Comparative Critical Studies 2, 3, pp.

311-22

BCLA 2005

Animal Presences: Tussles with

Anthropomorphism
GILLIAN BEER

How close allied are humans and animals.' What are the possibilities of
interpretation between them? Can human language encompass animal
experience.? Can animals inform our understanding of their natures and
our own.? The troubles and the iokes generated from the primary
question of kinship between humans and animals have stimulated writers
across the centuries. Often in literature animals have stood in for
humans: in fables, foxes, geese, and donkeys parade their supposedly
human traits: wiliness for the fox, panic for the goose, obstinacy for the
donkey (redeemed sometimes in Christian re-workings as lowliness).
The interest is certainly not in 'the whole animal' but in the animal as
pointer to or satire on human behaviour. Behind such images is the
assumption that, when all's said, the human is other than animal,
favoured in peculiar ways. In a surprising sonnet, John Donne in the
1620's challenges the animals for their willingness to be subject to man
and challenges too the ordering of their subjection:
Why are we by all creatures waited on?
Why do the prodigal elements supply
Life and food for me, being more pure than I,
Simple, and further from corruption.''
Why brook'st thou, ignorant horse, subjection?
Why dost thou bull and boar so sillily
Dissemble weakness, and by one man's stroke die,
Whose whole kind you might swallow and feed upon?
Weaker I am, woe is me, and worse than you,
You have not sinned, nor need be timorous.
But wonder at a greater wonder, for to us
Created nature doth these things subdue,
But their Creator, whom sin, nor nature tied,
For us, his creatures, and his foes, hath died.'

3"

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GILLIAN BEER

The bizarre passivity of powerful beasts is matched - surpassed - by

the willingness of their Creator to die 'for us, his creatures'. The word
'creature' returns from the first line, where it signifies animals ('Why
are we by all creatures waited on'); in the last line it signifies humans
('us, his creatures'). The comma, though, also allows a double presence
to hover, the creatures alongside the human. There is a ring of
indignation in the sestet's questions, so directly addressed to the
subjected animals, more than a hint that humans and animals, being all
His creation, are fundamentally kin. The hierarchy that places the
human as overlord is unstable, justified only by the example of
redemption in which the abject Lord astonishingly places himself as
suffering subject like the animals. Before the evolutionary emphasis on
the physical kinship of humans and other animals, the emphasis on the
one Creator already linked human and animal as one population,
though a population with man as master.
So the shudder of those like Ruskin who objected to the 'filthy
heraldries which record the relation of humanity to the ascidian and
the crocodile'^ represented only one response to the new balance
between likeness and variability within organic life that Darwin's work
presented. Nature, argues Darwin in 1859, 'acting during long ages'...
is 'slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex
relations of life.'^ Darwin's adjectives, 'slowly and beautifully', ward
off abrupt confrontation with awkward relatives in the animal kingdom.
Darwin valued difference, but he valued it across the entire gamut of
physical being, present and past: trees, fossils, cirripedes, climbing
plants, pigeons, mules and people. He made no special reservation for
the human, nor indeed for an exclusively human/animal relationship.
T.H. Huxley, his closest aide, insisted on that broad range of kinships
in his Man's Place in Nature (1863). That integration of man into nature
was what many found intolerable, and they sought to erect language as
a shibboleth. Language, argues Max Muller in 1861, 'estabhshes a
frontier between man and the brute, which can never be removed':
Now, however much the frontiers of the animal kingdom have been pushed
forward, so that at one time the line of demarcation between animal and man
seemed to depend on a mere fold in the brain, there is one barrier which no one has
yet ventured to touchthe barrier of language ... no process of natural selection
will ever distil significant words out of the notes of birds or the cries of beasts.*

Muller adds his name to those who 'consider it their duty to enter
their manly protest against a revival of the shallow theories of Lord

