Chapter 19 Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism, the concept seems easy, even self-evident. Anthropomorphism is ‘the attribution [usually falsely] of a human form or personality
to a god, animal, or thing’ (Illustrated Oxford Dictionary). The issue has recurred at key points in this book. It related to what may be the inherently anthropocentric nature of human language, projecting as it does a world usually understood according to our own scale, dimensions, interests and desires (see
Third Quandary in Chapter 4). Alternatively, language that may seem problematically figurative or ‘merely anthropomorphic’ can also acquire provocative
value as a way of doing justice to the agency of the non-human, as in Haraway’s naming nature ‘coyote’ or even Cheney’s talk of the ‘watchfulness’ of rocks. Finally, in this last chapter the category of ‘anthropomorphism’ is considered in relation to ethical questions of
the just representation of the non-human. The issue of ‘anthropomorphism’, positioned on the hazy borderlines between human
and non-human, can become a powerful tool for questioning the complacency of dominant human self-conceptions.
As a simple example of anthropomorphism, in parts of Jack London's The Call of the Wild it remains all too obvious that the hero, the dog ‘Buck’, is essentially a compound of still human traits, for all London's
efforts. When he is new as a sledge dog and unfamiliar with snow, Buck is puzzled that the other dogs seem suddenly to disappear
when it is time to sleep – in fact they have dug themselves for shelter under the snow. Incongruously, like the surrogate
human being he really is, Buck cannot scent the other dogs, but he must wander about using his eyes to locate them: ‘To his
astonishment [his team-mates] had disappeared. Again he wandered about through the great camp, looking for them, and again
he returned. Were they in the tent? No, that could not be, else he would not have been driven out. Then where could they possibly
be?’1 The question raised by such anthropomorphism is this: how on earth can one represent an animal in ways that do justice to its own perceptions and interests? At one extreme, there
are those who maintain that any anthropomorphism is simply a category mistake, that is, to attribute pride to a dog is like
attributing colour to a mathematical equation. This view, however, only assumes in advance what ought to be at issue, an absolute
and impermeable difference between the human and the rest. So extreme a position would also delegitimise almost all references
to animal life in human speech. More reasonably, anthropomorphism could mean the undue ascription of human qualities to a
non-human animal, for example, accusing a garden snail of religious heresy. Nevertheless, this would still leave a whole range
of creatures and situations for which ‘anthropomorphism’ would need to float as a term of uncertain and perhaps undecidable
status, as in the claim that a sparrow ‘enjoys’ its dust bath.
Given that all human representations project a human measure of some sort, it soon becomes debatable where ‘anthropomorphism’
stops (as was demonstrated by controversies about the so-called ‘selfish’ gene). All human knowledge must needs be anthropomorphic in some way. Beyond that, is a question like ‘Why does
the universe exist?’ anthropomorphic, or not? It would be nice to know.
In Chapter 3 Eileen Crist's work was used to show how even seemingly trivial choices of language project totally different conceptions
of an animal's nature. Is there a simple opposite to anthropomorphism? To return to The Call of the Wild, to say that Buck ‘scented out’ his colleagues would be an improvement but would also demand a more difficult act of imagination
for the human reader, conveyed into a canine world without colour, without human language but where scents form strong and
complex messages. Then the writing would need to confront the issue of how to render a canine thought process (how plausible
is London’s ‘Then where could they possibly be?’?). Sustained writing of this kind would require subtle shifts in reference
in some words (‘high’ for a dog is not ‘high’ for a horse) and a total redefinition of others (‘delicious’ for a dog is rarely
‘delicious’ for a human being), as well as somehow addressing the question of anthropomorphism in the nature of syntax, with
its built-in models of coherence, sequencing and causation.
Crist nevertheless defends anthropomorphism as a genuine source of understanding: ‘in the hands of impeccable observers of
animals the anthropomorphic perspective deserves serious attention, for it discloses the nature of animal life with the power
and internal cohesion that real worlds possess’ (Images of Animals, 7). She believes that scientific evidence for the commonality of humans and other animals gives credit to anthropomorphism
as a
Figure 16 Animal trails (Pavel Konovalov)
pragmatic shortcut for understanding animal life. Darwin himself saw emotion and mind in both animals and humans not as secret interior states but as legibly enacted in features
and behaviour: we just recognise when bees are ‘angry’ or when a dog is ‘happy’.2 Stephen Mithen argues that with the evolution of more fluid cognitive abilities, anthropomorphic thinking in the first modern
humans led to far greater success in hunting, that projecting intentions, fears and so on on to prey helped people to anticipate
it with a success that would have seemed magical to other hominid species.3 However, to ascribe to anthropomorphic accounts ‘the power and internal cohesion that real worlds possess’ (Crist) may itself
rest on an appeal to norms of self-evident narrative coherence and continuity of sense that might not always apply. Crist's own study included the deceptive case of
the Sphex wasp, an insect whose seemingly planned actions become on analysis more akin to a set of built-in responses to stimuli.
