What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity

Philip Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415358392
• eBook ISBN: 9781134245178
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity argues that nonhuman animals, and stories about them, have always been closely bound up with the conceptual and material work of modernity.

In the first half of the book, Philip Armstrong examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick. He then goes on to explore how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists, including H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Brigid Brophy, Bernard Malamud, Timothy Findley, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel and J.M. Coetzee.

What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity also introduces readers to new developments in the study of human-animal relations. It does so by attending both to the significance of animals to humans, and to animals' own purposes or designs; to what animals mean to us, and to what they mean to do, and how they mean to live.

1
The Inhuman Fictions of Swift and Defoe

Two travellers go on separate journeys. Both are marooned on alien shores, where they encounter exotic peoples and species. They have to make do with unfamiliar foods, company and clothing. They consume the animals they discover and use their skins for clothing, but also, seeking consolation for the absence of other humans, befriend them. One keeps pets, the other is kept as a pet; one uses empirical observation to master the natural world, the other is scrutinized as a natural-historical specimen; one breeds a stock of domesticated animals, the other is offered a mate to establish a breeding stock of his own kind.

Comparison between the adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver highlights two features integral to Enlightenment modernity.¹ The first is mobility. By turning their gaze beyond Europe, towards unfamiliar lives and locations, Enlightenment thinkers developed their notions about the world and the place of humans in it. The epistemological movements of the period were inextricably entwined with material expansion: trade, navigation, cartography, colonialism, slavery. And the fictional voyages created by Defoe and Swift drew extensively upon the experiences of real-life travellers – for example those of explorer, adventurer, trader, slaver and pirate William Dampier, and of Alexander Selkirk, the marooned Scottish sailor who survived four years alone on one of the Juan Fernandez Islands (Rowse 2000: 59–60).

The second feature of Enlightenment modernity demonstrated by all these adventures is the formative role played by human–animal relations. Whether as a concept (animality) or as a brute reality (actual animals), non-humans play a constitutive role in the preoccupations of the modern enterprise: its relentless mobility (spatial, social, economic and epistemological), its development of commodity culture, its promotion of new scientific paradigms and its determination to reconceptualize the human. The animal imagery created by Defoe and Swift – Crusoe in his goatskins with his parrot and dog; Gulliver swallowing forkfuls of tiny cows, struggling in the affectionate grip of a gigantic monkey, or talking politics with well-bred horses – have enduring appeal because they embody this relationship.²

The Beast-Machine

It was as a comment on human nature that the concept of ‘animality’ was devised (Thomas 1984: 41).

It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex – and not always edifying – economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place (Agamben 2004: 15–16).

As Keith Thomas concludes, the rethinking of human nature during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries occurred in reference to animality as its accompanying term. In this sense modern ‘man’ depends upon what Giorgio Agamben refers to as ‘anthropophorous’ animality: the conceptual animal that produces or bears the concept of the human as such (2004: 12).

In medieval Europe the security of the division between human and animal rested upon theological and moral qualities. Christian dogma, exemplified by Augustine and Aquinas, saw human nature as a conflict between the animal passions of the mortal body and the divine aspirations of the immortal soul, and as subject to an eschatological imperative to transcend the former in favour of the latter. This version of humanity was guaranteed by a divinely created chain of being that ordered the world, material and immaterial, into a hierarchy which placed animals below humans, and angels above. Hence, while in the mortal, fallen world humanity was constituted by an animality at once beneath and internal to it, the true and immortal nature of the human was emphatically non-animal. Theology licensed, indeed demanded, the subjugation not only of the human’s own animality, but also of the non-human animals over whom Adam and Eve were granted dominion (Thomas 1984: 17–30, 36–41).

Humanism, however – first emerging within Christian philosophy, but eventually arrogating the cultural dominance of its theological parent – required a reconfiguration of this bifold nature of ‘man’. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the growing authority of science and philosophy gradually but inexorably shifted the distinction between the human animal and all others away from the former’s unique access to divine grace and possession of an immortal soul, towards a more anthropocentric concept of mind, as characterized by the capacity for rational thought. Again, animals were integral to this movement – literally, as tools for scientific experimentation, and conceptually, as a control group against which to prove the uniqueness of human intellect and agency.

