Efthymia Rentzou
The animal as a modernist topos appears as an invitation to us humans to enter into a different relation with the world, a universalizing trope that aims to rethink the human globally.
If one seeks the other side of the human in modernist literature and art, the machine appears immediately as the obvious candidate. Modern machines changed perceptions of space and time, agency and productivity, subjectivity and the collective, but they also emerged as the great unifiers across cultures, nations, and languages, facilitating a tighter world through transportation and communication. Machines instigated the modern imaginary of a different human, a fantasy hybrid of the mechanical and the organic that at the same time threatened and broadened traditional understandings of humanity. As mechanical fantasy invaded modernist imagination it acted upon the concept of the human, offering both a counterpoint, and eventually a negative image, of what the human is or could be and the possibility of prostheses to existing faculties, proposing to extend the human itself.
In parallel with this salient mechanical trope, however, another entity cuts through the modernist imagination as an alternative pendant to the human: the animal. A perennial “other” for the human at least since Aristotle, the animal is both ubiquitous and invisible in the modernist imaginary. In critical readings of modernism, animals are eclipsed by the modernity of the machine, obscured and dismissed as traditional allegories or symbols, or tackled in organicist or natural paradigms often deemed regressive and incompatible with the heroic conception of modernism as ushering in a new era. The logic of exclusion underlying the preponderance of the human-machine pair has forcefully pushed the animal into the marginal zone of minor genres, lesser authors, or peripheral modernisms, normalizing its presence in Αimé Césaire or Julio Cortazar, for instance, but not knowing what to do with it in Virginia Woolf or even Franz Kafk a. Yet animals have a pervasive presence in canonical and marginal modernist texts in both the European and non-European archive, creating a network of references and meanings that attests to modernism as a global operation of rethinking the human. Animals abound in modernism and break the dyadic system of human-machine, introducing a third pole for understanding the human that opens up the antithetical structures imposed by this system. Animals function as signifiers for the decentering of the human as a riddle of culture and nature, an operation that proves to be more deeply unsettling than the human-machine binary. If the latter, after all, leaves human’s centrality in the world intact, what the modernist animals do is to offset the Western humanist tradition that posits the human as the sole and uncontestable subject in the world thanks to his capacity for logos. With a remarkable versatility that covers all kinds of species—insects, mammals, fish, and some imaginary ones—wild and domesticated, exotic and quaint, it is not an exaggeration to say that animals bridge local traditions with one global aspiration: modernism’s sustained contestation of Western notions of humanism and, with that, of Western values as a whole. The animal as a modernist topos appears as an invitation to us humans to enter into a different relation with the world, a universalizing trope that aims to rethink the human globally.
The impact of Darwin and Darwinism on these new perceptions of the human cannot be overstated. Darwin’s theory of evolution was one of the deep epistemological shifts that shattered many certainties in the Western humanist tradition and brought animals and humans much closer together not only from a biological point of view but also from a moral and metaphysical one. On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) suggested only a difference of degree, not of kind, between human and animal. Indeed, Darwin was cautious about even the possibility of distinguishing between species. In Darwin’s wake, the human’s status as absolute difference from the rest of the natural world eroded, and this radical difference became gradation. Toppled from a central and fixed position of alterity and exception, the human is shaped by Darwin as a transitory and uncertain series of insensible differences, a porous entity open to the rest of organic life. Nature itself, the world, was likewise recast because Darwin’s theory of evolution represented it not as the result of a mimesis, meaning as the image of God and God’s plan, but rather as a self-referential and self-regulating object that obeys its own internal rules without reference to anything outside of it (Norris, Beasts, 26). Darwinian nature is like a self-reflexive text that has displaced God as the supreme narrator along with the human as the supreme subject.
Darwin’s positivist empiricism was both a culmination of Enlightenment epistemology and a break with its philosophical tradition regarding the human. In this tradition a clear hierarchical order had placed the human at the top of creation, an order that hinged on the unique human capacity for logos. The dividing line between animals and humans could vary slightly, from reason, according to Descartes, who saw in the animal a machine or organic automaton, to imagination, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested. However, the common denominator of all categorical and hierarchical distinctions between animals and humans remained language. Language, either as reason or imagination, marked a firm boundary that Darwin set out to cross, thus trespassing, armed with new biological arguments, upon a centuries-long philosophical discussion on ontology and metaphysics. Aspects of the human considered to be spiritual, such as reasoning, moral values, the love of beauty, and language itself, became objects of evolution as process—another series of imperceptible differences. When Darwin suggests that language might have developed from musical vocalizations similar to birdsong and other animal cries, he reverses the symbolic function of human language from an ultimate barrier between species to a possible glorious link.