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313

Monboddo.' (p. 14) Quite why such protest is particularly 'manly' may
now be lost on us, but what is clear is that Muller is taking a swipe at
Darwin as well as Monboddo here. Monboddo considered the orangoutang our close cousin, lacking only - as yet - the power of speech, an
idea that Peacock took up to great comic effect in his novel Melincourt
in his figure of Sir 'Oran Haut-Ton', the supposedly 'high-toned'
aristocratic hero discovered in the jungles of Borneo who, though
entirely silent, rescues the heroine in distress. The orang makes his
case to be thought human through manly deeds, not speech.
The emphasis on language as the distinguisher between the human
and other life forms remains. In one sense, of course, it is merely selfproving, since it argues for a peculiarity that tells us nothing of other
forms of communication between other forms of life. Yet it does set
the central paradox for literature concerning itself with animals. How is
it possible to be true to animal experience, even if that were the wish, if
your medium of description is written human language.' Will empathy
be possible.'' Is it not more honest to avoid claiming understanding?
Human beings, within the wider range of species, are language-rich
and sense-poor. How to reach or record the capacities of other species?
Dogs, bats, and pigeons are familiar examples of inhabitants of sensezones beyond human capacities. The special human sense may indeed
be language, with its power of drawing the senses together into activity.
This paradox of representation through language, of 'literary beasts', is
what particularly interests me here, as I have indicated in my title
'Animal Presences: Tussles with Anthropomorphism'. Because human
language inevitably starts out from our own conditions, it cannot avoid
inclining towards the human and towards our systems of explanation.
Animals have their own means of communication. Their understanding of human address concentrates on responding to commands and
inducements. They do not talk back.
Granting utterance to animals seems to raise the thought of animal
insurrection for many writers, and animal revolutions have been a
recurrent topic in fiction, drawing on human guilt and curiosity alike.
Empathy and avoidance are two polarised responses to the dilemma of
human presence substituting for the animal through language.
Let me pause first on some of the allegorical uses of animals in
literature, Yann Martel's The Life of Pi (2002) being one of the most
recent. Writers for children show no inhibitions about crossing the
Rubicon, as Muller described it, between human and animal and endowing their various anthropomorphic bears, rabbits, and bread-and-

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GILLIAN BEER

butter flies with language. That is part of the pleasure: the child
disguised recognises herself in these other trappings. Whether it tells
her anything about other ways of being is perhaps more doubtful.
Rather, the figuring of her experience through absurdity may allow her
to grasp more of what is going on in the human household.
Or take a different case: Dr Dolittle, in Hugh Lofting's books for
children, appeals to them particularly because he has the secret of
understanding animal languages and because they are let in on that
secret by the simple act of reading the pages, as if open print has
become code. There is no attempt at actual translation; rather, the shift
across has already occurred: what we read is that other language. For
the child, the Dolittle move invites an escape from the controlling
language of adults into an imagined language within which they have
power and where they identify with other kinds of being (though cosily
transacted through the presence of the plump doctor).
Writers for adults who endow animals with language show considerably more need to justify the manoeuvre and very frequently find
such a position by writing accounts of animal rebellion. Here, animals
do indeed 'talk back', instead of simply responding silently to commands and inducements. One of the most extraordinary of these
accounts, just published again for the first time since its one edition in
1825, is The Revolution of the Beasts., possibly by Leigh Hunt, in which
a Cambridge student stumbles on the secret of understanding animal
language and then discovers that the entire world population of
animals is on the brink of rebellion. Their petition to the king lists all
the ways in which animals are murdered and made to serve the ends of
mankind: even apart from food, where 'two or three limbs of different
animals are boiled down, merely to make a sauce for some other limb',
'torches' are 'made from the fat of murdered sheep',
lamps are kept blazing by the oil taken from whales, the monarchs of the fish
tribe, who have been barbarously destroyed by hooked javelins, and barbed
harpoons. Your majesty's soldiers can never go to war, without calling your
sanguinary troops together by beating an instrument made out of the skin of that
most harmless and unwarlike of animals, the sheep.'