René Descartes provided the paradigm for this extreme remaking of the human via manipulation of the animal. Cogito ergo sum: for Descartes the ability to think is the precondition for human being, and in order to appre-hend the distinctive nature of human thought, Descartes produces his infamous comparison with animals. The exceptional esteem accorded to a particular species of human intellect demands a correlative underestimation of the cognitive capacities of non-human animals, who are thus reduced to mindless automatons, indistinguishable from perfectly crafted machines. Animals ‘have no intelligence at all’ writes Descartes; when they act, it is merely ‘nature working in them according to the disposition of their organs’, just as a machine operates not of its own volition but according to the design of its maker: ‘[t]hus a clock, composed only of wheels and springs, can count the hours and measure the time’ (1960 [1637]: 81–2). As Thomas points out, many early modern intellectuals, inspired by a new ‘host of mechanical marvels – clocks, watches, moving figures and automata of every kind – [were] well prepared to believe that animals were also machines …’ (1984: 33–4). The attractiveness of Descartes’ comparison was that it caught the flavour of modernity, and in particular the preoccupation with technological and temporal advancement. More importantly, the material agenda of early modern and Enlightenment culture required this kind of absolute distinction: ‘Descartes’ explicit aim had been to make men “lords and possessors of nature’’’, and ‘the most powerful argument for the Cartesian position was that it was the best possible rationalization for the way man actually treated animals’ (34). Accordingly, in the century following Descartes, the definition of modern ‘man’ according to a strict demarcation between animals and humans, and predicated on the possession or absence of rationality, achieved a growing authority in scientific and philosophical circles (Hulme and Jordanova 1990).

Yet as Thomas also argues, the extent and manner of the adoption of the Cartesian paradigm within the larger cultural milieu must be measured with great care. In Britain, a flurry of interest in this topic was given added momentum by the publication of a popular English translation of Descartes in 1694 (Shugg 1968). But while some devout proponents of the ‘new science’ advanced the Cartesian model, the greater part of English writing on the topic scrutinized it sceptically and, more often than not, rejected it. The rhetorical vehicle for this debate was provided by narratives about humans and animals, especially those that carried traces of dirt and blood from material relationships between species.

Non-Apes, Non-Horses, Non-Humans

The commonest of such vehicles was the horse. According to a long-standing convention, a man on horseback represents reason reining in the passions, while the inverted form, a horse comically riding a man, signifies the overcoming of reason by the passions (Rivero, in Swift 2002 [1726]: 192). Either way, the relation between the human and the equine provided an immediately recognizable image of the bifold nature of the human as it was commonly understood: animal flesh and immortal soul; brute body and knowing, judging mind. It recurred as a syllogism commonly used in schools: ‘[m]an is a rational animal. No horse is rational. Only rational animals are capable of discipline’ (Weiner 2000: 15). ‘Homo est animal rationale: no one could study elementary logic anywhere in the British Isles in the generation before Gulliver without encountering this formula’, most often ‘given without comment or explanation as the obviously correct formula for man’s distinctive nature’ (Crane 1962: 245). Such micro-narratives – man rides horse, horse rides man – often inform and give shape to philosophical abstractions, but they always owe their self-evident authority to human–animal practices. Prior to the nineteenth century, no animal was more central to the commerce of everyday European life than the horse, as a mode of transport, agricultural machine, agent of communication, weapon of war and tool of colonization. European states rode to national prosperity and global power on the back of the horse (Wintle 1994).

Gulliver’s Travels deploys the inverted form of this long-established emblem. In Book 4, it is not homo but the equine Houyhnhnm that is animal rationale – ‘their grand Maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and to be wholly governed by it’ – in contrast to the hominid Yahoo, whom Gulliver portrays as the embodiment of irrational, carnal appetite (Swift 2002 [1726]: 219–23, 225). Although the reader is never actually asked to imagine a Houyhnhnm astride the back of a Yahoo, Gulliver does see an ‘old Steed, who seemed to be of Quality’, riding in a sledge pulled by four of his Yahoo beasts of burden (196). Swift suggests the reversal linguistically as well. ‘Houyhnhnm’, presumably, should be pronounced like the word ‘human’ (with the final consonants swapped) as if spoken by a horse. And just as the equine whinny provides a language for the Houyhnhnms’ perfectly rational horse-sense, human speech transforms into the irrational vocalizations that give the Yahoos their name.

This apparently simple reversal of the conventional emblem, however, proves on examination to be fraught with complexities. Some scholars consider that Swift intends Gulliver’s high estimation of Houyhnhnm society to be taken seriously, as a neo-Stoic utopia based on the rational disposition of civic virtue. Others point out that Gulliver has become, in the course of his travels, a wildly unreliable observer, whose perceptions are distorted to the point of insanity after the first three voyages. According to this perspective, when considered outside the narrator’s idealized view of them, the Houyhnhnms are ascetic fascists, exemplars of a dispassionate extremism resulting from a moral code dependent on strict ratiocination.³ I suggest that the meaning of Swift’s extended portrait of equine rationality can be clarified only by placing it in context: first in relation to the preceding three parts of the Travels, and second within a wider cultural debate regarding the superimposed binary oppositions: reason/passion and human/animal.

