The Philosophy of the Animal in 20th Century Literature
by
Jamie Johnson
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of
The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL
May 2009
Copyright by Jamie Johnson 2009
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my wonderful husband, Karl Liebman, who so patiently supported
me during what seems like an eternity of weekends and weeknights that I spent reading
and writing instead of having fun with him. Sincere thanks to my mom, my dad, and to
my sister, Julie, for their encouragement throughout the writing of this manuscript. I am
forever grateful to my mentor and the director of this project, Dr. Andrew Furman, for his
truly invaluable insight and continued friendship. And to Dr. Marina Banchetti, who
graciously guided my interests in phenomenology and the animal. Thank you also to Dr.
Carol McGuirk for her scholarship in animal studies and editorial expertise. Finally, I
want to recognize all of the dedicated folks that comprise both the department of
Comparative Studies and the department of English at Florida Atlantic University.
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ABSTRACT
Author:
Jamie Johnson
Title:
The Philosophy of the Animal in 20th Century Literature
Institution:
Florida Atlantic University
Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Andrew Furman
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Year:
2009
The following dissertation examines the philosophy of the animal as it appears in
twentieth-century British and American literature. I argue that evolutionary theory, along
with the Romantic emphasis on sympathy, creates an historical shift in our perception of
humans and nonhumans. Beginning with Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby-Dick,
the whale represents what I call a transitional animal figure in that the whale not only
shows the traditionally symbolic literary animal but also the beginnings of the twentiethcentury shift toward the literal animal-as-subject. My proposed comparative analysis
consists of a return to classic existential and phenomenological philosophers with animal
studies in mind. A handful of critical essays in recent years have conducted just such an
analysis. My contribution extends these philosophical endeavors on the animal and
applies them to major literary authors who demonstrate a notable interest in the
philosophy of animals. The first chapter of the dissertation begins with D.H. Lawrence,
whose writings in selected essays, St. Mawr, and “The Fox” continue considerations
v
made by Melville concerning animal being. Because Lawrence often focuses on gender,
sexuality, and intuition, I discuss how a Heideggerian reading of animals in Lawrence
add value to interpretations of his fiction which remain unavailable in analyses of human
subjects. In Chapter Two, I move on to William Faulkner’s classic hunting tale of “The
Bear” and other significant animal sightings in his fiction and nonfiction. For Faulkner,
the animal subject exists in the author’s particular historical climate of American
environmentalism, modernism’s literary emphasis on visuality, and race theory. This
combination calls for a natural progression from a Heideggerian existential
phenomenology: a contemporary Sartrean reading of animal being. Finally, the last
chapter examines J.M. Coetzee, an author whose texts show the accumulated existential
and phenomenological progression in the philosophy of the animal with a combined
interest in current political and social issues surrounding animal life in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
A Brief History of The Animal in 20th Century Literature and Philosophy………………1
Chapter 1
D.H. Lawrence and the “tangle” of being-with-animal………………………………….36
Chapter 2
Faulkner’s “Conflict of the Heart”………...…………………………………………….72
Chapter 3
Coetzee on The Animal, The Human, and our current Condition of Being..…………..109
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….. 135
Notes……………………………………………………………………………………140
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….148
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Introduction:
A Brief History of the Animal in 20th Century Literature
The following dissertation will argue for a re-evaluation of major twentiethcentury literary authors whose fictional and biographical writings show a philosophical
interest in animals as individual, living subjects. Such literary animal subjects require the
progressive interpretation presented by current existential critics who wish to return to
major continental philosophers with animal ontology in mind. The rise in
interdisciplinarity and ―animal studies‖ supports a comparative analysis of the twentiethcentury literary animal from a phenomenological perspective.
In the last decade, a handful of contemporary philosophers returned to major
ontological thinkers of the twentieth century to revisit the topic of the nonhuman animal
other. These studies include Peter Steeves‘ collection of essays, Animal Others: On
Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (1999) and the recent publication by Matthew Calarco
Zoographies (2008). Animal Others begins by laying the groundwork for a new
perspective, claiming that the animal is not other.
The truth of the matter is that the world does not appear before me [. . .]
Space tricks us; false philosophy tricks us. My hand reaching for yours
seems to move away from me, though it never does: it is me. Your hand,
your paw, seems to be There and, hence other. It is not: it, too, is me. We
have met the animal‘s body, and he is us. There are no animal Others. (8)
1
Although philosophical scholarship on the nonhuman animal being exists, few literary
theorists consider twentieth-century philosophical writings on the animal, viewing the
nonhuman animal as purely symbolic. And, while literature is expressed through the
medium of language, engagement with the animal in literary texts includes the task of
developing through language a description of experience that does not yet exist in our
current discourse.
One of the most notable contemporary philosophers/literary theorists to take an
interest in animal existence is Jacques Derrida who published a series of talks entitled,
―The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)‖ (2002). Although animal studies in
various disciplines have grown more popular in the past two decades, Derrida‘s interest
in animal being has considerably influenced current academic awareness of the topic,
particularly in the humanities. For the purposes of this study, his contributions concerning
animal being include these concepts:
1. Derrida’s recognition of a shift in perception: ―We are living through a historical
turning point.‖ (―The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)‖ 393) Derrida
assures us that he refers to a ―literal,‖ ―real,‖ animal (in this instance, a cat), not a
―figure‖ or an ―allegory.‖ According to Derrida, the literary and philosophical animal
intersects in that the project of thinking of animals involves imagining narratives. He
says, ―For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry‖
(―The Animal‖ 377).
2. Animal being has been misunderstood and must be re-examined: ―No one can deny the
suffering, fear or panic, the terror or fright that humans witness in certain animals‖ (―The
Animal‖ 396). Here Derrida refers to the mass human effort to hide, mask, and disguise
2
from themselves the unethical treatment of animals, and also the now obvious a nswer to
Jeremy Bentham‘s question of whether or not animals suffer. Of course, Derrida
addresses linguistically the origin and development of our perception of animals. He
argues that by calling animals ―the animal‖ in the singular, humans place what should be
a multiplicity of being into a singular ontological category. The terminology of ―the
animal‖ does not recognize the gap between, for example, lizard being and dog being.
Yet, for humans, the phrase ―the animal‖ differentiates between human being and all
other animal beings. Derrida raises the common notion of the ―question of the animal,‖
indicating that animal otherness demands attention while remaining a philosophical
question.
Admittedly, logistically speaking, we always approach the question of non-human
animals from a human perspective. However, we are able to conceive that human
perception is not the center of the world. Because we are perceptually still in the stages
of understanding animal being, we should first return to those studies on consciousness
itself as it functions in the world with other beings, now with a new focus on non-human
beings. Such a return will lead to a re-examination of animal consciousness while
reasonably extending our understanding of human consciousness to non-human
consciousness. More importantly, we must return to phenomenological studies such as
those that define consciousness as a lived mind-body experience, for we agree that nonhuman animals share such fundamental faculties as sensation and emotion. This project
will include a study of the mind-body as it relates to empathy, intuition, ontological
coexistence, and the imagination.
3
Turning to literary criticism on the animal, the discussion of animals in modern
and contemporary literature is limited to a handful of texts. One of the earliest critical
texts on the modern animal subject, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction (1993) by Marian
Scholtmeijer, recognizes that the literary animal causes modern authors to push narrative
boundaries:
In modern literature, but more crucially in modern fiction, animals
contend with the conceptual devices that seek to subsume them. Their
resistance to enculturation influences the nature and profundity of the
difficulties literature addresses. (8)
These narrative ―difficulties‖ to which Scholtmeijer refers foresee Derrida‘s later claim
on the literary and philosophical intersection of ―imagining narratives‖ through poetry.
With a focus on the animal as victim, Scholtmeijer‘s book locates animal victimization in
such major authors as Jack London, Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, John
Steinbeck, and Gustave Flaubert.
Electric Animal (2000) by Akira Lippit, claims that the modern literary animal
reflects the rise in consciousness studies:
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cultural and
epistemological disciplines, as well as various literary and artistic
practices, became preoccupied with the transmission of ideas from one
body to another, one forum to another, one consciousness to another [. . .]
Animals symbolized not only new structures of thought but also the
process by which those new thoughts were transported. Animals—and
their capacity for instinctive, almost telepathic communication—put into
4
question the primacy of human language and consciousness as optimal
modes of communication. (2)
The combined rise in consciousness studies and the loss of literal animal presence in our
modern everyday lives, argues Lippit, causes humans to mourn. For humans, the
disappearance of animal being results in a human sense of loss. Lippit thus relates the
presence/absence of the animal to the cultural spectral image, leading to an examination
of film and technology. His literary analyses of the animal, then, examine modern texts
that show signs of the ―filmic‖ animal, to which he applies a Freudian approach.
Aside from Scholtmeijer and Lippit, current critical studies of the literary animal
focus on postmodern and postcolonial human themes such as race, class, and gender. In
his postmodern analysis of animals in literature and film in Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe
argues that the ―discourse‖ of animals remains ―speciesist‖ (presumably a reference to
Peter Singer‘s notion of ―speciesism‖ developed in his renown book, Animal Liberation).
Wolfe‘s text concludes, ―… the social and legal relation between ethics and action are
inadequate—and here is the full post-humanist force of the question of the human as well
as the nonhuman animal‖ (Animal Rites 192). The key point at which the discussion of
the animal deteriorates, says Wolfe, occurs when we recognize that the human and
animal are different in ontological degree, raising the question, ―Where exactly are the
lines to be drawn between human and animal existence?‖ Wolfe‘s argument returns us to
the opening claim on the existential animal as other. Unfortunately, because studies of
human consciousness are under debate in the scientific and philosophic communities,
Derrida‘s ―question of the animal‖ often receives less attention; animal consciousness
inevitably brings us back to human consciousness. The rise of consciousness studies
5
causes a desire to know animal being (and consciousness) as a way of helping us define
human consciousness. Wolfe‘s analysis, with a careful articulation of Derrida‘s thoughts
on the animal, is rooted in film and language studies as well. From an analysis of
discourse, post-humanist theorists such as Wolfe‘s can determine that Hemingway‘s
texts, for example, do not create a discourse that allows an animal or human ―other‖ to
exist outside symbolic or masculine realms. 1 Naturally, the topic of the non-human
animal interests post-humanist theorists in that the animal acts as a form of the ―other,‖
just as gender and race are studied as a form of the ―other.‖ The ―other‖ in this sense is
that which does not conform to oppressive western conceptions of the subject. Many,
including Derrida, have made the parallel between the mass slaughter of animals and the
Holocaust. 2
The following study looks to texts that invite an existential reading of the animal
in itself. The first chapter is devoted to Lawrence‘s progressive treatment of the literary
animal. His portrait reflects his own interest in the immediate experience of animal being
and also the cultural climate of his time. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
England was well ahead of America in terms of animal welfare movements. As Ryder
notes of British writers, ―some of the most famous writers of their times are on record as
concerned for the relationship between nonhumans and humans. D.H. Lawrence
castigated himself for throwing a log at a snake: ‗Immediately I regretted it. I thought
how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised myself and the voices of my
accursed human education‘‖ (Ryder 125). We will see in Chapter One Lawrence‘s
emotional development of the Romantic treatment of the mystery of the nonhuman
animal; the Romantic view of the animal shapes his own. Because literature so often uses
6
the animal as a tool to accentuate human characters, the problem with literary depictions
of animal being overlaps the modern literary depiction of the subject in general. What we
might call the metaphysics of subjectivity follows from dichotomies under scrutiny today
such as that of the self/other, mind/body, internal/external. Thus, the nonhuman animal
being, when interpreted as a human subject, often carries with it the flaws seen in
thinking of the human other. As I have discussed briefly, the most common dichotomy of
animal being projects wild and domestic notions of being. Because this study works with
authors who explore the ontological components of animal being, the lines of wild and
domestic remain important in articulating immediate experiences of animal being and
proximity. If an animal is perceived and/or experienced as either wild or domestic in
these texts, it is often a result of the actual changes in spatial relations.
Like Lawrence, Faulkner struggles with representing nonhuman animal
encounters. Yet in an extreme cultural climate of southern American hunting heritage, his
dramatizations with nonhuman animal being are very different from those of Lawrence.
Changes in setting, along with the modern author‘s theoretical interest in visuality, create
a depiction of animal being which lends itself to an ontological reading. A further chapter
turns to J.M. Coetzee, whose contemporary writings reflect cultural awareness of animal
activism and postcolonial studies. Coetzee‘s animal characters are even less traditionally
symbolic and in this way gain existential worth. Although Coetzee was born and raised in
Cape Town, he earned his PhD at the University of Texas in Austin for a project on
Samuel Beckett. His writings express an existentially charged philosophy, especially his
ideas on animal being. He pays specific attention to theories of the existential body and
responsibility, reflecting the development of these topics from Heidegger to Sartre to
7
Derrida. In Coetzee‘s Disgrace (1999), for instance, both Lucy and David are exemplary
human characters brought to experience a literary leveling of existence; yet their leveling
occurs through shame caused by historical oppression and they are brought not to human,
but to animalistic levels of shame and humiliation. Coetzee‘s focus moves animal
intention to the level of shame and humiliation, capacities of animal being supported
through the human and nonhuman lived experiences. I conclude this introduction with an
account of the turn to animal being in twentieth-century literature, offering an historical
sketch of the major contributors to the western perception of the animal: Aristotle,
Descartes, and Darwin, and considering closely the most enduring literary animal, MobyDick.
A Brief Philosophical History of the Modern Literary Animal
The twentieth century saw an increased interest in the philosophy of the
existential animal as it appears in western literature. This shift from the symbolic to the
existential animal was fueled by a combination of historical events. Most significantly,
evolutionary theory provided a compelling alternative account of the origin of living
beings, creating a significant reconsideration of human and animal boundaries. Before
this point in the philosophy of the animal, major thinkers from Aristotle, Saint Augustine,
Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes to Kant had dismissed animals as inferior to
humans. According to the dominant western perception of a fixed hierarchy, humans
exist below god(s) and above animals, a hierarchy that justifies the human right to power.
Under such a philosophy, the very definition of human being relies upon the inferior
8
position of animals. Darwin‘s evolutionary theory changed this prior philosophy of the
animal.
The history of the western philosophy of the animal discloses voices of dissent
considering the animal in itself, yet I limit the following outline to dominant voices prior
to the twentieth century. Such attitudes toward animals are embedded in the Western
tradition responsible for the philosophical and literary views studied in forthcoming
chapters. Homer‘s Odyssey, at times, portrays the mysteriously keen perception of
animals, the most poignant of which occurs when Odysseus returns after twenty years
and the dog, Argus, recognizes him. Argus tellingly ―lifted up his muzzle, pricked his
ears‖ and ―thumped his tail‖ (The Odyssey 17. 318). Odysseus, moved by the experience
but forced to remain in disguise, ―glanced to the side and flicked away a tear‖ (The
Odyssey 17. 364). While such instances of literal animal subjects recur in literary texts
before the twentieth century, they do not secure acknowledgment as beings-in-themselves
(animals as intending subjects existing outside an anthropomorphic human value system.)
On the Philosophy of the Animal in Aristotle and Descartes
Aristotle‘s (384-322 BCE) ancient Greek philosophy of the animal permits
progressive interpretations. Nevertheless, since Aristotle‘s views on animal being have
become controversial, and for the purposes of the historical context at hand, I will first
explain those ideas on animals set forth by Aristotle that persevered well into the
nineteenth century. (Later, I will engage in possible modern and contemporary
interpretations of Aristotle and the animal as they relate to twentieth-century
philosophical conceptions.)
9
According to Aristotle, a human or animal being‘s position on the hierarchal scale
is not only permanent but determined by the ability to reason. And although Aristotle
grants certain animals a capacity to reason, because they do not have rational language to
communicate their knowledge, animals are seen as incapable of reaching the highest state
of being: justice. Although a philosopher known for claiming man‘s existence as a social
animal, Aristotle maintains a resolute distinction between the two: ―[M]an is the most
intelligent of all animals‖ (Aristotle, De Anima 574). On the animal and Aristotle, as
Gary Steiner explains:
Aristotle envisions a whole human life or the life of a human community
as the proper unit of measure for morality. Particular actions are not moral
unless they are chosen for their own sake, are in accordance with right
reason, and proceed from a stable character state that the agent has
developed over a long period of time. On Aristotle‘s view, animals are
incapable of moral virtue because they lack the rationality requisite for
satisfying these conditions. (14)3
Steiner notes two requirements for attaining a just and moral state: that of acting out of
choice with a consciousness of morality as such, and maintaining and developing this just
state over time in order to reach a final goal. On the significance of telos and the animal
in Aristotle, Bernard Rollins remarks that ―For Aristotle, as for common sense, the fact
that animals had tele was self-evident—the task of the knower was to systematically
characterize each relevant telos‖ (―On Telos and Genetic Engineering‖ 342) 4 The
problem again returns to language: if an animal can justify its actions, humans
nevertheless are incapable of being aware of such animal thoughts. Therefore, while an
10
animal may choose to act in a way that is just over a long period of time with an intended
goal in mind, without language the animal cannot evaluate his/her situation. If an animal
acts ethically, its actions are due to instinct and not determined intentionally by intellect.
Based on this reasoning, humans can equate general ontological value with human ethics:
In the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition there is a sense of ‗ontological
dignity‘ [. . . .] Intellect as the desire and capacity to be intentionally
united with the forms of all other things gives to the beings with intellect a
participation in the existence and life of all other beings which is not
enjoyed by beings without intellect. (Steeves 182)
Peter Steeves notes an important aspect of ancient thought on the animal being in that an
intended consciousness, combined with a particular intellectual ―capacity,‖ determines a
being‘s ontological value.5 Since Aristotle believed that the only indication of intended
intellect appears in the expression of language, animals cannot participate in a
―dignified,‖ unified perception.
In turning from the mind to the physical realm, Aristotle grants certain classes of
animals degrees of imagination and sensation, but these capacities are limited, because
the animal lacks comprehension of them and their telos, or end. Aristotle recognizes the
power of what we might now call the emerging field of zoosemiotics. Yet because the
mind rather than the body is always correct, the physical and bodily capacities granted to
animals by Aristotle certain degrees of imagination, sensation, and appetite place animals
outside the realm of achieving a philosophically contemplative existence.
In considering Aristotle and the physical aspects of being, we must also remain
conscious of the evolving definition of the imagination. Historically in western
11
philosophy, the imaginative faculty strictly involves a sensual impression of the world,
yet any sensual act, according to Aristotle, clearly stands below an intellectual act.
Aristotle explains,
Sensitive imagination, as we have said, is found in all animals,
deliberative imagination only in those that are calculative: for whether this
or that shall be enacted is already a task requiring calculation; and there
must be a single standard to measure by, for that is pursued which is
greater. It follows that what acts in this way must be able to make a unity
out of several images. (600)
Aristotle admits that certain animals may have the capacity to think and imagine. Yet
without the calculative power to unify those thoughts and images, animals remain
incapable of achieving ―greatness.‖
While animals have a soul in Aristotle‘s language of classification, animal souls
are inferior because they do not reach unity: ―animals possess all these parts of soul,
some certain of them only, others one only (this is what enables us to classify animals)‖
(De Anima 558). In the end, Aristotle‘s determination of human-animal boundaries
returns to parts and wholes in which a being‘s capacities exist as parts of the desired
whole, a unified state to which only humans can relate. Steiner reminds us of the
importance of the conceptual reliance on capacities during Aristotle‘s time: ―[In] GrecoRoman times there was [. . .] a fundamental shift in thinking about animals, away from a
sense of kinship and toward a capacities-based approach according to which animals
were denigrated in relation to human beings‖ (37). In the 18th century there is a
12
reconsideration of animal capacities when Jeremy Bentham, among others, emphasizes
not the animal‘s capacity to reflect but the animal‘s capacity to feel.
Aristotle‘s hierarchical theory persists into the Middle Ages, when the dominant
religion of Christianity ―incorporated and popularized the Aristotelian hierarchy‖
(Langer, Animal Others 79).6 Although the Christian doctrine widens the human
perception of who can reach the highest levels of being, it solidifies human superiority
over animals by stressing the animal lack of reason:
The Bible largely reinforced the Aristotelian view of animals by asserting
that God created humans in his own image, and that we are free to use
natural resources – including animals – for our own purposes. On the other
hand, by declaring that all humans are made in God‘s image, the Bible
legitimated an egalitarian view of humanity that opposed the aristocratic
tendencies of Greek thought, including Aristotle‘s. In the Middle Ages,
such Christian philosophers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas
underscored the claim that animals‘ lack of reason justified their
subordination – a thesis most Christians have accepted ever since.
(DeGrazia 3-4)
Aristotle‘s views of the animal as lacking reason and language continue through
the Middle Ages and into the early modern era. In the book of Genesis, the
relationship between human and animal is clearly stated:
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,
cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was
so.
13
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their
kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God
saw that it was good.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let
them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,
and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply,
and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of
the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth. (Animal Liberation 186-7)
Although the Bible grants man dominion over all animals, it is not clear that this
dominion involves the killing of animals for food, tools, etc. Before the fall of
man, the Bible describes the Garden of Eden as a peaceful, vegetarian humananimal existence. (It is not until the fall, for which a woman and an animal are
responsible, that the killing of animals becomes permissible.)
This conception of animal being continues from Aristotle to Christianity and on to
Descartes. Descartes‘s ―animals as automata‖ theory emphasizes a diminished animal
capacity to experience the world. This key change in thinking of the animal marks an
unfortunate downturn in the philosophy of the animal. Aristotle granted animals an acute
sensitivity to the world and animals bear a soul, although a limited one. In the Book of
14
Genesis, animals are still sacred to some degree in that they are created for man as a
blessing; they are created ―after his [God‘s] kind.‖ Descartes‘ view of animal existence
eliminates the animal as sacred or sentient; it reduces the animal to the status of a
machine:
Conceptualizing nature in purely mechanical terms, modern science
replaced the long-dominant Aristotelian view of nature as endowed with
purposes and somewhat akin to a living being. With this background,
Rene Descartes found it natural to regard animals, part of nature, as
organic machines, entirely devoid not only of reason but of feelings.
(DeGrazia 4)
Descartes‘ most basic understanding of animals is in accordance with Aristotle‘s views:
to reach perfection, a mind must unite with the soul or spirit (which animals, still lacking
in reason and language, cannot attain).
In Rene Descartes (1596-1650), we see an extreme view of human supremacy: a
reflection of the rise in both Christian religion and modern science. Descartes‘ famous
line, ―I think, therefore I am‖ reinforces the conception of the mind/body split placing
value in consciousness over felt experiences, a view that does not work in favor of
nonhuman animals. Descartes‘ emphasis on existence as human knowledge of the self
and God generally determines the western epistemological discourse until the
existentialists of the twentieth century boldly claim favor of ontology over epistemology.
A modern critic, Akira Lippit, reflects upon Descartes‘ philosophy of the animal and its
humanist tie to the cogito: 7
15
It is Descartes who most deeply instilled in the philosophical tradition the
idea that the capacity for reason and consciousness determines the
ontological universe. As the greatest vehicle for such reflection, human
beings occupy the center of the universe that they themselves have
conjured. Across the Cartesian plane of being, only human beings
establish an authentic site: all other beings reflect the eidos of humanity‘s
productions. In this schema, animals, like automata, simply reflect the
priority of humanity‘s presence, its cogito. (Electric Animal 34)
Thus, according to Descartes, animals, along with the rest of the world, do not hold an
―authentic‖ ontological plane of being outside of their role as a product of the human
cogito. In such a schema both animals and world become reified as ―soulless automata‖
(Scholtmeijer 3).
With his focus on human perfection, in Meditation Three, Descartes argues that
the human cogito is a reflection of God not seen in other animate or inanimate life forms.
According to Descartes, man could not have formed the idea of God without being
originally created by God, an ―engineer‖: ―Just as the objective intricacy belonging to the
idea must have some cause, namely the scientific knowledge of the engineer, or of
someone else who passed the idea on to him, so the idea of God which is in us must have
God himself as its cause‖ (10-11). While human ideas show perfection, when it comes to
nonhuman animal life and nature, Descartes argues that the original cause is not present
in the effect.
Flies, plants, etc., do not go to show that there can be a degree of
perfection in the effect which was not previously present in the cause. For,
16
since animals lack reason, it is certain that they have no perfection which
is not also present in inanimate bodies; or, if they do have any such
perfections, it is certain that they derived them from some other source,
and that the sun, the rain and the earth are not adequate causes of animals.
(Meditations on First Philosophy 83)
Because Descartes views consciousness as the most perfect level of being and humans
still hold the Aristotelian perception of animals lacking the highest forms of reflection,
animals do not display the original source of being: God.
In the Second Meditation of Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes argues
that, along with the perfect human ability to reason, only humans have a soul. In such a
discussion of the human soul, as is often the case, the philosopher must address what
does not have a soul, which brings him/her to the topic of the animal. For Descartes, the
body is divisible whereas, in contrast, the mind and soul are indivisible, for we can
separate the body into parts but this cannot be done with thinking of the soul. Also, the
―decay‖ of the body does not result in the decay of the mind/soul. The body is a material
substance whereas the mind is absolute and pure. The body, then, consists of ―accidents‖
and parts that, if altered, result in a change of the whole functioning body; whereas,
changes in the mind do not result in changes in the identity of the mind. Once again,
Descartes‘ discussion of soul returns to the priority of the cogito.
Aristotle grants animals the ability to imagine and sense the physical world, yet as
Scholtmeijer argues, ―Descartes‘ theory seems, indeed, like a last desperate effort to hold
back humankind against the slide from divine status into kinship with the rest of nature‖
(Animal Victims in Modern Fiction 17).8
17
While Descartes‘ ideas negatively influence the human perception of animals in
terms of their ability to feel, at the same time, this extreme view causes a response from
the voices of dissent on animal ethics, which might otherwise have remained silent. The
radical utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a figure now viewed as significant in
the animal ethics movement, challenges Descartes by courageously redirecting our focus
upon not whether animals can think, but whether or not they can feel pain. Part of the
reason Bentham raises this question is due to Descartes‘ impact on animal vivisection on
a large scale. As we move into the Romantic period, this opposition to Descartes‘
position on animal being gains momentum.
These particular philosophers‘ sustained views domina te the cultural perception
of the animal until the Romantic period, when the first author to be examined, Herman
Melville, writes on perhaps the most famous literary animal, Moby-Dick. Melville‘s
treatment of the literary whale requires attention because the text in many ways marks the
beginning of the movements to be seen in the modern authors of the twentieth-century.