The revolution occurs: horses bolt and throw down the carriages ('All
the hackney coaches were broken to pieces in the streets' [...] 'toads
came crawling into every moveable ... his majesty found a Surinam
toad bobbing about in his cup of chocolate; and a great bull-frog began
croaking in the royal tea-pot.'(p. 52-53)). This world turned upside

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315

down is at first described with great relish. The humans are overmastered and subjugated. Then, with a vicious turn, after the collaboration of all the animals in this coup, rivalry and contention break
out and the commonwealth of the animals descends into dictatorship,
show trials, treachery, and oppression. The ass, so oppressed at the
start of the book, becomes grand and oppressive in his turn, heading
'the royal asinine family' (p. 100). '[T]he elephants sorted out divers
opinions advantageous to themselves, which they compelled the poor
brutes to believe; and foremost amongst them was the doctrine of
tythes.' (p 104)
The long shadow of the French Revolution lies behind this grim
and brilliant allegory. And although there is no evidence at all that
Orwell could have known it, it is a startling precursor to Animal Farm
- as in a more direct way is Leonard Woolfs Fear and Politics: A
Debate at the Zoo., published one hundred years later, in 1925.^
Woolf wrote this with the memory of the first world war and the
attempts to find a supra-national jurisdiction, in which he had been
much involved, behind the arguments of the animals. Like Hunt's
conclusion in The Revolution of the Beasts., Woolfs conclusion is bleak.
At the end of the animated, sometimes shrill, discussion, the Elephant
reminds the animals of what it meant to be born free in the jungle:
'Yes, it was sometimes very pleasant to be free in the jungle. But only
for a moment, because the jungle was a place of perpetual fear.' (23)
'It is clear from our discussion tonight that men are still living in the jungle. They
should learn a lesson from us. Here we are in captivity, peaceful, happy, unafraid,
civilized. Here each of us, locked up securely in his or her separate cage, neither
harms nor is harmed by, neither fears nor is feared by, any other animal. Is it not
clear that man will never be happy and civilized and unafraid until he has done for
himself precisely what he has done for us? These human beings delude themselves
that a League of Nations or Protection or armies and navies are going to give them
security and civilization in their jungle. But they are the savagest race of carnivora
known in the jungle, and they will never be happy and civilized, and the world
will never be safe for democracy or for any other animal, until each human animal
is confmed in a separate cage.'
The Elephant then declared the meeting closed amid applause. (23)

So isolation and imprisonment - the de-naturing of man as he has

de-natured the animals in the zoo - is the sardonic recommendation of
Woolfs satire on debate. Debate, that human tool of language, frustrates
action even as it elaborates possibilities, it seems. This challenging
tradition of animal satire, including Kafka's 'Address to an Academy'

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GILLIAN BEER

and Orwell's Animal Farm., uses elements of fable, witb its savage
simplification, to mock human procedures. In one sense, sucb works
are scarcely about animals, or rather they bold to tbe ritualised view of
animals as expressing one buman cbaracteristic eacb, and tbat one
being wbat makes tbem interesting to us.
Tbe next stage of my argument will concern particular recent poems
tbat take on tbe form of dramatic monologue, in wbicb creatures are
endowed witb utterance and in wbicb tbe reader is invited to sbare
alien organic life. My examples tbere are works by tbe poets Les
Murray and Jo Sbapcott. Otbers in tbis volume are discussing tbe
work of tbe novelist J.M. Coetzee. Here I bave space only - all too
briefly - to indicate bow be mixes animal witb buman in bis later
works and bow be constructively avoids figuring animals' experience in
language. At tbe end of Disgrace, pity for a dog includes killing tbe dog
and does not redeem tbe main character, but it does make us
experience bis reacb towards anotber creature - a reacb be bas bitberto
lacked. Wbat tbe animal feels is not for us to claim. Milan Kundera, in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), figures primal innocence in
Adam and in tbe dog Karenin, wbo 'looking in tbe mirror ... never
recognised bis image, gazed at it vacantly, witb incredible indifference.'^
Tbis pre-narcissian state of being Kundera sees as sbared by Adam tbe
first progenitor, tbe buman baby, and animals. Like Coetzee, Kundera
is careful not to invade or figure tbe consciousness of Karenin, tbe dog.
It is bis beroine Teresa wbo mocks antbropocentrism: 'Man is as mucb
a parasite on tbe cow as tbe tapeworm is on man: We bave sucked tbeir
udders like leecbes. "Man tbe cow-parasite" is probably bow non-man
defines man in bis zoology books.' (p. 287)
Sucb fictions give us glimpses, not so mucb of animal life, as of our
own species-life surveyed from afar. In Elizabeth Costeiio (2003), Coetzee's
main cbaracter, a distinguisbed older novelist, grapples witb tbe
problem of knowing bow it is to be anotber.^ Sbe is dismayed by tbe
pbilosopber Tbomas Nagel's argument tbat we can never know wbat it
is like to be a bat, even if we can imagine wbat it is like to bebave as a
bat. Sbe argues tbat to be 'a living bat is to be full of being; being fully
a bat is like being fully buman, wbicb is also to be full of being.' (p. 77)
Sbe sees as secondary tbe differing forms tbat 'being' takes.
Tbis is tbe preliminary to ber most cballenging argument, tbat buman
abuse of animals is morally fully equivalent to tbe abuse of buman
beings, even of tbe Holocaust. Tbat extreme of ber argument causes
outrage among some of ber audience. It is founded on a claim of