Another issue with anthropomorphism is this. To describe a specific representation as ‘anthropomorphic’ necessarily makes
certain assumptions about what human nature itself is in the first place: for example, that certain qualities are definitively human ones, whether also then attributed to other
creatures or not. For instance, the legal tradition crucial for some advocates of animal rights is based on a set of specific
presuppositions about supposedly incontestable human properties, a norm of the rights-holding person as both rational, self-interested
and individual. This norm, however, is vulnerable to claims that it not only ‘anthropomorphises’ the non-human but also misconstrues
the human by taking a specific western, individualist image of what a person is and then identifying it with human beings in general. For Heidegger4 or for post-humanist thinkers, anthropomorphism becomes turned back on itself as the question of what a human being is.
In sum, questions of anthropomorphism in representations of the non-human open a decisive space in which several difficult
issues – about the nature of other animals, of language, of the human – intersect in fascinating, provocative and perhaps ultimately irresolvable
ways.
An art of animal interpretation
Cary Wolfe's approach is primarily to deconstruct unexamined assumptions about the human as these surreptiously govern readings
of animals in literature and film. However, a great many primary texts about animals fall outside such a remit. These are
texts in which the animal in itself is already the explicit subject. Literary studies of animal species are not uncommon and
often are very popular. Examples are Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men, John A. Baker's The Peregrine (1967), Diane Ackerman's essays in The Moon by Whale Light (1991) or Richard Mabey's Book of Nightingales (1997).5 Such books typically blend details of natural history, anecdotes about behaviour, travelogue (the writer's own quest for
the animal), interviews with naturalists, the history of various human attitudes to the creature, its cultural and religious
associations. These works of hybrid genre admit of various kinds of reading, but one element in them remains distinctive and specific. This is the practice of
a novel mode of interpretative art (an ‘animal hermeneutics’?) that attempts to shape human language to express the specific life world of another species.
Writing that attempts an imaginary identification across the species barrier forms a beguiling and under-recognised practice.
It is as if writers were taking up the supposedly impossible challenge of Thomas Nagel's famous article, ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’6 Against the increasing appropriation of animals as images in the human environment, such literature strives to do justice
to the non-human as an agent in its own right, pushing against the inherent anthropocentrism of inherited language towards a partial if always problematic overlapping of life worlds. Few projects in
the arts of language are perhaps more difficult to judge, nor is there yet much discussion of why many people find such writing
compelling, despite its seeming lack of ‘human interest’.
The challenge is that of an art of language that conveys a creature's ‘environment’ in a phenomenological or hermeneutic sense,
that is, as a field of significance or network of meaning within which a creature experiences and orients itself. Lopez, influenced
by the controversial thinking of Jakob von Uexküll,7 writes of the ‘self-world’ of an animal. Human attempts to understand an animal's world might also draw on Kalevi Kull and Peeter Torop's work on ‘biotranslation’, describing the correspondence achieved between the signs in the world of one organism with those in another, as different species of bird understand others’ alarm calls.8
One of the best considerations of the ‘what is it like to be…?’ question is by Stephen W. Laycock (‘The Animal as Animal: A Plea for Open Conceptuality’).9 The cognitive and ethical challenge here is that the quality of animal subjectivity and hence the question of anthropomorphism
are fundamentally undecidable. ‘I cannot know whether the “terror” and “suffering” exhibited by a wounded deer are authentic
expressions of an inaccessible subjectivity or my own projection’ (275). However, this undecidability is not, for Laycock,
a problem to be wished away in favour of some objective answer. The most authentic way to approach a mystery is not to seek,
vainly, to dispel it, but to become more open to its resistance and challenge:
‘What is it like…?’, the openness to alterity in its own terms, not in ours, even if this openness can only suspend itself before a voiceless enigma, is at least innocent of the substitution of metaphysics for mystery…Mystery surrounds us. It is an index to the conceptual inviolability of the animate Other.281
Laycock's argument offers a way of conceptualising and perhaps evaluating writings on animals like those of Lopez and others, this strange and largely unstudied element of literature. To take an example from Victorian ‘nature writing’,
Richard Jefferies’s essay ‘Swallow-Time’ (1889) offers a peculiar blend of personal observation, hackneyed association (‘Now
the swallows are, of all others, the summer birds’)10 and, yet, also passages of sustained prose poetry on the flight of the swallow. Jefferies offers several pages simply celebrating