The Philosophy of the Animal during the English and American Romantic Period
Bentham‘s attention to animal feeling persists into the eighteenth and nineteenth
century with the sentimental Romantic period perceiving the natural world as sacred. The
nature-focused movement also allows for the development of the single animal subject
with its emphasis on the unique individual at the center of art. By rejecting Neoclassical
order in aesthetics, the Romantic period turns toward the imagination, a faculty, as we
have seen in Aristotle and Descartes, philosophically linked to sensation and experience
rather than the ability to reason. During this time, the animal acquires new meaning as
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part of the wild, irregular or grotesque. It exists as idealized, belonging to that of the
rural, uncivilized, or natural life. And while these characteristics of the Romantic period
increase the momentum in the direction of thinking of the animal as holding ontological
value in itself, the period cannot reach the level of animal existence seen in the nineteenth
century due to the continued worldview with an hierarchal focus. On the animal during
the Romantic period, Scholtmeijer notes,
The nature worship of the Romantics has a suspiciously self-serving
quality, and that quality seems to disbar, for the most part, regard for the
inherent value of animals [. . . .] In its religious and supernatural mode,
the Romantic imagination was inclined to jump from the individual person
to the panorama of nature, overleaping the animal in the process. (25)
When the animal inspires the Romantic writer by showing a window into the sublime, it
is the human artist who then reaches a state of grandeur. Animals, in this creative process,
exist more as a trigger to the event than the more important medium for an expression of
being. The human imagination taps into the sublime through not the animal itself, but the
larger divine force. Many of the most well-known Romantic figures to write on animals
such as William Blake‘s ―Tyger‖ do not address the actual animal experience of the
world but look to this grand creature to ponder who created its being. This perspective
discourages consideration of the animal‘s life. Scholtmeijer confirms, ―Like other
Romantics, he places certain human capacities, poetic genius primarily, at the summit of
creation‖ (28). Another key Romantic figure to call attention to the animal is Coleridge.
From a Christian perspective, the albatross functions in a symbolic, religious manner.
That said, whether intended or not, Coleridge‘s attention to the human will to destroy
19
animals without contemplation furthers the subject of animal being, possibly paving the
way for such figures as Shelley and Byron whose sympathy for animal feeling resulted in
their conversion to vegetarianism. In fact, in Byron‘s Cain, we see him challenge
Christianity‘s view of animals in that Cain‘s rebellion results from the unnecessary
suffering of animals.
Nonetheless, Romantic individualism benefits thinking of the animal in that
literary authors now focus on a human individual‘s intimate engagement with an animal
other. The human perspective of the animal becomes one which stands in awe at the
individual other, particularly the animal sublime. However, this sublime animal otherness
is not seen as existing in itself because, according to the Romantic philosophy, all
otherness transcends the world inhabited by humans in that it is created by God.
Additionally, as Scholtmeijer notes in the above mentioned passage, the Romantic
imagination places the animal inside the larger ―panorama of nature.‖ While seemingly
productive and environmentally conscious, this Romantic perception of nature as a
generalized unit is only now being recognized as a possible flaw in the beginnings of the
environmental movement.
Rather than perform a textual analysis of these major Romantic authors
mentioned thus far, I believe one might best see these Romantic tendencies at play in the
works of the English poet, William Cowper (1731-1800), who urges sympathy for the
animal in terms of the felt experience. Cowper‘s treatment of the animal does not receive
attention in Scholtmeijer‘s analysis of animals. Furthermore, his animal depictions prove
emblematic of the major Romantic authors in both their benefits and preclusions. His
most powerful thoughts on animal being appear in his five part poem in blank verse ―The
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Task‖ (1785). In Book III of the poem, ―The Garden,‖ Cowper considers the animal in
the context of the domestic country setting. On the human preoccupation with the sport of
hunting, he says:
Detested sport,
That owes its pleasures to another's pain,
That feeds upon the sobs and dying shrieks
Of harmless nature, dumb, but yet endu'd
With eloquence, that agonies inspire,
Of silent tears and heart-distending sighs!
Vain tears, alas! and sighs that never find
A corresponding tone in jovial souls.
(William Cowper, The Task [1785], "The Garden‖)
With an emphasis on feeling, Cowper talks of human ―pleasures‖ and animal ―pain.‖
Although Cowper retains a sympathetic perspective, one must also note his portrayal of
the animal other as one possessing a ―dumb,‖ ―harmless nature.‖ Thus, while the
Romantic authors begin to consider what it is like to be an animal, suggesting Thomas
Nagel‘s later famous essay ―What is it like to be a Bat?‖ (1974), the animal does not
reach a level of existential significance but instead is seen as a mere victim. Scholtmeijer
agrees, ―[v]arious forces in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries steered
sensibilities towards the importance of animals in themselves. In effect, then, animals
evolve into victims around the turn of the eighteenth century‖ (Sholtmeijer 16). Cowper
accepts animals as ―inferior,‖ leading to the description of animal other in hierarchal
terms, a continuation of Aristotle and Descartes. While animals are less than humans,
21
argues Cowper, it does not excuse their suffering for human pleasure. Cowper goes so far
as to describe humans and animals as being at war with each other, a notion to be used
later by controversial animal rights groups such as PETA (People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals). Cowper also connects the event to sound: ―sobs and dying
shrieks,‖ ―silent tears‖ and ―sighs‖ that do not meet a ―corresponding tone.‖ It is not until
the twentieth-century that the animal voice will receive serious critical attention by
important philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.
We see Cowper exposing the traditional relationships between humans and
animals; wild animals act as the target of hunting whereby domestic animals are
exploited for labor and pleasure. In ―A Winter Walk at Noon‖ Cowper boldly claims,
―With blood of their inhabitants impal'd / Earth groans beneath the burthen of a war, /
Wag'd with defenceless innocence (William Cowper, The Task). Cowper writes of the
noble horse, one of the most historically noted animals in that it crosses the boundaries of
wild and domestic.
He too is witness, noblest of the train,
That wait on man, the flight-performing horse:
With unsuspecting readiness he takes,
His murth'rer on his back, and push'd all day,
With bleeding sides and flanks that heave for life,
To the far-distant goal, arrives and dies.
So little mercy shows, who needs so much!
Does law, so jealous in the cause of man,
Denounce no doom on the delinquent? None.
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He lives, and o'er his brimming beaker boasts,
(As if barbarity were high desert)
The' inglorious feat, and clamorous in praise
Of the poor brute, seems wisely to suppose,
the honours of his matchless horse his own.
But many a crime, deem'd innocent on earth,
Is register'd in heav'n, and there, no doubt,
Have each their record, with a curse annext.
Man may dismiss compassion from his heart,
But God will never.
(William Cowper, The Task [1785], "A Winter Walk at Noon")
The horse, wild and noble, can act beyond man with its ―flight-performing‖ ability; yet
with ―unsuspecting readiness‖ the horse serves man to the point of ―bleeding shanks.‖
Tragically unappreciated by humans, the horse becomes objectified for humans,
comparable to Descartes‘ philosophy of the animal-as-machine. Calling upon the lack of
ethics and legality on the subject of animals, Cowper condemns such animal treatment as
a ―crime.‖ It is the final few lines of this passage that are especially indicative of the
Romantic period as it pertains to the philosophy of the animal, which returns us to
Scholtmeijer‘s opening statement concerning the ―nature worship‖ of the Romantics as
―suspiciously self-serving.‖ Cowper notes the issue of the origin of being and its
importance concerning the subject of the animal: ―Man may dismiss compassion from his
heart, / But God will never.‖ It is out of fear of God that one should have compassion for
animals. This act of animal cruelty, Cowper exclaims, might go without punishment on
23
earth, however, such is not the case in heaven, for he who commits crimes against
animals will surely receive severe punishment from God. Cowper‘s reason for thinking
of the animal other in itself, then, stems from the fear of eternal damnation upon the
human being. Cowper‘s reliance upon the afterlife raises the philosophical dilemma to be
discussed later by the twentieth-century existentialists. Furthermore, this Romantic
position locates human responsibility outside the self rather than locating it in the
immediate, lived world.
Thus, while the Romantic period surely advances the discourse on intimate
human-animal engagement by emphasizing individual experience in the natural world,
the Romantics do not successfully disengage from the hierarchal system that they have
inherited from the western philosophical tradition. Although the Romantic period creates
an atmosphere of sympathy for animals, the hierarchal theories and lack of human
responsibility towards animals found in Aristotelian and Cartesian philosophy endures
until the Darwinian revolution reaches its height in the nineteenth-century.
A Key Shift toward the 20th Century Existential Animal: Darwin‘s Evolutionary
Theory
It is hardly necessary to prove the impact of evolutionary theory on nearly all
dimensions of the human perception of reality, let alone the animal world. As Mary
Allen, one of the few authors to explore the animal in literature has made clear, ―As the
old hierarchy of the kingdoms toppled with Charles Darwin, and the belief in human
dominion over the animal lost its force, the creatures consequently loomed into a new
place [. . .] raising animals to a more important place than they had occupied for
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centuries‖ (8). It is not until the nineteenth century that the dominant cultural perception
of animals becomes seriously disrupted. The theory of evolution offers an alternative to
the origin of life as created by design. By the time Darwin publishes the Origin of
Species in 1859 the idea of evolution was already ―in the air,‖ as Milton Millhauser says
in his historical sketch of the scientific community. I note this fact not to dismiss the
importance of Darwin‘s ground-breaking publication but to recognize the wider,
profound change in the philosophic and literary community. Although Melville publishes
Moby-Dick in 1851 and Darwin‘s Origin of Species appears in 1859, Melville is already
well aware of the movement at hand due to the rapidly spreading scientific talk of the
possibility of transmutation and gradual changes in species. Such naturalists as Lamarck
(1801), Grant (1826), Matthew (1821), VonBuch (1836), Alfred Russell Wallace (1858),
and many others, published papers insisting that species descend from other species. As
Millhauser points out, ―the idea of development had entered the world and was touching
other fields than biology; thinking in terms of growth and change was becoming a
familiar habit of the age‖ (37). In the philosophic community, the influential German
philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel writes the paramount book, The Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807), a text based on the idea of ―becoming‖ and the evolution of consciousness
and paves the way for major existential thinkers of the twentieth-century such as
Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In an essay entitled ―The Influence of Darwin on
Philosophy,‖ John Dewey articulates the monumental change in human thinking: ―The
conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand
years, the conceptions that had become the familiar furniture of the mind, rested on the
assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final; they rested upon treating change and
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origin as signs of defect and unreality‖ (393). Dewey‘s claim on the finality of reality
returns us to Aristotle‘s key term, telos. The driving force behind Aristotle‘s idea of
reaching a perfect goal, along with Descartes‘ emphasis on perfection, is in direct
opposition to Darwin‘s theory of constant becoming. Without telos, the validity of
Aristotle‘s argument that animals differ from humans in their ability to reach or
comprehend this perfect goal loses its basis. The conditions of knowledge, reality, and
therefore human experience change with the new ways of perceiving the lifeworld.
Without the methods of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and their successors
in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, Darwin would have been helpless in
the organic sciences. But prior to Darwin the impact of the new scientific
method upon life, mind, and politics, had been arrested, because between
these ideal or moral interests and the inorganic world intervened the
kingdom of plants and animals. The gates of the garden of life were barred
to the new ideas; and only through this garden was there access to mind
and politics. The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his
having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and
thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life.
(Dewey 397)
Darwin‘s theory breaks the long ―arrested‖ state of animal being by moving ―through‖
the garden to make his claims. Only through (and not around) the natural world or
―kingdom of plants and animals‖ could our consciousness grant other beings access to the
political and ethical world, unchallenged until now.
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After the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin‘s The Descent of
Man (1871) makes claims about animal being that directly oppose those ideas which have
successfully dominated western thought for many centuries. As a scientist, Darwin
provides concrete facts and evidence to support his claims about animals. In order to
make his case, when citing particular animal experiments and observations in the
scientific community, Darwin also calls upon the everyday relationship between humans
and nonhumans. In his section on the ―Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the
Lower Animals,‖ Darwin sets out to prove the various ―mental powers‖ of animals,
including the following: happiness, misery, intentional deceit, love, maternal affection,
sympathy, fidelity, jealousy, modesty, a sense of humor, play, wonder, curiosity,
imitation, memory, imagination, free will, dreams, awareness of death, and the most
disputed of all, reason. This section precedes others which display how the ―bodily
structure‖ of beings is a result of evolutionary change. The comparison section, then,
turns from the physical aspects of the evolution of species to the mental powers of beings.
In response to the popularly held view that animals lack an ability to unify ideas and
images, Darwin argues that animals dream based upon the behavioral indications of
showing movements and sounds while sleeping. If animals dream, then the faculty of
imagination also enables animals to evaluate, an ability that was previously thought to be
absent in animals. Darwin concludes that this ability, ―unites former images and ideas,
independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results‖ (Darwin 250). To
create dreams one must use ―judgment‖ and ―taste in selecting or rejecting the
involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining
27
them‖ (Darwin 250-1). Darwin‘s emphasis on the sustained intentionality of animals
responds to Aristotelian claims on animals‘ inability to unify images.
On the subject of the ability to reason, Darwin first says, ―Only a few persons
now dispute that animals possess some power of reasoning‖ (Darwin 251). The animal
power of reason has been, by the nineteenth century, disputed as either instinct or as
―mere association of ideas.‖ (Darwin 251) In addressing this discrepancy, Darwin, uses
several examples, including monkeys, elephants, dogs, and fishes, and claims that
animals move beyond both instinct and the association of ideas. When confronted with
predicaments which could not have been presented to their ancestors and ―would be of
little use to an animal in a state of nature‖ (Darwin 252), multiple experiments prove that
animals ―after deliberation, broke through a habit which is inherited by them‖ (Darwin
254). This leads Darwin to conclude that through reasoning animals overcame what was
considered a fixed habit.
Moby-Dick: The Transitional Animal
Herman Melville‘s portrayal of the whale in Moby-Dick marks a cultural
transition from perceiving the animal as occupying a symbolic ―place,‖ to use Allen‘s
language, into what I will call an existential space. Immediate influences include the
already established Romantic Movement alongside the beginnings of Naturalism.
It was during the Darwinian awakening that the first great blossoming of
American literature took place. No evolutionist himself, Melville wrote
rather in reaction to the developing argument that man was to be deposed
[. . . .] It is no coincidence that, eight years before On the Origin of
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Species appeared, the biggest creature on earth should become a major
character—pursued by angry, shrinking man—in the mightiest American
novel of the century. However supreme Moby Dick became as a symbol,
he rides first as an actual whale. (Allen 10)
Melville‘s ―actual‖ whale represents a quintessential literary animal by presenting the
multiple, and often contradictory, aspects (real and unreal) of nonhuman animals. With
part of that distinction blurring the lines of sense-perception and rationality, philosophers
begin to re-think the interconnectedness of the mind/body dualism ascertained by
Descartes. A philosophical revolution of the body and sensation thus strongly influences
our perception of animal being as, for centuries, the reign of human rationalism placed
animal being below human being.
When evolutionary theory influences major literary works such as Melville‘s
Moby-Dick (1851), a change in the western literary animal occurs: the animal now exists
as the main subject of the literary text. While Melville displays signs of a traditionally
western human subject in his depictions of nonhuman animals, the author also takes the
animal seriously in that the literal life of animals is described on a philosophical level.
Although the interpretation of texts such as Moby-Dick may seem
anthropomorphic at times, portraying literal animals as main subjects who do not speak
human language is in itself a move away from the popular trend of placing human values
upon non-human animals. And while such nonhuman animal depictions often enable the
animal to become an intending subject, once an animal speaks a human language, as in
popular children‘s literature and film, the talking animal often immediately assumes a
human identity. These texts, which still make up the majority of animal subjects in
29
literature and film today, ask the reader to place her/himself in the position of the animal
that overwhelmingly assumes the nature of a human being. This study turns away from
such blatantly anthropomorphic representations of the literary animal; instead, it will aim
to explore texts that focus on what I will call not the animal as a human subject but the
animal-as-subject-in-itself. We will see in Melville, and even more so in the literary texts
of the twentieth-century, that these new historical perceptions of animal being give birth
to the authors‘ attempt to express their own immediate experiences of animal ontology.
In Moby-Dick, antagonistic descriptions of ―angry‖ and ―shrinking‖ human
characters cause a development of sympathy for the whale, a treatment typical of the
Romantic poets, as previously discussed in Cowper. Ahab and Queequeg appear no more
or less ―savage‖ than the ―monstrous‖ whale, with the brutish Queequeg an illiterate
cannibal and a ―savage creature‖ (50). The character depictions reflect evolutionary
theory: ―Queequeg, for you see was a creature in the transition state— neither caterpillar
nor butterfly‖ (55). Correspondingly, Ahab, as an unreasonably vengeful, ―sick‖
―madman,‖ and ―raving lunatic,‖ (202) is no more civilized than Queequeg thus stripping
him of the Aristotelian capacity to reason. The captain‘s revenge technically stems from
the loss of his leg to the whale when ―Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab‘s leg, as a
mower a blade of grass in the field‖ (201). Yet the reader does not blame the whale
because Melville informs us that the incident occurred as Ahab attempted to irrationally
slay the animal. Starbuck confirms Ahab‘s responsibility for the entire chase when he
shouts to his captain, ―Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest
him!‖ (570).
30
The reader‘s sympathy builds as the whale carries an arguably subjective identity.
He is named Moby-Dick. One might perceive the whale‘s naming, along with its male
gender, as a representation of human control, mimicking the Biblical naming of the
animal kingdom. Yet Melville‘s naming in the context of Darwin might also result from
the author‘s attempt to re-evaluate the notion of the origins of being. Whalers claim to
recognize Moby-Dick from all other whales by his whiteness and particular shape of
body. Obviously, critics recognize the whale‘s whiteness as symbolic in terms of race
theory. However, these characteristics doubly create a realistically unique, individual
whale identity based on characteristics which do not merely serve anthropocentric
purposes.
Moby-Dick pushes Ahab, conjuring the classic and problematic hunting
perspective of viewing animals as, at once, sacred and enemy. Melville shows Ahab‘s
negative reaction when experiencing the animal ―other‖:
To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think
there‘s naught beyond. But ‗tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in
him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That
inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or
be the white whale principle, I will wreak the hate upon him. (181)
The force behind the action of the chase in the novel is due to Ahab‘s perceived ―wall‖
described above. In contrast, Ishmael‘s prophetic perception of the whale arises from an
acceptance of the animal sublime and a re-adjustment of the phenomenon of human
perception. Although here Ahab blames the ―malice‖ of the whale, we can safely say that
the malice occurs only according to Ahab‘s distorted perception. In narrative terms,
31
Melville has not favored human or animal. In fact, as Lawrence Buell has noted, there is
much support to argue for Melville‘s push against human cruelty to animals and nature.
In the end, the whale inevitably resists capture and thus ―wins‖ the climactic battle
between beings.
The scene in which Ahab describes the ―wall‖ has been examined by the
postmodern authors Deleuze and Guattari in terms of the contradiction between the pack
and the lone animal in Moby-Dick. They argue that Ahab chooses to step outside of the
―law of the whalers‖ (A Thousand Plateaus 269) by pursuing not the pack but a select
whale. This ―anomalous choice,‖ according to Deleuze and Guattari, marks the point of
―becoming-whale‖ for Captain Ahab: ―Moby-Dick in its entirety is one of the greatest
masterpieces of becoming; Captain Ahab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but one that
bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a monstrous alliance with the
Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick‖ (A Thousand Plateaus 268). When ―becomingwhale‖ the literary character takes on the ―anomalous‖ or the threshold described by
Deleuze and Guattari as a ―phenomenon of bordering.‖ (270) In an explication of Ahab‘s
use of the word, ―wall,‖ the authors provide the following explanation:
That is what Captain Ahab says to his first mate: I have no personal
history with Moby-Dick, no revenge to take, any more than I have a myth
to play out; but I do have a becoming! Moby-Dick is neither an individual
nor a genus; he is the borderline, and I have to strike him to get at the pack
as a whole, to reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it. ‗To me, the
white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.‘ The white wall. ‗Sometimes I
think there is naught beyond. But ‗tis enough.‘ That the anomalous is the
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borderline makes it easier for us to understand the various positions it
occupies in relation to the pack or the multiplicity it borders, and the
various positions occupied by a fascinated Self. (270)
Deleuze and Guattari‘s description of Ahab‘s becoming-animal can be understood in
accordance with a rhizome, their model of an organic system. In lieu of the genealogical
or machine systems theory, they envision relations between beings as occurring in the
nature of a rhizome that moves in all directions in space, likened to the subterranean root.
According to their system, in animal and human-animal relations, there would be no
point of origin with constantly moving forces. Their becoming-animal relates to this
study in that, like contemporary ontological readings of the nonhuman animal, they wish
to move away from thinking of relations between beings as holding fixed points on a line.
Instead, they view not just animated beings but complex beings functioning in a system
with each other, constantly connected through multiple ―plateaus.‖ While I find the
interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari to be worth noting, I agree with Lori Brown and
Steve Baker when they argue that these theorists do not discuss animal-becoming as it
relates to lived, engaged experiences. Brown says,
the majority of becomings-animal we find in Deleuze and Guattari‘s tenth
plateau do not directly address the life of the animal participant. The
examples they give of becomings-animal generally take place in the midst
of mental illness, in music and other art forms, in tales of wild men,
vampires and werewolves. While they speak of becoming animal as a
means for challenging and breaking up various human institutions, they do
not address institutions that have a negative impact on other animals, such
33
as factory farming. Thus, as Steve Baker writes, ‗Animals, for Deleuze
and Guattari, seem to operate more as a device of writing … than as living
beings whose conditions of life were of direct concern to the writers.‘
(263)
In contrast to Ahab, we see in Ishmael the kinds of real life animal conditions that are
missing from Deleuze and Guittari‘s theoretical discussion. Ishmael is fascinated by the
sound the whales make as they ―slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the
long wet grass of marshy meads‖ (286). As Ishmael listens to the sound of this act in the
―Brit‖ chapter, he contemplates the whale‘s existence, ―And even when recognized at
last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky
masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that
lives in a dog or a horse‖ (286). As Allen pointed out, Melville‘s choice in comparing
the domestic dog and horse to the wild whale animal shows an emotional interest on
behalf of the engaged human. It is this moment, when experientially engaged with the
whale‘s physical act, that Ishmael considers the life of the whale, the ―sort of life‖ it lives
and whether or not it can be equated with other animal life forms of which he is aware.
The most powerful quote in Moby-Dick concerning the animal sublime appears in a
footnote when Ishmael, thinking of Coleridge, recalls his first sighting of an albatross.
Here, Melville speaks of the literary animal directly. Ishmael recollects the moments‘
emotional experience: ―Long I gazed at the prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only
hint, the things that darted through me then‖ (Moby-Dick 207). Ishmael goes on to call
the bird a ―glorious thing,‖ ―mystical,‖ with the ―secret of the spell‖ (207). In the
following chapter on Lawrence, we will see how Melville‘s shift toward thinking of the
34
animal life in itself challenges Lawrence in the form of what he calls the ―tangle‖ of
being with animals.
35
Chapter One:
D.H. Lawrence and the ―tangle‖ of Being-with-Animal
Lawrence‘s unfailing fascination with nonhuman animal being can be seen in
nearly all of his fiction and nonfiction writings. In the following chapter, I will first
argue for an existential reading of Lawrence‘s philosophy of the nonhuman animal
through a careful look at his less recognized critical essays. Secondly, a brief analysis of
animals appearing in such major literary authors as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf will
place Lawrence‘s progressive perspective in the context of his contemporaries. I will then
move on to a comparative analysis of the nonhuman animals found in Lawrence‘s fiction.
Lawrence‘s Philosophy of the Animal
Because the role of the whale in Melville‘s Moby-Dick is a key reference point in
the transition from the symbolic use of animals in literature toward a consideration of the
nonhuman animal-in-itself, I will begin an analysis of Lawrence‘s animals with the
author‘s own commentary on Moby-Dick.9 In 1917, Lawrence writes that he most
admires Melville‘s ability to retain a sense of the whale as at once mystical, symbolic,
and real. For Lawrence, the human-animal encounters in the novel are ―so real, yet so
unearthly‖ (Selected Essays 254) and simultaneously, ―[t]his dream-experience is a real
soul-experience‖ (255). Lawrence then quickly turns his attention to the human violence
directed toward the whale. According to Lawrence, the human violence in Moby-Dick
far surpasses that of ancient warriors and their counterparts. He notes, ―The Argonauts
were mild lambs in comparison. And Ulysses went defeating the Circes and overcoming
the wicked hussies of the isles. But the Pequod‘s crew is a collection of maniacs
36
fanatically hunting down a lonely, harmless white whale‖ (Selected Essays 246-7).
Unlike the ―wicked hussies of the isles‖ the whale is ―lonely‖ and ―harmless.‖ On the
subject of Ahab‘s leg lost to Moby-Dick, Lawrence declares, ―Quite right, too. Should
have torn off both his legs, and a bit more besides‖ (247). While Lawrence‘s sympathy
for the whale is not uncommon among readers and scholars, a careful examination of his
explanation for the violence toward the whale leads to an existential reading.
When trying to define the role of the whale in the human-animal relationship at
play in Moby-Dick, Lawrence determines:
What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race;
he is our deepest blood-nature. And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the
maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt
him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt
of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black,
east and west. Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in
this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide. (Selected
Essays 259)
When Lawrence speaks of the ―white mental consciousness‖ and his tireless, ―maniacal‖
hunt of the whale, one might then eliminate the life of the nonhuman animal from the
reading, perceiving the whale as a purely symbolic form of the white human self. On the
contrary, Lawrence‘s language of perception (―mental consciousness‖ and ―conscious
hunt‖) when paired with his writings on animal and human being reveal existential
relations between the human self and the nonhuman animal other. For Lawrence, ―our
deepest blood nature‖ and ―our deepest blood-being‖ refers to relations with otherness of
37
utmost ethical value. With such a perspective, the act of the hunt of the whale destroys
the self (and others) due to our relationships, which then determine our existential being
in the world.
