Figuring animals: essays on animal images in art, literature, philosophy, and popular culture

FIGURING ANIMALS: EssAYS ON ANIMAL IMAGES IN ART, LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND PoPULAR CuLTURE

Mary Sanders Pollock and

Catherine Rainwater

CoNTENTS

Contributors Acknowledgments

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Introduction Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater Part I

The Social Animal

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Lost Dog, or, Levinas Faces the Animal H. Peter Steeves

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Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear Melanie Fox

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3· Digging and Leveling in Adam's Garden: Women and the International Cat Fancy Susan E. Jones Part II

The Observed and the Observer

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4· Animal Testimony in Renaissance Art: Angelic and Other Supernatural Visitations William J Scheick

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5· Strange Yet "Familiar": Cats and Birds in Remedios Varo's Artistic Universe Nancy Vosburg

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6. Who's Looking? The Animal Gaze in the Fiction of Brigitte Kronauer and Clarice Lispector Jutta Ittner

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Part III

Art and Science

7· Burning Out the Animal: The Failure of Enlightenment Purification in H. G. Wells's The Island ofDr. Moreau Carrie Rohman

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8. Ouida's Rhetoric of Empathy: A Case Study in Victorian Anti-Vivisection Narrative Mary Sanders Pollock Part IV

Difference and Desire

9· The Black Stallion in Print and Film Lindsay McLean Addison 10.

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"Who are the Bandar-log?" Questioning Animals in Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli Stories and Ursula Le Guin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" Christopher Powici To the Other: The Animal and Desire in Michael Field's Whym Chow: Flame ofLove David Banash "IdentifYing with the Animals": Language, Subjectivity, and the Animal Politics of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing Robert McKay Part V

Theories of the Other

13. Sensory Experience as Consciousness in Literary Representations of Animal Minds

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161 163

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Julie A. Smith 14· Human-Animal Affiliation in Modern Popular Film TimGadd 15. Who May Speak for the Animals? Deep Ecology in Linda Hogan's Power and A. A. Carr's Eye Killers

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Catherine Rainwater Index

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CoNTRIBUTORS

Lindsay McLean Addison was born and raised in Naples, Florida, and attended college at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, where she majored in English and minored in biology. David Banash is a graduate student at the University of Iowa. Melanie Dylan Fox is an award-winning creative nonfiction writer. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies. In addition to teaching, she has worked as a freelance writer and as a writing consultant on several international projects. She is currently at work on a nonfiction book that explores television media fandom, and a collection of essays focused on the history and ecology of human interaction with the natural world in Sequoia National Park, California, where she lived and worked for five seasons. For now, she makes her home in western Pennsylvania. Tim Gadd is primarily interested in the depiction of animals and animal/human hybrids. He is presently completing his PhD at The University of Tasmania, titled Tales of the Morphing Period· Animals and Anthropomorphism in Modern Popular Texts. His fiction work has been published in the United States, and he has written and produced numerous radio plays and serials in Australia. Jutta Ittner received her PhD from Hamburg University, Germany. She has been teaching German at CWRU in Cleveland since 1992, currently in the position as assistant professor. Before that she taught at Oberlin College and in Munich. She has worked on exile literature, acculturation and foreign language acquisition, and published a comprehensive intellectual biography on the exile writer Martin Gumpert (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1998). Her main area of research is German contemporary women's fiction, especially Brigitte Kronauer's, and comparative literary studies with the focus on the representation of animals. Susan E. Jones is an Assistant Professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University. In addition to her academic interests, she has been intimately acquainted with the cat fancy through showing Maine Coon cats under her cattery name, Koonznroses. Robert McKay completed his PhD with a dissertation called, The Literary Representation ofPro-animal Thought: Readings in Contemporary Fiction at the

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Contributors

University of Sheffield in October 2003. As well as being a contributor to Society & Animals and coorganizing the Millennia! Animals conference at Sheffield in 2ooo, he is a member of the Animal Studies Group, a U.K. based collaborative research seminar. Their book, Killing Animals will be published in 2004-

Mary Sanders Pollock is a Professor of English at Stetson University, DeLand, Florida. She teaches and publishes on Victorian literature, women and gender studies, and environmental literature. She is the author of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership (Ashgate, 2003). Christopher Powici gained his PhD with a dissertation entitled, The Wolf and Literature, at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where he now teaches English, specializing in literature and environment. He balances academic work with writing poetry. His poetry has been published in a variety of magazines and journals, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio. He was awarded a writer's bursary from the Scottish Arts Council in 2002 and is first-prize winner in the 2003 BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Awards. Catherine Rainwater is a Professor of English at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. She is the author of numerous essays published in books and literary journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, Philological ~arterly, Mississippi ~arterly, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and others. In 1990, she was the recipient of the Norman Foerster Prize from the Modern Language Association for her work concerning the American Indian novelist and poet, Louise Erdrich. Her most recent book is Dreams ofFiery Stars: The Transformations ofNative American Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Carrie Rohman completed her doctorate in twentieth-century British literature and critical theory at Indiana University. Her dissertation is entitled, Stalking the Subject: Modernism, Alterity, and the ~estion of the Animal. She has also published recently on the discourse of animality in the work of D. H. Lawrence. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh it Johnstown. William J. Scheick, who specializes in Puritan and other Reformation art, is the]. R. Millikan Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His recent work includes "Tableaux of Authority: The Titlepages of Sixteenth-Century Bibles" in Explorations in Renaissance Culture (2ooo), "Renaissance Art and Puritan Heraldry'' in Studies in Puritan American Spirituality (2001), ''An Inward Power and Authority: John Davenport's Seditious Piety" in Religion and Literature (2001), and "Glorious Imperfection in Heemkerck's Lukean Portraits of the Virgin" in Konsthistorisk Tidskrift (2003).

Julie A. Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. She has

Contributors

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published articles on early English book illustration and in animal studies, with emphasis on representations of animal mental life. She lives with thirteen animals of various species and is active in animal advocacy. H. Peter Steeves is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University where he specializes in ethics, social/political philosophy, and phenomenology. His books include Founding Community: A PhenomenologicalEthical Inquiry (Kluwer, 1998); Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (SUNY Press, 1999); and The Things Themselves: Essays in Applied Phenomenology (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2004). He is proud to count many perritos vagabundos among his friends.

Nancy Vosburg is a Professor of Modern Languages at Stetson _University, DeLand, Florida. She teaches Spanish literature and culture on a regular basis, and occasionally teaches courses in Women and Gender Studies. Vosburg has published widely on contemporary Spanish women in exile.

AcKNOWLEDGMENTS

e would like to thank Stetson University and St. Edward's University for their generous support of this project. This book is the result of many collaborations, not only with the contributors who joined our conversation about animals. So we also owe a debt of gratitude to colleagues Rusty Witek, Tandy Grubbs, Camille King, and Anna Skinner; to Stetson University department chairs Tom Farrell and John Pearson, and Dean ofArts and Sciences Grady Ballenger; appreciation also goes to Jane Bradford of the DuPont-Ball Library. Many thanks to Cathy Burke, whose assistance with the manuscript was invaluable. Thanks are· due, too, to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Artists' Rights Society, and Walter Gruen. We are grateful to Farideh Koohi-Kamali and Melissa Nosal, our editors at Palgrave/St. Martin, and to Veena Krishnan of Newgen Imaging Systems. Finally, we are grateful to Maggie (a Standard Poodle) for her support and diversion, to Rory (a Standard Poodle), who died before this project was completed, and to Kodi, Timber, and Crystal (two Siberian Huskies and a Samoyed), for their furry warmth and dogwit through the years. Finally, we thank David Clark, whose fortunate phrasing in his article, "On Being 'The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany'" (in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in \~~estern History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior {Routledge 1977}), inspires our title.

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INTRODUCTION Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater

hat does the Lipizzan think as he goes through his paces in the crowded arena? Does his air of enormous concentration express a state similar to ours as we sit down to write these words? Or is this question simply an anthropomorphic projection of a limited human mind? Does the horse like his work, as we do ours, or is he simply compelled to do it by conditions that make resistance more trouble than compliance? What does the bobcat think when she pauses, standing tall at fifty (human) paces in the middle of a dirt road under the broad noonday sun, gazing warily in the human bypasser's direction until his dog springs into a gallop? And how does the dog figure her? Does he really want to catch her, or do the sight and smell of the cat simply give him a good excuse for a run in the brisk air?1 Our desire to know these things is a part of our humanity to which eons of myth and folklore attest. The disinherited prince who hears messages of his kingdom from the birds after eating the flesh of a magic fish, and who is borne back home with the speed of the wind on the tail of a friendly fox; the beautiful and heroic princess who weaves nettle coats for her enchanted swan brothers; the girl or boy initiated into adulthood by wolf or coyote; the woman who marries a bear or bull- such fictions, throughout all the known cultures of the world, give evidence of a powerful human desire to know the animal Other. Equally powerful is the pain of accepting our own perceptual limits as. human animals, or the dissonance we feel when we do not trust our understanding of other animals, or when we cannot fully translate what we perceive of them into human language. 2 As a species, we must explain things, somehow. In the western way of thinking, that explanation often sacrifices the complexity of the animal Other and, ironically, of the questioning human herself The graceful and disciplined horse is merely responding to his conditioning. The wary cat senses only motion and danger. The dog's enthusiastic sprint is merely a response to the stimulus of possible prey, or competition for prey. The desire to figure out animals may be human nature, but we are also quick to evade our own questions by figuring onto other animals our own traits: the white bird is a symbol of our desire for peace, its feathers the symbol of surrender. When we want to separate ourselves from the inconvenience, danger, or complexity of our biotic community; some of us are quick to

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quote-out of our complicated context of doubt and redemption-such verses as Tennyson's, opposing our own species to the wild: Man, [Nature's} last work, who seem'd so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who trusted God was love indeed And love creation's final lawTho' nature red in tooth and claw With ravine shriek'd against his creed. (In Memorium LVI)

Animals are different from humans, goes the logic, and difference necessitates hierarchy. Wtth Shakespeare's Hamlet, we typically accept the default position: ''What a piece of work is man! ... in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" But Hamlet had trouble maintaining that position, and so do we when we look into it closely. Fortunately, there are escape routes from the destructive dualisms of western thought, and alternative ways of understanding, representing, and constructing the other animals with whom we share the world. Some are very old, and like so many of the animals themselves, need to be protected from extinction. Some are emerging, inspired by expanding human horizons within the physical universe and the virtual universe of information technology. Some of these new ways of seeing result from the realization that the spiritual, if not the literal survival of the human animal depends upon a different way of being with our fellow animals. This book is a collection of ways of seeing them. At the turn of the twenty-first century, it is helpful to reconsider our inherited understandings of other species, some of which are still useful to us. It is also important to look ahead to new understandings and a new dialogue which may contribute to the survival of us all. The contributors to this volume participate in this dialogue in a variety of ways- through personal experience, natural history, cultural studies, philosophical inquiry, art history, literary analysis, f.tlm studies, and theoretical imagining-and through combinations of these trains of thought. Some of :us have found ourselves elbowing out the edges of the genres we've inherited; some of us have turned the available forms to new uses. Whatever our approach, this book represents for all of us the hope for a better world. Beyond this common hope, the essays are unified in their mutual tendency to expose weaknesses in western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own.

The Social Animal A broader view of a better world as "home" to ourselves and animal Others is the subject of H. Peter Steeves's philosophical meditation, "Lost

Introduction

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Dog: The Silent Authority of the Animal Face." Worrying significant bones of contention with "two E(I)mmanuels"-Kant and Levinas- on their misguided conceptions of animals, Steeves ponders humanity's failure to recognize animal being, especially in fellow mammals with faces "all there"- noses, mouths, imploring eyes-bilaterally symmetrical like our own. Several lines of argument converge on Steeves's central point regarding this human failure: are dogs ever truly "lost" or "homeless" in this world, and what, in fact, does it mean for any sentient creature, including ourselves, to be "lost"? What accounts for the ontological blindness of epistemologists such as Kant and Levinas, whose complex moral vision of human beings is undercut by their shocking inability to perceive the dasein of creatures who return their gaze or befriend them? At what stage in this crisis of recognition of animal being will humans finally see, finally relate to rather than merely dominate the nonhuman Other, whose "home" is the same as ours? According to Steeves, we must expand our vision, practice greater "moral vigilance" lest we remain disconnected and therefore truly lost. Steeves's observations about philosophers and their benighted, views of animals cut to the heart of contemporary scientific studies. A recent article in the Humane Society publication, A!! Animals, laments the plight of the orangutan, threatened with extinction in the diminishing Indonesian forests; animal scientists recognize among orangutans a "culture, previously the single greatest distinguishing mark of humanity," and they remark the "intimate kinship" we share with the great orange apes, but their study emphasizes the value of these animals to the human community} Their overriding concern is that we will lose a chance to understand the origins and evolution of human culture if we allow the orangutan's to disappear. Such anthropocentric attitudes, however benignly they figure in conservational efforts, lie behind compilations of endangered species lists ranking animals and plants based on frequently short-sighted human understanding of their value to us or to preserving an ecosystem that matters to us. Animal studies will be transformed profoundly when (if) we one day begin to read more about efforts to stop destroying apes, elephants, birds, and bugs simply because they exist, regardless of their perceived value to us. Recognizing the fathomless mystery of animal being, we might eventually awaken capacities in ourselves that proprietorship has thwarted. Steeves briefly recounts the story of the jaguar who loses and recovers his eyes, only to realize they were never truly lost but merely on loan, cast into a vision-expanding relationship with the Other. Those of us who have shared our lives with animals may recall a time when we "lost our eyes" and thus attained a fuller vision. Perhaps one day it dawned on us that our dog finds us difficult to communicate with-that the problem was oursinstead of vice versa; we might have realized suddenly what our horse has been telling us all along about the field we tried to force him through. Melanie Dylan Fox has loaned her eyes in this way to the black bears of Sequoia National Park. In "Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear," Fox examines her responsibility to the bears she has come to know in their

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trespassed habitat. Like Steeves and other contributors to this volume, she also ponders the etymological and semantic quandaries that accrue to us when we attempt to speak about such knowledge. We must violate "traditional grammatical rules": each bear, for example, is a "he," a "she," a "who" with an individual temperament, not an "it" or a "that" with merely a species identity. In the tradition of Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, and more recently, of Loren Eiseley and Barry Lopez, Fox looks at animals through the dual lenses of science and myth. Like Eiseley in the title essay of The Star Thrower, or Lopez in OfWolves and Men, Fox seems hopeful that some verbal concatenation of empirical detail and mystical insight might inspire the reader's own exploration and discovery.4 Her cross-species, social relationship with bears has changed her forever, and the experience she describes is available to all who expand their conceptions of what is possible. Eye-opening, cross-species social events of a different variety rivet Susan E. Jones's attention in her essay, "Digging and Leveling in Adam's Garden: Women and the International Cat Fancy." If we are tempted to speculate about the thoughts of a Lipizzan in the arena, or of a bear brazenly wandering the predawn streets of Aspen, Colorado, we might be even more apt to wonder just what a grumpy-faced Persian cat thinks as her human "Mom'' decks her out for yet another competition. Does a cat ·really care about a human-defined, feline beauty pageant? Jones concludes that cat shows are, indeed, different from dog shows, where canines eagerly exhibit their obedience, physical conformation, agility, or good citizenship before human judges; on the contrary, the cat show provides an opportunity for people to cater to their feline charges through elaborately ritualized human behavior. Such behavior has a dual focus: it honors the feline, but according to Jones it also affords the primarily female cat fanciers an indirect avenue of healthy competition with one another. Thus, from the international cat fanciers we are more likely to learn how cats help us express ourselves than we are to sound the mysterious depths of R domesticus, an animal alternately despised and adored by different human cultures at various times throughout history. Indeed, the history of our relationship to cats reminds us that we are, without a doubt, disturbingly inco,nsistent creatures. Even within the lifespan of a single animal we often, unfortunately, observe the sad effects of human failure to make sense. The depressed mixed breed dog slumped in the back of his cage at the local shelter, the feral cat who approaches our door but will not tolerate our touch- each tells the story in his eyes. The dog was carelessly acquired as a "cute puppy for the kids," then just as carelessly dumped for "behavior problems" as a mannerless, gangly adolescent; the eat's mother was never spayed because "kittens are so cute" or because "there was no time," then abandoned with her family among dogs, cars, and unsupervised children in the neighborhood. City pounds and animal shelters kill more than five million unwanted animals per year, but prior to the development of no-kill shelters, the number was higher than seventeen million.S

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The Observed and the Observer If many of us seem not to know what we think from one moment to the next about our responsibility to the animals in our homes, even fewer of us have a clear notion of the place of animals in the cosmological scheme. ' Such has been the case in the western world for centuries. In ''Animal Testimony in Renaissance Art: Mary's Annunciation and Paul's Conversion," "William]. Scheick underscores the internal contradictions in our views of animals as he examines several paintings in which CounterReformation artists "unwittingly revise the prevailing ... scientific and theological understanding of animals, and as a result ... sometimes effectively problematize the very function of animals in these scenes." Scheick explains that during the Renaissance, artistic representations of animals usually conformed to "dominant iconographic moral symbolism." He shows us how; at this time, animals were primarily introduced into paintings to "testify'' to currently held "beliefs in divine or universal truth." In scenes where animals show awareness of supernatural events "occurring in their presence," Counter-Reformation artists in particular included the animals to suggest the authenticity of the supernatural event: after all, if beasts could notice it, the occurrence had to be real. However, Renaissance science contends that animals, ·lacking rational (human) souls, cannot perceive supernatural events. Thus according to Scheick, although painters such as Mesiter von Schoppingen and Caravaggio include the animals as functional signs to underscore the reality of the supernatural, the artists paradoxically contradict themselves and the prevailing view of animals as oblivious to spiritual phenomena. Animal being thus emerges to complicate the most intentionally orthodox of representations. Scheick's analysis emphasizes one of many ways in which the controlled surfaces of human expression, whether verbal or visual, are often disrupted by deep, insufficiently explored suspicions that we have got it wrong about the animals. Some four centuries after the Counter-Reformation in Europe, modernists the world over were convinced that the West had got it wrong about much more than animals. They dared disturb the universe that their forebears had struggled so hard to describe. Inspired by numerous modernist painters and by Einsteinian physics, one such artist, Remedios Varo, creates an aesthetic universe fllled with animals who are portrayed as active agents in the ongoing transformation of human reality. In" 'Strange Yet Familiar': Cats and Birds in Remedios Varo'sArtistic Universe," Nancy Vosburg reveals how Varo's "paintings question what most people see as dualistic and impermeable boundaries between human and animal." Varo suggests that such boundaries are, in fact, mostly human illusions. In the world of her art, strange "transferences of energy'' between humans and nonhumans routinely expand the material and perceptual capacities of both. According to Varo, an "invisible thread ... unites all things," and our awareness of this unity may lead to freedom from fixed conceptions and even to knowledge of higher truths. Vosburg contends that in Varo's

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estimation, our connections to animals may lead us less to think outside of ourselves than to think more authentically from within ourselves as fully realized inhabitants of the universe. The transformations depicted in Varo's work expose the ontological and epistemological instability beneath our shored up preconceptions, the sort of instability that CounterReformation artists denied in paintings that, nevertheless, unintentionally subverted conventional authority through the directed animal gaze. Like Scheick and Vosburg, Jutta Ittner is intrigued by the epistemological shockwaves potentially conveyed through the enigmatical gaze of animals. In her essay entitled, "Who's Looking? The Animal Gaze in the Fiction of Brigitte Kronauer and Clarice Lispector," Ittner reveals how the two authors test generic and linguistic impediments to the expression of knowledge gleaned through encounters with animals. According to Ittner, both Kronauer and Lispector insist that truly seeing the animal Other means getting "beyond the threshold of discourse" through a "quantum leap" in comprehension. Like H. Peter Steeves and Melanie Fox, Kronauer and Lispector ask us to drop traditional epistemological frames of reference that objectify the animal Other; indeed, they invite us to redefine ourselves through I-Thou experiences with animals. However, although both writers imagine connections with animals that resemble Varo's "transferences," they are not so convinced as Varo that animal-human boundaries are permeable. Lispector, for instance, believes that humans and animals share essential being, although our efforts to transcend ourselves in acts of total identification with animals ultimately fail. Nevertheless, the transformative effort itself is its own reward. According to Ittner, the message emerging from the works of Kronauer and Lispector is that ''unflinching investigation into the contact with the animal 'thou' and its chain reaction of feelings, thoughts, and physical sensations call into question not only our preconceptions of animals but of ourselves." Ittner investigates these writers' "journey{s} towards Being" in the search for "who's looking": she studies their "adventure{s} of 'becoming animal' " on the way to discovering the rich possibilities of meaningful, if limited, human-animal exchange.

Art and Science For the empirical mind, of course, there is no question, "who's looking." The animal aspect is without ambiguity, without the possibility of meaningful exchange. A cat may not look at a king, much less at a god (as some cats do in Renaissance paintings). Even less may a cat look at someone who sets out to "study'' the cat. Certainly, a cat has nothing to teach us: Remedios Varo's challenge to that assumption is one reason her paintings are so enthralling, and so alien. Although these assumptions underlie most post-Enlightenment western thought, including cultural modernism, their most extreme expression has inhered in scientific inquiry, even including classical ethology, which takes as its subject of study the animal mind. 6

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The dangers of this anthropocentric view have been a thematic staple of Euro-American literary practice since the nineteenth century. Thoreau returned again and again to the notion that "in wildness is the preservation of the world."? For him, the challenge was philosophical and spiritual. Picking up this thread a century later, Aldo Leopold linked the loss of wildness, not only with the loss of spiritual resilience, but biological survival: when the wolves are exterminated, the multiplying deer strip the mountain of its plant cover, the mountain "dies," and the deer then also die of starvation. If we follow Leopold's analysis of the wolf's fate to its logical conclusion, the humans, the last link in this particular chain, are also robbed of an essential element in their own habitat: the fresh water that is processed through the biotic community of the mountain before its regulated release into the streams that nourish their communities below. We can neither remove ourselves from Nature nor separate ourselves qualitatively from other animals. 8 The green fire in the gaze of a dying wolf teaches Leopold a lesson for life. Even for Descartes, who thought of the animal as simply a biological machine, it was not so simple: late in his life, he never took an afternoon walk without the companionship of his dog. Ouida and H. G. Wells, the writers whose works are examined closely in the section of this volume entitled '~rt and Science," were active a century ago. 9 The attitudes of ignorance and indifference to the ontological value of other species, which these two writers describe, have not disappeared, although the particulars of experimental biology are far more technologically advanced, particularly in the area of genetics. Wells was tremendously prolific, and he probed the practices and perversions of empirical science in his own day from many different angles: in The Time Machine (1895), for instance, he takes up physics; in The Mlr of the Worlds (1898), astronomy and military science; in Tono Bungay (1909), the medical-cash nexus. The most horrifying ofWells's dystopian visions is perhaps that of the brutally anthropocentric Dr. Moreau, whose island laboratory is populated with monstrous creations reminiscent of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. But more horrible than Dr. Frankenstein's jilted and rebellious progeny are Dr. Moreau's human-animal hybrids, brainwashed to mimic human behavior while they are surgically altered to resemble the human in appearance- and all, supposedly, to "improve them." Here, Carrie Rohman's reading of this r896 novel posits Dr. Moreau's dangerous anthropocentrism as a response to the crisis of humanism occurring in the wake of Darwin's theory, which had the potential to rip humans from their special position between angel and beast. According to Rohman's "Burning Out the Animal: The Failure of Enlightenment Purification in H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr: Moreau," Wells's novel both expresses and releases this anxiety. The protagonist Prendick, who is shipwrecked on the island just before Moreau loses control of his experimental subjects, is so shattered by his confrontation of the human in the animal, and the animal in the human, that he lives the rest of his days as a recluse,

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studying the stars. The ethical problems identified in late nineteenthcentury critiques of experimental medicine remain problems to this day. 10 One wishes Wells could comment on the mass extermination of suspected "mad cows," the cloning of Dolly the Scottish sheep (the first of her tribe of clones), and the creation of the genetically altered piglets, whose bodies have been engineered to provide human beings with easy-to-harvest organs for transplant. Even more prolific than Wells, Ouida (Maria Louise Rame), the sensation novelist whose Under Two Flags (1867) has been reprinted through numerous editions and adapted for stage and screen, was also concerned about the arrogance of modern science. Her critique of experimental biology; however, derived not from a special concern about the limits and potential of science, but from her own powerful sympathies with the marginalized and the dispossessed in general. In 1870, she published Puck, a satirical novel told from a canine point of view: Puck was followed in 1872 by the more serious children's story, '~ Dog of Flanders." Over the next forty years, these two stories unleashed a series of fictional works exploring animal cruelty in all its manifestations. Ouida eventually focused on experimental medical research, which depended on a well-organized international trade in lost and stolen dogs. Finally, by the 189os, most of her attention was devoted to writing critiques of medical science-its practices, discourse, reliance on the corrupt laws governing domestic animals, and effects. The treatment of the animals in our power, she argues time and again, both reflects and affects the depths of our collective moral being. In her late essays, written mostly during the last decade of the nineteenth century, Ouida foresees a time of unregulated medical experiments-on humans as well as other animals-mass extinctions, and general environmental crisis. Mary Pollock's discussion of Ouida's career, in "Ouida's Rhetoric of Empathy: A Case Study in Victorian Anti-Vivisection Narrative," tracks this development in her work. Ouida's passion equals or surpasses that of contemporary animal welfare activists. Their battles today have, from one perspective, changed little since a century ago, when this writer devoted the final decades of her life to bettering the conditions of animals' livesand by logical extension, to bettering human life as well. Wells and Ouida offer two very different ways of attacking the fundamental questions about animals, which must be raised in the context of experimental biological science: what is the ontological status of the nonhuman, and how do we know? Too often, the human perceptual limitations of the scientist result in the too-simple answer that betrays both the scientist himself and the animal subject, in an ultimate refusal of the epistemological implications of scientific enterprise. Yet the questions should at least be left open. Some scientists do devote their lives to understanding and making common cause with their subjects-for example, actual wildlife biologistsJane Goodall and Farley Mowatt, fictional characters Dr. Dolittle and Abby McCord in Sheri S. Tepper's environmental thriller

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The Family Tree (1997). But the cultural productions that tackle these issues have primarily represented our fears rather than our hopes, no doubt because world culture has not yet made the necessary commitments to end species extinctions and forestall such environmental crises as global warming or the thinning of the ozone layer. The need to do so was dramatically underscored in a November 2003 Paris conference sponsored by the UN: findings of the UN Great Ape Survival Project suggest that, without powerful interventions during the next fifteen to twenty years, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans may be extinct within half a century.

Difference and Desire The epistemological questions about nonhuman animals that are raised by empirical science inform artistic inquiry, as well. The fiction-writer, painter, or filmmaker who wishes to represent accurately the experience of a dog or a whale, for instance, must come to terms with technical challenges such as narrative distance and point of view. In considering the dasein of other species, we cannot avoid questions about their ontological status or the inevitable limitations of our own human perspective. But we can "know'' about other animals in ways besides the cognitive. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggest inA Thousand Plateaus, the full potential of human life is fulfilled only when the human can become someone else through knowledge, observation, and affective sympathy; when the human can become animal-and can become animal without losing sight of the difference. This quality or ability must be consciously cultivated if humans are to avoid exploiting or reitying the Other, in whatever guise that Other appears. n Love and desire are other ways of knowing. Attention to similarity and difference also affords insight. In Out ofthe Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis's alien: guide suggests that all sentient life-forms desire the presence of the Other: that is why; in Lewis's novel, the human need for pets is fulfilled otherwise on a planet populated by several forms of equally intelligent life. The researcher who spends the best hours of his life swimming with the vast right whales who feed off the coast ofTierra del Fuego is propelled by love and desire no less than objective curiosity and, indeed, his desire may be inextricable from objective curiosity. 12 The American Indian myth of the woman who marries a bear, the recurrent figures .in children's literature of the boy who obsessively draws cats and the girl who dreams of horses-all represent a deep human desire for knowledge of difference. In "The Black Stallion in Print and Film," Lindsay Addison explains the enormous popularity of this central figure it]. twenty-one novels for adolescent readers by Walter Farley (never out of print since 1941), and a 1979 film by Francis Ford Coppola (perhaps his most visually stunning work). She sees the Black Stallion as an expression of the childhood desire for adventure, and, even more, for extra-human friendship. Alec, the main human character of this series, forms a friendship with the Black Stallion

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when they wash up together on a desert island, sole survivors of a shipwreck in the Mediterranean. As a matter of fact, literature for children gives us a unique and indispensable perspective on our cultural values and our desires: children's literature is not or!iinarily considered part of adult culture, but it is the adult who buys books, reads aloud to the child, looks over the shoulder of the child reader, and provides transportation to the movies. The child's desire for friendship with other animals does not dissipate with the end of childhood: it simply goes underground, and adults who write and buy these books for children are surely expressing their own hidden desires. Nevertheless, adults writing stories for children about animals do not always validate this desire for friendship, or define friendship between man and beast in the same way they might define friendship between human beings. As Chris Powici argues in his analysis of Kipling's Jungle Books (1894, 1895), the human-animal connection goes only one way in Kipling's work. Because of his superior intelligence and creative flexibility, the human boy Mowgli can become animal, import what he learns from other animals back into his human state, and return to the animal kingdom if he likes; in contrast, his wolf father and bear teacher cannot cross the boundary into humanhood. In Kipling's world, the love between boy and bear is incomplete. As a counter example, Powici points to Ursula K. Le Guin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" (1987), a story (for adults as much as children) in which a human girl arrives, like Mowgli, into the community of wild animals who teach and shelter her, then finally help her reintegrate into her human community. With this difference: among the wild animals, she has learned another way of seeing; she has been gifted with double vision through the pine-pitch eye that Coyote gives her to replace one she has lost in the plane crash, which brought her to the desert. Although the animals she meets cannot transform from chickadee or coyote or rattlesnake to human, their lives are replete with ontological significance equal to Gal's, and they can be known to each other on their own terms. Gal's ability to cross the border between the human and nonhuman communities enables her to understand the lifeways of other creatures. Because of the gift of double vision, she is unique among humans and other animals, and her special gift anoints her with special responsibilities. When adults are able to carry their childhood openness toward other creatures into maturity, their desire for, and knowledge of, the animal Other remains conscious, active, and alive. Sometimes, such a desire enables the literal absorption of the animal Other into the human family; a happy reversal of the childhood fantasy of escape into the jungle or onto the desert island. No doubt, this wish motivates the habit of pet-keeping, which so disturbs animal activists such as Peter Singer, and the zoo culture, which is problematic to an even larger segment of the animal activist community. 13 But just as Kipling's Mowgli does not represent all possibilities for friendship between human and nonhumans, animals who live in close proximity with

Introduction

lli>i<:il

n

human companions are not always exploited. Perhaps, if C. S. Lewis's alien guide is right, all animals, not just humans, desire other animals to provide interest to their lives, to give them variety in kinds of loving. Dogs, of course, offer the prime example. For Marjorie Garber, the "dogs in our lives, the dogs we come to love and who (we fervently believe) love us in return, offer more than fidelity, consolation, companionship. They offer comedy, irony, wit, a wealth of anecdotes .... Both powerfully imaginary and comfortingly real, dogs act as mirrors for our own beliefs about what would constitute a truly humane society.m4 In some human families, dogs become essential members. When dogs are workers, as they are in many of Guida's stories, their status within a family can be similar to that of its human members, although there is of course an understanding of fundamental constitutional differences. The position of companion dogs is, by contrast, overdetermined, for good or ill. In transgressive families, companion animals are often positioned more centrally than in normative families. For example, in Radcliffe Hall's great lesbian classic, The Well ofLoneliness (1928), dogs and horses are the only unproblematic objects of desire for Stephen, the protagonist, and the only unproblematic sources of love as well. In addition, in both of Stephen's adult relationships with other women, dogs are the enablers and bearers of erotic desire. For the aunt-niece collaborative and affectional pair who wrote under the name of Michael Field, their chow dog was at once the object of love, the channel oflove, and the symbol for love. In his article for this volume, David Banash argues that one of their last works, the poem sequence Whym Chow: Flame of Love, is also a "challenge to humanistic, identic thought." In art as in life, the dog, through his loving presence, opens a new space for the development of a new kind of relationship between the two women. For the Fields, the love that "dare not speak its name" is a love that "cannot speak its name" except indirectly, but this fact does not diminish its power. Whym Chow is far from the proverbial "child substitute." And Banash's argument suggests, furthermore, that the automatic assumption that dogs function this way in nonnormative families is an oversimplification, a fundamental misunderstanding of both human love and the possibility of trans-species loving. If the boundaries between human and animal are permeable or blurry in many cultural productions for or about children, and in gay or lesbian literature, such boundaries are more definitively drawn in most mainstream literature for adults. Nevertheless, the foregrounding of difference rather than identity does not necessarily indicate disrespect. Indeed, collapsing the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, argues Robert McKay, may be a facile gesture of dominance. For animals have always been, in every human society, "our most persistent other." In his analysis of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, McKay argues that accepting difference allows for an ethical "knowing." For example, one episode in Atwood's novel narrates the similar objectification of a woman and a murdered heron, both of whom are captured on fllm. by the woman's

12

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Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater

avant-garde filmmaker boyfriend. Witnessing the objectification of her friend, along with the heron and other animals, the protagonist realizes that she herself is reified by patriarchal capitalist culture in other, equally profound ways. With Carol]. Adams and Josephine Donovan, McKay finds that the reification of women and animals that is crystallized in this scene from Atwood's novel comes about through a powerful and pervasive system of interlocking exploitations-even more powerful because women and other animals are different. 15 One result of Atwood's focus on difference rather than identity is not a lessening of sympathy, but the promise of another kind- a reaching out across species barriers in kindness, imaged in the memory of the protagonist's mother, reaching out to feed the birds. "Our most persistent other," then, is not defined by race, sex, sexuality; gender, or class, but by species. Ironically, the Enlightenment discourse which defined "man" as "not-animal" also resulted in liberal questioning of categories and boundaries within the human community. For Mary Wollstonecraft, in the late eighteenth century, the logical leap between the rights of man and the rights of woman was critical, but it was also short. At the same time, the leap between the ontological significance of the European and that of the African slave was resisted by those invested in slavery, but it was equally obvious, and before another century was out, slavery had become illegal in most of the western world. As reductively logical as he tried to be in his great treatises on economic class, Marx is clearly motivated as much by his fellow feeling for the working class as by his economic calculus, and his arguments for the rights of the working class are, for the most part, an extension of Enlightenment arguments for the rights of men in general. But Enlightenment thought stalls at the species boundary. Perhaps it has taken the threat of environmental disaster for liberal and radical thinkers to begin transforming what Edward 0. Wilson calls biophilia, "the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life," into a fully conscious pursuit of understanding other animals. 16 The last group of essays in this volume is devoted to theoriesto thinking about ways of seeing our human selves as part of the larger biotic community. However, like~ the writers represented in other parts of this book, the contributors to this section do not confine themselves to pure speculation, but freely mix theoretical inquiry with personal experience and cultural analysis.

Theories of the "Other" Other Julie A. Smith considers how poststructuralist distrust of human subjectivity has contributed to richer conceptions and literary models of animal consciousness. Up through the modernist era, she argues, literary works about animals that begin by resisting the Cartesian view ultimately fall short of a radical challenge; instead, authors of such works frequently

Introduction

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13

"vacillate between granting and denying" animal consciousness for fear of ridicule and charges of anthropomorphism. Within a philosophical community (Daniel Dennett, Peter Carruthers, and Antonio Damasio, among others) that approaches animals in terms of propositional attitude and modes of intentionality; Smith argues that the poststructuralist writer "accentuates" anthropomorphism and thereby "preempts" accusations of soft-mindedness about animals. "It is as if the author defers from any truth claims about animal mind and yet creates an arena where his linguistic performance seems dependent on the elusive nature of animal consciousness." In other words, such writers overtly acknowledge both the fact of animal consciousness and the impossibility of rendering it in human language. Smith examines a short story by Brad Watson called "Seeing Eye" (1996). She argues that this story contains an implicit theory of animal mind that is provocatively harmonious with the claims of Antonio Damasio, a neurologist with a biologically based theory of how consciousness and the sense of individual self arise. For Damasio, consciousness is fundamentally neither linguistic nor higher-order analytical, but emotional; it results from feelings arising through physical encounters with the world. Thus, animals without human language or higher-order cognitive skills may be understood as conscious selves; we need not anthropomorphize a being who is already like us. Damasio argues further that, within the limits of their memory spans (shorter than ours), animals possibly also develop an "autobiographical" sel£ Smith examines Damasio's claims in detail, especially the ways in which his ideas illuminate the perspectives of poststructuralist fiction writers such as Watson. These new, creative constructions of mind and consciousness do not necessarily deliver up the truth, Smith contends; however, they help loosen the constraints of traditional views, with their anthropocentric, vested interest in "controlling the reified border" between human and animal that "excuses all manner of practices against animals." Moreover, says Smith, our new ideas may lead us to discover more of the animals' and our own "extraordinary capacities." Tim Gadd's view of the poststructuralist era resonates with Julie Smith's. Both note how asserted boundaries between human and nonhuman have begun to erode under postmodern philosophical interrogation. In "Human-Animal Affiliation in Modern Popular Film," Gadd discloses the stages in the development of popular portrayals of human-animal relationships. He focuses on the increasing humanization and socialization of animals from the modernist period through the 1960s and 1970s, and into the postmodern era. Today, he observes, wild animals take positions in flims that domesticated animals held in previous eras, while the domesticated animals have moved from the backyard into the family home, with adults as their companions. In other words, a wild animal has replaced Lassie in Timmy's life, and Lassie rests on the couch in front of the television with Timmy's parents.

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Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater

Examining such popular works as Lassie Come Home, K-9u, King Kong, The Planet of the Apes, Gorillas in the Mist, and Instinct, Gadd detects an undeniable trend toward "species egalitarianism," an attitude granting humans and animals more equal status as cohabitants of the earth than they have ever before enjoyed. Species egalitarianism in popular works, according to Gadd, is matched in academia by today's intellectual inquiries into animal-human relations, and by a less disdainful attitude toward anthropomorphism. Overall, Gadd welcomes the long overdue rejection of western anthropocentric values by contemporary popular film, ironically and ordinarily a perpetuator rather a subverter of stereotypes. If popular Him has traditionally perpetuated stereotypes of the animalhuman connection, it has perhaps been even more guilty of formulating and preserving stereotypes of Native Americans. In "Who May Speak for the Animals? Deep Ecology in Linda Hogan's Power and A. A. Carr's Eye Killers," Catherine Rainwater analyzes the challenge to Eurocentric views of animals and humans presented by two contemporary Indian writers. Rainwater reminds us of how Native Americans (like the animals to whom they have been both flatteringly and derogatorily compared) have themselves been subject to reductive western constructions. These constructions of indigenous people and animals come under assault in Hogan's and Carr's novels, which offer us alternative ways of thinking derived from their respective Chickasaw and Navajo-Laguna backgrounds. These alternative views, in turn, resonate profoundly with the global environmental perspective termed "deep ecology," a philosophy and practice demanding a thorough revision of human thought and behavior toward the earth. Rainwater argues that American Indians and other indigenous groups are best able to "speak for the animals" because, traditionally, such people have acknowledged the animal Other as coequal inhabitants of earth. They have valued the animals simply because they exist. She shows how Indian writers- Hogan and Carr among many others- invite us along with them radically to redefine the human self, nature, the self-in-nature, and the Other. These writers challenge Eurocentrically constructed boundaries between human and animal that authorize human beings to kill the planet in the name of intellectual and material progress. r7

The Immense Burden of Authority Regarding sentient beings of all sorts, the late Vicki Hearne has written, "the ability to exact obedience doesn't give you the right to do so- it is the willingness to obey that confers the right to command. I suspect that people with this understanding seldom end up in charge simply because with it goes an awareness of the immense imaginative burden of authority."18 The ability to define and dominate the animals does not automatically confer upon humanity the right to do so, especially if we continue to behave as we have in the past. 1 9 In league with the ever-increasing number of speakers on behalf of the radical rehabilitation of the human species, we

Introduction

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15

hope that readers of the essays in this book will emerge even better equipped to wield the "immense burden'' of authority that our responsibility to animals confers. World leaders today hotly debate their countries' roles in current environmental crises, which far too often become topics of partisan disputes and occasions for political posturing. All of us must abandon the limited visions of the past, develop new ethical standards, seek new imaginative visions. The essays we have included here highlight several of the key choices available to us at the dawn of a new century.

Notes 1. Thomas Nagel's classic paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" describes work in the 1940s by ethologist Don Griffin, whose discovery of bat biosonar forced the scientific and military communities to rethink basic assumptions about animal perception and behavior in comparison to human technologies (the bats did it better than the Navy!). The collabpration between Nagel and Griffin is described in Marc D. Hauser's Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 255-257. 2. Vicki Hearne, a philosopher, poet, and animal trainer-and also a provocative writer on animal rights and welfare-assumes that the working horse is not only fully intentional, but fully happy when making use of his natural talents (see especially Adam~ Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Knopf, 1986)). However, Hearne does not address the whens, wheres, whys, and hows: just because I might have a talent for singing, I wouldn't enjoy having to do it when I'm tired, nervous, bored, or coerced. One fine specimen of a poodle might thrive on the lights and noise of the show ring; another, equally fine, might slink in humiliation at her handler's side. The Lipizzan might enjoy executing the capriole on a fine day in a grassy field; the same movement might not be pleasurable at all in a crowded arena full of lights, noise, and gaping humans. We simply do not know. 3· Simon Elegant, "Disappearing Act." A!!Animals 4, 1 (Spring 2002): 6-7. 4· Loren Eiseley, The Star-Thrower (New York: New York Times Books, 1978). Barry Lopez, OfWolves and Men (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978). 5· Samantha Glen, Best Friends: The True Story ofthe World~ Most BelovedAnimal Sanctuary (New York: Kensington, 2001), 280-281. Glen reports that Best Friends Animal Sanctuary accumulated several cats and dogs this way even before it was officially open for business. Like most places of its kind, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, a multi-acre, no-kill shelter in Kanab, Utah, finds new homes for hundreds of animals per year who are dropped off or abandoned by people whose lives suddenly have no room for an animal friend. Many more hundreds of animals at Best Friends live the rest of their lives at the sanctuary. 6. In Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and the Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999), Eileen Crist analyzes at length the anthropocentrism of classical ethology in her work concerning the animal mind. For Crist, the connotative content of the language of science reveals its human-centered biases no less than its practices and its explicit discourse. 7· Thoreau's "Walking," in his Natural History Essays (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1989, 93-136), pursues this theme.

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Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater

8. See Aldo Leopold's account of wolves and the mountains (first published 1949) in "Thinking Like a Mountain," in Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford, 1987). 9· For this section of our book, we have shamelessly adapted the title of another British novel of the same period, Wilkie Collins's 1883 antivivisectionist novel, Heart and Science. 10. There is, in fact, a vast and growing literature on the ethics of science. For a good recent overview of the controversies and suggestions for solutions, see Deborah Rudacille, The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The "War between Animal Research andAnimal Protection (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000). n. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 12. Diane Ackerman's The Moon by Whalelight and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales (New York: Vintage, 1991) is a collection of accounts of scientists-bat specialists, whale biologists, specialists in reptiles, and ornithologists-whose work is full of passionate intensity. 13. Peter Singer's objection to pet-keeping-that pet-keeping is fundamentally an anthropocentric activity-is well known. In support of his argument, Singer quotes in Animal Liberation a statement in the principle organ of the American Veterinary Medical association, that the mission of the profession is "the over-all well-being of man-not lower animals" (New York: New York Review Book, 1975), 72. For an extensive, recent discussion of petkeeping, see two new journals in which the ethics of human-animal relations are the focus: Anthrozoos and Society andAnimals and Adrian Franklin's Animals in Modern Culture: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (London: Sage, 1999). Franklin argues that although humans have a history and elaborate social structures for exploiting other species, "this is not to deny the moral and affective ties that exist between humans and animals at any one time," particularly in the present (199). In The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), Harriet Ritvo identifies the origin of zoos within imperialist symbology- as an expression of dominance over subject peoples through ownership and display of subject animals from the same location: the wilder, the better. Finally, Randy Malamud argues in Reading Zoos: Representations ofAnimals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998) that even modern zoos have not transcended their origins, and that literary representations of zoos, overwhelmingly sympathetic to the animals imprisoned in them, reveal one of the fundamental cultural dissonances of the twentieth century. 14. Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 282. 15. Adams and Donovan have published extensively, together and separately, on animal rights in connection with women's rights. Notably, they coedited the important anthology Animals and WOmen: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham: Duke University Press) in 1995. 16. Edward 0. Wllson, The Diversity ofLife (New York: Norton, 1992), 350. 17· An extended analysis of the indigenous North American ethics of "co-equality" is developed in the work of Gary H. Gossen, for example, in Chamulas in the WOrld of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); the songs and prayers

Introduction

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17

Gossen includes in this work focus in particular on the jaguar, who is perceived not only as powerful, but as fully intentional. For an extended discussion of the Nahual-that is, the nonhuman-animal spiritual twin of every human being-see Prudencio Moscoso Pastrana's Las Cabezas Rodantes del Mal: Brujeria y Nahualismo en los Altos de Chiapas (Mexico {City}: Miguel Angel Porrua, 1990). 18. Hearne, Adams Task, 76. 19. Joining Vicki Hearne in her indictment of human exploitative attitudes, James Rachels, in Createdfrom Animals: The Moral Implications ofDarwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), clarifies the "moral implications" of Darwinism as he decries the use of evolutionary theory to justifY our "monstrous" behavior toward our fellow animal beings.

I I

PART

I

THE SociAL ANIMAL

CHAPTER I

LosT DoG, oR, LEVINAS FAcEs THE ANIMAL H. Peter Steeves

ere, at the shore of the Caribbean, the crab removes his eyes, casts them to the sea, and sings for them to return. And they do. He watches as they-he-find home again, gliding through the water, flying into the air, landing, balanced on their gangly stems. Here the jaguar watches too-and demands to play, to be let in on the secret. The crab hesitates and warns the jaguar that a large fish is swimming near, that he could eat the eyes and they would be lost forever. Fearless, the cat the Venezuelans call el Tigre insists, and with a song, the crab removes the jaguar's eyes and casts them to the waves. Where they are eaten by the fish. In blind rage the jaguar slashes out at the crab who crawls away in fear. Now the jaguar collapses on the beach in spasms of whimpers and tears. In this way the buzzard comes upon him, sees opportunity, and offers to help. "Find my eyes," cries the jaguar, "and I will kill something for you to eat." The buzzard stews up a hot paste of bark and grass and starchy roots, shapes it into two balls, and shoves it into the jaguar's empty sockets. In burning pain the great cat shrieks, "I am on fire, fool, and still I can't see!" "Open your eyes," laughs the buzzard, and when he does the jaguar sees the world with new eyes, flaming orange, that burn in the night. And this is how the jaguar lost and found his eyes. In Venezuela the city streets are filled with homeless dogs, perros vagabundos. I see them each day from the car as I drive to the university, along the street as we walk to the grocery, from the window and through the bars high up in the apartment where in the heat their bodies are distant, shimmering, and waving in and out of focus as if, perhaps, illusions. Weekdays, in mid-morning, a short-haired shepherd-mix plays in the dirt with workmen two blocks south. They are building another apartment high-rise but they have yet to begin the foundation. The shepherd climbs little mountains of dirt-el rey de Ia montaiia-and barks, hoping someone will try to chase him of£ From time to time the workers throw clumps of dry dirt in graceful arcs across the lot where they explode

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H. Peter Steeves

like grenades into dust. The shepherd chases each one, knowing there will be nothing left to fetch. He barks and rolls in the dirt, and at noon they all have lunch. Along the city streets I see the dogs traveling. They stay on the sidewalks, in general, and cross at intersections. They trot with their heads tilted down, seldom looking around, giving the impression that they are headed somewhere important, that they know precisely where they are going and why. No mindless wandering; no stopping to beg. I thought at first they were lost-agringo assumption, I know now. They live in the city, in neighborhoods, and are watched over by many people. In the United States, lost or stray, we would catch them, kill them, secretly turn them into soap and chicken feed. Here they are part of life, almost citizens. They remind me who I am, where I am, and keep moving on toward a goal and destination of which they never speak. I think of Emmanuel Levinas and Bobby, the stray dog who visited the philosopher in his concentration camp. "The last Kantian in Nazi Germany," Levinas called Bobby, because he barked and wagged his tail and reminded the prisoners who they were. It was something like "respect," writes Levinas. I have no nightmare of suffering to compare, but I know the power of the stray dog. And I know that dogs are not Kantians.

Even for Levinas, Bobby could not truly be a Kantian because he lacked "the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives.'" Indeed, Levinas has nothing respectful to say about animals in the short essay in which he recalls the few weeks during which Bobby affirmed the humanity of the prisoners in Camp 1492. Bobby, we learn, has neither ethics nor logos. He is animal and therefore subhuman. He is (truly) what the Nazis were trying to make (falsely) their prisoners: "a gang of apes," "no longer part of the world," "chatterers of monkey talk"-"signifiers without a signified.''2 These are parallels around which Levinas dances carefully: the human and the animal, the Nazi and the prisoner, a meal of meat and the Holocaust. Levinas' essay is a work of dualisms both self-deconstructing and yet so often reconfirming their duality. Even the form of the work forces us to rethink the nature of a philosophic essay: Levinas is foolish enough to mix autobiography with his scholarly analysis, thinking that there is no distinction between the two. Here, as a man and as a philosopher, Levinas comes close-so close!to animal rights. He comes close to resetting the family table of which he speaks. But then he carefully pushes away before the question can truly be served. Heidegger-as so often in these matters-is not careful, claiming, as he did in 1949, that the "motorized food industry'' was essentially the same as the gas chamber and concentration camp.3 Knowing what we know about Heidegger's views on animal being, the comment is doubly dangerous.

Lost Dog, or, Levinas Faces the Animal

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23

In Being and Time, we learn that only Dasein can die- other living things merely perish. David Clark, then, is right to worry that "Heidegger's ... assertion takes on utterly chilling consequences: insofar as the Jews perish with and like the animals who die in meat-processing plants, that is as essentially similar 'fabrications' of the militaryindustrial-agricultural complex, they cannot be human ... [and are thus slaughtered} with impunity."4 One can read Heidegger as lowering the horror of the Holocaust to the level of the carnivorous food industry, rather than raising the tragedy of the carnivorous food industry to the level of that greatest tragedy, the Holocaust. The lowering, no doubt, springs from evil intent. The raising is nobler, though perhaps unutterable. Still, how much hierarchy! How great the need to order our sorrows! Levinas, too, is a man of order: first the Other, then me. But the Other who comes first must, in the end, be human-which is to say, he must be me. True alterity goes unacknowledged. At home, the "Puppies Behind Bars" program thrives. Inmates train seeing-eye guide dogs, living with them in their cells. This is not the death camp of Levinas, though there is racism at work throughout. But enough of the ranking of tragedy! Each day the men work with the dogs, coming to know each other, coming to know what is expected. Hatred, say the program directors, begins to melt away. The inlllates become someone new. "Nobody needs to tell me I'm worth something," he says through bars and through tears. "This dog tells me that everyday."5 Levinas does not speak of order. He assumes it. The first half of his essay concerns the problem of animal rights-and here he is close to demanding vegetarianism; the second half is about Bobby-and here he cannot bring himself to thank this animal Other. Yes, Bobby jumped up and down and barked in delight when the prisoners returned in the evening, but Bobby didn't mean to. He didn't mean it. Clark is right again: "What is 'language' if it is not the wagging of a tail, and 'ethics' if it is not the ability to greet one another and to dwell together as others?"6 But for Levinas, the barking was a signifier without a signified, not a choice, not a duty, but an inevitable manifestation of his lowly being-a Cartesian Kantianism: input = see a man; output = bark and jump. Should the stock market plunge and our fortune be lost, we will not think to thank the servants for continuing to address us as "Madam" and "Sir." It is what we are regardless of our circumstances; they merely recognize it in a world gone mad. When Ulysses returns and is recognized by his dog, the canine is, perhaps, "the last true Greek in Ithica,"7 but Bobby is no Kantian. Levinas' reading of the bark turns us into Kantians. With the bark, Bobby is brought to play a canine Kantian role. Instead of hearing Bobby say "There is still love. I still love. And we are together," Levinas hears the voice of an inferior reminding him that whatever happens, the starry heavens will be above him, the moral law will be within him, and he is still an end in himsel£ It is good and needed news in a place of despair, but it cannot be seen as a gift because nothing less was expected.

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In the camp, remarks Levinas, "the French uniform still protected us from Hitlerian violence. But the other men, called free, ... stripped us of our human skin."8 One wants to question the philosopher on the importance of skin: human skin, a uniform, a coat of fur. Surely he sees the absurdity, the categorial nominalism that creates the combatant, the civilian, the French from the outer trappings of a covered body. One wants to place Bobby before Levinas and ask him to acknowledge that furry canine skin as skin, entice him to question the bureaucratic separation of species. But for Levinas there can be no face-to-face meeting, for Bobby has no face. It is via the face that one understands, for example, a dog. Yet the priority here is not found in the animal, but in the human face. We understand the animal, the face of an animal, in accordance with Dasein. The phenomenon of the face is not in its purest form in the dog.... I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called "face." The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don't know if a snake has a face. I can't answer that question.... But there is something in our attraction to the animal .... In the dog, what we like is perhaps his child-like character. . . . We do not want to make an animal suffer needlessly and so on. But the prototype of this is human ethics. Vegetarianism, for example, arises from the transference to animals of the idea of suffering. The animal suffers. It is because we, as human, know what suffering is that we can have this obligation. 9

Bobby cannot truly suffer; Bobby cannot truly have a face; Levinas has taken the Kantian ethic and reformulated it in his own terms. As the measure of all things, Man has a duty to himself only, but inasmuch as the animal is like him in some ways and he will become callous toward humans should he mistreat animals, Man has a duty regarding the animal. ro And so, too, do we grant the animal some semblance of a face-distorted from its pure human form-and some relief from suffering. The animal's face is not his own-it is a reflection only. And the same holds for animal · suffering. rr What could Bobby be missing? Is his snout too pointy to constitute a face? Is his nose too wet? Do his ears hang low; do they wobble to and fro? How can this not be a face? The truly interesting debates begin with flies and octopi, with worms and jellyfish. Perhaps with crabs-those eyes! But a dog? The dog's face is all there, all familiar, and with all the expressions of sorrow, accusation, guilt, and joy that we have come to know-not out of a hollow transference from us to them, but a bilateral pairing. 12 I know what expectation is partly because I looked into my dog's eyes when she would rush to the back door in preface to our going out to explore a frozen stream, a newly tilled field, a distant corner of the woods where we found blackberries that stained our lips, our skin. Did Levinas learn nothing of hope from Bobby? Separated by hundreds of miles but tied together by the same war- the same evil occupying a different homeland- Erazim Kohak's father was a

Lost Dog, or, Levinas Faces the Animal

~~:~m

25

prisoner of the Gestapo in Czechoslovakia for the first half of the 1940s. He lived his life on a wooden bench in a basement of the Petschek Palace, sitting all day while waiting to be called for interrogation. The Nazis imprisoned his body and further controlled his face, his gaze: he was to stare straight ahead, glancing neither left nor right, his eyes fixed on the mass of the whitewashed wall before him. Shackled in a demonic Platonic cave, Kohak had not even shadows on the bright surface to keep him company. How can one remain human? How can eyes return, thrown into a sea of white without even the faces of fishes to look back?

And then one day a fly appeared, lit directly on the wall before the man's gaze, and proceeded to clean its wings with its hind legs. Not a simple spot of black on white, but a triumph of life in a horizonless expanse of death, the fly returned Kohak's eyes. Rejoicing, the man could see and celebrate the detail others might miss: he could recognize and take a leg for a leg, a face for a face, a gift for a gift. And for this soul who could see hope when it was offered, there would be no later backpedaling, no philosophical tracts subtly ridiculing the wandering animal. "It was a touch of life," recalls his son, now a world famous environmental philosopher, "{and until} his death in 1996 my father never killed flies ... {but} would catch them under a glass and take them outside ... with a word of thanks. I do it after him to this day.m3 Flies are on the wall all around me. Dogs wander in and out of my life. The animal's body is Here and There. The animal's face is everywhere.

The cheetah tries to hide hers in a camouflage of spots. A butterfly tries to augment his with predatory eyes stenciled to his wings. For the first few · weeks of each season the rabbits are fooled by the face of our inflatable owl in the vegetable garden (they soon catch on- the face is dynamic and alive; it cannot be captured in plastic). To deny the animal face is to fear the demand it will make. Levinas admits, "the beginning of language is in the face ... {that} in its silence, it calls you.m4 What need, then, is there for that verbal, human manifestation of logos? The animal's silent face is authority. And if Levinas is right, if this authority requests rather than insists, if "one can do the opposite of what the face demands {because} the face is not a force, ... authority is often without force," 15 then the face of the animal must be seen as especially demanding-politically meek, historically ignored, as it is. Levinas can offer no description of the face. When asked to define its necessary characteristics- the needed bits and pieces-he rightly eludes a physical laundry list and speaks instead in ethical terms. The face is not a representation, not a thing that comes to hand; it is a means to access: "it needs something. It is going to ask you for something."16 This is what makes our ethical relationships with animals incalculable: I do not know

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what request will be made. I cannot capture it with rights or balanced utility summations, and therefore know what to do-have completed my duty-up front. Being together means sharing a good and sharing a life, and I cannot understand any of this without the transcendence of the faceto-face relationship. Levinas has become a Kantian, but I know many dogs who are Levinasian.

Along the streets in Maracaibo I see the faces. I will only come to know a few-the city is too large, too alienating. These are Bobby's Latino cousins, communitarians, wanderers. It is important to remember: no one's pet visited the camp. Bobby, too, was a perro vagabundo, and in this way yet again different from Ulysses' dog. Perhaps Bobby was like this shorthaired shepherd; perhaps they are both more like Ulysses than his dog. Here, an island of builders, leveling mountains, and making the Earth smoke. There, an island of prisoners, the presence of evil, the chance for a hero to hint at hope before wandering on. From the city to the jungle, to Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World somewhere in the heart ofVenezuela. For two days we made our way up a good-sized river, some hundreds of yards broad, and dark in colour, but transparent, so that one could usually see the bottom. The affluents of the Amazon are, half of them, of this nature, while the other half are whitish and opaque .... Twice we came across rapids, and in each case made a portage of half a mile or so to avoid them .... Of animal life there was no movement amid the majestic vaulted aisles which stretched from us as we walked, but a constant movement far above our heads told of that multitudinous world of snake and monkey, bird and sloth, which lived in the sunshine, and looked down in wonder at our tiny, stumbling figures in the obscure depths immeasurably below them. At dawn and at sunset the howler monkeys screamed together and the parakeets broke into shrill chatter, but during the hot hours of the day, only the full drone of insects like the beat of a distant surf, filled the ear, while nothing moved amid the solemn vistas of stupendous trunks, fading away into the darkness which held us in. '7

Preparing for a trip to Venezuela, one learns nothing from Conan Doyle. (I am reminded of a German of my acquaintance who felt confident before his trip to Puerto Rico because he could speak Latin. ':Adverte dexter, sis!" he planned to tell the taxi drivers, offering directions back to the hotel.) It is not just that there are no dinosaurs in Venezuela, but that there is life everywhere-if one is not so quick to separate the human and animal worlds. The lost world of Conan Doyle's novel is lost, I take it, not in space but in time. It is true that the Europeans "discover" the lost world (Professor Challenger, at one point, is called the "Columbus of science"-named for the conqueror who sailed the ocean blue in 1492, the curiously same number of Levinas' concentration camp, markers- both- of internment

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and the mad desire for conquest), but this is not the same as "recover."The latter indicates that something was lost and then found; the former gives no indication of prior knowledge of the thing's existence. "Lost" is said in many ways. It is juxtaposed with both winning and finding. One can lose something and one can be lost.

When we lose instead of win, there is a permanence to loss that appears to make it different from losing, for example, the car keys. The keys, under the status lost, seem capable of being found. But the permanent loss of, say; the World Series can never be undone. Still, it is not the notion of competition-of winning versus losing-that is troubling here. It is this permanence. For we can lose our virginity to a loved one, lose a loved one to death, or lose a weekend to alcohol: all permanent losses with no mirrorpossibilities of winning. The issue, however, is still more complex. That which is lost can never truly be found. All loss is permanent. The lost dog who makes his way home is found to be a new dog. Lost love is never regained-even with the same person-but can only be replaced by another. Ulysses always returns a new man. The search for what is lost, then, is always doomed. Yet we must search. The categories of lost and found have a weird logic not unlike the giving and receiving of the gift. When the gift is received it demands a new giving and thus is something other than a true gift. 18 So, too, does losing demand a search, although what we find is never what we lost; and thus, why look? When something or someone is lost, we feel the loss as a present absence. How easy it would be if "lost" meant "gone." But the lost love is with us still, achingly; emptily intended. We search her out the way the tongue probes the missing tooth; the pain of a lost parent is the pain of the phantom limb, here and not-here. Being lost is a special form of absence. This is how the jaguar lost and found his eyes-new eyes to see a new world. This is how fire remakes the old into the new. This is why traveling eyes, swimming eyes, flying eyes, are disembodied but not lost: the whole cat travels with his eyes through the sea; the return at the moment of the song is a return but not a recovery. This is how the buzzard came to turn death into birth, the light of fire into the light of a soul, loss into gain. But when one is lost one's self, the phenomenology is different. My Here becomes nameless, anchored only to my bodily presence. The nexus ofTheres that surround me becomes unfamiliar, inhabited by unfamiliar Others. I do not lose my communitarian nature, but I feel I am different, differently constituted by these Others and this place. To distant Others I may be presenced as absent. To myself, I am present in the u~own. The dogs of Exodus u:7 did not lose their voices. On the night of the death of the first-born of Egypt, the Israelites will be spared, explains Levinas, and to "celebrate this high mystery of man ... 'not a dog shall growl.' m9 The Hebrew literally gives us "not a dog will sharpen his tongue," an unusual expression in this context reasonably translated by

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Levinas into a growl, yet losing in the translation the sense in which there is here a fear of the animal's language: to speak one needs to sharpen one's tongue, to prepare to puncture the silence. If the dog barks, his contribution to the conversation will not be dull; he has something to say. And yet if we prepare ourselves to hear it-to hear it truly-we risk being harmed, risk injury from his ability to speak as much as from what he has to say. We risk our status. Thus it is not just that the dogs of Egypt will be on the side of the Israelites, but that they will not force the Israelites to question their human superiority. Still, this is not of the dogs' own choosing. Levinas sees the dogs' silence as an act of friendship, as ushering in a debt that cannot be repaid. But it is not clear that the dogs are choosing to stay quiet. God is holding their sharp tongues, not allowing them to speak. God, we must remember, is making distinctions clear this night. Though he slaughters the children of the Pharaoh and the slave and the cattle, the Lord is not collapsing these beings all together. They are simply non-Israelites. This is why He silences the dogs: "But against any of the Israelites not even a dog will sharpen his tongue against either people or animals that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel." The Lord, in fact, makes many distinctions. There are problems here if one thinks too much. The dogs of Egypt could not be said to have lost their voices unless they were thought to have possessed them in the first place, and Levinas is clear that the animal has no language. Even Bobby, who is said to be a "descendant of the dogs of Egypt" and whose "friendly growling, his animal faith, was born from the silence of his forefathers on the banks of the Nile,"20 is not really sharpening his tongue when he greets the returning prisoners. But the lineage Levinas claims for Bobby is intriguing. There is an equation, he seems to be saying, between the silenced growls that attested to Israeli/human dignity in Egypt and Bobby's vocal growling that did the same in Nazi Germany. But to equate the two in this way is to see Bobby's growl as an act of ventriloquism, as a sign of a present yet distant God making clear that He still recognizes distinctions. The Lord will force the dog to testify to this either through holding his tongue or through plucking his vocal chords and forcing out a growl. Either way, the dog does not speak. Levinas cannot hear Bobby. Perhaps he cannot even hear himsel£

"Language," writes Levinas, "does not begin with the signs that one gives, with words. Language is above all the fact of being addressed." 21 And yet did not the prisoners of camp 1492 address Bobby? "We called him Bobby, an exotic name."22 Isn't naming and calling out, and anticipating, seeing, and greeting one who is cherished a form of address? And is this not then a recognition of the Other's language, of logos, of the possibility of a tongue sharpened for good, for the chance to cut through the loneliness and the despair? This exotic name, this specific address, even, is not Rex or Fido or Spot or

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their German or French equivalents. It is the name of a foreign human Other: "Bobby," the shortened name for the cherished "Robert," comes from a twist on "Robin," as in Robin Hood. "Robert" is, literally, the bold, stout, night thief And so, though Levinas comes close to suggesting that Bobby gives some,thing to the prisoners, the name they choose for their address belies the greater fear that something is still taken away. Bobby, that is, will play the part of the inferior who reminds the men of their (constructed) humanity; but in his naming there is the clear indication that Bobby has the potential to take as well. On some level, Levinas must think that if something is taken it will thus be taken justly. The Nazis are evil, there is no debate; but among men and dogs, who ends up being the rich and who ends up being the poor in this forest is still up for grabs. Bobby is not only a reminder of one's humanity; he is redistributor of truth. If we listen. Levinas cannot be accused of "attaching too much importance to what 'goes into {one's} mouth' and not enough to what comes out."2 3 He, in the end, cares for neither: he will continue to eat meat and will continue to ignore what Bobby says. Coming close to caring about both is not good enough when the stakes are so high. But the meaning is lost on Levinas. Passover comes and goes. The chosen are saved, the dogs keeptheir silence, the Pharaoh's heart is hardened. Patience does not always triumph over evil. But soon there will be freedom, a joyous sad freedom that is not the final word but merely the beginning of further struggles and provocations. It is a freedom that will require loss, require us to be lost together, wanderers of a desert world without a signpost toward home. And in Venezuela, safe though disoriented, I live a privileged life. From a top window I watch as the shepherd climbs little mountains of dirt-e/ rey de !a montana- and barks, hoping someone will try to chase him of£ Half a world away, ecologist Robert Michael Pyle, searching for Bigfoot, once got lost. In retrospect, embarrassed, he looked back on his time and remarked: {n}o other animal has ever been lost. Disoriented, maybe. Temporarily confused as to location. But unless tossed in a rat's maze or transported far from home like a bad bear, every creature knows exactly where it is at every waking moment. Each "inferior" animal brain carries its own global positioning device and Geographic Information System as standard operation equipment. AI least this is what I believe about the essential nature of wild organisms: by definition they are situated. Only people get lost. 2 4

I respect Dr. Pyle's work-especially his excursions in search of our long lost hairy siblings-but there is nothing right in this passage. Shall we work backward? I fear his definition of"person'' is suspect. I want to hear mo~e about "being situated" (I imagine he attributes it to animals rather than humans because the modern, Liberal person is supposed to be rootless, ready to relocate when Bill Gates snaps his fingers, happy to abandon family and friends because, after all, there is always E-mail to keep us

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together). I contest the notion that there are clearly wild as opposed to domesticated organisms. I will fight to my last breath that any of us has an essential nature in one of these categories. 2 5 I want to resist thinkingeven metaphorically-that animals are fleshy technology; it leads to Descartes' robots, Malebranche's brutality, and Kant. It leads to no good. I ask us to think about the examples chosen as counterevidence. A rat lost in a scientist's maze? There is no home in a rat's maze; how could the rat be lost? The maze, the laboratory, is dystopia. The troublesome bear loses home not even because he displaces humans from theirs, but because he threatens their vacation. Neither rat nor bear got There (instead of Here) on his own; both were abducted, both were forced into the unknown. And this much, at least, is true: I have known confused, disoriented, and lost animals. The labels are not synonymous. What romanticism Pyle evokes! What a desire for mythical lost feral knowledge. The guilty imperialist projects a purity onto the savage he seeks to enslave in a hidden hope that "we" are truly different. And yet the abandoned dog returns a hundred miles to his home through unknown country; the hummingbird flies three days without stopping across the sea, unerringly returning to her Venezuelan winter refuge. What, then, does it mean to be situated? Must one have a home in order to become lost? Can we understand "home" in a noncapitalist manner, free of mortgages and building codes? Can we imagine it in a nonhuman manner-a way of belonging, a place to be without a codified mailing address? Are the hummingbirds, like me, away from home when in South America, yet fully appreciating their situation? The belief that an animal cannot be lost is not the belief that an animal is situated, but that an animal cannot be appropriately situated. Home, for us, has come to mean a fabrication, a construct to shelter us from what we deem Other, the unknown, the natural world. But this nature is where the anima/lives, goes the thinking. How can she be away from home? One river is as good as the next; any mountain will do. To say that the animal cannot be lost is to strip her of home. There is, as well, a residue of Levinas' patronization in the claima sense in which the animal is child-like, without a will or a direction. Max Scheler separates the human and the animal this way: The animal hears and sees-without knowing that it does so .... For the animal there are only those factors in the environment that are determined by attraction and repulsion. The monkey who jumps hither and yonder lives, as it were, in successive states of ecstasy. ... It does not have a "will" that outlasts the drives and their changing states.... An animal always arrives, as it were, elsewhere than at the destination at which it originally aimed.> 6

Unable to control its passions, Scheler's animal cannot maintain the plan, cannot avoid the temptation of straying off course. Each voyage

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would, in effect, be pointless. How can one be lost if there is no place to be going? To say that the animal cannot be lost is to strip him of a will. There are lost dogs. There are wandering dogs. And anyone who has seen both knows there is a difference. The agony of the lost dog is the agony of the blind jaguar. The agony of the lost dog is what drives him to search for a home a 100 miles away. Hearing only those stories in which he succeeds, we imagine any animal capable of the feat. The majority, of course, leave Penelope forever waiting. Outside of Venezuela, across the water, home, it will be thought that I romanticize homelessness. In America, wandering dogs struggle to survive. Most, though, maintain their body weight; most are accepted (if only in the sense that other wandering animals are not accepted). 2 7 If they avoid traffic, the dog catcher, the soap maker, they can lead their lives; but it is hard. In Venezuela they never receive handouts; they share in what is theirs. Each family offers a bit and elperro vagabundo moves on. We think him homeless because he has no leash. His home is the neighborhood. It is not to say that all dogs belong outside, then, but it is to recognize that a neighborhood can be home, a place to belong. These categories trouble us. Perhaps it is due, in part, to the fact that we have come to the city rather than the jungle. In the city one needs a home, which is to say a rent payment, a mortgage. I think of Harry Theodore in New York, a homeless man with eleven short hair German pointers living with him under a cardboard roof on a cliff hanging above the railroad tracks. With his social security check he feeds and provides shots for the dogs-$587 a month is not enough to rent a human home in the city, but supplemented with turkey from the local deli it is sufficient to feed a family of twelve; and even the local ASPCA must admit that the dogs are well cared for. Still, they are considered strays: how can a homeless man provide a home for a dog? ("He is a stray himselfl" go the secret cries. "What sin he must have committed to have fallen so low!") The ASPCA cannot help but find it troubling; the dogs should be spayed and neutered. Eilene Leevy, running an anirrial rescue program on Long Island, finds it disgraceful. Of the dogs, she says "they're not living a good life." 28 She announces this with a look of sad disapproval-of Theodore and his friends. She announces this standing in front of the rows of internment cages at her shelter. And of course, she is, in part, right. Theodore and his dogs are not living the American dream. And New York is in America, not Venezuela. The animals in Leevy's cages-will they have their sex organs mutilated? Will they be murdered when no one claims them, no one wants to provide them with more than a cardboard roof? Will they live the good life? Theodore is no romantic; life is hard, he laughs. When we define what a home means and then deny it to some, we fail them. But we fail them twofold: in the defining and the denying. My homeland has failed us all- human and animal alike. It has failed Theodore doubly. And if they are netted and taken away; it will fail eleven short hair German pointers.

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One cannot release dogs into the streets in the United States where a home has very nearly been defined as the opposite of the street. It is not really the street itself that is problematic, but all of the accompanying social goods that are denied when a home is not possessed, and all of the social perceptions that go along with "home" and "homeless." Homeless humans find the circularity of it all nearly impossible. To get a home they need to pay for one with a job. To get a job they need to list a home address. This is not just a political and economic problem; it is a philosophically conceptual problem as well. Theodore needs to be allowed a shot at the good life, an equal chance to realize his potential and achieve success. But can we not at the same time question how we define "success," question the very idea of the American dream itself? Homeless dogs in the United States need care and the basic goods that come from having a home; but can we not question how we defme "care," question the very idea of home itself? There is nothing wrong with a dog in the family, a dog with an address. But it requires a moral vigilance not to become a master to a pet, not to see every animal as a stray until it is under our control-physically (in a house, in a cage) and conceptually(as a house pet, as astray). There is nothing to be said in general. As is always the case, the challenge is specific to the place, the time, and the type of creatures-human and otherwise-trying to make a friendship work. Their bodies overlapped nearly to the point of becoming one. A green head appeared from the middle of the jumble, a dry green mouth slowly opening, carefully closing-like a vision from my childhood, women from my great-grandmother's nursing home kissing excess lipstick onto a sandwiched Kleenex on a Saturday night. The water was two centimeters deep, just enough so that if the three sea turtles were separated, they could stay submerged or stretch their necks above the waterline to breathe and dry their heads. But the only escape from the water completely, from the plastic bottom against which their tiny nails scraped, was to pile Yertle-like one on top of the other. Their stacking skills, still, were not so well developed, and often the attempt left only a jumbled mess of turtles. In Maracaibo I came to care for my niece's sea turtles, buying a large blue tub to replace the small, clear box; filling it with stones-purchased stones-to form islands; changing their water; feeding them, like a zookeeper, with compassion. It was a job of tending and protection. How could I have been more than a good steward? How could I approach them in any way other than their superior? What could I be to the three other than a caretaker? And then one night while I was doing dishes in the back washroom; a black lizard the size of my thumb crawled in through the barred window above the sink and sat on the wet cement near the faucet. He moved impossibly fast; his toes were spread impossibly wide in a graceful fan at the end of each foot; he stuck impossibly to the dripping wall of the sink, cranked one eye in my direction and turned to face me. Self-conscious, I froze. The moment was pregnant with possibility.

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The turtles, too, looked at me all day long. I think they came to know me. Eventually they didn't swim away when I approached as they did with others. I didn't know if they smelled me or heard my voice each time, reassuring them as I drew near. I am just a philosopher. I didn't study them, and I didn't know them long. But I imagine that they learned my face. My clothes changed each day; what other visual sign could there have been? So we looked at each other and came to develop the best relationship we could. With the noblest intentions I could aspire only to be the keeper of their plastic home. But the lizard.... His motions, his thoughts were unscripted. The relationship was open on both ends. We could become anything together. I wanted to please the turtles so that they would be as comfortable as possible and perhaps not hate me. I wanted to please the lizard so he would stay and perhaps let me get to know him. The difference is not just that the latter was free to leave, though this did create possibilities for us that were not there with the turtles. It is not a Libertarian's freedom that I wish to celebrate; a freedom to pick up and leave and not be bothered by others. It is that I, too, was able to become something new, something unknown, something better. I am not sure if this is ever possible with pet sea turtles. It is probably possible with a dog. I work to make it possible with life around me. How easily each relationship could degenerate without the constant care that love and friendship require. How easy it is to slip into a preordained role of dominance in this fallen world. Remember, warns Levinas, before paradise was lost, Adam was a vegetarian. The Pem6n Indians of Southeastern Venezuela say that when you are asleep your soul wanders and can get lost in an animal. A man sees his brother sleeping on the floor of the rainforest. A lizard crawls under the belly of the sleeping man, squeezing between flesh and soil. It emerges and runs a few feet away into the half-buried skull of a long-dead cow. It twists and turns, trapped and disoriented, moving from chamber to chamber-paths, cavities, and compartments that have formed from the deteriorating bone until it finds its way out and disappears into the jungle. The sleeping man awakens and says "Brother, I dreamt that I was lost in a large house, going from room to room, panicked, until I finally found my way out, my escape." And the brother understood, because he knew that the lizard had carried the soul of his sibling while he slept. 2 9

From the belly is born new life. It becomes the thought of a cow; it explores death, the holes with which death leaves us, the presence of the absence of bodies, our interchangeable bodies. We know now that the Pem6n get lost. Home is not a house. Paradise will not be a sublet in the Amazon. "In my father's mansion there are many rooms," is a threat, not a promise of reward. I wonder: Who visited me while I washed dishes?

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Does the lizard not have a soul of its own? Yes, but a human soul can visit, invited, piggybacked. What then is the lizard? An honored courier? A glorified beast ofburden? A friend. This is not Scheler's animal on the rainforest floor, on the wet cement. He is willful. This is not Conan Doyle's jungle. The lizard is so much like us- no! we are so much like the lizard- that this union is blessed, this body is an appropriate gift, a temporary home for a wandering human. The giving flesh does not reject the respectful xenotransplant. And the panic, too, is shared: we do not want to be lost to death; the brother and the lizard do not want to make a home of death. Animals do not merely perish. It is something the two E(I)mmanuels could never understand. Yet this is the cost of all odysseys-the jaguar feeds death to purchasenew eyes, new life, a new way of being. Eyes swimming through the water, eyes darting home through the air are still mine, but when I am eaten by the Other-as I am bound to be, my eyes, my flesh, my bones licked clean- I will no longer be me. Should I return in the muscle of a fish, in the blood of a buzzard, in the toes of a lizard, you may not recognize me. The lost dog who makes his way home is always found to be a new dog. And still, we cast our eyes to the sea.

Notes 1. Emmanuel Levinas, "The Name of a Dog," in Sean Hand, trans., Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 153· 2.

Ibid.

3· Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit (Freiberg: Alber, 1983).

4· David Clark, "On Being 'The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany'," in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, eds., Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in ~stern History (New York: Routledge, 1997), 172. 5· "Puppies Behind Bars," EXTRA, first broadcast 19 March 2000. 6. Clark, "On Being 'The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany'," in Animal Acts 190-191. 7· Ibid., 167. 8. Levinas, "The Name of a Dog," in Difficult Freedom, 152-153.

9· Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley, "The Paradox of Mortality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas," in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, eds., Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, trans., The Provocation ofLevinas: Rethinking the Other (London: Routledge, 1988), 169, 171-J72.

See the second part of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1959). 11. John Llewelyn, ''Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)," in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds., Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 234-245. 12. H. Peter Steeves, Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), esp. chapters 1-3. 13. Erazim Kohak, The Green Halo: A Bird's-Eye View of Ecological Ethics (Chicago: Open Court, 2ooo), 156. 10.

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Levinas, "The Paradox of Mortality," in Difficult Freedom 169. Ibid. Ibid., I68-I69. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost WOrld (Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, !987), 62-64. 18. For more on the madness of the gift, one might see Jacques Derrida, in Peggy Kamuf, trans., Given Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 19. Levinas, "The Name of a Dog," in Difficult Freedom, 152. 20. Ibid., 153. 21. Levinas, "The Paradox of Mortality," in Difficult Freedom, !69-170. 22. Levinas, "The Name of a Dog," in Difficult Freedom, I53· 2J. Ibid., I5I. 24. Robert Michael Pyle, Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 254. 25. At least of the type he implies. We are, I believe, communitarians. 26. Max Scheler, in Hans Meyerhoff, trans., Man~ Place in Nature (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), 40-41. 27. Alan M. Beck, The Ecology of Stray Dogs Dogs: A Study ofFree-Ranging Urban Animals (Baltimore: York Press, 1973), 27-32. 28. "Harry Theodore's Dogs," EXTRA, first broadcast 8 April2ooo. 29. This story is based on my translation of a Pem6n story retold in Fray Cesareo de Armellada, Cuentos y No Cuentos (Caracas: Instituto Venezolano de Lenguas Indigenas, 1988), 46-47. 14. 15. !6. 17.

