Chapter 18 Ethics and the non-human animal
In David Garnett's novella A Man in the Zoo (1924) a young man, as an extreme gesture in a row with his fiancée, has himself placed for weeks in a cage in the Ape House
at London Zoo. Spectators find him on display as a species between the orang-utan and the chimpanzee. In many scenes of this
novella the mere presence of the cage wires marking a strict line between the human-as-spectator and the animal-as-exhibit
produces defamilarising and disturbing effects. Take the scene in which the fiancée, Josephine, arrives among the crowd of
spectators:
At that moment he was engaged in walking up and down (which occupation, by the way, took up far more of his time than he ever suspected). But she could not speak to him; indeed she dreaded that he should see her.Back and forth he walked by the wire division, with his hands behind his back and his head bent slightly, until he reached the corner, when up went his head and he turned on his heel. His face was expressionless.1
The scene is both comic and disturbing. Normal conventions of signification are transgressed in a view of the human as animal
and of caged animal behaviour (walking up and down) as human boredom.
Such a scene may highlight the way in which most human societies depend on assumptions of a basic distinction between ‘human’
and ‘animal’. Of historical English society Keith Thomas writes, ‘consciously or unconsciously, the fundamental distinction between man and animals underlay everyone's
behaviour’.2 This remains as much a matter of daily practices of eating and language as one of theories reserving to people some characteristic
no other
Figure 14 Cage wire, woman and lynx (the author)
animal could supposedly share, whether that be reason, a soul, language, imagination or humour.
As Garnett's passage exemplifies, non-humans are not just objects of thought, they have always been used to map out constitutive
features of human culture. Some of these are obvious, for instance the use of animal names as insults (‘motorists are pigs!’). As Kate Soper writes: ‘It is as if through the semiotic use of animals we are spared the embarrassment of a more direct confrontation
with our own follies and aggression.’3 Soper also argues that derogatory references to animals help human beings sustain an image of themselves as both part of
but also above nature, as an unstable amalgam of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘merely animal’.
Animal terms seem implicated in all systemic human oppression. An association of women with the bodily has historically aligned them with the animal, even as meat-eating has often been associated with virility. Racism's
first move is usually to dissociate its object from the respect normally accorded other people, with the use of animal names as insults (‘pig’, ‘rat’, ‘dog’). However, a response that objects ‘these people are
not rats’ and so on, does not undo the force of hatred at work in the animal terms themselves. It does not confront what Cary Wolfe, following Peter Singer and others, terms ‘the institution of speciesism’ lying behind such language, manifest in ‘the ethical acceptability of the systematic, institutionalized killing
of nonhuman others’.4 The work of dissociating rats from ‘rats’, pigs from ‘pigs’, snakes from ‘snakes’, and so on (at least as understood in most
western cultures) has become one of the tasks of writers and broadcasters in natural history.
In the ‘developed’ world animals have become less and less visible in reality but more and more prominent as images. Wildlife
television documentaries have done much to awaken a general sense of the threat facing the natural world, but has this been
at the cost of transforming it into a kind of consumerist spectacle? Do they sometimes misrepresent the actual elusiveness and inaccessibility of many creatures, giving
a disproportionate amount of attention to violence and predation, becoming in fact sometimes a modern kind of bear-baiting
or cock-fighting at one remove?5 In sum, the non-human, whether sentimentalised as Bambi, bred and slaughtered for a civic or religious feast, sterilised
and then cosseted as a pet, watched on television or revered in its ‘rarity’ on some eco-tourist holiday, is caught up claustrophobically
in various kinds of human practice and self-image, and yet for all that still extraordinarily remote.
Literary texts have often drawn their power from the way distinctions of human and non-human can be unstable. The animal,
like the ghost or the good or evil spirit with which it is often associated, has been a manifestation of the uncanny, token
of either an attractive disruption of species boundaries, as in many children's stories, or a disconcerting one, as in the
horror stories of writers like H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James or in Algernon Blackwood's tales of actively malevolent wild places.6 The mere presence of a non-human animal can raise questions that engage the very definition of the human and human culture:
‘it is impossible to disentangle what the people of the past thought about plants and animals from what they thought about
themselves’.7
‘Kiss goodbye to the idea that humans are qualitatively different from other animals’8
Most recent thinking on the distinction of the human and (other) animals now finds the very terms of the debate misleading.