Darwin’s preoccupation with mental phenomena became even clearer in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), in which evolution crosses over into psychology. The influence of Darwin on Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of human psychosexual development, which added an important element to modernist understandings of the human, is well documented. In Freud, ontogeny—the development of the human from fetus to adult—is often seen as a recapitulation of phylogeny—the evolution of the human species—locking together the evolution of the species with the development of the psyche. Moreover, Freud’s association of the libido, of drives, and ultimately of the unconscious with an instinctual realm akin to animality offered a new dimension to the human/animal divide. The pair conscious/unconscious reproduces, to some degree, the human/animal dichotomy, with language again as the dividing line. Psychoanalysis is based upon the premise of making the unconscious speak in a way that is intelligible for the conscious, thus overcoming instinctual animality. For Freud, the demarcation line between human and animal is still speech, but he opens the possibility of some communication between the two. The unconscious, like the animal, is invisible because unintelligible, but what if we could make it (as well as the animal) speak? What if there were a bridging language between them, and, if so, what would it look like? Freud, after Darwin, posits language as the key to opening up the human, an opening that rests directly or indirectly on the animal. It is this association of language with animals no longer as a means of exclusion but rather as an unexpected realm of inclusion that is thematized in modernist elaborations of the human-animal articulation.
Animals, for the longest time in modernism’s blind spot, work through different literary genres and in different parts of the world as a common code for pushing the limits of language. The modernist crisis of representation, constantly interrogating the relation between language and the world, finds one of its most potent ciphers in the body of the animal. Animals become pressure points for the concept of subjectivity, channeling experimentations with literary representation. The presence of animals in modernist texts thus goes beyond a thematic constant to become both a vector for questioning forms and modes of writing and a cornerstone for an ontological, ethical, and ultimately political reconsideration of the humanist human.
This kind of operation is prominently articulated in Franz Kafk a’s animal narratives. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari underscore how Kafk a’s “becoming animal” in these stories combines radical modes of representation with radical philosophical and political positions. They consider the “becoming animal” as a way for a Czech Jew to escape from the hegemony of a major language (German) but also from any kind of symbolic order: the family and the father, capitalist social organization, or even the process of signification altogether. “Becoming animal” emphasizes a process—not unlike Darwin’s processual thinking—that creates “nonsignifying signs” of “zones of liberated intensities” that hover between species (13). The result is a subjectivity that is deterritorialized and not recomposed as a coherent entity. “Becoming” as a driving force of the text is especially prominent in Kafk a’s most notorious story, The Metamorphosis (1915). Although Gregor Samsa wakes up already in the form of a vermin, the narrative that adopts his point of view is structured around the push and pull of his preexisting human consciousness and his newly emerging grasp of the world as an insect. At first, he thinks he can still speak, only to hear his boss declare: “That was the voice of an animal” (10). He soon discovers the pleasures of walking on the walls and hanging from the ceiling, but he is still attracted to music, which makes him wonder, “was he an animal if music could captivate him so?” The end result of this tension is the death of Gregor and the “metamorphosis” of his sister, Grete, from a submissive girl into a strong-willed woman. The narrative starts with the fait accompli of Gregor’s transformation, complete with the details of his new insect body; it ends with the image of Grete stretching her young body in the fresh air. Ontogeny and (reverse) phylogeny are cleverly combined in this narration of becomings: from human to insect to death, from immature girl to woman to sexuality. The violence and unruliness of one transformation infers that of the other. Gregor’s becoming animal finds its parallel in Grete’s becoming autonomous adult. From a narrative viewpoint Kafk a’s venture into the realm of the fantastic turns on its head the basic structure of the bildungsroman, that of coming of age. The animal provides the hinge for the inversion.