CHAPTER 2

URSUS AMERICANUS: THE IDEA OFABEAR Melanie Fox

"I am afraid ofbears up here," one sturdily imisted. I felt it wasn't bears, but the idea ofbears that he feared: the umeen, dark forces that lurk in the forest ofour mind. -Gary Snyder

he sound of splintering glass, the mesh, metal screen being torn from the window, shakes me. Instinctively I awake shouting, without thinking, still half-dreaming of something mundane and pleasant. The rotting wooden frame that holds the pane falls onto the foot of my bed, pushed in by the black bear outside my cabin. It feels heavy and oppressive on my feet. Sitting up with a sigh, I feel around for the switch on the lamp. Faint red numbers on the alarm clock read2:13. I've barely fallen asleep, and already they've begun, the intrusions, as they have every night for the last month. Bits of glass shimmer in a reflection of light on the multicolor cotton blanket a friend brought from his last visit to Tijuana. I hesitate. Listen for a moment. Wonder if she is still there. Waiting. For me to flicker the light briefly, decide it's nothing, and settle back to sleep. Waiting to approach the door again, the back of the cabin, the other . window, panting low, scratching, and reaching for whatever she believes lies inside the flimsy walls. I listen for her, the deep hollow grunts that echo in the opaque darkness. I am waiting, too. In a nightly ritual, the bears start all over again with their relentless determination to get inside this cabin. Sometimes as many as three different bears awaken me on the same night. The black bears this summer have been more active, more destructive than in any other summer since I started working in Sequoia National Park four seasons ago. In both Sequoia and Kings Canyon, the sister park that borders Sequoia National Forest to the north, over 300 bear reports have already been filed this summer. The bears have caused tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage to vehicles and buildings. And the season will last for another six weeks. Six more weeks before I pack my belongings into boxes and leave to spend the winter in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

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In my head I tally the days left on the calendar and try to guess just how many more confrontations can possibly occur between the bears and the humans who live here in Giant Forest. How many more nights will I spend like this, restless, awake, waiting to chase them away from my home? Since I moved into this cabin at the Giant Forest Lodge, a full night's sleep has eluded me for almost a month. I've started tallying the nights too. When I was a little girl, my family used to joke that I could sleep through hurricanes, earthquakes, probably even tornadoes. Here, though, I sleep lightly, superficially, overly sensitive to the slightest noise or movement outside. My cabin is at the outer edge of the tourist lodgings, the walls made from slatted pine boards so old they no longer fit together tightly like a safe dwelling should. The wood is cracked and graffiticovered, remnants of all the summer employees before me. The cabin has settled slightly with the shifting of the moist forest ground, and at night narrow bands of pale light come in through the walls. Few other cabins are nearby. One side of my house overlooks a shallow wooded ravine and stream, and the sandy volleyball court where we sometimes play against the park rangers. I am isolated. A perfect bear target. Of the eight species in the world, the only bear that lives in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Sequoia National Park is Ursus americanus, the American black bear. While all bears share a common ancestor, little is known about black bears' evolutionary history in North America, though their species is believed to have arrived early in the Pleistocene era (about one million years ago). Black bears are native only to North America, with a range that stretches from southern portions of Canada into Mexico. For most people "bear" brings to mind not the black bear, but Ursus arctos, the brown bear, the most widely known and diverse species of bears. In North America, the Kodiak and grizzly are both members of the brown bear family. In California, black and brown bears used to coexist throughout the state. Grizzlies are now extinct here; the last-known brown bear in California was shot and killed near Sequoia National Park at Horse Corral Meadow in 1922. To call them "black" bears is misleading- I have seen bears as varied as their individual personalities. They can range from blond, to cinnamon, to deep black, still part of the same genus and species. Even related bears can be very different colors. Black bears in Sequoia are much smaller than brown bears, with adult males rarely reaching even 400 pounds (compared to an adult male grizzly, who can weigh up to 1,500 pounds). Female black bears are considerably smaller than the males, up to 250 pounds when fully grown. Black bears breed faster and more often than browns but live shorter lives, and for a black bear to reach the age of twenty-five is unusual. Black bears also differ from brown bears in the physical shape and size of their teeth and feet, adapted for the differences in habitat and diet. The black bears in Sequoia are exquisite, beautiful creatures. I often watch them from a distance, admiring the way they move gently and gracefully for such weighty, cumbersome animals, hardly rustling the tall

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meadow grasses and plants. Some cubs are small, weighing only ten ·pounds, less than the dogs I see on leashes at cluttered sites in the Lodgepole campground. By the end of a summer season of foraging in the meadows, scavenging in campgrounds, in dumpsters and trashcans, others are significantly larger. Although black bears are technically considered carnivores, in Sequoia they eat little meat. Most of their diet comes from various plants and insects- they love carpenter ants and yellow jackets and will spend hours overturning logs and rocks to find them-and in the fall, acorns. Only occasionally will black bears scavenge from carcasses left by the park's other animals or actively hunt for meat. Adequate food supplies for black bears can be scarce, less plentiful than for brown bears, and they often have to work much harder to prepare for the coming winter seasons. I think of them more as omnivores, eating whatever is closest and easiest to find, unconcerned and not particularly fussy as long as they can sustain themselves. Sierran black bears in the wild are disinterested, timid, independentthey care little for me when I encounter them on the path to work. Even when I hike in the backcountry, my loud clapping is enough to scare a bear away into the dense forest. But the bears who scratch at my window every night, they are no longer truly wild. They have become used to humans, unafraid. Many of them no longer pick wild berries and tear apart fallen logs in search of ants. Instead, their "normal" behavior is to follow human habits in search of food. Black bears unaccustomed to people usually forage in the dim light of dawn and dusk; the bears who try to break into my cabin instead wait until humans are asleep and scrounge for whatever is left behind. They've stopped relying on their instinctive survival mechanisms. These are bears that will eventually die, not only because they have become too much like us, but also because they have come to rely too much on us. The wildlife biologists usually distinguish between two types of "problem'' bears. Bears considered "habituated" aren't generally dangerous; they have simply lost their innate fear of humans, unlike most wild black bears. In Sequoia, these bears refuse to be chased away, often staring back at me with what seems like a strange sense of rebelliousness, defiance. More problematic and potentially dangerous are "food-conditioned" bears. These bears have learned that humans are an easy food source. They actively, often aggressively, do anything to try to get that food. Like the bears that scratch at my front door every night. Tonight, I still don't turn on the lamp in my cabin. I brush off the broken glass and pull the dusty green curtains away from the window, following the bear's familiar outline in the moonlight with my eyes. If she comes too close, I'll shout loudly again and take an oak branch from the woodpile by the stove, and beat it rhythmically on the front door. I won't call the park rangers in the morning to ftll out another bear report, even though it's what I should do. How many dozens of reports would be mine

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alone if I reported every incident, every night? Although my intentions may be misplaced, I don't want the burden of knowing I've contributed to their destruction. After having lived alongside black bears, my own understanding of these animals has changed. When I first came to Sequoia, the bears' cultural and historical associations influenced my idea of them. Images of bears are pervasive; they exist in prehistoric cave drawings, oral legends, fairy tales and fables, contemporary literature and film, in the plush toys we give to children. Even the flag of California still proudly "bears" the image of the grizzly, despite its having been extinct here for over seventy years. Perhaps these images are inspired by the immense size and seeming ferocity of the brown bear; we've come to associate it with power, danger, untamed places. In fact, only black bear populations continue to grow, while many brown bears are disappearing. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that fewer than 1,ooo brown bears remain in the continental United States, found only in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, and possibly Colorado. Approximately so,ooo brown bears used to roam across nearly every state in the lower forty-eight; the remaining brown bear populations currently occupy only 2 percent of their original range. My own relationship, though, is less informed by the idea of bears as dangerous and powerful than by personal experience with the black bears that live in this forest. It's difficult for me to relate to the bear as a metaphor for wild country. My sense of respect for bears is strong, but it comes from a different place, one in which humans and bears are inseparable. The bears' forest habitat here is not defined by huge, open expanses ofland such as can be found in, say, Alaska, where Denali National Park alone covers more than six million acres. Sequoia is large-Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks together cover about 9oo,ooo acres-and stretches far into an undeveloped wilderness that most tourists will never see. But the black bears have learned to thrive easily in their smaller range here, in many of the park's nonsecluded areas. The bears are obvious, highly visible, almost attention seeking; they wander around the parking lot by the cafeteria, forage next to the highway, and scratch on cabin doors at night. It becomes impossiblecto separate my home from that of the bears, no matter how hard I try. Each summer I am fully aware that I am living, however temporarily, in their home, imposing on this home, creating rules about what they should and shouldn't do, enforcing those rules rigidly. The edges of our lives in Sequoia intersect, overlap, and we learn respect for these blurred boundaries. We have to. It's even more difficult to associate the bears with a sense of fear, my fear of their power to kill me- though there's no doubt they could if they really wanted to. I am no longer afraid of the black bears here. They are generally not as aggressive as I've heard grizzlies are, even when unprovoked. Although the actual number of maulings and deaths caused by grizzlies in national parks like Yellowstone and Glacier is very small, the

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few disturbing stories are impossible to forget; they color my image of brown bears and my perception of their relationships with humans. The black bears in Sequoia instead interact with humans only when competing for food. They come to my house late into the night because they have probably found food in this same rickety cabin before, and act only on the strength of that memory. The first bear I ever saw during my first season was a small black yearling, away from his mother to fend for himself for first time. His fur was the exact color of the charred fire marks visible on many of the sequoia trees. I remember only that he was very small and he stepped in my path as I left the communal bathrooms in Pinewood, the employee housing area. That first time I was scared-startled by his presence. He looked at me for a split second and disappeared into the shadows of the forest. It took several minutes for my breathing to calm after he was gone. Whatever sense of fear I once felt has now turned into a stronger sense of protectiveness, particularly for those bears no longer afraid of people. They are the most vulnerable to human carelessness. Most problem bears become problems directly through the actions of humans, usually from improper food storage. Even without contributing directly to their habits, I still feel responsible, as a human, for the problem bears-even for the mother bear who bluff-charged me for ten minutes one Sunday morning, fiercely protecting her cub still trapped in my house. I can't blame the bear who's shattered my window tonight. The radio collar and yellow ear tag glint in the light, and I know she isn't responsible for the pieces of glass and wood I'll sweep up in the morning, or for the window that will have to be replaced. This past winter in the Sierra Nevada · seemed endless, the landscape barren and desolate. The snowfall reached near-record proportions and the bears were forced to do anything they could to find food. The eating habits of most bears-including black bears-correspond directly to the weather and to the availability of food resources. After hibernation, many begin foraging at lower forest elevations and move upward as the summer progresses and the snow melts. If little food is available at the lower elevations, black bears will immediately seek out alternative food sources, often in areas where people are. Confrontations become inevitable. In mild seasons when staple foods like acorns are plentiful, some park bears actually forage at lower elevations all winter rather than entering dormancy in December or January. I don't know which bear has tried to break into my cabin tonight. Several appear regularly at the Lodge, and identifying one with certainty will bring it that much closer to death. In some mistaken way I hope my silence will help save them. The National Park Service and the concessioner for whom I work discourage anthropomorphizing the bears, giving them human or pet names. We are instead instructed to refer to each individual problem bear only by the number stamped in black on the ear tag. After a bear has again tried to knock over the rusty, metal barrels where we store the restaurant's leftover fryer grease, the bear technician will ask two

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questions when she fills out the report: whether I clearly saw the ear tag's number, and whether I can describe the animal's markings. These questions help confirm the identities of problem bears, so that destructive behavior is attributed to the right ones, the really "guilty'' and most troublesome bears. I can only guess that not naming the bears is intended to prevent us from developing relationships with any of them that live in Giant Forest. Numbers, of course, are more impersonal than names. However, many native tribes also follow this custom of not naming the bear. The Ket, a tribe of Siberian Ostyaks, the Blackfeet tribe, and many North American Eskimos believe that the bear hears and understands human language. It is considered impolite and dangerous to criticize the bear or to even speak its name. They use euphemisms for both the bear itself and the act of hunting it. One maintains respect for the bear's spirit and the success of the hunt by refusing to name it. Most of us in Sequoia, though, do secretly name the bears with whom we share the forest. Our naming seems like another form of respect-an expression of respect for each individual bear and a way to avoid placing human beings' importance and well-being above theirs. The tradition of naming the bear raises other questions for me, as a writer. In many ways, the English language is impoverished when it comes to defining and describing humans' relationships to the animal world. Because, after so many seasons, I have come to recognize and know many of the bears in Sequoia, I find it nearly impossible to follow traditional grammatical rules when sharing my experiences. As I write these stories about the bears, I am uncomfortable referring to them as objects, as "it" or "that." I find it easier to describe them as I would a close friend. Here, I say things like, "The bear who broke into my cabin, she was especially determined last night" (in my experience Sequoia's problem bears tend to be female). These human terms are more satisfying, richer, and I believe these terms also translate my experiences more truthfully, more honestly. Whether the bears are named or numbered, I still fmd it difficult not to regard them almost as companions as we try to live together in the sequoia forest. Most are recognizable by sight now; especially the problem bears, and I care about their behavior and what will happen to them. I can't help it. As a result of their trying to break into my cabin every night, this season my idea of the bear has changed in other ways, too. Fear and protectiveness now also bring me to annoyance, at their determination and consistency. Bears, especially cubs, are said to be extremely moody, emotional animals, expressing themselves with a surprisingly wide range of vocal responses. My experiences this summer confirm the truth in this description. The black bears seem almost like pesky younger siblings, tugging at the back of my shirt and asking unanswerable questions, no matter how I try to brush them of£ I can shout at them and chase them (which I do), throw rocks and sticks at them constantly (which I do), but the bears keep returning, determined to find a tasty snack in my house. I have actually

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been awakened by the sound of a bear, fully a quarter ofa mile away, breaking into a building, overturning a restroom trashcan. And, while my responsibility for protecting them and educating the tourists about protecting them overshadows the moments of irritation, I can't help but wish some nights that the bears would just let me sleep. In order to understand their moods, their motivations, and determination, I'm trying to learn to think like a black bear, to figure out what really provokes them to visit this same cabin night after night. Why instead they don't scratch their long, sharp claws at the door of the cabin opposite mine, the one nearest the showers, or the one by the ice machine where some tourists have ignorantly left their cooler outside, candy wrappers in the dirt, so tempting. More than just understanding how they're able to recall distinctly past sources of free food, I want to understand what causes these bears to abandon the way of life they should know in favor of ours. The slightest understanding of their behavior might reveal many of their secrets, this knowledge a path to prevent them from becoming used to humans in the first place. I suspect that the bear whose shadowy outline I still see twenty feet away from my cabin is C91. I know that she is a sow; a mother bear with a couple of year-old cubs and a fondness for entering cabins through the windows. She is one of the more difficult of the dozen or so tagged and collared problem bears in the park. She has become amazingly adept at breaking into old, unstable buildings. At night, I hang a carefully washed, empty soda can to the outside of my door to warn me of a potential intruder bear-many have learned to turn doorknobs with their paws. The black bears in Sequoia are clever and remarkably intelligent animals, particularly when determined to find a source of easy food. The National Park Service has monitored and tracked C91's behavior by radio collar for several seasons. Earlier this year a friend came home from work one night to find a mother and her cubs in his cabin, possibly one of the same bears who scratches at my window every night. He opened the front door to find a sow standing in front of the open refrigerator, food strewn sloppily across the floor. Her two cubs sat quietly on a table, observing intently. He jokes that it was as if the mother were giving her cubs a lesson in the proper way to scavenge food from humans. A true reversal of Robert Southey's 1837 fairy tale, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." I think I can understand C91's behavior. She is simply trying to provide food for her cubs and herself, to ensure their ultimate survival, stealing food from humans because it's so much easier than foraging in the forest. I can almost understand her motivations, too, knowing what it's like to follow the path of least resistance. While I am inextricably linked to my forest home, I've returned here season after season because it's the easiest thing to do. Easier than settling in an unknown place, finding a job, starting over. Sequoia National Park is familiar, comfortable. From the moment of my return I know what my life will be like. Six months of every year, time

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stands nearly still, and I always know what to expect, just like the bears always know where to find food. If I were one of them, I might also sea,rch out the simplest life. The bear outside has wandered away from my cabin. The night air carries the faint sound of humans shouting in the distance, down the hill toward the Personnel Office. She's probably startled some sleeping tourists, people who don't expect to have their vacation interrupted by a bear reaching a swift paw through the window. I wonder if they're scrambling to pull video cameras from their suitcases, if they're standing on the small porch calling to the bear, luring her closer and closer so they can take the perfectly captured image with them back to Europe, Japan, or Los Angeles. After all, every tourist wants to see a bear when visiting Sequoia National Park. Just as I don't blame the bears, I don't always blame the tourists, either. I don't blame them for wanting to see one of these magnificent animals. I can almost forgive them because they don't know any better. They don't realize that when they stop to feed G95, who begs for human food by the side of the highway at the Big Fern turnout, they're doing more than getting a good photographic shot for their friends back home. The tourists are encouraging her, reinforcing the destructive behavior that most of us work so hard to prevent. And, they're contributing to her eventual death, though it may not happen for many more seasons. Yes, I can almost forgive them. Still, appearances are deceptive, and because of their small size, black bears do look harmless and cuddly, like Baloo in Disney's ofJungle Book. In addition to the idea of the bear as powerful, dangerous, and wild, the idea of bears as benign, sweet, and friendly is also pervasive. Look at one of the most familiar role models, Winnie the Pooh: endearingly clumsy, lumbering, kind, but not very smart, and a loyal friend to his human companion Christopher Rc.bin. There's nothing scary or dangerous about Pooh, even when he's focused on finding a pot of the honey he loves so much (in reality, black bears are also said to have a fondness for sweets). Bears are also portrayed as caring and protective; in "Goldilocks," it is the bears who are responsible, compassionate, with strong family ties, and the humans who are manipulative and deceptive. To further convince us of the g0od nature of bears, we have teddy bears, named for president Teddy Roosevelt after a 1902 hunting incident during which he refused to shoot a young bear cub. The popularity of teddy bears has firmly instilled the image of bears as tame and unthreatening. I've always disliked· teddy bears; they seem distrustful somehow. Teddy bears are too happy, always smiling, ever predictable. As a child, I preferred bizarre stuffed animals that carried some sense of mystery, creatures that were foreign and unknown to me except in my imagination: a long, rainbow-striped snake, a raccoon with glassy eyes, a creepy, imaginary monster with long fangs and a hairy furrowed brow. I do own two teddy bears, both stunning, expensive bears made by Steiff, the German company known for creating the first stuffed toy bear

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in 1902. One of the bears was given to me by a family friend at my birth. This bear, fur faded and worn to a dull, cocoa color, does somewhat resemble a wild bear physically, but has the feature of making a curious "bear" noise when turned upside down. The noise sounds much more like a cow, mooing plaintively, than a bear. My other teddy bear is fluffy white, like sweet and spongy campfire marshmallows, and wears a lacy pink collar around her neck. She also makes "bear" noises, breathy, squeaky, mouse-like sounds when you squeeze her perfectly rounded potbelly. Both bears remain unnamed in a dusty cabinet; perhaps it was their un-bearlike qualities that kept me from naming them, as most children do. Even now, I find it hard to respect them. Tourists forget that most bears, although we perceive them to be good natured and harmless, are still wild animals. While the black bears in Sequoia aren't generally dangerous to humans (in the twentieth century, there were only forty-three reported deaths caused by North American black bears), they aren't animals that have lived in artificial zoo enclosures or performed tricks in a circus ring. Even the bears that are now used to humans can be unpredictable. More importantly, tourists don't realize that human ignorance causes bears to be destroyed nearly every season. Humans have tried to "tame" bears throughout history. The gypsies of Eastern Europe used to force bears to walk over red-hot metal while they played music in the background. Eventually having learned to associate music with the sensation of intense pain, the bears would begin to "dance" whenever they heard music. In California, bear fights were a popular weekend and holiday activity from 1816 to the early 188os. Grizzly bears would be placed in arenas with Spanish bulls, while spectators cheered on the fighting animals. Enthusiasts interested in a sporting event could also find deliberately organized confrontations between bears and wild cats such as cougars and tigers. Similar practices continued into the early part of the twentieth century in Sequoia National Park. Here, the National Park Service operated a tourist site called "Bear Hill" from about 1920 to 1940. Rangers would take the daily garbage to this small, dirt arena. Hundreds of visitors would crowd themselves into wooden bleachers and wait excitedly for the park's black bears to come rummage through the trash. Years later, when dozens of bears showed up nightly at Bear Hill and rangers were faced with unpleasant human-bear encounters, the staff finally realized that entire bear families now preferred garbage to their natural food sources. It was only then that this appalling twenty-year-old practice was finally abandoned. Remnants of these long-ago practices still exist today. Park visitors unintentionally store food in places where the bears are certain to find it. Black bears have a highly acute, long-range sense of smell. They can smell a peanut butter sandwich or a bag of potato chips in an automobile trunk. Anything with a scent, even the fragrance of toothpaste, deodorant, or perfume, is enough to attract them. The bears in Sequoia have a particular

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fondness for the sweet strawberry-scented air fresheners many people hang from the rearview mirrors of their cars. Last season, I had left work one evening and was walking through a nearby parking lot. I saw a large, adult male bear standing on his hind legs next to a small imported sedan. The bear placed its forepaws on the car's roof and rocked it back and forth violently. I yelled, threw a couple of rocks, and chased it away. Just as I did, a tourist who had been videotaping the bear came over to me. "What the hell are you doing?" he barked, waving his arm in the direction of the retreating bear. "You screwed up my shot." Incredulous, I just stared at him, not believing he could possibly be serious. "Idiot," he muttered as he turned and reached for the hand of his young daughter. She had watched our entire interaction. My hands trembled with anger. I wanted to shout back that people like him have taken the wildness away from these animals. They have turned them into problem bears. Did he know that if this had been his car the insurance company probably wouldn't pay for the repairs once the 300-pound bear had forcefully peeled the metal roof away like the top of a sardine tin? Did he know that once bears learn to associate humans with food, they break into cars and cabins even if they simply suspect there might be food inside? I have seen a friend's truck gutted and mangled only because he had accidentally dropped a candy bar wrapper on the floor. Did this man know that the National Park Service issues fines for feeding the bears, for leaving food where they can find it, even unintentionally? I locked eyes with this man's daughter. What I wanted to tell her, the explanation that welled up in the back of my throat, was what eventually happens to the bears because of human ignorance. In Sequoia, bear management strategies are twofold. The most effective methods are proactive: providing bear-proof containers for guests to store food, enforcement of food-storage rules, and most importantly, ongoing public education about black bears and how to decrease their interactions with humans. Reactive techniques like aversive conditioning and relocation are only a short-term solution to the bear problem in Sequoia; these practices have few positive long-term effects on bear behavior. More effective is preventing bears from becoming~used to humans in the first place. Some national parks are trying new tactics, experimenting with specially trained Karelian Bear Dogs (a Finnish and Russian breed known for its bearhunting skills) to encourage positive bear behavior. Whatever the technique, The National Park Service is committed to exercising every possible option to save the lives of the park's black bears. Individual bears that exhibit problem behavior are first trapped and tagged in the ear, for identification. If conditioning and prevention are unsuccessful, the next step is to track problem bears by radio collar, often for many seasons. Sometimes, though, no matter how many chances park biologists give them, these problem bears become aggressive and dangerous to humans. Then the only remaining option is to destroy them.

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I can only imagine how the park's wildlife biologist must feel as the Bear Management Committee weighs the options about destroying a problem bear. By then she's spent years observing and monitoring the bear, learning the bear's habits, patterns, likes and dislikes, every color and mark on her body, her musky, heavy scent. The biologist can anticipate the bear's every movement in the forest, her daily rituals, and has reached a long-term understanding of the animal. In the meeting, the biologist listens closely as the committee discusses the problem bear's behavior in terms of monetary destruction, average numbers and frequency of break-ins. The vote is taken (it is rarely unanimous). This time, the committee decides it is in everyone's best interest to destroy her. One last time the bear is tracked by the faint signal of her radio collar, cornered and trapped. The wildlife biologist administers the bullet or dart containing a euthanasic drug. The bear falls. Once her body has grown completely still, her worn radio collar is removed for the first time. She is pushed over the edge of a small cliff, a resting place as it would have been in the wild; only in death does she finally regain her wildness. I don't know whether I could perform such an act. I don't knowwhether the bear would understand and accept my silent apology for what we have done to her. While picturing what happens once the committee decides to destroy a bear, I am reminded of "William Stafford's poem, "Traveling Through the Dark." In this poem, the narrator finds himselfby the side of a dark canyon road, wondering what to do with the body of a dead deer he encounters. The final lines of Stafford's poem are evocative and powerful: I thought hard for us all-my only swerving-, then pushed her over the edge into the river.

These words embody the same tension the wildlife biologist might feel in a similar situation. She must consider deeply both humans' connections to the animal world, and the nature of humans' ultimate responsibility to that world. The struggle in making the decision, the hesitant moments before a bear is actually destroyed, haunt me. Can one know with clarity that the choices humans make are the right ones, respectful, caring choices that reflect what is best for an animal? It is both easy and painful to visualize the events that lead to a bear's destruction. But it is always difficult to imagine how to accept the weight of our responsibility to the bears here, the uncertainty of facing such final judgments. In my seasons here I've seen more black bears than I can remember, and have come to accept them as a necessary part of my daily life. My friend Adam loves to recount the story of his first week in Sequoia, during our first season. I'd been there for several months already, and as Adam excitedly shared the story of seeing a bear, I responded indifferently, "Oh get over it, I tripped over one coming out of the shower last week." Even a bear leaning against a tree at the Lodge, eating granola stolen through the

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window of a tourist's cabin, surprises me only for a moment. I am now more afraid for the bears than of them. Outside my cabin window, the forest returns to nighttime silence. The human shouting has stopped and I can no longer smell, hear, the bear outside. My heart beats steady and even. My annoyance subsides and slips into something that resembles a deep and lingering sadness. Yesterday at lunch, I left the employee dining room to read a book outside on the wooden deck that overlooks Round Meadow. As I sat down, I realized that C9r's reddish-brown cub was sitting by a large boulder about ten feet away. He's a small bear, with thick, wiry fur the exact color of soft sequoia bark, and he's been hanging around a lot this summer. He doesn't wear a tag in his ear or a radio collar. Not yet. He didn't move or notice me. He had a half-eaten sandwich in his outstretched paw and was more interested in eating, undisturbed by my presence. Walking over to him I called out, "Hey, you." He looked up at me from the sandwich, didn't run away. The bear and I stared at each other for what seemed like a long time, gaze locked. I willed him to read my thoughts. Taking a deep breath, I pointed at him. "Go on, you can't stay here," I said, trying to make my voice sound serious and stern. "Someone might see you. You're going to get in trouble." The cub seemed almost to shrug his shoulders, and resumed eating. I picked up a large, rough granite rock from the ground. "Go away!" I yelled at the bear cub over and over, and threw the rock in his direction, close enough to make a loud noise without actually hitting him. He looked at me, surprised for a moment, but not at all frightened. He paused, then turned, and galloped on all fours toward the meadow and I chased after , him wildly, still shouting.

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3

DIGGING AND LEVELING IN ADAM's GARDEN: WoMEN AND THE INTERNATIONAL CAT FANCY Susan E. Jones

f you are traveling on a commercial airliner on any weekend in March or April, you are probably sharing cabin space with a feline passenger or two whose sexual escapades are more closely monitored and highly priced than those of any Mayflower Madam. March and April mark the end of the international cat show season when the "campaigners" head for the final shows of the year. Larger cities boasting shows with higher cat counts (the number of cats entered in the particular event) are the preferred destinations, but some cats will be entered in several shows, with the owner-handler making her final selection at the last possible minute based on the number of show entries in class. Women and their cats focus all this competitive calculation on winning a regional or national title. Before the age of scanners to monitor carry-on bags, you, the casual airline passenger, would have been sharing the air with not just one or two, but perhaps ten or more cats, show felines being smuggled in purses, carry-ons, and even coat sleeves, if your destination was the site of a major show. Few exhibitors will countenance shipping their cats in cargo (any more than they would consider riding there themselves), and most airlines restrict the number of nonhuman guests riding in the passenger area. The practice of carrying concealed cats, especially the larger breeds, has somewhat lessened due to scanners, which tend to reveal cat shapes regardless of the cats' containers. Show cats more than likely travel with female companions. These women are "getting the cat out," in show parlance, in one of the multiple associations-The _Cat Fancier's Association (CFA), American Cat Fancier's Association (ACFA), The International Cat Association (TICA), to name a few-which make up the cat fancy, that group of catlovers who continuously and vociferously argue the virtues of their feline friends. Critics have argued that historically the cat fancy was not primarily an organization of catlovers gathering to promote their favorite animal

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companions. Rather it was an organized means of affirming class status. In The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures of the Victorian Age, Harriet Ritvo claims of the domestic cat, "Members of this species differ from one another in little but their coats.m According to Ritvo, cats were not prestigious enough to enjoy the status of a "fancy'' until a system of classification could be created and the control of reproduction could be established. In fact, she argues that early fanciers were hard pressed to predict the qualities of kittens from one breeding to another and that, due to the independent nature of cat sexuality, fanciers did not know the parentage of litters. In this way, cats were thought to be unlike dogs, which Ritvo represents as docilely and exclusively mating with specimens selected by their owners. (Given that dogs and cats alike are relatively indiscriminate in their breeding habits without the intervention of their human companions, this allegation seems something of a distortion.) Quoting Darwin, Ritvo claims that early fanciers were relatively passive in their process of reproductive control and that often specious qualities were selected to divide the early "breeds."2 Furthermore, she states, "The elaborate categories of the cat fancy were, among other things, an exercise in projection and fantasy; most feline breeds were verbal rather than biological constructions."3 Although the cat fancy in Victorian England may have been rooted in class consciousness, the cat fancy as it has developed in other parts of the world is vigorously inclusive. Most cat fanciers would question Ritvo's conclusions, especially as the breed standards have developed. First, many modern and early cat breeds differ considerably in body type and head shape, and these differences occur naturally. One example would be the Abyssinian cat, introduced into the British fancy in the late nineteenth century, slender and lithe with a distinctively ticked shorthaired coat; another would be the Maine Coon, shown in the United States at least as early as the mid-nineteenth century, large, rugged, and shaggy with unique physical attributes, which enable it to survive in an extremely cold climate. One can hardly describe such differences without resorting to a written breed standard, the list of ideal physical attributes to which pedigreed cats are bred and by which they are judged in competition. If early standards appear to emphasize seemingly trivial differences to define breed, the modern cat fancy argues that current standards establish an aesthetic description of a perfect hypothetical breed representative, an aesthetic that emphasizes an internal logic based on harmony and consistency, and on beauty combined with health. But this aesthetic ideal is ultimately based on real animals. As for "natural" differences among cats, at least as early as the seventeenth century, John Aubrey notes, "W Laud, A.B. Cant. was a great lover of Catts ... He was presented with some Cyprus-catts, i.e. our Tabbycatts, which were sold, at first for 5 pounds a piece: this was about 1637, or 1638." Aubrey further notes, "I doe well remember ... that the common English Catt, was white with some blewish piedness: sc a gallipot blew. The

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race or breed of them are now almost lost."4 Aubrey's brief description reveals that he clearly has in mind a standard by which he measures the difference between the "English Catt" with its "blue" or gray spots on a white ground and the new "Cyprus-catts," tabby or striped. This standard recognizes color and pattern as significant (and not trivial) factors in identifying feline differences, because these features are connected with place of origin. Aubrey's work also identifies the powerful genetic potency of the dominant agouti or tabbying factor, one of a multitude of genetic features modern cat fanciers track as a part of their breed definitions. In the United States, the Maine Coon cat, America's oldest and largest domestic breed, was first written up in cat literature around the I86os and was certainly being exhibited in Maine by all classes and manners of individuals at that time. The Maine Coon or "shag" was and still is distinguished by its shaggy coat, its distinctive ear furnishings, and its body structure, which differ significantly from these features in cats like the Siamese, the Abyssinian, and the Persian. Although the colors of the Maine Coon range over many possible combinations, the distinctive body size (males sometimes ranging upward of twenty pounds) marked this breed and made it a favorite with Americans in and out of the early cat fancy. Further, the "shag" was a working cat, making a rapid transition from barn to competition. Even today, foundation cats are brought from the farm and worked into Maine Coon breeding lines in some associations in the American cat fancy, a continual process of expanding the healthy gene pool rather than concentrating it and preserving it among an exclusive group. New cat breeds enter the fancy because they exhibit proven genetic differences; they differ from existing cat breeds. Indeed, by contrast to the dog fancy in which new breeds tend to claim what seems a nostalgic identification with ancient breeds of aristocratic or pastoral origin, new cat breeds are buoyantly proletarian in their roots. The LaPerm was recog- · nized as a substantial deviation from known breeds when found on a farm in the American Northwest. The Selkirk Rex breed emanated from an abandoned, curly coated kitten from Montana with a hitherto unknown dominant rexing or curling coat factor. However the originating individuals were discovered, as each breed developed, each breed organization wrote a standard defining its ideal aesthetic. Each aesthetic, however ideal, is based on real cats. If Darwin denigrated the lackluster activities of nineteenth-century catlovers in developing significant variety in the domestic cat, women of the twenty-first century boldly develop new breeds, not for exclusivity and class advancement, but as a pleasure to be shared by all catlovers. The women in the cat fancy come from all walks of life and from many classes of society. Perhaps the variety of individuals involved in the cat fancy has influenced the rapid rise in cat popularity as home companions and feline family members in the United States, and, indeed, across the world. Cats are increasingly favored by both women and men, families, and single people. If at one time the cat was considered an "outside animal," a distant but

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slightly wild adjunct to the family, modern cats are represented as fourfooted people, treated with the special deference and attention any family member would expect. This anthropomorphic vision of the cat as a family member seems to stem from the feline's resolute and very "human'' independence. Cats have little interest in obedience training, except for litter box training which feline mothers initiate. They choose those to whom they will devote themselves, and they exhibit the best and worst of human personality traits: devoted attention, persistent naughtiness, clever insubordination, and unconditional love. New cat companions often find themselves uttering sentences beginning with "My cat ... " and ending in interminable tales of the latest cute kitty exploit, just as other friends would speak of children, spouses, or grandchildren. Catlovers flash huge albums of photographs of their feline friends. Cats are seen as having personalities, or "purrsonalities" as the word is often morphed by feline admirers. They are portrayed in popular literary works and in television advertising as speaking the mother tongue of their companions, and indeed, books like The Natural Cat suggest that telepathic connections can be developed by which cats and their people can communicate} The cat is represented and indeed exists neither as a slave to its human companions nor as a substitute for human companionshipit is a genuine family member. And although men have increasingly become cat fanatics in recent years, the cat is traditionally connected to women. Nowhere is this more marked than in the cat fancy. The cat fancy is a particularly feminine domain. Women judges and breeders outnumber men at least two to one. They abandon any semblance of normalcy to spend their time on Saturdays or Sundays in one show hall or another across the world. Women often author and maintain breed standards. Women oversee the creation of new breeds, using natural mutations to develop distinct new cat breeds. The LaPerm, discovered and developed by Linda Koehl; the Selkirk Rex, discovered and developed by Jeri Newman; and the Peterbald, discovered and developed by Irina Kovalyova, are but three examples of breeds discovered and developed by women active in the cat fancy. In the cat fancy, women name their cats, name their catteries, and name the new breeds. They develop and create standards of breeding and care, and they purvey and enforce these standards among the aficionadas of the fancy. In short, they appropriate the prerogatives of husbandry and nomenclature traditionally attributed to Adam in the Garden of Eden, and create a new feminine garden in which catnip is the principal crop. Both the cat fancy and the feline tribe are heavily matriarchal, with males often functioning ornamentally (or for sex), while smarter, faster, more diligent, and/or more persuasive alpha females generally control communal activities and behavioral orders. Women and their cats share strong psychic bonds more typically associated with feminine relationships, in addition to their physical companionship at home and on the show circuit.

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In the cat fancy; people are identified with their cats in quite maternal ways. A breeder campaigning a large Maine Coon cat to win the title of Grand Champion is more likely to be called "Geoffrey's mom'' than by her name or any other nomenclature. Moreover, while the cat fancy is known for its scrappy nature (catfights, as it were), it also fosters communal and supportive cooperation (like that typical of female cats observed in farm populations), with groups of women involved in breed and stray rescue; feral cat protection; emergency assistance in case of fire, floods, and other natural disasters; and feline health research. The cat fancy encourages a universal love of cats, both the less lovely and the superstars-a level of almost unconditional love most frequently associated with maternal care. This universal appreciation contrasts sharply with the practises of the dog fancy; in which conformation show, classes in which animals are judged against a particular standard of appearance, are tightly restricted-only pedigreed canines need apply. In fact, the majority of dog show classes are further restricted to individual pedigreed dogs that can be reproductively active, with few classes for neutered and spayed animals. Mixed-breed canines may compete only in performance or obedience events in which they are required to demonstrate how well they can obey commands; they must "prove" their worth. By contrast, in the cat fancy; the "Household Pet" class offers the same kind of competition for cats without pedigrees as other classes offer for those with them in order to support the ideal of cherishing felines of every stripe. Entries under this category are eligible for the same kind of spectacular finals ribbons that are awarded in the other classes. These other classes include events for kittens, championship pedigreed cats, and championship premiers (pedigreed neuters and spays), a class with no real equivalent in the dog fancy. In TICA and ACFA, Household Pets may be registered and advance to the level of Supreme Grand Master and Supreme Household Pet, earning points that qualifY them for Regional and International Awards at the end of the show season. Because they care for all cats, the women who organize and run cat clubs often donate substantial· revenue from their shows, thousands of dollars, to local animal care agencies for neuter and spay campaigns and for rescue of abandoned or feral cats and dogs. They support the research of the Wtnn Foundation and other medical groups dedicated to improving the health and well-being of all cats. Although many women are involved in the dog fancy; the dog fancy is more often associated with its male breeders and the many male professional handlers who put the dogs through their paces in the show ring. In contrast, the vast majority of cats in a show are entered and shown by their female companions, not by professional handlers at all. Women and their cats tour the countryside, enjoy a weekend of communal activity; spend quality time in some of the worst motels in the world (and every cat exhibitor has a hotel horror story to tell), and come home happy; even if their cats do not have a single ribbon to show for the experience. Cats on the campaign trail preen and play with the judges, mostly displaying

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enjoyment in becoming part of the spectacle-the subject of spectator gaze-as they are adored by their owners and the crowd (the "gate," in cat show language). Breeders proudly and maternally assist their human children in junior showmanship classes, in order to foster the fancy in the next generation. How do these women (and their cats) become involved in such a pastime?

Many of these show addicts come to the fancy either through involvement with cat rescue or through helping arrange for adoptions at a show, a practise that often involves showing prospective adoptees in a Household Pet ring. Their involvement in a charity brings them into contact with the fun and family feeling of the cat show world. Some eventually decide to show a high quality neutered or spayed pedigreed cat, known as a show alter; others show their own Household Pets. Many women discover the enjoyment of the cat show through popular magazines such as Cats or Cat Fancy. These periodicals and theirwebsites display colorful pictures or articles about cats and shows, copying the format of women's magazines and focusing subject matter on traditional women's concerns. Typical articles include the recent "Take Cat Fancy's Weight Loss Challenge," featured· on the June 2001 website, and archived articles such as "Cats on the Couch4 Steps Restore Bedtime Routine," "Sexy Cats, What Your Cat Needs," and "Conquering Kitty Clutter." Most important for the cat fancy; however, these magazines include the show calendar for the major associations, giving readers the opportunity to visit a show near them and encouraging them to participate. Women who participate in cat shows make a major commitment that is typical of women involved in all types of philanthropic endeavors. Planning a show consumes weekend after weekend. Funds for the show must be raised and commitments confirmed with judges, the show hall, a show hotel, vendors, and exhibitors. Volunteers who make up the majority of club members may raise and administer cash outlays in excess of ten thousand dollars for even a modest show, and the figure rises every year. In return for the privilege of, planning and managing the event, the women involved in the show committees will contribute endless hours of unpaid labor (a parallel to the traditional domestic role of women in the home), including almost nonstop activity on the days just before and during the show. They will make and put up decorations; they will find show stewards or spray-clean cat show cages themselves all weekend, hundreds of times; they will transport judges and exhibitors from airport to show hotel to show hall. They will solve problems, resolve disagreements, and try to make the show experience entertaining for all concerned. They may even find time to display their own cats. They will certainly take any opportunity offered to cuddle the participating cats and kittens, always with the kitty mother's permission, of course.

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Most associations and clubs provide support for individuals showing their cats for the first time, either in the form of a handout or personal contact from show committee members to make the new cat fancier feel at home. Some clubs provide mini-workshops prior to the show, another volunteer task for club members. Experienced exhibitors will often go out of the way to assist their neighbors, those "benched" next to them, in getting to rings on time; they will also share grooming expertise. Frequently the first-time exhibitor adopts her first show cat through participation in a cat club. Few breeders will entrust show quality cats, their babies, to unknown strangers. Even pet quality kittens will go to a new home only after prospective families have passed a series of successive grillings and examinations. Will they keep the cat inside? Will they promise to provide a home for this cat forever, recognizing that acquiring a cat is not a one-month or one-year responsibility, but a covenant to admit a new family member for a lifetime? Human adoption agencies sometimes observe less stringent requirements for children going to new families than those included in adoption contracts of particular cat breeders, and cat breeders are ready and willing to do whatever is necessary to remove their kittens from homes which ultimately do not observe the agreements signed on adoption. The cat breeder is the "woman in charge," the one who requires this initiation into the world of the pedigreed cat. She determines who the members of the new "cat families" will be, and her concern lies primarily with the welfare of the kitten or cat. She requires the supplicants to prove their qualifications to "mother" a new kitty, and she is just as willing to reject those found wanting as to give a kitten or cat to someone found worthy. According to a recent Cat Fancy article, the greatest secret of the cat fancy is how many retired show cats are simply given away to admirers who prove worthy of their companionship. Breed associations such as the Maine Coon Breeders and Fanciers Association maintain websites (such as www.MCBFA.org) on which retired cats may be listed-but new homes will be selected only on the basis oflengthy agreements and conversations. The typical cat breeder is not a businesswoman, but a woman who loves cats and enjoys their companionship. Many cat breeders are single, although numbers of them have "significant others" who are just as zany about the cats as they are, or who are at least tolerant of the patter of a significant number of little feet early every morning-as well as the collateral destruction implicit in cat companionship. Relationships must be very resilient indeed to withstand weekends on the road and nights spent overseeing the multiplication of one's feline flock. The typical hobby cat breeder does not make money with cats because she has veterinarians to support, cat food to buy and tote, and cat shows to attend. She is more likely to spend her days poring over pedigrees than counting coins. She spends hours on the Internet or on the phone with others of her tribe, discussing such crucial issues as nose placement and ear set. While dogs evoke the notion of a typical, nuclear family-Lassie, Timmy; Mom, and Dad-the average cat show reorients the stereotype.

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Women in the cat fancy reorder the nuclear family. They replace Adam's rule over Eve and their progeny in the Garden with a far more inclusive model. Just as the cat fancy is open to all kinds of felines, accepting and cherishing them, the fancy also values diverse types of people and family constructs. The typical cat show participants, judges and exhibitors alike, and even the "gate," represent a remarkable ethnic and social diversity: young and old; "traditional" couples and families-moms, dads, and kidsand single men and women; single moms, single dads, and their children; lesbians and gay men; bikers, surfers, nerds, athletes, and academics. The cat "family" with its maternal/matriarchal ideology embraces tolerance and unconditional love; it values the same kind of diversity in its human members as it does in its feline ones. Cat club members and cat show exhibitors welcome all to the cat family. The cat show exhibitor is usually a down-to-earth type; she often has one beat-up suitcase and one bottle of shampoo-conditioner combination for hersel£ For her cats, on the other hand, she has multiple carriers of various shapes and designs, and a valise full of cat shampoos and conditioners: degreasers, detanglers, long-coat shampoos, short-coat shampoos, shampoos for every color of coat she is showing, shampoos for defleaing, shampoos for disinfecting, shampoos for itches, shampoos for fluffiness. In addition, she has a mental storehouse of cures for any coat condition and a pharmacopoeia for curing hair and health emergencies: fuller's earth or cornstarch to cure greasy coat while on the road, a variety of pet wipes and powders for emergency cleanups, baby oil, claw clippers, and more. She comes to the show either with her own cat container in which her cats will rest between show rings, or with cage curtains she has sewn or bought to decorate the area where her cats are held. Curtains and cage decorations range from simple bed sheets and towels to drape the cat and provide privacy and comfort, to the over-the-top palace complete with feathers, artificial gems, and ornate signage. If the cat wins show rosettes, the ribbons themselves add to the glamour of the cage as the show goes on. While in Eden, Adam was ostensibly in charge oflanguage. The cat show Eve develops a new linguistic tradition, learning to name things aright in the special language of the fancy. The highest compliment seems almost trite, "That's a nice boy you're showing." Here, the word "nice" is elevated to a vague but superlative comment. Nothing more need be said. However, the same term is used when a breeder has nothing superlative to say about a cat. "What a nice kitty;" can also be a euphemism for a "real dog," also privately referred to as a ''woofer," a linguistic nod to the stereotypical rivalry between the canine and the feline. Discernment comes with experience. The vocabulary of the fancy is extensive. A male cat who sprays urine indiscriminately is called a "hoser." This is particularly embarrassing (although typically amusing to the spectators) when the cat is in the show ring; show ring etiquette requires the hoser's "mother" to clean up the show cage after him, rather than leaving the task to the steward, so there is no escaping everyone's knowing whose cat did the dirty deed.

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On a good day, judges "use" or "put up" a cat, that is, place a cat in their final, the event in the cat show when the big ribbons are awarded for a particular class. On a good day, one's cat gets put up-in the language of the fancy, the cat "finals." Cats that do not make the final are "dumped." Most exhibitors sit through a good many mediocre days before that good day experience. Cat show women appropriate not only the special structuring of language in a linguistic community, they also appropriate Adam's prerogative of naming. They name their cat clubs, and puns and linguistic jokes are a part of that naming process. Hence, if you are showing in ACFA, you may attend the show launched by the Hoosier Hissers, in TICA, the Foaming Frenzies, and in CFA, The Absolutely Abyssinians. The shows themselves also have names and themes, such as "Life's a Beach-or back to the sandbox" and "Purrs and Stripes Furever." One cat club holds a "Purrjama Party," in which the exhibitors dress up in fancy nightwear and competitions in the show rings are held from midnight to breakfast time, a period of time in which the cats are usually brighter and more alert than their human. The primary arena in which the cat aficionadas have most control over their naming is in the creation of their catteries and in the naming of their various cats and kittens. Some breeders expand their control over this naming process, and in naming their cattery, restrict the naming of kittens proceeding from their litters. Thus, the Maine Coon cattery Mainetoon would request recipients of their kittens to name each cat with a name related to a song title or a variation of the title. This naming would challenge the creativity of those who receive Mainetoon kittens by establishing boundaries. The results include Mainetoons Purrburger in Paradise, Mainetoons Red Tails in the Sunset, and Mainetoons Sage Paisley of Purriplume, names that reflect the linguistic originality of the new "mothers" of the Mainetoon kitties as well as the desire of the original breeder. Registered names in the cat fancy follow a stringent order: (a) the name 'of the cattery where the cat was bred, meaning the cattery where the mother of the litter resides; (b) the name given to the individual cat; and (c) "of" ___, the name of the registered cattery where the cat makes a new home. Thus, Mainetoons Sage Paisley ofPurriplume, for example, was bred by the Mainetoons cattery, lives in the Purriplume cattery, and has her own name of "Sage Paisley." If the eat's breeder has not registered the name of her cattery with the association in which the cat is being registered, the breeding cattery name may not appear. (Thus, you might have a cat registered in the ACFA records named Wholly Mackerel of Koonznroses, for example, where the new cattery "Koonznroses" is registering a cat from a cattery not associated with the ACFA.) The name of the cattery acquiring a cat may not appear at the end of the eat's name, should the new breeder run out of letters in the naming process. In total, a registered eat's name may not exceed thirty-five letters and spaces.

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Women find naming their catteries just as entertaining as naming their cats, since cattery names generally affect the subsequent naming of their kittens. In an article in The Cat Fanciers' Journal, a publication of CFA, breeders were asked to describe the reasons they selected the names they chose for their catteries. Typical responses reflect the personalities and interests of the breeder. One breeder, Barb French, writes that her cattery name, Tarantara, was derived from the operetta, "The Pirates of Penzance." She describes her choice, In the operetta, a group of pirates is breaking into a large Mansion, singing "With cat-like tread ... No sound at all, we never speak a word, a fly's footfall would be distinctly heard," while they are making a HELL of a lot of noise, breaking things, making elephantine stomping noises, etc. Having had Somalis before (and again next year), I can tell you that NOTHING makes more noise than a herd of running Somalis! 6

Another breeder, Susan McManus, reflects that she selected the name of "Beaudot" for an ocicat cattery because the cats have a lot of dots and cats and dots are beautiful.7 One breeder selected her name from the category of"bad southern names" (Elvessa), and another selected the cattery name of "Rainyday'' from the weather in her part of Oregon, a name that gave her the option of creating cat names related to that weather: Splashdance, Weathergirl, Electra, and Storm Shadow, for example. 8 Not surprisingly, the vast majority of breeders responding to a call for the rationale of their cattery names issued both on the internet and through the paper journal were women, the same women who radically outnumber the men in the fancy. To join the ranks of the breeders, a woman must make the transition from exhibitor to trusted matriarch. New breeders often work with a mentor, usually the woman who entrusts them with their first breeding female or "queen" (the technical term for female cats), and who may even direct the breeding of that female, determining which studs to "use" and how frequently the queen may be bred. Breeders are reluctant to place a breed/show female with someone. new to the cat fancy; they often try to discourage the potential breeder with horror stories of caesarian sections and dead kittens. This initiation serves to weed out individuals who think that cat breeding is a "get rich quick" proposition. Breeders are equally particular when sending their girls to the homes of experienced breeders. They may ask for personal and veterinary references before they will transfer a girl to her new home, and such transfers are always accompanied by written agreements regarding the care of the cat. Cat shows provide the interface between breeders; they establish the maternal network. Women who do not show their cats with reasonable regularity may find themselves outsiders in the family because they do not keep current on important issues in cat health and genetic issues crucial to those who care about their

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feline children. As a result, they may not gain breeder referrals to place their kittens, nor will they maintain the network necessary to send their breeding females to outcross studs (outcross breeding is essential for maintaining the health of their lines). The woman who exhibits a "show alter" gets to know both the breed and the breeders, and this experience brings her into the inner circle. Showing an alter gives the new aficionada an understanding of show grooming as well as breed standards and cat care. Learning patience under grueling days of crowds who ask the same questions ("How much does your cat weigh?" or "What does your cat eat?") prepares the potential new breeder for the patience necessary to deal with a new mother cat and the process of"queening" or the birthing of kittens. Mentorship really counts when the new breeder prepares for her first litter. While domestic cats give the impression that kittening is easy and uncomplicated, breeders usually monitor queening carefully (and in fact, because many nonregistered litters are born without human care, it would be hard to track statistically the problems with those litters or how many queens and kittens die in the process). In the wild or in barn situations, queens often help each other, experienced mothers assisting with births; mother barn cats cache their kittens with one female while they hunt for food, and mothers may feed kittens belonging to other cats in their group. Most breeders, who have to take the place of those helpful mother barn cats, put in hour after hour reading up on genetics, cat husbandry, and feline first aid before that first litter is ever conceived in their cattery-and it is not uncommon for one breeder to assist another in a birthing disaster by placing motherless kittens with an experienced mother whose lactation is sufficient for a larger number of babies. However well prepared with book-learning to assist her queen, the new breeder is often the one who needs the assistance through the birthing process, talking on the phone with her mentor while the kittens arrive. Special advice may be needed with first-time mother cats, who may not move quickly to clean the membrane from the nostrils of the newborns. Some kittens have fluid that must be expelled from their mouths and throats before they can breathe effectively on their own. The breeder generally aspirates the kitten to remove the fluid, and she may have to "sling" the kitten, rock the kitten gently to try to stimulate the first breaths. Some breeders will do mouth-to-mouth or attempt other forms of resuscitation for kittens slow in responding to the outside world. The breeder will turn off the air-conditioning or turn up the heat to protect the newborns. If the mother does not lactate immediately, the breeder must tube or bottle-feed the babies round the clock until the mother's milk comes in. In some cases, especially for first-time mothers, the queen has little interest in her kittens and must be encouraged to clean and care for them; the breeder sometimes stays right by the kittening box for twenty-four hours after the kittens are born to encourage the mother to stay there and care for her young. The breeder is second mother to this ftrst litter.

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Her mentor will often talk her through this process, spending long hours on the telephone, or driving over in the middle of the night to assist in recording the births, weighing the kittens, or making sure they are snug and cared for. In the event that a newborn kitten struggles with a genetic challenge, for example, the mentor helps the new breeder in conjunction with the veterinarian to make appropriate decisions regarding the kitten. Many breeders select a veterinarian who is on call for emergencies during queening, and that veterinarian may perform an emergency midnight C-section with the breeder in assistance as nurse. Birth announcements to cat fancy friends read, "It's a girl, it's a girl, it's a girl, it's a boy, it's a boy." Even before kittens are born, established and reputable breeders often have a waiting list for their kittens. Individuals on this list have been screened and deemed worthy of the adoption. Some have indicated preferences, a particular color, for example. The breeder will usually notifY the waiting list right away when a litter is born. The waiting list will consist both of individuals looking for show quality kittens and those waiting for a pet. This determination will take longer; when kittens are born, they rarely display the telling characteristics of a future champion. Many mentors will share their lists with the new breeder, helping her to find appropriate homes for her pet quality kittens and helping her decide which kittens, if any, to keep as the foundation of a breeding program. Like a mother cat herself, the mentoring breeder embraces the newcomer, but she also controls her activities. The more established the mentor in the matriarchy of breeders, the greater her control, as she can easily help a new breeder obtain the best available cats, or she can make the acquisition of outstanding foundation cats very difficult indeed. She can generously nurture the up-and-coming breeder, but just like a mother cat, she can "slap her down" if she gets out of control. An exquisite balance of acceptance and aggression comes into play, similar to the relationship of queens in a cat colony. While the cat fancy is a cooperative world, many alpha breeders are also concerned with their positions and reputations in the fancy-leadership of the tribe is at stake. If breeding cats and mothering kittens is not enough for a breeder and exhibitor at the peak of her form, she may elect to join the ranks of the cat show judges, the elite of the cat fancy. Each association has stringent requirements for judge certification, and the process of becoming a cat show judge takes years. The breeder must learn the breed standards for all current and probationary breeds being exhibited in the organization. She must begin by either breeding or exhibiting cats, and she must work with cats of all the various body and coat types, showing them successfully and earning the top titles granted in association shows. She must work actively in a club affiliated with the association, eventually serving as Show Manager. She must train and be licensed as a Ring Clerk- the person who keeps track of the judge's decisions in a ring-working her way through education and experience to licensing and service as a Head Clerk, charting all the records for a cat show and seeing that they are properly transmitted

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to the national organization. These requirements take years to complete and ensure that the judge trainee will have extensive exposure to members of the association and the fancy, as well as substantial experience with shows and showing. Once the judge trainee has met the basic requirements and registered to become a judge, she often works with a counseling judge who, like the maternally helpful mentor-breeders, assists her in developing her skills. She attends judging schools and breeder/genetics seminars. She receives feedback. Character as well as knowledge is a requirement for final licensing, and she must be sure to display integrity in her dealings with others inside and outside the show hall. After her basic studies are over, she joins her sponsoring judge in the show ring itsel£ She works with licensed judges in show rings until she demonstrates that she has achieved the knowledge and discernment required to obtain certification. Most new judges start with Household Pet rings and work their way up through Longhair/ Shorthair speciality rings in which breeds classified as longhaired or shorthaired are judged among themselves until these new judges are experienced enough to qualify as Allbreed judges, who work in rings where all breeds are judged against each other. The reward for becoming a judge in the cat fancy is not necessarily the adulation of the crowd. Instead, competitors will grumble about the decisions the judge has made, while members of the audience will applaud the liveliest and most engaging kitten, without any real knowledge of the qualifications by which the judge makes her decision. She will spend two days hefting cats of all sizes, from kittens at one or two pounds to Maine Coons at twenty to twenty-five pounds. She will be paid by the number of cats she handles, plus her expenses, and out of benevolence, she may find herself returning her pay to the sponsoring club of a show that fails to break even. In spite of the demands of judging and despite a sometimes grueling pace-flying throughout the world from one cat show to another-judges shape the mood in the shows they serve through their sense of humor and play. They conduct rings in which, blindfolded, they handle and describe cats, accurately identifying their breeds and even their colors. They dress up in bizarre costumes-as pirates, babies, or Santa's elves-to coordinate with the themes of the shows. At the recent Annual International Show for CFA (comparable to Westminster in the dog fancy), the three judges selected to pick the "Best of the Best" whiled away the time until they were ready to judge (since theywere not allowed to see the cat finalists until the final cut to three possibilities had been made) by shooting hoops with a rotten tangerine in the restroom of the show hall. Dressed in black evening gowns, Kitty Angel, Jody Garrison, and Kim Everett (women at the top of their game in the cat fancy) vied for the ladies-room victory, Angel winning with "a back-handed layup."9 A white Persian queen, Wishes Lyric, won the main event. Lyric's human companion, Connie Stewart, confirmed her human connection with her feline companion by hugging Don Williams, the

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president of CFA, and announcing, "Oh my- I sure didn't expect this. Lyric expected it; I didn't.mo The communication between woman and cat, the value placed on cats as companions and family members, and the universal acceptance of a bond between species cherished and promoted by the international cat fancy were supremely represented in that moment. And Lyric's reward? Stewart announced that Lyric was going home to take a nap on the bed, the eat's "idea of ecstacy."u The ultimate moment of pleasure in the cat fancy may come when the judge makes that "Best of the Best" selection or when an exhibitor has her cat chosen for that honor at an annual international show. It may come for the cats when the kitty superstar finishes a hard day of being admired and goes home for a nap on the bed. It may come when the catlover, like CFA judge Kitty Angel, for example, is able to publish creditable advice to both new and experienced catlovers and shape the words that shape the cat fancy of the future. Or, ultimately, it may come from the sheer sense of play shared by women and their cats in the International Cat Fancy, with women shoving Adam aside and leveling the walls of the Garden to let in light and joy. 12

Notes r. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the

Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), II6. 2. Ibid., II?· 3· Ibid., 120. 4· John Aubrey in, Oliver Lawson Dick, ed., Aubrey} BriefLives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), xxxvi. 5· Anita Frazier and Norma Eckroate, The Natural Cat: A Holistic Guide for Finicky Owners (New York: Putnams, 1981). 6. Kerrie Meek, "Online Mews The Name Game: Part One," The Cat Fanciers' Journal, 16: no. I (1996), 49· 7· Ibid., 49· 8. Ibid., 48. 9· Steve Dale, "Behind the Scences {sic} at the International Cat Show." Good News for Pets. Com, Germinder and Associates, Inc., (12 June 2001). IO. Ibid. II. Ibid. 12. In addition to works cited above, my essay is indebted to the literature of feline case, especially Louis L. Vine's Common Sense Book ofComplete Cat Care (New York: William Morrow, 1978).

PART

II

THE OBSERVED AND THE OBSERVER

CHAPTER4

ANIMAL TESTIMONY IN RENAISSANCE ART: ANGELIC AND OTHER SuPERNATURAL VISITATIONS William J Scheick

uring the Renaissance, animals provided more than a source of food, clothing, medicine, labor, and companionship. They also "reflected human values, virtues, and conduct in heralds, symbols, {and} emblems.m The Renaissance artistic use of animals to represent specific virtues and vices-particularly as disseminated by Martianus Capella, Alanus ab Insulis and Cesare Ripa-derived from a long tradition of assumptions and associations that had been forged during classical antiquity (in Aesop's beast fables, for example) and then allegorically embellished during the Middle Ages (in the Bestiaries, among other works). Reflecting this heritage, for instance, Renaissance art commonly relied on the horse to. stand for unconscious desires, the cat for liberty (free will), the lamb for gentleness or patience, the dog for faithfulness or memory, and the songbird for spiritual detachment from the material world. Such signification, however, was never stable because Renaissance artists inherited various, sometimes conflicting, traditions concerning animals. Dogs, for instance, remained ambiguous figures, especially in religious art. Whereas classical tradition tended to emphasize the loyalty; vigilance, and memory of dogs as positive features, Hebraic tradition tended to stress the destructiveness of dogs, as represented in Ps. 22:16. Even Ripa's Iconologia (1603), designed as a codification of prevailing emblems, fails to present a consistent interpretation of canines; in one image they stand for the negative trait of flattery, while in another instance they stand for the positive trait of memory. 2 L*ewise, in Renaissance art black cats may not conform to the then common association of felines with liberty and, as well, birds of prey or peacocks may not suggest detachment from the material world, the meaning once frequently assigned to songbirds. So considerable care is required when decoding the signification of animals in Renaissance paintings.

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When animals in Renaissance art conform to dominant iconographic moral symbolism, they testifY on behalf of a pervasive contemporary belief in divine or universal truths. There are occasions when these creatures are more mimetically rendered than such faunal emblems of virtues and vices. Even in these more realistic instances, however, the animals often testifY on behalf of divine truth, as we will observe in illustrations of angelic and other supernatural visitations. In these scenes of animal testimony, artists unwittingly revise the prevailing Renaissance scientific and theological understanding of animals, and as a result, they sometimes effectively problematize the very function of animals in these scenes. Renaissance thought inherited the Aristotelian/scholastic attribution of only a rudimentary soul (brute intelligence) to animals, a view that prevailed until the rise of seventeenth-century Cartesian mechanistic arguments against both consciousness and feeling in animals. All living things, it was commonly believed during the Renaissance, possess soul (anima). Floral soul is defined by the life force, including the functions of nourishment and reproduction. Animal soul, that is higher than plant anima, includes the life force, motion, appetite, and mind-responses limited to sensation. Above animal soul is the human soul, the elevated faculties of which augment and complete both floral and faunal powers. The three higher faculties of reason, will, and affections (the little Trinity) comprise the image of the triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) in humanity's soul. Humans are, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne, "that amphibious piece betweene a corporall and spirituall essence."3 They, in short, partake of both the animal and the angelic orders. Besides the physical features of the anima associated with plants and animals, humanity also possesses a rational soul, which it shares with the hierarchically superior angels. The rational soul is, Browne observes in his synoptic Religio Medici (1642), "a peece of Divinity in us," a "heavenly and celestiall part within us," that in a sense enables a person to "bee in Heaven any where, even within the limits of his owne proper body."4 In this graduated scheme of creation, animals are clearly inferior to humans despite their keener perceptual capacities at the level of sensation. An animal may, as St. Basil particularly observes of dogs, resolve problems in a remarkably efficient manner and do so better than other creatures, but such a creature is not intelligent} Even the seemingly "smartest" of the animals, Matthew Wren (later, a bishop of Norwich) insisted, are not logic~· each creature is simply endowed with keen senses, combined with well-adapted natural impulses that occasionally give the impression of logical thought. 6 Animals, in other words, are merely physical creatures restricted to a mind governed by sensation and natural impulse. There are instances in Renaissance art where animals are depicted in terms of the prevailing view of them as lacking any higher perceptual capacities akin to those of humanity's soul. In these instances, the animals-as creatures necessarily limited to the physical realm-show no awareness of a supernatural event occurring in their presence. Such is the

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case with "Tobias Catching the Fish in the River Tigris" (1556) by an unknown engraver.? It depicts a scene from The Book ofTobit, one of the Apocryphal works of the Old Testament, in which the Archangel Raphael oversees Tobias as he wrestles with a large fish. (Later, as the scene in the upper-right portion of the picture indicates, Raphael will instruct Tobias on how to prepare the fish in order to cure his father's blindness.) There are two dogs in the engraving, though only one is mentioned in the Apocryphal book. Neither canine notices the towering winged stranger; instead, close to the angel's leg one dog sits in the lower left corner patiently focused on Tobias, while the other, a little to the left of the center of the picture, agitatedly barks at the activity between Tobias and the fish. Clearly these dogs are only creatures of sensation and natural impulse, oblivious to the heavenly visitor standing between them. Similarly, in Pieter Lastman's "The Angel Departing from Tobit's Family'' (1618)8 a visually dominant ascending angel dazzles human attention, while behind them none of the animals notice anything unusual. The horses are calmly turned away from the event and a goat, prominent in the lower right corner of the picture, placidly looks down as it consumes nearby vegetation. Likewise, the dog in "The Angel Leaving Tobias and His Family'' (1641)9 by Rembrandt, who worked with Lastman for six months, seems completely unaware of the departing heavenly guest. He appears to be equally unaware of the emotional response of the humans among whom he calmly stands with his back turned to the site of their and our attention. In each of these illustrations, the winged stranger is invisible to animals because they have no faculty, no soul-principle, beyond sensation and natural impulse. If we turn to images of St. Francis of Assisi, we see a CounterReformation development in this representation of animals. In Flemish artist Raphael Sadder's engraving "St. Francis in His Cell Consoled by Angelic Music" (early I6oos) 10 there are three doves and a cat who take nO notice of the suspended angel with a stringed instrument. Nor does the lamb, the sweet-tempered animal representing Franciscan care that is a recurrent iconographic feature in paintings pertaining to the medieval saint. The position of the lamb at the foot of St. Francis's bed is noteworthy. In the lower right corner of the engraving this animal receives our attention as our view likely commences with the elevated angel in the upper left corner and then moves along an invisible diagonal line to the foot of the bed. With its rear toward us, the lamb's turned head potentially directs the movement of our scan of the picture slightly upward to the supine stigmatized figure. And there, presumably, our eyes settle on the prone but consoled saint. Limited to physical sensation, the lamb does not see or hear the angel; but the testifying gesture of this strategically positioned lamb, whose sensorial perception insists on visible effects on the saint, implicitly instructs us to believe in the angelic visitation as a real occurrence. As this illustration indicates, the conventional confinement of animals to the physical order of creation below humanity often provided

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Renaissance painters, especially Counter-Reformation artists, with an opportunity to validate religious beliefs and legends. When they depicted an animal responding to some supernatural visitation, these artists meant for the keen perceptions attributed to animals, as creatures defined by sensation, to attest to the authenticity of an event. If in the scene an animal responds to effects, such artists suggested, then something indeed must have occurred. From this position it was an easy development for artists to fashion a somewhat more ambiguous presentation of animal witnesses. Such is the case with the figure of the sheep in "St. Francis, Patron of St. Colette," an unattributed early seventeenth-century painting sometimes listed as "St. Colette, Reformer of the St. Claire Order."rr · Structurally designed in terms of a series of intersecting triangles, this portrait shows St. Colette experiencing a vision in which she is instructed to restore the original strict order of the Poor Clares, a Franciscan order of nuns. Behind Sister Colette stands an angel, who touches her arm while St. Francis looks on. Gazing at the transfrxed nun from its position at the bottom center of the picture, the characteristic Franciscan sheep or lamb directs our attention to the tangible result of the angel's visitation. The trajectory of the animal's upward glance, which forms the base of the picture's most centered structural triangle, leads precisely to the meeting of the nun's arm and the angelic touch. It is clear that the witnessing animal testifies to the physical effects of the vision on the nun. It is possible, too, that in this scene the animal observes the angelic touch. The trajectory of the sheep's vision introduces an element of ambiguity concerning just how much this animal actually sees. Of course, given the scientific and theological understanding of animals during the Renaissance, no faunal creature should be represented as capable of perceiving supernatural phenomena. According to St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei (sections n-rz), angels are immaterial and spiritual beings (Heb. 1:14; Mt. 22:30, Acts 10:19). Unlike postlapsarian humans, angels intuit divine ideas directly; and as heavenly inhabitants who can see God they are normally invisible to us (Col. 1:16). As St. Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen taught, angels are intelligences who never inhabit a body; and so they cannot spatially occupy a physical place. 12 Sometimes they appear in dreams or visions, but these occasions are said to be available only to a rational soul, the version of anima that bears the image of God (reason, will, affections). Only a rational soul can experience a visionary encounter with such "noble essences," "light invisible," in Sir Thomas Browne's phrasing. IJ Angelic messengers are, according to Increase Mather's Reformed summary of Renaissance angelology; "Real Rational Creatures.m4 Angels can "appear in human shape"-in the guise of human beings-but on such occasions their human presence is apparitional, not an incarnation. 15 Angels cannot usurp human will, nor can they confiscate a human body. (Demonic possession is a different matter involving, in one way or another, human consent.) Angelic visitations are, then, visionary experiences for which a rational soul is required. As we have seen, Sadeler,

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Lastman, Rembrandt, and the unknown engraver of the Tobias legend properly display animals who are utterly unaware of angels even in human guise. But as we have also seen in the painting of Sister Colette, some Renaissance artists were inclined to extend the possibilities of animal perception to include both "things visible and invisible" (Col. 1:16). In making this observation I do not mean to suggest that Renaissance artists in general necessarily focused on or even thought much about the scientific and theological positioning of animals as such, even if many of them participated deeply in the intellectual life of their time. 16 It was, however, simply a matter of common knowledge in their milieu that the animal realm was lower than the human realm, which in turn was lower than the angelic order. That some artists clearly weighed this universal "Staire, or manifest Scale of creatures.m7 is evident in Mesiter von Schoppingen's "Passionsalter" (ca. 1453). 18 His picture of the Annunciation is structured on a descending diagonal line that directs the viewer to proceed from the Archangel Gabriel's head (at center left), to Mary, to a cat hidden in a shadow beneath the loom behind Mary (at bottom right). Like Mary; the cat, which does not appear in the biblical account, is not frightened. Like the Virgin, it sits quietly attentive. But, apparently; in response to the angelic visitor it has shyly hidden itself, perhaps as a sign of its lower place in the hierarchy of creation; for the invisible diagonal line along which our eye moves in the painting reinscribes the order of being as it descends from the angelic, to the human, to the animal realms. (The vegetative world is represented by the small potted plant in the bottom left corner.) Nevertheless, the spatial positioning and the posture of the cat communicate more than the artist's desire to represent proper hierarchical symbolism. They both also indicate the eat's awareness of Gabriel's presence, a response that (together with the pictorial parallelism between the cat and the Virgin) problematizes the theological subordinate positioning of the cat in the painting. The cat, whose iconographic symbolism19likely represents Mary's free will in accepting her divine mission, has in some fashion sensed and witnessed Mary's vision of the angelic "Rational Creature." The role of the cat in this picture is as ambiguous as the role of the lamb in the painting of St. Colette's vision. How much these animals see remains unclear. Yet, like the lamb in the nun's vision, the cat in the Annunciation scene testifies to the actuality of the heavenly visitor, although (paradoxically) the animal's subordinate and shadowed spatial positioning in the painting reinforces the notion that in the universal "Scale" its anima is restricted only to sensation and natural impulse. Pertinent here is an observation by John Updike, who describes another picture (unidentified but exhibited at the Palazzo Grassi) in which "a cat between Mary and Gabriel leaps and bristles at the {angelic} announcement. me What accounts for this potential "disorder" in such works as Mesiter von Schoppingen's treatment of the Annunciation and the unknown painter's rendering of Sister Colette's vision (which also hierarchically positions the animal witness lower than the human figures, both of whom

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are properly located beneath the hovering angel)? Besides the iconographic heritage alluded to earlier in this essay, there is, of course, folkloric tradition, which often attributed to certain animals the ability to respond to supernatural phenomena. Religious tradition, too, viewed animals as creatures who, in accord with the innate nature of all living things, intuitively "worship" their maker through their very being. Early artists long played on this notion, with some embellishment, especially in popular depictions of Nativity scenes with animals enraptured by the mangered Christ child. There are countless renditions of this scene, including "Nativity'' (qoos) by Florintine painter Paolo Schiavo and "The Adoration of the Animals" (early rsoos) by Pravian painter Pier Francesco Sacchi. 21 Composition issues are also a factor in the placement of animals in the paintings we have so far reviewed. As we saw in Raphael Sadder's portrait of St. Francis consoled by angelic music, the strategic positioning of an animal often instructs the viewer where especially to focus in a picture. In the depiction of Sister Colette's vision, the viewer is encouraged to attend to the angelic touch as a sign of her divine authorization to reform the Poor Clares. In Mesiter von Schoppingen's depiction of the Annunciation, the viewer completes the vertical descent to the cat and then, following the look of the cat, retreats from the aesthetically unrewarding small feline figure and from the shadow beneath the loom toward the more pleasing centered figure of Mary, the central CounterReformation subject of the painting. In such paintings animals attest to the actuality of supernatural occurrences. Their reputation as creatures defined by keen senses serves to authenticate the event. In effect, these creatures testifY that what happened was not a delusion or some other form of mental aberration. On the other hand, by artistic design or accident, sometimes the use of animals as testifYing witnesses actually introduces a question about the mental state of a person said to have experienced a supernatural visitation. This is certainly the case of a conversion-of-Paul painting (r6oo-r6or)2 2 by the extraordinarily controversial Caravaggio. In this dramatic rendition of an episode from Acts 9 that was rejected by Caravaggio's patron, Paul has fallen from his horse and lies semi-prone, his hands covering his eyes and grasping his head, at the center-bottom of the p~cture. Towering behind him is a horse, not only wildly out of control but emphatically frothing at the mouth. After Michelangelo's version of the conversion of Paul, one or more horses were common figures in Renaissance depictions of this famous episode, although the inclusion of a horse at the time the disciple was blinded near Damascus lacks both historical probability and specific biblical authorization. 2 3 In these paintings generally, the horse represents the wild impulses (expressed in Saul's preconversion persecution of Christians) that the to-be renamed disciple will control after his spiritual enlightenment. And in these paintings the horse, as a creature of sensation, also attests to the actuality of the event. Commonly the horse shows a reaction, often mimicking Paul's, that suggests something real did indeed happen.

