancestry. An entire history of

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oppression is evoked through Ginger’s name, as it is by Black Beauty’s brother Rob Roy, as I have argued elsewhere in relation to Scottish history;31 Rob Roy is shot after being recklessly injured in a fox hunt by Squire Gordon’s son, the first note of tragedy in the novel. Rob Roy strongly resembles Black Beauty in outward appearance and is also, along with Ginger, his narrative double. As James Howard, the brave groom who rescues Ginger from the hotel fire, tells the kind, stalwart horse trainer John Manly about Black Beauty: “If it were not for bringing back the past, I should have named him ‘Rob Roy,’ for I never saw two horses more alike” (21). Englishness is complicated by gender, as beautiful thoroughbred horses are cruelly mishandled (and later worked to death) like Irish-named Ginger or summarily shot like Scottish-named Rob Roy after being mortally injured by English negligence and callousness. There is something about Black Beauty’s liminal gender that secures him from being brutalized quite like Ginger or ignorantly ruined like Rob Roy, who may in fact be a stallion rather than a gelding.32 Yet Ginger and Rob Roy arguably survive through Black Beauty’s memory of them, through his narrative retelling of their experiences, through repetition of Ginger’s own words, through Beauty’s survival after his equine friends’ gruesome deaths, and through his final reverie of his past life at Birtwick Park. Perhaps in these elements of the novel Sewell offers a small measure of redemption through memory and imagination. However, Beauty’s friends in his older age are now all human  – Joe Green, Miss Lavinia, and Miss Ellen Blomefield, the aptly named Mr. Thoroughgood, and his grandson Willie. Beauty has been separated from all of the horses he met in his many homes, and the few he knew well enough to love – Ginger and presumably Duchess and Merrylegs – are dead. The subtitle of the novel is “His Grooms and Companions,” but Beauty is significantly reunited with a human groom, Joe Green; his equine companions had too precarious an existence for a reunion to be likely. As Beauty says after he discovers that Rob Roy was his brother, “It seems that horses have no relations; at least, they never know each other after they are sold” (21).33 Beauty conjures his dead friends in the edenic closure of his tale, as he returns to a vision of his equine companions at Birtwick Park. Beauty relies now upon the promises of the Blomefield women rather than upon those of their father Vicar Blomefield, whose pledge never to sell Merrylegs Beauty worried about when he saw the suffering grey cart pony in London. Black Beauty’s story ends with the mention of the three ladies, “probably inspired by Elizabeth, Maria, and Ellen Wright, three maiden aunts of Sewell’s who lived together in Buxton, Norfolk.”34 This fictionalizing of Anna Sewell’s own maternal aunts seems as if Sewell is rounding back to

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herself and her mother Mary Wright Sewell  – and that Black Beauty is returning to the fiercely protective mind of Anna Sewell whence he was born. After mentioning “my ladies,” Beauty ends with the elegiac recollection of the beloved dead, the equine friends of his coltish days: I have now lived in this happy place a whole year … My ladies have promised that I shall never be sold, and so I have nothing to fear; and here my story ends. My troubles are all over, and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple trees. (162)

Coda: The Legacy of Black Beauty and Cross-Gender Human/Animal Narration The most famous and influential animal autobiography to follow Black Beauty is Canadian Margaret Marshall Saunders’ Beautiful Joe (1893). Joe’s story is set in Maine so that Saunders could be eligible for the contest George Thorndike Angell directed for the American Humane Education Society to find a companion volume to Black Beauty. In his introduction to the first edition of Beautiful Joe, Hezekiah Butterworth mentions Sewell’s book in his first sentence: “The wonderfully successful book, entitled ‘Black Beauty,’ came like a living voice out of the animal kingdom.”35 Saunders, like Sewell, was raised in a religious family as the daughter of the prominent Baptist minister Edward Manning Saunders of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Encouraged by her animal-loving father, Saunders had a veritable menagerie, including an aviary for her nearly 100 birds that provided them fresh air in an artificial forest.36 In Beautiful Joe, too, the female author writes the male animal protagonist’s story and inserts herself as the major female character and human moral touchstone Laura, in many respects Joe’s great love in this animal–human domestic plot. One might even write of a hybrid “marriage plot” between Joe and his beloved mistress, for although Laura eventually marries her dashing cousin Harry, Joe remains beside her in his old age – and there is, fascinatingly, no mention of Harry and Laura having children in a novel filled with child characters. Although Erica Fudge dismisses Beautiful Joe as “a furry human,”37 he tells a powerful story that channels Saunders herself through Laura’s words of compassion and outrage. Beautiful Joe – a physically ugly dog after his disfigurement by the cruel milkman Jenkins – nevertheless knows his own name, which is never taken away from him. Neither does Joe lose his home with Laura and her humane family after Cousin Harry rescues him from his distress in chapter  3 of the novel. Joe’s identification with the middle-class domesticity centered

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upon Laura makes his experience much more secure than Black Beauty’s unwilling transience. He is as much a brave Christian hero as is Black Beauty, but his courageous acts are much more permanently appreciated.38 In Virginia Woolf ’s Flush:  A Biography (1931), Woolf imagines the experience of the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s male spaniel Flush through third-person narration. In this feminist biography – written as a thrust at her distinguished father Leslie Stephen, founder of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography39 – Woolf imagines the consciousness of the historical male spaniel Flush, who falls in love with his human mistress Elizabeth Barrett and must conquer his jealousy of Robert Browning. Woolf ’s portrait of Flush is informed by her own experience with her beloved dog Pinker, a gift from her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, complicating the erotics of the book even further. As Kate Flint states in her fine introduction to the Oxford edition of the novel, “the closenesss between species is the assumption upon which the book pivots” (xx). Woolf ’s narrator evokes Flush’s imagined sensory experience while simultaneously admitting that only perhaps Shakespeare could have put that experience into words: “The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing in the world but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived … To describe his simplest experience with a chop or biscuit is beyond our power” (86). Woolf ’s novel extends cross-gender narration into new terrain, as she tries to capture Flush’s thoughts with modernist narrative technique, much as she portrays the minds of Clarissa Dalloway or Lily Briscoe when leaving the genre of animal autobiography altogether for modernist biography. When for instance Flush must be clipped because he has mange, this is his response: “Flush felt himself emasculated, diminished, shamed. What am I  now? he thought, gazing into the glass. And the glass replied with the brutal sincerity of glasses, ‘You are nothing.’ He was nobody. Certainly he was not a cocker spaniel” (89). Flush’s identity crisis is imagined, but his kidnapping focuses, like so much of Black Beauty, on sensory experience, especially upon the thirst he cannot alleviate until safely back with Elizabeth Barrett.40 From Black Beauty to Beautiful Joe to Flush and beyond, human imagining of animal consciousness is informed by the desire to access another species’ experience. It is also impelled by the humane desire to help animals who cannot communicate to humans in human language, but who try to communicate in their own “languages.” The narrative strategy of cross-gender narration in these texts creates a powerful liminal space in which animal minds can exist.

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Notes 1 The work of King and Godfrey-Smith contributes to years of research in animal studies by other scholars, including Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato:  New World Library, 2007); Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man (New York: Mariner Books, 2010); Marian Stamp Dawkins, Why Animals Matter: Animal Consciousness, Animal Welfare, and Human WellBeing (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012); Steven Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2002)  and Rattling the Cage:  Toward Legal Rights for Animals (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2000); and most recently Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015). 2 Petra Mayer, “Questions for Barbara J. King, Author of ‘How Animals Grieve.’ ” NPR Author Interviews, accessed February 24, 2017, www.npr.org/2013/05/ 27/185815445/questions-for-barbara-j-king-author-of-how-animals-grieve. 3 Margaret Sewell (1852–1937), Anna’s niece, quoted in Lopa Prusty, “Anna Sewell,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 163, British Children’s Writers 1800–1880 (Detroit: Gale, 1996), 260, quoted in Kristen Guest, “Introduction,” in Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell (Peterborough, Ontario:  Broadview Press, 2015), 13n. 4 Adrienne Gavin, “Introduction,” in Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xi. 5 Unnamed cousin to Anna Sewell, c. Dec 1877, quoted in Gavin, “Introduction,” xv. 6 Quoted in Gavin, “Introduction,” xv. 7 See for instance the Current Directions in Psychological Science (Autumn 2016), edited by psychologist Thomas R. Zentall; and popular essays including Jan Hoffman’s “To Rate How Smart Dogs Are, Humans Learn New Tricks,” New York Times, January 7, 2017, and Nell Greenfield Boyce’s “Their Masters’ Voices:  Dogs Understand Tone and Meaning of Words,” August 30, 2016, NPR broadcast. 8 Quoted in Barbara King, email conversation quoted in “How Smart Are Horses?” Cosmos & Culture:  Commentary on Science and Society, January 12, 2017, accessed February 24, 2017, www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/01/12/ 509451392/how-smart-are-horses. 9 See Jopi Nyman, “Re-reading Sentimentalism in Black Beauty:  Affect, Performativity, and Hybrid Spaces,” in Affect, Space, and Animals, ed. Jopi Nyman and Nora Schuurman (London: Routledge, 2015), 65–79. 10 Singer, Animal Liberation, 7–9, and Cary Wolfe, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 18, 24. 11 According to the Victoria listserv, almost all child readers of Black Beauty and many adult ones recalled Black Beauty as female. See also John Sutherland, “Is Black Beauty Gelded?” in Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1997), 177–80; and Gavin, “Introduction,” xxiv.

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12 George Thorndike Angell, founder and first President of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, distributed Sewell’s book widely as “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Horse.” 13 Peter Stoneley, “Sentimental Emasculations:  Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Black Beauty,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, no. 1 (June 1999): 53–72. 14 Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1790–1800:  Patriots, Nation, and Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 76. 15 Guest, “Introduction,” x, and see also Guest, “Black Beauty, Masculinity, and the Market for Horseflesh,” Victorians Institute Journal 38 (2010): 9–22. 16 Although scholars have not studied the history and politics of Black Beauty’s many dust jackets and book covers since 1877, one strand of this study might certainly be focused upon gender. 17 Deborah Denenholz Morse, “ ‘The Mark of the Beast’:  Animals as Sites of Imperial Encounter from Wuthering Heights to Green Mansion,” in Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Morse and Martin A. Danahay (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 187. 18 I have found no other scholarly analysis of Black Beauty in relation to earlier Victorian fictional autobiographies. 19 Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, ed. Adrienne Gavin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 149. All citations will be from this edition and provided in parentheses in the text. 20 Jane does disguise her name as “Jane Elliott” at Moor House with the Rivers siblings – but again, this is a choice. 21 Gavin, “Introduction,” x. 22 Ibid. 23 For this history see especially Harriet Ritvo, “A Measure of Compassion,” in The Animal Estate:  The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1987). Working-class men were much more easily prosecuted than the upper classes. Ritvo reports one instance of the Society’s constables being badly beaten when enforcing a cockpit raid (153). 24 Ludgate Hill is the site of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a location perhaps chosen to emphasize the profanity of such cruelty. Sewell and her mother were baptized into the Church of England subsequent to leaving the Society of Friends in 1835 (Guest, “Introduction,” xiii). 25 Anna Sewell’s mother Mary’s Quaker family background was egalitarian. One might argue that this is reflected in Black Beauty’s easy acceptance of all classes of horses from the thoroughbred Ginger to his fellow cab horses when he is with kind Jerry Barker, the “good honest fellow” Rory and the dappled Peggy, who has “no high breeding about her, but she is very pretty, and remarkably sweettempered and willing” (93): “Mary’s early experience in a farming family was idyllic in many respects. Though never wealthy, the family maintained both a generational connection to local labourers and sense of tightly-knit communal values that engendered a sense of stability and connection to the past” (Guest, “Introduction,” vii). See also Peter Hollindale, “Plain Speaking:  Black Beauty as a Quaker Text,” Children’s Literature 28 (2000): 95–111.

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26 I cannot recall any scholar who connects this chapter to the temperance texts of the Religious Tract Society or the Scottish Temperance Society, such as popular works by Hesba Stretton (Nelly’s Dark Days, Jessica’s First Prayer, Her Only Son). See Morse, “Unforgiven: Drunken Mothers in Hesba Stretton’s Religious Tract Society and Scottish Temperance Society Fiction,” in Other Mothers:  Beyond the Maternal Ideal, ed. Ellen Rosenman and Claudia Klaver (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 101–24, for an assessment of this temperance genre in Stretton’s novels contemporaneous with Black Beauty. 27 For a discussion of this urban space, see Nyman, “Re-Reading Sentimentalism.” 28 Gavin, “Introduction,” xxiv. 29 See especially Ruth Padel, “Saddled with Ginger: Women, Men, & Horses,” Encounter (November 1980):  47–54, and Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, and “Breaking in Englishness: Black Beauty and the Politics of Gender, Race, and Class,” Women: A Cultural Review 5:1 (1994): 34–52. 30 Gina Dorre, “Horses and Corsets:  Black Beauty, Dress Reform, and the Fashioning of the Victorian Woman,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no.  1 (March 2002):  157–78, compares the painful confinements Victorian fashion enjoined upon both horses and women. 31 See Morse, “ ‘The Mark of the Beast,’ ” for a discussion of Black Beauty as a site of imperial encounter. 32 In the context of nationhood, it is fascinating to consider the Shakespeareannamed thoroughbred Hotspur, “a fine brown horse … with a very handsome head, and only five years old,” who like Ginger injures men when he rebels against the cruel bearing rein. Like Black Beauty, Hotspur’s body is permanently scarred by this mistreatment, but under Jerry Barker’s good care, Hotspur thrives and indeed seems to be sent to a much better situation than Beauty when Jerry’s household breaks up. Hotspur’s English name – despite its rebellious Northern English heritage – may mark him for a more fortunate equine destiny than Irish-named Ginger or Scottish-named Rob Roy, whose bodies are arguably sites of imperial history and encounter. 33 This line has an obvious relation to slave narratives. 34 Gavin, notes, 203. 35 Quoted in Keridiana Chez, “Introduction,” in Beautiful Joe, by Margaret Marshall Saunders (Petersborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2015), 47. 36 Ibid., 12. 37 Erica Fudge, Pets (The Art of Living) (New  York:  Routledge, 2008), 50–1, quoted in Chez, “Introduction,” 24. 38 For Victorian dog culture, see especially Teresa Mangum, “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets,” in Victorian Animal Dreams, 15–34. 39 See Flint, “Introduction,” in Flush, by Virginia Woolf (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1998):  “Flush may stand as a testimony to the lives that have never been narrated, the inscrutable and therefore unrepresentable, the discarded and therefore wasted” (xvii). All citations will be from this edition and provided in parentheses hereafter in the text. 40 For more recent work of a similar nature, see Karen Joy Fowler, We Are Completely Beside Ourselves (New York: Penguin, 2013), in which the narration is voiced by a human, the young woman Rosemary Cooke, speaking both for herself and for her “twin” adopted chimpanzee sister Fern.

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Friedrich Nietzsche on Human Nature Between Philosophical Anthropology and Animal Studies Vanessa Lemm

How can we think the de-humanized (entmenschte) human being when the human being is the de-animalized (entthierte) animal? – Friedrich Nietzsche1

In aphorism 230 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature. In this aphorism, the question of human nature takes the form of a task, the “strange (seltsame) and insane (tolle) task” to “translate (zurückübersetzen) the human being back into nature.”2 Over the last two decades, the meaning of homo natura has taken center stage in discussion among Nietzsche scholars. Primarily the debates have revolved around the question of Nietzsche’s acclaimed naturalism and its relation to the life sciences in the nineteenth century.3 In these debates, Nietzsche’s naturalism is associated with a neo-Kantian naturalist epistemology that provides an account of human nature modeled on the natural sciences. This chapter wishes to bring this debate on the meaning of Nietzsche’s homo natura back to one of its first iterations in the 1930s, with Karl Löwith’s reading of homo natura as an example of philosophical anthropology.4 Löwith’s discussion of Nietzsche’s homo natura is not concerned with the theoretical question of positivistic naturalism but the anthropological question of the whole nature of the human being. This is also the question that, according to Wolfgang Riedel, motivated literary anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century.5 Philosophical and literary anthropology adopt Nietzsche’s conception of life and of the human being as a living being. Neo-Kantian accounts of Nietzsche’s naturalism separate the question of homo from the question of natura, the practical from the theoretical strand in Nietzsche’s philosophy. By contrast, from the perspective of philosophical anthropology, one cannot separate the question of knowledge from the question of the human being due to the fact that knowledge is always already conceived from within the perspective of the human being as a living being. 197

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The perspective of philosophical anthropology offers some reasons why naturalist interpretations of homo natura are too one-sided. First, due to an epistemological emphasis on natura, naturalist readings run the risk of reducing the human being to a mere object of nature and as such miss the self-reflective dimension of knowledge. Second, they ascribe to Nietzsche a conception of nature that is largely drawn from the life sciences in the nineteenth century and as such do not sufficiently take into account the ancient Greek influence on Nietzsche’s thinking about nature. Whereas in naturalist conceptions of nature, nature denotes something that can be captured through scientific laws, in archaic conceptions of nature, nature designates chaos. Nature as chaos is understood to be inaccessible and indeterminable on the one hand, and creative and generative on the other. For Nietzsche, only when knowledge becomes reflective and takes on these features of nature does knowledge release nature’s creative potential for the generation and creation of life within the human being. Thus knowledge realizes within the human being the extraordinary force of metamorphosis (Verwandlung), of transformation and self-transformation. I therefore take metamorphosis to be the main point of Nietzsche’s homo natura and of the task of translating the human being back into nature. This chapter agrees with Löwith that answering the question of the meaning of Nietzsche’s enigmatic term homo natura requires a philosophical anthropology. In contrast to Löwith, however, I  argue that his overall account of human nature in Nietzsche is too anthropocentric and does not adequately capture Nietzsche’s conception of human life as continuous with the life of other living beings. Human nature in Nietzsche’s philosophy of life exceeds the framework of a philosophical anthropology and resists what Foucault referred to as the anthropocentric turn in the nineteenth century.6 A  Nietzschean philosophical anthropology would therefore have to be complemented by a study of animal and plant life in Nietzsche’s philosophy. These aspects of nature have in part been captured by literary anthropology. This chapter argues that a study of animal and plant life reveals that what is creative and generative of culture in the human being is natura, the animal and plant life of the human being as a creative and generative source of metamorphosis, of human becoming and self-overcoming.

Karl Löwith and Philosophical Anthropology As far as I  am aware, Karl Löwith was the first to provide a reading of Beyond Good and Evil 230 that explicitly associated Nietzsche’s conception

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of the human being as homo natura with philosophical anthropology.7 In an article on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche published in 1933, he advances the thesis that what distinguishes their philosophy is a focus on human life and existence. Hence the two “basic concepts (Grundbegriffe)” that characterize Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s philosophy are “life” and “existence.”8 Their philosophy can no longer be understood as a closed metaphysical system that contains – among other sciences – an anthropology. Rather, all the questions of philosophy are gathered up in one “basic question (Grundfrage)”: What is the human being? It is important to clearly distinguish the question of “What is the human being?” in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard from Kant’s treatment of this question in his anthropology. As I understand it, the main point of Löwith’s philosophical anthropology is that it moves beyond the Kantian dichotomy between the transcendental (homo) and the empirical (natura).9 What distinguishes Nietzsche from Kant is that homo does not transcend nature but is immanent to it. For the same reason, natura for Nietzsche is no longer simply an object of scientific inquiry but a force that exceeds human knowledge. When Nietzsche speaks of “life,” he means both the immanence of homo and natura as well as the excess of nature within the human being. Furthermore, whereas Kant’s critical system seeks to define the conditions of possibility of knowledge that provide the critical foundation of the human and the natural sciences, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy becomes philosophical anthropology in the form of an experimental psychology where truths are produced by the living philosopher’s self-experimentations.10 As such, philosophical anthropology withdraws the ground of philosophy as the pursuit of absolute truth. But Löwith quickly adds that this loss of absolute truth also announces a new beginning.11 According to Löwith, this new beginning in Nietzsche arises from an overcoming of the Christian worldview and of its life-disdaining morality. Out of his critique of the Christian interpretation of human life Nietzsche reconceives humanity as “natural humanity” and the human being as homo natura. Löwith maintains that Nietzsche questions Christian morality on the basis of the distinction between what the human being is and what it means. Löwith gives the example of sinfulness and distinguishes between what sinfulness is and what it means for the human being as a Christian. Whereas the former denotes the “natural being” of sinfulness, the latter denotes a moral interpretation of what sinfulness is. This distinction does not presuppose a fact in contrast to mere interpretation, as naturalist readings of Nietzsche seem to suggest.12 Rather it presupposes “a natural

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conception (natürlichen Begriff ) of the human being, of what is ‘human (menschlich)’ in the human being, because this human aspect is  – in its own human way (auf menschliche Weise) – natural (natürlich). This natural humanity (natürliche Menschlichkeit) of the human being is ambiguously (vieldeutig und unbestimmt) referred to by Nietzsche as ‘life.’ ”13 For Löwith, “life” in Nietzsche is an “ambiguous and indeterminate” term for the “natural humanity (natürliche Menschlichkeit)” of the human being. Life is not biological or organic life, as in naturalist interpretations of Nietzsche where nature is understood as an empirical given that can be accounted for by the discourses of the natural sciences.14 This is why answering the question of human nature in Nietzsche requires a philosophical anthropology instead of a theory of knowledge. From the perspective of philosophical anthropology, “life” can only be conceived of within the horizon of the human being’s lived experience in the world. Furthermore, knowledge of the natural world, including the naturalness of the human being, can only be produced within the horizon of the human being’s self-understanding, including its self-understanding as a natural being. This may explain why Löwith refers to “life,” “human,” “nature,” and “natural” in quotation marks, indicating that these concepts are constructs of the human being’s lived experience in the world. Löwith argues that for these reasons, sinfulness is not a phenomenon of the natural life or natural world. Instead it only exists as a state of consciousness, as consciousness of sinfulness, which is why there are different possibilities of interpreting suffering. In contrast to Christian interpretations of human life, the naturalized human being, as Nietzsche envisages it, no longer asks for the “Why?” of its life and suffering: He does not only forgo “reason (Grund)” but also “meaning (Sinn)” and more generally “interpretation” as the explication and exegesis (Einlegung und Auslegung) of meaning. He renounces them, because he has understood that objectively speaking the so-called meaning of human existence does not “exist (vorhanden).” Meaning exists only in accordance with what the human being means to himself (was sich der Mensch bedeuten will).15

This new positioning of human nature beyond good and evil, beyond praise and reproach, calls for an affirmation of life and the love of fate expressed in Nietzsche’s vision of the eternal recurrence of the same. For Löwith, the eternal recurrence of the same places the human being back into the eternal cycle of nature and thus constitutes the final step in the naturalization of morality (Vernatürlichung der Moral) (KSA 12:9[8]). When Löwith speaks of the “eternal cycle of nature,” this is not a reference

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to the “natural world” as it is construed by the natural sciences and its ideals of lawfulness, causation, etc. Let’s recall that for Nietzsche, there are no laws in nature: “Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses.”16 In the context of this aphorism, necessity in nature does not imply a deterministic worldview. Rather, necessity means that nature is an-archaic: “there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses” (GS 109).17 As such, the naturalization of morality presupposes the de-deification of nature: “When will all those shadows of god no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature! When may we begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature!” (GS 109). A de-deified nature means, for Löwith, nature as an absence of meaning (Sinn), a lack of order and determination (Bedeutung). I therefore understand nature as “meaninglessness of pure existence (Sinnlosigkeit eines puren Daseins)” in Löwith as an aspect of nature as chaos:  “Chaos sive Natura” (KSA 9:21[3]).18 On this account, the liberation from the “shackles of morality” does not occur through biological and psychological explanations of life:19 what is liberating for the human being is the affirmation and love of nature as meaninglessness and anarchic chaos. Affirming and loving the meaninglessness of existence leads to a transformation of the human being: a sinful person becomes a sick person and a “moral way of existence (moralischen Existenzverfassung)” becomes a “natural way of life (natürliche Lebensverfassung).”20 However, for Löwith, Nietzsche leaves open the question of what is distinctly “natural” for the human being and what distinguishes a “natural” human life. Löwith maintains that Nietzsche’s homo natura reflects a conception of the human being’s “naturalness” that is polemical, reactive, and ultimately remains caught up within its opposition to the Christianmoral worldview. Despite the fact that in BGE 230 Nietzsche sets out to decipher the “eternal basic text of homo natura” behind the “many vain and overly enthusiastic (schwärmerischen) interpretations and connotations (Deutungen und Nebensinne),” Löwith concludes that Nietzsche fails to reach a positive definition of human naturalness. His conception of human naturalness remains vague and indeterminate, oscillating between purely naturalistic and physiological explanations of the human and an articulation of a moralistic/immoralistic interpretation of the world.21 Löwith laments that Nietzsche only gives a few historical examples of what he means by natural humanity: Greek antiquity and the human being in the Renaissance, as well as a few individual examples from modernity such as

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Goethe and Napoleon. But these examples do not provide a philosophical anthropology; they do not answer the question of human nature. Löwith regrets that “Nietzsche did not discover a truly habitable ‘new land of the soul’ on his ‘explorations of the nature of the human being.’ ”22

Animal Life: Rethinking Cruelty and the Becoming of Culture While Löwith regrets that Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology is inconclusive, Jean Granier argues that “Nietzsche is not interested in articulating an anthropology” in the first place.23 For Granier, Nietzsche is primarily interested in recovering an archaic notion of nature as artistic and creative chaos. This does not mean that Nietzsche wants to give up on the notion of the human being altogether. Rather he reconceives human nature from the perspective of a newly recovered archaic notion of nature according to which animal and plant life are constitutive of human life. As such, Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology is distinctly anti-humanist (and post-humanist) insofar as it deconstructs the modern idea of a universe construed around the notion of the human being as a rational and moral agent.24 Nietzsche’s reference to the idea of homo natura as a “basic text (Grundtext)” should therefore not be misunderstood as an example of “anthropological absolutism.”25 Rather, what Nietzsche uncovers behind the “many vain and overly enthusiastic (schwärmerischen) interpretations and connotations (Deutungen und Nebensinne)” of human nature is the animality of the human being. Nietzsche maintains that the “cruelty of the animal” is even active in the philosopher’s pursuit of truth: the seekers of knowledge “prevail (walten)” as “artists and transfigurers of cruelty” (BGE 229): “[I]n all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty” (BGE 229). Behind the humanist notion of the human being as a subject of knowledge, Nietzsche recovers the animality of the human being. It is important to point out that the conception of the animal that Nietzsche adopts in BGE 229 is neither produced through a Darwinian account of biological life, nor through natural history.26 Instead, Nietzsche attributes to the animal a key role in his understanding of culture. According to Nietzsche’s philosophy of culture, the cultural productivity of the human being derives from the cruelty of the animal. Culture in the human being is a thirst for “the spicy potions of the great Circe, ‘cruelty’ ” (BGE 229). Circe is the goddess of metamorphosis. She has the power to transform the human being: “Truth as Circe. – Error has transformed animals into human beings; is truth perhaps capable of changing the

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human being back into an animal?”27 By invoking the truth of human nature, Nietzsche seeks to transform the human being back into an animal that produces culture. This requires a transformation of our way of thinking about cruelty: “Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound  – this is my proposition. That ‘savage beast’ has not really been mortified (abgetödtet), it lives and flourishes, it has merely become divine” (BGE 229). According to Nietzsche, insight into the productivity of suffering is among the truths that have remained unsaid due to a “fear of the wild cruel animal”: In late ages that may be proud of their humanity, so much fear remains, so much superstitious fear of the “savage cruel beast,” whose conquest is the very pride of those more humane ages, that even palpable truths remain unspoken for centuries, as if by some agreement, because they look as if they might reanimate that savage beast one has finally mortified. ( BGE 229)

In these citations, Nietzsche places “savage beast,” “savage cruel beast,” and “higher culture” in quotation marks, indicating that they are false ideas of human civilization built on human prejudice and vanity. They are misconceptions grounded on belief in the human as something “more” and “higher” than nature (BGE 230). For Nietzsche, depiction of the animal as “savage” and “cruel” participates in a larger strategy of domination and control whereby Christian morality seeks to establish the “higher” distinction of humanity over and above its naturalness and animality. I would therefore agree with Löwith that Nietzsche’s conception of the naturalness of the human being is an integral part of his more general critique of the Christian worldview and morality, but would add that it is the denial of animality in Christian morality that Nietzsche hopes to overcome by means of a retranslation of the human being back into nature. In particular, as Lampert has pointed out, Nietzsche contests the Christian denial of suffering as an essential aspect of life:  “Nietzsche advocates for suffering (cruelty) in an age where compassion and elimination of suffering are the highest goals of society and the state!”28 According to Lampert, “cruelty belongs to our very nature as an animal species and needs to be enhanced for our species to be enhanced.”29 While I  agree with Lampert on Nietzsche’s critique of modern society and its hedonism, his reading of cruelty, which he equates with human suffering, remains anthropocentric.30 However, according to Nietzsche’s philosophy of culture, cruelty and suffering are productive and need to be enhanced not because they preserve the human species but because they decenter

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the anthropos and as such enhance the transformative overcoming of the human being. In this sense, the naturalization of the human being in Nietzsche reflects a move beyond both humanism and anthropocentrism. Nietzsche views superstition and fear as symptomatic of civilization and its domination over animal life and nature. I  take Nietzsche’s reference to superstition and fear in BGE 229 as a way of distancing himself from both the humanism and the scientism of the Enlightenment.31 Nietzsche is well aware of the dialectic of enlightenment and rejects its desire for knowledge at any price, for “objective” truth. Nietzsche recalls that the Greeks “knew how to live:  what is needed for that is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin” (GS Preface 4). Accordingly, it is questionable that Nietzsche would take his inspiration for the reconceptualization of human nature entirely from the discourse of the life sciences of the nineteenth century. Instead Nietzsche wants to bring us back to the Greeks and their thinking about the naturalness of the human being.

Literary Anthropology: Recovering Nature as Art Nietzsche’s recovery of archaic conceptions of nature also coincides with Wolfgang Riedel’s views on the shifting significance of human nature in literary anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century.32 Literary modernity arises from a paradigm shift in literary anthropology, which reflects a new configuration between the philosophy of nature, biology, and anthropology. Central to this paradigm shift is the concept of nature. According to Riedel, the reconceptualization of nature was of high anthropological relevance insofar as it led to an immediate reconceptualization of the nature of the human being. The main symptom of this transformation is a conceptual shift from “nature” to “life.”33 This conceptual shift confirms the point of Löwith’s philosophical anthropology, namely, that natural philosophy (Naturphilosophie) becomes philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie). Riedel attributes this conceptual shift from nature to life to the rise of biology as the new episteme of nature. But for Riedel, literary modernity and its reconceptualization of human nature do not stand under the sign of an alliance between literature and biology. Instead, Riedel understands this development as an alliance between literature and natural philosophy: When the idea of nature found in the natural sciences was absorbed by literature it was transformed into the idea of “the whole of nature (ganze Natur).”34 In other words, the scientific idea of nature was appropriated by literature through natural philosophy. It is thanks to this

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alliance between literature and philosophy that literary modernity – and I  would add philosophical anthropology  – was able to preserve a nonscientistic idea of (human) nature. Finally, Riedel relates this new conception of nature in literary anthropology to Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will, which explains why its notion of nature is also non-idealistic.35 Riedel holds that Nietzsche’s homo natura is inscribed within this larger paradigm shift towards a nonscientistic and non-idealistic understanding of the nature of the human being. In Nietzsche the “intertwined thinking of biological anthropology and sentimental history of philosophy”36 stands under the name of the Greek God Dionysus: “the cult of fertility in the early Greeks,” exemplifying a “genuine and more natural humanity.”37 The ancient Greek idea of natural humanity derives from a notion of nature as the basis of human culture. For the Greeks, the human being is homo natura, a being whose culture is immanent to nature. Nietzsche first articulates this idea of nature as culture (art) in the opening passage of “Homer’s Contest”: “The human being, in his highest, finest powers, is all nature and carries nature’s uncanny dual character in itself. Those capacities of it that are terrible and are viewed as inhuman are perhaps, indeed, the fertile soil from which alone all humanity, in feelings, deeds and works, can grow forth.”38 Human culture is immanent to nature to the extent that the human being’s so-called “natural” and “human” characteristics are bound together to the point of indistinction. Nietzsche understands the cultural achievements of humanity as rooted in the naturalness of the human being. What we take to be inhumane and terrible is in fact the fertile growing ground of humanity. The reversal of the meaning of nature as “terrible ( furchtbar)” into “fertile ( fruchtbar)” allows Nietzsche to reaffirm with the Greeks that nature is an artistic and creative source of the becoming of culture. For Nietzsche the Greeks herald a genuine and natural humanity, the antipodes of humanity in the moderns: “Thus the Greeks, the most humane people of ancient time, have a trait of cruelty, of tiger-like pleasure in destruction, in them … which … must strike fear into us when we approach them with the emasculated concept of modern humanity.”39 In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche articulates the uncanny dual character of nature through the opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses, which reflect the “artistic double drive in nature”:40 “So far we have considered the Apolline and its opposite, the Dionysiac, as artistic powers which erupt from nature itself, without the mediation of any human artist, … In relation to these unmediated artistic

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states in nature every artist is an ‘imitator’ ” (BT 2). In The Birth of Tragedy, we also find a first formulation of the cruelty of nature. In BT 7, Nietzsche invokes the Hellene, “by nature profound and uniquely capable of the most exquisite and most severe suffering” who has seen the “cruelty of nature”: “Art saves him, and through art life saves him – for itself ” (BT 7). For the Hellene, as Nietzsche imagines him, the naturalness of the human being does not come as the task of retranslating the human being back into nature (BGE 230). Greek culture celebrates the naturalness of humanity, and hence the Hellene can release his suffering from the “fearful, destructive havoc” in art (BT 7). This is not so for the “Europeans of the day after tomorrow” (BGE 214) and the “free spirits” (BGE 230) that Nietzsche addresses, who live in an age of cultural degeneration produced by two thousand years of Christianity. This is why, in contrast to the Greeks, they need to live up to the task of retranslating the human being into nature so as to unleash again nature’s power of creative transformation – to create again a culture that overcomes the disdain of life inherent to Christian morality and civilization. Nietzsche distinguishes between two different types of suffering from life. On one hand, the Greeks suffer from fullness of life and discharge this suffering in their cultural productivity. By contrast, moderns suffer from a lack of life: hence their suffering is unproductive. When Nietzsche calls for a rethinking of cruelty in BGE 230, he is advocating for the former rather than the latter type of suffering. The overcoming of civilizational conceptions of human nature in BGE 230 takes the form of a (self-)overcoming of life. The “basic will of the spirit,” “which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial” (BGE 229), is overcome by the opposite drive towards knowledge (Erkenntnis), the will to truth. Nietzsche’s “free spirits” turn the cruelty of the animal against themselves, the will to truth against the will to life, in the faith that the truth they discover may perhaps be “capable of changing the human being back into an animal” (HH 519). Only thus can they unleash the transformative and regenerative powers of nature so that the human being can become again a creator and artist of life and inaugurate an age of cultural renewal. Culture in Nietzsche does not imply an overcoming of the “wild cruel animal.” Instead, it requires an overcoming of the belief in the human being’s distinction over and above nature and the animal. Insight into the nature of the human being as homo natura thus leads to a transformation of what the human being has become in the process of its civilization rather than of the animal it is.41 This is an important point, suggesting that what needs cultural transformation

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in the human being is not its naturalness and animality but rather the “second nature” acquired in the process of its civilization and so called “humanization (Vermenschung)” (BGE 242).