If we turn for a moment to Lawrence‘s writings on the subject of sympathy, we
develop a better understanding of his claim concerning the hunt of the whale. In an essay
on Whitman and sympathy, Lawrence first praises Whitman‘s ―doctrine of life‖ for
human relationships; in this instance, the context of Whitman‘s philosophy is directed
toward human racism. 10 Lawrence analyzes Whitman‘s writings:
He does not say love. He says sympathy. Feeling with. Feel with them as
they feel with themselves. Catching the vibration of their soul and flesh as
we pass. It is a new doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A
morality of actual living, not of salvation [. . .] He is the first white
aboriginal. ‗In my Father‘s house are many mansions.‘ ‗No,‘ said
Whitman. ‗Keep out of mansions. A mansion may be heaven on earth, but
you might as well be dead. Strictly avoid mansions. The soul is herself
when she is going on foot down the open road.‘ It is the American heroic
message. The soul is not to pile up defences round herself. She is not to
withdraw and seek her heavens inwardly, in mystical ecstasies. She is not
to cry to some God beyond, for salvation. She is to go down the open road,
as the road opens, into the unknown, keeping company with those whose
soul draws them near to her, accomplishing nothing save the journey, and
the works incident to the journey, in the long life-travel into the unknown,
38
the soul in her subtle sympathies accomplishing herself by the way. This is
Whitman‘s essential message.‖ (Selected Essays 270)
This passage describes Whitman‘s notion of how the act of sympathy is conducted. For
Lawrence, then, the key to Whitman‘s doctrine focuses on sympathy (not love); a
sympathy which entails ―[f]eeling with‖ in order to ―[f]eel with‖ others ―as they feel
themselves.‖ To ―feel with‖ is an act, a ―journey‖ of ―actual living,‖ performed ―on foot‖
here on earth, neither outside the self nor withdrawn within the self. To engage in this
sympathetic ―feeling act,‖ one must also recognize that because others are ―unknown,‖
the process requires an ―openness‖ on behalf of the experiencer (and presumably also on
the behalf of the experienced). Thus, according to Lawrence, Whitman made the mistake
of misinterpreting his own watchword: sympathy. Rather than enacting his message,
Lawrence argues, Whitman ―still confounded it with Jesus‘ love, and with Paul‘s charity‖
(Selected Essays 271). Lawrence describes sympathy as an ontological (not religious) act.
He attributes Whitman‘s error to what he terms ―bad habit‖ (Selected Essays 272).
Later in the essay, Lawrence again explicates Whitman‘s language to explain that
Whitman‘s ―bad habit‖ stems from doing something ―for‖ others rather than being
engaged ―with‖ others.
Whitman said Sympathy. If only he had stuck to it! Because Sympathy
means feeling with, not feeling for. He kept on having a passionate feeling
for the Negro slave, or the prostitute, or the syphilitic—which is merging.
A sinking of Walt Whitman‘s soul in the soul of these others. He wasn‘t
keeping his open road. He was forcing his soul down an old rut. He wasn‘t
leaving her free. He was forcing her into other people‘s circumstances.
39
Supposing he has felt true sympathy with the Negro slave? He would have
felt with the Negro slave. Sympathy—compassion—which is partaking of
the passion which was in the soul of the Negro slave. (Selected Essays
272)
Lawrence‘s philosophical emphasis on sympathy as existing ―with‖ others rather than
―for‖ others coincides with the most basic ontological principles of existentialism.
Although the above discussion of Whitman‘s sympathy is one which pertains to human
others such as the Negro slave, the prostitute, and the syphilitic, in returning back to the
hunt of the whale in Moby-Dick, we must re-examine the act of sympathy as it relates to
animal being and how this form of engagement differs from human sympathy towards
humans.
To do so, I will first explain how Heidegger‘s notion of ―being-with‖ parallels
Lawrence and Whitman‘s comments before relating these concepts to animal being. In
terms of Lawrence‘s emphasis on one being ―with‖ rather than being ―for‖ an other, this
language corresponds to Heidegger‘s concept of ―being-in-the-world.‖ Lawrence, along
with Heidegger, argues for a kind of ―intersubjectivity‖ that attempts to eliminate the
traditional subject/object dichotomy and instead become a shared engagement through an
―open[ness]‖ with others. In fact, Michael Bell notes Lawrence‘s Heideggerean ontology
in terms of Lawrence‘s desire to convey the ―whole mode of existence in the world.‖ 11
Bell claims:
Lawrence always understood human feeling through the given individual‘s
whole mode of existence in the world. His truly remarkable, and I believe
unique, ability was to represent dramatically quite different states of being.
40
His capacity to respond to the otherness of other forms of life, and to feel
the moment by moment strangeness of his own existence, was the premise
of his fictional worlds. (6)
Bell accounts for Lawrence‘s experimentation with ―different states of being‖ and the
―otherness of other forms of life‖ in terms of the ―human,‖ ―individual‘s,‖ ―own
existence.‖ He then connects Lawrence‘s ―worlds‖ to Heidegger‘s existential notions of
―being-in-the-world.‖12 Bell argues, ―Heidegger‘s term ‗world‘ is the philosophical
equivalent of the constantly modulating and relational representation of ‗external‘
existence in Lawrence‘s fiction. In the Heideggerean, as in the Lawrencean conception,
there is no external world separable from human being in the world‖ (10). This view of a
Heideggerean ―being-in-the-world‖ includes a consciousness of environment as historical
in which the human realizes his/her place in evolution, a place comprising all other living
organisms. An historical perception of this kind also works to de-center the human self
by expanding beyond that which is known to the mystery that Lawrence argues should be
explored through Whitman‘s act of sympathy, one of Lawrence‘s goals in contemplating
identity and ―otherness.‖
To further Bell‘s interpretation of Lawrence‘s Heideggerean worlds, I will
consider recent studies that explore Heidegger‘s writings in order to determine where
nonhuman animals might fit into his thinking of ―being-in-the-world‖ and Dasein.13 In
their articles on Heidegger and the animal, Andrea Kenkmann and William McNeill
argue for an expansion of Heidegger‘s concepts in order to include nonhuman animal
world(s).14 Heidegger discusses the difference between inanimate objects, animals and
human beings in his lecture course, Fundamental Ideas of the Metaphysic,
41
―Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik.‖ In his talk, Heidegger determines three kinds of
worlds: objects, animals, and humans. He says, ―The stone is worldless (weltlos); the
animal is poor in world (weltarm); humans are world-forming (weltbildend): three
‗theses‘ which Heidegger proposes in order to frame his inquiry into world‖ (McNeill
214). Kenkmann and McNeill interpret the nonhuman animal‘s ―poor world‖ as
somewhere between that of the human and stone world(s). That is, if animals have a poor
world, they still have a world, albeit poor. If we follow Heidegger‘s definition of
―world,‖ animals hold some form of ―accessibility‖ and ―openness‖ for encountering
other beings. McNeill concludes, ―When we say that an animal does not have world, we
mean that it does not have access to other beings in the way that humans do‖ (214).
Thus, both philosophical critics argue against a humanist interpretation of Heidegger‘s
being-in-the-world concerning animals. By drawing on such studies, I will argue that
Lawrence‘s texts contain existential animals in that their actual (not merely symbolic)
lives play an essential part in the narrative.
In his critical texts, Lawrence illustrates how nonhuman animals and humans are
intuitively and sensually in tune. Lawrence‘s stance here should not be misunderstood as
the long-held Aristotelian perspective on animals as merely sensual, rather than rational,
beings. Instead, Lawrence specifically speaks of this sensual capacity as a kind of
‗knowing.‘ As an indication of the predominant cultural climate of his time, Lawrence
notes the current scientific and public perception of sex and beauty. While in agreement
with much of Darwin‘s writings, Lawrence felt dissatisfied with the cultural perception of
what he saw as a lack of recognition concerning nature‘s aesthetics. He says, ―[s]cience
has a mysterious hatred of beauty, because it doesn‘t fit in the cause-and-effect chain.
42
And society has a mysterious hatred of sex, because it perpetually interferes with the nice
money-making schemes of social man. So the two hatreds made a combine, and sex and
beauty are mere propagation appetite‖ (Selected Essays 14). Lawrence then proves his
point through examples of nonhuman animals: if the peacock‘s beauty were meant to
attract the attention of the peahen for propagation, the peahen would notice him, but she
does not. Instead, ―[b]eauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an
arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of
fineness‖ (Selected Essays 15). With the human animal and nonhuman animal, sex and
beauty are ―experiences‖ of ―touch‖ through ―living flesh‖ (Selected Essays 17).
Lawrence does not limit this experience to visuality or humanity, but instead argues for a
―felt” aesthetic experience conducted ―with‖ others as in Whitman‘s sympathetic act.
At times, Lawrence‘s progressive talk of ontological feeling with nonhuman
animal others comes in conflict with the commonly misunderstanding as implying a
hierarchy between human and nonhuman life forms. Although the rejection of Darwin
had calmed a bit by the turn of the twentieth century, Darwinism was, and often still is,
misunderstood as hierarchal whereas by definition, the status of the evolutionary
biological world is constantly changing and, in fact, unites beings rather than separates
them. When Lawrence discusses the two opposing concepts of ―being-with‖ and a
hierarchal order, he realizes their incongruence by identifying the human position as a
state of ―tangle.‖ (Selected Essays 67). This term is important in that Lawrence‘s
perception of the human-animal relationship as an existential ―tangle‖ continues to
bewilder future literary authors such as Faulkner and Coetzee.
43
We see this tangle at work in an essay, ―Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine‖
(1925), told in the first person narrative, when Lawrence relays a story in which the main
characters are a porcupine and a dog. A neighbor‘s dog wanders onto the narrator‘s
(presumably Lawrence‘s) small ranch having encountered a porcupine, for the dog‘s
snout is full of quills. Lawrence‘s memory of the occasion describes his painstaking
involvement in resolving the situation, which entails struggling to remove the quills from
the dog‘s nose, and later shooting the porcupine. After the personal narrative (one that
appears to have considerably disturbed the author), Lawrence then spends the remaining
portion of the essay defending his behavior through a philosophical discussion on the
existential status of human and nonhuman beings. This discussion provides one of the
most telling accounts of the author‘s position concerning animal life.
After deciding that killing the porcupine is a necessary act for humans due to the
porcupine‘s ―lower‖ position, the narrator rhetorically asks, ―[w]hat do we mean by
higher? Strictly, we mean more alive. More vividly alive. We know it, there is no trying
to refute it. It is all very well saying that they are both alive in two different ways, and
therefore they are incomparable, incommensurable. This is also true‖ (Lawrence,
Selected Essays 64). Lawrence‘s attempt at rationalization fails in that his second
statement concerning the incomparability of human and nonhuman lives contradicts his
previous statement which declares that one being (human) is higher or ―more vividly
alive‖ than the other (porcupine). He tries to reconcile the contradiction by separating
―existence‖ as ―species, of types, of races, of nations‖ from a different kind of existence,
that of ―single individual beings‖ (Selected Essays 65). He calls this second form of
existence the ―other dimension‖ or ―fourth dimension, of being‖ (Lawrence, Selected
44
Essays 65). Depending upon the particular individual beings involved in the encounter,
this ―other‖ or ―fourth‖ dimension may or may not be accessible.
The fourth dimension of which Lawrence speaks in ―The Death of the Porcupine‖
also appears in the context of a human and primate encounter in ―Corasmin and the
Parrots‖ (1924), yet another essay with intending animals as subjects and the topic of
human and nonhuman animal life at hand. During this instance, Lawrence refers to the
dimension of the monkey compared to the dimension of the human. Lawrence says:
If you come to think of it, when you look at the monkey you are looking
straight into the other dimension. He‘s got length and breadth and height
all right, and he‘s in the same universe of Space and Time as you are. But
there‘s another dimension. He‘s different. There‘s no rope of evolution
linking him to you, like a navel string. No! Between you and him there‘s a
cataclysm and another dimension. It‘s no good. You can‘t link him up.
Never will. It‘s the other dimension. (Selected Essays 209)
According to Lawrence, the primate and human cannot connect, yet certain forms of
animal life, such as Corasmin, a dog, possess the ability to link with humans. Lawrence
says, ―[a]nd Corasmin wags his tail mildly, and looks at me with real wisdom in his eyes.
He and I, we understand each other in the wisdom of the other dimension‖ (Selected
Essays 210). Lawrence then confirms, ―At the same time, every creature exists in time
and space. And in time and space it exists relatively to all other existence, and can never
be absolved [. . .] When speaking of existence we always speak in types, species, not
individuals. Species exist. But even an individual dandelion has being.‖ (Selected Essays
66)
45
Finally, Lawrence concludes that the ―best‖ way to ―get vitality‖ is through ―a
pure relationship, which includes the being on each side, and which allows the transfer to
take place in a living flow, enhancing the life in both beings‖ (Selected Essays 66). By
―vitality‖ Lawrence is referring back to his conception of beauty and sex, as discussed
through the peacock and the peahen. Lawrence, however, correctly realizes the
problematic relationship here between humans and animals in that his claim of the
―species‖ existence excuses violence against animals whereas his theory of the
―individual‖ recognizes an ability to engage in a common dimension. An hierarchal
existence, or what today we might call ―speciesist‖ position, suggests a ―survival of the
fittest‖ which excuses the death of the porcupine at human hands. In Lawrence‘s claims
here we see an influence of Darwin‘s philosophy in his consideration of whether or not
beings are linked. Yet one might call it a misconstrued Darwinian theory, as he continues
to see humans as the highest of beings. Secondly, we see the Romantic influence in
Lawrence‘s comments on individual beings. Lawrence‘s other dimension of individual
existence seems ideal in that two beings experience their ―fullness of being‖ in the
universals of time and space. Lawrence concludes by returning to the ―tangle‖ of
existence, ―[s]o we still find ourselves in the tangle of existence and being, a tangle
which man has never been able to get out of, except by sacrificing the one to the other‖
(Selected Essays 67). Leaning toward this ideal form of being with others, Lawrence
claims:
[s]acrificing is useless. The clue to all existence is being. (67) [. . .] there
will be conquest, always. But the aim of conquest is a perfect relation of
conquerors with conquered, for a new blossoming. Freedom is illusory.
46
Sacrifice is illusory. Almightiness is illusory. Freedom, sacrifice,
almightiness, these are all human side-tracks, cul-de-sacs, bunk. All that is
real is the overwhelmingness of a new inspirational command, a new
relationship with all things. (Selected Essays 69)
This language on human and nonhuman animal being, then, returns us to Lawrence‘s
previous statements concerning sex and beauty; neither religion nor Darwinism satisfies
his conception of the most significant factors of life: the felt experience and intuition.
Lawrence‘s conflict between the said types of existence shows his position as a major
literary figure struggling through, and clearly aiming towards, a ―new relationship with
all things.‖ One must also note Lawrence‘s ability to recognize the human interference in
such progression: ―side-tracks‖ and ―cul-de-sacs‖ are ―bunk.‖
The prevailing presence and contemplation of nonhuman animal lives in
Lawrence grant them worthiness of analysis in his writings. They also raise a certain
existential complexity in that they are literal, symbolic, familiar, and unfamiliar all at
once. The reason for such complexity as it relates to the animal is due to several factors,
many of which depend upon Lawrence‘s particular time period. Said factors include the
following: the traditionally symbolic representation of animals in literature, the early
modernist focus on immediacy, Lawrence‘s influence from Darwin and Nietzsche, and
most importantly, his personal insight concerning animal being and the persistence to
pursue the subject in his works. The author shows the human struggle through the
beginnings of a public animal welfare movement in his home country of England and, at
the same time, his texts continue to demonstrate the ancient western cultural heritage of
animal oppression. During Lawrence‘s time and place, the human-animal relationship
47
consists of hunting, farming, and pets. It is not until we reach Faulkner that the Romantic
view of the pastoral develops into a consciousness of a more severe loss of habitat for
nonhuman animals.
Lawrence‘s philosophical interests in sensation and intuition, alongside his
persistent interest in animal being, create a modern writer whose works should be re-read
with our current understanding of human and nonhuman perception. Lawrence‘s
existential ―tangle,‖ in phenomenological terms, shows his grappling with the normative
perception of world versus an understanding of the fundamental structures of
consciousness, both human and nonhuman.
Animals in Joyce and Woolf
A brief turn to Lawrence‘s major contemporary writers and their use of
nonhuman animals in literature will provide context for Lawrence‘s treatment of the
literary animal. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce experiment with otherness and stream of
consciousness; in literary terms, the mysterious nonhuman animal perception presents a
form of imagined intentionality. The following section will demonstrate, however, that
Joyce and Woolf do not pursue nonhuman animal being outside of the realm of
anthropomorphism.
The best example of Woolf‘s deliberate experimentation into the perception of
the animal appears in Flush (1933), an autobiography of a red cocker spaniel supposedly
belonging to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A popular book during her lifetime, it has
received little critical attention, often dismissed as simplistic and sentimental.
48
One critic, Craig Smith, objects to popular readings of the text as a sentimentalist
or feminist allegory and instead sees Woolf‘s project as a serious experiment on
otherness. Smith argues, ―Flush, in contrast to other classics of the animal story genre, is
neither specifically humane nor specifically humanistic in its agenda. Rather, it represents
Woolf‘s attempt to exercise modernist literary techniques in the mapping of a canine
subjectivity, as an experiment worth performing for its own sake‖ (349). Smith correctly
blames the lack of critical inquiry on the predominant anthropomorphic discourse.
Arguing for the text as a genuine exploration of human-animal relationships, Smith cites
passages where Woolf shows the subtle experiences belonging to the dog and also the
―gulf‖ yet ―closely united‖ (31) relationship with humans. In Woolf‘s story, the dog‘s
experience of the world is described as he moves from various environments such as his
first visit to London when ―[h]e saw houses made almost entirely of glass…[h]e saw
windows…[h]e entered mysterious arcades‖ (36). Woolf also provides the dog‘s reaction
to the natural environment with the intensity of smells, instinct, and canine sexuality.
Inevitably, the dog has human thoughts that are expressed in linguistic terms. And while
I agree that the text, at times, shows Woolf‘s interest in the subjective life of the dog,
upon reading the text itself, one finds that it reads much like the classic children‘s tale.
At one point, the dog asks himself in English, ―Were there not trees and grass?‖ (Woolf
38). In the final chapter, Flush relays his life experiences to the other dogs; he ―tell[s] his
stories of Whitechapel and Wimpole Street; he would describe the smell of clover and the
smell of Oxford Street; he would rehearse his memories of one revolution and another—
how Grand Dukes had come and Grand Dukes had gone; but the spotted spaniel down the
alley on the left—she goes on forever, he would say‖ (Woolf 155). Thus Woolf deserves
49
attention for focus on the animal-as-subject, yet her texts do not meet the requirements of
a phenomenological investigation of animal being, namely, Woolf resorts to the talking
animal.
At first glance, Joyce‘s instances of animal existence similarly show an interest in
the perspective of the animal. However, in the end, Joyce‘s animals overwhelmingly
mirror the human character‘s thoughts at hand. The most notable scenes with animals
appear in Ulysses in the Proteus and Calypso chapters. As we can see from a few lines of
the dog‘s thoughts, the dog‘s consciousness only works to circle back to Stephen‘s
human consciousness. When Stephen sees the dog carcass on the beach, the death
imagery strengthens in Stephen‘s mind: ―stoneheaps of dead builders‖ and ―bones for my
steppingstones‖ (Joyce, Ulysses 37). Consciousness of the living dog‘s bark produces
thoughts of death, loss, and time passed. Stephen then recalls his mother‘s death, ―Water
cold soft … Clongroves … A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror
of his death … I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost‖ (Joyce, Ulysses 38). Three
lines later the dog‘s thoughts once again imitate the human protagonist‘s: the dog
―Look[s] for something lost in a past life‖ (Joyce, Ulysses 38) while inspecting the
carcass.
As is the case in Proteus, the Calypso chapter with Bloom shows his seemingly
genuine interest in cat-being turn into thoughts that mirror his own human character‘s
fears about Molly. Bloom asks basic philosophical questions about the cat‘s perception of
the world. He ponders, ―They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than
we understand them‖ (Joyce, Ulysses 45). Bloom also contemplates the cat‘s gaze
directed towards him, ―Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can
50
jump me‖ (Joyce, Ulysses 45). We must first give Joyce credit for recognizing the
directed and powerful gaze of the cat, later discussed by Derrida in his 2002 talk, ―The
Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)‖ about the gaze of his cat. Yet, unlike the
philosopher, Bloom‘s questions are limited by his own personal preoccupations with his
wife‘s infidelity. Because the cat is female, his associations assume feminine
stereotypes: the cat slinks around the table, calling to Bloom; he sees the cat as focusing
on him, as if she is luring him in for attention and food; she has a ―lithe black form‖ with
a ―sleek hide,‖ connoting the supple, sexual movement of a woman. He recognizes the
feline‘s movements here before him as those that she also displays when on his writing
table, the sign of wanting affection. The answer to his inquiry of exactly what the cat
comprehends matches his present feelings toward his wife. The cat, according to Bloom,
―understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature.‖ (Joyce, Ulysses 45). He
then recalls the torturous ritual a cat undergoes when capturing mice. This naming
system relays his selective descriptions which uncannily parallel his anxiety about his
wife‘s affair with Blazes Boylan. 15
In sum, in comparison with Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf utilize animal
consciousness as a way to experiment with human consciousness, whereas Lawrence is
interested in shared experiences between or ―with‖ humans and nonhuman animals. For
clarity, I will differentiate between such depictions of the nonhuman literary as the
nonhuman animal-as-subject (Joyce and Woolf) and the nonhuman animal-as-subject-initself (Lawrence).
―The Fox‖
51
The following literary analysis will address those fictional texts by Lawrence that
most effectively portray human and nonhuman animal encounters in the existential terms
discussed thus far. Countless scenes contain face-to-face encounters of humans and
nonhumans; however, I have found that ―The Fox‖ and St. Mawr develop the author‘s
philosophy of animal being most effectively.
―The Fox‖ begins with March‘s intimate encounter with the nonhuman animal
subject. Because the fox previously has killed chickens, March first meets him while
standing guard one evening at the farm. Lawrence‘s description of March‘s state of
being during these moments requires careful examination because, as Bell suggests, for
Lawrence, the dramatic world in which each individual character exists at a particular
moment in time and space determines the meaning of a scene. March, the protagonist, is
the only character to connect with the fox. Banford and Henry lack such insight and are
not described as entering any such meditative states of being. (This individually
existential event will occur again in St. Mawr, where only select characters are capable of
sharing a world with animals, a choice indicative of the previous discussion on Lawrence
and species versus individual ontology.) The following passa ge describes March‘s state
before her first encounter with the fox.
[. . .] half watching, half musing [. . .] her eyes were keen and observant,
but her inner mind took no notice of what she saw. She was always
lapsing into this odd, rapt state, her mouth rather screwed up. It was a
question whether she was there, actually conscious present, or not.
(Lawrence, Three Novellas 88)
52
March‘s state is both conscious and physical: at once signaling distance alongside
contemplation. Although bewildered, March‘s calm yet alert state is described along with
an autumnal environment. Lawrence notes subtle lighting against leaves, wood, grass,
and surrounding wildlife in motion, while March continues to exist in this environment as
strangely both present and absent. She ―looked at it all, saw it all, and did not see it‖ (88).
Nearby, Banford calls to ducks in a pond and again, March ―[. . .] heard Banford
speaking to the fowls in the distance—and she did not hear. What was she thinking
about? Heaven knows. Her consciousness was, as it were, held back.‖ (88). March
―sees,‖ ―hears,‖ and ―thinks‖; yet she is ―held back‖ at the same time. March‘s world is
described as one in which she is present with herself to a certain degree; yet, she is also
present with the surrounding environment. In his writings on poetry and the ―immediate
present‖ (Selected Essays 287), Lawrence comments on a similar state of confusion
which arises from a state of ―creative change‖ or ―creative mutation.‖ He says, ―It is the
soul and the mind and body surging at once, nothing left out. They speak all together.
There is some confusion, some discord. But the confusion and discord only belong to
reality, as noise belongs to the plunge of water‖ (Lawrence, Selected Essays 289).
To understand Lawrence‘s state of being in phenomenological terms, I turn to
Ralph Acampora, a contemporary critic, who views a Heideggerean description of
environment as ―climate.‖16 He argues that thinking in terms of an ontological climate
―incorporates awareness of weather and landscape,‖ and it occurs in humans ―internally‖
(Acampora 121). Existential historicity returns one to the body, since ―it is through the
live body that we are most especially aware of climaticity‖ (Acampora 121). March‘s
ontological climate is not necessarily March’s environment, for in order for her to ―be-
53
with‖ the surrounding worlds, she must also be, to some degree, absent. Culturally, we
define the animal as that which is not human. Our mistake, as Lawrence‘s scene between
March and the fox reveals, is the problematic of processing difference as hierarchal.
Critics have come to identify such detailed states of being in Lawrence‘s texts as
―worlds.‖ Bell likens Lawrence‘s worlds to Heidegger‘s existential worlds: ―Lawrence
and Heidegger share a meditative dimension in seeking to experience afresh, or for the
first time, that which lies most obviously, as Heidegger put it, ‗to hand.‘ Much rests on
this new discovery of the apparently obvious.‖ (8) For Heidegger Zuhanden or ‗presentat-hand‘ refers to that which is presently accessible to the engaged and thinking human
being, or the human being that has access to other beings and the environment.
Conversely, Vorhanden or ‗ready-to-hand‘ refers to that which is not my focus such as
tools, for we do not ponder the use or being of tools as their being is already established.
To take Bell‘s connection of worlds a step further, one might connect Lawrence‘s
ontological worlds to spatiality in Heidegger‘s ―being-in-the-world.‖ In the same way
that Heidegger differentiates between one‘s environment as either ‗ready-to-hand‘ or
‗present-at-hand,‘ he also differentiates between two types of spatial forms of being. One
form of being, ―being in‖ (without hyphenation) is comparable to thinking of an object
directionally, for example, an object contained inside of, or next to, a box. The second
kind of spatial being, ―being-in‖ (hyphenated) refers not to an object, but to a relational
being. When beings are relationally bound, they exist actively as part of each other‘s
world thus they are related in ways more spatially complex and fluid than fixed locations.
This discussion of Heidegger‘s spatiality also returns to Lawrence‘s earlier
complaint of Whitman‘s sympathy. March‘s state in her environment is comparable to a
54
Heideggerean spatial ―being-in-the-world‖ and a kind of ―being-with‖ which then invites
an analysis of nonhuman animal being as well as human being. By focusing on being
and avoiding the language of consciousness, Heidegger and Lawrence attempt to return
to that which we are before conscious thought. In other words, as Heidegger historically
claims, being is that which we always already are.
In the following passage, we will see that March‘s previously described state
prepare for what one might call an ontological ―accessibility‖ into the fox‘s non-human
world:
She lowered her eyes, and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her.
Her chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. They met her
eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound – she knew he knew her. So
he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not
daunted.