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In his second, less controversial attempt to depict the conversion of Paul (also I6oo-I60I), 2 4 Caravaggio presents only a slightly disturbed horse, its head turned away from us. The horse merely tries not to step on the fallen rider, who vulnerably lies with outstretched arms beneath the animal's belly. Although this painting has been faulted in artistic terms,Z5 it has never stirred the sort of debate generated by Caravaggio's earlier and more dramatic rendition of Paul's conversion. Critics have responded to the earlier version with skepticism, doubting whether it is Caravaggio's. While some critics see the arrangement of the painting as "confused,m6 others resist reading its representation of the disciple as "a pathological case in the guise of a miracle." 2 7 The frothing horse certainly raises a note of ambiguity in the painting. Does this horse attest to the actuality of the sudden flash of"supernatural light," 28 or does it suggest that Paul has fallen as a result of a blinding delusion? Nothing in the "maddening" swirl of the picture helps resolve this uncertainty, least of all its darkish center. The circular flux of semi-lit images and the jutting illuminated hand of Christ in the upper right-hand corner both tend to lead the viewer's attention to this darkish center before our focus finally tries to settle on the stricken Paul. Blindness is emphasized in this picture. 2 9 Left uncertain here is whether this unlit center parallels the three days of blindness Paul experienced after this incident or whether it represents the "nothing" of delusion behind the convert's experience. No such ambiguity occurs in, say, "The Conversion ofPaul" (ca. 162o) by Daniele Crespi, a Counter-Reformation Milanese painter.3° Crespi's work features the conventional disturbed horse, but the animal looks upward in frightened confirmation of the heavenly flash of light (not depicted). Ambiguity like Caravaggio's is not common in religious Renaissance depictions of animals, which usually serve, like Crespi's horse, both as emblems of human traits and as reassuring attestors to the validity of a supernatural visitation. In fact, whereas the unattributed version of Sister Colette's angelic visitation and Mesiter von Schoppingen's rendering of the Annunciation only intimate that a lamb and a cat actually witness a supernatural event, other artists show far less reticence. Apparently inattentive to the hierarchies of creation, Venetian painter Francesco di Simone da Santacroche includes in his ''Annunciation" (1504)31 a very small bird (not a dove) standing on the floor between Gabriel and Mary. The picture directs the viewer's attention from the upper left of the painting, featuring a window (typically imaging the first letter of Mary) with the descending rays of the Holy Spirit (dove), along a diagonal line from the gliding angel to the kneeling Virgin in the lower right-hand corner of the painting. After our attention settles on the kneeling figure, it then potentially drifts toward the strangely positioned little bird, surrounded by over-ample floor space and situated at the center of the foreground of the picture. (A look at the original might usefully reveal the attentive bird's species, which does not appear to be identical to the

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peculiar indifferent little bird in Fra Angelico's Prado "Annunciation'' [ca. 1430-I432}Y) Whatever the artist's intention, this tiny creature attracts considerable notice. Its smallness, its isolation, and its stark contrast to the rich textures of the upper half of the painting potentially create some visual tension, possibly an expression of what Georges DidiHuberman has described as a Renaissance aesthetic of distortion designed to convey the otherness of such a miraculous event.33 Perhaps the artist means to suggest that Mary, whose kneeling posture (with her gown covering her feet) refigures the image of the bird, is detached from the worldly things and is unique (isolated) in her destiny. Clearer is the implied attribution to Mary of the higher or spiritual state of being commonly associated with birds (hence the traditional Christian use of the dove, seen in this painting, to represent the Holy Spirit). It is as if the dove-like Holy Spirit finds a mate in the delicate bird-like virgin soul, whose destiny is announced by an avianish winged angel. The attentiveness of the little bird, unafraid even though it is "unnaturally'' " indoors and vulnerably standing on a floor, suggests as well that Mary's unusual destiny (supranatural conception) positions her outside of humanity's usual element. Dogs are more prevalent than either cats or birds in Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation, though they, too, lack biblical authority in the scene. Benedetto Coda's ''Annunciation" (early rpos)34 features a dog, alert but calm at Mary's feet. The dog, whose head looks up slightly, whose ears are attentively raised, and whose forelegs are extended as if casually ready for action, if necessary, apparently senses the presence of Gabriel prior to Mary, whose eyes are still cast downward in the act of reading. Even more dramatic is the dog within the Mannerist embellishments ofPaolo Caliari Veronese's "The Annunciation" (ca. 1585))5 Positioned between Gabriel (descending from the upper left corner) and Mary (swooning in the lower right-hand corner), the dog stands amazed. In a posture typical of a canine intently responding to something sensed but not yet identified -a "pointing'' gesture refined in hunting dogs-a right forepaw is raised as the animal stares at the heavenly visitor that theoretically it should not be able to perceive. Perhaps the dog does not in fact see the angel; but it certainly detects the angel's presence, which ability may recall older emblematic representations of canine presci~nce but which should, in terms of Renaissance science and theology, be beyond the capacity of a faunal anima limited to physical sensation. Veronese's canine, so close to Mary's mantle, does not insist on its own importance in the peculiar manner of Francesco di Simone da Santacroche's little bird or (as we will see) Vittore Carpaccio's Augustinian dog. Our eyes linger on Veronese's dog just ·long enough for the artist's representation of the canine's keen senses to testify to us, as viewers, on behalf of the reality of the event. The same canine gesture of vigilance is seen in "Tobias and the Archangel Gabriel" (1400s) by the Florintine Piero Pollaiuolo.3 6 Pollaiuolo's inclusion ofTobias's loyal dog is authorized by the Apocryphal Book ofTobit. In contrast to the unattributed sixteenth-century engraving

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"Tobias Catching the Fish in the River Tigris" and Pieter Lastman's seventeenth-century "The Angel Departing from Tobit's Family," Pollaiuolo's fifteenth-century animal not only stands next to the angel; it apparently perceives the spiritual messenger. Even if (possibly) the dog does not actually see the winged visitor, the gesture of his elevated left forepaw is meant to suggest that he at least is (somehow) sensorially, physically, aware of the angel's noncorporeal presence. A similar situation is depicted in "The Dream of Saint Ursula" (1495);37 the fifth Ursuline painting in a series of nine by Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio. A lightenshrouded angel enters from the right side of the picture and looks upon the virgin martyr sleeping in her bed on the left side of the painting. Between them, situated at the very center and at the bottom of the scene, is a dog. This canine, described by one art critic as "wakeful, couched,"38 is clearly aware of a supernatural presence. The painting problematically suggests that the saint is greeted by an angel through the medium of sleep, whereas her dog senses the heavenly visitor while fully awake. Still more interesting is the dog who sits with his head raised-as entranced as his human companion-in Carpaccio's "St. Augustine in His Study" (ca. 1502).39 See figure 4.1. As we view the picture, our eyes likely move from the dog sitting on the lower left side of the scene, which is the most illuminated quadrant of the painting, toward the saint at his desk as he looks farther rightward while holding a pen suspended in mid-air (recalling the raised foreleg of startled dogs in other paintings). We follow the stare of the saint, which continues the look of the dog, to the luminescent

Figure 4.1 St. Augustine in his study (ca. 1502)

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window at the center of the right side of the composition. We cannot discern what they observe in the window, which from our angle of vision appears as a very narrow light-filled rectangle. The artist may mean to suggest either Augustine's doctrine that likens divine illumination to sunlight or the saint's explicit acknowledgment of personal spiritual experiences that were, he said, like light playing on his mind or soul. 4o It has been argued that the scene refers to an Apocryphal episode in Augustine's life when he was visited by the spirit of Jerome, who had died-note the stopped hourglass beneath the window-at the very time Augustine was writing a letter to himY Whether spiritual illumination or St. Jerome's ghost,' the dog testifies to a supernatural visitation. His position, so isolated on the left side of the painting, draws attention to him42 in the same manner as the little bird in Francesco di Simone da Santacroche's ''Annunciation." Carpaccio's dog seems to possess faculties beyond mere animal anima. Augustine's dog is such a good witness of the more-than-natural phenomenon outside the study window that the canine successfully serves as the initial agent of the viewer's own "visual" share in that supernatural visitation. Similar artistic liberties were taken, as well, with the traditional iconographic lamb. If, as we saw, Raphael Sadeler is careful to show a lamb only perceiving the angelic effect on St. Francis and if the unknown painter of Sister Colette's angelic visitation leaves ambiguous whether or not the lamb sees the angel, other artists are less cautious. In "The Mystical Marriage of Blessed OsannaAndreasi" (after 1649),43 a fading altarpiece by Sister Maddalena Caccia Orsola, the angelic visitation on behalf of a beatified nun is also witnessed by a lamb standing in the center of the right field of the painting. There, in the midst ofbarrier-like trees, the animal's reverent transfixion redirects our own eyes to the implicit oval formed by the angel and the nun. Although it is doubtful that the right foreleg of the signifying lamb is slightly lifted, its somewhat awkward positioning (whether intentional or accidental) intimates the imminence of the characteristic gesture of an animal whose attention has been suddenly arrested by some as-yet unidentified scent or presence. This would be especially apt since the lamb, in the typical iconography of such hagiographic depictions, represents Blessed Osanna's innocence and purity. The nun and the animal are, in short, mutually seized by the,wonder of the angelic appearance. A frontispiece (1582-1587) by Philipp Galle goes further.44 It situates St. Francis of Assisi within the prophecy of Rev. 7:2: "I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God." On each side of the transfixed saint an angel is depicted, the one on the left playing a lute, the one on the right strumming a lyre. Various animals representing the sky, the sea, and the land likewise stand transfixed by the sudden appearance of the angels. One sheep in fact holds up his right foreleg to suggest the arresting of his attention and possibly also an adoring attitude as he reverently raises his head toward one of the angels. As we have seen, then, during the Renaissance animal anima was thought to be restricted to sensation and natural impulse. Animals were

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said to lack a rational soul that would have enabled them to perceive the "noble essence" of angels or related supernatural phenomena. As mere creatures of sensation and natural impulse, moreover, animals are doomed to perish in the sensorial world that entirely defines them. According to the Christian theology of the time, there are no dogs, cats, birds, horses, or lambs in heaven, even if (as Renaissance illustrators often suggest) they once were the companions of either a saint or the mother ofJesus. And yet Renaissance artists represented spirit-sensing animals who respond to and emphatically credit supernatural events. More than passive instruments of emblematic meaning, these creatures actively attest to spiritual truths, which they are theoretically incapable of recognizing. Mary's dog, cat, and bird acknowledge the Angel Gabriel, who is pure spirit and presumably undetectable to these very creatures. Paul's horse likewise acknowledges the moment of his spiritual illumination as if it were a tangible and frightening disruption of its own quotidian sensorial experiences. And the lambs/sheep of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Colette, and Blessed Osanna, and the dogs of St. Augustine and St. Ursula all similarly verify supra-sensory visitations they are theologically said to be unable to experience, much less attest to as witnesses. Strangest of all, perhaps, is the dog in Carpaccio's "The Dream of Saint Ursula," in which a wide-awake little creature greets an angel the saint only encounters in her sleep. Whether or not individual Renaissance painters were especially concerned with the prevailing scientific and theological construction of animals, they had immediate religious and aesthetic aims that pressed against any such general philosophical constraints, which were more often than not likely peripheral concerns at best. The motifs they employed doubtless changed to meet various contemporary developmentsparticularly the Counter-Reformation-just as the moral fable mutated into political allegory in response to particular cultural pressures.45 Furthermore, these painters inherited various conflicting traditions upon which they drew, including the Old Testament account of the reproving voice of God spoken though the mouth ofBalaam's donkey (Numbers 22: 28) and a medieval legend, apparently started by the fourth-century hymnist and poet Prudentius. On the eve of the nativity of Christ, according to this legend, certain animals were gifted with the capacity to speak. In commemoration of the wondrous event of the birth of the Christ child, there were as well medieval liturgical services that featured humans who represented animals who could sing.46 Unlike the animals who in medieval tradition are briefly given the ability to talk in evidence of the miracle of Jesus's birth, the creatures included in Renaissance depictions of angelic visitations (Tobias, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Collette, St. Ursula, Blessed Orsola) and other supernatural episodes (St. Paul, St. Augustine) are mute witnesses. Nonetheless, like the emblematic animals of an earlier iconography, these animals gesture or "speak" on behalf of divine truth. Their aroused keen senses- the sensorial capacities by which animals are

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primarily defined-:-attest to the actuality of the supra-sensorial occasions they witness. Just as these animals often tutor the direction of eyemovement-that is, the viewer's spatial orientation within a paintingthey also tutor the audience's desire for reassurance that the depicted supernatural episode is an empirical rather than an imaginary occurrence. The intended traffic of signification is clear in these works. The "gestured" testimony of these dogs, cats, birds, lambs, and horses is meant to point away from animal witnesses, as such, to human subjects experiencing a supernatural visitation. Beyond characteristic gestures designed to convey the empirical authenticity of a miraculous event, usually little of the idiosyncratic nature of these animals is rendered in the illustrations. These "iconographically domesticated" animals are meant to serve human purposes, to be little more than subservient "signing" agents attesting to the credibility of the event. The viewer is not encouraged to linger over their "small" testimony per se but, instead, to dwell on the miraculous incident itself This "official" or intended meaning-that is, to emphasize miraculous events- mutes and obscures a significant implication in these scenes. If we double-back on the pathway of the official traffic of signification, we notice the overshadowed fact that creatures said to be entirely restricted to natural sensation and natural impulse have (somehow) responded to supra-sensory visitations as if they possessed the requisite higher spiritual capacities of a human rational soul. As agents of the official aesthetic and doctrinal intentions informing these pictures, as spatial pointers within their scenes, these creatures (like the talking animals on Christmas Eve) unofficially and unaccountably acquire human properties. It is noteworthy, in this regard, to observe (as we can with the bird in Francesco di Simone da Santacroche's ''Annunciation," the dog in Vittore Carpaccio's "St. Augustine in His Study," the lamb in "St. Francis, Patron of St. Colette," and the cat in Mesiter von Schoppingen's "Passionsalter") how often these animals exhibit a pose and an emotional response paralleling those of the transfixed saints in the same pictures. Both this "narrative" parallelism and their confirmation of supernatural visitations implicitly interrogate-intimate a counterauthority tothe prevailing Renaissance construction of animals as creatures limited solely to sensation and natural impulse. These animals testify on behalf the beliefs and legends of a theology that generally devalues them and specifically denies them the capability of giving such testimony. But within the paradox of their performance as signifiers of spiritual realities in Renaissance art, their gestures also mutely "speak" against the scientific and theological construction of animals as inferior brutes defined solely in terms of sensation and natural impulse. Some undefined, inadvertent recognition of animal mentality and cognition- some deep appreciation of animals based less on theories about than on human experiences with and feelings for them- is implicitly suggested whenever a Renaissance artist depicts such creatures demonstrating an aptitude for "sensorially'' gesturing/affirming a

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supra-sensory phenomenon. In the unofficial version of the natural order imaginatively rendered in many Renaissance depictions of angelic and other supernatural visitations, animals indeed share in the heavenly order. 47

Notes Claudia Lazzaro, ''Animals as Cultural Signs: A Medici Menagerier in the Grotto at Castello," in Claire Farago, ed. Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe andLatinAmerica, 1450-r6so (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 197. 2. Cesare Ripa, in Edward A. Maser, ed., Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery [lconologia} (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 30, 143. 3· Sir Thomas Browne, in Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed., Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 40. I.

4 . Ibid., 56, 83. 5· Saint Basil, in S. Giet, trans., Hexa~meron, vol. 9 (Paris: Du Cerf, 1950), 84.

6. Karl Josef Holtgen, "Clever Dogs and Nimble Spaniels: On the Iconography of Logic, Invention, and Imagination," Explorations in

Renaissance Culture 24 (1998):

I.

7· "Tobias Catching the Fish in the River Tigris" is reproduced in Peter van der Coden's Patriarchs, Angels and Prophets: The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmakingfrom Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt (Amsterdam: Museum het Rembrandthuis, 1996), 15. 8. "The Angel Departing from Tobit's Family" is reproduced in Peter van der Coelen's Patriarchs, 143. 9· "The Angel Leaving Tobias and His Family" is reproduced in Simon Schama's Rembrandt's Eyes (New York: Knopf, 1999), 426. 10. "St. Francis in His Cell Consoled by Angelic Music" is reproduced in Wolfgang Heinrich Savelsberg's Die Darstellung des HI. Franziskus vonAssisi in der F!itmischen Malerei und Graphik des Spiiten r6. und IJ. Jahrhunderts (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1992), 270. II. "St. Francis, Patron of St. Colette," also known as "St. Colette, Reformer of the St. Claire Order," is reproduced in Wolfgang Heinrich Savelsberg's

Die Darstellung des HI. Franziskus vonAssisi, 175. 12. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press, 1998), 62. 13. Browne, Selected Writings, 37, 40. 14. Increase Mather, Angelographia (Boston: B. Green &J. Allen, 1696), 6. 15. Ibid., 7316. Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 17. Browne, Selected Writings, 39· 18. This image from Schoppingen's "Passionsalter" is reproduced as Plate 32 in Barbara Jakoby's Der Einflufi niederliindischer Tofelmalerei des rs. Jahrhunderts auf die Kunst der benachbarten Rheinlande am Beispiel der Verkundigungs darstellung in Koln am Niederrhein und un Westfalen 6440-1490) (Koln: George Moliche, 1987). 19. Ripa, Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery, 62

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20. John Updike, "The Future of Faith," New Yorker (29 November 1999): 85. 21. Schiavo's "Nativity" is reproduced in Arte Christiana 83 (1995): 333; and Sacchi's ''Adoration of the Animals" appears in Arte Christiana 82 (1994): 408. 22. Caravaggio's "The Conversion of St. Paul" is reproduced in Timothy Wilson-Smith's Caravaggio (London: Phaedon, 1998), 14· 23. Charles T. Dougherty, "Did Paul Fall Off a Horse?" Bible Review IJ, iv (August 1997): 44· 24. Caravaggio's second "The Conversion of St. Paul" is reproduced in Timothy Wilson-Smith's Caravaggio, 19. 25. Howard Hubbard, Caravaggio (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 123. 26. Gilbert. E. Creighton, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 150. 27. Walter Friedloender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 24. 28. Ibid., 21. 29. Ibid., 23. 30. Crespi's "The Conversion of Saint. Paul" is reproduced in Burlington Magazine 141 (July 1999): 448. 31. Santacroche's ''Annunciation" is reproduced as plate 566 in Italian Pictures ofthe Renaissance: Venetian School, vol. 1 (London: Phaedon Press, 1957). 32. The Prado ''Annunciation" is reproduced in Georges Didi-Huberman's in

Jane Marie Todd, trans., FraAngelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 203. 33· Ibid., 45-60. 34· Coda's ''Annunciation" is reproduced inArte Christiana 77 (1989): 315. 35· Veronese's ''Annunciation" is reproduced in Burlington Magazine 141 (July 1999): 448. 36. Pollaiuolo's "Tobias and the Archangel Gabriel" is reproduced in Peter

and Linda Murray's The Oxford Companion to Christian Art andArchitecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 533· 37· "The Dream of Saint Ursula" is reproduced in Albert Cook's Changing the Signs: The Fifteenth Century Breakthrough (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 61. 38. Cook, 6o. 39· "St. Augustine in His Study'' is reproduced in Joseph C. Schnaukelt and Frederick van Fleteren's Augustine in Iconography: History and Legend (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 540. 40. Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed.,Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 438. 41. Joseph C. Schnaukelt and Frederick van Fleteren, Augustine in Iconography: History and Legend (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 508. 42. Ibid., 540. 43· "The Mystical Marriage of Blessed Osanna Andreasi" is reproduced in Arte Christiana 78 (1990): 64. 44· Galle's Frontispiece is reproduced in Savelsberg's Die Darstellung des Hl Franziskus vonAssisi, 140. 45· Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Wi-iting and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 42.

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46. {Hershel Shanks}, "The Nativity;" Bible Review 16, i (February 2ooo): 56. 47· Portions of this paper were presented at the 50th anniversary meeting of the South-Central Renaissance Conference at Texas A&M University and later at an annual meeting of the South-Central Modern Language Society. I am grateful to editor Phoebe S. Spinrad for the appearance of a shorter lecture version of this essay in Discoveries 18, no. 2 (2001): 1-2,15-18.

CHAPTERS

STRANGE YET "FAMILIAR': CATS AND BIRDS IN REMEDios VARo's ARTISTIC UNIVERSE Nancy Vosburg

cat sits solemnly gazing at me, apparently oblivious to the whirling disk entering the room from a window above. Across the room, another cat peers up from a hole in the floorboards, astonished at a strange phenomenontaking place-his human companion is being transformed into the armchair in which she sits! Not far away, yet another cat sends out electrifying sparks as she's gently stroked by her human, creating a permanent wave in her companion's hair. And behind me are more, peering out from underneath cloaks, perched contentedly on their humans' laps, lolling around a medieval tower. And the birds, the birds are almost everywhere-some perched in trees, others flying low, some peering out from the folds of draped cloaks, several others circling a group of girls, as if to herd them together. But the most astonishing ones are those flying off the artist's page as soon as they are drawn! And what strange. beings are these cat-human, cat-bird hybrids? To walk through an exhibition of the paintings of Remedios Varo (1908-1963) is to enter a fantastical universe where the laws of nature and our everyday ways of seeing have been dramatically ruptured. 1 Varo's paintings are unique works through which she questions and explores the order of the universe, postulating new realities and examining the logic of existing systems of thought. Her blending of surrealist techniques and images, Freudian and Jungian psychology, science, magic, and the occult results in an imaginative, oftentimes humorous and subversive vision, focused primarily on metaphysical speculations. Transformations, both physical and spiritual, are central to her paintings, as are transmutations, as when inanimate objects become living things, or, more commonly, when human beings take on the forms or markings of animals, plants, insects, or domestic objects. Born in Angles, Catalonia (Spain), Varo spent much ofheryouth traveling with her father, a hydraulic engineer, throughout Spain and Northern Africa. During the 1920s, she was schooled at Madrid's Academy of San

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Fernando, where she came into contact and found common interest with the Spanish avant-garde artists. Upon her graduation in 1930, she married classmate Gerardo Lizarraga, and together they, like many Spanish artists of the period, moved to Paris for a year to immerse themselves in the artistic atmosphere there. When they returned to Spain, they chose to live in Barcelona, a more intellectually cosmopolitan environment than Madrid. With the eruption of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Varo fled from Barcelona back to Paris with surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, although she was still married to Lizarraga and at the same time was having an affair with another fledgling Spanish artist, Esteban Frances. In Paris, Peret quickly introduced Varo to the intimate circle of Andre Breton's new artistic movement, and together they participated in surrealist gatherings and exhibitions. The Nazi invasion of Paris in 1940 caused another dramatic change in Varo's life, as it forced Varo and Peret, both of whom were briefly jailed by the Vichy government, to embark in 1941 for Mexico, where Varo would spend the rest of her life. 2 Although Varo had participated in a few exhibitions in Barcelona and Paris, it was in Mexico that she produced the main body of her work, presenting her first widely-acclaimed exhibition in 1954-1955. Among her closest friends in Mexico City was Leonora Carrington, who had also moved in the Parisian surrealist circle (with her lover Max Ernst), and with whom Varo collaborated on fictional writings (stories, plays, letters), ludicrous recipes incorporating heterodox objects (many noncomestible), and surreal dinner parties and soirees} Varo and Carrington shared common interests in surrealism, psychology, and the hermetic tradition, including magic, alchemy, and astrology. Mexico proved to be a fertile ground for Varo, despite the hardships of her first years of exile there, when she was forced to do commercial work (primarily advertising for Bayer aspirin and costume designs for theatrical productions) in order to support herself Yet her inquisitive nature, her constant preoccupation with spiritual life, and her fear of invisible, destructive forces kept her forever on the alert to discovering new dimensions to the universe. According to Juliana Gonzalez, For Varo, art itself was not a means of transcendence; transcendence resulted from having a different experience of the world and the spirit. Her artistic creation was carried out, then, as a poetic reflection of more universal concerns, which were of an intellectual and mystical nature.4

Nonhuman animals, particularly cats and birds, often populate Varo's paintings and writings, and while they generally occupy neither the thematic nor the compositional center of the work, their presence must be viewed as essential to the fabulist content of most of her paintings. Varo's niece, Beatriz Varo, herself an artist and a biographer/explicator ofVaro's life and works, contends, that "all the objects which emerge from Varo's canvasses have a purpose; neither chance nor whimsy exist here. She does not paint an object only because she likes it, or for its beauty, but rather because it

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has a determined meaning."5 In addition, as Roger Caillois points out, in Varo's paintings "species boundaries are not watertight, especially between women, cats and owls."6 Hybrid forms appear often, yet when birds and cats are presented in integral form, they tend to be even more individualized than Varo's human characters, who often take on her own appearance or are androgynous, asexual creatures. What role, exactly, do the various cats and birds play in Varo's paintings, and how do they reinforce, poetically, her universal concerns? Perhaps by exploring some of the paintings in which these beings seem to play a significant role in the pictorial narrative, we can begin to understand better Varo's "different experience of the world and the spirit." Because her paintings fascinate, amuse, and even sometimes haunt us, it is not uncommon that, as viewers, we also begin to experience "differently" the world that surrounds us. As Luis-Martin Lozano has written, "Her art casts a spell oflearned truths on its audience. Varo is much more than a painter; she is an illusionist opening the door to a visually fascinating and unimagined world, which is playful and intelligent, brimming with fine humor and existential dilemmas."? Cats, in particular, seem to play a variety of roles in Varo's artistic universe, sometimes as observers who bear witness to new realities or to Varo's deep inner fears and obsessions, other times as conveyers of the symbolic meanings embedded in human thought; in still other paintings, and particularly in Varo's writings, cats are mediators or collaborators in the process of spiritual transformation. In this latter regard, they are constructed as psychic companions, or "familiars," of the human beings they accompany. Varo, a rather solitary and profoundly spiritual person, surrounded herself with cats, and the fact that her facial features (heart-shaped face, slightly slanted, almond-shaped eyes) were strikingly similar to those of a cat resulted in self-portraits in which the transmutation from human to animal · can be discerned, suggesting an intimate identification of the artist with this particular species (see figure p). In The Days ofGabino Barreda Street, a 1944 painting by Gunther Gerszo of the exiled group that often gathered at the Varo/Peret house in the Colonia San Rafael in Mexico City, Gerszo in fact depicts Varo as a "mysterious feline figure reclining on the floor, wearing a cat's-eye mask and draped in heavy fabric from which several cats peek out."8 Varo was renowned for taking in stray cats from the streets, and few who visited her refrained from commenting on it. Not only Gerszo, but also Varo herself, had a tendency to "felinize" herself and/or others. In one of her journal writings, Varo records a dream that fills her with great anxiety, and which begins: I'm washing a blond kitten in the sink of some hotel. But that's not true; it seems that it is Leonora, who is wearing an ample overcoat and needs to be washed. I douse her with a little soapy water and I continue to wash the kitten, but I'm very perplexed and disturbed because I'm not sure who I am bathing.9

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Sympathy

In yet another writing, Varo adopts the pseudonym of "Felina CaprinoMandragora," Feline Goatlike Mandrake.ro The affinity or identification that Varo seemed to have with cats suggests that they may sometimes be stand-ins for the artist herself Among the over 360 paintings and sketches attributed to Remedios Varo (not including her commercial work), there are few that feature cats as their central subject. Among those few are Cat (1956) and Cats named "Pituso" and 'Zorrillo" (1958), two "realist" sketches of felines. Feline/human

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hybrids are the central figures in one watercolor and two sketches (Cat Man {1943}, Feline Personage {1945}, and Feline Lady b953} ), while The Cat Fern (1957) depicts a playful hybrid of plant and animal. Cats' Paradise (1955), on the other hand, partakes of the imaginative Romanesque, fairy-tale universe that is almost a constant in Varo's paintings, perhaps an autobiographical reference to the medieval and Renaissance landscapes of her childhood.rr In the background of Cats' Paradise, we discern a medievallooking city; in the foreground and occupying center stage are twin towers surrounded by a forest. A fat cat is ensconced in the central tower's window, lording it over the several other cats and kittens, lounging or playing nearby. Attached to the central tower is a windmill-powered mechanical contraption (another leitmotif in Varo's paintings' 2) from which hang strings with assorted toys-balls, spools, ribbons, a paintbrush, a pencil. Kittens lunge at the baubles as the contraption makes its circular movements. Cats' Paradise, perhaps a humorous reflection on Varo's domestic ambience, is important for understanding the artist's relationship to the "other." What is most striking is the individuality she bestows on each cat-they are of different breeds and different sizes-and the (relative) autonomy of the cat world from human culture that is created. Yes, the cats do occupy man-made constructions, and are entertained by a man-made mechanical contraption. Yet the harmonious universe depicted in Cats' Paradise suggests that, at least in Varo's domestic world, cats rule, and all man-made objects, including the artist's tools, are merely there to give them pleasure. Humans are superfluous in a eat's paradise, once they have carried out their function. More frequently, and particularly in Varo's writings, cats appear as collaborators in the process of spiritual transformation and enlightenment. As Beatriz Varo reports, Remedios lived an intense interior life in which her anguishes, fears, and worries about life beyond death were often masked by her dynamic sense of humor. In one of the many "fictional letters" she composed, which can best be described as fantastic tales, '3 Varo seems to explore the possibility of reincarnation: This reincarnation was not easy; {it came about} after my spirit passed, first through the body of a cat, then through that of an unknown creature pertaining to the world of velocity, that is, that which passes through a piece of quartz at more than JOO,ooo km. per second (and therefore can't be seen). '4

In a 1955 oil painting, Sympathy, Varo depicts another transfer of energy through a cat. Originally titled The Madness ofthe Cat, the painting depicts a woman stroking a cat who has just spilled a glass of milk. Varo described the painting as follows: "This lady's cat jumps onto the table producing the sort of disorder that one must learn to tolerate if one likes cats (as I do). Upon caressing it, so many sparks fly that they form a very complicated electrical gadget. Some sparks and electricity go to her head and rapidly

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make a permanent wave."'5 The "sympathy" is reciprocal; the eat's hair, and indeed its hind legs, are standing on end as well. Here, Varo has turned a quotidian incident (the spark of static electricity) into a reflection on the interconnectedness between humans and animals. 16 The theme of interdependency amongst objects (including animals and humans) is a theme that is explored in many of Varo's paintings and writings. As Juliana Gonzalez has asserted: "{Varo's} great theme is cosmic unity and, consequently, the secret interconnections between worlds, between diverse planes of reality. 17 Interdependency is also central to the teachings of the Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjief:f, whose philosophy Varo studied for many years, along with friends Leonora Carrington, Swiss photographer Eva Sulzer, and artist Alice Rahon. 18 According to Gurdjief:f, an individual can reach total knowledge by gathering the energy in her surroundings for personal use. This gathering enables the individual to achieve a certain spiritual elevation, to perceive all the extraordinary phenomena that exist, and to see the cause-effect relationships among them. In another lett~r, this to a real or fictional "Sr. Gardner," Varo explains how she has managed to put some order to the "small solar systems" in her house by careful arrangement of various heterogeneous objects. But, she warns: {A}t times, the incalculable is produced, provoked by the rapid trajectory of an unexpected meteor through my established order. The meteor is none other than my cat, but little by little I am gaining control over this chance factor, since I have discovered that by nourishing the cat exclusively with sheep's milk, her trajectory produces almost no effect. r9

In yet another fantastic tale, an epistle written in French and addressed to "a scientist," Varo describes a chemical experiment she claimed to be conducting with diverse substances (and musical notes) to produce softer skin on melons: Suddenly something terrible happened. Just as I was playing the note "ti" and was ready to move to the next octave in a slightly lower pitch, the cat meowed and someone who was walking down the street passed by the window and cast a shadow on my experimentation table ... 20

Unfortunately, the shadow causes the substances on the table to separate, leaving a small pearl-like particle that shoots off into space, creating a dangerous hole through which the atmosphere will slowly escape. Despite her efforts to reproduce all the elements present at that moment (including the eat's meow), Varo reports that she is unable to repair the hole. In Cosmic Energy (1956), Varo again explores the concept of the interdependency of objects and the transference of energy, depicting a cat in much the same way that we saw in Sympathy. The vague one-dimensional figures of a man and a woman are seen immured on adjacent walls. Each wall has a hole in it, through which a ray of light, or cosmic energy, is

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flowing, causing flowers to bloom from the floorboards. The man's hand becomes corporal, or "real," as it emerges from the wall and draws a bow across the violin leaning against the wall (in several of Varo's paintings, such as Solar Music h955} and The Flutist h955}), music is shown to possess magical powers. Similarly, the woman's hand emerges to stroke a cat, who sends out sparks of energy. Both the violin and the cat are depicted as media for the transference of cosmic energy, which "corporalizes" the figures embedded in the walls. Cats often appear in Varo's paintings as observers or bystanders during moments in which supernatural or magical phenomena are taking place. Mimesis (1960), a painting which Janet Kaplan has called "a powerful study of female passivity''21 is one of the many works in which a cat figures prominently. In notes she wrote to her brother Rodrigo, Varo describes the painting as follows: This woman is lost in her thoughts and has remained motionless for so long that she is turning into the armchair; her flesh has become just like the cloth on the chair and her hands and feet are already turned into wood, the furniture gets bored and the armchair bites the table, the chair in the background investigates what the drawer contains, and the cat, which went out to hunt, is frightened and astonished upon returning as he sees the transformation. 22

The painting, despite its humorous elements, conveys a sense of desperation precisely because of the fright and astonishment registered by the cat as it peers up through a hole in the floor. Perhaps it is transmitting the painter's own anxiety about domestic entrapment and isolation. In a 1955 painting, Revelation or the Clockmaker (see figure 5.2), we see a clockmaker at his bench surrounded by grandfather clocks, each showing the same time and each containing the same figure but wearing different period costumes. The clockmaker looks up as a whirling disk spins through his window. According to Varo's own description, the disk represents a "revelation" that allows the clockmaker to "suddenly comprehend a whole lot of things." 2 3 Perhaps it is a moment when time literally stops to give way to a harmonious vision encompassing past, present, and future. Kaplan interprets the disk as a representation of the Einsteinian revelation that time is relative, in contrast to a Newtonian construct of ordinary time, a system of absolutes in which the flow of time is uniform and unchanging. For Walter Gruen, Varo's husband from 1952 until her death, the disk in this painting and others represents the mystical experience of the "Great Unity'' underlying all within the universe. 2 4 Varo's niece Beatriz agrees with Gruen's interpretation, associating the sphere with Varo's studies of alchemy, in which the sphere symbolizes perfection. There is a detail, however, in Revelation or the Clockmaker, that we shouldn't overlook-in the lower right hand corner of the painting sits a cat, whose attention is focused, not on the disk or even the clockmaker, but rather on the viewer of the painting. Since, according to Varo's niece,

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Figure 5.2

Revelation or the Clockmaker

all of the objects that emerge in Varo's paintings have a determined meaning (163), we cannot attribute the eat's presence to either chance or whimsy. What meanings, then, might this cat bring to Varo's meditation on time? Perhaps the cat is merely the psychic conduit that brings about the sudden revelation. Yet as the cat gazes beyond the boundaries of the frame, into the viewers' space and time, we find ourselves somehow thrust into the painting, much in the same way that Velazquez brings us into his Las meninas, a pictorial master stroke that continues to engage viewers in its timeless illusion. 2 5 The cat seems to be challenging us, bedecked in our own period costumes and trapped within our own Newtonian space- time boundaries, to open our own minds and spirits to the possibility of the marvelous. In yet another painting, Farewell (1958), arcaded architecture is tilted toward the viewer, and flanking corridors recede at extreme angles back into space, reminiscent, as Janet Kaplan points out, of de Chirico's 1913 Anxious Journey. 26 In the two separate corridors, a man and a woman are vanishing into the distance, each taking a separate path. But their shadows remain behind, united in the foreground, observed by a cat peering out from an archway. Beatriz Varo associates this painting with a trip to Paris that her aunt had just taken in 1958, and contends: ''As Jung says, the shadow is the part of the self that does not wish to adapt to the norm."2 7

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As we have seen in previous paintings, cats are often present in the worlds ofVaro's work when moments of important encounters are depicted, even if those encounters are between lingering shadows. Cats are psychic companions, and their presence points toward the unconscious desires that are as important in the formation of identity as the conscious ones. Another cat stares at us from the center of Varo's 1962 Vegetal Architecture. Here, two solitary travelers, a man and a woman, are traversing, separately, multilevel walkways and stairs carved from a forest of tall trees, a propitious place for mysterious or marvelous events. Kaplan notes that this painting "is strikingly similar to Giovanni Battista Piranesi's elaborate studies of prison walkways and ramps,m 8 which were included in the New York Museum of Modern Art's 1936-1937 exhibition, "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" (Varo probably saw the catalog for this show as it passed among the surrealist group in Paris). The man is carrying a violin; the woman holds a cat within the folds of her cloak. Another, much larger cat is positioned on the central landing where the two travelers are destined to meet. The cat appears startled as it stares out at us, perhaps suddenly cognizant that it plays some role in this encounter. It is perhaps the symbol of destiny, or of chance, the outside energy that will bring these two solitary figures together, if even for a moment. While there are several more paintings that could be included in this overview, this sampling suggests that cats, whether bystanders or collaborators in spiritual and intellectual transformations, are central to Varo's domestic and artistic universe. Her works confirm a statement made by her niece, that Remedios saw the world as an enormous living organism of which she,

together with other beings, formed a part. She did not believe that the earth pertained to man, but rather the opposite; that it is man, along with animals, plants, and minerals, that depend on the planet, and all of them are deserving of the same respect.Z9

Beatriz's statement indicates that Remedios had her own version of the Gaian hypothesis. Birds are even more frequent inhabitants ofVaro's paintings than cats. Traditionally harbingers of peace, symbols of divinity or "higher truths," or manifestations of freedom, the birds in Varo's paintings often correspond to these conventional representations. As Beatriz Varo has stated, the birds symbolize, in general, "thought and imagination; other times they are human souls. In her paintings and in her short stories, which, as we have seen, are interrelated, birds fly in groups or are isolated, but they are a very important element as beings of elevated spirituality."3° Birds are particularly prevalent in paintings that have as their central theme the quest for spiritual enlightenment or transcendence, such as Troubadour (1959), Breaking the Vicious Circle (1962), and Spiral Transit (1962).3' In addition, we often see figures mounted on strange and surprising modes of

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locomotion and navigation that invariably include wings and/or feathers (see, e.g., Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River [!959}, Magic Flight [!956}, and Twisted Roads [!957}). Bird/human hybrids (Flying OwllfOman [1957}, OwllfOman [!960}, Enchanted Knight [!961}) and even bird/cat hybrids (Birds [!961}, Personage [!958}) point to the influence on Varo's imagination of both Hieronymous Bosch and Francisco de Goya, whose works she repeatedly visited at the Prado Museum.JZ But in several paintings, birds appear unexpectedly, or take on unexpected appearances that add additional layers of meaning to Varo's pictorial fables. Perhaps the most unexpected of Varo's bird-themed paintings is the 1958 Creation of the Birds (see figure 5.3). It is another in a number of paintings, already discussed above, which attempts to show the interconnectedness or interdependency of art, science, alchemy (or magic), and nature. The painting is dominated by a hybrid woman/owl, "the scientist- artist in the persona ofWisdom,"33 sitting at a desk drawing birds. Using paints distilled from the atmosphere in an egg-shaped alchemical vessel, she illuminates her work with a ray of starlight ftltered through a triangular prism. Her paintbrush is connected to a violin hanging from her neck and covering her heart. But, most unusual, the birds come

Figure 5·3

Creation of the Birds

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to life and take flight as each drawing is completed. As Janet Kaplan has noted: By creating birds that fly off the page, Varo placed herself within the tradition of mythological artists such as Pygmalion, whose creation was said to have come to life, and Daedalus, who sculpted wings that offered flight. In aligning herself with these traditions, Varo made a claim for the artist as one who goes beyond mere imitation of nature to actual creation itself This painting of the owl - woman - artist - alchemist creating beauty and life through the conjunction of color, light, sound, science, art, and magic is the very image of creativity to which Varo aspired in her life)4 A hybrid man/owl, also representing the persona of wisdom, is seen in Varo's 1962 painting, The Encounter (not to be confused with the 1959 Encounter: The Meeting, in which a self-portrait character opens a box, only to discover herself). In the 1962 painting, a woman opens the door and discovers "wisdom." Her flowing cloak gapes to reveal the face of a man she is cradling in her belly, while from the lower hems of her garment a bird, representative of her search for higher truth, peers out. Another painting that has as its theme the scientist - artist in his laboratory is the 1956 Harmony. In this scene, the artist is a composer, who removes diverse objects-plants, crystals, handwritten notes-from a treasure chest and places them as notes onto a musical staf£ Varo's description of this painting to her brother Rodrigo is indicative of her belief in the interconnectedness between music, nature, and science (mathematics): The personage is trying to find the invisible thread that unites all things by stringing together on a musical staff of five wires every type of object, from the simplest to a small paper containing a mathematical formula, which is in itself an accumulation of things, when he succeeds in putting each of the diverse objects in its place. By blowing through the clef that holds together the five wires, a music, not only harmonious but also objective (that is, capable of moving things around in its vicinity, if that is what one desires to use it for), should come out. The figure emerging from the wall and collaborating with him represents chance (which so many times intervenes in all discoveries), but objective chance. When I use the word objective, I mean that it is something outside of our world, or better still, beyond our world, and which is connected with the world of causes, and not that of phenomena, which is our world,35 There are a number of bizarre and painstaking details in this painting, from an additional immured figure arranging her own musical composition, to arched doorways and windows reminiscent of Renaissance depictions of saints in their studies, to parquet floor tiles that are being pushed up by sprouting plants and roots and what appears to be wispy drapery. But one of the most unusual details is found in the lower right-hand corner. Comparing this work to Antonello da Messina's Saint Jerome in His Study

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(1450-1455), Kaplan remarks, Where Antonello has tricked the eye by painting a foreground step that is convincingly three-dimensional, Varo has depicted an egg-filled nest emerging from a split in an upholstered chair toward which a bird flies anxiously. Here Varo has gone beyond Antonello's trompe l'oeil conceit to create a pun within a pun. The illusion of the nest within the chair is made so visually real that it fools not merely the viewer, but also a bird within the scene itsel£36

Both the "anxious bird" and another bird flying through the doorway reinforce nature's role in Harmony, and emphasize the spiritual quest for "higher truth" in which the composer is engaged. If the birds in Varo's paintings frequently represent spiritual elevation or the quest for transcendence, they are just as likely to be constructed as manifestations of enhanced personal freedom, either emotional or physical. In Varo's 1961 Toward the Tower, the first painting in a triptych mocking the constraints of convent education, a group of identical uniformed girls, all bearing Varo's features, are bicycling away from an elaborate medieval tower. They are led by a Mother Superior figure and a man from whose "bag" (an extension of his overcoat) fly several birds. Most of these birds hover over and encircle the girls, herding them together. Yet two birds have flown off on a separate path, just as one of the girls rebels by gazing out defiantly instead of at her leaders. Here, the opposition between two different constructions of birds-on the one hand, as traditional symbols of the "divinity'' professed by orthodox religion, and on the other, as symbols of freedom or independence-conveys the protagonist's desire, and indeed, the potential to find, an alternative spiritual path. The escape from the confines of traditional convent education is depicted in the other two panels of the triptych, Embroidering the Earth's Mantle and The Escape. Perhaps the construction of birds as harbingers of independent thoughts or pathways is what is operating as well in Varo's 1957 Portrait of Dr. Ignacio Chavez. Dr. Chavez was a well-known cardiologist in Mexico City who commissioned a portrait from Varo. But the portrait was hardly flattering. Varo has painted the doctor as a somewhat sinister character emerging from a sort of grotto and dressed "in somewhat priestly clothing to suggest that this profession is perhaps a kind of priesthood. In his hand he holds a key. The persons coming from the gorge have a little door in place of a heart, and he winds them up as they pass by."37 This painting seems to be mocking modern medicine's "godlike" pretensions, and the presence of two birds, one flying high and the other low, seems to ironically reinforce the "priestly'' representation of Varo's subject.38 Elixir, a painting from the same year and probably executed at roughly the same time, shows the same "patient" that is featured in the foreground in Dr. Chavez's portrait, reaching into a crack in the wall. But in this painting, what emerges from the crack is not the doctor, but rather a flying bird and wires (or perhaps cosmic rays) that are connected to the character's elbows, knees, and ankles. In the lower right-hand corner, we see a goblet

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of liquid, the elixir of the title, sitting on the checkerboard floor. This painting is startling when juxtaposed to Portrait ofDr. Chavez, for it shows that the artist was indeed contemplating a different sort of physical healing based on nature's elements. As with the cats, birds appear in a number ofVaro's paintings, but I will limit myself to describing just one more construction that is a humorous send-up of the human trait to domesticate and dominate nonhuman animals. Varo's 1962 vegetarian Vampires depicts three furry, winged vampires sitting at a cafe table joyously slurping the juices of various fruits and vegetables through long straws. On leashes, and sitting demurely at their feet, are two "domestic" pets, strange hybrids with rooster heads and catlike bodies with long sweeping tails. Varo's sense of humor, and her "different" way of perceiving the world, is on full display in this painting. Not only does Varo employ cats, birds, and, to a lesser extent, other nonhuman beings as significant players in her fabulist narratives, she endows them with an individuality-diverse and easily recognized breeds within each species-that reflects a spiritual milestone in thinking about human/nonhuman relationships.39 Perhaps she has achieved, in some small way, what Patrick Murphy has identified as the "ecological process of interanimation," escaping from dominant constructions that represent humans as superior to and separate from a passive, silent nature.4° Varo's cats and birds are important "actors" in her narratives, and because of their roles, her paintings question what most people see as dualistic and impermeable boundaries between human and animal. We do experience the world "differently'' as we view her fantastical universes, which give us pause to reconsider our own connections with nonhuman animals, while being careful not to erase their difference.41

Notes In spring, 2000, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., sponsored the first retrospective exhibition of Varo's works in the United States. The exhibition pulled together seventy-seven of the artist's paintings, many of which are in private collections in Mexico and the United States and therefore generally not accessible to the public. The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City regularly features three or four ofVaro's paintings at any given moment, and one can usually find her represented as well in exhibitions dedicated to surrealist women artists. 2. Walter Gruen, "Remedios Varo: A Biographical Sketch," in Gruen and Ovalle eds., Remedios Utro: Catdlogo razonado (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1994), 44· Gruen, an Austrian political refugee whom Varo married in 1952 (having separated from Peret in 1947), contends that Remedios was imprisoned in 1939 or 1940, "possibly for having hidden a deserter from the French army." Since she never spoke of this incident, very little is known about it, even by Gruen. 3· Alberto Blanco, "The Gold of Time," in Gruen and Ovalle, eds., Remedios Utro: Catdlogo razonado (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1994), 8. Blanco refers 1.

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7· 8. 9·

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Nancy vosburg to Carrington as Varo's "inseparable magician, 'spiritual sister,' fellow conspirator and accomplice in adventure." Juliana Gonzalez, "Trasmundo de Remedios Varo." in Octavio Paz and Roger Caillois, eds., Remedios Wtro (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1966. Remedios Wtro. Madrid: Fundaci6n Banco Exterior, 1988), 166. This is my translation of a passage in Spanish: "No se trataba para ella de trascender por el arte, sino por una experiencia diferente del mundo y del espiritu. Su creaci6n artistica se realizaba, entonces, como un reflejo poetico de inquietudes mas universales, de orden intelectual y mistico." The original of subsequent Spanish citations will appear in endnotes; all translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Beatriz Varo, Remedios Wtro: en el centro del microcosmos (Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1990), 163. "Todos los objetos plasmados en los lienzos por la pintora, tienen una finalidad, aqui no existe el azar o el capricho. No pinta un objeto solo porque le gusta, por su belleza, sino que obedece a un determinado significado." Roger Caillois, "Inventario de un mundo," in Paz and Caillois, eds., Remedios Wtro (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones Era 1966), 23. "Los limites de las especies no son estancos, sobre todo entre las mujeres, los gatos y las lechuzas." Luis-Martin Lozano, The Magic of Remedios Wtro (Washington, D.C.: National Museum ofWomen in the Arts, 2ooo), 45· Janet A.Kaplan, UnexpectedJourneys: The Art and Life ofRemedios Wtro (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 90. Varo, Remedios Wtro, 242. "Estoy Iavando una gatita rubia en ellavabo de alg6.n hotel. Pero no es cierto; parece mas bien que es Leonora, que lleva un abrigo amplio y que necesita ser lavado. La rocio con un.poco de agua de jabon y sigo Iavando a la gatita, pero muy peipleja y turbada porque no estoy segura de a quien estoy baiiando." Varo, Remedios Wtro, 160. Walter Gruen has identified this story as a project for a theatrical work that Varo was probably going to write with Leonora Carrington. It has been published in Isabel Castell's Remedios Wtro: Cartas, sueiios y otros textos (Mexico: Universidad Aut6noma de Tlaxcala, 1994) along with various other writings from Varo's sketchbooks, which include dreams, "recipes," and "letters." As Kaplan notes, "[Varo's} miniaturist technique, the shallow spaces of the Romanesque and Gothic architecture in which her scenes are often set, the monk-like cells in which her characters work, the clothing that looks like clerical vestments, the labyrinthine walled cities, the itinerant magicians, and the spiritual quest presented as a journey in the tradition of the holy pilgrimage-all are aspects of the medieval that Varo depicted repeatedly" (188). In her discussion of the numerous mechanisms that appear in Varo's paintings, Beatriz Varo speculates that their presence may respond to several influences: the hydraulic equipment that Remedios saw at the dams where her father worked, the machinery drawn by the great Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vmci, Isaac Newton's mechanistic conception of the universe, and, of course, the technological advances of the twentieth century (138). Both Varo and Carrington enjoyed writing immensely. As Teresa del Conde notes: "[Varo} wrote several missives to imaginary psychiatrists and

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psychoanalysts, in part as a sort of poetic fancy, in part as a kind of cathartic exorcism ....What is evident, however, is that in these letters she included information about her own life mixed with fantasy, as she also did in her paintings." Teresa del Conde, "Psychoanalysts and Remedios," in Remedios "Tnro, 20. I4· Beatriz Varo, Remedios "Tnro, 255. "Esta reencarnacion no fue facil; despues de atravesar mi espiritu, primero por el cuerpo de un gato, despues por el de una criatura desconocida perteneciente al mundo de la velocidad, es decir, a ese que atraviesa a mas de 30o.ooo km. por segundo (y que por lo tanto no vemos) un trozo de cuarzo." 15. Quoted in Kaplan, 122-123. 16. See Georgiana M. M. Colvile, "Beauty and/Is the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini," in Caws et al., eds., Surrealism and \.%men (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Colvile comments on this painting as follows: "The magic electricity refers to an exclusive complicity between the woman and the cat, like the one Baudelaire jealously describes in his poem, 'Le chat,' " 174. Kaplan, reflecting on the painting's original title, also emphasizes the exchange between animal and human, but sees it as one "laden with both sympathy and madness, communication and confrontation",

UnexpectedJourneys, 124. 17. Juliana Gonzalez, "Mundo y trasmundo de Remedios Varo,'' in Remedios "Tnro (Fundacion Banco Exterior), 34· "El gran tema es Ia unidad crfsmica y, como una consecuencia suya, las interconexiones secretas de los mundos, de los diversos pianos de la realidad" (Gonzalez's emphasis). 18. Kaplan, UnexpectedJourneys, 171. 19. Varo, Remedios "Tnro, 130-131. "{A} veces, lo incalculable se produzca provocado por la rapida trayectoria de un meteoro inesperado a traves de mi orden establecido. El meteoro no es otro que mi gato, pero poco a poco estoy llegando a dominar este factor azaroso, ya que he descubierto que alimentando al gato exclusivamente con leche de oveja, su trayectoria no produce casi ningtin efecto." 20. Varo, Remedios "Tnro, 20. "De repente paso algo terrible. En el momento en que yo tocaba la nota "si" y justo cuando fui a pasar a otra octava en un tono ligeramente mas grave, el gato ha maullado y alguien que ha pasado por la calle delante de la ventana ha proyectado una sombra sobre lamesa de experimentacion ... " 21. Kaplan, UnexpectedJourneys, 159. 22. Varo, Remedios "Tnro, 37-38. "Esa senora quedo tanto rato pensativa e inmovil que se esta transformando en sillon. La carne se le ha puesto igual que la tela del sillon y las manos y los pies ya son de madera torneada. Los muebles se aburren y el sillon le muerde a la mesa, la silla del fondo investiga lo que contiene el cajon, el gato, que salio a cazar, sufre susto y asombro al regreso, cuando vela transformacion." For Colvile, the cat may be an "alter-ego" of the human character ("Beauty and/Is the Beast,'' 173). 23. Varo, Remedios "Tnro, 235. "comprende de golpe muchisimas cosa." 24. Gruen, "Remedios Varo: A Biographical Sketch,'' in Remedies "Tnro, 49· 25. Diego de Velasquez's famous painting of 1656 captures the artist at a moment when his work has been suddenly interrupted-he, along with

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the princess who has come into his studio to watch him paint, stare out at the viewer, creating an ambiguity about the real "subject" of the painting. Varo would have been extremely familiar with this painting, which hangs in the Prado. 26. Kaplan, UnexpectedJourneys, 208. De Chirico's influence on surrealism, in general, and on Varo, in particular, is palpable. Like de Chirico's, Varo's pictorial architecture has a powerful psychological effect; many of her characters are enclosed in constricting spaces (towers, rooms, trees) and, like de Chirico, Varo often employs artificial fas;ades and tilted planes that create complex perspectives. 27. Varo, Remedios ~ro, 127. "Como dice Jung, la sombra es la parte del ser que no desea adaptarse ala norma." 28. Kaplan, UnexpectedJourneys, 188. 29. Varo, Remedios ~ro, 137 (my emphasis). "Remedios veia el mundo como un enorme organismo vivo del que ella formaba parte en union con otros seres. No consideraba que la tierra perteneciese al hombre, sino, mas bien, ala inversa; es el hombre, junto con los animales, plantas y minerales el que depende de nuestro planeta, y todos ellos son merecedores del mismo respeto." 30. Varo, Remedios ~ro, 30. "[E}n general, {las aves} simbolizan el pensamiento y la imaginacion; otras veces son almas humanas. En su obra yen sus cuentos, que, como hemos visto, estan muy ligados, las aves vuelan en grupo o estan aisladas, pero son un elemento muy imoprtante como seres de elevada espiritualidad." 31. In Troubadour, we see an Apollo-like figure advancing in a boat/swan/ mermaid down a serpentine river; for Beatriz Varo, the complex iconography of this painting, including the oversized birds that represent deities, signifies the figure's journey toward death and transcendence, 149. In Breaking the Vicious Circle, a woman pulls apart a rope that encircles her body; the bird peering out from her cloak, a Jungian symbol of transcendence, signifies her spiritual breakthrough. As the title suggests, Spiral Transit depicts several travelers navigating a spiraling course toward spiritual transformation, signified by the central tower in which a large bird is perched. 32. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, 30. The oversized birds in Troubadour, which Beatriz Varo interprets as symbols of deities 149, are remarkably similar to those in Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (1505-1510). See also Goya'sE/ sueiio de Ia razon produce monstruos and other drawings from the "Caprichos" and "Disparates" series. 33· Kaplan, UnexpectedJourneys, 181. 34· Ibid., 181-182. 35· Beatriz Varo, Remedios ~ro, 236. "El personaje esta tratando de encontrar el hilo invisible que une todas las cosas, por eso, en un pentagrama de hilos de metal ensarta toda clase de objetos, desde el mas simple hasta un papelito conteniendo una formula matematica, que es ya en si un cumulo de cosas, cuando consigue colocar en su sitio los diversos objetos. Soplando por la clave que sostiene el pentagrama debe salir una musica no solo armoniosa, sino tambien objetiva, es decir, capaz de mover las cosas a su alrededor si asi se desea usarla. La figura que se desprende de la pared y colabora con el representa el azar (que tantas veces interviene en todos los

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descubrimientos), pero el azar objetivo. Cuando uso la palabra objetivo, entiendo por ello que es algo fuera de nuestro mundo, o mejor dicho, mas alia de el, y que se encuentra conectado con el mundo de las causas, y no de los fen6menos, que es el nuestro." 36. Kaplan, UnexpectedJourneys, 191. 37· Varo's description, quoted in Kaplan, UnexpectedJourneys, 136. 38. Similarly, in The Juggler, Varo paints a magician performing before a mesmerized crowd. The birds flying through the tower of his wheeled vehicle/house/stage suggest the elevated, "priestly," status that the gullible congregation confers on him. 39· In contrast, Varo often transforms male mythological characters into females, while in several of her paintings, human characters are androgynous or asexual. Blurring the gender boundaries amongst humans is perhaps another way of resisting an epistemology of hierarchy and domination. In "Beauty and/Is the Beast," Colvile sees this contrast as Varo's attempt to portray "animals 'normality' as opposed to the complex, fundamentally hybrid nature of human beings," 173. 40. Patrick D. Murphy, "Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice." Hypatia 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 149. 41. See Karla Armbruster, "Blurring Boundaries in Ursula Le Guin's 'Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight."' Interdisciplinary Journal ofLiterature and the Environment 3 (1996). Armbruster's poststructuralist approach to ecofeminist criticism, which is a reading of Ursula Le Guin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight," was an essential reading for helping me think about the construction of nonhuman beings in Varo's paintings. Armbruster constructs her analysis primarily on the theories of Stacy Alaimo, Donna Haraway, and Patrick Murphy, all of whom speak to the need to build on our connections with "others" while maintaining our differences.

CHAPTER

6

WHo's LooKING? THE ANIMAL GAZE IN THE FICTION OF BRIGITTE KRONAUER AND CLARICE LISPECTOR Jutta Ittner

Introduction We feed a bird, hold a kitten, walk our dog, and watch the magic happen-unseeing eyes and indifferent stares are miraculously transformed into friendly looks. Our desire to be face to face with animals is so apparent, so personal, and at the same time so vague that it raises a multitude of questions about the relationship between humans and animals, questions that seem as pressing as they are unanswerable. What is this fascination that makes people flock to see a pig named Babe or a pair of pandas? What makes us come back again and again to the zoo, that sad "monument to the impossibility of animal encounters," 1 in order to catch the eye of the tiger behind bars-what are we hoping for? Contemporary philosophy, ·art, and literature have deconstructed the various cultural concepts of the animal, from the model of a soulless machine to an extension of human existence. In Electric Anima!, Akira M. Lippit argues that the recent psychoanalytical and philosophical discourse on animals suggests that the classical Cartesian polarity itself is wrong. Animals form an epistemological category that transcends not only the mind/body duality, but also more importantly, the neurological/ conceptual divide, inhabiting a "third world" that is a separate realm within the universe of human knowledge. 2 The "unashamedly anthropomorphic sentiment"3 of the nineteenth century and its comfortably self-centered companions of vilification and male domination fantasies have given way to a view of animals as subjects in their own right. Postmodernists have embarked on a challenging journey leading from an attitude of complacency about. animals that entails little regard for the "creatures amongst whom we move and in whom we have our being,"4 toward thinking about them in terms of their own identity. Aware of the disastrous effect that the exclusion of animals has had on our planet, they argue for replacing the old

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hierarchical structure by an ecological sensibility that understands the creative complexity of our existence. However, as primatologist Donna Haraway points out, the obstacles are immense if not insurmountable. The film of unfortunate bias or ideology cannot just be wiped off to reveal the healthy objective strata of knowledge below;5 Therefore, the crucial insight is, simply and devastatingly, that we do not understand animals. Instead, "we indulge in the obvious, deceptive directness of their exterior beings which are talking in many tongues," says the German writer Brigitte Kronauer. When she wistfully remarks, "How different we visitors to the zoo are. All we have is the mutual hope for an inner self What else is there for us?" 6 she addresses the fqct that humans typically want something from animals. As Baker says, we want them to be meaningful, and we want to be consoled by these meanings.? Postmodern sensitivity can no longer accept such constructs: "We keep [animals} in our zoos as models ... that alone is their right to life, that is why we made them, hollowed out into mere images without an inner life" (W 387). Where the humanized or demonized representations of animals no longer figure in the symbolic interpretations of human existence, the image of the wholly "Other" emerges, with radical consequences for our own role in the world. It is in terms of this outlined discourse on animals that I will look at the novels and short stories by Brigitte Kronauer (1940-), one of the most sophisticated voices in European literature, and Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), the extraordinary Brazilian writer whose texts are often viewed in France as contributions to contemporary philosophy. In my exploration of the animal gaze and its effect on human consciousness in Kronauer's work, I discuss mainly her novel Die Frau in den Kissen, 1990 [The Woman in the Pillows}, and her short story "Tageslauf mit Unterbrechung und Gegner," 1989 ["Day with Interruption and Opponent"}. OfLispector's texts I explore "The Buffalo" (1960) and "Dry Point of Horses" (1974), focusing especially on The Passion According to G.H. (1964), the most far-reaching literary inquiry into "becoming animal" that I know. 8 At first glance, Kronauer's and Lispector's works seem as far apart as geography would suggest. Kronauer's narrators live in cool, leafy Hamburg suburbs, whereas The Passion According to G.H reverberates with the heat of a glaring, South American sun. A closer look at their fictional worlds, however, reveals fascinating and surprising similarities. The most obvious is, of course, that both authors create highly complex poetic narratives for which ideas of genres "must be dusted off a bit," as Cixous says.9 Kronauer's voice tends to be rather detached, whereas Lispector's is intensely autobiographical. 10 Both use first-person narration to draw the reader into their introspective universes, and the virtuosity with which they construct their sophisticated combinations of linear and circular, "organic" structures can be mind-boggling. Although Lispector promises in her foreword that her novel "exacts nothing of anyone," it is often

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considered as unreadable as it is irresistible. Once we have lent our sympathetic ear to the anguished narrator, there is no escape: "Wait for me: I am going to get you out of the Hell into which I have descended. Listen, listen .... " (P 123). Her agony about describing an experience too horrific to tell moves in circles, or rather spirals. When she finally does begin, it is in traditional, linear fashion ("Yesterday morning-when I went out of the dining room to the maid's room." [P 15} ). But her efforts keep collapsing. The narrator becomes mired in questions, doubts, and the anguish of not understanding what she is experiencing, and yet she inches towards her epiphany as slowly and ine~orably as her teacher, the ancient cockroach. Kronauer's W::Oman in the Pillows presents a different kind of challenge to the reader. The monumental poetic narrative quest through time and space spans twenty-four hours in the narrator's life, one day spent at the zoo and the ensuing night-400 pages of observations and imaginings on human and animal identity in contemporary European consciousness. Both authors' obsession with looking has its roots in the nouveau roman. As observed through the zoom lens of Kronauer's gently ironic, laser-sharp perception, all objects appear familiar, yet fresh and revealing: "Fish without fins, couple from behind, slightly limping the husband. {Always} arm in arm, the two of them, be it hurrying or strolling between church and their home, back and forth, always saying hello. Fish without fins, the Holzes who've always lacked what it takes to be happy'' (W 364). As she indulges in her adventures of perception, she is more medium than protagonist, not unlike Lispector, who is "tuned into her unconscious and becomes a scribe."n However, a major difference between the two authors is that Kronauer does not involve her readers emotionally the way Lispector does. Indeed, she keeps them at arm's length and thoroughly discourages them from identifYing, be it through linguistic devices such as an impersonal pronoun {German "man"} or by the sarcastic "asides" of a cat. The narrator of The Passion According to G.H, on the contrary, lures her readers from the start: "I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don't know who, but I don't want to be alone with that experience" (P 3). Another interesting similarity between Kronauer and Lispector is the unorthodox ways they use language. In Kronauer's long, paratactic sentences we seem to witness the process of meticulously forging and burnishing words until they reflect a reality that seems elusive but crystal clear: "It's all provable-all the fleeting creatures that flicker from a cat, from dreams, here they are massive and palpable, they stand still and stroll around ... here's the true reality'' (W 206). Lispector's narrators have a far greater need to stretch, even force, and invent language. The narrator's attempts to process an experience too overwhelming for words seem ·tortured: "I was seeing all of it, the cockroach. A cockroach is an ugly, shining being. The cockroach is inside out. No, no, I don't mean that it has an inside and an outside; I mean that is what it is. What it had on the outside is what I hide inside myself: I have made my outside into a hidden inside" (P 69).

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The essential connection between Kronauer and Lispector, however, is their continuing investigation of reality and being. Their passion for understanding what is, and specifically their quest for the truth about the human condition, propel their protagonists far into unmapped territory. Even the trajectory of their literary adventures is similar. The starting point is always a narrator looking at an object-be it a chair, a rock, or, more often the case, a person or an animal. The step from safely looking at an "it," in Martin Buber's terms, to questioning what is before their eyes is equivalent to a quantum leap in perception and opens the door to the most intimate of encounters. For Buber, genuine interaction begins with the acceptance of what he calls the elemental otherness of the Other. Looking becomes an adventure with many different outcomes, depending on the gaze one encounters. As Lispector says, "there are various modes that mean to see: one being looking at the other without seeing it, one possessing the other, one eating the other, one simply being in a corner and the other being there too: all that means to see" (P 68). The unflinching investigation into the contact with the animal "thou" and its chain reaction of feelings, thoughts, and physical sensations calls into question not only our preconceptions of animals but of ourselves. I will first examine how the adventure of looking at an animal is described by Kronauer and Lispector. Then I will discuss what happens to their protagonists as they encounter the animal's gaze, and inquire into the journeys they undertake as they succumb to the eye-to-eye contact with an animal- imaginary or not. These inner processes go toward, or in Lispector beyond, what Deleuze and Guattari call the adventure of "becoming animal"- a journey toward Being. 12

Looking at Animals Kronauer's early stories have been called exercises in perception- the writerly attempt to look at the world moment by moment as if for the first time, so as to overcome the confines of our trusted sight, which is "itself an instrument of deception, the vehicle of self-hypnosis." 13 Lispector's The Stream ofLife can be called a meditation on the moment. "Each thing has an instant in which it is, I want to talce possession of the thing's is ... Is my theme the instant? my life theme" (SL 4). In Kronauer's stories the narrators can forget everything else-including themselves- just by looking, for example, at the flight patterns of wild birds or at a cat. It is not surprising that animals are particularly attractive objects of perception, since according to Lyotard in animal existence a "feeling appears and disappears entirely at every instant.m4 Cats, especially, are by nature masters of presence. They have the ability to be happy at the drop of a hat, to dissolve in the pleasurable incorporation of the moment, as Kronauer describes it (W 237). The "amoebic beauty" of felines is the basis for what happens in "Day with Interruption and Opponent." This story starts with a cat asleep on a couch and the female narrator quietly watching, a scene that seems peaceful

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and pleasurable. There is, however, a slightly disturbing edge to it: "Whenever the cat was lying motionlessly asleep between the pillows, I couldn't-not until yesterday-really focus on my work in the small room where we were both breathing, each on her own" (D 103), the narrator begins. She wonders "how deep its unconsciousness was, if it existed at all for itself in those moments," and experiences some envy at what she perceives as the peaceful unity of the eat's internal and external worlds. What at first seems to be the narrator's peaceful meditation on the nature of sleep quickly turns into uneasiness. The ambiguous sight of that "center of life in the deceptive stillness of its surroundings, in its blackness indistinguishable from the black pillows" suddenly spawns more uncomfortable associations. The pillows and the cat seem equally silent, equally "breathless"- so how can one tell merely by looking, which is nothing but fabric or feathers, and which is a small body susceptible to pain? It never moved ... it only lay there, black, stretched out into less than pillow size; and if it was really true that it was alive and breathing, it might just as well have been the pillows, that were breathing quietly, somewhat bigger beings, curled up without a sound. But if they had been ripped open with a scissors, feathers would have appeared and proved the contrary; the cat that was soundlessly pressed into a corner might have been ripped open just as well, and of course blood would have appeared, and in that case one would encounter real, true life. (D 103)

Clearly the narrator's mind has embarked on some kind of inquiry that goes beyond the ambiguity of reality to a question of life and death. "One of the black spots consisted of muscles,· bones, blood, and nerves, yet it now seemed to be nothing but fabric and feathers, stuffed and without feelings- a rag sown shut, devoid of any reaction, something that is merely useful and has no meaning or value beyond that" (D 103). If animals open up a channel of unconscious communication, as Lyotard suggests, it is not surprising that this narrator is both excited and upset at the sight of the sleeping cat. 15 For her to understand that only what is alive can have true meaning and value beyond being merely "useful" must be especially disturbing, because she is devoid of feelings, and has no sense of her physical aliveness-of the blood running in her veins. Her room is "empty, nonresisting, disorganized with its terrible equity of things sitting side by side" (D 106). Disconnected from herself and her surroundings, she is trapped in a pattern of restlessly moving from A to Z, inventing an order, and living her life "forward" instead of in the moment. In a word, she desperately lacks meaning in her life. When the cat awakes from its sleep, a miracle happens. The room is transformed, the air becomes alive, populated with quarry, visible and invisible. The cat prowls and attacks, "its glances never clutching the air but invariably hitting a target, an incentive which in a split..:second would launch its body into a chase ... , its eyes glittering and absent, turned inwards-looking at me yet not at me-its quarry, its opponent, the climax-a short running start, now it saunters

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relaxed, curious, busy; challenged by something new .... It never means me" (D 105). It is not the first time, of course, that she has watched her cat play. But that day she recognizes the connection between herself and the animal as something "precisely equivalent, a mutually satisfying need, like one recognition as a carbon copy of the other-two halves" (D 106). For a moment while watching in fascination she has forgotten herself, and the door to a spiritual experience opens. She looks in an "absolute" way, that is, not at anyone or anything that would have a name, a meaning, or a purpose, but "purely." Not like other times when "it would be my responsibility to maintain and to demonstrate a beginning and an end, to invent a motion towards an aim, to destroy uniformity and simultaneity through active living." And that is when she recognizes that the cat "renders a service in my place. It expresses me. There's the order, I think, completely relaxed, seeing it fill the room with events, watching myself sink-indeed, its mirror image, that's the solution-and now passionately apathetic, not living, only breathing in balanced use, indistinguishably I merge into my surroundings" (D 106). Once she relinquishes herself to the moment, there is no "I" and no understanding-although she is not conscious of it. Consciousness would imply self-awareness. She simply experiences what the eat's antics are about: it "immediately begins to fill my room; it pumps the air full of action and passion, full of goals, full of results, beginnings, conclusions, an order; suddenly, a past and a future, suddenly, a sequence of events, a selection of things, it breaks down into details the totality of the room and my person" (D 106). And along with her cat she herself has suddenly become alive and real, no longer isolated from the world but at one with the natural order of things. She participates in the eat's ecstatic moment of grace, not by identifying, but by watching it so closely that she "becomes" the cat that is joyfully alive the way only animals and children can be, fully present and playfully creating its own imaginative space-and itself-from moment to moment. Such blissful moments are rare, even in the modern literary imagination. Rather, epiphanies come after considerable struggle, if at all, partly because our postmodern sensibility c:an no longer naively follow the impulse of empathizing or identifying with the Other, much less follow the urge to co-opt and appropriate it. We cannot begin to understand animal otherness. At the same time, the field of animal being cannot be severed from that of the subject because neither field is constituted apart from another. 16 Lispector describes the resulting disorientation: "Sometimes I'm electrified when I see an animal. I'm hearing the ancestral shout within myself now: it seems I no longer know which of us is the animal, I or the creature. And I become completely confused" (SL 38). Any reflection on animals will turn into a reflection on the human condition. For "even in thinking about animals, we cannot escape creating them," and in that sense, all animals are man-made and whatever we say about them will

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only reflect our own concerns. r7 Lispector's "Dry Point of Horses" is a perfect illustration of this argument: "The form of the horse exemplifies what is best in the human being. I have a horse within me who rarely reveals himsel£ But when I see another horse, then mine expresses himsel£ His form speaks" (DP 106). One aspect of the mysterious relationship between animal and human is a kind of nostalgia. As Berger suggests, man pays for his unique spirituality with anguish, and to him the animal seems to enjoy a kind of innocence that he has lost. 18 Another aspect is that animal nature reflects the part in man that has remained natural, as Lukacs argues, or longs to "become natural once more."1 9 "If I could have chosen, I would have to be born a horse," muses Lispector's narrator with palpable envy for the animal's "wild, translucent, and free" nature (DP 106). And she wonders, "who knows- maybe the horse himself doesn't sense that great symbol of free life which we sense in him? Must I then conclude that the horse is there above all to be felt by me? Does the horse represent the beautiful and free animality of human beings? The best of the horse-does the human creature already have it?" (DP 107). The internalized ideal of "animal" surfaces in humans as a feeling surrounding a repressed desire, according to Berger. To Kronauer's narrator in The WOman in the Pillows, the sight of a horse engenders a wistful, dreamlike association that reflects what Berger calls "a point from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned." 20 The white horse seems a "messenger of a sunken dynasty, whose witness [we} used to be in faraway times," and whose presence now "sparks a faint glow, a sleepy recollection of a pre-human kingdom whose only trace of evidence is the gap it has left in us" (W 197). This passage reflects nothing less than the mourning of an imagined paradise, which is a mourning for the self- "a self that had become dehumanized in the very process of humanity's becoming human." 21 Thus, seeing animals is remembering ourselves.

The Animal Gaze Cats and horses populate not only Kronauer's The WOman in the Pillows but also appear in marginal but seminal roles in earlier novels, where they accompany, mirror, or are juxtaposed with the protagonist's inner development. Zoo animals and their much more pronounced alterity hold a special attraction for her narrators. Fascinated despite the creatures' miserable caged existences, they keep coming to the zoo in order to observe and wonder. The animals, however, long immunized against human encounter, ignore them or pretend to, "preoccupied as they seem with feeding, producing feces, staring into space like rocks while furtively observing me from below their eyebrows, sniffing the air, twitching their ears" (W 159). That the relationship is hardly mutual does not seem to matter: ''As virtue personified, fanned out in royal fashion, the animals in their cages speak to us of strength, of pride, and of reserve, while they're thinking of something else: Untiring personifications even in their deep sleep. Their very

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inaccessibility enables us to project freely our own states of being .... I almost believe that the zoo air has the ability to adopt the shape of animals according to my moods" (W r6o). One animal seems to be especially useful for projections by both writers. Kronauer's narrator singles out the buffalo as the creature that "very often has the exact volume of my state of being, or of what I am lacking. How obstinate, poised, and ancient the bison is, planted in front of me" (W r6o). In Lispector's story "The Buffalo," the bison becomes what Jung would call the animus-a male ally for a woman who goes to the zoo in order to find some aspect of herself she desperately needs to be whole. As she walks from cage to cage looking for the "right" gaze, she experiments, in a sense, with her own projections onto the animal being. All her life s~e has experienced herself as a shunned female who only knows how to submit. Now she seeks to connect with the animals' uncorrupted inner selves in hope of discovering the remedy for her own "sick core." Her observations lead to an exquisite vignette of animal existence, matched in sensibility and poetry only by Kronauer's. The lovely giraffe, "that silent wingless bird," looks at her so innocently that she has to avert her gaze. The elephant's eyes are as kind as those of an old man, and the camel's long dusty eyelashes shield eyes that dedicate themselves solely to the "patience of its internal craft." When an ape looks at her, holding onto the bars of its cage with its scrawny arms opened in form of a crucifix, she turns her eyes away in horror, because ,she recognizes in its eyes veiled with old age "the sweetness of illness": "Oh no, not this ... God, teach me only to hate." But it is springtime, and not even the lions remind her of "the carnage she had come in search of" (B r48-r49). When she has all but given up hope she sees the buffalo in the distance, a "blackened shape of tranquil fury" in the light of the approaching evening. With a visceral certainty, she recognizes her ally. In her frantic efforts to attract the attention of the animal she yells, throws stones, shakes the bars of his enclosure-and suddenly feels inside herself"the first trickle of black blood." Provoked at last, the buffalo approaches the woman, moving right up to the bars. The buffalo looks her straight in the eye: And a pallor so deep was exchanged that, drowsily, the woman grew numb ....The woman slowly shook her head, terrified by the hatred with which the buffalo, tranquil with hatred, watched her . . . entering ever more into those [small crimson} eyes that fixed her without haste, ingenuous, wearily sighing, without wishing nor being able to escape, she was caught in mutual assassination. (B 156)

Overwhelmed, she faints- the epiphany of a womaq who has finally tapped into her rage and her hatred, and now is able to access the inner strength and peace that will change her life. It is important to point out that in this powerful story about the impact of the gaze of the Other, the buffalo's role is assigned by the human viewer. What appears to be the animal's "hatred" is, of course, the woman's projection. In fact, all her projections serve her

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own healing process. The gaze of the Other is a mirror that reflects back her own, stereotyping gaze. Or as Donna Haraway puts it succinctly: "We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves."22 In the philosophical discourse on animals from Leibniz to Heidegger, the transcendental principles of humanity's existence have been placed above and in contradistinction to that of animality; as Lippitt says. 23 We have carefully constructed and rigorously guarded the barriers that defend the only authentic site for us- our human consciousness and its properties, human vision and human language. The animal is denied its gaze. Den·ida's comment about the animal's lack of human language applies as well to its lack of human vision: "Of course, if one defines {vision} in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man, what is there to say?" 2 4 In this construct animals remain the observed; within the anthropocentric perspective the question of how animals see the world is not even posed. Franz Marc's thoughts on animal representation in art reflect the gradual shift in perspective that took place during the past century. In 1911, the expressionist painter writes about his contemporaries: "The artistic logic of Picasso, Kandinsky, {etc.} is perfect. They don't 'see' the doe and they don't care. They project their inner world." He then ponders the challenge of painting not a picture of the doe but one "called The Doe," and of going even further: "I may also want to paint a picture, The Doe Feels. How infinitely more subtle must the painter's sensitivity be in order to paint that!" 25 The reversal of perspective does indeed demand a different sensitivity from the artist. But it also opens up new avenues for the artistic imagination, as Marc's paintings of white does and blue or red horses demonstrate. In The Stream of Life, a similar desire to represent the essence of the animal rather than its surface is expressed. "I have a need to study animals. I want to capture the it in order to be able to paint not an eagle and a horse but a horse with the operi wings of a giant eagle" (SL 38, author's italics). The painterly exploration of what a doe or a horse feels is an acknowledgment that animals are subjects, which puts them into not a "lesser relationship {but} an other relationship" to the world. 26 So then how does a doe see the world-and, even more significantly; who is the subject behind the eye of the doe, the eagle, or the horse? In his attempt to locate the source, or "original point" of vision, Lacan differentiates between the eye and the gaze. This distinction introduces a subject whose intention is to see and to attribute meaning to the image that its eye sees. 2 7 How then shall we try to imagine the gaze, "that underside of consciousness?" Lacan's suggestion to "give body to the gazem8 seems to be precisely what "Dry Point of Horses" is trying to do. "I saw a blind horse ... What does a horse see so that not seeing his kind leaves him as if having lost his very self?" The narrator's answer grants the animal an inner reality whose power supersedes the exterior image: "It's just that when he looks, he sees outside himself what is inside himself .... When he sees mountains, meadows, people, the sky-he takes dominion over men and over nature himself" (DP 107). But despite her attempt to imagine what a horse sees, Lispector cannot help resorting to her own concept of a horse. Even the most sympathetic

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construction of alterity tends to see the animal as merely an imperfect state of ourselves; that is, it denies the existence of the truly other. 2 9 In other words, we are back to square one-to the question of what an animal is. The 'WOman in the Pillows describes an attempt to actually move over to the animal's side. The narrator is looking at a tiger behind bars: I am standing in the crowd in front of the the cage ... see myself standingfrom inside the cage I see myself in the crowd with its distorted faces, in annoying amazement, obtrusive: an ugly, badly trimmed hedge which my gaze can easily penetrate ... no hunters, rather weak, plump proprietors, all of them, [and they cannot} distract me from travelling the endless, burning · roads inside my head. (W 193)

Again, this passage reflects the experience and impossibility of thinking outside human existence. As Berger says, "in the zoo the view is always wrong."3° No matter how hard we try to imagine "being" tiger, we seem condemned to meet only our own projections.

Seeing Eye to Eye In his essay, "Why Look at Animals," John Berger undertakes to approach the elusive animal "seer" by trying to distinguish between the human and the animal gaze. Between two men the inevitable abyss can usually be bridged: "Language allows men to reckon with each other as with themselves." Man and animal, however, are both trapped looking across abysses of nonunderstanding, dissimilar as they may be. While the animal always looks at man warily and attentively, it does not reserve a special look for man. To man its look feels familiar. He imagines being seen by the animal the same way as he himself sees his surroundings- and again sees nothing but his mirror imageY It seems that the more we know about animals, the further away they are. Facts will not help us in solving the mystery of animal being. Maybe trusting our eyes already closes the door. An episode in Lispector's The Stream ofLife suggests that when we put aside our assumptions we will catch a glimpse of an object's hidden "sel£" As the narrator looks at what must be the most familiar of sights-a chair- it switches for an instant from perceived object to perceiving subject: "The chair in front is an object for me. Useless while I'm looking at it ... I look at the chair and this time, it's as if it too had looked and seen" (SL 69-70). For a moment the human gaze is "freed from a world that is neither hers nor that of the chair."32 Such a moment of grace only happens when we move toward the field of the Other. It is a joyful epiphany when Kronauer describes it in "Day with Interruption and Opponent," or as in Lispector, a nightmare: A black panther is caged. Once I gazed deeply into a panther's eyes and she gazed deeply into mine. We transmuted ourselves. That fear. I left there

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totally dazed inside ... Everything had taken place behind thought. I long for the terror that the exchange of gazes with the black panther gave me. I know how to make terror. (SL 66)

Such an encounter with the animal Other is what Deleuze calls "becominganimal" and Lispector, "animalizing" herself, that is sharing the animal's lack of common language and its silence, which safeguards its distance, its distinctness, its exclusion, from and of man. According to Lispector, it "isn't hard and it comes easily. It's a matter of not fighting it and simply surrendering" (SL 38). But even in the ulti~ate encounter, challenging as it is to her sense of self, the "we" claims a mutuality that may not be the panther's experience at all. If the animal has secrets that are "specifically addressed to man," as Berger says,33 then our only chance to approach it is to meet it on its own terms. Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the gaze of an animal. That look between animal and man has been extinguished, says Berger.34 All the more reason, it seems, for writers like Lispector and Kronauer to fantasize about reconnecting with the animal. The U!Oman in the Pillows is, in fact, a gentle, colorful universe full of zoo creatures like blue doctor fish, spectral lemurs, and wolves. In it a lonely old woman, observed on her daily visits by the narrator, who also serves as her mouthpiece, shares her days and her dreams with the zoo animals. They culminate in an unlikely, bittersweet, and quite ironic romance where the boundaries between animal and human existence seem to dissolve only to reappear more harshly than ever. The old woman's love affair with a maned wolf is a moving poetic evocation of an animal's mysteriousness and unattainability. Both women's daily visits to the zoo are efforts to commune with the animals- the narrator watching and wondering, the old woman keeping the animals company and surreptitiously feeding them from a voluminous bag that she drags around with her. Then "one day she saw the maned wolf for the first time. 'For the first time in my whole life,' as she said to herself quietly, she saw the long-legged, black-stockinged fiery-red creature ... 'I cannot take my eyes off him,' the woman said to herself ... Something was causing warmth in her. She looked at the animal" (W 212). The first encounter already comprises all layers of their relationship. There's the woman whose gaze bridges the abyss between herself and the animal Other. Hers is an experience of love at first sight, like the "act of being" described by Buber. Nothing is withheld, and she knows everything of the other, for she knows "nothing isolated about {him} any more" (W n). As if to hold on to some sense of self, she speaks to herself about the momentousness of the event, and she does it in words simple and archaic. We witness the melting of the old woman's boundaries, and at the same time we see .the scene through the omniscient narrator's eyes. The two universes appear eternally separate: "She was standing there alone with her discovery who took no notice of her as he strolled and sauntered, ambling all by himself .... "But then the voice of the narrator's inner self- or is it the

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old woman's?-conveys an attunement to the animal's caged existence on a deeper level: "effortlessly imagining the brush-dotted pampas of South America, or else he would have perished on the spot" ('iX! 212). As the old woman stands there looking at the "improbably long-legged fox in black stockings, treading so lightly he had to be walking on clouds," a miracle happens. He suddenly stood there as if struck by lightning ... as if transfixed, as if spellbound in mid-motion. Not calmly was he standing there but frozen. He looked back at her. The blood rushed to the old woman's head, this sudden attention surpassing her wildest expectations. She couldn't read his face, but neither of them moved. When he ran on, he ran as before, provocatively, not ofi:his · world. (W 212)

From that moment on she is hooked, hoping every day for another look of recognition. She is saddened when he avoids her gaze, she tries to will him to appear when he hides, and she can't stop thinking about him day and night. She interprets the wolf's every move and every look as if they were messages for her. That day "he made her wait so long before he came, lanky, with a telltale smile right into her eyes, and everything so meaningful .... As if to tempt her he tossed his head, looking at her from his shoulder's dark fur" ('iX! 215). In her efforts to cross the abyss she moves through various phases of increasing awareness of her own human identity, each intimately connected with her fantasies of merging with the animal Other. She knows that "the maned wolf had nothing to do with her. That was precisely the point!" Her task as she sees it is to sense what he wants, to understand him without words. Gradually she moves from the familiar territory of reason toward that of the Other, not by radically switching but rather by tentatively shifting into the liminal areas of magic and mythos. "She always had the feeling that he'd just left the room. The russet color of the robin, the silhouette of a cloud were hints, proofs o~his presence. She wouldn't put it past him. He was capable of being around in many ways if he cared to" ('iX! 215). She wonders whether he, and perhaps all animals, were awaiting metamorphosis, and it fell upon her to redeem them. Then, finally she "understood. It was she who needed transformation, what lay ahead was her own salvation ... 'I'm destined to become an animal,' she said to the cat" ('iX! 218). The old woman's preparations for her own metamorphosis are touching and at the same time they are rendered with Kronauer's trademark hint of irony. They certainly betray how trapped humans are in their idea of self even as they are about to relinquish it. "She lay there with a trembling body and a joyful heart, and it occurred to her that she might have to start by relinquishing everything of importance to her. She'd have to leave for the zoo without an I. D. ... Money enough for the bus ride, but not a cent more. She'd put on her coat, but would her glasses be permitted?" ('iX! 218). Not surprisingly, on the momentous day the wolf won't even acknowledge her presence, "not even after a full hour, nothing happened, it was all over" ('iX! 221).

