Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire [1st ed.] 9783030514921, 9783030514938

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction: Rats in the Box (Kaori Nagai)....Pages 1-15
Winged Tales: The Advent of the Imperial Beast Fable (Kaori Nagai)....Pages 17-45
‘Once upon a Time When Animals Spoke’: Theories of the Beast Fable (Kaori Nagai)....Pages 47-75
Into the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books (Kaori Nagai)....Pages 77-120
Kangaroo Notebook: Abe’s Metatherian Journey (Kaori Nagai)....Pages 121-153
Animal Alphabets: Chesterton’s Dog, Browning’s Rats, Lear’s Blue Baboon (Kaori Nagai)....Pages 155-187
Fabling Cosmopolitanism: The Ark Esperanto (Kaori Nagai)....Pages 189-222
Back Matter ....Pages 223-252

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Imperial Beast Fables Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire Kaori Nagai

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors Susan McHugh Department of English University of New England Biddeford, ME, USA Robert McKay School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK John Miller School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures? This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages. Series Board Karl Steel (Brooklyn College) Erica Fudge (Strathclyde) Kevin Hutchings (UNBC) Philip Armstrong (Canterbury) Carrie Rohman (Lafayette) Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649

Kaori Nagai

Imperial Beast Fables Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

Kaori Nagai School of English University of Kent Canterbury, UK

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ISBN 978-3-030-51492-1 ISBN 978-3-030-51493-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: LLP collection/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Karin and Shizuku

Acknowledgments

This book has been long in making, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to many friends and colleagues for their support. First of all, I would like to thank the members of the Kent Animal Humanities Network, especially Charlotte Sleigh, Derek Ryan, Caroline Rooney, Sarah Wood, Karen Jones, Matthew Whittle, Peter Adkins, Ben Marsh, Emilia Czatkowska and also Donna Landry, who kindly read through the draft of my manuscript. I take this opportunity to thank Lyn Innes for her generosity and guidance over years, and her valuable feedback on my project. Many thanks also to Angela Groth-Seary for checking my German translations and for her friendship. This book has also been greatly inspired by my teaching experience, and especially by my students on the module ‘Animals, Humans, Writing’, who have shown me in many different ways why it matters to care about animals and the environment. I have met, and have drawn inspiration from, numerous wonderful scholars in the process of my writing, and thanks so much to all those whose words and kindness have touched this project, including (alphabetically) Pratik Chakrabarti, Jeanne Dubino, Paraic Finnerty, Heidi Goes, Donna Haraway, David Herd, Sarah James, Ulrich Knoepflmacher, Asako Nakai, Kenji Nakamura, Julia Noe, Will Norman, Judith Plotz, Gregory Radick, Harriet Ritvo, Karen Sayer, Ai Tanji, Lynn Turner, Thom van Dooren, John Walker, Cathy Waters and Pasquale Zapelli. This book partly originated in the research I conducted in editing the Penguin Classics edition of the Jungle Books (2013). I am grateful to Jan

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Montefiore, the general editor of the new editions of Rudyard Kipling, for her support and guidance, and for commenting on the Kipling chapter in this book. I would also like to thank the Kipling Society for hosting intellectually stimulating discussion via its events and e-mail forum, from which I drew much inspiration. Thanks also to Harish Trivedi for being a marvellous host of the ‘Kipling in India, India in Kipling’ conference in Shimla (April 2016), which I had the good fortune to attend. Meeting Indian animals in real life inspired my writing of this book, and the encounter with simian residents of the Jakko Hill (whom Kipling wrote about) was particularly memorable. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding my research on the Esperanto movement, and also the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, for awarding me a Caird Research Fellowship in 2016–2017. My research at the Museum has enhanced this book’s recurrent maritime themes. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists at the British Library, the Templeman Library, the Bodleian Library, the Caird Library, the National Archives of India in Delhi, the National Library of Ireland, the American Philosophical Society Library, the Butler Library of the Esperanto Association of Britain and the Hector Hodler library of the Universal Esperanto Association, for their valuable help in aiding and facilitating my research. I am also deeply indebted to the School of English, University of Kent, for its support, which made it possible for me to complete this book. I have also gained much from the School’s vibrant research culture, especially through sharing ideas and collaborating with my colleagues and students in the School’s Centres for Victorian Literature and Culture and Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. At Palgrave, I would like to thank Allie Bochicchio Troyanos, Rachel Jacobe and Ben Doyle, and also the Series editors of the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John Miller, for their invaluable support and guidance. It has been an honour to publish in this brilliant series. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the many constructive suggestions, which helped me greatly to revise my manuscript. Part of an earlier version of Chapter 4 appears as ‘The Beast in the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books as an Imperial Beast-Fable’, in Kaori Nagai, Karen Jones, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Caroline Rooney and Charlotte Sleigh (eds.), Cosmopolitan Animals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 233–45.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Last but not the least, my heartfelt thanks to Ben Grant for reading and commenting on many versions of the manuscript, and for sharing life’s journey with me. Without his love, support and encouragement, this book would never have been possible. My thanks also go to Karin and Shizuku, our much-loved fancy rats. The two years I spent with them undid many of my preconceptions about the nature of human-animal companionship, and the following pages bear many of their nibble marks. This book is dedicated to them and their memory.

Contents

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1

Introduction: Rats in the Box

2

Winged Tales: The Advent of the Imperial Beast Fable

17

3

‘Once upon a Time When Animals Spoke’: Theories of the Beast Fable

47

4

Into the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books

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5

Kangaroo Notebook: Abe’s Metatherian Journey

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6

Animal Alphabets: Chesterton’s Dog, Browning’s Rats, Lear’s Blue Baboon

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Fabling Cosmopolitanism: The Ark Esperanto

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Select Bibliography

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

‘Embarking Elephants at Bombay for the Abyssinian Expedition’. Illustrated London News, 11 January 1868 (© Illustrated London News Ltd./Mary Evans) Huxley’s diagram for the stages of Mammalian evolution [‘Prof. Huxley on Evolution, Part II’, Nature 23:584 (6 January 1881): 230] (Reproduced with permission of Springer Nature) Darwin’s Diagram II, showing a marsupial as the common ancestor of marsupials and placentals drawn by Charles Darwin in a letter to Charles Lyell, dated 23 September 1860 (Reproduced with permission of the American Philosophical Society) John Lockwood Kipling’s title illustration in the Preface to Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), v John Lockwood Kipling, ‘Little Anklebone’, Frontispiece to Flora Annie Steel, Tales of the Punjab, Told by the People (London: MacMillan and Co., 1894) Edward Lear, ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’, in Edward Lear, Laughable Lyrics: A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, etc. (London: R. J. Bush, 1877), n.p.

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.1

A group photo taken at the Second Universal Esperanto Congress, 1906: Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof (centre), with John Pollen (left) and Sher Khan, the Nawab of Radhanpur (right) (Reproduced with permission of the Butler Library, Esperanto Association of Britain)

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Introduction: Rats in the Box

B. F. Skinner, in his autobiography The Shaping of a Behaviorist (1979), recalls how ‘one fine Sunday morning [he] went to the Biology Building and descended to [his] subterranean laboratory’.1 Skinner is the famous inventor of the ‘Skinner Box’, a laboratory apparatus in which an animal is trained or ‘conditioned’ to press a lever to get food, and on that day he was back in his laboratory to resume his experiment on rats: I put the rats in their boxes and started my programming equipment. I was still using circuit breakers, and the friction drives under the four disks emitted a rhythmic pulse: di-dah-di-di-dah – di-dah-di-di-dah. Suddenly I heard myself saying ‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out ’. (174; emphasis in original)

‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out ’. When I first came across these words, which came to Skinner’s lips unawares, I assumed that they referred to the rats he had put in his boxes: they would never get out, trapped as they were in the laboratory, repeating their task to get food. This appeared to me to be a key moment in which Skinner unwittingly acknowledges and verbalises the cruel nature of his animal experiment. Also, he is shown to be fully aware of the unequal power relationship between himself and his rats: he is their jailer and lawmaker, who sentences them to lifelong confinement.

© The Author(s) 2020 K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8_1

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But, no. Skinner’s recollection disallows the possibility of such a ratcentric reading of his anecdote, as he goes on to say: Evidently the rhythmic stimulus had had the effect Sherrington called summation. An imitative response had joined forces with some latent behavior, which I could attribute to a rather obvious source: I was a prisoner in my laboratory on a lovely day. (174)

‘Summation’ here refers to the English neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington’s discovery that a subliminal stimulus, ineffective on its own, becomes effective when it is repeated.2 Skinner on that day was exposed to the repetition of a mechanical and rhythmic pulse coming from the rat boxes, to the point that it had the effect of bringing to light his latent thought: ‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out’. The episode concludes with his ‘authorial’ interpretation of what he had uttered: obviously it meant that he was ‘a prisoner in [his] laboratory on a lovely day’. Skinner has the last word, as if to recover the control he had lost when some other voice used his body to speak through him. This episode is included in Skinner’s autobiography as the moment which ignited his interest in the ‘latent behaviour’ of our mind, leading to his design of what he called ‘the verbal summator’, a device which ‘simply repeats a series of vowel sounds over and over until the subject reads something into them’ (176). Skinner calls these sounds ‘auditory inkblots’ (175), likening his invention to the Rorschach test and Freudian free association: it can be used to ‘[snare] out complexes’ (176), as it ‘enables the subconscious to verbalize itself’ (176). That is to say, his ‘rats in the box’ inspired him to invent another device to ‘snare’ an animal within the human subject: a part of himself, which, just like rats, felt trapped in the laboratory, resigned to the fact that it would never be able to get out on that fine Sunday morning. To quote the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘fable’ is ‘a short story devised to convey some useful lesson; esp. one in which animals or inanimate things are the speakers or actors’. The word is derived from the Latin word f¯ ar¯ı, ‘to speak’.3 A ‘fable’, which therefore means any spoken story, is generally understood as a fiction or fabrication in which animals magically speak. It gives expression to the speech of animals, including their silence and the silencing of their voices. It is true that Skinner’s scientific anecdote is not a typical fable, like those of Aesop, which centre

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on the conversations and actions of talking animal characters. Nevertheless, it has many traits of the fable and can be read as one. First of all, the anecdote exemplifies the fable’s function to convey a useful ‘human’ lesson through an animal story. The rats in the boxes, literally the central ‘device’ of the story, become completely forgotten, and are replaced by the story of a man trapped in a laboratory. This substitution also suggests that certain types of animal testing operate like a fable: humans observe animals to acquire greater understanding of themselves. Despite its clearly anthropocentric interpretive frame, which seems to be calculated to suppress any animal agency, animals speak in a fable. It is a literary genre in which animals and other inanimate beings are given the power of speech. Skinner’s anecdote is faithful to this law of the genre, as it stages the voice of the nonhuman, transcribed as ‘di-dah-di-di-dah – di-dah-di-di-dah’. According to Skinner, this sound, or rhythmic pulse, was made by the ‘circuit breaker’, which is part of the rat apparatus. Its role is to ‘automatically [eliminate] superfluous contacts’ made within the Skinner box, ‘due to the inexpertness of the rat’s manipulation of the lever’.4 In practice, the device ‘acts to break the circuit from the lever for a short time’ after a rat correctly presses it down, in order to discount ‘irregular’ manipulations of the lever by the rat.5 This device was necessary to make the results rigorous, or to reduce rats into data and a model species to be studied by humans. In order to arrive at scientific truth, which would allow him to tell human stories, Skinner has to repress, and refuses to note, the rats’ many ‘irrelevant’ acts. The sound of the circuit breaker is then an invitation for us to imagine what the rats might actually be doing in this scene. As the circuit breaker was operated by the rats, its rhythmic pulse is their voices, or, more precisely, a translation of their voices. It speaks softly yet powerfully, testifying to the rats’ agency and the effects which they had on Skinner. As we have already seen, the sound spoke to Skinner’s latent thoughts, making him realise that he was another rat trapped in the laboratory, and even inspired him to create a new machine. The agency of the ‘rats in the box’ is further underscored by the additional information which Skinner provides in his autobiography, according to which he later introduced into his rat apparatus a device operated by mercury, which had the same effect as the ‘circuit breaker’, and functioned as ‘an additional safeguard’ to eliminate superfluous contacts.6 This new device had a detrimental effect on his health because ‘a small wisp of vapor rose from the [mercury] cup every time the circuit broke,

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and in some of [his] experiments four rats were pressing levers at a fairly high rate’ (86–7). This description brings to mind a vivid image of the rats rapidly tapping the levers, emitting the pulse of ‘di-dah-di-di-dah – di-dah-di-di-dah’—affecting Skinner, his latent thoughts and desires, and his health and welfare (he recalls that this ‘possibly lethal device’ caused his hair to fall out ‘at an alarming rate’ (87)). Thus, Skinner’s ‘rats in the boxes’ story is hardly an allegory of man as a lab rat. Real rats are in operation, tapping, eating, calling one another, and living, and the fable allows us to hear their voices. ∗ ∗ ∗ Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire is a book on (and of) fables. With the Skinner Box in mind, it presents the British Empire as a fabular Animal-Machine. It is made up of a proliferating and interconnected network of boxes, each of which is a theatre of human-animal interactions. The book thus contains quite a few trapped animals, trained, transported and translated, while there are also, in the background, nonhuman ‘voices’ urging us to think outside the box, if we could only learn to hear them. Till very recently, the fable had been a neglected or even demonised genre in the field of animal studies, despite the fact that animals are central to fables, as both subject matter and narrative device. It had been regarded as a prime example of the anthropocentric misrepresentation of animals: by making animals talk and act like humans, the fable turns them into a human allegory, taking full advantage of the fact that they would not talk back to us. Harriet Ritvo declares that the fable ‘has little connection to real creatures, none at all’, in stark contrast to ‘texts produced by people who dealt with real animals’.7 Indeed, as Erica Fudge, writing about the fable in the Early Modern tradition, observes, ‘the beast fable is not merely a literary convention’ but a reading lesson, which ‘actually enacts the aim of humanism itself’: ‘To look beneath the surface of the fable, to read the moral not the animal, is where the human can be found … To misread a fable is to be an animal’.8 For Jacques Derrida, the fable, as a ‘determinate literary genre in the European West’,9 embodies the epistemic and material violence which humans exercise over other animals: ‘We know the history of fabulization and how it remains an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication. Always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of

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man, but for and in man’.10 Such anthropocentrism makes it necessary for us, if we would address animals, to ‘avoid fables’ (37). In recent years, however, there has been a flowering of scholarship which revisits and re-evaluates the fable as a genre that tells the stories of animals themselves. For instance, Naama Harel, in a 2009 article, urges us to listen to the ‘animal voice behind the animal fable’: some fables, if not all, give us ‘an alternative understanding, which does not exclude the nonhuman animals and does not reduce them to human figures and issues’.11 Similarly, John Hartigan Jr., in his Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach (2014), argues that fables ‘stage other species as capable of speaking to us’ and ‘present both the possibility and problem of how we might listen to and then learn from other species’.12 Hartigan excitingly characterises the fable as a space in which ‘species thinking’ takes place: not simply the knowledge of humanity as species, as Dipesh Chakrabarty, who originally coined the term, defines it,13 but rather the thinking with and through other species, which requires us radically to reconsider the whole gamut of cultural practices which have long been thought to be exclusively human.14 Similarly, Jeremy B. Lefkowitz calls attention to ‘the surprisingly fluid boundaries between fable and natural science’: human knowledge about animals has been formed in ‘dialogue’ with fables and anecdotes, sometimes drawing on the fable’s insights into animal behaviour, and sometimes defining ‘truth’ against the fable as a fiction.15 As an example of such fable-inspired thinking, Lefkowitz gives an account of the recent scientific re-enactments of Aesop’s fable ‘The Crow and the Pitcher’, in which a thirsty crow drops stones into a pitcher to raise the water level in it. Set the similar task of retrieving a worm floating in a narrow tube partly filled with water, a variety of crows have admirably solved the task by putting stones one by one into the tube. Bird and Emery, who pioneered this experiment by testing on four captive rooks in 2009, playfully cite the fable’s moral—‘necessity is the mother of invention’—as part of their discussion.16 The fable, then, encapsulates a lesson applicable not only to humans but also to other species. Not surprisingly, many scholars have taken the Darwinian theory of evolution as the defining influence on the modern representation of animals.17 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) revolutionalised the way in which man’s relationship with other creatures was perceived: as Virginia Richter in her Literature after Darwin (2011) succinctly puts it, ‘After Darwin, the human being was just an animal like any other – although, admittedly, the top animal’.18

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Darwin is also the major reference point in the two key books on the fable genre in the Victorian period. Horst Dölvers, in his Fables Less and Less Fabulous (1997), which examines the popularity of the Aesopian fables at this time, puts forward the idea of the ‘post-Darwinian fable’, which refers to the way in which Darwin’s theory changed what we read into an animal fable: it no longer tells a human story in the guise of animal characters, but unsettlingly wakes us to the truth of the bestial origin of man.19 The concept of the ‘post-Darwinian fable’ is further explored by Chris Danta in his Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (2018), which analyses the works of writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee as post-Darwinian Aesopian fables.20 Danta’s reading of these modern texts is grounded in his re-evaluation of the animal fable as Darwinian in nature, and therefore closing the ontological gap between the human and the animal. Danta intriguingly characterises Western anthropocentrism as being marked by a ‘vertical’ orientation: the human is defined by his ‘uprightness’ of posture and rectitude, as well as by the act of looking up to worship God, which also signifies his power over the earth-bound beast (7–8). In contrast, the post-Darwinian fable is ‘a biocentric story form’, which ‘existentially reorients the human perspective toward the earth and the nonhuman animal’ (30). Building on the recent ‘animal turn’ in studies of the fable, Imperial Beast Fables seeks to offer an innovative reinterpretation of the fable as a theatre of the human-animal relationship, especially within the context of British imperialism. My assumption is that the fable is both anthropocentric and biocentric, and this is in accordance with the way in which the fable is typically double-tongued: it is associated with rhetorical devices such as allegory, irony and metaphor, all of which ‘name ways of saying one thing with another thing, or by means of another thing’.21 An anthropocentric take on the fable is invariably accompanied by a ‘biocentric’ interpretation, which has the effect of decentring it. Indeed, the fable tells a human story by putting animals centre stage, which can foster animal ways of looking at the world. Likewise, Imperial Beast Fables shows how the fable can double-talk to embody the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while covertly critiquing them. An imperial beast fable might display the power of Empire as brutal, animal power, as in La Fontaine’s famous fable ‘The Wolf and the Sheep’, the moral of which is ‘The reason of the strongest is always the best’22 ; on the other hand, the fact that this power is put on show allows us to step back from and

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outside it in order to create a narrative space in which to reflect upon and resist it. In its central focus on nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, Imperial Beast Fables revises the fable’s vertical reorientation of the human-animal hierarchy earthward while also following a horizontal movement towards the non-West, across the oceans, which led Europe to ‘discover’ non-European fables. A great deal has been written on the topic of animals and the British Empire. As John M. MacKenzie puts it, ‘European world supremacy coincided with the peak of the hunting and shooting craze’: ‘the colonial frontier was also a hunting frontier and the animal resource contributed to the expansionist urge’.23 This led to what John Simons calls ‘the tsunami of exotic animals which deluged England’.24 Not only did these animals become familiar sights in zoos and travelling menageries, but they also greatly contributed to the advancement of European science in the form of stuffed or pickled specimens, sent from the colonies in great numbers.25 Imperial Beast Fables argues that non-European ‘indigenous’ fables were part of the exotic spoils of colonialism, eagerly collected by missionaries, settlers, travellers and anthropologists. It takes as its starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, which include the Oriental fable tradition, as it is found in such collections as the Panchatantra, the Jâtaka tales and the Arabian Nights , and African beast fables, which also found their way to the plantations of the West Indies and the American South. Each fable is a box containing exotic animals, which therefore staged a scene of colonial encounter between Europeans and their animal others. It constituted a site of colonial translation and appropriation, as well as a shifting zone of race, species and language. Notably, the post-Darwinian re-evaluations of the fable genre mostly take the Aesopian fables as their reference point, thus locating the genre within the European literary and philosophical tradition, beginning in Ancient Greece. In contrast, Imperial Beast Fables follows the Europeans in their quest for ‘non-European’ fables. Its genealogy starts in the late eighteenth century, when fables found in the colonial space emerged as exotic curiosities and valuable anthropological documents, thus predating the ‘post-Darwinian’ fable, which was officially made possible only after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. In doing so, however, it is not my intention to present non-European beast fables as a better alternative to the Eurocentric tradition of the animal fable. Instead, Imperial Beast Fables uses the term ‘beast fable’—which was commonly used

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in the nineteenth century to theorise the non-European fable—in recognition of the fact that Aesop is hardly the progenitor of the fable as a literary genre.26 Indeed, the nineteenth century was a period during which the Europeans themselves were actively debunking the myth that the fable tradition started with Aesop the Greek fabulist, as the nonEuropean world, made to represent ancient and ‘primitive’ cultures, was now believed to be the birthplace of beast fables. Recognised as a welltravelled genre, ubiquitously found across the world, the beast fable seemed to be the best literary genre with which to tell the stories of the animals whose lives formed an important part of the global and cosmopolitan enterprise called the British Empire. As Gert-Jan Van Dijk puts it, ‘fables have conquered the world, transgressing the barriers of time and place’,27 just as the British Empire aspired to do. The beast fable’s successful history of global distribution therefore embodied the ‘animal’ energy of the movement of Europeans as colonisers, settlers, travellers and migrants, often accompanied by their nonhuman companions. On the other hand, the rapid process of globalisation and mass migration effaced countless stories of ‘animal bodies’ who failed to reach their destinations, to settle or to compete against newcomers: this book aspires to give expression to the presence and voices of such animals. Rudyard Kipling’s two Jungle Books —The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895)—were considered by his contemporaries to be an innovative reworking of ancient Oriental beast fables. Throughout this book, I will use the Jungle Books as a framework and central reference point, and as the prime example of the ‘imperial beast fable’. It is true that the Jungle Books have often been cited as the most flagrant examples of the anthropocentric misrepresentation of animals. Not only are Kipling’s animal characters too ‘human’ in their speech and demeanour, but also they are made allegorically to represent Indian native subjects, presenting the process of colonisation as one of domestication. As Jopi Nyman puts it, Kipling’s animal characters ‘appear to be too closely connected with the racialized native Other’; this simultaneously bestialises non-European humans and anthropomorphises nonhuman animals.28 Moreover, in celebrating the British Empire, Kipling is said to make the animals as they are disappear: ‘the potential Otherness of the animal is suppressed and the colonial animal abandoned to construct a national allegory’ (52). Imperial Beast Fables resists the common reading of the Jungle Books as an allegory of the Raj or the Empire, in which animals are made to symbolise humans or human ideologies. Instead, it attaches importance to the fact that they

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are written as a collection of fables, the genre which is traditionally set aside as a space in which nonhumans can speak. The Jungle Books, which draw on the Indian fable tradition, tell the stories of Mowgli the wolf-boy and his animal brothers, alongside the stories of other animals living in, or working for, the British Empire. Kipling represents nonhuman animals as important members of the Empire, and this can be seen to herald the twenty-first-century effort to rewrite imperial history by taking nonhuman agency and environmental and conservation issues seriously.29 Moreover, the Jungle Books replicate the interlocking narratives, or the ‘box within a box’ structure, which Oriental fable collections such as the Panchatantra and the Arabian Nights are famous for. This theme of proliferating boxes is a recurrent one in Imperial Beast Fables. Through it, I present the British Empire as a worldwide network of animal stories. Chapter 2, ‘Winged Tales: The Advent of the Imperial Beast Fable’, investigates the roles which non-European fables played in the making of the British Empire. It introduces the Jungle Books as the state fable of the British Empire, and relates them to another iconic reworking of the non-European beast fables: Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, which I characterise as a beast fable of post-Civil-War America. In both cases, the white settlers/colonisers are shown to be educated in the school of non-European fables in which animals, who welcome the colonisers, teach them the art of migration, transculturation and colonial appropriation. Chapter 3, ‘“Once Upon a Time when Animals Spoke”: Theories of the Beast Fable’, considers several contemporaneous theories of the beast fable. It shows different ways in which the genre provided a theoretical space in which controversial ideas such as the possibility of animal language were proposed and explored. The Darwinian idea of interspecies kinship is inseparably entwined with philological investigations into the origin of language, and we see humans intently listening to animal stories to determine who they were and where they came from. Chapter 4, ‘Into the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books ’, analyses Kipling’s beast fables as representations of the colonial practices of enclosing and exploiting nature. It consists of two parts, the first of which, ‘Stories of the Forest’, places Kipling’s jungle stories in the context of the early efforts of forest conservation in India. The second part, ‘Stories of the Sea’, shows how Kipling’s forest stories are connected with animal stories from other parts of the world through the Empire’s maritime activities. The ocean, control of which was key to the expansion and consolidation of Britain’s maritime empire, also emerges as a space of

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creaturely vulnerability and political resistance, in which Kipling allows a nonhuman storyteller to challenge man’s absolute dominion over nature, which is pushing many species to the verge of extinction. Chapter 5, ‘Kangaroo Notebook: Abe’s Metatherian Journey’, presents Europeans’ encounter with Australia, a land of unfamiliar animals such as kangaroos and platypuses, as a beast fable, or the scene of the unsettling colonial encounter. It critiques Thomas Huxley and other British scientists’ assumption that the Australian marsupials are inferior to European mammals. The chapter uses as a theoretical framework the Japanese author Kobo Abe’s novel and beast fable Kangaroo Notebook, which narrates its protagonist’s strange journey into an unknown world. Looking at Huxley’s journey through this lens inverts the Eurocentric order of things, in which non-European stories are always read according to European theories (but never vice versa), and allows us to explore other ways of telling animal stories. Chapter 6, ‘Animal Alphabets: Chesterton’s Dog, Browning’s Rats, Lear’s Blue Baboon’, argues that animal alphabets, or a combination of animals and letters (e.g. ‘A for Ass, B for Bull, C for Cow …’), is central to the modern beast fable. Drawing on texts such as The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes and G. K. Chesterton’s introduction to Æsop’s Fables, it argues that to master animal alphabets, and to learn to read (animals), became a key requirement in the education of the modern orderly citizen. The chapter contrasts these texts with a variety of literary works such as Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, and Edward Lear’s nonsense texts, which mark the moment when the societal order breaks down. Central to these texts is the figure of the musician/poet as a beast charmer, to whose music animals are irresistibly drawn. He is shown to be a dangerous character who dissolves the boundary between humans and nonhumans and joins them together in their animal movement, thereby opening up a space of nonsensical animal cosmopolitanism. The beast fable can be defined as a utopian space in which we can magically understand, or converse with, our animal companions with whom we do not otherwise share a common language. In Chapter 7, ‘Fabling Cosmopolitanism: The Ark Esperanto’, I liken the beast fable to Esperanto, one of many international languages constructed in the nineteenth century, when the rapid process of globalisation brought together people with different linguistic backgrounds, creating the need for a common language. Both the beast fable and Esperantism embody an

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alternative form of cosmopolitanism to the one created through the hegemony of European languages. In this spirit, I retell the story of Mowgli and Shere Khan the tiger through the real story of another Shere Khan, an Indian prince who, just like his namesake in the Jungle Books, was made politically speechless, and whose life was touched by the Esperanto movement. As I demonstrated in my discussion of Skinner’s anecdote, I conceive of the imperial beast fable as a box (or an enclosed space) which contains and showcases an animal (or animals). The human spectator or observer is incorporated as an integral part of the structure. Thus, the fable is particularly suited to capture the modern human-animal power relationship, which produces and displays so many caged or enclosed animals. Each of these modern enclosures opens up a space of the beast fable, or a theatre of man’s control over other animals. Importantly, the modern fable is characterised by a deep sense of nostalgia and loss, which John Berger identifies as the effect of looking at animals: ‘animals are always the observed…. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are’.30 At the same time, the very act of enclosing animals in ‘a box’, which separates us further from them, paradoxically provides a safe arena in which humans can dream of their kinship with other animals, not only as that which has irrevocably been lost, but also as an ecological vision of a possible future. Imperial Beast Fables critiques the notion of the fable as representing a purely anthropocentric enclosure by relating it to the imperialist logic of appropriating and othering the non-European world. In making this connection, I have been inspired by recent work in animal studies which draws on the power of animal storytelling to unsettle the dominant anthropocentric narrative which endangers our lives. For instance, Susan McHugh stresses the importance of interspecies storytelling in Indigenous oral traditions, which disrupt and unsettle the Eurowestern narrative of ‘total human domination’: this storytelling, which teaches us how to survive together, can be read as ‘a vibrant form of resistance to the forces of destruction’ that are putting at risk the diversity of species and cultures, teaching us how to survive together.31 Imperial Beast Fables seeks to make an important contribution to this recent re-evaluation of animal storytelling by focusing on the strategies of appropriating and silencing non-European animal voices which have their roots in nineteenth-century colonialism and globalisation. Europeans, in the process of collecting,

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translating and interpreting the local fables, could decide which animals were allowed to speak and to what end, and which animals needed to be eliminated to facilitate their settlement. Moreover, animals were mummified and reduced to the status of ancient or ‘dead’ objects of study, rather than being treated as a living and evolving tradition, and as fellow travellers. This book therefore seeks ways to help these animal stories out of the box to which they (and we) have been consigned. At the heart of the beast fable is the familiar opening phrase ‘once upon a time’, with which we are transported to the mythic time when animals spoke and conversed with us. The nineteenth century was a period when this magic phrase was given much power: it was able to open the door to the origin of human language, to our ‘bestial’ past, and to a wide variety of unfamiliar animals whom globalisation had brought into close proximity with us. Beast fables, considered by many to be the oldest form of literature, were thought to have retained the living voices of animals who ‘once upon a time’ conversed with our animal ancestors: the Victorians started thinking in terms of deep geological time, and the beast fable was an important part of this new planetary awareness. It has been proposed that folklore would be the most effective medium in which to communicate important information, such as the dangers of nuclear waste sites, to future generations, millennia from now.32 If folklore can be trusted to survive into such a distant future, we should pay more attention to beast fables, which the Victorians imagined to have reached us across deep time and perhaps across species lines. Just as the tapping sounds of Skinner’s rats alerted him to the harmful chemical his box was releasing, the beast fable, when carefully attended to, might have serious messages to pass on to us, which would aid us in the global environmental challenge which all species collectively face. Indeed, the fable, as the Roman fabulist Phaedrus puts it, comes with ‘a double dowry’: ‘it raises a laugh and is a stern and prudent guide to living’.33 And in this world of ecological crisis, a ‘stern and prudent guide to living’ is exactly what we need. Perhaps we can find it in those animals whom the folkloric tradition has appointed as our wise teachers.

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Notes 1. B. F. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist: Part Two of an Autobiography (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1979), 174. 2. Charles Scott Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 36–8. 3. ‘fable, n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 7 February 2020). 4. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist, 86. 5. B. F. Skinner, ‘The Rate of Establishment of a Discrimination’, Journal of General Psychology 9 (1933): 305. 6. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist, 86. 7. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 4. 8. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 65. 9. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1. Ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34. 10. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 37. 11. Naama Harel, ‘The Animal Voice Behind the Animal Fable’, Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7:2 (2009): 19. For other recent scholarship on the fable from an animal studies perspective, see, for instance, Joshua Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), Chapter 1: ‘Fables: On the Morals of Marianne Moore’s Animal Monologues’, 22–46; Sebastian Schönbeck, ‘Return to the Fable: Rethinking a Genre Neglected in Animal Studies and Ecocriticism’, in Frederike Middelhoff, Sebastian Schönbeck, Roland Borgards, and Catrin Gersdorf (eds), Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag KG, 2019), 111–25; Bruce Shaw, The Animal Fable in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010). Karen Edwards, Derek Ryan, and Jane Spencer (eds), Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (London: Routledge, 2020) has a strong emphasis on the fable, with two chapters on the genre: Carolynn Van Dyke, ‘Entities in the World: Intertextuality Entities in the World: Intertextuality in Medieval Bestiaries and Fables’, 13–28 (Chapter 1) and Jane Spencer, ‘Behn’s Beasts: Aesop’s Fables and Surinam’s Wildlife in Oroonoko’, 46–65 (Chapter 3). 12. John Hartigan Jr., Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 53.

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13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35:2 (2009): 197–222. 14. Hartigan, Aesop’s Anthropology, 47–52. See also John Hartigan Jr., Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Chapter 5, ‘Species Thinking: Calibrating Knowledge of Life Forms’. 15. Jeremy B. Lefkowitz, ‘Aesop and Animal Fable’, in Gordon Lindsay Campbell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16. 16. Christopher David Bird and Nathan John Emery, ‘Rooks Use Stones to Raise the Water Level to Reach a Floating Worm’, Current Biology 19 (25 August 2009): 1412. 17. See, for instance, Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 18. Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction 1859–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3. 19. Horst Dölvers, Fables Less and Less Fabulous: English Fables and Parables of the Nineteenth Century and Their Illustrations (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 92–3. 20. Chris Danta, Animal Fables After Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 21. J. H. Miller, ‘The Two Allegories’, in Morton W. Bloomfield (ed.), Allegory, Myth, and Symbol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 356. 22. For brilliant analyses of La Fontaine’s fable, see Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Louis Marin, Food for Thought. Trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), Part II, Section 5. 23. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 7. 24. John Simons, The Tiger That Swallowed the Boy: Exotic Animals in Victorian England (Faringdon: Libri Publishing, 2012), ix. 25. See, for instance, Ritvo, The Animal Estate; Part III ‘Animals and Empire’; Helen Cowie, Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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26. Considering his iconic status, it is remarkable that we know so little about Aesop the Greek fabulist, to the point that it has been suggested that he himself is a fable. The most trustworthy information we have on him comes from a short passage written by Herodotus, according to whom Aesop lived around 550 B.C., was a slave in Samos, and died at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi. There is no consensus as to where Aesop originally came from: ‘Thrace, Phrygia, Aethiopia, Samos, Athens and Sardis all claiming the honour’, and some believe that he was an African slave. Nevertheless, many stories have been told around this legendary figure as a master storyteller, locating the fable genre within the Western philosophical and literary tradition, which originates in Ancient Greece. [‘Aesop’, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), vol. 1, 276.] 27. Gert-Jan van Dijk, Ainoi, Logoi, Mythoi: Fables in Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek Literature: With a Study of the Theory and Terminology of the Genre (Leiden: Brill, 1997), xiii. 28. Jopi Nyman, Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2003), 52. 29. See, for instance, John Miller, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (London: Anthem Press, 2014); ‘Nonhuman Empires’, special issue edited by Rohan Deb Roy and Sujit Sivasundaram in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (2015): 66–173. For recent readings of the Jungle Books as the empire of nonhumans, see Shefali Rajamannar, Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Parama Roy, ‘Kipling’s Bestiary’, Victorian Literature and Culture 45 (2017): 821–37. 30. John Berger, About Looking (1980; London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009), 16. 31. Susan McHugh, Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 9, 1. 32. Thomas A. Sebeok, Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia (Columbus, OH: Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, Battelle Memorial Institute, 1984), discussed in Dennis Duncan, ‘Languages Lost in Time’, in Dennis Duncan, Stephen Harrison, Katrin Kohl, and Matthew Reynolds (eds), Babel : Adventures in Translation (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2019), 154–65. 33. Phaedrus, Fabulae Aesopia, 1, Prologus, quoted with a translation in J. P. Sullivan, ‘Form Opposed: Elegy, Epigram, Satire’, in A. J. Boyle (ed.), Roman Epic (London: Routledge, 1996), 151.

CHAPTER 2

Winged Tales: The Advent of the Imperial Beast Fable

R. Howard Bloch, in his article ‘The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables and State Formation’ (2004), postulates that ‘the fable tends to appear at crucial moments in the development of cities and courts, moments also associated with state formation in the West’.1 He illustrates this with a series of examples, which constitute an interesting history of the animal fable, paired with that of the rise of states and empires: in the sixth century BC with Aesop and the rise of the Greek city-state; in the first century AD with Phaedrus, Babrius, and Rome; in the ‘cosmopolitan culture’ of Charlemagne’s court with its imperial and Roman revival; in the Anglo-Norman empire that, under Henry I and especially Henry II, offers, in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’, a model for almost all that follows by way of centralized economic, judicial, and political institutions alongside the rise of the communes that on both sides of the Channel grew into what we think of as towns (in distinction, say, to the Italian city-state). And that also produced the first woman poet in French, the remarkable Marie de France, whose 103 fables are a conduit of the animal tale from the Classical world to that of the sixteenth-century Renaissance as well as the court of the Sun King and Lafontaine. Nor, really, is the crystallization of the fable at moments of state formation restricted to the West, for the Pancatantra, source of the Arabic Kalilah wa Dimnah, was contemporaneous with the rise in the fourth and fifth centuries of ancient Indian civil administration. (69–70)

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According to Bloch, the appearance of animal fables at times of state formation is no coincidence. They serve as allegories of new states, playing a special role in ‘the creation of urban space as well as state values and institutions’ (70), while capturing, by using animal metaphors, contemporaneous human anxieties and desires concerning changing social relations. Bloch draws attention to the ‘civilised’ nature of animal fables, ‘despite the predatory ethos of the animal world and despite the corruption and inefficiency of the animal court’ (78). Emphasising the motifs of peace, fairness and justice, animal fables seek to define new rules of conduct in the new regime. Fables can be seen as ‘a repositioning of the relationship between violence as a principle of social domination and speech as a means of social interaction at court’ (77). It is important that animals speak in fables, as such bestial speech is a sign, as well as a vital means, of the successful transition from war to peace—from brutality to humanity—as fables ‘show an insistence upon the socially adaptive uses of speech that are part and parcel of an increased awareness of the mediatory role of words – as opposed to the immediacy of violent conflict – in the redefinition of human relations that occurs within the space of town and court’ (77). If every state and empire, built in the wake of outbursts of unspeakable violence, requires animal fables to re-establish order and civility, it is natural that the British Empire, which extended its territory on an unprecedented scale through colonisation and mass migration, should have had its official fabulists and many animal fables. Indeed, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books can easily be added to Bloch’s list of animal fables corresponding to state formation. This work has been often interpreted as a thinly disguised allegory of British India, in which Mowgli the wolf-boy stands for the white coloniser, ruling over and befriending the jungle animals who represent different types of Indian subjects. Given Bloch’s emphasis on the importance of ‘speech’ to mitigate the violence of conflicts, it is no coincidence that the ability to speak civilly is highly valued in Mowgli’s jungle. As Kaa the Rock Python, impressed by Mowgli’s gracious words of gratitude, puts it, ‘A brave heart and courteous tongue. […] They shall carry thee far through the jungle, manling’.2 Moreover, the Jungle is ruled by codes of conduct called ‘the Law of the Jungle’, clearly representing the British Empire as a lawful space. With this alignment between state formation and animal fable in mind, this chapter will demonstrate that the Jungle Books ’ scope as a fable of

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state formation is much wider than a simple allegory of imperialism. Bloch, drawing mainly on the fables of Marie de France, the twelfthcentury fabulist, concludes that the fables of state formation are ‘not about man and beast at all, but about men and their representation as beasts’.3 By contrast, the Jungle Books belong to a new space of the fable, which was specifically organised around the changing relationship between man and beast. As Sujit Sivasundaram argues, since 1800, imperial projects, such as the science of race, ‘operated alongside, within, and against questions of animal difference and human-animal difference’; these differences, far from ‘[rigidifying] the human and nonhuman divide’, became the site of multiple transgressions, which involved ‘the material and disciplinary enmeshing of natural and human’.4 This collapse of the human-animal border in the nineteenth century coincided, or closely correlated, with the crossing of many other hitherto inviolable borders—spatial, temporal, racial, linguistic, as well as mythic—and this process was accelerated by European imperialism and rapid globalisation. The beast fable presented the British Empire as the intersection of these borders, and aided the colonisers in creating and negotiating new values and ideologies. In what follows, I will consider how non-European beast fables, ‘discovered’ in the colonial space, played a significant part in the making of the British Empire, taking late eighteenth-century British India as a starting point. Beast fables, given their simplicity, proved to be a vital tool for Europeans to employ in learning local languages, which facilitated the process of colonisation and settlement. Moreover, they came to embody the fast-expanding Empire, as their cosmopolitan nature—similar fables could be spotted all over the world—allowed scholars to speculate on their migratory paths, and the kinship between languages, peoples and animals in different parts of the world. I will place the Jungle Books within this global circuit of animal storytelling, alongside Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, another iconic fable of state formation, set in the Post-Civil War American South. Kipling’s modern Indian fables resonated with Harris’s collection of African American beast fables, as both drew inspiration and materials from the same network of non-European animal stories, whose energy and vitality the British Empire claimed as their own, and which also gave expression to the hegemony of Anglo-American imperialism. In my exploration of the roles of non-European beast fables in the long nineteenth century, I am conscious that this was by no means the

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first time the British had come in contact with non-European fables. As Ros Ballaster, in her Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (and also in her anthology, Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662–1785) documents, Oriental fables, such as the Arabian Nights and Pilpay’s Fables, were already available in translations from French versions of them in the eighteenth century, and had a huge impact on the British imagination.5 These fables did not merely serve to create and reinforce stereotypes of the Orient, such as Oriental despotism, luxury and sexuality; they also transported the delighted European readers to ‘other places, other times, other bodies, other species’, while offering ‘models of wisdom and rational order in oriental cultures for the West to emulate’.6 Srinivas Aravamudan, in his Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, similarly celebrates the importance of the ‘Orientalist beast fables’ in the Enlightenment period as an intercultural, interspecies and even ‘interplanetary’ mode of storytelling, which resisted the rise of the novel as a hegemonic and imperialist mode of narrating the world.7 Importantly, Ballaster calls her genealogy of the Oriental fable ‘preimperial’.8 Her books end with 1785, around which time the British attitude towards India, according to her, turned decidedly more ‘predatory’ and colonising; this also coincides with the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal by William Jones in 1784, which launched ‘a more rigorous and academic relationship with oriental languages, religions, and history than the previous century had seen’.9 This chapter starts where Ballaster left off, with the aim of exploring the new roles which nonEuropean fables came to assume. In lieu of second-hand translations from the French, the British now ‘discovered’ and had access to ‘original’ manuscripts of fables; moreover, the imaginary encounter with nonEuropean animals was replaced by one with real animals (both human and nonhuman). Fables continued to be an intercultural, interspecies, and even ‘interplanetary’ mode of storytelling, though their implications were significantly altered, as the new era of imperialism coincided with the breaking down, and reorganisation, of the borders between cultures, races and species; the ‘imperial’ beast fable came to embody these dynamic changes.

The School of Fables In The Renaissance of Islam (Die Renaissance des Islâms, 1922), the German orientalist Adam Mez gave a detailed portrayal of the flowering of the medieval Islamic Empire, in which he commented on the importance of foreign literature, especially ‘fresh translations from Persian and

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Indian’, in creating a cosmopolitan atmosphere by contributing to ‘the decline of pure Arab taste’ in the ninth century.10 The two most typical examples of such ‘foreign’ literature, according to Mez, are One Thousand and One Nights, ‘then called by their Persian title, “Thousand fables” (Hazar Afsan)’, and Kalilah wa Dimnah, the Arabic translation of the Persian version of the ancient Indian beast fables, the Panchatantra, popularly known as ‘The Fables of Bidpai (or of Pilpay)’. To illustrate ‘the new un-Arab style’ which these fables represented, Mez refers to a scathing remark by a famous eleventh-century poet, Al-Maarri, in whose opinion Kalilah wa Dimnah was ‘really meant for foreigners’ (253). Robert Irwin speculates that what Al-Maarri meant was that ‘the book was only good for foreigners trying to learn Arabic’: ‘Fables in written form may indeed have been used to teach the rudiments of Arabic letters to foreigners and children’.11 These ‘foreign’ fables played similar roles in the British Empire, connecting the British and Islamic Empires across time. Britain’s close involvement with India and other regions resulted in the discovery and translation into English of many Oriental texts. One Thousand and One Nights, packaged as the Arabian Nights ’ Entertainments in English translations and adaptations, became the most influential ‘Oriental’ text throughout the nineteenth century, cultivating a taste for exoticism and the wonder of far-away places. The Pilpay fables, with their short and easy compositions, proved again to be useful educational materials for ‘foreigners’: this time, the British and other European colonisers, wishing to master the languages of their newly acquired lands. In particular, the Hitopadesha, a later Sanskrit adaptation of the Panchatantra, became an essential guide for the study of this language of ancient India, highly treasured by Orientalist scholars as a key to philological research. As William Jones puts it, the Hitopadesha was ‘a charming book, and wonderfully useful to a learner of the language’.12 Jones (1746–1794), a pioneer of British Orientalism and an East India Company judge in Calcutta, is famous for laying the foundations of comparative philology by discovering striking similarities between Sanskrit and European languages such as Latin and Greek. He thereby postulated the existence of ‘some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’, from which all Indo-European languages were supposed to have derived.13 In light of Jones’s discovery, philological investigations were energetically made to determine the relationship between Europe and the ‘ancient’ non-European world, and to map out the historical development of mankind.

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The Fort William College in Calcutta, founded by the East India Company in 1800 to teach Oriental languages to young Indian administrators, produced vernacular translations of the Hitopadesha.14 The first ever Sanskrit book to be printed in Nagari letters was also the Hitopadesha,15 edited by William Carey, the missionary and professor at Fort William, ‘to promote and facilitate the study of the ancient and learned language of India’.16 Likewise, the Hitopadesha occupied the first two volumes of Longmans’s Handbooks for the Study of Sanskrit, designed to aid Indian Civil Service candidates and scholars of Oriental languages.17 These handbooks were edited by Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), the Oxford professor of comparative philology, originally from Germany, according to whom the Hitopadesha was ‘a work which, since the days of Sir William Jones, has been used as the textbook in all Colleges and Public Examinations’.18 Indeed, it is noteworthy that so many eminent Orientalists began their career by studying the Hitopadesha, starting with William Jones who translated it ‘merely as an exercise in learning Sanscrit’.19 Müller’s first book was a German translation of the Hitopadesha, which he published at the age of twenty and after only a few years of studying Sanskrit.20 Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), the British explorer famous for his unexpurgated translation of The Arabian Nights, also started his career as a translator by producing a literal translation of a Hindustani version of ‘Pilpay’s Fables’ when he was still a young soldier in India.21 Burton’s translation was not published during his lifetime, but it was intended to assist the young scholar of Oriental languages in acquiring ‘a sufficient stock of words, idioms and phrases, together with the knowledge of Oriental manners, customs and modes of thinking, necessary to enable him to attempt other and more classical works’.22 It was as if British Orientalism emerged out of the world of talking animals, being trained in, to quote Edwin Arnold, another translator of the Hitopadesha, ‘the wit, the morality, and the philosophy of these “beasts of India”’.23 Burton suggests the use of Aesop’s fables as a next step to further linguistic study.24 This had already been attempted by John Gilchrist (1759–1841), the professor of Hindustani at Fort William College, who published The Oriental Fabulist (1803), a polyglot translation of Aesop fables into a selection of Indian vernaculars and classic languages. In his preface, Gilchrist argues that the surest way to improve one’s proficiency in a foreign language is to translate into that language and ask a native speaker to check the translation—if ‘he be lucky enough to meet with a man

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of honesty and candour, sufficient to disclose his mistakes’; by using his book, Europeans could check their own translations of an Aesop fable, and thereby avoid the embarrassment of ‘committing too many blunders’ before Indian natives.25 The implications of the fact that the beast fable was used to facilitate colonial translation are numerous. To start with, this aided Jones in making his monumental linguistic discovery, which defined the course of Oriental studies and accelerated the translation of non-European worlds into texts to be read, studied and appropriated—the process which Edward Said describes as Orientalism.26 Padma Rangarajan, in her book Imperial Babel : Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (2014), discusses the way in which translations of Oriental texts, including so-called ‘pseudotranslations’, were typically presented as ‘oriental spectacle[s]’, the accuracy of which as ‘oriental reality’ needed to be ‘[authenticated] through often-elaborate paratexts’, such as extensive scholarly footnotes.27 Translations of beast fables were also accompanied by many paratexts, such as long contextualising introductions and references to similar fables in other cultures. Having said that, they tended to have fewer footnotes than other translated texts, as animal fables are often devoid of culturally specific words upon which to comment. Indeed, they assert their authenticity not through layers of paratexts, but by the fact that they need little explanation to be understood. The shortness and simplicity of the fable means that it makes the task of colonial translation appear easy and attainable, inevitably suggesting the governability of the colonies. The fable’s simple lessons, applicable to both worlds, also reinforced the impression that these worlds had much in common, and animals, with their supposed universality, helped to create this impression: as noted by a friend of the philologist Wilhelm Bleek, ‘the natural propensities of animals in all parts of the world being so much alike, Fables intended to portray them must also be expected to resemble each other greatly, even to their very details’.28 Indeed, the characteristic translatability of the fable makes it an excellent example of ‘world literature’, which David Damrosch suggests is defined by its translatability and worldwide circulation.29 Furthermore, the process of translating beast fables made the coloniser a kind of naturalist, as he or she had to consider the correspondence between European and Indian animals. For instance, John Gilchrist, who did not ‘hold [himself] very responsible for the accuracy of the words used to express a bramble, crane, &C.’ in his polyglot translation of

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Aesop’s Fables, nevertheless looked for the best words to translate them; for instance: ‘After much enquiry, we have preferred jhur beree to express a bramble in page 2, though well aware of its being rather a sort of wild plum’.30 William Jones, in one of his letters, writes of how he and his wife, who had settled in a ‘retired spot’ in Bengal, are ‘literally lulled to sleep by Persian nightingales, and cease to wonder, that the Bulbul, with a thousand tales, makes such a figure in Oriental poetry’.31 This is another example of how Oriental fables helped Europeans to observe and appreciate the wildlife which they encountered in real life. Curiously, however, Jones here is hearing ‘Persian’ nightingales, celebrated as ‘the bird of a thousand songs’,32 in India. This is very different from the experience of James Forbes (1749–1819), a British painter who worked for the East India Company before Jones’s time (he also painted a picture of the Indian Bulbul): ‘it has a pleasing wild note, but I never heard one that possessed the charming variety of the English nightingale, or serenaded us with its nocturnal melody’.33 According to the British zoologist Thomas C. Jerdon in his The Birds of India (1862–1864), ‘the name of Bulbul, by which the most common species are known in India, being the Persian name for the Nightingale, has led to many misconceptions about their powers of voice and song’: the Indian bulbuls ‘have a chirruping call or warble, which seldom could be called a song’.34 That is to say, the Bulbul who serenaded William Jones could have been a product of his imagination, or the transposition of what he knows about the Orient onto the Indian reality. In this episode, it is no coincidence that the Joneses are alone with the serenading nightingales. Fables, featuring animals as their main characters, had the effect of immediately removing the native ‘human’ subject from view, despite the fact that native scholars and informants were instrumental in sourcing and translating these stories. This made it easier for the colonisers to settle in, and make connections with, a new landscape. Importantly, Jones’s reference to Persian nightingales occurs immediately after his description of his pet sheep: ‘among all our pets, are two large English sheep, which came with us from Spithead, and, having narrowly escaped the knife, are to live as long and as happily with us as they can; they follow us for bread, and are perfectly domestic’.35 The two sheep, who were carried aboard the ship to India as food but escaped being eaten, are now at the heart of the English home which the Joneses are setting up in India. The song of ‘Persian nightingales’, taken from

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Oriental fables, beautifies this English establishment. Fable animals, therefore, helped Europeans to feel at home in the colonies. The role of beast fables in assisting successful settlement, however, differed from ‘acclimatisation’, or the practice of introducing and cultivating European fauna and flora in colonies to ‘[convert] alien landscapes into homelike ones’.36 If acclimatisation aimed to anglicise and thereby ‘improve’ the foreign land,37 beast fables embody the exoticism of non-European fauna and flora, while making them more accessible to the white Masters, who came to settle among them. From Jones’s letter, we also know that the family later obtained ‘a tiger about a month old, who is suckled by a goat’.38 Such episodes would inevitably lead to household beast fables. In this context, the Jungle Books can be read as an allegory of how the ‘stranger’—i.e. the British coloniser—was taught in the colonial school of the fables. In ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, we see Baloo the bear take personal charge of teaching Mowgli the Law of the Jungle, which involves intensive language learning. Mowgli, like many British colonisers, proves himself to be an exceptional linguist: ‘The jungle has many tongues. I know them all’.39 The similarity between Mowgli and the coloniser, however, goes beyond their ability to learn the languages of the host culture. Mowgli starts with learning ‘the Strangers’ Hunting Call’ (26), used to ask permission to hunt outside one’s own grounds. Mowgli the stranger soon becomes privy to ‘the Master Words of the Jungle’, which ‘shall protect him with the birds and the Snake-People, and all that hunt on four feet, except his own pack’ (26). On the one hand, spoken in each species’s distinct language, the Master Words work like a secret password, and only a select few, such as Hathi the Elephant, have the knowledge of the Master Words of other species than their own. On the other hand, as Christie Harner puts it, the Master Words are designed to foster ‘crossspecies collaboration’.40 The Master Words, in each species’ language, mean ‘We be of one blood, ye and I’,41 which perfectly captures the spirit of comparative philology that seeks to establish the kinship between different nations and a common origin among them through the study of their languages; beast fables extend this linguistic kinship to other species, despite many philologists’ belief that nonhuman animals lack language, as we will see in Chapter 3. Mowgli, taught and armed with all the Master Words, can thereby force all the Jungle animals to offer him protection in their territories. Arguably, such a use of the Master language is a violation of hospitality, in that the stranger’s plea for protection, to be answered ethically by the host, becomes replaced with a command to be obeyed.

