Animal Satire 3031248724, 9783031248726

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Animal Satire Edited by Robert McKay · Susan McHugh

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature Series Editors

Susan McHugh Department of English University of New England Auburn, ME, USA Robert McKay School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK John Miller School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-­ disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures? This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages. Series Board Karl Steel (Brooklyn College) Erica Fudge (Strathclyde) Kevin Hutchings (UNBC) Philip Armstrong (Canterbury) Carrie Rohman (Lafayette) Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

Robert McKay  •  Susan McHugh Editors

Animal Satire

Editors Robert McKay School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

Susan McHugh English, SAH, Marcil Hall University of New England Biddeford, ME, USA

ISSN 2634-6338     ISSN 2634-6346 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ISBN 978-3-031-24871-9    ISBN 978-3-031-24872-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit line: ZU_09/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to express our gratitude to each of our contributors, to everyone who responded to our original call for papers, to the anonymous reviewers, and to Allie Troyanos and the Palgrave Macmillan production team. We also specifically thank Eric Greene, Gayle McKay, John Miller, Mik Morrisey, Annie Potts, Harriet Ritvo, Andrew B. Ross, and Tom Tyler for sage advice and input along the way. Finally, we thank Oscar and Brunhilde dogs as well as Jinx and Django cats for their delight. I was a scholar: seven useful springs Did I deflower in quotations Of cross’d opinions ’bout the soul of man; The more I learnt, the more I learnt to doubt. Delight, my spaniel slept, whilst I baus’d leaves, Toss’d o’er the dunces, pored on the old print Of titled words: and still my spaniel slept. Whilst I wasted lamp-oil, baited my flesh, Shrunk up my veins: and still my spaniel slept. And still I held converse with Zabarell, Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saw Of antick Donate: still my spaniel slept. Still on went I; first, an sit anima; Then, an it were mortal. Oh, hold, hold! at that They’re at brain buffets, fell by the ears amain Pell-mell together; still my spaniel slept. Then, whether ’t were corporeal, local, fixt, v

vi 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ex traduce, but whether ’t had free will Or no, hot philosophers Stood banding factions, all so strongly propt, I stagger’d, knew not which was firmer part, But thought, quoted, read, observ’d, and pryed, Stuffed noting-books: and still my spaniel slept. At length he wak’d, and yawn’d; and by yon sky, For aught I know he knew as much as I. John Marston, The Scholar and his Dog (1601)

Contents

A Satire by Way of a Preface   1 1 The  Hall of the Sovereigns  3 David Brooks Introduction   5 2 Animal  Satire: An Introduction  7 Susan McHugh and Robert McKay Part I Drama and Poetry: Animal Satire in Classics, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies  33 3 Dogs  in Court and Sheep in the Assembly: Animal Satire in Aristophanes 35 Babette Pütz 4 The  “Battle of the Frogs and Mice” (Batrachomyomachia) and Satire in the Ancient Greco-Roman Tradition 55 Matthew Hosty

vii

viii 

Contents

5 Making  an Ass of Yourself? The Pointed Comedy of the Mirror for Fools 73 Diane Heath 6 What  Can Beast Fables Do in Literary Animal Studies? Ben Jonson’s Volpone and the Prehumanist Human101 Erica Fudge 7 “That  was a rare experiment of transfusing the blood of a sheep into a mad-man”: Animal Experiments and Satirical Knowledge in Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso117 Vera Thomann Satirical Interruption 129 8 A Slaves’ Revolt131 David Brooks Part II Satirical Editorials and Fiction: Early Through High Modernist Studies 135 9 “A  green Parrot for a good Speaker”: Writing with a Birds-Eye View in Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot137 Adam James Smith and Ben Garlick 10 The  Lacking Satirical Animals of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man155 David Sigler 11 Learning  About Race and Religion with Bob and Felissa: Satire in Nineteenth-Century Children’s It-Narratives175 Christopher Douglas

 Contents 

ix

12 Nineteenth-Century American Anti-­extinction Humour: “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” as Environmentalist Animal Satire189 Jennifer Schell 13 Vivisections,  Vaccinations, Revelations: Ecofeminist Satire and Biopolitical Dystopia in Frances Power Cobbe’s The Age of Science209 Paul Fagan 14 “Wolf  within the Fold”: Satire and Animality in The Brutalitarian and The Beagler Boy227 Mo O’Neill 15 Animals  and Animality in Saki’s Satirical Short Stories243 Julia Ditter 16 Satire  and Significant Otherness in Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography263 Saskia McCracken Satirical Interruption 285 17 How  to Slaughter a Human287 David Brooks Part III Animal Satire in Contemporary Literature, Film and Media Studies 289 18 “Thanks  a lot, big brain”: Satirical Misanthropy in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos291 Peter Sands

x 

Contents

19 “Dogs  are supposed to be able to instinctively live with purpose”: Brian, Family Guy, and the Inevitable Anthropocentrism of Satire313 Brett Mills 20 The  Paradox of the Charismatic Pig in The Simpsons Movie and Okja333 Cynthia Chris 21 [Sic] Beasts349 Alex Lockwood 22 The  Satirical Rhetorics of [Re]Tweeting Birds373 Melissa T. Yang A Satire by Way of Conclusion 397 23 The  Need for Giant Ape Protection: A Petition to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee399 Human McStew A Grab-bag of Animal Satires 403 24 A  Grab-bag of Animal Satires405 Robert McKay and Susan McHugh Notes on Contributors413 Index417

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Fig. 9.1

Figs. 12.1 and 12.2 Fig. 13.1

József Tichy-Rács, a chicken parliamentary candidate for the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party in 2018 “Good-bye Testicles”, a pastiche of the cover of Good-bye Tonsils by Anne Welsh Guy and illustrated by Frank Vaughn, Little Golden Book no. 404 (1974) Brunellus holds up his mirror to Galen the Doctor and a Jester in a woodcut from a frontispiece in an early printed book Burnellus dreaming of becoming a bishop. This manuscript was probably written and illustrated around the 1420s by John Streeche, a canon of the Augustinian Priory of Kenilworth “The ladie’s disaster; behold love’s emblem in the thoughtless dame,/ who burns alas! unconscious of the flame;/ while from the lofty tête ‘tis plainly seen/ they’ve much without, who little have within”. A woman seated at a table, and underneath a parrot in a cage suspended from the ceiling, unaware that her wig has been set alight by a mischievous monkey; another woman screams in horror as she enters through a door, in the right foreground a cat shields her kittens from a barking dog. Etching. c.1780. Wellcome Library no. 31650i

11 14 80

88

138

“A Polar Whale”, The Friend190 Frances Power Cobbe’s canine companion Hajjin, photographed by Frank Haes, 1867 218

xi

xii 

List of Figures

Fig. 20.1 Fig. 20.2 Fig. 20.3 Fig. 20.4 Fig. 20.5 Fig. 20.6

Krusty the Klown threatens the pig that appears alongside him in a television commercial Homer Simpson helps the pig dance on the ceiling Hee Bong (Byun Hee-Bong) and the infant super-pig Okja Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun) and grown-up Okja Mirando Corporation’s slaughterhouse Pigs in a slaughter truck. (Photo taken during a vigil for slaughtered pigs outside a slaughterhouse, UK, November 2019)

336 337 341 342 343 346

A Satire by Way of a Preface

CHAPTER 1

The Hall of the Sovereigns David Brooks

I have no idea what the argument was about, or what victory they thought they’d achieved, but there he was, the Sovereign of the Humans, shouting to an angry hall full of the Sovereigns of all the other animals But we won! We won! The Sovereign of the Beetles, when the Sovereign of the Humans had been calmed, then gave a speech, in deep and sonorous tones— stentorian, for so tiny a frame—and you could have heard a pin drop, or the Sovereign of the Flies, rubbing her wings. The Sovereign of the Humans, the Sovereign of the Beetles said, seemed to misunderstand. There could be no winning; every creature was Sovereign to itself. They themselves, the Sovereigns of this animal or that, were there only to represent all of the other sovereign creatures of their kind. The bee was Sovereign of his own wings, for example, and the movement of his legs; he was Sovereign of his breathing and the thoughts he had; he was Sovereign of his memory and the maps within it; he was Sovereign of his dreams. And so was his sister bee. And if the Sovereign of the Humans had devised some conception that humans had won something, and were therefore Sovereigns of All, then they had placed

D. Brooks (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_1

3

4 

D. BROOKS

themselves in a position that no other Sovereign could support. But we won! We won! the Sovereign of the Humans kept interjecting. And it was then, when the deep voice of the beetle had finished, and the loud shouting of the human had begun again, as if he had heard nothing, that, sadly, reluctantly, one by one, in single file, as if something at last had been decided, the Sovereigns of all the other animals—the birds, the insects too—began to leave. It took hours, as you can imagine, and was done in almost total silence, as if the voices and the languages of the animals had also been withdrawn, the only sound now the continuing, unvarying cries of the Sovereign of the Humans, but eventually the Great Hall of the Sovereigns was empty, like an historical relic, a thing from an ancient time, and the shadows filled it as the night came on, and the moonlight and the stars shone weakly through its windows, and the wind toyed with its shutters, as if all life and all reality were now outside. And somehow the doors had locked, and the Sovereign of the Humans could not leave. That is one of the stories, anyway. Another is that the Sovereign of the Humans left at last, and made his report—leaving the Great Hall of the Sovereigns devoid of any occupant at all—and the humans declared an eternal war, so that, for ever after, always at odds with themselves, in their own disgrace, unable to live truly in their being-space, they’ve killed or enslaved whatever creature they could, in revenge for their great humiliation.

Introduction

CHAPTER 2

Animal Satire: An Introduction Susan McHugh and Robert McKay

During a frenetic week in early July 2022, after many months of self-­ inflicted political difficulty and amidst astonishing scenes in which more than 50 ministers resigned from his government, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Boris Johnson, vowed to carry on. Indeed, on the Wednesday, he blithely described the week he was having as “terrific”.1 Wounded beyond all hope, and yet full of blustering self-confidence to the end, he even went so far as to hint at calling a general election (which by most reckonings would have ended in defeat) in an attempt to stem the leaking lifeblood of parliamentary support. It was as if he was channelling

1  See BBC News, Boris Johnson. For an explanatory account of these events see Castle and Robins, How Boris Johnson fell. The greased piglet epithet, with which Castle and Robins open, is said to have been coined by David Cameron, who has had his own run-ins with a piglet, see McCorry, #PigGate.

S. McHugh University of New England, Biddeford, ME, USA R. McKay (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_2

7

8 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).2 As it turned out, however, Johnson most certainly was not invincible, and by Thursday morning he was finally obliged to accept that he must leave office. A politician often characterised as “the greased piglet”—satirically, but nonetheless with astonished and sometimes begrudged admiration for his capacity to elude seemingly the most perilous political trouble—was finally for the chop.3 It transpired that as he made his announcement from the steps of Ten Downing Street, Johnson, whose career was built in part on political buffoonery, ventured a bit of animal satire of his own. Conventionally, Prime Ministerial resignation speeches are muted, gracious, and accepting of the author’s return to political obscurity, but Johnson cavilled and railed. Recapitulating, by way of self-approval, his unsuccessful attempts to persuade colleagues that it would be “eccentric” to dispose of him, and voicing his pain at not being able to finish the programme he started, he arrived at the speech’s key moment: But as we’ve seen at Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves. And my friends in politics, no-one is remotely indispensable and our brilliant and Darwinian system will produce another leader.4

At the crux of his resignation is thus a doubled trope that offers us a glimpse into both Johnson’s particular political character and the surprising lability of animal satire. One reason that animal representations and the discourse of species, which are both playing out in Johnson’s gross pastiche of Darwinism, are so prevalent in satire is that animals and their ways of life are so conventionally and comprehensibly reduced to stereotype and because such stereotypes can in turn be manipulated to epitomise any aspect of folly that the satirist wants to mock. Animals—Johnson’s satiric logic goes—are herdlike, and herds must move in one formation; the herd is both awesome and despicable in its thoughtlessness, its lack of individuality, and in the inevitability of its instinctual force. Johnson’s satirical point is that ordinary parliamentarians—which is to say, in this case, his party colleagues and those who, until they moved against him, 2  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Knight_(Monty_Python). No pythonidae were harmed in the making of this film. 3  See McCabe, AI promised you; Riddell, “Boris Johson, Greased Piglet”. 4  Associated Press, Text.

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

9

were his closest appointed ministers—are just such simple beasts. Johnson the leader, by contrast, is an altogether more singular and sovereign force of nature. It may so happen that he is brought low now, but this is mere evidence of the brilliant fitness of the destroy-the-weak “system” that recognised his elite nature in the first place. And yet, of course, satire is a mode associated with political subversiveness, with the point of attack, and with humour, so it is quite unexpected to find it emerging from the mouth of the most powerful office in the land, at a moment of defeat, and ultimately in a tone of grudging resignation. This confusion of mode, occasion, and tone is likely why Johnson’s much-touted wit fails to hit home, which is to say that while this is animal satire, it is duff animal satire: less waspish sting; more damp squib. So perhaps the more pertinent way to align animal satire with Johnson is to reject his implicit claim to have been the fittest “Darwinian” leader and instead remember him as the scampering greased piglet who was eventually caught. For pigs (so that animal satirical logic goes) should and will be caught, killed and made into food—unless the context is fundamentally carnivalesque, in which case the fun comes from enjoying the animal’s ability to make fools of the food-makers. But the carnival cannot be fun if it goes on too long. “He may end up as someone’s pork sausage, but not for a while”, the British politician Vince Cable said of Johnson a month before his fall, sharpening the satirical knife.5 And, so indeed he did. In an era in which straight news media has fallen out of public favour,6 it perhaps goes without saying that Johnson is not the only populist political leader to become the subject of animal satire. For instance, in 2018 a species of caecilian (a sightless burrowing wormlike amphibian) was named Dermophis donaldtrumpi by the company EnviroBuild, after purchasing the power to bestow this unfortunate name at a well-intentioned fund-­raising auction for the nonprofit The Rainforest Trust. Dermophis donaldtrumpi “is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesake’s climate policies”, said EnviroBuild’s owner Aidan Bell, finding  Cable, The Greased Piglet.  McClennan and Maisel note an “extremely significant” twenty-first-century turn in the US history of journalistic satire: “Today, satire is often the only source of news that the public consumes. And it is often a more trusted source of the news than the mainstream news outlets” in Is satire saving, 7. 5 6

10 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

rather a dull way to exec-splain the snap out of what was a good satirical bite.7 In Brazil, opponents of President Jair Bolsonaro took great delight in circulating images of him being pecked by a captive rhea on the grounds of the presidential palace (not a euphemism), with one critical journalist believing that “even the animals recognise when someone is pernicious”.8 We do need their moral acuity sometimes. Elsewhere, the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party, which emerged from a network of Dadaist urban satirists during the 2000s, resists the government of Viktor Orbán in part by putting up animal candidates such as a chicken, who clucks in response to questions, and the Gorilla Gardener, who promises not to promise anything (except the launch of spaceships carrying oxytocin to promote world peace).9 What such examples suggest vibrantly enough is that in the more than 2500 years that have passed since the satirical comedy of Aristophanes (which marks the earliest example of animal satire discussed in this volume), the usefulness and appeal of animal representation for mocking the politically powerful have waned not a whit (Fig. 2.1). Animals and animality, then, have always been closely allied with satire. That said, while many commentators remark on moments of animal representation and incorporate analysis of specific instances into their accounts of satiric meaning, of the scholars to have explored the subject extensively, Gilbert Highet, in his individual and somewhat miscellaneous account The Anatomy of Satire (1961), is the only one we have found who tackles the topic directly or in any depth. Highet is loosely protective of the boundaries of satire and reserves the designation for only a few of the many thousands of animal tales, but offers a whistle stop discursive tour of several of them, including Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (c. 180 A.D.), the twelfth-­ century story cycle Reynard the Fox, Nigel’s The Mirror of Fools (1180 A.D.), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Anatole France’s Penguin Island (1908), John Collier’s His Monkey Wife (1930), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959). 7  See BBC News, Amphibian. We must now hope for an ecofeminist counter-manoeuvre along the lines of Ursula Le Guin’s satirical unworking of the Biblical Adam’s task in her story, She unnames them (1985). 8  See Phillips, The rhea-sistance. 9  On Donald Trump see BBC News, Amphibian and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Dermophis_donaldtrumpi; on the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party, see Nelson, Hungary’s satirical; and Case and Palatella, Is humour. On Bolsinaro, see The rhea-sistance, by Dom Phillips, an investigative environmental journalist who was killed in 2022 while researching the Amazon.

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

11

Fig. 2.1  József Tichy-Rács, a chicken parliamentary candidate for the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party in 2018.

It is a canon that indicates literary animal satire’s chronological persistence, as well as what Charles Knight rightly if delicately acknowledges as satire’s “gender exclusivity” in terms of authorship.10 But Highet has little specific to say about why animals might be so prevalent: for him, the only organising value of animals’ appearances in satirical texts is to show “a ludicrous or debased picture of this world”.11 Instead, Highet’s commentary reflects how post-Darwinian anxieties about what it means to be human come to crisis in the twentieth century. While acknowledging that animals populate satirical traditions in different ways, Highet locates Gulliver’s Travels in a peculiar subset of “satires which, like Reynard, pretended to be about animals while they are really about people” (183). Explaining away Swift’s Yahoos as stand-ins for Paleolithic peoples, and the Houyhnhnms as “certainly not horses”, his logic rehearses the sociobiological theories coming into vogue as he was writing, in lieu of imagining the complexities of literary animal representations: One of the sad things about the development of humanity is the fact which Dean Swift was trying to avoid, [namely] that the ape, although it looks hideously like us, is the most intelligent of the lower mammals. […] We  See Knight, Literature of Satire, 6.  Highet, Anatomy, 177.

10 11

12 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

may—as Dean Swift caricatured us and as scientists have assured us—be nearly apes; but we are intelligent, and it is a grievous satiric distortion to show us as inferior to other animals in that one talent.12

Between the lines, there lurks a literary history of how nonhuman primates became flash points for racism and xenophobia with the rise of the global slave trade and its intricate ties to unfettered colonialist trafficking in exotic species. From this perspective, attempts to incorporate plausibly realistic simian figures are invariably undercut by satiric parallels with the drollery of “debased” human animality. Cringe-inducing by today’s standards, Collier’s novel joins Wyndham Lewis’s send-up of the Bloomsbury art scene Apes of God (1930), Aldous Huxley’s anti-nuclear dystopia Ape and Essence (1948) and other modernist ape-themed satires in having fallen into obscurity not just because they are politically incorrect in human terms, but more importantly because they are epistemologically incoherent. Written explicitly in defence of his novel, Lewis’s pamphlet Satire & Fiction (1930) espouses an extremist view of the “greatest” satire as antisocial, amoral, and above all as undercutting any chance to claim “moral dignity” for human society: “Satire is cold, and that is good!”, something that Lewis conflates with “the non-­ human outlook” essential to the “objective, non-emotional truth of the scientific intelligence” (48). Nearly a century later, particularly in chapters like “The Lesbian-Ape”, the “truth” of Lewis’s satirical judgements reads like an obvious power play, laying claim to what feminist historian of science Donna Haraway situates as the “god-trick” of pretending to transcend the partial perspectives of lived experience. Along the way, being human among other animals gains renewed value for satiric positioning. Certainly, even if the etymological link to the animal hybrid satyr has long been debunked, the connection of the satirical impetus to the dog-­ like ancient Cynics, and with it the metaphorical notion of satiric “bite”, suggests that conceptions of animality have long captured something important about satire’s ability to adopt a rebarbative position with respect to norms of civility.13 But a more complex sense of the connection emerges  Ibid, 183.  Knight explains the error of this false etymology of satire before ingeniously reclaiming it because the connection to the satyr “defines satire’s power to articulate elements in our personal, public, and physical lives that cannot be expressed by conventional genres; it presents satire as a release from repression”. The established derivation of the word is from a term meaning “full”. See Knight, Literature of Satire, 20. 12 13

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

13

with attention to what we might call “satirical humanism”. We need not go so far as contemporary evolutionary anthropological accounts, such as Christopher Boehm’s, which suggests that ridicule, amongst other forms of “antiauthoritarian sanctioning”, exemplifies a distinctively human capacity to exceed dominance-submission behaviours in egalitarian ways.14 We can, nevertheless, find satirical ideals, at least as they have often been understood, to be deeply invested in the figure of the human. This investment lives in the strand of satirical practice with a corrective purpose that aims, even if in an implicit, crabwise, or self-ironising way, to educate with a harsh lesson. Satire disabuses humanity of its self-importance by laying bare (in the manner of the emperor’s new clothes) particular instances of human folly; it does this with a view to promoting self-reflection and change, if not in the object of satire, then at least in its consumers. But the ironic truth is that the best satire remains excoriatingly aware of any authority’s potential subjection to ridicule, of the very pompousness of the corrective purpose itself, and loads this awareness onto its audience too. A striking example for anyone who grew up with Little Golden Books is the Internet meme that pastiches the cover of Good-bye Tonsils to replace its human child with a canine patient similarly propped up in a hospital bed and substitute the word “tonsils” with “testicles” in the title. Does this evoke nervous laughter because dogs can never be completely interpellated by the ideologies of modern medicine or because humans cannot help but see themselves as medical subjects? (Fig. 2.2).15 Sustaining ambiguities may be one of satire’s greatest strengths. Knight, arguing for an expansive rubric, which he calls “the satiric cast of mind”, counters the oft-asserted claim that there is an intrinsically moral function to satire by appealing to its self-reflexivity. He puts it this way: The skeptical but observant satirist recognizes that some people are evil, but all are foolish not only because they do foolish things but because they are unaware of their folly. They are errant in action but blind in perception. 14  Boehm, Hierarchy, 112-15; this is taken up in Graeber and Wingrow, Dawn of Everything, 86 and passim. Thanks to Monica and Richard Tyler for alerting us to this material. 15  It adds an ironic meta-satirical layer here to discover the inexplicably credulous circulation of this meme, as if it were a genuine historical example, in otherwise self-consciously knowing articles that collect the outré book-covers of the past for humorous effect because they offer a form of “gee, what were they like?” kitsch; see, for instance, Tom Nixon, Literally bonkers.

14 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

Fig. 2.2  “Good-bye Testicles”, a pastiche of the cover of Good-bye Tonsils by Anne Welsh Guy and illustrated by Frank Vaughn, Little Golden Book no. 404 (1974).

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

15

Hence they are incurable unless perception is changed. [But this] is not effected by admonition—by the translation of behavior into abstract moral language—but by a form of representation so skewed as to allow recognition to take place and to force a new judgement on it, so that viewers recognize that they are what is represented and that what is foolish is them. We become both the subject and object of satire.

Such an account articulates satire’s particular ability to render and confront humanity’s inescapable entanglement with folly, a deep susceptibility to stupidity that is thought to be more truly human than any particular political or moral error. This is satirical humanism’s key vision. There are three principal lenses through which animals focus the searching reach of that vision, and we can briefly characterise these as human animality, zoontological difference and species-political satire. These three satirical logics interpenetrate in subtle but significant ways, and indeed, a default principle for the design of this volume—with chapters ordered more or less chronologically to track the animal satirical impulse from ancient Greece to the contemporary globalised US and beyond to a speculative postapocalyptic future—is that it is folly to try and rigorously distinguish them. Let us begin then with the importance for satirical ideas of the paradoxical notion of human animality—the aspects of human being that are thought to be solely biological or to pertain to the physical and sensing aspects of the body. This sphere is delineated by what Giorgio Agamben calls the “intimate caesura” by which “something like animal life has been separated within man [whose] distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognised first of all in the closest and most intimate place”.16 Despite Agamben’s generalising terms here, which imply that he is talking about a single ontological operation, it is indeed the case that, across different historical and geographic contexts, other writers identify manifold ways of conceiving human animality and of connecting it to, or distinguishing it from, humanities that are not also animal and animalities that are not also human. Prominent among these are non-Eurowhite satirists known for their critical animal representations, including Japanese modernist Sōseki Natsume, for the serialised fiction I Am a Cat

 Agamben, The Open, 15–16.

16

16 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

(1905–06),17 Native American writer Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) for the novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1986)18 and African-­ American dramatist Lynn Nottage for the plays The Grey Rooster (2014) and Mlima’s Tale (2018).19 Yet relations of human–animal similarity and difference are often reworked by satirists in particular satirical scenarios as a significant method for adjudicating human nature and behaviour. These can thus be comically compared and weighed up against animals’ nature (or characterisations of it) or against a seemingly more basic conception of the human—its “animal” side, untrammelled by self-regard, fashion, mores, too much knowledge or whatever. In the English satiric tradition, 17  Among many satirical innovations, Sōseki’s feline narrator explicitly and meta-textually rejects comparisons of himself with the far more anthropomorphized narrator of E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Life of Tomcat Murr (1819–21), and according to biographer John Nathan “attempts, and achieves, a portrait of a character who is at once a parody of a complacently sophisticated […] hypocrite and a self-lacerating portrait of the author” in Sōseki, 97. Sōseki is credited as a key influence by contemporary novelist Murakami Haruki and long before by the short-story genius Akutagawa Ryunosuke, whose popular satire Kappa (1927) enlists the same Japanese mythological creatures that haunt Murakami’s first (and favourite) novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985). Resisting conventional reduction of Kappa to autobiographical reflections on mental illness, Akira Lippit persuades that Kappa exemplifies the expression of a distinctly modern literary animal, one that significantly “leads to the threshold of literary language and its possible extinction” in Electric Animal, 161. 18  See Daniel Payne’s discussion of the importance of animal characters in the story to Vizenor’s cross-cultural explorations of human–animal shapeshifting-trickster traditions in Griever. In the context of decolonial studies, the perspective of Standing Rock Sioux writer Vine Deloria Jr. elaborates why creative approaches like Vizenor’s prove more effective than straight analysis: “satire provides much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of [conventional anthropological] research” because it can contain selfas well as counter-knowledge, in Custer Died, 126. Many examples of contemporary Indigenous animal satire such as Maori filmmaker Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), Cherokee novelist Thomas King’s Coyote Tales (2017), and Standing Rock Sioux poet and essayist Tiffany Midge’s Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (2019) extend and enrich Deloria’s point. 19  Derek Maus lists Nottage among contemporary African-American “post-soul satirists”, who, following the uneven achievements of the American Civil Rights movement, widen the rhetorical and formal scope of satire to call out forces of oppression and, along with them, the self-defeating tendencies that are a part of what defers the dream of equality in “Mommy”, xvii. Maus places Nottage alongside such disparate figures as novelist Colson Whitehead, cartoonist Aaron McGruder, and comedian Dave Chappelle, only we would add that Nottage’s work stands apart from the rest for often taking animals as—and alongside—seriously risky subjects, whether the former slave and his slaveholder’s fighting cock in The Grey Rooster, or the titular elephant ivory-trade victim’s ghost in Mlima’s Tale.

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

17

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind” (c. 1674), is perhaps the locus classicus of this broad approach. Rochester stages his account of the many vain and venal failures of man against his own fantasy of being a spirit able to select its animal form (he would prefer dog, monkey or bear). Man, by contrast, is:       that vain Animal. Who boasts so much of being Rational. The Senses are too gross, and hee’ll contrive A sixth to contradict the other five: And before certain Instinct will preferre Reason, which fifty times for one doth erre. (ll. 6–11)20

The point, here, is that it is a folly peculiar to the human to forget or reject its animal nature in favour of reason, whereas, understood properly as by Rochester, “Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast” (l. 225). As our volume suggests, in fact, Rochester is here recasting similar ideals that circulate widely in earlier periods and distant places to animal-­ satirise a prestige accorded to rationality that is so characteristic of early modern humanism. But the epistemic reach and continued development, in Western traditions at least, of ideas about humanity’s ambivalent place with respect to a differential relation of instinct and reason, or nature and culture, have ensured that the ironical animalising of the human is a persistent presence in satirical imaginaries. In a smart (or smarting) example, Jonathan Swift’s “On Poetry, A Rhapsody” (1733) brings the grandest of philosophical themes in this arena down to earth to animalise poetic tradition. This, handily enough, brings us to the second logic underpinning animals’ prevalence in satiric traditions. Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature. The greater for the smaller watch, But meddle seldom with their match. A whale of moderate size will draw A shoal of herrings down his maw; A fox with geese his belly crams; 20  In Fisher and Walker (eds.), John Wilmot. For further discussion see Rosenfeld, “That vain Animal”.

18 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

A wolf destroys a thousand lambs; But search among the rhyming race, The brave are worried by the base. If on Parnassus’ top you sit, You rarely bite, are always bit: Each poet of inferior size On you shall rail and criticise, And strive to tear you limb from limb; While others do as much for him. The vermin only teaze and pinch Their foes superior by an inch. So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite ’em, And so proceed ad infinitum. Thus every poet, in his kind, Is bit by him that comes behind. (ll. 323–46)

Swift moves from his caricature of Hobbes, which gently undermines the authority of general and monolithic claims about the animal state of nature by aping them in the repetitive grammatical parallelism that connects striking individual images of whale, herrings, fox, geese, wolf and lamb. From there he makes debasing fun of the human animality that connects poetics and predation by combining them in the trope of the miniscule but so annoying biting flea. By narrowing from the power dynamics of animal consumption more broadly to siphonapteran biting, though, Swift is turning to what we call the satire of zoontological difference. Whereas the satire of human animality takes the concept of animality, and the ways in which humans partake of it, more generally as its focus, here we are more interested in the “specifics” of species difference, those more detailed aspects of animals’ identity and behaviour which can be turned to satirical significance. We could see this style of satire as a product of animal biodiversity as such—the many kinds of animal life, different at the level of supposed typical species behaviours, can thus be normatively understood to be different in their own ways from humans’ propensities and predilections. Moreover, we should not draw any hard and fast line between the satirical value of what we might call, in this case, animals’ natural existence, and whatever fabular natures they are given in this or that tradition of human representation (e.g. parrots and apes as mimetic; donkeys as stolid and stupid; pigs as gross and greedy; dogs as slavishly devoted). In

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

19

the pages that follow, then, you will certainly encounter satirical biodiversity through each of these charismatic megafauna of animal satire—dogs and donkeys; asses and apes; pigs and parrots—but you will also meet frogs, flies and foxes; beagles, birds and badgers; wolves, wasps and whales; sparrows and sheep; cats and cows; hyenas and hares; dung beetles and deer and many more benighted critters and cryptids who have the fatal flaw of failing to alliterate. Alongside these different kinds of animal life, though, different animal forms of life—the configurations of capacities and experiences that are amenable to animal existence in specific contexts—offer yet more ways to satirically frame human actions. The co-constitutive history of human–animal relations that situates animals’ and humans’ collective lives with and against dominion and control means that the possible ways in which animals might experience life, and so the ways in which that experience might offer satirical perspective on human behaviour, expand exponentially. We have already seen herding behaviours and sexual selection being invoked by Johnson, but husbandry, vivisection, captivity, use for work or play, petkeeping, leisure, bestiality, social media sensationalism and more are all practices deployed as satiric resources which are explored in this volume. The so-called animal should therefore not be understood in a simple binary relation to the so-called human, such that animal satire would be that form of cultural text in which the representation of what is lacking in animality is resignified so as to besmirch the reputation of the human. Rather, the sheer multiplicity of satirical forms into which animal life has entered—a multiplicity we have endeavoured to capture in this volume— reveals something more complex. It is rather the case that animal otherness shapeshifts into multiple forms, its satirical value regenerating anew, in a kind of ontological animal magnetism with human presence, every time that humans develop a new way of being ridiculous. And we need not hold our breath in expectation that this process will stop. The renowned satirical troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus offers a fine example of this zoontological aspect of satire in their sketch “The Mouse Problem” (1969). The piece takes the form of a television news segment, The World Around Us, which reports on an erotic subculture in which men dress up to become mice and attend secretive gatherings. The item is a fully formed pastiche, complete with a VT of dropping newspaper headlines, astonishingly pompous news anchor, ridiculously exaggerated musophobic vox-pop comments from the public, a report on examples of “famous men throughout history now known to have been mice”, a

20 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

confessional insider interview and undercover footage (“by a BBC cameraman posing as a vole”) which details the parties (“well, first of all you get shown to your own private hole in the skirting board…then, perhaps take a run in the wheel…you might go and see one of the blue cheese films”). There is even a guest medical consultant, a caricature of the antipsychiatrist R.D. Laing (“I mean, how many among us can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn’t felt sexually attracted to mice”). Surreally, he happens also to be a conjurer called The Amazing Kargol (played by Graham Chapman) who can name, blindfold, any of his more than 700 case-histories chosen at random from the hand of a glamorous assistant named (not Pierre) Janet. The sketch, patently enough, satirises the homophobic and broader moral panic at work in anxiety-ridden news reporting of gay identities and pro-sex subcultures that was prevalent in the 1960s UK. Part of the animal satire—which, of course, also offers an object lesson in how assumptions about psychosexual identities will always misfire21—is predicated on the supposed ridiculousness, if not impossibility, of mouse fetishism. Refracted like this, coercive heteronormative prurience about queer human identities seems equally bizarre. What is especially striking about this satirical animal trope, however, is that its true vehicle is not mouse-­fancy per se, but the many stereotypes and other histrionic imaginings about mice which form the deliriously fantastical basis of the fetishistic play, all drawn from petkeeping, fable and other unremarkable contexts. The sketch thus allows us to see the stupidity of homophobic delusions about gay and sexpositive life in the guise of equivalently unedifying clichés about animal life. The point is piquantly made by the darkly humorous parody of the language of the “social problem” in the sketch’s punning title: suddenly the deadly serious exclusionary ideals of the homophobe and more generally sex-negative positionings seem as petty as bourgeois worries about domestic rodents. The Pythons’ profoundest target is therefore not the inherent ridiculousness of misplaced or excessive (animal) love, but the significantly deeper folly at work in the mediatisation and medicalisation of (homo)sexuality by both censorious, patronising news-­ mongerer and enlightened psychoanalytic defender alike. 21  A full transcript can, for example, be found on Wikifur, “the free encyclopedia written by and for furries”, which reports that “It is ‘re-discovered every few years’ by those new to [furry] fandom”. See “The Mouse Problem”, Wikifur, 7 April 2022, https://en.wikifur. com/wiki/The_Mouse_Problem.

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

21

As well as working against any suggestion that animal satire must take a single form or operate in a consistent way, this example, much like our opening one from Johnson’s speech, suggests that animal satire as we think of it in this volume will be found in some unexpected places. As did Knight’s “satiric cast of mind”, Jonathan Greenberg provides a helpful template for the non-dogmatic attitude to the delineation of satire that we adopt here, when he argues that satire is more usefully understood as a practice than as a genre (with more or less clearly defined formal properties) or a mode (that is characterised by a particular tone)—while acknowledging that these latter remain important ways of categorising it.22 This ecumenical idea of satire as practice posits instead that satire is “an action or behaviour that takes place in a specific historical context” and makes a specific intervention in a public arena of discourse, an activity that brings people together (and pushes them away) to thereby reproduce its own “public” mainstream or dissenting “counterpublic”. “By distinguishing good from bad, satire distinguishes us […] according to our tastes, judgements and behaviours”.23 But here we must add something crucial about animal satire. For, if the many different aspects of animal life that we have already talked through do indeed play a significant role in the configuration of a (presumptively human) writing and reading “us” and “them”, then by that very token they will also trouble the larger and paradoxically impossible process of constructing that “we” in human exceptionalist terms. Indeed, animal satire stands in ambivalent relation to the account of satirical practice that Greenberg offers partly in its double position with respect to the long history of anthropocentric human exceptionalism. For the very persistence and reach of that concept means that ways of satirising it, even if they do speak to specific instantiations, can echo beyond such local “historical contexts”. Looked at from the other direction, though, as Blanford Parker has pointed out, the broad epistemic changes through which “the space between human and animal nature began to collapse” result in a “broad reconsideration of the relation of animal and human nature (especially since the seventeenth century)”.24 Such changes, which extend far beyond specific satirical practices of course, no doubt continually developing in the era of xenotransplantation and zoonotic pandemic and beyond,  See Greenberg, Cambridge Introduction, 3-26.  Ibid, 11. 24  Parker, Mock poetic, 497. 22 23

22 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

c­ ertainly have their own significant impacts on what it can mean to use animal representations, or represent human–animal difference, in satire. In any case, one of satire’s most significant features is its ability to run hard against the usual anthropocentric configuration of the public sphere; the “public” that satire imagines is most assuredly multispecies in constituency. It is in the world of satire that the clucks of a Hungarian chicken can take on radical political meaning, and it is also in the world of satire that cats can at once be publicly shamed and generate millions in viewers and money for their feline grumpiness (and their owners). We should not expect, that is to say, that the animals in satire, any more than the humans, will be portrayed with respect. Our gambit, however, in compiling this volume, is that a significant amount of the savagery available to the satirical bite, despite the risk of infection it carries, comes from its playful refusal to be too discriminating about the species of ass it finds with its teeth.25 Satirical animals, that is to say, are genuine participants in a more-than-­ human economy of sense and nonsense. Of course, one of the most consistent ways that humans (or, better, human elites) have proven themselves worthy of ridicule is in their ill treatment of nonhuman animals and of those humans they think of as animals—not least through their ability to do so in ever more outrageous ways. This species-political element brings us to the third, final, and multiply complex explanation for the specific importance of animal satire— and, we can now add, for the importance of satire for animals themselves. For animal representation takes up significant room in the history of satire’s ambivalent relationship with the forces of reaction and progress. Let us unpack this claim by starting with the former. There is a rich history of texts appealing to the inherent ridiculousness of taking animals 25  That facile judgements about the facial appearance of “Grumpy Cat”—the trademarked celebrity moniker of Tardar Sauce, a disabled crossbreed cat from Morristown, Arizona, who died in 2019—could launch a thousand shit satirical cat memes, cuts to the morally ambiguous heart of animal satire. It can be crass, and its aim wayward, but there remains something striking about a cultural practice in which animals are so often envisaged as participants and granted the right to a meaningful personality, albeit an objectionable one. A case in point: Joe Hartshorn, a (presumably fictional) correspondent to the puerile British magazine Viz satirizes cats, their representation in popular horror, and petty-minded magazine correspondents in one fell swoop: “In Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, Dr Louis Creed buries his cat and it comes back as evil. If I did the same I honestly wouldn’t know the difference, because my cat is already a massive c**t”. King, on the other hand, claims not to have “trucked much with satire” since being punished in his student days for having written satirical news stories about school staff, all of which associated people negatively with animals, in On Writing, 54.

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

23

seriously, a tactic which can be used by satire simultaneously as a ticklish feather with which to tease out animal-centred attitudes and as a stout stick with which to beat progressive thought in the realm of human social values. It is an age-old trick, in some ways a specific variant of the standard satiric tactic of mocking human attitudes and behaviours by presenting them in animalised form. For instance, it is found (albeit in a manner that is so self-satirising as to be hard to pin down in terms of attitude) in Lucian of Samosata’s hilarious satirical dialogue “The Dream, or The Cock” (c. 165 A.D.). This exchange develops a ridiculous angle on the vegetarian Pythagoras, and his doctrine of the transmigration of souls, by voicing him as an archly humorous rooster who is self-referentially aware of his own relation to well-known representations of both talking and reincarnated animals. In modernity, the strategy recurs periodically from at least Thomas Taylor’s A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792)—a send-up of Mary Wollstonecraft’s watershed feminist statement of the same year. Indeed, the sheer persistence of the misogynistic representation of animal affection as an index of how daft women are supposed to be is quite something to behold. It appears canonically in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712), and in more quotidian fashion in an unsigned mid-nineteenth-­ century article in Chambers’s Journal, which offers a parodic assessment of the animal-centred feminism at work in French utopian socialist Alphonse Toussenel’s work of “passional ornithology” Le Monde Des Oiseaux (1853–55). That the unnamed satirist there is not at all interested in Toussenel’s influential anti-semitism indicates the multiple ambivalences and risks, in the realm of social politics, that persist in the field we are surveying here (including in its animal-centred elements). Animal satire is indeed a lightning rod for the kind of vexed, appropriative and dubiously humorous utterance that both gets its kicks out of and puts them into social difference.26 For instance, a deep misogynist logic also underpins the actions of Scottish YouTuber “Count Dankula”, aka Mark Meechan, who was found guilty of a hate crime in 2018 after uploading a video titled “M8 Yer Dug’s a Nazi”. The video, which was viewed over three million times, shows a pug dog, “Buddha”, the beloved pet of one Suzanne Kelly, raising 26  For more on Lucian, see Hawkins, Eloquent alogia; on Taylor, including a “rhetorical repurposing”, see Mueller, Archival mocking; on Pope, and other eighteenth-century misogynist animal satire, see Tague, Dead pets; on the review of Toussenel, see McKay, Read meat.

24 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

his right paw in response to Meechan uttering Nazi commands and other anti-semitic statements. “My girlfriend is always ranting and raving about how cute and adorable her wee dog is”, Meechan says at the start of the (now withdrawn) video, “so I thought I would turn him into the least cute thing I could think of which is a Nazi”. Part of Kelly’s response, as stated in court when Meechan was on trial for hate speech, was not to think about the effect of public offense, but to defend Buddha’s character and her affection for him in the most colourful terms: “My dog is just this wee fat, squishy dog. I’m so used to him being cute and I carry him about like a baby, and [Meechan] was using it in the video to look like a monster”. As a result of the case, Meechan briefly became a cause célèbre, attracting fascists, right-wing civil libertarians, and liberal free-speech activists alike, and therefore you can just bet that much humbug followed. But now he picks up miniscule numbers of votes in Scottish Parliament elections, which sounds about the right level of approval. Is it any wonder that no more is heard from Kelly or Buddha?27 Ad hominem attacks in lieu of more general opprobrium seem the exception rather than the rule in satires that target (or make use of) humans caring for other species. A more typical entry in the chronicle of satires of attitudes that grant animals due consideration appears in the New York Herald article “Cruelty to Animals: Great Mass Meeting at Union Square” (1866). Picking up on Taylor’s trick to attack incipient feminist egalitarianism, this purports to report on a multispecies rally in favour of animal rights and features such subheadings as “Speech of His Excellency a Jackass”. As Diane Ingram explains, while superficially a cynical response to Henry Bergh’s recently formed ASPCA, it “is also a response to the rights-based discussions that followed the American Civil War, first to determine the status of blacks freed from slavery, but also in the context of ongoing debates concerning the place of women, children, religious and ethnic minorities in a nation where the ‘rights of man’ had been idealized for close to a century”.28 For allegorically minded readers, Orwell’s Animal Farm, with its parlaying of arguments for animals’ proper claim to their own bodies and labour into satirical arguments about totalitarianism and those who accede to it, might equally well align under this rubric.

 For accounts of this case see Newsroom, You turned, and BBC News, Man fined.  Ingram, Imagining animal rights, 245. On the pro-animal possibilities of Animal Farm’s satire and its interpretations, see McKay, Contemporary. 27 28

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

25

The same broad wheeze continues through to the present day in the refined satirical realm of the academic hoax. A forerunner was the fictional author “Charles Phineas”—whose real name was never revealed—with “Household Pets and Urban Alienation” (1974), published in the Journal of Social History. Phineas’s true satiric targets, the radical social histories of women and the working class, become clear enough in the article’s extensive pastiche of oral, sociological and group-psychological, as well as speculative and literary methods in historiography. Novels like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), he writes: prove conclusively that animals were subjugated and that they sensed their subservience keenly. While granting that escape and particularly the formation of collective protest, as in roving bands of wild dogs, were not common occurrences it is here that the history of pets should be pursued, for in protest was expressed the normal thinking and expectations even of those animals who never turned a hair against their masters.

The aim may be supposedly dubious extrapolations and connections that power radical history, and the progressive political forces that carry them, but clearly the ironic energy that powers this satire is the silliness of the very idea that pet animals are meaningful or might have interests at all (let alone rights). Replaying Phineas’s game, a couple of twenty-first-­ century kerfuffles about the academic field of human–animal studies, by critics who sneaked spoof academic essays into print, are particularly illustrative of the reactionary politics of animal satire. Making headlines in 2016, the journal Totalitarianism and Democracy published then retracted an article in German about dogs on the Berlin wall.29 Why? A collective later naming themselves Christiane Schulte and Friends outed themselves as having fabricated the private-archival basis of the article’s argument that linked dogs and their breeders directly to eugenics. The intent may have been to expose animal historians as symptomatic of the excesses of an idle intelligentsia, but its achievement remains unclear at best. Public attention attracted along the way is impossible to separate from growing popular appetites for legitimate academic animal history. Coincidentally, in English-language contexts, a wider-scale hoax was perpetrated in several academic journals by another cabal of academic dissidents. One among 20 29  Schulte, Der Deutsch-Deutsche Schäferhund; for details of the case see Olterman, Human–animal studies.

26 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

similar frauds attempted by the same trio of writers about a host of topics, a fake study of queer performativity in dog parks was published under the pseudonym “Helen Wilson” in Gender, Place and Culture in 2018.30 While several of the trio’s spoofs made it to print without incident, it was only their dog-centred article that attracted a flurry of interest. It was widely embraced by the credulous on social media and (in a self-satirical miracle) was subject to a po-faced point-by-point denouncement as an instance of “woke culture” in the National Review.31 However, the sensationalism in turn attracted the interest of a sceptical press, who swiftly exposed the satirists. As in the Meechan case, the tables turned; under the clouds of ethics-violations inquiries that followed, the only career academic among the three subsequently left the profession.32 Meanwhile, the publishing of animal studies research across the disciplines grows unabated. Presumably, for those in the know and who can see through the premise, these various satires chart a pattern in which the revelation of excessive interest in a theme so evidently unworthy of serious attention thereby becomes a feint for satirising another kind of ridiculousness: Wollstonecraftian feminism for Taylor; abolitionist and other agitation for civil rights, and legislation and political organising for the labouring and indigent classes in the New York Herald; and, ultimately, the academic pursuit of the social history of women, the working class and traditional minorities, lumped together as “the inarticulate” by the pseudonymous Phineas. But, by the same token, to return to our point about Boris Johnson, the reason such attempts at satirical reaction might be said increasingly to fail is that they tend to emerge from positions of authority perceived to be under attack (male privilege in the case of Taylor, Pope and Meechan; a trifecta of anthropocentric, racist and capitalist conceptions of rights in the case of the Herald; conservative and humanist historiography in the case of Phineas and Schulte; and cisheteronormative, antiblack sociological inquiry in the case of Wilson). Yet the fact that these texts also must be read as oblique, defensive responses to the increased vociferousness and sometime validation of rights movements worldwide nevertheless remains important. Running directly against these many reactionary satirical manipulations of sentiments about animals or of pro-animal feeling, there is an important  Wilson, Human reactions; for information on the case see Schuessler, Hoaxers.  Katherine Timpf, Woke culture. 32  See Schuessler, Hoaxers, and Griffith et al, “‘It’s become a dogma factory’”. 30 31

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

27

counter-tradition of animal satire that militates for such values—some of which our contributors analyse at length, while yet others are indeed first published here. This tradition runs at least from the strand of satire against anthropocentrism in largely forgotten pet elegies of the eighteenth century, admirably recovered by Ingrid Tague;33 through a rich tradition of satirical texts produced by animal activists of a literary bent, such as Francis Power Cobbe’s The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century (1877); Henry Salt and The Humanitarian League’s The Brutalitarian, A Journal for the Sane and Strong (1904); Cleveland Amory’s modest proposal for a “Hunt the Hunters Hunt Club”, offered in lieu of his slated light-hearted commentary on the American “scene” on the American NBC Today show (1963); and Brigid Brophy’s collection of satirical fables The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (1973). Just as does Power Cobbe the daily newspaper, Henry Salt the activist periodical, and Amory the statement of aims of an enthusiast’s club on a morning chat show, Brophy’s stories knowingly parody recognisable textual subgenres to pro-animal purpose. A prime example is the arch “Classic Detective Story”, in which a locked room murder mystery is implicitly solved as it vaguely dawns on the characters that they are the murderers and the cadavers are the calf-skin books and tooled leather desktop in the library, and the meats on the breakfast buffet.34 Such formally innovative activist animal satire in turn finds correspondents in other media, from the “Lisa the Vegetarian” (1995) and “Homer’s Phobia” (1997) episodes of the animation series The Simpsons into the twenty-first century with Sustainable Table’s film The Meatrix (2003) and its sequels, Simon Amstell’s speculative documentary Carnage (2017) and faux-naïve drawings by the artist David Shrigley such as “What the Hell Are You Doing?” (2010), whose animal satirical perspective on cow’s milk circulates on posters, greetings cards and the very mugs from which some will obliviously consume it.35 It is therefore worth remembering that, despite the reactionary uses to which animal satire has often been put, it retains an indefinite but nevertheless unique capacity to advance multispecies politics. And if this is  See Tague, Dead pets.  Brophy, Classic detective story, 83-88. 35  On Power Cobbe and the Humanitarian League, see Fagan and O’Neill, respectively, in this volume; on Amory, see Greenwald, “A pen as sharp”; on Brophy, see McKay, Brigid Brophy’s; on The Simpsons, see Chris in this volume, and Rosenberg, Don’t have a cow; on The Meatrix, see Spannring and Grušovnik, Leaving; on Shrigley and animals, see Schwartz, Stuff. 33 34

28 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

clearly the case for the more explicit activist satire just discussed, we have argued here that it is also opaquely true of satirical forms seemingly less invested in animal rights and possibly lofting even more radical ideas for multispecies justice. And ironically enough, this species-political advance is even something that academic spoof can strengthen. We know anecdotally, for instance, that animal historians of Phineas’s time certainly recognised it as a rebuke of their research interest in the animal estate. Moreover, The Journal of Social History may initially have been duped by (or perhaps was even in on the “joke” with) whoever was writing as “Charles Phineas”. Five years later, though, the journal’s editors raised the question of who has the last laugh with their 1979 publication of John Walton’s “Mad Dogs and Englishmen: The Conflict over Rabies in Late Victorian England”. Beginning by acknowledging the prank, Walton makes the case that “alongside the satire [… ‘Phineas’] presented some genuinely useful suggestions for further research”, in an argument that goes on to cite many more legitimate academics to make the case for longitudinal analysis of the role of animal life in human history.36 In hindsight, Walton’s suggestion that we need to attend carefully to the different ways in which we have and can live with other nonhuman animal vectors of rabies and similar zoonotic diseases seems a no-brainer even for dyed-­ in-­the-wool anthropocentrists: this is just a matter of life and death on a planetary scale in the COVID-19 era. Along the way, however, as animals have become an acceptable topic of scholarship beyond the natural sciences, academic interest in animals per se continues to function as an irresistible subject to be satirised. Even as we draw this introduction to Animal Satire to a close, then, we feel ourselves—as Walton himself states up front—“satirized before [we] begin”.37 How much does this bother us? Hee-haw.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Associated Press. 2022. Text of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation speech. 7 July. https://apnews.com/article/boris-­johnson-­resignation-­speech-­transcri pt-­9fbb694a6d08aeff98e6d041ebf1e8a2  Walton, Mad dogs, 219.  Ibid.

36 37

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

29

BBC News. 2019a. Amphibian that buries head in sand named after Donald Trump. 19 December. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­us-­canada-­46614138 ———. 2019b. Boris Johnson says he is having “terrific” week. 6 July. https:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-­politics-­62064371 ———. 2018. Man fined for hate crime after filming pug’s “Nazi salutes”. 23 April https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­scotland-­glasgow-­west-­43864133 Blanford, Conrad. Modes of mockery: The significance of mock-poetic forms in the Enlightenment. In A Companion to Satire, ed. Rubin Quintero, 495–510. Oxford: Blackwell. Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Brophy, Brigid. 1974. Classic detective story. In The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl. Boston: Little, Brown. Cable, Vince. 2022. The Greased Piglet escapes yet again—But at what cost? Independent. June 7. Case, Holly, and John Palatella. 2016. Is humour the best weapon against Europe’s new wave of xenophobic nationalism? Guardian. January 6. https://www.theg u a r d i a n . c o m / w o r l d / 2 0 1 6 / j a n / 0 6 / h u n g a r y -­t w o -­t a i l e d -­d o g -­ viktor-­orban Castle, Stephen, and Peter Robins. 2022. How Boris Johnson fell. New York Times. July 14. https://www.nytimes.com/article/boris-­johnson-­prime-­ minister-­explained.html Deloria, Vine, Jr. 1969. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Penguin. Greenberg, Jonathan. 2019. The Cambridge Introduction to Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenwald, Marilyn. 2006. “A pen as sharp as a stiletto”: Cleveland Amory as critic and activist. Journalism History 32 (1): 13–21. Griffith, Keith, Stephen M.  Lepore, and Jennifer Smith. 2021. It’s become a dogma factory. Daily Mail, 10 September. Fisher, Nicholas, and Keith Walker, eds. 2013. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and Lucina’s Rape. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sheffield/detail. action?docID=4037254. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Hartshorn, Joe. 2022. Letter. Viz, No. 3. 17 August. Hawkins, Tom. 2017. Eloquent alogia: Animal narrators in Ancient Greek Literature. Humanities. https://doi.org/10.3390/h6020037 Highet, Gilbert. 1962. An Anatomy of Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

30 

S. MCHUGH AND R. MCKAY

Howell, Philip. Animals, agency and history. In The Routledge Companion to Animal–Human History, ed. Hilda Kean and Philip Howell, 197–221. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429468933-­9. Ingram, Darcy. 2019. Imagining animal rights in nineteenth‐century New York: Satire and strategy in the animal protection movement. Journal of Historical Sociology 32 (2): 244–257. King, Stephen. (2000) 2020. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner. Knight, Charles A. 2004. The Literature of Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, Wyndham. (1930) 1970. Satire & Fiction. London: The Arthur Press. Folcroft Library Editions. Lippit, Akira. 2000. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Maus, Derek. 2014. “Mommy, what’s a Post-soul Satirist?”: An introduction. In Post-soul Satire: Black Identity After Civil Rights, ed. Derek Maus and James Donahue, xi–xxiii. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. McCabe, Steven. 2022. Al promised you a miracle—Life under the “Greased piglet” Johnson. In Populism, the Pandemic and the Media: Journalism in the age of Covid, Trump, Brexit and Johnson, ed. John Mair et al., 242–250. London: Routledge. McClennen, Sophia, and Remy Maisel. 2014. Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics. New York: Palgrave. McCorry, Séan. 2015. #PigGate and the politics of necrobestiality. Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. 30 September. https://sheffieldanimals. group.shef.ac.uk/piggate-­and-­the-­politics-­of-­necrobestiality/ McKay, Robert. 2021. Read meat. In Animal Remains, ed. Sarah Bezan and Robert McKay, 129–157. London: Routledge. ———. 2018. Brigid Brophy’s pro-animal forms. Contemporary Women’s Writing 12 (2): 152–170. ———. forthcoming. Contemporary: Animal form and zoontologies. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals, ed. Derek Ryan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mueller, S. Marek. 2021. Archival mocking as feminist praxis: A rhetorical repurposing of A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. Women’s Studies in Communication 41 (4): 23–43. Nathan, John. 2018. Sōseki: Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist. New York: Columbia University Press. Newsroom. 2017. “You turned my pug into a Nazi”, woman tells court. Scotsman, September 13. https://www.scotsman.com/news/ you-­turned-­my-­pug-­nazi-­woman-­tells-­court-­1439823. Nixon, Tom. 2016. Literally bonkers. The Sun, 28 August.

2  ANIMAL SATIRE: AN INTRODUCTION 

31

Olterman, Philip. 2016. Human-animal studies academics dogged by German hoaxers. Guardian, March 1. Payne, Daniel. Border crossings: Animals, tricksters, and shape-shifters in modern Native American fictions. In Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds, ed. Susan McHugh and Wendy Woodward. 185–204. New York: Palgrave. Phillips, Dom. 2020. The rhea-sistance: Bird pecks Bolsonaro during coronavirus quarantine. Guardian. 14 July. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ jul/14/jair-­bolsonaro-­bitten-­by-­bird-­during-­coronavirus-­quarantine Phineas, Charles. 1974. Household pets and urban alienation. Journal of Social History 7 (3): 338–343. Riddell, Chris. 2022. Boris Johnson, greased piglet, escapes yet again—Cartoon. Guardian. 28 May. Rosenberg, Howard. 1995. Don’t have a cow, or a lamb, or a pig… Los Angeles Times, October 25. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­1995-­10-­25-­ ca-­60920-­story.html Rosenfeld, Nancy. 2003. ‘That vain Animal’: Rochester’s Satyr and the theriophilic paradox. Early Modern Literary Studies 9 (2): 1–27. Sarhaddi Nelson, Soraya. 2018. Hungary’s satirical “Two-Tailed Dog” Party will debut in Sunday elections. NPR Parallels, April 7. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/07/599928312/hungarys-­s atirical-­t wo-­t ailed-­ dog-­party-­will-­debut-­in-­sunday-­elections Schuessler, Jennifer. 2018. Hoaxers slip breastaurants and dog-park sex into journals. New York Times, October 4. Schulte, Christiane. 2015 (Retracted 2016). Der Deutsch-Deutsche Schäferhund— Ein beitrag zur gewaltgeschichte des jahrhunderts der extreme. Totalitarismus und Demokratie, 13: 319–334. Shrigley, David, and Katrina Schwarz. Stuff: David Shrigley in conversation with Katrina Schwarz. https://www.britishcouncil.org.ar/en/programmes/arts/ shrigley/curator-­conversation Spannring, Reingard, and Tomaž Grušovnik. 2019. Leaving the Meatrix? Transformative learning and denialism in the case of meat consumption. Environmental Education Research 25 (8): 1190–1199. Tague, Ingrid H. 2008. Dead pets: Satire and sentiment in British elegies and epitaphs for animals Eighteenth-Century Studies 41 (3): 289–306. Timpf, Katherine. 2018. Woke culture: A study researched rape culture and dog parks. National Review. June 11. Walton, John. 1979. Mad dogs and Englishmen: The conflict over rabies in late Victorian England. Journal of Social History 13 (2): 219–239. Wilson, Helen. 2018 (Retracted 2018). Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. Gender, Place and Culture. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346

PART I

Drama and Poetry: Animal Satire in Classics, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies

CHAPTER 3

Dogs in Court and Sheep in the Assembly: Animal Satire in Aristophanes Babette Pütz

Choruses of wasps, frogs and birds, a flying dung beetle, two dogs in a trial, a donkey that is carried by a slave, speaking horses, dancing crabs, fighting roosters, biting bed bugs and fleas with little wax boots. Animals contribute much to the fun and humour of Aristophanes’ comedies. This includes real animals on stage, humans pretending to be animals (sometimes in animal costumes, sometimes without) and many instances of animal wordplay. It is particularly striking how frequently Aristophanes uses animal imagery for his satire. Aristophanes (c. 450 to c. 386 BCE) is the most famous representative of the genre of Old Comedy, and the only complete plays which are extant from this period of ancient comic drama are all written by him. In addition to this, we have thousands of longer or shorter fragments by both Aristophanes and his colleagues and rivals. Old Comedy is a distinctive kind of comedy which was produced between 486 and c. 385 BCE in Athens. Its plays stand out for their frequent use of

B. Pütz (*) Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_3

35

36 

B. PÜTZ

animal imagery and in particular for their animal choruses.1 For example, in one of Aristophanes’ great comic fantasies, Peace (produced 421 BCE), the protagonist, an old farmer, decides to fly to Olympus on a giant dung beetle in order to find and free the goddess Peace and so to end the Peloponnesian War. In Birds (414 BCE), the protagonist transforms into a bird and organises the building of a city in the sky with the aim to subdue the gods. Old Comedy also stands out for its frequent use of personal mockery (onomasti komoidein—“mockery by name”) against well-known personalities of the time. These individuals are satirised for such traits as foreign origins, low class or occupation, cowardice, sexual/gender deviance, age or unattractiveness.2 Satire is a crucial aspect of Aristophanes’ comedies. In fact, he has been called “one of the earliest practitioners of the Western satirical tradition”.3 Most satire in Old Comedy is what we might call today “direct satire” in which the target of the mockery is directly attacked in an obvious manner, often by name.4 In fact, the targets of the mockery themselves are likely to have been sitting in the theatre, watching the performances. Animal imagery tends to be an important part of this satire, and this chapter will discuss Aristophanes’ particular mode of animal satire.5 Comedy uses satire and satire is a form of comedy.6 While authors employing satire have a tendency to claim a serious purpose, the use of comedy is, on the one hand, absolutely essential for a satire to work and, on the other hand, makes the audience wonder how serious the satire 1  Rothwell explains that the prevalence of animal choruses in the fifth century BCE came about because ideas of a kinship between humans and animals and the notion that human culture evolved from animal savagery were popular. In the fourth century BCE, the thinking regarding a human–animal kinship changed and comic animal choruses fell out of favour. Aristophanes’ extant plays feature choruses of frogs, birds, wasps and knights riding on speaking horses. However, animals and animal imagery are found throughout the plays, not just in the choruses. See Nature, 101. 2  Kamen, Insults, 42-52. 3  Rosen, Efficacy, 4-5. 4  On direct satire see Hile, Spenserian Satire, 12. 5  It is likely that much that can be observed about Aristophanes’ use of animal satire is also true for other authors of Old Comedy, which overall was fond of using animal imagery, including animal choruses. However, as only fragments of the plays of Aristophanes’ colleagues are extant, this study will focus on Aristophanes’ plays. 6  See Rosen, Efficacy, 2, and Rosen, Making Mockery, 19. Already Hewitt, Elements, 293, notes the importance of humour for Aristophanes’ satire to work properly. Caron, Satire, 35, notices the same for post-enlightenment satire.

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

37

really is and, in consequence, if the satire can indeed bring about the social change it claims to aim to achieve. Modern critics opposing the claim of comedy’s alleged seriousness rightly point out that “comic satire was (…) the expression of a spirit of unbridled freedom of speech, and this fact consorts ill with the idea of responsible criticism motivated by serious standards”.7 The animal imagery within the relevant scenes helps us understand that any “criticism” is really offered tongue-in-cheek. The ancient Greeks were very aware of the ambiguity of a humorous genre claiming to offer serious social critique and so coined the term spoudaiogeloion (“the serio-comic”) for it. There has been much discussion of how seriously comedic mockery may have been taken, especially in the case of the politician and demagogue Cleon (died 422 BCE) who is mercilessly made fun of in several of Aristophanes’ plays, particularly in Knights (424 BCE), clearly to get back at Cleon after he took the playwright to court for satirising him in an earlier play (Babylonians of 426 BCE, of which we only possess fragments). Aristophanes in this play and elsewhere likens Cleon (here represented as a slave in the house of Demos, the personification of the Athenian people) to a dog, in regards to his greed, his loud voice and shamelessness and, in the end, Cleon loses a competition against a fellow slave for the affections of his master when he keeps the tastiest food to himself instead of sharing them as a dog might. This animal-­like behaviour serves to characterise the demagogue as uncivilised, but in such an exaggerated grotesque manner that it is clear that the portrayal of the politician cannot be entirely serious. It is also questionable how serious Aristophanes’ satire of Socrates is. The philosopher is misrepresented as an absurd mixture between a sophist and a nature philosopher in Clouds, and, later on, Plato, at Apology 18b-d, shows Socrates claiming that his accusers were influenced by Aristophanes’ portrayal of him. However, it is highly unlikely that their comic depiction had such an influence on Athenians’ attitudes towards these famous personalities.8 Also Socrates’ characterisation depends heavily on animal stereotypes which are so absurd that it is clear that the comic poet’s purpose here is to create a figure of fun, rather than to utter serious criticism: he is 7  Halliwell, Aristophanic satire, 8. See Halliwell, Aristophanic Satire, 8-9; Rosen, Efficacy, 2-5, and Rosen, Making Mockery, ix-xi and 23, for detailed discussions of this problem. 8  Sommerstein in Rosen and Sluiter, Free Speech, 159. I agree with Kamen, Insults, 40, that given “that all these measures are unsupported by contemporaneous evidence and appear to be speculations by much later scholiasts”, it is likely that “none of these measures were in fact taken”.

38 

B. PÜTZ

so dirty (an ancient stereotype about philosophers) that the mattresses in his school are riddled with bedbugs; he conducts pointless experiments such as measuring how far fleas can jump by fitting the insects with miniature wax boots; he considers questions such as whether gnats hum through their mouth or their bum and, when he stares open-mouthed at celestial phenomena, a gecko defecates into his open mouth from the eaves. The appearance of animals in this play—mostly small, annoying creatures, when they refer to Aristophanes’ Socrates—gives a hint to the play’s spectators that the satire of Socrates is not meant as a serious critique. Its main purpose is to make the audience laugh.9 Animals in Aristophanes’ comedies have mainly been discussed in an unconnected manner in the commentaries on the plays or with a strong focus on animal choruses.10 The few studies that focus on the topic use animal imagery mostly to provide a commentary on certain of Aristophanes’ plays (or parts of them).11 In contrast, this chapter aims to focus on Aristophanes’ animal satiric techniques themselves. What are his animal satire’s central elements? What are its aims? Does the author employ other forms of animal representation and how do these affect the animal satire? This chapter will investigate, then, how animal imagery works as an important element within the humour of Aristophanes’ satire. The central question is: were the theatre audiences laughing with or at the animals? The chapter uses Aristophanes’ comedy Wasps (422 BCE) as a case study, as it contains a wide range of satire, parodying social, cultural and mythological matters, all of which are presented through the use of animal imagery. Wasps is built around satires of the Athenian jury system, the public figures Laches and Cleon and the institution of the aristocratic symposium (drinking party). It also contains satire of father–son relationships and a brief mythological satire of the myth of Odysseus fleeing from the Cyclops Polyphemus, hanging under a ram (Odyssey 9.437-63). It is striking what a wide range of subjects are presented in this play through animal satire. After a short plot summary of Wasps, I will analyse the four main passages containing animal satire: the dog trial (891-1002), the slaves’

9  As Rosen, Efficacy, 12, rightly points out, in Aristophanes’ political satire “one can find little in the way of specific policy recommendations”. 10  See especially Rothwell, Nature, 1-7, 117. 11  In particular Corbel-Morana, Le Bestiaire; Pütz, Schräge Vögel, 220-28; and Pütz, Good to laugh with, 63-64.

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

39

dreams (15-53), the wasp chorus’ appearance (230-460) and Philocleon’s escape attempts (138-213).

Plot Summary A young man, called Bdelycleon (“Hate-Cleon”), tries to cure his old father Philocleon (“Love-Cleon”) of his obsession with attending jury duty. He is especially annoyed that his father and the other old jurors refuse to acknowledge they are being manipulated by politicians, especially by the demagogue Cleon. Bdelycleon is running the affairs of the family now that his father is old, but the pay the old man receives for his jury duty provides Philocleon with a little independence and he loves the feeling of power he gets from punishing the defendants. Bdelycleon has locked the old man in his house in order to prevent him from physically attending court, but Bdelycleon pretends to be all sorts of small, clever animals and even smoke in his attempts to sneak out of the house. At dawn, Philocleon’s friends, the chorus of his old fellow jury members, arrive and he begs them to help him. The old jurors get into a fight against Bdelycleon and his slaves, during which the jurymen liken themselves to a swarm of wasps and eventually shed their cloaks to reveal wasp costumes, complete with stingers, which they use to charge at their opponents.12 Finally, Bdelycleon manages to convince the chorus of wasp-jurors that they are being taken advantage of by Cleon, but his father still refuses to let go of his jury addiction. So, his son sets up a court for him at his own home and, straight away, his first (and only) case presents itself: one dog of the household accuses another dog of having gobbled up a stolen cheese all by himself, without sharing it. After both sides have been heard, the cheese grater has been asked to give a witness statement, and the accused dog’s puppies have made an appearance (unsuccessfully) intended to evoke the judge’s pity, Bdelycleon tricks his father, who is proud of always voting “guilty”, into voting “not guilty”. When Philocleon notices this mistake, he is so upset that he considers suicide. 12  On the figurative meaning of “sting” as “a point that was driven home with forceful, perhaps devastating, effect by a speaker or someone rendering a verdict in court”, see Rothwell, Nature, 115. He also notes, with Sommerstein, Aristophanes. Wasps, 169-70, that the use of the word “sting” in Euripides’ Suppliants (which is likely to have been produced in 423 BCE) may have inspired Aristophanes to give his jurors wasp-identities. There is no indication that Philocleon wears a wasp costume.

40 

B. PÜTZ

In the second part of the play, Bdelycleon tries to educate his father how to behave appropriately at an aristocratic drinking party. The old man has great fun mocking Bdelycleon’s snobby behaviour and finally misbehaves terribly at a symposium which he attends, insulting the aristocratic guests and telling inappropriate stories. Finally, the old man appears with a prostitute who he pretends is a torch when accosted by his son. Philocleon mocks his accusers, who demand recompense for the damage he has caused, by telling them insulting and rude stories. In the end, Bdelycleon sees no other way but to pick up the old man and carry him back into the house. However, Philocleon pops out one last time and ends the play with an extravagant dancing competition against the sons of the tragic poet Carcinus.13

Animal Imagery in Wasps Animal imagery is central to this comedy, which revolves around the scene of the dog trial and in which contemporary Athenian politicians are satirised as the guard dogs of Philocleon’s household. The protagonist imagines himself as various animal species, in his desperation to outwit his son in order to get to the law court, and his captors unquestioningly accept the old man’s mental metamorphoses and are content to treat him like a captured animal about to slip out. This blurring of the borderlines between humans and animals (which is also shown in the chorus of wasp-jurors) brings to life the Wasps’ focus on the dichotomy of nature (physis) versus custom (nomos). Bdelycleon, in a comic reversal of the topos of intergenerational conflict, represents nomos, taking on the role which is usually given to the father, while Philocleon is shown to behave like an out-of-­ control teenager, who does what his physis tells him will be most fun. To make the play’s satire work, power relations are of particular importance and strongly emphasised through animal imagery: as usual in satire, the weaker party mocks those in power. In Wasps, the power imbalance between son and father is particularly striking and is the catalyst for much of the play’s satire. For example, the old man is associated with a very small 13  His name means crab and Philocleon refers to his sons as crablets. However, it has been convincingly argued that these dancers appear (surprisingly) on stage from seats at the front of the theatre audience, which indicates that they would not have been wearing costumes. See Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps ad Wasps, 1500–11, who follow Vaio’s and Stone’s viewpoint.

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

41

rodent trying to nibble its way out of the house and is opposed by Bdelycleon and his slaves, acting as human rodent catchers, armed with nets. There are also a strong power imbalances: between the old jurymen (who are represented as small insects, wasps, which can hurt when they attack as a swarm, but are also easily bamboozled) and Cleon (whose loud voice is like that of a barking dog which serves to support his power as a human demagogue); between the dog representing Cleon (who is able to speak fluent and eloquent Greek and so to accuse another dog in Philocleon’s home-court) and the dog Labes (who cannot defend himself, as he cannot utter more than a few barks); and between the aristocratic, educated symposiasts (who are associated with upper class occupations, such as hunting) and uneducated, crude Philocleon (who is compared to a lowly donkey regarding his out-of-control behaviour at the fancy symposium). The satire is further enhanced in puns and plays with animal proverbs pertaining to the species mentioned.

The Dog Trial The central scene involving animal satire in Wasps is the dog trial (891-1002).14 This clever scene advances the plot of the play about Bdelycleon’s attempts to cure his father from his jury addiction while satirising the Athenian law court system and two historical public figures of Aristophanes’ time. The “Kydathenaean Dog”—standing for the demagogue Cleon—indicts another dog of Philocleon’s household, called Labes—standing for General Laches (c. 475-418 BCE)—for stealing a Sicilian cheese and eating it all by himself, instead of giving the Cleon-dog a share (894-7). The use of dogs in this scene will have been determined by the quite obvious reference to Cleon, who liked to refer to himself as “the state’s watchdog” (cf. Knights 1017-24) and whose name even sounds a little like the Greek for dog (κύων - kyon). Also in other plays, Aristophanes repeatedly likens Cleon’s very loud voice to a dog’s bark (e.g. Knights 1017-18, 1022) and the demagogue is compared to the dog of the underworld, Cerberos, at Wasps 1031, Knights 1030-1 and Peace 14  Indeed, this passage may well have been the author’s original idea around which the entire play was composed. See Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, who write that the dog trial may surpass the agon (the debate between Bdelycleon and Philocleon) of the play “whose satirical thrust in regard to the alleged dysfunction of Athenian politics it illustrates”, xliii.

42 

B. PÜTZ

313.15 The defendant-dog’s name Labes (“Grabber”) in Greek sounds very similar to the name of General Laches, who is the other historical figure parodied in this scene. Aristophanes’ audience, then, would have been in no doubt as to which two contemporary local personalities are being made fun of in this scene. The fact that they are represented as dogs is not a way to make the satire less direct, but rather to add insult to injury.16 Dogs, as is obvious in this scene, had an ambiguous reputation in ancient Greece: on the one hand, they were praised for especially their great bravery and loyalty, but they were also associated with aggression, greed and shamelessness (cf. Knights 1017–27), which fits the political situation which is parodied in this scene.17 Laches was a successful general in the Peloponnesian War and a political ally of Nicias.18 After commanding the Athenian fleet, on his return to Athens in 425 BCE (i.e. three years before Wasps was produced) he was persecuted by Cleon but acquitted. Here the Sicilian cheese which Labes is supposed to have eaten without sharing seems to refer to some alleged wrongdoing of Laches’ during the Sicilian campaign of the Peloponnesian War (427–5 BCE). Yet it is unclear whether this passage refers to an actual trial against him or just threats by Cleon to prosecute his opponent.19 Furthermore, it is striking that the Cleon-dog does not complain about the theft, but about Labes’ refusal to share the stolen object with him (Wasps 914-16). This has been interpreted as referring to Cleon’s reputation for always demanding his share  See also Blakey, Canine Imagery, 164, and Lilja, Dogs, 70 and 127.  For a detailed discussion of direct versus indirect satire see Hile, Spenserian Satire, 12, with a focus, however, on Spenserian satire, rather than ancient Greek satire. 17  This ambiguity towards dogs can be seen in Greek literature as early as the Iliad: see Lilja, Dogs, and Blakey, Canine Imagery for detailed discussions of the topic. Lilja, Dogs, 22-25, discusses “dog” as a term of abuse in the Homeric epics, with many examples from the texts. She suggests (22) that dogs were seen as shameless because they are scavengers and were known to feed on dead bodies. Their sexual behaviour was seen as shameless, too, and so the term kyon is used derogatively for sexually shameless humans, especially women. Rawlings, A dog, 145-54, discusses Xenophon’s mention of “Hybris” as an apt name for hunting dogs and in this context mentions especially fables which comment on the stereotype of the “unproductive, gluttonous watchdog” (146), which we also find in the dog trial in Wasps. Menache, Dogs, focuses on positive attitudes towards dogs in antiquity, 69-73. 18  Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, 165, note that Aristophanes mostly speaks positively about Laches in Wasps and that Laches is not targeted in other comedies, so that he appears to be seen more as a military than public figure. 19  Cf. Henderson. Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 240. 15 16

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

43

in cases of embezzlement, as a reward for not charging the embezzler.20 This scene is prepared for already earlier in the play, when the Chorus Leader urges on his fellow jurors on their way to court, saying: “Anyway, let’s get a move on, lads; Laches is going to get it today! Everybody says he’s stuffed his hive with money. That’s why yesterday our patron Cleon ordered us to report for duty in good time, with three days’ rations of rotten rage against that bloke, to punish him for his crimes” (Wasps 240–44). Both dog characters are portrayed as animal–human hybrids: they seem to be dressed in full dog costumes; although, because of their size and body-shape, it would always be clear to the audience that they are watching humans being satirised as dogs.21 It has been proposed that the Cleon-­ dog was wearing a portrait mask,22 however there is no evidence for this and the references in the text make his real identity so obvious that a portrait mask would not have contributed much to the humour of the scene. Also, the dogs’ language is mixed: Labes only barks. The Cleon-­ dog otherwise speaks Greek and barks just once, possibly in order to play with the audience’s surprise in finding out that the trial is not between humans but dogs.23 This includes lines 929–30, where he comments in 20  See Wasps, 971-72, and Knights, 65-70, 775, with Sommerstein, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 896. Moreover, in 424 BCE, the Athenians had voted (against Cleon’s wishes) for a one-year treaty with Sparta, which had been proposed, among others, by Laches. So, the reference in this scene in Wasps might also be that Cleon was prosecuting Laches out of revenge for the truce. See Henderson, Aristophanes. Wasps, 216. 21  See Pütz, Schräge vögel, 225 n.22, for a discussion why these two characters will not have been played by trained live dogs, but by humans in costumes. Opinions differ as to whether Labes’ puppies (which are called in, like a defendant’s children in a human trial, to evoke the judge’s pity) are real dogs (perhaps lead by a slave on a leash) or actors in costumes, to match Labes and the Cleon-dog. Again, vocabulary which fits both humans and dogs is used in this passage. See Pütz, Schräge Vögel, 227 n.34-37, for a more detailed discussion of this matter. 22  See Halliwell, Aristophanic Satire, 9, and Reckford, Aristophanes’ Old-And-New Comedy, 259, on the possible use of portrait masks in Aristophanes’ satire. Labes’ grin, which Philocleon points out at line 901 and interprets as a sign that the defendant was trying to trick him, is interpreted as a human “sarcastic smirk” by Stone, Costume, 352, and as a dog’s baring his teeth by Blakey, Canine Imagery, 168. According to Little-Scott-Jones, A Greek-­ English Lexicon, s.v. sairo A 1, the expression does not usually refer to animals, but to humans. Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 901, give examples for its two uses: “smile” and “snarl”. 23  It is unusual that he barks “au au” as opposed to the more common “bau bau”. Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps 903-04, propose that it may serve to set up the “au” (“again”) spoken by the slave Xanthias towards the end of the same line (which is split up between three speakers, the dog, Bdelycleon and Xanthias).

44 

B. PÜTZ

Greek about his past and future barking as a part of his job description as watchdog. Even here, the vocabulary used for “barking” ­(keklango…keklanxomai 929-930) can refer to both dog sounds and human voices, keeping the imagery ambiguous.24 The Cleon-dog’s use of Greek language is necessary to make the scene interesting and funny. The one instance of and references to his barking are jokes about Cleon’s loud voice, his trademark as a demagogue, which the poet also mocks at Wasps 36 and 596. Labes, in contrast to the Cleon-dog, does not speak Greek, but Bdelycleon has taken over his defence. The fact that Labes cannot speak for himself is, however, not explained by his dog nature, rather Bdelycleon maintains that the reason is that Labes was tongue-tied (946–8), like a human. Here, another famous personality is satirised. The specific reference is to Thucydides, who is mentioned by name in line 947, a rival of Pericles, who was ostracised and exiled in the late 440s or early 430s BC and, upon his return from exile ten years later, was prosecuted again (the charge is unknown) and found himself unable to defend himself in trial as he was tongue-tied.25 Like the Cleon-dog speaking Greek, the idea of Labes being at a loss for words reminds the audience that this entire scene is an animal satire of human characters and events. Here the dog characters’ satirical animal natures are employed to justify the humorous disparagement of their real-life referents, both human and animal. In fact, it is also possible live puppies and a live rooster (100, 815-7) appear on stage in this scene. This addition of live animals would emphasise, through contrast, the grotesque human–animal hybrid nature of the two dogs on trial which perhaps takes some of the bite out of the satire, by focussing mostly on its ridiculous aspects. Nevertheless, both dogs are several times referred to as human by way of the term aner meaning “man” (Wasps 918, 923, 933, 1000); while confusing the literal and the allegorical sides of this scene, this reminds the audience that this is a satire about real-life public figures. Also, the proposed punishment for Labes, a wooden collar (897), fits both species, as wooden collars were used to control both dogs and human slaves and prisoners. The wood of this collar is supposed 24  Cf. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 201, and Euripides’ Phoenissae, 1144. The Cleon-dog threatens here not to bark anymore in future, which is comic as it would clearly be a positive thing, as far as the comic poet is concerned. 25  This episode is made fun of in more detail at Acharnians, 703-12. See Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 946-47.

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

45

to be fig wood (sykinos 897), which is an allusion to the term sycophant, which in ancient Greek (unlike its use in contemporary English) refers to an informer—giving us a hint that the charges here are groundless and for Cleon’s own “malicious or selfish reasons”.26 Again, the audience is cleverly reminded that the reference can be to a human, even though the defendant is wearing a dog costume. The other punishment, which Philocleon himself suggests with apparent relish, is a “dog’s death” (898),27 which can refer both literally to dogs and metaphorically to humans. The expression is used here in both the literal and proverbial senses for a painful, horrible death.28 To turn to the list of Labes’ virtues, in a metaphorical sense Bdelycleon indicates that Labes/Laches was a good military leader and a friend of Athenian citizens.29 However, he was, claims Bdelycleon, living a proverbial “dog’s life” (967-9), eating a poor diet and never staying long in the same place, and he had never learned “to play the kithara (lyre)” (959), meaning he was uneducated. These are clearly meant to be mitigating circumstances in how Philocleon is to judge Labes’ crime, which Bdelycleon does never deny the dog has indeed committed. Neither defence is true for the historical Laches who was wealthy and musically educated (as we know from Plato, Laches 186c and which would be expected of a member of the social elite of Athens), but both fit a dog. This leaves the audience wondering if they are to think of this dog as an animal or standing for a human. In contrast to Labes, the Cleon-dog, we are told, is just staying at home and bites if he does not receive part of the food of other dogs (971-2). The accusation of Cleon staying at home is 26  See MacDowell, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 897. Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 895–97, convincingly refute Wilson’s idea that the reference could be to figs used in a festival. For collars for biting dogs, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.4.41. For wooden collars to control slaves or prisoners, see, for example, Euripides, Cyclops, 235, and Xenophon, Hellenica, 3.3.11. 27  Whereas the phrase “die like a dog” is commonly used nowadays, in ancient Greece “a dog’s death” does not seem to have been commonly employed in literature but is quite likely to have been used colloquially and proverbially: Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 898. The commentaries on Wasps, 898, mention only Hesychius κ 4571 and Sophocles’ fragment 722 as parallel passages for this use of the expression. Dogs, in fact, were sometimes buried with great care by their caring masters: for example, MacKinnon, Pets, 273–74. 28  See MacDowell, Aristophanes. Wasps, and Sommerstein, Aristophanes. Wasps, both ad Wasps, 898. 29  Cf. also Wasps, 957. See also Olson, Politics, 139–41.

46 

B. PÜTZ

clearly not justified as he was a successful general in several campaigns and, in fact, later died on campaign in Amphipolis in 421 (Thucydides 5.10.9). Aristophanes’ point here seems to be that he was more focussed on his political than his military career. The reference to Cleon demanding his share of other people’s hard work builds on the satire of Aristophanes’ earlier play Knights (Knights 65-70, 359-60, 438-9, 775), which attributes such behaviour to this politician. Moreover, in the context of Wasps, this accusation is convincing, as earlier on, the Cleon-dog had himself complained: “And he [Labes] didn’t even share when I asked”. (914). Again, the constant shifting of the boundaries between human and animal adds humour to the satire. After this, in the second half of the play, which deals with Philocleon’s education for and attendance at a symposium, the animal satire, which clearly reached its peak in the dog trial, is reduced to animal imagery. For instance, the drunken Philocleon’s outrageous behaviour at the party is compared to that of a donkey (1310). This is followed by some animal fables, which Philocleon, in absurdly distorted form, tells his accusers after the symposium. When his son carries him back into the house, we wonder if the old man will ever get another chance to fully live out his animal nature. However, we are not disappointed, when he pops out of the house one more time, to end the play on his own animal nature terms, in a dancing competition against some small “crabs”, a pun on the name of the dancers’ father, Carcinus.

Sosias’ Dream This scene’s humour is based on metaphoric animal characterisation, rather than the more personified animal imagery of the dog trial, which is supported acoustically and visually through the use of animal sounds and costumes. Even though the charge laid against Labes clearly indicates a historical event, the virtues, which are listed by the defence in order to prove Labes’ good character, on first sight refer to a sheepdog: he chases away wolves and has the ability to control a large number of sheep (952, 955).30 The sheep imagery recalls the earlier appearance of metaphorical sheep, standing for easily mislead Athenian citizens, in a dream which 30  The verb used to denote “control/supervise”, ephestanai (955), also appears in this sense at Demosthenes 26.22 and so fits the description of a working dog. For the habit of speaking of a defendant’s good character in court, see Lysias, 12.38.

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

47

Bdelycleon’s slave Sosias recounts at lines 31–36. Furthermore, now not only well-known public figures but also the Athenian people as a group are compared to animals. Despite these slight differences in focus, the techniques of animal satire which Aristophanes employs in this scene are fundamentally the same as in the dog trial: the metaphorical and the personified uses of animal imagery aim to satirise characters through the association of animal behaviour with that of human beings. The dream scene is part of the first scene of the comedy (15–53), in which two slaves tell each other their dreams full of animal metaphors, which are used to satirise a number of public figures. An eagle stands for Cleonymus, one of Aristophanes’ favourite satirical targets, whom he makes fun of here for allegedly dropping his shield in battle (a sign of cowardice; 15–19),31 a monster for Cleon (31–39)32 and Theorus, one of Cleon’s cronies, appears sporting the head of a raven (42–43). The sheep in Sosias’ dream symbolise the Athenian demos. Sosias states right away that the sheep were meeting in Assembly on the Pnyx, so the audience is immediately alerted to the fact that they represent Athenian citizens. Furthermore, in line 29, the slave had already told his interlocutor Xanthias that his dream was “about the polis, the whole ship”.33 Being depicted as sheep, who were thought to be unintelligent and to follow a leader unquestioningly (cf., e.g. Clouds 1203, Wealth 922-3), of course was no compliment for the Athenians in the audience. The verb 31  This passage is a spoof on Iliad, 12.200-9 (see also Ar., Knights 197-212), about an eagle picking up and dropping a snake which the Trojans interpret as a bad omen. The joke of this passage is a play on the two meanings of aspis in Greek: “asp/ snake” and “shield”. Aristophanes mocks the politician Cleonymus in every play from Acharnians to Birds for his obesity, gluttony, effeminacy or discarding his shield in battle (a cause to loose one’s citizen rights for cowardice), which possibly happened at the battle of Delium in 424 BCE: see Sommerstein, Aristophanes. Wasps and Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, both ad Wasps, 19. Halliwell, Comic satire, 54, discusses that comedy (as part of its performance in a festive context) can make fun of things like throwing away one’s shield in battle, which in everyday life would be seen as slander. Also see Halliwell in Rosen and Sluiter, Free Speech, 135-37. Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 17, rightly note the connection with food implied in both the location of the dream at the agora and the voraciousness of the eagle. 32  Bowie, Aristophanes, 80, notes rightly that Cleon is again depicted as a monster at lines 1031-35, in a description reminiscent of the monster Typhoeus from Hesiod, Theogony, 821-29. In this way, Aristophanes presents himself as a monster-fighter. 33  Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 28-29, rightly note that skaphos— “vessel” is mostly used in tragedy. The comic device paratragedy is frequently used in Aristophanes’ plays and puts the audience on the lookout for jokes, here the satire of themselves, the demos.

48 

B. PÜTZ

used in Sosias’ dream, synkathemena—“meeting”, “crowding together” fits both humans and animals.34 Next in this short but quite detailed dream description, we are told that the sheep wear tribonia and hold sticks, depicting them as human–animal hybrids.35 Their simple choice of clothing helps portray them as lower class citizens. The carrying of staffs is likely meant to make the audience think of older men.36 This underlying characterisation fits the play’s central satire of this group of Athenian citizens, as portrayed through the play’s chorus of old jurors and Philocleon himself, who are all shown as being manipulated by young, wealthy, clever politicians like Cleon. With this short anthropomorphic description of the sheep of the dream, some slippage between the different levels of representation occurs: Sosias veers between describing the Athenians sitting in assembly on the Pnyx in Athens as animals and humans. First he clearly states that they are sheep (Ar., Wasps 32), followed by the announcement that they are wearing cloaks and carrying walking sticks (line 33), but in the following line (34), Sosias repeats that they are indeed sheep. He then expands the animal satire by immediately providing an animal example of a case of manipulation by a demagogue: a whale with the voice of a scalded pig is giving a speech to the sheep assembly.37 In these ways, Aristophanes alerts the audience that the play will move swiftly between both levels of representation and the boundaries between human and animal will be blurred to create satirical humour. To return to Cleon’s comparison to a whale, large sea mammals were seen as terrifying monsters in antiquity (cf. Odyssey 4.441-3), so there is an obvious power imbalance implied between the poor, uneducated, old assembly attendees of this dream and the politician that is shown to intend

 Cf. Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 31-33.  Tribonia are little mantles made from coarse material. 36  Even though staffs were carried by men of all ages and social classes: cf. Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 31-33. In ancient Greece, the carrying of staffs was not particularly associated with shepherds, as it is nowadays, but with old men of any profession. Compare the riddle that was posed to Oedipus by the sphinx about which creature was walking on four legs in the morning, on two legs at midday and on three in the evening, which refers to the stages of human life: a crawling baby, a man walking upright and an old man using a stick. 37  Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 34-36, point out (citing relevant passages) that, even though the verb used here, demegorein (35), implies a neutral formal public address, it can also carry an implication of “self-aggrandizement and audience manipulation”. This is also the case here, which becomes clear with the reference to the whale’s voice. 34 35

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

49

to divide the people.38 This power imbalance is emphasised through the imagery of small, defenceless sheep as opposed to a large frightening whale. The identity of the politician in this passage is hinted at through the reference to his voice like a pig set on fire, which may refer to both a terrified and terrifying shriek, but the reference to Cleon only becomes clear shortly after, when Xanthias complains that Sosias’ dream was smelling of “rotten hides” (38); this is an obvious reference to Cleon, whom Aristophanes had famously portrayed in his earlier play Knights as a tanner, regarded as one of the basest kinds of work. As Demos says to the slave representing Cleon at Knights 892: “To hell with you and your horrid smell of leather!” Smells in Aristophanes can carry a connotation of social status or behaviour and the choice of the adjective sapros (“putrid, rotten”, 38) is striking here as it is so uncouth that it is not found in the more elevated language of tragedy and Athenian prose of Aristophanes time.39 In this passage about Sosias’ dream, then, Aristophanes presents his satirical method of connecting animal comparisons and stereotypical human characteristics (e.g. sheep are stupid, wasps are aggressive, etc.) and the use of puns with animal proverbs and vocabulary which can refer to both animals and humans.40 As a result, the audience is always left in doubt as to whether they are dealing indeed with animals or with animalised caricatures of humans, as the boundaries seem to be constantly shifting. This technique keeps the audience on their toes throughout the play and creates humour if they are not quick enough to catch on that the level of the comparison has shifted and the playwright temporarily outwits 38  See Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Wasps, 34-36, for more references on whales in primary and secondary literature. The dividing of the people is indicated by a double word play involving the Greek words demos—“people” and “fat” (in Greek these words are accented differently)—and histanai—“weigh”—and dihistanai—“divide” (39-41). The idea of weighing fat shows that the whale, like the sheep, is a human–animal hybrid. Small differences, even just of an accent, would have been noticed and appreciated by an ancient Greek theatre audience, which becomes obvious when one compares Aristophanes’ joke, at Frogs 303, about the tragic actor’s Hegelochus’ misaccentuation of the word galen in a performance of Euripides’ tragedy Orestes, line 279, in 408 BCE. Instead of pronouncing the word as γαλήν’—“calm/stillness of wind and wave”, he famously said γαλῆν—“weasel/polecat”. 39  Biles and Olson, Aristophanes. Wasps, ad Ar., Wasps, 38. 40  See also Halliwell, Aristophanic Satire, 10, who writes about Aristophanes’ satire in general: “Aristophanes’s fundamental procedure in most cases is not to focus on particular features or traits but rather to turn the nominally real individual into an exaggerated and easily recognisable type”.

50 

B. PÜTZ

his audience. The blurring of species boundaries also creates the strong sense that humans and animals may not be so different from each other (a much-debated topic of the time), which actually helps justify Aristophanes’ animal satire, in turn reminding us that all this mockery is for good fun, rather than a serious critique of the public figures whom Aristophanes compares to animals.

Philocleon and Animals The topic of fluctuating boundaries between humans and animals, which is introduced in the fictional dreams in Sosias’ dream scene, is later displayed on stage in a literal sense: Bdelycleon and his slaves are perfectly happy to accept Philocleon’s self-presentation as various animals and that of the chorus as wasps. The wasp chorus, once they shed their cloaks, reveal that they wear wasp costumes with stingers, which makes more plausible the readiness of the other characters to accept their animal nature.41 Philocleon, in contrast, does not wear animal costumes, nor does he utter animal sounds. He just works with animal imagery as part of his great imagination, which allows him to portray himself as an animal in such a convincing way that his son and the household slaves go along with the old man’s pretence and treat him like the little creatures he claims to be, creating much humour as Philocleon and his slaves give a literal response to Philocleon’s metaphoric use of animal imagery.42 The use of animal metaphors is clearly taken a step further here from what we saw in the earlier dream scene: while in the first scene of the play, animal imagery stayed on the metaphoric level, here the metaphors are taken literally. In this way, the playwright seems to hint to 41  Their wasp-nature symbolises aggressiveness, but also military prowess and social solidarity. 42  Rothwell, Nature, 116, rightly notes that Philocleon is compared to probably “more different types of animals than any other character in Aristophanes”. This great diversity of comparisons points at a “volatility in his characterisation and instability in his identity”, an impression which is underlined by the fact that a number of the animals associated with the old man have connotations of marginality, in particular the dog, as a “marker of margins”. Also in terms of a mythological interpretation of the play it is highlighted that Philocleon is depicted as changing his identity. This is in contrast to the wasp-chorus: Wasps are not marginal, but have a strong, fixed identity and can even be said to “form a society of their own”. So, when the choir members remove their cloaks, they are not changing their identity but reveal their true nature which they have always possessed.