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On the most obvious level the old woman's romance is an ironic and astute psychological study of infatuation, with the old woman as the loves truck female and the distant wolf as the unattainable object of desire. There is, however, another level to the story. We are kept informed, not only about what happens at the zoo, but also-tongue-in-cheek, or so it seems-about the old woman's feelings and thoughts. Especially funny are her daily reports on the progress of her romance to her cat, which seems to have its own "all-too human" agenda, namely to cope with a partner's fling by pretending to ignore it: "That evening when she tried to tell the cat, the cat started to yawn at her first .word and turned her head away. The woman walked around her and laughed right in her face" (W 215). Kronauer does not fall for anthropomorphization, however, even for the sake of a narrative ploy. In fact, her writing exemplifies postmodern thinking about animals, where "the other being is precisely supposed to remain what it is and how it is."35 The cat serves as a kind of compass for the reader, an ironic reality check so to speak, to prevent us from aligning with the old woman's fantasy, and the author arranges increasingly grotesque juxtapositions to make her point. " 'Tomorrow's the day ... ,' she said to the cat. 'Tomorrow I'll save myself and him.' Relentlessly the cat pushed herself off the quilt and ran to her litter box" (W 220). More importantly, though, we are made to understand that the old woman's intimacy with her cat is no different than that with the wolf Both are entirely the old woman's constructs. Again, Buber comes to mind, who warns that although humans can address animals as "thou," creatures "live and move over against us, but cannot come to us.''3 6 All that remains for the old woman is the experience "of animal otherness: 'but for that very reason her eyes, her heart wouldn't let go of him ... She has to endure it, the woman, for it is the nature of passion, and it makes her burn all the more brightly' " (W 188). Kronauer's story powerfully demonstrates that when we see reciprocity in the animal's gaze despite all its indifference, objectivity, and autonomy, we are deceiving ourselves. How great our need is to have our gaze returned by animals is reflected in the popularity of household pets who can be conditioned to confirm aspects of their owner's character and so serve as mirrors. In fact, they are creations of their owner's way of life.37 So what will happen when we are not seen the way we know ourselves to be: that is, either recognized or rejected by a being whose concepts match ours and whose being is a part of who we are? Accustomed as we are to the security of anthropomorphism, which "presupposes that we know what the essence of man or anthropos is,"3 8 what will happen in an encounter with the completely Other? A cockroach's calm blank eyes make it impossible for us to imagine the "seer.'' What we may sense behind them is so alien and inaccessible that we feel threatened in our very existence. The ultimate challenge would be the gaze of an insect so revolting that we tend to avoid looking at it. This is the starting point of G.H.'s passion-as in via crucis and as in passion for truth. In this short novel a woman whose life has been as obvious

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and unquestioned as every room in her apartment experiences the collapse of everything she has taken herself to be. Her journey into the unknown begins as she enters a room that completely unhinges her sense of reality. Instead of finding the dark, jumbled, and musty storage area that she planned to reorganize, she faces an empty space, "screeching with silence." The maid's room is so dry and bright that the sun seems to emanate from within it, "as though the room didn't close its eyes, even at night" (P 35). It is, in fact, an empty container housing more containers, aU waiting to be filled with human life. There is the stripped bed, three neatly stacked old suitcases whose worn initials are the only trace of identification left. But the room is not as empty as it seemed. From the walls the angular ot;ttlines of the mummylike, starkly naked figures of a man, woman, and dog seem to be oozing-the maid's "writing on the wall." As she opens the parched wardrobe a crack the darkness inside seems to have eyes: "We remained for an instant spying on each other without seeing each other" (P 38). Finally, the dark slowly releases life-a huge cockroach "that was so old it was immemorial" (P 40). "I don't know what a cockroach sees. But the two of us were looking at each other, and I also don't know what a woman sees. But if its eyes didn't see me, its existence existed me: in the primary world that I had entered, beings exist other beings as a way of seeing one another" (P 68). As in the encounter with the panther, the gaze Lispector's narrator meets is not "a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by [her} in the field of the Other," as Lac an explains.39 None of her usual preconceptions about the "seer" obstruct her from experiencing the moment at a more essential level. After her first reaction, a profound sense of disorientation, she feels how useless her familiar constructs are. '~nd I ... I saw. There was no way not to see it. There was no way to deny it: my convictions and my wings were drying out quickly [and I could no longer} save myself, like before, with a whole culture that would help me to deny what I was seeing" (P 68-69). The cockroach's "much greater nature made anything that came in therename or person -lose its false transcendence" (P 88). If it were not for the revolting insect as a protagonist and the inevitability of events, there would be no obvious similarity to Kafka, certainly not in tone. In ever narrowing circles the anguished narrator tries to approach the extraordinary experience that unfolds face to face with a cockroach whose silence is "more eyes than mouth" (P 109). The text has many visual references, as befits an encounter that is "just a visual meditation" (P ro6). "I didn't want to open my eyes again, I didn't want to keep on seeing ... . Don't let me see because I am close to seeing the core of life ... the cockroach is pure seduction. Cilia, blinking cilia that beckon ... before my nauseated, attracted eyes, the cockroach's form ... kept slowly changing" (P 51-54). The visual continuum goes from filtering what is her own construct. to "purely seeing," and the narrator analyzes the nuances to a fault. "The fact is that I was no longer seeing myself, I was just seeing. An entire civilization that had been set up having as its guarantee that· one

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should immediately mix what one sees with what one feels ... -I was now in its debris" (P 55). Her first instinctual reaction is to kill the insect. But "it was too late by a split second:· I had seen it." Never before had she come face to face with a cockroach, not "even in my mind," and now what she sees is "life looking back at me." Its silent presence comes from a source much earlier and greater than any human source. Sensing the same silence emerging in herself, she wonders whether up to now she might have "invented one destiny while in my depths living one another" (P 50). As she submits herself to the energy that had first drawn her toward the room, she finds out that this room "had only one way in, and it was a narrow one: through the cockroach" (P 52). With its harsh light, its dryness, and its primordial "nothingness," the space seems to reverberate with the same fierce, objective truth that emanates from the cockroach's gaze and from the maid's black, silent "caveman mural." "Seeing" now takes on a different meaning: in the gaze of the cockroach the "world looks at itself in me ... in this desert things know things" (P 58). Looking and being become the same-once the cockroach "was touching me through with its black, faceted, shiny, neutral look {and} now I began to let it touch me" (P So). "I am what I have seen" (P 59). As she learns to see with the cockroach's eyes, she realizes that its gaze is not hard and indifferent, as she first experienced, but in the service of the naked truth rather than human expectations. Under this gaze that is interested yet has "an extremely energetic indifference" (P n4), her self reveals itself as an existence founded not on reality but on ideas, hopes, and memories: "I incarnated myself inside that set-up person and didn't even sense the great construction project that living was" (P 4).4° Up to this point her tightly drawn curtains had filtered and dimmed not only the harsh sunlight but the truth: Never, before that time, had life happened to me during the daytime. Never in sunlight. Only; at night, had the world slowly turned for me ... and in the morning when I opened my eyes, the world kept right on being a surface ... But now life was happening in the daytime. Undeniable, there to see. Unless I turned my eyes away; (P 70)

This passage is an interesting counterpoint to Kronauer's woman in the pillows who gleefully explores all the possibilities of looking at the world through closed eyelids when she should be "actively living." The warm and dimly lit elephant house serves as a refuge where she can float in the expansive vegetative state of "dissolving into the dream circuit of a more powerful body" (W IO). For G.H., the process of letting go is slow and painful. But step by step she descends into deeperrealms, propelled by the multiple questions that each of her answers spawns under the relentless eyes of the cockroach, which is slowly, mutely dying. Gradually the self that she has taken herself to be dissolves-"G.H. even on my luggage"-and the world reclaims its

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own reality. She finds within herself"the thing part of people," "the inhuman part {that} is our better part," or "God matter" (P 61). As the essential part of all creation it unites her with everything that is. In her own words, she becomes "neutral cockroach body," the "section of the brightest light on the wall plaster," and the "silence etched on the wall." She discovers that her essential self had been there, invisible to her, all the years of her false life. The bland, insipid quality of "nowness" that she experiences corresponds with the perceived or imagined properties of the cockroach: "I was absolutely sure that the cockroach's eyes were completely without taste ... salt would be sentiment, and word, and taste" (P 77-78). It is all part of the atmosphere of "essential being": silence, objectivity, heat, brightness, nakedness, dryness, and sand-a desert-like place that the Jewish author roots in Biblical, even prehistoric antiquity. ("In the presence of the cockroach, I was now able to see to far-off Damascus, the oldest city on earth. On the Libyan desert, cockroaches and crocodiles?" [P 105}.) She imbues her text with a distinctively Catholic flavor ("Mother, blessed be you among cockroaches" {P 86}). G.H's previous life was all excitement and color, a superficial construction out of fear of silence and insipidity: "To escape from the neutral, I had long since abandoned the being for the persona, for the human mask" (P 84-85). Her palate corrupted by salt and sugar and her soul by pleasures and pains, she had "never tasted the taste of nothingness {which} was new like the taste of mother's milk that has a taste only to the mouth of the child" (P 95). It is in this context that the most sensationalized aspect of The Passion According to G.H should be read. Long before the thought of tasting the cockroach's "white blood" emerges, the protagonist feels "impure, as the Bible speaks of the impure . . . . I had committed the forbidden act of touching something impure" (P 63). She has not physically touched the cockroach, rather its "black, faceted shiny, neutral look ... touched {her} through," and she let herself be touched. In G.H's mystical language seeing, touching, tasting, and recognizing the truth are the same. Thus, it is immaterial whether she recognizes "God matter" as it is seeping from the insect or actually tastes it. Perhaps it is also with her own "heart that is thick and white and living" (P 86) that she finally unites, as happens to the narrator in "The Buffalo," when "something white" is spreading in her, and "Death hummed in her ears" (P 155). To confound matters, Lispector's protagonists are able to "become animal", that is to "un-become human," only in an unconscious state-they faint. According to G.H., a human being can only taste the absolute-be it God or essential nature-as "someone who is ... not even going to tell herself ... Just as a lizard's nature sees: without ever having to remember. The lizard sees-like a loose eye sees" (P 98). To know that the animal whose gaze touches G.H. is not only the most ancient and lowliest of creatures, but that it also personifies the "impure" is crucial for understanding the "passion." As Mary Douglas points out, Leviticus' perplexing list of animals that man is forbidden to touch can only be understood within the total structure of Biblical thoughtY As for

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insects, they fly; creep, and crawl-in short they violate the categories of God's creation-animals of the water, earth, or sky-and thus they challenge divine oneness, purity; and completenessY G.H's meditations on why Leviticus' animals are forbidden follow their own logic, however. They certainly do not imply the "unclean;" in fact, the Portuguese imundo that Lispector uses means beyond mundus-man's world-and is much closer to the original Hebrew root which means "separate" rather than "impure."43 According to G.H., the forbidden animals are imund because they constitute living matter that is "back before the human." They are untouchable because they are the "comp~ete root" untouched by man, and eating them is eating the original fruit of good and evil: "imundi was, in my sudden, indirect moment of self-knowledge" (P 64). The punishment for looking the imund cockroach in the eye and realizing "that the imund is not imund" is expulsion from "a paradise of adornments" into the desert (P 64-65). G.H. has reached the point where she has perceived what man cannot see and returns to his world unchanged: "If that person has the courage ... she singes herself, as though she saw God" (P 93). Eye to eye with the animal that has been a witness to man's development over millions of years, she has caught a glimpse of the human condition- that to truly be is "to be beyond the human." Seeing has made her, like the cockroach, imund-"out of this world," "much less than human," and "so much greater that I no longer saw myself" (P 173).

Conclusion The end of The Passion According to G.H. returns to the beginning, creating a perfect loop, with the protagonist "looking, looking. Trying to understand," desperate to figure out how to be back in the world after having "become cockroach": "if I go al1ead with my fragmentary visions, the whole world will have to change for me to fit into it ... why is it that just looking is so greatly disorganizing?" (P 3-5). Lispector's and Kronauer's literary fantasies of visual encounters between humans and animals revolve around questions that are as crucial as they are unanswerable: What is it about the animal gaze that makes it infinitely remote and yet touches us in a very deep way? When we look at an animal do we actually see it, or are we only seeing ourselves? Who is the "seer" behind the small, crimson eye of the buffalo, and who is it that the panther sees when he looks at us? We feel an urgent need to know what to make of our encounters with animals, because looking at them challenges the assumption that simply being human is a virtue, and because we know that they vanish, and ultimately our, future may amount to nothing without them. However, imagining the animal Other also reveals the dilemma of the human mind trying to think "outside of itsel£" According to Deleuze and Guattari, if understanding the animal is a story's aim, its author is condemned to defeat, no matter its literary accomplishment. For such a story must be insufficient-if it is perfect and finished, it will "close in on

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itsel£ Or it will open but will open to something that ... would be in itself interminable"44-a description that seems apt for both Kronauer and Lispector. Their texts indirectly or directly reflect on the fact that however fascinated and touched we are by the animal gaze, we are trapped in projecting our own feelings and thoughts onto it. Rather than trying to explain the mystery of animal consciousness, they describe how it affects us in our lives and sense of self The message that lies in Kronauer's encounters with the cat and the maned wolf, and Lispector's with the buffalo and the cockroach, is dizzying: The only way to become truly human is to "un-become human." The animal way to see is to see "with the body," as Lispector says, a look that is free of the constraints of human consciousness. 1b see without concepts, always in the moment and, like Kronauer's old woman, as if for the first time. As G:H. describes it: "I worked directly with the evidence of my sight ... I was wholly prepared to surprise myself ... only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If truth were what I can understand ... it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized" (P IOO-IOI). Ifwe open ourselves to the animal gaze so it will teach us to see, we can transcend our human limitations and "becoming-animal." As Deleuze and Guattari write, we embark on an "immobile voyage that stays in one place; it only lives and is comprehensible as an intensity," guided by "a map of intensities" and traveling through "an ensemble of states"45- the journey toward our human identity.

Notes I.

John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?," in About Looking (New York: Vintage, r98o), 19.

2.

3·

4· 5· 6.

7· 8.

Akira Mizuta Lippitt, Electric Animal Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2ooo), 6. , Steve Baker, The Postmodern World (London: Reaktion, 2ooo), 20. Wendy Wheeler, A New Modernity.? Change in Science, Literature, and Politics (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999), 17. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinventing of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 12. Brigitte Kronauer's works will be cited parenthetically according to the following abbreviations: W Die Frau in den Kissen {The Woman in the Pillows} (Miinchen: dtv/ Klett-Cotta, 1996). D "Tageslauf mit Unterbrechung und Gegner," {''A Day With Interruption And Opponent"} in Gemusterte Nacht (Miinchen: dtv/Klett-Cotta, 1989). Translations from Kronauer's works are my own. Balcer, the postmodern World, 82. Clarice Lispector's works will be cited parenthetically according to the following abbreviations: B Giovanni Pointiero, t.rans., "The Buffalo," in Family Ties (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1972), 147-156. DP Giovanni Pointiero, trans., "Dry Point of Horses," in Soul Storm (New York: New Directions, 1989), ro7-II3.

Animal Gaze in Fiction-Kronauer and Lispector

9· ro.

n. 12. 13-

14. I5. r6. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 2J.

24-

2526.

27.

28. 29. 30.

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P Ronald W. Sousa, trans., The Passion According to G.H. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). SL Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz, trans., The Stream of Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Helene Cixous, in Verena Andermatt Conley, trans, Reading with Clarice Lispector (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 99· Cixous actually attributes this narrative stance to the author hersel£ In her 1980-1985 lectures Reading with Clarice Lispector she conflates the narrative and the authorial voices, possibly to emphasize how perfectly Lispector has created the illusion of an autobiographical account. Her questionable blurring of its fictitiousness is compounded by her referring to the author throughout as "Clarice," which suggests an intimacy between critic and author that further obscures the distinction between author and narrative voice: "Clarice tells herself that she must speak . . . But she has no words and nothing to say'' (37);" 'I felt then as if I were a tiger with a fatal arrow nailed into its flesh' . . . Clarice goes into the tiger . . . It is she who is in the tiger" (40) and so on. Marta Peixoto rightly calls Cixous's approach appropriative and compromised by the pressures of identification (Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 57-58). Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, 14· Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in Dana Polan, trans., Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 36. R. Lane Kauffmann, "The Other in Question: Dialogical Experiments in Montaigne, Kafka, and Cortazar," in Tullio Maranhao, ed., The Interpretation ofDialogue, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),181. Quoted in Lippitt, Electric Animal, 50. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 16. Bob Marvin and Garry Mullan, ed., Zoo Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 3· Berger, About Looking, ro. Ibid., 15. Ibid. Lippitt, Electric Animal, 18. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and WOmen, 20. Lippitt, Electric Animal, 15. Jacques Derrida, " 'Eating Well,' or The Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida," in Peter Connor et al., trans, What Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), rr6. Baker, The Postmodern WOrld, 21. Author's italics. Jacques Derrida, in Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, trans., Of Spirit: Heidegger and the fi0estion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 49· Author's italics. Jacques Lacan, "Of the Gaze as Object Petit a," inJacques-Alain Miller, ed., Alan Sheridan, trans., The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1977), 82. Ibid., 84-85. Kauffman, The Interpretation ofDialogue, 6. Berger, About Looking, 21.

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31. Ibid., 2-3. 32. Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, 38. Cixous' comment, "Clarice inscribes a frank look of madness" is, in my view, highly questionable, even though Lispector's thoughts on "animalizing herself" seem not too far from Foucault's ideas about madness and its cure, that is "becoming animal". 33· Berger,About Looking, 3· 34· Ibid., 26. 35· Will McNeill, Heidegger: Visions: OfAnimals, Others and the Divine (Warwick: Warwick University Press, 1993), 26. 36. Martin Buber, in Ronald Gregor Smith, trans, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1958), 6. 37· Berger, About Looking, I2-IJ. 38. McNeill, Heidegger, 25. 39· Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis, 84. 40. When G.H. says at some point that the visual encounter is "a murder where there is neither victim nor executioner ... My primary struggle for life" (P 74) it is clear that Peixoto's reading of this text in the context of victimization is a misunderstanding ("The woman feels engulfed by the cockroach, which is in turn victimizer and victim," 82). For although G.H. surrenders to the challenge with "disgust, with despair, with courage," she does so because "I had waited too long, and now I wanted to" (P So). She realizes that "I can still keep myself from having seen. And then I shall never know about the truth ... -it still depends on me!" (P 85). 41. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis ofthe Concepts ofPo//ution and Taboo (London and New York: Ark, 1984), 41. 42. Ibid., 56. 43· Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), rr6-n9. 44- Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 36. 45· Ibid., 35·

I I

PART

III

ART AND SciENCE

CHAPTER

7

BuRNING OuT THE ANIMAL: THE FAILURE OF ENLIGHTENMENT PuRIFICATION IN H. G. WELLs's THE IsLAND OF DR. MoREAu Carrie Rohman

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acques Derrida's recent and recurring interest in the problem of the animal signals the critical recognition in cultural theory of a nonhuman "other" that is crucial to our modernity and to our Western philosophical heritage. Derrida traces a certain recalcitrant humanism in Western metaphysical thought-especially in the work of such cardinal thinkers as Aristotle, Freud, Heidegger, and Levinas-which "continues to link subjectivity with man''1 and withhold it from the animal. In broad theoretical terms, Derrida characterizes the sacrificial structure ofWestern subjectivity as one that maintains the status of the "human'' by a violent abjection, destruction, and disavowal of the "animal." In other words, the sanctity of humanity depends upon our difference from animals, our repression of animality, and the material reinstantiation of that exclusion through various practices such as meat-eating, hunting, and medical experimentation. While Derrida outlines a kind of trans-historical Western "carnophallogocentrism,"2 Slavoj Zizek helps us understand the specific construction of the Enlightenment subject in its distancing from animality, or its "desubstantialization."3 According to Zizek, the " 'official' image of the Enlightenment-the ideology of universal Reason and the progress of humanity, etc."4 is rooted in the Kantian version of subjectivization: the subject "is" only insofar as the Thing (the Kantian Thing in itself as well as the Freudian impossible-incestuous object, das Ding) is sacrificed, "primordially repressed" ... This "primordial repression" introduces a fundamental imbalance in the universe: the symbolically structured universe we live in is organized around a void, an impossibility (the inaccessibility of the thing in itself).5

The "official" Enlightenment subject is one that represses its own animality or Thing-ness, and, because of this repression, circulates around a void.

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This purified notion of the human subject is profoundly threatened by Darwin's evolutionary theory, which emerges in the late nineteenth century. While various theories of evolution linking humans to other animals had developed prior to Darwin's, his work served as the apex of these philosophical and scientific investigations. With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, the human being could be understood as a highly evolved animal. Darwin's insistence that differences between humans and other animals are differences of degree rather than kind radically problematized the traditional humanist abjection of animality, particularly in its purified Enlightenment form. Darwin's positing of the fundamental inter-ontology of human and animal lays the groundwork for a crisis in humanism vis-a-vis the animal at the turn of the twentieth century. H. G. Wells is among the first modernist writers to thematize clearly this post-Darwinian uncertainty about the stability of the humanist subject in terms of its species status. 6 The humanized animals in Wells' 1896 novel, The Island ofDr. Moreau, embody a Darwinian nightmare of the evolutionary continuum, in which animals become human and-more horrifically-humans become animals. While seemingly invested in the improvement of animal behavior, Dr. Moreau's project is in fact targeted at the constitutive imbalance in the human subject identified by Zizek as the problem of the palpitating "Thing," which must be repressed for the subject to become human. Moreau's intense desire to make animals reasonable represents an excessive instantiation of Enlightenment rationalization in its drive to purifY the human subject of all connection to the irrational, the bodily, the animal. But the novel ultimately confirms the impossibility of such purification and stages an insistent collocation of human and animal being. Anxieties about humankind's participation in animality are recurrently coded in figures of ingestion and cannibalism in the literature of modernism.? The Island ofDr. Moreau further corroborates this insight. The reader meets Edward Prendick, the novel's protagonist, and two other sailors shipwrecked from the "Lady Vain," as they float helplessly without provisions and without promise of rescue. Prendick describes this initial crisis in terms of hunger and thirst: "We drifted famishing, and, after our water had come to an end, tormented by an intolerable thirst, for eight days altogether." 8 Prendick and his companions find themselves bereft of the basic comforts of human society and physical sustenance. They are confronted with mere physical survival, the need to eat and drink. Their predicament immediately compromises humanity's claim to the transcendence of animal instincts as the three men agree to draw lots and determine who will be the cannibals among them and who will be the victim. Though Prendick's companions struggle with one another and roll overboard before anyone is eaten, human nature is already marked in the novel as fundamentally physical, instinctual, and even aggressive. Peter Kemp describes this perspective as one that marks Wells' larger body of work, particularly his later work, in which the human being is understood more

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in relation to its animal contingencies and appetites than to its imagined transcendence of them.9 Cyndy Hendershot points out that Prendick, as the novel's "representative of masculine British civilization,"10 is set apart from the other men in the raft because he resists the initial proposal of cannibalism, but the text immediately undercuts Prendick's status as nonprimitive when he is picked up by Moreau and company. Moreau's assistant Montgomery gives Prendick some "scarlet stuff, iced" (5), and Prendick notes, "It tasted like blood, and made me feel stronger" (6). Here Prendick's basic physical need to eat and drink is realigned with cannibalism and therefore animalized. A few lines later, Montgomery assures the weakened protagonist that some mutton is boiling and will soon be ready to eat. When the mutton is brought in, Prendick is "so excited by the appetising smell of it" that he is no longer disquieted by a puma's incessant growls from the deck (7). Wells' emphasis on the olfactory in this description further underscores Prendick's animal needs. Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer have noted that Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, associates the acquisition of humanity with a decreased reliance on smell and an increased sense .of sight. II When "man" learns to walk upright, he removes himself from the organicism he once experienced on the ground: "Freud's fantasy of origins tells us, then, that the human animal becomes the one who essentially sees rather than smells." Therefore Wells' characterization of Prendick is one of regression to an animal state in which the olfactory rather than the specular dominates his relations to the objective world. Prendick has drunk blood and now smells the flesh being prepared for him to eat. Derrida has argued that the Western subject, just as it is identified with phallic privilege and with the metaphysics of presence, is also organized around carnivorous virility. The acquisition of full humanity in the West, he contends, is predicated upon eating animal flesh. This valorizing function of meat-eating has been explained in a different register by Nick Fiddes in his book Meat, which is premised upon the idea that "the most important feature of meat ... is that it tangibly represents human control of the natural world. Consuming the muscle flesh of other highly evolved animals is a potent statement of our supreme power.m 2 For humans, as opposed to nonhuman animals, eating meat enacts the cultural work of creating and maintaining a subjectivity that is imagined to exceed the natural. This putative transcendence over nature thus posits the nonanimality of the human carnivore, and, as George Bataille's Theory of Religion suggests, works to remove man from the realm of the thing. Eating cooked meat defines the animal as always-having-been a thing, and conversely, it defines man as never-having-been a thing. But Wells' text troubles the distinction between eating the flesh of animals and eating the flesh of people through its alignment of the carnivorous and the cannibalistic. Prendick's consumption of flesh and blood indicates the coincidence of human civilization and instinctual animality. Wells' foregrounding of the bloody and smelly in Prendick's eating habits realigns him with the

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cannibal/animal. The text tal<:es pains to emphasize the bloody realities of British cuisine by emphasizing Prendick's animal response to animal flesh. In this way, the text reveals the inherent contradiction of "carnivorous civilization." Within the first few pages of the novel, then, Wells codes the eating of flesh as an animal practice. Prendick's "civilized" status is undercut by his desire to feed on other animals, a desire that becomes one among several primary markers of animality in the novel. This early troubling ofPrendick's status as human is promptly mirrored in the appearance of M'Ling, Moreau's most beloved Beast Person whom Prendick perceives as a misshapen black man moving with "animal swiftness" (9). As Hendershot points out, M'Ling serves as an obvious point of conflation between imperialist racism and Darwinian theories of evolutionary superiority. Not yet realizing that M'Ling is one of Moreau's animals-made-human, Prendick experiences this creature within a psychomythological register: I had never beheld such a repulsive and extraordinary face before, and yetif the contradiction is credible- I experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had already encountered exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me. Afterwards it occurred to me that probably I had seen him as I was lifted aboard, and yet that scarcely satisfied my suspicion of a previous acquaintance. (10)

Prendick seems to recollect M'Ling's disquieting face through an unconscious source that is chronologically anterior. In Jungian terms, M'Ling triggers Prendick's collective unconscious.Jung maintains that "archetypes" or "primordial images" recur in dream symbolism because the mind, like the physical body, represents a "museum" with "a long evolutionary history behind it ... I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal."13 Prendick's vague recognition of M'Ling, like most recognitions in the novel, says more about him than about the Beast Man because it indicates his own evolutionary kinship with animality. This recognition is mythologized in a subtle yet instructive reference to biblical tradition when Prendick turns to view the schooner's deck. He is astonished to see, in addition to staghounds and a huge puma "cramped" in a small cage, "some big hutches containing a number of rabbits, and a solitary llama ... squeezed in a mere box of a cage forward. The dogs were muzzled by leather straps. The only human being on deck was a gaunt and silent sailor at the wheel" (n). In this parable of Noah's Ark, humans and animals are equalized by the wrath of God infused into nature and find themselves literally in the same boat. The parable implicitly deconstructs the superiority of man over animal by insisting upon their mutual corporeal needs. The Ark is an apt allusion for the beginning of Wells' tale, which, according to Anne Simpson, calls for humankind's "deep investigations of the nature of self-awareness."14

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M'Ling functions as the ironic precursor to Prendick's lesson on Noble's Island, which undoes humanism's fundamental species tenet that humans are ontologically distinct from nonhuman animals. Prendick's confusion over the status of M'Ling's humanity sets the stage for his own immanent tutelage. Looking toward M'Ling through the darkness, Prendick is astonished when "it" looks back with shining green eyes. "The thing came to me," notes Prendick, "as a stark inhumanity. That black figure, with its eyes of fire, struck down through all my adult thoughts and feelings, and for a moment the forgotten horrors of childhood came back to my mind" (18). For Jung, the childhood mind is more connected to the "deeper instinctive strata of the human psyche,ms which adults have learned to control and repress. This narrative moment of terror also recalls Freudian theory; which implicitly claims that the repression of one's animality must be learned because, as children, we are not repulsed by our own physicality. 16 Ultimately; then, Prendick is poised to unlearn one of the basic lessons of human subjectivization: to be a person, one must not be an animal. Moreau's apology for his experimental vivisections comes late in the novel, after Prendick has misunderstood the Beast People as humans who have been scientifically devolved into proto-animals. Of course, this misrecognition underscores the text's deep implications for human identity: Moreau's vivisections, which humanize animals, vividly register the inverse fear that humans already have animal qualities. This textual dialectic mirrors the double-edged nature of evolutionary theory as it was received in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That is, while much emphasis was placed on the progressive capacities of evolution for human cultures at that time, our shared heritage with other animals resulted in anxieties about regression and atavistic "leftovers" in the human person. Moreau's response to such threats is a grandiose humanizing project that aims ultimately to eradicate animality from the sentient world. And while Moreau remains captivated by his own romance, Prendick learns by the novel's end that this kind of purification is impossibly fantastic. The deeply disturbing nature of this eventual collapse of humanist subjectivity is foreshadowed in the ninth chapter, subtitled "The Thing in the Forest." In order to escape from the shrieks of the puma being vivisected in Moreau's enclosure, Prendick ventures out to explore his island home. He is surprised to discover an unidentifiable figure that "bowed its head to the water and began to drink. Then [Prendick} saw it was a man, going on all-fours like a beast!" (42). This "animal-man" (5o), this "grotesque half-bestial creature" (42), will be identified later in the text as the Leopard Man, but in this scene, Prendick cannot decipher its nature and struggles to comprehend the creature's trans-species appearance. His anxieties are heightened when he stumbles upon a dead rabbit with its head torn off, the most recent victim of the "man" who goes on all fours. The rabbit is covered with flies, with its blood scattered about, and therefore serves as an excessive depiction of predation, consumption, and what

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Zizek would term the "life substance. "17 In light of Zizek's work, Wells' terminology is perhaps most notable in this section. Prendick narrates the terrifying and various ways in which "the Thing" (46) pursued him. The creature easily coincides with the Kantian Thing, which Zizek reads as that which must be primordially repressed in order to produce the split subject of Lacanian discourse. 18 Prendick's flight from "the Thing" in Wells' text metaphorizes the Subject's haunt by das Ding, by a repressed and abjected animality that always returns. This reading is especially compelling because Prendick vacillates between the certain knowledge that the "other" is following him and the suspicion that his fears issue from within, from his own anxious imagination: I was tormented by a faint rustling upon my right hand. I thought at first it was fancy, for whenever I stopped there was a silence save for the evening breeze in the tree-tops. Then when I went on again there was an echo to my footsteps (47-48).

This "Thing in the Forest" serves as the animal-without who ignites anxiety about the animal-within, and though this chapter ends with Prendick's narrow escape from the creature, the novel will demonstrate that such an escape is ultimately impossible because the animal cannot be extracted from the human subject. As Zizek maintains in reference to the subject's attempt to escape the Thing, "The problem, of course, is that this endeavor (to master the Thing} is ultimately doomed to fail since the imbalance is constitutive." 19 While ostensibly aimed at the transformation of animals, Moreau's project is in fact directed squarely at this constitutive imbalance in the human subject. The doctor's strident and repeated attempts to make animals reasonable represent an extreme legacy of the Enlightenment project of rationalization: to purify the human subject-and even the animal subject-of all connections to the irrational, the bodily, the supernatural. In other words, Moreau's science is desperate to exterminate animality by creating and policing the boundaries of rationalist humanism. Moreau reveals this fundamental motivation to Prendick when he admits, "Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own" (89; emphasis added). Wells' portrait of Moreau emphasizes the constructedness of the Enlightenment subject by suggesting that the transcendence achieved by the rational human requires a certain intense and artificial technology; a burning out of the animal within human nature. The process, of course, is displaced here onto Moreau's unsuspecting subjects, who are animals. This fictional program of purification depends upon the newly articulated theories of mutation and natural selection. Moreau informs Prendick, "These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought irtto new shapes. To that- to the study of the plasticity of living forms- my life has

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been devoted" (81). The mutability of species was precisely what compromised humanity's claim to sovereignty over other animals once evolution was considered scientifically sound. And Moreau implicitly confirms this dethroning of the human when he tells Prendick, ''A pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily . . . Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion" (82). Wells appears to draw directly from Nietzschian philosophy in this passage that explains morality as a repression of instinct. Nietzsche outlines a similar theory in On the Genealogy of Morals, where he discusses the process of internalization, in which "all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself."20 The notion that a pig may be educated reveals the ideological kernel of Moreau's "benevolent" Enlightenment fantasy-that all creatures can be elevated beyond their animality, that all creatures can be finally humanized. Horkheimer and Adorno critique this sort of deeply totalizing gesture when they elaborate the repressive forces of Enlightenment reason and its connection to Fascism: "Enlightenment is totalitarian," they explain. 21 The "official" narrative of the Enlightenment proposes that matter will be mastered by scientism, systematism, and rationalist empiricism. The animal represents the human subject's internal resistance to rationality and symbolic law, so Moreau, as a perverse Enlightenment "father," wants to make all creatures reasonable. Despite Moreau's impassioned lecture on species transformation and the plasticity of forms, Prendick objects to the suffering Moreau inflicts upon his victims. At this objection, Moreau launches into a long discussion of physical pain and the need for rational man to transcend it. "So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick," he maintains, "so long as your own pains drive you . . .' I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels" (83; emphasis added). Here the scientist emphasizes the corporeal bottom line, the moment of pain in which materiality triumphs and the mind is conquered by the flesh. This is the moment in which humanity's embodiment cannot be denied, yet denial is precisely what Moreau recommends. Moreau refuses to see that his own violent experimentation is akin to the very "animal" drives he works against. As Horkheimer and Adorno say of the animal experiments: "It shows that because he does injury to animals, he and he alone in all creation voluntarily functions as mechanically, as blindly and automatically as the twitching limbs of the victim which the specialist knows how to turn to account." 22 Moreau continues his argument by drawing a knife and carefully inserting it into his own leg. His indifference to the blade is meant to demonstrate his transcendence of animal sensitivity to pain, which he argues can be "ground out of existence" by evolution (84). Again, Moreau aspires to epitomize the rationalist subject in his utter indifference to matters of the flesh: "This store men and women set on pleasure and

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pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure- they are for us, only so long as we wdggle in the dust" (84-85). At the end of Moreau's explanation, Prendick remains, to a certain degree, horrified by the humanizing experiments. He shivers at his newfound understanding of Moreau and finds himself in a "stagnant" mood. Prendick's ambivalence reflects his persistent inability to rationalize the cruel means and questionable ends of the vivisections. Throughout the text, Wells emphasizes Moreau's extreme violence to and thereby provides a rare fictional representation of animal suffering in medical experimentation. Moreau's rationale reinforces the text's suggestion that ~ctual violence against animals is a displaced violence that vainly attempts to exorcise animality from the human psyche. What's more, the text also intimates, through its description of animal suffering, that attempts to deanimalize humanity are fundamentally violent. Before Prendick knows of Moreau's procedures, he is driven from the compound by the puma's "exquisite expression of suffering," which sounds "as if all the pain in the world had found a voice" (40). Obliquely, then, the text bears witness to the inherent violence of the humanizing process that creates Lacan's split subject, a process that forces the individual to renounce its animal nature, its connection to the natural world, and its instinctual desires, and to reinforce this disavowal through violence against nonhumans. As Zizek explains, Lacan's subject "can never fully 'become himself,' he can never fully realize himself, he only ex-sists as the void of a distance from the Thing." 23 The violence of this "compromise formation" (22),. in which the subject becoming human must disavow its animality, is literalized in the text by the screams of the puma as Moreau forces its renunciation of animal being in order to shape its "humanity." If Moreau's experiments characterize the attempted renunciation and purification of animality, his creations also catalogue the inevitable failure of these processes. Moreau is motivated to eliminate the perpetual regression of his Beast People to an animal state. He admits to Prendick that his creatures are unable to maintain their human-like repression of animal instincts, so he works harder to perfect his craft: "I have been doing better; but somehow the things drift back again, the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again" (87). Hendershot reads the "beast flesh" as Wells' codification of sexual perversion, which was often attributed to non-European natives in imperialist narratives. 2 4 But a close reading of Moreau's continued description suggests that the "beast flesh" cannot be reduced to sexuality alone. Rather,.it stands for a multifaceted human participation in animality. At this point, Moreau's description is a thinly veiled denunciation of human behavior: And least satisfactory of all is something that I cannot touch, somewhere! cannot determine where- in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst suddenly and

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inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear .... As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again. (88-89)

As Prendick discovers, the repressed beast flesh can return in many ways and requires powerful symbolic containment. Moreau, who coincides with and embodies the Freudian Father, or as Lacan understands it, the retroactively projected Name-of-the-Father, writes the Law for his Beast Folk. His prohibitive symbolic economy parodies the Ten Commandments as it identifies specific bestial acts that the humanized creatures must forego. The Beast Folk chant their moral code, "Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to eat Flesh of Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?" (65). In addition, they are not to claw trees or chase other men, and Prendick notes how they swear the prohibition of"the maddest, most impossible and most indecent things one could well imagine" (65). These unmentionables register humanism's projected self-loathing or shame at organicism, while simultaneously acknowledging the profound unknowability of animal consciousness. The Beast Folk's interrogative coda ''Are we not Men?" insists upon the instability of human subjectivity and the concomitant need to establish and reestablish the boundaries of the human. Indeed, the Beast Folk provide a conspicuous instance of the "productive reiteration" of hegemonic norms that Judith Butler theorizes. zs The creatures habitually gather to repeat the Law in their desperate attempt to remain human. They must constantly remind themselves of their putative humanity. Butler's work on the iterability and cultural resignification of sexed identity can be applied here to the discourse of species as it operates in Wells' text. In Butler's terms, The Beast Folk speak the necessary recitation, the repeated assumption, of their identity position, "whereby 'assumption' is not a singular act or event, but, rather, an iterable practice."26 They speak and respeak their identity; they literally rearticulate their humanity in order to maintain its integrity. Wells continues to lay bare the precarious nature of human identity vis-a-vis the animal through Prendick's gradual demystification of the humanist version of the subject. After several months on the island, he reports becoming "habituated" to the Beast People (96). This habituation results from an uncanny resemblance between the behavior of the Beast People and Prendick's memories of human behavior. He can no longer distinguish the carriage of Moreau's bovine creature who works the launch from "some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours," or the Fox-Bear Woman's "shifty face" from the faces of prostitutes he once saw in "some city by-way" (96). Wells' mutual deployment of gender and species discourses clearly emerges here as he adds that the female creatures had an "instinctive sense of their own repulsive clumsiness" and therefore readily adopted a human regard for decorum (96). Victorian critics have analyzed "the animal within" as a figure aligned with sexuality, especially feminine sexuality, in nineteenth century

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literature. 2 7 But those analyses tend to read out animality as such when they treat it as primarily symbolic of human behaviors and anxieties. While animality is occasionally gendered as feminine in the text, and while masculine imperialism is clearly at issue in Moreau's attempts to create and control the "other," the novel remains irreducibly interested in the ontological boundary between human and animal. Therefore, the text's commentary on "primitive" female sexuality cannot contain its broader concern with human animality. Prendick's habituation to the Beast People signals an erosion of the symbolic abjection of animality that constitutes human identity. If humans are socialized to regard animals as fundamentally other, then Prendick's socialization is wearing thin as the Beasts appear uncannily human. There appears to be a two-way trafficking of identity-deconstruction here, as Moreau's animals become partially human while Moreau and the other men seem increasingly animal. This double destabilization unmasks the unmaintainability of the species boundary. The cultural edicts of speciesism dissolve on Dr. Moreau's self-contained island, which functions as an alternative space to the fin-de-siec!e British socius. Prendick's habituation to Moreau's creatures serves as a precursor to his more radical moment of deconstructive clarity involving the Leopard Man. Formerly known as the Thing in the forest, the amorphous Leopard Man hunted Prendick earlier in the novel. He proves to be Moreau's most wayward creature when he is exposed as a killer and consumer of flesh. The Leopard Man has disregarded Moreau's Law and resumed his instinctual modes of behavior; he serves as a testimonial to the impossibility of Moreau's Enlightenment fantasy of producing a purely rational human specimen. When Prendick and Montgomery discover a second slain rabbit in the woods, they suspect that the Beast People are on the verge of regression and revolt. Moreau calls the Folk together and confronts the carnivorous transgression, at which time the guilty Leopard Man leaps at Moreau. A frantic chase ensues, and the Beast People readily join the hunt for one of their own, a betrayer of the Law. In fact, the hunt allows them to indulge their "killer" instincts; the Swine-Folk squeal with excitement and the Wolf-Folk, seeing the Leopard Man run on all fours, howl with delight (106). The frenzied pursuit further unravels Moreau's humanizing project because it disregards the fifth Law: Not to chase other Men. In Freudian terms, the chase corresponds to a return of the repressed animality in the Beast People and ultimately to a similar return in the human psyche. The narrative insists upon the Leopard Man's inter-species identity at this point: "The thing was still clothed, and, at a distance, its face still seemed human, but the carriage of its four limbs was feline, and the furtive droop of its shoulder was distinctly that of a hunted animal" (106). For Prendick, the pursuit of the fugitive Leopard Man frames the novel's most pivotal recognition. Coming upon the crouched figure, who stares over its shoulder at Prendick, the latter admits: It may seem a strange contradiction in me-l cannot explain the fact-but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light

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gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact ofits humanity. (107-108; emphasis added)

This epiphanic moment produces a surprising inversion of the traditional humanist subject position, which abjects and represses animality. In profound contrast to that abjection, Prendick's vision privileges animality as an apriori, necessary, and constitutive element of the human. Prendick's vision insists that the Leopard Man's animality is actually his most human quality. Indeed, it is the Leopard Man's terror and capacity for suffering that reveal his humanity for Prendick in this scene. Moreau's Law punishes transgressors by returning them to his "House of Pain" (104) for further rationalization. When Prendick realizes that within seconds the animalman will be "overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures of the enclosure," he abruptly opts for a mercy killing and shoots the creature "between his terror-struck eyes" (108). This act of mercy grows out of Prendick's awareness of the creature's terror at its imminent suffering. His identification with the Leopard Man also suggests that experiencing fear of bodily harm and awareness of one's mortality are supremely human characteristics. In other words, being embodied, experiencing pain, having instincts and fears- these qualities mark one's humanity as profoundly as any other qualities. The broader implications of Prendick's privileged epiphany about the Leopard Man are almost immediately rendered in the text. The Beast People gather together after the fugitive's body is dragged away, and Prendick continues to analyze the products of Moreau's bizarre undertaking: ''A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate, in its simplest form" (109). Philosophical pronouncements like this one, that trouble the sanctity of humanism, characterize the remainder of the novel. Jill Milling's analysis of science fiction narratives involving beast-men confirms that the scientist/protagonist "who makes discoveries about the relations between humans and other animals ... records a sense of wonder, displacement, and ambivalence resulting from these revelations." 28 Prendick's vision of humanity is permanently altered by his experience on the island. When he laments the Beast People's lost innocence at Moreau's hands, he implicitly laments humanity's denaturalization as evolved, subjectivated, rational beings. Moreau's beasts had been "adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand" (109). Humanity is metaphorized as the antithesis of freedom, as a blind adherence to authority, to the Law, to the symbolic order. The human creature has lost its immanence. In these rare moments, one detects in Wells traces of a nostalgic longing to return to some originary, animal moment in history before the human emerged as fully other

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from its fellow creatures, before man became the "thinking animal." But for most of the novel, humanity's residual animality stalks the human and threatens its locatability. Moreau's death at the claws of his Leopard Man confirms the futility of his project and sounds a warning to rationalist humanism that attempts to purifY humanity of its animal tendencies are doomed to fail. Prendick's unsuccessful return to "civilization" echoes this defeat. Rather than feeling restored by English society, Prendick reports· a "strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread" he confronted on Moreau's island (154). His detailed explanation of this "delusion" warrants a sizable quotation: I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals half-wrought into the outward image of human souls; and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that .... I see faces keen and bright, others dull or dangerous, others unsteady; insincere; none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them .... [In London} I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me, furtive craving men glance jealously at me, weary pale workers go coughing by me, with tired eyes and eager paces like wounded deer dripping blood .... (154-155)

At the novel's end, then, Prendick cannot reengage the basic humanist disavowal of animality. He recognizes the undecidability of the species boundary, and there is a certain horror in that recognition. Ultimately, Prendick places himself in a liminal species category that seems more animal than human; ''And it even seemed that I, too, was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain, that sent it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with the gid" (156). Perhaps Prendick obliquely acknowledges the unreasonableness of Enlightenment reason here, a strange disorder in the human brain. The novel's final chapter informs us that Prendick must live as a recluse in order to maintain his sanity. He finds "hope" in an abstract sense of protection he gained from his astronomical studies, in the "eternal laws of matter" (156). Clearly, Prendick's gesture toward stability fails to recontain the anxiety released by the novel. Indeed, Wells' text not only stages a confrontation between the Enlightenment subject and its Darwinian roots, but in doing so it also fundamentally unsettles the traditional notion of the "human'' as ontologically nonanimal. r

Notes r. Jacques Derrida," 'Eating Well,' or The Calculation of the Subject: Interview

with Jacques Derrida," by Jean-Luc Nancy; in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, andJean-Luc Nancy; eds., Who Comes After the Subject.? (New York: Routledge, 1991), 105.

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3· 45· 6.

7·

8.

9· ro.

II.

12. 13. 14-

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 2b. 21.

22. 23.

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Den·ida, "Eating Well," u3. Den·ida adds the prefix "carno" to indicate his further delineation of the Western subject he had already identified as "phallogocentric."The more recent term includes carnivorous sacrifice as a primary activity that produces and recites humanist subjectivity. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom (New York: Routledge, 1992), 136. Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom, r8o. Ibid. Wells' relationship to science and to Darwinism in particular has beeti noted by a number of scholars in light of his tutelage underT. H. Huxley. R. D. Haynes has written "Evolutionary theory then seemed to Wells, and may still be regarded as, the nearest approa~h to a unifYing factor in contemporary thought." Roslynn D. Haynes, H. G. Wells: Discoverer ofthe Future (New York: New York University Press, 1980), r6. To name only a few, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), D. H. Lawrence's WOmen in Love (1921), and The Plumed Serpent (1926), and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) all explore the problem of animality and human identity through various economies of consumption and incorporation. H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Bantam, 1994), 2. Henceforth, references to this novel will be cited by page numbers and enclosed in parentheses. See especially Kemp's introduction to H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982). Cyndy Hendershot, "The Animal Without: Masculinity and Imperialism in The Island of Dr. Moreau and 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band,' " Nineteenth Century Studies ro (1996), 7· Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer, "Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme's Silence ofthe Lambs," Boundary 222, no. 3 (1995), 141-170. Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London: Routledge, 1991), 2. Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell Publishing, 1964), 57· Anne Simpson, "The 'Tangible Antagonist': H. G. Wells and the Discourse of Otherness," Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 31, no. 2 (Summer 1990), 135. Jung, Man and His Symbols, 36. Freud writes, "Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be a puzzle to them." Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Norton, 1950), 157. Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 22. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 18} Friedrich Nietzche, in Walter Kaufmann, trans., On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1989), 85. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1944), 6. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 245. Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 22.

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24- Hendershot, "The Animal Without," in The Island ofDr. Moreau, 5· 25. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107. 26. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 108. 27. Cyndy Hendershot (see note 10 above) discusses the Victorian equation of

feminine sexuality and the animal. 28. Jill Milling, in "The Ambiguous Animal: Evolution of the Beast~Man in Scientific Creation Myths," in The Shape of the Fantastic (New York: Greenwood, 1990), ro8.

CHAPTER

8

OuinA's

RHETORIC OF EMPATHY: A CASE STUDY IN VICTORIAN ANTI -VIVISECTION NARRATIVE Mary Sanders Pollock

I think not only is their affection undervalued, but that the intelligence of animals is greatly under-rated. Man having but one conception ofintelligence, his own, does not endeavour to comprehend another which is different, and differently exhibited and expressed.'

uida, born in 1839 as Maria Louise Rame, grew up in the small town of Bury St. Edmonds, a few hours northeast of London. During her childhood, she was surrounded by an attentive extended family and imaginatively inspired by an affectionate (though usually absent) father, whose desultory labot;s as a French master seem to have been a cover for his real work as an agent for Louis Napoleon. 2 Louis Rame's influence was erratic, but it was profound: from him, Ouida learned to love the French realists, especially Balzac, and to hate bourgeois politics, society, and religion. In 1857, Ouida moved with her mother and grandmother to London. Two years later, she began a long and wildly successful writing career with the publication of her first short story, "Dashwood's Drag; or, The Derby and What Came of It," in Bentley} Miscellany. Soon, her work was so commercially successful that she was able to support her small family in lavish style. She moved to Italy, settled in a villa with her mother and their dogs, and traveled widely throughout Europe. On one of those journeys, the menage landed for a period back in London, where Ouida set up for a few months in the luxurious Langham Hotel, entertaining such luminaries as Robert Browning and Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Edward Bulwer Lytton, the explorer Richard Burton and his wife Isabel, famous musicians, editors, MP's, and ambassadors. In 1950, V. S. Pritchett described the (imagined) scene of her boudoir in an article written for the

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New Statesman and Nation: One walked into the Langham Hotel out of the London daylight and was shown, at last, into a large, darkened apartment twinkling with candles. Heavy black velvet curtains were drawn over the windows; masses of exotic

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flowers were banked against them and, enthroned in an enormous bed in the midst of all this sat the genius: a small, ugly, dank-eyed woman with her hair down her back, scratching away fast with a quill pen on large sheets of violettinted paper and throwing each sheet on to the floor when it was done with. A large dog guarded the morning's work from the visitor's touch. One had gone to have one's head bitten off either by Ouida or her dog.3

Fascinated by high life, Ouida was even more attentive to the opposite extreme, and as she developed her literary powers, she turned her writer's eye more and more to the wretched of the earth. During her lifetime, Ouida published forty-eight volumes of essays, short stories, and bestselling sensation novels. Her passions were obvious and extreme; her plots were action-packed; her settings ranged from the drawing room to the slaughterhouse, and from the countryside to the battleground, where her most popular novel, Under Two Flags (1867), takes place. 4 Now; Ouida is remembered, if at all, as the author of A Dog ofFlanders (1872), a children's story. This book, and her less known but more polemical writings against animal cruelty, offer us a lens into both the popular conscience of the late Victorian era and the ethical issues of our own time. Reading Ouida's works arouses the disturbing sensation that, if scientific understanding has greatly advanced, and if literary trends have come and gone, the issues of animal welfare and animal rights, which fuel Ouida's essays and much of her fiction, have changed very little. The arguments of Ouida's day remain those of our own. Pritchett's comment represents the perspective of High Modernism, in which the narrative elements are flattened and character is developed through the description of internal process; modernism is predicated upon the premise that the artist's own passions are sublimated beneath the surface of the work of art. Pritchett's sarcasm about Ouida as an author is none too subtle-nor is the unkind suggestion that she herself is a "dog," hairy, small, and fierce, although, later in his remarks, he is forced to admit a grudging admiration for Ouida's "boldness."5 Given his own Modernist biases against sentiment and polemic, Pritchett's hostility is not surprising, and even in Ouida's day, when her books were enormously popular, her extravagance posed a problem for more sober readers and reviewers committed to the dictates ofliteraryrealism. She responded to them in 1883 in "Romance and Realism," the last essay in Frescoes, a collection of sketches and criticism: I do not object to realism in fiction; what I object to is the limitation of realism in fiction to what is commonplace, tedious, and bald-to the habit, in a word, of insisting that the potato is real and that the passion flower is not ... the dome of St. Peter's is as real as the gasometer of East London. . . . I cannot suppose that my own experiences can be wholly exceptional ones, yet I have known very handsome people, I have known very fine characters, I have also known some very wicked ones, and I have also known many circumstances so romantic that were they described in fiction, they would be ridiculed as exaggerated and impossible. 6

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One consistent aspect of Ouida's fiction of extremes is a profound sympathy for the marginal and the dispossessed as well as the powerful. And Ouida's books are populated not only with human characters-princes and paupers, artists and prostitutes, old soldiers and young orphans- but replete with sympathetic portraits of nonhuman animals-an asp who stings simply because that is what snakes do, a patronizing cat, a loyal bullfinch, suffering horses, and dogs -especially dogs-whose personalities, lives, and deaths are presented in startling variety. From childhood, dogs were Ouida's own passion, and the treatment of dogs was for her the test par excellence of human character. IfZola's naturalistic novels were experimental "laboratories" for getting at the truth about human nature, Ouida's fiction served as a workshop for the development of an ethic of empathy for the natural environment, and especially for the animate aspects of the nonhuman. But, unlike the realist novelist George Eliot, with whom she is sometimes contrasted, Ouida did not think of her work as a kind of "natural history'' of humans; she did not wish to represent the quotidian surface of life, along with psychological processes, in minute detail.7 Ouida shares, however, one goal in common with realism: once she established a readership, she seems to have felt that her art could perform the social function of arousing sympathy-and, in this, she was attuned to the mainstream ofVictorian literature, including the work of George Eliot. Clearly, however, the conventions of literary realism (like those of modernism) exclude the representation of nonhuman subjectivity, and hence, the exploration of a biotic and social community which includes nonhuman animal subjects. The central thread of post-Kantian ethical theories about the treatment of nonhuman animals is the argument that, although animals do. not have rights because they lack language and reason, cruelty to them escalates inevitably into cruelty to human beings, who do have the rights that devolve from language and reason. These hierarchies of rights and obligations are flattened in Ouida's ethical universe: for her, cruelty is the same, whether directed toward economically disenfranchised, unprotected women, the elderly, orphans, or dogs-and she observes that it is most often directed at those beings who are most defenseless against the creations of human reason. In her fiction, cruelty toward domesticated animals also always results in disaster for the humans associated with them, in plots suggesting that humans and nonhuman animals are bound up together in one living community-a community that cannot ultimately survive the mechanistic economic, social, and intellectual structures of modernity. Toward the end of her life, Ouida turned to the polemical genres of the essay and pamphlet to arouse imaginative sympathy for the plight of nonhuman animals in more direct ways than she had done in her fiction. In essays, she pointedly decries the mistreatment and casual killing of all animals, wild and domesticated. Vivisection-in Europe, perhaps the most controversial issue of Ouida's heyday in the 186os and 187os-is one of the principal concerns in Ouida's nonfiction

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prose, and it functions even in her early novels as a master trope. Ouida's narrative style allows her to represent nonhuman consciousness and emotion with less of the androcentrism that mars most cultural representations of animals in everything from medieval beast fables to contemporary toys and cartoons. Rabies, another focal point in late nineteenth-century Europe and North America for various animal phobias, is also an important trope in Ouida's work, for the threat of rabies was met with both an increase in vivisection as scientists tried to find cures for the disease and an increase in the number of laws applying to dog ownership-laws that effectively limited the keeping of dogs by the poor. 8 It almost goes without saying that, if nonhuman consciousness cannot be represented at all within the realist mode of Ouida's day, such representations are problematic at any point in literary history, and within any artistic genre or medium. The problem for artists parallels the problem for scientists who work with animals as experimental subjects. It is impossible to translate what a dog thinks into human language. Nevertheless, many scientists have, in fact, begun to acknowledge the epistemological paradox that informs their work: since dogs, especially, are useful laboratory animals because they resemble humans in sensory and emotional structures, reifying dogs and inflicting pain on them clearly parallels the torture of humans and thus, according to the dictates of"common sense," cannot be ethically neutral.9 Pioneering collaborative work in the 1950s by Don Griffin, an ethologist, and Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, remains exemplary on this point. During lectures to students at Rockefeller University, Griffin released bats into the hall in order to demonstrate the sophistication of their echolocation abilities, much to astonishment of the students-and the "experts" who had refused to believe that such a tiny animal could best high-powered naval technology. Nagel, one of Griffin's colleagues at Rockefeller, wrote an essay on Griffin's work entitled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Here, Nagel addresses the impossibility of knowing what it is "like" to be a bat or any other animal-or indeed any other consciousness. ro For Marc Hauser, whose study Wild Minds came along fifty years later, it is essential to persevere despite this infinite ontological regress. It remains imperative to know as much as possible about both human and animal minds through attentive, respectful observation and description that avoids projection and anthropomorphism and thereby mitigates against an ethically neutral position on animal experimentation. In holding this position, most ethologists, even classical ethologists, go against the grain of modern experimental scientific theory and practice. n Throughout most ofWestern scientific history-since Descartes, that is-animals have been regarded as biological machines, easy stand-ins for humans in experiments designed to map the flow of blood or describe the autonomic nervous system. Similarly, in Western literary history, animal characters have also served as stand-ins- for human vices, virtues, and desires. 12 Like many contemporary scientists, literary theorists are also

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beginning to reconsider the use of animals in cultural representations. As Michael]. McDowell comments, "Every literary attempt to listen to voices in the landscape or to 'read the book of nature' is necessarily anthropocentric. It's our language, after all, that we're using, and we inevitably put our values into the representation. But there are varying degrees of egoism.... 13 In cultural representations of nonhuman animals, there are two considerations, of which literary artists have become increasingly aware: narrative plausibility and the avoidance of anthropocentrism. At this point, I do not intend to present a survey of nonhuman animal characters in Western literature, but it is useful to consider some of the strategies developed by various writers for the creation of such characters. Between Descartes' day and our own, ways to write about the problem of animal existence and animal subjectivity have evolved which are less epistemologically problematic than simply using animals as symbols or figures in allegory. The most accurate of these may simply be to present, as accurately as possible, the surface presented by the animal itsel£ Indeed, some of the most powerful fictional appeals on behalf of animals have been made by writers such as Ouida's contemporary, Wilkie Collins. His descriptions in Heart and Science (1883) of monkeys in the zoo and dogs on the vivisector's table amount to one of the firmest indictments of Victorian experimental science on record. Collins does not attempt to explain the animals' points of view. He does not need to. 14 The objective approach, however, is understandably limiting for many writers of fiction, whose work is judged only by a standard of plausibility; writers are not required to struggle against the imputation of anthropomorphism as vigorously as scientists must defend against the same charge. 15 Indeed, one of the best sellers of all time, written by another of Ouida's contemporaries, Anna Sewell, is Black Beauty (1877), the "autobiography'' of a horse. Not a critical success, the book still inspired a spate of animal autobiographies targeted by animal welfare activists at the English working classes in the late nineteenth century. (Sewell's work may actually have been suggested by Ouida, who published Puck, a three-volume novel narrated by a dog, seven years earlier.) More plausible than first-person animal narrators are third-person narratives in which animals' points of view are represented directly or indirectly, from "inside" the mind of the characters or from a little distance. Such experiments have become more acceptable in fiction for adults with the decline of Modernism. A fairly recent example of a third-person narrative representing nonhuman points of view is Richard Adams' anti-vivisection novel The Plague Dogs (1977), which narrates the quest of two escaped laboratory dogs, attempting to live free and to find a "good master." Adams' dogs (and their companion, a fox) communicate telepathically-and the "images" of their language are based on northern English dialects. 16 But it is the. content of their dialogue-desperate hunger, thirst, fear, love, and loneliness-which is both artistically risky and plausible, because their experiences might well call forth these emotions in any sentient creature.

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The White Bone (1998), by Barbara Gowdy, is even more satisfying as a representation of nonhuman characters. Gowdy's narrative style resonates with the scientific approach suggested in "A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Rook of Invisible Worlds," an essay by Jacob von Uexkiill, a teacher of the pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz. According to Uexkiill, we who still hold that our sense organs serve our perceptions, and our motor organs, our actions, see in animals as well not only the mechanical structure, but also the operator, who is built into their organs, as we are built into our bodies. We no longer regard animals as mere machines, but as subjects whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting. We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world and all that he does, his effector world. Perceptual and effector worlds together form a closed unit, the Umvelt. These different worlds, which are as manifold as the animals themselves, present to all nature lovers new lands of such wealth and beauty that a walk through them is worthwhile.' 7

Told in the third person, mostly from the perspective of a young female elephant named Mud, Gowdy's excruciating tale of love, destitution, and danger convinces through a deliberately chosen and limited vocabulary. (The novel begins with a glossary- a crocodile, for instance, is a "jaw-log," and bullets are "stings.") The elephants' "words" describe not only the world they inhabit, but also Gowdy's approximation of how they themselves might see it from within their own sensory and physiological configurations- their Umvelt. They communicate through a variety of gestures and sounds, through "mind-talking" and infrasonic rumbles over long distances. Art and science face similar problems in dealing with nonhuman characters- scientific credibility is not identical to artistic plausibility; but it is akin. This novel suggests a rare rapprochement between art and science, as if Gowdy were applying the vision of Uexkiill to an art that arouses empathy and understanding for some of the world's most threatened and complex beings, and which allows us to walk through a new land of"wealth and beauty." In fact, Gowdy observed her subjects in the Masai Mara and indicates the depth of her research in a generous informal bibliography at the end of her novel. Ouida was a very different kind of artist. At first, she was not, interested in theories or arguments. Her protean imagination was easily engaged, and she simply learned to write fiction by doing it. Her approach was performative and empathetic. As Pritchett remarks (though with little empathy for his subject), Now she was a foreign aristocrat, now the great political figure, now the humanitarian defending the virtuous poor against the wicked rich, now the cynic as wilful as her one remarkable creation, the Cigarette of Under Two Flags; now the misunderstood artist, who will not sell her soul to a public of hucksters. They were the leading roles of an internal drama. ' 8

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Ouida's first canine protagonist is Puck, in the novel of that title published in r87o. Puck is a Maltese terrier with half a dozen masters at various times in his life; he is shuttled continually from the country to the city, from England to the Continent, from the boudoir to the dog-snatcher's kennel and back again. He is a picaresque hero, a cynical observer who manages to survive the many adventures that fate has in store for him with an unbroken spirit. He is not the sort of character to excite sympathy, as Ouida tried to do in most of her stories about animals: Puck's brush with the dog-snatchers, who supply laboratories with test animals, leaves him a wiser dog and proven survivor. Neither .a victim nor a champion, he is a commentator on human frailty and, as such, atypical of the way dogs are usually perceived in Western culture.X9 Ouida's next dog character is different. In Patrasche, the canine protagonist of A Dog of Flanders, Ouida creates the type to which she would return over and over again. This story represents a pivotal point in her artistic development, as well as her commitment to the cause of animal welfare. The two main characters of this fiction, a boy named Nello and his elderly canine companion Patrasche, are hardworking, economically exploited, and entirely devoted to each other. The huge dog has been nursed back to health by Nello and his grandfather after being left for dead on the roadside by a cruel, drunken master. Patrasche's experience is described with righteous fury. Here, in part, is the account of his history: Patrasche had been born of parents who had labored hard all their days over the sharp-set stones of the various cities and the long, shadowless, weary roads of the two Flanders and of Brabant. He had been born to no other heritage than those of pain and of toil. He had been fed on curses and baptized with blows. Why not? It was a Christian country, and Patrasche was but a dog! 0

As soon as he is able, Patrasche expresses his gratitude to the humans who save him by standing between the shafts of the milk delivery cart with which they earn a living. When old Jehan resists the dog's plea-for he "was one of those who thought it a foul shame to bind dogs to labor for which Nature never formed them"- Patrasche tries "to draw the cart onward with his teeth" (19). In fact, Patrasche's labor eventually becomes an economic necessity. Meanwhile, from infancy, Nello has been teaching himself to draw, and his ambition to be like Rubens is beyond the comprehension of the neighbors, who see him only as the grandson of the deliveryman. Nello has never been able to fulfill even the simplest of his desires- to see Rubens' huge, heroic painting in the Antwerp Cathedral, The Raising ofthe Cross, in which a curly haired dog, in the lower left foreground, gazes up at the tortured Christ. At the end of the story, Nello enters a contest held in honor of the painter. But the judges cannot appreciate the rough brilliance of his drawings, and the child's final hope is gone.

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The crisis of the story comes when the modes of production change, the little delivery business falls on even harder times, and the miller accuses Nello of arson when part of the mill burns. OldJehan dies, leaving Nello and Patrasche emotionally isolated as well as financially ruined. When the landlord warns them or eviction, ''All night long, the boy and the dog sat by the fireless hearth in the darkness, drawn close together for warmth and sorrow. Their bodies were insensible to cold, but their hearts seemed frozen in them" (62). At last, Nello asks the miller's daughter to care for Patrasche and sets out with his last measure of strength to visit the cathedral that houses the painting. But Patrasche breaks out of the warm mill to follow. Boy and dog are found in the cathedral on Christmas n::lOrning, frozen, finally at peace after a lifetime of bitter struggle and misunderstanding, which has at least been sweetened in its final moments by a moonlit glimpse of the painting: the custodians have forgotten to close the curtain-the only stroke of fortune in Nella's last days. Too late, concludes the narrator, "the people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored a special grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest there side by side-forever!" (78) Writing for a child audience seems to have freed Ouida from the constraints of writing for adults, whom she could expect to sympathize more with more conventional heroes. A child audience, on the other hand, allowed Ouida openly to express the empathy that she seems to have felt with animals more than for most people of her acquaintance. Writing for children allowed her to stress identification with the characters, rather than the cynicism and detachment suggested by a character like Puck. In A Dog of Flanders, Ouida's dog character does not speak, but he models virtue for the humans around him (and reading about him), observes human behavior without quite understanding its worst features, and reflects upon what he sees. The narrator stands just outside the dog's consciousness, reporting his observations and feelings. In fact, the human characters in this story rarely speak, either, and, as the passage above illustrates, the similarity with which human and canine points of view are presented reinforces Ouida's point that human and animal subjectivity are equally real and important. For instance, Patrasche empathizes with Nella's love of art because "he {knew} that Rubens had loved dogs or he had never painted them with such exquisite fidelity"(5o). Ouida's narrative strategy for presenting the dog's point of view amounts to what M. M. Bakhtin calls a "hybrid utterance," in which ''Another's utterance {remains} clearly separated from authorial speech: the boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing through a single syntactic whole, often through a simple sentence, and sometimes even dividing up the main parts of a sentence. {The result is a} varied play within the boundaries of speech types, languages and belief systems."21 In novels that are satirical, polemical, or ironic, the hybrid utterance contributes not so much to characterization as to "highly particularized character zones," which are compounded, not only of

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speech but of silence and gesture, "those invasions into authorial speech of others' expressive indicators," such as "ellipsis, questions, exclamations," and- the Postmodern critic trying to account for animal consciousness might well add-barks, whimpers, growls, and tail wags. 22 , Within Ouida's oeuvre, A Dog of Flanders served as a springboard from which she was able to tackle in fiction for adults, two of the burning issues of her day: first, the fear of rabies that swept Europe near the end of the nineteenth century, and, second, the unregulated use oflaboratory animals in medical research facilities throughout Europe, which gave rise to dogsnatching rings. These organized cri1llinal groups not only supplied medical laboratories with mostly stolen dogs, many of them also took advantage of the market for dogs to create a side business of dog-napping for ransom.2 3 In addition, local governments often got into the act, reacting to the rabies scare by levying new dog taxes, muzzle laws, and fines for loose animals, which had to be paid in order to keep pets or working dogs from being sold to suppliers for medical laboratories. Dogs with large chests-carters, hunters or shepherds, and guard dogs-were (and still are) the animals of choice for vivisection and, at the same time, the more likely to be working dogs whose economic contributions to a family would be missed. 2 4 The issues of rabies and vivisection were intertwined in another way, as well. Medical scientists vivisected even more dogs in the search for the cause and cure of rabies, which, according to Harriet Ritvo, "provoked a public response unparalleled in scale and intensity."2 5 Even the scientists, charged by a worried public to study the disease, were unable to quell bizarre beliefs about rabies- that it could erupt spontaneously in a man or beast under physical stress (actual!)~ a myth favored by animal protectionists in the nineteenth century); that the bite of even a healthy dog could infect a human with "hydrophobia"; or that various human mental ailments were simply manifestations of the madness that, in dogs, led to random biting and foaming at the mouth. 26 Many families whose emotional lives or materialliyelihoods were dependent on their dogs could ill afford to pay the fines and taxes imposed when a dog was accused of rabies, and suffered significantly when the dogs disappeared. Like A Dog ofFlanders, the adult fiction Ouida wrote about these issues demands sympathy and identification with both human and canine characters, but the misery in these stories results from active violence and exploitation rather than the passive neglect suffered by Nello and Patrasche. 2 7 The effect of Ouida's dog stories for adults is in many ways akin to the searing quality of naturalist writers on the Continent and in the United States-Zola, Pardo Bazan, Crane-all of whom attempted to describe the nonverbal aspects of human consciousness and the material aspects of daily life. But if the naturalist novelists turned a scientist's eye upon the beast in the human, Ouida gazes at the interface between human and nonhuman beings, which is populated by loyal, intelligent dogs and vulnerable or marginal human beings: the poor, the racially ambiguous, the orphan, the old, the addict. 28

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Typically, both human and canine characters in Ouida's fiction conform to the type Bakhtin identifies as uncomprehending or "stupid" characters, that is, characters who cannot understand the power structures that control their lives: Stupidity (incomprehension) in the novel [of pathos} is always polemical: it interacts dialogically with an intelligence (a lofty pseudo intelligence) with which it polemicizes and whose mask it tears away. Stupidity ... is a dialogic category, one that follows from the specific dialogism of novelistic discourse. For this reason stupidity (incomprehension) in the novel is always implicated in language, in the word: at its heart always lies a polemical failure to understand someone else's discourse, someone else's pathos-charged lie that has appropriated the world and aspires to conceptualize it, a polemical failure to understand generally accepted, canonized, inveterately false languages with their lofty labels for things and events: poetic language, scholarly and pedantic language, religious, political, judicial language and so forth!9

(To this list, Ouidaherselfwould certainly have added "scientific," "medical," and "economic.") Ouida's narrative style, as well as her characterization, also participates in the subversive potential of the novel, problematizing the boundary between the speaking human and the nonspeaking animal, while avoiding "speech'' that would parody or falsify the subjectivity of her nonhuman characters. Thoughts and feelings in Ouida's stories emanate from what Bakhtin calls "character zones."3° Ouida's human protagonists in the adult dog stories are rarely quoted, and the canine characters never are; rather, the third person narrator reports, from a point of view quite close to but not identical with the characters', what they may be feeling, actions from which their feelings might be inferred, various kinds of nonverbal communication, or the thoughts that the characters might frame if they expressed themselves in conventional human speech. The ontological equivalence of human and canine is thus constantly reinforced in Ouida's fiction through the use of this free indirect style; and the risk of implausible characterizations and anthropocentrism is avoided. Thus, Ouida's narrative technique establishes the ontological equivalence between human and nonhuman animals, intensifying her critique of human cruelty. In her fiction, vivisection- the use of living biological organisms in scientific experiments-signifies cruel and illegitimate power, as in a passage in the early novel Folie Farine (1871). This is the story of a half-gypsy orphan girl, who is sexually abused by her grandfather before becoming the model for the young Norwegian painter Arslan, a starving artist whom she secretly supports through prostitution. For Arslan, Folie Farine is thoroughly objectified, and he gazes at her with the "vivisector's eye."3 1 (The vivisection metaphor is more central in the much later novel Toxin {!895}, in which one character is an evil surgeon.) The application with which I am concerned here, however, is more literal. In Ouida's dog stories for adults,

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vivisection is a continual threat to the canine characters and to the humans who depend on them for love or livelihood. Vivisection is not only the roost visible expression of illegitimate scientific power, but of government's capricious interference in the lives of the poor, and the power of money to move human beings to monstrous greed. With a total lack of logic (since rabies is spread through the body fluids of a living animal- and thus would likely infect a medical experimenter) many of Ouida's stories unfold according to the same formula: the dog is accused of "madness," and threatened with vivisection. Yet it is perfectly plausible that in the world she knew, petty officials, corrupt dogcatchers, and local laws conspired to extract taxes and fines out of the poor with just this accusation and threat. Two of Ouida's dog stories show all these processes at work with particular clarity: "The Marriage Plate," from the collection entitled Pipistre!lo, and Other Stories (188o) and "The Stable-boy," from Santa Barbara, and Other Tales (1891). "The Marriage Plate" is the only dog story Ouida wrote for adults that has a happy ending (a somewhat mechanical happy ending, added perhaps to give the volume in which it appeared a wider appeal). Otherwise, it conforms to the pattern of "uncomprehending" protagonists threatened by the specter of authority-and therefore destitution and death. In this story, set in one of the small Tuscan towns known for its ceramics, the orphaned boy Faello ekes out a subsistence living for himself and his orphaned sisters by means of a delivery business, aided by Pastore, the family dog, who has always protected the family business by guarding the delivery cart while Faello talks to his customers. (Faello's work as a delivery man, like that of Nello, is not "productive" in a way that would link him socially to the neighbors, thereby reinforcing a web of connection. He merely comes and goes and does not "make" anything.) Pastore is one of the beautiful white sheep dogs of the country; dogs that would adorn a palace, and might lie on a queen's robes; dogs that are the very beau ideal of their race, brave, gentle, generous, and full of grace, very perfect knights of dogs ... ,32

Pastore is also a beloved family member, emotionally closer to Faello than his sisters: "I love him better than myself," says the boy. "He hungers with me, and plays with me, and we are brothers" (141). Both the dog's consciousness and the boy's-what Bakhtin calls their "expressive structures"33- are described from a perspective very near to theirs, in short simple sentences that convey feelings and impressions, rather than in the more complicated discourses of power. This passage from the opening pages is typical: Pastore loved them all .... They were good to him. He very often indeed had not enough to eat, but then they themselves had not either. They were

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very gentle with him, and he lived in the house like one of them; seeing his brethren beaten, kicked, starved, chained, and left out in the bitter snowstorms of the winter nights, Pastore, in his dog's way, thought his home was heaven. And his young master loved him with a great love. Whenever he had a holiday in any of the nine years since Pastore first had come to him ... Pastore had been his playmate and comrade in preference to any other .... Now, Faello had no heart for any holiday; he felt the burden of life on his young shoulders .... (125)

The first crisis in the story is the death of the grandmother, who provided love and stability. The little family falls upon even harder.times when the mules die. But the final turn in the inevitable cycle of destitution is the snatching of Pastore and the subsequent theft of the rented mule, the cart, and the shipment of jars for which Faello is responsible. In the line of duty, Pastore has fallen victim to a new law that forbids dogs to be loose in the streets. Unattended dogs are lassoed and taken to the slaughterhouse to await the claims of their masters, who must pay heavy fines. Since the waiting is longer and the fines heavier if the dog is suspected of rabies, corrupt officials find a windfall in the new laws, which enables them to collect more fines-or bribes. If the dog resists capture, he is inevitably accused of being rabid. The spirited Pastore is thus "suspected" of madness, the fines are increased, and Faello has little hope of rescuing him. When the boy objects, he too is fined for "contravention." The danger to Pastore is very great because, as the town shoeblack knows, They want to kill him- that is it-you see he is a fine dog. A surgeon has had his eye on him some time; the surgeon means to get him and cut him up alive, or burn him to death, after gouging out his eyes. They think to find God in that way, those gentlemen." (144)

If Pastore dies, the family will be financially destitute, and the emotional center of their lives will be destroyed as well. The fate of the boy is bound up with the fate of the dog-a mutuality that is reinforced by the narrative style. Throughout the story, the perspectives of both boy and dog are "uncomprehending," and this incomprehension functions as a narrative critique against "the human injustice that make[s} a hell of earth for earth's dumb creatures" (r4r). When Pastore is stolen, this inability to understand injustice is, of course, intensified: Faello "looked like a mad dog himself" (r4o); in the wake of the crisis, he is described as "blind and dizzy" (138), "dumb and stupid" (142), "dull" (150), without "consciousness of what he did or how he went" (r5r). The beautiful antique "marriage plate" of the title is the family heirloom, which is supposed to bring good fortune, and which Faello's grandmother, on her deathbed, has enjoined him to protect. Desperate, the boy considers selling the plate for the pittance offered by the antiquities dealer, in order to rescue his dog: "He prayed in dumb articulate fashion, as Pastore himself might have prayed, to have light shed on

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him to see his path aright" (149). Finally, after the sale of the plate, the rescue of the dog, and the recovery of dog and boy after a lengthy illness, an honorable dealer acquires the heirloom and returns to the little family a fair price for their lost treasure. "The Stable-boy'' is even more appalling, in part because the human protagonist's "stupidity'' is the apparent result of both inherited mental deficiencies and emotional deprivation. Gino's only friend is Stellina, a small black Lupetto dog who earns her keep in the stable (a ruined church) by killing rats. The dog's point of view is identical to the boy's: To Stellina as to her master it seemed a kingdom. They knew of nothing beyond, and what they had never known they did not miss, although instinct sometimes moved restlessly in both the boy and the dog in a vague, dim want of more space, more movement, more freedom.34

They converse with one another sitting side by side in the straw caressing one another, but always keeping a weather eye open for any rat or mouse which might stir beneath the litter. (218)

Since neither Stellina nor Gino give in to the yearning for space and freedom, the dog's capture from the doorway of the old church is particularly ironic. The dog-snatchers' methods are here described in Ouida's most extreme and visceral style: In the yellow light of evening {Gino} saw Stellina's little body swinging in the air; a noose of cord was round her throat, and by it she was being drawn into space, the noose tightening as she was raised higher and higher, and the pressure on her gullet forcing her eyes from her head and her tongue from her jaws. She had given one scream as she was seized, then the rope had choked her into silence. (222)

The guards' reaction to the boy is only marginally less brutal: one man, rougher than the rest, struck him in the chest and knocked him backward against the stable door .... The boy was thrown down so that his head struck the stone gatepost; the cart with its myrmidons rolled on its way. (223)

From the beginning, it is apparent that there are only two possible outcomes: "they kill the dogs or give them to the doctors" (238). Gino's repeated appeals to the sympathy of the officials and his masters are unsuccessful, and he is threatened with contravention. Stellina's grief for her puppies "dr[ives} her wild" (243), and the vets declare her mad and have her killed, nailing up her skin for sale as glove leather. Pushed beyond the limits of his endurance, the stable-boy hangs himself from the rafters of

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the old church, with the puppies dangling from his neck: the scene replicates the vivid image of Stellina's capture. Suicide- or at least willed death- also figures in several other stories in which human and canine characters are presented as ontological equals. In "Ruffo and Ruff" in La Strega, and Other Stories (1899), an Italian child slave with a Punch and Judy show walks into the Solent Water with the body of his fellow sufferer, a performing terrier who is killed outright by a brutal policeman because he is not muzzled. In "Toto," a story in the same volume, an elderly shopkeeper owns a heroic Newfoundland dog (Toto has saved four people from drowning in the Seine), who is accused of rabies and shot at point blank range; the old man, Charlot, collapses after attacking the brigadier in Toto's defense, and his wife fades away in less than a year. The murderous official leaves the scene hoping that "the Pasteur Institute would send him some recompense" for the risk he has taken in slaying a rabid animal.35 In "A Hero's Reward," in Pippistrello, and Other Stories, a beloved mastiff-bulldog mix named Drummer is accused of madness and captured, according to one of the guards at the slaughterhouse, "so that we can kill him, or send him to the doctors to be cut up." 36 The old soldier who owns Drummer (retired from the battles of the Italian Risorgimento) is unable to raise the money in time, and, when he finds Drummer dead at the slaughterhouse, "drop{s} down dead, by the side of his dead dog" (269). The old dog, .like his master, has "fought the Austrians ... Tooth and claw he fought them" (263), but in death, both bodies are desecrated: The poison-swelled body of Drummer was thrown out to swell a manure heap; the body of his master was cast into the common death-ditch of the poor of the city. The bed-ridden wife died very soon; the little children, starving and miserable, were taken in by people who had not bread enough to feed themselves. No one noticed, no one lamented .... (269)

Part of the pathos of this story is due to the ingratitude of the town toward the heroes who have liberated them from foreign domination. Ouida's dog stories overlap in some respects with what Bakhtin calls the novel of "Baroque pathos," a genre in which the narrative discourse is almost always a surrogate for some other genre that is no longer available to a given time or a given social force- such pathos is the discourse of a preacher who has lost his pulpit, a dreaded judge who no longer has any judicial or punitive powers, the prophet without a mission, the politician without political power, the believer without a church and so fortheverywhere, the discourse of pathos is connected with orientations and positions that are unavailable to the author as authentic expression for the seriousness and determination of his purpose, but which he must, all the same, conditionally reproduce by using his own discourse.37

The Baroque novel of pathos is inherently a novelistic form organized around the trope of the trial, as are all of Ouida's dog stories (and much of

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her work in general), and thus related to certain novels by Dostoevsky, the English sensation novels (the usual category into which all her work is placed), the prose works of the German Romantics, and Balzac's novels of trial.3 8 The language of these works "continually senses the resistance offered by alien discourses, alien points of view."39 The narrative style of Ouida's dog stories manifests this quality of knowing that she writes against the grain, against the hegemonic discourses of politics, economics, science, and that her works privilege feeling over the artificial strictures of deductive logic. And so the passages I have already quoted are representative of the shrill, didactic tone that most readers schooled in Modernist ways of reading find inappropriate in genres of fiction. But in Ouida's case, it is inaccurate to say that the appropriate genre was "no longer available"; instead, it was not yet available. Animal stories, told from the animal's point of view, might be written for children and the working classes; they had not yet been written for educated adults. And an author of stories for children, the customary audience for such tales, had to accept limitations on the representation of violence and the expression of social critique. The sentiment in Ouida's dog stories also consigned them to audiences other than those who could respond actively by changing political or economic structures. Close reading, in fact, sometimes reveals her despair of effecting change through these works of fiction. For example, she ends the mostly happy tale of "Moufflou" (Bimbi: Stories for Children) with this poignant note to the privileged children reading her words: "Oh, when you grow to manhood and have power, use it with tenderness!"4° In writing most of her dog stories for adults, then, Ouida consciously defied the trend: most of the Victorian classics of animal literature were written for children or the working classes, or quickly consigned to those groups. Black Beauty evidently had a powerful impact on working class attitudes for a few decades after its publication: the blood sports favored by the poor, and protected by a Parliament loathe to deprive them of "bread and circus games," eventually lost popularity as tastes and morals changed. This effect was limited, however, and as fiction with animal characters settled into a comfortable genre for children (including Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, and Winnie the Pooh), didactic stories that decried human cruelty to nonhuman animals lost their effectiveness in the fight for animal welfare- a limited effectiveness in any case, considering its primary audiences. As Coral Lansbury remarks, "Ostensibly, Black Beauty was written to awaken sympathy for the plight of horses forced to endure the bearing rein, but it could also be argued that horses that spoke to each other and recorded their autobiographies made an actual horse seem a very inferior and deficient kind of animal. It then became possible to make the fictional animal the privileged species and the real animal an anomalous species without rights or status."41 Ouida wrote her dog stories from a defensive position, with unconcealed anger against those in power, and apparently little trust in the good intentions of her adult audience. Yet her . narrative strategy, an attempt to represent animal consciousness without

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violating the boundaries of what is knowable, is obviously an appeal to sophisticated adult readers with the political and economic power to effect change. These stories have fared no better in literary history than Ouida's other works. In retrospect, however, it is evident that her dog stories participate in a genre that has gained focus and definition during the last decades of the twentieth century. Since Jeremy Bentham argued in the eighteenth century that animal welfare had to be considered in light of animal suffering, the most powerful tradition in pro-animal literature has focused on suffering rather than joy, wrongs rather than rights-and Ouida's fiction is no exception to this trend. Commenting on an episode in Soun(!er, an American novel (and film) about the parallels between racism and animal cruelty, Marjorie Garber comments that Racism here takes its language of abuse from both infantilization and animalization. Before the boy's eyes his father is stripped of humanity and manhood. The fact that the dog tries to join his master in the sheriff's cart, and is shot and maimed in just the same way that the father will later be maimed on the chain gang, merely completes this drama of identification and quiet heroism. Like many dog stories written "for children," this one is almost unbearable, at least to adultsY

In the final analysis, the genre of dog stories as Ouida practiced it is almost unbearable, for the adult reading alone or looking over the child's shoulder. Adults have preferred happy endings for animals-and we prefer animals whose lives more closely resemble the ones we know, or want to know. The genre of the dog story, which Ouida first offered to children and then to adults, was thus scarcely able to bear the weight of Ouida's message. But it was the only instrument she had as long as her energies were devoted exclusively to writing fiction. In the x89os, however, Ouida turned more openly to polemics to express her objections to modern life. In an essay entitled "The Ugliness of Modern Life," she decries the domination of that rude, cold, and cruel temper which takes pleasure in innovation and obliteration, and sneers, with contemptuous conceit, at those who are pained by ... acts of desecration. It is the same sneer, the same leering and self-satisfied snigger, with which it views the expression and evidence of pity for, and solidarity with, what {society} is pleased to call the lower animals.43

During the last three years of the nineteenth century, twenty-eight of her reviews and essays appeared in English periodicals- the Nineteenth Century, the Fortnightly Review, and the Review of Reviews-as well as the North American Review and NuovaAnto!ogia, and many of these pieces were later republished in book form.44 In some ways, Ouida's critical prose had more impact than the fiction that had made her fortune. Eileen Bigland remarks "Her criticisms were pungent and her style sometimes breathless,

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but thinking people of the day were greatly impressed by her quality of mind."45 Ouida was no longer a preacher without a pulpit. Two of Ouida's essays, written for The Nineteenth Century and republished in Critical Studies (1900), link the environmental degradation brought about by unrestrained capitalism with cruelty to humans and nonhuman animals. "The Ugliness of Modern Life" describes the horrifying impact of industrialization and mass production on the European landscape, both natural and architectural. Here, Ouida argues more explicitly a theme touched on over and over in her fiction- that capitalism is responsible for the alienation of workers and masters from other human beings, from their inanimate surroundings, and from other animals whose lives do not contribute in a direct way to profit and commerce. The factory system favored by captains of industry results, not simply in poverty for the masses, but in the spiritual impoverishment of all classes, especially the poor, who have no cultural or psychological resources except those offered by the natural world and the architectural riches of Europe, which are no less threatened .than nature. (Neither does Ouida find hope in the prospect of socialism, which she predicts will wash away beauty by imposing sameness.) The essay ends with afin de siec!e weariness and fear: wild species will soon be extinct, the horse will be obsolete, and "The dog will have no place in a world which has no gratitude for such simple sincerity and faithful friendliness as he offers."46 In "The Quality of Mercy," Ouida suggests that the loss of nature results in a peculiar kind of ennui, which, at a societal level, results in the conscious abuse of workers by masters, casual and institutionalized cruelty to animals, imperialism, war (especially the war in South Africa), ever more destructive levels of industrialism and commerce, and species extinction in service of the whims of fashion. (Plumage legislation, which protected several species of birds killed for their feathers, had not yet been proposed in Parliament.) As in "The Ugliness of Modern Life," Ouida argues here that human behavior toward all forms of life would improve if society learned to cultivate disinterested sensitivity to beauty, but instead, scientific and religious institutions seem to be in collaboration with the forces of industry. "In a few generations more," she concludes, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world's youth. For in the future the human race will have no tenderness for those of its own kind who are feeble or aged, and will consign to lethal chambers all those who weary it, obstruct it, or importune it: since the quality of mercy will day by day be more derided, and less regarded, as one of the moral attributes of mankind.47

In pointing out the links among industrialization, environmental degradation, class warfare, and animal abuse, Ouida both reformulates the thinking of the Victorian sages, especially Ruskin, and looks forward to some of the most progressive work of the late twentieth century.