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Mowgli’s entry into the jungle enacts the reversal of the host-guest relationship, which parallels that of the colonial encounter and subsequent colonisation.42

Migration of the Beast Fable The first English translation of the Hitopadesha (1787) from its original Sanskrit was by Charles Wilkins (1749–1836), William Jones’s friend and another pioneer of British Indology, who also worked for the East India Company. Wilkins’s translation was inspired by, and makes references to, Jones’s lecture, ‘The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindu’, delivered on 2 February 1786 at the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In this lecture, Jones portrays the Hitopadesha as ‘the most beautiful, if not the most ancient, collection of apologues [moral fables] in the world’, and comments that ‘as the very existence of Aesop, whom the Arabs believed to have been an Abyssinian, appears rather doubtful, I am not disinclined to suppose, that the first moral fables, which appeared in Europe, were of Indian or Ethiopian origin’.43 Just like Sanskrit, fables such as those in the Hitopadesha were regarded as key philological evidence, and Jones encouraged others to follow in the footsteps of the fabulous ‘animals’, which had travelled long distances alongside their human companions. The Panchatantra, from which many variants, including the Hitopadesha, descended, is an ancient collection of Indian animal fables, attributed to a learned Brahman, Vishnu Sharma. According to Patrick Olivelle, the date of its composition is uncertain, though the scholarly consensus puts the date around the third century BC.44 As the title (‘Five Chapters’ or ‘Five Treatises’) indicates, it consists of five books, and each of these contains interwoven animal fables. These books are framed further by one outer story, in which Sharma is revealed as the narrator, who tells the stories in order to educate the sons of an Indian Raja. According to Burton, the Panchatantra, generally known to Europeans as ‘the Fables of Pilpay’, signified ‘the rude beginning of that fictitious history’, which not only ‘ripened to the Arabian Nights ’ Entertainments ’, but also influenced the development of the novel, ‘that prose-epic of modern Europe’45 : These tales, detached, but strung together by artificial means – pearls with a thread drawn through them – are manifest precursors of the Decamerone, or Ten Days … Many of the ‘Novelle’ are, as Orientalists well know, to this

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day sung and recited almost textually by the wandering tale-tellers, bards, and rhapsodists of Persia and Central Asia. (xiv–xv)

The Panchatantra is predated by the Jâtakas , another ancient collection of beast fables, said to be dated around the fourth century BC. It collects Jâtakas, or Birth stories, each of which tells a former life of the Buddha in animal or human form. Just as in the case of the Panchatantra, it is impossible to determine the exact date of origin as both largely draw on the oral tradition: E. B. Cowell, the general editor of the comprehensive translation of the Jâtakas (1895–1907), containing 550 birth stories, commented that ‘many are pieces of folk-lore which have floated about the world for ages as the stray waifs of literature’.46 Theodor Benfey, a German philologist and Orientalist, in the introduction to his German translation of the Panchatantra (1859),47 proposed that India was the origin of all stories: ‘Stories and especially folktales turn out to be primordially Indian … My research in the field of fables, folktales, and stories of the East and West has led me to the conviction that only a few fables, but a great number of folktales and stories from India, have been disseminated almost over the whole world’.48 This ‘Indian’ theory became widely accepted throughout the nineteenth century. Intriguingly, Benfey makes a distinction between Indian fables and Western ‘Aesopic’ fables: according to him in the Aesopean fables, ‘animals are allowed to act as animals’, while Indian ones ‘make them act as men in form of animals’.49 In the Indian beast fables, the border between humans and nonhumans is porous, which Benfey attributes to the Indian concept of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul from one body to another.50 The fact that Benfey saw Indian fables as a representation not simply of animals, but of a mixture of humans and animals, is significant. Wendy Doniger calls this mode of representing animals, prevalent in Ancient India, ‘zoomorphism’, which involves imagining ‘humans as animals’.51 This contrasts strikingly with ‘anthropomorphism’, or the act of ‘projecting human qualities upon animals’, which ‘tells us comparatively little about animals’ (350). As such, the Indian beast fables can then be seen as a powerful alternative to anthropocentrism. Interestingly, nineteenth-century philologists were aware of the biocentric implications of the Indian beast fable. For instance, Joseph Jacobs, another believer in the Indian origin of fables, declared: ‘the Hindoos were Darwinists long before Darwin, and

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regarded beasts as cousins of men and stages of development in the progress of the soul through the ages’.52 In Britain, the theory of the Indian origin of stories was popularised by Max Müller, according to whom ‘it is extremely likely that fables, in particular animal fables, had their principal source in India’.53 In his lecture entitled ‘On the Migration of Fables’ (1870), he describes the ‘story of the migration of these Indian fables from East to West’ as ‘more wonderful and more instructive than many of these fables themselves’ (151). Drawing on La Fontaine’s admission that he ‘[owes] the largest portion of [his new fables] to Pilpay, the Indian sage’ (146), Müller traces the migration of a Panchatantra story ‘Brahman and the Pot of Rice’ from India to France, ‘through Persia by way of Bagdad and Constantinople’ (158), to the point that it becomes La Fontaine’s fable ‘The Milkmaid and the Pot of Milk’. In describing the migration of fables across centuries, places and languages, Müller metaphorically gives them agency. In one place, fables are likened to travellers, whose movement can be traced by checking their travel documents: ‘We have the passport of these stories visé’d at every place through which they have passed, and, as far as I can judge, parfaitement en règle’ (150–1). Fables are also ‘like precious seed scattered broadcast all over the world, still [bearing] fruit a hundred and a thousand fold’ (151) by being sown in the soul of each child. Without knowing it, we are taught and shaped by the ‘wise words, spoken a thousand, nay, two thousand years ago, in a lonely village of India’, and act as the carriers and transmitters of these same words by telling and retelling the fables to our children (151). Of course, the Indian origin of fables is not the only theory that can explain the similarity between two fables in different parts of the world, and the dominance of this theory was challenged by other explanations. For instance, Richard Francis Burton proposed an African origin of the fable: ‘Africa is the old home of the Beast-fable, because Egypt was the inventor of the alphabet, the cradle of letters, the preacher of animism and metempsychosis, and, generally, the source of all human civilisation’.54 However, despite their differences regarding the origin of the fable, scholars were in agreement that there was a history of constant cultural interactions between peoples, languages and locations, which made the migration of fables possible. As Isaac D’Israeli puts it, All tales have wings, whether they come from the east or the north, and they soon become denizens wherever they alight. Thus it has happened

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that the tale which charmed the wandering Arab in his tent, or cheered the northern peasant by his winter-fire, alike held on its journey towards England and Scotland.55

Burton, likely drawing on this very passage, similarly says, ‘Tales have wings and fly farther than the jade hatchets of proto-historic days’.56 Fables, with their ‘wings’, emerged in this period as particularly ‘cosmopolitan’, like birds or animals who do their best to adapt, multiply, proliferate and survive, willing to become denizens of wherever they are welcomed. It is this fabular animal whose movement and example Europeans eagerly followed, becoming ‘denizens of wherever they alight’, to devastating effect for many non-European nations and communities across the world.

Nights with Brer Rabbit Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) is a collection of African American beast fables featuring the famous trickster Brer Rabbit, which were recorded and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), an American writer and journalist.57 According to Harris, each story came ‘fresh and direct from the negroes’ in the Southern states of America, and none of them are ‘cooked’ (i.e. altered).58 Harris is said to have started collecting these stories after reviewing William Owens’s journal article, ‘Folklore of the Southern Negroes’ (1877).59 He found this article ‘remarkable for what it omits rather than for what it contains’,60 which he attributed to Owens’s poor grasp of the African American dialects and his unreliable recording of stories. In contrast, African American folklore was an integral part of Harris’s childhood spent in the plantation, where he nightly visited his black friends in the slave quarters. As Julia Collier Harris, his daughter-in-law, describes in her biography of him, ‘the boy [Harris] unconsciously absorbed their fables and their ballads, and the soft elisions of their dialect and the picturesque images of their speech left an indelible imprint upon the plastic tablets of his memory’.61 Uncle Remus is framed by the story of an eponymous fictional character: an old servant, former slave and, above all, an excellent storyteller. He tells his animal fables to a child of his white master night after night, nostalgically capturing Harris’s fond memories of childhood and what were for him the ‘good old days’ of slavery. Notably, Uncle Remus’s speeches and stories are written in dialect. For instance, the opening story,

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depicting the first of many attempts which Brer Fox unsuccessfully makes to catch Brer Rabbit, ends with this remark: ‘En Brer Fox ain’t never kotch’im yit, en w’at’s mo’, honey, he ain’t gwineter’.62 This makes the text difficult to read till one gets used to it, as it visually and aurally captures the narrator’s racial otherness as non-standard English; however, the distinct voices of the African Americans were for Harris an integral part of the stories, and also of ‘the domestic history of every Southern family’. As Harris writes in his introduction: my purpose has been to preserve the legends themselves in their original simplicity, and to wed them permanently to the quaint dialect – if, indeed, it can be called a dialect – through the medium of which they have become a part of the domestic history of every Southern family; and I have endeavored to give to the whole a genuine flavor of the old plantation.63

Uncle Remus and the second volume of the series, Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), both feature introductions by Harris, emphasising the anthropological importance of ‘Negro folklore’. However, Florence Baer calls him an ‘Accidental Folklorist’ as he knew little about the discipline when he started collecting his stories.64 To Harris’s surprise, he received a flood of communications from experts and authorities of folklore about the ethnological import of the ‘Uncle Remus’ tales, and this prompted him quickly to turn himself into an amateur folklorist. Indeed, the publication of the Uncle Remus stories instantly sparked intense speculation as to their origin and transmission.65 For Joseph Jacobs, for instance, Harris’s ‘Wonderful Tar-Baby Story’ was a perfect example to substantiate the theory of the Indian origin of the fable, as it shows a striking parallel with the Jâtaka story known as ‘The Demon with the Matted Hair’, in which the future Buddha becomes stuck with a Demon’s matted hair66 : [this story] must have passed from India to Africa with Hindoo merchants or Arab slave-traders, must then have crossed Equatorial Africa before Livingstone or Stanley, then took ship in the hold of a slaver across the Atlantic and found a home in the log-cabins of South Carolina. (xlv–xlvi)

Jacobs then concludes: ‘No wonder Brer Rabbit was so ’cute, since he is thus shown to be an incarnation of the Buddha himself’ (xlvi). Similarly, the ‘Tar-baby’ story was also reported to have variants among ‘the Indians of North America, the natives of the West Indian Islands, the

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Indian tribes of Brazil, the natives of Cape Colony, amongst the Bushmen, amongst the tribes of the lower Congo, in West Central Africa, amongst the Hottentots’,67 each of which could represent a possible origin or a path of diffusion of the story. There were also some who believed that a number of the Uncle Remus stories were originally told to the slaves by their white masters or mistresses, on the ground that they can be traced back to European medieval folklore, such as the tales of Reynard the Fox.68 This is an interesting take on the transmission theory, in that it identifies both the white Europeans’ and the black Americans’ paths of migration as contributing factors in the formation of the African American folklore. Julia Collier Harris asserts that her father-in-law never ‘[got] lost in the complicated mazes of ethnic or philologic investigation’, as he joined in the British and American Folk-Lore Societies and stocked his library with ‘the folklore of different nations’.69 However, the folklore study into which he ventured was a highly researched and competitive field, and Harris scholars speculate that he gradually ‘lost confidence’ in his ability to research,70 and became ‘somewhat fatigued by the flurry of folkloristic commentary that his stories had generated’.71 He stopped publishing new Uncle Remus stories after Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and his 1903 novel Wally Wanderoon and his Story-Telling Machine is often presented as his final answer to the whole debate. Wanderoon’s ‘storytelling machine’ is a professional storyteller caged in a cupboard-like box, who turns out to be a folklorist ‘taught in different schools’.72 When given the opportunity, he tries to show off his knowledge and expertise: ‘I would like to tell the story first, and then give you my idea of its relation to oral literature, and its special relation to the unity of the human race’ (180). To such attempts, Wanderoon would irritably exclaim: ‘We want no prefaces, and no footnotes; we don’t care where the story comes from. What am I feeding you for?’ (32). It is as if he finally settled for the literary value of storytelling over any scientific explanations of it. Harris nevertheless threw himself into the scholarly debate, in which he emerged as a passionate campaigner for the African origin of his stories. Among Harris’s correspondents was John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), the founding director of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, who wrote to Harris to inform him that ‘some of Uncle Remus’s stories appear in a number of different languages, and in various modified forms, among the [American] Indians’, adding his opinion that ‘they are borrowed by the negroes from the red-men’.73

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Harris publically refuted Powell’s theory, and made clear his view that the stories did come from Africa with black slaves, and that it is more likely that ‘the Indians borrowed their stories from the negroes’.74 In Nights with Uncle Remus , he even introduces a native African character called ‘Daddy Jack’, who was sold to the Georgia Sea Islands when he was twenty years old.75 By making him another storyteller, and contrasting his dialect and stories with those of Uncle Remus, Harris reinforced his theory of the African origin of the tales, while highlighting the long journey which both Africans and their stories had had to make to be told in the American South.76 Harris’s use of African American folklore in Uncle Remus has often been criticised as a blatant example of white cultural appropriation. For instance, Alice Walker famously decries: ‘[Harris] stole a good part of my heritage. How did he steal it? By making me feel ashamed of it. In creating Uncle Remus, he placed an effective barrier between me and the stories that meant so much to me’.77 Ironically, Harris made the case for the African origin of the Uncle Remus stories, and thereby safeguarded the African Americans’ entitlement to their heritage, at a time when such a claim could not be taken for granted. Yet, he did so to safeguard his entitlement to the African American stories. This is evident in the fact that Harris, despite his view that the tales were of African origin, instructed his illustrator to use local animals as the models for his animal characters: ‘The fox of the stories is the gray fox – not the red. The rabbit is the common American hare. The bear is the small species of black bear common in portions of Georgia and Florida’.78 Harris’s fabulous animals inhabit the landscape of the Southern Plantation of Harris’s childhood, which is connected with other locations through the migration of the fables. Although an American text, Uncle Remus can fittingly be called an imperial beast fable, especially because of the way in which the white masters drew on the fables of a subjugated people to narrate their own history. Just as the songs of textual nightingales are heard in William Jones’s bedroom in Bengal, lulling him and his wife to sleep, so the voices of Brer Rabbit and his friends fill Uncle Remus’s cabin, which the white boy nightly visits. Even where the power of native storytellers was curtailed as a result of colonisation and oppression, animal characters speak on their behalf to issue a heartfelt welcome to the white masters.

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New Aesops: Imperial Beast Fables It is interesting to think that the founding myth of Rome loosely connects Harris’s Southern plantation Folklore and Kipling’s Jungle Books. The name ‘Uncle Remus’ inevitably evokes the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, who are said to have been reared by a wolf,79 and the hero of the Jungle Books, Mowgli, is a wolf-child, raised among the wolf pack. Both are animal fables of ‘state formation’, creating fresh myths for their new nations (for Harris, the new America after the Civil War and for Kipling, the flowering British Empire). They do so by drawing on folkloric and ethnological materials from non-European worlds—one of the major spoils of the European colonisation of the rest of the world. Despite the fact that there was an explosion of talking animals during the nineteenth century, Kipling and Harris were singled out, and frequently mentioned together as two master tellers of animal stories. According to an early reviewer of the Jungle Books: To make animals think and talk is no new idea. Æsop did it first … Quite recently Mr. Joel Chandler Harris delighted the world with Uncle Remus, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling comes to complete the triumvirate. These three names stand out pre-eminent as the story-tellers of the animals – Æsop, Harris, and Kipling – and the greatest of these is Kipling.80

Both Kipling and Harris are, then, hailed as new Aesops, and Harris’s Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories after Dark (1889), one of his collections of Uncle Remus tales, was reprinted in 1896 as the companion volume to Kipling’s Jungle Books.81 As a book review in the Richmond Dispatch puts it, ‘Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox are elder brothers of Baloo, the Bear, and Bagheera, the Panther, despite the fact that the first two saw the light in the New World, and the latter came from the hoary jungles of India. And surely Uncle Remus is akin to Mowgli. Like the foundling of the Seeonee Wolf Pack, Uncle Remus knows the master words of the beasts in his domain’.82 Moreover, readers immediately perceived that the Jungle Books were a modern reworking of the folkloric materials known as the ‘beast fable’, which ethnologists and folklorists, including Harris, were passionately collecting all over the world. For instance, the Chambers’s Encyclopaedia’s entry (1888) on ‘Beast-fables’ defines the genre as ‘stories in which animals play human parts, a widely-spread primitive form of literature, often surviving in more or less developed forms in the more

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advanced civilisations’, and refers to the animal fables collected in Uncle Remus as the best example of the genre.83 In the 1901 edition of the Encyclopaedia, the Jungle Books (1894–1895) was added to the article’s list of suggested further reading, alongside recent ethnological researches on the topic.84 The two works were similarly cited side by side in the entry on ‘The Fable’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910): The fable has its origin in the universal impulse of men to express their thoughts in concrete images, and is strictly parallel to the use of metaphor in language. It is the most widely diffused if not the most primitive form of literature. Though it has fallen from its high place it still survives, as in J. Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book.85

Fascinatingly, Harris was among the first to perceive in the Jungle Books a primitive, mythic quality, characteristic of the beast fable. In 1895, in a review of The Second Jungle Book for the Christmas edition of The Book Buyer, he praised Kipling’s tales for their singular ability to capture the imagination by ‘[going] to the source of things without prelude or preliminary flourish’: Now, as of old, the elemental in man rhymes with the elemental in all things else, and Mr. Kipling’s genius touches the center of it all with a swing, a vigor, and a fearlessness that cannot be matched in modern literature. … Since the days of Uncle Æsop the animals have been parading about and making speeches, sometimes feebly and sometimes to good purpose; but never have they been caught in the act, as it were, by a more facile or a stronger hand than in these jungle tales.86

Harris, through the reference to ‘Uncle Æsop’, places Kipling, and by implication himself, firmly in the tradition of beast fables, while acknowledging Kipling’s achievement in elevating the genre into a ‘new order of tale-telling’: if ‘the myths that belong to India sometimes drag along and, for the most part, have the desultory vagueness of stories that are preserved only by passing from mouth to mouth’, Kipling by the ‘resetting or rebuilding of a myth … has made it entirely his own by transforming that which was without life into a living, breathing, moving piece of literature that lifts itself above and beyond the reach of imitation’, as can be most typically seen in his use of folklore material in ‘How Fear Came’.87 It is clear that Harris saw the Jungle Books as being engaged in

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the same mission which he himself had undertaken, namely, the preservation and elevation of myth in literary form. Moreover, Harris humorously describes the function of the beast fable as ‘catching animals in the act’ of speaking. It is as if we have found ways to hear animals speak through our engagement with fables, rather than, as is commonly supposed, imposing human speech onto them. Kipling was overjoyed with this complementary review by Harris, especially because his ‘debt to [Harris] is of long standing’.88 In his thank-you letter to Harris, which reads more like a fan letter, Kipling recounts how ‘the sayings of the noble beasties’ from Uncle Remus, which was then a bestseller, ‘ran like wild fire through an English public school when [he] was about fifteen’. The book ‘had got mixed in with the fabric of old school life’, and he and one of his old schoolmates ‘found [themselves] quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus’ when they met in India as grownups.89 Kipling later fictionalised this schoolday experience in one of his Stalky & Co. stories, ‘The United Idolaters’ (1924), in which the children for a period talk to each other like the characters in Uncle Remus, and divide themselves into two tribes to set up a fight, one under the banner of ‘Tar Baby’ and the other ‘Brer Terrapin’.90 In writing the Jungle Books, Kipling, just like La Fontaine, was fully aware of his indebtedness to the tradition of the Indian beast fables, dating back to the Jâtaka tales and the Panchatantra. For instance, ‘“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”’, a mongoose story in The Jungle Book, is said to have been inspired by ‘The faithful Mongoose’ (also known as ‘The Brahmin and the Mongoose’) in the Panchatantra.91 Kipling therefore strongly objected to the American writer Brander Matthews’s suggestion that ‘The King’s Ankus’, in which Mowgli witnesses men killing each other to obtain a jewelled elephant goad, was a reworking of Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’.92 In his letter to Matthews, he emphasises that he was familiar with an Indian version of the same story, from which he directly took his inspiration: ‘I don’t remember when I didn’t know the tale. Got it I suppose as a fairy tale from my nurse in Bombay’.93 Moreover, he evokes the time-honoured tradition of the Indian beast fables—‘the fables of Pilpay or anything [one] can find that is more than 8,000 B.C.’—to which Chaucer was nothing but ‘a parvenu’ (176). ‘The King’s Ankus’ is similar to a Jâtaka tale called ‘The Robbers and the Treasure’ (‘VedabbhaJâtaka’),94 and as far as Kipling is concerned, Chaucer borrowed from the same Indian source. Also, in his 1895 letter to Edward Everett Hale, an

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American author, thanking him for his praise of The Jungle Book, Kipling wrote: The idea of beast-tales seems to me new in that it is a most ancient and long forgotten idea. The really fascinating tales are those that the Bodhisat tells of his previous incarnations ending always with the beautiful moral. Most of the native hunters in India today think pretty much along the lines of an animal’s brain and I have ‘cribbed’ freely from their tales.95

Kipling here describes the idea of the beast fable as ‘new’, precisely because it is ‘a most ancient and long forgotten idea’, and he goes on to refer to ‘the native hunters in India today’ as the bearers of both the tales and animal brains. In the beast fables, the primitive intersects with, and indeed becomes, modernity, through the act of storytelling and the anthropological gaze towards the primitive savages. Kipling, through his innovative rewriting of the beast fable tradition, wove a new fiction of the British Empire as the meeting of different spaces. At the heart of these beast fables, in Kipling’s description of them, we find a non-European who crosses and mediates the human-animal divide, be it Buddha through his many beastly incarnations, or the native hunters who think like animals. Both the Jungle Books and Uncle Remus centre on such a figure, who has an excellent understanding of the animal world. Importantly, Mowgli is a wolf-child, through whom Kipling adds to the native lore of India: as John Lockwood Kipling puts it, ‘India is probably the cradle of wolf-child stories’.96 Kipling must have been familiar with ‘An Account of Wolves nurturing Children in their Dens’ (1852) by the British official and administrator William Henry Sleeman, which records several cases of the wolf-child in India.97 As Daniel Karlin points out, this report reinforces the stereotype of wolf-children as ‘dumb, savage, filthy and wretched’, which Mowgli is the complete opposite of.98 Moreover, it makes many references to their inability to be taught to speak, consolidating the idea that language represents the border between humanity and animality. Kipling, by endowing his feral child with an exceptional power of speech, highlights Mowgli’s ability to overcome, and cross freely, such a border. In Uncle Remus, the eponymous storyteller speaks as animals as he ventriloquises Brer Rabbit and other animal characters. This animality is visually captured in Harris’s transcription of Remus’s African American dialect, which, as I suggested above, marks him also as a racial Other. Issues such as the human/nonhuman divide, race and

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language mix together in the fable, as the figure of talking animals blurs the border between myth and reality. Indeed, in light of the contemporaneous anthropological discourses, which equate non-Europeans with the origin of humanity or with nonhuman animals, the migration of the fable from India (or other ‘primitive’ locations) to Europe was nothing but the journey of human evolution from animality to humanity, or from the primordial past to European modernity. The nineteenth-century fables of state formation took the form of collecting and appropriating folkloric and ethnological materials found in the non-European space. These animal fables became important building blocks of the new Empire: the Jungle Books present this Empire as a network of beast fables, in each of which animals teach, support and welcome the colonisers in their colonial home away from the English Home, while Uncle Remus, as the collection of migrant African fables, played a great part in mythologising the American history of slavery. And, furthermore, the two pioneering modern beast fables represent transatlantic connections. If many of the Uncle Remus tales were imagined to have come from India or other British colonies, the Jungle Books were written while Kipling was in America, newly wed to an American and hoping to settle there. Each Jungle Book features one ‘American’ story (‘The White Seal’ and ‘Quiquern’, respectively), showing the New World as part of the imperial network. This transatlantic linkage also foreshadowed the fact that the fable animals would increasingly, and worryingly, speak in English. Last but not least, there is another significant reference which weaves together Uncle Remus and the Jungle Books in a network of Oriental fables. One of the Uncle Remus stories begins thus: ‘One evening when the little boy, whose nights with Uncle Remus are as entertaining as those Arabian ones of blessed memory…’.99 This is a clear reference to the Arabian Nights , which indicates that Uncle Remus is another Scheherazade, whose nightly storytelling captivates the king. This association is further strengthened by the title of his second book Nights with Uncle Remus. Thus, Southern African American fables, through Harris’s use of the frame narrative, were woven into the structure of the Oriental fable collection, famous for its format of stories within stories; the Jungle Books follow the same tradition by featuring an outer frame narrative which brings together the stories within. As an engaged listener of Uncle Remus’s animal fables, Harris’s white boy occupies the same privileged position as the sons of the Indian King in the Panchatantra, to whom

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Vishnu Sharma, the Indian sage, tells his animal fables to educate them. Harris is allowing white America to be educated by the black American through his telling of animal fables. Much has been written about the political and subversive power of the fable tradition. For instance, Annabel Patterson, tracing the tradition of Aesopic writing, argues that the fable is ‘a medium of political analysis and communication, especially in the form of a communication from or on behalf of the politically powerless’: it ‘speaks to unequal power relationships’ and seeks to ‘emancipate’ the powerless through ‘wit’ and coded commentaries.100 The African American folklore collected in Uncle Remus is a perfect example of such powerlessness being made to speak politically, as the hero of Uncle Remus is, as Harris himself notes, ‘the weakest and most harmless of all animals’, i.e. the rabbit, who successfully outwits powerful opponents such as the wolf, the fox and the bear.101 To quote a contemporaneous review of the book, the ‘moral’ of Uncle Remus is ‘the triumph of the weaker over the stronger’.102 Or, as Joyce Hope Scott, in her article on the political power of the African American animal tale, puts it, the black narrator ‘will go on to “invert” the master’s definition of himself as “omnipotent administrator” and creator of “civilization” by showing that the rabbit can wreak havoc on his entire system’.103 According to Henry Louis Gates in his seminal book The Signifying Monkey (1988), even their dialect, which Harris turns into an ethnological object through his faithful transcription of it, can be a powerful form of ‘linguistic masking’—‘the verbal sign of the mask of blackness that demarcates the boundary between the white linguistic realm and the black’—which allows African Americans to manipulate meanings and become masters of signification.104 The imperial beast fable is created through the coloniser’s appropriation of this living oral tradition. On the surface, the native storyteller is reduced to the status of the ‘origin’ of the story, and, as in the case of Uncle Remus, a grateful recipient of white paternalism. Accordingly, the beast fables had to be retold and reinvented through their incorporation of the white coloniser as an appreciative (and captive) audience, while in the theatre of the framed stories slaves performed as animals and vice versa.105 This legacy of appropriation and reframing leads not only to allegories of the new Empire but also to the possibility of a new fabular critique, the object of which would now include the very structure of colonial appropriation and domination of animal others.

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Notes 1. R. Howard Bloch, ‘The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables and State Formation’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15:1 (2004): 69. 2. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books. Ed. Kaori Nagai (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 45. 3. Bloch, 71. 4. Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Imperial Transgressions: The Animal and Human in the Idea of Race’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35:1 (2015): 156–7. 5. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662– 1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6. Ballaster, Fables of the East, 2, 43. 7. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 129–40. 8. Ballaster, Fables of the East, 12. 9. Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 18. 10. Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam. Trans. Salahuddin Khuda Bakhsh and D. S. Margoliouth (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 1937), 253. 11. Robert Irwin, ‘The Arabic Beast Fable’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 42. 12. Jones’s letter to Dr. Patrick Russel, dated 28 September 1786 in John Shore, Baron Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, 2 vols (London: John Hatchard, 1806), vol. 2, 117. 13. William Jones, ‘The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindu, Delivered 2nd of February, 1786’, The Works of Sir William Jones. With the Life of the Author, by Lord Teignmouth, 13 vols (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1807), vol. 3, 34. 14. For instance, Ukhlaqi Hindee: or, Indian Ethics, translated from a Persian version of the celebrated Hitoopudes, or Salutary counsel, by Meer Buhadoor Ulee; head moonshee in the Hindoostanee Department of the new college, at Fort William, for the use of the students, under the superintendence of John Gilchrist (Calcutta: Printed at the Hindoostanee Press, 1803); Lal Lallu, Rajneeti, or tales, exhibiting the moral doctrines, and the civil and military policy of the Hindoos. Translated from the original Sunskrit of Narayun Pundit, into Brij bhasha, by Sree Lulloo Lal Kub, Bhasha Moonshee in the College of Fort William (Calcutta: Printed at the Hindoostanee Press, 1809); Charles Stewart (ed.), The Anvari Soheily: Being an Elegant Paraphrase of the Fables of Pilpay, in Classical Persian (Calcutta, 1804). See also S. Pearce Carey, William Carey (London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1923), 214.

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15. J. M. Steadman, ‘The Asiatick Society of Bengal’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 10:4 (1977): 473. 16. H. T. Colebrooke, ‘Introductory Remarks’, Hitópadé´sa, or Salutary Instruction: In the Original Sanscrit (Serampore, 1804), iii. This book was published with introductory remarks by Colebrooke, a renowned Sanskrit scholar and professor at Fort William, though William Carey was its editor. 17. F. Max Müller, Handbooks for the Study of Sanskrit, 4 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864–1866). 18. Müller, Handbooks, vol. 1, vi. 19. William Jones, ‘Preface to Sacontalá’, The Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 9, 373. His translation was published posthumously. 20. F. Max Müller, Hitopadesa: eine alte indische Fabelsammlungaus dem sanskrit in das Deutsche ubersetzt (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1844). 21. For accounts of Richard Francis Burton as a translator, explorer and anthropologist, see Ben Grant, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (London: Routledge, 2009); Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Silvia Antosa, Richard Francis Burton: Victorian Explorer and Translator (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012); Paulo Lemos Horta, ‘The Collector of Worlds: Richard Burton, Cosmopolitan Translator of the Nights ’, in Philip F. Kennedy and Marina Warner (eds.), Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 70–85. 22. Richard Burton (trans.), Pilpay’s Fables. Ed. Thomas E. Cox. Illustrated by Susheila Goodwin (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2003), 3. Also, see Byron Farwell, Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (London: Penguin, 1990), 46. 23. Edwin Arnold, The Book of Good Counsels: From the Sanskrit of the ‘Hitopade´sa’ (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1861), xii. 24. Burton, Pilpay’s Fables, 3. 25. John Gilchrist, The Oriental Fabulist; or, Polyglot Translations of Esop’s and Other Ancient Fables from the English Language, into Hindoostanee, Persian, Arabic, Brij B[hak]ha, Bongla, and Sun[s]krit, in the Roman Character (Calcutta: Printed at the Hurkaru office, 1803), i. 26. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). 27. Padma Rangarajan, Imperial Babel : Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 30. 28. Justice Watermeyer, quoted in Wilhelm Bleek, Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or Hottentot Fables and Tales (London: Tr¨ubner and Co., 1864), xx.

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29. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). For an account of the global reach of the Arabian Nights and its influence as World Literature, see Philip F. Kennedy and Marina Warner (eds.), Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum (eds.), The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 30. Gilchrist, xv. 31. William Jones’s letter to Charles Chapman, dated 26 April 1784, in Shore, vol. 2, 43–4. 32. James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs: A Narrative of Seventeen Years Residence in India, 2 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1834), vol. 1, 34. 33. Forbes, 34. 34. T. C. Jerdon, The Birds of India: Being a Natural History of All the Birds Known to Inhabit Continental India, 3 vols (Calcutta: Printed for the Author by the Military Orphan Press, 1862–1864), vol. 2, Part I, 76–7. 35. From Jones to Chapman, in Shore, vol. 2, 44. 36. Harriet Ritvo, ‘Back Story: Migration, Assimilation and Invasion in the Nineteenth Century’, in Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman (eds.), Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities (London: Routledge, 2014), 24. 37. For accounts of the colonial practice of acclimatisation, see, for instance, Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith (eds.), Victorian Environments: Acclimatising to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Part 1: ‘Acclimatisation’. 38. William Jones to J. Shore, dated 10 October 1787, in Shore, vol. 2, 155. 39. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 27; emphasis in original. 40. Christie Harner, ‘The “Animality” of Speech and Translation in The Jungle Books ’, in Brenda Ayres (ed.), Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (New York: Routledge, 2019), 194. 41. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 27. 42. For discussions of hospitality in the colonial context, see, for instance, Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986); Judith Hill, Enlightenment Hospitality: Cannibals, Harems and Adoption (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011). 43. Jones, Works, vol. 3, 43; these passages are also quoted in Charles Wilkins, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit,

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44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

56.

Being the Hitopadesa. Introduction by Henry Morley (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1885), 10. Patrick Olivelle, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Olivelle (trans.), Pañcatantra: The Book of India’s Folk Wisdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), xii. Richard Francis Burton, Vikram and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870), xiii. E. B. Cowell, ‘Preface’, in The J¯ ataka or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, Translated from the P¯ ali by Various Hands, Under the Editorship of Professor E. B. Cowell, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895–1913), vol.1, vii. Theodor Benfey (trans.), Pantschatantra: fünf Bücher indischer Fabeln, Märchen, und Erzählungen, 2 vols (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1859). Theodor Benfey, quoted in Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp, The Russian Folktale. Ed. and trans. Sibelan Forrester (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 108. Ion Grant Neville Keith-Falconer, Kal¯ılah and Dimnah: Or, The Fables of Bidpai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885), xiii. Keith-Falconer, xiii. Wendy Doniger, ‘Epilogue: Making Animals Vanish’, in Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely (eds.), Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 350. See also Wendy Doniger, ‘Zoomorphism in Ancient India: Humans More Bestial than the Beasts’, in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (eds.), Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 17–36. Joseph Jacobs, Indian Fairy Tales. Illustrated by John D. Batten (London: David Nutt, 1892), 227. Friedrich Max Müller, ‘On the Migration of Fables’, Chips from A German Workshop, vol. 4 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1880), 147. Richard Francis Burton, ‘The Bestial Element in Man’, Academy 849 (11 August 1888): 87. Isaac D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature, new edn, 2 vols. Ed. Benjamin Disraeli (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1881), vol. 1, 261. Also quoted as the epigraph to W. A. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformations, 2 vols (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1887), vol. 1, n.p. Richard Francis Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, 10 vols (London: Printed by the Burton Club for private subscribers only, 1885–1888), vol. 10, 120.

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57. Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. The Folklore of the Old Plantation. Illustrations by Frederick S. Church and James H. Moser (1880; New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881). 58. Julia Collier Harris, The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918), 156, 157. 59. William Owens, ‘Folklore of the Southern Negroes’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 20 (December 1877): 748–55. 60. Joel Chandler Harris, ‘Review’, The Atlanta Constitution, 9 December 1877, quoted in Stella Brewer Brookes, Joel Chandler Harris, Folklorist (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1950), 15. 61. Julia Collier Harris, 34. 62. Harris, ‘Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy’, His Songs and His Sayings, 22. 63. Harris, ‘Introduction’, His Songs and His Sayings, 3. 64. Florence E. Baer, ‘Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), An “Accidental” Folklorist’, in Florence E. Baer, Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1980), 13–25. 65. See Kathleen Light, ‘Uncle Remus and the Folklorists’, The Southern Literary Journal 7:2 (1975): 88–104. 66. Joseph Jacobs (ed.), The Earliest English Version of the Fables of Bidpai; The Morall Philosophie of Doni, by Sir Thomas North (London: D. Nutt, 1888), xliv. 67. Julia Collier Harris, 161. For a more comprehensive list of the similarities between Uncle Remus and other folkloric sources, see Baer, Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales. 68. A. Gerber, F. M. Warren, S. Garner, O. B. Super, and J. B. Henneman, ‘The Tales of Uncle Remus Traced to the Old World’, PMLA 7 (1892): xxxix–xliii. 69. Julia Collier Harris, 154. 70. Baer, 23. 71. R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography and Critical Study (1978; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 87. 72. Joel Chandler Harris, Wally Wanderoon and His Story-Telling Machine. Illustrated by Karl Mosely (New York: McClure, Philips & Co., 1903), 179. 73. Harris, ‘Introduction’, His Songs and His Sayings, 5. 74. Joel Chandler Harris, ‘Introduction’, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1883), xxviii. 75. Harris, ‘African Jack’, Nights with Uncle Remus, 132. 76. See Brad Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Chapter 2. Evans argues that the Harris-Powell debate was in

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77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

effect a battle between two competing visions of national myth-making in post-Civil War America. The Bureau of American Ethnology, of which Powell was the director, was a ‘northern institution’, which sought to incorporate Native American myths and legends into American history. It thus suited them to believe that the African American stories were borrowed from Indians, not vice versa. Harris, a self-appointed fabulist of the old Southern plantation, resisted such Northern appropriation of the Southern American folklore (Evans, 54). Alice Walker, ‘Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine’, Georgia Review 66:3 (Fall 2012): 637. Julia Collier Harris, 149. Cristina Mazzoni, She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 48. ‘The Jungle Books’, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (21 January 1896). Joel Chandler Harris, Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories After Dark (New York: The Century Co., 1896). Richmond Dispatch (11 October 1896): 8. Thomas Davidson, ‘Beast-fables’, in Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, new edn, vol. 1 (London: William & Robert Chambers, 1888), 822. Thomas Davidson, ‘Beast-fables’, in Chamber’s Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge, vol. 1 (London: William & Robert Chambers, 1901), 822. Francis Storr, ‘The Fable’, in The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), vol. 10, 114. Joel Chandler Harris, ‘Another Jungle Book’, The Book Buyer 12 (December 1895): 656–7. Harris, ‘Another Jungle Book’, 657. Rudyard Kipling, Letter to Joel Chandler Harris, dated 6 December 1895, in Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 6 vols (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990–1999), vol. 2, 217. Kipling, Letter to Harris, 217. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The United Idolaters’, The Complete Stalky & Co. Ed. Isabel Quigly (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1991), 140–54. Lisa Lewis, ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Indian History’, in Jan Montefiore (ed.), In Time’s Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 132–3. Brander Matthews, Recreations of an Anthologist (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1904), 17. Letter to Brander Matthews dated 7 February 1905, in Pinney, Letters, vol. 3, 176.

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94. ‘Vedabbha-J¯ataka’, in Cowell (ed.), The J¯ ataka, vol. 1, 121–4. 95. Kipling’s letter to Edward Everett Hale, 16 January 1895, in Pinney (ed.), Letters, vol. 2, 168. For a fuller account of Kipling’s engagement with the Jâtakas, see my chapter, ‘“I Have the Jâtaka; and I Have Thee”: Fables and Kipling’s Political Zoology’, in Harish Trivedi and Jan Montefiore (eds.), Kipling in India: India in Kipling (Routledge/IIAS, forthcoming). 96. John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relations with the People (1891), 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1904), 281. 97. William Henry Sleeman, An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens. By an Indian Official (Plymouth: Jenkin Thomas, 1852). Sleeman’s pamphlet, originally published anonymously, was an extract from his long official report to the Indian Government, which was later posthumously published as A Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude (1858). For other contemporaneous representations of the wolf-child, see E. B. Tylor, ‘Wild Men and Beast-Children’, The Anthropological Review 1 (1863): 22–32; F. Max Müller, ‘Wolf-Children’, The Academy 131 (7 November 1874): 512–13; Valentine Ball, Jungle Life in India: Or, The Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist (London: T. de la Rue & Co., 1880). 98. Daniel Karlin, ‘Introduction’ to Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 17–18. 99. Harris, ‘Mr. Rabbit Grossly Deceives Mr. Fox’, His Songs and His Sayings, 34. 100. Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 2, 55. 101. Harris, ‘Introduction’, His Songs and His Sayings, 9. 102. Review of Uncle Remus and his Legend of the Old Plantations, The Pall Mall Gazette (28 May 1881): 21–22. 103. Joyce Hope Scott, ‘Excising the Other: Liberation Ethics and the Politics of Difference: A Perspective on the Afro-American Animal Tale’, Bestia: Yearbook of the Beast Fable Society 1 (1989): 76. For recent discussions of Uncle Remus as African American fables, see also Christa Buschendorf, ‘“Revealing the Wellsprings of Power”: An Essay on the Social Function of Humor in “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story”’, in Birgit Spengler and Babette B. Tischleder (eds.), in An Eclectic Bestiary: Encounters in a More-than-Human World (Bielefeld: Transcipt Verlag, 2019), 219–302. 104. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 75. 105. Christopher Peterson, Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 53.

CHAPTER 3

‘Once upon a Time When Animals Spoke’: Theories of the Beast Fable

Africa is full of animal fables, in the style of Æsop’s fables … and it is often related that, in former times, men and animals could converse together. (Max Müller)1

According to Friedrich Max Müller, in his 1873 lecture series on Charles Darwin’s philosophy of language, Darwin’s evolutionary theory had provoked ‘a desire to remove all specific barriers, not only those which separate man from the animal, and the animal from the plant, but those also which separate organic from inorganic bodies’.2 In view of this crisis, Müller drew attention to the significance of ‘language’, which marks ‘specific difference’ between man and ‘the whole animal kingdom’.3 For him, the human possession of language was inseparable from their ability to speak it, as ‘nothing deserves the name of man except what is able to speak’ (666–7). As Müller, quoting a joke by the German philologist August Schleicher, puts it very plainly, ‘If a pig were ever to say to me, “I am a pig”, it would ipso facto cease to be a pig’ (667). Müller’s lecture series was an elaboration of his famous statement made in an 1861 lecture on comparative philology: ‘Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it’.4 In contrast, Darwin believed that Man is not the only animal with a ‘language’. In The Descent of Man (1871), he emphasised other animals’ ability to communicate with each other, proposing that human language © The Author(s) 2020 K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8_3

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had developed gradually from primitive animal cries, expressions of feelings and imitations of natural sounds, which humans shared with other animals.5 The issue of ‘animal language’ divided the two thinkers so decisively that they failed to find common ground. In 1874, when Müller paid a visit to Darwin, the only time that the two met, Müller had a chance personally to put his case to Darwin, who, after ‘[listening] most attentively without making any objections’, is reported to have responded, ‘you are a dangerous man’.6 Over the origin and nature of human language, Müller was engaged in a series of public debates with Darwin and his supporters, most notably Professor William Dwight Whitney, an American linguist and philologist, whose attack on Müller was particularly persistent. I shall not go into the details of the prolonged and embittered dispute between the two camps, which have been well documented.7 The whole affair has generally been treated as an episode in the history of the Darwinian revolution, in which Müller is made to represent the anthropocentric assumptions which Darwin sought to dismantle. As Gillian Beer puts it, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which implies kinship among all living creatures, does not make ‘special reservation for the human, nor indeed for an exclusively human/animal relationship’, and men like Müller ‘sought to erect language as a shibboleth’, as the last ‘frontier’ with which to demarcate humans as a species.8 The debate has also contributed to the perception that comparative philology was an outdated and too ‘human’ discipline, which had difficulty in accommodating Darwin’s radical new insights. However, this ‘Darwinian’ take on the debate fails to capture a genealogy of European scholarly interest in, and fascination with, the ‘beast fable’, i.e. animal folktales or ancient fables, in particular nonEuropean ones, which, as I discussed in the previous chapter, first emerged as the key object of philological study in the late eighteenth century. That is to say, Müller, who would never admit the possibility of a talking pig in reality, was an expert on talking animals in fiction, as a widely recognised authority on comparative philology. Indeed, the Müller-Darwin debate can be understood in the context of the parallel development of, and symbiotic relationship between, philological and evolutionary thought in the nineteenth century. As Stephen G. Alter demonstrates in his Darwinism and the Linguistic Image (1999), Darwinian evolutionary theory was heavily influenced by nineteenthcentury comparative philological discourse, which researched into the origins, historical development and kinship of different languages. For

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instance, Darwin’s tree of life, which traced genealogical interrelations between species, closely resembled philological trees of language families, and, conversely, his theory offered a perfect model with which to explain the ‘evolution’ of languages.9 A language was seen to function ‘like a species’, and vice versa, both being subjected to the laws of generation and evolution. The evolutionary narrative of human-animal similarity and continuity was thus shaped and supported by the philological and philosophical narrative of absolute difference between humans and animals. The two contradictory yet complementary narratives intersect with each other to mark the origin of humanity. I suggest that Müller’s characterisation of language as the Rubicon and Darwin’s hypothesis of the animal origins of human language can both be seen as beast fables, which mark the advent of human language and thereby of humanity. The grand narrative that language made humans human was never challenged in the Müller-Darwin debate; however divergent the standpoints of the two sides might seem, it was essentially a debate over how porous the linguistic border dividing man from other animals could be. This chapter will thus show how the compulsive return to the origin of language, coupled with a longing for a long-lost oneness with nature, constitutes the space of the beast fable, or to quote Jakob Grimm, one of the key theorists of the genre, ‘the golden age [in which] all animals had still spoken intimately with men’.10 The beast fable points to the many situations in which European observers found themselves intently listening to the stories of ‘nonhuman’ animals; these stories revealed the secrets of the origin of Man and his language, and, at the same time, allowed Europeans to define themselves as Man against the ‘nonhuman’ storytellers. Vinciane Despret, in her book What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, critiques our propensity to make origin stories out of animals. Even scientific studies of animal behaviour have produced many such stories, in which animals are forced to become ‘our ancestors’, who represent our true beginnings.11 Among many ‘origin stories’, ‘the award goes to language, for which an impressive number of behaviors have therefore been studied because they would be at the origin … Even the authors for whom I have the greatest respect do not escape this fascination about the origin of language’ (159). And, of course, ‘this is [not] exactly the type of story that honors [animals]’ (158). Despret’s own work recovers and reworks other kinds of animal stories—new forms of beast fable, if you will. Bruno Latour, in his foreword to Despret’s

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book, calls her ‘an Empirical La Fontaine’. She writes ‘scientific fables’, which freely move between scientific discourses and anecdotes: her stories are, according to Latour, ‘true ways of understanding how difficult it is to figure out what animals are up to’.12 The refusal of origin stories should be the first step towards new types of animal fables, which could truly honour animals. Nineteenth-century beast fables are quintessentially origin stories (and therefore, according to this argument, to be avoided). Moreover, they provide a perfect example of what Despret calls the ‘slightly manic obsession to research the origin of language’.13 Nevertheless, it seems to me important to consider the origin of such ‘origin stories’, especially as we are still in the habit of telling these stories to each other. Starting from the German philologists Jakob Grimm and Johann Gottfried Herder, this chapter will consider some of the key theorists of the genre, such as Wilhelm Bleek, Edward B. Tylor and Richard Francis Burton, who, in theorising the beast fable, drew much of their material from the contact zones of the British Empire. I will show various ways in which the nineteenth-century beast fable was a hypothetical space in which a great deal of speculation about the borders and intersections between species, races and languages took place. In many respects, the beast fable, I argue, corresponds to what Giorgio Agamben, in his The Open: Man and Animal, calls ‘the anthropological machine’, the mechanism by which the idea of Man is produced against that of the animal.14 This machine operates to produce the man-animal hybrid as ‘a zone of indeterminacy’ (37), in which the blurring and articulation of the humananimal divide take place. Agamben’s prime example of such a hybrid is the ‘Ape-man without speech’ (Pithecanthropus alalus ), a hypothetical creature proposed by the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel as the ‘missing link’ in the evolutionary path from ape to man (34). This hypothetical Man, created to bridge the man-animal divide, paradoxically has to be placed outside the human category, because it lacks language, ‘the identifying characteristic of the human’.15 The beast fable likewise specialises in creating hybrid figures, in the form of anthropomorphised animals, though they are, unlike Agamben’s speechless Ape-man, exceptionally loquacious animals. It should also be borne in mind that the beast fable was a specifically colonial anthropological machine: it was a mechanism which Europeans employed to select those animals who are and are not permitted to speak,

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and it allowed them to choose with whom to make historical and biological connections, in the safe and hypothetical space marked out by the fable. Its tremendous power of silencing nonhumans can be demonstrated by the great number of animals, peoples and their languages which colonialism managed to wipe out. The beast fable is at the same time the record of those vanished people, and a testament to many other stories of those ‘nonhumans’ who were silenced without even being recorded.

The Power of the Animal Voice: Herder and Grimm Horst Dölvers, in his study of the Aesopian fable in the nineteenth century, had to write against the standard narrative that the fable, which ‘had flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, had lost its significance and popularity by the end of the eighteenth century, to the point that ‘[a]round the year 1800, there was already talk among critics of “the death of the fable”’.16 The fable had, indeed, been a highly esteemed and popular genre in Europe in the previous two centuries, when the genre, to quote H. J. Blackham, ‘achieved classical maturity’.17 Not only were there many translations of traditional fables such as those by Aesop, but also many fabulists tried their hand at writing original fables. As Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, in her The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740, playfully puts it, ‘hundreds of imaginary animals quarrelled, inveigled, pontificated, and schemed in prose and verse, in English, French, and Latin, alongside supporting illustrations and unadorned’.18 Notably, the importance of the fable in this period owed much to its value as a useful pedagogical tool. Moral instruction was considered to be ‘the paramount pedagogical obligation’ of literature: ‘The fable, didactic by definition, fulfilled this requirement more neatly and naturally than any other genre’.19 For instance, the German philosopher and dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), a leading practitioner and theorist of the fable genre of his day, defined the object of the fable as ‘the clear and forcible perception of some moral truth’.20 In his essay ‘On the Use of Animals in Fables’ (1759), Lessing explained that animals are used in the fable as a consequence of their ‘generally known and distinctive characters’, which makes the moral message instantly and universally comprehensible; they are much more suited to this purpose than human characters, who inevitably excite passions and sympathies, which ‘[obscure] our perceptions’.21

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By the end of the eighteenth century, the fable had lost its status as a high literary genre and vehicle of didactic messages, but this hardly meant the death of the genre. Instead, it reinvented itself in three significant ways. Firstly, it established itself as children’s literature: as newly appointed children’s entertainers and companions, animal fables or talking animals came to define childhood, and the field of the family.22 Secondly, as Laura Brown points out, the animal fable in this period ‘[began] to dissolve into natural history and realist description, blending materials from contemporary experience and observation with the symbolic depiction that made it a core component of the emblematic worldview’.23 This mixing of naturalist/realist perspectives and symbolic/fabular ones made the genre a meeting point between humans and animals, science and fiction, reality and imagination. Thirdly, there emerged a new appreciation of the genre as ‘folklore’, as philological inquiries began to explore the origins of language and civilisation.24 This last point, in fact, closely correlated with the other two. Folklore is also children’s literature, in the sense that it can be seen to deal with the childhood of humanity, which one looks back upon nostalgically. Moreover, fables as folklore were taken seriously as ‘scientific’ documents, and were used as evidence in debates about the relationship between humans and ‘nonhumans’. This new paradigm of the fable can be seen in the works of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), a German philosopher and prolific writer, who is said to have laid the foundations of a wide field of modern disciplines, comparative philology and anthropology among them. Müller called him ‘the precursor of Darwin’25 in pioneering the idea of evolution, underlining the fact that evolutionary thinking had always existed in the modern philological tradition. Herder’s groundbreaking ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772) shows the double movement of rejecting, and wistfully embracing, the possibility of talking animals. According to Herder, animal languages ‘all stand completely and incommensurably apart from human language’.26 To the suggestion that apes are ‘an inwardly speaking human being, who was bound to invent his outward language for himself soon or later’, Herder exclaims: ‘To be sure, there are still negro-brothers in Europe who simply say, “Perhaps so – if only the orangutan wanted to speak! – or found itself in the right circumstances! – or could!” Could! – that would no doubt be the best formulation; for the two preceding ifs are sufficiently refuted by the history of animals’ (95; emphasis in original). Nevertheless, Herder elsewhere confesses his fascination with the space carved out, and made safe,

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by these ifs, and his secret sympathy with ‘negro-brothers in Europe’, who still delight in the idea of talking animals: From our closer acquaintance with the animals at that time, which we no longer have the honor of enjoying, stems also presumably the old poetic legend that men and animals understood each other in the Golden Age. For me this tale in Plato and others has much appeal and dignity, and it could possibly also yield some enlightenment about the childhood of the art of poetry… since a poetic, enthusiastic imagination can make from any impression whatever it wants, this first animal language seems to me to carry within it the seed for many poetic fictions. Homer’s heroes may therefore speak with their horses, and Aesop turn the whole nature into action – I have no objection.27

Ironically, the first human language emerged as an ‘animal language’ of talking animals, invented in ‘the childhood of the art of poetry’ when there was a closer acquaintance between man and animals. Herder, in his essay ‘On Image, Poetry, and Fable’ (1787), further explores and theorises this primordial time when ‘men and animals understood each other’ as the birthplace of ‘the fable’ genre. Rejecting Lessing’s emphasis on the educational value of the fable, Herder proposes that the use of ‘talking animals’ originated in primitive man’s perception that ‘the living creatures with which he associates are in a certain measure his equals and thus desire, will, and act in the same way that he does’, an ancient belief which, ‘strengthened by the authority of the saga, was passed down from the oldest times’.28 He reaches out towards animals with a sense of nostalgia, idealising the unity which man once had with nature. The phrase ‘Once upon a time’ is not merely a device to suspend disbelief so we can enjoy the world of talking animals (368), but a door back to the olden times: the Aesop fable ‘flew through all the spaces of Nature, indeed through “they say” back to primeval times, and drew forth the sap of a lesson from everything that had once been the intuition of the senses’ (369). The fable’s ultimate and most important function is ‘indelibly [to impress] on our mind a word or a syllable from the eternal statutes of Nature’ (380). Furthermore, although Herder’s essay equates the origin of fables with primitive times, he leaves us with the distinct sense that an intimate relationship with animals is still possible. A child would not clearly distinguish himself from animals, and the same can be said of other ‘sensuous peoples’ who have formed close relationships with their animals: ‘[t]he Arab talks with his horse, the shepherd with his sheep, the hunter with

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his hound, the Negro with his serpent, the wretched prisoner with the spider and mouse that share his cell’ (368). On the one hand, this is a good illustration of the Orientalist and evolutionary paradigms which equate childhood and ‘non-European’ civilisations on the basis of their both being closer to nature: ‘Hence that inimitable charm possessed by so many ancient fables from the Orient, from Greece, and from every other nation that lived closer to the animals than we do’ (370). On the other hand, Herder at the same time presents the fable as the space in which the human-animal relationship should be reassessed, so that humans can learn to be closer to nature again. Thus, he refers to primitive men’s belief in talking animals as ‘delusions [Wahns]’ (368), but then goes on to stress that these are based on the ‘intuitive similarity’ which these men perceived in animals: the fable is essentially endowed with this ‘analogical truth’ (369). Indeed, the primitive man’s ‘delusions’ about animals are only matched by the ‘delusion’ of western philosophers in wishing to portray animals as ‘lifeless Cartesian machines’: metaphysics, that prideful ignoramus, ought to give up the arrogant delusion that the humblest animal is wholly unlike man in its activities and aptitudes, for this notion has been amply disproven by natural history. In their whole disposition of life animals are organizations just like man is; they merely lack human organization and the prodigious instrument of our abstract, symbolic memories: speech. (368; emphasis in original)

This ‘analogical truth’ that animals are like men, with the exception of their lack of speech, also underpins Jakob Grimm’s theory of the animal fable. In his 1834 book Reinhart Fuchs (‘Reynard the Fox’), Jakob (1785–1863), the elder of the Brothers Grimm, collated a number of the Medieval ‘Reinhart’ texts in High and Low German, Latin and Flemish. This collection is accompanied by a long introductory essay, the first chapter of which is entitled ‘Wesen der Thierfabel’ (‘The Nature of the Animal Fable’). Grimm firmly rejected the common perception that the fable is essentially didactic or allegorical, and argued that ‘the origin, or almost the necessity of the animal fable’29 comes from the unmistakable similarity of, and affinity between, humans and other animals. According to Grimm, we identify with animals not only because of ‘the lustre in their eyes’ and their physical beauty, but also because their ‘manifold impulses, artistry, desires, passions, and sufferings’ force us to recognise in them an ‘analogue’ (Analogon) of the human soul; this ‘brings us into

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such a palpable relationship with them that, without forcible leaps, the features of the human heart may be transferred to animals, and their animal expressions to humans’ (i–ii). In the animal fable, therefore, animal characters are by no means humans in disguise, or the product of pure anthropomorphic fantasy; rather, they are informed by close contact with real animals and the ‘scientific’ process of analogy. Grimm writes in his opening sentence: ‘Literature [Poesie], not satisfied with encapsulating the fate, actions, and thoughts of human beings, also wished to master the hidden life of animals and place it under its influence and laws’ (i). Literature captures and encloses the lives and fates of animals, and mixes them with those of humans. The function of the fable, then, is not to provide a faithful representation of animals per se, but to create, and give expression to, a meeting place between humans and other animals. It is essential for Grimm that both ‘human’ and ‘animal’ elements are brought into the fable. The animal fable needs to be ‘endowed with human reason’ and ways of life, while it is equally essential that ‘the peculiarities of the nature of the several animals must be brought into play and made of good effect’: ‘If the animals of the fable be without any smack of humanity, the fable becomes absurd; if they are without traces of their animal nature, it becomes wearisome’.30 In the animal fable, humans and other animals coexist and intermingle, without losing their polarity. And this cross-species co-mingling, while keeping animals firmly in their ‘nonhuman’ place, maintains the fable as a space of analogy, wherein the human-animal affinity can be sought and embraced. Although Grimm falls short of granting animals ‘speech’, he emphasises that they have ‘the power of voice’, with which they appeal to us as our fellow creatures. Just like Herder, he looks back upon prehistoric times, in which humans’ close relationship with animals resulted in the belief in their ability to speak. Animals are everywhere in all folk literatures, Grimm reminds us, as ‘all life-giving literature’ could not refuse animals ‘participation in humanly articulated speech, the indispensable medium for closer community’.31 Grimm compares this concession of the power of speech to animals to the way in which, in literary texts, we do not notice that people from different nations talk to each other using the same language (v): in both cases, the question of the unknowability and untranslatability of the Other’s speech is suspended, in favour of a belief in the reality of other beings who share the world with us. Such a beautiful picture of coexistence and interaction, however, was soon to be lost:

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Significantly, the formula ‘once upon a time when animals spoke’ [‘als noch die thiere sprachen’ (literally, ‘when animals still spoke’)], with which we mark the darkness of a vanished prehistoric time, expresses the collapse of the closer contacts with animals, inherent in the faith in literature, which shows us in its images the memory of these contacts. As if struck by misfortune, the animals subsequently have fallen silent, or they hold back their language before the human beings, whose guilt, as it were, was instrumental in this loss of contact. (v)

Herder and Grimm both presuppose the unbridgeable difference between human and animal speech, echoing Max Müller’s standpoint that even ‘the lowest of savages – men whose language is said to be no better than the clucking of hens, or the twittering of birds’, possess the same linguistic ability as Europeans: ‘if you take one of their babies, and bring it up in England, it will learn to speak as well as any English baby, while no amount of education will elicit any attempts at language from the highest animals, whether bipeds or quadrupeds’.32 And yet, both were powerfully drawn to the fable as the earliest form of literature, bearing the vivid imprint of the primitive mind and way of life, in which animals ‘talked’ just like men.