A reverse becoming, from animal into human, is at the center of Kafk a’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (1917). An ape turned human with the name Rotpeter addresses an “academy”: he is called to describe the life he had as an ape before his transformation. Rotpeter, though, cannot remember anything from his life as an animal and remarks in a very Darwinian manner: “Your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be further removed from you than mine is from me” (250). His becoming human and his acquisition of language have obliterated any memory of being animal. Thus he changes the topic of the report to describe how he became human through the imitation of his capturers. Apes ape; this is what Rotpeter did to become human. His detailed description of his mimicry—how he learned to use his mouth to spit, drink alcohol, smoke, and finally speak like a human—plants, however, a doubt in the reader’s mind: is Rotpeter’s report also some kind of imitation? Is he fake? Some eighty years later and from a different part of the world, John Coetzee will make this point through his heroine in Elizabeth Costello (2003). Costello, a writer, delivers a lecture on “Realism” before an academic public, with Kafk a’s story as her starting point. For her, “A Report to an Academy” exemplifies literature as uncertainty: we do not know for sure whether the narrator is truly an ape, or a human posing as an ape, or even whether the academy consists of humans or apes. Elizabeth Costello maintains that we cannot know what is going on in the narrative because Kafk a wrote a literature that was no longer a faithful and trustworthy “word-mirror” in the manner of realism. But though we may not know what species are in the story, what we do know, Costello passionately asserts, is that whoever Rotpeter is, he is embedded deeply in his reality, and Kafk a makes sure that we, as readers, feel this embedment, that we get a feeling for his subjective experience. The late modernist Coetzee points out that modernism shifted literature from being an illusionist’s mirror of reality to offering an exploration of a subject’s investment in reality and that this shiftwas operated through the uncertain space of becoming between animal and human.
Modernist tales of becoming animal permit on the one hand the creation of radically different subjects, deterritorializing precisely the notions of human subjectivity and agency, notions of self and world, that disturb the reader’s certainties. On the other hand, such transformations exemplify modernism’s rerouting of literature’s referentiality from a phenomenological to an ethical perspective on the real, thanks to the animal as an extreme subject. The impossible task of faithfully representing an objective reality is superseded by the dominance of the hypersubjective. The animal, though, questions even this possibility, the representation of subjectivity, as in Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933), the life story of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. With the title already Woolf displaces a discourse on the animal from “zoology” to “biography,” from “zoe” as simple existence to “bios,” a lived life, and from “logos” to “graphein,” to writing. Woolf had already experimented with the biographical genre in Orlando: A Biography, in which fiction and biography were intertwined and where other barriers, such as gender, time, and space, were regularly transgressed. The biographical genre as a paradigm for narration goes even further with Flush and calls into question the possibility of biography altogether: can one write a life? What does it mean to narrate someone else’s life without having the experience of it? How can one imagine the world through the eyes of another? And what if this other is of a different species?
An interesting variation on the animal as extreme subject is a peculiar work within Greek modernism, Yannis Skarimbas’s novella The Divine He-Goat (1933). Exiled for decades at the fringes of canonical Greek modernism, Skarimbas’s texts present a thick layering of discursive registers that outline extremely complex and at the same time fragmentary subjectivities. The main character of the novella, Yannis, is a cultivated bourgeois turned globetrotting bum who has placed himself completely outside the norms of society and its morals. Similar to Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine of the homonymous novel, Yannis is absolutely evil. The narrative—which follows Yannis’s immersion in the married life of a woman he had once loved—adopts his perspective and his voice, which moves with ease from high literary references to regionalisms and argot and often to neologisms that break down language completely. The richness of this interior monologue is counterbalanced by the poverty of Yannis’s actual utterances. His spoken words are minimal, he often repeats what others say in lieu of an answer, he stumbles and stutters on purpose, he deforms words, or he uses the voices of animals. Yannis barks, quacks, and bleats like the he-goat with whom he identifies. While his transformation into an animal functions on the symbolic level to show his complete rebellion against societal norms, his animal voice in combination with the disintegration of human language