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In The New Priesthood, a lengthy pamphlet published in 1893, Ouida offers a more pointed critique of institutionalized cruelty to animals, and the connection between cruelty to animals and the mistreatment of human beings. At first glance, her argument seems to be based on the Kantian dictum that cruelty to animals vitiates the conscience and leads to disrespect for human life (or the religious permutation of this argument, which suggests that God's punishments to individuals or societies, for the cruelty to humans or animals, is fitted to the crime).48 But, as we have already seen in Ouida's fiction, the ethical hierarchy implied in this logic is flattened: humans do suffer when animals are mistreated, but the reverse is also true, and human misery is, in her moral universe, no worse than animal suffering. In her polemical writing, when she contemplates the escalation of misery as it redounds from animals to humans, and back again, the result is an apocalyptic vision of a horrifYing future of euthanasia and the extermination of animals, who can be replaced with machines. The evidence Ouida marshals to her argument in The New Priesthood is by now familiar. Like pro-animal activists in our own time, Ouida assaults her readers with graphic images of gratuitously suffering (unanesthetized) animals in medical laboratories throughout Western Europe: she describes dogs "made 'aphone' " (with the scientific euphemism for "mute" in quotation marks), or "slowly roasted to death." One is "blinded by needles run through the pupils of his eyes," another "drawn up on pulleys to a great height to be let fall onto iron bars to produce traumatisms," another "rendered the subject of toxological experiments, with inject{ions} of snake venom or. mineral poisons," another "with bared spine and lacerated nerves called back from the mercy of death by the unutterable spasms of electric shocks."49 Most of these animals, she reports, are used and reused, until they are simply used up. (Although this practice persisted on the Continent after it had been outlawed in Britain by the Cruelty to Animals Acts of 1876, Ouida does not absolve her English readers from guilt, since experimental practices in England are in most respects comparable to those in the rest of Europe. In fact, practices forbidden in England by the 1876 legislation were later permitted.) When a researcher working in Lausanne, Jules Charles Scholl, wrote a rebuttal to The New Priesthood, Ouida republished the pamphlet with a rejoinder, containing even more descriptions of tortured laboratory animals: dogs covered with gypsum or varnish, deprived of water, placed in chambers with air pressure eight times the normal level, or subjected to a "rinsing" of the brain; monkeys whipped, burned, or subjected to procedures in which portions of their brains were removed (53). One experiment strikes her as particularly capricious. Eight healthy rabbits are placed in eight contiguous boxes, only the first of which is open to the outside air; each of the other seven rabbits gets air from a hole into the next box; the rabbit in the last box dies first, and so forth. Patently capricious experiments are especially alarming to Ouida, who insists throughout the pamphlet that medical experiments on human

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beings, though outrageous in ethical terms, would more clearly serve the ostensible purposes of medical science: The horse, the dog, the lamb, the mule, are all useful in their several ways, and have done no ill; but there are tens of thousands of human beings in every country of Europe, who are of no earthly use to any living thing, who do but cumber the earth they pollute, who are at their best mere lumps of sodden flesh, and are at their worst dangerous and poisonous elements of society. Why do not the professors of vivisection claim these? It is what they will do, what they must do, by the sheer logical sequence of their own demands, if their sacrifice of animal life continue to be condoned and supplied .... (63)

"The puny infant, the scrofulous cripple, the sickly woman, the useless drunkard, the homeless worn-out prostitute, the criminal wasting his strength in the hulks" -all are at risk if animal experimentation is allowed to continue uncontrolled (66). Indeed, although records of such experiments are incomplete, Ouida notes that some researchers are already using human subjects. She writes that Robert Koch, for instance, admitted after the fact that he had experimented on poor peasants in his work on consumption (27). She offers the story of a child in Vienna whose pleas for relief were ignored so that the students of the surgeon in charge of the case could "have someone to practice on'' (46); and of two men suffering from cholera in a Belgian hospital, whose stomachs and bowels were removed, "syringed with a solution of sublimate, then replaced" (46). In another experiment she brings as evidence, several otherwise healthy epileptics died after experimental spinal surgery. And in Paris, "a little idiot girl" was "strapped down on the torture table" and subjected to the same experiments as those performed on laboratory dogs, including a skull biopsy to determine whether cranium thickness influences intelligence (47). Ouida's accusations are not well documented, and some of her assertions are recycled from other contemporary anti-vivisection literature, but they are powerful and even plausible: the annals of medical research in the twentieth century, which have been verified, are no less horrifYing. Through video records and legal battles, animal rights activists in the twentieth century have documented similar, if not almost identical experiments on animals; as for lethal experiments on human subjects, the study of African American men only a few decades ago in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is merely the best-known example in U.S. medical history. Two assumptions underlie Ouida's argument. First, animals have a right to fair treatment. Second, even the general public, if they do not protest, participate in the crimes of their "new priesthood." In the machine age, she argues, doctors and scientists have taken over the powers of the Church- and instead of the Inquisition, when priests at least thought they were saving souls, there is the certainty of animal torture and the prospect of the torture of human beings. Ouida's argument is this: experiments of this kind, whether on human or nonhuman beings, create a vicious circle by immunizing practitioners

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against sympathy and mercy. Since experiments upon living animals are part of medical education- and even the less specialized education of schoolchildren -cruelty is actively taught to younger generations. Cruelty, in the shape of medical experimentation, is the driving force of an industry that supplies animals and equipment to schools and laboratories; thus, the working-class people who serve within this industry, or who serve as lab assistants, are also being educated in the exercise of cruelty. As more women gain the right to attend medical school, the infection of cruelty spreads, as well, into middle-class homes-for Ouida, a horrifying prospect: ''As the inquisitor had his female witch-searcher who drove the pins into the breast of his accused sorceresses, so the male physiologist has his female pupil, who may be trusted to outrun his teachings ...." (r?-I8).5° The secrecy and unquestioning loyalty with which medical experimenters support each othersr encourage gratuitous experiments, which are, in fact, bad science; thus, the future of experimental science itself is compromised, along with the possibility of a sane and just society in the future. Therefore, it is both ethical and in the enlightened best interest of the public to break through the barriers of secrecy and, through their representatives, to regulate the activities of medical researchers. The similarities between The New Priesthood and Ouida's fiction are important. What is implicit in the stories- the complicity of ordinary people in the machinations of various power structures, the indifference of the well fed to the sufferings of the poor, the thin edge of subsistence experienced by most animals and many people, the emotional richness of the lives of those same people and of animals-is explicit in The New Priesthood. In the polemic, the impulse of a storyteller, whose work is to entertain, is not frustrated by the message of a preacher without a pulpit. Instead, in The New Priesthood, the preacher speaks with unmitigated eloquence to a clearly defined audience. The fiction and the critical prose are part of a continuous, almost lifelong project: late in life, Ouida attacked the monologic discourse of those who would silence the cries of the vulnerable, as vigorously as she had already attempted to express the experience of the unheard masses, both human and animal, in her stories. Ouida died in Italy in 1908, impoverished, demoralized, and alone except for her loyal housekeeper Gori and her dogs. She was continually vexed during the last years of her life by the need to care for them, protect them from the new muzzle laws, and find lodgings she could afford in which the dogs might also stay. After her death, her friend Lady Paget sold the paintings Ouida had made for the benefit of the Anti-vivisection Society, but there was little else left of the riches Ouida had made, spent, and given away during her lifetime. Lady Paget found homes for the dogs, and Ouida was buried where she spent her last days, outside Florence in Bagni de Lucca. Her effigy, by Guiseppe Norfini, adorns the tomb, and a small marble dog rests at her feet. Back in England, other friends contributed to a memorial fountain in Bury St. Edmunds. The inscription

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reads, in part, "Here may God's creatures whom she loved assuage her tender soul as they drink. "52 The movement for animal welfare and animal rights, to which Ouida devoted so much energy late in her career, continued to be viable until the First World War, which riveted popular attention instead onto human tragedy. Still, due in large part to the passion with which these issues were argued by the Victorians, and to their long-lived organizations such as the SPCA and the Anti-vivisection Society, activism in the cause of animal rights and welfare never ceased entirely. The linkages Ouida made among cruelty to nonhuman animals, inhumanity to human beings, and the degradation of the environment are newly relevant. As we attempt to understand how best to consider and configure the interior lives of our fellow animals, Ouida's carefully constructed, almost unbearable narratives of trial and injustice demand, perhaps for the first time, careful study.

Notes r. Ouida, "The Quality of Mercy," Critical Studies (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), 246.

There are a number of theories about Louis Rame's activities- including the possibility that he was a bigamist. In The Fine and the Wicked: The Life and Times of Ouida (New York: Coward-McCann, 1958), Monica Stirling argues the likelihood that Ouida's father was exactly what his family believed him to be-a spy-that is, until Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat in 1852 made him the dictator of France (2). Although the coup was actively supported in many quarters (including Queen Victoria's), political liberals tended to decry this illegal move away from democracy. 3- V. S. Pritchett, "The Octopus," in Books in General (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953, 223-228). {Rprt Twentieth-Century Literature,Vol. 43; 2.

373-375}, 373· 4- Under Two Flags is the only one of Ouida's novels now in print (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Most of her printed works are rare and, if

available at all, housed in special collections. Consequently, it has sometimes been necessary to rely on quotations from her writing that are located in secondary works. 5· Pritchett, "The Octopus," in Books in General, 374· 6. Quoted in Stirling, The Fine and the Wicked, 175. 7· George Eliot's clearest nonfiction theoretical statement is a review article (1856) entitled "The Natural History of German Life," Thomas Pinney ed., in Essays of George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 266-299.

8. Accounts of the rabies scare in Victorian England can be found in James Turner's Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) and Harriet Ritvo's The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). In "Little Lamb Get Lost," Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings (New York: Penguin, 1998), Angela Carter comments on the symbolic importance of

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rabies even into the twentieth century: "Rabies is both the beastliest of maladies and the malady of beasts. It is the ne plus ultra of the sickness unto death; not only, if untreated, always fatal, but also it transforms you into the object of the darkest fears of beastliness-a nightmare comes true. And it is transmitted to you by the furry innocent in your home and heart" (Jo8). 9· Despite the growing awareness of nonhuman interiority that comes as a result of ethological study, the argument over the relevance of animal consciousness that began in the nineteenth century continues almost unabated today. Deborah Rudacille's The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The ~r between Animal Research and Animal Protection (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, zooo) is an even-handed account. Ethical Issues in Scientific Research, ed. E. Erwin, S. Gendin, and L. Kleiman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), an anthology of essays on the subject, demonstrates the currency of this debate in pieces as diverse as Carl Cohen's "The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research" (a ncoCartesian argument that animals have no rights, and therefore that their suffering is subordinate to the needs of humans) and "On the Ethics of the Use of Animals in Science" by Dale Jamieson and Tom Regan (an application of utilitarianism to the development of a contemporary ethic regulating animal experimentation). ro. Marc D. Hauser, Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (New York: Henry Holt, 2ooo), 255-56. n. For an account of the ascendency of experimental over observational science, see Paul Elliott's "Vivisection and the Emergence of Experimental Physiology in Nineteenth-century France," Nicolaas A. Rupke, ed., Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: Croom Helm, 1987) particularly the section on "The role of Claude Bernard" (68-73). The period of classical ethology, that is, during most of the twentieth century, can be defined by attitudes toward the language of science: for example, the classical ethologist chooses more "objective" language and avoids the charge of anthropomorphism by using such terms as "internal response mechanism," or "IRM," in place of "motivation," or "behavior" in place of "action." In Images of Animal Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), Eileen Crist deconstructs this scientific language in detail. 12. As Marion Scholtmeijer succinctly expressed the problem, "We proceed from the idea that animals have not only been mistreated, they also have been misrepresented. Too many people are still stuck with animals as symbols of things other than what they are to themselves. That has become passe in modern times. Anyone who's still writing that way is writing bad literature" (Jennifer Schuessler, "Moo!" Lingua Franca, March 1999). The most thorough exploration of cultural (mis)representations of animals is perhaps The Anima/izing Imagination by Alan Bleakley (New York: St. Martin's, 2000). 13. Michael]. McDowell, "The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Awareness." Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., in The Ecocritical Reader (Athens: University Georgia Press, 1996), 372. 14. The work of contemporary South African writer]. M. Coetzee, in Disgrace (1999) and The Lives ofAnimals (2ooo) effectively deploys Collins' strategies,

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18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 2J.

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25. 26. 27.

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suggesting similar nonhierarchical parallels between indifference to animal suffering and the infliction of pain on human beings. Some contemporary scientists have, in fact, seen the behaviorist taboo against anthropocentrism as a distraction. As Griffin points out, "It is actually no more anthropomorphic ... to postulate mental experiences in other species than to compare its bone structures, nervous system, or antibodies with our own .... The prevailing view implies that only our species can have any sort of conscious awareness, or that, should animals have mental experiences, they must be identical with ours, since there can be no other kind. It is this conceit which is truly anthropomorphic" (Donald Griffin, The f(gestion ofAnima/Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience, 2nd ed. {New York: Rockefeller University. Press, 1981], 69). For Bakhtin, literary languages are always "images" of the languages that actually constitute human society and identity (Discourse in the Novel in The Dialogic Imagination. Michael Holquist ed., Holquist and Caryl Emerson, trans. {Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1981]). The term seems especially appropriate in reference to the "languages" that might be spoken telepathically by nonhuman animals. Quoted in Bernard E. Rollin, The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 227. Uexkiill's work on the representation of animal minds in science also figures in McDowell's work, which has, in fact, suggested to me applications of Bakhtin's theory beyond those explicated by McDowell himsel£ Pritchett, "The Octopus," in Books in General, 375· Ouida returned to this character type again in Ruffino (1890), the title character of which is a cynical, pampered Pomeranian companion to an Italian prince. The objects of sympathy in this novel are not the dog, but an exiled Eastern European countess and her dying brother. Ouida, A Dog of Flanders (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1909), 11-12. Henceforth, references to this text will be cited by page numbers enclosed in parentheses. Bakhtin, Discourse, 308, Bakhtin's italics. Ibid., 308, 320. For a particular account of how the dog banditti operated, see biographies of the Brownings, especially Margaret Forster's Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Life and Loves ofa Poet (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 117-119, 136-137· For an account of the current trade in laboratory animals, see "From the Leash to the Laboratory'' written by Judith Reitman for The Atlantic Monthly (July 2ooo). According to Reitman, dogs less suitable for labs than the large-chested retrievers, shepherds, and hounds are called "junk dogs," and many of these are consigned to dog fighters as bait (18, 21). Rivto, The Animal Estate, 167. Rivto, The Animal Estate, 167-173. The line between Ouida's adult fiction and her stories for children is blurry in some cases. The most reliable test is context: I assume that all the stories published in collections containing pieces predominantly directed at the child reader (A Dog of Flanders and Bimbi: Stories for Children) are, in fact, for children; otherwise, I assume that the stories are for adults.

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Children's literature, of course, is always directed at the adult looking over the child's shoulder-and this double audience accounts, I think, for the social commentary such as Ouida's ironic comment in A Dog of Flanders that Belgium was "a Christian country, and Patrasche was only a dog." 28. Ouida wrote about dogs sporadically between 1870 and her death in1908. Most of the human characters in these stories are poor. The child owner of"Moufflou" (Bimbi: Stories for Children, {Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1910}) is a crippled boy from an impoverished family. The children in "The Marriage Plate" (Pipistrello, and Other Stories, {London: Chatto and Windus 188o}) are poverty-stricken orphans; the human protagonist of"A Hero's Reward" (also in Pipistrello) is elderly. The human protagonist of "The Stable-boy" (Santa Barbara, and Other Tales, {London: Chat to and Wind us, 1908}) is an orphan who appears to be slightly retarded, and the main human character of "Poussette" (in the same collection) is an addicted gambler, a pitiable wreck of a man whose devotion to the casino is mirrored in his dog's devotion to him. The human companions of the dog "Toto" (La Strega, and Other Stories, {Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969}, rprt. 1899) are elderly shopkeepers who have lost all their children. Ruffo, the boy in "Ruffo and Ruff" (also in La Strega) appears to be a racially mixed orphan and child slave. 29. Bakhtin, Discourse, 403. 30. Ibid., 316. 31. Quoted in Pamela Gilbert, "Ouida and the Other New Woman," Nicola Diane Thompson, ed., in Victorian :w&men Wtiters and the :w&man ~estion, 181. 32. Ouida, "The Marriage Plate," n9. Subsequent references to this story will appear in parentheses. 33· Bakhtin, Discourse, 319. 34- Ouida, "The Stable Boy," 217-218. Subsequent references to this text will appear in parentheses. 35· Ouida, "Toto," 227. Subsequent references to this text will appear in parentheses. 36. Ouida, "A Hero's Award," 261. Subsequent references to this text will appear in parentheses. 37· Bakhtin, Discourse, 319. 38. Ibid., 392. 39· Ibid., 39440· Ouida, "Moufflou," 41. Subsequent references to this text will appear in parentheses. 41. Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: :w&men, :w&rkers, and Vivisection in Victorian England (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1985), 182. 42. Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 232-23} 43· Ouida, "The Ugliness of Modern Life," Critical Studies, 228. 44- Stirling, The Fine and the Wicked, 199. 45· Eileen Bigland, Guida:· The Passionate Victorian (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearch, 1951), 220. 46. Ouida, "The Ugliness of Modern Life," Critical Studies, 235. 47· Ouida, "The Quality of Mercy," 263. 48. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 135.

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49· Ouida, The New Priesthood· A Protest Against Vivisection (London: E. WAllen, r893), 25. Henceforth, references to this pamphlet will be cited by page numbers and enclosed in parentheses. 50. The fears expressed in Ouida's pamphlet, as well as in anti-vivisectionist writings by the better known (on this issue) work of Frances Power Cob be and Louise Lind-af-Hageby prefigured the famous trial of Stephen Coleridge, who accused W M. Bayliss, a professor at University College, of operating on a struggling, unanesthetized brown terrier. Bayliss's female students were enlisted to testify that the dog had received anesthesia. An account of the r903 can be found in Coral Lansbury's, The Old Brown Dog: WOmen, WOrkers, and Vivisection in Victorian England (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, r985). 5r. This secrecy among experimental scientists is well documented. An anecdote from Mary Midgley's Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University Georgia Press, r983) demonstrates this "strangely anti-rational stance" (27): in his Introduction to The Study ofExperimental Medicine, Claude Bernard, the great French physiologist ... flatly refused to defend by argument his systematic total disregard of distress and pain in his unanaesthetized animals, proclaiming simply that it was the attitude proper for scientists, who should therefore refuse to discuss the matter at all with anybody except their like-minded colleagues. (The first Anti-vivisection society in Europe seems to have been founded by Bernard's own wife and daughters, who had come home to find that he had vivisected the domestic dog.) Bernard's [was a} purely tribal approach to a topic which is after all not beyond the scope of reason . . . . (28) 52· Bigland, Passionate Victorian, 262.

I

PART

IV

DIFFERENCE AND DESIRE

CHAPTER 9

THE BLACK STALLION IN PRINT

AND FILM Lindsay McLean Addison

ne of the perennially popular genres .of children's literature is the "horse story." From early novels such as Black Beauty and Smoky the Cowhorse, to more recent books such as the 198os Saddle Club series, the attraction of horses themselves, the vicarious wish fulfillment offered children who cannot own a horse of their own, and the happy idea of friendship between horse and child have combined to make horse stories irresistible for many children and writers. One of the most popular fictional horses ever-possibly the most popular-is the Black Stallion. Created by author Walter Farley, the wild stallion has starred in a twenty-one-book series that is known in countries around the world and, since the original book, The Black Stallion, appeared in 1941, no book in the series has been out of print. 1 In The Black Stallion, teenager Alec Ramsay is returning home to New York from a visit with his uncle in India. A wild, black stallion acquired off the Arabian coast attracts Alec's attention and sympathy, and when the ship, the Drake, founders in a storm and sinks, the boy and the horse are the only survivors. Shipwrecked on a desert island, Alec befriends the Black, as he calls him, and wins his trust. Throughout the book, it is clear that the Black is never fully tamed, and that only his bond with Alec keeps him controllable. Alec and the Black are rescued, and Alec returns home to New York with his horse. There he meets Henry Dailey, a retired jockey and trainer, and dreams of racing the Black. The climax of the novel is a match race between the Black and the two top thoroughbreds in racing, which of course the Black wins. Like Alec and the Black, Farley and the book went on to remarkable success. In 1979, a film version of The Black Stallion was released that was significantly different in theme and tone from the book; executive producer Francis Ford Coppola and director Carroll Ballard had different intentions-and a different sensibility-and the resulting movie is more than a pulp kiddie movie attempting to capitalize on the success of Farley's series. The fihn's artistic, even lyrical, direction and cinematography emphasize the role of the natural world and the connection Alec has with nature,

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specifically through his bond with his horse. Further, the plot is altered somewhat, and Alec's character is significantly different from the confident, outgoing teenager in the books, as the movie's Alec is younger and therefore more vulnerable-and, according to Western cultural stereotypes, more "in tune with" nature. Neither version is "correct," but the discrepancies make the book and the movie two very different stories. Walter Farley was an avid horse lover since he was a small boy, and through his horseman uncle he was able to spend time around horses and learn much about their care and training. 2 He was also able to exercise his interest in horses through writing; according to family members, most of Farley's school compositions were about horses, and he began writing the book that would become The Black Stallion in high schoo1.3 In accordance with Farley's interests, the book was written as an adventure story about a wild horse, and additionally it was an outlet for his passion for horses. Just as The Black Stallion was Farley's first book, it was also director Carroll Ballard's first feature film. But Ballard went on to direct other movies such as Fly Away Home, which also contains strong visual elements and a story line prominently featuring a troubled child. Furthermore, a natural forcethis time a flock of geese-helps to heal the heroine. This difference in focus, which was also doubtlessly shared by Coppola, the producer, led to significant alterations. These changes in the presentation of the story reflect two alternative ways that the natural world and animals were and are commonly thought about and represented. The makers of the film choose to use archetypal connections among children and animals and nature throughout the movie, presenting Alec, the natural world, and the Black as interconnected. The natural world and the horse are also used to illustrate and draw attention to Alec's emotional life, and the movie is willing to blur the lines separating the human child, the horse, and their natural environment. The book, however, focuses more on the effect of Alec's friendship on the Black, not the effect of the Black, or the natural world, on Alec; indeed, in the book, it is Alec's task to calm the Black so that he can assimilate into urban life, while in the movie the Black both receives and gives comfort. The relationship portrayed in the book is therefore more one-sided, and the book's emphasis is not on the emotions of Alec, but on the adventures he has. Such a difference reflects changes in some of the received sensibilities about the role of nature, as the book and the movie are not only products of different media, but also of different time periods and sensibilities; although both feature a close relationship between a boy and a horse, one is reluctant to identify humans with nature and one is more willing to represent humans and nature as closely connected. One of the most noticeable differences between the book and the movie is the age of Alec. In the book Alec is seventeen years old, making him six years older than his eleven-year-old counterpart in the movie. This is significant because of the common cultural connection between young children and nature, a connection with origins in romantic thought. In

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fact, for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, nature plays such a key role in a young boy's life that in Emile's educational program, he declares "Nature provides for the child's education in her own fashion, and this should never be thwarted." Instead of classroom and discipline, boys who have not yet reached the age of reason should be allowed to play outside, to "run, jump, and shout to their heart's content" without any of the restrictions that would be placed on an older child or an adult. 4 Although this theory is not wholly embraced today, Western culture still posits connections between the child and nature, as exemplified by "animal stories that capture the empathy children have with animals."5 By casting eleven-year-old Kelly Reno, a small, round-faced boy, as Alec, and by foregrounding Alec's youth and innocence, the filmmakers reinforce this connection. The movie Alec's tender age also makes him more vulnerable and gives him less agency than an older teenager has. In the book, Alec is portrayed as more aware of the necessities and problems of the adult world: when a ship out of an Irish port discovers Alec on the island, he argues and reasons with the sailors, eventually persuading them to take the Black on board. First, he tells them the story of the shipwreck and how he was saved by grabbing onto a rope the Black was trailing. When he calls the horse and the sailors balk at taking the wild animal, he reasons with them: "I can handle him. Look at him now!" .... "He saved my life, Captain. I can't leave him here alone. He'll die!" 6 Alec explains that the horse can swim and, as the rowboat departs the beach, it is he who gives the sailors orders to make for the ship when he judges the Black will follow, and who figure1i out how to get the harness around the Black"Give me the band, Pat, and more line,"7 he says, before diving into the water-so the horse can be lifted onto the deck. The scene is tense and suspenseful, as it is uncertain whether the horse will be successfully hoisted on board or not; Alec must make several dives to accomplish the task and is struck by one of the Black's hooves in the process. In contrast, in the movie Alec is discovered by a group of sailors who speak no English; Alec says only "He saved my life, I can't leave him here," and makes no further persuasive argument, as he is grabbed by the three sailors and taken forcefully to the rowboat. 8 From there he calls the Black, an instinctive reaction on his part that is similar to his calling for his father in the shipwreck, and the horse follows. A brief series of shots show a winch lowering the band and Alec swimming the strap around the Black's belly. The lack of dialogue and the short, matter-of-fact shots of the ship's machineryand especially the long shot underwater of the Black being harnessed that removes the camera from any exciting action, such as the pumping of the horse's hooves-make the departure from the island a calm, sure event, and make Alec only a part of the process as a whole, not the impetus for action. This removal of agency ensures that Alec is perceived as simply a child, not a child with adult characteristics. He is not yet old enough for that. This also places Alec in much the same situation as the Black, being taken forcefully on board a ship and having decisions made by a second party.

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A common difference that arises between conceptions of the child and the adult relates to the ability to manipulate nature, a theme that was common in boys' adventure books in which "discovering, or seeing, the world is equivalent to controlling, or subduing, it."9 Books such as The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe are examples of this kind of literature. Such an attitude, prevalent in nineteenth-century boys' books/ 0 is demonstrated to a degree in the book The Black Stallion. The book's Alec is plainly more experienced and able to affect his environment than Kelly Reno's Alec, both because of his age and because of specific details supplied by Farley. The version of events related in the book places Alec on the Drake, returning from helping his mis$ionary uncle in India. During his two-month visit, Alec had not been a spectator, either: "Never again would he think of a missionary's work as easy work. No, sir, you had to be big and strong, able to ride horseback for long hours through tangled jungle paths. Alec glanced down proudly at the hard muscles in his arms. Uncle Ralph has taught him how to ride- the one thing in the world he had always wanted to do."n He also knows how to light a fire without matches from seeing a man in India perform the same feat, and the knife that saves him several times on the island was a gift from his uncle, who had expected him to use it and told him, ''A. knife, Alec, comes in handy sometimes." 12 This experience translates into more "adult" activities on the island. In the book Alec forms a plan and constructs a shelter out of planks from wrecked Drake lifeboats and the few tree branches he can find on the rocky desert island; in the two nights depicted in the movie, Alec is in a small natural cave or camped outside under the sky with the Black. Though he does make a fire, and though he is shown once attempting to spear fish, these activities are given very little screen time, and the fishing is an abortive attempt. While on the island in the book, Alec reasons and plans, as he decides to offer the Black some of his seaweed because "I'll bet he's as hungry as I am"; 1 3 Alec considers that there is a source of food on the island if he could bring himself to find a way to kill the horse (he rejects this idea immediately), and vows to himself, "We'll get out of this somehow, Black-working together!" 14 Instead, in the movie, the action focuses on Alec's befriending the Black. We are shown Alec finding seaweed by chance and eating it immediately-in the book, he notices it, thinks it may be carragheen, a plant he remembers from a biology class, and collects some, dries it, and samples it later. In the movie Alec is thoughtful, but not planning, and though he gazes out to sea several times during the island scenes, close-ups of an introspective expression and long shots that emphasize that he is alone with the horse on the island do not reveal any determined thoughts of rescue. Rather, he seems lonely, and finds a friend in the stallion. In contrast to Alec's portrayal as a "rugged self-made man" who displays a Protestant work ethic, full of pluck and vigor,t5 the movie depicts a quieter child whose outbursts are focused on his horse. This reflects the

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tradition in literature as "children are increasingly differentiated, so as to become part of the natural as opposed to the civilized and civilizing 'adult,' " making them therefore less likely to enact change on their environment or to hold themselves apart from it by using it as a tool. 16 This identification with the natural is also captured in Alec's reaction to civilization and his awareness of the adult world. In the book, when he arrives in New York harbor, Alec is ready for his parents' practical questions. He is aware of the demands of the civilized, adult world. He has already thought of finding the horse a home in his Flushing neighborhood: " 'I do know where I can keep him!' The words poured out of his mouth. He knew that he must convince his parents right now, once and for all, that the Black must be his- for keeps! 'There's that old bam in the old Halleran place up there street where the Daileys are living now. I'm sure they'd let me keep him there for almost nothing .... I'll work, Dad, after school, to make money to pay for his feed.' m7 Alec also shows an ability to adapt and blend into civilization. He reassimilates into Flushing, New York, with ease and self-awareness. He hides the Black's escape from his parents because it would only worry them more and thinks to himself, "Life was settling down to normal again-as normal as it could ever be with the Black.m 8 Meanwhile, the Alec of the film responds differently and does not make and execute practical plans for securing the Black's keep. We find that the Black is being kept in the Ramsays' small backyard, looking very out of place. The mechanisms by which he was transported to the home or what arrangements are in the works are left out. Instead of visiting the Daileys to ask for a stall to rent, Alec finds Henry Dailey's bam by chance after tracking down the Black after he escapes. Like any eleven-year-old, he does not think of the practical, realistic side of keeping a large animal in the suburbs, trusting that things will somehow work out, while in the book, Alec is focused on this task alone. The movie's Alec retains some of his "wild" island habits after returning home. He runs off after the escaped Black, staying away from home without contacting his mother for almost two days, and eats with less-thanperfect table manners. During his first night in New York, he makes for the backyard to sleep outside with the Black, instead of in his bed. This change in characterization emphasizes the childlike qualities of Alec, and makes him therefore more likely to be seen as "natural," and able to form bonds with animals, even wild ones like the Black. It is the assumption of the purity and transparency of children that facilitates this portrayal of Alec. There is often in fiction an assumption that there is "an inevitable and mythical ... contact and communication between children and the natural environment and, again, especially between children and animals." 19 Certainly the book explores an uncommon, unexplainable bond between Alec and the Black. Alec is the only person who can safely ride the stallion, and as Jake, Henry's friend who lets them on a racetrack for night rides, says, "Only his love for the boy keeps him on that track"20 - a sentiment

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that is echoed many times over, by several characters and the third-person narrator. The Black is also given a personality: he loves freedom and racing, and he forever wants to have his head to run. When he does get the bit between his teeth, he "love[s} it" and is "wild and free." 21 Alec's love of the thrill of speed and racing is echoed by the Black's. However, the film develops the relationship between the horse and the boy to a greater extent. Unlike the book, the film places Alec's father on board the Drake, and he drowns when the ship goes down. The father-son relationship portrayed in the movie feeds into Alec's relationship with the Black. Alec's most prized possession is a small statue of a horse that his father won at the card game. It comes with a fabulous story of how, as a boy, Alexander the Great won the magnificent wild, black stallion Bucephalus by riding him when no one else could. Alexander proclaims, "I can ride that horse," and succeeds, riding him over the stadium walls and into freedom. Alec is skeptical of his father's tale, especially of the smoke coming out of the horse's nostrils and the fire in his eyes, but he consumes the story eagerly anyway, as only a young child can. Just after he washes up on the island, when he is sitting alone on the beach, his head on his drawn-up knees, the horse figurine his father gave him falls out of his pocket. This provides the impetus for his exploring the island, as in the next scene we see him stepping carefully over the rocky terrain. Much of the visual imagery immediately after Alec arrives on the island is devoted to emphasizing Alec's loneliness and grief In two different shots, the shapes of rocks suggest human form. In the first, a long shot, Alec climbs along the base of a rugged cliff; the natural formation of the rocks suggests a human face, gazing down on the boy from a horizontal angle. The shape of the rocks and the fact that the face is made from rocks give it a heavy; sorrowful appearance. Nature, through the rocks, pities the boy. A short while later, Alec finds a cave to spend the night in. From there, he can see a large outcropping jutting out into the sea. In profile, those rocks appear human as well. A nose, slight recesses for eyes and a mouth, and a forehead emerge in silhouette. Alec looks at the face in the rocks and, in a close-up, we can see he has been crying. Alec keeps the figurine with him throughout the movie as a talisman of his father and his horse. He compares the Black to it as the horse runs up and down the beach and, judging from his smile, we assume they are much alike. The movie intercuts close-up shots of the figurine and Alex examining it with long, panoramic shots of the Black pacing the beach, visually reinforcing this connection. Later, Alec explains to his mother: "Dad gave it to me just before the storm. It reminds me of the Black and me. Alex's [Alexander the Great's} father gave it to him before he died. I was in the water. I couldn't breathe. It was dark, and I yelled out for Dad, but I looked up and there was the Black." The connection between the statue and the stallion is strengthened by the movie's soundtrack and opening sequence. Music is often used in movies to suggest a mood or a feeling, without specifically labeling it or its

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object. 22 As the titles roll, Arabian-sounding music is heard and sand blows away to reveal the statue. When Alec's father shows him the statue, saying "I'll bet this is the most valuable piece of all," the music returns faintly, and when Alec in turn shows it to his mother, the same music plays. Similar music, though louder and more rhythmic, accompanies the Black when he runs on the island. The music and the plot together suggest that the father, in giving his son the statue, also gave him the Black, who saves his life and helps him emotionally. The bond that is formed between the boy and the horse that his father "bequeathed" to him is all the stronger, and the idea that the Black is Alec's protector is introduced. Reno is often shown standing beneath the horse's neck, looking up at him; when the two are lying next to a campfire-Alec using the Black as a backrest-a close-up shot of the horse's face, executed as a shot of a person's face would be, imbues the horse with a nurturing human presence. Unlike the movie's Alec, the book's Alec is not traumatized by the shipwreck. In the book, he says casually to a ship's officer who is overseeing the inspection of livestock entering New York harbor, "From what I hear we're the only survivors,m3 and when his survival story is brought up later by Mrs. Dailey and a newspaperman, he is unaffected. But in the film, the theme of Alec's (and Mrs. Ramsay's) loss is repeated subtly throughout the movie: Alec periodically looks at his father's old things, such as his pocket watch and his gloves, which are literally and symbolically too big for his hands to fill; Alec's mother balks at his racing the Black because "my son could get killed in a horse race .... I've lost a husband, and I'm not going to lose a son"; and when Alec recounts the shipwreck to his mother, his voice becomes husky and uncertain. These incidents make Alec seem more emotionally vulnerable, more likely to look up to the Black as protector and to Henry as a surrogate father, and more like a child, as his youth is contrasted with his new role as "man of the house" in late 1940s America. In one scene, he eats his first dinner at home with his mother. She watches uncertainly as he awkwardly carves the roast, taking over the father's traditional contribution to the dinner. Alec's attachment to the figurine and his grief after the death of his father work together to bind him more closely to the Black, and he is more dependent on the horse's friendship than Alec ever is in the book. In fact, in the island scenes in the book, the opposite is true: the Black needs Alec as much as Alec needs the Black. The horse needs the seaweed to survive, just as Alec needs the horse to save him from the snake. After the snake incident, Alec asks himself, "Was the stallion beginning to understand that they needed each other to survive?m4 This is not an issue in the film; instead, throughout the film shots are composed to depict Alec standing beneath the arch of the Black's neck, under the horse's care and protection. Clearly, the Alec of the film finds emotional support in the Black. Because of these differences in the stories, throughout the film, Alec is more closely connected with nature, and the thematic elements found in each version are different. Through its mixture of well-researched fact and

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fantastical events, the book The Black Stallion and subsequent books in the series "explore {the} zone between normalcy and subversion of order." 25 As the owner of a manifestly untamed stallion, Alec is continually placed in the delicate area between the everyday and the unexpected. Wilderness, in the form of the Black, is part of his life, and he is confronted with conflict between that wildness and the civilization in which he lives. A seminal scene in the book takes place when Alec arrives in New York and must coax the Black down the gangplank and greet his parents. There, Emrys says, Alec is "faced with the question of whether his horse is simply too wild to live in civilization," and he suggests that throughout the Black Stallion series, "Farley illustrates a dynamic tension between discipliQe and freedom and implies that both elements, rather than choice, is {sic} ideal.m6 In the book, romantic elements, such as the Black's "heart" to race and his come-from-behind victories, are present. 2 7 However, this romanticism remains within the bounds of the realistic story: Alec may find a stallion with blazing speed, but much of the tension in the second half of the book comes from Alec and Henry's efforts to find the Black's registry in the Arabian Stud Book or secure a spot in the Chicago match race. Further, Alec may race for the fun of it, but he never leaves civilization, and the description of the island and other natural scenes remain necessary only for plot aud not for theme. Nature in the book is not used to reflect Alec's feelings, the Black is not a nurturing presence, and instead of the movie's focus on the therapeutic effects on the Black on a grieving Alec, the book follows the process of taming and training the Black closely. As a result, the natural world does not play a significant role in the book, except as an obstacle, such as in the case of the storm that sinks the Drake. It is this difference-the realism of the book versus the romanticization of nature in the film- that most strongly distinguish them one from another. When the film's recurring, rich panoramas of the sea and the rocks and the sunset are compared to Farley's description of Alec's first view of the whole island, the contrast is plain: "From where he stood he could see the entire island; it was small-not more than two miles in circumference. It seemed barren except for a few trees, bushes, and scattered patches of burned grass. High rock cliffs dropped down to the sea on the other side of the island.m8 In the movie, scenic shots often are composed well enough to stand-alone as photographs, cliffs and rock contrasting and balancing the expanse of the ocean. Music swells as Alec and the Black stand, each on his own outcropping, surveying the land and the water. It is, finally, the island scenes that form the centerpiece of The Black Stallion film, and that establish Alec and the Black's place in relation to nature- they even go so far as to inform the final race scene. The first fifty minutes of the film are devoted to the Drake sequences, in which Alec first sees the Black and is shipwrecked, and the interlude on the island. They make up nearly half of the 130-minute movie, while these same scenes take up forty-five pages of a 187-page book.

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A common feature of children's literature is a utopian world, a world "concocted out of cultural desires and realities" in which readers "can enjoy the adventures of the main characters without worrying about the consequences.m9 The island, as depicted in the film, is such a place, as it exemplifies the timelessness of the extraordinary worlds that May suggests heroes find themselves in: by venturing beyond the everyday and into the new world, the hero expands the horizons of his traditional world.3° Clearly, Alec's time on the island changes his experience of Flushing when he returns. He owns an amazing horse, rides in races, and makes new friends, moving beyond the boundaries of his previous life. In the rarefied air of the island, extraordinary things can happen, and the film uses music and visuals to depict these events. There, on the island, nature is glorified, and Alec forms his friendship with the Black. Several techniques are used to capture all of this on film. Just as May suggests an illustrator may reframe and reshape a tale through visuals, through the selection of details· and the depiction of scenes,Jl the visuals of a movie can alter a story. On the island, carefully composed close-ups of small bits and pieces of the natural panorama-a sea urchin crawling along a rock, the ripples in the water and sand created by the discarded knife, the moss and wood Alec uses to start his firefocus on beautiful elements of the harsh landscape. Unusual angles and details convey to the viewer a sense that the island and nature are being rediscovered. Medium-range and long shots are also selected and composed carefully. A particularly striking shot of Alec starting his fire places the boy in front of a large, black crevasse of a tan cliff face. The crevasse is slightly off-center, as is Alec, who sits behind a boulder upon which he has spread out his gray and brown tinder. The composition is stark and simple, almost reminiscent of a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Alec is filmed in much the same way as the landscape: close-up shots show his hand cleaning his knife, or his feet picking their way between rocks. Ballard draws the viewer's attention to these specific details of nature and of Alec in the same way, suggesting they are similar, different aspects of the same.natural world. When the story shifts to New York, the scenery there is treated in the same way: long vistas of an industrial area-a slash of brilliant green beneath irregularly shaped gray and black factories that leak smoke into the sky-make the scene pretty; after a fashion. The shot is there to show more than where the escaped Black is running; it is there to contrast the horse's run in New York with his runs on the island, and to continue the vivid, mystic atmosphere the island's "nature scenes" create. 'Indeed, much care was taken in the selection of the locations, and, of course, of the horse that would be the focus of much of the movie. Months were devoted to finding an appropriate stallion; Ballard and producers traveled to England, Morocco, and Egypt before finding their star, a Texas Arabian named Cass Ole. Three other horses, two stunt horses and another Arabian stallion chosen for his liveliness, were all trained specially

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for the movie, while in addition Reno spent several weeks establishing a rapport with Cass Ole. Meanwhile, Sardinia was chosen for the island scenes, and four different locations-one only accessible by boat-were used to capture the range of landscapes requiredY Such care emphasizes the importance Ballard placed on the human-horse relationship and the film's natural setting. The natural setting is further emphasized by the use of sound. In some scenes, no music is heard, only the Black's breathing and whinnying, or the sur£ A total lack of sound can heighten viewer response,33 and even the ambient noise that one would hear when standing on the island affects viewers' perception, encouraging them to look at the pictures presepted in detail. This technique also heightens suspense, as when the Black's ropes have snagged between rocks and Alec frees him, because music is not giving the audience hints on how to feel and respond. When it is used, music works to great effect, combining its rhythm with the motions of the horse and the boy, giving the movie a sensuous quality that "encourages viewers to luxuriate in sights and sounds."34 This is especially true when Alec watches the Black and the statue as he makes a fire. The vigorous movement of the knife scraping a piece of wood initiates this "composition." Staccato notes from a piano accentuate the wisps of smoke, and when Alec looks up and sees the Black on the beach, strings and drums join in. The tempo changes in relation to the speed of the Black's movements, making that scene, and others, seem like a dance, composed specifically to fit the edited film. Next, halting Arabian-sounding percussion and plucked strings score Alec's first prolonged interaction with the Blacl<:. With a gift of seaweed, he entices the Black to a small semicircular beach, where he encourages the horse to approach and take the offering. The back-and-forth movement of the Black, as he approaches and retreats, is again followed by the tempo and rhythm of the music. The drums stop as the boy and the horse are silhouetted against the sun; in the silent moment, with only their outlines defining them in the picture, they seem archetypal. When the Black takes the seaweed, the music begins again and continues as they play a kind of tag. The vigor and speed of the game are emphasized when the camera does not move quickly enough to keep Alec or the Black in the frame properly. Forceful, deep drums overwhelm other instruments when the Black gets a head of steam and gallops past Alec, and these sounds recede when the horse's speed abates. Finally, in the sequence that seems most like a dance, the music and the action complementing each other best, Alec leads the Black into the water where he can swim onto his back and ride him. A formal, restrained piano melody accompanies underwater shots of Alec leading the Black out to sea, and in time with the cut from underwater to above, drums and a full orchestra break in. Strings keep the music constantly moving, even as the brass and percussion drop out when Alec falls off, and the composition

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climaxes when Alec spreads his arms as if he were flying. The last note that is struck, as the camera pulls back as waves run up the beach, is not a crash of cymbals, but the pounding of the sur£ Music and natural sounds are combined elegantly and underscore the relationship of Alec, the Black, and the natural world of the island, giving the scenes a mystical quality that complements the untouched, utopian realm Alec is temporarily living in. The music is so effective that one hardly notices that for nearly half an hour, there has been no dialogue. In the book, Alec speaks to the Black to sooth him, and to the captain of the Drake and his Irish rescuers, but in the first half of the film, only Alec's father speaks English to him- further separating Alec from the rest of the civilized world- and no words are necessary to interpret events in the lyrical, musical island scenes. Instead, the sequences serve as short narrative vignettes that use only images and music and sound to tell their story. Children are often seen as not needing external devices-such as, in a film, dialogue-to connect to nature. Instead, "both the 'child' and 'nature' have been assigned the status of being prior to, above and beyond man, and therefore man's language, history and culture. They are held to preserve that which is primeval, original and transcendent . . . . As such, they represent access to direct or pure experience, unmediated by language or human interpretation."35 The story, though, returns to civilization and takes Alec and the Black to Chicago for the match race against Cyclone and Sun Raider. There again, sound is used to great effect. When Alec and the Black are in the starting gate, only ambient noise is heard-even during the fight, which would usually be underscored with dramatic music-and the film cuts to a variety of detailed shots of the jockeys, their boots, their whips, and the track. Ballard's previous documentary work helps in setting the scene, and the silence actually works against the drama of the fight and helps to build the suspense before and during the race. Only the Black's breathing and hoofbeats and the murmur of the crowd are audible for the first twothirds of the race. Then, after he has stopped fighting the Black, trying to pull him up because he has cut his leg in the fight, Alec enters the race too. He removes his gaudy helmet and goggles, some of the trappings of the civilized racing world, and begins to enjoy himsel£ Another minute passes on film before wistful, meditative string music fades in so softly that it initially seems like an auditory illusion. As the film slips into slow motion, we see the shadow of the Black and Alec on the track, which fades into a familiar shot from the utopian island: Alec is riding the Black along the beach. As the Black passes the camera, the film hard-cuts back to the race and resumes regular speed, and the Black passes Cyclone and Sun Raider. Alec throws his arms up in the flying gesture, in a shot very similar to the "flying" on the island, and again, the racetrack fades into the "flying" scene on the island. Although the film has moved away from the island, it is clear that the rest of the movie, from the plot to shot selection, depends on what happened

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there. Racing in New York, as it was on the island, is an act of natural exuberance on Alec and the Black's part, and the effect of the race on Alec is made most important by the intercutting of racetrack and island shots. In the book, the race is important, but not on such a deeply psychological level: the narrative voice removes itself from such intimacy with Alec by switching to a transcript of the announcer calling the race. Even when the voice of the announcer relinquishes the stage, the narrative does not revert to Alec's point of view or describe his emotions. But the film maintains its story from Alec's point of view throughout, and uses natural scenery and alterations to the plot to keep the story focused on the boy and his relationship with the Black. Indeed, the movie ends with a tight shot .pf Alec stroking the Black while the horse nuzzles the little statue ofBucephalus. In the last line of the book, the Black is led away to be fed a victory meal; the movie's end emphasizes the human-animal relationship, and the book's ending highlights the victory while returning to the everyday chores of horse care. Both the book and the film are extremely effective in doing what they set out to do. The book tells an exciting, detailed adventure story about a teenager and his beloved horse. The film takes this story and transforms it into a poetic story about a boy who has lost his father and who has found a friend in a horse. This version of Alec is explicitly and implicitly tied to his horse and to nature through his experiences on the island. Such differences reflect changes from the way the natural world was represented in the 1940s, and differences in the filmmakers' approach to the story and their interest in the implications of Alec's close association with the natural world. It is in large part through the use of images of nature that the film alters the overall tone and theme of the book. Instead of fast-paced action and a r~alistically detailed plot, the film reveals close relationships among Alec, the Black, and the· natural world. It portrays Alec's equine and natural-world relationships against the backdrop of the loss of his father, and the natural qualities of the child (and Western culture's tendency to associate children with nature) are captured in richly visual, lyrical pictures and music. Thus, instead of being shown as a nonentity or an obstacle, the natural world is sensitized to Alec's emotions and is presented as sympathetic to him in an almost spiritual way. Through such contrasts, The Black Sta!!ion movie and book illustrate two polarities on the continuum of ways in which animals and the natural world have been represented.

Notes I.

Black Stallion Inc., Walter Farley's The Black Stallion-The Official Website, October 13, 2003, < http://www.theblackstallion.com > (November 3,

2001). 2. Walter Farley, The Black Stallion (New York: Random House, 1941), 188.

Taken from the about the author page.

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3· Black Stallion Inc. Farley would maintain his interest in all things horse throughout his life, not only in his books, but through association with owners and trainers from whom he would gather many of the details he incorporated into the Black Stallion series. 4- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (New York: Dutton Everyman, 19rr), 50. 5· Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, "Children's Literature and the Environment," in Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, eds., Writing the Environment (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 209. 6. Farley, The Black Stallion, 39· 7· Ibid., 41. 8. All references to the movie refer to The Black Stallion, prod. :Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos, and Tom Sternberg, dir. Carroll Ballard, rr8 min, MGM, 1979, videocassette. 9· Jacqueline Rose, The Case ofPeter Pan or The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1984), 58. 10. Lesnik-Oberstein, "Children's Literature and the Environment," in Writing the Environment, 2131!. Farley, The Black Stallion, 3-4. 12. Ibid., 413. Ibid., 2r. 14. Ibid., 28. 15. A. B. Emrys, "Regeneration Through Pleasure: Walter Farley's American Fantasy," Journal ofPopular Culture 26 (1993): 188. 16. Lesnik-Oberstein, "Children's Literature and the Environment," in Writing the Environment, 213. 17. Farley, The Black Stallion, 66. 18. Ibid., 99· 19. Lesnik-Oberstein, "Children's Literature and the Environment," in Writing the Environment, 2ro. 20. Farley, The Black Stallion, 135. 2r. Ibid., 128. 22. William H. Phillips, Analyzing Film (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), 78. 23. Farley, The Black Stallion, 6r. 24. Ibid., 27. 25. Emrys, "Regeneration Through Pleasure," Journal ofPopular Culture, 187. 26. Ibid., 188-189. 27. Ibid., 19!. 28. Farley, The Black Stallion, 17. 29. Jill P. May, Children's Literature b Critical Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88-89. 30. Ibid., 90-9r. 31. Ibid., 98-99. 32. "The Black Stallion: One Tough Movie," Arabian Horse World (April 1978), 482-484. 33· Phillips, Analyzing Film, Sr. 34· Ibid.,. 88. 35· Lesnik-Oberstein, "Children's Literature and the Environment," 2ro.

CHAPTER IO

"WHO ARE THE BANDAR-LOG?" QuESTIONING ANIMALS IN RuDYARD KIPLING's MowGLI STORIES AND URSULA LE GuiN's "BuFFALO GALS, WoN'T You CoME OuT ToNIGHT" Christopher Powici

I "But then, who are the Bandar-log?m Pleasure-loving, anarchic, and scandalously irreverent, yet strangely familiar, the Monkey-People, or Bandar-log, of Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories can leave the reader at something of a loss. This at least is the implication behind the question Ursula Le Guin raises, but does not answer, in the introduction to her own collection of animal stories, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. By leaving the question open, Le Guin invites readers to think about the meaning(s) of "the animal" for themselves. This essay represents one reader's attempt to do just that-to "think" the animal, to come to terms with its "familiar otherness." I want, especially, to look at Kipling's Mowgli stories2 and the title story from Le Guin's collection, "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight" for the ways in which the sense of the animal in these stories informs a sense of the human. In short, I will explore how the human/animal border is not simply represented but also constructed in narrative by these two authors. My starting point is Le Guin's claim that women, children and animals are the obscure matter upon which 'civilization erects itself phallologically. That they are other is (vide Lacan eta!.) the foundation oflanguage, the Father Tongue. If Man vs. Nature is the name of the game, no wonder the team players kick out all these non-men who won't learn the rules and run around the cricket pitch squeaking and barking and chattering! (ro)

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Her desire to critique civilization as intrinsically oppressive, reinforcing its claims to authority by simultaneously exploiting and excluding what is deemed "other" to the patharchal ideal, does not, however, prevent Le Guin from praising the animal stories of Rudyard Kipling, a writer whose name has become inextricably linked, rightly or wrongly, with the project of civilization in its most conspicuously imperialist guise. For Le Guin, the Jungle Book is among Kipling's "finest work," offering a counternarrative to the myth of civilization, "which all talking-animal stories mock, or simply subvert" (Io-n). That Le Guin does not draw attention to this seemingly atypical view of Kipling suggests that, beneath the rhetoric of empire, she identifies a mutual fascination with the human/animal border, and especially that blurred dividing line between the child and the animal Both writers explore the ways in which this border is established and sustained, crossed and permeated, and, from a certain perspective, violated. At stake in these traversals and transgressions is a definition of what counts as animal and what counts as human, together with the array of meanings, qualities, and attributes that cluster around these discursive formations. In the Mowgli stories, issues of humanness and animality intersect not only in metaphors and rhetorical figures such as "The Law of the Jungle" and Mowgli's "mastering" gaze, but also in how these figures are themselves subverted by the paradoxical mixture of anarchy and mimicry that characterize the Bandar-log or Monkey-People. Almost a century after the publication of Kipling's famous stories, Le Guin's treatment of the child and the animal in "Buffalo Gals" develops themes that are implicit in Kipling by opening up the human/animal boundary through a radical and liberating decentering of the human subject. In the place of jungle law, LeGuin posits desert semiotics; instead of ontological hierarchies, the web of life. Any discussion of Kipling's and Le Guin's texts requires not only a coherent critical approach but also an ethical analysis, and with this in mind I want to take up a call that Karla Armbruster makes in the prelude to her own discussion of Le Guin's story, "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight: A Poststructuralist Approach to Ecofeminist Criticism." Armbruster argues that two major pitfalls lie in wait for the intellectually rigorous and ethically engaged ecofeminist critic attempting to address the relationship of human and nonhuman life. On the one hand, she warns, "an unproblematized focus on women's connection with nature can actually reinforce dualism and hierarchy by constructing yet another dualism: an uncomplicated opposition between women's perceived unity with nature and male-associated culture's alienation with it."3 On the other hand, an emphasis on "differences based on aspects of identity such as gender, race, or species" may result in isolating "people from each other and from nonhuman nature."4 For Armbruster, avoiding these extremes requires "crossing the boundaries of ecofeminist theory and engaging with the ideas of other theorists."5 This widening of the ecofeminist approach engenders the possibility of "proposing new solutions to the problems of how to negotiate connection and difference, while simultaneously

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contributing to literary criticism and theory by showing how complex questions about the relationship of human subjects and nonhuman nature can result in new and exciting ways to read literary texts." 6 With Armbruster's call in mind, I shall turn to psychoanalytic theory and employJulia Kristeva's rubric of the semiotic and symbolic modalities as a theoretical framework to test the extent to which Kipling's and Le Guin's narratives reinforce or disrupt phallocentric notions of civilization, and to explore how both "animality" and "humanness" are figured in their respective investigations of the human/animal border. In so doing, I am conscious of the relatively limited part that psychoanalytic approaches have (so far) played in the diverse field of ecocriticism. A glance at the index of any foundational ecocritical anthology shows the names of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva conspicuous by their absence. Up to a point, this reluctance to employ psychoanalytic theory is understandable. Freud's claim, in Civilization And Its Discontents, that the extermination of"wild .and dangerous animals," and the extensive breeding of "tamed and domesticated ones," is a defining characteristic of a highly civilized society, indicates how psychoanalysis may be seen as complicit with the very ideologies and practices that ecocriticism challenges. 7 But if, as Armbruster argues, ecofeminist theory and ecocriticism in general need to open their own borders if they are to achieve the kind of academic and political impact they seek, then a willingness to engage with critical approaches from previously neglected quarters must be a part of this strategy. As for Lacan, the suggestion of kinship between children and nonhuman animals is nowhere to be found in his explorations of infancy and childhood. Although Kristeva does not specifically address the human/animal boundary; her analysis of human subjectivity also assumes a valorized notion of an essential human identity that many critics view as integral to the ways in which human beings represent, construct, and subjugate nonhuman nature. At the heart of Kristeva's thinking is her concept of the "semiotic" and "symbolic" modalities, explicated at greatest length in Revolution in Poetic Language. 8 The term "semiotic" is used to describe the child's relationship with the maternal body; and other objects, at a precognitive and preverbal stage of development: "Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the {child} subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body-by family and social structures" (25). At this stage, then, the child does not possess a unique "personal" identity dis·tinct from its environment. The child is not yet an "I". The "symbolic" refers to the child's later acquisition of language and entry into the social order. By learning the "laws" of the social and linguistic system, the child learns to tak~ up his or her own place within that system, and as a result becomes aware that he or she possesses a differentiated identity, that he or she is an "I." The sense, then, of a unitary essential "I" prior to language and socialization does not exist because it is an effect of that very process.

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However, for Kristeva, the semiotic and symbolic are not completely separate realms. The latter does not overturn the former. Rather the two modalities are involved in a continual and complex interaction. Kristeva adopts from Plato the idea of the "chora" to describe how the energy of the semiotic is preserved, and it is precisely this energy that the symbolic arrests and resolves into "stasis" in order to establish itself as the site of meaning and authority. In turn, however, the meanings and significations imposed by the symbolic remain vulnerable to an excess of semiotic energy. The semiotic is thus "a precondition of the symbolic," and it also "functions within signifying practices as a transgression of the symbolic" (50). These "transgressions of the symbolic" include the undermining of ideologies and sociopolitical practices-patriarchy and capitalism among them-which constitute the symbolic at a familial and societal level. Two key implications flow from this claim. First, that because self-identity cannot be assumed beyond the particular, historically determined, configuration of the symbolic, any sense of "self" is itself subject to destabilization. Hence, for Kristeva, the subject is always a "subject in process/on trial" (22), as are the sociopolitical practices according to which the "self" is constituted. Second, both the semiotic and the symbolic are essential to any signifying process; the energies of the former, and the ways in which they are controlled by and subvert the symbolic, may be realized in language. The process is especially marked in literary texts such as those by avant-garde writers including Lautreamont, Mallarme, Joyce, and Aftaud. In the "performance" of these practices "the dynamic of drive charges bursts, pierces, deforms, reforms, and transforms the boundaries the subject and society set for themselves" (103). In analyzing this kind of textual practice, Kristeva concentrates on nondenotative aspects of text such as musicality; rhythm, and transgressions of grammar. It is arguable whether either Kipling's or Le Guin's narratives could be accommodated within a strict Kristevan notion of "text." Kristeva, however, also points out, "Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either 'exclusively' semiotic or 'exclusively' symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both" (24). This interaction of the semiotic and the symbolic, manifest in the "signifying systems" of Kipling's and Le Guin's narratives, profoundly affects their respective figurations of the human/animal border. In their different ways, both writers show this border to be at continual risk of a destabilization that undermines and exceeds the ontological sanctity of the human subject.

II If there is one thing that any self-respecting member of Kipling's jungle community has to Jearn it is "The Law of the Jungle," that all-pervasive body of customs, rules, injunctions, and restrictions that, as Baloo the bear tells Mowgli, "was like the Giant Creeper because it dropped across

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everyone's back and no one could escape" (w). This is a revealing remark, for as much as Mowgli will need to learn the "Law of the Jungle" in order to survive, the Law also seems, in its creeping inescapability, to menace as much as it protects. "When thou hast lived as long as I have," Baloo instructs Mowgli, "thou wilt see how all the Jungle obeys at least one Law. And that will be no pleasant sight" (173). The Law, then, appears to have a strange status. Obedience to the Law may be necessary, but obedience, as Baloo suggests, may trail in its wake the threat of some dread but nameless horror. This essential but scarcely definable concept has also trailed in its wake a fair share of critical attention. For Shamsul Islam, the jungle law is not a "utopian dream that can be realized," but a "practical code" whose "five essential elements" are "Reason ... The Common Good ... Ethical Values ... Law-making Authority and Promulgation ... and Custom and Tradition."9 For John Murray, however, any association of Kipling's Law with either an idealistic quest or ethical values is mistaken: as "a child of his time in his imperialism, in his trust in practical science ... and his mistrust of metaphysics," Kipling is more concerned with "practicality" than "idealism."10 In Murray's view Kipling eschews notions of "natural law"inviolable human rights-in favor of an "analytical positivist" position that emphasizes "law and ethics are separate realms" and that law "assumes the form of command from sovereign to individual."II There is, however, a way of looking at the "Law of the Jungle" that need not entangle the reader in the finer points of jurisprudence. Instead we may consider what, in Kipling's view, amounts to lawlessness. According to Islam, Kipling "heroically'' opposes the Law to "the nameless, shapeless Powers of Darkness, Disorder and Chaos.m 2 Islam is here perhaps a little modest in describing such powers as "nameless" since he, in effect, proceeds to name them by capitalizing "Darkness, Disorder and Chaos." Kipling, however, is even more explicit when it comes to putting names to such fearful and nightmarish forces. Their names, at least as far as the Mowgli stories are concerned, are monkeys, jackals and tigers, or lame tigers, at any rate. The character ofTabaqui the jackal, "the little shadow with the bushy tail," is introduced as being despised by "the wolves of India" for his "mischief" and tale telling (35). Worse still, "they are afraid of him too, because Tabaqui more than anyone else in the jungle is apt to go mad" and "madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature" (35). Such opprobrium, however, seems muted when contrasted with the scorn that Bagheera the panther and Baloo reserve for the Bandar-log, the Monkey-People. According to Bagheera, the Bandar-log are not only "without law'' but also "the eaters of everything," and therefore the embodiment of "great shame" (58). Baloo is no less forthcoming in detailing the sinfulness of these disgracefully omnivorous simians. Not only do they possess neither "Law'' nor "leaders," they "have no remembrance" and, furthermore, "are very many, evil, dirty, shameless" and lacking in "any fixed desire" (59). The chaotic multiplicity of the Bandar-log, then,

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represents an explicit threat to the normative structures of society insofar as the austere and unadulterated voice of the law may be overwhelmed by, in effect, the babble of the rabble. Put bluntly, "The Monkey-People are forbidden" (59). This division of the jungle into the lawful and the lawless may appear to have the virtue of producing a world that, on the surface at least, is coherent and comprehensible, but it also reinforces a status quo, which, as Le Guin laments, can have the effect of excluding anything, or anyone, deemed "non-man." It is, however, possible to aggregate the sins of jackal and monkey under rather different headings than "Darkness, Disorder and Chaos" if, instead of Kipling's "heroic" opposition of Law to lawl~ssness, we adopt as a frame of reference Kristeva's concepts of the symbolic and the semiotic. In "From One Identity to An Other," Kristeva describes the semiotic as "a presymbolic and trans-symbolic relationship to the mother," which is heterogeneous as "to meaning and signification" and cannot therefore be attributed to the "operating consciousness of a transcendental ego.m3 In contrast, the symbolic is described as the "inevitable attribute of meaning, sign and the signified object for the consciousness of[the} ... ego" that constitutes itself only at the cost of"repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother.m4The semiotic "maintains itself at the cost of reactivating this ... instinctual element" repressed by the symbolic. r5 Seen in this light, Kipling's "Law of the Jungle" is the symbolic at work under another name, as patriarchal authority, as "the transcendent ego," defending itself against, and imposing its will in opposition to, the semiotic, which, in Kristeva's terms always threatens to expose "the constraints of a civilization dominated by transcendental rationality." 16 To put some flesh on the bones of these abstractions, consider how the semiotic makes its presence felt not only in the Bandar-log's contempt for paternal authority, for leadership and laws of any kind, but also in their lack of both "remembrance" and "fixity of desire." Their ambivalence to differentiation, whether diachronic or synchronic, recalls Kristeva's characterization of the semiotic as a "continuous relation to the mother."1 7 This conception of the Bandar-log takes on a special resonance in the context of Kipling's otherwise highly masculinized jungle. Mowgli may have "brothers," but sisters there are none. Indeed the only two significant females, Mowgli's foster mothers, both wolf and human, are themselves appropriately hierarchalized into the masculine structures of wolf pack and village respectively. In this context, the Bandar-log and jackal may be figured as representing a kind of surrogate femininity, for they operate as an ever-present counterpoint and threat to the masculine structures of the Law. Baloo may claim that, "We do not notice them" (59) but the Bandar-log themselves are continually kicking up a rumpus, throwing "sticks and nuts at any beast for fun and in the hope of being noticed" (6o). And Mowgli does take notice, but not because he sees them as a threat. Mowgli is attracted to the Bandar-log because they give him "pleasant things to eat" and "play all day'' (58). Even more strikingly, he feels a guilty

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enjoyment at being taken possession of by the Monkey-People, thrilling to the "wild rush" (61) of his treetop abduction. Thus lawlessness emerges not only as "Darkness, Disorder and Chaos" but also as desire, pleasure, and play. In Kristevan terms, the lawlessness of the Bandar-log can be seen as enacting the irruption of the semiotic into the "thetic," the "phase" between the semiotic and the symbolic that "produces the positing of signification," of "enunciation,m8 and of a "subject" who is constituted as subject by virtue of the capacity for enunciation. It is the security of the subject thus constituted that the semiotic undermines, cutting through and exceeding the subject's self-consciousness. However, Kristeva also argues that, because of its very transgression of the thetic, the semiotic "brings about all the various transformations of the signifying practice that are called 'creation.' m9 In this sense the anarchic, irreverent game-playing of the Bandar-log is exactly a kind of"creation.'' Oblivious to the authority of the law; they "monkey about," not only with meaning, but also with the subject who means, abducting him from his designated niche in the.social order, and, in Mowgli's case, sweeping him off his feet. But what of the role of Shere Khan the tiger, "the Big One" (36) whom Shamsul Islam includes, along with the jackal and monkeys, as the third member of that animal triumvirate that stands "for the dark powers that reside within one's heart.'' 20 Islam describes Shere Khan as "representing the brute animal power which defies all restraints," a characterization that would appear to place Shere Khan at several removes from those funloving criminals, the jackals and monkeys. 21 Indeed even Tabaqui the jackal is moved to acknowledge Shere Khan as "My Lord" (38). And yet Shere Khan may also be figured in terms of the semiotic/symbolic tension that Kipling, though his concept of the Law and through the agency of Mowgli, attempts to resolve, but not because Shere Khan represents, like the Bandar-log, the play-without-end of the semiotic. Rather, Shere Khan stands for the symbolic, but in its negative aspect. In his determination to impose his authority at whatever bloody cost, Shere Khan seems to encapsulate the figure of the father writ large, of a self-determining apotheosis of authority in its most brutal and therefore most transparent form, but he has also been lame "from his birth" (36). Thus, in Freud's terms, Shere Khan is an emasculated father, a father who reveals the deep ambivalence at the heart of the symbolic. The very transparency of Shere Khan thus exposes the symbolic, leaving it vulnerable to an influx of the semiotic. And by killing Shere Khan, the bad father, the limping king, and by claiming the dead tiger's skin and succeeding him as "Master of the Jungle," Mowgli is himself the subject of the imperative of the symbolic. In terms of the social order and its signifying practices, the signifier "man" replaces the signifier "tiger." The ideology of mastery is transfigured but not transformed. Kipling's animals- from Baloo the wise uncle to Shere Khan, the brutal father, from the criminally insane Bandar-log to the sane and responsible

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wolves-can be interpreted as manifestations of the semiotic and sym~ bolic functions, of, in effect, Madness and Law. But what of the site where these forces contend with one another? What of Mowgli himself? In his role of"child of the jungle," the intimate ofbird and beast, Mowgli seems to exemplifY the notion of the "natural child." In her discussion of the rela~ tionship between children and the natural environment, Karin Lesnik~ Oberstein argues that this notion draws its strength from eighteenth century thought, and particularly Rousseau's emphasis on the child as free from the "contaminating knowledge of civilization," leading to "the unquestioned-indeed, almost unquestionable-assumption that there is an inevitable and mythical ... contact and communication between chil~ dren and the natural environment and, again, especially between children and animals.m 2 In Mowgli's case, this rapport seems especially strong, raising the question of whether he is human or animal. For example, he surpasses his mentor Baloo in his Command of the "Master Words" of the jungle, to the extent that "neither snake, nor bird, nor beast would hurt him" <57). Mowgli's rapport, however, has limits. His relationship to the jungle and its animal denizens is never one of complete concordance between "child" and "nature," as Bagheera realizes. Exempting Mowgli from the fear that the panther arouses among other members of the jungle community; Bagheera tells Mowgli, "thou art a man's cub ... and even as I returned to my jungle, so thou must go back to men at last- to the men who a:re thy brothers" (46). In this sense, the Mowgli stories amount to an articulation of their hero's rites of passage from boy to man, from nature to culture, an existential journey whose end is predetermined, inescapable. "Man goes to Man" runs the refrain that heads the last of the Mowgli stories, a formulation which concretizes "truth" that "man-ness" is the innate, essential core of the Mowgli's being (323). The truth of the injunction "Man goes to Man'' is stressed by Baloo, who, as if to forestall any possible objections, claims, "It is the law" (34o). But what are the specific ways in which Mowgli's difference, his "manness," is figured in the text? Daniel Karlin makes the point that Kipling destabilizes "the distinction between human and animal environment," so that Mowgli's journeys between jungle and village represent not so much "an encounter ... between nature and culture," as a meeting, "between two forms of culture." 2 3 Karlin also sets out the scope of this destabilization. Mowgli, as a human being "may become a wolf ... but a wolf may not become human." 2 4 In other words, the transformational agency is firmly located within the human, and not the animal, echoing the theological principle that while God may become man, man may not become God. Insofar as the Mowgli stories are concerned, this distinction is rendered as a matter of language. Mowgli may "master" the words of the jungle-of bear, wolf, panther, and snake- but the jungle may not "master" the speech of man. Kipling's bridge between nature and culture is restricted to one-way traffic. Before man, the animal remains speechless.