To pose the issue in ways that place ‘the animal’ on one side and ‘the human’ on the other, then to attempt to trace the line
of demarcation between them, already conveys the assumption of a major divide between the two, the seeming issue being only
to locate just where it lies.9 Cary Wolfe writes: ‘the humanities are…now struggling to catch up with a radical revaluation of the status of nonhuman animals that has taken place in society at large’.10
This brings us to a point made most forcefully by Derrida, that the term ‘the animal’ in the singular is already preposterous for lumping together such a diversity of living creatures. The phrase itself
bears all the weight of the crudity of the human–animal distinction. Derrida writes:
it is rather a matter of taking into account a multiplicity of heterogeneous structures and limits. Among nonhumans and separate from nonhumans there is an immense multiplicity of other living things that cannot in any way be homogenized, except by means of violence and wilful ignorance, within the category of what is called the animal or animality in general.11
Human beings could not exist but as part of a community of animals. For Haraway, ‘Human nature is an interspecies relationship’.12
Human–animal
Critical thought on the human–animal border line immediately raises fundamental, multidisciplinary issues. However, the challenge
is frequently unmanageable and seems often to be resisted, either consciously or unconsciously. For instance, if there were
as straightforward an analogy as some claim between human rights and putative animal rights, then one would expect there to be numerous literary readings equivalent to schools of interpretation elsewhere,
namely, we would have readings of classical texts highlighting in them elements of prejudice or of the systematic misrepresentation
of animal life. A demystification of the civilised sphere would take the form of demonstrating its basis in modes of food
production requiring mass servitude, imprisonment and slaughter. There would be widespread arguments that ‘the canon’ itself needs to be overhauled in view of its systematic endorsement of pastoral, hunting and religious practices
implicated in animal suffering. There would be a broad questioning of the general association of animals with ‘mere’ children's books, leading perhaps to new evaluations of books such as Williamson's Tarka the Otter (1927) or Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903). Might not even Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It find itself recategorised as an instance of ‘speciesism’, together with subgenres of writing on hunting and fishing?
However, apart from a few essays in scattered places, no literary movement with such modes of reading exists.13 Even the landmark Ecocriticism Reader of 1996 contained not one essay devoted to the issue of an animal or animals. Why is engaging with non-human creatures so
difficult?
In most canonical literary texts, the place of non-human life is both pervasive but unseen. It is simply so uncontroversial as to
make alternative readings centred on animals seem almost like a change of discipline. Any study of a text on the non-human
always becomes a study of humanity in some sense. A survey of texts in which animals appear in some symbolic guise or other
leads John Simons to conclude: ‘the human experience bulks too large and is so important to us that it tends to blot out all other
concerns whenever we encounter them’.14 At the same time, once the issue of animal exploitation is raised about a text, it immediately becomes obvious in ways that
may leave little more to say.
Surprisingly perhaps, the most fruitful readings of these issues appearing this century have not taken their crucial moves
from the arguments of thinkers in the animal rights movement such as Tom Regan, Mary Midgley or Stephen Clark, arguments that move outwards from a given understanding of the human as having certain attributes (moral worth,
capacity for suffering, sentience, etc.) to argue the implications of the fact that other creatures have them too.15 Instead, the more fruitful critical practice has derived from work that makes our very concepts of the human problematic in
the first place, as with arguments loosely associated with post-humanism. Critiques of essentialist, dogmatic and exclusive notions of the human lead necessarily to new attitudes of
respect towards those animals from which people can no longer be so confidently distinguished. More than that, it can be shown
that it is precisely in making the gesture of saying that ‘animals don't have x’ or ‘animals can't y’ that a dogmatic humanism
is sustained.