Plant Life: Recovering the Transformative Force of Knowledge Against the background of Nietzsche’s philosophy of culture and animality, Löwith’s idea of the “naturalness” of the human being appears too humanistic and anthropocentric. Löwith’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology would have to be complemented by a study of animality that encompasses the cultural value Nietzsche attributes to the animality of the human being. However, there is yet another form of nonhuman life at stake in Nietzsche’s conception of the human being as homo natura: namely, plant life and the idea of the human being as a plant. When we consider the double meaning of “zurückübersetzen” in German as both “retranslation” and “replantation,” we find that BGE 230 uncovers not only the human being’s animality but also its vegetality. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche speaks of the human being not only as an animal but also as the “human plant” (BGE 44), a plant that has been uprooted from its natural growing ground.42 Nietzsche assigns to future philosophers the challenging task of (re)producing the conditions under which the plant human being has so far grown furthest and highest (BGE 44). Retranslating the human being back into nature then not only means discovering and recovering the human being’s animality, its instincts and natural drives, from which it has been alienated, but also replanting the plant human being into its natural soil, from which it has been uprooted. Hence Nietzsche needs to be acknowledged at the forefront of those thinkers who seek to overcome the “barriers that humans have erected between themselves and plants.”43 As far as I am aware, the double meaning of “zurückübersetzen” as both “retranslation” and “replantation” has so far not been discussed in Nietzsche scholarship, where the emphasis has largely been on the textual metaphoric of BGE 230, in which deciphering the “Grundtext homo natura” is compared to interpreting a palimpsest.44 Interestingly, in the French edition of Beyond Good and Evil, the sentence “Den Menschen nähmlich zurückübersetzen in die Natur” (BGE 230) is translated as “Retransplanter l’homme dans la nature.”45 Unfortunately, Sarah Kofman, who cites this passage at length, does not pick up this nuance in the French translation – an ironic lapse given her insistence on the primacy of interpretation in the Nietzschean homo natura. In order to fully appreciate the meaning of will

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to power as an art of interpretation, we need to acknowledge the transformative force of plant life within the human being. In BGE 230, Nietzsche provides an explanation of what the “people” call “spirit” and what he refers to as the “basic will of the spirit.” The capacity of incorporation is here featured as one of the main attributes of this basic will of the spirit: The spirit’s power to appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory – just as it involuntarily emphasizes certain features and lines in what is foreign, in every piece of the “external world,” retouching and falsifying the whole to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to incorporate new “experiences,” to file new things in old files – growth, in a word or more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power. An apparently opposite drive serves the same will: a sudden erupting decision in favour of ignorance, of deliberate exclusion, a shutting of one’s windows, an internal No to this or that thing, a refusal to let things approach, a kind of state of defence against much that is knowable … all of which is necessary in proportion to a spirit’s power to appropriate, its “digestive capacity,” to speak metaphorically – and actually, “the spirit” is relatively most similar to a stomach.46 (BGE 230)

The above passage offers an account of the human being’s relation to its environment that is based on two opposed drives: a drive to master one’s environment by means of a dominating incorporation oriented towards growth and increased strength; and a drive to ignorance as a means of protection and preservation.47 Nietzsche insists that these drives pertain to all beings that live, grow, and reproduce themselves. Nietzsche compares the functioning of these two opposed drives and their relation to their environment to the digestive metabolism and concludes that as such the “spirit” is relatively most similar to a “stomach” (BGE 230). In my view, Nietzsche’s comparison of “spirit” to “stomach” in BGE 230 should be read within the context of his more general emphasis on the centrality of key attributes of plant life – nutrition, growth, and reproduction – in his thinking about the human being. In the history of philosophy, the three key attributes of the “basic will of the spirit,” namely, the acts of nutrition (incorporation), growth, and generation, have since Aristotle been associated with the life of plants.48 These same attributes are also central to Nietzsche’s understanding of life as will to power (BGE 36). In a posthumous note, Nietzsche calls life “a multiplicity of forces linked to each other through a common process of nutrition” and adds that “everything we call feeling, representation and thinking”

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is part of this more general “process of nutrition” (KSA 10:24[14]). On Nietzsche’s hypothesis of the will to power, all higher organisms and psychic processes have thus never really superseded the “basic modus operandi of the plant-soul”: even in our highest endeavors, in the pursuit of truth, the human being remains a sublimated plant.49 Nietzsche then shows how the attributes of plant life manifest themselves in the human being. Just as in his explanation of the “basic will of the spirit” in BGE 230, he claims that the metabolic processes in the human being manifest themselves as a drive to create forms: “the human being is a form-giving (formenbildendes) creature … When you close your eyes, you discover that a form-giving drive is continuously active within the human being, and that it tries out an infinite number of things that do not correspond to anything real” (KSA 10:24[14]). Nietzsche continues that “[t]he human being is a rhythm-giving (rhythmen-bildendes) creature” (KSA 10:24[14]). The form-giving process of nutrition and incorporation in the human being follows a rhythm, as in BGE 230, between the will to master the environment through incorporation and the will to ignorance through non-incorporation. In BGE 230, Nietzsche claims that the human being’s inclination towards knowledge (Erkenntnis) is opposed to these two basic tendencies of all living beings, to either appropriate or to ignore, insofar as they are both falsifying:  “This will to mere appearance, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface … is countered by that sublime inclination of the seeker after knowledge (Erkennenden) who insists on profundity, multiplicity and thoroughness, with a will which is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste. Every courageous thinker will recognize this in himself ” (BGE 230). However, the fact that the will to knowledge (Erkenntnis) is opposed to the two basic tendencies of life does not make this drive unnatural or anti-natural.50 On the contrary, Nietzsche maintains that the metabolic processes of nutrition and reproduction manifest themselves in the human being as a “resisting (widerstrebende) force”:  “The human being is a resisting force” and “knowledge … a means of nourishment” (KSA 10:24[14]). From the perspective of plant life, the drive to knowledge reflects the human being’s drive to incorporate, grow, and reproduce. However, Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of nutrition: that which simply preserves us and that which transforms us. The same distinction applies to knowledge and the process of learning: “Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely ‘preserve’  – as physiologists know” (BGE 231). From the perspective of plant life, transplanting the human back

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into nature produces a type of nutritive knowledge with transformational power. This is what Nietzsche seeks to achieve through the retranslation of the human being back into nature. The transformative and regenerative power of plant nature also distinguishes an earlier aphorism in Human, All Too Human (1878). In aphorism 107, Nietzsche offers a first comparison of human life with the growth and transformation of plants, anticipating the passage in BGE 230 where Nietzsche compels the “free spirits” to stand before the human being “as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest (andere) of nature” (BGE 230). In HH 107, Nietzsche maintains that “[a]s he [the human being] loves a fine work of art but does not praise it since it can do nothing for itself, as he stands before the plants, so must he stand before the actions of the human being.” As in BGE 230, in HH 107 the point of Nietzsche’s comparison is to show that the human being is not more than nature and does not derive from a higher nature-transcending origin. Nietzsche understands the difficulty of coming to terms with this new insight into human nature and offers the consolation that this knowledge (Erkenntnis) has a transformative and regenerative power: Such pains are birth-pangs. The butterfly wants to get out of its cocoon, it tears at it, it breaks it open: then it is blinded and confused by the unfamiliar light, the realm of freedom. It is in such human beings that are capable of suffering (Traurigkeit) – how few will there be! – that the first attempt will be made to see whether humanity could transform itself from a moral to a wise humanity. (HH 107)

As in BGE 230, this transformation requires transplantation back into nature. It requires “planting” new habits of evaluation that come to their full fruition under the influence of “growing” knowledge” (HH 107). Transplantation can be both transformative and healing. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of transplantation (Verpflanzung):  a “thoughtless change of location (gedankenlose Verpflanzung)”51 where a plant is alienated (entfremdet) from its soil and then deteriorates, and a change of location (Verpflanzung) that functions as a “spiritual and physical cure (geistige und leibliche Verpflanzung als Heilmittel)” capable of transforming the entire earth into a sum of “places to recover health (Gesundheitsstationen).”52 Whereas naturalist readings interpret Nietzsche’s references to the human being as a plant as evidence for his naturalistic psychology,53 I read the references to the metamorphic power of the plant as examples of

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the transformative power of the pursuit of truth. Nietzsche invites us to re-evaluate truth from a post-Christian (im)moral perspective. This requires recovering the naturalness of the human being such that human beings can transform themselves again into creators of new values who produce truthful interpretations of the basic text homo natura.

Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Colli and Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988), 9:2[45], subsequently abbreviated as KSA with references providing the volume number followed by the relevant fragment number and any relevant aphorism. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil:  Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 230, subsequently abbreviated as BGE followed by the number of the aphorism. 3 Christian J.  Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism:  Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2014); Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche and Aestheticism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, no. 2 (1992): 275–90; Brian Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. John Richardson and Ken Gemes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 576–98. 4 Karl Löwith, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 11 (1933): 43–66. 5 Wolfgang Riedel, “Homo Natura”: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, Quellen und Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 1996). 6 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1990), 12. 7 This reading is distinct from that of Karl Jaspers, who understands anthropology as merely one aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking about the human being:  Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche. Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981), 125. 8 Löwith, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” 43–66. 9 For a similar point, see Helmut Heit, “Erkenntniskritik und experimentelle Anthropologie. Das erste Hauptstück: ‘von den Vorurtheilen der Philosophen,’ ” in Friedrich Nietzsche – Jenseits von Gut und Böse, ed. Marcus Andreas Born, Klassiker Auslegen 48 (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 27–46. 10 Löwith, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” 43. 11 Ibid., 46. See also Jaspers, Nietzsche, 123–69; Richard Schacht, “Nietzsche and Philosophical Anthropology,” in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith AnsellPearson, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 35 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 116. 12 Joshua Knobe and Brian Leiter, “The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology,” in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Shinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83–109.

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13 Löwith, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” 59–60. 14 Leiter, “Nietzsche and Aestheticism,” 275–90. 15 Löwith, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” 60. Löwith is here advancing an indirect critique of Heidegger, who understands the being of humanity through the meaning-giving activity of existence. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. J.  Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), aphorism 109, subsequently abbreviated as GS followed by the number of the aphorism. 17 On necessity in Nietzsche, see Herman Siemens, “Nietzsche’s Conception of ‘Necessity’ and its Relation to ‘Laws of Nature,’ ” in Nietzsche and the Becoming of Life, ed. Vanessa Lemm (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 82–104. 18 On nature as chaos, see Babette E.  Babich, “Nietzsche’s Chaos Sive Natura: Evening Gold and the Dancing Star,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 57 (2001), 225–45; Jean Granier, “Nietzsche’s Conception of Chaos,” in The New Nietzsche, ed. D. B. Allison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 135–41. 19 Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered,” 582. 20 Löwith, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” 61. 21 Löwith distinguishes between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as a “dilatant positivistic Neo-Kantian” (Nietzsche) and a “well-educated Hegelian” (Kierkegaard): Löwith, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” 64. For Löwith, Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology did not go far enough in the overcoming of positivistic Neo-Kantianism. 22 Löwith, “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” 64. 23 Jean Granier, “Le statut de la philosophie selon Nietzsche et Freud,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 86e Année, no. 1 (1981): 101. 24 I here rely on Rosi Braidotti’s definition of post-humanism in The Posthuman (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 13–54. 25 Andreas Urs Sommer, Kommentar zu Nietzsches Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken 5/ 1 (Berlin; Boston:  de Gruyter, 2016), 650–1; Marco Brusotti, “Vergleichende Beschreibung versus Begründung. Das fünfte Hauptstück: zur Naturgeschichte der Moral,” in Friedrich Nietzsche – Jenseits von Gut und Böse, ed. Marcus Andreas Born, Klassiker Auslegen 48 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2014), 129. 26 Marco Brusotti, “ ‘der schreckliche Grundtext homo natura’:  Texturen des Natürlichen im Aphorismus 230 von Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” in Nietzsches Inszenierung der Philosophie in “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” ed. Marcus Andreas Born and Axel Pichler, Texturen des Denkens (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Verlag, 2013), 259–78. 27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 519, subsequently abbreviated as HH followed by the number of the aphorism. For culture and animality in Nietzsche, see Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Beings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 28 Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2001), 223.

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29 Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, 225. 30 I rely here on Braidotti’s definition of anthropocentrism in The Posthuman, 55–104. 31 On Nietzsche’s critique of the dialectic of Enlightenment, see Theodor W.  Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum 2002), 44; Reinhart Maurer, “Der andere Nietzsche. Zur Kritik der moralischen Utopie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 38, no. 11 (1990): 1019–26. 32 Riedel, “Homo Natura.” 33 Ibid., viii–ix. 34 Ibid., xii. 35 Ibid., xv. 36 Ibid., 193. 37 Ibid., 186. Riedel’s interpretation of homo natura in Nietzsche can thus be read as a correction of both Nehamas’ aestheticism and Leiter’s anti-aestheticism (Leiter, “Nietzsche and Aestheticism”). 38 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest” in Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 174. 39 Ibid., 174. 40 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6, subsequently abbreviated as BT followed by the number of the section. 41 I disagree with Jennifer Ham’s argument that all that is required to recover animality is forgetfulness. This undermines the task of self-overcoming implied in retranslating the human being back into nature:  Jennifer Ham, “Circe’s Truth:  On the Way to Animals and Women,” in A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, ed. Christa D. Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 193–210. 42 For Nietzsche’s conception of the human being as a plant, see Vanessa Lemm, “Is Nietzsche a Naturalist? Or How to Become a Responsible Plant,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 61–80. 43 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking:  A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New  York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 5. 44 See, for example, Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, 230; Sommer, Kommentar, 651. 45 Cited in Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la métaphore (Paris:  Editions Galilée, 1983), 135. 46 Sommer (Kommentar, 647) derives Nietzsche’s conception of the spirit from Otto Liebmanns, Zur Analyse der Wirklichkeit, which depicts it as a plant interacting with its environment. Sommer also cites Orsucci’s claim that BGE 230 must be read in the context of the discourse on contemporary biology and physiology. See Andrea Orsucci, Orient  – Okzident:  Nietzsches Versuch einer Loslösung vom europäischen Weltbild, Monographien und Texte Zur NietzscheForschung (Berlin; New  York:  De Gruyter, 1996), 55–6. Furthermore, Sommer traces the comparison of incorporation and nutrition to Ludwig

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Va nessa Lemm Feuerbach, who popularized the idea that the human being is what it eats (Kommentar, 653). On the two movements of incorporation in Nietzsche, see Vanessa Lemm, “Nietzsche, Einverleibung and the Politics of Immunity,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21, no. 1 (2013): 3–19. Marder, Plant-Thinking. Ibid., 40. Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, 226. Friedrich Nietzsche, Second Untimely Consideration, 2, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche:  Untimely Meditations, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), subsequently abbreviated as HL followed by the number of the section. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadows, 188, in Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, subsequently abbreviated as WS followed by the number of the aphorism. Brian Leiter, Nietzsche: On Morality (London: Routledge, 2002).

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CH APTER  12

Opening Up a Dossier Animals, Animalities, and Living Together with Roland Barthes Michael Lundblad A flock of birds in the sky can be more than just ecology. It can transform suddenly into a formation, a murmuration of starlings, for example, that becomes a ballet with no heads, with darting moves and waves of motion that seem to dance toward chaos but then bank and dive together to avoid collision. Schools of fish might also seem to move together at times according to rhythms of inaudible symphonies, unless we reduce these kinds of behaviors merely to predator–prey strategies. What else might we learn from these astonishing nonhuman displays? What kinds of models could flocks of birds and schools of fish provide for thinking about ideal forms of living together, for example, in powerfully affective ways? What would be the right distance to maintain between individuals who want to move to their own rhythms yet still be part of a community? These kinds of questions inspire and fascinate Roland Barthes in one of the last lecture series he gave at the Collège de France in 1977, published posthumously in English as How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (2013). The key problem for Barthes becomes how to “regulate interindividual distance” when “what’s most precious, our ultimate possession is space.”1 But there is also a desire for “a distance that won’t destroy affect,” where there is a “relation that’s in no way oppressive but at the same time where there’s a real warmth of feeling” (132). In his introductory lecture Barthes provides an antithetical example to suggest how these kinds of relations can nonetheless become oppressive. He recalls seeing a “mother pushing an empty stroller, holding her child by the hand … [walking] at her own pace, imperturbably; the child, meanwhile, is being pulled, dragged along, is forced to keep running, like an animal ” (9; my emphasis). The figure of the animal in this case signifies a lack of agency, a simile for the child whose own desires are inevitably subordinated to the mother’s. Barthes generally wants to theorize the key elements that are necessary if we want organisms to be able to live together without having their own rhythms disrupted by the power of others. But it 217

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also becomes quite clear that Barthes sees nonhuman animals as little more than just symbolic since they are assumed to lack language and therefore subjectivity. Barthes’ project could be explored from a variety of animaloriented perspectives that have emerged in literary and cultural studies in the last decade or so, from animal to animality studies, from humananimal studies to posthumanist theory, among many other labels for this kind of work. But these fields can also be seen as exploring “how to live together” in various ways, without necessarily relying upon Barthes’ fundamental distinction between human and nonhuman animals. Barthes’ method is intriguing to consider, though, when he says that he is “merely opening a dossier” on key “traits” such as “Animaux/Animals” (135, 26), particularly as they are constructed in literary texts. My aim in this chapter is to explore the potential as well as some of the more problematic aspects of Barthes’ thinking about both human and nonhuman relations in these later lectures. Barthes’ attempt to theorize how best to live together also provides an opportunity for exploring the different kinds of cultural politics that drive the burgeoning attention to animalities of various kinds in literary and cultural studies today.2 Barthes begins his lecture series with the question of method, distinguishing the project even from his own earlier emphasis on semiotic interpretation in the service of Marxist critique. Building upon Nietzsche, Barthes argues against “method” as opposed to “culture” because he explicitly wants to avoid a “manner of proceeding toward a goal, a protocol of operations with a view to achieving an end; for example:  a method for decoding, explaining, describing exhaustively” (3). He is focused instead on following what he calls a “fantasy”:  “the fantasmatic force of Living-Together:  living together ‘harmoniously,’ cohabiting ‘harmoniously’; it’s what fascinates most about other people, what can inspire the most envy … It’s myth (illusion?) in its most basic form: the right sort of material for a novel” (5). It’s important to note, then, that Barthes is not interested in social prescriptions for utopian communes; instead, he wants to explore key literary texts that tap into the fantasy of an ideal form of living together, or else illustrate the forces that can tear it apart. How to Live Together is a collection of Barthes’ lecture notes, supplemented by transcriptions from recordings of the lectures themselves, along with the seminars he ran in conjunction with the lectures. As a result, they are often only fragments of thoughts, with references and allusions to various other texts, rather than a finished book adapted and published by Barthes himself. But the introductory lecture lays out a path that Barthes will follow, particularly in relation to the key concept of “idiorrhythmy”: “something

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like solitude with regular interruptions: the paradox, the contradiction, the aporia of bringing distances together” (6). The concept comes from Barthes reading about the history of monks on Mount Athos, “both isolated from and in contact with one another within a particular type of structure … Where each subject lives according to his own rhythm” (6). The Greek idios means “personal, particular, one’s own” (178n31), which makes it possible to fantasize about “idiorrhythmic clusters” of people living together outside of monasteries as well. The central texts that Barthes then proposes as sites for considering idiorrhythmy – or its obstacles – are André Gide’s La Séquestrée de Poitiers (The Confined Woman of Poitiers), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Palladius of Galatia’s The Lausiac History, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Emile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (Pot Luck), while other texts such as Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu also become key reference points. Barthes wants to resist “method” in the sense of a pre-determined or overly didactic approach to the literary texts. As a result he anticipates more recent critiques of literary criticism by Rita Felski and others who see “symptomatic” or “suspicious” reading practices as too predictable, reductive, or boring.3 Barthes’ position might also be seen as challenging the critiques of animal studies broadly conceived if the point is simply to determine whether or not a given text suggests ethical ways of treating nonhuman animals (or living together with them). While I believe there are good reasons for exploring the treatment of nonhuman animals in literary texts, I  have also prioritized the study of discourses related to animality in ways that focus more on their implications for human cultural studies, arguing for the distinction, therefore, between animal and animality studies.4 While I  might not agree with some of Barthes’ politics in these lectures, I think it’s fair to say that his theorization of how best to live together (even if he does not really consider the materiality of interspecies relations) is not necessarily so different from a similar starting point for much of the work that is being done today on animalities broadly conceived. Barthes becomes quite useful, for example, when he identifies power and desire as two primary forces that can disrupt idiorrhythmy  – perhaps inevitably  – along with less obvious ways that individuals can feel restricted by others, such as the idea of another “holding forth” in ways that negatively impact one’s own rhythms. An example of “holding forth” might be linguistic but it could also be a bodily imposition, in which one feels perhaps crashed into, or forced to alter course, rather than allowed to maintain one’s own rhythm, or flight pattern, so to speak. Barthes reveals

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that he feels “intimidated if someone lectures me … what’s more, slight paranoia, I’m very sensitive to other people ‘holding forth.’ I’m quick to feel that I’m being lectured at” (142–3). It can be seen in the form of Robinson Crusoe’s father “holding forth” at the beginning of the novel, exhorting him to embrace bourgeois life rather than going to sea, as well as other kinds of behaviors Barthes has observed, including someone eating breakfast next to him with “force, vigor, continuity, tension, a certain theatricality. Investment:  breakfast is a garment” (150–1). In this case the “epiphany” can be “affectionate (loving someone whom you take pleasure in seeing eating heartily)” as opposed to “more irritating, more corrosive” examples of behaviors that impose upon those around them (151). In order to organize the topics and texts for his lectures, Barthes takes this kind of approach to other “traits” that affect living together, to allow for “a certain number of digressions – into the fields of historical, ethnographical or sociological knowledge” (171), as he later summarizes the results of the lecture series. The process of “opening dossiers” is one that Barthes wants others to contribute to “in their own manner,” while Barthes himself would merely “suggest ways of structuring the themes” that are “presented in alphabetical order of the key words” (172). But if we are critics interested in animalities today, is it possible or even desirable, to explore “traits” such as “Animaux/Animals,” “Banc/School,” “Cause/ Cause,” and “Nourriture/Food” without “holding forth” in some way? Not everyone would agree. Some would articulate important reasons for pursuing what might seem like a more predictable path into texts that engage with animals and animality.5 The primary literary text that Barthes opens up in his dossier on animals is Robinson Crusoe, which he sees as paradigmatic of the opposite of living together:  solitude (15). Despite all of the nonhuman creatures  – and nonwhite humans  – that Crusoe meets, Barthes still sees the novel primarily in terms of living alone, as well as a recapitulation of the evolution of human civilization, beginning with “man” in his “animal” state. In his introductory lecture Barthes acknowledges how the novel can be read within a Marxist frame: “Robinson Crusoe: capitalist, colonizer, slave trader. Having lost everything (sort of shipwreck-bankruptcy, all he’s left with is a knife), gets back on his feet, colonizes and populates his island, becomes its governor, etc.” (14). But Barthes reads Crusoe primarily as living in solitude, moving from “beast to man” (26), which is one of the reasons why “animality” becomes important for him in this case. Some of the questions that animality studies today might ask, though, would be: what kind of “beast” (as in “the beast within”) is constructed in this

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reading? Must Defoe’s deployment of the term necessarily be the same as what could be called the discourse of the jungle that Barthes seems to have in mind?6 How might this signifier have shifted diachronically in relation to Christian and Darwinist/Freudian discourses? What is the relationship between constructions of human animality and constructions of racial and class difference at different historical and cultural moments? For Barthes, Crusoe’s “ascendency from animal to man runs parallel to another, symmetrical movement:  the domestication of animals” (26). But Crusoe’s interactions with nonhuman animals are not considered as material examples of idiorrhythmy along the way because the animal is merely “a substitute for man” (27). The parrot becomes a “Substitute for language,” for example, but it still remains an object: “It’s possible to fetishize an object by turning it into a person, a God, a term of interpellation … But it’s not possible to solicit a familiar You from an object” (27). For Barthes, when Crusoe hears his own name from the parrot, he “doesn’t lose sight of the fact that he’s a human being” (27), with the implication being that the parrot does not ever achieve subjectivity through the use of language; it can only manage the imitative response of an animal other. Further, Crusoe’s interactions with a young goat that he nurtures are read merely as a “[s]ubstitute for affect” (27), in which the goat becomes merely a “domestic” and therefore an example in which Crusoe (and the history of human civilization writ large) can be seen as “deriving affect from power, creating an affective power, using power as a means to receive affect” (27). Defoe’s description seems to support Barthes’ reading: “the creature became so loving, so gentle and so fond that it became from that time one of my domestics and would never leave me afterwards” (qtd. 27). Barthes reads it instead as an example of biological “imprinting” that might be a “conduit” for an affective relationship, but not a contact zone between subjects from different species.7 Barthes takes a similar approach to the “trait” of “Nourriture/Food” when he does not consider the possibility that nonhuman animals could be read as subjects rather than objects. He opens up that dossier instead in terms of the role of food in relation to idiorrhythmic possibilities of humans “Eating Together,” from various rules and rituals in different historical and literary examples, to religious prohibitions in different contexts, to menus and eating practices as signifiers of various cultural signifieds. But there is no consideration of animals themselves, of the lives of nonhuman beings that are raised and killed and consumed in these various examples. Critics today interested in animalities would generally find these kinds of perspectives to be problematic, suggesting as they do a construction of

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nonhuman animality that must forever be bracketed off and distinguished from “the human.” Barthes’ contemporary Jacques Derrida is one theorist who has been particularly influential in terms of deconstructing that kind of thinking. Derrida’s later work takes up what he calls the “question of the animal” in significant detail, including ideas that he first worked out as lectures two decades after Barthes. From a 1997 conference titled “L’animal autobiographique” in Cerisy-la-Salle, France, for example, Derrida’s tenhour address was published posthumously in book form as The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008). The last seminar that he gave at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2003 was later published as The Beast & The Sovereign (vol. 1 and 2; 2009, 2011), in which he also highlights Robinson Crusoe, but as a site for theorizing discourses of sovereignty and biopolitics.8 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, which can provide a more general background here, Derrida tracks the human/animal binary in relation to major philosophers and theorists, from Descartes to Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, revealing how all of them, in different ways, rely upon ultimately untenable formulations of “the human” as categorically different from all other species on the planet. According to Derrida, all of these philosophers “say the same thing: the animal is deprived of language. Or, more precisely, of response, of a response that could be precisely and rigorously distinguished from a reaction; of the right and power to ‘respond,’ and hence of so many other things that would be proper to man.”9 The distinction between response and reaction in animals, with reaction corresponding to mere instinct, becomes a particularly useful site for exploring a range of theoretical issues that have traditionally been used to mark off the human/animal boundary. Derrida argues that it makes no sense to talk about “the animal” as the binary opposite of “the human” since there are so many different kinds of differences between species and even within what calls itself “human.”10 Instead, we should focus on the “finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish.”11 According to Derrida, it is quite clear that animals can suffer, following Bentham’s famous question. But it also becomes clear that denying animals language  – the ability to respond rather than merely react – is no longer tenable, particularly if we understand language more broadly. As a result, Derrida moves toward ethical consideration of animal subjects in ways that Barthes could not imagine

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in the 1970s. Derrida points out that “the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation.”12 But it also becomes clear that Derrida does not advocate for universal positions on animal rights, for example, because of the ultimately humanist framework in which those kinds of rights are invoked.13 Derrida’s work thus becomes important not only for posthumanist theory, but also for humananimal studies and animality studies, depending upon whether one’s focus is on nonhuman or human animals. Barthes’ work tends to lend itself more to animality studies, perhaps primarily because he reads nonhuman animals as models for humans or for human instinctual behaviors. In his discussion of animals as a “trait,” the “two contrasting movements” he traces are “from beast to man,” as discussed earlier, and “from man to beast” (26). The latter can be seen in what Barthes identifies as “anachoresis,” which is the idea of a human being retreating from the rest of humanity, or, in this case, “man desiring, drawn to, fascinated by animality” (29). This can take the form of a movement “back,” so to speak, to a more “animal-like” existence, for Christian monks, for example. But Barthes also registers different possibilities for “animality” within Christian discourses, such as when “Animality  =  infra-nature:  aggression, fear, greed, flesh:  man without law” (29) (and that therefore might align “the beast within” more with Christian than Darwinist discourses). Animals can also become metaphors for “a world turned upside down,” when Christian texts register stories of animals going against “their basic animal nature” (29). Other possibilities seem to include something like a more equitable relationship between a hermit and a companion animal, or what Barthes calls “the affectively humanized animal,” but the hermit, we are told, must be careful not to venture into “the risk of sin” (30). Barthes’ thinking about idiorrhythmy does not include sexual relations  – or the potential for bestiality in this case – and so the occasion of living with a domesticated animal becomes “[a]n aporia typical of love: How is it possible to love someone just a little bit?” (30). But it seems to me that the animal here remains mere metaphor, that the question is really only ever about a human “someone” for Barthes.14 In his subsequent discussion of the trait “Banc/School,” Barthes reinforces the fact that his interest in animals is primarily as metaphor: “Clearly: one

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should never seriously compare traits of animal ethology with traits of human sociology, never infer one order from the other (because between the two there’s always at least this separating them: language)” (37). But we can consider parallels, according to Barthes, since animals can evolve toward better ways of living together as well, even if “Ethology: supplies images, not explanations” (37). Barthes is interested in this case in a school of fish, more so than an anthill, for example, which he sees as a metaphor for “generalized, universalized bureaucratized training (this has nothing to do with specific regimes: the mass culture of capitalist societies = a version of the anthill society; television = an extension of the ant-hill)” (37). The school of fish, though, can be seen as modeling “collective, synchronized, abrupt shifts in tastes, pleasures, fashions, fears” (37). If we weren’t talking about literal fish, Barthes reflects, we might see this model as “what appears to be the perfect image of Living-together, one that would appear to effect the perfectly smooth symbiosis of what are nevertheless separate individual beings” (37). It can even reproduce itself without sexual intimacy: “a school of male fish will swim above a school of females. As the mass of eggs floats up to the surface it passes through the school of males, which then release their sperm – reproduction without contact, pure species with no subjects. Erotic paradox: bodies are pressed against each other and yet they don’t make love” (38). Barthes is careful throughout his work to note that idiorrhythmy is not about the intimacy of lovers, which makes this example more appealing to him: “Idiorrhythmy: protects the body in that it keeps it at a distance in order to safeguard its value: its desire” (38). According to Patrick ffrench, we might want to note Barthes’ own sexuality and elements of his biography – particularly living with his mother until her death  – as contributing to Barthes’ fantasy of “an affective, desexualized eroticism” that “carves out a space outside or ‘before’ castration and repression. It privileges maternal attachment and is resolutely non-phallic. It features a ‘happy’ sexuality.”15 This helps to explain why Barthes might want to exclude couples and sexual relationships as positive examples in his dossiers related to idiorrhythmy, although ffrench elides any mention of how animals and animality are related to Barthes’ fantasy. In the dossier on “Écoute/Hearing” Barthes begins by distinguishing which senses are more important for dogs and humans, for example, with dogs privileging smell and humans usually focusing on sight, but noting that hearing can also be quite important. The difference can be seen when it comes to the idea of territory: “Animal territory: often marked out by smell,” while human territories can be defined by sight, touch, or hearing as well (79). Noting Freud’s connection between hearing and sexuality in

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his “theory of the Primal Scene (scene of hearing),” Barthes also references literary examples in which hearing is related to repression: “Hans Castorp overhearing his Russian neighbors making love in the room next door” in Mann’s The Magic Mountain; “the entire apartment building … [as] a space of eavesdropping and espionage” in Zola’s Pot Luck; and then the fantasy of the “Idyllic, utopian community: a space where there’s no repression, that is to say no listening, where there would be hearing but no listening” (80–1). In order to imagine that kind of idiorrhythmy, Barthes wants to avoid focusing not only on the couple but also on the family as part of a community, since “the commune falls apart from the moment family groups are reestablished – due to the conflict between sexuality and law” (8). At the other end of the spectrum, Barthes wants to avoid “macro-groupings, large communes, phalansteries, convents, coenobitism” as well, “because their structure is based on an architecture of power… and because they’re openly hostile to idiorrhythmy” (8). For this reason, I think it’s quite accurate to say, as ffrench does, that Barthes’ lectures “will inevitably disappoint those seeking a systematic and totalized socio-political theory.”16 ffrench is right then, to focus on “the pleasure and the jouissance of the fragment” rather than “the theoretical construction of social space.”17 Following Diana Knight, ffrench argues that utopia for Barthes “pertains essentially to the details of everyday life and … to a certain mode of corporeal and spatial being with others – a precise calibration of spatial, corporeal and affective factors.”18 But I am not ultimately persuaded by ffrench’s argument that Barthes’ inquiry should be read primarily as a response “to the demand for some kind of political expression that emerged in the wake of the events of May 1968.”19 For ffrench, “Much of Barthes’s work of the 1970s can be read as a counter-strategy to the intense politicization of the decade, deflecting the demand for politics toward a subtle and delicate ethics of affective and corporeal relations.”20 Whether we agree with that hypothesis or not, I find it difficult to read How to Live Together primarily as a critique of “communities established in the wake of 1968 in France” that end up re-instating the problematic power relations of the society they were established to resist, presumably echoing critiques made by Foucault and Lacan.21 If this were the case, I would think that Barthes would have taken advantage of a wide range of comparisons to be made explicit between the traits that limit idiorrhythmy and contemporaneous historical and cultural examples in which those dangers could be identified. But I do agree with ffrench that Barthes is ultimately more interested in “a community formed by the

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subjectivities of reading and writing” and that the “virtual or at least nonactual nature of this community does not, however, dilute the affective force of living with, precisely because this takes place affectively and imaginatively, in the dimension of the Imaginary.”22 I would instead see this interest as a missed opportunity for connecting the work to more explicitly politicized critique. Barthes is quite explicit in the end about not making any social prescriptions. He ends his lectures intentionally with a dossier on “Utopie/ Utopia,” indicating that he had initially planned to “dedicate the thirteenth [and final lecture] to constructing, in front of you, a utopia of idiorrhythmic Living-Together – since the lecture course started out from that particular fantasy” (130). Instead, he admits that he “didn’t have time to collect your contributions”; that he “lacked the necessary enthusiasm”; and that he had realized over the course of the lectures that “a utopia of idiorrhythmic Living-Together is not a social utopia” (130). Although it’s not in his written notes, orally he says, simply: “I don’t have a philosophy of Living Together” (196n12). While he suggests vaguely that the lectures of the following year will “involve an Ethics,” Barthes also resists committing to any particular method for dealing with the dossiers he has opened up thus far: “[T]he preparation for method is an infinite, infinitely open process. It’s a form of preparation whose final achievement is forever postponed” (136). Despite the fact that he begins the lecture series by talking about a “non-method,” he now concludes that “As always, the ‘non-’ is too simple. It would be better to say: pre-method. As if I were preparing my materials with a view to dealing with them methodically at some later stage; as if I actually weren’t too bothered what method would take them up. Anything is possible: psychoanalysis, semiology, ideological criticism could make use of them” (136). But Barthes is content to leave those kinds of approaches to others. How might various scholars today respond to this suggestion that “opening up dossiers” should be left at the stage of a “pre-method”? Perhaps Barthes himself would have brought subsequent work to bear on these dossiers if he had time to do so before his unexpected death. It is certainly possible to do more in political terms with other dossiers he opens that indicate promising (or limiting) “traits” to consider, such as “Domestiques/Servants,” in which distinctions come to be made between members of a community who work and those who do not work to meet the basic needs of the community. According to Barthes, “this communitary problem repeats the major structural problems of all societies:  the division of labor, exchange, class divisions, the reconstruction

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of a social microcosm at the margins of society, the circumscription of an idle, privileged group” (77). This problem can begin even with a voluntary master/servant relationship in the case of apprentice monks, but can also be seen in literary examples such as Robinson Crusoe and Friday, which Barthes describes more accurately as a master/slave relationship: “LivingTogether with Friday is a matter of living with a slave … Friday places Robinson’s foot on his head himself (as if it were the essential nature of a black man to be instantly enslaved” (76). According to Barthes, under the “trait” of “Chef/Chief,” the idiorrhythmic space is disrupted as soon as there is a chief, rather than a community of equals, or even a group with an informal guru, for example: “the introduction of a hierarchy: the invention of the chief ” (54). Or, in the dossier on “Idyllique/Idyll,” there must be “an absence of conflict,” where the idyllic “refers to a literary representation (or fantasmatization) of its relational space” (88). Or, under “Règle/ Rule,” idiorrhythmy is threatened by the development of habits or customs into more rigid rules: “Perhaps, after a certain period of time (historical, personal), every rule, even an inner one, becomes abuse?” (120). All of these threats to idiorrhythmy  – servants, chiefs, conflicts, rules  – could be considered not only in relation to specific historical and cultural examples, but also in relation to animalities as well: how can opening up these dossiers illuminate some of the obstacles to harmonious forms of inter-species Living Together? One of the traits that Barthes pays less attention to is “Cause/Cause.” When considering “small, flexible groups of several individuals who are attempting to live together (within a certain proximity to one another), while each preserving his or her rhuthmos,” Barthes acknowledges the importance of the question: “What brings them together?” (43). Whether it is a monastery or the sanatorium of The Magic Mountain, “For there to be idiorrhythmy – or a dream of idiorrhythmy – there has to be: a diffuse, vague, uncertain Cause, a floating Telos, more a fantasy than a belief ” (46). For human-animal studies, the fantasy might be not just a small community but larger societal structures that allow for different species to live together in better ways. For animality studies, the desire might be for a world in which discourses of animality are no longer deployed to justify oppressive and exploitative practices and societal structures. But we might also think about animalities scholarship itself as uniting behind “a diffuse, vague, uncertain Cause” in which opening up dossiers on animalities in literary and cultural texts is more than just a “pre-method” but motivated instead by a desire to critique problematic practices and discourses.