Reynard in South Africa Grimm, in his lecture ‘On the Origin of Language’ (1851), acknowledged the significant part played by ‘the established dominion of the British in all parts of the world chiefly in India’ in the development of comparative philology. For him, Sanskrit was ‘a magnetic instrument found to which sailors on the linguistic ocean could look … [letting fall] such a bright and unsuspected light upon that far-reaching series of languages immediately connected with and related to the Indian’.33 Indeed, the work of German philologists, such as Grimm and Müller, was greatly assisted by a wealth of anthropological materials discovered as a result of British and French colonial activities. Some even crossed the physical oceans, following a linguistic compass, as in the case of Wilhelm Bleek (1827–1875), a German philologist, whose interests in African languages led him to be part of the British colonial endeavours in South Africa. A graduate of Bonn University, Bleek completed his doctoral thesis, a comparative study of Southern and Northern African languages, in 1851.34 He first went to South Africa in 1855, to assist John William

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Colenso, first bishop of Natal, in his compilation of a Zulu grammar. In 1856, he became the official interpreter to Sir George Grey, then Governor of the Cape Colony, who was a scholar and assiduous collector of Indigenous materials. During his governorship in New Zealand (1845– 53), Grey had taken a keen interest in the Maori traditions and language: to govern the Maori people, who were often in violent dispute with European settlers, he wished to understand their communications and grievances, often woven with ‘fragments of ancient poems or proverbs’.35 In collaboration with Maori chiefs and priests, he collected and compiled oral Maori traditions, such as Ko Nga Mahinga a Nga Tupuna Maori [Mythology and Traditions of the New Zealanders], published in London in 1854.36 These works, as James Belich aptly puts it, ‘simultaneously colonized and preserved Maori culture’.37 Bleek was put in charge of Grey’s vast private collection of books and manuscripts. After Grey’s reappointment as Governor of New Zealand in 1861, Bleek remained in Cape Town as the curator of the collection which he had donated to the South African public library. This allowed him to continue his philological researches. Bleek’s 1864 publication Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or Hottentot Fables and Tales is a collection of animal fables told by Khoi (‘Hottentot’) people in the Cape Colony.38 According to Bleek, the book originated in Grey’s wish to build a collection of native literature in South Africa, just as he had done in New Zealand. It centres on the twenty-four Khoi fables recorded in Hottentot and in German by the Rev. G. Krönlein, a German missionary stationed at Great Namaqualand, who responded to Bleek’s request to collect materials. Bleek translated these fables into English, and also reproduced several other fables which had appeared in past publications, such as the Scottish traveller James Alexander’s Expedition of Discovery into the Interior of Africa (1838) and the Norwegian missionary H. C. Knudsen’s Gross-Namaqualand (1848).39 The book provides a glimpse into how indigenous stories were collected in colonial spaces, and how such operations were truly international: Europeans of many nationalities collaborated to gather and record materials and their labours were supported by colonial officials like Grey, who himself moved between different colonies.40 Reynard the Fox in South Africa, which demonstrates the kinship between African orature and European fables, stimulated much discussion about the origin and nature of the genre; for instance, the book

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was one of the sources which Joel Chandler Harris would use to illustrate the African origin of the Uncle Remus tales.41 It is worth bearing in mind that the Khoi, or ‘Hottentots’, had been thoroughly stereotyped in the colonial imagination as bestial savages. The Cape was first colonised by the Dutch in 1652, and, as David Johnson points out, the early records of contact with the Khoi ‘identify them repeatedly as “beasts” and “brutes”’.42 The Khoi woman Saartjie Baartman (1789–1815), who was brought to London in 1810 and exhibited as ‘the Hottentot Venus’, was turned into an icon of bestial sexuality and racial difference in both the popular imagination and scientific discourses.43 Bleek’s book challenges the negative stereotype of Hottentot beastliness: as he puts it, ‘The fact of such a literary capacity existing among a nation whose mental qualifications it has been usual to estimate at the lowest standard, is of the greatest importance’.44 Indeed, the book provokingly suggests not only that the Hottentots do have literature but also that their fables strikingly resemble European ones. Its title playfully transports the famous European trickster, Reynard the Fox, into South Africa, and transforms him into Khoi tricksters such as the jackal, the tortoise and the baboon. The subversiveness of such cultural translation can be attested by the fact that it offended the sensibility of one reviewer, who found the book ‘inaptly named’: ‘the old animal epic of Reineke Fuchs, which Goethe modernized, [is] one representative of the mind of the masses in a great free movement of national thought in Europe, to which nothing in the history of these poor Hottentot tribes can furnish the ghost of a parallel’.45 Unlike his compatriots such as Benfey and Müller, who, as Sanskritists, promoted the theory of the migration of Indian fables to Europe, Bleek, an expert on African languages, followed a different line of philological inquiry. Firstly, the resemblance between the Khoi and European fables supported his theory that the Khoi language originated in Northern Africa, and that all ‘sex-denoting’ languages in Africa, Asia and Europe, are ‘members of one large family, of which the primitive type has, in most respects, been best preserved to us in the Hottentot language’ (xviii). ‘Sex-denoting’ languages are those whose nouns are (or can be) gendered, and, according to Bleek, ‘almost all European languages, as well as all the rest of the Aryan ones (also the Semitic languages, and even the Egyptian), in fact almost all civilized languages belong to the sexual family of languages’.46 Secondly, Bleek defines fables and myths as ‘the personification of impersonal beings’: the former ‘[ascribes]

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speech and reason to the lower animals’, while the latter gives ‘celestial and other elementary phenomena’ ‘human-like agencies’.47 And this animating power of personification comes from the grammatical structure of a sex-denoting language: the language assigns a gender even to inanimate objects, which is ‘likely to lead the mind towards ascribing reason and other human attributes to irrational beings’ (xxi). It thus follows that the nations who do not speak these gendered languages are ‘almost, as a matter of course, destitute of Myths as well as Fables’ (xxv). Bleek was aware that other African nations also possess animal tales, in which ‘animals are sometimes made to act and speak like men’; but this is ‘less a real personification than a mere consequence of their religious belief in metempsychosis or migration of the soul, and intimately connected with their ancestor worship’.48 As Rachel Gilmour notes, Bleek’s ‘all-encompassing’ philological approach resulted in ‘a systematic and inflexible schema classifying the “native races” of the region’,49 which could nevertheless be used to justify and maintain racial relations in South Africa. For instance, Bleek’s linguistic theory allowed him to classify Bantu speakers, the most numerous language group in South Africa, as ‘culturally unproductive and stagnant, set in their prosaic mode of thought’, because their languages are not ‘sex-denoting’ (188). Bleek’s book was published not long after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), following which there had been intensive discussion regarding the extent to which the ‘lowest’ human races resemble apes. This must have prompted Bleek to compare and even conflate African manners of speaking and the vocalisations of nonhuman animals: in the Khoi fables, ‘taken down by [Krönlein] from the mouth of the Natives’,50 Bleek not only heard animal characters speak but also the Khoi speak as animals. Bleek was a cousin and friend of Ernst Haeckel, famous as a German promoter and populariser of Darwin’s theory of evolution. They knew each other’s works well, and their relationship embodies the close kinship which existed between evolutionary and linguistic frameworks.51 Haeckel edited and wrote a preface to Bleek’s On the Origin of Language (1869), in which he took the opportunity to celebrate the considerable impact which On the Origin of Species was having on all scientific disciplines, including comparative philology, commenting that ‘the knowledge of the origin of language plays a conspicuous part’ in furthering ‘the knowledge of the descent of man from a class of lower animals’.52 A letter from Haeckel which Bleek extensively cites from in On the Origin of Language also shows that their topics of correspondence

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included the nature of ‘the language of the apes’, and its relationship with the languages of those who are ‘at the earliest stage of humanity’,53 about which Bleek was the acknowledged expert: The language of the apes has not hitherto received from zoologists that attention which it deserves, and there do not exist any accurate descriptions of the sounds uttered by them. They are designated sometimes simply as howls, sometimes as cries, clicks, roars, &c. Remarkable clicking sounds, produced not only with the lips, but also, though seldomer, with the tongue, I have myself frequently heard in zoological gardens, and from apes of very different species, but I have been unable to find anywhere an account of them. Evidently these sounds have not interested most observers. (53; emphasis in original)

These ‘remarkable clicking sounds’, which Haeckel heard the apes make, are an implicit reference to the fact that Southern African languages, which include the ones spoken by the Khoi, are famous for having clicking sounds as part of their set of consonants. Bleek shared with Haeckel the opinion that these sounds, just like ‘the clapping of hands and other sounds not produced with the organs of the mouth’ (54) are animal sounds made to express feeling; Southern Africans retained them as part of their speech, even after they had acquired human languages. By a ‘human language’, both Bleek and Haeckel meant an ‘articulate language’, which Haeckel defines as ‘a real language of words and ideas’.54 They conformed to the conventional narrative that language defines what man is; indeed Bleek sounds almost like Max Müller, when he says that the advent of articulate language ‘coincides with that of selfconsciousness, and thereby of humanity, of human existence’, and indeed, ‘Consciousness … awoke in man with the birth of the first words’.55 Nevertheless, in Bleek and Haeckel’s theory of the origin of language, linguistic and biological evolutions are organically intertwined with each other, to the point that it is not possible to institute a chasm between nonhuman animal sounds and human language. That is to say, Haeckel’s ‘Ape-man without speech’ actually means the ‘Ape-man without articulate speech’, who is, nevertheless, fully endowed with ‘language’, in that ‘[t]here indeed exists in very many animals a language for communicating sensations, desires, and thoughts, partly a language of gestures, partly a language of feeling or touch, partly a language of cries or sounds’.56 For Bleek and Haeckel, then, our possession of human language does not

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separate humans from other animals but is the very proof of the continuity between the two. Bleek captures the transition from the former to the latter through the metaphor of the advancement of printing technology: I should like here to call attention to the fact that hitherto no sufficient inquiry seems to have been instituted into how far the lower animals are endowed with language. So far as I can make out at present, that which they possess analogous to language occupies almost the same position as printing from blocks does as compared with printing from moveable types. If, for example, we must really refuse to acknowledge that the Chinese are in possession of the art of printing (as we understand it in Europe), we cannot say that the lower animals possess language in the real sense of the term – least of all, articulate language. But as there is only a step from printing with blocks to printing with types, so in those means of expression which the animals use to communicate their feelings we find the elements out of which, under favorable circumstances (which rendered the division of speech into articulate elements possible), it was possible for human language to arise.57

The distance between animal sounds and human languages is only one step, equivalent to the distance between the Chinese way of ‘printing from blocks’ and the European way of ‘printing from movable types’. To deny that animals have speech is the same as denying that the Chinese have a primitive art of printing. Bleek’s metaphor presents an animal’s evolution into humanity as a matter of technological innovation. On the one hand, this can be seen as a radical rewriting of Müller’s speciesist take on language: it is no longer Man’s Rubicon, never to be crossed by nonhumans, but is placed on a par with animal sounds, as a means of both expression and communication. On the other hand, Bleek’s metaphor is highly disturbing, and this is not only because his description of the Chinese printing technology echoes the racist way in which he treats African languages as more primitive than European ones. Shane Moran, commenting on Bleek’s printing analogy, spots ‘the utilitarian demand to efficiently conserve the expenditure of energy’, which caused Bleek to privilege movable types over woodblock printing.58 Added to this economic factor is the fact that Bleek draws attention to the technological and linguistic advantage which Europeans have over the Chinese, which is made to correspond to the advantage human ‘articulate’ speech has over animal sounds. ‘Of all the languages in the known world, the most difficult to represent by

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movable types is, without controversy, the Chinese’; so declared Marcellin Legrand, a French type founder who made the first systematic attempt to produce Chinese fonts in the 1830s.59 Despite the fact that movable type was first invented in China in the eleventh century, well before the German printer Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the same technology in 1439, woodblock printing (i.e. ‘printing from blocks’) remained the dominant mode in China till the late nineteenth century.60 The sheer numerousness of Chinese characters rendered the use of movable types impractical and too expensive, and this was further aggravated by the fact that they are non-alphabetic, and therefore cannot easily be moved and arranged, unlike the Roman alphabet. That is to say, the ‘backwardness’ of the Chinese printing technology was inseparable from key characteristics of the Chinese language, which expert European typographers, such as Legrand, were working hard to overcome. In Bleek’s printing analogy, both the Chinese with their woodblock printing technology and nonhumans with their inarticulate language are physically stuck in a ‘primitive’ stage before taking a crucial step to the next stage of evolution. This is similar to the way in which he classifies non-‘sex-denoting’ languages as uncivilised, because of their inability to animate inanimate objects. (Incidentally, Chinese is also non-sexdenoting, which made Bleek wonder whether it ‘must not be regarded as having belonged, at least originally, to the sexual class of languages’, in light of the fact that China clearly has forms of ‘scientific acquirement’.61 ) It is, then, ironic that Europeans’ superiority over non-Europeans, who are deemed to be closer to brutes, depended on the former’s possession of an ‘animated’, ‘sexual’ or more ‘animal’ language (I will further explore this animating power of the alphabet in Chapter 6). Modern progress was driven by, and tailored for, the use of the Roman alphabet, and the same process was making languages like Chinese—one of the most ancient and sophisticated writing systems—‘incompatible with modernity’, to quote Thomas Mullney, in his intriguing book on the making of the Chinese typewriter.62 Bleek’s printing analogy, which implicitly maps a linguistic evolution from Chinese to European languages, also involves a drastic reduction in the number of characters to be used: from tens of thousands of Chinese characters to the Roman alphabet of 26 letters, or from a visually and symbolically rich system of writing to a set of phonetic signs. This is a massive reduction of diversity, which can be seen to mirror what was happening in the natural world. In this period, a great many Europeans

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migrated to colonies, accompanied by a multitude of essential animals (dogs, horses, sheep and so on), forming (as it were) a European animal alphabet. For instance, foxes were successfully introduced to Australia in the 1860s and 1870s for sport hunting, and soon became a major pest species. Thus the real Reynard the Fox was in Australia, endangering the lives of indigenous animals.63 Moreover, those animals were doubly vanishing, as indigenous animal stories which vibrantly recorded animals’ involvement with people were also fast disappearing as a result of colonial contact. At least, this was the supposition on which philologists like Grey and Bleek collected their materials. In the 1870s, Bleek turned his attention from the Khoi to the San, also known as ‘Bushmen’, whose hunter-gatherer lifestyles had been ‘severely curtailed by encroaching farming settlement in their dry northern Cape heartlands’.64 In particular, the |Xam Bushmen, Bleek’s main focus of study, had been a target of genocidal eradication and enslavement, and their population had dwindled to the point of no return.65 According to George McCall Theal, a friend of Bleek’s sister-in-law and collaborator Lucy Lloyd (1834–1914), Bleek knew that ‘in the few wild people left he had before him the fast dying remnant of a primitive race, and that if any reliable record of that race was to be preserved, not a day must be lost in securing it’.66 After his death in 1875, Lucy continued their project, which resulted in the publication of Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911. The |Xam language became extinct shortly thereafter. In this context, the choice of the word ‘specimen’ is harrowing. Just as animals needed to be dead or killed in order to become scientific specimens, the act of collecting, preserving and classifying indigenous languages and literatures represented the very colonial power which was putting traditional ways of life at risk. These beast fables were the stuffed animals, the skin and fur of the living tradition of the colonised subjects and the unique animal worlds they knew and lived in.

Beastly Knowledge: Tylor’s Evolutionary Fable In his 1865 work Researches into the Early History of Mankind, the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) celebrated ‘the great class of stories known as Beast Fables’, which ‘in old times [were] listened to by high and low with the keenest enjoyment for their own sake’.67 These stories had been deplorably belittled and reduced to ‘means of teaching little moral lessons’, or even worse to ‘cock and bull [stories]’

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(10). He was therefore delighted by the recent resurgence of interest in, and estimation of, these fables: a generation among whom there has sprung up a new knowledge of old times, and with it a new sympathy with old thoughts and feelings, not only appreciate the beast fables for themselves, but find in their diffusion over the world an important aid to early history. (10)

Tylor’s book includes an extensive discussion of the diffusion of beast fables over the world, drawing on the philological and ethnological debates of the day. For instance, Bleek’s recent collection (1864) of Khoi fables is an excellent example for him of how ‘other mythic episodes, long familiar in remote countries, have established themselves among these rude people as household tales’ (10). However, Tylor also warned that the comparative method was used too uncritically: ‘not only is its value fully admitted, but there may even be observed a tendency to use it with too much confidence in proof of common descent’ (367). In his view, the diffusion of myths and fables, though very useful, did not totally account for the similarity in beliefs and customs in regions of the world widely separated from each other, and had to be paired with an exploration of the development of the human mind and culture (362). In his Primitive Culture (1871), widely regarded as the foundational text of cultural anthropology, Tylor presented the history of the human race as a linear progress from a savage to a civilised state; the similarity of two separate cultures now comes to signify a similarity in their stage of development. Significantly, the book is famous for its identification of ‘animism’ as the earliest form of religion and philosophy. This term refers to ‘a belief in personal souls animating even what we call inanimate bodies’, which is expressed in, for instance, the personification of nature, the animation of inanimate objects, and the belief in the transmigration of souls.68 Within this animistic framework, Tylor reinvents the beast fable as an anthropological concept. He defines it as a primitive form of literature arising among savages, who have not learned to distinguish themselves from other animals: ‘To their minds the semi-human beast is no fictitious creature, invented to preach or sneer, he is all but a reality’ (409). Therefore, Beast-fables are not nonsense to men who ascribe to the lower animals a power of speech, and look on them as partaking of moral human nature: to

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men in whose eyes any hyaena or wolf may probably be a man-hyaena or a werewolf … Such beliefs belong even now to half mankind, and among such the beast-stories had their first home. (409–10)

Tylor’s evolutionary explanation of the fable, though it did not totally displace the diffusion theory, became very influential as an alternative and competing theory. For instance, Harris and Powell’s dispute about the origin of the Uncle Remus tales, which I discussed in Chapter 2, has been explained as the difference between the diffusion theory and the evolutionary theory. While Harris believed that the ‘negro folklore’ came from Africa with the slaves, Powell, who subscribed to the Tylorian evolutionary theory, postulated that the stories originated among the American Indians; as Brad Evans puts it, ‘because Powell felt that the Indian tribes were more primitive, and thus closer to the natural sources for folklore … he could assume that the tales originated with the Indians’.69 Tylor’s theory, which laid out a new direction for anthropology, also fostered a flowering of folklore study. It led to the founding of the Folk-lore Society in 1878, ‘whose energetic founders were deeply committed to the thesis of unilinear cultural evolution’.70 Tylor was a member of the Society’s Council, and the Society’s journals became a vibrant platform for the sharing of animal tales from all over the world.71 Tylor, in defining the concept of animism as primitive spiritual beliefs, presents the beast fable as a theatre of the animistic world, in which nonhumans are imbued with souls and the power of speech. His characterisation of animism as one stage in universal human cultural evolution, however, discounts the importance not only of philological findings, but also of language. The materiality of language, which made possible the meeting between nations and species, became less relevant, as did the animal-like, migrating power of language, which philologists took for granted and whose trail they were keenly following. Tylor’s explanation of the origin of the fable also demonstrates a canny conflation of the past and the present, to accompany that of animals and savages: beast fables originated in the ‘animistic’ world in which the border between humans and animals was porous, and these have been passed on and are still believed in as true by generations of savages, who remain in the primitive stage. This theory has the effect of pairing the primitive races with nonhuman animals as mirror images of each other, while placing the European outside of such an animistic encounter, as an

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observer: this position of the outsider, or ‘ethnographer’, is the very sign that the European belongs to a more advanced stage of civilisation.72 Nonetheless, Tylor takes care not to equate savages with animals, and indeed is highly critical of those who ‘look on savages as senseless, apelike brutes’, such as those who ‘hunt them like wild beasts in the forests, who can only hear in their language a sort of irrational gurgling and barking’.73 These people ‘fail totally to appreciate the real culture which better acquaintance always shows among the rudest tribes of man’ (380). Ultimately, the beast fable can be understood as the earliest philosophical theory which men formed of their relationship with other animals: To suppose that theories of a relation between man and the lower mammalia are only a product of advanced science, would be an extreme mistake. Even at low levels of culture, men addicted to speculative philosophy have been led to account for the resemblance between apes and themselves by solutions satisfactory to their own minds, but which we must class as philosophic myths. (376)

The modern theory of evolution and degeneration, then, has already been explored in the stories told among savages. For instance, the Zulu tale of an idle ‘Amafeme tribe who became baboons’ is just one of many examples which explore the idea of ‘apes as degenerate from a previous human state’ (376). Tylor even suggests that savages’ insights into the humanape relation are comparable to ‘the speculations of Lord Monboddo’ (1714–1799), a pioneer of evolutionary theory who proposed the idea of man’s descent from the monkey, if not to ‘the anatomical arguments of Professor Huxley’ (379). They require us to ‘discard the results of modern scientific zoology’ and ‘bring our minds back to a ruder condition of knowledge’, in which savages ‘deliberately assign to apes an amount of human quality which to modern naturalists is simply ridiculous’ (379). Tylor thus acknowledges that the animistic beast fable is a form of knowledge, containing valuable philosophical insights into the human-animal relationship. It follows, therefore, that Tylor’s theory of the beast fable can be used to critique his own evolutionary scheme which neatly locates ‘savages’ at the bottom of the evolutionary scale, as it challenges us to unlearn what we already know in order to understand ‘a rude condition of knowledge’, which does not recognise western forms of knowledge as valid.

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Reminiscences of Brute Brothers According to Isabel Burton, in her biography of her husband Richard published in 1893, three years after his death, he once collected ‘forty monkeys of all kinds of ages, races, species’ to learn ‘the manners, customs, and habits of monkeys’ when he was in India in the 1840s. His main objective was ‘ascertaining and studying the language of monkeys’: ‘he used regularly to talk to them, and pronounce their sounds afterwards, till he and the monkeys at last got quite to understand each other’.74 He successfully identified and wrote down ‘as many as sixty words’, but unfortunately his monkey vocabulary was later lost in a fire. She compares her husband’s project to the then-recent experiment by Richard Lynch Garner, who recorded the ‘speech’ of monkeys using a phonograph, and had attracted much public attention in the early 1890s: ‘Mr. Garner has now the advantage of phonographs, and all sorts of appliances. Had Richard been alive, he could have helped him greatly’.75 Isabel’s association of Burton and Garner is not surprising, as both were proponents of the Darwinian theory of the ‘animal’ origin of human language, though Burton’s experiment took place well before the publication of On the Origin of Species. Gregory Radick underlines that the use of phonographs allowed Garner to pioneer a technique called ‘playback’: ‘the playing of recorded animal vocalizations back to the animals’.76 Through Isabel’s account, we see Burton orally employ the same technique: pronouncing the monkeys’ sounds back to them, and recording their vocabulary on paper. Considering that Burton was a master linguist who managed to learn ‘twenty-nine languages, European and Oriental – not counting dialects’,77 his reproduction of his simian vocabulary must have been exceptional. It is fascinating to think that, in this early history of ‘playback’ experimentation, Burton, who ‘aped’ or ‘parroted’ monkeys, was replaced by a phonographic machine; this draws our attention to not only the ‘machinic’ nature of animals, and of humans becoming animals, but also the power of writing as a tool of reproduction, which can turn any sounds into iterable and reiterable languages.78 This focus on reproduction also uncannily echoes the way in which Bleek uses the metaphor of printing technology to capture the transition from animal sounds to human language. We could say that the staging of the beast fable is a form of ‘playback’ experiment, in which animals spoke, and their speeches emerged as animal footprints of their evolution into humans, which could

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be traced back to their origin. Thus, Burton, who lacked ‘the advantage of phonograph, and all sorts of appliances’, resorts to the ‘fable’—a human drama acted by animal characters—as the setting of his linguistic experiment. According to Isabel Burton, Richard, who was then serving in the Indian Army, ‘got rather tired of the daily Mess, and living with men’.79 He therefore arranged the life with his monkeys as a parody of the Indian administration; he became the head of the monkeys, and assigned them ‘different offices’: ‘he had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aidede-camp, his agent’, and he even made a pretty female monkey ‘his wife, and put pearls in her ears’.80 In this space of the fable, the species border became disturbingly blurred and transgressed, while the human fantasy of being at the top of the animal hierarchy was kept intact. Only with the safeguard of storytelling could Burton fully pursue the possibility of animal language and interspecies communication, especially because the Darwinian fable of talking apes as our ancestors was not available to him at that time. It is then no coincidence that Burton, a collector, translator and appreciator of the fable throughout his colonial career, emerged as another prominent theorist of the ‘evolutionary’ beast fables in his later life. As I have already mentioned, he is famous for his unexpurgated translation of The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night (1885–8); this text, in which ‘fables occur as separate stories and as part of larger cycles of stories’,81 includes a series of beast fables. Burton highlighted the importance of these, and lamented the fact that they had been neglected and sometimes omitted by his predecessors; for instance, Edward William Lane, in his influential translation of The Nights, ‘most objectionably’ for Burton, delegated his partial translation of them to a note, and called them ‘second-rate’ and ‘inferior’.82 In contrast, Burton takes these fables seriously as an integral part of The Nights ’ narrative: they are ‘introduced with some art and add variety to the subject-matter, obviating monotony’.83 Moreover, the beast fable as a genre has considerable anthropological value as that which ‘apparently antedates all other subjects in The Nights’.84 In his ‘Terminal Essay’ (1886) to The Nights, Burton defines ‘the Apologue or Beast-fable proper’ as the oldest form of literature.85 It is ‘one of the earliest creations of the awakening consciousness of mankind’, and its ‘monumental antiquity’ can be vouched for by the fact that the fables are already recorded in ‘the hieroglyphs and in the cuneiforms’

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(66). Burton pushes this antiquity further back in time when he explores the true origin of the beast fable: The essence of the beast-fable is a reminiscence of Homo primigenius with erected ears and hairy hide, and its expression is to make the brother brute behave, think and talk like him with the superadded experience of ages. To early man the ‘lower animals,’ which are born, live and die like himself, showing all the same affects and disaffects, loves and hates, passions, prepossessions and prejudices, must have seemed quite human enough and on an equal level to become his substitutes. (119)

Compared to Tylor’s, Burton’s conflation of savages and animals is far less subtle, as he evokes the beastly image of an early man with ‘erected ears and hairy hide’. His description of Homo primigenius inevitably reminds us of Darwin’s description of the human ancestor in his The Descent of Man (1871) as ‘a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World’.86 Burton elsewhere makes a more specific reference to Darwin in relation to the beast fable: ‘As regards the reminiscence of Homo Darwiniensis by Homo Sapiens, doubtless it would ex hypothesis be common to mankind’.87 Whether primigenius or Darwiniensis, this hypothetical creature is a much sought after ‘missing link’ between the human and the primate. Burton locates the origin of the beast fable in this hypothetical space, in which semi-beast humans meet their brute brothers face to face as the mirror images of each other. It is a space of beastly cosmopolitanism, in which early man becomes bonded with other animals not only through common animality (they are ‘born, live and die like himself’), but also through common speech (he teaches them to ‘behave, think and talk like him’). As Burton puts it, the beast fable originates in ‘the deep underlying bond which connects man with beast’.88 It is important that this bond is formulated as early man’s reminiscences of his recent beastly past. In its nostalgic gaze on the close relationship man once had with animals, Burton’s evolutionary beast fable strikingly resembles Grimm’s philological animal fable. Moreover, he also cleverly avoids addressing the question of whether Homo primigenius had a language or not, and thereby keeps the space of the fable where the humans and other animals freely mingle and interact, both linguistically and emotionally, intact. The beast fable was, then, a nineteenth-century phonographic machine, predating the invention of the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas

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Edison. It was perceived to contain the oldest ‘phonographic’ records, documenting the beastly conversations which our ancestors had with our brute brothers. These records were passed down from generation to generation, orally repeated and retold, surviving the long history of translation, transmission and migration. Each time they are retold, they play back the traces of animal speech, to our brute brothers, or to the animals within us, who would recognise the primordial animal voices, telling us where we came from, and who we are. In this sense, the beast fable can be seen to be what Derrida calls ‘the animal in whose tracks therefore I am (following), and who picks up traces’.89 Through this figure, Derrida not only deconstructs the human subject as the Cartesian being (‘I think, therefore I am’), with his consciousness and language, but also redefines it as that which is being written by, and created through the search for, animal traces. Derrida goes on to ask, ‘Does it speak’? (56), as if to capture the nineteenth-century debate on animal language. Beast fables, despite being quintessentially and problematically origin stories, lead one into an interspecies space of storytelling; animal voices, heard a long time ago and therefore repeated now, reverberate there, shaping and keeping company with Man as a speaking being.

Notes 1. Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religions of India (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878), 115–16. 2. Friedrich Max Müller, ‘Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language: First Lecture, Delivered at the Royal Institution, March 22, 1873’, Fraser’s Magazine 7:41 (May 1873): 525. 3. Friedrich Max Müller, ‘Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language: Second Lecture, Delivered at the Royal Institution, March 29, 1873’, Fraser’s Magazine 7:42 (June 1873): 666; emphasis in original. 4. Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, new edn, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1885), vol. 1, 403. 5. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 1, 56. 6. Friedrich Max M¨uller, Auld Lang Syne (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 203. 7. See Christine Ferguson, Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate About Animal Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Will Abberley,

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8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

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English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Stephen G. Alter, William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), Chapter 8: ‘The Battle with Max Müller’. Gillian Beer, ‘Animal Presences: Tussles with Anthropomorphism’, Comparative Critical Studies 2:3 (October 2005): 312. Stephen G. Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 28–37. Jakob Karl Ludwig Grimm, On the Origin of Language. Trans. Raymond A. Wiley (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), 5. Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Trans. Brett Buchanan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 158. Bruno Latour, ‘Foreword: The Scientific Fables of an Empirical La Fontaine’, in Despret, vii. Despret, 159. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 33. Agamben, 34. Horst Dölvers, Fables Less and Less Fabulous: English Fables and Parables of the Nineteenth Century and Their Illustrations (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 13. H. J. Blackham, The Fable as Literature (London: The Athlone Press, 1985), xx. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. Thomas Noel, Theories of the Fable in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 6. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Fables and Epigrams, with Essays on Fable and Epigram (London: J. & H. L. Hunt, 1825), 111. Lessing, 110, 111. For a full discussion of the importance of the animal fable and other talking animal literary genres in the nineteenth century, see Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 22. Also, see, Harriet Ritvo, ‘Learning from Animals: Natural History for Children in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Children’s Literature 13 (1985): 72–93. Noel, 122.

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25. Friedrich Max Müller, Natural Religion: The Clifford Lectures Delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1888 (London: Longman Green & Co., 1889), 260. 26. Johann Gottfried von Herder, ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772), Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 96. 27. Herder, ‘Fragments on Recent German Literature’ (1767–8), Philosophical Writings, 61. 28. Johann Gottfried von Herder, ‘On Image, Poetry, and Fable’, Selected Writings on Aesthetics. Trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 368. 29. Jakob Grimm, Reinhart Fuchs (Berlin: Reimer, 1834), i. This and all subsequent references to this text (except for note 30) are my translation. 30. Jakob Grimm, Reinhart Fuchs (1834), cited and translated in William John Thoms (ed.), The History of Reynard the Fox: From the Edition Printed by Caxton in 1481 (London: Reprinted for the Percy Society, 1844), xii–xiii. 31. Grimm, Reinhart Fuchs, v. 32. Friedrich Max Müller, ‘My Reply to Mr. Darwin’, Contemporary Review 25 (January 1875): 325. 33. Grimm, On the Origin of Language, 3. 34. Andrew Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushmen Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006), 18–19. 35. Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs (London: J. Murray, 1855), vii. 36. George Grey, Ko Nga Mahinga a Nga Tupuna Maori (London: G. Willis, 1854). Grey’s Polynesian Mythology is a translation of this Maori collection. See David Simmons, ‘The Sources of Sir George Grey’s Nga Mahi A Nagi Tupuna’, The Journal of the Polynesian Society 75:2 (1966): 177–88. 37. James Belich, ‘Grey, Sir George (1812–1898), Colonial Governor and Premier of New Zealand’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://www.oxforddnb.com/ (home page; date accessed 14 February 2020). For an analysis of George Grey as the Governor of New Zealand, see Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the NineteenthCentury British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chapter 6. 38. Wilhelm Bleek, Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or Hottentot Fables and Tales (London: Tr¨ubner and Co., 1864).

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39. James Edward Alexander, An Expedition of Discovery into the Interior of Africa. 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1838); H. C. Knudsen, Gross-Namaqualand (Barmen, 1848). 40. See Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in NineteenthCentury South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); John R. Davis, Stefan Manz, and Margrit Schulte Beerbühl (eds), Transnational Networks: German Migrants in the British Empire, 1670–1914 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 41. Joel Chandler Harris, ‘Introduction’, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1883), xxiv–xxvi. 42. David Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony: History, Literature, and the South African Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 38. 43. Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman: Born 1789 – Buried 2002 (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), Chapter 9. 44. Bleek, Reynard the Fox, xii. For an interesting discussion of Bleek’s attempt to make the Khoi people appear more civilised by censoring erotic or scatological content in the Hottentot fables, see Hermann Wittenberg, ‘Wilhelm Bleek and the Khoisan Imagination: A Study of Censorship, Genocide and Colonial Science’, Journal of Southern African Studies 38:3 (2012): 667–79. Wittenberg argues that Bleek’s ‘sanitisation’ of the fables suppressed the ‘libidinal and transgressive energies’ (678) of indigenous narrative, affecting the Khois’ ability to write their own histories. See also Hermann Wittenberg, ‘The Boer and the Jackal: Satire and Resistance in Khoi Orature’, Critical Arts 28:4 (2014): 593–609, in which he characterises the Khoi fables as a satire on colonial relations. 45. ‘The Literary Examiner’, Examiner (19 March 1864): 183. 46. Wilhelm Bleek, On the Origin of Language. Ed. Ernst Haeckel. Trans. Thomas Davidson (New York: L.W. Schmidt, 1869), xx. 47. Bleek, Reynard the Fox, xxi. 48. Wilhelm Bleek, A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages (London: Trübner, 1862), x. 49. Rachael Gilmour, Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 188. 50. Bleek, Reynard the Fox, xii. 51. See Mario A. Di Gregorio, ‘Reflections of a Nonpolitical Naturalist: Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Bleek, Friedrich Müller and the Meaning of Language’, Journal of the History of Biology 35 (2002): 79–109. 52. Ernst Haeckel, ‘Editor’s Preface’, in Bleek, On the Origin of Language, vii–viii. 53. Bleek, On the Origin of Language, 54.

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54. Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation. Trans. E. Ray Lankester, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1876), vol. 2, 301. 55. Bleek, On the Origin of Language, 50, 56. 56. Haeckel, The History of Creation, vol. 2, 300–1. 57. Bleek, On the Origin of Language, xi–xii. 58. Shane Moran, Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 73. 59. Marcellin Legrand, quoted in Walter Henry Medhurst, China: Its State and Prospects, with Especial Reference to the Spread of the Gospel (London: John Snow, 1838), 558. 60. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004). 61. Bleek, On the Origin of Language, xxii. 62. Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), Chapter 1: ‘Incompatible with Modernity’. 63. To quote from The Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions (2011), the introduction of foxes was ‘followed by the disappearances of several bandicoots and small wallabies weighing 200 g or more. Foxes are more strongly implicated in extinctions than cats because their arrival in different regions can be matched with species disappearances’ [Tim Low, ‘Australia: Invasions’ in Daniel Simberloff and Marcel Rejmanek (eds), Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions [Vol. 3 of Encyclopedias of the Natural World] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 36]. 64. Wittenberg, ‘The Boer and the Jackal’, 603. 65. A. Traill, ‘The Khoesan Languages’, in Rajend Mesthrie (ed.), Language of South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37. 66. George McCall Theal, ‘Introduction’, in Wilhelm Bleek and L. C. Lloyd (eds), Specimens of Bushman Folklore. With an Introduction by George McCall Theal (London: G. Allen & Company, 1911), xxxiv. 67. Edward Burnett Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (London: J. Murray, 1865), 10. 68. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 4th, revised edn, 2 vols (London: J. Murray, 1903), vol. 1, 287. 69. Brad Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54. 70. Richard M. Dorson, History of British Folklore: A History. Vol. 1: The British Folklorists (London: Routledge, 1968), 196. 71. The Folk-lore Society’s journals are as follows: The Folk-Lore Record (1878–82), The Folk-Lore Journal (1883–9), Folklore (1890–). 72. For a critical reading of theories of animism, including Tylor’s, from postcolonial and ecological perspectives, see Caroline Rooney, African Literature: Animism and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000) and

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73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

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Graham Harvey (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (Durham: Acumen, 2013). Tylor, Primitive Culture, 380. Isabel Burton, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 2 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1893), vol. 1, 160. Isabel Burton, vol. 1, 160. Radick, 1. Isabel Burton, vol. 2, 9. As Lisa Gitelman demonstrates, the phonograph, which translates sounds into records which can be played back, is a type of ‘writing machine’ [Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)]. See also Freidrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Isabel Burton, vol. 1, 160. Isabel Burton, vol. 1, 160. Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, ‘Fable’, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2 vols (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004), vol. 2, 549. Richard Francis Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, 10 vols (London: Printed by the Burton Club for private subscribers only, 1885–8), vol. 3, 114; Edward William Lane, The Thousand and One Nights: Commonly Called, in England, the Arabian Nights Entertainments, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1859), vol. 2, 48. Burton, Nights, vol. 10, 122. Burton, Nights, vol. 10, 115. Burton, Nights, vol. 10, 66. Darwin, vol. 2, 389. Richard Francis Burton, ‘The Bestial Element in Man’, Academy 849 (11 August 1888): 87. Burton, Nights, vol. 10, 121. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 56.

CHAPTER 4

Into the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books

According to the OED, to be ‘in a wood’ is to be ‘in a difficulty, trouble, or perplexity; at a loss’.1 This expression, common throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is now obsolete, and only makes sense in association with phrases such as ‘lost in a wood’ or ‘out of the wood’. This is indicative of the fact that the forest has been made safe, and that we can no longer appreciate what terror it once signified. And yet, ‘in a wood’, along with ‘all at sea’, are among the best expressions with which the natural world has provided the English language for being reduced to a helpless state. To be in the middle of nature is to lose one’s bearings—to become confused, befuddled and in difficulty. These proverbial idioms, derived no doubt from generations of human experience, speak to our intuition that nature is bigger and more powerful than us. At the same time, they also tell something about our need and desire to be above or outside nature, in order to remain in control and keep our dignity as humans. The Gothic genre, known for its use of frame narratives and embedded stories within stories, has made the most of these ‘at a loss out in nature’ tropes as part of its settings as well as framing devices. Some of the most iconic Gothic texts, such as S. T. Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), contain, or are framed by, a maritime story set in a ship experiencing difficulty far out at sea.2 The horror of being at the mercy of nature is a prominent theme © The Author(s) 2020 K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8_4

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of another Gothic classic, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). The adventure of Edward Prendick, the narrator of the novella, begins when he is literally ‘at sea’, shipwrecked, suffering from hunger and thirst and nearly eaten by the other survivors on the boat.3 Soon after his arrival on the island of Doctor Moreau, Prendick is chased by what later turns out to be one of the Beast Folk, the humanised animal hybrids created by Moreau. The horror of this incident is augmented by the fact that the chase takes place at night through the jungle. As the chapter title ‘The Thing in the Forest’ suggests, the jungle is presented as a terrifying realm of the unknown (the word ‘Thing’ evokes the ‘it’ or id of the unconscious) and the dwelling place of nonhumans, which poses a serious threat to the physical safety and sense of control of any human who dares to step into it.4 To what extent, then, can Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books be read as a Gothic text? Kipling heavily draws on the Oriental fable tradition of the Chinese box narrative, consisting of, and conveying the sense of, stories within stories. Moreover, the stories collected in the Jungle Books are principally set ‘in a wood’ or ‘at sea’. Mowgli’s adventures famously take place in the Indian jungle, and there are recurrent references to the sea and ships in the text. Despite these striking similarities, the Jungle Books certainly do not feel or read like Gothic texts. For one thing, the implications of being ‘in a wood’ and ‘at sea’ in the Jungle Books are strikingly different from those in Gothic fiction. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, for instance, the dark forest which Prendick ventures into is terrifying because it is where humans (as well as the humanised Beast folk) can no longer stay safely human: the forest is an integral part of the Gothic setting, which accentuates the border between humans and nonhumans, the transgression of which creates the sense of horror. In the Jungle Books, by contrast, the forest as the dwelling place of the nonhumans is hardly a Gothic space of dehumanisation, but that which shelters the secret worlds of animals, hidden away from humans. To enter a forest and thereby to cross the human-animal border is a magical experience and a privilege, which the reader vicariously participates in by following the adventures of Mowgli the wolf-boy. This chapter will further explore the ways in which the Jungle Books ’ Chinese box style of narration can be seen to embody the modern configuration of human-animal relations, which have undergone considerable transformation and acquired new meanings. The image of ‘Chinese boxes’

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is useful in analysing this transformation, as each ‘box’ nested in the Jungle Books can be seen as a theatre of the modern human-animal encounter, in which the politics of man’s relationships with animals are revealed in fables. Moreover, the structure of boxes within boxes gives expression to the complex embedding of the lives of humans and nonhumans within each other, which is accelerated and complicated by the processes of globalisation and colonisation. The chapter is divided into two sections, centred on the forest and the sea, respectively. In the forest section, I will focus on ‘In the Rukh’, the first written of the Mowgli stories, which can be seen as Kipling’s rewriting of the trope of being ‘in a wood’, as the word ‘rukh’ signifies ‘forest reserve’. Following the circulation of Kipling’s animal stories from the forest to the sea, which seems to follow the circulation of nonhumans within the imperial circuit, I will read his beast fables as representations of the colonial practices of enclosing and exploiting nature. At the same time, I will explore to what extent the Jungle Books as beast fables might be seen to problematise and disrupt the anthropocentric assumptions behind such practices, bearing in mind the thematic and structural affinity of Oriental fables with the Gothic genre.

Stories of the Forest Box 1 Robert Pogue Harrison, in his Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992), which examines the ‘role forests have played in the cultural imagination of the West’, captures the striking affinity between the fable and the forest in the following passage: ‘in the forest the inanimate may suddenly become animate, the god turns into a beast, the outlaw stands for justice, Rosalind appears as a boy, the virtuous knight degenerates into a wild man, the straight line forms a circle, the ordinary gives way to the fabulous’.5 We could therefore define the fable as a type of forest, and vice versa. Both demarcate a space of transgression and metamorphosis, in which all the ‘ordinary’ norms and boundaries become subverted. Markedly, they involve the breaking up of the borders which define humans, opening up a space in which nonhumans, such as animals, speak. What is more, they figure as the primitive space in which storytelling originates: the forest, just like the fable, is the birthplace of ‘animal’ stories, where humans mix with other creatures as fellow characters. It then seems natural that the

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Jungle Books, Kipling’s take on the ancient genre of the beast fable, should have their setting in the forest, or the Indian ‘jungle’. The title, the Jungle Books, beautifully captures the kinship between the forest and fabulous storytelling, in which the ‘Book’ and the Jungle contain one another. It is, therefore, significant that this fabulous, transformative space of the Jungle Books is derived from, and framed by, another story of the forest: ‘In the Rukh’, first published in Many Inventions (1893), is the first Mowgli story written prior to the Jungle Books, and is set in a forest reserve in British India. In this, Mowgli appears as a grown-up, who meets the white men and joins the Indian Forest Department; on securing his job, he marries an Indian girl he has been courting and becomes a father. This story is briefly mentioned in ‘“Tiger-Tiger!”’, which ends with the scene of Mowgli leaving his Jungle: ‘years afterward, he became a man and married. But that is a story for grown-ups’.6 ‘In the Rukh’ is located in the adult world of work and mundane reality, and it would appear that the story, placed outside of the Jungle Books as ‘a story for grownups’, is also outside the magic of the forest, in which we become lost and transformed. It is then no wonder that there has traditionally been much resistance to recognising ‘In the Rukh’ as part of the Jungle Books. Many scholars have, to quote W. W. Robson, argued that ‘In the Rukh’ does not ‘really belong to the same imaginative or daemonic impulse’ as the other Mowgli stories.7 Daniel Karlin states even more emphatically that the story is ‘a half-baked anticipation’ of the Mowgli of the Jungle Books, and should be considered as one of several pieces of ‘indifferent writing which contributed to the making of Mowgli’.8 However, it is difficult to reconcile this rejection of the story’s place within the Jungle Books with the fact that Kipling himself authorised its inclusion as part of the Mowgli saga soon after the publication of the two Jungle Books. Reprinting the story in McClure’s Magazine in June 1896, Kipling, in his introductory note, writes: This tale, published in ‘Many Inventions’ [in] 1893, was the first written of the Mowgli stories, though it deals with the closing chapters of his career – namely, his introduction to white men, his marriage and civilization, all of which took place, we may infer, some two or three years after he had finally broken away from his friends in the jungle. Those who know the geography of India will see that it is a far cry from Seeonee to a Northern forest reserve; but though many curious things must have befallen Mowgli, we

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have no certain record of his adventures during those wanderings. There are, however, legends.9

Here, Kipling acknowledges a certain lack of continuity between the two texts, which he interprets not as inconsistencies but as a kind of gap. This was created through the passage of time, which he suspects to be ‘two to three years’, the great distance between Seeonee in Central India and a Northern forest reserve, and the lack of any ‘certain record of [Mowgli’s] adventures during those wanderings’, which has left many blank pages between the two texts. What is most interesting here is, I think, not Kipling’s disavowal of any thematic and aesthetic incongruities between the two texts, but his eagerness to locate the two ‘incongruent’ texts on the same imperial map. On the one hand, Kipling underlines the structural relationship which the story has with the Jungle Books: namely, it is at once the first and last of the Mowgli stories. This is a curious combination of the origin and the end—Mowgli, who emerges out of ‘In the Rukh’, grows up and goes back to the same story. It is as if Mowgli has to leave his beloved Jungle, not because, as his animal friends keep telling him, Man after all goes back to Man, but because he is destined to return in the end to the place in which he was made. On the other hand, Kipling highlights a spatial and temporal gap between the two texts, to smoothen the transition. He even invites his readers to bridge that gap themselves in their imaginations by thinking of the ‘many curious things [which] must have befallen Mowgli’, each of which will add to the countless ‘legends’ of him, and thereby to the glamour and magic of the Jungle Books. ‘In the Rukh’ is by no means a simple ‘grown-up story’, which serves as an irrelevant origin of the Mowgli saga. As an outer text which engenders and supplements the Mowgli world, it significantly adds to the Books ’ complex storytelling. Indeed, ‘In the Rukh’ and the rest of the Mowgli stories are interconnected, while being located outside each other. ‘In the Rukh’ (a ‘sequel’ written before the main oeuvre was conceived) and the Jungle Books (a long and elaborate ‘prequel’ to the original story) supplement each other, creating an infinite loop between ‘the Rukh’ and ‘the Jungle’, adulthood and childhood, colonial realities and the field of imperial fantasy. The pairing of the two texts forms the nucleus of the Jungle Books ’ elaborate embedded narratives, to which further stories and layers come to be added. Moreover, it provides the blueprint of the bipartite structure of the Books, which can be thematically divided into the

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Mowgli stories and the non-Mowgli stories: ‘In the Rukh’ is a Mowgli story, which is nonetheless located in the adult space of work, and within the context of imperial realities and politics, which the non-Mowgli stories explore. More importantly, Kipling’s pairing of the inside and the outside is an expression of the new relationship which humans have formed with forests. According to Harrison, the forest (a word which etymologically derives from ‘foris ’, or ‘outside’), was once ‘[o]utside of the law and human society’.10 To ‘go to the woods’ is to join the outlaws— ‘the outcasts, the mad, the lovers, brigands, hermits, saints, lepers, the maquis, fugitives, misfits, the persecuted, the wild men’ (61); the forests offered asylum to all those who sought to escape the reach of human law. However, the structure of the Jungle Books signals that forests have ceased to be the outside of human society; indeed, there remains no genuine ‘outside’. Instead of the lawless forests, we have Mowgli’s Jungle, which is exemplarily lawful, being governed by the Law of the Jungle. The Jungle Books constantly switch between Mowgli’s Jungle and the imperial world of work; this means that the two spaces, though kept separate, come to mirror and supplement each other. With the vanishing of the forest as the outside, the terrifying abode of wild beasts and refuge of outlaws, we enter ‘the Chinese Boxes’—the labyrinth of multiplying spaces, in which every space of ‘the other’ is paired with, and controlled by, another space, or waiting to be assimilated as part of the system. Kipling’s fable-as-forest expands its scope to embody this colonising machine. Box 2 In 1892, Kipling, soon to be a father, was discussing his plan to write new children’s stories with Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St. Nicholas Magazine, a popular American magazine for children. His suggestion included a story about: the small boy who made himself a Noah’s Ark on an Indian tank and filled it with animals and how they wouldn’t agree, and how the dove wouldn’t fly for the olive branch and how Noah was ingloriously lugged to the bank with all his ark and spanked.11

This story was never written, but Kipling went on to propose a set of six children’s stories under the title of ‘Noah’s Ark tales’.12 This proposal

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eventually led to Kipling’s two works of children’s literature, the Jungle Books (1894–1895) and Just So Stories (1902), both of which were packed with animals, as any Noah’s Ark should be. U. C. Knoepflmacher, who does not care to ‘uphold the purity of [the] Jungle Books ’, includes ‘In the Rukh’ as an integral part of this extended Ark narrative, describing it as ‘a prolegomenon for a host of “Ark Tales” that vastly outnumbered the six stories’.13 These stories, according to him, all ‘involve spatial movements that dramatize adaptation and survival’ (60), while featuring ‘the interaction between a child and an adult’ (58) as a key theme. This characterisation of the Jungle Books as part of a multiplying collection of ‘Ark Tales’ supports the connections which this chapter makes between the Stories of the Forest and those of the Sea. Significantly, Knoepflmacher inclines to read the Ark Tales as a ‘corrective’ (67) to the imperialist ideologies which Kipling is often seen to represent: the Deluge, in which mankind and all his achievements are destroyed, hardly suggests a narrative of imperial grandeur (66), especially when Noah is ‘ingloriously lugged to the bank’ and ‘spanked’. And yet, in the Jungle Books, the Ark, having escaped the confines of the boy’s Indian tank, sails across the seven seas and its stories of ‘adaptation and survival’ inevitably cover those of the colonisers, the settlers and all their animal companions. ‘In the Rukh’ is not just one of the stories which the Jungle Books ’ intricate Chinese box structure weaves together; it also draws attention to the very power which connected different spaces and stories, turning the British Empire into one magnificent Oriental beast fable. This power was wood, which was ‘in many ways … the oil of the nineteenth century’.14 ‘In the Rukh’ celebrates the efforts of Indian Forestry, which had been created to conserve forests in order to secure the supply of timber and other wood products, upon which the prosperity and expansion of the British Empire was heavily dependent. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the Jungle Books, which communicate the energy of imperial networks through the vitality of animal bodies, originated in Indian forestry: timber is what fuelled the movement of the empire by being made into ships. The importance of forests in building the hegemony of the British Empire cannot be overstated. Ships, which were instrumental to British control of the sea, required a vast amount of timber in order to be built. For instance, it required ‘three thousand loads of timber or two thousand well-grown Oak trees to build a seventy-four-gun ship’.15 The age of sail depleted the stock of available English Oaks for shipbuilding, and

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the British needed to resort to foreign timber supplies. As Robert Greenhalgh Albion, in his Forests and Sea Power, puts it, ‘The timber supply was inseparably connected with sea power. As long as England could maintain control of the sea, the whole world could be searched for timber’.16 The India teak was much valued due to its similarity to ‘the oak in size, shape, weight, texture, and rate of growth’, and also ‘[s]hips built of teak were famous for their durability and safety’ (35). According to Berthold Ribbentrop, in his Forestry in British India (1900), the first significant steps towards forest conservancy in India can be traced back to as early as 1805, when the Court of Directors of the East India Company conducted an enquiry to determine ‘to what extent the King’s Navy might, in view of the growing deficiency of Oak in England, depend on a permanent supply of Teak timber from Malabar’, a region of the southwest Indian coast.17 This enquiry led to the formation of a forest committee, whose report revealed that the Malabar rainforests were by no means ‘permanent’ sources of timber: they had already suffered from extensive deforestation. A proclamation was thus made declaring royalty rights over teak trees; furthermore, unauthorised felling of trees was prohibited, and a special officer was appointed to ensure ‘the preservation and improved production of Teak and other timbers suitable for ship-building’ (64–5). During the 1860s, iron decisively replaced wood as the material for shipbuilding. Nonetheless, forests continued to fuel the movement of the Empire through the global expansion of railway networks; this building of railways prompted the construction of new cities and houses along the new rail routes, which required more timber. The railways played a further, even more significant role in the process of deforestation, accelerating it.18 According to Brian Lavery, before the age of steam railways, the land transportation of ‘heavy materials like naval timber’ was generally avoided: ‘It was necessary to get timber to a navigable waterway and this was not easy; and it was commonly assumed that any timber more than 40 miles away from water transport was useless for the navy, as the costs of moving it were prohibitive’.19 This statement echoes the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu’s famous fable of ‘The Useless Tree’, in which a tree escapes being cut down owing to its unsuitability as timber. As Ben Grant, commenting on this fable, puts it, ‘Uselessness is … at the heart of the tree’s wisdom’.20 Trees once exercised this wisdom to be useless by their sheer weight and materiality, and through their good fortune of

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having grown at a distance from a waterway. However, new technologies—such as railways and steam saw-mills—made it possible to turn any tree into a ‘useful’ one. The process by which man overcame the tree’s material resistance—or its wisdom to be useless—was noted by William Colenso (1811–1899), a Cornish printer, naturalist and missionary, who spent most of his life in New Zealand. In his sketch ‘On the Rapidity with which the Largest New Zealand Trees are felled and converted into Timber for various Uses’, included in his ‘Bush Notes’ (1890), Colenso expresses his amazement that ‘a stately tree – the giant monarch of the forest’ can now be cut up and ‘ready for use, within two hours’.21 This new speedy dispatching of trees is very different from what he had seen in his younger days, when the process of cutting down trees and getting useful boards from them was ‘a slow and laborious process’, the ‘unpleasant remembrance of [which he] shall never lose’ (489). Colenso assures us that the spectacle of tree-cutting—‘this great, this truly wonderful performance’—would impress any spectator with ‘exalted ideas of man’s evergrowing powers over Nature when working in concert with her’ (487; emphasis in original). Colenso’s paradoxical formula, combining two different attitudes towards nature (dominance and harmony), can serve as an insightful commentary on ‘In the Rukh’ as well as the Jungle Books. The Indian forestry originates in man’s newly acquired power to destroy and deplete forests, to be compensated for by the even mightier power to reforest and conserve them, just as Mowgli’s harmonious relationship with his animal brothers can be read as a powerful fable of Man’s dominance over nature. Gregory Allen Barton, in his book on Empire forestry, argues that environmentalism, in the sense of practical action taken to conserve nature, originated in British India in the mid-nineteenth century.22 The sense of mastery over nature, as well as the need to make sustainable ‘use’ out of it, strongly coloured early conservation efforts. Indian ‘nature’ emerged as an important resource to be ‘interfered with and improved’ (37); this resulted in a series of government measures to create forest reserves. It started with Lord Dalhousie’s 1855 ‘Charter of Indian Forestry’, which pronounced all wastelands, which were not privately owned, to be state property. The Indian Forest Department was created in 1864, and a series of legislative acts followed to consolidate the British claims to the forests. The Forest Act of 1878 was another landmark, which extended the forest legislation to most of the British provinces in India and limited local and

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traditional rights to forests. This gave the colonial government the power to appropriate any public forests as the government’s forest reserves.23 The word rukh has been translated as ‘forest’ in the New Readers’ Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling,24 and the OED, till quite recently, gave the Hindi word r¯ ukh, which means ‘tree’, as its etymology.25 However, rukh, which Kipling chooses not to give a translation of, is not just a forest. Used chiefly in the Punjab, it refers to a forest reserve, a land ‘specially set apart’ by Government ‘for the growth of fuel or grass’.26 The word comes from the Panjabi word rakkh, which means ‘protection, guardianship and watchfulness’, and also rakkhna, to keep or to set apart.27 A rukh is therefore a man-managed forest, set apart by the act of enclosing and taking possession of nature, and maintained by the nurturing, and controlling, gaze cast over it. The word encapsulates the Indian government’s conservational attitude to nature shaped in response to the ever-growing demand for forest resources. In the story, Kipling mentions ‘Changamanga rukh’ in the Punjab,28 the first manmade forest in India, the plantation of which started in 1866. The story is therefore firmly located within the history of forestry in British India. The rukh is clearly distinguished from ordinary Indian forests, the common word for which is simply ‘jungle’. The title of the story thus implies already the polarity between the rukh and ‘jungle’. It is then natural that the story of the rukh would be accompanied by the story of the jungle, which, as we know, took the shape of the Jungle Books. The Jungle, nature outside the man-managed rukh, can only exist in the Book, or as the Book. The Jungle Books do not only trace the colonial violence of killing, making safe and then idealising nature so as to extract modern animal fables from it. More importantly, Kipling was writing with an awareness that nature beyond man’s control was fast diminishing, and could only exist in representation. Box 3 John Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India collects many curious myths and traditions relating to animals, among which is ‘a belief in the Chittagong Hill tracts that wild elephants assemble together to dance’.29 One of Lockwood Kipling’s informants was Colonel Thomas Herbert Lewin (1839–1916), who acted as the Superintendent of the tracts from 1866 to 1875. Lewin once came upon ‘a large cleared place in the forest, the floor beaten hard and smooth, like that of a native hut’, and the hill-men, who accompanied him, declared this to be ‘an elephant

