The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Michael Malay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319706658
• eBook ISBN: 9783319706665
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book argues that there are deep connections between 'poetic' thinking and the sensitive recognition of creaturely others. It explores this proposition in relation to four poets: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, and Les Murray. Through a series of close readings, and by paying close attention to issues of sound, rhythm, simile, metaphor, and image, it explores how poetry cultivates a special openness towards animal others.

The thinking behind this book is inspired by J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. In particular, it takes up that book's suggestion that poetry invites us to relate to animals in an open-ended and sympathetic manner. Poets, according to Elizabeth Costello, the book's protagonist, 'return the living, electric being to language', and, doing so, compel us to open our hearts towards animals and the claims they make upon us. There are special affinities, for her, between the music of poetry and the recognition of others.

But what might it mean to say that poets to return life to language? And why might this have any bearing on our relationship with animals? Beyond offering many suggestive starting points, Elizabeth Costello says very little about the nature of poetry's special relationship with the animal; one aim of this study, then, is to ask of what this relationship consists, not least by examining the various ways poets have bodied forth animals in language.

© The Author(s) 2018

Michael MalayThe Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary PoetryPalgrave Studies in Animals and Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70666-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Why Look at Animals?: Poetry and the Difficulty of Reality

Michael Malay¹

(1)

University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

End Abstract

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. (George Eliot) ¹

This sentence from Middlemarch enacts what it describes: it turns outwards. Beginning with ‘ordinary human life’, it moves towards a larger, ecological landscape, one which includes the grass’s growth and the squirrel’s beating heart. Doing so, it rides the circles of a widening sensibility, modulating from a human ‘we’ to an intimate form of ‘hearing’ others, and from ‘keen vision’ to insight. The sentence performs a double motion, going deeply into the self while turning towards others.

It should be noted, however, that the sentence is also predicated on a subjunctive clause: ‘If we had’. This mode of attention, it seems, is difficult to inhabit. Indeed, it seems impossible to sustain: ‘we should die of that roar’. This listening, this intense attunement, would destroy you. The sentence thus seems to be saying two things: imagine, but also acknowledge the impossibility of truly imagining.

Such tensions had preoccupied Eliot before. In The Lifted Veil (1859), for instance, one of her first works of fiction, she endows her narrator Lattimer with ‘incessant insight and foresight’, as well as extrasensory abilities that allow him to hear a ‘roar of sound where others find perfect stillness.’² But these abilities turn out to be debilitating: they overwhelm—constantly, and against his will—Lattimer’s sense of self. The narrator of Middlemarch is also alert to the dark side of sympathy, to the possibility of total (and therefore incapacitating) absorption in the lives of others. Her exhortation to imagine is therefore qualified by a caveat emptor. She praises the effort involved in imagining, but is aware that the sensitivity she describes might lead to a breakdown of perspective, an overpowering of the self. And yet her qualification is also qualified, I think, by an affirmative vision of the imagination. If unlimited sympathy is unsustainable and even impossible, one must also guard against being too guarded. Middlemarch is partly an exploration of this proposition.

True, even the most sensitive among us can be insensible to others: Eliot is realistic about this. ‘As it is’, her narrator observes in Middlemarch, ‘the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.’³ Nevertheless, the narrator enjoins us to imagine anyway—even if the effort is patchy and hard to sustain. One may not physically ‘hear’ the squirrel’s heartbeat, but one might imagine what that sound could ‘be like’, and that likeness might be sufficient. What is at stake, after all, is not the success or failure of sympathetic identification but the sensibility involved in the imaginative effort. There is a richness to the attempt which stands independent of its success.

What might it mean to stand before animals in the way described by Eliot? What would it ‘be like’? This book explores that question in relation to modern and contemporary poetry. It examines how poets represent animals in language, the ethical challenges this task involves, and the sense of wonder and awe (as well as fear and terror) that creatures have inspired in those poets. It also asks whether there is something peculiar about poetry’s relationship to the animal. Does ‘poetic’ thinking open up possibilities of relating to animals unavailable to other modes of thought? If so, why and how?