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To return, finally, to my opening invocation of a murmuration, I  am struck by what seems to be a lack of imagination in Barthes’ thinking about this kind of phenomenon. Barthes makes other references to it at various points in How to Live Together, but his attention stays focused on the question of distance between individuals. In relation to the idea of territory, for example, Barthes suggests that it “Isn’t just a matter of security, it also has to do with a constraint of distance: the spacing of subjects between one territory and another + a certain regulated distance between one subject and another within the territory itself ” (117). But security and predator–prey strategies in particular instances also have a significant role to play: “Intraterritorial spacing is reduced whenever the territory is under threat (schools of fish, flocks of starlings) but, once the danger has passed, the subjects reestablish their distance from one another” (117). Once again, the fish (what kind?) and the starlings (in which historical and cultural contexts?) are generic stand-ins for human potential. For Barthes, a biological basis of behavior seems to connect humans and nonhumans when it comes to reproduction and breeding (117), as well as territoriality, since he reinforces the idea that “man = a territorial animal, like the stag and the robin” (57). While he remains quite clear that he sees language as the ultimate dividing line between “the human” and “the animal” – along with all of its corollaries, from subjectivity to affect to culture – Barthes still leaves no space for the sheer awe that can result from watching a murmuration of starlings. What else can we do with that feeling? Where else can our thinking about flocks and schools lead? From my perspective, the animalities that Barthes opens up in How to Live Together thus remain insufficiently explored. Why must we assume, for example, that biology or evolution must be the most interesting or important reference points for thinking about human and nonhuman behavior? How might we go further – with both affect and politics – with studies of literary and cultural animalities today?

Notes 1 Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 131–2. All subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2 For more on the concept of “animalities” as an organizing feature of animaloriented scholarship today, see my “Introduction:  The End of the Animal  – Literary and Cultural Animalities,” in Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

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3 See, for example, Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 4 More recently, I have come to believe that more productive distinctions can be made between animality studies, human-animal studies, and posthumanist theory, rather than lumping them all together under the supposedly broader term of “animal studies.” See my “Introduction.” 5 For some of my reservations regarding the critique of critique suggested by Felski, for example, see my “The Future of Reading: Animality, Illness, and the Politics of Critique,” in The Future of Literary Studies, ed. Jakob Lothe (Oslo: Novus Press, 2018). 6 For more on the history of “the jungle” as a discourse, see my The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 7 Donna Haraway has been a crucial and influential voice in human-animal studies exploring interspecies relations. See, for example, When Species Meet (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and Staying with the Trouble:  Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2016). 8 Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, Volumes 1 and 2, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; 2011). For more on these issues, see David Farrell Krell, Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), and Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 9 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I  Am (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2008), 32. 10 Ibid., 30. 11 Ibid., 28. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 For more on this critique of rights discourse, see Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites:  American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003), 21–43. See also Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 14 For more recent discussions of interspecies sexualities and erotic relationships, see Kathy Rudy, Loving Animals:  Toward a New Animal Advocacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Colleen Boggs, Animalia Americana:  Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (New  York: Columbia University Press, 2013), and “Love Triangle with Dog: Whym Chow, the ‘Michael Fields,’ and the Poetic Potential of Human-Animal Bonds,” in Animalities:  Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Lundblad, 190–210; and Greg Garrard, “Bestial Humans and Sexual Animals: Zoophilia

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Mi chael Lundbl a d in Law and Literature,” in Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human, ed. Lundblad, 211–35. Patrick ffrench, “How to Live with Roland Barthes,” SubStance 38, no.  3 (2009): 123, 122. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 117. See also Diana Knight, Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Ibid., 117. Ibid. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 124.

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Animal Unfamiliars A Bestiary of Time-Travel Cinema Alanna Thain

Aberrant or strange experiences of time in films provide access to one of the body’s primary capacities, that of novelty.1 The body’s ongoing existence in time is simultaneously one of creative recompositions, of breaks; unusual experiences of temporality activate and remind us of what I term the “anotherness” of the body itself:  a dispossessive strangeness most intimately ours.2 In a kind of topographical relation to the quotidian, this anotherness inheres at the edge of livability, expanding one’s capacity to act via a productive time machinics. Félix Guattari, speaking to this dispossessive force of time (which he calls “affect”), writes: As much the color of the human soul as of animal becomings and cosmic magics, affect remains fuzzy, atmospheric, and yet is perfectly apprehendable, in so far as it is characterized by the existence of thresholds of passage and of reversals of polarity … Affect is the process of existential appropriation by the continuous creation of heterogeneous durations of being.3

Guattari’s connection of affect and time gives something other than loss as a way to think of existential appropriation, and the ambiguous intensities of affect embodied between human soul, animal becomings, and cosmic magics are clearly articulated in one form of speculative media:  the time-travel film, a genre riddled with animal companions. What role do animals play in such experiences, and in particular, how does their relationship to territory demand that we think their role ecologically? Guattari’s work rethinks relations between ourselves and what I  will term our “animal unfamiliar.” This paper uses Guattari’s thought to consider the companion species that populate time-travel movies, exploring how animals make us live time both intensively and disjunctively – that is to say, affectively – through experiences of alterembodiment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975), Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968), Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).4 What can our animal unfamiliars teach us about time travel 231

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as an ethico-aesthetic response to the crisis of contemporary ecologies? Throughout, I consider how the presence of animals in time-travel cinema foregrounds the way that all bodies are time machines, in the sense of their capacity for demonstrating the heterogeneity of our own existence in time. Animals, I argue, co-compose experimental ecologies of intensity, otherwise understood as direct experiences of heterochronicity, the felt multiplicity of forms of time. They make legible our corporeal experience of time. This is the work of the animal unfamiliar, an adaptation of Gilles Deleuze’s work on the animal. Deleuze’s loathing for domestic animals is well known. In the eighthour interview series Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, he heaps scorn on dogs and cats and the people who cherish them. But in the opening segment of that piece, “A is for Animal,” and in the hours that follow, he qualifies this loathing as less for the domestic animal than for the familiar or familial, noting (in language that suggests the expanded sensorium that animal unfamilars enable) that “domesticated animals that are not familial, not familiar, I like them much, as I am sensitive to something in them.”5 This sensitivity registers the animal’s capacity to activate an experience of the limit or threshold; animal unfamiliars are uncanny lures into territories of the “unthought”: And there is no literature that separates the language and the syntax from the human being and the animal. One has to be sure of that limit. And I  don’t believe it. Even by doing philosophy. Here, one is on the border that separates thought from the non-thought. One should always be on the border that separates oneself from the animality in such manner that one is not separated anymore. There is an inhumanity peculiar to the human body, and the human spirit. There are animal relationships to the animal. So, if we could be finished with “A,” this would be good.6

This inhumanity proper to the body and mind, and the animal relation to the animal, are fundamentally for Deleuze relations of time. Deleuze gives as an example the hunter who reads the signs, in footprints, of the animal that was there as an act of temporally disjunctive becoming with the animal: “I admire the people who can recognise, such as hunters, real hunters and not the ones from hunting societies, but the real hunters who are able to recognise the animal that passed by. Then they are animals; then they have an animal relationship to the animal. This means having an animal relationship to an animal. It is incredible.”7 Not mimetic, an animal relationship to the animal is characterized by an untimely becoming. Such a relation can only be untimely, in that the participants don’t sync up; animals provoke these relations as out-of-body experiences. Animals

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produce corporeal encounters of thresholding, as in Deleuze’s description of the cat who returns home to find a place to die, who makes a territory of death as the body’s ultimate anotherness. They are literally the analphabêtes, the illiterate beasts without speech. Deleuze articulates this otherness of the animal unfamiliar as the means to access one’s own, to reach the limit that marks a change of state not from one thing to another, but to an excluded middle or in-between. The animal returns as a refrain function in the abecedary to contour the places of the non-thought that make thinking possible. Though Deleuze voices impatience with the topic of the “Animal,” it recurs, making clear that the work of the animal for Deleuze is as a force of becoming, the shift from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Animals are our companions in anotherness, our unfamiliars. They are such because they both mark the limit of thought and non-thought (the bark of a dog, Deleuze says, is the stupidest sound in the world) where non-thought moves into potential. In other words, animals co-compose with us new territories of thinking. In following our animal unfamiliars through their displacements in time-travel cinema, I explore their invitation to think and live otherwise. In these works, animals diverge from their normal function within the anthropocentric discourse of disaster that characterizes so much of our current thinking on ecologies. This chapter looks at the relation of catastrophe, time, and affect to ask what new powers to affect and be affected we gain in relation to our traveling companions.

Time Machinics: Beyond Domestic Seriality To move into the machinic, I understand time travel as fundamentally an experience of affective intensity rather than displacement along a temporal continuum. The body does not travel through time as through space; rather time travel is a process of reworlding, as becomes clear in Deleuze and Guattari’s work on nomadology and machines for traveling. A simple sketched image of a fourth- or fifth-century horseless nomad chariot opens the chapter “1227:  Treatise on Nomadology:  – The War Machine” in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. That chapter characterizes the nomad as the one who travels intensively rather than extensively across space, one for whom “voyage in place is the name of every intensity.”8 Such an intensive voyage in place does not simply absent the animal, but rather situates it at the limit of the perceptible and the legible. A mobilizing disappearance traverses both Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadism and Alain Resnais’ time machinics of a vanishing

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mouse, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter. How might we see this horseless chariot, then, not as a machine for traversing space, but as a time machine? Animals in time-travel cinema generate heterochronic bodies, deranging relations of risk, approximation, and mimesis. Deleuze and Guattari write, speaking of the outlandish, creative force of nomadism:9 “what the warrior borrows from the animal is more the idea of the motor than the model of prey. He does not generalize the idea of prey by applying it to the enemy, he abstracts the idea of the motor, applying it to himself.”10 Here, they describe a regime of affective intensity as a movement impulse “which relates only to the moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed amongst elements.”11 They term this “matter in variation”:12 intensive transformations of time, inseparable from the “passage to the limit as change of state,”13 from processes of deformation or transformation. Robert Bird attributes the uncanny efficacy of animals in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films to the filmmaker’s preference for long uninterrupted takes, which gave “considerable freedom to the material forces” of animals “to manifest themselves in activity.”14 The effect was a crucial part of what he terms the “aleatory” or “stochastic” feeling of time within Tarkovsky’s cinema, including the film under consideration here, often described as his most personal work, The Mirror.15 The Mirror is non-linearly composed of three distinct time periods in the life of a poet, with the body in extremis initiating time travel in response to the imminent death of the protagonist, Alexei. Like Deleuze’s dying cat, the film performs an outlandish deterritorialization of the space of a dying form, and early on, the film’s time machinics are yoked to animality as a productive force of unfamiliarity. Two back-to-back scenes play out the film’s relation to our animal unfamiliars.16 These scenes make explicit Deleuze’s link between the writer and animal as two beings “on the lookout”: Deleuze: Claire Parnet: Deleuze:

Yes. If someone would ask me what an animal is, I  would answer “a being on the lookout.” It is a being fundamentally on the lookout. And the writer? Well, yes, the writer is on the lookout. So is the philosopher. Of course we are on the lookout. For me, you know, you see, the ears of an animal. Well it does nothing without being on the watch. An animal never keeps still.17

Deleuze’s description not only equates the animal to the writer, it also performs a corporeal rearrangement of “ears that look” that constitutes a typical threat to animal and human embodiment alike in time-travel

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movies – that displacement in space and time will (fatally) rearrange the body. In Tarkovsky’s film, animals signal not just an altered state, such as dreaming or memory, although this is how animal appearances are often read in his work. They repurpose habitual embodiment in the service of the body’s heterochronic being, folding and complexifying forms of time. The first scene involves a burning barn in the countryside. Here the fire’s destruction, replayed already in memory, is further rippled by heterochronic forces and initiated by animal sounds. The scene’s abstracted animal elements machinically articulate a movement across time. The scene opens with a close-up of Maria (Margarita Terekhova), the mother of Alexei, wiping tears from her face, accompanied by the noise of a ticking clock. In the background, a dog barks and an echo effect makes this sound almost artificial or metallic, a curious bark that contours and deranges the surrounding space. A cat’s meow immediately follows. Maria turns her head as if in response but it is unclear which animal has caught her attention. People begin to shout in alarm and the barking increases, the echoing effect producing a strong sense of dislocation as the volume varies and destabilizes the dog’s relation to the human characters. The mother announces there is a fire, and two children leap up to run and see. The camera cuts to the reverse shot and lingers in the home as everyone flees. As this happens, the ticking stops and we hear the mechanical call of a cuckoo clock, the harsh metricality of time fading away into the refrain function of birdsong. The camera continues to explore a space now shot through with the folds of time made manifest and initiated by the abstraction of animal voices, moving from sense to sound. If the warrior abstracts the animal motor and applies it to himself, in time-travel cinema the animal’s propensity to make territory through leaving – what Deleuze in the abecedary calls its “outlandishness”18 – suits an art of replay like cinema and relays a line of flight, the emergent novelty of anotherness. In the next scene, the effects of temporal derangement play out again across abstracted movements of animality. From the burning barn, we cut to a child who starts upright in bed at the sound of a distant birdcall. Shifting to black and white, the film presents a forest where grass and trees are rippled by wind. We cut back to the boy, sleeping now, who starts awake. The birdcall repeats and he gets out of bed; at the third birdcall, a white form flits across the screen, a piece of clothing suggesting the extravagant form of a bird, traditionally a harbinger of death, but here, abstracted, a harbinger instead of anotherness. In the mysterious scene that follows, the bird’s form and force are distributed across characters

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and frame-composition. In slow reversed motion, the mother rises from washing her hair, which hangs over her face. Her arms flail awkwardly like disjointed wings in an impossible movement composed of competing forces of time. Only as an animal can she move. This scene mirrors the irreversible burning of the barn in a corporeal contagion, as the mother’s wetness infects the whole room, which, saturated in liquid, starts to collapse. At the end of her movement through space, the young Maria encounters her future self. The animal unfamilars confound and make contagious Alexei’s temporal movement through the bodies of women; he doesn’t simply travel through his memories but becomes unfamiliar to his own self. Writing about his film’s receptions in his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky describes letters he received about his films that directly address the complex temporal conditions that his films enacted upon the bodies of his spectators and their link to our animal unfamiliars.19 The first is a violent failure of sense (the work of the analphabête) where what frustrates, according to viewers, is their failure to recognize and understand, described as a shock to mind and body. The effects of Tarkovsky’s films  – “severe headaches” and revulsion (one man describes the film as “unhealthy”)20  – can perhaps be understood as the effects of what Tarkovsky described as a deeply felt “time-pressure” (his term): a kind of unlivable intensity. Other viewers, instead of an alienating somatic repulsion, describe an experience of immediate, intuitive understanding, that generatively claimed the film’s uncanny anotherness as their own. A factory worker wrote to say that The Mirror is a “film I can’t even talk about because I am living it.”21 He then describes the film’s time-transporting affect in terms that show the importance of animals for articulating technology and corporeality in an ecology of sensation: “if two people have been able to experience the same thing even once, they will be able to understand each other. Even if one lived in the era of the mammoth and the other in the age of electricity.”22 Rather than integrative forces of indexical reality, animals in The Mirror activate untimely affective contagion. The Mirror’s animal unfamiliars open a gap in space-time, enabling an encounter across what Guattari calls “partial enunciators” of subjectivation.23 In Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema (2017) I outline two qualities of cinematic time travel as a somatechnics.24 The first is that at the individual level, time travel is barely liveable. Deeply disturbing to our body’s heterogeneous but fragile composition of speeds and slownesses, working at radically different rates, time travel amplifies this fragile

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holding together and generally produces breakdown. Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a film with a special place for animal unfamiliars, portrayed a kind of primal scene of time traveling bodies as drained of life force by the experience, only kept alive by technology25 The film’s unusual use of still images unfolding in cinematic time doubles the stuttering exhaustion of the protagonist’s wasted body, in a catastrophe that is equally subjective and ecological. Bodies do not simply move through time but are made of time, and the violence of time travel mutates our chronological DNA. A second somatechnical effect of time travel is that mutation takes place both in bodies onscreen and also in the audiovisual image (or cinematic body) itself. The first mainstream time-travel film of the digital era, Jurassic Park (1993), depicts actual and existential mutation played out across insect, dinosaur, and cinematic bodies alike.26 This demonstrates how we live ourselves as composed by our flesh and by our images, over which we have only partial control at best. Images are partial enunciators of subjectivation, that nomadically relay our experience of the world across subjective, social, and media ecologies. Time travel, understood as something other than displacement along a predetermined continuum, is thus a minor practice of anotherness. The violence and derangement of time-traveling bodies and the generic affiliation of time-travel cinema with the motivational spur of imminent death or apocalypse release an anarchic impulse geared towards the virtual dimension of existence  – what else could happen? – and the ethical question that accompanies it – how else can the future be? Siegfried Zielinski, writing on time travel in cinema, has argued that cinema, as essentially a chronometric machine, serves as a mechanism to regularize movement to allow us to control the emergence of novelty as lived in the body.27 Cinema’s future for Zielinski will be a built-in time machine: “a machine that not only enables us to travel through time using our imagination but also using our bodies.”28 But en route to that future, Zielinski mentions the numerous animals – experimental subjects – that populate fantasies of machines of corporeal displacement. The animal articulates the familiar and unfamiliar, the limit where the mechanical production of the same (regulated clock time, for instance) tips over into the machinic, the creative, or the as-yet-unthought. This is one way a cinematic time machinics expresses the disjunctive corporealities and different ways of making sense that time travel both requires and tries to resolve. In time-travel cinema, animal bodies make human bodies into inscriptive surfaces. They reverse the idea of the disposable experimental animal

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as a transparent site of legible effects, throwing their human utility into question. In amplifying the differential, these animal unfamiliars reveal the constituent force of time in the composition of human bodies. The animal’s inability to speak, the muting of its difference in an experimental violence of mimesis, reappears in the human bodies that come not to speak in the name of animals, but to participate in an untimely becoming, what Deleuze calls the act of writing. Often, intensive movement triggered by an animal’s displacement causes such transformations. In Alain Resnais’ 1968 experimental science fiction film Je t’aime, je t’aime, a mouse’s scurry repeatedly serves as the counter-rhythm to lost human life, whether that of protagonist Claude Ridder (Claude Rich) or of his lover Catrine (Olga George-Picot). Resnais’ film abounds with animal unfamiliars, from scarab beetles to a possibly imaginary cat to sea serpents, and the small white lab mouse becomes an uncanny companion to Ridder throughout. While recovering from attempted suicide following the death of his lover, Claude is invited by a pair of blandly sinister scientists from the Crespel Research Institute to become a human guinea pig. Chosen, the scientists say, because he has “nothing to lose,” Ridder will be sent back to spend one minute in the past as part of an attempt to master the science of time travel.29 His voyage from the hospital to Crespel is coded in the language of rational cuts and cinematic norms: multiple shots of the car moving through the city and out into the countryside both convey and condense the journey in the space of a single continuous song. From this point on, however, Resnais’ film upends the conventional language of cinematic displacement, entering into a series of irrational cuts that continuously disorient the viewer. Ridder meets a man who informs him that “everyone thinks we do agricultural tests; actually, we study time,” and who delicately probes Ridder’s suicidal impulses. Ridder realizes he is their “ideal guinea pig,” and agreeing to serve as such he asks his odds of surviving. The man blithely replies, “if you were a mouse, 100%,” before taking him to the lab to introduce him to mouse subjects A and B. Ridder is a writer, valuable because, as such, he can compensate for the inability of the mice to describe their experience. Mouse B, he is told, was sent back just yesterday to relive a moment from his past and has returned with no ill effects. Claude replies: “Then how do you know it really happened?” and the scientists admit that there’s the rub. This is Claude’s first taste of ambiguous embodiment, as he stands in for the animal, giving voice to experience that cannot be extracted from its body. We see the repeated image of mice in glass jars and under glass

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domes, their monadic embodiment a barrier to science and a metaphorical expression of desire for a spatialized and thus manageable time. As Claude agrees to repeat the mouse’s journey, this doubling plunges him and the viewer into the creative sensation of a body in time. In the time-travel device, which resembles a lumpy organic blob, Claude accompanies a mouse in a round dome. Both passengers are placed in furniture that appears to have grown up around their bodies. The mouse’s domed confinement echoes Claude’s within the time machine and also figurally suggests the danger of contamination across human and animal bodies: another instance of ambiguous embodiment. Sunk into his bed, Claude eyes the mouse sniffing around the dome when suddenly, with a brief rush of sound, the mouse vanishes. The same thing happens to Claude, except instead of a single disappearance, his movement through time is represented as a stutter-effect. At first his body disappears from the time machine, and reappears in an underwater shot of him swimming. Scenes of Claude in the machine, underwater, or emerging onto a beach are disjunctively intercut with shots of the machine and the empty bed. Once Claude begins to travel, he doesn’t simply return to a discrete moment in the past but starts violently skipping, like a record. One temporal displacement only generates more non-chronological cuts, and often Claude’s only cue to his actual body’s state back in the machine is the occasional glimpse of a mouse running through the scenes of his past. The ecological nature of such displacements, which do not simply travel along a temporal continuum but take an entire world with them, is evidenced by the first jump in time Ridder makes. He first lands in the sea, his body at the rear of the image as the camera hovers between water and air. Snorkeling produces strange modes of embodiment for Ridder; when he emerges from the water and makes his way to shore he tramps along in a crab-like side scuttle. This is not a body moving autonomously through space and time, but a body caught up in its relations. Throughout the film, Ridder remains largely at the center of every shot, sometimes exaggeratedly so. In one scene where he stacks magazines, the camera dodges left and right to keep him dead center as he sorts and shuffles. The film’s centering camerawork proposes a different solution to irrational movement through time than the famous dream sequence from Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), discussed by both Deleuze and David Rodowick,30 in which Keaton’s character retains his footing as he leaps through space and time by consistently remaining at the center of the image, and after a moment of disorientation, he

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quickly finds a new way to move in each world he encounters. In Je t’aime, je t’aime, however, the same technique is undermined by the film’s animal alterrhythms, which destabilize Ridder’s embodiment even as he remains at the center of the frame. The mouse returns twice early in the film, making its way into Ridder’s past by scurrying across a sandy, open beach where Catrine and Ridder lie together. Ridder exclaims in surprise at the mouse and tries to snatch it; he marvels to Catrine, “have you ever seen a mouse at the beach?” She laconically replies, “Perhaps he’s on vacation” (off the clock, so to speak). But the mouse’s appearance at the water’s edge, a site that across varying locations will be a scene for exhaustion, death, and re-animation, is critical to the film’s timetraveling alterembodiment. The mouse is a natural-cultural time traveler, infinitely reproducible as a lab animal and emblematic of efforts to contain the unruliness of life by suggesting that one iteration is the same as the next. But in Resnais’ film, the silent mouse suggests that the body’s differential is time itself. Just before its second appearance, Ridder sits in a room at 3 p.m., utterly still and seemingly in despair at the relentless seriality of time. It’s 3 p.m., in three days it will still be 3 p.m., as also in three weeks, he notes, finally picking up the phone to check the time and hold an absurd conversation with the recording, as if to reinject life into this clockwork stasis. In this film, the time machine as a device is machinic, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of that which is not mechanical, producing only the same, but machinic, productive of novelty through connection; a time machine assembles whatever passes through. As such, between the availability of objective lab time, cut to the measure of the scientists’ desired life cycle, and the aberrant spatiality and speed of the experimental subject’s actual experiences, the mouse is as much a part of the apparatus of the time machine in that film as the visible device in the laboratory. Alterrhythms of existence are drawn into the loop, and the lesson they open to us is to look again at our corporeal habits of temporalocation, how we place ourselves in time. Je t’aime, je t’aime proceeds by a logic of small irrational cuts, a logic of the relay that displaces the replay of a past simply recorded. It is a form of nomadology as a knowledge practice. Nomadic thought, Deleuze and Guattari write, operates by relays instead of forming an image, as the inbetween has a consistency all its own: the point is reached, only to be left behind. In this way, Ridder isn’t simply a “lab rat,” with the mouse’s punctual appearances there to underscore the similarity; rather the parallelism runs interference with a logic of exchange such that the two become

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indistinct, and we are left looking for the mark of change itself. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari write: We think and write for animals themselves. We become animal so that the animal also becomes something else. The agony of a rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. This is the constitutive relationship of philosophy with nonphilosophy.31

This constitutive relationship ultimately forces us to think. In their untimely becoming and exchange of signs, Ridder and the mouse jam the mechanical and release the machinic, something only made possible by the experiment’s instigating factor, the mouse’s silence. At the end of the film, Ridder activates a relay to escape from the temporal leaping he is subject to, reversing into death. Sitting at his desk in the final sequence set in his “past,” Ridder rises up like a somnambulist and walks over to the record player where a jazz song plays, lifting the needle from the record. We continue to hear the sound of the record turning. He then retraces his steps to his desk, pulls out a gun, and shoots himself. The sound of the record turning stops as soon as he sits. There are a series of cuts between Ridder’s dying body in the office, as he silently mouths words we do not hear, and his body landing and collapsing at multiple sites at Crespel. The dislocations stop with a close-up on Ridder’s face as an exaggerated bird song plays, its refrain re-marking the territory of Ridder’s altered embodiment. We cut back to the lab where the scientists decide, “We’ll never get him back,” and exit the space. As they go outside, once again the birdsong plays at a high volume and they discover Ridder alive. As the scientists mutter orders around him, his lips move and his eyes fill with tears, but he makes no sound. Through the replay, and the reversal away from the interruption of the repeatable record, Ridder breaks the disjunctive, spasmodic hold of the past. But in doing so, he does not simply free himself. Rather, he takes up the mouse’s silent seriality as a new force, and in doing so loses his own speech. The final shot of the film is the mouse, forgotten in the abandoned time machine and returned to his plastic dome in the present. As he sticks his snout through one of the air holes, pressing against the surface with his paws, the image freezes. Here, the mouse is trapped not simply in space but in time, in a kind of limbo. But much like Ridder’s mute entrapment within his own body, is this freeze-frame gesture legible as an image of temporal displacement, retaining the body’s capacity for anotherness in an image of an uncertain future?

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In Resnais’ film, human bodies ping off of animal bodies in a relational ecology of time travel. In Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), a dystopic time-travel fantasy composed mostly of still images and an important precursor for Resnais, a man travels back in time from post-apocalyptic Paris. He is the latest lab rat in experiments on prisoners by scientists seeking a way out of their present hell. What gives him the power to withstand what has killed and deranged other experimental subjects is the affective intensity that codes his guiding image in the past of a woman glimpsed at the Orly airport at a moment of fatal crisis. She becomes his cross-temporal touchstone. Marker’s film does not parallel the bodies of human and animal as experimental subjects; instead, it appropriates the alterrhythms of animal embodiment when the time traveler and the woman he seeks fall in love amidst the animal remains of the Museum of Natural History, their training ground as they seek to learn how to move in an impossible space between worlds. More than background, these taxidermied bodies stage a tableau of cinematic suspense:  in the doubled suspense of durational photogram (the length of the shot) and the animal’s eternally posed bodies, affect intensively ripples static form without movement. As with Resnais’ doubled embodiment of man and mouse between parallel and contagion, here the film and animal bodies become sites of alterembodiment. For Marker, the time traveler is always in the process of becoming-lab-rat, but never quite arriving at it. Like the mouse in Je t’aime, je t’aime, this lab rat lends its ambiguous embodiments to the art of experiment and speculative futures.

Simians, Cyborgs, and Chronic Collage The key device in Je t’aime, je t’aime is explicitly a time machine, one that ends up machinically articulating man and mouse in a mute territory that the scientists cannot measure and fail even to perceive. In David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986), a more sensitive experimental scientist, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), aims to build a machine for spatial displacement – a transporter or telepod – in a home laboratory that more closely resembles an artist’s loft.32 At the beginning of his experiment, in a modest gesture, the two telepods sit in the same room only a few feet apart, just for starters. But before anybody is beamed anywhere, the machines must harness the energy of time by shrinking the temporal scales of past and future. The telepod must represent time to itself, make it legible. These images of time are as much part of the blueprint of the machine as any design specs; they are in fact its speculative dimension of futurity.