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nautch-khana [ballroom]’ (224). Lockwood Kipling, captivated by the idea that wild elephants delight in dancing, ‘[confesses] to a deep envy of the Assam coolie, who said he had been a hidden unbidden guest at an elephant ball’ (224): Let us believe … until some dismal authority forbids us, that the elephant beau monde meets by the bright Indian moonlight in the ballrooms they clear in the depths of the forest, and dance mammoth quadrilles and reels to the sighing of the wind through the trees and their own trumpeting, shrill and sudden as the Highlander’s hoch!’ (224–5)

Note that, in Lockwood Kipling’s imagination, Indian elephants are transformed into Europeans engaged in social dancing, performing complex movements of quadrilles and reels. The mammoth bodies of elephants, powerful enough to tear down trees to create a spacious ballroom, are disciplined into those of dancers: as he observes from his human experience, ‘stout people are often light dancers, and sometimes most eligible partners’ (224). This is a perfect example of how human-animal analogies, which provide a basis for the animal fable, tame animals into civilised humans (Lockwood Kipling goes on to discuss the trainability of domestic elephants: they are ‘easily taught to dance by American and European circus trainers’ [224]). The Indian forest provides a stage for an imperial beast fable, which reveals the colonial fantasy of training Indian animal subjects to perform human (European) routines. At the same time, the secret elephant ballroom, hidden deep in the forest, becomes an Anglo-Indians’ playground, in which the British space is layered and rendered a palimpsest with the Indian one, allowing them to become the Lords of the Jungle. Elephants here take on Celtic characteristics, speaking in Scottish dialect (‘Highlanders’ hoch!’): human-animal analogies, which risk interspecies hybridity, manifest themselves as racialised national identities.30 A dance-ball of wild elephants on a moon-lit night is also the centrepiece of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Toomai of the Elephants’. In this story, Little Toomai, a ten-year-old boy and son of a mahout, is taken into ‘the depths of the forest’ by his father’s elephant Kala Nag, to witness the event. The story is a fictionalisation of his father’s vision of dancing elephants, and a good example of the many father-son collaborations which underpin the Jungle Books.31 It is then interesting to note that Kipling’s take on the elephant-ball is very different from his father’s. In lieu of the idyllic

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scene of elephants dancing ‘to the sighing of the wind through the trees’, Kipling describes it as the ‘stamp of hundreds of heavy feet on the raw earth’, which sounds like ‘a war-drum beaten at the mouth of a cave’; it is so overpowering that Little Toomai has to cover his ears to ‘shut out the sound’.32 Unlike his father, Kipling places his elephant dance outside the range of human senses and human meaning. Likewise, the elephants are clearly seen to ‘talk in their own tongue’, a ‘clucking and gurgling’ (116) which Kipling dare not render into human language. In its exploration of nonhuman animal languages, the story holds a unique position within the Jungle Books as a collection of talking-animal fables. The elephant-ball is a scene of the nonhuman beast fable written in the elephant tongue, and this allows for the existence of many such fables still to be discovered in the woods. ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ has much in common with the Mowgli stories, and their similarity is not limited to their being stories of the forest. They are also beast fables woven out of Indian folklore, discovered and reinvented by the colonisers. In the story, the native belief that wild elephants congregate to dance takes the form of an ‘old joke among elephant-catchers’: ‘when thou hast seen the elephants dance’, which ‘just means never’ (110). Little Toomai, who does see the elephants dance, breathes life into the old phrase, just as the figure of Mowgli is a modern take on Indian wolf-child stories. In this way, Kipling’s stories draw on the anthropological belief that beast fables, animal-related proverbs and phrases and indeed our languages themselves retain the trace of our encounters with animals and our animal origin. And the colonial space, imagined by the coloniser as primitive and unhistorical, is shown to be the treasure house of such secrets, unappreciated by ‘natives’, who use, and live in, these ‘animal’ languages. Moreover, ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ sharply distinguishes between the spheres of the domestic and the wild, or of humans and animals. The wildness of the elephant-ball is emphasised by the fact that Kala Nag, a long-serving Government elephant and loyal servant of the Queen, escapes the camp to join wild elephants to dance. This gap is further accentuated by the child hero, who, just like Mowgli, is given the role of bridging the two spheres. Little Toomai is no ‘hidden unbidden guest’ because Kala Nag responds to his plea to take him to the ball (113). He has developed a strong tie with this elephant, who has taken care of him from the moment he was born, and acknowledges him to be his future master. After the ball, Kala Nag safely brings the boy back to their camp,

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and the head of all the elephant drivers bestows upon him the title of ‘Toomai of the Elephants’, blessed with ‘the favour of the elephant-folk and of the Gods of the Jungles’ (120). This is reminiscent of the ending of the Jungle Books, when Mowgli, the Jungle’s well-beloved, eventually leaves for the human world; his animal friends sing in chorus as a parting gift: ‘Jungle-Favour go with thee!’ (314). However, the affinity between ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ and the Mowgli saga goes beyond the admiration they both evoke for the secret animal world that exists beyond the human sphere, which only their child hero is privy to. They are also grounded in the real, adult sphere of work in the British Raj. Indeed, ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ has much in common with ‘In the Rukh’, in that it shows the workings of the Indian Government in full operation. The story is set during a Government elephant-catching expedition to the Garo Hills. The operation is led by Petersen Sahib, described in the story as ‘the head of all the Keddah operations—the man who caught all the elephants for the Government of India, and who knew more about the ways of elephants than any living man’ (107). This character is modelled on George Peress Sanderson (1848–1892), who worked for the Indian government and supervised a yearly expedition to capture and train wild elephants for the Government service.33 ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ implicitly characterises the British as benign and diligent rulers who strive to cultivate better relationships with the natural world in India. Notably, it showcases the new technique of catching elephants by driving them into a stockade (Keddah), which was pioneered by Sanderson in the 1870s. This British invention was thought to be more humane than the traditional method of using pitfalls or traps; in ‘Letting in the Jungle’, for instance, we learn that Hathi was once badly injured by ‘the sharpened stake in the pit’ which he had fallen into, and this is the reason why he, with his three sons, ‘let in the jungle upon five Indian villages’ to drive the men away.34 ‘In the Rukh’ and ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ explore the British coloniser’s new identity as the protector of nature, and they do so by showcasing the British operation of ‘enclosing’ nature. In each story, Kipling uses an Indian word—rukh and ‘Keddah’, respectively—to encapsulate the process of capturing, taming and nurturing nature. These exotic terms help naturalise the British intervention into the Indian nature as part of Indian life, and even endow it with mystical qualities. Moreover, the new space of nature, enclosed and put under colonial control, is paired by Kipling with the ‘wild’ space of animals outside the human sphere,

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which is the playground of the child Mowgli, and which Little Toomai has a glimpse of. The success of the British operation to control nature greatly depends upon the inclusion of these native boys, who not only have the ability to command nature, but can also bless and protect the British rule with the Jungle Favour they carry. Box 4 To quote Tess Cosslett, ‘both the animals and Mowgli himself provide sites of ambiguous and contradictory readings, sometimes appearing as the natives, sometimes as the colonisers’.35 Just like nonhuman animals in the fables, the figure of Mowgli the human vacillates between allegorical readings and literal ones. Allegorically, he represents the coloniser, who exercises power and authority over natives, who are represented in the stories by nonhuman animal characters.36 His status as a feral child, traversing fully human and animal worlds, has also been interpreted as the expression of his colonial hybridity, comparable to that of Kipling’s other ‘hybrid boys’ (such as Kim, Stalky and Tods), who inhabit both English and Indian worlds.37 Literally, however, he is a native boy, who grows up to accept the colonial authority of the white Masters. Such a reading contradicts and undercuts the fable’s allegorical drive to say one thing to mean another. At the same time, the beast fable is nothing if we cannot take seriously the literal. Indeed, why is Mowgli a brown boy? Of course, Mowgli’s brownness would illustrate the racist and anthropological assumptions of the day: children and natives are closer to, and have affinities with, animals; or more problematically, natives are (like) animals and children. As Jane Hotchkiss rightly points out, Mowgli is presented as ‘a sort of Aryan figure, a throwback to a pre-historic India’, who, as a wolf-boy, also evokes a Darwinian history of origins.38 Kipling could not have chosen a European boy to characterise the feral child. Added to this, the fact that the Jungle Books originates in a story of the forest, or of Indian forestry, allows another way to interpret ‘literally’ why Mowgli has to be a brown boy. ‘In the Rukh’, which locates the Mowgli saga in the adult reality of the British Raj, does not simply present Mowgli as a colonised subject willing to work under white men. The colonial masters, after finding out about his superhuman skills, encourage him to take up a position in the Indian Forest Department. Mowgli is offered the job of ‘Forest-guard’ with ‘a pension at the end of that business’.39 The offer is made to him by none other than Inspector-General

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Muller, the Head of Forests in the Government of India. This is a very rare occasion indeed in Kipling’s world, in which an Indian native is eagerly recruited into Government service. However, it is important to note that Muller does not create the position of forest guard especially for Mowgli. Gisborne, the Forest Officer who discovers Mowgli’s talents, also mentions to him the availability of a salaried position before Muller makes his first appearance (324). That is to say, the Indian Forestry already had institutional arrangements in place to offer forestry jobs to Indian subjects. As Gisborne says to himself, ‘in Mowgli he had found at last that ideal ranger and forest-guard for whom he and the Department were always looking’.40 As I have shown, the figure of Petersen Sahib in ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ is derived from a real-life superintendent of elephant-catching operations. Likewise, Inspector Muller, described in the story as ‘the gigantic German’, is said to have been modelled on Berthold Ribbentrop, a German forester, who joined the Indian Forestry in 1866 and acted as Inspector-General of Forests from 1889 to 1900.41 According to a newspaper interview he gave in 1895, Ribbentrop knew the Kiplings well, including the young Rudyard who had been working as a journalist in Lahore in the 1880s. In the same interview, Ribbentrop also confirmed that he is the model for Muller in ‘In the Rukh’.42 At the same time, Muller can also be seen as a composite figure of the first three Inspectors-General of the Indian Forest, all of whom were German. In particular, his successful recruitment of Mowgli alludes to Dietrich Brandis (1824–1907), a founding father of Indian forestry and the first Inspector-General from 1864 to 1883, who played a significant role in promoting the employment of native foresters. He was the founder of the first Indian forest school at Dehra Dun, Northern India in 1878, which aimed to teach Indians the science of forestry and to provide professional training in forest works. Initially, classes were given in English and only students who were well acquainted with the language were admitted into the school; however, due to a serious lack of English-speaking candidates, instruction in Hindustani was later introduced, to ‘extend the circle of selection of candidates suitable for forest work’.43 Native students were trained principally to be rangers and were placed under the supervision of the British Forest Officer. However, deserving natives had ‘the prospect of promotion to the controlling branch, and of rising to high appointments’; to quote Brandis, ‘the Forest Department was one of those, in

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which, without any political risk, the highest appointments might be filled by Natives’.44 The Indian Forest Department was keen to employ native foresters, first of all, to save money. The Department expanded rapidly through the latter half of the nineteenth century, and to meet its growing requirements, it was necessary to employ natives who were considerably cheaper than the British foresters as a workforce. Secondly, to be successful, forest conservancy required the cooperation and understanding of native peoples, whose ancestral jungles and territories were used for the creation of forest reserves. Settling disputes over land rights and access to forest resources was one of the important duties which the foresters had to perform, but naturally this met with much resentment and resistance from the affected parties. According to Brandis, ‘the proof of a good forest officer is that he feels sympathy with these people, and endeavours to make them trust him and like him’,45 and native officers were obviously better placed to offer sympathy to, and gain trust from, native peoples than their European counterparts: The only plan […] in order to mitigate the friction which is the unavoidable consequence of strict protection and a regular system of working, is to employ as many competent and professionally trained Native forest officers, not only in subordinate but also in responsible positions. It is not maintained, that Native Forest Officers will necessarily be more considerate than Englishmen. But in any case it cannot be said against them, that they lack the perfect knowledge, the deep insight into and the sympathy with the feelings and prejudices of Asiatics.46

Note, however, that the Forest Department’s efforts to understand, and sympathise with, ‘the feelings and prejudices of Asiatics’ were inseparable from its own prejudices against ‘Asiatics’. Indeed, the belief that the natives had been destroying forests by their destructive practices was one of the very reasons which the Department gave to justify taking preventative measures such as the reserving of forest lands. In particular, it strongly objected to ‘shifting cultivation’, a traditional system of agroforestry, which had been widely practised in South Asia for centuries. In this system, a plot of land is cleared by slashing and burning the vegetation, and then used for cultivation for a number of years. The land is then abandoned, and left to revert back to its natural vegetation, while another plot of land is chosen for slashing and burning. The Forest Department

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condemned this indigenous practice as a destructive and unsustainable use of forest resources, and made it its mission to prohibit and eradicate it; accordingly, shifting cultivation had largely ceased to be practised by the early 1870s.47 It also tried to regulate a host of other native practices, such as cattle grazing and the cutting down of trees for fuel. Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar, in her piece ‘Reading Kipling in Kipling’s Own Country’, rightly draws attention to the fact that Kipling ‘[chooses] to almost completely ignore’ the lives, histories and customs of the tribal people who actually inhabit the Seonee (Seoni) hills in Madhya Pradesh, in which the Mowgli stories are supposed to be set.48 That Kipling made a Seoni jungle into Mowgli’s playground, a native-free space in which he can freely explore imperialist values, is a violent act of writing out the presence of indigenous people and their histories, especially when these people were losing their lands due to a series of Forest Acts. With this argument in mind, it is illuminating to read Mahesh Rangarajan’s Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces 1860–1914.49 This book gives a good overview of the conflict between the Forest Department and forest tribes in the region, and corroborates Bhatnagar’s sense that Kipling’s jungle is made possible by silencing indigenous voices and histories. Among the forest tribes living in the Seoni region, the Baigas, though not a numerous tribe, were considered by the forest department to be by far the most destructive, as their method of shifting cultivation, called bewar, involved burning down an extensive area of wooded land (101). It was impossible to persuade them to settle on, and cultivate, a given plot of land, as they refused to plough the land out of respect for ‘[their] mother the earth’ (119). The Jungle Books do not mention the Baigas, or their destructive bewar practice. However, among many unrecorded adventures of Mowgli, there could easily be some incidents relating to the Baiga tribe: they slash and burn away his jungle, and all the animals have to relocate elsewhere. To come back to the question of why Mowgli has to be a brown boy, the answer is because native foresters were a new species of creature which the Forest Department was committed to introduce into the rukh and nurture as an integral part of its new ecosystem. The creation of forest reserves was not simply an infringement upon people’s ancestral ‘rights’ and territories, but was intended to change radically the way in which forest resources were managed. There was a great need to educate natives on the importance of forest conservancy; as Brandis put it, ‘unless the practice of rational forest management becomes the common property of

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the natives of this country, the permanence of the measures now initiated and their ultimate beneficial effects will remain uncertain’.50 The forestry school at Dehradun was founded for this reason. It is then no coincidence that Mowgli’s education is a central theme of the Jungle Books. Mowgli’s jungle can be seen as one big forestry school, in which many animals volunteer to act as his teachers and guardians. Mowgli learns everything there is to learn about the forest, and at the end of the process, he emerges as an ideal forest guard who can immediately contribute to the work of the Forest Department. As Bhatnagar herself has noted, Kipling did not totally write out the presence of forest tribes.51 In particular, three of the five Mowgli stories in The Second Jungle Book make reference to the Gonds, the most populous forest tribe in the Seoni region. They appear to hunt in Mowgli’s jungle. In ‘How Fear Came’, Sahi the Porcupine is ‘considered uncommonly good eating by the Gonds’, who call the animal ‘Ho-Igoo’; for Sahi, ‘the wicked little Gondee axe that whirls across a clearing like a dragon-fly’ represents the threat of Man, the Hairless One.52 In ‘The King’s Ankus’, Mowgli witnesses humans killing each other for possession of a jewelled ankus, and one of them is a Gond hunter. In ‘Letting in the Jungle’, when all the animals in the Jungle, led by Mowgli, turn on a Hindu village, the villagers send for ‘the head man of the nearest tribe of wandering Gonds’ (200). Described as ‘little, wise, and very black hunters, living in the deep Jungle, whose fathers came of the oldest race in India – the aboriginal owners of the land’ (200), Kipling clearly acknowledges them as denizens of the jungle, with a deep knowledge of, and historical ties to, the land. The Gondi head man has little advice to offer the villagers about the impending disaster, knowing full well that man is powerless before the force of nature. Disconcertingly, however, he makes ‘white men’ an exception to this rule: ‘He knew that when the Jungle moves only white men can hope to turn it aside’ (201). Kipling’s representation of the Gondi head man, who accepts the white man’s intervention in the jungle, disempowers and depoliticises the forest tribe. Moreover, the Gonds’ knowledge of the forest is used to give expression to the supernatural power of the colonisers, which matches, and is equated with, Mowgli’s power to command the animals and wipe out a human village. As such, Mowgli embodies the colonising process of the Indian Forest Department, which forcefully takes from natives their land, to reforest it (or ‘let in the jungle’). It was then natural that a feral jungle boy should turn into an imperial forest guard.

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Box 5 The Indian Forest Department, overseen by the three successive German Inspectors-General, was characteristically European in its making. Just as Mowgli’s story echoes the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus, twins suckled by a wolf in the forest, the art of forestry adopted by the Indian Forest Department originated in European forests, and was fostered by the long tradition of continental forestry. When the Department started in the 1860s, Britain did not even have its own forestry school. France and Germany were the two leading nations in forestry in the nineteenth century, from which Britain had to learn a great deal, and humbly. All officers intended for the Indian Forest Service were sent to study either at the National School of Forestry in Nancy, France, or in forestry institutions in Germany. S. Ravi Rajan, in his Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial Eco-development 1800–1950, underscores how European debates and scientific research on the effects of deforestation led to ‘the emergence of the campaign for forest conservancy in the British Empire’, and shaped the policy and methodologies of the Indian Forest Department.53 A British Forestry school was finally established at Cooper’s Hill in Surrey in 1885, but its curriculum and training programme were heavily indebted to the continental forestry paradigm (82). Indian forestry went on itself to acquire an international reputation by becoming a model to emulate. Barton documents how the forestry ideals and environmental innovations developed in British India were exported to other parts of the Empire, such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.54 He considers ‘In the Rukh’, penned by ‘such a best-selling artist as Kipling’, to be a perfect example of the fact that Indian forestry as an imperial venture was capturing the public imagination, and aptly characterises Mowgli as ‘a new Adam, ready to join governmental service in the biggest endeavor in human history – nothing less than the reforestation of the world’ (33). The rukh, then, was hardly a desolate wasteland in the colonial margin, cut off from the rest of civilisation. It was the international centre of nature conservation, and, as such, was an integral part of the global forestry network. Added to this cosmopolitan nature of Indian forestry is the fact that Kipling wrote the Jungle Books while he was a resident in Vermont (1892– 1896), the hometown of his American wife Carrie. Mowgli’s jungle was not only formed in conversation with the American forests which Kipling encountered, but also with the conservation issues which surrounded

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them. This was a period in which the United States, following the disappearance of the Western Frontier to conquer, was developing its own conservation movement in search of a new relationship with nature. Kipling was both aware of this development, and called upon as a forestry expert to contribute to the debate about it. When in late 1894 the Century Magazine, which crusaded for forest conservation,55 organised a forum on how to save and manage the forests, based on a set of proposals from the Harvard Professor Charles S. Sargent, Kipling was one of those who were invited to contribute a commentary. (Other respondents included the leading conservationist John Muir and the President-to-be Theodore Roosevelt, both of whom played a pivotal role in shaping the National Park system.56 ) Kipling refrained from contributing a piece for publication (saying ‘I might do more harm than good’), but heartily supported the Magazine’s initiative and promised to write to Professor Sargent personally.57 In this context, it is important that Kipling reprinted ‘In the Rukh’ in McClure’s Magazine in 1896, to share his celebration of Indian forestry with his American audience. It was his way to contribute to the ongoing efforts to preserve the American forests through public intervention, and Kipling could show the Americans that important works were already underway in India. The opening paragraph of ‘In the Rukh’ has been quoted in full by historians of Indian forestry, such as Barton and Rangarajan,58 as it vividly captures the various activities of the Indian Forest Department, which was put in charge of the ‘reboisement of all India’.59 In this passage, Kipling presents the foresters as ‘[wrestling] with wandering sand-torrents and shifting dunes’ in their effort to reforest them, by ‘wattling them at the sides, damming them in front, and pegging them down atop with coarse grass and spindling pine’ (315). The new forests, created ‘after the rules of Nancy’—that is, the French National School of Forestry at Nancy—are highly ‘international’ in their ecosystem, as the foresters ‘experiment with battalions of foreign trees’, and ‘coax the blue gum’, native to Australia, ‘to take root and, perhaps, dry up the Canal fever’ (315). However, ‘In the Rukh’ illustrates how the actual work in Indian forests elevates the continental training into a noble imperial mission. The paragraph ends with a fascinating moment in which the nurtured nature wipes away the French influence from its Forest Officer: ‘the woods, that show his care, in turn set their mark upon him, and he ceases to sing the naughty French songs he learned at Nancy, and grows silent with the silent things of the underbrush’ (316). This paints the sublime picture of the White

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Man working alone with nature, while also illuminating the way in which man and nature shape each other in the rukh. The forestry work involves communion with, and attentiveness to, the nonhuman world: the Forest Officer learns to listen to and be part of the ‘things of the underbrush’, vibrating with silence. The success of colonial forestry is attested to by Mowgli the wild man: ‘This is a good rukh. I shall stay in it’ (322). According to Ribbentrop, the boundary of the Rukh Changa Manga is ‘marked by pillars’, each of which is numbered.60 These pillars beautifully illustrate the porous nature of the rukh’s boundary: each rukh, while being clearly demarcated and monitored, is open to, and in conversation with, the other world. It is then no wonder that Mowgli, known for his fluid and trans-border identity, should have originated in this space. Mowgli embodies the man-managed nature and a new imperial subjectivity as the guardian of nature, both of which are the produce of the rukh. In addition, he represents the ideals and ideology of what might be called ‘imperial cosmopolitanism’: the British Empire as a hospitable space, in which all the barriers which separate one thing from another break down, making possible all kinds of fellowships, including that between humans and other animals. Mowgli enters the story as ‘a man without a village’ and ‘without caste’61 ; he is therefore a cosmopolite by definition. He represents the porosity of the ‘imperial’ border, which is sharply contrasted with the rigidity and inhospitability of every other space. The animals in the jungle ‘bade [Mowgli] go because [he] was a man’, and he is also driven out from the Indian village ‘with sticks and stones’ (334), condemned as a Jungle demon, whereas the British would gladly receive such a demon, and even offer him a salaried position to induce him to stay forever. The story’s characterisation of the rukh as a cosmopolitan utopia obviously masks the reality of colonial rule. Its border is porous only for the privileged few such as Mowgli and Europeans, while the local inhabitants’ rights to access forest reserves were strictly regulated. Moreover, the act of enclosing land is accompanied by the exclusion and extermination of what is not desirable. Significantly, the first action that takes place in the rukh is Gisborne’s killing of the Red One, the man-eating tiger. This is the moment when Gisborne the Englishman, for whom it is ‘a sin to kill’ (317), draws a clear line between wildlife to protect and ‘vermin’ (319) to be exterminated. It was Kipling’s creative invention to dramatise this aspect of man’s relationship with nature by placing the hunting

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of tigers centre stage. He thereby transposes onto the scene of conservation the popular discourses of hunting and sportsmanship in which tigers were demonised as dangerous enemies to be dealt with. The use of tigers makes the whole scene heroic, while in reality Forest Officers’ number one enemies were undoubtedly tree-eating insects, against which ‘the strict preservation of the feathered tribe’ was recommended as ‘the most effectual safeguard’.62 Notably, the originary act of violence in the story is not a man’s killing of a tiger, but a tiger’s killing of a man, presented as that which has always already happened and not as reversible or preventable. Mowgli magically appears immediately after one of Gisborne’s forest guards was killed by the Red One, as if to respond to this crisis of human superiority. The Jungle Books restage the killing of a man by a tiger, in the shape of Mowgli’s karmic battle with Shere Khan; they also invent the Law of the Jungle, in which the First of the Tigers’s killing of a man once upon a time turns out to be its cornerstone and the reason why animals became afraid of men, according to the foundational myth of the Jungle, told by Hathi the Elephant in ‘How Fear Came’. This confirms that the Jungle and the rukh, which are supposed to be outside of each other, are virtually identical spaces, formed around the tension arising from the man-animal relationship and its containment. The killing of Shere Khan is not only symbolic but also necessary, because the Man-Eater represents the forest as the terrifying space of nonhumans. In this sense, it is important that the forest turns against the First of the Tigers in the above-mentioned myth. The Tiger’s first offence was the killing of a buck, which introduced Death into the Jungle; as a punishment for this, trees and creepers were ordered by Tha, the Lord of the Jungle, to mark the offender,63 and the Law, created as a result of the Tiger’s killing of a man, is compared to the Giant Creeper, because ‘it dropped across everyone’s back and no one could escape’ (143). This myth marks the moment when the forests were divided between the lawful (or that which follows the human law) and that which menaces humans, and the Man-Eater is made to represent the latter. By killing Shere Khan, and thereby eliminating the forest’s threat, Mowgli becomes a new Adam, whose identity and authority come from his affinity with nature.

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Stories of the Sea Box 1 As we move from the forest to the sea, let us follow the career of Kala Nag the elephant, who embodies the connections between forest and maritime stories more than any animal in the Jungle Books. He was captured and taken away from ‘all [his] forest affairs’ at the age of twenty. Since then, he ‘had served the Indian Government in every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years’.64 After taking part in many military operations, he was transported to undertake timber-hauling at Moulmein, a teak port and commercial centre of British Burma (now Myanmar), and the setting of George Orwell’s essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936).65 He thereby became involved in the imperial timber trade, and thus in the worldwide shipment of forest resources. He was a willing participant in this enterprise, as he ‘had half killed an insubordinate young elephant who was shirking his fair share of work’.66 Eventually, he was employed in ‘helping to catch wild elephants among the Garo Hills’ (104). With his return to his forest as a Government elephant, which includes his onenight visit to the wild elephants’ dance-ball, his story comes full circle. He now helps engender fresh cycles of elephant forest-sea stories in the form of new elephant recruits. It is then no coincidence that one of the highlights of his career involves maritime travel. The Abyssinian expedition of 1867–1868 was a punitive war against Emperor Theodore II of Ethiopia. Under the command of General Sir Robert Napier, the Commander-in-Chief of the Bombay Army, an expeditionary force of more than 12,000 troops, chiefly drawn from the Indian Army, was transported to Abyssinia by 205 sailing vessels and 75 steamers.67 Altogether 44 elephants accompanied the expedition, as if to showcase the might and splendour of the Indian Army, and Kipling imagines that Kala Nag was among them to partake in the honour: [Kala Nag] had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam-crane and taken for days across the water, and made to carry a mortar on his back in a strange and rocky country very far from India, and had seen the Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala, and had come back again in the steamer entitled, so the soldiers said, to the Abyssinian War medal.68

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The spectacle of embarking elephants for Abyssinia, which drew ‘a very numerous company of spectators’ on the day, captured the public imagination. The Illustrated London News reported it with an illustration (Fig. 4.1), which shows the loading of 19 elephants onto the transport ship Compta on 8 December 1867, thus capturing the moment in which Kala Nag was ‘hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam crane’. According to the report, the operation was a great success, with only one elephant, who ‘[turned] away with dignified disgust from the ship’, refusing to comply, and it was ‘considered prudent to leave it behind’.69 The second batch of 25 elephants was shipped a month later.70 The disgusted elephant was certainly wise to turn away from the ship, as the expedition was not without animal casualties: 5 out of the 44 elephants died in Abyssinia, ‘two from exhaustion, and three from want of water’.71 The remaining 39 were safely shipped back to Bombay.72 In the case of other military animals, such as camels, mules, bullocks and horses,

Fig. 4.1 ‘Embarking Elephants at Bombay for the Abyssinian Expedition’. Illustrated London News, 11 January 1868 (© Illustrated London News Ltd./Mary Evans)

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the situation was far starker. Of 36,094 animals who landed by sea routes to take part in the expedition, only 7421 were reembarked to return home. According to Napier, the difference of 29,673 animals represented ‘the numbers expended’ in Abyssinia.73 This includes a great number of pack animals who died from back injuries caused by bad equipment, as well as the want of food and attention (126). Even those who survived were thought ‘not worth bringing away, part of which were sold’; many were destroyed (60). Considering that the main aim of the expedition was to secure the release of a handful of European hostages, it serves as a sobering reminder of how little nonhuman lives were valued compared to those of humans. Moreover, it also demonstrates the extent to which so many animals became caught up in human maritime activities. Kala Nag’s army career leads us to another of Kipling’s Jungle Book tales, ‘Servants of the Queen’ (in the American edition, ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’), in which yet another military spectacle, comprising a vast number of animals, is created to showcase the power of the Indian Army. The story opens as follows: It had been raining heavily for one whole month – raining on a camp of thirty thousand men and thousands of camels, elephants, horses, bullocks, and mules all gathered together at a place called Rawal Pindi, to be reviewed by the Viceroy of India.74

I will come back to the importance of the rain later. The story is set during the Rawal Pindi Durbar, the meeting between the Viceroy Lord Dufferin and the Amir of Afghanistan (Abdur Rahman) which took place in April 1885. The review of the Indian army, for which the men and their animals were summoned, was held to entertain and impress the Amir with a grand military display. At first glance, ‘Servants of the Queen’ has nothing to do with maritime connections: Rawal Pindi, adjacent to Islamabad (now the capital of Pakistan), is far away from the coast, and animals would have arrived there by ‘locomotive’ (122). However, we soon discover that one of the animal characters, the troop-horse, is an Australian; as the narrator informs us, ‘Nearly all our horses for the English cavalry are brought to India from Australia, and are broken in by the troopers themselves’ (125). Moreover, as the title suggests, they are all ‘Servants of the Queen’, the monarch of the faraway maritime country called England, in whose name they could be called upon to take part in overseas actions at any time.

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The narrator of the story is based on the young Kipling himself, who attended and reported on the durbar as a special correspondent for the Civil and Military Gazette.75 His fox terrier, Vixen, also makes an appearance as the narrator’s beloved companion.76 In this story, the narrator overhears the conversation of the camp animals, whose speech he says he understands: ‘I knew enough of beast language – not wild-beast language, but camp-beast language, of course – from the natives to know what he was saying’ (123). He is thus able vividly to record a conversation between two mules, the troop-horse, the baggage-camel, the elephant and the bullocks, who compare notes about their experiences in the Army. Kipling treats these animals as psychological entities, all of whom ‘seem to be affected in various ways’ (133). For instance, the elephant, who can ‘see inside [his] head’ (131), is ‘afraid of most things’ (132), while the bullocks, who do not think and are therefore brave, seem to have collective agency, as they ‘see out of [their] four eyes’ (131). The camel dreams ‘very bad dreams’ (124), which often cause him to stampede across the camp. Overall, the army is represented as a regular zoo, consisting of a wide variety of animals with varied experiences and peculiarities, who are aware of, and particular about, each other’s differences. This makes it all the more striking that the animals are all in agreement when it comes to their role in the army: ‘All you have to do is to obey the man at your head and ask no questions’ (133). As a native officer explains: [animals] obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier the general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done. (136–7)

For the discipline of the Indian Army, only one type of relationship matters: that between man and the animal under his charge. A chain of command and supervision turns the British Army into hierarchically arranged Chinese boxes, each of which represents a story of a man and his animal, which is included within a bigger story. This nesting of stories within stories in turn serves as a model of the British Empire itself, with its boxes ever-proliferating, as more people, animals and stories join in the chain. Alarmingly, we here see that British imperialism, notorious for its colonising violence and exploitation, is founded on principles which

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we also treasure: the affinity, partnership and trust between humans and animals who live and coexist together. Tzvetan Todorov, in his famous essay ‘Narrative-Men’, describes the Arabian Nights as a ‘narrative machine’, in which the process of narrative embedding is propelled by the fact that each story contains a lack which has to be supplemented, and this supplement, which takes the form of a frame narrative to the story, again contains a lack to be supplemented by another, and so on.77 The Jungle Books can be seen as ‘a narrative machine’, similarly built upon supplementarity. In it, each animal story lacks, and therefore has to be supplemented by, the figure of Man, who stands outside and above nature as the benevolent supervisor. The term ‘human-animal’ encapsulates this fabular logic of supplementarity: the hyphen denotes at once man’s pairing with, and his exteriority to, his animals. Here, let us come back to the importance of rain in the story. According to the narrator, ‘it had been raining heavily for one whole month’, and, while the military parade was being performed, ‘the rain began to fall again, and for a while it was too misty to see what the troops were doing’.78 It is during this moment of poor visibility that the spectator undergoes a peculiar experience of being ‘at sea’: ‘one solid wall of men, horses, and guns […] came on straight towards the Viceroy and the Amir, and as it got nearer the ground began to shake, like the deck of a steamer when the engines are going fast’ (136). Rain brings the ocean into the land-locked city of Rawal Pindi (nowhere is beyond the reach of British maritime power), where Kipling, in order to convey the ‘frightening effect this steady come-down of troops has on the spectators’ (136), evokes the image of a steamship. The energy and movement of thousands of animals is equated with those of the steamship, thereby revealing the British Empire to be a kind of terrifying Animal-Machine. Furthermore, the true implication of the rain becomes apparent when the parade is over and ‘an infantry band struck up’ the following tune: The animals went in two by two, Hurrah! The animals went in two by two, The elephant and the battery mu1’, and they all got into the Ark For to get out of the rain! (136)

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This is a pastiche of a famous anonymous ballad, with Kipling substituting ‘the battery mule’ for ‘the kangaroo’,79 and its use in this story clearly connects Kipling’s comparison between the parade and a steamer to the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark. When God decided to send the Deluge to Earth to cleanse it, he instructed Noah to build an Ark and to take on board his family and a pair of each living creature. He was put in charge of the lives of animals during the Deluge, ‘to keep them alive with [him]’ (Genesis 6:19; emphasis in original). In this context, the story’s opening line—‘It had been raining heavily for one whole month’—takes on a different meaning, since, according to the Bible, the rain which caused the Deluge lasted ‘forty days and forty nights’ (Genesis 7:12). The British Empire is the Ark on the ocean, carrying all the living creatures and their stories, while the divine work of renewing the world is underway. It is terrifying that this Empire-as-Ark, or gigantic Animal-Machine, requires each animal to obey his master (the same principle is enshrined in ‘the Law of the Jungle’: ‘the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is – Obey!’80 ). At the same time, it is suggested that animals (both human and nonhuman) are trained to obey, rather than being naturally inclined to do so. A young recruit-mule, who ‘[has] been quiet for a long time’, speaks up and raises an uncomfortable question: ‘What I want to know is, why we have to fight at all’ (133; emphasis in original). He thereby questions the necessity of war, as well as the nature of animals’ involvement with human affairs—but his question is instantly dismissed with contempt by all parties, who have learned to obey ‘because we’re told to’ (133). Animals’ subjectivity, desire or ‘thinking’ abilities (‘I want to know’) have to be suppressed to ensure the working of the imperial machinery. In this sense, ‘Servants of the Queen’ (like the Jungle Books as a whole) strikingly resembles Kipling’s story ‘The Ship that Found Herself’ (1895), written around the same time as the Jungle Books, and later collected in The Day’s Work. In this story, Kipling gives voice to various parts of the ship—the capstan, the deck-beams, rivets and so on—which initially find themselves at odds with each other and keep squabbling. During the ship’s maiden voyage, however, they learn to work together, which causes them to lose their individuality: ‘all the talking of the separate pieces ceases and melts into one voice, which is the soul of the ship’.81 Just like in ‘Servants of the Queen’, the ship is shown to contain nonhuman agencies, which coexist and coordinate with each other to animate the machine. The Jungle Books, which include the stories of the ship, are in

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turn contained within the modern Ark, which represents Britain’s global reach and its role as the new Noah. Just as in the case of Kala Nag the elephant, the tales of the jungle and those of the sea seamlessly come together, only to speak in the one voice of the Empire. Box 2 The Oriental fables, to quote Jill Mann, are famous for their ‘elaborate “Chinese-box” principle of narration’, which is ‘completely unlike the unitary, self-contained nature of the Aesop fable’.82 The best-known example of this is the Arabian Nights , in which frame narratives—stories within stories—proliferate. Panchatantra, a famous collection of beast fables, also takes this structure, and the image of ‘Chinese boxes’ allows us to see each fable as a box or an enclosed space, in which animal characters are contained to be observed. In a Chinese box structure, the one who stands outside the box and ‘witnesses’ animal stories is himself part of a bigger story, being observed and ‘taken care’ of. If the European (or Aesopian) fable foregrounds the act of enclosing animals in a simple unit, the Oriental beast fable further draws attention to the way in which the lives of animals are interlocked with each other: a life encloses a life and is enclosed in a life, a system within a system. The Jungle Books, a modern take on the Oriental tradition of animal fables, exemplarily follow the ‘Chinese Box’ narrative structure. Each human-animal relationship in the Books constitutes an enclosed space of the fable, in which man takes care of nature and the animal under his charge. Every human-animal story is entwined with another, forming part of the Jungle Books as a network of imperial beast fables. By juxtaposing animal stories side by side, and by bringing together different spaces and species through his storytelling, Kipling suggests that animals are important members of the British Empire and their lives are intimately connected with human lives and activities. This complex interlocking system of stories provides a perfect illustration of cosmopolitanism, in which different societies, each with its own stories, interconnect and depend on each other, jointly creating a bigger picture. It is no coincidence that ‘Servants of the Queen’, which illustrates the Jungle Books ’s Chinese Box structure, has strong maritime references. The ship, in itself a ‘box’ on the waves, is a moving frame narrative, which makes connections between diverse ‘animal’ stories of the Empire wherever it sails to. Indeed, recurrent references to the sea and ships in the

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Jungle Books create a distinct sense that animals are part of the worldwide network of colonies, built on the British control of international sea routes. The prevalence of the maritime theme is further evident in the fact that the first reference to a ship is made in ‘The Preface’, the outer frame narrative to the entire Jungle Books. In it, the narrator reveals himself to be the Editor of the animal stories collected in the Jungle Books, and acknowledges the contributions of ‘a multitude of [animal] informants, most of whom desire to preserve the strictest anonymity’.83 This includes a mystery ‘fellow passenger’, whom the Editor had a chance to offer ‘some slight assistance’ to when he was ‘a passenger on the Empress of India’ (4). This turns out to be Limmershin, the winter wren, who is the storyteller of ‘The White Seal’. Modern technologies such as trains and steamships were making their presence felt as the British expanded their networks even to rural parts of India, affecting the animals locally. This disruption of animal worlds by colonial infringement is fully explored in ‘The Undertakers’, collected in The Second Jungle Book. The story is set on a riverbank below a newly constructed railway bridge, where three Indian animals—an Adjutantcrane, a jackal and an old man-eating Mugger (crocodile)—chat about how the arrival of the English has changed their lives. Out of the trio, the two scavengers—the jackal and the Adjutant-crane—are keeping pace with the changes to survive, while the Mugger, once revered as the ‘godling of the village’ (210), is still stuck in the past. This stasis manifests itself in his dislike of the bridge: ‘Since the railway bridge was built my people at my village have ceased to love me; and that is breaking my heart’ (208). He also erroneously describes the train-engine, which passes over the bridge pulling the carriages, as ‘a new breed of bullock’ (215). The Mugger, who can only look up at the bridge from below, does not know the true nature of the train, or the true power of the Empire which he is resisting. The story ends with the shooting of the Mugger, who represents native insurgency and the memory of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 in which many British were killed (and their dead bodies eaten by the Mugger) … but that is another story.84 The trio’s conversation also offers intriguing glimpses of the way in which the steamers have touched Indian animals. For instance, they have made the lives of the jackals difficult, as the English have brought ‘big fat dogs’ in the steamers, to chase away the jackals and ‘keep [them] lean’ (213). The Adjutant-crane also recalls his agonising experience of swallowing ‘a seven-pound lump of Wenham Lake ice’ freshly delivered from Massachusetts by an American

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ice-ship (214). The steamships create countless surprising trans-Oceanic links, making an Indian bird an unwitting consumer of an American product. Each of the two Jungle Books contains one non-Indian story, which clearly locates British India within a wider international context: ‘The White Seal’ in The Jungle Book and ‘Quiquern’ in The Second Jungle Book. Not surprisingly, both are stories of the sea, which exemplify the role of the ship as the frame device of the stories of the Empire. ‘Quiquern’ tells the story of Kotuko the Inuit boy, who, with a team of sled dogs and a girl companion, sets out to find food for his starving village. The setting is an Inuit village in the northernmost part of Baffin Island, which is shown to be part of the global flow of commodities and peoples created by sea routes: ‘a kettle picked up by a ship’s cook in the Bhendy Bazaar’ (the most cosmopolitan area of Bombay) ‘might end its days over a blubber lamp somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle’ (248). Moreover, this story of a remote Inuit community enters into the global circuit, in a similar way to the kettle picked up by a ship’s cook: the picture-story of Kotuko’s adventures, inscribed by himself ‘on a long flat piece of ivory with a hole at one end’ (265), travels all round the world on steamers, passed from hand to hand by traders, till the narrator finds it in Colombo: [Kotuko] left the picture-story with Kadlu, who lost it in the shingle when his dog-sleigh broke down one summer on the beach of Lake Netilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Inuit found it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was interpreter on a Cumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was afterwards a quartermaster on board a big steamer that took tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When the tourist season was over, the steamer ran between London and Australia, stopping at Ceylon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to a Cingalese jeweller for two imitation sapphires. I found it under some rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from one end to the other. (265–6)

This story, which draws heavily on Franz Boas’s The Central Eskimo (1888), is a good example of Kipling’s use of anthropological materials to create his beast fables.85 In it, the sense of the interconnectedness of the world is overlapped with Man’s oneness or partnership with nature, which is most succinctly captured by the fact that Kotuko shares his name with his dog, the leader of his sled-dog team, who follows a parallel trajectory towards adulthood with his master and is indeed an integral part of his identity. The movement and energy of the dog-sleigh, which propels the

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pair’s adventure, is implicitly juxtaposed with that of the steamers, the modern bearers of beast fables. Kotuko in his adventures is accompanied by an Inuit girl, a stranger from another community, and the story ends with the girl’s integration into his community by marrying him. This uncannily echoes the way in which the Mowgli saga ends with his marriage: ‘[Mowgli] became a man and married’.86 The story of a man-animal partnership, therefore, turns into that of a family unit, with human babies to follow. In this way, the multiplying Chinese boxes of imperial beast fables further proliferate, to take the chain of stories into a prosperous future. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Jungle Books were, as I have already mentioned, conceived and written around the time when the author, newly married in 1892, became a father.87 Given the Books ’ celebration of the family unit (or ‘the interaction between a child and an adult’ as Knoepflmacher puts it), which enables the successful reproduction and survival of the human species, it is striking that the other tale of the sea, ‘The White Seal’, told by the winter wren Limmershin, focuses on the threat of extinction which fur seals, and other nonhuman species, face. I will analyse this story in the next section, as a way of concluding this chapter. Box 3 (with a hole in the side) To be ‘in a wood’, or ‘at sea’ in the Jungle Books, as I hope I have demonstrated, is to be invested with the new power which modern man acquired over nature. This contrasts sharply with the sense of helplessness conveyed by commonly used phrases such as ‘out of the woods’ and ‘all at sea’, in which to wander into nature is to lose one’s control and bearings. This new human-nature relationship is embodied by the rukh, a new type of forest, set aside and demarcated for forestry. The character of Mowgli is created as the guardian of this nature, enclosed for human use. He also embodies the new human-animal relationship, based on the same principle of man’s control over his animal. To be inside nature (‘in a wood’ or ‘at sea’) comes also to mean being above and outside of it, to take up the position of superiority from which Man takes care of the nonhuman. Man’s dual positioning of being at once inside and outside of nature is again embodied by Mowgli, who at once belongs to the jungle and to the human world. Man has become, to quote J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, ‘the managers of the ecology’.88 If the Gothic genre uses nested narratives to create a sense of confinement and entrapment, humans in the

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Jungle Books are free to move from one box/story to another, while the animals who once were a source of Gothic terror, are safely consigned to their boxes as human companions. There is nothing ‘Gothic’ about the Books, unless we are to focus on the experience of their nonhuman protagonists, who feel a sense of danger and entrapment at the hands of humans; Kipling draws our attention to their perspective in ‘The White Seal’, the other tale of the sea. ‘The White Seal’ tells the story of Kotick the albino fur seal, a native of St. Paul, a seal island off the coast of Alaska. He becomes determined to find a peaceful hiding-place for his people, after witnessing men’s brutal clubbing of his friends to death. Kotick swims across the Seven Seas to visit every rookery (the name for a breeding colony of seals), only to hear the same devastating news: ‘men had killed them all off’.89 Though Kotick, guided by Sea Cow, eventually finds a perfect sanctuary, ‘in that sea where no man comes’ (85), the story raises the alarm about man’s overexploitation of nature, and conveys a real sense of urgency about the fate of fur seals. This urgency is further accentuated by the accompanying poem, ‘Lukannon’, which, according to the narrator, is ‘a sort of sad Seal National Anthem’ (86). The poem nostalgically looks back on the good old days, in which ‘two million’ seals gathered and happily lived on the beach of Lukannon on St. Paul ‘before the sealers came’. Now the seals are reduced to ‘a broken, scattered band’, as ‘Men shoot us in the water and club us on the land’, to the point that ‘The Beaches of Lukannon shall know their sons no more!’ (86). Daniel Karlin, in his influential reading of ‘The White Seal’, suggests that the story’s happy ending paradoxically signifies the extinction of seals. This is because Kotick, in his search for a seal sanctuary, follows the trail of the Sea Cow, an extinct species of manatee which had been exterminated soon after Europeans discovered it in the eighteenth century. This suggests that Kotick and other seals have unknowingly died, and that their paradisal beaches are nothing but the seals’ heaven. Consequently, ‘salvation has become a figure of speech for the seals’ gradual extinction’.90 This reading, by deriving pathos and irony from the contrast made between human awareness and animal ignorance, draws attention to, and even performs, the power and structural advantage humans hold over animals. As Karlin puts it, ‘[the seals] cannot realize the make-believe of their escape; unlike Mowgli, they cannot be the readers of their own story’.91 Animals lack the ability to stand outside of their own story, as the ‘outside’ position of the reader is reserved for humans only.

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Such an interpretation, though persuasive and sophisticated, ultimately accepts the inevitability of animal extinction: it turns the story into a deathtrap, a gothic box which the animals enter to die. To this interpretation, let us add another: the story celebrates animals’ resourcefulness and will to survive, while looking for a way to undermine the human framework which has entrapped them. Like all good fables, ‘The White Seal’ double-talks to convey hidden messages and multiple interpretations, in order to find a hole in the box through which animals can escape. ‘The White Seal’, despite its focus on man’s brutal mistreatment of animals, is perfectly in line with other Jungle tales, which present Man as the protector and caregiver of nature. In writing this story, Kipling drew much information from The Seal-Islands of Alaska (1881). This book, authored by the American naturalist and conservationist Henry Wood Elliott (1846–1930), is a detailed report on the conditions of rookeries in the Alaskan seal islands, which ‘The White Seal’ rewrites from a seal’s point of view. The story was originally written in response to AngloAmerican tension over the rights to hunt seals in the Bering Sea around the early 1890s, during which Elliott, who had previously advocated sealhunting in Alaska, emerged as a vehement critic of the indiscriminate hunting of seals, after witnessing the drastic fall of the seal population of once abundant seal islands over a period of ten years.92 Kipling clearly sides with Elliott’s campaign, and this explains the story’s sensationalist tone regarding the imminent threat of extinction of seals. The story made a timely appearance in the National Review, shortly before the dispute was finally resolved by international arbitration on 15 August 1893.93 Elliott’s campaign eventually led to the signing of the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, an international treaty on sealing which is said to have saved fur seals in Alaska. It is also important to note the symbolism of the ‘whiteness’ of Kotick, who guides his people to safety. This does not merely represent the Englishman’s racial identity, as Nyman suggests,94 but also the importance of Anglo-American unity to end the dispute, as well as of the white men’s leadership in the cause of safeguarding nature, making amends for the past in which they had been the major force in destroying it in the first place. Kipling’s little story is part of the efforts made by many people to save the seals. The vision of total seal extinction is also at odds with the fact that ‘Lukannon’, the sad seal anthem, is described by the narrator as ‘the great deep-sea song that all the St Paul seals sing when they are heading back to their beaches in the summer’.95 In Kipling’s world, seals, though facing

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the real possibility of extinction, are still alive. They are portrayed not just as a species, but also as a nation, forming its identity around the shared history of having survived many massacres. Indeed, the Alaskan fur seal, though its conservation status remains vulnerable, still exists (at the time of writing). Kotick’s descendants have managed to survive, and are still fighting for survival. Kipling, by writing this story, supports them in their struggle. The adventure of Kotick can be interpreted as an animal’s attempt at alternative storytelling, as he leads his people out of the story of their inevitable extinction. This narrative drive is further reinforced by the fact that this animal story is framed by another, which literally takes us outside of the story. A winter wren called Limmershin was ‘blown on to the rigging of a steamer going to Japan’ and the narrator of the Jungle Books ‘took him down into [his] cabin and warmed and fed him for a couple of days till he was fit to fly back’ (68). It is during his stay in the cabin that Limmershin tells the entire story of Kotick the white seal. As I have already mentioned, the bird’s contribution as a storyteller is acknowledged by the narrator in the Preface. He thus connects the inside and the outside of a fable, highlighting the text’s Chinese-box-like structure. Oriental fables often draw attention to the power relationship between the ‘animal’ storyteller and the human listener, the caged and their jailor, as the very condition of the fables being told. As Ros Ballaster puts it, the Oriental fables can be read as ‘an oblique means of criticizing despotism by an oppressed people, voiced by the enslaved woman in the harem, or by the marginal brahman/sage/Sufi’.96 The most famous example of this is Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights , who resorts to the art of storytelling to delay her execution night after night, in the course of which she successfully reforms the sultan. The fables’ use of the complex ‘Chinese box’ structure can be seen to represent the long and gradual process by which the despot learns and changes as he listens to the entertaining stories told by one of his subjects. In this context, ‘The White Seal’, in which a ‘caged’ bird tells an animal story in the confined space of a human’s cabin, is an innovative restaging of the Oriental fable tradition in a modern setting. Indeed, it stands out as the only Jungle Book story in which a nonhuman animal is allowed to speak uninterrupted. The human narrator chooses not to give a running commentary on the bird’s story, or to assert himself at the end to have the last word. The story registers his physical presence as a silent yet attentive listener. He lets Limmershin, who ‘knows how to tell the truth’,97 do the necessary storytelling to

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persuade him and other humans to care for other animals and to become a better manager of ecology. The casting of Limmershin as the storyteller is a fitting choice, considering that the caged Parrot is among the famed storytellers in the Oriental ´ fable tradition. In the Sanskrit beast fable, Sukasaptati (Seventy Tales of the Parrot), a pet parrot nightly tells an entertaining tale to his mistress during her husband’s absence from home, in order to prevent her from going out to meet her lover.98 The fourteenth-century Persian collection of fables, Tuti-nama, ‘The Tales of a Parrot’, is a rendition of the ´ Sukasaptati, but its frame narrative places a stronger emphasis on the power relationship between the bird narrator and the human. The parrot in Tuti-nama had witnessed the mynah, his companion, who had advised their mistress candidly not to meet her lover, being dragged out of the cage and killed in a rage. The parrot thus has to tread very carefully to avoid the same fate.99 Just as in the case of the Arabian Nights , so also in Tuti-nama, the narrator’s survival depends on his art of storytelling. True to this tradition, Limmershin is another animal ‘in captivity’, who tells his story while entrusting his life to a human stranger. It is interesting that he chooses to tell the story of the seals dying at the hand of humans, because this can be construed as a fable of his own life, equally at the mercy of the human narrator. It is true that Kipling did not fully explore the fable’s function as a gentle yet effective admonishment of the ruler by the ruled, which, if faithfully applied, would have turned his Indian fictions into an oblique criticism of British rule, through which the British are persuaded to change their manners. Nevertheless, the Jungle Books should be read within the living tradition of the beast fable which draws our attention to animals’ voices, resourcefulness and vitality, while admonishing us to examine our whole attitude towards animals ‘under our care’. The Books ’ Chinese box structure, hardly a Gothic labyrinth for trapped animals, secretly gives expression to an animal’s line of escape or trajectory of life, as it seeks, gnaws, or pecks a hole in each box which entraps it. Indeed, we should remember that the Oriental fables, despite giving an impression of infinite regress, do not go on forever: the chain of fables ends when the caged narrator successfully reforms her listener and thereby gets herself out of danger. That is to say, the success of animal storytelling heavily depends on us, and on our willingness and readiness as an audience to listen to the stories animals might tell. What happens if the sultan, having

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a bad day, is not receptive to Scheherazade’s charm or her art of storytelling? Or, if the mistress in Tuti-nama kills the Parrot mid-way through his story, too eager to go out to meet her paramour? This leads to another question: what is the true nature of the relationship between the narrator and Limmershin in ‘The White Seal’? As I have suggested, the narrator seems to present himself as an attentive and sympathetic listener to Limmershin’s story, but to what extent can we believe in his story and what exactly happens when the bird is kept in his cabin? The frame narrative of ‘The White Seal’ reminds me of one of the journal entries of Edward Beck, a British sailor who served as a crew member on merchant sailing ships in the 1820s. His journals, kept during his sea voyages, are packed with interesting details of daily routines at sea, and are particularly rich in records of maritime animal encounters. On the voyage from Sunderland to Upper Quebec in 1824, Beck ‘saw a shoal of small birds flying about the ship’, ‘[seeking] for lodging’ as it was becoming dark.100 Beck caught two of the birds who came upon the deck, and, just like the narrator of ‘The White Seal’, took them into his cabin: ‘The poor things from having flown so long were so weary, that they immediately tucked their little heads under their wings and fell asleep’ (103). Beck, however, finds himself trapped in a strange double bind: I looked at them and thought I should like their skins to take home, yet how could I kill them, when they suffered so much and had such a claim upon our hospitality? It would seem very cruel, so I determined on the morrow to give them their liberty, though I cannot help wishing they may die. (103)

Beck’s human kindness—to offer the weary birds a temporary accommodation—turns out to be not at all straightforward, because he is tempted to keep the birds, and, what is worse, to kill them, skin them and add them to his collection of avian specimens to take home. Beck was not able to set them free next day, as he found both birds had died by the next morning. This allowed him to skin them ‘at the first opportunity’, though, he imagined, ‘from them being so small and tender, I shall make a bad job of it’ (103). The stark contrast between the living birds and the birds’ skins is reminiscent of ‘The White Seal’, in which seals were hunted to near extinction for their skins. And who knows if the narrator

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of ‘The White Seal’ was not longingly looking at Limmershin’s feathers, and wishing he may die? In his search for a safe seal sanctuary, Kotick talks to other species to ask for help and information; his quest would not have been possible without the guidance of Sea-Lions, Walruses, Sea-Cows, and other creatures like an ‘old Stumpy-tailed albatross’.101 The narrator takes part in this cosmopolitan multispecies network of life as a rescuer of Limmershin, but, despite his happy reference to the bird as ‘a fellow-voyager’ (4), we wonder about the nature of his hospitality, considering that the bird chooses to give him a terrifying account of the human exploitation of nature, and animals’ dream of a world without human beings. How might we offer real hospitality to other animals, without subjecting them to captivity and the violence of anthropocentrism? How might we be truly worthy of our membership in the infinite interplay of life, which, despite our best intentions, we allow helplessly to be destroyed? In the Chinese box structure of the Jungle Books, Limmershin, through the cage bars of anthropomorphism, speaks to us the readers; we must first learn to listen and respond. Only then can we start imagining what might be the shapes of the fables which other animals tell to each other, in order to cope with, and to live in, this world we share.

