B. F. Skinner, in his autobiography The Shaping of a Behaviorist (1979), recalls how ‘one fine Sunday morning [he] went to the Biology Building and descended to [his] subterranean laboratory’.1 Skinner is the famous inventor of the ‘Skinner Box’, a laboratory apparatus in which an animal is trained or ‘conditioned’ to press a lever to get food, and on that day he was back in his laboratory to resume his experiment on rats:
I put the rats in their boxes and started my programming equipment. I was still using circuit breakers, and the friction drives under the four disks emitted a rhythmic pulse: di-dah-di-di-dah – di-dah-di-di-dah. Suddenly I heard myself saying ‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out’. (174; emphasis in original)
‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out’. When I first came across these words, which came to Skinner’s lips unawares, I assumed that they referred to the rats he had put in his boxes: they would never get out, trapped as they were in the laboratory, repeating their task to get food. This appeared to me to be a key moment in which Skinner unwittingly acknowledges and verbalises the cruel nature of his animal experiment. Also, he is shown to be fully aware of the unequal power relationship between himself and his rats: he is their jailer and lawmaker, who sentences them to lifelong confinement.
But, no. Skinner’s recollection disallows the possibility of such a rat-centric reading of his anecdote, as he goes on to say:
Evidently the rhythmic stimulus had had the effect Sherrington called summation. An imitative response had joined forces with some latent behavior, which I could attribute to a rather obvious source: I was a prisoner in my laboratory on a lovely day. (174)
‘Summation’ here refers to the English neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington’s discovery that a subliminal stimulus, ineffective on its own, becomes effective when it is repeated.2 Skinner on that day was exposed to the repetition of a mechanical and rhythmic pulse coming from the rat boxes, to the point that it had the effect of bringing to light his latent thought: ‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out’. The episode concludes with his ‘authorial’ interpretation of what he had uttered: obviously it meant that he was ‘a prisoner in [his] laboratory on a lovely day’. Skinner has the last word, as if to recover the control he had lost when some other voice used his body to speak through him.
This episode is included in Skinner’s autobiography as the moment which ignited his interest in the ‘latent behaviour’ of our mind, leading to his design of what he called ‘the verbal summator’, a device which ‘simply repeats a series of vowel sounds over and over until the subject reads something into them’ (176). Skinner calls these sounds ‘auditory inkblots’ (175), likening his invention to the Rorschach test and Freudian free association: it can be used to ‘[snare] out complexes’ (176), as it ‘enables the subconscious to verbalize itself’ (176). That is to say, his ‘rats in the box’ inspired him to invent another device to ‘snare’ an animal within the human subject: a part of himself, which, just like rats, felt trapped in the laboratory, resigned to the fact that it would never be able to get out on that fine Sunday morning.
To quote the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘fable’ is ‘a short story devised to convey some useful lesson; esp. one in which animals or inanimate things are the speakers or actors’. The word is derived from the Latin word fārī, ‘to speak’.3 A ‘fable’, which therefore means any spoken story, is generally understood as a fiction or fabrication in which animals magically speak. It gives expression to the speech of animals, including their silence and the silencing of their voices. It is true that Skinner’s scientific anecdote is not a typical fable, like those of Aesop, which centre on the conversations and actions of talking animal characters. Nevertheless, it has many traits of the fable and can be read as one. First of all, the anecdote exemplifies the fable’s function to convey a useful ‘human’ lesson through an animal story. The rats in the boxes, literally the central ‘device’ of the story, become completely forgotten, and are replaced by the story of a man trapped in a laboratory. This substitution also suggests that certain types of animal testing operate like a fable: humans observe animals to acquire greater understanding of themselves.