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First, Brundle’s machine reins in the past as the history of evolution, drawing in as the first experimental subject a cultured figure of our recent ecological past: a baboon who, like the serial mouse in Je t’aime, je t’aime, is presented as an acceptable stand-in for the human body. The baboon is the time machine’s “animal familiar” and what underpins the mechanical imperative to produce repeatable effects: close enough in form and history to stand in for a human body, but at a safe distance as an experimental subject. Brundle repeatedly speaks to the baboon, who of course can never reply; as a stand-in, the baboon is non-disruptive, but also unsuccessful. The first baboon sent through the system suffers a horrible fate, literally turned inside out, just a pile of smoking guts in the receiving telepod. Later a fresh baboon, as repeatable as Resnais’ mouse, witnesses Brundle’s work looking in from the outside of the machine through a pane of glass. From his first failure, a crestfallen Brundle concludes that the machine is stupid: it doesn’t know how to deal with organic matter, only inorganic objects. He has yet to realize that he too is stupid:  he doesn’t yet know enough about “the flesh” to program the machine successfully, and in particular he is ignorant of the body’s temporal forces. He only gains an insight while having sex with his girlfriend (Geena Davis): she exclaims, “I want to eat you up! That’s why old ladies pinch babies’ cheeks. It’s the flesh, makes you crazy.” This crazy, incorporative, cannibalistic desire is also a mode of time travel, producing an ambiguous embodiment, of old ladies incorporating youthfulness; this ambiguous embodiment will likewise characterize the film’s human and nonhuman becomings. For Brundle, the problem of moving across space becomes one of untimely animation, rendering the ecology machinic through the movement of life itself. The machine projects into the future the promise of a superhuman cyborg, floating free of the constraints of time and space. But the tight control of Brundle’s experiment fails when its spatialized displacement (one that reins in past and future by disappearing the present of one thing becoming another) comes out of joint: when Brundle rashly decides to teleport himself to prove his own genius, a fly joins him in the transporter. Caught up in the vision of his own future success, he fails to notice the unexpected traveler sharing his domestic ecology. The baboon notices, though, and with calm interest observes the fly make its way into the telepod; Brundle seems to feel that the baboon’s only concern is for him. We of course can’t know what the baboon is thinking. The trip through the transporter merges man and fly. Brundle’s body soon begins to mutate. But it is the eccentric temporality of the Brundlefly’s life cycle that turns the transporter, and the film

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as a whole, into a time machine. When Brundle takes his fateful trip, he enters the pod naked and assumes an iconic, crouched position that immediately evokes Arnold Schwarzenegger’s time-traveling cyborg assassin in The Terminator,33 but Brundle will only briefly live up to the superhuman potential of the reference. Scientific protocols have little to offer Brundlefly in the art of living this new life. Rather than a linear transformation, this life is expressed in the film as a variable and unlivable intensity that simultaneously transforms human into fly, making all of his corporeal habits painful, and replays at accelerated speed human development and growth. In one scene, Brundle, charged with a powerful sex drive, brings home a woman he meets in a bar for some athletic lovemaking. With the stamina of a teenager, he flinches when she notices wiry hairs growing out of his back, untimely markers both of a kind of relived puberty and of the fly’s emerging re-corporation. One of Brundlefly’s first impulses is to archive himself, turning his bathroom into a cabinet of curiosities storing the disgusting excess of this coming-into-form, in an attempt to regain control over a future both predictably deadly and dangerously unknown. Though at first his transformation gives him super strength and energy while keeping his exterior intact, he quickly starts to mutate, with strange growths and unidentifiable liquids oozing from his body. Early on after this disturbing turn, he enters the bathroom to examine his face, becoming unrecognizable, and his fingers, which are increasingly useless for typing. Here, in another conflation of temporalities, he resembles nothing so much as a teenager getting his first pimples, as he pokes and prods at the gooey lumps on his face. This replay of his already-past is the expression of the derangements of time travel. He takes a finger and, while examining it, causes it to “ejaculate” a white goo onto the bathroom mirror. As with the animal on the lookout who watches with ears, this corporeal derangement makes visible the heterochronic distortions of the Brundlefly’s merged temporalities, the finger-penis a limp reminder of Brundle’s fading agency. That the animal and the human play out at once, rather than transforming progressively from human to fly, speaks to the ambiguous embodiments of time-travel cinema. We consistently see a double vision of Seth as an aging human body and as a becoming-other  – neither fully arrives or settles and this vagueness is the source of affect and potential. The fly’s accelerated life-cycle, developing into legibility on the screen of Brundle’s human form, serves both as ticking time bomb but equally as the affective form of suspense, intensifying the present by rendering the future intimately other.

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Time machinics foreground the question: how to negotiate the differential of excess as the remainder of anotherness. One of Brundlefly’s final desires in the film is to use the transporter to fuse his wildly mutating body with that of his pregnant girlfriend, condensing and composing the linearity of generations, as he puts it to his horrified girlfriend, into “the ultimate nuclear family.” Brundle’s mad scientist thus takes his place in a long lineage of masculine reproducers, seeking to harness the future through orderly reproduction, here shifting from the lab mouse’s seriality to a novel form of simultaneity. Rather than Frankenstein’s elimination of motherhood, however, Brundle manages the movements of a body reproduced within the media archive. Its untimeliness is best demonstrated in the pregnancy scene where Brundle’s lover dreams she gives birth to a larva:  the nine months to grow a human are suspended between dream and film time in a nightmare anotherness. Machines here are black boxes of relation, serving to derange. This illustrates a last characteristic of time travel: its contagious effects. All human bodies are subject to this in this film. But the ethico-aesthetic question all these films share, made legible by their animal unfamiliars, is how to live in intensity, in the heterogeneity of becoming, without simply falling into death. What kinds of time machinics might be an open invitation to anotherness as a felt futurity? While this differential might fail at the level of character, as so many timetravel narratives kill their protagonists or recuperate them into cliché, it registers as ambiguously embodied across cinematic and nonhuman bodies, through animal unfamiliars, as the sign of the more-to-life, or the productiveness of bodies in time.

Notes 1 Some sentences and concepts in this essay are adapted from chapter 4 and the conclusion of Alanna Thain, Bodies in Suspense:  Time and Affect in Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 2 Thain, Bodies in Suspense, 3. 3 Felix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 23. 4 See, for example, the thread of the animal throughout the work of Donna Haraway: “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A.  Treichler (New  York:  Routledge, 1992), 295–337; The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago:  Prickly Paradigm Press at University of Chicago Press, 2003); Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_

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Meets_OncoMouse™:  Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997); and When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “A Is for Animal,” Gilles Deleuze from A to Z, dir. Pierre-Andre Boutane, trans. Charles J. Stivale (Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/ Foreign Agents at The MIT Press, 2011). Ibid. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 381. Deleuze mentions that “outlandish” is the English equivalent of “deterritorialized” in “A Is for Animal,” a term he gleans from reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 396. Ibid., 400. Ibid., 406. Ibid., 407. Robert Bird, Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 171. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). Andrey Tarkovsky, The Mirror (Kino International, 1975). Deleuze and Parnet, “A Is for Animal.” Ibid. These responses to Tarkovsky’s films are described in greater detail in Thain, Bodies in Suspense, 271–4. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. See Felix Guattari, “On the Production of subjectivity,” Chaosmosis: An EthicoAesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–32. For a longer discussion, see Thain, Bodies in Suspense, chapter  4, “Time Takings: Suspended Reanimations and the Pulse of Post-Digital Cinema.” Chris Marker, La Jetée (Criterion Collection, 1963). Steven Spielberg, Jurassic Park (Universal Films, 1993). Siegfried Zielinski, “Backwards to the Future: Outline for an Investigation of the Cinema as a Time Machine,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2003), 566–9. Ibid., 568. Alain Resnais, Je t’aime, je t’aime (Kino International, 1968). See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2:  The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1989)  and

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D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 31 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1996), 30. 32 David Cronenberg, The Fly (Twentieth Century Fox, 1986). 33 James Cameron, The Terminator (Orion, 1984).

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CH APTER  14

Theorizing Animals Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben Matthew Calarco

There are myriad ways to think about human–animal differences. Recent work in animal studies is broadly unified in rejecting the approach that has been hegemonic in Western intellectual and cultural traditions. This approach tends to define differences between human beings and animals in binary and hierarchical terms, positing a strong opposition between the two groups and granting higher ethical value to human beings over animals. Contemporary developments in a number of fields  – ranging from ethology and biology to philosophy and theory – have called into question the onto-theological and ethico-political assumptions that undergird this framework. However, if this dominant framework is set aside, it is not at all clear what alternative conception of human and animal existence should take its place. Should the undercutting of binary and hierarchical oppositions lead to human–animal biological continuity and flattened value schemas? Or might this displacement of simple oppositional schemas allow other, more complex conceptions of human–animal differences to come to the fore? My aim in this chapter is to examine three distinct but related positions concerning these questions, associated respectively with Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. I will suggest that although none of these positions is entirely persuasive, together they nonetheless point toward a promising direction for future thinking. My analysis begins here with the work of Heidegger, insofar as his writings set the terms for much contemporary theorizing concerning animals. Although Derrida and Agamben articulate novel positions on the issue of human–animal differences and relations, they both do so, as we shall see, primarily in view of and in contradistinction to Heidegger’s approach.

Heidegger: Human–Animal Opposition There are two key ways of thinking about human beings and animals with which Heidegger is primarily in dialogue. The first is the Darwinian 248

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approach that seeks to understand human nature within a biologicalzoological framework; this approach effectively eliminates any sharp distinction between human and animal existence. The second is the conception of human nature that derives from metaphysical humanism; here, human beings are seen as animals with some special capacity (reason, language, moral agency, awareness of death, and so on) that ultimately distinguishes them from all other animals. Of these two approaches, Heidegger is clearly closer to the latter, humanist position insofar as it preserves something of a distinction between human beings and animals. But Heidegger will depart even from traditional humanism inasmuch as it fails, on his account, to think the separation of human beings and animals in a radical enough manner. It has perhaps not been fully appreciated just how radical Heidegger’s approach to the human–animal distinction actually is. The aim of his discourse, as we shall see, is not simply to distinguish or differentiate human beings from animals, but is instead to delimit an absolute, insuperable abyss between the two domains. One might be tempted to think that Heidegger’s emphasis on radical difference is not particularly novel, that it is simply a continuation of traditional ways of drawing the human–animal distinction. But one of the more provocative aspects of Heidegger’s analysis is his insistence that traditional metaphysical oppositions concerning human beings and animals actually proceed from shared ontological grounds, wherein the human is understood as a being differentiated from animal life only by emerging in and through it. Thus, in the classical Aristotelian definition, the human is described as zōon logon echon and shares (among several other things) zōē with animals and is distinguished from them primarily through a unique relation to logos. In the scholastic Christian tradition, even as human beings retain their uniqueness as the only created beings with an immaterial soul (ens creatum immateriale), they still belong with animals to the sphere of created material beings (ens creatum materiale) as distinguished from the uncreated God (ens increatum). Likewise, in the definition of the human as animal rationale that comes to dominate in modernity, the rationality of the human is thought as emerging from and through the human’s animality. In this sense, the Darwinian rejection of any kind of radical break between the human and animal registers of existence is not entirely foreign to the dominant metaphysical tradition but is in fact one of its logical possibilities. For Heidegger, as long as we think human existence starting from a shared animal foundation, any purported break with animality will effectively be one of degree and will risk being reduced to and collapsing back into its animal substrate.

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Heidegger’s aim, in a certain sense, is thus to sever the link between humanity and animality altogether, at least as to what constitutes the unique manner of human existence. As such, any possible animalization of the human or hominization of the animal is rejected outright in his analysis. Shared behaviors, homologies, or analogies found among human beings and animals – the very kinds of things Darwinian evolutionary theorists have used to demonstrate deep continuity among the two registers, and that metaphysical theorists have used to establish a shared animal substrate – are reinterpreted by Heidegger as emerging from radically different modes of being and aiming at utterly different ends. In effect, then, what Heidegger is seeking to do is to get behind or beneath traditional ways of distinguishing human beings from animals in order to demonstrate that they rely on a certain interpretation of the Being of the human and the Being of the animal that fails to respect their essential differences. In particular, he maintains that the specific nature of human existence is fundamentally obscured if it is thought starting from biological or zoological grounds of any sort. We should bear this abyssal oppositional logic in mind when considering Heidegger’s much-discussed theses on “world.” In his 1929–30 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Heidegger proposes to examine the concept of world through a comparative examination of the respective world relations of human, animal, and stone.1 Heidegger begins with the following theses: the human is “worldforming”; the animal is “poor in world”; and the stone is “worldless.” Inasmuch as the stone is commonly assumed to be entirely without world, Heidegger is able to set this particular class of entities aside and focus more closely on the differences and similarities between the human and animal worlds. Upon initial consideration, it would appear that the animal has something like a world – if by “world” we mean access to other beings – for the animal clearly has some relation to other beings and is not closed in on itself like a stone. But even if the animal has access to other beings in some way, that access appears impoverished when compared with human relations. The human relation to world would seem to display a much richer, more nuanced mode of access to other entities, hence the relative and comparative poverty of the animal world. Considerable ink has been spilled on these theses, with several readers decrying the attribution of poverty to animals’ world relation and arguing that this kind of analysis fails to do justice to the rich relations that constitute animal life. While such responses are undoubtedly correct up to a point, they miss the deeper stakes of Heidegger’s analysis. For Heidegger

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has no desire actually to defend this thesis concerning animals; in fact, any approach that characterizes human and animal relations to the world as lying on a continuum and then ranks those relations in terms of degree is precisely the kind of thinking he hopes to avoid. As the comparative analysis of world proceeds through the course, it becomes increasingly evident that, for Heidegger, the animal is not simply poor in world but instead has no access to world at all. The concept of world is not reducible to the notion of having access to other entities, but implies a certain kind of relational comportment (Verhaltung) toward other entities in their Being, a relation that would allow one to notice that other beings exist. On Heidegger’s analysis, the animal is incapable of any such comportment and stands in relation to other entities entirely within a driven performing (Treiben) (237). Thus, for the Heidegger of the 1929–30 lecture course, the animal is entirely suspended in its environment and has access to other beings only within the orbit of its highly constrained, captivated behavior (239). While it is true that Heidegger sometimes characterizes human Dasein as also being captivated, the terminological similarity does not denote an ontological or existential correlate between human and animal life. For what primarily holds human Dasein captivated are its concernful projects and the dictates of das Man, both of which are subject to occasional breakdowns, which in turn give rise to the possibility of glimpsing the fact that one is caught up in the projects and cultural norms that form the bulk of one’s average, everyday being-in-the-world. As such, human Dasein’s captivation and capture are never total according to Heidegger; there are events and emotive dispositions that allow a given Dasein to catch sight of its condition in a way that the tightly closed, impenetrable relation an animal has to its surroundings would never allow. That human Dasein can, on occasion, glimpse its condition – can see and awaken to its captivation as such – implies that human Dasein has a relation to Being and to history that lies at the very ground of its existence. It is this specific relation to Being that marks the abyssal separation of human from animal in Heidegger’s analysis. The animal can never become aware of its captivation because it never stands in the clearing of Being – which is to say, the animal is unable to be struck by and notice other beings as such, is unable to apprehend (vernehmen) them or name them as such (243, 311). To use the technical terms of the lecture course, the animal never exists in the pre-predicative manifestness (vorprädikative Offenbarkeit) or the pre-logical truth (vorlogische Wahrheit) that grounds logos, and for that reason can never speak about or attend to itself or other entities as such

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(341). In the final analysis, then, the animal has no world, no referential context of significance in which other beings might come to presence and take on sense. There is no possibility of animals differentiating between beings and their Being or accessing beings as such; hence, for Heidegger, we can only conclude that the animal is separated from the human by an abyss (264). Such broad and general claims about animals and animality are, of course, contentious. One could accuse Heidegger of being dogmatic here and of not attending to the specific and complex relations that animals have to Being and language. It should be noted, though, that Heidegger is quite modest about the import of the claims he makes about the nature of animal life, and he himself underscores in several places that his analysis is problematic. He acknowledges, for instance, that his exploration of the animal’s relation to world is tacitly oriented toward human beings (211). In this vein, he notes in several places that his account of the animal’s relation to its environment and the essence of the animal organism more generally are fundamentally incomplete and should not be taken as definitive statements about the nature of animals (240, 260, 265). What is more, Heidegger openly acknowledges that he has slanted his discussion of animality toward beings whose behavior is more “remote” from ours, thereby avoiding discussing what he calls “higher animals” whose behavior corresponds more closely to human comportment (240–1). Were he to take the full range of animal behavior into account, there would undoubtedly be numerous complications raised in regard to every major aspect of his articulation of the human–animal distinction. At bottom, Heidegger is thus fully aware that he has not offered a positive analysis of animal life on its own terms, and that what he has to say about animals is primarily useful for helping to highlight the human relation to world and the complex relations humans have with Being and language that engender world. It is for this reason that Heidegger’s ultimate conclusion with regard to his thesis on animals is that it “must remain as a problem” (273). Nevertheless  – and here the most serious issues with Heidegger’s discourse emerge – the problematic nature of this analysis and the ambiguous status of animal life never detract from his certainty that there is, in fact, a deep and insuperable abyss separating human existence from animal life. Following the 1929–30 lectures, this certainty about the existence of an anthropological difference becomes even more marked, and it is no longer supplemented by the kind of careful and provisional analysis of animal life we find in the lectures. Instead, the detailed engagement with scientific and zoological literature we find in 1929–30 is replaced by dogmatic

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statements about human–animal difference that lack any kind of compelling supporting evidence. As Heidegger continues to ponder the question concerning Being throughout his subsequent writings, his focus turns increasingly toward the manner in which the human  – and the human alone – stands in the clearing of Being and how this relation gives rise to language, history, and other modes of relation that are supposedly inaccessible to animal life.2 What, then, are we to make of Heidegger’s attempt to determine a radical, abyssal opposition between the human and the animal? Even on the most charitable reading, it must be admitted his approach is deeply problematic and appears to be based on a very limited understanding of the complexity of animal life. When Heidegger makes contentious claims about the uniqueness of the human relation to Being (especially in his later writings), he tends to rely for evidence on what “our experience shows.”3 But whose experience is being relied upon in such instances? Does it include the experience of ethologists, poets, and artists? And what of people from other cultures and other ways of life who have been less prone to drawing divisions between human beings and animals? Or is Heidegger limiting himself to his own range of experiences and limited familiarity with the animal sciences of his day? We might further wonder whether we have had additional experiences, collective and individually, since Heidegger wrote that these would make us rethink his entire approach to abyssal oppositions. Have we not come to suspect that the very desire to establish strong oppositions between human and animal nature is one of the primary problems plaguing contemporary social and political life? I turn now to an analysis of Derrida’s work on the question of the animal in order to take up these and related questions.

Derrida: Human–Animal Différance Although Derrida’s interest in the question of the animal is evident even in his earliest writings, he only began to give this issue sustained consideration and attention from the mid-1980s onward.4 For Derrida, the question of the animal emerges primarily out of a deepening of the critique of metaphysical humanism carried out by Heidegger. In questioning traditional presuppositions about human nature, Heidegger opened the door for a rethinking of the human–animal opposition that undergirds traditional accounts of the human. But, as we have seen, Heidegger’s overarching concern to determine the uniquely human relation to Being blocked him from grasping the full implications of his own critique. Derrida’s work pushes

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beyond this dogmatic limitation in Heidegger’s thought and tracks more fully and critically the manner in which the human–animal opposition has been used to secure traditional notions of human propriety. Despite the original insights one finds in Heidegger’s work concerning the inner relations between humanism and metaphysics, what remains unquestioned in his discourse according to Derrida is the equally metaphysical tendency to determine the difference between human beings and animals in a simple, oppositional manner. It is the insistence on locating a single, general, and essential break between human and animal life that brings Heidegger’s deeply original thinking back within the orbit of the very metaphysical tradition he had hoped to delimit and go beyond. Derrida uncovers a quintessential instance of this kind of metaphysical approach to animality and the human–animal distinction in Heidegger’s discourse on the human hand, which Heidegger confidently asserts is something essentially different from an animal hand. For Heidegger, human and animal hands are so different, in fact, that they require different nomenclature. He notes that “apes, for example, have organs that can grasp, but they have no hand.”5 These and related attempts to determine simple and strict oppositions between human beings and animals lead, according to Derrida’s critique, to a reductive homogenizing of animal life. Thus, rather than underscoring the multivalent, rich, and complex relations that animals have to themselves and other beings, Heidegger’s reductive discourse would have us determine that which unites all of animal life within a single register of (non-)relation. For Derrida, this kind of unwittingly anthropocentric and essentialist logic dovetails all too easily with the sacrificial structure inherent in the Western metaphysical tradition, one that grants a certain priority to human Dasein and abandons the entire nonhuman world to a zone of sacrificeability.6 Derrida’s criticisms of Heidegger’s remarks on animality might encourage the reader to anticipate a complete rejection of the human–animal distinction on his part. For Derrida, though, the problem with Heidegger lies less with his attempt to determine an anthropological difference than with the specific way in which that difference is configured. Heidegger’s conception of the human–animal distinction relies on a logic of differentiation that is articulated along a single axis, one that aims to find a single joint of rupture between human and animal and serves as the ground for other human–animal differences. But in seeking this single joint, line, or point of rupture (located, as suggested above, in the exclusively human relation to Being, pre-predicative manifestness, and related notions), Heidegger is forced by his own logic to reduce the ontological richness of animal

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differences to a common essence of animality. In brief, the chief problem with Heidegger from Derrida’s perspective is not that Heidegger tries to determine differences between human beings and animals, but rather that he seeks to locate a difference; and this commitment leads Heidegger dogmatically to adopt the metaphysical posture of thinking in a reductively oppositional manner and to flatten the differences both among animals themselves and between human beings and animals. In view of these limitations, Derrida posits a more complex understanding of human–animal differences. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, he recurrently emphasizes the incredible richness and variation of animal life. He thus rejects the Heideggerian and classical philosophical efforts to determine animal life in a unified manner, either in positive terms (some shared characteristic that binds all animals in a single class) or in terms of lack (some capacity that human beings have but animals uniformly lack). Derrida urges us to recognize the singularity of individual animals and the massive number of species and groupings that we find in the animal world.7 Such multiplicity should lead us to recognize how animals rebel against and outstrip our efforts at categorization and intellectual capture. But such multiplicity does not, for Derrida, suggest we should erase the human–animal distinction and allow it collapse into homogeneity. Consistent with his general approach to metaphysical oppositions, Derrida seeks to complicate, trouble, and multiply oppositions without rejecting them outright. Collapsing the human–animal distinction in particular smacks, in his reading, of biologism and continuism, intellectual tendencies that fail to appreciate human–animal differences and instead create homogeneity by placing both groups within a single, undifferentiated class.8 In a certain sense, then, continuism of this sort is for Derrida an even bigger threat to thought than Heidegger’s essentialism, for Heidegger’s approach protects at least something of difference. Thus, rather than rejecting oppositional thinking in favor of continuity and homogeneity, Derrida seeks to pass through Heidegger’s thought and other philosophies of human–animal opposition in order to radicalize, deepen, and complicate the posited differences. And such multiplication of differences is carried out on both sides of the binary as well as between the seemingly opposed groups. Derrida’s thought is ultimately dedicated to deepening and refining differences both among and between human beings and animals, and to attending to the varieties of singularity that are occluded both by essentialist oppositions and reductive homogeneities.9 This deconstructive philosophy and ontology of differences bids a definitive farewell to the desire to locate a single and final threshold

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between human and animal or a single anthropological difference. But in rendering the distinction between human beings and animals so complex and differentiated, Derrida risks being read as calling for a wholesale liquidation of the human–animal distinction. As we have just noted, he is deeply sensitive to this concern, and in multiple places in his work he stresses that there is still something to be said for human propriety and that he views human–animal continuism not just as ontologically deficient but as ethically pernicious and politically sinister.10 Thus, for Derrida, the traditional philosophical notions that (1)  human beings are unique and (2)  human beings are different (in a variety of ways and along various axes) from other animals are never entirely abandoned.11 Derrida’s chief contribution to the ongoing discussion over human–animal ontological difference is to recognize that simplistic oppositions fail to do justice to the complexity of human and animal lives and that much richer categories are necessary going forward. What remains problematic in Derrida’s thinking about the question of the animal is his unwillingness to consider the distribution and production of differences differently. Following Heidegger, Derrida begins from the presumption that there is something positive about the human– animal distinction worth maintaining. While Heidegger wants to ground that distinction in a more originary difference, Derrida as we have seen wishes to multiply differences along this intersection. But why, one might wonder, is there a need to maintain and rework this particular distinction? In looking for the reasons behind this strategy, it is important to note that Derrida’s thinking about differences and singularities reflects a neo-phenomenological approach to difference based on the inaccessibility of the Other’s interiority. On this account, inasmuch as I am unable to inhabit the other person’s subjective experience and perspective, there is a difference in the world that I am unable fully to comprehend – a radical Other, who fundamentally resists my attempts at mastery and domination. This limit to my intellectual comprehension leads to a kind of ontological pluralism in which singular subjects are seen as radically distinct and thereby resistant to any attempt at bringing them under general categories.12 While this conception of radical difference might have some purchase when considering the inaccessibility of the subjective existence of an individual organism, it seems less plausible when applied (as Derrida does in his analysis of the question of the animal) to sets, groups, or species that are clearly social constructs. After all, are human beings as a set truly distinguishable from animals as a set? If all of our previous attempts to determine conceptual human propriety over and against animals have been manifest

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failures due to the complexity and richness of the sets under consideration (a point Derrida readily concedes),13 why must we continue to hold open the possibility that such a search for propriety remains worth pursuing? To head off one objection to this line of reasoning, it should be acknowledged that the human–animal distinction will undoubtedly continue to function within the dominant social order for a long time to come; hence, there will be a concomitant need to maintain a critical counter-discourse on this same conceptual and institutional terrain for the foreseeable future. But there is a massive difference between critically and ironically occupying a given set of distinctions for strategic reasons, and positively arguing for the value and ontological purchase of those same distinctions. Derrida’s discourse on the question of the animal is firmly situated within both of these approaches, but there is precious little argument for why the second thread should be pursued. At this point in the development of pro-animal practice and discourse, it is not at all clear that this is a particularly helpful or sensible strategy. Does a complication and multiplication of the human–animal distinction really disrupt the established order? Does not the established order already accept radical differentiation among animal species? Indeed, it would be easy to show that the exploitation of animals is predicated on careful attention to nuanced differentiation among animal species. It would seem that the dominant order could and does allow that not all animals share a single essence, as long as it is still assured that some kind of border or set of barriers will keep “the human” on the other side of animal existence. What the regnant order seems unable to affirm, by contrast, is the notion that differences along the human–animal axis can no longer be considered operative – not because all human beings and all animals are identical but because the differences among these sets simply overwhelm the conceptual and institutional apparatuses used to establish, articulate, and maintain the dominant way of life.

Agamben: Human–Animal Indistinction Perhaps it is worth risking a thought and practice that go beyond this division and proceed from within a perspective that no longer takes the differentiation of human and animal as its point of departure. Such an approach is precisely what Giorgio Agamben has sought to develop in his writings on animals and animality. As is the case with Derrida, Agamben approaches the animal question primarily through an extensive critical engagement with Heidegger. The specific frame through which Agamben

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analyzes Heidegger’s texts is that of anthropogenesis, understood as the varied processes that give rise to the human.14 At stake in this analysis for Agamben is arriving at an understanding of “the human” as constituting something other than an ontologically neutral description or category. For Agamben, the human – which is less a denotative concept and more of a performative apparatus  – is formed in and through processes that are deeply loaded in a political sense; as such, the maintenance of this category and the oppositions through and against which it is built (foremost among them being animals and animality) is hardly a neutral endeavor. On Agamben’s analysis, human propriety is the result of a problematic and pernicious split between two different aspects of life, zōē and bios, a split that is instituted chiefly at the political level and that prepares the way for Western biopolitics. The point for Agamben, then, is not to offer a new articulation of human propriety but to think through a form of life that no longer requires us to separate humanity and animality. Such a thought will require us to set aside the human–animal distinction, to abandon it to its fundamental undecidability, and to acknowledge that the project of trying to determine the proper of the human can no longer be maintained – the very gesture that both Heidegger and Derrida refuse. Agamben offers a complex reading of Heidegger’s work, remaining close to the letter of Heidegger’s text while departing radically from it in spirit. Agamben asserts that the human is continuous in many ways with animals and animality,15 and he rejects Heidegger’s insistence that human and animal modes of existence can never be understood from shared grounds. Agamben does, however, seem to accept Heidegger’s central contention that animals do not have world in the human sense. The basic animal condition is one of being captured by disinhibitors that simultaneously open up an environment characterized by a specific, limited set of relations while closing off the space for animals to become aware of their condition. The human relation to world and that which grows with and out of it (language, history, culture, and so on) do not (as in Heidegger) emerge on Agamben’s account from some fundamentally different mode of being, but rather constitute the simple event of the human awakening to its animal condition. The human is thus an animal who has become aware of its condition, a being who has taken notice of itself as such and other beings as such. Agamben suggests that what we do with this condition, how we seek to configure it and make it meaningful, forms the core of the great political projects of the West. On his analysis, what we in the West have most commonly done is to see the human condition as providing us with a task or

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vocation that requires us to set aside our animality and fully embrace and actualize our humanity. Simple animal life comes to be seen as insufficient for constituting the good life and is rigorously distinguished from the work and life of humanity proper. This separation of sheer animal existence from the qualified modes of life proper to humanity is central to the distinction that Agamben draws between zōē and bios. While he no doubt overstates the case about the rigor with which this distinction is maintained in classical Greece and throughout the development of Western politics, there is certainly something to be said for using this frame to uncover important aspects of the political logic of the West. Agamben suggests that Heidegger represents the last philosopher in the West who could believe “in good faith” that human beings have a proper historical task or vocation.16 For us, today, Agamben believes it has become painfully clear that the attempt to separate human life from animal life is at the heart of the violence of our biopolitical present; and the way out of this violence begins with recognizing that human beings have no such distinctly human vocation, no work or essence they must take on. Human beings must come to see themselves, alongside animals and other living beings, as abandoned on earth with no historical calling and no essential task to accomplish. The good life, if it is to be found, will emerge on this shared, ex-propriated terrain. In this sense, contesting our biopolitical present entails healing the fracture between human existence and animal life, bios and zōē, political life and the natural sweetness of life. In overcoming this caesura, we would need (as just noted) to learn to see the two realms as indiscernible, and to see human and animal as indistinct. And yet, in order to understand Agamben’s analysis charitably, this alternative vision of human life cannot be understood as a simple return to an animal condition that has never been touched by politics, language, history, and culture. Rather, the point seems to be to pass through the human condition and take up a form of life that would no longer be considered either human or animal. In the closing pages of The Open, Agamben leaves the orbit of Heidegger’s thought and turns to Walter Benjamin’s writings to articulate what it might look like to leave the anthropogenetic project behind. Here he borrows the concept of the saved night from Benjamin as a way of naming a state of existence in which the history of being and the historical tasks humanity has sought to take on are no longer in play. Within Benjamin’s saved night, the world appears as something that is no longer in need of being named by human beings, no longer in need of being repaired or improved by them, and is instead approached as existing beyond Being. The saved night thus names a condition of living that approaches the human and nonhuman worlds

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beyond the traditional project of knowledge and mastery and instead lets the world be outside of Being. Agamben also briefly touches in these pages on how such a notion of life would transform human relations with animals. Animals, too, he suggests would be seen as existing in an irreparable state, outside of Being, as real beings who have “gone beyond the difference between being and beings.”17 It is precisely at this point that we can begin to catch sight of both the promise and critical limitation of Agamben’s thinking on morethan-human animals. For Agamben, to let animals be is to let them be in their animal environments, in their animal condition, in a state in which they know of neither being nor nonbeing. In other words, it is to allow them to remain in the state of animality in which Heidegger’s analysis has placed them – without world, captured by their disinhibitors, and closed to the play of concealedness and unconcealedness. Here, Heidegger’s dualistic and reductionistic picture of animals – which is never subjected to serious critical scrutiny by Agamben in the way it is by Derrida  – is allowed to cut short any consideration of how the human–animal split has led to impoverished conceptions of and relations with animals. Contra Agamben, we who are the inheritors of millennia of anthropogenesis cannot enter into another economy of relations either with ourselves or with the more-than-human world simply by letting beings be outside of being. If our conception of animality and the more-than-human world is deeply impoverished, we need critically to dismantle that vision in order to create the space for a richer one to emerge. In The Open, these reflections on the saved night and the formation of a new economy of relations involving animals are not particularly clear, and Agamben acknowledges the profound difficulty involved in thinking through the issues at stake here. More recently, in the final volume of the Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben returns to the question of post-historical humanity and human–animal relations in a more accessible way and under slightly different rubrics. In this text, Agamben relies on the concept of the inappropriable to delineate a form of relation to self and world that leaves behind ownership and gestures toward use. Much as the saved night involves letting beings be outside of Being, engaging self and world as inappropriable returns them to their own sufficiency and allows them to circulate outside of the proper “work” of humanity. Remaining within the terms of the human–animal distinction as Heidegger articulates them, the inappropriable would thus name a relation and mode of existence that is neither animal nor human. But what kind of life emerges once the apparatus that separates human from animal

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is no longer operative? In a fascinating set of remarks on the notion of landscape, Agamben suggests that a life beyond the human would take the form of contemplation, or a mode of looking that occurs outside of being. Viewing a landscape is the chosen figure for this conception of contemplation because it involves deactivating the standard ways in which entities are individuated and brought to presence in standard forms of cognition. But Agamben is insistent that such contemplation is not a simple return to some prior animal state in which we know nothing of Being or nonBeing; nor is it a properly human state beyond the animal condition in which we name entities and co-constitute their unconcealment. To view a landscape in the sense under discussion here is to contemplate beings outside of Being, to theorize (understood here as theōreō, to behold) beings as not being subject to any overarching telos, whether human or divine. One can of course take notice of each individual element that might be in one’s purview within a given landscape, but to contemplate a landscape is to deactivate categorized elements one by one, passing outside of Being and holding the logos in abeyance so that another form of relation might emerge. In Agamben’s words: “Neither animal disinhibitors nor entities, the elements that form the landscape are ontologically neutral.”18 In theōria, both the one contemplating and the landscape being contemplated enter into another economy of relation, one that Agamben suggests is ulterior to the animal mode of existence (which knows nothing of Being and nonBeing) and the qualified form of human life (which subjects other beings to mastery and a historical task). This mode of theōria thus leaves behind both the animal mode of environmental relation and the human mode of world formation for another mode of existence, pointing toward a form of life where the fracture between human and animal, self and world is finally healed. “No longer animal nor human, the one who contemplates the landscape is only the landscape, no longer seeking to comprehend, just looking.”19 There is, however, a passing remark in Agamben’s discourse on landscape that complicates the seemingly smooth schema that would have us pass from animal environment to human world to posthuman theōria. In remarking that viewing landscapes from heights has been of interest to human beings at least since antiquity, Agamben also notes that something analogous to the contemplation of landscapes has been “unexpectedly found in the animal kingdom” by ethologists.20 This is indeed an unexpected and curious finding for Agamben’s analysis if, in fact, animals are (as Heidegger’s and Agamben’s respective discourses would suggest) entirely limited in their purview by the environmental relations opened

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by their disinhibitors. If contemplating a landscape presupposes a mode of looking that extends beyond utility and beyond being, then how can an animal ever contemplate a landscape? Might it be that there is something of the human and posthuman conditions folded into the basic ground of existence of many nonhuman animals as well? And if that is the case, would this not require us radically to revise our understanding of what constitutes the animality of nonhuman animals? Were we to take such possibilities seriously, our understanding of what constitutes human–animal indistinction would be correspondingly transformed. We would have to acknowledge that the fracture between animal and human, zōē and bios, does not pass “first of all” through the human, but is simultaneously at work in our relations to animal life as well, structuring how animality is conceived in both registers.21 Thus, in order to arrive at a genuine theōria of human–animal indistinction, it would also be necessary to acknowledge the profound continuities and crossings that structure both of these registers. Simply to deactivate our standard conception of animality without recognizing its deep inadequacy and immersion in structures of exclusion and violence would hardly leave us on the kind of ontologically “neutral” terrain that Agamben seeks to describe here. Furthermore, if in fact animals do have a relation to themselves and the world that is more complex than the neo-Heideggerian “environmental” picture that Agamben seems to accept, and if in fact we encounter other animals who contemplate (albeit and undoubtedly in their own unique ways), then a rather interesting possibility opens up that Agamben, Heidegger, and Derrida overlook. Rather than conceiving of theōria as a uniquely human activity, we begin here to catch sight of the possibility of a kind of syn-theōria – which is to say, a shared engagement in contemplation with other theorizing animals. Through contemplating, thinking, and seeing with other animals, syn-theōria creates a space for another way of life to take hold. No longer would theōria be limited to a human contemplation of Being, of the deep structures of phusis, or of thinking about animals beyond Being. Rather, theōria would mark a co-constitutive zone in which fundamental re-subjectifications and environmental and structural transformations with and alongside animals and other more-than-human others might take place. As a mode of syn-theōria, theoretical contemplation would thereby be transformed into an ethology that challenges us to rethink what a non-athropocentric form of life might be and that takes seriously the need fundamentally to reconstitute ourselves and our various ēthea (dwellings, habits, customs) in view of and alongside the more-than-human world.