brings back to the surface the association of the animal with language, speech, and their limits. In modernist narratives, speaking—and writing—as the animal bears the Freud-tinted ability to voice the deepest layers of the human psyche. But it also reiterates a thought that haunted modernists: the impossibility of human language to signify. In Kafk a, Woolf, Coetzee, and Skaribas, the animals speak and thus materialize, in their sometimes unyielding carnality, a subjectivity that cannot be contained within human limits. But these “becoming animals” cannot be contained in traditional literary genres either. Interspecies metamorphosis allows us to reflect on the rules of literature, realism, the bildungsroman, biography, fantasy, and ultimately on literature’s connection with the real. The voice of the animal stages literature not as a word-mirror but as a word deflector.1
This general quest to transcend language and its semantics and convey an unmediated experience of the world finds its most distilled version in modernist poetry. Poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé said, is the redemption of language from its deficiencies, from its lack of perfection, through the creation of an idiom that is total in itself. The quest of perfection also passed sometimes through the mechanical paradigm—William Carlos Williams’s dictum on the poem as a machine, small or large, made out of words is telling. Poetry conceived as machine entertains the possibility of a new language that could represent the new pace of modernity. One can think of the futurist poems imagined as perfect, powerful machines rhythmed by the syncopating onomatopoeias of the new technology or of the Dadaist poems as the relics of dysfunctional machines from the Great War. However, poetry as machine projects the idea of a different language, which is still used in the same way as human language. The process of signification is not altered; only the signs are. On the contrary, the animal seems to foster both radical foreignness and splendid autonomy for modernist poetry in a way that short-circuits the process of poetic representation itself. This is what Georges Bataille points to in Theory of Religion (1948) when he remarks that we can only speak of the animal’s point of view in a poetic way: “Nothing is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended” (20). Thus poetry is the only means of imagining what the animal sees because “poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable” (21). Bataille brings together animal and poetry through their common hermeticism: the animal life is closed and unreachable for humans, and poetry is closed to human knowledge; it speaks what cannot be known. The syllogism is simple and gives to the animal’s speechlessness a different dimension. Animals do not share everyday language with humans, but poetry is made to be a radically different language, one as foreign and as elliptic as the silence of beasts. This may well be the logic underlying the presence and centrality of numerous animals in modernist poetry as a conduit for the Mallarmean dream of a total language.
Indeed, it is this totality of the animal that Rainer Maria Rilke admires in the eighth of the Duino Elegies (1925). The animal is capable of seeing “the open,” that is, a pure space of boundless existence, as opposed to the human gaze that is always oriented toward objects, a gaze always looking into things instead of out of things. The eyes of animals show humans what there really is, maintains Rilke, tweaking the standard trope of the poet as the one who sees what others cannot: “Forever turned toward objects, we see in them / the mere reflection of the realm of freedom, / which we have dimmed. Or when some animal / mutely, serenely, looks us through and through” (49). This densely theoretical poem, which will find philosophical elaboration in both Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben, is not the first in which Rilke contemplates the animal’s view. Two of his Parisian New Poems written around 1906, “The Panther” and “Black Cat,” thematize the gaze of the feline. In both poems the eyes of the animal function as places where the world is arrested, suspended, and where it ultimately disappears. The panther in the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes cannot face the world because of the bars of his cage, but occasionally a glimpse of the world is captured like prey: “Only at times, the curtain of the pupils / lifts, quietly—. An image enters in, / rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, / plunges into the heart and is gone” (25). The domestic black cat, on the other hand, gazes back to the human, provoking a moment of suspension: “she turns her face to yours; / and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny, inside the golden amber of her eyeballs / suspended, like a prehistoric fly” (65). This is a moment of anagnorisis of self and world elaborated further by Rilke in the eighth of the Duino Elegies. It opens the possibility of experiencing a complete moment of simply being in the world—like an animal. This experience of animal-being is necessarily extralinguistic, and as such it may only be inferred by poetry as an alternative to language and as a glimpse of an unmediated “real.”
