Animal Visions

Posthumanist Dream Writing

Susan Mary Pyke

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030038762
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030038779
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Animal Visions considers how literature responds to the harms of anthropocentricism, working with Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and various adaptations of this canonistic novel to show how posthumanist dream writing unsettles the privileging of the human species over other species. Two feminist and post-Freudian responses, Kathy Acker's poem "Obsession" (1992) and Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay" (1997) most strongly extend Brontë's dream writing in this direction. Building on the trope of a ludic Cathy ghost who refuses the containment of logic and reason, these and other adaptations offer the gift of a radical peri-hysteria. This emotional excess is most clearly seen in Kate Bush's music video "Wuthering Heights" (1978) and Peter Kosminsky's film Wuthering Heights (1992). Such disturbances make space for a moor love that is particularly evident in Jane Urquhart's novel Changing Heaven (1989) and, to a lesser extent Sylvia Plath's poem, "Wuthering Heights" (1961). Brontë's Wuthering Heights  and its most productive afterings make space for co-affective relations between humans and other animal beings. Andrea Arnold's film Wuthering Heights (2011) and Luis Buñuel's Abismos de Pasión (1954) also highlight the rupturing split gaze of non-acting animals in their films. In all of these works depictions of intra-active and entangled responses between animals show the potential for dynamic and generative multispecies relations, where the human is one animal amongst the kin of the world.

© The Author(s) 2019

Susan Mary PykeAnimal VisionsPalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03877-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Emplaced Readerly Devotions

Susan Mary Pyke¹

(1)

School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

Susan Mary Pyke

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1.1 Dream Writing Beyond Anthropocentric Hierarchies

Ideas of human superiority are embedded in the cultural model of dominion that patterns most human societies at this historical moment. This limited anthropocentric thinking has been instrumental in brutal injustices against animals of all species, humans included, especially over the past two hundred and fifty years of global industrialisation, and most concertedly in the last fifty years of intensifying animal agriculture. Literature offers readers a way to respond to the ethical and environmental damage caused by this cruel privileging of some humans over most other animals.

This socially fabricated conceit of privilege has grown largely from the dominant rationalism of the Enlightenment period, after a strong wave of scientific determinism did much to rid nonhuman animals of personhood. Many influential thinkers from this time followed René Descartes’ determination of animal bodies as machines. Descartes argues that the particularities of sentience qualify only the human species for ensoulment. All other species, he insists, are a homogenous group of living beings dependent on instinctive bodily senses and associative memories. As he infamously declares, ‘humans are the only thinking being’ ([1637] 1993, 19). Despite his surety, Descartes also acknowledges his position is inherently problematic, for humans are of course, animals. His own, and other contemporary critiques of this position, were strengthened through a surge of Romantic thinking that reformulated the living world as deeply interconnected and ensouled.

Cartesian ideas of human exceptionality contrast with the parallel thinking of the controversial Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza. Spinoza broadens ‘the perfection of things’ from anthropocentric limits of what is ‘of use to, or are incompatible with, human nature’ to a broader universe of affect ([1677] 1985, 446). Spinoza argues that while humans most often see the world in ways that suit them, there is more to the world than this perspective. Much of Spinoza’s materialist thinking has been applied in contemporary resistances to the doctrine of human exceptionality, an ethical direction that informs my work. Humans can never have godlike knowledge, according to Spinoza, when ‘God’ is understood as ‘a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence’ (409). Humans, he writes, are more limited than this ‘God’, but they can strive towards greater godly reason. My effort is to understand the less hierarchical perspective Spinoza makes visible, as far as I am humanly able.

Despite Spinoza’s long-standing protest, the Cartesian idea that humans deserve more of the world than other species still dominates, as does the assumption that humans have a right to benefit from the bodies of other animals. Doctrinal disputes bristle over the question of ensoulment, ethical disputes rage over which animals are appropriate to main and kill in the name of experimental vivisection, yet meanwhile the use of nonhuman animals for the physical and psychological sustenance of humans remains the global norm. Now the ethics of assuming nonhuman animals as companions are under debate, as the human strings of conditionality tied to such relations become increasingly problematic.