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Notes 1 See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); henceforth cited by page number in the text. 2 For a helpful overview of this material, see Stuart Elden, “Heidegger’s Animals,” Continental Philosophy Review 39 (2006): 273–91. 3 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” trans. Frank A.  Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998), 247. 4 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 161–96; Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago:  Chicago University Press, 1989), chapter  6; and Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ Or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991): 96–119. 5 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D.  Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 16; see Derrida’s comments on this passage in “Geschlecht II,” 173–4. 6 Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ ” 112–14. 7 See, for example, Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … : A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 66. 8 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 30. 9 Ibid., 47–8. 10 Ibid., 30. 11 Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 66, 72–3. 12 See, for example, Derrida’s remarks about the unsubstitutable singularity and absolute alterity of his cat in The Animal That Therefore I Am, 9, 11. 13 Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 66–7. 14 Giorgio Agamben, The Open:  Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79–80. 15 See Agamben’s description of the human as a “primate” that lets itself be captured by various apparatuses in What Is an Apparatus? trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14. 16 Agamben, The Open, 75. 17 Ibid., 92. 18 Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi (Vicenza:  Neri Pozza Editore, 2014), 127, my translation. This sentence is omitted from the English translation. I am grateful for Brady Heiner’s expert assistance in translation matters. 19 Ibid., my translation.

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20 “Numerous passages testify, in fact, to a true and proper passion of the ancients for contemplation from the heights … which ethology has unexpectedly found in the animal kingdom, where one sees goats, vicuñas, felines, and primates climbing up to an elevated place to then contemplate, for no apparent reason, the surrounding landscape.” Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 88–9. For a more extended and fascinating exploration of this theme, see Barbara Smuts, “Encounters with Animal Minds,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001): 293–309. 21 Agamben, The Open, 15–16, 79.

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Becoming-Animal in the Literary Field Brian Massumi

Challenging the “Anthro-” in the “-Cene” In August 2016, earth’s entry into the Anthropocene era was officially declared by the International Geological Congress, confirming the impact of human activity not only on a changing climate, but on the planet’s very geology. Two months later there appeared a new estimate of the damage to animal life in this new era.1 The number of wild animals on earth, it was reported, had declined by 58 percent since 1966. By 2020, the toll was projected to rise to 67 percent, fanning talk of a “sixth mass extinction” event in earth’s history. It seemed to be another beginning of our species’ sporadic reckoning with the end – including, it seemed increasingly plausible, our own. The dominant response to this crisis at the level of intergovernmental organizations and NGOs (and among national governments, to the paltry extent that they have responded at all), has been technoscientific. It seeks to foster science-based policy aimed at reducing carbon emissions, mitigating climate change, safeguarding wildlife habitat, and preserving endangered species on life-support. Necessary as this approach is, something about it gives pause. It prescribes as cure the same instrument that brought us to this juncture: human instrumental reason itself. In other words, it employs what humans have prided themselves most on – their ability to dominate nature as the self-declared “rational animal” – as the corrective to the historical exercise of this very ability as it infused the modern capitalist spirit. This approach mobilizes the dominant self-defining characteristic of the human as pharmakon:  a poison, but also a remedy. What gives pause is that this maintains unchanged the human sense of its own nature, and its position at the apex of the pyramid of nature in the wider sense. Humanity remains master of itself, and of all other creatures, now reduced to the status of dependants in permanent technoscientific foster-care, their existence hanging on the tenuous goodwill of “man.” 265

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Other approaches take a very different tack, without calling into question the need for technoscientific intervention. These approaches aim at changing the ethical framework within which the response to the ecological crisis operates. They require an attitude of humbleness and respect for nonhuman creatures, and the environment on which they depend. The human must abdicate its position of dominance, recognize its belonging in a horizontal web of interrelations, and reposition itself as their steward. This ethos has a long history, from the Romantics through the rise of the conservation movement in the late nineteenth century, to the first wave of the modern ecology movement in the 1960s. Many of its heirs question the humanism of the underlying “stewardship” model, which appeals to the better nature of the human – but to the nature of the human nonetheless. Current preoccupations point beyond the human as known up to now, past a relational engagement to a relational becoming. Truly tending to the web of interdependencies cannot fail to change the human’s sense of its own species, and with it the cast of its practical involvement with nonhuman others. This aim for the human to get over itself is not confined to explicitly posthumanist approaches; these traditionally focus more on the becoming-other of the human in symbiosis with its own technological excrescences than in interspecies intercourse.2 Many varied approaches bring the ethical supplement of a relational ethos to the discourse on the ecological crisis. One current, presently strong, and gaining momentum, emphasizes traditional and emerging forms of inter- or multispecies alliance, locally embodied in practical assemblages. It militates for new modes of “kinship” extending beyond the traditional human family, and beyond the humanness of the family itself, toward new adventures in “symbiogenesis.”3 Another major current envisions a new “settlement” between human and nonhuman entities, a “parliament of things” recognizing the role played by nonhuman “actants” of all kinds in the reticulations of human being and becoming.4 The discourse of Gaia highlights interdependencies, seeing the earth as a single, complex superorganism.5 In Isabelle Stenger’s retelling, Gaia becomes a supra-human force of “intrusion” calling the human to attention, obliging it to rethink constituent (and destituent) powers beyond the human pale, and to reposition itself in relation to them.6 Also extending beyond the animal to the nonhuman spectrum is the neo-vitalist “new materialism.” Work in this vein often focuses on the quality of “liveliness” incumbent in all that grows and changes, suffusing life and its non-living associates alike. An increased attunement to differing livelinesses, as they amplify each other’s relational potential for sensing and acting, can lead to the

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composition of an altered form of life.7 Relational potential for sensing and acting: sensibility. Lived quality, differential attunement: affect. Sensibility, affect: this is not just the addition of terms, but of a whole new dimension for which there is no better word than the aesthetic. The ethics of relational becoming, having supplemented technoscientific problem-solving, now finds itself supplemented in turn: toward an “ethicoaesthetic paradigm.”8 This shift brings into salience the qualitative in its own right, as harboring aesthetic values, lived purely for their own sake, that are not in simple opposition to the functionalities and efficiencies of the technoscientific paradigm any more than they reduce to the “oughts” inherent in any ethical framework. What follows takes a path, not often taken in these debates but in no way foreign to their concerns, toward an ethico-aesthetic paradigm for becoming-animal.

Enter the GoatMan Between the declaration of the Anthropocene era and the landmark study on the sixth extinction event, in September 2016, two books shared the Ig Nobel prize for biology.9 Both had been widely and positively reviewed, and had sold remarkably well. Why then their ignominy? Ostensibly because each, in their way, explored human–animal relations in the qualitative key. The ethico-aesthetic paradigm is not so easily affirmed. Can this be serious? Any time lived quality is seriously mentioned in relation to differing forms of life, Thomas Nagel’s endlessly cited (less often read) essay is brought up. Here the qualitative question was most famously posed – and declared unanswerable – “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”10 We will never really know, because the bat is an “alien”11 form of life whose central modes of experience – sonar and flight – we humans don’t even have. The battiness of bat existence, the “immediate quality”12 defining what it’s “like” to be a bat, is only accessible to bats. Both Ig Nobel books duly cite Nagel – then convert his warning into a challenge: to embark on a project of becominganimal, as literally as possible, to test whether one can indeed bridge the species gap. Serious exploration need not exclude the pursuit of folly, and the books relate the different means whereby their authors pursue their respective obsessions. Their compounding of serious questioning with whimsy undoubtedly marked them for the Ig Nobel. That both vacillate between seriousness and frivolity suggests that the qualitative question entertains the same ambivalence, making every student of it a candidate for ignominy. At the same time, the simultaneous appearance of two books

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about actually attempting to become animal indicates that, between the Anthropocene and the sixth extinction, something in our moment makes the qualitative question, and the ethico-aesthetic paradigm it implies, newly compelling. Becoming-animal is in the air. In GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human, Thomas Thwaites takes a design approach to the question of what it is like to be a goat.13 In Becoming a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, Charles Foster tries a field biology approach, informed by observational data translated into first-person experimentation.14 He attempts to embody a series of animals, from badger to fox to swift, lingering on otter, his favorite. He is not shy about his hatred for cats.15 It’s hard not to take this favoritism as a warning sign. It holds in reserve a proprietary quantum of subjective fiat that will not surrender itself to what it wishes to become, maintaining its peak-mammal prerogative to judge other species. With the animals he doesn’t hate, Foster steeps himself in scientific literature about their behavior and sensory abilities. He then attempts to use this information to put his safeguarded self in the other animal’s boots (had he been more successful, I would have said paws). The tool for his projection is empathy, “no different from what you need to be a decent lover or father or colleague.”16 Human empathy transfers to other animals because of similarites in the neurological makeup of animal and human.17 This not only limits becoming-animal to the “higher” vertebrates, it also limits how far the becoming can go. There is, of course, also a limit to the similarities, so in the end the animal remains as “elusive” and “inaccessible” as ever.18 Returning to the comforts of home after six months in a simulated badger den, Foster finds his badger colleagues “farther away than ever.”19 But there is a consolation prize: “Our capacity for vicariousness is infinite. Empathize enough with a swift and you’ll either become one or (which may be the same thing) you’ll be able to rejoice so much with the screeching race around the church tower that you won’t mind not being one yourself.”20 The author’s imitation of otherness makes “Charles Foster [become] more like himself.”21 The experience of being “like” animals only confirms “there is some essential I that inhabits my body.”22 It was about human self-enhancement all along. This should come as no surprise to the reader, given the book’s humanist epigraph from Jonathan Safran Foer: “To ask ‘What is Animal?’ … is inevitably to touch upon how we understand what it means to be us and not them. It is to ask ‘What is Human?’ ” Us and not them: home again. Otherness be denned. Nagel would not be surprised at Foster’s failure. Efforts to translate objective knowledge about an animal into an empathetic imitation, he says, are bound

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to fail. “Insofar as I can imagine [what it’s like to be a bat] (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question.”23 Nagel recommends “another direction”: “an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination. … [whose] goal would be to describe … the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.”24 In other words, close the gap between human and animal as much as possible by objective means:  research the animal’s capabilities to build as complete an understanding of its world as possible. Then describe. You’ll never close the gap entirely, but the reader’s understanding will asymptotically approach what it is like to be the nonhuman animal in question. Nagel seems unaware that although he has skirted the self-defeating mediation of human empathy, he has introduced another intervention: language. He assumes description is objective, with language a transparent medium for the literal transmission of meaning, against the many advisories by generations of scholars in any number of disciplines that description is a language genre. No language use is literal. All use carries an irreducible literary element (understood in a broad sense). This literary element is not stranger to becoming-animal projects. Both Thwaites’ experiments and Foster’s were undertaken in order to produce books. Foster acknowledges the literary element in his undertaking – his use of an empathy-filled descriptive genre (“nature writing”) – as “a sort of literary shamanism.”25 But it’s not. A  few pages later,26 he makes this clear, disparaging J.  A.  Baker’s “canonical” book of becoming-animal, The Peregrine,27 for being “shamanistic.” He means that Baker seeks “selfdissolution” through literary invention:  the development of a “new language.” This troubles Foster: “Who’s Speaking Here?” he asks accusingly. The question doesn’t arise in his book, where he proudly maintains “a boundary between me and my animals.” If it is clear who is speaking, if a point is made of maintaining the boundary between me and “my” animals, how could a becoming-animal possibly eventuate? Perhaps Baker is on to something. If neither human empathy nor “objective phenomenology” can go all the way, maybe, just maybe, literary inventiveness can. How paradoxical would that be? Could language, the traditional (and highly questionable) dividing line between human and animal, actually be a privileged portal to the becoming-animal of the human? Understood: it would have to be a “new” language (how would that work?). Baker must be added to the mix. Thwaites provides a bridge. In GoatMan, he tries to experience what it is like to be a goat by modifying his body. His research into goatliness

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approaches it as a design question, revealing basic physical differences: four legs not two; four stomachs not one. He is interested in goat perception and sociality, but he fears his access to both are hindered by his bipedalism and inability to graze. How could he understand what it’s like to be a goat if he cannot approach the world from their quadrupedal angle and indulge in the feeding activity that occupies virtually all their waking hours? How could he experience goat sociality when no natural-born goat would ever accept a biped into the fold? So he develops prostheses that allow him to walk on four legs and eat grass (an artificial rumen). The road is hard, the returns meager: he barely manages a day with the herd on the Alps. Significantly, he approaches his goal through the artifice of design, not by an attempt at naturalism. His rumen extends beyond his own body. He chews grass during the day, spits it into a sack, then at night processes the grass in a pressure cooker designed to render the cellulose digestible by humans. The need to share goat activities distances him from imitation. He can only approach goatliness by strategically departing from it, and inhabiting the differential. No goat wears its stomach on the outside. But that is the only way he can join them in grazing. Similarly, he joins the movement of the goats through another inventive differential. He finds it difficult, even with his quadruped prosthesis, to maneuver and keep pace with his herd-mates. Even with the prosthesis, there is no way to move “like” a goat. He keeps falling behind, out of any possibility of participating in goat society. “[S]o I invent a new semibipedal – more tripedal – kind of gait. Using a mixture of sideways on four legs/frontways tottering on two while using a third leg against the slope for stability, sometimes going backwards, sometimes going forwards, I … scramble” to follow the herd.28 He moves into the gap between bidepalism and quadrupedalism, in a way more like a crab than a goat. He does not become the other: he becomes other, to man and goat. He scuttles into the gap between them, inventing a third term: goatman-crab. No such animal has been seen in nature. Thwaites’ methods go against nature. He pursues a becomingdifferent: neither like a goat, if that means feeling what a goat feels when roaming and grazing, nor more like himself. Becoming more like himself is the last thing on his mind. The whole adventure grows from his lassitude with being human and yearning to escape petty “worries of [human] personhood.”29 As the book’s subtitle announces, Thwaites wants nothing more than “to take a holiday from being human.” Meager as the results are, a breakthrough moment does occur. It happens because Thwaites commits a “goat faux pas.”30 In goat society, being higher on the slope signals dominance. With his prosthetics, Thwaites moves up

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more easily than down, and the dominant goat takes this as a challenge. Before the situation comes to head-butting, a third goat interposes itself between the two. The situation is defused; Thwaites is careful thereafter to stay in his place. Goats are not stupid. The dominant goat was not fooled by some likeness between himself and a hornless helmet-wearing assisted crab-walker. He looked upon Thwaites as a goat when Thwaites committed a faux pas as a goat would, and reacted as a goat would in that circumstance. The “as” here connotes not a resemblance of form, but the singularity of a mode. Goat and modified man enter a goatly mode of relation, across their differences, without equalizing what it feels “like” to be one or the other. They fall into attunement with each other’s actions and affect, at a very precise crossing point between species. This does not make them either physically or mentally alike. It inducts them together into the same event. This is becoming-animal, against the settled categories of nature: a mutual enactment of difference in motion; a differential attunement cotriggering an event. This is an asymmetrical process, enabled by one of the two terms moving into relation, toward an unimaginable unknown third term, neither the one nor the other. Becoming-animal as “heterogenesis”:31 a difference-becoming. Here, otherness is not a problem, but the necessary condition for the event. It goes into making the event, and comes out no less other than it went in. Under its conditioning, a thirdness emerges. Another otherness, anothering of others, occurs. This happens through a transmission of character. Here likeness does play a role. It figures not under the equal sign, but in chiasmus. Earlier, Thwaites visits a neo-pagan shaman in Amsterdam. He is intrigued, but cannot relinquish his knowledge that no matter what mushroom he eats, under whomever’s ritual supervision, he will not “actually” become an elk. But is it not possible, he asks, to change one’s “relationship with the world … so that, for a moment, the elk and the person [a]re also the person and the elk”?32 Human regards elk as person at the same moment that elk regards person as elk. In this cross-eyed exchange, natures cross. This is what happens in the top-goat incident. Thwaites regards the dominant goat as a person in the sense that Thwaites’ participation in the event is predicated on his having immediately, unreflexively, attributed to the goat intention, desire, meaningful gesture, and a spirited adherence to a system of values. The goat figures in the encounter not as a mere goat, but as a nonhuman person:  subject of his own life. The goat does the same for Thwaites when regarding him as a rival for top-goat status. This chiastic transfer of character – this simultaneous cross-positing of personhood – in no way vitiates the otherness in play. The exchange occurs across an

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inexpungeable species difference that remains intact, even as it becomes oddly irrelevant. The two leave the encounter no more similar than they went in. They cross-subjectify each other without becoming alike. The attribution of likeness that both cross-perform preserves the mutual otherness, anothering. The attribution of personhood should not be interpreted as anthropomorphism. That would forget the goat’s co-responsibility for the event. What it actually does is distribute personhood across the animal and human divide, so that neither side has sovereign rights to it. It dehumanizes personhood, placing it in a chiastic zone of indistinction between animal and human.33 The chiasmus involved is life-altering. The goat’s life becomes otherly goatly by entering into society with a man against the natural slope of things; in the same stroke, the human becomes a bit more than man by living a remarkable intensity of experience in goat-mode. Double becoming.34 Both terms in the reciprocal relation alter. Trans-becoming. But neither term “actually” becomes the other. Something else has happened. Another otherness – a thirdness – has slipped in between the two, at the insubstantial intersection that is the chiastic crossing point:  a reciprocal self-differing irreducible to one or the other, as goat gets otherly goated and man more-than-humaned in the same event. This something else taking effect in the thirdness of the in-between is the becoming-animal. It is in a sense abstract: consubstantial only with its own event of reciprocal self-differing, it isn’t concretized in a separate form. It is the occurrent reality of the cross-eyed differential at play in the event. As Deleuze and Guattari would say, a becoming-animal occurs – without there actually being an animal become.35 Thwaites brushes up against becoming-animal, in this in-between sense, through design practice. Baker gives it perfect pitch in his writing. What greater artifice, what greater anothering abstraction, can be achieved than in the literary mode? That animals don’t write books is no obstacle to a differential becoming whose necessary conditions are asymmetrical, although they take effect at the crossing point of a chiastic exchange of character similarly performed.

The Accidental Falcon Thwaites consciously sets out to become goat. This voluntarism represents a residual humanism in his project. His usual un-cross-subjectified human personhood leads the way. In The Peregrine, Baker does not choose his becoming falcon. He slips into it, as if softly possessed. He notices the

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seasonal presence of peregrines in his little patch of England. It is the early 1960s, when peregrines verge on extinction due to DDT. He is drawn to them, fascinated more by their ephemerality in the face of looming extinction than by any describable solidity of their species being. The prospect of their disappearance makes them already a future abstraction, living ghosts of themselves. Baker is drawn to that eerily present abstractness in the future tense. Little by little, it overtakes him. He does not subjectively choose – the better to be cross-subjectified. From his self-centered perspective, Foster misunderstands this as “selfdissolution” (the simple opposite of his “essential I”). Echoing Nagel: that is not the question, which concerns eventful intensities of relational experience in becoming. Following Baker into the field requires amending what was just said about personhood. The Peregrine calls in question the centrality of intention, although desire, meaningful gesture, and immersion in a system of values remain. When personhood enters the zone of indisctinction between the animal and the human, affect replaces intention as the arbiter of character. As Robert MacFarlane remarks, Baker “had to forge a new language of description” to produce this book “in which very little happens, over and over again” (xii). There is no narrative arc, intrigue, or dénouement. The narrator goes into the fields to observe peregrines. Dawns rise, dusks fall. Days pass, seasons change. Birds appear and disappear, flock, scatter, circle, rise, and roost. Peregrines hunt. That’s about it. And it’s gripping. There is uncommon intensity in the very little happening of this book. The language has a poetic terseness, focusing first and foremost on movements. Contrasting and coordinated movements draw lines and curves across the page. “A peregrine rising and falling. Godwits ricocheting across the water, tumbling, towering” (51). “As a tern rose, the peregrine stooped” (46). The birds draw movement across the sky. They figure as movement, as movement figures: activation contours cutting shapes on the sky. “He created beautiful patterns and doodles in the sky, as swiftly evanescent as the swirling shapes of waves upon the shore” (103). Second to movement come light and color. The play of light and color brings the individual into relief. “The hawk shone in the amber light and color, every feather sleek and burnished” (168). Light and color highlight his figure, but also refract it into its background. “He fused into the white mist of the sun” (82). These passages, mergings and emergings, are effected by movement. “Moving down through sunlight, he changed color like an autumn leaf, passing from shining gold to pallid yellow, turning from tawny to brown, suddenly flicking out against the skyline” (97). In the

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color passages, birds not only emerge from and merge into the background, they refract each other, taking on each other’s aspects. One of the “distant pigeon-like birds, that had until then always proved to be pigeons, was suddenly the peregrine” as it flew “crisp and golden in the sunlight” (96). Movement and color themselves merge with and into and emerge from each other. “Movement is like color to the hawk” (102). The hawk does not confuse movement with color on the basis of what they look like. It sees in one what the other can do: effect passages. They are alike not in what they are but in how they operate. Similarly operative, they combine forces to co-effect transformation. This occurs across their difference. Movement still does what only movement can do, as does color. Different as they are from each other, they remain always for each other. Each holds a standing invitation from the other to join forces for combined effect. They are less two separate things than two different dimensions, each defining its own axis of variation, between optimal and pessimal limits, beyond which it fades out, losing its defining quality (light and darkness for color, rest and infinite speed for movement). Each axis is amenable to the other in the mid-range of its polarized stretch. Always in the middle, the invitation stands. Together in their middlings, alone in their movements to the limit, they form a matrix of transformation. Everything in The Peregrine is “like” this. A bird is defined less by species than by the “style” (126) its movements carry through the matrix of transformation, taking on color and aspect, light and dark, rest and acceleration. An individual is its pattern of matrixial transformation: the figure it cuts across and among dimensions. Often in the book the peregrine assumes the figure of another bird by varying its style of movement (see 71). Equally numerous are passages where the hawk emerges into its own figure from a flock of a different feather, or shears away from its own into their fold (see 86). The “The” of The Peregrine functions as an indefinite article. “The” peregrine is sometimes two. Then it pairs movements with its own kind, arabesquing. When it is one, it is often unclear if it is the same one. The “individual” is actually “dividual”:  multiple qualitative fissions and fusions continually varying in figure. Not a particular, but a singular self-populating. Rather than follow a particular bird in a narrative line through the book, the description follows passages to the limit, mergings and emergences, appearings and disappearances, across many a middling qualitative transformation, through a shifting panorama of manyings and singlings out. The world of The Peregrine pulsates with these passages. It sets its own pulse, following the movements its appearing and disappearing figures cut in their

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dance with each other and the elements. Intensities rise and fall, each pulse pumping new life, in rhythmic variation, at the slightest flicker of movement. It is gripping to fall into the rhythm of the book’s not-much-going-onover-and-over-again, then be carried away by the pulse. One soon senses that not much in particular is going on not because nothing is eventful, but because everything is eventful all over again, on something like a vertical axis perpendicular to the narrative progression. On that intensive axis, the world is composing and recomposing itself, accordioning in and out, pulsing with life. At each pulse-beat, world reemerges anew from its matrix of relation. This is not creation ex nihilo; it is co-creation through repeated relation. Each figure is inflected on the fly by the movements around it and the mood swings of the elements. The world rearises in time with the wing-beats of the moving figures, varying in concert. There are not specific events, so much as the event:  of worlding. Particular acts do stand out, but as motifs woven into the matrixial fabric. The dominant motif, in this world where the hawk flies supreme, is predation. “The” event carries the same multiply singular tenor as “the” peregrine: the paragon. The ambit of the peregrine’s movements are the largest. It rises to the zenith on an upswell (95, 139), fades to a speck (86, 11, 141, 139, 163), then disappears, merging no longer with other birds – these are left behind, far below, specks in the commanding purview of the peregrine’s eye – but with the element of the sky. The peregrine swoops from zenith to nadir of its world at inconceivable speed  – as good as infinite, from any prey’s perspective  – disappearing now into the field’s dampness, to chance a coat of mud that might hold it sodden to the earth, bird now merging with the terrestrial element (65, 85, and esp. 98). The peregrine has many becomings with other birds, and other birds have their own figural transmogrifications, if more limited, less exemplary. But the peregrine alone cuts its figure into becomings-elemental. This status as elemental animal makes it the focal point of the becoming hawk of the human. The peregrine is the linchpin of this world’s cocreating.36 “The most exciting thing about a hawk is the way,” when it swoops to kill, “it can create life from the still earth by conjuring flocks of birds into the air” (106). Life arising at the point of death. With each swoop, a life in this world in the balance – just as all life in our world today is in the balance. From the jolted earth of climate change will a new world rise? If so, who or what will cut the peregrinal figure, conjuring forth the flocks of life? The point isn’t the overused, and overly general, one of the poignancy of the life/death dialectic. It is about what happens in the middle, between

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life and death. It is when life is in the balance, already figuring its own death, at once itself and the specter of itself – and pulsing all the more for that intensity – that the world’s matrixial plenitude is most hauntingly felt. This is life, at ghostly distance from itself, living its own abstraction, at the utmost edge of intensity.

Writing the World Anew The Peregrine does not describe the empirical world. The peregrine of the book is not the empirical referent of traditional description. This is not “nature writing.” It is creative writing in the most forceful sense. The world of The Peregrine consists of elements, dimensions, and figures, conjured up in language. They are no less real for that: abstract yet real, as Deleuze liked to say.37 The components of The Peregrine’s world are real, if abstract, forces. The movement figures the novel stages are integrals of affect, defined by how they do, and in their doing, by how they affect and are affected by what else is figurally (not figuratively) a-wing. They are swirls of relation. The author goes to field every day for a year to observe empirical interactions, embodied beings affecting each other, in the co-composing movements of nature naturing. He then abstracts from the observed interactions the affective manners  – the modes of affectability  – they exemplify. These he reembodies in words. The birds’ movements continue in the novel, their manner intact, cutting the same figures in language as in the field. The empirical creatures have been translated, by literary artifice, into abstract characters. Each exemplifies an integral of affect in matrixial imbrication with others. Reembodied through words:  the book is gripping because it really, abstractly awakens the kinesthetic sense, “[l]ilting, surging, rushing, boring, dipping, swaying, carving-up” (143), activating the reader’s body through the abstract figure’s movements on the page. The words vibrate with the movements of the characters. With each merging and emerging, hover and dart, not-quite visions and smells and touches and flickerings populate experience. These almost-actions no sooner appear than disappear, like a hawk soaring and swooping, merging into and emerging from the element of language. Flockings of feeling flit on the edge of perception, in the balance between the empirical and the abstract, as life balances on the brink of death. They quasi-occur, liminally: felt, but not fully actualized. This makes them all the more real: experience, at a ghostly distance from itself, lives its own abstraction, at the edge of perceptual intensity. The

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affects of the birds are one with the percepts of the reader. A transfer of character occurs between them. The reader’s experience pulsates with the words. She is affected by the spectral movements across the page as she would were she in the field. As: not “like.” The co-composing of affective forces has jumped to another element, with all the artifice native to that realm. It is their mode of affectability that transfers, straddling the differential gap between field and book. The book’s force hinges on artful differencing, rather than naturalistic likeness; not on representation, but on anothering. Field and book, across the gap of their reciprocal alienness, effect a spectral third of liminal experience. Their mutual otherness is not an obstacle but a necessary condition. The Peregrine performs a double becoming literary of the world of the hawk and of the human reader. It is a choice to pick up the book, but not to be carried away by it. Lulled by words, the reader falls in with the rhythm, riding the figural movement as a hawk in the wind. A nonvoluntary – not simply involuntary – merging into the movement of becoming occurs. This is sympathy. Not empathy. Empathy is what my “essential I” does when it maintains the boundary between myself and “my” others, and feels for them, producing a disingenous feeling of being “like” them. Sympathy is when the boundary of the I is dissolved – but not the difference on either side of it. Sympathy is a bodily falling in with a feeling-with, at the edge of perception. It does not dissolve the self. It produces another, of self and other, across their difference, in the liminal thirdness of affective co-composing. “Sympathy is what things feel when they shape each other.”38 The becoming literary of The Peregrine is ethico-aesthetic. It is aesthetic in its literary artifice and ethical in its reliving of relation, all the more intensely ethical in refusing I-centered motivation. Sympathy is not intended: it takes, both setting in of its own force, and working as a force of possession. It is larger than the self it sidelines, and more powerful. In sympathy, The Peregrine powers beyond humanism, and the anthropocentrism inscribed in the very word. It does this as only humans can: literarily. In literary language, with its artificings of abstraction, the human can breach its own nature, most liminally, and experience the world in the balance. In literary language the human enters with utmost real-yetabstract intensity into other-becomings, exemplarily including becominganimal. This in no way means that literary becoming-animal is the only kind, or the “best,” only that it marshals for this undertaking the highest powers of abstraction. When becoming-animal happens without there being an actual animal become, the becoming-animal is all in expression.

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Literary becoming-animals bring becoming-animal into pure expression. This expressionism puts a certain distance between the present approach and the new materialism:  here, becomings-animal brink on the incorporeal (suggesting an incorporeal materialism). The Peregrine’s becoming-animal is not unlike the chiastic double becoming of goat and man in Thwaites. Goat looks at man, man at goat, and their eyes cross. They regard each other as persons. In this event, they directly, nonreflexively posit each other as having character. Here the meaning of “person” changes, under the spell of sympathy. Sympathy subtracts intention from character. You still have desire, meaningful gesture, and valuation. You still have qualities of experience, both joy (10) and fear (66). But you have them not as persons in the usual sense, but as figures, abstract integrals of affect. Literary writing is figure-full of character, and characters. The narrator is one of them. He begins as a representative of his species, a man, and thus the enemy of all animals, none more than the peregrine. Animals flee him. They fear him, so intensely as to verge on hatred (121). But as he eases into the world that is becoming, and as the relational pulsings of that world wash through him, he becomes, for his animal others, just another creature of the field. The animals gradually lose fear of him. The peregrine, which had avoided all acknowledgment, now engages with him. He enters into the peregrine’s ambit. He is now in the scope of that lofty eye. On occasion, the peregrine treats him as another creature of this world. He does not, however, see him as another peregrine. The peregrine, after all, is the paragon; the exemplary animal; the most fully, affectively forceful animal in this world. This world cannot contain two peregrines – only the indefinite multiple singular of his figure. No other can be “like” him. As did the goat, the peregrine sees the man in his own terms, with an attribution of character. But to see in peregrine terms is to see the other not as cohort but as prey. At times the peregrine harries the man as he would pigeons or mice (154–5, 172). With this gesture, hawk posits narrator as a character in his world, but not of his ilk. Inducted into the raptor’s relational world of predator and prey, as Thwaites was into the society of goats, the narrator rejoices in the peregine’s movements (143). He feels peregrine joy in soaring to the zenith, and thrill in the speed of the descent. He can almost taste the peregrine’s kills (111). As the eyes of the peregrine settle more often on him, he begins to see with them. From on high, a hawk can take in the full compass of this world, in lofty survey. The narrator’s view flickers between the on-high of the paragon predator, and the low-to-the-earth

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that is the station of his prey. He does not resolve the flicker into a single image, as if coinciding with the peregrine, in a becoming like him. Instead, he inhabits the differential. Distance is not overcome in the comfort of a unifying synthesis. Man and hawk remain as different as zenith and nadir. Affective distance, the asymmetry of otherness, the unease of difference, is honored. A noted episode in the literature of becoming-animal seems to work similarly. In David Abram’s Becoming Animal, the author describes an epiphanic moment seeing through the eyes of a hawk. He looks down and sees nothing other than … himself.39 He doesn’t flicker between onhigh and low-down. He occupies both stations at once. The self enlarges into an “encompassing awareness.”40 For Abram, to become animal is to “come home to myself.”41 Otherness melts into a synthetic sentience, experienced in the first person:  a bigger, better world-me. Everywhere is the center of experience, and at every center is I  spying me. Here, becoming-animal operates as a subjective phenomenology, steadfastly cleaving to the “concreteness” of first-person experience. The result is a hypostatization of empathy. This is very different from Nagel’s hypothetical “objective phenomenology,” no less so than Baker’s abstract, sympathetic approach. Through the eyes of the peregrine, Baker does not see his homebody self. He sees himself as different: the raptor prey he never was (except really abstractly). Rather than coming home, Baker goes to field. In The Peregrine, the relation to the other is no longer empirical, but does not go so far as mysticism. It is superempirical: in surview. In surview, the point of view is that of the writing. It is liminal. The center does not hold. It cleaves as a differential. The movements of language envelop the distance between affective perspectives. This is what makes it truly relational:  annexing the self to a liminal world of becoming, rather than annexing the world to the self. Only under these conditions, of encompassing asymmetry, can the intensest of double becomings be attained. The affective force of both sides of the becoming is intensely felt because the separating distance is not finessed. Both sides participate in the same relational weave, as the differences that they are. Nature denatures, transforming from natural landscape to artificed affectscape. Only on that condition can it renature – pulsing with self-creative tension, rearising. Concrete nature provides no encompassing perspective. Humanism fools itself, as does Nagel’s objectivism, into thinking that the rational, descriptive mind can embrace the whole, asymmetries dissolved, differentials resolved. This is the last conceit of the human. Gaia’s

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intrusion disabuses us of that, making it palpable that the human has no possibility of synthetic encompassment. As a species, we are fatally immersed in the goings-on of nature. However, with artifice, language can mobilize more-than-human affective force  – returning the human not to its familiar home, but to its difference-engined animal becoming. By exercising one of the very capabilities that have historically alienated the human from other animals, the human can rejoin the relational matrix of trans-becoming. This in no way implies that nonhuman animals are excluded from language.42 Languaging is on a continuum, across the range of animality. It is an axis of animal life, one of its differential dimensions. The human takes wing at one end of the continuum. By carrying its abilities in this dimension to their highest power – literary language – the human can contrive to overcome its own conceit and remit itself to the creative movement of its own animality. For all animals embody creative movement, creativity in movement, relationally co-composing. It is called evolution: continuing qualitative transformation, in which individual figures of different species stand out against the matrixial background of all-embracing asymmetrical relation. Nothing characterizes animality more than its capacity for creative evolution,43 displayed in the boundless variety of animate life present in all of the earth’s eras, across every extinction event. The more-than-humaner the human becomes, drawing to its utmost on its ownmost capabilities, the more intensely animal it also becomes. Language, taken to the literary limit, gives the human all the more animal character. Yes, life will rearise. After the sixth extinction, new flocks will arise from the scorched fields and flooded plains. New figures will cut patterns of movement no hawk or human has ever seen. It’s not a choice between life and death. It is a question of who will die – and what role the human will choose to play in those deaths, and in setting the conditions for new life. Although “choose” is not the right word. To place the world’s fate in the hands of human choice is no better an idea now than at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Rational choices well grounded in functionalist technoscientific understanding are crucially needed, as are the ethics of empathy. Yet there is a need for something more than these. The ethicoaesthetics of sympathetic becoming can provide that more-than. Baker does not choose to become animal. He falls into it, and rides the winds of becoming. He rejoices when these bring him to a place where he ceases to feel like a man among men (95). He rejoices in the becoming different of his humanity. There is nothing heroic in this journey, although there is much that is gripping. It can – must at times – involve feeling as

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small as a mouse in the eye of the hawk. A generous dose of this modesty would become the human. So, take to the field, however that presents itself to you, with mud and stubble or in concrete and steel. Hone your affectscapes. And not just in writing. What would it mean to learn, literally, to live literarily, as an ethico-aesthetic adventure toward parts more-than-human? Is such a thing possible? By what artifice? Would it involve large-scale peregrinization, wafting at the zenith of predatory surview?44 Not on your life, Gaia admonishes. Then what other options are there?45 How can we, as a species, not-choose them?