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

51

his audience that nomos/custom is really just a social construct, which is easily overcome by a physis/nature as strong as Philocleon’s. The fact that in this scene animal metaphors are taken literally makes it seem almost as if Philocleon is undergoing mini-metamorphoses into various animals, though without changing his costume nor uttering animal sounds. In the next major animal scene, when the chorus reveal their wasp costumes, costume is added into the humorous mix. Finally, in the dog scene, animal imagery is taken literally and both costume and animal sounds take the animal satire to its most extreme level. By adding more and more elements to his animal satire, the play keeps the audience interested and adds several levels to the animal humour. That his pretend animal transformations have such a strong effect on the other characters in the comedy points to the strength of Philocleon’s animalistic side. The old man is clearly not bothered about following the customs of civilised Athenian men, but lets his behaviour be solely determined by his untamed (animal-)nature.43 As we have seen, custom is represented in this play through the son Bdelycleon who encourages his father to behave in an appropriate way by stopping his jury service and encouraging socially acceptable behaviour at occasions, such as drinking parties. It is striking that, despite the power imbalance between father and son, the old man emerges victorious and proves unchangeable in character. Nature (physis) is clearly stronger than custom (nomos) in this comedy.

Conclusion Animal satire, as we have seen, is central to Wasps and pervades the entire play, from the dreams which the slaves recount in the first scene of the play to the dancing crablets in the final scene. The play has an animal chorus, its protagonist successfully re-imagines himself as all sorts of creatures and the dog trial is a memorable satire of Athenian court procedures and the public figures Cleon and Laches. The use of animal satire in this central scene is carefully prepared for from the start of the play and added to throughout, keeping the audience entertained by including animal costumes and sounds. On first sight, one might think that portraying two contemporary, well-known personalities as dogs might make the play’s satire less direct and so less dangerous to the author, who, as we know, had already been persecuted by Cleon at an earlier occasion for satirising him  Pütz, Schräge Vögel, 227-28.

43

52 

B. PÜTZ

in a play.44 However, it is made so obvious which two politicians are meant in this scene, that it rather seems that the use of dogs makes the mockery of the two men funnier. In the satirist’s hands, the ambivalent role of canines in ancient Greece—from loyal workers to greedy, threatening scavengers—primes audiences for lampooning dog-like qualities in humans and illustrates the literary riches of animals for Old Comedy. Animal imagery, then, greatly enhances the satire in this play. It is carefully established and developed, adding humour to the satire.45 Furthermore, the satire of public characters is enhanced by the outrageousness of comparing such well-known figures with rather uncomplimentary animal species. Even the theatre audience itself is satirised as dumb sheep. At the same time, the grotesque nature of Aristophanes’ human–animal hybrids shows that his satire is foremost focussed on making the audience laugh, rather than a serious critique. Finally, animal imagery adds the necessary element of general social commentary to the satire by reminding the audience that physis trumps nomos—humans’ animal natures are stronger than society’s norms and conventions. We are invited to imagine ourselves living out this part of our natures together with Philocleon. We laugh not at the animals, but at the humans which they help characterise in such memorable ways.

Works Cited Aeschylus. (1926) 1999. Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments. Ed. and Trans. H.W.  Smyth with an appendix by H.  Lloyd-Jones. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aristophanes. 1971. Wasps. Ed. and Trans. D.M.  MacDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1983. Wasps. Ed. and Trans. A.H.  Sommerstein. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. ———. 1998, 1998, 2000 and 2002. Wasps. Vol. 1-4. Ed. and trans. J. Henderson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2015. In Wasps, ed. P.B.  Biles and S.D.  Olson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

44  On Cleon’s attempts to prosecute Aristophanes for satirising him see Halliwell, Comic Satire, 48–70, and Sommerstein in Rosen and Sluiter, Free Speech, 145-67. 45  Silk, Aristophanes, 369 and 375, even writes that “Wasps goes beyond satire to an all-­ consuming humour” and that Philocleon’s nature was transcending the political satire.

3  DOGS IN COURT AND SHEEP IN THE ASSEMBLY: ANIMAL SATIRE… 

53

Blakey, J. M. 1972. Canine Imagery in Greek Poetry. Ph.D. Diss. University of North Carolina. Bowie, A.M. 1993. Aristophanes. Myth, Ritual and Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caron, J.E. 2021. Satire as the Comic Public Sphere. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Corbel-Morana, C. 2012. Le Bestiaire d’Aristophane. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 2001 and 2002. Vol. 1 and 5. Euripides. Ed. and trans. D. Kovacs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halliwell, F.S. 1984. Aristophanic satire. Yearbook of English Studies 14: 6–20. ———. 1991. Comic satire and freedom of speech in classical athens. Journal of Hellenic Studies 111: 48–70. Hesiod. 1936. Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica. Ed. and Trans. H.G.E. White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hewitt, J.W. 1913. Elements of humor in the satire of Aristophanes. Classical Journal 8 (7): 293–300. Hile, R.E. 2017. Spenserian Satire: A Tradition of Indirection. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Homer. 1919. Iliad. In Books 1-12, ed. D.B.  Monro and T.W.  Allen, 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1917. Odyssey. In Books 1–12, ed. T.W.  Allen, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kamen, D. 2020. Insults in Classical Athens. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Liddel, H.G., R. Scott, and H.S. Jones. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lilja, S. 1976. Dogs in Ancient Greek Poetry. Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 56. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica. Lysias. 1930. Orations. Ed. and Trans. W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacKinnon, M. 2014. Pets. In The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life, ed. G.L. Campbell, 269–228. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menache, S. 1998. Dogs and human beings: A story of friendship. Society and Animals 6 (1): 67–86. Miles, S. 2017. Cultured animals and wild humans? Talking with the animals in Aristophanes’ Wasps. In Interactions Between Animals and Humans in Graeco-­ Roman Antiquity, ed. T. Fögen and E. Thomas, 205–232. Berlin: De Gruyter. Olson, S.D. 1996. Politics and poetry in Aristophanes’ Wasps. TAPA 126: 129–150. Plato. 2017. Eutyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo. Ed. and Trans. C. Emlyn-Jones and W. Preddy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pütz, B. 2008. Schräge Vögel und flotte Wespen: Grenzüberschreitungen zwischen Mensch und Tier bei Aristophanes. In Mensch und Tier in der Antike, ed. A.  Alexandridis, M.  Wild, and L.  Winkler-Horacek, 219–242. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.

54 

B. PÜTZ

———. 2014. Good to laugh with: Animals in comedy. In The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life, ed. G.L. Campbell, 61–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawlings, L. 2011. A dog called hybris. In Sociable Man: Essays on Ancient Greek Social Behaviour in Honour of Nick Fisher, ed. S.D.  Lambert, 145–160. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Reckford, K.J. 1987. Aristophanes’ Old-And-New Comedy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rosen, R., and I.  Sluiter. 2004. Free Speech in Classical Antiquity. Mnemosyne Suppl. 254. Leiden: Brill. Rosen, R.M. 2007. Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. Efficacy and meaning in ancient and modern political satire: Aristophanes, Lenny Bruce and Jon Stewart. Social Research 79 (1): 1–32. Rothwell, K.S. 2007. Nature, Culture, and the Origins of Greek Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silk, M.S. 2000. Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, L.M. 1981. Costume in Aristophanic Comedy. New York: Arno Press. Thucydides. 1921. History of the Peloponnesian War, Books 5-6. Ed., tr. C.F. Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vaio, J. 1971. Aristophanes’ Wasps: The relevance of the final scenes. GRBS 12: 335–351. Xenophon. 1918. Hellenica vol. 1, Books 1-4. Ed., tr. C.L. Brownson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 4

The “Battle of the Frogs and Mice” (Batrachomyomachia) and Satire in the Ancient Greco-Roman Tradition Matthew Hosty

Satura Quidem … Neither the Greeks nor the Romans would have understood the title of this volume. Although ancient grammarians and scholars loved to discuss and dissect the boundaries of genre, often distinguishing sub-genres based on minor details of linguistic style or poetic metre, “animal satire” is not a category they ever describe. The Greeks—who were every bit as satirical in their instincts as the next culture—never even seem to have isolated “satire” as a specific literary mode. The word kōmos means a revel or a festive procession: it gave rise to a kind of theatrical performance called kōmōidia, a farcical and often surrealist drama staged at Athenian civic festivals like the Great Dionysia. There was also the word iambos, of uncertain origin, which was used to

M. Hosty (*) St John’s College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_4

55

56 

M. HOSTY

describe a type of mocking or insulting poetry aimed at a specific individual or group of individuals: its patron saint was the archaic poet Archilochus, who is supposed to have written a set of iamboi so ferocious that their target, a man called Lycambes, committed suicide in response.1 Both genres overlap to some degree with what we would call satire, but neither is equivalent to it: kōmōidia can be pure slapstick, without any satirical “point”, and iambos can be straightforwardly abusive without any pretensions to humour. It was the Romans who established satura as a type of literature, although the process by which they did so is convoluted and sometimes opaque. The word first appears as the title of a collection, now mostly lost, by the poet Quintus Ennius (third/second century BCE). Ennius’ Saturae were probably a “grab-bag” or a “miscellany”—the word satur means “full”, but may also have connoted being full of different things, and enough fragments remain for us to see that a single book of the Saturae could contain poems on different topics and in different metres.2 It is hard to determine whether these original Saturae were particularly satirical; but the name was adopted by later poets, like Lucilius and Juvenal, who used it to describe what is very recognisably satire.3 The final ancient literary mode which needs to be brought into consideration is what we now call fable. The Latin fabula really means just a tale or story; the Greeks used several different words, including logos (“speech, story”) and ainos (also “story”, though related to the verb aineō “speak positively of, praise, advise”, and therefore carrying an implication of moral guidance or exemplarity).4 Ancient fables—now most closely associated with the semi-mythical figure of Aesop5—were short and sometimes funny anecdotes, which like satire were designed to convey a moral or 1  The word may originally have had a religious meaning: in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (ca. seventh century BCE) we meet an old nurse called Iambe, who entertains the goddess Demeter by making bawdy and scurrilous comments (although the poet discreetly passes over the specifics of what she says). The metrical foot called the iambus or iamb, ˘ –, seems to have taken its name from the type of poetry rather than vice versa. 2  The latter being relatively unusual at the time: Hellenistic Greek collections of shorter poems, like the Iambs of Callimachus and the Idylls of Theocritus, tended to maintain a single metre throughout each book. 3  Livy also refers to a kind of musical-theatrical performance called satura (7.2.4-10); the relationship between this and Lucilian verse satura remains obscure. 4  See Nøjgaard, La Fable Antique, 123ff. 5  Already known as a teller of fables by Herodotus (2.134.3) in the late fifth century BCE.

4  THE “BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE”… 

57

ethical message. Their characters were almost always animals that possessed human-like powers of speech and thought, while still behaving in ways true to their animal selves (foxes hunting chickens, and so on). The moral “point” was generally delivered via analogy—human readers were more or less explicitly invited to spot the connection between the situation in the fable and situations they might encounter in real life. The roots of this genre can be traced right back to the origins of Greek literature: Hesiod’s Works and Days, one of the oldest Greek poems we possess, already includes a short ainos about a talking eagle who carries off a nightingale (202–12). When we look more closely at this set of genres—kōmōidia, iambos, satura, and fable—interesting connections begin to emerge. Hesiod introduces his hawk-and-nightingale story as follows: νῦν δ’ αἶνον βασιλεῦσιν ἐρέω φρονέουσι καὶ αὐτοῖς Now I will tell an ainos to rulers, who themselves have understanding. (WD 202)

In other words, he explicitly states that his animal-ainos will carry a political message. This is not some generalising gnomic story about good and bad behaviour, applicable to anyone who may happen across it: this is a story which engages specifically, albeit obliquely, with a currently relevant socio-political situation and with issues of power and authority. In fact the ainos ends up being so oblique that even today scholars scratch their heads over exactly what Hesiod wanted rulers to take away from it: on a surface level, its “moral” appears to be that the strong can treat the weak however they like, with no consequences. But Hesiod seems to intend it as some sort of political commentary or critique, and thereby anticipates what will, over a thousand years later, become one of the common characteristics of animal satire. (It is easy to imagine Works and Days 202 making an apt epigraph for Orwell’s Animal Farm.) The surviving fragments of Archilochus, the earliest surviving poet of mockery, also make substantial use of motifs from animal fable and of animal imagery more generally. Herennius Philo, discussing the difference between fable (ainos) and proverb (paroimia), quotes from Archilochus: αἶνός τις ἀνθρώπων ὅδε ὡς ἆρ’ ἀλώπηξ καἰετὸς ξυνεωνίην ἔμειξαν …

58 

M. HOSTY

There is an ainos among mankind as follows, that once a fox and an eagle united in friendship. (Archil. fr. 174)6

A handful of other fragments come from what seems to be the same poem, telling the story which we know from the Aesopic collections as The Fable of the Fox and the Eagle (Perry 1), about the penalties for betraying one’s friend. Given that we also have fragments in which Archilochus rails against Lycambes for a betrayal of friendship, it seems quite likely that he told the ainos as a way of warning that there would be a reckoning to come. The famous maxim “the fox knows many tricks; the hedgehog one, but a good one” is attributed to Archilochus by the grammarian Zenobius (Archil. fr. 201). Between Hesiod and Archilochus, it is obvious that seventh-­century BCE Greece already saw the potential of using stories about animals to make pungent and critical comments on a person’s behaviour or a political situation.7 The missing element is comedy: none of the archaic animal stories mentioned so far seem to have been designed to raise a laugh (although the extremely partial and fragmentary tradition makes it impossible to be sure). The closest we come is with Archil. fr. 187, which preserves the punchline of another ainos, the story of the fox and the monkey (also passed down as an Aesopic fable, like the fox and the eagle above). The crafty fox, having lured the overconfident monkey into a humiliating trap, taunts him with the line: τοιήνδε δ’, ὦ πίθηκε, τὴν πυγὴν ἔχων … you, monkey, with an arse like that …

The presence of the colloquial term puge ̄“arse”—not obscene in Greek, but mildly coarse—suggests that this may have been a comic payoff. For animal stories to really attain their comic potential, however, we have to wait for the fifth century BC and the Athenian playwright Aristophanes. The titles of some of his most famous surviving plays—Frogs, Birds, 6  The numeration used for the fragments of Archilochus is taken from Gerber, Greek Iambic Poetry. 7  Cf. Acosta-Hughes and Scodel, Aesop Poeta, 5: “fables in [ancient Greek] literature are especially important as a weapon of the weak in speaking to the powerful … and of an individual confronting a crowd”—two rhetorical positions that will later also become characteristic of satire.

4  THE “BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE”… 

59

Wasps—immediately make clear that animals were important to Aristophanes’ kōmōidia, which was also jam-packed with uncompromising satirical commentary on political figures and celebrities of the day. The first fully extant text which deserves to be called “animal satire” in the modern sense is probably Aristophanes’ Birds (first performed in 414 BC), although its protagonists are actually human.8 Two Athenian citizens, Peisetairos and Euelpides, flee the city of Athens and take refuge with the bird-king Tereus. Peisetairos convinces Tereus and the other birds to create a bird-city in the sky, called Nephelokokkygia (“Cloud-­ Cuckoo-­Land”), and to declare war on the Olympian gods. By Aristophanic standards the satiric point of Birds is unusually blunted: it “[differs] from all Aristophanes’ other fifth-century plays in taking no topical issue, political or otherwise, as a theme”.9 It is nonetheless full of incidental swipes at contemporary issues and personalities, and a substantial section of the play is devoted to a parade of undesirable Athenian stock characters (an oracle-­ seller, an informer, a pretentious poet, and so on), all of whom are resoundingly evicted from Peisetairos’ new utopia. These scenes in particular are an obvious ancestor of Roman satirical catalogues of contemporary malefactors, such as Juvenal 1.22-80. Titles of lost plays by other authors imply that Aristophanes was not the only poet of Old Comedy to use animals as characters, but both the animal and the satirical elements disappeared with the development of “New Comedy”, which chose instead to focus on all-human domestic dramas— love-affairs, mistaken identities, and what we might now think of as situation comedy. It was the New Comedy of Menander, not the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, that the early Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence took as their model: the satirical vigour of Aristophanes, stripped of its more surreal and slapstick elements, instead found a new outlet in 8  The status of Wasps, an earlier play, is debatable. The Wasps themselves are not animals: they are a chorus of angry old men, who compare themselves to wasps (and were probably dressed in wasp-like costumes on stage), but are clearly understood by all present to be fully human. The trial of Labes the dog at 805-1002, on the other hand, arguably does contain all the necessary elements to be considered animal satire: the canine prosecutor and defendant are transparent disguises for the contemporary politicians Cleon and Laches (although only one of them is allowed to speak), and the details of the “case” are all based on recent events. For further discussion, see Babette Pütz’s chapter in this volume. Frogs, which came later, does feature actual talking frogs, but they play a very small role in the play and have no particular satirical purpose. 9  Henderson, Aristophanes, 3.

60 

M. HOSTY

the saturae of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal.10 Animals, on the other hand, rarely feature in these poets’ works—certainly not as actors or characters. One of the few surviving fragments of Ennius’ Saturae is a retelling of an Aesopic animal fable.11 At Satires 2.6.77–117 Horace tells the famous story of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, as part of a wider complaint about the troubles of city living, but the point is fabular rather than satirical: it is a charming narrative way of expressing the generalised conclusion “peace and simplicity in the country is better than luxury and danger in the city”. No Roman satirist actually uses animal characters to reflect or refract a specific contemporary situation in the human world. To sum up our survey of Classical literature so far: ancient fable uses animal protagonists, but is by default neither topical nor humorous (though, as Hesiod proves, animal fables can be deployed to comment obliquely on a topical issue). Iambos is ferociously aggressive and shows some signs of a generic association with animal stories, but is only incidentally comic. Old Comedy is very funny, very topical, and makes some use of talking-animal characters—but never really brings the three elements into a unified whole (the talking birds of Birds are not particularly satirical, while the highly satirical “wasps” of Wasps are not really meant to be wasps). And Roman satura is, naturally enough, satirical in the modern sense, but does not generally seem interested in animals—definitely not anthropomorphised ones. We can now turn to the Batrachomyomachia.

Frogs and Mice There is no fully preserved text from Classical antiquity quite like the Batrachomyomachia, “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice” (hereafter BM; its original title may have been simply Batrachomachia, “The Frog War”).12 It is a Greek poem of roughly 300 lines—significantly longer than a normal lyric or elegiac poem, but much shorter than a tragedy for example— written in dactylic hexameter, the traditional metre of epic. Its style, register, and vocabulary are all highly reminiscent of epic, particularly of  As the satirists themselves sometimes acknowledge: see Persius 1.123-4, Horace 1.4.1-5.  Quoted at Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 2.29.17-20; appears as fr. 10 of the Satires in Goldberg and Manuwald, Fragmentary Republican Latin. 12  For more detail on general points about the poem’s composition and genre, see Hosty, Batrachomyomachia, 1–33. 10 11

4  THE “BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE”… 

61

the Iliad. It tells, in simple narrative fashion, the story of how a prince called Psicharpax meets a foreign king called Physignathus by the shore of a lake. The king invites the prince back to his palace as a guest, but during the journey something goes wrong, and the prince is killed; the cowardly king abandons him to his fate rather than trying to rescue him. When the news is brought to the prince’s father, he furiously declares war on the other kingdom. An enormous and bloody battle is fought, with conspicuous acts of valour on both sides, until eventually the gods intervene to bring the conflict to a sudden end. All of this is perfectly within the domain of ancient heroic epic, except for one key fact: every single non-divine character in the story is a talking animal. Prince Psicharpax is a mouse, as are all his countrymen; King Physignathus and his people are frogs.13 The death of Psicharpax occurs because Physignathus tries to give him a ride across the lake (really more of a pond) but accidentally throws him off into the water, where he drowns. The basic plot of this story is taken from the world of fable. There is a fable found in most of the Aesopic collections, “The Mouse and the Frog”, which tells an obviously similar tale: a mouse asked a frog for a ride across a body of water; the frog betrayed him, and left him to drown; the mouse, as he died, uttered a curse against the treacherous frog; a bird of prey, attracted by the mouse’s struggles, swooped down from the sky and ended up catching and eating the frog. The moral, as often in fable—as, indeed, in “The Fox and the Eagle”, used to such effect by Archilochus— is that people who betray their allies will not escape eventual retribution. What seems to have happened is that a poet who knew this traditional ainos decided to rework it into a miniature epic, by chopping off the part with the bird of prey and adding in its place a declaration of war on the Frogs by the mouse’s kinsmen. This enabled the second half of the resulting poem to be taken up with an impeccably Homeric battle scene, full of flashing bronze and crunching bone. Everything about the circumstances of the BM’s creation remains obscure. It was certainly not, as some ancient sources believed, composed by Homer. Linguistic features and intertextual connections strongly suggest that it was written some time between the third and first centuries BCE—after Callimachus, but before Vergil. Since this so-called Hellenistic period of Greek literature is known, among other qualities, for an interest 13  Their names, like all names in the poem, are significant: “Psicharpax” literally means “Crumb-snatcher”, and “Physignathus” means “Puff-cheek”.

62 

M. HOSTY

in formal experimentation and deliberate muddling of genres, it is certainly easy to imagine how a Hellenistic Greek poet might have liked the idea of recasting a traditional fable as a tiny heroic epic.14 The author’s name has (unusually) been lost to time: hundreds of years later, some manuscripts record the poem as the work of a mysterious individual called Pigres or Tigres, from Caria in Asia Minor—but this is quite unverifiable, and even if it were true it would not tell us very much, since no other information about Pigres/Tigres survives. All we know for sure is that by the first century AD the BM had become popular—the Roman poets Martial and Statius both refer to it, and both seem to have regarded it as a genuine minor work of Homer, since they both mention it in the context of great writers amusing themselves with trivial or playful compositions. It remained a widely circulated and well-known poem all through the Byzantine period and into the Renaissance, only really dropping below the critical horizon during the nineteenth century, in the wake of definite linguistic proof that it could not be Homeric. It is possible—indeed, I judge it quite likely—that miniature “animal epics” of this kind were a literary trend in the Hellenistic period, even if only a short-lived one.15 The BM’s only living relative is a few papyrus scraps of a similarly faux-Homeric narrative, again told in dactylic hexameter and an epic register, describing the outbreak of a war between a tribe of mice and a weasel. This too is a plot taken from fable (“The Mice and their Generals”, Babrius 31, Phaedrus 4.6; weasels rather than cats were the classic mouse-catchers in the ancient Greco-Roman world), although so little of the poem survives that we cannot tell how closely it adhered to the original story. But if other mini-epics of this kind did exist, none of them seem to have survived into the following centuries, and today for all intents and purposes the BM stands as the sole example of its genre.16 14  Where in this two-century window the poem ought to fall is a harder question to answer. I favour a relatively early date—early second century, or perhaps even very late third—but this is by no means certain. 15  Hosty, Batrachomyomachia, 32. 16  There existed in ancient Egypt a separate but obviously related tradition of visual art depicting mice and cats fighting each other, usually with the equipment and tactics of human warfare (archers, chariots, and so on). These often follow the comic principle of monde renversé—so that the mice are shown in dominant or aggressive roles, for example laying siege to a cat fortress, rather than the other way round—although it is hard to tell whether the intent was satirical or purely surrealist. See Brunner-Traut, Katzenmäuserkrieg. Since neither frogs nor mice normally prey on the other species, the concept of reversal is not relevant to the BM.

4  THE “BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE”… 

63

If the facts of its composition are opaque, so too are its literary objectives. Modern encyclopaedias and reference works tend to describe it as an example of ancient parody, and there is some merit to this. The Greek word parōidia, which comes from para “next to, alongside” + ōide ̄“song” and gives us the English “parody”, seems to have been used in literary discussion to mean something like “reapplication”: the parōidos or parodist was someone who borrowed the style or language of a particular text and applied it to something different, often but not always producing a humorous effect. When you quote a line from a “serious” poet, like Homer or Aeschylus, but change one or two words to produce a homely, trivial, crude, or otherwise “unserious” effect, you are engaging in parōidia—what we might think of as the “While shepherds washed their socks by night” approach. The BM almost never engages in this kind of deliberate misquotation, but it is written in a very careful imitation of Homeric style, and many of its narrative beats are obviously reminiscent of scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey.17 No ancient reader could have encountered the BM without Homer being uppermost in their mind throughout. But imitation of Homer was widespread in ancient literature—from entire “serious” epics composed in Homeric style, like the third-century AD Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna, to epitaphs found carved on tombstones from the rural communities of central Anatolia.18 What makes the BM a parody rather than simply a descendant? Presumably, its humorous intent. Yet when we look at the poem, there is surprisingly little in the way of obvious humour to be found. As the plot summary above suggests, almost everything that happens—genealogical boasting, curses on one’s enemy, assembly scenes, speeches of lamentation, divine councils, battles—would be perfectly appropriate to a genuine heroic epic. The one thing that makes the BM funny, or at least non-serious, is the fact that its protagonists are all animals—and not even powerful, “epic” animals, like lions or eagles, but small and basically harmless creatures which the average Greek would have been used to seeing in their surroundings on a daily basis.

17  For example, the speech Psicharpax’s father Troxartes gives on learning of his son’s death has strong echoes of Priam’s mourning speech for Hector in the Iliad, and a damaged scene towards the end seems to involve a mouse hero called Meridarpax single-handedly routing the Frog army in much the way that Achilles does to the Trojans in Iliad Books 20–21. 18  On the latter see Thonemann, Poets of the Axylon.

64 

M. HOSTY

The tension between heroic actions and unheroic (because animal) actors is carefully controlled and modulated throughout the poem. Sometimes the poet seems to want us so swept up in the narrative that we almost forget we are not reading about Achilles and Hector; at other times, the animality of the characters is brought inescapably to our attention. The contrast in scale is first brought out in the proem, where the narrator announces his or her intent to relate “how the Mice went among the Frogs … emulating the deeds of those Earth-born men, the Giants”. The Gigantomachia or “War of the Giants” was a famous topos of epic poetry— the story of how the offspring of Earth, the Giants, made war against Olympus and were eventually defeated by Zeus and the other gods. The comparison is at once an announcement that the poet plans to write a big, serious, action-packed epic, and a playful reminder that (unlike the Giants) the Mice are extremely small. The rest of the poem can be broken down into six fairly discrete episodes. I. Conversation between Psicharpax the Mouse and Physignathus the Frog (9–64) II. Journey across the pond, death of Psicharpax (65–97) III. Assembly of the Mice; declaration of war; both sides arm for battle (99–167) IV. Divine council on Olympus (168–97) V. The battle (198–267) VI. Final intervention by Zeus; Mice driven away (268–303) The least “animal” and most straightforwardly epic of these episodes is the battle. There is very little reference here even to the physical details of mouse and frog anatomy—many lines could be reused without alteration to describe human fighters.19 We are given a glimpse of how different this could have looked in the very final lines of the poem, when a swarm of 19  In my translation of the poem in Hosty, Batrachomyomachia, I opted to accentuate the animal aspects where the Greek is actually ambiguous. For example, I translated geneion (10) as “muzzle”, trikhes (91) as “fur”, kheiri (239) as “paw”, and lipareisi ̄ … lagonessin (222) as “the slimy sheen of his flanks”. The first three nouns can equally well mean “chin”, “hair”, and “hand” when used of a human being—unlike the English, there is nothing inherently animalistic about them—and even liparos, which I rendered as “slimy” when describing a frog, is often used of human bodies which are “gleaming” with oil or ointment (e.g. of athletes).

4  THE “BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE”… 

65

crabs sent by Zeus emerges from the water to attack the Mice: the poet specifies that they “bit at the tails of the mice” (299). This is the first time we have been reminded that the Mice have tails since line 74—a line which is likely not even original to the poem. By contrast, the episode where most is made of the characters’ non-human status is probably the arming scene, in which we are given detailed descriptions of the Mice and Frogs donning wargear that is appropriate to them in size and provenance: the Mice are using sewing-needles as spears and chickpea shells as helmets, for example, while the Frogs use sharp bullrushes and snail-shells. The characterisation of the two species is broadly in line with the way they tend to be represented in Greek animal fable, but is not a primary concern of the poet. In fable, mice are generally depicted as greedy and daring, but are sometimes also exemplars of caution or cunning; frogs are often boastful or arrogant in speech, but stupid or cowardly in action. There are certainly signs of this in the BM. Psicharpax’s opening speech is a mouth-watering encomium to all the delicious foods he likes to eat (bread, cake, cheese, ham, and more), and Physignathus, after a grandiose introduction, leaves his new ally to drown because he is panicked by the sudden appearance of a water-snake.20 Yet the poet makes no more systematic attempt to distinguish the two sides by personality than he does by anatomy: although by the end of the battle scene the Mice are victorious and the Frogs are fleeing, Homeric battle scenes generally do end with either the Greeks or the Trojans being forced to retreat, and there is no real sense that the Frogs have been defeated because they are unusually timid or cowardly. Nor is the murine obsession with food a major Leitmotiv: it is mentioned by Athene in her complaint at 178–186 (the Mice have chewed up the sacred paraphernalia in her temple), and alluded to in many of the speaking names given to mouse characters (Psicharpax “Crumb-­ Snatcher”, Troxartes “Bread-Chewer”, and so on), but apart from the speech of Psicharpax it never really features in the plot. To put it another way, the fact that the two armies in the BM are mice and frogs in particular is not enormously important; all that really matters to the poet is that they are small, familiar, everyday creatures. On the surface, the BM only really has one joke: animals are behaving like humans, and not just like any humans, but like the characters of the  An alteration from the plot of the original fable, in which the frog deliberately betrays and abandons the mouse. 20

66 

M. HOSTY

Iliad and Odyssey, the two most celebrated and revered heroic epics of the ancient world. The things the protagonists say and do are barely if at all removed from the world of bona fide epic, but speeches and actions which would be tragic or heroic if given to Achilles become charming and amusing when given to a mouse. Modern readers of the poem who have been introduced to it as a “parody” of Homer are sometimes primed to expect that it will make fun of its model, in the way that Henry Fielding’s Shamela parodies Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs parodies George Lucas’ Star Wars. Again, there is little sign of this.21 A couple of plot points can be explained as humorous exaggerations of quirks which genuinely occur in Homer: the strange two-stage denouement, where Zeus fails to scare the Mice off with a thunderbolt and so is forced to send a horde of crabs, is vaguely reminiscent of the confusing ending of the Odyssey (where Zeus ends up throwing a thunderbolt at Athene after she apparently ignores his instructions). There is also an issue running through the battle scene with individual warriors seemingly coming back to life— most spectacularly Psicharpax himself, who drowns at line 99 and then turns up alive and well in the fighting at line 234, without authorial comment. The Iliad has a few minor characters whose deaths fail to stick, most notoriously a Greek warrior named Hypsenor, who is killed by Deiphobus at Il. 13.411–12 but then carried off “groaning heavily” by his men at 13.423, only twenty-one lines later. It is possible, therefore, that the BM  Some scholars have suggested that the BM’s attitude to heroism—in the sense of the implicit ethical code that underlies most heroic epic—is mocking or satirical: see Scodel, Iambos, 264, “the [BM] overtly satirizes not just the conventions of epic, but heroic attributes” (emphasis mine). Scodel argues that Psicharpax is “gullible and cowardly” while Physignathus is “vain, thoughtless, and deceitful”. I am not altogether convinced by this. For one thing, writing an epic about a specific hero who is cowardly or vain is not necessarily the same thing as satirising the epic hero in general; for another, the negative traits of the BM’s characters are not strongly emphasised by the text. Psicharpax is certainly depicted as terrified by the storm that blows up during the pond-crossing (“he uttered terrible groans, gripped by icy fear”, 73), but feeling fear in a dangerous situation is not actually antithetical to ancient epic heroism: even Achilles is described as deisas, “frightened”, when the flood of Scamander threatens to overwhelm him (Il. 21.248). Likewise, Physignathus rather dishonourably tries to pass off blame for Psicharpax’s death at 147–50, but we more than once see Agamemnon in the Iliad try to evade responsibility for the disaster that has befallen the Achaeans (for instance his self-exonerating speech at Il. 19.78-144). The characters of the BM are not moral paragons, but nor are those of the Iliad, and I see no evidence that ancient readers of Homer were blind to the nuances involved. 21

4  THE “BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE”… 

67

is deliberately “parodying”—albeit in an oblique and unostentatious way—Homer’s occasional inconsistencies over who is alive and who is dead.22 There is another explanation, though. We know that scholarship on the Homeric epics was a widespread intellectual pursuit throughout the Hellenistic period.23 Philology was not restricted to the library and the lecture hall: the early Hellenistic philosopher Epicurus is supposed to have advised rulers who were truly philomusoi, lovers of the arts, to prevent their banquets from descending into impromptu seminars by forbidding all discussion about “poetic problems and the philological investigations of critics”.24 Today we might worry that a dinner party would be ruined by a swerve into tendentious political discussion; Epicurus seems to have felt that arguments about the text of Homer might have a similar effect. Nor were literary and textual criticism considered a wholly separate discipline from poetic composition: it is relatively well-established that Alexandrian poets such as Callimachus and Apollonius sometimes used their verse to engage indirectly with scholarly controversies, especially those surrounding Homer, the first and greatest of their poetic forebears.25 The BM is very conscious of its status as a work of modern poetry. Its opening lines present us with a homely image that nonetheless upsets a fundamental assumption about epic verse: the poet prays for the Muses to lend their power, “for the song’s sake/which just now I have set down in tablets upon my knees”. The word “tablets”, deltoi, refers to the wax-­ covered wooden boards which scholars of all ages used as the equivalent to a modern notebook: the wax surface could be scratched on and then erased for reuse, without wasting expensive papyrus and ink. But writing things out in advance is not epic. A true archaic epic poet would just have 22  Scholarly analysis of this issue has been badly hampered by the state of the text: many early editors assumed that the re-emergences of Psicharpax et al. were caused by corruption in the manuscript tradition, and tried to emend the text to remove the problems. 23  For a brief summary of scholarly activity during the period, see Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 5–19. 24  Quoted (as part of a fierce attack on Epicurus’ point of view) by Plutarch, Moralia 1095 CE. It is worth noting that one of the longest works of literary discussion and analysis to survive from the ancient world, albeit from a later period, is the second-century CE Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus—originally fifteen whole books of dinner table conversation between a crowd of scholars, all of whom clearly love nothing better than trading obscure literary trivia and arguing about points of interpretation. 25  See Rengakos, Homeric scholar.

68 

M. HOSTY

sung: Homer, transformed by divine power into the mouthpiece of the Muses, has no need to write himself a prompt sheet in advance. Our poet is a writer—not, like the inspired bards of the archaic past, a singer. This portrayal could already be taken as gently satirical: instead of a bearded sage, lyre in the crook of his arm, pouring forth honeyed verses to a spellbound audience, we are shown a very recognisable scholar hunched over on a stool in the reading room, frantically scratching and smearing-out lines on a wax slate. The bathos is accentuated by the following comparison of the Mice to the Giants: beyond the obvious contrast in size, we are perhaps also invited to see the author, and by extension other Hellenistic poet-scholars, as tiny mice struggling to live up to the heroic exploits of earlier literary “giants”. In this light, it is easy to see how something like the mysterious resurrection of Psicharpax discussed above might be a joke aimed less at Homer’s continuity errors and more at the critics who poured such energy into resolving them. Few first-time readers even notice the fact that a Trojan warrior called Chromius actually dies three times during the Iliad. Anyone who did notice would be unlikely to feel that it interfered much with the poem’s literary merits. A parodist, in the modern sense, tends to light on features of an author’s style which are visible to the casual reader (or at least visible with a bit of nudging). But the Iliad is hardly rife with undead warriors: the glitch occurs a handful of times in over 15,000 lines of poetry, and only ever with very minor characters. Most readers of the BM, confronted with Psicharpax’s reappearance, are bewildered or assume a textual error. We know, however, that these unexpected resurrections were noticed and actively studied in ancient scholarship: discussing the death of Hypsenor, mentioned above, the famous Alexandrian grammarian Aristarchus proposed changing a word in the text so that “groaning” referred to Hypsenor’s followers, not to the dead man himself.26 The only readers who are likely to recognise in the BM a reference to Homer’s occasional resurrections are the ones—ancient grammarians or modern scholars—who have spent altogether too much time with Homer. Another possible example of what we might consider affectionate satire comes at line 135, where the Frogs are depicted as looking for “the source of the uproar, or what the news might be”. In Greek this is literally “and as they were enquiring (skeptomenōn) from where the discord (stasis) came, or what was the story (muthos)”. In Classical Greek, stasis normally means  See Fenik, Battle Scenes, 132; Kelly, Referential Commentary, 397–8.

26

4  THE “BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE”… 

69

dissent, uprising, or political turmoil, while the very common word muthos means just a tale or any kind of narrative account. At Odyssey 21.71, however, Penelope addresses the Suitors, accusing them of consuming the resources of Odysseus’ house: “nor”, she says, “have you been able to come up with any episkhe ̄sia of a muthos, except that you are seeking to marry me”. An episkhe ̄sia is something like a pretext (literally a “thing held out in front”), and so Penelope’s comment should probably be translated as “any attempt at a justification”—understanding muthos in context as the story one tells to explain why one is doing something. An anonymous ancient commentator, however, writing in what we now call the V-scholia to the poem adds a helpful note to this line: “muthos: in modern language, stasis”. This is supported by the early Byzantine lexicon called the Etymologicum Genuinum, which glosses the word muthos as follows: “i.e., stasis; used once in Homer, in Odyssey 21, where he writes ‘to come up with any episkhe ̄sia of a muthos’”. This seems to be a based on a misinterpretation of Penelope’s remark— that she is saying “nor have you been able to come up with any explanation (episkhe ̄sia) for your unruly behaviour (muthos)”, and that in this context muthos has the unique meaning “squabbling, chaos, uproar” and is therefore very similar to stasis. Why some ancient scholars took the line this way is a mystery.27 If we assume, however, that a certain amount of scholarly ink had been spilt on Od. 21.71 and the sense of the word muthos, BM 135 suddenly changes from an unremarkable line of hexameter verse to a neat joke. The Frogs are investigating—the verb skeptomai can mean either to look around or to examine something critically—where stasis came from and what muthos is. Against the backdrop of active discussion about whether muthos could mean the same thing as the later word stasis, which never appears in Homer at all, this becomes an allusion to a crux of contemporary philology. To cement the link, three lines later a Mouse herald appears “bringing the dreadful phatis of war”. Phatis means something spoken out loud, and in Homer tends to mean “what is commonly said”, a general opinion or the topic of popular discussion. At BM 139 it clearly means a report of a thing—the herald is not bringing general gossip about war, he is formally announcing the news that the Mice have declared war on the Frogs. This sense of phatis, governing a genitive noun to mean “news of an event”, is used once and only once by 27  There is some very scanty and partial evidence for muthos and its compounds being used this way elsewhere in early Greek: see Matthews, Panyassis, 135–36.

70 

M. HOSTY

Homer—Odyssey 23.362, where Odysseus says that tomorrow morning the phatis of the Suitors’ deaths will travel. One branch of Hellenistic and later ­scholarship on Homer was devoted to cataloguing hapax legomena, words he only uses once, or only once with a particular sense: here we have references to two different hapax legomena, muthos meaning “uproar” and phatis meaning “news”, in a single short passage.28 Attempts to excavate political satire from the BM—such as the famously bizarre contention of Herrmann that the poem is a satirical take on the events of AD 69, in which the Mice, Frogs, and crabs represent the armies of Vitellius, Otho, and Vespasian, respectively—have met with little support.29 Nor is there much sign of moral or social satire at work: Psicharpax’s encomium of the delicious foods he likes to eat (31–55), with its concomitant dismissal of the Frogs’ boring vegetable diet, is part of a long Greek comic tradition of exuberant food catalogues and unlikely to carry any topical point.30 To the extent that the BM is a satire at all, we would have to categorise it as primarily intellectual satire. Its learned in-jokes on problems of Homeric scholarship would only have appealed to the kind of poet-critics who frequented the Museum in Alexandria and ruined Epicurus’ dinner parties—while its wider comic conceit, that of comparing tiny animals to fearsome giants and epic heroes, carries an obvious reflection on the contrast between Homer’s grand art and the petty contemporary struggles over individual words in his text. This kind of artistic introspection would be entirely Hellenistic. Scodel notes the tendency of the “satirical” instinct in literature of the period to express itself as detached, amused, and intellectual—very much the tone that would later be borrowed by Horace in his Epodes and Epistles—rather than as ferocious and personal.31 It would be really startling if a Greek 28  See also Kelly, Hellenistic arming, which suggests that the arming-scene at BM 122–31, where the Mice don their wargear in Homeric fashion, is an additional response to a scholarly controversy which Apollonius had already acknowledged in the Argonautica. 29  Expressed in, for example, Herrmann, Babrius. It is interesting that from the fifteenth century onwards, editions and translations of the BM often attempted to press it into service as a text with a political message to convey: the earliest surviving English translation, that of William Fowldes in 1603, advertises itself as “couertly decyphering the estate of these times”. See further Carpinato, La fortuna della Batrachomyomachia; and Braund, Translation as a battlefield. 30  Wölke, Untersuchungen, 225–33, does suggest that the speech is a comic portrayal of social snobbery, in which Psicharpax favours “wealthy” foods over “poor” ones; I disagree (Hosty, Batrachomyomachia, 142–3). 31  Scodel, “Iambos”.

4  THE “BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE”… 

71

poem from the third or second century BC scorched like Juvenal or spat venom like Archilochus; some mild and self-deprecating mockery of obsessive library-dwellers, on the other hand, would perfectly suit the aesthetic and political climate. A much-quoted fragment from Timon of Phlius, a Hellenistic philosopher who wrote a collection of satirical verses called the Silloi, describes “bookish recluses” (bubliakoi kharakitai) in Egypt quarrelling with each other while being fed “in the Muses’ bird-­ cage” (Mouseōn en talaro ̄i)32; the image seems to be of fat, pampered birds who cannot look after themselves, since the word kharakite ̄s means “protected by a fence” or “cloistered”. This scornful summation has a sharper tone than anything in the BM, which seems more amused than annoyed by the little creatures who fight to the death around the shores of a garden pond, but a similar satiric point animates both images: scholars as small, plump, harmless, and prone to ferocious battles. Like many of the best satires, it is a verdict that remains uncomfortably recognisable to this day.

Works Cited Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin, and Ruth Scodel. 2004. Aesop poeta: Aesop and the fable in Callimachus’ iambi. In Callimachus II, ed. M. Annette Harder, Remco F. Regtuit, and Gerry C. Wakker, 1–21. Leuven: Peeters. Braund, Susanna. 2011. Translation as a battlefield: Dryden, pope and the frogs and mice. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 18: 547–568. Brunner-Traut, Emma. 1954. Der Katzenmäuserkrieg im alten und neuen Orient. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 104: 347–351. Carpinato, Caterina. 1988. La fortuna della Batrachomyomachia dal ix al xvi secolo: da testo scolastico a testo «politico». In La Battaglia delle Rane e dei Topi: Batrachomyomachia, ed. Massimo Fusillo, 137–148. Milan: Guerini e associati. Fenik, Bernard. 1968. Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. Gerber, Douglas E. 1999. Greek Iambic Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldberg, Sander M., and Gesine Manuwald. 2018. Fragmentary Republican Latin, Volume II: Ennius, Dramatic Fragments. Minor works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henderson, Jeffrey. 2000. Aristophanes, Birds. Lysistrata. Women at the Thesmophoria. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herrmann, Léon. 1973. Babrius et ses Poèmes. Brussels: Latomus. 32  Supplementum Hellenisticum 786; quoted at Athenaeus 1.22d. The mention of a Muses’ bird-cage in Egypt has been taken since Athenaeus himself as a reference to Alexandria and its Museum.

72 

M. HOSTY

Hosty, Matthew. 2020. Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice): Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelly, Adrian. 2007. A Referential Commentary and Lexicon to Iliad VIII. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Hellenistic arming in the Batrachomyomachia. Classical Quarterly 64: 410–413. Matthews, Victor J. 1974. Panyassis of Halikarnassos: Text and Commentary. Leiden: Brill. Nøjgaard, Morten. 1964. La Fable Antique. Vol. 1. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag. Rengakos, Antonios. 2001. Apollonius Rhodius as a Homeric scholar. In A Companion to Apollonius Rhodius, ed. Theodore D. Papanghelis and Antonios Rengakos, 193–216. Leiden: Brill. Reynolds, Leighton D., and Nigel G. Wilson. 2013. Scribes and Scholars. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scodel, Ruth. 2010. Iambos and parody. In A Companion to Hellenistic Literature, ed. James J. Clauss and Martine Cuypers, 251–266. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Thonemann, Peter. 2014. Poets of the Axylon. Chiron 44: 191–232. Wölke, Hansjörg. 1978. Untersuchungen zur Batrachomyomachie. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain.

CHAPTER 5

Making an Ass of Yourself? The Pointed Comedy of the Mirror for Fools Diane Heath

To call someone a donkey is discourteous—to call them an ass is far ruder. Behind the asinine slur of being slow (and dim), there is a broad hint of arse, like Bottom wearing his Ass’s head in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the Middle Ages, when Latin was the vehicle for scholarly debate, asinus (ass) had sexual connotations too—it put si (indeed) inside anus.1 The medieval poet Nigel Wireker knew exactly what he was

1  In the Middle Ages the Latin for ass, “asinus” was considered a vulgar term and “asellus” was used instead. This change was mirrored aptly in English where “ass” (with its connotations of arse) was replaced by “donkey” in the eighteenth century. See Smithies, Introducing the Ass, 8-9 and n. 10, and Housman, The Latin for ass, 11.

D. Heath (*) Centre for Kent History and Heritage, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_5

73

74 

D. HEATH

doing when he made his anti-hero Burnellus an ass.2 Nigel (c. 1145–1217) was a Benedictine monk of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, the mother church of England. His popular, pun-filled, poem, Speculum Stultorum, or the Mirror for Fools, remains an engaging and at times biting satire on monks and priests, nobles and bishops, and kings and popes. The Latin poem is 3900 lines long, written in elegiac couplets, and relates the comic adventures of Nigel’s wild and untamed ass Burnellus (or “Browny”), a humble animal often used to symbolise a lowly monk.3 This chapter begins by contextualising the poem and providing a synopsis, before exploring the major satirical aspects of the Mirror for Fools’ animal representation, which is to say the main elements of the poem’s animal-satirical style and the sources that Nigel used to develop his satire. These groundworks develop into an examination of the poem’s key targets and the satirical strategy for attacking them. The chapter ends with a reflection on how this particular satirical approach allows the book to speak to the cultural arena of today.

2  Little is certain about Nigel’s life, see Rigg, Canterbury, Nigel of (c. 1135–1198?). Perhaps born at Whiteacre (or “Witeker”), near Canterbury, Nigel studied at the schools of Paris, inferred from references in the Mirror for Fools, lines 1513-70, before he became a monk at Canterbury Christ Church Priory probably during the archiepiscopate of Thomas Becket (1165–70). Nigel may have witnessed Becket’s martyrdom in the cathedral; he certainly visited the court of Richard I in London in 1189. Rigg notes that the date of Nigel’s death has also been subject to debate. However, the Obit List in British Library, Arundel 68, records the death of Nigel, a monk and priest, on 13 August (fol. 38, l. 8) and the Canterbury Cathedral Priory’s Treasurer’s Accounts 1207–1308, f. 60v, lists the monies received on Nigel’s death in 1217, from which I deduce Nigel died on 13 August 1217. There is also scholarly debate about how to name Nigel, as “Wireker” is probably a sixteenth-century scribal error for “Witeker”, according to Rigg. 3  The Latin names “Burnellus” and “Brunellus” are interchangeable, both mean Browny. Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum (Mirror for Fools) is the standard scholarly Latin edition. For a translation of the poem, including the accompanying dedicatory Letter to William, see Regenos, Daun Burnel. Both the scholarly edition and Regenos’s book are available via Internet Archive. I refer to the poem in English as Mirror for Fools (and use Regenos’s translation) and refer to the Latin edition as Speculum Stultorum. See also Mozley “Epistola ad Willelmum”, 13-20, and Mozely, /A Mirror/. The Letter to William has also been translated in Mann, Aesop to Reynard, Appendix 3.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

75

Context and Synopsis It was the Middle Ages that gave us the ass-eared figure of the jester, whose guise as an assy, sassy simpleton allowed him to tell truth to power.4 The representation of human–animal relationships in medieval literature, such as the tales of Reynard the Fox, also drew in satire and comedy in the form of imitation and paradox, as well as resistance to authority.5 Nigel’s satirical epic poem was composed in stages at various times around 1175 to 1200 (a key period in the interplay between sovereign power and increasing papal authority) and the poem remains most pertinent for thinking through the ever-renewing relevance of animal satire for political critique.6 The Mirror for Fools presents several fruitful resonances with modern satirical literature and animal satire in terms of its animal anti-­ hero, its humorous doubling wordplay, its questioning of masculinities, and its intricate exploration of authority and domination that complicates the binary of oppressed and oppressor. However, Nigel did not take himself too seriously; his creation, Burnellus, is in effect a talking donkey (like the character now widely known from the Disney cartoon Shrek). His choice of animal anti-hero implies that Nigel knew he could easily be accused of talking out of his ass. Unsurprisingly then, although a satire, the Mirror for Fools has many lighter comedic episodes that kept it in favour long after its political moment was forgotten. An impressive 40 manuscripts and early printed books of the poem from England and the Continent survive, ranging from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century; such wide geographical coverage over so long a period indicates the poem’s enduring and widespread popularity.7 The wide-ranging contextual resonance of the asinine figure and its use to expose common clerical and monastic weaknesses and abuses were the main reasons for this extensive esteem, evident even in the poem’s  Jones, The Secret Life of the Middle Ages, 102.  Medieval animal satire includes the well-known stories of Reynard the Fox (see Avery, Reynard the Fox and Wacker, Introducing the Medieval Fox), animal fables known from antiquity (see Hervieux, Fabulistes Latin and Adradros et al., History of the Graeco-Latin Fable), and the subversive (and frequently obscene) fabliaux (Bédier, Les Fabliaux). See too Bonello Rutter Giappone, Francis, and MacKenzie, Comedy and Critical Thought, 1-12. 6  There is a mention in the Mirror for Fools of King Louis VII who died in 1180 (line 102) and a reference to Nigel going to the royal court, datable to November 1189 (line 2367), see Stubbs, Chronicles, lxxv-vi and letter cccxxix. 7  See Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, manuscript list, 9-15 and n. 56, 127-8, for two later copies from Germany. 4 5

76 

D. HEATH

lightest and most humorous touches. Take, for example, Nigel’s parody of a well-known passage in the Vulgate Bible on Dies Irae (the Day of Judgement). In these verses (Zephaniah 1:15–16), the word Dies (day) is repeated like a drumbeat to warn and emphasise the imminent and terrifying end of the world.8 Nigel linked Dies Irae instead to two cows talking about their tails being stuck in the mud. This passage is presented as a warning to Burnellus not to pursue his stupid plan to find a way to make his tail as long and luxuriant as his beautiful Ass ears (a warning to which Burnellus naturally pays no heed at all): That day of doom and dread throughout the world Will, like Judgement Day, be filled with fear. That day will take account of all our tails, And justly choose which ones are good or bad.9 Illa dies dura multumque tremenda per orbem Tanquam judicii plena timoris erit. Illa dies caudas nostras numerabit, et illa Discernet pariter quae bona quaeve mala.10

Not only were the Vulgate verses from Zephaniah an excellent example of anaphoras or amplification, but such figures of repetition were funny as they were very familiar to Nigel’s medieval readers because they were taught at school as rhetorical exercises, while later, and serendipitously, Dies Irae became a famous thirteenth-century hymn.11 A dozen English manuscripts (and nine Continental ones) also include an explanatory letter Nigel sent to his dedicatee, William de Longchamp, Bishop of Ely (1189–97), that was written to accompany the Mirror for Fools. The letter reveals that the poem’s combination of satire on clerical abuses (such as nepotism and simony—having more than one Church 8  Vulgate Bible, Zephaniah 1:15-16 “Dies irae dies illa, dies tribulationis et angustiae, dies calamitatis et miseriae, dies tenebrarum et caliginis, dies nebulae et turbinis, dies tubae et clangoris super civitates munitas, et super angulos excelsos”. “That day is a day of wrath, a day of tribulation and distress, a day of calamity and misery, a day of darkness and obscurity, a day of clouds and whirlwinds. A day of the trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities, and against the high bulwarks)”. Douay-Rheims Vulgate English translation. 9  Regenos, The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass, 43. 10  Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, lines 413-416. 11  See Ibid, lines 367-448, for the parody on rhetoric exercises as declaimed by Brunetta, “in praise of her tail”, and see notes on lines 405-26,106, on tails symbolising the devil, Regenos, The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass, 42-43, and Mann, Aesop to Reynard, 126.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

77

income), sharp political commentary, and broad comedy allows us to consider the poem in terms of animal-centred political satire, parody, and laughter as resistance. Burnellus the Ass is a comic figure but one written in a highly politicised context that features kings, popes, papal legates, archbishops, monks, and martyrs—all wrapped around burning faith and a burning cathedral. Here is a taste of the historical background of the poem, followed by a synopsis. Canterbury Christ Church Cathedral Priory, where Nigel spent nearly his entire life as a monk, was one of the busiest as well as one of the holiest places in England, and indeed Europe, because it was the site of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170. Becket’s murder was committed more or less at the behest of King Henry II by four of his knights, including Robert de Broc, who earlier that December had raided the archbishop’s deer park and also cut off the tail of Becket’s horse as part of a campaign of intimidation and violence concerning a land dispute.12 News of miracles immediately after Becket’s murder utterly altered the political situation. An enormous influx of people came to Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, making it second only to the Holy Land as a place for Christian pilgrimage. Becket was swiftly canonised in 1173, and in 1174 Henry II came to pray at the shrine in penance; he heard the next day that his army had beaten the Scots in battle and Becket became in effect the Angevin (and later the Plantagenet) royal patron saint. A serious fire severely damaged Canterbury Cathedral later that same year, leaving the monks howling in their burnt choir. The Cathedral’s East End and Trinity Chapel were reconstructed, enlarged, and beautified between 1174 and 1220, turning the holy site into a building site. In the late 1180s arguments disrupted the construction works and the shrine as the monks repulsed Archbishop Baldwin’s desire to build a new church to house Becket’s relics, funded by monies that had been given to the monks for almsgiving. At one point, Baldwin attempted to starve his monks into agreeing to his plans by imprisoning them for 88 weeks between 1188 and 1189 within the Cathedral’s inner precincts. Fortunately for the monks, Canterbury citizens and pilgrims threw food over the walls for them.13  See Miller, Knights, bishops and deer parks, 204-37.  Sweetinburgh, Caught in the crossfire, 187-202; Heath, Burnellus speaks, 33–54, and on the political context of the poem, see 35-39 and Mann Aesop to Reynard. More generally, see Heath, Monastic culture, 165-187, and on Becket’s miracles, see Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate. 12 13

78 

D. HEATH

Becket’s martyrdom had shown Nigel and his brothers that it was possible miraculously to overcome enemies, even archbishops and kings. The cathedral fire of 1174 had allowed a new and more fitting cathedral to rise from its ashes to house the bejewelled shrine of the new martyr and donations poured into the priory as Becket’s miracles continued. The monks had faith, holy relics (that they gave to supporters in beautiful reliquaries), and money with which to defend their rights. The poem works as a direct comment on what can go wrong following an unprecedented influx of fame and fortune, when people in a place are caught up in a tense political struggle. The Prologue begins with a dedication to William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, who was made a co-Justiciar of England (equivalent to a regent), just before King Richard I went on Crusade.5 Nigel quotes the uncomplimentary Avianus fable of the ass in a lion’s skin: “An ass may reign and hold the lion’s sway, and Judgment give. He’ll always be an ass”.14 The reference is the key to the poem’s satirical message, to the extent that it draws on the fabular method of talking animals teaching human morals. The poem proper then begins with Burnellus stating his desire for a longer tail to match his long ears, and he asks the famous medieval doctor, Galen, for advice. Galen insists the silly ass should not change what nature has given him and tells of two cows, Bicornis and Brunetta, whose tails freeze in the mud; Brunetta patiently waits for her tail to become free, but Bicornis cuts hers off to return to her calf but regrets her rashness when flies plague her in the summer. Yet Burnellus will not listen to Galen’s advice, so the doctor gives him a mock list of ingredients to lengthen his tail and the little ass happily sets off from Cremona for Salerno where he is tricked into buying empty jars that allegedly hold all he needs. Returning via Lyons (not a sensible route), Burnellus is accused of trespass by the devious Cistercian Fromundus whose fierce dogs bite off half his tail, so he drops and smashes all his jars.15 After Burnellus’s empty threats, the monk promises recompense but plans to kill him on the way to the monastery. Suspecting this, Burnellus astutely kicks Fromundus into the river. Feeling pleased and clever, the Ass immediately decides to go and study at the prestigious Schools of Paris (later to become the University of Paris). On 14  Regenos, The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass, 31. Mozley and Raymo, Speculum stultorum, lines 57-8, “Regna licet teneat sceptrumque leonis asellus,/ Juraque det populis, semper asellus erit”. 15  Canterbury Benedictine monks were not in favour with their Cistercian Archbishop, Baldwin of Forde, who regarded them as extravagant and greedy.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

79

the way, he meets Arnold, a Sicilian pilgrim, who tells of Chaunteclere, a rooster, and his revenge, a tale later used by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Joining the English students in Paris, Burnellus labours hard but so fruitlessly he can only say “hee-haw” at the end of seven years. Rueing his youthful errors, Burnellus thinks of becoming a bishop, or joining a monastic order, considering the faults of each order in turn before ambitiously deciding to set up his own. He meets Galen again and decries the sleaze of the papal curia and the king’s court, as well as corrupt bishops and abbots, before suddenly but tactfully recalling a debate he heard among some birds, later retold by Chaucer in The Parliament of Fowls. Burnellus asks Galen to join his Order, recounting the tale of the Three Fates and the Peasant Girl. Finally, Bernard, Burnellus’s original master, catches the little ass, trims his ears to match his tail, and puts him back to work. Once Burnellus returns to Cremona, he is silent for the rest of the poem while Bernard relates the tale of the Three Grateful Beasts, and the poem ends with an epilogue on over-ambition, ingratitude, and the wisdom of learning from the fates of others.

Key Elements of Animal Satire and Key Sources in The Mirror for Fools The Mirror for Fools was enormously popular in the Middle Ages, mainly due to its animal anti-hero, who was a recognisable and overdetermined anthropomorphised figure for a monk. A key joke was the ass’s search for a longer “tail” when Englishmen like Nigel were supposed to have long “tails” or “angli caudati” (a Latin term meaning a belt or tail which was also medieval slang for penis).16 Beyond this joke, Nigel was asking how long a “tail” should be, that is, in how masculine a way should a monk appear or behave? Nigel’s Ass brays at power and authority; ass and human mingle, speak, and indeed merge in the Mirror. In an early modern print, Burnellus looks like an ass but stands upright, he gestures with very human hands and talks to a doctor and a jester while holding a looking-glass to his face.17 Burnellus is depicted making a self-reflective and very human ass of himself (Fig. 5.1). 16  On angli caudati and the link to Thomas Becket’s horse, see Jones, The Secret Middle Ages, 66-68. 17  See Brunellus in speculo stulto[rum] published in Leipzig in c. 1490, Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?dir=inkunabeln/50–25–poet.

80 

D. HEATH

Fig. 5.1  Brunellus holds up his mirror to Galen the Doctor and a Jester in a woodcut from a frontispiece in an early printed book

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

81

In discussions on the major satirical aspects of animal representation, Jill Mann’s arguments have brought several important issues about medieval beast literature and animal satire to the fore. The key question in her book is “not what animals mean, but how animals mean” and she includes the Mirror for Fools as a case study for the medieval beast epic.18 Her work probes beyond the poem’s surface similarities to fable to explore the themes of the power of nature, of speech and silence, of animal and human, and (pertinently here) of rhetoric and satire. Mann views the whole poem as set in a “resolutely amoral world” to frame a “firmly tongue in cheek” request that William Longchamp, as Justiciar, should help advance Nigel’s career.19 Connecting the poem to a comic form of beast epic “self-­interest”, or rather, a beastly epic of self-interest, Nigel expressly said in his letter to William that “the Ass is a monk [or any cleric] dissatisfied with his lot, as the ass with his tail” (“Asinus iste monachus est, qui non contentus conditione sua, sicut nec asinus cauda sua”).20 As mentioned above, Nigel took the idea of an ass trying to look regal from fable by Avianus, which has been translated into a more modern idiom by David Slavitt: Only a fool or stranger could mistake You for a lion. In front, you pass but from behind, one recognizes: ass.21

Responding to Jill Mann’s analysis, Susan Crane argues that “the epic’s relation to morality in fable and the very verbosity of beast epics would make deeper sense if the beast epics were not entirely closed to moral significance”, and questions whether Nigel’s satire does not have a similar form of moral warning to that of the violent trickster, Reynard the Fox, who was also used to examine “how moral principles come under threat”.22 James Simpson has discussed how Reynard used satire as part of his deception to puncture the hypocrisy of those in authority, while Paul Wackers finds an instance when Reynard rescues a knight and acts in good faith

18  Mann, Aesop to Reynard, 1; on Nigel’s poem see 24-27, 98-148, and 160-163; Mann, Does an author, 1-37 dates the poem to 1190s, 32, n. 128, and 34, n. 133; on beast epics generally see Mann, Ysengrimus. 19  Mann, Aesop to Reynard, 51, and 147-148. 20  Stubbs, Chronicles, lxxxiv; Regenos, The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass, 24. 21  Slavitt, Fables of Avianus, 7. 22  Crane, Review of From Aesop to Reynard, 445-448, 447.

82 

D. HEATH

(although he does so only to spite an enemy).23 The point is that medieval exegesis on nature allowed different moral points to be drawn even when they went against the generally perceived nature of the creature. Burnellus turns from a wild ass cantering around Europe to a tame and silenced ass, working patiently for his master, and no longer seeking to change his nature. Besides the fable and the beast epic, there are two other key strands of medieval writing on the nature of the ass that Nigel knew and which he exploited to satirical effect to nuance the raucous comedy of fable: the first source is the most well-known medieval book on animals, called the bestiary, and the second derives from a work by the famous medieval theologian and philosopher Peter Abelard (1079–1142), who was notoriously castrated for seducing Heloise and then forced to become a monk. Abelard’s Glosses were an early form of the many and various medieval philosophical tracts on universals which use the ass as an example. The medieval bestiary had several formats and translations but remained a spiritual work on how animal traits speak to human emotions.24 Nigel’s poem builds on the bestiary teachings about two related animals: the Tame Ass (Asinus) and the Wild Ass (Onager). The Tame Ass is a stubborn but patient beast of burden, like the ass in traditional Christmas Nativity scenes. As noted in the bestiary, in Greek, the ass is called “onus” (ονος). Nigel used the bestiary descriptions and the Greek homonym to make puns about onus or burden, for example, line 145: “Such ears no honour but a burden are” (“Non honor est sed onus tales aures habuisse”), or line 246: “No honour but a burden is my tail” (“Non honor est, sed onus, haec mea cauda mihi”); Christ was a burden on the ass as he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and monks were supposed to regard 23  Simpson, Consuming ethics, 321-336, at 330, and for more examples, see Paul Wackers, The Fox, n.19 and passim. 24  James was the first scholar to separate medieval bestiary manuscripts into different types or “families” based on chapter order and content. The earliest First family Bestiary, probably produced in the tenth century, added information from the early seventh-century St. Isidore’s encyclopaedic Etymologies to the chapters of a third-century work on nature called the Physiologus (the Naturalist), forming some 39 chapters. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries more chapters were added, mainly from Isidore, so that the Second family has some 126 chapters and the Third family over 200. Canterbury was a key location for the development of the bestiary. See introductions in James, The Bestiary and, more recently, Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users and Clark, A Medieval Book of Beasts.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

83

themselves as obedient and humble beasts of burden, an indication that there is more than weaponised rhetoric and amoral self-absorption behind Nigel’s chatty ass.25 So, what else connects the Mirror for Fools to the bestiary? Two other bestiary chapters are linked to Burnellus since they provide the reason for making Burnellus both a figure for a monk and an ass.26 The bestiary’s Christocentric teachings and lessons on man’s natural place in the visible and invisible worlds used biblical exegesis of the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the spiritual, called the allegory of the fourfold senses.27 In the chapter on the Wild Ass, the earliest form of the bestiary wrote of the Onager’s literal hourly braying at the Spring Equinox (resonantly close to Easter). Through allegory, the Wild Ass’s regular braying represented the daily monastic services (called “Hours”) when monks were called to prayer by the bell as part of their Divine Office. Nigel explores the idea of Burnellus the ass turning into a monastic calling bell—“Just like a brazen vessel is my skin / Which may be beaten but receive no pain”—when he finally realises his years of study at Paris have been in vain.28 Yet, remaining a silly ass, he subsequently decides to set up his own monastic order that includes none of the other orders’ strengths and disciplines but all of their various laxities. The moral pursuit of monastic celibacy was, in the bestiary chapter on the Wild Ass, symbolised by the male leader of the herd biting off the colts’ testicles. The final aspect, the spiritual lessons of an enclosed monastic life, was represented by the female onagers hiding groups of their young colts in the desert away from the jealous older male in a way that represented the Mother Church protecting her sons. As Jean Leclercq points out, “onager” was linked in monastic teaching to one or “unus” and unity (just as the boar or “sanglier” came to stand for “singular”) and 25  Honor/onus was a common medieval trope and wordplay, see Walter Map, De Avaritia et Luxuria Mundi, line 72: “It is not an honour but a burden to always support the load” (“non honor est sed onus semper sustinere ferentem”), Wright, Latin Poems, 165. 26  First family bestiaries still extant include Brussels Bibl. Royale 10074, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 247, London, British Library Royal 2 C XII, Paris, BnF NAL 873, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 602. 27  “Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria/ Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia” quoted in Ziolkowski, “Literary genre”, 1-23, 6, and see de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, 1, and Ohly, Sensus Spiritualis on medieval monastic culture and spirituality. 28  Regenos, The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass, 87, and Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, lines 1603-7.

84 

D. HEATH

referred to the monastic life by focussing on several Biblical references to the onager dwelling in the desert.29 At the end of the poem, in his short-­ tailed simplicity and obedience, Burnellus resembles the bestiary Onager, described as a spiritual son of the apostles, a true, faithful monk, and he is like a tame ass in his patience and hard work. Another bestiary chapter, this time on the monstrous Ass-centaur (Onocentaur), may also be linked directly to the Mirror for Fools. This animal was a fantastic hybrid, described as half-man and half-ass; an animal with the higher reasoning and speech of man and the baser instincts of the hot-tempered and violent, desert-living Wild Ass. This asinine figure for the masculine humours of heat and dryness was taken from medieval humoral theory—women were by contrast cold and moist (and represented by mermaids).30 Ass-centaurs were likened to sheep inside the church but outside they were sinful “brutish beasts” (Ps 49:20), and they represented devilish deceit and hypocrisy. So, although Burnellus is, in early drawings, pictured wholly as an ass, he nevertheless has the speech and reasoning of a man and on his travels he is like a sinful monk who has escaped from his monastery, making him an ass-centaur. By satirising the long and luxuriant retinues of abbots and priors, the long tail so desired by Burnellus links proud clerics to the devilish sin of pride.31 The powerful association of ideas between the monk in thrall to the calling bell and the 29  See Leclercq, Etudes sur le vocabulaire monastique du moyen-age, 36: “en plusiers autres endroits de la Bible, l’onagre est dit vivre au désert. On comprend que S. Grégoire, S. Isidore, Raban Maur, Jean de Fécamp, Abelard aient vu en lui le symbole du solitaire: nouveau figurant dans le bestiaire monastique” (“In several other biblical passages, the wild ass is said to live in the desert. We understand that St. Gregory, St. Isidore, Rabanus Maurus, Jean de Fécamp, and Abelard, regarded it [the wild ass] as a symbol of the solitary [monk or hermit], a new figure in the monastic bestiary”). 30  Travis, Of sirens and onocentaurs, 29-62. 31  Keller and Keating, Aesop’s Fables, 104, Fable 17; “This fable talks about rich and poor. The ape begged the vixen, since she had so long a tail and she herself had none, to share a bit of it with her … To this the vixen is supposed to have said: ‘simply so that you may not [become] more beautiful by receiving something from me, I would rather have a tail so long that it will drag on the ground”. This fable teaches that the rich and stingy should not keep what they have in excess. See Mozley, The Epistola ad Willelmum, 13-20, 17, “Nova cauda et prolixa possit sibi accrescere, scilicet ut prioratum vel abbatiam posset sibi apprehendere, ubi parentum suorum sequelam copiosam possit prius inserere et postea quasi caudam post se quocunque ierit trahere”. Translated by Mann, 2009, in Appendix 3, 314-5, as “a new and luxuriant tail may grow on him, that is, that he may be able to get himself a prioracy or abbacy, where he can first introduce a numerous retinue of his relatives, and then drag them after him like a tail wherever he goes”.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

85

devilish tail of the bestiary Ass links Nigel’s poem even more closely to the monastic spiritual path, rather than just to the fable and the beast epic. Turning now to the second strand of medieval writing that featured the Ass, there were several scholastic texts that investigated universals in terms of logic (part of the medieval liberal arts education). These texts satirised not only reductio ad absurdam arguments but also the medieval teachers and their students who indulged in such disputations. The ass was considered the archetypal irrational creature and set against the polar opposite of a man of reason in logical arguments.32 Abelard’s works would have been familiar to Nigel. As Virginie Greene notes, in his Glosses on Porphyry Abelard expanded the argument on the absurdity of universals being a single entity by conflating the learned Socrates with Browny the donkey (Brunellus or Burnellus). For example, Abelard proposed, “Socrates and Browny really are Socrates” (Et vere Socrates et Brunellus sunt Socrates).33 Abelard mentions Brunellus 20 times, once more than Socrates, in a passage that Greene calls “an ode to asininity”.34 Was Burnellus named for Abelard’s favourite “paradigm of animal irrationality”?35 Nigel’s travelling donkey Don Quixote is a richer creation for being the product of a variety of sources and a complex political background that was ripe for comedy and satire, and the key ways that Burnellus becomes a richer character and more satirical ass are in his conflation of sources that paradoxically mix and meld the speaking, spiritual, human, and asinine.

Key Satirical Targets of The Mirror for Fools Nigel’s lively wordplay, juxtaposing Latin puns, numerous jokes about “tails”, and interludes with talking animals engaging with the human world, allows readers to learn how to make assessment of themselves while at the same time pointing out that it is best not to.36 The Mirror for Fools more specifically employs animal satire as propaganda against King Richard the Lionheart, his archbishop, Baldwin of Forde, the subsequent archiepiscopal contender, William, Bishop of Ely and Richard’s brother, John, 32  The asinine proposition is neatly summed up by William Heytesbury (d. 1372) as “Every animal is an ass. You are an animal. Therefore, you are an ass” (“Omne animal est un asinus. Tu es animal. Ergo tu es asinus”), see Smithies, Introducing the Medieval Ass, 62-82, 65. 33  Greene, Abelard’s donkey, 13-32, 18. 34  Ibid, 19. 35  See Peter Abelard, “From the Glosses on Porphyry”, 26-56, 31. 36  Mozley, Unprinted poems of Nigel Wireker, 398-423, 400.

86 

D. HEATH

Count of Mortain. The poem is thus an exploration of the power play and tensions in medieval royal, monastic, clerical, and noble masculinities. Why did Nigel write a letter dedicating his poem to William, Bishop of Ely, papal legate, and Justiciar, the de facto ruler of southern England from 1190 to 1191? Given to making grand entrances into the towns he visited, including processions where he was preceded by a troupe of minstrels singing his praises, William was ambitious; he was a loyal and capable administrator who held the confidence of his king, Richard I, and he was seeking to become the Archbishop of Canterbury following the death of Archbishop Baldwin on crusade with Richard the Lionheart in 1190.37 However, Richard I’s brother, Count John (who became King John in 1199), warned the monks by letter not to support William’s candidature.38 William of Ely’s loyal but undiplomatic government, low birth, and huge retinues had quickly offended not only John (eager to rule in Richard’s absence) but also the barons.39 The immediate problem for the monks was how to succeed in keeping William’s goodwill (to preserve Christ Church Cathedral Priory from the anger of King Richard) even if William was not chosen as archbishop, given that picking William would incur John’s rage and enmity. One solution was a comic poem about an ass’s tail with an added sting, found in the dedication to William: “those watching not the scorpion’s head but his tail—are the men who are tolerant of the impulsive acts of others in times of adversity”.40 Nigel was begging for William’s understanding of the monks’ predicament “in times of adversity”. Yet the reference to an ass on lion skins from the Avianus fable was an unsubtle jibe when loyal but low-born William was running the country in Richard the Lionheart’s absence.41 Unfortunately, there had been serious political misjudgements made by William and his family concerning the treatment of Geoffrey, the illegitimate son of Henry II, whom King Richard had appointed Archbishop of York.42 While celebrating mass, Geoffrey was dragged from his sanctuary at St Martin’s Priory in Dover (a 37  “Longchamp had some ambition of securing election for himself”, according to Turner, Longchamp, William de (d. 1197). 38  Stubbs, Chronicles, letter cccclxxiv. 39  Balfour, William Longchamp. 40  “Non attendentes faciem scorpionis, sed caudam. Hi sunt qui in adversis patienter impatientium impulsiones tolerant”. Stubbs, Chronicles, lxxxv; Regenos, 26. 41  Flori, Richard the Lionheart, 42, Richard “earned the nickname ‘Lionheart’” during his campaign in Aquitaine in 1175, much earlier than the First Crusade, Gillingham, Richard I, 3. 42  Karn and Smith, English Episcopal Acta 31, Ely 1109–1197, lxxxii-x.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

87

daughter-­house of Canterbury Cathedral Priory) and imprisoned in Dover Castle. The incident was a vivid reminder of the sanctuary-breaking murder of Becket in 1170.43 William denied he had ordered this sacrilege but he had certainly ordered Geoffrey’s arrest; this error enabled John, the barons, and the citizens of London to force William to flee to the country and seek a boat to France in October 1191.44 There is a gleeful description, by his rival, Hugh Nonant, the Bishop of Coventry, of William as a “priest prostitute” and a “bishop clown” in Dover when William, desperate to leave the country, tried to disguise himself as a woman to hire a boat and then had to fight off a fisherman’s advances, hardly the most seemly situation for a bishop. Nonant’s defamation might not be wholly reliable, but the story indicates the strength of feeling against William.45 These actions rendered William unacceptable to the monks of Canterbury Priory and no wonder Nigel thought William a most unsuitable candidate to be archbishop, even if he did not say so directly. It is perhaps as an allusion to William’s flight, then, that Burnellus embarks upon a series of picaresque adventures (including to the schools of Paris where Nigel might well have met William of Ely). The journey’s tale is broken up by interludes of various animal stories and lists of monastic orders with their faults interpreted as virtues by the Burnellus. In a late medieval manuscript copy of the poem, Burnellus is depicted as dreaming that he is so clever he can become not merely an abbot but a bishop; the marginalia shows a bishop’s mitre hovering above the ass’s head.46 The poem ends with Burnellus working silently, humbly, and willingly for his old master with a docked tail and shorter ears, and perhaps being somewhat less of an ass (Fig. 5.2). 43  Lovatt and Smith English Episcopal Acta 27, York 1189–1212, xli-xlii; Brewer et al, Vita Galfridi, 388–9; Stubbs, Radulfi de Diceto, 96-7. I am grateful to Professor Louise Wilkinson for these references. 44  Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225, 34, calls it “a factional coup”; Clanchy, England and its Rulers, 97, thought it had a “more popular character”. 45  Turner, Longchamp; Barlow, The Feudal Kingdom, 313; and Ziolkowski, Passion, 39-40. William hired singers to chant his praises and Hugh Nonant, Bishop of Coventry, also decried William as a “sacerdos meretrix, episcopus scurra”, Stubbs, Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, 142-147, 146. 46  The early fourteenth-century collection by the Augustinian canon and chronicler, John Strecche, London, British Library, Additional MS 38665 includes fables and a copy of Speculum Stultorum with marginal sketches, such as on f.107v, where Burnellus is depicted dreaming of becoming a bishop.

88 

D. HEATH

Fig. 5.2  Burnellus dreaming of becoming a bishop. This manuscript was probably written and illustrated around the 1420s by John Streeche, a canon of the Augustinian Priory of Kenilworth

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

89

Despite Burnellus’s wanderings around Europe, Nigel’s poem is very much about Canterbury and relations between the monks and their archbishops, popes, and kings. There are specific satirical logics at work in the text’s status as “resistance” that are most relevant to the high politics Nigel’s poem deplores. For example, in the depiction of the evil Cistercian monk Fromundus and his evil wolf-like dogs who attack Burnellus, it is easy to see a satirical allusion to the austere Cistercian Archbishop Baldwin and his secular canons. Like a lens, the Mirror for Fools sharpens our focus on violence and stupidity in unexpected ways. In another example, Burnellus, in his musings on the various monastic orders, considers how shameful it would be if, as a Cistercian monk (and therefore, not issued with underwear), his rear were to be accidentally revealed. Perhaps an allusion to a gust of wind that lifted up the Cistercian Archbishop Baldwin’s robes to reveal all, the notion makes Burnellus decide never to join that order, even though as an ass he does not wear any clothes.47 In essence, the animal satire and specifically asinine representation in the Mirror for Fools sought to debase and so resist authority, for example, by making us laugh at the Cistercian monk Fromundus’s wicked end, kicked in the river by an ass, or Baldwin’s exposure, or the idea of an ass dreaming of becoming a bishop. The Mirror for Fools, in conjunction with other contemporary sources and his other poetry, reveals how Nigel sought to strengthen monastic bonds of brotherhood, of community, by imagining a form of monastic masculinity that opposed rather than emulated secular and clerical power and aggression. He does not shy away from poking fun at his brethren. The impetuous Bicornis, who cut off her tail when it was stuck in frozen mud (we are not told how), may be a figure for Brother Reginald who was very impatient to preserve the monastery’s rights. Reading Nigel’s beast epic in terms of this “multiplicity” of constructed masculinities, and not just those within the ecclesiastical framework, allows a more fruitful investigation of the satire. This is the point of all those jokes about “tails”. Indeed, Nigel privileged humanity over beastliness by making his hero Burnellus an Ass-centaur (Onocentaur) or talking donkey. It is an 47  Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum lines 2143-6, “Nescia braccarum genitalia membra deorsum/ Nocte dieque simul libera semper erunt./ Ergo quid facerem, veniens si ventus ab Austro/ Nudaret subito posteriora mea”. See also Regenos, 106, “Their [Cistercians’] lower parts which breeches [britches] never touch/ By day or night will always be exposed./ What am I to do if winds arise/ and quickly bare my rear”.

90 

D. HEATH

interesting use of rhetorical paradox, because no one would consider an ass’s thoughts of any value. Burnellus is self-contradictory on the surface—an impossible talking animal who even in asininity seems to evoke some truth, by holding up a mirror for readers to spot their own errors, especially one reader who happened to be the co-ruler of England. This allows Burnellus to be both violent and masculine, passive and asinine; as a comic figure, he bears lightly the heavy moral and political burden concerning royal masculinity. For issues of violent masculinity certainly arose in Angevin politics, as Nigel well knew even in the seclusion of his cloister. Hot temper was masculine. Twelfth-century kings epitomised an angry, viciously powerful, regal, and leonine masculinity which Robert Bartlett considers part of their “predatory and punitive” rule.48 It led Richard I to earn the soubriquet “Lionheart” for his bravery in battle; while John was so enviously enraged he staged a coup d’état against his brother’s regent. In a section of the poem called On Kings /De regibus Burnellus launches an angry and bitterly sarcastic diatribe beginning “should I unfold the life and ways of kings / What might I find but cause of major grief?” 49 Phrases such as “tyrant” (line 2570), “full of guile”, and “bloodstained hands” (line 2583) make clear Nigel’s feelings towards the regal court, and he becomes even more irate about bribery because the priory had given expensive gifts both to Richard I and to the papal legate sent to rule on whether to allow Baldwin’s new church. In the fifty lines of On Kings Nigel uses the word “munera” 36 times, 33 times at the start of the line, a longer, deeper, and much more bitter form of amplification than the earlier parody of Dies Irae. Although “munera” may be translated as “gift”, it has biblical connotations of bribery: “bribes disturb and yet again they calm the king” (“munera conturbant rursusque reges serenant”).50 Nigel set a steed-like and thus a knightly episcopal masculinity against a more neutered, humbler, ass-like form for abbots and, by extension, monks (again appropriate since Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass). The poet eventually has Burnellus realise his tail is trouble in lines when he is 48  See Bartlett, England, 48, who quotes some of Richard of Devizes’ report on John’s outbursts of fury. 49  Regenos, The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass, 121. Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, lines 2560-1, “Rursus si regum mores vitamque revolvam/ quid nisi causa majoris doloris erunt?” see note on “munas” as bribery, 147. 50  Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, lines 2593-4, and n.174, and Vulgate Bible, Isaiah 1:23 “thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: everyone loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards”.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

91

about to leave Paris, but then he dreams of becoming a bishop instead.51 In the long passage where Burnellus considers becoming a bishop, the foolish ass compares the abbot as a sterile mule to the more aristocratic, mounted, fully masculine, bishop with all the attributes of a stallion with a long “tail” of followers: Full bishop I shall be, for I don’t want His honours as a mule, but as a horse. Be ever far from me the abbot’s ring52

Nigel celebrated monkish masculinity that sought exemplars of martyrdom in imitatio Christi and emphasised the sacrifice of Becket and Nigel’s beloved Prior Honorius who had been pressing his Priory’s claims in Rome when he died of plague in 1188. Moreover, Nigel contested the idea that clerical and particularly episcopal masculinity should ape secular values of virility and power.53 As Abelard noted, the onager is also a figure for a monk who ultimately flees the world, not someone seeking the trappings of a successful secular life.54 Yet that monastic seclusion does not prevent almsgiving and indeed it echoes Christ’s life; these themes resonate in Nigel’s other works such as his Passion of St Lawrence where the saint gives away church treasure to the poor which the greedy emperor seeks to take away from the Church. A Canterbury Cathedral stained glass panel dated to between 1178 and 1180 shows the apostate Roman Emperor Julian and Byzantine Emperor Maurice depicted with heaps of gold to emphasise the greed of kings and seed covered in sp. thorns: “these thorny ones are the rich and extravagant; they bear no fruit since they seek earthly things”. The panel was a rather pointed allusion, given the Priory’s 51  Regenos, The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass, 86, “Hope too was gone of adding to his tail/ He knew the claims the English made were false”; Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, lines 1569-70, “Spes quoque deperiit caudae superinstituendae,/ Sensit et Anglorum carmina falsa fore”. 52  Regenos, The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass, 90; Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, lines 1686-90, “Plenus praesul ero quia pontificalibus uti/ Nolo velut mulus sed volo sicut equus/ Annulus abbatis et mitra sophisticate/ Sit procul a nobis”. 53  For current historiographical debates on the “multiplicity of clerical masculinities” see Thibodieux, Introduction, 5-6. See also Ziolkowski, Passion, 103, for example, lines 565-575, which echo the use of anaphora of munera in Speculum Stultorum, lines 2593-2610. 54  Nigel’s Epigram 2, lines 1-2, see Ziolkowski, Passion, 268-9. Also see McLaughlin, Abelard, Institutio, 247, “onager...monachus est...ad tranquillam vitae solitariae libertatem se contulit et, saeculum fugiens, in saeculo non remansit”.

92 

D. HEATH

relationship with the Angevin kings.55 This reading of Nigel’s works contextualises the historical and literary evidence to enhance the understanding of Nigel’s work not merely as a simple beast epic and general satire on clerical abuses but instead as a poem with a much more nuanced political argument which was nevertheless formed from a deep understanding of Benedictine identity and the sensus spiritualis, the monastic spiritual path.

Modern Resonances Nigel’s concepts of monastic identity and masculinity emphasise the search for a Christ-like, divine-martyr spirituality in opposition to violent and powerful, secular and episcopal forms of bestial masculinity.56 Of course, the stupid ass-centaur Burnellus wanted to be like the powerful chivalric elite, whose speech and rationality as men are linked to greed, violence, and beastliness or bêtise, defined as an asinine stupidity.57 To return the argument to the present, there are resonances with Jacques Derrida’s ideas on bêtise explored in The Beast and the Sovereign, Cary Wolfe’s work on biopolitics in Before the Law, and Robert Esposito’s ideas on connections between community, immunity, and biopolitics.58 For bêtise has been linked by Wolfe to Derrida’s questioning of “what lives”, so as to understand how humankind differs from beasts in terms of bêtise defined as rationality, cruelty, and bestiality; this leads to discussions of sovereignty, individuality, and freedom. It is possible to tie a medieval form of bêtise to monastic tensions over masculinity by focusing on the talking ass hero of Nigel’s poem as a link between human and animal. Burnellus is the comic paradox that unites human rationality and beastly passions in asininity—he talks but remains steadfastly an ass. This figure epitomises the ambivalence inherent to the dyad of “the what and the who”—Derrida’s encapsulation of the binary structure inherent to any recognition of subjectivity. More specifically, Burnellus is a liminal creature that satirises the ambivalence of regal rage, for although Derrida never mentions the ass-centaur, he does discuss in this context the twin natures of the wild yet learned Centaur and 55  Canterbury Cathedral, window n. XV, 1st register, panel 7; originally in the Sixth Typological Window (panel 26). 56  Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men, who notes a late medieval scholar “proved his manhood by his rationality, which distinguished him not only from women but also from beasts”, 67. 57  Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 150-151. 58  Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 183; Wolfe, Before the Law, 65; and Esposito, Community, and, much more fully in Immunitas.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

93

the inherently unconstrained masculinity of the ass, which in classical mythology fathered Priapus.59 Extending contemporary biopolitical thought along these lines, Roberto Esposito has gone back to the etymology of communitas and its stem “munas” which is linked to munera—remuneration, gift, or bribe, the same root Nigel uses to such deadly effect on the faults of kings. Esposito in turn links munera to the legal and political immunity that excludes rather than includes the community by way of rules, restrictions, exemptions, and burdens. Nigel’s comic hero Burnellus tolerantly, if somewhat unwisely, helps even the undeserving of his city by aiding prisoners to escape (lines 1805–1912); he thus enacts an inclusive form of community that necessarily, by dint of the hero being part ass, transcends divides between the animal and the human, the townspeople and the monks, and even outcasts. Biopolitical thought today also turns its reflections on sovereignty and subjectivity towards questioning the simple human/animal binary. Wolfe has posited a more ethically generous legal framework that considers the “community of the living” which includes humans and at least some animals, in a world where being a “what” or a “who” is not easily or finally parsed. Nigel, in his way, envisioned a community that did not celebrate rich “whos” through corruption and bribes but recognised the poorest through almsgiving, repaying the community who had supported the monks during their imprisonment.

Conclusion A crucial factor for Nigel’s satire was money—money received from pilgrims and money (and bribes) demanded by the king and several archbishops; as we saw earlier, Baldwin even wanted to take money set aside for almsgiving to build his new abbey. The monastic office of Almoner was tasked with helping not the rich and powerful but the poor and, in his later life, Nigel indeed copied his own foolish ass Burnellus’s desire to “be helpful to … the poor”.60 He took up the honourable ass’s burden (onus) of supporting the needy in Canterbury and its hinterland by serving as

 Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 84.  Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, lines 1757-58, “sit baculus claudo, sit caeco lumen, egenti/ Copia, spes lapso, consiliumque reo”. 59 60

94 

D. HEATH

Almoner.61 Nigel, it seems, greatly increased the Priory’s portfolio of rentals used for almsgiving, for William Urry noted the sudden expansion of the almonry in around 1200 when the income available for almsgiving was tripled.62 On the evidence of his poems the Passion of St. Lawrence, the Mirror for Fools, and some of his epigrams, it seems that Nigel considered his position of Almoner to be a fitting purpose and monastic occupation until the end of his life in 1217.63 In his self-reflection and service, the poet gave nuance to ideas of manly asininity, especially the violently masculine combination of rationality, cruelty, and bestiality, in ways that chime with Kari Weil’s reflection on Derrida’s term bêtise: Our engagement with animals may reveal to us our particular human stupidity, and it is only by deeply attending to animals or, more precisely, by becoming “attuned” to them … that we may be able to think otherwise and overcome some of the limitations of our so-called rational condition.64

The multi-valenced interpretations of asininity offered by Nigel include stubbornness and kicking against the trend for becoming greedier with age, fame, and power. His animal satire ends (and the Mirror is a poem all about ends) with a story contrasting human perfidy and animal generosity. Dryanus, a rich man, does nothing to repay Burnellus’s master when he rescues him from a pit (also occupied by an ape, a lion, and a snake). However, the animals repay Bernardus with repeated gifts including firewood (from the ape) and meat (from the lion); but the serpent also gives him a magic stone which, no matter how many times it is sold, reappears 61  Curtius, European Literature, 336, n. 56 on Nigel’s “mirror of self-improvement”. Puns on “honor” and “onus” were often used by Nigel and other medieval poets. See Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, lines 145, 246 and 2010 and Ziolkowski, n.2, 270, and Epigram 2 on 252. 62  Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings, 33-5 and 369. Medieval Canterbury Cathedral records refer to Nigel as holding the office of Almoner and purchasing rentals, see the Rental “C”, ff. 61r, 62r and 64r and a charter dated purchasing Chartham rentals, marked Nigellus. 63  Epigram 10 exhorts the reader to give possessions away, see Ziolkowski, Passion, 261, and in the Passion poem, St Lawrence gives all the treasures of the Church to the poor so there is nothing left in the treasury for the evil Emperor Decius, see lines 229-86, 291-4, and 713-36 and see Mozley and Raymo, Speculum Stultorum, on the duties of a good bishop, lines 1742-48. 64  Weil, Thinking Animals, xvi.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

95

in his bag. This—as Burnellus witnesses it—is a kind of asinine fable (lines 3561–878) that gently carries on “undoing those boundaries between human and animals”.65 Now known almost solely for the Speculum Stultorum, Nigel also composed many religious poems including the Miracles of St Mary and the Life of St Paul the Hermit. He also owned a life of St Thomas Becket to which he added his own verses on Pope Innocent and St Lawrence.66 Indeed, The Mirror for Fools is embedded in Canterbury, in Benedictine spirituality, and in the cruel politics of the time, when Becket was murdered in Canterbury cathedral, and his monks immured there by their own archbishop. Nigel’s satire on an ass’s search to replace his skinny end with a more luxuriant horsetail might seem to emphasise the very monkish weaknesses the de Broc family sought to shame when they chopped the tail off Becket’s horse, as an insult to the manliness of the Archbishop and his Priory.67 But Burnellus, as a comic hybrid ass who wanted to be a bishop, also refers to bishops’ long tail-like retinues that mimicked secular lords’ power, pride, bêtise, and greed. So, the joke about Englishmen’s “long” tails referred to in The Mirror for Fools turns Becket’s mutilated horse from a cruel jibe into a dick joke at the expense of the medieval nobility, many of whom, like William, also held positions of power in the Church. The implication is that one had to be an ass to want a longer tail. Among several other books, Nigel owned a copy of Peter the Eater’s Historia Scholastica, to which he added more of his poems and other marginalia.68 On one leaf Nigel noted, “the ass is a figure for stupidity or the human heart” (“in asino stultorum uel cordia figuratur”).69 It is a striking comment because it implies that Nigel intended the Mirror for Fools, with its hapless ass Burnellus, to be a compassionate and understanding reflection on human nature, not simply a prolix satirical beast epic and parody of clerical abuses.

 Ibid, xviii.  London, British Library Cotton Vespasian MS D XIX and see James, The Ancient Libraries, No. 278, 48. 67  Thomas, Shame, 1050-88. 68  James, The Ancient Libraries, Peter Comestor, Historia Scholastica, 101, Nigel’s books were recorded in the monastic library catalogue as Nos. 1084-1091, and see W.  Pantin, Canterbury College, Oxford, 5, 13, 22, 59. 69  Ziolkowski, Passion, includes the poems written in the margins of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.5 but not this marginal note by Nigel on f. 78. 65 66

96 

D. HEATH

Nigel often makes room for laughter, and although the Mirror for Fools sent a sharp political message to William, Bishop of Ely, it was drawn up as a comic paradox; for, when has an Ass ever taken his own advice? Moreover, the poem deplored the brutality, indeed the bêtise, of knights and bishops and emphasised instead a more spiritual masculinity, and a kinder one. After all that, Nigel widens the meaning of community. Later, portrayed as a hybrid in fifteenth-century woodcuts, Burnellus became more popular and more human, but he continued to direct his reflective Mirror for Fools and his asinine bray at the rich and powerful: a satirical hee-haw to persistent emotional, spiritual, and political problems that are asinine, sensitive, and very funny.