She struggled, confusedly she came to herself, and saw him making off,
with slow leaps over some fallen boughs, slow, impudent jumps. Then he
glanced over his shoulder, and ran smoothly away. She saw his brush held
smooth like a feather, she saw his white buttocks twinkle. And he was
gone, softly, soft as the wind. (Lawrence, Three Novellas 88)
Submerged, March ―suddenly‖ realizes that the fox holds its own intentional being in an
also shared, present world. Lawrence marks a significant moment in the act of
recognition between a human being and a non-human being here. Not only is the fox
physically near March in proximity, Lawrence repeats that when the fox‘s eyes meet
hers, the fox ―knew her‖ and ―she knew he knew her.‖ I should note that while
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Lawrence‘s language is traditionally interpreted as epistemological, I am arguing that his
language of knowing should be read ontologically. Lawrence emphasizes ―seeing:‖
March ―lowered her eyes,‖ the fox was ―looking,‖ ―his eyes were looking,‖ March and
the fox‘s eyes ―met,‖ ―he looked into her eyes,‖ ―she saw him making off,‖ ―he glanced‖
back at her, she then again ―saw‖ him float away. The combination of an emphasis on the
act of seeing and the previous description of her action and inaction leads not to a
directed consciousness from the human or nonhuman animal, but to ―seeing‖ as an
activity. (In Chapters Two and Three on Faulkner and Coetzee respectively, I will later
discuss how this scene expands into Sartre‘s ―look‖ in Faulkner and Derrida‘s gaze in
Coetzee.) In the same ways that touch functions on various levels such as doubly
touching and being touched, seeing functions as a form of exchange with the world.
When Lawrence says the fox ―knows‖ March and, conversely, March ―knows‖ that the
fox ―knows‖ her, Lawrence is differentiating between a traditional mind-body dualist
knowing and an ontological knowing. Rather than ―consciousness‖ as the Husserlian
consciousness directed toward something, this perceptual event with March and the fox
challenges the rational, objective knowledge commonly directed toward nonhuman
animals. Lawrence, unlike previous authors such as Melville, resists the biological,
objective knowledge of the fox. In fact, Lawrence‘s repetition of the fox‘s knowledge
directed toward March indicates a reversal in epistemological knowing. Conventionally,
humans know animals, not vice-versa. This directional knowing now becomes an
engaged perception between two beings reflecting a change in the human perception of
reality.
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In Animal Others, Steeves argues, ―[t]he truth of the matter is that the world does
not appear before me‖ (8). Instead each subject, albeit human or nonhuman, holds an
intending position ―for themselves.‖ If we take a moment to consider traditionally
epistemological and symbolic ways in which March ―knows‖ the fox, Lawrence leads the
reader back to problematic human-constructed identities. That is, false conceptions of the
nonhuman animal as ―other‖ circle back to misconceptions of ―the other‖ in terms of
human gender. Lawrence‘s male fox represents the soldier, Henry, who is a ―huntsman‖
and wishes to control March. In the same way that the fox hunts the chickens, Henry, as a
male figure, preys upon March. Lawrence complicates gender politics by March
encountering the fox while herself in the position of a predator, for she holds a gun. Yet,
notably, March does not kill the fox. When the opportunity arises to kill him, she is
―spellbound;‖ she ―struggles‖ from ―confus[ion].‖ One might claim that March‘s
inability to shoot the fox is due to her feminine sympathy. As I have previously shown,
March‘s state when approaching the fox emphasizes an acute sense of their shared being,
which is not sentimental, a choice deliberately made on Lawrence‘s behalf. Because
Lawrence‘s text simultaneously complicates conceptions of the ―other‖ in terms of both
gender politics and the nonhuman animal ―other,‖ we should read Lawrence as a modern
author writing during an early twentieth-century cultural perception of the animal.
The final animal scene in the short story shows March once again in a
Heideggerian world not unlike those previously portrayed. She is described as what
Heidegger might call both there and not there, present and absent. Her actions when
touching the dead fox include a sense of contemplation; yet she lacks rational and social
consciousness. With the fox dead, March directs her perception toward the fox and the
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visual exchange in the previous encounter does not exist. It is no longer an ontological
encounter between a human and a nonhuman animal gaze, returning a gaze with
intention. Instead, with the fox dead, the human gaze toward the animated being becomes
a gaze toward an object. Perception of the fox as fearful is released from March‘s
consciousness, an important factor in human perception of the animal ―other‖ (especially
since Lawrence is also connecting Henry to the fox as a male dominant figure). When
the dead animal is proudly presented by Henry to March, ―He was holding it by the
brush. March saw, in the middle of the darkness, just the reddish fleece and the white
belly and the white underneath of the pointed chin, and the queer, dangling paws. She did
not know what to say‖ (―The Fox‖ 123). Henry expects March‘s praise, for, as a hero, he
has outwitted the troublesome predator. Henry announces, ―He‘s a beauty, [. . .] He will
make you a lovely fur‖ (―The Fox‖ 123). March responds that she would never wear a
fur. The next morning March visits the animal body as it hangs ―suspended upside
down.‖ When approaching the body, March is described as silent with a ―pale‖ face.
Lawrence poetically repeats that she again notices the appearance and texture of the fox‘s
fur: ―White and soft as snow his belly: white and soft as snow‖ (―The Fox‖ 124). March
then slowly and ceremoniously touches the fox. Because the fox is a ―wild‖ animal,
March‘s previous meeting could not reasonably include tactile engagement. Now that he
is dead, March can ―know‖ him through touch, a form of contact only attainable without
fear.
She passed her hand softly down it. And his wonderful black-glinted brush
was full and frictional, wonderful. She passed her hand down this also,
and quivered. Time after time she took the full fur of that thick tail
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between her fingers, and passed her hand slowly downwards. Wonderful,
sharp, thick, splendour of a tail. And he was dead! She pursed her lips, and
her eyes went black and vacant. Then she took the head in her hand [. . .]
March stood there bemused, with the head of the fox in her hand. She was
wondering, wondering, wondering, over his long, fine muzzle …She felt
she could not understand it. The beast was a strange beast to her,
incomprehensible, out of her range. (124)
This sensual passage might cause a reader to associate the fox with Henry, in which case,
one arrives at a sexual interpretation of March‘s actions. Without fear, March gains
sexual control as she strokes her hand along his body, ―quivering.‖ As I have argued thus
far, while such analogies of gender exist in the text, Lawrence is not merely using the fox
as a tool for an anthropomorphic reading. Rather, Lawrence‘s psychological exploration
of gender can reasonably return to the larger issue of identity, to which both gender
politics and animal ontology belong. Thus, the reading of Henry as ―other‖ and the fox
as ―other‖ both exist, only it would be naïve to assume Lawrence means to express that
March perceives and experiences being the same with Henry as she does the fox.
Lawrence‘s ontological language concerning nonhuman animals leads to
Kenkmann‘s argument differentiating between human being and nonhuman animal being.
Kenkmann says, ―When we deal with animals, we experience our own being differently
from when we deal with other human beings or inanimate entities.‖ (480) Lawrence
carefully provides March‘s conscious bodily reactions to the fox, with her bodily
reactions proving more accurate. Her conscious reactions end in confusion and, once
again, she enters a kind of trance. She was ―bemused,‖ and Lawrence repeats
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rhythmically her ―wondering, wondering, wondering.‖ The fox remains
―incomprehensible, out of her range.‖ Yet the act of touch brings confirmation of the
fox‘s coat as ―wonderful,‖ with clearly articulated descriptions of the animal body: ―full,‖
―thick,‖ ―sharp,‖ and ―black.‖ Touch allows March to temporarily step outside of the
social perception shared by her present human company. After touching the fox, March is
suddenly startled by her own actions, as if returning from the trance. She realizes,
My word, what a strong smell he‘s got! Pooo! It‘ll take some washing off
one‘s hands. I don‘t know why I was so silly as to handle him.‘ And she
looked at her right hand, that had passed down his belly and along his tail,
and had even got a tiny streak of blood from one dark place in his fur.
(Lawrence, Three Novellas 125)
March‘s states of being change as being is altered by time. One moment does not
match the next; when one is being-in-the-world, one adjusts with one‘s horizon. A few
lines after March returns to a normative perception of the animal, Lawrence informs the
reader, ―Later in the day she saw the fox‘s skin nailed flat on a board, as if crucified. It
gave her an uneasy feeling‖ (―The Fox‖ 125). March moves from confusion to
wonderment to repulsion to a final sympathetic state. Lawrence repeatedly demonstrates
unresolved vacillation during nonhuman animal encounters in other texts as well.
For instance, in the popular, often anthologized poem, ―Snake,‖ the narrator
encounters the reptile drinking at his water trough and moves through a complex of
emotions from repulsion to regret. Similar to March, the narrator vacillates between
various internal yet normative voices: the ―voice‖ of his education, masculine voices- ―If
you were a man / You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off‖ (403),
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and on to fear, honour to be in his presence, and finally regret. Similarly, in ―Reflections
on the Death of a Porcupine‖ the narrator experiences internal conflict both in his
behavior towards the dog and the porcupine. Lawrence carefully describes sessions in
which both the dog and the narrator struggle through the removal of quills from the poor
dog‘s nose; the narrator suddenly decides that he has had enough.
So I picked up a stone. He dropped his tail, and swerved towards the house
[. . .] I dropped my stone, and found a good stick under the cedar tree [. . .]
I could not bear to have that dog around any more. Going quietly to him, I
suddenly gave him one hard hit with the stick, crying: ‗Go home!‘ He
turned quickly, and the end of the stick caught him on his sore nose. With
a fierce yelp, he went off like a wolf, downhill, like a flash, gone. And I
stood in the field full of pangs of regret, at having hit him, unintentionally,
on his sore nose. But he was gone. (Selected Essays 59)
Shortly after this episode of behaving violently and then regretting such actions, the
narrator again treats nonhuman animals in ways that prove conflicting. After the dog
wanders off, the ranch Madame alerts him of the porcupine who has appeared once again
on their ranch. I should note that the story began with the narrator‘s encounter with the
porcupine; however, he decides ―the dislike of killing him was greater than the dislike of
him‖ going on to observe the porcupine‘s movements. Therefore, this is his second
meeting with the nonhuman animal. One presumes that the reason for his ―hardening‖ is
his grueling removal of the quills from the dog. So he loads a gun ―with rather trembling
hands.‖ He assures the reader, ―Now never in my life had I shot at any live thing: I never
wanted to. I always felt guns very repugnant: sinister, mean‖ (Selected Essays 60). After
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the shooting, he asks the Madame, ―Does it seem mean?‖ The two humans agree that it
was a necessary duty of keeping a ranch. Later, the narrator notes the porcupine-hands.
―The only nice thing about him- or her, for I believe it was a female, by the dugs on her
belly – were the feet. They were longish, alert black hands, paw-hands [. . .] So, he is
gone: or she is gone‖ (Selected Essays 61). Thus in these stories with March and the
narrators Lawrence provides a human who is clearly in a ―tangle‖ with his/her own
psychological and physical being with nonhuman animals.
These ―modes of being,‖ as Bell would call them, contain moments of accessing
Heideggerian worlds. However, these modes also display a complex process which is
difficult to decipher, for it cannot be traced linearly or chronologically. The movement
from states of being is phenomenological in that it is engaged in time and space, mental
and physical both for the experiencing subject, the other, and the world of horizons. This
creates a complex multiplicity in being or, as Lawrence identifies it, a ―tangle.‖
In an article on Lawrence and otherness, M. Elizabeth Sargeant and Garry Watson
discuss this process in terms of the ―Dialogical Principle.‖ The critics correctly point out
that Lawrence is known among scholars as a ―‗single-voiced metaphysician‘ whose
novels are ‗monological allegories of his own personal sexual and social beliefs‘‖
(Sargeant and Watson 412). They argue instead for Lawrence‘s ―dialogical and embodied
modes of thinking and being – in explicitly ethical terms‖ (411). In fact, Sargeant and
Watson briefly address the nonhuman animal as a form of ―otherness‖ and ―difference‖
which spurs such dialogue in Lawrence‘s texts. To apply their theory of the ―dialogical
principle‖ to ―The Fox,‖ we see March‘s dialogue occur internally but Lawrence also
shows an exchange of ―knowing‖ between the fox and March. The dialogue
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―acknowledges an ongoing tension between opposing points of view, other ways of
seeing, being, believing, acting – while yet continuing to affirm and explore one‘s own‖
(Sargeant and Watson 411).
We will see this ontological dialogue, or ―tangle,‖ reach a more explicit level in
St. Mawr as the story contains not just one protagonist who connects with nonhuman
animals, but other fellow human individuals with whom the protagonist can communicate
on the topic. In this way, St. Mawr differs from ―The Fox‖ in that the story allows
Lawrence to express many of his thoughts concerning nonhuman animal being and
cultural perception externally through dialogue between characters rather than internally,
as seen with March in ―The Fox.‖
St. Mawr
Along with the explicit conversation surrounding nonhuman animal
consciousness, another key difference includes the main nonhuman animal character as
domestic rather than ―wild.‖ In ―The Fox,‖ due to the animal‘s wildness, the most
intimate meetings entail reciprocated ―seeing,‖ with physical contact occurring only after
the fox‘s death. The still wild, although partially domesticated, St. Mawr, on the other
hand, shows characters physically engaged with live animals. Thus, the engagement
between the human protagonist, Lou, and the animal protagonist, St. Mawr, changes in its
movement from wild to domestic and also in terms of the text‘s explicit dialogue among
characters concerning the nature of human and animal being.
Margaret Norris describes St. Mawr as a text in which ―Lawrence does battle with
the most fundamental premise of the Western humanistic tradition: that human being is
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superior to animal being because man thinks, speaks, and differentiates between good and
evil‖ (297). Norris‘s article is unique in that it argues against an allegorical reading in
which the horse is conventionally viewed as the ―dark,‖ ―wild,‖ ―true‖ animal self of a
human who wishes to escape ―modern culture, technology, and enlightenment‖ (297).
Norris instead turns to Lawrence‘s description of exploring a world ―…where each
creature attains, to its own fullness of being, its own living self‘‖ (297). She tackles one
of the most commonly disputed controversies in animal philosophy: how humans
understand animal being without projecting a human perception onto what it is like to be
an animal.17 She firmly claims: ―One can be an animal without being an animal, and it is
precisely the wedge of difference between these two statements (and the ontological
conditions they represent) that is the philosophical object of the novella‖ (Norris 297-8).
Therefore, according to Norris, humans have the ability to imagine animal perception, or,
at least, to imagine a perception that is not human-centered and St. Mawr successfully
describes such experiences.
In St. Mawr, another woman protagonist, Lou, discovers that the world in which
the horse resides is preferable to any human world known to her. Lou, as an American
intellectual, cynically criticizes the modern, materialistic lifestyle of the current cultural
environment. Lou describes her superficial human world as “far more bodiless‖ than St.
Mawr‘s (35). At social gatherings she finds herself ―talking to handsome young barefaced unrealities, not men at all‖ (35). Lou restores a ―wild,‖ ―primitive,‖ ―flame of life‖
through the horse and its caretakers, Phoenix, and Lewis. One might connect working
class caretakers to the animal; they are beings who share an insight into a vital form of
life. Such ―nature vs. culture‖ representations mirror the classic romantic desire (also
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seen in Melville‘s Moby-Dick) to escape an empty, industrial lifestyle and return to a
natural, more authentic world.
Lawrence‘s texts have received scrutiny for his simplistic representations of
primitive culture, as was the common fascination among the early twentieth- century
artists. These readings, however, are questionable. Kingsley Widmer argues that there is
an important distinction between primitivistic and primitivism in that ―[t]he primitivistic
is the aesthetic employment in the twentieth-century arts of primitive materials and forms
in ways which are significantly antithetical to the values of primitivism‖ (Widmer 344).
Instead, Widmer continues, artists such as D. H. Lawrence and William Faulkner
approach the ―creation of an elaborately literary epic mythology and the exploration of
the values of a traditionalist society‖ (Widmer 345). And they do so through
―intellectualization, wit, complexity, and labyrinth psychological analysis rather than by
the ‗simple‘ and ‗natural‘ values usually ascribed to primitivism‖ (Widmer 345). The
previous analysis of Lawrence‘s treatment of gender in ―The Fox‖ helps to support
Widmer‘s view of the primitive in his texts in that the text does not allow a simplistic
feminist reading. ―The Fox‖ instead pushes those boundaries by reversing those roles and
shifting the focus to fundamental philosophical structures of identity and being.
What is striking about Lawrence‘s human/animal, culture/nature, and
domestic/wild binaries is his treatment of fear coupled with the physical phenomenon of
touch as it relates to the body. This development of the topic of fear and the body
arguably occurs successively as ―The Fox‖ (1923) was written before St. Mawr (1925).
Although Lou detects authenticity in the horse, Lawrence also emphasizes her intense
fear of St. Mawr, which stems from bodily being. Lou recalls:
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It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her own world had
suddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of
which the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish
question [. . . .] and his great body glowed red with power. What was it? [.
. . .] she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing, fearsome eyes,
arched with a question, and containing a white blade of light like a threat.
What was his non-human question, and his uncanny threat? She didn‘t
know [. . . .] it had looked at her as she had never been looked at before:
terrible, gleaming, questioning eyes arching out of darkness, and backed
by all the fire of that great ruddy body [. . . ] that black fiery flow in the
eyes of the horse was not ‗attitude‘. It was something much more
terrifying, and real, the only thing that was real. Gushing from the
darkness in menace and question, and blazing out in the splendid body of
the horse. (Lawrence, St. Mawr 23)
The horse‘s eyes cause a state similar to March‘s exchange with the fox; both characters
are ―spellbound‖ in a state of confusion. For March, this ―non-human question‖ is also
authentic in that it is very ―real‖ to her. However, Lou‘s captivation with St. Mawr
causes her to respond in fear from the horse‘s ―great‖ and ―splendid‖ body. Lawrence
clarifies that this fearful form of being is not to be confused with ―attitude,‖ which would
limit the event as purely psychological. Admittedly, the horse‘s bodily energy represents
traditional notions of power, strength, nobility, mystery and energy. But, just as we saw
in the ―The Fox,‖ it would be unreasonable to dismiss Lawrence‘s clear philosophical
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interest in the topic of how human and non-human ontology complicates such common
cultural representations.
Recent studies on human and non-human ontology argue that ―fear lives in the
body‖ (Steeves 136). Fear, in both humans and non-humans, is dependent upon a
―contextual horizon, and thus cannot be explained fully by biophysical states‖ (Steeves
136). According to Steeves, fear must be defined as a spatial being-in-the-world. He
says,
[. . .] to say that fear resides in the body is not to say everything that can
be said about fear. Fear is a mode of state-of-mind. The dog experienced
through fear is not frightening; our relationship, our proximity, our way of
being-with the dog is as frightened. Fear is spatial. Is it not proof enough
we share an intersubjective world with ani mals that we can fear them?
Where the dog sits snarling—Here for him, There for me—can quickly
become Here for us both. (Steeves 137)
A contextual horizon, then, is determined by experience, which is again determined by
time and space. Just as human worlds vary according to context such as environment,
mood, and other human‘s environments and moods, so too do nonhuman animal contexts.
In many of the scenes where characters are shown interacting with the horse,
Lawrence remains focused on such ―contextual horizons‖ described by Steeves. That is,
Lawrence shows not only the characters‘ bodily and conscious reactions to the horse, but
how the horse‘s conscious and bodily being reacts to each individual character. For
instance, Lewis, the caretaker, is said to deeply respect St. Mawr. Lou‘s mother
observes, ―He rode his horse and watched the world from the vantage ground of St. Mawr
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[. . . .] He seems to sink himself in the horse. When I speak to him, I‘m not sure whether
I‘m speaking to a man or to a horse‖ (30-1). Lewis suggests to Lou that a person must
―meet‖ this ―special‖ horse ―half-way‖ (26) in order to develop a relationship with him.
Thus, when Lewis introduces Lou to St. Mawr, the horse reacts according to that which is
projected toward him. Lewis approaches St. Mawr:
Loquacious even with the animals, he went softly forward and laid his
hand on the horse‘s shoulder, soft and quiet as a fly settling. Lou saw the
brilliant skin of the horse crinkle a little in apprehensive anticipation, like
the shadow of the descending hand on a bright red-gold liquid. But then
the animal relaxed again. (Lawrence, St. Mawr 19)
Lawrence provides a reason for the horse‘s ―apprehensive anticipation,‖ even with an
empathetic caretaker such as Lewis. The caretaker informs Lou that St. Mawr‘s
apprehension is due to being ―a trifle raw somewhere. Touch this spot, and there‘s no
answering for him.” (20) Rather than the horse‘s sensitivity originating in his instinctual
wildness, the perception dominating the literary animal during the author‘s time,
Lawrence turns to the world of the horse as a living subject with intentions, a past,
present and future life existing in time and space. Lou inquires, ―Where is he raw?‖ […]
She thought he might really have some physical sore. ‗Why, that‘s hard to say, my Lady.
If he was a human being, you‘d say something had gone wrong in his life‖ (20). Rather
than anthropomorphize the horse experience with a ―talking animal‖ or create language
that conveys the horse‘s experience as Woolf or Joyce might, Lawrence retains the
unknown of St. Mawr‘s otherness. The human and nonhuman animal bodies react to each
other as subjects with independent histories of their own. Lawrence conveys that touch
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and bodies do not exist as one might locate a point on a map; instead, human and animal
bodies function as a complex system, internally and externally. As Steeves confirms,
―[a]nyone who has lived in the world knows that all tactile experience cannot be reduced
to bits of sense data‖ (Steeves 137). Contextual horizons can include anything in one‘s
spatial world from one‘s mood to living others, weather, or physical objects. St. Mawr
eventually relaxes after Lewis‘s touch whereas when Rico is severely injured by being
thrown from St. Mawr, the event causes Rico‘s negative perception and bodily treatment
directed toward the horse. Rico ―mounted with a swing, blind and rough. St Mawr
reared‖ (43). When characters are killed or injured from riding the horse, rather than
fault St. Mawr, the humans in Lawrence are deemed guilty of insensitive behavior
directed toward the nonhuman animal.
Later in St. Mawr, Lawrence explicitly addresses the difference between animal
and human existence. Consistent with his rejection of a rational modern human,
Lawrence favors nonhuman animal intuition. This opposition between the rational and
intuitive connects back to philosophical issues of epistemological and ontological
―knowing‖ as they relate to animals. When Lou approaches the topic of a rational human
versus an intuitive animal, Lou‘s mother announces that man is valuable because he
thinks. Lou replies:
It seems to me there‘s something else besides mind and cleverness, or
niceness or cleanness. Perhaps it is the animal. Just think of St Mawr! I‘ve
thought so much about him. We call him an animal, but we never know
what it means. He seems so far greater mystery to me than a clever man.
He‘s a horse. Why can‘t one say in the same way, of a man: He’s a man?
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There seems no mystery in being a man. But there‘s a terrible mystery in
St Mawr. (55)
The mystery to which Lou here refers is not the animal nature of man but the literal
―question of the animal.‖ Although we define an animal by its name, our definition
remains mysterious. The animal as mysterious then becomes ―terrible‖ due to fear.
Rather than fearing animal being, Lou suggests acknowledging an authenticity found in
the horse. Lou says, ―But think, mother, if we could get our lives straight from the
source, as the animals do, and still be ourselves.‖ (57). Lou‘s bodily interaction and
reflection of St. Mawr shows a refusal to accept the animal as inhabiting a non-human
and therefore separate world. Lou‘s experiences with animals are authentic and ―real‖ in
that they are based in a shared, human-animal experience. Many phenomenologists argue
that a directed perception causes a false sense of space.
Space tricks us; false philosophy tricks us. My hand reaching for yours
seems to move away from me, though it never does: it is me. Your hand,
your paw, seems to be There and, hence other. It is not: it, too, is me. We
have met the animal‘s body, and he is us. There are no animal Others.
(Steeves 8)
This ―appropriate‖ form of being with animals, as Steeves calls it, results in realizing
that, ―The animal is not other‖ (Steeves 7).
―The Fox‖ and St. Mawr offer a perspective of the modern author that does not
return us to human perception but instead exploits cultural perception of the nonhuman
animal as ―other,‖ and subsequently, provides careful descriptions of alternate, nonlinguistic possibilities of human-animal encounters. In the following chapter on Faulkner
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and the animal, we will see a major early to mid-twentieth century American writer
continuing the shift toward thinking of the animal in existential terms; only, while
Lawrence‘s interests are framed by the English and American early modern focus on
gender and class, Faulkner‘s literature is framed by his cultural space and time in the
American south: the African-American experience and the beginnings of the most recent
environmental ethics movement.
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Chapter Two:
Faulkner‘s ―Conflict of the Heart‖
Just as Lawrence‘s philosophy of intuition applies to the nonhuman animal,
Faulkner‘s experimentation with temporality and vision extends to his interest in the
ontology of nonhuman animals. Faulkner‘s particular focus will lead to a Sartrean
reading of the animal gaze. In an effort to remain structurally consistent, I will begin with
an overview of the author‘s philosophy of the animal, including Faulkner‘s biographical
information as it pertains to his personal experiences and public statements concerning
nonhuman animal being. Next, I will discuss Hemingway‘s treatment of the nonhuman
animal other and its relationship to Faulkner‘s literary animal. Finally, the comparative
analysis applying Sartre‘s theory of ―the look‖ will focus on Faulkner‘s most significant
depictions of the nonhuman animals-as-subjects-in-themselves in The Hamlet and Go
Down Moses.
Faulkner‘s Philosophy of the Animal
During Faulkner‘s lifetime, Mississippi‘s drastic landscape changes significantly
affect the author‘s living conditions with the natural world, and in terms of an ontological
study, environmental and lifestyle changes also lead to changes in the ontological
relationship with the nonhuman living animal. In Faulkner‘s experience, deforestation
from timber companies became land for cotton farming, moving previously established
boundaries from wild to domestic. In the case of smaller species, some animals adapted
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to domestic living conditions, whereas, other large animals that require more land and
space, such as the deer and bear, disappeared.
In 1928, more than a decade before Faulkner‘s hunting stories appeared,
Aldo Leopold, one of the pioneers of modern wildlife biology and
environmental ethics, conducted a historic survey of game in Mississippi
and estimated that only a few thousand deer and turkeys survived
statewide. Bears were so scarce that he ignored them as a viable game
species in the very state where Teddy Roosevelt‘s bear hunting exploit had
led to the creation of that most familiar of toy animals. (Prewitt 203)
Although Faulkner is raised within a cultural community that perceives the animal-asobject, as seen in Roosevelt‘s attitude towards hunting, his texts also show a changing
perception toward thinking of the animal-in-itself. The author‘s powerful writings on
animals are a combination of his knowledge of the romantic literary animal and his
progressively evolving perception of nonhuman animals. In his lifetime, Faulkner
explicitly positions himself as working toward a change in environmental perception.