Notes 1 World Wildlife Fund/London Zoological Society, Living Planet Report 2016: Risk and Resilience in a New Era (Gland, Switzerland: WWF, 2016). 2 See, e.g., N. Kathryn Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity, 2013). 3 See Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durhan, NC:  Duke University Press, 2016). See also Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World:  On the Possibility of Life in the Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); The Multispecies Salon, ed. Eben Kirksey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and Vinciane Despret and Jocelyne Porcher, Etre bête (Paris: Actes Sud, 2007). 4 This current derives from Bruno Latour. See We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 143–5. 5 Touchstone works include James Lovelock, Gaia:  A New Look at Life on Earth (2nd repr. ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Slanted Truths:  Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution (New York: Copernicus, 1997). 6 Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarity, trans. Andrew Goffey (n.p.: Open Humanities Press, 2015). 7 See Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter:  A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 8 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 9 “The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize Winners,” Improbable Research, accessed January 8, 2017, www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2016. 10 Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 4, 48 (1974): 435–50. 11 Ibid., 438.

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12 Ibid., 445n11. 13 Thomas Thwaites, GoatMan:  How I  Took a Holiday from Being Human (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). 14 Charles Foster, Becoming a Beast:  Adventures Across the Species Divide (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016). 15 Ibid., 149. 16 Ibid., 101. 17 Ibid., 15. 18 Ibid., 11. 19 Ibid., 77. 20 Ibid., 216. 21 Ibid., 216 (author’s italics). 22 Ibid., 22. 23 Nagel, “What It’s Like to Be a Bat,” 439. 24 Ibid., 449. 25 Foster, Becoming a Beast, 1. 26 Ibid., 12–13. 27 J. A. Baker, The Peregrine, intro. Robert Macfarlane (1967; New York: New York Review Books, 2005). Subsequent references are to this edition. 28 Thwaites, GoatMan, 159. 29 Ibid., 15. 30 Ibid., 176. 31 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 50, 108, 127. 32 Thwaites, GoatMan, 143–144. 33 For parallels, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10:3 (2004): 463–84; and Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 4, “Transspecies Pidgins,” 131–52. 34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 304–7. 35 Ibid., 238. 36 In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the peregrine is the “Anomal”:  A Thousand Plateaus, 243–7. 37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 255. 38 Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things:  Ruskin and the Ecology of Design (Rotterdam: V2/NAi, 2011), 148. 39 David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 258. 40 Ibid., 216 41 Ibid., 222. 42 That there is a continuum of language stretching across the spectrum of animality is a central argmument of Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach us About Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 43 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NJ: Dover, 1998).

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44 Nietzsche’s animal becomings occur between the optimal and pessimal limits of the eagle and the snake. But in the becoming more-than-human of Zarathustra, the predator–prey relation is overcome:  “An eagle cut broad circles through the air, and upon it hung a snake, not as prey but as a friend.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. The passage to the “overman” is marked by the lion becoming a child, predation turned to play (15, 17, 48–9). 45 Deleuze suggests the way of fabulation. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations. 1972– 1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1995), 125–6, 174; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 150–4, 222–4, 279 (“fabulation” is badly translated as “story-telling” in this book).

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Animation and Animism Thomas Lamarre

Many early discussions of animation in the 1930s tended to characterize it in terms of animism, stressing how animation made for an experience of multiple kinds of beings endowed with an animating agency or soul, and for a worldview without dualist oppositions between the animate and inanimate. Due to the subsequent decline of interest in animation theory as well as the desire of anthropology to distance itself from the imperialist primitivism associated with animism, that tentative dialogue soon ended. The resurgence of animism studies and animation studies in the 1990s, however, paves the way for another kind of dialogue, one attentive both to the colonial legacy of animism and to the potential of animism and animation to offer other forms of knowledge and ways of being in the world.

The Method of Animism In his notes on Disney’s cartoons, Sergei Eisenstein connects animation with animism:  “The very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism.”1 Like so many of his contemporaries, Eisenstein became interested in animation at a time when cartoons were undergoing a radical transformation, from being short attractions shown before or between feature films, to becoming feature-length narrative films. The cartoons of the 1930s were poised between narrative cinema and the cinema of attractions.2 Eisenstein’s interest in animism in the context of cartoons follows from his interest in attractions, which he considered to be powerful sensory stimuli operating independently of narrative to shock spectators, evoking strong emotions or sparking new concepts, which triggered an experience of ecstasy.3 To describe the experience of Disney cartoons, he writes, “Ecstasy is a sensing and experiencing of the primal ‘omnipotence’ – the element of ‘coming into being’ – the ‘plasmaticness’ of existence from which everything can arise.”4 Such was the context for Eisenstein’s inquiry into animation’s “method of animism.” 284

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Although Eisenstein does not explicitly define animism, his discussion adopts a familiar stance: animism implies a worldview in which nonhuman beings, running the gamut from nonhuman animals to plants and trees, to fire and water, possess an animating agency, which might also be construed as a soul, for it does not differ essentially from the animating agency of humans.5 In one influential anthropological formulation of animism, A.  Irving Hallowell found that, among indigenous peoples, “Animals are believed to have essentially the same sort of animating agency which man possesses.”6 We might also make a distinction “between the animation of living things such as trees … and that of non-living things such as stones or machines (that is, fetishism).”7 But in the animic worldview Eisenstein finds at work in Disney cartoons, nonhuman beings are persons, and this may apply not only to animals but also to plants, trees, waters, brooms, teapots, and other entities. As for the actual cartoon method of animism, Eisenstein locates it in techniques for drawing lines that allow for “plasmaticness” or “plasmaticity,” that is, a protoplasm-like plasticity that allows cartoon figures to undergo continual transformation.8 Due to his interest in an ecstatic experience of “participation in the laws governing the course of natural phenomena,”9 Eisenstein tends to focus attention on the deformative moment of plasticity. Consequently, even though his account assumes that the cartoon entity – fire, water, animal, or tree – somehow remains itself through transformation,10 he speaks only of the stretching of the contour line, neglecting to mention its resilience, its tendency to return to its prior shape. Nonetheless, his account implicitly depends on contour lines imparting a kind of virtual unity to cartoon characters. Although his account consists of notes and sketches that are not fully developed, his basic idea is insightful, and so I would like to expand on it. Under conditions of elastic transformation, as contour lines stretch and rebound, the movement of cartoon characters comes to feel causa sui. Which is to say, the plasmaticity of the line in animation is not experienced as an external limit on movement but as an internal limit or potentiality, which makes the cartoon entity seem to move of its own accord, as if it possessed some inner principle, an animating agency.11 Arguably, character design gives a good deal of unity to the cartoon figure; it might be deemed responsible for imparting unity and even identity to the cartoon character. What is striking about Eisenstein’s account, however, is that it shows little interest in character design or identity. His account focuses, almost by default, on unity-yet-to-come, or virtual unity. This leads Eisenstein to see in animation a method of animism: animation is generating person-like beings, imparting an animating agency to all manner of entities.

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In sum, for Eisenstein, plasmatic techniques of the line conspire to generate the sense of an internal limit within animated entities  – an inner essence or intelligence, an animating agency or soul that is continuously in the making. This is how the idea of animation becomes a direct embodiment of the method of animism: line-work turns animated objects into persons. Insightful and generative as it is, his account is but the beginning for an inquiry into animation and animism. A series of challenging questions arises, about animist practices and animation techniques, about life and death, and about relations between humans, animals, and other persons.

New Animism In recent years, scholars and writers who propose to take animistic practices seriously have introduced the rubric “new animism” to distinguish their project from the “old” anthropology that portrayed animism, especially that of indigenous and aboriginal peoples, in terms of irrationality, emotionality, and superstitious beliefs. In contrast to the old anthropology, the new animism looks at animistic practices in terms of their reasonableness and effectiveness, and even as akin to scientific rationality. Animism provides a way of knowing and relating to the earth, one whose time has arrived. As Chicksaw poet, novelist, essayist, and scholar Linda Hogan puts it, “ours will no longer be a ‘primitive’ way of looking at the world. The new animism, the notion that all earth is living, and that it is perhaps even a singular organism, now even matters to world economies … Animism, where every particle in the universe is alive, is implicit in all our work for future survival.”12 The new animism, then, is not deemed incompatible with contemporary sciences. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Professor of Environmental Biology and Member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, makes recovering indigenous lineages of knowledge integral to her work with tribal nations on environmental sustainability. She describes her approach in these terms: Scientists are very eager to say that we oughtn’t to personify elements in nature for fear of anthropomorphizing. And what I mean when I talk about the personhood of all beings, plants included, is not that I am attributing human characteristics to them, not at all. I’m attributing plant characteristics to plants. Just as it would be disrespectful to try and put plants in the same category through the lens of anthropomorphism, I think it’s also deeply disrespectful to say that they have no consciousness, no awareness, no beingness at all. And this denial of personhood to all other beings is increasingly being refuted by science itself.13

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The study of animism reemerged from relative obscurity in the 1990s, decades after anthropology had distanced itself from it, and for good reasons. During the second half of the nineteenth century, as the new discipline of anthropology established itself in some universities in Europe and North America, animism became a key term, primarily due to Edward Burnett Tylor’s 1871 work, Primitive Culture. Signe Howell provides a nice summary of Tylor’s approach: Drawing on second-hand accounts of primitive peoples, most of which made little attempt to present the beliefs and practices from the natives’ point of view, Tylor (1871) argued that many of these attributed a spiritual aspect – or soul – to the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds as well as to thunder and celestial bodies, and that this form of primitive religion might be best thought of as the origin of religious thought in general. Like his contemporaries, Tylor characterized the mental faculties of primitives to be like those of the contemporary child.14

Tylor’s work relied on a paradigm of cognitive and social evolution in which scientific knowledge disproved and displaced animism,15 and because “anthropologists were at great pains to distance themselves from any notions of primitive or childlike, or indeed, mistaken or faulty knowledge, [they] distanced themselves from the concept of ‘animism’ altogether.”16 In the course of the 1990s, however, animism reemerged as a key concept in the anthropology of religion, due to new ontological theories of animism grounded in studies of the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s 1992 monograph on the Araweté and Philippe Descola’s 1996 book on the Achuar.17 At the same time, Nurit BirdDavid’s fieldwork on the indigenous community of Nayaka in Southern India spurred her to work through and repurpose the old anthropology of scholars like Tylor and Hallowell, which culminated in her theory of animism as “relational epistemology” published in 1999.18 As such, the new animism should not be construed in terms of a rupture or definitive break with the old animism, even though it is by no means smoothly continuous with it. As Hogan insists, it is the legacy of critique of and resistance to forms of imperialism that serves as the crucible for the new animism. Even while expressing her gratitude toward the new animism, she highlights the sociohistorical conditions for its emergence: “What once victimized us is now a special area of religious studies.”19 The new animism is intended as an anti-imperial form of knowledge and practice. Eisenstein’s discussion may prove more difficult to repurpose for the new animism than Tylor’s, for Eisenstein not only adopts the social evolutionary stance characteristic of Tylor’s Primitive Culture but also

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tends to romanticize animism. Where Tylor positions both animism and science as materialist accounts of the external world (even if science inevitably trumps animism), Eisenstein situates animism on the side of irrational outbursts, primitive emotionality, and a childlike view of the world.20 Animism for him thus stands in opposition to reason, knowledge, science, and materialist accounts of world. His romantic, even theistic take on animism meshes with his dialectical stance: he finds in Disney cartoons something that contradicts the mechanization of daily life exemplified in the assembly line of the American factory. Eisenstein continually pits the plasmaticity of cartoons against the “formal logic of standardization.”21 Consequently, even though it has an effective method, animism in Eisenstein’s account does not lend itself to rationality, knowledge, or reason. He positions it as an attraction, as something that ruptures the habits and expectations of viewers. Disney’s cartoons literally afford a break for American workers, a semblance of respite from their mechanized daily life. Cartoons provide mechanized laborers with a therapeutic shock that temporarily alleviates their condition with joy and laughter. In its social dimension then, Eisenstein’s account of cartoons is on terrain similar to Theodor Adorno’s. Miriam Hansen has shown how, for Adorno, the holistic and organic devices associated with Disney cartoons (fluid movement, syncopated music), like those of cinema and mass culture in general, do not truly counter the mechanization of daily life, but tend to conflate mechanization with feelings of relief from it, confounding enslavement with freedom, mass control with mass enlightenment.22 Although Eisenstein, unlike Adorno, seems to envision genuine relief from mechanization in animation’s animism, both Eisenstein and Adorno assume a series of dualist oppositions that the new animism has called into question and rejected, particularly in light of Bruno Latour’s account of nonhuman actors:23 organism versus mechanism, nature versus culture, sensation versus logic, and magic versus science, to name a few salient terms. Such oppositions led the study of animation to an impasse like the one that occurred in the study of animism. The rise of the Freudian turn in film theory, incipient in the Ideologie Kritik of Adorno and the Frankfurt School but reinforced with Lacanian models in the 1970s, introduced a persuasive resolution to the above binaries by grounding film and cultural analysis in the “weird substance” of human desire (to adopt Žižek’s phrase).24 This model exacted a price:  because everything was now seen to be culture and language all the way down, nonhuman actors were stripped of force and reality.25 They were at best

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fetishes in the most limited Freudian way: sites of repetition-compulsion. The psychoanalytic approach shied away from animation, while the study of animation gravitated toward the least controversial concerns – studio histories and auteurs. It would have been the height of naiveté to speak, as Eisenstein did, of an animating agency with any degree of autonomy from human desire: that is, not grounded in constitutive lack. Equally naïve to speak of life when everything in film analysis was so resolutely predicated on the pleasure principle and the death drive, and all the more naïve to address the vitalist realism of animation, as Imamura Taihei did in the 1930s:26 anything that smacked of life was deemed entirely ideological and thus without philosophical purchase. Theorization of animation returned to the fore concurrently with the new turn in animism, in the 1990s. Its resurgence followed from the impact of digital technologies that made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between cinema and animation. At the same time, animation became a pervasive force in diverse forms online, and non-American forms of animation, especially from Japan, enjoyed a new surge of global popularity, making tangible a neglected history of global and transnational networks of animation production, circulation, and reception. Cinema was renamed “live action cinema” in a last-ditch effort to preserve a domain distinct from animation, yet as Lev Manovich declared in the late 1990s, cinema seemed to be a subset of animation. Much as it became possible by the end of the 1990s to think again through animism, it became possible to think again through animation. The study of animation began to adopt more philosophical and anthropological perspectives on the moving image. On one hand, it no longer focused so much on the classification of types by form, materials, or genre (e.g., cel animation, stop-motion animation, claymation, etc.). The advent of digital technologies made it possible to envision animation as a technical mode of existence, which inspired new, ontologically oriented accounts of cinematic movement.27 On the other hand, animated worlds produced new, non-expert, non-credentialed practices and forms of knowledge. Not surprisingly then, the new study of animation draws on many of the same sources as the new animism, and similar debates about ontology versus epistemology have emerged, if less explicitly.28 Needless to say, the animisms of animation and of indigenous peoples are not one and the same. Yet, rather than confining them in advance to incommensurable realities – of industrialized artifacts versus natural beings – we need to reconsider how they meet and how they differ. Another dialogue is possible.29

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The Animic Mode of Personation One of the charges brought against animism, particularly in its ontological form, is that of “mere” anthropomorphism. Responding to Descola’s four modes of identification (animism, totemism, analogism, naturalism), for instance, Marshall Sahlins characterizes them as “forms of a more generic anthropomorphism: a disposition for personification which … is also our own default way of talking about institutions, nations, ships, and many other things.”30 Sahlins does not intend to discredit animism, and yet, as soon as animism is characterized as anthropomorphism, one of the central claims (and goals) of the new animism – that animism entails neither anthropocentrism nor human exceptionalism – is undermined. This is a risk whenever “person” and “human” become conflated: animism may slide into anthropomorphism, and anthropomorphism into anthropocentrism. A similar problem arises in accounts of animation. Take the cartoon characters of Eisenstein’s era, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Felix the Cat, Norakuro the Stray Dog, and Sun Wukong the Monkey King: these animated beings sport apparently human arms and legs, even hands and feet, and adopt human modes of locomotion and action and even human trades (walking, dancing, driving cars, flying planes, playing music, working in factories, etc.).31 They bear human facial features, too, displaying human forms of expression. Such cartoon beings might well be characterized as anthropomorphic and maybe even anthropocentric. In fact, in his critique of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (frequently evoked for its resonance with the new animism), Christian Thorne locates Bennett in a cartoon universe, a recklessly anthropomorphize[d] cosmos … where that entirely humanist device, which everywhere it looks sees only persons, tips over into its opposite, as humanity begins divesting itself of its specialness, giving away its privileges and distinguishing features one by one, and so produces a cosmos full of more or less human things, active, volatile, underway  – a universe enlivened and maybe even cartoonish, precisely animated, staffed by singing toasters and jitterbugging garden shears.32

For Thorne, anthropomorphism flips politics to the inverse side of humanism, where animism arises, a worldview in which everything is equally animated, ontologically equal. Thorne legitimately asks: if all that exists is an expression of becoming, and consequently, equally animated and important, is there anything left for politics to do? Does this stance make any demands on us, or require us to do anything? The new animism offers a direct reply. In Hogan’s opinion,

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it “requires an act of attention, an acknowledgement that all are sentient beings and of the smallness of our own being in this world of the living, ongoing, life force.”33 Similarly, Danny Naveh and Nurit Bird-David see in animism a shift in how we perceive things: “what may appear as a ‘thing’ to a mind infused with ‘typificatory schemes’ and non-immediate considerations may appear as a ‘person’ more than a ‘thing’ to a mind available to perceive it in its outmost vividness.”34 As such stances attest, the new animism does not produce a cosmos full of more or less human things, as in Thorne’s description, but proposes a mode of address to nonhuman others as persons. As Morrison puts it, the animic mode organizes “indigenous life … around the existence of persons, human and otherwise, rather than around materiality.”35 In sum, animism requires a distinction between human and person. Likewise, the animic mode implies a distinction between anthropomorphism and what I  will call personation  – the generation of persons (ontology, or more precisely, ontogenesis) as well as careful attention to personness (relational epistemology). The animic mode thus invites another kind of engagement with animation – in terms of personation in contrast to anthropomorphism. But what would it mean to address cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Pikachu and Doraemon, as persons instead of psychological projections of anthropomorphic desire? On one hand, the legal apparatus of copyright attached to cartoon characters, notoriously Mickey Mouse, tends to treat them less as persons than as legal constructs, much like corporations. The cartoon being, then, may be readily transformed into a corporate entity, a legally incorporated individual. On the other hand, fans tend to treat the same cartoon beings as persons, as beings autonomous of corporate ownership, often claiming in effect to have a relation to the character that goes beyond legal ownership – an affective form of possession that outstrips copyright. French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno directly engaged with this problem, purchasing a character from the catalogue of Kworks, a Japanese agency that develops manga figures for animated films, comic strips, advertising, and video games.36 They named her Annlee (also known as AnnLee, or Ann Lee). After allowing a series of artists to make videos featuring her, they put an end to her exploitation, legally transferring Annlee’s copyright to a foundation that belongs solely to her.37 Their gesture may appear at one level to constitute nothing but a slightly self-serving perversion of the logic of the legal individual, which remains indebted to the logic of the human, and yet at another level it beautifully evokes the sense of an

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animated character as a nonhuman person. Their twisting of the legal individual thus confirms another crucial pair of distinctions for thinking animation in the animic mode: a person is more than an individual, and thus personation is more than personalization or individualization.38 To counter the holistic and legalistic definition of the individual as that which cannot be divided, anthropological accounts of the new animism have tended toward the conceptual framework of dividuation, repurposed from Gilles Deleuze, to stress how self and others emerge together. This notion of dividuation agrees with the conceptual framework of individuation, inspired by the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, which similarly dethrones the individual by focusing on the processes of individuation through which individuals emerge. Personation, then, is a specific mode of dividuation: dividuation that addresses the genesis of persons (human and nonhuman) in the specific context of the animism of animation as well as the relatedness arising with them. How Then Does Animation Generate Persons? Eisenstein’s account shows how easy it can be. When a contour line is plasmatic, an experience of animism arises. Eisenstein does not fully explain how this effect works, but despite his tendency to emphasize irrational explosion, his basic intuition is sound: when a contour line stretches and rebounds, it gives a feeling of an inside that is not coterminous with the contour line, with the boundary. In fact, it is not the stretching but the rebounding of the line that produces the animic effect. This rebounding is an instance of what Deleuze calls “stopping on movement,” which is how moving images for Deleuze begin to think and feel.39 Cinema becomes encephalized. Put another way, it is not the fact of movement alone that generates the sense of something thinking or feeling within animation: there must be moments and sites of “deanimation” or “inanimation” within animation. It is when the contour line rebounds that it feels like there is an inner something acting on it, like an intelligence or sentience, an animating agency, stopping on its movement, allowing it to feel its way.40 This inside cannot, however, be localized inside the boundary of the contour line around the cartoon character. It is, to use Foucault’s turn of phrase, an inside of the outside. Should one call it interiority? In his account of modes of identification, Descola replaces the terms body and mind with physicality and interiority, to distance himself from the Cartesian biases the former terms conjure forth. He characterizes the

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animic mode as a mode of identification based on acknowledging different physicalities, all with the same interiority. I gloss it as “diverse bodies, collective mind.” The result is perspectivism, an ability to adopt the different perspectives implied by different bodies through the common fact of mind. Mind, of course, is not confined within bodies; it is in the world, an outside on the inside. Mind emerges not only in a physicality but also in its world. This is precisely what the plasmatic contour performs:  the emergence of a non-localizable inside, or a kind of superject. This is how animation generates an incipient person. How Then Does Relatedness Arise? Another early film theorist, Jean Epstein, saw this sort of animic effect at work in moving images in general, characterizing cinema as “polytheistic and theogonic” in its manner of “summoning objects out of the shadows of indifference into the light of dramatic concern.”41 He adds, “If we wish to understand how an animal, a plant, or a stone can inspire respect, fear, or horror, those three most sacred sentiments, I  think we must watch them on the screen.”42 Epstein speaks to the process of personation in remarking that cinema confers life to things and beings in the guise of personality: “Personality goes beyond intelligence. Personality is the spirit visible in things and people, their heredity made evident, their past become unforgettable, their future already present.”43 While Epstein, like Eisenstein, frequently adopts a theistic stance on animism, his intuition about cinematic movement adds something to this account of animation procedures: dramatic concern. Looking at animation through the perspective of animism reveals at least three simultaneous moments of composition. First, the stretching and rebounding line generates the sense of an animating agency not simply inside the animated entity – a partial mind as it were. This plane might be seen as a first connective synthesis or determination.44 Second, dramatic concern introduces personation, making connections across disparate moments and sites in order to prolong “personality” as something that is both a person and an overall tonality – a care for an animated being. This might be considered an inclusive, disjunctive synthesis or determination, whereby a perspective may become an affective world. It jibes with the animic mode defined by Descola as “one mind, multiple bodies” or “one world, many natures.” The new animism of Bird-David and others, with its emphasis on relational epistemology, introduces a third, conjunctive synthesis, provided one construes these three planes ontogenetically not

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temporally: temporally speaking, the first may to be said to happen through the third or second, for instance.45

The Empire of Corpses In the opening scene of the animated film The Empire of Corpses (Shisha no teikoku, 2015), a young doctor John Watson brings his dead friend back to life. In this alternative version of the late nineteenth century, corpses are regularly reanimated through the injection of “necroware” in the base of the neck. Apparently, a prior method existed: Victor Frankenstein succeeded in reanimating a corpse capable of feeling, thinking, and speaking, a corpse with a soul. The Frankenstein method was lost, however. With necroware, corpses remain soulless, unable to speak, feel, or think. Watson has great ambitions: he wishes to find Frankenstein’s lost method to help his friend regain his soul. In the meantime, however, he invents an illegal version of necroware to reanimate his friend:  that is, a soulless, non-speaking, non-thinking version of him. In keeping with the motley crew of actual and fictional figures who populate Empire of Corpses  – such as Thomas Edison, Ulysses Grant, Hadaly Lilith, and Alexei Karamazov – Dr. Watson renames his friend Friday. The film adapts a novel completed by the renowned Japanese science fiction writer Ejō Tō (also Enjoh Toh) based on an outline by the equally renowned Itō Keikaku (also known as Project Itoh). Unlike the novel, the animated version garnered neither critical nor popular acclaim, perhaps because it relies heavily on stylistic and narrative conventions associated with manga and anime, departing from the book without clearly developing its own perspective. In this context, however, The Empire of Corpses is good to think with, for it extends the prior account of animic techniques of animation while introducing thorny questions about death and empire. The opening scene of reanimation stages a key paradox of animation. There are two human beings, largely indistinguishable in terms of physical appearance, yet one is supposed to be living, while the other is dead. The scene aims to convey a distinction between life and death, yet, since this is animation, the distinction doesn’t readily take hold. Everything in animation is strictly speaking inanimate, yet everything feels full of life. Thus animation is frequently characterized in terms of deathlessness or pure life. But the animated situation is more complicated than that, dispensing with a  binary opposition  between life and death. Both Watson and Friday are, in fact, animated beings: depending on one’s viewpoint, they may be considered alive, or dead, or both at once, or something else

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altogether. In The Empire of Corpses, instead of life in opposition to death, the dramatic or “monstrable” distinction, then, is between animated being and reanimated being. Animation generates a relation prior to life and death, which implies a virtual animic unity in the making. The same might be said of literary characters, film actors, or even historical figures, as the play on character names in The Empire of Corpses underscores:  they are neither dead nor alive; they are animated or reanimated. Animation as such is not limited to animated films. Due to the ontological priority of movement, however, the animation associated with moving images comes at this problematic of person in a specific way, through movement and relations to movement. Stopping on movement is a folding, the fold of a fold, a brain folding into a body. It is like ectoderm spreading across the surface of the embryo to form skin while gravitating inward to form the spinal cord and brain, to call on Deleuze’s embryogenesis of cinema. Stopping on movement thus introduces a relation between two movements, of brain and of body. In The Empire of Corpses, for instance, the animated (Watson) and reanimated (Friday) are rendered as two kinds of movement, already in relation. For an animated being, Watson’s bodily movement is limited. Although digitally rendered, The Empire of Corpses adopts techniques of limited animation characteristic of Japanese television animation or anime. Thus Watson’s manner of locomotion is consonant with generic conventions. It is unremarkable. Watson is also the center of action and knowledge. As a military doctor, he is somewhere between the man of action and the man of reason, with action and reason oriented toward a goal – imbuing Friday with a soul. He drags Friday throughout the colonial empire, through adventure after adventure in his search for the Frankenstein method. In contrast, Friday’s movements are remarkable, like those of reanimated corpses in general. Friday wobbles as he moves, weaving and reeling, unsteady on his feet, as if exhausted or stupefied. He seems barely capable of wielding the pen Watson bestows on him. All reanimated corpses show a similar lack of sensory-motor coordination. Even when they sit at a desk, a wobble courses through their bodies, their head bobbing as if too heavy for their neck to support. They move like oversized infants or drunkards, as if ill or wounded or disabled. Yet they also appear almost weightless, as if the lack of a soul made their bodies lighter. Such movement recalls the undead now so familiar from zombie movies. Without making a categorical distinction between cinema and animation (computer-generated imagery [CGI] makes this impossible),

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I would point out that The Empire of Corpses begins from the inverse side of live-action zombies. Live-action zombies are living humans in ghoulish makeup acting dead, either dragging themselves along as if their bodies were too heavy to move properly, or moving askew as if certain parts of their body were immobile or missing. Life takes on the qualities of death, a gruesome display in which death appears to be in surplus. By contrast, in animation, even when living beings are rotoscoped or motion-captured, the situation is inverted:  inanimate beings (configurations of line and color) take on life-like qualities. Life is in surplus. Moreover, in The Empire of Corpses parts of the body appear to move autonomously of the other parts: hence the sense of sensory-motor helplessness. The head, for instance, wobbles independently of the shoulder, which moves independently of the slack arm, as if each part had its animating agency. This recalls the choreography of Bob Fosse (and sometimes Michael Jackson): knees, hips, ankles, elbows, and neck seem to move autonomously, making for a dancer poised between abject meat puppet and a body teeming with multitudes. Primarily due to animation techniques that induce a sense of surplus life, The Empire of Corpses digs even deeper into this non-dualist take on movement. This animation sweeps both life and death into it. This surplus of life in reanimated bodies explains their subjection to imperialist exploitation. As Watson journeys across the Eurasian continent, every city and port teems with reanimated corpses pressed into mindless, routinized labor; from secretary to stevedore, from service work to factory labor, corpses constitute a vast pool of unskilled labor. The Indian Army consists of platoons of undead foot soldiers. The imperial powers are clearly rooted in the exploitation of beings who have absolutely no stake or interest in empire – empire literally does not enter their mind. As the reanimated stagger and wobble, their mobilization feels physically implausible and thus all the more wrong morally. For these corpses with their sensory-motor helplessness appear so vulnerable, even childlike. What is exploited, then, is animating agency itself. The Empire of Corpses offers such a literal vision of imperial technologies of biopolitical exploitation that it feels unreal: empire uses necroware to deskill bodies to mobilize and exploit them in larger numbers. Such reanimation conforms to what Marx calls formal freedom: you’re free to sell your labor, body and soul. Stopping on movement in The Empire of Corpses differs from Eisenstein’s elastic rebounding lines. Here the “inanimation” occurs between the bodily components of the reanimated corpse. The usual kind of coordination, that of Watson, has become disorganized. Stopping occurs on

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the overall coordinated movement of the ordinary animated body. But the reanimated body doesn’t fall to pieces; it revives, implying a strange new manner of coordination. As with the plastic line, this reanimated or re-assembled body renews our impression of an animating force that is not inside the body but working through it – an inside that is the fold of an outside. The resulting sensory-motor helplessness also disrupts goal-oriented, causal action. Reanimated beings display a delay between stimulus and response, action and reaction. While the corpses respond to orders, something happens between command and its execution. This interval between action and reaction, stimulation and response, is what Bergson called affect. This temporal lag thus gives the impression that, contrary to everything the film tells us, the corpses are in fact feeling and thinking. They address us affectively; we watch them closely, wait, try to get a feel of their behavior, and their eyes take on a hypnotic feel as we try to gauge what is happening in depth, but that depth is not localized in them. Indeed, almost independently of the plot, we tend to become fixated on Friday, entranced by his behavior, scrutinizing every sound and gesture for evidence of speech, emotion, or soul. This is how reanimated corpses become personalities in The Empire of Corpses. While Watson is at the center of a narrative based on action and reason, Friday is the focus of dramatic concern, the affective lure, to the point of unbearable suspense. In this way, as bits and pieces become both dividuated and loosely coordinated (individuated) through animation and dramatization, the animated being takes on a sense of personness, displaying its more-than-physical nature. This is also where the relation between body and mind comes into play, clarifying the stakes of animism. Initially, Watson and Friday appear to offer an instance of what Descola describes as totemism (same physicality, different interiority): Friday has a body like Watson’s yet lacks interiority. But then, considering his odd bodily movement, it might seem that Friday has a different kind of mind and a different kind of body, which is how Descola describes naturalism, which characterizes modern scientific regimes. Then again, because it is hard to say whether bodily movement belongs to the body or to the mind, it is equally plausible to characterize Friday in terms of animism: different body (bodily movement), same mind (affective-emotive mind). In other words, due to the ontological priority of movement, animation techniques generate animated beings that appear poised at the crossroads of animism, totemism, naturalism, and arguably Descola’s fourth mode as well, analogism.46 Which way will they go? What will become of them?