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However, language is not the principal sign of Mowgli's mastery of the jungle. Mowgli, after all, must learn to speak, but ultimate mastery is innate and delivers itself in the form of his gaze. "Not even I can look thee between the eyes," Bagheera tells Mowgli, "The others hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine . . . because thou art a man" (46). That Mowgli has hitherto been unaware of this authority only serves to demonstrate that he must learn not how to become "Master of the Jungle," but that he already is "Master of the Jungle." But, since all that passes in Kipling's jungle is supposed to be regulated by the "Giant Creeper" of the Law, what exactly is the legal status of Mowgli's gaze? Although it seems to lack those practical and socially cohesive aspects that Shamsul Islam contends make up of Kipling's concept of "the Law," Mowgli's gaze is best understood in terms of a pure authority, in terms of its power to delineate subject positions within a context oflaw-giver and law-receiver. Put simply, Mowgli's gaze is the gaze of the master, the gaze not of the body of the law as such, but, rather, of that which bodies forth the law, the law in its transcendent aspect. If the Bandar-log's abduction of Mowgli can be seen as the irruption of the semiotic into the thetic, then Mowgli's gaze is its symbolic corollary- the attempt by the symbolic to arrest, or repress, that irruption and disavow the heterogeneity of the thetic in favor of an originary sovereign authority. For Kristeva, such a repression of the semiotic "is what sets up metalanguage and the 'pure signifier.' ms In this sense, Mowgli's gaze is an emanation of "metalanguage." It is the gaze of "an unshakable consciousness [which} rests its position on transcendental laws." 26 Paradoxically, however, by staring down the brute animal other, which it "transcends," Mowgli's gaze evinces what it seeks to deny-that the "other" is the very precondition of identity, of an "I" that is capable of enunciating its own presence. Kristeva describes the crucial importance of the "other" in relation to the process initiated at the "Mirror Stage" of the development of the infant and completed with "the discovery of castration," when the subject "must separate from and through his image, from and through his objects.''2 7 As a result, "dependence on the mother is severed and transformed into a symbolic relation to an other; the constitution of the Other is indispensable for communication with another," conferring on this other "the possibility of signification.m8 In effect,, it is this debt to the other that Mowgli's gaze attempts to cancel: in Kipling's story, the symbolic seeks to disavow its own foundation and wholly enclose all signifying practice within its own borders, that of the unitary "I," the transcendent ego. And it is this gaze of man, of the transcendent ego, which, as Hithi the elephant remarks, puts even tigers to flight (187). But this is not the whole story. Although Mowgli's gaze helps to maintain distinctions between man and animal, between culture and nature, which otherwise are in danger of destabilization, his seemingly unreturnable gaze is itself at continual risk of destabilization. For the animals that return Mowgli's gaze are not Kipling's law-abiding wolves, bears, and

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panthers, but the monkey and the jackal. Put briefly, that transcendent gaze of human, masculine authority is returned in the form of mimicry. The Bandar-log, for example, gather together in the ruined city where they would "sit in circles on the hall of the Icing's council chamber and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men" (68). Thus the forms and structures of the "Law" become the subject of mimetic critique amid the very ruins of the "Law." This is not to say that mimicry is the same as mockery. Rather the implicit threat of the Bandar-log, from the point of view of authority, is that they seem to want to be men. In terms of colonial discourse, Homi Bhabha describes this perceived desire to resemble as "the inappropriate ... a difference or recalcitration which ... poses an immanent threat to both 'normalized' knowledges and disciplinary powers," and, which "rearticulates presence in terms of its otherness, that which it disavows." 2 9Thus the threat of the "other" is transformed into its opposite-the threat of the "same." The cry of the jackal may be "half-sobbing and half-chuckling, just as though it had soft human lips" (330), but it remains an animal whose presence disturbs precisely because, not despite, of its "inappropriate" resemblance to those authorized subjects of the Law, wolves and men. Thus, through the mimesis of monkey and jackal, the gaze is returned to the gazer in its most mad and maddening forms, as the self-conscious, unitary ''I" is taken aback by the self-shattering realization of its own heterogeneity. It is a realization that, as Mowgli discovers when he is abducted by the Bandar-log, can be thrilling in its intensity. But insofar as this is personal, it is also political. For Kristeva, the social is a necessary dimension of the symbolic, in that the concept of a self-conscious unitary subject, which the symbolic posits and seeks to establish, is the ultimate foundation of"certain social relations-the family, civil society, and the state."3° However, "jouissance," the heterogeneous "play'' of the semiotic that manifests itself in the mimicry of the Bandar-log, is potentially catastrophic for these "social relations" insofar as the social order assumes the authority of the self-conscious subject and his orher "judicial corollary, the State."3 1 In his analysis of the symbolic power of the state, Bhabha prefers to figure "the displacing gaze of the disciplined" in terms of a "metonymy of presence," which represents the "nonrepressive production of contradictory and multiple belie£"3 2 However, his very emphasis on "contradiction" and "multiplicity" allow for the return of the gaze to be figured within Kristeva's semiotic/symbolic rubric. Thus, for the Bandar-log, something is true not because of the singular authority of the law, but because "we all say so," a proposition that Mowgli concludes can only have been inspired by jackal-induced insanity (70). Moreover, the Bandar-log contradict the "Master Words" of the Law, not with an unambiguous "no," but with "foolish songs" in the hope that "the Jungle-People" will "notice them"(69). But then what else are apes supposed to do but ape, and thus hold up to a mirror the symbolic gaze of the Law, which, having designated the ape as no more than ape, now senses itself under threat from a mimetic recapitulation of its own authority as nothing more than a song and dance. It is a

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"song and dance" from which Mowgli must be rescued by Baloo the magisterial bear, Bagheera the black panther and Kaa the hypnotic python, and for which the Bandar-log must be put in their place. With cunning and brute force, this deadly trio rescue Mowgli from his ambivalent captivity; slaying scores-perhaps hundreds-of the Bandar-log in the process. Their "place" is not so much out of sight as out of mind; one recalls Baloo's injunction, spoken more in hope than conviction, that, as far as the Monkey-People are concerned "We do not notice them." In Kipling's jungle,· the Law must ultimately triumph over lawlessness, but its dominance is never absolute, and the battle-lines between the two are never straightforwardly set out. Rather, the distinctions between the human and the animal, between nature and culture, and even between the law itself and its outlaw other; are vulnerable to an ontological zigzagging, which can leave the subject, especially the human subject, stranded outside the structures that determine him. Kipling's narrative, in accordance with the imperatives of imperialist ideology to establish the "civilized" norm, must attempt to quell the threat of the semiotic, in the form of the Bandar-log. Otherness must be contained and constrained by the sovereign authority of the Law, which simultaneously is the foundation and the expression of the authority of "man." The semiotic, however, may be restrained but not extinguished. It does not simply threaten existing structures of identity and signification; it engenders potentially new ways of being. For Baloo, the "Giant Creeper" of the Law may drop inescapably "across everyone's back," but the Bandar-log know different. The vines give them their mobility and their play. They know that the "Giant Creeper" is there for swinging and, in Kristeva's words, taking "from the flank," those very subjects of its phallic entanglement.33

III At first glance, Ursula Le Guin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" and Kipling's Mowgli stories have much in common, at least as far as plot is concerned. In Le Guin's short story; a young American girl is blinded in one eye when the small plane she is traveling in crashes in the desert. She is rescued by Coyote, who, along with the other desert animals, looks after her, heals her wounded eye, and prepares her to return to the familiar world of human beings, of houses and shops, roads and cars. Thus described, it seems a naive tale, until one recalls that Le Guin, drawing on Native American narratives, depicts a coyote who is apt to drop talking turds from whom she seeks advice, and who is also inclined to screw any passing male coyote within sniffing distance, including her own son. Such a heady blend of coprophilia and sexual licentiousness would seem to put a certain distance between Kipling's strict and sober wolves and Le Guin's coyote. Despite these differences, in both cases, a child enters into the society of animals who educate her/him into the ways of the world.

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The rites of passage of these two child protagonists lead; however, to very different visions of the human/animal border. In the Mowgli stories, Kipling attempts to shore up the breaches in this border that his narrative opens up. Though tempted by the dangerous promise of the Bandar-log, Mowgli is "rescued" by the Law. In an albeit reluctant obedience to the imperatives of the symbolic, he quits the jungle and moves to that other country, off-limits to the animal, known as "Man." Le Guin's emphasis is different. Like Kipling, she does not abolish the human/animal border. To do so would be abolish difference itself-a move that would effectively deny nonhuman presence. But in "Buffalo Gals ... "gaps in the human/animal border are allowed to remain open. Le Guin's aim is not to erect fences but to establish crossing places, points of connection, between the human and the animal. In other words, Le Guin tells the same story differently. By alighting on the same themes as Kipling- the metaphors of seeing and gazing, as well as the role of the Law- but from a different perspective, Le Guin's text illustrates in complex and telling ways the crucial importance of the human/animal border. Although both Kipling's and Le Guin's narratives are based on the difference between animal communities and "normative" human communities, the problematic .nature/culture binary (rendered as the opposition between "jungle" and "village") that provides the thematic tension of the Mowgli stories is subject to an even· greater destabilization in "Buffalo Gals ... ". Le Guin presents the difference between the nonhuman and the human in terms of"first people" and "new people."34This difference is not, however, represented as essential, as Le Guin's. description of"first people," the desert animals, shows: "first people" include both indigenous humans and nonhuman animals, who have adapted basketry and other sustainable technologies from their human associates. When Myra, or Gal as she comes to be known, first encounters her rescuing Coyote, only its power of speech marks it out as exceptional. In other respects it, or rather she, appears to be typically Coyote: "It was a big one, in good condition, its coat silvery and thick. The dark tear-line from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat." (IIJ). But Myra is not sure what she sees, for, as Coyote notices right away, she has lost an eye. Le Guin employs Gal's damaged sight as a metaphor for calling into question "civilized" ways of envisaging other life, and also to suggest how the world might be seen differently. Coyote herself is the subject of such a moment of "reseeing," becoming, in effect, a person. At the same time that Gal sees Coyote as Coyote, she also sees her as "a tawny-skinned woman .... The woman's hair was yellow and grey, bound back with a string. Her feet were bare" (20). A little later, Gal's perception of the other animals that inhabit the "little town" (23) in the desert is similarly transfigured. Owl, for example, is described as "broad and tall, with powerful hands, a big head, a short neck," while Doe has "a severely elegant walk, small steps like a woman in high heels, quick, precise, very light" (23-24, 30). However, Le Guin, balances this humanization of her animal subjects with an "animalization"

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of Gal, which means that the animal is not rendered as mere mimic. When Gal asks why all the animals "look like people," Coyote replies that "Resemblance is in the eyes," and goes on to explain, "to me you're basically greyish yellow and run on four legs," but to the Jackrabbits "you hop around twitching your nose all the time" (31). This emphasis on the perception of the other as being conditioned by the predilections of the observer subverts any sense of absolute observer authority. In effect, Gal discovers that neither her own identity, nor those of the "first people" she encounters, can be encompassed within received systems of meaning. In terms of Kristeva's semiotic/symbolic rubric, the symbolic-in the sense both of a unitary consciousness and as the social system that is its corollary-is, in this way, not so much erased as demonumentalized. There is no transcendent "I" that "sees" the world exactly as it is, and that exists independently of the world, but only an "I" in relation to the other(s). For Gal this means facing the dilemma of who she is: The child thought of herself as Gal, but also sometimes as Myra. So far as she knew, she was the only person in town who had two names. She had to think about that, and about what Coyote had said about the two kinds of people; she had to think about where she belonged (34).

In other words, Le Guin suggests how the animal other and the human "I" do not confront one another in a static, hierarchalized binary relation, as "phallocentric civilization" would have us believe. Instead, they interact in what might be called an "ecology of the subject," which is not a ftxed point but a process. This emphasis on process means that Gal's journey, unlike Mowgli's, is not precisely a quest. Although she must eventually return to the industrialized human or "new" world, this return is not represented as a journey to some "higher place." There are no commanding ontological heights from which the world may be objectified. In this sense, "Buffalo Gals ... " puts both the process of signification and the subject who signifies "on trial." Language, especially the language of story, is no longer perceived as a precision instrument by means of which a sovereign cqnsciousness uncovers and names "truth," or arrives at a goal, an endpoint. Le Guin makes much the same point in her essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." Instead of seeing narrative purely in terms of orthodox, "masculine" notions of the "hero" and "conflict," Le Guin makes the case for the story as "receptacle": Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived .as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized as either conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process."35

Le Guin's refusal of stasis means that a valorized notion of (masculine) human identity, perceived as the fulfillment of being (and which Kipling

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invests in Mowgli) is, in "Buffalo Gals ... ," both defused and diffuseddefused from the apogee of the androcentric subject, and diffused along lines, not of authority, or even mimicry, but instead along lines of relationship and resemblance. The animal other is not so other after all. The transformation of Gal's sight also means that the power relationship between the human and the animal is radically altered. Mowgli deflects and shuts out the animal gaze, but Gal must learn to take it in and absorb it as part of her own reorientation. Mowgli, commanding, gazes at Bagheera, but Gal, "yearning," gazes after Coyote (27). It is this reorientation that marks the crucial difference between Kipling's and Le Guin's notions of human and animal subjectivity, a difference which cons}sts not in the simple inversion of hierarchalized identities, but, rather, as a critique of hierarchy itself In obedience to the law that "Man goes to Man" Mowgli must learn to let go of the jungle, transcending the jungle in order to master it. By contrast, Gal's "task" is not to transcend the desert, but to incorporate it, to take it with her. If the animals, or "first people," in "Buffalo Gals ... " are subject to a subtle and telling anthropomorphizing, how are humans or "new people" conceived? Chickadee describes them as "the others ... they live apart. And their places are so heavy. They weigh down on our place, they press on it, draw it, suck it, eat it, eat holes in it, crowd it out .... Maybe after a while there'll only be one place again, their place. And none of us here" (32). The "new people," then, are miners and consumers, colonizers and usurpers representatives of that phallocentric notion of civilization that Le Guin, in her introduction, rejects. However, when Gal refers to the "new people" as "illegal immigrants," Coyote immediately rebuts her by declaring "Illegal is a sick bird. What the fuck's illegal mean?" and goes on to make the not unreasonable point that it is somewhat foolish to expect a code of justice from a coyote (32). This explicit rejection of a legalistic paradigm is in itself striking, given that the "new people" are, as Chickadee laments, responsible for the disappearance of Bison, Antelope, Grizzly, and Gray Wolf (43). This rejection of "law'' and "lawlessness," along with the sibling concepts of legislator, judge, and criminal, also demonstrates how Le Guin's perspective on the interrelationship of the human and the nonhuman differs in significant ways from Kipling's. For Kipling, the law is of fundamental importance in guaranteeing identity, insofar as identity is determined in terms of occupying a designated place and role in the social order. However, Kipling, also hints that in its "creeping inescapability'' the law assumes a profoundly oppressive aspect. In effect, Le Guin brings Kipling's misgivings to their logical conclusion. The "new people," in their exploitation of the desert, of nonhuman life, are not simply agents of the law, but the embodiment of that very ideological perspective that determines the oppositions of human and animal, male and female, law and lawlessness, and thereby licenses the destruction of Chickadee and Coyote's desert home. Seen in this light, Coyote's mocking dismissal of all things

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legal or illegal amounts to a destabilization of the very oppositions by which civilization seeks to found itself For Le Guin, it is not enough to switch subject positions around within the same ideological framework and hope for a kind of emancipatory epiphany. It is the framework itself that needs reenvisaging. For Gal, this task is achieved through the transformation of her sight. Using her human eye and her "animal eye" (presented to her by Coyote as a ball of pine pitch), she sees the world from the perspective of both "first people" and the "new people": "If she shut the hurting eye and looked with the other, everything was clear and flat; if she used .them both, things were blurry and yellowish, but deep" (28). Her hybrid vision means that for Gal the world is no longer subject to an originary and irrevocable taxonomy. The established names for things, which assimilate what is other into received systems of meaning, not only fail to mean but also cause pain. When, at her behest, Horse takes her to the margins of Gal's former world, she is forced to confront the deadening power of names: "It's a ranch," the child said. "That's a fence. There's a lot of Herefords." The words tasted like iron, like salt in her mouth.· The things she named wavered in her sight and faded, leaving nothing-a hole in the world, a burned place like a cigarette burn (40). This questioning, or demonumentalizing, of symbolic, patriarchal authority, does not, however, imply a headlong rush to embrace the semiotic, as if one position might simply be exchanged for another. Le Guin's construction of animality, when defined in opposition to a patriarchal, civilized notion of humanity, does not entail rejoicing in the boundless freeplay and hedonistic amnesia that characterize Kipling's Bandar-log. Such a complete dissolution of identity in the semiotic would mean that the subject risks, in Kristeva's words, "becoming the very mechanism of the chora's operation ... with no signifying substance of its own."3 6 By contrast, Le Guin's animal community has "signifying substance." It is both rooted and coherent. The Bandar-log may lack "remembrance" and "fixity of desire," but Chickadee remembers Bison, Antelope, Grizzly and Gray Wolf Although desire may not be exactly "fixed" in the desert, it has direction. As Chickadee puts it, "it all goes together," but it "goes together" not because it is forced into compliance by the dictates of a sovereign authority (42). Instead of the "Master of the Jungle," Le Guin presents the reader with a spidery "Grandmother" of the desert, a Grandmother Weaver who, as Gal discovers, "was there at the center, at her loom ... making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning" (50). In place of a vertical hierarchy and strictly delineated subject positions, "Buffalo Gals ... " posits the lateral, overlapping warp and weft of the weave. There is, however, one animal in the desert who does not follow established directions, whose desire cannot be "ftxed," and that is Coyote herself As the principal agent of Gal's reorientation, Coyote, Grandmother

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explains, is Gal's guide between the worlds of the "first" and the "new" people (51). By crossing this border, Coyote transgresses it, opening up ruptures and fissures- new and multiple ways of seeing the world- and making visible the "obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itsel£" Here Le Guin draws on Native American narratives that depict Coyote as the supreme trickster whose very comic unruliness opens up the possibility for transformations and becomings.37 Tricky, evasive, shocking, pleasure-loving, unpredictable, and law-denying, Coyote is Le Guin's "Bandar-log," the semiotic made flesh, the heterogeneous other, apt to "destroy accepted beliefs and significations. "3 8 The edifices of law and civilization tremble at her unedifYing approach. She pees in public, scre:ws her own children, and sees the fatal bait of poisoned salmon, which the' "new people" have laid out to kill her, as an "offering" 64, 33, 48).Even more significantly, shit doesn't just happen for Coyote, it talks, and an animal crazy enough to listen to its own shit is crazy enough to go between "the two kinds of people," to cross over, heedless of the authority of either 65). These traversals result in her own death, but then, as Grandmother points out, "she gets killed all the time" (50). And to be killed "all the time," to die without finally dying, is not an event or a goal but a process, mirroring the process of signification in which, through the irruption of the semiotic into the symbolic, meaning is made, disrupted and remade. In effect, the ambiguous and contradictory figure of Coyote performs what Kristeva describes, in terms of the avant-garde textual practice of Mallarme,Joyce, and others, as "significance." For Kristeva this concept is cruciaL Significance registers the impact of the semiotic in "a transformation of natural and social resistances, limitations, and stagnations."39 As a "structuring and destructuringpractice, a passage to the outer boundaries of the subject and society" significance makes change possible.4° In this way, Coyote does not make the world meaningless but meaningful, remodeling the "symbolic order" through "the influx of the semiotic."41 It is Coyote's "tuneless song" of the "outer boundaries," her border howl, that weaves the "web" that holds "the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock's place and the earth together" (48). By substituting the intricate, blurry textuality of the "web" for the transparent but deadening grid of the "law," Le Guin allows for "difference" to be integrated without being abolished. In other words, if the "human" can no longer be enclosed within the symbolic then neither can the "animal" be enclosed within the semioticY Thus the animal is no longer merely the animated shadow of the human unconscious, embodying the "unreason" of nature in contradistinction to the "reason'' of civilization. Indeed, Coyote's shit-listening craziness might be a form of sanity after all. If we, as "new people," perhaps listened to our own shit, that for which civilization has no place, we might be less inclined to visit it on those other lives that are so deeply interwoven with our own, and thereby still find room in the world "out there," as well as in story, for Bison, Antelope, Grizzly; and Gray Wol£ It might also mean that we could

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follow in the footsteps of both Mowgli and Gal, and make a journey not to "Man," but to another place entirely; where, by "connecting with difference," the names of things do not taste "like iron, like salt" in the mouth.

Notes 1. Ursula K. Le Guin, "Introduction" in Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1987), 10. Further references toLe Guin's story will be cited by page numbers enclosed in parentheses. 2. Rudyard Kipling, in Daniel Karlin, ed., The Jungle Books (London: Penguin, 1989). All stories in The Jungle Books reward analysis, but the character of Mowgli, as "child of the jungle," lends my discussion of the human/animal border an especially fine focus.Subsequent references to this work will be cited by page numbers and enclosed in parentheses. 3· Karla Armbruster, "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight: A Poststructuralist Approach to Ecofeminist Criticism," Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3, no. 1 (1996): 19. 4· Ibid., 19. 5· Ibid., 20. 6. Ibid., 20. 7· Sigmund Freud, in Joan Riviere, trans., Civilization and Its Discontents, (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 548. Julia Kristeva, in Margaret Waller, trans., Revolution in Poetic Language, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Until otherwise noted all references to Kristeva are to this text and will be cited by page numbers and enclosed in parentheses. 9· Shamsul Islam, Kipling} Law: A Study ofHis Philosophy ofLife (London: The MacMillan Press, 1975), 123, 12410. John Murray, "The Law of the Jungle Books," Children} Literature, Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children} Literature 20 (1992): } II. Ibid., 4> 5· 12. Islam, Kipling} Law, 5· 13. Julia Kristeva, "From One Identity to an Other" in Leon S. Roudiez, ed., Thomas Gora, Alise Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez trans., Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 137, 133. 14- Ibid., 134, 136. 15. Ibid., 138. r6. Ibid., 140. 17. Ibid. r8. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 43· 19. Ibid., 62. 20. Islam, Kipling} Law, 132. , 21. Ibid., 132. 22. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, "Children's Literature and the Environment" in Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells, eds., Writing The Environment; Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998), 212, 210. 23- Daniel Karlin, introduction to The Jungle Books, 19. 24. Ibid., 9· 25. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 51.

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26. Ibid., 34· Kristeva is here describing the implications of Husserlian phenomenology. Kristeva's thesis is, effectively, a critique ofHusserl. 27. Ibid., 43· 28. Ibid., 48. 29. Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse" in Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds., Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 235, 240. 30. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 136. 31. Ibid., 135. 32. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Men," in Modern literary Theory, 239. 33- Kristeva, "From One Identity to an Other," in Desire in Language, 138. 34- Le Guin, "Buffalo Gals ... ," 32. .. 35· Ursul~ K. Le Guin, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" in Dancing at the Edge ofthe World (London: Victor Gollancz, 1989), 169. 36. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 182. 37· The trickster figure in Native American culture has been widely elaborated by a variety of critics. See, for example, Katrina Peiffer Coyote At Large (UniversityofUtah Press, 2ooo),]ohn Sandlos "The Coyote Came Back: The Return of an Ancient Song Dog in the Post-Colonial Literature and Landscape of North America" (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment) vol 6.2 (Summer 1999) 99-120, Dell H. Hymes, "Coyote, the Thinking (Wo)man's Trickster" in A. James Arnold, ed.,

Monsters, Tricksters and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities,

38. 39· 40. 41. 42.

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). Hymes, in particular, makes an interesting point when he argues that, as far as the Native American trickster figure is concerned, it is "a mistake to characterize all tricksters, or even the trickster of a particular society, in the same way" (no). That Coyote can thus be seen as eluding its own stereotype serves to emphasize its very "trickiness" as a narrative figure. Kristeva, "From One Identity to an Other," in Desire in Language, 133. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 17. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 62. Kristeva herself maintains an implicit human/animal distinction, arguing that on the "other side" of human sociality "is the a-symbolic, the dissolution of order, the erasing of differences, and finally the disappearance of the human in animality." In this respect, my discussion aims to unfold Kristeva's thesis in ways that challenge this assumption. See Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 76.

CHAPTER II

To THE OTHER: THE ANIMAL AND DESIRE IN MICHAEL FIELD'S

WHYM CHow: FLAME OF LovE David Banash

Michael & I love Chow as we have loved no human being -Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (The Michael Fields) There is an entire politics ofbecoming-animal, as well as a politics ofsorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family, nor of religion, nor ofthe state. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt; or always on the fringe ofrecognized institutions. - Deleuze and Guattari

here is a growing critical interest in M.ichael Field, and it should come as no surprise. Few overlooked poets of the nineteenth century offer both lives and works so relevant to the urgencies and vocabularies of cultural criticism and identity politics. Throughout their thirty-year partnership, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper challenged, escaped, or reinvented the definitions and roles available to women in the fin-de-siecle. While their intense connection to each other was socially sanctioned by the fact that they were aunt and niece, they reinvented these roles as they developed a relationship as lovers. As poets, they took the name Michael Field, writing and publishing verse dramas and collections of poetry that trouble both traditional notions of authorship and gender. Throughout their career they were tireless supporters of animal rights as active members of the anti-vivisection movement. Thus, just as their lives and work challenge traditional ideas about the family and heterosexual normativity, they also question the all too human presumption that homo sapiens has the right to inflict its will on the other creatures of the world. The growing critical recuperation of Michael Field in the work of Yopie Prins, Christine White, Holly Laird, and others has focused on the transgressive nature of their lives and the pivotal role of Sappho in their poetry. 1 However, as I hope to demonstrate in this paper,

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such humanist concerns and precursors were not the only ways in which the Michael Fields reinvented themselves. In their last and perhaps strangest poetic work, Whym Chow: Flame of Love, the Michael Fields explore and celebrate their complex relationship with their beloved dog, the Chow of the title. Using the critical analysis of human-animal relationships developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I will argue that the animal was an important part of the Fields' developing relationship and a impassioned challenge to humanistic, identic thought.

Becoming-Animal and the Affective Body The book Whym Chow: Flame of Love is composed of thirty poems. Written late in the Fields' career, in anticipation of their Catholic conversion, and shortly after the death of their dog, the book is ostensibly an elegiac series of meditations, each devoted to the Chow. However, to see this dog as simply a sentimentalized pet misses the sense of these poems. As Field puts it in "Trinity," the fifth poem, "It is to feel we loved in trinity, I To tell thee that I loved him as Thy Dove I .Is loved and is Thy own" (V 4-6). 2 But if this is not simply gratuitous sentimentality, how should we read it? When Whym Chow has been read at all, usually in the context of biographies or notes, it has been in the form of passing comments on an oddity of the Fields' career. Mary Sturgeon's 19i2 biography suggests that Whym Chow is a selfless vision of Catholic poets as they come to "realize sacrifice as the supreme good."3 Or, in a very different register, Emma Donoghue's 1998 biography suggests, "Whym features as a sex symbol and god made flesh, the masculine principal joined with their womanhood in a mystic trinity."4The essentialist language of Donoghue's passing comment is almost as problematic as Sturgeon's uncritical invocation of Catholicism. While themes of both Catholic sacrifice and male/female oppositions do run through the poems, in proximity to the animal Other we would do better to follow Deleuze's and Guattari's suggestion to find our nonhuman sexes. The most unusual aspect of the Whym Chow poems is the dog's role as a condition of possibility. Consider the final line of "Trinity," which characterizes the dog as the "Bearer of Love's interchange" (V 18). In other words, it is through the dog that the speaker and beloved enact their relationship. In this, we see something remarkable in Michael Field. Rather than the revision of the poetic tradition with its attendant focus on creating a language to articulate lesbian desire, here the lovers reinvent and enact their passion through the mediating body of their beloved dog. In proximity to the animal Other, the Fields find a space of possibilities to transform themselves. For Deleuze and Guattari, the figure of the animal, especially when it appears in literature, often indicates a becoming-animal of human subjects. A becoming-animal does not take the form of an imitation of the

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animal, nor does the animal become an archetypal figure; rather, the presence of the animal creates a space of possibilities, "which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become a proximity, an indiscernibility that extracts a shared element from the animal far more effectively" than any "imitation could."5 In Whym Chow there is no suggestion that the lovers imitate the animal, and the animal is not simply a symbol corresponding to their love. Instead, as "Trinity'' makes clear, this strange triangle allows the lovers to "feel" (V 4). The emphasis on the corporeal response, the capacity to feel, is an indication that the stakes here are rooted in the body and its capacities. The importance of this alterian bpdy is indicated in the Fields' journal: "our new love of animals is a desire to get into another kingdom." 6 Here, the animal offers a line of flight, a liberation of desire. In this other kingdom, the lives and work of the Michael Fields are open to the proximity of nonhuman capacities and desires. In short, the animal provides a new possibility for the lovers of the poems to develop, experience, and articulate an emotional intensity for each other- an intensity inconsistent with heterosexual, patriarchal definitions and expectations of women. The proximity of the dog and its function as an intensification and legitimation of desire between the two lovers is not an isolated image in "Trinity," but a consistent theme throughout the poems. In "Sleeping Together: Sleep," the speaker further develops this theme. As the lovers sleep they feel "The lull of thy breath on the air/ That held the lull of our breath there" (XXII 2-3). In this image, the exhalations of the two women mingle with that of the dog, underscoring their intimacy with the animal. Further, the image emphasizes the most basic corporeal sign of life, breath itsel£ This initial image thus functions to deemphasize the traditional difference between human and animal. In foregrounding breath, it equates human and dog through what is common to both, somatic experience. Though the poem initially takes this image in terms of sleep, it gives way to the morning in which the dog and the lovers begin a new day: To see thee greet us with the good Of such nature.as could hold· Thee so eager, bright and bold, We with all our deeds and dreams Re-illumed, as were the gleams Of thy savoring body, till Complement of power did fill Thee and us, that side by side We in newness might abide. (XXII rS-26)

Hete, the speaker emphasizes that the dog is constantly with the two lovers, both as they sleep and awaken. The dog is presented as "bright and bold," greeting the new day and the lovers. The attitude of the dog is further equated with the power of the sun and the potential of a new day. Just as the sun reillumines the world in the morning, the body of the dog, "side by side" with the lovers, makes it possible for the lovers to "abide" in

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"newness" as they are all filled with a "complement of power." Perhaps more powerfully than in any of the poems, the speaker emphasizes the proximity of the animal and its omnipresent role in the relationship of the two lovers, thus associating the animal with a space of possibility for a new experience of love. While poems such as this certainly indicate the shared somatic experience and intimacy between the lovers and the animal, shouldn't the power they ascribe to the dog be dismissed as simple anthropomorphism? The charge could certainly be made, but in Deleuze and Guattari's theory we find potential anticipation and response to such a problem. Following Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari argue, "we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or be destroyed by it, either to. exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body."? If bodies are defined by their "affects," by what they can do, the process of human socialization is to select certain affective modes and coordinate those with various categories: Man, Woman, Homosexual, Child, and so on. Each of these bodies is defined by what it does, yet the range of affects assigned to each of these categories is quite limited compared to the affective capacities of most bodies. Here, the problem is strategic: how does an individual body break out of the assigned limits? If the category Woman is associated with the affective capacities of heterosexuality, how to move beyond it, to articulate and enact other desires? For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal is one possible strategy. In its most literal sense, becoming-animal means that one body perceives, abstracts, and then uses the affects of a different body in concert with its own. In this process the individual perceives a certain capacity in another body (the physical and emotional intensity of the dog), abstracts these affects (the possibility of such literally animalistic emotional-physical intensity between the two lovers of the poem) and then actualizes the affects in its life (the speaker becomes-dog by actualizing the flame-like intensity in her own body and orienting it toward the body of the beloved). In essence, the human can become animal to the extent that the animal becomes something else-.a set of affects and intensities. In his remarkable article, "Six Notes on the Percept (On the relation between the Critical and the Clinical)," Fran~ois Zourabichvili further explains Deleuze's and Guattari's idea of animal-becomings. "fW}e ourselves become-flower, become-whale: there is obviously no room to suppose this is life as it is experienced by the flower or the whale (to the reproach of anthropomorphism, we can only respond: yes, of course; but this is hot the problem ...); it is the resonance of their life in our own, becoming one of its possibilities, one of its levels." 8 For Zourabichvili, it is a matter of understanding animal-becomings as "a truly vitalist knowledge" that would "answer the following question: where, at this precise instant,

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is the other [animal} to which I am related, which I pursue and in relation to which my life is played out (becoming)?"9 Here, Zourabichvili emphasizes the possibility for a relation to an animal to become transformative since the animal provides the human another reference from which to gauge what sort of life is possible beyond the disciplinary sensibility located in the categories of socialization. For Deleuze and Guattari, affects are impersonal; they are merely so many potentials that a body has to exert or submit to various forces. Insofar as the Chow is presented as an affective .animal, it is not a dog at all, but rather an abstract set of affects. In these poems, the dog becomes a body capable of sustaining a love intensity comparable to a flame. In the poem "Liberal Love," the speaker describes the dog as a "gift of fire" that has "what human hearts will scarcely give" (XXIII 18, 22). The speaker explains that this flame of nonhuman intensity is not encumbered by the guilt of"covetousness," but capable "by fire to live/ Even as the universe! 0 God praise, praise!" (XXIII 12, 23-24). The speaker perceives that the dog lives unencumbered by the guilt and regulated libidinal exchanges of a socialized human. Since the body of the dog lacks such constraints, its body is capable of sustaining greater intensities, intensities as impersonal and unencumbered as those of the universe itsel£ Recognizing this freedom, and its difference from a human experience, the speaker ends by praising God for the existence of the dog. The idea of the dog as a flame of emotional intensity is consistent throughout the poems. In "I want you, little Love, Not From the Skies," the speaker further develops this image: I want you with your resolute, fine jaw Snapped down to hold one love, one love no more, Not mine, but hers we love: your glance, the spark Prometheus stole as fire, A little thing that could remove the dark It lived through, making of its haunt a pyre; A glance with wayward shifting of pure flame And strength to found a Temple-hearth, be tame To worship, but to other curbing wild, Nor to sky robbing earth yet reconciled. (XXV n-20)

In this poem, the dog is again presented as a body of flame, as a body capable of a tremendous. emotional intensity. However, this intensity is not located in some essential or abstract spirit, but in the dog's body itself-in its eyes and jaw. In short, the capacity for love is present to the extent that it is expressed by the actions of the body. This power of the body is further emphasized since the affective capacity of the dog is equated with the myth of Prometheus; rather than the fire of divine knowledge, the dog is animated by a fire of emotional intensity. But the speaker is cautious as well, for while the dog may have the affective capacities of intense emotion, it must remain nonhuman-wild-if it is to sustain such intensities.

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In this poem, as in others, a delicate balance between the inhuman affective capacities of the animal is juxtaposed with the possibility that those intensities could be corrupted by the human. However, if the dog might be humanized in a negative sense, it is also possible for the dog to function as a liberating and positive dehumanizing element for the speaker. In the first lines of the stanza, the speaker uses the word "love" to conjoin three different potentials. In the first instance, the "love" refers to the potential power of the dog's body, literally its jaw. However, this love is directed toward the beloved of the poem, since the dog holds the beloved's hand in its jaw. The potential power of the dog's body is thus focused on the beloved of the poem. The speaker of the poem then equates herself with the power of the dog, uniting both herself and the dog as lovers of the beloved. Playing on multiple senses of the word "love," the speaker demonstrates the function of the animal in articulating and developing the relationship of the lovers through nonhuman affects. While the previous two poems underscore the affects of the Chow, their difference from human capacities is further emphasized in "Out of the East." Here, their distance from an occidental speaker is emphasized by locating the origins of the Chow in "fuming China hoary'' (VII 4). Yet while the distance between the dog and the human speaker is emphasized by a cultural and geographical orientalism, the speaker employs these terms to suggest something else that begins to emerge in the second and third stanzas of the poem. And from thy glinted eye what lust of eye, What joy in having joy to thy desire, What potency out of thy gold to fashion Thy slaves to aptness for each regal passion, What ambush and what ease of rampant fire! What somnolence of ancient cruelty! And what endowment of what frenzied joy, That our cold flesh of the Hesperides Can reach not, ... eyes and teeth and feet all blended In pomp of dithyramb that only ended By sleep, through which the god remitting frees His votary from fire-flames that destroy. (VII 7-18)

In the second stanza, the speaker reads in the body of the dog capacities for "lust," "joy," "passion," "desire," and "potency." The capacity to experience these intensities begins with the dog's eye. It is "from the eye" that the dog reveals this capacity for lust. After making this observation, the speaker reflects that it must be a great joy in simply being free from constraints in experiencing as powerful a passion as lust. The speaker emphasizes the affirmative sense of this evaluation in the repetition of the word "joy" itsel£ Echoing the eye of the first line, the second line becomes an exclamation: "What joy ... joy ...."Next, the speaker explains that the dog possess a "potency" in its ability to "fashion/Thy slaves in aptness for each

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regal passion." The "slaves" of the line refer to what the dog fashions out of the "gold" that earlier served as a reference to his fur; literally, the slaves are parts of the dog's body itsel£ In this poem, as in the others, we see a speaker mapping the capacities of the dog, redefining love and emotion in completely somatic terms, and mobilizing the body of the dog in the articulation of a love relationship. In the third stanza, the "frenzied joy" of the animal is contrasted with "our cold flesh of the Hesperides," that "can reach not," that cannot equal the affective intensities of the animal. The ellipses that follow are important though. While the speaker has recognized the radical differences between the intensity of the dog and the "cold flesh" of the human lovers, the ellipses leave room for the possibility that the lovers may be able to reach something like the intense state of the animal. They leave open the possibility that insofar as the dog has become a set of abstract affects, the lovers may also continue to develop the affective range of their own bodies, thus becoming-animal themselves.

The Possible Lives of Becoming-Animal In the fourth poem of the book, "0 Dionysus, at Thy Feet," the speaker presents one of the first developed examples of the intensity between the two lovers, which is articulated through the proximity of the dog. The speaker, addressing Dionysus on the death of the Chow, urges the god to both receive the dog and help the lovers continue their passionate relationship: He loved thy torch of vivid flame, He loved the breath of life, the rush, the glance Of eyes from inmost happiness, and splendid His glow as on his Joyance he attended With countenance Of merchant over jewels of deep fame Receive him, tragic god of tendrilled fireOur sweetest, let us rove and rove with him. We pledged him in thy grape. Leave us not lonely! But bring him and thy wine-cup with thee onlyOur Chow, Our Whym, And thirst should end, and passion bind desire. (IV 13-23) In these two stanzas the speaker again presents the affective capacity of the dog to engage in a tremendous, bacchic-like emotional intensity. The dog is associated not only with the Greek god, but also with joy and flame. Thus, the speaker abstracts from the individual dog impersonal affects. The second stanza however, is curious. As the speaker asks the god to receive the dog, the god is a god of "tendrilled fire." But they plead that this god of fire-like intensity should not leave them lonely after the death of the dog, but that they should somehow be reunited. For the two lovers

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it is the presence of the dog, and the dog's association with the intensity of the god's wine that allows "thirst to end, and passion to bind desire." Here, it is the last lines that are the crux of the becoming. The desire that the lovers have for each other must be bound in passion. In this formulation, desire remains abstract, something that cannot assume bacchic intensity without a relationship to the intensity of the dog. In terms of becoming-animal, this is a significant moment in the book. Earlier in this poem the dog was described in terms of "joy," a "beauteous reveller," and "our joy" (IV 2). Now, after the dog's death, the speaker realizes that the figure of the dog provides a modality to translate an abstract or virtual desire into an active and concertized passion as the lovers assume the affective capacities of the dog for worship in a bacchic sense. Here, we see the promise of the ellipsis from "Out of the East." In order to articulate their intensity and passion, the lovers must maintain a relationship to what they have perceived as possible through the dog. This adoption of the dog's affective capacities is further developed in the poem "My Loved One is Away from Me." In this poem, the speaker and the Chow wait for the beloved of the poem to return home. In the first stanzas of the poem the speaker describes waiting impatiently for the beloved to return. Here, both the speaker and the dog are filled with desire to see the beloved again: "Your eyes burnt signals, mine/ Sprang the same flambeaux the same aid to reach" (IX i9-20). Though these lines established a kind of equivalence between the speaker and the dog, the role of the dog in articulating and legitimating such intense feelings is emphasized as the lover returns in the sixth stanza: For, lo, our loved One surely came, Lo, she was at the door! Your eyes demanded Yes, in running flame; Mine gave them yes-no more: And we reached our vigil's end in gladness Of so great ease from terror it seemed madness. (IX 30-35)

In this stanza, the speaker describes how the dog has the capacity to act more directly on its desire than the human speaker. While the dog experiences an immediate and total feeling that takes the form of a "running flame," the speaker has eyes that say only "yes" to the same desire. As in many of the other poems, here the dog presents the possibility of expressing the desire that both share for the beloved at a physical level. The movement of the poem in terms of becoming is more complex in the last stanza, for in this final stanza the dog has died, and the speaker addresses the absent animal: My loved one is away-my cry! Be at my side, unseen, Alert, like strange Anubis, toward the sky, As you so oft have been.

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0 Chow, my little love, you watch above her, Watch still beside me, be with me her lover! (IX 42-47)

Now the positions of the animal and the speaker are somewhat reversed, or, rather, the speaker has mobilized the now-absent figure of the dog to articulate how she enters into a direct relationship with the beloved. Since the dog is gone, it has become an abstract expression or synecdoche for desire, like Anubis. But now, the lover is able to assume the active position that the dog held earlier. Instead of merely watching the dog approach the lover from the passive position of the spectator, the speaker moves to the imperative-"be with me her lover." Here, the language of the poem itself reflects the now passive "still" body of the dog while the speaker has become the active agent, engaging the beloved as lover and entreating the absent dog to also enter into this relationship again. This recalls the dog's capacity for such a love relationship and underscores the importance of the dog in the speaker's ability to assume the active position. Throughout, this poem emphasizes the role of the dog in mediating desire between the lovers and legitimating that desire through example. Through the presence of the dog, the speaker moves toward the active position of last line of the poem. By the end of the poem, the speaker has entered into a becominganimal that literally creates for the speaker a position of active desire. The active position of the speaker at the end of "My Loved One is Away from Me" is also echoed in the poem "Created." Though this poem is a meditation on the pain of the human realization of mortality, it is also another example of the human's assuming the freedom of desire the dog possessed. In the first two stanzas the speaker concentrates on the realization of the limits of a corporeal life: "Thou wert held in capture fraught/ With Sweet sacrifice" (XVII 15-16). Though this is hardly a new sentiment, what becomes far more interesting in terms of a becoming-animal is the final stanza in which the speaker reflects on the experience of the dog in creating a new sense of the possibilities of life that, in the physical absence of the dog, the speaker is still in the process of realizing: For all that is created bears A limit scarcely to be borne, Till out of it, though unawares, A Spirit of new life is drawn: So thy love's unfettered soul Deathless though thy body stole, Levying on thy days its toll Of subjection- So to-day Dead, thou takest living way, And with my soul its freedom shares. (XVII

21-30)

In this final stanza, the usual and cliched sentiment of mortality is transformed into the possibility of life. The speaker laments the death of the, dog, but emphasizes that out of the dog's death came a "new life."That

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new life is the possibility for the speaker, once again, to experience a more intense and direct life because the speaker's relationship with dog provided a different vision of what kind of life is possible. This idea is most concretely stated in the final lines of the poem when the speaker states, '.'Dead, thou takest living way;/And with my soul its freedom shares." In these final lines, the emphasis is certainly on the possibility for the speaker to realize in her life the kind of life the dog articulated because that life is now part of the speaker's perception. This resonance of possibilities created by the dog and their realization in the life of the speaker is further emphasized in one of the last poems of the book. Though this poem focuses more explicitly on the animal's death, it too returns to the theme of possibility and legitimation of alterian desire. In the opening lines of the poem, "When Others Are About Me and the Lips," the speaker explains the extent of her grief over the dog's death. Then the first two stanzas go on to describe how others urge her to forget about her grie£ However, the speaker refuses to leave the memories and grief behind. Yet, rather than being simply self-indulgent or melodramatically sentimental, the speaker offers a reason why she feels so much for this dog: As Sea Birds for their prey beneath the sea: Then sudden with a single heed, I sink down where my whole desire would be, Where I would find my unseen life and feed; Lost in my heart my pinions seek their food; My heart, a silver sea's infinitude. (XXVI 19-24)

Using the image of a bird that must dive beneath the water to find its prey, the speaker explains that she too finds her life in the life of the dog. The power of the dog to provide life is underscored by this image. The birds must hunt the fish under the water simply to stay alive. Similarly, it is a matter of life for the speaker to remember the dog. However, unlike the birds, for the speaker it is a question of which life, of what kind oflife. The key line here is, "Where I would find my unseen life and feed." Here, the dog represents the unseen life of the speaker, or, rather, the possibility to experience life in a different way, to actualize other affective capacities that would be obscured by the more normal life that the others in the poem urged the spealcer to pursue. Rather than returning to the rigid and normalized life of the seen, the speaker finds in this unseen life her "whole desire." Again, the dog has helped the speaker to reconceive desire in modes outside the norms. In the final image, the speaker's heart, which is the seat of her desire, has become a vast sea that offers "infinitude." But, rather than the infinity of death, or the finitude of quotidian life, the speaker has found the infinite possibilities of desires that extend beyond the world of the seen. The speaker has entered into a becoming with the dog that has swept her into a world unrecognized by others.

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The Politics ofBecoming-Animal The book Whym Chow: Flame of Love is an ironic book. Ostensibly the book is a series of meditations on death. An unsympathetic reader might even say these poems are almost comic in their inflated eloquence since the subject was simply a sort of family pet. But such readings only make sense in terms of the seen life; they cannot touch the unseen possibilities that the Fields came to perceive in their dog. Encoded in the Fields' perception is an entire politics, a politics of becoming-animal as a strategy to develop and legitimate alternative forms of desire. Rather than a book of death, this is a book of lives and desires that were reaching for new languages and new bodies.

Notes I.

The growing critical conversation about the work of Michael Field has generated numerous articles. The following were pivotal in shaping my own reading of Michael Field's poetry: Holly Laird, "Contradictory Legacies: Michael Field and Feminist Restoration," Victorian Poetry 33: 2 (1995), III-I25; Yopie Prins, "Sappho Doubled," Yale Journal of Criticism 8: r (1995), r65-i86, and Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Christine White, " 'Poets and Lovers Evermore': Interpreting Female Love Poetry in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field," Textual Practice 4: 2 (1990), 197-212.

Michael Field, Whym Chow: Flame of Love (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healy Poetry Full-text Database, 1992). < http://lion.chadwyck.com > (5 June 2000). Henceforth all references to these poems will be cited in parentheses. 3· Mary Sturgeon, Michael Field (London: Harrap, 1922), 54· 4· Emma Donoghue, ~ Are Michael Field (Somerset: Absolute Books, 2.

1998), !22.

5· Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in Brian Massumi, trans. A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 279· 6. Qtd. in Donoghue, ~Are Michael Field, 97· 7· Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 257. 8. Fran<;ois Zourabichvili, "Six Notes on the Percept (On the Relation between the Critical and the Clinical)," in Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 191. 9· Ibid., 189.

CHAPTER 12

"IDENTIFYING WITH THE ANIMALS": LANGUAGE, SUBJECTIVITY, AND THE ANIMAL PoLITics oF MARGARET ATwooD's SuRFACING Robert McKay

Introduction nimals are prevalent in Margaret Atwood's early work, whatever the genre. Images of identification with slaughtered cows and hunted rabbits proliferate throughout The Edible WOman, and in Lady Oracle a "con-create artist" makes sculptures from squashed animals that prefigure the contemporary animal-based art of Damien Hirst, Mark Dion, and Bruce Nauman. Atwood discusses "animal victims" as paradigmatic in Canadian literature in her critical work Survival, and she insists in "Don't Expect the Bears to Dance" that "zoos make her nervous."1 Perhaps most ubiquitously in her poetry, Atwood provides "a multitude of animals of diverse generic and aesthetic kinds," as Kathleen Vogt has noted. 2 Despite this recurring fascination with the animal in Atwood's work, there has yet to be an exploration of the animal politics of her fiction. It is often noted that Atwood's protagonists, in Barbara Hill Rigney's words, "find it difficult to eat animals," a fact which probably lies behind Atwood's comment, "people are always asking me if I'm a vegetarian {and} they are astonished when I tell them that I am carnivorous."3However, thus far no one has explored the discrepancy indicated by this vignette to ask how Atwood's world might contain such opposing possibilities. This is my aim here, for I want to argue in a discussion of Surfacing that Atwood's novel entails an animal politics that is remarkably complex and instructive, primarily because it is marked by the vital importance oflanguage to the production of human subjectivity, and second because it traces the implications of this fact for our relationships with animals. My intention,

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in the second section of this essay, is to read Atwood's animal politics in part through the lens ofJudith Butler's influential work on the discursive production of sex and sexuality. To facilitate this discussion, though, I first introduce the terms at issue here by exploring the implications of Butler's work for pro-animal theory as expounded by the feminist writers Carol]. Adams andJosephine Donovan.

Pro-Animal Politics, Feminism, and the Body Adams and Donovan explain the reasoning behind the influence of feminism on pro-animal theory that has developed throughout the 1990s: It could be argued that theorising about animals is inevitable for feminism. Historically, the ideological justification for women's alleged inferiority has been made by appropriating them to animals: from Aristotle on, women's bodies have been seen to intrude upon their rationality. 4

The key critical term here, of course, is the body. Feminist writings of the 1970s and 198os reappraised cultural notions of the body by disputing the masculinism and somatophobia inherent in enlightenment humanism; these writings have proved of paramount worth in constructing contemporary pro-animal theory. Indeed, as Adams herself writes, the problem is not just that "women are equated with animals' bodies, for instance in pornography, but also that animals are equated with their bodies. "5 This focus on the wholesale repudiation of all bodily matters in the construction of the hegemonic idea (or, perhaps more accurately, ideal) of humanity as essentially rational ensures that the body serves as the all-important ground for a politics that appeals to an even wider constituency than feminism per se. Stating that the "connections between the abuse of women and the abuse of animals make explicit that somatophobia applies to species as well as gender, race and class interactions" (xp), Adams argues for a pro-animal politics based on the recognition of"interlocking systems of domination": racism, sexism, classism, and speciesism. The intersection of these systems is visible precisely because of the perception of somataphobia as foundational for each. An apt condensation of Adams's "progressive, anti-racist defence of animals" (78-84) can be found in her belief, "dismantling somatophobia involves respecting the bodily integrity of all who have been equated with bodies" (x6x). Given its roots in feminist body politics, we might helpfully think of Adams's view, then, as an animal-body politics. Looking a little more closely at Adams's conceptualization of the body, though, the first thing I want to note is the way that the body is posited as having an "integrity" thatis prior to and then obscured by somatophobic discourse. This discourse, she argues, underpins the oppressive logic of Western culture. Jacques Derrida has provided an abbreviated term for this logic in the word "phallogocentrism," though this term is rarely if ever

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explicitly used by Adams and Donovan. 6 That the functioning of Adams's pro-animal feminism requires a notion of the body-before-discourse becomes clear if we consider that she thinks of her methodology as ideological critique, exposing the flawed, obfuscatory, or contradictory logic inherent in Western culture's hierarchical denial of the (animal) body. Her stated intention in Neither Man nor Beast is to expose the "ideology that ontologizes animals as usable" and to make "the ideology and material reality of corpse production visible, to denaturalize it." Such consciousnessraising exposition allows Adams to posit, "when the concept of species is seen as a social construction, an alternative social construction that recognizes animals as a subordinated social group, rather than naturally usable, becomes apparent" (15, n4). Here, Adams is aware enough of her own implication in this usage of ideological critique to recognize that she cannot simply appeal to an extra-discursive truth, noting instead the social construction of her own pro-animal position. Nonetheless, theodes of ideology require a ground on which such social constructions are built and Adams serves notice that this ground is the ontological and ethical integrity of the body. In her clear statement of the feminist pro-animal position, she argues: We reject a cultural construction of some bodies as so completely and solely matter that their bodies become immaterial, unimportant. Animals' bodies do matter . . .. We affirm that we all share the same universe in which we are a community of subjects-no matter how fragmented the notion of the subject-not a collection of otherwise objects. In this way we respond with integrity, respecting bodies. (13)

Thus Adams reclaims the integrity of the animal body from speciesist ideological constructions. Theoretically, her argument echoes the reclamation of the female body through the division of sex and gender that facilitated second-wave feminism's critique of traditionally conceived femininity. Adams also invokes the bodily essentialism for which the division of sex and gender has come under increasing scrutiny in the past decade or so. Therefore, it is particularly fascinating (if perhaps unintentional) that Adams's affirmation so clearly evokes the title of Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter (1993). This work is itself prefaced by the notion not only that gender, but that the supposedly natural category of biological sex itself is constructed, that "bodies are in some way constructed."? Butler's compelling (and by now famous) thesis radicalizes the theory of social construction at issue in my discussion thus far, placing a question mark over both the straJghtforward critique of speciesism as ideology and the concomitant pro-animal appeal to the integrity of the animal body. Her thesis also goes some way toward explaining the inadequacy of such ideological critique fully to capture the sociodiscursive othering of women and animals. Rapidly to recapitulate Butler's thesis, gender is not simply an ideological imposition upon the uncodified human body; rather, "the matrix of

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gender relations is prior to the emergence of 'the human' " (7). The key point is that, indeed, we are not always-already human, but that in order to "be" at all, we must "become" human by passing through the enculturating mechanism of gender. Biological sex, then, is "not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the 'one' becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility" (2). Butler's development of this claim is worth quoting at length, not least for its focus on the conceptual category of the human-always important for theorizing the animal, the most persistent other of humanity: The construction of gender operates through exclusionary means, such 'that the human is not only produced over and against the inhuman, but through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation. Hence, it is not enough to claim that human subjects are constructed, for the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and less "human," the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the "human" as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation. (8) The point here is not just that the category of"the human" or "humanity" is a cultural construction, in which. one specific type of biologically marked body is valued via a set of arbitrarilyfositive-coded cognitive abilities (e.g., rationality, language, or tool-use) ; this recognition has been a touchstone for pro-animal thought, and is something that animal advocates who would see political advantage in the point "humans are animals too" have long recognized. Rather, Butler's analysis further indicates that such easy equations of human and nonhuman animal, based as they are on a fantasy of essential communion between the two on the level of the ethical integrity or equality of the body, miss a fundamental point. Indeed, "becoming human"- if we take that to mean developing even the most basic form of identity within the social field of human interactionrequires passing into "that field of discourse and power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as 'the human' " (8). To make explicit this exclusionary logic: being-human in a fundamental sense means not-being-animal. For Butler, whose main interest is the functioning of compulsory heterosexuality, the primary effect of this field of discourse is seen most clearly when we look to "those abjected {human} beings who do not appear properly gendered; it is their very humanness that comes into question" (8). All of us are compelled to become "properly'' gendered, because otherwise we would not become "properly" human: such is the logic of the discursive production of sex. This thesis has two unstated implications, however. The first is that it is absolutely unavoidable that we become human, for it is only by the force of this inevitability that subjects can be compelled towards "correct" gendering. The second is that this necessity is

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cultural rather than biological: our being-human is not simply a function of species but instead is a cultural imperative, just like gender, to which we are necessarily obliged to accede. Bearing this in mind, the focus of the pro-animal theorist will be slightly different from Butler's analysis of gendering. She somewhat rests on her laurels in that she fails to extend the critique of heterosexism inherent in the binary gendering of human beings to the speciesism of a field of discourse that relies on the category of the "inhuman" to police that effective gendering. This omission is surprising, since one of Butler's most powerful claims, which prefigures Adams's emphasis on interlocking systems of domination noted earlier, is that she does "the important work of thinking through the ways in which ... vectors of power deploy each other for the purposes of their own articulation" (!8).9 Extending Butler's purview, I would want to look for ways to work against the suggestion that our becoming-human is unavoidable. For, to paraphrase Butler herself, it is surely possible to find people in the realm of pro-animal politics (ethical vegetarians, e.g) who are "not properly humanized," at least in the sense that to become human is to become the other of the animal. Notwithstanding this blind spot regarding speciesism, however, Butler's consistent focus on the productive exclusionary power of discourse itself suggests an important critical development for the pro-animal feminism I have described. For as Butler makes clear, not all beings of the human species get to enter the "community of subjects," which Adams would like to see include humans and animals. Indeed the very notion of a community of fully human subjects is founded on exclusion: not only of animals but also of a whole gamut of social alterities. A list (which is, logically speaking, limitless if every community is founded on exclusion) would extend well beyond the oft-cited class, gender, race, and sexuality to include any others who do not match the conventional typology of humanism: children, criminals, and the mentally ill, for example. Butler's reading, then, marks a shift from an understanding of social injustice based on ideology. Following her, I have suggested that speciesism is inherent to the discursive production of the human. Ideological critique, on the other hand, imagines that speciesism as a cultural ideology obfuscates a "truer" relationship to the reality of the animal world. For pro-animal feminism as I have described it, such a relationship is the equality of humans and animals due to the integrity of the body-before-discourse. It is this relationship that provides the bedrock for a community of equal subjects based on total inclusion: essentially a community of sameness, rather than one that accepts otherness, whether it is of species or sexuality. Rejecting these implications of ideological reasoning, Butler's analysis offers instead the hint of a pro-animal politics that responds to her insistence that "every discourse operates through exclusion" (189). Such a politics will no longer have the notion of the integrity of the body on which to rely, but my claim is that it will be all the more rigorous for that.

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The reconfiguration of the influential pro-animal feminism of Adams and Donovan via Butler is then, amongst other things, a readjustment in critical focus from "the body'' to "discourse." This shift inevitably involves a parallel change toward post-structuralist and psychoanalytically influenced feminism-the critical method that most consistently inquires into the relationship between discourse and the body. As my analysis thus far makes clear, this relationship is fundamental in reading the politics of human-animal relationships. To be sure, such a development has its drawbacks, since theories such as Butler's that insist on the discursive nature of social relations of power, have a tendency to slide into a linguistic essentialism that is not far from the humanism they would critiqu~. This slippage presupposes (or enacts) the exclusion of animals from the "community of subjects" that the pro-animal critic attempts to redress. In a later text, Butler asks: "can we imagine a subject apart from his or her linguistic bearing?" She concludes, "it seems that this linguistic bearing might well qualify as something essential ... without which they could not be said to exist." 10 Such a circumscribing of subjectivity within the human-linguistic realm would seem to ignore the many developments in understanding of primates' and other species' subjectivities, even though these results of studies in primatology or cognitive ethology have found broad cultural recognition via the discourse of popular natural history. Nonetheless, pro-animal theory can benefit profoundly from Butler's sophisticated brand of feminist discussion. Therefore, my aim in the next section is to delineate the ways in which the animal politics of Surfacing exemplify the problems inherent in the appeal to an ethics of the bodybefore-discourse. In my third and final section, I will look to the alternatives that the novel offers for pro-animal theory, chiming as they do with Butler's notion of a politics that acknowledges how all communities of subjects are formed through exclusion.

Language, "Being Human" and the Sacrifice of the Animal: · The Animal Politics of Surfacing During the r98os, in resonance with the feminism of the time, the critical focus on Surfacing was valuably shifted from a blunt reading of the novel as a revision of myth and indigenous religion or as an analysis of Canadian cultural nationalism. Instead, critics began to see this novel as a feminist search for the maternal body in language. Sherrill Grace condenses this theme in describing the book as a drama of the "discovery, articulation and recovery'' of the "lost, silent mother."rr This is an apt description, as far as it goes. However, Grace does not explore the way in which Atwood delicately tests the possibility of achieving such a conclusion. In fact, to this maternal quest the novel counterpoints the female narrator's search for her father, a search that also leads her away from her mother. For in the good tradition of the psychoanalytic description of Oedipal subject development, if the narrator's mother equates to the maternal body

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always-to-be recovered by the speaking subject, the search for her father in Surfacing figures her drive toward a place in the symbolic order of language. Now, complicating this tidy Lacanian schema, and of vital importance to my reading, is the narrator's tentative and confused search for an ethical relationship with animals. Surfacing resonates profoundly with my earlier reading of feminist pro-animal politics: the ethical relationship with the animal the novel explores necessitates a drive away from discourse and from the ideology to which Adams refers, and toward the body. Part three of the novel details the narrator's thoroughgoing attempt to identify with animals, who "have no need for speech," by denying the most basic elements of her enculturation: "I no longer have a name. I tried for all those years to be civilized but I'm not and I'm through pretending."' 2 In this sense, the animal is in a position analogous to the maternal body for psychoanalytic feminism: it is that which is before (or beyond) discourse. Over and over, the narrator remembers her mother surrounded by jays; this image is perhaps the most telling and poignant example of the animal-mother analogy. The birds are always just beyond the extension of the mother's reach. And the mother herself is always hazily described, eluding the grasp of the narrator's memory. But before I come to a reading of this vital image in the final section, which will serve my Butlerian proanimal politics, I want to track the path of the narrator's developing animal ethics in these particular terms of the interplay between discourse and the animal (or maternal) body. The key moment in sparking this development is the narrator's encounter with a dead heron, shot by hunters: "I turned around and it was hanging upside down by a thin blue nylon rope tied round its feet and looped over a tree branch, its wings fallen open. It looked at me with its mashed eye" (356). The transfixing quality of the heron's look signals a compelling agency of the animal, even beyond death, in its ability to interpellate the narrator into some form of relationship with it. The visual power of this identification, despite its undoubted genesis in the physicality of the mutilated animal, is almost a cognitive aftereffect of the narrator's primary, visceral reaction: "it was behind me, I smelled it before I saw it; then I heard the flies. The smell was like decaying fish" (356). It is, first and foremost, the narrator's body that reacts with disgust to the presence of the animal's corpse. The gap between the narrator's bodily reaction and a more cultural or discursive one is most clearly marked by the response of her two male traveling companions to the dead heron. Immediately, they capture it for a "modernist" art-film, Random Samples. This film's discourse is motivated by a Jackson Pollock-like aesthetics of chance, which they believe gives the work an "organic" relationship with its physical subject matter, "like a painter throwing paint at a canvas" (328). Such a relationship fails to materialize, however: the film instead goes the way of all fleshly modernism by stifling into a passive secularized object, the physical body, which it aims to capture in representation. That this stifling effect extends from the animal

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body to the human female is evident later when photographs, just like "windows opening into a place [the narrator} could no longer reach," fail to capture completely her mother's communion with the birds, and also when David (the instigator of the film) wants to film his girlfriend Anna to juxtapose "a naked lady with 'big tits and a big ass'" with the dead heron 650, 371). 13 It is worth remarking that, although it is almost a critical cliche to note a critique of the logic of the gaze in Atwood's work, there has rarely been sustained inquiry into what exactly can be said to escape the gaze. Here, at least, it is the smell that profoundly acts on the body of the narrator and prepares her for an ethical relationship with the animal. Smell is also the physical remainder unassimilable into David's representation of the dead animal in the discourse of his "art." As David replies to a complaint from his cameraman Joe (the narrator's lover) that the bird " 'really stinks' " " 'That won't show in the movie ... you can stand it for five minutes, it looks so great' " 656). David's reply discounts the importance of the smell, and hence of the dead animal's physicality. Yet in the narrator's original encounter with the dead bird, not only is the power of the gaze temporarily shifted (even if in a heavily circumscribed way) from the human and the technological to the (dead) animal with its affecting "mashed eye," but the status of vision itself is also undermined by a visceral reaction (the narrator's disgust). If the dead heron, in its irreducible materiality, suggests that the starting point for understanding the narrator's ethical relationship with the animal is the shared level of the body-the argument of current pro-animal feminism- then Atwood quickly sheds doubt on this straightforward possibility. Reading the position of the heron in the psychoanalytic schema of subject development that I have outlined (mother/ animal = body: father = discourse), we see that while the bird is (as body) aligned with the mother, it is also, paradoxically; aligned with the father. Herons form a recurrent motif in Surfacing, and the striking visual imagery that represents them demands close attention. Describing a plane flying above her as "an X in the sky;" the narrator is reminded of an earlier vision of a heron "flying above us the first evening ... legs and neck stretched, wings outspread, a bluegrey cross, and the other heron or was it the same one, hanging wrecked from the tree" 675). Her almost compulsive remembering of the dead bird, which repeats the original traumatic encounter and underscores its ethically foundational status, here indicates the heron's structural parallelism with the narrator's father, whose disappearance has occasioned this hazardous journey to the Canadian wilderness with David, Anna, and Joe. By linking the heron to the "X," Atwood evokes the narrator's search for the father that repeatedly takes the form of a search for an X marked on a map. Read at first as her father's signifiers for the location of indigenous cave-paintings that he had been researching, the signification of these Xs becomes remarkably unstable. Later, the X also indicates the location of

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the father himself, and the number of significations proliferates further to suggest possible sites for paintings. The narrator furthermore acknowledges the equally unstable origin of the pictures signified by these Xs when she finds her father's hand-drawn reproductions. She first thinks they are hallucinogenic self-portraits, and then realizes they are "not originals, only copies" that trace of indigenous paintings. Hence they offer a symbolic way to find him by vindicating his research. Finally, they are read as a guide to help her understand the pantheistic power of the environment. If X marks the spot at which the narrator presumes she will complete the search for the father, it would appear that such a search is doomed to everdisplaced failure. '4 Significantly, the narrator's search for her father is also a search for a logic and language that can completely represent the physical world with no remainder: she remembers that her father values only what can be logically accounted for. Stumbling with uncanny accuracy on a key insight of the post-structuralist critique of such discourses, thenarrator finds during one of her early forays in search of her father, not that there is "no sign" of him, but there are "too many signs" (300). As we try to come to ethical terms with the animal by reading the dead heron image according to the psychoanalytic schema, it appears that the. heron is positioned as that physicality that is irreconcilably beyond discourse (i.e., aligned with the mother). Yet in being marked, like the lost father, by the signifier of the X, it is important that the heron also comes to indicate that this function will always itself be a figuration. The heron (because is smells) cannot actually be embodied in the narrator's written text; it can only symbolize that embodiment beyond discourse. Such an inability to escape the symbolic structure of language, of course, is the crucial position with respect to bodily materiality in the post-structuralist logic of the sign, as it has been aptly described by Judith Butler: The linguistic categories that are understood to "denote" the materiality of the body are themselves troubled by a referent that is never fully or permanently resolved or contained by any given signified. Indeed, that referent persists only as a kind of absence or loss, that which language does not capture, but ... which impels language repeatedly to attempt that capture, that circumscription-and to fail .... To posit a materiality outside oflanguage is still to posit that materiality, and the materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive condition.'5

How then to discern an ethical response to the animal from the novel's portrayal of this murdered heron, marking as it does this complex interrelation of discourse and the body? Perhaps the clearest explanatory way to do this is to follow Atwood's narrator, as in a short space of time she passes through a series of key stages in her adoption of an ethical consciousness about animals. As her thinking proceeds from stage to stage, we can see more clearly the underlying logic that propels her beliefs. By analyzing in the first instance the complexities and ambiguities of the narrator's

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response to the heron, the ethical relation to the animal offered by the text as a whole will become clear. Vital to the narrator's response is the way she apportions blame for the heron's death. Wondering why the heron had been strung up "like a lynch victim," she equates it to other "trophies" that are displayed by hunters to "prove they could do it;'' She recognizes that since the wild heron cannot be "tamed or cooked or trained to talk, the only relation they could have to {it} was to destroy it." Reading the heron thus as, once again, a secularized object, she)decides that "It must have been the Americans" who killed it (357). This is a national group whose ability to unite animal display with the economic colonization of Canada is noted early in the novel, as a gas station is advertised by a stuffed moose dressed in human clothes "waving an American flag" (270). Perhaps the narrator's most perceptive comment on this '1\.merican" commodification of nature is to recognize that the killing and display of the heron has a primarily sacrificial function; it provides the hunters with an object onto which they can project the unwanted parts of themselves. To use a term that is apposite for its etymology in the important place of the animal in such human procedures, the heron serves as a scapegoat. Interestingly, given my earlier reading of the logic of specularization and the failure of representation vis-a-vis the female and animal body, the narrator's perception of the sacrificial function of the heron appears in the context of the simultaneous objectification of woman and animal by David. He makes a sexualized joke that Canada's national emblem should be the "split beaver" and the narrator responds with a naivety that is anything but insignificant. She reads his pun literally, just as she earlier queries the old axiom that there's more than one way to skin a cat, " 'Why should it be split?' I said. It was like skinning the cat, I didn't get it." This defamiliarization helps reveal the function of David's metaphor. In his jocund collocation of woman and animal the bodiliness of female genitalia and animality itself are both repressed, even symbolically butchered, in a misogynistic and speciesist configuration of the sel£ The narrator's mental response to his joke returns her to the scene of the heron's sacrifice: "a part of the body, a dead animal. I wondered what part of them the heron was, that they needed so much to kill it" (358-359). Seen in this light, the narrator's sympathetic ethical response to the animal adumbrates Adams's pro-animal feminism, particularly in relation to her theory of the "absent referent," which has been cogently described by Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer: In speciesist, sexist society, both women and animals are subject to a twofold process of objectification through dismemberment (real or figurative) and renaming, a process that foregrounds edible or sexually charged body parts and makes what Adams calls an "absent referent" of the subjectivity and ontogeny of the Other. Thus, for example, dead cows are "meat," baby ones "veal," ... and so on. The sexual absenting of women operates by the same sort of renaming of women as animals (chicle, beaver, playboy bunny). 16

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The narrator's ignorance of metaphor (split beaver/skinned cat) suggests a "respect for the literal" that Adams sees as vital to a pro-animal literature or criticism that would rescue the absent referent from this ideological renaming. 17 Indeed, I read this dismantling precisely as an attempted denial of the "sacrifice" inherent in the symbolic logic of metaphor itself, in which the vehicle (the "real" animal) is eliminated by the metaphoric substitute. This process of dismantling continues as the narrator suddenly becomes aware of the act of killing involved in fishing. With the "Thud of metal on fish bone, skull, neckless headbody" comes the realization, "the fish is whole, I couldn't do it anymore, I had no right to" (306). The description of the fish as "whole," and particularly as a "neckless headbody" clearly resonates with Adams's animal-body politics, which refuses the phallogocentric separation of mind and body. This description certainly prefaces the narrator's release of some frogs she had used to bait the fish. While the others admire the "murder{ed} cadaver," the narrator also begins to recognize the sacrificial logic that validates this use of the frogs, just as it does their use in high school vivisection (360). This reading is complicated, however, if we revisit for a moment a Butlerian reading of linguistic reference to the body. For Butler, language operates "by means of the displacement of the referent, the multiplication of signifiers at the site of the lost referent" -as we saw with the Xs marking the absence of the narrator's father. "Indeed, signification requires this loss of the referent, and only works as signification to the extent that the referent remains irrecoverable.m 8 Wolfe and Elmer extend this psychoanalytic reading of the formation of the human subject in language and link it explicitly to the logic of sacrifice as it is inscribed in the inherently symbolic function of language. In doing so they make a vital point about the pro-animal feminist schema that posits the animal or female body as the lost referent of phallogocentrism. "There is a powerful psychoanalytic account of {the} accession to culture," they note, and in it, what intervenes between child and mother, what effects the "primordial repression"- of mother ... of "nature" and "the animal"- and erects thereby a regime of symbolic substitution and sacrifice, is in fact language itself, or rather symbolicity tout court. '9

This observation suggests that the living animal-heron, cat, beaver, or fish-is not the absent, hidden reality behind speciesist ideological practice, as Adams claims. For, as Butler notes, the bodily referent is always beyond language. The animal-body is better considered (in Butler's terms) as the "constitutive outside" of the discourse of speciesism. Indeed, to recapitulate my point made in section one, Butler's reading of the binary "sexing" of the human being locates the gay or lesbian body as the constitutive outside of "compulsory heterosexuality." 20 The critic who attends to gendering of the human, while attuned to the complementary functioning in it of speciesism-a discursive formation that repudiates the

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animal as sexism does the feminine and heterosexism does homosexuality-will go on to read the animal-body as the constitutive outside of what we might call, following Butler, "compulsory humanity." It is compulsory that we "become" human, and this very becoming is a function of our renunciation of the animal. This reading allows a recognition of what I would call, with Wolfe and :Elmer, the essentially sacrificial structure of language itself; or, again in Butler's terms, a recognition that "every discourse operates through exclusion." In light of this Butlerian analysis of the animal politics of Surfacing, I want to explore more fully the implications of the narrator's putative denial of the metaphoric logic that sacrifices animals. The futility of such a denial quickly becomes clear. It is signaled by her insistence that such a "sacrifice" certainly jumps the species barrier, for humans do not only sacrifice the animal: ''Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first." The narrator insists, "the Americans"for whom the only "things worthy of life were human, their own kind of human" -are most responsible for the sacrificial repudiation of the animal in their killing of the heron. And if for the narrator "guilt glitters on them like tinfoil," then perhaps the xenophobic rhetoric by which she apportions all blame for any abuses of power to "the Americans" points to another sacrifice, another discursive exclusion (36o, 366). But this time the sacrifice is in the human sphere. That her readiness to condemn entails its own form of exclusion is evident only when the hunters are revealed not as Americans but as a group of Canadians sporting New York Mets merchandise. Clearly, the scapegoating of Americans had simply served to relieve the narrator of responsibility or complicity in her own-and the animals'- fate. For throughout the book we find the narrator searching for ways to justify any use of animals- from her pretence that fish might forgive her in advance if she prays for them to be caught or her belief, "killing certain things is all right, food and enemies, fish and mosquitoes" (312), to her remarks about indigenous Americans' strategies of atonement later on in the novel. Since these strategies do not expiate her profound but unacknowledged guilt at using animals as a resource, she projects that guilt onto the Americans. Envisioned as oppressors, they bear the weight of the guilt that she tries to repress. In this evasiveness, she mirrors the hunters, who also project an unwelcome part of themselves onto the sacrificial heron. In their case, it was the animality that must be purged as they perform their masculinity and humanity. Atwood herself has shed some light on this complex configuration of victimization and responsibility, guilt, and sacrificial substitution in the context of both animal and national politics. In response to a series of questions around the notion of guilt in Surfacing, she has said in an interview that what she was "really into in that book was the great Canadian victim complex."21 And in Survival, her survey of Canadian literature, Atwood argues that Canadian writers, from "wild animal story'' authors Seton and Roberts onward, had been better able to write "from the point

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of view of the animal" because of their perception of Canada's perpetual oppressive colonization (whether by Britain or America). As she asks,fauxnai've: "If animals in literature are always symbols, and if Canadian animal stories present animals as victims, what trait in our national psyche do these animal victims symbolize?" 22 This perspective is clearly at play in Surfacing, in which the narrator identifies with the "innocent" animals who "get slaughtered because they exist" (365). This understanding ot Canadian animal literature in terms of the "victim complex" suggests a postcolonial analysis of national psychology, but in doing so reveals how postcolonial thinking can easily short-circuit proanimal politics. In the fiction of Graeme Gibson, Atwood finds a critique, which prefigures one found in Surfacing, of "the need to see yourself as a victimized animal.m3 For her, this is a cultural weakness or pathology that should be transcended because it short-circuits what she sees as a necessary progression in the national-cultural psychology of the Canadian from identifying with the victimized animal (exemplified by Seton and Roberts) through self-knowledge and self-definition (such as her own or Gibson's cultural analysis) to healthy self-respect. The problem with Atwood's otherwise valuable description of the progression from colonial to postcolonial consciousness- aside from its slightly harsh impatience with a "victim complex" that might betoken the very real psychological effects of cultural disenfranchisement-is that such progression occurs in direct proportion to a concomitant disavowal of the animal's right to be an object of cultural concern. Atwood's assertion that animals are always symbols- that they can only bear anthropomorphic meaning such as providing the vehicle for cathartic explorations of Canada's national identity in victimization- has an important corollary. She makes it logically impossible to render the victimization of animals in literature. In doing so, she herself replicates the speciesist sacrificial logic that is in fact tested within the novel. Perhaps a way around this impasse can be found by following the stages of the narrator's own reaction to the discovery of her shared nationality with the hunters. Her response is to remove from her xenophobia whatever basis (justifiable or not) it has in the substantive realities of North American geopolitics. But they'd killed the heron anyway. It doesn't matter what country they're from, my head said, they're still Americans .... They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over .... If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do. (367)

Here, the narrator deessentializes nationality, representing it as a matter of linguistic or cultural mindset instead of one of geographical or genealogical origin. Consequently, she is able tentatively to maintain the othering of Americans that shores up her own victimized, and hence guiltless, position. Yet the dispersal from within stable national boundaries of abusive

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power-or as she calls it, "evil" -as a virally proliferating cultural construction only provides the narrator with the resultant problem of pinpointing its original causes. "But how did [the Americans} evolve, where did the first one come from?" she asks (367). Remembering her post war childhood she becomes increasingly aware of the ubiquity of scapegoating, and its failure to purify the world of oppression: "if only he could be destroyed everyone would be saved, safe .... But Hitler was gone, and the thing remained" (367). In the face of this collapsing logic of sacrificial substitution, the narrator again confronts the dead heron, "still there, hanging in the hot sunlight like something in a butcher's window, desecrated, unredeemed. It smelled worse" (367). Reexperiencing this bodily identification with the animal, only this time without scapegoats to blame for its death, the narrator reaches perhaps the key stage in the development of the animal politics of Surfacing. She feels "a sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands." "The trouble some people have being German," she thinks, "I have being human" (368). Inspired by this acceptance of guilt-a common feeling among animal advocates, even if not expressed in these terms- she relives her liberation of animals from her brother's childhood vivisection "laboratory," only to remember a further complicity: her fear of his angry reaction had allowed many others to die (369). Through this series of realizations, the scapegoating of Americans as a means to assuage her guilt appears as just another exercise of exclusive power, an exercise that the narrator characterizes as constitutive of"being human." In an attempt to void herself of this power, the narrator compulsively clings to her innocent childhood drawings of the "peaceable kingdom": "I didn't want there to be wars and death, I wanted them not to exist; only rabbits with their colored egg houses, sun and moon orderly above the flat earth, summer always, I wanted everyone to be happy'' (369). As Atwood describes her narrator, she wishes not to be human, because being human inevitably involves being guilty; and if you define yourself as innocent, you can't accept that ... you refuse to accept power. You refuse to admit that you have it, then you refuse to exercise it, because the exercise of power is defined as evil,24

If this all seems to invoke Butler's argument that power "orchestrates, delimits and sustains ... the human," then it is because Atwood's belief, borne out in the text, is that sacrificial substitution-Butler's "constitutive exclusion"-is just such a human inevitability. This conclusion is nowhere more obvious than in the text's playing out of Atwood's assertion that the heroine's action "at the end of Surfacing results from taking a hypothesis and pushing it as far as it goes: what happens when you identify with the animals?" 25 I want to claim that the result of Atwood's animal politics in Surfacing is indeed a Butlerian one, and to do so I return to the narrator's bodily identification with the dead heron and "neckless headbody'' of the fish. As I argued earlier, this identification

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aligns the animal body with the lost maternal one; this alignment is entirely consonant with pro-animal feminism's "identifying with the animals" on the level of the body. Atwood makes the connection clear after comparing the "unredeemed" heron and all animals to Christ- that ultimate sacrificial lamb. Strung up in the shape of an X, the heron is an "unsacred crucifix." Whether it died willingly, consented, whether Christ died willingly, anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ .... The animals die that we might live .... And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. (375)

This passage obviously collapses two Christian notions, the sacrament and the crucifixion, to recognize the physically and spiritually redemptive function of meat for human beings, as well as the sacrificial substitution of animals that a carnivorous diet involves. There is also an intimate connection between the sacrificial logic at work here and the denial of the body in enlightenment humanism. Indeed, this connection has recently been marked by Derrida in his extension of his already quoted description of western cultural logic to carno-pha!!ogocentrism. 26 Unlike meat-eaters, however, the narrator in her guilt goes "unredeemed" like the heron. Her frequently noted dive into the lake, which immediately follows, offers redemption and in doing so marks her most explicit configuration of animal body and maternal body as the sacrificed others of humanity. Although the "spiritual" or "baptismal" nature of this dive and its vital place in the textual construction of the narrator's identity has been repeatedly noted by critics, its function in the novel's animal politics has not. Marking her imagined equivalence to the victimized animal, the dive explicitly parallels the narrator's earlier release of the bait frogs: she dives "letting out air like a frog," evoking the way that they had "slipped into the water" (376, 360). And it is precisely via this state of identification that the narrator is able to confront the trauma of her own determined nonacceptance of the maternal body, her abortion- the function of the dive as it is usually read. Indeed, she remembers the aborted fetus itself in terms of animal abuse, "in a bottle curled up ... like a cat pickled" (378). The fetus was the bodily part of her that she rejected, precisely the heron's function for the hunters. However, she is not able to maintain the distance insinuated by the sacrificial logic that underpinned the hunters' killing of the bird. This confrontation with abjected maternity and animality-for the narrator's lover the fetus "wasn't a person, only an animal"(379)-marks the start of the narrator's thorough merging with the victimized animal. As such, it prefigures the rejection of her humanity undertaken in the third part of the novel: I ,realized it wasn't the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both .... I wanted there to be a machine that could make

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them vanish a buttoil I could press that would evaporate them without disturbing anything else, that way there would be more room for animals, they would be rescued. (387) This is perhaps the key passage for my Butlerian reading of the novel's ani~ mal politics, not least because the passage unselfconsciously reveals that attempts to rid the world of abusive power can so easily slide into a terrorism that replicates that power's very logic. This passage is important also because the narrator's attempt to purifY herself of the power inherent to her humanity, an attempt to create for herself a nonhuman world, is explicitly a refusal of sacrificial or substitutive logic. With Butler as well as Wolfe and Elmer, I earlier identified this logic as characteristic oflanguage itself, of "symbolicity tout court." The narrator's renunciation of substitution is also a renunciation of language. The narrator makes it quite clear that language is a problem, for "language divides us into fragments," while "she wants to be whole" like "the animals {who} have no need for speech" (38r, 4ro). Furthermore, she indicates that the symbolicity inherent in language is itself the problem in the ethics by which she understands fishing: "if we dived for them and used our own teeth to catch them, fighting on their own grounds, that would be fair, but hooks were substitutes" (365). The narrator thus attempts to fashion a level playing field for human and animal, an ethical field devoid of power, by refusing humanity access to anything but its own natural tekhne. In the final episode, sunk into apparent madness, the narrator refuses to cross any artificial boundaries- the walls of her parents' cabin, or the fence around the garden. This refusal suggests that the novel's logic drives toward concerns that are strictly environmentalist, rather than pro-animal. The narrator's attempt to forge herself into a symbiotic part of a holistic natural environment in disavowal of these most literal of human cultural barriers is another indication that the symbolic logic of language is a problem. 2 7 Such demarcations, like those between subject and object, or sign and referent, are essential to the logic of language and so to renounce them is to renounce language itsel£ Of course the very possibility of denying of the gap between word and absent referent is exactly what is at issue in my Butlerian critique of Adams's pro-animal criticism. And as I have argued, identification with the animal on the level of the body-such as the narrator's attempt to suffuse herself in animality by abrogating symbolic-sacrificial substitutionis eventually seen by Atwood to fail. It fails precisely because it necessarily entails a rejection of human community. At the novel's close; the narrator must return to some sort of place in human society: "withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death" (4r8). Indeed, Atwood predates Butler in recognizing that any abrogation of language in celebration of the body will in the end always be just that, an abrogation. Atwood makes this most explicit when detailing the narrator's futile attempt to divest herself of all the trappings of human productivity. In a gesture that

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ironically adds to the proliferating signification ofXs earlier in the novel, the narrator attempts to "sacrifice" her possessions by symbolically scratching a cross onto a suitcase and "x-ing it out" (406). Julia Kristeva has most succinctly captured the impossibility at the heart of the narrator's aporetic project here to cancel out the stain of discourse symbolically: "purification is something only the Logos is capable o£" 28 Agreeing with this point, Butler suggests in her psychoanalytic reading of the substitutive logic of language that there must remain a gap between word and referent. "Were the referent to be recovered this would lead to psychosis, and the failure oflanguage," and of subjectivity itself, she writes. 2 9 And if that state of psychosis that means exclusion from human linguistic community must be avoided, so too must the narrator "surface" from her immersion in animality in order to attempt what Atwood calls the "supposed ideal" ofbecoming a "whole human being."3°This surfacing happens at the moment of the narrator's reentry into language, the recognition that "the name of the father" must also mean the absence of the father himself, and the simultaneous acknowledgment of the otherness of the animal: I say father. He turns towards me and it's not my father. It is what my father saw; the thing you meet when you've stayed here too long alone. I'm not frightened, it's too dangerous for me to be frightened of it; it gazes at me for a time with its yellow eyes, wolf's eyes, depthless but lambent as the eyes of animals seen at night in the car's headlights. Reflectors. It does not approve of me or disapprove of me, it tells me it has nothing to tell me, only the fact of itsel£ (414)

This is an ambiguous description of the father-wolf's eyes: first, they are depthless (i.e., both without depth and impossible to measure; moreover, if the wolf allows for no more than basic phenomenological knowing, with "nothing to tell ... but the fact of itself," then the symbolism with which its eyes are described suggests that such knowing will destroy it. This ambiguity indicates that the wolf's "otherness" must ultimately be recognized as an aspect of the self, as it is when the narrator finds that the wolf/father's footprints are in fact her own (416). Yet this assimilation is of a particular kind. The narrator's reentry into language itself entails another form of surfacing: . J:
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We see here the narrator's reacceptance of linguistic substitution (after her "submersion" into the animal world) and her perception of the animal's inevitable elevation in the process of human linguistic cognition from real to symbolic meaning. Indeed, the highly literary representation of this progression by a textual change from free verse to prose seems almost to presume its inevitability. Only after this progression is made, and it is granted that to know the animal is necessarily to know symbolic representations of it, can the fish "become ordinary" again. However, if we are to read this ordinariness as a state of autonomous being, then that autonomy must also bear some of the ambiguity that applied to the wol£ What are we left with then, in surveying the animal politics of Surfacing? Clearly, there is recognition that humanity cannot identify with the animals. Our construction in language requires the sacrificial substitution of both the animal and the (maternal) body. Yet, as both Atwood and Butler show, a simple renunciation of this construction- identifying with the animals and accepting the integrity of the body, the position of proanimal feminism- is clearly impossible. At the end of the novel, Atwood offers us a character who must "refuse to be a victim" in order to function in human society (418); but in doing so she must renounce her bodily connection with animals, and admit the absence of the maternal. To put it succinctly, Surfacing suggests that pro-animal politics is "humanly" impossible.