Works Cited Abelard, Peter. 1994. From the ‘Glosses on Porphyry’ in His Logica ‘Ingredientibus’. In Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham, ed. Paul Spade. Indianapolis: Hackett. Adrados, Francisco R., Leslie A. Ray, and Gert-Jan van Dijk, Ed. and Trans. 1999. History of the Graeco-Latin Fable. 2. Boston: Brill. Avery, Anne. 2020. Reynard the Fox. Oxford: Bodleian. Balfour, David. 1996. “William Longchamp: Upward mobility and character assassination in twelfth-century England”. PhD thesis. University of Connecticut. Barlow, Frank. 1999. The Feudal Kingdom of England 1042–1216. Harlow: Pearson. Bartlett, Robert. 2002. England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baxter, Ron. 1998. Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Bédier, Joseph. 1895. Les Fabliaux: Etudes de Littérature Populaire et d’Histoire Littéraire du Moyen Age. 2nd ed. Paris: Emile Bouillon. Giappone, Bonello Rutter, Fred Francis Krista, and Iain MacKenzie, eds. 2018. Comedy and Critical Thought: Laughter as Resistance. London, New  York: Rowman & Littlefield. Brewer, John, James F. Dimock, and George F. Warner, eds. 1873. Vita Galfridi. In Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, 8 vols., 4. London: Longman. Clanchy, Michael. 1998. England and its Rulers 1066–1272. Oxford: Blackwell. Clark, Willene, ed. 2006. A Medieval Book of Beasts. The Second-Family Bestiary. Commentary, Art, Text and Translation. Woodbridge: Boydell. Cleaver, Laura. 2016. Education in Twelfth-Century Art and Architecture: Images of Learning in Europe, c.1100–1220. Woodbridge: Boydell. Crane, Susan. 2010. Review of From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32: 445–448.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

97

Curtius, Ernst R. 1973. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. W.R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign, volume I.  Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Esposito, Roberto. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2012. Community, immunity, biopolitics. Trans. Michaela Russo. Política Común, 3, https://doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0003.001 Flori, Jean. 2006. Richard the Lionheart: King and Knight. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Gillingham, John. 2002. Richard I. New Haven: Yale University Press. Greene, Virginie. 2014. Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, Diane. 2016. Burnellus speaks: Beast books and beastliness in late twelfthcentury Canterbury. South Atlantic Review 81 (2): 33–54. ———. Monastic culture in early medieval Canterbury: 597–1220. In Early Medieval Kent, 800–1200, ed. Sheila Sweetinburgh, 165–187. Woodbridge: Boydell. Hervieux, Léopold. 1894. Fabulistes Latin. 3. Paris: Firmin-Didot. Housman, Alfred E. 1930. The Latin for ass. Classical Quarterly 24: 11–13. James, Montague R. 1928. The Bestiary: Being A Reproduction in Full of Ms. Ii 4. 26 in the University Library, Cambridge, with supplementary plates from other manuscripts of English origin, and a preliminary study of the Latin bestiary as current in England. Oxford: Roxburghe Club. ———. 1903. The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover: The Catalogues of the Libraries of Christ Church Priory and St Augustine’s Abbey and of St Martin’s Priory at Dover. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Malcolm. 2004. The Secret Life of the Middle Ages. Stroud: Sutton. Karn, Nicholas, and David M.  Smith, eds. 2005. English Episcopal Acta 31, Ely 1109–1197. London: British Academy. Keller, John E., and L. Clark Keating Trans. 1993. Aesop’s Fables; with a Life of Aesop, translated from the Spanish. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Koopmans, Rachel. 2011. Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Leclercq, Jean. 1961. Etudes sur le Vocabulaire Monastique du Moyen-age. Studia Anselmiana Fascilius 48. Rome: Herder. Lovatt, Marie, and David M. Smith, eds. 2004. English Episcopal Acta 27, York 1189–1212. London: British Academy.

98 

D. HEATH

Lubac, Henri de. 1998. Medieval Exegesis: Vol. 1 The Four Senses of Scripture. New York: T & T Clark. Mann, Jill. 1987. Ysengrimus; Text with Translations, Commentary and Introduction. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2007. Does an author understand his own text? Nigel of Longchamp and the Speculum Stultorum. Journal of Medieval Latin 17: 1–37. ———. 2009. From Aesop to Reynard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mazo Karras, Ruth. 2002. From Boys to Men, Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McLaughlin, Terence P., ed. 1956. Abelard, Institutio seu regula sanctmonialium. Medieval Studies, 18: 242-97. Miller, Andrew. 2010. Knights, bishops and deer parks: Episcopal identity, emasculation and clerical space in Medieval England. In Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Thibodeaux, 204–237. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mozley, John. 1970. The Epistola ad Willelmum of Nigel Longchamps. Medium Ævum 39 (1): 13–20. ———. 1963. A Mirror for Fools: The Book of Burnel the Ass by Nigellus Wireker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mozley, John, and Robert Raymo, Eds. and Trans. 1960. Speculum Stultorum By Nigellus Wireker. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Mozley, John. 1932. The Unprinted Poems of Nigel Wireker. Speculum 7: 398–423. Ohly, Friedrich. 2005. Sensus Spiritualis: Studies in Medieval Significs and the Philology of Culture, Ed. S.  P. Jaffe, and Trans. K.  J. Northcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pantin, William. 1947. Canterbury College, Oxford. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Regenos, Graydon W. 1959. The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass: Nigellus Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum. Austin: University of Texas Press. Rigg, Arthur G. 2004. Canterbury, Nigel of (c. 1135–1198?). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1987. Nigel of Canterbury: What was his name? Medium Ævum 56: 304–307. Simpson, James. 2005. Consuming ethics: Caxton’s History of Reynard the fox. In Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood, 321–336. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Slavitt, David, and trans. 1993. The Fables of Avianus. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Smithies, Kathryn. 2020. Introducing the Medieval Ass. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

5  MAKING AN ASS OF YOURSELF? THE POINTED COMEDY OF THE MIRROR… 

99

Stubbs, William, ed. 1864. Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I: Epistolae Cantuarienses. Rolls Series 38, 2. London: Longman. ———, ed. 1870. Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene. Rolls Series 51, 3. London: Longman. ———. 1876. Radulfi de Diceto Decani Lundonensis Opera Historica. Rolls Series 68, 2. London: Longman. Sweetinburgh, Sheila. 2011. Caught in the crossfire: Patronage and institutional politics in late twelfth-century Canterbury. In Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Paul Dalton, Charles Insley, and Louise Wilkinson, 187–202. Woodbridge: Boydell. Thibodieux, Jennifer, ed. 2010. Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thomas, Hugh M. 2012. Shame, masculinity, and the death of Thomas Becket. Speculum 87: 1050–1088. Travis, William J. 2002. Of sirens and onocentaurs: A romanesque apocalypse at Montceaux-L’Etoile. Artibus et Historiae 23 (45): 29–62. Turner, Ralph V. 2002. Longchamp, William de (d. 1197). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Urry, William. 1967. Canterbury Under the Angevin Kings. London: University of London/ Athlone Press. Wackers, Paul. 2023. Introducing the Medieval Fox. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Weil, Kari. 2012. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New  York: Columbia University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2013. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wright, Thomas. 1841. The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes. Vol. 16, first series. London, Camden Society. Ziolkowski, Jan, Ed. and Trans. 1994. Nigel of Canterbury: The Passion of St. Lawrence, Epigrams and Marginal Poems. Leiden: Brill. ———. 1997. Literary genre and animal symbolism. In Animals and the Symbolic in Mediaeval Art and Literature, ed. L.A J.R.  Houwen, 1-23. Mediaevalia Groningana, 20, Groningen: Egbert Forsten.

Manuscripts and Incunabula Brussels, Bibl. Royale MS 10074. Bestiary Cambridge, Corpus Christi, CCCC MS 441. Miscellany Canterbury, Cathedral Archives and Library (CCAL), DCc MA 1. Canterbury Cathedral Priory’s Treasurer’s Accounts 1207–1308 Canterbury, Cathedral Archives and Library (CCAL), CCA DCc Lit Ms D.4. Rental “C”

100 

D. HEATH

Canterbury, Cathedral Archives and Library, (CCAL), CCA ChAnt C 504. Charter of Chartham rentals, 1217 Leipzig. c. 1490–5. Nigellus. Brunellus in speculo stulto[rum] London British Library, Additional MS 38665. John Strecche, Miscellany London, British Library Royal MS 2 C XII. Bestiary London, British Library, Arundel MS 68. Obit List London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian MS D XIX. Nigel Wireker, Miracula sancte Dei genitricis uirginis Marie, uersifice Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 602. Bestiary Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud MS Misc. 247. Bestiary Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France NAL MS 873. Bestiary

CHAPTER 6

What Can Beast Fables Do in Literary Animal Studies? Ben Jonson’s Volpone and the Prehumanist Human Erica Fudge

In his 2002 Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation, John Simons wrote of the beast fable: Although the fable is a narrative which operates entirely via the representational strategy of anthropomorphism, there is no stage at which a reader can doubt, or is invited to doubt, that what he or she is being offered is a tale which explores the human condition. Thus, the role of animals in the fable is almost irrelevant. They are merely vehicles for the human and are not, in any way, presented as having physical or psychological existence in their own right. … From the point of view of this study, therefore, the fable has little

Throughout this chapter the spelling and literation of original early modern sources have been silently modernised.

E. Fudge (*) University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_6

101

102 

E. FUDGE

to offer and can teach us nothing about the deeper relationships between the human and the non-human.1

Likewise, in an article first published in English translation in the same year as Simons’ book appeared, Jacques Derrida looked back and considered how to engage with the many animals that peopled his own writing. One thing was clear, he argued: “Above all, it would be necessary to avoid fables. We know the history of fabulation 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 man and as man.”2 Coming from very different perspectives, then, both outline what is presented as an unproblematic position: “a reader” can be in no doubt, generalises Simons; “We know”, says Derrida, assuming a communal understanding about fables. In this chapter I want to make the case that beast fables might actually have more of a part to play in thinking about human–animal relations than Derrida and Simons suggest. I will propose that their readings of the role of fables postulate a notion of species difference that is ahistorical and that both are reinforcing rather than challenging human exceptionalism. I will take as my evidence a particular conception of humans and animals that was dominant in early modern England and from that starting point I will probe the assumption that beast fables have little to say about actual animals and actual humans. To do this I will reassess what the human is assumed to be in such a dismissal, what the animal, and how the relationship between the two might be working in fables, using Ben Jonson’s 1606 play Volpone as a focus. My hope is that in making a case for the need to rethink beast fables through a reading of this early modern text what I am also doing is engaging in a debate that is about the relationship between humans and non-human animals that remains relevant today. To underline this I will turn briefly at the end of the chapter to look beyond the early modern period to posthumanist ideas as a way of thinking through how the historical analysis might also impact upon contemporary literary studies that attend to what Cary Wolfe has called “the question of the animal”.3

 Simons, Animal Rights, 119.  Derrida, The animal, 405. 3  Wolfe, Animal Rites, 44. 1 2

6  WHAT CAN BEAST FABLES DO IN LITERARY ANIMAL STUDIES?… 

103

The Beast Fable In ancient Greece and Rome, as Leslie Kurke has shown, the beast fable was a popular form that was regarded as distinct from and beneath the “respectable genres” of the period.4 Despite this, their use by orators in persuading audiences saw fables used in political debate into the medieval period at which time they were also taken up as part of the school curriculum as a means whereby Latin was taught.5 So by the time Erasmus was outlining the ideal Education of a Christian Prince in 1516 the didactic value of beast fables was well established. Not only did they help the child learn Latin, they impressed morality upon his mind (and almost always the educated child was male) in a particularly fruitful way. “When the little pupil has enjoyed hearing Aesop’s fable of the lion being saved in his turn by the good offices of the mouse”, Erasmus wrote, “and when he has had a good laugh, then the teacher should spell [the meaning] out”. The meaning here, appropriately for the royal pupil, is about rule: [T]he fable applies to the prince, telling him never to look down on anybody but to try assiduously to win over by kindness the heart of even the humblest of the common people, for no one is so weak but that he may at some time be a friend who can help you or an enemy who can harm you, however powerful you may be yourself.6

In this reading, the fable of the lion and the mouse has direct application, but to the ruler not to the beasts. This is, as Derrida argued, “a discourse of man”. Ben Jonson would have encountered beast fables during his time as a pupil at Westminster School, and a crucial piece of fox-lore provides the plot of his 1606 play Volpone. This comes from a story that can be found in a twelfth-century bestiary that T.H. White translated as follows: [the fox] is a fraudulent and ingenious animal. When he is hungry and nothing turns up for him to devour, he rolls himself in red mud so that he looks as if he were stained with blood. Then he throws himself on the ground and holds his breath, so that he positively does not seem to breathe. The birds, seeing that he is not breathing, and that he looks as if he were covered with  Kurke, Aesopic Conversations, 156.  Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, 5–6. 6  Erasmus, The Education, 12. 4 5

104 

E. FUDGE

blood with his tongue hanging out, think he is dead and come down to sit on him. Well, thus he grabs them and gobbles them down.7

Peter Harrison has argued that in the medieval period the study of animals might better be regarded as an “aspect of biblical hermeneutics”,8 and in this context, the narrative of the fox and the birds was perceived to have a religious meaning. “The Devil has the nature of the same”, the bestiary entry writes of the fox: With all those who are living according to the flesh he feigns himself to be dead until he gets them in his gullet and punishes them. But for spiritual men of faith he is truly dead and reduced to nothing.9

Studying the fox and the birds is a reminder to readers that sinfulness is a constant presence; that the Devil is always waiting to pounce. In Volpone this story of temptation is transferred to contemporary Venice, and the wealthy title character—whose name is Italian for fox—is faking serious illness in order to gull three citizens all of whose names are avian—Corvino (crow), Corbaccio (raven), and Voltore (vulture). Each of these citizens is attempting to woo the apparently dying Volpone with gifts in order that they should be named as the sole beneficiary of his estate in his will. As if to ensure the audience has spotted the link to the bestiary narrative of the fox feigning death to catch the gullible birds, direct reference is made to it in the play itself. At the first knock on his door, Volpone states: Now, now, my clients Begin their visitation. Vulture, kite, Raven, and gorcrow, all my birds of prey, That think me turning carcass, now they come.10

And later, when an inquiry is made about the “arms” that are engraved on the large “piece of plate” that has been brought by Voltore as an

 White, The Book of Beasts, 53–4.  Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, 269. 9  White, Book of Beasts, 54. 10  Jonson, Volpone, 1.2.87–90. 7 8

6  WHAT CAN BEAST FABLES DO IN LITERARY ANIMAL STUDIES?… 

105

inducement, Volpone notes that it should show “a fox/Stretched on the earth, with fine delusive sleights,/Mocking a gaping crow”.11 But it is not only that the “birds of prey” offer money. Corbaccio disinherits his own son Bonario in order to make Volpone his sole heir, assuming that Volpone will die before he does; and Corvino sends his wife Celia “to sleep by” Volpone and “restore” him, assuming that Volpone is impotent.12 Both, however, are fools, and, once alone with Celia, Volpone leaps up from his feigned sick bed and attempts to rape her, but Bonario, who has overheard, steps in and saves her and reports the fraud to the city authorities. When Volpone arrives at court faking illness once again, however, he convinces the judges that he would have been incapable of the attempted rape and is released. Celia (named from the Latin for “heavenly one”) and Bonario (which means “honest, good”) are instead taken into custody for telling lies. This, as Stephen Greenblatt has noted, feels like it should be the “finale” of the play, with the great manipulator triumphant and the virtuous characters banished from the scene.13 But there is another Act to go—there must be a moral to this fable. And in Act 5 Volpone decides to take his pretence to its logical conclusion and let it be announced that he has died and that he has bequeathed all of his wealth to his servant Mosca (which means “flesh fly”) rather than to any of his “clients” so that he, Volpone, can entertain himself watching the impact this has on the “birds of prey” who have gathered around him. However Mosca, the true parasite of the play, refuses to go along with his master’s plan and decides to actually take the wealth from him, and Volpone finds himself a non-person (he has been declared dead) and realises too late that he has made “a snare for mine own neck! And run/My head into it wilfully”.14 The fox has undone himself and can only stop his parasite by revealing the whole tale in court, and it is notable that it is when it diverges from its bestiary original in the final Act that the plot Volpone has woven unravels. It is when he tries to improvise—to step away from the guidance of the beast fable—that he fails. Finally, then, Jonson fulfils the bestiary narrative in a way his title character had not intended: Volpone is caught out by his crimes and it is Celia and Bonario (the heavenly and the good) who are freed. The fox is out-foxed  Ibid., 1.2.92–6.  Ibid., 2.6.35 and 28. 13  Greenblatt, The false ending, 91. 14  Jonson, Volpone, 5.11.1–2. 11 12

106 

E. FUDGE

and Jonson fulfils the promise made in the “Epistle” that accompanied the printed edition of the play, that it would “imitate justice and instruct to life”.15 Given the play’s use of animals to speak about human concerns, one might assume that Jonson’s beast fable would reflect the assumptions made by Simons and Derrida with which I began. In Volpone we seem to have a clear sense that the play is “a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for man and as man”. But I want to suggest that there is another way of reading the play’s relation to the fable conventions. What, for example, is “the human” that Simons refers to? Who is this “man” of Derrida’s discussion? And how do these fit Volpone? Behind both of these singularly singular concepts—“the human”, “man”—lie assumptions that need to be unpacked, and in unpacking those assumptions a very different sense of both humans and animals emerges, one which reminds us how historically constituted both are in a way that might make the beast fable a strange ally to literary animal studies.

The Paragon of Animals So, what kind of human was Jonson thinking with when he wrote Volpone, and what kind of animal? The two—humans and animals—were inseparable in the philosophy he had been schooled in, because in that philosophy humans required animals to be present so that they could enact their humanity. The narrative that underpins this perspective originates in the Bible. In the beginning God gave Adam absolute power over the rest of creation, power that received its clearest expression in Adam’s naming of the animals. Genesis 2.19 (KJV) reads: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof”. In this world of absolute order nature is not wild, it is available for human use and, indeed, that is its purpose. The naming of animals is an action that places those animals within a human ordering structure: in figurative terms, Adam puts the animals in their place because their place is his to designate. The story, of course, does not end there. The Fall which followed Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil undid this  Ibid., Epistle, 39.

15

6  WHAT CAN BEAST FABLES DO IN LITERARY ANIMAL STUDIES?… 

107

order, and as punishment nature no longer yielded its goods up to humanity freely. Instead, labour was required: “[C]ursed is the ground for thy sake”, said the Almighty to Adam, “in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. … In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (KJV: Genesis 3: 17 and 19—Eve was cursed with another kind of labour, of course). Thrown out of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had to train, dig, cage, and prune—in short, they had to struggle against a wild nature. And because all humans “have Adam for our common parent”, as Alexander Whitaker, the religious leader of the English settlers in the Virginia colony put it in 1613, the curse placed upon Adam and Eve was also placed upon future generations.16 But the Fall, and the concomitant wildness of the natural world, was also seen to have a positive role. It was through exercising control over wild nature that humans were believed to approach a return to Eden and a reinstatement of their original being. As Nicholas Morgan wrote in his horse-training manual, which was printed three years after Volpone was first performed: [M]an must consider that by his disobedience, he hath lost all obedience, which by original creation was subject unto him, and that now the obedience of all creatures must be attained by Art, and the same preserved in vigour by use and practise.17

The art of horse training should be read as a model of a humanity’s exercise of control over nature in a fallen world more generally. Vigorous use—labour—was required to regain order. Morgan notes, however, that the outcome of such work is never permanent. Like any attempt to control the wild in a fallen world it cannot achieve perfection: animals that are made tame can always become wild once again, and thus the struggle against wildness is a continuous and inevitable part of human experience. It is also viewed as a necessary part of that experience, for it is in the act of training, digging, caging, and pruning that the true potential of humanity can be expressed after the Fall. As John Donne noted in 1610, “[O]ur business is, to rectify/Nature, to what she was”.18

 Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, 24.  Morgan, The Perfection of Horse-manship, 5–6. 18  Donne, To Sir Edward Herbert, lines 33–4. 16 17

108 

E. FUDGE

But it was not only the external world that rebelled against humanity. The internal world of the self also grew wild after the Fall. As John Davies wrote in his 1599 poem Nosce Teipsum (“Know Yourself”): I know my Soul hath power to know all things, Yet is she blind and ignorant in all; I know I am one of Nature’s little kings, Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.19

What these little kings are in thrall to is the stuff of the world that too easily draws them, and the impact of this thralldom is potentially catastrophic. As Robert Burton put it in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1624): humans give “way to every passion and perturbation of the mind: by which means we metamorphose ourselves, and degenerate into beasts”.20 This metamorphosis must be regarded as a real and not as a figurative conception, and the orthodox early modern understanding of reason explains this. From Aristotle thinkers took the belief that humans possessed three souls: the vegetative soul, which was the source of nutrition, growth, and reproduction, and was shared by humans, animals, and plants; the sensitive soul, possessed by animals and humans alone, which was the source of perception and movement; and the rational soul which was found only in humans and housed the faculties that made up reason.21 Thus, when humans followed their passions (greed, lust, anger, etc.), instead of making rational choices the sensitive soul took precedence and their truly human capacity was inactive. And in this moment when reason was in abeyance, humans were simply animals: as George Gascoigne declared in 1576, recognising how alcohol had the capacity to wipe out reason, “all Drunkards are Beasts”.22 Thus, just as a horse could become wild if the training ceases, so the human self could become wild without true rational control. Or, as Donne put it: “How happy is he, which hath due place assigned/To his beasts, and disafforested his mind!”23 But it was not just that humans could become animals: it was worse than that. Humans had the potential to become lower than the other animals because those other animals lacked rational souls and so could never  Davies, Nosce Teipsum, 8.  Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 5. 21  Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 8–13. 22  Gascoigne, A delicate Diet, for daintiemouthde Droonkardes, 6. 23  Donne, To Sir Edward Herbert, lines 9–10. 19 20

6  WHAT CAN BEAST FABLES DO IN LITERARY ANIMAL STUDIES?… 

109

make reasoned choices and thus were only ever acting according to their natures (i.e. naturally) when they followed their passions. Humans, on the other hand, had the God-given capacity to act with reason, but too often failed to use it. So those humans who failed to act like humans were not simply beasts, they were worse than beasts because they undid their own status. As Hamlet says of his mother’s speedy re-marriage: “[A] beast that wants discourse of reason/Would have mourned longer”.24 Gertrude isn’t simply failing to mourn like a human should, she is failing to mourn like an animal would, and that makes her failure much worse. In the context of such a view of human nature a beast fable might be interpreted as having a particular import. Here actual animals (the ones that possess only vegetative and sensitive souls) are materially absent, but their conceptual presence is crucial to meaning. Thus, when the fabled fox pretends to be dead to capture the birds—when it gets what it wants through its cunning and their foolishness—the interpreter of the fox’s action should read this as revealing the fox acting according to its nature (it is not being devilish, it is simply being a fox) and the birds (who lack reason) as capable of following only their stomachs as they approach a potential meal. Human actions, of course, should be informed by—controlled by—reason, and if a human is acting immorally this is a sign of poor choice which reveals how truly beastly humans could become. “All Drunkards are Beasts” is not a comment on animals; it is, of course, a comment on humans. Volpone can thus be read as being a play full of humans who are not properly human and who, because of that, become the worst kind of animal. This is, undoubtedly, a beast fable that is, as Derrida wrote, “a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for man and as man”. But animals do not disappear as animals in this early modern conception. Not only are the humans of the play’s world staged very explicitly as animals, through their names and through the self-conscious references to the beast fable in the text. In addition, Jonson makes clear, as Burton would do a few years later, that this conception of humanity can only be understood through an attention to actual animals—those creatures who possess only vegetative and sensitive souls. The degeneration is not metaphorical. But we can do more with this early modern conception: by reading Volpone as a text that might be relevant to thinking about human–animal  Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.2.150–1.

24

110 

E. FUDGE

relations we are, I suggest, brought face to face with a sense that the category “human” is not historically transcendent—that humans were not made once and for all time (as Genesis, and as perhaps Simons and Derrida seem to suggest in their conceptions of “the human condition”, and “man”). Rather, this early modern beast fable reveals that being a human is a product of a group of ideas that are in action at a particular moment; that the human is situated, constructed, and so can change. From this perspective, a blanket dismissal of beast fables from literary critical analyses of human–animal relations might be less useful than it initially appears to be as such fables have in the past made visible how humans were once viewed as inseparable from animals, that there once was what Juliana Schiesari has termed “a continuum of life in which humans also partake reciprocally in animal characteristics”.25 Having that as a model of interspecies engagement might offer another way of reading beast fables that makes “the human”, and “man”, figured as distinct from animals, more problematic categories than Simons or Derrida seem to acknowledge when they dismiss the genre.

Old and New Continuums In the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin cited on six occasions the phrase “Natura non facit saltum” (nature does not make leaps). This idea reflected his hypothesis about the natural world—that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification”. But the Latin quotation was also used by Darwin to present evolutionary theory in familiar terms. “Natura non facit saltum” was, he wrote, “that old canon in natural history”,26 and versions of the idea can be found from classical times and into early modern England. The poet George Herbert, for example, celebrated a sense of the smooth graduations to be found in nature in his poem “Providence” (first published in 1633): “Frogs marry fish and flesh; bats, bird and beast;/Sponges, non-sense and sense; mines, th’earth and plants”. For him, “Man is the world’s high Priest”: where animals are mute, humans can sing God’s praise, and the human who fails—who does not use this special gift—“Doth not refrain unto himself alone,/But robs a thousand who would praise thee fain,/and doth commit a world of sin  Schiesari, Rethinking humanism, 61.  Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 346 and 154.

25 26

6  WHAT CAN BEAST FABLES DO IN LITERARY ANIMAL STUDIES?… 

111

in one”.27 As in Volpone, Herbert’s human has a capacity to be more than animal, but can fail to utilise this power. Darwin’s theory of evolution, of course, did not attempt to offer such a moralising conception of natural order. Rather, evolution was presented as an inevitable process, beyond the will or agency of the individual creature. But Darwin wasn’t only writing in response to such established conceptions of the natural world. He was also, I suggest, writing in the context of an idea of the human that came to dominate philosophical discussion after Volpone had been written and first performed, and that continues to hold power today. This is a construction of the human that underpins what posthumanist thinkers often term “humanism”. In Wolfe’s definition humanism’s conception of “‘the human’ is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature … but more generally by transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether”.28 Humanism, in short, sets aside the “continuum” of humans and animals found in Volpone; it denies how far humans are in “thrall” to physical things. A key origin of this thinking is the mid-seventeenth-century work of René Descartes who saw what Derrida has termed “abyssal differences” separating humans from animals.29 Where pre-Cartesian thinking posited a link between human and animal, Descartes proposed reason as an innate, inalienable property of the human that allowed for his/her utter separation from animals which, he wrote, lack not simply reason but full consciousness. Animals act in the world “[i]n the same way a clock, consisting only of wheels and springs, can count the hours and measure time more accurately than we can with all our wisdom”30: they are automata, incapable, in Derrida’s terms, of responding, capable only of reacting.31 The difference from Jonson’s conception is that in Descartes’ thought the gulf between humans and animals is unbridgeable. An actual metamorphosis from rational human to drunken beast, for example, is no longer possible. It is from this post-Cartesian perspective that a beast fable can be read as being solely about “man”. Only when such an absolute distinction

 Herbert, Providence, lines 135–6, 13 and 18–20.  Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, xv. 29  Derrida, The animal, 402. 30  Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 141. 31  Derrida, The animal, 400. 27 28

112 

E. FUDGE

between humans and animals is assumed do the species slippages that underpin Jonson’s play disappear from view. Posthumanist ideas too often project “humanist” ideas backwards onto the period before Descartes and so miss the much more indistinct notion of the human that can be found there.32 Thus, for example, in What is Posthumanism? Wolfe proposes that we should remove “meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on”, and instead rethink human experience “in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings”.33 We might view this as having links to Burton’s claim that humans “metamorphose [themselves] and degenerate into beasts”—although for Wolfe letting go of reason has a positive rather than only a negative potential. And Wolfe proposes another connection to earlier ideas when he writes that such rethinking of the value of reason should lead humans to an increase in “vigilance, responsibility, and humility”.34 This is not the same humility that Davies experienced when he recognised humanity’s thraldom, of course, or when Morgan acknowledged that his training of his horse would never be completed, but it is not wholly dissimilar either. What is proposed by them all—Wolfe, Burton, Davies, Morgan—is another way of living, without leaps, without abyssal differences—Natura non facit saltum, you might say. Given posthumanism’s emphasis on the connections between humans and animals that can be found in Wolfe’s and others’ work,35 what might the beast fable do? The question needs to be addressed because to continue to deny the relevance of beast fables on the grounds offered by Simons and Derrida would seem to suggest that humans are always and forever distinct from animals; that the line between them and us can never be crossed. Posthumanist rethinking of the species continuum might offer a way to retrieve beast fables for use in contemporary literary animal studies as well as in early modern ones. Two very brief outlines of recent critical analyses that show how this might work will have to suffice here. Susan McHugh has reclaimed George Orwell’s Animal Farm for literary animal studies by noting the “flexibility of species differences” that the novel contains, when pigs and humans become indistinguishable and yet 32  See Fudge, The animal face, 177–198; essays in Feerik and Nardizzi, ed., The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Culture; and Campana Scott Maisano, Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism, 1–36. 33  Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, xxv. 34  Ibid., 47. 35  See, for example, Pick, Creaturely Poetics.

6  WHAT CAN BEAST FABLES DO IN LITERARY ANIMAL STUDIES?… 

113

dogs can be just animals to other humanised animals.36 This suggests, she writes, that an interpretation that focuses only on the text as an allegory of Soviet political—that is, human—history37 is incomplete because the distinction between the animal story and the human story that is supposed by such a reading does not really exist. For McHugh, the line between human and animal, as between animal and animal, is too blurred to allow readers to view Animal Farm as being only about humans. The animal story is a human story, but it is also an animal story. And the apparently human story is also animal. Chris Danta has also turned to beast fables likewise claiming something that resonates with early modern ideas: that “fables cast the human down by casting the human as an animal”.38 His context is inevitably very different to the one I have proposed for Jonson’s play. Where pre-Cartesian thinkers saw themselves on a continuum with beasts, always potentially metamorphosed by their own moral failures, Danta’s starting point is the idea of “animal uplifting”—that is, the attempts through various kinds of genetic or prosthetic enhancement to dissolve “the ontological boundaries between the different species so that the nonhuman animal can be viewed and measured in terms of the human”.39 This attempt, maintaining humans as the standard by which everything is judged, is a product, he argues, of humanist thinking and it is the very literary “play with the vertical order of things” that he finds in beast fables that offer a way of thinking against such scientific developments. After Darwin, Danta writes, the “fable implicates readers in the biological order by forcing them to contemplate and confront the existential fact of their apehood”.40 The boundary between humans and other animals (all other animals) is blurred, and the beast fable is for this reason offered, once again, as a key source for re-encountering animals in literary studies. Where McHugh’s and Danta’s readings are informed by post-­Darwinian and posthumanist ideas, the early modern writers I have cited should be recognised as pre-Cartesian—or perhaps prehumanist. But the two groups—the pre- and posthumanists—have, as I have sketchily hinted at, a surprising amount in common. Through attending to work by writers  McHugh, Animal Farm’s lessons, 29.  See Brunsdale, Student Companion, 128–9 for such an analysis. 38  Danta, Animal Fables after Darwin, 3. 39  Ibid., 2. 40  Ibid., 19. 36 37

114 

E. FUDGE

like Jonson, Donne, Burton, and Morgan as much as to fiction by Orwell, or H.G. Wells, Franz Kafka, and J.M. Coetzee (some of Danta’s foci), it becomes clear that a blanket dismissal of fables such as Simons and Derrida propose is problematic in that it assumes a conception of “the human” that is singular, ahistorical, permanent. Such a reading we might term “humanist”. As this brief exploration hopes to make clear, that thing called the human is not and never has been permanent, and it might be that it is in the beast fable—the most anthropomorphic of all genres, the place where animals speak in human voices in order to voice human concerns— that we are offered the best starting point to engage with that idea.

Works Cited Boehrer, Bruce. 2010. Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brunsdale, Mitzi M. 2000. Student Companion to George Orwell. London: Greenwood Press. Burke, Peter. 1997. Fables of the bees: A case-study in views of nature and society. In Nature and Society in Historical Context, ed. Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson, 112–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton, Robert. 1624. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford: Henry Cripps. Campana, Joseph, and Scott Maisano. 2016. Introduction: Renaissance posthumanism. In Renaissance Posthumanism, ed. J. Campana and S. Maisano, 1–36. New York: Fordham University Press. Danta, Chris. 2018. Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darwin, Charles. (1859) 2008. On the Origin of Species. Edited by Gillian Beer. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, John. 1599. Nosce Teipsum. London: Richard Field. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. The animal that therefore i am (more to follow). Critical Inquiry 28 (2): 369–418. Descartes, René. (1637) 1985. Discourse on the method. In The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Donne, John. (1610) 2000. To Sir Edward Herbert, at Juliers. In John Donne: The Major Works, ed. John Carey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erasmus, Desiderius. (1513) 1997. The Education of a Christian Prince. Translated by Neil M.  Cheshire and Michael J.  Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feerik, Jean E., and Vin Nardizzi, eds. 2012. The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

6  WHAT CAN BEAST FABLES DO IN LITERARY ANIMAL STUDIES?… 

115

Fudge, Erica. 2000. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ———. 2006. Brutal Reasoning: Humans, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2013. The animal face of early modern England. Theory, Culture and Society 30 (7): 177–198. Gascoigne, George. 1576. A Delicate Diet, for Daintiemouthde Droonkardes. London: Richard Jhones. Greenblatt, Stephen J. 1976. The false ending in Volpone. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 75: 90–104. Harrison, Peter. 1998a. Reading the passions: The fall, the passions, and dominion over nature. In The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Steven Gaukroger, 49–78. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1998b. The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herbert, George. (1633) 2015. Providence. In George Herbert: The Complete Poetry, ed. John Drury and Victoria Moul, 111–115. London: Penguin. Höfele, Andreas. 2011. Stage, Stake and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jonson, Ben. (1606) 1999. Volpone. Edited by Brian Parker and David Bevington. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kurke, Leslie. 2011. Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Mann, Jill. 2009. From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McHugh, Susan. 2009. Animal farm’s lessons for literary (and) animal studies. Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies 1 (1): 24–39. Morgan, Nicholas. 1609. The Perfection of Horse-manship, drawne from Nature; Arte, and Practise. London: Edward White. Pick, Anat. 2011. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Schiesari, Juliana. 2013. Rethinking humanism: Animals and the analogic imagination in the Italian Renaissance. Shakespeare Studies 41: 54–63. Shakespeare, William. (c.1601) 2006. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden. Shannon, Laurie. 2013. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simons, John. 2002. Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Whitaker, Alexander. 1613. Good Newes from Virginia. London: F. Kyngston.

116 

E. FUDGE

White, T.H. (1954) 1992. The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century. Reprint, Stroud: Alan Sutton. Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

CHAPTER 7

“That was a rare experiment of transfusing the blood of a sheep into a mad-man”: Animal Experiments and Satirical Knowledge in Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso Vera Thomann

Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, the scientist who serves as the main protagonist in Thomas Shadwell’s satirical play The Virtuoso (1676), is introduced to the stage only in the second act, “learning to swim upon a table”.1 As his admirer Sir Formal and a swimming master are standing by, the virtuoso is in the midst of performing an animal experiment with a frog. His wife, Lady Gimcrack, describes the scene as follows: 1

 Shadwell, The Virtuoso, 2.2.

V. Thomann (*) University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_7

117

118 

V. THOMANN

He has a frog in a bowl of water, tied with a packthread by the loins, which packthread Sir Nicholas holds in his teeth, lying upon his belly on a table; and as the frog strikes, he strikes; and his swimming master stands by to tell him when he does well or ill.2

Gimcrack’s experimental performance is twofold: On the one hand, the experiment requires the scientist to mimic the frog’s movement in order to learn about the animal’s swimming technique. The frog leads by a thread, while Gimcrack adapts to its swimming rhythm and coordination, and ultimately exceeds the frog, since, in Sir Formal’s words, “nor […] this or any other frog upon the face of the earth [will] outswim you”.3 The scientist’s epistemic interest therefore demands an adaptive experimental performance, which satirizes Gimcrack’s desire to perfect a froggish swimming technique. However, Gimcrack is interested in the theory of frog-­ swimming exclusively, stating that “I content myself with the speculative part of swimming; I care not for the practic”.4 The scientist’s dry training hence additionally satirizes contemporary science by seemingly serving no practical purpose. On the other hand, Gimcrack’s experimental performance is undoubtedly a theatrical performance, which not only evokes an intrinsic link between experimentation and theatricality,5 but also adapts the experimental performance to the stage: Since the audience of the Restoration theatre, as Lucinda Cole states, “could not see a frog onstage”,6 Gimcrack himself has to mimic as well as perform the frog. Gimcrack’s role as a performer is highlighted by his titular nickname “The Virtuoso”, which in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England referred to “amateurs in the root sense of the word, pursuing their interests in artworks, antiquities, mathematics, and natural rarities for the love of it, as an avocation and diversion”.7 Since the virtuosi “constitute a field of knowledge and a type of perception that focuses on awe and on the amazing”, Gabriele Brandstetter argues, they are themselves figures of theatricality—serving as “attractors of attention, as well as being media of attention”.8 In Shadwell’s  Ibid., 2.1.295–99.  Ibid., 2.2.25–26. 4  Ibid., 2.2.84–85. 5  See Shanahan, Theatrical space and sceintific space, and Chico, Gimcrack’s legacy, for specific discussions of theatricality and experimentation in The Virtuoso. 6  Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 83. 7  Daston, Attention and the values of nature in the Enlightenment, 104. 8  Brandstetter, The Virtuoso’s Stage, 180. 2 3

7  “THAT WAS A RARE EXPERIMENT OF TRANSFUSING THE BLOOD… 

119

Restoration comedy, both functions of the virtuosi are satirized: Hanging by the frog’s thread, Gimcrack actually enacts the animal experiment with and through his own body on stage. The scientist therefore invokes satirical elements not only through the performance of physical mimicry (as an attractor of attention), but also through the inversion of the experimental setting (as being media of attention). The Virtuoso thereby introduces a reciprocal, if not reversed, logic of animal experimentation, which is tested on animal bodies only to be subsequently translated into theatrical practices. As a result, the animal experiments enable the fundamental satirical logic of the play as such. In Shadwell’s comedy of five acts, two adolescents named Bruce and Longvil are presented as madly in love with Miranda and Clarinda, the nieces of scientist Sir Nicholas Gimcrack. To be with their love interests, the young men pretend to be interested in Gimcrack’s animal experiments instead, which he performs with frogs, sheep, dogs and insects, all on the basis of scientific practices of the time such as blood transfusions, transplantations and vivisection. With its scientific setting, The Virtuoso directly refers to a high time of animal research in 1660s Oxford and London, where a group of scientists surrounding the physician William Harvey coined the scientific club known as The Royal Society. Harvey, who was trying to prove that blood circulates throughout animal and human bodies, “combined animal dissection and vivisection with experiments and quantitative arguments” and “brought animal experiments to the forefront as a scientific method” throughout his scientific career.9 After Harvey left Oxford, the group of scientists including Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Richard Lower moved to London to further research issues such as the “purpose of respiration, the cause of animal heat, how metabolism works, why arterial blood is red and venous blood dark, and the cause of nervous transmission”.10 According to Anita Guerrini, their public and drastic performances of blood transfusions, open thorax or air pump experiments led not only to scientific progress but also to growing moral concerns regarding animal welfare, changing general “popular attitudes towards animals” in the process, and turned animal suffering into a “moral issue for the first time since antiquity”.11 For this reason, Shadwell’s satirical strategies in The Virtuoso have been widely discussed with reference to their factual experimental sources—“Sprat’s History, Hooke’s

 Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals, 27/52.  Ibid., 42. 11  Ibid., 51–52. 9

10

120 

V. THOMANN

Micrographia, and the Philosophical Transactions”.12 These historical documents in turn generate a “biographic or demographic” satire of science13 by unmasking the “value systems embedded in the practice of experimental philosophy”,14 the scientific rhetoric15 or the “[d]ramatic representations of experimental philosophy”.16 But Shadwell not only “satirized the Royal Society’s best-known [animal] experiments” by exposing the brutality and hubris of the scientists involved.17 The play also adopts the logic of animal experimentation as a satirical principle as such by merging the motifs of marriage, love affairs and passion with the animal experiments— with cross-over scenarios, blood transfusions and a wide notion of animality. Shadwell’s animal satire is thus not exclusively science-related, but points to the fact that The Virtuoso “satirizes the self-defeating delusion that the rational soul governs corporeal desire” in general.18 A first inherently satirical aspect of The Virtuoso’s animal experiments lies in Gimcrack’s choice of experimental animals: As a “sot that has spent two thousand pounds in microscopes, to find out the nature of eels in vinegar, mites in a cheese, and the blue of plums”,19 the Virtuoso is interested not only in frogs, sheep and dogs, but in insects particularly. His attention to marginal animals therefore contains satirical value due to an implied exchange of “human and animal traits and literal and metaphorical reference”,20 with the animals’ insignificance and gruesomeness ultimately rubbing off on the scientist’s performance. Gimcrack’s microscopical lifeforms in turn “pose[ ] theatrical problems for Shadwell”, since an audience is not able to look through the lens of a microscope.21 As a result, Gimcrack is in most cases “reduced to describing rather than performing” experiments.22 Hence, the practice of “collective verification through witnessing and adjudication”, as institutionalized by the Royal Society,23 is  Lloyd, Shadwell and the virtuosi, 475. See Lloyd also for an extensive overview.  Shanahan, Theatrical Space and Scientific Space, 556. 14  Chico, Gimcrack’s Legacy, 46. 15  Shanahan, Theatrical Space and Scientific Space, 551. See also Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 82 and Lloyd, Shadwell and the Virtuosi, 492. 16  Chico, Gimcrack’s Legacy, 31. 17  Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals, 45. 18  Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 106. 19  Shadwell, The Virtuoso, 1.2.7–9. 20  Shanahan, Theatrical Space and Scientific Space, 559. 21  Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 82. 22  Lloyd, Shadwell and the virtuosi, 475. 23  Chico, Gimcrack’s Legacy, 38. 12 13

7  “THAT WAS A RARE EXPERIMENT OF TRANSFUSING THE BLOOD… 

121

permanently dissolved into the performance of describing the experimental performance. If anything, a theatrical audience can thereby only witness Gimcrack’s—and experimental sciences’—system of values being satirized. However, the aforementioned connection between experimental and theatrical performance points to the importance of not only considering animal species as sources of satire but also taking into account the experimental logic tested on the various animal bodies. In what follows, I will point out two experimental performances that are subsequently translated into theatrical practices. Witnessed by the audience as a production site of satiric effects, The Virtuoso’s experimental animal bodies thus actually serve the production of satirical knowledge—which may not be of scientific, but of theatrical value. In the first instance, Gimcrack recounts a blood transfusion exercised on two different kinds of canines: Sir Nicholas. Why I made, sir, both the animals to be emittent and recipient at the same time. After I had made ligatures as hard as I could (for fear of strangling the animals) to render the jugular veins turgid, I open’d the carotid arteries and jugular veins of both at one time, and so caus’d them to change blood one with another. Sir Formal Indeed that which ensu’d upon the operation was miraculous, for the mangy spaniel became sound and the bulldog mangy. Sir Nicholas. Not only so, gentlemen, but the spaniel became a bulldog and the bulldog a spaniel. Sir Formal Which considering the civil and ingenious temper and education of the spaniel with the rough and untaught savageness and ill-breeding of the bulldog, may not undeservedly challenge the name of a wonder.24

Shadwell hereby directly quotes Thomas Coxe’s article “An Account of Another Experiment of Transfusion, viz. of Bleeding a Mangy into a

 Shadwell, The Virtuoso, 2.2.118–32.

24

122 

V. THOMANN

Sound Dog” that was published in Vol. 2 of the Philosophical Transactions25 and thereby comments on the transfusion “craze”, as Guerrini puts it, that swept England and France in the 1660s.26 While both the composition and the different types of blood remained unknown, the prevailing thought behind the practice of blood transfusion was that the exchange of blood would transfer characteristics of the donor to the recipient.27 Gimcrack’s experiment, however, is presented as a reciprocal setting, which ultimately produces an intra-species chiastic transformation when the bulldog becomes the spaniel and vice versa. These canine types would not only have been seen as symbolically opposed, with the sycophancy of the spaniel meeting the tenacity of the bulldog, but evoke different associations as well—of English royalty and aggressive bull baiting, respectively. In The Virtuoso, this inversed change of traits introduced through an animal experiment anticipates a major storyline, since Gimcrack’s nieces Clarinda and Miranda are in love with Bruce and Longvil as well. Unfortunately, as Miranda puts it, “he whom I love is in love with you, and your man makes addresses to me as their letters tell us”.28 Said ill-fated setting is of increased satirical value since the two men seem to be radically synonymous: “Mr. Bruce is a fine person really, and so is Mr. Longvil; and so is Mr. Bruce I vow, and so is Mr. Longvil I swear”, states Lady Gimcrack.29 Throughout the play, the so-called cross love—as pointed out by Lady Gimcrack30 and by Clarinda31—leads to multiple cross-over love scenes (e.g. in 3.1. with the couples Miranda/Longvil and Clarinda/ Bruce and in 3.4. with the couples Clarinda/Longvil and Miranda/ Bruce). It is the character of Bruce who, only in the final act, points out that “[s]ince our affections will not thrive in the soil we had plac’d them in, we must transplant them”.32 The solution for the women’s trouble is, of course, not a blood transfusion or transplantation, but ultimately a  Coxe, An account of another experiment of transfusion, 451–452.  Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals, 44. 27  Schicktanz, Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der Transplantationsmedizin, 130. 28  Shadwell, The Virtuoso, 1.2.50–52. 29  Ibid., 2.1.240–42. 30  Ibid., 3.1.232–33. 31  Ibid., 5.5.71. 32  Ibid., 5.5.86–87. It also is the character of Bruce who transfers Gimcrack’s scientific distinction of speculation and practice to the topic of love: “I shall forget the speculative part of love with Clarinda and fall to the practic with [Lady Gimcrack]”, he declares in the third act (3.1.139–41). 25 26

7  “THAT WAS A RARE EXPERIMENT OF TRANSFUSING THE BLOOD… 

123

change of men.33 Nevertheless, the logic of a reciprocal experimental setting is invoked firstly through the animal experiment and then imposed in rhetoric and structure onto a “cross love” scenario, where it serves as a satirical disposition for the rest of the play. By intersecting the logic of animal experimentation with the motifs of marriage, love affairs and passion, all cross-over scenarios that produce satirical ambiguities are thus initially tested in the form of experimental animal satire. The logic of blood transfusion is furthermore implemented with the character of Sir Samuel Hearty, a suitor of Miranda. Playing the role of Longvil’s servant (2.2.) or cross-dressing as a woman (3.4.)—only to be sexually assaulted by Sir Formal in the vault scene (4.1.)—Sir Samuel is presented as a master of disguise. Indeed, Sir Formal remarks that “[h]e would make a fine person if he were but solid”—a meta-commentary on Hearty’s role-play that invokes the possibility of changing Sir Samuel’s temper through character solidification.34 Sir Samuel, of course, gets busted in all his roles and is subsequently doused under a pump and tossed in a blanket in the second act, on which Longvil comments with the words: “That was a rare experiment of transfusing the blood of a sheep into a madman”.35 Sir Samuel’s punishment, therefore, is conflated into the notion of a cross-species blood transfusion experiment, which would ultimately change his temper. Shadwell thereby incorporates the fact that lamb blood in particular was used for blood transfusions in the 1660s, since sheep and lambs especially were viewed as the gentlest and most peaceful animal species. The use of other animal species for blood transfusions, however, was feared to transmit adverse properties.36 As reported in the Philosophical Transactions, the referenced non-fictional model experiment was realized by Jean-Baptiste Denis and caused a patient to die in 1668, which “ended any further attempts at animal-to-human blood transfusion”.37 In Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, however, the cross-species blood transfusion initially only serves as a figure of thought, which contextualizes Hearty’s punitive treatment. As a result, Sir Samuel’s treatment on stage is dovetailed with experimental imagery.

 See Shadwell, The Virtuoso, 2.1.244–45.  Ibid., 2.2.153–54. 35  Ibid., 2.2.180–81. 36  See Schicktanz, Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der Transplantationsmedizin, 130. 37  Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals, 47. 33 34

124 

V. THOMANN

Nevertheless, Longvil’s comment about Sir Samuel serves as ground for a second described animal experiment. Gimcrack, overhearing Longvil’s statement, hereafter explicates his own human-sheep experiment: I assure you I have transfus’d into a human vein sixty-four ounces, avoirdupois weight, from one sheep. The emittent sheep died under the operation, but the recipient madman is still alive. He suffer’d some disorder at first, the sheep’s blood being heterogeneous, but in a short time became homogeneous with his own.38 […] The patient from being maniacal or raging mad became wholly ovine or sheepish: he bleated perpetually and chew’d the cud; he had wool growing on him in great quantities; and a Northamptonshire sheep’s tail did soon emerge or arise from his anus or human fundament.39

Gimcrack, mistaking Longvil’s figurative statement as a literal one, radicalizes the aforementioned experiment by exaggerating the idea of a physical, psychological and acoustic exchange of characteristics: Not only is the madman calmed down through the animal blood, but becomes utterly “sheepish” in the literal sense of the word, developing a tail, woolly skin and a bleating voice. “No longer figurative descriptions of human traits, the ‘sheepishness’ of the patient has become ontological”, declares Shanahan.40 Hereby, the fear of adverse properties being transmitted through blood transfusions is mocked once more, with the madman completing a full transition into a sheepish being. However, since the necessary blood transfusion serves as the grounding structure for one particular character of the play, the described transformation is modelled not only in between human and sheep, but as a transfer from scientific to theatrical practices as well: Developed initially on Sir Samuel as a figure of speech, the narrated experimental design retroacts necessarily upon his character. Since the attempts of “solidifying” Sir Samuel’s character—whose satirical value lies exactly in his theatrical role-play—can only fail, the implied blood transfusion procedure and the sheepish madman are reinvoked on stage implicitly with every failed role-play of his. The experimental ­arrangement, although in this example set up as a unidirectional exchange,  Shadwell, The Virtuoso, 2.2.182–87.  Ibid., 2.2.190–94. 40  Shanahan, Theatrical space and scientific space, 560. 38 39

7  “THAT WAS A RARE EXPERIMENT OF TRANSFUSING THE BLOOD… 

125

thus results in an unwanted, excessive human-animal exchange process on a theatrical level as well: The experimental settings in The Virtuoso are exaggerated to such an extent that their satiric value can be reused on stage through literal, figurative and personalized depictions. Animal satire, as I would like to highlight, is thus not only to be found in the immediate presence of animal bodies, but also in the transfer of scientific practices onto theatrical character development. Both examples, with reference to the practice of blood transfusions, make use of an elementary logic inherent to the Royal Society’s animal experiments, which originates in a precarious correlation of humans and animals: Proceeding from a one-sided exchange, the experimental designs establish a relation between humans and animals in the form of an abstraction (when results obtained from animals are generalized), a representation (when the animal serves as a proxy for humans) or a transfer (when the conclusions are transferred from animals to humans), as is the case with most of Gimcrack’s animal experiments.41 This inherent logic of animal experiments can, as The Virtuoso highlights, not only generate knowledge of human anatomy through animal bodies, but is also accompanied by the premise that these analogies lend themselves to be played through in reverse or reciprocally— that certain (unwanted) associations or traits of the experimental animals can consequently rub off onto the non-scientific settings of courtship and romance. The animal body in Shadwell’s scientific satire thus becomes the starting point for a theatrical translational process that is able to create recurring references within the stage area when the activities performed on the animals (transfusions, vivisections or transplantations) are relocated into meta- and extra-scientific discourses through theatrical practices (of confusion, convergence or identification). Simultaneously, the arbitrariness of the theatrical system is exhibited as an epistemic strategy, only becoming effective—and thereby satirical—in its literal disclosure of the animals. To conclude, the figure of the Virtuoso thus carries out a “circulation of knowledge” through animal bodies,42 which is simultaneously utilized 41  Borgards, Das Tierexperiment in Literatur und Wissenschaft, 351–352. While the methodological connectivity of humans and animals is not a mandatory criterion of an animal experiment, said exchange relationship, however, can be situated in the mutual, albeit unequal, dependence of humans and laboratory animals: While the animal is dependent on protection and responsibility by humans, humans are dependent on data and research results provided by the animal (model). 42  See Vogl, Für eine Poetologie des Wissens, 110.

126 

V. THOMANN

in the theatrical foundations of Shadwell’s play. Thereby, Shadwell not only makes use of animal bodies, but also instrumentalizes the “connotative contaminations” that are always inherent in the logic of animal experimentation when conceptualized in a radically reciprocal way.43 The Virtuoso therefore invokes certain practices of animal experimentation only to transform them into theatrical practices, which in turn enable the satirical logic of the play as such. Viewed in this light, Shadwell’s audience may not witness the production of scientific knowledge but rather verifies the production of theatrical knowledge that is transferred from animal onto human bodies on stage for satirical purposes. Animal satire, in turn, is not only to be found within the animal bodies and the animal experiments performed and recounted within the Restoration comedy, but also within the theatrical practices which are inherently constructed and tested on animal bodies. Or, with reference to Gimcrack’s frog-swimming technique: There is really no dry training on stage.

Works Cited Borgards, Roland. 2016. Das Tierexperiment in Literatur und Wissenschaft. In Experiment und Literatur. Themen, Methoden, Theorien, ed. Michael Gamper, 345–360. Göttingen: Wallstein. Brandstetter, Gabriele. 2007. The Virtuoso’s Stage: A Theatrical Topos. Theatre Research International 32 (2): 178–195. Chico, Tita. 2008. Gimcrack’s legacy: Sex, wealth, and the theater of experimental philosophy. Comparative Drama 42 (1): 29–49. Cole, Lucinda. 2016. Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Coxe, Thomas. 1666. An account of another experiment of transfusion, viz. of bleeding a mangy into a sound dog. Philosophical Transactions 2: 451–452. Daston, Lorraine. 2004. Attention and the values of nature in the Enlightenment. In The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, 100–126. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guerrini, Anita. 2022. Experimenting with Humans and Animals. From Aristotle to CRISPR. Second Edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkings University Press. Lloyd, Claude. 1929. Shadwell and the virtuosi. PMLA 44 (2): 472–494. Schicktanz, Silke. 2019. Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der Transplantationsmedizin und ihrer ethischen und kulturellen Relevanz. In Kulturwissenschaftliche Konzepte der Transplantation, ed. Ottmar Ette and Uwe Wirth, 123–146. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.  See Wirth, Konzepte und Metaphern der Transplantation, 21.

43

7  “THAT WAS A RARE EXPERIMENT OF TRANSFUSING THE BLOOD… 

127

Shadwell, Thomas. 1966. The Virtuoso. Edited by Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David Stuart Rodes. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Shanahan, John. 2009. Theatrical space and scientific space in Thomas Shadwell’s Virtuoso. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 49 (3): 549–571. Vogl, Joseph. 1997. Für eine Poetologie des Wissens. In Die Literatur und die Wissenschaft 1770–1930, ed. Karl Richter, Jörg Schönert, and Michael Titzmann. München: Fink. Wirth, Uwe. 2019. Konzepte und Metaphern der Transplantation. In Kulturwissenschaftliche Konzepte der Transplantation, ed. Ottmar Ette and Uwe Wirth, 9–27. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Satirical Interruption

CHAPTER 8

A Slaves’ Revolt David Brooks

Zu Dao the place was called. Island of the Pigs. A five-day sail south of what’s now known as Taiwan. Ocean currents make it difficult to approach, in little boats anyway. Perhaps that’s what protected it so long. A small island. Remainder of an ancient volcano. A dramatic mountain range to the west, with forbidding sea-cliffs; a gentle descent to the lowlands on the eastern side. Lush jungle. Don’t know how the pigs came—a bit of a mystery—but there they were, for many thousands of years, maybe millions. Left in peace. A pity Darwin never visited. Or Alfred Wallace. They might have explained it. A beautiful race those pigs were. Ancestors of the great bearded pigs of Borneo. Noble creatures. Sharp, powerful tusks, big bushranger beards. Long legs. Fierce eyebrows. Dark skinned—not quite black, more the colour of forest shadow. And, though they lived so much of their lives in peace, such fighters when they had to be. A race of warriors. But eventually of course someone found it. Early Chinese explorers, it might have been, on tours of acquisition, or fishermen blown far out to sea. Over 2000 years ago, maybe as much as three. Amazed to find no

D. Brooks (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_8

131

132 

D. BROOKS

humans there at all, just pigs, thousands of pigs. Don’t know how these particular humans got themselves a toe-hold. Any previous attempts had been repulsed. Just a matter of numbers I suppose, and luck. But, anyway, it happened. Humans, who pretty soon had begun domesticating the native population, which is to say forcing them into slavery, putting fences around them, deciding when and what they could eat, how long they could live, whom they could breed with, all that. When has it been otherwise? Trimming their beards. Cutting their hair. Breeding the wildness out, or so they thought. Allowing only chosen sows and boars to survive as brood stock. (Such a human song and dance—and I don’t say it’s not rightful—when Messrs Hitler embark upon programs of eugenics, but let a human near an animal and what else do they do? Thoroughbred horses. Pedigree cats and dogs. Show me a pure-bred anything—a Ridgeback, or a Bull Mastiff, or an Abyssinian—and I’ll show you nasty science.) And killing the rest in their tasty infancy (ever had suckling pig? but of course you have) or sending them off by the shipload to the mainland, where in human terms they did very well, creating their own short-lived enslaved generations, adding strength and savour to the native strain. To this day you could trace their genes in a Hangzhou Dong Po Rou. And probably much farther to the west than that. Genetic fingers into the Middle East by Christ’s time, and off, then, into the great forests of Europe. A hundred years or so go by, anyway. The domesticated pigs are enslaved on the Zu Dao plain, their great-bearded ancestors holed up in the mountain jungle, eyeing off the lost lowlands. And I don’t know what starts it, what gets into them, but something does. A border skirmish, I imagine. A settler pushing his or her luck too far, killing a valued member of the tribe, or treating their slaves too badly, too publicly, too close to the forest, and the hunted deciding to hunt back. Maybe they have a leader at last. Imagine, a four-cleft-footed Guevara, a tusked Ned Kelly! It must have been something like that. A master-mind. Guerrilla warfare. A tactician. An out-lying farm attacked, and the domesticated pigs, liberated, turning upon the human who’s enslaved them, killing him, and yes—a terrorist masterstroke!—eating him. Before you know it other outlying farms have been taken, more farmers killed and eaten, more domesticated pigs liberated, a true slaves’ revolt! and the ranks of the liberation army— what else to call it?—swollen to the point where, ah, well, they become unanswerable, irrepressible. What point going into the gory details? The whole island is at last cleansed of its human invaders, is again indigenous domain, scarcely a

8  A SLAVES’ REVOLT 

133

word of it getting back to the mainland. The whole embarrassing incident, when eventually written up, wiped from history in the destruction of the Imperial Archive when Lord Elgin burns the Summer Palace. Not that there isn’t the occasional trace. Psalmanazar, for example, mentions the island—he calls it Zateya—in his History of Formosa, and William Dampier, the pirate, in his Voyages, where he tells of the attempted capture of huge and ferocious pigs on a deserted island south of Japan and the loss of two of his men in the process. It’s even thought that, transmogrified, the pigs of Zu Dao were the original of the Houyhnhnms, but who knows? Very possibly the Borneo descendants were of the ‘herd’ whom the eunuch-­­ admiral Hong Bau, en route to exploring the east coast of Australia, captured on his way past in 1420 but had such trouble with—one imagines them running amok on the deck—that he threw most of them into the sea some way off a large, smoking island he chose not to explore. Pigs are excellent swimmers. A pity he didn’t bring some here but who knows, maybe he did? That might help to explain a few oddities in the national character—of the pigs, of course. Gone now, the island. Swallowed up by the sea, or maybe just the expanding populace of the Chinese Republic, the only pigs there now in slaughterhouses, or waiting to be taken to them, or hanging in plate-sized pieces, golden yellow, in the windows of restaurants. Restaurants! What is a restaurant but the showroom of an abattoir? Don’t get me started on restaurants!

PART II

Satirical Editorials and Fiction: Early Through High Modernist Studies

CHAPTER 9

“A green Parrot for a good Speaker”: Writing with a Birds-Eye View in Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot Adam James Smith and Ben Garlick

Some People will have it that a Negro might as well set up for a Beauty, as a green Parrot for a good Speaker;—Preposterous Assertion! as if the Complextion of the Body had any Influence over the Faculties of the Mind; yet meerly on this Score they resolve, right or wrong, to condemn all I say beforehand. Eliza Haywood, The Parrot (1746)

Fig. 9.1

A. J. Smith (*) • B. Garlick York St John University, York, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_9

137

Fig. 9.1  “The ladie’s disaster; behold love’s emblem in the thoughtless dame,/ who burns alas! unconscious of the flame;/ while from the lofty tête ‘tis plainly seen/ they’ve much without, who little have within”. A woman seated at a table, and underneath a parrot in a cage suspended from the ceiling, unaware that her wig has been set alight by a mischievous monkey; another woman screams in horror as she enters through a door, in the right foreground a cat shields her kittens from a barking dog. Etching. c.1780. Wellcome Library no. 31650i.

9  “A GREEN PARROT FOR A GOOD SPEAKER”: WRITING WITH A BIRDS-EYE… 

139

The Avian Eidolon In 1746, having spent two years publishing The Female Spectator—widely considered to be one of the first periodicals written by women for women— Eliza Haywood turned her attention to another community whose opinions were underrepresented in the periodical press: the avian community. Indeed, more specifically, London’s marginalised community of green parrots.1 The Parrot, a short-lived weekly essay-periodical that lasted for nine issues in 1746, took the concept of the eidolon—the fictional editorial voice employed in periodical writing reminiscent of what we might today recognise as a house style—and asked what would happen if such a voice were nonhuman. The eidolon was a common feature of eighteenthcentury periodicals. The best remembered eidolon is perhaps Mr Spectator, the narrator of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator, a character who personified that periodical’s mischievous promise to always “observe an exact neutrality between Whigs and Tories”.2 Mr Spectator provided Addison and Steele with a first-person persona through which they could articulate the tone, style and ambition of their periodical and a voice with which they could address readers. Where groups of writers were contributing to the same periodical, the emulation and enaction of this shared voice facilitated a degree of stylistic consistency familiar to regular readers. The eidolon also provided these writers with a meta-fictive shorthand for communicating any commercial or editorial changes that might shape or change their periodical. For instance, when Richard Steele decided to wind down his popular periodical The Guardian (narrated by the fictional Nestor Ironside) to launch the more explicitly patriotic Englishman, he opened this fledging periodical with “an account of the transfusion of the spirit of Ironside into me an unknown writer”.3 In short, as Manushag Powell observes, “for a writer to embark upon this sort of project means the deliberate assumption of a performative role, because the reader expects to see authorship being enacted in the periodical”.4 In the case of Haywood’s periodical of 1746, this “enacted” authorship was attributed to a green parrot who had been born in Java, captured, taken to Holland, and sold to, amongst many others, a French merchant, a widow, a great 1  See Powell, Performing Authorship, for a detailed discussion of Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator. 2  Addison, No 1, 2. 3  Ibid, 1. 4  Powell, Performing Authorship, 14.

140 

A. J. SMITH AND B. GARLICK

philosopher, a gentleman taking the grand tour, a young girl and a suite of English noblemen. That this well-travelled avian eidolon can draw upon such a wealth of cosmopolitan knowledge to offer his unique perspective on all that he observes in London provides the thrust of Haywood’s satirical project, skewering and troubling the hegemonic assumptions of the day to reveal hypocrisies and contradictions beneath. This chapter argues that Haywood’s parrot bears multiple significations and has multiple satirical functions. On the one hand, the parrot is a quasi-­ allegorical stand-in for a range of human agents, which include but are not limited to women writers, slaves, colonial subjects and Jacobite sympathisers. In this sense, Haywood’s periodical sits comfortably within a branch of animal satire that Gilbert Highet describes as being only “externally about animals”.5 In such works, Highet explains, animals “do things which are just a little like normal animal behaviour but are really lessons for human beings. They are proverbs made visible”.6 At the same time, though, Haywood also writes of her parrot as a parrot: an exotic outsider who looks askance at human activities, rendering the familiar unfamiliar and revealing false assumptions, hypocrisies and absurdities that the quotidian world of the reader has normalised and rendered invisible. As Katherine R. King has noted, Haywood’s “parrot-speaker is an alien many times over, stigmatized by species, green colouration, and Java-born foreign origin, and thus an apt comic mouthpiece for a satire on the narrow insularity and easily inflamed xenophobia of the British”.7 Haywood inverts the common use of the “satirical voyage” to present the reader with a vision of our world through new eyes hailing from faraway lands.8 In this chapter, we argue not only that Haywood’s parrot is simultaneously an allegory for both familiar groups at home and exotic outsiders, but that he also represents a deliberate subversion of pre-existing instances of parrot satire. The parrot insists that he is not merely a pretty prattler innocently reciting information without understanding, as is the case in earlier precedents such as Psittacorum Regio: The Land of the Parrots (1668), A Trip to the Moon (1728) or even Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).9 Unlike  Highet, Anatomy, 177.  Ibid. 7  King, Political Biography, 148. 8  Highet, Anatomy, 177. 9  Powell, Parroting the periodical, 65. 5 6

9  “A GREEN PARROT FOR A GOOD SPEAKER”: WRITING WITH A BIRDS-EYE… 

141

these mimicking antecedents, Haywood’s parrot is rather an editorial agent who intentionally and discriminately curates information, reconfiguring the world of the reader in a way that this essay recognises as the process of writing through the animal. Such a process names a speculative practice of commenting upon the foibles and limitations of human society by seeking to inhabit the external vantage point, and alternative social existence, afforded to the nonhuman. Consequently, writing through the animal proves an effective satirical technique to both make strange the familiar relations of human existence and to illuminate the other, parallel, yet interwoven forms of living that co-constitute and unfold through such relations. Haywood combines these distinct types of animal satire to skewer the authoritative, objective, masculinist voice typical of eighteenth-­ century periodical print, foregrounding the extent to which it implicitly denied both the significance and existence of meaningful subjective experiences amidst those in society positioned as outside of or inferior to the bourgeois public sphere. Simultaneously, perhaps at times incidentally, by making her eidolon a parrot Haywood skewers the humanistic, anthropocentric inclination of contemporary print satire, and it is this decision which, ultimately, enables the critical estrangement of her speaker from the wider human society she seeks to critique.

Allegories and Outsiders: Eighteenth-Century Bird Satire Lady Mary Montagu’s poem “The Politicians” provides a useful comparison to The Parrot when clarifying Haywood’s use of animal allegory for satirical purposes. Montagu’s poem opens by imagining an ancient golden age in which “every brute/ To humble privilege had right;/ Could reason, wrangle, or dispute”.10 However, this natural order is disturbed following the arrival of “the malcontents”: a screech-owl and a raven. These “birds who love the dolesome night” proceed to frighten fools and children, persuading the populace that their way is better than nature’s. Montagu’s poem is a sound example of the type of animal satire, which Highet characterises as being stories of “humans disguised in animal skins”.11 Montagu’s birds straightforwardly provide an allegory for the political classes who fill up parliament and, according to this poem’s  Montagu, Letters and Works, 495.  Highet, Anatomy, 177.

10 11

142 

A. J. SMITH AND B. GARLICK

politics, needlessly disrupt the pastoral harmony found in nature due to an all-encompassing need to be heard. Additional satire arises from an implicit comedy of recognition: it is humorously and bathetically debasing to picture a politician as a noisy screech-owl or a carrion crow picking at a carcass. Haywood’s parrot, in contrast, is at most quasi-allegorical, and the events and characteristics that function as allegorical within the periodical are consistent with the treatment a parrot might expect when traded around mid-eighteenth-century colonial networks. At this time, a British petkeeping industry had begun to flourish, with birds becoming the most popular companion animal. Specialist shops selling domestic and exotic species opened across London during the middle decades of the 1700s, exploiting imperial trading link overseas (further strengthened in the wake of the Seven Years’ War) and rising spending power at home, as parrots, amongst many other creatures, were transformed into ubiquitous “consumer goods” and—consequently—metaphorical resources when it came to cultural commentary.12 Such material context is important for our argument. As explored later in this chapter, Haywood’s parrot is understood primarily as a parrot, but presented in such a way that both the reader and the parrot-speaker itself are alerted it the metonymic potential of its situation. It is not the case, for example, that the parrot is allegorical because it starts walking around wearing a monocle and negotiating with neighbouring farmers, in the manner of the pig Napoleon in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.13 Instead, where allegorical potential occurs, it arises from the presentation of aspects of the parrot’s lived experience as being broadly analogous to recognisable scenarios from human society. One such instance would be the fact that the parrot was taken from his home in Java and traded around Europe as an object, a situation that blatantly recalls that of those condemned to slavery. As such, the parrot comes to stand, metonymically, for slavery and transatlantic displacement. Felicity Nussbaum has argued convincingly that Haywood’s green parrot is “a subversive (though somewhat camouflaged) agent of both antiracism and antislavery in an account that satirizes facile connections drawn between colour and ability”.14 Elsewhere, the parrot resists dismissal from public discourse on the grounds that his ideas are recycled and regurgitated without  Tague, Animal Companions.  Orwell, Animal Farm. 14  Nussbaum, Limits, 137. 12 13

9  “A GREEN PARROT FOR A GOOD SPEAKER”: WRITING WITH A BIRDS-EYE… 

143

understanding, an accusation founded in the fact that our animal speaker is a parrot and parrots mimic sound. This is, however, also a situation reminiscent of the experience of women writers in eighteenth-century print culture. Powell, who usefully locates Haywood’s periodical within a canon of earlier “parrot literature”, writes that “the parrot was renowned for speaking articulately, but without sense or discrimination, and for this reason became a common deprecatory metaphor for threatening figures of alterity like social climbers, racial ‘others,’ and women who speak out or write improperly”.15 More obviously (and perhaps most reductively), this parrot is green, and green was a colour associated with the cause of Jacobitism, which can be broadly understood as a sub-culture galvanised following the exclusion of James France Edward Stuart, the son of James II, from ascending to the throne on the grounds that he was Catholic. The crown instead passed to the Protestant, German-speaking George of Hanover, whose claim was significantly more tenuous. Jacobites were those who sympathised with the claim of the excluded monarch. By the time Haywood was writing, Jacobitism typically manifested itself in subtle, often (but not exclusively) discrete rituals and behaviours, such as “drinking healths to the Stuarts, […] joining secret societies of like-minded sympathisers, or by collecting souvenirs of the exiled dynasty, or (more dangerous this) by cursing the reigning monarch”.16 As King writes of Haywood’s parrot: “his verdant plumage is said to have called forth Jacobite associations, green being associated with the fabled Stuart Oak”.17 Even the simple fact of his being green, then, as many species of parrot indeed are, invites readings of his situation as analogous to that of Jacobite writers forced to the margins of literary culture. King has observed that “the parrot-speaker seems to have provided the Jacobite-leaning author with an irresistible channel for registering the distress experienced by outsiders and underliers, the poor and the powerless, Jacobite sympathizes among them”.18 Crucially, all of these resonances arise from Haywood’s green parrot being a parrot.

 Powell, Performing Authorship, 172.  Colley, Britons, 74. 17  King, Political Biography, 148. 18  Ibid. 15 16

144 

A. J. SMITH AND B. GARLICK

Reading with Parrots In the remainder of this essay, we present an alternative reading of The Parrot, inspired by recent work in literary animal studies.19 Rather than read The Parrot as an allegory, we consider the ways in which the parrot can be usefully engaged as a nonhuman narrator: as a parrot. We take inspiration from recent writing on animals in literature that deploys “lively theory” to rediscover the “creaturely” character of texts.20 Whilst animals abound within literature, their status as lively, corporeal beings, exerting agential force within (or upon) textual form and content—rather than as solely metaphorical vehicles for human ideas, concerns, and values—has only relatively recently garnered attention.21 Appreciating literary texts as coproduced within and through a multispecies context means they can be read for insight into the material, quotidian and affective encounters and structures that shape human-nonhuman relations.22 Thus, critical energies have shifted away what Giles Deleuze terms an “archaeological conception” of the literary, seeking to disinter the meanings located beneath the metaphorical surface. Instead, a “cartographic conception” of the text reframes literature in rhizomatic terms: a tangle of possible connections to be creatively mapped and (re-)assembled by different readers.23 When reading for nonhuman presences, this means allowing “the animal’s traces, scents, presences and noises [to] guide [readers] into the text”.24 Literary animals become lures, illuminating alternative trajectories, narratives, readings, interpretations or lines of connection with a wider (literary and lived) historical context. Multiple readings exist in productive tension with animals as metonyms, metaphors or analogies, and as material-affective

19  See McHugh, McKay and Miller, Introduction, for an overview of recent debates in this field. 20  Ohrem, Creaturely life. 21  McHugh, Animal Stories, provides an example of work that champions the reading of “animal stories” in this way. 22  McHugh, McKay and Miller, Introduction. 23  See the work of Deleuze, Essays, 63, for an elaboration of this cartographic approach to the text-as-rhizome, also developed elsewhere in his work alongside Félix Guattari. We have been particularly inspired by the work of Ann-Sophie Lönngren (cited elsewhere in this essay) who has applied this concept in her own work on “mapping” the traces of literary animal presences. 24  Lönngren, Following the animal, 241.

9  “A GREEN PARROT FOR A GOOD SPEAKER”: WRITING WITH A BIRDS-EYE… 

145

agents, illuminating vital proximities and differences between other beings and ourselves.25 We offer two, interlinked readings of Haywood’s Parrot. The first reframes the parrot-narrator as a work of “figuration” (after Donna Haraway): a semiotic and material entity speculatively mapping the multispecies milieu of the mid-eighteenth century. The second draws from Deleuze (together with Félix Guattari) to understand writing as “a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and [going] beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience”.26 More specifically, The Parrot is read as a work of “becoming-animal”, propelling the writer, and reader, into forms of affecting/being affected otherwise. By necessity brief, these open-ended analytical sketches highlight the productive potential of attending to the animal presences amidst eighteenth-­century print culture.

Figuring out The Parrot A notable critical strategy within feminist theorising, figuration features abundantly throughout the work of Haraway.27 She has crafted multiple figures—the cyborg, Oncomouse©, companion species and, most recently, a range of “chthonic” beings (spiders, octopi, even compost)—each a means of interrogating and speculating upon the lived and representational dimensions of human-nonhuman relations.28 Each figure presents “a matter of fiction and lived experience […] a condensed image of both imagination and material reality”.29 Neither “representations” nor “didactic illustrations”, figures, as lively agents in the text, serve as “material-­ semiotic nodes”. Being “creatures of imagined possibility” emergent from “fierce and ordinary reality”, they give tangible form to the agencies,

 Lönngren, Metaphor.  Deleuze, Essays, 1. 27  An excellent overview of recent scholarship in this vein is provided by Giraud et al, Menagerie. 28  In her most recent work, Haraway has mobilised a variety of figurations to critique the concept of the “Anthropocene” and propose alternative stories and modes of becoming that might provide a basis for fostering more liveable futures. See Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 29  Haraway, Simians, 149-150. 25 26

146 

A. J. SMITH AND B. GARLICK

affects, materialities, politics and relationships that characterise specific multispecies entanglements.30 Haywood’s parrot can be read as such a figuration. Her eidolon semiotically and materially freights a historically specific, multispecies geography. Introducing himself as “a Bird of Parts”, the parrot is a self-confessed composite of the experiences characterising its migratory life course.31 In satirising the “family madness” of English society (and as something of a retort to those who, after Linnaeus, might taxonomise humans based on complexion32), the parrot locates his corporeal being at the end of a long chain of inter-generational relations: “I am a Parrot;  - my Father, Grandsire, great Grandsire, and so back for near six thousand Years, were all Parrots”.33 Reflecting a wider tendency in cultural representations of parrots, the specifics of this bird, however, beyond its colour (green) and origin, are never identified, despite the great diversity of forms that parrot life can take. It is merely an archetypal “green parrot”.34 In “dialogue” with other parrot correspondents (notably in issues VI and IX), the parrot also makes passing mention of other avian informants as the sources of its anecdotes and observations. These shared experiences inform The Parrot’s commentaries on the failings and cruelties of English and European society, as well as colonial governance (e.g., as detailed by “Poll-Americana” in issue IX). Haywood evokes a network of birds, passed between owners, occasionally crossing paths with experiences that are variously intersecting and shared. Reticent to comment on political matters directly, the parrot prefers “Things of real Substance”, or possibly personal direct experience.35 Diagnosing the foibles of (English) society are “of a Nature more agreeable [to his] Talent”.36 But they are also perhaps informed by a parrot’s movements through that world. What becomes of The Parrot, when read as an act of figuration? For Haraway, figures “[map] our social and bodily reality”.37 Vital to such  Haraway, When Species Meet, 4.  Originally published in 1746, here we refer to the collected volume The Parrot published in 1764 by T. Gardener. 32  Nussbaum, Limits, 137-139. 33  Haywood, Parrot, 3. 34  The cultural figuring of parrot “types” is elaborated at length in the discussion of Carter, Parrot. 35  Haywood, Parrot, 16. 36  Ibid, 17. 37  Haraway, Simians, 149-150. 30 31

9  “A GREEN PARROT FOR A GOOD SPEAKER”: WRITING WITH A BIRDS-EYE… 

147

work is the geographical and historical specificity of the entanglements they trace.38 Thus, The Parrot becomes other than a cipher for Haywood’s, or her publishers’, socio-political sensibilities and experiences. Instead, the text—and its narrator—diagrams a wider multispecies context. The material connections conjoining Europe with the newly encountered, and increasingly exploited, ecologies of islands in the Pacific are given form. Birds, taken as curiosities or trophies at the commencement of an extensive imperial project of producing natural knowledge, enter the homes of imperial citizens in the metropole, moving along a series of lines betraying the economic and social interconnectedness of imperial Europe. Whilst we should be cautious of the temptation to equate today’s parrots with those of the eighteenth century, contemporary research on the keeping of psittacines attests to the eminent possibility of such a scenario as that facing Haywood’s speaker. Many pet parrot species tend to live over 20 years (some as many as 80) in captivity.39 Treated superficially for its beauty and the gimmick of speech (until such gimmicks are worn out, and the bird is passed on), the parrot’s interior world and its specificities as a particular kind of parrot are effaced. It becomes merely “a green parrot”, observing society’s workings from its perch in the corner. As “compounds of creatures and capacities”, figures propose and sustain critical orientations onto a shared existence.40 The parrot’s life intersects with that of other birds, as well as a range of owners. Passing through cages and aviaries, perhaps the parrot leaves its mark on these others, and they on it. His world view (as recorded in The Parrot) is thus a figuration in human terms of the unique accumulation of cognitive, behavioural and vocal ticks (or traumas) that, as contemporary scholarship reveals, manifest in such creatures as a result of their passing through multiple owners.41 Equally, as a beast of metaphor and matter, reading the parrot-as-figure allows negotiation of the situated nature of eighteenth-century writing on animals and biology amidst a wider socio-cultural context. The parrot-as-­ figure highlights the lack of any unmediated access to “real” animal life in literature during this (or any) time.42 Haywood actively engages (and  Giraud et al, Menagerie.  See the discussion of numerous psittacine specialists in Hess et al., Appropriate pets, on this subject and its implications for petkeeping. 40  Collard, Cougar figures, 534. 41  See, for example, Langford, Avian bedlam, which demonstrates the cognitive capacities—and accumulated psychological traces—demonstrated by domestic parrots. 42  As discussed by Brown, “Real” Animals. 38 39

148 

A. J. SMITH AND B. GARLICK

subverts) a literary association between parrots and women in a remarkably similar way to later feminist “dog writing”.43 The parrot is also an object of fancy, decried as mechanical and stupid, confined to the same private sphere as many women in society (in turn, caricatured in relation to these birds’ characteristics and traits).44 It materialises a multispecies imperial geography of patriarchy, domination and affection.45 Read in this way, alongside a more detailed history of parrot-human relationships, Haywood’s text manifests the quotidian materiality of eighteenth-century exotic petkeeping in eighteenth-century Britain and Europe more widely.46

Becoming-Parrot Deleuze and Guattari frame writing as an act of “becoming”: “We think and write for the animals themselves. We become animal so that the animal also becomes something else”.47 Thus, literature is cast as a “zone of exchange” or “proximity” in which human and nonhuman can pass into one another, with transformative consequences.48 Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming animal” expands an appreciation of animal agency, materiality and affect as emergent and cross-species, perceived and reworked via acts of language and representation. “The animal” for Deleuze and Guattari simultaneously encompasses actual, individual animals, metaphorical entities and the “pack” of assorted affects and ­subjective capacities that characterise a particular mode of being.49 To “become” animal is, therefore, not to mimic, or parrot, the animal’s assumed way of being. Indeed, the animal we become may bear little resemblance to the animal that we sought to become. Instead, to become animal is to open oneself onto the affective registers of animality, actualising erstwhile virtual bodily or cognitive capacities, to creatively explore the potential  For a critical survey see McHugh, Bitch.  Powell, Performing Authorship, 178. 45  See the work of Tuan on the relationship between pets and owners characterised in these terms. 46  The material relations and conditions of petkeeping (and the wider emerging “pet industry”) in eighteenth-century Britain are examined by Tague. For a discussion of exotic petkeeping in a European context, see Robbins. 47  Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, 108. 48  Deleuze, Essays, 1-2. 49  McHugh, Animal Stories, provides a neat summary of Deleuze’s concept of “becoming animal”. 43 44

9  “A GREEN PARROT FOR A GOOD SPEAKER”: WRITING WITH A BIRDS-EYE… 

149

affiliations between human and nonhuman, as well as speculate on difference. Thus, through efforts to “become animal”—or “become parrot”— both writer and parrot become something else. Mobilising these ideas, we can read Haywood’s Parrot as an act of “becoming” (becoming-parrot) that opens the writer (and reader) into inhabiting a speculative “birds eye view” of contemporary society. The act of writing through the parrot is thus a means of attuning and attending to those aspects of the (more-than-)human situation that pass below the notice of other commentators. Inhabiting what she imagines to be the parrot’s perspective mobilises Haywood’s satirical critique of human society by virtue of the parrot seeing (and being) otherwise. As the parrot remarks: “I am an Alien […] in these Kingdoms”.50 Consequently, the parrot has valuable knowledge to share. More commonly deployed in the eighteenth century as a metaphor for unthinking or mechanical speech, the parrot talks because it is driven to by an “insatiable Itch”.51 Yet, in Haywood’s writing, the parrot becomes something else. In gathering its observations to present a view onto the social ills of the English—their base tendencies to revel in executions, cleave to ill-founded beliefs, or fail to prepare for the future—the act of “parroting” is recast as a creative work of rhizomatic bricolage. For rather than a mere intermediary, passing on unedited the words of others, Haywood’s parrot mediates and translates. Elaborated in one letter received from the (fictional?) correspondent, Amicus Veritas, the parrot steals nuggets of information, but is also “eternally ringing Changes” upon that material as it does so.52 Whereas human parrots—politicians, coffee-house commentators, lazy journalists—are “mere Machines to convey the Sentiments of those who find their Account in making use of them this way”, Haywood’s Parrot enacts a more creative engagement with the material it accumulates. Indeed, such capacities for speech betray other capacities that might surprise or confound our tendency to explain them, as in Veritas’ tale of the parrot who long stole from his owner, with the consequence of his housemaid being wrongfully accused and executed, demonstrates: The chief Motive I had for relating this little Story, which, I assure you, I had from very good hands, was to show the Danger of being too certain of  Haywood, Parrot, 18.  Ibid, 11. 52  Ibid, 16. 50 51

150 

A. J. SMITH AND B. GARLICK

anything, - to prevail on people to have that laudable Scepticism of doubting all,  - examining into all, and waiting Time, the only faithful Solver of Difficulties, before they set down in their Minds as real Facts.53

Thus, by becoming-parrot, Haywood becomes a different kind of commentator, able to inhabit and convey an alternative perspective onto her wider situation. At the same time, the parrot she writes with becomes more than a mechanical voicebox, being recast as a creative (re-)assembler of knowledge.

Conclusion Haywood’s parrot, then, can be read as both “a symbol, a part of cross-­ species allegory in which animal life embodies ideas about human life” and as “as an account of the [animal’s] material and experiential reality”.54 As Robert McKay, Susan McHugh and John Miller have argued, it is productive to recognise the animal in literary texts as “metaphorical” and “material” at the same time. Haywood is alert to and able to exploit this double vision as a vehicle for satire.55 As we have seen, Haywood mines the allegorical potential of her parrot-speaker, finding a voice with which she can trouble the reader’s normative assumptions and suggest alternative ways of thinking and being. This might be an encouragement to reconsider the legitimacy of Jacobitism, an invitation for readers to reappraise both the output and potential of women writers with the eighteenth-century republic of letters or, as Nussbaum has suggested, an anti-racist attempt to foreground the inherent ludicrousness of judging the quality of a speaker according to the colour of the skin (or plumage, in this case). Or, as King has argued, the parrot might provide a broader allegory deployed to ask what kinds of utterances can be made in the England of 1746, and who can make them: “[Haywood] was acutely aware of the paradoxical nature of the human response to power that is projected in the parrot’s wanting to talk back but also feeling disabled, and thus oscillating between defiance and paralysis”.56 It seems most likely that Haywood’s parrot is an allegory for all of these and, as Powell concludes, an “attempt to  Ibid, 21.  McHugh, McKay and Miller, Introduction, 2. 55  Ibid. 56  King, Political Biography, 142. 53 54

9  “A GREEN PARROT FOR A GOOD SPEAKER”: WRITING WITH A BIRDS-EYE… 

151

rehabilitate the margins - women writers, Jacobites, foreign elements, gossip speakers”.57 However, as we have argued, this short-lived eighteenth-­ century periodical also demonstrates well the stylistic, thematic and intellectual opportunities which writing through the animal afforded the eighteenth-century satirist. Haywood’s reader is exhorted to become less of a human parrot, by revelling in the playful bricolage of moralising, anecdotal reportage, and epistolary, that parrots the material of others in a way that remakes it into something else. Writing and reading through the work of Haywood’s “becoming-parrot” thus provide both author and audience with a lure to think in new ways. And by extension, in persuading readers to suspend their disbelief to the extent that they can value and accept a parrot’s perspective, she renders the suggestion that female authorship might also make a valuable contribution to the public sphere a far easier concession by comparison.

Works Cited Addison, Joseph. 1711. Number 1. The Spectator, March 1. Brown, Laura. 2021. “Real” animals and the eighteenth-century literary imagination. In The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller, 211–224. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Carter, Paul. 2006. Parrot. London: Reaktion. Collard, Rosemary-Claire. 2012. Cougar figures, gender, and the performances of predation. Gender, Place and Culture 19 (4): 518–540. Colley, Linda. 1992. Britons: Forging the Nation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Creedon, Genevieve. 2014. Analogical animals: Thinking through difference in animalities and histories. Configurations 22 (3): 307–335. Deleuze, Giles. 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Giles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Giraud, Eva, Greg Hollin, Tracy Potts, and Isla Forsyth. 2018. A feminist menagerie. Feminist Review 118: 61–79. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press.

 Powell, Performing Authorship, 178.

57

152 

A. J. SMITH AND B. GARLICK

Haywood, Eliza. 1746. The Parrot, with a Compendium of the Times. London: T. Gardner. Hess, Laurie, M. Susan Clubb, Scott Echols, Neil Forbes, Sonia Hernandez, Jan Hooimeijer, Lorakim Joyner, Eric Klaphake, Susan Orosz, Greg Rich, Rodney Schnellbacher, and Brian Speer. 2016. Parrots: Appropriate Pets or Best not Bred? Journal of Avian Medicine and Surgery 30 (3): 286–297. Highet, Gilbert. 1972. The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. King, Kathryn R. 2012. A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. London: Routledge. Langford, Jean. 2017. Avian bedlam: Toward a biosemiosis of troubled parrots. Environmental Humanities 9 (1): 84–107. Lönngren, Ann-Sofie. 2018. Following the animal: Place, space, and literature. In Animal Places: Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations, ed. Jacob Bull, Tora Holmberg, and Cecilia Åsberg, 231–247. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2021. Metaphor, metonymy, more-than-anthropocentric: The animal that therefore I read (and follow). In The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller, 37–50. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McHugh, Susan. 2011. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2012. Bitch, bitch, bitch: Personal criticism, feminist theory, and dog-­ writing. Hypatia 27 (3): 616–635. McHugh, Susan, Robert McKay, and John Miller. Introduction: Towards an animal-centred literary history. In The Palgrave Book of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller, 1–11. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Montagu, Mary Wortley. 2000. In The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie Warncliffe and William Moy Thomas, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Felicity. 2003. The Limits of the Human: Fiction of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ohrem, Dominick. 2017. Animating creaturely life. In Beyond the Human-­Animal Divide, ed. Dominick Ohrem and Roman Bartosch, 2–19. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Orwell, George. (1945) 2012. Animal Farm. Reprint, London: Penguin. Powell, Manushag. 2008. Parroting and the periodical: Women’s speech, Haywood’s “Parrot,” and its antecedents. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27 (1): 63–91. ———. 2012. Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Robbins, Louise. 2002. Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

9  “A GREEN PARROT FOR A GOOD SPEAKER”: WRITING WITH A BIRDS-EYE… 

153

Steele, Richard. 1713. Number 1. The Englishman, October 7. Tague, Ingrid. 2015. Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1984) 2003. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. Reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 10

The Lacking Satirical Animals of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man David Sigler

“My life was like that of an animal”, explains Lionel Verney, the protagonist-­ narrator of Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826), introducing himself to the reader.1 Shelley’s novel, primarily known for its depiction of a plague that becomes an extinction event for humans, is usually discussed as an early example of apocalyptic fiction. During the early part of the COVID-19 era, it gained wide public visibility on pandemic fiction lists. Yet we might just as easily read The Last Man as an example of animal satire. A key facet of success in animal satire, explains Karen L. Ryan, is a text’s ability to maintain a duality in the protagonist, who must be noticeably human and nonhuman at the same time2—which is to say, a 1  Shelley, The Last Man, 18. Further references to this edition will be given parenthetically, in-text. 2  Ryan, Stalin, 50.

D. Sigler (*) University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_10

155

156 

D. SIGLER

(somewhat) human protagonist must live a life “like that of an animal”. Rather than portraying human characters in animal form, however, Shelley’s version of animal satire—which often plays out through images of wolves, dogs, birds, and shepherds—stems from its use of a presumed lack in animality with respect to conceptions of fully human nature to address an internal contradiction in the political field. The lack that Shelley seems to posit in animal life is ambiguously associated with women’s rights and with the novel’s protagonist, Lionel. This enables Shelley to challenge the masculine bias of both her era’s political philosophy, which often imagined states of nature from which government would be reasonably generated, and the emergent biopolitical logics of early nineteenth-century Europe. This is a powerful way to re-open questions of political belonging and rights in response to political philosophy. After all, a satirical novel, which takes the messiness of the political world as its basic milieu, need not contemplate imagined states of nature or pretend that people have consented to be ruled. Instead, it can analyse, through its development of complex fictional analogues to the modern political world, a contradictory and riven political system formed around gaps and injustices. For a novel set in the late twenty-first century, The Last Man is remarkably devoid of imagined technological, political, or cultural advancements. Its characters marvel at the hot air balloon, debate the political issues of the early nineteenth century, and depend upon nonhuman animals for transportation, labour, food, and companionship. It is a setting well adapted, then, for satire, given the mode’s conventional attention to current historical events. The storyworld closely mirrors Great Britain of the 1810s and 1820s: the King has stepped aside, much as George III had done during the Regency; politics are hyper-partisan, marking a clash of interests between the landed gentry and the bourgeoisie; corruption is rampant; a fractious populist movement has emerged and a movement for parliamentary reform is underway; the aristocracy is clinging to what power it has left. The restoration of monarchies, as embodied by Adrian, son of the ousted queen, represents the promise of social healing—this is plainly Shelley’s commentary on the Congress of Vienna, which had restored monarchies across Europe following the Napoleonic Wars. Even when the pandemic arrives halfway through the novel, its early phases merely recreate early nineteenth-century Britain: famine in Ireland spurs mass emigration; agriculture is swiftly rationalized; people, uprooted, pour into cities. It is quite possible, therefore, to read this novel as a satire

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

157

of early nineteenth-century politics rather than a bleak vision of the future or a reckoning with end times. To read The Last Man as an animal satire builds on existing scholarship that has highlighted the prominent role of nonhuman animals in the text.3 Yet critics have generally disregarded the satirical elements of the novel to discuss The Last Man as apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction. The novel is satirical not because it makes recommendations for how best to survive the reign of George IV, but, to borrow from Charles A. Knight’s discussion of satire, because it confronts the political present by “shifting from specific political action to general political consciousness and by transposing the burden of the frustration [about politics] from the satirist to the reader”.4 The reader, like the frame narrator in the Sibyl’s cave, is asked to assemble meanings out of a complex and contradictory network of animal figures, in the absence of a unifying ethos. The novel seems to construct a theory of sovereignty around those images and tropes, in a semi-fictional world “divided by three factions, aristocrats, democrats, and royalists” (49). Lionel’s dual status as member of the human flock and exception to it undercuts and secures the novel’s distinctions between its factions. The novel’s shifts from specific action to general consciousness, and from author to reader, play out through its many animal metaphors and similes, which together tend to point to something contradictory in the political order. The novel’s animal imagery allows Shelley to respond implicitly to the titans of Enlightenment political philosophy such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and, most of all, Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. For Shelley, satirical animal writing prioritizes a feminizing lack that undermines ideologies of governmentality from within. The enclosure laws of the late eighteenth century had materially demarcated humans from animals, inscribing their separation as a principle of modernity—a fact that made a profound impression upon Shelley.5 Hence it seems intuitive that her satirical commentary upon modern England would prioritize the questions of animal labour and animal proximity to human settlement. Through often highly ambiguous animal tropes, Shelley develops an

3  Williams, Mary Shelley’s bestiary; Mussgnug, Naturalizing apocalypse; Haslanger, The last animal; and Washington, Romantic Revelations, 66–99. 4  Knight, Literature of Satire, 47. 5  Carman, Radical Ecology, 22.