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Because I  think it the genius of animation to bring its beings to this crossroads of becoming, I  am as happy with the question as with any answer. Nonetheless, I gravitated toward The Empire of Corpses because it does provide the semblance of an answer in the end, when Watson, having failed in his quest to acquire Frankenstein’s method, decides to become like Friday. He gradually detects or imagines signs of a soul in Friday, or maybe he comes to realize that his goal was simply to be with his beloved Friday. Watson jabs the necroware into his neck, dying into a new life, joining the reanimated corpses. The answer, then, is animism. The passage through the animic mode of personation arrives at the threshold where the modern empire of corpses can be rejected for a composite world of many natures.

Notes 1 Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Layda (London:  Methuen, 1988), 44. 2 See Tom Gunning’s discussion, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment:  Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 3, ed. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Shepherdson (London: Routledge, 2004), 78–95. 3 See David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1993), 52; 193–5. 4 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 46. 5 In The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Suzanne Buchan makes a similar point (30). 6 A. Irving Hallowell, “Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere,” American Anthropologist 28, no. 1 (1926): 8. 7 Alf Hornborg, “Submitting to Objects: Animism, Fetishism, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 250. 8 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 83–4. 9 Sergei Eisenstein, “Pathos” (1947), 168–9; cited in Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, 195. 10 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 41–44. 11 See Thomas Lamarre, “Manga Bomb: Between the Lines of Barefoot Gen,” in Comics Worlds & the World of Comics, ed. Jacqueline Berndt (Kyoto: Kyoto Seika University, 2010), 245–85. 12 Linda Hogan, “We Call It Tradition,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 22. 13 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Intelligence in All Kinds of Life, podcast audio, On Being with Krista Tippett, February 25, 2016, accessed January 11, 2017, www. onbeing.org/program/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-in-all-kinds-oflife/8446.

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14 Signe Howell, “Metamorphosis and Identity: Chewong Animistic Ontology,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 103. 15 See Robert A. Segal, “Animism for Tylor,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 53–62. 16 Howell, “Metamorphosis and Identity,” 103–4. 17 Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Philippe Descola, In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 18 Nurit Bird-David, “ ‘Animism’ Revisited:  Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40, Suppl. 1 (1999): S67–91. 19 Hogan, “We Call It Tradition,” 21. 20 Kenneth M.  Morrison, “Animism and a Proposal for a Post-Cartesian Anthropology,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 40–3. 21 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 35; 42. 22 Miriam Hansen, “Of Mice and Ducks:  Benjamin and Adorno on Disney,” South Atlantic Quarterly 92, no. 1 (1993): 27–61. 23 Bruno Latour addresses nonhuman actors across numerous publications; see especially We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 24 Slavoj Žižek, “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,” New Left Review 183, no. 1 (1990): 50–62. 25 Critiques of this hylemorphic stance emerged in feminist new materialisms; see, e.g., Vicki Kirby, Judith Butler:  Live Theory (London:  A&C Black, 2006). 26 See the translation of Imamura Taihei’s 1938 essay, “Japanese Cartoon Films,” in Mechademia 9: Origins (2014), 107–24. 27 Among many possible examples, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2009); Eric Jenkins, Special Affects: Cinema, Animation and the Translation of Consumer Culture (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2014); and essays in the recent collection Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 28 See, e.g., Birgit Meyer, “How to Capture the ‘Wow’: R. R. Marett’s Notion of Awe and the Study of Religion,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 1 (2015): 7–26. 29 In recent years, discussions of life and animation have boomed, many of them broaching the question of animism. Among possible examples see: Suzanne Buchan, ed., Pervasive Animation: An AFI Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2013); Anselm Franke, ed. Animism (Berlin:  Sternberg, 2010); and Sigrid Leyssen and Pirkko Rathgeber, ed. Bilder animierter Bewegung/Images of

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Animate Movement (Paderhorn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013); as well as Paul Wells’ monograph, The Animated Bestiary:  Animals, Cartoons, and Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008). Marshall Sahlins, “On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (2014): 282. The point of reference is Japanese animated films based the Norakuro manga that appeared in the late 1930s, and the 1941 Chinese animated film Tieshan gongzhu aka Princess Iron Fan, directed by the Wan Brothers. Christian Thorne, “To the Political Ontologists,” in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 105–6. Hogan, “We Call It Tradition,” 23. Naveh and Bird-David, “Animism, Conservation and Immediacy,” 37 Morrison, “Animism and a Proposal for a Post-Cartesian Anthropology,” 39. Marcia Tanner, “No Ghost, Just a Shell,” Stretcher, February 10, 2003, accessed January 5, 2017, www.stretcher.org/features/no_ghost_just_a_shell/. Ibid. As fans’ passionate relation to animated beings attests, personation evokes a relatedness that works both ways:  the fan both possesses and is possessed by the animated person. While such a relationship may not preclude forms of personalization and life-style fashioning, the underlying relatedness is not reducible to psychological projection insofar as it is a world and a collective that possesses the fan through personation. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1:  Movement-Image (Minneapolis:  Minnesota University Press, 1986). For a complementary account, see Tim Ingold in “Being Alive to a World without Objects,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 213–25. Ingold characterizes life as what leaks from meshwork, associating leak with Deleuze and Guattari’s ligne de fuite; the case of animation suggests there would be no flight or escape without the non-localized inside of the outside, or superject. Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 317. Ibid. Ibid. The three syntheses are adapted from Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Charles Saunders Peirce, “The Law of Mind,” in The Essential Peirce Volume 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 312–33. Descola introduces the first three modes in In the Society of Nature, adding analogism later. See Sahlin’s review cited above, and Philippe Descola, “Beyond Nature and Culture,” in The Handbook of Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Routledge, 2014), 77–91.

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Becoming Mammoth The Domestic Animal, Its Synthetic Dreams, and the Pursuit of Multispecies F(r)ictions David Jaclin Animals are no longer the signifying system that props up humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations. Nor are they the keepers of the gates between species. They have, rather, started to be approached literally, as entities framed by code systems of their own. (…) The animal can no longer be metaphorized as other but needs to be taken on its own terms. – Rosi Braidotti1 Liveliness is a way of telling stories that refuses to make clean distinctions between organisms and machines, or between vitalism and mechanism. Lively narratives reach toward a world in which thrive barely recognizable forms of life. Liveliness is a relational concept. It hinges on an intra-active conception of agency or agencement. (…) It is in the kinaesthetic and affective entanglements of inquiry that modelers, models, and molecules intra-animate. – Natasha Myers2 It never would have occurred to the pioneers of cinema to dissociate research on film from research by means of film. – Jean Painlevé3

Finding a Telltale Streak of Life in the Grey Gravel of a River Bed Klondike. Near Dawson City, Canada’s Yukon Territory. During the short mining season (end of May through October), borrowing techniques from the eighteenth-century California gold rush, employees of an international digging conglomerate wield large hoses of pressurized water (also called monitors) to blast and wash away layers of agglomerated soil. Collected from snow melt and temporarily stored into big artificial ponds, murky water helps these “placer” miners access the gravel underneath the permafrost and expose its alluvial deposits, in which gold is expected to be found. In fact, since their discovery in 1897, the Klondike gold fields have produced approximately 20 million ounces of gold, or around 566 tons. As 301

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a point of reference, on January 2, 2017, 1 ounce of gold was trading at US $1,151.89 on the financial markets. Yet no significant underground mine has been developed, and none of the estimated 100,000 prospectors who attempted the perilous migration to the remote region between 1896 and 1899 – nor any companies operating there since – have located the source of such great fortune. More than a century after the Klondike Gold Rush,4 ore prospectors are still searching. In a post-industrial version of the alchemical dream, they search the mud for telltale streaks of shining yellow while reshaping, within their own abilities and limitations, some of North America’s most iconic landscapes. If climate change affects the temperature of most northern territories across the globe, engaging those territories in fast-changing melting processes, so do miners and monitors. By rerouting an antediluvian flow of subpolar water and projecting it with great force onto the friable hills of the landscape, contemporary mining activities are speeding up processes of both decomposition (of organic matter, of sedimentation, of forest, and arctic ecosystems growth) and recomposition (of material capital, of circulation, of market value, and resources growth). In doing so, mining activities also wash away plant and animal matter that has been decaying underground for hundreds of thousands of years, in the process releasing bones into the artificial streams generated by monitors. In this washed-out dirt, remains of Ice Age animals are now resurfacing, offering up fossils of horses (Equus lambei), bisons (Bison priscus), and mammoth skulls and tusks (Mammuthus primigenius) to a handful of paleoanthropologists, who value these fossils as another kind of gold. They too are hunting, but for prized, though seriously deteriorated, organic material. Within this prehistoric magma where frost has, for many centuries, been slowing down the deteriorating process of dead flesh, adventurous scientists now chase nuggets of ancient DNA. Among monitors, miners, and mosquitoes, they look for highly regarded traces of past lives potentially stored in this well-aged bone material, hoping to find a telltale streak of life in the grey gravel of a river bed. Their idea? To use the remnants of paleo-life to reengineer some neo-lives. This is the story of resurrecting the woolly mammoth: a story made out of mud and dream and decaying organic substance mixed with intensifying oneiric activities. Private sector money, millennial ideology, ultramodern synthetic biology practices, and random luck all congregate once more in the Klondike, this time crystallizing around the remains of calcified

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bones. At stake is both their past animating potential and their potential for future animations. In this chapter, I  address issues deriving from the de-extinction venture that are pertinent to both communication and animal studies. When an animal body enters new communication activities, at various levels of interaction, how can we conceive of life and its unfolding processes? Using a biomedia ecological approach (where animals are regarded as transductive milieus), I  reflect on the potentialities, both factual and fanciful, that animal bodies currently encapsulate, as well as on the various historical actualizations (regarded as domesticative activities) that multispecies assemblages have long been expressing through manifold places and times. I suggest that domesticating animals is not just about artificial selection of phenotypic or genotypic traits, nor is it reducible to utilitarian dimensions that bind humans to other living beings within cultural realms and their cosmological variations. It is also about fiction, about creative envisioning activities that unfold along (and sometimes against) physiological, genetic, and epigenetic processes. Such processes are complex and multidimensional. In the case of “resurrecting” a woolly mammoth, they are simultaneously steering forward – towards the dream of offering conservation initiatives the technology for bringing back extinct species (to be rendered plausible via computing, synthesizing and cloning techniques) – and backward – towards the remaining traces of ancient DNA contained in actual defrosting arctic mud. The Klondike is here conceived as a nodal point where multiple conjunctive and disjunctive currents, embodying multiple force fields, intersect and operate on different scales (up to and including the global). Following Anna L. Tsing and Nick Couldry’s idea that in every place, multiple scales of connection are overlaid, it is “a global sense of the local” instead of a traditional notion of “place” as bounded locality that I am interested in mapping.5 As McKenzie Wark reframes it: It is not a question of preferring the local, the different, the marginal or the specific to the abstract, the global or the universal. In that sense this is not postcolonial theory. But on the other hand, this is not one of those approaches, Marxist for example, where the totality is the first and last cause of what happens in local situations. It is more a matter of thinking again about these antinomies through a study of various competing universals as they get mixed up in local situations. Empire isn’t total; the marginal isn’t magical.6

Living in a world of biotic mass extinctions, where conservationists list species according to their about-to-disappear-ness, where geologists are

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concerned with plastic melding with rocks, while the scribes of modern media constantly report on cataclysmic threats looming over biodiversity, and where poets strive to repopulate collective imaginaries with disanthropomorphized images, I thought it both animating and literalizing to become woolly and to “mammoth” a little. That is, I take seriously the idea of dreaming up animals in the mud – and I seek to problematize the multispecies f(r)ictions such dreams intimate.

Extr-Activism Rerun. By scavenging gold mine sites in the Arctic, retrieving Ice Age fossils comprising traces of ancient DNA, reconstructing the genome of past lives, reprogramming their DNA and, ultimately, creating a chimera both synthetically and embryonically through surrogate elephant moms, de-extinction scientists wish to bring species back from the dead. Prospectors of a new kind, they are looking for traces that will not only contain memories of ancient times, but that might also encapsulate the potential for the past to be reactivated and carried forward into our future. By opening new veins within the earth’s capillaries, monitored water produces new possibilities for people, for animals, for plants, for ore, for capital, for life, not only to subsist or perish, but to consist, and eventually persist, in other ways. Here I look at animals (their bodies and liveliness as well as their constant incarceration) as productive literary complexes. I  view animals, that is, as grown, growing, and growable loci of significant fictionalizing dynamics that produce novel paths for information to move across, and for communication processes to be activated within a number of fields (or domains of activity). I  am interested in conceptualizing both the actual and the potential consistencies of terrestrial animal life, doing so along lines of concreteness and indetermination that weave, dynamically and conjointly, specific textures together. In this respect, I regard genes not only as composed texts (inside living matter, writing the so-called book of life with their protein alphabet), but as textures. It is less what the text is or says that interests me (or any normative work around “what is or is not a body, an animal, a plant or a mammoth”), but rather the textures and textuality of lively inscriptions. I focus, that is, on the performative and affective realms activated around such inscriptions: “what is an extinct animal capable of?” (or, “what kind of potency bears a fossilized bone of mammoth?”). Is ancient DNA a new fetishism? More than as historical trace or simple artefact, how can

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we conceive of ancient materialities in an animating, both lively and mediumnic, capacity? For if an Ice Age fossil can merge, via the hijacking of the physiological complexes of not-yet extinct animals, with a post-naturalistic idea of an emblematic, though extinct, species, in order to give birth to a cinematic chimera, then animals are indeed truly literary  – not because they are metaphorizable or serve as “the signifying system that props up humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations,”7 as Braidotti puts it, but because both animals and texts feed on potentialities and shelter supplements of indetermination fostering creative expression and conditions of possibilities.

Research On Animals and Research By Means of Animals I began with the story of mud, and wish to stick with it, the Klondike, and the micro-events of excavating ancient DNA from fossilized bones a bit longer. I want to highlight these specific and singular contemporary arctic activities and not overlook such micro-events – events that the history of domestication has serialized and built on for centuries. In these micro-events lie precisely the intricacies of many humanimal figurations, for to domesticate is to dwell upon details and to install habits or patterns. Micro-events so dense and so rich in durational overlaps and in relational ontogenetic processes make it important to engage seriously with such mud  – in a way that is communicational, anthropological, media-ecological. Such mud encases sought-after ore and fossils. It forms a moving landscape, once a place for now-displaced arctic people and animals. And today it has become a well-organized realm of capitalistscientific activity. More than just a commodity-extraction medium, mud encapsulates dreams:  dreams of gold, dreams of knowledge contained within tons of decaying organic material, and dreams for bones full of potency that avantgarde microbiology labs can use to resurrect animal lives and pierce a little further into the secrets of life. The nightmares of our century’s massive animal extinctions call forth rêveries of resurrected Ice Age mega-fauna. In his short essay “The World of Dreams,” Henri Bergson asks a simple question, one resonant with individual night-dreaming activities and collective daydreaming enterprises: What, then, is a dream? I perceive objects, yet there is nothing. I see men. I think that I speak to them and hear them answer me, yet there is no one

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Davi d Jacli n and I say nothing. Everything happens as if there were real things and real persons, but upon awakening I find that everything has vanished. How does this come about? To begin with, is it really true that there is nothing in the dream? In other words, is there not some perceptible matter that we can see, hear, feel, etc. when we are asleep as well as when we are awake?8

Such perceptible matter is of great interest to my understanding of the mud and dreams the Klondike currently informs. Is Paleo the new domestic dream? What kind of dream exactly is de-extinction? How is it that one of the boldest contemporary scientific humanimal endeavors is, in fact, a fantasy of resurrection – one that mobilizes fancies of eternal life, ideas of capture and control over vital processes, faiths and fears in order to bring back what is long gone? And for what? To provide current conservation initiatives with very expensive providential technologies promising redemption? Can individual members of vanishing species (in this case elephants, which are in steep decline throughout Africa and Asia due to habitat encroachment and ivory poaching) really serve as “vehicles” for such fantasies? In other words, if de-extinction encapsulates some of our WEIRDest9 contemporary animal dreams, how can such fictionalization of life be regarded in terms of anthropology, especially when it comes to mapping today’s human/animal interminglings? As Bergson stresses, dreaming may appear incoherent, but only because of the problematic relations dreaming activities intrinsically install between sensation and memory:  “The incoherence of dreams seems to me to be easily explained. Since a dream characteristically exhibits, not a perfect correspondence but rather some variance between memory and sensation, quite different remembrances may be suited to the same sensation.”10 Can the perceptible matter of which dreams are made of also be understood as propelling polarized sensational and memorial collective dreaming activities? If ancient DNA is the perceptible matter out of which contemporary technoscientific dreams of de-extinction are forged, how can it help us better understand some of the relationalities existing among animals, animality, and the literary field – and do so in a way that will not be restricted to literature, but rather open to proto- as well as post-literary forms (such as rock art or de-extinction inscriptions for instance)? Dreaming appeals to different remembrances, or trajectories. Between memory and sensation, between traces and perceptions, is subsequently drawn an image, or, more precisely, a succession of images  – a cinematic orchestra of some sort, where explosive figurations of animals can be experienced. More than dreams on animals, it is dreams by means of animals that is at stake.

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De-Extinction 101 In her latest book, How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction, American molecular biologist and paleoanthropologist Beth Shapiro borrows from the culinary recipe model and offers to her reader chapters such as “Select a Species,” “Create a Clone,” “Make More of Them,” “Should we?”11 By incorporating an interesting mixture of science and fiction writing, Shapiro merges precise descriptions of contemporary biological techniques, such as ancient DNA recombination or interspecies somatic nuclear cell transfers, with prospective renderings of futuristic sociotechnical becomings, such as repopulating the Siberian tundra and its strange Pleistocene Park with cloned creatures bearing traits of Ice Age animals. Unfolding the intricacies of a new branch of contemporary synthetic biology, the so-called de-extinction science, the young scientist follows up on a recent media frenzy (a TEDx talk hosted at the US National Geographic headquarters triggered an important wave of interests in both popular news outlets and scientific journals12). Unpacking the current scientific and cultural challenges that such an enterprise implies, Shapiro hopes to revive extinct species by using state-of-the-art genetic and synthetic technologies to offset the anthropo-driven forces wiping emblematic animals off the planetary surface. In doing so, she wishes to provide twenty-first-century conservation initiatives with accurate models and procedures that will allow for the production of “resurrected” animals as well as their effective re-introduction into the wild. This script is extremely interesting, especially when it comes to the question of cross-pollinating animal bodies with fictional potentialities, and vice versa, interbreeding the literary field with traces of animality. The book encapsulates emergent technoscientific worldviews about the uncertain future of animals. The text offers interesting material to reflect on the contemporary f(r)ictions between living beings and their collective becomings under accelerated anthropogenic pressures.13 In fact, for Shapiro, DNA is an inscription from which to “read” and essentially invent a story. A story whose plot is carefully laid out: First, we find a well-preserved bone from which we can sequence the complete genome of an extinct species, such as a woolly mammoth. Then, we study that genome sequence, comparing it to the genomes of living evolutionary relatives. The mammoth’s closest living relative is the Asian Elephant, so that is where we will start. We identify differences between the elephant genome sequence and the mammoth genome sequence, and

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Davi d Jacli n we design experiments to tweak the elephant genome, changing a few of the DNA bases at a time, until the genome looks a lot more mammoth-like than elephant-like. Then, we take a cell that contains one of these tweaked, mammoth-like genomes and allow that cell to develop into an embryo. Finally, we implant this embryo into a female elephant, and, about two years later, an elephant mom gives birth to a baby mammoth. The technology to do all of this is available today. But what would the end product of this experiment be?14

The result would be, not a mammoth, but rather the waking dream of a fictionalized animal: a process comprised of concreteness and indetermination, producing a new totem made out of mud, proteins, bits, electricity, embryos, and blank cheques. In the excerpt above, Shapiro explicates the many steps of her plan (along with their durational challenges) to clone an extinct animal. A certain protocol corresponds to each step, a set of rules that will guide the practice and eventually (as in a role-play video game) allow one to proceed to the next stage. In this fine and delicate linear process of control and orientation, each step implies a specific mode of communication. Within such modalities, different (and differential) activities, rhythms, explorations, or choices are then set into motion. This movement  – between storage and actualization, between the recording of something at a certain place, at a certain time, and its reconstitution, at another place and/or at another time – is also known as an inscription, and proves central to the force and logic of any écriture. After all, the use of bones and animal parts, recalls Clarisse Herrenschmidt, was at the heart of the first human writing inscriptions we know of. Such materials were used to both count and dream, for recording and divination.15 Historically, we see projective activities (accounting or divinatory) using animal materials (such as bones) become inscription activities (the birth of writing). With the curious case of resurrecting the woolly mammoth, we see a sort of inversion, a return of both the flesh and the sign (of the semiotic and the semantic) within inscribing activities (such as the recombination of ancient DNA) using animal materials (Ice Age fossils) for projective activities (the idea of bringing back an extinct animal – which is of both an accounting and a divinatory nature). A, T, C, G.  Letters for words, words for text, text for stories, stories for correspondences and composition. Or maybe these are not letters, not words or maps, but things and territories in and of themselves, already composed at the same time as always recomposing. We should be very careful with the analogy. DNA is not text, as Landecker and Bardini have reminded us.16 DNA is a message, but not a message in the Shannonian

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understanding of the word (with an information source, a transmitter, a canal and its afferent noise, a receptor and a destination).17 There is no such a thing as a linear process with DNA (nor in its replication or expression). Codes are not just encoded in order to be decoded. There is no teleology here, but rather a complex operation composed of both quantitative and qualitative dimensions: as Bateson puts it, a set of differences that make differences.18 Or, even more accurately when it comes to depicting living organisms’ communicational activities, we could think of DNA replication as an irritation (as Ruyer conceptualizes it), a sensible event in formation. In this respect, the curious enterprise of bringing back extinct species offers media archaeology (a field concerned with the relations between anthro and techne), animal studies (another field problematizing relationships between zoe and bios), and their mutual interest for domestication (which I regard here as the turning of zoe into techne and of anthro into bios) a fascinating case study.

The Domesticated Animal Animal bodies have been domesticated over time and forced into the domain of utilitarian activities to provide “services” to certain groups. From old-school breeding (I am thinking of Darwin’s detailed description of UK pigeon culture) to synthetic upbringing (as in Haraway’s cyborg and species manifestos), domesticated animals have been de-territorialized and re-territorialized for centuries.19 The variety and scale of these territorializing activities are immense and made of multiple deviations and creative involutions – that is, of diverging and converging operations budding from two distinct, though indissociable, tendencies. One is life’s ceaseless tendency to produce new forms (animals’ liveliness as negentropic sources). The other has been the tendency to use animal bodies for different purposes, ranging from food to force, through fantasy-making. Primarily anthropogenic, this tendency rapidly became anthropocentric and is now reaching a new, anthropocenic, threshold.20 Domestication is thus understood as a transindividual activity where living organisms are pressed into the domus of human undertakings and husbandry regimes. This is a durational domain where significant shifts occur in both biology and ethology, where qualitative changes propel forms of life into new realms where humans, animals, and plants, together, access new plateaus. This enduring partnership often turns out to be violent and to borrow from slavery rather than mutualism. However, I am

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less concerned here with the previous modes this relationship has taken than in conceptualizing the potential that they can offer again in the present. What proves most challenging in concentrating on the potential for such reciprocal affect-ability is the endless play involved in being and becoming with (a constant when it comes to animal domestication). For instance, in the case of any speciation as well as in every humanoriented agri- and ani-cultural activity, what was presumably gone forever (the ancestors) nonetheless still carries a potential to return. Here, both the natural and artificial selection of animal traits turn out to be about physiological inscriptions of potential expression as well as about collective expressions of potentializing the world (and experimenting on and with such inscriptions).21 Hence, trait-oriented breeding activities unfold both on a speculative level (“How about breeding dogs with longer ears, or smaller legs?”) and on a physiological one, where reproductive periods and cycles are diverted and rerouted in order for such fictionalization to be embodied, for potentialities to both actualize and be actualized. In fact, the history of domestication reminds us that humans have not only been affecting animals, but have also been significantly affected by them: animals are transformed by humans, as much as the reverse.22 But how does fiction give form to life? Precisely how are potentialities actualized through envisioning activities such as fiction or dream? If such imagining is inherent to any relational realm, and if any inscription or encoding has to be actualized to be of effect and to affect, the question then becomes one of invention, one where fiction remains critically creative and one where a combination of projecting, inscribing, and deciphering cross-activities enables involutionary momentum. In the case of most domesticated animals, this kind of storytelling mode turns out to be not only effective (dogs did not exist before wolves – it took a series of experiments with wolf cubs to permit the emergence of a dog species), but productive and stabilizing (the dog population counts millions of individuals nowadays and most dogs do not return to wolf lives), as well as creative (to visit a dog run is to explore the inherent plasticity, viscosity, and strangeness of life processes). Inspired by Bergson’s concept of duration, Simondon’s work on individuation, Bateson’s idea of play, and Massumi’s take on animality, I draw on a modal theory of what I  call the “animal-medium.” As in every medium, something grows. In biology, a medium is a substance within which a culture grows. In media theory, a medium is a technology within

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which a culture grows. I suggest that an animal is a living organism within (and through) which a culture grows – and grows also by means of words, texts, and other configurative literary activities. In other words, an animal is a living organism is a medium. Medium is the singular for the Latin media, meaning intermediary, milieu.23 A medium is also someone through whom communication with the dead is rendered possible or, more broadly, communication with what is normally invisible. Close to a shaman, a medium is invested with special powers, starting with the power to put in relation those who are present and those who are absent. She renders accessible what was, until then, only virtual. In the case of the woolly mammoth, the relation between the visible and the invisible, between presence and absence, also proves central. Ancient DNA plays the role of a fertile milieu (both in the sense of a distinct setting and in the sense of the middle or center) for life to be transmitted. A milieu is where things propagate.

Passing Life (no matter the conception one may have of such a word/thing/process) actually unfolds among forms, between forms, because of forms, and in order to continue producing new forms. For life to proceed, forms are essential. They are points of passage for life to continue, to keep circulating and to transduce. Domesticating animals is a dynamic and constant life-reshuffling activity. It borrows its signs and potentials from the past, activates them in the present, and projects and inscribes them into the future. Domestication splits durations. It produces new life forms and forms of life (killing old ones, re-inventing them) and gives fictionalizing/ dreaming activities both substance (such as the actual matter of ancient DNA, deciphered to be recombined with new material) and subsistence (using cloning techniques, surrogate elephants are expected to foster future generations of mammoths). If domesticating life, animals, and plants, is also about fiction, it is largely because any living organism proves to be both a being and a becoming, an actual organism and an organism in the making. That is, a being always becoming other. Therefore, in the making of any “domesticated” body, what is at stake is the modification/continuation24 of a living entity – one that not only is, but also constantly and dynamically does and transduces into something (or someone) else. Hence, if domestication is in the making, it is also in the passing. And such passages are, biologically and literarily speaking, propositions.

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These are realistic propositions, if we consider the fact that every domesticated animal is the descendant of other, past living organisms (a reminder that every life form stems from the continuity of other life forms). But these propositions are also fictionalized propositions, built upon an envisioned, yet not actualized, potential  – a dreaming of some sort. At the intersection of those realistic and fictionalized propositions constantly emerges a zone of creative indistinction. What emerges precisely is a nexus of transindividual assemblages through and within which both dreaming and instrumentalizing activities consistently fall into involution together. In fact, the simple dialectic of a demiurgic human scheme (turning an elephant into a mammoth), coupled with a technosocial set of procedures (synthetic biology) following the intention behind this mental representation (to resurrect an iconic extinct species), will never fully account for the actual complexity of a domesticating project (or, for that matter, of any relational entanglement). As Donna Haraway writes, “life itself is the psychic, cognitive, and material terrain of fetishism. By contrast, liveliness is open to the possibility of situated knowledges, including technoscientific knowledges.”25 Changing the size of pets’ ears, the capacity for cattle to produce milk or flesh, or identifying the genes responsible for the production of some hairy tonsure: all of this proves to be both very effective (the actual selection of desired traits) at the same time as highly speculative (the actual selection of other traits, as well as the simple idea of being able to select, to orient, to curve in one’s favour part of the cosmic unfolding). Here the argument is not about leaving animals alone, or about refraining from imprinting our desires on them. To the contrary, I lament our lack of imagination when it comes to interacting with other life forms. As if it was human, too human maybe, to almost invariably regard animals for what they could provide us, to respect them (or to attribute them “rights”) only because of what they share with us, not for what they don’t – that is, to treat them as commodities, to enslave them to our (most of the time very poor) dreams, rather than to welcome their differences and to allow humanimalities to drift away, to enter, with politeness that is,26 into their both common and singular Welten. Humans are animals. Animals are domestic-able, which also means fiction-able. We are all prone to creative involutions. How can we learn a literary lesson from such animality, and eventually start dreaming differently? The most ancient human inscriptions we know of depict animals, and the oldest traces of storytelling we are left with (cave paintings and rock art, both in Europe and Southern Africa) are precisely dreams of animals, as well as animal dreams.27 How is it that animal forms have been

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reigning for such a long time over artistic figurations and large swathes of our literary field?

Duration, or the Art of Decaying After having mapped out what the science of de-extinction does and hopes to achieve with ancient DNA, I  would like to reflect a little further on overlapping durations. Included here are the duration of contemporary science; of gold mining activities in the Yukon, from the Klondike rush to Kondike Gold Corporation; of snow melting every year; of permafrost (and its current defrosting accelerations); of North American collective structures of thought about extinct animals (in which Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novels and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptations have played a significant role); of ancient DNA itself. All these durations bear onward an intra-animating mix of history, memory, activity, and potentiality. These colliding forces are baroque encounters at the end of the world, but they are also possible new worldings. They simultaneously encapsulate indicators of future potentials and symptoms of a past. Regarding the duration of ancient DNA, for instance: as soon as an organism dies and is exposed to air, a conjunction of processes that builds on the affordances of the dead organism’s flesh and freshness starts to work against the former body unity. This is also to work against the preservation of the body’s DNA, in favor of its modification/continuation through space and time, via many composters. Sunlight, for instance, will continue decomposing DNA (as it does, more slowly, while the organism is still alive), while the epidermis layers of the carcass will eventually serve as food for a complex chain of beings feeding on its organicities. Also chewing up DNA, from the inside this time, are the enzymes contained within the guts of the organism. Once the flesh is gone, bones start to meld with soil and to be “attacked” by microbes and fungi. Ultimately, bones turn into rocks. Moving slowly, over thousands of years, organic material will fossilize and transform into minerals. But grafting onto those very slow molecular processes, another force is now to be found, an anthropocenic one: a joint venture of sorts, a partnering between libidinal forces, a creative coupling of capital and knowledge, methodically searching for gold and fossils, both craving new forms of life as well as new life forms. But problems remain. DNA tends to deteriorate quickly, and even if some DNA can be found on bones, it is difficult to separate the DNA of the targeted dead animal from that of the many living organisms with which the bone has been in contact (including bacteria, archaea, or viruses).28 This mixed bag of molecular

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communication activities or DNA contamination, as paleogenomics refers to it (e.g., strand breaks, oxidative and hydrolytic lesions, and DNA crosslinks29) is, however, an interesting manifestation of shared decomposition/recomposition processes hinting at a shared life. Their activating modalities are precisely at stake here, both in the history of resurrecting the woolly mammoth and the history of animal domestication. It is those modalities or, more precisely, the passage between different as well as differential modalities, that I have conceptualized here. In order to get a more robust sense of those acceleration/redistribution processes, one needs to understand the informational and communicational operations (in both their actual and potential modes) involved in the constant reshuffling of life. This understanding remains critical to a better comprehension of common though singular life activities (ranging from molecular to stellar, through the individual and the collective). A finer understanding of such constant reshuffling, I  suggest, can be addressed through literary questions, that is, questions of creative expression, of play, and of playing with constraints. This is a question of communication or, as Bateson and Massumi put it, a question of a continual variation – of a difference that makes a difference,30 of “a changing field of reciprocally presupposing differencings, complexly imbricated with one another all along the line.”31 This chapter addresses the fictionalization of reality. The de-extinction enterprise suggests the possibility of “resurrecting” dead species such as the woolly mammoth, whereas in fact, it builds on a chimerical dream of turning the embryo of an actual elephant female into a mammoth-like trait bearer – a metaphorical mammoth of sorts. In the curious case of “resurrecting” extinct species, metaphorical activities are not solely ascribed to a logic of truth (neither could they be judged only morally, based on transcendent ideas of right and wrong – “Should we resurrect the woolly mammoth?”), but are also comprehended according to a certain logic of performativity, of productive and creative, as well as of unproductive and sometimes destructive, transductions. This raises not only moral but ethical issues. Based on the immanent appreciation of moving-across-forms tendencies and nourishingwithin-forms expressions, those issues address the involutionary potential living entities always carry within and through their milieus.