During a lecture on the subject of the environment at the University of Virginia in 1959,
Faulkner stresses,
What the writer‘s asking is compassion, understanding, that change must
alter, must happen, and change is going to alter what was. That no matter
how fine anything seems, it can‘t endure, because once it stops, abandons
motion, it is dead. It‘s to have compassion for the anguish that the
wilderness itself may have felt by being ruthlessly destroyed by axes, by
men who simply wanted to make that earth grow something could sell for
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a profit, which brought into it a condition based on an evil like human
bondage [. . . .] but they [the big woods] were obsolete and had to go. But
that‘s no need to not feel compassion for them simply because they were
obsolete. (Aiken 453)
Faulkner‘s ontological language of the natural world indicates that humans and nature
engage in an active relationship. According to Faulkner, humans lack ―understanding‖
and ―compassion:‖ a ―compassion for‖ an ―anguish‖ that the wilderness ―itself may have
felt.‖ Faulkner‘s language of nature as an intending subject is revealing here; usually
humans, not the wilderness, experience ―anguish‖ and feelings. Further, we do not
normally refer to nature as ―them‖ or ―they,‖ but rather as ―it.‖ Literary critics discuss
how Faulkner‘s texts contend with southern plantation exploitation of ―land‖ and
―wilderness,‖ yet human-tree relations differ from human-animal relations. Although
critics primarily read Faulkner‘s animals as objectified, we will see that Faulkner‘s
language of a directed nonhuman animal consciousness creates a tension within his
cultural heritage of nonhuman animal objectification. We might call this tension, to use
Faulkner‘s terms, a ―human conflict of the heart:‖ a relationship that fuels a continued
process of redefining one‘s perception. 18
While the majority of this chapter will focus on the bear in Go Down Moses and
the cow in The Hamlet, I will first examine horses as examples of Faulkner‘s philosophy
of the animal. When asked about the symbolic status of horses in his texts, Faulkner
responds by returning to his lived experiences with animals. On the subject of symbolic
horses in ―Spotted Horses‖ and Santurary, John Flanagan notes,
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If they symbolized anything, Faulkner once told a Virginia audie nce, they
symbolized the hope and aspiration of men who were capable of
committing some puerile folly in buying a three-dollar horse in opposition
to the cold practicality of country women like Mrs. Littlejohn [. . .]
Faulkner knew and loved horses for themselves. He once replied to a
questioner at Negano that he had written Sanctuary in part because he
needed money in order to buy a horse. To the end of his life he enjoyed
riding. Not only did he understand horses but he knew the life of men who
were to a large extent dependent on them. From his boyhood, harness
terminology, equine breeds and ailments, and the temperaments of animals
were as familiar to him as they were to Sherwood Anderson growing up in
Ohio and hanging around country racetracks. It is small wonder that
horses display an interesting role in Faulkner‘s fiction‖ (Flanagan 139). 19
This passage reveals the social perception of animals through Faulkner‘s response to the
animals as symbolic, and furthermore, through Flanagan‘s reading of Faulkner‘s
responses. When asked, Faulkner speaks of the horses in accordance with the conditions
of the human-animal relationship in a Mississippi cultural setting. Yet rather than focus
on their value to humans, Flanagan notes Faulkner‘s ―understand[ing]‖ of horses and his
love of horses ―for themselves.‖ Although epistemological terms of ―knowing‖ appear in
this passage such as ―three dollar horse,‖ ―harness terminology,‖ and ―equine breeds,‖
Flanagan‘s reading conveys Faulkner‘s ontological interest in nonhuman animal life.
Flanagan distinguishes between one‘s knowledge of horses and one‘s understanding:
Faulkner‘s ―love‖ of horses, his ―familiarity with their temperaments,‖ his
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―understanding‖ and ―enjoyment.‖ While Flanagan‘s language indicates his preference
for the latter reading of Faulkner and horses, his article moves on to only discuss the
horses as a human ―accessory.‖ Readers must turn their attention to Faulkner‘s horses,
argues Flanagan, based first on the overwhelming number of appearances that they make
in his texts. Among them are the following: the horses of ―Spotted Horses‖ later revised
to become a chapter in The Hamlet; Sanctuary; ―Ambuscade,‖ the opening story of The
Unvanquished; As I Lay Dying; Absalom, Absolom! Sartoris, and As I lay Dying.20
Flanagan then interprets Faulkner‘s horses as ―prominent‖ yet inevitably an ―accessory‖
and thus an object of use in a human-centered setting (142).
J. Rea insightfully notes the horses ―themselves‖ as the focus for Faulkner.
However, Rea‘s thesis, like Flanagan‘s, retains the traditional reading of the literary
nonhuman animals as representative. 21 The following passage by Rea places visual
importance on the horses as subjects:
In his talk to the English Club and in the story in Go Down, Moses, there
is no Flem Snopes. Whether Flem Snopes had something to do with the
horses or not, the horses are what interested Faulkner most. He thinks they
are wonderful and gives most of the lines in the story to them. He begins
the story in The Hamlet by describing the horses coming up the road from
Texas looking like colored paper torn from billboards or circus posters.
After the horses get to the store, he says they have pink faces, blue eyes,
yellow teeth, and ironing-board heads. Faulkner‘s metaphors tell how
intently he is looking at the horses. They are large rabbits and gaudy
parrots. They are wild deer, rattlesnakes, doves, and fish. They are
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partridges in a pear tree. They are a kaleidoscope and a maelstrom. They
are silver clouds. They are gaudy phantoms, hobgoblins, and
hallucinations. They are hay-burning sidewinders and Christmas
pinwheels. They are explosions. They are tossing flames. (159)
These depictions of horses do not match that of the traditional literary animal of the
horse. Rather than noticing their speed, strength and power, the horses first, are seen by
the reader and townspeople as objects; they appear, ―looking like colored paper torn from
billboards or circus posters.‖ And, while the story begins with this inanimate image,
throughout the rest of the text, the horses are unusually animated. This change in
perception displays the transformation undergone when ―being seen.‖ Although it is not
stated here, Rea‘s study reveals that Faulkner told the story of the spotted horses at least
six times, and on each occasion the horses, not human characters, remain central. 22
Holding ―most of the lines in the story‖ the horses appear first remaining the point of
focus as the story follows their actions throughout. Human actions are either led by the
horses or the human characters remain static with their attention unflinchingly directed
toward the horses.
[. . .] Nothing much happens in ‗Spotted Horses.‘ The men stand at the
fence and look into the barn lot part of the time, and the rest of the time
they chase the horses across the countryside. But the inability of the men
to take their eyes off the horses in the barn lot tells how deep is the love of
poetry inside them. And when they chase the horses, they are not ‗simply
trying to recover their property, bought with their hard-earned money…
(Rea 164)
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As Rea points out, Faulkner himself is among the characters and readers whose attention
is ―intently‖ directed towards the horses. Further, although Rea does not pursue it, her
analysis shows an ontology of nonhuman animal being. At first, the horses appear
coming up the hill as objects (or paper), but once the men get closer, they see that the
animals can look back upon them, reversing the objectified perception previously
directed toward the horses. As Sartre says,
[. . .] if he turns towards me, then although I immediately experience and
with certainty the fact of being-looked-at, I can not make this certainty
pass into my experience of the Other-as-object. In fact it reveals to me
only the Other-as-subject, a transcending presence to the world and the
real condition of my being-as-object. (276)
The perception of the horses, for both the reader and the human characters, changes from
a position of knowing to a perception of the horses which cannot be defined. ―Pink faces,
blue eyes, yellow teeth, and ironing-board heads‖ become an array of animate nonhuman
beings not normally associated with horses: ―rabbits,‖ ―parrots,‖ ―deer,‖ ―rattlesnakes,‖
―doves,‖ ―fish,‖ ―partridges in a pear tree.‖ Resisting one metaphorical or biological
category, the nonhuman animals are ―kaleidoscopic,‖ ―maelstrom,‖ ―silver clouds,‖
―gaudy phantoms,‖ ―hobgoblins,‖ and ―hallucinations.‖ Animals with which we are at
once both familiar and unfamiliar, the horses are beyond our realistic reach. Only,
Faulkner does not present them as romantically otherworldly; instead, these animal
images ignite the imagination as a kaleidoscope does, creating rich visual images, once
again placing an emphasis on the act of looking according to the transformative power
described by Sartre.
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Faulkner‘s post-civil war American south responds to a cultural crisis in
perception. And, while Faulkner‘s texts have been critically recognized for raising
awareness of the inability to perceive the other in terms of the environment and black
Americans, the perception of the nonhuman animal remains overlooked as its own
cultural issue in both Europe and America during the twentieth-century. Sartre certainly
read Faulkner; in fact, Sartre once argued that one might consider time the main subject
of Faulkner‘s texts, as temporality and the phenomenon of perception often stylistically
dominate them. 23
Just as recent readings of Heidegger have attempted to incorporate the question of
the nonhuman animal, so too do recent critics recognize connections between Sartrean
conceptions of ―the look‖ and the animal gaze. 24 Derrida references Sartre‘s gaze in
terms of shame when confronted with the animal gaze. His embarrassment stems from
his nudity ―in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze,
surprised or cognizant. The gaze of a seer, visionary, or extra-lucid blind person‖ (―The
Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)‖ 372). Marcus Bullock, in ―Watching
Eyes, Seeing Dreams, Knowing Lives,‖ claims ―…there is no part of an animal that does
not look back at us. There is no part that does not remind us that there is something, a
life, an existence that in some way echoes our own, but which remains always behind
what meets our gaze, elusive, impossible, unimaginable. Our life undergoes a change
from that experience of seeing an animal too‖ (102). Bullock‘s passage shows Sartre‘s
most basic theory regarding ―the look:‖ first, a consciousness directed towards me brings
a consciousness of others as subjects; and second, the look, or second consciousness,
transforms me. Cary Wolfe 25 suggests that, when addressing the question of the animal,
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we might ―recast‖ our theories of vision from Sartre to Foucault by returning to a
phenomenological position.
[. . .] confronting the problem of nonhuman others seems especially
important [. . .] one way to recast the figure of vision (and therefore the
figure of the human with which it is ineluctably associated) is to resituate
it as only one sense among many in a more general—and not necessarily
human—bodily sensorium. As Thomas Nagel long ago realized in framing
his famous essay, ‗What is it Like to Be a Bat?‘ these phenomenological
differences make the problem of the animal other a privileged site for
exploring the philosophical challenges of difference and otherness more
generally. (Wolfe 3)
Wolfe‘s neither human nor nonhuman ―bodily sensorium‖ returns us, once again, to an
existential ontology, as seen in Chapter One in the discussion of Lawrence and
Heidegger. Sartre‘s ―look,‖ along with his studies in general, builds upon Heidegger‘s
being-in-the-world, with a focus on being-for-others. In applying Sartre‘s human to
human theory to the animal, the same series of events holds true when a human becomes
conscious of an animal‘s gaze toward him/her. For, while animal consciousness remains a
mystery to humans in many ways, we surely agree that the animal gaze is directed and,
therefore, holds some power over that towards which its consciousness is directed. In
fact, because humans are unsure of the degree of consciousness of an animal, the effect
the animal‘s gaze has upon us can be even more powerful than the gaze from a human
other. In the animal gaze there persists something which evades us; an experience with
transcendental possibilities not usually associated with a human other. 26 As Buell argues
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when addressing the problem of the environment, texts that ―remythify the natural
environment‖ are so often overlooked in their environmental ethics due to the fact that ―it
is easy to persuade oneself on the basis of the average critical discussion of these works
that the literary naturescape exits for its formal or symbolic or ideological properties
rather than as a place of literal reference or as an object of retrieval or contemplation for
its own sake‖ (Buell 85).
The Nonhuman Animal in Hemingway
Faulkner marveled at the chase involved in classic American hunting narratives
such as Melville‘s Moby-Dick and Hemingway‘s The Old Man and the Sea. The
difference between Melville and Hemingway‘s hunting narratives pertains to each
authors‘ philosophy of reality; Faulkner‘s philosophy is aligned with Melville rather than
with Hemingway, whose texts can be deduced as anthropomorphic, since Hemingway
rarely considers the subject of nonhuman animal being as such.
Possible instances of the consideration of nonhuman animal being appear in The
Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls.27 One might recall Robert Jordan‘s
refusal to shoot animals in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In an article comparing
Hemingway‘s Robert Jordan to Ike in ―The Bear,‖ Howell claims that Hemingway‘s
unusual treatment of the animal cannot be viewed as a case in animal philosophy due to
the particular context and general egocentric tendencies of Hemingway‘s characters.
Howell argues, ―Indeed, Robert Jordan is unique among Hemingway‘s heroes in his
aversion to shooting animals. This is, of course, a trait so contrary to Hemingway‘s vision
of the good life that it must be—and is—symbolic‖ (Howell 120). Wolfe devotes a
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chapter to Hemingway‘s treatment of the animal also concluding that Hemingway uses
animals toward human ends both symbolically and linguistically. 28
Another instance of nonhuman animal being in Hemingway appears through
Santiago‘s sympathy for the turtles. Santiago says, ―Most people are heartless about
turtles because a turtle‘s heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered.
But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs.‖
(The Old Man and the Sea 37) This contemplation of animals, along with others in
Hemingway, become rationalized by the role each animal (human and nonhuman) plays
in the hierarchal world that ends in a game of survival rather than consideration of being.
Equating an animal‘s being, in this case the body of the turtle, to the human body only
works to retain a human-centered perception of the world. For Hemingway, sympathetic
nonhuman animal thoughts quickly dissipate into a return to the human self. To read
Hemingway as addressing animal life as such would be a stretch, while other masculine
writers such as Melville, Lawrence, and Faulkner reject Hemmingway‘s
anthropomorphic perspective and, instead, explore the life of nonhuman animal being-initself.
While Hemingway‘s texts do not address the animal existentially, they are known
to have influenced Faulkner‘s story of ―The Bear,‖ Faulkner‘s classic hunting tale.
Critics believe Faulkner‘s prevailing image of Old Ben‘s ―enormous warped two-toed
foot‖ (192) was likely borrowed from Hemingway‘s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Whether
borrowed or not, Faulkner expands Hemingway‘s symbolic meaning of the paw. In ―The
Bear,‖ the print evokes the symbolic, realistic, mythical, and ethical nature of the bear,
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while additionally suggesting important philosophical questions concerning human and
nonhuman animal identity. In the following passage, Howell connects the two images:
[In] ‗Lion‘ [. . .] the narrative ends with the poignant image of a ‗wooden
cross with Old Ben‘s dried mutilated paw nailed to it.‘ It is an image
strikingly similar to the image of the bear‘s paw, ‗dried and nailed through
the palm to the door of a church,‘ in For Whom the Bell Tolls [. . .] given
the parallel contexts (church door and wooden cross) and the identical
images (‗dried‘ and ‗nailed‘ paws). (Howell 120)
Immediately, the ―dried, mutilated paw‖ ―nailed‖ to the cross signifies the Christ
allegory: the human desire to control, and eventually destroy, that which is pure. Yet
with the paw and, therefore, animal being nailed to the cross, the interpretation becomes
what the bear himself signifies: wildness, or, as Faulkner describes, ―that doomed
wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows
and axes who feared it because it was wilderness‖ (Go Down Moses 185). An
environmental reading acknowledges problematic human-environment relations, but
reading the bear as a symbol of the wilderness denies the nonhuman animal‘s existence as
separate from the category of ―wilderness.‖ 29
Others may interpret the paw on the cross as cultural primitivism or the human
historical fascination with the bear‘s resemblance to humans: it‘s awesome bodily size
and strength, ability to stand on two hind legs, and human-like features, including handlike paws. When Ike encounters Old Ben, ―It turned at bay against the trunk of a big
cypress, on its hind feet; it seemed to the boy that it would never stop rising, taller and
taller‖ (Go Down Moses 202). This bear is assigned a human name.
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[He] earned himself a name, a definite designation like a living man [. . .]
(185) Old Ben, the two-toed bear; in a land where bears with trap-ruined
feet had been called Two-Toe or Three-Toe or Cripple-Foot for fifty years,
only Old Ben was an extra bear (the head bear, General Compson called
him) and also had earned a name such as a human man could have worn
[. . .] (221)
Whether the men name the bear as an act of domination, (as discussed in the nami ng of
St. Mawr in Chapter One), Faulkner repeatedly likens the bear to humans: ―like a living
man [. . .] such as a human man‖ (Go Down Moses 221). During the chase, Faulkner
describes the hunters ―as if they were meeting an appointment with another human
being‖ (Go Down Moses 202) In response to such interpretations, I might remind the
reader of the argument made by Widmer, in Chapter One, in which he argues that D. H.
Lawrence and Faulkner approach traditional social values in such a complex way that
their texts do not allow for the simplicity involved in a primitivist reading. The very fact
that there are multiple readings of a single hunting narrative supports the idea that the text
cannot be categorized as simply demonstrating the anthropomorphism common in a
primitive reading.
Finally, the transcendental language descriptions of Old Ben also encourage a
mythic interpretation. 30
[. . .] in the land [. . .] through which ran not even a mortal beast but an
anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a
phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny
humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like
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pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant; --the old bear, solitary,
indomitable, and alone. (Go Down Moses 185-6)
This fantastic portrayal refers not to the bear itself, but to the human perception of the
bear as mythical. Faulkner represents the bear as earthly (either human or wild), or otherworldly (religious or mythical).
―The Bear‖
In ―The Bear,‖ the real reason that Ike is a hero goes back to his refusal to shoot
Old Ben. Alternbernd argues that ―The truth which Ike has acknowledged in his refusal to
shoot the bear is that the earth—the land, its people, its encumbering properties—cannot
be possessed. This is the truth that is one and unchanging, and this is the truth that
liberates Ike‖ (579). As seen in Faulkner‘s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, compassion
and humility should intervene. Ike‘s experience of being-for Old Ben responds to the
question of the animal and, thus, partly to the dilemma of the south: ―The problem
becomes not whether, but how and why and with what effect the South—and by
extension the whole American continent – was, as Uncle Ike puts it in ‗Delta Autumn,‘
‗deswamped and denuded and derivered‘‖ (Alternbernd 573).
An interpretation of Faulkner‘s animals as existential does not interfere with
readings of Faulkner‘s natural landscape. It reveals what has been missing from an
environmental reading of many literary texts. Faulkner‘s treatment of horses, the cow
and the bear, while culturally calling upon our historical conception of the ani mal as
symbolic, also demands an interpretation of the existentially lived experience of humans
and nonhuman animals.
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In the context of ―The Bear,‖ the lived experience stems from Faulkner‘s personal
experience. In the south, ―Faulkner saw the wilderness around Stone‘s camp cleared and
the land planted in cotton as happened on so much of the Yazoo Delta‖ (Aiken 455).
While we might read Ike‘s experiences with the bear as solipsistic, contained events in
time, Faulkner‘s point is to express the opposite: most humans experience animals
through seeing and bodily experience of the animal as ―other.‖ The bear, dog, and cow
are mortal; their death confirms their absence and presence in the world. Faulkner, again
returns to the footprint when Ike realizes this ―…when for the first time he sees the actual
footprint – Ike realizes that the bear is a mortal animal and that what he can learn from
his ‗alma mater,‘ the bear, is the means of destroying it. This realization perhaps
measures the quality of Ike‘s moral superiority to the other ‗true hunters,‘ while his
possession of superior woodsman‘s skill and his knowledge of its potency imposes on
him a moral responsibility for restraint and renunciation of the ultimate prizes within his
grasp‖ (Alternbernd 574).
―Lion‖ and ―The Bear‖ are moral stories. Yet reading them with a contemporary
view of the animal generates a critique of our most basic notions of being.
Conventionally, human being is defined in accordance with a hierarchy of animal being
that places us at the top and justifies our power over and the destruction of the natural
world. While Faulkner‘s texts are read according to the relations between humans and the
environment, time and space do not function for animals and humans as they do between
humans and other humans or humans and the environment. Our being and our knowledge
of animal being exist differently. Faulkner‘s text attempts to expose such thresholds of
being.
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Faulkner addresses the real and the unreal of the nonhuman animal. Perception
itself is the reason for these varied historical interpretations. He turns the concept of the
patriarchal hunting narrative on its head by re-orienting our conceptions of looking with
the nonhuman animal. This re-orientation, as it relates to perspective, space, and time,
requires a turn to Sartre‘s existential writings. Sartre‘s theory of ―the look‖ (Being and
Nothingness 1943), when applied to ―The Bear‖ (1942), will help to understand the
inevitable ethical shift from the foundational concept of an intending consciousness, or
consciousness directed toward something, to that of a consciousness directed toward
another directed consciousness, that of the dynamic nonhuman animal other.
Earlier versions of ―The Bear‖ reveal Faulkner‘s vision for the story expressing an
even greater emphasis on the dog, Lion. The title was originally ―Lion‖ before later
changing to ―The Bear,‖ at which time revisions entailed lengthening Faulkner‘s
examination of race relations with the added, more human-centered, controversial section
four. Before these revisions, the dog, rather than the bear, is the main focus. In ―The
Bear,‖ however, Faulkner introduces the little dog, the ―fyce,‖ which charges Old Ben,
forcing Ike to save him. It is not until the addition of the fyce in the 1941 revised and
lengthened version of the story that Ike becomes an integral part of the hunting game
between Lion and Old Ben; that is, Ike does not witness Old Ben‘s death in the early
version. Consequently, ―Lion‖ contains a far more in-depth portrayal of the dog as a
subject. I will later address this matter as it appears in the earlier publication, ―Lion.‖
However, for the purposes of this project, should be recognized as a story that revolves
around the bear.
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Due to this particular narrative style with an emphasis on perception and looking,
tracking the ―sightings‖ and actual live encounters between Ike and the bear is a tricky
business. Encounters with the bear are told outside of c hronological time, hence common
notions of temporal order quickly become confused. Faulkner also works to retain time
as it functions in classic hunting narratives: that is, time becomes more apparent through
the suspenseful chase. Faulkner enhances temporality in ―The Bear‖ by juxtaposing the
traditional movement of the chase with a disoriented sense of time. Various forms of
looking31 take place in the ―The Bear.‖ To name a few, there are Ike‘s visions and
memory of the bear, the community‘s cultural memory of the bear, Old Ben‘s gaze and,
finally, Faulkner‘s dramatic campsite-as-stage where the neighboring men observe events
in the story.
His story‘s opening line refers to human and nonhuman animals in time: ―There
was a man and a dog too this time‖ (183) In the first section, we are introduced to the
characters, human and animal, through memory only:
[Ike] realized later that it had begun long before that [. . . .] It ran in his
knowledge before he even saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams
before he even saw the unaxed woods where he left its crooked print [. . .
.] It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had
not encompassed yet [. . . .] His day came at last [. . . .] He entered it [the
wilderness] It seemed to him that at the age of ten he was witnessing his
own birth. It was not even strange to him. He had already experienced it
all before, and not merely in dreams [. . . .] he knew already how it was
going to look. (184-88)
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In Ike‘s memory, the encounter with the bear has ―already‖ occurred. At the same time,
Faulkner‘s use of verbs creates a sense of action through the verbs are used in the past
tense. The memory of the bear was ―realized,‖ it ―loomed,‖ ―towered,‖ he ―dream[ed]‖
it, he ―divined‖ it. Descriptions of Ike‘s visions of the bear are paired with experiential
language such as ―ran,‖ ―entered,‖ ―witnessed,‖ and ―experienced.‖ Faulkner‘s disjointed
time sequence intertwined with visual and lived experience indicates the human
formation of knowledge of the nonhuman animal being.
In linear time, Ike perceives the bear through memory and storytelling. If we
locate Ike‘s first actual encounter with Old Ben, Ike does not see him. Instead, the bear
sees Ike. According to Sartrean being-for-others, Ike is given for the bear to see. The
bear‘s look directed towards Ike causes the boy to think: ―So I will have to see him, he
thought … I will have to look at him‖ (196). Faulkner dramatizes this first encounter
between the bear and Ike when, a few moments before this realization, Ike walks through
the woods and comes upon a stand, a particular location known for good visibility. Ike
―stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without
motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where,
invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead
trunk‖ (194). In this carefully constructed environment around Ike and the bear, which
mirrors Lawrence‘s descriptions of March‘s first view the fox, once again, the sense of
motion, space, and time become altered. Ike holds the position of a world. If the stream
―creeps,‖ without ―motion‖ it is safe to assume that it does so only for Ike. He stands
―against‖ the tree, ―beside‖ the water. The text then provides Ike‘s internal reflections:
suddenly, he recalls the smell of the dogs from under the table back at the cabin and the
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image of the bear‘s print, his ―living foot.‖ Once Faulkner sets up the scene from Ike‘s
perspective, ―the look‖ occurs and the environment is no longer ―for‖ Ike:
He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew
that the bear was looking at him. He never saw it. He did not know
whether it was facing him from the cane or behind him. He did not move,
holding the useless gun which he knew he would never fire at it, now or
ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the
huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen. Then it was gone. As
abruptly as it had stopped, the woodpecker‘s dry hammering set up again.
(194-5)
The text has changed to de-center Ike. Once he becomes aware of Old Ben watching
him, the world no longer exists for him. He cannot tell whether or not the bear is
―facing‖ him or ―behind‖ him. Ike‘s internal being becomes focused on an other‘s world:
that of the dogs huddled in the kitchen. His inability to use his gun and see the bear (or
the woodpecker) emphasizes his lack of control. A human hunter with a gun on a stand
suddenly becomes vulnerable. Just when Old Ben sees Ike, Ike becomes conscious of his
vulnerability through his awareness of the bear‘s gaze. Faulkner accentuates the
nonhuman animal look further when Sam then assures Ike that the bear is the one who
―done the looking,‖ which returns to Ike‘s realization: ―So I will have to see him, he
thought … I will have to look at him‖ (196).
According to Sartre, when looked upon by an other, one experiences a shift in
orientation. Rather than my view of the world, I become conscious that another view
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exists outside of my own. This realization alienates me, for it disorients my usual selfcentered being in the world. Sartre explains:
To apprehend myself as seen is, in fact, to apprehend myself as seen in the
world and from the standpoint of the world [. . .] If I am seen as seated, I
must be seen as ‗seated-on-a-chair,‘ if I am grasped as bent over, it is as
‗bent-over-the-keyhole,‘ etc. But suddenly the alienation of myself, which
is the act of being-looked-at, involves the alienation of the world which I
organize. I am seen as seated on this chair with the result that I do not see
it at all, that it is impossible for me to see it, that it escapes me so as to
organize itself into a new and differently oriented complex—with other
relations and other distances in the midst of other objects which similarly
have for me a secret face. (Sartre 263)
Before being conscious of myself as seen, I am not aware of the possibility of seeing
myself as an object in the world. For I am my world. The other‘s freedom is what
enables them to see me. Yet their freedom stops me from knowing them. My reaction to
an other‘s freedom, and my alienation, opposes their freedom in order to gain my world
back. Sartre argues that,
These new characteristics do not come only from the fact that I cannot
know the Other; they stem also and especially from the fact that the Other
is free. Or to be exact and to reverse the terms, the Other‘s freedom is
revealed to me across the uneasy indetermination of the being which I am
for him. (Being and Nothingness 262)
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Sartre‘s language of a being ―for him‖ prompts Levinas‘s later study of the ethical
obligation to an other. Unfortunately, Levinas also avoids the subject of the animal other.