158 

D. SIGLER

alternative to the standard consensus-based political models or rising models of pastoral power rooted in biopolitical administration. At the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, argues Michel Foucault, power came to focus on the management of the health and vitality of a population as such, rather than the exercise of punitive violence on transgressive individuals.6 Government was reshaped into what Foucault calls “pastoral power”, following the metaphor of a shepherd tending to a flock.7 The Last Man certainly illustrates this eighteenth-century biopolitical turn in political thought, given its dread of human extinction at the level of species. Animal studies, as an interdisciplinary scholarly field, has often turned to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as “a method or frame with which to understand human and nonhuman relations” and “as a way to understand the ‘ontological’ or structural divide between humans and animals”, given that model’s implicit capacity for “interrogating and challenging anthropocentrism”.8 Yet Foucault’s vision of pastoral power is totalizing—it makes no room for an internal lack that might upend the workings of power from within. Shelley’s animal imagery explores such a possibility, as a way of calling attention to the contradictions obscured by an administrative organization of power. An apocalyptic reading of the novel will tend to highlight its biopolitical logic—that is, how the novel becomes a tale about the health and diminishment of a human population, which “enacts the process of biopoliticization by contagion” to create a novel “singularly focused on the counting and enumeration of [human] bodies”, while nonhuman animals free themselves from human domination.9 Yet Shelley aligns nonhuman animals with lack in a way that deconstructs species distinctions and, in so doing, short-sells the novel’s own biopolitical investments. Read in such a way—that is, as animal satire—The Last Man becomes a complex meditation on sovereignty from a feminist perspective, a way of upending biopower from within at a moment when the meaning of sovereignty was transforming. The lack at the basis of the novel’s many animal metaphors satirizes the novel’s overall concern about species health. But reading the novel primarily as the story of a public health crisis has unfortunately meant that we have disregarded this aspect of its cultural critique.  Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 243–57.  Foucault, Security, 125–30. 8  Wadiwel, Biopolitics, 80. 9  Chatterjee, Our bodies, 37. 6 7

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

159

For Chris Washington, the first half of the novel primarily exists to stage competing versions of anthropocentrism, which all get cleared away by the posthuman force of the plague; for Andrea Haslanger, it is “the plague [that] forces the admission that humans are animals”.10 In contrast to such views, I do not see the plague as a decisive turning point in the novel’s representation of nonhuman animals. This is because the first half of the novel, several hundred pages long, is not simply a prelude to the plague; it is in its own right a detailed satire of Georgian-era politics. The novel’s subsequent discussion of the plague, which is twice likened to “a thousand packs of wolves”, merely continues the species satire of the novel’s early stages (242, 268).11 Reading The Last Man as a satire of Regency-era politics rather than a transmission from the end of the world reveals a different side to its nonhuman animals and animalistic humans. It reminds us that the distinction between human and nonhuman life is far from secure in the early parts of the novel, and that the novel’s later images of animals function mainly by re-activating earlier moments in the narrative rather than refuting them. Washington explains how The Last Man engages with nonhuman animals as part of its post-apocalyptic meditation upon sovereignty.12 I differ from his view, however, by stressing that Lionel Verney does not become animalistic through the experience of surviving the pandemic; rather, he is animalistic from the start. At the beginning of the novel, shortly after declaring himself to be like an animal, he begins to recount days spent working as a shepherd, poaching birds from Windsor Forest, and plotting revenge against the ruling class (25). These elements too are recognizable examples of animal satire in which the animalistic human protagonist comes to embody “antisocial human impulses” and political illegitimacy.13 Important for Shelley’s satirical purposes is how these antisocial impulses place Lionel both inside and outside of the reach of the law, and thus sovereign power. For the poaching, Lionel spends a month in jail and suffers an extrajudicial “horse-whipping” (25). He is not whipped like a criminal or a condemned man; he is whipped like a horse, as if the punishment for his criminal behaviour diagnoses an existential animality in him or perhaps performatively creates it. Between the two punishments, Lionel endures  Haslanger, The Last animal, 667; Washington, Romantic Revelations, 77.  Shelley, The Last Man, 242, 268. 12  Washington, Romantic Revelations, 66–67. 13  Ryan, Stalin, 50–51. 10 11

160 

D. SIGLER

“being-outside-the-law” from a space within the law’s jurisdiction, and in this way he has something in common, as Jacques Derrida would say, with beasts and heads of state.14 As Derrida observes: “[B]east, criminal, and sovereign have a troubling resemblance: they call on each other and recall each other, from one to the other; there is between sovereign, criminal, and beast a sort of obscure and fascinating complicity, or even a worrying mutual attraction” as figures “outside the law” who “strangely resemble each other”.15 Over the course of the novel, as Lionel continues to exist in an ambiguous state, both citizen and stranger, rogue and sovereign, he effectively, by dint of figuration, hollows out the category “animal” in the text, by ensuring that there is no outside to the law’s reach except for the space he has inhabited, paradoxically, within it. Lionel’s ambiguous position inside and outside of the law is also a way of feminizing him, given how, as Derrida consistently shows, the figure “woman” is likewise positioned ambiguously inside and outside of sovereignty’s reach, and thus becomes affiliated with animality. Derrida reveals how political theory often stages an ambiguous and always figural encounter between a feminized beast (always la bête, in the feminine), who is beneath the law’s reach, and (or ambiguously as) a masculinized sovereign (always le souverain, in the masculine). Additional ambiguity arises from the French homonyms et (and) and est (is): the beast and the sovereign, but the beast is the sovereign.16 What appears to be an opposition between state power and its animal other can easily be redescribed as a difference internal to sovereignty itself. Because beast and sovereign are gendered terms in French, and because woman is so often located, like the animal, on the ambiguous periphery of rights discourses, animality links the woman to the sovereign and, also, the outlaw. This “double oscillation” of feminine and masculine, differentiation and identification, means that discussions of sovereignty are often “haunted by virtual sexual difference”, in Derrida’s view.17 As Judith Still explains, “When man, above all the philosopher … insists on the difference between man and the animal then it seems to me that it is also woman who silently enters into play as the non-­ man, the other to man”.18  Derrida, The Beast & The Sovereign, 17.  Ibid. 16  Ibid. 17  Ibid., 65, 32. 18  Still, Derrida and Other Animals, 306. 14 15

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

161

Thus the rights of woman can be readily vindicated in animal satire, given the way that such writing can challenge the assumption, core to Enlightenment models political philosophy, that people first exist in a state of nature and then consent to be governed. Alastair Hunt, in considering the status of animals as an occluded other of rights discourses, suggests that “the announced function of such animal figures is to vividly depict the tragic predicament of human beings expelled from political community”, an act of figuration that depends upon the “tacit assumption that the predicament of rightlessness finds an exemplary expression in the situation in which animals are forced, by our political communities, to live”.19 Lionel is male, yet Shelley uses his figurative animality to satirize a patriarchal political order from a feminist perspective. The association between animality, femininity, and sovereignty is easy for Shelley to make, because of the long history of writers metaphorizing politics through images of wolves and mothering, most notably the legend of Romulus and Remus as wolf-raised founders of Rome and the Roman Empire. In making this association, Shelley builds on the pioneering work of her own mother. In Shelley’s as in Wollstonecraft’s work, nonhuman animals highlight the invisible, inassimilable gaps produced within humanist rights discourse and call its model of sovereignty into crisis. The lack perceived in animals serves throughout the novel as a figure for woman. Across her career, Wollstonecraft had used animal imagery to “focalize some of the most controversial issues surrounding gender equality and biological difference between females and males”.20 Indeed, Wollstonecraft is a crucial figure in the history of thinking about the connection between women’s rights and animal rights. Shelley is known to have absorbed her mother’s influence in thinking about that connection: for instance, Carol J. Adams reveals distinct echoes of Wollstonecraft’s concern for animal welfare in Frankenstein, while Eileen Hunt Botting traces the influence Wollstonecraft’s concern for animal rights in Frankenstein.21 Several of the contemporary responses to Wollstonecraft’s work, most notably Thomas Taylor’s, dismissed her arguments on the basis of their animal imagery, complaining of a slippery slope from women’s rights to animal rights.22 As Penelope Deutscher explains of Wollstonecraft’s legacy, “The promise was  Hunt, Of whom, 83.  Klemann, How to think, 1. 21  Adams, Sexual Politics, 129–31; Botting, Mary Shelley, 166–70. 22  Singer, All animals, 51–52. 19 20

162 

D. SIGLER

that women would be raised above the beast”. Yet, because of her frequent recourse to animal imagery, “the future she articulated ran a high risk of reproducing the animality against which women’s rights appeared to offer an immunity”.23 The Last Man takes hold of this double bind to outline, in a bleakly literalized way, the meaning of such “immunity” within the field of politics. As I will demonstrate next, Shelley’s similes ambivalently place women and girls—as well as Lionel, who is male but “hypersensitive” and “effeminate”24—in the realm of the animal, and thus symbolically, but not actually, out of the plague’s reach. Shelley’s point is not that women are survivors—they die in the novel at the same rate as men, seemingly—but that they have an ambiguous status regarding sovereignty. The lack presumed to be in woman is also there in nonhuman animals, an absence which prevents the totalization of the political. The lack internally disrupts the universalising or system-making proclivities of Enlightenment theories of sovereignty and biopolitical technologies of population management. Shelley especially uses the character of Clara to develop this Wollstonecraftian critique. “Clara was not an ordinary child”, Lionel explains, as she was “endowed” with “the rights of womanhood” (205). She falls under Lionel’s guardianship after the deaths of her parents, Raymond and Perdita, an arrangement always highly mediated by nonhuman voices. Clara is the one, for instance, who locates the injured Raymond in Constantinople by following the cries of the family dog, Florio. Florio essentially speaks on behalf of Raymond, his voice testing the limit between human and animal in ambiguous ways: “‘They are human cries’, said one: ‘More like the howling of a dog’, replied another” (206). This indeterminacy of species seems to attach to Clara throughout the novel, allowing her to mediate between human and nonhuman worlds, becoming, as in conceptions of womanhood, a limit-figure for the set called “man” in rights discourses. Through Lionel and Clara, Shelley begins to pose a question that, today, political philosophers are exploring in Wollstonecraft’s texts: “what happens when women, claiming political rights, deem themselves the child, the slave, the beast, and how are the relations of the beast and sovereign differently sexualized?”25 Clara seems to embody these questions in The Last Man, as, in Lionel’s view, “her motions were more  Deutscher, Sexual immunities, 93.  Carman, Radical Ecology, 158. 25  Deutscher, Sexual immunities, 78. 23 24

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

163

harmonious than the elegant boundings of the fawns of her native forest”—a comparison that associates her femininity with childhood and the wilds outside of the city and its political order (160). Lionel explains his guardianship of Clara with a remarkable triple simile: “to my guardianship she consigned the full freight of her anxieties, reposing on my love, as a wind-nipped fawn by the side of a doe, as a wounded nestling under its mother’s wing, as a tiny, shattered boat, quivering still” (292). In one sentence, Clara becomes a deer, a bird, and a boat. What is noteworthy here is not simply how Clara is brought into Lionel’s care under the sign of the animal, but how these animal figures ambiguously re-activate the novel’s previous similes. In a passage just a bit earlier, Lionel had observed that nonhuman animals are unscathed by the epidemic: “The painted birds flitted through the shades; the careless deer reposed unhurt upon the fern … for death fell on man alone” (276). Becoming-deer and -bird marks Clara, through the reactivated imagery, as implicitly immune to the plague. Similarly, Lionel’s “man alone” passage repurposes imagery associated with his own “horse-whipping” in chapter 2, a scene which itself is built around the contrast between birds (which Lionel, the rogue, was caught poaching) and deer (which Adrian, rightful heir to the throne and owner of the forest, and thus the very picture of legitimate sovereignty, refuses to hunt even on his own land); the friendship between Lionel and Adrian would be established immediately next, in chapter 3, in a small boat. The homonym in the novel’s tendency to call small boats a “little bark” connects them to the voices of dogs, especially Florio (171). This chain of recurring images means that, as Clara begins to split the difference between criminal and sovereign, the similes that Shelley uses to establish her vulnerability—bird, deer, boat—are the same indicators that the novel had been using to signal invulnerability. This positions Clara as a figure ambiguously inside and outside the reach of the plague, and by implication inside and outside the field of biopower. To extend this interest in the way animal figuration functions as motif in The Last Man, Shelley’s complex network of interwoven wolf and sheep metaphors early in the novel suggest that the novel’s early, more obviously satirical sections are far from anthropocentric. The wolf in Shelley’s story is never just a wolf, or even a wolf at all, but the vehicle of a quite flexible set of political metaphors, giving the text heightened potential for political satire whenever it invokes wolves and sheep. As it happens, Derrida is himself drawn to fables involving wolves, which—because loup, or wolf, can also mean “mask”—indicates the importance of figural language to this

164 

D. SIGLER

haunting. Because of “sexual difference, pas de loup signifies the absence, the literal non-representation of the wolf itself in response to its name, and so an evocation that is only figural, tropic, fabulous, phantasmatic, connotative; there is no wolf.”26 The wolf only ever appears as a figure, a fable, a trope. Therein lies its satirical potential for Shelley, for the wolf’s capacity to assert that sovereignty is entirely figural. Wollstonecraft had done something similar in The Wrongs of Woman (1798), in which the working-class character Jemima explains her sexual dalliances with a tradesman by saying: “I was famishing: wonder not that I became a wolf!”27 This is not to say that the wolf trope has applicability only to humans, or that sovereignty in The Last Man is solely an issue for humans. Rather, the figural aspect of the wolf in political philosophy allows The Last Man’s satirical insights to spill across and between species boundaries. Shelley, like Derrida and Wollstonecraft, aligns the figure of the wolf with that of the stranger. Lionel “wandered among the hills of civilized England as uncouth a savage as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome. I owned but one law, it was that of the strongest, and my greatest deed of virtue was never to submit” (14). If, for Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud, the foundation of the political is the motto homo homini lupus (“man is a wolf to man”), Shelley seems to be suggesting something more nuanced along the lines of Plautus: “When one does not know him, man is not a man but a wolf for man”.28 Plautus’s statement conditionally builds negation, and therefore lack, into the observation, and connects politics to issues of hospitality through the figure of the stranger. Shelley is doing the same thing in this passage. Animality becomes not a fact of human society but a way of introducing contradiction (“man is not a man”) into the political order through metaphor or simile. Shelley, like Plautus and Wollstonecraft, therefore highlights the literariness of wolfishness by emphasizing its association with figural language and social marginalization, repurposing the Hobbesian wolf metaphor for use in satire. Here, in declaring his roguishness, Lionel compares himself to Romulus, the mythical founder of Rome, a human child reared by a she-wolf. Positioning her narrator at the boundary of the human and lupine, Shelley implicitly activates questions of female sexuality. “You mustn’t forget the she-wolf, … often a symbol of sexuality or even of sexual debauchery or  Derrida, The Beast & The Sovereign, 6.  Wollstonecraft, Wrongs, 117. 28  Quoted in Derrida, The Beast & The Sovereign, 11. 26 27

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

165

fecundity”, Derrida urges, because the she-wolf roots the myth of sovereignty in sexual difference.29 Kate Singer sees the allusion to Romulus as a sign of Lionel’s normative, civilizing impulses—a master narrative that the novel will eventually undo, in her view.30 By inverting the mythical trajectory whereby the she-wolf raises the man to be the founder of a civilization, Shelley stresses the porosity of the human–animal divide, rather than the progressive movement across that divide. Yet I would say that the novel meanwhile attempts to clarify these human–animal boundaries rather than completely obliterating them. After all, the plague is an extinction event for human beings that leaves other species unharmed—it enforces a human/animal binary very rigidly and clearly—even as it leaves Lionel strangely inside and outside of that binary division as the sole surviving human (“man is not a man”). In this way, the novel develops its satirical commentary on women’s incomplete subjection to the law and to sovereignty, and their consequent social isolation, rather than directly addressing interspecies relations. In the same passage, Lionel also presents himself to the reader as a sheep raised by wolves—that is, a sheep in wolf’s clothing, thrust into service as a shepherd by a history of paternal dispossession. He was, he says, as unlearned as the animals I tended. I often compared myself to them, and finding that my chief superiority consisted in power, I soon persuaded myself that it was in power only that I was inferior to the chiefest potentates of the earth. (14)

Ironies abound in this passage: the sometime Romulus Lionel declares himself “savage” by introducing himself as domesticated livestock and likens himself to sheep specifically because of their shared lack of formal education. The word “unlearned”, in a way, registers Lionel’s disappointment that these are real fictional sheep, not anthropomorphized sheep from a fable. One would not normally call a sheep “unlearned”, as they have no opportunity for a human-style education; a sheep can be “trained” but not “educated”, and shepherds are the ones tasked with this training, showing sheep how to live as domesticated livestock. By the end of the novel, the reader discovers that Lionel has been writing these words from  Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, 9.  Singer, It’s the end, 217.

29 30

166 

D. SIGLER

Rome, in the presence of a “half shepherd’s dog, whom I found tending sheep” (467); presuming himself the last man on earth, he has happened upon a writing table there, and so endeavours to reconstruct his life’s story from memory (466). Hence, either the story is neatly circular or, more likely, Lionel’s ironic early play of pastoral figuration should be read as a screen memory—a retroactive construction serving to justify his authority at the end of the novel, as a man with total sovereignty, but over no one. It would seem, too, that the reader has been in the grips of an unreliable narrator, not unlike “Verbal” Kint in the film The Usual Suspects, who rearranges the elements around him to construct a myth of his own origins from ingredients ready to hand.31 It is as if Lionel, in having become nearly a sheep himself, is scrambling retroactively to justify why he might have abdicated his role as shepherd, given how “the animals I tended” remained “unlearned”. His simile defines animality through lack, and implies, through the power of dashed expectations, that certain sheep may expect to be properly educated in the human style. Implicit here is Wollstonecraft’s argument, in her second Vindication, that women have no access to a genuine education, as they are instead prepared for a marriage market “making mere animals of them”.32 The implication is that the experience of education is what establishes human beings as a special category, meaning that humanness is something that emerges through learning. Yet the simile effaces that difference by clinging to it: Lionel imagines that he does indeed have “superiority” to the flock, if only because of his capacity to exercise “power”. He says “it was in power only” that the sheep are his inferiors. In this sense, he backhandedly claims not to be like the sheep, insofar as he (or rather, his dog) can dominate them. He does not imagine himself sovereign over the sheep, merely more powerful than them, which is to say that he does not claim for himself a state of exception. Yet the metaphor also cuts the other way, in the sense that it also implicitly animalizes those people actually governed by the earth’s “chiefest potentates”, by suggesting that sovereignty is merely domination, rather than a natural right, skilful statecraft, or even the expert application of self-sacrificing pastoral management procedures. For Lionel, sheep, dog, shepherd, and she-wolf are together enmeshed in the field of politics, through an arrangement of straight domination rather than cunning or education. While the arrangement may secure Lionel’s  Singer, The Usual Suspects.  Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 76.

31 32

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

167

place as shepherd, it also implies that any animal superior in strength or quickness to him—a lion or a wolf, perhaps—would, in turn, automatically be his master. Shepherding is a conventional metaphor for modern state power,33 and this passage, with its invocation of “potentates”, clearly activates such a discourse. Lionel presents himself as a particularly powerless human in comparison to those who supposedly govern the world. (Wollstonecraft had lamented that “tribes of men, like flocks of sheep, should quietly follow such a leader”.)34 Lionel thus implies there is some other quality beyond sheer power that may make equivalences between beings: he claims to be human, and thus powerful, in the same way that a potentate is, despite his lifelong dispossession. This directly contravenes the logic of the same passage’s sheep simile, discussed above. Lionel, in a self-serving and contradictory logic, suggests that he is a potentate among sheep simply because he can control them with a dog’s assistance; yet he is of the same species as the human potentate despite his relative powerlessness. Shelley here satirizes the dream of political power by revealing human domination to be dependent on interspecies relations. Lionel is an insider to human society and occupies, it would seem, a middle position in the hierarchy of beings, a station between sheep and sovereign; yet he also claims membership in the category of the “human” despite emphasizing, in the same breath, his sheep-like tendencies. By the time the reader learns that the passage has been narrated from Rome in the presence of a dog, the reader can begin to see the early scene’s fantasy as satirical. When in Rome, Lionel does as the Romans did, fantasizing about a time when he was himself a sheep-like shepherd, raised by wolves; in his fantasy, even dogs that tend sheep all day may be deemed only “half” shepherd. A polysemy emerges between a biological category (the dog breed Shepherd) and a vocation (shepherd) that throws into crisis Lionel’s initial reflections on humanness and shepherding. One is forced to reckon with the ambiguity of the situation—the dog may be either half-wild, mixed-breed, or half-shared with another master, who could only themselves be nonhuman given Lionel’s status as the last man. I would not, then, say, with Washington, that the early pastoral passages are particularly anthropocentric. Apocalyptic readings such as this tend to underemphasize the first half of the novel, which focuses in detail on  Foucault, Security, 122–30.  Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 114.

33 34

168 

D. SIGLER

supposedly late twenty-first-century parliamentary politics and the leadership roles supposedly inherent in inherited nobility, and engage more deeply with the second half of the novel, in which the world is swiftly depopulated and social structures collapse. Certainly, I would grant that The Last Man abruptly shifts genres halfway through; that said, such a shift is itself a convention of modern literary satire. Moreover, Shelley’s novel offers real-world political targets, an unusually static plot, visions of nightmare cities, and, in Lionel, a plain-spoken, low-born protagonist/narrator—all of which are standard elements of modern satire.35 The crucial thing to note, I think, is that the novel’s early vision of animal life plays out primarily in self-serving similes, which retroactively put the shepherd within the same ontological field as his flock as a form of immunity (e.g., “I often compared myself to them”). The entire scene merely rearranges elements from the narrator’s space of writing and recasts them as the myth of one’s own immunity as a form of interspecies political belonging. He styles himself the owner and point of origin of the law—not juridical human law, but “that of the strongest”—someone subject to this political order and part of it, yet also strangely immune, its founding figure and sole human survivor. Conscious of his own self-consciousness, Lionel worries at the novel’s end that he may not be nonhuman after all and thus not immune to disease. Frustrated, he compares himself to cows: “Why could I not forget myself like one of those animals?” (459). To make sense of himself as exception to the laws of nature, then, he aspires to the condition of livestock, to be part of a herd or flock, and thus implicitly to be subject to pastoral power. The contradictions apparent in Lionel’s psyche as he attempts and fails to justify his existence as human and animal, sovereign and shepherd, last man and part of a species, effectively amount to a satirical account of sovereignty in a world increasingly organized around biopower. The novel concludes with Lionel reflecting upon being the “sole survivor of my species” (449). The phrase reminds the reader of a previous passage, in which Lionel had warned the reader not to console themselves about their own individual mortality by “glory[ing] in the continuity of our species” (230). Even powerful people, he had stressed, are “subject to the same laws” as animals are (230); hence his status as “sole survivor” is made to seem, through the biopolitical but also zoological discourse of “species”, inextricably a question of “laws”. A feat of survival that had  Hammer, The world, 39.

35

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

169

seemed to be a biological fact (through the metaphor of natural laws) now becomes a matter of set theory: is there at least one being who is exempt from natural laws? This is the lack that will pull apart the novel’s biopolitical logic from within, never allowing biopower to cohere into a system, while never allowing sovereignty to separate itself from beastliness. As Cynthia Schoolar Williams notes, “[T]he discourse of species [in the novel] asks us to accept the premise that the rights of man are based in the lack of rights of animals”.36 But the problem that Shelley is highlighting is not simply that the rights extended to some (“man”) depend upon the denial of others’ (animals’) rights. Rather, Shelley is using the discourse of species to illustrate a lack in the rights of man. After all, Lionel is both “man” (a seemingly universal Enlightenment category, as bearer of rights) and “last man” (i.e., a sole survivor, seemingly somewhat exempt from the biological and socio-legal rules governing the category “man”). “Man”, in this case, is revealed to be not a fully coherent set; it requires supplementation with something both inside and outside of its purview, along similar lines to the way that Wollstonecraft followed her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) with the deconstructive arguments of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). There, she uses the figure of the animal to make thinkable the lack in sovereignty itself, not just the lack of rights afforded to others. Lack, in her way of thinking, functions as a positive presence internal to the set called “man”, not as the other of that set: it is not simply something missing; it is the presence of something ambiguously inassimilable within the category “man”. Woman is not, in this model, a proto-Beauvoirian second sex but a disruption or impossibility within sex as such. The Last Man, with its feminized male figure of exceptionality, takes up this model to satirize the contemporary political order from within. As it does this, the category of “man” warps ambiguously in gender and species to include companion animals such as the half-­ shepherd dog. Sovereignty, in the traditional formulation going back to Aristotle, means exercising the right to declare exceptions to the law.37 Lionel here upends such a concept of the political, saying that those who are truly sovereign (“the lords of creation”) would understand that they are “subject to the … laws” that govern all (230). The Last Man, read in such a way, partakes of the satirical beast fable. As Margaret Doody explains,  Williams, Mary Shelley’s bestiary, 139.  Schmitt, The Concept; Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15–67.

36 37

170 

D. SIGLER

“[T]he fable is one of the close companions of the novel”, but is ­ultimately unlike a novel for the way that it directly “ties the human to the animal”, a trait that she claims limits the ability of fable to imagine new and more just social structures.38 The Last Man is, though, not wholly a fable: its human characters, embroiled in the rancour of modern politics, are sometimes like wolves, but they aren’t wolves in overalls bidding good morning to a frog. When its animals do take on human characteristics, it happens by force of metonymy or simile, rather than in fable’s preferred language of metaphor. Simile connotes partial and ambiguous forms of belonging and dissuades the reader from attempting to glean moral lessons. Such a technique is consistent with the development of satire more broadly in the Romantic period, a time in which satirical writing “relinquished the qualities most often attributed to satire”, such as relentless ridicule, and instead attempted to fuse the emergent aesthetic norms of the realist novel with traces of a classical satirical tradition.39 Yet eventually in the novel, dogs and horses actually do begin to occupy human habitations and take on human jobs, such as shepherding.40 Where some scholars have seen in these moments utopian visions of “masterless animals” and “radical freedom”,41 I see in Shelley’s text a satirical novel hinting at the world of the beast fable by activating an ambiguous set of repeating figurations meant to call sovereignty itself, as a concept, into crisis. The language with which Lionel expresses his wishful interspecies egalitarianism—with emphasis on the natural “laws” from which no creature can be exempt, and from which he himself, like all nonhuman animals, actually is exempt— makes the novel a meditation, at root, upon political belonging in an age of nascent biopower.42 Though The Last Man is replete with nonhuman animals, Shelley remains pointedly focused on their lack—their incapacity to be human even when they are human, the ways that they symbolize the lack in human experience, or the uncanny pathways by which they almost become human, but never quite. They are usually not posited as beings in themselves, but as figures for an absence that asserts itself in the field of politics, distorting it. Hence I do not see them as figures of radical freedom, as  Doody, Philosophy, 153–54.  Matz, Satire, 139. 40  Sigler, Fracture Feminism, 237. 41  Williams, Mary Shelley’s bestiary, 143; Haslanger, The last animal, 668. 42  See also Chatterjee, Our bodies. 38 39

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

171

Ranita Chatterjee and others have maintained, but of humans’ deep, shared, but incomplete implication in the field of governmentality circa 1826. This is to say that these animal images function satirically. Lionel’s insistence on his own animality in his early days as an outlaw or stranger, combined with his repeated embrace of the biopolitical language of “species”, effectively eliminates the special category of the “animal” by ensuring that there is no outside of the law. Animals, humans, animal species and the human species, and sovereignty itself are all, here, subject to the law of death: they are subject to the law, they coequally make the law, and no one is exempt from the precarity of being a “species”. As a result, says Lionel, “we became ephemera” (274)—fleeting in existence, certainly, but also, by way of etymological trace, transforming into flies: the becoming-­ insectile of human civilization. To be included in the set is to accept one’s biopolitical doom; the central conceptual problem of this satirical novel is how to live finally, within yet not-all within that set, as women are said to do. Reading the novel as a species satire highlights Shelley’s feminist engagement with the political philosophy of rights and social belonging, in a way informed by the legacy of Wollstonecraft. Shelley illustrates the collapse not only of human populations but also of the human/animal binaries at the root of Enlightenment political philosophy. Shelley is less certain than Wollstonecraft was that animals and humans are distinct categories, which gives her satire a particularly ambiguous and contradictory tone. What had appeared to be a difference between humans and nonhuman animals now appears as a lack internal to the field of power.

Works Cited Adams, Carol J. 2000. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 10th Anniversary ed. New York: Continuum. Agamben, Giorgio. 2008. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Botting, Eileen Hunt. 2018. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in Frankenstein. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Carman, Colin. 2018. The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment. New York: Routledge. Chatterjee, Ranita. 2014. Our bodies, our catastrophes: Biopolitics in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. European Romantic Review 25 (1): 35–49. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2013.863494.

172 

D. SIGLER

Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The Beast & The Sovereign. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Vol. I. The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deutscher, Penelope. 2015. Sexual immunities and the sexual sovereign. In Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts, ed. Claire Colebrook, 77–93. Abingdon: Routledge. Doody, Margaret. 2009. Philosophy of the novel. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 63 (2): 153–163. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Hammer, Stephanie Barbé. 1990. The world as it will be? Female satire and the technology of power in The Handmaid’s Tale. Modern Language Studies 20 (2): 39–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/3194826. Haslanger, Andrea. 2016. The last animal: Cosmopolitanism in The Last Man. European Romantic Review 27 (5): 659–678. https://doi.org/10.108 0/10509585.2016.1211009. Hunt, Alastair. 2018. …Of whom? In The Right to Have Rights, ed. Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, and Samuel Moyn, 64–86. London: Verso. Klemann, Heather. 2015. How to think with animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria. The Lion and the Unicorn 39 (1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2015.0004. Knight, Charles A. 2004. The Literature of Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matz, Aaron. 2010. Satire in an Age of Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mussgnug, Florian. 2012. Naturalizing apocalypse: Last men and other animals. Comparative Critical Studies 9 (3): 333–347. https://doi.org/10.3366/ ccs.2012.0067. Ryan, Karen L. 2009. Stalin in Russian Satire, 1917–1991. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Expanded ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shelley, Mary. 1826/2008. The Last Man. Ed. Morton D. Paley. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sigler, David. 2021. Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism. Albany: SUNY Press. Singer, Peter. 2002. All animals are equal … or Why the ethical principle on which human equality rests requires us to extend equal consideration to animals too. In Applied Ethics: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, ed. Ruth F.  Chadwick and Doris Schroeder, vol. 4, 51–69. London: Routledge. Singer, Bryan. 2015. The Usual Suspects. Alliance.

10  THE LACKING SATIRICAL ANIMALS OF MARY SHELLEY’S THE LAST… 

173

Singer, Kate. 2020. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel queer: Mary Shelley, queer affect, and shapeshifting through The Last Man. In Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things, ed. Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L.  Barnett, 213–231. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Still, Judith. 2015. Derrida and Other Animals: The Boundaries of the Human. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. 2018. Biopolitics. In Critical Terms for Animal Studies, ed. Lori Gruen, 79–98. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Washington, Chris. 2019. Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Williams, Cynthia Schoolar. 2006. Mary Shelley’s bestiary: The Last Man and the discourse of species. Literature Compass 3 (2): 138–148. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1741-­4113.2006.00306.x. Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1989a. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vol. 5, 61–266. London: William Pickering. ———. 1989b. The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria. A Fragment. In The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vol. 1, 74–184. London: William Pickering.

CHAPTER 11

Learning About Race and Religion with Bob and Felissa: Satire in Nineteenth-Century Children’s It-Narratives Christopher Douglas

In her accounting of the work of nineteenth-century children’s literature publisher John Harris, Margery Moon notes that “probably the first book to be published by J. Harris alone” in 1801 was The Dog of Knowledge; Or, Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier: Supposed to be Written by Himself. By the Author of Dick the Little Poney.1 The earlier title Dick the Little Poney had been published by Harris while working for Elizabeth Newberry sometime in 1799–1800. While not the first it-narratives written with children in mind—that distinction goes to Mary Anne Kilner’s The Adventures of a Pincushion (c. 1780)—or the first it-narratives written for children with an animal as its main subject—that distinction goes to Dorothy Kilner’s The

1

 Moon, John Harris’s Books for Youth, 39.

C. Douglas (*) Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, AL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_11

175

176 

C. DOUGLAS

Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (c. 1785)—these two texts formed an important moment in the development of the genre as children’s fiction.2 Harris would go on to republish Dick the Little Poney in 1804 and publish Felissa; or, the Life and Opinions of a Kitten of Sentiment (1811) and Cato; or, Interesting Memoirs of a Dog of Sentiment (1816) in the subsequent decade. These animal-narrated autobiographies draw on earlier traditions of the it-narrative that developed for adults in the mid-eighteenth century and in doing so engage in a sophisticated level of irony and satire. As Christine Kenyon-Jones notes, many eighteenth-century authors turned to animals to teach child readers how they connected with a broader world, and these texts exploit that interconnection.3 In examining two of these texts, the anonymously written Bob, the Spotted Terrier and Felissa, we can see how authors of early children’s fiction used animals to comment on the topics of chattel slavery and religious hypocrisy to an audience of children, often in surprisingly nuanced ways. It-narratives are a genre of fiction that developed in eighteenth-century England as literature meant for an adult audience, with examples that combine both object-focused and animal-focused narration.4 Usually written in the voice of an object or animal (and nearly always after the publication of Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea in 1760–1765), it-narratives such as Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little; or the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751) and The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes (1754) utilize their narrators to comment satirically on eighteenth-century British society from the perspective of ordinary, sometimes cherished commodities that then as today include living beings. While Christopher Flint finds a distinction between object narrators and animal or plant narrators in eighteenth-century adult fiction, noting that animals “parody human figures or types” and objects are “satiric observers”, both types of narrator use satire, irony and parody to make their social commentary.5 Also germane is that, for a contemporary audience, both animal and object narrators were considered to be 2  Dorothy and Mary Ann Kilner, influential authors of children’s literature in the 1780s, and progenitors of the it-narrative as a children’s genre, were related by marriage. Dorothy and Mary Ann (née Maze) were childhood friends. Dorothy wrote one it-narrative for adults, The Adventures of a Hackney Coach in 1781. See Wright, Kilner. 3  Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes, 55–56. 4  For a broad overview of the genre, see Blackwell, Introduction; Blackwell, General introduction; and Liz Bellamy, It-narratives. 5  Flint, Speaking objects, 182.

11  LEARNING ABOUT RACE AND RELIGION WITH BOB AND FELISSA: SATIRE… 

177

members of the same genre of fiction. A reviewer writing for The Critical Review derisively notes the connection across narrators in a review of Helenus Scott’s The Adventures of a Rupee (1781): This mode of making up a book, and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, a Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-coach, a Louse, a Shilling, a Rupee, or—any thing else, is grown so fashionable, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection. It is indeed a convenient method to writers of the inferior class, of emptying their common-place books, and throwing together all the farrago of public transactions, private characters, old and new stories, every thing, in short, which they can pick up, to afford a little temporary amusement to an idle reader.6

In using this genre to explore “the farrago of public transactions”, the it-­ narrator provides an opportunity to satirically comment on the (elite) human world from an outsider’s perspective. Elsewhere I have argued that it-narrators function as moral agents concerned with asking readers to understand how they fit into a broader social space as a supportive member of a society made up of people with different talents, skills and backgrounds.7 Both Bob, the Spotted Terrier and Felissa use a satiric lens to ask their child readers to question the world around them, indicating how animals come to play a special role in understanding and critiquing injustice. One of the first things in Bob, the Spotted Terrier is an affirmation of this social outlook. On the first page of the text, before Bob introduces his birth or first owner, the dog narrator strongly emphasizes the theme of socially supportive understanding across class boundaries: There is sufficient room for each to act a useful, if not a distinguished part, without encroaching on another’s province; and instead of trying to snatch the bone from their neighbour’s mouth, or snarling when they happen to meet, it would be well if the interchanges of humanity more frequently took place, and the strong and the powerful lent their ready aid to the helpless and weak.8

 The Adventures of a Rupee, 52.  Douglas, Sideways-written words, 212–213. 8  Bob, the Spotted Terrier, 3. 6 7

178 

C. DOUGLAS

Bob then moves to undercut this statement by claiming that the “sons of reason” will probably ignore his advice and then begins to tell his personal story. By referring to the resistant readers as the “sons of reason”, the animal narrator is already engaging in a satiric view of human society. Bob then establishes his pedigree and, crucially, he is not a purebred terrier but is instead a mixed-breed dog: his father is “a terrier of the highest blood” and his mother is a “beagle of the first merit”.9 Bob’s parents’ pedigrees may be established, but he very quickly moves to become working class as he is given as a puppy to a beggar (8–9). This work establishing his pedigree is necessary, due to contemporary views on the animals owned by the poor. Harriet Ritvo calls the “dogs of the poor… equally objectional, if less aggressive—living emblems of the depravity of their owners”.10 Ritvo also notes the interest, as far back as 1800, in trying to establish the heritage of dog breeds, and in beagle fanciers placing the genesis of the breed as far back as the sixteenth century, thus establishing Bob’s pedigree as firmly English.11 Bob’s first owner is a man who was caught poaching small game to support his family in a nobleman’s park, and this action ruins the man’s life. Bob is clearly sympathetic with his master and blames his master’s fate on “[t]he noble owner, who would rather have preserved his game than the love of his neighbourhood, or even the life of an individual”.12 The sympathies of this narrator clearly lie with the poor. Later in the narrative when he is traded against the will of his poor master, Bob will state that “dogs and the unfortunate must be passive: it is criminal in either to complain”.13 The satire in this line lies with Bob’s use of the word “must” which moves between an understanding that passivity is the “correct” response due to social expectations and direct force compelling such obedience; however, it is clear that the reader is expected to sympathize with Bob, who is mourning the loss of his good master. For an audience of children, from the beginning this text expects its readership to start reading through an ironic lens. By comparing the poor to dogs in this passage, Bob highlights the mistreatment of both and satirically asks the child reader if this should be true.  Ibid., 7.  Ritvo, Animal Estate, 177. 11  Ibid., 96, 106. 12  Bob, the Spotted Terrier, 16. 13  Ibid., 20. 9

10

11  LEARNING ABOUT RACE AND RELIGION WITH BOB AND FELISSA: SATIRE… 

179

Having introduced this ironic lens to its audience of children early on, readers of Bob, the Spotted Terrier should expect to be shown a world made up of what is versus what should be, with Bob giving an outsider’s viewpoint on the situation. While the text includes other examples, the most noteworthy is its direct confrontation of the chattel slavery system practiced in English colonial holdings. Published six years before the passage of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, the author of Bob, the Spotted Terrier uses the tools of irony and satire to advocate for abolition to its audience of children. Bob witnesses the slavery practiced in Jamaica first-hand, when he is taken there by a military officer. The thematic connection between the it-narrative and the slave narrative has been noted by several scholars, making this journey less unexpected than it might be. Tess Cosslett notes a “formal parallel between the animal autobiography and the slave narrative”.14 Writing specifically on this passage, Markman Ellis claims that Bob’s observations on slavery “obscures—yet somehow underlines—the difference between the ethical status of humans and animals, even as it highlights and clarifies the ubiquity of their suffering”.15 This paradoxical treatment may be due to the nature of chattel slavery itself, which rests upon crafting legal distinctions of personhood where no such actual distinction exists, systemically blurring the lines between humans and other animals.16 While in Jamaica, Bob witnesses the chattel slavery practiced on British plantations. What follows is a moment of intense irony, one which initially expects its child readers to perform a great deal of introspection, although perhaps through the interlocutor of an adult who reads the tale along with them: From this spectacle I turned away with horror. I felicitated myself on being born a dog, and not a negro, as these poor creatures are called. To be sure, 14  Cosslett, Talking Animals, 80. Emphasis original. This trend is noted by other critics: “Tales told by things exist in harrowing proximity to tales told by slaves (or rather vice versa). Both sets of texts display and enact a disturbing confusion of subject and object, person and thing”, notes Festa in Sentimental Figures, 132. 15  Ellis, Suffering things, 108. 16  See, for example, the conflation between enslaved person and animal in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography: “We were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. There were horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being, and were all subjected to the same narrow examination”, in Narrative of the Life, 45.

180 

C. DOUGLAS

they had not the complexion of Europeans, and perhaps possessed none of the same delicate sensibility; yet they walked on two legs like the rest of the species, and seemed to me to differ in nothing but in the colour of their skin and contour of their face. However, there certainly must be a fallacy in appearances; and these can only be a particular, though singular, kind of animals, that are born to subjection, the same as dogs or horses. Man surely could never tyrannise over his fellow-man without compunction, nor dare to injure him with impunity.17

Perhaps most simply, as Ellis finds, Bob makes certain that the line between humankind and animal connotes not a gradation of the same experience, with humans possessing more and better rights, but insists on wholly different natures and, in the case of animals, a distinct lack of rights. Horses and dogs, as animals, are meant to be dominated by humans.18 While Bob has witnessed servants, he has yet to witness the forced labour and cruel reality of human slavery until this moment; the treatment which these enslaved persons receive mirrors that of a workhorse. In referring to enslaved persons as “a particular, though singular, kind of [animal]”, Bob frames slavery from the viewpoint of someone whose text opened by affirming that “dogs and the unfortunate must be passive” (my emphasis). Bob exists in a society that requires animal labour to function, and the unknown human author of Bob’s narrative does not break away from this claim; hierarchies of species are reaffirmed here as in most eighteenth-­ century children’s fiction.19 Bob’s line, “Man surely could never tyrannise over his fellow-man without compunction, nor dare to injure him with impunity”, carries the barb of the irony. Readers of Bob’s text will remember that his first master was punished by the law for catching rabbits to feed his family. While nothing in the text up to this point equals slavery, Bob has witnessed humans mistreating each other. What this it-narrator asks his child audience to do is remarkable, as he trusts children to recognize the irony and agree with Bob’s initial statement that these slaves must be humans; if they are  Bob, the Spotted Terrier, 70–71.  Both Bob and Dick from Dick the Little Poney are physically mutilated by their owners. Bob has his ears and tail cropped, and Dick is gelded, in addition to undergoing ear and tail cropping. In each case, the animal narrator is left to wonder at why their bodies were mutilated, but ultimately has decided to trust that there was a good reason. Bob, the Spotted Terrier, 14; Dick, the Little Poney, 10–11, 25. 19  Cosslett, Talking Animals, 17–19; Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes, 57–58. 17 18

11  LEARNING ABOUT RACE AND RELIGION WITH BOB AND FELISSA: SATIRE… 

181

humans, then even a dog can understand that they are being hideously mistreated. Bob’s reasoning shifts from an elite racist one, labelling enslaved black persons as “a particular kind of animal”, to a more liberal (although still white privileged one). There is, however, an awareness by the author that this reasoning is too open ended, as it may allow for a reading where humane ownership for enslaved persons is possible. Immediately following Bob’s apparent invocation of irony, the dog repeats two lines of poetry, which his master often repeats to himself, along with his dog’s-eye view of it: “Say, does th’ eternal principle within, Change with the casual colour of the skin?” I cannot pretend to understand the meaning of this question, or to answer it. It is enough for me to know that humanity is due to every thing that has life, and to pronounce that the cruel and insensate must ever be unhappy.20

The lines are from abolitionist Hannah More’s Slavery, a Poem (1788), which is explicit about the answer Bob seeks: “No: they have heads to think, and hearts to feel,/ And souls to act, with firm, tho’ erring zeal”.21 The inclusion of More’s poem in Bob, the Spotted Terrier provides a key to understanding Bob’s irony as irony. Bob imagines freedom and rights for people who are far removed from England itself, only connected at a great distance by commerce. Festa in Sentimental Figures of Empire discusses how markets of exchange connect people across disparate parts of the globe, where “sentimental commerce … establishes bonds between human beings by establishing a shared relation not between objects (as in commodity fetishism) but through objects”.22 Festa develops how this relationship creates sympathy for the enslaved in The Adventures of a Watch! (1788) whose narrator claims: “Colour ought to furnish no colour / for barbarity”.23 Festa explains that the watch does not critique slavery, but instead individual enslavers.24 This is but a half step towards recognizing the rights of the enslaved. Bob’s text goes further, extending the web of social connections fully to the enslaved. That this step occurs in a children’s novel is remarkable, yet it helps us  Bob, the Spotted Terrier, 72.  More, Slavery, 67–68. 22  Festa, Sentimental Figures, 119. 23  Adventures of a Watch!, 160. 24  Festa, Sentimental Figures, 121. 20 21

182 

C. DOUGLAS

observe how Bob, the Spotted Terrier extends community to people distantly removed from its readers. Cosslett describes how slave narratives, such as Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent)’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), do similar work in creating an “invitation to empathy” which she calls “a strong part of the didactic purpose of animal autobiography”.25 The remarkable turn in Bob, the Spotted Terrier is that this text works as a vehicle to the same end, generating sympathy for the enslaved through the sympathy a child reader already has for Bob. Published by Harris a decade later, Felissa, or the Life and Opinions of a Kitten of Sentiment (1811) continues to use a satiric lens, pressing its readers to consider their place in a larger social order. Felissa never leaves England, however, and therefore never experiences the system of chattel slavery in English colonies. The text, instead, focuses mostly on the sorts of people that the child reader would be likely to encounter in their own lives. The book follows the adventures of a kitten from her birth, through a series of owners, good and bad, upper, middle and working class until she is eventually reunited with many of her best owners. The cat is forcibly traded to a new owner against her will in the first two instances of circulation—from the benevolent Earl Glamorgan to his granddaughter Louisa as a Christmas gift and later by the housekeeper of Louisa’s home, Mrs. Tricksey, to a porter to be drowned—but later escapes an abusive owner on her own and spends a good deal of the latter half of the book wandering in and out of locations. It is during this wandering that the narrator provides the most wide-ranging satire, with individual chapters being given over to showing specific figures of ridicule. In Chapter VI the cat enters the house of a very rich woman who gives food away to beggars, a woman called “the most charitable woman living” by the beggars (emphasis original).26 The cat then runs into what she terms an “abode of benevolence and temple of Charity”.27 Here, the cat observes the mistress of the house looking down at the beggars below, eating soup she has provided for them. The woman comments: That fool has taken the soup too soon, and the wretches will have swallowed it all and be gone before a soul comes out of church, and the Bishop is always late… oh! Here they come at last: run down to the door with another  Cosslett, Talking Animals, 80.  Felissa, 69. 27  Ibid., 69. 25 26

11  LEARNING ABOUT RACE AND RELIGION WITH BOB AND FELISSA: SATIRE… 

183

jug of broth directly, and if any of the kind neighbours inquire after me, be sure and tell them that nothing but excessive indisposition could have kept me from my duties at church, this morning.28

Here the rich, putatively charitable woman is shown to be a hypocrite who is only concerned with appearances. Rather than attending church, she merely has “gallons and gallons” of cheap broth made to feed people as the local Bishop walks by, to appear better than she is.29 This cat, from her vantage point behind a sofa where she can “take a survey of the apartment and appearance of [her] benefactress”, is treated to the secret of this woman.30 For all of this rich woman’s outward appearances, she is actually morally bankrupt. The cat comments on the woman’s dinner, being “surprised to see so sumptuous an entertainment served up for an invalid”, making it clear that this rich woman not only tries to look better for the Bishop, but also feels no problem about lying to her neighbours or the Bishop either.31 The cat is removed from the house forcibly after “the charitable lady” exclaims “Drive it out of my house… I cannot squander my property on filthy Cats—I that give so much to the poor! why, I should be ruined for what you care!”32 It is clear from this final comment that the rich who do not care for others with their wealth, but only pretend at it, are base hypocrites—more concerned with keeping their own power than with the starving at their doors.33 The social critique on religious hypocrisy does not end here, however, as this theme continues into the next chapter. In Chapter VII, the cat is taken by two kind girls to the house of “the ‘best sort of people in the world’”.34 During this exchange, the cat comments on the rich woman who “substitute[d] ostentation for benevolence”, further clarifying the  Ibid., 71–72.  Ibid., 72. 30  Ibid., 70. 31  Ibid., 72. 32  Ibid., 74. 33  The inverse is also seen in Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786). In Trimmer’s animal-centered novel, a widow with two children takes very good care of her several pets but neglects her children; this widow is later seen denying charity to a woman with “seven children in a starving condition”. This lack of care for other humans bears fruit when the widow’s son grows up to be a sadist who delights in torturing animals. The lesson these texts arrive at is that true generosity is not limited to one area, but instead should inform all areas of life. Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, 101–105, 110, 224. 34  Felissa, 76. 28 29

184 

C. DOUGLAS

satire.35 Felissa’s author seems less confident that the text’s child readers will be able to sift through the irony without clearly spelling out what readers should take away from these exchanges. The cat will soon find that she has wandered into a place that has substituted austerity for benevolence, thus giving a different view of what constitutes religious hypocrisy. The middle-class home to which the cat arrives is the home of a miserly poet, who writes “by two dismal candles”, with “ink… in a broken cup” and paper covered with “blots and creases”; the “dirtiest and most disagreeable man… both his shirt-skin and his outer-skin [clothing]… seemed much out of repair”.36 While this may appear to be the home of an impoverished family, the home has a court, there is a large library, and the family employs servants. The poet reads “An Ode to Mercy” to his daughter who weeps and sobs at the recital (emphasis original).37 The cat, in hearing the title, is initially pleased and expects that this poem reflects the character of the author. When the cat is spotted hiding in the room, the poet becomes irritated, the daughter exclaims that “she hates Cats, because it is so old-maidish to love them”, and the cat is removed from the house by a servant.38 The cat then critiques the household: “I was surprised and shocked too at the extreme poverty or cruelty of the acknowledged wiser part of the creation, who either could not, or would not, afford a night’s shelter to such a harmless, unoffending wretch as myself,– and thought that even ‘the best sort of people’, as well as those reputed as charitable, might be both inconsiderate and selfish”.39 This family, as has been established, is not in extreme poverty of money but instead appears to be morally poor. The daughter has enough tears to shed for a poem about mercy, but not enough actual sympathy to care for a poor cat. This poet is considered a good person in the community, most likely from his poetry which is written about such high ideals. Although he is not duping a bishop with cheap soup to feed the poor, he is fooling the reading public with his poetry on religious virtues that impoverishes his daughter’s moral education. Speaking on the it-narrative’s satiric look at society, Liz Bellamy states that “[p]overty and riches are equally bad in a society that is based on a  Ibid., 77.  Ibid., 78–79. 37  Ibid., 80–81. 38  Ibid., 82. 39  Ibid., 84. 35 36

11  LEARNING ABOUT RACE AND RELIGION WITH BOB AND FELISSA: SATIRE… 

185

system of commercial exchange where the possession of wealth is not necessarily allied to the ability to dispense it wisely”.40 Neither the rich woman nor the miserly poet is able to wisely use what they possess (money or mercy), but want to appear as if they do. The complexity of Felissa’s critique, with its recursive linking of aristocratic and bourgeois misbehaviour in these two chapters, underscores the need for social standing to be backed up with concomitant action. Neither “the most charitable woman living” nor “the best sort of people” are who they claim to be, realizations that come only through the intermediary of a nonhuman animal observer. Festa notes that “animals seek to instill a virtuous humility in their readers, reminding them of the obligations reason imposes upon humans”.41 The satiric look at both kinds of people serves to remind the child reader that even a cat can see that statements about religious intention or virtue need to be more than just statements if social interconnections are to be actually strengthened. What each of these it-narratives shows is the ways in which the authors of early children’s fiction adapted animal narrative to a developing genre more purposefully to expose the hypocrisy of the adult world to child readers and perhaps confront some adult readers into seeing their own lives too closely reflected in the objects of satire. These animal narrators use their life story to directly confront institutional and personal failures to create a broadly generous, supportive society. While later examples of animal autobiographies, such as Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) or Margaret Marshall Saunders’ Beautiful Joe (1893), operate mostly in the sentimental mode, these earlier examples maintain stronger connections to their eighteenth-century satiric forebears. Contrary to Frederike Middelhoff’s discussion of satire in the German literary autozoographic text The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1819/21) by E.T.A.  Hoffmann, where the irony showcases how cats are relatable objects of sentiment to adult readers, English children’s texts quickly move beyond the need to establish the human-animal relationship to questions about human society itself.42 These early children’s novels, published by John Harris, show a nuanced take on both animal and human rights, casting their readers into an interconnected world of obligation, duty and injustice. Child readers are challenged to change not just  Bellamy, Commerce, 38.  Festa, Moral ends, 320. 42  Middelhoff, Literary autozoographies, 65–66. 40 41

186 

C. DOUGLAS

­themselves, as exhorted by the author of Felissa, but the world around them, as scripted in the abolitionist rhetoric of Bob, the Spotted Terrier, in both cases using a complex satiric lens.

Works Cited 1782. The Adventures of a Rupee. The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature. By a Society of Gentlemen 52: 477–480. London: A. Hamilton. https://books. google.com/books?id=cWHQAAAAMAAJ. Accessed 15 July 2022. 1788. The Adventures of a Watch! London: G.  Kearsley. British It-narratives, 1750–1830: Toys, Trifles and Portable Furniture, ed. Mark Blackwell, vol. 4, 131–161. London: Pickering and Chatto. (1799–1800) 1813. Memoirs of Dick, the Little Poney, Supposed to be Written by Himself; and Published for the Instruction and Amusement of Good Boys and Girls [Reprint]. London: J. Harris. Philadelphia: Benjamin Johnson. America’s Historical Imprints. 1801. The Dog of Knowledge; Or, Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier: Supposed to be Written by Himself. By the Author of Dick the Little Poney. London: J. Harris. https://books.google.com/books?id=gj5WAAAAcAAJ. Accessed 15 July 2022. (1811) 1903. Felissa or; The Life and Opinions of a Kitten of Sentiment [Reprint]. London: J. Harris. London: Methuen & Co. Bellamy, Liz. 1998. Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. It-narrators and circulation: Defining a subgenre. In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell, 117–146. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Blackwell, Mark. 2007. Introduction. In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell, 9–14. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. ———. 2012. General Introduction. In British It-narratives, 1750–1830: Money, ed. Liz Bellamy, vol. 1, vii–xxvii. London: Pickering and Chatto. Cosslett, Tess. 2006. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. Douglas, Christopher C. 2020. “Sideways-written words”: Appropriations of the eighteenth-century british it-narrative in Natsume Sōseki’s I am a Cat. Journal of Narrative Theory 50: 208–231. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2020.0008. Douglass, Frederick. 1845. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office. https://docsouth.unc.edu/ neh/douglass/menu.html. Accessed 15 July 2022.

11  LEARNING ABOUT RACE AND RELIGION WITH BOB AND FELISSA: SATIRE… 

187

Ellis, Markman. 2007. Suffering things: Lapdogs, slaves, and counter-sensibility. In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-­ Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell, 92–113. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Festa, Lynn. 2006. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. ———. 2007. The moral ends of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century object narratives. In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell, 309–328. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Flint, Christopher. 2007. Speaking objects: The circulation of stories in eighteenth-century prose fiction. In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell, 162–186. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Kenyon-Jones, Christine. 2001. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing. Aldershot: Ashgate. Middelhoff, Frederike. 2018. Recovering and reconstructing animal selves in literary autozoographies. In Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives, ed. André Krebber and Mieke Roscher, 57–79. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan. Moon, Marjorie. 1976. John Harris’s Books for Youth 1801–1843: A Checklist. Cambridge, UK: Five Owls Press Limited. Moore, Hannah. 1788. Slavery, a Poem. London: T. Cadell. Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/ o4179–w0010.shtml. Accessed 8 August 2021. Ritvo, Harriet. 1987. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trimmer, Sarah. 1786. Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals. Dublin. https://books.google.com/ books?id=WVU-­1MnA7u4C. Accessed 15 July 2022. Wright, Patricia. 2004. Kilner, Dorothy (1755–1836), Children’s Writer. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/67335. Accessed 15 August 2021.

CHAPTER 12

Nineteenth-Century American Anti-­extinction Humour: “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” as Environmentalist Animal Satire Jennifer Schell

Although most pieces of print ephemera from the nineteenth century faded into obscurity soon after publication, some were preserved in the collections of university libraries, historical societies, and private individuals. While these artefacts occasionally attract the attention of curious scholars, they tend to remain ignored by the general public, which is largely uninterested in esoteric texts from the distant past. One remarkable exception is “A Polar Whale’s Appeal”, an anonymous letter to the editor published in the 15 October 1850 issue of The Friend, a Honolulu newspaper for sailors (see Figs. 12.1 and 12.2).1 Written in the first person from 1  Launched in 1843 by the American Seamen’s Friend Society—a religious organization for sailors—The Friend furnished sailors in the Hawai’ian archipelago with local news, letters, and editorials. A temperance and reform newspaper, it also published sermons, as well as religious poetry and anecdotes.

J. Schell (*) University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_12

189

190 

J. SCHELL

Figs. 12.1 and 12.2  “A Polar Whale”, The Friend

the cetacean’s point of view, the piece uses various forms of humour— puns, parody, and satire, among them—to warn readers that whalemen are hunting their quarry to extinction. It also attempts to enlist human support for unspecified preservation initiatives and vengeance missions. Few references to “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” appear in the annals of nineteenth-century print culture—probably because of the ephemeral and remote circumstances of its publication—and this indicates that its initial impact on the American cultural and historical imagination was minimal. Yet, instead of vanishing from view like innumerable other antebellum newspaper articles, this piece experienced a surge in popularity in the 1980s when historians John R. Bockstoce and Robert Lloyd Webb cited it in their studies of the American whaling industry’s Arctic sector. While interest languished for a time, it increased in 2007 with the publication of two popular whaling histories—Eric Jay Dolin’s Leviathan and D. Graham Burnett’s Trying Leviathan—both of which described “A Polar Whale’s

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

191

Appeal” and discussed its concerns about cetacean extinction. In that same year, sound engineer Mark Franklin produced a short film about the piece for the Oceania Project, a non-profit cetacean research organization located in Australia. As its renown spread, references to “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” began to appear in a number of popular magazines, blogs, and books. It also received significant exposure in 2010 when Ric Burns featured it in his PBS documentary Into the Deep. Taken together, the vast majority of these authors and filmmakers fail to recognize the humorous aspects of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal”. Ignoring its hyperbolic diction and satirical tone—not to mention its egregious puns—they tend to interpret it anachronistically as an earnest example of early American environmentalist writing. This textual history raises several intriguing questions: what makes this piece of nineteenth-century ephemera so compelling to twenty-first-­ century readers, and why has its humour gone largely unrecognized? For the most part, I would attribute the popularity of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” to its environmentalist content. As an early example of American anti-­extinction writing, it possesses an eerie prescience because it addresses a serious anthropogenic ecological problem that only worsened over time, spectacularly contributing to the sixth mass extinction event in the planet’s history. Much like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers and George Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, it demonstrates that at least some antebellum writers possessed the foresight to worry about the precarity of those nonhuman animals—respectively, passenger pigeons, buffalo, and whales— that were endangered by Euro-American settlers and their resource extraction activities. Answers to the second question are a bit more complicated. One explanation for the twenty-first-century proliferation of misreadings of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” is that extinction is often regarded—especially among the scientists and environmentalists of the Global North—as a sombre and frightening concept, which forces humans to confront certain deep-seated fears about death.2 In addition to existential concerns, I suspect that other literary, cultural, and historical factors have played a role in the aforementioned misunderstandings. Without doubt, readers of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” have been influenced by what Susan McHugh—drawing on the scholarship of Philip Armstrong—calls the “cetacean turn”, a  Schell, Annihilation of self, 106–107.

2

192 

J. SCHELL

twentieth-­ century change in Euro-American attitudes towards whales prompted by conservation campaigns that exposed the barbarous and exploitative aspects of industrial whaling and scientific research that revealed the emotional and intellectual capacities of cetaceous lifeforms.3 Affected by this perceptual shift, twenty-first-century readers tend to have blind spots when it comes to stories about whales. Just because “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” indulges in satire, puns, and parody, it does not mean that it dismisses or disregards the possibility of cetacean extinction, however. According to ecocritics Ursula Heise and Nicole Seymour, comedic texts can address serious environmental problems, raising awareness and encouraging action without relaying apocalyptic doomsday scenarios.4 For this reason, I suggest that “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” is reminiscent of what Seymour calls “bad environmentalism” or “environmental thought that employs dissident, often-denigrated affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on both our current moment and mainstream environmental art, activism, and discourse”.5 Viewed in this way, “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” represents a form of environmentalist satire that uses irony and jocularity to express quite serious concerns about endangered species of animals. Building on Seymour’s scholarship, I argue that it is imperative to recognize the complex mixture of humour and advocacy inherent in this piece as well as other examples of bad environmentalism, for they represent “important alternatives to the status quo” (232). To put it another way, texts such as these can provide both readers and writers with new ways of thinking and writing about environmental problems, ones that avoid tired clichés and traditional tropes.

Sincerity and Sentiment: Misinterpreting “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” Before turning to the text, I want to survey the interpretations of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” furnished by my predecessors in the publishing and filmmaking arenas. All told, this evidence indicates that the piece gained fame over time through a process that was likely facilitated by key events in environmental history as well as broad trends in academic scholarship and 3  McHugh, Love in a Time of Slaughters, 73; Armstrong, Whale road, 79. See also, Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 204. 4  Heise, Imagining Extinction, 12–13; Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, 2–4. 5  Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, 6.

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

193

popular publishing. Not coincidentally, references to “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” began to appear in twentieth-century American print culture in the mid-1980s, shortly after the International Whaling Commission enacted its moratorium on industrial whaling. They proliferated throughout the 2000s and 2010s, along with scholarly interest in the fields of oceanic studies and animal studies. Note, too, that these decades also witnessed the release of several popular books and films about whales. Published in 2000, Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea won the National Book Award for nonfiction and inspired a film adaptation directed by Ron Howard. Other cetacean-centred texts followed in its watery wake, including Philip Hoare’s The Whale and Joshua Horwitz’s War of the Whales—published in 2008 and 2014, respectively—and The Cove and Blackfish—released in 2009 and 2013, respectively. As observed above, “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” emerged from the obscurity of the archives in the 1980s and began its ascension in the American cultural imagination. At first, the process proceeded at a slow pace. In 1986 and 1988, references to the piece appeared in two scholarly history books, John R.  Bockstoce’s Whales, Ice, and Men and Robert Lloyd Webb’s On the Northwest. In the former, Bockstoce describes the discovery of whales in the Chukchi Sea and their subsequent depletion by American whalers, explaining that “as early as 1850, at least a few whalemen believed they were doing irrevocable damage to the bowhead population”.6 As evidence for this claim, he reprints “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” in its entirety. Importantly, Bockstoce concedes that the letter represents a “flash of humor”, but he concludes that its “author understood that at the current pace of killing, the bowheads would soon be exterminated” (100). Like his predecessor, Webb highlights the whaling industry’s overhunting problem, but he does not regard “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” as a warning about anthropogenic species extinction. Instead, he adopts a sarcastic tone so as to ridicule it. In his introductory remarks, Webb wryly comments that it constitutes “the only known communiqué from the newly discovered leviathan”.7 After quoting a lengthy passage, he contends that whalers “undoubtedly received it doubled over in laughter, guffawing”. Further amplifying the sarcasm, he adds, “one can only hope that ‘Polar Whale’ sent his friendly message through someone who really cared”, 6 7

 Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 99.  Webb, On the Northwest, 83.

194 

J. SCHELL

because “the readership of The Friend cared but little, and knew less, about the parable of whaling and its diminishing numbers” (84). As Webb understands it, the piece is not meant to be taken seriously. For the next twenty years, interest in “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” subsided, so much so that it almost fell back into obscurity. Then, in 2007, two historians—Eric Jay Dolin and D.  Graham Burnett—reintroduced and reinterpreted the piece for twenty-first-century readers. In Leviathan, Dolin describes the decline of American whaling enterprises in the Western Arctic, and he observes that “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” advances “a particularly cogent if not self-serving argument, which was highly unusual, coming as it did in an era when few, if any, people spoke up against the ravages of whaling”.8 To conclude this portion of the book, he comments on the ineffectuality of the letter, noting that it failed to help preserve cetaceans because whalers continued to prosecute their trade with “their characteristic drive and determination” (232). Nowhere does he mention any of the piece’s humorous features. Meanwhile, in Trying Leviathan, Burnett offers a critical interpretation of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal”. After surveying nineteenth-century whaling narratives and describing their various depictions of cetaceans, he indicates that most sailor-authors understandably regarded whales as monsters, formidable adversaries capable of smashing boats and killing men with ease. He notes, though, that a few of them “hazarded whale’s eye views of the world” to encourage empathy for the plight of cetaceans.9 Because Burnett regards these texts as serious attempts to embody nonhuman animal perspectives, he mistakes the humour of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” for pathos and characterizes the letter as “plaintive” and “tinged with maudlin sentimentality”. As he goes on to argue, “such bathetic treatments undermined—or perhaps simply remained in tension with—the characterizations of whales as ‘monstrous’ beings” (132). Shortly after the publication of these two histories, numerous writers of popular nonfiction—Paul Greenberg, Brian Switek, Andrew David Thaler, and Sarah Vowell—advanced similar assessments of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” and its sincerity. For their part, Greenberg, Switek, and Thaler cite the piece to showcase the ecological foresight of its author; they also stress that some nineteenth-century sailors empathized with whales,

8 9

 Dolin, Leviathan, 231.  Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 132.

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

195

regarding them as emotional and intelligent organisms.10 More interested in the history of the American whaling industry in Hawai’i, Vowell ­introduces the letter, describes it as “odd”, and provides some context for its warnings about cetacean extinction.11 None of these writers—not even Vowell, who is known for her keen sense of irony—mentions the humorous aspects of the piece. If twenty-first-century historians and nonfiction writers regard “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” as a grave warning about the precarity of cetaceans, then so do filmmakers. Produced in 2007 for the Oceania Project, Mark Franklin’s video version of the letter indulges in saccharine sentimentality throughout.12 As the film begins, the title cards scroll across the screen and non-diegetic humpback whale songs echo in the background. In a soft, quiet voice, Franklin contextualizes his subject matter, explaining that “in 1850, the final years of Yankee whaling, there was a plaintive call from a lone polar whale to put an end to the killing of his species”. Then, accompanied by Native American flute music played by R. Carlos Nakai (Navajo and Ute), he begins reading the original text of the appeal.13 Insofar as its visuals are concerned, the film consists mostly of short clips of today’s awe-stricken whale watchers, leaning over the side of their vessel in an attempt to interact with a humpback who is lazily rolling about on the surface of the ocean. These scenes are intercut with footage of other whales breaching, spouting, or swimming. All of the beatific imagery and New Age music continue until Franklin finishes reading the appeal and the video draws to a close with a tight close up on a single whale’s eye. Symbolically speaking, this image connotes contact and connection, and it attempts to inspire empathy for cetaceans by invoking what film historian Jonathan Burt calls “the old idea that it is possible to commune with animals”.14 10  Greenberg, Four Fish, 210; Switek, Tearing teeth, para. 1; Thaler, Historical origins, para. 4. 11  Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes, 117. 12  The Oceania Project has posted the film on a number of websites and social media platforms, including IMDB, YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook. Although its popularity is difficult to gauge—it is no longer available on many of these sites—it has accumulated over 23,000 Facebook views. 13  The film’s appropriation of Native American flute music for environmental purposes serves to reinforce and perpetuate the well-worn trope captured in Shepard Krech’s title, The Ecological Indian. 14  Burt, Animals in Film, 64.

196 

J. SCHELL

Somewhat less cloying but no less emotive, Ric Burns’s documentary Into the Deep presents viewers with a brief discussion of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” and its prescience. Although the narrator of the film (Willem Dafoe) often romanticizes whalers for their bravery, he also condemns them for causing a dramatic reduction in cetacean populations over the course of the nineteenth century. As he turns his attention to this issue, he explains, “year after year, more and more ships went out, and the slaughter continued to widen. The vessels now sailing to every ocean on the planet, chasing not only sperm whales, but right whales, humpbacks, California greys, and bowheads from the tip of Cape Horn to the Arctic circle and beyond.” After quoting the opinions of a few perspicacious whalers, the narrator mentions “A Polar Whale’s Appeal”, citing an apparently poignant passage from it. In terms of tone, the sadness in his voice is reinforced by sombre music and historical photos of dismembered whales. A bit of additional voice-over commentary from Eric Jay Dolin only adds more gravitas to the scene and amplifies its serious mood. Although all this accumulated evidence might seem damning, I do not think it indicates that twentieth-first-century authors and filmmakers are unobservant or unintelligent when it comes to their interpretations of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal”. They might misperceive the satiric target of the piece, because they are unfamiliar with the historical context surrounding nineteenth-century American anti-extinction advocacy, which tends to endorse care for the conservation of stocks, not care for the preservation of species. They also might be blinded by emotions. According to scholars working in the field of extinction studies, anthropogenic species extinction represents a particularly disturbing form of death to contemplate. It is excessive, because it involves the extermination of an entire species, and it is irrevocable, because it leaves vacancies in ecosystems that will never again be filled in quite the same way.15 Presented as a problem caused by human beings and their rapacious exploitation of natural resources, it also appears to be preventable. For these reasons, extinction tends to inspire not jocularity, but sadness, anger, fear, grief, and guilt in those who read and write about it. I would add, too, that Euro-American and Euro-Australian authors of popular nonfiction—especially those influenced by or involved in the marine mammal conservation movements of the late twentieth 15  Heise, Imagining Extinction, 34–36; Schell, Annihilation of self, 104; Rose, Van Dooren, and Chrulew, Introduction, 8–10.

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

197

century—have published numerous books about the emotional, social, and intellectual capacities of cetaceans. Early examples include John Lilly’s The Mind of the Dolphin and Joan McIntyre’s Mind in the Waters, while more recent examples include David Neiwert’s Of Orcas and Men and Rebecca Giggs’s Fathoms. Over the same period of time, fiction writers have produced many sentimental, environmentalist novels that adopt cetacean points of view. The list includes, among others, Victor Scheffer’s The Year of the Whale, Robert Siegel’s Whalesong, Hank Searls’s Sounding, and Alison Baird’s White as the Waves. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, twenty-­ first-­century readers have grown accustomed to earnest books, whose narrators—human and cetacean—represent whales as sensitive, sentient beings who do not deserve to be persecuted by hunters. As a result, they tend to approach “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” unprepared for its humour.

Irony and Satire: A Reinterpretation of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” While “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” has been popular with historians, nonfiction writers, and filmmakers, literary critics have largely ignored it, preferring instead to concentrate their attention on the concerns about cetacean extinction that appear in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.16 One exception is Timothy Sweet, who examines the intricacies of the letter in his book Extinction and the Human. First, he highlights its complexity—its combination of “pathos” and “grim humor”—and then he raises the possibility that it constitutes “an elaborate satire on the idea that whales deserve something like human rights”.17 For some reason, though, he declines to produce a definitive reading of the piece; instead, he posits that Ishmael would have appreciated its humour, and then he segues into an analysis of Moby-Dick’s extinction chapters (85). Rather than hesitate or speculate as Sweet does, I draw on Nicole Seymour’s scholarship in Bad Environmentalism to position “A Polar 16  Most scholars commend Melville for contemplating cetacean extinction and regard his denial of this possibility as typical of the time period. See Schultz, Melville’s environmental vision, 106; Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 210; Armstrong, Moby-Dick and compassion, 25; King, Ahab’s Rolling Sea, 257; Neely, Against Sustainability, 19; Sweet, Extinction and the Human, 85–91. Some scholars see Melville’s commentary on the immortality of whales as more ironic than not. See Schell, We account the whale immortal, 211; Barnard, The cod and the whale, 864. 17  Sweet, Extinction and the Human, 84–85.

198 

J. SCHELL

Whale’s Appeal” as an antebellum-era example of environmentalist satire. Before defining her terminology, Seymour describes some of the problems with traditional forms of ecological writing, such as their tendency to advance narratives of apocalyptic disaster that inspire feelings of doom and gloom. Then, she emphasizes the value of attending to examples of bad environmentalism, texts that respond to current environmental problems “through absurdity and irony, as well as related affects and sensibilities such as irreverence, ambivalence, camp, frivolity, indecorum, awkwardness, sardonicism, perversity, playfulness, and glee”.18 Here, it is important to mention that Seymour regards bad environmentalism as a product of and response to the satirical traditions and ecological movements of the late twentieth century. Towards the end of the book, though, she observes that “future work might bring to the fore other traditions of bad environmentalism … or identify earlier precedents” (233). As I would suggest, “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” represents one such precedent. A note of caution, though. In the nineteenth century, bad environmentalism—in Seymour’s sense of the term—had not yet emerged, largely because American ecological writing had not yet emerged as a genre replete with conventional tropes. As a result, I prefer to call “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” an example of environmentalist animal satire, which employs several different forms of humour in order to advance serious criticisms of the whaling industry and its overhunting problem. First and foremost, the piece ridicules the human tendency to anthropomorphize animals, by taking its portraits of whales and their human capacities to ludicrous extremes. These bowheads form assemblies in the middle of the ocean to gather information about existential threats. They also compose letters to the editor of The Friend, expressing their grievances against whalers using prose that alternates between elevated diction and atrocious puns. As such, “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” also represents a perfect parody of amateur newspaper writing. Several features of the letter reveal its humorous and satirical aspects. For example, in his introductory remarks to readers, the editor of The Friend indicates that “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” is not necessarily to be taken seriously: All attempts to discover the means by which this communication reached our office will doubtless be vain. Should it become known, it might lead to  Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, 4.

18

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

199

serious consequences! We are somewhat surprised that a member of the whale-family should condescend to make his appeal through our columns, inasmuch as we have ever aimed to direct whalemen to the best cruising grounds. We feel honored by the compliment and shall feel bound, on no consideration to betray the confidence thus reposed in us.19

In the first few sentences, the editor anthropomorphizes the bowheads, pretending that he received the letter through an elaborate saltwater smuggling intrigue. He also displays a hefty amount of mock concern for the safety of Polar Whale should his identity become known to his enemies, and he highlights the irony of the fact that a cetacean would choose to seek help for his species in the pages of a newspaper intended for an audience of whale-hunters. Dated from the “second Year of the Trouble” and dispatched from “Anadir Sea, North Pacific”, the letter begins with a few formal flourishes before segueing into a description of its purpose: Mr. Editor,—In behalf of my species, allow an inhabitant of this sea, to make an appeal through your columns to the friends of the whale in general. A few of the knowing old inhabitants of this sea have recently held a meeting to consult respecting our safety, and in some way or other, if possible, to avert the doom that seems to await all of the whale Genus throughout the world, including the Sperm, Right, and Polar whales. (82)

Although this passage raises the spectre of anthropogenic species extinction, its tone is more playful than not, for it takes its anthropomorphization of bowheads to absurd lengths. In the process, it also makes fun of the social and political machinations of human beings. Note, too, that Polar Whale writes as if he has received training in the nineteenth-century art of letter writing. Adopting an attitude of polite deference, he addresses the editor by his title and asks his permission to advance his appeal to “friends” of his species. Here, he not so subtly puns on both the title of the newspaper and the popular nickname for Quakers, a pacifist religious group whose members developed the American whaling industry into a global powerhouse. Rife with dramatic irony, these sentences—and their humorous effects—depend upon readers recognizing something that Polar Whale does not, namely that “friends” were in short supply in the  Polar whale, 82.

19

200 

J. SCHELL

nineteenth century, an era in which most Americans were very proud of their whaling fleet and its accomplishments.20 After this initial introduction, Polar Whale proceeds to describe the geographic scope of the problem confronting cetaceans: Although our situation, and that of our neighbors in the Arctic, is remote from our enemy’s country, yet we have been knowing to the progress of affairs in the Japan and Ochotsk seas, the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and all the other “whaling grounds”. We have imagined that we were safe in these cold regions; but no; within these last two years a furious attack has been made upon us, an attack more deadly and bloody, than any of our race ever experienced in any part of the world. (82)

In these sentences, the letter continues to characterize the bowheads as wise and intelligent personages, who are apprised of the various assaults launched against them in far-flung corners of the world. Polar Whale also attempts to inspire empathy for the members of his species, by explaining that the Arctic no longer represents a safe haven for bowheads because of the incursions of American whalers in the region.21 Whether or not readers of The Friend—many of whom were involved or invested in the industry— were affected by this appeal is doubtful. As he elaborates on the travesties visited upon the whales by their human hunters, Polar Whale employs an odd combination of gruesome imagery and humorous wordplay: I scorn to speak of the cruelty that has been practised by our blood-thirsty enemies, armed with harpoon and lance; no age or sex has been spared. Multitudes of our species (the Polar), have been murdered in “cold” blood. Our enemies have wondered at our mild and inoffensive conduct; we have heard them cry, “there she blows”, and our hearts have quailed as we saw their glittering steel reflecting the sun beams, and realized that in a few moments our life-blood oozing out, would discolor the briny deep in which we have gambolled for scores of years. (82)

 Dolin, Leviathan, 220.  Insofar as this issue is concerned, Polar Whale disagrees with Ishmael who glibly asserts the “whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man”. See Melville, Moby-­ Dick, 461. 20 21

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

201

First, Polar Whale characterizes whalers as greedy, dishonourable men, who attack and slaughter every cetacean they encounter in their travels, including cows and calves. Note, though, that he undermines this statement by invoking some levity—and perhaps some groans—with his hyperbolic use of the word “murder” and his pun on the word “cold”. Although the gory death scene at the end of the quotation serves to reinforce the bowhead’s initial criticisms of whalers, these jokes indicate that his complaints are not necessarily meant to be taken seriously.22 At this point, Polar Whale turns his critical attention to his hunters, highlighting just how ill-equipped he and his cetacean brethren are to handle their attacks: We have never been trained to contend with a race of warriors, who sail in large three-masted vessels, on the sterns of which we have read “New Bedford”, “Sag Harbor”, “New London”. Our battles have hitherto been with simple Indians in their skin canoes. We have heard of the desperate encounters between these whale-killing monsters and our brethren the Right whales on the North-west coast. Some from that quarter have taken shelter in the quiet bays of our sea, others of the spermaceti species from Japan, have also visited us and reported their battles and disasters; they have told us it is no use to contend with the Nortons, the Tabers, the Coffins, the Coxs, the Smiths, the Halseys, and the other families of whale-killers. (82–83)

As this passage progresses, Polar Whale takes advantage of popular nineteenth-­century ideas about white supremacy to differentiate between Indigenous and Euro-American hunters, describing the former as “simple Indians” and the latter as “warriors” and “whale-killing monsters”. Importantly, this comment contains an ironic reversal of the monster imagery that sailor-writers so often used to characterize their quarry and romanticize their exploits.23 It also serves to furnish evidence for Polar Whale’s conclusion about the futility of escaping or resisting the assaults of the famous and formidable whalemen that he lists by name. Emphasizing the gentle and genteel qualities of bowheads, Polar Whale concludes his letter with a direct appeal to readers:

22  Over the course of the twentieth century, this kind of hyperbolic language would become a mainstay of ecological writing and a target of criticism. 23  Burnett, Trying Leviathan, 132.

202 

J. SCHELL

We Polar whales are a quiet inoffensive race, desirous of life and peace, but, alas, we fear our doom is sealed; we have heard the threat that in one season more we shall all be “cut up”, and “tried out”. Is there no redress? I write in behalf of my butchered and dying species. I appeal to the friends of the whole race of whales. Must we all be murdered in cold blood? Must our race become extinct? Will no friends and allies arise and revenge our wrongs? Will our foes be allowed to prey upon us another year? We have heard of the power of the “Press”; pray give these few lines a place in your columns, and let them go forth to the world. I am known among our enemies as the “Bow-head”, but I belong to the Old Greenland family.

                    Yours till death,                     POLAR WHALE. P.S.  I send this by the------ of-------. Do’nt [sic] publish the name of the vessel. P.W. (83)

In his conclusion—just as he did in his introduction—Polar Whale presents readers with a serious warning about the precarity of cetaceans and the problem of anthropogenic extinction. At the same time, he amplifies the humour of the letter by advancing an increasingly ridiculous deluge of rhetorical questions. First, he repeats his hyperbolic pun on the phrase “murdered in cold blood”; then, he challenges his readers to help cetaceans avenge the wrongs committed against them by their human hunters. Here, the humour stems from the levelling of the speciesist hierarchies inherent in certain nineteenth-century strains of Western philosophy that position human lives as more valuable than whale lives. Perhaps realizing that his ideas are too radical for his readers to accept, Polar Whale abruptly changes the subject, declaring his familial affiliations and acknowledging the “power of the ‘Press’”. Taken together, this analysis illustrates the various satirical aspects of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal”. It does not, however, reveal whether its empathy for whales or its condemnation of overhunting is genuine. Insofar as these questions of sincerity are concerned, historical evidence from nineteenth-­ century whaling narratives provides some possible answers. No doubt, some sailors grappled with difficult emotions when they witnessed dying whales. For Enoch Carter Cloud, the experience was particularly disturbing: “I never knew before what it is to sail through a sea of blood! My feelings were most peculiar! It is painful to witness the death of the smallest of God’s created beings, much more, one in which life is so vigorously

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

203

maintained as the Whale!”24 Other sailors saved their sympathy for the cows and calves they mercilessly slaughtered. After witnessing such an event, Charles Nordhoff confesses, “Never did mother, of whatever species, display a more absorbing affection for her young than did this whale, and there was scarcely one in the pursuit, but felt as though we were taking a dishonorable advantage of her”.25 Most men, however, did not respond to their work in this manner. Some—including Dean C.  Wright, John Jones, and William Whitecar, Jr.—describe whale-killing in perfunctory terms.26 As Wright explains, “To strike a sperm whale the whalemen endeavors to place his boat directly astern of it; or, if that is not practicable, he gets right ahead”.27 Other sailors—including Owen Chase, Jacob A.  Hazen, and William M.  Davis— transform the act into the ultimate confrontation between hunter and hunted.28 As Davis exclaims, “If we regard the whale as a game animal, and his capture as a field-sport, then how regal our pursuit becomes in all its appointments!”29 What the preponderance of evidence indicates is that nineteenth-century whalers tended to display a general lack of empathy towards their quarry, probably because their job required chasing, killing, and processing whales on a regular basis. Insofar as the issue of empathy is concerned, I think it is also important to note that “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” predates the advent of the animal rights movement in the US, which began in 1866 when Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Not insignificantly, this movement inspired a number of postbellum American authors to publish novels that employ nonhuman animal points of view as a means of inspiring empathy and advocating for protection.30 Examples include, among others, Mark Twain’s “A Dog’s Tale”, Jack London’s Jerry of the Islands, and James Oliver Curwood’s The Grizzly King. Given that few of these sorts of texts were published in the  Cloud, Enoch’s Voyage, 53.  Nordhoff, Whaling and Fishing, 187. Ishmael expresses similar sentiments in Moby-Dick, though his sincerity is difficult to determine. 26  Wright, Commonplace Book, 6; Jones, Six Months Outward Bound, 16; Whitecar, Jr., Four Years Aboard the Whaleship, 91. 27  Wright, Commonplace Book, 6. 28  Chase, Narrative, 29–30; Hazen, Five Years Before the Mast, 72; Davis, Nimrod of the Sea, 155. 29  Davis, Nimrod of the Sea, 155. 30  Beers, Prevention of Cruelty, 108. 24 25

204 

J. SCHELL

US prior to 1877, I think it unlikely that “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” represents a genuine protest against human cruelty towards cetaceans.31 Certainly, though, the piece makes economic sense. While they did not necessarily possess much empathy for cetaceans, most sailor-authors recognized the problem of scarcity and treated it as a serious concern. As voyages grew longer over the course of the nineteenth century, many men complained about the time they wasted casting about the world searching for whales. Others contemplated the issue of anthropogenic extinction and advanced dire predictions about the future of certain cetacean species. In a letter printed in The Polynesian in 1845, M.E. Bowles denounces the bowhead fishery as unsustainable and declares, “That the poor whale is doomed to utter extermination, or at least, so near to it that too few will remain to tempt the cupidity of man, I have not a doubt”.32 And, in his narrative The Whale and His Captors, Henry T.  Cheever surmises that “[b]etween all these natural foes and its predatory human enemy, the great mammoth of the ocean seems doomed to extinction”.33 After the appearance of “A Polar Whale’s Appeal”, the editors of The Friend continued to publish articles that expressed concern about cetacean extinction. In a piece from 1852, entitled, “Reminiscences of a Whaleman in a Snowstorm”, an anonymous sailor describes a harpooned bowhead, noting that his appeal “would be quite as affecting as that recently made through the pages of the Friend”.34 Then, he proceeds to relay this whale’s thoughts and feelings in his own words. Perhaps not surprisingly, much like Polar Whale, this bowhead concludes: “Soon our race will be dead, and the whalemen will have only walrusses [sic] and ice-­ bergs to contend with” (75). Subsequent writers adopted a different approach, namely recommending conservation measures to stave off extinction. As the anonymous author of “Letter No. 10” explains, “[I]t will not long be profitable to send ships to the Arctic. If the ships were

31  Nineteenth-century American activists were likely too preoccupied with abolition to compose stories about animal cruelty. 32  Bowles, Some account, 3. Published intermittently between 1841 and 1866, The Polynesian served as the official newspaper of the Hawai’ian government, furnishing residents with news articles and opinion pieces. 33  Cheever, Whale and His Captors, 125. 34  Reminiscences, 75. This article contains the only allusion to A Polar Whale’s Appeal that I have found in the annals of nineteenth-century American print culture.

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

205

withdrawn for ten years, you might again have good whaling. Would it not be the wisest course to pursue?”35 Over time, concerns about the precarity of cetaceans increased considerably as populations plummeted in response to overhunting. According to the author of “The Story of the Whale”—published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1856—“Circumstances favor the probability that the time will eventually come when the great leviathan of the deep will be exterminated”.36 Just fifteen years later, Charles Melville Scammon underscored the endangered status of those species of whales preferred by American sailors, including the California grey whale, Pacific right whale, and sperm whale. With astute insight into the situation, he concludes, “[W]e have never yet learned of any place of resort for whales … that has not been the scene of slaughter by their human captors”.37 For these writers and their predecessors, extinction was a serious issue, primarily because it threatened the profitability of the whaling industry and, by extension, their livelihoods. Given that the author behind Polar Whale had access to the most accurate information about the endangerment of whale populations posed by hunting at that time, it seems likely that his criticisms of the fishery’s overhunting problem are more genuine than not. Because it pays attention to insider perspectives and historical context, this analysis demonstrates that “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” does not represent an example of mawkish sentimentality or interspecies empathy, as many twenty-first readers seem to think. It also indicates that this piece is best understood as a form of environmentalist satire that mocks humans for anthropomorphizing animals and criticizes whalers for overhunting cetaceans. As such, it engages in serious environmental advocacy while maintaining a sense of humour, at least according to nineteenth-century sensibilities. What makes this letter so important, then, is that it—much like the twenty-first-century examples of bad environmentalism that Seymour discusses in her book—challenges conventional ideas about the forms that ecological writing can and should take. It provides alternatives to traditional tropes and encourages environmental authors to explore their options and experiment with their prose, perhaps laughing a little along the way.

 Letter No. 10, 90.  Story of the whale, 480. 37  Scammon, Marine Mammals, 259. 35 36

206 

J. SCHELL

Acknowledgements  Insofar as my work on this chapter is concerned, I am indebted to many of the students who took my early American literature survey in fall 2019. As such, I would like to thank Alana Kilby, Brandon Smothers, and Annie Wenstrup for their discussion of and insight into “A Polar Whale’s Appeal”. I would also like to extend some additional appreciation to Alana for unearthing Mark Franklin’s video and introducing it to our class.

Works Cited 1850. A polar whale’s appeal. The Friend: 82–83. 1852. Reminiscences of a whaleman in a snowstorm. The Friend: 75. 1853. Letter No. 10. The Friend: 90–91. 1856. The story of the whale. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 12: 466–482. Armstrong, Philip. 2004. Moby-Dick and Compassion. Society and Animals 12: 19–37. ———. 2013. The whale road. In A New Zealand Book of Beasts: Animals in Our Culture, History and Everyday Life, ed. Annie Potts, Philip Armstrong, and Deidre Brown, 76–98. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Barnard, John Levi. 2017. The cod and the whale: Melville in the time of extinction. American Literature 89: 851–879. Beers, Diane L. 2006. For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States. Athens: Ohio University Press. Bockstoce, John R. 1986. Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bowles, M.E. 1845. Some account of the whale-fishery of the N. West Coast and Kamschatka. The Polynesian: 2–3. Buell, Lawrence. 2003. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burnett, D. Graham. 2007. Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Burns, Ric. 2010. Into the Deep: America, Whaling, and the World. Dir. Ric Burns. Boston: WGBH Education Foundation and Steeplechase Films. Burt, Jonathan. 2002. Animals in Film. London: Reaktion. Chase, Owen. 2000. Narrative of the most extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. In The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale: FirstPerson Accounts, ed. Nathaniel Philbrick, 13–73. New York: Penguin. Cheever, Henry T. 1850. The Whale and His Captors; Or, The Whaleman’s Adventures. New York: Harper and Brothers. Cloud, Enoch Carter. 1994. Enoch’s Voyage: Life on a Whaleship, 1851–1854. Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell.

12  NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ANTI-EXTINCTION HUMOUR… 

207

Davis, William M. 1972. Nimrod of the Sea; Or, The American Whaleman. North Quincy, MA: Christopher Publishing. Dolin, Eric Jay. 2007. Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. New York: W.W. Norton. Franklin, Mark. 2007. A Polar Whale’s Appeal. IMDB. https://www.imdb.com/ title/tt1344423/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. Greenberg, Paul. 2010. Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. New York: Penguin. Hazen, Jacob A. 1854. Five Years Before the Mast. Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard. Heise, Ursula. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, John. 1991. Six Months Outward Bound. In Mediations from Steerage: Two Whaling Journal Fragments, ed. Stuart M. Frank, 14–30. Sharon, MA: Kendell Whaling Museum. King, Richard J. 2019. Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krech, Shepard. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New  York: W.W. Norton. McHugh, Susan. 2019. Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Melville, Herman. 1988. Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Neely, Michelle C. 2020. Against Sustainability: Reading Nineteenth-Century America in the Age of Climate Crisis. New York: Fordham University Press. Nordhoff, Charles. 1856. Whaling and Fishing. Cincinnati, OH: Moore, Wilstach, Keys. Rose, Deborah Bird, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew. 2017. Introduction: Telling extinction stories. In Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations, ed. Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew, 1–17. New York: Columbia University Press. Scammon, Charles Melville. 1968. The Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America. New York: Dover Publishing. Schell, Jennifer. 2014. “We account the whale immortal”: Fantasies of ecological abundance and discourses of extinction in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In Critical Insights: Moby-Dick, ed. Robert C.  Evans, 209–228. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press. ———. 2017. The annihilation of self and species: The EcoGothic sensibilities of Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In The Gothic and Death, ed. Carol Davison, 103–115. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schultz, Elizabeth. 2000. Melville’s environmental vision in Moby-Dick. ISLE 7: 97–113.

208 

J. SCHELL

Seymour, Nicole. 2018. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sweet, Timothy. 2021. Extinction and the Human: Four American Encounters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Switek, Brian. 2011. From Tearing Teeth to Baleen. Wired. https://www.wired. com/2011/08/from-­tearing-­teeth-­to-­baleen/. Thaler, Andrew David. 2011. The historical origins of “whales as people”. Southern Fried Science. https://www.southernfriedscience.com/the-­historical-­origins-­ of-­whales-­as-­people/. Vowell, Sarah. 2011. Unfamiliar Fishes. New York: Penguin. Webb, Robert Lloyd. 1988. On the Northwest: Commercial Whaling in the Pacific Northwest, 1790–1967. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Whitecar, William B., Jr. 1860. Four Years Aboard the Whaleship. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott. Wright, Dean C. 1991. The Commonplace Book of Dean C. Wright. In Mediations from Steerage: Two Whaling Journal Fragments, ed. Stuart M.  Frank, 5–12. Sharon, MA: Kendall Whaling Museum.