The animal as a vector of the unknowable and the unspeakable may also be seen behind numerous animal descriptions in modernist versions of the ancient genre of the bestiary. From Guillaume Apollinaire’s deceptively naive 1911 Bestiary or the Parade of Orpheus, beautifully illustrated by Raoul Dufy’s woodcuts, to Marianne Moore’s sprawling animal kingdom throughout her nuanced and complex poetry, to Paul Eluard’s The Animals and Their Men, and the Men and Their Animals (1920), modernist poets compile descriptions of animals, simple or cryptic, and with them deploy their poetics. But perhaps the close association of the animal body and the power of literature exemplified in poetry finds its most memorable incarnation in a different modernist bestiary. Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings (1957) is a fantastic zoology, as the original title in Spanish explains, arranged through the encyclopedic convention of alphabetical order. Strictly speaking, this is not a poetic bestiary. Nonetheless, the book brings together and collates numerous traditions and literary references, combining anthological and encyclopedic features that create, as Borges says in the preface, a mythological zoo. This cultural zoo is meant to delight readers the way children are delighted when they discover animals in a zoological garden. Borges ponders the possibility of endlessly extending the list of these fantastic creatures since “a monster is no more than a combination of parts of real beings, and the possibilities of permutation border on the infinite.” But the reality is different: “This, however, does not happen; our monsters would be stillborn” (14). The reason for this contrast between infinite combinatory possibilities and the limited number of attested fantastic animals is that only a few of these creatures can get a grip on human imagination. The structure reproduced here is the one operating in Borges’s well-known story “The Library of Babel” (1941). The library contains a quasi-infinite number of books, each counting 410 pages, representing every possible ordering of twenty-five alphabetic characters, of which only a few are actually meaningful. The library contains every possible written combination in the form of a book, but which ones can we actually read? In The Book of Imaginary Beings the endless combinatory possibility of language and literature is transferred to the body of the animal, with the same conclusion: yes, we could imagine any possible creature, but which ones would we fear? The animal becomes a bodily materialization of the power of representation; rearranging the body of the animal and rearranging letters and words are part of the same process.
The animal leads Borges to create a kind of encyclopedia of human imagination, thus using the quintessential Enlightenment project of classification to illustrate something that cannot be classified, the monstrous. Another reversal of the Enlightenment trope is of course the Chinese encyclopedia that Borges mentions in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1942). The only example given from this apocryphal Chinese encyclopedia is one of animal classification, divided into fourteen unexpected categories: animals belonging to the emperor, embalmed animals, the sirens, the fabulous animals, those who just broke the water pitcher, and so on. In both of Borges’s lists the animal is fuel for dynamiting a certain kind of thought, the heritage of the Enlightenment’s certainty of an absolute and universal order of things that cannot imagine any alternative. Classifications of animals are deployed as a way to stretch the Enlightenment straightjacket and with it the Western tradition’s image of itself as universal truth. This is certainly the case in Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Cannibalist Manifesto,” a work that established the direction of Brazilian modernism and openly attacks the West—Europe—through the trope of animality. This manifesto is a declaration for a native Brazilian modernism, one that would not be a simple imitation of European modernism but a creation of an autonomous culture through the cannibalization and ingestion of Europe. Antropofagia as a creative principle obviously rides on and reverses both a colonial logic and a European perception of the primitive as animal. Andrade fully appropriates Western perceptions of savages as animals in order to switch the value of cannibalism from negative to positive. Brazil is not seen as the terrain of an animalized savage to be civilized but rather as the terrain of an animal-human that eats up the whole defunct Western culture: “But those who came here weren’t crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization we are eating, because we are strong and vindictive like the Jabuti [tortoises]” (41). Here the identification with the animal is meant openly as an aggressive resistance against the hegemony of the West.
Within modernism’s increasingly self-conscious worldwide reach, the search for an idiom that would both partake in this global endeavor and express the locality of its inception pushes the Brazilians to adopt an animal paradigm. In doing so, they tap into a source that is as universal as the human but that uproots the fundamental assumptions of Western thought about the human. The undermining of the Western, universalist, humanist human via the animal is a generalized modernist operation, but it gains probably its full political, representational, and global potential in the works of surrealism. Surrealism, spurred by a devastating world war, contested from its beginnings the principles and values of the West and had as its horizon in its various generic, media, and national iterations a revolution of representation, of ethics, and of politics. Unique among the historical avant-garde movements in its global resonance, surrealism—for many non-Europeans—exemplified modernism as the expression of a heterogeneous but unified world. The deliberate universalism of surrealism, with its very distinct political components—antibourgeois, antinational, anticolonial—rested on a total liberation of the human from binding constraints, including that of anthropocentrism. Animals thus populate en masse the surrealist universe, creating persistent images that upset the human as cultural and natural entity. The examples are many; in the visual arts one has only to think of Max Ernst and his hybrid human-animal creatures (including his bird alter ego, Loplop), Remedios Varo’s and Léonore Fini’s cats and other animals, Victor Brauner’s hybrid animal-object Wolf-table, Meret Oppenheim’s use of animal fur for her tea cup Object, Wilfredo Lam’s complex animals, not to mention Salvador Dalí’s anamorphic animal-humans and many others. In literature animals crisscross languages and genres, for example in Leonora Carrington’s stories written in English, French, or Spanish, offering haunting animal-human encounters, as in “The Debutante,” in which a hyena wearing the face of a maid it just devoured replaces the narrator in her society debut.