My critical engagement with literary texts explores resistances to speciesist assumptions of superiority, working with texts that offer, to varying degrees, less hierarchical understandings of animal cognition and sentience. My focus on literature that offers insights into cross-species relations means I am not able to consider metamorphic shape-shifters here, even while I find this trope fascinating. It is hard to resist the suggestive possibilities of the slithery bat-lizard that is also Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, and I feel for Mary Shelley’s creature, made of body parts gathered from the ‘dissecting room and the slaughter-house’ ([1818] 1996, 32). I do not deal with anthropomorphism in detail either, even while as a younger reader, I was deeply imprinted by the viewpoint of Anne Sewell’s Black Beauty, an impression supported by the time I spent with a horse who would only take a bridle’s bit if it came with slices of apple. I can still imagine the pain of blinkers, fashionable reins and a ‘hard-tempered hard-handed man’ ([1877] 1978, 46). The ‘sudden uprising’ of George Orwell’s politicised farm animals has long been my favourite ‘Rebellion’ ([1945] 2000, 12). In my mind, the seventh commandment in this text still applies without exception; every animal ‘is equal’ whatever their differences and excellences (15). Orwell’s utopian vision, albeit short-lived, is a brilliant comment on the potential of animal politics.

The unabashedanthropomorphism in literary works such as those of Sewell and Orwell, helps readers to deal, in positive ways, with unjust cross-species relations. By strategically depicting nonhuman animals speaking in human languages, or engaging in social relations specific to humans, these texts make clear the harms done by the human species to other creatures. Lori Gruen, a leading animal studies philosopher and advocate, distinguishes between ‘arrogant anthropomorphism’, which she glosses as ‘human chauvinism’, and the more ‘inevitable anthropomorphism’ where human perceptions of other animals are shaped by what are understood as shared capabilities between species (2015, 24). Gruen’s equitable nuance allows Immanuel Kant’s well-known claim to stand, in an extended form. It is true, as Kant argues, that human ‘knowledge begins with experience’ ([1781] 2001, 19). Humans can only see what can humanly be seen, feel what can humanly be felt. However, these sensations need not lead to speciesism.

When Kant is read through Spinoza, his perspective seems reasonable and helpful. As Omri Boehm shows, in his consideration of the importance of Spinoza’s work on Kant’s thinking, there is a ‘regulative Spinozism’ in the relations he draws between what can be known and what is lived through (2014, n.p.). It is the practical focus of Kant, Boehm argues, that differentiates these two thinkers. I suggest there is nothing inherently practical in Kant’s claim that human capabilities offer them a rightful means to use other animals as they will. Kant is right that I can only describe agency, human or nonhuman, from where I am situated, but it does not follow that human agency has a greater validity than that of other animal agencies.

While I understand that representing all animals as if they are humans is, to a degree, unavoidable, and while recognising that anthropomorphic literature can improve cross-species relations, I am attracted to an ethics of writing that works to move beyond this humanist paradigm. In Susan McHugh’s analysis of animal literary scholarship, she tackles the ‘complex dynamics of reading literary animals as substitutes for human subjects-in-the-making’ (2011, 7). As McHugh demonstrates, the most effective way to change these power-ridden dynamics is to develop a ‘narrative ethology ’ that learns from life sciences (19). This is sound advice, although there is, as McHugh notes, a pitfall. Inevitably, it is humans who teach humans about the cognitions and behaviours of nonhuman animals. However, this is no reason to shy away from learning more about cross-species relations, particularly given emerging collaborative learning frames. Marc Bekoff, both biologist and animal behaviourist, gives full credit to Jethro, a rabbit-rescuing rescue dog that shares his life, in the development of his work on the ‘active and thoughtful minds’ of animals other than humans (2002, 22). Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich theorise this approach, as they seek more equitable ways for humans to work together with other animals to ‘fuse, refuse, and confuse’ pre-existing categories that operate in ethological studies (2010, 553). Artistic shared agency is leading these multispecies trans-disciplinary directions. These approaches are readily accessible to scholars in the environmental humanities with an interest in animal studies.

Ethical multispecies ethnography is possible, at least to an extent, because human communications are animal communications. I am, primarily, bound within my own species-specific communicative abilities, but these may be read by individuals of other species in ways that have meaning for them, just as I make my own sense of the movements and sounds of creatures who are close to me. As McHugh goes on to argue, narrative ethology that emphasises ‘embodied relations of agency and form’ can broaden human experiences of what it is to be one animal amongst many others (217). It is best, such thinking suggests, for me to read through and beyond textual signifiers, always informed by my shared communications with animals of other species that I know well. In this way, literature that pays attention to shared communications between species may well be limited to human understandings of these relations, but these understandings need not be anthropocentric. An engaged reading of literary works that grant personhood to all animals, no matter their excellences, can counter the violence of centralising humans that are (most often) cis, white, male and in a position of influence.