CHAPTER 13

Vivisections, Vaccinations, Revelations: Ecofeminist Satire and Biopolitical Dystopia in Frances Power Cobbe’s The Age of Science Paul Fagan

In this chapter, I undertake an animal studies, ecofeminist, and biopolitical reading of the science-fiction satire The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century, a rare work of fiction by Anglo-Irish essayist, feminist, and animal rights activist Frances Power Cobbe.1 Although Cobbe, a prominent contributor to diverse Victorian periodicals,2 originally offered the satire to Blackwood’s Magazine with a request “to keep her name secret whether [Blackwood] published it or not”, it was issued in January 1877 1  For scholarship on Cobbe’s life, writing, feminism, and antivivisection activism, see Raftery, Frances; Williamson, Power; Peacock, The Theological; Mitchell, Frances; Hamilton, Hajjin; O’Connor, The Female; Carrera, Frances. 2  For more on Cobbe’s position as “a mid-Victorian feminist journalist and one of a handful of women to make a steady living writing for the mid-nineteenth century established press”, see Hamilton, Frances, 1 and passim.

P. Fagan (*) Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_13

209

210 

P. FAGAN

as a standalone volume with “bright, illustrated paper covers” by the Fleet Street publishers Ward, Lock, and Tyler under the pseudonym “Merlin Nostradamus”.3 Sally Mitchell notes that these publishing strategies were designed “to encourage impulse reading by people not interested in vivisection [a major target of the text’s satire] or in anything written by a strong-minded woman” (249). Thus, while it was likely conceived as a variation on, and response to, other examples of the satirical-periodical format, the publication of The Age of Science as a standalone novella allowed Cobbe to disseminate the themes of her periodical essays on vivisection and women’s rights to a popular audience. Indeed, the plot turns upon a recognisable sci-fi conceit: through the invention of a “Prospective Telegraph”, the story’s narrator grants their reader direct access to excerpted columns from a newspaper published 100 years in the future, dated 1 January 1977. The paper is titled “The Age of Science”4 to refer “with pride to the consciousness of its readers that they live in a period of the world’s history when Science reigns supreme over human affairs”, having erased from society almost all traces of religion, literature, the arts, animal rights, women’s education, and bodily autonomy.5 To pin down the specifics of Cobbe’s critique, I explore her depictions of the variously represented, deconstructed, commodified, vivisected, tortured, and exterminated animal body as a point of access to the novella’s diverse yet conceptually interconnected satirical targets. Firstly, I situate the text in a network of satirical and speculative traditions, from Victorian feminist science fiction and the Swiftian grotesque to biopolitical dystopian literature. Secondly, I demonstrate how the sci-fi conceit of the “Prospective Telegraph” allows Cobbe to craft a future dystopia that satirises the patriarchal values of Victorian medical discourse and practice by disclosing the ideological affinities between pro-vivisection and anti-­ feminist movements. Thirdly, I draw attention to mandatory vaccinations as a previously neglected target of the novella’s anti-medical satire and explain this convergence of animal rights activism, feminism, and vaccine scepticism by historicising it in relation to the Victorian physical purity movement. In closing, I show how Cobbe heightens the stakes of this

 Mitchell, Frances, 249.  Across the chapter, I refer to Cobbe’s novella itself as The Age of Science and the fictional 1977 newspaper within the story as “The Age of Science”. 5  Cobbe, The Age of Science, 6. 3 4

13  VIVISECTIONS, VACCINATIONS, REVELATIONS: ECOFEMINIST SATIRE… 

211

conflict between scientific utilitarianism and human/nonhuman life in the newspaper’s final apocalyptic prophecy of anthropogenic mass extinction. Kate Culkin observes that the most immediate influence for The Age of Science was the 1875 time-travel play 1975: A Prophetic Drama by Harriet Hosmer (whose sculptures Cobbe vigorously promoted in her own writing) yet notes that Cobbe’s “novella stands out as a dystopia among the mostly hopefully utopian feminist science fiction of the nineteenth century”.6 This distinction from the feminist utopianism of her immediate contemporaries can be explained, in part, by the fact that Cobbe’s text signals its position in the tradition of Swiftian satire from the outset. The attribution to “Merlin Nostradamus” announces a debt to Swift’s astrological hoax Predictions for the Year 1708, written under the pseudonym “Isaac Bickerstaff” which publicly ridiculed the astrologer John Hewson, who used his Merlinus Liberatus almanack to disseminate his seditionist politics under the pseudonym “John Partridge”. Resituating Cobbe’s text at the peculiar nexus of utopian Victorian feminist science fiction and misanthropic Swiftian satire (itself a development of the bitter invective of Juvenalian satire) foregrounds the author’s alignment with Swift’s hybrid Anglo-Irish status,7 but also her ambivalent blend of progressive politics with conservative wit. In its grotesque tone and satirical focus on the brutally instrumentalised body, The Age of Science echoes Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, which satirically proposes “a fair, cheap, and easy method” of making excess Irish children into “sound, useful members of the commonwealth” by turning their bodies into food for the Irish poor (who had been devastated by a famine caused, in part, by crop failures and trade restrictions imposed by the British government) and using their flayed skins to make gloves and boots for “persons of quality and fortune”.8 Like Swift’s perversely earnest proposer, Cobbe’s future newspapermen, who report enthusiastically on the dystopian consequences of the age’s scientific regime, are cast to draw a visceral distinction, for the discerning reader, between the “truth” and those who fraudulently claim to possess the expertise and authority to speak it. Cobbe deploys the Swiftian satirical trope of misreading to signpost the text’s allegiances. The despotic scientists who run the world in 1977, as  Culkin, Prophetic, 166–68.  On Cobbe’s status as an Anglo-Irish woman writer in Victorian England, see O’Connor, The Female, 31–58. 8  Swift, A modest proposal, 16, 18. 6 7

212 

P. FAGAN

well as the doctors who enforce their tyrannical programmes and the newspapermen who uncritically endorse them, are wholly incapable of understanding irony or extracting value from literary texts. The paper’s arts critic praises The Loves of the Triangles as “almost the only poem bequeathed to us by the past worthy of retaining a place in our libraries” (21), without realising that George Canning’s 1807 poem is in fact a bawdy parody of Erasmus Darwin’s “The Loves of the Plants”. The review of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), which the 1977 paper mislabels “Daniel Allround by George Evans”, praises the “scientific value” of the novel’s “abstruse technical terminology” but critiques the space wasted by its “delineations of characters without tracing them to the laws of Heredity” (22). The elevation of terminology over characterisation renders the reviewer not only disinterested in but wholly blind to the “veiled feminist message”9 of Gwendolen Harleth’s struggles in the novel. Moreover, the critic’s obsession with heredity not only anticipates how the theme of Zionism would come to overshadow much of Daniel Deronda’s reception history, but also reflects how the “supposed science of heredity and selective breeding”, advocated in works such as Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences (1869), was seen by many of Cobbe’s contemporaries as “the answer to racial degeneration [of] … the poor, mentally ill, and criminals”.10 Such pragmatic misfires comically illuminate Cobbe’s real concern with a rampant scientific materialism that will come to obliterate the values of faith, affection, empathy, and honour through an insistence “that Utility, not Beauty, is [the] only legitimate aim” of human expression (24). More than this, Cobbe’s parodic mimicry of scientific discourse (here, in the racist, ableist, classist rhetoric of “the laws of Heredity”) indicates that the erasure of these aesthetic-ethical values is a necessary step to legitimise science’s violent, biopolitical control over any body that it categorises as less-than-human. Cobbe’s satire of the scientific corruption of aesthetics is sharpened in the paper’s report on an Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts. The 1977 reporter asserts that, compared “with the rude and uncouth attempts of the ancient Greeks to idealize the naked human form”, scientific realism has enabled a new standard of representational accuracy. He singles out “the feathers of the bird’s wing” rendered in sculpture “No. 2,320, ‘A 9

 Sutphin, Feminine passivity, 342.  Robb, The way, 591.

10

13  VIVISECTIONS, VACCINATIONS, REVELATIONS: ECOFEMINIST SATIRE… 

213

Chinese Scullion plucking a Goose’” as exemplary of scientific realism’s representational power (26). In the figure of the plucked goose, the aesthetic shift to brute realism is implicitly linked to the nineteenth-­century rise of scientifically “accurate” representations of the distressed animal body in museal and taxidermal contexts. Giovanni Aloi has shown that Victorian literary and optical realism drew heavily on museal taxidermy dioramas,11 which, in their ideological coupling of scientific realism with power through acute forms of violence over animal bodies, are given as evidence of science’s superior ability to produce and disseminate knowledge. As animal life fades from the everyday human social sphere, the function of this discursive move—both in the nineteenth century and in Cobbe’s future satire—is to insist that the art of conserving the animal body has been perfected through scientific precision. As the animal’s “realistic” museal and sculptural simulation reframes nonhuman genocide, perversely, as a technology of de-extinction, the actual living animal body is rendered obsolete. It is in “effigies” such as the sculpture of the plucked goose, Cobbe’s reporter insists, that “truth will be upheld” (25). The satirical implication of sculpture “No. 2,320” extends to other political spheres in the racial and class coordinates of the figure of the “Chinese Scullion”, whose menial labour deconstructing the nonhuman body for its commodification (as food, as down) places them also in close proximity to the realm of animality. In such images, Cobbe’s satire of science’s hierarchical delimitation and regulation of human and nonhuman bodies anticipates Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist observation that the supposed gulf between the rational and the non-rational, and the inferiority of the latter, can be used to support the supposed inferiority of not just women, but also of slaves, people of other races and cultures (“barbarians”) and those who perform manual as opposed to intellectual tasks. All of these can be treated as less rational and as closer to the sphere of nature, and especially as closer to animality.12

Coral Lansbury has demonstrated how nineteenth-century feminists such as Cobbe came to identify with animals as fellow victims of biopolitical control and oppression by the patriarchal state, and how in this period, the  Aloi, Speculative, 53.  Plumwood, Feminism, 47.

11 12

214 

P. FAGAN

tortured animal came to signify the suffering of oppressed women, racial minorities, and workers.13 Furthermore, Maureen O’Connor and María José Carrera have demonstrated in depth the interconnectedness of the antivivisection and feminist movements in Cobbe’s thought, evidenced in her frequent comparisons between wife-torturers, vivisectors, and animal abusers.14 While the novella is largely overlooked in these studies in favour of Cobbe’s periodical essays, an activist dedication to the interdependent causes of animal rights and women’s rights animates the satirical impulse across The Age of Science. I will focus on two set-pieces on the theme of education to show how the text foregrounds animal bodies to “tie Cobbe’s anti-vivisection campaign” to the cause of women’s rights specifically.15 “The Age of Science” includes a report on the Simian Educational Institute, dedicated to setting the brain of apes “towards progress and civilization” (15). For instance, one “young gentlemen” at the Institute, “Joseph Macacus Silenus, Esq.”,16 is praised for his ability “to answer any question in elementary science by means of an alphabet and a system of knocks” (16). By contrast, a different—but thematically related—column in the paper praises the suppression of the Victorian movement for “the Higher Education of women”, under which [t]he feeble brains of young females were actually taxed to study the now forgotten Greek and Latin languages, and even Mathematics and such Natural Science as was then understood. The result was truly alarming; for these poor creatures flung themselves with such energy into the pursuits opened to them, that, as one of their critics remarked, they resembled “the palmer-worm and the canker-worm—they devoured every green thing”. (42–43)

The specific reference to “the palmer-worm and the canker-worm” alludes to the biblical plagues of locusts and prophecies of the End Time outlined in Joel 1:4—as we will see, this characterisation of Victorian women’s education as apocalyptic takes on added irony as the patriarchal Age of Science is revealed to be one of anthropogenic mass extinction. For now, I would note that, working in tandem, these columns imply that while the

 Lansbury, The Old.  O’Connor, The Female, 31–58; Carrera, Frances, 36. 15  Culkin, Prophetic, 168. 16  Macacus silenus is the Latin taxonomical name for the lion-tailed macaque. 13 14

13  VIVISECTIONS, VACCINATIONS, REVELATIONS: ECOFEMINIST SATIRE… 

215

schooling of apes orients them towards civilisation, women’s education debases these “poor creatures” to the level of parasites. The February 1877 number of The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions identifies the target of The Age of Science’s satirical handling of the women’s education debate as Edward Clarke’s Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1874).17 The solution to the “problem of the women’s sphere”, Clarke asserts, “must be obtained from physiology, not from ethics or metaphysics”.18 On the basis of this physiological approach, he concludes that if a girl “puts as much force into her brain education as a boy, the brain … will suffer” (157), resulting in “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria and other derangements of the nervous system” (18). Clarke’s thesis is manifested across his study in images of inferior nature (the domain of animals, women, “othered” races, manual labourers) which are implicitly contrasted with the superior civilisation (the domain of white, male scientific knowledge and reason); for instance: “A German girl, yoked with a donkey and dragging a cart, is an exhibition of monstrous muscular and aborted brain development. An American girl, yoked with a dictionary, and laboring with the catamenia, is an exhibition of monstrous brain and aborted ovarian development” (179). In “The Age of Science”, the reporter writes approvingly of scientific interventions in the Victorian era: Of course it was the solemn duty of the Medical Profession to put a stop at once to an error which might lead to such a catastrophe, and numerous books were immediately written proving (what we all now acknowledge) that the culture of the brains of women is highly detrimental to their proper functions in the community. (43)

In 1977, the dangerous “dream of a Higher Education has been replaced by the abolition of even Elementary Schools for girls” and an Act of Parliament has been passed “which renders it penal for any woman to read a book or newspaper, or to write a letter” to the point that “the position of women, we are happy to say, has been steadily sinking” (43–44). The ecofeminist implication of these set-pieces is that patriarchal scientific discourse and practice legitimise women’s oppression by casting

 Anon., Art. IX, 95.  Clarke, Sex, 12.

17 18

216 

P. FAGAN

sexual difference “as closer to the animal”.19 In each case, the scientific humanist rhetoric of “progress and civilization” is in fact directed towards legitimising the labour exploitation of less-than-human bodies. The report on the Simian Educational Institute praises the plan “to employ the anthropoid apes” as domestic servants, nurses, and cooks (16). The second report makes it clear that the prohibition of women’s education is intended to bar them from “entering the learned Professions” as “the more ignorant a woman may be, the more delightful she is as a wife, and the better qualified to fulfil the duties of a mother” (43). Thus, Nan Bowman Albinski reflects, Cobbe’s satire demonstrates how “male-­ dominated science” equates women “with animals, thereby reducing them to that ‘natural’ state subservient to science” and confining them to domestic labour.20 Yet, The Age of Science does not employ the image of the animal only as a symbol for human concerns but also considers the violent consequences of patriarchal scientific biopolitical control over nonhuman bodies in their own terms. In a report on the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, “The Age of Science” documents the mass extinction of almost all animals native to Europe; among the “species of animals which are rapidly dying out” and “soon be lost altogether to Zoological science” are numbered “the Ass, the Fox, the Dog, the Hare, the Pheasant, and Partridge” (17). Not only is this extinction event anthropogenic, it is also unevenly enacted along speciesist lines, according to a conceived capacity for servile labour and ability for rudimentary reasoning. While apes are educated for domestic labour owing to their similarity to (yet difference from) the human, it has been deemed “impossible […] to go on employing a creature like the Donkey, proverbial for its intellectual deficiency” (17). The near extinction of the dog is more regrettable, the reporter laments, given its “sagacity” and the consequent “scientific interest in connection with the form and size of its brain” (17–18). It is reported that companion dogs were “privately destroyed by hundreds by their owners, who disgracefully sought to withdraw them from the researches of physiologists” while “[t]he remaining kinds have been perhaps rather recklessly used by vivisectors, whose ardour in the noble cause of science has caused them to experiment, on an average, on about 14,000 dogs apiece (an example originally set by the sainted Maurizio Schiff)” with the consequence that only 12  Plumwood, Feminism, 4.  Albinski, Women’s Utopias, 28.

19 20

13  VIVISECTIONS, VACCINATIONS, REVELATIONS: ECOFEMINIST SATIRE… 

217

dogs remain in existence (18). The reference to German physiologist Moritz Schiff (1823–96), who fatally removed thyroid glands from dogs as part of his research, makes it clear that Cobbe’s vision of the future has specific contemporary targets in its satirical sights. The tone here is a satirical twist on Claude Bernard’s influential 1865 argument that the “man of science […] no longer hears the cry of animals, he no longer sees the blood that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms concealing problems which he intends to solve”.21 In contrast to this instrumentalist view, Cobbe wrote regularly and passionately about the emotional connection between humans and canines. A photograph of Hajjin, Cobbe’s companion dog with her partner Mary Lloyd, was featured on the cover of her 1867 publication Confessions of a Lost Dog: Reported by Her Mistress (Fig. 13.1).22 Chris Pearson notes that “[a]s dogs held such emotional resonance” for Victorian readers, antivivisectionists such as Cobbe “frequently published detailed descriptions of experiments on them to convince the public of the evils of vivisection” which showed that “humans and dogs shared similar emotions”.23 In an 1879 article on “Vivisection” for Fraser’s Magazine, George Hoggan documents his experience as a laboratory assistant when two dogs, held down on the vivisection table, licked the experimenters’ hands “as their last means of exciting compassion”.24 Pearson identifies this as “a distressing scene common in antivivisectionist literature” (156), and indeed, it is anticipated by two years in an especially disturbing scene in Cobbe’s satire. The “Age of Science” report on the near total extinction of dogs owing to vivisectors’ overzealous experimentation ends in a horrifying account of a physiologist killing the family’s devoted Newfoundland dog in a tub as an “instructive and entertaining spectacle” in front of his six-year-old son for “the scientific interest which would attach to watching it slowly drowning” (18). The scene dramatises Cobbe’s position that the shared human and canine emotions of “faith and affection” were “manipulated, exploited, and degraded on the vivisection table”:25 The dog, when withdrawn half dead for a moment from the water, having attempted to lick the boy’s face, the child was weak enough to implore his  Bernard, An Introduction, 103.  Hamilton, Hajjin, 28–31. 23  Pearson, Dogopolis, 155–56. 24  Hoggan qtd. in Pearson, Dogopolis, 156. 25  Pearson, Dogopolis, 156. 21 22

218 

P. FAGAN

Fig. 13.1  Frances Power Cobbe’s canine companion Hajjin, photographed by Frank Haes, 1867 father to spare it; but the learned gentleman of course pointed out to the boy the folly of such a request, and the experiment was completed. (19)

“We trust”, the report concludes cheerfully, “to see this young gentleman hereafter as sound and eminent a physiologist as his distinguished father” (19). The scene dramatises Jeremy Bentham’s well-known argument for extending rights to animals based on their capacity to suffer, but the

13  VIVISECTIONS, VACCINATIONS, REVELATIONS: ECOFEMINIST SATIRE… 

219

suffering here is twofold: enabled by a callous manipulation of the animal’s faith in the human, but also inflicted cruelly on the son who has committed the error of forming a bond of affection with the nonhuman beast. The exploitation of nonhuman bodies as mere resources not only for the production of scientific knowledge but also for industry and profit is rendered explicit in the “Age of Science” report on the “cheerful” opening ceremony for a new “Incineration Hall”. The facility boasts “a furnace capable of reducing 12 bodies at a time to ashes, which … will be used in the manufacture of water-filters for the drinking-fountains of the town” (17–18). Again, the satirical image targets actual Victorian practices, as household water-filters produced by the London Water-Purifying Company (on the Strand in London), Messrs. Atkins (on Fleet Street), Mr Lipscombe (on Queen Victorian Street) and others used the “property of animal charcoal to remove colouring matters” and retain lead.26 Yet, in Cobbe’s dystopian future, the programme is extended so that water-filters now also use the charred bones of human “persons despatched by Euthanasia” (17). The abject image anticipates twentieth-century satirical scenes of human bone char made from dead soldiers, as in Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–23) and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Yet, Cobbe’s satire is trained more sharply upon what she conceived to be a dangerous increase of medical power over life, and her critique is developed through a progressively grotesque display of the interdependence between biopolitical and economic control over less-­ than-­human bodies (animals, women, children, the infirm, and working poor) in the Age of Science. Through these glimpses at future newspaper reportage, Cobbe’s reader learns that normative instrumentalist approaches to the animal and the animalised human body have legitimised diverse forms of ableist eugenics and even the vivisection of working-class human children. One reporter asks, rhetorically, with a hint of defensiveness: What if physicians and surgeons do try experiments daily on the patients in the hospitals, sometimes involving a good deal of pain, or loss of limb or life? These people are fed and housed, and often extravagantly fattened up on the most luxurious food, on the condition of serving the cause of Science as subjects of experiments. And what, again, if the children in the workhouses  Voelcker, Purification, 184.

26

220 

P. FAGAN

be given over now and then …, at the request of the Medical authorities, for vivisection? They are nearly always placed under the influence of anæsthetics, … unless the object of the experiment would be frustrated by their use. Could the humanest of our humanitarians ask anything more? The rule of Science is the most benign, as well as enlightened, the world has ever seen. (40–41)

The charged image of the vivisected human body is familiar to us, perhaps, from later iterations of the trope: the vivisector Dr Benjulia’s planned experiments on Carmina Graywell in Wilkie Collins’s antivivisection sensation novel Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time (1882) (Collins corresponded with Cobbe throughout the novel’s composition and acknowledges her influence in the foreword) or the abject creations of H.G. Wells’s vivisector in The Island of Doctor Moreau, “who no longer feels sympathy for the sufferings of his half-animal, half-human victims”.27 However, unlike these examples of cruel, even mad, individual vivisectors, Cobbe’s critique is social and institutional. Her handling of the human vivisection trope is further distinguished by the fact that it is mediated to the reader through the reporter’s approving rhetoric, which satirises and renders grotesque the language of “efficient and humane” practices that Victorian vivisectors evoked to justify their animal experiments.28 Read solely at the level of antivivisection satire, the scene comes across, perhaps, as a wild fantasy, potentially racist and classist itself, which fetishises human suffering to score a specific animal rights point. However, in my reading, Cobbe’s implication is that these oppressions are not allegorical of each other but discursively and materially inextricable from each other. Just as the scenes of animal torture do not function solely as allegories for purely human concerns (such as the patriarchal oppression of women), so the scenes in which the bodies of children, the infirm, and the working poor are made to suffer vivisection under the reigning medical authorities are not solely allegories for animal suffering. In each case, the point, in part, is rather that the “animal” is a discursively constructed category and that any body or class (whether human or nonhuman) thus categorised is placed outside of any moral obligation or ethical consideration. Read in these terms, the satirical proposition of the humaneness and utility of vivisecting the most vulnerable in society asserts implicitly (after  Straley, Love, 349.  Pearson, Dogopolis, 142.

27 28

13  VIVISECTIONS, VACCINATIONS, REVELATIONS: ECOFEMINIST SATIRE… 

221

the fashion of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”) that under such a structure of utilitarian biopower, upheld by the ideology of scientific rationalisation and the rhetoric of humaneness, every act of violence is permitted over any body categorised as “animal”. Indeed, the near exclusive critical focus on the oppression of women’s and animal’s bodies under this future scientific dystopia (important and even central as they are to its satire) has in certain ways obscured the fact that Cobbe’s novella offers a much broader anti-medical invective. Through its sci-fi conceit, The Age of Science develops not only an ecofeminist but also a biopolitical satire of a world in which “[t]he sanitary interests of the community are now recognized … as the supreme concern of the State” (42). The first extended excerpt from the 1977 paper is taken from a Report of the Assembly of Convocation, consisting “exclusively of Medical men” (9), in which an official rises to voice his complaints regarding “the inadequacy of the fees to be legally claimed by Doctors for granting Certificates of Birth, Vaccination, Equination, Porcination” (11). Again, the theme of biopolitical control over the body through medical regulation and intervention is developed through the figure of the animal, as the etymological root of the word vaccination from vacca meaning “cow” (owing to the early use of the cowpox virus against smallpox) is extended to horses (“equination”) and pigs (“porcination”). Elsewhere, it is reported that “an elderly nobleman in feeble health” has been subjected to an inoculation using “the saliva from mad dogs” (31). It is made obvious in such reports that the citizenry is routinely subjected to experimental inoculations that infect rather than protect them. The scientific means of giving people cholera, consumption, scarlet fever, the plague, and leprosy have been “effected, it is needless to remark, by laborious pathological experiments on animals and idiots”, and although remedies for these diseases “have not yet been ascertained by the Faculty, we can scarcely fail to attain that secondary object ere long” (41–42). Under this authoritarian administrative state, “Medical Certificates of good Health” are “legally required from men, women, and children performing any kind of labour”, which need to be updated every few days to the enrichment of the doctors issuing them. It is reported that “[c]rimes of the lesser class, such as murders, poisonings, electroding and exploding, have indeed increased considerably”, while “crimes which involve so much larger evils to the community”, such as the “neglect of Equination, Vaccination, Canination, and Porcination, have dwindled under the severe measures of punishment” (45). The severity of these measures is made

222 

P. FAGAN

clear when citizens charged with “having deceived the Officers of Domestic Inspection respecting their own and their children’s Canination and Porcination” are sentenced to “be vivisected for the instruction of the students at the magnificent new School of Physiology in Carlton Gardens” (31). Twenty-first-century readers may wonder at these resonances between Cobbe’s progressive satire and the anti-vax movements of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, by returning her text to its historical contexts, we can see how its antivivisection and feminist drives intersect with the anti-vaccine sentiment of Victorian British physical purity feminism. The “first step towards” this dystopian “reign of science” is identified explicitly in The Age of Science as an act passed “at the end of the [nineteenth] century”, whereby “certificates of Vaccination were substituted for all legal purposes for Baptismal certificates” (45). The Compulsory Vaccination Acts of 1853, consolidated by the Vaccination Acts of 1867 and 1871, mandated that parents who refused to vaccinate their children against smallpox during their first three months of life were “liable to repeated fines, the distraint and sale of their household goods, and even gaol terms”.29 These measures were met with fervent, at times violent protests and led to the formation of the Anti-Vaccination League. Objections ranged from lay fears about “giving ‘diseased blood’ to the healthy” to legitimate medical concerns about arm-to-arm inoculation, which “carried an objective danger of conveying diseases such as syphilis and erysipelas through septic lancets”.30 However, objectors were united by a broad unease with “the expansion of the state into the previously private and domestic realm of medical practice”.31 Cobbe was acquainted with several figures in the anti-vaccination movement; indeed, she recruited Walter Hadwen, a prominent anti-vaccination campaigner known for his denial of the germ theory of disease, as a member of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (Hadwen succeeded Cobbe as head of the organisation following her death in 1904).32 Anne L. Scott notes that the core support for the anti-vaccination movement was women (626), especially when it was connected to the Contagious Diseases Acts 1864, 1866, 1869, which empowered police officers to subject women  Scott, Physical, 632.  Ibid., 632. 31  Durbach, They might, 45. 32  Hawden’s 1896 speech The Case Against Vaccination remained a rallying cry for the anti-vaccination movement. 29 30

13  VIVISECTIONS, VACCINATIONS, REVELATIONS: ECOFEMINIST SATIRE… 

223

suspected of being prostitutes to compulsory venereal disease checks and confinement to a lock hospital. For Cobbe and many of her peers, these acts could not be disentangled from the disgrace of an unregulated vivisection. Thus, the feminist anti-medical sentiment “found expression in the rapid development of vegetarianism, temperance, spiritualism, and various alternative medical therapies as semi-politicised movements”.33 “The Age of Science” reports the “absurdity” that “there once existed two or three Lady Doctors in London, who […] foisted themselves surreptitiously into an exalted position from which Nature should have debarred them” (44). The allusion is, in part, to Dr. Anna Kingsford (née Bonus),34 an acquaintance of Cobbe’s via The Lady’s Own Paper35 and a figure who combined fervent feminist, vegetarian, antivivisectionist, and anti-vaccination sentiments.36 One of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine—and among the first to graduate without experimenting on any animal—Kingsford claimed that vaccination “is based on the principle of setting a thief in the house to keep other thieves out” and protested that it is “urged with all the pompous air of scientific authority, that henceforth the blood of both man and beast should be infected by every one of these germs, and thus be maintained in a continual state of ferment and impurity”.37 Thus, while the broad strokes of Cobbe’s satire might encourage us to place it alongside future religious feminist dystopias such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)—or even biopolitical dystopias such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)— it can be situated even more precisely alongside works such as Mary Bramston’s The Island of Progress (1893) as a product of the physical purity anti-medical feminist movement, for whom the vivisected animal body became an image not only of injustice towards nonhuman life, but an index of anxieties regarding a repressive biopolitical medical state that would exert increasingly despotic control over the less-than-human bodies of women, children, the infirm, and the working poor. Yet, the novella’s epigraph sets the text in relation to a different tradition still, via Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Two Voices” (1842), in which the  Scott, Physical, 644.  The other “Lady Doctors” referenced are most likely Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. 35  Rudacille, The Scalpel, 33–34. 36  Scott, Physical, 626. 37  Kingsford, A Lecture, 94–95. 33 34

224 

P. FAGAN

second voice attempts to persuade the lyrical I to end their misery through suicide: Forerun thy time, thy peers, and let Thy feet, millenniums hence, be set In midst of knowledge dreamed not yet.38

This curious paratext establishes a quite different tone and conceptual framework from that offered by the text’s narrator and obliquely sets up the sci-fi conceit of time travel. More intriguingly, it establishes the satire’s thematics of prophecy, apocalypse, and revelation. The apocalyptic theme is ignited with the novella’s opening announcement that with the Prospective Telegraph, “the obstacle of Time is as effectually conquered” (3). The scientific fantasy of extinction, subtly developed across the text, comes to full fruition in the final article reproduced from “The Age of Science”. Though still mediated by the conceit of reading the future newspaper via the Prospective Telegraph, The Age of Science shifts tone slightly to close with a more direct evocation of its core themes. Via a column outlining the paper’s New Year’s Day prognostics for the year 1977, the reader is presented with an apocalyptic vision of an anthropogenic Ice Age in which “the fruits of the earth perish one by one, … the dead and silent woods petrify, … all the races of animals become extinct” and all human works, hopes, martyrdoms, virtue, genius and love perish along with them (48). The inevitability of this fate, “predicted so surely by Science”, suggests to the paper’s reporter that “[t]he enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly for … Progress … must be recognised as a dream, wherein no man in a Scientific Age can long indulge” (49). Cobbe’s implication that society must choose between life (coded as progressive, feminist, artistic, religious, eco-egalitarian ideals) and suicide (associated with the biopolitical destruction of less-than-human bodies that is legitimised through scientific materialism, rationalism, realism) anticipates the apocalyptic tone of, for instance, H.G.  Wells’s “The Star” (1897) or E.M.  Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909). Yet, what distinguishes Cobbe’s satire from those more directly humanist apocalyptic texts is its insistence on not only women’s but all humankind’s shared end, and thus its common plight, with nonhuman life.

 Cobbe, The Age of Science, front matter.

38

13  VIVISECTIONS, VACCINATIONS, REVELATIONS: ECOFEMINIST SATIRE… 

225

Works Cited Albinski, Nan Bowman. 1988. Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction. London: Routledge. Aloi, Giovanni. 2018. Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene. New York: Columbia University Press. Anon. 1877. Art. IX—Paragraphs. The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions (February): 95–96. Bernard, Claude. 1957. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Trans. Henry Copley Green. New York: Dover. Carrera, María José. 2020. Frances Power Cobbe on brutes, women, and the Irish (human) landscape: Ethics, environment, and imperialism. Estudios Irlandeses 15 (2): 31–41. https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2020-­9742. Clarke, Edward. 1874. Sex in Education; Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company. Cobbe, Frances Power [Merlin Nostradamus]. 1877. The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler. Culkin, Kate. 2019. Prophetic dramas: The time travel narratives of Harriet Hosmer and Frances Power Cobbe. In Neglected American Women Writers of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Verena Laschinger and Sirpa Salenius, 158–172. New York: Routledge. Durbach, Nadja. 2000. “They might as well brand us”: Working-class resistance to compulsory vaccination in Victorian England. Social History of Medicine 13 (1): 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/13.1.45. Hamilton, Susan. 2006. Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Feminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. Hajjin: “Photographed from Life”. Victorian Review 40 (1): 28–31. Kingsford, Anna. 1882. A lecture on food. In Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. 1912/2007. Addresses and Essays on Vegetarianism, ed. Samuel Hopgood Hart and John M. Watkins. London: John M. Watkins. Lansbury, Coral. 1985. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Mitchell, Sally. 2004. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. O’Connor, Maureen. 2010. The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing. Bern: Peter Lang. Peacock, Sandra J. 2002. The Theological and Ethical Writings of Frances Power Cobbe, 1822–1904. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Pearson, Chris. 2021. Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London and Paris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.

226 

P. FAGAN

Raftery, Deirdre. 1995. Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904). In Women, Power and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy, 89–124. Dublin: Attic Press. Robb, George. 1996. The way of all flesh: Degeneration, eugenics, and the gospel of free love. Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (4): 589–603. Rudacille, Deborah. 2000. The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The War Between Animal Research and Animal Protection. University of California Press. Scott, Anne L. 1999. Physical purity feminism and state medicine in late nineteenthcentury England. Women’s History Review 8 (4): 625–653. https://doi. org/10.1080/09612029900200220. Straley, J. 2010. Love and vivisection: Wilkie Collins’s experiment in Heart and Science. Nineteenth-Century Literature 65 (3): 348–373. Sutphin, Christine. 1987. Feminine passivity and rebellion in four novels by George Eliot. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29 (3): 342–363. Swift, Jonathan. 1729/2020. A modest proposal. In Writing Politics: An Anthology, ed. David Bromwich, 15–24. New York: New York Review of Books. Voelcker, Augustus. 1877. Purification of water. In Journal of the Bath and West of England Society and Southern Countries Association for the Encouragement of Agriculture, Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, 182–187. London: William Clowes and Sons. Williamson, Lori. 2001. Power and Protest: Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Society. London: Rivers Oram Press.

CHAPTER 14

“Wolf within the Fold”: Satire and Animality in The Brutalitarian and The Beagler Boy Mo O’Neill

This chapter examines two obscure satirical periodicals created by the Humanitarian League, a British campaign group active from 1891 to 1919. Under the umbrella of humanitarianism, the League addressed issues of multispecies justice, including campaigns on hunting, imperialism, women’s wages, corporal punishment, vivisection, and slaughterhouse reform. Satirising one journalist’s reactionary diatribe against the wave of such radical reform movements at the fin de siècle, the League released a single issue of The Brutalitarian, A Journal for the Sane and Strong (1904), jokingly positing the proud reclamation of cruelty as a corrective to this problem. The Beagler Boy, published in 1907, continued to satirise the League’s detractors by issuing a mock-protest regarding its own campaign to see the beagling of hares abolished at Eton College, an English public school long recognised as a training ground for members of the socioeconomic elite. Both publications provoked considerable discussion in the press, questioning their status as satire or genuine polemic: a second issue of The Beagler Boy utilised a slew of enthusiastic

M. O’Neill (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_14

227

228 

M. O’NEILL

endorsements from hunting advocates to flippantly deny its status as a hoax. Parodying their critics allowed the League to subvert the stereotypes surrounding fin de siècle animal advocates, who were frequently deemed austere, humourless, and hysterically sentimental. The periodicals parodied the jingoistic, hypermasculine style of the defenders of animal cruelty, empire, and corporal punishment, indirectly asserting the inextricability of these humanitarian concerns. This article explores the publication of the periodicals, attending in particular to the meta-commentary of Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939), League founder and author of both satires. Journalist Heywood Broun’s contention that Salt was the “father of modern vegetarianism” is quoted approvingly in Carol J.  Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990).1 Famously combining feminist theory with a potted history of anti-­ patriarchal vegetarian advocacy, the text positions Salt and other early animal advocates as pioneering Adams’s own discursive strategy of identifying and critiquing the “texts of meat” underwriting patriarchal and anthropocentric violence. Reading Salt’s periodicals via Sexual Politics suggests that they similarly leverage satirical extremity to expose the violence of fin de siècle anti-humanitarian discourse, aiming to restore the “absent referent” of the murdered animal that, as Adam contends, such texts obscure. However, exploring the complex reception of the periodicals problematises the efficacy of a satiric textual approach rooted in the restoration of “absent” animals. One year after founding the League, Henry Stephens Salt published Animals’ Rights. In this first book-length exposition of the case for a rights-based animal ethic, Salt diverged from the welfarist approach that predominated in nineteenth-century animal campaign groups such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). While recognising the need for situational welfarist reforms, Salt suggested that animals’ rights must ultimately be achieved through a fundamental ethical transformation, overcoming the “antiquated notion” of a “great gulf” separating man and animals in order to recognise the “common bond of humanity that unites all living beings”.2 Salt and the League—a loose agglomeration of late Victorian radicals, including George Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter—frequently emphasised the interconnection of humans and animals within a shared kinship or family, extending 1 2

 Adams, Sexual Politics, 92.  Stephens Salt, Animals’ Rights, 8.

14  “WOLF WITHIN THE FOLD”: SATIRE AND ANIMALITY… 

229

protection to animals under the aegis of a shared “humanity”. The League aimed to advance this modernising ethical project through an inclusive approach to social issues, allowing them to raise public consciousness of the interrelated oppressions of humans and nonhuman animals within a critique of the “numerous barbarisms” of fin de siècle society.3 In this manner, the League strategically distanced itself from the accusations of sentimental zoophilia and selective compassion that coloured popular responses to the RSPCA and “single issue” organisations such as the antivivisectionist Victoria Street Society. As James Gregory notes in relation to Victorian vegetarians, animal welfarists were commonly placed alongside other “fringe” cultural interests such as spiritualism and socialism as a “target for humourists”, each dismissed as ephemeral, eccentric, and sentimentalist faddists.4 Stressing that their humanitarianism was “not merely a kindly sentiment”, but “an integral portion of any intelligible system of Ethics or Social Science”, the Humanitarian League attempted to position itself as a rigorous, rational, and modern transformation of existing ethical reform movements.5 The rationalist claim was well-calculated to draw out the absurdities of their critics. While the League used its interlinking of social causes to pre-­ empt and circumvent the common strains of anti-humanitarian criticism, an 1898 article by social Darwinist war correspondent G.W.  Steevens characterises the equal revulsion levelled at the titular “New Humanitarianism”. Steevens decries the new school of “crack-brained sentimentalists” who, unlike the older, more specialised faddists, issue a full-scale attack on “patriotism and common-sense and virility of individual character”.6 Steevens argues that each humanitarian issue, from vivisection to empire, is connected by antipathy towards acts that inflict physical pain, concluding that “we have let brutality die out too much”.7 This quotation serves as the slogan of The Brutalitarian; a play on Steevens’s quote and the title of the League’s own newspaper, The Humanitarian, Salt saw “Brutalitarian” as an original coinage, although its usage as an adjective for inhumane behaviour dates back to at least

 [Henry Stephens Salt?], The Humanitarian League: What It Is, n.p.  Gregory, Of Victorians, 185. 5  [Henry Stephens Salt?], The Humanitarian League: What It Is, n.p. 6  Steevens, Humanitarianism, 101, 98. 7  Ibid., 103. 3 4

230 

M. O’NEILL

1874.8 Reflecting on the creation of the mock-periodical in his 1921 autobiography, Salt states that by the time of writing, the League were wellversed in the arguments of their critics, and felt able “to carry the war into the enemies’ camp […] by means of the reductio ad absurdum, a pretended defence of the very practices which we were attacking”.9 As such, while presented as a genuine new periodical—laid out in a visually convincing four-page format—the narrative voices presented in The Brutalitarian satirise the arguments of Steevens and other anti-­ humanitarian detractors. Expounding its position as a Swiftian “modest proposal” for the benefits of brutality, the periodical’s introductory statement illustrates its satirical tone: It is full time, in this age of decadent humanitarianism, that some trumpet-­ tongued protest were raised against the prevalent sentimentality, and that there should be an attempt to organize and consolidate the forces—at present scattered and isolated—that make for manliness and patriotism. Our opponents are fond of using the term “brutal” in an opprobrious sense. We take up the word like a gauntlet, and lo! the Brutalitarian!10

The hyperbolic exclamation and alliterative emphasis employed in the passage simultaneously reinforce its verisimilitude as fervent political polemic—potentially duping the unsuspecting anti-humanitarian reader— and inflect it with narrative irony, presenting the anti-humanitarian as aurally spluttering (“trumpet-tongued”) and rhetorically overzealous. The narrator goes on to issue a lamentation against the Humanitarian League’s previous campaigning victories, such as the abolition of the Queen Victoria’s hunting pack of royal buckhounds. The militaristic enthusiasm of the opening editorial is satirically undermined by its representation of anti-humanitarianism as a reactive, disorganised attempt to thwart the League’s blossoming powers (1). The only contemporary critic to attend to The Brutalitarian, Leela Gandhi reads this mock-cry to consolidate the “scattered and isolated” forces of brutality—uniting “Imperialist with sportsman, sportsman with vivisectionist”—as highlighting the machinations of “beefy masculinity”, 8  See The Decline, 1264. The word in its original context is separable from its later popularisation as a portmanteau of “brutal” and “totalitarian” during the Second World War. 9  Stephens Salt, Seventy Years, 174. 10  [Stephens Salt], Brutalitarian, 1.

14  “WOLF WITHIN THE FOLD”: SATIRE AND ANIMALITY… 

231

the patriotic construction of a “virile” English national identity amalgamating colonialism, patriarchy, and anthropocentric violence.11 The Sexual Politics of Meat critically interrogates this association between anthropocentrism and patriarchal power, scrutinising the “texts of meat” that have progressively naturalised the idea that meat-eating and attendant cruelties such as hunting are masculine activities which increase men’s “virility” (xxxv, xxviii). For Adams, making the texts of meat visible allows animal advocates to “situate the production of meat’s meaning within a political-­ cultural context”, lifting them from the sphere of individualised consumption (xxxv). Adams views her own work as a continuation of a vegetarian literary canon to which Salt also contributed, which advances “multigenerational, multitextual readings against the texts of meat” (93). In presenting a series of quotations from the most vocal proponents of “beefy masculinity”, the final section of The Brutalitarian, “Words of the Wise”, offers a singular example of this multitextual strategy. A quotation from Alfred Lyttleton describing war as a “Magnificent Game” for “Patriots and Sportsmen” highlights the connection between blood sports and imperialist fervour; sarcastic admiring commentary foregrounds his influence as the incumbent Colonial Secretary (4). This careful captioning allows the Brutalitarian to shield itself from accusations of falsehood by contextualising its ideas within the real extremities of anti-humanitarian cultural discourse, simultaneously reflecting its worst excesses. But other quotations appear with no such framing, as in the final instance, taken “From a Private Letter”: My views as regards Anti-Vivisection are these: That all the animals in God’s creation should suffer the excruciating tortures of hell for millions of years, provided that by doing this they saved humanity from a pain in its little finger for five minutes. (4)

Ending on this quotation, presented with no further comment, The Brutalitarian deflates a final opportunity for bathetic release through its exaggeratedly sycophantic captions. While Adams finds in texts like Salt’s pro-vegetarian writings a holistic challenge to “dismembered texts, dismembered animals”—writing that they alternatively seek “a remembered text that protects the literal, living animals”—the “Words of the Wise” represent a more oppositional textual strategy, deployed in Salt’s satirical  Gandhi, Affective Communities, 85.

11

232 

M. O’NEILL

writing (93). In cleaving the quotations from their informing contexts, the section performs a counter-dismemberment of the texts of meat, throwing their ideological violence into relief. In placing Steevens’s fulminations on the necessity of brutality in building the British Empire alongside carnivoracious endorsements of hard labour and animal cruelty (one quotation reads, “Chloroform your dog, and take to reading your New Testament”), the section also underscores brutalitarian masculinity as, in Gandhi’s words, the “pernicious link in a chain connecting cruelty toward other species with the exploitation of other races”.12 As well as articulating the nexus of power underpinning anti-humanitarian brutality, The Brutalitarian’s editorial stance that “war and sport, flesh-eating and vivisection, are all kindred practices which must stand or fall together” allows the League to indirectly promulgate its organisational stance against the selective adoption of humanitarian causes. For example, the introductory article targets sportsmen who protest the use of feathers in women’s headgear, as “the pain inflicted by the feather-­ fashion […] is a trifle compared to that which is caused (quite justifiably), by sport” (2). A cursory parenthesis distinguishes this comment from the League’s own routine attacks on humanitarians who opposed “this or that cruel practice in particular” while advocating other forms of brutality.13 The periodical’s satirical extremity provides a literary means for the League to rip away the hypocritical pretence of humanitarian kindness, exposing the speciesist violence undergirding the “texts of meat”. However, the periodical’s treatment of Shechita, the “Jewish method of slaughter”, employs this strategy to more discriminatory strategic ends on the part of the League (3). A mock letter to the editor by “Shochet”, a Hebrew name meaning “ritual slaughterer”, claims to challenge the falsification that Shechita, a practice opposed by the League, is observed “for reasons of humanity” (3). Referencing a recent motion to lay down rubber flooring in Kosher slaughterhouses to cushion animals’ fall, “Shochet” writes that “it does not make much difference whether you fall on a lump of hard rubber”, as the violent acts of slaughter “still remain to testify to our real principles” (3). This collective invocation of shared nefarious 12  [Stephens Salt], Brutalitarian, 4, and Gandhi, Affective Communities, 85. “Carnivoracious” is a variation on the neologism “carnivoracity”. A portmanteau of “carnivore” and “voracity”, the word is employed by Robert McKay to suggest “something excessive or at least remarkable in the eating of meat”. See McKay, Read meat, 133. 13  [Henry Stephens Salt?], The Humanitarian League: What It Is, n.p.

14  “WOLF WITHIN THE FOLD”: SATIRE AND ANIMALITY… 

233

principles reflects the anti-Semitic sentiments prevalent in early twentieth-­ century Britain. Jonathan Burt highlights that while it is possible to differentiate “the well-intentioned animal welfare arguments from anti-Semitic currents in the attacks on shechita”, the timing of such campaigns at pregnant moments of cultural anti-Semitism such as the early 1900s and 1920s highlights that “from a historical point of view the enacting of anti-shechita legislation has always been political”.14 The League saw themselves as humanist defenders of animals against religious injustice on all sides, lampooning what Salt called the “quibbling justification for acts of cruelty to animals” furnished by the so-called religious ascription of immortality to “man alone”.15 Yet stereotypical references to “slyness” and the use of scripture to imply a doctrinal injunction for Jewish cruelty foreground the specifically anti-Semitic dimensions of their critique (3). While the “brutalitarian” category offers an effective satirical critique of the powers of “beefy masculinity”, this section highlights that the construct of an inhumane “brutality” can also be employed to exclude marginalised groups from the category of the “human(itarian)”. The League’s particular brand of animal satire proved more effective when applied to the seat of power. Their second and final satirical offering, The Beagler Boy, was published in the context of the League’s ongoing and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to abolish the practice of beagling at Eton College. Around the fin de siècle, the school’s wealthy and influential alumni often assumed prominent roles governing the British Empire. As part of pupils’ elite training, the school maintained a pack of beagles for use in recreational hunting; organised in hunting clubs, students would set the “Eton College Beagles” in pursuit of hares, attempting to run them down until they were exhausted or killed. As professed in its subtitle, the mock-newspaper was “conducted by Old Etonians”, edited by former pupils Salt and the League campaigner George Greenwood.16 Salt, who taught at the school before leaving to pursue a humane lifestyle, reflects that the absurd rhetoric of the defenders of the Eton Beagles offered “a tempting mark for satire”; he describes the periodical as an experiment intended to demonstrate that “there is nothing too fatuous to be seriously accepted as argument by the upholders of blood-sports”.17 Like The  Burt, Conflicts, 131.  Stephens Salt, Animals’ Rights, 8. 16  [Stephens Salt and Greenwood], Beagler Boy, 1. 17  Stephens Salt, Seventy Years, 176. 14 15

234 

M. O’NEILL

Brutalitarian, The Beagler Boy is framed as a reactionary defence against the Humanitarian League, opening by fearfully listing their previous successes in campaigns against private school hunts. The first edition also mirrors The Brutalitarian in asserting the interconnections between animal cruelty and imperialism: organised into sections addressing the “Scriptural Sanction for Beagling” and the “Imperial Aspects of Beagling”, the periodical states its intention to prove that “hare-hunting is the very best form of exercise that can be provided for British boys” (1). Here, the periodical lampoons the educational culture fostered under the previous Eton headmaster, Edmond Warre. In their history of sport at Victorian Eton, J.A. Mangan and Callum McKenzie observe that Warre supported the “strenuous exercise” embodied in the hunt as a “panacea” for unmanliness and an excessively academic nature in his schoolboys.18 Emphasising religiosity, hunting, and athleticism as means of structuring “an imperial ethnocentric sense of a superior English masculinity”, the ethos of “Muscular Christianity” prepared the boys for participation in the imperialist project (54). The journal mocks the ignorance engendered by this emphasis on sport over learning through its ab absurdo justifications for hunting. For example, the Biblical description of Nimrod as a “mighty hunter before the Lord” is interpreted as an example of a “righteous” huntsman “blessed by the approval of the Supreme Being”, despite his role as a tyrannical leader whose contempt for God led to the linguistic sundering of the Tower of Babel (3–4). The periodical’s eight-page format provides space to embrace linguistic and rhetorical playfulness more extensively than its predecessor. Singing the praises of the Eton schoolboy’s biblical education, the following passage exemplifies its flippant narrative tone: When […] he is exhorted by certain neurotic and hyper-aesthetic persons, calling themselves Humanitarians, to relinquish the manly and invigorating sport of Beagling, or to substitute for the healthy excitement of the living hare, the flabby puerilities of anaemic aniseed, he naturally turns to the inspired volume to see what warrant can there be found by these bilious busybodies for their new fangled doctrines, so opposed to the faith and practice of his ancestors. (3)

 Mangan and McKenzie, Victorian masculinity, 48.

18

14  “WOLF WITHIN THE FOLD”: SATIRE AND ANIMALITY… 

235

A mock-retort against artificial scent-chasing as a humane alternative to hunting—known as drag hunting—the passage lampoons the ubiquitous late Victorian stereotype of the weak and enervated “sickly sentimentalist” (5). Applied to the aniseed used in drag hunting itself, the arbitrary labels “anaemic”, “flabby”, and “puerile” reveal the absurdity of this semantic field of sickness. Elsewhere, the comparative “healthy excitement” of the hunt is deflated, as the narrators highlight particularly severe cruelties committed by the beaglers, in the context of humorously bathetic justifications. The practice of hunting pregnant hares during the spring is sanctioned via “nature” and its irrevocable dictate that football occupy the “energies of the boys before Christmas” (5). The bellicose ideal of beagling as a form of martial practice is chastened in a treatise on the hare’s paralysing slowness and timidity in flight, rendering it a particularly suitable animal for the mighty hunter’s chase (4). Like The Brutalitarian, The Beagler Boy establishes a stance of extremity as the only consistent way to endorse hunting. Warre’s position as both a pro-beagler and a branch member of the RSPCA is targeted as a particularly egregious form of equivocation: as the introductory address demurs, “[I]t is impossible, of course, to defend an old institution such as Beagling, unless one defends it in its entirety” (2). In a chapter of Animals’ Rights addressing blood sports, Salt remonstrates against the process through which “the modern sportsman converts the killing of animals from a prosaic and perhaps distasteful business into an agreeable and gentlemanly pastime” (53). Civilising discourse falsely bifurcated hunting along class lines, allowing the RSPCA to prosecute working-class blood sports while the equally violent practices of upper-class hunting were obscured and protected.19 The Beagler Boy’s ostensibly unequivocal pro-hunting stance affords a challenge from within to this civilising discourse, targeting Warre’s image-conscious instruction to the school journal, the Eton College Chronicle, to avoid the use of violent terms such as the “blooding” of hounds and the “breaking up” of hares in their descriptions of the hunt (2). In a section titled “Beagling Memories”, The Beagler Boy offers an editorial corrective to this cowardly capitulation to the “humanitarian agitators”, presenting uncensored extracts from hunting reports in Eton 19  The League stressed in its literature that it was “not a prosecuting society”, fashioning its educational and awareness-raising activities as explicitly distinct from the RSPCA’s enforcement of animal cruelty legislation. See [Henry Stephens Salt?] The Humanitarian League: What It Is, n.p.

236 

M. O’NEILL

College Chronicle, under the guise of nostalgia for hunts past (6). Phrases such as “scarcely able to move”, “absolutely dead beat”, and “absolutely stiff” emphasise the torment of the hunted hares (7). In Adams’s famous conception, animals become the “absent referent” in the consumption of meat, divorced from the circumstances of their death and rendered consumable through a process of metaphorical abstraction. To re-present the absent referent by “describing exactly how an animal dies, kicking, screaming, and is fragmented” challenges both the metaphorical and the consumptive process (32). The inclusion of these extracts aims to expose the civilising discourses that suppress the literal “breaking up” of the hares’ bodies, again reflecting the violence of animal abusers in their own, incontrovertible words. The Brutalitarian instructs the “patriotic press”, especially those “military, naval, judicial, scientific, and sporting” papers “directly threatened by the fanatics of the Humanitarian League” to publicise its emergence (2). The League’s exploitation of the anti-humanitarian strains of the press resulted in widespread circulation and discussion of both satirical publications. The ambiguity surrounding the hoax was bolstered by the convincing presentation of both publications; the Washington Post ultimately concluded that The Brutalitarian was sincere, as its formatting was “not much different from the ordinary periodical”.20 However, both periodicals were immediately recognised as satire by some journalists; The Brutalitarian was suspected by multiple reporters to be the work of League supporter George Bernard Shaw.21 While the Glasgow Herald correctly guessed the author, Salt later took pleasure in recounting their conclusion that “perhaps that is attributing too much cleverness to the Humanitarian League”.22 The Brutalitarian prompted debate about the effectiveness of satirical extremity: while the progressive Daily News deemed it “so much overdone as to be quite worthless”, the Birkenhead News saw its quotations from real brutalitarians as undeniably reflective of anti-humanitarian sentiment in their “naked ugliness”.23 The newspaper wrote that the brutalitarians would disavow the satire, “not because it misrepresents them, but because it is so brutally frank” (7).

 Brutality preached, A2.  Stephens Salt, Seventy Years, 174. 22  Stephens Salt, Seventy Years, 174. 23  Table talk, 6, and The magazines, 7. 20 21

14  “WOLF WITHIN THE FOLD”: SATIRE AND ANIMALITY… 

237

Contrary to this prediction, several newspapers welcomed The Brutalitarian as a serious new challenge to humanitarian sentiment. The anti-humanitarian response was especially marked with The Beagler Boy, which was endorsed by hunting newspapers including Sporting Life and Hare and Hound. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News went as far as to celebrate this upfront alternative to the growing “class of journalists who despise an unvarnished story”.24 The Beagler Boy was also praised in the wider “patriotic press”, underscoring the League’s stance on the interconnection of “brutalitarian” causes: endorsements appeared in the Court Journal, the Army and Navy Gazette, and the pro-vivisectionist British Medical Journal. As well as highlighting the inherent risk of political satire being taken seriously by those it lampoons, these responses demonstrate the difficulties attached to naming the “absent referent”; for these critics, its unmediated “presence” acts not as a consciousness-raising tool, but as a justification to espouse further anthropocentric violence. The Bedfordshire Times, for example, praises the Brutalitarian’s protests against “squeamishness” as an introduction to a broader opinion piece on the necessity of culling sparrows.25 These responses thus problematise the notion of the absent referent as a fixed signifier that can determine a particular ethical response in a reader; reflective of the broader instability of signification, this problem is reinforced by the satiric lens, which engenders particular interpretative ambiguity through layers of irony and sarcasm. The League’s newspaper The Humanitarian officially responded to the publication of each satire by denying authorship, but positioned themselves as sagely recognising their satirical quality, mocking the anti-­ humanitarians’ credulity.26 With The Beagler Boy, the League went further in their self-referentiality, releasing a second issue to exaggeratedly deny claims that the newspaper was “a fraud, a skit, a satire”.27 Under the guise of defensiveness, the League could spotlight their own attacks; with mock-­ horror, they incorporated a poem from The Humanitarian, exclaiming that “The Beagler lied; but the Sportsman’s brain/Could not see his thin veil under” (2). The issue highlighted particularly gullible anti-­ humanitarian journalistic responses, including The Sportsman’s judgement  Beagling, 984.  Bedfordshire Times, untitled, 6. 26  See [Henry Stephens Salt?], The Brutalitarian, 94–5, and The Beagler Boy, 118, in The Humanitarian. 27  [Stephens Salt and Greenwood], Beagler Boy issue 2, 1. 24 25

238 

M. O’NEILL

that the journal was “[f]ar more interesting and invigorating than anything we are capable of” (1). They teased that accusing The Beagler Boy of duplicity insinuated the “unthinkable”: that “among the foremost defenders of the hare hunt are so many portentous dullards […] who are so bereft of the sense of humour as to accept, and repeat, a bitter mockery of their own brainless arguments!” (4). The Sphere wrote of The Sportsman’s praise that “this must have given the satirists more pleasure than any praise of their pamphlet could”.28 These metatextual strategies allowed the League to defuse the risk associated with potential “misreadings” of the texts by their critics, redirecting these responses by lampooning the credulous humourlessness of their opponents. Prior to the publication of the second Beagler Boy, The Sportsman responded defensively that regardless of its intention, the paper was a “capital advocacy of beagling”, even writing that an “outside expert” they had employed to vet it for sarcasm “failed in the search”.29 A postscript to the second issue, updated to reflect The Sportsman’s change of heart, teased that the editors “could not honourably accept” the hunting magazine’s characterisation of The Beagler Boy as “a sort of wolf within the fold, only a wolf whose baa is not distinguishable from the sheep” (4). Positioning the humanitarians as hunters, and the sporting lobby as their prey, this metaphor reflects Salt’s wider sense that the League’s anti-­ hunting agitations were turning the tables on blood sports. He wrote in the anti-hunting volume Killing for Sport that the sportsman was increasingly compelled to “play the part less of the pursuer than the pursued”, hunted through ethical interventions “from cover to cover, from argument to argument”.30 The satirical publications allowed the League to subvert the stereotyping of humanitarians as “totally lacking in a sense of humour”, a characterisation utilised to dismiss their ethical interventions as sensitive, miserly meddling in the joys of blood sports, meat-eating, and other cruel recreations.31 Both periodicals figure within Salt’s broader attempts to challenge the notion that humanitarians “[spoiled] other people’s pleasure”; an appendix to Killing for Sport stresses the opposite case, arguing that “life is at present so narrowed and saddened by brutalitarian stupidity that to try to alter it […] is a necessary condition of any  A few days, 10.  [Stephens Salt and Greenwood], Beagler Boy issue 2, 4. 30  Stephens Salt, Sportsman’s fallacies, 130. 31  Stephens Salt, Seventy Years, 169. 28 29

14  “WOLF WITHIN THE FOLD”: SATIRE AND ANIMALITY… 

239

enjoyment at all”.32 Salt hoped that the practice of mocking hunting would highlight “the essential silliness of the habit of sport itself”, modelling an ethically attuned alternative to the sporting humour uncritically upheld by the popular press.33 As this humanitarian self-fashioning suggests, the periodicals are not satirical texts that place nonhuman animals at their centre. On one level, this reflects the multispecies emphasis of the League’s campaigns, as well as the levels of discursive abstraction mediating between these texts and the anthropocentric violence in question. The second volume of The Beagler Boy can be described, albeit confusingly, as a metatextual play on a journalistic response to a satirical discourse about an anti-humanitarian backlash to an ethical campaign about the killing of hares. However, in gauging the “presence and absence” of real and textual animals, Hil Malatino reminds us in a review of the twentieth-anniversary edition of Sexual Politics that these terms figure alongside “matter and spirit, male and female, animal and human” as dyadic logics that contemporary cultural criticism must work to destabilise.34 De-essentialised more-than-­ human thought challenges the implication, embedded in the concept of the absent referent, that a discursive move exists sufficient to allow a fundamental presence or “essence” to be “somehow restored to women and nonhuman animals alike” (133). Literary animal studies illuminates the complexity of textual animals and their relation to material animal referents, disappearing and reappearing through metaphorical, metonymic, and anthropomorphic play. The reception of The Brutalitarian and The Beagler Boy highlights how these unstable qualities of signification complicate the awareness-raising project of restoring the absent referent. Rather than providing a means for recuperating the animal’s lost “presence” within a text, the periodicals suggest that the absent referent is most instructive as a conceptual tool for recognising the processes of violence inflicted upon nonhuman animals that speciesist discourse would intend to obscure. Through their strategies of rhetorical extremity—undergirded by real examples of the most uncompromising “texts of meat”—The Brutalitarian and The Beagler Boy ultimately satirise the myopia of an anti-humanitarian worldview constructed around such anthropocentric violence, which  Stephens Salt, Spoiling, 179, 182.  Stephens Salt, Cruel sports, 546. 34  Malatino, Carnophallogocentrism, 132. 32 33

240 

M. O’NEILL

nevertheless seeks to categorically “absent” the nonhuman animal from ethical consideration. Sadly, while the publications succeeded in their immediate aims of hoisting the anti-humanitarians by their own petard, it is the very recalcitrant traditionalism that they satirise and reflect that continues to forestall attempts to ethically transform interspecies relationality to this day. The continuing existence of the beagling club at Eton College highlights the ongoing need for wolves within the fold, exploiting the bite of the satiric form to keep the speciesist, cisheteropatriarchal, (neo)imperialist political establishment on the defensive.

Works Cited Adams, Carol. 2015. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Bloomsbury. 1907. Beagling. Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, February 9. 1904. Brutality preached by new British periodical. Washington Post, November 6. Burt, Jonathan. 2006. Conflicts around slaughter in modernity. In Killing Animals, ed. Animal Studies Group, 120–144. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1874. The decline of the brutality panic. The Examiner, November 21. 1907. A few days ago. The Sphere, February 9. Gandhi, Leela. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Gregory, James. 2007. Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Victorian Britain. London: Tauris Academic Studies. 1904. The magazines. Birkenhead News, October 29. Malatino, Hil. 2011. Carnophallogocentrism and The Sexual Politics of Meat. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9 (3): 128–134. Mangan, J.A., and Callum McKenzie. 2006. The other side of the coin: Victorian masculinity, field sports, and English elite education. In A Sport-Loving Society: Victorian and Edwardian Middle-Class England at Play, ed. J.A.  Mangan, 41–59. London: Routledge. McKay, Robert. 2022. Read meat. In Animal Remains, ed. Sarah Bezan and Robert McKay, 129–157. New York: Routledge. Steevens, G.W. 1898. The New Humanitarianism. Blackwood’s Magazine, January. Stephens Salt, Henry. 1893. Cruel sports. Westminster Review, July. ———. 1894. Animals’ Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress. New York: Macmillan & Co. [Stephens Salt, Henry?]. 1904a. The Brutalitarian. The Humanitarian, December. ———]. 1904b. The Brutalitarian: A Journal for the Sane and Strong, October. ———?]. 1907. The Beagler Boy. The Humanitarian.

14  “WOLF WITHIN THE FOLD”: SATIRE AND ANIMALITY… 

241

Stephens Salt, Henry. 1915a. Spoiling other people’s pleasure. In Killing for Sport, ed. Henry Stephens Salt, 179–182. London: G. Bell and Sons. ———. 1915b. Sportsmen’s fallacies. In Killing for Sport, ed. Henry Stephens Salt, 130–146. London: G. Bell and Sons. ———. 1921. Seventy Years Among Savages. London: George Allen & Unwin. ———. 1928. Memories of Bygone Eton. Plymouth: Mayflower Press. [Stephens Salt, Henry?]. The Humanitarian League: What It Is, and What It Is Not. Henry S Salt Society. https://www.henrysalt.co.uk/humanitarian-­ league/what-­it-­is/. Accessed September 10, 2021. [Stephens Salt, Henry, and George Greenwood]. 1907a. The Beagler Boy: A Journal Conducted by Old Etonians, February. ———]. 1907b. The Beagler Boy: A Journal Conducted by Old Etonians, March. 1904. Table Talk. Daily News, October 25.

CHAPTER 15

Animals and Animality in Saki’s Satirical Short Stories Julia Ditter

The British writer Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), who published under the pen name Saki, is to this day mostly known for the fable-like satirical portrayal of Edwardian society in his macabre short fiction. Even though Saki’s stories are populated by all kinds of animals that range from wild or feral to domesticated, from companion animals and zoo animals to livestock, these animals have so far not been regarded as prime actors, but rather as contrastive or allegorical figures used to expose human “beastliness”. As much as Saki’s satirical portrayals can be read as statements about human society, animals often take centre stage in Saki’s stories, and indeed in his biography.1 The animals that populate his stories remind us that other, nonhuman lives intersect with human perspectives. Even though some of Saki’s stories may certainly be said to treat animals merely as plot devices or symbols, my aim in this chapter is to trouble this notion by 1

 Miller, Saki, 155.

J. Ditter (*) Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_15

243

244 

J. DITTER

illustrating some of the diverse and animal-centred ways in which these stories can be read. I want to complicate readings of Saki’s animals by paying attention to complex human–animal relationships at play, which often highlight subjectivity and agency of the animal characters depicted in his satirical short stories. The satire form, rather than precluding a reading of animals as agents in their own right, opens avenues for a destabilisation of species hierarchies. Even when satirical animals seemingly function to create a situation of slapstick humour or to mock human behaviour, the representations of animals in Saki’s stories reveal the complex frictions of interspecies relationships. As I hope to show, the animals in Saki’s stories insist on being present and crucially shape the functioning of his satires. Without being turned into mere symbols or allegories, they manage to expose human hypocrisy and question the morals of human characters, thereby revealing humanistic ideals of superiority as fraught. At the same time, the stories also turn to focus on the animals themselves as conscious, embodied agents and examine not only how they are being instrumentalised and mistreated by humans but also how aesthetics and representational practices contribute to creating and upholding species hierarchies. The animals of Saki’s short fiction are, then, not merely satirical symbols or allegories to describe the human: they are agentic characters and subjects, crucially shaping the meaning of these stories and engaging readers in reflections about human–animal relations. Before examining the role of animals in select stories by Saki in more detail, I want to consider the affordances of the satirical short story for thinking with animals and suggest how the form may be read to encourage a reading practice that acknowledges the complex layers of meaning through which human–animal relations are explored in animal short fiction.

Animals and Satirical Short Fiction The lack of scholarly interest in his fiction and the claim that “Saki exists only to be read […] not critic-handled”2 may be attributed to the difficulties that come with analysing satire and irony unambiguously, to the conventional form of Saki’s stories at a time when modernist experimentation was reconfiguring the genre, or to the marginal status of the short story form itself. It may also be reasoned that the prevalence of animals in the 2

 Qtd. in Byrne, Unbearable Saki, 15.

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

245

stories could have contributed to the implicit academic opinion that the works are not worthy of careful critical attention. Craig Smith criticises exactly such anthropocentric assumptions that suggest that stories featuring animals can only become legitimate objects of inquiry when treated as if they were not really about animals but used them only as allegories to express human concerns.3 Given the shortsightedness of these various potential reasons for dismissal based on the characteristics of Saki’s fiction, it is worth reconsidering our reading practices when it comes to satirical animal short fiction. As Kate Macdonald points out, the consideration of comic short fiction is generally only regarded as “academically respectable” when it focuses on authors who have produced works beyond the genre such as Rudyard Kipling or Charles Dickens.4 Because both satire and the short story have long been dismissed as simple,5 with the accusation that satire simplifies and flattens narrative fiction,6 there remains a lack of critical methods to approach satirical short fiction holistically. While a range of satirical novels have received critical attention within literary animal studies, most prominently Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,7 the position of the satirical short story remains marginal. This is especially surprising given that, even though satire could most adequately be understood as a mode that transcends literary form and genre,8 the short story seems to be the ideal literary form for satire with its brevity, open-endedness, ambiguity, and its timely publication process in response to current events. Macdonald emphasises that the brevity of the short story “is essential in the delivery of wit” (147) and Dustin Griffin’s definition of satire, even though he claims the novel as the ideal format for satire (4), actually aligns most closely with the characteristics of short fiction: “satire is problematic, open-ended, essayistic, ambiguous in its relationship to history, uncertain in its political effect, resistant to formal closure, more inclined to ask questions than to provide answers, and ambivalent about the pleasures it offers” (5). The formal characteristics of the short story and the satirical mode thus complement each other, but they also contribute to the  Smith, Across the widest gulf, 349.  Macdonald, Comic short fiction, 145. 5  See Griffin, Satire, 3–4. 6  Griffin, Satire, 3; Macdonald, Comic short fiction, 151. 7  For a detailed discussion of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels from an animal studies perspectives, see for example Armstrong, What Animals Mean. 8  See Griffin, Satire, 3. 3 4

246 

J. DITTER

affordances of satirical short fiction to subversively negotiate human–animal relations. Both satire and short fiction have traditionally been defined as forms that lend themselves to pondering the human condition with a focus on how they explore and propose moral standards for human society. As a result of this focus, animals and animality crop up in discussions of satirical short stories mostly where animals are regarded allegorically to express the moralistic failures of civilisation. Recent criticism on the mode of satire, however, has begun to question the centrality of moral instruction with Charles Knight arguing that satire is, in fact, entirely “independent of moral purpose”.9 A less firm stance is taken by Griffin who proposes an understanding of moral ideas as “the raw materials for the satirist” rather than the central message of the satire and suggests that satire works through a range of different moral positions from different angles in a process of exploration (37). Moving beyond moral instruction as the main function of satire and reading satire instead as a subversive mode of provocation and open-ended inquiry, Griffin argues, facilitates an understanding of satire within its socio-political contexts and explores its potential to “open up an ethical or a political question and […] disturb complacency” (186). This move away from an exclusive focus on moralistic readings appears especially productive for literary animal studies, which criticises that literary animals are often reduced to allegories or symbols precisely to fulfil functions of moral instruction. Focusing instead on the potential of satire to open up ethical or political questions—including about interspecies relations—thus allows for a better understanding of the affordances of the satirical short story for launching a critique of anthropocentric hierarchies and rethinking human–animal relations. The way satire produces humour and laughter is vital to the subversive character of this inquiry. Building on Isabel Ermida’s work on humour,10 Macdonald identifies three main characteristics on how comedy functions in short fiction: the connection between laughter and scorn, comic release from social inhibitions, and the creation of laughter through surprise and incongruity that comes with a destabilisation of social rules (148). Through these characteristics, Macdonald argues, “Anglophone comic short fiction ambushes the expectations of the auditor and reader, and breaks their anticipated pattern of behaviour” (148). This is certainly the 9

 Knight, Literature of Satire, 5.  Ermida, Language of Comic Narratives.

10

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

247

case in Saki’s stories, which overhaul readers’ expectations by playing with genre and form in order to highlight the agency and subjectivity of literary animals that exceed their anticipated behaviours and refuse to fulfil the role ascribed to them by the rules of genre or other literary conventions. While we should be cautious not to overemphasise the potential of satire for provoking readers into action, when we understand satire as an exploratory rather than a straight-forward and didactic mode, new avenues of thought may be opened up that ultimately may lead to real socio-political change. The comedic strategies of comic short fiction identified by Macdonald correspond with Griffin’s strategies of provocation and inquiry and enhance the subversive potential of the stories: By conducting open-ended speculative inquiry, by provoking and challenging comfortable and received ideas, by unsettling our convictions and occasionally shattering our illusions, by asking questions and raising doubts but not providing answers, satire ultimately has political consequences. (160)

Anthropocentric beliefs in the superiority of humans over animals and a desire to believe in the stability of such species hierarchies are frequently the target of Saki’s satirical inquiry into human character and human–animal relations. Whether Saki himself intended his satires to overhaul human behaviour towards animals and promote animal welfare or not, his stories certainly display an admiring fascination with animal life, especially predatory animals, and ascribe animals with subjectivity and agency to challenge received ideas about species hierarchies. Saki’s animal characters are frequently “integral parts of the action and meaning of the tales”,11 without whom the stories could not work in the way they do. If satire is to be understood, as argued by Griffin and Knight, as a mode that challenges accepted behaviours and mindsets, the question of immediate political effects becomes less urgent than the potential of Saki’s satirical inquiry to engender a slower conceptual shift in understanding species relations. Rather than providing moral instruction and advocating for specific moral ideas to be followed, the satirical mode allows Saki to prise open a space for animals to become visible in our midst and ensures that even in stories that have predominantly been read as about the human, animal subjects play an important role. Saki’s stories offer us a version of thinking with animals that acknowledges them alternately as individual agents,  Salemi, An asp lurking, 423.

11

248 

J. DITTER

co-habitant species, companions, and a collective force; this not only contrasts but also complements and reroutes the human elements of his stories. Saki’s manipulation of the satirical mode involves an inquiry into its symbolic staples and rhetorical strategies, and into how it is conventionally read. Ambiguity of intent and meaning, both central elements for satire, are used productively throughout to think with animals rather than to reduce them to symbols. Equally, unreliable narration and narrative distancing from characters’ views serve to invite readers to interrogate the attitudes and question the statements made by characters in all of the stories discussed here. More generally, genre expectations about animal stories are satirically inverted and aesthetic conventions are revealed for their falsity through ironic means, as part of Saki’s inquiry into animal representation in art and literature. As the examples that follow will show, then, Saki explores animal relations and interrogates species hierarchies by making use of the formal characteristics of the satirical short story.

Beastly Humans and Unruly Animals in Saki’s Short Fiction Saki’s beasts inhabit an Edwardian world that is rapidly changing, and in which animals are pushed to the margins of society, disappearing from its centre and finding themselves increasingly, as Akira Lippit describes it, “in a state of perpetual vanishing”.12 Lippit’s claim is attentive to literary modes of writing about the perceived vanishing of actual animals and their reappearance in fiction. For Nicole Shukin, the weakness of Lippit’s claims lies in this literary focus, which, she argues, leads him to treat “the animal as a rhetorical currency transcending its material body” and develop a perspective in which the undying but ever vanishing animal is turned into an aesthetic theory.13 While Shukin’s caution against turning animals into no more than rhetorical devices and aesthetic symbols is justified, Lippit is staking out a space for more precisely literary claims about animal representation and how a (perceived or actual) disappearance of the animal is reflected in literary works of the early twentieth century. However, Lippit’s argument recapitulates John Berger’s thesis that animals in modernity were disappearing which focused heavily on the zoo as the place in which this disappearance could be seen as most pertinent and which has been  Lippit, Electric Animal, 1.  Shukin, Animal Capital, 41.

12 13

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

249

criticised for being anachronistic. Jonathan Burt outlines the limitations of Berger’s thesis and argues that the change in animals’ visual status in the nineteenth century was not “a shift from an integrated relationship to an alienated one between human and animal, but rather reflects the beginning of the institutionalisation of animal-centred issues” that is reflected in the rise of animal welfare movements and organisations in Britain.14 Public visual culture, according to Burt, thus changed to the degree that animals became more visible in a welfare context, while animal death became increasingly less visible (213). By contrast, several of Saki’s stories explicitly focus on (violent) animal death, which is represented as deplorable, or reflect on the very absence of representations of animal death, as is the case in “The Stalled Ox”. The short stories discussed here directly engage the idea of the disappearing animal, including the disappearance that is animal death. While the animal in Saki’s work therefore precisely does not disappear, he manages to employ the satirical mode to develop a metafictional reflection on the possibilities and limitations of animal representation, including the role literary and artistic representations play in allowing the animal and animal death to disappear. While actual animals were thus, by some accounts anyway, disappearing from view, the influence of Darwinian and Freudian theories on the primitive, human identity and the limits of civilisation meant that animals reappeared in the literature of the time. Carrie Rohman discusses the challenges Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution posed to humanist ideals but concludes that “a relatively uninterrogated notion of the human” remained. This clear and stable notion of the human was beginning to splinter in the late Victorian and modernist periods whose literature reveals “the lurking anxiety that this view of human privilege cannot be maintained” after all, an anxiety that was only heightened when Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, building upon Darwin’s framework, presented yet another “threat to humanism”.15 As a result of the repercussions of these theories, Rohman argues, the literature of the early twentieth century that responded to these debates is especially pertinent for examining human–animal relations: [T]he animal problem becomes particularly acute for British modernism. The transhistorical dynamics of species discourse under humanism are  Burt, John Berger’s, 212.  Rohman, Stalking the Subject, 5.

14 15

250 

J. DITTER

refracted at this historically specific moment through the lenses of evolutionary theory, British imperialism, antirationalism, and even the discourse of psychoanalysis. Early twentieth-century British literature is marked by a certain crisis in humanism vis-à-vis the animal. (21)

Saki’s animal satires respond to this context, staging a challenge to humanist ideals of species hierarchies and the superiority of the (white, European) human. While Rohman argues for the pertinence of these discourses in modernist literature, an investigation into human–animal relations in Saki’s oeuvre reveals the satirical short story as equally pertinent for an examination of the crisis in humanism and the “animal problem” discussed by Rohman. A closer look at Saki’s animal satires may thus open up debates around literary representations of animals in the early twentieth century beyond a focus on modernist literature, including about other genres and forms that may have received less critical attention. The presence of animals in Saki’s stories has been accounted for by critics either as expressing misanthropy or as contributing to the satirical exposure of human beastliness, especially of the upper classes, by contrasting human and animal behaviours. At the same time, however, Joseph Salemi contends that aside from their function as mere décor to enhance the setting of the stories and mirror human animality, Saki’s animals are frequently “integral parts of the action and meaning of the tales” (423). In fact, Salemi points out, Saki “seems […] to have been on the lookout for every possible turn of events—or of phrase—that could be an occasion for the entrance of some animal, or for a zoological reference” (424). Saki’s obsession with animal others as well as the variety of animals he portrays and how they are integrated at the level of theme and plot suggest that a more complex human–animal relationship is at play than has so far been acknowledged by most critics. Looking at Saki’s representation of wolves and werewolves in particular, John Miller argues that “the material animal and the figurative animal appear in close, complex and disquieting alignment”, and that Saki both exemplifies and critiques the assumption that animals symbolise human concerns (155). In an overview of Saki’s short fiction, Sandie Byrne outlines the variety of the stories in form, subject, theme and characters, and their generic play that includes elements of black comedy, supernatural fable, and didactic morality tale. Given this spectrum, it would be reductive to assume that animals have but one meaning that encompasses the whole oeuvre and that can easily be grappled with. A look at the formal characteristics of satire more broadly,

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

251

beyond reading them as “didactic morality tales” or fables, and how they are employed by Saki to examine human–animal relations, draws out the manifold meanings of his literary animals. In “The Mappined Life” (1914), Saki takes the redesign of the animal enclosures through the construction of the Mappin Terraces in the London Zoo from 1913 to 1914 as an occasion to reflect on human–animal relations. The architectural design of the terraces was inspired by the animal gardens of German animal merchant Carl Hagenbeck who had pioneered a bar-less zoo aesthetic in which animals could be seen in enclosures that create an illusion of the animals’ natural environment. Through satirical intervention, Saki’s short story examines what Nigel Rothfels has described as the “overwhelmingly human nature” of zoos that is masked by architectural aesthetic intervention such as this.16 The morally objectionable side of Hagenbeck’s legacy in the presentation of Indigenous people as zoo exhibits and visitor attractions in his racist people shows is not openly discussed in this story; but it enters the story more subtly through ironic means to suggest that the crisis of humanity proclaimed by the characters consists in the loss of humanist ideals from which both animals and Indigenous people have been excluded. In the story, Mrs Gurtleberry and her niece discuss the new design, which is claimed as “a great improvement on the old style of wild-beast [c]age” because the terraces provide a more naturalistic habitat for bears and other zoo animals, which, for zoo visitors, creates “the illusion of seeing the animals in their natural surroundings”.17 Her aunt’s question of “how much of the illusion is passed on to the animals” leads Mrs Gurtleberry’s niece to muse on the differences between animal consciousness and their perception of the world around them, concluding that, while presenting an improvement to previous enclosures, the terraces cannot authentically recreate “the dictionary of sound and scent and recollection” of a natural habitat, only ever serving as “a poor imitation of a life of liberty” for the animals (480). While animals will be able to see through the illusion, the niece continues her argument, humans are less attentive and self-reflective, not recognising that they themselves are moving around metaphorical Mappin terraces created by society and deceiving themselves in believing that their existence is free and untrammelled by the shackles of civilisation. It is this  Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, 7.  Munro, Saki, 479. The Penguin edition has what appears to be a typographical error here, replacing the seemingly correct word “cage” that appears in other editions with “age”. 16 17

252 

J. DITTER

thematic shift towards the human condition that facilitates a reading of the story simply as a moralistic satire about human behaviour in which the zoo functions as a symbol for intellectual captivity. In this reading, animals are included as contrastive figures meant to “awaken in man a feeling of unworthiness and inferiority” and function only “as symbols for the sort of contrast Saki wishes to emphasize”.18 The actual zoo animals are indeed markedly absent from this story, which takes place in a sitting room with the zoo being evoked only through an article about the new design in the illustrated newspaper Mrs Gurtleberry is reading. The animals of the story may then figure primarily as mirrors held up to humanity by the niece, but they are also essential to the ensuing discussion around social conventions and human society. The contrast between zoo animals and socially confined humans that the niece creates is characteristic of modern attitudes in which, as Lippit argues, “the animal continues to haunt the recesses of the modern human being, appearing only to reestablish human identity in moments of crisis” (54). The modern zoo, described by John Berger as demonstrative of the displacement of animals from daily life in which animals become “the living monument to their own disappearance”,19 enables this disappearance and facilitates the metaphor of social captivity. At the same time, however, the story highlights the presence, rather than the absence of the animals in the zoo through the niece’s insistence that it is because animals perceive their captive environment through their embodied presence within it that they see through the illusion. Without the presence of the animal, the self-reflection of the niece would not be possible; indeed, the symbolic image of humans inhabiting social structures that resemble the architectural structures of the Mappin terraces in function and effect suggests that it is the human rather than the animal who is vanishing. The displacement of animals, as Lippit suggests, ultimately disrupts the relationship between human and nonhuman beings, which is the foundation of “the very humanness of the human world” (20). In the view of the niece, humanity has already begun to disappear when she argues that the comparison with the animals on the Mappin terrace can only be to the disadvantage of humans, because while “the animals are there to be looked at […] nobody wants to look at us” (480). In the context of a zoo aesthetic inspired by Hagenbeck, the “us” here is of  Elahipanah, Saki, 89.  Berger, About Looking, 26.

18 19

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

253

course highly selective in describing only a certain class of privileged, white, Europeans of which the niece is part.20 Read ironically in its historical context, the niece’s claim thus not only implies a lack of self-reflection by humans who do not care to interrogate their concepts of humanity, but also subtly reveals the niece herself to accept those problematic ideas in her uncritical attitude to humanist ideals at a time when “exotic” people were exhibited alongside animals. The comment also subtly expresses a disappointment about the lack of a reciprocal gaze from the animals. The animals are not looking back, finding nothing to see in the visitors that walk by their enclosures, and it is the loss of this connection, the impossibility of the encounter with the animal, that Berger describes as the tragic consequence of their displacement in modern society: “nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. […] They have been immunised to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention” (28). The disappearance of animals from the centre of concern, and their transformation into objects to be looked at, is then directly linked to a disappearance of the humanness of humanity; this disappearance is critically understood by the niece as the replacement of depth of feeling, morality, and meaningful action with a self-important and meaningless existence. Humanity, which for the niece is superior to the animal world neither in intelligence, sense perception, nor morality, is mocked for its self-importance in a satirical move which, as Griffin describes it, “provoke[s] by holding up to scrutiny our idealized images of ourselves—forcing us to admit that such images are forever out of reach, unavailable to us, or even the last things we would really want to attain” (60). The dialogic form in which the short story is written highlights these multiple layers of meaning as the aunt and her niece exchange their views, with multiple moral positions being worked through. Through this process, fragmentary ideas about human–animal relations feed the subversion of human superiority at the heart of the story. One example of this is the curious mention of the reversal of agency when a wasp stings a human through her own initiative while the human is passive in the encounter; another a comparison of the permanence and individualism of magnolia trees with the exchangeable and deindividualised people who own the space in which they grow. If these aspects seem marginal when the focus is on the moral of the story, they create small incongruities that destabilise 20  For a more detailed discussion on the history of Carl Hagenbeck’s zoo aesthetic and the Hagenbeck people shows, see Rothfels, Savages and Beasts.

254 

J. DITTER

dominant readings of the story in which the animals are viewed solely as satirical instruments. With respect to the explorative mode of his satire, it is best to be cautious about reading the views and attitudes of Saki’s characters as representative of an overall message because most of them are unreliable and some of them are downright unlikeable. Even though the niece instrumentalises animals to criticise social conventions, this very use of the animal as metaphor becomes a critique of such rhetorical strategies themselves when we consider it in the context of Saki’s oeuvre. The next two stories discussed here shed light on how Saki’s satires criticise anthropomorphism through a distancing from his protagonist’s attitudes and comment on the process of representing animals itself. In “Esmé”, a short story that parodies tales about hunting, animals feature more prominently and drive the plot. Beginning with the complaint by Saki’s returning dandy protagonist Clovis that “[a]ll hunting stories are the same” (101), the story sets the expectation that animals will appear as either prey or hunting companions. This expectation, however, is soon overturned. Once again, the story is told through dialogue; this time between Clovis and a baroness, who tells him how she and another upper-class woman surprisingly encountered an escaped hyena on their hunting trip in England. This story is usually read as a critique of the upper classes and their immoral lack of empathy because of the remarkable indifference with which the baroness reacts to and recounts the killing of a child from a travelling community by the hyena. Afterwards, the baroness profits from the death of the hyena who is overrun by a car when she mourns him as her pet and is sent a diamond brooch by the owner of the car as condolence for her loss. For Salemi, the hyena can be read as a mirror for the cold selfishness of the women, and the story equates their human desire for comfort and money with an animal’s hunt for food (425–26). Salemi reads the animals of Saki’s stories as manifestations of the psychological detachment of the human protagonists, as a Freudian return of the repressed: the story does not express explicit irritation or disapproval at the deeds of the baroness, but rather constructs a “vindictive zoology” in which the hyena unsentimentally “dishes out retribution” to a world in which social rituals require the repression of anything beastly (430). This level of interpretation is invited by the narration, which raises at the centre of its storyline the moral question of who is behaving more beastly: the baroness as a human who shows no moral decency, or the hyena who is merely acting out of instinct.

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

255

In reading Saki’s animals as no more than allegorical figures and so limiting them to a purely moralistic function, however, Salemi’s reading fails to account for both the complexity of interspecies relations actually at play in the story and the affordances of satire for negotiating human–animal relations. By contrast, we should consider the bizarre context in which a hyena appears in an English forest and the details of its encounter with the human narrator to unravel how Saki mobilises the satirical mode to explore animality and human–animal relations. Miller describes Saki’s admiring fascination with predatory animals in his stories about wolves and werewolves in which he “craves animality and bemoans its taming” (162). The hyena disrupts the conventions of the hunting story that are parodied: being out of place in England this animal subtly evokes colonial histories of private zoos while also destabilising the primacy of the human hunter by reversing the relationship between predator and prey. The presence of the hyena is explained by the baroness through a potential escape from the wildlife park of Lord Pebham, because he appears partially domesticated having “probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans” (102). The fact that Lord Pebham never advertises the loss of his hyena is attributed by the baroness to his fear of having to pay compensation for past experiences when other animals have escaped his enclosures. Like the baroness, Lord Pebham implicitly appears as an unlikeable aristocrat with no sense of the moral consequences of his negligence, which, after all, leads to the death of a child. The story thereby addresses the problems caused by capturing wild animals and keeping them in a park for human amusement while trying to evade the consequences. Unlike the animals in the London Zoo of the “The Mappined Life”, the hyena can escape enclosure and come to the centre of the story, confronting the human protagonists with his look. At the same time, the lack of fear of humans as a result of domestication and its inability to navigate the terrain outside of the enclosure lead to the death of the hyena. Both the child and the hyena are ultimately victims of aristocratic mores and eccentricities, which is particularly pertinent given the power relations at play not just in terms of species but also with the child belonging to an ethnic minority group. Byrne detects a “judicial tone” in the deadpan narration of Saki’s stories of retribution in which “miscreant humans” are dealt “poetic justice” and highlights how animal deaths are depicted as deplorable and cannot be read as punishment for their actions (39). In this story, however, the satirical provocation and critique lies in the fact that the baroness profits

256 

J. DITTER

dishonestly from the death of the hyena and both she and Lord Pebham evade any form of punishment for their behaviour. The fact that the story is focalised through the baroness, whom the reader is invited to judge harshly for her lack of morality and blasé attitude towards other human beings, facilitates a reading of her encounter with the hyena as critique: she anthropomorphises and names the hyena Esmé, engaging with him as with a companion animal, calling to him when he moves out of reach, and (unsuccessfully) trying to control him through game-keeping language when he attacks the child. At the same time, the encounter with the hyena makes the baroness’ lack of morality visible to the reader in the first place. She attributes an understanding of the hyena’s transgression of human morals to his behaviour that mirrors her own questionable acts: “there was an air of patient understanding about him, as though he knew that he had done something of which we disapproved, but which he felt to be thoroughly justifiable” (104). The same sentence could apply to the baroness herself who, while knowing her actions to be morally deplorable, is entirely satisfied that her actions are justifiable because she profits from them. The indifference of the baroness when confronted with the death of a child is mirrored in her reaction to the hyena’s death at the end of the story, which troubles any hint at real companionship with the animal and characterises the affective flatness of the baroness’ narration. The outward show of her grief is highlighted by the disapproval of her friend, and her presentation of the events later on when she describes the affair as an invention and does not express any residual feelings for the hyena. The alleged companionship with the hyena suggested by the baroness’ calling him her pet is thus no more than a superficial performance for her amusement. The unlikability of the baroness and the abhorrence the reader is inclined to feel at her actions draw her behaviour towards the animal into question. The approach of the baroness towards the hyena is depicted as flawed and problematic and the use and abuse of animals recurs as a spectre that haunts many of Saki’s stories. While many of Saki’s stories centre on predatory animals that disrupt the domestic spheres of the upper and middle classes, domestic animals are frequently revealed as similarly unruly participants in human–animal relations. “The Stalled Ox” centres on Theophil Eshley, who creates pastoral paintings of dairy cows and walnut trees. Eshley lives in an almost picturesque neighbourhood that is neither clearly city nor countryside but from which he can observe the cows in a neighbouring meadow. The locals resist the threatening realities of modern industrial urbanity, imagining the

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

257

cityscape as both picturesque and pastoral. By juxtaposing mediations of animals in art and the artist’s encounters with an actual ox, the story links aesthetic distance to a feeling of alienation from nature and reality. When Eshley is called to help his neighbour evict an ox from her garden and living room, he dismisses his neighbour’s assumption that he would have any knowledge about the actual animal: “I cannot claim to have had any experience in rounding up stray oxen. I’ve seen it done on a cinema film, […], one never knows how much of those pictures are faked” (346). The story emphasises the dangers and challenges connected with assumptions about animals’ knowability in supposedly mimetic representation. Rather than being interested in ethical representation, accuracy, and becoming familiar with his animal subjects, Eshley is concerned with the aesthetic value of his paintings, retaining a safe distance from the actual animals by observing them from afar. Similarly, the neighbours keeping dairy cows and oxen within the city are unable to fully restrict their movements. The full irony of the situation is revealed later, when Eshley auctions off a painting of the incident: “Ox in a Morning-room, Late Autumn”, was one of the sensations and successes of the next Paris Salon, and when it was subsequently exhibited at Munich it was bought by the Bavarian Government, in the teeth of the spirited bidding of three meat-extract firms. (348)

This representation of a deviant but ultimately harmless Ox is sold to a federal state known for its meat consumption and sausage specialities as the highest bidder, with the meat industry coming in second. With this twist at the end of the story, the Ox is turned into a representational figure that may be (according to the artist himself) far removed from the actual animal, masking the connection between the animal in the living room of Ashley’s neighbour and the consumption of its meat. Indeed, the heavy irony hanging over the fact that this representation is adopted to celebrate the animal’s consumption presages the critique offered by Carol J. Adams at the end of the twentieth century, when she describes the living animal as an “absent referent” in the representational system of industrial animal agriculture. As Adams puts it, when animals are turned into absent referents, “meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image”21 which “permits us to forget  Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, 13.