the flight of a bird, with apparently no further attempt to give it significance or make some more general point relevant
to human life. The very fact that the essay ends lamely, with a sentence precisely trying to make such a connection (124),
shows how far the writing was from needing such a flat gesture of closure:
It is when they fly low, but just missing the grass, that their wonderful powers of flight appear…Imagine shooting an arrow from the strongest bow in such a way that it might travel about seven inches above the ground – how far would it go before it stuck a tall buttercup, a wiry bennet, or stick into a slight rise of the turf? You must imagine it given the power to rise over hedges, to make short angles about buildings, slip between the trunks of trees, to avoid moving objects, as men and animals, not to come in contact with other animated arrows, and by some mysterious instinct to know what is or what is not out of sight on the other side of the wall. I was sitting on a log in the narrowest of lanes, a hedge at the back, in front thick fir trees, whose boughs touched the ground, almost within reach, the lane being nothing more than a broader footpath…Suddenly a swallow slid by me as it seemed underneath my very hands, so close to the ground that he almost travelled in the rut, the least movement on my part would have stopped him. Almost before I could lift my head he had reached the end of the lane and rose over the gate into the road – not a moment's pause before he made that leap over the gate to see if there was a waggon or not in the way…119–20
The passage enacts an ‘openness to alterity in its own terms, not in ours’, in describing something that a human being cannot
do or comprehend doing. It is also the celebration of the virtuosity of bird flight. Analogies with post-Victorian technologies
are striking. The swallow is ‘the perfection of a machine for falling’ (120). ‘He does not fall perpendicularly, the angle
of his fall is prolonged and very low, and the swifter he goes the more nearly it approximates to the horizontal’ (122). Jefferies's
passage, written a couple of decades before cinema, also shows how animal writing anticipated what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze saw as the philosophical challenge of film, a fascination with modes of seeing other than those of an embodied
human eye and which may explore unknown modes of experiencing time and space.11 When purists attack the use of time-lapse photography or slow motion in films of animal behaviour, they are perhaps missing
a deeper point: that the speed with which the world happens for a human being need not be a norm.
John Simons writes of texts in which the narrative focalisation shifts to the point of view of a non-human:
It is not only characters that are transformed but also the very world of the text. As we shift from a fictive world entirely organized around human perspectives to one in which non-human perspectives also have their place, we also shift in our ability to account for literary language and the strategies through which it structures our perceptions by offering a representational matrix which is, potentially at least, complete in itself.12
The animal not only disrupts an anthropocentric point of view but breaks the illusion of a seemingly closed human horizon, the familiarity of given significances,
dimensions. It ‘offers a transgressive route not only across species boundaries, but also between the closed formal universe
of the linguistic artefact and into the material world in which it exists’.13
Another way of thinking about such writing would be through the work of Deleuze and Felix Guattari, important as instigators of post-humanist thinking and a common reference in what criticism there is in relation to non-human animals.14 In A Thousand Plateaus (1980) they offer a concept of a ‘becoming animal’.15 Linguistic experiment or virtuosity of the kind found in Jefferies or Woolf's The Waves can be seen as a letting go of the illusory fixity of the conventionally human standpoint and a becoming open to otherwise
unimagined modes of perception and sense. One might even want to develop this perspective further to risk the objection that
the swallow in Jefferies's essay is still being thought too anthropomorphically, that is, as a unified self-relating subjective agent to which events happen in narrative sequence or which is depicted as the consistent central wielder of certain abilities and skills. Might it be a matter
of writing not ‘he…reached the end of the lane and rose over the gate into the road – not a moment's pause before he had made
the leap over the gate to see if there was a wagon or not in the way’ but somehow of a multiple happening of relations in
which definitive concepts of ‘lane’ and ‘gate’ do not exist, but instead a transitory and changing constellation of percepts,
hunger and muscular flexing, metamorphosing itself as a variously focussed assemblage of co-ordinations and impulses? In sum,
animal writing of this kind raises questions of anthropomorphism and its contestation that render the text a space of identification
between human and non-human while also pushing its reader into a questioning of the even the most basic and assumed categories
of sense-making and self-conception.