Notes 1. ‘wood, n.1’, OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 15 February 2020). 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads. Note on the Text by Michael Schmidt (London: Penguin, 2006), 1–25; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 2003). 3. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau. Ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), Chapter 1, ‘In the Dinghy of the “Lady Vain”’, 7–9. 4. Wells, Chapter 9, ‘The Thing in the Forest’, 39–47. 5. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ix, x. 6. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books. Ed. Kaori Nagai (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 65. 7. W. W. Robson, ‘Introduction’ to Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books. Ed. W. W. Robson (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1992), xiv. 8. Daniel Karlin, ‘Introduction’ to Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books. Ed. Daniel Karlin (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 13.

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9. Rudyard Kipling, ‘In the Rukh: Mowgli’s Introduction to White Men’, McClure’s Magazine 7:1 (June 1896): 23. ‘In the Rukh’ was included in a number of the Jungle Books editions, including the Outward Bound (American) edition of the Jungle Books (1897) which brought together all the Mowgli stories in one volume (with the non-Mowgli stories being collected in the second volume), and All the Mowgli Stories, published in 1933. 10. Harrison, 61. 11. Rudyard Kipling’s letter to Mary Mapes Dodge, dated 15 October 1892, in Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 6 vols (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990–1999), vol. 2, 62. 12. Rudyard Kipling’s letter to Mary Mapes Dodge, dated 24 November 1892, in Pinney, Letters, vol. 2, 71–2. ‘Noah’s Ark tales’ was to include three of the stories which would later appear in The Jungle Book: ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, ‘“Tiger-Tiger!”’, and ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ (71). 13. U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Kipling’s American “Berangements” for the Young’, Kipling Journal 88:355 (July 2014): 60. 14. Christopher Johnson and David Govatski, Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests (Washington: Island Press, 2013), 13. 15. Charles Alexander Johns, The Forest Trees of Britain, 2 vols (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1847), vol. 1, 65. 16. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Forests and Sea Power (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1926), viii. 17. Berthold Ribbentrop, Forestry in British India (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1900), 63–4. 18. See, for instance, Pallavi V. Das, Colonialism, Development, and the Environment: Railways and Deforestation in British India, 1860–1884 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); John Perlin, A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 2005). 19. Brian Lavery, Building the Wooden Walls: The Design and Construction of the 74-Gun Ship Valiant (London: Cornway Maritime Press, 1991), 63. 20. Ben Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (London: Routledge, 2016), 63. 21. William Colenso, ‘Bush Notes; or, Short Objective Jottings’, Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 23 (1890): 488. 22. Gregory Allen Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 163.

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23. For the history of forestry in British India, see Ribbentrop, Forestry, and Barton, Chapters 3 and 4. 24. Alan Underwood, ‘“In the Rukh”: Notes on the Text’ (2009), New Readers’ Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling. http://www.kiplingso ciety.co.uk/bookmart_fra.htm (date accessed 15 February 2020). 25. The etymology of the word ‘rukh’ was given as ‘L19. [Hind. r¯ ukh f. Skt. vr.ks.a tree]’ in Lesley Brown (ed.), The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), vol. 2, 2646. The current OED gives the Panjabi word rakkh [protection] as the word’s etymology (‘rukh, n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press [date accessed 15 February 2020]). 26. ‘Railway Fuel in The Punjab’, The Calcutta Review 92 (1867): 267. According to B. E. Smythies, whose family worked for the Forest Department in India and Burma, it is unlikely that the term was ‘used outside the Punjab’ (B. E. Smythies, ‘Kipling and Forestry in India’, Kipling Journal 65:260 [December 1991]: 36). 27. A Dictionary of the Panjábí Language, Prepared by a Committee of the Lodiana Mission (Lodiana: Printed at the Mission Press, 1854), 392–3. 28. Rudyard Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, The Jungle Books. Ed. Kaori Nagai (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 328. 29. John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relations with the People (1891), 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1904), 224. 30. In Kipling’s story ‘My Lord the Elephant’ (Many Inventions ), the taming of a rebellious Indian elephant is presented as that of an Irishman with grievances. For a full analysis of the story, see Kaori Nagai, Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006). 31. For an insightful analysis of Kipling’s collaboration with his father, and their shared interest in Indian animals and Hindu mythology, see Harish Trivedi, ‘Of Beasts and Gods in India: Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Bridge-Builders”’, Kipling Journal 92:373 (May 2018): 31–45. 32. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 117. 33. See G. P. Sanderson, Thirteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India (1878), 2nd edn (London: W. H. Allen, 1879). 34. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 195, 196. 35. Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 138. 36. For instance, John A. McClure, in Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), describes the Jungle Books as ‘a fable of imperial education and rule, with Mowgli behaving toward the beasts as the British do to the Indians’ (59).

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37. See Don Randall, Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); John McBratney, Imperial Subjects, Imperial Space: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction of the Native-Born (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002). 38. Jane Hotchkiss, ‘The Jungle of Eden: Kipling, Wolf Boys, and the Colonial Imagination’, Victorian Literature and Culture 29:2 (2001): 441. 39. Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, 336. 40. Natives were put in charge of the ‘executive and protective’ forest service, which consisted of, in order of rank, Rangers, Deputy Rangers and Foresters, and Forest Guards (Ribbentrop, Forestry, 89). 41. Ulrike Kirchberger, ‘German Scientists in the Indian Forest Service: A German Contribution to the Raj?’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29:2 (2001): 4. 42. ‘Knew All the Kiplings’, The San Francisco Call (8 September 1895): 16. 43. Circular No. 7-F Extract from the Proceedings of the Government of India in the Home Department (Forests), dated Simla, 3 June 1884. National Archives of India. 44. Dietrich Brandis, ‘Indian Forestry: The Extended Employment of Natives’, Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review and Oriental and Colonial Record, 3rd Series, vol. 3, nos. 5 and 6 (April 1897): 246. 45. Brandis’s speech, in D. Brandis and A. Smythies (eds.), Report of the Proceedings of the Forest Conference, held at Simla, October 1875 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1876), 26. 46. Brandis, 252–3. 47. Barton, 84. 48. Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar, ‘Reading Kipling in Kipling’s Own Country’, a paper given at The ‘Kipling in India: India in Kipling’ conference, 26–28 April 2016, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India, to be published in Harish Trivedi and Jan Montefiore (eds.), Kipling in India: India in Kipling (Routledge/IIAS, forthcoming). This quote is taken from Bhatnagar’s conference abstract. 49. Mahesh Rangarajan, Fencing the Forest: Conservation and Ecological Change in India’s Central Provinces 1860–1914 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 50. Brandis, 245. 51. Bhatnagar, n.p. 52. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 156. 53. S. Ravi Rajan, Modernizing Nature: Forestry and Imperial EcoDevelopment 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 102. 54. Barton, 94. Also see his Chapter 5, ‘Empire Forestry and the Colonies’.

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55. Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 347. 56. ‘A Plan to Save the Forests: Forest Preservation by Military Control’, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 49 (February 1895): 626–34. 57. Rudyard Kipling’s letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, dated 11 November 1894, in Pinney, Letters, vol. 2, 157–8. 58. Barton, 33; Bhatnagar, 48. 59. Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, 315. 60. Berthold Ribbentrop, Working Plan of the Vhan-Khara Circle of the Chunga Munga Plantation (Lahore: Printed at Indian Public Opinion Press, 1874), 3. 61. Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, 318. 62. Ribbentrop, Working Plan, 6. 63. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 153. 64. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 103. 65. George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 10 (London: Secker and Warberg, 1998), 501–6. 66. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 104. 67. Alan Harfield, The Indian Army of the Empress: 1861–1903 (Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount, 1990), 23. 68. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 103–4. 69. ‘Shipping Elephants at Bombay’, Illustrated London News 52:1464 (11 January 1868): 45–6. 70. Report from the Select Committee on the Abyssinian Expedition: Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix (London: House of Commons, 1870), 497. 71. H. Wilberforce Clarke, ‘Notes on Elephants and Their Transport by Railway’, in A. M. Brandreth (ed.), Professional Papers on Indian Engineering, 2nd Series, no. 34 (Roorkee: Thomason College Press, 1879), 257. 72. Report on the Abyssinian Expedition, 491, 497. 73. Report on the Abyssinian Expedition, 60. The number is exclusive of 18,906 animals obtained locally (xvii). 74. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 122. 75. Extracts from Kipling’s Civil and Military Gazette articles on the Rawal Pindi durbar are collected in Thomas Pinney (ed.), Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884–88 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), ‘To Meet the Amir’, 77–80, 85–104. 76. Kipling was a dog lover, and ‘Servants of the Queen’, in which his dog Vixen and himself make an appearance, echoes his collection of dog stories, Thy Servant A Dog, told by Boots (1930), based on his experience of owning an Aberdeen terrier. For a brilliant analysis of the language of this work, in which Kipling experiments with dog language, see Daniel

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77.

78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

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Karlin, ‘Language and Understanding in Rudyard Kipling’s Thy Servant a Dog ’, Kipling Journal 92: 374 (June 2018): 8–19. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Narrative-Men’, in Ulrich Marzolph (ed.), The Arabian Nights Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 236–7. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 135. The weather was dismal while Kipling was in Rawalpindi as a special correspondent. To quote Thomas Pinney’s headnote to Kipling’s CGM articles (see note 75 above), ‘the rain came nearly every day and the Amir delayed to come day after day’ (Pinney, Kipling’s India, 78); the weather, though overcast and with some April showers, was much better on the day of the military review (103). Alan Underwood, ‘A Note to “Her Majesty’s Servants”’, 4 May 2012, in The New Readers’ Guideto the Works of Rudyard Kipling. http://www. kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_majservants_notes.htm (date accessed 7 October 2019). Kipling, The Jungle Books, 161. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ship that Found Herself’, in The Day’s Work. Ed. Constantine Phipps (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 101. Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 3. For a reading of the Jungle Books as a story of the Indian Mutiny, see, for instance, Lisa Lewis, ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and Indian History’, in Jan Montefiore (ed.), In Time’s Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 129–41; Randall, 84– 6; Supriya Goswami, Colonial India in Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–3; Shefali Rajamannar, Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Chapter 5. Franz Boas, ‘The Central Eskimo’, in vol. 6 of Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1888). Kipling, The Jungle Books, 65. Kipling conceived the idea of the Jungle Books during his wife’s pregnancy with their first child, Josephine (b. 1892), who was soon followed by their second daughter, Elsie, born in 1896. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 54. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 79. Karlin, 11; emphasis in original. Karlin, 11. See, Charles S. Campbell, Jr., ‘The Anglo-American Crisis in the Bering Sea, 1890–1891’, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48:3

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93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101.

(December 1961): 393–414. For a reading of ‘The White Seal’ as an anti-sealing activist story, see also John Miller, ‘Fiction, Fashion, and the Victorian Fur Seal Hunt’, in Karen L. Edwards, Derek Ryan, and Jane Spencer (eds.), Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (London: Routledge, 2019), 212–26. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Seal’, The National Review 21:126 (August 1893): 845–59. Jopi Nyman, Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2003), 52–4. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 353, n.1. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662– 1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 68. B. Hale Wortham (ed.), The Enchanted Parrot, A Selection from The ‘Suka Saptati’ (London: Luzac & Co., 1911). Ziya’ U’D-Din Nakhshabi, Tales of a Parrot: The Cleveland Museum of Art’s T u.t¯ın¯ ama. Trans. and ed. Muhammed A. Simsar (Cleveland, .¯ ´ OH: The Cleveland Museum, 1978), 11. In Sukasaptati, the parrot’s companion, who admonishes the mistress, manages to fly away when she tries to capture it and wring its neck (CS. Töttössy, ‘The Variants of the ´ Frame Story of the Sukasaptati’, Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 28 [1980]: 441). Michael Hay and Joy Roberts (eds.), The Sea Voyages of Edward Beck in the 1820s (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1996), 103. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 79.

CHAPTER 5

Kangaroo Notebook: Abe’s Metatherian Journey

In the world of Kobo Abe (1924–1993), who has been described by many as a Japanese Kafka, to become hopelessly lost in a labyrinth is a recurrent motif, central to his surreal, nightmarish characterisation of modern society. In a television interview for NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster, Abe related this motif to literature’s role in defamiliarising our perception of reality: the sense of a labyrinth can be created just by a shift of perspective. The example which Abe chose to illustrate this was becoming-a-dog. Not only does the dog see things from a perspective much closer to the ground than humans, but also it has an acute sense of smell, and therefore, according to Abe, its world is made up of ‘the shades and hues of smell’. He invites us to imagine ‘a strange map … based on the dog’s senses’: ‘by shifting a point of view, what is familiar suddenly turns into a labyrinth’.1 In Abe’s world, the literary experience of defamiliarisation is invariably accompanied by an invitation to question what makes us feel safe and ‘human’—in this case, by abandoning our human body and getting into the dog’s skin. This chapter will draw on this power of defamiliarisation to shed light on colonial human-animal relations and the question of animal taxonomy. By reading Abe’s novel Kangaroo Notebook alongside the Victorian discovery of Australian mammals, it will seek to transform the latter into a disorienting journey into marsupial pockets. Abe is famous for his bizarre fables of human metamorphosis, often into non-animals. This is a central motif of his first collection of stories, © The Author(s) 2020 K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8_5

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The Wall (1951), with which he established his reputation as a writer.2 In the title story ‘The Wall: The Crime of Mr S. Karma’, for instance, the protagonist, from whom his name runs away, metamorphoses into a wall, left to grow solitarily in the boundless desert.3 ‘The Red Cocoon’ in the same collection tells the story of a homeless man who transforms into a cocoon: he thus obtains a home but loses himself in the process. In ‘The Flood’, on the other hand, humans turn into liquid, causing the second Flood. These liquid humans then inundate and wreck Noah’s Ark, thereby wiping humanity, and all their animals, off the face of the earth.4 There are many other examples in Abe’s oeuvre. For instance, he wrote a story about a man who turns into a stick (‘The Stick’, 1950), and also a play with the same theme (‘The Man who Turned into a Stick’, 1957).5 Another story, ‘Dendrocacalia’ (1949), traces the protagonist’s transformation into a rare species of tree,6 and in ‘The Underwater City’ (1952), a man who claims to be the father of the protagonist turns into a fish.7 These ex-human nonhumans usually retain their thinking capacity, which acutely heightens the effect of ‘dehumanisation’ which befalls the characters. Among Abe’s many strange animal creations, which are designed to undermine human exceptionalism, the most uncanny is the ‘Ueh’, the nonhuman species who look exactly like humans and are bred to be used as slaves. Abe wrote three plays (‘Slave Hunting’ [1955], ‘Slave Hunting: The Revised Version’ [1967], and ‘The Ueh: New Slave Hunting’ [1975]), all of which feature the Ueh, or the idea of the Ueh, who severely unsettle our sense of what it is to be human, because there is no way of telling them apart from humans.8 Similarly, in his novel Ningen Sokkuri [Human Look-Alike] (1966), the protagonist is visited by a self-professed ‘Martian’, who looks exactly like a human; his conversations with this character utterly shatter the protagonist’s human identity.9 Needless to say, Abe’s human-like nonhumans can be read in terms of racism and national identity. Abe spent most of his formative years in Manchuria, which was then under Japanese colonial rule, where he was appalled by the discrimination against the colonised, who, though considered to be fellow Asians (so he was taught in school), were never treated in the same way as the Japanese.10 Moreover, he also witnessed how easily the ‘humanness’ of the Japanese colonisers and settlers, which was safeguarded by colonial ideology, evaporated with the defeat of Japan in 1945. Thereupon, Abe became a foreigner and even a ‘beast’ in the place which he had made his home; this is depicted in his 1957 novel

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Kemono tachi wa Kokyo wo Mezasu [Beasts Head for their Homeland], which is based on his own experience of returning to Japan amid much confusion and uncertainty.11 Although Abe produced few direct fictionalisations of his time in Manchuria, other than this novel, his questioning of what makes us feel safe and ‘human’ certainly had its roots in his colonial experience. This makes him an important ‘beast fabulist’, in whose work critiques of speciesism and racism are inseparably intertwined with each other. Abe’s world is no doubt Kafkaesque, but he importantly acknowledges Lewis Carroll as one of his major influences, especially with regard to The Wall .12 His surreal stories, full of unlikely situations and jumps in plot, can be understood in relation to the Carrollian world of dream and nonsense: the dissolution of the border between humans and nonhumans is initiated by the logic of wordplay, or the defamiliarisation of the language we use. Indeed, language plays a key role in Abe’s world, which is populated by an army of talking and/or thinking ‘nonhumans’. Having trained as a doctor as a young man, Abe had a lifelong interest in the biological basis of language and was familiar with Ivan Pavlov’s theory of conditioned reflexes and Konrad Lorenz’s ethology. This allowed him to explore human language as a type of animal behaviour. In later life, he was much taken with Derek Bickerton’s ‘language bioprogram theory’, which characterises creole language as naturally emerging from children’s innate language capacity, rather than being just an assemblage of various linguistic traditions.13 Regarding the question of ‘animal language’, however, Abe ruled out its possibility completely, except in the literary world of talking animals. As he puts it in his essay, ‘Does the Visual Image Destroy the Walls of Language?’ (1960): ‘Unfortunately … I cannot imagine that wordless animals – dogs, monkeys, pigs, etc. – are capable of arriving at some type of abstract thought. Aren’t such things possible only in fairy tales?’14 This comment echoes Max Müller’s assertion, which I have discussed in Chapter 3, that humans are the only animals capable of speaking, and, therefore, of thinking. However, there is a significant difference between Abe’s and Müller’s conceptions of language as a uniquely human skill. Müller, who famously describes language as ‘our Rubicon’, similarly talks of ‘the fortress of language’, which ‘as yet, stands untaken and unshaken on the very frontier between the animal kingdom and man’.15 In contrast, language is for Abe the ‘walls’ behind which humans are willing prisoners. According to him, man cannot bear, and is terribly frightened of, a direct encounter with bare

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reality, and that which he cannot name. Abe illustrates this with reference to the case of aphasiac patients, who are ‘stripped of their linguistic armor and rendered as defenceless as infants’ (62). He describes language as our ‘mirrored shield’, which we wield against ‘the head of Medusa’ (62), or unmediated existence, lest we be turned into stone. However, this defence mechanism of language is so strong that our reality has become ‘the safety zone of stereotypes enclosed by the walls of language’ (65), which oppressively imprisons us. Abe therefore calls upon all artists to find ways to blast apart these walls of language. In particular, novelists ‘have an obligation to participate in the making of dynamite so as to ensure the destruction of language’ (65). In collaboration with visual and other artists, they should work towards ‘creating a fundamentally different linguistic system (which of course also leads to a new discovery of reality)’ (65). Though Abe declares that talking animals are not possible in reality, his innovative use of the fable genre to test human certainties suggests that he considers the fable to be an effective means of achieving this. In his essay ‘On Mr. Fujino’ (1975), Abe explains how he conceived the idea of the Ueh, the human-like animal in ‘Slave Hunter’.16 ‘The sprout of an idea’ (259), which later grew into the Ueh, was planted in him during a trip he made, a long time previously, to Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, during which he shared a train carriage with a number of elderly men, one of whom told him a bizarre story about the hunting of ‘the Amuda’, animals which, according to the old man, look exactly like humans (259). During the war, the local farmers were forced to breed the Amuda (a name which sounds uncannily like ‘Adamu’, the transliteration in Japanese of ‘Adam’, the first and representative ‘human’), so that their meat could be used for military rations, and their skin tanned and made into shoes, bags and other commodities. After the war, despite the severe food shortage, some farmers let their Amudas loose, because they felt unable to eat such human-looking animals. However, the Amuda quickly multiplied in the wild, and came to be considered vermin. Now, all over Hokkaido, they are being hunted to extermination. Abe was naturally astounded by the old man’s story: he had never heard of the Amuda, whose dead bodies ‘the government office is now buying up for 10 yen a piece’ (260), and exclaimed, ‘the fabulisation of reality is not uncommon, but this was my first experience of a fable turning into reality’ (260). However, on asking further questions, it transpired that Abe had completely misheard the old man’s story:

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the animals he was talking about were not ‘Amuda’ but ‘hamsters’, and ‘they look like rats, not humans’ (260). The old man spoke in a heavy Hokkaido accent, which the narrator found difficult to catch, and this deviation from standard Japanese, accentuated by the difficulty of hearing the old man above the noise of the moving train, turned his story into an extraordinary fable. In Abe’s world, the fable is to reality as animals are to humans, and the merging of the former two is always accompanied by that of the latter. It is, then, no coincidence that Ningen Sokkuri, another text featuring human-like nonhumans, centres on the breaking down of the border between the fable and reality. No longer sure if he himself is a human or a Martian, the protagonist finds himself confined in a mental hospital, which he calls ‘a courtroom of madness’,17 and the novel ends with this plea to the reader: Has this reality come about because the fable story, or because the true story was defeated by stand outside of this court room, please tell me. tell if it is really the world of the true story? Or fable? (161; my translation)

was defeated by the true the fable? You, who safely Where you stand, can you can it be the world of the

For Abe, the fable is a topsy-turvy theatre of nonhumans, securely bound, contained and framed by the human world, which nevertheless, or because of this inversion, invites its audience to question their reality. By radically re-examining our assumptions about Man, Abe encourages us to have a double vision of reality, and thus draws attention to the moment in which the ‘true story’, created inescapably to trap us within linguistic walls, might seem to crumble, turning into another fable. I started this chapter with Abe’s formulation of defamilarisation as ‘becoming-a-dog’, and ‘becoming-an-animal’ is an excellent way of defining the beast fable. Not only, as I will demonstrate later, does it echo Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea of ‘becoming-animal’, but it also marks the fable as a theatre of language, in which an animal character performs as a human (and vice versa) to defamiliarise our world. Animals in fables are by no means the allegorisation of human affairs and politics, but doors to altered realities. To enter the world of fable is importantly to bore a hole in the wall of language which divides us humans from animals: what at first seems to be a trick of perception will irreversibly

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change our taken-for-granted reality and all our anthropocentric assumptions. Interestingly, Abe describes ‘The Ueh’ as an ‘escape-play’, in which the human-Ueh relationship is captured using the image of escaping from a cage within a cage: ‘Within a cage, there is another cage, into which an Ueh who pretends to be a human tries to escape, in order to perpetuate its pretence as a human … Outside and surrounding that outer cage, there is another cage, in which a human who pretends to be an Ueh, is tirelessly digging a tunnel, towards the ground which you stand on’.18 The concept of the human inevitably accompanies, and sets in motion, a Chinese-boxlike ‘Oriental’ fable machine: setting clear boundaries between humans and nonhumans not only invites transgression but also prompts the escape of the animals trapped on both sides. In this way, the distinction between reality and fiction, or that between the stage and ‘the ground which [we] stand on’, becomes no longer tenable.

Marsupial Taxonomy Abe’s ‘fables’ have much in common with Victorian beast fables, as both stage the moment when the established border between humans and animals becomes unsettled. The difference is that, while the Victorians were committed to rationalising threats to their superiority over other living creatures, Abe tears wide any crack he finds in the linguistic construction of human superiority. His work therefore provides an oblique commentary on Victorian beast fables, and Victorian ideas about Man’s place in nature. Abe identifies the act of naming as the most powerful human defence against the threat of bare reality: ‘By naming something, or transferring it to the order of language, man was able to subjugate, neutralize, and domesticate it’.19 This process was fully operative during the nineteenth century, and drove what Keith Booker describes as ‘the Victorian mania for taxonomy and classification and the Victorian obsession with scientific description and explanation’.20 At this time, the Western understanding of the world was radically shaken by a proliferation of new discoveries in, and materials brought back from, the colonial space. Laws and systems of science had to be rewritten, and new names invented, in order to ‘contain, delimit, and circumscribe’ (106) the threat of the unknown and the unfamiliar. Among these bewildering new discoveries were the marsupials of Australia and New Guinea. Although the Europeans had already encountered pouched animals in the form of the opossum of North America,

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it was a shock to discover a whole continent and its associated islands almost exclusively populated by pouched animals, and even stranger still, egg-laying mammals like platypuses and echidnas. These ‘strange’ creatures challenged the existing classification of animals: in particular, their relationship to other mammals posed a big question. As Harriet Ritvo puts it, ‘Old systems of mammalian classification had to be seriously revised, or even discarded, and the ability plausibly to accommodate the Australian fauna became an important criterion for judging potential replacements’.21 The Victorian search for Man’s place in nature was, in other words, conducted in tandem with the search for the Kangaroo’s place in the Mammalia. Captain James Cook’s first voyage to Australia in 1770 was by no means the moment of the first European encounter with ‘kangaroos’. In 1606, Captain Don Diego de Prado y Tovar, who accompanied Pedro Fernandez de Quiros’s expedition in search of Terra Australis, recorded his encounter with a curious animal on the southern coast of New Guinea. This is considered to be the earliest European account of an Australian marsupial: we killed an animal which is in the shape of a dog smaller than a greyhound, with a bare and scaly tail like that of the snake, and his testicles hang from a nerve like a thin cord; they say that it was the castor, we ate it and it was like venison, its stomach was full of ginger leaves and for that reason we ate it.22

According to J. H. Calaby, an Australian naturalist and wildlife expert, this animal was ‘probably a wallaby and possibly a cuscus; the species that best fits his description is Thylogale brunii’,23 the dusky pademelon. It is interesting that Quiros’s party, who were eager to name the new places they discovered (for instance, the bay on the coast of which this strange animal was spotted was named San Milian by Prado24 ), were not at all interested in giving a name to this unfamiliar animal; in this case, their way of vanquishing the unknown was simply to eat it and thereby to assimilate it through their bodies. Likewise, in 1699, William Dampier, the first Englishman to explore Australia, ran into ‘a Sort of Raccoons, different from those of the West-Indies, chiefly as to their Legs; for these have very short Fore-Legs; but go jumping upon them as the others do (and like them are very good Meat)’.25 Though Dampier was a natural historian, and his book A Voyage to New Holland (1703) included, its title

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page asserts, illustrations of ‘divers Birds, Fishes and Plants not found in this Part of the World’, this unusual animal, which was not to be found in Europe, received no further mention and did not prompt him to rethink the classification of animals. It was simply eaten, and found to be wholesome and tasty. Captain Cook’s voyage was significant, in that it marked the moment when the creature was named and ushered into the European linguistic system as something new, unknown and in need of explication. The name ‘kangaroo’ was obtained from natives by Joseph Banks, the naturalist accompanying Cook. It is now said to be derived from the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimidhirr, in which the word gangurru, according to the linguistic anthropologist John B. Haviland, writing in 1974, refers to ‘a species of large black kangaroo, now, unhappily, rarely seen in the area’.26 ‘Kangaroo’ was also listed among the Guugu Yimidhirr words which Captain Cook collected in 1770 near the present Cooktown, in Queensland. Haviland compared this word-list, which ‘represents the first written record of an Australian language’ (216), with the one he had produced in the course of his fieldwork, and several other lists from different time periods. He found that Cook’s list is broadly in agreement with a modern vocabulary of the language, and therefore concluded that ‘Guugu Yimidhirr has changed little since 1770’ (219). This finding contrasts sharply with the reluctance of earlier researchers to pass a verdict on the authenticity of the word ‘kangaroo’. According to Edward Ellis Morris, who traced the origins and usages of the word in his Austral English (1898), the earlier attempts to verify its meaning of ‘kangaroo’ caused much confusion, because natives reportedly did not recognise it, even if they did other words on Cook’s word-list. This apparent non-recognition led inquirers to doubt their findings even when they came across ‘a few [words] that are not far from Kangaroo’, as they ‘[fancied] that the natives obtained the words sounding like Kangaroo from English’.27 John Simons, in his book on Victorian attitudes towards Australian animals, draws attention to ‘the amazing fact’ that ‘no linguist was able to record the word “kangaroo” again until 1972’ when Haviland began studying Guugu Yimidhirr: ‘So the word remained concealed for some two hundred years after the first English visitors noted it down’.28 Simons attributes this to the fact that there are (or were) many species of kangaroo as well as many aboriginal languages, which the colonists did not differentiate between. For instance, Captain King’s party, who explored the

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Endeavour River in 1820 and created their own list of the Guugu Yimidhirr vocabulary, could not obtain the word ‘kangaroo’, but were instead given another word, which they transcribed as ‘min-n¯ ar, mee-nuah, or m¯en-¯ u-˘ah’.29 As Simons puts it, ‘we must assume that, unfortunately for King and his men, there were no large black [kangaroos]’.30 However, I would suggest that the sailors’ and settler-colonists’ lack of knowledge, or their failure to match a particular kangaroo to an aboriginal language, was not the whole story, for it may also be that Europeans in the colonial period, in their attempt to verify the meaning of ‘kangaroo’, were more sensitive to the possibility of ‘translation’, in the distinct sense which Bruno Latour gives to this word: ‘the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies the original two’.31 Translation in the traditional sense of finding one-to-one correspondences between two languages (such as in the form of the word-list) would not do justice to the fact that colonial encounters and interactions would produce new meanings and practices, which would affect in turn both societies and even their languages. Failing to be paired with any corresponding original word, ‘kangaroo’ came to represent for the Europeans the linguistic and sociocultural changes which they imagined the Aborigines must have experienced as a consequence of the colonial contact, and the new connection thus created. The assertion that ‘kangaroo’ really meant ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t understand’, and that Banks mistook this for a name, was well known by the time of the publication of Austral English, in which Morris said: ‘this is quite possible, but at least some proof is needed, as for instance the actual words in the aboriginal language that could be twisted into this meaning’.32 This episode beautifully captures what ‘kangaroo’ stood for in the nineteenth century: the colonial contact zone as a theatre of radical (mis)translation. The similarity with Kobo Abe’s story about ‘the Amuda’ is striking. Both are derived from conversations about a particular species of animal with local people whose language the narrator cannot fully understand, and in both cases, the miscommunication defamiliarises the language we use, and thereby undermines our sense of reality. ‘Kangaroo’ (or, in the case of Abe, ‘the Amuda’) is the hole bored in the walls of language, because it is the name given to the ‘unknown’ animal, pointing to where our ability to name in order to make the unknown knowable simply fails. Arguably, then, ‘kangaroo’ was even more perplexing than ‘paradox’, a name given to the platypus in order to capture its anomaly as a

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creature combining ‘the bill of a bird with the usual characteristics of a quadruped’.33 According to Austral English, paradoxus is ‘a shortened form of the former scientific name of the Platypus, Paradoxus ornithorhynchus. Sometimes further abbreviated to Paradox’; both paradoxus and paradox were used as a common name for the platypus.34 This scientific name, more correctly Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, was invented by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1800, after he examined the specimen of the platypus procured by Joseph Banks.35 Blumenbach was unaware that the English zoologist George Shaw had already named the creature Platypus anatinus in 1799. However, Shaw’s genus name Platypus [flat-footed] had already been given to a genus of beetles, and thus had to be replaced by Blumenbach’s Ornithorhynchus. Thus the name which was finally settled upon was Ornithorhynchus anatinus (‘bird snout’ + ‘duck-like’), making it a rather bird-like mammal, even though, at this point, the fact that the platypus is egg-laying was yet to be established as a scientific fact.36 While the ‘paradoxus’ part of the name did not, then, survive the process of scientific naming, it certainly remained in the popular imagination, and platypus has become a byword for paradox. To return to my comparison between the names for the kangaroo and the platypus, i.e. ‘I don’t know’ and ‘paradox’, the latter is ‘a statement or tenet contrary to received opinion or belief; esp. one that is difficult to believe’.37 To name the platypus in this way therefore identifies and draws attention to the place where the established taxonomic system is challenged and collapses, inciting the demand for a better framework. It thereby reduces the mystery of the platypus to the status of ‘A Natural History Puzzle’,38 to quote the headline of an 1883 Times article on it. To define it in this way suggests that it is a ‘puzzle’ which can be solved. In contrast, ‘kangaroo’, which embodies the aporia and undecidability of ‘I don’t know’, questions our certainty concerning what is created through language. The mystery of the Australian mammals centred in large part on their relationship with the rest of the mammals, which were newly defined and set apart as ‘placentals’. For instance, the comparative anatomist Richard Owen categorised the monotremes (i.e. egg-laying mammals, such as the platypus and the echidna) and the marsupials as ‘Lyencephala’ (loose or disconnected brain), implying that they are far less intelligent than the placental mammals, which have a superior brain structure.39 According to Owen, a placental, if placed in a cage, would soon realise the impossibility

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of escape and resign itself to confinement, while ‘the lyencephalous animal … unable to profit by the experiences of former trials, continues over and over again to repeat the same fruitless efforts to liberate himself’ (407). Here, placentals are judged as superior on the basis of their potential to be enslaved, while non-placentals are ‘inferior’ owing to their refusal to give up, till they are freed. Owen’s comparative study of mammal brains is a good example of the Australian mammals playing a crucial role in the reclassification of the entire Mammalia, a project which never failed to reinstate Man’s special status. To accompany ‘Lyencephala’, which were placed at the very bottom of the mammalian scale, Owen divided the placentals into three sub-categories: the ‘Lissencephala’ (smooth-brain), the ‘Gyrencephala’ (convoluted brain), and the ‘Archencephala’ (ruling brain), which is set aside for humans, as the species which has the highest form of brain and is the most intelligent mammal in nature.40 Owen’s classification was vehemently attacked by Thomas Henry Huxley, who did not accept that the human brain has certain features ‘peculiar to man’, such as the hippocampus minor, which makes it significantly different from the brains of the other primates. The so-called ‘hippocampus’ debate between Owen and Huxley was one of the fiercest fought on the subject of evolution.41 Unlike Owen, Darwin and Huxley sought to locate Man’s place in nature in continuity with the other primates on the evolutionary ladder. The remainder of this chapter explores the nineteenth-century Darwinian accounts of the naming and taming of marsupials, which were arguably as problematic as Owen’s categorisation of them. Both Darwin and Huxley subscribed to the widely held assumption of the superiority of white Europeans, and the kinship between humans and animals was demonstrated by arguing for a closer affinity between ‘lower’ races of humans and the apes. This assertion of a racial hierarchy can easily be seen to signify belief in a hierarchy of species. Indeed, despite the fact that Darwinism had successfully taken down the sacrosanct barrier between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, it may be said that the latter was subjected to even more rigorous human control, as the new animal classification systems, which were designed to reflect Darwinian evolution, invariably placed humans at their apex. For every new reality, we need a new fable, so as to see the former more clearly than before. Abe’s novel Kangaroo Notebook (1991) uses an evolutionary understanding of the mammalian order as a frame of reference, and can therefore be read as a powerful fable with which to consider

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the Darwinian classification of the Mammalia. In honour of the marsupial who did not know when to surrender, let us try ‘becoming-a-kangaroo’, which is also an alternative passage to ‘becoming-a-man’, that is, a beast fable of man; as Lady Muriel in Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded puts it, ‘the chief advantage of being a Man instead of a Dog … [consists] in having pockets’.42 Let us, then, find ways out of the evolutionary cage which has been created to bolster the superiority of the placental mammals, and ultimately of Man.

Darwin and Huxley in Australia As Leonard Huxley points out, it is ‘a curious coincidence’ that both Darwin and Huxley ‘began [their] scientific career on board one of Her Majesty’s ships’.43 Both ships conducted survey expeditions into the Southern Hemisphere, during which they visited Australia. Darwin was on board HMS Beagle (1831–1836), which explored South America and crossed the Pacific Ocean. This itinerary took him to the Galapagos Islands and led him to develop his idea of evolution; Australia was one of its last destinations, visited in January 1836, before returning to England. Huxley, on the other hand, joined the voyage of exploration of HMS Rattlesnake (1846–1850) to New Guinea and Australia. Darwin’s impression of Australia was not very positive. Although he could see its potential as a colony, and socialised with wealthy Australians whose company he enjoyed, he could not quite get over the fact that it was a convict colony: ‘On the whole I do not like new South Wales: it is without doubt an admirable place to accumulate pounds & shillings; but Heaven forfend that ever I should live, where every other man is sure to be somewhere between a petty rogue & bloodthirsty villain’.44 This skewed conception of the ‘degraded’ nature of the Australian population inevitably affected how Darwin viewed the landscape: The scenery is singular from its uniformity. – every where open Forest land; the trees have all the same character of growth & their foliage is of one tint … Formerly I had entertained Utopian ideas concerning it; but the state of society of the lower classes, from their convict origin, is so disgusting, that this & t[he] sterile monotonous character of the scenery, hav[e] driven Utopia & Australia into opposite sides of the World.45

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Australia, the remotest corner of the world, is thus further distanced from England, by being made into the antipode of Utopia. In the process, Darwin’s journey to Australia paradoxically turns England into the Utopia which he was looking to find, as the antipode of the antipode is nothing but Home. As Darwin wrote from Tasmania in February 1836 to his sister Catherine Darwin, ‘It is necessary to leave England, & see distant Colonies, of various nations, to know what wonderful people the English are’.46 To see the world, to learn different ways in which one can be ‘human’, did not lead Darwin to celebrate diversity, but confirmed his sense of the merits of England, his origin and home nation. In this light, we should consider The Descent of Man (1871), in which Darwin discussed the close affinity between ‘the negro or Australian and the gorilla’, and famously ranked Fuegians, whom he met during his trip on the Beagle, ‘amongst the lowest barbarians’, while he characterised the European nations as those who ‘now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilisation’.47 Darwin’s journey of exploration can be seen as a movement that creates a hierarchy among peoples whom he has encountered and surveyed, thus allowing him to situate himself, and his English readers, at the centre and summit of the world. However, while he disparaged the Australian people, Darwin showed a great appreciation for Australian wildlife. He was hoping to see kangaroos, but they turned out to be elusive. One day, he ‘went out with a party in hopes of seeing a Kangaroo hunt, & so walked over a good many miles of country’, only to see the ‘sandy & very poor’ soil everywhere.48 His ‘ill luck’49 with the kangaroo was also for him a sign of the devastating effect of European colonisation on the Australian environment: ‘A few years since this country abounded with wild animals; now the Emu is banished to a long distance & the Kangaroo is become scarce; to both the English Greyhound is utterly destructive; it may be long before these animals are altogether exterminated, but their doom is fixed’.50 Nevertheless, he was able to see some characteristically Australian animals, including a Kangaroo Rat, ‘an animal as big as a rabbit, but with the figure of a Kangaroo’ (401). He was also rewarded with the sight of the ‘Platypi & actually killed one’: ‘I consider it a great feat, to be in at the death of so wonderful an animal’.51 These Australian mammals made him ‘[reflect] on the strange character of the Animals of this country as compared to the rest of the World’: ‘An unbeliever … might exclaim “Surely two distinct Creators must have been [at] work; their object however has been the

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same & certainly the end in each case is complete”’.52 The unbeliever in him, however, was soon suppressed when he witnessed a fly fall into the antlion’s sand pit trap, and he recognised its similarity to its European counterpart: ‘Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple & yet so artificial a contrivance? It cannot be thought so. The one hand has surely worked throughout the universe’ (403). In his imagination, the world of animals was split into two, before being unified again, through an animal’s artificial contrivance. The journal Darwin wrote in Australia is full of references to Australian wildlife, conveying his amazement and excitement at encountering it. This makes a striking contrast with the lack thereof in Huxley’s notebooks: he spent nearly three years of his voyage in Australia, but seems to have left no record of his encounters with characteristically Australian creatures. This gap in the record occurred partly because Huxley, as a young and aspiring scientist, specialised in marine creatures, especially Medusae, or jellyfish, and, unlike Darwin, he was not particularly looking to find kangaroos and platypuses. Also, according to Julian Huxley, his grandson, who edited his Rattlesnake diary, ‘In general … it was not animal life which had kindled Huxley’s interest, but human life’.53 That is to say, he was decidedly more interested in ‘placental’ mammals in these regions, rather than marsupials or monotremes. Huxley took an active ethnological interest in the ‘native’ people, especially in New Guinea, making detailed records of his encounters with them, and drawing some fine sketches of their clothes and physiques. Furthermore, he made acquaintance with the explorer Edmund Kennedy, and nearly joined his ill-fated last exploration into Queensland in 1848. Kennedy was reportedly speared to death by natives, and only two of his crew, as well as his Aborigine tracker, survived the expedition.54 While in Australia, Huxley also fell in love with, and was preoccupied in courting, his future wife, Henrietta (‘Nettie’) Heathorn, whom he met in Sydney.55 With her, he was to have eight children in England, laying the foundations of the Huxley family dynasty, which includes the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley and the writer Aldous Huxley. His initial courtship to mate as a placental in the land of the marsupials can be seen as part of the force of rapid European invasion and immigration, which tipped the ecological balance and triggered that destruction of the Australian wildlife which Darwin had observed and was already concerned about.

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Into Marsupial Pockets Kangaroo Notebook is Kobo Abe’s last novel, in which the narrator, just like Darwin and Huxley, travels to ‘the other side’ of the world. However, unlike Darwin’s and Huxley’s journeys to Australia, which presuppose return, Abe’s is a one-way trip, to a very strange land, with no hope of return. And if Darwin’s and Huxley’s voyages helped them to find their (and Man’s) place in the world, Abe’s protagonist becomes terribly disoriented and loses his sense of self, as well as his dignity as a man. The novel traces his surreal journey to Hell, aboard a hospital bed, which keeps moving forward as if of its own volition. He suffers from the condition of having radish sprouts growing on his shins, and he eats these to survive on his journey, during which he meets a series of strange creatures, far more peculiar than marsupials, such as vampire nurses, goblin children, a killer chiropractor, and even his long-deceased mother. The novel is often read as the representation of a near-death experience, which the narrator himself suspects is happening, and we learn of his death, not from his own narrative, but from an excerpt from a newspaper article, inserted at the very end of the novel, which reports the discovery of the corpse of an unidentified man at a train station ‘no longer in service’.56 Curiously, the author of this article suspects the cause of death to have been an accident or murder, rather than the sprouting of radish sprouts. This makes the truth of the protagonist’s narrative doubtful and turns his whole journey into a metaphor of modern man’s condition. However, we should take metaphors seriously. From this novel, entitled Kangaroo Notebook, a real kangaroo is uncannily absent. A dead kangaroo makes a brief appearance, in the shape of a fur rug (125), which, just as in Darwin’s unsuccessful kangaroo hunt, draws attention to and heightens its absence, in the place where one expects to find it. The novel, however, keeps returning to the elusive idea of the ‘Kangaroo Notebook’, a phrase which the narrator scribbled down and submitted to his company’s suggestion box, half in jest, because every employee was required to come up with a product idea twice every month, and he could not think of anything—he just happened to be interested in kangaroos at that time. He got into serious difficulty when his idea was picked and the manager himself came to meet him to discuss the product details. When asked what would be its major selling points, the narrator, instead of giving a straight answer, speaks at length about marsupials:

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‘… But, getting back to marsupials, the longer you observe them the more you realize how pathetic they are. As I’m sure you know, marsupials and eutherians have parallel evolutionary branches that mirror each other; cats and dasyures, hyenas and Tasmanian devils, wolves and Tasmanian wolves, bears and koalas, rabbits and bandicoots …. Pardon me for digressing.’ ‘If you see you’ve derailed, you should get back on track’. Obviously, his adrenaline was flowing; his smile had shifted to a furrow between his eyebrows.57

The narrator then tries very hard to get back on track, as instructed, but he again loses his way and finds himself digressing in a similar vein: ‘… It would seem that marsupials are poor imitations of eutherians. Their inadequacy gives them a certain appeal; we’re touched by it’.58 In the world of Kangaroo Notebook, marsupials and placental mammals ‘have parallel evolutionary branches that mirror each other’, though marsupials are poor imitations of their placental counterparts. The narrator, by dwelling on the marsupials, digresses from the path of placental mammals, called here, in accordance with the current classificatory system, ‘eutherians’. In his narrative, marsupials turn into a metaphor for himself: he feels ‘inadequate’ and unable to live up to what is expected of him as the modern office worker, who should be efficient, productive, and fit to survive. It is immediately after this tense encounter with the manager that the narrator starts growing radishes on his shins. With this, his strange journey on the hospital bed begins, taking him on a further path of digression. Abe’s reference to ‘eutherians’ brings us back to Huxley, who in 1880 proposed a new classification of mammals. Huxley divided the mammals into three subclasses: Eutheria, Metatheria and Prototheria, corresponding, respectively, to placental mammals, marsupials and monotremes.59 The term ‘Eutheria’ was originally coined by Theodore Gill, an American mammalogist, in 1872; significantly, Gill’s ‘Eutheria’ encompassed both placentals and marsupials, to distinguish them from egg-laying mammals, which he classified as Prototheria.60 Huxley, by introducing ‘Metatheria’ as a new subclass, not only separated out placentals from marsupials, but also placed the latter below the former on the mammalian evolutionary ladder. According to Huxley, ‘Metatheria’ is ‘an intermediate type between that of the Prototheria and of the higher mammals’.61 His classification therefore formalised the consensus among scientists that marsupials were, just like Australian aborigines with respect

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to Europeans, inferior to placental mammals. This classification proved to be influential, and William Kitchen Parker, an English zoologist, was reported in 1884 to have described the Metatheria ‘as looking from the summit of their Pisgah toward the promised land of the Eutheria, into which they were never to enter’62 ; it was at the summit of Mount Pisgah that God showed to Moses the Promised Land of the Jews. Huxley’s diagram of the stages of Mammalian evolution (Fig. 5.1) indicates that placental mammals have gone through the Prototherian and Metatherian stages to become Eutherian, while marsupials are stuck at the Metatherian stage. Significantly, this chart does not form an evolutionary tree of life, which would suggest the interrelatedness of all mammals. Instead, Huxley here indicates evolutionary processes in parallel lines of differing length, which are never to meet. That is to say, all mammals are portrayed as striving single-mindedly to attain the Eutherian standard. In Kangaroo Notebook, the narrator presents a model of mammalian evolution which deferentially submits to, and yet radically deviates from, Huxley’s classification. Just like Huxley’s, Abe’s Metatherians are characterised as inferior, and as incomplete versions of the Eutherians. In feeling ‘touched’ by, and sympathising with, them, Abe’s narrator himself becomes a Metatherian, who has every intention of following the glorious

Fig. 5.1 Huxley’s diagram for the stages of Mammalian evolution [‘Prof. Huxley on Evolution, Part II’, Nature 23:584 (6 January 1881): 230] (Reproduced with permission of Springer Nature)

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path towards the Eutherian land. However, the harder he strives, the further he seems to deviate from the norm and the ultimate destination. It is interesting to note that Darwin, in his letter to Charles Lyell, dated 23 September 1860, enclosed two phylogenetic diagrams, indicating two possible paths of mammalian evolution. Diagram I suggests that marsupials and placental mammals evolved from a common ancestor, which is neither a marsupial nor a placental. Diagram II proposes that marsupials are the ancestors of placentals (Fig. 5.2). According to Darwin, ‘I have not knowledge enough to choose between these two diagrams’, though ‘as a general rule’ he preferred the first.63 Darwin’s diagrams resemble, and seem even to capture, Kangaroo Notebook’s Metatherian journey, in that they show where, or rather when, placentals and marsupials diverged, each thereafter to follow a separate path of evolution; Darwin’s framework, however, is strikingly different from Abe’s. In both diagrams, Darwin marked the starting point of his phylogenetic tree with a big letter A, which, according to him, represents an ‘unknown form’, an intermediate between mammals, reptiles and birds, and ‘probably more closely related to Ornithorhynchus [platypus] than to any other known form’.64 We have already seen that in Australia the young Darwin mused over the possibility of two distinct Creators creating two different worlds, which he dispelled by reassuring himself that there must be only one God present in the universe. The A is, then, where the two worlds become united in the form of a common Ancestor, or, we may also say, at the hands of the single Author of the universe.65 Huxley’s Eutherian journey is a determined march towards the highest type of mammal, i.e. Man. This mirrors his iconic frontispiece to Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), which shows Man’s evolution from ape to human as, to quote Monique Scott, ‘the linear march of progress – forward-facing men marching single-file toward the future’.66 Darwin’s diagrams indicate the same journey made backwards: the return to the origin, only through which one learns the meaning of one’s journey. In contrast, the narrator of Kangaroo Notebook travels towards an uncertain future, away from ‘home’ and his secure sense of identity, including the sense that he is a normal human being. His path cannot be traced on either scientist’s diagrams, except as digressions and skewed mirror images, shadowing the steady progress of humankind. I suggest that Kangaroo Notebook critiques the idea of the ‘human’ as a model Eutherian, by pairing it with the idea of ‘Metatheria’ as its metaphor. The novel centres on a uniquely hybrid figure, a man ‘tightly

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Fig. 5.2 Darwin’s Diagram II, showing a marsupial as the common ancestor of marsupials and placentals drawn by Charles Darwin in a letter to Charles Lyell, dated 23 September 1860 (Reproduced with permission of the American Philosophical Society)

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strapped to the [hospital] bed with a synthetic-rubber belt’,67 and hooked to a penile catheter and an IV bottle, whose shins grow radish sprouts. His ‘cyborg’ body is supported by a machine, and supports the life of vegetables, which in turn give him nourishment. None of these can ‘live’ without the others, as the bed self-animates only in proximity with the narrator’s body, and the radish sprouts, when removed from his body, cannot survive. One character remarks of these radish sprouts, ‘as soon as we transplant them to the earth, they begin to rot’, to which the narrator responds: ‘Maybe among plants, it’s a kind of marsupial’ (17). This gives an interesting insight into the nature of a kangaroo notebook. It points to an ecosystem in which there is an interdependence of machines, animals and vegetables. A marsupial here means a weakling and deviation from the norm, which needs to be nurtured by others under special conditions. In this sense, the protagonist is another ‘marsupial’, and ‘kangaroo’ is a name for his posthuman existence. In the novel, there are three occasions on which the narrator suggests what a ‘kangaroo notebook’ might look like: In my dreams appeared sketch after sketch of nebulous notebooks, each with an infinite number of pockets within pockets. Generally, a notebook goes in your pocket, doesn’t it? Give that notebook its own pocket … In that pocket, put another notebook … (6–7) A kangaroo notebook jumps out, warm from inside the pouch … (16) A dream of falling through a hole into another, deeper hole. Wait a minute! That could be a useful image! A hole inside a hole. There’s a hint of obscenity about it; it might be just right for the kangaroo notebook. (30)

The most obvious feature of a kangaroo notebook is that it has a pouch. That is to say, Abe’s kangaroo is always a female. A kangaroo notebook is feminine writing, which is characterised by the movement of going through a hole, or a pocket.68 Importantly, this journey through a hole, despite its hint of obscenity, is not a return to the origin. The kangaroo’s pouch is not a womb: baby kangaroos are born prematurely (just like human babies), and have to leave the womb and crawl into their mother’s pouch to live. Going through a pouch is not a return to the origin but a departure from it; in this sense, the kangaroo notebook embodies the essence of metaphor as a rhetorical figure, which is, as Sarah Wood elegantly puts it, ‘a movement of meaning that will not return to itself’.69

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The second key feature of a kangaroo notebook is that it jumps. It is interesting that the kangaroo notebook is associated with dreams in two of these quotations: it signifies the power to jump from one logic, one story, to another, as if in a dream. With this ability to jump, the kangaroo notebook again captures a metaphor’s forward movement. Metonymy, in which a part represents the whole, is a figure of speech which presupposes the perpetual reproduction, and extension, of the same. It can therefore be said to embody the principle of speciesism, which interdicts cross-breeding and interactions between different species. On the other hand, metaphor ‘jumps’ to bring about a surprising meeting between two different things, even between a man and radish sprouts on a hospital bed. It moves from one thing to another, creating differences, embracing changes, and revealing the inevitability of passing time, and of death as part of the process. It is therefore a more suitable figure of speech by means of which to capture our life as an animal, both as an individual and a species. The latter, for instance, embraces transmutations from generation to generation, both culturally and environmentally, and the co-evolution of, and interactions between, many different creatures. The narrator’s dream of ‘nebulous notebooks, each with an infinite number of pockets within pockets’ is uncannily reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold—a folding or doubling in which the outside becomes the inside. Not only are marsupial pouches, or pockets, good examples of the folded structure, but also one of the characteristics of the Deleuzian fold is that it ‘goes out to infinity’: ‘A fold is always folded within a fold. Like a cavern in a cavern’.70 Likewise, Abe evokes an infinite proliferation of kangaroo notebooks, which, as I will show later, encloses the narrator in a labyrinth of folds. Such folding, which makes an inside of the outside, provides Abe with an interesting alternative to the blasting of a hole in the wall of language; it urges us, instead, to encounter what we cannot ‘think’ through language, no matter how terrifying it might be. According to Deleuze, in his tribute to Michel Foucault entitled ‘Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (subjectivation)’, folding creates an interior—our subjectivity—by folding in the ‘unthought’, which is supposed to be excluded from thought. Through folds and foldings, the ‘impossibility of thinking’ is located ‘at the very heart’ of thought.71 In this sense, it is interesting that ‘Kangaroo Notebook’ is an obvious pun in Japanese on ‘Kangaeru Notebook’, which means ‘thinking notebook’; indeed the narrator, who travels strapped to his hospital bed, cannot do much other than think. Kangaroo Notebook, as a metaphor of the human

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being, therefore clearly echoes Descartes’s famous formulation ‘Cogito, Ergo Sum’, which is often evoked to reinforce our status as the only animal capable of higher thinking. However, a Kangaroo Notebook also introduces infinite pockets inside, which fold the ‘unthought’ and the unknown within us. Eutherian etymologically means ‘good animal’ or ‘true animal’: ‘Eu-’ means good, or well, and ‘theria’ means ‘beast’. What, then, does ‘Metatheria’ signify? The different meanings associated with metasuggest many possibilities. According to the OED, this prefix denotes ‘change, transformation, permutation, or substitution’.72 Its use in ‘metatheria’ is clearly different from Agamben’s take on the ‘meta’ of ‘metaphysics’, which, he argues, ‘completes and preserves the overcoming of animal physis in the direction of human history’,73 because the kangaroos hopping towards the future have not yet completed the process of overcoming theria to become a better animal: they are still trying. The meta here has more in common with one of Donna Haraway’s favourite words, metaplasm, ‘a change in a word, for example by adding, omitting, inverting, or transposing its letters, syllables, or sounds’.74 A Metatherian is a beast which metamorphoses. Also, the prefix confusingly means at once ‘beyond, or at a higher level’ and at a lower stage—‘behind or at the back’; it also means to be ‘in-between’.75 One recurring motif is that it occupies and negotiates two states, or places. If the Eutherian is an ideal type, respectable and fixed, the Metatherian is an animal always on the move, changing, following, and traversing two different spaces (inside and outside, human and nonhuman, life and death …), never choosing one over the other, but embracing an infinite play and interchange between the two. The similarity between metaphor—meaning ‘carrying across’— and Metatherian is striking, considering that Metatherians are animals designed to carry things in their pockets. If kangaroo the Metatherian is a metaphor, it is interesting to think what kind of figure of speech we Eutherians would make. That would be Eu-phore—Euphoria—which, as we know, is a pathological, false condition of well-being, ‘one based on over-confidence or over-optimism’.76 Anthropocentrism (that is, for us to think we are human and therefore superior to other animals) is euphoria in need of urgent cure, especially because ‘euphoria’ etymologically means ‘carrying well’, inviting us to learn the art of Metatherians. Kangaroo Notebook is built around the narrator’s suggestion that ‘marsupials and eutherians have parallel evolutionary branches that mirror each other’. It is important to note that this relationship is largely derived from

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the Japanese translation of the European taxonomy system, which emphasises the pouchedness of the marsupials. A pouch in Japanese is ‘fukuro’, and we have fukuro-cat, fukuro-fox, fukuro-rat, fukuro-rabbit, fukurowolf, fukuro-anteater, etc. Thus, many marsupials are given a Japanese name with a ‘fukuro’, and this creates the distinct impression that Marsupialia is a pouched version of Placentalia. It is easy to laugh at this as an example of inappropriate mistranslation, which lacks scientific rigour. However, to do so is a Eutherian gesture, condemning a system that deviates from its own. Remember, translation is a metaphoric movement, a crossing of the border from one side to the other, folding one meaning within another. And Abe, by drawing upon the Japanese convention of naming marsupials, suggests that every word which is used to describe animals has, and should have, a secret pocket, through which to undermine the human arrogance with which we classify animals, according to our own standards. Hayao Kawai, the famous Jungian psychologist, in a conversation with Kobo Abe, asks: ‘You know marsupials. If there are rats, there are bound to be pouch-rats. I wonder what is a “Kangaroo Notebook” the marsupial of’.77 I would suggest that a Kangaroo Notebook is the marsupial of the Huxleyan Book of Nature. In his campaign for Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Huxley evoked the image of Nature as an authentic text with which to replace the Bible. In it, Man emerges as an integral part of Nature, which must be added to complete the Book. Man’s place in Nature, newly found, however, was a vantage point, only from which could a full explanation of nature’s mechanisms be given. This also signified Man’s seat as the sovereign, the most superior creature in the animal kingdom. It is then important to imagine a Kangaroo Notebook, in which the ‘place’ in Huxley’s Book of Nature, specially set aside for Man, would turn into a marsupial pocket, into which the privileged figure of Man magically disappears. Only then might we start reading animals differently, to undo our anthropocentric assumptions and to recognise our potential as ‘Metatherians’.