21

258 

J. DITTER

about the animal as an independent entity” and “enables us to resist efforts to make animals present” (66). In addressing the process by which animals are turned into absent referents, “The Stalled Ox” metafictionally reflects on the limitations of animal representations. Not only does the story highlight the role of literary and artistic representations in allowing the material presence of animal death to vanish, it also shows the absurd results of this process when the painting gains value only in being circulated through capitalist colonial centres of the time where it is instrumentalised by representatives of the growing animal industrial complex. Though the story presents no straight-­ forward critique of the meat industry, the irony of the situation draws on the feeling of alienation evoked earlier on in the story and highlights the paradoxes of modern human–animal relations. By depicting the sale of a painting that turns the animal into a consumable commodity in an ironic fashion, rerouting the anthropocentric humour we find in images of pigs eating a sausage used in the advertising panels of butcheries, the story shows that commercial profit takes centre stage while meaningful, everyday relations with animals come to be understood as out of place in the increasingly industrialised forms of animal agriculture of the twentieth century. These industrial relations are concealed behind the veil of the picturesque and pastoral imagery constructed within the neighbourhood. The question of species hierarchies and the symbolic representation of animals are raised again in “Tobermory”, Saki’s famous story about a speaking cat. After being taught to communicate in human language, Tobermory ignores all rules of conduct and embarrasses the guests at a house party to which he is invited by exposing their intrigues and threatening to reveal their love affairs. For Salemi, Tobermory can be read as the typical symbolic animal that functions to expose “what human beings really are beneath the surface of upper-class manners, bourgeois respectability, and feigned solicitude for others” (426) and the story illustrates the irreconcilability of the human–animal divide. But Tobermory can also be understood as a deviant subject that does not conform to human dominion over animals that denies them voice or any claim to subjectivity. By inviting the animal and its animality into the realm of human society and turning it into a hybrid, the story destabilises the notion of the human. As Karla Armbruster suggests, “a yearning to genuinely know the otherness of nonhuman animals runs through most, if not all, talking animal

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

259

stories”.22 While Saki’s story does not set out to explore feline consciousness, it can be said to work through a form of knowability of the animal through its relationship with humans. As Byrne points out, “a character’s relationship with cats is always telling in Saki’s work” (151), and Tobermory expertly navigates the space between anthropomorphic projection and accurate portrayal of animal subjectivity through the story’s juxtaposition of species-specific behaviour and his play with human rules of social conduct. In keeping with typical cat behaviour, walking along the balustrade outside of the windows of the house is described as Tobermory’s favourite pastime. It simultaneously forms the main focus of the humans’ anxieties around his linguistic abilities—namely that he could expose the secret affairs taking place in their bedrooms. According to MaGee, Tobermory “says only what would sound trite or obvious from a human being. Yet what Tobermory says seems in keeping with the nastiness suggested by a cat’s smug face.”23 This opinion about cats’ smug appearance is, of course, a cultural construction that is an all-too-familiar descriptor for cats. Beyond serving such imaginative needs, Tobermory appears as a cat with a certain degree of agency and autonomy, a (human) voice, as well as a singular being that is different from the other cats in the story and more than a mere type of the feline species. His characterisation is thus both species-specific and similar to humans. Throughout, Tobermory remains clearly marked as a cat, never being likened within the story to a human, nor being anthropomorphised by the party guests. Language is a skill that he has acquired while being a cat, and the guests’ irritation derives from the otherness of Tobermory’s behaviour, and the “embarrassment in addressing on equal terms a domestic cat” that is talking back “in a most horribly natural voice” (110). As Armbruster argues, we deny animals their own perspectives when “we only recognize communication when it comes in the form of human speech, and the only message we want to hear is that we are inherently lovable” (17). The story belies the notion that talking animals will only communicate in ways that are pleasing to us. It is not just Tobermory’s ability to talk, but his knowledge and the ability to talk back that endangers the social gathering. Like Derrida’s cat,24 Tobermory looks back at the humans, but he also shares a perspective on what he sees. Not only are humans rendered symbolically naked as their  Armbruster, What do we want, 19.  MaGee, The animal story, 163. 24  Derrida, The animal. 22 23

260 

J. DITTER

secrets are revealed by Tobermory, but they are also literally naked as he walks past the windows of their bedrooms observing their affairs. Tobermory’s “superior intellect” (109) exceeds that of other cats, as well as of the majority of the members of the house party. This turns him from acquiescent companion animal into dangerous beast and inverts the dominant human–animal hierarchy. He does not adhere to the rules of communication set out for talking animals and the guests consequently decide to kill Tobermory in an attempt to reestablish their dominion through violence against the deviant talking animal, revealing themselves to be the true brutes.

Conclusion The achievement of Saki’s satirical short fiction in relation to human–animal relations lies in the manifold ways in which they trouble the notion of the human and make visible the complex web of relations that characterise our everyday engagement with the animals around us. Rather than letting them vanish from our midst, Saki brings the animal back in to an almost excessive extent and uses the satirical mode of inquiry and provocation to make us rethink the frameworks through which we have made sense of our relationship with them. According to Dustin Griffin, it is this eye-opening quality of satire that defines its political value: The ultimate provocation—what Swift calls vexing the world—is to make readers look in the mirror and see that they are not and can never be what they claim to be. Satire cannot mend them; it can only hope to make them see. (62)

Animals may take on symbolic meaning in Saki’s stories, but at the same time they do not vanish behind the symbolism if we do not let them: rather than accepting animals as symbols, if we consider satire as more than moralistic, we can see animals re-emerge as conscious actors, both individual subjects and collective force, that provide crucial reflections for humanity to understand itself and its relationship with other, nonhuman beings.

15  ANIMALS AND ANIMALITY IN SAKI’S SATIRICAL SHORT STORIES 

261

Works Cited Adams, Carol J. 2010. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Twentieth anniversary ed. New York: Continuum. Armbruster, Karla. 2013. What do we want from talking animals? Reflections on literary representations of animal voices and minds. In Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing, ed. Margo DeMello, 17–34. Abingdon: Routledge. Armstrong, Philip. 2008. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. Abingdon: Routledge. Berger, John. (1980) 2009. About Looking. Reprint. New York: Vintage. Burt, Jonathan. 2005. John Berger’s “Why look at animals?”: A close reading. Worldviews 9 (2): 203–218. Byrne, Sandie. 2007. The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H.H.  Munro. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. The animal that therefore I am (more to follow). Critical Inquiry 28 (2): 369–418. Elahipanah, Nooshin. 2007. Saki and the human zoo. Contemporary Review 289: 85–93. Ermida, Isabel. 1968. The Language of Comic Narratives: Humour Construction in Short Stories. Berlin: de Gruyter. Griffin, Dustin. 1993. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Knight, Charles A. 2004. The Literature of Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. 2000. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Macdonald, Kate. 2016. Comic short fiction and its variety. In The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus, 145–158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MaGee, William. 1964. The animal story: A challenge in technique. Dalhousie Review 44 (2): 156–164. Miller, John. 2017. Saki, Nietzsche and the Superwolf. In Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, ed. Robert McKay and John Miller, 153–176. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Munro, H.H. 2000. Saki: The Complete Short Stories. London: Penguin Classics. Rohman, Carrie. 2009. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press. Rothfels, Nigel. 2002. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

262 

J. DITTER

Salemi, Joseph. 1989. An asp lurking in an apple-charlotte: Animal violence in Saki’s “The Chronicles of Clovis.” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (4): 423–430. Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Craig. 2002. Across the widest gulf: Nonhuman subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Flush. Twentieth-Century Literature 48 (3): 348–361.

CHAPTER 16

Satire and Significant Otherness in Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography Saskia McCracken

Virginia Woolf’s bestseller Flush: A Biography (1933)—the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel—has only recently received proper critical attention with the rise of literary animal studies. Woolf scholars Anna Snaith and Linden Peach have demonstrated the need to consider what Woolf called her “joke” biography1 as “part of Woolf’s anti-fascist writing of the 1930s”.2 Woolf’s focus in Flush: A Biography on pedigree must also, I argue, be read as satirising Darwinian, Victorian eugenicist discourse. I have transcribed the earliest manuscript draft of Flush: A Biography and unearthed excised passages that reveal Woolf’s close engagement with Charles Darwin’s work on dogs and human racial pedigree (amplified by his eugenicist cousin, Francis Galton) in The Descent of Man (1871). Woolf’s excised sections indicate how her interests in Darwin were also more explicitly shifting along political lines, away from the science 1 2

 Woolf, Letters 140, 155, 161.  Snaith, Of fanciers, 632.

S. McCracken (*) Glasgow, Scotland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_16

263

264 

S. MCCRACKEN

supporting evolutionary theory and towards resistance to the theory of social Darwinism popularised by Francis Galton and others. I argue, drawing on the critical race and animal theory of Bénédicte Boisseron, Maneesha Deckha, and Srinivas Aravamudan, that we must read Woolf’s satire of pedigree in Flush: A Biography, particularly the manuscript version, with reference to Darwin’s attitudes on racial purity, class, and eugenics. I will show that, while Darwin supported a liberal version of eugenics, Woolf challenged this outlook using his own canine tropes against him, and against the classist and racialised proto-eugenicist views expressed in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). The fictional biography’s staying power hinges on the excision of language that references poisonous ideologies of eugenic “improvement”, and that in turn suggest that Woolf’s sentiments were shifting between satirising the targets of eugenic discourse and the discourse itself, all suggested by her ambiguous animal satire. At the same time, however, I will consider how Woolf’s satire (if it is such) risks reinforcing the racist and animalised representation of the working classes and Black people which she challenges. Donna Haraway calls for canine stories that “teach us to pay attention to significant otherness”—Flush: A Biography is such a story, one that engages on satirical, Darwinian, and political levels, with human and animal significant otherness. We shall see that race and class are interconnected issues in Woolf’s animal satire of eugenic discourse. What is at stake here, as Haraway puts it, is “who and what gets to count as an actor” in a post-­ Darwin world.3 Woolf’s narrative follows Flush from his early life as “companion species”4 born to breeder and minor novelist Mary Russell Mitford, then gifted as a companion to her famous poet friend Barrett (later Barrett Browning), and through his adventures with her, including being dognapped by Londoners and travelling with her to Italy when she eloped with rising poet Robert Browning, concluding with Flush’s demise in Italy. Woolf completed the first draft in April 1932, the second draft in October 1932, submitted the final (now lost) version in January 1933, and published the book (and a July–October serialised version in Atlantic

3 4

 Haraway, Companion Species, 27.  Ibid., 11.

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

265

Monthly) in Britain and the USA in October 1933.5 I will primarily be referring to the first manuscript, FMS1 (which contrasts most significantly with the published version), and the first edition of the British 1933 publication as they appear in the Cambridge edition of Flush: A Biography. Woolf’s canine biography was heavily researched and intertextual. Her postscript to the first draft included a list of “Authorities” including Barrett Browning’s poetry and letters, as well as contemporaneous social commentary like Thomas Beames’s The Rookeries of London (1850). Woolf’s reading notebook for her research refers to later texts such as A.G.  L’Estrange’s The Life of Mary Russell Mitford (1870) and Hugh Dalziel’s British Dogs: Their Varieties, History and Characteristics (1888). There are several further intertexts, but the most significant of these, when it comes to understanding the evolution of Woolf’s animal satire, is Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, as it helps to explain the rising tensions around questions of race and class that Woolf highlights in her modernist biography of a Victorian dog.6 Animalisation, racialisation, and class are intimately, discursively entangled, as postcolonial, critical race, and working-class studies scholars have shown. The triangulation of speciesism, racism, and classism is important for understanding Flush: A Biography’s contributions to animal satire because it is where these issues overlap, in textual hotspots across different versions of the text, that we can trace Woolf’s shifting attitudes to Darwinist and social Darwinist discourse. As Deckha explains, under colonialism the “cultivation of ideas of race, culture, gender, and species”, and I would like to add class, was “interactive and mutually constitutive”.7 The white working classes, including Jewish people (in Woolf’s time) and Irish people (in Barrett Browning and Woolf’s time), were often racialised as Black and animalised. Black, Irish, and Jewish people living in London’s East End slums are heavily alluded to in Woolf’s chapter on Whitechapel, dognapping, and poverty, in a complex and satirical blurring of speciesism, racism, and classism, as we shall see. Indeed, dogs are central to this matrix, as for example, in the infamous British post-war signs reading: “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs”, which were widespread after Woolf’s time, and built on such mutually constitutive discourses. As Boisseron points out,  Peach, Ryan and Goldman, Introduction, 14–15, 51, 10, 21.  For these intertexts, see my 2021 doctoral thesis, which this chapter draws on extensively, and Peach, Ryan and Goldman, Introduction. 7  Deckha, Intersectionality, 252. 5 6

266 

S. MCCRACKEN

and as Aravamudan has discussed, questions of animality and racialisation often figure in canine tropes, as for example with the “petting” (or making a pet) of the fictional enslaved Surinam prince Oroonoko,8 which I discuss below. Boisseron discusses the violent use of dogs against Black people (enslaved people, civil rights activists, and other African Americans) by enslavers and police, and the canine figuration of Black people historically in Western discourse.9 Because racism and classism have “been shown to overlap in systems of exploitation and discrimination”,10 and because canine figures are central to such discourse, I will address race and class as intersecting issues for thinking through the politics of dog tropes in Flush: A Biography. Woolf’s canine tropes are textual hotspots where the racialised, classed, and animalised meet in satirical and often problematic ways.

Darwinian Dogs The first few pages of the first published edition of Flush: A Biography (1933) draw heavily on Darwinian discourse, and, as Woolf scholar Jeanne Dubino states, “Darwinian language and concepts appear through[out]”.11 Woolf’s use of Darwinian language was particularly marked in the first draft, FMS1. This is clear from the prevalence of words such as “origin” which appears six times in FMS1 and only once in the published version12; “descent” which appears four times in FMS1 and twice in the published version13; and “inherit”14 and “adapt”,15 which appear in the first draft but do not occur in the publication. All these words were newly freighted with evolutionary and social significance after Darwin. Woolf may have used this Darwinian language because, in February 1932, while drafting Flush: A Biography, she was reading H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G.P. Wells’s The Science of Life (1929), which offers an introduction (the latter two

 Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 29.  Boisseron, Afro-Dog, 1–36. 10  Ibid., 24 11  Dubino, Evolution, 144. 12  Woolf, FMS1, 59, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155; Woolf, Flush 7. Throughout I use Peach, Ryan, and Goldman’s pagination for their forthcoming edition of Flush: A Biography. 13  Woolf, FMS1, 9, 123, 163, 169; Woolf, Flush 7, 12. 14  Woolf, FMS1, 121, 157, 211. 15  Ibid., 135. 8 9

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

267

authors were biologists) to Darwinian evolutionary theory.16 Moreover, in spite of the excision of several of the above words between the first draft and publication, the opening line of the first published edition of Flush: A Biography features key Darwinian terms: Flush “claims descent […] of the greatest antiquity” and Woolf discusses the “origin” of the word spaniel.17 Woolf also describes, in a satirical tone which sums up much of natural history in a few lines, the evolution of the world through natural laws: “Ages passed; vegetation appeared”, and “where there is vegetation the law of Nature has decreed that there shall be rabbits”.18 Indeed, “as the centuries took their way, minor branches broke off from the parent stem” with a range of breeds “deriving from the original spaniel of prehistoric days”.19 Humans are said to have “claimed descent” from esteemed families and Flush himself is described as “descended from” pedigreed dogs.20 By aligning canine pedigree with the nobility’s “stud books”, Woolf uses Darwinian discourse to satirise the notion of superiority by birth. Furthermore, this profusion of Darwinian discourse evokes the abundance of organic life that Darwin describes throughout his work and as Dubino points out, the “profusion of families, both human and spaniel, and Woolf’s botanical language, recalls Darwin’s famous ‘Tree of Life’ diagram” published in On the Origin of Species and central to his theory of evolution.21 Woolf’s Flush, then, is as much a creature of Darwin as of the critique of social Darwinism. Recent Woolf scholarship on Flush: A Biography primarily focuses on the text’s exploration of gender, class, race, fascism, and animality. Flush the protagonist has been read as a “stand-in for the woman writer”22 or “as a stand-in for that other dogsbody, the servant”,23 and, more to my point, it has become generally accepted that “Flush is the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning” herself, with Flush himself as a “satiric device”.24 Reading it at face value as a dog’s biography proves trickier, as Dubino explores Woolf’s use of “Darwinian discourse in constructing a history of  Ibid., 68.  Woolf, Flush, 7. 18  Ibid., Emphasis added. 19  Ibid., 9, 10. 20  Ibid., 14. 21  Dubino, Evolution, 145; Darwin, Origin, 90. 22  Squier, Virginia Woolf and London, 124. 23  Light, Servants, 50. 24  Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf, 206. 16 17

268 

S. MCCRACKEN

the origin of the spaniel”, describing Flush: A Biography as “informed by a deep appreciation and knowledge of Darwinism”.25 I am arguing that Woolf’s satirical canine biography does not simply “illustrate several Darwinian concepts, including survival of the fittest”, but engages with the stakes of his theories as they relate to significant otherness, specifically in relation to dogs and satire.26 I am interested in how the figure of Flush is classed and racialised in Darwinian ways, and in the politics of these developments in modernist animal satire.

Woolf, Darwin, Eugenics The “Whitechapel” chapter of Flush: A Biography, in which Flush finds himself held captive by dognappers in London’s East End slums, is the main focus of this chapter because this is where Woolf’s writing on pedigree both satirises and seems to become complicit with social Darwinist discourse, as she conflates discourses of race, class, and animality. In Flush’s time the area had a large, deprived, and often racialised Irish population; in Woolf’s time Whitechapel had a large, poor, often racialised Jewish population, and though neither are explicitly mentioned in Flush: A Biography, they are alluded to in problematic ways, as we shall see. The rise of Fascism in Europe during the 1930s was one of the key contexts for the composition of Flush: A Biography, as Anna Snaith, Linden Peach, and Donald Childs explain. The British Fascists party was founded in 1923, and the Imperial Fascist League splintered off from it in 1928, the latter having “a strong presence in the (predominantly Jewish) East End”, where Flush is held by dognappers, and where the League could be found “preaching anti-Semitism, recruiting, and selling their publications”.27 Oswald Mosley founded the New Party in 1931, which became the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. Woolf’s friend Harold Nicolson briefly edited the New Party’s journal Action, while both her husband Leonard Woolf and friend John Maynard Keynes were interested in joining the party before its anti-Semitism became apparent.28 Woolf read Action and would have known that the party supported eugenic sterilisation,29 while  Dubino, Evolution, 143, 148.  Ibid., 147. Emphasis added. 27  Snaith, Of fanciers, 626–7. 28  Ibid., 626–7. 29  Ibid., 631. 25 26

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

269

her friends Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Ottoline Morrell, and John Maynard Keynes were all members of the Eugenics Education Society.30 Woolf was “familiar” with the “tenets of eugenics”,31 which were popular across the political spectrum and popularised by “many articles on eugenics in newspapers, magazines, and popular journals such as The Times which Woolf read daily, and other publications at the time.32 The Woolfs’ Hogarth Press even published a translation of Mussolini’s The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (1933), alongside their own anti-­ fascist works including Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) and Leonard Woolf’s Quack, Quack (1935). Woolf visited Italy in 1933, before Flush: A Biography was published, and wrote to her friend Ethel Smyth (18 May 1933): “I don’t like Fascist Italy at all … there’s the blackshirt under the window—so no more”.33 The following year, she wrote to Quentin Bell (24 Jan 1934): “They think Mosley is getting supporters. If so I’ll emigrate.”34 Fascism and eugenics in 1930s Germany, Italy, and Britain are clearly key contexts for Flush: A Biography, written between 1931 and 1933, but the drafting of the book itself reveals the evolution of Woolf’s anti-fascist politics regarding eugenics. Woolf was, as we shall see, somewhat ambivalent on the topic. Her exploration of eugenicist ideas in Flush: A Biography appears to be ironic, but we shall see that Woolf’s satire blurs the lines between critiquing and reinforcing the animalisation and racialisation of the working classes in ways that draw on Darwinian and eugenicist discourse. Animal tropes, as synonyms for the Other, always already invoke such associations, but there is a danger in challenging racist and classist discourse through satire, as Woolf does here, with reference to Darwin. Certainly, if misread, her satire risks reinforcing the dominant narrative which it seeks to undercut, a particular risk because, as Melba Cuddy-Keane notes, critics and readers often “failed to detect satire from a woman’s pen”35 and were frequently “oblivious to Woolf’s irony”.36 I will argue that Woolf slips from a clearly satirical bestialisation of the poor to what reads as an ambiguous racialisation of people living in the slums in which satire and irony tread unstable ground.  Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 27.  Peach, Woolf and eugenics, 439. 32  Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 25. 33  Woolf, Letters, 187. 34  Ibid., 273. 35  Cuddy-Keane, Rhetoric, 150. 36  Ibid., 150, 151. 30 31

270 

S. MCCRACKEN

Flush: A Biography must be read not just with 1930s eugenics, but, given the book’s extensive use of Darwinian discourse highlighted above, specifically with Darwin’s views on eugenics in mind. Darwin stated, drawing on the work of Thomas Malthus, that “[n]atural selection follows from the struggle for existence; and this from a rapid state of increase” and that the “primary or fundamental check to the continued increase of man is the difficulty of gaining subsistence”.37 Darwin’s thoughts on population “checks” were also indebted to what he called Galton’s “admirable labours” in his “great work” Hereditary Genius (1869).38 Galton, Darwin’s cousin, coined the term “eugenic” in 1883, was president of the Eugenic Education Society (established 1907), and his Galton Institute published The Eugenics Review (1909–1968). In Hereditary Genius, “Galton had conceived the not unflattering idea that genius runs in families, like the Darwins, and can be increased by selective breeding”.39 Darwin claimed Hereditary Genius had “made a convert of an opponent”.40 In Hereditary Genius, Galton proposed checks and incentives to regulate “the improvement of the race”, through scholarships and early marriage for the “gifted”; naturalisation of “the better sort of emigrants and refugees”; societal “pride of race”; and “celibate monasteries or sisterhoods” for the “weak”.41 Darwin discusses Galton’s work in The Descent of Man, and states: [w]ith savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. […] We civilised men, on the other hand, do the utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. […] Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.42

He added that “[b]oth sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind”, and “all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children”.43 Darwin,

 Darwin, Descent, 168, 63–4.  Ibid., 46, 159. 39  Moore and Desmond, Introduction, Descent, xlvi. 40  Darwin, Letter, np. 41  Galton, Hereditary Genius, 415. 42  Darwin, Descent, 159. 43  Ibid., 688. 37 38

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

271

then, proposed eugenic solutions to what he saw as “the degeneration of a domestic race”.44 Darwin also used animal breeding analogies—which Woolf interrogates in Flush: A Biography—to argue against humans propagating “the weak members” of “their kind”.45 Darwin states that “[n]o one who has attended to the breeding of animals will doubt” that preserving the “weak” “must be highly injurious to the race of man”.46 This “naturalizing” of the principles of animal husbandry reveals how normative the eugenic logic of the latter is. The strangeness of eliding the difference between the general singular “man” and “anyone” shows how bizarre the idea is, logically (and from the point of view of evolution, which approves no such agency), revealing a slippage from Darwinism to social Darwinism. He adds that “excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed”,47 an analogy which aligns disabled and poor people with animals that a breeder would cull or keep from the breeding pool. He also observes that “man differs widely from any strictly domesticated animal; for his breeding has never long been controlled”.48 Woolf makes a similar point, albeit with a heavy dash of irony, about unregulated human breeding in Flush: A Biography: “if we now turn to human society, what chaos and confusion meet the eye! No Club has any such jurisdiction upon the breed of man”, only the “Heralds College” resembles the “Spaniel Club” in its “attempt to preserve the purity of the human family”.49 Here she seems to be mocking the social Darwinist logic of the royal Herald’s College which grants coats of arms and records human (usually aristocratic) pedigree. She adds that if the standards of the Kennel Club were applied to Dr Mitford, the drunken gambling father of Flush’s breeder—who claimed to be descended from “the Mitfords of Bertram Castle” and married a woman “remotely” related to the “ducal house of Bedford”—Dr Mitford would not be “allowed to perpetuate his kind”.50 Whether or not this is a good thing is left to the reader to decide. In FMS1, however, as I will show in the next section, Woolf makes a much more explicit connection between canine  Ibid., 159.  Ibid. 46  Ibid. 47  Ibid. 48  Ibid., 46. 49  Woolf, Flush, 11. 50  Ibid., 12. 44 45

272 

S. MCCRACKEN

pedigree, and the inheritance of racialised human pedigree, and property, to suggest that human breeding is actually, and regrettably, regulated, by such bodies as the Herald’s College. She focuses, through often satirical scenes, on the erasure of illegitimate, racialised, and working-class children, deemed by the aristocratic to be significantly other. She does so in a challenge, I argue, to Darwin’s eugenic position in the Descent of Man.

From Pedigree to Race and Animality In Flush: A Biography, animalisation and pedigree are also inextricably linked (though not in Dr Mitford’s case) with racialisation and Victorian society’s hypocritical horror of miscegenation. The three strands of intertwined classed, racialised, and animalised pedigree form a social Darwinist beastly eugenic discourse which Woolf both mocks and explores through satire. Once in Italy, following the Barrett Browning elopement, Flush gives up his role as a pedigree dog who abides by the laws of the Spaniel Club. Instead, “careless of the signs of rank” he ruts with Italian mongrels.51 Immediately after this renunciation, Woolf writes in the published version that if an “English peer” is “rumour[ed]” to have become a Muslim or had “a son by a Chinese washerwoman”, his “old friends are ready enough to overlook these aberrations” and “he is asked to Chatsworth”.52 But in the first draft of this passage, she explicitly name-­ calls aristocrats who, she suggests, have disinherited their biracial bastard children. This is the first draft of the passage: he [Flush] had voluntarily ad ab renounced his rank, & contracted alliances which were not recognised by the Kennel Club, which the Spaniel Club would ignore, no doubt had its weight in loosening the family ties, the strict bonds of family life; for when a if an English the most {tolerant} & democratic English peer—shall we say the late Duke of Devonshire or Norfolk— would hardly care to assent strictly to the right of the a +coal+ black son by a negress, of a coff yellow son by a Chinese lady, to inherit the ancestral splendours of Arundel & Chatsworth.53

Here the peers are not invited to Chatsworth, or Arundel, but own these estates. What is at stake is who gets to count not only “as an actor”, but as  Ibid., 127.  Ibid., 131. 53  Woolf, FMS1, 157. 51 52

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

273

an inheritor of property and pedigree, and who is disinherited on account of their “significant otherness”.54 More explicitly than even Haraway ­ventures, Woolf draws an explicit parallel between canine pedigree and racialised human pedigree. The effect both frames her critique in satirical canine terms and invokes a discourse that aligns miscegenation and mixing dog breeds, where both produce synonymous racialised human and animal others, subordinate to the white aristocratic male human self, the self that has the right to inherit. Her revised, published version of this passage moves away from racialised difference (“+coal+black” and “coffyellow”) and blurred human-animal boundaries to religious, cultural difference, with reference to Islam, restoring that boundary somewhat. Her satire operates on multiple levels of discourse here, appropriating the dominant narrative that equates dogs and people of colour both to undercut that discourse (far more explicitly in FMS1 than the published version) and potentially to reinforce it in the eyes of readers “oblivious to Woolf’s irony”.55 Simultaneously, she celebrates the flip side of pedigree and racial purity—mongrelisation—in a move which calls into question the pure/impure binary. Woolf implies that British human society, in both Barrett Browning and Darwin’s time and, by implication, in the 1930s, practises a form of eugenicist, racialised breeding. By this she implies that racist, eugenicist discourse and practices are not simply unique to Nazi, Italian, and BUF rhetoric. Rather, inheritance, in Britain and by extension the whole structure of British society, is defined by this racialised, eugenicist fixation with human pedigree. In the course of critiquing such discourse by identifying it in the British aristocracy, Woolf turns her Darwinian dog against the eugenicist views Darwin expresses in The Descent of Man. However, by not naming names in the published version of Flush: A Biography, Woolf renders her criticism hypothetical and so downplays the real threat of the British-nativist tradition amidst the rise of fascist politics in her time.

Racialised Dogs The significance of Woolf’s racialised dog trope becomes clearer when we consider how, as Goldman observes, the signifying dog gestures towards slavery, particularly to Aphra Behn’s portrayal of the titular enslaved  Haraway, Companion Species, 27, 28.  Cuddy-Keane, Rhetoric, 151.

54 55

274 

S. MCCRACKEN

African Prince in Oroonoko (1688), throughout Woolf’s works. Srinivas Aravamudan explains that “Oroonoko responds to the coordinated logic of the aristocratic pethood of Africans” exemplified at the time by newspaper advertisements selling “silver padlocks for blacks or dogs”.56 Indeed, in stage performances of Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, the lead actor “would have worn an ornamental collar on stage”.57 The figure of Oroonoko in Behn’s novel is, Aravamudan argues, not only “a vassal or slave, but also as a pet”.58 Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own cites two Behn poems—“A Thousand Martyrs I have made” and “Love in Fantastic Triumph Sat”59—and Woolf “probably read” Oroonoko.60 She also implicitly aligned the notorious “fine negress” in A Room of One’s Own both with “a dog”61 and with Behn’s “fine” enslaved protagonist,62 a man who “die[s] like a dog”,63 as Goldman observes.64 The narrator of Woolf’s polemic also wears a “collar”.65 Woolf was evidently aware of the discursive connections between dogs, collars, racialisation, and enslavement. Woolf’s dog tropes in Flush: A Biography are also frequently adjacent to racialised humans. Woolf writes of Flush’s “race” twelve times in the first draft and not at all in the published version of Flush: A Biography, where she replaces the word “race” with terms such as “breed”, “family”, and “kind”. In the first draft, Woolf writes of the “race of Spaniels” as a “marked & adventurous race”.66 She writes of the “red cocker race”, the “race of greyhounds & spaniels”, and “bull dogs, mastiffs, sheep dogs, & other races”.67 These dogs share “the imagination of [Flush’s] whole race”.68 But “race” (i.e. breed) is also regulated. The “Spaniel Club which regulated the race, & kept its ranks pure”, abhorred “a topknot, or […] a light nose […] light

 Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 38.  Ibid., 39. 58  Ibid., 41. 59  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 48. 60  Goldman, Chien, 75. 61  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 39. 62  Behn, Oroonoko, 81. 63  Ibid., 140. 64  Goldman, Chien, 75. 65  Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 4. 66  Woolf, FMS1, 153. 67  Ibid., 121. 68  Ibid., 97. 56 57

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

275

eyes […] curled ears”, which were “fatal”.69 Indeed, “any dog who exhibited these faults […] his offspring was denied the {privileges} of his race++hierarchy of his race” and “was not allowed to perpetuate them”.70 The crossed-through “hierarchy of his race” makes explicit what the repeated references to dog “races” imply that race is a hierarchical classificatory construct, rather than a description of naturally occurring differences. In the first published edition, however, Woolf ultimately resists directly conflating race with breed; instead, uncertainty grows in her blurring of Darwinian principles and social Darwinism. Woolf’s reference, for example, to “light eyes” and the purity of breeding “evokes a language of racial superiority reminiscent of fascist ideas concerning anti-Semitism and Nordic superiority”,71 but, I would add, also evokes Darwin’s breeding analogies in his eugenicist passages from The Descent of Man. Snaith argues that Woolf mocks theories of racial superiority in the first edition by “relating them to dogs”.72 If Woolf’s “repeated references to breeding, purity, mongrels, and hierarchies of species” in the first edition are clear and “politically charged”73 then they are even more so, and more explicitly racialised, in her first draft. Woolf celebrates the mongrelisation of dogs (and by association, of humans) in a slippery satirical move that challenges and reinforces the discursive alignment of mutts and racial others. Prior to living with Barrett Browning, Flush had mated “with a lady of +his own kind+ quality”,74 “Mr. Partridge’s spaniel” in the first edition. While interbreeding native with exotic stock was a familiar practice to British animal breeders, especially horses and sheep, this practice did not apply to pedigree dogs.75 When Flush was living in London, in an FMS1 passage excised from later drafts, “the Spaniel Club would never have countenanced an alliance” with a “King Charles Spaniel”, and “Nature had effectually” prevented all but the “most perfunctory intercourse between Flush & Catiline the bloodhound”.76 Flush, then, desired other dog breeds before he moved to Italy, but was prevented from mating with them by British breeding  Ibid., 159.  Ibid., Emphases added. 71  Snaith, Of fanciers, 630. 72  Ibid., 631. 73  Ibid., 629. 74  Woolf, FMS1, 119. 75  Woolf, Flush, 146. 76  Woolf, FMS1, 119. 69 70

276 

S. MCCRACKEN

standards that were strictly enforced along class lines (not to mention comical size differences). Indeed, while rank underpins London society, in Italy, in the first edition, “there were no ranks”,77 and rank is exposed as an “entirely arbitrary set of values”.78 In another suggestive passage excised from the first draft, Flush could “scarcely be blamed if in the circumstances he gave way, […] gave way on Mrs Browning gave way; if he felt bubble up in him those {sensual} impulses”, for Flush had “inherited, through his Spanish ancestors, some of the Latin amorosity which is never found” in British dogs.79 Both excised passages offer a deceptively comical canine erotics (perhaps the reason for their excision) which challenges breeding hierarchies, and celebrates multispecies intimacy, mongrelisation, and by association, miscegenation. As Snaith puts it, “Woolf celebrates impurity and hybridity” in the first edition, and this is also, indeed especially, true of her first draft.80 The result in either version is both a clear rejection of systems that rank breeds (and implicitly races) and practice eugenics, and a slippery figurative move. Woolf satirises discourse which considers dog breeds synonymous with human races, but risks reinforcing such discourse in her celebration of “a society of mongrels”.81 Her canine figures are fraught with the risks of satirical racialised troping. Furthermore, Woolf celebrates the racialised, animalised mongrelisation of language itself, when she writes in “Craftsmanship” (1937) a few years later that: Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.82

Like Flush, the amorosity of the English language is beastly and hybrid (with Woolf blurring animal mating with human marriage), racialised (enjoying miscegenation), and freighted with power imbalances (e.g. with English words colonising Indian words). But, as the phrase “Royal words mate with commoners” suggests, class is equally, if not more so,  Woolf, Flush, 105.  Snaith, Of fanciers, 631. 79  Woolf, FMS1, 121. 80  Snaith, Of fanciers, 631. 81  Woolf, FMS1, 113. 82  Woolf, Essays, 96. Emphasis added. 77 78

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

277

discursively connected to British pedigree than race. Race and class are interconnected issues in Woolf’s animal satire of eugenic discourse.

The Bestialised, Animalised, Working Classes Woolf appears complicit in reinforcing the animalisation of the working classes in her satirical depiction of the East End slums where Flush is held captive in Flush: A Biography, particularly in her first draft. On the one hand, her narrator, an ambiguous authority, parrots and exaggerates Beames’s beastly discourse The Rookeries, but on the other hand, as we shall see, Woolf troubles the boundaries between satire and complicity in social Darwinist discourse. She writes that the dognappers in the slums “live like beasts”, and “roost here” (the latter a reference to Beames’s The Rookeries), while Flush is afraid of the “half naked drunken creature who cursed him”.83 These zoomorphic phrases do not appear in the first edition. In FMS1, Woolf aligns the women in the slums with dogs; they “heaved themselves off the floor where they had lain among sacks all night & staggered off to fetch pots of beer for their masters”,84 whereas in the first edition these women “fetch beer” but do not have masters.85 In both versions, however, Flush is terrorised by the “claw”,86 “the black paw of Shoreditch”,87 and the thieves who “pawed and clawed”88 at him. In both versions the animalisation of these Londoners is exacerbated by their proximity to the cows they live with. In FMS1 “the diseased meat was eaten & the diseased milk drunken by the poor”,89 while Woolf uses a less visceral description (with “disease” implied rather than explicit and repeated) in the first edition: “the cows were milked and killed and eaten under the bedroom”.90 In both versions, the living conditions in the slums are appalling. The tenements have “broken windows”,91 the people “scarcely had food for themselves”, and children drink “stagnant water green with

 Woolf, FMS1, 25, 59, 75.  Woolf, FMS1, 75. Emphasis added. 85  Woolf, Flush, 81. 86  Woolf, FMS1, 61. 87  Ibid., 67. 88  Woolf, Flush, 80. 89  Woolf, FMS1, 65. 90  Woolf, Flush, 73. 91  Woolf, FMS1, 25; Woolf, Flush 83. 83 84

278 

S. MCCRACKEN

putrescent scum” in “a bright-green stream”.92 These conditions allow Woolf’s narrator to animalise those living there. Woolf blurs these beastly living conditions with being beastly. She equates the poor with vermin infestations. In the first draft “innumerable families”, she says, “swarmed over […] rotten and insanitary slums”.93 She describes them “swarming, populating, breeding”, they “seethed & {raged}, died & bred, the lowest of the poor”, in a “seething mass +swarm+, or a vast swarm of lawless, penniless, untaught, starving, po breeding, dif diseased, men & women”.94 In the first edition, these people “seethed” and “swarmed” too, where “vice and poverty breed vice and poverty”.95 It is unclear here, whether the narrator’s disgust is satirical, directed solely at these living conditions, or extends to those living in the slums. This scene reads like a Malthusian nightmare, and such “swarming” and “breeding” in poverty were certainly abhorrent to Galton and Darwin. Woolf names Thomas Beames as her source for these slum scenes.96 His The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective (1850) uses the words “swarm”97 and “race”98 to describe the working classes, which Woolf evidently reproduces across different versions of Flush: A Biography. Although his title references the then-familiar metaphorical connection between London slums and raven’s roosts, Beames does not use the words “paw”, “claw”, or “breed” to refer to humans, nor does he explicitly say that they live like animals. Woolf appears to build on Beames’s work with further animalising, Darwinian, eugenic language. Moreover, although it may be marginally less bestialising than FMS1, the first edition of Flush: A Biography seems to allude more directly to Darwin’s eugenicist comments about how “the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind”,99 when Woolf writes that in these slums “poverty and vice and misery had bred and seethed and propagated their kind for centuries without interference”.100 The narrator here invokes Darwin’s animalising

 Woolf, FMS1, 67; Woolf, Flush 74.  Woolf, FMS1, 59. 94  Ibid., 65. 95  Ibid., 70, 89. 96  Woolf, Flush, 73. 97  Beames 124, 130, 151. 98  Ibid., 96, 143, 150. 99  Darwin, Descent 159. 100  Woolf, Flush, 75. Emphasis added. 92 93

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

279

eugenicist views to ambiguous effect, both challenging such views through satire and, as the satire is quite ambivalent, appearing to sympathise with them. The animalised poor are also racialised. The clearance of the East End slums in the 1830–1840s was justified, as Snaith observes, by “racial metaphors to describe class distinctions, linking the East End and Africa”.101 The Fascist groups campaigning in the area in Woolf’s time, using social Darwinist discourse, also claimed the Jewish population were racially inferior.102 Woolf would have known that those in the East End were “often connected by analogy […] to other species”, Snaith argues, and that the area was thought to have produced “menageries of sub-races of men and women”103 whose existence threatened “to bring about the degeneration of the British race”.104 This language evokes Darwin’s fears about “sub-­ species” and the “degeneration of a domestic race”.105 Snaith argues that by “attributing the ‘bestial’ view of Whitechapel in the published version of Flush: A Biography to an aristocratic dog, Woolf exposes the ridiculousness of the[se] hierarchies”.106 Woolf also, however, reinforces this racialised rhetoric even as she exposes it, I argue, particularly regarding the working classes in the first draft, when her ironic satire becomes ambiguous. Indeed, the published version, from which some of this ambiguity is excised, suggests that Woolf came to manage her satire in a more careful, considered way. In her early drafts, Woolf writes that “Flush saw the again the rough faces of his enemies—the black cruel men who had snatched him”,107 and describes the “black hand of the Rookery”, an area filled with “bare black feet”.108 These lines were excised from later versions. Woolf scholar Stuart Clarke argues that “Woolf often used ‘black’ to mean ‘dressed in black’, not a race called black”.109 This seems both unlikely and closes down the range of readings available for the frequently multivalent words in Woolf’s work. The word “black” might also refer, simultaneously, to dirt from the soot  Snaith, Of fanciers, 623.  Ibid., 627. 103  Greenslade, Degeneration, 38. 104  Snaith, Of fanciers, 624. 105  Darwin, Descent 210, 159. 106  Snaith, Of fanciers, 624. Original emphasis. 107  Woolf, FMS1, 75. 108  Woolf, FMS2, 66, 71. 109  Clarke, The “increasing”, 33. 101 102

280 

S. MCCRACKEN

and smog of London, the darkness of Flush’s confines, and metaphorically to the men’s characters; Woolf, for example, calls the racially white Mr Barrett “the blackest, the most formidable of elderly men”.110 Alternatively, or again concurrently, Woolf’s narrator may be suggesting that these men are, or are like, men (including the Irish who lived in the East End in Flush’s time) racialised as Black, keeping all of the above options in play. Furthermore, Clarke’s aim, to “prevent readers from populating Woolf’s fiction with Africans […] who are not actually there”, is based on the erroneous suggestion that there was little racial diversity in Britain before the 1950s.111 In fact, as Jeffrey Green demonstrates in Black Edwardians (1998), this was not the case, with “Britain’s widespread population of African birth or descent” living not only in London, but places including Scarborough (a key setting in Woolf’s Jacob’s Room), and Cornwall, where Woolf spent childhood holidays, long before the 1950s.112 The few discussions of Woolf and Black people focus on Woolf’s “fine negress” passage in A Room of One’s Own,113 and on her controversial blackface exploits in the 1910 Dreadnought Hoax and 1911 Post-Impressionist Ball.114 Little has been said about her Black characters. Blackness is far more prevalent in Woolf’s works than previously recognised and is intimately connected, in Flush: A Biography, with questions of class, animality, and eugenics. Woolf’s writing features several minor Black characters. In Jacob’s Room, Jacob mistakes a rock on the beach for a “large black woman” whom he calls Nanny, and later watches a “black woman with the dancing feather in her hat” leave a restaurant.115 In Orlando: A Biography, Shelmerdine is “trapped” in a relationship “by a black woman”.116 In Between the Acts, a reporter observes a “black man in fuzzy wig” on stage and a “stout black lady” watches in the audience.117 Woolf’s Black characters then are varied. They are performers, viewers, lovers, servants, cosmopolitans. But many of her depictions of Black people directly reflect rather than question racist stereotypes that shape figures of animalised, classed bestiality. In this context Woolf’s depiction of the East  Woolf, Flush, 43.  Clarke, The “increasing”, 32, 33. 112  Green, Black Edwardians, xiii. 113  See Carr, Goldman, Hovey, Marcus. 114  See Seshagiri. 115  Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 7, 109. 116  Woolf, Orlando, 235. 117  Woolf, Between the Acts, 163, 79; See also McCracken, (R)evolutionary Animal, 172–3. 110 111

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

281

End slums in Flush: A Biography is all the more ambiguously satirical. Most scholars only mention these Black characters in passing, perhaps because, as Urmila Seshagiri explains, “Woolf’s interests in racial identity are nowhere as explicit or well-developed as her interests in the politics of gender, war, class, or education”.118 Nonetheless, Woolf’s representation of Black people calls for further attention if we are to better understand her “black cruel men” in the manuscript versions of Flush: A Biography, and her approach to race more broadly. My racialised reading of the “black cruel men” in Flush: A Biography changes how we think about Woolf’s later comments on this “savage population”119 in the slums, a phrase which only appears in the first draft of the manuscript. Woolf also invokes Black men in the first edition of Flush: A Biography: his ancestral memories “of forests and parrots and wild trumpeting elephants” seem to reach back to Africa and include “black men crying ‘Span! Span’”.120 But in FMS1 her allusions to Black and poor people in Flush’s London, such as the Irish living in poverty in the East End during Flush’s lifetime who were often racialised as Black, are more bestial. She writes of the slum inhabitants: “these men & women—but they were more like apes & chimpanzees in their rags, in their {nakedness}”.121 Apes have long been synonymous with people of both African heritage and the Irish in racist discourse and in the biological racism that emerged after Darwin. Apes were also central to the “Gorilla Wars” that followed the publication of On the Origin of Species, during which the Darwinists sought to prove our neurological similarities with apes in the face of vehement opposition.122 While Woolf’s allusions to Africa in the first edition are inoffensive, it is unclear whether Woolf’s savage and simian references in FMS1 are satirical or not, and whether they refer to Black people, the Irish, those covered in the soot and smog of Victorian London, or the metaphorically “Black” London poor. It would clearly be satire if her references were sustained and arch, rather than singular and, in the case of the simian references, bracketed by dashes. Woolf risks reinforcing racist, classist discourse through her ambiguous satire and canine tropes, where it is easy to be “oblivious to Woolf’s irony”—if  Seshagiri, Orienting, 59.  Woolf, FMS1, 63 120  Woolf, Flush, 37, 57. 121  Woolf, FMS1, 73. 122  Moore and Desmond, Introduction, xxxv. 118 119

282 

S. MCCRACKEN

indeed Woolf is being ironic.123 It is unclear “who or what”, as Haraway puts it “gets to count as an actor” in Woolf’s post-Darwin world.124 In sum, when we compare the early and published versions of Flush: A Biography, it is evident that while all versions of the narrative use animal satire to explore questions of pedigree, some of Woolf’s early humour echoes, and even appears complicit in, the animalising racism and classism of social Darwinism, whereas the published versions excise some of this humour and offer more careful, considered uses of animal satire. It may be that this shift in tone was shaped by Woolf’s increasing awareness of Fascism, which was marked by her marriage to the Jewish Leonard Woolf (the couple were later blacklisted by the Nazis), and their experience of travelling through Fascist Italy whilst she was writing the book. The Woolfs were in Italy in 1933, perhaps unaware that it was at the height of the Italian genocide of North Africans,125 witnessed the reality of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s “blackshirt[s]”, and as we saw, Woolf “[did]n’t like Fascist Italy at all”.126 Whatever the reason for Woolf’s edits and excisions, the different versions of her fictional canine biography reveal her shifting attitude to writing about Darwinism and social Darwinism, from mocking the targets of eugenic discourse to challenging the discourse itself, all suggested by her ambiguous animal satire.

Works Cited Ahmida, Ali. 2020. Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Aravamudan, Srinivas. 1999. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham: Duke University Press. Behn, Aphra. 1992. Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works. Edited by Janet Todd. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Boisseron, Bénédicte. 2018. Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. New York: Columbia University Press. Carr, Helen. 2010. Virginia Woolf, empire and race. In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Sellers, 197–213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Cuddy-Keane, Rhetoric, 151.  Haraway, Companion Species, 27. 125  See Ahmida. 126  Woolf, Letters, 187. 123 124

16  SATIRE AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S FLUSH… 

283

Childs, Donald. 2001. Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, Stuart N. 2022. The “increasing” Black population in Virginia Woolf’s fiction. The Virginia Woolf Bulletin of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain 37 (May): 32–36. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. 1996. The rhetoric of feminist conversation: Virginia Woolf and the trope of the twist. In Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology & British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei, 137–159. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Darwin, Charles. 1869. Letter to Francis Galton. December 23. #7032. Darwin Correspondence Project Online. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/ letter/?docId=letters/DCP-­LETT-­7032.xml;query=7032;brand=default. ———. (1871) 2004. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Edited by James Desmond and Adrian Moore. London: Penguin. Deckha, Maneesha. 2008. Intersectionality and posthumanist visions of equality. Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal 23 (2): 249–268. Dubino, Jeanne. 2011. Evolution, history, and Flush or, The origin of spaniels. In Virginia Woolf and the Natural World: Selected Papers from the Twentieth International Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Rohman, 143–150. Clemson: Clemson University Press. Galton, Francis. (1869) 2001. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences. Reprint, Honolulu, HI: The Pacific University Press. Goldman, Jane. 2007. “Ce chien est à moi”: Virginia Woolf and the signifying dog. Woolf Studies Annual 13: 49–86. Green, Jeffrey. 2011. Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain 1901–1914. London: Frank Cass. Greenslade, William. 1994. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. Hovey, Jaime. 1997. “Kissing a negress in the dark”: Englishness as a masquerade in Woolf’s Orlando. PMLA 112: 393–404. Light, Alison. 2007. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. London: Penguin Fig Tree. Marcus, Jane. 2004. Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. London: Rutgers University Press. McCracken, Saskia. 2021. (R)evolutionary Animal Tropes in the Works of Charles Darwin and Virginia Woolf. PhD diss., University of Glasgow. Moore, James, and Adrian Desmond. 2004. Introduction. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Desmond and Adrian Moore, xi–lx. London: Penguin.

284 

S. MCCRACKEN

Peach, Linden. 2012. Woolf and eugenics. In Virginia Woolf in Context, ed. Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman, 439–448. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peach, Linden, Derek Ryan, and Jane Goldman. Forthcoming. Introduction. In Flush: A Biography, ed. Derek Ryan, Linden Peach, and Jane Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Rosenthal, Michael. 1979. Virginia Woolf. New York: Columbia University Press. Seshagiri, Urmila. 2004. Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, aesthetics, and politics in To the Lighthouse. Modern Fiction Studies 50 (1): 58–84. Snaith, Anna. 2002. Of fanciers, footnotes, and fascism: Virginia Woolf’s Flush. Modern Fiction Studies 48 (3): 614–636. Squier, Susan. 1985. Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1979. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth. ———. 1983. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth. ———. (1941) 1992. Between the Acts. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1922) 2008. Jacob’s Room. Edited by Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6. Edited by Stuart N.  Clarke. London: Hogarth. ———. 2015. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Edited by Anna Snaith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1928) 2018. Orlando: A Biography. Edited by Suzanne Raitt, and Ian Blyth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1933) Forthcoming-a. Flush: A Biography. Edited by Derek Ryan, Linden Peach, and Jane Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. Forthcoming-b. FMS1. Transcribed by Saskia McCracken and Jane Goldman. In Flush: A Biography. Edited by Derek Ryan, Linden Peach, and Jane Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. Forthcoming-c. FMS2. In Flush: A Biography, ed. Derek Ryan, Linden Peach, and Jane Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Satirical Interruption

CHAPTER 17

How to Slaughter a Human David Brooks

You must bleed a human at slaughter, otherwise the meat will taste rancid and rot all the sooner. Stun it first—a shot or hammer-blow to the temple— then exsanguinate, as soon as possible, to minimalise the chance of its regaining consciousness, or the blood settling in any one part, bruising the flavour. A quick, deep cut across the throat with a very sharp knife is most efficient and porcine. Try not to excite the animal beforehand: fear and too much activity at time of slaughter will also spoil the taste. Then hang it, upside down, over an appropriate receptacle to collect the blood. Oats, parsley, bay leaves, and onion are the staples for blood sausage. Some pigs add pennyroyal, or fennel. Human intestines are long and excellent for the purpose, but get somebody else to wash them for it is stinking work. Better if humans have been fed grain exclusively for at least a week before processing. This cleans them out. There is not a part of them that one can’t eat: brains, liver, heart, kidneys, testes, feet—though it has been suggested that digestion of the human brain can lead to madness. The human is omnivorous, of course, eats other animals, carrion, rotting stuff—a greater range than any other mammal. Many religions therefore forbid its consumption as tainted flesh; filthy, some say. The

D. Brooks (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_17

287

288 

D. BROOKS

optimum age of slaughter is 6 or 7, and certainly before 20 years of age. Before which, if such is your interest, they make wonderful pets. They are easily led, and will argue all day if you let them. Starved and slaughtered in infancy, well bled, they have the palest flesh. As to the best sectioning of the carcass, see page 3.

PART III

Animal Satire in Contemporary Literature, Film and Media Studies

CHAPTER 18

“Thanks a lot, big brain”: Satirical Misanthropy in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos Peter Sands

The thing was: The hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions, probably billions, of species of plants and animals [was] the voluntary extinction of one species; Homo sapiens … us.1

Or so it was for the authors of the radical eco-newsletter These Exit Times, a subsidiary of the better-known journal Earth First! released in 1991 as a vehicle for the latter’s more troublesome strands of environmentalist rhetoric. The ideas promoted by the Times, encapsulated by the succinct tagline “May we live long and die out”, concern the rectification of environmental wrongs via the pursuit of “voluntary extinction”, or the idea that “good health will be restored to the Earth’s ecology” only

1

 Knight, These Exit Times, 1.

P. Sands (*) University of York, York, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_18

291

292 

P. SANDS

through a collective striving for the end of human life.2 Despite the grisly nature of its aims, the language of the magazine is characterised by a repeated emphasis on life and its vital persistence after the final death of the human—an ending filtered through the positive affective lens of good health in place of slow death. But this hopeful futurism is supplemented in the magazine’s rhetoric by a different kind of affect, located in an extension of the acronym for the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) into “vehemence”3; a word defined in the OED as describing a “great or excessive passion; eagerness or fervour of personal feeling, action, expression, etc.; passionate force, intensity, or excitement”.4 Far from straightforwardly hopeful, the magazine seems at least latently attuned to the paradoxical (and perhaps even comedic) currency of the word. “With a VHEMT perspective”, it notes, “we move forward in a dynamic balance of optimism and pessimism, aware that our reality is both hopeful and hopeless”.5 In describing a “passionate force” with no clear direction or objective, the term vehemence conjures psychoanalytic figurations of the drive, which in its Lacanian articulation holds the subject in a suspended state of circulation around its inaccessible object of desire—a notion fulfilled here by the figure of a human extinction that can be wished but never experienced. But in addition to faithfully encapsulating the paradoxical affective reality of this eco-death drive, the word also characterises the Times as participating in what might be its most obvious charge: misanthropy. As Tom Tyler argues, the term misanthropy often describes a subject “depicted as being ruled by passion, their intense, emotional abhorrence of humanity the result of personal affronts or misfortunes”.6 In Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and Molière’s The Misanthrope, Tyler notes, the respective protagonists are represented as extreme, pathological, and governed by excess, with misanthropy “cast as a misguided consequence or symptom of intemperate inclinations”.7 Yet in exemplifying extremity, the misanthrope also functions as an object of comedy, enacting a hatred of humanity in general that, in the mode identified by Tyler, fails to account for the misanthrope’s own position within the realm of the human.  Ibid., 1.  Ibid., 5. 4  Oxford English Dictionary, “vehemence, n.”. 5  Knight, These Exit Times, 5. 6  Tyler, Misanthropy without humanity, 239. 7  Ibid. 2 3

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

293

Misanthropy’s dissident vehemence fuels the satirical irony of its tunnelvision, only drawing the human further into focus as the object of universal and passionate disdain. This way of thinking takes us far when critiquing the noxious logics found in publications such as These Exit Times, which as Sarah Ensor argues mark a particular extension of the Deep Ecology movement’s “neo-­ Malthusian” tendencies in which “appeals to kill or let die” exist “primarily as a foil to and a precondition for the continuance of life”.8 But I argue that the satirical currency of misanthropy also holds the potential for a posthumanist critique of the anthropocentrism that lurks within such environmentalist discourses on the one hand, and more broadly across cultural depictions of environmental catastrophe and the “end of the world” on the other. This chapter will focus on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galápagos (1985) as the centre of such a critique. Vonnegut’s evolutionary satire functions according to a simple, aphoristic thesis: that the catastrophes of the twentieth century can be explained solely by the existence of the human’s “big brain”. By writing the human as an evolutionary mistake, Vonnegut engages the eco-centric holisms of publications such as Earth First!, suggesting as Sheila Pardee writes “that intellectual achievement might properly be abandoned in favour of a simpler, more just and harmonious mode of living”.9 But such a disavowal of the human sits alongside the novel’s interest in the simultaneous problem that sees planetary change become ever more legible during the 1980s—a fact that centres around what Etienne Benson argues is the emergence of the “climate system” as a name for the “singular, planetary phenomenon that could be studied only through globe-spanning sensor networks and computer simulations”.10 From the unassimilable spectacle of climate change, Benson notes, emerges the “master term” Anthropocene, an abstraction easier to conceive than the totally inhuman yet ever more knowable scope and scale of humanity’s geological agency.11 We may read Vonnegut’s pathologisation of human hyper-intelligence as satirising precisely this kind of abstraction, extending the notion of universal anthropogenic culpability to its logical misanthropic conclusions.

 Ensor, Terminal regions, 42.  Pardee, Drifting and foundering, 252. 10  Benson, Surroundings, 164. 11  Ibid., 191. 8 9

294 

P. SANDS

In this regard, Vonnegut’s novel produces a form of what Mark McGurl describes as “posthuman comedy”, or the trend in which “the spatiotemporal vastness and numerousness of the nonhuman world becomes visible as a formal, representational, and finally existential problem”.12 In part, this satire of the parochial anthropos functions through the construction of a narrative voice that purports to surpass the limitations of anthropocentrism altogether. As Marco Caracciolo argues, Vonnegut makes evolutionary time “a formal principle for experimental storytelling”, bypassing the humanist trappings of linear temporality and centring his narrative around processes that vastly exceed human agency or perception.13 Yet as C. Parker Krieg suggests, Vonnegut’s subversion of narrative convention does not belie the fact that he also “maintains a fidelity to the human”, anchoring the formal disruptions of the novel to political realities that fasten deep evolutionary futures to a twentieth century present.14 Vonnegut’s satirical misanthropy is both hopeful and fatalistic, centring the culpability of a universal humanity for the catastrophes of modernity while at once displacing the very consistency of such a figure. But what makes Galápagos a form of animal satire is not its relationship to anthropocentrism, but rather its reconfiguration of anthroponormativity as the discourse that takes the human as the measure for both affirmative and pessimistic visions of futurity. Rather than either totally displacing or reifying the human, in other words, Vonnegut’s evolutionary science fiction imagines a future constituted according to an animal norm whereby the values of foreseeable, planned, or programmed futures are underwritten by the logics of creaturely chance and evolutionary contingency. To understand Vonnegut’s animal satire, we must first unpack the misanthropy depicted in Galápagos as a strategy for problematising the process whereby human identity— even as the object of disdain—is constituted as the norm.

Queer Misanthropy In his book No Future, Lee Edelman offers a critique of futurism that provides a useful analytic framework for this task. Edelman’s argument is predicated on the idea that heteronormativity, as the structural symbolic logic governing social and political life, polices subjects according to the  McGurl, The posthuman comedy, 537.  Caracciolo, Posthuman narration, 311. 14  Krieg, From scale to antagonism, 183. 12 13

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

295

ideals of what he terms “reproductive futurism”. This is the idea that, across political locations, heteronormativity maintains itself as a dominant structural force via an insistence that futurity is an inherent good. Edelman relies upon Jacques Lacan’s notion of the symbolic order, which he summarises as the “fantasy” that “assures the stability of our identities as subjects”, as well as Lacan’s placement of the death drive as central to such an order as “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability”.15 Associated with the symbolic order is the figure of the Child, capitalised to sever its association with the lives of actual children but rather functioning as a totem of futurity that appears across Edelman’s cultural analysis as the very condition for political expression. Following Lacan’s theorisation of a subjectivity enacted through an endless circulation around an essential lack, Edelman interprets the Child as constituting a vision of the future that is omnipresent, yet unattainable: “such a goal, such an end, could never be ‘it’; achieved, it could never satisfy”.16 The repressive power of the Child functions as a linear execution of this logic of circulation, demanding an orientation towards the future that persists precisely through the impossibility of its own achievement. By showing reproductive futurism to be dependent upon a constitutive paradox—that is, its orientation towards a future that will never arrive— Edelman’s argument helps to draw out what is perhaps a surprising convergence between the logics of radical environmental misanthropy and the repressive norms of heterosexuality. This is that despite their clear differences, both discourses depend upon a particular idea of the future to secure stable forms of identity in the present. Resisting such a security, Edelman imagines queerness as a fundamental force of negation that challenges the symbolic fabric of futurism. Misanthropy, as encapsulated by the figure who expresses passionate and high-minded derision of humanity, thus depends upon the same sense of security in its own oppositional outsideness to the human norm. Such a norm is elsewhere described by Tyler using the phrase “anthroponormativity”, describing discourses that “take human being to be self-evidently normal” and treating the human “as a reference point, or axis for reflection, or criterion for judgment”.17 In other words, the misanthrope relies as a condition of its existence upon the mandate of futurity that is already working to secure “human” as an  Edelman, No Future, 7–9.  Ibid., 22. 17  Tyler, The exception and the norm, 22. 15 16

296 

P. SANDS

ontological category. In diagnosing this mandate, Edelman proposes instead a form of queerness that embraces its own constitution as threat to the social order, refusing to be assimilated into supposedly benign and well-meaning processes of inclusion that unwittingly reproduce heteronormativity’s logics. Edelman’s point is a queerness without the static identity “queer”, a position that seeks both to undermine the symbolic order of heteronormativity in addition to refusing to render itself meaningful in relation to this order. In its resolute rejection of identity’s securitising tendencies, Edelman’s conception of queerness helps to open a space for a misanthropy separated from the general singular “human”. Edelman centres his argument around what Lacan calls “the Thing”, or the monstrous emptiness that inhabits the centre of the symbolic order and around (or towards) which futurism’s unending velocity circles (or takes aim). This means that the symbolic order’s conservative will to preserve identity takes place “beneath the banner of openness to the difference of the Other”, with such a notion of difference founded upon the fantasy that futurism chases but will never attain.18 As a result, Edelman argues, queerness is charged with a “future-­ negating sameness construed as reflecting its pathological inability to deal with the fact of difference”.19 The liberal humanist dependence upon ideas of flexibility and progress, in other words, creates a situation in which queer negativity is aligned with a static and unchanging present. Such a charge is mirrored in Tyler’s analysis of the misanthrope, a figure which, in Shakespeare and Molière, is unable “to tolerate the inconstancies, accidents, and infractions with which they are beset”.20 Misanthropy is depicted here as an incapacity for change, rather than as a deviation from a human norm, with the misanthrope incapable of accepting the difference constituted by such a norm (i.e., the proper difference of futurism’s semblance of flexibility and dynamic change). Indeed, just as Edelman’s vision of queerness receives the charge of self-hatred by the standards of reproductive futurism, so the misanthrope, Tyler writes, is depicted as pathological in their rejection of this proper mode of difference: “their hatred is, in truth, a form of self-hatred. And it is in this way that these conventional representations of misanthropy would have us grant that

 Edelman, No Future, 60.  Ibid. 20  Tyler, Misanthropy without humanity, 243. 18 19

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

297

hatred of humanity is pathological: what could possibly be more unhealthy than to hate yourself?”21 Tyler argues that this way of thinking about misanthropy takes place within a specific normative framework. It is this self-defeating impulse that is ultimately the deviation or abnormality that determines the archetypal misanthrope’s downfall. But this characterisation of misanthropy as a pathological state is itself, of course, an evaluation, a particular, prejudicial depiction of the misanthrope and the object of their disaffection. In construing an individual’s self-love and their love of humanity as both equivalent and necessary, it casts humanity itself as the norm. It is, in short, an anthropocentric portrayal of misanthropy, or, better, what we might call an anthroponormative portrayal.22

Pursuing a similar line of thought to Edelman, Tyler notes that archetypal depictions of misanthropy always feature a human self beset with this pathology: “the word has in fact been used only of humans who express this loathing”, he notes, rather than describing, for example, the perspective of a deadly virus or geological cataclysm that brings about the end of human life.23 Along such lines, the framework of normativity allows Tyler to express the possibility of a “misanthropy without humanity”, imagining the critical sentiment of the misanthrope as severed from a subjectivity that could meaningfully perform something like “self-hatred”.24 Instead, Tyler suggests a model for interpreting misanthropy according to an “inhuman norm”, rejecting the idea that a dislike for humanity constitutes pathology but rather considering such an attitude as if from outside the human, accounting for nonhuman interests as ways in which to envision “non-anthropocentric modes of opposing humanity”.25 To supplement Tyler’s argument with Edelman’s, such a misanthropy proceeds from within the fantasy of anthroponormativity to provide an obstacle to this very fantasy, beginning as a loathing for the singular and general “human” and becoming, in this same utterance, a mode of rejecting the framework of meaning that allows such an identity to be formed.

 Ibid., 243.  Ibid. 23  Ibid. 24  Ibid., 244. 25  Ibid. 21 22

298 

P. SANDS

At this juncture, it is important to note that such a rejection of identity risks erasing the multitudinous experiences that rely upon forms of ontological security in their strategies for managing repressive norms and imagining futures outside of them. José Esteban Muñoz makes just such a point when he argues that Edelman’s theory of antireproductive futurism fails “to factor in the relational relevance of race or class”, reproducing “a crypto-universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporal—which is to say a subject whose time is a restricted and restricting hollowed-out present free of the need for the challenge of imagining a futurity that exists beyond the self or the here and now”.26 Vonnegut’s narrator embodies much of the description that forms Muñoz’s critique, existing in a space out of time that renders differences between subjectivities inconsequential for the novel’s broader evolutionary comedy. But the hollowed-out present of Galápagos does not foreclose the operation of futurity in the novel. Indeed, what criticisms of Edelman’s staunch negativity point out—his commitment, as Tim Dean writes, to a narrow model of the social that ignores the sense in which queerness begets new forms of kinship—reflects Vonnegut’s own turn towards the future from within the mechanisms of its satirical dismantling.27 In other words, while I argue that the queer misanthropy of Vonnegut’s novel undermines the symbolic fictions of anthroponormativity, this satire also creates the conditions for new frameworks of meaning no longer teleological but ambient, lateral, and driven by the vital contingencies of evolution. Importantly, the animal norm of Galápagos emerges unexpectedly from the aesthetic ruse of the novel’s misanthropy, not reinstating the future as a site of meaning insomuch as reconfiguring the future’s capacity to mean beyond the dominant discourse of the human.

Posthuman Satire Quoth Mandarax, so long ago: Man’s destiny is to be the sole agent for the future evolution of this planet. He is the highest dominant type to be produced by over two and a half billion years of the slow biological improvement effected by the blind opportunistic workings of natural selection; if he does not destroy himself, he has  Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 94.  Dean, The antisocial homosexual, 827.

26 27

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

299

at least an equal stretch of evolutionary time before him to exercise his energy.28 Julian Huxley (1887–1975)

The vision of apocalypse at the heart of Galápagos proceeds according to misanthropy’s central tenets: helplessness, systemic collapse, and a dislike for humanity (in general). The novel details the events surrounding the voyage of the “Nature Cruise of the Century”, an excursion intended to transport a troupe of rich and famous individuals to the Galápagos Islands from the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Through its omniscient narration by the character of Leon Trout—a ghost haunting the ship, named the Bahía de Darwin—Galápagos constructs its negative vision of the human as a perspective rendered verifiable at the manifest level of its text. This is because Trout, a construction worker and veteran of the Vietnam War who was killed during the building of the ship, narrates from the perspective of one million years in the future. During this time, Trout watches on as the occupants of the Bahía de Darwin are stranded on Santa Rosalia, Vonnegut’s fictional addition to the Galápagos archipelago, and their evolution away from the human form towards a simpler existence as beings with flippers, fur, and beaks. Like the evolutionary humanist Julian Huxley, Trout is concerned with the human’s existence as an evolutionary being, both a product of and a participant in ongoing processes of natural selection that conjure ideas of what the deep future might look like for Homo sapiens. But unlike Huxley, whose expression of a technologically driven, purposive evolution would find an apt home amid Vonnegut’s satire, Trout sees the “energy” of the human as a deleterious influence on planetary life. Emanating from his apparitional position outside the realm of the human, Trout’s musings refuse the regime of sense posed by such a category—both deriding the human and undermining its consistency as a category. For Trout, the extinction of humanity is an unavoidable process produced by the logic of the “big brain”: a figure of humanity’s ineptitude and a marker of its tragic incompatibility with planetary systems. While haunting the ship, Trout witnesses the demise of humanity at large thanks to a virus that inhibits fertility, and ponders the reasons behind the horrors of human history that culminate in financial crisis and war on the day that the cruise sets sail. His conclusions, littered throughout the novel as  Huxley, The humanist frame, 17.

28

300 

P. SANDS

satirical aphorisms that explain the root causes of systemic crises, are simple: the human brain, an organ developed far beyond the basic evolutionary measure of survival, brings about systemic collapse as an inevitability. Trout’s evidence for this thesis is backed up by his own transhistorical access to the inner worlds of the novel’s characters, and the unquestionable nature of this argument appears front and centre: So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogramme brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race? A second query: What source was there back then, save for our overelaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hearing about simply everywhere? My answer: There was no other source. This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains.29

By allowing his narrator a form of knowing that transcends the traditional contingencies of knowledge, Vonnegut writes a form of misanthropy that bypasses the charge of pathological self-hatred identified by Tyler. With abilities far beyond those of the human’s “cumbersome computer”, including the “licence to read minds, to learn the truth of people’s pasts, to see through walls, to be many places all at once, […] and to have access to all human knowledge”, Trout’s inescapable reliability dictates the inhuman norm of Vonnegut’s satire (59–203). In this regard, Trout’s narration produces a double relationship with knowledge, meaning, and semblances of objectivity that guides the satire of Galápagos. On the one hand, Vonnegut’s spectral narrator undermines the systems of thinking whereby human life is rendered meaningful through its anchoring to the idea of the future. But viewing the world through Trout’s eyes also functions as satire precisely because it purports to a literal, undeniable, and verifiable mode of thinking about the human— a misanthropy not fuelled by passion in a traditionally literary sensibility, but rather by claims to truth in a more recognisably scientific mode. It is in this way that Galápagos produces what McGurl describes as “posthuman comedy”, or the representation of the human, most commonly in the genres of science fiction and horror, as being displaced by scales (both maximalist and minimalist) that are radically inhuman. For McGurl, genre fiction offers the opportunity, in its “formulaic flatness”, for a model of  Vonnegut, Galápagos, 16.

29

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

301

representation that bypasses the preoccupation with character that marks literary realism, and instead with “the literalism of science, whose pursuit of objective knowledge, even of intensely ‘human’ things like human cognition, could be described as a kind of antianthropomorphism, an effort to know what is true about the universe behind and beyond the self-­interested projections of the human point of view”.30 Vonnegut’s novel produces such conditions not through modelling scales that appear as totally inexplicable to the human, as shown by McGurl’s analysis of H.P. Lovecraft, but instead by presenting the otherness of scientific literalism itself as character. The posthuman comedy of Galápagos lies in the discordant overlap between both discourses, with Trout’s powers of observation unsettling his role as the witty scribe and narrator of the novel. As Ursula Heise argues, narratives that engage with vast time scales create problems for the novel form, with the obvious “discrepancy between geological or evolutionary time spans to be narrated” and the typical length of the format promoting innovative formal solutions.31 For Vonnegut, such a solution is found not on the side of the cold complexity that scientific literalism might promote, but rather in the satirical sense of inevitability that results from making his narrator an inhabitant of deep time. This is most apparent at the level of text in Trout’s practice of starring the names of characters who will soon die in the narrative; a convention, he notes, designed to alert “readers to the fact that some characters will shortly face the ultimate Darwinian test of strength and wiliness” (24). The biographies of Vonnegut’s characters are prefigured by a textual coding of their evolutionary transience, in a system of signification in which the future is sealed in the technical realm of the written symbol rather than at the “human” level of narrative. But insofar as evolution functions as a formal limitation for meaning in the novel, Trout’s retroactive prophesying is also informed by the absence of meaning he locates in anthroponormative systems of knowledge. These are represented by the figure of Mandarax, a personal computer invented by the cruise passenger Zenji Hiroguchi, which by unlikely accident accompanies the last vestiges of humanity to the Galápagos Islands. Ostensibly a translation device, Mandarax is also loaded with an archive of quotations from figures in human history interspersed throughout the novel alongside Trout’s own aphorisms. Like the earlier passage from Huxley’s collection The Humanist  McGurl, The posthuman comedy, 548.  Heise, Science fiction, 284.

30 31

302 

P. SANDS

Frame (my addition to Vonnegut’s satirical archive), these inserted lines of wisdom often appear self-evidently foolish when filtered through the allknowing lens of Vonnegut’s narrator. The starkest example of this can be found in the novel’s epigraph, for which the first of Mandarax’s quotations is attributed to Anne Frank: “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart” (7). The misanthropy of this moment is found not only in the uncomfortable irony of Frank’s statement, but in Trout’s own mastery over the “everything” it proceeds in spite of—the future given over not to human agency, as techno-­humanists such as Huxley would have it, but instead to inevitable catastrophe and extinction. The passages loaded into Mandarax’s hard drive signify an ironic convergence of the sophistication of humanist knowledge production with the automaticity of a technology that repeats the insights of big-brained thinkers ad infinitum. Yet in addition to proving central to the novel’s posthuman comedy, this politics of information also serves as the way that Vonnegut makes Trout’s misanthropy the object of satire in the novel— underlining, at the same time, the potential for Galápagos to guide a form of posthumanism not wedded to the isolating hopelessness risked by the logics of queer misanthropy, but instead driven by the promise of futures that require, to use Julietta Singh’s phrasing, “less masterful subjectivities”.32 Such a possibility is heralded late in the novel when our narrator is hailed from beyond the grave by his father, the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who castigates his son for remaining fixated on the activities of humanity: “For all your eavesdropping”, Kilgore charges, “you’ve accumulated nothing but information. […] For the sense you can make of all the information you have now, you might as well be Mandarax” (203). Kilgore’s attempt to associate Leon with Mandarax’s automated archive refigures the posthuman comedy of the novel away from its focus on the macrocosmic figure of the human, and towards Leon himself, whose catastrophising observations are undermined somewhat by his own demonstrated curiosity in the lives of Vonnegut’s human characters. Indeed, in a fittingly Lacanian moment, Vonnegut indicates that Leon’s misanthropy may in fact reflect the predilections of his absent father, whose symbolic hold from the realm of the truly dead ultimately fails to persuade his son to abandon his observation of humanity’s evolving remnants. Leon’s mastery over reality is satirically rendered suspect by his own attachment to a present that continues to unfold in complex and unforeseeable ways.  Singh, Unthinking Mastery, 6.

32

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

303

Lateral Comedy The satirical misanthropy of Galápagos troubles the relationship between human identity and the future, attributing the inevitable extinction of human life to the darkly absurd agency of the big brain. Yet to read the novel as solely advancing this critique—through a misanthropy that situates itself, as it were, outside the human—risks missing the extent to which Vonnegut’s narrative remains anchored to its own version of reproductive futurism. Indeed, the bite of Trout’s satire results not from his repeated evolutionary maxims, but from the animal futures that proceed beyond and despite the cataclysmic norms dictated by human maladaptation. In charting this reconfigured futurism, I turn to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose thinking offers a queer framework for persisting in a hostile yet complexly embodied present. More broadly, Galápagos mirrors the tenets of what Grace Dillon describes as “native slipstream”, or the mode of Indigenous futurism that “views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream”.33 Vonnegut’s alignment with Indigenous science fiction, underlined by his enlistment of a narrator who speaks from beyond the grave, reflects the novel’s cultivation of a posthumanism that draws from frameworks of meaning previously disavowed by or excluded from dominant discourses of the human. For Sedgwick, the epistemological trend in critical theory towards paranoid forms of reading—or structural analyses in which the object of critique is pre-diagnosed—supposes a model of inevitability that renders theory incapable of responding to contingencies that may prove illegible to the paranoid frame. Put differently, paranoia obscures the potential for affective strategies of ongoingness in a present that may be both threatening and nourishing; practices of repair attuned to ambivalence, contingency, and survival as a way of living with and within the repressive structures identified by paranoid methods.34 It is such a methodology that leads Ensor, in her reading of Sedgwick, to imagine reparative reading as a way of inhabiting terminality, not as a misanthropic planetary condition welcomed by Malthusian environmentalism, but “as a deeply ethical—and importantly non-normative—practice” that produces an “ethics of temporariness” not as a state concerned with endings, but rather as a space within

 Dillon, Introduction, 3.  Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 123–53.

33 34

304 

P. SANDS

which different ways “to persist and dwell together” can be imagined.35 To read Vonnegut’s novel reparatively is to place misanthropy within the same frame as the ways of being it negates, understanding contempt for the human as an interpretative strategy that must nevertheless maintain a bearing on anthroponormative reality. Indeed, just as queer misanthropy begins itself from within the fantasy of anthroponormativity, a reparative misanthropy might remain situated within this frame, working in productive tension with anthroponormativity to chart ways of being that remain plausible, practicable, and hopeful. In Galápagos, such hope stems from the unlikely evolutionary significance that Vonnegut traces through the banalities of his characters’ lives. For some, such as the duplicitous polygamist James Wait and irresponsible businessman Andrew MacIntosh, moral failure and capitalist greed are channelled into Trout’s transhistorical pessimism, producing individual justifications for his derision of the big brain. Yet in other moments, Trout strays beyond this commitment to inevitability and towards a comedic expansion of evolutionary meaning: If Selena was Nature’s experiment with blindness, then her father was Nature’s experiment with heartlessness. Yes, and Jesús Ortiz was Nature’s experiment with admiration for the rich, and I was Nature’s experiment with insatiable voyeurism, and my father was Nature’s experiment with cynicism, and my mother was Nature’s experiment with optimism, and the Captain of the Bahía de Darwin was Nature’s experiment with ill-founded self-­ confidence, and James Wait was Nature’s experiment with purposeless greed, and Hisako Hiroguchi was Nature’s experiment with depression, and Akiko was Nature’s experiment with furriness, and on and on. (71)

Extending the rubric of evolutionary significance to include flaws, deficiencies, feelings, and the outright incidental, Vonnegut weaves a narrative of survival that occurs despite the agency of the big brain and instead through a series of chance events and fortuitous blunders. Mary Hepburn, a high-school biology teacher, finds herself aboard the Bahía de Darwin to fulfil the dying wishes of her husband Roy, whose inoperable brain cancer produces malfunctions that make him urge Mary to attend. As war breaks out and missiles rain down on Guayaquil, Mary is joined on the ship by a troupe that includes Adolf von Kleist, the captain who does “not  Ensor, Terminal regions, 45–8.

35

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

305

know shit from Shinola about navigation”; a group of girls from the Kanka-bono tribe, a fictional South American Indigenous community themselves perilously close to extinction; and the pregnant Hisako Hiroguchi, whose intergenerational exposure to radiation at Hiroshima destines her to give birth to the mutated Akiko, the first of humanity’s accelerated evolutionary deviations (114). Shielded on the Galápagos Islands from the virus that lays waste to humanity’s remainder, these characters inhabit a future depicted by Trout as a positive departure from the logics of the big brain, defined instead by the slow, creaturely existence of Akiko and her kin, whose capacities for misdoing are hampered by the development of “flippers in which the hand bones are almost entirely imprisoned and immobilised”, and beaks that make it nigh-impossible, Trout notes, “to use tools and build houses and play musical instruments and so on again” (150). Yet this animal horizon, utopian in contrast with the catastrophic epoch of the big brain, appears alongside Vonnegut’s repeated attention to the embodied animal lives of his human and nonhuman characters in the present. Interpreting Lauren Berlant’s conception of “lateral biopolitics” at the intersection of queer theory and extinction studies, Neel Ahuja argues that reproductive futures need not delineate a straightforward privileging of “life” in a linear anthropocentric capacity, in opposition to the kind of “death” that functions in Edelman’s work as a figure for the refusal of normativity’s operations.36 Rather, for Ahuja, lateral reproduction names a form of relationality that encompasses assemblages of actors, human and nonhuman, that through their atmospheric attachments combine to bring new forms of reality into being. Crucially, these queer relationships—for they are lateral, rather than linear, and oriented towards no preordained norm—can be simultaneously sustaining and harmful, producing in Ahuja’s case study ecological interactions between humans, mosquitos, toxins, and figurations of race that interrupt “anthropocentric body logics and space-time continuums”.37 Lateral reproduction describes futures that exist immanently in the present, producing forms of attachment that underwrite the norms that may previously have constituted the limits of intelligibility. While Trout’s future-based narration is structured to disrupt causality and reiterate inevitability, Vonnegut also allows us to perceive him as trapped within an unending and unreliable present. In the final pages of  Ahuja, Intimate atmospheres, 368.  Ibid., 372.

36 37

306 

P. SANDS

the novel, we discover that Trout has recorded the narrative with his finger, in mid-air: “Does it trouble me to write so insubstantially”, he reflects, “with air on air? Well—my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote” (233). Much like Mandarax’s ironic proverbs, Trout’s own system of knowledge is ephemeral, providing a perspective that ultimately functions not in opposition to anthroponormative futurism, but in and around such a futurism: a form of lateral comedy built on Trout’s ambient presence in the narrative. Indeed, the impermanence of Vonnegut’s narrator ties him to the condition of temporariness experienced by the human characters of the novel. For Mary’s husband Roy, whose deathbed ramblings see him lament the fact that without children the Hepburns are “but fruitless, leafless twigs on the tree of evolution”, the brief lives of humans are defined by knowledge of their own ineptitude, with the human soul named as “the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right” (42–3). Roy’s terminal condition even leads to a meditation on interspecies violence, as he hallucinates an embellished vision of the US government’s use of animals in nuclear weapons testing, participating in the sacrifice of “peacocks and snow leopards and gorillas and crocodiles and albatrosses” on a Pacific atoll (40). Roy’s fantasy about the fates of these “so-called lower animals” echoes Sedgwick’s assertion that for the paranoid reader, “no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new”.38 The case for the paranoid style of Trout’s pessimism here is clear: Roy’s dream, while premised upon an expanded menagerie that also includes his own golden retriever Donald, still reflects the basic realities of the US government’s sacrificial testing regime during the cold war.39 But the dream also  Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 146.  As Joseph Masco notes, the sacrifice of pigs and other animals was commonplace in US nuclear testing programmes, with animals positioned at various proximities to blasts in order to model the effects of radiation and shrapnel injuries. As Masco argues, the “body of the Cold Warrior, increasingly rendered as cyborg in the cockpit of planes and other military machines, was thus prefigured by the vapourised, mutilated, and traumatised animal body”. Beyond such animal sacrifices, Masco emphasises the disproportionate effects of nuclear testing on Indigenous North Americans and Marshallese Islanders, many of whom were displaced from their homes, exposed to lethal levels of nuclear radiation, and made to reckon with the toxic legacies of nuclear waste. The invisible toxic risks produced by nuclear colonialism are reflected in Vonnegut’s novel in the experience of the Kanka-bono girls, whose “parents had all been killed by insecticides sprayed from the air”. See Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands, 156–309 and Vonnegut, Galápagos, 125. 38 39

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

307

signals the simultaneous reparative element to Vonnegut’s satire that functions by associating animal life (including the human’s own) with a positive construction of evolutionary failure. When we meet Mary, Vonnegut presents a character “cursing her own brain sotto voce for the advice it was giving her, which was to commit suicide” (28). Lamenting “the terrible enemy inside of me”, Mary compares her condition to the extinct Irish Elk, whose antlers, despite being “the size of ballroom chandeliers” and preventing the animals from seeking food, Mary would rather possess than her own brain (28–9). Throughout the novel, the evolutionary flaws of such animals are reflected in the traits that push Vonnegut’s characters towards anything but survival. Andrew MacIntosh, “despite his exhibitionistic sexuality and his mania for claiming as his own property as many of the planet’s life-support systems as possible”, has surprisingly little interest, Trout notes, in the survival scheme of reproduction (67). In the end, MacIntosh is prevented from further reproducing not through his own reluctance, but through being shot in the back by Geraldo Delgado, a soldier with his own paranoid delusions. A door left ajar by Delgado paves the way for the Kanka-bono girls to board the Bahía de Darwin and ultimately inherit the evolutionary future of Vonnegut’s novel, thereby justifying Trout’s claim: “if he had not burglarised that shop, there would almost certainly be no human beings on the face of the earth today” (122). With this matrix of malfunction, Vonnegut constructs something closely resembling what Sedgwick, quoting correspondence with Joseph Litvak, describes as the reparative practice of “taking the terror out of error, […] making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful”.40 Driven by the creaturely contingencies of human and nonhuman animals, the power of failure finds important expression in the evolutionary adaptions of several animals found in the Galápagos. For the flightless cormorant, failure to fly is translated into a peculiarly local model of evolutionary success, with Vonnegut’s descriptions of the birds’ fishing techniques and ungainly bodies demonstrating particular attention to the embodied expression of evolution’s ironies. Great frigatebirds and blue-­ footed boobies, meanwhile, exhibit behaviours that cannot be assimilated into narratives of reproductive survival. Describing the mating dance of the blue-footed booby, shown on film to her students, Mary asks a probing set of questions:

 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 147.

40

308 

P. SANDS

And that brings us back to the really deep mystery of the blue-footed boobies’ courtship dance, which seems to have absolutely no connection with the elements of booby survival, with nesting or fish. What does it have to do with, then? Dare we call it “religion”? Or, if we lack that sort of courage, might we at least call it “art”? (91–2)

This depiction of booby behaviour beyond the drives of reproductivity— yet “supremely erotic all the same”—introduces a lateral counterforce to Trout’s regular determinism (89). While the mating dance marks an emblem of linear evolutionary progress for big-brained scientists, who name the routine “sky-pointing” after “the moment when the beaks of both birds were pointed in the direction exactly opposite to the pull of gravity”, Mary is drawn instead to the imperceptible spectacle of the dance, which exhibits an intensity that offers nothing of meaning to reproductive time (89). In the case of the great frigatebird mating display, which resembles “an enormous party for human children, at which every child had received a red balloon”, the birds’ inflated gular pouches produce an aesthetic impulse that prompts Vonnegut to look laterally towards the resemblances conjured by the display, rather than forward to an evolutionary telos conjured by the norm of reproductive survival (91). Untethering evolution from the future and recasting it towards the excesses of an animal present, Vonnegut ties his narrative to the forces of a sexual selection which, in Elizabeth Grosz’s words, “unhinges, deranges, and complicates survival for the sake of intensification”.41 Such forces ultimately give rise to the lateral forms of reproduction that ensure humanity’s animal future in Galápagos. After the occupants of the ship are stranded on Santa Rosalia, Mary conducts an experiment suggested by her big brain, which involves transferring the captain’s sperm into the body of a Kanka-bono woman unbeknownst to either party (153). With this act of “rash, inexplicable, irresponsible, plain crazy” liberty, Mary facilitates a reproductive future in which intent, agency, and design give way to circumstance (214). But the lateral evolution of Vonnegut’s novel is located not just in the narrative design that privileges malfunction and c­ ontingency, but in the consideration for the intensive lives of animals that such a lateral focus reveals. Beyond the frigatebirds, boobies, and cormorants, Vonnegut is concerned throughout the narrative with the creaturely proclivities and vulnerabilities of his animal characters. Kazakh the seeing-eye dog,  Grosz, Becoming Undone, 171.

41

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

309

companion to the blind passenger Selena MacIntosh, is depicted as unfairly detached from her canine compulsions, never barking, playing, or investigating interesting smells or noises because “big-brained human beings had showed her hate and withheld food whenever she did any of those things” (45). Elsewhere, Mary compares herself to the Galápagos giant tortoise, the vulnerabilities of which were exploited by sailors who would store the defenceless animals alive on their backs aboard ships to keep their meat fresh. And in repetition of such cruelties, Vonnegut depicts the final days of a dairy cow, hoisted aboard a neighbouring ship subsequently destroyed by missiles destined for the Bahía de Darwin. The cow is suspended from a crane in a position ill-suited to the “evolutionary process which had produced this huge mammal”, meaning that her neck comes to “resemble that of a blue-footed booby or swan, or flightless cormorant”, before her meat is preserved in much the same manner (171). Such attention to the ethical lives of animals, as channelled through the satirical evolutionary lens of Trout’s narration, forms an important part of the lateral comedy of Galápagos. Crucially, what I have described as the reparative turn in Vonnegut’s novel does not contradict the misanthropy through which Galápagos problematises the systems of meaning that anchor the human to the idea of the future. Rather, Vonnegut’s radically negative, reparative, and lateral visions of misanthropy combine to depict a dynamic vision of hope and hopelessness that, far from the pernicious imperatives found in the strands of environmentalism with which this chapter began, declares the necessity for a different way of representing the human’s position in time amid planetary crises. This is, in one regard, a call to dislodge the “human” that so often sits at the centre of narratives of catastrophe, inhabiting calls to save the world as a master signifier for reproductive futures that remain anthroponormative. But in a more specific sense, Vonnegut’s satire asks us to inhabit the insides of anthroponormativity in order to chart routes away from its condition from within; dwelling with its failures, observing the attachments it sustains, and directing its reproductive impulses away from the death drive of its terminal futures. In depicting reproduction as lateral, Vonnegut orients us towards the intensities, affects, and contingencies that make the human animal— and underlines the potentials for modes of relating that such an animality allows. Galápagos imagines a form of futurism that need not exclusively disavow the masterful human subject, but rather denature its exclusive hold over the future as an object of knowledge and hope. As such, the novel

310 

P. SANDS

facilitates a posthumanism that can be informed not only by the productive tension between queer pessimism and optimism, but by Indigenous futurisms that address the category of the human as a site from which futures have been denied to native populations. Indeed, while the depiction of the Kanka-bono tribe as inheritors of humanity’s evolutionary future illustrates the novel’s alliance to Indigenous systems of meaning other to and older than Western humanism, this is better illustrated still by Vonnegut’s satire on the big brain as a comedically universal condition that falters when viewed through the “spiralling temporality”, to adapt Kyle P. Whyte’s phrasing, of Trout’s narration.42 The comparison between Vonnegut’s novel and Indigenous science fiction illustrates the necessity for accounts of hopeful futurism in the environmental humanities that dispense with temporalities of crisis and universalising depictions of the human, and instead imagine time scales in which forward motion “can be both predictable and irregular”.43 More broadly, the novel’s treatment of hopeful futures engages ongoing discussions on the role of comedy in contemporary fiction’s response to biodiversity loss, extinction, and climate crisis. Critiquing Heise’s privileging of macrocosmic articulations of optimism in environmental texts, John Miller argues instead for comedy’s capacity to highlight the creaturely dimensions of extinction, “which is to say extinction’s arrival through the pain and death of individual sentient beings with an urgent interest in their own survival”.44 As Sarah Bezan notes, Vonnegut’s novel highlights the totemism often assumed by the figure of the endling, the groups that make up the last of their species, whereby the lives and deaths of individual animals are transmuted into new forms of significance within extinction iconographies.45 If Galápagos allows for an optimistic assessment of the futures of extinction, it is precisely through undermining such symbolic fantasies, reorienting our perception instead towards the i­ ntensive lives of individuals and their incompatibility with rubrics of evolutionary progress. Quoth Trout, and quoth Darwin, whose thought is plucked from the balmy atmosphere: “Progress has been much more general than retrogression” (233). Such is the animal norm of Vonnegut’s satire.  Whyte, Indigenous science (fiction), 228.  Ibid., 229. 44  Miller, Last Chance to See, 608. 45  Bezan, Endling taxidermy, 212. 42 43

18  “THANKS A LOT, BIG BRAIN”: SATIRICAL MISANTHROPY IN KURT… 

311

Works Cited Ahuja, Neel. 2015. Intimate atmospheres: Queer theory in a time of extinctions. GLQ 21: 365–385. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-­2843227. Benson, Etienne. 2020. Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Bezan, Sarah. 2019. The endling taxidermy of Lonesome George: Iconographies of extinction at the end of the line. Configurations 27: 211–238. https://doi. org/10.1353/con.2019.0013. Caracciolo, Marco. 2018. Posthuman narration as a test bed for experientiality: The case of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos. Partial Answers 16: 303–314. https:// doi.org/10.1353/pan.2018.0021. Dean, Tim. 2006. The antisocial homosexual. PMLA 121: 826–828. Dillon, Grace L. 2012. Imagining Indigenous futurisms. In Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, ed. Grace L. Dillon, 1–15. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Ensor, Sarah. 2016. Terminal regions: Queer ecocriticism at the end. In Against Life, ed. Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, 41–62. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke University Press. Heise, Ursula K. 2019. Science fiction and the time scales of the Anthropocene. ELH 86: 275–304. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2019.0015. Huxley, Julian. 1961. The Humanist Frame. In The Humanist Frame, ed. Julian Huxley, 11–49. New York: Harper. Knight, Les U. 1991. These Exit Times no. 1: 1–8. Accessed November 1, 2021. https://www.environmentandsociety.org/mml/these-­exit-­times-­no-­1. Krieg, C. Parker. 2021. From scale to antagonism: Reading the human in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos. In Close Reading the Anthropocene, ed. Helena Feder, 175–190. London: Routledge. Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-­ Cold War New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McGurl, Mark. 2012. The posthuman comedy. Critical Inquiry 38: 533–553. https://doi.org/10.1086/664550. ———. 2017. Gigantic realism: The rise of the novel and the comedy of scale. Critical Inquiry 43: 403–430. https://doi.org/10.1086/689661. Miller, John. 2021. Last Chance to See: Extinction in Literary Animal Studies and the Environmental Humanities. In The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller, 605–620. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

312 

P. SANDS

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Pardee, Sheila. 2015. Drifting and foundering: Evolutionary theory in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos. DQR Studies in Literature 57: 249–265. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham: Duke University Press. Tyler, Tom. 2014. Misanthropy without humanity. Paradoxa 26: 239–245. ———. 2021. The exception and the norm: Dimensions of anthropocentrism. In The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller, 15–36. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Vonnegut, Kurt. 1994. Galápagos. London: Flamingo. Whyte, Kyle P. 2018. Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1: 224–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 2514848618777621.

CHAPTER 19

“Dogs are supposed to be able to instinctively live with purpose”: Brian, Family Guy, and the Inevitable Anthropocentrism of Satire Brett Mills

In the episode “Stewie, Chris and Brian’s Excellent Adventure”1 of the animated comedy series Family Guy (Fox, 1999–) Stewie (Seth MacFarlane), Chris (Seth Green), and Brian (Seth MacFarlane) travel through time to help Chris revise for his upcoming history test at school. They are an odd group; while Chris is a typical teenage boy bumbling aimlessly through his life, Brian is a walking, talking anthropomorphic dog and Stewie is a genius, maniacal baby, and the inventor of the time machine

1

 Family Guy, Series 13, episode 7.