Cary Wolfe's Animal Rites (2003) is an example of such questioning. Wolfe puts ‘speciesism’ and the issue of the animal at the crux of numerous literary, philosophical and cultural debates. His detailed
readings show, skillfully and yet with an almost surprising lack of resistance, how the issue of animals disrupts even basic
methodological assumptions: ‘much of what we call cultural studies situates itself squarely, if only implicitly, on what looks
to me more and more like a fundamental repression that underlies most ethical and political discourse: repressing the question
of nonhuman subjectivity’.16 The very presence of an animal can show up the fragility of speciesism and the violence of the practices that sustain it.
A simple initial point is this: images of non-human animals in literary texts are rarely taken seriously as such. In Ernest Hemingway's novels, for example, there are numerous images of animals. Wolfe yet observes:
the discourse of species, and with it the ethical problematics of our relations to nonhuman others, continues to be treated largely as if species is always already a counter or cover for some other discourse: usually gender (Spilka, Comley and Scholes, Burwell), sometimes race (Toni Morrison) or ethnicity (Walter Benn Michaels), still more rarely, class.17
Wolfe takes up critical readings of texts or films and examples of given critical methods to show how they fail to engage
deeper assumptions about the animal–human and nature–culture divide, and thus perpetuate the cultural bases of speciesism.
Thus a psychoanalytic reading of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) is placed within the wider context of the human–animal distinction, something it merely takes for granted. Picking
up on the way references to animals structure accounts of human sexuality, Wolfe strives to prise open space for writing of
non-human species as something
other than a figure for the relation of the symbolic order to the Real, or if you like, the Oedipal subject with its drives to the body, instinct and the biological…the psychoanalytical ‘outside’ of the subject is subtended by another, even more remote outside against which psychoanalysis persists in an essentially humanist effort to secure the human…by relegating the nonhuman other to the realm of senseless matter, inert organicity, brute instinct, or at best mindless repetition and mimicry.18
Wolfe also offers a reading of a well-known attack on the environmentalist movement, Luc Ferry's The New Ecological Order (1995). Ferry had been alarmed by some of the political implications of deep ecology and by dubious appeals to ‘nature’ as
a source of values. Seeing environmentalism as an implicitly totalitarian and regressive discourse of the comfortable and
privileged, Ferry reaffirmed the stock ideals of liberal humanism. He argued that a certain freedom from natural causes, a kind of self-making and perfectibility, is definitive
for the human being alone: ‘nature is not an agent, a being able to act with the reciprocity one would expect of an alter ego. Law is always for men, and it is for men that trees or whales can become objects of a form of respect tied to legislation – not the reverse’.19 The emphasis here is Wolfe's. It highlights how Ferry's argument hinges on the preconception of the sovereignty of the human
over the non-human. This is also implicit in Ferry's understanding of ethics, which is ‘contractarian’, that is, it acknowledges
rights to others only within a reciprocal framework (an implicit contract) in which they acknowledge our rights in turn, something other animals probably cannot do. Correspondingly, within such circular conceptions, any question
of the moral standing of the non-human can only be a matter of how it relates to the human. Wolfe continues, ‘“Animals”, Ferry
argues, “have no rights…but…we do have certain indirect duties towards them”’, if only because the respect with which we treat animals reflects
on the way we view ourselves and treat each other: ‘“the most
Figure 15 Animal trails (Pavel Konovalov)
serious consequence of the cruelty and bad treatment inflicted on [animals] is that man degrades himself and loses his humanity”’.20 In other words the non-human has moral worth only as a kind of sounding board and mirror for human self-conceptions. In sum,
Ferry's arguments against environmentalism rest on a dogmatic and unexamined understanding of the human–animal opposition,
one allowing subjectivity and ethical consideration to the human alone.