Deleuze and Guattari's post-humanism helps answer Dana Phillips's attack on environmentalist writing as working within an essentially romantic tradition in which identification with other creatures is just material for a cult of heightened personal experience,
of escape into forms of psychic epiphany.16 Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari also seem vulnerable to Haraway's critique that their notion of ‘becoming animal’ is a concept primarily designed to undo humanist conceptions of
human sovereignty and superiority – there is little real interest in animals as such. That their interest remains fixated
on questions of the human is clear in assertions that show little actual knowledge of non-humans, the showy and inaccurate
claim, for instance, that all ‘animals are packs’.17
A reading: The Wind in the Pylons
The issue of anthropomorphism poses the question of animal experience in all its power and ambivalence. It can be at once
a mode of understanding non-human animals, a profound barrier to such understanding, a mode of
Figure 17 The Wind in the Pylons (Brill Books)
appropriating of animal otherness or a term that rebounds into the open question of what the human actually is. Finally, in
the tension between these views, anthropomorphism in literary texts may enact an ethical and cognitive challenge to re-evaluate
the bases of modern society. The non-human effects both a defamiliarisation of human perception, an undermining of ‘speciesism’ and a potentially revolutionary ethical appeal against the brutal human tyranny over the animal kingdom.
A look at Gareth Lovett Jones's The Wind in the Pylons (vol. I, 2003) can further open up some of these points. The Wind in the Pylons is a sequel to the Edwardian children's classic, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908). In it the figure of Grahame's Edwardian mole suddenly pops up one spring into a 1990s English landscape next to a
six-lane motorway. Bewildered, he later finds himself caught up in a raid on a chicken prison camp led by ‘the badger’ and
the Animal Restoration Front. A slogan is painted, ‘These are also Animals / Remember / ARF’. The following exchange then
takes place concerning the mole's acquaintance with some powerful corporate executives in the City:
Figure 18 Animal trails (Pavel Konovalov)
[Badger] ‘With just a bit of persuasion you could become a mole for us. I mean – you understand – at Toad Transoceanic’…[Mole] ‘But I am…I am a mole.’[Badger] ‘Yes but I mean, a mole. An underground animal.’‘Ah. O.’ The mole hesitated, thinking very hard. ‘Surely, surely, the Badger could not be mad too.’18
Most of The Wind in the Pylons is what Simons terms ‘trivial anthropomorphism’: that is, the characters are essentially all types of human being, as in Jones's description
of modern industrial society as a world dominated by ‘weasels’. As in The Wind in the Willows, the very name ‘weasel’ draws on its use as an insult for a certain type of person and then projects these characteristics
back upon the original mustelids. No fox is a major character in the original, but it is easy to imagine what kind of personality
it would have if there were. Where Jones's version differs from Grahame's is, of course, in its satirical and even loathing
account of modern Britain, depicted through the mole's inexhaustible horror at so brutally instrumentalised a landscape. The perspective is
primarily environmental rather than an exercise in nostalgia for Grahame's earlier idealisation of the Edwardian society of the river.
Jones's weak anthropomorphism produces a curious paradox: that to make his fictional world coherent the book has to reinvent
or reintroduce a human–animal distinction into it.19 A distinction becomes necessary between those animals which, like all the main characters, have clothing and speak, and those
that do not (see 208–9), like the wild fox the mole encounters being chased by a hunt (Jones underplays there what ought to
be the bizarre image of a toad and a weasel hunting on horseback). This is in some ways a necessity of the narrative – no
fully coherent parallel world can be invented without some ‘animals’ in it. However, the redefinition of the human–animal distinction in terms of two kinds of animal also makes for some provocative
conceptual transgressions, as in the slogan of the Animal Restoration Front (‘These are also Animals / Remember / ARF’).20 At such times, though primarily a satire on modern capitalism, Jones's book achieves a genuinely non-human perspective, more like what Simons terms ‘strong anthropomorphism’: ‘a category of representation which deals with animals as if they were humans but
does it in such a way as either to show how the non-human experience differs from the human or to create profound questions
in the reader's mind as to the extent to which humans and non-humans are really different’ (120). Jones's satire redeploys
the way the animal world has always offered a source of tropes for human cultures. Nevertheless, apart from the scene in which
the ARF liberate the egg factory of chickens, Jones does not take much interest in one crucial feature of modern speciesism, the industrial mass production of sentient creatures for slaughter. The rescued chickens are given the voices
of bewildered and institutionalised creatures who have taken their dark shed to be the whole universe, but Jones does not
take up the challenge of actually depicting an abattoir. Such a scene would needs have shown scores of talking animals being
shunted and forced through a conveyor belt to be killed by other talking animals.