B. Mills (*) Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_19

313

314 

B. MILLS

they are using for their adventure. They are all members of the Griffin family, and the programme depicts their adventures alongside the rest of the family (father Peter [Seth MacFarlane], mother Lois [Alex Borstein], and daughter Meg [Mila Kunis]) and the variety of inhabitants in fictional Quahog, Rhode Island, USA, where they live. As part of their time travels, at Brian’s request the three visit the laboratory of Ivan Pavlov, the Russian scientist renowned for his work on physiological and psychological conditioning, whose most famous study involved training dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Stewie, Chris, and Brian arrive in the laboratory and see rows of undernourished, shaking dogs, and witness Pavlov experimenting on an animal. Brian angrily shouts at Pavlov, “You dog-teasing dick, how’s this for positive reinforcement?” He grabs one of the bells, and beats him to a pulp with it. He then spits in Pavlov’s bloodied face, before returning to the time machine and disappearing off with Stewie and Chris to another period in history. This 30-second scene neatly encapsulates much of the comic intent of Family Guy. The series is characterised by short, cut-away gags, often with little relation to the dominant narrative, with a grotesquery to its violence that results in it being categorised as “brazen”, “subversive”, and indicative of “a shift in comic sensibility [in the 1990s] towards cynicism, irony and often stringent parody”.2 But the sequence also exemplifies something important about Family Guy’s depiction of Brian, the family dog. In recontextualising Pavlov’s work from a milestone in human science to animal abuse worthy of violent reprisal, Brian can be seen to trouble anthropocentric understandings of human–animal relations in satirical ways. In these moments, Brian disrupts the “anthropocentric bias”3 normalised in human-centred cultures, which typically serve to shape the construction of narratives in terms of consensual human viewpoints. What renders this short scene satirical—as opposed to merely humorous—is that it “relies upon humor to expose both human and institutional failures”,4 functioning “to persuade an audience that something or someone is reprehensible or ridiculous”5 and to critique “the tyranny of unquestioned authority”.6 However, there is something particular about Brian’s satiric purposes,  Sandler, Synergy, 90; Larson, Re-drawing, 60; Mundy and White, Laughing, 164.  Herman, Narratology, 52. 4  Morris, Satire, 377. 5  Griffin, Satire, 1. 6  Freedman, Offensive, 166. 2 3

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

315

given that satire is often understood as having “humanitarian”7 goals; what does satire become when it instead troubles the anthropocentrism that underpins humanitarian ideas? By serving to invite Family Guy’s viewers to reconceptualise their engagement with the programme’s world through the lens of an animal character, Brian enables satire that interrogates and troubles anthropocentric understandings of the world. That Brian can serve as entry point to such satiric reformulations can be seen in his appearances in the two short cartoons made by the creator of Family Guy, Seth McFarlane, which pre-empt the later series: Larry and Steve (1997) and The Life of Larry (1995). Both feature a man and his dog not unlike Family Guy’s Peter and Brian, though here they are named Larry and Steve respectively. While Larry is an ignorant, thoughtless buffoon, it is Steve who actively engages with the world, reflecting cynically on both the stupidity of modern life and how he is treated as a dog. Indeed, Larry and Steve begins with Steve in a dog pound ruminating morosely on the fact that he’s about to be euthanised, pleading with human visitors to rescue him. While all other humans understand his communication as barks, Larry hears him speak English, and Steve is thus able to persuade Larry to adopt him. So while most animals “cannot use language to resist how they have been discursively constructed”,8 Steve’s ability to speak in ways legitimised by the human culture in which he is entrapped saves his life. While Brian in Family Guy is considerably less cynical than Steve in Larry and Steve and The Life of Larry, it is clear from the outset that the comic potential embedded within this dog–human anthropomorphic character resides in his duality, where he is both human and animal at the same time without ever definitively settling in either category. Kathryn Perry outlines the history and conventions of animal–human hybrid representations in early modern literature, arguing that their satirical potential lies in “the game of playing with recognized animal attributes, making apt, unlikely, or outrageous correspondences with human types or behaviors”.9 Although in contemporary societies this might be seen as problematic because it undermines assumptions of human superiority and uniqueness, at other moments in history human–animal representations took on meanings “demonstrating similitude and dissimilitude  Quintero, Introduction, 3.  Stibbe, Erased, 19. 9  Perry, Unpicking, 19. 7 8

316 

B. MILLS

with bewildering variety”.10 The pleasures offered by this kind of animal representation are, however, “slippery”,11 inviting (human) readers to see human–animal comparisons as productive tools for examination of species-­ based norms, but never fully able to coalesce into rigid and definitive statements of fact or satirical meaning. For Steve Baker there is a “funniness in animal representation” because it allows for “a release from the usual constraints of meaning”.12 Such constraints can be loosened further in animation, which—as a form with a particular capacity to transgress human–animal boundaries in representation—can depict “some degree of parity between human consciousness and animal consciousness, human emotion and animal emotion”.13 There is therefore potential in animation for the acknowledgement that “domesticated animals are capable of forming relations with humans that allow them to manifest a subjective good, to cooperate, and to participate—in short, to be citizens”.14 Brian’s anger at Pavlov, as well as his performance of liberal politics, depicts him as a citizen of the world certain of his right to enact change. Moreover, in a powerful repudiation of the normalisation of citizenship as a human-only category, this often arises from his perspective as a dog. This indicates the liberatory potential of anthropomorphism as a representational technique, and animation’s propensity to draw on anthropomorphism suggests it is a powerful mode for troubling anthropocentrism. Paul Wells distinguishes four different kinds of anthropomorphised animal representations: 1. the “pure ‘animal’” which “is represented only through known animal traits and behaviors”; 2. the “aspirational human” in which an animal’s characteristics are “used as a tool by which to demonstrate favorable human qualities”; 3. the “critical human” in which “the animal character is used to critique humankind”; 4. “hybrid ‘humanimality’” that draws on ideas that “define and explain both the human and animal world”.15  Ibid., 22.  Ibid., 30. 12  Baker, Picturing, 23. 13  Malamud, Americans, 90. 14  Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis, 105. 15  Wells, The Animated Bestiary, pp. 51–52, italics in original. 10 11

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

317

Brian’s satirical potential rests on his movement between these categories; indeed, what Family Guy often offers up for humour is Brian’s shifting from one of these modes to another. So, while he spends most of his time aligned with typical human representations, he often engages in “typical” dog behaviour (barking at the mailman, chasing birds, dropping to all fours, and running around in circles when excited) which the series presents as comic evidence of his inescapable, innate dog-ness. Repeatedly, the programme indicates the porous nature of these categories and thus the flimsiness of human–animal distinctions. Indeed, the impossibility of being fully and permanently placed in either of these categories is perhaps Brian’s most important and powerful satirical characteristic. Brian is thus, for the most part, situated within Wells’s fourth category, “hybrid ‘humanimality’”. In visual terms, he is to be understood both in human and in animal terms; and it is important that each of these is not distinct, but blended into a whole where they sit comfortably in relation to one another. His body shape and size align him with a tradition of cartoon dogs, and he is coloured differently from the series’ human characters, rendering him distinct. Family Guy episodes often begin with the family sitting together watching television, and while the human characters sit upright on the sofa or on the floor, it is not uncommon for Brian to be lying down curled up, clearly indicating “dog”. Perhaps his most obvious “animal” element is his tail; while his other animal bodily shapes (e.g. his large ears and nose) might be comprehensible in human terms, his tail is more clearly “canine”, sometimes apparently acting involuntarily (see below). But such aspects of design also appear alongside representational strategies that indicate “human”, intersecting animal-ness with human-ness. So, Brian typically walks on his back two legs, adopting a form of movement that is so normative that “energetically efficient bipedal posturing”16 is understood as a defining characteristic of humans as a species-­category. He has opposable thumbs such that his paws are drawn identically to the hands of the recognisably human characters. This means he is both quintessentially human and animal. Indeed, animation is a form in which these happily sit side-by-side in an image that is unproblematic within conventions of cartoons but which would be largely incoherent or incomprehensible outside of this context. And this allows Brian to function as a satirical tool because he sits in both the “human” and the

 Tuttle, Apes, 230.

16

318 

B. MILLS

“non-human” categories simultaneously, while also residing in a third that is neither and is instead “hybrid”. This hybridity offers significant representational potential, but anthropomorphism occupies a complex cultural space. While this term is denotatively neutral, Claire Parkinson shows that the “denigration” of it “has a rich history” intended “as a move which reassures human exceptionalism”.17 So powerful is this cultural norm that it results in non-human animals being denied characteristics they may hold precisely in order to reformulate multi-species attributes as human-only, a process Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial”.18 The question here, though, is not whether animals do or do not have abilities humans are keen to preserve as their own; it is instead the representational potential of anthropomorphism if it is understood as a tool that might engage empathy, offer alternative representations, or trouble cultural assumptions. So, for Parkinson, “the animal-shaped human proxies that populate our screens also force us to confront some difficult questions about their affective appeals and mobilising potential”.19 This potential could arise precisely from the “discomfort” anthropomorphism engenders, or its ability to invite (human) audiences to consider the “animal experience”.20 Anthropomorphism therefore enables “the possibility of recognising or discovering new kinds of human–animal continuity”.21 By this account, Brian’s anthropomorphic nature thus becomes a critical site of human–animal engagement, and having a paw in both the human and the animal worlds is precisely what makes him satirically powerful. The potential for such “critical anthropomorphism”22 is related to Brian’s status as an animated character. As Wells demonstrates, the “sense of ambiguity or ambivalence in the language of animation”23 renders it a medium rife with multi-species potential. This involves “animation’s frequent use of animal personae”,24 perhaps best exemplified by Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and so on. There is, then, an “illustrative

 Parkinson, Mediated, 17, 18.  de Waal, Anthropomorphism. 19  Parkinson, Mediated, 18. 20  Ibid., 20, 27. 21  Tyler, If horses, 24. 22  Guyer, Critical. 23  Wells, Animated, 3. 24  Stephens, Animating, 207. 17 18

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

319

tradition”25 out of which a character such as Brian emerges, and which is drawn upon both by the production team when rendering him and by audiences when making sense of the programme. Examples in anthropomorphic animation include “front-facing positions for the eyes; making the characters bipedal; giving them human-like mouth expressions”.26 Noting that others have critiqued this tradition as evidence of humans’ power over non-humans, Wells instead argues “that animation demonstrates an intrinsic respect” for non-humans when it engages with the potential of “animal identity”.27 Importantly, though, a tension persists in such representations between “the anthropomorphic intentions and outlook of the characters” and “what simplistically may be called recognizably true animal actions, behavior, and primal motivation”.28 For example, Brian’s attack on Pavlov can be rendered in animation only because the form is simultaneously anthropomorphic (Brian’s use of speech, and his oppositional thumbs enabling him to pick up a bell and use it as a weapon) and animal-focused (Brian’s desire to seek revenge on Pavlov on behalf of dogs overall). This means that while animated anthropomorphism may offer satiric potential able to critique anthropocentrism and depict utopian ideas of “interspecies community”,29 its comic force nevertheless remains wedded to notions of “intrinsic” animal-ness, which is usually species-­ based. This is particularly acute for Brian, who—in comparison to many other characters in Family Guy—commits to liberal ideas and often condones the immoral behaviour of the humans he lives with. The Pavlov scene, however, indicates that Brian’s animal-ness is never far from the surface, and able to motivate violent, bloody, vengeful behaviour. So while this anthropomorphic depiction might in many cases invite human audiences to recognise affinities with Brian, Family Guy also polices this possibility by offering up an intrinsic animal-ness that, it suggests, Brian can never truly escape. But Brian is not a generic animal; he is a dog (albeit an anthropomorphised one). It is not that he is an animal–human hybrid; he is a dog– human hybrid, and his dog-ness is central to how he is represented. Susan McHugh notes, “[T]he central cultural work of dogs in complicating  Wells, Animated, 7.  Dydynski and Mäekivi, Impacts, 756. 27  Wells, Animated, 11. 28  Ibid., 22. 29  Haworth, A family of wolves, 122. 25 26

320 

B. MILLS

rather than resolving questions of representation”30 precisely because the variety of sizes, shapes, colours, and breeds that dogs can come in, as well as their interspecies breeding,31 makes it difficult to define what “dog” means. There is an interesting contradiction here between the unending scientific complexity of defining “dog” and the common-sensical and unquestioned way the term is used in everyday practice. Brian is clearly a dog: but what kind of a dog? It is easier to say what he is definitely not (e.g. he’s not a Chihuahua, or a Great Dane) than what he is. The programme itself is unsure, with differing episodes including assertions that he is either a Labrador or a Beagle.32 That this characteristic is undefined— and impossible to resolve simply by looking at Brian or his behaviours— evidences how far “dog” can function as an unproblematic representational tool in animation. Indeed, Brian is often referred to as “Brian the dog”; his species-category both marked in a manner unlikely for humans, yet imprecise. His dog-ness matters, and his satirical potential is reliant upon this baggy yet culturally normalised categorisation, whereby the programme’s humour relies on normative societal understandings of “dogs”, rather than the specificities of breeds or individual dogs. Brian is thus an individual (“Brian”) and a species-category (“the dog”), a conflation common in anthropocentric culture’s usage of animal representations that nods towards individuality while simultaneously reducing all animal characters to their species-category. Important here are distinctions between visual representation and narrative representation. That is, anthropomorphism may reside in how an animal character looks, in how a character behaves, in how the characters function in terms of narrative, or in a combination of these. Importantly, these different components may also run counter to one another. Brian’s walking upright on two legs might well visually trouble human–animal distinctions, but this could be entirely undercut by the narratives within which he appears and the functions he fulfils within them. While he is clearly understood by the other characters in the programme as a dog, they remain untroubled by the fact that he speaks human language and engages in other activities usually not associated with animals, such as  McHugh, Dog, 9.   Dziech, Identification; Gabriele-Rivet, Brookes, Stephens, Arsenault and Ward, Hybridisation. 32  See the Family Guy episodes “Road to the Multiverse” (series 18, episode 1) and “Fecal Matters” (series 19, episode 10); though the latter also suggests Brian is 1% cat. 30 31

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

321

driving a car. Much of the satirical force of Family Guy’s employment of Brian is directed at mocking things typically understood as existing only in the human world. For example, he espouses simplistic liberal views, yet repeatedly behaves in ways contrary to them. His choice of car—a Prius— is ridiculed as the kind of gestural liberalism that prioritises symbolic virtue over genuine action. This positioning in the human world is also expressed in his accent and dialect which take the form of a bland American English quite different from the more exaggerated, “cartoony”, regional voices of the human characters. For many of the programme’s narratives, then, Brian functions in a manner comparable to the human characters, despite the fact that, visually, his design marks him as recognisably different and non-human. Again, this tension sits comfortably within traditions of animation and so is unlikely to trouble the programme’s audiences, belying the medium’s potential for rupturing species-based norms dominant in human cultures. This is complicated further by Family Guy’s episodic nature, resulting in a representational corpus made up of hundreds of individual episodes produced over decades. Episodic television troubles notions of narrative analysis formulated for literature or film, in which it is usually possible to conceptualise a story’s totality and the pleasures offered arise from the knowledge that there will, in the end, be “closure”.33 While individual episodes for television series may have “closure”, this does not indicate the end of the narrative for the characters return in subsequent reiterations with no implication that there cannot be an infinite number of episodes. This renders difficult delineating what any character representation might mean, for its status within a particular scene or episode might be entirely incongruous with an episode many years later. For example, the violence Brian enacts against Pavlov is never mentioned again, and some of its comic force and satirical import rests on it being out of character relative to his depiction in other episodes. Family Guy’s reliance on short scenes often unrelated—or, at least, inessential—to the larger narrative complicates matters further here; the episode “Stewie, Chris and Brian’s Excellent Adventure” would still make narrative sense without the Pavlov scene, and the scene itself has an internal comic logic that does not necessarily require knowledge of the episode it is part of. This hybridity is weighted in different ways at different times, and it is at points where the human overpowers the animal, or vice versa, or the  Carroll, Narrative.

33

322 

B. MILLS

two come into conflict, that Brian’s comic function within Family Guy becomes apparent. For example, in the episode “A Fistful of Meg”34 Brian is disgusted when Peter, after a shower, shamelessly dries himself off in front of Brian. When Brian complains, Peter replies, “Who cares? You’re my dog. Everybody gets naked in front of their dog. Besides, you’re always naked.” This comic narrative works in contradictory ways, for while Brian’s disgust could be read as legitimate, Peter’s lack of bodily inhibition could be read as satirising social repressions concerning corporeality. What renders it significant is that Peter justifies his behaviour entirely on the fact that Brian is a dog, implying that the logic he is working from does not apply in human–human interactions. This is a comic moment dependent on the mutable ways in which Brian is categorised; whereas his demands for certain social rules evidence a desire to be treated on human terms, Peter’s response instead reasserts Brian’s animal-ness. Throughout the episode, Peter continues to flaunt his body at Brian, exploiting his embarrassment rather than offering genuine consideration. In the end, Brian is only able to escape this treatment through an excessive display of his animal-­ness; he shaves all his fur off, moving from a form of animal nudity Peter understands to one he has never considered. Without his fur, Brian is revealed to be a grotesque, scrawny, saggy being, offering none of the cuddly, furry pleasures that dogs are required by humans to fulfil. His appearance is so appalling that Chris scratches his own eyes out and Peter capitulates to Brian’s demands that he temper his nudity. For the viewer, too, Brian’s appearance is assumed to be repulsive, indicating how Family Guy sits alongside much contemporary adult animation that aligns “lewd and satirical”35 content. That Brian’s de-furred body should cause such distress to those he lives with satirises the hypocritical and self-serving expectations many humans place upon animals they deem legitimate to be categorised as pets, with his move from pet-ness to creatureliness disrupting the norms of behaviour expected of domesticated animals. It also indicates the inconsistent ways in which nakedness is conceptualised in animation,36 in which Brian’s fur is here depicted as comparable to Peter’s clothes. Brian’s resistance—and the fact that he wins—points to a potential for animal empowerment in animation, in which the successful resolution of the story affirms the animal’s point of view. Yet it also indicates the  Family Guy, series 12, episode 4.  Mittell, Genre, 78. 36  Wells, You can see, 106. 34 35

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

323

extent to which animals are ensnared in human cultures, in that rendering himself disgusting and repulsive is the only way Brian can convince a family who purport to care for him to acquiesce to his demands. The categorisation of some animal characteristics as repellent is presented in contradictory ways throughout Family Guy. After all, in many episodes, Brian has romantic and sexual relationships with other characters, and these are overwhelmingly human. Yet whereas bestiality is an act usually understood as “immoderate”, “unnatural”, or “shocking”,37 the programme does not construct these relationships as problematic or even highlight their interspecies nature. However, Brian’s dog-ness can persist as a problem. In “The Blind Side”38 Brian dates a woman—Kate—who is blind. Only when they have already been on a number of dates does Kate reveal that she hates dogs, whereupon Brian realises that she does not know he is one. The rest of the episode comedically explores Brian’s attempts to hide his dog-ness from her, such as refusing to let her touch him, which would reveal he is covered in fur. When Brian is forced into meeting Kate’s sighted parents, he arrives covered in bandages, pretending he has been in an accident, in order to prevent them from seeing his true self. His deception is unearthed during the family meal when Brian’s excitement causes his tail to wag noisily. Kate later states that she would have accepted Brian as a dog, but cannot accept his lying to her, meaning her rejection of him stems not from interspecies disgust or revulsion about bestiality, but on the basis of interpersonal morality. A comparable story reliant on Brian’s uncertain species-category status is “Brokeback Swanson”39 in which he has an affair with a married woman (Tori) but is able to convince the woman’s husband (Vic) that he is no threat by behaving as a dog whenever he is around. For the rest of the episode, then, Brian has to negotiate the animal and human aspects of his character, drawing on each when appropriate and successfully maintaining the affair through this manipulation. This could categorise the narrative as belonging to “stories of canine-human intimacy [that] enable the kinds of critical assessment and creative dismantling of the interlocking structures of oppression”40 within which animals are enmeshed; it instead depicts the extent to which Brian remains vulnerable to human whims. For when Tori  Brown, Homeless, 85.  Family Guy, series 10, episode 11. 39  Family Guy, series 14, episode 8. 40  McHugh, Bitch, 617. 37 38

324 

B. MILLS

ends the affair, Vic ties Brian up in their backyard. Here his success in presenting a façade of being “just a dog” entraps him, and humans’ power over animals is emphatically reasserted. Both these episodes helpfully indicate the satirical potential in Brian’s fluctuating status within species categorisations. His ability to exceed his dog-ness enables him to have a relationship with Kate; but the ability to exceed his human-ness enables an affair with Tori. His status as an “aspirational human” is enacted with Kate to the extent that his aim is to convince her that he is entirely human, and this aspiration is dependent upon his behaviour and actions, which are here detached from his visual representation (which she cannot access). Thus the episodes could be read as offering up satire that indicates how species identities are cultural performances rather than biological certainties, with Brian able to draw on the multiple schemas within which he sits in order to engage in relationships. While it is certainly the case that the narratives of these episodes offer this up for pleasure, it is important to note that eventually Brian’s schemes fail and he is, in effect, punished by the series for this behaviour. Neither of the relationships last beyond the episode, and Brian’s ability to move across and within the cultural categories that define him does not lead to a happy ending. Furthermore, the programme most fundamentally reasserts Brian’s animal status and indicates his lack of power as a result of this. In “The Blind Side”, it is the revelation that Brian is a dog that causes the end of his relationship, and even though Kate indicates she would have been able to overcome her prejudice towards dogs, this issue would not have arisen at all had Brian been entirely human. In “Brokeback Swanson” Brian is disempowered by categorised fully as a dog, and reduced to being tied up in a yard with no agency over his actions. Indeed, he is only able to leave in the end because Stewie rescues him, in a narrative conclusion that indicates the extent to which animals—even when they trouble human–animal distinctions—remain dependent upon human agency for their freedom. In his repeated desire to establish a long-term relationship, Brian seeks to align himself with normative ideas of monogamous coupling, which is “one of the objects given to use by heterosexual culture”.41 This means that while Family Guy offers up localised moments of satirical commentary on sex, romance, and human–animal relations, its narratives remain wedded to traditional ideas, basing Brian’s unhappiness in his inability to  Schippers, Beyond, 3.

41

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

325

achieve conservative norms. Even more than this, these are stories in which Brian is required to learn a lesson (even if his behaviour in subsequent episodes shows this lesson has since been forgotten). And that lesson is that he is a visitor in the human world whose presence is dependent on behaviours that meet human expectations. As such, Family Guy always finally capitulates to an anthropocentric perspective in its closing moments, with Brian forever marginalised in terms of the (human) cultural norms he aims to emulate, his dog-ness always outweighing his human-ness or hybridity. Brian’s status as a pet is crucial here. He is not just a dog; he is a pet dog. The pet is a particular formulation of animal categorisation, with specific implications for human–animal interactions and relations of power. For Erica Fudge, making an animal into a pet is a process that enables the existence of those animals as “quasi-humans”,42 comparable to the “hybridity” Wells discusses. The cultural power of the pet category is evident in Brian’s encounters with the world, and how others treat him. While his hybridity—in both visual and narrative terms—means he often functions even more as a “quasi-human” than most pets, his agency is repeatedly revoked through the reassertion by others of his status as a pet. For example, when Stewie rescues Brian at the end of “Brokeback Swanson” Brian asks how he knew where he was. Stewie reminds Brian that he has a tracking chip in him, a now commonplace procedure that is legally required in some countries.43 Brian protests, saying, “That’s a total violation of my rights”, to which Stewie laughs, replying, “Ha! I like how you’re chained up in a yard and still trying to pretend you’re a guy”. Here the dominion under which Brian is held is multiply formulated: first in his being tied up in the yard; second in his being chipped; third in Stewie’s reminder that Brian will never fully achieve the status of human, and thus remains powerless given his categorisation as an animal. Again, Family Guy offers a space for satire that might be seen as progressive in terms of human–animal relations but, at the end of the narrative, comically reimposes anthropocentric power relations, for while previously in the episode Brian’s complex hybridity had enabled him to move largely undetected in human arenas, at the end he is forcibly constrained within the animal category, dependent upon humans for all aspects of his existence.

 Fudge, Pets, 2.  For example, the UK; see Jones, Microchipping.

42 43

326 

B. MILLS

Family Guy makes many jokes that both indicate Brian’s reliance on the humans who “own” him and mock his belief that he is a member of the family on a par with the humans. For example, in “Brian the Closer”44 Brian and Peter have a violent fight over an old toy, resulting in Brian getting his teeth smashed out. He is now a grotesquely comic figure, his snout hanging down limply in front of his face due to the absence of teeth holding it in place. Brian pleads to the family, “You got to take me to the dentist to get my mouth fixed!” However, Lois replies, “Brian, we can try to make you feel a little less repulsive, but we’re not spending human money on a deformed animal”. The comic cruelty here rests on Lois’s casual employment of descriptive language arising from a history in which “impairments have been a source of amusement for non-disabled people”.45 Furthermore, here the family’s “money” is categorised as solely a resource to be used for “human”-only things, and Brian becomes nothing more than an animal, losing his name, his status as a pet, and his species-­category. While this joke is clearly meant to work on the fact that Lois is being cruel, satirising the disjuncture between ways in which humans profess to express care and empathy for animals and their actual willingness to do anything practical as a consequence, it also offers up a logic that reasserts human dominance. Indeed, Brian’s health is a concern in other episodes and these too show the extent to which he is reliant for his very wellbeing upon the family who “own” him. So in “American Gigg-olo”46 Brian has to get a job to pay for his own health insurance after Peter’s insurance company decides his policy no longer covers pets; this is presented as a problem for Brian, and not something Peter should be concerned about or have any responsibility for. Yet, conversely, where Brian is a problem for human health, that is given priority and Brian is forced to reshape his life in order that humans are not inconvenienced. This means that in “Peter’s Def-Jam”,47 when Lois develops allergies and suspects this is due to Brian’s fur, the family agrees that Brian has to sleep in another room. Across the series, then, impacts upon Brian’s health and security are categorised by the family as of no concern, whereas if Brian’s condition affects them directly the family collectively reassert the prioritisation of the human. Again, it is worth noting that much of the satirical intent of Family  Family Guy, series 13, episode 4.  Lockyer, Comedy targets, 1399. 46  Family Guy, series 15, episode 3. 47  Family Guy, series 15, episode 12. 44 45

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

327

Guy rests on the dysfunctional nature of the Griffin family, and it is not unreasonable to argue that what is being offered for comic response in these moments is precisely the unthinking way in which the human characters treat Brian. Yet while individual comic moments might well have this function, the narrative structure of the episodes means this overarching human hegemony is never fundamentally challenged, with story endings typically re-establishing the relationships of “dominance and affection”, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s phrasing, that underpin human–pet interactions. The tensions this causes for Brian are examined in the episode “Brian & Stewie”,48 whose entire narrative concerns Stewie and Brian being trapped in a bank vault. Throughout the series the two have been shown to be best friends, but also capable of considerable violence and vindictiveness towards one another. This is encapsulated in this episode, which includes Stewie forcing Brian to eat faeces at gunpoint, and Brian hitting Stewie to the extent that he cries. But it also contains non-comic moments where the two characters reflect on their personalities and their friendship. A key aspect of the story is the discovery that Brian keeps a gun in a safety deposit box in the bank, which appears to contradict his usual liberal, anti-gun stance. While Stewie initially mocks him for his hypocrisy, the story takes a contemplative turn when Brian reveals he has the gun in case he ever wants to kill himself. He says, “I don’t know, sometimes it’s all too much”, and “Just having the gun here, knowing there’s a way out, it helps”. He reveals unhappiness in his life, stating, “You know, I’ve tried to find meaning in my life, and I just can’t”, and asks Stewie, “Is there ever a time when we’re truly in the present moment, and not looking toward the past or the future? I mean, right there, in the moment?” Here Brian presents an avowedly American solution to problems of unhappiness, given the majority of gun-related deaths in that country are suicides, and disrupts the usual role dogs play in narratives featuring children in which they are required to be trouble-free “benevolent, helping creatures”.49 Stewie accuses Brian of selfishness, saying, “What would I do if you weren’t here? Hmm? You’re the only one who makes my life bearable” and, “The truth is, you’re my only friend, Brian. If I didn’t have you, I’d be lost.” The two reconcile, reasserting their friendship, and the whole scene is played seriously, a touching and sincere expression of interspecies “kindness”.50  Family Guy, series 8, episode 17.  Campbell, Gun Wars, 142; Superle, Animal heroes, 175. 50  Pryor, Heidegger. 48 49

328 

B. MILLS

But there’s a particular aspect to this scene that underpins Brian’s troubled psychology, and it relates precisely to his species status. He says, “Dogs are supposed to be able to instinctively live with purpose. Not even have to think about it, just born like that. But I wasn’t.” Brian’s unhappiness is predicated on his knowledge of what being a dog is meant to be, and how this informs engagement with the world. While Brian’s anguish might be emblematic of a more general (human) existentialism, it is inflected via his dog-ness, and points towards the expectations he knows are placed upon dogs and behaviour that should come to him “instinctively”. This scene encapsulates something about the constrained satirical usage of Brian, and the angst that ensues from his failure to have “purpose”. If Brian is unhappy because his hybrid nature gives him no acceptable place within the world of Family Guy, so we can see the blunted comic usage of Brian as similarly displeasing. As a number of examples above have shown, Brian’s mutable species status offers potential for the satirical disruption of anthropocentric thinking, and this is embedded in the character all the way back to his pre-Family Guy appearances as Steve. Yet while comic moments allow Brian to momentarily destabilise anthropocentrism, these are framed by narrative conclusions that reassert his powerlessness. It is no surprise that he cannot “instinctively live with purpose”, for as someone entrapped within cultural assumptions about both humans and animals, that purpose is contradictory, requiring him to conform to historically specific societal structures that are not to his benefit. In this way, Brian is emblematic of many comic uses of animals, a form of representational “dominance and affection” that finds momentary humour in a non-human sense of the world, but which is rapidly abandoned so that stories can satisfactorily conclude.

Works Cited Baker, Steve. (1993) 2001. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Reprint. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Brown, Laura. 2010. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Campbell, Donald J. 2019. America’s Gun Wars: A Cultural History of Gun Control in the United States. Santa Barbara: Praeger. Carroll, Noël. 2007. Narrative closure. Philosophical Studies 135: 1–15.

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

329

de Waal, Frans B.M. 1999. Anthropomorphism and anthropodenial: Consistency in our thinking about humans and other animals. Philosophical Topics 27 (1): 255–280. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press. Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2011. Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dydynski, Jason Marion, and Nelly Mäekivi. 2021. Impacts of cartoon animals on human-alloanimal relations. Anthrozoös 34 (6): 753–766. Dziech, Arkadisuz. 2021. Identification of wolf-dog hybrids in Europe: An overview of genetic studies. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 9 (1): 1–13. Freedman, Leonard. 2009. The Offensive Art: Political Satire and its Censorship Around the World from Beerbohm to Borat. London: Praeger. Fudge, Erica. 2008. Pets. New York: Routledge. Gabriele-Rivet, V., V.J. Brookes, D. Stephens, J. Arsenault, and M.P. Ward. 2021. Hybridisation between dingoes and domestic dogs in proximity to Indigenous Communities in Northern Australia. Australian Veterinary Journal 99 (9): 388–391. Griffin, Dustin. 1994. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Guyer, Sarah. 2020. Critical anthropomorphism after #MeToo: Reading The Friend. Diacritics 48 (1): 30–50. Haworth, David. 2016. “A family of wolves I knew”: Disney’s civilised animals and the feral child. In Debating Disney: Pedagogical Perspectives on Commercial Cinema, ed. Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode, 121–130. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Herman, David. 2021. Narratology beyond the human: Self-narratives and interspecies identities. In The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller, 51–64. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, Carol. 2013. Microchipping and its importance in dogs. UK-Vet Companion Animal, December 1: 468–473. Larson, Allen. 2003. Re-drawing the bottom line. In Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, ed. Carol A.  Stabile and Mark Harrison, 55–73. New York: Routledge. Lockyer, Sharon. 2015. From comedy targets to comedy-makers: Disability and comedy in live performance. Disability and Society 30 (9): 1397–1412. Malamud, Randy. 2009. Americans do weird things with animals, or, Why did the chicken cross the road? In Animal Encounters, ed. Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini, 73–96. Boston: Leiden. McHugh, Susan. 2004. Dog. London: Reaktion.

330 

B. MILLS

———. 2012. Bitch, bitch, bitch: Personal criticism, feminist theory, and dog writing. Hypatia 27 (3): 616–635. Mittell, Jason. 2004. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge. Morris, Linda A. 2007. American satire: Beginnings through Mark Twain. In A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, ed. Rubin Quintero, 377–399. Malden: Blackwell. Mundy, John, and Glyn White. 2012. Laughing Matters: Understanding Film, Television and Radio Comedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Parkinson, Claire. 2019. Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters. London: Routledge. Perry, Kathryn. 2004. Unpicking the seam: Talking animals and reader pleasure in Early Modern satire. In Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge, 19–36. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Pielak, Chase. 2021. Bad dog: The dark side of misbehaving animals. In The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, ed. Susan McHugh, Robert McKay, and John Miller, 265–276. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pryor, Ashley E. 2012. Heidegger and the Dog Whisperer: Imagining interspecies kindness. In Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies, ed. Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely, 289–306. New  York: Columbia University Press. Quintero, Ruben. 2007. Introduction: Understanding satire. In A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, ed. Ruben Quintero, 1–11. Malden: Blackwell. Sandler, Kevin S. 2003. Synergy nirvana: Brand equity, television animation, and Cartoon Network. In Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, ed. Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, 89–109. New York: Routledge. Schippers, Mimi. 2016. Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities. New York: New York University Press. Stephens, Bradley. 2014. Animating animality through Dumas, D’Artagnon, and Dogtanian. Dix-Neuf 18 (2): 193–210. Stibbe, Arran. 2012. Animals Erased: Discourse, Ecology, and Reconnection with the Natural World. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Superle, Michelle. 2012. Animal heroes and transforming substances: Canine characters in contemporary children’s literature. In Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies, ed. Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely, 174–202. New York: Columbia University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1984. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tuttle, Russell H. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

19  “DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INSTINCTIVELY LIVE… 

331

Tyler, Tom. 2009. If horses had hands…. In Animal Encounters, ed. Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini, 13–26. Boston: Leiden. Wells, Paul. 2008. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons and Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. ———. “You can see what species I belong to, but don’t treat me lightly”: Rhetorics of representation in animated animal narratives. In Animal Life and the Moving Image, ed. Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon, 95–107. London: British Film Institute. Włodarczyk, Justyna. 2018. Genealogy of Obedience: Reading North American Dog Training Literature, 1850–2000s. Leiden: Brill.

CHAPTER 20

The Paradox of the Charismatic Pig in The Simpsons Movie and Okja Cynthia Chris

In The Simpsons Movie (2007), the iconic buffoon Homer Simpson befriends an animal. Nothing unusual there. The very first standalone episode of the animated situation comedy The Simpsons resolves with the adoption of a washed-up racing greyhound, Santa’s Little Helper.1 Over the course of thirty-plus seasons (so far), the Simpsons family has welcomed into their home at least four cats named Snowball, a couple of goldfish, and for a short time an elephant named Stampey. This time, the pet of the moment is neither as commonplace as a dog nor as odd as an elephant. The animal is a pig, and while it may not be surprising that a pig would come into Homer’s life sooner or later, the depth of his attachment 1  The Simpsons, created by Matt Groening, first appeared as short films within The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–90) and premiered as a half-hour sitcom on 17 December 1989 on the Fox television network. David Silverman directed The Simpsons Movie from a screenplay co-­ written by Groening and a team composed of Al Jean, James L. Brooks, Mike Scully, and several others who have previously written for the TV series.

C. Chris (*) College of Staten Island, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_20

333

334 

C. CHRIS

to the pig is central to the film’s narrative—until it is not. It is also downright discomfiting, upending the Simpsons’ household, pushing the town of Springfield to the brink of catastrophe, and, at times, coming close to shattering Homer’s very own sense of self. In consistent Simpsons style, the movie offers up the Simpsons as the prototypically American nuclear family: internally dysfunctional but ultimately united and loving. Likewise, they may be selfishly bad neighbours, but their roots in their communities are deep and strong. In this iteration of their story, the Simpsons—or Homer at least—are also animal lovers and irresponsible pet owners, all at once. To set the plot in motion, Homer rescues a pig from butchery and introduces him to his wife Marge as “the newest Simpson”. But when Homer disposes of the pig’s excrement in a local lake, the Simpson family is banished from Springfield, making a swift escape to Alaska. The film leaves the pig behind too. The animal steals Homer’s heart, taints Springfield’s lake, and is jettisoned when it has nothing left to do. Narrative disposal is not the only way to get rid of an animal. The animal may be renamed, reimagined, removed, or eaten. In every case, it is eradicated, symbolically or literally. Jacques Derrida saw this coming, this endless erasure of animals, recognizing “the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal” in factory farming and other forms of exploitation.2 Factory farming, as it happens, is one of several targets of Okja (2017, directed by Bong Joon Ho), which broadly satirizes both corporate hubris and animal rights activism, not to mention nature film presenters. In this oddball of a film, a corporation genetically modifies pigs with the goal of revolutionizing the pork industry. The resulting GMO swine grow to enormous proportions, not unlike those of a hippopotamus, if hippos had lop ears, yet taller and heavier.3 Why build bigger pigs? Because producing bigger pigs will satisfy demand while killing fewer animals. The corporation puts piglets in the hands of farmers around the world, experimenting with different techniques of animal husbandry. One of them is Okja, who grows up on a farm nestled into a lushly idyllic forest in rural Korea. The farmer’s granddaughter Mija bonds so closely with Okja that when the corporation snatches Okja back, she sets out to rescue the “super pig”,  Derrida, The Animal, 2 (emphasis in original).  Hee-Chul Jang, who designed Okja, imagined her as an eight-foot-tall, thirteen-foot-­ long, and six-tonne animal. See Giardina, How Okja. 2 3

20  THE PARADOX OF THE CHARISMATIC PIG IN THE SIMPSONS… 

335

teaming up with an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) cell. Just in the nick of time, Mija escorts Okja safely out of the slaughterhouse, but thousands of super pigs remain, penned in preparation for butchering. The rescue narrative does nothing to disrupt the status quo for food animals generally: the salvation of Okja ends only her individual suffering. Both The Simpsons Movie and Okja place pigs at the centre of their narratives, as objects of adulation and exploitation, as catalysts of displacement, and as unwitting agents of human endangerment. While The Simpsons Movie, like the venerable television series on which it is based, specializes in satirizing the small-town American family generally, and, like many a situation comedy, masculine buffoonery in particular, Okja casts a wider net, exposing the agendas of any number of those invested in Okja (except for Mija—maybe) as cynical and short-sighted. In these films, the central pigs—both charismatic, one animated, the other an enormous CGI-enhanced puppet—are vehicles of human ambivalence towards the animal, rendering in stark terms the intense and paradoxical human cathexis in individual animals vis-à-vis the animal’s imminent disposability. Viewing these films, one has to wonder: is human love for animals more than a little bit structured by our control over not only their lives but also even their deaths?

The Simpsons and the Spider Pig: Or, with Great Piggery Comes Great Responsibility A pig first appears in The Simpsons Movie when a television commercial is shot in a Krusty Burger fast food restaurant. Franchise founder Krusty the Clown (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) introduces a new pork sandwich he calls “The Clogger”, while the pig, perched on a tabletop, looks on apprehensively. And why shouldn’t he be uneasy? Costumed in a chef’s toque, the pig is positioned as next on the chopping block and the party responsible for creating the sandwich from the meat of his own kind. It’s an oddly abject role for a corporate pitch pig to pose as both comestible and cannibal. Krusty jumps at the chance to play executioner, brandishing a saw-like blade. Taking a bite and leering into the camera, he makes a characteristically derisive crack rich with America First-style xenophobia—“If you can find a greasier sandwich, you’re in Mexico”—just the kind of damp squib that serves to remind that The Simpsons writers may be intent on satire but not always exactly sure what they are satirizing; it wouldn’t

336 

C. CHRIS

Fig. 20.1  Krusty the Klown threatens the pig that appears alongside him in a television commercial

be the first time that casual racism has come from The Simpsons’ writers room, unconsciously or otherwise.4 Finished with his lines, Krusty spits out the bad bite and calls to the crew, “Cut, print, kill the pig” (Fig. 20.1). Fortunately for the pig, Homer (also Castellaneta) is seated within earshot, on the verge of a rare heart-to-heart with his son Bart (Nancy Cartwright). Distracted, he blurts, “You can’t kill him if he’s wearing people clothes!” and the pig seizes his chance to trot to Homer’s side. Marge (Julie Kavner) is appalled, and implores Homer to “get rid of that pig”, to no avail. Instead, Homer dotes on the pig, who he names Harry Plopper, riffing on another multimedia mega-franchise, Harry Potter. Her patience runs out when she notices cloven hoofprints on the ceiling, and finds Homer holding the pig aloft, trotters skyward, singing a ditty parodying the theme to the animated series Spider-Man (1967–1970) that echoes throughout the Spidey franchise. Instead of lauding a man who “catches thieves, just like flies”, Homer tunelessly, nonsensically, rambles on about

4  If there is any doubt about the reactionary streak in Simpsonian humour, it bears noting that within the movie’s first twelve minutes, two characters—Homer’s nemesis, the born-­ again single dad, Ned Flanders, and Ralph Wiggum, the bullied, nose-picking son of Springfield’s police chief—are both the butt of one-liners questioning their sexual orientation, in which gayness is both punch line and putdown. As well, the film’s depiction of the EPA as a militarized government agency hellbent on ruining daily life in Springfield—and not for the first time in the Simpsons storyworld (see “The Frying Game”, May 19, 2002)— deserves further interrogation.

20  THE PARADOX OF THE CHARISMATIC PIG IN THE SIMPSONS… 

337

Fig. 20.2  Homer Simpson helps the pig dance on the ceiling

the pig’s superpowers, or lack thereof: “Can he swing from a web?/No he can’t./He’s a pig” (Fig. 20.2).5 Thanks to Homer, the pig, now nicknamed Spider Pig, is making a literal mess—the hoof prints—and that’s going to be Marge’s problem. But the creature is making a larger mess, a mess anticipated by Marge when she inquires after his “leavings”. (Homer assures Marge that he has found “a most elegant solution” to this particular problem.) Excrement is a pivotal object in the film’s plot, which proceeds on its disposal. The fate of not only the Simpson family but also their hometown, Springfield itself, rises and falls on this pig’s shit. Voluminous, toxic, and ill-managed pig shit. Later, Homer inelegantly dumps a silo full of the pig’s waste in Lake Springfield. Never mind that his daughter Lisa (Yeardley Smith) is actively campaigning for environmental causes including clean-up of the already notoriously polluted body of water. It’s been a well-known fact, since at least the second season of The Simpsons, that the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant has spoiled the town’s waterways, accounting for the startling appearance of a three-eyed fish named Blinky at the end of the line on Bart’s fishing pole in “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish”, which first aired on November 1, 1990. (Blinky made an earlier, incidental appearance in the first season’s “Homer’s Odyssey”, January 5  “Spider Pig” derives from the “Spider-Man” theme song by Bob Harris and Paul Webster, with new lyrics by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Ian Maxtone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Mike Scully, Matt Selman, David Silverman, John Swartzwelder, and Jon Vitti.

338 

C. CHRIS

21, 1990.) Despite Marge Simpson serving Blinky on a plate to the power plant’s owner, Mr Burns (Harry Shearer), to shame him as an environmental villain, the three-eyed fish remains a recurrent character. When Springfieldians discover that it was Homer and Harry Plopper’s contribution that pushed the town to the brink of disaster, they run the Simpsons out of town. The Environmental Protection Agency gets involved, isolating Springfield’s toxicity from the rest of the nation by placing a dome over the city, Truman Show-style, and planning to destroy the town and its residents. By film’s end, of course, Springfield is saved—by Homer, of course, in a heroic stunt that outdoes the greatest feats of the likes of Evel Knievel. So that problem, big as it is, is resolved. But throughout the film, the pig has posed another problem, one that is not quite fully addressed. The animal’s presence makes a mess of categorical conventions through which we understand the animal. Despite Homer’s omnivorous appetites, he’s rescued the pig from butchery, from becoming meat. It’s not the first time Homer has rehomed an edible animal; in the episode “Lisa Gets an ‘A’” (November 28, 1998), he picked up a lobster at a grocery store and grew fond enough to name him Mr Pinchy, but the crustacean landed on the diner plate anyway after an accidentally too-hot bath. Once livestock and almost foodstuff, these animals became a different kind of animal, the pet. The pig also becomes yet another kind of animal, if only in Homer’s imagination, if only temporarily, as the chimaera “spider pig”, defying expectations of either species when dancing on the ceiling. The animal, then, is pig and not pig, pet and not pet. As Susan McHugh has written, the pig is “the consummate ‘creature of the threshold’ … between barn and home, pet and pork, or unclean and acceptable meat”.6 It’s just one of the many transmogrifications that Spider Pig will undergo, as he morphs from fast food hawker to adored companion animal, to mismanaged super polluter whose output is so toxic, whose presence is so troubling, that he must be banished. Could Homer have found another way? Of course he could have, but then he wouldn’t have been the lout we know and love. Likewise, there might have been a moral to this story of environmental catastrophe, but the movie satirizes these dire straits without a roadmap to repair. How deep does Homer’s love go, while it lasts? In a scene set not long before disaster strikes, Harry Plopper joins Homer on the couch to watch 6

 McHugh, Animal Stories, 170.

20  THE PARADOX OF THE CHARISMATIC PIG IN THE SIMPSONS… 

339

television, only to see local screen star Bumblebee Man (Hank Azaria) surprised at a kissing booth by an amorous ass (“un burro amoroso”).7 Homer’s initial response is a warning—“Don’t get any ideas!”—but his hostility is displaced by a laugh. Then, with Homer slipping onto the floor—that is, putting himself at the pig’s level—the idea is incorporated: “Maybe we should kiss, just to break the tension”. Homer flirts with bestiality, repositioning affection between pet owner and pet, human animal and companion animal, into the realm of the erotic, and not just the erotic, but for heterosexual Homer, the homo-erotic, as if the boundaries of one’s species self and one’s sexual self were so linked as to crumble together. Marge intrudes upon the scene, and that problem is (perhaps thankfully) left aside. Yet at least one problem remains. When the mischievous animal nearly foils the Simpsons’ plot to escape the enraged mob that blames Homer for the ruination of Springfield, the family heads to Alaska, leaving the pig behind. The film leaves the pig behind too. The once-beloved swine is never seen again—not in the film, anyway. (Plopper does appear in a scene depicting the reconstruction of Springfield that was cut from the theatrically released version of the film but is included on the DVD extras. In the first Simpsons episode of the Fall 2007 season, the pig makes a brief appearance. Homer, in a nostalgic swoon, calls the animal his “summer love”. The pig has had cameos in several additional episodes, as well as Simpsons comic books and videogames.) A sort of rupturing object, the pig comes between Homer and Marge, between the Simpsons and Springfield, between purity and pollution, between desire and disgust, between the once-stable categories of animal and human.8 At first held close, the pig is jettisoned when it has nothing left to do. So goes the animal, as expendable in this satire as readily as in the slaughterhouse.

7  Bumblebee Man is based on El Chapulín Colorado (The Red Grasshopper), starring the actor Chespirito (Roberto Gómez Bolaños), in a parody of superheroes like Batman and Superman. This comedy series was produced for the Mexican television network Televisa from 1973 to 1979. 8  In the term rupturing object, I seek a counterpoint to the concept of the “boundary object”, as described in Star and Griesemer, Institutional ecology.

340 

C. CHRIS

Okja Come Home: Or, a Girl and her Pig Escape from New York Scholars who have undertaken analyses of Okja have recognized it as a mishmash of genres: coming-of-age and bildungsroman, fairy tale and fable, comedy and science fiction.9 Ironically, some viewers do not seem to recognize it as satire, as a text exposing society’s foibles, even its cruelties, with humour in the form of mockery, ridicule, and hyperbole. For example, a study comparing how focus groups composed of students at a Texas University reacted to the film tends to measure Okja against documentaries about food production. Students found the film “unrealistic”, “inaccurate”, and “overdramatized”, never mind that realism and accuracy are not hallmarks of satire—and overdramatization surely is.10 Some of the students participating in the study were agricultural majors, and may have been sensitive to a damning portrait of the industry in which they are training for careers. They seem to have missed the point that, in the film, it is not only pork production which is skewered; animal rights activists and wildlife TV presenters are portrayed as equally self-interested, equally duplicitous, and equally exploitive of the animals about whom they profess to care so deeply. In fact, Bong Joon Ho seems to take satirical aim at a range of the entities that comprise what we might call the animal–industrial complex: those whose relationships to the animal are ones of resource and resource extraction, as well as those who see themselves as saviour, advocate, shepherd, or soul mate. Okja, much like the Simpsons franchise, plays no favourites. Every role and relationship is fair game. After all, aren’t they nearly all driven by myopic—if megalomaniacal—self-interest? If, in taking this approach, Bong, Groening, and their ilk risk vying for the title of more cynical than thou, don’t worry, there’s a silver lining somewhere, a happy ending for the few, but not for the many. In Okja, Tilda Swinton does double duty as Lucy and Nancy Mirando, twin heirs of the Mirando Corporation. Lucy has recently taken over the company helm with a plan to revolutionize the pork industry. Claiming that the company identified a so-called super pig, “miraculously discovered on one Chilean farm”, Lucy announces to a roomful of journalists that Mirando has developed a super-pig bloodline—ostensibly by natural 9   Jin, Making the global, 2–3; Rehen, The curious case, 530; Gorbman, Bong’s song, 21–26. 10  Steede et al., Genetic modification.

20  THE PARADOX OF THE CHARISMATIC PIG IN THE SIMPSONS… 

341

breeding at a ranch in Arizona. (She’s lying. Despite her boasts that products derived from the super pigs will assuage consumers’ fears about genetically modified foodstuffs, they are in fact GMOs created in a lab in Paramus, New Jersey.) Origins aside, the company dispersed some 26 piglets to farmers around the world as an experiment in which the company would observe the outcome of various traditional methods of animal husbandry, in a wholesale grab of indigenous knowledge. Teaming with Dr Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal), the outlandish host of a TV show called Magical Animals, Lucy promotes this experiment, slathering on the rhetorical spin of faux-corporate social responsibility.11 The next generation of super pigs, she claims, will position the company to reduce the meat industry’s environmental impact because the pigs will “consume less feed and produce less excretions. And most importantly, they need to taste fucking good.” One of the super pigs is sent to the Republic of Korea to be raised by an elderly farmer named Hee Bong (Byun Hee-bong) on his remote and idyllic land. But it is his granddaughter Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun) who becomes the constant companion and caretaker of the animal, who she names Okja (Figs. 20.3 and 20.4). Now ten years old, Okja possesses the bulk of a moving van and the playfulness of a puppy. When Wilcox and a TV crew arrive to reclaim Okja, Mija is startled to learn that her friend is being shipped out—and

Fig. 20.3  Hee Bong (Byun Hee-Bong) and the infant super-pig Okja

 Acquier, Okja meets Ellul, 523.

11

342 

C. CHRIS

Fig. 20.4  Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun) and grown-up Okja

underwhelmed by the little gold pig her grandfather gives her as compensation. As Mija sets out to rescue Okja, an Animal Liberation Front cell lends a hand. The ALF leader, Jay (Paul Dano), convinces Mija to allow Mirando to retake Okja, so that they can tag the pig with a device that will transmit video from inside the corporate lab, and promising that they have a foolproof plan to rescue Okja again. Indeed, Okja’s time in Mirando’s control is horrific. She is subjected to an unwanted mating and suffers puncture wounds (all captured on video) at the hands of self-proclaimed animal lover Dr Wilcox, when he extracts meats samples as she writhes and moans. Lucy Mirando connives to reunite Mija and Okja as a publicity stunt in New York, but the Animal Liberation Front spoils her party by patching the disturbing video of Okja’s torment into an electronic billboard. Chaos ensues. Nancy Mirando seizes control of the company from her sister and sends Okja to the slaughterhouse, where she is prepared for butchering. Just in the nick of time, before Okja is stunned, Mija buys back Okja, offering Nancy Mirando the gold pig her grandfather had given her. Greed wins in the end; Nancy orders Okja freed (Fig. 20.5). As Mija and Jay escort Okja to safety, they leave behind thousands of super pigs, penned in preparation for inevitable slaughter. As they walk on, a sow noses her tiny piglet through the fence, and Okja scoops the little one into her mouth for safekeeping. We witness the violence approaching Okja, we fear for her safety, and we are relieved of that fear. Even better: in the next scene, Okja, Mija, and their little adoptee are back on grandpa’s farm, picking persimmons and playing in the lush forest, as if none of

20  THE PARADOX OF THE CHARISMATIC PIG IN THE SIMPSONS… 

343

Fig. 20.5  Mirando Corporation’s slaughterhouse

the traumatic events of the film had occurred. And yet, despite the happy ending for Okja, the suffering of untold others persists. In the end, it may be character-driven cinema and character-loving audiences, hopelessly sutured to imaginary narratives that unfold in imaginary worlds, that are the ultimate targets of Bong’s satirical glare—which turns out to be not too dissimilar from Groening and his collaborators’ Simpsonian smirk. We may be so fixed on Okja’s fate, so relieved at her rescue, that the suffering of others literally and figuratively fades into the background. Maybe we even focus so intently on the individual animal so as to avoid seeing the suffering that goes on around her. We cheer for Okja’s freedom—just as we breathe a sigh of relief with the salvation of the Simpsons’ Springfield. An animal (or two) is saved, while uncountable animals are not, and never will be. Sure, we get a glimpse of the suffering that Okja leaves behind—but Okja escapes, fulfilling expectations for a happy ending. For, as Derrida reminds us, “everybody [already] knows what the production, breeding, transport, and slaughter of these animals has become” (26). And yet on it goes.

Pigs in the Parlour or a Pig in a Poke? The Industrial/Cinematic Pig Films like Okja—and, from a different angle, The Simpsons Movie—play with a visual economy not unlike one that agribusiness has developed to rationalize meat production and hide from the consumer its most unsightly facts. No corporations are known to have bred hogs as ludicrously large as

344 

C. CHRIS

Okja, but they certainly have undertaken “the unending pursuit of body uniformity”—as Alex Blanchette describes the industry’s goal of porcine “standardized life”.12 To what end? Perhaps foremost, standardization enables automation, with the intention of reducing the cost of labour in an industry in which human workforces must be (literally) hands-on, from conception at artificial insemination to death in butchering. Blanchette studied and worked in pork production during a twenty-­ seven month participant–observer ethnography. In a town he calls “Dixon”, locals tell him, “If it wasn’t for the hogs, there’d be nothing here” (1). Maybe so. In “Dixon” and similar towns, Blanchette explains, pork producers swooped in after the manufacturing sectors that once drove their economies gave way to offshoring in the 1980s. The number of animals produced and processed in places like this is staggering. A single “Dover Foods” (another pseudonym) facility in “Dixon” butchered 5.6 million hogs in 2013 alone (3). Still, Blanchette writes, anyone just passing through could fail to realize that a series of windowless, uniform buildings house piglets and pigs, research labs, veterinary facilities, and butcheries, if it were not for the stench of manure. In other words, the pigs are nowhere to be seen and yet their presence is palpable everywhere. And the pigs are such well-protected assets that the companies that run these facilities routinely bar workers from sharing a household with anyone who works for a competing company (and sometimes even with workers in a different division of the same company) for fear of contaminating the pigs (not the workers) with bacteria that humans might track from barn to home to barn.13 The hogs’ needs are preeminent, even in the homes where they are ostensibly absent, with the exception of instances in which they take the form of dinner on the table or when they slip through hygiene protocols and linger in the form of debris under the fingernails or stuck to the sole of a shoe. What Blanchette calls “the industrial pig” is an animal who is thoroughly predetermined: ejaculation stimulated; ovulation and uterine contractions during farrowing controlled by hormone injections; size of litter increased through selective breeding to result in “the hyperprolific sow” (139); movements constrained within pens; rate of growth managed  Blanchette, Porkopolis, 17.  Consider this: during an outbreak of the porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus in Iowa in 2013, surfaces in dozens of convenience stores were tested, and all showed evidence of the virus, which is a coronavirus that is fatal to piglets. See Blanchette, Porkopolis, 45, 47. 12 13

20  THE PARADOX OF THE CHARISMATIC PIG IN THE SIMPSONS… 

345

through monitored feeding and pharmaceuticals; life ended with a blast of carbon dioxide and a sharp knife. Once dead, workers divvy the pig into hundreds of components that become any of over a thousand distinct products, from familiar pieces of meat to gelatins that make their way into desserts and cosmetics; from fats transformed into biofuels to hormones used in the manufacture of drugs for human use; from parts that become ingredients in concrete to parts that become ingredients in glue (204, 210). Workers’ bodies, too, are measured and moulded to the work: new workers at “Dover” visit a health clinic for tests that assess the strength of various muscle groups so that the company can match workers to tasks most likely to be performed well and well-tolerated (179–80). Who among them is best suited to place a hook or to split a carcass? Who is more suited to make a more delicate slice, and to repeat that cut over and over again, all day long? Even so, workers report excruciating “breaking in” periods as their bodies are subjected to intense cold, stifling heat, and repetitive motions (not to mention foul odours). Not surprisingly, agriculture ranks among the most dangerous jobs in the United States (185–89).14 As Blanchette argues, “The labouring movements of humans’ muscles are being as finely physiologically divided as the finely sliced hog” (193). Under these circumstances, does the super pig premise that propels Okja seem so farfetched? (Fig. 20.6) The narrative twists and turns that elevate an individual animal, and then open the door to the animal’s disposal or disappearance, are familiar old saws. Okja takes a page or two out of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web by E.B.  White, first published in 1952  in an edition illustrated by Garth Williams, a fact duly noted by some reviewers of Bong’s film.15 In that book and its movie remakes, the pig protagonist is Wilbur, a rejected runt hand-raised by farm girl Fern Arable in order to save him from her father’s axe.16 The Simpsons Movie, too, has a bit of the animated Charlotte’s Web in its lineage, at least in the pig’s rescue and domestication, and in scenes depicting Homer and Harry Plopper, like Fern and Wilber, in joyful play. 14  See also National Census. Historical data and date on non-fatal injuries are also available on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website (www.bls.gov). 15  Mejia, Okja is; Griswold, Belated film review. 16  Film adaptations of Charlotte’s Web included an animated version (1973) directed by Charles A.  Nichols and Iwao Takamoto for Hanna-Barbera Productions and Sagittarius Productions, and a Nickelodeon-backed live-action remake (2006) directed by Gary Winick involving live as well as computer-generated and -enhanced animals.

346 

C. CHRIS

Fig. 20.6  Pigs in a slaughter truck. (Photo taken during a vigil for slaughtered pigs outside a slaughterhouse, UK, November 2019)

But of course, the differences are significant. In the first film version of Charlotte’s Web, the 1973 animated feature, Fern (voiced by Pam Ferdin) rescues Wilbur (Henry Gibson), but she eventually displaces her bond with her pet pig with her desire for a boy her age. Wilbur avoids being sold for slaughter thanks to the inventive tactics of his friend Charlotte (Debbie Reynolds), a spider, who spins webs of words extolling his virtues: “Some Pig!” and “Terrific!” Human attention turned, an animal takes the role of rescuer. And the whole project of Charlotte’s Web is to keep the pig in the picture, allowing Wilbur to live a life of barnyard leisure after winning a prize at the county fair. Similarly, in Babe, directed by Chris Noonan, 2006, the piglet—“played” by some 48 individual pigs and some pig puppets as well, all of whom gained the power of speech through digital visual effects and the voice work of Christine Cavanaugh—has some close calls, but animals and humans alike help him live his dream of herding sheep like a border collie.17 The Simpsons Movie privileges its human subjects more ruthlessly, allowing the pig to disappear, whereabouts unknown, for most 17  Interestingly, McHugh points out that Babe’s success comes about in part through savvy television exposure, predicated on “panspecies media literacy” (185); perhaps Charlotte’s sloganeering for Wilbur in her cobwebs was but a lower tech version of using media to get their message across.

20  THE PARADOX OF THE CHARISMATIC PIG IN THE SIMPSONS… 

347

of the latter part of the film, dispensing with the animal when it is no longer narratively necessary. The cinematic pig, then, is one that is multiplied, rendered, and—however abundant—removed from view, just as surely as the industrial pig. Ultimately, it may be that of all the human–animal relationships satirized by these films, our own fickle investments are the real object of the joke-­ work.18 Melodramatic currents help us forget that, while the Simpson family and their fellow citizens survive the catastrophe striking Springfield, Harry Plopper’s storyline is dropped; that, while Okja and one little piglet escape the horrific Mirando slaughterhouse, that thousands of super pigs face the fate for which they were bred; even that, while Wilbur lives on accompanied by three of Charlotte’s many spiderlings, the young girl who once saved his life has turned away, underscoring the pig’s proper place among non-humans and breaking the human–animal bond. That bond proves, again and again, only a fantasy. We might call ourselves animal lovers—as do Okja antagonists Dr Johnny Wilcox and animal rights activist Jay. We might claim to love an animal—as Mija loves Okja, as Fern loves Wilbur, and as Homer loves Harry Plopper (until he doesn’t). But this love deserves the satirists’ pokes and prods if it can do no more than what we’ve seen to protect the animal—industrial pig and cinematic pig alike— from its erasure.

Works Cited Acquier, Aurelien. 2019. Okja meets Ellul: Nature, culture, and life in the iron cage of the technical system. M@n@gement 22 (3): 517–536. Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham: Duke University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press. Doherty, Thomas. 2007. Review of The Simpsons Movie. Cineaste 33 (1): 63–65. Freud, Sigmund. 1989 [1905]. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton. Giardina, Carolyn. 2017. How Okja brought a fantasy animal to life. The Hollywood Reporter, November 27. 18  See Freud, Jokes, 61. Freud uses the term joke-work to refer to the “psychical processes involved in the construction of the joke” (emphasis in original, 61) and to liken the creation of a joke to that of dream-work, a subject he had previously explored in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

348 

C. CHRIS

Gorbman, Claudia. 2018. Bong’s song. Film Quarterly 71 (3): 21–26. Griswold, John. 2019. Belated Film Review: Okja, by Bong Joon-Ho. The Common Reader, December 6. https://commonreader.wustl.edu/belated-­ film-­review-­okja-­by-­bong-­joon-­ho/. Accessed April 18, 2022. Hsu, Hua. 2017. The soft racism of Apu from The Simpsons. The New  Yorker, November 16. Jin, Ju Young. 2019. Making the global visible: Charting the uneven development of global monsters in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal. CLCWbeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21 (7). https://doi. org/10.7771/1481-­4374.3659. McHugh, Susan. 2011. Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mejia, Carlos. 2017. Okja is a gritty Charlotte’s Web reboot. Fatherly, June 28. https://www.fatherly.com/play/bong-­j oon-­h o-­o kja-­s cience-­f iction-­ charlottes-­web/. Accessed April 18, 2022. Murphet, Julian. 2008. Pitiable or political animals? Substance 27 (3): 97–116. 2020. National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2019. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S.  Department of Labor. December 16. https://www.bls.gov/ news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf. Rehn, Alf. 2019. The curious case of children and the corporation: Capitalism, corruption and contested childhoods in Okja. M@n@gement 22 (3): 530–536. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science 19: 387–420. Steede, Garrett M., Kelsi Opat, Leah S. Curren, and Erica Irlbeck. 2018. Genetic modification, factory farms, and ALF: A focus group study of the Netflix original film Okja. Journal of Applied Communications 102 (4): Article 9 (Dec.). https://doi.org/10.4148/1051-­0834.2224

CHAPTER 21

[Sic] Beasts Alex Lockwood

A. Lockwood (*) University of Sunderland, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_21

349

350 

A. LOCKWOOD

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

351

The History of Satire and Its Implication for the Texts in Question Satire has long been woven together with the (mis)representation of animals. From Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms (1726) and Thomas Taylor’s Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792) through William Hogarth, ̌ George Orwell, Karel Capek, and Banksy, we reach the present day with Martin Rowe’s essay “A Modest Proposal: Kill all the Animals” (2020) as a satirical response to our failures to deal with animal exploitation at the root of the COVID-19 pandemic. We live daily with watered-down satire in the puns of newspaper headlines wherever animal stories are carried (“Otter Devastation”; “Fake Mews”; “Celebrity Big Blubber”—all real examples). In Kindred Brutes, commenting on the writing of British “pet” elegies, Christine Kenyon-Jones notes, “[M]aterial from this earliest classical form often had a satirical intention, and its characteristic tone is light and emotionally detached” (2001, 24). Similarly, in her study of epitaphs for “pet” animals from the eighteenth century, Ingrid Tague charts how satire “dominated the genre in the first half of the century” (2008, 293). This was before the tone changed from satire to sentiment, as social relations between humans and animals shifted due to “the rise of what is often seen as the Romantic sensibility” (293).1 Of course, animals were not always the intended poetic subject but rather “lent themselves to easy parallels with other satirical targets” (294) and became foils by which others, particularly women and fops, were mocked. As Tague continues: “Pets [sic]2—especially lapdogs, monkeys, and parrots—could be seen as useless luxuries, just as women themselves were useless [sic]; women’s love of pets [sic] proved their misplaced values” (293). The falling away of the satirical form is evidence of people rethinking “the relationship between humans and animals. … [If people] continued to use a moral lens to evaluate the qualities of both humans and beasts [sic], some at least became less willing to deem all animals both radically different from and inferior to humans” (302). 1  This was long before the nineteenth century, which is when historian Harriet Ritvo (1987) suggests “pet” keeping became widespread. Tague’s argument is that “pet” keeping was a widespread phenomenon before that commonly held historical view. 2  I have adopted the anti-oppressive practice of addressing speciesist (or any oppressive) terms, as advocated by the unnamed author of Text 2, by using [sic] to draw attention to their questionable usage.

352 

A. LOCKWOOD

Evidence for this reappraisal arrives in the form of elegies that were both sentimental and heartfelt. For Anna Laetitia Barbauld writing in 1798 (“Epitaph to a Green Finch”) as Tague puts it, to cage a bird was to destroy its birthright. The “moral purpose that lay behind much satire” (Tague 2008, 295) also employed animals to question mankind’s moral integrity, such as in Manasseh Dawes’s elegies to his dogs, in which their lack of reason was much preferable to mankind’s poor use of that faculty, so “that the dog might be considered the wiser animal” (298). For Peter DeGabriele, much early modern poetry followed a “theriophilic tradition … in which beasts [sic] are held to be more natural and thus both superior to and happier than humans” (2015, 1). In the poetry of the Earl of Rochester, for example, particularly his “A Satyre Against Reason and Mankind” (c. 1674), DeGabriele argues that the role of the animal is to “deny humanity an outside perspective on itself [and] works to undercut the satiric procedure to show that satire is a form both beyond and beneath human capabilities” (1–2). For Tague, “pet” epitaphs could only come about once there was (a) enough wealth for people to indulge in luxury pass-times, such as “pet” keeping; and (b) perhaps more critically, a demarcation of the human and animal domestic boundary; as houses grew larger animals kept for food were removed to outhouses, with “pets” kept indoors with the family. Yet DeGabriele brings a sledgehammer to Tague’s position; rather, DeGabriele suggests, the Earl of Rochester’s seventeenth-century poetry was already questioning whether such boundaries could exist in relation to man [sic], or rather Man (as a constructed category of being), when troubled by comparison with and imitation by nonhuman animals. In Rochester’s poetry Man turns to “‘the bladders of Philosophy’ that temporarily keep man [sic] afloat as he drowns in his own reason, the need to supplement merely demonstrates man’s [sic] own lack” (DeGabriele 2015, 6). Further, Rochester “cleaves strongly to the idea of man’s [sic] negative exceptionality, and this makes his version of theriophily a fundamental challenge to an anthropocentric vision of the world. Man cannot even centre himself, let alone the world around him” (6). For DeGabriele, Rochester’s poetry suggests the ontological demarcation, which Tague finds evidence for in the separation of “pets” and “livestock” that led to the satirisation of animals in eighteenth-century poetry, had already been undermined a

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

353

century before. For DeGabriele, in Rochester’s poetry what is missing is “a category that cannot contain the differences between particular men [sic]. … a category that would allow man [sic] to coherently draw a distinction between himself and the beast [sic], and this is precisely because there is no category that can coherently organise man [sic]” (6–7). Rochester makes “the overlapping of cultured man and beast [sic] central to the genre of satire itself” (14). “Man” is undone as a category by recourse to the workings of a specific literary category: and it is the genre of satire. And yet, it is then satire that steps in to occlude from sight this failure of category to separate human from nonhuman. If satire is, after all, a genre, and one that has at its centre the “overlapping of cultured man [sic] and beast [sic]”, then we must ask what other places it may occupy in the field. (I would point readers to Derrida’s “The Law of Genre” and its opening exhortation: “Genres are not to be mixed” (Derrida 1980) alongside his work The Beast [sic] and the Sovereign Vol. 1 [2009].) What is important, as Tague notes, is how “pet” epitaphs, written as they were mainly by wealthy men [sic] who identified as poets in the world of letters, participated in a network of literary allusions, helping define and solidify the literary canon and Republic of Letters. Just as such poems frequently contained classical references (like the allusion to Catullus and Ovid), so more recent works could occasion literary efforts. (2008, 292)

Which brings us closer to the questions we are exploring today: of animal satire in relation to canonicity, and anti-speciesist challenges to both. For satire, as Tague argues, is far from being free of a role in helping establish a literary canon, or indeed the concept of canonicity. This is an important note considering the content of the texts under scrutiny. That is to say, this preamble on the historical relations between satire and animals lays the groundwork for us to identify the demarcations that make satire, satire; otherwise how are we to tell the difference between satire and farce or parody, or indeed satire and myth, comedy or tragedy, or satire from deadly serious intent? Is it only the overlapping of “cultured man [sic] and beast [sic]” that gives us our clue? Or is it the “light and emotionally detached” tone, as Kenyon-Jones identifies? How did Alan Abel get away with his SINA spoof for so long? (If indeed spoof it was?) (Aiello 2021).

354 

A. LOCKWOOD

Or how about Dr Lasagna’s 1975 “Clinical trials of drugs from the viewpoint of the academic investigator (a satire)”—would a satire announce itself? A double bluff? Is it, with a nod to “A Satyre”, a coincidence that Louis Lasagna is “Professor and Chairman, Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Rochester” (1975, 629, my italics)? (Or, indeed, that it is lasagne that prompts the most guilt in Charles Foster’s attempt to live like a badger in Being a Beast [sic], a carnist text discussed in the “Emails”, below?) When Dr Lasagna asks, “[D]oes the slope of a dose-response curve in animals tell us nothing about how we can progress in man? [sic]” (630), is it rhetorical, satirical, pragmatic, even spiritual? How would we know? And, critically, can we use these considerations to figure out how to better ask questions of the texts below, especially: why did the correspondents feel it possible to speak openly of their otherwise publicly unacknowledged, carnist underpinnings? Was it overconfidence, desperation, a ruse? The history of satire, then, is long, and stretches into the present day. It was employed, perhaps, in the texts below, in similar service to the “pet” epitaphs that Tague explores in her work: to shore up the canon. But which canon? So, let us move on to these demands of satire, the canon, and the representation of animals in the salvaged texts. These texts were found in the remains of an abandoned university in the landscape of a previously inhabited southern belt of England, mostly afflicted by water-damage. Before we get to the communication between two correspondents, dating from around 2021, however, we first examine a scrap of teaching material that addresses them, which survived tucked into a folder in a rucksack on a shelf in Room 4.07 on the top floor of the Arts building on what was, before submersion, known as Grand Avenue. Can either of them be trusted, or neither? Which is the animal satire, and which is animalist satire? (Could you ask that question of three texts: including this one?)

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

355

356 

A. LOCKWOOD

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

357

358 

A. LOCKWOOD

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

359

360 

A. LOCKWOOD

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

361

362 

A. LOCKWOOD

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

363

364 

A. LOCKWOOD

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

365

366 

A. LOCKWOOD

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

367

368 

A. LOCKWOOD

And that is it. The documents are meagre, but there will be more. And yet the debate around their status continues. As Elliott wrote over sixty years ago, satire is difficult to pin down, and perhaps animal satire or animalist satire even more so. For Elliott, “No strict definition can encompass the complexity of a word which signifies, on one hand, a kind of literature, and on the other, a spirit or tone which expresses itself in many literary genres” (1962, 475). Perhaps what we need, indeed, is what Boileau asked in his Satire VIII (1668) (written in the form of an epistle to Dr Morel … I feel sure our correspondents were aware of this); not so much the appeal to theriophily and the contrasts between “Man” and the animals, but rather the question that Boileau’s narrator puts to Dr Morel: do animals have universities? What would a university for animals look like? Perhaps that is where I should have begun? What such an institution would do, perhaps, is foreground the question that Boileau asks: “[I]s knowledge really the criterion we use to judge humans by” anyway? (Tierney 1981, 10). Because if it is not, why should we judge animals by it? Boileau asserted in his satire that man is paradoxically nothing but a beast [sic]. And if that is so, then it may be best to leave the last words to DeGabriele on Rochester: “the satirical animal … is a guarantee that man cannot find a position external to himself from which to construct a satire in which he would not be always-­ already included” (2015, 15).

21  [SIC] BEASTS 

369

Works Cited Aiello, Thomas. 2021. A Nude Horse is a Rude Horse: The Society for Indecency in Naked Animals. Animal Studies Journal 10: 140–168. https://doi. org/10.14453/asj.v10i2.7. Appleman, Deborah. 2009. Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents. 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press. Bazterrica, Augusta. 2020. Tender Is the Flesh. London: Pushkin Press. DeGabriele, Peter. 2015. Clothes Make the Ape: The Satirical Animal in Rochester’s Poetry. Early Modern Literary Studies 18: 1–15. Derrida, Jacques. 1980. The Law of Genre. Critical Inquiry 7: 55–81. Trans. Avital Ronell. ———. 2009. The Beast [sic] and the Sovereign. Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elliott, Robert C. 1962. The Definition of Satire: A Note on Method. Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 11: 1–29. Feinberg, Leonard. 1968. Satire: The Inadequacy of Recent Definitions. Genre 1: 31–46. Foster, Charles. 2016. Being a Beast [sic]. London: Profile Books. Kenyon-Jones, Christine. 2001. Kindred Brutes [sic]: Animals in Romantic Period Writing. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Kirkland, David. 2011. Books Like Clothes: Engaging Young Black Men [sic] with Reading. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 55: 199–208. Laird, Tessa. 2021. Zoognosis: When Animal Knowledges Go Viral: Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country, Contagion, Becoming-Animal, and the Politics of Predation. Animal Studies Journal 10: 30–56. https://ro.uow.edu. au/asj/vol10/iss1/5. Lasagna, Louis. 1975. Clinical Trials of Drugs from the Viewpoint of the Academic Investigator (a Satire). Clinical Pharmacology Therapeutics 18: 629–633. Lockwood, Alex. 2016. The Pig in Thin Air. New York: Lantern Books. ———. 2017. The Collaborative Craft of Creatural [sic] Writing. In Beyond the Human-animal Divide: Creatural [sic] Lives in Literature and Culture, ed. Dominic Ohrem and Roman Bartosch, 167–188. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Front Row. BBC Radio 4, November 23. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/m000183n. ———. 2019. H is for Hypocrite: Reading ‘New Nature Writing’ through the Lens of Vegan Theory. In Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism, ed. Laura Wright, 205–222. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Macaluso, Michael. 2016. Examining Canonicity as an Implicit and Discursive Frame in Secondary English Classrooms. Dissertation. East Lansing: Michigan State University.

370 

A. LOCKWOOD

Macdonald, Helen. 2015. H is for Hawk. London: Vintage. McKay, Laura Jean. 2020. The Animals in That Country. Melbourne: Scribe. Parkinson, Claire. 2020. Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters. Abingdon: Routledge. Ritvo, Harriet. 1987. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures [sic] in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rowe, Martin. 2020. A Modest Proposal: Kill All the Animals. Medium, May 15. https://medium.com/brighter-­g reen/a-­m odest-­p roposal-­k ill-­a ll-­t he-­ animals-­faf5a1c4093c. Accessed May 6, 2022. Royle, Nicholas. 2017. An English Guide to Birdwatching. Brighton: Myriad Editions. Scholes, Robert. 1998. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2011. English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Stone, Gene. 2011. Forks over Knives: The Plant-based Way to Health. New York: The Experiment. Tague, Ingrid. 2008. Dead Pets [sic]: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals. Eighteenth Century Studies 41: 289–306. Tierney, Thomas. 1981. Satire on Mankind: The Nature of the Beast [sic]. Dissertation. Chicago: Loyola University. Yunker, John, and Midge Raymond. 2018. Writing for Animals: New Perspectives for Writers and Instructors to Educate and Inspire. Ashland: Ashland Creek Press.

CHAPTER 22

The Satirical Rhetorics of [Re]Tweeting Birds Melissa T. Yang

@Twitter The microblogging platform known as Twitter today was launched as “Twttr” in 2006 before the co-founders—Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams (and briefly, Noah Glass)—bought the vowels from an existing domain. To underscore the birdsong from which the messaging system took its name, the team spent around $15 on a stock image logo of a sky blue bird by Simon Oxley (who earned nearly nothing for his design).1 This bird had legs, an upturned frame, and a white eye. The Twitter bird, based on a mountain bluebird and named Larry after basketball star Larry Bird, went through several molts. The second iteration, by Philip Pascuzzo in 2009, had a bubbly frame and cartoonish aesthetic, beak open in chatter. This Larry lost his legs but grew open wings and a tuft of crest feathers. Pascuzzo later revised this design to lose the eye, leaving only the silhouette. Designer Doug Bowman slimmed down the bird further and perked it up with a tilt—this lofty icon has lived on since 2012. Upon 1

 Doll, Why Twitter.

M. T. Yang (*) Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_22

371

372 

M. T. YANG

releasing the latest Larry into the world, Bowman proclaimed: “(Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter)”.2 After presenting this dramatic parenthetical antimetabole, Bowman shared how this soaring silhouette “crafted purely from three sets of overlapping circles” is meant to be the “ultimate representation of freedom, hope and limitless possibility”.3 As a platform designed to limit users to a terse character count (first 140, then 280 as of 2017), the claim to freedom feels comical—the relationship between medium and message seems messy.4 Besides, they specifically eliminated feathers from the logo to polish their bird—when hope is the thing with feathers. Still, the flat, featherless icon is a recognizable stamp on society, and Twitter has proven to be a dynamic space for a convergence of avian influences—and strange satire. When Twitter’s co-founders brainstormed this platform, the team was notorious for disagreements and deception, but there was no debate that Noah Glass had landed on the perfect name while flipping obsessively through a dictionary. While different co-founders have cited varying versions of the dictionary definition, the links to birdsong, humor, and triviality remain consistent. Nick Bilton writes in Hatching Twitter that “Twitter” was defined as “The light chirping sound made by certain birds. … A similar sound, especially light, tremulous speech or laughter … Agitation or excitement; flutter” in Glass’s dictionary.5 Dorsey’s 2009 interview with the L.A. Times cites the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “a short burst of inconsequential information”,6 which rhetorician Damien Pfister draws upon to deepen an inquiry around how Twitter was designed to circulate “information in ways analogous to the contact and assembly calls of birds”.7 To lean into this platform so “explicitly modeled on avian communication”, I look to the literal and ludic legacy of birds flocking to Twitter.8 Such bird tweeters encompass a broad range: domestic and wild birds pecking at keyboards, humans impersonating birds, bird mascots, bird  Rehak, Who made.  Bowman, Taking flight. 4  I am alluding to Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” idea introduced in Understanding Media, and his mosaic approach to writing. 5  The definition used in Bilton’s Hatching Twitter matches the one in American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language “twitter”. See also Bilton, All is fair. 6  Sarno, Twitter creator. 7  Pfister, A short burst, 130. 8  Pfister, A short burst. 2 3

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

373

bots, birders who tweet about birds, and more. Many of these bird tweeters appear quirky on the surface—yet deeper investigation leads, perhaps predictably, to flattening and wallet-fattening. As cute, zany, and capitalistic gimmicks, these bird tweeters could be analyzed through the lens(es) of Sianne Ngai’s theories of aesthetic categories.9 The birds and their virtual representations are treated at once as cute, zany, and interesting, and their likenesses are often crafted into capitalistic gimmicks through the vehicle of Twitter. While these Twitter birds span and flap in actual and virtual worlds, they illuminate mixed messages, serious and comical, in multiple modes. My project’s engagement with theory is intentionally light and gestural—more observational and less analytical, more akin to casual birdwatching than serious ornithology. Yet while I seek aleatory lucidity rather than anchored lucidity, there is plenty that is difficult and problematic in these explorations. Consider how people puppeting and parroting birds online want to sell you things, while the actual birds just want to eat and not be killed. In this superficially simple dynamic, one can unpack mind and language games, conceptual art, concealed algorithms, and so on. These are cases of multispecies and multimodal mimicry exploring ways of making meaning and sending messages. There are lessons in the cultural constructing of nature, and the unexpected juxtaposing and chaotic clashing of all the above, and more, in investigating these accounts. In the messy tradition of a social media feed, this investigation flits across different profiles and ideas. There will be fluff—while fluff is frowned upon in academic writing, birds require fluffy down to survive in three-dimensional realms. Occasionally, ideas will be intentionally connected; occasionally, I will leave readers in a semi-wild state to tether their own jesses, to use falconry jargon, and to embrace and enact gimmicks fully for content and form to spark birds. (I am using spark here as a verb, but “spark birds” is the term that birders use to label the first bird that sparks their interest in birding.10) As with all my longer bird essays, I compose in interchangeable sections—as birds can change places while flocking in flight, so can the parts of my piece. Imagine an algorithm scrambling the sections into a feed; read accordingly.

9

 Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick.  See Raboteau, Spark bird, for a memorable discussion of this term.

10

374 

M. T. YANG

@OED Among the most irresistible pleasures of humanistic prosing is the ritual naming of keywords and associated grasping of and associative grappling with their various meanings and etymological roots. “The inarticulate utterance of birds, or a vocal sound resembling it” is a dictionary definition that could easily fit into the roster of meanings already assigned to “Twitter”. Rather, this “inarticulate utterance of birds” is actually attached to the word “jargon” in the Oxford English Dictionary. This early definition suggests jargon is so specialized that it registers as the language of another species. Geoffrey Chaucer’s satirical Canterbury Tales offers an example when January of The Merchant’s Tale is written to be full of jargon—full of the nonsense birdsong of “a flekked pye”—a flecked magpie (Pica pica).11 Magpies, clever birds with insatiable appetites and a habit of collecting shiny objects, are assigned to the scientific genus of Pica. The human disorder of pica, of compulsively eating inedible substances, gets its name from the ravenous reputation of these birds.12 This compilation of eclectic etymologies and definitions feeds into a fuller discussion of satire—with its shared roots in “satiate” and origins in lanx satura, Latin for a “full dish” or “food composed of many different ingredients”.13 The resemblance of satire as a word to the hybrid beast of the Greek satyr has caused occasional specious speculation of connections, and at least leaves a tangential trail of crumbs to beyond-human inquiry— perhaps to Donna Haraway’s appetizing invitation to think with companion species. Here, “companion” comes from “cum panis”, with bread, and thus we are asked to break bread with non-human species as we learn from them.14 As birders of Twitter, an active and often activist community, are often quick to note: breaking bread with avian companions is frowned upon. This gesture of care is a destructive human habit—bread is bad for birds, who can fill up on it and die by malnutrition. Somewhere, here, there may be a parallel for how humans fill and fuel up on social media feeds and still end up running on empty. When people talk about wild and domestic birds, the topic of feeding often arises: from feeding birds to feasting on birds. Here, I consider  See Jargon, OED; and Jones, Jargon.  Magpie, Online Etymology Dictionary. 13  Satire, OED. 14  Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 29. 11 12

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

375

different ways of consuming birds in actual and virtual worlds—with a focus on birds in social media feeds. By tracing the stories of Twitter users that represent themselves as birds, several patterns emerge—in many, the cuteness of the account is simply trying to sell you things. But often, these birds also attempt to teach us things while they engage in their slant mimicry that makes us attentive to our human habits of language use, of media consumption, of desires for interpersonal and interspecies connection.

@Hungry_Birds One winter in the cold coastal town of Sārnate, Latvia, Voldemars Dudums screwed chunks of pork lard onto a computer keyboard and hooked the keyboard up to Twitter to tempt hungry tits (mostly tom tits, or blue tits, Parus caeruleus)—to feast on the hearty, healthy fat. By doing so, he enticed wild birds to peck at the keyboard and engineered a program to send their messages into the Twittersphere. This meant wild birds were tweeting on Twitter, feasting on suet attached to the keys to type nonsense streams of characters. Audiences across the World Wide Web tuned into this conceptual art feed on livestream in 2011 and 2012.15 At the height of their popularity, the @Hungry_Birds tom tits made rounds in the press. Founder of the art platform Colossal, Christopher Jobson, recommended “reading through the archive of tweets … for random literary gems like ‘OOOMMMGGGGG’ and ‘AIAIAIA’”.16 Wired reporter Olivia Solon shared logistics of how “screws serve to add weight to each of the keys to ensure that the light birds can provide enough pressure to depress them”, and thus allow the birds to share their screwball “literary gold”.17 While “literary” is surely used tongue-in-cheek, it does conjure the thought experiment of the infinite monkey theorem, popularized by mathematician Émile Borel: if infinite monkeys were provided typewriters and infinite time, they might eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Thus, @Hungry_Birds fans may similarly muse: if infinite birds were set upon an infinite cache of sustainable treats spread over resilient keyboards, 15  Dudums’s Birds on Twitter (https://www.birdsontwitter.com), where the project was livestreamed, is now defunct, but the 2011–2012 records are accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/). 16  Jobson, Birds on Twitter. 17  Solon, Bacon-fat keyboard.

376 

M. T. YANG

would they eventually type out Shakespeare’s oeuvre (or, say, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls)? Based on their extant abstract output, it seems unlikely, no matter how rich the concept. It is apt that multiple reporters compared the value of the tweets to the value of jewels—gems and gold— since @Hungry_Birds was not just a conceptual art piece, but also a moneymaker, as a publicity stunt for Ir, the Latvian independent newspaper where Dudums worked. It’s not clear whether there was a purposeful conceptual connection between @Hungry_Birds and Ir besides the publicity tag (an @irLV tag was automatically attached to every bird-pecked tweet as clear evidence of human tampering on the language of birds). When the Wired reporter asked about his project, Dudums remarked: “Yes, one may say it is quite silly. … But if you look at what people sometimes say on Twitter, then the tom tits’ messages are still okay.” He has a point, and regardless of whether @Hungry_Birds’s followers could read Latvian, the universal appeal of the gimmick gave Ir international attention that recruited readers and turned a profit. Wrapping up the article, Solon notes: “Unfortunately, it looks like the weather is now warm enough that the birds can catch their regular bug prey, so the project is on hold”. The adverb feels unfortunately anthropocentric here—as if the ability of birds to survive on their own without hungrily tapping out nonsense strings of characters for humans to gawk at online is truly a loss. Still, I am not the only one to miss the birds. A decade has gone by since we have heard from @Hungry_Birds (whose profile promised a 2013 return); the account still has 12.9K fol­lowers waiting in the wings (as of 2023). The tits sent out an average of 150 tweets per day through the cold season, and the final bird tweet (“/1//1 /////1/1/1////2////////////////2/1///2//////////” “““/////”//...........88 @irLV”18) was posted in March 2012, before Dudums signed in to comment, uncharacteristically, on American politics. One of the final messages posted to the account dates to November of 2012 and simply says: “Lard knows, Obama wins”, with a sketch of the presidential victor grinning and flashing a peace sign, stars and stripes in the background, a blue tit perched on his head.

18  Hungry Birds, “/1//1/////1/1/1////2////////////////2/1///2///// /////”“/////’//...........88 @irLV”.

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

377

@ProBirdRights Bird (@ProBirdRights)—who interchangeably refers to himself as “bird” and “birb” with inconsistent capitalization19—is a small and sassy European robin (Erithacus rubecula) campaigning for the American presidency on Twitter on the platform of bird rights. An irreverent and narcissistic char­ acter, Bird loudly tweets using sensational spelling and twee childlike lol­ speak drawn from the recent lineage of lolcats—with an avian twist.20 Bird joined the platform on a similar flight path as @Hungry_Birds—by mashing keys for food to the befuddled delight of human spectators in 2011— then diving into American politics, and winning influencer acclaim. In the years Bird has been tweeting, the character has reached some 400,000 followers as of early 2023. While @Hungry_Birds took home the People’s Voice Webby award for Online Guerilla and Innovation and other advertising honors,21 Bird has been nominated twice as a top influencer in the “weird” and “non-human” categories for the Shorty Awards, whose website sums up his feats22: “From Bird’s first tweets where he pecks out a string of ‘g’s’ on the keyboard (mistaking the letter for a worm) to his outspoken critique of science … what Bird lacks in knowledge of history, he makes up for in histrionics”.23 While @Hungry_Birds featured actual birds keysmashing for healthy sustenance, @ProBirdRights centers his pronouncements on a bird’s right to bread, with focused pitches like: “How about a pipeline that goes through bread factory direct into my mouth I guarantee it will make severals of jobs”.24 @ProBirdRights has not won a presidency yet, but he does comment on American politics while mirroring the rhetorical stylings of different presidential candidates when it suits him. Sometimes, Bird’s pronouncements resemble that of the narcissistic American president who 19  Elbein’s title—When is a bird a “Birb”?—raises another question of colloquialisms that Audubon has enlightened us on. 20  Rozakis, “I” before “E” except after “C” defines “sensational spelling” as “intentionally misspelling a word to create a special effect most often in advertising” (24). An early post by Anil Dash in the blog post, “Cats Can Has grammar”, mentions “kitty pidgin”, and linguists such as Mark Liberman in Language Log and Gretchen McCulloch, who mentions @ProBirdRights in a write-up for The Toast, have extended this inquiry. 21  The Webby Awards description for Birds on Twitter. Dudums is included in a list of all @Hungry_Birds awards and nominations in Starr, When real birds tweet. 22  The Shorty Awards, Pro Bird Rights. 23  The Shorty Awards, BirdsRightsActivist: Finalist in non-human. 24  Goldin (@ProBirdRights), How about a pipeline.

378 

M. T. YANG

achieved Twitter notoriety before being banned from the site. Like Donald Trump, Bird champions causes proven terrible by scientists for the well-­ being of his own species. On the flip side, Bird has capitalized on the moment when a bird landed on Bernie Sanders’s podium and gave him the nickname “Birdie Sanders”.25 @ProBirdRights even created a bumper sticker copying Bernie’s style—with “Birdie” underlined in red and white and stars to dot each “i”—next to the image of a European robin in a messy white wig.26 This sticker sold out on Bird’s Patreon page, which, as of 2021, continues to collect about $100 per month with a “Super Peck” fundraising video. Keeping a running commentary during the last presidential debates, Bird emphasized his bipartisan commitment: “debat questins too hard. not bird enough. i refuse answer. media have a no-­ wing bias.”27 By contrast, Katie Jo Goldin, the ghostwriter who brought Bird to life, was unequivocal when vocalizing the importance of Trump losing the election in an interview. She tells Sara Ost of East Bay Magazine: “Here’s the trouble with satire and someone like Trump: In terms of my life and everyone’s lives, I would like him to lose. But I would also like him to lose because of comedy. It’s incredibly hard to satirize someone who is blatantly evil.” Goldin revealed that she invented @ProBirdRights largely in reaction to the misogynistic, exclusionary discourse of men’s rights activists that predated and perhaps anticipated Trump’s rise to power. She created Bird in reaction to email chain letters of the so-called manosphere—self-pronounced “activists” who justified their discriminatory and supremacist rants by warping language borrowed from social justice movement leaders. Spinning comedy from toxicity, Goldin appropriated their patterns of speech, and funneled them into the political “perspective of an angry bird … [where] being gluten-free is anti-bird”.28 Bird was born to amplify the assertive, aggressive patterns of quasi-activist discourse, projected as the idiosyncratic whims of a fictional bird, with his unassuming bio of “Hello yes this is a bird i am a birdsrightsactivist and I fight against antibird sentiment”.29 The gendered complexities of Goldin

 Alter, “Birdie Sanders” gets a standing ovation.  Goldin (@ProBirdRights), Birdie 2020 Bumper Stickers. 27  Goldin (@ProBirdRights), debat questins. 28  Ost, Does a bird. 29  Goldin (@ProBirdRights), Twitter. 25 26

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

379

voicing Bird as a masculine entity are curious, too, when we consider the misogynistic use of “bird” as a patronizing pet name for women. Bird, for all his silly stances, occasionally does attend to current news and actual issues facing birds in need—for example, the right of birds to be free of the dangers of window strikes and outdoor cats—and the Migratory Bird Act Trump tried to gut.30 Ultimately, though, Bird’s followers are not there for pressing social commentary but for the uncritical joy of a tiny bird shouting big obscenities, for the images of Bird’s head popping up through a slice of bread. Followers seek comic relief to cut through the ennui and doom of scrolling through a feed, that element of the unexpected, of surprise in a cute package. Sianne Ngai defines cute as “an aesthetic disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities”31 and this is precisely what Bird does for us, arguably more so than the other Twitter birds featured in this archive. He is a small round “birb” anthropomorphized through his slant and standout use of barbed and garbled human language. At once, Bird is a digital projection of a human representing how she imagines a bird might mimic human language, a figure with something to say about human relationships to language and mimicry and comedy, and a guilty treat to behold.