Gulliver’s third voyage, for example, provides the most direct satire against Descartes and other proponents of the new science, and the concomitant exaggeration of the distinction between animal body and rational mind. The most evidently Cartesian culture anywhere in the Travels is that of Laputa, the flying island founded upon a scientific imperative to transcend the material world, whose gentry have their heads permanently ‘reclined either to the Right, or the Left; one of their Eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the Zenith’. Preoccupied by ‘intense Speculation’, obsessively contemplating the worlds of inner thought or transcendent space, the Laputans so neglect their material conditions that they require servants to strike them with rattles periodically to remind them of their proximity to other people or to physical risks. Without this, the typical Laputan is ‘so wrapped up in Cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every Precipice’ (Swift 2002 [1726]: 133–4). The subjectivity proposed by the Cartesian cogito here reduces the human body to an inconvenient drag on the mind, an unfortunate material residue capable only of precipitating a distracted intellect into physical pratfalls.

Even when the Laputans are forced to deal with any aspect of the body, they do so according to mathematical principles. For example, diet: Gulliver is served ‘Mutton, cut into a Aequilateral Triangle, a piece of Beef into a Rhomboides, and a Pudding into a Cycloid’, resulting in an ‘Indisposition that held me some Days’ (Swift 2002 [1726]: 135–6). The same problems occur with clothing: the king’s tailor measures Gulliver’s ‘altitude’ with a quadrant and ‘the Dimensions and Out-Lines’ of his body with a ruler and compass, but when the clothes come they are ‘very ill made, and quite out of shape’ (136). As for Laputan architecture: ‘[t]heir Houses are very ill built, with Walls Bevil, without one Right Angle in any Apartment, and this defect ariseth from the Contempt they bear to practical Geometry’ (137). Laputan intellectual calculus proves imperfect in proportion to its engagement with the material body and environment.

However the divorce between mental and bodily phenomena on Laputa merely exaggerates Gulliver’s own tendency to lapse into a kind of body dysmorphia. Returning from Brobdingnag, his psychological sense of his own anatomy is skewed. Having grown accustomed to the gigantic proportions of those around him, he keeps overestimating his own stature – bending down to enter his house for fear of striking his head, stooping below his wife’s knees to embrace her, and attempting to pick up his daughter by the waist in one hand (Swift 2002 [1726]: 124–5). Similarly, coming home from Houyhnhnmland after his long immersion in equine culture, he speaks in a whinnying tone and trots like a horse (235, 241). In this regard, Gulliver – ‘a Person of much Curiosity and easy Belief ’ (151) whose name hints at his gullible introjection of the values of the two alien cultures he admires most – provides another instance of that disease of modern humanity which Swift diagnoses in Laputa: the devaluation of the body at the expense of an abstract notion of intellectual transcendence. Gulliver’s own growing contempt for human flesh is evident in his horrified depictions of dermatological pathologies in Brobdingnag, and his disgusted anatomization of the Yahoos (93–4, 98–9, 189–90).

The Yahoo–Gulliver–Houyhnhnm relation thus occurs as a culmination of Swift’s critique of the opposition and hierarchy put in place by the Cartesian view of the relationship between reasoning mind and sensual body. But it must also be considered in the light of a related challenge that targets the Cartesian distinction between human and animal on the basis of the former’s unique possession of rationality. Throughout the Travels, and most obviously in the fourth voyage, Swift destabilizes the privileged relationship between reason and the human that provides the crux of Descartes’ formulation. He does this in two symmetrical ways: through Gulliver’s portrayal of the Houyhnhnms as a species embodying virtuous reason conjoined to an indisputably non-human body, and through his attitude to the Yahoos, in whom, despite their hominid forms, Gulliver can recognize no sign of any rational or moral capacity whatsoever.⁴

A sustained inter-implication of the two anti-Cartesian conceits described above – one that mocks the supremacy of reason, and another its unique possession by humans – thus structures Gulliver’s final voyage. It is within this context, I suggest, that the moral character of the Houyhnhnms must be considered, since they represent both aspects of Swift’s anti-Cartesianism simultaneously. While clearly embodying the displacement of rationality from the human form, they also demonstrate its unreliability as an ultimate source of virtue. The faults apparent in Houyhnhnm society, indeed, arise from an overestimation of rationality as the basis for social division. Just as certain strains in Enlightenment thought took rationality as the measure of full humanity, thereby excluding those found wanting (women, the poor, non-Europeans), the Houyhnhnms believe that ‘it is Reason only that maketh a Distinction of Persons’, using abstract ratios and principles to regulate marriage, the production and distribution of offspring, the education of the young, and servant-master relationships (Swift 2002 [1726]: 226).⁵ The same application of rationality as the measure of all things applies to the Houyhnhnms’ treatment of others, most obviously the Yahoos. Given the anthropomorphism with which the latter are described, the discussion in the Houyhnhnm General Assembly of a plan to exterminate them cannot help but evoke genocidal implications – an effect not far removed from the black humour of Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ (1969 [1729]), which recommended the consumption of Irish infants as a way of easing that country’s poverty while at the same time answering its demand for food (Hawes 1991; Rawson 2001).