Becoming-a-Kangaroo Needless to say, the idea of ‘becoming-an-animal’, with which I started this chapter, echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s famous formulation ‘becoming-animal’, especially when they, in reference to Kafka’s animals, describe the process as follows: ‘to become animal is to participate in

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movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves’.78 The movement of becoming-animal is not only a departure from the existing orders and structures, but also a radical critique of them, as it seeks ‘to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds’ (13). Importantly, ‘becoming-animal’ is not a human transformation into an animal, but ‘a movement from the individuated animal to the pack or to a collective multiplicity’ (18), in which the human-animal distinction loses its meaning. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari capture this collectivising movement and blurring of distinctions using the image of the ‘rhizome’, in the complex underground networks of which they find a form of resistance to being made part of ‘a classificatory or genealogical tree’.79 This rhizomatic sense of ‘becoming-animal’ perfectly describes Kangaroo Notebook, which depicts the journey to Hell of the narrator, whose underground trajectory resists, and strikingly deviates from, the hierarchical evolutionary path, while forming symbiotic relationships with unlikely things and establishing contacts with fellow outcasts. Historically, kangaroos, the representative species of all Australian marsupials, also came to stand in for Australian people. For instance, Charles Lamb, in his ‘Distant Correspondents’ (1823), which takes the form of a letter to a friend in Sydney, sees a ‘natural’ association of the kangaroo with both the indigenous people and those petty criminals who were sent to Australia to populate the land: ‘The kangaroos – your Aborigines – do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with those little short fore puds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pick-pocket!’80 Lamb amusingly portrays the meeting of England and Australia as a multiplication of pockets, emblematised by Kangaroos as pick-pockets who are themselves provided with pockets. George Bennett, an English-born Australian naturalist, commenting on Lamb’s description of kangaroos in his Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australia (1860), added another ‘pocket’ to the mix: the kangaroo picked its own pocket, ‘like a Highlander his sporran’, if sugar was placed in it.81 In this description, the kangaroo as a convict transforms into a Scottish Highlander, who would not pick others’ pockets but only his own. We may even say that this also signals a significant change in sensibility: Australians were no longer convicts, but settlers who came to Australia to start a new life. Not only did the settlers identify with kangaroos to be true Australians, but also they imagined themselves, as it were, folded in within pockets

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of Australia; they were now an integral part of the Australian landscape, inhabiting the land and creating their own ‘pockets’ within it. Such European (or, we may say, ‘placental’) ‘becoming-a-kangaroo’, however, left in its wake deadly trails. On the one hand, it figuratively wiped out the presence of the human indigenous populations, by identifying kangaroos as the true (or to quote Lamb, ‘your’) Aborigines of the land. Paradoxically, it also presupposed the pairing of kangaroos and Aborigines as primitive and inferior; both could then justly be ‘culled’ to safeguard European settlement. As John Simons points out, ‘[in] the earlier colonial period various attempts were made to protect the growing pastoral industry by controlling kangaroo numbers’,82 and similarly in the history of the Australian Aborigines, it has almost become a commonplace to say that they were ‘driven into the wastelands and hunted like kangaroos’.83 Interestingly, Darwin, who had a chance to witness a corroboree (an Aboriginal ceremony), in which the emu and kangaroo dances, which imitate the movements of these animals, were performed, declared them to be ‘a most rude barbarous scene, & to our ideas without any sort of meaning’.84 As well as thus dismissing the aboriginal rites as senseless ethnological curiosities, Europeans also set out to ‘cull’ other ways in which to become kangaroos, and with them, the freedom of the aborigines to create their own meanings and decide on their own trajectory into the future. Europeans as Eutherians (it is remarkable how the two words resemble each other), by settling in the land of marsupials, ably assisted by their fellow ‘Eutherians’—sheep to graze and to ‘accumulate pounds & shillings’ and dogs to hunt with and to protect their properties—firmly laid their paths as settler-capitalists, and thereby contributed to a network of westernisation, modernisation and globalisation, which expanded in all directions in pursuit of profits and further resources. ‘Marsupial’ trails of the Australian animals (whether human or nonhuman) were forced into disuse, just as Abe’s narrator, at the end of his Metatherian journey, is found dead in a train station which no longer operates. The narrator’s bizarre journey finally ends when an incoming train collides with his bed, while it is parked at the train station. This causes the narrator to see a vision of countless kangaroos running away and disappearing into the darkness. After his conversation with a mysterious girl, the scene suddenly cuts to this last paragraph, in which the narrator finds himself trapped in a box:

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The box was no ordinary carton. It was tough and resilient, like hard plastic. On the front of it was a peephole. An opening the size of a mail slot. I peeked out. I saw myself from behind. That self was peeking out of a peephole too. He seemed terrified. I was as terrified as he seemed. It was dreadful. (182)

The last scene recapitulates the novel’s theme of kangaroo pockets as a ‘mise en abyme’—through a hole, the narrator sees himself seeing through a hole, creating an infinite chain of folds, connecting the inside and the outside. At the very end of his journey, he seems to have become part of a Kangaroo Notebook, the design of which he struggled so hard to conceive. However, despite its appearance, what the last scene represents is radically different from the marsupial lines of flight we witness throughout the novel. The box here is made of ‘tough and resilient’ material, like hard plastic, preventing the narrator’s escape. More importantly, the scene presented here is alarmingly reminiscent of the frontispiece to Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, which illustrates Man’s ‘march of progress’, as ‘forward-facing men marching single-file toward the future’. No wonder the narrator feels terrified. This alternative way of becoming part of a Kangaroo Notebook emerges only after his bed is destroyed by the train: Magic carpet ripped apart. The cyclical tale has finally come to a halt. Is this the end of the line for me? Until now, each time I was on the brink of disaster, the bed played a role in my rescue by whisking me from one dream to another … (178–9)

The collision between his bed and the train, then, represents the moment when the elusive marsupial journey finally comes to end to be replaced by the Eutherian one. Or, might it be the case that our individual deaths give us the distinct sense that our movement is halted, before we eventually start a new cycle of the tale in some other life form? If so, would another magic carpet come to our rescue to assist our journey? Or, perhaps, the novel’s ending signals the disappearance of all Kangaroo Notebooks, leaving us heading for an irreversible disaster, with no hope of turning back?

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As for our prospects of salvation and survival, it is significant that the narrator encounters a group of child goblins on the bank of the Sanzu River, which separates the world of the living from the underworld. They call themselves members of the ‘Otasuke (Help Me!) Club’, and sing the same song over and over again, like a mantra: ‘help me, help me, help me, please / please, please won’t you help me, please’ (69). The narrator hears the echoes of this song even after he moves away from the river, and it becomes, as it were, one of the theme tunes of his journey. These child goblins are ‘Mizuko’ (water children)—aborted foetuses, still-born children, dead babies or infants—those who could not grow up to be fully ‘human’, just like the narrator, who fails to follow the Eutherian path. Their souls are stranded in limbo, between the dead and the living. In Japanese folklore, the guardian of these children is Jizo, who is said to guide them through death and rebirth. Interestingly, despite the strong associations of Mizuko with Jizo, we find only a few fleeting mentions of the latter in the novel. Abe, when asked about Jizo, commented that he deliberately left him out of the novel because such a powerful rescuer figure would have spoiled the poignancy of the narrative.85 That is to say, the world which Abe sought to depict is a world without salvation. Jizo is a Bodhisattva who has resolved to save all those condemned to Hell, making this famous vow: ‘Only after the Hells are empty will I become a Buddha’.86 He guides all the living creatures in all the six Hell realms, including the nonhuman animals in Chikusho-dou (the animal realm); this makes him one of the earliest animal welfare activists. Jizo is also the guardian of travellers, and he is often represented as a pilgrim. Indeed, he has travelled across East Asia and even crossed gender boundaries to reach Japan: being of Indian origin and originally female, he was transformed into a Buddhist monk in China and the Far East, and became a popular object of worship there, especially in Japan. The word Jizo is derived from the Sanskrit ‘Ksitigarbha’, which means the Womb or Repository of the Earth. If Jizo is prepared to stay with us for aeons, this is because he is the Earth itself, and its resourcefulness in recovering from any disaster through the cycle of death and birth. He is also a rescue worker on the ground, tending to the present needs of suffering creatures, here and now, unlike Miroku Bodhisattva, a messianic figure who it is said will appear at the end of the world (scheduled for 5.67 billion years after Buddha’s death) to save us all. Jizo almost seems to embody the spirit of Donna Haraway’s call for us to ‘stay with the trouble’, to

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‘live responsibly in thick copresents, so that we may bequeath something liveable to those who come after’.87 In light of our present ecological crisis, Jizo’s absence from Abe’s novel is an ominous sign. It seems to signal the end of the Earth’s resources and recuperative power, and the powerlessness of our most trusted environmental workers to stop suffering on earth. It may be that the true task of staying with the trouble starts when Jizo the merciful rescuer has finally left us. The realisation that nobody is in charge will make us truly realise that we are not managers of the Earth, and that we have to share the world with other creatures; we must learn to take good care of them, and to be cared for by them. It is notable that Haraway, when advocating her idea of ‘staying with the trouble’, turns to Deborah Bird Rose’s book on Australia and its environmental challenges, and cites her vision of coexistence in which the Aborigine’s worldview plays an important part: ‘Country is multidimensional: it consists of people, animals, plants, Dreamings, underground, earth, soils, minerals and waters … it exists both in and through time … living things of a country take care of their own … those who destroy their country destroy themselves’.88 Abe’s Hell echoes this Australian ‘underground’ in its figuring of the kangaroo. As a labyrinth of marsupial pockets, it is highly ‘multidimensional’, weaving together different things, creatures and space-times, dreamings and stories. ‘Kangaroo Notebook’ must, then, be the name of this space; there, all creatures, inhabiting different pockets, are intimately interconnected through the leaps of marsupials, who meet and miss each other, and who journey together towards an unknown future.

Notes 1. Kobo Abe, ‘Hakobune wa hasshinsezu’ [‘The Ark Does Not Depart’], in Abe Kobo Zenshu [Complete Works of Abe Kobo], 30 vols (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1997–2009), vol. 28, 50 [my translation]. This is a transcript of the NHK documentary, ‘Abe Kobo: Houmon Interview’ [‘At-home Interview’], 14–17 January 1985. 2. Kobo Abe, Kabe [The Wall] (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1969). 3. Excerpt collected in Kobo Abe, Beyond the Curve. Trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1991), 35–42. 4. ‘The Red Cocoon’ and ‘The Flood’ are collected in Lane Dunlop (trans.), A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 159–62, 163–8.

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5. Kobo Abe, ‘The Stick’, collected in Dunlop, 169–74. Kobo Abe, The Man Who Turned into a Stick. Trans. Donald Keene (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975). 6. Kobo Abe, ‘Dendrocacalia’, Beyond the Curve, 43–64. 7. Kobo Abe, ‘Suichu Toshi’ [‘The Underwater City’], Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 3, 201–22. 8. Kobo Abe, ‘Doreigari (Slave Hunting)’, Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 5, 97–181; ‘Doreigari: Kaitei-ban (Slave Hunting: The Revised Version)’, Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 21, 347–414; and ‘Ueh: Shin-Doreigari’, Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 25, 281–345. 9. Kobo Abe, Ningen Sokkuri (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1976). 10. Abe, ‘Hakobune wa hasshinsezu’, 46. 11. Kobo Abe, Kemono tachi wa Kokyo wo Mezasu (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1970). 12. Kobo Abe, ‘Kafka no Seimei [Kafka’s Vitality]’, a Dialogue with Koji Nakano on Franz Kafka, Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 27, 59–60. 13. Kobo Abe, ‘Creole no Tamashii [The Soul of Creole]’, Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 28, 365–76. 14. Kobo Abe, ‘Does the Visual Image Destroy the Walls of Language?’, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe K¯ ob¯ o. Ed., trans., and with an introduction by Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 62–3. 15. F. Max Müller, ‘Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language: Third Lecture, Delivered at the Royal Institution, April 5, 1873’, Fraser’s Magazine 8:43 (July 1873): 22. 16. Kobo Abe, ‘Fujino-kun no koto’ [On Mr. Fujino], Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 25, 258–61. All quotations in this paragraph are my translations. 17. Abe, Ningen Sokkuri, 159 [my translation]. 18. Kobo Abe, ‘Douketeki Dasshutsugeki [The Clownish Escape-Play]’, Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 25, 247. 19. Abe, ‘Does the Visual Image Destroy the Walls of Language?’ 61. 20. M. Keith Booker, Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection, and the Carnivalesque (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991), 106. 21. Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 14. 22. Henry N. Stevens (ed.), New Light on the Discovery of Australia, as Revealed by the Journal of Captain Don Diego De Prado y Tovar (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1930), 139. 23. J. H. Calaby, ‘Early European Description of an Australian Mammal’, Nature 205:4970 (30 January 1965): 517. 24. Stevens, 139.

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25. William Dampier, A Voyage to New-Holland: The English Voyage of Discovery to the South Seas in 1699. Ed. James Spencer (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1981), 108. 26. John B. Haviland, ‘A Last Look at Cook’s Guugu-Yimidhirr Wordlist’, Oceania 44:3 (1974): 216, n1. 27. Edward Ellis Morris, Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages, etc. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1898), 230. 28. John Simons, Rossetti’s Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian Animals in Victorian London (London: Middlesex University Press, 2008), 31. 29. R. M. W. Dixon, The Languages of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8. 30. Simons, 30. 31. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 179. 32. Morris, 231. 33. Augustus A. Gould (ed.), A System of Natural History: Containing Scientific and Popular Descriptions of Man, Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles and Insects (Brattleboro: Fessenden & Co., 1834), 278. 34. Morris, 340. 35. John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 155. 36. Ann Moyal, Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 9. As Kathleen Dugan points out, it was in 1884, ‘more than eighty-five years after the first platypus specimen arrived in Europe’, that ‘European scientists finally accepted that the monotremes laid eggs’ [Kathleen G. Dugan, ‘The Zoological Exploration of the Australian Region and its Impact on Biological Theory’, in Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (eds.), Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 87]. 37. ‘paradox, n. and adj.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 11 March 2020). 38. ‘A Natural History Puzzle’, The Times (23 January 1883): 10. 39. Richard Owen, ‘Abstract of a Lecture on the Classification and Geographical Distribution of the Mammalia’, The British Medical Journal 1:125 (21 May 1859): 407. 40. Richard Owen, ‘On the Characters, Principles of Division, and Primary Groups of the Class Mammalia’ (Read February 17 and April 21, 1857), Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, Zoology II (1858): 20, 37. 41. For details of the ‘Hippocampus Controversy, see, for instance, Nicolaas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Biology Without Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Chapter 6.

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42. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, in The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1939), 618. 43. Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 3 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1913), vol. 1, 42. 44. Charles Darwin, letter to J. S. Henslow, 28–9 January 1836 in Frederick Burkhardt (ed.), The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 1: 1821– 1836 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 485. 45. Charles Darwin, letter to Susan Darwin, 28 January 1836 in Burkhardt, 482–3. 46. Charles Darwin, letter to Catherine Darwin, 14 February 1836, in Burkhardt, 490. 47. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 1, 201, 35, 178. 48. Richard Darwin Keynes (ed.), Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 410. 49. Gordon Chancellor and John van Wyhe (eds.), Charles Darwin’s Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 560. 50. Keynes, 401. 51. Charles Darwin, letter to Philip Parker King, 21 January 1836, in Burkhardt, 481. 52. Keynes, 402. 53. Julian Huxley (ed.), T. H. Huxley’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), 157. 54. Julian Huxley, 110–11. 55. Julian Huxley, 79. 56. Kobo Abe, Kangaroo Notebook. Trans. Maryellen Toman Mori (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 183. 57. Abe, Kangaroo Notebook, 5. Translation modified: the translation has ‘higher mammals’ for ‘eutherians’ (真獣類). 58. Abe, Kangaroo Notebook, 6. Translation modified: ‘eutherians’ for ‘fullfledged mammals’. 59. T. H. Huxley, ‘On the Application of the Laws of Evolution to the Arrangement of the Vertebrata, and more particularly of the Mammalia’, Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 43 (1880): 649–62. 60. Theodore Gill, Arrangement of the Families of Mammals (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1872); see also, Theodore Gill, ‘Eutheria and Prototheria’, The American Naturalist 22:255 (March 1888): 258–9. 61. Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Prof. Huxley on Evolution, Part II’, Nature 23:584 (6 January 1881): 228. 62. ‘Notes and News’, Science 3:57 (7 March 1884): 297. 63. Letter of C. R. Darwin to Charles Lyell, 23 September 1860. Darwin Correspondence Database. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2925 (date accessed 9 August 2019).

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64. A letter of Darwin to Lyell, 23 September 1860. 65. For a discussion of Darwin’s two diagrams, see J. D. Archbald, ‘Darwin’s Two Competing Phylogenetic Trees: Marsupials as Ancestors or Sister Taxa?’ Archives of Natural History 39:2 (2012): 217–33. 66. Thomas H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863); Monique Scott, Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins (London: Routledge, 2007), 49. 67. Abe, Kangaroo Notebook, 16. 68. Here it is interesting to recall that Kipling’s ‘Old Man Kangaroo’, though he is a male, nevertheless has a pouch, suggesting that Kipling’s network of beast fables is also feminine writing (Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories . Ed. Judith Plotz [London: Penguin Books, 2011], 56). The subversiveness of this feminine ‘kangaroo’ writing is evident in the fact that the kangaroo’s pouch bears the inscription ‘Patent Fed. Govt. Aus’ (56, 57, 172n16); that is to say, it is placed under strict colonial control, lest it should deviate from the official stories of empire. 69. Sarah Wood, Derrida’s Writing and Difference: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2009), 69. 70. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Foreword and trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 2006), 6. 71. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault. Trans. and ed. Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 1999), 80. 72. ‘meta-, prefix.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 21 February 2020). 73. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 79. 74. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 20. 75. ‘meta-, prefix.’ OED. 76. ‘euphoria, n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 11 March 2020). 77. Kobo Abe, ‘Kyokai wo koeta sekai’ [‘The World Beyond the Boundary’], a Dialogue with Hayao Kawai on Kangaroo Notebook, 3 December 1991, Abe Kobo Zenshu, vol. 29, 216 [my translation]. 78. Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 13. 79. Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 238, 239. 80. Charles Lamb, ‘Distant Correspondents’, The Essays of Elia (London: E. Moxon, Sons & Co., 1869), 167.

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81. George Bennett, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australia (London: John Van Voorst, 1860), 5. 82. John Simons, Kangaroo (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 41. 83. Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 311, quoted in Philip Yale Nicholson, Who Do We Think We Are? Race and Nation in the Modern World (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 100. 84. Keynes, 412. 85. Abe, ‘Kyokai wo koeta sekai’, 221. 86. Jan Chozen Bays, Jizo Bodhisattva: Guardian of Children, Travelers, and Other Voyagers (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2003), xii. 87. Donna Haraway, ‘When Species Meet: Staying with the Trouble’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28:1 (2010): 53. 88. Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004), 153–4, quoted in Haraway, ‘When Species Meet: Staying with the Trouble’, 53.

CHAPTER 6

Animal Alphabets: Chesterton’s Dog, Browning’s Rats, Lear’s Blue Baboon

Of course you know your ABC?1

The Jungle Book (1894), richly illustrated by Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, opens with an image of an Indian child playing a pipe. He is surrounded by a large group of different animals, all intently listening to him, captivated by his music (Fig. 6.1). This image, which adorns the Preface in the English edition, is also used as an illustration for the opening story, ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, in the American edition (which omits the Preface); the implication is that Mowgli the wolf-boy is the piper around whom animals gather.2 Drawn to look like an old relief carving, a relic from a bygone age, this picture beautifully sets the tone for the Jungle Books as a modern rewriting of the ancient beast fable genre. Indeed, it strikingly resembles the illustration which Lockwood Kipling provided around the same time for a story titled ‘Little Anklebone’ in Flora Annie Steel’s Tales of the Punjab (1894), a collection of Punjabi stories, largely drawn from the fable tradition, including the Ja“takas and the Panchatantra (Fig. 6.2). ‘Little Anklebone’ was once an orphan boy who lived with his aunt and tended her flock of sheep. When a ‘great big wolf’ demanded either a sheep or the boy to eat, his aunt, without any hesitation, told the boy to allow himself to be eaten, to save her fat sheep.3 After eating him, the wolf ‘[threaded his] anklebone on a string and [hung] it on a tree’ over the pond, in accordance with the boy’s last wish (119). The illustration © The Author(s) 2020 K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8_6

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Fig. 6.1 John Lockwood Kipling’s title illustration in the Preface to Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), v

shows how the boy, now ‘Little Anklebone’, then played his shepherd’s pipe by the pond, and ‘all the beasts of the forests, and the birds of the air, and the fishes of the pond came to listen to him’ (120). Furthermore, female animals, ‘the does, and the tigeress, and the she-wolves’ gathered around him to be milked. This milk flowed into the pond, turning it into ‘a pond of milk’, which Little Anklebone offered to whoever comes to visit him (120). Charles Allen describes ‘Little Anklebone’ as ‘the archetype of both Mowgli the man-cub and Kim’,4 and, indeed, the similarity between him and Mowgli is striking: Little Anklebone, just like Mowgli, was abandoned by human society, initiated into animal society through being ‘adopted’ (in his case, eaten) by a wolf, and nurtured by all the animals of the forest, whom he, in turn, nurtured. Moreover, both boys figure as a piper, around whom a harmonious circle of animals is formed. If the music of ‘Little Anklebone’ attracts ‘all the beasts of the forests, and the birds of the air, and the fishes of the pond’, resulting in a gathering of all the Punjabi (or Indian) animals, the scope is even wider in the illustration for The Jungle Book. To the piper come not only Indian animals, but also animals like the lion, the seal, and the camel which are not typically Indian, or have stronger associations with other parts of the world. The illustration thus presents the Jungle Books ’ imperial network, in which Indian animals play a central part. Indeed, these are the animals who are enticed by the music to become part of Kipling’s stories; this explains the seal’s presence in the illustration, an obvious reference to Kotick in ‘The White Seal’. Among the Indian animals is also a many-headed snake,

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Fig. 6.2 John Lockwood Kipling, ‘Little Anklebone’, Frontispiece to Flora Annie Steel, Tales of the Punjab, Told by the People (London: MacMillan and Co., 1894)

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a mythic creature, reminding us of a recurrent theme in the beast fable genre: when man and animals meet, there arises a space in which myth and reality, past and present, converge. This is invariably presented as a harmonious congregation of animals, in which a primitive man (or man-cub) is the centre of attention. The underlying contention of this chapter is that every beast fable harbours a ‘piper’, to whose music the animals in it irresistibly respond. This piper is noted for his proximity to animals and animality; that is why in the nineteenth century, the heyday of colonial anthropology which customarily conflated animals, children, and non-Europeans, Mowgli and Little Anklebone, two Indian wolf-boys, ‘naturally’ step into this role. With this framework in mind, this chapter will characterise the imperial beast fable as a scene of reading, in which the beastly piper pipes to animals as alphabet letters. Through readings of a diversity of texts, such as The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes , G. K. Chesterton’s introduction to Æsop’s Fables , Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, Machado de Assis’s ‘Alexandrian Tale’, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems and Edward Lear’s nonsense texts, I will argue that as literacy has become a key requirement for lawabiding and orderly citizenship, so the folkloric figure of the piper as a beast-tamer has come to be paired with that of the modern reader as the master of the alphabet. Reading is thus a bodily and animal activity: part of the pleasure of learning to read must come from children’s sense of omnipotence as they learn to manipulate the alphabet letters, which are conventionally taught to them through the animal alphabet or animal stories. According to David Abram, in his The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), we once lived in an animistic and sensuous universe, filled with nonhuman voices. The landscape, rivers, trees, animals—everything around us spoke and we heard these things using all our bodily senses. Human language arose from this ‘perceptual interplay between the body and the world’.5 Even where the shift from oral to written cultures took place, pictographs and ideographs, ‘the early writing systems of our species’ (96), still recorded our encounter with the natural world by incorporating the materiality of nature as pictures and traces. However, our connection with nature was broken with the advent of the alphabet, a ‘purely phonetic set of signs’ (240) which does not rely on our sensory participation to represent the world. This led to a double silencing of ‘the more-than-human world’. Not only did language cease to be formed by our interactions

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with nature, but also the alphabet opened up a textual space in which its letters speak and even ventriloquise the voices of nature. Abram notes the striking similarity between our phonetic reading of a written text and our pre-alphabetic engagement with the natural environment: As a Zuñi elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices … As nonhuman animals, plants, and even ‘inanimate’ rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the ‘inert’ letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless — as mysterious as a talking stone. And indeed, it is only when a culture shifts its participation to these printed letters that the stones fall silent. Only as our senses transfer their animating magic to the written word do the trees become mute, the other animals dumb. (131; emphasis in original)

The animism of the printed letters, through which everything can become animate, is ‘as mysterious as a talking stone’. Abram is clearly aware of the power of alphabetic animism and of how alluringly it resembles the animism born out of the natural environment. He thus warns us not to place ourselves too willingly under the ‘spell’ of the written word, because it came into existence by replacing ‘the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world’ (133). Abram’s theory, which locates the animistic and linguistic encounter with nature in our distant past, is strikingly similar to that of the nineteenth-century theorists of the beast fable, and, indeed, the modern and sophisticated proponents of the genre. This chapter thus writes both alongside and against Abram’s sense that the alphabet has terminated our bodily connection with the nonhuman world. This ‘transference’ of animism from things in the world to the alphabet does not, I argue, mark a termination of the human engagement with the natural environment. On the contrary, it has created a new bodily connection between human and nonhuman worlds in the form of what I call the animal alphabet: the animation of letters as animals (and vice versa), which is at the heart of every modern beast fable. By learning to read, we train ourselves to be the masters of animals as alphabet letters; this makes the coupling of Man and his animals the basic unit of modern society. At the same time, we have learned to rejoice in, and to become part of, the animal alphabet, animated to dance to the music of modernity. Perhaps what

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Abram omits to admit is the possibility that his idealisation of the prealphabetic animism might have been made possible by the animism of the written letters: it has taught us to imagine the ‘wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world’ through the incessant chattering of the letters of the alphabet.

Animating the Alphabet The fable’s transformation into anthropological documents in the eighteenth century coincided with the advent of animal stories as educational tools for children. Animals literally became alphabets to teach children reading and writing, as well as morals and good conduct. Many scholars have cited John Locke’s educational theory as the most important source of this new development. Locke, in his treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), famously described Æsop’s Fables as the best book to use to teach children how to read and write, as it consists of stories ‘apt to delight and entertain a Child’.6 He recommended the use of an illustrated edition of Aesop: ‘as soon as [the child] begins to spell, as many Pictures of Animals should be got him, as can be found, with the printed names to them, which at the same time will invite him to read, and afford him Matter of Enquiry and knowledge’ (212). Pictures would not simply enhance the child’s reading experience, but would also make it easier and more pleasurable for him or her to acquire knowledge. Locke argues that, unless the child becomes familiar with the appearance of animals ‘from the Things themselves or their Pictures’ (212), the information about them would be of no use to him or her. Animals were thus officially appointed as children’s learning companions: whenever they learn the alphabet, they are trained to conjure animals in their imaginations. John Newbery (1713–1767), remembered as the father of children’s literature, was the first publisher to specialise in books for children. He was a great admirer of John Locke’s educational theory, and his most popular children’s book, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), is a prime example of the new pairing of animals and alphabets advocated by Locke. The story tells of how Margery Meanwell, an orphaned girl, rose from poverty to respectability through the power of the alphabet: she educated herself to be an inspiring school teacher and virtuous woman, and eventually became a Lady by marrying a rich widower, who was impressed by ‘her Virtue, good Sense, and prudent Behaviour’.7 Her rise began when she realised that only the twenty-six letters of the alphabet

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were ‘required to spell all the Words in the World’ (25). As a teacher, she dedicated herself to teaching children ‘the Science of A, B, C’ (61). She set up a school, aptly named ‘the A, B, C College’ (66), for which she recruited many animals to help the children learn their lessons. Two of Margery’s animal helpers were specialists in teaching the alphabet. Ralph the young Raven was ‘taught to speak, to spell and to read’ (70): ‘as he was particularly fond of playing with the large Letters, the Children used to call this Ralph’s Alphabet’ (70–1). Ralph was so clever that he could correct the children’s mistakes in ordering the alphabet, and he even composed a short verse to teach the children manners (71, 76). Likewise, Tom the Pigeon ‘took Care of the small [letters]’ (72). Tess Cosslett rightly draws attention to the important role of Margery’s animal helpers in ‘[linking] the world of entertainment to the teaching of reading’, but I disagree with her when she says that ‘the birds’ ability to “talk” or “read” is to be seen as a performing trick, not a fiction or fable’.8 Quite the contrary: the fact that the birds talk is crucial, as this is exactly what happens when children read stories. To learn the alphabet is to be initiated into the world of the fable, in which children are granted the power to talk with animals. Clearly, the moral of such a fable would be that those who can master the alphabet can master animals, and vice versa. Abram argues that the interplay between different senses, which he calls ‘synaesthesia’, was at the heart of man’s sensorial engagement with the natural world before the advent of the alphabet. The animism of the printed letters also shares this characteristic (hence the striking resemblance between the two), as the act of reading requires a ‘synaesthetic collaboration between the eye and the ear, between seeing and hearing’.9 Gillian Brown, in ‘The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, similarly examines the importance of bodily participation in the act of reading. According to her, the eighteenthcentury children’s book is an ‘interactive’ genre, devised to engage children physically as well as mentally. For instance, Newbury’s books, including The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, link the experience of reading with a variety of physical activities such as ‘seeing, talking, playing, touching, and moving’,10 in the form of off-the-page activities. Moreover, the act of reading itself requires the coordination between different senses, not only seeing and hearing, but also ‘the eye-hand coordination’ necessary to hold a movable book in order to read it (357). ‘[The] cooperation of different senses’ is, according to Brown, ‘now recognized by cognitive psychologists as crucial in learning to read’ (357).

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In The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, key animal characters are introduced into the text with a portrait, which the narrator asks the reader to take notice of: ‘[Margery] called his Name Ralph, and a fine Bird he is. Do look at him’; ‘This Pidgeon was a very pretty Fellow … See here he is’.11 These pictures, included to make the learning process more fun, also consolidate visually the pairing between the animal and the letter of the alphabet which the children need to learn. The alphabet letter, which can be too ‘abstract’ for the child to grasp, is turned into a kind of pictograph by being paired with the reference to, and the picture of, an animal. Brown calls letters or marks on a page ‘abstraction’, as the child encounters these initially as ‘unintelligible phenomena’ (355). Reading is an ‘animating process’ which takes place when the child learns to make ‘the connection between materiality and abstraction’ (357), that is to say, between the alphabet and what he or she knows to be tangible reality. In many children’s books, this required connection between abstraction and materiality takes the form of the animal alphabet, as a combination of letters and animals. That is to say, children are considered to have mastered reading when the black marks on the page materialise as moving and often talking animals. Thus, the animal alphabet is not a simple learning tool; it also encapsulates the child’s joy and amazement when the world suddenly comes alive before his or her eyes in the manner of cinema (359). The animal alphabet can be defined as the animation of letters through (and as) animals. The aliveness of animal letters, however, needs to be fuelled by one important skill: the ability to read (animals). Children are encouraged to read stories into their animal characters, and even to become animals themselves, in order wholly to immerse themselves in the stories. This activity of reading and identifying with animals is closely linked with an important moral lesson: be kind and compassionate towards animals. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke warns against children’s tendency to ‘torment, and treat very roughly young Birds, Butterflies, and such other poor Animals … with a seeming kind of Pleasure’, because such acts ‘by degrees, harden their Minds even towards Men’.12 Childhood cruelty to animals needs to be prevented, as these little bullies will certainly grow up to be criminals with no qualms about harming or killing humans (as famously ‘documented’ in Hogarth’s engravings The Four Stages of Cruelty [1751]).13 In contrast, kindness to animals would soften the mind, making it receptive to the rules of society. Thus, Margery forcefully imparts the lesson of compassion to her

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students, urging ‘naughty Boys throwing at Cocks, torturing Flies, and whipping Horses and Dogs’ to put themselves in the position of the poor creatures they torture: They as well as you are capable of feeling Pain, and of receiving Pleasure, and how can you, who want to be made happy yourself, delight in making your fellow Creatures miserable? Do you think the poor Birds, whose Nest and young ones that wicked Boy Dick Wilson ran away with Yesterday, do not feel as much Pain, as your Father and Mother would have felt, had any one pulled down their House and ran away with you? To be sure they do.14

Animals are no longer playthings wantonly to be toyed with, but should be regarded as fellow creatures, whose life stories children are encouraged to imagine. In this sense, it is significant that Margery’s two alphabet helpers, Ralph the Raven and Tom the Pigeon, were both rescued by her from naughty children (69, 71). Their transformation from children’s playthings to alphabet helpers beautifully illustrates Margery’s educational philosophy: to learn the alphabet is to cultivate a different relationship with animals, and to turn them into stories to be read. As Keith Thomas observes in his Man and the Natural World (1983), ‘by the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of people had come to find man’s ascendancy over nature’, sanctioned by Scripture, ‘increasingly abhorrent to their moral and aesthetic sensibilities’.15 The rapid progress of civilisation and urbanisation had resulted in the clearing of forests and other wildernesses, which had made nature less threatening. Also, ‘[e]conomic independence of animal power and urban isolation from animal farming had nourished emotional attitudes which were hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the exploitation of animals by which most people lived’ (301). This change in sensibility arose in tandem with the rise of what Thomas W. Lacquer calls ‘the humanitarian narrative’, which is characterised by detailed descriptions of suffering victims, intended to evoke the reader’s sympathy. In this context, the suffering animal body (made dumb and speechless in an agony of pain) acquired new significance ‘not only as the locus of pain but also the common bond between those who suffer and those who would help’.16 To teach children to be compassionate towards animals was therefore to cultivate their ‘humanitarian’ sensibilities, which the cohesion of society now depended upon.

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I suggest that this changing attitude towards animals can be considered in light of the distinction which the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965) makes between ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy’. Simply put, the art of abstraction is the inclination towards the inorganic and the geometrical, while empathy takes pleasure in the organic: it is the urge vicariously to project oneself into external living things. According to Worringer, abstraction was the predominant principle of art in primitive societies, while empathy emerged as the new aesthetic principle in the post-Renaissance period, resulting in realistic and mimetic art forms. The difference between abstraction and empathy stems from two different relations to the external world: ‘Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world’.17 In this context, the animal alphabet can be seen as a new set of letters, with which a new human relationship with other animals came to be written. Instead of animal cruelty, the sure sign of a hardened attitude towards life, children were taught to read animal bodies as texts. Certainly, Margery’s A, B, C College cultivates what Worringer calls the ‘empathy’ impulse, as she fully embraces a happy vision of human-animal coexistence: Mrs. Margery, you must know, was very humane and compassionate; and her Tenderness extended not only to all Mankind, but even to all Animals that were not noxious; as your’s ought to do, if you would be happy here, and go to Heaven hereafter. These are GOD Almighty’s Creatures as well as we. He made both them and us; and for wise Purposes, best known to himself, placed them in this World to live among us; so that they are our fellow Tenants of the Globe. How then can People dare to torture and wantonly destroy GOD Almighty’s Creatures?18

Animals are ‘our fellow Tenants of the Globe’, and the alphabet plays a central role in creating this sense of animal cosmopolitanism, not only because it is what is needed ‘to spell all the Words in the World’, but also because it is through the learning of the alphabet that a child learns to read other animals’ pain, and thus to become ‘humane and compassionate’. This global vision of animal cosmopolitanism certainly echoes the image of Mowgli as the Piper, around whom all the animals in the British

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Empire gather together. Note that Margery discreetly excludes animals that are ‘noxious’ from the list of those to whom we should extend our compassion, a telling reminder that empathy becomes possible only when the danger of the external world has been eliminated; this again echoes the way in which Mowgli has to kill off vermin like Shere Khan the Man-Eater to ensure the interspecies harmony which he creates around himself. Considering that the Latin alphabet is a quintessentially abstract and geometric art form, it is no coincidence that the emergence of the ‘animal alphabet’ can be located in the modern age of empathy and realism. To follow Worringer: as nature ceased to be a significant threat to human existence, animals—the tangible embodiment of the organic—became objects of empathy, identification with which would produce pleasurable feelings; accordingly, the alphabet began to be appreciated as organic objects, or more literally, real animals. Abstraction is no longer a response to the danger of an external world which has to be made safe and bearable. On the contrary, it embodies the materiality of nature, and the joy of handling and manipulating it. Therefore, it beautifully complements the ‘empathy’ impulse of taking delight in organic objects.

A Man with Six Legs: Chesterton’s Doggy Alphabet Jacques Derrida, in his The Animal That Therefore I Am, famously critiques the use of the singular ‘the animal’, by which we ‘corral a large number of living beings within a single concept’.19 Such a use of the word obliterates the heterogeneity and multiplicity of living creatures, facilitating our use and exploitation of them (31–2). Similarly, Tom Tyler’s CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (2012) problematises our use of animals as symbols, metaphors, examples, ‘ciphers’ or empty signs. The representation of animals is a theatre of domestication, in which animals are tamed into ciphers, whose function is to stand in for human values.20 Just as Derrida, in lieu of ‘the animal’, invented the word animot ‘to have the plural animals [animaux] heard in the singular’,21 Tyler employs an ingenious wordplay to resist the violence of the human language, which reduces animals to the status of nonentity: animals are hardly ciphers, or ‘ciferae’ in Latin,22 but should be seen as CI FERAE—101 (CI in Roman numerals, meaning many) feral animals (FERAE)—who are ‘wild and unruly enough to escape cipherous substitution’ (44–5).

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Significantly, CIFERAE includes a section entitled ‘An ABC of Animals’, which examines the ‘animal alphabet’ as it appears in the genre of the fable. Tyler suggests that this is the most typical example of the violent reduction of animals to the status of ‘ciphers’: in fables, animals are stripped of any significance or actuality, and used to represent aspects of human nature (49–50). For Tyler, this is most clearly seen in G. K. Chesterton’s introduction to a 1912 translation of Æsop’s Fables, in which Chesterton describes the language of the fable as follows: ‘In this language, like a large animal alphabet, are written some of the first philosophic certainties of men. As the child learns A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow, so man has learnt here to connect the simpler and stronger creatures with the simpler and stronger truths’.23 Not only are animals made to embody human truths, but also Chesterton decrees that animals in the fable ‘must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess’ (vii), which nicely supports Tyler’s argument that Chesterton turns animals into ciphers. In the same section, Tyler also suggests the subversive potentiality of the fable, in which ‘many a cipher will metamorphose into an index’.24 By saying that they become ‘indices’, Tyler means that the animal characters in fables come to embody certain qualities or values (e.g. ass for stupidity, lion for valour), which, though stereotypical, point to, or index, animals in the real world. Animals in the fable alternate between functioning as ciphers and as indices, without ever being fully either (50). This fluctuation and ambivalence allows the wildness (‘ferae’) of animals within ciphers (‘ciferae’) to find a way to express itself (50). Chesterton (1874–1936), a devout Catholic and Christian apologist, famous for his sharp wit and paradoxical wisdom, was highly critical of the evolutionary theory of the origin of Man, and the ensuing assumption of biological kinship between man and animals. Of course, man is in many ways like other animals, but for him it is ‘the monstrous scale of [man’s] divergence [from other animals] that requires an explanation’.25 ‘We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal’ (247). This is because man alone has ‘broken out’ from the condition of ‘tame animals’, enslaved to ‘the rugged respectability of the tribe or type’ (247). This ‘undomestication’ of man by himself created the great ‘chasm’ between man and beasts: ‘it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins’ (247). To use Tyler’s formulation, it is Man, not other animals, who should be written as a ci-ferae. Having gained his wildness (ferae), Man has ceased

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to be part of the animal alphabet as a collection of ‘ciferae’ (ciphers), while remaining part of it (ci-ferae) as the master of the alphabet. At first glance, Chesterton’s insistence on human exceptionalism further supports Tyler’s argument as to the cipher-like nature of his animal alphabet. Thus, it is rather surprising to find that, in several places, he warns us specifically against our tendency to turn animals into signs, to make them stand in for something other than themselves. A good example of this is his essay ‘The New Credulity’ (1914), in which he attacks the Darwinian creed of evolution in relation to how we read animals in fables.26 The essay starts with a reading of medieval travellers’ accounts of meeting African men with the heads of dogs. Instead of dismissing this as an unbelievable fairy tale, Chesterton argues that it was a ‘remarkably accurate’ (59) description of baboons by those people. Baboons have dog-like snouts, an obvious fact which escapes the notice of those who are blinded by Darwinism: having ‘a vague idea that the largest apes must be in every way the nearest to Man’ (58), they believe in the monstrous image of the primitive man as half-man and half-ape, best captured in the famous cartoon of Darwin with an ape’s body.27 For Chesterton, the fallacy of Darwinism, then, originates in the inability to read animals in the stories as they are. To illustrate his point further, he presents a scenario in which ‘some very urbane intellectual, a man like Herbert Spencer’28 would explain the value of an Aesop fable, ‘The Dog in the Manger’— the story of a dog lying in a manger, who would not let the cattle eat the hay, even though he cannot eat it himself: The intellectual, according to his particular theory, would probably reply in one of two ways. He would either say that these tales about animals thinking and talking like men were the remains of savage superstition; when Man thought the beasts as wise or wiser than himself; when he would worship monkeys or crocodiles; and when he personified everything, putting a spirit into a stone or a tree. Or, if his purely intellectual explanation were a different one, he might tell the child that the fable was an entirely artificial sort of allegory invented by the Greeks; that it described the relations of human beings, but dressed up in the form of appropriate animals merely for fun or legal fiction. The point is that in either case he would suppose the Dog in the Manger to be a symbol of an unreasonable man. (59)

Chesterton, through the figure of an ‘urbane intellectual’ who is an Evolutionist (‘a man like Herbert Spencer’), identifies the two dominant

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theories of the fable. One is the allegorical reading of the genre, in which animals stand in for humans, while the other is an understanding of the beast fable as an anthropological concept, which, as we have seen, was often used to validate the Darwinian theory of the animal ancestry of Man: fables are the records of savage superstitions from a time when men were, and thought, like animals. For Chesterton, both theories are problematic, not only because they reduce animals in fables to ‘symbols’ of man, but also because they prevent us from spotting real animals when they are present in the stories. ‘The Dog in the Manger’, he admits, ‘may be inconsistent with Darwin’, as the dog’s behaviour, fighting for the hay he cannot eat, does not fit the Darwinian framework of selfpreservation and survival. However, ‘it is not inconsistent with Æsop’ (60), who simply captures the way in which ‘a dog really will eat food he commonly contemns and loathes rather than allow some rival animal to eat it’ (60). Indeed, he concludes by saying that the intellectual’s error would be ‘due to the fact that he had not got a dog. Anybody who has a dog of his own knows that the Dog in the Manger was a very doggy dog; and might easily be found in a manger as well as in a fable’ (60). This lesson of reading a dog as a dog is put into practice in one of Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ stories, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’ (1926), in which a dog’s unusual behaviour holds the key to solving a murder mystery. The opening of the story draws attention to the dog’s alphabetical existence, with Father Brown, a crime-solving Roman Catholic priest, saying: ‘I always like a dog, so long as he isn’t spelt backwards’.29 This seemingly flippant comment encapsulates his reading strategy: treat a dog literally as a dog, and never read any other meaning into it, such as human characteristics or the oracle of ‘God’. In this story, a dog made a wailing howl, around the time when his master was murdered at a distance. Father Brown dismisses the informant’s interpretation that the dog howled because he sensed his master’s death, and instead uses the episode to solve the case. At the time of the crime, the dog was playing fetch on a beach. According to Father Brown, the dog howled in protest because the stick he was chasing unexpectedly sank and disappeared. One of the two men who were walking the dog was the perpetrator, who threw the murder weapon into the sea, pretending that it was a walking stick which the dog was accustomed to fetch. Father Brown comments: ‘The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk … All I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels’ (80).

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Chesterton, who cautions us not to read human meanings into animals, might come across as lacking empathy for animals. And yet, he has much in common with Margery Meanwell, for whom to cultivate empathy for animals is the first step in the process of education as humanisation. Both Chesterton and Margery are experts on the animal alphabet, who stress the need to read animals correctly; and in both cases, this ability to read animals enables the reader to form a close partnership with them. In his essay ‘On Keeping a Dog’ (1909), Chesterton reveals himself to be the proud owner of an Aberdeen terrier.30 Here again, his warning against seeing the dog as something other than the dog is repeated—‘if the dog is loved he is loved as a dog; not as a fellow-citizen, or an idol, or a pet, or a product of evolution’ (148). Intriguingly, his experience of being a dog owner leads him to develop an alternative ‘beast fable’, which tells of Man’s close proximity to animals ‘once upon a time’, while running counter to the Darwinian narrative of evolution by natural selection: … there is something deeper in the matter than all that, only the hour is late, and both the dog and I are too drowsy to interpret it. He lies in front of me curled up before the fire, as so many dogs must have lain before so many fires. I sit on one side of that hearth, as so many men must have sat by so many hearths. Somehow this creature has completed my manhood; somehow, I cannot explain why, a man ought to have a dog. A man ought to have six legs; those other four legs are part of him. Our alliance is older than any of the passing and priggish explanations that are offered of either of us; before evolution was, we were. You can find it written in a book that I am a mere survival of a squabble of anthropoid apes; and perhaps I am. I am sure I have no objection. But my dog knows I am a man, and you will not find the meaning of that word written in any book as clearly as it is written in his soul. (149)

Chesterton’s beast fable is a dream-text, conjured up before the domestic hearth, with his dog at his side. His drowsy state not only produces a human-canine intersubjectivity (‘the dog and I’), but also a human-dog hybrid: a man with six legs. Unlike the Darwinian hybrid, which manifests itself in the form of Man as an ‘anthropoid ape’, Chesterton’s humancanine does not undermine the boundary between humans and other animals, but on the contrary reinforces it: his dog ‘has completed [his] manhood’. Significantly, this beast fable is not written in the Darwinian book on evolution. Indeed, Chesterton tells us, the human-canine alliance predates any history of evolution, and its story is written in the very soul

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of the dog; ‘That is the real secret of the matter which the superficial evolutionists cannot be got to see’ (150). With this in mind, let us go back to Chesterton’s ‘animal alphabet’. The focus of his introduction to Æsop’s Fables is not on Aesop’s fables per se, but on ‘the human tradition called Fables’, which ‘had gone on long before’ Aesop and other tellers of fables such as Uncle Remus.31 That is to say, the ‘animal alphabet’ as the essence of the fable belongs to the same primordial space as ‘the prehistoric outlines of the man and the dog’32 which he talks about in ‘On Keeping a Dog’. Chesterton sees this space bursting with the life force of animals, defined by their very inability to be ‘anything but themselves’: ‘[In fables], everything is itself, and will in any case speak for itself. The wolf will be always wolfish; the fox will be always foxy … in all the fables that are or are not Æsop’s all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or growing trees’.33 Thus, for Chesterton, animal letters are never ciphers, or even indices for animal qualities, but the expression of animals as they are: ‘A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow’. As such, they become ‘the alphabet of humanity, which like so many forms of primitive picture-writing employs any living symbol in preference to man’ (x). It is then no coincidence that, when Chesterton, in ‘On Keeping a Dog’, briefly considers the nature of the wild dog as a pack animal, he touches upon the possibility that ‘if I have one Aberdeen terrier I ought to have twenty-five Aberdeen terriers’.34 Twenty-five and one makes twenty-six, exactly the number of letters in the English alphabet. However, Chesterton refuses to have a full set of the wild dog alphabet, because he recognises that the wild dog pack and the human-canine alliance are at odds with each other: ‘But my dog knows that I do not ask him to hunt with a pack; he knows that I do not care a curse whether he is canine or not so long as he is my dog’ (150). He prefers to see the dog always at the side of his human master, to ‘complete his manhood’. Chesterton’s animal alphabet, then, operates on two principles: the unbreakable union between a man and an animal, and the human mastery of animals as letters. The animal alphabet which Chesterton locates at the heart of the primitive beast fable is certainly the product of what Worringer calls ‘abstraction’, created when man had a more precarious relationship with the external world. Habitually having to confront the terrible forces of nature and circumstances, which threatened their survival, men once sought their happiness in the abstract arts, which represented ‘the possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its

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arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness, of externalising it by approximation to abstract forms, and in this manner, of finding a point of tranquillity and a refuge from appearances’.35 Primitive people found their ‘point of tranquillity’ by turning the external world into fables, populated with abstract forms and ‘alphabets’. In this sense, cattle, working animals, and other animal companions were quintessentially ‘animal alphabets’, extracted from the wild and turned into helpers and resources to improve human welfare. It is also important to bear in mind that Chesterton’s animal alphabet is a modernist one. His introduction to Æsop’s Fables was published in 1912, contemporaneously with Worringer’s Empathy and Abstraction (1908), which was, to quote Mary Gluck, ‘the most influential Primitivist manifesto of the age’.36 Worringer’s theory of abstraction and empathy had a huge impact on the English philosopher and art critic T. E. Hulme. In his famous lecture ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’ (1914), he gave an overview of Worringer’s ideas, and presented them as a theoretical framework for the ongoing modernist experiments in ‘abstract’ art. According to Hulme, the modern period was witnessing ‘the re-emergence of geometrical art’, and this was breaking up the postRenaissance dominance of realism and naturalism built on empathy, which had found satisfaction in the beauty of the organic and vital form.37 While primitive art became an important source of inspiration, the modern tendency towards abstraction signalled the rise of a new sensibility, rather than ‘a romantic return to barbarous and primitive art, inspired by a kind of nostalgia for the past’ (98). Hulme’s hypothesis is that the ‘specific and peculiar quality which will differentiate this new geometrical art from its predecessors’ is ‘the idea of machinery’ (104). The machinic has taken over from the organic as the foundation of man’s happiness, because it is able to ‘[lift] him out of the transience of the organic’ (107), putting him in touch with ‘something unlimited and necessary’ (106). We may say that in Chesterton’s animal alphabet, which should be ‘like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess’, animals are made into alphabet letters as a kind of machinery, which has now become a new source of human happiness. We come to be written, and complemented, by this animal-machine, to become a ‘six-legged’ cyborg. If our alphabet appears to be too abstract or cipher-like, this is because this new animality is experienced as the force of the machinic, which surpasses ‘the transience of the organic’ and assumes an almost God-like power. Another consequence of this is that we are have become constituent parts of this animal alphabet, and, as such, can be easily mastered by a master piper, as I will show in the next section.