Surfacing and the Ethics of Animal Otherness If the legacy of the narrator's father is that the "real" animal, the bodily animal, is possessed of an otherness that can never itself be shared by humanity, only subsumed into the self-identity of human understanding, then the mother, the only person in the narrator's life who "prohibited cruelty," offers something very different, a gift "simple as a hand" (369, 383). The hand in question is the mother's own as it is repeatedly remembered by the narrator, always "stretched out" toward the jays that she often feeds (301, 324, 350, 4n). In the distance between human and animal, marked by the mother's perpetual reaching, the birds maintain their difference from her, despite her desire to close this gap. Indeed, one of the few biographical facts we hear about the mother is her injurious attempt to fly as a child (362). It is clear, though, that the impossibility of complete identification with the birds does not imply a steadfast divide. We might also explicitly contrast the hand's continual reaching toward the animal other with the notion of capturing it. Such a capturing is permissible in the ethics that results from the narrator's refusal of"substitutes" and human productivity: "perhaps I can catch a bird or a fish with my hands, that will be fair" (410). The difference between the narrator and her mother here marks the difference between an ethics that tries to reach beyond the fundamentally exclusionary logic of any identity formation-a logic that is constitutive of "the human"-and one that imagines the figure of humanity can be

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divested of such exclusions and returned to equity with nature. As was suggested by my earlier allusion to Atwood's political statements, this is per-· haps the difference between pro-animal ethics on the one hand and strictly environmental ethics on the other. Surfocinffs contrast between seeking (or being tantalized by) animals and capturing them also brings into view the link between the animal ethics I am sketching here and Butler's political project. That project follows from her assertion of the constitutive nature of exclusion in any social field. Developing this assertion, I have argued that the exclusion of the animal, as a figure of the "inhuman," is constitutive of the human community. Yet for Butler, exclusions of this kind are inevitable: every social formation-whether it is sexuality, nationality, or race-has its others. Her political project, therefore, is to try to redefine those socially excluded positions as "a set offuture possibilities for inclusion," rather than dreaming of a community empty of all human power relations. "The ideal of radical inclusivity is impossible," Butler states, but that very impossibility demands that a socius defined by political and ethical hospitality should extend a welcome to those excluded beings- as animals certainly are by the current constitution of society-whose lives form the "not-yet-assimi· lable horizon of community."3 1 Figuring the animal other, the ever-elusive jays are just such a horizon, I would argue. In terms of the animal politics of Surfacing, then, the "gift" of the mother exceeds that of the father. His gift characterizes the text's most apparent trajectory: that human subjectivity, always-already in language, necessitates the otherness of the animal. The maternal gift is necessary because it insists that such an otherness is neither a reason for fear, nor indeed a validation for cruelty. Rather, in the words of Steve Baker's pertinent invocation of Luce lrigaray, animals' difference is "a space for wonder." It propels our always-human attempts to reach beyond our humanity and toward the animalY

Notes I.

Margaret Atwood, The Edible W0man (1969) and Lady Oracle (1976) in The Margaret Atwood Omnibus (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991); Survival

(Toronto: Anansi, 1972). On contemporary animal-based art, see Steve Baker, The PostmodernAnimal (London: Reaktion, 2000). On zoos, Atwood is quoted in Kathleen Vogt, "Real and Imaginary Animals in the Poetry of Margaret Atwood" in Kathryn van Spankeren and Jan Garden Castro, ed., Margaret Atwood· Vision and Forms (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 163. 2. Vogt, "Real and Imaginary," in Margaret Atwood, 164. 3- Barbara Hill Rigney, Margaret Atwood (London: Macmillan, 1987), 54-55 and Margaret Atwood, in Earl G. Ingersoll, ed., Conversations (London: Virago, 1992), 47· 4· Carol ]. Adams and Josephine Donovan, ed., Animals and W0men: Feminist Theoretical Speculations (Durham and London: Duke University

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Press, 1995), r. Notwithstanding influential ecofeminist theorists like Val Plumbwood and Karen ]. Warren, Adams and Donovan can rightly be called the motivating figures of contemporary feminist pro-animal theory. See in this regard their other edited collection Beyond Animal Rights: Towards a Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1996) and Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A FeministVegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990). The influence of these writers and an indication of the changes they have brought to proanimal thought are helpfully detailed in a review essay on these books by Steve Baker for Society b Animals 4, r (1996): 75-89. 5· Carol]. Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defence ofAnimals (New York: Continuum, 1994), rp, her emphasis. Until otherwise noted, references to this text will be cited by page numbers and enclosed in parentheses. 6. Jacques Derrida, in Barbara Johnson, trans., Dissemination (London: Athlone, 1981), 48-49. 7· Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London: Routledge, 1993), x, Butler's emphasis. Until otherwise noted, references to this text will be cited by page numbers and enclosed in parentheses. 8. Of course, to this list could be appended other attributes supposedly exclusive to human beings such as self-consciousness, deceptive behavior, peacemaking, aesthetic interest, trans-generational culture, and altruism. These are listed, sourced and this issue discussed at more length than I can here in Marian Scholtmeijer, "What is 'Human'? Metaphysics and Zoontology in Flaubert and Kafka," in Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, ed., Animal Acts: Reconftguring the Human in western History (London: Routledge, 1996), 127. 9· See also Susanne Kappeler, "Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism ... or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity," in Adams and Donovan, ed., Animals and Wbmen, 320-352. A humorous, if quite disturbing example of such a deployment happened to me when, on presenting me with a vegetarian meal, a family friend said to me (with an uneasy laugh) "Here's your lesbian food"! The economical condensation of the twin disavowals of lesbian sexuality and pro-animal consciousness leaves one in no doubt as to the efficiency of such discursive intersections. ro. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: Towards a Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 28, 30. n. Sherrill Grace, "In Search of Demeter: the Lost, Silent Mother in Surfacing' inMargaretAtwood, 84. See also Rigney, 54-55. The fullest reading in terms of psychoanalytic feminism's search for the pre-oedipal mother is Sally Robinson, " 'The Anti-Logos Weapon': Multiplicity in Women's Texts," Contemporary Literature 29 (r988): !05-124. 12. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1973) in The Margaret Atwood Omnibus, 4IO, 400. Until otherwise noted, references to Surfacing will be cited by page numbers and enclosed in parentheses. On being named as an essential part of becoming a subject, or becoming human, see Butler, Excitable Speech, 28 f£ 13. Adams offers an extended critique of the interrelationships between women and animals due to their simultaneous passive positioning by the (male) gaze in Neither Man nor Beast, chapter two.

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Here, Atwood's novel diverges slightly from the Lacanian schema: as for him it is the attempt to reach the mother, rather than the father, which necessitates the subject's entry into the differential logic of language. If Butler, Bodies that Matter, 6. I6. Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer, "Subject to Sacrifice: Psychoanalysis, Ideology and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme's Silence ofthe Lambs," Boundary 2 22, (3) (I995): I5I. See also Carol]. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, I990), chapter two. I7. Adams, The Sexual Politics ofMeat, 104. Adams' argument in fact fleetingly refers to Surfacing (I83, I85). . I8. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 209 (my emphasis). I9. Wolfe and Elmer, "Subject to Sacrifice," in Silence ofthe Lambs, I62-I63. 20. Butler, Bodies That Matter, I8. 21. Margaret Atwood, in Earl G. Ingersoll, ed., Conversations (London: Virago, I{.

1992), 1J. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Atwood, Conversations, I3, 14-15. Ibid., 81 (Atwood's emphasis). Atwood, Survival, 75· Atwood, Conversations, 43-44. " 'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject,'' Peter Conner and Avital Ronnel, trans, in Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews, I974-I994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 280-281. Atwood advocates an environmentalist position in her nonfictional statements such as Survival. There, her explicit concern to question "the great Canadian victim complex" insists that the type of identification with individually victimized animals that promotes pro-animal thought in Surfacing is unhealthy in contemporary human society. She concedes, however, that one should be "humane to animals {and] protect the wolf" (81). Julia Kristeva, in Leon S. Roudiez, trans., Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, I982), 27. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 209. Atwood, Conversations, 16. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 193. Luce Irigaray in Catherine Porter, trans., An Ethics of Sexual Difference, (London: Athlone, 1993), 7J, qtd. Baker, The PostmodernAnima!, 84.

I I

PARTV

THEORIES OF THE OTHER

CHAPTER

13

SENSORY ExPERIENCE As CoNsciousNEss IN LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF ANIMAL MINDS* Julie A. Smith

eabiscuit, the biography of a race horse who lived in the 1930s, is currently on the New York Times "Best Sellers" list. Its popularity is only the most recent evidence of adult interest in animal characters, particularly in representations of their mental life. Nevertheless, passages such as the following are apt to produce derision among some readers: "Seabiscuit had the misfortune of living in a stable whose managers simply didn't have the time to give his mind the painstaking attention it needed.»~ Students of literature may assume that any text that attributes "mind" to an animal is anthropomorphic, even though they may not be quite sure what mind is. "Mind" may be variously defined, but it functions as a synonym for consciousness. When literary representations of animal consciousness are read alongside of some basic philosophical definitions of consciousness, they more often seem conservative than generous in the attribution of consciousness to animal characters. Only recently has post-structuralist fiction offered richer literary models of animal consciousness, models friendly to new neuroscientific theories. These have emerged as part of the postmodern distrust of human subjectivity and its related exploration of the liminal. 2

S

Consciousness as Thought The most conservative philosophical view of animal consciousness is the Cartesian model. In this account, animals process sensory phenomena in a mechanistic way that precludes describing them as having experiences. Carl Hiassen's Sick Puppy, a work quite sympathetic to the canine character McGuinn, nevertheless uses this kind of representation to create him.

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Did he miss Palmer Stoat? It was impossible to know, the canine memory being more sensually absorbent than sentimental; more stocked with sounds and smells than emotions. McGuinn's brain was forever imprinted with the smell of Stoat's cigars, for example, and the jangle of his drunken late-night fumbling at the front door. And just as surely he could recall those brisk dawns in the duck blind, when Stoat was still trying to make a legitimate retriever out of him-the frenzied flutter ofbird wings, the pop-pop-pop of shotguns, the ring of men's voices. Lodged in McGuinn's memory bank was every path he'd ever run, every tomcat he'd ever treed, every leg he'd tried to hump. But whether he truly missed his master's companionship, who could say. Labradors tended to live exclusively; ... obliviously in the moment.3

To understand what McGuinn is both granted and denied, we may find helpful a review of the Cartesian description of animal sensory experience. While Descartes did not deny that animals have sensations, he argued that they are not sensations in the full sense of the word as they are with humans, because they are not accompanied by propositional thoughts. As Norman Malcolm has described Descartes' view, Descartes wrote to More that "thought is included in our mode of sensation." He meant the human mode of sensation. If every human mode of sensation includes thought, and if thought is propositional content together with propositional attitude, then at the center of every sensation of ours there is a proposition. Animals do not have propositional thoughts and therefore do not have sensations in the human mode.4

By "propositional attitude" and "propositional content," Malcolm refers to a philosophical definition of thought that includes three components. The first is the subject, that is, the mind that has the thought. The second is a propositional attitude-a psychological state such as a belief, desire, or intention-held by the subject. The third is the propositional content, that is, the object toward which the attitude is directed. In the Cartesian view, animals are not held to have the capacity for attitudes toward phenomena. Put another way, they are not believed to be capable of a relation to an object by means of a propositional attitude. McGuinn has no beliefs or desires about the external world that his body encounters. While his brain contains mental images, visual, auditory, and olfactory, that are retained in memory, these seem imprinted in McGuinn's brain in a physical way, as a stamp makes an impression in clay. The sensory phenomena seem marked onto McGuinn's brain by some external agent or internal mechanism not quite part of a "McGuinn himself" rather than attended by a psychological state. "[S}ensually absorbent," "stocked," "imprinted," "lodged" in memory, "memory bank" all diminish the idea of McGuinn's sensory experience as propositional content. McGuinn is, in fact, a stimulus-response biomachine. As Eileen Crist has formidably demonstrated, the stimulus-response description of animal sensory uptake eliminates an internal, experimental perspective, constructing the animal as a vessel upon or through which external forces act.

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At each separate moment the animal is guided by the stimuli at hand. Because those moments are discontinuous, the resulting picture is that of an animal that does not coherently assemble the objects present and the events unfolding around it. When the sequential logic of linked actions is repudiated, a picture of subjective coherence becomes unsustainable.5

In many other texts besides Sick Puppy, the basic capacity for propositional attitude is called into question, often at the very moment that it is asserted. The following passage from Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven exemplifies the desire of authors to represent animals as both aware and not aware, conscious and not conscious. Here, an animal communicator, Elizabeth, is describing to friends a mental activity that we would call "channeling" but what she calls "pervasion." In a state of pervasion, the horse Mr. Tis said to be capable of processing sensory data without having propositional attitudes. "Well, it's not a channel, really. I call it a pervasion." '~what?" said Joy. '~ temporary ubiquity caused by paying attention. I've had to coin my own terms. Pervasions. Ubiquity. Alertion. We asked him that earlier question, so he is in a state of alertion." "Why don't you just say he's alert?" "Because he isn't conscious of it. He's not noticing anything but he's available. He could even be sleeping. When we go over there, he's attentive to us, but that's just physical." 6

Elizabeth claims that the horse is alert to outside stimuli but redefines the word to mean a mental state with little or no mental activity yet capable of processing psychic stimuli. Thus what begins as sensory acuity that exceeds the capabilities of humans ("ubiquity'') ends as the automatic processing of sensory data of a biomachine. Later Elizabeth reassures Joy that Mr. T loves her-she grants him a propositional attitude. The account of Mr. T thus vacillates between granting and denying him the capacity for propositional thought, or consciousness in this sense. The description of McGuinn and Mr. T's consciousness, or lack of it, may also be read through ideas of intentionality, which unpack the concept of propositional thoughts. In philosophical terms, intentionality is not, as we usually think of it, the purposiveness of an agent, but a competence that is about something else, a capacity for mental contents that refer to things. In this respect, it is similar to propositional thought but further elaborates the variety of ways in which propositional thoughts can occur betWeen subjects and objects. According to philosopher Daniel Dennett, "zero-order intentionality" refers to the simple goal-directedness of a biomachine capable of fulfilling a function for its survival as it receives sensory stimulation. As illustrated above, animals are thought by many to function at this level, to operate by a kind of absentmindedness or "blindsight," as in the cases of McGuinn and Mr. T. Human patients with

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"blind sight" have damaged striate cortexes and are unable to see objects in certain locations of their field of vision yet are able to process information from those fields. When asked, they have no awareness of acquiring the information that comes from those areas, yet they possess it. McGuinn and Mr. T have sense impressions that are processed through the brain, but they do not have mental states in the sense of propositional attitudes, and behavior is fully determined not by thought but by an automatic response to outside sensations. A much more frequent literary practice is to grant an animal character "first-order intentionality," although often this is revoked in one way or another. "First-order intentionality'' is the capacity of an organism to represent external phenomena in the mind, and for many thinkers this is enough to confer consciousness. The individual has the capacity for propositional thinking in that it has psychological states that are directed on or at something. In this account, the animal mind has an "about relatedness" to various phenomena ("objects" of sundry kinds) in the external world. In the following passage, again from Jane Smiley's Horse Heaven, the horse Iron Plum can be said to be capable of first-order intentionality: The thing the Iron Plum found most intriguing about the Round Pebble {the track groom} was her fragrance. He often put his nose up to her face and snuffled her in. She let him. After her face, he would sometimes work his way down her shoulder, or over her back, or down her chest, or into her hair ... she was available for investigation, and the Iron Plum investigated. She was endlessly fascinating to him.7 Iron Plum has sensations (smell) but also mental states. He is intrigued and fascinated, suggesting a curiosity that both arises from sensation and seeks out further sensory data. He thinks propositionally, in the sense that he has a propositional attitude (desire) toward an object, the smell of the groom. In scientific discussions of animal consciousness, some theorists view animals as fully capable of first-order intentionality. To them, animals have beliefs, desires, intentions that are functional states, that is, that play a role in determining their behavior. But in literary texts, one often finds authorial self-consciousness about attributing even this level of mentation to animals and endless devices for retracting what has been initially granted. For example, the description of Iron Plum concludes not with the claim that the horse effectively constructs a richly complex mental representation of the groom from the different smells of her body but nothing more than the determination that she is a very quiet person: "The Iron Plum recognized that Round Pebble was absolute stillness, a space there in the clutter of the house .... " 8 Thus, animal desire or intention often ends in banality, here a simple conclusion about the groom's manner. Another way to say this is that Iron Plum's capacity for "about relatedness" to the world is checked by a trivial second-order intention (discussed more

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fully below), that is, a reflexive thought, a judgment about his sense experiences. This kind of writing- rich sensory description that ends with a too-obvious or trite observation-is exceedingly common in literary accounts of animal minds. For most people, literary anthropomorphism occurs when animals are represented as having "second-order intentionality." Second-order intentionality depends upon the ability to know that one has thoughts that govern behavior, a capacity to understand the cognitive mechanism for the goal-directed behavior. Thus an organism capable of second-order intentionality will have the capacity to understand that both he and others have mental states. In literary texts, this is signaled by conclusions based on previous thoughts. Iron Plum's attention is directed entirely outward, and nothing in the passage suggests that he is aware that he has mental states, that he has "introspection," except his final judgment about the groom's quietness. Thus, according to some thinkers, he would be said to lack consciousness. Modeling his theory of consciousness on Daniel Dennett's second-order intentionality, Peter Carruthers argues that consciousness occurs when the subject's thoughts are available for further thought, that is, when one can know that one is thinking about something. Thus, for Carruthers, the only thoughts that confer consciousness are reflexive. To the conscious individual, thoughts will be regularly available to be thought about, as will those thoughts in their turn. 9 Needless to say, Carruthers has a very stringent and cerebral requirement for consciousness that may or may not exclude animals. He emphatically argues that it does. Some texts offer animal experience as a version of what Carruthers maintains is exclusively human experience, that is, reflexive thinking about sensory phenomena. These texts would be thought to be anthropomorphic. But I would argue that even these representations manage to degrade the animals' perceptions even as they humanize them. Charles Siebert's animal autobiography Angus, a thoughtful exploration of the human need to live with companion animals, appears to grant Angus second-order intentionality, as in this passage where he speaks. The scents? I couldn't keep up. Would have drowned in them if Sweet-Voice hadn't been holding on to me: everywhere an air of expenditure and exhaust, of cooked essences, freshness stewed: coal, potato, fish, bread; twangs of spilled beer and briny fog; of offal and pot roast and old carpet; of paved rain and dead leaves. Yes. That's it. London smells like a long-ago cemented autumn. 10

The text attributes to the dog the capacity for reflexive thought (secondorder intentionality), indicated by the manipulation of language. Reworkings of language are evidenced in counterfactuals ("if Sweet-Voice hadn't been holding on to me"), the transformation of physical phenomena into nonphysical abstractions ("an air of expenditure and exhaust"), and metaphor ("freshness stewed"). These linguistic creations require reflection

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on one's thoughts about sensory phenomena; they entail contemplation about and reconceptualizations of one's mental constructs. But the passage is not generously anthropomorphic because it also uses devices intended to mark the animal character as simple-minded. These include ungrammatical sentences; the replacement of a proper name with a sensory characteristic ("Sweet-Voice"); and categorical errors, as when Angus links physical objects with abstractions, disgusting objects (to the human) with desirable ones ("offal" and "pot roast"), and two phenomenologically separate objects ("pavement" and "rain") to each other to become "paved rain." These techniques attempt to capture features of the dog's thinking, such as the absence of a hierarchy of value discernable to humans. But in the end they represent animal consciousness as deficient. Here, for example, the passage suggests that the dog has no basis for distinguishing between properties that are desirable and undesirable to him, not just that he ranks properties differently than do humans. In most literary texts, anthropomorphisms are invariably combined with markers of linguistic incompetence or subcompetence. These might include very simple language-single-syllable words, repetitive and unelaborated subject-verb sentence structure-and underlexicalization, that is, inadequate verbal markers for object identification (as when one animal narrator refers to flags as "cloths on sticks").rr The result is to write animals not as humans but as mentally deficient humans. Only recently have literary experiments attempted ways around this. A practice in post-structuralist fiction with animal characters is to accentuate the anthropomorphism. Novels like Angus and others-Paul Auster's Timbuktu, John Berger's King, Kirsten Bakis's Lives of the Monster Dogs, John Hawkes's Sweet William-claim ownership of the anthropomorphism by making it exceptionally transgressive. In King the main character, a dog, engages in conversations with humans who fully understand him. John Hawkes's horse, Sweet William, is the most metalinguistic animal in literature, pointing out features of his own discourse. These excesses preempt accusations of anthropomorphism. It is as if the author defers from any truth claims about animal mind by creating an arena that foregrounds his linguistic performances. Nevertheless, to the reader the choice of language seems dependent on the elusive nature of animal consciousness. 12 Such texts differ from those like Black Beauty or The White Bone in that they do not represent their linguistic accounts of animal minds as plausible "translations." They tend, rather, to foreground the linguistic precociousness of the human author rather than to take seriously the possibility that animal consciousness can be rendered in human language. For example, in the Siefert passage cited above, the phrase "an air of expenditure and exhaust" is self-consciously poetic. Because poetry is a human enterprise, the passage seems to go out of its way to anthropomorphize Angus. But it also suggests that a nonlinguistic apprehension of atmospheric stasis, a state of nature no longer characterized by growth and fruition but by decay and death, is a plausible capacity of

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animal consciousness. Thus, the text implies that metaphors may point to elusive capacities of the animal mind but can never linguistically capture them.

Consciousness as Meaningful Experience All orders of intentionality represent consciousness as an intellectual relationship to the world, a cognitive process. Although first-order intentionality incorporates attitudes that suggest personal experience-such as desire- it does not fully address the important question of whether sensory experience is meaningful to the one having it. The idea of the "meaningfulness" of experience for animals in literary texts may be read through Thomas Nagel's pivotal 1974 essay "What Is It Like To be A Bat?". Nagel argues that consciousness entails simply the capacity to experience phenomena subjectively: Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life ... But no matter how the form may vary; the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically; that there is something it is like to be that organism ... fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism-something it is like for the organism. 13

Nagel is primarily interested in consciousness, rather than in the dynamic between consciousness and sensory experience. But if we combine Nagel's idea of consciousness with the basic philosophical notion of"qualia," that is, the property of things as they are experienced, we arrive at a view of consciousness to which many literary texts about animal minds may be referred. In this account, consciousness is the capacity to have meaningful sensory experiences, or a sense of "like something to be the subject" that results from encountering the property of things in the world. The following passage from Virginia Woolf clearly indicates that the consciousness of the dog Flush emerges because it is like something to be him as he experiences the world. it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were smell. To him religion itself was smell. To describe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power. Not even Mr. Swinburne could have said what the smell ofWimpole street mearit to Flush on a hot afternoon in june. As for describing the smell of banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra-But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy; then, we can but note that to Flush Italy; in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. 14

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Woolf makes clear that Flush intensely experiences the world that his sensory experience produces in him, something that it is like for him to be in the world. Elsewhere she describes Flush's world as a "{p}aradise where essences exist in their utmost purity, and the naked soul of things presses on the naked nerve.ms She does not say whether this state is created by having propositional thoughts about objects in the world. Nor does she attempt to represent what Flush's experience is like for him or how he processes it but uses the inexpressability motif four times. For Woolf and for Nagel, humans do not possess the capacity to understand the sensory experience of nonhumans. But for Nagel, as well as for Woolf, being unable to describe what experience is like for a nonhuman animal does not justifY the conclusion that it is not like anything at all to be, say, a dog. To Woolf the experience of sensory phenomena is an emotional experience. She writes, "to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. ' 6 Flush's experiences produce in him the feeling that it is like something to be a dog because they generate emotion in him, happiness. It is not clear that Nagel associates his idea of experience, that is, the "like something to the subject," with emotion produced by sensory experience. Woolf seems embarrassed about affording Flush's sensory experience equal value to the mental life of humans. On the one hand, she implies that Flush's experiences have a richness not available to human beings. Yet her comparison of Flush's sense of smell to all the products of human culture seems tongue-in-cheek. The effect, as in so much representation of animal mind, is an ambivalence about animal forms of consciousness. A very similar model of consciousness-again, a capacity to experience subjectively the property of things-is found in Jean Dutourd's novel A Dog~ Head, but to different effect. The passage comes from the end of the novel, at which point Edmond, born with a dog's head, is fully "reverting" to animal nature. Olfactory sensations constitute the most important part of Edmond's life. They rule his appetites, his dislikes and his ecstasies, for it is in fact an ecstasy which fills him when he brushes by a tree against which his dogs have lifted their legs: a hot rush descends to his stomach, a thrill runs up his spine and he in turn has to relieve himself. Game fills him with a fury which he can no longer control. He flings himself with howls on the trail of hares and snatches the creatures from Sultan's mouth to cram them, still palpitating, between his own jaws ... In the grip of anger he begins to bark. During his night rounds, he chases poachers with cries which fall somewhere between barking and speech. '7 Like Woolf, Dutourd imagines Edmond in relation to the properties of physical things as they are experienced by him and describes the encounter as meaningful because of the emotions that they elicit. Unlike Woolf, however, Dutourd refuses to devalue this version of animal consciousness through patronizing comparisons. Edmond's sensory experience is

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presented unapologetically; and it unnerves, both because its intensity implies a loss of control so feared by human beings and because it affords Edmond profound fulfillment. 18 If consciousness is the capacity for subjective experience, isn't Edmond more conscious than most humans because his subjective experiences are more extravagant? the text asks. Edmond both does and does not think propositionally. In the sentence, "Game fills him with a fury which he can no longer control," he is the passive recipient of sensory forces that act on him. But in other sentences, for example, "[he} flings himself with howls on the trail of hares," he has propositional attitudes toward propositional objects (desire for hares). In literary descriptions of animal minds, authors may choose to represent animals either as the recipients of sensory stimulation or as actors motivated by their psychological attitudes toward sensory objects. Both states seem to me part and parcel of each other, attitudes that can be only linguistically disassociated or weighted.

Consciousness as a Sense of Self Whether consciousness is cognitive or emotional, it is above all a sense of self, for most people at least. In other words, in the literary passages cited thus far, the animal characters must have a sense of self in order to be considered conscious. But do they? In the case of Woolf's dog, Flush, and Dutourd's Edmond, a sense of self may emerge from the personal meaningfulness of experience. Flush understands happiness through a succession of smells, and presumably that happiness is connected to a feeling about himself as the recipient of happy feelings. But this is not clear. Some would argue that a self can only arise through second-order intentionality, a capacity to reflect on one's mental states and existence as an individual. Certainly this view has prevailed in twentieth-century thinking. But it is currently under scrutiny, particularly in some literary and scientific quarters. One impetus for this is a postmodern suspicion that ideas about human subjectivity produced analytically are modernist metanarratives that posit essentialist readings. As such, they are fictions about a fixed or core self that participate in various Western cultural imperatives inseparable from power politics. But also, some postmodern thinking suggests that the kind of self that is rationally constructed through biography and autobiography renders human beings less present to themselves than they would be with a less cerebral appreciation. These works reflect and respond to the failure of human beings to sense the self in spite of the cultural imperative to fixate on it. They propose the possibility that animals may, have had all along a richer sense of self that is differently constituted. And such efforts in fiction to redefine the self in terms of sensory experience have their counterpart in the culture of neuroscience. Brad Watson's short story "Seeing Eye" (1996) exemplifies a postmodern redescription of consciousness as a sensing of the self and conforms very closely to the theory of consciousness proposed by neurologist

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Antonio Damasio. "Seeing Eye" is one of eight stories in Watson's riveting and disturbing collection Last Days of the Dog-Men. In these tales, human beings look like dogs and create alter egos through dogs. While both the human and nonhuman characters sometimes operate from "animal instinct"-here figured as the capacity for unremorseful violence against others- such instinct is not nearly as disconcerting as the exclusively human mind. Although Watson makes no moral judgments of humans or animals, many readers may share the view of Barry Hannah cited in the prefatory material to the collection: "Watson's people are the wretched dreams of honorable dogs." For example, a man living on the outskirts of civilization requires that his dogs prove their humanity through a taunting meat-scrap test. "Seeing Eye" differs from the other stories in being very short and having little plot: a seeing-eye dog and a blind man stand waiting for a defective traffic light to change. Additionally, the consciousness of the human being and the animal are given equal descriptive time, whereas in the other stories animal mental life is only passingly referred to or is to be inferred from behavior. In "Seeing Eye" Watson's description of the dog's mind may be read through the description of consciousness theorized by Antonio Damasio. Waiting for the traffic light to change, the dog, Buck, is momentarily allowed the luxury of his own sense impressions rather than the focus required by his duties: The sounds of the traffic grinding through the intersection were diminished to a small aural dot in the back of his mind, and he became aware of the regular bleat of a slow-turning box fan in an open window of the building behind them. Odd scents distinguished themselves in his nostrils and blended into a rich funk that swirled about the pedestrians who stopped next to them, a secret aromatic history that eddied about him even as the pedestrians muttered among themselves and moved on. The hard clean smell of new shoe leather seeped from the airconditioned stores, overlaying the drift of worn leather and grime that eased from tiny musty pores in the sidewalk. He snuffled at them and sneezed. In a trembling confusion he was aware of all that was carried in the breeze, the strong odor of tobacco and the sharp rake of its smoke, the gasoline and exhaust fumes and the stench of aging rubber, the fetid waves that rolled through it all from garbage bins in the alleys and on the backstreet curbs. '9

The passage refers explicitly to Buck's experience of the properties of the things in the world. In this respect, his experience is similar to that of Flush and Edmond. All reside in a "sensory ecology" that entails experiences that make it like something to be these dogs. But the representations of their experiences are very different. The sense of self imbricated in the guide dog's response to environmental stimuli is lacking or at least muted in Flush and Edmond. Watson's dog has a self to which he relates objects in his environment. The stimuli are understood by the dog as events that are happening to him. The odd scents are in his nostrils; the

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aromatic history eddies around him. The cacophony of scents produces in him a trembling confusion. There is a him there; somebody is at home to interact with the stimuli from the external world. Brad Watson's account of the mind of the guide dog may be mapped onto the description of the sense of self offered by neurologist Antonio Damasio. Damasio explains consciousness as the feeling of something happening to the self in the act of knowing. In Damasio's model, consciousness is a sense of self that begins with a "proto-self," a set of nonconscious regulatory functions of the body that maintain the life processes and provide a first-order recognition of current body states: "The protoself is a coherent collection of neural patterns that map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions." 20 When the proto-self encounters outside stimuli in the environment, it is changed; and this produces an image, also called a feeling, that depicts the internal states of the organism as it responds to the stimuli. In other words, the proto-self is modified while processing external stimuli, and the images formed in the mind that represent this encounter always signal to the organism its own engagement with this business. This too is nonconscious but becomes conscious when the organism automatically re-represents its own changing states in a composite of images and a feeling of the self in the act of apprehending those images. I imagine Damasio's model as similar to the experience I had viewing the film Being John Malcovich. At certain moments in the film, that is, when a stranger entered John Malcovich's brain, the viewer was shown the world through Malcovich's eyes as the stranger experienced that view. The screen image contained a dark border around the view of the world that the moviegoer understood to be Malcovich's as experienced by the stranger. The dark border communicated the feeling of being inside a person's head; it reminded me that I was in a place that was the person who was having visual experiences. If Malcovich himself were to experience his own sense perceptions as I experienced them, he would encounter a visually enhanced version ofDamasio's idea of the sensing of the self in the act of knowing external phenomena. My visualization lacks the dynamic relation between the regulatory functions of the body and the world that produces the self in Damasio's theory. But it is similar in that, as I read Damasio's account of consciousness, sense experience always includes an intimate composite of a sensing of the self (dark border) and the external phenomena one is processing. Damasio makes clear that consciousness has nothing to do with language: "language operates for the self and for consciousness in the same way that it operates for everything else, that is, by symbolizing in words and sentences what exists first in a nonverbal form . . . there must be a nonverbal self and a nonverbal knowing for which the words 'I' or 'me' or the phrase 'I know' are the appropriate translations." 21 Second, for Damasio, consciousness is an emotional experience not a higher-order

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analytical one. As described above, consciousness is a feeling about the existence of the self that emerges only as the self interacts with the environment. In fact, one knows the self through the feeling of this continual encounter. The guide dog's mind in Watson's short story shares with Damasio's theory the representation of the self as emergent from an interaction between the physical environment and the complex functions of the body that engage with this environment. In Damasio's words, the stimuli are being received by "this other presence that signifies you, as observer of the things imaged, owner of the things imaged, potential actor on the things imaged. There is a presence of you in a particular relationship with some object ... In that perspective, the presence of you is the feeling of what happens when your being is modified by the acts of apprehending something."22 The internal images of objects are sensed as the unmistakable mental property of an automatic owner. As in Watson's passage, there is a "unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the sel£"23 All of this is what Damasio calls core consciousness, and he goes on to describe extended consciousness, which is core consciousness only bigger and better, a broader canvas, a larger panorama. While core consciousness is the sense of self arising "in the subtle, fleeting feeling of knowing, constructed anew in each pulse,"2 4 tended consciousness is the ability to "retain records of myriad experiences, previously known by the power of core consciousness ... the ability to reactivate those records in such a way that, as objects, they; too, can generate 'a sense of self' in the act of knowing." 2 5 Brad Watsson's guide dog experiences this sort of extended consciousness: Looking up from the intersection, Buck saw birds dart through the sky between buildings as quickly as they slipped past the open window at dawn. He heard their high-pitched cries so clearly that he saw their beady eyes, their barbed tongues flicking between parted beaks. He salivated at the dusky taste of a dove once he'd held in his mouth. And in his most delicate bones, he felt the murmur of some incessant activity, the low hum beyond the visible world. His hackles rose and his muscles tingled with electricity. 26

Buck's memory brings together images of the past to inflect the present. The birds that he now sees darting through buildings activate memory records of past images of birds flying past an open window, perhaps a window in the building where he lives (the text does not say). At those times he saw the birds more closely and therefore in more detail, so much so that he transfers detail from past images onto the present one. Most importantly; his experience is not just a case of associative memory. The vision of past birds are stored is a phenomenon of core consciousness, and so they are not just images of an external phenomenon but a memory of when he encountered them. The memory is "bathed in the feeling of knowing," 2 7 to use Damasio's term, the feeling that present and past experiences have happened and now are happening to him.

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Damasio grants core consciousness to animals, and extended consciousness as well, although he asserts that at its peak extended consciousness is exclusively human. His basis for this is the questionable claim that humans have greater memory. Damasio would have no quarrel with Carruthers about the exclusive capacities of the reflexive human mind; he just does not believe that what Carruthers describes is consciousness. Thus, while Damasio argues that self-awareness is not the distinguishing characteristic bf human animals, he still maps human and nonhuman animallife onto the Great Chain of Being. Largely he does this rhetorically rather than analytically; seeming to be ~elf-consciousness or uncertain about the implications of his theory for the traditional boundaries between animal and human. Forexample, he refers to highly invasive animal experiments as if they were acceptable practice given who animals are. Ultimately; he draws the line between animals and humans not on the basis of anything he himself has proposed but on a criterion that remains unexamined and unargued in his work- the supposed moral sense that humans have and animals do not, the expectation that a moral sense can only come through reflexive consciousness. Damasio describes an autobiographical self and even extends it to some animals. By the autobiographical self h~ means a "buildup of memories of many instances of a special class of objects: the ~objects' of the organism's biography;" 28 the capacity to retain an image "of previously memorized objects pertaining to the organism's history.m9 Instead of outside stimuli serving as the trigger of core consciousness, the trigger object becomes biographical memories: "While relying on the same fundamental mechanism of core consciousness ... extended consciousness applies the mechanism not just to a single nonself object X, but to a consistent set of previously memorized objects pertaining to the organism's history; whose relentless recall is consistently illuminated by core consciousness and constitutes the autobiographical self" 3o Watson's guide dog has Damasio's autobiographical self He remembers himself consuming a dove. He recalls a time on the farm where he was raised when chi~dren and a man and a woman called him Pete and wrestled with him and threw sticks for him to. retrieve. But Buck's consciousness and the man's differ, and the difference can be related to the kind of self produced by Damasio's core consciousness and the traditional idea of an autobiographical self Although Buck has memories, his orientation is to the world, and his self emerges from this. His consciousness does not make judgments, neither about his "master" nor his own servitude. No grand narratives organize his. memories or current impressions: no explanations of himself for himself are constructed. Nonetheless, the story suggests that the kind.ofself that Buck has can be deprived, and that deprivation can cause suffering, even though his consciousness does not say to itself in reflexive fashion, "I am suffering." Watson has imagined a state of nonreflexive consciousness that can suffer precisely because the process of sensing the self is foreclosed. For Buck, the stalled traffic light is. a brief

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release and relief from the demands of a sterile concentration required by his servitude. The traffic, the blinking crossing signal, the next move, the crossing, the course of pedestrians, the potential obstructions,3 1 all command his attention while he functions as a service tool for humans; this removes him from sensory experiences that would be meaningful to hitn. For a few moments, the stalled traffic light affords him the "rare luxury of wandering attention." When the light changes, Buck must leave his expansive reverie and return to the narrow world of his duties: "He felt the activity of the world spool down into the tight and rifled tunnel of their path."3 2 Dependant on its encounter with the world, Buck's self, his consciousness, constricts and suffers because his attention is determined by human needs and because the environment in which he is forced to work is a polluted human world degraded of sensory richness.· The blind man's sense of self, by contrast, is dependant on the autobiographical self, a perpetual self-referencing, evidenced by his persistent talking to the dog about himself He focuses on the loss and distortion of his memories of the world as a sighted person. He speaks particularly of a growing inability to visualize panoramas and color. He is focused on his present deficiencies, measured through memories of himself as a person with vision. Thus, while Buck's sense of self is sensed through the continual processirtg of sensory phenomena,·the blind man's is produced by the "relentless recall" of "previously memorized objects pertaining to the organism's history." Because of this orientation, he remains less aware 'of his environment and other beings in it than is Buck. Oblivious to the dog's rich consciousness, the man assumes that whatever he feels, the dog feels; he seems to 'assume that the dog is as invested as he is in his (the man's) tragedy. He speaks to Buck as ifto himself: "But now the man always said 'Buck' in the same tone of voice, soft and gentle. As if the man were speaking to himself As if Buck were· not really there. "33 While he and Buck are waiting for the traffic light, he chatters •to the dog about why they must wait rather thango a block out of their way to an operating signal: "If we went down a block, I'll bet that light would get stuck too. We'd be following some kind of traveling glitch across town. We could go for miles, and ·then end up in some field, and a voice saying, 'I suppose you're wondering why I've summoned you here.' "34 No doubt this expresses how the man feels about his own life, but he failsto understand that the feeling of being lost, purposeless, and absurd is what Buck feels too. The blind man fears that he can no longer visualize panoramas, "the big picture," and that he is replacing it "with something phony, like a Disney movie or something.''35 The problem is that his view of the world, like a Disney production, is removed from the world, is a product of the isolated human mind out of touch with life outside of the self That deficiency is not caused by physical blindness but a failure to be sympathetically attuned to the world beyond the self The title "Seeing Eye1' refers to the irony that the man fails to see the world through the eyes of his "seeing-eye dog.'' Additionally, perhaps, it is· intended as an incomplete, disrupted

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rendition of the phrase "seeing eye-to-eye." As such, it suggests the incommensurability of human and animal consciousness, due to the incapacity of animals to grasp and validate the human autobiographical self and the human obsessiveness with that self, a focus that cuts humans off from the world of true animal company. Damasio. has magnifiCently theorized a core consciousness that includes nonhuman animals. It is a sense of self that is rich, interactive, bodily, and emotional. And Damasio makes clear that nonhuman animals participate as fully as do humans in this phenomenon. When one finds a literary text such as Watson's with animal characters informed by .Damasio's core consciousness, one is struck by its fullness. Damasio's account is one of many newer explanations that suggest that traditional ideas about the exclusiveness of the human self are becoming unconvincing and unsatisfying. I would maintain that a robust sense of self often seems absent from contemporary human experience in spite of the assertion that consdousness, in· the sense of self.:awareness, is what humans have and animals do not. The contemporary failure to grasp the self, and even the longing to e11cap~ the self-escape painful, claustrophobic selfconsciousness-iii perhaps the cultural background for newideas about the self th,at are emerging ill. literature about animals . From the mania for infinitely reflexive thought about the self that is neededto,maintain the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, needed to patrol the reified border that excuses all manner of practices against animals, we are returning to a sense of self realized through the rich experiences of the body that we .share with nonhuman animals. As human academic culture rediscovers the body, the challenge will be to afford animals their extraordinary bodily capacities rather than to mark them in new ways as lesser beings.

Notes

* I am very grateful to my brother, James Reed Smith, for his thoughtfl;lt reading of this essay and extensive, insightful comments. r. Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (New York: Random House, 2001), 41.

The examples included in this essay illustrate writings about animals current today rather than stages of historical representation, although two texts come from the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the examples describe animal sensory experience as smell, because this is the capacity through which animal consciousness is most often imagined. 3·. Carl Hiassen, Sick Puppy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, zooo), 150'-151. 4· Normal Malcolm, " 'Thoughtless Brutes,' " Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1972-73 46 (November 1973): 456. 5· Eileen Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and the Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 102-10} 6. Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 2000), 231. 7· Ibid., 199. 2.

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8. Ibid., 199. 9· Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), r8o. 10. Charles Siebert, Angus: A Memoir (New York: Crown Publishers, 2ooo), 92-93· 11. I am indebted to Professor Marian Bean for the e:x,:planation of underle:x:icalization and her example from Richard Adams's Traveller (New York: Random House, 1998). 12. I discuss this point more fully in "Resisting Metaphor: John Hawkes's Sweet William: A Memoir ofOldHorse," Papers on Language and Literature 38. 4 (Fall2oo2): 416-418. ' 13. Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat," Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 436. 14. Virginia Woolf, Flush. (London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1983), 130. 15; Ibid., 132. 16. Ibid., 130. . .. 17. Jean Dutourd, in Robin Chancellor, trans., A Dog's Head (1951; Chicago; . . London; University of Chicago Press, 1998), 144-145. .. 18 .. The expedence of Dutourd's Edmond begs comparison with that of the medical student described by Oliver Sacks in "The Dog Beneath the Skin," in his The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1970; New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 156-160. High on cocaine, PCP arid amphetamines, the student found himself in a world of smells unimaginably rich and significant, one which conveyed an entirely different, more palpable, aesthetic that the human one. 19. Brad Watson, "Seeing Eye," in Last Days ofthe Dog-Men: Stories (New York: Delta, 1996), 41. 20. Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York; San Diego; London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999), 154. 21. Ibid., 108. 22. Ibid., 10. 23. Ibid., II. 24. Ibid., 196. 25. Ibid., 197· 26. Was ton, in Last Days ofDog-Men, 43· 27. Damasio, in The Feeling ofWhat Happens, 198. 28. Ibid., 197· 29. Ibid., 198. 30. Ibid., 197-198. 31. Watson, in Last "Wtys ofDog-Men, 41. 3?-· Ibid., 41. 3J. Ibid., 42. 34- Ibid., 40-:-41. 35· Ibid;, 42.

CHAPTER

14

HuMAN-ANIMAL AFFILIATION IN MoDERN PoPuLAR FILM TimGadd

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uring the past two decades, domestic animals have rapidly beco.me soc~ali~ed .into the human ~pher~, c:eating a se.n~e of speCies egahtanamsm, and a growmg dtsdam for trad1t1onal conceptions of "human'' and "animal." As domestic animals shift along this continuum toward humanization (by which I mean atendency for them to be· regarded, however inconsistently, in the same way that we regard humans), wild animals have also been repositioned, moving in many respects into the position previously occupied by domestic animals during the modernist era, I will examine this process at work in various films from the modernist and postmodern eras,· including Lassie Come Home, K-9II (domestic animals), King 'Kong, The Planet of the Apes, Gorillas in the Mist, and Instinct (wild animals). I will also argue that in popular media-representations of human'-domestic animal relations, adults have ·largely usurped the actantual role of children, and that children, rather than pairing off with the family pet, are increasingly finding themselves with wild aniinal pals. In effect, killer whales have slipped •into the space on the anthropomorphic continuum vacated by Rin Tin Tin, who has moved up into the adult sphere. Essentially there are two parallel processes at work: the retruitment of domestic ·animals into adult media products, and the induction of wild animals to replace them in children's films. Increasing species egalitarianism and a widespread desire for closer contact with other animals are not isolated phenomena. During recent decades, characteristically similar changes in attitudes toward animals have occurred across a broad range of cultural sites. For instance, the longupheld scientific taboo, on anthropomorphism and' the idea of animal mind has ,been increasingly on the back foot throughout the 1990s. 1 Stories, films, and even plays focusing on closer human-animal relations have been spectacularly popular. The distinction between pets and human family members is becoming increasingly blurry. In short,,we are presently fascinated by other species, and wish to tonsider ourselves clo§er to them than cultural traditions have permitted in recent centuries. These changes are now beginning to intersect in our cultural consciousness, producing an escalation in academic interest in social attitudes to animals.

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A growing consensus exists among cultural commentators from various fields that the later twentieth century is characterized by a decline i!l anthropocentric values in both scientific and popular literature, and iq mainstre,am culture, and by a decentering of humanity's self..,image in rela~ tion to nature in general. The portrait of the twentieth century that emerges from the works of these writers2 is one of a developing publit empathy toward animals, interrupted by a mid-century hiatus or, in som& cases, even by a reversal. Across a broad spectrum of animal-related articles and texts, the early to mid-twentieth century emerges as a nadir or hiatus in_ positive or egalitarian attitudes toward other species, followed by a reversal of these trends in the later part of the century. Some examples include the dominance of behaviorism and classical ethology; and the consequent resurgence of scientific interest in animal mind and anthropomorphism; the rise; stagnation, decline, and return of the animal welfare and animal right~ movements; the sudden postwar increase in pet-keeping, the general contemporary fascination with animal intelligence, and the massive prolifera" tion .of human-animal crossover texts in the last two decades. This same chronology can be applied to the. way in which animals and human-animal relationships.are depicted in modern popular texts. Moreover, the trajectory of these changes in depictions and attitudes corresponds to C<';rtain characteristics of the successive paradigm states of modernism and postmodernism. Adrian Franklin provides a useful characterization of this transition in his 1999 book, Animals and Modern Cultures. In the final chapter, he observes, "The decentered sensibilities ;of postmodernity are nowhere better demonstrated.than in human-animal relations."3 Franklin identifies "two paradigm states of human-animal relations in the twentieth century, which correspond, approximately; to the social,conditions; of modernity and late or postmodernity."4 Under modernism, until the mid1970s in Franklin's chronology; these relations were characterized ·by. a relatively small variety of sites of human-animal interaction, which tended to utilize animals either for entertainment or utilitarian purposes .. Attitudes were highly anthropocentric, and sentimentality was generally reserved for a "narrow range of highly anthropomorphized and neotenized animals."5 Postmodern animal-human relations are effectively the reverse of this. attitude. The '"former certainty; of anthropocentrism" has "dissolved"; caught up. in a range of "reflexive remodelling in relation to a range of 'Others' (including people of different race, gender; age, and sexual orien~ tation)." Sentiments and empathy have extended to virtually all.animal types; not just those with "superficially human-like characteristics." Pets have become "companions rather than entertaining playthings or fashion accessories,"6 fellow family members with whom close emotional relation-· ships, viewed as "pathological" as recently as the r96os, are now regarded as "good for us" and "normal."? Indirectly; Franklin acknowledges that these paradigm states of human-animal relations under. modernism and postmodernism .coincide with the changes delineated by writers working in other animal-related

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fields. For example, a substantial se.ction of his book comprises a review of Marvin and Mullin's Zoo Culture (1987), and whereas Franklin doesn't always agree with its authors on the causes or the inevitability of the changes described, he does not contest the basic precept of the declining anthropocentrism in the style of presentations staged by zoos. Similarly, whereas Franklin does not mention Richard Ryder's works, and is often critical if not hostile to the animal rights movement, 8 both he and Ryder cite the 1975 release of Peter Singer's Anima! Liberation, suggesting that it signifies some sort of watershed in human attitudes to other species, and Franklin observes that a "clear pattern of de~differentiation of humans and animals" has become conspicuous "especially in the last quarter of the twentieth century."9 I postulate an additional, intermediary period, buffering the modernist and postmodern eras, in terms of anthropomorphism and animal representations in popular texts. The demarcation points are necessarily somewhat arbitrary, and refer to popular media: 10 Anthropocentric /modernist (r920-I959)• Transitional (r960-1979) Postmodern I egalitarian (r98o-present)

The transitions in the conventions of anthropomorphic, and animal fiction in the modern era are far from universal in their deployment. Older, even archaic: traditions of animal representation still persist in some popular texts/ 1 and even those texts characteristic of the new anthropomorphism sometimes include elements from these traditions. Nevertheless; representative examples of modern styles of depiction are abundant, and I will offer some examples that typify the contra,st between such portrayals and the conventions that. preceded them-first. in depictions of human relationships with domestic animals, then wild animals. The two most popular canine media stars of the 1950s are Lassie and Rin TinTin (both debuted on television in 1954). As Marjorie Garber notes in Dog Love, these canine characters "employ the old theme of the!helpful .animal' familiar. from mythology and romance. m 2 The animal helper motif is ostensibly alive and well in modern movies too, but there are. significant developments in the convention, which become clear if we compare Lassie. and Rin Tin Tin with modern products like the German TV series CommissarRex, and especially the 1999 Hollywood movie K-9n(the latter is a sequel to the original 1989 film K-9). Both of these shows feature dogs, ostensibly in the role of helper to a human.professional; Rex and Jerry Lee are ·both German Shepherd police dogs, It turns out though that the dogs' contribution. to the police work involved in both Commissar Rex, and particularly in K-911 is quite peripheral to what the. texts are fundamentally about: the integration of dogs into human social life as almost fully humanized adult characters. In comparing such 1950s cultural products with thdr late 1990s counterparts, some contrasts are immediately apparent. The human who

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possesses an animal companion in the earlier films is a child. In the modern~ versions he is an adult-moreover, an adult fulfilling the highly responsible and demanding social role of police officer. The parent or guardian of the child in earlier animal-child series and movies was very often a law enforcement officer (or in the case of Rin Tin Tin, an entire military outpost)- a role that suggests the adult character as a ntetonym for ortho-' dox social attitudes; thus we might say that the first significant difference is merely the removal of the child as mediator between adult and animal, and thereby between culture and animal. That the companions of preference for popular media domestic animals are now likely to be adults is a significant transformation. That companion animal films have graduated from the child's to the adult's sphere is characteristk of what Franklin, Garber, and others have noticed: that in "late modernity" we are "unselfconscious in acknowledging" the emotional value of companion animals, not just for our children, but for ourselves as welJ.I3 In the same sense, a generation of children who grew up on The Adventures of Rin Tin Tt'n and Lassie now find themselves in a cultural environment within which the demise of the exclusive animal-child pair allows them to enjoy animal buddy-films whose human protagonist is an adult. r4 The second difference to which I would direct attention relates to the first. The pairing of dog with adult human facilitates a true integration of the animal into the human social sphere. While the human companion is a juvenile, the entire relationship is effectively bracketed from the "real worH' of human society. In fact the common pairing of child with animal in older texts underlines that children and domestic animals have, in certain· respects, been traditionally conceptualized· in similar terms. (An example of this tendency can be seen in period Rin Tin Tin memorabilia, which customarily refer to the child and animal co~stars ·as "Rusty and Rinty.") 15 Children have traditionally been conceptualized as closer to animals because they are closer to a prelinguistic condition themselves, and it is common; if not usual, for the animal companions in older texts to be unable to communicate with adults in the same way they can communicate with the child. This convention has changed. Not only do adults talk to dogs now,·but in A. R. Gurney's 1995 Broadway hit Sylvia, they utter profanities, discuss late twentieth-century capitalism, and become embroiled in serious romantic triangles. Prime-time televisionmay not be quite ready for such material yet, but Gurney has allegedly worked on a screenplay of Sylvia for Steve Martin and Sara Jessica Parker (Nightingale). Such depictions of domesticated animal-adult human communication are now nearly taken for granted. Whenchildren are cast as the human half of the animal-human pair nowadays, the animal half is often a wild animal. In Joey the child protagonist is paired up with a kangaroo. In The Journey of Natty Gann, a young girl is accompanied and protected by a wild wol£ Free Willy and its sequels see a killer whale filling the role of animal companion. In Grizzly Falls, the role falls to a bear. In addition to these movies there

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have been the recent remakes of The Jungle Book and Tarzan. In situations where the animal is domesticated, the setting is frequently wilderness (White Fang, White Fang 2, or Iron Will) . Wild animals are being drawn toward the human sphere, occupying roughly the position that domestic animals held forty years ago in terms of media depictions of human-animal relationships. The prospect of a highly successful series of 1950s children's films featuring a killer whale is hard to imagine, and conversely, the Flipper movie remake of the 196os TV series, in which the animal protagonist is effectively an aquadc version of the 1950s Lassie, was not a tremendous success at the modern box office. Whereas domestic animals and children formerly mediated betWeen nature and culture, domestic animals are now so humanized that either the species of the animal or the setting must be rendered feral in order to maintain an impression df mediation betWeen disparate worlds. With regard to depictions of human-animal relationships and anthropomorphism, the modernist and postmodern periods are separated by a transitional period, beginning in the late 1950s and ending in the late 1970s. During this period, these themes steadily migrated from "serious" literature to popular texts. 16 Popular media of this transitional period often depict animal-human, and particularly animal-child relations occurring in a sort of crepuscular zone that is neither wild nor domestic. The· early 'indications of this trend are discernible in both Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, which both involve domestic animals in rural or frontier settings. By the 196os, animal characters in television series featuring child-animal relationships were apt to be semidomesticated wild animals who interacted with human characters on the fringe of a domestic setting, while retaining close contact with essentially wild settings; therefore they mediated betWeen urban and rural, culture and nature, wilderness· and domesticity. Characteristic examples· from the 196os include Gentle Ben, Flipper, and Skippy (the "bush'' kangaroo). By the year zooo, and K-9II, children are often friends with wholly wild animals, and the domestic animal-human partnership has become both adult and urban. In fact what has essentially occurred is that domestic animals have been sufficiently socialized and humanized, and have penetrated far enough into human emotional and social· affairs, so as to have become depicted in adult human terms, and without the uncomfortable sense of the ridiculous that almost always accompanied such depictions when they occurred previously. 17 This is what Adrian Franklin is referring to when he speaks of the postmddern unselfconsciousness in acknowledging the value of close emotional relations with pets-a phenomenon that has shown significant growth even during the seven years since Marjorie Garber, in her 1994 article "Heavy Petting," bemoaned the "pity'' or "condescension" generally shown by people toward humans who were emotionally close to their pets. 18 ·To typify the transition in depictions to which I'm referring, we might consider varieties of productions focusing on close relationships or

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communication between adult humans and animals in existence from the 1940s to 1960s. For a start, there were very few of them. The ones that <;l~d exist operated on the premise that such a relationship was dysfunction~!,, eccentric, ri<;liculous, or child-like, and reiterate<;l the period's perceived affinities between animals and children. Examples include Mr. Ed, or: Harvey, in which the ami~ble, eccentric, but ultimately infantile adult character Eldwood P. Dowd, shares the .lead role of the movie with an invisible anthropomorphic rabbit. More generally though, the adult in such productions is insula,ted against a personal relationship with the animal, either by the child character, who m,ediates most communications between a<;lult and animal, or by virtue of possessing some .quasiprofessional relationship to the animal, as in Dr Doolittle or, Daktari (the name itself means '~nimalDoctor"). InK-9n,]ames Belushi's character, Dooley, and his canine partner,Jerry Lee, possess a professional relationship too, in ,the. sense :they are both police officers; however K-9rr concentrates at least as much on thei.r domestic life (Dooley is a widower, now living with his dog). There are a great many scenes where, Dooley is shown brushingJerry's teeth, groomipg him, eating breakfast cereal from the same bowl, exercising with him, sleeping with him, sharing a beer with him, and so on. At first glance this, does not appear to depart radically from the conventional, comic portrayals of such relationships, as depicted, for instance in the original K-9 movie of ten years earlier: but there is more going on in K-9rr. There are several scenes in which the emotional closeness of the rela,tionship is depicted as sincere, serious, even normative. In particular there are four scenes ofJerry Lee and Dooley alone together, each accompanied by a rather sentimental if not romantic signature tune, where Dooley tells him "I love you the way you .are," or grooms him, saying "Pretty ears ... so handsome." These an; odd, unexpected, scenes in which the plot of the film ceases to ,move, and the viewer is simply presented with depictions of the extent to which Dooley feels emotionally close to Jerry Lee, and regards him as an important fa,mily member. Even depictions such as these would not necessarily go against the sort. of traditions that have existed un,til recently, if the film closed in such away. as to. restore Dooley to a more tra<;lition,a,l state of ontological complete:ness, indicating that the homosocial mateship with Jerry Lee was merely a "thing" he went through while recovering from his wife's death. Indeed, much of the film appears to be shaping up to deliver just such an ending. Dooley's new partner, Welles, is a young female cop withwhom.he had a one-night stand at some point, apparently during his marriage. She is also paired with. a dog (whom Dooley dislikes, because he "probably doesn't even drink"). An attraction develops between the humans, following the now customary perio<;l of mutual hostility. When .Welles starts sleeping in Dooley's house, his new partner sleeps with 4~:;r dog downstairs, while Dooley and Jerry L.ee sleep together in the upstairs bed. 19 H;owever, against all expectations, traditional. domestic normalcy is n,ot restored.

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Dooley and his female cop friend remain close, no solid indication given that anything more serious or permanent has developed than an infatuation, which appears to have become platonic by the movie's end. More significantly, the film closes with scenes underscoring the undamaged closeness of the human-canine domestic relationship, and the movie ends with a scrolling credit assuring us, ':Jerry Lee is still by Dooley's side." Dooley, it seems, rather than remarrying, or even entering into a de-facto marriage, has chosen to remain a bachelor whose best friend is a dog.. Somehow, it is this fact, rather than the triumphant initiation of a sexual romance between Dooley and a new woman, which symbolizes Dooley's ontological restoration. The vacuum left by the death of Dooley's wife 20 does not apparently require either a human or a sexual relationship to take its place. Dooley's domestic and professional partnership with Jerry Lee is. quite arguably a trans-species substitute for a male homosocial relationship. However, significant in the context of my argument is merely that a dog can now be deployed in this capacity in a modern film without it's seeming anomalous. I ·should add that K-9n does not leave itself open to a sequel, which might furnish a traditional restoration.: One of the main premises of the story development throughout the film is that both Dooley and Jerry Lee are becoming too old for police work, and that any further deterioration in the latter's health due to, normal aging would render him completely incapable of police work. A K-9n does not' seem likely, unless it is a "next generation." · · The emphasis on species egalitarianism in a domestic setting in popular texts such as K-9n helps break down the convention of distancing the animal from the human by representing the animal as helper; mere pet, or other.adjunct to the human family. In earlier popular media works featuring human-domestic animal partnerships, a variety 1of buffering devices existed to help maintain this distance- a frontier, rural or exotic setting, or the mere existence of an already ontologically complete human family whose interaction with the animal· character is achieved mainly via the medium of the child. In fact,' until adeast the I96os, as noted !by James Serpell, pet-keeping in western societies<was largely associated with marginalized groups such. as women, the elderly, or the emotionally dysfunctional. 21 I suggest that children should be added to this category. The entire constellation of,marginalized groups is .assembled in Lassie Come Home (1943)~which, despite its obvious friendliness to the idea of pet-keeping, succeeds in confining overt examples .of human-canine communication and interaction to members of the aforementioned groups. In the film's opening sc'en:e, a group of men gather around Lassie, enumerating her virtues. Significantly, not a single remark in this fairly lengthy conversation is. directed to Lassie; she ismerelythe object of discussion; Other than Joe, Lassie's child-companion, the only characters in the film to engage her in "conversation," speaking directly to her and apparently expecting to be understood, belong to one or more marginalized categories

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of adult. The first is a childless, possessive, elderly woman, whose husband finds Lassie exhausted,outside their cottage, and in whose home she briefly recuperates during her journey home from Scotland. The second is a trav,.. eling salesman, a xpiddle-aged single man who wanders the countryside if!. a sort of gypsy caravan, and who is depicted as a kindly eccentric, already in· the habit of addressing lengthy monologues to his tiny dog "Toots." However benignly or affectionately these characters may be presented in Lassie Come Home, the film still adheres to the tacit assumption that Serpell claims informed popular attitudes to pet-keeping until at least the 196os: "the suspicion that pets are no more than substitutes for so-called 'normal' human relationships." 22 In R!-9n, Dooley is still depicted as an eccentric and a widower; the absence of a normal human relationship. 1s evident. The difference is that, ultimately, the human..:.pet relationship in K-9nis depicted as a reasonable alternative to a human social-emotionaJ relationship, not a dysfunctional substitute. Franklin states that under postmodernism, an increasing number of animal species are being drawn into the human sphere, and becoming the; object of individualized human attitudes. 23 This claim supports the observations I have 'made about. the· shift from child to adult protagonist in animal buddy movies (since the animal-human interaCtive sphete has now expanded to include adults), and from domestic to wild animals where the. human protagonist is still a child. In the. inevitable progression. of these trends, wild species are finding their way into more texts in which,the human partner is adult; moreover, the changes in the manner of their portrayal in such stories reveal further aspects of the change from modernist to postmodern attitudes, Of the nondomestic animals; primates have traditionallybeen depicted as more similar to humans. than most species. 2 4 Gorillas, in particular, have featured in a large number of popular films, and whereas they have often been portrayed as victims of human exploitation, their representation has altered in character since the modernist period. KingKong of 1933 emphasizes the impossibility of meaningful human~ape.interaction. Though he is presented (without excessive sentimentality) as.a victim of human avarice, Kong is an alien, his otherness exaggerated by his sheer size. By the time ofMightyJoeYoungin 1949 (remade byDisneyin 1998), the c;apturedgorilla had shrunk to . a more tractable fifteen feet. The' interaction between Kong and his female human captive is.all but nonexistent, limited to the unfulfillable desires of the beast himself. His portrayal illuminates the human-animal connection only in a negative sense, betraying a .deep cultural anxiety· about, and fascination with the animalistic nature of human desire. That Kong belongs on the nether side ofthe human-animal, culture-nature divide is symbolized by the giant wall that. the human natives who live on his island have erected between their world and his prehistoric "kingdom." During the late 196os and early 1970s-within the transitional phasein animal depictions that I have posited~primates returned to the science

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fiction limelight in the Planet of the Apes movies. In the original movie, The Planet ofthe Apes (1968), a time-traveler finds himself on a future' Earth where humans are semi+sentient mutes, and the dominant, mostly hostile species' are sentient, English-speaking gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. Ah important premise of this scenario, not fully explained until the fourth movie (Conquest ofthe Planet ofthe Apes, 1972), is that this state of affairs originated in the practice of humans< keeping primates as pets. Time-traveling sentient primates who return to present-day Earth in the third movie, Escape from the Planet ofthe Apes (1971), bring with them a virus that kills all the world's cats and dogs. "That's how it all began," explains Armando to the future ape:--revolutionist Caesar, during the fourth film. "Humans wanting little household pets to replace the ones they had lost." I mention this to demonstrate that traditional negative attitudes toward pet-keeping, and amdeties about affiliations that blur the human-animal distinction were still robust in the popular imagination during this era. Nevertheless, the primates are now more heavily anthropomorphized, of human-like size and stature, sentient and speech-capable, and not all of them are antagonistic.' Indeed, by the conclusion ofthe final film of the series-Battle For the Planet oftheApes, 1973-theidea of reconciliation between ape and human seems possible. Significantly perhaps, this sym.bolic dismantling of 'species barriers is. set ,in a distant fut:ure. zs In Tim Burton's 2001 remake of the original movie, further changes in social atti.tt.tdes to other species are evident, particularly in Helena Bonham Carter's ape character, Ari, whose attitude toward the abused,'"primitive" human characters is essentially that of an animal-'rights activist. Additionally, an inter..:species romance, seems immanent after Ari's conspicuous and ·repeated attempts to seduc.e the human protagonist, 'Captain Davidson. No such sexual tension existed in the original version of the movie. · By contrast with these examples· from the· modernist and transitional periods, Gorillas in the Mist in 1988 is informed by an almost fully postmodern set of attitudes toward other spedes. I would not be the first to observe that animals are the newestin a succession df marginalized groups to be accorded serious consideration by philosophers and culture in general: for instance, in The Political Animal, Richard Ryder argues, "the parallels between speciesism, sexism and racism have become clearer over recent years." 26 With this in mind, it is unsurpdsing that in the beginning of Gorillas in the Mist we are shown that Diane Fossey initially works with disabled children before moving on to gorillas. This detail also underlines another aspect of the mediative function: of children in· animal-human crossover texts. The basic plot of Gorillas in the Mist is simple. Fossey spends an:extensive period studying gorillas in a remote wildeJ;ness area. She becomes emotionally bonded with them, and eventually commits an act of vengeance against the poachers who have been preying on the 1gorillapopulation at the behest of western zoos. The crucial moment in the movie, in: terms of its depiction of human-animal relations, appears in the final scene,' where Fossey is

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buried alongside the slaughtered male silverback leader of the gorilla family; their graves surrounded by a ring of stones, which, it is explained elsewhere in the movie, symbolize marriage (by contrast, at the conclusion of King Kong, Fay Wray is returned to her human husband). Culminating in this scene, Gorillas in the Mist presents us with a range' of roles, characterizations, .and· events, which. completely invert the depiction of human:_ animal relations .in King Kong. In the person of Diane Fossey, the Fay Wray character, Kong's helpless, 'lingerie-draped female prisoner, for. possession of whom the military and moral arsenal of contemporary culture js deployed, has become a vengeful and righteous force, rising up to avenge a helpless Kong against· the barbarity of anthropocentric human culture. Earlier, I stated that the attitudes conveyed in Gorillas in the Mist are "almost fully postmodern;" In fact, when assessed by Franklin's criteria, ·the movie is· a· fully fledged postmodern product. It displays the misanthropy that. Franklin. considers typical of late modern attitudes and; the vision of humanity as "a destructive, pestilent species, mad and out df control," while animals are "essentially good,·· balanced and sane." 2 7 However, unlike Franklin, I do not. regard the misanthropic critique of anthropocentrism as an emergent phenomenon of postmodernism per se; it was a tra9ition already established in modernis.t literature, which had certainly begun to penetrate popular culture during the transitional period in the 1950s and 196os. In fact I would argue that misanthropy, far from typifying· the most contemporary vision of humanity's relationship with nature, is actually beginning to wane. 28 · ,. Instinct (1999) is effectively a postscript to Gorillas in the Mist, for it is in many ways ~ fictionalized,, 1990s continuation of the Diane Fossey legend .in which the naturalist survives the revenge he visits on the human destroyers,of his adopted family .2 9 and is returned to civilization to stand trial. The protagonist is Ethan Powell, a murderous,.enigmatic "wild man'' who refuses to speak,, and has apparently reverted to a savage, instinctual condition. Instinct eventually inverts the expectations it creates by its utilization of Hopkins' connotative potency, finally recasting the killer in the Diane Fossey rnold as a man,merely defending his family. Significantly, we are allowed to witness the gradual conversion of Powell's psychiatrist, whose eventual acknowledgment,both of his client's sanity and essential innocence ,can be interpreted as a .vote for. ,reconciliation and species egalitarianism on behalf of,society in general. At the movie's end, Powell escapes prison and returns to the jungle. As in K-9n, we are presented with a man restored to ontological completeness and.sound mind, who chooses to integrate himself into a nonhuman family, rather than a dysfunctional, misanthropiceccentric wandering offinto the jungle because he can't deal with other humans. Popular depictions of human relationships with both domestic and wild animals have, over t4e past half century, and particularly during the 1990s, moved 'toward a greater egalitarianism, manifesting a slippage ofthe concepts of nature and culture,' human and animal. This amelioration of

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species can be seen in one respect as a scientifically influenced phenomenon, relateq to the misgivings about reality in movies like The Matrix, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, or Existenz, as well as to the immanent completion of the Human Genome Project-an exercise emphasizing the digital, arbitrary essence of species. In everyday terms however, these changes in depictions signify that, as Donna Harraway puts it, "many people no longer feel the need for separate categories of animal and human."3° Our popular texts reflect this sentiment, previewing an emergent phenomenon: a species egalitarianism pointing toward a future in which "multiculturalism" may acquire .new meanings.

Notes I.

2.

3· 4· 5· 6. .7· 8. 9· 10.

In the July 1997 edition of Discover, primatologist Francis De Waal poses the question 1'Are we in Anthropo-denial?", by which he means a deliberate refusal to acknowledge the human-like characteristics of other animals. Many animal scientists now openly acknowledge the usefulness of anthropomorphism and empathy as research tools, . and the phrase 1'critical anthropomorphism" has been in currency now for at least ten years. Writers who I believe have made a significant cbntribution to this growing front during the past fifteen years include, on human-animal relationships, James Serpell, In the·Company ofAnimals: A Study·ofHuman-Animal Relationship (Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Adrian Franklin,

Animals b Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relationships in Modernity (London: Sage, 1999); Richard D. Ryder (on the history of the animal welfare movement), The Political Animal.· The Conquest of Speciesism (London: McFarland, 1998); Donna Haraway (fot her "Cyborg Manifesto" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature ·(New York: Routledge, 1991); and Eileen Crist (on the history of the scientific community's attitude to animal mind), Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and the Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), as well as a plethora of writers involved in debates on scientific anthropomorphism, ecocentrism, or animal rights in journals such as Environmental Ethics, Natural History, Capitalism Nature Socialism, or Environmental Values. Franklin, Animals b Moderti Cultures 175. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 189. Ibid . Ibid., 8+ Ibid., 182. For instance, he describes it as a "fetish .. ; mutated into a fundamentalist·•cult." Ibid., 175. Whereas I agree with Franklin that the modernist period was characteristically anthropocentric, I believe there was nevertheless a strong anti-anthropocentric tradition in modernist literature, . as opposed to popular fiction and culture of the era. In Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Neitzsche, Kafka, Ernst, b Lawrence (Baltimore: John Hopkins

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University Press, 1985), Margot Norris outlines wl;lat she calls the ''biocentric" critique of anthropocentrism in the works of writers such as n H. Lawrence and Kafka, and the surrealist artist Max Ernst, opse.rying that it died out after Second World War I contend that over the following several decades this tradition did not exactly. die out, but gradually reemerged and transformed, becoming a salient characteristic of popular culture, rather than a critique of it. For instance Maus, in which species are used to represent specific hurnan racial/political groups: a convention characteristic of a much older style of anthropomorphic representation (though, interestingly, Maus is set in a historical period during which this convention was still more commonly used-for instance in George Orwell's Animal Farm-and I think it could be argued that its deployment in Maus constitutes part of the historical setting). See Art Spiegelman,·Maus: A Survivor} Tale I: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon, 1986). Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (London: Penguin, 1996), 89. Franklin, Animals & Modern Culture, 104. An. even more pronounced example of this trend is "furry fandoni'' -a thriving, adult-oriented subculture that has emerged and flourished during the last decade. Similar to. science fiction and media fandoms in most respects (its conventions have names like "Anthrocon," "Confurence," etc.), furry fandom is devoted exclusively to art, stories, or films featuring anthropomorphized animals, or animal-h\lrnan hybrid chara~ters (e.g., the bipedalfelines in the "Chanur" novels ofC.J.Cherryh). This convel).tion is emphasized in the first episode of the Rin Tin Tin TV series, where it's explained that Rusty and Rinty were adopted by Fort Apache three years earlier, when they were found__, "just a pair of babes in arms. The only things left living a.fter that wagon train massacre." See "Meet Rin Tin Tin," The Adventures ofRin Ti11 Tin. Dir. Robert G. Walker. ABC, 1954~ 1 . I believe the transition occurred more rapidly, and with fascinating genreblurring characteristics in fiction and quasi-fiction books of this intermediary period, amongst whose ranks.I would include J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip (1955), Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf (1963), James Herbert's Fluke (1977),.and Richard Adams' The Plague Dogs {1977). I regard these genre-bending characteristics as the equivalent to the "crepuscular zone" I referred to in relation to 1960s television series' like Flipper. For the purposes of this paper however, I have restricted discussion to television and film. I would go so far as to say that the cop-police dog relationship inK9n, with senior (human) and junior (canine) partners subject to the authority of superior officers, is literally a modern, adult replica of the (Honorary Corporal) Rusty-(Honorary Private) Rintyrelationship from The Adventures ofRin Tin Tin. See K9n. Dir. Charles T. Kanganis. Universal, 1999· Marjorie Garber, "Heavy Petting," in Diana Fuss, ed., .Human, All Too Human (London: Routledge, 1996),•25. I was recently directed to a survey on the Internet (Anita Lang Pet Survey Results <;:http://www;anitalang.com/surv~yresults.html>), which found that 98 percent of 1279 American pet-qwners interviewed sle.ep with their pets. If this is even remotely accurate, the significance of this scene would

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seem to be less in its potential to titillate, and more in its implication that cinema is begin to reflect the unselfconscious postmodern attitudes to pets outlined by Franklin. 20. Dooley's wife dies of natural causes, sometime between the original movie and the sequel. There seems to be no real purpose for her absence, other than to allow the second movie to concentrate on the Dooley-:Jerry Lee relationship. 21. James Serpell, In the Company ofAnimals: A Study ofHuman-Animal Relationships (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 24-25, 58. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Franklin, Animals b Modern Culture, 189. 24. Despite the many depictions of gorillas as close to human, I would argue that the phenomenon is even more pronounced in the case of dogs, and even wild canines in modern texts. In fact, it was a little difficult to resist choosing wolves as the wild species for this chapter. 25. The intent to represent the ape revolution as a metaphor for the American civil rights movement is undeniable, and director J. Lee Thompson admits, in an interview included in the recent video reissuing of the Apes movies, that the staging of clashes between apes and human security forces were influenced by the 1965 Watts riots. This does not, in my view, negate or compromise what the series suggests about human attitudes to other species during the period. See Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Dir. J. Lee Thompson. 2oth Century Fox, 1973; Conquest ofthe Planet of the Apes. Dir. J. Lee Thompson. 2oth Century Fox, 1972; Escape from the Planet ofthe Apes. Dir. Don Taylor. 2oth Century Fox, 1971. 26. Ryder, The Politica!Animal, r. 27. Franklin, Animals b Modern Culture, 54-57, 3· 28. This decline in misanthropy is not universal in its deployment, nor is it always easy to recognize; however, even in modern popular texts where the message seems ostensibly to be purely misanthropic, a human character almost inevitably emerges who defies the behavior of his species, and initiates meaningful communication with the nonhuman characterssymbolizing the beginnings of inter-species affiliation. An example is the zoologist character called "The Mann" in William Horwood's The W:VIves ofTime series. Viewed in this light, these apparently misanthropic texts become retellings of the anthropocentric excesses of the modernist era, and the promise of reconciliation and egalitarianism in the present age. 29. In both films the killings of gorillas and humans occur in Rwanda, a setting that, in the interval between Gorillas in the Mist and Instinct acquired a connotative potency that further accentuates the peacefulness of the nonhuman characters. Given the connotations of violence that have traditionally surrounded traditional depictions of the behavior of wild animals, the film title Instinct is steeped in irony. See Gorillas in the Mist. Dir. Michael Apted. Guber, 1988; Instt'nct. Dir. John Turteltaub. Touchstone Pictures, 1999. 30. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, andWVmen, 152.