My interest in these questions has its origins in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1997). More specifically, I am interested in a claim made by the fictional protagonist of that book, Elizabeth Costello, that there are special affinities between animal life and the music of poetry. Poets, she says, ‘return the living, electric being to language’, and, in doing so, return us more vividly to life, sensitising us to the presence of the animals with whom we share the world (LA 65). This is a deeply suggestive proposition, one which raises deep questions about the relationship between language and perception—that is, between the limits of our language and what that language allows us to think and feel in relation to otherness. Costello’s claim is that poets inhabit those limits differently, revising or remaking what it is possible to think and feel. But how do poets ‘return’ life to language, and why might this have any bearing on our attitudes towards nonhuman life? What are the connections between language’s ‘electric being’ and the animal? Since Costello says little about these questions in The Lives of Animals, one aim of this book is to pick up where she left off. The chapters that follow offer a set of close readings of modern and contemporary poems, with the aim of examining, testing and ultimately building upon her insights in relation to poetry and animal life.

This book’s starting point, however, is much more basic than Costello’s. For her, it is the poets who return life to language, whereas, here, the relationship between the poetic and the creaturely is understood to extend well beyond poetry. The ‘poetic’, that is, is not a property of poetry, an exclusive feature of poems as such, but rather an attitude, sensibility or mode of attention. One can see animals ‘poetically’ without ever having read a poem. Jacques Derrida makes a similar point in ‘Che cos’e la poesia?’. The poetic, he writes, is a ‘voyage’ or a ‘rambling of a trek’, an experience that cannot be ‘reduced to poetry’. It is something we take to heart, a journey that ‘never leads back to discourse, or back home’.⁴ To see poetically is to enter an open-ended relationship with the world, to relinquish, insofar as possible, the temptation to accommodate things within pre-existing patterns of thought (what Derrida calls ‘discourse’). It is to be moved by reality, an experience which may involve surprise, delight and wonder, but also perhaps fear and self-estrangement. The poetic does not take us ‘back home’, as Derrida remarks, but alters the ground beneath our feet, changing our sense of what we thought we knew: it is a peculiar and powerful form of voyaging.

As the following chapters will suggest, ‘poetic’ experiences are not exclusive to poems; nevertheless, they seem to be curiously enabled by poetry. Through its use of metaphor and simile, for instance, or its manipulation of sound and rhythm, poetry appears to offer heightened forms of engagement with animal life. Exploring the dynamics of its relationship—examining why poetry can align us with the animal in some special, distinctive way—is the aim of this book. In this introduction, however, I want to begin with a much more general claim, the idea that poetic experiences of animals can exist in a variety of forms—books, letters, songs—and in different contexts, during a walk in a park, for example, or during an unexpected encounter with an animal in a forest. A little unusually, then, this study of animals in poetry begins not with poems but with prose—in particular, with Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, a letter written by Stanley Cavell, and J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. In different ways, these texts exemplify what it means to see animals with ‘keen vision and feeling’, not as ideas, symbols or allegories, but as living, breathing creatures. They therefore illuminate one of the main arguments of this book: the importance of taking our encounters with animals seriously, and in such a way that opens our selves to the unpredictability of the encounter.

The Moose

In The Maine Woods, a record of three separate journeys to Maine between 1846 and 1857, Thoreau reflects on an experience of disturbance before an animal—namely, a moose shot by his travelling companion, George Thatcher, and later discovered by Joe Aitteon, his Native American guide. ‘He had found the cow-moose lying dead, but quite warm, in the middle of the stream, which was so shallow that it rested on the bottom, with hardly a third of its body above water. It was about an hour after it was shot, and it was swollen with water.’⁵ Thoreau’s first response betrays the instincts of a naturalist. Lacking a measuring tape, he takes a rope from his canoe, and, tying knots in it at regular intervals, uses it to record the moose’s length and height. All these pains he takes, he writes, because he ‘did not wish to be obliged to say merely that the moose was very large’.⁶ Once the measurements are taken, however, and once his companion begins to ‘skin the moose’, the voice of Thoreau the naturalist is troubled by another, more complicated presence:

I looked on; and a tragical business it was,—to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe, which was made to hide it […] In the bed of this narrow, wild, and rocky stream, between two lofty walls of spruce and firs, a mere cleft in the forest which the stream had made, this work went on.⁷

The discovery of the moose is, to some extent, the culmination of Thoreau’s expedition. Earlier in The Maine Woods, he explains that he has come to the woods as ‘reporter or chaplain to the hunters’ in order to satisfy his desire to see ‘a moose near at hand’.⁸ But his reaction to the moose surprises him, prompting unexpected feelings.

The above passage is particularly interesting but also difficult to interpret. At one point, the narrative voice seems to lift from the scene, as though Thoreau and his companion were being watched from above, from a detached, even cosmic perspective. In the bed of a stream, in the cleft of a forest, ‘this work went on.’ The detachment of that phrase, ‘this work’, is especially marked after Thoreau’s close observations of the creature being skinned, a process that prompts horror at the moose’s ‘ghastly’ carcass, as well as admiration for its former dignity (the moose’s ‘seemly robe’). Vacillating, his voice is at once engaged and detached, private and quite apart: in any case, it bears the signs of being deeply troubled. The moose’s death is described as a ‘tragical business’, and, in a repetition of that theme, Thoreau later speaks of the ‘afternoon’s tragedy’.⁹ He has come to the woods to see a moose ‘near at hand’, but this encounter is much too close. The expedition has somehow gone awry.

Part of Thoreau’s anxiety is explicable. The moose has been shot neither for its hide nor flesh but ‘merely for the satisfaction of killing him’.¹⁰ In this regard, the moose’s death is without utility—a shocking waste of life. But what does it mean to see the moose’s death as a ‘tragedy’? There is something charged about Thoreau’s response that cannot be explained conventionally—that exceeds, I think, the ‘normal’ response many of his contemporaries would have had to the moose’s death.

During his expedition in the woods, Thoreau spends a great deal of time studying local plants. At the time of the moose’s discovery, for instance, he is ‘absorbed’ in the activity of looking at a flower, an ‘Aster macrophyllus’.¹¹ This moment is worth stressing, as it seems that part of his disturbance can be attributed to the shock of transition: the gentleness of botanising, characterised by close looking and noticing, is interrupted by a different form of relating to the natural world, one characterised by harmful imposition. The ‘tragedy’ of the afternoon, then, is partly this forfeiture of ‘innocence’; Thoreau seems to mourn, alongside the moose’s death, the loss of a quality of mind that botany had inspired in him only moments earlier, a loss which allows him to feel, in an apparently visceral and striking way, the violence involved in hunting. The ‘hunting of the moose’, he goes on to write, ‘merely for the satisfaction of killing him […] is too much like going out by night to some woodside pasture and shooting your neighbor’s horses.’ The moose ‘are God’s own horses, poor, timid creatures’.¹²

Despite the severity of these remarks, however, Thoreau’s view of hunting is not at all straightforward. While he admits he has ‘had enough of moose-hunting’ after the moose’s death, he also acknowledges, in the same paragraph, his attraction to the hunter’s life: ‘I think that I could spend a year in the woods, fishing and hunting, just enough to sustain myself, with satisfaction.’ He adds: ‘this would be next to living like a philosopher on the fruits of the earth which you had raised, which also attracts me’.¹³ There are aspects to the hunter’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Why Look at Animals?: Poetry and the Difficulty of Reality
• 2. The Homely and the Wild in Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop
• 3. Rhythmic Contact: Ted Hughes and Animal Life
• 4. Presence and the Mystery of Embodiment: Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World
• 5. Poetry’s Electric Being
• Back Matter