But from a theoretical point of view, the most sustained treatment of the animal as a universalist and antihumanist trope within surrealism is to be found in the Parisian surrealist magazine Minotaure (1933–1939), which brought lesser-known writers and artists together with those that marked the modernist canon: André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Roger Caillois, Brassaï, Jacques Lacan, Diego Rivera, Roberto Matta, Hans Bellmer, Nicolas Calas, Gisèle Prassinos, Benjamin Péret, Wolfgan Paalen, and Man Ray, to name a few. As its editorials declared, this very luxurious magazine wished to express through its texts and its exquisite illustrations a new universality, that of a modern aesthetic. The title of the magazine, evoking the Greek monster and the Cretan mythological cycle already dear to such artists as Giorgio de Chirico and Picasso, seems at first to sit astride ancient Greece as a topos of the universalist common culture of humanism. However, the elaboration of the title Minotaure as the guiding principle of the magazine points to a debunking of the kind of humanism for which the classical was supposed to stand. The cover of each issue, created especially by an artist as a new representation of the mythic human-animal hybrid, gave the cue to a sustained dismantling of the human figure as a complete, coherent, and closed entity. In parallel, animals creep in throughout the pages of the magazine, in photographs and articles, creating a continuum with the human that destabilizes even further the latter’s perceived autonomy, centrality, and exceptional status. The magazine, in staying true to its title, was a constant faceoff between human and animal that created a new vocabulary for understanding both. What Minotaure produced in its thirteen widely disseminated issues is a perception of the human open to the animal that aspires to break down dichotomies of culture and nature along with dichotomies of reason and the irrational, body and mind. The result is an intense mode of anthropological thinking—in the sense of an inquiry into the human—that decenters the anthropos by opening its realm to the animal. Minotaure, in its multiple, collective, and multimedia form, can thus be seen as a paradigm for the modernist animal in general as a signifier for a new humanism, one no less encompassing than its Renaissance and Enlightenment predecessors.
The humanism that modernism articulates through the animal is indeed a critique of the whole Western tradition, a critique coming from within and from without. The anticolonialist or postcolonialist logic of the latter, the non-Western global archive, joins with European critical stances of the West’s hegemony in following the animal’s trail. Reaching farther than the human-machine dyad, which tends to emphasize the divide between nature and culture and leads to a dualistic ontology that folds back into rather traditionalist understandings of the human, the animal upsets these divides and proposes an alternative universalism. This alternative universalism can be described as a nonanthropocentric humanism, with the oxymora and paradoxes that the term carries, one that pulls the rug out from under a Western humanism based on classical understandings of the human. This universalism surpasses the chronological limits of the industrial era imposed by the human-machine opposition and delves into the long history of the human-animal philosophical coupling.
No longer an “other,” modernist animals gaze, speak, and exist as open possibilities for a different signification of the world as they are for a different human. Poems, manifestoes, magazines, biographies, narratives of transformation, taxonomies, and bestiaries rediscover animals as a common, universal denominator that upsets certainties: everyone knows animals, but no one really does. Entrenched in the textual intricacies of modernist grappling with the real, the animal emerges as a global encoding of experimental positionings. Animals incite to try out different possibilities for exploring subjectivity and voice and for reflecting on genres and their representational heft, and at the same time they incite to rethink the global political implications of the Western human as an uncontested authority. Lurking at the sidelines of twentieth-century antihumanism and debates on the “end of (hu)man” as a philosophical, normative, and political concept, the animal has stealthily radicalized the meaning of being human and has become a conduit for an alternative universality.
Note
1. The becoming animal (or human) takes different twists and turns in modernist writing across the globe. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog (1925) narrates the transformation of a dog into a human after a successful operation—recalling H. G. Wells’s vivisections and hybrids in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)—and is more a straightforward allegory for the new Soviet regime than an exploration of the limits of human subjectivity. The same can be said for Eugène Ionesco’s animal transformations in Rhinoceros (1959), a political allegory of resistance to a massive brutalization of social life. In both cases the animal is equated with the darkest, most vilified aspects of humanity.
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