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Dancing Rats As Jean-Jacques Lecercle puts it, nonsense can be defined as ‘a conservative-revolutionary genre’: ‘the liberated, light-fantastic, nonsensical aspect of nonsense’ for which the genre is famous is inseparable from the way in which it is ‘deeply respectful of authority in all its forms’: nonsense is evoked to consolidate the rules of language and society.38 This conservative reading is comparable to the way in which the fable is typically framed by ‘the moral of the story’, the function of which is to make ‘sense’ out of the fable, even when the main story contains some subversive or nonsensical elements, such as its customary use of talking animals, another aspect which the fable shares with nonsense literature. Both are characteristically anchored in the world of ‘sense’ and order. Thus, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appropriately features the Duchess, who is so ‘fond of … finding morals in things’.39 According to her, ‘Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it’ (79). Joseph Jacobs, a believer in the Indian origin of the beast fable, traces the Duchess’s ‘moralising tendency’ back to ‘the gatha or “moral” verse, of the Buddhistic Jatakas ’,40 confirming the affinity between nonsense literature and the fable tradition. One of her dictums, ‘Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves’,41 comes across as particularly nonsensical, because the Duchess, as she says this, ‘most glaringly disregards the sense of what has gone before’, as Mladen Dolar points out.42 The Duchess also draws our attention to a gap between sense and sound, that is to say, between the signified and the signifier. I suggest that this gap makes possible a ‘nonsense’ space in which letters, yoked to sense, gain autonomy and start moving on their own, setting free their materiality and movement as animals. That is to say, when we escape from the tyranny of sense, we dance to the tune of the animal alphabet. The legend of the Pied Piper, to whose music all the rats danced to their death, and who subsequently piped 130 children away from the town of Hamelin, ‘had long been established in oral tradition’ when the Brothers Grimm printed their version of it, as ‘The Children of Hamelin’, in their Deutsche Sagen (1816; German Legends ).43 This is a compilation of various folkloric records and became the standard text of the legend, which, in the English-speaking world, entered the popular imagination through Robert Browning’s poem, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (1842). An antiquarian work by the Anglo-Dutch writer Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1605), has often been

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cited as one of Browning’s possible sources. His erudite father owned a copy of this book, and, as Radu Florescu speculates, might have told the story to Browning when he was a child.44 Also, given that Browning visited Germany in 1834, he could have heard the legend there as a piece of living folkloric heritage. Whatever the case may be, Browning’s poem was another reworking of folkloric materials, which brings us back to our ‘animal’ past. ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, subtitled ‘A Child’s Story’, was ‘written for, inscribed to, W. M. the Younger’, the seven-year-old son of Browning’s friend, the famous actor William Macready.45 Browning wrote it to amuse the boy Willy, who was ‘confined to the house by illness’.46 Willy ‘had a talent for drawing, and asked [Browning] to give him some little thing to illustrate’.47 Thus, the poem, written in simple and playful language, was meant as an interactive text which the child could play with: Willy’s drawing hand danced to the Piper’s music, just like the children and rats in the poem he was invited to animate. Indeed, the power of the text was further enhanced by the fact that Browning chose to write it as a poem, a genre traditionally associated with music: by resorting to the rhythmic nature of poetry, he turns the reader into one of the rats irrepressibly affected by the Piper’s piping. ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ presents itself as a moral fable, in which the townspeople learn a lesson in honesty, good governance, and perhaps caution against strangers, in a hard and mysterious way. True to the fable’s convention, the narrative is framed by the moral of the story, directly told to Willy: ‘If we’ve promised them aught, let us keep our promise!’48 The Piper piped away all the town’s children, because the Mayor broke his promise to pay an agreed fee for successfully removing the rats from the town. It is important that the Piper first makes his appearance as a pestcontroller, who safeguards the town’s order. Despite the fact that he can manipulate ‘All creatures living beneath the sun, | That creep or swim or fly or run’ (l. 73–4), he ‘chiefly use[s] [his] charm | On creatures that do people harm’, such as ‘[the] mole and toad and newt and viper’ (l. 76–8), as if to follow Margery’s teaching to be kind to all animals except ‘noxious’ ones. In fact, it turns out that he makes his living by travelling all over the world to destroy pests wherever his services are needed: ‘In Tartary I freed the Cham, | Last June, from his huge swarms of gnats, | I eased in Asia the Nizam | Of a monstrous brood of vampyre-bats’ (ll. 89–92). Only when he is denied due payment for his services does he use his charm against people. If Margery’s animal alphabet teaches the basis

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for good citizenship, the Pied Piper forcefully takes hold of the alphabet and tears it away from the rubric of society. Just like nonsense, the Pied Piper represents an eruption of disorder, which joyously and momentarily subverts society’s order. And he does so through his ‘nonsensical’ manipulation of the alphabet understood purely as signifiers. Even before his arrival, the rats are described as musical notes, with their ‘shrieking and squeaking’ being ‘[in] fifty different sharps and flats’ (ll. 19–20). As they follow the Piper ‘step for step … dancing’ (l. 120), it is clear that they are animated by intense pleasure. One of the rats, ‘stout as Julius Caesar’ (l. 123), survives to tell the story, according to which the Piper’s music evoked in the rats’ minds a series of delicious foods, to whet their appetites, accompanied by a voice urging them to ‘munch on’ and ‘rejoice’ (ll. 139, 137). According to Lecercle, ‘sounds represent – “embody” might be a better word – instinctual drives’.49 Thus, the piper’s music speaks to the rats’ and the children’s deepest desires and animal instincts; for the rats, it manifests as a promise of food which would satisfy their voracious appetite, and for the children, as visions of a new ‘joyous land’ (l. 240), which sets them dancing and skipping in sheer joy and delight. Beastly disorder is evoked to consolidate the existing ‘human’ order; but nothing remains the same after everybody has ecstatically danced to the tune of the Piper. It is significant that the legend of the Pied Piper gives a specific date for the event which it describes: 26 June 1284, or, according to a different manuscript, 22 July 1376.50 Browning’s poem, in accordance with this tradition, gives the 1376 date, along with references to the various efforts made by the townspeople of Hamelin to commemorate the event, ‘to fix [it] in memory’ (ll. 267–88). The inclusion of the date creates a curious intermingling of myth and reality, while marking the moment when the mythic time of the legend ends, giving way to the human time of history. Thus, the Piper signals the advent of modernity, when the community redefined itself and commenced its history, leaving behind its past. In Thomas Hardy’s short story, ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’ (1893), the figure of a musician is similarly evoked to mark Victorian modernity as a rupture with the past. The story is set around the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which is seen as forming ‘an extraordinary chronological frontier or transit-line’, or ‘a precipice in Time’: ‘As in a geological “fault”, we had presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute contact’.51 The ‘Pied Piper’ figure in this story is a fiddler

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known as Wat Ollamoor, or ‘Mop’, the ‘elfin-shrieks and “unholy music” of whose violin are’, to quote Claire Seymour, ‘a threat to the stability of the community he haunts’.52 Mop uses his music on young susceptible women, and a village girl, Car’line, completely succumbs to his melodies, resulting in her giving birth to a baby girl. The story culminates with Car’line, now a married woman, chancing upon Mop again after several years, and she finds herself once more helplessly and compulsively dancing to his tunes. Mop goes away, taking their child with him. Once again, the folkloric tradition is called upon to embody a primitive force; as Frank R. Giordano puts it, ‘the fiddle is considered a magical instrument in folklore, used to summon dwarfs or animals, make fairies dance, and bewitch mortals’.53 Paradoxically, the fiddler’s music, which can electrify animal bodies into motion, is made to echo the force of the modern, typified here as the Great Exhibition. Mop is a ‘veterinary surgeon’ or a ‘horsedoctor’,54 though not a practising one, and therefore an expert in the very animal physiology which he deftly manipulates with his music. Even in her first casual encounter with Mop’s music, Car’line is seized by ‘a wild desire to glide airily in the mazes of an infinite dance’ (140). Her name markedly inscribes within it the lack of ‘o’, a letter which Mop Ollamoor has plenty of. It is as if his music forcibly opens up, and makes her aware of, a lack within her, as she yearns for his coming, moaning ‘O – O – O – !’ (141). Many scholars have written on ‘Hardy’s lifelong fascination with traditional modes of social music’.55 This background makes Mop an even more disturbing figure, through whom folk music, which was at the heart of the rural community for generations, has changed into something else entirely: the irresistible rhythm and temporality of the modern, which materially takes hold of the villagers’ bodies and imaginations, changing their lives forever. Just like the Pied Piper, Mop is a nomadic artist and stranger, ‘coming from nobody knew where’.56 He is also described as ‘un-English’ (138), representing the British Empire’s colonial and international networks, which the Great Exhibition showcased. The reach of Mop the Modern even extends beyond the Empire, as the story ends with a rumour that he has ‘emigrated to America’ (155) with his and Car’line’s child. True to the Pied Piper tradition, he is a child-kidnapper, who arrives to break society’s traditions and continuity, and carries away the children who represent the future. This chapter started with the illustration of a child piper adorning the opening page of The Jungle Book, and we may even go so far as to say

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that the entire Mowgli saga originates in the wizardly figure of the Piper. In ‘In the Rukh’ (1893), the first Mowgli story to be published, prior to the publication of the Jungle Books , Mowgli appears as a Wildman, ‘newly crowned with flowers, playing upon a rude bamboo flute, to whose music four huge wolves danced solemnly on their hind legs’.57 He is the master of what Chesterton might call the doggy alphabet, composed of the wolves who broke away from their pack to follow their human master to civilisation. Moreover, as with Hardy’s Mop, so also with Mowgli— his power is equated with the power of sexual attraction, and Mowgli manages to seduce a Muslim girl, who, to be with him, throws away all the old conventions of Indian society, disobeying her father. So in the names of Mowgli and Mop, the letter M means Music, Modernity, and a new kind of Man, who rearranges and rewrites laws, and recreates spaces by appealing to animal bodies. And this Modernity is characterised, paradoxically, as pagan power.58

Pied Beauty: Lear’s Animal Cosmopolitanism The Brazilian writer Machado de Assis (1839–1908) exposes the violence of human cruelty to animals by taking the idea of ‘the animal alphabet’ literally. In his short story, ‘Alexandrian Tale’ (1883), two philosophers come to the conclusion that ‘the gods placed the essence of all human capabilities in the animals of the earth, water, and air. The animals are the letters of the alphabet, and man is the syntax’.59 For instance, ‘the constitutive elements of the thief are contained in the blood of the rat, those of the patient man in that of the ox, and those of the daring man in that of the eagle’ (25), each forming an alphabet letter for humanity. To prove their hypothesis that an animal’s distinctive characteristic can be transmitted to humans when they drink its blood, they vivisect many rats, justifying this act in the name of Truth, which is ‘worth all the rats in the universe, not only all the rats, but all the peacocks, goats, dogs, nightingales, and so forth’ (29). Though the story is purportedly set in Ancient Greece, it offers a thinly disguised critique of the nineteenth-century practice of vivisection. And the philosophers’ truism—‘the animals are the letters of the alphabet, and man is the syntax’—succinctly captures the logic of human exceptionalism, through which man sets himself apart from other animals: man as the ‘syntax’ is enriched by animal letters, and this gives him full licence to vivisect any nonhuman animals. Indeed, vivisection is presented as a

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necessary step to extract the essence contained in an animal’s blood. At the end of ‘Alexandrian Tale’, the two philosophers, who seemingly manage to turn themselves into thieves by consuming a large quantity of rat blood, are executed in their turn by vivisection in the name of scientific advancement. The story ends with the report that ‘the rats commemorated this distressing and lamentable incident with dances and feasts’. ‘[A] number of dogs, turtledoves, peacocks, and other animals’, who were invited to the celebrations, do not attend, being too afraid that ‘there will come a time when the same thing could happen to [them]’, to which the rats reply, ‘But until then, let us laugh!’ (34). In this way, Machado de Assis lets thrive the alternative animal alphabet, that of the rats who prefer to dance to their own music rather than be part of the human syntax, and who would write their own stories in a place which humans cannot reach. I see Machado de Assis’s alternative animal alphabet (or his joyous rat congregation) as being closely related to Edward Lear’s nonsense alphabets and other texts. ‘The animals are the letters of the alphabet, and man is the syntax’: this human-centred truism is exactly what becomes subverted in nonsense texts, in which animals, constituting letters and words, run free, disregarding ‘man’ who provides the syntax. There, the governing principle is only the first half of the above truism—‘the animals are the letters of the alphabet’—generating a field of nonsense alive with dancing and rejoicing animots. Indeed, as Ina Rae Hark puts it, Lear has the remarkable ‘ability to conceive of individual letters as having a life of their own’60 : he treats all his alphabet letters, and the words created out of them, as animals, or joyfully animated beings. Moreover, if Machado’s story writes against the scientific practice of vivisection, the nonsense texts by Lear, who worked as a zoological illustrator in the 1830s, can be seen to resist the Victorian practice of collecting and classifying specimens all over the world.61 Ann Colley fittingly calls Edward Lear’s animal texts an ‘Anti-Colonial Bestiary’, which reveals ‘his impatience with the practice of “colonizing” the animal world’ and his sensibility towards the animals he depicts.62 Indeed, Lear’s nonsense alphabets, each letter of which is very much alive, make a striking contrast to the dead, stuffed or caged specimens of nonhuman creatures, which were abundantly available at that time due to European colonial activities, and which Lear was required to draw as an illustrator. Just like Machado de Assis’s rats, Lear’s alphabet animals show no inclination to follow human rules, which would certainly lead to their death.

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Edward Lear prepared more than seventeen nonsense alphabets over the years,63 each of which was written for the amusement of a child friend. Strictly speaking, they are not ‘animal alphabets’; rather, they are a miscellaneous list of different entities (animals, plants, objects, human characters and so on), with some alphabet sets including more animals than others. To give one example, one of the nonsense alphabets consists of Apple-pie, Bear, Cake, Doll, Eel, Fish, Goose, Hen, Ink, Jar of Jam, Kite, Lark, Mouse, Needle, Owl, Pump, Quail, Rose, Shrimp, Thrush, Urn, Vine, Whale, Xerxes, Yew and Zinc. Only 13 out of the 26 letters are animals (including Xerxes the King).64 And yet, they are more ‘animal’ than the standard animal alphabet, and this is not only due to the way in which Lear animates each letter. Marnie Parsons characterises Lear’s limericks, which similarly feature many entities, as ‘the world of shifting boundaries’: ‘The worlds of animal and plant, insect and plant, object and plant, mingle’.65 His jumbled-up alphabets are clearly a continuation of his limericks, sharing the same world. That is to say, Lear’s alphabets are hardly zoos, which pigeonhole animals in the cages of letters. Instead, they place animals within a shifting network of what Donna Haraway describes as ‘assemblages of organic species and abiotic actors’, whose myriad ‘inter/intra-actions’ make planetary history. 66 In this sense, it is interesting that Lear’s alphabet uses the set formula of ‘A was an ….’ or ‘A was once an …’, through which each of the alphabet letters is paired with an animal, or whatever is named in the formula. This echoes, and then subverts, the conventional opening of the beast fable as ‘Once upon a time …’, with which animals are made to mark the origin of human history. Lear’s nonsensical animal alphabets have no intention of becoming a foundational myth. Rather, they are historical entities and participants in a ‘planet-changing development’ (99); as such, they represent surprising connections with other players formed at a particular moment in time, through the letters’ incarnations and fortuitous juxtapositions. Unlike Lear’s other animal alphabets, ‘Twenty-six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures’, collected in his More Nonsense (1872), is a nonsense alphabet solely made up of animals (including some human characters). It also takes a different format. Instead of using the ‘A was an …’ formula, this alphabet uses an alliteration of the alphabet letter to introduce the alphabet animal: for instance, ‘The Absolutely Abstemious Ass’, ‘The Bountiful Beetle’, ‘The Comfortable Confidential Cow’, and so on.67 These alliterations create a strong sense of rhythm and melody, artfully

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animating the alphabet animals. Again, this is a radical departure from the ordinary ‘animal alphabet’, in which animals are made into the types of their species, and thereby the alphabet of humanity. The alliterative alphabet letters, instead of functioning as a zoo’s cages to confine animals, embody patterns of animal energy running through humans and nonhumans alike, the pulse of which the readers, who are invited to read the alphabet aloud, inevitably become part of. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English poet and Jesuit priest, was an admirer of Lear’s Book of Nonsense, which he describes as ‘something like Alice but much better’.68 On the face of it, Hopkins’s poems, imbued with theological meanings, seem diametrically opposed to Lear’s ‘nonsensical’ texts. Yet, as many critics have observed, there are striking similarities between the two poets.69 Both use language playfully and inventively, employing similar techniques such as alliteration, assonance, and neologism. Furthermore, both delighted in the wonder of the natural world, and used language to capture it. As Hopkins’s fellow Jesuit Henry Marchant observed, ‘[Hopkins] had a keen eye for peculiarities in nature, and hunted for the right word to express them, and invented one if he could not find one’.70 For instance, Hopkins, in his poem ‘The Windhover’, seeks to give expression to the beauty of a common kestrel. He calls the bird by many different names as if to explore the unique individuality, or what Hopkins calls the inscape, of the bird: ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- | dom of daylight’s dauphin, dappledawn-drawn Falcon’.71 The alliteration of the letters M and D, which almost turns the bird into a winged, hovering alphabet, is reminiscent of Lear’s ‘Twenty-six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures’, in which he similarly uses alliteration to capture the energy and aliveness of his alphabet creatures. As I have argued, Lear’s nonsense alphabets, each of which is a highly eclectic collection of various entities, can be seen as a celebration of diverse and multiplying networks of animals and non-animals. They also embody the singularity of each actor and its connections, as each alphabet series is a unique grouping of entities. The same can be said of Hopkins’s poem ‘Pied Beauty’, in which the poet praises God for the amazing variety of patterns found in both natural and man-made things: ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’.72 As Barbara Hardy observes, Hopkins enhances the sense of diversity and multiplicity by giving an ‘accumulative’ list of ‘dappled’ things: ‘skies of couple-colour’, ‘a brinded cow’, ‘fresh-firecoal chestnut’, ‘landscape plotted and pieced’, and so on. ‘The

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very act of accumulation is itself exciting, in its implications of piled-up abundance and its delighted clamour: “this and this and this”.’73 This joyous ‘piling-up’ is also a defining feature not only of Lear’s alphabets, but also of nonsense in general. And needless to say, such a list of accumulation runs counter to the classificatory lists of animals made for the purpose of natural history, which reduce animals into types, rather than embracing the uniqueness of each object. It is significant that Hopkins characterises God as the one who ‘fathersforth’ such variety. This, in turn, echoes Lear’s poem, ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’, which is about a certain ‘Quangle Wangle Quee’, whose face, like God’s, we cannot see, because he is wearing a huge Beaver Hat, ‘a hundred and two feet wide’.74 Though obviously a nonsense figure, the Quangle Wangle, similarly to Hopkins’s God, is a unifying principle of life in diversity, because a whole variety of animals come one by one to inhabit this hat, making it a happy world. This is also a very musical world, as all the creatures ‘danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon’ (Fig. 6.3): And the Quangle Wangle said To himself on the Crumpetty Tree, – ‘When all these creatures move What a wonderful noise there’ll be!’ And at night by the light of the Mulberry moon They danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon … (392)

Fig. 6.3 Edward Lear, ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’, in Edward Lear, Laughable Lyrics: A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, etc. (London: R. J. Bush, 1877), n.p.

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James Williams and Matthew Bevis, drawing attention to Lear’s description of the creatures’ stamping feet as ‘a wonderful noise’, suggest that ‘what the Quangle Wangle pleasurably anticipates is not music but noise’: ‘something more chaotic and unpredictable’ than ‘music’, which is typically associated with a sense of order and harmony.75 I would interpret this ‘noise’ to mean instead that which escapes our human sense, and therefore is experienced as ‘noise’, similarly to how the stumping sounds of dancing wild elephants in the depth of the forest were so overwhelming that Little Toomai had to cover his ears to shut them out (see Chapter 4). The noise is, however, embraced by the Quangle Wangle as ‘wonderful’, and it therefore makes a perfect accompaniment to the Blue Baboon’s Flute, which evokes ‘a vision of irreducibly plural coexistence’ (11; emphasis in original). According to J. Hillis Miller, ‘Pied Beauty’ celebrates the ‘wonderful world of linked multiplicity’, the beauty of which comes from its ‘piedness’, being ‘marked, dappled, speckled with’ (OED): ‘piedness, like beauty and like rhyme, is a relation between things which are similar without being identical … Each individual thing, the poem says, is pied or dappled. Though it is all one thing, it is different from one place to another’.76 It is beauty and variety running within and across species, creating the recurrence of similar yet different patterns in the whole natural world, with rhyme and music traversing and blending with this world. In ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’, Lear also creates his own sense of ‘piedness’, an odd assortment of various creatures coming to inhabit the Hat, as if drawn to the Flute of the Blue Baboon, whose blueness must be thoroughly pied with the light of the Mulberry Moon. Here again, we see the vision of animal cosmopolitanism formed around the figure of the piper; however, this time, the musician is nonhuman. In this context, it would be interesting to speculate why the famous Piper, who has power over ‘All creatures living beneath the sun, | That creep or swim or fly or run’, and to whose music all animals are compelled to dance, should be dressed in ‘pied’ clothing. Piedness implies duality (originally, black and white), which we also find in the fable, in which coexist the consolidation of the status quo and the pleasure of subverting and escaping from it. On the one hand, the Pied Piper, who exterminates any kind of vermin on demand, can be seen as a Mowgli-like ‘ideal’ custodian of nature, on whom we can count to maintain the piedness, or biodiversity, of the world—unless, of course, our greed for money once again compels us to break the promise we make with him. If so,

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the animal cosmopolitanism which his music brings forth would be based on the human sense of beauty. On the other hand, the music of the Pied Piper, which can manipulate every animal alphabet which writes the world, breaks down the boundary between humans and nonhumans, and joins together humans and animals in their animal movement. This gives rise to an alternative form of animal cosmopolitanism, based on the joy of being alive and together. Lear’s nonsense texts are undoubtedly committed to the second sense of animal cosmopolitanism. This is evident in the fact that the ‘Pie’ in his poem ‘Calico Pie’ has nothing to do with a pie, but merely comes attached to the word ‘Calico’, which is a cloth printed with many colours. We can therefore translate the title as ‘Piebald Pie’—it is another celebration of the pied or dappled world, and each stanza evokes the meeting and parting of many different animals: Calico Pie, The little Birds fly Down to the calico tree, Their wings were blue, And they sang ‘Tilly-loo!’ Till away they flew, – And they never came back to me! They never came back! They never came back! They never came back to me!77

Birds gather together, fish meet each other, insects congregate, but when the moment of meeting passes, they go away, leaving the artist, ‘me’, who has witnessed this gathering, alone: ‘They never came back to me’. The poem is not only the celebration of meeting and of the oneness and uniqueness of an event. It is also an acknowledgement that the human is not at the centre of animal cosmopolitanism, but is an incidental, though important, knot of different creatures. According to the OED, the word ‘pie’ is associated with ‘magpie’.78 The black and white colouring of the magpie evokes the image of a white page, with writing in black ink—while the bird’s ‘tendency to collect miscellaneous articles’ is thought by some to give the name ‘pie’ to a ‘baked pastry dish’, in which many different ingredients are mixed together. The magpie’s habit of collecting things also gave rise

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to another meaning: ‘A mass of type in confusion or mingled indiscriminately’.79 Animal alphabets, then, must be such jumbled-up writing, meeting, breaking up, freely and playfully, always moving, ever producing infinite meanings, and non-meanings. To appreciate the beauty of such a linguistic pie, which is poetry, we have to eat it, take it in, learn it by heart, to see what happens.

Notes 1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass and What Alice Found There. Ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009), 227. 2. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book. With illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling, W. H. Drake and Paul Frenzeny (New York: The Century Co., 1894), 1. 3. Flora Annie Steel, Tales of the Punjab, Told by the People. With illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling. Notes by R. C. Temple (London: MacMillan and Co., 1894), 118. 4. Charles Allen, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling (London: Abacus, 2007), 329. 5. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 82. 6. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Eds. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 212. 7. Anon., Goody Two-Shoes: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Edition of 1766. Introduction by Charles Welsh (London: Griffith & Farran, 1881), 129. 8. Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 13. 9. Abram, 125. 10. Gillian Brown, ‘The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 39:3 (Spring 2006): 357. 11. Goody Two-Shoes, 70, 72. 12. Locke, 180; emphasis in original. 13. William Hogarth, ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty’, The Complete Works of William Hogarth; in a Series of One Hundred and Fifty Superb Engravings on Steel, from the Original Pictures (London: Printing and Pub Co., 1861), 133–5. 14. Goody Two-Shoes, 68–9. 15. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 300–1.

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16. Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 177. 17. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 15. 18. Goody Two-Shoes, 68. 19. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 32. 20. Tom Tyler, CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 42. 21. Derrida, 47. 22. Tyler, CIFERAE, 23. 23. G. K. Chesterton. ‘Introduction’ in V. S. Vernon Jones (trans.), Æsop’s Fables. With illustrations by Arthur Rackham (London: William Heinemann, 1912), x. 24. Tyler, CIFERAE, 47. For another of his analyses of the fable animals as both ciphers and indices, see Tom Tyler, ‘Quia Ego Nominor Leo: Barthes, Stereotypes, and Aesop’s Animals’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 40:1 (March 2007): 45–59. 25. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Bodley Head, 1908), 246. 26. G. K. Chesterton, ‘The New Credulity’, The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 30: Illustrated London News, 1914–1916 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 57–61. 27. ‘A Venerable Orang-Outang: A Contribution to Unnatural History’, The Hornet (22 March 1871). 28. Chesterton, ‘The New Credulity’, 59. 29. G. K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown. Foreword by Ann Widdecombe (London: Capuchin Classics, 2008), 57. 30. G. K. Chesterton, ‘On Keeping a Dog’, Lunacy and Letters. Ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed and Ward, 1958), 147. Originally published in The Daily News (27 March 1909). 31. Chesterton, ‘Introduction’, vii. 32. Chesterton, ‘On Keeping a Dog’, 150. 33. Chesterton, ‘Introduction’, viii–ix. 34. Chesterton, ‘On Keeping a Dog’, 150. 35. Worringer, 16. 36. Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 165. 37. T. E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd, 1936), 78.

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38. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (London: Routledge, 1994), 2–3. 39. Carroll, 80. 40. Joseph Jacobs (ed.), The Earliest English Version of the Fables of Bidpai; The Morall Philosophie of Doni, by Sir Thomas North (London: D. Nutt, 1888), xlviii. 41. Carroll, 80. 42. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 147. 43. Wolfgang Mieder, The Pied Piper: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 38. 44. Radu Florescu, In Search of the Pied Piper (London: Athena Press, 2005), 54, 57. See also Arthur Dickson, ‘Browning’s Source for “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”’, Studies in Philology 23:3 (July 1926): 327–36. 45. Robert Browning, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, in James F. Loucks (ed.), Robert Browning’s Poetry (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 103–10. 46. Mrs Sutherland Orr (ed.), Life and Letters of Robert Browning, revised edn (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1908), 122. 47. From Robert Browning to F. J. Furnivall, dated 1 October 1881, in Thomas J. Wise (ed.), Letters from Robert Browning to Various Correspondents, 2 vols (London: Privately printed, 1895), vol. 1, 76. Browning first gave him a short poem called ‘The Cardinal and the Dog’. The boy ‘made such clever drawings for’ the poem that Browning ‘tried at a more picturesque subject, the Piper’ (77). 48. Browning, line 303. Hereafter cited within the text by line number. 49. Lecercle, 32. 50. Mieder, 6–7. 51. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, Life’s Little Ironies. Ed. Alan Manfred. Introduction by Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), 137. 52. Claire Seymour, ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 2002), xvii. 53. Frank R. Giordano, Jr., ‘Characterization and Conflict in Hardy’s “The Fiddler of the Reels”’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17:3 (Fall 1975): 618. 54. Hardy, 137, 141. 55. Andrew Radford, ‘The Sublime Violence of Folk-Music in Hardy’s “The Fiddler of the Reels”’, Thomas Hardy Yearbook 39 (2011): 19. For Hardy and music, see, for example, Eva Mary Grew, ‘Thomas Hardy as Musician’, Music & Letters 21:2 (1940): 120–42; Tim Armstrong, ‘Hardy, History, and Recorded Music’, in Tim Dolin and Peter Widdowson (eds.),

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56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

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Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 153–66. Hardy, 137. Rudyard Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, The Jungle Books. Ed. Kaori Nagai (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 333. To this list of words beginning with the letter M, we could also add Margery Meanwell who, though not a musician, similarly manipulates animals, and who is taken for a witch at one point (Goody Two-Shoes , Chapter 6, 121–33). Machado de Assis, ‘Alexandrian Tale’, The Devil’s Church and Other Stories. Trans. Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu (London: Grafton Books, 1987), 25. Ina Rae Hark, Edward Lear (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 111. For an analysis of Lear’s nonsense texts in relation to the taxonomic practice of collecting, counting, and classifying animals, see my chapter, ‘Counting Animals: Nonhuman Voices in Lear and Carroll’, in Karen Edwards, Derek Ryan, and Jane Spencer (eds.), Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (London: Routledge, 2019), 123–39. Ann C. Colley, ‘Edward Lear’s Anti-Colonial Bestiary’, Victorian Poetry 30:2 (1992): 110. Vivian Noakes, ‘Notes’ to Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse. Ed. Vivien Noakes (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 492 (Notes to ‘A Was an Ant’). Lear, ‘A Was Once an Apple-pie’, Complete Nonsense, 279–304. Marnie Parsons, Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 88. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 99–100. Edward Lear, ‘Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures’, More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc. (London: Robert John Bush, 1872), np. Also collected in Lear, Complete Nonsense, 256–69. Claude Colleer Abbott (ed.), Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 121. For instance, see David Sonstroem, ‘Making Earnest of Game: G. M. Hopkins and Nonsense Poetry’, Modern Language Quarterly 28:2 (June 1967): 192–206; Daniel Brown, ‘Being and Naughtiness’, in James Williams and Matthew Bevis (eds.), Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 170–3; Sheelagh Russell-Brown, ‘The Serious Work of Play: Wordplay in the “Dark Sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, in Angelika Zirker and Esme Winter-Froemel (eds.), Wordplay and Metalinguistic/Metadiscursive Reflection: Authors, Contexts, Techniques, and Meta-Reflection (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 95–116.

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70. Henry Marchant, quoted in Humphry House (ed.), The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 385; emphasis in original. 71. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 144. 72. Hopkins, 144. 73. Barbara Hardy, The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 56. 74. Lear, ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’, Complete Nonsense, 391. It is interesting to note here that an ‘elderly Quangle Wangle’ makes his appearance in Edward Lear’s story ‘The Story of the Four Little Children who Went Round the World’, as the children’s travelling companion. It is not clear what kind of creature he is, and Lear’s illustration, which presents him, to quote a reviewer of the Scribner’s Monthly, as ‘a mysterious, formless, bodiless, comic demon’, with a pair of ridiculously long arms and legs, is calculated to defy any attempt at classification (‘Nonsense’, Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 2 [1871]: 668–69, 669). 75. James Williams and Matthew Bevis, ‘Introduction’, in James Williams and Matthew Bevis (eds.), Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 11. For an interesting reading of ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’ as a ‘humanless’ (and yet human) paradise, see James Williams, Edward Lear (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2018), 68–9. 76. J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five 19th-Century Writers (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 303, 299; ‘pied, adj.1 and n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 23 February 2020). 77. Lear, ‘Calico Pie’, Complete Nonsense, 244. 78. ‘pie, n.1.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 23 February 2020). 79. ‘pie, n.4.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 23 February 2020).

CHAPTER 7

Fabling Cosmopolitanism: The Ark Esperanto

The Language of Animals ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’ (Genesis 11:1).1 So goes the biblical story. But when humans began to build a tower which might reach up to heaven, God punished their impudence by ‘[confounding] their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech’ (11:7). He was displeased not only with the act of transgression committed by humanity to emulate Him, but also with their possession of a universal language, which granted them God-like power: ‘the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do’ (11:6). After the confusion of tongues, people were dispersed by God across the face of the earth; this was made easy by their loss of the common speech which had united them. There is a curious resemblance between the biblical story of the Tower of Babel and the beast fable. Both centre on the question of language (etymologically ‘fable’ comes from the Latin word f¯ ar¯ı, to speak), and weave into their narratives the dream of conversing freely with longlost companions. If the myth of Babel has led to countless efforts to discover, or invent, a universal language which could undo the confusion of tongues, the fable invites us to return to the good old times (the mythic past of humanity’s childhood, or when we ourselves were young) when animals spoke and we were able to understand them. The difference © The Author(s) 2020 K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8_7

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is that the fable dreams of communication between different species, while the Babel myth evokes the utopian vision of the unity of all humanity; i.e. the story concerns just one species. The beast fable is a multispecies version of the myth of Babel. This is epitomised by the fact that learning the language of animals—the story of a man who comes to understand what animals say—is one of the genre’s most prominent motifs. For instance, in one of the Grimms’ fairy tales, ‘The White Snake’, a King’s servant becomes endowed with knowledge of animal languages when he takes a bite of a white snake’s flesh from the King’s plate. His new ability gains him many animal friends, who help him to solve a series of impossible tasks set by a beautiful princess, whom he eventually marries.2 In another Grimms’ tale, ‘The Three Languages’, a count’s ‘stupid’ son, who only manages to learn the languages of dogs, birds and frogs, goes to Rome and becomes Pope, thanks to his knowledge of these three languages.3 As the folklorist W. A. Clouston puts it, ‘“Knowledge is power”; and … a goodly number of instances [show] that a knowledge of the speech of animals is a very great power to the heroes of folk-tales’.4 The Jungle Books, which stage man’s privileged entry into the linguistic world of animals, follows this folkloric convention. As I observed in Chapter 2, Mowgli, a human child raised by wolves, learns to speak the languages of all the beasts in the Jungle. Just like the heroes in the Grimms’ tales, he grows wise, powerful and influential thanks to his knowledge of these languages, and eventually attains the position of Master of the Jungle.5 In an article entitled ‘The Language of Animals’ (1888), James George Frazer (1854–1941), a Scottish anthropologist and author of The Golden Bough, explores the folkloric motif of humans with a knowledge of beast language.6 He traces how stories with this motif are widely told all over the world, and shows that some stories recur across many different cultural and linguistic traditions (for instance, variants of the Grimms’ ‘The Three Languages’, otherwise known as ‘The Boy who became Pope’, can be found all over Europe [84–91]). At the same time, Frazer draws our attention to the special appeal which tales of man’s possession or acquisition of such language have for us: It is an old belief that animals, and even plants, talk to each other, and that men can freely understand and answer them. But this belief, born of that primitive communism which makes the whole world kin, is gradually dispelled by a more exact observation of nature; and men, beginning to

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draw the line more sharply between themselves and the lower creatures, are fain to confess that they understand the beast language no longer, though they cling to the idea that the faculty is still enjoyed by a few, either as a natural gift or an acquired accomplishment. (81)

The tale of a man with the gift of animal speech is compelling because this figure nostalgically connects us with the bygone past in which we once freely spoke with animals, and allows us to partake in the joy of multispecies cosmopolitanism, or in Frazer’s words, the ‘primitive communism which makes the whole world kin’. Frazer states that humans, even after they learn to distinguish themselves from ‘the lower creatures’, cling to the idea that the ability to communicate with them is still enjoyed by a few, ‘either as a natural gift or an acquired accomplishment’.7 The Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) was certainly one of these privileged few, being one of the founders of ethology, or the scientific study of animal behaviour. He is best known for his pioneering work on ‘imprinting’, a type of conditioning in which a young animal forms an attachment to the first object which it encounters. His book King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (1949) takes its title from the legend of King Solomon, who is said to ‘talk the language of animals, which was hidden from all other men’ with the help of a magic ring.8 Lorenz boasts that as an ethologist he can perform the same feat without the help of magic, because ‘[w]ithout supernatural assistance, our fellow creatures can tell us the most beautiful stories, and that means true stories’ (xvi; emphasis in original). According to him, ‘the “signal code” of a species of social animal can be called a language’ (xvi), and it ‘can be understood by a man who has got to know its “vocabulary”’ (xvi). Lorenz’s ethological world is clearly rooted in the world of ‘beast fables’, in which we delight in conversing with other animals. This can be further attested to by the fact that Lorenz opens his book with a quotation from Kipling’s story ‘The Butterfly that Stamped’, collected in Just So Stories for Little Children (1902): There was never a King like Solomon, Not since the world began; But Solomon talked to a butterfly As a man would talk to a man. (xv)

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In this story, both King Solomon and his head wife Balkis understand the language of animals, but Lorenz only quotes the lines about the King speaking to the male butterfly. This brings his book close to the world of the Jungle Books, in which interspecies communion takes place predominantly between male animals. The Jungle Books were indeed one of the literary works which Lorenz acknowledges had inspired his scientific study. Despite being ‘fairy tales’, they ‘convey a true impression of what a wild animal is like’: ‘one feels that if an experienced old wild goose or a wise black panther could talk, they would say exactly the things which Selma Lagerlof’s Akka or Rudyard Kipling’s Bagheera say’ (xx). Kipling and Lorenz took strikingly similar approaches to the question of animal speech. For instance, Mowgli’s ability to mobilise his four wolf brothers appears to the natives as ‘witchcraft and devildom’.9 However, just like Lorenz, Mowgli knows such things can be done without the aid of magic: he simply communicates with the wolves using their ‘language’, which he shares with them from childhood. The ‘Master Words’ of the Jungle, secret codes spoken by each species in its respective language to ask for protection and assistance, resemble closely Lorenz’s definition of animal language as ‘the “signal code” of a species of social animal’. The meeting between the fable and the study of animal behaviour has, we might say, already taken place in the Jungle Books, with Mowgli as a pioneer ethologist. In ‘The Butterfly that Stamped’, King Solomon and his wife Balkis overhear, and intervene in, the quarrel between a butterfly husband and wife by helping the former.10 When the butterfly husband stamps, Solomon’s palace disappears, and when he stamps again, it is restored. This miracle (performed by Solomon’s ‘four vast Djinns’ [136]) frightens the female butterfly, who thereby learns the lesson of wifely obedience. Moreover, the disappearance and reappearance of the palace terrifies Solomon’s nine hundred and ninety-nine other wives, who have been quarrelling and troubling the King. Overawed by what their husband can do, they stop their quarrelling, much to the delight of the King (140). This story resembles, and is very likely a rewriting of, a Ja“taka tale (Kharaputta-Ja“taka, often referred to as ‘The Language of Animals’), of which a tale in the Arabian Nights, ‘The Tale of the Bull and the Ass’, is a variant.11 These stories follow a similar plotline: (1) the husband has the power to understand the language of animals; (2) he has a quarrelsome or wilful wife (or wives) who challenges his authority and makes his life difficult and (3) he disciplines his disobedient wife (or wives), drawing

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on the insight he gains from listening to (or talking with) animals. As it happens, the knowledge which the main character gains from animals is a ‘brutal’ one. In the Ja“taka tale and the Arabian Nights, animals teach the husband to beat his wife, just as humans beat their animals to make them obey; the husband ‘[flogs] the skin off her back’12 in the former, and leaves her ‘well-nigh senseless’13 in the latter. These beatings reduce the wives to the status of dumb animals, deprived of language as a result of physical pain.14 In Kipling’s modern rendition, King Solomon is portrayed as a kind and humble soul reluctant to discipline his unruly wives. Thus, it is Balkis who cleverly creates the opportunity for him to show off his power, by persuading the female butterfly to challenge the male butterfly to stamp. The theme of wife-beating is further downplayed by the fact that Solomon and Balkis are represented as a happy, loving couple. Kipling has ‘civilised’ the fable by making it conform to western moral standards (though Solomon remains a polygamist), fit for the amusement of his beloved daughter Josephine (for whom he wrote his Just So Stories ) and other little children. However, Kipling’s version more fundamentally differs from the other variants in its treatment of animal languages. According to Frazer, ‘in most stories, a knowledge of the beast-language stands its possessor in good stead’, but in some cases, ‘this gift of tongues proves dangerous or even fatal to its possessor’.15 The stories to which Kipling is responding clearly fall into the latter category; in ‘The Tale of the Bull and the Ass’, for instance, the wealthy merchant, endowed by Allah with the gift of understanding the tongues of animals, is ‘under pain of death if he divulged the gift to any’.16 This gift of tongues therefore comes with the injunction not to misuse it: one will, and should, risk one’s own life, in exchange for the privilege of fellowship with other animals. Moreover, the hero is strictly forbidden to share the gift with any other human being, as if to prevent the animal language from becoming common knowledge among humans, who are bound to use it for their own interests. In Kipling’s story, in contrast, there is no sense of prohibition or secrecy about the language of animals between the husband and his wives: Solomon and Balkis share the joy of talking with the butterflies, and his other wives, awed by his power to make his Palace vanish, seem to take it perfectly for granted that he speaks with animals. In the Ja“taka tale and the Arabian Nights variants of the story, the man who experiences this interspecies communion holds a powerful and privileged position in society, suggesting that once upon a time only a

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handful of men, such as the King, had access to the knowledge of animal speech. Kipling extends this privilege widely, turning every ‘Man’ into a King (and vice versa): by intending his Just So Stories for young readers, he replaces the King’s hereditary rights over nonhumans with children’s sense of omnipotence, in which their animal companions, in reality and in imagination, play a huge part, as exemplified in the case of Mowgli. In this way, Kipling abolishes the notion of transgression previously attached to learning the languages of other species, and, consequently, each one of us can become a Mowgli. This brings about a new Babel of animal languages, in the form of a fantasy centre of interspecies communion. It is then interesting to note that ‘The Butterfly that Stamped’, as Bruce Mazlish points out, can be read as a fictionalisation of the so-called ‘butterfly effect’.17 This term, coined by the American meteorologist and mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz, and made famous by his 1972 lecture subtitled ‘Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas?’,18 has come to be used to refer to ‘systems in which a small change in one place can lead to major differences in a remote and unconnected system’.19 Kipling, by establishing a physical connection between a small butterfly and a disappearing palace, demonstrates the connectivity of the world, which cuts across linguistic and species boundaries. The fantasy of interspecies communication which his beast fables embody is thus that of instantaneous communication between different worlds, which the technological inventions and advancements of the day were turning into reality. In the Jungle Books, Kipling presents the imperial network as a gigantic Animal-Machine, the vitality of which he repeatedly associates with modern technologies such as ships and trains. According to Roland Barthes, the good working order of a machine can be attested to by the ‘rustle’ it produces: a musical ‘limit-noise’ which delightedly vibrates with the machine’s physical movement.20 For Barthes, language is a machine that can rustle only when it is released from the burden of ‘too much meaning … to fulfill a delectation appropriate to its substance’ (77; emphasis in original). Beast fables, with their characteristic simplicity and translatability, would then be a perfect linguistic machine, which pulses to the music of imperial modernity. Barthes also associates the idea of the rustle of language with a utopia, ‘impossible [but] not inconceivable’ (77), and this echoes Kipling’s vision of animal cosmopolitanism, another utopia made possible by the smooth operation of a language machine.

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However, such a vision of instantaneous communication is destined to remain utopian, simply because, as Barthes notes, a machine is bound to malfunction, just as speech is ‘condemned to stammering’ and writing to ‘silence’ (77). That is to say, the imperial beast fable as an Animal-Machine, known for its worldliness, translatability and mobility, is made possible by excluding stammering or speechless animals from its menageries—just as Kipling elided from his butterfly story the bodies in pain of the wives, whom flogging had rendered silent. It is then no coincidence that the fable tradition imagines Aesop the slave as a stammerer. As Louis Marin, in his masterful reading of ‘the life of Aesop’ as ‘a story about the origin of the fable’,21 demonstrates, the fable disrupts the master’s oppressive monologic discourse by putting the animal body on show to create an image of supplication (46–8): Aesop’s inability to speak, due to his stammering and his position as a slave, is an important part of his bodily performance. The imperial beast fable writes against this fable tradition, the main function of which is to draw attention to, disrupt, and if possible intervene in, the violence of sovereign power, through the muted bodies of animals. In the imperial beast fable, by contrast, silenced animals do not appear, or are given only marginal roles. Moreover, what cannot be translated from one world to another is silently removed, in order to ensure the smooth operation of the British Empire, represented as the magical communication between humans and animals. This is ironic because the British Empire was full of silenced and stammering animals, both human and nonhuman, which the rapid processes of modernisation and globalisation made difficult to see. ∗ ∗ ∗ The Jungle Books, which started as ‘Noah’s Ark Tales’, are the Empireas-Ark, built specially for a multispecies journey. In what follows, I will juxtapose this imperial Ark with what I would call the Ark Esperanto, another international network operating in the same period. Esperanto is a constructed international language, publicly launched in 1887, and, curious as it may seem, Esperantism presents itself as an uncanny double of the British Empire: both were global enterprises, committed to facilitating instantaneous international communication by breaking down linguistic and physical barriers between nations. Though the Esperanto

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movement within the British Empire has been written out of the official imperial history, its existence nevertheless serves as a reminder of the many different types of cosmopolitanism which coexisted within, and were part of, the imperial networks. The Ark Esperanto also resembles Kipling’s Empire-as-Ark, in that both centre on the voices of ‘the Other’: just as Kipling, through his beast fables, made it possible for us to hear animals talk, so Esperanto was invented to communicate with those who speak different languages—though the ways in which each Ark provided a platform for these voices, I argue, were fundamentally different. Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, in HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, investigates how silence might be exercised to counter racism as the process of dehumanisation and animalisation.22 Unlike muteness, which signifies passivity and deprivation, silence might be ‘a counterforce, a force of annulment’ (31), which the silenced and therefore animalised humans can use to resist the force of law. Seshadri’s book features the figure of ‘the wild child’ as an example of the humAnimal, who powerfully unsettles many human categories, ‘insofar as it is silent and does not speak’ (141). Although Seshadri does not discuss the Jungle Books, her characterisation of the wild child attests to the extent to which Kipling, by making his wild child so eloquent, suppresses the power of silence, which is also the power of the traditional fable, associated with the stuttering, animal speech and silence.23 In the Jungle Books, which elide the figure of the mute or silent animal, there is nonetheless one ‘dumb’ animal whose body is prominently on display: that of Shere Khan the Tiger. Mowgli skins his body and spreads his hide out on the Council Rock, on which he dances his victory song; then the hide was left there to stay.24 He is Mowgli’s arch-enemy, and, as suggested by his name, is represented as a resentful Indian ruler, who, stripped of many of his traditional privileges, looks for an opportunity to reassert his authority. Shere Khan, unlike Mowgli, does not represent the animal energy of Empire, because he is a disabled tiger: he is called ‘Lungri’ or ‘The Lame One’, as ‘He has been lame in one foot from his birth’ (6). Thus, he dies ‘a dog’s death’ (61): he was stamped to death by a herd of buffaloes, led by Mowgli, which assaults the tiger ‘just as steamers shoot rapids’ (60). He becomes just another victim of the unstoppable power of modern European technology, which leaves the bodies of animals in its wake. This leads to another doubling between Kipling’s imperial Ark and the Ark Esperanto. As a way to conclude this book, I will tell the story of

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another Shere Khan, one ‘paralysed’ Prince under British indirect rule, who, just like Kipling’s tiger, had to fight to reassert his sovereignty. It is one of the countless stories of the muted or silenced ‘animals’, which the imperial beast fable omitted to narrate. The story is touched by Esperanto, the language created against the power of linguistic imperialism, which narrowly defines what the human is, according to which language one speaks and how one speaks it. Through the story of Shere Khan, the two Arks intersect and coincide with each other. This Ark was not merely brimming with the voices of talking animals supportive of imperialism. It was also the space of speechlessness, in which those voices which were not heard, or could not be part of the official imperial narrative, ended up being, as it were, lost at sea.

Esperanto at Sea One after the other I gave up various Utopian ideas of childhood, and kept only the dream of one language for all mankind… I was attracted for a time to the ancient languages, and dreamt of a day when I should travel through the world, and with burning words persuade mankind to revive one of those languages for common use. Later on, I forgot in what way, I came to the firm conviction that this also was impossible, and I began to dream vaguely of a new, artificial language. I then made various attempts, inventing rich artificial declensions, conjugations, etc. But a human language, with, as it seems to me, its endless series of grammatical forms and its hundreds of thousands of words, which made the big dictionaries so terrible, appeared to me such an artificial and colossal machine that I more than once said to myself: ‘Away with dreams! This work is beyond the power of man.’ But all the time I kept coming back to my dreams.25

A universal language, for Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof (1859–1917), an eye doctor and Russian-Polish Jew, was a dream, a dream which had haunted him since his childhood, a dream project beyond human power, which would nevertheless take man beyond man if successful, reversing the curse of Babel. It was also a dream of a machine, making an artificial tongue out of human languages, which, to his eyes, already seemed like ‘an artificial and colossal machine’, terrible, yet always drawing him back in order to set this machine—or dream—in motion. Esperanto was a dream thus materialised, a simple, user-friendly machine which would

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bring all mankind together, unhindered by the massive complexities of national languages. The machine grew out of his dream by becoming part of his body—Zamenhof experimented with it himself for about six years before he officially presented it to the world in 1887.26 Along with the other constructed languages which appeared in this period (and there were many), it was a machinic prosthesis, a fabulous ‘supplement’ functioning to overcome man’s linguistic boundaries as well as the temporal and spatial barriers separating different races of mankind. Esperanto was thus intended to lend ‘a ready aid to the man of commerce, to the crews of ships in foreign ports’, and to be ‘of immense service in facilitating communication between scientific communities’, as reported in the Times in 1907.27 It was also developed alongside other modern technologies; as another Esperantist puts it in his 1912 book, ‘Esperanto appears as natural and as necessary as the railway train, the steamship, the postal system, the telegraph and the telephone’.28 Indeed, the popularity of Esperanto at the beginning of the twentieth century can best be understood within the context of the contemporary modernist movements which celebrated speed, power, technology, and above all the marriage between body and machine. According to F. T. Marinetti in his 1913 Futurist manifesto,29 new means of ‘communication, transportation and information’ brought about ‘the complete renewal of human sensibility’ (96), accelerating life to today’s swift pace, shrinking the earth by speed, and leading to a ‘[n]ew mechanical sense, a fusion of instinct with the efficiency of motors and conquered forces’, in a word, ‘Man multiplied by the machine’ (97). This paring of Man with a machine sensibility triggered the ‘[v]ast increase of a sense of humanity and a momentary urgent need to establish relations with all mankind’ (97), and to this end, Esperanto was created.30 As a modern technology to abolish time and space, paving the way for the instantaneous communication much sought after by modern Man, the dream of Esperanto coincided with that of British imperialism. The Esperanto movement spread beyond the confines of Europe, reflecting the recent processes of colonialism and internationalism which had drastically expanded the concept of mankind, and brought greater varieties of languages and their speakers into close contact. It draws on a wide range of languages, chiefly Slavic, Romance and Germanic ones, and can be seen as part of the nineteenth-century philological project, which sought to establish the unity and kinship of the human race through the study of language. Comparative philologists presupposed, and tried to reconstruct,

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an original language, from which all the Indo-European languages were supposed to have originated, by comparing a wide range of languages31 ; this project strikingly resembles Zamenhof’s effort to construct an international language acceptable to all by choosing the ‘root-words which are common to the greatest number of languages’.32 Max Müller, the authority on comparative philology, is said to have given his blessing to the language.33 Despite many similarities, Esperantic cosmopolitanism was at odds with imperial cosmopolitanism.34 For a start, Esperanto challenged the English language’s ascendancy and legitimacy as a lingua franca of the world as a consequence of the unprecedented expansion of the British Empire and the United States. Indeed, it was designed to counter the ‘monolingualism’ of the colonising nations, which Jacques Derrida says exists at the foundation of every colonialism, which ‘tends, repressively and irrepressibly, to reduce language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogeneous’.35 It is important to bear in mind that Esperanto, as many Esperantists argued, was not a universal language, but an international auxiliary language—‘a second language for all nations’—to be used alongside a living language to supplement it.36 As Albert Léon Guérard put it in 1921, ‘An auxiliary language has for its purpose, not to suppress diversity, but to promote co-operation’.37 Contrary to the suspicion that Esperanto would displace all living languages, it was invented to resist the monolingual drive of imperialism and globalisation, and to protect minor languages from being obliterated. Esperanto also drew attention to the presence of those who suffered from the effects of globalisation. We may here recall how beast fables were used by the European colonisers to learn local languages (Chapter 2). Marc Shell makes an insightful link between talking animals and stutterers, whom he takes to include those deemed to have foreign accents and domestic dialects. Not only are stutterers identified with talking animals (as in the case of Aesop), but animals often have a therapeutic effect on them: ‘human beings who stutter do not stutter when they speak with (or to) real animals’.38 This enabling effect explains the appeal of the colonial animals and beast fables for the colonisers, who, like anybody else, ran the risk of becoming dumb animals in their inability to speak. With the aid of fabulous animals, the colonisers adapted to and mastered the colonised world. Decades of colonialism, however, left behind a great many dumb and stuttering animals, in the form of migrants, foreigners, and non-Europeans. Esperanto, as a talking cure,

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was a new species of beast fable, which aimed to assist those people. Indeed, if Aesop’s journey can be traced from ‘a brute beast’ to an eloquent ‘human’ fabulist, Esperanto as a talking cure was supposed to ‘humanise’ those foreigners whom the breakdown of communication makes appear nonhuman.39 Naturally, Esperanto has been repeatedly discussed in connection with the Tower of Babel. And yet, the story of Esperanto also resonates with that of Noah’s Ark, especially because the world was knitted closer together by the global movement of ships. The modern Torah scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg characterises the biblical episode of the Flood as ‘a drama about language’.40 Drawing on passages from the tradition of Jewish Biblical interpretation known as midrash, she argues that the humans in the Ark suffered from a kind of aphasia, which the kabbalistic sources call ‘the exile of speech’: they ‘[failed] to speak, to communicate with God – or, indeed, with each other’ (48). Their speechlessness is caused by being surrounded by the open, boundless sea, overwhelmed by the ‘voices of many waters’ (49). According to Zornberg, this pathology, which ‘converts openness to a dumbness’ (48), is symptomatic of the ‘Flood generation’, by which she means not only Noah’s generation, but also all those who collectively face some kind of global cataclysmic event: A fundamental disaster has befallen the language powers of human beings. They have become so open that they are closed to one another. Communication between subjects has degenerated into a babble of indiscriminate voices. The silent compression of the ark (the teiva, meaning both ‘box’ and ‘word’) is the mirror image, the alter ego of the cacophony outside. (49–50).

I suggest that those who lived through the late nineteenth century were a ‘Flood generation’, who faced a similar challenge and predicament to Noah. This was a period of unprecedented globalisation, and people, as they came into contact with new peoples, languages and situations, were forced to open themselves up to the unknown and unfamiliar. This need to negotiate the previously unknown caused communication between subjects to degenerate into ‘a babble of indiscriminate voices’, as if they did not know each other’s language. This situation, instead of enabling a fully multilingual future, resulted in much xenophobia, racism, nationalism and a propensity to monolingualism. Too much openness led people paradoxically to close up, in order to avoid ‘the cacophony outside’. In

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this modern Ark, they huddled together and entrusted themselves to the ‘oceanic’ powers of globalisation, which they were part of, but over which they had no control. Zamenhof was born in Bialystok, then part of the Russian Empire (now Poland). There he experienced the constant tension and violence between four linguistic/ethnic communities (Russian, Polish, German, and Yiddish), which led him to wish for a common language which would unite mankind. He likens the people’s hardened attitude towards one another to ‘walls’, which are ‘fearfully high and thick’.41 The failure to communicate with each other, in other words, causes people to wall themselves in. This strikingly resembles Zornberg’s description of the humans on the Ark, who retreated into their ‘box’ to avoid the ‘cacophony outside’. It is also interesting to think that Esperantists and those on board Noah’s Ark share the hope of returning to dry land. The idea is that whenever two people meet and converse in Esperanto, this instantly opens up a neutral space called ‘Esperanto-land’ (Esperantujo), which is treated as an international ‘nation’: it has its own anthem, called ‘The Hope’ (La Espero), written by Zamenhof, and its own flag—green, with a white star.42 This virtual homeland had a personal meaning for Zamenhof, who belonged to the Jewish people, downtrodden and scattered all over the world, without a nation or a common tongue to unite them. (Hebrew was yet to be ‘revived’ as a spoken language; this development was brought about by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the late nineteenth century.43 ) As Zamenhof puts it, No one feels so strongly the necessity of a non-national language, neutrally human, as a Jew, who has to pray to God in a long dead tongue, be educated in a language of a people who reject him, and who has fellow sufferers around the world and cannot communicate with them.44

For Zamenhof, Esperanto was a language in which his Jewish brethren could unite again and re-establish their Jewish nationality in an international space. He preferred this to the Zionist solution, the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, an idea which he, as a young man, had been committed to.45 Esperanto emerged out of Zamenhof’s identity as belonging to a cosmopolitan, rootless, oppressed nationality. In the nineteenth century, this wandering race was joined by the masses of other peoples who

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had been equally displaced from their native lands and their mother tongues, and thereby turned into not-quite-humans. And such a multilingual space was constantly ‘at sea’, as the liveable land had been quickly colonised by monolingual nations.46 Esperanto-land, a neutral non-space of conversation, was built on the waves; its passengers, just like Noah, were perpetually waiting for their dove to come back with a plucked-off olive leaf (Genesis 8:11), to secure their safety.

The Tiger and the Shamrock: An Apologue Once upon a time, there was a young Indian Prince, who was also a Tiger, who suffered the misfortune of not being able to speak. A curse was put on him in his childhood by an evil foreign wizard, who, upon the death of his father, took over his court. The wizard declared that the Prince was too ‘beastly’ (being a tiger) and his muteness was bad for the kingdom. The Tiger was thus banished from his own kingdom, ordered not to come back until he had regained his speech. The Tiger thus crossed the sea, where he met a worldly Shamrock, who knew a magic cure to reverse his curse. The Tiger and the Shamrock, who became good friends, embarked on an oceanic journey, in the course of which the Tiger, with a little help from some Rats, fully recovered his voice. The Prince returned to his Kingdom, chased the wizard from his court, and finally became King.

Sher Khan (officially His Highness Muhammad Sher Khan Bahadur) was born in 1886 in Radhanpur, a small Princely State in the north of Gujarat, as the eldest son of the Nawab Bismillah Khan. His name must inevitably have reminded his contemporaries of Kipling’s lame, villainous tiger, who entered the British imperial imagination with the publication of the Jungle Books .47 Indeed, it was a curious coincidence that The Second Jungle Book was published in November 1895 to complete the Books, only a month before Sher Khan’s father’s death, upon which Sher Khan immediately succeeded him as the Nawab of Radhanpur, at the age of nine. It was then that his prolonged political paralysis began; to quote my above beast fable about him, this paralysis manifested as the condition of not being able to speak. During its ruler’s minority, a Native State was customarily placed under the British Administration, or in the charge of native officers trusted and appointed by the British Indian government.48 In Sher Khan’s infancy—a legal term for minority, and a word which etymologically means the state

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of being ‘unable to speak’49 —the British seized the opportunity to speak on his behalf, thereby tightening their grip on the State politically and economically (although a ruler’s minority was hardly the only pretext used by the Indian government to reduce a Native State to the condition of ‘infant’, that is, not yet fit for self-rule: debt, misconduct, famine, mutiny and so on, were all seen to require the intervention of the British, as a responsible adult). Sher Khan thus spent his long minority under the close supervision of the British officials, for whom the education of the young chief was an integral part of their administration of the State. The taming of Sher Khan, however, turned out to be a rather difficult task, for the young Nawab seems to have resented and resisted any attempt to mould him into a ‘fitting’ ruler. To cut a long story short, when Sher Khan came of age, the Indian government was not willing to grant him full power. From an early age, he was said to have shown ‘unfortunate proclivities’,50 and one act of defiance on the part of Sher Khan was taken particularly seriously. During the summer of 1905, while he was on leave from the Imperial Cadet Corps, thought to be ‘a disciplining camp’ for ‘indolent and licentious’ princes,51 Sher Khan mobilised his men to collect a huge sum of money from people in Radhanpur, and spent most of it, ‘right under [the] nose’ of Captain Coghill, the British administrator of the state. The outraged Coghill compiled a dossier detailing the young Nawab’s recent misbehaviour, and brought it to the attention of the Indian government, which treated it as a matter of great importance. Reports then poured in, vilifying the character of Sher Khan and questioning his suitability as a ruler: the money raised was allegedly spent on ‘drink and debauchery’, and entertaining ‘bad women’ in the Darbar building; he treated his wife badly; and, furthermore, he had been drinking since the incident and was in a very bad state of health. All of these actions, it was argued, pointed to the desirability of a prolongation of his minority. Some officials advised giving the Nawab the opportunity to explain his actions, as ‘Coghill cannot be regarded as an absolutely disinterested judge’.52 However, all were unanimous in the opinion that the young Nawab should be kept away from Radhanpur ‘until he has realised the obligations of his birth right as well as his privileges and is prepared to devote himself to his duties to his State and his people rather than his own bestial pleasures’.53 That is to say, his infancy—his inability to speak—was now conflated with his bestiality, or his inability to engage with the human domain, ‘his State and his people’. He was, then, truly a Beast without sovereign power.