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317

affinity that refuses to characterise difference. She is not fma]ly concerned with what it feels li]ie to be a bat or a calf or a person, but she
is concerned that we be attentive to being, and that is why she claims
that poetry can inhabit us with the being of other life-forms. She is
speaking specifica]]y of Ted Hughes:
By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that
no one has explained and no one ever will. He shows us how to bring the living
body into being within ourselves. When we read the jaguar poem, when we
recollect it afterwards in tranquillity, we are for a brief while the jaguar. He
ripples within us, he takes over our body, he is us. (98)

Poetic invention in her argument is put beyond explanation ('ming]es

breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever
wi]]'). It can therefore become a magical recourse in which language
makes a body, transferred from another form of being to being within
us. Her romantic and alluring argument is scoffed at by her daughterin-law, a philosopher, and doubted by her son. It bypasses the question
of language and its doubtful capacity to represent forms of being that
exist outside language.
Coetzee disguises his own presence in the argument, poised inscrutable as the author of the fiction, cross-gendered, not bound by any
statement within it, and not bound to represent the animals who are
the subject of the arguments. In Costello's argument, they are multitudes. Coetzee remains mum, making no claims to inwardness, but
opening out more and more relations. In the last resort, the last story,
as Costeilo waits for obscure judgment, she learns (but will even that
lesson hold.?) that passion is enough, not belief (p. 213).
The opaqueness of animals that Coetzee honours is compelling for
very diverse writers. Jo Shapcott in her collection Phrase Book teases
the reader with surreal and flirtatious imaginings of the further lives of
vegetables and animals.' Her poem 'Pig' opens with reproach and then
unfurls a pleasure-rich existence we might not ordinarily associate with
pigs but cannot quite securely deny:
You think of me
as clean and tasty,
don't want to know
about the mud, the tail,
the terrible trotters

3i8

GILLIAN BEER

don't want to know

about the neat little hats
in my wardrobe, the orchid
collection and the lengths and lengths
of breaststroke, the days and nights
in the Railtrack buffet
and the mad rapture for molluscs.

Here antbropomorpbism becomes tbe joke. Tbe joke is on us again in

ber 'Cabbage Dreams', wbicb opens as if it were a neutral description
by some buman autbority and tben swerves to be cabbage-statement
cast loosely in sonnet-form, of wbicb tbe octave runs:
After dark, cabbages are proud and brilliant,
supercool. We stalk the garden
under the moon, discussing politics with flowers.
We inspect your houses in the early hours
criticising the curtains, wondering about
the furniture, amazed at your reading habits.
Your clothes baffle us, though we know
about layers and the colour of leaves.