Inception In the case of the woolly mammoth, what I find particularly interesting is the blurring of our traditional categories of form. How could a frozen

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piece of bone give birth to a resurrected individual, though it is still part of an extinct species? Where exactly would the animal stand in such a configuration? In the bone, in the computers that help recombine genomic information, in the surrogate bodies of elephants? In a famous example, Bateson asks a similar kind of question:  where and when does a blind person’s mind start or end? In the hand that holds the cane, in the cane itself, in the brain? Showing that the question of the passing proves more interesting than the question of location, he talks of extensions and of the actual deviation/augmentation of the mind – not without echoes of McLuhan’s extension of the human, or of our idea of domestication understood as a re/de-territorializing activity. I regard not only mind and humanity, but life itself, as being extended, caught in a wider flux of information processes and communication activities – that is, life conceived of as a mediumnic event(uality). In this respect, any animal can be regarded as a living organism within and through which a culture grows – a medium, that is, with its own duration, propelled along tendencies or themes (Ruyer), expressed in a milieu where individuation processes (Simondon) are at play (Bateson). Here, what transduces forms and matter (and gives form to matter and matter to form) is precisely its explosive character, or its animality (Massumi).32 A challenge for any theory of communication processes, the deextinction venture helps conceptualize questions of information activities and signal/irritation compatibilities. Because it raises issues pertaining to affective realms with regards to creativity, life can hardly be reduced to what is contained in the frozen dirt or inside the bone of an extinct Ice Age animal. Nor is the essence of life locked into some ancient DNA. Life is neither matter nor form, but rather the process of (re)forming matter as well as “mattering” a form. It is in the passing from one entity to the next, from the dynamism that (naturally and artificially) allows for the bridging and reconfiguring of dirt into bones, into ancient DNA, into computation, into surrogate birth, etc. Life is in the play. The modalities along which animal existences are unfolding in the wake of our twenty-first century compose a baroque bestiary of living reconfigurations at the same time as they transduce an inherent reconfiguration of lives. From domestic to synthetic, I have read some of our contemporary relationships to animals as live experiments, which are producing experiences along with traces and supplements. A creative mix of sorts, made out of both concreteness and indetermination. As other avenues possible for future work on this subject, I would like to point out that it is in Beringia that paleoanthropologists are looking for

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their precious fossils: a place of many passages, a locus that is simultaneously a-historic, pre-historic, and post-historic, a space that was bridged for millennia, a passageway for life, a site for many biotic and abiotic exchanges and the crossing of many lively roads.33 I  would also suggest that a more in-depth exploration of our contemporary collective structures of thought would add precious insights into some of our attachments (symbolic, political, economic, geographic, and anthropological) to the mammoth.34

Coda In this chapter, I have analyzed domestication and domesticated animals (and their synthetic biology and bestiary) as milieux, as different modalities of expression, as differential captures of life, animality, and their respective animacies. This engagement with media ecology and natural philosophy allows for the emergence of an ethical perspective revolving around the animal potentialities subsisting even under conditions of extinction or captivity, rather than on the emancipation or conservation of animals. By looking at de-extinction beyond representational issues (what would it be like to resuscitate a mammoth?), and viewing it instead as a practice of playing with life (and its many forms, especially its microscopic ones, sort of animalcules of the twenty-first century), I draw on the multi-faceted potential expressed by the reconfiguration of life forms within existing forms of life. Here, ideology, beliefs, practices, techniques, bio-military apparatuses, philanthropic money, computers, along with high-pressured filthy water, mud, bones, and Jurassic Park imaginaries, all merge in a sort of trance where the animal-medium that we collectively feed, animate, and subject follows the true textures of our contemporary worlds. Projected into new forms, modalities, regimes, or gestures, within and across differential durational frames, the mud and its (now defrosted) golem return.

Notes 1 Rosi Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (March 2009): 528. 2 Natasha Myers, Rendering Life Molecular:  Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 233. 3 Andy Masaki Bellows, Marina McDougall, and Brigitte Berg, eds., Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 169.

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4 For a more in-depth account of the Klondike Gold Rush, see Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold:  An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). 5 Nick Couldry, “Passing Ethnographies: Rethinking the Sites of Agency and Reflexivity in a Mediated World,” in Global Media Studies:  Ethnographic Perspective, ed. Patrick  Murphy and Marwan Kraidy (London:  Routeledge, 2004), 43; Ana Tsing. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 240. 6 McKenzie Wark, “Friction,” Public Seminar, 2016, accessed February 1, 2017, www.publicseminar.org/2016/09/friction/. 7 Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” 528. 8 Henri Bergson, The World of Dreams (New  York:  Philosophical Library, 1958), 12. 9 WEIRD stands for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.” 10 Bergson, The World of Dreams, 53. 11 Beth Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth:  The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 12 Revive & Restore, TEDxDeExtinction (Washington, DC, 2013), accessed February 1, 2017, http://tedxdeextinction.org/. 13 About some of the most salient and current earth’s transformation scientists have reported, see in particular Colin N. Waters, Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Clément Poirier, Agnieszka Gałuszka, Alejandro Cearreta, et al., “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene,” Science 351, no. 6269 (January 8, 2016): n.p. 14 Shapiro, How to Clone a Mammoth, 11–12. 15 See Clarisse Herrenschmidt, Les trois écritures:  langue, nombre, code (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 11–219. 16 Hannah Landecker, “From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back: A Critical Introduction to Environmental Epigenetics for Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 333–57; and Thierry Bardini, Junkware (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) 29–124. 17 For an overview of the Information Theory developed by Claude Shannon and its ramifications, see Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 18 See in particular his chapter on “Forms, Substance and Difference,” in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (San Francisco:  Chandler Pub. Co., 1972), 318–28. 19 Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (New  York:  D. Appleton and Co., 1896); Donna J.  Haraway, Cary Wolfe, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 20 Peter Sloterdijk, Règles pour le parc humain; suivi de La domestication de l’être (Paris:  Mille et une nuits, 2010); Jared M.  Diamond, “Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication,” Nature 418 (2002): 700–7; Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals

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Davi d Jacli n Chose Domestication (New York: W. Morrow, 1992); Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene:  Conservation after Nature (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2015), passim. Richard M. Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 174–250. Dominique Lestel, Les Origines Animales de La Culture (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), passim. For more on the etymology and why it matters when it comes to articulate archaeology and ecology see Thierry Bardini, “Entre archéologie et écologie. Une perspective sur la théorie médiatique,” Multitudes, no.  62 (April 18, 2016): 159–68. As François Jullien puts it, borrowing to the Chinese concept of bian-tong. See Jullien, Les Transformations Silencieuses (Paris: Grasset, 2009), 26. Donna Haraway, Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan ₋Meets₋ OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 185. About politeness, its forms and spirits, see in particular Vinciane Despret’s work, in particular, “Responding Bodies and Partial Affinities in Human–Animal Worlds,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no.  7–8 (December 1, 2013):  51–76; Donna Haraway, “A Curious Practice,” Angelaki 2, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 5–14. Renaud Ego, L’animal voyant (Paris: Éditions Errances, 2015). Hendrik N.  Poinar et  al., “Metagenomics to Paleogenomics:  Large-Scale Sequencing of Mammoth DNA,” Science 311, no. 5759 (January 2006): 392–4. Svante Pääbo et al., “Genetic Analyses from Ancient DNA,” Annual Review of Genetics 38, no. 1 (2004): 645–79. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 179. Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 6. Raymond Ruyer, La genèse des formes vivantes (Paris:  Flammarion, 1958); Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Millon, 2005); Brian Massumi, “Ceci N’est Pas Une Morsure. Animalité et Abstraction Chez Deleuze et Guatarri,” Philosophie animale française, no. 112 (2011): 67–91. See Nastassja Martin, Les Âmes Sauvages. Face À L’occident, La Résistance D’un Peuple d’Alaska (Paris: La Découverte, 2016), 21–267. Matthew Chrulew, “Hunting the Mammoth, Pleistocene to Postmodern,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies IX, no. 1/2 (2011): 32–47; Sophie Houdart, “Le mammouth à l’Expo, ou comment reconstituer la chaîne de l’existence,” in Humains, non humains. Comment repeupler les sciences sociales by Olivier Thiery and Sophie Houdart (Paris: La Découverte, 2011), 40–8.

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Bush/Animals Peter Kulchyski

What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them. – John Berger1

On the Dehcho One time in late June I was on the Dehcho (Mackenzie river, Northwest Territories) in Frank T’seleie’s boat, with his adult son Jr. and my little daughter Malay. We had hit a rock earlier in the day and had to change the prop on the boat motor. The replacement prop used a lot of gas because it had been designed for a different purpose than running up the river. Instead of the normal six or so hours from Tulita to Pehdzi’ki we were plodding along, our fifteenth hour in the boat, worried now about running out of gas. Late June is the season of twenty-four hours of daylight in the far north: at three in the morning we had a surreal twilight to navigate in. Somewhere in this zone of indistinction, this dream time, exhausted, worried, half awake, the boat following the contours of the shoreline so if our fuel gave out we could land, seemingly out of nowhere, about fifty feet in front of us we spot something black moving towards shore in the water ahead of us. Almost at the moment we see it, it rises out of the river, water splashing and dripping from its deep black fur. My mind has a moment of displacement: the creature is too tall and thin to be a bear, but a large black beast swimming across and climbing out of the river is always a bear. The beast slips from the linguistic to the prelinguistic. It seems aware of us but somehow not afraid. It doesn’t look our way. As it rises out of the water it lopes across the short bottom shelf and towards the sheer seven- or eight-meter bank of the river, and effortlessly hurls itself up and over the bank and gone. All in less than a minute. Somehow as it rises from the water and up the river bank and I realize that it is a wolf, it moves back from the pre-linguistic to the linguistic: a giant, 319

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black, lone wolf, my consciousness barely having the time to recognize it for what it is before it is no more. In his reflection on the gift, Derrida writes “if it remains pure and without possible reappropriation, the surprise names that instant of madness that tears time apart and interrupts every calculation”;2 the gift. Giving something someone desperately needs or wants but was entirely unaware that the giver knew this, giving something that surpasses the “expected”; giving something at an unusual time: these are some of the ways in which surprise, the moment that “tears time apart,” is created through gifting. Every bush animal that appears, appears with something of this quality. Even in a known bio-rich hunting territory, where the actual moose or caribou or seal or whale will appear – and precisely when – is always and inevitably a surprise. Bush animals cannot be disentangled from the logic of the gift. They are a gift to humans, to humankind, to humanity: most especially and particularly, to hunters. The logic of the gift, itself a result of the impossibility of calculating precisely where and when they will be encountered, always inheres in those fleeting moments of contact with bush animals. Adrian Tanner writes of this in his now-classic Bringing Home Animals: The facts about particular animals are reinterpreted as if they had social relationships between themselves, and between them and anthropomorphized natural forces, and furthermore the animals are thought of as if they had personal relations with the hunters. The idealized form of these latter relations is often that the hunter pays respect to an animal; that is, he acknowledges that animal’s superior position, and following this the animal “gives itself ” to the hunter, that is, it allows itself to assume a position of equality, or even inferiority, with respect to the hunter.3

Bush people, hunters, are acutely aware of this facet of their relation to bush animals. Bush people rarely if ever boast of their hunting prowess; rather they respectfully, humbly, and gratefully acknowledge the bush animal that gifted itself to them.

Social Boundaries and Ethical Systems The old Marxist notion of “mode of production” rarely gets its due and is even in retreat in the current conjuncture, where notions of cultural hybridity have captured the conceptual moment. Fredric Jameson, however, insists on the concept as the highest, final moment of interpretation, while a leading indigenous scholar, Glen Coulthard, has used the word “bush mode of production” to talk about applying the concept to northern gathering and hunting peoples.4 Following Coulthard I will use the term

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bush people, and following Jameson will take very seriously the concept of mode of production as marking a profound and materially based line of cultural difference that still echoes in contemporary times and perhaps far into the future. All concepts, all ways of understanding and embodying time and space and subjectivity, ways of seeing, hierarchies of affect, life ways or patterns: all assume a radical difference across the boundary mode of production. Social science uses the terms “traditional,” “pre-capitalist,” even “indigenous” to talk about (and collapse) two distinct modes of production: the bush mode and the agricultural mode. Capitalism grew out of the agricultural mode and the two have more in common, especially pertaining to social hierarchy, than either does with the bush mode. Animals, and an ethical relation to animals, are likewise entirely different beings in the context of these entirely different modes of production. The agricultural (or, following Eric Wolfe, the tithe) mode involves domestication of animals on an extraordinary scale, the production of work beasts and livestock. The capitalist mode extends to the production of pets and spectacle animals, industrializes the production of domestic food animals and industrializes the slaughter of certain bush animals (buffalo and whales in the nineteenth century, tuna in our time, as examples). Attention in recent scholarship has turned to the problem of ethics in relation to these categories of animals. But no matter how careful and considered these ethical discussions, no matter how relevant to the treatment, care, and killing of animals within the system of global capitalist food and pet production, ethical reflection has not yet truly landed on the site where the form of ethical engagement is challenged: bush animals. What follows aims to evoke rather than exhaustively define such an ethical engagement. As well, along the way there will be a few engagements with the literary positioning of bush animals. The biggest surprise through which bush animals rupture time may be the way their continued existence challenges the assumptions that circle around them.

Categories of Animals With each mode of production there is associated a mode of animal existence. Capitalist modernism has produced the industrial animal, a form of living meat in which a concentration-camp existence purely focused on increasing production while decreasing expense exposes the utter ethical rot at the core of contemporary life. This mode of production has now

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extended into casual interference in the DNA structure of the confined species, ensuring their inner being will conform as much as their outer being to their instrumental purpose as meat. In contrast to this and as a substitute for the previous affections that may have circulated between herders and their stock or work dogs, capitalist modernism also produces the pet as a site of affections that, in possessive individualist social contexts devoid of anything that deserves the name community, have nowhere else to rest. Finally, the form of knowledge associated with capitalist modernism, science, enthusiastically tests its latest theories on other subsets of animals: test subjects. Meat, pets, and test subjects: each of these profoundly inscribes and reinforces a hierarchical relation in which, at least initially, ethics has no place. Confine, butcher, sell cook and eat, or reward or punish, or prod, measure, and test: all these actions conducted in the firm knowledge that other living beings exist underneath the anthropocentrist hierarchical logic that positions human at the summit. Agriculture gave rise to animal domestication and husbandry. The most viable distinction operating within this social form was between work animals and sources of food. Compared to capitalism, the work animals (seen through the lens of pets) were treated very badly, while the livestock or chickens lived glorious, albeit artificially shortened, lives. The sheep/ cow/horse/pig/chicken complex did involve cross-breeding exercises and no doubt some degree of affection or disdain depending on the temperament of the herder. But the animals had an individual existence, something entirely denied industrialized meat sources. The hierarchy did not end with humans, but with gods: perhaps this acted as a tempering force on human arrogance. Among bush peoples there are often animal helpers, most commonly dogs or horses. These are treated in highly complex ways, both loved and beaten, known intimately and used ruthlessly. More common, however, are bush animals, beings who live their own pattern of being in an ecological system that threatens and nourishes or nurtures them. The pact between bush people and bush animals is profound, strong, and a solid foundation of animal ethics: far beyond the tepid rules propounded in the dominant culture. Among many bush peoples, clans form one of the deeprooted social structures. Clans often derive from animals thought to be ancestors. Members of the deer clan, among my own Anishinabek friends, for example, will not eat deer. Bear clan. Wolf clan. Raven clan. Beaver clan. Frog clan. The distinct qualities of animals are translated and matched with the distinct character of people. A bond, something like what Karl Marx referred to as the “organic extension of the human body,” is forged

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out of a more nuanced relationship than that which can be imagined in the instrumental terms of contemporary capitalist modernism. In all of these social forms there are also vermin: the animals who feed off of human leftovers or steal human foods: the animals that are thriving out of place, that depend on the margins of human sociality for their existence: half a human reality, half an animal existence. Rats, coyotes, ravens. What form of ethics can be offered vermin?

The Hunter and the Raven Northern bush people, Inuit and Dene both, tell stories of the ways in which raven plays a role in the hunt. Wise, experienced, knowledgeable hunters, while walking on the land or in the bush, keep an eye to the sky. Raven likewise has an eye out for them. Raven knows what they are looking for. The tired hunter glances up and sees raven circling on the other side of the ridge or hill. The hunter watches. Raven continues to circle. The hunter makes a detour, cautiously moving over the crest of the hill to see what raven is up to. There are caribou below, or moose. The hunter plots a course of action, using the terrain and the wind and the position of moose to place herself in position for a kill shot. When the butchering is done and the hunter has begun the long walk back to camp laden with meat, raven will begin her meal. The hunter and raven have never been introduced but they know each other. They will meet again but only the circumstances of their meeting will determine whether they are allies or enemies. On this day, though, they have helped each other to feast.

Animal Ethics The logic of capitalist modernism offers a profoundly poor starting point for any substantive discussion of something that deserves to be called ethics. How is it that “we,” who will cook and consume a shrink-wrap-covered piece of meat from an animal raised in confinement, fed the worst forms of meal (often including excrement and hormones), brutally slaughtered, feel any degree of moral authority over those who can tell the story of the animal that gave itself to them on the hunt? But modern society must be the best ever, especially on an ethical level. “We” must restrain the barbarities of “them,” living with some unfathomable attachment to an outdated mode of existence:  do not use leg-hold traps, do not hunt seal, follow the quotas that have been set, follow the laws and seasons that have been established.

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A whole movement of animal-rights activists has emerged (since they can no longer speak for people of color, or women, or indigenous communities, they will orient their politics towards beings without speech), and the easiest activity for these activists to police is the hunting of bush people. They are already marginal, seemingly powerless. To protect bambi the killers of bambi must be policed. It is not the endless destruction of habitat through industrial resource extraction that threatens the continued life of elephants, it is the vile poaching of African hunters, so backward they do not prize the continuance of the species over the meat and profit from the sale of tusks. But enlightened Westerners, having invented a social form that demands the eradication of the bush, will brutally impose their will on the few remaining hunting families who live the bush, who dream the animals:  moral superiority as a refined value structure based upon social hierarchy. Enjoy your privilege.

There Is Only One Bear: Bear Among Dene, Inninuwug (also Inninew, Innu, Inninewak), Anishnaabe, when one sees or encounters a bush animal it is – in the English-language variations spoken by these bush people, at least  – referred to in the singular-general form. One does not see “a bear.” One encounters “bear.” “Yesterday, bear came down from that rock ridge to try and get at my grub box.” “This morning while I was hanging laundry I saw bear over at the point.” “Bear was back at the dump today.” Every singular, unique bear is also the embodiment, the incarnation, of bear itself, the spirit of bear, bearness, bearivity, bearization. So too lynx, deer, wolverine, fox, moose, chipmunk, ground squirrel, dall sheep: each is something larger than itself while being an idiosyncratic version of the larger being or way of being. “Bear” becomes thus the name of a form of being, rather than a category. One does not see an example of a broader order, one sees the latest representative of a named friend or enemy. An infinite degree of difference expressed with the slightest linguistic slip: “I saw a bear” as opposed to “I saw bear.” In Loon, Henry Sharp, whose work takes a strong semiotic turn within ethnography, has directed attention to the same aspect of language use: Perhaps the most comprehensible facet of this unlearning can be found in the English language’s use of articles when people talk about animals. What is true for caribou is true for the way Dene use English to speak of all animals. The Chipweyan word for caribou is “EtOhen,” a word they frequently prefer to the word caribou even when speaking English. The

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Chipweyan do not say “an EtOhen” or “a caribou,” they do not say, “the EtOhen” or “the caribou” but EtOhen or caribou, regardless of number. EtOhen is simply EtOhen; caribou is simply caribou. There are words for kinds of caribou  – for a cow, a calf, a large bull, and so forth  – and the Chipweyan are perfectly capable of distinguishing between one individual caribou [sic] as well as between kinds of caribou. Nevertheless, caribou are, simultaneously, individual animals and “spiritual” beings. As individual caribou they exist in the realm of inkoze [power/knowledge] even as their bodies walk the earth, but their spiritual status is also simultaneously individual and collective.5

For Sharp, the linguistic pattern speaks to the spiritual bear that walks in step with bear: Caribou and other wild animals exist in Dene society as but iterations of their kind. What concerns the Dene is not the individual identity of the caribou but the tie between the ordinary form of caribou and its spiritual aspect. What happens to the embodied animal reverberates in the spiritual realm, but killing an animal is not offensive to it. Animal abuse is not about predation but about why an animal is killed, the wastage of an animal that has been killed, the means by which the animal is killed, or the exposure of its remains to pollution.6

This spiritual bear is lost to us the moment we see “a bear” or “the bear.”

Spectacle Animals A fourth relationship to animals, in addition to food source, pet, and test subject, emerges or becomes apparent when capitalist modernism is closely interrogated: animals as spectacle. Bush animals are objects of visual fascination in capitalist modernity. Whole television channels are devoted to showing, in intimate detail, their savagery their tenderness. Enormous and profitable effort goes into submitting bush animals to the logic of the spectacle. This is how, having profited from their hides and oils, capitalism can still ensure bush animals form an element of the circuit of capital. Instead of the hours and days of searching that are required by hunters, they appear at will on the screen of choice. But the animals who thereby appear are not bush animals precisely because they appear at will. They are bush animals consumed by spectacle logic. Better to call them spectacle animals. John Berger, in an elegant essay called “Why Look at Animals,” commented upon this a long time ago. It is notable that Berger pays no attention to the distinction between bush people and peasant people; there

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is little anthropology informing his analysis. Yet he reflects with remarkable acuity upon the symptomatic element in the way animals are treated in the Western world, arguing that “the zoo cannot but disappoint”7 and that “everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.”8 Yet the animal cannot be entirely erased, and becomes inserted into a different representational logic: The cultural marginalization of animals is, of course, a more complex process than their physical marginalization. The animals of the mind cannot be so easily dispersed. Sayings, dreams, games, stories, superstitions, the language itself, recall them. The animals of the mind, instead of being dispersed, have been co-opted into other categories so that the category animal has lost its central importance. Mostly they have been co-opted into the family and into the spectacle.9

This co-optation into the spectacle has become the illusory foundation upon which debates concerning contemporary animal ethics circulate. A small child wanders into a gorilla exhibit; the gorilla turns out not to be an image and takes to dragging the child around; the keepers shoot and kill the animal because as soon as it does not adequately perform its imagefunction it is guilty of endangering the real; an uproar ensues as everyone blames everyone else. No doubt better barriers will be built, allowing all parties to return to their primordial docile states.

The Speech of Bush Animals Dene elder, storyteller, and writer George Blondin begins his When the World Was New with a chapter called “In the Time When Animals Could Talk,” which itself begins with the following: “In the very early days when human beings were just developing, many people were reincarnated from animals. At that time, powerful medicine people could easily communicate with animals and birds, and that’s why we have stories about talking animals.”10 There are many stories among all the northern hunting peoples, perhaps among all bush peoples, of animals talking among each other and with people. In his book on Yamoria: The Lawmaker Blondin writes: When the world was new, animals and humans held a conference to see how they would relate to each other. Yamoria used medicine power to control everyone’s mind to arrive at a fair resolution. The meeting lasted a long time and involved humans and every bird, fish, and animal that lived on the earth. All agreed that humans could use animals, birds, and fish for food, provided that humans killed only what they needed to survive and treated their prey with great respect. Humans must use every part of the animal and

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never waste anything. It was also made law that humans take the bones of the prey and place them in a tree or scaffold high above the ground. And finally, humans were told to always think well of animals and thank the creator for putting them on the earth. When the conference was over, communication was still possible between humans and animals, especially when medicine people needed to talk to animal leaders regarding issues not resolved at the conference. Slowly, communication between the two life forms dwindled, until today it is rare to find someone who can talk to animals.11

The spoken words of bear, raven, caribou, and all the rest are a striking feature of bush narratives, always a reminder of the degree of intimate interdependent relations between bush people and bush animals. They knew each other well. These narratives are a literature of bush animals, a literature barely read by students of literature, a genre, a tradition, a powerful literary resource that remains the purview of ethnographers and creates no ripples on the scene of the literary. “Field,” of course, is a tithe, agricultural spatial metaphor that involves erasure of “bush”: the literary field may be due for the epistemological unsettling that comes with getting lost in the bush. Dene, Inuit, Inninew, and Anishinaabe narratives of bush animals could be one source of such an unsettling. It may be that, still, in the bush, far from prying eyes and listening ears, those bush animals are talking among themselves. If so, we can be sure that they have fewer and fewer good things to say about us.

Valued Ecological Components In 2012 I  was involved with a group of activists and researchers in preparing a case for public environmental hearings into a proposed hydroelectric dam in northern Manitoba (the Keeyask project). Our group was called the Concerned Fox Lake Grassroots Citizens, and was led by an Inniniwak elder named Noah Massan. The company had paid for an environmental assessment, which outside groups like ours could then criticize or supplement. The assessment was partly based on the company identifying what it called “valued ecological components” (VECs) then determining the impact of the damn (I cannot but refer to it this way) on each VEC, then developing “mitigation” measures to reduce or compensate for that impact. Such a nicely wrapped power/knowledge bureaucratic plan leaves no room for air. Much of the discussion focused on sturgeon and caribou. The damn was to be built (and is now being built) on the last natural spawning ground of an endangered sturgeon species. It was somewhere between disconcerting

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and actually shocking to see biologists employed by the company confidently argue that their never-tested artificial spawning technologies would mean, in the end, that there would be “more sturgeon in the river than ever before.” Science, too, can be bought and has its price. The discussion of caribou  – an issue of more public concern since caribou are so much cuter than sturgeon  – focused on whether endangered woodland caribou use the territory affected by the damn or not, or whether caribou in the vicinity were from a non-endangered species. The elders we worked with, including Noah Massan, insisted that near the site of the damn was a caribou calving ground. The company’s lawyers and scientists took to calling these “summering caribou,” as if the caribou had their own cottages in the country and beach vacations. But Noah Massan was not distracted by the smokescreens being blown around by biologists and bureaucrats. He kept asking not about the caribou and sturgeon, though these were of concern, but about the squirrels and rabbits and other creatures that literally did not count to the project proponents:  they were not “valued” enough to be a “VEC.” He would say: “what about these rabbits? These squirrels? Where are they going to go? What is going to happen to them?” No one ever bothered to answer:  no one else in the process was concerned about squirrels or rabbits: no one took responsibility for them. In Noah Massan’s world, the wanton destruction of any members of any animal species, any, is a deep violation of an ethical tie to bush animals. To the company these bush animals do not deserve to make a list titled “valued.” They are expendable, roadkill, of so little concern that there would be no reason even to bring them to the level of conscious thought or reflection: their individual existence or non-existence a matter of absolute disregard. This is the pinnacle of modern ethics: it tells us what we can utterly disregard – roadkill, civilians in Aleppo, the bush, the homeless. Bush people, who hunt, kill, skin, butcher, and eat bush animals every day, are not responsible for the global destruction of bush animals. Primarily, habitat loss or degradation due to industrial extraction and production is the core factor destroying bush animals. When enough habitat is destroyed, even squirrels and rabbits may become endangered. Then they’ll be classified as VECs and by then, of course, it will be too late. But to be clear, Noah Massan’s point is not that we should assess the viability of each species and find a way to protect the most vulnerable. His point is that we have an ethical relationship and therefore responsibility to all the bush animals: the unthinking brutality of the logic of the bulldozer is an incomprehensible ethical absence.

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Observation and Close Watching Writing about the zoo as also a site of an objective, scientific gaze, Berger noted of the animals that “the more we know, the further away they are.”12 The determination to be rigorously “objective” drives a gap between the seer and the seen, a gap that eventually precludes the possibility of empathy or, indeed, ethics. Bush people must watch closely enough to be able to draw on their own still-active mimetic abilities, to copy the sounds or movements of animals. Close watching does not lead to detachment from the subject, but rather an increased sympathy towards it: how will it build this part of the beaver dam with these materials? Can it find a way over these rapids? Will it escape the attention of the eagle perched above? The drama of the individual bush animal is an element that can rarely or ever be given attention by the biologist, but remains a preoccupation of the hunter. As Frank Tester and I documented in a book called Kiumajut, in the immediate post-war period biologists became very interested in using the latest technologies to push the previous limits of their field. Counting caribou from aircraft became, with all the self-regard of high modernism, the newest, latest, best approach to determining caribou populations. One could extract from old accounts of explorers how many caribou had been in a district in the early twentieth century (never mind that these numbers, which became a base, were wild speculation). One could then fly over a region, count the caribou, multiply by the overall land area, and come up with a gross number of contemporary animals. Further, by extrapolating from the earlier “data,” one could determine the rate of population loss. The results of this calculation led to the conclusion that the species was at risk. This led to more funding for the biologists, and so a happy bureaucratic feedback loop. With all the self-assuredness of science, plans could now be made that were the best, most advanced, most modern. It all went along smoothly until someone got the bright idea of testing the veracity of the counts by flying a second plane behind the first to see if both counters arrived at similar results. The discrepancies were such that they became an embarrassment. Meanwhile, policy planners, also in love with the truth of their scientific knowledge, placed all manner of restrictions on Inuit and Dene hunters of caribou. These restrictions played a significant role in damaging the ability of bush people to live as contemporary hunters. Today, there are many biologists who work closely with and prize the knowledge of indigenous partners. But there are many who do not, and who underwrite increasing restriction of hunters’ relationship with prey. They still have

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the confidence that their newer approaches, tagging individual animals with radio signals or some such, represent the best, the most advanced, the most modern knowledge. Conflicts over quotas on whales, caribou, bears, sturgeon, musk oxen, moose, swans, and many other species are a key element in the struggle for aboriginal rights in Canada, and a version of similar conflicts exists wherever there are bush animals and bush people in this world. The restrictions fly in the face of bush people’s knowledge and understanding. Hugh Brody notes that “many Inuit say that animals that are not hunted will decline in number. People have an obligation, therefore, both to respect the animal that is willing to die and to hunt animals to ensure that their species will thrive.”13

Hunting vs. Hunting The corporate executive, stranded in the middle of a social hierarchy with too few people beneath him to do his bidding and too many above demanding him to do theirs, goes hunting. His hunt is an echo of that undertaken by aristocratic forebears, for whom hunting is a privilege and a pleasure. He will fly in his rented helicopter back over the mountains to where he can see the dall sheep. He will shoot the animal, often from the helicopter, and then take the head with its large horns to mount over his fireplace. His superiority, his place high up on the social chain, has been reaffirmed. He will tell a story based on his superior shooting ability, where the moment of the kill is the centerpiece of the narrative: “kill” as “climax.” The executive has absolutely no concern if another bighorn sheep is ever hunted by anyone. He has his. Begade Shuhtagotine, mountain Dene of the Keele river area, are camped near the river at the foot of the same mountains. From below they will patiently watch the thin traces of trails high up on the mountainside. In time, they see tiny white dots on those trails. Looking carefully, patiently, they realize that the dots are moving:  not a rock, but sheep. Where there are enough hunters, two groups will make the arduous hike up along parallel ridges, the sheep in between. After a long steep climb, the trail is reached; the hunter waits. A sheep appears, perhaps another. A shot. One sheep falls down a steep cliff, the other turns and runs back into the waiting rifles of the other group of hunters. Both sheep are dragged far from the trail so that what remains after they are butchered will not scare off other animals: the sheep will return to that trail. Most likely, the story that will be told will be about putting a heavy wrench into someone’s pack, so he unknowingly carried it up the whole way.

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In capitalist modernism, hunting is a masculine activity that speaks to prowess. The moment of the kill is the centerpiece of any hunting story. Effectively, everything about the hunt, including or especially who gets to do it, is steeped in gendered social hierarchy. Brody writes that in the world of hunters “no one can be superior to that upon which he depends.”14 For bush people, hunting is about relationship, respect, and the attribute most necessary for a successful hunter, even with modern technology, is patience. Mostly, hunting bush animals is about waiting, about a time suspended, lingering, expanded, and then, suddenly, and for a period that seems to end before it began, contracted, intensive, engaged. Capitalist modernism is profoundly unconcerned with the fate of species, especially when placed on a scale next to the latest round of capital accumulation demands. Bush peoples do what they must to ensure the animals will return. Something of this is reflected in Henry Sharp when he writes: Animals are persons. As persons they individually, collectively, spiritually and physically replicate the relationships with human persons that have existed within the realm of inkoze [power/knowledge] since before the beginning of time. It is not the individual that endures in Dene reality but those relationships between human and animal/persons. When the Chipweyan say animals become young again in the spring, they speak the truth, for it is not the individual that is renewed but those enduring relationships that are the covenant between human and animal within the reality of inkoze.15

Something of this is reflected in Robert Brightman when he writes: The animals are endlessly regenerated, and yet they are finite. I am more powerful than the animal because I  kill and eat it. The animal is more powerful than I because it can elude me and cause me to starve. The animal is my benefactor and friend. The animal is my victim and adversary. The animal is different from me, and yet it is like me, as much like me as its ancestors were in the earliest time of the world.16

Paradoxically, hunters are the bush animal’s best friends. The people who hunt, kill and eat bush animals represent their best chance of continuance. As animal rights activists, often, do not. For there to be bush animals, there need to be bush lands. For there to be bush lands, there need to be bush people.

The Literary Field At the edge of the field is the bush. In the liminal zone where they intersect a million misunderstandings have developed. Imagine translating the bible, rich with agricultural and husbandry metaphors, into Inuktitut, the language of Inuit. What will we ever do with sheep, or daily bread, or the

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flock? Hugh Brody’s The Other Side of Eden reflects in part on this particular disjunction. Bush animals are at the edge of the literary field: their eyes can be sometimes spotted, glowing with the reflection of our fires in the night. In literature they most commonly express some notion of the unconscious: a powerful desire, as in Marian Engels’ Bear, or a savage bestiality, as in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. These are versions of the literary field expanding but cutting down more of the bush at its edges. So perhaps we need to leave the literary field entirely, and enter the literary bush. Doing so would have us read the literary in passages by Henry Sharp or Hugh Brody, to play close attention to the narratives of George Blondin and Louis Bird, and to see the power and poetry and the epistemological and ethical challenges posed by bush narratives.

Bush Animals Own Nothing But Their Bodies Modernist capitalism is a process of allowing the logic of abstraction to dominate all forms of existence, with exchange-value being the most powerful but not the only vehicle for abstraction. Adorno and Horkheimer, extrapolating from Marx, understood this clearly. Feminists and Foucauldians alike, meanwhile, emphasized the body and embodiment as a critical site of engagement. The notions of abstraction and embodiment mark a key polarity in late twentieth-century critical theory. While they can be commodified as rare meat delicacies or as objects of spectacle, the particular bush animals so captured by the logic of capital have left the bush behind, have forsaken their very being itself or had it stripped away. But in the bush, bush animals may be the precise exemplar of non-capitalist being inasmuch as they own nothing but their bodies. They embody their bodies. They remain no more or less than those bodies. This thought perhaps mirrors another, by John Berger, who wrote: “the life of a wild animal becomes the starting point of a daydream: a point from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned.”17

Notes 1 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 7. 2 Jacques Derrida, Given Time:  1. Counterfeit Money, trans Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147.

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3 Adrian Tanner, Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and Mode of Production of the Mistassini Cree Hunters (New York; St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 136. 4 See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 171. 5 Henry S.  Sharp, Loon:  Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 67. 6 Sharp, Loon, 67–8. 7 Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” 26. 8 Ibid., 24. 9 Ibid., 13. 10 George Blondin, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtu Dene (Outcrop: Yellowknife, 1990), 5. 11 George Blondin, Yamoria:  The Lawmaker (Edmonton:  NeWest Press, 1997), 48. 12 Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” 14. 13 Hugh Brody, Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1987), 77. 14 Ibid., 73. 15 Sharp, Loon, 72. 16 Robert Brightman, Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relations (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2002). 17 Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” 15.

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