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It was eventually decided that the Nawab should visit England for a period of time, there to be placed under the supervision of Dr. John Pollen, C.I.E., an Irishman and retired Indian Civil servant who now lived in London. Pollen was thought to be a safe pair of hands: he had served in the Bombay Civil Service for 32 years, and as a Political Agent in Gujarat. He also had plenty of experience in dealing with native Chiefs.54 On agreeing to be Sher Khan’s guardian, Pollen gave a specific request that the minor Nawab be sent to Marseille around 12 August 1906. Accordingly, Sher Khan sailed from Bombay on July 28th in the P&O SS Oriental. The Indian government was a little apprehensive that Pollen planned in the first instance to take the Nawab to Switzerland. However, they were happy that, following the continental trip, he would ‘live in retirement’ in Pollen’s house in Blackheath, London.55 Pollen, as instructed, informed the Indian Government of the Nawab’s movements as they proceeded to England, although he did not see fit to report that he was taking the Nawab to the second Universal Esperanto Congress, to be held in Geneva from August 28th to September 6th. This event was, in fact, the reason why he was taking the unusual route via Switzerland. The title of my beast fable, ‘The Tiger and the Shamrock’, primarily captures the curious relationship which Sher Khan the Indian prince and Pollen the Irishman came to form. Pollen took the young prince under his wing, and did his best to help him redeem his reputation and be allowed back to Radhanpur. Much has been written about the complexity of the Indo-Irish connections formed under the British Empire, and the pairing of Sher Khan and Pollen offers an interesting example of this conjucture.56 On the one hand, many Irishmen, such as Pollen, participated in the Raj and enjoyed the privilege of being the White Man and the coloniser. On the other hand, Ireland was also a British colony, and the Irish and Indians identified with each other as fellow colonised subjects. This was a symbiotic relationship between two ‘nonhuman’ subjects, made speechless as a result of colonialism; they each sought to rediscover their ‘national’ voice by speaking through each other’s misery. It is therefore not surprising that the story of Sher Khan and Pollen overlaps with that of Esperanto, the language especially created to cure the voicelessness which emerges out of international encounters. John Pollen (1848–1923) was the kind of individual whose magnetic personality and infectious enthusiasm facilitated the resolution of often difficult colonial situations, and he won over many with his ‘charm

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of manner and kindness of heart characteristic of the best type of Irishman’.57 An excellent conversationalist and a charismatic orator, he devoted his energy to creating a platform upon which ‘all opinions would be given a hearing’, in order to ‘bring the opposing factions to a common meeting ground, to make them rub shoulders with one another, to talk matters over, and through argument to reach agreement’.58 That Pollen saw himself as a mediator of warring factions owed much to his Irish upbringing: ‘from his relations with Protestant and Roman Catholic families he described himself as a “central Irishman”, who knew and understood all sides, from the Ulster loyalist to the extreme Sinn Fein partisan’.59 He was thus an active member of the East India Association, an organisation founded in 1866 by Dadabhai Naoroji (who would later be elected the first Asian Member of the British Parliament) as a debating forum for all Indian issues. Pollen became its honorary secretary in 1907, and energetically campaigned for the unity of the Indian Empire against growing Indian nationalist sentiments. Learning the other’s languages became a passion for Pollen, who noted ‘in [his] Eastern experience how ignorance of language leads to strained relations’.60 Being a remarkable linguist, he acted as a Sindi translator to the government at one point, and later was selected as the president of the Bombay Civil and Military Examination Board in Indian languages and vernaculars. While in India, he also fell in love with the Russian language, the grammar of which he learned ‘chiefly on camel-back, riding over the little deserts of Sind’.61 His interest in Russian led him to discover Esperanto, which had recently been invented in Russia. Pollen became a fluent speaker and enthusiastic apostle of this new language, and, when the British Esperanto Association was formed in 1904, he became its first president. For him, campaigning for Indian unity and for Esperanto were one and the same thing. To quote from his 1903 lecture on Esperanto: ‘I say to young officers, if you desire to serve the people from whom your pay cometh, learn their language, and learn all you can about their manners and customs; and I say also: “Learn Esperanto”’.62 He believed that Esperanto would be an aid to the enormous challenge of administrating India, a land of several hundred languages and dialects. In his exceptional ability to make friends through the knowledge of many languages, the art of conversation, and personal charm, Pollen strikingly resembles Mowgli (and also Kipling’s other famous boy hero, the eponymous protagonist of Kim [1901]; Kim is, just like Pollen, an Irishman in India). Yet, their attitudes towards languages are very

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different. For Mowgli, his language skill is both an advantage and a mark of his superiority, which he uses to consolidate his position in the jungle. In contrast, Pollen wished to give everybody the same gift of tongues, called Esperanto, in order to connect with the peoples whom the English language failed to reach. This difference affects the way in which the two dealt with their respective Sher(e) Khans: Pollen, by offering his support to the ‘voiceless’ young prince, attempted to salvage what Mowgli’s tiger can be seen to represent, namely that which needed to be silenced or eliminated to make the imperial beast fable possible. The Times reported that the second Universal Esperanto Congress, which Pollen and Sher Khan attended in the summer of 1906, attracted ‘representatives of about 18 different nationalities, of whom about 1,000 hold full congress tickets; and these, with their friends and families, bring the total number of the wearers of the little green star to close upon 3,000’.63 There was a strong feeling among the delegates that their movement was rapidly gaining momentum. There was an even greater excitement among the English-speaking contingent, when, on the second last day of the congress, Cambridge was selected as the location for the following year’s Universal Congress, and Pollen, as the president of the British Esperanto Association, delivered the official invitation to the event. Sher Khan, as Pollen’s companion, was fully exposed to the energy and excitement of the occasion, and he thoroughly enjoyed the experience. As an Indian prince, he was ‘of course highly regarded’, and he was the centre of attention at the Congress Ball.64 He also made some effort to learn Esperanto: according to a Congress report, he ‘understands our language very well, but he does not speak it much, more out of anxiety than from impossibility. Moreover, it is remarkable that within the first few days he has already made rateable progresses’.65 During the congress, Sher Khan was formally photographed with Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, and Pollen, in his role as the president of the British Esperanto Association (Fig. 7.1). Sher Khan stands proudly next to these two celebrities of Esperanto-land, lending his support to the movement, and embodying its reach outside Europe. That is to say, in Esperanto-land, he was for the first time treated like a Nawab endowed with full powers, and he had the honour of representing ‘Hindujo’ (India). From Pollen’s point of view, the photo can be seen as a striking illustration of Britain and India cordially held together through the power of Esperanto, which Zamenhof invented. The group portrait

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Fig. 7.1 A group photo taken at the Second Universal Esperanto Congress, 1906: Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof (centre), with John Pollen (left) and Sher Khan, the Nawab of Radhanpur (right) (Reproduced with permission of the Butler Library, Esperanto Association of Britain)

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was made into a postcard, to be used as promotional material for the Cambridge Congress. After their trip to Switzerland, Sher Khan was accommodated in Pollen’s own house in Blackheath, London, staying in his son’s room while he was away at school. Sher Khan, though terribly ‘home-sick’, seemed to have settled there comfortably, commenting that he was ‘quite happy’ and that ‘Madame Pollen’ was ‘most kind to him’.66 It is remarkable that the young Nawab, guarded and suspicious in the presence of the British officials in India, came to trust Pollen, but it is clear that he did. This is all the more surprising because the Bombay government kept sending Pollen unfavourable accounts of the young man. As if to respond to the official report of Sher Khan as indulging in ‘bestial pleasures’, Pollen used animal metaphors to describe him: ‘he is like a young steed badly broken in and injudiciously treated. His mouth has been hardened and he pulls a bit’.67 More equine metaphors appear in his later report: ‘He ought to make a good strong Ruler – and, if not ridden too much on the curb, will probably go straight. This is the opinion I have formed so far. But his character is a complex one and not easy to discipline’.68 In these passages, Pollen rewrites the government of India’s characterisation of Sher Khan as an unruly beast; instead he is presented as a noble animal, who has suffered from mistreatment at the hands of the Indian government. Indeed, by equating the young prince with a young horse in training to be ridden or governed, Pollen exposes the incompetence of the government officials in managing the Princely State. If the Nawab remains in his infancy, i.e. in a state of being politically unable to speak, then that muteness is a consequence of his having been ridden by ‘bad’ hands, who have hardened his mouth: the young prince as a horse has thus lost the ability to communicate with his rider by accepting the bit. This has caused the relationship of the British officials with the Native State, likened to horsemanship as an interspecies collaboration, to break down.69 The horse metaphor, in this instance, was all the more relevant in that Sher Khan associated his prestige as a ruler with his access to, and mastery over, horses. To quote Pollen, he ‘is very fond of riding and I have promised to try and manage a horse for him at home, if funds will run to it’.70 Sher Khan also expressed a desire to undertake ‘a Veterinary course at home’, as he was ‘devoted to sport and horses’.71 By November 1906, after three months’ careful observation, Pollen had made up his mind to defend Sher Khan’s character, declaring that ‘there has been some mistake somewhere with regard to the young man’s

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character and career’.72 He thus recommended in the strongest terms that he should be invested with full power at once. Pollen also did him a huge favour by successfully negotiating that he be allowed to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca on his way back to India.73 As the pilgrimage period in 1907 fell in late January, the government had to respond quickly to Pollen’s request. With permission duly granted, Sher Khan, accompanied by Pollen, left Marseilles on 11 January 1907, on board the P&O ship Marmora. Unacknowledged in the official record was the role which Esperanto had played in reforming the prince, whom the Indian government had given up as a hopeless case. Upon leaving England, Sher Khan wrote a short message for The British Esperantist, the official organ of the British Esperanto Association: ‘His Highness, Muhammand Sher Khan Babi, Nawab of Radhanpur, desires to thank his “gefratojn Esperantistajn” for their kindness to him during his tour in Switzerland (and England). He enjoyed his time with the Esperantists more than anything in the course of his European tour’.74 He became a supporter of the British Esperanto Movement, and donated £100 to the Guarantee Fund for the forthcoming third Esperanto Congress in Cambridge. In the interests of space, I will omit the details of the Tiger and the Shamrock’s journey, which included Sher Khan’s successful pilgrimage to Mecca incognito and many Esperanto propaganda activities on the part of Pollen (he never missed a chance to promote the language wherever he went). I will, though, just briefly mention the part which the Rats played in this beast fable, to make it resonate with that of the rats in the Skinner box, with which we started this book. Steamships were at this time, just like the Jungle Books as a new Noah’s Ark, a multispecies community, inhabited not only by the crew’s and passengers’ companion animals, but also by uninvited animal ‘stowaways’, like rats and mice. If the word ‘Ark’, as Zornberg points out, literally means ‘box’, the steamship as the modern Ark was another box, containing rats whose lives are everywhere wired into man-made machinic networks; they secretly yet surely affect human lives, just as Skinner’s rats, in tapping the lever as they were conditioned to do, endangered his health. Although the Bombay government had agreed to the Nawab’s return to India after the completion of the haj, the details of how and when this would happen were still under consideration. They had been instructed to proceed to Egypt after the pilgrimage to await instructions. However, it so happened that Jeddah, where Pollen stayed to await Sher Khan’s return from his pilgrimage, was declared to be infected by plague.75 Thus,

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strict quarantine restrictions were in place at ports; this involved disinfecting ships and the destruction of rats, who, as a consequence of the recent discovery of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in 1894, had been singled out for extermination as a vector. Rats had to be eliminated to ensure the smooth running of global maritime operations, despite the fact that it was the very process of globalisation—embodied by the steamships which put nonhuman and human animals from all over the world in close contact—which facilitated the transfer of disease and created ‘systemic risks’ of pandemics.76 This ended the flourishing career of rats as global travellers…but that is another story. Egypt was one of the countries whose ports were placed under strict quarantine. Pollen thus wrote to the government, urging them ‘to get speedy permission for Sher Khan to return’, without proceeding to Egypt, and this permission was accordingly granted.77 Thus rats, inadvertently, helped to speed up Sher Khan’s return to India, and his ascension to power.78 And Sher Khan, by returning speedily to India, in defiance of all the constraints placed on global movement at that time, came to embody the ideal of imperialism as smooth global operations, and thus left behind his ‘lame tiger’ side, which had long prevented him from becoming a successful player of the imperial Game. On 21 February 1907, a ship with a mysterious flag was seen entering Bombay Harbour. This was the Shah liner SS Shanur, a ‘Pilgrim Ship’ carrying passengers who had just completed the haj. And proudly at its masthead flew ‘a green flag of goodly proportions, with a white square in the centre, where again appeared one green star’,79 which became ‘the cynosure of all the telescopes and eyes of the ships of the Royal Navy and Indian Marine, and of the Harbour Authorities’.80 The mystery of the flag was soon solved once the identity of one of the ship’s passengers became apparent. This passenger was Dr. John Pollen, well known in India as the president of the British Esperanto Association, and the flag was none other than the Esperanto Standard, carrying its gospel of Hope to the Indian Empire. In many ways, Sher Khan’s glorious return to Radhanpur rewrites Kipling’s fable: Sher Khan, who was silenced and expelled from his jungle by the Mowgli-like British authority, was allowed to return home and to assert his kingly power, thereby defying Kipling’s brutal treatment of his namesake. If the Jungle Books represent the energy of Empire as the Animal-Machine, Sher Khan was energised by another Machine called Esperanto, a prosthetic aid to all those who had lost their voice in the international encounter, enabling them to speak again. Sher Khan’s

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newly found voice echoed and was joined by other non-English, therefore ‘beastly’, voices within the Empire, which were equally looking to defy the dehumanising power of colonialism. The Esperanto Flag, which Pollen took wherever he went, represented this international meeting of voices. For instance, Pollen was able to point out to his Muslim friends (and rulers) that Esperanto has the colour green and the five-pointed star among its emblems.81 Both are of central importance in Islamic iconography, also. Therefore, far from being another European project forcing Muslims to perform the role of dumb beasts, Esperanto can be seen to advance the Islamic ideal of peace and brotherhood.82 And of course, as Pollen was proudly aware, green is the national colour of Ireland. Indeed, Zamenhof’s decision to use it as the Esperantic colour was inspired by Richard H. Geoghegan (1866–1943), the first English-speaking person to take up Esperanto, who commented on the colour green as ‘the colour of his homeland, Ireland’.83 Geoghegan, though born in England, was of Irish descent, and he later emigrated to America, as many Irish at that time did. Esperanto, born out of Zamenhof’s own experience of Jewish diaspora, also became an expression of Irish diaspora, helping to make everywhere they went a ‘homeland’. Pollen safely escorted Sher Khan back to Radhanpur, and after ‘[saying] “good-bye” to His Highness’ on March 5th, went on to do a grand promotional tour of Esperanto around India.84 On 13 April 1907, a durbar to invest Sher Khan with the full powers of the State was held in his palace. During the Durbar ceremony, Sher Khan gave a public speech, in which he acknowledged the benefits of his European tour ‘accompanied by such a trusted and kind ex-civilian as Dr. Pollen’, who ‘helped [him] to accomplish the great desire of my heart, namely a pilgrimage to Mecca’: ‘In the course of that tour and pilgrimage my eyes have been opened and I shall endeavour to keep them open for the welfare of the people whom providence has entrusted to my care’.85 With this public pronouncement, Sher Khan, cursed from his childhood with political paralysis, regained the power of speech. He was determined to be a good ruler of Radhanpur. He turned down the Bombay government’s recommendation for the position of Dewan [prime minister], requesting instead that his father’s old Dewan Chimanrai Harrai be reappointed.86 By adopting his father’s Dewan on his own initiative, and creating continuity from his father’s era to his own, the Nawab appears to have made a brilliant beginning. ∗ ∗ ∗

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At noon on 24 June 1907, two months after his full instalment as Nawab, Sher Khan suffered a stroke of paralysis. The seizure not only left him paralysed on the right side of his body, but also significantly damaged his ability to speak. Initially, it was thought that he had ‘lost all power of speech’: ‘though he can understand what is said to him he cannot express his ideas and has lost all command over his tongue. If questions are put which require “Yes” or “no” for an answer he can reply by moving his head, but not otherwise. He will have to learn to speak as a child might, or as anyone learning a totally unknown language’.87 If this report by a political agent likens the Nawab to a child or even a foreigner, the report made by the Indian government’s physicians uncannily echoes what had been said about nonhuman animals, namely that they have no articulate speech: [the Nawab] can understand all that is said to him… But he cannot speak and he cannot write, in short, though he can think intelligibly, he cannot translate his thoughts into words, either spoken or written. Thus he is unable to communicate his thoughts or wishes to others, and he can only do so by gestures, by signs of assent or dissent, and by drawing pictures.88

That is to say, the Nawab was considered to have reverted back to the condition of infancy and animality. This time, he literally became a beastly king, without the power of speech. Sher Khan again requested help from Pollen, who returned to India at the beginning of 1908 to accompany him back to Europe, where he was to seek professional treatment.89 Thus began the second period of their partnership, which lasted nearly two years. Although the Nawab gradually regained his health and much of his physical mobility, his speech impediment remained severe. Pollen had to sit with him daily, and tried to teach him ‘how to use his lips & palate & teeth’.90 Pollen’s letters to the Indian government give us a glimpse into the Nawab’s depression, misery, and occasional fights with Pollen, who nevertheless offered him continual support and ‘often [felt] full of pity’.91 To Sher Khan’s dismay, the case was soon made to place Radhanpur once again under British administration: ‘His Highness the Nawab must be considered to be a permanent invalid entirely incapable of administrating his State even with the assistance of a competent Diwan’.92 By 1909, the Indian Government appointed an Administrator on a temporary basis, which made Sher Khan restless to return home.93 It was

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thus arranged that he go back to Radhanpur in the spring of 1910, after making a tour of Ceylon, Australia, and New Zealand, which was recommended on medical advice. On 25 February 1910, Sher Khan, on board the P&O steamer SS Mongolia, travelling from Colombo to Fremantle, disappeared from the deck. At the very time that this disappearance occurred, the Bombay government was about to wire the Australian government to request ‘due consideration for comfort of Sher Khan at Fremantle & other Australian Ports’. They were instructed to do so by Pollen ‘in order to avoid annoyance & difficulty under the Law relating to Asiatics’.94 The official who was making this arrangement, noting down the estimated dates of His Highness’s arrival, added this note: ‘This is now unnecessary. I had a telegram today to say that HH died at sea’.95 This marks a very sad end to Sher Khan’s career; he was 23 years of age. It was thought that he ‘put an end to his life by throwing himself overboard in a fit of melancholia’.96 Just a week earlier, Pollen had reported to the Bombay government that ‘Sher Khan has derived so much benefit from the voyage so far… He wants to get his hand quite well before he shows himself in India’.97 According to the Times of India, ‘On the day of his death… he was in good spirits and talked with animation of his future plans’.98 It is not possible to know what exactly happened or what went through Sher Khan’s mind when it happened. However, the Nawab’s death had one significant consequence for his state: it cleared the path for his younger brother, Jalaluddin Khan, who had recently come of age, to succeed him with immediate effect. It is as if Sher Khan, by throwing himself overboard, did exercise his agency, or the power of silence: it was the only way to free the Radhanpur state from the long period of political paralysis from which it had suffered for the duration of his lifetime. The mode of Sher Khan’s passing reminds me of the Japanese writer Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights of Dream (1908), a collection of ten short stories of dreams, all dreamt by the narrator.99 Surrealistic and often unsettling, these stories collectively create the sense of unending nightmare. One of these dream texts (‘The Seventh Night’) tells of a narrator who finds himself aboard a massive ship with foreigners as his fellow passengers, and contemplates committing suicide by throwing himself overboard. This dream apparently echoes Soseki’s sojourn in Britain in 1900–2; he crossed the ocean to study English literature, and lived for two years in London, the very heart of the cosmopolitan Empire, which he later described as ‘the most unpleasant years of my life’.100

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The language difficulties, the racism he encountered, and homesickness all contributed to making his stay in London miserable to the point of near mental breakdown. Indeed, a deep sense of unhappiness suffuses the dream throughout, and afflicts the narrator as a transnational voyager. The ship endlessly sails across the unknown ocean, and, not knowing where this ship is taking him, the narrator follows with his eyes the sun’s trajectory day in and day out. Through his gaze, the ship’s movement— it forever ‘[chases] the setting sun’, but ‘never catches up’—becomes his own: an ‘eastern’ physically and symbolically compelled to travel towards the ‘West’, indefinitely and to no avail.101 When he chances upon the sight of ‘a woman leaning on the rail, and crying bitterly’, he recognises in her his own desperation and grief: ‘Seeing her weep, I realized that I was not the only person sad’ (322). The early twentieth-century cosmopolitan space represented as a transoceanic steamship, then, joins foreigners together only in their plight and uncertainty. At the end of the dream, the narrator throws himself into the sea, no longer able to bear his misery. The very moment when his feet leave the deck and his ‘link with the ship [is] severed’, however, he regrets his rash action—life suddenly feels so precious. The dream ends with the narrator in suspended animation, forever falling, ‘infinitely regretful, infinitely afraid’ (323). Soseki’s story, just like the representation of the tiger in the Jungle Books , places the silenced, vulnerable body of an animal on stage, in the form of the narrator perpetually falling from the steamship: the falling body, out of control and deprived of agency, is an animal body in its muteness. The story therefore could be read as a beast fable, which draws attention to the violence of globalisation and modernisation. It is significant that Soseki chose this figure of falling overboard to express the impossibility of being a global citizen, because the transoceanic steamship from which he falls can be seen to represent both the Imperial Ark as the vanguard of globalisation and the Ark Esperanto as a refuge of the voiceless and helpless multitudes on the move. Sher Khan fell from both of these spaces, marking the end of his life and, with it, the end of the story. Yet, I dream that his falling from the steamship fables a different kind of cosmopolitanism. It can be construed as a sensible act of deserting a dangerous ship, which is bound to sink at some point—this is the animal wisdom which, as the proverb goes, rats have always acted on to ensure their survival. Moreover, by falling, Soseki’s narrator joins the ocean, brimming with the voices of many waters and other creatures, into which

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all those whom land-made animal cosmopolitanisms fail to carry across inevitably fall. On 25 June 1923, thirteen years after Sher Khan’s death, John Pollen mysteriously went missing. He was last seen walking the streets of Castletown, Isle of Man, of which he was a resident, and he was wearing ‘a green five-pointed Esperanto star in his buttonhole’.102 Five weeks later, his body was washed up at Auchencairn, a small Scottish village on the Solway Firth, 60 miles away from Castletown. The strange manner of his disappearance and death distressed those who were close to him. As his wife wrote, ‘we shall never know how it really happened. I can only hope that the end came suddenly & then the sea came up & bore him away’,103 while some assumed that ‘he committed suicide by walking into the sea’.104 Indeed, we shall never know. But it is symbolic that he disappeared into the sea, when the dream of imperial unity for which he worked so hard throughout his life was fast collapsing. The Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which the British army shot into an Indian crowd, damaged the trust between Britain and India, and Ireland was partitioned in 1921 after a bitter war of independence. The drowned body of Pollen, symbolising the dream of imperialist and Esperantic cosmopolitanism, built on the power of conversation, had fallen into the sea, joining Sher Khan in speechlessness. Here the Tiger and Shamrock meet again, in their mutual speechlessness, to be carried away by the waves.

Notes 1. The Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, n.d.). 2. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘The White Snake’, Complete Fairy Tales (London: Routledge, 2002), 76–9. 3. ‘The Three Languages’, Grimm, 141–3. 4. W. A. Clouston, ‘On the Magical Elements in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”, with Analogues’, in Frederick J. Furnivall (ed.), John Lane’s Continuation of Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale’ (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1890), 363. 5. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books. Ed. Kaori Nagai (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 226. 6. J. G. Frazer, ‘The Language of Animals’, The Archaeological Review 1:2 (April 1888): 81–91; 1:3 (May 1888): 161–81. 7. Traditionally, the gift of animal speech is given as a reward by God or an animal, or acquired by the aid of magic, or by eating, or making contact

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8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

with, a serpent (or a dragon). See N. M. Penzer (ed.), The Ocean of Story. Being C. H. Tawney’s Translation of Somadeva’s Kath¯ a Sarit S¯ agara, 10 vols (London: Charles J. Sawyer, Ltd., 1924–8), vol. 2, 107n1. Frazer’s article includes an extensive discussion of the serpent’s role in unlocking the knowledge of animal language (Frazer, 166–81). Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways. Trans. Marjorie Kerr Wilson (London: Routledge, 2002), xv. For the figuring of King Solomon in the Arabian Nights, see Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), Part I: ‘Solomon the Wise King’. Rudyard Kipling, ‘In the Rukh’, The Jungle Books. Ed. Kaori Nagai (London: Penguin Classics, 2013), 326. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Butterfly That Stamped’, Just So Stories. Ed. Judith Plotz (London: Penguin Classics, 2011), 129–42. ‘No. 386. Kharaputta-J¯ataka’, in E. B. Cowell (ed.), The J¯ ataka or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, Translated from the P¯ ali by Various Hands, Under the Editorship of Professor E. B. Cowell. Vol. 3, Trans. H. T. Francis and R. A. Neil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), 174– 7; ‘The Tale of the Bull and the Ass’, in Richard Francis Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Now Entituled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, With Introduction Explanatory Notes on the Manners and Customs of Moslem Men and a Terminal Essay upon the History of the Nights, 10 vols (Benares: Kamashastra Society, 1885–88), vol. 1, 16–24. ‘The Tale of the Bull and Ass’ is told to Scheherazade by her father, the Wazir, to discourage her from marrying the sultan. His ‘ineffectual’ animal storytelling, which totally fails to persuade Scheherazade, is contrasted with her subsequent successful storytelling, which reforms the sultan. See my Chapter 4 for further discussion of Scheherazade’s appropriation and reinvention of the fable as a tool of resistance. Cowell, 177. Burton, 22. As Elaine Scarry puts it, ‘physical pain … actively destroys language, deconstructing it into the pre-language of cries and groans’ [Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 172]. Frazer, 161, 162. Burton, 16. Bruce Mazlish, Globalization and Transformation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 84. Edward Norton Lorenz, ‘Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?’ presented at the 139th

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19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

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meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, 1972. Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), xiii. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard (Berkley: University of California Press, 1989), 76. Louis Marin, Food for Thought. Trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 44. Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xvi. For the representation of Mowgli as a wild child, see Dipika Nath, ‘“To Abandon the Colonial Animal”: “Race”, Animals, and the Feral Child in Kipling’s Mowgli Stories’, in Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger (eds.), Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2009), 251–77. Kipling, The Jungle Books, 66–7, 197. L. L. Zamenhof’s speech, quoted in Bernard Long, The Passing of Babel or Esperanto and Its Place in Modern Life (London: The British Esperanto Association, 1912), 11–12. Long, 13. ‘The Esperanto Congress’, Times (19 August 1907): 8. Long, 61. F. T. Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without Strings – Words-in-Freedom 1913’, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 95–106. For the history of the Esperanto Movement and its ideals, see, for instance, Peter G. Forster, The Esperanto Movement (The Hague: Mouton, 1982); Marjorie Boulton, Zamenhof: Creator of Esperanto (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960); and Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2016). See, for instance, Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987); J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). John Pollen, quoted in ‘Esperanto: The World’s Auxiliary Language: Growth of the Movement’, The Western Australian (3 March 1910): 2. Felix Moscheles, ‘What Max Müller Said’, The Esperantist, no. 2 (December 1903): 19–20. For a more detailed discussion of Esperantic cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century, see my article ‘“The New Bilingualism”: Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Esperanto’, in Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru, and

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds.), Re-routing the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (London: Routledge, 2010), 48–59. Also, Guilherme Moreira Fians, ‘Of Revolutionaries and Geeks: Mediation, Space and Time Among Esperanto Speakers’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2019), explores the idea of Esperanto as a ‘humanist cosmopolitanism’. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, Or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 40. J. C. O’Connor, A Primer of Esperanto, the Auxiliary Language; A Second Language for All Nations (London: British Esperanto Association, 1907). Albert L´eon Gu´erard, A Short History of the International Language Movement (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921), 12. Marc Shell, ‘Animals That Talk; or, Stutter’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15:1 (2004): 86. In this sense, it is interesting to note that John Carl Flügel (1884– 1955), one of the founding members of the London Psycho-Analytical Society, was an active member of the British Esperanto Society from its early days in the 1900s. In his article, ‘Esperanto and the International Language Movement’, he suggests that failing to speak foreign tongues leads to the castration complex, as any linguistic failure ‘oppress[es] one with a painful sense of impotence or inferiority’. For him, international languages like Esperanto can help one overcome this trauma. [J. C. Flügel, ‘Esperanto and the International Language Movement’, Men and Their Motives (London: Kegan Paul, 1934), 180]. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 48. Boulton, 108. Forster, 66, 99–101. Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1973); Eliezer Ben-yehuda, A Dream Come True. Trans. T. Muraoka (Boulder: Westview, 1993). L. L. Zamenhof, quoted in E. James Lieberman, ‘Esperanto and TransNational Identity: The Case of Dr. Zamenhof’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 20 (1979): 95. Forster, 52. In 1908, there was an attempt to make Moresnet, a tiny neutral territory (3.6 km2 ) between Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, a friendship state for Esperanto; this, however, did not materialise. Arika Okrent, commenting on this, says: ‘in the increasingly tense and nationalistic atmosphere of prewar Europe, there was no place for a friendship place,

7

47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

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and Esperanto never got its piece of terra firma’ [Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009), 81–2]. ‘Shere’ means Lion or Tiger, and it is highly likely that ‘Sher’ Khan was actually a lion, especially because he was a native of Gujarat, famous for its Asiatic Lions. However, for the sake of making a fable out of his story, I will pretend that he was a tiger, the traditional icon of the rebellious India. In Persian, Shir is the word for ‘lion’, which is clearly different from the word for ‘tiger’ (‘babr’). According to Divyabhanusinh, these two big cats got mixed up in India, partly because the tiger was much more common, and also because in Urdu/Hindustani sher had come, by the nineteenth century, to be used ‘both for lion and tiger’, ‘such usage being common today’ [Divyabhanusinh, ‘The Great Mughals Go Hunting Lions’, in Mahesh Rangarajan (ed.), Environmental Issues in India: A Reader (New Delhi: Pearson Education India, 2007), 53]. Under the British Raj, Indian Princes, hereditary rulers of the Indian states, came under British indirect rule. Although they retained a degree of autonomy and traditional forms of governance, they had no judicial power over British subjects, and their administration was closely supervised by a ‘Resident’, or British political agent. The Residents exercised power over the Native States by interfering with their internal affairs and manipulating court ritual, which was ‘the major symbolic expression of the Ruler’s status’ [Michael H. Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1858 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 435]. For further accounts of the Princely states under the Raj, see Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Julie E. Hughes, Animal Kingdoms: Hunting, the Environment, and Power in the Indian Princely States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). ‘infant, n.1 (and adj.)’, OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 18 March 2020). British Library, India Office Records [subsequently abbreviated as IOR], IOR/R/2/675/19, file 1906: A letter dated 9 February 1906, from R. M. Kennedy to J. J. Heaton. Pradeep Barua, Gentlemen of the Raj: The Indian Army Officer Corps, 1817 –1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 11. IOR file 1906: a letter dated 9 March 1906 from R. M. Kennedy to Steyning W. Edgerley, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay. IOR file 1906: a letter to Pollen, dated 24 October 1906. For instance, at Edward VII’s Coronation in 1902, Pollen acted as a political agent in charge of the 15 Indian representatives, consisting mostly of Native Chiefs.

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55. IOR file 1906: a letter dated 2 August 1906, from Lord Minto, the Viceroy of India, to John Morley, the Secretary of State for India. 56. See, for instance, my book Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India, and Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006); Tadhg Foley and Maureen O’Connor (eds.), Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and Empire (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006); Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire. Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–1964 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008); Julia Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 57. The Times (24 July 1923): 14. Pollen passed the Indian Civil Service Examination in 1869, the year in which three Indians, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Surendranath Banerjee, and Behari Lal Gupta, were also admitted to the Service. They ‘often [held] debate together, and discuss[ed] all kinds of questions, political and religious’, and Pollen formed lifelong friendships with Dutt and Gupta [John Pollen, ‘The Indian Student in England’, The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review and Oriental and Colonial Record, 3rd Series, Vol. 27 (January 1909): 11]. 58. Lord Lamington (Charles Cochrane-Baillie), ‘Obituary: Dr. John Pollen’, The Asiatic Review 19 (1923): 657. 59. F. P. Marchant, ‘John Pollen’, The Slavonic Review 2:5 (December 1923): 425. 60. John Pollen, ‘Esperanto’, The Anglo-Russian Literary Society: Proceedings 38 (1904): 36. 61. John Pollen, ‘The Russian Language and Literature’, The Anglo-Russian Literary Society: Proceedings 18 (1893): 10. 62. Pollen, ‘Esperanto’, 36. 63. ‘The Esperanto Congress at Geneva’, The Times (3 September 1906): 7. ˆ 64. A. Montrosier, ‘Lastaj ehoj de L’Kongreso’, Tra la Mondo 2:5 (November 1906): 71. 65. Montrosier, 71. 66. IOR file 1906: a letter from John Pollen to Edgerley, dated 26 October 1906. 67. IOR file 1906: Extract from a letter, dated 12 September 1906, from Pollen to Edgerley. 68. IOR, IOR/R/2/676/21, file 1907. Extract from a demi-official letter from John Pollen, dated 15 November 1906. 69. I am grateful to Donna Landry for pointing out the importance of the horse metaphors in these passages. 70. IOR file 1906: Extract from a letter, dated 12 September 1906, from Pollen to Edgerley.

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71. IOR file 1906: Extract from a letter, dated 12 September 1906, from Pollen to Edgerley. 72. IOR file 1907: A letter from Pollen to Edgerley, dated 15 November 1906. 73. IOR file 1907: A letter from Pollen to Edgerley, dated 15 November 1906. 74. The British Esperantist, 3:26 (February 1907): 27. The phrase ‘gefratojn Esperantistajn’ can be translated as ‘Esperanto brothers and sisters’, as ‘gefrato’ refers to siblings of both sexes. 75. ‘Current Quarantine Measures’, Public Health Reports 22:14 (5 April 1907): 396. 76. Goldin and Mariathasan, Chapter 6: Pandemics and Health Risks, 144– 67. 77. IOR file 1907: a letter from Pollen to H. O. Quin, Acting Secretary to Government of Bombay, Political Department, 25 January 1907. 78. For a discussion of rats on ships and/or their links to plague, see Michel Serres, Biogea. Trans. Randolph Burks (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012); Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Karen Sayer, ‘Vermin Landscapes: Suffolk, England, Shaped by Plague, Rat and Flea 1906–1920’, in Christos Lynteris (ed.), Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains: Histories of Non-human Disease Vectors (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 27–64; and Nicholas Evans, ‘Blaming the Rat? Accounting For Plague in Colonial Indian Medicine’, Medicine Anthropology Theory 5:3 (2018): 15–42. 79. The Pioneer (1 March 1907). 80. John Pollen, ‘The Story of my Wanderings with the Flag Through India’, The Esperanto Monthly 5:50 (February–March 1917): 9. 81. A letter from John Pollen to Sir Fairdun Jung, dated 29 February 1916. British Library, IOR MSS EUR F 147/48. 82. For the notable similarity between Islamic and Esperantic cosmopolitanisms, see also Khalid Sheldrake, ‘Islam and Esperanto’, Islamic Review and Muslim India 2:6 (July 1914): 298–99. 83. ‘La Deveno de la Verda Stelo’ [The Origin of the Green Flag], The British Esperantist 8:86 (February 1912): 34; my translation. 84. IOR file 1907: A confidential letter from Pollen to the Secretary to Government, Political Department, Bombay, dated 16 March 1907. 85. The Times of India Illustrated Weekly (24 April 1907): 6. 86. IOR file 1907: Letter from Sher Khan to Radhanpur Palace, dated 1 March 1907. 87. IOR file 1907: From George Edward Hyde Cates, Political Agent, Palanpur to Quin, dated 21 October 1907.

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88. ‘Report on the case of His Highness the Nawab of Radhanpur’, signed by L. F. Childe and C.H.L. Meyer, Foreign Department, July 1908, pro. No. 101. National Archives of India in Delhi. 89. Sher Khan was placed under the care of Sir Victor Horsley, an eminent surgeon living in London, and also sought medical help on the Continent. 90. IOR, IOR/R/2/677/28, file 1908: letter from Pollen to Quin, dated 5 June 1908. 91. IOR file 1908; letter from Pollen to Quin, dated 21 April 1908. 92. IOR, IOR/R/2/678/35, file 1909: ‘Assumption by Government of the administration of the Radhanpur, Bombay Castle’, dated 12 January 1909. 93. IOR file 1909: Letter from J. H. DuBoulay, Secretary to the Government of Bombay, Political Department, to Hyde Cates, dated 26 June 1909. 94. IOR, IOR/R/2/679/48, file 1910: Letter from Pollen to Quin, dated 19 February 1910, No. 93. 95. IOR file 1910, No. 97. 96. ‘The Late Chief of Radhanpur’, The Times of India (24 March 1910): 8. 97. IOR file 1910: From Pollen to Quin, dated 19 February 1900, from SS Mongolia. 98. ‘The Late Chief of Radhanpur’, 8. 99. Natsume Soseki, ‘Ten Nights of Dream’. Trans. Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Japan Quarterly 16:3 (1969): 314–29. 100. Natsume Soseki, The Tower of London. Trans. and ed. with introduction, commentary, and notes by Peter Milward and Kii Nakano (Brighton: In Print, 1992), 12. 101. Soseki, ‘Ten Nights of Dream’, 322. 102. ‘Isle of Man Mystery’, Daily Mail (25 June 1923): 7. 103. A letter from Mary Pollen to Colonel Robinson dated 2 August 1923. The Butler Library, the Esperanto Association of Britain (ref. E09-2 Pollen). 104. Letter to Mr. Baker from Mrs. H. Flitcroft, dated 31 July 1976. The Butler Library, the Esperanto Association of Britain.

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Index

A Abe, Kobo Beasts Head for their Homeland, 123 ‘Dendrocacalia’, 122 ‘Does the Visual Image Destroy the Walls of Language?’, 123, 126 ‘The Flood’, 122 Kangaroo Notebook, 121, 131, 135–148 ‘The Man who Turned into a Stick’, 122 Ningen Sokkuri, 122, 125 ‘On Mr. Fujino’, 124–125, 129 ‘The Red Cocoon’, 122 ‘Slave Hunting’ (and ‘The Ueh: New Slave Hunting’), 122, 124–126 ‘The Stick’, 122 ‘The Underwater City’, 122 The Wall , 122, 123 ‘The Wall: The Crime of Mr S. Karma’, 122

Abram, David, 158–160, 161 Abyssinian Expedition (1867–8), the, 99–101 acclimatisation, 25 Adam, 95, 98, 124 Aesop, 8, 15n26, 26, 33–35, 53, 195, 199, 200 Aesop’s Fables , 2, 22, 24, 51, 160, 167, 170 ‘The Crow and the Pitcher’, 5 ‘The Dog in the Manger’, 167–168 Africa, 28, 30–32, 47, 56–63, 65, 95, 167 Agamben, Giorgio, 50, 142 allegory, 4, 6, 8, 18, 25, 167 Al-Maarri, 21 alphabet, 10, 28, 62–63, 155–183 America, the United States of, 9, 19, 29–32, 37–38, 82, 95–96, 107, 110–111, 126, 175, 211 Anglo-American relationships, 19, 37, 110

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8

245

246

INDEX

Animal-Machine, the, 4, 103, 104, 143, 171, 194, 195, 210 Animals adjutant-crane, 106 antlion, 134 ape, 50, 59–61, 66, 131, 138, 167, 169 baboon, 58, 66, 167, 180–181 bullocks, 100, 101, 102 camel, 100, 101, 102, 156, 205 cat, 74n63, 136, 143 dog, 17, 63, 106–108, 118n76, 121, 123, 125, 127, 132, 145, 163, 167–170, 185n47, 190, 196 dove, 82, 177, 202 elephant, 25, 35, 86–90, 91, 98, 99–105, 181 fox, 30–33, 38, 54, 57, 63, 170. See also Reynard the Fox goat, 25, 176 horse, 53, 63, 101–103, 163, 175, 208 jackal, 58, 106 kangaroo, 10, 104, 126–132, 133, 134, 135, 140–141, 144–145. See also marsupials; Metatheria (marsupials) magpie, 182 mongoose, 35 monkey, 66, 67–68, 123, 167 Mugger (crocodile), 106 mule, 100–104 nightingale, 24–25, 32, 176 parrot, 67, 112–113 pigeon, 161, 163 platypus, 127, 129–130, 133–134 porcupine, 94 rabbit, 29–30, 32, 33, 38, 133, 136 rat, 1–4, 12, 125, 143, 172–174, 176–177, 202, 209–210, 214 raven, 161, 163

seal, 37, 106, 108–111, 114, 156 sheep, 24, 53, 63, 145, 155 snake (serpent), 25, 54, 156, 190, 215n7 tiger, 25, 97–98, 156, 196–197, 202, 206, 209–211, 214, 215 ueh, 122, 124, 126 winter wren, 106, 108, 111–114 wolf, 6, 17, 33, 38, 65, 95, 136, 155–156, 170, 176, 192. See also wolf-child Animism, 28, 64–66, 158–160, 161 anthropocentrism, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 27, 48, 79, 114, 126, 142, 143 anthropology, 7, 36, 52, 63–66, 68, 88, 90, 107, 128, 158 anthropomorphism, 4, 8, 27, 50, 55, 114 Arabian Nights , 7, 9, 19–20, 21, 26, 37, 103, 105, 111, 112, 192–193 ‘The Tale of the Bull and the Ass’, 192–193, 216n11 Arnold, Edwin, 22 Australia, 10, 63, 74n63, 95, 96, 101, 107, 121, 132–134, 136, 138, 144–145, 148, 213 Australian aborigines, 128–129, 134, 136, 145, 148 B Baartman, Saartjie, 58 Babel, Tower of, 15n32, 23, 115, 189–190, 194, 197, 200 Baiga tribe, the, 93 Balkis, Queen of Sheba, 192–193 Ballaster, Ros, 20, 111 Banks, Joseph, 128–130 Barthes, Roland, 194, 195 Beast Fable. See also Fable and animal language (animal speech), 9, 47–48, 52–56, 67–70, 88, 105, 123, 189–195

INDEX

and music, 10, 155–160, 172–176, 180–182, 194 and non-human wisdom, 5, 12, 84, 214 and storytelling, 11, 19–20, 36–38, 68, 70, 79, 105, 111–113, 216n11 and the Chinese-box structure, 9, 77–114, 126, 146 and translation, 3, 20–24, 26, 51, 58, 68, 70, 129, 143, 166 as a dream text, 123, 140–142, 148, 169, 215. See also dream as a theatrical space, 4, 6, 11, 38, 65, 79, 125–126, 129, 214 as origin stories, 49, 70 in animal studies, 4–7 of state formation, 17–19, 33, 37 theories of, 47–70 Beck, Edward, 113 Beer, Gillian, 48 Benfey, Theodor, 27, 58 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer, 201 Berger, John, 11 Bickerton, Derek, 123 Bleek, Wilhelm, 23, 56–63 Boas, Franz, 107 Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, The. See Arabian Nights Brandis, Dietrich, 91–92, 93 Brazil, 31, 194 Brer Rabbit, 29–30, 32, 33, 36 Brothers Grimm, 54. See Grimm, Jakob ‘The Children of Hamelin’, 172 ‘The Three Languages’, 190 ‘The White Snake’, 190 Browning, Robert ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, 172–174 Buddha, 27, 30, 36, 147 Burnett, James, Lord Monboddo, 66

247

Burton, Isabel, 67 Burton, Richard Francis, 22, 26, 28–29, 50, 67–69

C Carey, William, 22, 40n16 Carroll, Lewis, 123 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 172 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 132 Through the Looking-Glass , 155 Ceylon, 107, 213 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 5 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 35, 215n4 Chesterton, G.K., 158, 165–171 ‘Introduction to Æsop’s Fables ’, 158, 166, 170–171 ‘The New Credulity’, 167–168 ‘On Keeping a Dog’, 169–170 ‘The Oracle of the Dog’, 168 children’s literature, 52, 83, 160–164 Chuang Tzu ‘The Useless Tree’, 84 Clouston, W.A., 42n55, 190 Coetzee, J.M., 6, 108 Colenso, John William, the Bishop of Natal, 57 Colenso, William, 85 Coleridge, S.T. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 77 comparative philology, 21, 22, 25–26, 27, 47–48, 52, 56–58, 59–60, 198–199 conservation. See environmentalism and conservation Cook, James, 127–128 cosmopolitanism and the fable, 8, 10, 29–30 animal/multispecies, 10, 29, 69, 114, 164, 183, 190, 195, 199

248

INDEX

Esperantic, 10–12, 195 imperial, 4, 17, 20, 23, 94–98, 105–108, 194, 199 Irish (and Indo-Irish), 204–206, 211 Islamic, 211 Jewish, 201 Oceanic, 9, 202, 214 Cosslett, Tess, 71n22, 90, 161 Cowell, E.B., 27 D Dampier, William, 127 Danta, Chris, 6 Darwin, Charles, 5–6, 7, 9, 27, 47–49, 52, 67–69, 90, 130– 134, 138–140, 143, 145–146, 167–169 The Descent of Man, 5, 69, 133 On the Origin of Species , 5, 7, 59, 67 Deleuze, Gilles, 125, 141, 143, 144 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 14n22, 70, 165, 199 Despret, Vinciane, 49, 50 dialect (and accent), 29–30, 32, 36, 67, 87, 125, 199 D’Israeli, Issac, 28 Dölvers, Horst, 6, 51 Doniger, Wendy, 27 dream, 102, 123, 140–142, 146, 148, 169, 197–198, 215 E East India Company, 21, 22, 24, 26, 84 Elliott, Henry Wood, 110 environmentalism and conservation, 9, 85–86, 95–98, 148 Esperanto, 10–11, 195–196, 197–202, 204–211, 214

Eutheria (placentals), 136–138, 142–143, 145–147. See also Metatheria (marsupials) evolution, 5, 37, 47–48, 49, 50, 52, 59–65, 66–67, 131, 135–140, 141, 142–143, 166–170 extinction, 10, 63, 74n63, 114

F Fable. See also Beast Fable Aesopian, 6–7, 27, 38, 51, 105 and political resistance, 10, 11, 38, 73n44, 111, 124, 216n11 as double-talk/vision, 10, 12, 93, 105 as world literature, 23 etymology, 2, 189 the migration of, 9, 26–29, 31, 37, 58 the moral of, 4–6, 11, 36, 38, 51, 59, 63, 161, 172, 173 post-Darwinian, 5–7. See also Darwin, Charles pre-imperial, 20 Fables of Bidpai (or Pilpay). See Panchatantra Flügel, John Carl, 218n39 folklore, 12, 29–35, 52, 63, 65, 88, 147, 158, 172–173, 175, 190 forest, 66, 77–98, 99, 108, 132, 156, 163, 181 forest reserve, 79, 80, 85–86, 92–93, 97 the stories of, 9, 77–98 Fort William College, 22 Foucault, Michel, 141 France, 28, 95 France, Marie de, 17, 19 Fudge, Erica, 4

INDEX

G Garner, Richard Lynch, 67 Genesis , 104, 189, 202 Geoghegan, Richard H., 211 Germany, 22, 54, 95, 173, 201 Gilchrist, John, 22–23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 58 Gonds, 94 Gothic, the, 77–79, 108–110, 112 Great Exhibition, the, 175 Grey, George, 57, 63 Grimm, Jakob, 49, 50, 54–56, 69 Guattari, Felix, 125, 143, 144 Guugu Yimidhirr, 128–129 H Haeckel, Ernst, 50, 59–60 Haraway, Donna, 142, 147, 148, 178 Hardy, Thomas ‘The Fiddler of the Reels’, 174–176 Harris, Joel Chandler, 9, 19, 29–38, 58, 65 Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories after Dark, 33 Nights with Uncle Remus , 30, 37 Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings , 29–30 Wally Wanderoon and his Story-Telling Machine, 31 ‘The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story’, 30, 35 Harrison, Robert Pogue, 79, 82 Hartigan, John, 5 Haviland, John B., 128 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 50, 51–54 History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, The, 10, 158, 160–165, 186n58 Hitopadesha, 21. See also Panchatantra Hogarth, William, 162 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 158, 179–181

249

‘Pied Beauty’, 179, 181 ‘The Windhover’, 179 hospitality, 25–26, 113–114 Howard, Bloch, 17–18 Hulme, T.E., 171 Huxley, Aldous, 134 Huxley, Julian, 134 Huxley, Leonard, 132 Huxley, Thomas H., 10, 66, 131, 132, 134, 135–138, 143, 146 Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, 138, 143, 146 hybridity, 50, 78, 87, 90, 138, 169

I Indian Forest Department, the, 80, 85–86, 90–94, 95–98 Indian Mutiny, the, 106, 119n84 Inuit (Eskimo), 107–108 irony, 6, 109

J Jacobs, Joseph, 27, 30, 172 Jâtakas , 7, 27, 30, 35, 172, 192–193 ‘The Demon with the Matted Hair’, 30 ‘The Language of Animals’, 192–193 ‘The Robbers and the Treasure’, 35 Jizo (Ksitigarbha), 147–148 Jones, William, 20, 21, 23–25, 26, 32

K Kafka, Franz, 6, 121, 123, 143 Kalilah wa Dimnah, 17, 21. See also Panchatantra Karlin, Daniel, 36, 80, 109, 119n76 Keddah, 89 Kennedy, Edmund, 134 Khoi (Hottentots), 57–60, 63, 64

250

INDEX

Kipling, John Lockwood, 35, 86–88, 155–158 Kipling, Josephine, 119n87, 193 Kipling, Rudyard, books by The Day’s Work, 104 Jungle Books , 8–9, 11, 18–19, 25–26, 33–37, 77–114, 155–158, 176, 190–192, 202, 209, 210, 214 Just So Stories , 83, 152n68, 191–194 Kim, 90, 156, 205 Many Inventions , 80 Thy Servant a Dog told by Boots , 118n76 Stalky & Co, 35, 90 Kipling, Rudyard, stories by ‘The Butterfly that Stamped’, 191–195 ‘How Fear Came’, 94, 98 ‘In the Rukh’, 79–86, 89, 90–91, 95–98, 176 ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, 25 ‘The King’s Ankus’, 35, 94 ‘Letting in the Jungle’, 89, 94 ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, 115n12, 155 ‘My Lord the Elephant’, 116n36 ‘Quiquern’, 37, 107 ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, 35 ‘Servants of the Queen’ (‘Her Majesty’s Servants’), 101–105 ‘The Ship that Found Herself’, 104 ‘The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo’, 152n68 ‘Tiger-Tiger!’, 80, 115n12, 196 ‘Toomai of the Elephants’, 87–90, 91, 99–101, 105, 115n12 ‘The Undertakers’, 106 ‘The United Idolaters’, 35 ‘The White Seal’, 37, 106, 107, 108, 109–114, 156 Knoepflmacher, U.C., 83, 108

L La Fontaine, Jean de, 6, 17, 28, 35, 50 ‘The Milkmaid and the Pot of Milk’, 28 ‘The Wolf and the Sheep’, 6, 14n22 Lagerlof, Selma, 192 language and comparative philology, 21, 22, 25, 47–49, 56–63 as technology, 61–63, 67–68, 69–70, 197–198 English, 37, 91, 199, 206 Esperanto, 10, 11, 195, 197–202 learning of, 19, 22, 25–26, 128–130, 160–163, 199–200 of animals. See also Beast fable, animal language (animal speech) the origin of, 9, 48–50, 52–56, 59–61 the walls of, 123–126, 129, 141 Latour, Bruno, 49–50, 129 Lear, Edward, 176–183 Book of Nonsense, 179 ‘Calico Pie’, 182 nonsense alphabets, 177–179 ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’, 180–181 ‘Twenty-six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures’, 178 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 51, 53 Lewin, Thomas Herbert, 86 linguistic imperialism, 37, 197, 199 Lloyd, Lucy, 63 Locke, John, 160, 162 Lorenz, Edward Norton, 194 Lorenz, Konrad, 123, 191–192 M Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria ‘Alexandrian Tale’, 158, 176–177

INDEX

Marinetti, F.T., 198 Marin, Louis, 14n22, 195 marsupials, 10, 148. See also Animals, kangaroo; Metatheria (marsupials) McHugh, Susan, 11 Mecca, 209, 211 metamorphosis, 79, 121 metaphor, 6, 18, 34, 61, 67, 135, 136, 138–143, 165, 208. See also Metatheria (marsupials) Metatheria (marsupials), 136–143, 145 and metaphor, 136–143 compared to Eutheria, 136–138 metempsychosis, 27, 59 Mez, Adam, 20, 21 Miller, J.H., 181 Modernity, 36–37, 62, 159, 174–176, 194 monolingualism, 200 Muir, John, 96 Müller, Friedrich Max, 22, 28, 47–48, 52, 56, 58, 60, 61, 123, 199

N Naoroji, Dadabhai, 205 Napier, Robert, 99, 101 Newbery, John, 160 New Zealand, 57, 85, 95, 213 Noah’s Ark, 82, 83, 104–105, 122, 195–197, 200–202, 209 nonsense, 10, 123, 158, 172–174, 177–183 Nyman, Jopi, 8, 110

O Orwell, George, 99 Owen, Richard, 130–131

251

P Panchatantra, 7, 9, 21, 26–28, 35, 37, 105, 155 ‘Brahman and the Pot of Rice’, 28 ‘The faithful Mongoose’ (or ‘The Brahmin and the Mongoose’), 35 Patterson, Annabel, 38 Pavlov, Ivan, 123 Phaedrus, 12, 17 phonograph, 67–70 plague, 209–210 Pollen, John, 204–215 Powell, John Wesley, 31, 32, 65 Prado y Tovar, Don Diego de, 127 Princely States, 202, 219n48 printing (as technology), 61–62 psychoanalysis, 6, 218n39

R race, 7, 50, 58–61, 63, 64, 94, 131, 196 Radhanpur, 202, 204, 210–213 Radick, Gregory, 67 Rawal Pindi Durbar, 101–103 Reynard the Fox, 31, 54, 57, 58 Ribbentrop, Berthold, 84, 91, 97 Ritvo, Harriet, 4, 127 Romulus and Remus, 33, 95 Roosevelt, Theodore, 96 Rose, Deborah Bird, 148 rukh. See forest reserve; Kipling, Rudyard, ‘In the Rukh’

S San (Bushmen), 63 Sanderson, George Peress, 89 Scheherazade, 37, 111, 113, 216n11. See also Arabian Nights Schleicher, August, 47

252

INDEX

Sea (or the Ocean), 7, 9–10, 56, 77–78, 82–83, 99–114, 132, 168, 197, 200–202, 213–215 the stories of, 99–114 Sebeok, Thomas A., 15n32 Seoni (Madhya Pradesh), 93–94 Serres, Michel, 221n78 Seshadri, Kalpana Rahita, 196 Sharma, Vishnu, 26, 38 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 77 Sher Khan (the Nawab of Radhanpur), 11, 197, 202–215 Shere Khan (the tiger), 11, 98, 165, 196–197, 202, 210 Ship, 24, 30, 77–78, 83–84, 99–101, 103–105, 105–107, 113–114, 132, 194, 198, 200–202, 209–210, 213–215 Simons, John, 7, 128–129, 145 Skinner, B.F., 1–3, 11, 12, 209 Sleeman, William Henry, 36, 45n97 Solomon, King, 191–193 Soseki, Natsume Ten Nights of Dream, 213–215 South Africa, 56–63, 95 speech impediment (stammering, stuttering), 195, 196, 199–200, 212–214 Spencer, Herbert, 167 Steel, Flora Annie ‘Little Anklebone’, 155–158 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 6

T taxonomy, 121, 126–131, 143, 186n61 Thomas, Keith, 163

Todorov, Tzvetan, 103 transgression, 19, 78, 79, 126, 189, 194 Tuti-nama (‘The Tales of a Parrot’), 112–113 Tyler, Tom, 165–167 Tylor, Edward B., 50, 63–66 U Universal Esperanto Congress, 204, 206–208. See also Esperanto uselessness, 2–3, 84–85 V vermin, 97–98, 124, 165, 181, 221n78 vivisection (or animal testing), 3, 176–177 W Walker, Alice, 32 Wells, H.G., 6, 78 The Island of Doctor Moreau, 78 Whitney, William Dwight, 48 Wilkins, Charles, 26 wolf-child, 9, 18, 33, 36, 78, 88, 90, 95, 155–156, 158, 192 Worringer, Wilhelm, 164–165, 170–171 Z Zamenhof, Ludovic Lazarus, 197–202, 206–208, 211 zoo, 7, 178 Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb, 200–201, 209