Sbapcott's poems bave a blitbe and tbreatening freedom, as if sbe bas

taken possession of tbat wbicb cannot be known and filled tbe space at
will, as in dream. In ber 'Mad Cow' sequence of poems, tbe 'mad cow'
dances and tells us of ber glee. Tbese alternative imaginings of otbers'
way of being bave disconcerting power as well as comedy. Tbat may be
precisely because at tbe point of tbe poem wbere we expect to enter
animal experience, tbe language doubles back on itself to race towards
buman deligbts and dilemmas. Tbe poems are tender and pitiless at
once. Tbey speak in otber voices and tell us tbings we tbink may be lies,
delicious lies tbat cannot be tested because animal life is impenetrable
to tbe buman.
Tbis playful guise is very different from tbe direct speecb 'natural
world' poems of tbe Australian poet Les Murray. Tbere tbe language
is often baffling in its ellipses and leaps, but tbe triumpb is to draw
anotber life-form into speecb: speecb scarified, but surviving, drawing
on tbe buman, but at tbe service of anotber way of being.
Les Murray opens bis wrencbingly violent poem 'Puss':
I permit myself to be
Neither ignored nor understood.

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319

The first line stands poised, alone, 'I permit myself to be', expressing
control and essence, before the swerve across line ending and the human
observer's gaze, seeking to ignore or understand: 'Neither ignored nor
'understood'. The rest of the poem acts out the arcane savagery of the
cat's instincts, the abyss behind the eyes, or - it might be argued imputes them to him. The poem comes from Murray's collection
Translations from the Natural World (1993).'

This collection, while occasionally recalling Ted Hughes's 'Crow'

poems, is the most original attempt of which I am aware to move
animal experience into human language. Here the position is that of
the animal, the language that of a human writer. How to make them
join? How to transport one into the other.? Les Murray's answer is to
warp language, to force it into contortions it never knew it could reach,
in order to express the sheer difficulty of the move across the Rubicon.
Translators may choose to accommodate the originating language to
the translation, smoothing the joints so that it lies level and familiar to
the reader in the substituted language. Or the translator may keep the
sense of the alien, of the clotted strangeness in experience that will not
quite submit to the form in which it must now appear. That is the
choice Les Murray makes. These animals rear up in their full presence
and yet are unaccommodated. He keeps the bruise of movement, of
being, wrenched into language. Murray dedicates the book to 'the
glory of God' and declares the value of 'Presence' for each creature and
its translated self-description. Like Donne, he insists on the pure being
of animals, manifested as sharing the sacred 'presence' of their Creator.
In Murray's poems, empathy signifies selfless joining: readers must
enter experience that sometimes runs alongside, sometimes athwart our
own. Although the poems point towards human recognition, they outgo
satire to provoke questions about how and what we are and what other
life-forms are in their presence around us. Many of Murray's poems
are self-celebrations by the life-form that utters the verse: egret, snake,
spermaceti, echidna, tick, cuttlefish, grass. Some poems take us deep
into suffering. 'Pigs' opens with the sound of snuffling, 'Us all on sore
cement was we', then remembers wild full rank life: 'Us snored the
earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted,' - and ends in horror:
Us never knowed the slitting nor hose-biff then.
Not the terrible sheet-cutting screams up ahead.
The burnt water kicking. This gone-already feeling
here in no place with our heads on upside down.

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GILLIAN BEER

The reader must enter the leaps and pauses of understanding, always a
moment belated, then riveting meaning: hose-biff (the onomatopoeic
thwack of water from hoses, then the unexpected human comparison
for the sound of screams 'sheet-cutting'.) In the printed collection that
poem lies on the answering page to the limpid 'Mother Sea Lion' with
its doubled joy, its two-line stanzas:
My pup has become myself
yet I'm still present.
Each form of being and experience (desperate pig, tranquil sea lion) is
actual, autonomous, not cancelling the other out, both present on the
common fold of the pages.
Murray does not rest solely in the animal kingdom: sun-flowers and
DNA are his province too, since all things in evolution and in creation
are kin. (One poem is entitled 'That Evolution Proceeds by Charity
and Faith' and links a primordial tottering small lizard to the fledgling
who 're-attains and exceeds' the reach for air.) He seeks to give all lifeforms their full presence, yet he dramatises also their avoidance, their
unwillingness to accord with human language. Just occasionally rhyme
does figure accord, but accord founded in difference:
Cell DNA
I am the singular
in free fall.
I and my doubles
carry it all:
life's slim volume
spirally bound.
It's what I'm about,
it's what I'm around.
presence and hungers
imbue a sap mote
with the world as they spin it.
I reach it by rote
but its every command
was once a miscue
that something rose to,
Presence and freedom
re-wording, re-beading
strains on a strand
making I and I more different
than we could stand.

