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Article Excerpt
A comparison of Coetzee's Disgrace and Gowdy's The White Bone reveals that while it is possible to generate sympathy for animal being while resisting describing animal sentience in human terms, anthropomorphism can be a valuable and sophisticated strategy for depicting animal minds.
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The gulf that separates Man Friday from Batouala may be paralleled by the gulf that will separate Kipling's wolves from their literary descendants two hundred years hence, and we shall have animals who are neither symbolic, nor little men disguised, nor as four-legged tables moving, nor as painted scraps of paper that fly. It is one of the ways where science may enlarge the novel, by giving it fresh subject matter. --EM. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
The representation of animal consciousness in literature raises moral and epistemological issues, many of which revolve around the problems posed by anthropomorphism, the projection of the characteristics of human subjectivity onto animal sentience and behaviour. Animals are a nearly continual presence in most of our lives, and yet we feel ourselves severely restricted in our ability to know and understand them. It is thus natural that writers would include them as subjects in literature, but that they are at the same time wary of creating something unreal in developing animals as characters. Not representing animals at all robs them of their subjectivity and the influence they actually have on our lives. At the other extreme, casting them as fully developed and seemingly human characters robs them of their difference from us and among one another.
This is not a new dilemma and it is not isolated to literature. The OED notes that the original meaning of the word "anthropomorphism" refers to the error of casting God in human form, and it is not until the general development of biology as a science that the term has come to identify the danger and error of casting the "lower" animals in human form--especially of ascribing to them consciousness, emotion, and intelligence. Animals have, of course, been "humanized," inspirited, or deified since the very beginning of art (as cave paintings attest), so the contemporary interdiction against assuming aspects of mind and consciousness down (or across) species is especially striking, especially since Darwin himself assumed significant similarities between human and animal consciousness in his 1872 publication, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This resistance to anthropomorphism has held remarkable power especially within the field of ethology (the study of animal behaviour) until only the past decade or so, reaching its ascendancy in a mid-twentieth-century behaviourism that assumed that all animal behaviour could be explained without any reference to consciousness or even individuality (de Waal 54-61). The sentimentality and the sympathetic imagination involved with perceiving animals as intentional, emotional, intelligent, and even self-conscious have long been regarded by science has embarrassing errors.
Indeed, anthropomorphism has historically been connected with forms of embarrassment. Traditional animal fables embarrassed readers by revealing obvious human failures; such anthropomorphism also signals embarrassment for overt symbolism. Contemporary forms of anthropomorphism are frequently taken to suggest a lack of seriousness. It is what children do, or what we do for children. Talking animals are now primarily the realm of Disney, of easy sentiment and willed escape from the affairs of humans, or even of a barely suppressed misanthropy. In literature, as Ursula Le Guin rightly notes in the introduction to her collection of stories about talking animals, anthropomorphism has largely been relegated to writing for children, which is itself relegated to the realm of the un-serious (9). Our embarrassment signals that there is something suspect about taking animals seriously.
Interestingly, Derrida takes up precisely this point in his late essay "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)." Here, he investigates the puzzle of feeling oneself naked before the gaze of a pet cat. The "question of the animal" as he puts it, is in part an acknowledgement of the moment of embarrassing personal exposure. But his question is profound: what does it mean to take the gaze of an animal seriously? Why should one feel naked before it? His embarrassment, perhaps familiar to many pet owners, is the product of a double-bind; in this specific moment we suppose both that the cat is a subject who can be said to have a gaze, who can size us up, as it were, and that it is a being who cannot recognize our nakedness, before whom we should not be embarrassed. We are embarrassed both for our nakedness, and for having over-stepped some boundary by projecting human awareness, even human taboos (of nakedness), onto the cat. The larger problem Derrida points to is in identifying the animal as a version, perhaps the constitutive version, of the other. The human-animal binary is at the centre of our cultural history and presumably at or near the centre of our collective self-consciousness. Derrida argues that philosophy has grounded itself in part by defining the human against the animal: we are the only animal who is rational, tool-making, linguistic, spiritual, forward-seeing, conscious, and so on. Thus, imagining animal consciousness is dangerous because it can undermine self-conceptions, especially of our sanctified place in the natural order of things. Imagining animal being is also pathetic or embarrassing because defining the human against the animal implies our own insufficiency.
Contemporary ethology is now beginning to embrace the likelihood that human consciousness itself has evolved from pre-existing forms, as Darwin himself suggested--that animal brains contain their own extraordinary complexities and that many animals other than humans possess degrees of intelligence and consciousness. This in turn has encouraged several ethologists to adopt anthropomorphism as a heuristic mode of investigating animal consciousness and representing their findings (Searle, Jamieson, Bekoff, de Waal). For such ethologists, terms normally reserved for features of human consciousness and behaviour may be used to describe and explain animal behaviour. They assume that such terms imply neither erroneous projection nor objective fact, but potential similarity. Indeed, these scientists argue that the interdiction against anthropomorphism is inherently speciesist, since it assumes that all qualities of mind we appear to perceive in animals are merely projections rather than similarities shared to differing degrees. Jamieson goes so far as to liken the behaviourist interdiction against anthropomorphism to a self-enforced perceptual disability, a willed suppression of perception and imagination on the part of the observer of animal behaviour (64).
It is worth asking in the light of these changing scientific perceptions of anthropomorphism, and growing acceptance of animal consciousness and individuality within ethology, how contemporary literature has reflected animal consciousness. Does an increasing interest in the animal, abetted not just by science, but also by our growing awareness of...
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