CHAPTER

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WHo MAY SPEAK FOR THE ANIMALs? DEEP EcoLOGY IN LINDA HoGAN's PowER,. AND . A. A. CARR's ErE KILLERS Catherine Rainwater

M are limited not by an aware ignorance, but by our' "knowledge" that th'e · 'world is as we think it "must" be. 1 tangle of unexamined cultural assumptions about nature and indigenous people under.lies much of t~e .discours~ of early; ~nd even present-day Amettca. The semtottc equatton of ~'wtld" American Indians with a "hideous and aesolate wilderness, full of wild beasts'' persists well irtto the nineteenth century. 2 The Eurocentric story of "progress" underlying the doctrine •of Manifest Destiny was constructed around biblically aild philosophically grounded differences between nature_,_'phenoinena to be exploited arrd subdued-and Humanity-the .superior, rational beings chosen by God to preside over the test of creation. In the western gdrid design, nonhuman animals and the land fell unambiguously to the inferior, "nature" side of the· equation, but often and paradoxically; so did some human beings, including Indians. Eurocentric 'ambivalence concerning the ontological status of native people is suggested rh~torically i~ countless historiCal and cultural documents comparing them favorably andunfavorably'to the wildlife of the forests, plains, and mountains where they made their homes. Ignorant frontiersmen unabasheply called American Indians "bel;t.sts" ~nd "vipers," but even better-educated individu,als frequen,tly had to remind themselves "savages are men . "3 "On the level of statement," writes Richard Drinnon, "Indians were as, Genesis dictated, brother offshoots ofAdam; [but} on the levil of action, and the words and images flowing from acts that mattered, Indians ... were animals of the forest.'' Quoting from Timothy Dwight's Greenfield Hill.· A Poem in Several Paris ~1794), Drinnon reminds us that Indians were viewed as " 'sable forms' who crept along 'snaky paths' to aim their 'death unseen' and scream 'the tyger.:yell.' "4 Though Dwight alludes to the gradual assimilation of the Pequots and other ttibes into "one

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extended class" of Americans, the end of his poem more decisively envisions their disappearance into a legendary past. Likewise, in another work from the same era, The Forest Rangers: A Poetic Tale of the ~stern Wildern~~s in I794 (1832), Andr~w Coffinberry's Indian-hating fr6ptiersman joyfully reports, that ':the wild and untat:Ifable natives of these fl:OW flm;~rishing climes, are rapidly vanishing from the things that be!''5 · These works exemplify .cqnventions of early American discourse ~in which the human status of Indians becomes a site of semiotic instabiHty. The Eurocentric construction iOf Indians appears to. follow th~ satne pattern of devaluation that Jean Baudrillard observes regarding animals, who were "demoted" proportionally "as reason and humanistn progressed."6 Often, the implicit message is that the disappearance of Indians along with other "wild and untamable" things would greatly simplify many philosophical and practical dilemmas posed by their existenc;e. Ironically, this early Euroamerican dream of the disappearing Indian was gradually displaced throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by nostalgic longing, not only for the "vanishing tribes," but al§o for the "lost wilderness." America:tl Jiterature and .p;J.inting from t~e nineteenth century onward romanticizes Indian$ and nature si):llpltaneously, as both nonetheless continue to suffer the consequences of western progress. Even today, at the turn of tl1e twenty-:-first .century, this muddl~d thinking about native people and nature is reflected in popular venu<;.s, including well-:-intended New Age an,d environmentalist proclamations t):lat are.rife.with romantic and n0 stalgic stereotypes .. Dean Ma~Cann~~l describes this contemporary attitude as "a kind of unrealized mourning in which. all of life has bec:;ome reorga.nized around something that 'died' "; upon the "purportedly dead" are be~towed alL the. "4onors, privilege, an,d prestige denied them in,life."7·Bradford's. "wild beast~ ;J.n,d wild men".qf Puritan imagination are conspicuov~ly present among the "mourned." Nostalgic constructions of jndigenous people, nonhuman animals, and nature are one focus of ecocriticism, defined, by Ursula K. Heise as on.e of th.e most recent interdisciplinary fields to have em<':rged in literary and cultural studies. Ecocriticism analyzes the role that the natural environment playsin theimagination of a cultural communityat a specific historical moment, examining how the concept of"nature" is defi,ned, what values are assigned to it or denied it and why, and the way in which the relationship between humans and nature is erivisioned. More specifically, it investigates how na:tun~ is used literally or metaphorically in certain literary or aesthetic genres at?-d tropes, and what assumptions about nature underlie genres that may not address this topic directly. This analysis in turn allows ecocriticism to assess how certain historically conditioned concepts of nature and the natural, and particularly.literary and artistic constructions of it, have come to shape current perceptions of.the e:qvironment. 8

Some ecocritics are. also beginning to address contingent questions of ethnicity, gender, and species; their efforts to reconstruct our ideas about

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"nature and the natural" are .predicated on the deconstruction of ethnocentric, patriarchal, and anthropocentric paradigms. Moreover, indigenous people's and women's voices have recently begun to inform contemporary ecostudies. Though nothing resembling a consensus of environmental or aesthetic principles unites ecocritics, ecophilosophers, and other committed parties, today, far more than in any previous. era, we are examining our "historically conditioned concepts of nature and the natural, and particularly {our} literary and artistic constructions" within a global, conversational framework. In some instances, indigenous activists, artists, and scholars. assume leading roles in eff~cting along-anticipated paradigm shift in the ways that industrial societies have conceived of nature, including its human and nonhuman inhabitants. 9 Whether or not such .an expanded conversation can bring about profound, lasting change is itself a subject for ecocritical debate,. Certain groups of ecofeminists, for instance, complain that as long as these conversations unfold within a Eurocentric matrix, we can never hope to escape Western conceptual constraints. Freya Mathews, an "ecosophist,"10 agrees that we cannot expect radical change ifwe,merely try to repair parts of an· established system of thought that at its core is mistaken about human identity; nature, and otherness. '!As people seeking to shift the values of Western civilization," she writes, we need to realize, "what is wrong with our culture is that it offers us an inaccurate conception of the self ... as existing in competition with and in opposition to nature .... {W}e are suffering from a maladaptation in the form of a fat;~lty belief system that misrepresents our identity to us."n As the debate stands, some ecoscholars believe that nonwestern voices can help repair the way we think about the global environmental situation~ and thus the .environment itself-while others fear that western nations are merely assimilating the Other within an autocratic; '\faulty belief system." Appropriately, Alan Drengson inquires whether it is possible to alter, or even explore adequately, our current ecological reality "while imprisoned in the concrete streets of a modem metropolis.m 2 Numerous ecocritics contend that profound alteration of the ways in which humans interact with animalsis possible, and that art, philosophy, religion,. and literature assume key roles in the proce~s; In fact, one irnportant aim of ecocritical writing is "the direct intervention in current: social, political, and economic debates.;•r3 In many cases, writers of both fiction. and nonfiction not only offer critiques of the environmental status· quo, but also set forth platforms for action and outline consequent changes in the way that we understand life on the planet. Ecofeminists, ecosophists such as Mathews, and the diverse proponents of"deep ecology'' number among those ecocritics delineating the transformational politics ofliter
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and our personallifestyles."The deep approach "examines the roots of our environmental (and} social problems. (It}'aims to achieve a fundamental· ecological transformation of our sociocultural systems, collective actions,. and lifestyles.m4 "Deep ecology is concerned with the metaphysics of nature; and of the relation of self to nature."I5 Many deep ecologists; including Naess and his adherents, affirm the pbwer of literature to spur fundamental changes in consciousness that· must precede an ecological paradigm shift. These changes would be refleded in a "many-sided• maturity'' characterized by responsible relationship to all beings, human and nonhuman, and in an accompanying attitude of "aware ignorance"~ a sense of the profound limits of humanknowledgeJ6 · . No longer merely the subject of Eurocentric discourse, contemporary Indian writers over the last quarter-century or so have developed a powerful collective voice in American letters. For a broadly defined readership, many of these writers redefine self, nature, self-in-nature, and the Otherincluding the animal Other-in ways intended to "shift the values of Western civilization." With special emphasis on relationships between human and nonhuman animals, Power (1998), by Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, and Eye Killers (1995), by Navajo-Laguna author A. A. Carr, afford· two examples of such works embodying deep-ecology perspectives and wielding profound interventionary potential. Both works also raise significant questions concerning who may speak for tlie animals, and why. .

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People Like Ourselves .in Different Skins In Power, a sixteen-year-old Taiga narrator named Omishto ("The One Who Watches") tells the story of how she and her kinswoman, Ama Eaton, "keep up relations" with nature; the spiritworld, and the animals. 17 As Panther Clan women, both are closely related to Sisa, the Panther"the ·first person to enter this world," long before the humans appeared' (15)vSisa arrived through a hole in the sky when the unformed universe was all storm and chaos: "Sisa, God of Gods, entered this world with grace and sunlight and beauty. It was a wbrld filled with the wind, with life-creating air. And everything in it began to breathe and move~' (84). Unfortunately, the "humart people" (15) soon wreaked havoc on the earth; By the time Ama an·d Omishto are· borrt; Sisa's material embbdiment; the Florida panther, is a" sick and dying" animal on the U.S. government's fist of endangered species. · Hogan's novel underscores Eurocentric estrangement from nature that has resulted in environmental breakdown. :Like most cbntemporary American Indians, her narrator, Omishto, moves easily between tribal and mainstream realities, but she holds fast to her opinibn that "progress" is "the way to kill a worJdl' (27). Despite her assimilated mother's influence, Omishto identifies more readily with her traditibnal Taiga kin, and especially with her rather unorthodox Taiga "aunt," Ama, who is rumored to have "met and married a panther, and now she was an animal come back•

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to observe us to see if our manner of worldly conduct toward them was right and kind" (22). Like the traditional women Ama, Janie Soto, and Annie Hyde, Omishto identifies with the animals and suffers with them when they are abused. Indeed, the material and spiritual boundaries between these women and nature are ten,uous and shifting, exemplified in part byJanie So to's artificial leg made from .a tree that sprouts new growth while she wears it. Janie is flpparently also a shapeshifter, coming and going at will in the physical form of the panther, whose statQs as a "person" is noncontroversial. 18 . , . Upholding a metaphysics that contrast.s sharply with western rational-:ism, Hogan invites us to imagine, "an,imals are people like ourselves, in different skins" (189). Like us, she insists, the animals are sentient beings, but with different intelligence. Like us, they go about their business in the world, sometimes stopping. to ponder our strange behavior, toga~~ back at us from their own inscrutable perspectives,. or even to form partnerships with us, as the panther does with the clan.women. Hogan asks Eurocentric readers to open their minds to alternative ways of knowing the animals, and to entertain the fundamentally different ontological status that her narrative attributes to nonhuman life. Accordingly, Hogan rejects conventional literary depictions of animals. Despite her claim, "animals are people like ourselves," Hogan r.esists sentimen,tal, anthropomorphic representation; she avoids reduction of animals to mere rhetorical figures for ht~man tra,i,ts. Hogan displays a genuin,~ly "animalizing imagination," Alan Bleakley's term to describe "a deep noticing or witnessing," an attempt to avoid th~ "narcissistic selfinterest" in which anthropocentrism is grounded. 19 In Power, nonhuman animals are not a measure of nature's. otherness or of human superiority; but living evidence of human alienation and blindness. Ultimately, Po~er encourages readers to reach, with Omishto, a state of aporia-a .sustained state of doQbt in the face of a deeply considered awareness of the limits of knowledge. By endorsing such r;;tdical hesitancy, however, Hogan does not convey flny predictably postmodern message. Omishto, like all of us, must finally choose a responsible way of being in the world, even though her choices are not based on t~nqq~stioned knowledge. All of us must apprehend the my~tery at the heart of existence, where phenomena have no ht~manly constructed names to tame them, no inflexible"stories" to circumscribe th~m. In the end, Omishto exemplifies for the read~r the "all-sided maturity'' to which deep ecologists frequently refer, together with an attitud~ of compassionate, "aware ignorance" that characterizes .this maturity. Such acknowledgment of the "Great Mystery'' on the part of indigenous peoples was for centuri~s dismissed by Eurocentric cultures as evipence of Indians' childlike naivete, or of their fundamental lack of intellectQal curiosity; rather than <;onsidered seriously as a sign of epistemological sophistication. .Poet Gary Snyder describe.s this deep ecological state of awareness in a manner relevant to our understanding ot Hogan's narrative: '~11 the great

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civilized world religions," he says, "remain primarily human centered. The next step is excluded, or forgotten- 'well, what do you say to Magpie? What do you say to Rattlesnake when you meet him?' What do we learn frOm Wren, and Hummingbird, ·and· Pine Pollen, and how? Learn what? Specifics: how to spend a life facing the current; or what it is to perpet?ally die young; or how to be huge and calm and eat anything (Bear), But also; that we ate n:iany selves looking at each other, through the same eye."20 ' Hogan's Power vividly illuminates this "next step" in human development toward the end of anthropocentrism. The languishing panther in Power is the physical and spiritual embodiment of decades of environmental destruction. Its plight affords Hogan a focus for her critique of the shallow ecology behind U.S. federal policies on wildlife preservation, ~hile the Taiga foundatiOnal story of Sisa affords the author a concomitant means· for exploring the possibilities for fundamental changes in humari consciousness: "In the old days," says Omishto, "it was said that wewere humans·," that we offered the animals "our kinship, our respect, ... our kind treatment .. ·.. What people believe, falsely, is that all this can no longer be so" (229). · During a devastating hurricane reca:lHng the storm in the tribal story·of Sisa's emergence, Ama and Omishto undergo their own change in consciousness. Both women are caught, trance'-like, in the web of an "old story." This traditional story· foretells the panther's ritual sacrifice, followed by Sisa's return to restore heauty and order to a world damaged when humans broke their covenant with the animals. Consciously, yet also' son:iehow beyond their control, Ama and Omishto·defy both Taiga tradition and federal law. Omishto watches as Ama, in the grip of story's power, hunts and mercy-kills a pitiful, unhea:lthy panther who seems also to be her own animal ally, the one "born alongside of her, to give her strength" (16). Various local groups, both Indian and non-Indian, are infuriated by Ama's act, but nearly all of them for naive, self-serving, or hypocritical reasons. Some whites object only because the panther is a popular"n:iascot" (123)iri Florida, a sign of the romariticizedwilderness that they seldom: otherwise appreciate. Others, shallow ecologists with atomistic rather than holistic environmental awareness, argue that since the Florida panther is a ·protected species; Ama must be punished for a ctime. None Of these people, however, care about the panthers killed by cars on the highways that disrupt their habitat, about the obviously debilitated condition of surviving cats in the wild, or about the plight of other animals not on the list of the officially protected: Power thus underscores the absurdity of shallow environmentalism; isolated efforts· to "preserve" a species here and there seem as pathetic as the dying panther itself when we consider,• with Omishto, how the whole earth is "diminished and endarigered" (6'9). · •·Taiga· traditionals living in ·Kili Swan:ip. also disapprove· of Ama's act, despite their deeper understanding of it within the context of Sisa's story: An:ia offends them by thinking and ac'ting independently instead of abiding by tradition. Omishtd explains, though, "the old ways are· not

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enough to get us through this time and [Ama} was called to something else. To living halfway between the modern world and the ancient one" (22-23). Holding stubbornly to the "old ways," however, the traditional Taiga seems even more eager than the white townspeople to punishAma for killing the panther. While the federal court drops the case, unable to prove that the cat Ama~killed was, indeed, a Florida panther, the Taiga elders sentence Amato the walk of death-four years of aimless wandering with no destination. Though it is a harsh sentence nearly equivalent to annihilation, 21 the walk is a metaphorical variant of Omishto's chosen state of aporia, an open-ended condition of being. While Ama is forbidden to settle anywhere, however, Omishto must settle, at least tentatively, on some responsibly chosen lifeway. She .chooses the Taiga over the mainstream society in the end. To refuse to choose would, indeed, be a .kind of "death" ~passive awareness without responsible action. Through young Omishto's struggle to decide what she thinks about Ama's. situation and other people's reactions .to it, Hogan explores subtleties of environmental philosophy. Omishto's narration indicts soulless, environmental policy-makers, but it also exposes the flaws in tribal, spiri-:-tualized views of nature that may become inflexible and thus inadequate to meet the demantls of the present. Her remarks about the great fallen tree,. Methuselah, reinforce Hogan's message. More than 500 years old, the tree is transplanted from Spain and signifies European appropriation of North American land through occupation and biblical naming• .Uprooted by the hurricane, the tre.e dies, a symbol of the end of both Eurocentric and tribal-centered worlds as we know them. The renewed world that Omishto anticipates will be different from both, just as the young saplings that sprout up afterthe storm will be. different from Methuselah. Moreover, Methuselah's rigidity that makes it powerless in the :wind (Oni) reiterates Hogan's point about inflexible beliefs and mores; the old "stories"we cling to may blind us to needed changes and, ironically, bar our efforts to "keep up relations." At Ama's Taiga trial; she holds back from the. old people certain information that could help explain. her deed because she knows their beliefs cannot accommodate her hard-won knowledge (that the panther and the present world ate dying) ..$he knows that the old people would fall, heartbroken, like the ancient, brittle tree, so she would rather let them pass away with .their faith intact. Likewise, in the Florida court,• the non-Indian jury holds rigid notions about Indians, animals, and "reality.'~ They lack even a modicum of the cultural, knowledge required for understanding Ama's motives, as well as any interest in learning. She knows this and behaves accordingly. Consequently, her. Otherness-her silence and her wild appearance-make her an extremely unsympathetic defendant, not much·different from the panther itsel£ Omishto reports howi'the jurors s.tudy [Ama}, a woman so unlike them as to exist in another world; another time. She is their animal" (emphasis tnine,136). Besides pointing to self-imposed cultural blindness, this passage in Power also subtly recalls early American portrayals of Indians as "animals

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of the forest." 22 Hogan turns the trope to her own ends, however. Her comparison (actually, her equation) of an Indian woman with an animal does not measure the degree of Indian otherness from the "human," but the degree of Indian identity with a more authentic humanity, fully integrated within the natural environment. Ama "the animal" is a measure of Eurocentric, tragic estrangement from the natural-not a measure of western, heroic transcendence of it. In the end, Omishto adheres rigidly to no specific worldview because, even beyond Ama; she has become self-aware about worldviews. She becomes a kind of phenomenologist at last, apprehending mystery without clinging tightly to interpretations of it. Omishto revels in living "without the shadow of a single god" (229). When she does look for God,· or for.hints of Sisa's return, she is content to know only the world of "no name birds" (170) and other beings that "are just themselves" without reference to our constraining frames of .reference. Thus, she never endorses Ama1s ritual sacrifice. Even though she would like w believe in the Taiga story of Sis a's return, Ornishto's own heart tells her that Ama was wrong to kill the panther. In the mature Omishto ofthe novel's ending, we observe Hogan's deep ecologicalmessage. The animals are beings "like ourselves" to be respected for themselves, not merely for the uses we make Of them, including their semiotic uses within our "stories." Omishto'reaches full maturity in her "relations" to nature and other entities: she resists her own and other human-centered thoughts and actions. Thus Hogan· suggests a model of personal identitY resembling the "ecological self" outlined by deep ecologists such as Naess and Bill Devall. This ,js a self "rich in constitutive relations," not only with other humans but also with "plants and animals which co-inhabit our living space."23 Fostering this kind of personal development, Hogan implies, could help repair the damage inflicted on us all by centuries of "progress." With "Sisa's return'' may come the renewal of the human "covenant with the animals,"'who is ''one step closer to the true than we are" (188). As Ama tells Omishto, "skin was never a boundary to be kept or held to; there are no limits between one thing and dmother, one time and another .... [T}he wind speaks in intelligent trees that look bright as bonfires to eyes that are open" (188-I89). Ama Eaton, Janie Soto, Annie Hyde; Omishto-all are one with each other and the panther. In Hogan's view, only such animal-aligned human beings live correctly in the world. Hogan's green ethic ·is reminiscent of British·ethicist Mary Midgley's moral philosophy. Midgley rejects western "ritual skepticism" for an affective ethics. She argues that in our dealings with animals, ;we should not demand proof that they are like us before we treat them accordingly; in the absence of any proof that they are not like us, she contends, we must treat them as if they are, and above all, we must treat them compassionately. We have no choice but to honor. our no'nrational, "anthropomorphic'' relation to them, even though we may never satisfactorily explain it in words: "Neither with dog nor human do we need words to reveal to us what

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expressive and interpretative capacities far older and far deeper than words make clear immediately.m4 Such ancient "capacities" connect all beings, deep ecologists believe. Moreover, these capacities are basic to mythmaking- the "old way" of explaining the world to ourselves similar to indigenous foundational storytelling. If, as Alan Drengson contends, the "current spiral" of technocratic human "development is in some ways [still} open to an infusion of elements of older wisdom," 25 perhaps this infusion constitutes one mode of Sisa's return.

The Dark SideofBeauty "Expressive and interpretative capacities far older and far deeper than words" are also a key concern in A. A. Carr's Eye Killers, a surprisingly neglected novel of impressive depth and subtlety. Too elaborate to address within the sq>pe of the present essay, Carr's broad ,ecological message unfolds within a narrative structured .through meticulously patterned. references to Navajo.,...Pueblo cosmology; 26 within this complex frame· of reference, the presence of Eye· :Killers (vampires), the poisoning of the American earth, and broken relations with animals 11re all inextricably linked to European and Euroamerican history.· Here, myJocus must necessarily be on only one aspect of Carr's multifarious universe, in which the balal}ce of good and evil depends heavily upon human-animal alliances. Inscribed within the .Navajo cosmology that informs Carr's novel is a conception of good and evil bearing deep ecological significance. This conception differs radically from the Judeo,Christian view; which considers.good and evil.mutually exclusive, holds nature inferior to humanity, and. anticipates the total eradication of evil and the escape from nature at the end of time. In the Navajo worldview, · good and evil coexist eternally in either balanced or imbalanced proportions. Though humans and spirits are more likely than animals to cause disharmony, the "human peoplel' are primarily responsible for maintaining balance by living correctly.in relation to land, spirits, animals, and society. 27 All beings, though, are caught up in the delicate equilibrium that must be maintained.· In a heroic effort to· control evil, Carr's protagonists in Eye Killers discover their roles in a present-day variant of a foundational story recounting how this world was first "balanced". for human habitation by the War Twins, Monster Slayer, and Child of the Water. 28 Like. Hogan's, Carr's animal-aligned, ··central characters afford readers a model for an "ecological self," one who lives responsibly, in balance, on the earth. · Similar to Hogan, Carr incorporates into his narrative an insightful critique of contemporary society's abuse of the environment. Eye Killers is a creative adaptation of the western vampire genre to non-Eurocentric and ecocritical purposes. Transplanted European vampires become Eye :Killers within a Navajo-'-Pueblo universe, where they are also a trope for environmental destruction ,and greed~ both forms of predation that is evil because it violates the "order of things"; it is also excessive and out·of

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controP9 Such destructive disorder results from the "progress" that Omishto, in Power, calls "the way to kill a wotld" (27). The evil beings in Bye Killers drive the plot and occasion a cross-cultural, cross-generational part~ nership between an old Navajo man, Michael Roanhorse, and a white woman, Diana Logan. Their unprecedented affiliation develops with the indispensable assistance of animals, especially Coyote, the · old man's animal-ally. Among numerous horrible deeds, a vampire named Falke kidnaps Michael's granddaughter, Melissa, and begins her ultimately failed transformation into one of the livingdead. Falke desires Melissa because she reminds him of Christiane, his lost-love-turned~nun from the twelfth century. As an Austrian vampire from the European Middle Ages who longs to possess the young Navajo girl, Falke represents Eurocentric predatory power over indigenous people; he has also established his vampire lair at Mesa Gigante, a part of Navajoland. Temporally, the vampires' occupation of Navajo and Pueblo territory roughly corresponds to the times pan of European presence in the southwest, a presence in turn connected to the uranium poisoning of the land: Falke's arrival in America occurred approximately 500 years ago during the so~called "first-contact"years; and, of course, there would probably never have been uranium mining or the development of nuclear products in the southwest if indigenous lands had not been occupied by non-Native people. · Michael understands quickly. that the Eye Killers must be destroyed (actually, destroyed again, according to the cyclic pattern established by the War Twins when they first killed an array of monsters, including Eye Killers). Michael realizes more slowly, however, that indigenous powers are inadequate to dispel nonindigenous forms of evil such as Falke, who is different from the type of monster that the Twins initially dispatched. In the same way that Ama and Omishto in Power see the deficiencies of the "old ways," Michael knows that some new ceremonies, some unconventional modes of power are required to meet the challenges of the present, disorderly world. "The medicine we are preparing might not destroy him,'' the old man confesses to Diana. "He is so different from the evil things running here .... How are we going to hurt him?"3 1 Answering this question involves Michael, Diana, several other Navajo and Pueblo traditionals, and some important animals in a circuitous, dangerous quest. Among Michael's least expected discoveries as an arthritic oldman suddenly thnist into the role of avenging culture hero are his power-alliances, first with Coyote and then with a white woman. Nowhere. in American Indian lore is Coyote considered a trustworthy being. Indeed, he is the pan-Indian trickster, a troublemaking hero who may whimsically choose good or evil at any moment, who is more likely to spread calamity than to effect any obviously positive change in people's lives; Nevertheless, he commands great respect as a sacred entity with indispensable; if patadoxical, powers.32 He exemplifies the complex dualism of the indigenous worldview informing Bye Killers, for he is a god who is always simultaneously good and

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evil, creative and destructive. Michael's alignment with him on the "dark side" proceeds in accordance with the· Navajo belief that evil can sometimes be controlled only through the a risky, temporary alliance with it by powerful beings on the side of good.J3 Carr reminds us of Coyote's ambiguous nature when he alludes to the story of First Woman that Michael struggles to remember. Before this present world was established, Coyote created chaos. As First Woman was arranging the stars, Coyote in a fit of impatience scattered them across the night sky, where eventually they formed the Milky Way. Although the Milky Way itself becomes a key featu~e of Navajo cosmology, Coyote cannot be credited with any unmitigated constructive action. Familiar with this trickster's ways that may cause havoc, Michael is therefore leery when a coyote visits his hogan several times and speaks to Michael in his dead wife's voice. Since Michael has partially forgotten his spiritual connection with Coyote (along with much more of his traditional knowledge), he also forgets that they share names: First Warrior, First to Hurl Anger (7, 314); He discourages the animal's advances, saying, " 'I don't know you.' " However, Coyote (ma'ii) talks back: "You'll know me good enough." The coyote's voice changed w a man's resonant voice distantly familiar to Michael. "North is where evil gathers,'' the coyote continued. "North is where the dead leave the hogan. Walk just my side of beauty for a little bit, my grandson. Night is coming. But remember who scattered the stars across it." (91)

Coyote's short, ostensibly. simple speech in this passage commands close attention. Coyote foretells Michael's immediate future when the two will share Coyote's body -"You'll know. me good enough.'' Ma'ii also speaks in a voice that Michael will finally recognize as the voice of"ma'iitsoh," or Wolf (traditionally, Coyote's older brother and, in this instance, the negative force opposed to Coyote's positive force. Ma'iitsoh is the name that Michael calls Falke in recognition of the two·men's adversarial kinship as figures balancing good and evil. Michael's alliance with Coyote (ma'ii) against Falke (ma'iitsoh), who is nevertheless a "brother;" reminds us of Gary Snyder's observation, earlier, that "we are many selves looking at each other, through the same eye.'' Our "relatives" include our human enemies and all nonhuman beings, benign and malevolent; moreover, all beings contain gdod and evil propensities that must be balanced within. The contest between Michael and Falke acknowledges the "predator" in the human animal. Through their interaction, Carr emphasizes the need to respect ~he predator while balancing predatory forces in the universe with life-sustaining ones. As Coyote, Michael's "tailbone shot out into a .bushy tail to give balance while running" (315) through the dark. Vanquishing the greedy Eye Killers requires Michael/Coyote to "walk" on the spiritually dark "side of beauty'' to balance good and evil within a dualistic universe.34 Here, ''shallow

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ecologists" who champion the causes of "attractive~' animals may be reminded of the larger picture of an ecosystem containing "dark" forces commanding respect, but often instead inspiring extermination campaigns, such as wolf-eradication efforts and shark hunts. This fundamental principle ofbalance is reiterated in Carr's development of Melissa's character. Early in the narrative we learn that she is a defender of wildlife. If she'learns the ways of her Navajo people, she too will doubtless become an animal-aligned healer of worlds like her grandfather and her "adopted" white '"sister," Diana; Animal posters cover the walls of her room. She writes an impassioned essay for her high school English clas.s lamenting'"the "ignorance" causingwanton destruction of beautiful predator animals-mountain lions, wolves, and coyotes (43). As a captive of Falke and during her partial transformation into a vampire, she herself joyfully roams the night as a greedy predator. Thus, when Michael discovers Melissa's broken glass animal collection (89), the passage is rich in symbolism. The shattered totem figures point to the broken life she will lead if she forsakes her Navajo identity and joins forces with evil; the broken animals also imply that Melissa is out of control, out of order'-,not a rightful predator, but a monster, an Eye Killer. The smashed replicas, like animals ~illed for no good reason (or like .the panthers carelessly run over on the highways in Power), point to the excesses of a greedy society that disrespectfully takes more than it needs from the earth, thereby breaking a sacred pact with the animals.35 The scattered pieces of glass are also, paradoxically, a reminder that new worlds come from older, shattered ones. When Coyote warns Michael never to forget"who scattered the stars," he reminds Michael of (among other things) the essential role ofchaos in creation. Just as Sisa's rebirth in Power must come from the '\storm" of chaos, so must the new, monsterpurged world in Eye Killers come after a "scattering" that breaks the hold of "old stories/' Michael's familiar reality fractures like Melissa's glass animals as, literally, he learns to see the world and himself from surprising perspectives, particularly Coyote's. No longer an isolated old man alone with bitter memories, Michael eventually breaks through a series of preconceived boundaries. In his capacityas a reluctant hero, MichaeLRoanhorse must see past a significant ·cultural boundary. Early in the narrative, he finds that his strange companions are not limited to talking coyotes. Diana Logan is a white high school· teacher in her early thirties, initially as ignorant of American Indians as Michael is of ancient Austrian vampires. However, Diana's mind is (reluctantly at first) open to broader possibilities, a fact to which ·her mythologically significant first name attests. Throughout the novel, Carr scatters clues to Diana's spiritual identity and powers, which, eventually, enable her to join a pack of coyotes in a race toward .her monster-slaying rendezvous with Falke.36 ' , · Among these clues are certain features of Diana's past. Her greatgrandfather, Zachary, was an Indian fighter in the 18oos. In this novel

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pointing to old wounds of the historical past (especially the Long Walk37) that need healing,· Diana is responsible for her ancestors' violence. Carr's view, like that of most American Indians, is that the crimes of the past are not assuaged by the ·mete passage of time, but exist in a kind of eternal present, and actually affecting the present, until someone takes responsibility for atonement: In Eye Killers, the evils of the past knock insistently at the door of the. present, demanding redress. Sensing this fact, Diana weeps when she reads Zachary's diary. She keeps his sketch of a "whirling Stars-and-Stripes tornado" on her wall next to her dead parents' photograph. Unbeknownst to her, the "whirling stars'' intimate her connection to Coyote/Michael, her partnership with the wind, and her future life fulfilling patterns set down in Navajo foundational stories and chantways.3 8 Along with Zachary's diary and sketches, among Diana's keepsakes is also a plastic, antlered deer that Diana as a child at her grandparents' home once played with, telling it "ghost stories" (156). Her Keresan {Laguna) mentors, who prepare her to fight Falke, own an exact copy of the plastic deer. Diana recognizes the animal'-totem as a link in a barely perceived ·chain of meaningful events suddenly shaping her life. The deer links her not only to her mentors, but also to Michael, a deer hunter who can see Deer in certain humans; and to her own ancient European culture. The creature most prized by Diana's classical European namesake, to whom all the animals were sacred, was the "hind," or deer; moreover, Diana's goddess-of-the-chase idelitity also corresponds to her role as the Navajo huntress figure, Hastseoltoi, who helps the Twins in the Night Chant to drive out evil,39 Like Coyote, the plastic deer icon bear~ paradoxical potentiality. On the one hand, the deer is a toy manufactured by industrialized society for children who are, more than likely; variously estranged from natureUCarr's deer replica also suggests, on the other hand,¥ how such a society nevertheless generates totemic icons that can intimate to us our full identity as animal-denizens of the earth, if only we heed them. Even the most technocratic "culture" is never fully separated. from "nature," the ··author reminds us. Along with the deer; Diana's othet artificial-animal associates include her rUn-'down car, derogatorily named "The Mole." Like the plastic deer, this "animal" also links her to Michael, to whom Mole is obviously related as a helper. Diana drives Michael around in the car as they huntfor Melissa and her captors; and later, a famished Michael-as-Coyote devours a mole while chasing down evil (312-313). Finally; a third significant animal inhabits Diana's imagination. As she brushes her hair, she sees herself as ''a tawny catwoman" (251) recalling Mountain Lion- together with Coyote and Wolf, legitimate predatar animals within the Navajo symbolic universe. 4o Within a dualistic· continuum 'of good and evil, Diana's Mountain-Lion'self(good) likewise connects her to Falke and Melissa, who speed through the night in a stolen Jaguar (evil). · · Artificial as they are, such· "animals'l help illuminate the characters' partly chosen, partly fated path; Diana's apparent attraction to animals,

2 74

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suggested by their role in her imagination, implies her receptivity to lessons she will learn as,apprentice to the oldNavajo,woman, Emily, who tells her: "You must keep the animals ,of the .land sacred in your heart. Respect them always. Don't lie to them, for they will know the truth. The landis ours to live on, .but the animals are the true guardians of it" (286). Later, when Diana visits the sacred cave of"The Mother" at Mesa Gigante, she quickly recognizes the message inscribed on its walls: a fossil outline of a humpbacked turtle, with four young snuggled within her "protective embrace" (287), speaks clearly to Diana of her own nurturing role in the face of consuming evil. She will join the Navajo-;-Laguna community as a spiritual relative4 1 and become ''mother" and "sister" to Melissa, long deprived of any maternal, "protective embrace." Through the animals .we know ourselves, yet they are not to be treated merely as instrulJ?.ents of our own self-discovery. This is a key message emerging ·from Carr's narrative featuring profound human-animal alliances . .The signs, he. insists, are all around us, •potentially opening us, like Diana, "to an infusion of element$ ofolder wisd0 m," to our latent "capacities far older and far deeper than words"; Car.r .and Hogan imply that such wondrous "capacities" may even include the kind of relationships with animals that Michael shares with Coyote, in Eye l(i!lers., and that Ama enjoys with Sisa, in Power. In Carr's universe in need of healing, plastic replicas of animals and automobiles named for beautiful predators are traces of our essential being. that await our spiritual awakening to their deep significance.

Who May Speak for the Animals? Doubtless, both Hogan and Carr hope non-Native readers are receptive to their subtly. inscribed, environmental agendas recognizing the "personhood" .ofnonhuman animals, an aspect of their work that most Native readers likely take for granted. With undisguised; socially reformative aims, these authors invoke the formidable, world-altering power of the .imaginati<;m inherent in telling and listening to stories. The endings of both novels convey faith in the possibility of a future better than the past and.the present, and. crea~ed in part. through. the .. collective efforts of self,aware, environmentally .responsible human animals •.tP.Hogan and Carr seem aware of their own roles as artists in attaining this future through their influence on audienceimagination, for they share a pan-Indian belief in the power of storytelling to alter the course of material events. 43 This notion that social reform can result from storytelling is not unique to American Indian cultures ..Within the western critical tradition of affective literary theory that dates back to Plato, Wayne Booth articulates an "ethics. of fiction" that. even the most traditional of American Indian storytellers could endorse. Though. he sees "no way to prove" it, Booth contends, "the ethical effects of engaging with narratives are felt by everyone in all times and dimes .... No human being ... escapes the effects of

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stories, because everyone tells them and listens to them." According to Booth, literary fiction is "the most powerful of all the architects of our souls and societies."44 Arne Naess, the founder of the deep ecology movement, likewise affirms this "architectural" power of fiction, as we may readily observe in his remarks about the role of art in the movement. Naess believes that art presents us with alternative ways of seeing and being that might eventually help us escape the confines of anthropocentrism. Regardless of the powers of art, however, nonhuman animals cannot represent themselves. Therefore, difficult questions persist no matter how enlightened our contemporary conceptions of animals might be. To say with Hogan, for instance, that animals are "people like ourselves, in different skins," is still to speak for animals, to construct their identities from a hwnan perspective. To speak with Carr of "order" and "disorder" in the universe, and the animals' role in keeping the delicate balance, is still to speak from within a humanly articulated frame of reference. Consequently, .despite confidence in the interventionary powers of art, some ecocritics complain that we are still guilty of "tropological enslavement," of containing the animal "in the intellectual zoo" of our conceptions. 45 Other ecocritics, however, argue that given its considerable limitations, human language may yet facilitate a profound "recovery of the animal." Bleakley, for example, contends that a "Heideggerian disclosure of Being" occurs in response to the semiotic animal "traces."46 Our "word animals," he declares, carry the animal into our minds. They disclose to us the animal's being as well as our own, perhaps similar to the way in which the plastic deer in Eye Killers cues Diana to her spiritual identity. Bleakley and many other ecocritics, including Naess, offer no apologies for such essentialist views, nor indeed would Hogan, Carr, or most other American Indian writers holding tribal worldviews. Antifoundationalists, however, reject essentialist positions as myth-making, which they see as among the most offensive of human-centered modes of thought. They argue that belief in spiritual absolutes necessarily leads to oppressive constructions of reality, whether these are the Judea-Christian views that allowed for the subjugation of the Indians and the environment, or indigenous views (exemplified by Hogan's Taiga tribe) that prescribe outmoded, ritualistic behavior. Antifoundationalists are more comfortable proclaiming the social construction of realities: acknowledged constructions, they argue, are more amenable to change than views based on presumed absolutes. This frequently acrimonious debate between essentialists and antifoundationalists is not easily resolved.47 Nevertheless, those who hope for a "shift {in} the values of Western civilization"- those who seek radical changes in the ways we think about and treat nonhuman animals-cannot afford to tarry long in the ivory tower of philosophical arguments over essentialism. Regardless of what we believe about the presence or absence of absolutes, there remains the more

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compelling question of what we will do in the world of beings, human and nonhuman, who may or may not be "like us." Will we choose, like Hogan's Omishto, or will we, like Ama on her walk, merely wander in a postmodern realm of contingency? These two novels by Hogan and Carr raise profound questions concerning who might be best suited to speak for animals and thus to shape our chosen thoughts and actions in daily life. Like some ecoscholars who posit and defend the "interests" of animals, Hogan and Carr imply that the humans, most entitled to speak for animals, are those whose relationship with animals is not exclusively, or even primarily utilitarian- those people for whom the animal's intrinsic value (not use) matters. 4 8 Basing his own stance on Alfred North Whitehead's and Supreme CourtJustice William 0. Douglas's pragmatic arguments concerning animals' interests, Alan Drengson admits that we can never know the full range of nonhuman beings' "interests": "we do not know what other natural beings value. What do deer and bear want? But the point is that this is no.t for us to judge. They have their way of life. This we should respect .... To disrespect them is to impoverish our own lives, ... to pave the way to destructive exploitation. "49 Such is the message of Linda Hogan, A. A. Carr, and a variety of other contemporary Native American artists who venture to speak on behalf of the animals. Among the most powerful voices arising today in defense of nonhuman life on the planet are the voices of people, like Hogan and Carr, whose ancestors were once equated with the "hideous wilderness" and consigned with it to eventual oblivion. Their frequently eloquent, sometimes hopeful messages require a wide, open-minded audience if they are to fulfill their full interventionary potential as world-transformative stories. Whether or not a global audience of sufficient size exists for these and related works of environmental and ecocriticalliterature remains to be seen. However, if (as Hogan writes) "intelligent trees ... look bright as bonfires to eyes that are open" (188-I89), the messages inscribed in the leaves of works such as Power and Eye Ki!!ers blaze incandescent.

Notes r. Alan Drengson, "Shifting Paradigms: From Technocrat to Planetary

Person," in Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue, eds., The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1995), 85.

William Bradford, in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Of Plymouth Plantation, r62o-r647 (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 62. 3· Richard Drinnon, Facing "West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and EmpireBuilding (New York: Schocken, 1980, 1990), 69. 4· Drinnon, Facing "West, 68. 5· Quoted in Klaus Lubbers, Born for the Shade: Stereotypes ofthe Native American in United States Literature and the Visual Arts, I776-r894 (Rodopi: Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1994), 229. 2.

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6. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, I994), IJJ. 7· Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory ofthe Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, I976, I989), xi-xii. 8. Ursula K Heise, "Science and Ecocriticism." The American Book Review I8.5 (July-August I997). (4]une 2ooo). 9· Cheryll Glotfelty argues that ecocriticism is dominated by white people, but perhaps this is true if one considers only academic works. If we extend our definition of "ecocritical" writings to fiction and creative nonfictionnovels, essays, and poetry by contemporary Native Americans, for example- I believe a different picture is emerging. See Glotfelty, "Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis," in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, I996), xv-xxxvii. ro. "Ecosophy" is Naess's term to describe his own general philosophy based on the deep ecological principles and platform he has developed. Ecosophists are Naess's adherents. For a full discussion of ecosophy, see Drengson and Inoue's "Introduction," in The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology, xvii-xxviii. rr. Freya Mathews, "Conservation and Self-Realization: A Deep Ecology Perspective," in Drengson and Inoue, eds., The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology, rz6, IJ2 12. Drengson, "Shifting Paradigms," in The Deep Ecology Movement, II4IJ. Heise, "Science and Ecocriticism," in The American Book Review. I+ Drengson and Inoue, eds., The Deep Ecology Movement, xix. If Mathews, "Conservation and Self-Realization," in The Deep Ecology Movement, I26. I6. The terms "all-sided" or "many-sided maturity" are used by deep ecologists to describe the attitudes and practices of those, like many indigenous groups, who have a consciously held, articulated view of nature that is based primarily on the acknowledgment of a complex web of environmental relationships. The terms are used throughout the essays included in Drengson and Inoue, ed., The Deep Ecology Movement. I7. Linda Hogan, Power (New York: Norton, I998), I7. Henceforth, references to this novel will cited by page numbers and enclosed in parentheses. I8. The personhood of plants and animals is pan-tribally acknowledged. The words in various tribal languages for animals and plants translate, for example, as "the standing people" (trees), or the "four-legged people." Among the "two-leggeds"' are often not merely humans, but bears, eagles, and other highly respected animals who are capable of standing or walking on two, usually rear, legs. For more on this topic, see Howard L. Harrod,

The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000). I9. Alan Bleakley, The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality, and Ecocriticism (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), xiv. 20. Gary Snyder. "Re-inhabitation," in Drengson and Inoue, eds., The Deep Ecology Movement, 70.

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2!. Because personal identity of tribal people is so thoroughly informed and sustained by social and geographical relationships, ostracism is considered by most tribes to be one of the most serious forms of punishment that can be inflicted on an individual. For more on American Indian identity, see Catherine Rainwater, Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially chapter 3· 22. Drinnon, Facing "West, 68. 23- Bill Devall, "The Ecological Self," in Drengson and Inoue, eds., The Deep

Ecology Movement,

102.

24. Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 58. 25. Drengson, "Shifting Paradigms," in The Deep Ecology Movement, 79· 26. For accounts of the Whirling Logs foundational story and the Night Chant ceremonial, see Washington Matthews (1902), The Night Chant, A Navajo Ceremonial (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995). The Eye Killers in Carr's novel are variants supplied by his own artistic license; they differ from those described by Gladys A. Reichard, Navajo Religion: A Study of Symbolism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 72, 74, 432. 27. For more on the Navajo and Pueblo conceptions of human responsibility for maintaining cosmic balance, see Peggy V. Beck, Anna Lee Walters, and Nia Francisco, The Sacred· Tllays ofKnowledge, Sources ofLife (Tsaile, Arizona: Navajo Community College Press, 1992); and Raymond Friday Locke. The Book ofthe Navajo (Los Angeles: Mankind, 1992). 28. There are numerous War Twin stories among the Navajo and the Pueblo, and most other American Indian tribes have foundational stories concerning twins. On the War Twins (Navajo), see Locke, The Book of the Navajo, and Matthews, The Night Chant. On twins ih other Native American works, see Rainwater, Dreams ofFiery Stars, chapter 5; and "Intertextual Twins and Their Relations: Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit and Solar Storms," Modern Fiction Studies 45 (Spring 1999): 1-2r. 29. Becket a!., in The Sacred, chapter 12, explain pattern and order in the Navajo universe. 30. The same message about the need for new ceremonies appears in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1977), and other contemporary Indian nonfiction writing including Joseph Rael, House of Shattering Light: Life as an American Indian Mystic (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 2003). 31. A. A. Carr, Bye Killers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 22!. Henceforth, all references to this text will be cited by page numbers in parentheses. 32. On the dualism of Navajo and Pueblo cosmology, see Becket a!., The Sacred, chapter 12. 33· See Reichard, Navajo Religion, 4-5. 3+ The Navajo conception of beauty stresses order and balance. Things that are ugly are disorderly, excessive, immoderate, and immoral. By contrast, the beautiful is harmonious, controlled, moral. Navajo textiles and pottery visually illustrate these notions. For an introductory discussion of this topic, see Beck et a!., The Sacred, chapter 12; and Gary Witherspoon,

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Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). 35· Traditionally; most American Indians believe that the relationship between the hunter and the hunted is a sacred one, in which the hunted chooses to be killed by the hunter in acknowledgment of the eternal cycle of life and death, eating and being eaten. Traditional stories about hunting almost always reflect this foundational concept. See Harrod, The Animals Came Dancing, for more on the animal-human sacred relationship. 36. On the role of the Navajo "huntress" (recalling Diana/Artemis in classical mythology), in the Night Chant, see Matthews, The Night Chant, 138. 37· An important part of the plot in Carr's novel centers around the evils occasioned by The Long Walk (Navajo's forced removal and nearly ten-year exile by the U.S. government to Bosque Redondo in the late nineteenth century), and the spiritual wounds inflicted on the Dine that require healing. Carr implies that such healing can occur through cross-cultural efforts such as those imagined in his novel. On the Long Walk, see Locke, The Book

ofthe Navajo. 38. In The Sacred, Becket al., explain the life patterns established by the Dine Holy People and fulfilled by humans and other animals. See chapter 12. See

also Rainwater, Dreams ofFiery Stars, chapter 3· The first syllable of Diana's last name, Log (in Logan) might also imply her connection to the events unfolding according to a cosmological pattern outlined in the Whirling Logs stories that are part of the Night Chant. 39· See Matthews, The Night Chant, 133-134- Through such cleverly arranged cross-cultural correspondences, Carr perhaps reflects the view of Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough (1890, 1896, 1912) (New York: Macmillan, 1922). In its time this was a monumental study of cross-cultural variants of apparently universally shared foundational stories. 40. See Matthews, The Night Chant, and Reichard, The Navajo Religion, for more information on predator animals in the Navajo cosmology. 41. Carr's assigning to a white person a spiritual kinship with a Navajo is likely to stimulate the same sort of controversy as Momaday met in response to Angela, Momaday's white, female crossover character in House Made ofDawn. However, a close look at some work by other contemporary Indian authors, including Silko and Hogan, reveals similarly sympathetic white characters . .The priest characters in Hogan's Mean Spirit (New York: Ivy Books, 1990) and in Silko's short story, "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," in Kenneth Rosen, ed., The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians (New York: Vintage, 1975), 3-8, are apt examples. 42. Joni Adamson sees environmental literature as characterized primarily by "hope," despite most authors' serious, realistic assessments of the global situation. See her American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), 4!.

43- Pan-tribal beliefs about the power of storytelling are widely and welldocumented. See Becket al., The Sacred, chapter r, and Rainwater, Dreams ofFiery Stars, especially chapter r. 44- Wayne Booth, The Company 1l/e Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 38-39. 45· Bleakley; TheAnimalizing Imagination, 21, 19.

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46. Ibid., 19, 20. 47· On the challenges to political action by arguments between foundationalists and antifoundationalists, see William Howarth, "Some Principles of Ecocriticism," in Glotfelty and Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader, 69-9 1 ; and Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism, 77-78, 81-82. 48. Drengson, "Shifting Paradigms," in The Deep Ecology Movement, 90. 49· Ibid., 93·

INDEX

258 258 Ackerman, Diane 16 Ackerly,J.R.

My Dog Tulip

The Moon by Whalelight and Other Adventures among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales 16 Adams, Carol]. 12, 16, 208-209, 2II-212, 216-217, 222, 225-227

Animals and WOmen: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (with Josephine Donovan)

16, 225

BeyondAnimal Rights: Towards a Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment ofAnimals (with Josephine Donovan)

226

Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defence ofAnimals 209, 226 The Sexual Politics ofMeat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory 226-227 Adams, Richard

139, 246, 258

The Plague Dogs 139, 258 Adorno, Theodor W

127, 133

The Dialectic ofEnlightenment (with Max Horkheimer) 133 Aesop's fables 65 Ainley, Alison 34 "The Paradox of Mortality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas" (with Peter Hughes, and Tamra Wright) 34 Alaimo, Stacy 97 American Cat Fancier's Association , (ACFA) 49, 53,57 Ames-Lewis, Francis 77

The Intellectual Life ofthe Early Renaissance Artist 77 animal consciousness 12-13, n6, 129, 143, 149, I 57. 226, 231, 234. 236-238, 245 animal shelters 4

Anita Lang Pet Survey Results 258 http://www.anitalang.com/ surveyresults.html anthropocentrism 3, 7, 13-16, 107, 139, 144· 157. 248-249. 256-259. 263, 265-266, 275 anthropomorphism 1, 13, 15, 52, 99, nr, 138, 156-157. 198, 219, 235-236, 247-249,252,257-258,265,268 Anthrozoos 16 Aristotle 121, 208 Armbruster, Karla 97, 178-179, 193 "Blurring Boundaries in Ursula Le Guin's 'Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight.'": A Poststructuralist Approach to Ecofeminist Criticism 97 Atwood, Margaret n-12, 207-227 Surfacing u, 207-227 The Edible WOman 207, 225 Lady Oracle 207, 225 Survival 207,218,225,227 Aubrey,John 50-51, 62 Aubreys BriefLives 62 Auster, Paul 236 Timbuktu 236 Baker, Steve

roo, n6, 225-227

The PostmodernAnimal 225, 227 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 156-158

142, 144-145, 148,

Discourse in the Novel 157 Bakis, Kirsten

236

Lives ofthe Monster Dogs 236 Ballard, Carroll, director 163-164, 171, 173, 175 FlyAwayl-Iome 164 The Black Stallion (Prod. Francis Ford Coppola) 164, r66, 170, 174-175

282

~

Index

123 Theory ofReligion 123 Battle for the Planet ofthe Apes (Dir.]. Lee Thompson) 255, 259 Baudelaire, Charles 95 "Le Chat" 95 Baudrillard,Jean 262, 277 Simulacra and Simulation 277 Bayliss, W.M. 159 Beck, Alan M. 35 The Ecology ofStray Dogs Dogs: A Study ofFree-Ranging UrbanAnimal 35 BeingJohn Malcovich 241 Belushi,James 252 Berger,John 105, wS-109, n6-n8, 236 King 236 "Why Look at Animals?" w8, n6 Bernard, Claude 156, 159 Bataille, George

Bernasconi, Robert 34 Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,"

The Provocation ofLevinas: Rethinking the Other (with David Wood) 34 Bhabha, I-Iomi r86, 194 "Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Disco,urse" 194 Bigland, Eileen 150, 158-159

Guida: The Passionate Victorian 158 biophilia 12 Blackfeet tribe 42 Blanco, Alberto 93 "The Gold ofTime" 93 Bleakley, Alan 156, 265, 275, 277> 279 The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality, and Ecocriticism 277 Bonham Carter, Helena 255 Booth, Wayne 274-275, 279 Bosch, Hieronymous 90, 96 Garden ofEarthly Delights 96 Bradford, William 262, 276 OfPlymouth Plantation, (r62o-r647) 276 Bradley, Katherine 195 Breton, Andre 82 Browne, Sir Thomas 66, 68, 77 Religio Medici 66 Buber, Martin 102, 109, rn, n8 I and Thou n8 Burton, Tim 255

Butler,Judith 129, 134, 208-213, 215, 2!7-218, 222-227

Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of"Sex" 134, 209, 226-227 Excitable Speech: Towards a Politics ofthe Performative 226 Caillois, Roger 83, 94 "Inventario de un mundo" 94 cannibalism 122-124 Caravaggio 5, 70-71, 78 carno-phallogocentrism ru, 221 Carpaccio, Vittore 72-76 "The Dream of Saint Ursula" 73, 75>78 "St. Augustine in His Study" 78 Carr, A.A. 261-280 Eye Killers 261-280 Carrington, Leonora 82, 86, 94-95 Carruthers, Peter 13, 235, 246

The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice 246 Carter, Angela 155 "Little Lamb Get Lost" 155 Cass Ole (horse) 17I-I72 Castell, Isabel 94 Remedios ~ro: Cartas, suefios y otros textos 94 Cat Fancier's Association, The (CFA) 49, 57-58, 61-62 Chavez, Ignacio 92-93 Cixous, Helene roo, n7-II8

Reading with Clarice Lispector II7-II8 Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing uS Clark, David 23, 34 "On Being 'The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany' " 34 Cobbe, Frances Power 159 Coda, Benedetto 72, 78 ''Annunciation" 72, 78 Coetzee,J.M. 156 Disgrace 156 The Lives ofAnimals 156 Cohen, Carl 156 "The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research" 156 collective unconscious 124

Index Collins, Wilkie

16, 139, 156

Heart and Science 16, 139 Colonia San Rafael 83 Colvile, Georgiana M.M. 95, 97 "Beauty and/ls the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini" 95 Commissar Rex 249

Conquest ofthe Planet ofthe Apes (Dir.]. Lee Thompson) 255, 259 Cook, Albert 78

Changing the Signs: The Fifteenth Century Breakthrough 78 Cooper, Edith 195 Coppola, Francis Ford (exec. producer) 9, 163-164, 175 "The Black Stallion" 9, 163-164, 175 Creighton, Gilbert E. 78

283

de Armellada, Fray Cesareo 35 Cuentos y No Cuentos 35 de Chirico, Giorgio 88, 96 Anxious Journey 88 de Goya, Francisco 90

E! suefio de !a razdn produce monstruos and other drawings from the "Caprichos" and "Disparates" series 96 De Waal, Francis 257 Discover 257 Deep ecology 14, 261, 261-264, 275-280 del Conde, Teresa 94-95 "Psychoanalysts and Remedios" 95 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 16, 102, 109, 115-118, 195-196, 198-199, 205

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Felix Guattari) 9, 16,205

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals 78 Crespi, Daniele 71, 78 "The Conversion of Paul" 71, 78 Crist, Eileen 15, 156, 232, 245, 257

Images ofAnimals: Anthropomorphism andAnimal Mind 15, 156,

(with Felix Guattari) 117 Denali National Park 40 Dennett, Daniel 13, 233, 235 Derrida,Jacques 35, 107, 117, 121, 123, 132-133, 208, 221, 226-227

OfSpirit: Heidegger and the ~estion

245,257 Cross, F.L. 77

117

Dissemination 226

The Oxford Dictionary ofthe Christian Church 77 Cruelty to Animals Acts of 1876 da Messina, Antonello

152

91

Saint Jerome in His Study 91 da Santacroche, Francesco di Simone 71-72, 74, 76 '~nnunciation" 71, 74, 76, 78 Daktari 252 Dale, Steve 62 "Behind the Scenes [sic} at the International Cat Show" 62 Damasio, Antonio 13, 240-243, 245-246

The Feeling ofWhat Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consiousness 242 Dark City 257 Darwin, Charles

-

7, 50-51, 122, 257

On the Origin of Species

122

Descartes, Rene 7, 12, 23, 30, 66, 99, 138-139, 156, 231-232 Devall, Bill 268, 278 "The Ecological Self" 278 Didi-Huberman, Georges 72, 78

FraAnge!ico: Dissemblance and Figuration 78 Donoghue, Emma 196, 205 'WeAre Michael Field 205 Donovan,Josephine 12, 16, 208-209, 212, 225-226

Animals and WOmen: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (with Carol]. Adams) 16,225

BeyondAnima! Rights: Towards a Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment ofAnimals (with Carol]. Adams) 26 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 49 Dougherty, Charles T. 78 "Did Paul Fall Off a Horse?" 78

Douglas, Mary n4, uS

Purity and Danger: An Analysis ofthe Concepts ofPollution and Taboo uS Douglas, William 0. 276 'Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 26, 34-35 The Lost World 26, 35 Dr Doolittle 252 Drengson, Alan 263, 269, 276-27S, 2So "Shifting Paradigms: From Technocrat to Planetary Person" 276-27S, 2So Drinnon, Richard 261,276, 27S

Facing "West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building 276 Dutourd,Jean 23S-239, 246 A Dog's Head 23S, 246 Dwight, Timothy 261

Greenfield Hill· A Poem in Several Parts 261 The Forest Rangers: A Poetic Tale ofthe "Western Wilderness 262 Eckroate, Norma

62

The Natural Cat: A Holistic Guide for Finicky Owners 62 ecocritidsm 156, 179, 193, 262-263, 269, 275-2SO ecofeminists 263 Eiseley, Loren 4, 15 TheStarThrower 4,15 Elegant, Simon 15 "DisappearingAct" 15 Eliot, George 137, 155 "The Natural History of German Life" 155 Elliott, Paul 156 "Vivisection and the Emergence of Experimental Physiology in Nineteenth-century France" 156 Elmer,Jonathan 123, 133, 216-219, 222,227 "Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species inJonathan Demme's Silence ofthe Lambs" (with Cary Wolfe) 133 Emrys, A.B. 170, 175 "Regeneration Through Pleasure: Walter Farley's American Fantasy" 175

Enlightenment 6-7, 12, 121-122, 126-127, 129-133 epistemology 97 Ernst,Max S2,257-25S Erwin, E. 156

Ethical Issues in Scientific Research 156 Escape from the Planet ofthe Apes (Dir. Don Taylor) 255, 259 Eskimos (Inuit) 42 ethology 6, 15, 13S, 140, 156, 212, 24S Existenz 257 EXTRA 34-35 "Harry Theodore's Dogs" 35 "Puppies Behind Bars" 34 Farley, Walter 174-175

9, 163-164, 166, 170,

The Black Stallion 163-164, 166, 170, 174-175 Fiddes, Nick 123, 133 Meat 123, 133 Field, Michael n, 195-196, 205 "Created" 203 "I want you, little Love, Not From the Skies" 199 "Liberal Love" 199 "My Loved One is Away from Me" 202-203 "0 Dionysus, at Thy Feet" 201 "Out of the East" 200, 202 "Sleeping Together: Sleep" 197 "Trinity'' 196-197 "When Others Are About Me and the Lips" 204

Whym Chow: Flame ofLove

1,

195-196, 205 fin-de-siecle 130, 195 Fitzgerald, Allan D. 7S

Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia 7S Flipper 251, 25S Forster, Margaret

157

Elizabeth Barrett Browing: The Life and LovesofaPoet 157 Franklin, Adrian 256-259

16, 24S-251, 254,

Animals &Modern Culture: A Sociology ofHuman-Animal Relations in Modernity 16, 24S, 257-259

Index Frazier, Anita

62

The Natural Cat: A Holistic Guide for Finicky Owners 52, 62 Free Willy 250 Freud, Sigmund 81, 121, 123, I25, 129-130, 133, 179, 183, 193

Civilization and its Discontents 123,

Friedloender, Walter 78 Caravaggio Studies 78 Gaian hypothesis 89 Galle, Philipp 74, 78 Garber, Marjorie II, 16, 150, 158, 249-251, 258 Dog Love 16, 158, 249, 258 "Heavy Petting" 251, 258 Gendin, S. 156

Atwood· Vision and Forms 226 Griffin, Donald

15, 138, 157

The ~estion ofAnima/Awareness: Evolutionary continuity ofMental Experience 157 Grizzly Falls 250

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Gilles Deleuze)

9, 16, 205

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

Ethical Issues in Scientific Research (with

(with Gilles Deleuze) Gurdjieff, G.I. 86 Gurney, A.R. 250 Sylvia 250

II7

156

Gentle Ben 251 Gerszo, Gunther

285

Gruen, Walter 87, 93-95 "Remedios Varo: A Biographical Sketch" 93, 95 Guattari, Felix 9, 16, ro2, II5-II8, 195-196,198-199,205

179, 193

Totem and Taboo 133

E. Erwin, and L. Kleiman)

-

83

The Days ofGabino Barreda Street 83 Gibson, Graeme 219 Gilbert, Pamela 158 "Ouida and the Other New Woman" 158 Glacier National Park 40 Glen, Samantha 15

Best Friends: The True Story ofthe World} Most BelovedAnimal Sanctuary 15 Glotfelty, Cheryll 156, 277> 28o "Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis" The

Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology 277 Gonzilez,Juliana 82, 86, 94-95 "Mundo y trasmundo de Remedios Varo" 95 Goodall,Jane 8 Gorillas in the Mist (Dir. Michael Apted. Guber) 14, 247, 255-256, 259 Gossen, Gary H. 16-17

Chamulas in the World ofthe Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition 16 Gowdy, Barbara 140 The White Bone 140, 236 Grace, Sherrill 212, 226 "In Search of Demeter: the Lost, Silent Mother in Surfacing' in Margaret

H.G. Wells 7-8, 121-124, u6-129, 131-133 The Island ofDr. Moreau 7, !21-122, 133-134 Hall, Radcliffe II The Well ofLoneliness II Haraway, Donna 97, roo, 107, n6-n7, 257,259

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The ReinventingofNature II6-II7, 257,259 Harrod, Howard L.

27], 279

The Animals Came Dancing: Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship 277> 279 Harvey 252 Hauser, Marc

15, 138

Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think 15, 138, 156 Hawkes, John

236,246 236,246 Haynes, Roslynn 133 H. G. Wells: Discoverer ofthe Future 133 Hearne, Vicki 15, 17

Sweet William

Adam} Task: Calling Animals by Name 15 Heidegger, Martin II7-II8, 121

Being and Time

13, 23, 107, 23

286

-

Index

Heise, Ursula K. 262, 277 "Science and Ecocriticsm" 277 Hendershot, Cyndy 123-124, 128, 133-134 "The Animal Without: Masculinity and Imperialism in The Island of Dr. Moreau and 'the Adventure of the Speckled Band' " 133 Herbert,James 258 Fluke 258 Hiassen, Carl 231, 245 Sick Puppy 231, 233, 245 Hillenbrand, Laura 245 Seahiscuit: An American Legend 245 Hogan, Linda 14, 261, 264-268, 274-279 Power 14, 264-267, 270, 272, 274, 276-277 Holtgen, Karl Josef 77 "Clever Dogs and Nimble Spaniels: On the IconographyofLogic, Invention, andlmagination" 77 Horkheimer, Max 127, 133 The Dialectic ofEnlightenment 133 Horwood, William 259 The WOlves ofTime 259 Hubbard, Howard 78 Caravaggio 78 Hughes, Peter 4 "The Paradox of Mortality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas" (with Tamra Wright and AlisonAinley) 34-35 Humane Society 3 Huxley, T.H. 133 Hymes, Dell H. 194 "Coyote, the Thinking (Wo)man's Trickster" 194

Instinct (Dir.John Turteltaub) 14, 247, 256,259 interanimation 93 International Cat Association, The (TICA) 49, 53, 57 Irigaray, Luce 225, 227 An Ethics ofSexual Difference 227 Iron Will 251 Islam, Shamsul 181, 183, 185, 193

Kipling} Law: A Study ofHis Philosophy ofLife 193

Jakoby, Barbara 77

Der Einflufi niederliindischer Tofelmalerei des rs. Jahrhunderts aufdie Kunst der benachharten Rheinlande am Beispiel der Verkiindigungs darstellung in Koln am Niederrhein und un Westfalen 77 Jamieson, Dale 156 "On the Ethics of the Use of Animals in Science" (with Tom Regan) 156 Joey 250 Jung, Carl G. 88, 96, ro6, 124-125, 133 Man and His Symbols 133 Jungle Book (Prod. Walt Disney Studios) 44,251

K-9 249,252 K-9II 14,247,249,251-254,256,258 Kafka, Franz n2, 117-n8, 226, 257-258 Kamuf, Peggy 35, 227 Given Time 35 Kant, Emmanuel 3, 22-23, 26, 30, 34, 121, !26, 137, 152 Metaphysics ofMorals 34 Kaplan,Janet 87-89, 91-92, 94-97

UnexpectedJf.!urneys: The Art and Life of Remedios Utro 94-97 Kappeler, Susanne 226 "Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism ... or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity" 226 Karlin, Daniel 184, 193 "Introduction" to The Jungle Books 193 Kauffmann, R. Lane II7 "The Other in Question: Dialogical Experiments in Montaigne, Kafka, and Cortazar II7 Kemp, Peter 122, 133 King Kong 14, 247, 254, 256 Kings Canyon 37, 40 Kipling, Rudyard ro, 177-179, 181-185, 187-191,193 The Jungle Books ro, 193 Kleiman, L. 156 Ethical Issues in Scientific Research (with E. Erwin, and S. Gendin) 156 Koch, Robert 153 Koehl, Linda 52

Koh:ik, Erazim

24-25, 34

The Green Halo: A Bird}-l!.'ye View of Ecological Ethics 34 Kovalyova, Irina 52 Kristeva,Julia r79-r83, 185-187, 189, 191-194, 223, 227 Powers ofHorror 227 Revolution in Poetic Language 179, 193-194 "From One Identity to an Other" in

Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach 182, 193-194 Kronauer, Brigitte 6, 99-102, 105-106, 108-111, 113, II5-II6

Die Frau in den Kissen (The W&man in the Pillows) roo, n6 "Tageslauf mit Unterbrechung und Gegner" ('~Day With Interruption and Opponent") roo, n6 Lacan,Jacques 107, 112, 117-118, 126, 128-129, 177, 179, 213, 227 "Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a" 117 Laird, Holly 195, 205 "Contradictory Legacies: Michael Field and Feminist Restoration'' 205 Lansbury, Coral 149, 158-159

The Old Brown Dog: W&men, W&rkers, and Vivisection in Victorian England 158-159

Lassie Come Home 14, 247, 253-254 Lastman, Pieter 67, 69, 73 "The Angel Departing from Tobit's :Family" 67, 73, 77 Lazzaro, Claudia 77 '~nimals as Cultural Signs: A Medici Menagerier in the Grotto at Castello" 77 Le Guin, Ursula K. 10, 97, r77-r8o, 182, 187-194 "Buffalo Girls, Won't You Come Out Tonight" 10, 97, roo, 177-178, 187-191, 193-194 "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" 189, 194 Leevy, Eilene 31 Leopold, Aldo 7, r6 Sand County Almanac r6

Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin 175, 184, 193 "Children's Literature and the Environment" 175, 193 Levinas, Emmanuel 3, 21-30, 33-35, 121 "The Name of a Dog" 34-35 "The Paradox of Mortality" 34-35 Lewis, C.S. 9, n Out ofthe Silent Planet 9 Lind-af-Hageby, Louise 159 Lippit, Akira M. 99, 107, n6-n7 Electric Animal 99, n6-117 Lispector, Clarice 6, 99-102, 104-109, 112, II4-II8 "Dry Point of Horses" 100, 105, 107, n6 "The Buffalo" 100, 106, 114, n6 ThePassionAccordingto G.H. 100, II4-II5, II7 The Stream ofLife 102, 107-108, II7 Livingstone, E.A. 77

The Oxford Dictionary ofthe Christian Church 77 Lizarraga, Gerardo 82 Llewelyn,John 34 '~m I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)" 34 Lopez, Barry 4, 15 OfW&lves and Men 4, 15 Lorenz, Konrad 140 Lozano, Luis-Martin 83, 94 The Magic ofRemedios T1iro 94 Lubbers, Klaus 276

Born for the Shade: Stereotypes ofthe Native American in United States Literature and the Visual Arts, (m6-z894) 276 Lukacs, Georg 105 Lyotard,Jean Franc;:ois 102-103

MacCannell, Dean

262, 277

The Tourist: A New Theory ofthe Leisure Class 277 Malamud, Randy

r6

Reading Zoos: Representations ofAnimals and Captivity r6 Malcolm, Norman 232, 245 "Thoughtless Brutes" 245 Malebranche 30 Marc, Franz 107

288

l!al:il

Index

Marvin, Bob

n7, 249

Murray, Peter

Zoo Culture (with Garry Mullan) Il7, 249 Marx, Karl 12 Mather, Increase

Murray)

68, 77 Angelographia 77 Mathews, Freya 277 "Conservation and Self-Realization: A Deep Ecology Perspective" 277 May, Jill P. 171, 175

Children's Literature &Critical Theory 175 McDowell, Michael]. 139, 156-157 "The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Awareness" 156 McManus,Susan 58 McNeill, Will n8

Heidegger: Visions: OfAnimals, Others and the Divine n8 Meek, Kerrie 62 "Online Mews The Name Came: Part One" 62 Melville, Herman 4 Moby-Dick 4 Midgley, Mary 159, 268, 278 Animals and Why They Matter 159, 278 Mighty Joe Young 254 Milling,Jill 131, 134 "The Ambiguous Animal: Evolution of the Beast-Man in Scientific Creation Myths" 134 Moscoso Pastrana, Prudencio 17

Las Cabezas Rodantes del Mal· Brujerfa y Nahualismo en los Altos de Chiapas 17 Mowat, Farley 258 Never Cry Wolf 258 Mr.Ed 252 Mullan, Garry n7 Zoo Culture (with Bob Marvin) n7 Murphy, Patrick D. 93, 97 "Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice" 97 Murray,John 181, 193 "The Law of the Jungle Books" 193 Murray,Linda 78

The Oxford Companion to Christian Art andArchitecture (with Peter Murray)

78

78

The Oxford Companion to Christian Art andArchitecture (with Linda 78

Naess, Arne 263-264, 268, 275, 277 Nagel, Thomas 15, 138 "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" 15, 138 Nahual 17 National Park Service 41, 43, 45-46 Newman,Jeri 52 Nietzche, Friedrich 133 On the Geneaology ofMorals 127, 133 Norfini, Guiseppe 154 Norris, Margot 258

Beasts ofthe Modern Imagination: Darwin, Neitzsche, Kafka, Ernst, & Lawrence 257 Orsola, Sister Maddalena Caccia 74-75 "The Mystical Marriage of Blessed OsannaAndreasi" 74, 78 Orwell, George 258 Animal Farm 258 Ouida (Rame, Maria Louise) 7-8, n, 135-159 A Dog ofFlanders 8, 136, 141-143, · 157-158 Folie Farine 144 Pipistrello, and Other Stories 145, 158 Santa Barbara, and Other Tales 145, 158 Toxin 145 "Dashwood's Drag; or, The Derby and What Came of It" 135 "Moufflou" 149, 158 "Ruffo and Ruff" 148, 158 "The Marriage Plate" 145, 158 "The Quality of Mercy" 151,155,158 "The Stable Boy" 158 "1bto" 148, 158 The New Priesthood 152, 154, 159 Under 'Fwo Flags 8, 136, 140, 155 Patterson, Annabel 78

Fables ofPower: Aesopian Writing and Political History 78 pedigree 50, 53-55 Peiffer, Katrina 194 Coyote at Large 194 Pem6n Tribe 33, 35

Pequot 11-ibe 261 phallogocentrism 121, 133, 208, 217, 221 Phillips, William H. 175 Analyzing Film 175 Picasso, Pablo 107 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 89 PlanetoftheApes, The 14,247,255 Plato 25, 180, 253, 274 Pollaiuolo, Piero 72-73, 78 "Tobias and the Archangel Gabriel" 72,78 primatology 212 Prins, Yopie 195, 205 "Sappho Doubled" 205 Pritchett, V.S. 135-136, 140, 157 "The Octopus" 155, 157 Pyle, Robert Michael 29-30, 35

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide 35 Rahon, Alice 86 Rainwater, Catherine

278-279

Dreams ofFiery Stars: The Transformations ofNative American Fiction 278-279 Regan, Tom "On the Ethics of the Use of Animals in Science" (with Dale Jamieson) 156 Reitman,Judith 157 "From Leash to the Laboratory" 157 Rembrandt 67, 69, 77 "The Angel Leaving Tobias and His Family" 67, 77 Reno, Kelly 165-166, 169, 172 Rigney, Barbara Hill 207, 225-226 MargaretAtwood 225 Ripa, Cesare 65, 77 Iconologia 65

Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery [Iconologia} 77 Ritvo, Harriet

16, 50, 62, 143

The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures ofthe Victorian Age 16, 50, 62, 155, 157

Robinson Crusoe 166 Robinson, Sally 226 "'The Anti-Logos Weapon': Multiplicity in Women's Texts" 226 Rollin, Bernard E. 157

The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Science 157 Roosevelt, Teddy 44 Rose,Jacqueline 175

The Case ofPeter Pan or The Impossibility ofChildren} Fiction 175 Rousseau,Jean-Jacques 165, 184 Emile 165, 175 Rubens, Peter Paul 141-142

The Raising ofthe Cross 141 Rudacille, Deborah

16, 156

The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War between Animal Research andAnimal Protection 16, 156 Ruskin,John 151 Ryder, Richard D.

249, 255, 257, 259

The PoliticalAnimal.· The Conquest of Speciesism 255, 257, 259 Sacchi, Pier Francesco 70, 78 "The Adoration of the Animals" 70 Sacks, Oliver 246 "The Dog Beneath the Skin" 246 Sadeler, Raphael 67-68, 70, 74 "St. Francis in His Cell Consoled by Angelic Music" 67, 77 "St. Francis, Patron of St. Colette" 68, 76-77 Sandlos,John 194 "The Coyote Came Back: The Return of an Ancient Song Dog in the Post-Colonial Literature and Landscape of NorthAmerica" 194 Sappho 195, 205 Savelsberg, Wolfgang Heinrich 77-78

Die Darstellung des HI. Franziskus von Assisi in der Fliimischen Malerei und Graphik des Spaten r6. und I7· Jahrhunderts 77-78 Schama, Simon

77

Rembrandt} Eyes 77 Scheler, Max 30, 34-35

Man} Place in Nature 35 Schiavo, Paolo 70, 78 "Nativity" 70, 78 Schirmacher, Wolfgang 34 Technik und Gelassenheit 34

290

-

Index

Schnaukclt,Joseph C.

78

Augustine in Iconography: History and Legend (with Frederick van Fleteren) 78 Scholtmeijer, Marian 156, 226 "What is 'Human'? Metaphysics and Zoontology in Flaubert and Kafka" 226 Schuessler,Jennifer 156 "Moo!" 156 Sequoia National Forest 37 Sequoia National Park 3, 37-38, 43-45 Serpell,James 253-254, 257, 259

In the Company ofAnimals: A Study ofHuman-Animal Relationship 257, 259 Seton and Roberts 218-219 Sewell, Anna 139 Black Beauty 139, 149, r63, 236 Shakespeare, William 2, 237

Hamlet 2 Antony and Cleopatra 237 Shelley, Mary 7

Frankenstein 7 Siebert, Charles 235, 246 Angus 235-236, 246 Simpson, Anne 124, 133 "The 'Tangible Antagonist': H.G. Wells and the Discourse of Otherness" 133 Singer, Peter ro, r6, 249 Animal Liberation r6, 249 Skippy 251 Smiley, Jane 233-234, 245 Horse Heaven 233-234, 245 Smoky the Cowhorse r63 Snyder, Gary 37, 265, 271, 277 "Re-Inhabitation" The Deep Ecology Movement 277 Society and Animals r6 Sounder 150 Southey, Robert 43 "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" 43 SPCA 155 Spiegelman, Art 258

Maus: A Survivor} Tale I: My Father Bleeds History 258 Spinoza, Baruch 198 St. Augustine 68, 73, 75-76, 78 De Civitate Dei 68

St. Basil 66, 77 Hexaifmeron 77 St. Francis of Assisi 67-68, 70, 74-77 St. Thomas Aquinas 68 Stafford, William 47 "Traveling Through the Dark" 4 7 Steeves, H. Peter 34

Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry 34 Stirling, Monica 155, 158

The Fine and the Wicked· The Life and TimesofOuida 155, 158 Sturgeon,Mary 196,205 Michael Field 205

Tarzan 251 teddy bears 44 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord

In Memorium Tepper, Sheri S.

2

2

8

The Family Tree 9 The Adventures ofRin Tin Tin 250, 258 TheDoe 107 The Journey ofNatty Gann 250 The Jungle Book 250 The Matrix 257 The Swiss Family Robinson r66 Thirteenth Floor, The 257 Thoreau, Henry David Turner,James 155, 158

7, 15

Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind 155, r58 Tuskegee Syphilis Study 153 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 40 Uexkiill,Jacob von qo, 157 "A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds" 140 Updike, John 69, 78 "The Future of Faith" 78 van der Coelen, Peter

77

Patriarchs, Angels and Prophets: The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmakingfrom Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt 77

Index van Fleteren, Frederick 78

Augustine in Iconography: History and Legend (with Joseph C. Schnaukelt) 78 Varo, Beatriz 82, 85, 88-89, 94-96

Remedios Mtro: en el centro del microcosmos 94 Varo, Remedios

5-6, 81-97

Birds 5, 90 Breaking the Vicious Circle 89,96 Cat 84 CatMan 85 Cats named "Pituso" and "Zorrillo" 84 Cats' Paradise 85 Cosmic Energy 86 Creation ofthe Birds 90 Elixir 92 Embroidering the Earths Mantle 92 Enchanted Knight 90 Encounter: The Meeting 91 Exploration ofthe Sources ofthe Orinoco River 90 Farewell 88 Feline Lady 85 Feline Personage 85 Flying Owl WOman 90 Harmony 91-92 Magic Flight 90 Mimesis 87 Ow/WOman 90 Personage 90 PortraitofDr. Ignacio Chdvez 92-93 Revelation or the Clockmaker 87-88 Solar Music 87 Spira! Transit 89,96 Sympathy 84-86 The Cat Fern 85 The Encounter 91 The Escape 92 The Flutist 87 The Juggler 97 The Madness ofthe Cat 85 Toward the Tower 92 Troubadour 89,96 ·Twisted Roads 90 Vegeta!Architecture 89 Vegetarian 11impires 93 Velazquez

88

Las meninas 88 Veronese, Paolo Caliari

"The Annunciation" Vine, Louis L. 62

291

72, 78

Common Sense Book of Complete Cat Care 62 vivisection 138-139, 143-145, 153, 155, 195, 217, 220

Vogt, Kathleen 207, 225 "Real and Imaginary Animals in the Poetry of Margaret Atwood" 265 von Schoppingen, Mesiter 5, 69-71, 76 "Passionsalter" 69, 76-77 Walker, Robert G. 258 "Meet Rin Tin Tin" 258 Watson, Brad "Seeing Eye" 13, 239-240, 244, 246 Wells, H.G. 7-8, 122-133 The Tt'me Machine 7

The \\Jar ofthe WOrlds 7 Tono Bungay 7 Wheeler, Wendy

n6

A New Modernity? n6 White Fang 251 White Fang 2 251 White, Christine 195, 205 " 'Poets and Lovers Evermore' Interpreting Female Love Poetry in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field" 205 Whitehead, Alfred North 276 Wilson, Edward 0. 12, 16

The Diversity ofLife 16 Wilson-Smith, Timothy 78

Caravaggio 78 Wolfe, Cary 123, 133, 216-218, 222,227

"Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme's Silence ofthe Lambs" (with Jonathan Elmer) 133 Wollstonecraft, Mary 12 Wood, David 34 "Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,"

The Provocation ofLevinas: Rethinking the Other (with Robert Bernasconi) 34 Woolf, Virginia 237-239, 246

Flush 72, 78

-

237-240, 246 66, 266

Wren, Matthew

292

'*~

Index

Wright, Tamra 34 "The Paradox of Mortality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas" (with Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley) 34-35 Yellowstone National Park

40

Zizek, Slavoj

121-122, 126, 128, 133

Enjoy Your Symptom 133 Zola, Pardo Bazan 137, 143 Zourabichvili, Fran~ois 198-199, 205 "Six Notes on the Percept (On the Relation between the Critical and the Clinical)" 198, 205