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321

Murray's powerful wrench on language, by drawing attention to its

difficulties, pays respect to the ways of being that lie beyond language.
But he is willing, too, to draw those beings into the centre and to
figure them with an attentiveness that never demands reciprocity. He
does not drag on likeness; he accepts difference, however hard to bear.
That is what gives his poems their formidable precision and confounding strangeness.
Very dark paths are necessary to an attempt, however baffled, to
enter other life forms through language. Many writers still pitch their
literary beasts instead as forms of commentary on human concerns, in
allegory, fable, or fiction. Only a few subjugate those interests to the
presence of beasts. If it is true that we cannot fully know in language
the other life forms by which we are surrounded, poets and story
tellers comfort us with knowable not being., bodied out in pure mirror.
Jo Shapcott takes as epigraph to her 'Mad Cow' poems two quotations
from Rilke that pose opposing meanings for animal presences: sturdily
actual and impenetrable; ideally symbolic and fictive.
Und in dieser Unwirklichkeit: Tiere: das Wirklichste von allem. (And in all this
unreality: animals - the realest of all.) Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Clara Rilke
O dieses ist das Tier, das es nicht gibt.
Sie wusstens nicht und habens jeden Falls
- sein Wandeln, seine Haltung, seinen Hals,
bis in des stillen Blickes Licht - geliebt."
(For an English rendering see Muldoon's version below.)

Not being is ideal being, Paul Muldoon suggests in his poem, the reworking of that same Rilke poem of which Shapcott quotes the beginning. But not being., caught in language, is also actuality.
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Unicorn
This, then, is the beast that has never actually been:
not having seen one, they prized in any case
its perfect poise, its throat, the straightforward gaze
it gave them back-so straightforward, so serene.
Since it had never been, it was all the more
unsullied. And they allowed it such latitude
that, in a clearing in the wood,
it raised its head as if its essence shrugged off mere
existence. They brought it on, not with oats or corn,
but with the chance, however slight,
that it might come into its own. This gave it such strength

that from its brow there sprang a horn. A single horn.

Only when it met a maiden's white with white
would it be bodied out in her, in her mirror's full length.'^

In Muldoon's title, 'Rainer Maria Rilke: The Unicorn', the poet

Rilke, present purely as translated language, becomes dignified as
another form of that pure and mythical beast, the unicorn. Poet and
unicorn gaze into the mirror, embodied in human language that creates
its own reciprocity. They do not attempt to pass beyond it into animal
life but are content to create within the poem, from out of that 'which
has never actually been', ''das Wirklichste von allem' (the realest of all).

NOTES
1 John Donne, ed. John Carey, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990), p. 177.
2 John Ruskin, Love's Meinie (Keston: Kent, 1873), p.59.
3 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), p.379. First published 1859.
4 Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language (London: Longman, Green,
Longman, and Roberts, 1862), p. 13.
5 [Leigh Hunt?], The Rebellion of the Beasts (Chicago: Wicker Park Press, 2004),
p.36, 37. First published 1825.
6 Leonard Woolf, Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo (London: Hogarth Press,
1925), Hogarth Essays, number 7, p.24.
7 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper and Row,
1984) Perennial Classics Edition, 1999, p.296.
8 J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Viking, 2004), p.76.
9 Jo Shapcott, Phrase Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
10 Les Murray, Translations from the Natural World (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993),
PP-36-3711 Sonnets to Orpheus, quoted, Jo Shapcott, Phrase Book (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), p.39.
12 Paul Muldoon Poems ig68-igg8 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002),
P403I am grateful to the publishers for permission to quote from poems by Jo Shapcott,
Les Murray and Paul Muldoon.