Before Ike becomes conscious of the bear‘s look toward him, Faulkner describes
Ike‘s orientation from Ike‘s perspective: he stands ―against‖ the tree, ―beside‖ the water;
the bird is ―invisible‖ to him; he internally recalls memories of the dogs and the bear‘s
print. After Ike ―knows‖ that the bear is looking at him, he is ―alienated‖ from his
previously ―organized‖ world. Ike becomes unable to see the bear or to ―know whether it
was facing him from the cane or behind him‖ (263).
Once Old Ben‘s intending perspective appears in the text, Ike‘s position is
reversed: the subject becomes the object to be observed, known, and inspected. As the
viewer at this particular moment, Ike is pushed into a new dimension because perspective
itself is ―outside my reach, outside my action, outside my knowledge…‖ (Sartre 268). In
Go Down Moses, Faulkner establishes the human inability to ―know‖ animal being, as
seen in the bear‘s footprint which represents myth, anthropomorphism, and experiential
encounters between human and animal. In addition to the print, Faulkner directly
criticizes a rational perspective of reality. When the men wrongfully accuse Lion of
killing the colt, for instance, Ike notes mankind‘s self-inflicted misconception concerning
the subject of animals. ―But that was neither the first nor the last time he had seen men
rationalize from and even act upon their misconceptions‖ (206).
In order for Ike to regain his viewpoint, he must succeed in directing his look
toward the bear. Once again, Faulkner reiterates the importance of the print before the
first live encounter between Old Ben and Ike, and as in the previous analysis, perspective
alters significantly once Old Ben enters Ike‘s field of vision:
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[S]eeing as he sat down on the log the crooked print, the warped
indentation in the wet ground which while he looked at it continued to fill
with water until it was level full and the water began to overflow and the
sides of the print began to dissolve away. Even as he looked up he saw the
next one, and, moving, the one beyond it; moving, not hurrying, running,
but merely keeping pace with them as they appeared before him as though
they were being shaped out of thin air [. . . .] It rushed, soundless, and
solidified—the tree, the bush, the compass and the watch glinting where a
ray of sunlight touched them. Then he saw the bear. It did not emerge,
appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon‘s
hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had
expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at
him. Then it moved. It crossed the glade without haste, walking for an
instant into the sun‘s full glare and out of it, and stopped again and looked
back at him across one shoulder. Then it was gone. It didn‘t walk into the
woods. It faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion as he had
watched a fish, a huge old bass, sink back into the dark depths of its pool
and vanish without even any movement of its fins. (Go Down Moses 2001)
Like March in ―The Fox,‖ Ike is present in the world. Ike not only sees the bear paw
print fill with water, but experiences it spatially. As time passes, he witnesses diminutive
changes in the shape of the dissolving paw print. Before encountering the look of the
bear, Ike participates in his presence in the world. Yet this scene still ―appears before
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him.‖ As a directionally perceiving subject, the world presents itself ―before‖ Ike.
Faulkner then lists objects in this environment including the tree, bush, compass, and
watch: two natural objects and two non-living ―things.‖ A ray of sun projects upon
them, which acts as another form of perspective in the scene. As in the last scene when
the bear saw Ike, the bear‘s presence (and absence) is abrupt. Previously, the scene
―appeared‖ before Ike; but now the bear ―did not emerge, appear: it was just there,
immobile, fixed.‖ A subject empowered with freedom, the bear holds its own horizon of
―green and windless noon‘s hot dappling.‖ Although Faulkner describes the bear as seen
by Ike, the bear has a world. The nonhuman animal has his own motion, his own size,
and his own freedom to move in spaces that are unpredictable to Ike.
When Ike first sees the bear, time pauses as the intending subject looks toward
him. The bear then moves into a ray of sunlight. Like the look given to March in ―The
Fox,‖ the bear ―looked back at him across one shoulder. Then it was gone.‖ To recall
Lawrence‘s passage: the fox ―glanced over his shoulder, and ran smoothly away. She saw
his brush held smooth like a feather, she saw his white buttocks twinkle. And he was
gone, softly, soft as the wind (88).‖ Similar to the fox‘s mysterious movements, we see
Ike and Old Ben spatially positioned as if in a world that transcends the natural setting:
―it seemed to him that he was directly under the bear. He could smell it, strong and hot
and rank. Sprawling, he looked up where it loomed and towered over him like a
thunderclap. It was quite familiar, until he remembered: this was the way he had used to
dream about it. Then it was gone. He didn‘t see it go‖ (202). This transcending
movement, when read ontologically, is an aspect of the otherness of being accepted not as
transcending the world(s) inhabited by the human and nonhuman animal other but as
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transcending the human capacity to perceive the nonhuman other. Similarly, during
another encounter, Ike sees the bear‘s movement in both an unfamiliar and familiar
manner: ―He saw it [. . . .] It rushed through rather than across the tangle of trunks and
branches as a locomotive would, faster than he had ever believed it could have moved,
almost as fast as a deer [. . . .] It was not crouched nor even standing. It was in motion, in
the air, coming toward them—a heavy body crashing with tremendous force‖ (202-207).
In each moment, Ike tries to associate the bear‘s movement in space with subjects or
objects with which he can relate. Yet the bear‘s movement both resembles his reality and
transcends it. Of course, in the context of Faulkner, the otherness presented here has
been read as the presence of god. However, given the texts‘ environmental and
ontological tone, Faulkner‘s intent may also concern raising appreciation of the otherness
of nature. 32
To alter one‘s perception of animals is to alter one‘s fundamental knowledge of
self and world. Faulkner must show an illuminating, transformative, transcending event.
Sartre‘s change in perception when seeing an other similarly transforms the world: ―The
Other‘s look touches me across the world and is not only a transformation of myself but a
total metamorphosis of the world. I am looked-at in a world which is looked-at‖ (269).
Faulkner‘s texts do not provide omniscient narrators but, rather, changing, multiple
perspectives of world(s). The look is world in this sense: ―if he turns towards me, then
although I immediately experience and with certainty the fact of being-looked-at, I can
not make this certainty pass into my experience of the Other-as-object. In fact it reveals
to me only the Other-as-subject, a transcending presence to the world and the real
condition of my being-as-object‖ (Sartre 276). Exposure to the self as object and
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exposure to the other places one at the core of being, a place which can only be described
as a part of, yet transcending the perception previously known. That is, when Old Ben
reveals his self as subject to Ike through looking, Ike is brought to a place of shared
being, which, without the intending gaze of the bear, he would not have seen.
―Lion‖
In the original version of the story, Faulkner‘s decisions about subjects between
the bear and Lion, for the purposes of this project, point to the literary and existential
question of the animal as either wild or domestic. The wild bear‘s gaze (as with March
and the wild fox) proximity becomes an issue and the look engages beings. Although Ike
does not touch the bear, he experiences the bear‘s bodily presence through looking. The
wild/domestic binary projected onto animal being is mirrored back onto the human
characters. Because Faulkner and Lawrence challenge traditional perceptions of animal
being, their ontological discourse challenges binaries of human/animal. Defining the
human/animal binary relates to conceptions of wild and domestic, and is very much tied
to the pragmatic and theoretical treatment of animal being and human being. Through
ontological language, Faulkner and Lawrence provide an ethical interpretation of nonhuman and human being, language that is undeniably, although less obviously, political.
As I have argued in the introduction, due to the absence of a philosophical animal
discourse in literary criticism, we lack the language to acknowledge animal being as
such.
When reading ―Lion,‖ one quickly notices the focus on the lives of dogs and the
hunters‘ intimate relationship with them. Lion is mentioned in almost every paragraph.
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The story revolves around the dog‘s heroic death and how it ―affected the two people
who loved him most.‖ Boon and Major de Spain, the narrator explains, ―were funny
about Lion:‖ (134)
Neither one of them owned him or had any hope of ever owning him and I
don‘t believe it ever occurred to either of them to think, I wish I owned
that dog. Because you didn‘t think of Lion as belonging to anyone, any
more than you thought about a man belonging to anybody, not even to
Major de Spain. (134-5)
The men view Lion as an intending subject, who each night is begged by Ad and Boon
to sleep with them; meanwhile, the dog does not care ―which one he slept with, and not
staying long with either one even when they persuaded him,‖ retained his sense of
individuality (135). This portrayal, at times, contrasts that of the later version in which a
vicious dog is ―broken‖ by starvation. Of course, Lion as a subject is still the one and
only dog to kill Old Ben, but he might be seen in ―Lion‖ as more domestic than the
revised and wilder dog character. We see Lion‘s domestication in his sleeping in the
men‘s living quarters, but also in the special attention paid to his disposition as
intelligent:
I remember how after breakfast we went out and into the damp, gray, faint
light and there he stood, apart from the other dogs and not tied, just
standing there [. . . .] he was the color of a blue sorrel horse, though
perhaps it was his topaz-colored eyes that made him look so dark. I
remember how he stood there—big-footed, with his strong and grave head
and a chest almost as big as mine. Beneath the skin you could feel the
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long, easy, quiet, strong muscles that did not flinch with either pleasure or
distaste from any touch [. . . .] He stood like a horse, only different from a
horse because a horse promises only speed while Lion promised—with
that serene and comforting quality of a promise from a man whom you
trust absolutely. [W]ith his big head raised and his big feet quiet before
him; you would go to him and speak to him or pat him and he would turn
his head slowly and look at you with those topaz eyes that were as
impenetrable [. . . .] as free of meanness or generosity or gentleness or
viciousness but a good deal more intelligent. Then he would blink and
then you would realize that he was not looking at you at all, not seeing you
at all. You didn‘t know what he was seeing, what he was thinking. (139)
As with the bear encounters, Faulkner describes only that which is available to him as a
human spectator: the dog‘s manner, his disposition, his body, and his look. His
disposition exudes calmness, a sense of contemplation. Significantly, Faulkner speaks of
the ―feel‖ of the dog: ―[b]eneath the skin you could feel the long, easy, quiet, strong
muscles that did not flinch with either pleasure or distaste from any touch‖ (139). Lion‘s
being can only be paralleled with a man‘s because of the human viewer‘s sense of
―absolute‖ trust. Ike communicates with Lion through touch and voice: he ―pats‖ him
and ―speaks‖ to him. Lion then responds through his gaze, interpreted by humans as
―intelligent.‖ We see the dog‘s affection towards men in ―Lion‖ when ―Major de Spain
was sitting on the pallet with Lion‘s head in his lap, soaking a rag in a pan of water
squeezing it into Lion‘s mouth [. . . .] He just lay there with his head on Major de Spain‘s
knee and his eyes open a little and looking yellower than ever in the lamplight; once I
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saw his tongue come out and touch Major de Spain‘s hand‖ (145). Yet as Faulkner notes,
although the men can feel, sense, touch, communicate, and see Lion, Ike admittedly
―didn‘t know what he [Lion] was seeing, what he [Lion] was thinking‖ (139). Lion is
allowed to retain his mysterious dog being.
―Lion‖ is more ―human‖ than in ―The Bear,‖ although ―The Bear‖ contains
important moments of sentiment as well. In both versions, the compassion heightens
once Lion is injured. When Lion is mauled during the final fight, Boon refuses medical
aid before Lion. Boon, along with the other men, is emotionally disturbed by Lion‘s
suffering. In ―Lion,‖ Boon arrives with Lion under his coat, ―[h]e stood there in the door,
looking at us, and he began to cry. I never had seen a man cry before [. . . .] that tough
unshaven face of his crinkled up and more like a dried walnut than ever, and the tears
streaming down it fast as rain‖ (144). Strong emotional concern for the dog‘s wellbeing
continues in ―The Bear‖ when Major de Spain demands that Tennie‘s Jim go ―straight to
Hoke‘s [. . . .] Bring Doctor Crawford back with you. Tell him there are two men to be
looked at‖ (233). Major de Spain is referring to Boon and Lion.
The psychological and emotional acts normal to the game of hunting overwhelm
the men when Lion is hurt. In section four, Faulkner connects ownership and abuse to
animals: ―that whole edifice intricate and complex and founded upon injustice and
erected by ruthless rapacity and carried on even yet with at times downright savagery not
only to the human beings but the valuable animals too‖ (285). Faulkner goes on to
reiterate misconceptions of animal being, referring to the fyce, a character added to the
later version. Faulkner notes that the men see the fyce as soulless, although they do not
―know it was not going to heaven since they had already decided it had no immortal soul,
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so that all it could be was brave even though they would probably call that too just noise‖
(283). Of course, as Alternberd reminds us, it is no coincidence tha t Ike realizes the sins
of man, the violation of other men‘s rights, and ―violation of the wilderness, equally
grave, and equally a part of Ike‘s inheritance. All this Ike has discovered alone in the
same winter in which Old Ben is killed‖ (578). One might also recall the elaborate
mourning and burial for the animals as a confirmation that the men do not view the
animals as soulless.
Faulkner‘s hunting narrative, unlike that of Hemingway and many of his literary
predecessors, forces the being shared between humans and nonhuman animals as an
ethical matter. In ―Lion,‖ the dog is the hero before and after Old Ben‘s death. This final
section on Faulkner‘s nonhuman animal turns to the strange and comedic relationship
between the cow and Ike in The Hamlet.
The Cow in The Hamlet
William J. Mistichelli views ―The Long Summer‖ as an opportunity for Faulkner
to expand upon previous conceptions of the love story:
33
One is confronted here with an anonymous narrator who is very much
present in his depiction of characters and events. The elaborate diction and
syntax he uses to portray Ike‘s love for the cow, along with his references
to myth and romance, enable him to invest an idiot‘s passion for an animal
with qualities that are not merely different from, but that outdistance, as
well, the feelings of common lovers. (Mistichelli 15)
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Ike‘s human feelings create an otherness from which Faulkner successfully explores the
perception of an idiot. For Mistichelli, a mythical recognition of the other means that
―Ike‘s affair forces into the open unsettling questions regarding love and the human spirit,
especially as those matters affect the social and moral life of Frenchman‘s Bend‖ (22).
When addressing the community‘s reaction to Ike‘s love for the cow, Mistichelli again
recognizes the potential animal ethics in the text. On the killing of the cow as a solution
to Ike‘s affection, Mistichelli notes,
[. . .] it is interesting to note that the community finds it appropriate to kill
the animal rather than merely remove it from Ike‘s presence. The belief is
that if he eats its meat he will be cured of his disorder. Judgment, here,
though clouded by superstition, receives moral and legal sanction not
because it is just, but because both Ike and the cow are powerless to plead
their case against it. (28)
Mistichelli calls the extraordinary presence of animal being, ―the almost supernatural
aura that frequently surrounds the animals in the story.‖ Yet he then determines that the
so-called aura, along with the unusual narration of the novel ―bring together‖ the
―manifold richness of human experience‖ (28) At one point, Mistichelli claims that
animals seem to ―possess a life of their own‖ outside of the human perception of the
townspeople. Further, Ike gains perspective from his unique perception of the cow:
He grows attentive to the cow‘s comings and goings, learns to anticipate
her needs and show tenderness in meeting them, and discovers joy and
ecstasy in her presence. At one point he is able, even, to anticipate her
danger from a great distance: ‗Although it was three miles away, he can
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even see her backing away before the flames and hear her bellowing‘
(886). Thus, Ike reaps the benefits of following his passion, though he is
unable to articulate how or why. The cow, too, seems transformed. The
narrator attributes ‗shame‘ and respect for privacy to her in the face of
Ike‘s sexual advances (891). He speaks of her as feeling ‗betrayed and
outraged by her own treacherous biological inheritance‘ (891), as though
she were capable of something like conscious self-reflection and able to
separate her mental life from her physiological destiny. (28)
According to Mistichelli, Faulkner‘s text forces the reader to re-examine ―perceptions
ordinarily considered bizarre or outlandish‖ and instead insists upon exploring them
―with depth and precision‖ (19). In The Hamlet Ike and the cow‘s relations are known to
convey the larger ironic and comedic theme of the novel as a whole. Most literary critics
dismiss this section of The Hamlet as a joke. Yet the section also contains Faulkner‘s
existential prose. Critics often describe it as ―reprehensible,‖ ―pathetic,‖ and ―repulsive‖
(Mistichelli17). Daniel Hoffman notes, ―[o]n a first reading of The Hamlet one is
astonished at the elevated diction, the high romantic tone, the allusions to Hera—and at
having to read almost two pages before an offhand mention of hooves reveals that the
love object so defined is a cow‖ (97). Hoffman uses the phrase ―love object‖ here
because although the ―elevated‖ and ―romantic‖ language may suggest otherwise, his
reading of the cow remains objectified. In the end, Hoffman resorts to calling the entire
section a ―bizarre combination of elevated romanticism and bestial content‖ (98). With an
acknowledgement of the story as containing a comedic tone, I will expand upon
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Mistichelli‘s interpretation of the text as one which shows ―bizarre‖ aspects of the
nonhuman animal being.
Faulkner‘s philosophy of the animal shows his desire to disrupt our ―natural
attitude‖ as it relates to animal being. 34 Although Ike‘s perception of the cow is
dysfunctional, to examine Ike‘s wrongdoing is also to discover that part of existence
which should be held in sanctity. The Snopes‘ are known for ―representing Faulkner‘s
conception of the worst sort of human evil, the threat of redneckism in its most blatantly
dreadful form [. . .]‖ (Powers 145).35 In the story of the cow and Ike, this human evil
comes as evil action taken against nature. As Lyall Powers insightfully points out, the
Snopes‘
[. . .] commit evil acts, are evil agents; but in addition to that their
presence indicates that human evil (or at least the distinct tendency or
liability to do evil) was already present before them. Faulkner spoke of
them as being ‗like mold on cheese‘ […] they represent the unnatural—the
corruption, spoiling, frustration, or misdirection of natural (and hence
good) tendencies. (Powers 146)
Faulkner‘s positioning of the story in the middle of The Hamlet leads critics to
view the section as especially vital in that it parallels relations between other human to
human and human to nonhuman animal characters throughout the novel: for instance,
Eula‘s physical resemblance to a cow, Labove‘s dysfunctional sexual desire, and
Houston‘s isolated condition. Critics redirect these meaningful animal scenes toward
human characters. The following reading will show an existential interpretation of Ike
and the cow‘s engagement. Outside of the distant yet insightful narrator, the ―The Long
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Summer‖ section contains two main characters (if I may call the cow a main character)
who, for the most part, do not speak. Ike may utter a word on occasion, but especially
when he is with the cow, we are told their story according to the ―lifeworld‖ of an
animal.36 In The Hamlet, even for Faulkner, we see also an unusual amount of references
to animals in the text. 37 While the human characters compare humans to animals, when
joined with Faulkner‘s strange depiction of a loving relationship between a cow and an
idiot, one begins to wonder exactly how Faulkner might be working outside of such
common notions of animal being. In fact, the lack of linguistic dialogue in this section is
made even more startling because the previous section held the local voice of Ratliff and
the townspeople.
Faulkner‘s cow is clearly an intending subject with a directed consciousness. The
cow receives substantial attention in the story as a living being with thoughts, intentions,
affections, feelings, desires, etc. Section two of ―Long Summer‖ opens with Ike‘s altered
perception of the cow. Ike seems to have entered the ―otherworldliness‖ of animal
perception. As in The Sound and the Fury, Benji Compson‘s unique perspective of the
world offers an event-based perception through which the text functions; a perception
which is also both dysfunctional and insightful. In the narrative of Benji Compson, like
Ike Snopes, Faulkner becomes an other with limited vocabulary, repeated images, and
acute sensations (i.e. Benji‘s perception of his sister Caddy smelling like grass). The
reader‘s impression of Benji‘s consciousness of a particular moment in time (with Caddy)
is one which is sensually based, and therefore, Faulkner creates a new way of perceiving
reality. While Benji‘s consciousness is contrasted by other human forms of
consciousness, Ike‘s consciousness exists alongside the consciousness of the cow. In
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Ike‘s pursuit of the cow, he locates her according to her world. The natural world guides
his actions. The environment is determined not by measured time but by the changing
landscape. The following passage shows an alternate world through the ―mist‖ which is
shared by Ike and the cow.
[. . .] when the night at last succumbs to day; and then he would begin to
hurry, trot, not to get there quicker but because he must get back soon,
without fear and calmly now in the growing visibility, the gradation from
gray through primrose to the morning‘s ultimate gold, to the brow of the
final hill, to let himself downward into the creekside mist and lie in the
drenched myriad waking life of grasses and listen for her approach. Then
he would hear her, coming down the creekside in the mist. It would not be
after one hour, two hours, three; the dawn would be empty, the moment
and she would not be, then he would hear her and he would lie drenched in
the wet grass, serene and one and indivisible in joy, listening to her
approach. He would smell her; the whole mist reeked with her; the same
malleate hands of mist which drew along his prone drenched flanks paled
her pearled barrel too and shaped them both somewhere immediate in
time, already married. (182-3)
The colors of the sky change from gray to primrose to gold, the mist moves from wetting
the grass to evaporation. As Mistichelli accurately pointed out, Ike‘s behavior gains
perspective in his adoration for the cow. The narrator makes it clear that Ike‘s perception
of the world is unusually acute, specifically through the mist. The mist places an
emphasis on vision and the shared vision between Ike and the cow.
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When Ike awaits the cow, the scene is described visually. Yet the vivid landscape
and Ike‘s waiting strengthen the presence of the cow, for Ike cannot actually see the cow;
he knows she is coming from sounds and smells and the look of the landscape, but not
from her actual, immediate presence. Faulkner emphasizes the cow‘s invisibility: ―the
flowing immemorial female, hearing the slow planting and plopping such of each
deliberate cloven mud-spreading hoof, invisible still in the mist loud with its hymeneal
choristers‖ (The Hamlet 183). Her invisibility and the lengthy description of her entrance
before her presence create a theatrical event when Ike does see her.
Then he would see her; the bright thin horns of morning, of sun, would
blow the mist away and reveal her, planted, blond, dew-pearled, standing
in the parted water of the ford, blowing into the water the thick, warm,
heavy mil-laden breath; and lying in the drenched grasses, his eyes now
blind with sun, he would wallow faintly from thigh to thigh, making a
faint, thick, hoarse moaning sound. (The Hamlet 183)
The emphasis on vision continues; Ike ―see[s]‖ her, the mist disappears to ―reveal her‖
the sunlight ―blind[s]‖ his ―eyes.‖
After the cow‘s dramatic appearance, for which the reader and Ike awaited, the
cow continues to be the center of the text, moving Ike and the reader to follow her. With
every move he makes toward her, she responds through actions and looking. Several
pages follow this event in which Faulkner shows their dance through sound, gesture, and
looking. In this dramatic entrance and dance, we begin to see the ―ecstasy‖ that can
become dysfunctional. Ike‘s altered perception allows him to view the cow as a subjectin-itself rather than object. As noted by Mistichelli, the cow‘s being seen by Ike seems to
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change the cow as well. Ike‘s ability to see the cow-as-subject-in-itself cause Ike to
experience the Sartrean transformation: ―The Other‘s look touches me across the world
and is not only a transformation of myself but a total metamorphosis of the world. I am
looked-at in a world which is looked-at‖ (Sartre 269). If we read Ike‘s perception of the
cow-in-itself causing an opening of the unknown, the common reaction to the look of the
subjective other, according to Sartre, is to become defensive out of the inability to define
the other. The town‘s reaction to Ike‘s perception of the cow-in-itself would then be to
force the opposing perspective, that of the cow-as-object. This natural attitude of which
the town holds is displayed through their solution to Ike‘s perspective: Ike must eat the
cow and he receives a toy cow object.
If we read Mistichelli‘s realization of the potential for an ―outdista nce[ing]‖ of
our usual perspective of ―common lovers‖ as the workings of the structure of perception,
we do not end with a return to myth. Instead, for Sartre, ―The Other‘s look makes me be
beyond my being in this world and puts me in the midst of the world which is at once this
world and beyond this world‖ (Sartre 261). By ―beyond this world‖ Sartre, as an
existentialist is not referring to any particular world; instead, it is that which is unknown.
In such a reading, that which is gained by the animal look is left undefined and therefore
understood as a shared, ontological structure of being.
In moving from Lawrence to Faulkner‘s depiction of the nonhuman literary
animal being, we see a new perception of ani mal being develop, one that considers loss
of the environment and the changes that arise from twentieth-century living conditions
and perception. Immediate experiences among human and nonhuman characters cause a
disruption in the traditional literary depiction of animals. Faulkner‘s horse, cow, bear, and
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dog characters do not hold a place in our already existing conceptions of a subject: self,
other, and that which transcends. We will see Coetzee continue to struggle with the
notion of the nonhuman animal being and its place in literature and life.
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Chapter Three
Coetzee on The Animal, The Human, and our current Condition of Being
In Faulkner, the nonhuman animal appears during a unique cultural intersection
between an emphasis on the visual and the mid twentieth-century southern American
environment. In the late twentieth-century and beyond, however, the interdisciplinary
field known as ―animal studies‖ presents a new set of voices in academia and popular
culture, the most recognized of which include Jacques Derrida, Peter Singer, Tom Regan,
and Carol Adams. Coetzee‘s literary depictions of the nonhuman animal being require an
understanding of these contemporary voices due to his awareness of (and response to)
their key points on the subject.
As seen in Lawrence and Faulkner, the topic continues to develop a place among
a historically anthropocentric discourse. Yet the present academic climate has
accumulated a familiarity with conceptions of ―otherness‖ by means of postcolonial
theory, identity politics, the metaphysics of subjectivity, and e xclusionary logic leading to
new readings of the nonhuman animal. For example, Adams‘ feminist texts parallel the
violence against women with the violence against nonhuman animals. 38 Other animal
analogy readings include: connecting the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust to that
of animals in slaughterhouses and vivisection; the African American slavery and violence
against animals analogy; or, Peter Singer‘s controversial claim that highly cognitive
nonhuman beings should receive the same ethical treatment as severely retarded human
beings. In response, Derrida argues, ―many of the analogies that are drawn between
human and animal genocide overlook the singular situation and suffering of animals‖
(Calarco 111). As I will discuss at length in this chapter, Coetzee‘s writings expose and
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question these controversial voices on the topic of nonhuman animal being. Therefore,
Coetzee‘s texts will illustrate the philosophy of the twentieth-century animal, which will
include those attributes that humans, over time, have thought to be uniquely human: the
hand, soul, shame, awareness of death, language, reason, ethics (or responsibility), and
technology.