The marginalisation of most animals as a reduced category is so entrenched, the assumption of dominion so ‘natural’, that innovative literary resistance is needed to depict animalities in ways that make room for a specific creature’s personhood. I suggest that literary depictions that seek post-anthropocentric ways of seeing the world can be enriched through dream writing. Dreams offer unexpected and moving ways of viewing the world that are not obvious in a conscious state. Depictions of dreams are often accompanied by an intense form of writing. Mesmerising and affective texts dream with their readers in surprising ways that can unsettle the given, including the unconscious privileging of one species over others. French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous has brilliantly argued—and demonstrated through her own writing—that when creative works give themselves over to the affect of words—when they dream write—they can open new conceptual spaces for their readers. Cixous characterises dream writing by drawing on her engagement with the philosopher, Jacques Derrida, and by association, with psychoanalytic thought. Sigmund Freud is the always-present ghost in the sensitive thinking of these two theorists.

Dream writing is a practice, and Cixous is an exemplary dream writing practitioner. Thinking my species into less harmful relations with other species, begins, for me, with dream writing nonhuman animals with personhood, leaving space for cognitions beyond human understanding. Anthropomorphism must be faced critically in this process, as writing and reading nonhuman animals as would-be-humans can erase nonhuman agency. Being specific about animal similarities and differences helps, as does being tuned into the individual predilections of each animal, no matter their species. This non-anthropocentric dream writing invites readers to re-imagine themselves as the vulnerable animals they are, co-dependent with other species in a shared and fragile world.

My emphasis on dream writing is not intended to take away from foundational efforts to understand nonhuman species in and for themselves. Indeed, it is such work that allows literature to granulate and change the ways animal subjects, animal people, are written and read. Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) achieves a great deal of ground-breaking work towards this end, and his thinking is politically enriched with the feminist perspective in Carol Joy Adams’s The Politics of Meat (1990). Cultural theorists Cary Wolfe and Rosi Braidotti add distinct yet related modes of post-anthropocentric thinking to such discourses of animal advocacy. Gruen’s work, grounded in a lifetime of fighting animal exploitation, gathers her thinking under practically theorised terms, where empathy and sanctuary are couched in stories of the rodents and primates that have shaped her life. Together, these thinkers offer a strong argument that a shift towards a more socially just world requires fundamental changes in cross-species relations.

Philosophical developments in animal justice are increasingly informing literary analysis. I was introduced to literary animal studies through Grace Moore’s insightful reading of the triangulations between dogs and humans in the work of Charles Dickens, in a prescient collection of works, Victorian Animal Dreams (2007). This led to my first paper at an animal studies conference, where I met the indefatigable political scientist and animal advocate, Siobhan O’Sullivan. Not only did her pecan love cake offer the final sweet push that turned me vegan, a brilliant workshop she arranged, with Anat Pick, Robert McKay and Tom Tyler, committed me to this area of study.

Like resetting a body’s habits of reading and eating, resetting language for change is difficult and often contested. My investigation into dream writing activates key conceptualisations that indicate the directions of my research. I provisionally define these terms in their first use, and in the glossary following my final chapter. Words can hold humans in ontological stasis. Even the difficulties in using the term animal are clear, as indicated by the fissures Descartes identifies in his own thinking. Peter Harrison suggests Descartes’ position is not clear cut, detailing his readiness to include humans in the category animal, and making the point that while he only granted ‘thought and self-consciousness’ to humans, he had no doubt that other species could feel (1992, 220). Derrida complicates these destructive divisions between humans and other animals with the neologism ‘l’animot ’, a difficult but helpful term, well summarized by Mathew Calarco as an escape from the ‘metaphysically-laden concept’ of animal (2009, n.p.). I await a word that allows for the multiplicity of animal people. Such terms are needed to improv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Emplaced Readerly Devotions
• 2. Artful Dream Writing into the Roots
• 3. Ghosts: Of Writing, at Windows, in Mirrors, on Moors
• 4. Moor Loving
• 5. Respecting and Trusting the Beast
• 6. Animal Grace
• Back Matter