Ultimately, when placed alongside the Cartesian debates characteristic of English letters during the first part of the eighteenth century, neither Yahoos nor Houyhnhnms should be considered as portraits of the human, ideal or otherwise, in the sense given to that term by the Enlightenment. Neither indeed are they animals, according to the Enlightenment understanding of that accompanying term. They are something more like Locke’s ‘shape of an ass with reason’, which the philosopher insists must be considered ‘different from either that of man or beast … a species of an animal between, or distinct from both’ (1997 [1689]: I, 134).⁶ Furthermore, having lived so long and so gullibly with these two (non-species, Gulliver also is no longer human; neither has he become an animal, properly speaking. Instead, Gulliver’s radical mental and bodily unease at the conclusion of his final voyage demonstrate the conceptual disarray that Swift perceived to be endemic to the category of the human as produced by Enlightenment thought. This ‘modern man’ cannot conceive of himself as a reasoning animal body like the Houyhnhnms; nor do his pretensions permit him to inhabit the world as a bare, forked animal like a Yahoo. In keeping with their satirical function, then, the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms – unlike the Cartesian beast-machine, or even Locke’s rational ass – do not function to support, define, give shape to or bear the human as a concept or category. Rather they demolish, unfasten, annul, delegitimize or subvert it. Instead of being anthropophoric, then, their role is anthropoluotic.⁷ The modern notion of homo as animal rationale evaporates under Swift’s scorching gaze, and leaves nothing behind. No longer defined by a theological regulation of the relation between the spiritual and the animal, yet still unable to settle itself convincingly into one domain or the other, the modern category of the human fractures and dissipates even as it begins its ascent to dominance.

Animals and the Animal

In dismantling ‘man’, the early eighteenth-century English literary interrogation of the Enlightenment simultaneously deconstructs the crucial companion term, ‘animal’. Insisting upon the ways in which different animals and varying animal practices call into doubt the magisterial opposition of these two abstract categories, Swift, Defoe and others undermine a conceptual assumption central to modernity and humanism alike.

In some of his last work, Jacques Derrida asserted that use of a general and singular concept of ‘the Animal’ signals the ‘complicit, continued and organized involvement’ of European philosophy since Descartes ‘in a veritable war of the species’, insofar as it attempts to confine

within this catch-all concept, within this vast encampment of the animal, in this general singular, within the strict enclosure of this definite article (‘the Animal’ and not ‘animals’), as in a virgin forest, a zoo, a hunting or fishing ground, a paddock or an abattoir, a space of domestication … all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbours, or his brothers (2002: 399–402).

Derrida indicates the constraints of the modern notion of ‘the Animal’ – the same limits that allow the concept to do the ideological work of defining ‘Man’ – by beginning the impossible task of listing all the material practices and contexts within which humans encounter different species (Fudge 2002a: 164).

The animal–human reversals of Gulliver’s first two voyages demonstrate the same effect: that of a deconstructive, anthropoluotic oscillation between the singular concept of ‘animality’ – with its anthropophorous function in defining humanity – and the multiple categories to which animals are assigned by the material practices of human societies. On first landing in Lilliput, Gulliver awakens to find he is bound and netted like some gigantic wild beast. His departure from the island is motivated by the realization that the Lilliputians, instead of seeing him as a human being, think of him as a beast of burden or a warhorse, and accordingly plan to mutilate him to keep him under control. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver’s survival amongst the giant inhabitants depends entirely upon the various animal categories they apply to him, each of which invites different practices. Initially he is taken for a pest, and spared the fate of vermin not because he is recognized as human, but because he is transferred into a different category of non-human: first that of a sideshow or circus exotic, then that of a pet. In these ludicrous narratives, the singular category relied on by the Cartesian paradigm inevitably multiplies into different kinds of animal, treated according to their varying lived relationships with human beings.

The same effect occurs in Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s fiction puts pressure on the abstract distinction between man and animal, and the abstract concepts of rationality and language upon which this depends, by imagining their application in practical terms. As Crusoe settles into life on the island, his attitude changes from an initial wonder and fear to something much more appropriate to one of Descartes’ ‘lords and possessors of nature’:

It would have made a Stoick smile to have seen, me and my little Family sit down to Dinner; there was my Majesty the Prince and Lord of the whole Island; I had the Lives of all my Subjects at my absolute Command. I could hang, draw, give Liberty, and take it away, and no Rebels among all my Subjects.

Then to see how like a King ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Inhuman Fictions of Swift and Defoe
• 2 Gulliver, Frankenstein, Moreau
• 3 Rendering the Whale
• 4 Modernism and the Hunt for Redemption
• 5 Animal Refugees in the Ruins of Modernity
• Notes
• References