J. M. Coetzee‘s Philosophy of the Animal: The Lives of Animals
I will begin an examination of Coetzee‘s philosophy of the animal with his most
explicit text concerning the nonhuman animal to date, The Lives of Animals. Immediately
calling attention to the issue of speaking for the other, Coetzee delivers the 1997-8
Princeton lectures on animal lives through the voice of a fictional character, Elizabeth
Costello. After its publication in 1999 containing an added section of interdisciplinary
commentary, The Lives of Animals then reappeared in Coetzee‘s fictional 2003 novel,
Elizabeth Costello. This narrative represents the paradox one faces when speaking for
another being. The human voice carries with it perceptual and lived complexities, a
history not separated from human language. When the human voice speaking for another
that is a nonhuman animal other, the breadth of animal studies crosses disciplinary,
public, and private cultural boundaries. From Coetzee‘s strategic choices in lecture and
text, possible speakers indicate (but are not limited to) the following: an interdisciplinary
academic community (Princeton Lectures); general readers of the popular novel and the
author of said novel (Elizabeth Costello); and, the private audience to whom the main
character must face.
Although the protagonist, Elizabeth, is an animal activist and the majority of her
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notions of animal being parallel that portrayed in Coetzee‘s other fiction, we see how
Elizabeth is perceived by the scientific community. Norma, her critical daughter-in-law,
calls Elizabeth‘s topic a ―hobbyhorse,‖ ―naïve,‖ ―jejune and sentimental‖ (Coetzee, The
Lives of Animals 16-7). In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth refers to scientists who have
attempted to understand animal being, but inevitably fall short because, in her eyes, their
scientific experiments are designed to practice only the rules of human reason. The
scientists do not perceive the animal as a poet might. The human-centered view of
animals creates experiments that can only result in satisfying those pre-supposed
projections. The key here is our perceptual projection onto the animal. Elizabeth
understands that realistically, we are not capable of ―thinking our way into the life of a
bat‖ (Lives, 33).39 Yet we accept our capacity to think and/or feel our way into another
human being, hence the acts we call sympathy and empathy; therefore, when thinking of
the animal being, we must first accept the ability to empathize and sympathize with other
humans as difficult at best.
According to Graham Huggan, an ecocritic, Coetzee‘s rhetorical function
determines representation of the other, human or nonhuman:40
Here, the crucial questions of who speaks and for whom require constant
critical attention, particularly in cases where ‗othering‘ is the inadvertent
result of an act of well-intentioned political advocacy, or where the
attempt to reach out on the side of the oppressed group runs the risk of
further marginalizing another. (720)
Instances where one group might be ―further marginalizing another‖ return to connecting
animal oppression to human oppression in terms of slavery, the Holocaust, feminis m, etc.
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According to Josephine Donovan, Coetzee‘s philosophy of the animal includes
the following:
41
It is in his unquestioned acknowledgement that animals can suffer, feel
pain, and experience humiliation—and therefore may be afflicted with
evil—that Coetzee parts company from most other authors who include
animals centrally in their fiction. Although many modern writers [. . .]
succeed in granting subjectivity to the animals who figure in their work,
few if any—of their human characters exhibit the intense empathetic
identification with animal suffering and loss of dignity as do Coetzee‘s.
This is what makes his work so original and groundbreaking in the area of
fictional treatment of human-animal relations. (86)
Donovan‘s emphasis on suffering in Coetzee returns to the utilitarian approach rooted in
Jeremy Bentham. Singer uses Bentham‘s claim on animal suffering as a source of
inspiration in his popular book, Animal Liberation. While I agree with Donovan that
animal dignity and humiliation are key factors in Coetzee‘s contribution to the topic,
Donovan‘s discussion strictly pursues a feminist perspective as she argues, for example,
that in Waiting for the Barbarians the Magistrate‘s transformed position from victimizer
to victim are a result of the character‘s feminization. While the eco-feminist approach and
the animal consciousness project share the umbrella of oppression (as we have seen in
Lawrence, Faulkner, and Carol Adams), the feminist reading does not address the
problems unique to the nonhuman animal oppression discussion. For instance, the
Magistrate‘s consistent sensitivity to animal being through lived experience raise
questions beyond the scope of feminism. Similarly, in Disgrace, David‘s transformation
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through encounters with animals requires an analysis of empathy and consciousness of
death, topics that necessarily differ from the human-to-human treatment of the woman
other. Rather than concentrating on the nonhuman animal‘s bodily being, Donovan
accounts for the Magistrate and David‘s experiences in terms of gender and, therefore, of
human gender politics in South Africa.
Another critic to address animal being in Coetzee, Louis Tremaine, recognizes
―contradictions,‖ ―creative tensions,‖ ―irony,‖ ―commitment and skepticism‖ (588). 42
Tremaine‘s discussion is closer to addressing the animal-in-itself than Donovan‘s because
it pursues a form of consciousness that does not run the risk, as Huggan says, of ―further
marginalizing another.‖ Tremaine points out, ―The problem for some critics is their sense
that these different dimensions of Coetzee‘s work are at odds with one another, the
attention to language and textuality undercutting the effectiveness and credibility of the
response to oppression‖ (588). To relieve reader frustration of these opposing linguistic
and experiential ―dimensions‖ in Coetzee‘s texts, Tremaine offers the following
interpretation of Coetzee‘s animals:
Coetzee‘s narrative use of animals, and dogs in particular, is one means by
which a reader can [. . .] reveal a deeper, foundational concern with the
condition of living beings, one that at least partially accounts for the
source of Coetzee‘s response to the various forms of human oppression
that he records. At this level, the ironic, skeptical, tautly cerebral voice in
which Coetzee treats textuality, rationality, and ideology grows silent and
we hear emerging instead a voice that insists, with a more visceral
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urgency, on the direct, factual, and compelling reality of bodily suffering
and death, the threat of shame, and the desire for salvation. (588)
With his focus on a ―deeper, foundational concern with the condition of living beings‖ as
it relates to the ―reality of bodily suffering,‖ Tremaine calls attention to that which
Donovan feminizes: concepts such as shame, salvation, death, and suffering as embodied
events in time and space. For Coetzee, shame and salvation function not according to
traditional Judeo-Christian religious terms, but as a condition of our embodied state.
Similarly, when Derrida‘s cat gazes upon him, his ontological condition changes:
In his autobiographical account of the encounter with his cat, [he] is intent
upon underscoring the ‗event‘-like nature of the encounter and the way in
which its force jumbles his experience of time, self, and being. This kind
of encounter with the alterity of another animal helps to expose the
limitations and shortcomings of our existing philosophical language about
animals as well as corresponding ethical and political theories, whether
pro- or anti-animal. (Calarco 126)
Derrida‘s description of an ―encounter‖ which ―jumbles his experience of time, self, and
being‖ is similar to that described by Lawrence and Faulkner. Also, Derrida notes the
encounter as meeting ―another animal‖ thus viewing man as animal. This ―event‖ of
encountering the animal other, then, begins with a disruption caused by the animal, often
in the form of the animal gaze. Tremaine continues,
But the problem over which Coetzee agonizes is not simply that we can be
made to suffer and that we die, but that we know this, in the way that his
animals know that the knife is descending and can do nothing about it. To
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know that, as a condition of our embodiedness, of our animal being, we
are helpless in the face of suffering and death is to experience shame—an
experience not just of suffering, but of being subjected to suffering, of
being forced, as body-souls, to be the involuntary channels of our own
pain and fear, which we can neither alter nor comprehend. (599)
From the disruption forms a new development of ―being subjected to‖ one‘s
circumstances, i.e. death or suffering. And, as a passive position, one subsequently
experiences shame. As living beings, we know that we suffer through experiencing our
own ontological limitations.
In his recent book, Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee provides another scenario where
the nonhuman animal and human animal are experientially subjected to finitude.
Every day for the past week the thermometer has risen above the fortydegree mark. Bella Saunders in the flat down the corridor tells me of her
concern for the frogs along the old creek bed. Will they not be baked alive
in their little earthern chambers? She asks anxiously. Can we not dig them
out and bring them indoors until the heatwave is over? She says. I caution
her against trying. You won‘t know where to dig, I say.
Toward sunset I observe her carry a plastic bowl of water across the street,
which she leaves in the creek. In case the little ones get thirsty, she
explains.
It is easy to make fun of people like Bella, to point out that heatwaves are
part of a larger ecological process with which human beings ought not to
interfere. But does this criticism not miss something? Are we human
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beings not part of that ecology too, and is our compassion for the wee
beasties not as much an element of it as is the cruelty of the crow? (211)
The narrator‘s advice to his neighbor (that she will not know where to dig) indicates a
reversal in conventional value ethics, which normally suggests that the human subject or
nonhuman animal subject has a choice in the matter. The woman‘s actions, regardless of
her will and morality, cannot resolve the problem for the animal or for herself. And,
standing in the face of this realization, humans still must determine whether or not to
respond with the cruelty of the crow or with compassion. As Derrida points out, we have
reached a point in human history where the struggle to speak for the nonhuman animal
other has become ―incontournable, uncircumventable for thought‖ (Calarco 113).
Finally, with an awareness of our human limitations, a cultural consciousness
stemming from environmental threats, the human must re-define how to achieve a level
of salvation, how to act ethically. And for Coetzee, salvation occurs:
[…] through (and not around) the body-soul, through and not around the
shame to which our embodiedness lays us open. For salvation is itself a
being laid open—open to the possibility, at least, of ‗full being‘ by the
acceptance of one‘s self as an embodied soul that is ‗alive to the world,‘
and not merely to an idea of the world of knowing the world through one‘s
own particular ‗extension in space,‘ and not through the self as an
abstraction. (Tremaine 602)
Elizabeth Costello describes, ―to be full of being is to live as a body-soul‖ for, the animal,
she says, exists as a ―living soul,‖ an ―embodied soul‖ (Lives 33). Language of the
―body‖ and ―soul‖ once again return to the history in the philosophy of the animal from
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Aristotle to Descartes.43 The majority of the western philosophical discussion on animals
surrounds defining the human. Humans have long justified nonhuman animal status as
lower due to animal sense perception with an absence of the uniquely human soul. Soul
is related to the body in that some religions claim that the soul endures the body. To this
degree, Coetzee‘s texts cover the main arguments which attempt to define the human and
nonhuman.
In his latest book, Coetzee says of the soul that there are two types known to man:
the soul that endures and the soul that does not endure. In the ―soul that endures- the ―I‖
continues to exist as itself after the body dies‖ whereas in the ―soul that does not endurethe ―I‖ ceases to exist as itself and is absorbed into some greater soul. (Coetzee, Diary of
a Bad Year 153) Coetzee points out that in either scenario, we are up against the
following problem of the loss of self or subject:
…if ―I‖ will in the next life have a kind of existence that ―I‖ as I am now
am incapable of understanding, then Christian churches should rid
themselves of the doctrine of the heavenly reward, the promise that good
behavior in the present life will be rewarded with heavenly bliss in the
next: whoever I am now I will not be then. (Diary 153)
With the two types of being between being separated from the body and being joined in
the soul-of-souls, the ―I‖ cannot be rewarded. Coetzee argues,
It is surprising that the notion of an individual afterlife persists in
intellectually respectable versions of Christianity. It so transparently fills a
lack - an incapacity to think of a world from which the thinker is absent –
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that religion ought simply to note such incapacity as part of the human
condition and leave it at that. (Diary of a bad Year 154).
Animals in Alice Walker
Before applying Coetzee‘s philosophy of the animal to his fiction, I will first
examine another major writer of Coetzee‘s time period and caliber, Alice Walker, who
also addresses the topic of the nonhuman animal in a philosophical manner. Walker‘s
black women characters often come to the realization that the same system of oppression
at work in slavery is responsible for the violence against nonhuman animals.
The best examples of Walker‘s treatment of the nonhuman animal occur in The
Temple of My Familiar and ―Am I Blue?‖ The term ―familiar‖ in Walker is most
commonly used to refer to the demonization of women and animals, the anti-Christian
witch with her black cat. The black cat is reminiscent of the historical tendency to
identify the nonhuman other as transcendental, in this case, a negative determination.
Already, the nonhuman animal cat does not have a soul, as defined biblically. The black
cat, as the confidant of the witch, carries an unfortunate dark ma gic component, thus
demonized remaining to this day a living cultural superstition. In reference to the black
cat as a ―familiar,‖ Erickson argues, ―Part of Walker‘s revisioning of women and women
of color is renaming those who were also maligned along with women: nature and
animals.‖ (Erickson 68). While there is a real concern from Walker about the lives of
nonhuman animal others, Walker‘s literary texts do not explore the existential condition
of nonhuman animal life. They argue toward a spiritual uni ty with animals and nature, a
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relationship through which nature can teach humans to exist as a part in the whole of the
spiritual earth.
Similarly, in ―Am I Blue?‖, Walker tells the story of the lonely white horse and
her realization that the treatment of all oppressed peoples reflects the violence against
nonhuman animals. In fact, Walker, not unlike Coetzee, is considered an animal activist
in that her texts raise the issue of eating meat. Yet as Erickson correctly points out,
―animals in The Temple of My Familiar serve as the trope for Walker‘s Edenic vision of a
woman-centered existence and identity‖ (Erickson 58). Thus, while Walker‘s texts, like
almost all literary texts discussed thus far including Melville, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf,
Faulkner, and Hemingway, sympathize with animals, very few of them move outside of
the nonhuman animals function as a literary tool for the larger purpose of human
freedom.
Disgrace
I will begin the comparative analysis portion of this chapter with David Lurie‘s
ontological disruption, as it arises through the nonhuman animal gaze. David‘s predatory
gaze begins with relations between women such as Soraya, Melanie, and Bev. Yet his
ontological disruption occurs when confronted with the nonhuman animal gaze during his
experiences in the animal shelter. The following section will demonstrate why the animal
encounters in Disgrace, along with several other animal encounters in Coetzee‘s fiction,
deserve attention outside of human-to-human studies.
Beginning with his interaction with the prostitute, Soraya, David‘s gaze appears
animalistic. His gaze contains the power of a predator when in an instant, David and
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Soraya‘s eyes meet and ―everything changes‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace 6). From the moment
they see each other in public, their private meetings end. The reader then learns of
David‘s gaze and its past sexual power: ―one day it all ended. Without warning his
powers fled. Glances that would once have responded to his slid over, past, through him.
Overnight he became a ghost. If he wanted a woman he had to learn to pursue her; o ften,
in one way or another, to buy her‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace 7). His sexual power gone, David
finds other ways of utilizing his social forms of power. When approaching his student,
Melanie, in the gardens on campus, he wonders, ―[d]oes she know he has an eye on her?
Probably. Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze‖ (Coetzee,
Disgrace 12). Coetzee uses the language of predator and prey: ―[s]tepping out in the
forest where the wild wolf prowls‖ (Disgrace 168). Finally, David‘s relationship with
Bev plays similar sexual power games. However, these relationships between women and
the protagonist must be considered in their own right, for, most importantly, David‘s
transformation, the climax of the novel, occurs when faced with the nonhuman animal
gaze, not the gaze of the human other.
Jopi Nyman, a postcolonial critic, identifies Melanie‘s connection with the
animal, along with other human-animal relations in Coetzee, as ways in which the author
―interrogate[s] the categories of centre and periphery‖ (Nyman 140). In an aim toward
proving the issues of race through the literary trope of animals, Nyman claims that
Disgrace successfully uses Melanie and David as human-animal hybrids; their
relationship ―emphasizes the crisis of Eurocentric modernity and questions its privileged
models of subjectivity‖ (Nyman 138). While the characters are hybrids, the previous
section on Coetzee‘s philosophy of the animal should show that he is deeply and
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seriously interested in the existential status of nonhuman animals as well. When
recognizing that power can play a role in human-human, human-animal, animal-animal
relations, the power relations between David and women functions differently than his
relations with animals. According to Nyman, their characters work to ―reconstruct the
dominant colonialist perception of being and space‖ (Nyman144). In perceiving David
and Melanie‘s relationship as colonial, and a way for Coetzee to exercise human
structures, we risk eliminating the existential animal-in-itself altogether. In the end of the
novel, when Lucy decides to re-construct the boundaries of living in South Africa, she
says that it will be like being a dog. Nyman interprets Lucy‘s new identity as ―Coetzee‘s
animal representation [as] a critique of Cartesian exceptionalism and its strong polarities‖
(Nyman 145). The relations between David and the nonhuman animal other can be seen
when compared to his relations with Soraya, Melanie, and Bev. First and foremost, with
the women, David‘s predatory gaze is directed toward the woman other. In this
intentional gaze lies the power structure of sexuality. Similarly, in Waiting for the
Barbarians the Magistarate‘s relationship with the barbarian woman is misunderstood as
paralleled with that of animals. With her associations with animals both symbolic and
real, the reader groups the woman and animal together; however, the Magistarate‘s
postcolonial power over women in the novel does not justify the magistrate‘s relations
with animals or the barbarian woman‘s relations with animals, a reading only furthering
human affairs. Playing with the boundaries of animals and humans in terms of animal-ashuman-subject or conversely human-as-animal-subject has been practiced in literature
from Melville to Coetzee. The difference in Coetzee‘s treatment goes back to the
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metaphysics of subjectivity, only rather than anthropomorphizing, Coetzee turns to
disempowerment.
Before the protagonist‘s change in perception, Coetzee positions David as
existentially indifferent, unlike the animal activist antagonists, Bev Shaw and Lucy.
Early on, David apologizes to his daughter for his lack of interest in animals:
―I‘m sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the
subject. It‘s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animalwelfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so
cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do
some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace 73)
Coetzee similarly creates a character transformation from the Magistrate in Waiting for
the Barbarians with the protagonist beginning the story as a ―passive, nonjudgemental
figure content to let things drift until forced…‖ (79) only to become transformed through
an understanding of the other.
Apprehensively, David soon thereafter begins his work at the shelter. David is
―thrown‖ into a lived encounter with Bev and the dog when he immediately assists Bev
with lancing an abscess from a dog: ―he grasps it as it scrabbles to get off the table; for a
moment its eyes, full of rage and fear, glare into his‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace 81).44 The gaze
now takes the shape of being directed toward David; the dog peers toward him, only this
gaze is not one of sexual power, rather the dog‘s gaze intends in the form of ―rage‖ and
―fear.‖ And, importantly, David is powerless in the face of the gaze.
One might note the difference in the animal encounter here compared to that of
Lawrence and Faulkner. In Lawrence, whether between March and the fox or St. Mawr
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and Lou, the romantic notions of the wild animal have changed. While Lawrence and
Faulkner dream of the wild and mysterious animal being with its transcending nature,
Coetzee‘s characters are activists living in conditions which do not allow for such
romanticization of animals. The lives of animals has changed. For Coetzee, they now face
death and suffering as the human watches with a sense of powerlessness, for his own
social status and sexual status do not play a role in this encounter. Just as Heidegger and
Sartre‘s theories of being and vision require an extension to the nonhuman animal being,
so too do the postmodern readings require consideration of animal being. As the
existentialists tried to express the modern crisis of their time, Coetzee attempts to convey
his translation of this crisis of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century human
condition, which now extends to the animal condition.
Responding appropriately to the Heideggerian notion of being ―thrown‖ into the
suffering of this animal being, Bev tells her new assistant to respond by ―[thinking]
comforting thoughts, think strong thoughts. They can smell what you are thinking‘
(Coetzee, Disgrace 81). This is a key moment in that Coetzee lays open the major issues
that animal being tackles today: that of animal consciousness, animal language, animal
awareness of death, and animal ethics. First, David is existentially ―thrown‖ into this
particular world and ethical choices immediately arise (indifference becomes a choice,
not a neutral position); two, a dog‘s superior ability to smell returns to the question of
defining the nonhuman and human, disrupting David‘s hierarchal perception; and three,
Coetzee uses this moment later in the text to show David‘s movement from disbelief to
belief in Bev‘s perception. The suggested ability to smell thoughts, the animal question at
hand, indicates a sense known to bodily, (not rational) being, leading to a consciousness
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connected to the body. One should note that the emphasis during this encounter between
David and the dog is not on scientific approaches to animal behavior, but, as Elizabeth
Costello argues, the approach of the poet is necessary in interpreting animals. In the clinic
and on the farm, it is these very physical (not scientific) and intuitive (not rational)
experiences with animals that will change David‘s perception of animal being.
Coetzee continues to expose the major theories surrounding animal being by
moving on to the topic of the soul. As he does so, we also begin to see emerging
Coetzee‘s own theory of the nonhuman animal. In response to Bev‘s statement on
thinking strong and comforting thoughts, David ponders: ―They can smell what you are
thinking: what nonsense!‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace 81). Bev then compliments his ability to
work with animals, asking if David likes animals. Again, his aloof response dramatizes
the later climactic transformation from indifference to shame. He says, ―Do I like
animals? I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them.‘‖ David then
supports his stance based on the dominant religious cultural perspective of animals: ―[t]he
Church Fathers had a long debate about them and decided they don‘t have proper souls,
he observes. ‗Their souls are tied to their bodies and die with them.‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace
79) Bev, according to David, stands outside of this rationalization; he sees Bev as ―not a
veterinarian but a priestess, full of New Age mumbo jumbo, trying, absurdly, to lighten
the load of Africa‘s suffering beasts. Lucy thought he would find her interesting. But
Lucy is wrong. Interesting is not the word‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace 84).
Coetzee‘s understanding of the nonhuman animal goes back to a term used in The
Lives of Animals, the ―sympathetic imagination.‖ As Elizabeth describes, the sympathetic
imagination occurs through a ―feeling act,‖ and thus, through the body of humans,
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nonhumans, and the world in which they are presently situated. The current condition of
our being-in-the-world on historical and political terms, according to Coetzee, involves a
continuance of the modern loss of the animal. 45 Today, Faulkner‘s loss of environment
translates into the environmental crisis of global warming.
Coetzee‘s scene from Diary of a Bad Year demonstrates the current human and
nonhuman animal condition: Bella Saunders brings water out to the frogs who suffer
from the thermometer continuously rising. Thus, just as the Saundra attempts to make the
frog‘s destiny less painful, Bev‘s main duty at the shelter involves making the dog‘s last
moments before euthanasia as comforting as possible. A repeated scene in David‘s
memories as he works through his realizations of the nonhuman animal condition,
Coetzee describes the last moments of the dog‘s life during which Bev provides the most
attentive and loving care. The emphasis then, as Tremaine notes, is on nurturing them
due to the nonhuman animal anticipation of death. Indicators of their awareness consist
of that which only those who are immediately and spatially present could experience:
They flatten their ears, they droop their tails, as if they too feel the
disgrace of dying; locking their legs, they have to be pulled or pushed or
carried over the threshold. On the table some snap wildly left and right,
some whine plaintively; none will look straight at the needle in Bev‘s
hand, which they somehow know is going to harm them terribly. Worst
are those that sniff him and try to lick his hand. He has never liked being
licked, and his first impulse is to pull away. Why pretend to be a chum
when in fact one is a murderer? But then he relents. Why should a creature
with the shadow of death upon it feel hi m flinch away as if its touch were
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abhorrent? So he lets them lick him, if they want to, just as Bev Shaw
strokes them and kisses them if they will let her. He is not, he hopes, a
sentimentalist. (143)
Coetzee‘s use of ―as if‖ relays an interpretation of the dog‘s directed consciousness
toward David. This environment works against Cartesian binaries in that David‘s
experience engages in a multiplicity of shifting horizons shared by the beings existing in
this environment. Although Nyman recognizes the effec ts of such binaries on human to
human perception, Monica Langer recognizes the lack of ontological examination on the
subject of the animal.46 The western worldview, she argues, ―dichotomizes reality,
denies reciprocity, [and] declares the nonhuman realm devoid of meaning‖ (Langer 120).
For Langer, when we refer to an ―environmental crisis,‖ we are not ―in‖ the crisis; instead
we are the crisis itself. Political and ethical movements functioning inside these
dichotomized worlds cannot succeed without a radical change in ontology which
questions our most basic views on the categories of being.
In her essay on ―Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology,‖ Langer calls attention to our
current view of the nonhuman animal via the term ―environment.‖ In her ―ecophenomenological‖ essay, Langer argues that the linguistic term environment causes a
problematic perception of ―worldliness.‖
[T]he very use of the term ‗environment‘ and its derivatives is
counterproductive; as is environmentalists‘ recourse to what we might call
co-opted ecology, their problem-solving approach, and their appeal for an
environmental ethics [. . . .] The term signifies something surrounding,
surrounding objects, surroundings. It connotes physical thing rather than a
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‗network of relationships‘ and frequently invites images of so-called
natural scenery. (118)
For Langer, thinking of the environment as things surrounding humans returns us to a
―dominant Cartesian scientific paradigm‖ that reverses recent progressive relational
conceptions of nature and nonhuman beings (119). In an attempt to ―eliminate [the]
fact/value split‖ (120), she proposes a distinction between ―deep‖ and ―shallow‖
ecology: ―deep‖ referring to the preferable ―ever questioning‖ perception of the world
and ―shallow‖ to the divided self and being. Her proposed ―deep‖ ecology stems from
Merleau-Ponty‘s philosophy of the body. The role of horizon should remind the reader
of that which took place in both Lawrence and Faulkner: horizon stems from Husserl‘s
concept of intentionality in which every object is situated among a world horizon. For
example, if I am looking at a tree, the tree also sits near a stream, etc. When one is
conscious of an object, one is also conscious of the object‘s background or
surroundings. In Faulkner, Ike‘s being, when accompanied by the bear‘s being (or
gaze) creates the possibility for a new altered sense of motion, space, and time.
In the clinic, David, Bev, and the dog‘s movements constitute worlds shared
among them. Because David carries the dogs to the table, he now experiences them
physically: ―[t]hey flatten their ears, […] droop their tails,‖ ―[lock] their legs,‖ ―snap
wildly,‖ ―whine,‖ ―look,‖ ―sniff‖ and ―lick.‖ Merleau-Ponty describes spatiality and
bodily movement: ―[e]ach voluntary movement takes place in a setting, against a
background which is determined by the movement itself…[w]e perform our movements
in a space which is not ‗empty‘ or unrelated to them, but which on the contrary, bears a
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highly determinate relation to them‖ (Phenomenology of Perception 138). Leaving the
clinic, we see David working through this level of engagement.
He had thought he would get used to it. But that is not what happens. The
more killings he assists in, the more jittery he gets. One Saturday evening,
driving home in Lucy‘s kombi, he actually has to stop at the roadside to
recover himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands
shake. He does not understand what is happening to him. Until now he has
been more or less indifferent to animals. Although in an abstract way he
disapproves of cruelty, he cannot tell whether by nature he is cruel or kind.