Wolfe's readings are extremely sophisticated, but their sophistication lies mainly in their engagement with the ‘humanist’ assumptions
at work in the depth structure of even the most progressive critical methodology. If the issue becomes instead one of simply
tracing the work of the human–animal divide in a primary text, the critical work involved seems less demanding. For instance,
one can take a canonical text in which animal concerns seem at first to play no part at all, say Dickens's David Copperfield, and then trace in it the fault lines of the animal–human distinction. In this case we would move from, say, consideration
of the lap dog ‘Jip’ who serves as a kind of double to David's spoilt and decoratively genteel first wife, Dora (dog and mistress
even dying at the same time), to his aunt Betsey's phobia of donkeys (and men), and the ubiquity of horses and animal imagery
and metaphors. Once removed from its customary blind spot, the place of animals in the work of human self-imaging becomes peculiarly
and even disturbingly obvious. ‘[O]nce we have seen through our self-serving, anthropocentric thinking about other animals, we are and should be left disarmed, ill-equipped to calculate our proper response.’21 However, a basic ‘speciesism’ is so fundamental and all-pervasive that it is still hard to imagine what society would be
like without it. A critic can ask ‘What would War and Peace be without horses?’, but then what?
Twelfth quandary: reading the animal as ‘construct’
Do some methods of argument dominant in the modern humanities make a crude speciesism inevitable? Take the familiar method of analysing a text by mapping out representations
– of flowers, of animals, of the landscape – in terms of how they project and negotiate the perceptions, values and interests
of specific human groups. Thus Hindu conceptions of the cow may be compared to those of Maasai in East Africa, or US hunting
culture examined through changing conceptions of the wolf. Clearly, however, animals cannot be thought of solely in this way:
cows and wolves have interests of their own that transcend their image and status within any human culture.
A specific reading may illustrate the difficulty created by animal ethics for the dominant critical method of analysing how
the cultural politics of differing human groups leads them to ‘construct’ the non-human realm in different ways. Lisa J. Kiser's ‘Chaucer and the Politics of Nature’ appears in the critical anthology Beyond Nature Writing (41–56). Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls (c. 1380), Kiser's concern, is a dream-vision poem in which the humanised and aristocratic figure ‘Lady Nature’ is pictured
presiding over the mating rituals of a host of birds of various rank. She is especially and most favourably concerned with
an aristocratic female eagle, faced by three eligible eagle suitors. Thus both the figure of Lady Nature and the birds, Kiser
observes, are necessarily ‘constructed’ according to then available codes of human aristocratic privilege. Other birds, ranked
according to their eating habits, appear in various ‘lower-class’ guises, their descriptions evidently modelled on human castes
and stereotypes of Chaucer's time. As in other Chaucer texts, the subordinate voices are critical of the roles in which others
put them. The courtly speeches of the eagle's three wooers are interrupted in various comic ways by the ‘lesser’ birds. This
brings us to the crucial point of Kiser's argument. Chaucer, she argues, is unusually aware, in using these socially derived
constructions of birds, that they are just that:
What is remarkable about Chaucer's poem, however, is that its author seems to know all about his complicity in the practice of social construction and to want to signal this knowledge to his wisest readers…Chaucer reminds us forcefully that there is indeed a nonhuman world, one that lies unrepresented in his poem, for readers to contemplate.47–9
Kiser is proposing that Chaucer's caricatures of birds invite an ironic reading, as a self-mocking rhetorical strategy:
By aggressively appropriating the nonhuman world in his representation of it, and ensuring that his readers notice this act of appropriation, Chaucer suggests that there is a natural world outside the parameters of his artistic colonization, one that has been silenced and suppressed and about which he has no authority to write.50
This leads towards the conclusion that Chaucer anticipates ‘an issue that has preoccupied modern ecological critics’, namely,
‘of the extent to which it is philosophically sound (and politically justifiable) to insist on extreme social constructivism
as the basis on which to ground one's views of the environment’ (50).
Without going on to offer an actual alternative to cultural constructivism, Kiser's essay effectively highlights the inherent
anthropocentricism of currently dominant modes of reading, the now standard assumption that all human representations are
instrumental modes of cultural ‘construction’. In fact, the only recourse for any critical essay aspiring to a non-human viewpoint
but following such assumptions would be the kind of irony Kiser claims to find in Chaucer, that is, representations that stage
their own artificiality but can say nothing about the non-human as such.22
Once again, environmental criticism seems poised on the difficult intellectual question of how to conceptualise non-human agency. As the inhabitant of undeniably real worlds, alien to us and not fully comprehensible, the animal's gaze into the
human realm may seem profoundly to shake it, refusing it the illusion of totality or of self-evidence in its modes of coherence.23