Despite its clearly anthropocentric interpretive frame, which seems to be calculated to suppress any animal agency, animals speak in a fable. It is a literary genre in which animals and other inanimate beings are given the power of speech. Skinner’s anecdote is faithful to this law of the genre, as it stages the voice of the nonhuman, transcribed as ‘di-dah-di-di-dah – di-dah-di-di-dah’. According to Skinner, this sound, or rhythmic pulse, was made by the ‘circuit breaker’, which is part of the rat apparatus. Its role is to ‘automatically [eliminate] superfluous contacts’ made within the Skinner box, ‘due to the inexpertness of the rat’s manipulation of the lever’.4 In practice, the device ‘acts to break the circuit from the lever for a short time’ after a rat correctly presses it down, in order to discount ‘irregular’ manipulations of the lever by the rat.5 This device was necessary to make the results rigorous, or to reduce rats into data and a model species to be studied by humans. In order to arrive at scientific truth, which would allow him to tell human stories, Skinner has to repress, and refuses to note, the rats’ many ‘irrelevant’ acts. The sound of the circuit breaker is then an invitation for us to imagine what the rats might actually be doing in this scene. As the circuit breaker was operated by the rats, its rhythmic pulse is their voices, or, more precisely, a translation of their voices. It speaks softly yet powerfully, testifying to the rats’ agency and the effects which they had on Skinner. As we have already seen, the sound spoke to Skinner’s latent thoughts, making him realise that he was another rat trapped in the laboratory, and even inspired him to create a new machine.
The agency of the ‘rats in the box’ is further underscored by the additional information which Skinner provides in his autobiography, according to which he later introduced into his rat apparatus a device operated by mercury, which had the same effect as the ‘circuit breaker’, and functioned as ‘an additional safeguard’ to eliminate superfluous contacts.6 This new device had a detrimental effect on his health because ‘a small wisp of vapor rose from the [mercury] cup every time the circuit broke, and in some of [his] experiments four rats were pressing levers at a fairly high rate’ (86–7). This description brings to mind a vivid image of the rats rapidly tapping the levers, emitting the pulse of ‘di-dah-di-di-dah – di-dah-di-di-dah’—affecting Skinner, his latent thoughts and desires, and his health and welfare (he recalls that this ‘possibly lethal device’ caused his hair to fall out ‘at an alarming rate’ (87)). Thus, Skinner’s ‘rats in the boxes’ story is hardly an allegory of man as a lab rat. Real rats are in operation, tapping, eating, calling one another, and living, and the fable allows us to hear their voices.
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Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire is a book on (and of) fables. With the Skinner Box in mind, it presents the British Empire as a fabular Animal-Machine. It is made up of a proliferating and interconnected network of boxes, each of which is a theatre of human-animal interactions. The book thus contains quite a few trapped animals, trained, transported and translated, while there are also, in the background, nonhuman ‘voices’ urging us to think outside the box, if we could only learn to hear them.
Till very recently, the fable had been a neglected or even demonised genre in the field of animal studies, despite the fact that animals are central to fables, as both subject matter and narrative device. It had been regarded as a prime example of the anthropocentric misrepresentation of animals: by making animals talk and act like humans, the fable turns them into a human allegory, taking full advantage of the fact that they would not talk back to us. Harriet Ritvo declares that the fable ‘has little connection to real creatures, none at all’, in stark contrast to ‘texts produced by people who dealt with real animals’.7 Indeed, as Erica Fudge, writing about the fable in the Early Modern tradition, observes, ‘the beast fable is not merely a literary convention’ but a reading lesson, which ‘actually enacts the aim of humanism itself’: ‘To look beneath the surface of the fable, to read the moral not the animal, is where the human can be found … To misread a fable is to be an animal’.8 For Jacques Derrida, the fable, as a ‘determinate literary genre in the European West’,9 embodies the epistemic and material violence which humans exercise over other animals: ‘We know the history of fabulization and how it remains an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication. Always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man’.10 Such anthropocentrism makes it necessary for us, if we would address animals, to ‘avoid fables’ (37).
In recent years, however, there has been a flowering of scholarship which revisits and re-evaluates the fable as a genre that tells the stories of animals themselves. For instance, Naama Harel, in a 2009 article, urges us to listen to the ‘animal voice behind the animal fable’: some fables, if not all, give us ‘an alternative understanding, which does not exclude the nonhuman animals and does not reduce them to human figures and issues’.11 Similarly, John Hartigan Jr., in his Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach (2014), argues that fables ‘stage other species as capable of speaking to us’ and ‘present both the possibility and problem of how we might listen to and then learn from other species’.12 Hartigan excitingly characterises the fable as a space in which ‘species thinking’ takes place: not simply the knowledge of humanity as species, as Dipesh Chakrabarty, who originally coined t...