He is simply nothing. He assumes that people from whom cruelty is
demanded in the line of duty, people who work in slaughterhouses, for
instance, grow carapaces over their souls. Habit hardens: it must be so in
most cases, but it does not seem to be so in his. He does not seem to have
the gift of hardness. His whole being is gripped by what happens in the
theatre. He is convinced the dogs know their time has come. Despite the
silence and the painlessness of the procedure, despite the good thoughts
Bev Shaw thinks and that he tries to think, despite the airtight bags in
which they tie the newmade corpses, the dogs in the yard smell what is
going on inside. (143)
David‘s rational thoughts do not parallel his lived experiences of the event: David
―thinks‖ in an ―abstract way‖ according to theoretical rationalizations; however, what
goes on in the clinic is no longer ―empty‖ but instead ―his whole being is gripped by what
128
happens in the theatre.‖ As Merleau-Ponty claims, the space through which David and
the dogs engage ―bears a highly determinate relation to them.‖
Bev‘s actions with the animals affect David as well, for he often recalls her tactile
engagement with them. He remembers her ―nuzzling the old billy-goat with the ravaged
testicles, stroking him, comforting him, entering into his life. How does she get it right,
this communion with animals? Some trick he does not have. One has to be a certain kind
of person, perhaps, with fewer complications‖ (126). Rather than assist the animals from
a scientific perspective, such as that described by Elizabeth in The Lives of Animals,
Bev‘s actions toward the goat are described as ―entering into his life.‖ She enters a
―communion with animals,‖ which David finds mysterious. A careful look at Coetzee‘s
language as Bev interacts with animals will show how the communion occurs.
She kneels down again beside the goat, nuzzles his throat, stroking the
throat upward with her own hair. The goat trembles but is still…She is
whispering. ‗What do you say, my friend?‘ he hears her say. ‗What do you
say? Is it enough?‘
The goat stands stock still as if hypnotized. Bev Shaw continues to stroke
him with her hand. She seems to have lapsed into a trance of her own. (83)
Bev then offers to put the goat down, but the owner wants to kill the goat on her own.
Although Bev tries to hide her tone, she speaks ―the accents of defeat. The goat hears
them too: he kicks against the strap, bucking and plunging, the obscene bulge quivering
behind him. The woman drags the strap loose, casts it aside. Then they are gone.‖
(Coetzee, Disgrace 83) Bev‘s actions enter the goat‘s world in proximity through her
gestures of ―kneeling,‖ ―nuzzling,‖ ―stroking.‖ Her actions are then met by the goat‘s
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reactions to her touch; the goat responds with fear ―trembling‖ yet he manages to remain
―still.‖ Coetzee informs us of their reciprocity, their shared world, as the goat ―hears her‖
whispers. The two have ―lapsed into a trance‖ (Disgrace 83) The goat not only hears
Bev‘s whispers, but he captures a form of knowing in his awareness of the ―accents of
defeat‖ responding appropriately with ―kicks,‖ ―bucking,‖ ―plunging,‖ and ―quivering.‖
Now sure of animal awareness of death, David develops meaning not from language and
thought, but from the kind of ontological knowing seen in Lawrence and Faulkner, one
which is based in a bodily dialectic for which we do not seem to have language to
express.
One might recall the similar state of being between the fox and March in Chapter
Two on Lawrence. March is described as, ―half watching, half musing… Her eyes were
keen and observant, but her inner mind took no notice of what she saw. She was always
lapsing into this odd, rapt state, her mouth rather screwed up. It was a question whether
she was there, actually conscious present, or not‖ (Lawrence, ―The Fox‖ 88). First,
Lawrence and Coetzee both use the term ―lapsed‖ to describe the way in which the
characters enter an altered state of being. Lawrence‘s language indicates March‘s state as
there and not there, a kind of trance, a way of being present and absent at once. In
Chapter Two, I explained this state as Heideggerean in that a form of ontological
knowing forms, one which shared the world with otherness, in Heidegger‘s words, a
being-in-the-world. For Bev, unlike March, her experience is even more readily
described in terms of her bodily experience with less focus on the act of seeing. Bev,
unlike March, is able to stroke the goat; whereas, due to the fox‘s wildness, March could
only stroke the fox with her hand when it was dead near the end of the story. In the case
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of St. Mawr and here in Disgrace, the animal encounters enable more tactile engagement
due to animal domesticity.
David Abram connects the phenomenology of the body to animals and nature. 47
As an ecologist and philosopher, Abram begins his argument for a sensual ecology by
recalling the ―profound tension‖ brought about by Darwin‘s Origin of Species and The
Descent of Man. Evolutionary thought disrupted the ―anthropocentric trajectory of
European philosophy and science‖ by making animals our distant ancestors (Abram,
The Spell of the Sensuous 78). However, Abram argues, scientists‘ stubborn view of
the human as hierarchal creates dependence on language as an exclusively human
phenomenon. This view continues, ―by conceiving language as a purely abstract
phenomenon [. . .] by overlooking the sensuous, evocative dimension of human
discourse, and attending solely to the denotative and conventional aspect of verbal
communication, can we hold ourselves apart from, and outside of, the rest of animate
nature‖ (Abram 79). Rather than focusing on human language, Abram agrees with
Merleau-Ponty‘s conception of the body as the focal point of being thus opening
existence to animals and nonhumans.
While David entered a shared world between animals and Bev when working in
the clinic, he later re-creates a shared human-animal world without Bev. As he ponders
the slaughter of the sheep, David remembers Bev‘s gentle treatment of the goat: ―He
recalls the goat in the clinic, wonders whether, submitting to her hands, it felt the same
peacefulness‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace 106) Petrus tied the sheep to a tree in the sun before
slaughtering them for his party. David asks Petrus to let them graze in comfort until their
time of death. Petrus does nothing. David then ponders the lives of the twin sheep:
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Twins, in all likelihood, destined since birth for the butcher‘s knife. Well,
nothing remarkable in that. When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do
not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every
last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and
fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no
one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in
the dark, bitter gall, hiding. (123-4)
After contemplating Descartes overlooking the gall bladder as the container of an animal
soul, David takes a position rather opposite of his initial indifference concerning animal
life. He and Lucy discuss the sheep:
‗I‘m not sure I like the way he does things—bringing the slaughter-beasts
home to acquaint them with the people who are going to eat them.‘
‗What would you prefer? That the slaughtering be done in an abattoir, so
that you needn‘t think about it?‘
‗Yes.‘
‗Wake up, David. This is the country. This is Africa.‘ (124)
David now sees that which remained invisible to him before his experiences in the clinic.
He has experienced something in animal being that does not agree with his perception of
animal life. David‘s encounter with the sheep returns to the ―sympathetic imagination.‖
David becomes critical of the very stance previously held: that of existential indifference
toward animals. While not intellectually aware of the ―bond‖ between them, a new world
of meaning opens. David says,
132
A bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the two
Persians, he does not know how. The bond is not one of affection. It is not
even a bond with these two in particular, whom he could not pick out from
a mob in a field. Nevertheless, suddenly and without reason, their lot has
become important to him.
He stands before them, under the sun, waiting for the buzz in his mind to
settle, waiting for a sign.
There is a fly trying to creep into the ear of one of them. The ear twitches.
The fly takes off, circles, returns, settles. The ear twitches again.
He takes a step forward. The sheep backs away uneasily to the limit of its
chain. (Disgrace 126)
He finally concludes, ―Do I have to change [. . . .] Do I have to become
like Bev Shaw?‖ (Coetzee, Disgrace 127)
Donovan argues that this scene between David and the sheep is meant to ―particularize
the otherwise abstract mechanized slaughter of millions of animal companions that
happens every day in animal shelters worldwide, just as Coetzee‘s particularizing of the
sheep dramatizes individual cases of the otherwise routinely accepted mass daily
slaughter of farm animals‖ (88). We must acknowledge that the dogs at the shelter differ
from the animals seen in Lawrence and Faulkner in that these dogs are being put to death
not for the game of hunting and not in order for the human to survive as an animal but
because there is simply no place for them. The focus, as Donovan says, still remains on
the singular and immediate experience of the nonhuman animal other. With these sheep,
David exists in a world that is not his, but shared by him. He ―stands before them.‖ They
133
do not stand before him. Reminiscent of the trance of being-in-the-world like that of
March, Ike, and Bev, the world seems to change from for-him to with-him. He notices
the miniscule fly and its subtle movements of taking off, circling, returning, and settling.
The sheep‘s movements respond to its own foreground and background. David is aware
of the sheep‘s world: the fly, the twitching ear, the sun, the sheep‘s limitation in
movement. While this scene may read like a traditional natural landscape in literature, it
is quite different than the common literary projections of the world. First and foremost,
the author steps outside of the romantic, conventional relations with animals and tries to
perceive their world from a nonhuman perspective.
David‘s response to the sheep‘s death conveys our current state of being with
animals for Coetzee. He smells the ―boiling offal‖ and knows that ―the deed has been
done, the double deed, that it is all over. Should he mourn? Is it proper to mourn the
death of beings who do not practice mourning among themselves? Looking into his heart,
he can find only a vague sadness‖ (127). At the party, ―The plate he is holding contains
two mutton chops, a baked potato, a ladle of rice swimming in gravy, a slice of pumpkin.
He finds a chair to perch on, sharing with a skinny old man with rheumy eyes. I am going
to eat this, he says to himself. I am going to eat it and ask forgiveness afterwards‖ (131).
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Conclusion
The literary texts discussed in the previous chapters show multiple major authors
attempting to recognize the actual nonhuman animal, albeit whale, bird, fox, snake, horse,
bear, cow, or dog. The events described by the authors consist of an unfamiliarity
juxtaposed with a familiarity of nonhuman animal being. Marcus Bullock, a literary
critic, identifies such human-animal encounters in literature as combined ―aesthetic‖ and
―experiential‖ ―spheres‖:
The world of appearances both moves closer to the familiar domain, to
evoke something we recognize in human experience, and at the same time
moves these appearances further away, so we understand the opening,
expanding realm of the human that must acknowledge something that is
not itself in order to find more of itself. That is, such narratives must both
anthropomorphize and resist the narrow meaning of anthropomorphism.
(Representing Animals 109)
The existential spheres of the familiar and unfamiliar arise through the Romantic animal
sublime in Moby-Dick when Ishmael calls the albatross a ―glorious thing,‖ ―mystical,‖
with the ―secret of the spell‖ (207). March and Lou are ―spellbound‖ when engaged with
the animal other. If we return for a moment to Lou‘s comments in St. Mawr as indicative
of the early twentieth century perspective of animal consciousness, we might see the
development in perception of the nonhuman animal being and its necessary tie to cultural
consciousness. Lou boldly says of horse:
It seems to me there‘s something else besides mind and cleverness, or
niceness or cleanness. Perhaps it is the ani mal. Just think of St Mawr! I‘ve
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thought so much about him. We call him an animal, but we never know
what it means. He seems so far greater mystery to me than a clever man.
He‘s a horse. Why can‘t one say in the same way, of a man: He’s a man?
There seems no mystery in being a man. But there‘s a terrible mystery in
St Mawr. (55)
Lawrence‘s once progressive view toward animal being seems outdated in that two
women characters in both ―The Fox‖ and St. Mawr are entranced by the ―terrible‖
mystery of the fox and horse. For March, the fox spurs confusion, sympathy, and disgust.
For Lou, the horse adds fear to these mixed states of being.
Lawrence, Faulkner and Coetzee express in detail this opening along with the
resistance described here by Bullock. Lawrence names Bullock‘s spheres ―dimensions,‖
whereas critics such as Michael Bell liken them to Heidegger‘s states of being-in-theworld. Acampora‘s conception of what he calls ―climate‖ focuses on human and
nonhuman animal engagement in terms of sensation and i ntuition. As an early modern
author, we see in Lawrence the pursuit of the modern question of the animal. With the
modernist perception of reality often deemed solipsistic, Lawrence‘s foresight on animal
being might offer a defense of the modern literary a uthor‘s focus on individual
consciousness and experience in that his consideration of animal being help to deanthropomorphize a modern worldview.
In moving to Faulkners‘ cultural setting of the American south, a location doubly
problematic in its historical objectification of animals and consequent severe historic loss
of habitat, Faulkner responds with sympathy by viewing the animals and land as actively
engaged in the world. ―The Bear‖ focuses on an intending, directed nonhuman
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consciousness and in doing so, human characters‘ engagement with animals re-directs the
traditional view toward animal being by returning the animal gaze. This existential
perception of the animal causes a focus on the individual state of animal being and also,
as seen in Lawrence, a re-consideration of the given human worldview. With space and
time altered, the ―climate‖ or ―dialogical principle‖ changes for both beings engaged in
the event. Faulkner transforms the hunted print of the bear from Hemingway‘s classic
chase through Ike‘s experiential understanding of the bear. Faulkner‘s animals reveal
themselves as subjects when obtaining a directed consciousness. Coinciding with Sartre,
―The Other‘s look makes me be beyond my being in this world and puts me in the midst
of the world which is at once this world and beyond this world‖ (Being and Nothingness
261). By ―beyond this world‖ Sartre, as an existentialist is not referring to any particular
world; instead, it is that which is merely unknown. In such a reading, the animal look
remains undefined and therefore accepted as a shared, ontological structure of being.
By the late twentieth-century, the early environmental consciousness seen rising
in Faulkner has now reached a level of clarity in Coetzee. And now the question of the
animal incites the human choice of what to do with this cultivated level of awareness. We
can no longer, as humans, shroud ourselves in the history of the philosophy of the animal.
Coetzee‘s texts most clearly represent the current state of human perception toward
animal being and the urgency of the predicament. His texts allow animals to retain the
mystery of their being and, as a twenty-first century writer, he calls attention to our
current ontological crisis as disempowered, humiliated, and shameful.
In attempting to understand the movement of the literary animal in twentiethcentury literature from symbolic to existential, I began this project with the nineteenth-
137
century shift in thinking of the animal from a fixed being to an evolving being. Previous
to Darwin, humans perceived animals as holding a permanent position strictly below
human being. Darwin‘s evolutionary theory disrupts a two thousand year long dominant
view of animals as objects. Although animals play an overwhelming role in literary texts,
and thus our cultural consciousness, their symbolic significance more often than not
functions beyond their own actual, living existence as beings in a shared world. Two
events occur to create Melville‘s depiction of the great, living whale: first, the Romantics
show an unusual degree of sympathy for nonhuman animal beings; second, the evidence
offered by the scientific community suggests validity to said sympathy. Of course, the
history of this word, sympathy, only regards compassion from human to human being.
However, because the hierarchy of being becomes disrupted by evolutionary theory,
human perception of sympathy extends to nonhuman beings. Between humans this act
remains just as impossible as it is between human and nonhuman animal beings. Human
perception of the possibility of shared experiences allows sympathy acceptance as a
cultural conception. Lawrence and Faulkner describe characters who engage with animals
through in their words, a ―tangle‖ of existence or a ―conflict of the heart.‖ Melville,
Lawrence, and Faulkner grapple with their experience of animals because their cultural
living conditions conflict with their incommunicable engagement with animals.
In reviewing these lived moments of engagement described between characters
such as March and the fox, Ike and the bear, or David and a dog, the bodily event
between the two beings triggered by alterity exposes a disconnect. By the end of the
twenty-first century, Coetzee, armed with animal rights theory and global warming,
confronts the same existential dilemma seen in literary authors since Melville. For
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Coetzee, the body-conscious realization ignites not transcendence (Cowper), a ―wall‖
(Melville), fear (Lawrence), nor conflict (Faulkner) but an urgency to act.
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Notes
1
See Animal Rites (133).
2
See Derrida‘s various lectures on animal being, J.M. Coetzee‘s The Lives of
Animals, Peter Singer‘s Animal Liberation, and PETA‘s controversial advertisements.
3
Gary Steiner‘s Anthropocentricism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of
Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (2005) outlines the animal in philosophy
from Homeric Greece until the twentieth-century. His book is unique in that it both tracks
those major anthropocentric voices alongside less recognized arguments of dissent.
4
See The Animal Ethics Reader edited by Armstrong and Botzler.
5
One of a handful of key texts to re-examine the animal in progressive yet
phenomenological terms, Animal Others (1999) edited by Peter Steeves is a collection of
critical and creative essays incorporating thinkers such as Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche,
Derrida, and Merleau-Ponty. In the foreward, Tom Regan calls the book the first ―volume
where the tools of philosophy fashioned on the continent are used to explore the contours
of our knowledge of, and encounters with, other than human animals‖ (xiii).
6
A continental philosophy scholar, Monika Langer, provides a Nietzschean
reading of animals.
7
Akira Lippit, author of Electric Animal, is one of the few modern critics to take
an interest in animal being in twentieth-century texts. His introduction of Electric Animal
includes an acknowledgement of the importance of a phenomenological reading of the
modern animal in film and literature.
8
Mary Scholtmeijer.
9
From ―Writing and Painting: Moby Dick‖ Selected Essays.
140
10
From ―Writing and Painting: Whitman‖ Selected Essays. Written 1917-18,
Rewritten 1922-3. Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923.
11
The most comprehensive study on Lawrence and ontology is Michael Bell‘s
D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being in which Bell argues that the author‘s language
concerning narrative and theme connect in a way that shows his philosophical
development from symbolic to ontological.
12
Defining Heidegger‘s terms remains difficult, as the philosopher is known for
his abstract language. For the most straight-forward interpretation of Heidegger‘s
conception of ―being-in-the-world,‖ see Hubert Dreyfus‘s Being-in-the-World: A
Commentary on Heidegger‘s Being and Time. For the purposes of this study, in
Heidegger‘s Dasein, translated as ―being there,‖ we see neither a subject nor an object of
being but rather a being with an ―openness‖ to the being of other beings. Heidegger‘s
careful description of Dasein shows his rejection of the subject-object dualism. Thus
Heidegger looks to being-in-the-world (an ontological project- ―to be‖) rather than the
Husserlian consciousness-of-the-world (an epistemological project- ―to know‖).
13
Andrea Kenkmann applies Heidegger‘s talks on animals from one of his
lectures, ―Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik‖ to Being and Time. She does so because
Heidegger does not directly apply his ideas in Being and Time to his talks on animal
existence. One can assume that this application was not conducted by Heidegger himself
or his contemporaries due to past cultural and scientific perception of animal being.
14
See McNeill, William. ―Life Beyond the Organism: Animal Being in
Heidegger‘s Freiburg Lectures, 1929-30‖ Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and
141
Animal Life. Ed. H.Peter Steeves. Albany: State University of New York Press,1999.197248.
15
A few semiotic readings of animals discuss the sign systems seen in Joyce‘s
nonhuman objects and animals. The most noteworthy include ―‗Signs on a White Field‘:
Semiotics and Forgery in the ‗Proteus‘ Chapter of Ulysses‖ by Murray MacArthur and ―I
Have Been A Perfect Pig‖: A Semeosis of Swine in ‗Circe‘‖ by Eric Smith.
16
See ―Bodily Being and Animal World‖ by Ralph Acampora. Acampora is
referring to an article written by Watsuji Tetsuro.
17
―What is it Like to be a Bat?‖ by Thomas Nagel.
18
See Faulkner‘s acceptance speech of the Nobel prize in 1950. ―[. . . ] the young
man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict
with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about,
worth the agony and the sweat.‖
19
See Flanagan‘s ―The Mythic Background of Faulkner‘s Horse Imagery.‖
Folklore Studies in Honor of Arthur Palmer Hudson. Erik Dal. The Journal of American
Folklore, Vol. 81, No. 319 (Jan. - Mar., 1968)
20
In Absalom! Absalom!, Flanagan notes, ―Thomas Sutpen is a man-horse-demon
abrupting out of a thurderclap. Wither he sits ‗immobile,‘ bearded and hand ‗palmlifted‘
quietly directing his slaves and his captive architect in the building of his wilderness
mansion, or whether his is the Confederate officer astride his stallion, he is a magnified
figure deriving power and influence from his equestrian position. Rosa tells Quintin
Compson of Sutpen‘s appearance ‗on that gaunt and jaded horse on which he did not
seem to sit but rather seemed to project himself like a mirage,‘‖ Here the image of the
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horse and rider remains ―It is mounted man who lingers in the memory and the mounted
man is as often mythical as human‖ (143). In Sartoris, ―The mule is pariah and celibate,
misanthropic and misunderstood, a performer of alien acts in alien surroundings—yet he
is strong, courageous, meek. Like a Negro who generally drives him he is durable, and
again like the Negro—as Faulkner was never unwilling to assert—he will survive‖ (140)
In As I Lay Dying the steed for Jewel symbolizes something ―personal and private‖
(140).
21
In her article on ―Faulkner‘s ‗Spotted Horses,‘‖ J. Rea argues that Faulkner‘s
horses represent the theme of the story: a man‘s love for poetry.
22
―in‗Spotted Horses,‘ Scribner‘s June 1931; in ‗Centaur in Brass,‘ American
Mercury, February 1932; in The Hamlet, 1940; in Go Down Moses, 1942; in The Town,
1950; and in a talk to the English Club at the University of Virginia in 1957. In all the
stories there are the same Texas ponies, the same barbed wire, the same shelled corn, the
same little boy, and the same dead-end street that the horse runs into. (Rea 158)
23
See ―On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Works of Faulkner‖ (1966) by
Jean-Paul Sartre.
24
Sartre‘s philosophy remains bound to Husserl‘s premise of intentional being, as
Sartre says in Being and Nothingness, ―To be sure, as Husserl has shown the ontological
structure of ‗my‘ world demands that it be also a world for others‖ (272). Again, while
Husserl here refers to the intentional mind of others, he is referring to humans; however, I
will pursue Husserl and Sartre‘s theories of the look with an acceptance of animal
consciousness (albeit different than human consciousness, I move forward with the
assumption that the reader accepts some form of animal consciousness and being, which,
143
as I have already argued in the introduction, our cultural and scientific community also
accepts).
25
This quote is taken from Wolfe‘s introduction, and, I should note that while
Wolfe here acknowledges phenomenology as a way to examine the nonhuman being, his
focus is on language and postmodern theory.
26
By ―transcendental,‖ I mean the term in the Kantian sense, i.e. that which
transcends the human experience, but, at the same time, does not transcend all beings but
god.
27
In ―Hemingway, Faulkner, and ‗The Bear‘‖ Howell argues that ―visions of
courage‖ in Hemingway and Faulkner is the ―illuminating difference‖ between the two
authors (Howell 116). In his analysis, he sometimes turns to the authors‘ use of animals
to prove that Faulkner is more concerned with morality.
28
In Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist
Theory, Wolfe‘s chapter, ―Aficionados and Friend Killers: Rearticulating Race and
Gender via Species in Hemingway‖ focuses on Hemmingway‘s symbolic language.
29
One such article includes Breaden‘s ―Faulkner and the Land,‖ which discusses
how natural law and natural rights play a part in Faulkner‘s texts. Much like the ―question
of the animal,‖ Breaden addresses the ―land question‖ (273), a great philosophical
question concerning the being and ethics of land and humans. Breaden says of
Faulkner‘s ―The Bear,‖ ―…and from his realism and his rhetoric, from his depth and his
profundity, there evolves in his work a philosophy or a concept of land, its ownership and
its fundamental character that is brilliant and humanitarian in its vastness of scope and its
depth of understanding‖ (Breaden 273).
144
30
In ―Nature Myth in Faulkner‘s ‗The Bear,‘‖ Lyndenberg argues that Faulkner‘s
texts are mythical in their larger than human characters and ―mythical kingdom of
Yoknapatawpha‖ (Lydenberg 63). While I agree this symbolic aspect of the text exists,
to say that ―The Bear‖ relies upon the mythical component seems unlikely. Rather, the
more modern and provocative interpretation of the mythical bear involves the existential
animal as it exists in the world with humans.
31
I am using the term, ―the look‖ because I will draw upon Sartre‘s terminology.
What I mean to express is looking as an act. One might then think of critical conceptions
of the gaze or Foucault‘s panopticon; such versions of the look incorporate more than the
mere invisible line of perspective like a beam of light directed from one subject to an
object. Instead, I mean to discuss ―the look‖ as the Hegelian philosophical concept
involving the entire body and being-in-the-world.
32
―The Bear‖ and Go Down Moses criticize man‘s disrespect of nature, which is
indicated in the following passage: ―It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and
older than any recorded document: -- of white man fatuous enough to believe he had
bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it
had been his to convey…‖ (183).
33
Mistichelli, William J. ―Perception is a Sacred Cow: The Narrator and Ike
Snopes in Faulkner‘s The Hamlet‖ (1990).
34
A Husserlian term, ―the natural attitude‖ is our perception of the world that
contains our presuppositions. As part of the phenomenological reduction, Husserl claims
that we should ―bracket‖ this natural attitude in order to see world more clearly.
35
See Powers‘ text, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Comedy (1980).
145
36
Husserl‘s term ―lifeworld‖ is used in his later writings that lean toward a
rejection of solipsism. The ―lifeworld‖ is that which is ―given,‖ meaning the world as it
exists in itself.
37
A few examples of animal references include, but are not limited to, the
following: Jody Varner‘s new clerk is described as having ―little, full, bright-pink mouth
like a kitten‘s button and his bright, quick , amoral eyes like a chipmunk and his air of
merry and incorrigible and unflagging conviction of the inherent constant active
dishonesty of all men, including himself. Jody Varner was at the scales; Ratliff craned his
turkey‘s neck…‖ (The Hamlet 177) and ―the rodent‘s face of the teacher‖ (The Hamlet
178).
38
See Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-vegetarian Critical
Theory, 1990.
39
Presumably, a reference to Nathan‘s ―What is it like to be a bat?‖
40
See Graham Huggan, "Greening" Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives
MFS Modern Fiction Studies - Volume 50, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 701-733
41
―‘Miracles of Creation‘:‖ Animals in J.M. Coetzee‘s Work‖
42
See Louis Tremaine. ―The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M.
Coetzee‖ Contemporary Literature, 2003 Winter; 44 (4): 587-612.
43
See Gary Steiner‘s Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: the Moral Status of
Animals in the History of Western Philosophy, 2005.
44
An existential term, an individual is ―thrown‖ into the world. A term used by
Heidegger, we exist in the world as ―thrown‖ due to the nature of Dasein being all at once
directed toward one‘s Being, directed toward one‘s self, directed toward others, and
146
directed toward objects. These simulataneous features of the nature of being, for
Heidegger, are also part of the fundamental states of ―care‖ and ―anxiety.‖
45
See Akira Lippit‘s Electric Animal.
46
Monica Langer, author of the Merleau-Ponty guide and articles on the animal
and phenomenology.
47
See David Abram‘s book, The Spell of the Sensuous (2001).
147
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