@ChickenTreat Chicken Betty tweeted her way to Internet stardom in fall of 2015 when the Australian fast-food chain Chicken Treat hooked a keyboard up to her coop. Reporters dished the same fluffy news in bite-sized nuggets across the globe: a red hen named Betty was taking over the company’s Twitter account until she managed to tweet a five-letter word in English for Guinness Book of World Records, in another infinite monkey theorem-esque spin in a contained and capitalistic sphere.32 Betty was “trained” to walk and peck on a keyboard placed in her coop throughout the course of the day, where she tapped out “mostly nonsensical strings of characters” for over a month.33 Chicken Betty’s reign on @ChickenTreat began on  National Audubon Society, Trump administration.  Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories. 32  Franco, Betty the Tweeting Chicken. 33  Jenkins, Australian Chicken Treat Restaurant. 30 31

380 

M. T. YANG

October 7, 2015, with a long string of caps-locked letters and numbers: “1 SQDE3WH7 SEËCQYU CXSVVS . 67”.34 Each of her messages, and tweets about her, were automatically attached to the hashtag “#chickentweet”. Betty’s fans were delighted by the few decipherable English-­ language tweets she shared over the month. Within larger strings of nonsense, “bum” and “poop” appropriately appeared, along with a creatively spaced-out “YOLO”.35 Betty never made the Guinness Book of World Records, stepping down as social media manager by late November 2015. However, the advertising ploy was successful, despite glibly glossing over the fact that Chicken Treat capitalized on the anthropomorphized charms of a pampered live chicken to sell the meat of factory-farmed and slaughtered chickens. Chicken Treat, a 39-year-old chain of 70 stores at the time of the experiment, saw “sales jump 8% in just 10 days” when the project launched.36 At the end of Betty’s reign, Chicken Treat shared a “Magic Moments” montage highlighting her comic successes, ending on a chipper note of “I’ll be BOK!”37 Some enthusiasts mounted the text Betty generated onto stock photographs of sunset backgrounds, creating inspirational posters to mimic an Instagram aesthetic.38 The darkly ironic undercurrent of the lighthearted experiment didn’t escape most reporters and spectators, even if the cognitive dissonance didn’t deter consumers. Nash Jenkins of Time reminds us that Betty is “unwittingly working to promote a firm that exists only to execute and barbecue her brethren for human consumption”,39 and Samantha Guff of Huffington Post hopes Betty’s “Twitter prowess will earn her immunity from a similar fate”.40 She ends on an uplifting cheer of: “Keep on tweetin’ on Betty. Never lose your voice.”41 Since Betty never achieved her goal, some followers tweeted asking if she was eaten. The recurring discourse of “voice” is striking in discussions around Betty—namely, how generously “voice” is assigned to aleatory, asemic keysmashings of a hen in this context. It is a non-threatening, jesting use  Chicken Treat (@ChickenTreat), 1 SQDE3WH7 SEËCQYU CXSVVS . 67.  Chicken Treat (@ChickenTreat), #chickentweet—Betty’s Magic Moments. 36  Goldman, Campaign watch. 37  Chicken Treat (@ChickenTreat), #chickentweet—Betty’s Magic Moments. 38  Shaw, #ChickenTweet. 39  Jenkins, Australian Chicken Treat Restaurant. 40  Guff, This cluckin’ chicken tweets. 41  Ibid. 34 35

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

381

of an animal “voice” which perhaps inadvertently reinforces the hierarchy long established by humans for our ability to voice our ideas in representational, systematic forms. Ornithological subjects are of particular interest in this long history—many birds have been a source of awe and fear due to their ability to mimic human speech—but not chickens, with their mere cluckings. Each of these bird tweeters shows how satire on this platform balances computerized constraints with the human curation of and credulity around animal voice. We witness these animals who have little to no agency over the way they are represented on this medium, functioning as wildcard elements interacting with a program designed to give them a human-curated voice. Chicken Betty’s identity as a mascot makes her distinct insofar as it assigns her to be the representative “voice” for a chicken-focused fast-food company. To assuage critics concerned about her humane treatment, a human Chicken Treat representative tweeted that the project was vetted by the Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and “abides by all standards regarding animal welfare”.42 Still, no great stakes are attached to Betty’s distinct identity and voice; no one seemed to mind, for instance, when CNN simply used a stock photo of a reddish hen to accompany its story on Betty with a caption of, “A chicken, not unlike this one, is tweeting in Australia for a chicken restaurant”.43 This casual attribution calls to mind Jeffrey Vallance’s 1979 project, where he purchased a chicken carcass from the grocery store, named her Blinky the Friendly Hen, and performed funerary and burial rituals for the random hen.44 Like Blinky, Betty could have been any chicken, with her status elevated by human-given names and roles. Revisiting this story, I am often struck by how little we do know about the specifics of the set-­up— Betty could’ve been a random rotation of chickens for all we know. Followers were given behind-the-scenes glimpses into Chicken Betty’s set-up on the company’s YouTube page in a tongue-in-cheek “training video”, but all footage is whimsically edited.45 We know little about what inspired the project nor about the controlled conditions or manipulations of her coop or keyboard. Of course, this was designed as a publicity  Chicken Treat (@ChickenTreat), qtd. in Pearson, Chicken Restaurant.  Ibid. 44  Drohojowska-Philp, Jeffrey Vallance and Blinky, The Friendly Hen. Thanks to Robert McKay for noting this connection. 45  ChickenTreatAU, Betty the First Tweeting Chicken’s Training Video. 42 43

382 

M. T. YANG

­ immick, not a scientific experiment, and its humor relies on its randomg ness, and in the zany and superficially joyful act of bringing actual birds to Twitter. As of 2021, the @ChickenTreat Twitter account still has over 17,000 followers and their bio still reads: “Home of Your Favourite Chicken and the first tweeting Chicken, Betty! #chickentweet”.46 Their recent tweets have received little engagement since reverting to generic advertisements of chicken sandwiches and sales announcements. Based on the now lackluster social media presence of Chicken Treat, it appears little content has engaged their followers and eaters as whole-heartedly as Betty’s Twitter takeover. In exploring Chicken Betty’s story, we may consider its resonances across various contexts. Recall, for instance, the tradition of alectryomancy—among the most ancient efforts to capitalize on chicken talents. Here, letters of the alphabet were traced around a circle in the ground, grains were placed on each letter, and a rooster in the center. Left to peck at the corn, barley, or other tasty grains, the rooster spelled out messages for diviners to read, interpret meanings, and reveal predictions. They “carefully observed the letters from which the rooster removed the seeds, and from those gathered letters they formed a word that was the response to what they wanted to know”.47 In this way, chickens were forced to scratch out human alphabetical text through feeding for prophecy and profit. The beliefs informing the practice perhaps infused it with more spiritual depth than Chicken Betty’s nonsense keysmashings, but in alectryomancy as in Chicken Treat’s gimmickry, humans find meaning in the scratching of chickens. In the long span of time from ancient to contemporary human communication practices, avian bodies have been manipulated and sacrificed to make meanings and messages. More directly, this was done in the slaughter of birds to craft human text through quill pens. Plucked and carved from wings of poultry such as swans and geese, pen feathers were used for centuries to document every flight of fancy. Yet, as Susan Merrill Squier writes in her “Augury” chapter in Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet: “As we have accepted chickens as animals farmed for

 Chicken Treat (@ChickenTreat), Twitter.  Mallet, Alectryomancy.

46 47

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

383

their meat and eggs … we have lost the ability to see what they and other animals augur for our collective future”.48 Consider Betty’s literal relationship to the concept of “chicken scratch”, a phrase understood as “unintelligible, illegible, or roughly-drawn marks … illegible handwriting”.49 This figure, used as noun and adjective, commonly describes messy human penmanship, but surely also applies to the literal messy typing of chickens themselves. It is linked closely to “chicken feed”, or “substances intended to be scattered on the ground for hens to scratch at and eat as a supplement to their diet … an inexpensive mixture of cracked corn and grains”. Throughout, the question of value stays in play—in fact, one definition of “chicken feed” is simply: “Anything of small amount or of little importance or significance; esp. a trifling sum of money” with both the chicken and the feed abstracted.50 On the one hand, one might deride this very essay for committing to a phenomenon of seemingly “little importance or significance”—even birdbrained, to quote another insult. Yet, there is a cornucopia of food for thought as we move through these stories of avian cacography—defined in its roots as “bad writing”, the term can also extend to intentional misspellings, such as those by @ ProBirdRights.51 These conceptual curiosities can conjure conversations around capitalism, consumerism, and deepen inquiries around animal-­ human-­computer interactions. This eclectic essay scatters, as feed, a few openings to many possible conversations.

@BigBird Anne Lamott’s popular Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life reminds writers to craft in drafts, bird by bird, not letting fear of cacography hold us back.52 I’ve taken this literally in my ongoing investigations into what birds can teach us about writing. Several iconic fictional birds have been tasked with teaching children about language and literacy through the years—from Mother Goose to Duo the bright green owl of Duolingo, a foreign language educator and social media influencer. 48  Squier, Poultry Science, 20. With thanks to Susan McHugh for reminding me to add this important citation, among other apt suggestions. 49  Chicken scratch, OED Online. 50  Chicken feed, OED Online. 51  Cacography, OED Online. 52  Lamott, Bird by Bird.

384 

M. T. YANG

Perhaps the greatest educational bird presence in Western media is Big Bird (@BigBird) of the US children’s television program Sesame Street, whose first Twitter post was an unassuming “Tweet?”53 in 2015. Big Bird is the one bird featured here whose three-dimensional presence predates Twitter: the Muppet was first designed in 1969 and embodied by puppeteer Caroll Spinney. Since then, the character has done a lot of teaching and growing up (while remaining perpetually six years old). Big Bird’s first brush with Twitter notoriety occurred before he had an active online presence—and it wouldn’t be the last time the bird inadvertently provoked Republican politicians into outbursts. During a presidential debate against Barack Obama in 2012, Mitt Romney claimed: “I love Big Bird”, but that this love was not strong enough to stop him from cutting PBS funding to reduce national debt. His comment gained traction on Twitter, where users “[posted] about Big Bird 17,000 times a minute in the moments following the remarks”54 and multiple left-leaning spin-off “satirical Big Bird accounts popped up on Twitter”.55 Among these was @BigBirdRomney, who tweeted: “Obama will provide healthcare for talking birds. Mitt Romney wants to cut them. America, the choice is yours. #PresidentialDebate2012.”56 The situation amplified Twitter’s unique contribution to political discourse, leading to analyses like “I Love Big Bird: How Journalists Tweeted Humor During the 2012 Presidential Debates”. Here, a team of media scholars—Rachel Mourão, Trevor Diehl, and Krishnan Vasudevan—analyzed how Twitter caused a “blurring of lines between news and entertainment, journalist and commentator” that fundamentally shaped approaches, attitudes, and roles of political journalists.57 This far-ranging response to Big Bird, the tweets about him, and later the tweets by him further underscore the unpredictable, unstable expansiveness and the satirical potential of Twitter’s birds. On November 6, 2021, Big Bird tweeted: “I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.”58 Several journalists reported on the backward backlash, where Ted Cruz decried Big Bird’s  Big Bird (@BigBird), I heard my friends on Twitter.  Blake, Big Bird’s fans tweet. 55  Katz, Debated makes Big Bird. 56  Big Bird Romney (@BigBirdRomney), Obama will provide. 57  Mourão et al., I love Big Bird. 58  Big Bird (@BigBird), I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! 53 54

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

385

tweet as “government propaganda”, while a Fox commentator feared the Muppet was “brainwashing children” with pro-vaccination messages.59 Supporters of Big Bird’s tweet included Hillary Clinton, who posted a photograph of herself with Big Bird to emphasize how the bird simply “teaches children things. Like how to stay healthy. That’s it.”60 In addition to human politicians, fictional birds on Twitter started weighing in: @ ProBirdRights retweeted Big Bird, adding: “the goverment experiment to make birds huge is a successe”.61

@BirdsArentReal Another avian accusation of government experimentation is the “Birds Aren’t Real” movement—a Gen-Z activist group rallying that “birds don’t exist and are really drone replicas installed by the U.S. government as spies”.62 According to the @birdsarentreal Twitter bio, the organization was founded in 1976, and birds “used to be” real until the government eradicated the animals and replaced them all with drones.63 The actual founder, Peter McIndoe, began the movement in January 2017, in the heat of protests against Trump’s inauguration. He dropped out of college in 2018 to dedicate to being the full-time front man of Birds Aren’t Real, selling merchandise, creating media, and tweeting to their 73.5K followers as @birdsarentreal. The crew has demonstrated tangible ties to Twitter: while staging a 2021 rally at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey was photographed embracing the Birds Aren’t Real team.64 Shortly after, in an unrelated event, Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO of Twitter with an email screenshot—the subject line: “Fly”.65 For years, McIndoe’s team, who earned thousands of dollars monthly from this project, presented themselves as straight-faced bird truthers, making arguments that left followers and spectators wondering if they truly believed birds did not exist. It wasn’t until December 2021 when 59  The story was covered by various news sources including Treisman, Big Bird got “vaccinated”. 60  Clinton (@HillaryClinton), It’s a bird that teaches children things. 61  Goldin (@ProBirdRights), the goverment experiment. 62  Lorenz, Birds Aren’t Real. 63  Birds Aren’t Real (@birdsarentreal), Twitter. 64  Birds Aren’t Real (@birdsarentreal), Hugely successful protest. 65  Dorsey (@jack), not sure anyone has heard.

386 

M. T. YANG

McIndoe, at age 23, broke character to comment on his satirical project to his New York Times interviewer Taylor Lorenz to confirm that the project was meant to mock the absurdity of misinformation commonplace in Trump’s America. Besides drawing bemused attention, however, it’s unclear what exactly the group is accomplishing (besides selling merchandise). For all their talk of a fictional “bird genocide”, the group (to my knowledge thus far) has yet to acknowledge the very real die-offs of wild birds in the world, which could just as easily be linked to the devastation wrought by corrupt politicians. If the human destruction of Earth continues at the pace it’s going, it’s possible there could be a future where birds are no longer real—where we could live in an actual world without the tweets of birds, something Rachel Carson so powerfully warned us of in Silent Spring.66

@Twitter: Redux Every second of every day, Twitter continues to buzz with actual and virtual birds coming and leaving. Watching this action and these movements, one finds endless distractions and disruptions—and divergent directions this project could go in. Refreshing my Twitter feed in the days leading up to submitting this essay, I am struck by all the avian voices left out in this iteration. I wonder how many other voices I missed altogether, through algorithmic absences, through tweets in languages I can’t read. To wit, after the first draft of this piece was due: In November 2021, amidst the ruckus called by Big Bird’s vaccination status update, Aaron Reynolds of @EffinBirds (a popular meme account of vulgarities are pasted across vintage images of birds) shared a real life meet-up with Christopher Skaife (@ravenmaster1), who cares for and tweets for the ravens of the Tower of London.67 In December 2021, Winged Geographies (@WGeographies), an interdisciplinary bird studies conference organization at Cambridge, shared a tweet asking: “Do you want to know more about Twitter Bird? … read our most recent piece from Susan Clayton (Université Paris VII, France)

66  Carson titled Silent Spring (1962) based on a repeated line from John Keats’s 1819 poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” that reads, “And no birds sing”. 67  Reynolds (@EffinBirds), Today I met @ravenmaster1.

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

387

on centuries of crafted bird”.68 I briefly worried my own project has already been rendered obsolete before submission, but found a project fascinated with a different, but converging, set of bird lineages. Clayton’s piece traces examples from art and literature (and creates original art) to show “how birds have enabled humans to span time and space via crafted birdlines”— and how logos, such as the Twitter bird, “striking for its ornithological flatness and artistic shortcomings”, undermine these histories.69 I agree that the consumerism signified by the logo is dangerous, but do think the Twitter bird has surprising histories and dimensions that shouldn’t be quickly dismissed. In these profiles, I’ve prioritized the strange mimicry of accounts featuring bird voices that primarily served capitalistic and comedic means. I did not attend to the larger world of bird Twitter, where meaningful accounts do attend to bird conservation, environmental justice, and education—and connect people who care about these causes. Such conservation projects include Sirocco Kākāpō (@Spokesbird), “New Zealand’s official Spokesbird for Conservation”.70 A member of the large green ground parrot species that Māori call kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus), Sirocco first went viral attempting to shag Stephen Fry in a BBC video,71 and now begins tweets with the species’ characteristic sounds of “Skraaarrk!” and “BOOM!” before imparting news about the critically endangered species in plain human English, combining humor with care. Also powerful are projects like the Twitter-powered educational programming and community building of #BlackBirdersWeek, run by the Black AF in STEM team.72 Leaders behind this project include naturalists Corina Newsome (@hood_naturalist)73 and Tykee James (@Tykee_James), and other Black activists, birders, scientists, and writers such as J. Drew Lanham (@wildandincolor).74 This ongoing initiative initially responded to an egregious incident of anti-Black racism caught on video in New York’s  Winged Geographies (@WGeographies), Do you want to know.  Clayton, Centuries of crafted bird lines. 70  Sirocco Kākāpō (@Spokesbird), Twitter. 71  Carwardine and Fry, Last Chance To See—BBC. 72   #BlackBirdersWeek is organized by Black AF in STEM (https://www.blackafinstem.com/). 73  Newsome (@hood_naturalist), Twitter. 74  J.  Drew Lanham has been writing on the challenges of birding while Black for years before the case, and became one of the most quoted commentators on the issue. See Lanham, I’ve spent. 68 69

388 

M. T. YANG

Central Park—where a Black birder, Christian Cooper (@blackburniannyc), asked a white woman to leash her dog per park rules. Instead, she unleashed her unreasonable wrath and called the cops on him, captured in a video his sister Melody Cooper (@melodyMcooper) shared to Twitter.75 This all happened, of course, amid the slew of hate crimes that occurred (and continue to occur) during the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. It is clear that Twitter can function as a tool to generate reactions and circulate resources for people by people at the end of the day, even as non-­ human animals influence the conversation and shape the landscape powerfully. I first began researching this project in 2015 for a Computational Media seminar with Annette Vee, where an assignment to create a Twitter bot led me down the rabbit hole of weird animal (but not-bot) accounts including @Hungry_Birds and Chicken Betty. In the years since I began re-envisioning this project through the lens of animal satire, the world has changed in inconceivable ways, and we contend daily with the horrors of hate crimes, climate catastrophe, the global pandemic, and beyond. Throughout all this, many human and non-human voices have flooded to social media—from earnest connections to satire to nonsense, jumbled and juxtaposed, fed to us by algorithms. These words keep us curious and they keep us company. At the same time, the future of the Twitter company is uncertain today—Dorsey had just resigned when this essay was first completed. Making final edits in late 2022 and early 2023, Elon Musk has launched a chaotic takeover, prompting mass layoffs and takeoffs. It would be challenging to craft an algorithm to predict the state of Twitter by the time this piece is published. Throughout my writing process, I kept a low profile on Twitter. I have made occasional connections through virtual birding circles—these circles grow as more people flock to birding as an idea social isolation hobby. Yet, I have never engaged with the accounts I built this project around—those tweeting from the perspective of birds themselves. Perhaps it is to maintain ethnographic distance, or because the idea of interacting with a non-­ human entity in virtual space feels even more difficult in a time of increased anxiety around socialization of all sorts. Perhaps there is an unease in furthering engagement around what become inevitably capitalistic ventures, when one can engage more meaningfully in direct ways to address the dire circumstances of actual birds and wildlife in the natural world.  Cooper (@melodyMcooper), Twitter.

75

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

389

Still, I wonder how this project would change if I did reach out and interact with these bird voices, at least those with active accounts. Twitter is most powerful as a platform that is charged and changed by interaction, and one of the fascinating elements across these accounts is the extent to which people engaged with them—by the hundreds and thousands. At the end of the day, this project is more for them than for the birds, and says more about human inclinations than the meaningful languaging of birds. Having completed this exploration, I, for one, am thrilled to close my Twitter feed to listen again for the birds tweeting and feeding in the trees outside. Perhaps, you will do the same.

Works Cited Alter, Charlotte. 2016. “Birdie Sanders” gets a standing ovation at Rally. Time, March 25. https://time.com/4272885/bernie-­sanders-­bird-­podium/. Big Bird (@BigBird). 2015. Tweet? Twitter, February 15. https://twitter.com/ BigBird/status/566321042545594368. ———. 2021a. I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy. Twitter, November 6. https://twitter.com/BigBird/status/ 1456971880666046465. ———. 2021b. I heard my friends on Twitter were asking about my cousins around the world! It’s true, I have a lot of bird cousins in different countries … Twitter, February 5. https://twitter.com/bigbird/status/1357795422283173890. Big Bird Romney (@BigBirdRomney). 2012. Obama will provide healthcare for talking birds. Mitt Romney wants to cut them… Twitter, October 3. https:// twitter.com/BigBirdRomney/status/253673631031382016. Bilton, Nick. 2013a. All is fair in love and Twitter. New York Times, October 9. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-­is-­fair-­in-­love-­and-­ twitter.html. ———. 2013b. Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. New York: Portfolio/Penguin. Birds Aren’t Real (@birdsarentreal). Twitter. https://twitter.com/birdsarentreal. ———. 2021. Hugely successful protest at Twitter yesterday. Thanks for coming out @jack, glad to have your support. Twitter, November 11. https://twitter. com/birdsarentreal/status/1458897738892931107. Birds on Twitter: Dudums. 2012. The Webby Awards. https://winners.webbyawards.com/2012/advertising-­m edia-­p r/individual/online-­g uerrilla-­ innovation/148580/birds-­on-­twitter. Black AF In STEM. 2021. Black Birders Week 2021 Schedule. https://www. blackafinstem.com/bbw2021schedule.

390 

M. T. YANG

Blake, Meredith. 2012. Big Bird’s Fans Tweet after he’s targeted in presidential debate. Los Angeles Times, October 4. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/laxpm-2012-oct-04-la-et-st-big-bird-debate-mitt-romney-20121004-story.html. Bowman, Doug. 2012. Taking flight: #Twitterbird. Twitter Blog, June 6. https:// blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2012/taking-­flight-­twitterbird. 2022. Cacography, n. OED Online. Oxford University Press, Accessed July 14, 2022. https://www.oed.com/. Carson, Rachel. (1962) 2002. Silent Spring. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Carwardine, Mark, and Stephen Fry. 2009. Last Chance To See—BBC. YouTube, September 29. https://youtu.be/9T1vfsHYiKY. 2022. Chicken Feed, n. and adj. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed July 14, 2022. https://www.oed.com/. 2022. Chicken Scratch, n. and adj. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed July 14, 2022. https://www.oed.com/. ChickenTreatAU. 2015. Betty the First Tweeting Chicken’s Training Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7dYQi3meh8. Chicken Treat (@ChickenTreat). 2015a. 1 SQDE3WH7 SEËCQYU CXSVVS. 67 #chickentweet. Twitter, October 15. https://twitter.com/chickentreat/ status/651893117910540288. ———. 2015b. #chickentweet—Betty’s Magic Moments. Twitter, November 26. https://twitter.com/ChickenTreat/status/670058659582341122. Clayton, Susan. 2021. Centuries of crafted bird lines face current logo times. Winged Geographies, December 10. https://www.wingedgeographies.co.uk/ post/centuries-­of-­crafted-­bird-­lines-­face-­current-­logo-­times. Clinton, Hillary (@HillaryClinton). 2021. It’s a bird that teaches children things. Like how to stay healthy. That’s it. Twitter, November 9. https://twitter.com/ HillaryClinton/status/1458100961608716292. Cooper, Melody (@melodyMcooper). 2020. Oh, when Karens take a walk with their dogs off leash… Twitter, May 25. https://twitter.com/melodyMcooper/status/1264965252866641920?s=20&t=jykK9RET1j2_E5jmKdpCkg. Dash, Anil. 2007. Cats can has grammar, April 23. https://anildash. com/2007/04/23/cats_can_has_gr/. Descartes, René. 2008. Discourse on the Method and the Meditations, Translated by John Veitch New York: Cosimo. Doll, Scooter. 2020. Why Twitter logo is a bird called Larry. ScreenRant, September 6. https://screenrant.com/twitter-­bird-­logo-­name­history-­explained/. Dorsey, Jack (@jack). 2021. Not sure anyone has heard but, I resigned from Twitter. Twitter, November 29. https://twitter.com/jack/status/ 1465347002426867720.

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

391

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. 2019. Jeffrey Vallance and Blinky, The Friendly Hen. KCRW, February 7. https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/art-­talk/ jeffrey-­vallance-­and-­blinky-­the-­friendly-­hen. Dudums, Voldemars. Birds on Twitter. https://www.birdsontwitter.com. Elbein, Asher. 2019. When is a bird a “birb”? An extremely important guide. Audubon, December 12. https://www.audubon.org/news/when-­bird-­ birb-­extremely-­important-­guide. Franco, Michael. 2015. Betty the Tweeting Chicken going for Guinness World Record. CNET, October 14. https://www.cnet.com/news/ betty-­the-­tweeting-­chicken-­going-­for-­guinness-­world-­record. Goldin, Katie Jo as “birdsrightsactivist” (@ProBirdRights). 2015a. Debat questins too hard. Not bird enough. I refuse answer. Media have a no-wing bias. Twitter, October 28. https://twitter.com/ProBirdRights/status/ 555884171579490307. ———. 2015b. How about a pipeline that goes through bread factory direct into my mouth i guarantee it will make severals of jobs. Twitter, January 15. https:// twitter.com/ProBirdRights/status/555884171579490307. ———. 2021. The goverment experiment to make birds huge is a successe. Twitter, November 7. https://twitter.com/ProBirdRights/ status/1457344419653373957. Goldman, Jeremy. 2015. Campaign watch: Betty the Live Tweeting Chicken. Proponent Agency, December 8. https://proponent.agency/campaign-­watch-­ betty-­the-­live-­tweeting-­chicken/. Guff, Samantha. 2015. This cluckin’ chicken Tweets, and she’s got more Twitter followers than you. Huffington Post, October 15. https:// www.huf fpost.com/entr y/chicken-­t weets-­f or-­c ompany-­c ampaign_ n_561fb248e4b028dd7ea6c69f. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Harper, Douglas R. 2022a. Alectryomancy. Online Etymology Dictionary. https:// www.etymonline.com/word/magpie. ———. 2022b. Magpie. Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline. com/word/magpie. Hobson, Jeremy. 2014. Biz Stone on Things A Little Bird Told Me, April 1. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/04/01/biz-­stone-­twitter. Hungry Birds (@Hungry_Birds). 2012. /1//1/////1/1/1////2///// ///////////2/1///2//////////”“/////’//...........88 @irLV. Twitter, March 17. https://twitter.com/hungry_birds/status/ 181045923525304322. James, Tykee (@Tykee_James). Twitter, https://twitter.com/Tykee_James. 2022. Jargon, n.1. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed July 14, 2022. https://www.oed.com/.

392 

M. T. YANG

Jenkins, Nash. 2021. Australian Chicken Treat restaurant uses hen to Tweet. Time, October 15. https://time.com/4074408/chicken-­treat-­betty-­tweets/. Jobson, Christopher. 2012. Birds on Twitter. Colossal (blog), November 29. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/11/birds-­on-­twitter/. Jones, Paul Anthony. 2022. Jargon. Haggard Hawks. https://www.haggardhawks.com/post/jargon. Katz, Leslie. 2012. Debate makes Big Bird a big hit on Twitter. CNET, October 3. https://www.cnet.com/news/debate-­makes-­big-­bird-­a-­big-­hit-­on-­twitter/. Lamott, Anne. 1994. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. Lanham, J. Drew. 2020. I’ve spent my life birding while Black. Here’s why I can’t and won’t forgive Amy Cooper. Newsweek, May 29. https://www.newsweek. com/ive-­spent-­my-­life-­birding-­while-­black-­heres-­why-­i-­cant-­wont-­forgive-­ amy-­cooper-­opinion-­1507247. Liberman, Mark. 2007. Kitty Pidgin and asymmetrical tail-wags. Language Log, April 25. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ archives/004442.html. Lorenz, Taylor. 2021. Birds Aren’t Real, or are they? Inside a Gen Z conspiracy theory. New York Times, December 9. https://www.nytimes. com/2021/12/09/technology/birds-­arent-­real-­gen-­z-­misinformation.html. Mallet, Edme-François. 2020. Alectryomancy. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Trans. Audra Merfeld-Langston and Jessi Schoolcraft. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0003.928. Originally published as Alectryomancie. 1751. Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 1. 253. Paris. McCulloch, Gretchen. 2015. A linguist explains how we write sarcasm on the Internet. The Toast. June 22. https://the-­toast.net/2015/06/22/ a-­linguist-­explains-­how-­we-­write-­sarcasm-­on-­the-­internet/. McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mourão, Rachel, Trevor Diehl, and Krishnan Vasudevan. 2016. I love Big Bird: How journalists Tweeted humor during the 2012 presidential debates. Digital Journalism 4 (2): 211–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/2167081 1.2015.1006861. National Audubon Society. 2020. Trump administration continues effort to strip away bird protections. Audubon, June 5. https://www.audubon.org/news/ trump-­administration-­continues-­effort-­strip-­away-­bird-­protections. Newsome, Corina (@hood_naturalist). 2020. MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!! We at @BlackAFinSTEM…. Twitter, May 29. https://twitter.com/hood_naturalist/status/1266387163727486977.

22  THE SATIRICAL RHETORICS OF [RE]TWEETING BIRDS 

393

Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2020. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ost, Sara. 2020. Does a bird not Tweet? An interview with Katie Jo Goldin, the creator of the wildly popular parody Twitter account, ProBirdRights. East Bay Magazine, December 1. https://eastbaymag.com/does-­a-­bird-­not-­ tweet-­an-­interview-­with-­katie-­jo-­goldin-­the-­creator-­of-­the-­wildly-­popular-­ parody-­twitter-­account-­probirdrights/. Pearson, Michael. 2015. Chicken restaurant puts fowl to work on Twitter. CNN, October 15. https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/15/living/chicken-­tweets-­ feat/index.html. Pfister, Damien S. 2015. “A short burst of inconsequential information:” networked rhetorics, avian consciousness, and bioegalitarianism. Environmental Communication 9 (1): 118–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/1752403 2.2014.910243. Raboteau, Emily. 2021. Spark Bird. Orion Magazine, February 19. https://orionmagazine.org/article/spark-­bird/. Rehak, Melanie. 2014. Who made that Twitter bird? The New York Times, August 8. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/magazine/who-­made-­that-­ twitter-­bird.html. Reynolds, Aaron (@EffinBirds). 2021. Today i met @ravenmaster1 and he introduced me to the ravens at the Tower of London. Twitter, November 7. https:// twitter.com/EffinBirds/status/1457362285115150345. Rozakis, Laurie. 2008. “I” before “E” except after “C”: Spelling for the Alphabetically Challenged. New  York: Citadel Press. http://archive.org/details/ isbn_9780806528847. Sarno, David. 2009. Twitter creator Jack Dorsey illuminates the site’s founding document. Part I. LA Times Blogs—Technology (blog), February 18. https:// latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-­creator.html. 2022. Satire, n. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed July 14, 2022. https://www.oed.com. Shaw, Dorsey. 2015. #ChickenTweet as motivational posters. BuzzFeed, October 16. https://www.buzzfeed.com/dorsey/chickentweet-­as-­ motivational-­posters#.xql197L4EG. The Shorty Awards. Pro Bird Rights: Finalist in Weird. Accessed July 14. 2022. https://shortyawards.com/12th/probirdrights. Sirocco Kākāpō (@Spokesbird). Twitter. https://twitter.com/Spokesbird. Skaife, Christopher (@ravenmaster1). Twitter. https://twitter.com/ravenmaster1. Solon, Olivia. 2011. Bacon-fat keyboard lets real birds Tweet. Wired, April 26. https://www.wired.com/2011/04/bacon-­fat-­keyboard/.

394 

M. T. YANG

Squier, Susan Merrill. 2012. Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Starr, Michelle. 2012. When real birds Tweet. CNET. December 2. https://www. cnet.com/news/when-­real-­birds-­tweet/. Stone, Biz. 2014. Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind. New York; Boston: Grand Central Publishing. Treisman, Rachel. 2021. Big Bird got “vaccinated” against COVID-19, drawing outrage from Republicans. NPR, November 8. https://www.npr. org/2021/11/08/1053548074/big-­bird-­covid-­19-­vaccine-­conservative­backlash-­ted-­cruz. 2022. “Twitter”. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Fifth Edition. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/twitter. Winged Geographies (@WGeographies). 2021. Do you want to know more about Twitter Bird? Then read our most recent piece from Susan Clayton (Université Paris VII, France) on centuries of crafted bird. Twitter, December 10. https:// twitter.com/WGeographies/status/1469234609888149508.

A Satire by Way of Conclusion

CHAPTER 23

The Need for Giant Ape Protection: A Petition to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee Human McStew

We, the inhabitants of Skull Island, call for an extension of protection as a World Heritage Site. Per both Articles 1 and 2 of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, we do so in the name of They whom our unique island ecology and culture together define as chief among us: Kong. Native Skull Islanders are one people comprising several species in an ecological and social system overseen by a gargantuan ape. We acknowledge the irony of our directly appealing to UNESCO, an organization of and for humankind. Yet we are so compelled because we need help to conserve our largest, and largely misunderstood, living link to the past, along with our greatest hope for our future.

H. McStew (*) Levittown, PA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_23

397

398 

HUMAN MCSTEW

We anticipate the objection that harboring “monsters” is a Skull Island tradition that impedes rather than enhances UNESCO’s mission. In response, we assert, in the words of the convention, that “there is no greater effective system of collective protection of the [cultural and natural] heritage of outstanding universal value” than that already in place on Skull Island. Also known as Skull Mountain Island, Farou Island, Mondo Island, or the Beach of the Skull, our homeland is indeed the last remaining refuge of several dinosaur species, as well as astonishing varieties of mammals, arachnids, and many more chimera, so many of whom are prone to gigantism. Yet all will agree that the most fascinating, most uncanny, and truly most awe-inspiring Native Skull Islander is and has always been Kong. In the twenty-first century, the worldwide notoriety of Kong has become both blessing and curse for Skull Island, the last pristine Pacific island ecosystem. Imagine our collective elation when King Kong filled movie screens in 1933, ending all talk of foreign investors and their resort casinos, and again in 1976, when the remake served to frighten away offshore oil-drilling speculators. By 1986, when Kong Lives flopped everywhere except the USSR, we figured we were safe forever. Today, however, Internet memes that reference the 2005 remake awaken us to a sad truth, namely, that something even more stupid and incredible than climate-­ change denial will inevitably sink our island: fear and loathing of Kong. Contrary to popular belief, Kong cannot be our “king” or our “god”. In myriad ways, Kong provides an essential stabilizing force within our fragile island community; whether by producing and depositing necessary tree and crop plant fertilizers, by redirecting primitivist or unconscious ideas about virgin sacrifice to critical self-reflection, or by guiding wayward T. Rexes back to their proper paleontological places, Kong is there for us like no other. Indeed, were we to lose Kong in the manner so often envisioned in the Hollywood imaginary, life on our island would collapse immediately in ruins, with ripple effects felt all over the world. We respect that it may be unpopular in the international community to advocate for the conservation of a biome and worldview dominated by humongous versions of the most terrifying vertebrate and invertebrate critters ever to have existed. While it is no doubt true that even the grandest foe shrinks before our contender for the title of King of All Monsters, such rhetoric profoundly distorts what Kong’s flourishing means for Native Skull Islanders. Naysayers must ask themselves: what would the Himalayas be without Yeti? Or Scotland without Nessie? We are nothing

23  THE NEED FOR GIANT APE PROTECTION: A PETITION TO THE UNESCO… 

399

without the giant ones. Why else commit so many resources to conserving the tattered remains of old-growth forests, let alone to preserve the physical remains of so many truly extinct charismatic megafauna? How else to explain why “save the whales” became a catchphrase for anti-­extinction movements? We Native Skull Islanders cherish our small as much as our mighty community members, but we also appreciate the power of market logic. That said, we warn against misguided efforts to extend UNESCO-­ protected status to just any old big creature that can fan the flames of jingoistic fervor. Kong is not to Skull Island what Godzilla is to Japan. Kong is a natural wonder linking us to our prehistoric past and possibly to a sustainable future, not one of those technological “accidents” or side-­ effects of modern-industrial misanthropy. Indeed, Kong may be our only hope for protection from these problems. Our main plea here is to be left alone. That said, the architecture of Skull Island is badly in need of funds for preservation. Survival for the humanoid among us—more precisely, the few Native Skull Islanders who can communicate with you limited creatures calling yourselves human— traditionally requires a garrisoned existence, and not just for biosecurity reasons like protection from exotic pests and diseases. Outside these walls, everyone is potentially prey. Still, our way is to maintain working doors on a sufficiently grand scale in order to welcome our chief, as They please. We cannot stress strongly enough that it is in everyone’s best interest that Kong alone travels freely between our fortress and the island’s outer zone, which serves as Their combination combat-training facility and forest-­bathing meditation space. All on Skull Island agree that this is how it should be. Even the T. rexes concede that they would not have persisted without Kong to keep them in their place. Kong’s mobility is the key to our sustainability. The scope of UNESCO protection must therefore also be expanded to allow Kong to travel beyond our shores, in order that They might sport with the likes of Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, King Ghidorah, not to mention Their evil doppelganger Mechani-Kong. The stakes of giant ape protection—ours of Them, and Theirs of us—are nothing less than saving the world.

A Grab-bag of Animal Satires

CHAPTER 24

A Grab-bag of Animal Satires Robert McKay and Susan McHugh

We offer here an indicative selection of animal satires, which makes no claim to be comprehensive. The intention, rather, is to document the extent and reach of animal presence in the history of satirical practice. We might well say that the list is a prime case for satirical hijacking itself: overwhelmingly comprising the words of privileged white men, it certainly evidences one aspect of self-regarding folly in the cultural history of satire. It also self-evidently betrays our own areas of expertise in twentieth- and twenty-first-century English-language literary cultures. But, where we are lucky enough to have encountered them, we have included items that push beyond this narrow canon. Texts discussed in depth in this volume are indicated with *.1

1  The list will be simultaneously published on the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre blog. Readers who are so-minded are encouraged to extend or respond to the list by commenting on it there: https://sheffieldanimals.group.shef.ac.uk/.

R. McKay (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK S. McHugh University of New England, Biddeford, ME, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6_24

403

404 

R. MCKAY AND S. MCHUGH

Ancient and Pre-modern Satires *Aristophanes, Wasps (422 BCE) *Unknown, Batrachomyomachia, “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice” (c. 300–1 BCE) Horace, Satires, Book 2, no. 6 “The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse” (c. 30 BCE) Phaedrus, “The Fox and the Sour Grapes”, “The Wolf and the Lamb”, “The Lion’s Share”, and other fables (c. 40–50 AD) Juvenal, Satire 4, “Mock Epic”; Satire 15 “Compassion, not Hatred” (c. 100 AD) *Lucian of Samosata, Gallus (c. 165 AD) Apuleius, The Golden Ass (c. 180 AD) *Avianus, “The Ass in the Lion’s Skin” and other fables (c. 400 AD) Ibn al-Muqaffa, Kalı ̄ la wa-Dimna (c. 760 AD) Brethren of Purity, “The Case of the Animals Versus Man Before the King of the Jinn” (c. 960 AD) Anon., Ecbasis captivi (c. 1050) *Nigel, The Mirror for Fools (c. 1180) Anon., Scrolls of Frolicking Animals (c. 1100–1200) Nivardus, Pierre de St. Cloud, Heinrich der Glïchezäre, Willem die Madoc maecte, and others, Reynard the Fox Story Cycle (c. late twelfth century and after) Geoffrey Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (c. 1390) Robert Henryson, The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian (mid- to late 1400s) Sixteenth Century William Dunbar, Ane Ballat of the Fenyeit Frier of Tungland, How He Fell in the Myre Fleand to Turkiland (c. 1500) David Lyndsay, The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo (1530) John Placentius (Jan Leo Stuyven), The Pig War (1530) Cristóbal de Villalón, El Crotalón (composed ca. 1553) William Baldwin, Beware the Cat (1561) Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Two Chained Monkeys (1562) Edmund Spenser, Mother Hubberd’s Tale (1591) Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West (1592) William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595–1596)

24  A GRAB-BAG OF ANIMAL SATIRES 

405

Seventeenth Century John Marston, “The Scholar and His Dog”, from What You Will (1601) *Ben Jonson, Volpone (1605–1606) Miguel de Cervantes, “The Dialogue of the Dogs” (1613) Dong Yue, A Supplement to the Journey to the West (1640) Aesop/John Ogilby, The Fables of Aesop, paraphras’d in verse and adorn’d with Sculpture, by John Ogilby (1651) Anon, “The Ballad of Gresham College” (c. 1662) Samuel Butler, “An occasional reflection on Dr. Charlton’s feeling a dog’s pulse at Gresham College. By R. B. Esq. to Lyndamore” (c. 1662) John Ogilby, A battle between frogs and mice (Batrachomyomachia): a kite descends and kills the combatants (ca. 1668) Samuel Butler, Elephant in the Moon (c. 1676) Francis Barlow, An ape in military attire, sitting astride a hog, confronts a baboon, also in military attire, who sits astride a bear (ca. 1679/1680) Aesop/Francis Barlow, Aesop’s Fables with his Life: in English, French and Latin. London: William Godbid for Francis Barlow, 1666. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Satire Against Reason and Mankind” (1674) *Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso (1676) La Fontaine, Fables (1668–1694) Nicolas Boileau, “Satire 8: On Man” (1668) Eighteenth Century Anon., Sugungga (c. 1700) John Dryden, The Cock and the Fox (1700) Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books (1704) Susanna Centlivre, The Basset-Table (1705) Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive: Or, Knaves Turn’d Honest (1705) John Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull (1712) Chikamatsu Monzaemon, The Sagami Lay Monk and the Thousand Dogs (1714) Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726) ———. “A Modest Proposal” (1729) ———. “The Beast’s Confession” (1732) *———. “On Poetry: A Rhapsody” (1733) Alexander Pope, “I am his Highness’s Dog at Kew; Pray tell me, Sir, whose Dog are you?” (1736)

406 

R. MCKAY AND S. MCHUGH

———. “An Essay on Man” (1733–1734) John Gay, Fables (1738) Christophe Huet, Singerie: The Dance (c. 1739) *Eliza Haywood, The Parrot (1746) Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” (1747) Francis Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little (1750) William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) Jane Collier, An essay on the art of ingeniously tormenting; with proper rules for the exercise of that pleasant art Humbly addressed, In the First Part, To the Master, Husband, &c. In the Second Part, To the Wife, Friend, &c. With some General Instructions for Plaguing all your Acquaintance (1753) Thomas Taylor, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792) Thomas Rowlandson, Man’s head and sheep’s head (c. 1795–1805) Nineteenth Century *John Harris, The Dog of Knowledge; Or, Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier: Supposed to be Written by Himself. By the Author of Dick the Little Poney (1801) Charles Williams, John Glaisyer a Quaker anointing a dog with burning vitriol oil; implying a satirical attack on the Quaker movement (c. 1806) Thomas Rowlandson, The Corsican Tiger at Bay! (c. 1808) ———. The Corsican Spider in His Web! (c. 1808) *John Harris, Felissa; or, the Life and Opinions of a Kitten of Sentiment (1811) Thomas Peacock, Melincourt; Or, Sir Oran Haut-Ton (1817) E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1819–1821) *Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826). James Gillray, The Genuine Works of James Gillray, Engraved by Himself (1830) J. J. Grandville, Public and Private Life of Animals (1842) *Anon., “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” (1850) R.S. Surtees, Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853) ———. Mr. Facey Romford’s Hounds (1865) Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872) *Frances Power Cobbe, The Age of Science (1877) Henry Stevens Salt, “The Dream of Queer Fishes (A Modern Prose Idyll)” (1887)

24  A GRAB-BAG OF ANIMAL SATIRES 

407

Mark Twain, Letters from a Dog to Another Dog, Explaining and Accounting for Man, by Newfoundland Smith. Translated from the Original Doggerel by M.T. (1891) Gene Stratton-Porter, Strike at Shane’s (1893) Dan Baxter, “A Monkey Story” (1896) Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables (1899) Twentieth Century Mark Twain, A Dog’s Tale (1903) *Humanitarian League, The Brutalitarian, A Journal for the Sane and Strong (1904) Soseki Natsume, I Am a Cat (1905–1906) *Humanitarian League, Beagler Boy (1907) Anatole France, Penguin Island (1908) Kiichi Hosaka, The America That I See (1913) unauthorized sequel to I Am a Cat The Cameraman’s Revenge, Dir. Ladislas Starevich (1912) Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy (1917) Nikolai Kostomarov, “The Farm Animals’ Revolt” (1917) Wladyslaw Reymont, Revolt of the Animals (1922) Karel Č apek and Josef Č apek, Pictures from the Insects’ Life (1921) Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog (1925) Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa (1927) Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug (1929) John Collier, His Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp (1930) Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God (1930) ———. Satire & Fiction (1930) Lao She, Cat Country (1933) *Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (1933) Karel Č apek, War with the Newts (1936) The Tale of the Fox, Dir. Irene and Ladislas Starevich (1937) Countee Cullen, The Lost Zoo, by Christopher Cat and Countee Cullen (1940) Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct (1941) George Orwell, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945) Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (1948) Walter Kelly, Pogo (1948–1975)

408 

R. MCKAY AND S. MCHUGH

Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts (1950–2000) Sławomir Mrożek, The Elephant (1957) Stevie Smith, Some Are More Human Than Others (1958) Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros (1959) Jay Ward, Alex Anderson and Bill Scott, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (1959–1964) SINA. Inside SINA: The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (1963) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1968) Planet of the Apes. Dir. Franklin Schaffner (1968) Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (1969) Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “The Mouse Problem” (1969) Romain Gary, White Dog (1970) Pound, Dir. Robert Downey, Sr. (1970) Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That”, in Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, Women’s LibeRATion (1970) Brigid Brophy, The Adventures of God in his Search for the Black Girl (1973) Chico Buarque, Fazenda Modelo (1974) Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory’s Bible Tales (with Commentary), (1974) Patricia Highsmith, The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975) William Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat (1976) Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs (1977) Pink Floyd, Animals (1977) “Basil the Rat”, Fawlty Towers, S2. E.6, Dir. Bob Spiers, BBC (1979) “The Right to Know”, Yes Minister, S1. E.6, Dir. Sydney Lotterby, BBC (1980) Berkeley Breathed, Bloom County (1980–1989; 2015–) Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984) Ursula Le Guin, “She Unnames Them” (1985) *Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos (1985) “Dish and Dishonesty”, Blackadder S3. E1, Dir. Mandie Fletcher (1987) Gerald Vizenor, Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1986) Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988) “Corporal Punishment”, Blackadder S4. E2, Dir. Richard Boden (1989) “Chicken”, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, S1. E6, Dir. Roger Ordish (1989) Gerald Scarfe, Scarfeland: A Lost World of Fabulous Beasts And Monsters (1990) Zero Patience, Dir. John Geyson (1993) “Stretch cast”, The Day Today, S1. E.4, Dir. Andrew Gilman, BBC (1994)

24  A GRAB-BAG OF ANIMAL SATIRES 

409

Jane Smiley, Moo (1995) Jane Doe, Anarchist Farm (1996) Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin (1996) “Animals”, Brass Eye, S.1 E.1, Dir. Michael Cumming, BBC (1997) Will Self, Great Apes (1998) *Family Guy, Dev. by Seth McFarlane and David Zuckerman (1999–) J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (1999) Lemony Snicket (Brett Helquist), The Reptile Room. A Series of Unfortunate Events #2 (1999) Twenty-First Century Michel Faber, Under the Skin (2000) The Meatrix, Dir. Louis Fox (2003) Thomas King, “A Short History of Indians in Canada” (2005) Fiona Farrell, Mr. Allbones’ Ferrets: An Historical Pastoral Satirical Scientifical Romance, with Mustelids (2007) Andrew Marlton, First Dog on the Moon (2007–) *The Simpsons Movie. Dir. David Silverman (2007) Lydia Millet, Love in Infant Monkeys (2009) David Sedaris, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (2010) Slavenka Drakulić, A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (2011) George Saunders, Fox 8 (2013) Isabella Rossellini, Mammas (2013) Armand Chauvel, The Green and the Red (2014) Lynn Nottage, The Grey Rooster (2014) Carnage, Dir. Simon Amstell (2017) *Okja, Dir. Bong Joon Ho (2017) “Metalhead”, Black Mirror, S.4 E.5, Dir. David Slade (2017) Lynn Nottage, Mlima’s Tale (2018) Sorry to Bother You, Dir. Boots Riley (2018) A Short History of Indians in Canada, Dir. Nancy Beiman (2018) NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory (2022)



Notes on Contributors

David Brooks  a poet, fiction-writer, and essayist, has taught Australian literature at several universities, most recently the University of Sydney, where he also directed the graduate writing program and co-edited (1999–2018) the journal Southerly. His work has won or been shortlisted for numerous awards, and he received a 2015/16 Australia Council Fellowship for distinguished service to Australian and international literature. A long-time vegan and animal rights advocate, he lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales with rescued sheep. His recent works include Napoleon’s Roads (stories, 2016); Derrida’s Breakfast (essays, 2016); The Grass Library (essay/memoir, 2019); Animal Dreams (essays, 2021); and Turin: Approaching Animals (meditations, 2022). Cynthia Chris  is a professor in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is the author of Watching Wildlife (2005); The Indecent Screen: Regulating Television in the Twentieth Century (2019); and Crab (2021), the ninety-ninth volume in Reaktion’s Animal series. She is also co-editor of the volumes Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007) and Media Authorship (2013).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6

411

412 

Notes on Contributors

Julia Ditter  is a PhD candidate in English at Northumbria University. Her doctoral dissertation examines the narrative forms through which the relationship between borders and the environment is articulated in Scottish literature. She has authored on Scottish and British literature, ecocriticism, animal studies, and the short story. Her research interests include Scottish and Anglophone literature and television, border studies, ecocriticism, animal studies, and new formalism. Christopher Douglas  is Assistant Professor of English at Jacksonville State University, where he teaches classes on literature and composition. He received his PhD from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2016. His research focuses on it-narratives, stories narrated by nonhumans, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and moral agency as defined by Scottish Common Sense Philosopher Thomas Reid. His articles have appeared in ESQ, JNT, Digital Defoe, and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Paul Fagan  is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University and a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society. Paul is a founding general editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies and Production Archives, both published by the Open Library of Humanities. He is the co-editor of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (with John Greaney and Tamara Radak; 2021) and Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation (with Dieter Fuchs and Radak; Irish Studies in Europe, 2021) as well as four well-received edited volumes on Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (with Ruben Borg and Werner Huber; 2014); Problems with Authority (with Borg and John McCourt; 2017); Gallows Humour (with Borg; 2020); and Acting Out (with Fuchs; 2022). Paul is currently finalising a monograph on Irish Literary Hoaxes and edited collections on Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman (with Katherine Ebury and Greaney) and Finnegans Wake: Human and Nonhuman Histories (with Richard Barlow), as well as developing research projects on “Representations of Nonhuman Skin in Modernist Writing” and “Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing, 1860s–1950s.” Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and is the director of the British Animal Studies Network. She has written widely on human-animal relations in the early modern period, and her most recent book is Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England (2018). She

  Notes on Contributors 

413

has recent essays in the Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Animals (ed. Holly Dugan and Karen Raber) and in Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future (ed. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Lars Deile). Ben Garlick  is Senior Lecturer in Geography at York St John University. His primary research interests include the exploration of cultural landscapes, past and present, in terms of their literary geographies and morethan-human relations. He has also explored questions of nonhuman culture as they arise in the context of conservation, our perception of animals, and our involvements in their historical geographies. Diane Heath  is a medievalist and Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Kent History and Heritage at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her research interests include medieval animal studies, monasticism, and book culture. Diane is preparing a monograph on the bestiary in medieval monastic culture for the University of Wales Press and is the general series editor for its strand on medieval animals. She is also project lead for NLHF Medieval Animals Heritage project that links green heritage to education, wellbeing, and sustainability and is currently building a climate emergency dragon in the university campus. Matthew Hosty  is Lecturer in Classics at St John’s College, Oxford. His textual edition with commentary of the Batrachomyomachia was published in 2020. His primary research interest is in ancient parody, although he also works on Greek epic more broadly and on Hellenistic poetry, particularly epigram. Alex Lockwood  is a novelist, creative writer, and scholar working at the intersection of animals, activism, and narrative theory. His 2016 memoir The Pig in Thin Air explored paths to connect climate change with the animals we eat. His 2019 novel, The Chernobyl Privileges, shortlisted for the Rubery International Prize, took on the psychological legacy of environmental disaster. He is Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Creative, and Professional Writing at the University of Sunderland. He has work on animalist writing in Beyond the Creaturely Divide and the new nature writing in Through a Vegan Studies Lens and has articles in Environmental Communication, Environmental Humanities, Animal Studies Journal, and chapters on bearing witness in Vegan Geographies and on gender in The Vegan Studies Handbook. He is a member of the Vegan Society’s Research Advisory Committee, as well as associate editor for Animal Studies Journal, and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Class and Culture.

414 

Notes on Contributors

Saskia McCracken  completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis considers Virginia Woolf’s Darwinian animal tropes. She has publications on Woolf, Darwin, and Aldous Huxley in Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (2020); Modernism/Modernity: Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction (2021); The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture: 1880–1950 (2021); Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the Human (2021), and transcribed the earliest manuscript draft of Woolf’s Flush: A Biography for the Cambridge UP edition (2022). Susan McHugh  is Professor of English at the University of New England, USA. She is the author of three monographs: Dog (2004; 2019); Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines (2011); and Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction (2019). McHugh has coedited several academic volumes, including The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (2021) as well as Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader (2021). McHugh also serves as co-editor of two book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature and Plants and Animals: Interdisciplinary Approaches. She is editor-inchief of Society & Animals. Robert McKay  is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield, where he is co-director of the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. He has authored widely on the politics of species in modern and contemporary literature and film, including the co-edited volumes Animal Remains (2022); The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (Palgrave, 2021); and Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic (2017). He is series co-editor for Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature and managing editor of the humanities for Society & Animals. Human McStew  is the pseudonym of a raging bore in literary animal studies. Any resemblance in their contribution to actual Native Skull Islanders making kin in the Chthulucene is entirely coincidental. Brett Mills  is Visiting Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Edge Hill University, UK, and Honorary Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Television Sitcom, The Sitcom, and Animals on Television: The Cultural Making of the Non-Human, and co-author (with Erica Horton) of Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry and (with David M.  Barlow) of two editions of Reading Media Theory: Thinkers, Approaches, Contexts. He is a

  Notes on Contributors 

415

member of the team currently undertaking two AHRC-funded projects on multispecies storytelling. Mo O’Neill  is a PhD student in English Literature, based within the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC) at the University of Sheffield. Their doctoral research considers pro-animal and other morethan-human aspects of the writing of author and activist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929). Their research interests include animal studies, ecocriticism, fin de siècle British radicalism, and horror film. Babette Pütz is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington. Her research is on ancient comedy, animals in antiquity, ancient drinking parties, and Classical reception. She is the author of a monograph The Symposium and Komos in Aristophanes (2003, 2nd ed. 2007) and articles and book chapters on a variety of topics in Classics, including “Straight from the Horse’s Mouth: Speaking Animals in Aristophanes’ Comedy” in Speaking Animals in Ancient Literature (2020); “Good to Laugh with: Animals in Comedy” in The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life (2014); and “Schräge Vögel und flotte Wespen: Grenzüberschreitungen zwischen Mensch und Tier in Aristophanes’ in Mensch und Tier in der Antike. Grenzziehung und Grenzüberschreitung (2008). One of Babette’s favourite undergraduate courses to teach is Animals and Monsters in Ancient Greece and Rome. Peter Sands is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York. His research examines the relationship between nonhuman animals, technoculture, and security imaginaries, and he is currently working on a book project on relational humanism and the literature and culture of the cold war. Jennifer Schell is Professor of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her specialties include North American literature, animal studies, Arctic writing, and blue humanities. Her book, “A Bold and Hardy Race of Men”: The Lives and Literature of American Whalemen, was published in 2013. She has written numerous articles on ecogothic environmental themes, many of which involve endangered or extinct species (great auks, killer whales, polar bears, mammoths, megalodons, and velociraptors). She is working on a book manuscript on these subjects titled, Ghost Species: North American Extinction Writing and the Ecogothic.

416 

Notes on Contributors

David Sigler is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism (2021) and Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism: Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1753–1835 (2015). He serves as co-editor of the journal Romanticism on the Net. His recent articles have appeared in journals including English Studies in Canada and the KeatsShelley Journal. Adam James Smith  is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at York St John University. His research explores the role of cheap print in mediating the relationship between citizens and the state throughout the long eighteenth century, with a particular interest in protest, propaganda, and satire. Smith co-edited Print Culture, Agency and Regionality in the Handpress Era (Palgrave, 2022) and Impolite Periodicals: Down and Out with Mr Spectator (2022) and is an editor on the People of Print “Elements” series at Cambridge University Press. He is also editor of Criticks—the online reviews hub for the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies—and has co-directed the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire since its inception in 2019. Vera Thomann  studied German and English Literature at the University of Zurich and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is currently working on her PhD-Project Animal Experiments in Contemporary German Literature at the University of Zurich. Additionally, she is a research assistant for the interdisciplinary social-science research project HumanAnimal Relations in Scientific Animal Experiments at the University of Zurich, funded by the Office of the Vice President Research. Her publications include contributions on Dougal Dixon’s Zoology of the Future, The Animal Body Multiple in Animal Experiments, and the Politics of Anecdotal Theory in Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. Melissa T. Yang  is the Writing Center Director at Emory University, where she teaches courses grounded in the environmental humanities. She holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh specializing in Composition and Rhetoric. Her research revolves around birds in figurative language and the material histories of human communication, and her recent work includes musings on the etymology of “jizz” in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Index1

A Abelard, Peter, 82, 85, 91 Adams, Carol J., 161, 236, 257 The Sexual Politics of Meat, 228, 231 Addison, Joseph, 139 Adventures of a Pincushion, The (Mary Ann Kilner), 175 Adventures of a Rupee, The (Helenus Scott), 177 Adventures of a Watch!, The, 181 Aesop, see Fable, Greco-Roman Aesthetics, 71, 170, 212, 213, 220, 244, 248, 251, 253n20, 257, 298, 308, 371, 373, 379, 380 Agamben, Giorgio, 15 Agon, 41n14 Ahuja, Neel, 305 Aiello, Thomas, 353 Ainos, see Fable, Greco-Roman Akutagawa, Ryunosuke Kappa, 16n17

Albatross, 306 Albinski, Nan Bowman, 216 Aloi, Giovanni, 213 Amory, Cleveland, 27 Amphipolis, 46 Animal(s) abuse, 314 agency, 148, 381 as allegories, 141, 150, 220 “becoming animal,” 145, 148, 148n49 chorus, 36, 36n1, 36n5, 38, 51 costume, 35, 50, 51 death, 249, 255, 258 experiments, 127–136, 220 as figures, 110, 161, 163, 169, 221 labour, 157, 180 literary, 11, 16n17, 101–114, 144, 143n23, 239, 245–247, 251, 263 satirical, 20, 22, 44, 155–171, 244, 245, 370

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. McKay, S. McHugh (eds.), Animal Satire, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24872-6

417

418 

INDEX

Animal(s) (cont.) sound, 45, 46, 50 stereotypes, 37 stories, 58, 60, 87, 113, 144n21, 248, 351 studies, 25, 26, 101–114, 144, 158, 193, 209, 239, 245, 245n7, 246, 263 Animalist, 354 Animality, 10, 12, 15, 18, 19, 64, 102, 106, 109, 130, 148, 156, 159–162, 164, 166, 171, 213, 227–240, 243–260, 266–268, 272–273, 280, 309, 359 Animal Liberation Front (ALF), 335, 342 Anthropocene, 145n28, 293 Anthropocentrism, 27, 158, 159, 231, 293, 294, 313–328 Anthropodenial, 318 Anthropomorphism/ antianthropomorphism, 101, 254, 301, 316, 318–320 Anthroponormativity, 294, 295, 297, 298, 304, 309 Anti-semitism, 23, 233, 268, 275 Antivivisection movement, 214 Apes, 12, 18, 19, 214–216, 281 Apocalypse, 224, 299 Apocalyptic fiction, 155 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 264, 266 Archilochus of Paros, 56–58, 58n6, 61, 71 Aristophanes, 10, 35–52 Acharnians, 44n25, 47n31 Babylonians, 37 Birds, 36, 58–60 Clouds, 37, 57 Frogs, 49n38, 58, 59n8 Knights, 37, 41, 42, 46, 49 Peace, 36, 41

Wasps, 38, 40–42, 42n17, 42n18, 43, 43n20, 44, 46, 48, 51, 59, 59n8, 60 Aristotle, 108, 169 Armbruster, Karla, 258, 259 Armstrong, Philip, 191 Art, 12, 62n16, 67, 70, 85, 107, 192, 199, 210, 212, 213, 248, 257, 308, 354, 373, 375, 376, 387 Ass, 19, 22, 73–96, 216, 339 Athens, 35, 42, 45, 48, 59 Atwood, Margaret The Handmaid’s Tale, 223 Australian RSPCA, 381 B Babe, 346, 346n17 Bad environmentalism, 192, 198, 205 Badger, 19, 354 Baker, Steve, 316 Banksy, 351 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 352 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 263–265, 267, 272, 273, 275 Bat, 110 Batrachomyomachia, 55–71 animality in, 64 dating of, 61–62 humour in, 56, 63 intellectual satire in, 70 literary parody in, 63 summary of, 63 Bazterrica, Agustina Beagle, 19, 178, 233, 320 Beames, Thomas, 265, 277, 278 The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective, 265, 278 Beast, 9, 81–85, 89, 92, 92n56, 95, 103, 106, 108–114, 147, 160,

 INDEX 

162, 219, 223, 248, 260, 277, 352–354, 374 Beast fable, 101–114 Beautiful Joe, 185 Beauty, 147, 212 Becket, Thomas, 74n2, 77, 78, 79n16, 87, 91, 95 Bedbug, 38 Behn, Aphra, 273, 274 Benson, Etienne, 293 Berger, John, 248, 249, 252, 253 Berlant, Lauren, 305 Bernard, Claude, 79, 217 Bernard Shaw, George, 228, 236 Bestiality, 19, 92, 94, 280, 323, 339 Bêtise, 92, 94–96 Bezan, Sarah, 310 Big Bird, 384–386 Biopolitics, 92, 158, 305 See also Biopower Biopower, 158, 163, 168–170, 221 Birb, 377, 379 Bird, 19, 35, 59, 79, 103, 141, 156, 212, 307, 317, 353, 371–389 Birds Aren’t Real, 385 Black Beauty, 185 Blackwood’s Magazine, 209 Blanchette, Alex, 344 Blinky, the Friendly Hen, 381 Bloodhound, 275 Blood transfusion, 129–135 Blue-footed booby, 307, 309 Boats, 87, 131, 163, 194, 203 Bodily autonomy, 210 Boisseron, Bénédicte, 264–266 Bolsonaro, Jair, 10 Bong Joon Ho, 334, 340 Borgards, Roland, 135n41 Borstein, Alex, 314 Botting, Eileen Hunt, 161 Bowhead whale, 193, 196, 198–201, 204

419

Bramston, Mary The Island of Progress, 223 Breed, 132, 167, 178, 267, 271, 273–276, 278, 320 British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, 222 British Union of Fascists (BUF), 268, 273 Brophy, Brigid, 27 Broun, Heywood, 228 Browny, 74, 74n3, 85 See also Burnellus Buffalo, 191 Bull baiting, 132 Bulldog, 131, 132 Burnellus, 74, 74n3, 75–79, 82–85, 87, 87n46, 88–96 See also Browny Burnett, D. Graham, 190, 194 Burns, Ric, 191, 196 Burt, Jonathan, 195 Burton, Robert, 108, 109, 112, 114 Butchery, 258, 334, 338, 344 C Caecilian, 9 Canker-worm, 214 Cannibal, 335 Canning, George The Loves of the Triangles, 212 Canon canonicity, 353 literary, 11, 231, 353 Canterbury, 77, 82n24, 86, 89, 93, 95 Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 74, 74n2, 87 Capitalism, 383 Caracciolo, Marco, 294 Carcinus’ sons, 40 Carnivoracity, 232n12 Carpenter, Edward, 228

420 

INDEX

Carrera, María José, 214 Carson, Rachel, 386 Cat, 19, 22, 22n25, 62, 62n16, 132, 138, 182–185, 258–260, 333, 379 Categorisation, 320, 323–325 Cato; or, Interesting Memoirs of a Dog of Sentiment, 176 Cetaceans, 190–197, 197n16, 199–202, 204, 205 Charlotte’s Web, 345, 346 Chaucer, Geoffrey The Merchant’s Tale, 374 The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 79 Parliament of Fowls, 79, 376 Chicken, 10, 11, 22, 57, 380–383 Chicken Betty, 379, 381, 382, 388 Chicken Treat, 379–382 Chihuahua, 320 Children’s literature, 175, 176n2 Chimera, 398 Christiane Schulte and Friends, 25 Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, 176 Circulation of knowledge, 135 Cisheteronormative, 26, 240 Clarke, Edward Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, 215 Class, 25, 26, 36, 41, 48, 48n36, 141, 159, 164, 177, 178, 182, 213, 220, 221, 235, 237, 250, 253, 254, 256, 264–269, 276–282, 298 Cleon, 37, 38, 41–43, 37n20, 44–47, 47n32, 48, 49, 51, 52n44, 59n8 Clinton, Hillary, 385 Cobbe, Frances Power Confessions of a Lost Dog: Reported by Her Mistress, 217 as “Merlin Nostradamus”-The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century, 27, 209–224 Cognitive dissonance, 380 Cole, Lucinda, 128

Collier, John, 12 His Monkey Wife, 10 Collins, Wilkie Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time, 220 Comic short fiction, 245–247 Companion species, 145, 264, 374 Congress of Vienna, 156 Contagious Diseases Acts 1864, 1866, 1869, 222 Cooper, Christian, 388 Cooper, Melody (@ melodyMcooper), 388 Cosslett, Tess, 179, 182 Coventry, Francis, 176 COVID-19, 28, 155, 222, 351, 384, 388 Cow, 19, 27, 76, 78, 168, 201, 203, 221, 256, 257, 277, 309 Coxe, Thomas, 131 Crab, 35, 40n13, 46, 65, 66, 70 Crane, Susan, 81 Creature, 16n17, 38, 48n36, 50, 51, 63, 65, 71, 82, 85, 92, 106, 107, 109, 111, 131, 142, 145, 147, 170, 179, 214–216, 267, 277, 327, 337, 338, 399 Crocodile, 306 Crow, 104, 105 carrion crow, 142 Culkin, Kate, 211 Cynics, 12 D Danta, Chris, 113, 114 Darwin, Charles, 110, 111, 113, 131, 249, 263–273, 275, 278, 279, 281, 306, 310 Darwin, Erasmus, 212 Davies, John, 108, 112 Dawes, Manasseh, 352 Dean, Tim, 298

 INDEX 

Deckha, Maneesha, 264, 265 Deep Ecology movement, 293 Deep time, 301 Deer, 19, 77, 163 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe, 140 Degabriele, Peter, 352, 370 Deleuze, Giles, 144, 145, 148 De Longchamp, William, 76 See also Wireker, Nigel Deloria, Vine, Jr., 16n18 Demagogue, 37, 39, 41, 44, 48 Derrida, Jacques, 94, 102, 103, 106, 109–112, 114, 160, 163–165, 259, 334, 343 The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow), 102, 111, 259 The Beast and the Sovereign, 92 “The Law of Genre,” 353 Descartes, René, 111, 112 Deutscher, Penelope, 161 De Waal, Frans B.M., 318 Dillon, Grace, 303 Disney, 75, 318 Dog, 13, 17–19, 23–26, 35–52, 59n8, 78, 89, 113, 129, 130, 132, 138, 148, 156, 162, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170, 177–181, 216, 217, 221, 232, 263, 265–268, 272–277, 279, 308, 313–328, 333, 352, 388 Dolin, Eric Jay, 190, 194, 196 Donald Duck, 318 Donkey, 18, 19, 35, 41, 46, 73, 73n1, 75, 85, 89, 215, 216 Donne, John, 107, 108, 114 Doody, Margaret, 169 Dorsey, Jack (@jack), 371, 372, 385, 388 Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 179n16 Dream, 16n19, 39, 46–51, 91, 167, 215, 224, 306, 346

421

Dubino, Jeanne, 266, 267 Dung beetle, 19, 35, 36 Dystopia, 12, 209–224 E Eagle, 47, 47n31, 57, 58, 63 Early twentieth century, 233, 248–250 Earth First!, 291, 293 Ecofeminism, 10n7, 155–173 Ecuador, 299 Edelman, Lee, 294–298, 305 Education, 46, 85, 131, 165, 166, 184, 210, 214–216, 234, 281, 387 Edwardian era, 243, 248, 280 Eidolon, 139–141, 146 Elephant, 16n19, 281, 333 Eliot, George, 212 Daniel Deronda, 212 Enclosure, 157, 251, 253, 255 Enlightenment, 157, 161, 162, 169, 171 Ennius, Quintus Saturae, 56, 60 Ensor, Sarah, 293, 303 EnviroBuild, 9 Environmental Protection Agency, US (EPA), 336n4, 338 Ephemera, ii, 171, 189, 191 Epicurus, 67, 67n24, 70 Erasmus, Desiderius, 103 Esposito, Roberto, 92, 93 Eton College, 227, 233, 240 Etymology, 12n13, 93, 374 Eugenics, 25, 132, 219, 264, 268–272, 276–278, 280, 282 Euripides, 39n12, 49n38 Evel Knievel, 338 Evolution, 111, 249, 265, 267, 269, 271, 298–301, 306, 308 Exception, state of, 166 Excrement, 334, 337

422 

INDEX

Existentialism, 328 Extinction, 16n17, 155, 158, 165, 190–193, 195–197, 197n16, 199, 202, 204, 205, 211, 214, 216, 217, 224, 291, 292, 299, 302, 303, 305, 310, 399 F Fable, ii, 20, 27, 42n17, 46, 56–58, 56n5, 58n7, 60–62, 65, 65n20, 75n5, 78, 81, 82, 84n31, 85, 86, 87n46, 95, 101–114, 163–165, 169, 170, 250, 251, 340 Greco-Roman, 62 Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting their Treatment of Animals (Sara Trimmer), 183n33 Factory farming, 334 Family Guy (Fox, 1999–) “American Gigg-olo,” 326 “The Blind Side,” 323, 324 “Brian & Stewie,” 327 “Brian the Closer,” 326 Brian the dog (character), 320 “Brokeback Swanson,” 323–325 “A Fistful of Meg,” 322 “Peter’s Def-Jam,” 326 “Stewie, Chris and Brian’s Excellent Adventure,” 313, 321 Fascism, 267–269, 282 Feminism, 23, 26, 209n1, 210, 222 Figuration, ii, 145–147, 145n28, 160, 161, 163, 166, 170, 266, 292, 305 Fish, 110, 308, 337, 338 Flaccus, Quintus Horatius, see Horace Flea, 18, 35, 38 Flesh fly, 105 Flightless cormorant, 307, 309 Flush: A Biography (Virginia Woolf), 263–282

Forster, E. M., 224 “The Machine Stops,” 224 Foster, Charles, 354 Being a Beast, 354 Foucault, Michel, 158 Fox, 17–15, 57, 58, 75, 75n5, 81, 103–105, 109, 216 Fox (television network), 313, 333n1, 385 France, Anatole, 10 Penguin Island, 10 Frank, Anne, 302 Fraser’s Magazine, 217 Freud, Sigmund, 164, 249, 347n18 The Friend, 189, 194, 198, 200, 204 Frog, 19, 35, 36n1, 59n8, 60–71, 110, 127–130, 170 Fudge, Erica, 325 G Galápagos, 291–310 Galápagos giant tortoise, 309 Galápagos Islands, 299, 301, 305 Galen, 78–80 Galton, Francis, 212, 263, 264, 270, 278 Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences, 212 Gandhi, Leela, 230, 232 Gascoigne, George, 108 Gaze, 253 Gecko, 38 Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 334, 341 Genre, ii, 12n13, 21, 35, 37, 55–57, 60n12, 62, 103, 110, 114, 168, 176, 176n2, 177, 185, 198, 244, 245, 247, 248, 250, 300, 340, 351, 353 Gen-Z, 385 George III, 156

 INDEX 

Gnat, 38 The Golden Ass (Apuleius), 10 Golden retriever, 306 Goldfish, 333 Goldin, Katie Jo (@ ProBirdRights), 378 Goose, 213, 383 Gorilla, 306 Gorilla Gardener, 10 Great Dane, 320 Great frigatebird, 307, 308 Green, Seth, 313 Greenblatt, Stephen, 105 Greenwood, George, 233 Gregory, James, 229 Greyhound, 274, 333 Groening, Matt, 333n1, 337n5, 340, 343 Grosz, Elizabeth, 308 Guattari, Felix, 144n23, 145, 148 Guerrini, Anita, 129, 132 H Hadwen, Walter, 222 Haes, Frank, 218 Hagenbeck, Carl, 251, 252, 253n20 Hajjin, 217, 218 Haraway, Donna, 12, 145, 145n28, 146, 264, 273, 282, 374 Hare, 19, 216, 227, 233–236, 238, 239 Harris, John, 175, 176, 182, 185 Dog of Knowledge; or, Memoirs of Bob, the Spotted Terrier, The, 175 Felissa, or, The Life and Opinions of a Kitten of Sentiment, 176, 177, 182, 184–186 Harrison, Peter, 104 Harvey, William, 129 Hašek, Jaroslav, 219

423

The Good Soldier Švejk, 219 Haslanger, Andrea, 159 Haywood, Eliza, 137–151 Heise, Ursula, 192, 301, 310 Heloise, 82 Herbert, George, 110, 111 Herodotus, 56n5 Hesiod, 47n32, 57, 58, 60 Works and Days, 57 Heteronormativity, 294–296 Heterosexual, 295, 324, 339 Highet, Gilbert, 10, 13, 140, 141 History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes, The (Anon), 176 History of Pompey the Little; or the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog, The (Francis Coventry), 176 Hoffman, E.T.A., 16n17, 185 Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, The, 185 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 18, 157, 164 Hogarth, William, 269, 351 Hoggan, George, 217 Homer, 61–63, 66–70, 66n21, 337 Iliad, 42n17, 47n31, 61, 63, 63n17, 66, 66n21, 68 imitation of, 63 Odyssey, 38, 48, 63, 66, 69, 70, 337 Homoeroticism, 339 Homophobic, 20 Homosexuality, 20, 298 Hooke, Robert, 129 Micrographia, 130 Horace, 60, 70 Horse, 13, 35, 36n1, 77, 91, 95, 107, 108, 112, 132, 159, 170, 179n16, 180, 221, 275 Horse-whipping, 159, 163 Hosmer, Harriet, 211 Human–animal hybrid, 44, 48, 49n38, 52

424 

INDEX

Human animality, 12, 15, 18, 250 Human–animal kinship, 36n1 Human exceptionalism, ii, 21, 102, 318 Humanism, 13, 15, 17, 111, 249, 250, 310 Humanitarian League, 27, 227, 229, 230, 234, 236 Humour, 9, 35, 36n6, 38, 43, 46, 48–52, 52n45, 56, 63, 84, 189–205, 238, 239, 244, 246, 258, 282, 317, 320, 328, 336n4, 340 Humpback whale, 195 Hungry Birds (@Hungry_Birds), 375–377, 377n21, 388 Hunt, Alastair, 161 Hunting, 41, 42n17, 57, 190, 205, 227, 228, 230, 231, 233–235, 237–239, 254–255 Huxley, Aldous, 12, 223 Ape and Essence, 12 Brave New World, 223 Huxley, Julian, 266, 299, 301, 302 Humanist Frame, The, 299n28 Hybridity, 276, 318, 321, 325 Hyena, 19, 254–256 Hyperbole, 340 Hypocrisy, 81, 84, 140, 176, 183–185, 244, 327 I Iambos, 55–57, 60 Immunity, 92, 93, 162, 168, 380 Imperialism, 227, 234, 250 Indigenous futurism, 303, 310 Influencers, 377, 383 Insect, v, 38, 41, 129, 130 Ionesco, Eugène — Rhinoceros, 10 Irish elk, 307 Irony, 165, 176, 179–181, 184, 185, 192, 195, 197–205, 212, 214,

230, 237, 244, 257, 258, 269, 271, 273, 281, 293, 302, 307, 314, 397 It-narrative, 175–186 J Jacobites, 140, 143, 151 Jacobs, Harriet (Linda Brent), 182 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 182 Jamaica, 179 James, Tykee (@Tykee_James), 387 Johnson, Boris, 7–9, 19, 21, 26 Johnstone, Charles, 176 Jonson, Ben, 101–114 Volpone, 101–114 Jury system, 38 Juvenal, 56, 59, 60, 71 Juvenalian satire, 211 K Keats, John, 386n66 Kenyon-Jones, Christine, 176, 351, 353 Kilner, Dorothy, 175, 176n2 Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, The, 175–176 Kilner, Mary Ann, 175, 176n2 King Kong, 398 King, Stephen, 22n25 On Writing, 22n25 Pet Sematary, 22n25 Kingsford (née Bonus), Anna, 223 Knieval, Evel, 338 Knight, Charles A., 11, 12n13, 13, 21, 157, 246, 247 Kōmos, 55 Krieg, C. Parker, 294 Kunis, Mila, 314 Kurke, Leslie, 103

 INDEX 

L Labrador, 320 Lacan, Jacques, 295, 296 Laches, 38, 41–43, 42n18, 43n20, 45, 51, 59n8 Lack, 8, 109, 111, 147, 156–158, 161, 162, 164–166, 169–171, 180, 183n33, 203, 244, 245, 253–256, 295, 308, 322, 324, 337, 352, 377 The Lady’s Own Paper, 223 Laing, R.D., 20 Lamott, Anne, 383 Lanham, J. Drew, 387, 387n74 Lansbury, Coral, 213 Larry (Twitter bird), 371, 372 Larry and Steve (Television show), 315 Lasagna, Louis, 354 Law, 40, 41, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165, 168–171, 180, 212, 267, 272 Lewis, Wyndham, 12 Apes of God, 12 Satire & Fiction, 12 Life of Larry, The (animated film), 315 Lion, 63, 81, 86, 94, 103, 167 Lippit, Akira, 16n17, 248, 252 Little Golden Books, 13 Good-bye Tonsils, 13, 14 pastiche of, Good-bye Testicles, 14 Litvak, Joseph, 307 Lloyd, Mary, 217 Lobster, 338 Locke, John, 157 Locust, 214 Longchamp, William (de), 76, 78, 81, 86n37 Lönngren, Ann-Sofie, 144n23 Love for animals, 20, 334, 335, 347, 351 for nature, 41 Lovecraft, H.P., 301 Lucian of Samiosta, 23 Lyttleton, Alfred, 231

425

M Macaque, 214n16 Macfarlane, Seth, 313, 314 Malatino, Hil, 239 Mangan, J.A., 234, 234n18 Masco, Joseph, 306n39 Mastiff, 132, 274 Mcgurl, Mark, 294, 294n12, 300, 301, 301n30 McHugh, Susan, 7–28, 112, 113, 144n21, 144n22, 148n29, 150, 150n54, 191, 192n3, 319, 320, 338, 338n6, 346n17, 383n48, 403–409 McKay, Robert, 7–28, 150, 232n12 Mckenzie, Callum, 234, 234n18 McLuhan, Marshall, 372n4 The Meatrix, 27, 27n35 Medicine, 13, 223 Meechan, Mark or “Count Dankula”, 23, 24, 26 Melville, Herman, 197, 197n16 Memoirs of Dick, the Little Poney, 175, 176, 180n18 Metamorphosis, 108, 111 Metaphor, 47, 50, 51, 143, 144, 147, 149, 158, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 238, 252, 254, 279 Metaphysics, 215 Mickey Mouse, 318 Middelhoff, Frederike, 185, 187 Miller, John, 150, 250, 255, 310 Mirror for Fool, 73–96 Misanthropy, 250, 291–310, 399 Mitford, Mary Russell, 264, 265, 271, 272 Modernist/modernism, 12, 15, 244, 249, 250, 265, 268 Modest proposal, 27, 230 Molière, 292, 296 The Misanthrope, 292, 295–297 Mongrel, 272, 273, 275, 276

426 

INDEX

Monogamy, 324 Monster, 25, 47n32, 48, 194, 201, 398 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 141 “The Politicians,” 141 Monty Python, 408 Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 8 “The Mouse Problem,” 19, 408 Morality moral instruction, 246, 247 moralism, 111, 151, 246, 252, 255, 260 More, Hannah, 181 Slavery, A Poem, 181 Morgan, Nicholas, 107, 112, 114 Mouse, 20, 61, 62, 63n17, 64, 65n20, 66, 103 Muñoz, José Esteban, 298, 298n26 Munro, Hector Henry, 243, 251n17 See also Saki Murakami, Haruki, 16n17 Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, 16n17 Muscular Christianity, 234 Mutt, 275 Mythological satire, 38

Nicias, 42 Nimrod, 203n29, 234 No Future, 294–296 Nonhuman, 12, 22, 28, 113, 139, 141, 144, 145, 148, 149, 155–159, 161–163, 167, 168, 170, 171, 185, 191, 194, 203, 211, 213, 216, 219, 220, 223, 224, 229, 239, 240, 243, 252, 258, 260, 294, 297, 305, 307 Nottage, Lynn, 16, 16n19, 409 The Grey Rooster, 16, 16n19, 409 Mlima’s Tale, 16, 16n19, 409

N Napoleonic Wars, 156 Narrative form, 60–64, 69, 101, 104–106, 144, 159, 178–180, 182, 185, 194, 198, 202, 204, 230, 234, 245, 248, 264, 269, 273, 282, 294, 301, 303, 304, 306–309, 314, 320–325, 327, 328, 334, 335, 343, 345, 347 Nature (physis) vs. Custom (nomos), 40, 51, 52 New Comedy, 59 Ngai, Sianne, 373, 373n9, 379, 379n31

P Paine, Thomas, 157 Palmer-worm, 214 Pardee, Sheila, 293, 293n9 Parkinson, Claire, 318, 318n17, 318n19 Parody, 16n17, 20, 27, 63, 66, 76, 77, 90, 95, 176, 190, 192, 198, 212, 314, 339n7, 353 ancient definition of, 63 Parrot, The (periodical), 137–151, 406 Parrot, 18, 19, 138–151, 277, 281, 351, 373, 387

O Obama, Barak, 376, 384, 384n56 O’Connor, Maureen, 214, 204n14 Okja, 333–347 Old Comedy, 35, 36, 36n5, 52, 59, 60 Orwell, George, 10, 24, 57, 112, 114, 142, 351, 407 Animal Farm, 10, 24, 24n28, 57, 112, 113, 142, 407 Ox, 257

 INDEX 

Partridge, 216, 275 Partridge, John (John Hewson), 211 Passenger Pigeon, 191 Pastoral power, 158, 168 Patriarchy, 148, 231 Pavlov, Ivan, 314, 316, 319, 321 Peacock, 306 Pearson, Chris, 217 Pedigree, 132, 178, 263, 264, 267, 268, 271–273, 275, 277, 282 Peloponnesian War, 36, 42 Pericles, 44 Periodicals, 27, 139, 141–143, 151, 209, 210, 214, 227, 228, 230, 232–234, 236, 238, 239 Perry, Kathryn, 315 Pet elegies for, 27, 351 epitaphs for, 351 Pet owners, 334, 339 Pheasant, 216 “Phineas, Charles,” 25, 26, 28 Physical purity movement, 210 Physiology, 215, 222 Pig, 9, 18, 19, 48, 49, 112, 131–133, 142, 179n16, 221, 258, 306n39, 333–347 Plague, 78, 91, 155, 159, 162, 163, 165, 214, 221 Plato, 37, 45 Plautus, 59, 164 Plumwood, Val, 213 Plutarch, 67n24 Poetry Romantic, 170 satirical, 17–18, 55–100, 141–142, 181, 184, 212, 223–224, 237, 352–353 “A Polar Whale’s Appeal” (letter to The Friend), 189–205 Political philosophy, 156, 157, 161, 162, 164, 171

427

Politics American, 376, 377 Brazilian, 10 British, 273 Hungarian, 22 Pope, Alexander, 23, 23n26, 26 Pork production, 340, 344 Portrait mask, 43, 43n22 Posthuman comedy, 294, 300–302 Posthumanism, 112, 302, 303, 310 Posthuman satire, 298–302 Potentates, 165–167 Proverbs, 41, 49, 57, 140, 306 Puns, 41, 46, 49, 82, 85, 94n61, 190–192, 198, 199, 201, 202, 351 Puppy, 178, 341 Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 55, 219 Q Queen Victoria, 219, 230 Queerness, 295, 296, 298 R Race/racism, 12, 131, 175–186, 200–202, 204, 213, 215, 224, 232, 264–268, 270–279, 281, 282, 298, 300, 305, 336, 387 Rainforest Trust, 4 Ram, 38 Raven, 47, 104, 141, 278, 386 Realism optical realism, 213 scientific realism, 212, 213 Reductio ad absurdum, 230 Regency-era, 159 Renaissance, 62 Reproductive futurism, 295, 296, 298, 303

428 

INDEX

Restoration theatre/Restoration comedy, 128, 136 Reynard the Fox, 10, 75, 75n5, 81 Rhetoric, 76n11, 81, 83, 130, 133, 186, 212, 216, 220, 221, 233, 273, 279, 291, 292, 354, 371–389, 398 Richard I, 74n2, 78, 86, 90 Ritvo, Harriet, 178 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 17, 352 “A Satyre Against Reason and Mankind,” 352 Rodent, 20, 41 Rohman, Carrie, 249, 250 Romantic period, 170, 351 Rome, 91, 103, 161, 164, 166, 167 Romulus and Remus, myth of, 161 Rooster, 23, 35, 44, 79, 382 Rothfels, Nigel, 251 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 157 Rowe, Martin “Kill all the Animals,” 351 Royal Academy of Arts, 212 Royal buckhounds, 230 Royal Society, 129, 130, 135 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), 228, 229, 235, 235n19, 381 S Saki (Hector Hugh Munro), 243–260 “Ésme,” 254, 256 “mockery by name,” 36 “The Mappined Life,” 251, 255 “The Stalled Ox,” 249, 256, 258 “Tobermory,” 258–260 Satire and allegory, 141–143 of American nuclear family, 334

animalist, 354 (see also Species-­ political satire) direct satire, 36 human animality in, 15 species-political, 15 (see also Animalist) strategies for, 74 Satura, 56, 56n3, 57, 60, 374 Saunders, Margaret Marshall, 185 Schiesari, Juliana, 110 Schiff, Moritz, 216, 217 Science scientific materialism, 212, 224 scientific realism, 212, 213 theatricality of, 128 Science fiction, 209, 294, 300, 302, 303, 310, 340 feminist, 210, 211 Scott, Anne L., 222 Scott, Helenus, 177 Screen memory, 166 Sculpture, 211–213 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 303, 306, 307 Set theory, 169 Sewell, Anna, 185 Seymour, Nicole, 192, 197, 198, 205 Shadwell, Thomas The Virtuoso, 127–136 Shakespeare, William, 296, 306, 375, 376 Hamlet, 109 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 73 Timon of Athens, 292 Shaw, George Bernard, 228, 236 Shechita, 232, 233 Sheep, 19, 35–52, 84, 127–136, 163, 165–167, 179n16, 238, 275, 346 Sheep dog, 274

 INDEX 

Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 161 The Last Man, 155–171 Shepherds, 48n36, 63, 156, 158, 159, 165–169, 340 Short story, 16n17, 243–260 Shrigley, David, 27 Shukin, Nicole, 248 Significant otherness, 263–282 Simian, 12, 214, 281 Simons, John, 101, 102, 106, 110, 112, 114 Simpsons Movie, The, 333–347 Simpsons, The (TV series), 27 Singer, Kate, 165 Singh, Julietta, 302 Sirocco Kâkâpô (@Spokesbird), 387 Slaughter, 196, 201, 205, 232, 287–288, 342, 343, 346, 382 Slaughterhouse, 133, 227, 232, 335, 339, 342, 343, 346, 347 Slavery, 24, 132, 142, 176, 179–182, 273 Snow leopard, 306 Social Darwinism, 264, 267, 271, 275, 282 Social Media, 19, 26, 195n12, 373–375, 380, 382, 383, 388 Society for Indecency in Naked Animals (SINA), 353 Socrates, 37, 38, 85 Sôseki, Natsume, 16n17 I Am a Cat, 15 Sovereignty, 92, 93, 157–166, 168–171 Spaniel/Cocker spaniel, 131, 132, 263, 267, 268, 271, 274, 275 Sparrow, 19, 237 Species, 8, 9, 12, 18, 22, 24, 40, 41, 45, 50, 51, 62n16, 65, 102, 112, 113, 131, 133, 140, 142, 143, 145, 147, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 167–169, 171,

429

180, 192, 193, 195, 196, 199–205, 216, 232, 244, 247–250, 255, 258, 259, 264, 265, 275, 279, 291, 310, 324, 328, 338, 339, 374, 378, 387, 398 Species continuum, 112 Speciesism, 265 Species-political satire, 15 Speculum Stultorum, 74, 74n3, 87n46, 95 Sponge, 110 Squier, Susan Merrill, 382 Steele, Richard, 139 Steevens, G.W., 229, 230, 232 Stephens Salt, Henry, 228 The Beagler Boy, 227–240 The Brutalitarian, 27, 227–240 Killing for Sport, 238 Steve the dog (character in Larry and Steve; The Life of Larry), 315, 328 Still, Judith, 160 Stone, Biz, 371 Strangers, 81, 160, 164, 171, 253 St Thomas Becket, 95 Sweet, Timothy, 197 Swift, Jonathan, 18, 260, 351 “A Modest Proposal,” 211, 221, 351 Gulliver’s Travels, 10, 11, 245 “On Poetry, A Rhapsody,” 17 Predictions for the Year 1708, 211 Sycophant (Informer), 45 Symbolism, 260 Symposium/drinking party, 38, 40, 41, 46, 51 T Tague, Ingrid, 27, 351, 351n1, 352, 353 Talking animals, 60, 61, 78, 85, 90, 258–260

430 

INDEX

Taxidermy, 213 Taylor, Thomas, 23, 24, 26, 161, 351 Tennyson, Alfred “Two Voices,” 223 Thucydides, 44, 46 Tichy-Rács, Jozsef, 11 Toussenel, Alphonse, 23 Trimmer, Sarah, 183n33 Trump, Donald, 378, 379, 385, 386 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 327 Twitter Big Bird, 384–386 Birds Aren’t Real, 385 Chicken Treat, 379–382 Hungry Birds, 375–377, 388 Two-Tailed Dog Party, 10, 11 Tyler, Tom, 292, 295–297, 300 U Unreliable narration, 248 The Usual Suspects, 166 Utilitarianism, 211 Utopia, 59 V Vaccination Anti-Vaccination League, 222 Compulsory Vaccination Acts, 1853, 222 Vaccination Acts, 1867, 1871, 222 Vaccine scepticism, 210 Vegetarianism, 223, 228 Victorian era, 215 Violence, 77, 89, 92, 158, 213, 221, 228, 232, 236, 237, 239, 260, 306, 314, 321, 327, 342 Vivisection, 19, 129, 135, 209–224, 227, 229, 232 See also Antivivisection movement

Vizenor, Gerald Griever: An American Monkey King in China, 16, 16n18 Vonnegut, Kurt, 291–310 Vulture, 104 W Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph, 158n8 Walrus, 204 Walton, John, 28 Warre, Edmond, 234, 235 Washington, Chris, 159, 167 Wasp, 19, 35, 36n1, 39, 39n12, 41, 49, 50, 50n42, 51, 59n8, 60, 253 Weil, Kari, 94 Wells, H. G., 114, 220, 224, 266 The Island of Doctor Moreau, 220 The Science of Life, 266 “The Star,” 224 Wells, Paul, 316–319, 325 Whale, 18, 19, 48, 48n37, 49, 189–205, 399 Whaling industry, 190, 193, 195, 198, 199, 205 Whitaker, Alexander, 107 White, E.B., 345 White, T.H., 103 Whyte, Kyle P., 310 Williams, Cynthia Schoolar, 169 “Wilson, Helen,” 26, 45n26 Winged Geographies (@ WGeographies), 386 Wireker, Nigel, 73, 74n2 Mirror of Fools/Speculum Stultorum, 10, 74, 74n3, 95 See also De Longchamps, Nigel Wolf, 18, 163, 164, 167, 227–240 Wolfe, Cary, 92, 93, 102, 111, 112 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 23, 157, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 171

 INDEX 

Woman, 81, 133, 138, 160–162, 169, 182, 183, 183n33, 185, 210, 211n7, 215, 216, 254, 267, 269, 271, 280, 308, 323, 388 Women’s rights, 156, 161, 162, 210, 214 Woolf, Leonard, 268, 269, 282 Woolf, Virginia, 263–282

431

X Xenophon, 42n17 Z Zoo, 243, 248, 251–253, 253n20, 255 Zoological Gardens (Regent’s Park), 216 Zoontological difference, 15, 18 See also Satire